Podcast Episodes

Are You *Really* Ready to Raise a Round? Here’s How to Tell

Season 2 Episode 74

You don’t need a Stanford degree or a flashy deck to raise a pre-seed, seed or Series A, but you do need to show investors that you’ve put in the work.

645 Ventures co-founder Nnamdi Okike shares pra…

Published on 14 hours ago

From Side Project to Series B: How Learning Led to Product-Market Fit

Season 2 Episode 73

Dan Lee co-founded what would become Nooks while on leave from Stanford. He wasn’t solving sales. He was exploring remote collaboration during the pandemic.

But when they noticed that some of his mos…

Published on 1 day, 19 hours ago

Building Hard Tech: Lessons on Funding, Teams, and Timelines

Season 2 Episode 72

Transforming breakthrough research into a sustainable company is never simple — especially in hard tech.

In this episode recorded in December 2024, Zero Emission Industries CEO/founder Dr. Joseph Pra…

Published on 4 days, 15 hours ago

Forget the Spin: Startup Myths That Hold Founders Back

Season 2 Episode 71

Rob Biederman has sat on both sides of the table — first as co-founder and CEO of Catalant Technologies, and now as managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners. In this candid conversation, he ex…

Published on 1 week, 4 days ago

Avoiding Founder Burnout and other Early-Stage Startup Pitfalls

Season 2 Episode 70

Pro tip: If you can’t see yourself getting up every morning for the next ten years and being excited about going to work, don’t launch a startup.

Ajay Prakash co-founded Rinse in 2013 to take the fri…

Published on 1 week, 6 days ago

De-Risking Deep Tech: How to Land Seed Capital for Complex Ideas

Season 2 Episode 69

Karthee Madasamy is the founder of VC firm MFV Partners and the founding managing partner of Harper Court Ventures, both of which focus on early-stage deep tech startups.

In this episode of Fund/Buil…

Published on 2 weeks, 1 day ago

Execution > Ideas: What Engineers Need to Know Before Becoming Founders

Season 2 Episode 68

Jyoti Bansal sold his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco for $3.7 billion.

Harness, his next company, reached a similar valuation a few years later.

As an entrepreneur — and as a VC at Unusual Vent…

Published on 2 weeks, 5 days ago

How to Think Like a VC When You’re Building (or Joining) a Startup

Season 2 Episode 67

Brian Rothenberg, partner at Defy and former VP of Growth at Eventbrite, joins Fund/Build/Scale to share what really matters when evaluating early-stage startups. From spotting false signals of tract…

Published on 2 weeks, 6 days ago

Cap Table Strategy: A Playbook for Early-Stage Founders

Season 1 Episode 66

When you’re raising your first rounds, every cap table decision can echo for years. Give away too much equity early, lock yourself into restrictive pro rata rights, or over-optimize for valuation — a…

Published on 3 weeks, 3 days ago

From D2C to B2B: How to Pivot Without Losing Your Mission

Season 2 Episode 65

A turbulent flight sparked Wayne Slavin’s idea for Sure: let consumers buy insurance in real time. But after launching as a D2C app, he realized the bigger opportunity was powering insurance sales fo…

Published on 4 weeks ago