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

Jay Levy is the co-founder and partner at Zelkova Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm with over 17 years of experience backing transformative SaaS companies like Help Scout, Klout, and Crimson Hexagon. From designing websites in high school to scaling startups during the dot-com boom, Jay has lived the full founder-to-investor journey. With a disciplined, people-first approach to investing, he offers sharp insights on sca...

Greg Weinger is the Senior Vice President of Product Management at SheerID and the creator of The Powerful Introvert podcast. With over 15 years of experience scaling B2B SaaS product teams at companies like Urban Airship, YesMail, and Jive Software, Greg brings a unique blend of technical depth, leadership insight, and introverted clarity to every role he takes on. In this episode, he shares lessons from building enduring product ...

Chris Anzalone is the founder and CEO of Knowledge, an AI-driven sales intelligence startup reshaping the way businesses identify in-market buyers. With a unique background in high-ticket finance and agency sales, Chris bootstrapped Knowledge from a services-based business into a fast-scaling SaaS company, reaching thousands of users and notable ARR growth. In this episode, he shares how data, psychographic matching, and real human...

Chuck Stormon is a serial entrepreneur, AI pioneer, and managing partner at StartFast Ventures. With a career that includes founding multiple startups, commercializing early AI accelerators, and building foundational internet infrastructure, he offers deep insights into AI, entrepreneurship, and the future of intelligence. In this episode, Chuck shares his journey from developing neural chips for the U.S. Air Force to shaping the n...

Ravi de Silva is the founder of DeRisk Partners and a seasoned compliance expert with a global track record, having led financial crimes compliance at Citi and held senior roles at JPMorgan and American Express. With deep experience navigating regulatory environments across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, he now helps banks, credit unions, and fintechs build scalable, strategic compliance infrastructures. In this episode, he shares wha...

Erika Anderson is the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Storytell AI, a platform that transforms unstructured conversations into strategic insights. A published essayist in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, Erika brings a deeply human and creative lens to the world of AI. With a background in storytelling, facilitation, and product development, she offers fresh insight into using generative AI to mine value from overlooked...

Samara Hernandez is the founding partner of Chingona Ventures, a trailblazing venture capital firm dedicated to backing overlooked and underestimated founders. With experience at Goldman Sachs, Math Venture Partners, and a mission deeply rooted in her heritage, Samara brings a fresh and authentic perspective to VC. She's helped grow Chingona Ventures into a $60M firm by rethinking who gets funded—and why.

With a thesis focused on ea...

Eric Silverman is the Managing Partner at Eastham Capital and a veteran investor with decades of experience across real estate, banking, and early-stage ventures. With six successful funds under his belt—and a seventh underway—Eric brings unmatched insight into distressed multifamily investments and a sharp eye for identifying high-performing operating partners across the country. His disciplined, value-driven approach has made Eas...

Rajeev Rai is the co-founder and CEO of QASource, one of the world’s leading software QA and engineering services firms. With decades of experience across Apple, Adobe, and his own ventures, Rajeev has made quality assurance a strategic asset for hundreds of companies, from scrappy startups to global tech giants. In this episode, he offers deep insights into why QA is often misunderstood, how to scale it effectively, and why it'...

Dave Perretz is a former Army officer turned founder of Signal Fund Services, where he helps emerging GPs scale with confidence. With experience at JP Morgan, Iron Spring Ventures, and startup 2U Laundry, Dave combines deep operational expertise with a strategist’s mindset to reimagine how fund infrastructure should work. In this episode, he shares how his military background shaped his leadership philosophy, the hidden pain points...

Ben Black is the co-founder and managing director of Akkadian Ventures, a pioneering secondary investor with a career spanning over two decades in venture capital. With a track record of building innovative investment strategies and founding the Raise Global Summit, he offers unparalleled insights into secondaries, fund management, and the evolution of the venture ecosystem. In this episode, he shares his journey from early-stage i...

Abdo John Hajj is the Managing Partner at Type One Ventures, a multi-dimensional investor and former founder who's deployed over a billion dollars into some of the most transformative companies in tech, AI, and space—names like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Neuralink. With a bold mission to accelerate humanity’s path to a Type One Civilization, Abdo combines a cinematic storytelling background with deep conviction in frontier technologie...

Malcolm De Leo is the Co-founder and Chief Business Officer at GraphIQ, an innovation-first platform redefining how enterprises discover and connect with business intelligence. With a PhD in chemistry and a 20+ year career spanning Clorox, Orbital Insight, and Quantified, Malcolm has built a reputation for evangelizing innovation, data-driven transformation, and cultural change inside legacy organizations. In this episode, he share...

Chris O'Neill is a seasoned tech executive with over 25 years of leadership experience at companies like Google, Glean, and Xero. As the current CEO of GrowthLoop and a board member at GAF, Chris brings deep expertise in AI, cloud, and go-to-market strategy. With a track record of navigating both wartime turnarounds and scaling peacetime operations, he offers a rare blend of operational rigor and visionary thinking. In this epi...

Oliver Libby is the co-founding Managing Partner of H/L Ventures and City Rock Venture Partners. With nearly two decades of experience backing high-impact, mission-driven startups, he has pioneered a unique venture studio model rooted in daily active engagement. He's also the co-founder and Chair of the Resolution Project, which has helped launch over 1,000 social ventures around the world. In this episode, he offers a deep dive in...

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and the originator of the term “newsjacking.” With a career that spans decades and a front-row seat to the evolution of real-time, fan-first marketing, David offers insights into how founders and brands can break through the noise without losing their authenticity. In this episode, he shares how to humanize your marketing, levera...

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...