Fund/Build/Scale
After working for years in early-stage startups and as a journalist, here are three hard truths I’ve learned: 1. Success in Silicon Valley hinges on connections, hard work and luck. 2. Startups often fail because founders lack fundamental business knowledge. 3. Real, actionable advice comes from those who’ve actually done it. There’s no such thing as “founder DNA.” If you’re willing to take on risk and invest years of your life in something that has maybe a 10% chance of paying off — less if you’re a woman or person of color — you can be a startup founder. Here’s why I founded Fund/Build/Scale: 1. To help founders make fewer mistakes. 2. To share successful strategies that can accelerate your go-to-market journey. 3. To inspire more people to see themselves as potential founders. There’s a lot of overlooked talent out there, and we are missing out. This podcast is for anyone who’s interested in learning the basic skills required to launch a startup, secure initial funding and transform an idea into a sustainable business. I’m talking to guests about everything: finding a co-founder, conducting customer discovery, recruiting early employees, developing a PLG strategy, fundraising when you’re outside a major tech hub — all of it. Interested? Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on all major platforms and follow the podcast on LinkedIn to get articles, excerpts, transcripts and more. Fund/Build/Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media LLC.
Episodes
Startup employees are encouraged to believe in the mission. But IPO timelines now stretch well past a decade — and many never happen at all.
In this episode, Ben Black, co-founder and managing director of Akkadian Ventures, explains how tech workers can think more strategically about the equity they’ve helped create.
Drawing on more than 750 secondary transactions, Ben walks through how employees can evaluate a company’s liquidity...
I interviewed Play Ventures General Partner Phylicia Koh to explore what founders outside of gaming can learn from two decades of game design.
Play Ventures began as a gaming-focused VC fund. Today, it also invests in what Phylicia calls “playable apps,” consumer products that combine utility with the engagement mechanics of games.
That doesn’t mean slapping on points and badges. It means understanding motivation, social dynamics,...
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Sentry co-founder David Cramer joins host Walter Thompson for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about what founders actually struggle with — and why so much conventional startup advice falls apart in practice.
David shares how he dropped out of high school, taught himself to code, and turned a side project into Sentry, the error-tracking platform now used by millions of developers. From there,...
Building an early-stage startup isn’t just about the technology — it’s about earning trust before the proof exists.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I’m joined by Jeff Smith, CEO and co-founder of 2nd Set AI, a startup building generative image and video tools for media, entertainment, and sports organizations.
Jeff is a repeat founder navigating a familiar but uncomfortable phase: selling complex, unproven AI into large enterp...
As African startups mature, the leap from seed to growth brings a new set of challenges — longer fundraising cycles, institutional expectations, governance, and the realities of scaling across fragmented markets.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sit down with Ngetha Waithaka, partner at Norrsken22, one of the continent’s leading growth-stage funds. We talk about how investors evaluate African startups as they approach Series ...
In this episode, I’m joined by Jon Callaghan, co-founder and managing partner at True Ventures, and Julie Bornstein — CEO and co-founder of Daydream, founder of The Yes, and former COO of Stitch Fix — to break down what investors really evaluate in the first 18 months of a company’s life.
Drawing from their shared history as investor and founder, we talk candidly about runway, hiring before certainty exists, conviction versus ego, ...
For years, founders have been told to build a defensible moat. But in AI, where platforms, models, and capabilities can shift overnight, that advice is starting to feel outdated.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Simular CEO and co-founder Ang Li talks about what it actually means to build a company when the underlying technology won’t sit still.
Rather than evangelizing agents or predicting the future of work, Ang gets unusual...
When most founders look at markets dominated by Google or Apple, they see a dead end. Ariel Seidman saw an opening.
Before founding Hivemapper, Ariel helped scale Yahoo Maps during a period when search and mapping were rapidly evolving. That experience gave him a front-row seat to how large-scale mapping systems are built — and how technical, capital, and organizational constraints shape the pace of innovation at scale.
In this epi...
Odille Sánchez leads the Tech and Scientific-Based Entrepreneurship Center of Excellence at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where she works with hundreds of early-stage founders across Latin America.
In this episode, she explains how mindset, methodology, and community are reshaping what it means to launch a startup in a region where early capital is scarce and institutional support is fragmented.
We also talk about:
- Read more
When you don’t have generational wealth or a built-in network, the startup path isn’t just harder — it’s different.
In this episode, I’m joined by James Norman and Sean Green of Black Operator Ventures for a candid conversation about what early-stage founders actually need to understand to raise capital and scale companies when they’re coming from the outside.
We talk about why fundraising is a power-dynamic game, not a meritocracy...
Lexi Reese has scaled companies at every stage — from building Google’s programmatic advertising business, to helping Gusto grow revenue from $10M to $300M.
Now she’s co-founder and CEO of Lanai, an enterprise AI startup tackling a problem most companies don’t even realize they have: they can’t actually see how AI is being used inside their organizations, or whether it’s driving real outcomes.
In this episode, we unpack what it rea...
April co-founder and CEO Ben Borodach joins Fund/Build/Scale to break down how he built a compound startup in one of the hardest markets in fintech: U.S. taxes.
We talk about why some problems can’t be solved with a simple wedge product, how to sequence engineering, compliance, and distribution, and what it takes to operate inside complexity for years before the market catches up.
Ben shares the early customer discovery work, the...
In most industries, if you’ve got a solid idea, a few engineers, and a working prototype, you can at least get in the game.
Professional sports is not one of those industries.
When Jordy Leiser co-founded Jump with Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore, he wasn’t just building software — he was trying to rebuild the entire fan experience from the ground up, in a business dominated by legacy players lik...
Most founders think VCs want a pitch deck full of market numbers, a roadmap, and a feel-good story about the future.
Hoxton Ventures Partner Payton Dobbs isn’t looking for any of that.
He wants to know if you actually understand the game you’re trying to play.
In this conversation, Payton breaks down the tactical stuff founders almost always get wrong:
- why TAM slides don’t matter
- Read more
Today’s episode is something a little different.
I’m doing a feed swap with Humans of AI, a podcast from the team at Writer.
What you’re about to hear is their conversation with David Ryan Polgar, the Founder and President of All Tech Is Human, a leading organization in the Responsible Tech movement.
He’s a pioneer in tech ethics and responsible innovation, and someone who’s been thinking about the societal impact of AI long befo...
Recorded live in San Francisco during TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 week, this Fund/Build/Scale session brings together Cyan Banister (Long Journey Ventures) and Cristian Cibils Bernardes (Autograph) for a practical look at building consumer AI and the investor-founder dynamics that make it work. We dig into pre-traction signals that actually predict momentum, how to validate a weird idea, raise smart money, and ship products people retu...
I interviewed Ryan Wang, co-founder and CEO of Assembled, in his San Francisco office to unpack how he turned lessons from Stripe into a fast-growing startup that powers customer support teams at Robinhood, Canva, and Notion.
We talk about:
- Finding the right co-founders and surviving a CEO hand-off
- Discovering product-market fit by asking one powerful question
When startups fail to scale, it’s rarely because of bad code or bad luck. More likely, it's because they didn’t hire the right people at the right time.
Chris Barbin, founder and CEO of Tercera, shares a playbook for assembling your “Starting Five” — the essential leadership roles every professional services startup needs to grow from $10M to $100M and beyond.
Drawing from decades as an operator and investor, he explains how to sp...
I’ve explored different aspects of product-market fit on the podcast, but when you’re scaling an open-source business with enterprise customers and a global developer community, you also need customer–engineering fit — the ability to translate between what’s being built and what the market actually needs.
At Astronomer, Viraj Parekh is that bridge. He is part engineer, part strategist, and part customer advocate, working across pro...
More startups die from co-founder breakups than from running out of money.
Attorney David Siegel, a partner at Grellas Shah LLP, has spent years inside these conflicts, helping founders navigate everything from equity disputes to emotional meltdowns.
In this conversation, he explains:
- Why greed and mismatched expectations trigger so many founder breakups
- How minority f...
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