We The Builders

If you’ve spent any time in tech over the past few years, you’ve probably read Not Boring or at least seen a screenshot of it on X/Twitter. Packy built it from a Substack assignment during David Perell ’s Write of Passage course into one of the most-read newsletters in technology, now at over 250,000 subscribers. Encouragement goes a long way. David in that course told him his first assignment was...

New Year’s Eve special: I recorded this one at the Founders Fund office on Nov 6, 2024, right after election day. It was originally scheduled to be over zoom but I read Delian’s blog post called “ Thirty Observations at Thirty ” where one of the things he talked about was prioritizing in-person whenever possible so I decided to make the trip to Miami. Delian dropped out of MIT, became a Thiel Fell...

I got to sit down with Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, the largest travel company in the world. $BK NG market cap was $160B as of Dec 3, when I am publishing this. For context, it’s market cap is ~2x that of Marriott and AirBnB, which are 2 and 3. Here is a chart of the rest on the list: I knew travel was big but I did not know it was roughly 10% of Global GDP. According to World Travel & To...

Around 11,000 Americans are retiring every single day, ~60m people in the US are retired. Medicare is one of the biggest problems among this community, there are 100s of providers and choosing the wrong one could either mean losing thousands of dollars or your life (I think Cobi quoted a report citing ~20% fatality on choosing the wrong provider). If your parents are not in that age group yet, you...

Colin Greenspon is the co-founder of Narya Capital, a venture capital fund he cofounded with Vice President JD Vance and Falon Donohue (also cofounder of Reindustrialize). Before Narya, Colin was on the investment team at Mithril Capital, working alongside Peter Thiel. As a technologist if you go over the Twitter/X timeline, it will be hard to miss hype videos of hardtech companies announcing thei...

Intro Today’s episode features Auren Hoffman founder of LiveRamp ($RAMP), Flex Capital, Dialog, Safegraph and NQB8. This is one of the most interesting conversations I have had on the show so far and probably the best. He grew LiveRamp to a $300m exit, has invested in 180+ companies through Flex Capital , a seed stage fund, is chair of Safegraph ($370m data company backed by Sapphire Ventures, Pet...

Hi all, This was happening week, I was in NYC and recorded 3 really fun episodes with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Colin Greenspon (Cofounder of Narya Capital with VP JD Vance and Peter Thiel) and Abe Murray (AlleyCorp - firm that incubated MongoDB and Business Insider) - stay tuned for those to drop within next month. In today’s episode, I got to sit down with AJ Piplica, founder and CEO of Herm...

I sat down with Vivas Kumar, founder & CEO of Mitra Chem, a company commercializing iron-based cathode battery materials. They have raised $100M in equity but more interestingly they have secured $150M+ in grants from the Department of Energy and the state of Michigan. Backers include bestie Chamath Palihapitiya (who personally led the $20M Series A), and Mitra Chem is now building America’s first...

This is another one from the Reindustrialize conference in Detroit. I got to sit down with Karan Talati, CEO and co-founder of First Resonance , the factory operating system used by companies like Astranis, Radiant and now nearly 60 companies across mission-critical industries—think aerospace, defense tech, energy (including nuclear), heavy machinery, and robotics. With $30M raised and a rapidly g...

Hi all, I was traveling for work the last couple of weeks which pushed back some of our episodes but excited to get back on schedule. This is one of the Lex Fridman-like long form ones, there will be 3-4 of these. I am still experimenting with the format and would love to hear your feedback. I am aiming to do 70-80 min pods post editing for future recordings but curious to hear if we should keep i...

Shoutout to my friends at Reindustrialize who put together an incredible event in Detroit mid-July. On the sides of the conference, I interviewed Christian Garrett , Partner at 137 Ventures, a $6B+ AUM growth-stage venture fund known for backing generational cateogory defining technology companies, investments include SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir, Spotify, Airbnb, Turo, and Uber. Last month, Mario at...

I got to sit down in San Francisco with Omri Amirav-Drory , General Partner at NFX , a $1.4B AUM pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm that invests in tech startups across various sectors, focusing on fostering network effects and defensible competitive advantages. They seek out companies in fields like AI, biotech, fintech, SaaS, marketplaces, and crypto. He started out conducting research...

This is it—the very first episode of We The Builders . Earlier this year, I sat down with Shahin Farshchi in LA. He is a General Partner at Lux Capital, a venture fund with $5B AUM. To kick us off, who better than the man who was investing in hard tech 18 years before it was cool: Shahin has invested in companies manufacturing in space (Varda), building autonomous transportation systems (Zoox), pr...