Sunil Dhaliwal has been in investing for 27 years, he was a General Partner at Battery Ventures for 14 years before starting Amplify Partners. He founded Amplify 13 years ago with the thesis of backing technical founders. Interestingly, the “business guy” was more investable back in the 2010/11 era.

Amplify is an investor in companies like Datadog, Fastly, Recursion, Chai Discovery, Langchain, Anchorage Digital, Covariant, Runway ML, Temporal, Luma AI to name a few. These are either publicly traded or have privately achieved unicorn valuations.

They have launched a dedicated bio fund after their latest $900m fund announcement building on top of the success of their bio portfolio, Sunil explains on the pod why they are uniquely positioned to operate in the space.

We had a great conversation covering how to train junior investors, the madness of the dot-com era and how it rhymes with some of what we see today in technology bubbles, his investing philosophy, fundraising advice and more.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
03:20 - What was going on in the Dot-Com bubble?
08:15 - Collapse of the Telecom value chain
09:37 - Why the AI boom is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained
12:37 - OpenAI canceling Sora
17:15 - Why brand and trust are self-reinforcing in enterprise software
19:17 - Shipping frequently as a mechanism to preserve vendor trust
22:58 - Debunking the SaaS apocalypse
30:23 - The Amplify playbook
38:05 - The shift from scale-up servers to agent-first platforms
41:42 - Progression timeline of autonomous agents
49:23 - Investing in Runway and the AI-meets-creativity thesis
52:08 - Why you're an idiot if your early-stage firm has an investment committee
55:00 - The failure of consensus markets and competing for growth deals on price
1:07:00 - Early-stage fundraising is a search problem, not a sales process
1:10:24 - Capping limited partner allocation at 10%
1:14:07 - The necessity of letting people learn from their own failures
1:14:58 - Launching a dedicated bio fund to capture compounding variables
1:17:57 - The art of training junior investors
1:26:05 - Why traditional biotech is a terrible place for returns
1:34:52 - How networks and relationship goodwill compound over decades
1:49:54 - Designing a platform team for recruiting and go-to-market execution
1:52:57 - Closing

Todd Klein is a currently a Managing Partner at Revolution Growth, a VC firm founded by Steve Case. He has been in venture investing for over 25 years, his notable investments include companies like AirBnB, CAVA, Square, Pinterest, CustomInk.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:44 - What have you changed your mind on?
03:19 - How capital has become a commodity?
05:28 -Why truly talented founders are a rare asset?
07:11 - How founders must evolve through personality transformations?
09:56 - The extraordinary velocity of job obsolescence
13:55 - Has the software industry gotten too big?
15:08 - Why AI will never replace human taste and judgment?
19:01 - Higher education: The value of "Camp" vs. credentials
24:16 - College campuses as a laboratory for microcultures
28:11 - Discussing Cava: Building a hospitality-first brand
31:40 - Controlling quality through slower, company-owned growth
36:29 - What makes for a great board member?
40:38 - What makes an effective, future-oriented board meeting?
43:22 - Defining a structural compensation philosophy
45:58 - Communication failures and bad board meetings
49:28 - Storytelling as the ultimate form of peer leadership
52:38 - Jose Andres and changing the world through food
55:54 - Importance of the founders background
59:53 - Hollywood 101: Insights from Anonymous Content
1:06:37 - Relationships as investments
1:11:05 - Identifying and solving for business model conflict
1:15:18 - Book recommendations

I first met Christian Keil over Twitter/X DMs probably 3 years ago or so. He started building the Astranis media function in public, he was the face of it as he figured out Twitter and video in real time. When he joined, they were a team of 50 and by the time he left they were about 500 people.

How to be an elite operator at a startup? Take on more projects. I agree with Christian on this and can relate. Some of them become whole orgs, Christian was hired for a finance job, got looped into recruiting as the company was struggling to find a good recruiter, he was involved in regulatory and building their owned premium media.

He hired Jason Carman (E21 on We The Builders), who he describes as generational video talent to start their owned premium media production at the company and they started doing this before cinematic video went mainstream as a channel for startups, especially frontier tech startups.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Hiring generational talent

• How become good at something you have no experience in?

• How to get good at Twitter/X without rage baiting

• Podcasting and his show 1st Principles

• How to think about what problem to go after?

• Time allocation, digital and physical cleanliness

Tune into the full episode for all the insights.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:57 - Growing Twitter/X
04:37 - Finding the message to fit the audience
06:24 - “Reply Guy” as a growth strategy
08:46 - Building a marketing function from scratch
10:50 - Spotting generational talent
12:47 - Why you should only hire “Standard Deviation” outliers?
15:13 - Curiosity as the core predictor for successful operators at startups
16:52 - From 50 to 500 people
18:46 - When to hire specialists vs. promoting from within?
20:25 - What is the Chief of Staff role?
21:54 - The process of becoming good at something new
23:33 - Lessons in practicality and steady leadership
24:30 - The stress and spectacle of a satellite launch
33:31 - How space regulations work?
35:44 - The “Parking Spots” of space and the ITU
37:21 - Range Safety: Proving you won’t explode the pad
40:15 - Why space-based Internet is easier than fiber?
42:06 - Dedicated satellites vs. shared constellations
44:33 - Why we don’t see many startups challenging telecom giants?
46:09 - Goal of “First Principles”: Getting better at technical video
48:23 - The harder path: Choosing optimism over rage-bait
51:53 - How high school debate channels competitive energy?
54:27 - 180 Mindset shift: Realizing parenting is hard
58:11 - Joining the American Dynamism team at a16z
1:00:06 - Why media and government engagement matter for VCs?
1:01:46 - Advice for early talent: Optimizing for trajectory
1:03:19 - Why you should work in-person early in your career?
1:05:40 - Reducing mental burden through time allocation
1:07:50 - The danger of “Job Hopping” every two years
1:10:18 - Sci-Fi and the best Harry Potter book
1:14:42 - Rebranding the “State Schooler” party with Chipotle
1:17:52 - Closing thoughts

Jonathan Lacoste, is the founder of SpaceVC, a pre-seed frontier tech fund with at least a 20% unicorn hit rate, this is my observation based on publicly reported valuations of the companies listed on their website.

Before starting his fund, Jonathan was an entrepreneur, he dropped out of college to start his company Jebbit for which he raised for $90m and successfully exited to BlueConic. Their product was similar to a better version of SurveyMonkey or Qualtrix, like a Canva and SurveyMonkey fusion. Highlight of the company was that they sold billions of questions in consumer interactions with customers like NFL, NHL, eBay, NBA, P&G.

Jonathan’s company was part of one of the early Techstars cohorts which is pretty successful and a mafia of its own. His cohort includes people like Nikita Bier, the founders of PillPack (TJ Parker & Elliot Cohen) acquired by Amazon for $750m, their MD Katie Rae is the Cofounder of The Engine at MIT, Kash Razzaghi who is now CCO of Circle ($CRCL) a $25B company.

Highlights of what we cover:

• Early investments in Castelion and True Anomaly which just announced a new funding round valuing them at $2.2B alongside friends of the show Colin Greenspon (E9 and E22), Seth Winterroth (E25), Thiel Capital etc

• Why concentrated portfolio is a winning strategy

• When to run away from a category?

• How to identify top-decile founders? (by camping outside SpaceX, Anduril and Pentagon?)

• What makes a great cofounding team?

• Would SpaceVC ever consider getting acquired by a mega fund?

• How the skill of debating is great for cofounding relationships

• The State of Accelerators

• Approaching venture as a craft business and learning from CJ Reim at Amity

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:49 - The state of start ups in Austin
05:07 - Why venture capital is concentrating into fewer deals?
07:54 - The founder journey and transitioning to VC
09:59 - Discussing Castalian and True Anomaly
11:17 - How to find top-decile founders at inception?
13:26 - Why small concentrated funds win at pre-seed?
16:17 - What It Takes To Build a Frontier Tech Franchise?
19:42 - Frontier Tech vs. Deep Tech: Engineering execution over science risk
21:14 - Evaluating technical founders without data points
26:11 - The importance of speed and iteration
31:36 - Identifying market forces before they become obvious
36:45 - Finding insights at the edge of the venture lexicon
40:41 - Why now is the time to invest in biotech?
43:25 - Why being a founder is harder than being a VC?
44:54 - The power of a concentrated, hands-on portfolio
47:59 - Talent networks: SpaceX, Tesla, and the cultures of innovation
49:18 - The DNA of a complementary co-founding team
52:20 - The founding journey: From college dropout to multi-hundred million dollar exit
55:37 - Gorilla marketing and the early pivots in his company
1:01:48 - How accelerators have evolved over 15 years?
1:06:27 - Brand degradation in the venture and education ecosystem
1:09:58 - Learning the craft: Mentorship and firm building
1:11:51 - Discipline in deployment: The courage to not do a deal
1:15:15 - Underwriting towards a standard 10-year fund life
1:18:05 - Cross-sector lessons in culture and fundraising
1:22:21 - The role of X and LinkedIn in VC marketing
1:24:42 - Historical influences: From Genghis Khan to Alan Turing
1:28:12 - Book recommendations: Ambition and breakthrough stories
1:32:34 - Closing

Matt Ocko is the Cofounder and Co-Managing Partner of DCVC, a firm he started with Zachary Bogue 16 years ago. Matt started his career at Oracle and then went on to join a $1B AUM fund called Helix Investments in the 90s where he learnt the lesson that venture is 90% people from Ben Webster.

Matt coined the term “deeptech” almost a quarter of a century ago with Steve Jurvetson on a late 1999 winter night when they were talking about quantum computing being an investable category.

DCVC has been investing in deeptech since its inception and has invested in companies like RocketLab, Oklo, Planet, Agility Robotics, SentinelOne, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Confluent, Evolv and many more.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
04:45 - The Oracle Mafia
08:45 - Why venture outcomes are 90% people?
12:45 - The Great Man Theory
16:45 - What It Takes To Build a DeepTech Franchise?
20:45 - Customer trust in deeptech
24:45 - Disucssing Latus Bio
28:45 - How Moore’s Law and open-source enabled modern deeptech
32:45 - Validating nuclear energy on venture dollars
36:45 - The strategic failure of Chinese supply chain dependency
40:45 - What policy changes we need to decouple from China?
48:45 - Protecting energy markets and homeowner Equity
52:45 - How Pivot Bio disrupts global fertilizer monopolies
56:45 - The parallel journeys of Peter Beck and Elon Musk
1:00:45 - It takes a team to execute on vision
1:04:45 - Why every failed investment comes back to people
1:08:45 - First to market vs. first to scale
1:12:45 - You need a 100x better product at seed
1:16:45 - Overcoming the risk aversion of market
1:20:45 - Tidal Metals and the future of critical minerals
1:24:45 - Culture for successful organizations
1:28:45 - Closing

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
04:45 - Dual-Use Framework
08:45 - Strategizing for the Indo-Pacific
12:45 - Reinvigorating American Shipbuilding: Addressing the Competitiveness Gap
16:45 - Rhode Island's Maritime Hotbed: Proximity to Talent and Capital
20:45 - Hardware as a Durable Moat

Seth Winterroth is a Partner at Eclipse where he has been investing in the physical world for over a decade. They now have fresh $1.3B in funds taking their AUM (Assets Under Management) to ~$10B to build and invest in critical technologies in the physical world.

His portfolio alone is collectively worth over $13B and includes:

• Wayve - valued at $8.6B as of their last round. Their global team is advancing AV2.0, a next-generation embodied AI system that can learn from real-world experience and large-scale data, and generalize across cities, vehicles, and driving conditions worldwide.

• True Anomaly - valued at $1.5B as of their last round. The only defense technology company focused exclusively on space defense. It designs and builds spacecraft, payloads and software for space superiority

• Mytra - reportedly valued at $2B. It is a software-defined automation platform built around three modular components: The bot, storage, and operator interface. All the intelligence lives in the bot and software layer; the storage structure is commodity steel. That architecture eliminates the lifts, cranes, and conveyors that make traditional automation systems rigid and prone to cascading failures, and replaces fixed workflows with a platform that can be configured and changed in software

• Forsight Robotics - reportedly valued at $500m. The company aims to bridge the worldwide gap in the accessibility to eye surgery and help over one billion people who suffer from preventable vision impairment.

• Ursa Major - reportedly valued at $600m. An aerospace and defense company delivering flight-proven capabilities for hypersonics, solid rocket motors, space mobility and launch.

*The company descriptions are sourced from Eclipsed website and the valuations are sourced from publicly available reporting.

In this conversation we cover:

• The talent density in frontier tech is growing, fueled by leaders and decision-makers trained at organizations like SpaceX, Tesla, and Rivian, alongside software builders “bored” of the “long tail of SaaS”.

• Eclipse’s investment framework prioritizes “market, market, market,” alongside a strong team and a differentiated technology-driven product.

• The firm focuses on taking engineering execution risk—following the Jeff Bezos adage that “hard is our moat”—while actively avoiding science risk or net new invention risk.

• Seth is excited about distributing large foundation models into physical world applications for multi-variable problems, but notes that hard engineering execution challenges must be solved to proliferate this capability.

• He defines Eclipse’s opportunity set as every problem that exists in the physical world, viewing the 80% of global GDP in that domain as an unbelievably large opportunity.

• A key insight for early-stage teams is the willingness to ship, knowing they will get “punched in the face” during the pilot phase. The most important factor for success is how teams incorporate those messy learnings into Gen 2 and attack the next phase with vigor.

• Seth’s most contrarian view is that “physical AI” is currently “a lot of hype,” and that humanoids and general-purpose models for robotics are “ninth-inning robotics,” suggesting the category will unfold through an iterative grind, not a sudden “ChatGPT moment”.

  Share

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
02:14 - Breaking down techno-optimist Tech Twitter
04:45 - Rediscovering Silicon in Silicon Valley
08:45 - The SpaceX and Tesla Training Grounds
12:45 - Hard is the Moat: Engineering Execution vs. Science Risk
16:45 - Institutionalizing a Thesis-Driven Culture
20:45 - Partnering with Highly Prepared Minds
24:45 - The Wave Series A Case Study
28:45 - The Willingness to Ship: Managing the "Gen 1" Failure
32:45 - Managing Design Partners and Expectations
36:45 - The Hard Reality of Defense Tech Go-To-Market
40:45 - The First Chapter of Company Formation
44:45 - The Mytra Thesis
48:45 - The Build-Co Strategy at Eclipse
52:45 - First Principles Thinking and Avoiding the Small Idea Trap
56:45 - Why General Purpose Robotics is a Ninth-Inning Game
1:00:45 - Breaking the Industrial Food Complex: A Decade-Long Opportunity
1:04:45 - Finding Value After the Hype
1:08:45 - The Rigor of Capital Allocation and Returns
1:12:45 - Reindustrialization: Market Dynamics and National Security
1:16:45 - Sustaining Long-Term Value and Discipline
1:20:45 - History, Podcasting, and the Next Generation of SaaS

Subscribe now

Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz cofounded Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy. This is his second appearance on the show and is a special format we recorded at the Hill & Valley Forum.

The company is backed by Narya Capital, Generation (Al Gore), XYZ Capital, Addition (Lee Fixel), Peter Thiel, Kivu Ventures and more.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:08 - The rise and fall of empires, and the arc of history
04:38 - The “spin-off” to the British Empire
06:44 - Stagnation
07:43 - Scientific advances vs. Systemic decline in the American health landscape
09:01 - Why insurance carriers aren’t paid to keep you healthy?
11:06 - Administrative bloat and the “jobs program” reality
13:21 - How Silicon Valley and D.C. began working together?
14:15 - Why the government moves slowly by design?
15:37 - The ongoing fight for private sector procurement
17:24 - Addressing the societal implications of a growing senior population
18:41 - The loss of learned wisdom from elders
19:54 - Finding purpose without a job
20:21 - Helping seniors navigate modern technology and finance
21:06 - Closing thoughts

Rob Leclerc is the Cofounder and General Partner of AgFunder which is $300m AUM venture fund focused on food and agriculture. He also started AgFunder News which has over 100,000 subscribers and is the largest publication and source of news for the world of venture and startups focused on food & ag.

In this conversation we discuss how media and venture have always gone together and how Rob was able to use that as a platform to build the venture business. We also dive into his personal story of why and how he got started in venture capital having no experience in the space.

What people might not know is that AgFunder actually started out as a crowdfunding platform for food & ag startups and was part of the 500 Global accelerator.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

01:55 - From being un-hirable to a PhD and starting a VC Fund

04:03 - The 2008 financial crisis and exposure to the Agriculture space

07:47 - Going from computer science and philosophy to food and bio

13:36 - The “Miserable Failure” of Rob’s first startup

16:40 - Building the TechCrunch for AgTech

22:28 - Going from media to venture and finding your own voice

27:44 - 500 Global and the million-dollar demo day

31:19 - Transitioning from Broker to Principal

37:50 - “Trust can’t be rushed”, how that applies to fundraising

42:21 - AgFunder’s business model and keeping storytelling alive

51:35 - The evolution of AgFunder’s thesis

1:00:26 - Managing customer relationships

1:04:55 - What builds founder resilience

1:08:58 - The true definition of agency and how do you inculcate that in kids

1:13:48 - What’s more important agency or intelligence?

1:14:56 - Rob’s vision for 2050

1:21:42 - Humanoid Robotics and the “Specialized vs. General” debate

1:26:08 - Rob’s lessons in storytelling

1:30:51 - Reputation through Reps: The intentional practice of the pitch

1:38:04 - Closing questions, how does Rob build relationships

Leland Miller is the Cofounder of China Beige Book, which according to some media reports has been labelled as a firm having more data on China than even the CIA. He is also a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission. He has advised Fortune 50 CEOs and top government officials including the Congress on China.

In this conversation we talk about:

—> The espionage in the tech industry from universities to companies

—> Why China has long-term strategy for Taiwan where they expect the West to self-implode

—> How U.S banks including JP Morgan were partially responsible for covering up China’s real economic condition

—> How China fabricated their GDP

—> What happened to the great China opportunity?

—> China’s military readiness

And more. Full episode now available wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:26 - China 101: The death of the “China Dream”
09:26 - Surveillance, residency permits, and the reality of internal environment
11:04 - Supply chain leverage: Why critical minerals are national security
13:50 - The pharmaceutical threat: Chinese control of U.S. medication supply chains
16:34 - Strategic decoupling: Reshoring and friendshoring national security nexuses
19:45 - Dependence on Chinese foundational materials
24:21 - The military balance in the Pacific: Why everyone thinks they would lose
27:56 - Command readiness: Xi Jinping’s military purges and wartime memory loss
31:13 - Geostrategy in the neighborhood: Japan, Philippines, and missile distance
35:20 - Made in China 2025: The fourth industrial revolution playbook
37:46 - Reindustrialization hurdles: Shipbuilding, chips, and bipartisan focus
39:50 - Breaking the rare earth processing monopoly
43:54 - An Economic Security Strategy: A 5-point master plan for the US
49:19 - IP theft and clones: The deep-rooted issue of technological espionage
52:01 - The STEM dilemma: Training talent in the U.S. and letting them go back
55:27 - China’s compute disadvantage and U.S incentives
01:00:23 - The Food and Energy problem
01:06:12 - Xi Jinping’s psyche: Paranoia, time horizons, and the Taiwan ticking clock
01:10:56 - Economic sensibilities: Global frustration with the imbalanced trade model
01:16:35 - Why China doesn’t drive global growth
01:19:02 - GDP Fabrication: Trillon-Yuan exaggeration
01:28:41 - Tracking credit and stimulus in a “non-commercial” system
01:33:59 - AI, Quantum, and Biotech integration
01:45:18 - Counterbalancing industrial policy
01:58:19 - Why China uses 12x more robots than prediction
02:08:52 - Why Xi doesn’t care about consumers
02:14:35 - Closing thoughts

Special conversation with Shahin Farshchi at Hill & Valley Forum 2026 now available wherever you get your podcasts. Lux Capital has deployed over $7B in deeptech and have been accelerating us towards SciFi future for over 20 years.

Shahin has invested in companies manufacturing in space (Varda), building autonomous transportation systems (Zoox), providing robots as a service (Formic), automating industries (Covariant), using space to revolutionize the Earth observation industry (Planet), 3D printing rockets (Relativity Space) and many more.

Watch on YouTube

Narya keeps a low profile so perhaps you might not see them pop up on your Twitter or Linkedin but they have quietly worked their way to having what is probably the best unicorn hit rate of any active fund that I know of since 2020. Now, I haven’t checked with the firm but from our last conversation I know they make 2-3 investments a year, if you go and check out their website and see the list of featured companies, a simple Google search on those companies and their publicly reported valuations reveals that at least 7 of them are likely unicorns, i.e have at least or close to a $1 billion valuation or have achieved a billion dollar market cap at least once if public. Some of this is based on public reporting and the rest is an estimate based on funding rounds.

Lets say they averaged 3 investments a year since founding in 2020 and maybe went over the average in a couple of years, assuming they have made around 18-20 investments, that is an insane ~35% unicorn hit rate. It is hard to know without knowing the total amount of investments made and private valuations are hardly reported on with the exception of any press releases from the company itself or a credible source like TechCrunch officially reporting on a round but based on publicly available information, it is safe to assume it is somewhere around that mark.

These companies include:

• Chapter

• Kriya Therapeutics

• True Anomaly

• Branch Insurance

• Hallow

• Strive Asset Management (public)

• Rumble (public)

For reference check out this graph below that Ilya Strebulaev posted 7 months ago on unicorn hit rates of venture firms since 2020, this is based on research from Stanford GSB (Link here). This graph only counts pre-unicorn investments in unicorns. Firebolt Ventures had the best hit rate at 10% (13 unicorns in 129 investments), Greenoaks is at number two with a hit rate of 9.4% (11 unicorns in 117 investments), IVP is number 3 with 9.2% (11 in 120 investments).

Narya is notably not in the list but it is perhaps because they lay low and quietly go about funding the next best companies. Perhaps why Colin had not done a long form podcast before I got him on the show last year but I am convinced other firms, LPs and founders can learn from their strategy and way of doing business.

This episode is a deep dive into topics I wanted to cover more from Episode 9 of We The Builders where he gave a masterclass on Thesis Driven Investing. Narya is unique in the sense that it is very concentrated for an early stage fund, their focus is Seed to Series A, they only do 2-3 high conviction investments in a year.

Colin brought up in our last conversation that the most interesting ideas die because of lack of business model innovation. In this episode we cover some examples of business model innovation and how the firm supports on that front, we cover framework for effective private company board meetings, what competent founders look like, Narya’s masterplan and more.

They are relatively new, with what is an elite team (easy to say in hindsight) but at the time it was a group of people making contrarian unpopular bets of their era. Whether that is investing outside Silicon Valley, betting on reindustrialization as a category in 2021, investing in religion as category when it was taboo, going against ESG before Blackrock followed or betting on a new free speech social platform before the Twitter acquisition by Elon. Narya has been what friend of the show Mike Maples would describe as contrarian and right.

In case you didn’t check out our last episode, I will do a reintroduction. Colin Greenspon cofounded Narya with JD Vance, now Vice President of the United States. The firm was founded with the thesis of addressing America’s most acute problems by investing in the frontiers of science & technology solving for the future. He now runs the firm with Falon Donohue (Cofounder of Reindustrialize) and Peter Thiel.

Watch On Youtube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

02:58 - Mimeticism in venture

05:05 - Why Narya stays lean and nimble

08:26 - The apprenticeship model and changing team dynamics

13:32 - The best founders figure it out

16:35 - Diversity of thought on the cap table

24:19 - The true purpose of a board seat

27:18 - Conviction-based capital allocation

31:02 - Business model innovation

36:16 - Bespoke customer engagement

42:51 - How design partners prove product-market fit

47:42 - Discovering the exact problem

53:10 - Why showing up in person still matters

55:35 - Investing in need-to-solve problems

01:01:30 - The holding company structure

01:04:47 - Defining ambition

01:10:37 - Identifying competent founders

01:19:57 - True business leadership

01:29:11 - Building in public

01:35:20 - The right way to run a productive board meeting

01:52:49 - Network effects in enterprise

02:01:08 - The Narya Master Plan

02:08:17 - Closing thoughts

Dmitri has correctly predicted three wars including the Russia-Ukraine war and has a prediction for China going after Taiwan.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
00:53 - The mission of Silverado Policy Accelerator
02:00 - Predictions of war and the state of Ukraine - Russia conflict
02:31 - Timeline for conflict in Taiwan and the 2028 elections
04:15 - Operation Causeway: Why Taiwan is a complex military feat
06:40 - High stakes of failure for Xi Jinping
08:21 - The evolving relationship between Silicon “Valley” and “Hill”
09:19 - Building in defense tech
10:56 - Military-grade vs. Consumer-grade
12:38 - System integration over “widgets”: Lessons from the front
15:03 - New Defense Tech and Old Primes
16:44 - Mapping the Next American Century and neutralizing threats
19:40 - The American industrial base compared to Russia
22:50 - The need to reindustrialize America
24:39 - Advice to founders

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps:

01:21 - Shifting landscape between Silicon Valley and DC

02:51 - AI has become a political attack vector

04:46 - Late-stage empires and the impact of national debt

07:03 - Potential for AI to rewrite the story of US economy

08:26 - AI’s recent performance and productivity gains

10:03 - Bullish outlook on humanoid robots

11:16 - Robots as a platform for economic mobility

13:41 - Reindustrialization and energy production challenges

15:15 - The “functionally bankrupt” status of California

16:50 - The declining value of institutional education

18:46 - Personalized AI-driven tutoring as the future

20:01 - Emerging private sector models for education

New SciFi writing and film started declining at the end of the 20th century and we have seen a continued decline in the first quarter of the 21st century. Sci-fi is and always has been the source of inspiration for a better future. It is where the greatest builders of our time got inspired to work on the hardest problems of their era. Whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars or the Foundation Series, if you talk to entrepreneurs building frontier technologies or products; people like Elon Musk, Brett Adcock, Peter Beck, Blake Scholl, Sam Altman, you will likely hear about one of these series as a childhood inspiration.

Friend of the show, (Episode 14) did a post called the SciFi Idea Bank which lists about 3,000 ideas that haven’t been brought to life. I think one of the biggest reasons nobody is talking about those ideas or listing them as inspiration is because they haven’t become part of the culture. Series like Harry Potter or Star Wars became cultural movements for generations, something people from different age groups could connect on. It has been 49 years since the first Star Wars movie came out. Half a century later, over Christmas break or summer holidays, I know of families who still binge watch the entire series together as an activity. It has been 25 years since the first Harry Potter movie came out, it has had a similar impact on culture.

We are living in the age of shorts and reels. Majority of the new creators have flocked to engagement baiting reels that are usually under five minutes. The purpose is getting eyeballs for advertisers. I am probably guilty of this, that is one of the ways we promote our podcast. Taking out the time to write the script for a film, recruiting a cast, iterating through the creative process, discarding hundreds of ideas, finding a way to finance it with your own money or from your profits would be kind of the antithesis of what you would do as a revenue strategy. Well, not if you have the right masterplan.

Jason has been doing film and media for 15 years. This is his life’s work. He is one of the most long-term oriented, focused and mission driven entrepreneurs I have met. Before this he was Head of Content Strategy at Astranis where he got to see the science make story real. He has a deep understanding and realization of the depth of the crisis we are in when it comes to SciFi film and television and the role it plays in inspiring the future generation.

You can see the decline of new SciFi ideas in the chart below:

Someone had to raise their hand and say I am going to change this. That is how we got every great invention in the history of science, tech and culture.

Jason is leading the SciFi renaissance and is on a mission to make SciFi great again. Hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did recording it. Their 2nd SciFi film, The Greatest Lie is going to be in theatre April 2nd. You can get your tickets here.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
02:15 - The making of "Planet" and relearning fiction
06:53 - Why good stories start with novel prose
11:31 - How Astranis gave Jason permission to build a sci-fi studio
15:18 - Why sci-fi writing dropped in the 1970s and why we need it back
21:15 - Sci-fi as the 21st century's latest addition to human philosophy
25:19 - Creation of safeguards for a spacefaring civilization
29:58 - Space Warfare and realistic combat rabbit hole
34:04 - Why bureaucracies fail and the magic of Bell Labs
41:05 - Lessons in leadership
46:58 - The biggest risk of hiring all your friends
52:02 - Bootstrapping the company and using the profits to fund movies
59:39 - Inspiring the next generation through sci-fi books
1:05:11 - YouTube Strategy
1:11:36 - Lessons on marketing
1:15:34 - The launch video bubble
1:22:15 - Closing thoughts

Seth Berman is the cofounder of Susa Ventures and Kivu Ventures. He started angel investing at Y Combinator demo days back when there used to be twenty companies and a handful of investors looking at them. He then went on to start one of the early few seed funds funding 10 unicorns across ~100 investments. Some of these include companies like Robinhood, Flexport and Chapter (Cofounded by Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, who has also been on the show). See link below to the original episode.

Special thanks to Cobi for the intro. We filmed this in Aspen CO on my first trip there. Since I don’t ski, the only reason I had heard of the city was Aspen Institute and their events.

Highlights

Sharing below some of the topics we covered in the episode. You can also check out the Full Episode on YouTube.

The Early Days of Seed Investing [02:03 - 04:31]

• “I was angel investing starting in 2010 and I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people that would go to Y Combinator’s demo days.”

• “When I started going, it was probably 12 founders that were presenting and 12 investors in the audience.”

• “I think we invested in five or six companies that became unicorn businesses in a fairly small portfolio.”

The Explosion of the Seed Ecosystem [05:34 - 09:00]

• “There’s now 900 plus seed funds out there in the ecosystem.”

• “Any great company that’s running a competitive process, if they’re talking to 20 funds, 19 of them are going to lose and one of them is going to win.”

• “What used to be seed is now series A and what used to be pre-seed is now seed.”

• “It’s very challenging for them to let other large seed funds in or multi-stage funds. So it becomes a winner take all round.”

The Series A Opportunity [09:00 - 10:30]

• “I felt like there’s a tsunami of seed-stage deals coming to series A.”

• “I graduated from doing seed to series A and B now.”

• “I’m more focused on companies that have some sort of product market fit.”

• “Series A funds, there’s probably 30 super high quality funds, but there’s not 900.”

Missing Out on Pinterest [10:30 - 12:40]

• “One of my biggest misses was Pinterest. I remember meeting with the founders outside at TechCrunch Disrupt.”

• “The number that I remember seeing was they are over 20 minutes time on site per day. And that was a similar number to what Facebook had.”

• “I should have known that with that much engagement, they were going to build something really special.”

The Era of the “No-Deck” Fundraise [12:50 - 13:47]

• “Any founder that has really strong experience can go out and fundraise with no product.”

• “They can literally just have an idea and pitch it and raise funding and not even a deck.”

• “A creative can come in with no technical expertise really and build a sizable business.”

• “The gates are down. And if you’re a creative person or entrepreneurial person and you have an idea... it’s easier ever to build a product.”

Vertical AI and the Super Cycle [13:34 - 14:43]

• “What we’re seeing in AI... it’s changing everybody’s workflow on a daily basis.”

• “A lot of these models whether they’re vertical specific or they’re horizontal is they’re breaking the benchmarks way faster than anybody could imagine.”

• “I see adoption of them at my much higher rates than I’ve seen other super cycles in the past.”

AI 2.0: Physical Intelligence [14:43 - 16:15]

• “We call it physical intelligence... we think AI 2.0 is really when intelligence starts affecting physical objects.”

• “There’s going to be so many different things that are going to happen over the next 5 to 10 years that bring intelligence into every person’s life on a daily basis.”

• “Bring intelligence into every person’s life... on the manufacturing floor in agriculture and in construction.”

• “We’re trying to find kind of the picks and shovels that invest in those models and in those businesses to allow this new ecosystem to be built.”

Starting a Company vs. Solving a Problem [22:28 - 23:25]

• “I think there’s two types of entrepreneurs. I think there’s an entrepreneur that wants to start a company and there’s an entrepreneur that wants to solve a problem.”

• “We tend to want to invest in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve a problem.”

• “Experience that problem before... have some domain expertise to understand why the problem exists and how to solve it.”

The AI Scientist [32:10 - 34:01]

• “Instead of having a few thousand researchers you can have billions and you can replicate them over and over and over again.”

• “An AI agent can have access to everything and be able to analyze it constantly.”

• “I think there’s going to be profound discoveries over the next decade from these AI scientists.”

• “They’re going to hit prime human sometime in the next two to five years. Prime human being, Albert Einstein level intellect.”

Vertical vs. Horizontal Models [35:51 - 37:21]

• “A startup raised like $50 million to build this model... they tested it against ChatGpt and ChatGpt was better.”

• “They just spent $50 million for nothing... you just don’t have the same sort of resources as these horizontal models and access to compute.”

• “These models might just be so powerful that you don’t need a lot of these vertical specific companies out there today.”

Why Founders Don’t Care About Your VC “Platform” [39:19 - 41:12]

• “If they get multiple term sheets from the tier one funds, they tend not to care so much about the platform and the services.”

• “They care more about the partner that they’re going to be working with.”

• “What we found is it’s very hard to have specialists in every single vertical.”

• “Unless you’re kind of within the sweet spot of the individuals that they hired at that fund... they tend not to be that helpful.”

Investing is Harder Than Tweeting [48:04 - 48:53]

• “I think that investing is incredibly difficult. You only have so much time during the day.”

• “It’s very hard to have the time to kind of build up an online presence.”

• “My focus has always been on do the best deals possible, support those founders, and have those founders speak highly about you.”

Identifying Talent: Broken Resumes and Persistence [01:10:48 - 01:15:00]

• “Sometimes the most talented people have broken resumes. They don’t check the boxes... the credentials aren’t there.”

• “You want somebody that is extremely persistent that is going to run through walls to make things happen.”

• “It’s a very different skill set building a product and building a team and making that team successful.”

• “A lot of founders... they don’t put the resources or the time into go to market at the early stages.”

Timing: Catching the Wave [01:32:00 - 01:35:50]

• “Sometimes as investors, we’re so far in front of the wave and the wave isn’t coming for 10 more years that, you know, we’re just never going to catch it.”

• “Catching it too late... you invested in a social network in 2012 or 2014, you’re probably too late.”

• “Understanding what potential outcomes can be is like absolutely critical to being a great investor.”

The Future of Public Markets and AI Analysts [01:38:16 - 01:43:12]

• “You could go public when you’re doing like 150 million of revenue 10 years ago... in the next two years it might be you have to be doing a billion of revenue.”

• “AI might change that... you might not need those public market analysts anymore and then a lot of these businesses could start going public much earlier.”

The Robinhood Story [01:45:00 - 01:48:00]

• “We met them... and they kind of told us their vision of fee free trading.”

• “We were the only investor that was willing to kind of open up our our books and be like the the investor of record for FINRA.”

• “My feeling on why they were so successful was it was really intuitive UI and it was just a great user experience.”

• “I kept 80% of my stock. So, I still own a lot of Robinhood stock.”

Exceptional Go-To-Market is Now Required [02:00:04 - 02:01:08]

• “Go to market has just become so much more challenging and the go to market motion... needs to be so more highly refined.”

• “If you have the resources, your go to market team should be equal to your product and engineering team.”

• “Build a world-class team around whatever channel you want to focus on and find people that have done this before.”

Watch On YouTube

Ali is an entrepreneur, investor, diplomat and industrialist. When I first met Ali in 2017, he was the Special Assistant to Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan. For my friends in the US, that would be like the President’s Chief of Staff. He also didn’t need the job. He had built one of Pakistan’s fastest growing banks in JS Bank (now over $4B in assets), built the largest carbon-neutral private steel industries in the UAE (Arabian Gulf Steel Industries), founded the first private domestic airline with AirBlue and was central to growing the Jahangir Siddiqui Group into easily the Top 10 family business empires out of Pakistan.

I recently got interested in the history of patronage which got me into the history of Medici family from Renaissance Europe, one of the wealthiest families in the 15th century. When we caught up after recording the episode, I was curious about whether Ali had studied them before starting the bank given his interest in Austrian and European history — unsurprisingly he had deeply studied both the Medici and Fugger families before starting the bank. Given the unique range and adaptability Ali has shown by reinventing himself in different industries every few years (venture capital & private equity, commercial airline, steel & glass manufacturing, foreign diplomacy, climate-tech to name a few) it would be fair to categorize him as a Renaissance Man of our era at the heart of building and growing what future historians will probably refer to as the House of Jahangir Siddiqui (JS Group).

Ali and I reconnected last year after seven long years. Even though we have had limited interactions, he has had some of the most formative impact on my life trajectory and career since I have met him. I will share those exact moments in a bit but first some context is important on where I was at in life at the time.

I was working on playing my part in growing a still nascent entrepreneurship ecosystem in the country by organizing business plan competitions in 20+ universities across the country. I was doing this as the head of Pakistan’s national campus program for Hult Prize Foundation which would grant $1 million to a team of student entrepreneurs working on a specific challenge every year.

This took me to New York City to the annual final event where $1 million is awarded which overlapped with the UNGA week which brings together all world leaders. Ali was in town as part of the Prime Minister’s delegation and was helping coordinate high stakes meetings with other heads of states, billionaires and so forth in a very short three day trip. On that same trip, I was introduced to Ali through a mutual to discuss potential collaboration opportunities with the government.

Ali was gracious enough to carve out time for me, my colleague and the Hult Prize winning team that year. At the end of the meeting, he came up to me and said that he is close with the Prime Minister and his sons and that I should become friends with them. He scheduled a 45-min meeting for all of us and the rest as they say, is history.

What did that particular instance do? It showed me that if you are ambitious and you work hard, there is some sense of meritocracy in the world. That you in fact can change the trajectory of your life. It showed me that anything is possible and people are just people at the end of the day even if they have fancy titles or 20-car motorcades. I did not come from the wealthiest family or the most powerful but was able to open doors, that changed how I have looked at life ever since.

After I was back in the country, I kept nagging Ali and his chief of staff at the time and would try to meet him for all sorts of stuff. My different business ideas at the time, my job and just try to learn from him by finding an excuse to spend some time together. During one of these trips to the Prime Minister’s office, he showed me this app called RelSci where you could list your most powerful/well networked connections and map out an exact path to anyone in the world.

This taught me that anyone in the world is at most six degrees removed. Donald Trump was President at the time, just as an experiment I checked for a path to him and saw that Ali was four degrees removed. It would later turn out that he would get appointed as the Ambassador to the U.S and thus I would be one degree removed. I never asked for any introduction, well at 21 I wasn’t doing something that would warrant the request for such introductions but it taught me a critical lesson: relationships run the world and anyone including the President of the United States is at most six degrees removed from you.

In this conversation:

We talk about the pros and cons of the CEO role in companies, optimizing your career around your strengths, cold outreach, taking over a successful family business, spotting and nurturing outlier talent, consuming media and making sense of the world, the concept of rules being counterintuitive to innovation, the concept of shorting people, the art of relationships, mentorship, evaluating opportunity costs and more.

Watch on Youtube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:31 - On doing his first ever long form podcast
06:24 - Operating philosophy and not taking CEO roles
13:28 - On optimizing his career around strengths
17:00 - Lessons from working with one of Asia’s largest VC firm
21:30 - Social media presence and identity
24:00 - Media diet, continuous learning, questioning institutional programming & making sense of the world
33:00 - The art of cold outreach, warm intros and
40:20 - Spotting, hiring and nurturing outlier talent
54:25 - Ambition, problem-solving archetype
56:00 - Taking over a successful family business
1:04:25 - Talent retention
1:14:55 - Mentorship
1:21:00 - The concept of rules is counterintuitive to innovation
1:24:31 - Evolution of venture capital
1:32:06 - The art of relationships
1:38:13 - Shorting people
1:41:16 - What is more important? The network or the product?
1:51:01 - Building OnZero
02:01:25 - Evaluating opportunity cost and the 10 year plan
2:10:30 - Closing thoughts and rapid fire

Check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts or right here on Substack. Sharing some of my highlights below.

How do you know you are working on a problem worth solving?

- You can feel if you’re solving a big enough problem for someone through their like reactions to things, such as people falling off chairs in conference rooms as we showed them what we could do.

What does product market fit feel like?

- Early government customers literally bought Chainalysis on expense credit cards and used emails that didn’t have real government affiliation.

How do you sell to the government?

- The core strategy in selling to the government is: how do you make people’s careers?

How much of growth fundraising is about financial vs. the story?

People get behind the story and even very very smart people look at numbers differently depending on how emotionally bought in to the story they are.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

04:11 - Growing up as an immigrant in London and the “chip on my shoulder”

09:18 - Why market sequencing is critical

16:23 - Choosing to take up the CEO role and the domain of sales

23:20 - Early transformational experiences and the entrepreneurial bug

26:13 - How to penetrate the government

30:57 - Importance of storytelling, emotional and intellectual storytelling

38:26 - Raising funds and why too much money can hurt a culture

42:23 - Lessons in creating a culture

48:50 - How to hire executives

55:44 - Jonathan’s favorite interview questions and hiring philosophy

1:02:09 - Exciting things in the next 20 years

1:06:44 - The “two-stage rocket” of fundraising

1:11:45 - Loneliness of being a CEO

1:12:55 - Rapid fire and closing questions

Our story goes back to when I got David Friedberg (Cohost All-In Podcast, Cofounder Ohalo, The Production Board) for the Building Atoms Summit in Nov 2023. My internal champion was the Chief Brand Officer of The Production Board at the time, Rachel Konrad who has become a friend and mentor. She just found the story of how I just orchestrated running into Friedberg outside Starbucks really funny and gave it her all to make the event happen.

Since I have known Rachel, she has been telling me to meet Bharat and somehow knew that we would get along. After a couple of failed attempts over 2 years we finally got together over a dinner I hosted and have become friends ever since. She probably described him best as “lighthearted but not lightweight” and that will come across in our conversation.

We talk about our military upbringing and how that teaches adaptability, culture at companies and how startups are like little cults, how life is different at the abstracted management layer in corporates vs. startups, storytelling, resource allocation, time management, insiders vs. outsiders and the value of a network and more.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
02:50 - Bharat’s career trajectory
07:36 - What military upbringing taught me
11:02 - Being authentic to yourself
19:47 - The co-founder dynamics and culture building
28:57 - The navy vs. pirate team structure
32:56 - What does follower-ship mean?
40:11 - What comes first? The mission or the people?
43:20 - All startups are cults
48:15 - How Bharat allocates his time
1:00:12 - Learning from Venture, Corporate and Startups
01:12:24 - Resource allocation
01:22:03 - Developing a thesis and discarding an idea
01:31:22 - An outsider becoming an insider
01:42:52 - How should one build trust
01:47:48 - Building value over time
1:56:40 - Choosing What Not To Build
2:03:00 - Why Canva & Figma Worked and the Future of Media
02:15:45 - Distribution vs. Production
2:25:40 - What Compounds as a Founder
02:27:48 - Closing Rapid Fire

As I prepared for this episode, I discovered how Mike has changed his opinion on topics throughout the years after discovering new information. He is one of the most independent minded people out there and it was fun to sit down for a conversation on media, Pirate Wires, Founders Fund marketing, state of advertising, charter cities and more.

did a four part series on Founders Fund a while back and described their marketing strategy as soft power initiatives. Some of these included Peter’s book Zero To One, Hereticon and Pirate Wires to name a few. has been at the centre of this strategy which made him a billionaire media tycoon (iykyk). At Founders Fund, he has been able to stay ahead of rivals with a team only four full time people on the marketing team compared to teams of fifty at other funds of similar size. Now he helps us make sense of the world of tech, business and politics through .

Friend of the pod would probably agree that Mike has been able to build new categories around ideas he stands for representing important problems of the time. Some of these are limited standalone brands, others are cultural movements. One example of this is Hereticon, where he was able to create the category of “Thoughtcrime” which went mainstream after Elon bought Twitter. There were two editions of Hereticon (2022 & 2024) and it looks like it won’t make a comeback.

Mike’s strategy is to be different. Once you have created a category and are not unique anymore, you move on. In true Zero To One fashion.

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
03:06 - Building a media company vs building a tech startup
05:41 - Building culture in a company
11:36 - Substack vs having your own website
17:51 - The utility of advertising
29:24 - Building a large audience vs. building a quality audience
35:55 - Twitter strategy and evolution in the past 5 years
47:10 - Pirate Wires master plan and inspiration from Walt Disney
53:16 - Charter cities in America
1:03:03 - The podcast experiment
1:15:03 - Mike’s information diet
1:29:18 - Working on Zero To One with Peter Thiel and marketing at Founders Fund
1:38:05 - Rapid fire and closing thoughts

Watch on YouTube: