Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation. To date, Cris has raised over $285M for the company from the likes of Lux Capital, Felicis, Coatue, Amplify, and Nvidia to name a few. Runway’s customers include academy-nominated movies, TV shows, media companies, and creatives across industries.
1. From Childhood in Chile to Founding one of the Hottest AI Startups:
2. Models are not a Moat: Models 101:
3. The World Has Got AI Wrong: We Need Different Stories:
4. Company Building 101: Hiring and Fundraising:
Howie Liu is the Founder and CEO @ Airtable, the fastest way to build apps for your business. To date, Howie has raised over $1BN with Airtable with the last round valuing the company at $11BN and an investor base including Benchmark, Thrive, Caffeinated, Greenoaks and Coatue to name a few.
1. Scaling into Enterprise:
2. Enterprises: Do They Really Love AI:
3. The Changing Sales Process:
4. Howie Liu: AMA:
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.
Rick Zullo is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Equal Ventures. Prior to co-founding Equal Ventures, Rick was an investor at Lightbank, Prior to Lightbank, Rick worked with investment firms Foundation Capital, Bowery Capital, and Lightview Capital.
1. Why Venture Capital Needs It's Jerry Maguire Moment:
2. Unicorns are So 2019:
3. Efficiency and Growth: We Need it All:
4. Entering the World of LPs:
Nick Huber is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and content creator focused on real estate and small business. In the last 9 months, Nick has co-founded 6 companies including RE Cost Set, RecruitJet, Titan Risk, Blue Key Capital, Tax Credit Hunter, and WebRun Labs. His primary business, Bolt Storage, owns 1.8M sqft of self-storage facilities across 62 locations in 11 states.
Wealth:
Marriage and Parenting:
5. Why it is BS to not pass your wealth down to your children?
6. Why you have to let your kids suffer in order for them to grow?
7. How do you stop kids from becoming assholes if they are brought up with money?
8. Why the majority of the time, people choose the wrong partner? What should we look for?
9. What is the number one thing you can do to set your child up for success?
Silicon Valley and Entrepreneurship:
10. Why entrepreneurship is not for everyone? Who is it for?
11. Why VCs are out of touch and naive?
12. What is the single biggest lie of Silicon Valley?
13. Why will so many would-be great entrepreneurs burn themselves out when they should not have to?
Management and Brand Building:
14. How to build a brand today? Why you have to be controversial to be interesting?
15. How to deal with hate and criticism? Why you cannot please everybody?
16. Why woke culture can give you an advantage if you do not have it?
17. How to build a strategic network the right way? How to become a card in someone's rolodex?
18. What is the single worst thing you can do when hiring?
19. What do you do when you lose trust in an employee?
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.
1. The Decade-Long Journey to Becoming an AI OG:
2. Models: Does Size Matter:
3. Where Does Value Accrue:
4. Open vs Closed: Which Wins:
5. Richard Socher: AMA:
Brian Balfour is the Founder and CEO of Reforge. Previously, he was the VP of Growth @ HubSpot. Prior to HubSpot, he was an EIR @ Trinity Ventures and founder of Boundless Learning and Viximo. He advises companies including Blue Bottle Coffee, Gametime, Lumoid, GrabCAD, and Help Scout on growth and customer acquisition.
1. Entry into Growth and Lessons from Hubspot:
2. The Foundations:
3. The Importance of Product Channel Fit:
4. Next Comes Channel Model Fit:
5. Finally, Model Market Fit:
6. Brian Balfour: AMA:
Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator and co-founder of Wait But Why, a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of half a million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Tim’s 2016 TED main stage talk is the third most-watched TED talk in history with 66 million views. In 2023, Tim published his bestselling book What’s Our Problem? A Self Help Book for Societies.
1. The Founding of Wait by Why:
2. Wait But Why: The Scaling Journey to 600,000 Subs:
3. Topic Selection: Choosing What To Write:
4. The Writing Process:
5. The Distribution Process:
6. AI: Super-Intelligence and The Future:
Sam Lessin is a Co-Founder and Partner @ Slow Ventures with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Robinhood, Slack, Solana, PillPack and many more unicorn companies. Prior to Slow, Sam was a VP Product at Facebook having sold his company to Meta.
Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors, one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms investing today with a portfolio including the likes of Klarna, Kavak, Quinto Andar, Credit Karma and more. As for Frank, prior to QED, Frank was one of the earliest analysts hired into Capital One and spent almost 13 years there helping build many of the company’s business units and operational areas.
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.
1. The Seed Model Was Broken and What Comes Now:
2. Round Construction: YC, Multi-Stage Funds and Party Rounds:
3. VC Value Add at Seed: Is it BS?
4. What Happens Now:
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.
1. WTF is Happening At Seed Right Now:
2. Is Series A a Dead Zone:
3. Growth: People are Too Negative!
4. Ring That Bell: IPOs and M&A:
5. Jason Lemkin: AMA:
Vinod Khosla is the Founder of Khosla Ventures, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with investments in OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. Prior to founding Khosla, Vinod was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems.
1. The State of AI Today:
2. The Future of Healthcare and Music:
3. Solving Income Inequality:
4. The Future of Energy, Climate and Politics:
5. Vinod Khosla: AMA:
Ilir Sela is the Founder and CEO of Slice, the all-in-one ordering and marketing tech platform for local pizzerias. Through its partnerships, Slice has driven over $1B in earnings for over 18,000 independent pizzerias nationwide. Fun fact, Slice is also one of the largest employers in Macedonia and at one point, employed so many people there, they had to start their own school to train more people. Before Slice, Ilir started Nerd Force and sold it in 2008. Huge thanks to Jeff Richards (GGV) and Ben Sun (Primary) for some amazing questions today.
1. From Macedonia to the Bright Lights of NYC and Bentley Buying:
2. Why Bootstrapped Was Best & The Decision to Fundraise:
3. Why Delegation is BS and Your Upbringing F***** You Up:
4. Decision-Making 101:
Lori Jimenez is the Chief Revenue Officer at WorkRamp where she is responsible for sales, customer success, solutions engineering, sales development, and revenue operations. Over her 25-year career, Lori has a track record of scaling high-growth GTM teams at companies including Google, TripActions/Navan, Facebook, and Box.
1. From a First Sales Job at 15 Years Old to Leading Sales Teams at Google and Facebook:
2. The Sales Playbook: What, When and How:
3. The Hiring Process: Building the Sales Team:
4. Scaling the Machine: Bringing the Dollars In:
Marcelo Claure is the Founder & CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm. He is the Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Bicycle Capital, a $500M Latin America-focused growth equity fund, and was appointed Chairman in Latin America of SHEIN, the global #1 on-demand fashion company in the world. Claure was also the CEO of SoftBank Group International where he launched SoftBank’s $8B Latin America Funds, and had direct oversight for SoftBank's operating companies. As an entrepreneur, Marcelo built Brightstar from a small local distributor to the world’s largest global wireless distribution and services company. In addition, Claure led the turnaround of US wireless telecommunications company Sprint and helped orchestrate its US$195 billion merger with T-Mobile.
Shu Nyatta is the founder of Bicycle Capital. Before Bicycle, Shu was most recently a Managing Partner at SoftBank Group International, where he launched and managed two separate funds - the SoftBank Latin America Fund and the Opportunity Fund for early-stage investments in US-based founders-of-color. In the first part of his SoftBank career, Shu was a founding Partner of SoftBank's Vision Fund. Several companies have retained him on their boards as an independent board member following his departure from SoftBank, including Lemonade (NYSE: LMND), Kavak and Tribal Credit. Shu also serves on the board of Endeavor Global - the leading global community of, by and for high-impact entrepreneurs.
1. From Deploying $10BN at Softbank to Founding Bicycle Capital:
2. Lessons from Investing $10BN at Softbank:
3. The Venture World is Changing:
4. LATAM is Under Construction: It is Time to Build:
Stephane Kurgan is widely considered one of the best operators in Europe. During his tenure as COO @ King, King went from $65m to $2.4B in bookings, from 100 to 2,400 employees, and did a $7B IPO before being acquired by Activision Blizzard. Prior to joining King, Stephane served as CFO of Tideway Ltd. (acquired by BMC Software) and was the co-founder and CEO of Digital Reserve. Today, Stephane serves as a Venture Partner at Index Ventures, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade and more recently as an executive advisor at Technology Crossover Ventures.
1. From Belgium Boy to Europe's Leading Operator:
2. Four Criteria of Truly Great Leaders:
3. Speed of Execution and Mission Statements:
4. Delivering Feedback and Maintaining Trust:
Sri Batchu currently leads Growth at Ramp. He previously led Growth Strategy and Operations at Instacart where he also helped grow their Ads business. Prior to that, he was one of the first 50 employees at Opendoor where he built, scaled, and managed a variety of business teams including Analytics, Sales, and Pricing. During his time, the company grew from $100M to $5B+ revenue and to 1500+ people. He started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and also held various investing roles including in private equity at Bain Capital.
1. From Harvard to Private Equity to Leading the Best Growth Teams:
2. Growth Teams Should Fail and Fail Fast:
3. Building the Bench: Hiring a Growth Team:
4. When Operators Become Investors:
Adam Mosseri is the Head of Instagram, where he is responsible for overseeing the engineering, product, and business teams and leading Meta’s efforts on creators and Reels. Adam has been at Meta for more than fifteen years. He started at Meta as a designer for Facebook's mobile app before moving to product management, where he led the Facebook News Feed product and engineering teams, and served as the Head of Facebook News Feed. Adam began his career founding a design consultancy focused on graphic, interaction, and exhibition design before joining TokBox as the company’s first designer.
1. From Designer to Product Leader to Instagram CEO:
2. A Deep Dive on the Wild Times as Instagram CEO:
3. Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users in Three Days:
4. The Future of Consumer Social: What Happens Now?
Jean-Denis Greze is Chief Technology Officer at Plaid where oversees global product business units across North America and Europe. Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Jean-Denis is also a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Nex Health, Merge.dev and Rupa Health to name a few.
1. The Journey to One of the Most Powerful CTOs:
2. Hiring the Best: 101:
3. Product Differentiation is not Sustainable:
4. Remote Work, Titles and Entitlement:
Lauryn Isford is the Head of Product Growth at Notion, managing Notion's product-led growth engine and self-serve business. Before Notion, she led growth at Airtable, and previously worked on growth teams including Meta, Dropbox, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Lauryn is an active angel investor and advisor supporting companies building product-led go-to-market motions.
1. From Blue Bottle to Airtable and Notion:
2. What is Growth: 101:
3. Mastering the Onboarding Experience:
4. Making Growth work with the Rest of the Org:
Dave Clark is the CEO of Flexport, the global freight forwarder and logistics platform that has now raised over $2.5BN to build the category leader. Prior to Flexport, Dave began his career at Amazon in 1999 as an Operations Manager, working his way up to become the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business in 2021. By the time Dave left, he was responsible for over 1 million employees. Dave spearheaded the launch of Amazon Robotics and grew the company’s logistics divisions to include Amazon’s own planes, trailers, and last-mile delivery vehicles through Amazon’s own delivery network (which today ships more packages than FedEx and UPS). Huge thanks to Ryan Peterson for some amazing question suggestions today.
1. From Operations Manager to CEO @ Amazon:
2. How Big Leaders Make Big Decisions:
3. How Big Leaders Hire Big Talent:
4. How Big People Deal with Big Problems: Kids, Money and Ego
Sheel Mohnot is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Better Tomorrow Ventures, a $225M fund that leads rounds in pre-seed and seed-stage fintech companies globally. Sheel and Jake (his co-founder) invested for many years together before founding BTV and wrote checks into Mercury, Flexport, Ramp, and Hippo Insurance to name a few. As for Sheel, before BTV he ran 500 Fintech for close to 7 years, and before that was a founder, founding two companies, both of which were acquired.
1. VC Needs to Change:
2. VC in 10 Years Time:
3. The Errors of a Bull Market:
4. Building a Fund: Lessons, Mistakes and Advice Scaling to $225M:
Kevin Egan is the Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian and brings more than 25 years of enterprise sales experience and leadership to the company. Prior to his current role, Kevin served as the Vice President of North America Sales at both Slack and Dropbox and has held various senior sales leadership positions at Salesforce.
1. The Makings of a Truly Great Enterprise Sales Leader:
2. The Sales Playbook:
3. PLG vs Enterprise:
4. Hiring the Sales Team:
5. Making the Machine Work:
Simon Sinek is an optimist and author, as we discuss in the show today. Simon is best known for his TED Talk on the concept of WHY (62M views), and his video on millennials in the workplace (80M views in 7 days). Simon is also a bestselling author including global bestseller Start with WHY, Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game. In addition, Simon is the founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development company, and he publishes other inspiring thinkers and doers through his publishing partnership with Penguin Random House called Optimism Press.
1. The Makings of Simon Sinek:
2. Identity:
3. Trust:
4. Creating Safe Spaces:
5. Listening:
6. Simon Sinek: AMA:
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Last month Contextual closed a $20M funding round including Bain Capital, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and 20VC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.
1. Founding a Foundational Model Company in 2023:
2. Foundational Model Providers: Challenges and Alternatives:
3. Data Models: Size and Structure:
4. Regulation and the World Around Us:
Jennifer Hyman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, the world’s first and largest shared designer closet. Under Jennifer’s leadership, RTR has made history by being the first company to go public with a female founder/CEO, COO, and CFO. Jennifer serves on the Board of The Estée Lauder Companies and Zalando, and also is a Founding Member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council, a Member of the Women.nyc Advisory Board and a Member of the Launch with GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs.
1. The 14-Year Overnight Success: Scaling Rent The Runway To IPO:
2. Building the Best Team:
3. Building the Business for IPO and Beyond:
4. Boards 101: Leading and Learning from Estee Lauder:
Akin Babayigit is a serial entrepreneur and an active angel investor. He is currently the Founder and COO of Tripledot Studios, one of the fastest-growing mobile gaming companies in the world, which was recently valued at over $1.4BN. In just 4 years, Tripledot grew to generate several hundred million dollars per year in revenue and currently entertains over 50 million people every month. Tripledot was recently named as the #1 fastest-growing European company by FT, as well as being named as the fastest-growing Tech business in the UK, in the annual “UK Tech Awards”.
Entry into the World of Startups and Gaming:
90% of Startup Advice is Total BS: