Venturing with Vishesh — Startup Founder Interviews on SaaS, AI, Fundraising & Venture Capital.

# AI's Real Bottleneck Is Not Chips. It Is the 100-Year-Old Grid.## Guest IntroductionI'm joined by Vikhyat Chaudhry, Co-Founder at Buzz Solutions. He's Forbes 30 Under 30 in Energy and just published a book on why the power grid, not chips, is AI's real bottleneck.## Episode SummaryChips get blamed for every AI bottleneck, but the real constraint is a 100-year-old power grid that...

# What This CTO Checks Before He Merges AI Code## Guest IntroductionI'm joined by Michael Bromley, CTO & Co-Founder at Vendure. He started Vendure as a solo open-source project in 2018, and today he no longer writes code: he runs parallel AI agents and a review agent called Nigel.## Episode SummaryCode is no longer scarce, so an engineer's value moves to review, architecture and taste....

# Your AI Agent Does Not Need an API. It Needs a Login.## Guest IntroductionI'm joined by Furqan Kidwai, Co-Founder & CEO of Plouton AI, which builds AI finance co-workers for mid-market CFO teams. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who started his career building credit-risk models at Deloitte, he explains why his agents log in instead of integrating.## Episode SummaryMid-market finance teams d...

## Guest IntroductionI'm joined by Gregor Biljardt, CEO of Mondrio and a former Simon-Kucher pricing lead who spent roughly eight years pricing startups before building an agentic pricing platform. He's seen exactly where founders leave money on the table — and why the AI era just rewrote the rules.## Episode SummaryPricing is one of the highest-leverage levers a founder has, yet most set...

# How to Land Press With Zero Journalist Connections## Guest IntroductionI'm joined by Kathy Wang, Co-Founder at Press Club. She's an ex-Dropbox designer who built a 10,000-person audience before she had a product, and now lands founders in Forbes, TechCrunch, and Axios entirely through cold outreach, without knowing a single journalist.## Episode SummaryLanding top-tier press has nothing...

Guest Introduction I'm joined by Sabina Nawaz, CEO Coach, Keynote speaker, Author, Board member at Nawaz Consulting LLC. She spent fourteen years at Microsoft running executive development for over 11,000 managers before becoming an executive coach to CEOs and leaders across the globe. Episode Summary Her book argues it's not power that corrupts leaders, it's pressure. This episode sho...

I'm joined by Justin Robbins — he spent years studying why the best employees go silent, and his answer is that it's never a people problem. It's always a design problem. He's the founder of Metric Sherpa and author of More Than a Motto. ## Episode Summary Most leaders believe quiet quitting is a people problem — a failure of attitude, motivation, or grit. Justin Robbins argues it&...

# The Marketing Industry Solved Measurement. It Was Always the Wrong Problem.## Guest IntroductionI'm joined by Peter Grafe, Founder at BlueAlpha, the AI-native marketing hub built for performance marketing. A first-cohort data science graduate who turned down nothing to keep a Tesla internship, he spent four years building the measurement infrastructure that proved Tesla's paid media actu...

I am joined today by Will Bodewes, founder and CEO at Phonely. Phonely uses AI to answer business phone calls so naturally that nine out of ten callers can't tell it's not human. They just raised sixteen million, and one of their customers replaced three hundred and fifty agents in a single month. Key Discussion Points: 🔥 How a $7 idea on a pizza box turned into a $16M Series A funding ro...

Arnau Ayerbe left JP Morgan at 23 to build Throxy — an outbound company that ignores LinkedIn completely and sells into manufacturing, logistics, and construction using AI agents and human cold-callers. They just raised 6.2 million from Base10 after going through YC. Today we're getting into the contrarian bets, the co-founder dynamics of building with your best friend since age 14, and why he...

My next guest, Krishna Namasivayam, is working on what he calls "Synthetic Human as a Service." After leading AI at Dropbox and Meta, he’s now building with the radical belief that we should simulate human behavior before we ship code, product, messaging, or anything really. In this episode, we break down his contrarian thinking on product, AI, hiring, and what it takes to launch in a gr...

Episode 61 with Sara-Louise Ackrill FRSA, Founding CEO at Wired Differently. My next guest is a therapist-turned-founder, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and author of The ND Lovers Club. She runs Wired Differently — a 32-person company where 85% of the team is neurodivergent. We talked about founders who are building from exile, why psychological safety isn't a luxury that disappears und...

Today's guest watched digital transformation projects fail for years. Not because the tech was broken — the governance was. The values had drifted. And nobody noticed until it was too late. So he did something unusual. He went back 2,000 years to Tamil philosophy — specifically a tradition called Saiva Siddhanta — and built a framework that treats ethics not as a compliance checkbox, but as th...

This episode is about what happens when you win — and still feel lost. My guest Sama went from hospital clown to cybersecurity founder to a successful exit. And on this episode we get into the stuff nobody talks about after an acquisition — the identity crisis, the scars, the 'now what.' We also unpack his clown mindset framework — this idea that failure is success — why he's now build...

Episode 58 with Vikram Das, Co-Founder & CEO at Yasu. I'm joined by Vikram Das, the Co-Founder & CEO of Yasu. Vikram spent two decades in the industry with stints at Cognizant, and AWS. He went from closing 50 million dollar cloud deals for AWS to walking into a room of 70 strangers in Amsterdam to find a Dutch co-founder he'd known for weeks, and they recently raised a little over...

I'm joined by Ryan Kalisky, Co-Founder and CEO of WareMatch, a platform connecting suppliers and 3PL vendors globally. As a 26-year-old McGill finance grad, Ryan is trying to disrupt an unglamorous $1 plus trillion logistics industry. We explore the honest reality of early-stage marketplace building, the hacks they’ve used so far, and more. I am always excited to talk to marketplace founders,...

I'm joined by Saher Shodhan, founder of Thera Travel, a startup that's disrupting the healthcare industry by providing patients with access to affordable and high-quality medical care abroad. With a background in marketing and growth, Saher has leveraged AI tools to drive growth and reduce marketing costs by 10x. In this conversation, we dive deep into the challenges of building a successf...

I'm joined by Scott Persinger, Co-founder and CTO of BizTrip AI, a company focused on utilizing AI technology to enhance corporate travel management. With a background in software development and a passion for innovation, Scott has led BizTrip AI from its inception to become a leader in the AI-powered travel industry. In this conversation, we dive deep into the challenges of integrating AI int...

I'm joined by Brian Leor Frankel, Growth Consultant at Ignite. Consulting, with a background in market research and over 20 years of experience in B2B campaigns. With a passion for teaching and helping startups scale, Brian brings a unique perspective on customer acquisition cost optimization and marketing strategy. Optimizing customer acquisition costs is crucial for startups and entrepreneur...

David Abaev is the founder of Databar.ai; a powerful, plug-and-play data enrichment platform built for lean GTM teams. In this episode, we unpack how David is building a category-defining product in the shadow of VC-backed behemoths, his playbook for partnerships and product prioritization, and what founders get wrong about GTM data, AI agents, and scraping. From a rough AppSumo launch to scaling...

I'm joined by Bradley Jones, the Founder & CEO of ThatRound, a pioneering investment platform in the UK. With a background in mathematics and experience in the financial sector, Bradley has a unique understanding of the challenges and opportunities in early-stage investments. In this conversation, we explore how ThatRound is disrupting traditional early-stage investments in the UK, the loo...

Episode 51 with Santosh Sharan, Co-Founder & CEO at ZeerAI.I'm joined by Santosh Sharan, Co-Founder & CEO of ZeerAI, a pioneer in AI-driven go-to-market strategies. With a background in engineering and a passion for innovation, Santosh has led ZeerAI from its early days to a successful SaaS company. In this conversation, we dive deep into the challenges of building a successful SaaS busine...

I'm joined by Gautam Rishi, the Co-Founder & CEO of OneShot.ai, a pioneering AI-powered sales development platform. With a background in tech and a passion for innovation, Gautam has led OneShot from its early days to a successful company that's changing the face of sales development. In this conversation, we dive deep into the challenges of sales development in the AI era and explore...

I'm joined by Ananya Grover, Founder of HealCycle, a Labouisse Fellow, and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Antler. With a background in public health and a passion for women's health, Ananya has dedicated her career to developing innovative solutions for women's health and wellness. This episode explores the intersection of hormonal and mental health, discussing the importance of emotiona...

I'm joined by Jasmine Bonder, the Chief Executive Officer of Clinova. Solutions, a healthcare technology company that's revolutionizing patient care. With a background as an ICU nurse practitioner, Jasmine brings a unique perspective to the intersection of healthcare and entrepreneurship. This episode explores the intersection of healthcare and entrepreneurship, highlighting the importance...