Grace Gong
Venture with Grace
I host a top VC podcast called Smart Venture Podcast (SVPpro.com). Past guests include C-level/VPs of Google, Meta, Amazon, Sephora, Dunkin' Donuts, Chipotle, Pepsi, Instagram, Deloitte, Reddit, Lyft, etc. Managing Partners of top funds (many were featured on the Forbes Midas List) and unicorn founders (founders of Craigslist, Square, Loom, Cruise, etc.) Venture with Grace is my new spin-off series that features top LPs, GPs, solo GPs, Angel Investors, top AI founders, and other experts in tech and business to cover specific domain expertise. Watch this Live on LinkedIn/ YouTube: Grace Gong
Where to listen?
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Episodes
Reed McGinley-Stempel, CEO of Stytch: Building Frictionless Auth 09.03.2025 1:02:21
Reed McGinley-Stempel is the co-founder and CEO of Stytch, an all-in-one platform for modern authentication, authorization, and fraud prevention. Their mission is to eliminate friction on the internet -- without compromising security. They offer solutions that are purpose-built for the needs of both consumer and B2B apps, including features like Google One-Tap & Biometrics to optimize conversi...
Sam Toole, Partner at Primary Venture: Future of Healthcare 07.03.2025 1:00:01
Sam Toole is a Partner at Primary, where he spearheads new enterprise and healthcare investments. The Nantucket native and Hamilton alum was previously the GM of Physician Marketplace for Nomad Health, where he helped lead the company’s sales team from seed through a Series B. Sam’s entrepreneurial career started as the founder of ACK Surf, a surf school on the island of Nantucket, then continued...
Alex Bangash, Transpose Co-founder: Platform Investing Innovator 07.03.2025 57:34
9Alex Bangash is the Co-founder/ Managing Director of Transpose Platform. Transpose Platform investing in the future of venture—backing founders, funds, and platforms that shape the next generation of market leader. Topics: The Evolution of Venture Capital The Future of Fund Structures Building Successful Venture Funds #venturecapital #ventureinvesting #transposeplatform #futureofvc
David Blumberg, Blumberg Capital: Global B2B Tech Visionary Builder 05.03.2025 1:04:05
David Blumberg is the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital, which he established in 1991. Prior to Blumberg Capital, David managed international investments with the Bronfman Family Office (Claridge), Adler & Co. Venture Capital APAX Partners and at T. Rowe Price. He also launched business development for Check Point Software Technologies as one of its top four executives. David ea...
Jon Turow, Partner at Madrona: Shaping Future AI/ML Infrastructure 05.03.2025 1:02:44
Jon Turow joined Madrona in 2022. As part of the investment team, Jon partners with founders who build products that customers love. He is interested in applied AI/ML, data infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and open-source business models. Jon is an experienced product leader with over a decade of experience in cloud computing. Most recently, Jon led the product teams for AWS Computer Visi...
OSS4AI CEO Yujian Tang on Democratizing Open Source AI Development 02.03.2025 57:13
Yujian Tang is the CEO of OSS4AI. OSS4AI is an organization aimed at providing all developers access to the resources to understand, use, and contribute to the direction and development of AI. He is also a Venture Partner at Banyan Ventures, a New York City-based pre-seed, first-money-in, venture capital firm born in the AI era. We will be in person going live at AWS in SF! Topics: Open source AI...
Pointhound CEO Jay Reno on Travel Points & Early-Stage Venture Investing 02.03.2025 59:44
Jay Reno is the Co-founder and CEO of Pointhound. Pointhound is helping people find and book free flights, for free, to amazing destinations using credit card points and miles. 🛫🏝️ 💳 He also leads seed and series A investments with 645 Ventures where he's a Venture Partner. Investment areas include consumer, fintech, climate tech and AI. Previously founded Feather, raised $76m, built a world...
(Smart Venture Pod watch party) Founding Partner Lauren Kolodny of Acrew Capital on the future of AI 27.02.2025 49:38
Lauren Kolodny is a Founding Partner of Acrew Capital. Lauren leads the fintech thesis area at Acrew. She has made investments in companies including Chime, Clara, Divvy, Gusto, Klar, Papaya, Pie, & Plaid. Prior to co-founding Acrew, Lauren was a partner at Aspect Ventures. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google, where she led a number of launches for Workspace, including Goo...
Nosu.io CEO Audrey Chen on Building AI, Winning Hackathons & Tech Content 23.02.2025 56:19
Nosu founder backgrounds: Audrey (CEO) won 20+ hackathons, engineering @ Intuit, Intel, NASA USRC, content creator with 68k following on instagram @jia.seed. Disclaimer: Grace is an investor in Nosu. Topics: How to Spot Successful Founders at Hackathons Content Creation and Community Building Authentically Building a Gen Z Engineering Community #hackathon #startups #womenintech #engineering #tech
Incisive Ventures' Martin Tobias on Pre-Seed B2B Software & Building Unicorns 21.02.2025 57:45
Martin Tobias is the founder of Incisive Ventures. Over decades of investing, he has identified seven meta themes and developed a screening process that successfully identified outlier companies and founders. Incisive Ventures is a Pre-Seed Fund in Seattle to invest in technology companies that reduce friction at scale, leveraging the partner's network built as an angel investor in 60+ compani...
NVIDIA VP Howard Wright on Accelerating the Global AI Startup Ecosystem 21.02.2025 59:25
Howard Wright is the VP of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. Prior to that he was the VP of Global Head of Start Ups at Amazon Web Services. At NVIDIA, he leads their global Inception program, positioned at the epicenter of the generative AI revolution. His role focuses on democratizing access to NVIDIA's comprehensive AI platform while building strategic partnerships across the startup ecosystem....
NEA Partner Aaron Jacobson on AI, DevTools & Enterprise Infrastructure 21.02.2025 1:02:37
Aaron Jacobson is a Partner at NEA. He seeks to partner with founders building generational companies in AI, developer tools, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and robotics. His current investments include Databricks, Second Front, Pulumi, Martian, Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Deltastream, Rapid Robotics, Built Robotics, Outrider, Tigera, and ForAllSecure. Previous investments include Box (NYSE:...
Abbas Haider Ali, VP at GitHub: Customer Success & Innovation 16.02.2025 1:06:48
Abbas Haider Ali is the Vice President of Customer Success at GitHub where he lead all post-sales teams with an org size of 550+, supporting a $2B+ ARR business serving over 150 million developers, including over 90% of the Fortune 100. Prior to GitHub, he was Vice President of Customer & Partner Success at Twilio, leading the Data & Growth business ($300M+ ARR) following Twilio's $3B+...
Michael Freedman, CTO at Timescale: PostgreSQL & Real-Time Analytics 16.02.2025 1:06:06
Mike Freedman is the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, as well as the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Timescale is building the PostgreSQL database cloud for modern applications, supercharging real-time analytics, intelligence (AI), and transactional workloads. Thousands of global customers, $180M raised from leading VCs. Hiring globally @ timescale.com/careers...
Sandy Kory, General Partner at Horizon: Seed-Stage Tech Insights 16.02.2025 1:06:09
Sandy Kory founded Horizon in 2022 and has over 15 years of venture capital experience. He was an early investor in Palantir, Canva, BillionToOne, Flutterwave, Sendbird, and several other unicorns. Horizon is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in disruptive software. Topics: Evolution of Software Investing Bootstrapped vs. Billion-Dollar Rounds Inside Palantir & Canva's Early...
Eugene Lee, Partner at OMERS Ventures: SaaS & Innovation 13.02.2025 58:44
Eugene Lee is a Partner at OMERS Ventures. He is currently a board member at Postal (offline marketing automation), WorkRamp (learning engine), Klue (competitive enablement), Mosaic (strategic finance), Fonoa (tax automation), Quorso (co-pilot for retail operations), and an investor in Crunchbase (prospecting for private companies).Eugene is an experienced professional with a demonstrated ability...
Sarah Catanzaro, General Partner at Amplify Partners: AI & Data Insights 12.02.2025 1:04:34
Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners. Amplify Partners investments include Intervenn Biosciences, RunwayML, Maze Design, Bayes (acquired by Airtable), OctoML, Einblick AI (acquired by Databricks), Hyperparam, Hex, Meroxa, Metaphor Data, Datafold, Modal, Eppo, Gantry, Datology, WarpStream among others. Prior to that she worked as an associate at Canvas Ventures and the head of d...
HOF Capital Partner Hansae Catlett: Early-Stage AI & Dev Tools Investing 12.02.2025 1:03:29
Hansae Catlett is a Partner at HOF Capital where he invests across sectors and stages, with a particular focus on leading the firm's early stage investment strategy in applied AI, B2B application software (horizontal and vertical), dev tools & infra, and deep tech. Prior to joining HOF Capital, Hansae was a Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, helping to lead the firm's investm...
Emilio Escobar, CISO at Datadog: Security & Innovation 11.02.2025 1:00:33
Emilio Escobar is the Chief Information Security Officer of Datadog. With two decades of experience in Information Security and Compliance, Emilio Escobar has worked at large enterprises, medium-sized companies, and governmental organizations. Previously, Emilio served as the VP of Information Security for Hulu, where he played a pivotal role in setting up key security functions. Prior to that, Em...
Itamar Novick: Recursive's Pre-Seed & Seed Investor in AI/Data Ventures 08.02.2025 1:03:33
Itamar Novick is the Founder & General Partner at Recursive Ventures where he invest in early stage technology companies. Supporting entrepreneurs since 2010 (100+ investment). Business insider Top 100 Global seed investor in 2021-2024.Previously Entrepreneur & Startup executive at Life360 and Gigya. Some of his portfolio companies including: Deel, Honeybook, Peerspace, Akash Network, Safe...
Numeric CTO Andrew Bihl: Building AI-Powered Accounting Automation 07.02.2025 1:06:34
Andrew Bihl is the co-founder & CTO at Numeric. Numeric is an AI accounting automation platform, built to take manual work off accountants' plates so they can focus on what’s impactful. Numeric is currently used by hundreds of private and public companies to organize their close, automate reconciliations, and leverage AI for auto-drafted flux explanations and technical accounting research....
Tony Conrad, True Ventures Partner Backing WordPress, Slack & Blue Bottle 06.02.2025 1:12:20
Tony Conrad is a Partner at True Ventures. He worked with amazingly talented founders, operating teams from companies like Automattic (WordPress), ZERO Longevity Science, Modern Animal, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, MakerBot, Voiceflow, Giftshop, Cast, Bumo, Typekit, Pluralsight, Connectifier & Holey Grail Donuts. He also co-founded about.me & Sphere, both acquired by AOL. Tony is a pers...
McKinsey NA Chairman Gary Pinkus: Leading Through Business Evolution 05.02.2025 1:02:59
Gary Pinkus is chairman of North America. He was previously the managing partner for the firm in North America, and before that led McKinsey’s office for the Western United States. Gary is also the former global leader of McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice, which he helped cofound more than two decades ago. He has been a long-time member of McKinsey's Shareholders Cou...
Ternary Former CEO & DeepLearning.AI Expert Joe Reis on Data Engineering 04.02.2025 1:06:57
Joe Reis is an Instructor of DeepLearning. AI DeepLearning. AI is making a world-class AI education accessible to people around the globe. DeepLearning. AI was founded by Andrew Ng, a global leader in AI. Joe is also the former CEO of Ternary Data. He also co-authored the wildly successful O’Reilly book, Fundamentals of Data Engineering. Topics: The Data Engineering Skills Gap The Future of Data E...
Lesley Young: Fractional CRO on Growing Vimeo & Sourcegraph 01.02.2025 1:09:59
Lesley Young is the fractional CRO of Vimeo and Sourcegraph. She is an LP at Stage 2 Capital. Prior to that, she was the CRO of Gem and VP at Segment. She is a creative, visionary, and decisive leader with a track record of integrating and elevating go-to-market strategies that drive revenue and customer growth while steering through economic uncertainties and growth periods. Combines business and...
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