Startupable

resented by Ashurst Perkins Coie. Paul Navarro works with some of the best founders in Latin America, many of them guests on the podcast. I always ask my guests who I should interview next, and the only time anyone recommended a lawyer, it was Paul. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor.👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro-------------------------Every founder is taught to avoid crowded markets.Zeno Rocha bet his company on one of the most crowded markets in tech: email. He started Resend in 2023, and they're now at 4M users and 100k paying customers.Every other developer category had been rebuilt. Auth0 led auth until WorkOS and Clerk showed up. Heroku led hosting until Vercel. But in email, SendGrid was bought by Twilio for $2B and the product decayed. The rest got acquired too, and stopped improving.His bet was care: dark mode, animated icons, details nobody in the category had bothered with. Then AI turned email into a hot market again, and what he had to care about changed.Also in this episode:* Why the giants in your category are more vulnerable than they look* The advantage of knowing nothing about the market you enter* What changes when your fastest-growing customer is an agentGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssZeno Rocha's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zenorochaEnzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/-------------------------Jumpstart is the immigration service I wish I'd had when I moved to the US. Bianca and Fabiano have helped 1,250+ founders get O-1, L-1 and EB visas with a 98% approval rate, and if it doesn't come through, they DON'T charge you. 👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/

This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ⁠⁠⁠ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠⁠-----------------------------When Dan Mishin set out to build legal services powered by AI, every investor gave him the same feedback: why not just sell software?He refused. Selling software to law firms didn’t fix the system and incentives behind expensive legal services.The bet underneath it: AI is the leverage that finally makes a services business as good as SaaS.When each lawyer is 10x more productive, the company stops scaling with headcount. Dan’s benchmark: the largest law firm in the world does $7B in revenue with 1,200 attorneys.-----------------------------Also in this episode:The case for and against the hype of AINSThe ownership innovation that made Manifest venture-backableWhether AI services can hold quality and margins as they scaleGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: ⁠⁠https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss⁠⁠Dan Mishin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmishin/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ⁠⁠ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠-----------------------------Frontier AI labs have no shortage of companies willing to collect data for them.Their harder problem is determining which data will actually make their models better.José Nunes built Vetto to solve that problem. Instead of waiting for a lab to specify the data it needs, Vetto studies where a model is underperforming and designs the work required to improve it.Also in this episode:His journey from a small town in Brazil to Silicon ValleyWhy the most valuable part of AI data happens before collectionHow Vetto competes with the labs in researchHow it recruits researchers it cannot outbid the frontier labsWhy researchers hired in Brazil can perform alongside people from DeepMindGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: ⁠https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss⁠José Nunes´s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-andrenunes/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

At 12, one of Brazil's biggest soccer clubs offered Nicolas a spot on its pro track. Saying yes meant dropping out of school. He said no.Today he's playing the "main league" of Silicon Valley: building an AI company in SF, against the smartest, best-funded people in the world. In his words, "you're playing against the Pelés and Kakás."That company became Firecrawl, the biggest web-scraping repo on GitHub. 170k stars from a team of 20.Firecrawl does one unglamorous job: it reads webpages for AI. It takes a page full of code and turns it into clean text a model can use. Almost every AI agent needs that and agents now browse the web more than people do. (according to Cloudflare).Also in this episode:His path from Brazilian soccer to Silicon ValleyThe "indie hacker test" for defensibilityWhat he means by building the eyes for AGIWhy the best product is the one your users never seeWhy, if you're not building for agents, you may not be here in 5 yearsGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssNicolas's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-silberstein-camara/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro

Five years ago Esteban Sosnik brought me to the US, helped me get my visa, and gave me a seat at Reach Capital.Those have been the best and highest-growth years of my life. Today his episode goes live, and I finally get to tell his story, because most people don't know the arc.The wildest part? He's too humble to tell you any of this himself.So I got it out of him on today's episode. This was a special one for me. Hope you enjoy it!Also in this episode:How Argentina’s first VC circle found and backed Mercado LibreWhy Reach invested in Replit at pre-seed in 2016Why AI is raising the bar for technical cofoundersThe “bloodbath” Esteban expects as companies cut ten AI tools down to one or twoWho should move to Silicon Valley and how everyone else should spend time hereGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssEsteban's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esteban-sosnik-779159/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/