Latest Interviews
Showing 166–175 of 175 transcripts.
Clear all filtersFounder of Fundera (Nerdwallet) & GroupMe (Skype/Microsoft) Path to VC | Jared Hecht, USV
Venture Partner Jared Hecht joins Union Square Ventures to apply his serial founder experience from exits at GroupMe and Fundera toward backing contrarian startups operating at the edge of large markets. Under USV's collaborative, generalist partnership model, the firm prioritizes deep founder support, honest feedback, and consistent pro-rated follow-on investing to navigate transformative sectors like AI and healthcare. This approach is bolstered by a shifting New York tech landscape where traditional finance alumni are increasingly dominating the founder ecosystem, effectively moving the region's startup culture from the fringe to the epicenter.
Embracing American Dynamism to Upgrade Manufacturing Production With Oden CEO Willem Sundblad
Odin Technologies secured a $28.5 million Series B investment led by Sweden's North Star Growth, with participation from Flat Capital and current customers to accelerate the deployment of its real-time Process AI platform. The company targets large-scale manufacturing operations in sectors like paper, pulp, and plastics, where its interpretability-focused technology reduces operator dependency and shortens sales cycles by half. Following over three times growth since 2022, the capital will fund the integration of domain-specific foundation models and data enrichment tools to expand operations from North America into Europe and Latin America.
Kyle Harrison, GP at Contrary on Techno-Optimism, Talent Vortexes, & Writing “Investing 101”
Kyle Harrison, a former film major who transitioned into venture capital through diverse roles at TCV, Coatue, and Index, now applies a holistic framework at Contrary to support talent from undergraduate studies through company exits. Contrary operates as a "talent vortex" that leverages a productized research arm and a generalist investment strategy across sectors like defense and AI to identify the "smartest people" early and facilitate career growth via its open-source reports. Harrison's approach emphasizes navigating geopolitical shifts and hype cycles by treating truth as a narrative construct while preparing for an upcoming age of acquisition driven by capital recycling and market correction.
Morgan Housel: Understanding Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and Other Outliers in Tech
Morgan Housel, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Molly O'Shea
Financial writer Morgan Housel discusses how 90% of outlier success in fields like venture capital and publishing stems from uncontrollable luck rather than replicable strategies, challenging the validity of morning routines and predictive forecasting. He contrasts this by analyzing the post-2020 capital cycle, noting that the transition from zero interest rates to a 5.5% discount environment has forced a return to valuing current cash flows over speculative stories to flush out unsustainable "tourist investors." Drawing on themes from *The Psychology of Money* and *The Same as Ever*, Housel argues that while specific market conditions and technologies evolve, human behavioral constants regarding greed and fear remain the only reliable guide for navigating financial uncertainty.
Get Tesla Big | Chris Power, Hadrian
Chris Power, Hadrian, Molly O'Shea
Hadrian, a US-based manufacturer of precision components for the defense and aerospace sectors, secured a $117 million Series B round led by Andy Grayson and RTX Ventures to finance a new debt-backed capital expenditure strategy and expedite a second factory location. The company leverages its proprietary software and robotics to deliver 10x productivity gains over traditional labor models, aiming to reach full production capacity by Q1 2025 before expanding into a new state by mid-year to meet surging demand from tier-one primes. Founder Chris Power describes the venture as a mission-critical effort to preserve American industrial competitiveness against China, forecasting a high-stakes trajectory toward becoming a $10 billion entity through a "human-in-the-loop" operational model and aggressive global scaling.
Nick Abouzeid, Rivet: Growth "Hacking" Myths, What Worked at Ramp, & Better Tax Services
Former Ramp Growth Lead Nick Abouzaid and co-founder Kyle launched Rivet, a venture-backed tax preparation firm designed to combine human expertise with technology to address fragmentation in the industry. Backed by a pre-seed round from XYZ Ventures and supported by over 40 executives from top firms, the company utilizes existing tax platforms like Drake while developing proprietary front-end tools to improve client responsiveness and automate manual data entry. The founders emphasize a strict operational framework where growth is driven by singular metric ownership and high-impact testing rather than complex experiments, aiming to build a long-term, multi-billion dollar service firm.
Varda's Landing, Peter Thiel, & the Future of El Segundo, Delian Asparouhov, Founders Fund
Peter Thiel, Delian Asparouhov, Molly O'Shea
Delian, a recent father and Founders Fund partner, founded Varda Space Industries to commercialize space manufacturing by deploying a low-cost, Starlink-like re-entry capsule under new FAA regulations. By pivoting exclusively to small-molecule pharmaceuticals and utilizing novel ground-based centrifuge research, the company targets a per-mission cost of $3.5–$4 million while implementing risk-sharing agreements for flight discoveries. Complementing this venture, Delian leverages his operator experience to advocate for decentralizing investing culture and predicting Eastern Europe's economic rise over stagnating Western markets.
David Weisburd, 10X Capital: Finding Alpha and LP Bias
David Weisberg, the strategy architect behind Tenex Capital's venture franchise, leverages his *Liquidity* podcast to dissect the structural tensions between General Partners and Limited Partners in today's AI-driven market. He argues that the sector operates as an access class defined by a critical misalignment between founder risk mitigation and the LP demand for concentrated power-law outcomes, a dynamic that creates volatility during conflicting economic cycles. Weisberg advises navigating this environment through time diversification, limiting portfolios to fifteen to twenty-five positions to optimize alpha, and utilizing early-stage secondary sales to return capital without relying solely on lagging DPI metrics.
Alex Kolicich, 8VC: Exodus of Venture Capital, AI Predictions
Alex Kulisic, founding partner of 8VC, outlines a market correction driven by post-2021 leverage distortions while forecasting a temporary AI overhype followed by a decade of transformative knowledge work. He identifies a shift toward disciplined capital allocation across software, biotech, and defense, noting that current enterprise value creation remains nascent despite infrastructure enthusiasm. Ultimately, Kulisic advises founders to capitalize on available dry powder by prioritizing durable product-market fit over transient feature parity as the sector matures.
Xander Oltmann, Commodity Capital: Downfall of SaaS & Uprising of Vertically Integrated Monopolies
Commodity Capital founder Xander Oltman invests in pre-seed hard tech and manufacturing companies by leveraging declining software costs to build vertically integrated monopolies that bypass traditional SaaS vulnerabilities. Backed by industry figures like David Sachs and public CEOs, the firm targets assets such as Hadrian and Armada that utilize AI and modern APIs to achieve superior gross margins while competitors face eroding technological moats. This strategy positions the fund to capitalize on a shifting market where distribution and capital intensity drive value, anticipating a 2024 resurgence in IPOs and larger check sizes for defensible operating models.