Beginner's Mind

229 Episodes

Reverse

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

2026-10-1501:00:19

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

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

2026-09-2702:05:33

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

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

2026-09-0858:06

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

#181 - When Things Fall Apart: 3 Lessons from Ben Horowitz on Leading Through the Struggle (Part 1 of 2)

2026-08-3049:13

What do you do on the morning when there are no good moves left? In March 2001, Ben Horowitz took Loudcloud public in the middle of the dot-com collapse. The bankers cut the price from ten dollars a share to six in the week of the offering. The day before the deal, Yahoo announced its chief executive was stepping down. Neither of the two banks that took the company public offered the traditional closing dinner. On the plane home, Horowitz turned to his director of finance and said they had do...

EP 180: Eric Ries | Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success

2026-08-0301:03:41

What happens when the moment a company finally succeeds is the moment it becomes most likely to be destroyed? Most founders assume the market rewards the better product and protects what they built. The legal reality runs the other way. The dominant theory of the corporation treats a company as a financial instrument designed to enrich its shareholders, and treats everything else as optional. That theory has a name, shareholder primacy, and nobody voted for it. It hardened in courtrooms and b...

#box-pro-ellipsis-179215386542169{-webkit-line-clamp:2;}Beginner's Mind