The Peel with Turner Novak

Peter Rahal is the Founder and CEO of David. Before David, he built RXBAR in his parents' basement with $10k and sold it to Kellogg for $600M. We get into why he basically rebuilt the same company again, how buying his own ingredient supplier made a food business venture-backable, why RXBAR's paleo positioning was a trap, the EPG fat technology behind David, how GLP-1’s have changed diet t...

Hans Swildens started Industry Ventures in 2000, and this is his first podcast since selling it to Goldman Sachs in 2026. Hans has been buying venture secondaries longer than almost anyone, and the combined business is one of the largest VC portfolios in the world: 525 firms, 1,600 funds, and over $22B in capital commitments. We get into why he sold to Goldman, the barbell market quietly killing m...

Charles Hudson started Precursor Ventures in 2015, and helped create pre-seed as a category. Ten years and hundreds of Day 0 checks later, few investors have backed as many first-time founders, making him the perfect person to talk through the state of the category today. We talk about why this is the hardest moment for pre-seed/seed investing he can remember, why sitting out of bubbles can be mor...

Dan Teran is the co-founder Gutter Capital, a concentrated seed fund in NYC, and Elbow Grease, the accelerator that puts 15 startups in one building and helps build their teams for them. Gutter just announced a $75M Fund III and opened applications for the second Elbow Grease batch (apply below by July 31st) We get into starting an accelerator when there’s already a hundred of them, why Gutter pre...

Sam Blond is the Co-founder and CEO of Monaco, the revenue engine for startups. Sam is one of the best sales operators in tech. He spent four years as CRO at Brex, where he helped scale it to a ~$12B valuation, ran sales at Zenefits before that, and got his start at EchoSign. If there’s a modern GTM playbook, Sam helped write it. Our conversation walks through how AI has rewritten a big chunk of i...

Nuno Goncalves Pedro is the Founder and Managing Partner at Chamaeleon. He won't describe it this way, but I'd call Chamaeleon something like "The RenTech of VC." Chamaeleon is built around its proprietary data platform, Mantis, which borrows tools like factor analysis from public-market investors and operates more like a quant hedge fund than a traditional venture firm. We talk...

I just attended Allocate’s Beyond Summit in Deer Valley Utah. It was a peek into what the top VC's and LP’s are thinking about right now. Allocate asked me to record an episode of the show, live from the conference. So I asked everyone “What’s your hottest take on the VC market today?” Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sa...

Alfred Wallforss is the Co-founder of Listen Labs, the AI customer research company. Companies like Microsoft use Listen to run AI-powered customer interviews, and Alfred talks about how they first landed them as a customer at a pitch competition. We talk why startups should pursue enterprise customers early on, why 85% of survey answers are random clicks, how AI is changing the $140B market resea...

Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner of Theory Ventures. We talk about today’s “all out sprint” in AI, Anthropic’s strategy, the three layers of AI business models, how AI compares to prior technologies, where to invest in AI today, and what Theory looks for in new investments. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sa...

Ali Partovi is the Co-founder and CEO of Neo. Neo started in 2017 as a network for the top college students. Neo is a “people-first” investor, a thesis it developed missing out on early investments in PayPal and Google at three employees. Neo has since invested in the Seed rounds of Cursor and Kalshi, and Ali shares everything he’s learned about spotting outlier talent, how to hire the best people...

Jim Belosic is the Co-founder and CEO of SendCutSend, a sheet metal manufacturing business he bootstrapped to a $140 million revenue run rate in eight years. We talk building a manufacturing business in the US, creative ways he financed the company early on, using speed and trust to compete with overseas competitors, lessons from restaurants, and why you can’t run a factory from a spreadsheet. Tha...

Alex Israel is the Co-founder and CEO of Metropolis. He unpacks the unique strategy they used as a tech startup to rollup parking lots and become the largest parking operator in the world. Thank you to Will Quist, Yoni Rechtman, Adam Bain, and Jamie Siminoff for their help brainstorming topics for the conversation. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episodeNumeral: The e...

Karthik Duraisamy is a professor at the University of Michigan. He is co-leading U of M's newly created Institute of Agentic Computing, the first of its kind. The institute will serve researchers and developers building agentic AI infrastructure to advance scientific discovery, engineering, and the knowledge economy. It will also be a central node for managing developers and maintainers of the Ope...

Nikhil Krishnan is the Founder of Out of Pocket, a media company that makes understanding healthcare more entertaining and accessible. We spend 100 minutes talking about how the US healthcare system actually works, how World War II changed it forever, all the ways AI is seeing real adoption across the industry, and most common bad startup ideas in healthcare. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplit...

Sophia Amoruso is the Founder of Nasty Gal and Trust Fund, an early stage venture capital firm. We talk through her journey of starting Nasty Gal as an Ebay store in 2006 to sell vintage clothing, bootstrapping it to $28 million in revenue, raising $50 million, scaling it to $120 million and a massive team, turning down a $400 million acquisition offer, and ultimately declaring bankruptcy. She tak...

Nikhil Basu Trivedi and Mike Smith are the Co-founders of Footwork where they invest up to $15 million in Seed and Series A rounds. This is the first time they've ever sat down to record a conversation together on video. We talk about starting the firm in 2020, their secret sauce for working with founders, lessons investing in Canva’s Seed round, scaling Stitch Fix from $0 to $1B revenue in fi...

Chris Hladczuk is the Co-founder and CEO of Hanover Park, the AI-native fund administrator, vertically integrating fund administration, portfolio management, and LP experience for finance and investment teams. Chris is the 2nd ever returning guest of the show, and is fresh off announcing Hanover’s $27m Series A. We go inside the round, their explosive growth, why they built their own general ledge...

Scott Stevenson is the Co-founder and CEO of Spellbook. Spellbook is an AI copilot for contract review and drafting, essentially “Cursor for lawyers.” They have 4,000 customers in 80 countries, and to my knowledge is the fastest growing AI company in Canada, and the largest company in the world built on a Microsoft Word plugin. Scott has been building in legal AI longer than almost anyone. We talk...

Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner at Benchmark. We talk about investing in Manus, the AI company that went from zero to $100M ARR in eight months and was recently acquired by Meta. We also talk through the full history of application software, from mainframes to client-server, to the internet to cloud, why each wave reduced the barrier to entry and created an explosion in the number of new so...

Jake Stauch is the Co-founder and CEO of Serval. Serval automates IT with AI. We talk taking on incumbents with an AI-native product, why IT departments haven’t had much automation historically, the 12+ month journey of landing their first customer, and how teams can increase talent density as they scale. Try Numeral, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance: [https://www.numeral.com⁠]...

Gary Tan is the President and CEO of Y Combinator. YC is the startup accelerator behind companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Reddit, Twitch, and thousands more. According to Garry, they’ve invested in 20% of all startups worth $5B or more started since 2012. Gary has lived every side of the YC ecosystem. He went through YC as a founder, later became a partner, started Initialized Capital where...

Miranda Nover is the Co-founder and CEO of Fort Health. Fort builds wearables that automatically track strength training for people who care about longevity. This is a new format I’m experimenting with. It’s the first time I’ve had a Banana portfolio company founder on the show while they’re still at the pre-seed stage. When I surveyed my subscribers a few weeks ago, you were most interested in mo...

Dug Song and Jon Oberheide are the co-founders of Duo Security. If you’ve never heard of Duo, it might be one of the most underrated software stories of all-time. Starting in 2010, they burned only $14 million to hit $100m in ARR, were acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018, and now rumored to be doing over $1 billion in ARR inside Cisco 16 years later. We talk about how they built one of the...

Jacqueline Cheong is the Co-founder and CEO of Artie. Artie moves data across your systems in real-time, and we talk about why that’s so important in the age of AI. It’s a lot harder than you’d think, as less than 5% of real-time data streaming projects are successful. I talked to a dozen people to prepare for this conversation, including Jared Friedman who worked with Jacqueline during YC, her sa...

Nathan Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI report. On its eighth year, the report is a year-long effort on the biggest things happening in AI, across research, industry, politics, and safety. This episode covers the biggest takeaways from the latest report, like the rise in reasoning, the surge in China’s open source models, where AI is working in practice, t...