Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

Mala Ramakrishnan is the founder and managing partner of Progressive Ventures. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, she brings over two decades of experience as a technologist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. With multiple startup exits and a background as head of privacy at WhatsApp, Mala offers rare insight into B2B AI SaaS, privacy, and inclusive investing.

In this episode, she shares her journey from founding startups in...

What if the secret to building enduring billion-dollar businesses isn't chasing growth at all costs—but betting on slower, more sustainable scale, even if it means skipping the traditional exit? Jim Curry thinks most of Silicon Valley has it backwards—and he’s proving it, one founder-led company at a time.

Jim Curry is the co-founder of Build Group, a $330M permanent capital firm that invests in long-term, operator-led businesses. B...

Osama Elkady is the co-founder and CEO of Incorta, the only open data delivery platform enabling real-time analysis across all systems of record without complex ETL. With nearly two decades at Oracle—where he led innovations in BI, mobile strategy, and enterprise reporting—Osama holds several patents in data architecture and has helped numerous Fortune 100 companies become real-time enterprises. In this episode, he offers deep insi...

Minha Hwang is a principal applied scientist with a rare blend of technical depth and cross-disciplinary experience—holding dual PhDs in materials science and marketing science. He’s spent his career at the intersection of machine learning, experimentation, and causal inference, helping scale some of the most sophisticated AI evaluation systems in the world. Prior to his current work, Minha helped launch a data science arm within a...

Steve Kann is a Partner at Ocean Street Partners, a prolific investor, capital markets strategist, and Amazon #1 bestselling author of Microcap Magic. With over 30 years of experience in investment banking, public markets, and entrepreneurship, Steve has advised or raised over $1 billion in deals. He’s known for uncovering massive value in overlooked public companies and helping growth-stage startups navigate IPOs, M&A, and str...

What do Looney Tunes, hedge funds, and a $10M smartwatch Kickstarter have in common? For Benjamin Bryant, they’re all part of the unlikely path that led him to become one of the most prolific early-stage investors in YC history. A former VFX engineer turned Pebble exec turned venture fund builder, Benjamin now runs the AngelList Demo Day Funds—backing hundreds of YC startups with a quantitative edge and a founder’s intuition.

In...

What happens when a Bay Street dealmaker trades spreadsheets for seed rounds—and turns Canada’s next wave of startups into a global force?

Alex Norman, co-founder of N49P and Canadian partner of TechTO, went from investment banking and private equity to becoming one of the country’s most connected early-stage investors and ecosystem builders. Through N49P, he’s backing founders who are flipping the script on what Canadian innova...

What if one of the sharpest minds in finance wasn’t shaped by textbooks—but by watching Lehman Brothers collapse from the inside?

Chris Zaccarelli, CIO of Northlight Asset Management and co-founder of Beacon Capital Advisory Group, went from coding derivatives at Goldman Sachs to redefining how everyday investors navigate risk, recession, and returns. A Cornell-trained computer scientist and CFA, Chris shares how a career across...

What if one of the boldest early-stage investors in frontier tech got her start chasing down a job over yoga pants and no website?

Kristina Simmons, founder and managing partner of Overwater Ventures, began her career launching Lululemon’s e-commerce before rising through the ranks at Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures. Now she’s channeling that rare mix of brand, ops, and VC experience into Overwater, a fund built to help scie...

What if the most viral bedding brand in America was born not from a lifelong passion—but from a movie scene that made its founder furious?

Colin McIntosh, founder and CEO of Sheets & Giggles, turned a rage-fueled reaction to War Dogs into a fast-growing, pun-powered DTC bedding company built on eucalyptus, humor, and heart. A Techstars alum, former pitch coach, and comedy nerd, Colin shares how he scaled from an impulsive bu...

What if the person shaping the future of AI at one of the world’s biggest companies started by modeling the brains of bumblebees?

Daniel Hulme, Chief AI Officer at WPP and founder of Satalia (acquired by WPP), is a rare hybrid: academic, founder, and futurist. Now he’s building Consium—the first commercial research organization focused on machine consciousness—while leading AI transformation across a 120,000-person creative empire.

I...

If your startup’s logo disappeared tomorrow, would anyone still remember your brand? Today’s guest, Michelle B. Griffin, knows exactly why the answer matters.

As a Forbes-featured visibility strategist, author of The LinkedIn Branding Book, and founder of Brand Leaders, Michelle has built a career helping B2B founders stop hiding behind logos and start standing out as authority brands.

After starting her career shaping the images o...

What if your first investor didn’t just invest in startups—but had personally helped launch thousands?

Jenny Fielding, former Managing Director at Techstars and now Co-Founder of Everywhere Ventures, has been behind some of the biggest startup successes you’ve heard of—and is now reimagining how early-stage investing works in a borderless world. From scaling companies as a two-time founder to accelerating hundreds at Techstars, Jenn...

What if your biggest startup insight came not from a spreadsheet—but from knocking on 150 doors and listening?

Louis Retief is the co-founder and former CEO of Hubly, a vertical SaaS platform that reimagined how financial advisors manage compliance, capacity, and client service. What began as a peer-to-peer lending idea pivoted—through sheer grit and real-world curiosity—into a back-office automation engine used by hundreds of f...

What if your first investor not only knew how to scale a brand—but had built them alongside Jay-Z, Will Smith, and Kevin Hart?

Samyr Laine, Olympic triple jumper turned Harvard-trained lawyer and VC, is the co-founder of Freedom Trail Capital—a venture firm backing consumer brands at the intersection of culture, lifestyle, and influence. From Roc Nation to Westbrook, from athlete to operator, Samyr brings a rare lens to talent-l...

What happens when a finance-savvy product leader, obsessed with automating herself out of a job, meets the generational shift in AI? Erin Kim, former Carta exec and investment banker turned founder, is reimagining what a finance team even is. Now CEO of Mesh, Erin is building a fully agentic AI-powered finance team—starting with automated bookkeeping and reconciliation.

In this episode, we dive into how Mesh is replacing traditi...

What if cracking video game copy protection as a teenager could someday lead you to reshape how Main Street businesses adopt AI?

Mike Ghaffary’s journey is anything but typical: from reverse-engineering games at age 12 to co-founding Stitcher (acquired for $300M) and scaling Eat24 to $750M GMV as Yelp’s Head of BD turned CEO. Now as General Partner at Burst Capital, he’s backing the next generation of AI, software, and marketpla...

What if your first check came from someone who actually understood your scrappy MVP, your emerging market, and your ramen-burn rate lifestyle?

Ali Jamal, global operator turned full-time investor, is the founding partner of First Check Ventures—one of AngelList’s most prolific syndicates, now evolved into a pre-seed fund backing founders in 30+ countries. With experience scaling at Zynga, Agoda, and Rappi, and over 200 startup i...

What if your favorite store knew exactly what you wanted—before you even asked?

Alain Denzler, bootstrapped founder turned AI commerce pioneer, is making that vision real. As co-founder and CEO of getitAI, Alain is transforming e-commerce with AI-powered live store avatars that act like personal shoppers—turning product pages into real-time, high-conversion conversations. After scaling Pitcher, a sales enablement platform, to do...