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InProd

Author: Laura Hamilton

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InProd (fka Partner Path) is a podcast exploring the venture and startup ecosystem through the lens of trailblazing founders and operators building the next wave of AI companies. We feature candid conversations with early-stage leaders, offering practical insights on product execution, GTM, and the messy middle of scaling teams and navigating growth. 

67 Episodes
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This week’s guest is Dean Leitersdorf, CEO of Decart. Decart is a vertically integrated AI research lab building some of the world’s most advanced audio and video models, including Mirage, a real-time generative video system where users can transform themselves or their environments instantly. We dive into Dean’s path from finishing his PhD in computer science at 21 to founding Decart with the ambition of creating a true “before-and-after” company in AI. We cover how Decart evolved from GPU ...
This week, we're sitting down with Arjan Singh, the Co-Founder of Jolie. Arjan's journey into the world of beauty and wellness began early on and grew as he collaborated with entrepreneurs in high school and honed his expertise in luxury, consumer, and fashion at BCG. In today's episode, we'll delve into the essentials of building a successful consumer brand, the underlying factors of skin and hair health, the significant impact of social influence, and the number one tool every founder shoul...
We are excited to sit down with Charlotte Japp, the Head of Platform at ffVC. Charlotte began her career in creative marketing and later founded Cirkel, a platform that facilitates connections between experienced and younger professionals for mutual career support. Fundraising for Cirkel served as her introduction to the VC ecosystem. During this episode, Charlotte provides insights into platform's evolving role, the value VCs bring to the table, the assessment of platform performance, brand ...
Today, we sat down with Sean Simons, a Senior Associate at Newark Venture Partners. Sean had an untraditional path into Venture Capital. He started his career at PhotoShelter and 212 brewing before beginning a fellowship at NVP. While at NVP, he worked as a scrap collector and airplane washer. Five years later, Sean has built a strong brand by leading impressive investments within supply chain & logistics. Join us as Sean dives into getting his foot in the door, how to win deals, theme-fo...
Today we are joined by Rickard Brüel Gabrielsson, an artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of Unbox AI. Rickard moved from Sweden to the US to attend Stanford and immediately dove into learning systems and artificial intelligence. Rickard breaks down unsupervised learning, text-based language models, revolutionizing retail, pricing your product, encoding semantics, and where companies will incorporate foundation models. Episode Chapters: Transitioning from Sweden to the US - 1:35...
In today's episode, we interview Judy and Eliot Fost, co-founders of Beli. Former investment analysts at McKinsey, their shared passion for food and exploration led them to create Beli, an innovative app. Beli allows users to organize restaurant lists, maps, and reviews, while also offering personalized recommendations based on their dining history. Join us as Judy and Eliot share insights on Beli as a social media platform, user acquisition, the product roadmap, competition, and their unique...
During today’s discussion, we sat down with Carlos Alonso-Torras, a newly promoted Partner at FinTech Collective in New York City. Carlos is a former operator turned investor with a strong passion for investing in Latin America. His current fund focuses on Seed and Series A investing in FinTech globally. Since its inception in 2012, FTC has invested in over 50 companies, including MoneyLion, Vestwell, Willa, Flutterwave, and TradeBlock. Join us as Carlos discusses shifting from an operating t...
Today, we welcome Nevin Raj, Co-Founder and COO of Grata. Grata is revolutionizing VC & PE deal sourcing by providing a platform for users to find, research, and engage with middle market companies. Grata raised a $25 Million Series A round led by Craft Ventures in February 2022. Nevin shares his journey of founding Grata, insights on the future of sourcing, establishing product/market fit, handling customer feedback, and building strong leadership. Episode Chapters: 1. Grata's Founding...
Today, we welcome Matt Lu from Cowboy Ventures, based in NYC. Cowboy Ventures is a Pre Seed and Seed stage-focused fund. Cowboy has made over 100 early-stage investments, with 70% being pre-product. Before joining Cowboy in late 2022, Matt was an investor at Bullpen Capital in San Francisco. Episode Chapters: Breaking into Venture and Cowboy Ventures - 1:00East Coast Versus West Coast Investing - 10:30Sourcing Best Practices - 18:20Generative AI and Focus Areas - 25:20Overall Market Thought...
This week, we’re joined by Alexis Gauba, Co-Founder of Raindrop, an AI native observability platform built for agents in production. Alexis breaks down why operating agents is fundamentally different from monitoring traditional software. As systems shift from deterministic code to probabilistic behavior, dashboards alone are not enough. Teams need to detect unknown issues, track signals like forgetting, and understand long agent trajectories across millions of AI events. We discuss why agent ...
This week, we’re joined by Anish Agarwal, CEO of Traversal, an AI-native site reliability platform helping teams detect, diagnose, and remediate incidents before they spiral into prolonged downtime. Anish shares how Traversal is tackling the full lifecycle of reliability work: identifying what caused an incident, determining which signals actually mattered during alert triage, and helping teams plan how their infrastructure should evolve over time. As modern systems grow more complex, spannin...
This week, we’re joined by Ivan Burazin, co-founder of Daytona - a company rethinking developer environments for an AI-native world. We talk about how Daytona creates real value for developers, why the most advanced agent companies are emerging bottom up, and the idea that agents should be treated as first class users with reliable access to compute. Ivan also shares some of Daytona’s most demanding use cases including AI scientists in chemistry and pharma running agents inside massive sandbo...
This week, we’re joined by Ishan Gupta, co-founder of Juicebox — a company redefining how recruiting works in an AI-native world. Ishan shares how they pivoted from earlier ideas to focus on the highest value part of hiring: identifying the right people and getting them into process. With Juicebox, you describe what you want in natural language and the platform searches more than 800 million professional profiles, surfaces the best matches, and engages candidates through recruiting agents. Th...
This week’s guests are Henry and Ani, co-founders of Smithery. Smithery is building the marketplace and runtime for MCP, making it easier for developers to distribute, discover, and monetize tools in the emerging agent ecosystem. Smithery provides a platform to connect your repo, integrate with CI/CD, and handle hosting for servers seamlessly. MCP shines when agents become more general, but it only scales if demand grows for more connections between tools and systems. Drawing from...
This week’s guests are Samir and Kunal from Farsight. Farsight is transforming how financial firms operate by automating the most time-consuming parts of dealmaking, from drafting pitch decks to generating investment insights, in seconds instead of weeks. We dive into Samir’s journey from Wall Street to building Farsight, and why AI is reshaping the workflows at the heart of finance. We cover how power users are creating entire pitchbooks in minutes, how firms leveraging Farsight are winning ...
This week’s guest is Jordan Dearsley, CEO of Vapi. Vapi enables enterprises to deploy humanlike voice agents in minutes. Whether you are building a new voice product or managing millions of calls, Vapi’s infrastructure and flexible APIs make it simple and reliable. We explore why Waterloo continues to produce world-class engineers and founders, Jordan’s journey from building calendar apps and AI therapy tools to leading Vapi, and why enterprises are turning to voice AI to save engineering tim...
This week’s guest is Brooke Hopkins, Founder of Coval, a company building automated testing infrastructure for AI agents starting with voice and chat assistants. We unpack her journey from studying in Abu Dhabi to leading simulation infrastructure at Waymo, where she helped ensure autonomous vehicles could operate safely at scale. Brooke shares how that experience shaped Coval’s approach to agent evaluation, why voice is the hardest modality to test, and what it means to simulate human-...
This week’s guest is Christopher Chedeau, better known as Vjeux, Front-End Engineer at Meta and the mind behind React Native, Prettier, Excalidraw, and more. We unpack his journey from modding Warcraft at 13 to shaping some of the most widely used developer tools in the world. Christopher shares his thoughts on why React took off, how side projects become developer staples, and what AI means for the future of software creation. Episode Chapters: 1:55 - Christopher aka Vjeux2:55 - Learning to ...
This week’s guest is Karan Vaidya, Co-Founder and CTO of Composio, a platform enabling AI agents to connect with hundreds of tools and take autonomous actions to streamline workflows. We dive into his journey building “Devin” for integrations, why the rise of AI is creating demand for thousands of application connectors, how 90% of Composio’s use cases today are agent-driven, and the role early product virality played in their traction. Episode Chapters: 2:00 – Founding with...
This week’s guest is Taranjeet Singh, Founder and CEO of Mem0, a company building the self-improving memory layer for AI agents and LLMs. The conversation covers his path to founding Mem0, from applying to YC 7x and learning to "think bigger," to identifying a core pain point after launching a viral app in India. Taranjeet breaks down why memory is essential for agents, how Mem0 works across any LLM, and why solving one core problem deeply is a competitive advantage. He also discusses how to ...
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