Nilan Peiris is Chief Product Officer at Wise, where he leads on growth across channels including product and platform. Prior to Wise, Nilan was VP Growth at HouseTrip, in charge of scaling the company’s growth in the European market. He’s also worked as Chief Marketing Technology Officer at Holiday Extras, where he was responsible for all areas of technology, marketing and customer acquisition. Nilan also advises a number of early-stage startups on growth and getting to traction.
2. How to Use Content to Crush Competition:
3. Wise's Framework on How to Win at Performance Marketing:
4. The Secret to Adding More Products:
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
1. Wiz Rejects Google's $23BN Acquisition Offer:
2. Crowdstrike: WTF Happens from Here:
3. LegalTech: Show Me the Money: $1BN in a Single Day:
Kevin Hartz is a Co-Founder and General Partner at A*, an early-stage venture capital firm. Prior to founding A*, Kevin co-founded Eventbrite, a publicly traded company, and served as the CEO for the first 11 years of the company. Before Eventbrite, Kevin co-founded Xoom, a money remittance company that was acquired by PayPal in 2015 for over $1BN. Kevin is also a prolific angel investor having backed companies such as PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest, Ramp, Trulia, and Anduril at the seed stage, and was an early investor in Uber, Palantir, SpaceX, Square, Gusto and many others.
1. What Makes the Best Founders:
2. The Exploding Term Sheet That Cost $10BN:
3. From World's Greatest Angel to VC with $600M AUM:
4. Learning From the World's Best Investors:
Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Canva where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. Since launching in 2013, Canva’s global community has grown to over 185 million monthly users in over 190 countries. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion, following a $200m funding round. This saw it become one of the most valuable private software companies in the world. Prior to joining Canva, Cameron found himself working closely with Lars and Jens Rasmussen (co-founders of Google Maps) to realise the design vision for Google Wave.
1. From Accidental Joining to Most Valuable Private Company:
2. How to Create Users that Truly Love Your Products:
3. Scaling Canva into the Enterprise:
4. AI Changes Everything: More Money or Better Products Only
Pedro Franceschi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Brex, the AI-powered spend platform with tens of thousands of customers, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood and Roblox. Pedro has raised over $1.2BN for the company from the likes of Greenoaks, Ribbit, DST, Bond and YC. The latest reported valuation was $12.3BN. Before Brex, Pedro was the first person to “jailbreak” the iPhone 3G in Brazil and co-founded payments company Pagar.me with Dubugras when he was 15. In three years, Pedro scaled it to over 100 people and US$1.5 billion in transactions processed.
1. The Challenge is in Your Own Head:
2. From a 13-Year-Old Hacker in Brazil to Billionaire in LA:
3. The Importance of the Idea: What Everyone Misunderstands:
4. Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins:
Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock, where he has led investments in Abnormal Security (incubated at Greylock), Apiiro Security and Opal Security, as well as AI companies like Adept, Braintrst, Cresta, Predibase, Snorkel, and more. Before Greylock, Saam founded Guru Labs, a machine learning-driven fintech startup, and worked in product management at RelateIQ, one of the first applied AI software companies.
1. Seed Today is Frothier than 2021:
2. Series B and Growth are not a Viable Asset Class Today:
3. Markets vs Founders: The Billion Dollar Mistake and Lessons:
4. Saam Motamedi: AMA:
20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock
Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark was the founding CRO at HubSpot, where he scaled ARR from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. He was also awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year at the MIT Sales Conference.
1. Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot to $100M in ARR:
2. How the Best Startups Scale into Enterprise:
3. Second Product and Second Channel:
4. 99% of SaaS Founders Do Partnerships Wrong:
Ara Mahdessian is the Co-Founder and CEO @ ServiceTitan, one of the great vertical SaaS business of the last decade. Today the company powers over 11,800 trade customers and has raised over $1.4BN from some of the best including Bessemer, Battery, Index, ICONIQ and more. Their latest valuation pegged the business at a reported $7.3BN.
1. We Did Not Want To Raise VC Money:
2. How to Master Going Upmarket:
3. How to Build a Brand in SaaS and Have Premium Pricing:
4. How to Master the Second Product & Be the Best at Customer Success:
5. The Core Pillars of Great Leadership:
Pat Grady is one of the most successful growth investors of the last decade. As the Head of Sequoia's growth investing practice, Pat has invested in companies with a combined market cap exceeding $250BN. Among Pat's immense portfolio is Hubspot, Snowflake, ServiceNow, Okta, Amplitude, Zoom and Qualtrics. Pat is also one of the best acquirers of talent in venture hiring Andrew Reed, Matt Huang, Julien Bek.
1. The Sequoia Investment Process:
2. What Sequoia Look for When Investing:
3. The Three Core Pillars of Venture:
4. Pat Grady: AMA:
Avi Eyal is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Entrée Capital, an early-stage VC fund with a portfolio including the likes of Monday.com, Stripe, Coupang, PillPack, and Snap. From their $15M investment into Monday, Entrée distributed a whopping $1.5BN, one of their $45M funds is a whopping 37x DPI. Avi is one of the greatest venture investors you might not have heard about.
1. The Biggest BS "Rules" in Venture Capital:
2. What Makes the Best Founders:
3. The Biggest Hits and Biggest Misses:
Matt Clifford is the Co-Founder of Entrepreneur First (EF), the leading global talent investor and incubator. EF has incubated startups worth over $10bn, including Cleo, Tractable and Aztec Protocol. Matt is also Chair of ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and advises the UK government on AI and in 2023 served as the Prime Minister’s Representative for the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park.
1. The Most Important Questions in AI:
2. The Biggest Opportunities in AI Today:
3. China and the Race to Win the AI War:
4. What Makes Truly Great Founders:
Samir Vasavada is the Co-Founder & CEO of Vise, a technology-powered asset manager. Samir and his co-founder, Runik founded Vise from the Midwest at 16 years old. They bootstrapped the company before dropping out of high school and raising $128M in just 6 months from some of the best including Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. The company achieved unicorn status when the pair turned 20 years old, making them the youngest founders of a $BN company at the time.
1. The Biggest Hiring Mistakes That Broke Us:
2. Fundraising: 3 Rounds and $126M in 6 Months:
3. The Depression, The Pressure and Wisdom From Jensen Huang:
Andrew Bialecki is the Co-Founder and CEO of Klaviyo, the platform that powers smarter digital relationships for businesses and their data. To date, Klaviyo has raised over $778M from the likes of Accel, Summit Partners, Sands Capital, and Shopify, and raised an additional $700M after its IPO in September 2023.
In Today’s Episode with Andrew Bialecki We Discuss:
Founding a $6.23BN Machine in Klaviyo: The Aha Moment
What was the aha moment for Klaviyo?
How important does Andrew think it is for founders to stick with their initial vision vs when is the right time to pivot?
Does a great product sell itself? If you build it, will they come?
Bootstrapping Klaviyo: Would it Have Worked with More VC Cash Earlier?
Why did Andrew decide to bootstrap & not take VC money with Klaviyo?
Does Andrew think Klaviyo would have been successful if they raised a seed round? What would they have done differently?
Why does Andrew believe companies should take their time to find product-market fit? What are the most common mistakes founders make?
What is Andrew’s advice to founders on fundraising?
When did Andrew decide to raise a seed round when he did?
How to IPO in an IPO Winter: Advice & Lessons
Why did Andrew decide to take Klaviyo public in a bad public market?
How was the IPO roadshow process? What were Andrew’s lessons from it?
How has Andrew’s role as CEO changed after taking Klaviyo public?
Does Andrew think Klaviyo is undervalued today?
What is Andrew’s advice to founders on secondaries?
Behind the Shopify Partnership
How did Klaviyo’s partnership with Shopify happen? What were Andrew’s lessons working with Tobi Lütke & Harley Finklestein?
How does Andrew define a win-win partnership?
What does Andrew mean by “Partnerships are like a tug of war?”
What does Andrew think are the most common reasons partnerships go sideways?
David Luan is the CEO and Co-Founder at Adept, a company building AI agents for knowledge workers. To date, David has raised over $400M for the company from Greylock, Andrej Karpathy, Scott Belsky, Nvidia, ServiceNow and WorkDay. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at OpenAI, overseeing research on language, supercomputing, RL, safety, and policy and where his teams shipped GPT, CLIP, and DALL-E. He led Google's giant model efforts as a co-lead of Google Brain.
1. The Biggest Lessons from OpenAI and Google Brain:
2. Foundation Models: The Hard Truths:
3. Bunding vs Unbundling: Why Chips Are Coming for Models:
4. The Application Layer: Why Everyone Will Have an Agent:
Val Scholz is the former Head of Growth @ Revolut, where he led the company to their first 10M users. Post Revolut, Val played a crucial role in scaling several high-growth companies including VEED, Simple & Busuu (exited for $400M). Today, Val is the Head of Growth at Kittl, an intuitive design platform empowering graphic designers.
In Today’s Episode with Val Scholz We Discuss:
Lessons from Scaling Revolut to 10M Users
What were Val’s biggest takeaways during his time at Revolut?
What does Val consider the secret sauce behind Revolut’s success?
What did Val think Revolut understood about customers that no other bank did?
The Secrets to Revolut’s Growth Playbook
What was Val’s best growth decision? What was his worst?
Why does Val think most companies don’t do referrals well?
What made Revolut’s signup strategy so successful?
What are Val’s two ways to master content marketing?
Does Val think it’s good to diversify growth channels? When should founders diversify?
What are Val’s strategies to make Youtube influencers successful?
Product Marketing 101:
Why does Val think traditional marketing methods are outdated?
If traditional marketing methods are outdated, what should startups do instead?
What does Val think is the most dangerous myth around product-led growth?
What does Val believe are the most common mistakes founders make on optimizing products?
Growth Hires: Who, What, When & How
When does Val think is the best time to hire a head of growth?
What is the profile Val looks for in a growth hire? What traits does he look for?
What are the most common reasons founders fail at hiring?
What does Val think are the biggest red flags to look out for in a CV?
How does Val define good culture? Did Revolut have a good culture?
Michael Eisenberg is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Aleph, one of Israel's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Wix, Lemonade, Empathy, Honeybook and more. Before leading Aleph, Michael was a General Partner @ Benchmark.
1. The State of AI Investing:
2. Where Is the Liquidity Coming From?
3. AI as a Weapon: Who Wins: China or the US:
4. Venture 101: Reserves, Selling Positions and Fund Dying:
Danny Rimer is a Partner @ Index Ventures and one of the most prominent VCs of the last two decades. Danny has led Index to be one of the top global firms on both sides of the Atlantic. Among Danny's incredible portfolio, he has led or been involved with Figma, Discord, Dream Games, Etsy, Glossier and Patreon.
1. The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook:
2. The Biggest BS Rules in Venture: Market Sizing, Valuations and Signalling
3. Lessons from the Biggest Wins and Losses:
4. Lessons from Two Decades Building Index into a Premier Firm:
Janie Lee is the Head of Product and the owner of the Self-Serve business at Loom. Janie previously worked at Rippling, leading the Identity Management and Hardware teams. Prior to that, she worked at Opendoor launching markets and developing pricing algorithms. During this time, Opendoor scaled from 2 to 20+ markets, $5B+ revenue, and 1500+ employees.
1. Inside the Product Building Machine of Rippling and Opendoor:
2. What Makes a Truly Great PM:
3. How to Find and Pick the Best PMs:
4. Onboarding PMs and Crushing Product Reviews:
Alex Wang is the Founder and CEO @ Scale.ai, the company that allows you to make the best models with the best data. To date, Alex has raised $1.6BN for the company with a last reported valuation of $14BN earlier this year. Scale tripled their ARR in 2023 and is expected to hit $1.4BN in ARR by the end of 2024. Their investors include Accel, Index, Thrive, Founders Fund, Meta and Nvidia to name a few.
1. Foundation Models: Diminishing Returns:
2. AI: A Military Asset in Global Conflict: China + Russia
3. "I Get Fairer Treatment in Congress than in the Press":
4. Alex Wang: AMA:
Reid Hoffman has been one of the most impactful people in technology over the last two decades. He is the Co-Founder of Linkedin (acq by Microsoft for $26BN) and Co-Founder of Inflection.ai. As an investor, Reid has backed the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, Zynga and more. Reid is also a Board Member @ Microsoft and was on the board of OpenAI.
1. Foundation Models: Commoditisation, Business Models, Incumbents:
2. Inflection & Microsoft: What Went Down:
3. OpenAI: Board, Lessons and Management:
4. Trump is the Biggest Threat to Democracy: What Lies Ahead?
5. The Future of TikTok:
6. Reid Hoffman: AMA:
Ashley Kelly is the VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling, the all-in-one platform for HR, IT, and finance. Before Rippling, Ashley played a crucial role in scaling Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR, and has hired over 800 SDRs during her time in some of the best tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Lever and Zenefits.
In Today’s Episode with Ashley Kelly We Discuss:
From NASCAR to Silicon Valley SDR
How did Ashley make her way into the world of sales?
Why does Ashley think the best AEs and leaders start off as SDRs?
What is Ashley’s advice to new SDRs starting their jobs today?
Age of AI: Is SDR Outbound Dead?
Does Ashley agree that outbound is dead today? Is SDR dead?
How will AI change SDR? Why is Ashley hesitant to adopt AI?
Why does Ashley think founders should always build the first sales playbook?
What did Ashley mean by SDR is the 3rd pillar between sales and marketing?
What does Ashley think most companies get wrong about outbound?
SDR Hiring: Who, What, When & How
When does Ashley think founders should hire their first SDR?
How does Ashley structure the hiring process? What questions does she ask?
What profile does Ashley look for when hiring for an SDR?
How does Ashley structure the finance package? How is it different for each team?
Why did Ashley avoid hiring SDRs with SDR experience? Why has she changed her mind?
What was Ashley’s biggest hiring mistake? What were her takeaways?
Onboarding New SDR Hires
How does Ashley onboard new SDR hires? What is her onboarding timeline?
How does Ashley set targets for new hires? When should they be fully productive?
When does Ashley know if a new hire isn’t working?
What are common traits among Ashley’s most successful hires?
Aravind Srinivas is the Co-Founder & CEO of Perplexity, the conversational "answer engine" that provides precise, user-focused answers to queries. Aravind co-founded the company in 2022 after working as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. To date, Perplexity has raised over $100 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Susan Wojciki.
In Today’s Episode with Aravind Srinivas We Discuss:
Biggest Lessons from DeepMind & OpenAI
What was the best career advice Sam Altman @ OpenAI gave Aravind?
What were Aravind’s biggest takeaways at DeepMind?
How did DeepMind shape how Aravind built Perplexity?
What did Aravind mean by “competition is for losers?” What did he learn about talent assembly at DeepMind?
The Next AI Breakthrough: Reasoning
Does Aravind think we are experiencing diminishing returns on compute & model performance?
Does Aravind agree reasoning will be the next big breakthrough for models?
What are the reasons Aravind thinks models suck at reasoning today?
What is the timeline for reasoning improvement according to Aravind?
What does Aravind think are the biggest misconceptions about AI today?
Will Foundation Models Commoditise?
Does Aravind think foundation models will commoditise? What will the end state of foundation models look like?
Why does Aravind think the second tier models will get commoditised?
Why does Aravind think the subscription model will not work for AI models with true reasoning?
Why does Aravind think the application layer companies will benefit from foundation models commoditising?
Why does Aravind think foundation models will not verticalize?
When does Aravind think is the right time to go enterprise? What is his strategy to differentiate Perplexity from its competitors?
AI Arms Race: Who Will Win?
Who does Aravind think will be the winners of foundation models?
What do AI companies need to do to win the model arms race?
How does Aravind think startups can compete against incumbents' infinite cash flow?
What are the reasons Aravind thinks Perplexity’s browsing is better than ChatGPT?
What is Aravind’s biggest challenge at Perplexity today?
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
1. PluralSight Goes to Zero:
2. Salesforce's Worst Stock Market Drop Since 2004 + Mongo Takes a 23% Hit:
3. The Settlers into Slow Growth:
4. Venture Capital is Broken:
Matt Lerner is one of the OGs of growth having spent 11 years leading growth teams at PayPal. Post PayPal, Matt led the growth marketing program at 500 Startups. He is also the bestselling author of Growth Levers and How to Find Them. Today, Matt is the Co-Founder and CEO of SYSTM, an accelerator program helping startups find their growth drivers.
In Today’s Episode with Matt Lerner We Discuss:
From Philosophy Student to PayPal Growth Leader:
How did Matt make his way into the world of growth?
What were Matt’s biggest lessons from 11 years at PayPal?
What did Matt know now that he wished he’d known when he entered the world of growth?
How to Master Growth in a World of AI:
What is growth to Matt? What is it not?
Why does Matt think growth is more science than art?
Does Matt Agee with Adam Gross @ Vimeo that paid acquisition below $100M ARR isn’t PLG?
How does Matt think AI will change the world of growth today?
What does Matt think are the most common growth mistakes founders make?
Optimizing Growth Channels: Dos & Don’ts
Why does Matt believe there are only six types of growth channels?
What is the “locksmith moment" & how do startups find channels that work for them?
How does Matt pick a Northstar metric?
What are the most common mistakes founders make when picking North Star metrics? When is the right time to change them?
How does Matt approach horizontal product messaging? What works? What doesn’t work?
How to Hire & Manage Growth Teams
What does Matt look for in the first head of growth hire?
What questions does Matt ask when interviewing?
What were Matt’s biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn?
Why does Matt think the best growth hires have no marketing experience?
What are Matt’s two steps to master onboarding?
What are the 3 most common patterns in leaders according to Matt?
Mike Schroepfer (Schrep) is the Founder & Partner @ Gigascale Capital, a new kind of climate-focused investment firm. Prior to Gigascale, Mike was the CTO @ Meta where he scaled products to billions of users, shipped millions of units of consumer hardware, constructed tens of millions of sq ft of data centres, built teams of up to 35,000, and made breakthroughs in AI. Before Meta, Mike led engineering at Mozilla and founded a company acquired by Sun Microsystems.
1. Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg and Meta:
2. The Future of Energy:
3. Investing in Climate: It has to be Profitable:
4. Schrep: The Man Behind Whatsapp and Instagram: AMA: