Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

Most conversations about AI at work sound the same. New tools. New models. New productivity hacks. That framing misses the point.The real disruption isn’t that machines are getting smarter. It’s that humans are still showing up to work with industrial-age instincts, while the ground under them is moving at exponential speed.That tension sits at the heart of this conversation with Nikki Barua, founder and CEO of Flipwork, a company built around a simple but uncomfortable truth: you can’t modernize work without reinventing the people doing it.From Human Doing to Human BeingFor the last century, work trained us to be excellent doers. Follow instructions. Move tasks from inbox to outbox. Measure effort. Repeat.That model worked when value was created through repetition.AI breaks it.When machines can execute faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors, effort stops being a differentiator. Time spent stops mattering. What matters instead is judgment, context, creativity, and the ability to define outcomes, not just complete tasks.This is why so many AI initiatives stall. Companies invest heavily in technology while leaving human behavior untouched. The tools change. The mindset doesn’t. Nothing sticks.Flipwork starts from the opposite direction. Reinvent the human first, then redesign the workflow, then deploy the tools. In that order.Why Most AI Transformations Fail QuietlyBoards ask executives for an AI strategy. Leaders respond by treating it like an IT problem.That’s the first mistake.AI isn’t a software upgrade. It’s a forcing function that exposes every outdated assumption inside an organization, from how decisions get made to how power flows to how people define their worth.When those assumptions stay intact, two things happen:• AI gets used at the surface level, mostly for automation or content generation• Shadow AI explodes, with individuals experimenting in isolation without alignment or governanceThe organization looks busy but isn’t actually changing.The companies making progress aren’t pretending to have all the answers. They’re running small, fast experiments, learning in public, and accepting that reinvention is continuous, not episodic.The Real Identity Crisis Inside CompaniesOne of the most interesting threads in this conversation isn’t technical at all. It’s psychological.Individual contributors struggle because their identity is often tied to effort. Long hours. High output. Being indispensable.Managers struggle because their role has been about directing people. Telling teams what to do. Measuring compliance.AI challenges both.When agents can execute, the human role shifts toward sense-making. Providing context. Defining why something matters. Orchestrating outcomes across humans and machines.This is why middle management gets squeezed. Not because leadership is unnecessary, but because the definition of leadership is changing.The winners won’t be the best controllers. They’ll be the best clarifiers.Adaptability Is the New Competitive MoatFor decades, companies differentiated through proprietary assets, distribution, or scale. Those advantages erode faster in an AI-native world.What lasts longer is adaptability.How fast can your organization unlearn?How quickly can teams form, disband, and reform around outcomes?How comfortable are people operating without a script?Nikki frames the future org not as a pyramid, but as a network. Less Titanic, more fleet of speedboats. Small, autonomous teams moving fast in the same direction, loosely connected, constantly evolving.This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening at the edges. The question is how fast the core catches up.Reinvention Is a Muscle, Not a MomentThe most dangerous myth about change is that it’s a one-time event. A transformation initiative. A two-year roadmap.In reality, reinvention behaves more like fitness. Short cycles. Repeated reps. Continuous feedback.Flipwork operates in 90-day loops for a reason. The world won’t wait for perfection. Momentum matters more than certainty.The companies and founders who thrive won’t be the ones with the best plans. They’ll be the ones with the fastest learning curves.The Quiet TakeawayAI will keep getting better. That part is inevitable.What isn’t inevitable is whether humans evolve alongside it.The future of work won’t be decided by models or tools. It will be decided by who is willing to let go of old identities, old incentives, and old definitions of value, and who isn’t.Reinvention isn’t optional anymore. It’s the job.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Welcome and Nikki Barua Introduction02:00 Reinvention as a Life Pattern04:10 Immigrant Mindset and Resilience06:20 Video Games, Mastery, and Growth08:40 Enjoying the Grind10:30 Boredom as a Signal for Change12:00 Corporate Inertia and Slow Innovation14:20 From Enterprise to Entrepreneurship16:30 Building Flipwork18:10 AI Is Not an IT Problem20:00 Human and Machine Co-Evolution22:10 From Task Doers to Outcome Orchestrators24:30 Identity Crisis at Work27:00 Middle Management Gets Squeezed29:30 Enterprise AI Blind Spots32:00 Adaptability as the New Moat35:00 The Industrial Age Is Over38:00 Neural Network Organizations41:20 Reinvention as a Muscle43:40 The End of Full-Time JobsTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:09):Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Nikki Barua on the mic. She is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, transformational leader, and one of the most recognized voices on reinvention and human capability in the AI age. She spent nearly 25 years helping organizations rethink culture, leadership, and growth, built and scaled multiple companies. She’s been honored by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the 100 most influential women and featured across CNBC, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Forbes. Today, she’s leading Flipwork and championing a movement to make people exponentially capable in the age of AI. Thanks for coming on, Nikki.Nikki Barua (00:01:43):Thanks for inviting me, Brian. Thrilled to be here.Brian Bell (00:01:45):Yeah, I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background? What’s your trauma that drives you?Nikki Barua (00:01:50):I love that. Well, the through line of my story is all about reinvention. As someone who grew up in India in the 70s and 80s and did not have a lot of exposure to tech or media, the world in general, I was always a really big dreamer. And I really believed as I grew up that America is a place where those dreams would come true. That’s what brought me to this incredible country and kind of really built my career, my businesses here. But every chapter of that story has really been about adapting to change, figuring out how to make it, how to survive, really be resilient through every obstacle that I’ve faced along the way. And before you know it, it becomes your superpower, right? You go from doing things out of survival to realizing that is actually what allows you to make it through every twist and turn.Brian Bell (00:02:42):Yeah, I love that. And I have a similar upbringing and growing up poor and working full time since I was 11 to like, I could buy shoes for school and stuff. And yeah, and it does become your superpower over time.Nikki Barua (00:02:55):Yeah, in the moments of that struggle, it’s kind of hard to see it sometimes because there’s a part of you that’s sort of like in that woe is me state of why do bad things happen to me? Why is my life so hard? And why does everybody else have the things that I do seek and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get it. They’re all those stories that you’re caught up in in the moment. And then you get out of that and you overcome that. And it’s sort of like getting to the next level of a video game, right? When you’re in it, you’re kind of stuck and you’re like, I don’t know what to do. And then you get to the next level and you’re like, wow, the very thing that I struggle with is what helps me win at this next level of the game.Brian Bell (00:03:34):Yeah, I love that. It’s why I like to back founders that were exceptional at video games. It tends to predict future success. And I’ve noticed this with some of my founders that are very successful. They were, you know, top 1%, you know, semi-pro player in Fortnite or Rocket League or, you know, Starcraft or something like that. And I think that kind of experience teaches you a little tenacity and wherewithal to kind of break through challenges and keep grinding. And I think it’s such a problem in this country right now is what makes America great is you can come here with nothing, you know, be successful, right? And then you get people in the country who, you’re like well what can the government give me it’s like no what can you get out of your house and go like capture some value create some value look at all the people doing it around you you have no excuse right you started here i mean to me that’s one of the greatest things about this country is just the meritocracy of being able to come here with a dream no privilege no power no resources and still figure it out and there aren’t the same kind of, you know, even though there’s so much talk about systemic barriers here, and I’m not denying that there are some, but when you compare to so many other parts of the world, there are things that are designed to just keep you down. It doesn’t matter.Nikki Barua (00:04:49):Well, especially in India, right?Brian Bell (00:04:51):Right, I mean, population by itself is one of those things, right? When there’s 1.5 billion people fighting for very limited resources and a landmass less than America, you’re just not going to have the same kind of access. You have to be the best of the best of the best to get anywhere with that.Nikki Barua (00:05:09):So the struggle is real. And compared to that, it’s so much easier here, but you have t

Most venture firms are built for sugar highs.Fast deals. Loud narratives. Big portfolios designed to statistically survive chaos. It works, until it doesn’t. And every cycle, when the music slows, you can see which strategies were conviction and which were vibes.Sheena Jindal decided to build for the comedown.She’s the founder and managing partner of Sugarfree Capital, a seed and Series A fund designed around a simple but uncomfortable belief: when intelligence becomes the core economic driver, technical founders outperform, and concentration beats diversification.This post distills the core ideas from our conversation, for anyone who didn’t listen to the episode but wants the signal without the noise.From Optimization to IntelligenceThe last decade of startups was about optimization.Shave minutes off delivery times. Match supply and demand more efficiently. Move faster, cheaper, smoother. Great businesses were built, but they mostly rearranged existing systems.Sheena’s core thesis is that we’ve crossed a line.We’re entering the age of intelligence, where the hard problems aren’t workflow tweaks, they’re systems problems. Interoperability. Data capture. Ground truth in messy, physical, non-AI-native environments.That shift quietly changes who wins.Optimization rewards polish. Intelligence rewards depth.And depth tends to live with founders who can build, not just pitch.Why Technical CEOs Win (Especially Now)Sugarfree Capital has a clear rule: the CEO must be technical.Not “technical-adjacent.” Not a charismatic seller paired with a strong CTO. The person running the company needs to understand the system end to end.Why?Because in an AI-native world:* Product cycles compress brutally* Feedback loops are immediate* Integration complexity explodes* Sales conversations are increasingly technicalCustomers don’t want to be sold. They want to be understood.Founder-led sales works longer than people think, especially when the founder can explain exactly how the product fits into a broken stack, not just why it’s exciting.This is one of Sheena’s recent conviction shifts. In the past, early go-to-market hires felt essential. Today, much of that work can be automated. Deep product understanding cannot.The Case for Concentration (and Sleeping at Night)Most early-stage funds optimize for coverage. Twenty-five, thirty, sometimes more companies per fund. The logic is familiar: most will fail, a few will return the fund.Sugarfree runs the opposite playbook.Roughly 15 companies per fund. Heavy reserves. Ongoing involvement. Decisions made as if each investment were the only one that mattered.This forces uncomfortable discipline.You can’t hide behind portfolio math. You can’t wave away risk with “power laws.” You actually have to believe the founder can build something enduring.Sheena put it simply: she’d rather underwrite carefully and sleep at night than glorify losses as proof of boldness.It’s not anti-risk. It’s selective risk.Sugar Highs in AI (and How to Say No)Yes, the sugar is back.AI companies are being priced aggressively. Momentum is driving decisions faster than fundamentals. It feels familiar because it is familiar.Sugarfree’s response isn’t abstinence, it’s discipline.Valuation still matters. Capital intensity still matters. Future fundraising still matters. A moonshot that requires endless capital can still be a bad bet at the wrong entry point.The firm’s ethos isn’t anti-ambition. It’s anti-delusion.High conviction doesn’t mean ignoring gravity. It means choosing carefully where to fight it.Deep Tech, Defense, and Raising the Dopamine BarOne of the more telling moments in the conversation came when Sheena said her dopamine bar has gone up.Incremental software no longer excites her. She’s drawn to hard problems that attract founders with extreme urgency.Think:* Data center optimization at the infrastructure level* Autonomous systems and defense applications* Physical AI where ground truth is scarce and valuableOne portfolio company builds AI-powered night vision. Once a month, the entire team drives hours outside the city on moonless nights to test their technology in the field.That’s not a pitch deck story. That’s founder DNA.The hardest problems tend to repel tourists and attract obsessives. Sugarfree is built to find the latter.Venture Is Getting Leaner, TooA quiet theme running through the discussion was leverage.AI isn’t just making startups more capital efficient. It’s doing the same to investors.Sheena runs a lean firm by design. Automation handles admin. Tools reduce cognitive load. That frees time for what actually compounds: thinking, pattern recognition, and founder relationships.The implication is subtle but important. We may see more solo GPs, smaller teams, and tighter funds, not because capital shrinks, but because leverage increases.The work doesn’t disappear. The waste does.What Sugarfree Is Really Optimized ForZooming out, Sugarfree Capital isn’t optimized for headlines or scale.It’s optimized for:* Technical depth* Decision autonomy* Long-term founder partnerships* Staying power across cyclesSheena doesn’t plan to turn it into a massive platform. Fund 10 should look a lot like Fund 1. Tight. Focused. Opinionated.Her ambition isn’t to back the most companies. It’s to back the right ones, and still be standing when the sugar wears off.The Bigger PatternEvery cycle produces two kinds of firms.Those built to ride momentum. And those built to survive clarity.When intelligence replaces optimization, when founders ship faster than narratives can keep up, and when leverage compresses everything except judgment, the firms with real conviction start to look boring.Boring is underrated.Especially when everyone else is crashing from the sugar high.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 – Welcome & Guest Introduction00:43 – Sheena Jindal’s Origin Story at MIT02:16 – From BCG to Bessemer to Comcast Ventures04:13 – Are We Back in a Sugar High Market?07:29 – Why Sheena Founded Sugarfree Capital09:25 – The Case for Technical CEOs11:11 – High-Conviction, Concentrated Venture Strategy14:15 – Reserves, Pro Rata, and Long-Term Founder Support16:34 – How Sheena Evaluates Founders Quickly19:58 – Deep Tech, Moonshots, and Raising the Dopamine Bar22:41 – Valuation Discipline in Frothy AI Markets24:10 – Thesis-Driven vs Opportunistic Investing26:24 – Physical AI, Defense, and the Data Layer28:14 – How Venture Capital Is Evolving30:10 – AI, Automation, and the Future of Work34:28 – Long-Term Vision for Sugarfree Capital36:06 – Under-the-Radar Startup Models39:53 – Founder-Led Sales and Changed Convictions41:03 – Advice for MIT Students and Early Founders44:00 – Staying Sugar FreeTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:08):Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have Sheena Jindal on the mic. She’s the founder and managing partner of Sugar Free Capital, a venture firm backing high conviction, technical founders, often from MIT, building an AI infrastructure and emerging systems. Before founding Sugar Free, Sheena was a partner at Comcast Ventures, where she led or co-led investments in companies like Ample Markets, Seven Rooms, and NERCs. She’s also spent time at BCG, Bessemer, and has been an operator. Thanks for coming on.Sheena Jindal (00:01:36):Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to the discussion today.Brian Bell (00:01:39):Yeah, likewise. So I’d love to start with your background. What’s your origin story?Sheena Jindal (00:01:42):Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the Boston area, went to MIT for undergrad, and really spent my time in college building an e-commerce infrastructure startup. And I think one thing I really realized about MIT is nothing was impossible. It was never find something narrower, pick a simpler problem, let’s try to simplify this. The goal was always, let’s build the impossible. And I think that energy is incredibly infectious and always has been in the back of my mind over the next iteration of my career. After MIT, I worked at BCG for a few years, then joined a Series A startup out in the Bay Area in 2015, and was fortunate enough to start my venture career about eight years ago now. I started working with Kent Bennett over at Bessemer, really learned two things from Kent. One, find your edge and venture early and really lean into that. And then two, it’s a lot more fun to invest in sectors and categories that others aren’t hunting in just yet. Both of those really rung true for me. I joined the team over at Comcast Ventures in the summer of 2019. Honestly got incredibly lucky, but ended up leading about a dozen deals at the firm across a handful of category winners. And in the 2021 era, some of us may remember the markets were quite frothy and kept referring to investment opportunities we were seeing as being too sugary. So always joked if I launched a firm one day, it’d be named Sugar Free Capital, an anecdote to the agent. 2022, 2023, really started to think about what the next generation of a venture firm would look like. Sugarfree was founded on two core beliefs. One, that technical founders outperform as CEOs. And two, that high concentration strategies are what yielded out. So Sugarfree was born. 2024, we fundraised and then have been spending 2025 actively deploying out of our first fund.Brian Bell (00:03:29):Oh, congrats. That’s a huge lift. At least you raised your first fund having actually worked in venture. I raised mine without any experience. So people were very much taking a leap of faith. What was that second lesson from Bessemer? I kind of missed it.Sheena Jindal (00:03:41):It was really around investing in sectors and categories that aren’t mainstream yet. So, you know, you typically go into a big firm. Everyone obviously has swim lanes that they’re known for. So-and-so invests in cyber. So-and-

Most people don’t wake up thinking about “the American Dream.” They wake up thinking about rent, healthcare, their kid’s future, and whether the system is quietly rigged against them.Here’s the uncomfortable stat that frames everything: only about one in four Americans still believes the American Dream is real. Not “hard,” not “uneven,” but real at all.That’s not a vibes problem. That’s a systems failure.This blog post distills the core ideas from a wide-ranging conversation with Oliver Libby, a civic entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author of Strong Floor, No Ceiling. If you don’t have time for the full episode, this is the intellectual spine.The core idea, in one sentenceA healthy capitalist society needs two things at the same time, a strong floor so people don’t fall into despair, and no ceiling so ambition, innovation, and wealth creation still matter.We’ve been arguing as if those ideas are opposites. They’re not. They’re complements.Break either one, and the whole system starts eating itself.What a “strong floor” actually meansA strong floor is not socialism. It’s not equal outcomes. It’s not “free stuff for everyone forever.”It’s the minimum foundation required for a modern economy to function without tearing itself apart.Think of it like the operating system of a country. If the OS is unstable, no app, startup, or market innovation runs well on top of it.The floor is built from boring but essential things:* Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt people for getting sick* Education that prepares people for real jobs, not just expensive credentials* Housing that doesn’t turn shelter into a speculative blood sport* Infrastructure that actually works* A justice system that keeps people safe without warehousing human potential* Access to capital so small businesses can exist at allHere’s the key inversion most debates miss: A strong floor is not a moral concession. It’s an economic investment.You cannot run a high-performance economy on a population that’s constantly one bad month away from collapse.Why markets fail when incentives are miswiredHealthcare is the clearest example of what happens when markets are “present” but fundamentally broken.In most industries, the person who pays, the person who benefits, and the person who decides are roughly the same.In healthcare, they’re completely disconnected.* Employers pay* Insurers decide* Providers bill* Patients hope* Outcomes are optionalThat’s not a market. That’s a Kafka novel with an HSA.When outcomes, prices, and accountability aren’t linked, you don’t get efficiency. You get cost explosions and mediocre results.This isn’t an argument against innovation. It’s the opposite. Innovation thrives when incentives make sense.Education broke its promiseFor decades, we told an entire generation a simple story: go to college, take on debt, and your life outcomes will improve.That math no longer works.College graduates now face historically high underemployment, while trades like electricians, plumbers, and nurses remain critically understaffed and well-paid.The failure wasn’t people choosing the “wrong” degrees. The failure was a system that stopped signaling where real demand was.A functioning floor means:* Early childhood education as baseline infrastructure* Trade schools and service academies treated with the same respect as elite universities* Clear pathways from learning to earningWhen signals are distorted long enough, frustration becomes anger. That’s not cultural, it’s mechanical.Capital as a floor, not just a rewardOne of the most underrated ideas is that capital itself can be part of the floor.If half the country doesn’t meaningfully participate in markets, you shouldn’t be surprised when markets lose legitimacy.Giving people early, long-term exposure to ownership, even small amounts, changes how they relate to the system. Compounding doesn’t just grow money. It grows patience, agency, and belief.When people are stakeholders, they stop rooting for collapse.The “no ceiling” part everyone forgetsHere’s where the argument usually derails.People hear “strong floor” and assume it implies capped ambition, punished success, or flattened incentives.That’s backwards.A strong floor only works if there’s no ceiling.If wealth creation is capped, the pie stops growing. If the pie stops growing, redistribution turns into trench warfare.No ceiling means:* If you create massive value, you can capture massive upside* Innovation is rewarded, not rationed* Entrepreneurship remains a legitimate path upwardNo ceiling does not mean no rules. It means success is constrained by value creation, not resentment.You can believe billionaires should pay taxes and still believe society benefits when people build extraordinary things.Both can be true. Adults can hold two ideas at once.The role of founders, VCs, and private capitalPrivate capital isn’t separate from this system. It’s the fuel.You cannot fund a strong floor without a growing, innovative economy. And you cannot grow that economy if founders and investors treat government, policy, and public trust as externalities.The dirty secret of innovation is that government has always been a silent co-founder:* Early research funding* Infrastructure* Defense and biotech spillovers* Market creationThe future isn’t “markets versus government.” It’s alignment versus dysfunction.The real obstacle isn’t policy, it’s beliefThe hardest truth is this: none of these ideas fail on paper.They fail when a country stops believing it can execute long-term plans at all.Historically, America was at its best when it was about something.* The New Deal* The Great Society* Becoming the arsenal of democracyToday, we argue policy details without agreeing on direction.You can’t steer if everyone’s fighting over the wheel.The takeawayA strong floor without a no ceiling becomes stagnation. A no ceiling without a strong floor becomes instability.We tried both extremes. Neither worked.The work now is integration, not ideology.This isn’t about left versus right. It’s about whether a complex system can be redesigned before it breaks completely.The American Dream doesn’t need nostalgia. It needs better systems, clearer incentives, and the courage to think long-term again.That’s the real contrarian bet.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 — Oliver Libby Returns02:30 — Strong Floor, No Ceiling Explained05:45 — The American Dream Crisis09:10 — Capitalism vs Socialism Framing12:00 — Healthcare as a Broken Market16:20 — Incentives, Outcomes, and Costs19:40 — Education System Mismatch23:30 — Trade Schools and National Priority Jobs27:10 — Infrastructure and Economic Foundations31:00 — Justice, Safety, and Incarceration36:00 — Capital Access and Small Businesses40:20 — Ownership, Markets, and Compounding44:30 — Strong Floor Without Capping Ambition47:15 — No Ceiling and Wealth CreationTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:02):Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Oliver Libby on the mic. He’s a civic entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author of Strong Floor, No Ceiling, his new book, Building a New Foundation for the American Dream. And he has the important distinction of being only the second-time guest on the podcast. So thanks for coming back, Oliver.Oliver Libby (00:01:21):Well, thanks for having me, Brian. I’m honored to be your second repeat guest and happy to be here.Brian Bell (00:01:25):Yeah. And so for anybody interested, you can go back and listen to episode 172 and find out a lot about Oliver and who he is. But maybe for new listeners, new audience members out there, you can just kind of tell us who you are and how you got to do what you’re doing and what you do and why you wrote the book and what the book is.Oliver Libby (00:01:42):Totally. Yeah. And episode 172 was banger, folks. So go back to it. I’m really glad to be back. And for those who didn’t hear that episode, I’m Oliver. I’m based in New York. I’m kind of a strange, strange career. I’ve been through all the sectors that America has to offer. I started very early on, actually recruited while I was in college to the U.S. intelligence community and I did work at the CIA briefly, but very meaningful experience in my life. I went from there to consulting for large corporations, but rapidly got typecast as the guy who would take on the startup engagements and began to kind of suss out 20 years ago, the idea of a venture studio and taking equity for compensation instead of, instead of just working for highBrian Bell (00:03:04):Yeah. So tell us about the book. The name of the book is Strong Floor, No Ceiling. What does that mean? And what is building a new foundation for the American dream mean in the book?Oliver Libby (00:03:13):Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, Brian, what you and I are in the innovation ecosystem professionally. And and I think, you know, while there are elements of skepticism and you’ve got to be a thoughtful due diligence or investor, this is a fundamentally pretty hopeful industry in VC. And we believe in technology and we believe in its ability to improve lives and livelihoods. But we are in a time of real suffering and pessimism. One of the scariest statistics in America right now is just over a quarter of Americans believe in the American dream. And if you ask me as someone who started my life in the national security world, whether an external threat like a 9-11 could destroy the country or whether it be something internal, I would say, you know, absolutely. We are resilient to outside attack, but we’re really hard to survive is if we as a society fundamentally no longer believe in the American dream. That’s the thing that for generations has gotten Americans out of bed. You know, the idea that you could work hard, play by the rules and improve your lot and leave yourself and your kids better off

Most workplaces don’t fail because people are malicious. They fail because their systems quietly tilt the table.Imagine a startup that hires brilliant people, moves fast, prides itself on meritocracy, and still ends up promoting the same profile over and over again. Not because anyone planned it that way. But because small, invisible design choices nudged decisions in predictable directions. This is the uncomfortable, data-backed reality Siri Chilazi has spent her career studying.Siri is a senior researcher at Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of Make Work Fair. Before academia, she worked in management consulting, where she saw something that felt off long before she had the language for it. Entry-level talent looked diverse. Leadership didn’t. The further up you went, the narrower the funnel became.This isn’t a story about bad actors. It’s a story about bad systems.Why good intentions don’t scaleFor decades, companies have tried to fix bias by fixing people. Trainings. Workshops. Awareness sessions. The logic sounds reasonable. If we teach people about bias, they’ll behave differently.The data says otherwise.Hundreds of studies show that most diversity and unconscious bias trainings feel good and change almost nothing. People learn new concepts, nod along, then return to the same environments that produced biased outcomes in the first place. The system stays the same, so behavior snaps right back.Siri’s core insight is almost annoyingly simple. You don’t need to change people’s beliefs to change their behavior. You need to change the environment in which decisions are made.Humans are incredibly sensitive to context. Change the context, and behavior follows.Bias hides in informalityStartups love informality. No rules. No bureaucracy. Decisions made on the fly. It feels fast and founder-friendly.It’s also where bias thrives.When hiring criteria live in someone’s head instead of on paper, when promotions are based on “potential” without definition, when assignments are handed out based on who speaks up first, the door quietly opens for favoritism, pattern matching, and comfort-based decisions.Structure, boring as it sounds, is the enemy of bias.Clear criteria. Written rubrics. Consistent processes. Not because people are untrustworthy, but because our brains are lazy. We default to shortcuts, especially under pressure.Fairness is not the opposite of performanceOne of the most common objections to fairness work is the fear of lowering the bar. The assumption is that fairness means choosing diversity over quality.That assumes the current system reliably selects the best people.It doesn’t.Audit studies repeatedly show that identical resumes receive different outcomes based solely on names, gender, or perceived background. If that’s the case, the problem isn’t fairness initiatives. The problem is that meritocracy has been broken for a long time, we just called it something nicer.Fairness, as Siri defines it, is not about equal outcomes. It’s about equal starting lines. Same rules. Same shoes. Same chance to show what you can do. After that, let performance decide.Small tweaks, big resultsThe most striking part of Siri’s work is how small the interventions can be.Not massive reorganizations. Not sweeping cultural revolutions. Often, it’s a seven-minute video shown at exactly the right moment. A hiring process that asks managers to reflect on missing skills instead of defaulting to familiar profiles. A performance review structure that forces evidence over vibes.These changes work because they are embedded into real decisions, not layered on top as optional programs.They don’t rely on people remembering to “be fair.” They make fairness the path of least resistance.What founders should take awayIf you’re building a company, especially an early-stage one, the lesson is both sobering and empowering.Sobering, because culture and outcomes are being shaped far earlier than most founders realize. The first five or ten hires set patterns that echo for years.Empowering, because you don’t need a DEI department or a playbook full of slogans. You need curiosity, structure, and a willingness to design your internal systems with the same rigor you apply to your product.Ask simple questions:• How do we actually decide who gets hired, promoted, and rewarded?• Where are decisions vague instead of explicit?• What assumptions are baked into our defaults?Run experiments. Measure outcomes. Adjust.Fairness, done right, isn’t political. It’s operational. It’s good design.And once you see it that way, it becomes hard to unsee the hidden levers shaping who succeeds at work, and why.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters:00:01 Introduction and Siri Chilazi’s background02:56 Early experiences with gender inequality04:12 Lean In and the shift in public conversation06:35 Why traditional DEI programs fail07:01 Behavioral science vs changing hearts and minds08:50 Embedded design vs programmatic approaches11:23 The core thesis of Make Work Fair14:41 Small interventions that change hiring outcomes16:45 Meritocracy, bias, and what “qualified” really means20:58 Where bias comes from and how early it forms23:16 What startup founders can do differently from day one26:27 Why structure beats informality in fast-growing teams29:48 Measuring fairness, performance, and retention33:11 Remote work, visibility, and promotion bias36:02 AI, automation, and the next wave of fairness risks39:48 The future of DEI and what actually works41:50 Open research questions and experimentation44:00 Rapid-fire advice for founders and leadersTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00:51):Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast today. We’re thrilled to have Siri Telazi on the mic. She is a senior researcher at the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, co-author of Make Work Fair, data-driven design for real results, and a leading voice in workplace fairness, gender equality, and behavioral design. Thanks for coming on, Siri.Siri Chilazi (00:01:09):Thanks for having me, Brian. I’m so looking forward to this conversation.Brian Bell (00:01:12):And, you know, we were joking about your name ahead of time before we recorded, but everybody’s going to be like, Siri, really? And like everybody’s Apple phone is probably going off in the car right now.Siri Chilazi (00:01:22):I’m the original. I was first.Brian Bell (00:01:25):So I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?Siri Chilazi (00:01:27):You know, I would say I’ve been passionate about gender equality since I was born. My parents would tell you the same thing. I remember even experiences as a young kid, three, four, five years old, where you notice girls and boys being treated differently just because of their gender. And it never made any sense to me. I happened to be a girly girl myself, so I gravitated to ballet and the dolls and all of that. But I didn’t understand why people would make assumptions about what I’d be interested in or which team I’d want to play on just because of my gender. And then fast forward to when I’m graduating in college and starting my first job in management consulting, you know, those intervening years in the education system, actually, in my case at least, had by and large insulated me from the worst manifestations, the most egregious manifestations of gender inequality. So it wasn’t a topic that was actually on my mind for the next 20 years. But then as soon as I entered the workplace, it all comes crashing to the fore. I was in a management consulting firm where it’s 50-50 at the entry levels, but you look up to the partnerships. 90% of partners are men. I had colleagues getting promoted right and left, men who I’d worked with who I felt were doing pretty mediocre work. And then some women that I’d also worked with who I thought were absolute top performers were not getting promoted at the same rates. I myself was underpaid, I found out. And so all of these experiences where you realize, wow, this stuff that I’ve been reading about in the news that I thought was just old complaints from the 1980s, this stuff still hasn’t been solved. It’s the 2010s and it’s still very much real. And that’s what galvanized me to want to make solving gender equality in the workplace, but also more broadly in society as my life’s work. And I eventually went back to graduate school and then landed in academia. And I now split my time between doing research and and identifying concrete solutions that work to level the playing field for everybody in organizations, but also ensuring that the insights that we’re generating through rigorous research reach the hands of people who are actually in organizations, leading companies, leading small teams. Even if you’re the most junior member of the team, you know, a summer intern, there are things that you can do to do your work better and more fairly. And I’m on a mission to share those things.Brian Bell (00:03:33):Yeah, and I think it all kind of galvanized this whole in the 20s with probably a Sheryl Sandberg’s book, right?Siri Chilazi (00:03:40):Yep, in 2013.Brian Bell (00:03:41):What was the kind of impact for you? Where were you when that book came out and what kind of impact did it have?Siri Chilazi (00:03:46):Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I was still in management consulting, but I was actually getting ready to go back to graduate school. So I already knew that transition was on the horizon. And I read the book, obviously, as soon as it came out and was very attentively following the discussion. And I think one thing it did for me is it was the point in my lifetime where I felt the conversation around gender equality peaking up the most steam. Now, this is obviously not a new topic. I mean, women have been fighting for the right to vote since 160 years ago, right? So this is by no means new. Bu

Most small businesses don’t fail because the founders are lazy or the ideas are bad. They fail because money moves at the wrong speed.Imagine running a perfectly healthy business, customers want what you sell, employees show up every day, orders keep coming in. Then a large client tells you, “We’ll pay you in 60 or 90 days.” Your employees, your rent, and your suppliers, they still want to get paid this month. That timing mismatch is where growth quietly dies.This is the world Nicolás Villa knows well. Before becoming CEO of Platam, he lived it as a founder. His first company waited years for something as basic as a corporate credit card. Banks looked at his personal credit and shrugged at the company’s, even though the business itself was healthier on paper. That contradiction became the seed of Platam.The credit paradox no one talks aboutZoom out and you see a strange picture across Latin America. On one side, institutional capital is piling up, funds actively looking for places to deploy money. On the other, small and mid-sized businesses are starved of working capital. Not because they’re reckless, but because the system was never built for them.Traditional banks aren’t evil here, they’re just structurally broken for this problem. The cost of underwriting, servicing, and recovering small loans often exceeds the value of the loan itself. So banks do the rational thing, they move upmarket and leave everyone else behind.The result is a massive financing gap and millions of companies stuck in survival mode, not because demand is missing, but because cash flow is.Why embedded finance changes the gamePlatam’s insight is simple and quietly radical. Don’t sell credit to small businesses. Embed it directly into the places where they already work.Instead of asking an MSME to apply for a loan, Platam integrates financing into supply chains and buyer networks. When a business uploads an invoice or places an order with a supplier, the option to access working capital is already there. No new dashboard. No cold outreach. No pretending financial statements tell the whole story.Credit stops being a product and starts becoming infrastructure.This shift does two powerful things at once. It lowers customer acquisition costs to near zero, and it replaces unreliable self-reported data with real transactional behavior. Who you buy from, who buys from you, how often, and at what scale, tells a far more honest story than a spreadsheet designed to minimize taxes.The hardest decision isn’t yes or noOne of the most counterintuitive lessons Nicolás shares is that lending decisions aren’t binary. The real risk isn’t deciding whether to lend, it’s deciding how much.Give too little, and the credit gets misused or doesn’t move the needle. Give too much, and you amplify risk faster than the business can absorb it. SMEs aren’t static entities, they fluctuate with seasons, contracts, and demand spikes. A great December can be followed by a brutal January.Platam’s systems are built to move with that reality, constantly adjusting credit lines as businesses change, not freezing them in time like traditional lenders do.Growth can lie to youThere’s a moment in nearly every startup’s life when growth feels like validation. Platam hit that moment too, and paid for it later.Pushing volume without respecting credit discipline led to pain downstream. Defaults don’t show up immediately, they arrive months later, quietly undoing today’s good news. The lesson was clear, revenue without risk control is just deferred regret.That scar now shapes how the company scales, with partnerships, data, and patience doing more work than brute-force expansion.Building bridges, not chasing hypeWhat Platam is really building isn’t just a lending business. It’s a bridge between idle capital and real economic activity. One side speaks the language of institutional investors. The other speaks in invoices, inventory, and payroll. The magic happens in the middle.And once you build a bridge, something interesting happens. You realize you can sell pieces of it. Credit scoring systems, onboarding flows, compliance tools, all of it becomes reusable infrastructure for markets that look very different on the surface but share the same underlying problem.Latin America is just the starting point.The quiet revolutionFintech headlines love consumer apps and flashy interfaces. Platam is doing something less visible and far more important. It’s changing how money moves for businesses that never get podcasts, press releases, or venture hype.Nicolás started as a founder waiting to get paid. Now he’s making sure others don’t have to.Sometimes the biggest innovations don’t create new behavior. They remove the friction that never should’ve been there in the first place. 👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters: 00:01 – Why Small Businesses Fail02:10 – Founder Origin Story04:30 – Experiencing the SME Credit Gap07:00 – The Idea Behind Platam09:20 – What Platam Does12:00 – Supply Chain Finance Explained15:10 – The Latin America Credit Paradox18:30 – Why Banks Can’t Serve SMEs21:40 – Embedded Finance and Risk25:10 – Credit Size vs Credit Approval28:20 – Lessons from Chasing Growth31:30 – Partnerships as Distribution34:20 – The Future of Platam37:30 – Closing ReflectionsTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:02): Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Nicholas Villa on the mic. He’s the CEO of Platam, a Colombian fintech rethinking how SMEs access credit and a serial entrepreneur who spent years building innovation infrastructure across Latin America.Nicolás Villa (00:01:17): Thanks for coming on, Nicholas. Thanks for having me here. It’s my first podcast in English, so yeah, it’s going to be hard. You need to give me some time to lose my tongue, but I’m happy to be here and it’s going to be a great time. Great to catch up.Brian Bell (00:01:30): So I’d love to start with your origin story. What’s your background?Nicolás Villa (00:01:33): So my background, been into entrepreneurship for about six to seven years. I started my first company when I was 27. I actually started it as a consulting company in innovation and transformation for big organizations. That was really good venture. It wasn’t a big company, but we had an acqui-hire because we built a company, we built a platform for open innovation around Latin America. And I got to work as a consultant in Open Innovation for the biggest companies in Latin America, like Huawei, Kizer, Inditex. So that was a great experience. After the act we hired, I lived in Mexico for a while. Coming back to Colombia, my co-founder had been, I think, like proving the concept of Platam for about one year and a half, getting money and getting the money back. That was something very important for him, obviously, as a financial expert. He said, okay, we need someone to go to the company. Let’s bring Nicolas. We’ll meet each other by chance. That was how I got into the company. When I started the company, he didn’t have sales team. There were like three people organically selling. They were actually growing. That was a surprise. The first time I saw it, it was something very surprising against Constance. Because you actually push consultancy services on the company, right? Like you really need to sell those. And something like a credit is the other way around. The company is selling themselves for you to give them credit. So that was one of the biggest prizes when I arrived to the company and happy problems that I had is like, there is a lot of demand for this product. Something that I didn’t have in my previous companies.Brian Bell (00:03:18): Yeah, what was the aha moment for you when you realized that SMEs, small to medium enterprises in Latin America, were massively underserved by traditional finance?Nicolás Villa (00:03:27): Well, I have lived this as an SMC. This wasn’t my first company. I also found a company in Mexico. And obviously, the first thing that a young entrepreneur says when they are looking to get some funds is, okay, I’m going to venture capital. And then you say, okay, am I building a venture-backed company or not? If you’re building a venture scalable business. Is it scalable for venture capital or not? If it is not, then your doors are closed, mostly closed to raise capital as debt or credit or even investment. So I leave that. For example, I always say my first company, I had my first credit card for the company like three years after it started. And it was a loan application for a credit card. And they gave me like $2,000 credit line. And my personal credit, like my personal credit, like it was like 10 times that. And I was like, it’s impossible. Like if you look at my numbers as Nicholas Villa and the numbers of the company, the numbers of the company are much better and it wasn’t attractive for tax. So I lived that. I lived how companies were going to pay me, like big companies were going to pay me 60 days, 90 days after. And I needed to pay my employees at the end of the month. So when I arrived and I met Rodrigo building this, I was like, this is genius. I wish I knew a solution like this one before because that was a real pain. I couldn’t grow. And of course, when I started thinking about being the CEO of this company, I started my research and I knew building companies, of course, was difficult. And I knew from before data that was pretty impressive and it’s like only 30% of companies in Colombia survive after five years. And that was sad, of course, but then I knew investigating about this huge problem is like 92% of companies don’t grow. So if you are building an entrepreneur, a company, if you are into this entrepreneur adventure, which is pretty, pretty hard, your chances are you’re not going to grow. Like 92% of companies don’t grow. And the number one cause of

Most investors don’t lose great deals because they lack conviction.They lose them because they see them too late.That’s the quiet problem Ali Dastjerdi is obsessed with. And it’s why he left Insight Partners, one of the most sophisticated growth investors in the world, to build Raylu, an AI-native platform designed to help investors think faster, not louder.This episode of Ignite isn’t about AI hype. It’s about a structural flaw in private markets that almost everyone has learned to live with.The invisible tax on investingImagine trying to track 30,000 companies. Now imagine that every 90 days, something meaningful changes in half of them.That’s not diligence. That’s cognitive overload.Most investor tools pretend this problem doesn’t exist. They pile on more companies, more filters, more dashboards, and quietly push the real work back onto humans. The result is familiar, constant motion, very little early insight, and decisions made just late enough to hurt.Ali’s core insight is simple and uncomfortable. Private market investing isn’t starved of data. It’s starved of synthesis.Why “proprietary deal flow” is overratedEarly-stage investors love to talk about inbound. Later-stage investors quietly panic about it.Ali breaks this down cleanly. At the extremes, deal flow is abundant. Pre-seed investors are flooded. Mega-funds see everything that matters. The real battleground sits in the middle, where timing, preparation, and conviction decide who wins.In that zone, proprietary deal flow isn’t about secret access. It’s about who shows up first with a sharper understanding of the company, the market, and the why now.That’s not a networking problem. It’s a workflow problem.AI that thinks like an investor, not a spreadsheetRaylu doesn’t try to replace judgment. It tries to earn the right to inform it.Instead of static databases, investors teach AI agents what they actually care about. Founder backgrounds. Business models. Go-to-market signals. Ecosystem integrations. Even oddly specific heuristics, like which customer logos matter or which hires signal momentum.Those agents monitor, score, and map companies continuously, not once a quarter when someone remembers to update a CRM. Timing becomes dynamic. Context becomes default.Ali draws a hard line here. AI should never write the final memo or make the final call. Those moments aren’t outputs, they’re thinking processes. Automating them would feel efficient and quietly destroy decision quality.Founders aren’t convincing investors, they’re matching frameworksOne of the most honest moments in the conversation comes when Ali says the quiet part out loud.Founders don’t change investors’ minds. Investors recognize patterns they already believe in.Pitching, in this light, isn’t persuasion. It’s search. The real job is finding the investors whose mental models already align with your worldview. Everyone else is just intellectually curious.It’s uncomfortable advice. It’s also freeing.Why AI favors new entrants, not incumbentsThere’s a popular belief that AI will entrench incumbents. Ali disagrees.Building truly AI-native products often requires ripping existing systems down to the studs. Most incumbents can’t do that without breaking what already works. Startups can.That’s why Raylu exists. Not as a feature layer on top of legacy workflows, but as a clean-sheet rethink of how investors actually operate.The real future of investingAli doesn’t believe AI turns private markets into slot machines. He believes it removes friction so judgment matters more, not less.When discovery gets cheaper, thinking gets more valuable. When access equalizes, insight compounds.If Raylu succeeds, it won’t be because it automated investors out of relevance. It’ll be because it gave them back the one thing they’ve been quietly losing for years, time to think clearly before everyone else does.And in a world where being 5 percent better often means winning the only deal that matters, that difference isn’t incremental.It’s everything.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters:00:01 – Ali’s background, machine learning roots, and joining Insight Partners03:40 – Why investing felt broken from the inside06:15 – Early startup attempts and the pull back to company building09:10 – The original Raylu idea and why it failed12:30 – ChatGPT as a forcing function and the reset moment15:20 – From infrastructure to vertical SaaS for investors18:45 – Private markets as a sales and timing problem22:10 – Why proprietary deal flow matters less than investors think25:30 – Teaching AI agents what “good” actually means29:40 – Replacing databases with adaptive investor workflows33:15 – AI as conviction acceleration, not decision-making36:50 – What investor work should never be automated40:20 – How better context changes investment outcomes44:30 – The future of venture in an agentic AI worldTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:14):Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have Ali Dasjurdi on the mic. He’s the co-founder and CEO of ReLU, an AI company helping private market investors think faster and decide smarter. Before building ReLU, Ali was on the investment team at Insight Partners, where he backed companies like Weights and Biases, Landing AI, DNS Filter, and some others. He’s now on a mission to redefine how investors make decisions in the age of AI. Very cool. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, I’d like to start with your origin story. How do you tell us about your background?Ali Dastjerdi (00:01:42):Yeah. Absolutely. Starting all the way back in school, kind of classically studied machine learning and data and kind of ended up in a weird role for someone right out of school, which is I started off as a large venture fund called Insight Partners. I joined a fairly technical team there, which was a great fit for me. So I spent most of my time investing in machine learning ops companies. Now it’s maybe called AIOps, but at the time it was called MLOps. A lot of developer tools, developer infrastructure companies is what I was covering. Insight’s a unique place where a lot of the model of a junior investor, when they joined that team is to meet a lot of companies, speak to a lot of founders and kind of really get a lot of reps in through the whole history and cycle of building businesses. But after a while, I knew that my kind of end goal was to get back to actually kind of company formation. And in college, I had spent a lot of time with my college roommate, starting little things and trying to build companies. And we never did it in college. But fast forward three years later, my co-founder now, and at the time, my ex-college roommate, Nathan, had shut down his first startup attempt, looking to build something new. And it was a perfect moment to start something with him. So yeah. I left my role at Insight. Nathan and I joined forces with our third co-founder, Sam, and we started Raylu. Our company is a story of a lot of pivots and change. You know, I’ll be honest with you. When we first started Raylu, it had basically nothing to do with what we are today. At the time, we were three very nerdy people deep in machine learning land. And so we set out to kind of make it easier to allow traditional software engineers to build models in their applications so that you didn’t need both a software engineering team and a machine learning engineering team to build a feature that leveraged AI. So that’s what we were working on when we first started the company. Lo and behold, ChatGPT happened. And every product team and engineering team we were working with at the time said, hey, this traditional machine learning, this prediction system, this ranking system, the scoring system is cool and all. But with a little bit of work with the OpenAI API, I can do XYZ amazing thing. And so it was a big reset moment for us as a company. And so we went through all sorts of pivots trying to kind of find product market fit again. Funny enough, we basically took everything we knew about building agents, building LM based systems, all the work we spent on in that world at an infrastructure lens, we kind of translated into a vertical SaaS app. So today, we basically build AI agents for investors. And our goal is a pretty simple one. It’s, you know, in the world of private market investors, and that’s everyone from VCs to late stage middle market private equity funds. It’s really difficult to go from, I as an investor have a thesis as to where I want to deploy capital and the types of companies that I want to invest in, to actually finding and executing and building relationships with the exact companies that let you do that. And so Rayleigh’s goal is a pretty simple one. We want to make it so that AI agents fill that gap. You tell us what you’re interested in, we find the companies, we build the relationship, we prepare you for the conversation, we help you with the research so that really the process of thesis to company identification can be as simple as possible.Brian Bell (00:04:36):that’s really interesting so it’s almost like almost like a marketing platform for private equity in vc where like hey i i want to go find these customers which are founders and help me go find them like help me find my icp yeah absolutely funnyAli Dastjerdi (00:04:50):enough is a lot of you know some folks in this universe call this business development they call them like dd professionals a lot of funds it’s just like a hybrid investment team vd role but it’s exactly that it’s like a sales function And a lot of times when we meet investors, they actually have kind of filled their stack with sales tools as kind of replacements for some of the problems that they hit in here. And we end up replacing with those sales tools for them. But yeah, it’s a perfect analog. It’s as if they’re doin

Most people think venture capital is about spotting rockets early. It’s not.It’s about deciding which fires are worth sitting next to while everyone else complains they’re not warm enough yet.That’s the quiet throughline of this conversation with Adam Besvinick, founder and managing partner of Looking Glass Capital. If you didn’t listen to the episode, here’s the short version, this is a masterclass in patience as a competitive advantage.The cold email that started everythingAdam didn’t grow up inside the venture bubble. He cold-emailed his way in. Hundreds of messages. Twitter replies back when Twitter was still a small town instead of a shouting stadium.One of those cold emails landed with Chris Sacca.That turned into a remote apprenticeship at Lowercase, working nights and weekends while in business school, learning how early conviction actually forms. Not spreadsheets first, people first. Not speed, judgment.The lesson stuck.Cold outreach still works, Adam has backed multiple companies that way, but only when it signals clarity, effort, and respect for the other side’s time. Spray-and-pray is noise. Thoughtful curiosity cuts through.Pre-seed is not finance, it’s psychologyAt the earliest stages, there is no data. There is no certainty. There is barely a product half the time.What there is, is a human being deciding whether they are willing to suffer longer than most people would.Adam describes pre-seed investing as pseudo-psychology, evaluating resilience, self-awareness, and how founders behave when the plan breaks. Because it will break.This is why he believes lived experience matters. Why a 25-year-old running a venture fund is often underprepared, not because they lack intelligence, but because they haven’t seen enough hard conversations yet. Cap table conflicts. Co-founder breakdowns. The slow grind of markets that take years, not weeks.You can’t vibe-code your way through those moments.The traction trapOne of Adam’s most honest admissions is that he used to overweight early traction. Many investors do.Revenue early feels like gravity. It pulls attention. It quiets doubt.But over time, he saw how often early traction was a false positive. A marketing spike. A novelty curve. A short-term behavior masquerading as product-market fit.Now he treats traction as one signal, not the signal.A company growing slowly in a market with long sales cycles, regulatory friction, or real-world complexity may be far more durable than something scaling fast on vibes alone.Or as Adam put it in the episode, some startups are giving others “company dysmorphia,” unrealistic expectations shaped by outliers that distort what normal progress actually looks like.Patience is not passiveThis is the part many people miss.Patience doesn’t mean hands-off. It means staying engaged when things are boring, uncomfortable, or unfashionable.Adam backs founders in healthcare, climate, education, and economic infrastructure, spaces where nothing happens fast and everything matters. These founders don’t quit at the first down-round scare. They cut salaries. Extend runway. Keep shipping.The unspoken contract is simple. Try as hard as you can. If it fails honestly, no one is angry.That dynamic, Adam argues, is what makes venture work when it works.Why Series A is broken for many companiesOne of the sharper insights in the conversation is about the widening gap at Series A.Many modern Series A funds need to write massive checks to justify ownership targets. But more startups today don’t need that much capital, especially with AI-driven efficiency.The result is a mismatch. Companies that are healthy, growing, and capital-efficient struggle to raise because they don’t fit the check size math, not because the business is weak.This is where early investors with conviction matter most, helping founders choose the right path instead of chasing the biggest round available.AI flattens teams, not judgmentYes, AI is changing everything. Teams are smaller. Output per employee is higher.But Adam is clear about what it won’t replace. Taste. Context. Pattern recognition built through years of repetition. The ability to help a founder through a deeply human moment.If anything, AI raises the bar for judgment. When execution becomes cheaper, decision quality matters more.The quiet signal of fund threeA subtle but important takeaway for emerging managers, getting to fund three is itself information.Not because it guarantees success, but because survival requires discipline. Doing what you said you would do. Not chasing shiny objects. Not rewriting your strategy every market cycle.In Adam’s words, the bar for consistency in venture is shockingly low.The bigger patternZooming out, this episode isn’t really about venture capital.It’s about incentives.We live in a system that rewards speed signals over endurance, optics over substance, and short-term narratives over long arcs. Adam’s approach quietly rejects that.He’s not trying to see everything. He’s trying to see clearly.And in a market addicted to immediacy, that might be the most contrarian strategy left.If you’re a founder, the takeaway is reassuring and demanding at the same time. You don’t need to look like an outlier in month six. You do need to be resilient enough to still be here in year six.If you’re an investor, the question is simpler and harder.Are you optimizing for excitement, or for truth?👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Welcome and Adam’s Background03:00 Cold Emails and Breaking into Venture07:30 Apprenticing with Chris Sacca at Lowercase11:50 Early Operator Experience at Gumroad and Startups14:50 MBA Decisions and Career Tradeoffs19:30 Transition from Operator to VC23:00 Venture as Psychology28:30 Patience vs Speed in Venture Capital33:00 The Myth of Fast Growth36:00 AI and the Flattening of Teams41:00 Why Series A Is Broken for Many Startups46:00 Concentration vs Spray and Pray Investing51:00 Founder Resilience and Hard Moments56:30 Building Looking Glass Capital01:01:30 The Future of Pre-Seed and Closing ThoughtsTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:05):Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Adam Bespinik on the mic. He’s the founder and managing partner of Looking Glass Capital, a pre-seed firm known for being the first yes for mission-driven founders. He’s invested across the earliest stages of company building, worked with iconic seed firms and later stage funds, and has supported founders solving challenges across health, climate, and economic drivers. Thanks for coming on, Adam.Adam Besvinick (00:01:27):Thanks for having me, Brian.Brian Bell (00:01:27):So we were giggling before about this trauma question, but I’d love to know what your origin story is and what do you think the trauma that is driving you and shaping you?Adam Besvinick (00:01:36):I think maybe ultimate sort of first world problem is I don’t fortunately have too much trauma that’s driving me to build a venture fund. Origin story-wise, I’ve kind of been surrounded by small business entrepreneurs and founders since I was growing up. My grandmother ran a small business. My father ran a small consultancy. Now, these aren’t startups in the sense of the types of companies that you and I fund, but I’ve kind of been surrounded by entrepreneurs from the time that I was quite young. And so seeing that type of drive and the dedication that it takes to start a company was something that I saw firsthand from a relatively young age. And so I don’t necessarily think that’s the reason why I became a venture capitalist per se, but I do think it is a really important part of my upbringing in terms of wanting to be surrounded by these types of inspiring individuals who want to build something from scratch and sort of control their own destiny to a degree as far as sort of like origin story and adventure it doesn’t feel all that dissimilar from a lot of sort of peers who tried to network their way into this ecosystem when it’s sort of you know very relationship driven and relationship centric and you’re you know It’s an overused term, but you’re trying to like hustle your way into conversations and meetings and coffee chats. And I was fortunate enough years ago at this point, which feels dating myself that 14 years ago, I was still like, I was out of college, well out of college, but I sent cold emails to literally hundreds of VCs and was active on, you know, very active on Twitter when Twitter was a different place, trying to get in front of investors to figure out the best way to network my way into this business. industry. And unfortunately, a lot of people got coffee with me and got on phone calls with me and took the time to share their advice and experiences. And one of those people was Chris Saka, who started Lowercase Capital and has since gone on to start Lower Carbon and has probably the best seed track record of all time, the best seed fund of all time. And I ended up working remotely for Chris when I was in business school from 2011 to 2013. And that was a role that I got with Chris. And really, I started with Chris that came off of a cold cold email to him. And so that was sort of my foray into venture and was working 10 to 15 hours a week remotely for Chris for two years while I was in business school and just trying to soak up as much as I possibly could from the way that he worked with founders, the way he thought about making investments, the way that he thought reputation as a, you know, really was like one of the first truly solo GPs when he started the fund. Nobody called it that, you know, in 2010, 2011. And so that was, I’d say that’s my like venture origin story or more proximate origin story, which is sort of the way that I was able to sort of network my way into this, into this industry and sort of parlay that relationship with, with Chri

Most founders don’t fear competition. They fear the spreadsheet.It’s 11:47 p.m. You’re not debugging code or answering customers. You’re staring at cash flow, wondering if the numbers are lying to you. Somewhere between “I think we’re fine” and “we might be dead in six months,” finance becomes a quiet, persistent anxiety. That’s the problem Alexander Wulff decided to go after.Alexander is the CEO and co-founder of ScaleUp Finance, and the mind behind NUM, an AI CFO built for startups and small businesses. Before fintech, he spent more than a decade building and exiting a deep-tech company. He lived the pain. Founder by day, accidental CFO by night. That experience shaped a simple insight, finance is the most broken function in early-stage companies, and no one is really fixing it.Finance is universal pain, not a niche problemTalk to ten founders and you’ll hear ten versions of the same story. Monster spreadsheets. Fragile accounting setups. Sunday night anxiety before board meetings. Even founders with finance backgrounds feel behind, and most founders don’t have one.The root issue isn’t intelligence or effort. It’s structure. Small companies rarely have a real finance team. They rely on outsourced bookkeeping, occasional advice, and hope. Strategic financial thinking, the kind that helps you decide when to hire, how fast to grow, or when to say no, is usually missing.That gap is exactly where ScaleUp Finance started.A contrarian bet, software plus humansInstead of building pure SaaS from day one, Alexander and his team did something unfashionable. They combined software with real CFOs. Inspired by Palantir’s forward-deployed model, they embedded finance experts directly with customers while building the product alongside them.The logic was simple. Finance tools cannot be “mostly right.” They must be right. And the only way to get there was tight feedback loops between engineers and people who actually do the work.This approach paid off early. Customers didn’t just like the product, they shared it. Investors and board members began seeing financial reports stamped “powered by ScaleUp Finance” and asking where it came from. Distribution emerged naturally, because quality travels.When AI finally became useful for financeFor years, AI felt promising but unreliable for financial work. Large language models are great with words, less great with numbers. That changed when the team began building agentic systems, not chatbots.Instead of one model guessing answers, NUM breaks every task into smaller steps. Specialized agents retrieve data, verify it, analyze it, and cross-check results. Accuracy isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the product.This shift turned ScaleUp Finance’s original SaaS vision into something bigger. NUM wasn’t just a tool. It behaved like a CFO. Always available. Never tired. Comfortable answering the “dumb” questions founders are often afraid to ask.Why this matters more than automationThe real impact isn’t saving time or money, though it does both. It’s confidence. Founders make better decisions when they actually understand what’s happening in their business. They stop avoiding finance and start using it.Alexander points out something subtle. Many CEOs don’t ask their head of finance half the questions they’re thinking, because they don’t want to sound uninformed. An AI CFO removes that friction. No judgment. Just answers.Over time, that changes behavior. Better questions lead to better decisions. Better decisions compound.The long gameAlexander isn’t chasing a feature checklist. His north star is simple, what would a great human CFO do here? The roadmap follows from that question. More proactive insights. More automation without prompting. Fewer dashboards, more signal.The ambition is global, because the problem is global. Debit and credit are the same language everywhere. Financial anxiety is too.When asked about legacy, Alexander doesn’t talk about valuation or scale. He talks about sleep.If founders can sleep better at night, because they trust their numbers and understand their options, the product has done its job.And maybe, just maybe, the spreadsheet stops being the villain of the startup story.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Introduction and Alexander Wulff’s background02:05 From deep tech founder to fintech operator04:12 Living the CFO problem as a founder06:10 Early product market fit and rapid inbound demand08:02 Viral distribution through financial reporting10:01 Blending CFO services with software12:30 Why finance tools must be 100% accurate14:45 The shift from SaaS to agentic AI17:20 Building NUM, an AI CFO20:10 Orchestrating agents for financial accuracy23:05 Ideal customer profile and SME focus26:00 Finance complexity as companies scale29:15 Democratizing CFO access with AI32:10 Founder behavior and finance confidence35:05 Lessons from scaling too fast37:30 Long-term vision for AI in financeTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:09): Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we are thrilled to have Alexander Wolff on the mic. He is the CEO and co-founder of ScaleUp Finance, a fintech startup on a mission to build an AI CFO for growth companies. Very interesting. He brings years of entrepreneurial experience, finance and accounting depth and a global view on scaling fintech infrastructure. We’ll dig into how he got here, what he’s building now, where he’s headed next. Thanks for coming on, Alexander. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be on. Well, I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?Alexander Wulff (00:01:37): My background, I typically say I’ve been a founder my whole, at least adult career. I started my first VC-backed company in 2010. I almost can’t comprehend that it’s so many years ago, but I started something completely different to what I’m doing today because I actually started a deep tech company where we developed a new building material in concrete, ran that company for 11 years, exited five years ago, and then decided that I wanted to solve one of the biggest problems that I had been having myself running my previous company. And that was, guess it, financial management.Brian Bell (00:02:12): That’s amazing. So what were some of the key moments or frustrations that you saw that must be a better way? I mean, you exit a company, there’s sort of like a vacation period. When did you know you’re going to work on this?Alexander Wulff (00:02:23): I actually had zero vacation period because it was slightly before I exited. I already teamed up with a new group of still entrepreneurs here in Copenhagen. And we had been talking about this for quite some months. So no vacation, but... But I think that the real moment that led us to start Skill of Finance, not just me, but also the co-founders I have here, is that we had just been living this problem ourselves. I typically say that I was my own de facto CFO and I even studied finance and accounting at Copenhagen Business School. So compared to a lot of other founders and small business owners, I would say I had a pretty good foundation, but most founders, they are techies or product people or somebody with some industry or domain expertise, right? That just get this idea to build a product, whatever it is. I actually had some kind of foundation, but I also just typically say that studying finance and accounting in a business school definitely doesn’t make you a finance pro. And then, you know, when you are in the startup ecosystem for so many years, you meet hundreds of other founders at different events and stuff like that. And it just felt like every time I went to these events, you know, it just so often came up that this financial management, it’s just, you know, it’s this burning problem and It’s my Sunday anxiety. And everybody talked about this monster of a spreadsheet that they built up or this really error prone finance tech stack or whatever it might be. And it was just really, it was almost pattern recognition. You know, I felt it myself, but I don’t think I ever met a founder who didn’t call finance a problem or at least a very serious pain point.Brian Bell (00:04:00): Yeah. So what were some of the biggest obstacles? Because obviously this was quite different from your last company as you started to build this out.Alexander Wulff (00:04:06): Yeah, well, starting Scalar Finance was quite different to what I did before and also what is probably the typical trajectory when you start a company because I think we hit product market fit within three or four months of starting out Scalar Finance. And then the big challenge that I’d never tried before that was really scaling. I think we hit $1 million in ARR less than 12 months after starting and we We almost hit 100 employees two years after starting. And that pace and all the things changing all the time, that really took me a bit by surprise, I’d say.Brian Bell (00:04:44): How did you know you had product market fit?Alexander Wulff (00:04:46): The sheer amount of customers that we closed. I remember it was a very... kind of very specific moment in time. I think we launched Scala Finance 1st of May and I got back from summer vacation. It was in 21. And suddenly when I came back, my phone just couldn’t stop ringing. And it was from potential customers. But even more than that, it was from a lot of these. It was actually VCs and like board members in some of our customers. And they all told me the same story. They were like, Alex, I’m sitting here with like a monthly financial report from one of my portfolios. It has a little banner in the button saying, powered by Scala Finance, this is the best monthly report I’ve ever received from any of my portfolios. Need to learn a bit more about you and like, what do you do? Because then I’m going to make you five entries right away. And when that happened, you know, i

Most people think networking is a volume game. More emails. More intros. More “quick chats.” Like pouring water faster into a leaky bucket and calling it strategy.Andrew D’Souza thinks that’s backwards.After building one of the most consequential fintech companies of the last decade, Clearco, Andrew is now working on something stranger, riskier, and arguably more important, an AI that doesn’t optimize for growth, but for judgment.This post is for people who won’t listen to the full episode but still want the core ideas, without the fluff, without the hype.The real problem isn’t access, it’s trustImagine two worlds.In the first, you can get introduced to anyone. Investors, customers, hires, partners. Infinite intros. Zero friction.In the second, you get fewer introductions, but almost all of them are worth your time.Most of today’s software bets on world one. Andrew is building for world two.Early in his career, he learned a hard lesson while building a referral-based recruiting marketplace. The idea was simple, pay people to introduce candidates. The result was subtle and destructive. The moment money entered the equation, trust evaporated. People stopped assuming goodwill and started questioning motives.That insight stuck.Trust, once diluted, is almost impossible to re-concentrate.Clearco proved scale, not defensibilityClearco helped create a new category, programmatic, non-dilutive capital for founders. It scaled fast, globally. But Andrew noticed something uncomfortable.Capital isn’t a network effect.Once the category was obvious, competition rushed in. Pricing compressed. Differentiation narrowed. The business became operationally excellent, but strategically fragile.That’s when Andrew did something most founders avoid. He stepped aside as CEO.Not because the company was failing, but because the job had changed. It needed a different kind of operator. He stayed close, but mentally moved on.The next thing he wanted to build had to be harder to copy.Enter Boardy, an AI that behaves like a person, not a productBoardy isn’t an app. There’s no dashboard. No onboarding flow. No features page.You talk to it. On the phone. By text. Like a human.That design choice isn’t cosmetic, it’s philosophical.Humans don’t trust interfaces. They trust relationships.Boardy’s job is simple to describe and extremely hard to execute, make high-quality professional introductions at scale. Not maximum intros. Good intros.And here’s the twist. Boardy can say no.If it believes an introduction will waste time, damage goodwill, or hurt the network, it refuses. That alone makes it feel radically different from software trained to comply.Think less “assistant” and more “board member.”Why saying no is the featureMost AI tools optimize for helpfulness in the narrow sense. Do what the user asks. Faster. Cheaper. More reliably.Boardy optimizes for a different objective, long-term trust across the network.Every introduction spends goodwill. Every bad one compounds distrust. Boardy tracks this implicitly, who responds, who ignores, who follows through. Over time, it learns judgment, not just matching.The worst outcome is wasted time. The best outcome is life-changing.That asymmetry matters.Voice is not a gimmick, it’s biologyAndrew is blunt about this. Humans evolved for sound, not screens.Before language, there was tone. Before text, there was voice. Podcasts work not because they’re efficient, but because they’re human.Boardy uses voice because voice carries intent, hesitation, confidence, and context that text strips away. It’s higher bandwidth, emotionally and informationally.Typing is new. Talking is ancient.AI that ignores that is fighting human nature.The contrarian AI take, imagination is the bottleneckHere’s where Andrew gets provocative.He doesn’t think we’re limited by models, compute, or talent. He thinks we’re limited by imagination.Most AI startups are doing incremental work. Faster versions of old workflows. Slightly cheaper humans. Polished wrappers.Useful, sure. Transformative, rarely.The real opportunity is asymmetric problems, where the downside is small and the upside is enormous. Introductions are one. Creative partnerships are another. Founder-investor matches. Network orchestration.AI is finally good enough to explore possibility space, not just optimize known paths.But only if we let it.A glimpse of the moonshotAndrew’s long-term vision for Boardy is audacious.Imagine an AI that understands your strengths better than you do. That helps articulate what you should build, who you should meet, and when. Not once, but continuously, as your context changes.An AI co-founder with taste. An AI connector with restraint. An AI that compounds trust instead of burning it.He compares it to an AI version of Richard Branson, spotting people’s zone of genius and connecting dots across industries, without needing to run everything itself.Whether Boardy becomes that or not is an open question.But the underlying idea feels durable.In a world drowning in noise, the scarce resource isn’t information or access. It’s judgment.And that might be the most interesting thing AI can learn next.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 – Breaking Things, Founder Embarrassment, and Why It Matters03:30 – Studying the Brain, Behavioral Economics, and Human Decision-Making06:40 – McKinsey, Facebook, and Getting the Startup Bug10:10 – Early Lessons on Incentives and Why Referral Marketplaces Fail14:45 – Becoming a Connector Between Silicon Valley and Canada17:30 – The Origin Story of Clearco and Access to Capital22:10 – Financing the DTC Boom and Creating a New Category27:40 – When Scale Outgrows the Founder, Stepping Aside as CEO31:50 – Discovering GPT-3 and the Clear Angel Experiment36:10 – The Problem with Personal CRMs and Human Memory Limits39:40 – Network Effects, Voice AI, and the Birth of Boardy44:30 – Why Voice Is the Most Human AI Interface48:20 – Judgment, Trust, and Saying No in Network Design52:51 – The Future of AI, Imagination, and Human ConnectionTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00.951)Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast today. We’re thrilled to have Andrew D’Souza on the mic. He’s the founder and CEO of Bordie.ai and the serial entrepreneur behind Clearco, formerly ClearBank. He’s built pivoted broken and reimagined companies at the intersection of finance, AI and networks. He’s now constructing an AI super connector that speaks to you, introduces you and helps you build leverage in the real world. Let’s dive in. Thanks for coming on, Andrew.Andrew D’Souza (00:24.066)Thanks for having me. This is fun. This is fun. definitely broken the parts of things in my career.Brian Bell (00:31.093)Yeah, you haven’t really shipped product or been a founder if you haven’t broken things and been really embarrassed by launches. But I’d love to dive into your origin story. What’s your background?Andrew D’Souza (00:41.622)Yeah, so I mean, I studied engineering. I actually did a deep focus on a specialization called simulating neurobiological systems. And so sort of this idea of like, how does the brain work and can we model it in computers?At that time, we were simulating neurons in MATLAB. But it was fascinating because also there was a cadaver lab. took gross anatomy, neuroanatomy. We were looking at brains, different brain components, physiological psychology. So how do our hormones and neurotransmitters affect the way that we process information, the way we feel, the way we make decisions, consumer behavior, how do marketing messages affect the way we process information, make decisions. And thenBrian Bell (01:00.172)Wow.Andrew D’Souza (01:24.204)a couple of macroeconomic courses around behavioral economics, behavioral psychology. So sort of thinking about how does this create markets, how does this create networks? And so it’s always been an area that’s been fascinating for me, was just sort of like, how do we work as people? And how do we interact with computers, technology, systems, software? It’s been a lifelong question for me.Brian Bell (01:53.111)That’s amazing. we birds have a feather a little bit except for the cadaver part. You know, I never, never studied brains, but I really got into cognitive neuro psychology and I almost went back to grad school. I was reading like books like nudge and all the behavioral econ books back in the two thousands, 2010s and just really fascinated. I think it’s what kind of probably drove me into building product is just understanding how people interact with technology and how they think. And what was that trigger for you though, where you’re like, okay, I want to build something that just, you know,Andrew D’Souza (01:57.471)youAndrew D’Souza (02:08.684)Yeah.Andrew D’Souza (02:14.307)Yep.Brian Bell (02:23.205)do research or consult orAndrew D’Souza (02:25.28)Yeah, I mean, started my first job was at McKinsey. And so was a lot of research and consulting. And I think very quickly, I realized I’m not cut out for that. I wasn’t a very good employee. I never really listened to what they needed me to do. was like, well, what about this? What about this? What about this? And so eventually, yeah, yeah. So I ended up.Brian Bell (02:41.259)Classic founder mentality, yeah.Andrew D’Souza (02:46.772)Somehow my resume ended up on Chamath’s desk when he was running growth at Facebook. So he was probably 10 years ahead of me in school at Waterloo. And so we had, you know, through a couple of people that like, I’ve got a friend who, you know, is senior at Facebook. Do you want to go talk to him? And he was like, Hey, look, you could join my team at Facebook or I’m, you know, leaving to start a fund. I’m incubating a company here. It was a company called Top Prospect and it was a referral based recruiting marketplace. SoBrian Bell (03:14.487)I remember it. I remember it. Yeah.

Most people think venture capital is a gated community. Ivy League keys, Silicon Valley zip codes, warm intros from people whose Wikipedia pages are longer than your résumé. This episode quietly dismantles that myth.Sarah Romanko didn’t follow the traditional VC playbook because she never had access to it. Instead, she built her own. Fellowships stacked on fellowships. Startup work mixed with real estate to pay the bills. Relentless networking. Speaking gigs. Cold outreach. And one slightly unhinged but brilliant move, walking into an interview with a 32-slide deck ripping apart a firm’s own investments.It worked.Today, Sarah is an investor at Geek Ventures, backing immigrant founders building deeply technical companies in AI and robotics. Her story isn’t inspirational in the motivational poster sense. It’s more useful than that. It shows what actually compounds when credentials don’t.Venture isn’t about pedigree, it’s about pattern recognitionOne of the biggest themes in this conversation is how early-stage investing is really learned. Not from spreadsheets. Not from brand-name firms. But from proximity to founders.Sarah argues that empathy is the real moat. You can’t fake understanding what it feels like to ship a product at 2 a.m., miss payroll, or hear “almost ready to sign” for the fifth time in a row. That’s why she believes aspiring VCs should work at startups, or build something themselves, before trying to allocate capital.Without that scar tissue, you’re just guessing with confidence.The uncomfortable truth about breaking into VCThere’s a moment in the conversation where Sarah admits she left a stable job with no offer in hand. No safety net. Just conviction and an unwillingness to move back home.This isn’t advice. It’s a data point.VC, especially at the early stage, rewards people who act before permission is granted. The industry likes to talk about optionality, but careers in venture often require the opposite, burning the boats and betting that your ability to create value will outrun your fear.Sarah’s edge wasn’t a résumé. It was clarity. She showed firms exactly how she would source deals, grow brand, support founders, and think independently. She didn’t ask to be trained. She showed up already operating.What VCs actually notice in pitchesAfter reviewing hundreds, possibly thousands of decks, Sarah has a refreshingly simple filter.Can you explain what you do in one sentence, without sounding like you swallowed an AI buzzword generator?The founders who stand out aren’t always the most polished. They’re the ones who sound human. Who have fun. Who can make an investor retell the idea later that night without checking notes.A great pitch doesn’t just make sense. It sticks.Hype fades, character compoundsOn the investment side, Sarah is candid about what kills deals fast. Lack of transparency. Inflated numbers. Playing games with investors. If trust breaks once, the round is over.On the flip side, what pulls her in is founder character. People who can take feedback without becoming defensive. Who push back thoughtfully instead of blindly agreeing. Who know when to move fast and when to slow down.Ideas pivot. Markets shift. Founders don’t change as easily.The future of venture looks less polished, and that’s a good thingZooming out, Sarah sees venture quietly evolving. More emerging managers. Younger investors. More emphasis on access over aesthetics. Less obsession with where someone went to school, more curiosity about why they’re building what they’re building.Geek Ventures’ focus on immigrant founders is part of that shift. Not because it’s trendy, but because talent has always been widely distributed. Capital just hasn’t been.The opportunity now is for investors who can see around corners not by running better models, but by listening to people the old system ignored.The throughlineIf there’s a single idea that ties the episode together, it’s this: venture capital is not a career you wait to be invited into. It’s one you prepare for so thoroughly that the invitation becomes inevitable.Sarah grew up watching Shark Tank, studying the judges. Now she’s the one deciding when to lean in, when to pass, and when to trust her gut.Same table. Different seat. Same rule applies.Bet early. Pay it forward. And don’t confuse hype for progress.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters: 00:01 Welcome and Guest Introduction01:01 Sarah’s Early Curiosity and Business Background02:26 Breaking Into Venture Without a Clear Path04:26 Leaving Stability and Betting on Herself05:24 The 32 Slide VC Interview Deck Strategy07:54 Where Ambition and Drive Come From09:55 Discovering Venture Capital and Founder Empathy11:46 Advice for Aspiring VCs14:18 Geek Ventures Investment Thesis15:57 Learning to Prioritize Deals and Move Fast17:45 Missing Deals and Investor Regret19:21 Post Mortems and Learning from Failure20:29 How Geek Ventures Supports Founders22:09 Building Community and VC Culture23:44 What Makes a Pitch Stand Out25:34 Easy No’s and Red Flags for VCs26:56 Market Trends and Emerging Managers29:06 Redesigning Venture Capital31:12 Fast Decisions and Due Diligence Tradeoffs32:03 Remote First VC and Team Culture33:47 Long Term Career Vision and Legacy36:17 Common Fundraising Mistakes37:09 Overhyped vs Underrated Startup Trends38:12 Dream Investor Dinner38:37 Frameworks and Mental Models39:41 Lessons from Judging Hundreds of Pitches40:47 The Hardest No42:33 Rapid Fire CloseTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:25):Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Sarah Romanko on the mic. She is on the investment team at Geek Ventures, where she focuses on sourcing and evaluating early stage startups led by visionary immigrant founders. We’ve done a lot of deals with Geek over the years and so excited to have her. She has hands-on experience across multiple VC firms. So we’ll talk about that. Startup ecosystems from Hustle Fund to Sputnik, Techstars. Thanks for coming on, Sarah.Sarah Romanko (00:01:49):Yeah, absolutely. It’s great to be here, Brian. As Brian said, I’m on the investment team here at Geek Ventures. I focus on sourcing, evaluating and diligencing prospective investment opportunities. What I really love is also working with our founders post-investment. And there’s a few founders that we’re currently in the process of working with. Haven’t announced the investments yet, but super excited. Hopefully we’ll announce that in a few weeks.Brian Bell (00:02:10):Well, I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?Sarah Romanko (00:02:13):Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up very different from my peers. I was that child that loved to do homework, which I think is very weird. I remember when I was in kindergarten, I did my homework twice just for fun. And I, you know, I was kind of like that growing up when I was back when I was in high school. I grew up watching Shark Tank. I remember I had the opportunity to participate in more than 10 business classes. So I did business competitions and I was going to networking events when I was like 14, 15 years old. And I think that really early experience led, you know, charted the path for me because I just knew that I was, you know, always wanted to be that hard worker and not go to parties like my friends. I always had my nose in a book or studying. So when I got to university, I really wanted to dive deep into business. So I took several business classes, kind of just like when I was in high school. You know, I already had a great business background because of high school and I had some early VC roles, but they weren’t really, you know, they weren’t like, didn’t lead to a full-time role. It was more just kind of like getting that early experience, did some roles at my university, also did like fellowships, worked for some startups. And that’s where I’ll pause because I can go deeper.Brian Bell (00:03:17):Yeah, I’d love to kind of get that story arc from, you know, from university to having a full time role in venture. I’m sure a lot of younger folks out there listening to this podcast want to break into venture and it’s hard to do. So maybe you could kind of talk about that journey because it’s not easy.Sarah Romanko (00:03:32):Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I thought I had it all figured out. You know, I had that path. Like I mentioned in high school, I did business classes, competitions, majored in general business. I had great GPA. I did the honors programs. I thought I was following the path that everyone tells you to follow growing up, you know. But for me, the biggest challenge was when I graduated, I was told that I didn’t have enough experience. So for me, the roles I was applying for, they were looking for people who already had several internships under their belt, you know. And for me, the biggest challenge was that they also required someone to relocate. My personal life is very important to me. So I recently got engaged and I didn’t want to move because my fiance and I had already done long distance. So for me, I say that because I think that there’s so much focus on in the venture world of really focusing on, you know, the like work all the time, 24 seven, but there is that personal side that really helps you have that success. And so I was trying to prioritize both. And so there weren’t many roles in Austin and in Dallas, which is where I wanted to stay. And that’s ultimately why it was so hard for me to get a role. And what I did was I took several different like fellowship roles, internship roles, Sputnik ATX VC here in Austin, Moonshots Capital. I was on the advisory board at Able Partners. I did Venture Institute, put on by VC Lab.Brian Bell (00:04:44):Is that Moonshots Capital to say, is that Peter Diamandis or is it a different one?Sarah Romanko (00:04:48):Moonshots Capital, it’s like they inv

Most startup advice breaks down right when it’s needed most, in the messy middle, after the first signs of traction and before real scale. This is the phase where dashboards look decent, investors get excited, and founders quietly wonder if they’re about to make the wrong irreversible decision.Karen Page has lived in that middle for decades.Before becoming a General Partner at B Capital, Karen helped scale Box from its early days, built one of the most influential partnership ecosystems in SaaS, and later led enterprise go-to-market strategy at Apple. Today, she sits on boards and works directly with founders navigating the exact moment where momentum can either compound or collapse.This episode isn’t about hype cycles or shortcuts. It’s about how companies actually grow.Scaling is a mindset shift, not a milestoneOne of Karen’s core observations is simple and uncomfortable. The skills that get a company from zero to one are not the same skills that get it from one to ten.Early traction rewards speed and conviction. Scale rewards clarity and judgment.Founders who struggle during this transition often don’t lack intelligence or ambition. They lack perspective. They are deep in the weeds, fighting fires, optimizing tactics, and missing the broader terrain. Karen describes her role as oscillating between airplane mode and ant mode. Most of the time, she’s zoomed out, scanning for patterns, risks, and opportunities. Occasionally, she dives deep to help solve a specific problem that’s blocking progress.Great founders learn to do the same.Go-to-market clarity beats tactics every timeTools change. Channels change. AI changes everything around the edges.What doesn’t change is the need for an undeniable value proposition.Karen has seen every GTM flavor, sales-led, partnerships, product-led growth, enterprise-heavy motions, and now AI-assisted everything. Her conclusion is blunt. If you cannot clearly articulate what you sell, who it’s for, and why it materially changes how that customer operates, no GTM motion will save you.Founders often over-rotate on tactics when growth slows. New hires. New pricing. New tools. What’s usually broken is the message.Clarity compounds. Confusion leaks.Boards are leverage, not overheadMany early founders delay forming a board because they fear bureaucracy or loss of control. Karen takes a more pragmatic view.A board is not about governance theater. It’s about access to pattern recognition.The best boards function as a room of trusted advisors who have seen similar problems before, often at the worst possible moments. Hiring mistakes. GTM stalls. Executive transitions. Strategic forks in the road. These moments don’t show up neatly on dashboards, but they determine outcomes.Her guiding principle is “noses in, fingers out.” Boards should be deeply curious, strategically engaged, and respectful of the operator’s role. When trust exists, hard conversations become productive instead of destructive.AI is a bigger shift than cloud ever wasKaren lived through the cloud transition firsthand. She sees AI as something fundamentally larger.Cloud changed where software lived. AI changes how work itself is done.The opportunity isn’t just efficiency. It’s redefinition. Entire workflows, pricing models, and operating assumptions are being rebuilt in real time. Companies that treat AI as a feature risk irrelevance. Companies that rethink processes from first principles gain unfair advantage.This shift also changes how founders think about scale. Capital efficiency is improving. Smaller teams are doing more. Value per employee is becoming a critical metric. The winners won’t just grow faster. They’ll grow smarter.Vertical software is quietly getting dangerousOne of Karen’s most contrarian views is her continued conviction in vertical software.For years, many vertical markets looked too small to support venture-scale outcomes. AI changes that math. When software starts absorbing labor, not just software budgets, it can capture a much larger share of economic value within a niche.The result is deeply specialized companies solving real problems with precision, not generic platforms trying to be everything to everyone.These businesses don’t look flashy at first glance. They compound relentlessly.The founder skill that matters mostAcross all stages, industries, and cycles, Karen keeps coming back to the same trait.Curiosity.The best founders are relentless learners. They seek data, ask uncomfortable questions, pressure-test their assumptions, and update their thinking when reality changes. They don’t confuse confidence with rigidity.That learning mindset is what allows founders to scale themselves alongside their companies. Without it, growth eventually stalls.The long gameKaren’s definition of success isn’t just ringing the bell at an IPO, though she’s done that too. It’s helping build companies that last because the leadership, culture, and decision-making systems were strong enough to survive inevitable stress.The throughline of her career is partnership. Connecting people, systems, and ideas so the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.In a world obsessed with speed, that might be the most durable advantage of all.If you’re a founder navigating the jump from early traction to real scale, this conversation is a reminder that the hardest problems are rarely tactical. They’re structural, human, and strategic. And they show up whether you’re ready or not.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Welcome and Karen Page’s background02:30 Early career in sales and building GTM foundations04:20 Discovering partnerships as a growth lever06:00 Scaling Box through ecosystem strategy08:10 Exposure to venture while fundraising at Box10:00 Transition from operator to investor12:00 Why B Capital and building the early-stage fund14:30 How Karen works with founders and boards17:00 What great founders do differently as they scale19:45 Evaluating investors and building the right board22:00 Boardroom trust and decision-making under pressure25:20 AI as a platform shift versus cloud and mobile28:00 Go-to-market evolution in an AI-first world31:00 Pricing, value creation, and capital efficiency with AI34:00 Product-led growth versus sales-led at scale36:30 Vertical software and overlooked markets39:30 Talent, culture, and scaling leadership43:00 How venture and startups will evolve46:30 Timeless GTM principles and founder lessonsTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00:59):Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Karen Page on the mic. She’s a general partner at B Capital Group and one of the most accomplished go-to-market leaders turned investors in venture. Before B Capital, Karen was a founding executive at Box, where she built out the partnership ecosystem and founded Box.org. Very cool. She later joined Apple, leading enterprise partnerships and GTM strategy. Today, she sits on or advises multiple boards across SaaS, fintech, and digital health, helping founders turn early traction into scale sustainable growth. Thanks for coming on, Karen.Karen Page (00:01:29):Thank you so much. It’s really good to be there.Brian Bell (00:01:31):Yeah, likewise. So I would love to get your origin story for the listeners.Karen Page (00:01:35):Absolutely. I grew up in a little town outside of Annapolis, Maryland, oldest of six kids, ran around a bunch in that area and kind of decided by the time I was in 11th grade that I was ready to go to college. So I figured out how to work the system, graduated early, landed at Towson State, barely 17 years old at the time and did exactly what I had always known I wanted to do, which was major in business. I jumped out of Towson after four years and got a job in sales. And I really believe that that was a very strong foundation. I didn’t imagine myself in sales and yet that’s where I landed. It was an incredible experience for me, really solidified kind of how to build relationships and really had a great time. I also knew that I was not going to stay in Baltimore for the rest of my life and started preparing for my eventual exit. I knew that I would need a great kind of master’s degree. So started working at night towards a degree at Johns Hopkins in their, what was now called the Cary Business School at the time was just Johns Hopkins Executive Program in Business and worked my way through that program. At the time that I was just about to graduate, I was working on my thesis there and got an opportunity to move to Honolulu, Hawaii. I was just getting married and had an opportunity to transfer with my sales role and took that and I was an avid runner, avid triathlete, greatest place in the world to take on those activities and continued my sales effort. A few years later, migrated over to LexisNexis, which was awesome. That was at the time when they were transitioning to web-based solutions. I was selling into law firms and took over Hawaii for them, incredible experience. 99, 2000 era, had an opportunity to move to the Bay Area, which was also kind of a big dream of mine, just as things were getting crazy and heated up there. I moved there in about 2000, got the bug for startups, but was also going through a transition in my life. I had two small children, was going through divorce and needed to kind of have a job that would allow me to both be a mom, and kind of have my foot in the career world. So I landed at Brobeck, worked as a marketing lead there for the business team. It was also a really incredible time. Transitioned from there to Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, where I built business development programs for the lawyers there, all the partners. And that led me to my first startup, which was called Prosper. And under Chris Larsen, who was just a great, great leader, very disciplined. And eventually, just may

Most people think wealth is about picking the right stocks.That’s adorable.In reality, wealth is a systems problem. A long-horizon, low-drama, deeply unsexy systems problem. And in a world where public markets have been feasting on tailwinds for 15 years, that truth is about to matter again.In this episode of the Ignite Podcast, we sat down with John McArthur, Senior Partner and CIO at Krillogy, to talk about what happens when the old playbook starts to break, and what disciplined investors are quietly doing about it.If you didn’t listen, here’s the short version. If you did listen, here’s the zoomed-out pattern hiding underneath the details.The Golden Age of Easy Returns Is Probably OverFor most of the last decade and a half, public markets were generous. Liquidity everywhere. Valuations climbing. Mistakes forgiven.That era trained a generation of investors to believe markets mostly go up and patience alone is a strategy.John’s view is calmer, and more unsettling.When you strip away narratives and look at structure, debt levels, demographics, and starting valuations, forward-looking public market returns may be far lower than what people are anchored to. Not zero. Not catastrophic. Just… lower.And that’s a problem if your entire plan assumes yesterday’s returns will fund tomorrow’s life.Private Markets Aren’t “Riskier”, They’re Just Less ForgivingOne of the most useful reframes in the conversation was this, risk is often confused with illiquidity.Private markets feel scary because:* You can’t click a button and sell* Prices aren’t updated daily* Losses don’t scream at you in real timeBut structurally, private equity and venture have delivered strong returns for decades, largely because they live where innovation happens before it’s sanitized for public markets.The real risk isn’t going private.The real risk is going private badly.Small portfolios. Too few managers. Overconfidence in picking. Not enough shots on goal.Private markets punish concentration and reward process.Why Fund-of-Funds Exists (And Why It’s Boring on Purpose)There’s a reason endowments, pensions, and family offices obsess over diversification inside private markets.Venture and private equity returns are wildly dispersed. A few managers drive most of the gains. Miss them, and your “private markets exposure” is mostly vibes.John’s philosophy is simple:* Start broad* Maximize probability* Let math do the heavy liftingFund-of-funds structures exist not to be clever, but to be statistically sane. They trade ego for consistency. They accept that you won’t pick every winner, and design a system where you don’t have to.It’s not exciting.It works.Liquidity Is a Lifestyle Question, Not an IQ TestOne of the more subtle points in the episode is that allocation decisions have less to do with intelligence and more to do with life design.Are you still accumulating?Approaching distribution?Funding future generations?Running a business with uneven cash flow?Liquidity isn’t good or bad. It’s contextual.The mistake most people make is allocating as if all dollars have the same job. They don’t.Some capital needs to be flexible.Some capital should be patient.Confusing the two creates stress, not returns.Process Beats Brilliance, Every TimeJohn repeated this idea in different forms throughout the conversation, and it’s worth underlining.Markets reward discipline over drama.Doing nothing is still a decision.Diversification is still underrated.Boring strategies still compound.The job of a CIO, and frankly of any long-term thinker, isn’t to predict the future. It’s to build a portfolio that survives multiple futures.That means fewer heroic bets, more repeatable frameworks, and a willingness to look wrong in the short term to be right in the long term.The Bigger PatternZooming out, this episode wasn’t really about private markets.It was about maturity.Mature investors stop asking, “How do I beat the market?”They start asking, “How do I design a system that holds up when the market doesn’t cooperate?”That shift changes everything, from asset allocation to time horizons to how you define success in the first place.The irony is that it looks conservative from the outside and radical from the inside.Which is usually a good sign you’re onto something.If you’re building wealth, managing capital, or just trying to think clearly in a noisy market, this conversation is a reminder that the edge is rarely found in speed, hype, or cleverness.It’s found in patience, structure, and the humility to let probabilities work in your favor.Unsexy. Effective. Durable.Just like the best systems tend to be.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Origin Story and Early Career01:55 From D1 Quarterback to CIO03:10 What Krillogy Does05:05 Scaling Through People and Culture06:40 Early Move into Private Markets09:10 Defining Private Markets11:30 How the Ultra-Wealthy Allocate Capital14:00 Access and Innovation in Private Markets17:05 Fund-of-Funds and Diversification Logic20:10 Liquidity and Time Horizon Management23:05 Portfolio Allocation to Private Markets26:10 Diversification and Dispersion in Venture29:05 Public Market Return Expectations32:00 Building Durable Portfolios35:13 Transition to Rapid FireTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:03):Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have John MacArthur on the mic. He is the senior partner and chief investment officer at Krilogy, where he conducts a multi-billion dollar orchestra of portfolios with precision and vision. Thanks for coming on, John.John McArthur (00:01:19):My pleasure, Brian. Thanks for having me.Brian Bell (00:01:20):Well, usually how I start these episodes is just getting your backstory. What’s your origin story?John McArthur (00:01:25):Yeah, so I’ve been in the business for 25 years in the wealth management space, having the benefit of being at really large firms such as Morgan Stanley, and then kind of Central States focused AG Edwards back when it existed prior to joining Krilogy at the beginning of 2012. So it’s been an absolute blessing to have seen kind of the lens through the traditional wire house world and then the independent space now for a number of years.Brian Bell (00:01:50):Yeah, that’s quite the journey. And I have here in my notes that you were a D1 college quarterback. Is that true?John McArthur (00:01:55):I was many moons ago. Our founder and CEO, Kent Scornio, and I were we were college teammates together at the University of Missouri beforeBrian Bell (00:02:05):we that’s amazing I’m learning new things about you so you know let’s talk about Krillogy you know what is Krillogy what’s your goal what do you guys do yeah soJohn McArthur (00:02:13):Krillogy its meaning is art of accomplishment and when the firm was founded in mind the inspiration was to was to get all things done for clients to simplistically put it and obviously folks have a number of unique and complex needs often and when we kind of put the flag in the ground way back when the the mission was to to solve for for everything in clients lives much of that goes beyond what many think about traditional wealth management which is of course the portfolio management side which is where my team and I focus and spend the majority of our time. But, you know, it’s in addition to kind of the simplistic meaning our mission is to and purpose is to inspire and serve and enrich lives. You know, our focus is to not only do that with the folks that we get the pleasure of working with, but in our communities, with our teammates and you know i it’s it’s been a it’s been a really fun journey i feel like in so many ways we haven’t really done anything yet you know when i came over we were managing about 100 million in assets and we’re at about 4.5 billion now which are which are big numbers but again i you know in many ways our team feels like we’re just getting warmed upBrian Bell (00:03:21):yeah yeah i mean for for folks listening you know 4 billion sounds like a lot but there are as asset managers out there that have you know hundreds of billions or trillions, like a trillion even, right?John McArthur (00:03:32):Absolutely. Yeah. Four and a half billion is on the smaller side in today’s standards, you bet.Brian Bell (00:03:37):But you were able to grow at 40X, which is pretty incredible. What do you attribute that growth to?John McArthur (00:03:41):You know, I think this may sound really cliche, but we’ve just been disciplined around hiring great people. So much of us spend so much of our working lives in office and together. And so in a business that typically is a little bit more individualistic by nature, we’ve created an atmosphere and environment that people love to come into every day and collaborate well with one another. And that’s been, I think, the number one thing that i would point to we have so much i mean one of our differentiators is is in-house expertise i mean we have so many experts literally under under our roof that are well versed in so many different areas and i think that’s really what a big part of what makes us go so over time you guys have gottenBrian Bell (00:04:27):more into private markets in addition to public markets maybe you could talk about that transition you know how that’s been over the last you know 10 or 15 years for you and Yeah, that balance looks like in your firm.John McArthur (00:04:37):Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, a lot of so I took over the CIO role in 2012. And, you know, a lot of the firms that we work with, the asset managers have continually told us over time that we’re on kind of the leading edge of proactively thinking about private markets and implementation and so forth. And we’ve really been in private markets since 2012. And it used to be really kind of a finely curated list of exposures in private markets that have different risk ch

What most LPs miss, and why venture is quietly changing shapeHere’s a strange truth about venture capital: it’s an industry obsessed with pattern recognition, yet remarkably bad at measuring its own patterns.We have spreadsheets for startups. Metrics for growth. Frameworks for product-market fit. But when it comes to evaluating the people allocating the capital, especially emerging managers, we mostly rely on vibes, pedigree, and coffee chats.That worked when the industry was small. It breaks the moment it scales.Eric Woo has spent most of his career living inside that contradiction. He’s evaluated hundreds of emerging managers as an LP, helped institutionalize syndicates at AngelList, and now, as the co-founder and CEO of Revere, he’s building infrastructure to make venture underwriting a little less mystical.This post distills the core ideas from our conversation for anyone who didn’t listen to the episode, or wants the signal without the audio.Venture underwriting is still mostly vibesLet’s start with the uncomfortable part.Despite all the talk of rigor, most LP decisions about emerging managers still come down to:* Do I trust this person?* Do other smart people seem to trust this person?* Does this story feel coherent?None of that is irrational. Venture is a human business. But it’s dangerously incomplete.Eric’s experience across fund-of-funds platforms revealed a recurring problem: LPs are forced to compare managers using narratives that aren’t standardized, aren’t comparable, and often aren’t falsifiable.Everyone claims to be “value-add.”Everyone claims to have “differentiation.”Very few can prove either.As more capital flows into early-stage venture, that ambiguity becomes a bottleneck. Not just for LPs, but for the managers themselves.The signal that actually matters: founders know who their first call isAcross hundreds of GP evaluations, one signal kept resurfacing.Not pedigree.Not fund size.Not even early markups.The signal was simple: who founders call first when things break.The best managers aren’t fungible. Founders know exactly which investor actually helps, who picks up the phone, who can close a customer intro, hire, or next round.That relationship shows up long before outcomes do.Eric frames it this way: product-market fit de-risks a startup. Founder-GP fit de-risks a fund.If a GP consistently helps companies reach their first real customers, not hypotheticals, not decks, but paying users, that’s an early indicator of future fund performance.Most LPs underweight this because it’s hard to measure. But difficulty doesn’t make it less real.“Value-add” is meaningless unless you can show your workHere’s where things get awkward.Ask ten GPs how they add value, and you’ll hear ten confident answers. Ask them to show evidence, and the room gets quieter.Eric’s work at Revere started with a basic question: what if GPs had to operationalize their claims?Not marketing slides. Actual tracking.* How many customer intros led to revenue?* How many hires came from the GP’s network?* How often did founders actually use the GP as a resource?The insight wasn’t that some managers are better than others. Everyone already knows that.The insight was that the act of measuring value-add changes behavior. Managers who track it tend to improve it. Managers who don’t often overestimate it.This isn’t about turning venture into a spreadsheet. It’s about accountability.AI changes venture ops first, not venture judgmentThere’s a lot of hype about AI replacing investors. That’s not what’s happening.What is happening is quieter and more consequential: AI is eating the operational layer of venture.Screening.Summarization.Diligence workflows.Portfolio monitoring.These were once labor-intensive, expensive functions. Now they’re table stakes.But judgment, deciding who to back, when to sell, how to support, still resists full automation. Especially in early-stage venture, where the data is sparse and the variables are human.Eric’s view is pragmatic: AI doesn’t replace the GP. It raises the baseline.The next generation of standout managers won’t be those who “use AI.” They’ll be the ones who redeploy the time AI saves into deeper founder relationships, better networks, and more thoughtful capital allocation.1x DPI is a psychological unlockHere’s a counterintuitive LP insight that doesn’t get enough airtime.Returning 1x DPI early matters more than people admit.Not because it’s the goal, it’s not, but because it changes the emotional math. Once LPs get their capital back, everything else feels like upside. Trust increases. Patience expands. The GP gets breathing room.Secondaries make this more possible than before. Selling a portion of a breakout position to return capital doesn’t mean giving up on upside. It means de-risking the relationship.This is less about financial engineering and more about human behavior. LPs are people, not IRRs on legs.Venture is becoming a financial product, whether we like it or notZoom out, and a bigger pattern emerges.Venture capital is being pulled toward new distribution channels, private wealth, RIAs, global capital, that demand consistency and clarity, not just hero narratives.That doesn’t kill the art of venture. It creates parallel strategies.On one side, concentrated, conviction-driven funds hunting for generational companies.On the other, diversified, index-like approaches aiming for repeatable top-quartile outcomes through volume and process.Neither is “right.” They serve different end customers.The mistake is pretending one can be both without tradeoffs.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters: 00:01 – Eric Woo intro, Revere VC01:00 – Engineering to finance pivot, CFA escape hatch02:30 – Pricing CDOs before the financial crisis04:20 – Front-row seat to the GFC05:50 – First startup experience, search engine marketing08:30 – Entering venture via fund of funds10:40 – Early micro-VC and seed investing era13:00 – Institutionalizing emerging managers15:00 – Heuristics for backing new GPs17:10 – Specialization and GP differentiation19:30 – AngelList and the rise of syndicates22:00 – Family offices and venture as participation sport24:30 – Scaling challenges in GP–LP matchmaking26:10 – What never changes in evaluating GPs27:50 – Founder–VC relationship as core signal29:10 – The origin of Revere30:40 – Rating emerging managers with data33:00 – Quantifying value-add35:30 – Gaming the system vs real substance38:00 – AI in GP self-assessment41:00 – Structured vs unstructured data in venture44:00 – AI, fees, and fund economics47:30 – Transparency as LP differentiation50:00 – Revere roadmap and Velvet merger52:30 – Network effects and venture platforms55:10 – Venture distribution and new capital channels57:20 – Efficient frontier of early-stage venture59:40 – Concentration vs volume strategiesTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00:57):Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Eric Wu on the mic. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Revere VC, a platform reinventing how allocators evaluate and manage emerging funds. Very interesting for us. Eric blends deep investing chops with product sensibility. He’s a CFA. All three levels?Eric Woo (00:01:14):All three levels. Yeah, absolutely.Brian Bell (00:01:16):All three levels, Eric? Yeah. That’s amazing. Engineer, former head of institutional capital at AngelList, and longtime advocate for data transparency and infrastructure in private markets. Let’s get going. Thanks for coming on.Eric Woo (00:01:26):Appreciate it, Brian. Glad to be here and excited to share some thoughts and wisdom, especially where we are in the venture markets today, definitely going through its own evolution.Brian Bell (00:01:35):Yeah. Well, I’d like to start at the beginning, kind of get your backstory. What’s your origin story?Eric Woo (00:01:40):Well, it starts with trying to try my hand as an engineer so went through four grueling years of engineering school at berkeley figured out very quickly i didn’t have the disposition to be an engineer yeah absolutely and that was really for me a formative moment because i wanted to transition into the world of finance. And speaking of CFA, that was my escape hatch from engineering was first job out of school. People were going out and partying on weekends and weekdays and I was studying for the CFA exam, but it was definitely something very worthwhile because it got my foot in the door on the finance route. So that was really kind of chapter one for me was figuring out I had some technical sensibility, but really wanted to pursue a career in finance if it was a natural way to do that without um you know essentially going through business school um and that was it’s kind of shocking but that was like 2004 when i completed the cfa exam so i’ve been kind of 20 years through that experience. And then obviously a couple of additional chapters, you know, moving into venture, even experience the global financial crisis in a very unique and interesting way. But we’d love to unpack all this stuff as we get through this conversation.Brian Bell (00:02:59):Yeah, it’s fascinating. I just did the level one and I kind of used it as a way to get my first analyst job on Wall Street. I was finding I wasn’t getting callbacks. This is 2005 or 2006, roughly the same timeframe. I was like, okay, I’ll just do the CFA. And that got me the job. And then I quickly realized I didn’t want to do the job that I got. Anybody who’s listened to this podcast knows this story, but I won’t repeat it. So what did you do next? What was your first job post CFA?Eric Woo (00:03:26):First job, working for an insurance company in risk management. And for those of the audience who are old enough to remember this, I was actually pricing CDOs. And this was during 2005 to 2007. For the insurance company, they had a financial guarantee

Here’s a surprising truth most founders learn too late: Money is rarely the thing that breaks a startup. Isolation is.In a world where it’s never been cheaper to start a company, it’s somehow become harder to build one that matters. Noise is everywhere. Advice is infinite. Capital shows up early, often with strings attached. And founders are left trying to decide which signals to trust.This is where Techstars quietly earns its reputation, not as an accelerator, but as a compression engine for learning.In a recent Ignite conversation, Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi, both Managing Directors at Techstars, pulled back the curtain on how early-stage companies actually scale, why most accelerators are misunderstood, and what separates founders who survive from those who stall.You don’t need to listen to the episode to get the core ideas (but you still should). Here’s what matters.Techstars Isn’t a Class. It’s a Network With Memory.Many people still think of accelerators as startup bootcamps. Three months. Some workshops. A demo day. A little capital.That framing misses the point.Techstars’ real advantage is its distributed network, thousands of founders across dozens of industries, all connected by shared norms, shared scars, and a simple rule, give first.Kerty Levy describes it as pattern recognition at scale. When you’ve worked with thousands of startups, you start seeing what works, what fails, and what fails slowly enough to be dangerous.Keith Camhi puts it differently. Techstars doesn’t just help companies grow faster. It helps founders avoid repeating mistakes that have already been paid for by someone else.The accelerator is just the front door. The network is the product.Vertical Networks Beat Geography Once Things Get RealEarly accelerators scaled by geography. Boulder. Boston. London. Singapore.That still matters. But once Techstars reached global scale, a more powerful axis emerged, verticals.Healthcare founders don’t need generic advice. They need regulatory fluency, clinical validation, and partners who can open doors that usually stay shut until Series B. AI founders don’t need inspiration. They need to understand compute constraints, data leverage, and where hype ends.Vertical networks group founders by the problems they’re actually solving, not just where they live.That’s why Kriti leads Techstars’ AI and machine learning efforts, while Keith runs the healthcare accelerator powered by Permanente Medicine. It’s also why corporate partners, when aligned correctly, become accelerants instead of bottlenecks.Access matters. Context matters more.Momentum Beats Metrics in the Early DaysOne of the most counterintuitive ideas in the conversation is this.Early success isn’t about hitting numbers. It’s about momentum.Revenue can lie. User counts can lie. Even pilots can lie.Momentum doesn’t.Are customers pulling the product forward?Is feedback arriving faster than the team can process it?Are decisions getting sharper week over week?Inside Techstars, founders define goals early, but what matters most is speed of learning. A team that blows past its initial plan is often healthier than one that hits every metric but learns nothing new.Acceleration, in the real sense, is about shortening the feedback loop between action and truth.Why Team Still Beats Everything ElseTechstars famously evaluates startups on six criteria. The first three are the same word repeated.Team.Team.Team.This isn’t motivational fluff. It’s pattern recognition.Keith shares how his own perspective shifted over time. Early in his investing career, he avoided risky bets. He didn’t want to back something that might fail publicly. Over time, he learned that safe bets rarely produce meaningful outcomes.The companies that move the needle are usually working on problems that look unreasonable at first. The only way to underwrite that risk is to believe deeply in the founders.Kerty adds another layer. Team isn’t just about skill. It’s about psychology. How founders handle stress. How they fight. How they recover. How they listen.Most startup failures aren’t technical. They’re relational.Headwinds Are a Feature, Not a BugIf the last few years felt harder for founders, that’s not an accident.Capital tightened. Valuations corrected. Easy money disappeared.Both guests agree on something most people won’t say out loud.This is good.Headwinds filter out weak ideas early. They force clarity. They reward discipline. And they create space for companies that can survive without constant capital infusion.Keith has lived through multiple cycles as both operator and investor. His take is blunt. Winning in headwinds often means you end up alone in the market when things finally turn.Tailwinds feel good. Headwinds build companies that last.AI’s Next Act Is Physical, Not DigitalAI is everywhere. Most of it looks the same.Kerty is focused on what comes next. AI moving out of dashboards and into the physical world. Robotics. Automation of dirty, dangerous, or overlooked jobs. Systems that don’t just think, but act.The easy AI startups, wrappers, copilots, shallow tooling, are already crowded. The next wave is harder. It requires hardware, supply chains, and real-world constraints.Which is exactly why it’s interesting.Big opportunities usually look inconvenient before they look inevitable.The Real PointIf there’s a single thread running through this conversation, it’s this.Great founders don’t win because they have better ideas.They win because they compound learning faster than everyone else.Techstars isn’t magic. It’s leverage. Leverage from people who’ve already seen the movie, survived the plot twists, and are willing to hand you the notes.Kerty Levy learned how to land in unfamiliar territory and adapt fast.Keith Camhi learned what happens when growth outruns understanding.Today, they help founders avoid both mistakes.Different paths. Same mission.Build fewer companies blindly. Build more companies that endure.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters:00:01 Welcome and introductions02:55 Kerty Levy global origin story08:55 Keith Camhi early builder mindset13:05 Building FitLinxx and creating a category18:05 Venture capital realities and liquidation preferences20:50 Why Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi joined Techstars24:20 The origin of Techstars vertical networks29:15 Distributed scale as Techstars’ advantage32:40 AI as a vertical and what comes next34:05 How founders engage with Techstars36:30 Virtual vs in-person accelerators41:00 Inside the Techstars 12-week program46:05 Too early vs too late for an accelerator49:30 Defining success after 90 days52:00 How Kirty Levy and Keith Camhi evaluate founders57:40 Corporate partnerships that accelerate startups01:00:40 How the startup landscape has changed01:02:00 What the next few years will rewardTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01.157)Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we're thrilled to have two powerhouse leaders from Techstars joining us, Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi. Together, they lead the vertical networks at Techstars, connecting founders with specialized support, mentors, and corporate partners across more than 50 industries. Kerty is the managing director of Techstars Anywhere and leads the AI ML vertical network with 80 startup investments and a global perspective shaped by living ever from Japan and Belgium, Sweden, China, and a bunch of other places. She's led multiple Techstars programs. across different geos. She holds degrees from UC Davis. That's right up the road from us. I'm in East Sacramento and APPS. Yeah. Yeah. love the El Dorado Hills. You probably know where that is. Moved out during COVID. then, Keith is the managing director of Techstars Healthcare Accelerator powered by Permanente Medicine and leads the vertical network there. Techstars, seven years there, 70 startup investments.Brian Bell (00:58.405)He brings the founder-turned-investor perspective, having scaled FitLinks, which was number 20 on the Deloitte Fast 500. Pretty cool and great play. And a whole series from Cornell and MIT. Thanks both for coming on.Keith Camhi (01:13.501)Thanks for having us this far.Kerty Levy (01:13.57)Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here.Brian Bell (01:15.619)Yeah, so I’ll do my best. I was saying before we started recording, I don’t usually have two guests at a time. So this is kind of new for me. I’ve maybe done this one other time. I will apologize in advance for stumbling through. But this should be really, I think having a group is kind of fun. So I’d like to start with you, Kurti. What’s your origin story?Kerty Levy (01:33.718)Yeah, sure. I’m really, it’s defined by my worldview. I grew up in six countries and went to 13 schools by the time I graduated from college. Started in, my father was in international business and personal care, pharmaceuticals, medical device, and we moved all over. So up until college, they decided where I was going, but. After college, I decided that I was going to head off to China. I spent six years in China. And so by the time I was in my early to mid 20s, I had been outside the US more than inside the US. And what that did for me was it really gave me an appreciation for different points of view. looking at the world through different lenses, I had to figure out really quickly the lay of the land, I had to figure out languages really quickly, I had to make friends really quickly, and for a natural introvert, I forced myself to be an extrovert. very early on, I learned all the big skills to do that. And even today, I feel like that upbringing of seeing so many different parts of the world, so Japan, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, has really enabled me to think big. And sometimes when I meet founders, I think I can actually see their visions more largely than they can. So that’s really helped shape my view.Brian Bell (03:05.253)Amazing, Ke

Most founders think PR starts with a press release.That’s like thinking fitness starts with buying fancy running shoes.This episode of the Ignite Podcast is a long, honest, occasionally funny intervention for anyone who’s ever wondered why their “big announcement” landed with a quiet thud—and what actually moves the needle instead.Matt Stewart has spent 15+ years inside the PR machine, helping frontier tech companies—from climate to AI to biotech—turn real substance into stories people actually care about. He’s currently the West Coast GM at Method Communications, but more importantly, he’s a professional translator between founders and the outside world.This blog is for people who won’t listen to the full episode but still want the insight without the fluff. You’re welcome.The uncomfortable truth about PRPR isn’t about being louder. It’s about being interesting.Most founders aren’t boring because their companies are boring. They’re boring because they’re scared. Scared of saying the wrong thing. Scared of annoying an investor. Scared of sounding “too opinionated” in a world that feels permanently one tweet away from backlash.So they sand everything down into jargon soup.Media hates that. Readers hate that. Even AI is starting to hate that.Matt’s core point lands hard: you cannot have thought leadership without actual thoughts. Safe messaging doesn’t travel. Spiky, honest perspectives do.The irony? The founders who stand out usually aren’t trying to be provocative. They’re just telling the truth clearly.Why most startups hire PR too early (or too late)PR isn’t magic. It’s leverage.If you don’t have:* real traction* a compelling market insight* someone internally who can actually work with a PR firm…then hiring PR early is like hiring a megaphone before you know what to say.Matt agrees with a counterintuitive idea many founders resist: PR should come after demand gen and product marketing, not before. You need something worth amplifying.That said, modern “Series A” means everything and nothing. Some companies raise massive rounds early. Others don’t. The real signal isn’t funding—it’s whether you can consistently offer insight, access, and credibility.PR works best when it compounds, not when it’s expected to save the day.The founder skill nobody practices: being quotableReporters don’t want your deck. They want your brain.The fastest way to get coverage isn’t “news.” It’s perspective. Journalists constantly ask:* What’s the market getting wrong?* What’s about to change that no one sees yet?* Why does this actually matter now?Founders often know the answers—but they hide them behind buzzwords.Matt coaches executives to slow down, drop the script, and say what they really think. The goal isn’t controversy. It’s clarity. The best quotes stick because they sound human, not approved.Think less “next-generation platform.”Think more “here’s the part everyone’s missing.”AI is changing PR—but not how you thinkYes, AI makes research faster. Shockingly faster. What once took analysts days now takes minutes.But here’s the risk Matt worries about: everything starting to sound the same.AI-polished writing often loses friction—and friction is where insight lives. Media doesn’t reward “good enough.” It rewards voice, judgment, and specificity. That last 5% still requires a human who knows what not to say.AI can draft. Humans still decide.(And if your messaging feels suspiciously smooth, reporters can smell it.)What early-stage founders should do before hiring PRIf you’re pre-seed or seed and can’t justify a PR firm yet, Matt offers surprisingly practical advice:Pick 3–5 reporters you genuinely respect.Reach out directly.Ask what they need, not what you want.Most reporters are happy to give feedback. Some will say “not yet.” That’s still a win. You’re learning how the market sees you.PR isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a relationship you build.The hidden PR lesson in crises, stunts, and scandalsCrises aren’t about perfection. They’re about speed and tone.Matt has handled everything from leaks to executive scandals, and the lesson stays consistent:* Say something quickly.* Don’t panic.* Leave room to tell a better story later.Media stunts can grab attention, but attention fades fast if there’s no substance underneath. The only thing that endures is a strong underlying narrative.You can spike awareness overnight. You can’t fake credibility for long.The real takeawayPR isn’t about controlling the story.It’s about earning the right to be part of the conversation.That means:* having a point of view* being willing to sound human* accepting small risks to avoid permanent invisibilityThe founders who win long-term aren’t louder. They’re clearer. And usually kinder, too.Sometimes the most memorable quote isn’t spicy at all—it’s just honest, delivered by someone who actually means it.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 – Matt Stewart’s origin story, from college tabloids to tech PR02:20 – Why storytelling works better than credentials04:45 – Attention economics, phones, kids, and the cost of scrolling07:30 – What Method Communications actually does and why PR is hard10:15 – Making news when you don’t have news12:40 – Slack-splaining, surveys, and why naming things matters15:05 – Why founders are afraid to be interesting18:10 – Thought leadership starts with real opinions21:20 – When startups should (and shouldn’t) hire a PR firm24:00 – What founders can do before they’re ready for PR27:15 – How PR engagements actually work week to week31:05 – How AI is changing PR, for better and worse34:20 – Writing, thinking, and why AI flattens voice37:05 – What Matt is hopeful about with AI and society40:10 – The underrated role of decency and human behavior44:00 – Final advice for founders who want attention that lasts48:30 – Closing thoughts and wrap-upTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00.974)Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have Matt Stewart on the mic. He is a communications leader who spent over 15 years helping frontier tech companies tell crisp stories, can’t talk today, from record setting solar to AI and biotech and now serves as West Coast GM at Method Communications. Thanks for coming on, Matt.Matt Stewart (00:19.792)Awesome to be here.Brian Bell (00:21.57)So I’d love to get your backstory. What’s your origin story?Matt Stewart (00:25.49)Well, I always loved storytelling. In college, I edited the tabloid. I had a lot of fun with it. And then after college, didn’t know, you know, was a bad time. was usual. Yeah, people actually read that. That’s what I learned is that people like spicy headlines and, you know, things.Brian Bell (00:34.57)This is a college tabloid, like a gossip, like around college.Brian Bell (00:42.542)And the quarterback did this, know, stuff like that.Matt Stewart (00:44.524)And a sense of humor and just having some fun with it. Like it’s like eternal things, right? Like why do we watch TV? Anyway, got out of college, joined the Peace Corps, screwed around, tried some stuff. I thought I wanted to go to law school. I applied, I got in, and I had that sinking sensation on the bottom of my guts that these guys are not having any fun and I want to be weird, want to be weirder. So. I wound up kind of falling into PR as a writer. And I learned that it’s hard to be a writer, especially when you’re 25 and don’t really know that much. Easy to just have a voice mismatch, just not embody the executive. So I started picking up the phone and calling reporters. And I found I was into it. I like just figuring out what makes things interesting. Like what do people actually care about? And how can I help my clients be interesting enough that other people care about them? I had a little existential crisis. was like, tech is stupid. I was working with food. I’m like, this doesn’t matter. And I went and worked as head of marketing and environmental nonprofit, got into climate and climate education. But I missed sort of the cut and thrust of everyday business. So I went back to work at a climate tech only firm for a few years. Then I came to method, where I do some climate tech, I do frontier tech, I do robotics, I do, of course, AI and everything. But really just cutting edge things that I think are really genuinely making the world better, mostly. And in tech, that’s, I think, the best you can ask for.Brian Bell (02:16.364)I mean, it’s interesting that you say that. Do you feel like there are tech companies out there that you wouldn’t work with that aren’t making the world a better place?Matt Stewart (02:24.8)of course. There’s a lot of tech companies designed to just capitalize on your attention. And I think, you know, what is that? What are we doing on this planet?Brian Bell (02:30.211)Yeah.Brian Bell (02:33.762)Like if TikTok called and said, hey, we got a job for you.Matt Stewart (02:36.786)That’s not my thing. look, I think, look, there’s room for entertainment in our lives and human connection. But I think we can all agree there’s been probably little too much digital connection, not enough human connection. But the good news is there’s so many companies doing great things that are trying to save you time on nonsense and really create more energy and freedom to hang out with your kids or.Brian Bell (02:51.192)Yeah.Matt Stewart (03:02.194)go get a drink with a friend or climb the mountain or whatever you want to do. So I do think most companies are on the right side, but look, you got to police your attention, man, or else life passes and you spend it all scrolling.Brian Bell (03:09.634)Yeah.Brian Bell (03:14.734)My wife and I talk about this a lot because we have three kids, a couple of teenagers and a nine-year-old daughter. And my teenage boys are past the age where they can police their own phones. But when they’re under 13, I could control all their sc

What Happens When a Curious Teenager Accidentally Helps Invent the Cloud?Imagine a long-haired kid in a tiny Seattle computer store in the late 1970s, opening boxes of manuals he was supposed to shelve—but instead reading cover to cover. Customers wandered in, confused. Employees shrugged. “Ask that kid in the corner.”Fast-forward a few decades and that same kid—Jeff Barr—has quietly helped explain, shape, and humanize the cloud for millions of developers as AWS’s Chief Evangelist.The Career Pattern Nobody Plans (But Everyone Lives)Jeff’s story isn’t a master plan. It’s a string of “that looks interesting” decisions:* Teen job at a computer store → deep curiosity* Hardcore engineering roles → love of building* Consulting in early web services → explaining complex ideas* Accidentally discovering Amazon’s first APIs → click* Becoming AWS’s first true developer evangelist → history beginsZoom out and you see the pattern: deep understanding + clear explanation = leverage.Jeff didn’t chase titles. He chased clarity and his curiosity. And that turns out to be a cheat code.AWS Didn’t Win on Marketing. It Won on Trust.One of the most surprising revelations: early AWS barely had marketing.So Jeff did something radical in 2004—he launched a blog.Not “thought leadership.” Not “brand voice.”Just one engineer explaining new services, honestly, in plain English.Over 20 years:* ~3,300 posts* ~1.5 million words* ~150+ service launches explained by someone who actually used them firstThe secret wasn’t hype. It was credibility.Jeff insisted on:* Hands-on access before writing* Saying what wasn’t ready yet* Killing “enterprise speak” on sight* Writing to developers, not at themResult? Developers trusted AWS before they trusted the cloud.“Create Your Own Luck” (A Masterclass in Boldness)One of the best stories sounds fake—but isn’t.Jeff once followed Bill Gates into a McDonald’s to ask for early access to an operating system his company needed. It worked.The lesson wasn’t recklessness. It was preparedness.You can increase the odds of lucky moments.But when they arrive, you must recognize them—and act.Luck favors people who:* Put themselves near interesting things* Know what they’ll ask before the moment comes* Are brave enough to ask onceSwiss cheese holes line up more often than we admit.The Cloud’s Hidden Impact: 10× Lives, Not 10% RaisesJeff now spends most of his time traveling—meeting AWS communities across Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and beyond.The pattern is humbling:* Developers self-organize* Study together* Certify together* Change their families’ economic futuresNot 10% better.10× better.Cloud skills + community + persistence = social mobility at global scale.No deck captures that.AI Changes the Developer’s Job (But Not the Responsibility)Jeff has lived through mainframes, PCs, the web, SaaS, cloud—and now AI.His take is refreshingly sober:* AI coding assistants are just the next tool* Writing code matters less than reading and validating it* The commit still has your name on itThe real new skills:* Explaining intent clearly (to humans and machines)* Reviewing generated code critically* Communicating requirements with precisionThe future developer looks suspiciously like a product manager with better instincts.The Next Era: Disposable Apps, Durable DataOne of Jeff’s most provocative ideas:Apps may become disposable.Data will not.With AI + serverless:* Build fast* Use briefly* Throw away* Rebuild when neededWhat lasts?* Clean data* Clear specs* Deep understanding of usersInfrastructure becomes permanent. Apps become fast fashion. Insight becomes the moat.What Jeff Barr Wants to Be Remembered ForNot scale.Not AWS’s size.Not even cloud.Just this:“I gave people accurate information that helped them grow.”That’s the quiet superpower behind every enduring tech platform:someone who cared enough to explain it clearly.And once you see that pattern—you start seeing it everywhere.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters:00:01 – Welcome to the Ignite Podcast00:45 – A Teenager, a Computer Store, and the Birth of Curiosity02:45 – Learning by Reading the Manuals (Literally)04:10 – From Retro Computers to Real Engineering05:45 – Startups, Microsoft, and the Pain of Big Companies07:30 – Web Services Before They Were Cool09:50 – The Accidental Discovery of Amazon APIs (2002)11:30 – The First AWS Developer Conference (Before AWS Existed)13:30 – “I Have to Be Part of This”15:00 – Joining Amazon at Its Lowest Point17:00 – Inside Early AWS: Less Structure, More Vision19:15 – Becoming the First AWS Evangelist21:00 – Launching AWS Through a Blog (A Radical Idea in 2004)24:00 – Writing for Developers, Not “Enterprise Speak”27:30 – 20 Years, 3,300 Posts, and 150+ Service Launches30:00 – AI Coding Assistants Are Just Another Tool33:00 – Reading Code Is the New Writing Code35:45 – re:Invent Takeaways: Community Over Everything38:30 – How Cloud Skills Change Lives Globally41:15 – The “One-Person Unicorn” Thesis43:45 – From Infrastructure to Agentic Applications46:15 – Disposable Apps, Durable Data49:00 – The Developer of the Next Decade51:30 – Jeff Barr’s Legacy53:15 – Closing ThoughtsTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00:58):Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we are thrilled to have Jeff Barr on the mic. He’s been helping shape the story of cloud since the beginning before serverless was cool. Currently serving as chief evangelist at AWS. He writes, builds, evangelizes, experiments, and pushes boundaries on the cloud while keeping one foot in the hands on tech and other narratives. Fresh off reInvent 2025. Welcome to the program, Jeff.Jeff Barr (00:01:21):I’m really happy to be here, Brian.Brian Bell (00:01:22):I’ve been wanting to have you on the pod for a year or two now. I’d love to get your background and your origin story. How’d you end up in cloud?Jeff Barr (00:01:28):Wow. Let’s see. So I was super lucky that my actual first job in tech was when I was a teenager. And when I was 16 years old, I worked at a computer store up in Green Lake, not too far from where we are in Seattle right now.Brian Bell (00:01:41):Fond memories of Green Lake growing up in Seattle. Yeah.Jeff Barr (00:01:44):So I was on Northeast 72nd Street in Green Lake in the late 1970s. And a friend hired me into the store. And my official role, if I even had one, was when all the books and magazines and literature came into the store for the brand new world of personal computers. My official job, I was supposed to just slice open all those boxes and put all that literature and great content up on the shelves for our customers to read and buy. But being super curious about this brand new field, already knowing what it was all about, I spent a lot of my time actually reading all of this content and absorbing it and understanding the hardware and the software and the people and the companies. And the cool thing is that as customers were coming to the store and they would ask the other employees questions about, hey, what does this do? Or how does this work? Or can this board work with this computer? They’d say, I’m not quite sure, but that long haired kid over in the corner, he can probably help you. You had long hair back then? Yeah, I had quite the mess of hair. But the funny thing is my hair doesn’t actually go down. It goes out. And so it’s pretty unruly when it- Yeah, in a fro. Yeah, totally.Brian Bell (00:02:48):I’d love to see a picture of Jeff Barrett.Jeff Barr (00:02:49):I can dig one up. You can use this as one of your pictures if you’d like.Brian Bell (00:02:55):We’ll put it on the thumbnail for the episode.Jeff Barr (00:02:57):Yeah. In Amazon terms, we call that diving deep. And so the amazing thing is I’m still doing the same thing today is trying to deeply understand something new and then to explain it to my audience. Yeah. It was super fun to be in the right place at the right time as a teenager. And this little computer store, we had the original, the first personal computer. We had the Altair computer, then the MSI and CompuColor, Southwest Technical Products and the Processor TechSol and all the really originals that are now the retro computers. And it’s actually so fun to see some of my younger colleagues now rediscovering these retro computers and saying, look at this ancient computer I found and realizing, yeah, it’s kind of ancient, but apparently so alive because at That’s something I worked on early in my career. Amazing. And so I did that. Let’s see, moved to Maryland, got married. We had five children, worked in some startups, worked in some bigger companies, and was always doing something pretty hardcore tech and development related. Always loved to be deep in code and building things. Was a VP of engineering for a startup for quite some time, doing cross-platform software. And in 1997, we moved out to Seattle for what we thought would be a kind of a five-year excursion for me to work at Microsoft. Came to Microsoft and I was on the Visual Basic team. Loved the product, had a lot of trouble adapting to being part of a really big company. Decided that wasn’t quite for me. And this was around the year 2000 when web services were starting to become a phrase. And people were talking about SOAP and XSLT and XML and UDDI. and Wizzle, all these really complicated, super early terms for web services. And so for a couple of years, I had a consulting practice that was just all about different customers building and trying to get things to do with web services. The challenge for web services back in 2000, 2001, they were very appealing to a technical audience. And you could show a developer, here’s my server, here’s my client, we’ve got access across port 80 on the internet between the two. Developers are like, wow, that’s amazing. That’s super, super cool. You’d show that to a business person. They’r

Here’s a quietly brutal truth: most adults don’t lose friends because they’re bad at friendship. They lose them because the system breaks.You move cities. Jobs eat time. Relationships reorder priorities. Suddenly the scaffolding that once handed you friends for free—school, dorms, shared chaos—disappears. And in its place? A vague instruction manual that says: “Put yourself out there.”Dorothy Li looked at that advice and did what founders do best: she called b******t and designed a system.She’s the co-founder and CEO of The Real Roots, a company building guided, matched, real-world experiences that help adult women form actual friendships. Not “let’s grab coffee sometime” friendships. Real ones. The kind that turn into bridesmaids, group chats, and people who show up when life gets messy.This blog is for anyone who won’t listen to the episode but still wants the insight. Loneliness Isn’t a Personal Failure. It’s a Design Flaw.Loneliness feels private, almost shameful. Like you missed a class everyone else attended.But zoom out and a pattern appears.Adults today move more. Marry later. Work longer. Live farther from family. The pandemic didn’t create loneliness—it just ripped the social mask off and made it socially acceptable to say, “Yeah, I’m lonely.”Dorothy’s key reframing: loneliness isn’t a character flaw; it’s a coordination problem.Humans still want connection. The environment just stopped supporting it.So instead of asking, “Why can’t people make friends?” she asked a better question:What conditions reliably create closeness—and how do you engineer them on purpose?Why Most “Friendship Products” Don’t WorkThe internet has tried to solve adult friendship. Repeatedly. And mostly failed.Why?Because most products stop at matching.They pair people based on interests, age, or location and then… shrug. Good luck. May the extroverts win.But decades of social science point to three ingredients that actually matter:* Compatibility (values, energy, communication style)* Repeated contact (you need more than one hang)* Facilitated depth (someone nudges the conversation past weather and work)Miss one, and the friendship stalls.The Real Roots doesn’t.Instead of saying “you two should meet,” it creates small, guided groups that meet multiple times, with structured prompts and a live guide whose job is to pull people gently—but firmly—past small talk.Think less “networking mixer,” more “permission to be human.”The Unsexy Secret: It Started Concierge-OnlyBefore AI. Before scale. Before decks.Dorothy personally ran the early groups. She matched people manually. Facilitated conversations herself. Watched what landed and what flopped in real time.This matters.Because a lot of social products fail by assuming humans behave like clean data. They don’t. They’re weird, guarded, inconsistent, and deeply pattern-driven.Only after seeing the patterns up close did Dorothy bring in technology—eventually using voice AI to capture nuance that surveys miss: tone, self-awareness, emotional openness, conversational style.Not to replace humans. To protect the magic while scaling it.A Subtle but Important Gender InsightOne of the more interesting observations from The Real Roots experience:* Women tend to bond depth-first (conversation → activity)* Men tend to bond activity-first (activity → conversation)Neither is better. They’re just different.So designing for women’s friendship meant designing spaces where emotional safety and depth happen early, not accidentally later.This isn’t therapy. It’s just… permission.Permission to skip the performance and get to the part everyone actually wants.Why “IRL Doesn’t Scale” Is the Wrong TakeInvestors love to say real-world experiences don’t scale.Dorothy’s response is quietly radical: badly designed IRL doesn’t scale. Well-designed IRL does.The Real Roots scales city by city as a three-sided marketplace:* Members* Guides* VenuesTechnology handles matching and logistics. Humans handle presence and nuance. Each does what they’re best at.The result isn’t virality. It’s retention. The rare kind driven by real outcomes, not dopamine loops.The Founder Lesson Beneath the ProductUnderneath the friendship thesis sits a founder truth many people—especially women—will recognize.Dorothy talks openly about how many women wait until they feel “extra ready” to start. More credentials. More certainty. More permission.Her lived lesson: readiness is usually a mirage.The real work begins when you leap slightly before you’re comfortable—and build clarity through contact with reality.Much like friendship, actually.The Big Idea to Take With YouIf you remember one thing, let it be this:Connection doesn’t happen by accident anymore. It has to be designed.Not in a creepy, optimized way. In a human one.With intention. With structure. With someone brave enough to say, “Hey—go a little deeper.”That’s what The Real Roots is really selling. Not friendship as a feature, but belonging as an experience.And in a world optimized for speed, that might be the most contrarian product of all.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters: 00:01 Why Adult Friendship Feels So Hard01:42 Dorothy Li’s Path to Building The Real Roots04:12 Loneliness Isn’t New—It’s Just Finally Admitted06:38 Why Friendship Was Never Properly “Designed”08:55 The Failure of Matching-Only Friendship Products11:06 What Actually Creates Closeness Between Strangers13:18 What You Can’t Self-Report (But Matters Most)15:34 Early Proof: When Friendships Really Stick18:06 Men vs Women: Different Paths to Bonding20:11 Inside The Real Roots Experience22:57 Why Facilitation Changes Everything25:04 Designing for Repetition, Not One-Offs27:09 Scaling IRL Without Killing the Magic29:41 Building a City-by-City Marketplace32:08 What Growth Actually Looks Like Early On35:02 The Awkward Phase Everyone Wants to Skip37:40 The Founder Trap: Waiting Until You’re ‘Ready’41:12 How AI Finally Made This Scalable44:10 The Metrics That Actually Matter47:36 What’s Next for The Real RootsTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:34): Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Dorothy Lee on the mic. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Real Roots, the startup reimagining how adult women build friendship circles via guided matched experiences. She brings deep operations and growth experience and a strong mission to this work. Really excited to dive in. Thanks for coming on.Dorothy Li (00:01:52): Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited.Brian Bell (00:01:54): Yeah. So I’d love to get your background. What’s your origin story?Dorothy Li (00:01:57): Well, my background from the very beginning is my parents were both entrepreneurs. I grew up in SoCal, and I just saw how two immigrants who barely knew the country could really take charge of their own destiny and make a really great service that a lot of people. So they’re both structural engineers, so they built an engineering firm. And as an adult, I’ve always been working in startups. So I worked in two mission-driven edtech startups in the beginning of my career, eAcademy, which is mine, and then Cambly, which I was an early employee at. And both I chose because I just felt at that time in my young adulthood that education was the most important problem I could solve for the world. But as I matured and just spent more time living as an adult, I found that the greatest problem that I faced in my own life was the sense of isolation when I would move from city to city or change life stages or go through a breakup or get in a new relationship. Anytime something like that changed in my life, it created a need for new people that supported that new life stage. And it took me a long time sometimes to find that new group. During that period, I felt isolated. I oftentimes would be following a move. So I would go from a community where I was like, very, you know, ingratiated and felt really supported into a city where I knew nobody. So I wanted to build this solution for myself foremost and all the women like me.Brian Bell (00:03:23): That’s amazing. And we met BYC, obviously we were an investor and what really struck us was the momentum and traction. You know, like you guys were some of the highest ARR coming out of the batch that we’ve ever seen. And it feels like you kind of struck kind of the right idea at the right time. What do you think is causing the kind of the rise of social isolation? You know, there’s this famous book, famous for me, Bowling Alone, that came out probably 20 years ago. And it talks about this phenomenon in America where we’re increasingly isolated from each other and kind of just, you know, maybe we’re just stuck in our screens. But I think it was before social media even. What do you think is kind of and maybe social media compounded it, but maybe you can talk a little bit about the impetus for real roots and kind of, you know, your own personal lived experience, which you just talked about, but also like kind of like economic and social zeitgeist, especially in the United States. And this is a worldwide phenomenon. Do you see or is this like isolated to the U.S. and more like Western countries?Dorothy Li (00:04:14): Yeah, I mean, you raised a really good point. Loneliness has been a growing epidemic for the last 20, 30, maybe even 50 years, as illustrated by books like Bullying Alone. And that, I believe, is global. What is happening now is not so much that loneliness is new. It is growing, of course, because we’re more geographically mobile than ever before. And women and men are getting married later than ever before, meaning there’s this longer period of time where your friends are your family. So those two trends are only getting worse. But what changed in a pivotal sense overnight is the pandemic. And the pandemic was a period of time where everybody felt lonely a

Most great marketing stories start with a spreadsheet. Udi Ledergor’s starts on stage.Before he helped build Gong into one of the most influential SaaS brands of the past decade, he spent years in the performing arts: magic, theater, even puppetry. Strange origin story for a CMO? Maybe. But it planted the idea that business, like theater, works best when it feels like a show—designed, intentional, and a little magical.That lens shaped nearly everything he later did at Gong.The Power of Small, Compounding AdvantagesImagine two competing startups. Same market, similar features, similar IQ points. One inches 5–10% better on a dozen tiny decisions: sharper messaging, cleaner UX, smarter pricing, a sales deck people actually want to read. Nothing heroic. Yet those inches compound, and suddenly the race isn’t close.That’s the story Udi tells about Gong’s early years.Plenty of teams recorded sales calls. Only Gong obsessively replayed those calls, spotted patterns, and used them to coach reps and inform product. Plenty of teams used AI. Gong waited until they had undeniable value before saying the word out loud. Plenty of marketers ran safe campaigns. Gong picked fights, ran experiments, and published data that made people stop scrolling.A thousand small edges, stacked.How Gong Rewrote Its Own CategoryGong started inside a narrow box called “conversation intelligence.” Accurate name, terrible ceiling. It appealed to frontline managers, not executives who control budgets.So the team reframed the whole space: Revenue Intelligence.Not a cosmetic rename, an elevation. Suddenly the buyer changed, the stakes changed, and the product roadmap had a north star. The company didn’t just “record calls”; it illuminated the entire revenue machine.Category creation usually sounds mystical. Udi strips it down: it’s about clearly naming the problem you solve, raising the altitude of the conversation, and giving customers language to explain why you matter.Brave Marketing (And Why Most Companies Avoid It)Udi argues that B2B marketing fails not because people lack creativity, but because teams run on autopilot.He prefers a different mode: courageous marketing: a set of choices that might raise eyebrows but almost always raise brand affinity. His examples range from viral studies on swearing in sales calls to a privacy-policy email turned into a meme (complete with Britney jokes).The common thread: don’t settle for being forgettable. Indifference is the real enemy.Who Should Be Your First Marketing Hire?Founders often hire the wrong marketer at the wrong time. Udi breaks the role into four buckets:* Demand generation* Product marketing* Brand/creative* Communications/PROnly two matter early on: demand gen and product marketing. The puzzle is deciding which comes first.His rule of thumb:* If you already have product–market fit and leads to scale → hire demand gen.* If your messaging isn’t landing or sales calls feel inconsistent → hire product marketing.Gong started with demand gen, then added product marketing when deals began stalling due to unclear positioning.Everything Is MarketingA quirky release note. A tiny loading animation. An error message. A legal email. A booth your buyers actually want to walk into.Every touchpoint tells a story, even the ones people ignore. Udi’s view is simple: if customers see it, it’s marketing. And if it’s marketing, it’s a chance to build trust or delight.Gong used this mindset to turn the mundane into the memorable.The Human Side: Betting on PeopleOne of the episode’s standout threads: Udi repeatedly hires for potential over pedigree. His famous example is Vince, a Filipino food-truck owner who became Gong’s first social media manager and eventually a marketing leader.Talent hides in strange places. Experience helps, but hunger compounds.Of course, not every role tolerates inexperience, Udi jokes that you don’t want a “high-potential” brain surgeon, but in marketing, the upside can be enormous.Why This Conversation MattersUnderneath the anecdotes, the episode is a masterclass in building a modern go-to-market engine:* Define your category before someone else does.* Make bold creative bets.* Use data, but don’t worship buzzwords.* Hire for slope, not just intercept.* Treat every customer touchpoint like an opportunity.It’s a roadmap for founders, marketers, and anyone trying to build a company people actually care about.If you want the full behind-the-scenes journey—complete with stories about early Gong chaos, category breakthroughs, and the real meaning behind Courageous Marketing—the episode is worth the listen.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Welcome & Introducing Udi Ledergor00:42 Growing Up Performing in Tel Aviv02:08 From Computer Science to Product and Marketing03:56 Leadership, Trust & Creative Risk-Taking06:15 Product vs GTM: Building a Winning Engine07:12 Gong vs Competitors: Small Edges, Big Outcomes11:48 The “Quarter From Hell” & Gong’s Origin Story14:20 Why the Shift from Conversation Intelligence to Revenue Intelligence18:45 Breaking Through with Courageous Marketing21:58 Data, Storytelling & When to Reveal the AI24:37 Early-Stage Marketing Mistakes Founders Make26:32 Udi’s Framework for Hiring Your First Marketer29:50 The Missing Role: Product Marketing & Enablement31:58 Writing Courageous Marketing & Its Core Message34:22 Creating a POV That Polarizes (In a Good Way)36:40 Turning a Privacy Email into a Brand Moment38:57 Mascots, Dogs & The Hidden Layers of Brand41:25 Hiring for Potential, Not Pedigree44:09 How Udi Advises Startups as an Angel46:52 The Underrated Power of Email in B2B49:28 Lessons from Writing a Nonfiction Book52:10 What’s Next for Udi & The Future of Revenue AI53:02 Closing Thoughts & Episode Wrap-UpTranscriptBrian Bell (00:00:56–00:01:19):Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Udi Ledergor on the mic. He’s the chief evangelist and former CMO at Gong, we all know that app, where he built a help define the revenue intelligence category and scale the company to a multi-billion dollar valuation. He’s also a best-selling author, investor, and board advisor known for his bold, human-centric approach to storytelling and marketing. Thanks for coming on.Udi Ledergor (00:01:20–00:01:21):Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be here.Brian Bell (00:01:22–00:01:24):Yeah, so I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your backstory?Udi Ledergor (00:01:25–00:03:08):I guess my backstory starts in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I grew up. Born and raised in Israel and lived most of my life there up until about seven years ago. I grew up going to the high school of the arts, which is relevant to what I think I’ve been doing in the last 20 plus years. I dabbled early in all sorts of performing arts from music to magic to puppetry to stage lighting, you name it. always been huge huge fan of the performing arts and to this day i i go to anything from one to three shows a week i i really uh i’m a big student of performing that’s amazing my my youngest daughter she’s nine is in the local theater troupe and she does performances you know so she’s already getting speaking roles and singing and yeah it’s amazing not just tree number four that’s such a enriching experience for anyone to be able to take part in any sort of performing arts or other arts And as I was growing up, I kind of wanted to see how I can converge a lot of these fun, exciting things into a grownup job. And that’s how I came across marketing eventually, which I think is all about putting on a magical experience, whether it’s creating a brand or a category or content marketing or brand campaigns. It’s all about simplifying something complicated, which I bring from the world of magic, right? And magic, sometimes there’s a very intricate way of performing a trick. But to you, the spectator, it seems like magic because it’s something very simple that seems unreasonable. And that’s what we’re doing in technology marketing. At least that’s how I like to look at it. We’re taking something that’s inertially... But most of our business users, unless you’re marketing to a very technical audience, our business users don’t need to know about all the nuts and bolts and the bits and the bytes. And I think that’s what great marketing can do amongst other things, simplify and create something that looks magical. And so that’s kind of how I think I ended up in marketing.Brian Bell (00:03:10–00:03:16):That’s amazing. And so did you always know, like, right in college, you’re like, I’m going to major in marketing, that’s my path?Udi Ledergor (00:03:17–00:04:14):Evolved. So I started studying computer science. And a year into that, I realized a couple of things. One, I love technology, I’m very interested in how it works and evolves. But I don’t see myself creating the technology and laboring away at writing the code and debugging all day. And I wanted something more people facing. And so one of my significant first roles was a product manager. And I did that for five years. And product manager is an amazing role because on the one side, you’re working with R&D, the engineering, telling them what to develop in a language that they understand. On the other side, you’re working with customers, hopefully to understand what they need, how they’re reacting to your product, and kind of translate between those two languages. And after five years of doing that, I realized that I love the customer side a lot more than the engineering side of the job. So I decided to focus all of my efforts in marketing. So just over 20 years ago, I stepped into my first head of marketing role. And since then, I’ve led five marketing teams to varying degrees of success. The longest, best-running one here at Gong, where I’ve been for nine years now.Brian Bell (00:04:18–00:04:46):Yeah,

Imagine a world where fusion energy costs less than your monthly coffee habit, biotech startups design new materials the way software engineers write code, and climate tech companies scale as fast as mobile apps. Now imagine all of that sitting in university labs, stuck—brilliant ideas idling on the runway because the institutions around them were built for a different century.That’s the tension Ramana Nanda dives into. And if you don’t have time to listen to the full episode, this is your guided tour through the ideas that matter most.The Hidden Architecture of InnovationMost people look at a breakthrough technology and see… the technology. Ramana sees the scaffolding around it: incentives, capital flows, regulatory environments, and the subtle social contracts that decide which ideas live.He argues that deep tech’s biggest bottlenecks aren’t scientific—they’re structural. We know how to push electrons, fold proteins, and fuse atoms. What we don’t know is how to build an institutional system that funds, tests, and scales those things with the speed and precision of venture-backed software.Deep tech today is like a sports car stuck in first gear—not because the engine lacks power, but because the gearbox belongs to a tractor.A Career Built on Following the FrictionsRamana’s journey reads like someone rewiring their own mental operating system. Born in India, raised in the UK, trained in chemical engineering, then abruptly pulled toward economics—not because he loved equations, but because he wanted to understand why good ideas fail.Consulting in London and New York exposed him to a truth that would define his career: capital allocation quietly determines the future. Who gets funded, when, and under what conditions can accelerate or erase entire industries.At MIT and later Harvard Business School, Ramana sharpened that question into a discipline: entrepreneurial finance—how money shapes innovation.His move to Imperial College London marks his next chapter: building the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship, a place laser-focused on the hardest part of innovation today.Why Software Moves Fast and Deep Tech Moves Like Continental DriftIn the early 2000s, AWS quietly detonated a bomb under the cost structure of startups. Suddenly, founders could run hundreds of experiments for pocket change. Learning cycles collapsed. Risk plummeted. Venture capital adapted.Deep tech never got its AWS moment.Imagine two founders:Founder A: a software entrepreneur who can test ten hypotheses before lunch. Founder B: a fusion founder whose “experiment” means installing a new neutron detector, waiting three weeks, and burning a million dollars.These two live in different universes.Ramana explains why this matters:* Software has short, cheap learning cycles.* Deep tech has long, expensive learning cycles.* Venture capital is optimized for the former.* Societal challenges increasingly depend on the latter.The mismatch is the story of our time: we expect deep tech to behave like SaaS, then scold it when it doesn’t.Europe: World-Class Science, Amateur-Level CommercializationRamana says the quiet part out loud: Europe produces phenomenal science but often suffocates commercialization.A few culprits:* Pricing controls: great for consumers, terrible for early-stage frontier tech that needs premium early adopters.* Risk-averse procurement: governments act like referees, not customers.* Cultural discomfort with wealth creation: universities want impact without the optics of financial upside.Europe has more Nobel-level scientists than early customers who will pay for their inventions.The US, by contrast, deploys NASA, DARPA, the NIH, and the DoD as active buyers of frontier tech. Capital follows demand. Markets form. Scale happens.Ramana frames it elegantly: Innovation requires customers long before it requires markets.Lab Success vs Market Success: The Gap That Swallows StartupsOne of Ramana’s most useful distinctions is between two types of proof:Proof of Concept: It works in controlled settings. Proof of Value: Someone will pay real money for it.Most deep-tech teams treat these as synonymous. They are not. They’re not even close.A battery that works at 200ml in a lab often collapses when you need 200,000 liters of production. A biotech pathway that looks elegant in a paper turns chaotic in a bioreactor. A new energy source that works on a test rig may fail under grid-level conditions.Scaling breaks things you didn’t know could break.The job of early deep-tech support isn’t to make the science “more scientific.” It’s to compress the path to learning:* Which features customers care about* What they’ll pay* What the cost curve must look like* Which beachhead markets make sense* And which don’tMost startups die not because the science fails—but because they wander into the wrong early market.Universities: The Underused Superpower in Deep TechUniversities love talking about impact. But their structures often block the very people trying to create it.Ramana highlights three leverage points:1. Equity-light tech transferTaking 20% of a startup “because policy” is a tax on ambition. MIT understood this early. Others are catching up—but slowly.2. Non-dilutive internal fundingScientists don’t need millions to explore commercial pathways; they need enough runway to learn. Universities can provide that.3. Time as capitalIf an academic can’t leave the lab bench to build a company, the company never forms. Sabbaticals for founders could transform tech-transfer success rates.Ramana’s point is subtle: Use institutional design to let the right 1% of academics become founder-builders without derailing their scientific careers.Government as a Customer, Not a CheerleaderRamana makes a razor-sharp observation: Procurement beats policy.If governments simply buy early versions of climate, bio, and energy tech, everything else—investment, talent, momentum—follows.The US does this instinctively. Europe intellectualizes it. Asia industrializes it. The UK… debates it.Buying power determines which technologies escape the lab.If He Could Build a New Institution from ScratchRamana dreams of a hybrid model:* Philanthropy to shoulder early scientific risk* Patient capital to fund slow, hard learning* Venture discipline for scale-up* A structured path from academic insight to industrial realityThink of it as an “innovation middle layer”—something between universities and VC that treats deep tech’s unique physics as a feature, not a bug.If Bell Labs and Y Combinator had a child—and that child had a sovereign wealth fund for a trust fund—that’s roughly the shape.What Founders Get Wrong About Term SheetsA quick tactical insight: founders obsess over the valuation of this round. Investors obsess over their ownership at exit.Ramana argues founders should reverse their perspective:* Map backwards from a realistic exit* Decide what ownership they need to stay motivated* Choose funding partners and pacing that protect that curveOtherwise, you win the battle (a nice valuation today) and lose the war (a cap table that strangles you later).What Excites Him Most About the FutureTwo themes lit him up:1. AI as a scientific co-pilotA future where researchers run thousands of virtual experiments before touching a pipette. If AWS changed software, AI may do the same for science.2. Fusion and cheap energyA world where abundant clean energy unshackles manufacturing, materials science, carbon removal, and entire industries we can’t yet name.Energy abundance isn’t just a technology shift—it’s a civilizational one.The Takeaway: Deep Tech Needs New Institutions, Not New SlogansRamana’s core message lands with quiet force:We don’t lack scientific ambition. We lack the institutional imagination to support it.If we build systems designed for deep tech instead of treating it like broken software, more frontier ideas will cross the chasm. Climate solutions scale. Biotech breakthroughs commercialize. Hard problems become solvable.Deep tech isn’t slow because the scientists lack brilliance. It’s slow because the world around them hasn’t been redesigned—yet. 👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 – Introduction & Deep Tech Framing00:49 – Early Life & Career Origins01:40 – Shift from Engineering to Economics03:23 – Entrepreneurial Finance Journey05:02 – Europe vs. U.S. Commercialization Gap09:11 – Founding Imperial’s Deep Tech Institute12:54 – AWS and the Cost of Experimentation16:42 – Deep Tech’s Two Learning Curves18:27 – Government as Early Customer20:54 – Proof of Concept vs. Proof of Value22:07 – Choosing the Right Early Customers29:18 – Sector Lessons: Energy, Biofuels, Tesla32:09 – University Incentives & Academic Founders35:10 – Tech Transfer Models: MIT vs. Imperial40:11 – Underused Policy Levers44:26 – AI’s Impact on Science & Labor47:43 – Future of Scientific ProductivityTranscript:Brian Bell (00:01:05): Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Professor Ramana Nanda on the mic. He’s the Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at Imperial College London, academic lead of the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship, and a key thinker at the intersection of science, venture capital, and institutional innovation. Over his academic and advisory career, he studied how deep tech can bridge the gap between lab and market, how capital markets must evolve to support frontier science, and how universities and policy can play catalytic roles in the innovation ecosystem. In our conversation today, we’ll trace his origin story, walk through his research and institutional work, and explore his views on what is next in deep tech and capital. Romano, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me, Brian. So I’d love to kind of get your origin story.Ramana Nanda (00:01:51): What’s your background? Yeah, so I grew up in Ind

Imagine you’re trying to predict the next unicorn.Not in a tarot-cards-on-a-coffee-table kind of way, but with actual data—the kind that tells you which companies really have a shot.Now imagine that instead of analyzing the company—the market, the founder, the pitch deck—you zoom out and ask a different question:Who picked this company?That’s the starting point for Rob Hodgkinson, the co-founder of SignalRank, a venture platform quietly reshaping how capital flows into Series B rounds. And his backstory is almost too perfect: a Cambridge history major who somehow ends up building a quantitative engine for venture capital. Because of course the guy predicting the future starts by studying the past.Let’s break down the big ideas from our conversation—no headphones required.The Unlikely Path: From Post-Colonial Africa to Pro Rata MathRob didn’t begin in spreadsheets and term sheets.He studied post-colonial African history and found himself fascinated by a basic question:Why do some economies take off while others stall?That curiosity led him to the African Venture Capital Association, building what he describes as a “print-era Crunchbase” for emerging markets. It was here he caught the bug: small amounts of capital + great founders = outsized impact.But he also got a reality check:“You’re a history major. No one will believe you can count. Go into banking first.”So he did. Rothschild. INSEAD. The whole traditional path.And then something interesting happened.The Series B Problem No One Talks AboutAs an operator raising capital in Europe, Rob spent a full year trying to close a Series B. Meanwhile, early-stage funds often couldn’t keep their pro rata because check sizes ballooned from six figures to eight.It wasn’t just a funding gap.It was a structural gap.Seed funds saw their best companies grow, but couldn’t afford to keep backing them.Founders raised great rounds, but with limited room to include their earliest believers.And global investors?They wanted access to these breakout companies but had no systematic way in.Enter SignalRank.The Big Insight: Bet on the Horse Trainer, Not the HorseWhile everyone else is mining for signals inside the company, revenue, hiring cadence, founder pedigree—Rob and his co-founder Keith Teare asked a sharper question:What if the best predictive signal is actually the investor?Because in venture, there’s something called persistence:* The best VCs tend to stay the best* Great investors get into great deals earlier* Founders choose them, not the other way aroundSo instead of examining companies, SignalRank scores and ranks investors across seed, A, and B rounds. Think of it as tracking the “horse trainers” instead of the horses.If a company is backed by world-class investors at multiple stages—that’s the pattern that correlates with outsized outcomes.And here’s the twist:The model is built to eliminate zeros, not chase heroes.Once you cut out the losers, venture math starts working in your favor.Why Series B Is the Goldilocks RoundSeries B sits in a sweet spot:* Too early for private equity spreadsheets* Too late for early stage chaos* Big enough to show real signal* Small enough to still generate venture-scale returnsAnd right now, three sectors dominate the highest-quality Series Bs:* Artificial Intelligence* Defense* FintechConsumer? Barely a pulse.But here’s the real kicker: Series B rounds backed by tier-one firms, from Sequoia to Lightspeed, are getting bigger and attracting more participants, not fewer. That means more access points for a systematic player like SignalRank.A New Structure for Venture CapitalInstead of a traditional fund, SignalRank is a Delaware C-Corp—a permanent capital vehicle that plans to go public. Why?One word: liquidity.Venture investors love to brag about TVPI (unrealized returns), but you can’t exactly buy groceries with it. A listed vehicle lets shareholders convert paper gains into cash whenever they want.This mirrors a broader shift: BlackRock, Apollo, Robinhood, all building products to let regular investors tap into alternatives.Venture is becoming more like the public markets.And SignalRank wants to be the “smart beta index” for Series B.The Speed Advantage: Decisions in DaysTraditional VC diligence is a contact sport—weeks of calls, strategy decks, partner meetings, and hand-wringing.SignalRank flips this.Their diligence looks like this:* Verify the term sheet* Verify the cap table* Make sure it’s not a disguised bridge round* Confirm investor patterns match the algorithmThat’s it.Because once world-class investors at seed, A, and B have already vetted it, the model assumes your incremental insight is marginal at best.The result?Deals get done in days, not months.Seed funds love this, because now they can confidently claim their pro rata without scrambling for SPVs while the round closes without them.So Is Traditional VC Dead?Not at all.Rob is clear: early-stage investing will stay deeply human. You can’t spreadsheet your way into reading founders at the idea stage.But later-stage venture?That’s where quant, passive strategies, and systematic algorithms are rising fast.The future looks like:* Early stage → artisanal, high-touch, founder-first* Series B+ → data-driven, diversified, index-likeIt’s the same evolution public markets saw decades ago.What This Means for Founders and InvestorsIf you’re a founder:* Your cap table matters more than you think* Who backed you is now a predictive metric* Relationship pro rata still matters—don’t burn early allies* Series B is becoming algorithmic—prepare earlyIf you’re an investor:* Pro rata is gold* Diversification beats romantic concentration* Being in the right networks matters more than ever* Speed wins deals—but only with the right filtersAnd if you’re the ecosystem?SignalRank is one of the clearest signals of where venture capital is heading:More transparent.More systematic.More accessible.And oddly enough—more human than it appears.Because behind every algorithm is a very human question:How do we pick the companies that will shape the future?Rob Hodgkinson’s answer:Start by studying who already knows how to pick them.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:01 Meet Rob Hodgkinson & SignalRank00:47 From History Major to Venture Capital01:26 Early Exposure to African VC02:30 The Banking Detour03:28 Lessons in Risk and People04:08 The Series B Pain Point05:09 Europe-to-US Founder Migration06:20 The Pro Rata Gap07:45 Meeting His Co-Founder08:26 Building Global Access09:03 Legal vs. Relationship Pro Rata10:15 The Series B Landscape11:17 More Participants, More Access12:15 Ranking Investors, Not Companies13:10 Persistence and Pattern Recognition14:44 Eliminating Zeros16:40 People Readers vs. Scale Readers17:34 Lessons from Fraud Patterns18:02 Why a Delaware C-Corp18:59 Could Seed Funds Do This?20:33 Operational Leverage21:10 One of the Most Active B Investors22:12 Expense Ratios & Incentives23:59 Liquidity Before Listing24:48 Raising at NAV25:37 Why LPs Avoid C-Corps26:44 Selling Access, Not Exposure27:21 Rise of Liquid Alternatives27:46 Speed as an Edge29:17 Term Sheet Red Flags30:14 The Top 5% Sectors31:18 Partnering With SignalRank32:46 Just Text the Term Sheet33:10 Check Sizes Today34:06 Is VC Breaking or Evolving?TranscriptBrian Bell (00:00:55): Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Rob Hodgkinson on the mic. He’s the managing director and co-founder of SignalRank, a data-driven venture platform that ranks and invests in the world’s top 5% of Series B rounds for pro rata financing. Very cool. His career spans investment banking, growth equity, startups with a track record that includes roles at, he has an MBA from INSEAD and a history degree from Cambridge. Very cool, I was a history major as well. He’s a fascinating blend of operator and quant-driven investor. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Brian. Delighted to be here. So glad to finally sit down with you. I’d love to get your back backstory. What’s your origin story?Rob Hodgkinson (00:01:31): Sure. I mean, as you probably hear, I’m British. Is that the accent? It’s British? That’s the accent. And I’ve been in the States for about five years. I moved during COVID. But as you said, I’m really a history major at Cambridge. And then I kind of fell in love with Bench Capital in 2005. And so I’ve kind of been pursuing this path for the last 20 years, on and off, through kind of meandering.Brian Bell (00:01:55): Yeah, so how did studying history at Cambridge lead into VC? What’s that story?Rob Hodgkinson (00:02:00): I studied a lot of post-colonial African history at Cambridge. I was kind of intrigued as to why African economies didn’t take off in the same way they did in the West, and particularly the role of SMBs, SMEs, as a major contributor in the economy. And so in 2005, I actually did an internship with the African Venture Capital Association, where they asked me to create effectively a pamphlet on what was happening within venture capital within Africa. So it’s basically a list of, it’s kind of a proto print-based version of Crunchbase on what was happening in the ecosystem there. And I kind of fell in love with this idea that with a small amount of capital, you can actually build a meaningful business. And that actually as a VC, as an investor, you can help support those kind of founders along the journey and be a very small part of that journey. And the advice given to me at the time was, you’re a history major. No one’s going to believe you can count. So go and join a bank. I work for a bank, do an MBA, and then you can probably get into venture capital. And broadly, I thought that was good advice. And so that’s kind of the career path that I followed. And so I joined Rothschild in 2007 on the investment banking side. And then, as I said, went on to do my MBA at