Fund/Build/Scale

Recorded in July 2024, Aimi founder Edward Balassanian joins Fund/Build/Scale to share how his AI-powered platform creates generative, copyright-safe music for enterprise clients. He explains how customer discovery with DJs shaped Aimi’s tech, why compliance is core to their strategy, and why the company downsized after hitting product-market fit — all while inventing a market where AI music solves problems humans can’t.

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Nectir co-founder and CEO Kavitta Ghai shares how she turned her frustration as a college student into a fast-growing, VC-backed edtech startup. Kavitta discusses the leap from student to founder, how she built an AI-powered tool for classrooms without a technical background, and the tactics that helped her and her co-founder land paying customers early. She also opens up about navigating the ve...

Would you leave a stable, high-paying job at Google to build something that competes with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD? That’s exactly what Tim Davis, co-founder and president of Modular, did. Since then, his company has raised $130M to reimagine AI compute infrastructure — but are AI startups really desperate for a new compute layer? And what’s it like to build a startup when your biggest competitors are trillion-dollar giants? In...

Building a startup in Europe presents a unique set of challenges, like fragmented markets, cultural differences in risk-taking, and a VC ecosystem that’s still maturing compared to Silicon Valley. But things are changing fast.

For this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sat down with Lucile Cornet, partner at Eight Roads, a global VC firm that invests across Europe. We dive into:

🚀 How European founders are breaking away from Silicon ...

Journey founder and CEO Stephen Sokoler appeared on Fund/Build/Scale in June 2024 to talk about how his startup pivoted from B2C meditation services to a B2B mental health platform, along with what that shift revealed about selling to enterprise clients. He breaks down the challenges of high customer acquisition costs, the trade-offs of venture capital, and the key lessons founders should know before making a major business model s...

When you accepted the offer, maybe you imagined being in the group photo when your boss rang the bell at NASDAQ.

But five years later, your company just raised its Series C, and an IPO isn’t on the horizon. Meanwhile, you need liquidity — whether it’s for a down payment on a house, starting a family, or another major life event.

The stock options you’ve earned are fully vested, but they’re just sitting there. So how do you turn the...

Do you want to know the difference between marketing and PR?

Marketing is when you say something nice about yourself;

PR is when other people say nice things about you.

Jenna Guarneri is the founder of JMG Public Relations and author of the bestseller "You Need PR." In this episode, she shares DIY PR tactics that help founders establish themselves as experts, attract customers, and raise their profile with investors — without spen...

Building a startup in Africa isn’t the same as doing it in Silicon Valley.

Some challenges overlap, but many don’t, like currency volatility, limited early-stage funding, and investors who expect you to scale faster than the market allows.

So how do you grow beyond your home market? How do you raise funds when VC is scarce? And what do African founders need to do to make their startups more venture-backable?

To find out, I spoke wi...

Eric Ly is the CEO of KarmaCheck, where he’s tackling a problem he first noticed years ago as a co-founder of LinkedIn:

People don’t always tell the truth about themselves.

To address this, KarmaCheck — launched in 2019 — automates key aspects of the background check process. By reducing complexity, employers can speed up hiring, while job applicants experience less friction along the way.

“This is one of the first touch points wit...

Most early-stage founders I talk to are focused on getting their first customers, hiring their first employees, or maybe, if they’re lucky, closing their first round of funding. But what happens after that?

For Rohit Choudhary, the answer was building a whole new category.

Rohit is the CEO and co-founder of Acceldata, a data observability platform that helps companies manage the complexity of modern data infrastructure. Before star...

Startups face unexpected risks every day — cyberattacks, lawsuits, market shifts —but many entrepreneurs don’t think about risk management until it’s too late.

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Vouch co-founder/CEO Sam Hodges explains why risk management should be top of mind for early-stage founders. We discuss:

• Why risk management matters for early-stage startups  

Amr Awadallah is the CEO and co-founder of Vectara. Previously, he co-founded Cloudera, which went public in 2017 and was acquired for $5.3 billion, and also served as VP of Developer Relations at Google Cloud. His first startup, Aptivia, was acquired by Yahoo, where he later became VP of Product Intelligence Engineering.

I talked to him about his experience as an immigrant in Silicon Valley, the frameworks he’s built to articulate...