Yesterday Podcast

Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a San Francisco-based digital banking platform for startups. He was born in Pakistan, with his mother working as a teacher and his father owning a mechanic shop. At the age of nine, he moved with his family to London. He would go on to attend the University of Cambridge and later move to San Francisco to participate in Y Combinator with his compan...

Kayvon Beykpour is the co-founder and CEO of Macroscope, an AI code review agent, backed by Lightspeed, Thrive Capital Google Ventures, and others. Previously, Kayvon was the GM of Twitter’s consumer division until the platform was acquired by Elon Musk. He Joined Twitter after co-founding Periscope, a live video platform where people can create, watch, discover and share live video, Periscope was...

A conversation with ⁠Frank Guzzone⁠, Head of Design at Thrive Capital. He grew up in Virginia, the son of an immigrant father. Frank and I are from the same hometown & college. Frank enrolled at UVA with the plan to become a doctor. He took the MCATs, spent two years as a scribe but a chance opportunity to design the cover of a textbook accompanied a change of course, he decided to pursue a master...

James Currier is a Founding Partner at NFX and an angel investor in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon. James grew in New Hampshire to a carpenter father and music teacher mother. He left home at 13 on a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy. Then Princeton, then HBS, all three on scholarship. After college, he sailed to Tahiti, then went to work for Rupert Murdoch building Asian satellite TV at ST...

A conversation with David Tisch, founder of BoxGroup. We talked about the importance of taste, why you can't replicate career paths, playing in the world series of poker, and a bunch more. I hope you enjoy! Timestamps:00:00 Intro01:33 Focusing on Tomorrow04:22 A Bet Against the Cable Monopoly06:02 A Historical Lens to Understand the Future of Tech09:40 Tech is Filled with Rebels11:55 Jumping Into...

Zach Dell and Justin Lopas are the co-founders of Texas-based Base Power Company. They recently raised a $1B series C at a $4B valuation, fueling their goals to modernize the electricity grid and provide affordable energy for all. Zach comes from Blackstone, Thrive Capital, and a lifetime of mentorship from his father, Michael Dell. Justin comes from leading efforts at SpaceX, Anduril, and world-c...

Episode #18 of Yesterday:Aaron Levie is the co-founder and CEO of Box (NYSE: BOX), a cloud storage company used by over 100,000 businesses worldwide, including 67% of the Fortune 500. He co-founded Box in 2005 while a student at USC, initially funding it with online poker winnings before securing an investment from Mark Cuban off a cold email. Under Aaron’s leadership, Box grew from a dorm-room st...

Episode #17 of Yesterday:Jonathan Neman is the co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, Inc. (NYSE: SG), the mission-driven restaurant brand redefining fast food through fresh, seasonal, and sustainable meals. Born in Los Angeles and a graduate of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business (’07), Neman co-founded Sweetgreen with classmates Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru shortly after graduatio...

Zach Sims co-founded Codecademy with Ryan Bubinski after dropping out of Columbia. And over a decade later in 2021, they sold to Skillsoft for $525M. We discuss his family, scrappy upbringing that led to Columbia, and early life stories before Codecademy. We also discuss YC, growing to hundreds of thousands of users in a few days, the reason they exited, and much more. Zach’s on the precipice of a...

Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantir (now worth ~$400B) and went on to found venture firm 8VC, the University of Austin, OpenGov, Addepar, and several other companies. In this wide-ranging conversation, Lonsdale traces his life story from deep family roots and early childhood to the present day. He shares the formative experiences that shaped his thinking, his years at Stanford, and the lessons learne...

Gordon Ritter co-founded Emergence Capital, backing iconic brands like Salesforce, Veeva Systems, Zoom, and more. We cover his life story in great detail — ranging from his father’s bloody face on the New York Times front page to founding Emergence in 2003. How did he realize $8 billion in fund returns, co-found a company with @benioff, AND run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps? This conversation is...

We discuss the life story of Notion’s co-founder, Akshay Kothari. Notion is a productivity tool, valued at $10B+ with over 100M users. Akshay grew up in Western India in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat. He has two brothers, Nikunj & Pranav, and is the middle child. Their family business centered around finance and loan-giving, common for some Indian families at that time. Early...

This week, we cover the life story of Dwarkesh Patel, host of The Dwarkesh Podcast. Dwarkesh grew up in India until the age of eight, when his family moved to the United States for his father's medical career. His childhood was marked by frequent moves across the country, from Bismarck, North Dakota, to West Virginia and West Texas. While in college, he became deeply interested in intellectual ide...

This week, we cover the life story of Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel. Rauch grew up in Lanús, a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He taught himself to code and by 11, he was freelancing online for clients abroad. In his teens, he became well-known for creating several influential open-source projects, including Socket. IO and Mootools. Rauch then dropped out of...

This week, we cover the life story of John Andrew Entwistle. He was once a Formula race car driver, during which he broke his back multiple times, and he even threw a house party that shut down his entire town. Amidst similar teenage years, John Andrew was sued by Microsoft, where he subsequently cc’d his dad on the email — a famed lawyer who did the Bernie Madoff and FTX cases. Later on, John And...

Jessica Mah is the founder of inDinero and Mahway, a venture studio backing companies in aerospace, legaltech, and biotech. We discussed growing up in Westchester to immigrant parents, teaching herself to code at 10, and burning out from her first startup by 14. At 15, she dropped out of high school, enrolled in college, and later founded inDinero through Y Combinator at just 19 — at the time, the...

Joshua Browder is the founder of DoNotPay, a legal tech company that automates consumer rights protection. We discuss the Russian mafia stalking his family, interviewing Warren Buffett at 18, building DoNotPay to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and much more. Josh is also a Thiel Fellow, Stanford dropout, and prominent early-stage investor. This is a public episode. If you would like to...

Jack Altman is the founder of Lattice, a now multi-billion dollar company. He recently launched Alt Capital, a 150M early-stage venture fund. We discuss Jack’s suburban upbringing and going from Princeton to quitting investment banking in his first year. This led to a start in venture capital, followed by a tenure at Teespring, the fastest-growing YC company at the time, and the eventual origins o...

Haseeb Qureshi is a former pro poker player and now the founder of Dragonly, a crypto-focused venture firm managing $3B+. We discussed growing up in Texas to immigrant parents, his foray into the internet, and how he turned $50 into many millions with poker… a feat that his Muslim parents thought was fake. From there, we discussed the controversial end of his poker career and his early beginnings...

Spenser Skates is the founder of Amplitude, a digital analytics platform. We discussed growing up in Boston to immigrant parents, his struggle of feeling like he wasn’t amazing at anything, and his path to quant, YC, and Amplitude. Spenser was mentored by Sam Altman and the now legendary Matt Huang of Paradigm, among others. Way back, Amplitude spun out of his previously hot yet failed company, So...

Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, the leading research and consulting firm for AI infrastructure and buildouts. Their publication is broadly respected, and they sell data to many hyperscalers and AI labs. In this episode, almost all of what we discussed has never been said publicly. We cover Dylan’s small-town upbringing, a stretch where he felt lost in life & traveled the world, the sta...

Brian Distelburger co-founded Yext, which he helped grow from a small startup into a public company valued at over $1 billion. He is also on the board of Tech NYC. In this episode, we dive into Brian’s early years and the formative lessons that shaped his entrepreneurial mindset. We talk about his first ventures, building Yext, navigating the company’s growth, going public on the NYSE, and more. T...

Chad Byers co-founded Susa Ventures, now managing over $1 Billion. He’s the seed investor in many unicorns, most notably Robinhood, turning his first investment of $250K into $400M. In this episode, we start by discussing his early years and timeless principles instilled by his dad, Brook Byers, who co-founded the legendary Kleiner Perkins. We then discuss selling on Ebay in his teenage years, his...

Kevin Hartz co-founded Eventbrite (NYSE: EB), Xoom (IPO & acq. PayPal), and A*, an early-stage venture firm managing hundreds of millions of dollars. Recently, he also co-founded Sauron, a high-end home security company. Kevin has been an early angel investor in PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Pinterest, Palantir, Anduril, and many more companies worth tens of billions. In this episode, we start by...