The Peel with Turner Novak

Marcelo Lebre is the Co-founder and President of Remote, the payroll and international employment company. Remote is one of today's most underrated software companies. We get into why payroll is such a hard problem, why most of the industry still runs on spreadsheets, the edge cases of software meeting government, and a diagnosis of Europe’s regulation problem. We also talk through the journey...

Kevin Hartz, Co-founder of A*, Eventbrite, Xoom, and Sauron. Kevin has been building and investing in technology companies for 30 years, and we talk about how the industry’s evolved, why he calls AI the Mother of All Bubbles, why we’re still early, and lessons today’s breakout AI companies can learn from those that survived the Dot Com Crash. Kevin is a big proponent of backing young founders. A s...

Jason Calacanis is the host of the All-In Podcast, This Week in Startups, co-founder of the Launch Accelerator, and the “3rd or 4th investor in uber”. We go inside the origins of All-In, how they decide what to talk about each week, and if Jason thinks it helped swing the election. We also talk lesson from starting 7 media companies over the past three decades, what he's learned from studying the...

Steven Fabre is the Co-founder and CEO of Liveblocks. Liveblocks builds ready-made AI copilots and collaboration for your product, and Steven is one of my smartest friends on how people are actually using AI on a day-to-day basis. We talk about what most people get wrong when trying to build AI-native software, how to treat it as more than just a copilot that sits on top of your product, and what...

Zaid Rahman is the Co-founder and CEO of Flex. Flex is the AI native private bank for high net worth middle market business owners, headlined by it’s 60-day interest free credit card for businesses. Flex just announced their $60 million Series B, as well as their new consumer product, Flex Elite, which pits it head-to-head against Amex for the consumer spending of some of the wealthiest people in...

Matteo Franceschetti is the Co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep created one of the original breakout consumer health products in 2014, quietly building a business that’s raised over $300 million dollars and was reportedly free cash flow positive in the first half of 2025. But things weren’t always easy, and Matteo shares the challenges of starting a hardware company, why hardware has st...

Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO of Superhuman Mail. Rahul sold his company to Grammarly in July of 2025, which had just acquired Coda in 2024. Following the acquisitions, the combined companies rebranded to Superhuman in October of 2025. And it’s quietly one of the most underrated businesses that no one is talking about, with over $700 million ARR and 40 million Daily Active Users. Grammarly sp...

Will Gaybrick is the President of Technology and Business at Stripe. Stripe builds financial infrastructure for the internet, and if you’ve ever purchased a product online, you’ve probably used Stripe. We talk about what Stripe’s doing in crypto and stablecoins, how AI is changing commerce and payments, how they’re thinking about going public, how they build products internally, and interesting da...

Roger Ehrenberg is the Co-founder of Game Changers Ventures and IA Ventures. We talk about the current Seed stage venture environment, what he learned investing in sports teams, how COVID changed sports, what he’s investing in today, characteristics of the top founders, advice for emerging managers, and his real estate and consumer brand projects in Detroit. Thank you to Michael Kim, Jon Oberheide...

Daksh Gupta is the Co-founder and CEO of Greptile, the AI code reviewer that understands your entire code base. Greptile just closed a $25M Series A led by Eric Vishria at Benchmark, and we get into their long and winding journey to build one of the fastest growing AI companies. Thanks to Suds at SF1 for helping brainstorm topics for the conversation. Thank you to Numeral and Hanover Park for spon...

Sign-up here to get weekly episodes + transcripts in your inbox: https://www.thespl.it/ Adit Abraham is the Co-founder and CEO of Reducto. Reducto’s product takes PDFs and physical documents, and extracts all the data, just like a human would if they were reading it. At the time of recording, they’ve processed over 1 billion pages, grew 6x over the past five months, and are fresh off a $75 million...

Erik Bernhardsson is the Co-founder and CEO of Modal, building high-performance AI infrastructure. We talk about building what is essentially a new cloud provider, created from the ground up, optimized for AI. We also talk about what actually happened with the great GPU shortage, how Modal fixes the inference problem in AI, and why he thinks AI will lead to 10x more developers. He also shares less...

Austin Petersmith is the Co-founder and CEO of Howie, the AI secretary. We talk about why AI assistants are so hard to build, why they decided to build Howie super narrow, and everything that went into their brand, name, and viral launch. Thank you to Adam D’Augelli, Sophia Amoruso and Alex Cohen for help brainstorming topics for the conversation. Thank you to Hanover Park for supporting this epis...

Chris Frantz is the Co-founder and CEO of Loops, the email platform for software companies. We get into why sending emails is still a big problem, his hilariously simple framework for building products, getting in to YC with a last minute application, and why they skipped raising a Series A. We also talk through Chris decade of working in marketing, like when to lean into PLG vs Sales vs hype led...

Dan Gray is the Head of Insights at Equidam. If you’re a tech and investing nerd like us, you’ll love this conversation. We cover everything Dan’s learned reading dozens of academic research papers on startups and venture capital, debunking many popular narratives of the industry. We talk about the dangers of pre-mature startup scaling, the importance of origination stage investing, the concept of...

Dan Feder is a Senior Managing Director of Investments at the University of Michigan’s $18 billion endowment. Our two hour conversation talks through the past, present, and future of all things venture capital, and investing more broadly. Dan lays out the case for why most institutional investors should change how they approach asset allocation, why risk and uncertainty are not the same, the impor...

Eoghan McCabe is the Co-founder and CEO of Intercom, building Fin.ai, the AI customer service company. This was an extremely candid, two hour conversation going inside every detail of how Intercom was the first late stage software company to successfully re-architect itself to be AI-native. Intercom just announced they’ve built their own customer service-focused AI models, and Eoghan explains why...

Albert Azout is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Level Ventures, combining first-principles thinking with state-of-the-art data science to back and build top seed-stage firms and their breakout companies. Venture investing is hard, and this conversation covers all their research unpacking exactly how to generate alpha. We also talk about how Level picks and backs emerging venture managers to...

Will O’Brien is the Co-founder of Ulysses, building autonomous, low cost robots for the ocean. Will considers the ocean humanity’s next great frontier. It makes up over $2.5 trillion of economic activity, considering things like fishing, aquaculture, shipping, mining, communications infrastructure, and defense. Yet we know more about the surface of the moon’s of Saturn than we do the bottom of our...

Isaac Medeiros is the Founder of Mini Katana and Kanpai Foods. Isaac’s content gets over 1 billion views per month. Our conversation gets into content strategy from a high level down to tactical decisions, differences between the TikTok and YouTube algorithms, and how AI will impact content creation. We also get into Isaac’s origin story building consumer brands, why TikTok made food an interestin...

Michael Dempsey is the Managing Partner at Compound, a thesis-driven, research-centric investment firm. We spent two hours talking through the past, present, and future of a bunch of topics in technology and investing. Michael started investing in AI in 2016. He was the first investor in now-unicorns Runway and Wayve. But he hasn’t done much AI investing over the past few years. We talk about why,...

Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week. Ryan Hoover is the Founder of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund. Ryan’s probably helped more founders launch their products than anyone else on Earth. We talk about starting Product Hunt as an email list, and he open sources the growth flywheel that propelled it to one of the most important places in technology....

Sahill Poddar is the Co-founder and CEO of Parafin, helping marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and point of sale providers offer financial services their merchants. Sahill and his team have quietly built Parafin to nearly a $100m GAAP revenue run rate in only four years, and they've done it in an industry that's become a Silicon Valley graveyard: SMB lending. Sahill talks about how they partnere...

Garrett Lord is the Co-founder and CEO of Handshake, the career and social network for Gen Z, connecting a million employers, 1,600 universities, and 18 million students and alumni. We talk through the explosive growth in Handshake’s human AI data labeling business, how AI is changing the job market and careers, advice for scaling a three-sided marketplace, and Garrett’s approach to hiring executi...

Jake Cooper is the Founder of Railway. This conversation explores how AI accelerates the need for strong backend infrastructure, when to build vs buy in AI software, and why there are only two moats: solving hard problems and doing hard things. We also unpack Railway’s bold product bets, like enabling creators to earn revenue with backend templates, building their own data centers, and not buildin...