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

Jonathan David Nelson has lived a stranger founder journey than most: missionary kid in Latin America, trauma nurse, software engineer, founder community builder, and now capital markets contrarian. After building Hackers and Founders from a bar meetup into a global startup community, Jonathan now runs HF Capital—an AI-native investment bank focused on IPOs, secondaries, and M&A.

In this episode, Jonathan breaks down why h...

What does a founder learn after selling four companies, burning one to the ground, and spending years building AI agents before “AI agents” became the phrase of the moment?

Dennis Mortensen has the scars to answer that. A Danish-born, New York-based serial founder, Dennis has built and exited companies across analytics, media optimization, and AI, including X.ai, the AI scheduling assistant that raised $44 million from F...

What if the hardest part of raising venture capital isn’t building the company — but understanding the game being played across the table?

Charlie O’Donnell has spent more than two decades inside the venture machine: first on the LP side at the General Motors Pension Fund, then as the first analyst at Union Square Ventures, then helping First Round Capital build its New York presence, where he sourced early deals l...

What does it take to design products people trust enough to wear, install in their homes, and use to manage their money?

Lauren Von Dehsen has spent 15 years at the intersection of hardware, software, and human behavior, shaping products that quietly become part of everyday life. She worked on the UX of Nike FuelBand when connected devices were still experimental, helped define how smart home products worked together at Nest, contri...

What happens when the future of transportation depends on infrastructure that still fails one out of every five times?

Brad Crist, co-founder and CEO of ChargeMate, is tackling one of the least glamorous—but most important—problems in EV adoption: broken charging experiences. Before founding ChargeMate, Brad spent more than a decade in climate tech, working across energy, automotive, and EV charging at companies like Acc...

What happens when the entrepreneur who taught Silicon Valley to “move fast” decides the real threat isn’t failure — it’s success?

Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup movement, is back with a far more uncomfortable thesis: the companies we admire don’t usually die because they lose. They die because they win — and then get financially engineered into irrelevance.

In this episode, Eric break...

What if the biggest risk in a startup isn’t hidden in the product, the team, or the market—but buried inside the data no one is auditing?

Attila Tóth is the co-founder and chief strategist of Cognitive Creators and the author of Hyper: The Untold Story of Marketing Data. His path started far from boardrooms: as a teenage professional cyclist who built a scrappy webshop for his father’s business, saw the first sale ...

What happens when a founder who nearly got crushed maintaining 70 integrations decides to rebuild the entire data layer for the AI era?

Roy Pereira is a 5x founder, multi-exit operator, and now the CEO of Unified — the infrastructure company powering real-time data connectivity for AI-native software. Unified helps B2B applications plug into hundreds of APIs and customer data sources without the engineering nightmare of buildi...

What happens when the people who can’t get a meeting become the ones building the room everyone wants access to?

Alex Sobol, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Millennium Alliance, has spent the last 12+ years turning enterprise relationship-building into infrastructure. What started as a bet between two operators who believed they could outperform legacy trade shows has become one of the dominant invite-only networks conn...

You can build a product in a weekend now—so why are so many teams still building things nobody wants?

Bill Albert has spent decades watching companies ship polished products that nobody wants. Now, he’s built his entire career around stopping that from happening.

He’s the founder of Greenlight Idea Lab and a leading voice in product validation and UX measurement. Before that, he led global customer experience at Mac...

What if insurance isn’t actually about protection—but about who understands risk better than anyone else?

Tanner Hackett has spent his career at the edge of massive shifts—helping build Lazada into Southeast Asia’s e-commerce backbone, then co-founding Button to ride the mobile commerce wave. Now he’s the founder and CEO of Counterpart, an insurtech company rebuilding small business insurance with AI-dr...

What if your AI didn’t just answer you… but interrupted you, remembered you, and slowly became someone you knew?

Vish Hari is building toward that future. A former Facebook AI researcher with roots in astrophysics, he’s spent nearly a decade inside deep learning—from training early models in 2013 to now founding Ego AI, an applied research lab focused on one idea: AI should feel human, not mechanical.

Ego isn...

What do you learn after building companies across five generations, and investing in thousands more?

David S. Rose has been early to nearly every wave: PCs, the internet, mobile, and now AI. As the founder of Gust, he didn’t just invest in startups, he built the infrastructure that powers how startups raise money globally.

He’s a serial entrepreneur, one of the most active angel investors in the world, founder of New York...

What happens when Google stops sending traffic… and AI starts deciding who gets discovered?

Jochen Madler is betting that most companies are not ready for that shift.

He’s the co-founder and CEO of SiteFire, a YC W26 startup building marketing infrastructure for the agentic web. After a background in statistics and reinforcement learning, he left his PhD to build a company helping brands show up inside AI systems like Ch...

Why do some startups get instant buy-in while others struggle to convince their first customer?

Mike MacCombie didn’t come up through the typical VC pipeline. He’s a former behavioral science consultant, Techstars mentor, and ecosystem builder who has hosted 50+ curated communities designed to change how people connect, share, and act. Today, he runs Generous Ventures, a pre-seed fund built on one core idea: the best com...

How do you secure systems when attackers are moving faster than your developers?

Derek Foster has spent his career inside that gap. From breaking video games with GameShark to securing large-scale fintech systems, he now builds what most teams still lack: a way to test, validate, and fix vulnerabilities continuously, not once a year.

As Co-Founder and CTO of Best Defense, Derek is building an AI-driven cybersecurity platform that doe...

What happens when a former Google and Oracle engineer spends a decade studying how enterprise buyers actually make decisions—and then uses that to pick startups? You get a very different lens on what “product-market fit” really means.

Arun Penmetsa, Partner at Storm Ventures, sits at the intersection of deep technical experience and over 11 years of early-stage investing. At Storm, a firm with 25+ years of history ...

What happens when a 22-year-old gets dropped into frontier markets to build e-commerce from scratch—and learns how to scale chaos into systems?

Christian Schroeder lived it. Today, he’s channeling those lessons into building and backing companies designed to win from day one.

Christian is the founder and CEO of 10x Value Partners and Utopia Capital, a former Rocket Internet operator, and an investor with ~40 portfolio com...

What happens when the same founder who once scaled a $30M HR tech company decides he picked the wrong problem—and starts over with a completely different bet on how companies grow?

David Walsh is a three-time founder, former professional rugby player from Dublin, and now the CEO of Limelight, a fast-growing platform building the operating system for B2B creator-led marketing. After scaling and exiting his previous company, he ...