Beginner's Mind

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Spark 20: Alex Dang | Everyone Agrees? Think Again. How Venture Capitalists Decide

2026-11-0129:16

Invest in the wrong startup and you lose one times your money. Miss the next Google and you lose ten thousand times. Most boards are built to avoid the first mistake. Venture capitalists play by different rules. They back the team before the market, read full agreement in the room as a warning sign, place small bets, double down on the ones that work and kill the rest. Then they give the winners five to seven years. Alex Dang led products at Amazon and at Amazon Web Services and was a partner...

EP 185: Ivy Nguyen | IQ, EQ and the Execution Quotient Investors Fund

2026-10-1801:04:20

The trait a Silicon Valley AI investor rewards most in a management team has a name almost nobody uses: XQ. IQ brings the idea and EQ reads the people across the table. The execution quotient shows in something as small as how fast a team follows up after a meeting, and in her experience the people who score high on it have no patience for those who do not. Meanwhile the money in AI moves in waves, from models to tools to packaged products, and only some of those waves leave room for an early...

EP 184: Ivy Nguyen | 10,000 AI Pitches and the One Test That Matters

2026-10-1559:28

In 2017 another investor told Ivy Nguyen that artificial intelligence was too small a niche to dedicate a fund to. More than ten thousand AI pitches later, every pitch deck says AI. Single funding rounds have grown larger than entire venture funds, and from the outside the companies that will matter look exactly like the ones a fast follower overtakes within three years. Ivy Nguyen is a Partner at GFT Ventures in Palo Alto, the early-stage firm founded by former NVIDIA and Samsung executives ...

EP 183: Marie Schroeder | Send the Rough Deck, Not the Perfect One

2026-09-2702:04:43

A seed investor at Novo Holdings would rather read your rough idea than your finished pitch deck. Most founders spend a year building the deck, forming the team and waiting until the story holds together. By the time it is ready the science has moved, the money has gone somewhere else, and nobody told them the fund they were preparing for creates companies out of raw material. Marie Schroeder is a Principal on the Seed Investments team at Novo Holdings, the investment company owned by the Nov...

#182 - How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You Are Going: 4 Lessons from Ben Horowitz (Part 2 of 2)

2026-09-0857:15

What does it mean when the most respected adviser in Silicon Valley tells you that you are the best chief executive he works with, while your company is heading straight into a wall? Bill Campbell said exactly that to Ben Horowitz. Campbell was advising Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt at the time, so Horowitz assumed the compliment was absurd. Campbell explained himself: there are plenty of good peacetime chief executives and plenty of good wartime ones, and almost nobody who can do b...

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