We The Builders

Intro This is a special edition of our show from Reagan National Economic Forum where I interviewed Dan Wright, Cofounder and CEO of Armada, a decentralized cloud for the edge. They are valued at $2B according to their last round and are funded by some of the friends of the show at Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8090 Industries, Overmatch and strategic capital from firms like M12 (Microsoft's venture...

Intro Eric Jorgenson started a nights and weekends projects compiling the most useful ideas Naval Ravikant had publicly shared, this has sold five million copies so far. He has since doubled down on this niche of curating the best ideas from the best thinkers and entrepreneurs in the technology industry. He went on to write the Anthology of Balaji and most recently, The Book of Elon. I talked to h...

Intro Chauncey Hamilton is a General Partner at XYZ, a firm which was started with the thesis of backing Palantir alumni. I met Chauncey earlier in the year and had the chance to hang out a few times at Chapter’s office in NYC. I know founders who camp at their investor’s office, I don’t know many investors camping at their portfolio company’s offices. She explains how this helps her at her job, w...

Intro David Ulevitch is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture firms by AUM with $90B. He cofounded the American Dynamism practice with Katherine Boyle about 4 years ago. Since then, it has taken over the timeline and become the language many use to describe frontier, deep or hard tech. Friend of the show Christopher Lochhead calls this Category Design, where you don’...

Intro Sunil Dhaliwal has been in investing for 27 years, he was a General Partner at Battery Ventures for 14 years before starting Amplify Partners. He founded Amplify 13 years ago with the thesis of backing technical founders. Interestingly, the “business guy” was more investable back in the 2010/11 era. Amplify is an investor in companies like Datadog, Fastly, Recursion, Chai Discovery, Langchai...

Intro Todd Klein is a currently a Managing Partner at Revolution Growth, a VC firm founded by Steve Case. He has been in venture investing for over 25 years, his notable investments include companies like AirBnB, CAVA, Square, Pinterest, CustomInk. Watch on YouTube: Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:44 - What have you changed your mind on? 03:19 - How capital has become a commodity? 05:28 -Why t...

Intro I first met Christian Keil over Twitter/X DMs probably 3 years ago or so. He started building the Astranis media function in public, he was the face of it as he figured out Twitter and video in real time. When he joined, they were a team of 50 and by the time he left they were about 500 people. How to be an elite operator at a startup? Take on more projects. I agree with Christian on this an...

Intro Jonathan Lacoste, is the founder of SpaceVC, a pre-seed frontier tech fund with at least a 20% unicorn hit rate, this is my observation based on publicly reported valuations of the companies listed on their website. Before starting his fund, Jonathan was an entrepreneur, he dropped out of college to start his company Jebbit for which he raised for $90m and successfully exited to BlueConic. T...

Intro Matt Ocko is the Cofounder and Co-Managing Partner of DCVC, a firm he started with Zachary Bogue 16 years ago. Matt started his career at Oracle and then went on to join a $1B AUM fund called Helix Investments in the 90s where he learnt the lesson that venture is 90% people from Ben Webster. Matt coined the term “deeptech” almost a quarter of a century ago with Steve Jurvetson on a late 1999...

This is a special edition of We The Builders recorded at The Hill & Valley Forum 2026. Billy cofounded Regent, building all-electric Seaglider vessels for fast, safe, and low-cost coastal transportation. The company is backed by Founders Fund, Lockheed Martin, Mark Cuban, Caffeinated Capital, 8090 Industries and more. Watch on Youtube: Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 04:45 - Dual-Use Framework 08...

Intro Seth Winterroth is a Partner at Eclipse where he has been investing in the physical world for over a decade. They now have fresh $1.3B in funds taking their AUM (Assets Under Management) to ~$10B to build and invest in critical technologies in the physical world. His portfolio alone is collectively worth over $13B and includes: * Wayve - valued at $8.6B as of their last round. Their global t...

Intro Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz cofounded Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy. This is his second appearance on the show and is a special format we recorded at the Hill & Valley Forum. The company is backed by Narya Capital, Generation (Al Gore), XYZ Capital, Addition (Lee Fixel), Peter Thiel, Kivu Ventures and more. Watch on YouTube Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:08 - The rise and fall of empires, and t...

Intro Rob Leclerc is the Cofounder and General Partner of AgFunder which is $300m AUM venture fund focused on food and agriculture. He also started AgFunder News which has over 100,000 subscribers and is the largest publication and source of news for the world of venture and startups focused on food & ag. In this conversation we discuss how media and venture have always gone together and how Rob w...

Intro: Leland Miller is the Cofounder of China Beige Book, which according to some media reports has been labelled as a firm having more data on China than even the CIA. He is also a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission. He has advised Fortune 50 CEOs and top government officials including the Congress on China. In this conversation we talk about: —> The espionage i...

Special conversation with Shahin Farshchi at Hill & Valley Forum 2026 now available wherever you get your podcasts. Lux Capital has deployed over $7B in deeptech and have been accelerating us towards SciFi future for over 20 years. Shahin has invested in companies manufacturing in space (Varda), building autonomous transportation systems (Zoox), providing robots as a service (Formic), automating i...

WTB Intro Narya keeps a low profile so perhaps you might not see them pop up on your Twitter or Linkedin but they have quietly worked their way to having what is probably the best unicorn hit rate of any active fund that I know of since 2020. Now, I haven’t checked with the firm but from our last conversation I know they make 2-3 investments a year, if you go and check out their website and see th...

Special episode from Hill & Valley Forum 2026: A conversation with Dmitri Alperovitch Cofounder of CrowdStrike ( a $100B company), Silverado Policy Accelerator and Author of World on the Brink Dmitri has correctly predicted three wars including the Russia-Ukraine war and has a prediction for China going after Taiwan. Watch on YouTube: Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction00:53 - The mission of Silverad...

Special Episode of We The Builders from Hill & Valley Forum 2026: Conversation with David Friedberg on rise and fall of empires, the state of US economy, robots as an economic platform, what has changed since the Winning AI Race Summit featuring President Trump, reindustrialization, the end of institutional education and of course the California bankruptcy. Watch on Youtube: Timestamps: 01:21 - Sh...

Intro New SciFi writing and film started declining at the end of the 20th century and we have seen a continued decline in the first quarter of the 21st century. Sci-fi is and always has been the source of inspiration for a better future. It is where the greatest builders of our time got inspired to work on the hardest problems of their era. Whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars or the Foundation Ser...

Intro Seth Berman is the cofounder of Susa Ventures and Kivu Ventures. He started angel investing at Y Combinator demo days back when there used to be twenty companies and a handful of investors looking at them. He then went on to start one of the early few seed funds funding 10 unicorns across ~100 investments. Some of these include companies like Robinhood, Flexport and Chapter (Cofounded by Cob...

Who is Ali Jehangir Siddiqui and why I was interested in having a conversation with him? Ali is an entrepreneur, investor, diplomat and industrialist. When I first met Ali in 2017, he was the Special Assistant to Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan. For my friends in the US, that would be like the President’s Chief of Staff. He also didn’t need the job. He had built one of Pakistan’s f...

I had a conversation with Jonathan about choosing what to work on, getting the government as a customer, fundraising and how too much money can hurt the culture, favorite interview questions and more. Check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts or right here on Substack. Sharing some of my highlights below. How do you know you are working on a problem worth solving? - You can feel if...

Of all the guests I have had on the show, Bharat has probably had the most dynamic career. He has been an executive at public companies, been a venture capitalist, an investment banker and a founder. Our story goes back to when I got David Friedberg (Cohost All-In Podcast, Cofounder Ohalo, The Production Board) for the Building Atoms Summit in Nov 2023. My internal champion was the Chief Brand Off...

Twitter/X is a battleground where you defend your ideas and murder the ones you don’t stand for (as you will hear in Mike’s own words). There is little room for nuance as I too have observed and so the Twitter/X persona of people you see often wouldn’t be the right way to categorize the person. As I prepared for this episode, I discovered how Mike has changed his opinion on topics throughout the y...

I first found Mike Maples when I came across his podcast with Osman Rashid, (Cofounder of Chegg) about 6 years ago. I have since admired Mike’s philosophy on startups and investing. Mike is an early investor in category defining companies like Twitter, Okta, Chegg, Twitch, Clover Health and Applied Intuition to name a few. I hosted a dinner on the topic of technological stagnation about 3 years ag...