Latest Interviews
Showing 1171–1185 of 1,633 interview transcripts.
Clear all filtersDaniel Yanisse: Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in the Hiring Process | 20VC #903
Checkr co-founders Daniel and Jonathan launched an API-first background check platform in a high-risk transition from corporate employment, leveraging early acquisitions and strategic hiring to build a scalable infrastructure. The company subsequently prioritized capital efficiency and founder-led delegation over rapid valuation growth, navigating significant lessons from premature enterprise expansion and pandemic-era fundraising challenges. Today, Checkr aims to redefine HR technology by normalizing second-chance hiring for individuals with criminal records while maintaining near-profitability to control its long-term strategic destiny.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 25m
Tony Bellew: Nothing Made Me Happy Until I Found This | E156
Former WBC world champion Tony Bellew reflects on a career defined by navigating family trauma, racial prejudice, and severe financial instability before achieving championship success. The conversation highlights his profound journey through the grief of losing family members and his struggle with mental health, which ultimately led him to reject work as a distraction and prioritize authentic connection with his wife and children. Bellew concludes by advocating for a realistic philosophy of life, emphasizing that true fulfillment comes from setting a positive example and embracing the struggle rather than seeking external validation.
Sonali De Rycker | How I Became a Partner at Accel; Type 1 vs. Type 2 Mistakes | 20VC #902
Sonali Balaji leverages her background in socialist-era India and a career spanning Goldman Sachs to Excel Venture Management to navigate market cycles from the 2000 dot-com crash to the 2008 financial crisis with a philosophy centered on never stopping investment. She champions a hyper-collaborative internal culture at Excel that empowers junior talent and prioritizes long-term founder support over short-term financial engineering to mitigate Type 2 mistakes. Balaji's current strategy emphasizes conviction over consensus, urging rapid learning and capital deployment in depressed valuation environments while fostering deep local trust across her global offices in Palo Alto, London, and Bangalore.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 14m
Bear Grylls: Man VS Failure, Anxiety & Imposter Syndrome | E155
Bear Grylls redefines resilience and confidence in his new book *Never Give Up* by framing both as developed through repeated failure and honest vulnerability rather than innate talent. Drawing on personal traumas ranging from severe military injuries to the loss of his father, he argues that true strength requires balancing high-performance ambition with a commitment to family and mental well-being. Grylls uses these experiences to advocate for a cultural shift where "doing your best" replaces the pressure to win, emphasizing that a life built on connections and authentic struggle is ultimately more sustainable than a pursuit of superficial fame.
Henri Pierre-Jacques: How I Founded Harlem Capital; Our $134M Fund | 20VC #901
Founded in 2018 by former investment bankers Henri and Jared, Harlem Capital operates a $134 million Fund II dedicated to backing early-stage ventures led by women and diverse founders. The firm employs a distinct "diverse camp" strategy targeting 30 to 45 portfolio companies while maintaining strict ownership targets and leading 80–90% of deals to ensure institutional control. By overcoming initial skepticism through a demonstrated diversity multiplier effect and implementing rigorous operational protocols like the human-first LP selection process, the firm has scaled its impact to support thousands of underrepresented entrepreneurs across the venture ecosystem.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 18m
World Leading Therapist: 3 Simple Steps To Remove Your Negative Thoughts: Marisa Peer | E154
Renowned therapist Marisa Peer presents Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) as a high-urgency intervention that treats emotional pain with the same immediacy as physical trauma by identifying the singular root cause of suffering: the limiting belief of "I'm not enough." Utilizing a "Detective, Dentist, Coder" framework, her methodology traces negative behaviors to childhood origins to extract toxic narratives and rewire the psyche with empowering beliefs, often achieving results within 21 days or even 21 seconds. Peer asserts that this approach simplifies mental health care for diverse demographics, effectively resolving issues ranging from addiction and depression to modern disconnection by correcting the internal stories that drive self-sabotage.
- Dwarkesh Patel1h 5m
Agustin Lebron - Trading, Crypto, and Adverse Selection
Augustin Lebrun's analysis challenges retail participation in financial markets by highlighting the systemic disadvantages of adverse selection while advocating for a radical shift in hiring practices toward globally sourced, high-intelligence talent. Drawing on his background in chip design and quantitative trading at Jane Street, he proposes a "trillion-dollar arbitrage" where firms utilize mass screening to bypass credential inflation, effectively replacing mid-tier hires with elite "A-players." Furthermore, Lebrun critiques current crypto infrastructure and financial regulations, predicting a consolidation of the trading industry and a future where technical excellence and sequential domain mastery become the primary drivers of economic success.
Mire CRO Zhenya Loginov: Hiring Tips for Sales; Why Dropbox Lost Enterprise | 20VC #900
Mire CRO Zhenya Loginov, Zhenya Loginov
The speaker synthesizes critical strategic lessons from Dropbox, Segment, and Miro to define a robust framework for scaling sales teams and integrating product-led growth with enterprise strategies. Emphasizing that successful expansion requires a cultural shift where the entire organization prioritizes sales, the discussion outlines a rigorous hiring process focused on passion over exact title matches and establishes a hybrid motion to align self-serve and high-touch revenue streams. Ultimately, the analysis provides actionable guidelines on sales playbooks, global timing, and organizational structure to navigate the complexities of moving from early product-market fit to sustained multi-year growth.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 17m
How I Raised $700 Million: Charity: Water Founder: Scott Harrison | E153
Scott Harrison, Stephen Bartlett
Charity Water founder Scott Harrison transformed a decade of hedonistic excess and a traumatic childhood into a global nonprofit after a 2007 medical mission in West Africa revealed the direct link between waterborne disease and untreated illness. By securing a crucial overhead grant from Michael Birch in 2010, the organization survived an early financial crisis to establish a transparent business model where 100% of public donations fund water projects while dedicated private funding covers operational costs. Over the last fifteen years, this approach has provided clean water access to 15 million people across 29 countries, successfully redefining Harrison's purpose from personal accumulation to global service.
- Goldman Sachs47 min
Investing with Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner
Brad Gerstner, Katie Koch, Alison Nathan
Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner forecasts a deep global recession followed by a deflationary shift, positioning the current market dislocation as a historic buying opportunity for high-quality private and public technology assets. He outlines a concentrated investment strategy that prioritizes secular AI and data trends over cyclical volatility, specifically highlighting undervalued opportunities in Meta, Snowflake, and the broader enterprise cloud migration. Beyond portfolio performance, Gerstner advocates for structural wealth inequality solutions through the "Invest America" initiative, which proposes universal investment accounts to democratize ownership of the American economy.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 14m
Example: The Dark Side Of Money & Fame | E152
Example, Steven, Stephen Bartlett, Elliot
Elliot, a musician with a background in working-class London and Asperger's syndrome, has transitioned from a decade of substance abuse and industry marginalization to a prioritization of family and mental well-being following a relationship reset in 2011. He is now preparing for his eighth album, which blends Drum and Bass, UK Garage, and Drill styles, while strategically shifting his career focus from chart-dependent radio play to global live touring and streaming loyalty. Despite facing frustration from gatekeepers who label him "retired" due to his absence from major airplay, Elliot aims for a final chart validation while building a sustainable legacy through health-focused living and his dedicated fanbase.
Adam Fishman: Takeaways from Lyft and Patreon; How to Build Viral Loops | 20VC #897
Adam outlines a framework for building high-velocity growth functions by prioritizing speed, customer respect, and the distinction between quantitative data and qualitative feedback based on his leadership at Lyft and Patreon. He details the structural requirements for defining growth loops, hiring "player-coach" leaders, and executing rebranding strategies while warning against premature scaling or misclassifying non-loop activities. Finally, the discussion emphasizes that sustainable expansion relies on managing failure through documented post-mortems and aligning organizational culture with the fundamental psychological drivers of user acquisition and retention.
HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah: The Ultimate Guide to Company Culture | E896
Dharmesh Shah, Harry Stebbings
HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Patel recounts the company's origins from an MIT Sloan connection to its mission of serving small businesses, emphasizing a leadership philosophy rooted in transparency, humility, and the critical management of "culture debt." Patel details strategic lessons on avoiding premature enterprise expansion, pricing for optionality rather than maximum willingness to pay, and the necessity of "all-in" bets for secondary products to sustain growth. Finally, he outlines his angel investing framework designed to minimize time commitment and his conviction that the current intermediary data model is broken, urging creators toward direct monetization.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 25m
What No One Tells You About Success And Mental Health! - Building A $240M Dollar Empire!
Jane Wurwand, Stephen Bartlett
In 1986, Jane Sowerby and her husband Raymond Werwand founded Dermalogica, a skin-care brand that challenged industry norms by combining pharmaceutical-grade formulations with a distinct "piss off 80%, please 20%" positioning strategy. Leveraging their shared visa loophole to establish operations in both South Africa and the US, the couple built the International Dermal Institute to bridge global licensing gaps before successfully exiting the business through a 2015 acquisition by Unilever. Sowerby's leadership philosophy, rooted in overcoming childhood trauma and prioritizing decisiveness over perfection, emphasized direct staff accessibility and operational hygiene while she eventually reframed her personal narrative from shame to pride through therapeutic intervention.
Ruchi Sanghvi: My Job Interview with Mark Zuckerberg; Deep Dive on DAOs | 20VC #895
Ruchi Sanghvi, Mark Zuckerberg, Harry
South Park Commons, founded by former Facebook and Dropbox executive Ruchi Gandhi, operates as a peer-learning collective that supports technical founders through a nine-month pre-seed phase focused on problem validation before deploying a $50 million fund to back 50 to 60 early-stage investments annually. The organization innovates within the venture capital landscape by launching a hybrid governance structure via its Founder Fellowship DAO, which distributes tokens to investors and non-investing contributors to secure liquidity and maintain long-term portfolio commitment. By prioritizing deep founder-market fit and adapting its capital strategy to navigate both traditional and decentralized Web3 environments, the group aims to bridge the gap between chaotic idea generation and scalable enterprise development.