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
Conventional wisdom says the hardest part of building a startup is building the product.
Shanea Leven says the harder challenge is figuring out what customers will actually pay for.
Before co-founding Empromptu.ai, Shanea spent more than 15 years building products at companies including Google, eBay, Docker, and Cloudflare.
In this conversation, she explains why sales is every bit as complex as engineering, why customer interviews...
If you're building a startup, there are easier industries to choose than healthcare.
Sales cycles are long, regulations are complex, and earning the trust of providers and patients takes years.
In this episode, Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate Director Jamie Sundsbak explains how healthtech founders can improve their odds of success.
We discuss what Mayo looks for in founding teams, why the program focuses on product development in...
Most startup advice assumes the biggest challenge is finding customers. But what happens when the demand is obvious and the real question is whether the technology can actually work at scale?
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sit down with Stanford professor and Inception Labs founder and CEO Stefano Ermon to discuss how a breakthrough research paper evolved into a venture-backed AI company serving enterprise customers.
Stefa...
Most technical founders can explain how their product works.
Far fewer can clearly explain why a customer should care.
In this episode, Cribl CMO Abby Strong shares what she has learned from building go-to-market teams and helping scale one of the fastest-growing companies in data infrastructure.
Drawing on her background in IT operations, product, and marketing, Abby explains why founders often struggle with messaging, how to kn...
What does it actually mean to build an AI-native company?
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I talk with True Ventures Managing Partner Puneet Agarwal and Gather CEO/co-founder Mayank Mehta about how the startup evolved from an AI-powered customer feedback idea into a broader research and content platform for marketing teams.
We get into founder conviction before product-market fit, what investors actually look for when there&rsq...
For this episode, I interviewed Eugene Malobrodsky, partner at One Way Ventures and former founder of AnchorFree, the company behind HotSpot Shield, one of the first consumer VPN products to scale globally.
Before becoming a VC, Eugene spent 15 years building and scaling a startup through the 2008 financial crisis, painful layoffs, difficult fundraising environments, and the long grind from idea to acquisition.
Today, he back...
A lot of early-stage founders can explain their company five different ways — and all five might be technically correct. The problem is that often, those answers don’t fully line up.
That gap in a startup’s narrative creates friction.
Investors may understand the problem but still don’t feel like the story lands. Candidates may understand the product, but they’re not fully on board with the missi...
Hiring is one of the hardest things for first-time founders to get right, especially if you’re building a distributed team that spans the globe.
For this episode, I spoke to Isaac Saul Kassab, co-founder of Pearl Talent, a recruiting firm that helps startups hire offshore teams. We break down the underlying hiring frameworks founders can actually use, whether you’re hiring locally or globally.
We get into how to write t...
Technical founders don’t usually struggle with what they’re building.
They struggle with explaining it clearly, quickly, and in a way that makes someone want to invest.
In this episode, I spoke with Sheena Jindal, Managing Partner and Founder of Sugar Free Capital, about how technical founders can de-risk themselves before they ever get on a call with a VC.
Sheena meets hundreds of founders each quarter and often decide...
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...
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...
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 ...
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, unpro...
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 appr...
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,...
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 u...
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 th...
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:
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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 p...
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...
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