Fund/Build/Scale Podcast
1) Dead Weight on the Cap Table: Inside the Ugly World of Founder Breakups
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 ever...Show More
2) An Operator’s Playbook for Monetizing Product-Led Growth
What do you do when everyone loves your product but no one’s paying for it? That was the challenge facing Beautiful.ai. Founder Mitch Grasso nailed the product, but to build a sustainable business, he...Show More
3) Building a Bridge Across the Valley of Death
Frontier tech startups don’t fail because the science is bad — they fail because no one needs what they’re building. In this episode, Roadrunner Venture Studios CEO/co-founder Adam Hammer explains how...Show More
4) Are You *Really* Ready to Raise a Round? Here’s How to Tell
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 prac...Show More
5) From Side Project to Series B: How Learning Led to Product-Market Fit
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 most...Show More
6) Building Hard Tech: Lessons on Funding, Teams, and Timelines
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 Prat...Show More
7) Forget the Spin: Startup Myths That Hold Founders Back
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 exp...Show More
8) Avoiding Founder Burnout and other Early-Stage Startup Pitfalls
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 fric...Show More
9) De-Risking Deep Tech: How to Land Seed Capital for Complex Ideas
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/Build...Show More
10) Execution > Ideas: What Engineers Need to Know Before Becoming Founders
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 Ventu...Show More