Fund/Build/Scale
After working for years in early-stage startups and as a journalist, here are three hard truths I’ve learned: 1. Success in Silicon Valley hinges on connections, hard work and luck. 2. Startups often fail because founders lack fundamental business knowledge. 3. 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 — less if you’re a woman or person of color — you can be a startup founder. Here’s why I founded Fund/Build/Scale: 1. To help founders make fewer mistakes. 2. To share successful strategies that can accelerate your go-to-market journey. 3. To inspire more people to see themselves as potential founders. There’s a lot of overlooked talent out there, and we are missing out. 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. I’m talking to guests about everything: finding a co-founder, conducting customer discovery, recruiting early employees, developing a PLG strategy, fundraising when you’re outside a major tech hub — all of it. Interested? Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on all major platforms and follow the podcast on LinkedIn to get articles, excerpts, transcripts and more. Fund/Build/Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media LLC.
Episodes
Recorded live in San Francisco during TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 week, this Fund/Build/Scale session brings together Cyan Banister (Long Journey Ventures) and Cristian Cibils Bernardes (Autograph) for a practical look at building consumer AI and the investor-founder dynamics that make it work. We dig into pre-traction signals that actually predict momentum, how to validate a weird idea, raise smart money, and ship products people retu...
I interviewed Ryan Wang, co-founder and CEO of Assembled, in his San Francisco office to unpack how he turned lessons from Stripe into a fast-growing startup that powers customer support teams at Robinhood, Canva, and Notion.
We talk about:
- Finding the right co-founders and surviving a CEO hand-off
- Discovering product-market fit by asking one powerful question
When startups fail to scale, it’s rarely because of bad code or bad luck. More likely, it's because they didn’t hire the right people at the right time.
Chris Barbin, founder and CEO of Tercera, shares a playbook for assembling your “Starting Five” — the essential leadership roles every professional services startup needs to grow from $10M to $100M and beyond.
Drawing from decades as an operator and investor, he explains how to sp...
I’ve explored different aspects of product-market fit on the podcast, but when you’re scaling an open-source business with enterprise customers and a global developer community, you also need customer–engineering fit — the ability to translate between what’s being built and what the market actually needs.
At Astronomer, Viraj Parekh is that bridge. He is part engineer, part strategist, and part customer advocate, working across pro...
More startups die from co-founder breakups than from running out of money.
Attorney David Siegel, a partner at Grellas Shah LLP, has spent years inside these conflicts, helping founders navigate everything from equity disputes to emotional meltdowns.
In this conversation, he explains:
- Why greed and mismatched expectations trigger so many founder breakups
- How minority f...
What do you do when everyone loves your product but no one’s paying for it? That was the challenge facing Beautiful.ai. Founder Mitch Grasso nailed the product, but to build a sustainable business, he brought in operator Jason Lapp as CEO.
In this conversation, Jason shares how Beautiful.ai killed its freemium tier, introduced a credit-card-gated trial without losing momentum, and learned to serve both self-serve and enterprise cus...
Frontier tech startups don’t fail because the science is bad — they fail because no one needs what they’re building.
In this episode, Roadrunner Venture Studios CEO/co-founder Adam Hammer explains how to avoid that fate.
We talk about why the U.S. struggles to turn research into startups, why being right isn’t enough, and what it really takes to cross the Valley of Death between lab science and real-world demand.
Along the way, Ad...
You don’t need a Stanford degree or a flashy deck to raise a pre-seed, seed or Series A, but you do need to show investors that you’ve put in the work.
645 Ventures co-founder Nnamdi Okike shares practical advice for founders who are prepping to raise capital, including what he looks for in pitch meetings, how to uncover “earned secrets,” and why chasing hot categories can backfire.
We also dig into how 645 uses outbound sourcing a...
Dan Lee co-founded what would become Nooks while on leave from Stanford. He wasn’t solving sales. He was exploring remote collaboration during the pandemic.
But when they noticed that some of his most active users were in sales development — and that investors were starting to reach out — he followed the signal.
Today, Nooks is a sales AI platform used by teams at Seismic, Fivetran, and Modern Health, with $70 million in funding fr...
UPDATE: On 9/8/2025, ZEI announced "the conclusion of its operations." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zeroei_zero-emission-industries-zei-announces-activity-7371012829409177601-yQph?
******* Transforming breakthrough research into a sustainable company is never simple — especially in hard tech.
In this episode recorded in December 2024, Zero Emission Industries CEO/founder Dr. Joseph Pratt and Chief Strategy Officer John Motlow s...
Rob Biederman has sat on both sides of the table — first as co-founder and CEO of Catalant Technologies, and now as managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners. In this candid conversation, he explains why so much of the conventional wisdom around startups is actually counterproductive.
He breaks down why design partners don’t equal traction, why headcount growth is a vanity metric, and why Silicon Valley should stop romanticiz...
Pro tip: If you can’t see yourself getting up every morning for the next ten years and being excited about going to work, don’t launch a startup.
Ajay Prakash co-founded Rinse in 2013 to take the friction out of laundry and dry cleaning — for consumers, and for the small, family-owned businesses behind the counter.
Since then, Rinse has scaled into a national brand, and Ajay has become a lecturer at Stanford Graduate Business Schoo...
Karthee Madasamy is the founder of VC firm MFV Partners and the founding managing partner of Harper Court Ventures, both of which focus on early-stage deep tech startups.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, he explains what early-stage founders get wrong about TAM, why technical validation isn’t enough, and how to de-risk your company when the market barely exists.
We also talk about:
- What MFV loo...
Jyoti Bansal sold his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco for $3.7 billion.
Harness, his next company, reached a similar valuation a few years later.
As an entrepreneur — and as a VC at Unusual Ventures — Jyoti has built and backed multiple billion-dollar startups. But despite his track record, he says technical founders often overlook the same hard truth: good ideas don’t build great companies. It’s all about execution.
In this c...
Brian Rothenberg, partner at Defy and former VP of Growth at Eventbrite, joins Fund/Build/Scale to share what really matters when evaluating early-stage startups. From spotting false signals of traction to building defensible business models, Brian offers practical advice for both founders and operators.
He also explains why job seekers should “think like a VC” before joining a startup, how he prefers to be pitched, and what signal...
When you’re raising your first rounds, every cap table decision can echo for years. Give away too much equity early, lock yourself into restrictive pro rata rights, or over-optimize for valuation — and you may find yourself boxed in just when your company starts to grow.
Pulley co-founder and CEO Yin Wu has seen these mistakes firsthand. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, she offers practical, founder-first strategies for structu...
A turbulent flight sparked Wayne Slavin’s idea for Sure: let consumers buy insurance in real time. But after launching as a D2C app, he realized the bigger opportunity was powering insurance sales for others. Sure’s pivot to B2B turned it into a vertical SaaS platform that lets enterprise companies embed insurance at the point of transaction.
In this episode, Wayne explains how to pivot without losing your mission, why founders sho...
James Joaquin is co-founder and managing partner at Obvious Ventures, a VC firm that backs startups tackling intractable problems like climate change, chronic disease, and income inequality.
Their portfolio includes businesses that once sounded like science fiction but are reshaping billion-dollar industries. He says he's looking for technology that will “move humanity forward."
But this episode isn’t just about mission-driven inv...
Uncork Capital Partner Amy Saper shares practical advice for early-stage founders building AI-enabled tools for engineering, product, and design teams, or as she describes them, "products that make you not want to quit your job."
Drawing on her experience in product marketing at Twitter, Uber, and Stripe, she explains why storytelling is an underrated founder skill, how to refine your ideal customer profile, and why it’s good to re...
Ten Eleven Ventures CTO and Operating Partner Scott Lundgren shares practical advice for early-stage cybersecurity founders.
He explains why founder-market fit matters more than product polish, how teams should think about TAM in fragmented markets, and the signals he looks for in technical pitches.
He also breaks down how Ten Eleven’s network helps with diligence and customer development — and why “cool tech” often misses the ma...
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