Venture with Grace

Venture with Grace

I host a top VC podcast called Smart Venture Podcast (SVPpro.com). Past guests include C-level/VPs of Google, Meta, Amazon, Sephora, Dunkin' Donuts, Chipotle, Pepsi, Instagram, Deloitte, Reddit, Lyft, etc. Managing Partners of top funds (many were featured on the Forbes Midas List) and unicorn founders (founders of Craigslist, Square, Loom, Cruise, etc.) Venture with Grace is my new spin-off series that features top LPs, GPs, solo GPs, Angel Investors, top AI founders, and other experts in tech and business to cover specific domain expertise. Watch this Live on LinkedIn/ YouTube: Grace Gong

Episodes

October 10, 2025 62 mins

Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data and ML teams that enables deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with effortless scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Modal's pay-per-use model charges only for actual compute time down to the CPU cycle, eliminating idle costs while accelerating development and reducing infrastructure overhead. Befor...

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Çağla Kaymaz is a partner at Category where she invests in founders building transformative companies in enterprise software. Previously, she was at Citi Ventures, where she backed AI infrastructure and application startups including Datavolo (acquired by Snowflake), Galileo, Glean, Lexion (acquired by Docusign), and Norm Ai. Cagla began her career at Microsoft as a software engineer before moving into product management, where she...

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Harris Stolzenberg is a Partner at Pear. Based in Boston, he is focused on making Pear the go-to early stage firm on the East Coast. He thrives when working alongside ambitious founders at the very earliest stages, rolling up his sleeves to help turn bold ideas into enduring companies. Harris returns to Pear as a partner after previously working at Pear as an associate. He touched many different parts of the Pear ecosystem before t...

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Will Lehmann is the Founder & GP at Step Function. He has spent his entire career investing in technical founders at the earliest stages. He started Step Function to give founders leverage: a fund purpose-built to help founders building infrastructure software succeed from the outset. He provides the support, domain experience & expertise that you expect from an institutional lead investor with the feel, velocity & acce...

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Clayton Petty is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to Gradient, Clayton helped build the Cyber Security practice at McKinsey & Company, advising founders, operators, and investors across the cyber ecosystem. He also worked closely with vertical software, automation, and cloud infrastructure businesses to scale their go-to-market efforts. Before McKinsey, Clayton was a software engineer and studied computer science at Texas A&M U...

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Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, where he leads product and business innovation in AI and software. He has held leadership roles at Salesforce, Cisco, Tonkean, TomoCredit, and Workplay Labs, and is also a General Partner at RNR Capital. Jeff co-founded RocketFuel Education, an education platform focused on cryptocurrencies, economics, AI, and venture capital, and is an active angel investor in multiple startups that have scaled to...

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Minjae Ormes is a Forbes World’s Most Influential CMO and Goldhouse A100 honoree, celebrated for building iconic brands and transformative teams at global companies including YouTube, Visible, and most recently as VP of Marketing at LinkedIn. Renowned for driving innovation in social media, the creator economy, and now AI, she leads with curiosity and courage, fostering inclusive, high-accountability cultures. In her free agent era...

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Arif Damji is a Partner at Conductive Ventures with deep experience in software and tech-enabled services. He focuses on achieving an efficient Go-To-Market strategy, leveraging his background in both B2B and B2C marketing and sales. Arif believes that scrappy founders deserve hands-on investors who provide practical support rather than buzzwords or generic advice.Topics:

  • How AI is reshaping B2B and B2C GTM playbooks
  • How traditi...
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Joanne Chen is a General Partner at Foundation Capital, where she invests in AI-first B2B applications and data platforms that power the automated enterprise. A technologist at heart who built her first webpage business at age nine, she launched her career as an engineer at Cisco before co-founding a mobile gaming company and later advising tech companies on IPOs and M&A at Jefferies, as well as venture firms on fundraising at ...

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Wen Sang is the Co-Founder and COO of Genspark.ai, a Palo Alto-based AI company building agents for knowledge workers, which reached 2 million users and $36M in ARR within 45 days of launching in April 2025, securing $160M in funding and partnering with top AI labs to advance agentic work solutions. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Smarking Inc., a Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures-backed SaaS company for parking analytics,...

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Nick Evans is the Co-Founder and CEO of Avocado, a restaurant point-of-sale system integrated with an AI assistant designed to transform restaurant operations. He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Tile, a leading consumer technology company specializing in Bluetooth tracking devices, which was successfully acquired by Life360. Nick has deep technical expertise across hardware and software engineering, including embedded sy...

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Ganesh Bell joined Insight Partners as a Managing Director to invest in and help entrepreneurs build great software & data companies that will define modern enterprise and digital business. He is a profound student of the enterprise software market and industries reimagined by data. Ganesh has over 25+ years of rare experience as a builder and operating executive across startups, high-growth scaleups, global conglomerates, unic...

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Sri Batchu, most recently Chief Marketing Officer at The RealReal, the leading luxury luxury resale platform in the U.S, is a seasoned leader in growth and operations, with a proven track record of scaling hyper-growth tech companies through pivotal roles at Ramp, Instacart, and Opendoor. In addition to his growth and marketing expertise, Sri is an active investor and advisor to over 50 startups. A graduate of Dartmouth College and...

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Caroline Duffy is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures. She thrives partnering with ambitious builders reimagining existing categories or creating entirely new ones. She focuses on B2B software and AI, with a particular passion for teams modernizing overlooked, unglamorous industries burdened by outdated tech stacks. It’s never too early to reach out - she’s excited to collaborate with founders from idea inception onwards. Before Cowboy, C...

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Akankshu Dhawan is Senior Vice President of Product Management and Executive General Manager at Xero, where he leads product strategy and AI-driven innovation for small businesses. He previously held leadership roles at Uber, AppDynamics, and Microsoft, and co-founded ImaZing. With an MBA from Chicago Booth, an MS in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UMass Dartmouth, and a B.Tech. from DAIICT, Akankshu brings deep ...

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Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI, a leading generative video company whose personalized storytelling app quickly reached #1 in graphics on the App Store and debuted a state-of-the-art video world model in 2025. Previously, he served as Director of Generative AI at Snap Inc., leading MyAI chatbot development and GenAI AR effects for hundreds of millions of users, after Snap acquired his startup AI Factory for $...

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Kate Berardo is the Vice President of Executive Development at Meta, where she leads the company’s most strategic coaching, team, and leadership initiatives. Trusted by senior leaders to navigate their most pressing challenges, she has designed and delivered some of Meta’s most impactful leadership programs and learning products. With a proven track record of building and scaling teams, practice areas, and centers of excellence, Ka...

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Andrew Chau is the co-founder and CEO of Boba Guys Inc., the revolutionary bubble tea company that has fundamentally changed how people view boba and tea culture in America. Starting from a shared passion for quality milk tea and a mission to elevate the boba experience with fresh, premium ingredients, Andrew and co-founder Bin Chen launched Boba Guys in 2011. What began as a single San Francisco location has grown to 24+ locations...

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James Flynn is a Partner at Sequoia Capital focused on post-Series A investments across the tech landscape. Prior to that he was a growth equity investor at General Atlantic. Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most valuable and enduring businesses. We partner with a few outliers each year and go all-in, providing them with the hand...

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Vikram Chatterji is the co-founder and CEO of Galileo. Galileo is the leading platform for enterprise GenAI evaluation and observability. Our comprehensive suite of products support builders across the new AI development workflow—from fine-tuning LLMs to developing, testing, monitoring, and securing their AI applications. Each product is powered by our research-backed evaluation metrics. Today, Galileo is used by 100s of AI teams f...

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