Fund/Build/Scale

S2 E5: From the ground up: Building startups with Deb Kemper of Golden Seeds Ventures

Deb Kemper is a managing partner of Golden Seeds Ventures, a firm that focuses on backing early-stage, women-led companies.
She joined me on the podcast to share tactics with founders who want to build networks with investors outside of Silicon Valley and discuss some of the challenges facing anyone seeking follow-on funding these days.
We also talked about the criteria investors use to gauge the strengths of teams and their ideas.
“I know some investor groups do full-on psychological assessments of founders and their teams,” she said, noting that she prefers to learn through observation. One red flag: entrepreneurs who can’t easily explain their ideas aren’t ready to work with investors.
“If I go to a networking event and someone can't tell me in 60 seconds what they do — or even less — I'm done,” said Deb.
“They just want to talk to you and tell you everything about their company. And I walk away saying, “I still don't know what they do.’”
Episode breakdown
How Golden Seeds Ventures works with Golden Seeds Angel Network
“You have to be really solving a customer problem in a way that we see is unique.”
Strategies for fundraising, extending runway + adapting to the current investment climate
Founders/companies that might benefit more from funding methods besides traditional VC
Why finding a co-founder is more about serendipity than process
How Golden Seeds gauges a team’s domain expertise/understanding of market needs
Deb talks about the need for products to solve substantial problems and not just be quick fixes
Common pitfalls for founders, especially around financial management and market positioning
“I don't think that's of any use to have a rubber stamp board.”
Deb’s perspective on the current state of AI investments and the potential for startups outside major tech hubs
Links
Deb Kemper, managing partner, Golden Seeds Ventures
Golden Seeds Ventures
Utah Tech Week 2024
Fund/Build/Scale on LinkedIn
Fund/Build/Scale on Substack
Thanks for listening!
– Walter.

S2 E4: VAST Data CEO/founder Renen Hallak: “When we started, AI wasn't a thing.”

One of the first interviews I did for the podcast was with Renen Hallak, CEO and founder of AI infrastructure company VAST Data. 
The company launched in 2019, and three years later, it was ranked No. 5 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™. Today, its customer base includes massive organizations like Disney, Verizon, the US Air Force and the US Department of Energy. It’s one of the fastest-growing companies in its sector.
You can probably tell I was a little nervous.
Most of the questions I asked covered VAST Data’s first eighteen months: his customer discovery process, how his team worked to gain traction and build credibility with clients and also, why he looked for a co-founder who could take over go-to-market strategy.
Renen also spoke frankly about his previous experiences launching startups, which weren’t as successful.
When it came to fundraising, “I did not know how to do it,” he said. “I didn't understand the game. I thought that VCs judge ideas based on the merit of the idea. In fact, I think most of the weight goes to who you are, what you've done, and who vouches for you, in terms of who they choose to invest in.”
If you’re an academic or a worker in a technical role who’s thinking about starting up, you’ll definitely want to listen to this episode.
LINKS
Renen Hallak, CEO/founder, VAST Data
VAST Data
VAST Data Ranked 5th Among North America’s Fastest-Growing Technology Companies [press release]
Fund/Build/Scale on LinkedIn
Fund/Build/Scale on Substack
EPISODE BREAKDOWN
What VAST Data does
Renen's career shift and the early challenges he faced starting VAST
Why his previous fundraising failed: “I did not know how to do it. I didn't understand the game.”
Customer discovery processes and early challenges in gaining traction/building credibility
What he learned from failure about fundraising and VC dynamics
Strategies for creating innovative products that withstand competition from big players
How VAST used customer feedback to shape their product development
The process and timing of building a team, particularly focusing on sales + marketing
Initial customer acquisition and how VAST secured large-scale data users early on
From zero -> $1 million ARR -> $10M ARR in about 18 months
How VAST anticipates/integrates future AI trends into its pipeline + business model
Renen’s personal advice for new founders transitioning from technical roles to CEO positions

S2E3: Felicis' Viviana Faga on early-stage AI brand development and investment tactics

Viviana Faga is general partner at Felicis, a venture firm that invests in seed to Series B startups in several sectors. Since its founding in 2006, the company has backed breakout companies like Adyen, Canva, Shopify and Runway. 
Because she’s a former operator with experience in positioning, branding and go-to-market strategy, I asked her to come on Fund/Build/Scale to talk about how she evaluates seed-stage AI investments and share some of the tactics she’s using to help founders “really focus on this idea of a defensible brand.”
Episode breakdown:
A look at Felicis’ strategy of investing across different sectors and stages
Viviana outlines areas of interest within AI and clarifies typical investment size
“If you're a traditional SaaS company, I think it's going to be very hard.”
How AI startups differ from traditional SaaS in terms of growth/funding opportunities
“I think TAM is just a false predictor in either direction.”
“It's hard to start an AI company if you have not been in research or in academia,”
“Every time there's a hot AI company, there's 15 new YC companies going after that problem 3-6 months later.”
“Marketing is formulaic, it really shouldn’t scare anyone.”
Questions AI founders should ask investors to ensure alignment and set expectations
Viviana shares her resources for keeping up with the latest developments in AI
“I always ask teams, ‘what's going to happen in five years that will determine your success, and walk me through it.’”
Links:
Viviana Faga, general partner, Felicis
Felicis
NeurIPS 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
No Priors podcast
Thanks for listening,
– Walter.
FBS on Substack
LinkedIn

S2E2: Capital-efficient growth and discovering diverse talent with Drew Glover of Fiat Ventures

Fiat Ventures General Partner and co-founder Drew Glover fits the textbook definition of an emerging investor, but we had so much to talk about, the term itself never came up during our interview.
Founded in 2022, Fiat Ventures is nearing the end of its $25M Fund One, which has focused on seed-stage fintech startups. “Seed is really the space that's optimized to our process, which is to work with them prior to investment,” said Drew.
In addition to Fiat Ventures, he also co-founded full-stack consultancy Fiat Growth, along with Fiat Advisory, a business marketplace that connects founders with experienced operators. Working separately, Fiat’s three arms strategically support early-stage founders from talent spotting to market entry in a capital-efficient manner.
In our interview, Drew unpacked the firm's philosophy of assembling a consortium of experts tailored to each stage of a startup's growth, rather than relying solely on an in-house marketing team.
We covered a lot of ground: Drew talked about his journey from football at UC Berkeley to venture capital. Because he's a person of color who navigated unconventional paths into the industry, he emphasized his commitment to accessibility and mentorship for underrepresented founders and fund managers. He also explained how and why Fiat Ventures actively seeks talent beyond Silicon Valley.
“As a Black VC that had to find a backdoor into the VC space, I understand how few folks that look like myself are out there both as a fund manager, as a venture capitalist, as well as a founder of color,” said Drew. “I'm typically looking for ways to make myself as available as possible.”
Episode breakdown
Founding Fiat Growth, and how it evolved into Fiat Ventures
Drew: “We believed we had a strategy around cost-efficient growth.”
How Fiat Ventures is adapting to recent shifts in fintech?
“Reverse-engineering venture” = working with companies prior to investment
“Do not hire a growth team. Bring a team like us in who can build your entire growth foundation.”
Common pitfalls in early-stage startup hiring and implementing growth strategy
The criteria and process Fiat Ventures uses to select and support startups
Fiat Advisors supports early-stage startups that aren’t yet ready for direct investment
“There is a relationship foundation in the VC space that needs to be honored.”
Fiat’s criteria for choosing investments and the importance of founder dynamics
Drew reflects on navigating the VC world as a person of color
Fiat Ventures’ plans for expanding services and the long-term vision for Fiat's ecosystem
Links
Drew Glover, GP, Fiat Ventures
40 Under 40: Drew Glover, Fiat Ventures, San Francisco Business Times, 4/21/23
Alex Harris, GP, Fiat Ventures
Marcos Fernandez, co-founder/managing partner, Fiat Ventures
Fiat Growth
Fiat Ventures
Fiat Ventures, with $25M for first fund, brings ‘insider’ approach to investing in early-stage fintechs, TechCrunch, 11/16/22
Steady App
Chime
Oakland Citizens Committee for Urban Renewal (OCCUR)
David E. Glover Emerging Technology Center
Fintech Meetup
Money 2020

S2 E1: Inside Intel Ignite with VP & GM Tzahi Weisfeld

Early-stage deep tech founders working in AI and ML, or sectors like mobility, robotics and semiconductors are generally better off raising funds, seeking mentorship and connecting with potential customers via investors who aren’t expecting rapid growth and expansion.
Because corporate VC looks for strategic plays that can accelerate their companies’ tech adoption and expand access to markets, they’re often more in alignment with deep tech startups. They also cast a wider net — while Y Combinator enrolls 1.5% of the applicants it receives, Intel Ignite is still highly selective, but it has a 4% acceptance rate and a broader global reach, says VP and GM Tzahi Weisfeld.
In this episode, we discussed his program’s selection and evaluation process, the kind of team Intel Ignite wants to mentor, and how they help deep tech founders overcome common challenges like feature prioritization and hiring.
“We look at the size of opportunity for Intel to be engaged,” said Tzahi. “And for us to look at this as a relevant thing, we would want to see a major impact.”
Interested in more corporate venture capital insights? I’m interviewing two more CVCs this season: Kevin Weber (managing director, Amex Ventures) and Nicolas Sauvage, (president, TDK Ventures), so please subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on your preferred podcast platform.
Links:
Intel Ignite
Tzahi Weisfeld, VP, GM, Intel Ignite
Intel Capital
CB Insights State of CVC 2023 report
Intel To Acquire Granulate (2022 press release)

Fund/Build/Scale season 2: Why I'm doing this podcast (and why you should listen)

I’m Walter Thompson. After working for years in early-stage startups and as a journalist, here are three hard truths I’ve learned:
Success in Silicon Valley hinges on connections, hard work and luck.
Startups often fail because founders lack fundamental business knowledge.
Real, actionable advice comes from those who've actually done it.
There’s no such thing as “founder DNA.” If you’re willing to take on risk and invest years of your life in something that has maybe a 10% chance of paying off, you can be a startup founder.
Here’s why I founded Fund/Build/Scale:
To help founders make fewer mistakes.
To share successful strategies that can accelerate your go-to-market journey.
To inspire more people to see themselves as potential founders. 
This podcast is for anyone who’s interested in learning the basic skills required to launch a startup, secure initial funding and transform an idea into a sustainable business.
Interested?
Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale and follow the podcast on LinkedIn or Substack to get articles, excerpts, transcripts and more.
Thanks for listening.
 

Episode 10 | Two repeat founders share long-term strategies for building sustainable startups

The average failure rate for a tech startup is 90%. 
Around one-fifth will flame out in the first year, and the overwhelming majority of the ones that make it past that mark will never be acquired or go public. It’s brutal.
It takes years to build a sustainable technology company, and considering how unbalanced the risk/reward ratio is, each founder needs to craft personalized mental and emotional frameworks that suit their needs.
Because there’s no single recipe for long-term success, I was glad to interview Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra and DevRev CEO Dheeraj Pandey about how they deal with the fear, uncertainty and doubt that affects every entrepreneur.
Poshmark is a pure consumer play, and DevRev sells enterprise software, but because Dheeraj and Manish are repeat founders who’ve taken startups from Day Zero to IPOs, they were an excellent choice for the last episode of season 1.
We broke down some of the strategies they’ve developed over time for recruiting, fostering early adopters, driving growth, and transitioning across industries. Both guests also unpacked some of the strategic decisions that propelled their companies forward and spoke openly about how they navigated some very lonely times along the way.
Episode breakdown
[2:38] Dheeraj: “The hardest thing was to really find the innovators and the early adopters.”
[4:40] Manish: “I just kept saying, ‘I'm not the right guy to do this idea because I had no consumer background.’”
[7:03] Why it’s so important to build an advisory team early on
[8:12] Dheeraj: “Finding people who have hunger and humility… has always been hard.”
[10:51] Prioritize hiring early employees who will challenge you and your assumptions
[14:18] Use your initial recruiting process to refine your value proposition
[17:30] When Manish realized Poshmark was the right company for the moment
[21:24] Winning “VMworld awards basically told us that we're doing something right.”
[24:36] Manish: “We got the first version of the app ready, but there were a couple of problems.”
[30:09] Dheeraj: “We said, ‘we’ve got to take something to the have-nots.’”
[35:14] Embrace a design-first mentality from Day Zero.
[39:00] Search for ways to reduce friction from every internal and external process
[43:21] Dheeraj: “By the way, the only job of the CEO over time is to go towards the fire.”
[50:39] When it comes to design, “less is better”
[53:39] Manish: “Whatever you don't have, you can always find it in someone else.”
[55:16] Dheeraj: “The more and more money you actually raise, the less you can pivot.”
[59:21] Manish: “Always be closing, because money can disappear very quickly.”
[1:02:32] Dheeraj: “I think my learnings have been about keeping the balance sheet in your head all the time.”
[1:05:31] How to recognize when it’s time to throw in the towel
[1:07:01] Is work-life balance even an achievable goal for an early-stage founder?
Links
Manish Chandra, CEO, PoshmarkTracy Sun, co-founder, Poshmark
LyAnn Chhay, VP, Poshmark
Dheeraj Pandey, CEO, DevRev
Kaboodle
Nutanix
TiE Global
Gokul Rajaram on Twitter: “VISION => TALENT => TEAM”
What Is Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing?
How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them
Rise of Empires: Ottomans
Eclectic grandpa style
Simon Sinek
Thanks very much for listening to season 1 of Fund/Build/Scale!
There’s much more to come in season 2, which starts very soon.
Join the FBS LinkedIn group
Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on Substack
Fund/Build/Scale is sponsored by Mayfield and Securiti.

Episode 9 | Taking an AI startup from research to reality with Dipanwita Das of Sorcero

For this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I interviewed Dipanwita Das, CEO and co-founder of Sorcero, about the journey of taking an AI startup from research to reality. She shared her experience of interviewing more than 300 people to shape Sorcero's product and technical requirements, as well as strategies for aligning customer needs with product development. We also discussed the challenges of building a capable team, fundraising, and the process she and her co-founders used to transform their thesis into a marketable product.
[1:55] How Sorcero’s co-founders connected and launched in 2018 (before the AI boom)
[5:31] Why she interviewed 300+ people to gather insights before Sorcero started building
[6:21] "R&D for us sort of is in two halves."
[8:57] Building a team with the right balance of skills and entrepreneurial spirit
[10:52] "Someone… suggested we use the frame, 'minimum lovable product.'"
[12:20] "My TAM calculation was a bit amateur in the early years."
[16:28] How Sorcero managed R&D while building trust with early customers
[19:14] Series A milestones
[21:44] "I zeroed in on a number of roles" in hundreds of customer discovery interviews
[26:14] How they determined whether Sorcero would be a horizontal or vertical product
[29:31] If you have a cohesive cognitive framework and market proof, you can fundraise
[32:20] Why AI academics/researchers should cultivate "a customer-facing mindset"
[37:46] When making early hires, "you need a builder persona with an incredible drive."
[41:15] The one question she asks in every interview
[42:25] Her advice for AI founders who are trying to raise funds right now
Links
SorceroDipanwita Das, CEO
Walter Bender, CSO
Richard Graves, CCO
What is a minimum loveable product? [Product School]
Funding alert: AI startup Sorcero raised a (mid-pandemic) $3.5M bridge round
AI startup Sorcero secures $10M for language intelligence platform
How Sorcero is improving the accessibility of scientific literature
Thanks for listening!
Fund/Build/Scale is sponsored by Mayfield and Securiti.

Episode 8 | Securiti CEO Rehan Jalil on scaling to $1M ARR (and beyond)

Going from zero to $1M in annual recurring revenue is worth celebrating, but it’s no guarantee that your startup is on a path to success.
How long did it take to reach this milestone? How much did you spend to acquire each customer, and how many have renewed or extended their contracts?
When it comes to sales, repeatability equals success. To learn more about the tactics startups use to reach $1 million ARR (and beyond) I interviewed Rehan Jalil, CEO of Securiti.
Drawing from his experience as a three-time founder, we talked about setting up an initial sales motion, understanding and validating the problem you're solving, focusing on a specific audience to hone your value proposition, and building trust with early customers.
Episode breakdown:
“Before we even get to the revenue, it actually is important to understand what problem you're trying to solve.” [2:10]
“The only metric is repeatability.” [4:55]
“So we coined the term ‘privacy ops’… we wrote a book on it.” [7:35]
“Teams have to be very much in sync, which means information has to flow.” [10:39]
“By the time you get to MVP, you better have refined this thing. [12:40]
“Before you bring in sales teams, it’s important that you actually have the content for them.” [15:34]
“The bar is very high within the enterprise, and it takes much longer.” [18:29]
“If you don’t start with conviction, don’t do it.” [21:41]
“Find people who have a common interest on the problem that you're trying to solve.” [26:08]
“If they feel like you helped them… they can actually be advocates.” [28:14]
“Just putting things freemium out there doesn’t mean people are going to adopt it.” [30:41]
“Prioritize finding a viable use case and viable product strategy vs. rushing into something.” [32:36]
Thanks for listening! Follow Fund/Build/Scale on LinkedIn and Substack.

Episode 7 | Communicating your vision with May Habib (CEO, Writer) and Gaurav Misra (CEO, Captions)

Successful entrepreneurs must translate their personal visions into something tangible enough to attract employees, investors, and eventually, customers. 
There are best practices for product management and software pricing, but how do you make yourself persuasive (and authentic) enough to convince someone else to risk their time and money on your idea?
I interviewed May Habib (CEO and co-founder, Writer) and Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder, Captions) to learn how they use a mix of hard and soft skills to maintain a clear and strategic vision that informs everything from recruiting to GTM strategy. 
We also discussed methods for finding investors who understand your space, building a team, and why “rarely is the first idea the right idea.”
Here’s a full episode breakdown:
Part 1: May Habib, CEO and co-founder, Writer
"This was going to be just a much more interesting product." [03:27]
Writer's original founding "team is pretty together from early days." [5:45]
"In 2020, I don't remember spending a lot of time on the AI behind the AI." [6:11]
When May recognized that she’d connected with investors who shared her vision [8:30]
"The benefit of the full-stack approach is really becoming pretty obvious for people who are spending time with enterprise customers." [12:11]
"I don't see myself as a storyteller, I see myself as decent at picking up signal from noise and explaining that to people." [13:03]
"I do care a lot about design, about brand.... it's always been a very visual company." [16:07]
"If I was just meeting somebody, they got a slightly different deck in the first meeting." [19:06]
"Even ‘til the Series A, I think I looked down on people who were active on LinkedIn." [20:03]
"I think enterprises are getting fatigued." [23:01]
"If it's AI, show, don't tell, because the capabilities are so wild that you can really blow people away." [26:42]
Part 2: Gaurav Misra, CEO and co-founder, Captions
"We want to come up with a lot of different ideas in this space and what gets us excited." [33:32]
"We talked to a lot of people to help solve that creation problem that we were trying to go after." [36:34]
Why social media is "a really good way to actually test startup ideas" [38:20]
Investors were enthusiastic about shifting strategy, but "the hard part was to convince yourself." [39:55]
"It's really important to have an investor who understands the space inside and out." [41:29]
"The hardest part has been, what do we actually want to do, and what did we see actually working?" [44:35]
"I don't think of myself as a natural storyteller. I think it's something that I had to learn a little bit more of." [47:00]
Why Gaurav is still Caption's 'chief storyteller'" [49:42]
The importance of aligning your overall vision with PMF [51:16]
"As the company grows, the vision does become more and more crystal clear" [52:10]
"Once people try the alternate solution, they should never want to go back to the original." [54:30]