In this episode we talk with Ali Partovi about lessons learned identifying, evaluating and accelerating talent across a long and storied career in Silicon Valley. We talk about his founder experience, great investments he's made, and his new accelerator Neo (which is something like YC 2.0).

You can learn more about Neo here, and follow Ali to on Twitter to connect with him. 

Michael Martocci is the Founder and CEO of SwagUp, a platform that makes it easy to create, automate and distribute swag globally.  

In this episode we talk about:

1. Lessons learned bootstrapping SwagUp to over $100M in revenue
2. Advice on managing cash flow and how Michael approached forecasting
3. Michael's vision and SwagUp's unique position to reimagine the entire end to end workflow from the customer experience to the complex supply chain. 

This was a really fun conversation. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

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• Follow Michael on Twitter
• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter

Michael Stoppelman is the former SVP of Engineering at Yelp and profilic angel investor in 300+ startups. In early 2007, he left Google to join Yelp, and helped scale Yelp Engineering from 6 to 600 engineers.

In this conversation we talked about Michael's lessons learnt building and scaling a world class engineering team- from hiring to motivating to leading world class teams. We also talk about lessons learned from early days at Google, and his approach to angel investing where he has an extremely impressive portfolio and track record.

This was a really fun conversation. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Links

• Follow Michael on Twitter

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• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries
• Click here to share feedback — it only takes a minute

Cameron Peake is a Partner at Restive Ventures, an early stage fintech focused VC fund. Previously Cameron was co-founder and CEO of Azlo, a company that provided online banking services for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers, and quickly grew to almost $1B in deposits. 

Cameron understands fintech from multiple vantage points: building for international markets, building one of the first neobanks in the US, and now funding early stage companies. In this conversation we discuss what it takes to build an enduring fintech, drawing from Cameron's experiences as both a builder/operator and investor. 

• Path to building fintech products
• Founding, building and scaling Azlo
• Experiences and advice on managing fraud
• Fintech landscape and building enduring companies
• Closeout questions

This was a fun conversation. We learnt a ton, and hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Links

• Follow Cameron on Twitter
• Avoiding common fraud traps

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• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries
• Click here to share feedback — it only takes a minute

Semil is the founder and GP at Haystack, an early-stage VC firm with $450M+ AUM. He’s an investor in 200+ companies including DoorDash, Instacart, Hashicorp, Figma and more.

In this conversation we discuss the current funding environment, Semil's approach to venture capital and making early investments, and his advice for founders starting a company and fundraising in today's market.

This was a really fun discussion and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Links

• Follow Semil on Twitter

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• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries
• Click here to share feedback — it only takes a minute

Beerud Sheth in a rare  founder who’s started not one, but two unicorns — UpWork and Gupshup. He’s seen a lot of pivotal moments in SV history — having started Upwork in 1998 before the dot com bubble, and Gupshup in 2005, three years before the GFC.

Today, Upwork is a publicly traded company valued at $1.5B and Gupshup is a unicorn, last valued at $1.4B+ as of April 2021.

In this conversation, we talk with Beerud about his experiences building UpWork and Gupshup across almost 25 years.

Links

• Learn more about Gupshup and try Upwork 

Hit subscribe to keep up with new episodes!

• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries
• Click here to share feedback — it only takes a minute