The Room Podcast

In the Season 2 finale of The Room, we sit down with Trae Vassallo, co-founder of early stage venture fund Defy.vc . Out of undergrad at Stanford, Trae worked for the iconic design and innovation firm IDEO , developing products for companies including the Palm Pilot and Dell. During her second year of business school at Stanford, Trae founded Good Technology, a mobile device company whose purpose...

In this week’s episode of The Room, we welcome Liz Meyerdirk, CEO of The Pill Club , a women’s telehealth platform that simplifies and personalizes the experience of prescribing and delivering birth control. Prior to joining The Pill Club Team, Liz was a founding member of the Uber Eats team, leading strategy and global business development for six years. As The Pill Club hit a $100 million run ra...

This week on The Room, we sat down with Zubin Koticha, co-founder and CEO of Opyn . Opyn is a decentralized finance platform for ethereum options, which recently raised their series A, lead by Paradigm only months after their seed. Zubin graduated from Berkley in 2018 after a Manu-year love and obsession with the crypto space. Post-graduation Zubin worked at Thunder researching blockchain but soon...

In this week’s episode of The Room, we talk to Allison Barr Allen, Co-Founder and COO of Fast , a one-click, passwordless checkout platform. Allison started her career as tech consultant with PwC then joined Uber in its early days, eventually serving as Head of Global Product Operations on the Money Team. While launching Uber Money products including Instant Pay, Cash, and Wallets, Allison delved...

Claudia and Madison welcome Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO and Co-Founder of Neeva , into The Room this week. Sridhar immigrated from India for his PhD in Data Science at Brown, back in 1989. Today, Sridhar is a Silicon Valley legend, first growing Google’s search ad program to a $115 million business as the Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce. After 15 years with Google, he joined Greylock as a Par...

In this week’s episode, we welcome Jesse Draper, Emmy-nominated television star turned venture capitalist who founded Halogen Ventures , an early-stage venture firm focused on investing in female entrepreneurs. You’ve seen her on TV in The Naked Brothers Band and as the host of The Valley Girl Show, interviewing tech and business entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. As a fourth-generation...

This week on The Room, we sit down with Jane Metcalfe. Jane was the co-founder of the legendary Wired magazine and media company, TCHO chocolates, and now NEO.LIFE. In the early 1990s, Jane and her life partner and co-founder Louis Rossetto came to the Bay Area with the idea and passion to build a magazine and media company devoted to cutting-edge technology. This magazine is what we now know as t...

In this episode, co-hosts Madison and Claudia, interview Ajay Kori, co-founder and former CEO of UrbanStems. They find out more about his journey of founding and scaling this massively successful eCommerce flower delivery service business. He shares a few of his learnings about customer satisfaction and the best way to ensure the longevity of new customers. His inspiring story of failing during th...

In this episode of The Room, Claudia and Madison kick off the new season with Amy Chang, Co-Founder of Accompany , an AI-driven relationship intelligence platform acquired by Cisco in 2018 for $270 million . we hear from a first-time founder and long term product guru on the ups and downs of transitioning from big tech to founding a company. Listen here to learn about the power of early career dec...

And that’s a wrap on Season 1! Thank you so much to all of our listeners for joining us on The Room! We have big plans for Season 2, launching Tuesday, Feb.9, but before we enter the room where it happened with a whole new slew of entrepreneurs, we take a look back on Season 1, its guests, and our biggest takeaways.

Claudia and Madison close out The Room’s first season with guest Amit Sharma, CEO, and founder of Narvar . Madison first met Amit in Narvar’s offices back in 2019, as a customer at Gap Inc. If you’ve ever received an email about your tracking update or returned something online, odds are you’ve interacted with Narvar’s core products. Narvar is a post-purchase customer engagement platform helping o...

Alexa Buckley is the Co-Founder of Margaux - a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of insanely comfortable and beautiful shoes. If you pay attention to Instagram posts from influencers wearing handcrafted ballet flats in every color of the rainbow, then you’ve probably seen a Margaux shoe. Alexa started the shoe line during her senior year at Harvard. Alongside co-founder, Sarah Pierson, the two women...

This week, we sat down with Amy Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, a digital and physical community for women. Spending 10 plus years in corporate law, Amy never thought she'd be a founder. However, after the 2016 election, she took a closer look at what mattered most to her - The Riveter was born. While it's been a challenging year for physical spaces, Amy has gallantly persevered by buildin...

This week on The Room, we interview Shishir Mehrotra, founder and CEO of Coda . Coda is a venture-backed workflow tool recently valued at over $600 million dollars. With Coda, docs are now as powerful as applications. Although Coda was started in 2014, Coda is more relevant now than ever as a key player in 2020’s “future of work.” Coda is redefining what it means to stay organized, engaged, and ef...

This week on The Room, we interview Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information . In Silicon Valley, whenever there is a breaking story, The source that founders, funders, and technologists turn to to get the inside scoop is the subscription-based news-source that Jessica founded in 2013. Jessica has created a platform the tech world can’t get enough of in a world crowded by media coverage and ad-b...

This week on The Room, we interview Hope Cochran, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. It's probably easier to ask, what hasn't Hope done? Music and economics at Stanford. Founder and CFO of SkillsVillage, bought by Peoplesoft in 2001. CFO of Clearwire and King Digital. Board member of three public companies, Hasboro, Mongo DB, and New Relic. Today we explore colorful stories of her time in...

This week on The Room, we interview Coral Chung , the CEO, and co-founder of Senreve . Sitting down with Coral to hear about the start of her luxury D2C brand, we learned about the early days of founding an accessories brand in Silicon Valley, her global expansion plans, and a bit about juggling the hats of CEO and mother.

In this episode of The Room podcast, Madison and Claudia spend some time diving into the history of Silicon Valley power couple; Matt Rogers and Swati Mylavarapu - founders of Venture Capital business - Incite. Previously to Incite, Matt Rogers was the co-founder of Nest. They go into detail about how they have been able to juggle the highs and lows of building a business together while pursuing t...