Village Global Podcast

Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild, lays out his investing thesis for the AI era: The Model Economy.His argument is that most AI startups being built today are fighting a losing battle against the scaling laws. The models themselves will swallow the application layer. So where does durable value actually go?Sumeet walks through the Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton's foundational insight on why brute-force scale always beats domain-specific cleverness), what the mobile era teaches us about what's coming, and the two types of companies he believes actually win: infrastructure that keeps models alive and growing, and post-skeuomorphic applications that build workflows only possible with AI.This is the second episode of Worldbuilders — a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Sumeet Singh, exploring the people and ideas shaping what comes next.Watch the first episode with Evan Conrad (SF Compute): https://youtu.be/pteKdEGYRjUThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is the first episode of Worldbuilders, a new series on the Village Global Podcast guest-hosted by Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild.Sumeet sits down with Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of the San Francisco Compute Company, to talk about the real economics of GPU compute, how SF Compute went from an accidental GPU cloud to building supercomputers, where the actual AI bubble is, and why the future of supercomputing should be calm.Topics covered include: the origin story of SF Compute, why GPU contracts require multi-year commitments, the difference between GPU and CPU economics, what "offtake" means and why it matters, the Marriott model for supercomputing, and how SF Compute is working to reduce the risk of an AI bubble.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Bhavin Shah spent years building Moveworks into the agentic AI platform behind employee support at Toyota, Siemens, Unilever, and hundreds more. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion.In this episode of Recall Sessions, Somrat Niyogi goes back to the beginning. How did four co-founders find each other? Why did Bhavin and his team run 34 CIO conversations to validate the idea before their first investor wrote a check? How did they close their first customer with nothing but a vision demo — and get contractor badges to work out of the customer's office? And what made them finally say yes to an acquisition after turning down offers for years?Bhavin covers the full arc: the founding team, the first customers, how he chose investors, what ChatGPT changed overnight, and what he's building now inside ServiceNow.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Parth Patil built Reid Hoffman's AI digital twin from scratch, without engineering team or a software background. Before that, he was a data scientist at Clubhouse. When GPT-4 came out, he cashed out his 401k and spent four months talking to the model every day. He came out of that running Reid's AI work. He now manages a fleet of coding agents for most of his waking hours.In this conversation with Village Global VP Sam Kirschner, Parth talks through everything AI: how coding agents have evolved since AutoGPT and BabyAGI, why data analysts tend to make better vibe coders than engineers, how he thinks about multi-agent orchestration and TMUX, context engineering, and what he believes is coming next. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Welcome to Recall Sessions - a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital. Each episode goes deep on how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. In this episode, Somrat sits down with Tomer London, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Gusto, to discuss how he and his co-founders built the leading payroll and HR platform for small businesses. Gusto serves over 400,000 businesses today and is valued at $9.5 billion - but it started as ZenPayroll, with a product scoped down to California-only, under five employees, salary only, and no benefits.Tomer talks about growing up in his dad's clothing store in Israel and building an inventory system at age 12, cold-calling businesses off Yelp before writing a single line of code, the Thai restaurant lunch that confirmed they were onto something, why charging $2 per employee per month was a mistake, and how building for small businesses is startup in hard mode - but worth it if the pain is big enough.Thanks for listening - if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner.Celine discusses what's still non-consensus in longevity, how cognitive aging shapes our preferences and worldviews, and what society looks like when parents stay healthier longer — from socioeconomic mobility to financial planning.Listen to the full episode here: https://www.villageglobal.com/podcastThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Welcome to Recall Sessions – a new series on the Village Global Podcast.Hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital, each episode goes deep on go-to-market: how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. In this episode, Itai Damti, Co-Founder & CEO of Unit, joins Somrat to break down how Unit went from a year of stealth building with no committed customers to becoming the leading embedded finance platform – moving over $50 billion annually and powering programs at seven public companies.Itai talks about the bet he and co-founder Doron Somech made on a market that barely existed, why they spent a full year building before going to market, how their first customer came through a LinkedIn message, and what he's learned about selling infrastructure that changes how buyers think.He also shares a framework for categorizing buyers – deciders, explorers, and the "unawares" – and why minding the chasm between your first 5% of customers and the next 95% is where companies live or die.Thanks for listening – if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner.Celine discusses Loyal's 10-year vision for expanding into cats and humans, why the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to treat aging as a drug category, and why the biological and economic case for going dogs-first is stronger than most people realize.Listen to the full episode here: https://www.villageglobal.com/podcastThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly), and Village Global's Ben Casnocha.Shishir and Ben discuss the "Silicon Valley Inc. vs. Google Inc." framework for understanding career tradeoffs, when recruitment firms add value vs. when they don't, and how to design a hiring process that produces great outcomes — including the critical role of reference checking.Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/S7UO7AOLgBAThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, joins Village Global VP Sam Kirschner to discuss her journey building a biotech company developing the first FDA-approved drugs for lifespan extension – going dogs first. Loyal has raised over $250M and recently closed its Series C after clearing major regulatory milestones on both efficacy and safety.In this conversation, Celine breaks down why you can't develop a human longevity drug today (and it's not because of biology – it's logistics and financial norms), why dogs are the fastest path to getting there, and how milestone-based fundraising works for deep tech companies that are years from revenue. She also shares hard-won lessons on understanding the incentives of the people around you, taking people as they are, and staying emotionally unattached to the how while staying committed to the what.Loyal: https://loyal.com Celine on X: https://x.com/celinehalioua Thanks for listening – if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Henry Shi (Anthropic, co-founder of Super.com) and Village Global GP Anne Dwane.Henry and Anne discuss the three paths available to successful founders, why traditional venture capital often becomes a sales job, the rise of "seed-strapping" as a new funding model, and what ultimately led Henry to join a frontier AI lab instead of starting another company or becoming an investor.Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN88HLFx8-MListen to the full conversation here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-%24200-million-revenue-founder-to-frontier-lab-with/id1316769266?i=1000746090022Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Henry Shi (Anthropic, co-founder of Super.com) and Village Global GP Anne Dwane.Henry and Anne discuss how AI coding tools have evolved from autocomplete to junior engineers, what skills will matter when writing code becomes obsolete, and whether humans or AI will end up as the boss in the future of work.Listen to the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-global-podcast/id1316769266?i=1000746090022Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN88HLFx8-MThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is an excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly).Shishir discusses why Grammarly is one of the most underestimated companies in Silicon Valley, how it's transforming from a grammar tool into an open platform for AI agents, and why "assist" AI—which meets you where you work—may be more powerful than chat or autonomous agents.Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7UO7AOLgBAThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly).Shishir discusses the fundamental differences between working at big tech companies versus startups, why skills at large companies are less transferable than you think, and what separates world-class recruiting processes from mediocre ones.Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7UO7AOLgBAThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Henry Shi, founder of Super.com (scaled to $200M+ annual revenue, 50 million users, profitable), joins Village Global GP Anne Dwane to discuss his unconventional path from founder to Anthropic.Henry shares why he stepped back from his company at its peak, what he learned during his gap year building AI resources in public, the patterns he discovered tracking lean AI companies, and why he ultimately chose a frontier lab over VC or starting another company. He also gives a candid look inside Anthropic's culture and shares his predictions for what's coming in 2026. Mentioned in the Episode:Lean AI Leaderboard: https://leanaileaderboard.com/AI Crash Course (GitHub): https://github.com/henrythe9th/AI-Crash-CourseAI 2027 Report: https://ai-2027.com/Super.com: https://www.super.comAnthropic: https://www.anthropic.comHenry on X: https://x.com/henrythe9thsHenry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrythe9th/Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan and LinkedIn co-founder / Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman.Eric and Reid discuss what separates companies that last from those that flame out, why hypergrowth can hide critical problems, and how founders should think about their "theory of the game" for the next ten years.Listen to the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-work-with-zoom-ceo-eric-yuan-and-reid-hoffman/id1316769266?i=1000744325171Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Magnus Sandstrom and Debbie Wiss are senior partners at Swing Search, specializing in go-to-market roles at director, VP, and head levels for nearly 20 years. They joined Village Global partner Lindsay Pettingill to discuss the mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales and marketing talent, and how to get it right.Takeaways:Don't go too senior too early. Look for someone who can see around corners, not over mountains. Senior hires want teams and foundations. You need someone doing outbound calls and chasing deals.Don't try to solve product-market fit with a go-to-market hire. Talk to customers first. If you're pre-PMF, it's too soon to hire sales.You'll never leave sales. Even $100M+ CEOs are on sales calls. Accept this reality and get good at it rather than trying to hand it off.Strong sellers know their metrics to the decimal. "112.2% quota attainment" reveals discipline and ambition. "Around 100%" is a red flag.Hire two founding AEs, not one. They work in the trenches together while competing. If one doesn't work out, you still have revenue coming in.Marketing is more complex than sales. Define whether you need product marketing, demand gen, or brand. Wanting someone analytical and creative is unicorn territory.You can't delegate what you can't document. Write down your processes before expecting new hires to execute them.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.Eric and Reid discuss where startups can compete against big tech in the AI era, why enterprise adoption of AI tools remains surprisingly slow, and what founders should focus on when selling AI products to enterprise customers.Listen to the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-work-with-zoom-ceo-eric-yuan-and-reid-hoffman/id1316769266?i=1000744325171Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Eric Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. Both are luminary LPs at Village Global. They joined Village GP Ben Casnocha to discuss the future of AI agents, digital twins in the workplace, selling AI to enterprise, and what it takes to build companies that endure.Takeaways:Digital twins will handle meetings you're unsure about attending. Your AI can join internal meetings, summarize key points, and alert you only when your presence becomes critical. This frees you to focus on what truly matters.External AI interactions are coming too. Eventually, digital twins could negotiate contracts, discuss pricing, and handle preliminary conversations before humans finalize agreements.Enterprise customers want partners, not just products. When selling AI to enterprise, become a trusted guide through anxiety-ridden territory. Trust matters as much as features, especially when customers feel behind.Make customers part of your innovation cycle. Get enterprise customers deploying early, even partially. The unique data they generate becomes your moat that competitors can't replicate.Focus on vertical markets with domain expertise. Generic horizontal AI products are vulnerable to big players who can give similar tools away for free. Build where deep domain knowledge creates defensibility.Hypergrowth hides problems. Rapid revenue growth can mask fundamental issues in your product and operations. The best scenario is growing fast while proactively fixing hidden problems, but that's extremely hard.Theory of the game matters more than current metrics. Companies aren't valuable in a year; they're valuable in ten years and beyond. Have a clear theory for how your initial traction compounds into long-term value.Be honest with yourself about durability. Rapid early success doesn't automatically mean you have a long-term strategy. Understand what's driving growth and whether those factors will last.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCR-zFXiXKA&t=2sHowie spent 2.5 years building Airtable before launching – and only talked to about a dozen customers in that time.In this clip, he explains why that approach made sense for a platform company, and how founders can validate ideas without drowning in customer discovery.