Fund/Build/Scale

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...

Construction workers spend hours on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines to mark where walls, plumbing and utilities should go. It’s painstaking, back-breaking labor. And that’s how it’s been done for centuries.

Tessa Lau saw an opportunity — and built a robot that does it faster, safer, and with surgical precision.

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, the Dusty Robotics founder and CEO shares some of what she's learned about...

What happens when a team of legal veterans decides to rebuild the dispute resolution process from the ground up? 

To find out, I interviewed Rich Lee, co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR, a platform designed to resolve legal disputes faster, at lower cost, and with less friction for both companies and individuals. 

We talked about building a team that had enough credibility to sell into one of the most risk-averse industries, how the...

Before Postman became a category-defining platform used by millions of developers, it was a personal side project. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Abhinav Asthana shares how he went from hacking on API tools in Bangalore to leading a global company with nearly 900 employees across three continents.

We talk about:

• Building a developer-first product that spread through word of mouth
• Read more