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
Be sure to visit the podcast's website and support the creator: svppro.com
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Episodes
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...
Ex-Tableau CFO Damon Fletcher on Making Data-Driven Decisions 31.01.2025 1:00:07
Damon Fletcher is the Founder & CEO of Caliper. Caliper transforms cloud cost and usage data into actionable insights with an intuitive analytics platform. Designed for Data Analysts, DevOps, FinOps, IT, and finance professionals, Caliper offers seamless control over cloud environment. Prior to Caliper, Damon was the CFO of DataRobot and Tableau. Topics: The Evolution of Cloud Economics Buildi...
Anurag Chandra: Board Trustee, San Jose Pension Fund 30.01.2025 1:08:25
Anurag Chandra is a CIO at a Single Family Office. He has spent 20 years in Silicon Valley as both an investor and an operator. He has helped lead three venture capital funds, managing over $2B in aggregate. Anurag has been a senior executive in three enterprise technology startups, two of which were sold successfully to public companies. He was a partner with Fort Ross Ventures a traditional mid-...
Josh Stein, Threshold Managing Partner: Box to Twilio - Building Tech Giants 30.01.2025 1:03:40
Josh Stein is a co-founder and Managing Partner of Threshold. He currently holds board responsibilities at ChangeEngine, Databook, Inscribe, LaunchDarkly, LendKey, Sanity, and Talkdesk. He is also actively involved with the firm's investments in AngelList, CloudZero, Doximity (NYSE: DOCS), Front, Imbue, and Rippling. His previous investments include Box (NYSE: BOX), Chartbeat (Cuadrilla Capita...
John McMahon: Former Snowflake & MongoDB Board Member, 5X Public CRO 28.01.2025 1:01:06
John McMahon is widely recognized as the person having been the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) at five public, enterprise software companies, PTC, Geo-Tel, Ariba, BladeLogic and BMC. John’s expertise was formulated as a pre-IPO member of 4 of the 5 companies listed above. John serves/ served as a board member at public software companies Snowflake, MongoDB and private, pre-IPO companies Lacework, Sig...
Eventbrite's CMO Samantha Wu on Breaking Barriers in Tech Marketing 26.01.2025 1:03:04
As the Chief Marketing Officer for Eventbrite, Samantha Wu leads the strategic direction of the company’s marketing initiatives as it evolves into a consumer destination for event discovery. Prior to joining Eventbrite, she served as the CMO of Braintrust, the first decentralized talent network where she oversaw brand, product and growth marketing. With over 20 years of marketing experience, Wu ha...
Smart Venture Podcast watch party ft. StepStone Group Partner Seyonne Kang 23.01.2025 55:26
EP160 StepStone Group Partner Seyonne Kang Seyonne Kang is a Partner at StepStone Group. As of September 30, 2024, StepStone was responsible for approximately $682 billion of total capital, including $176 billion of assets under management. She is a member of the private equity team, focusing on venture capital and growth equity investments. Prior to StepStone, Ms. Kang was a partner with Greenspr...
Insight MD Nikhil Sachdev on Building Global Software & Fintech Giants 23.01.2025 55:09
Nikhil Sachdev joined Insight Partners in 2020 as a Managing Director. In his role, he works with companies in the software and fintech ecosystems starting at Series A and well beyond. He invests through a global lens, partnering with founders close to his homebase in California and stretching across the US into Europe, India, SE Asia and Latin America. He began his career advising technology comp...
Mo Islam: Threshold Partner Exploring Frontier Tech's Transformative Potential 21.01.2025 1:00:00
Mo Islam is a Partner at Threshold Ventures. He focused on enterprise and frontier technologies. He sits on the boards of Benepass, EdgeQ, Elementary Robotics, Freeform, OpsLevel, Yellowbrick Data, and several stealth companies. He has also been involved with Threshold's investments in Atomwise, Imagen, Mythic, and Upside Foods. Mo was on the technology team at In-Q-Tel, where he conducted tec...
Geek Ventures' Ihar Mahaniok: Seed Investor Behind Tech Unicorns 20.01.2025 1:08:24
Ihar Mahaniok, Founder and Managing Partner, is an immigrant engineering leader turned investor. Ihar grew up in Belarus, where he studied Computer Science. He has over 20 years of experience building code, ML models and engineering teams for startups and conglomerates, including Google & Meta. As an angel investor, Ihar invested in 150+ startups. Companies he has backed at seed include unicor...
Akkadian's Ben Black: RAISE Summit Leader & Growth-Stage VC Innovation 17.01.2025 59:11
Benjamin Black is the Co-founder and Managing Director of Akkadian Ventures & Raise Global. Akkadian Ventures invests in growth stage technology companies. They provide alternative liquidity solutions for entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capital funds and employees. Raise Global is the premier community for emerging fund managers and forward-thinking LPs. Topics: How to build relationsh...
Samsara CMO Meagen Eisenberg: Mastering B2B Tech Growth & Exits 17.01.2025 56:23
Meagen Eisenberg is the CMO of Samsara. Samsara is the pioneer of the Connected Operations™ Cloud, which is a platform that enables organizations that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations. Meagen is a transformational leader, advisor, and marketer managing customer acquisition to adoption and advocacy wit...
Science General Partner Priscilla Guevara: Building Billion-Dollar Brands 17.01.2025 1:01:02
Priscilla Guevara is a General Partner of Science. Founded in 2011, Science co-founds and invests in 8-10 consumer companies per year, thematically identifying opportunities ahead of where culture and consumers are moving. Science has co-founded 3 billion-dollar companies, Dollar Shave Club ($1B Exit), DogVacay/Rover ($2.4B Exit) and Liquid Death ($1.4B current). With a deep understanding of succe...
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