Fund/Build/Scale
After working for years in early-stage startups and as a journalist, here are three hard truths I’ve learned:
1. Success in Silicon Valley hinges on connections, hard work and luck.
2. Startups often fail because founders lack fundamental business knowledge.
3. Real, actionable advice comes from those who’ve actually done it.
There’s no such thing as “founder DNA.” If you’re willing to take on risk and invest years of your life in something that has maybe a 10% chance of paying off — less if you’re a woman or person of color — you can be a startup founder.
Here’s why I founded Fund/Build/Scale:
1. To help founders make fewer mistakes.
2. To share successful strategies that can accelerate your go-to-market journey.
3. To inspire more people to see themselves as potential founders. There’s a lot of overlooked talent out there, and we are missing out.
This podcast is for anyone who’s interested in learning the basic skills required to launch a startup, secure initial funding and transform an idea into a sustainable business.
I’m talking to guests about everything: finding a co-founder, conducting customer discovery, recruiting early employees, developing a PLG strategy, fundraising when you’re outside a major tech hub — all of it.
Interested? Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on all major platforms and follow the podcast on LinkedIn or Substack to get articles, excerpts, transcripts and more.
- Update frequency
- every 5 days
- Average duration
- 40 minutes
- Episodes
- 88
- Years Active
- 2023 - 2025
Are You *Really* Ready to Raise a Round? Here’s How to Tell
You don’t need a Stanford degree or a flashy deck to raise a pre-seed, seed or Series A, but you do need to show investors that you’ve put in the work.
645 Ventures co-founder Nnamdi Okike shares pra…
From Side Project to Series B: How Learning Led to Product-Market Fit
Dan Lee co-founded what would become Nooks while on leave from Stanford. He wasn’t solving sales. He was exploring remote collaboration during the pandemic.
But when they noticed that some of his mos…
Building Hard Tech: Lessons on Funding, Teams, and Timelines
Transforming breakthrough research into a sustainable company is never simple — especially in hard tech.
In this episode recorded in December 2024, Zero Emission Industries CEO/founder Dr. Joseph Pra…
Forget the Spin: Startup Myths That Hold Founders Back
Rob Biederman has sat on both sides of the table — first as co-founder and CEO of Catalant Technologies, and now as managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners. In this candid conversation, he ex…
Avoiding Founder Burnout and other Early-Stage Startup Pitfalls
Pro tip: If you can’t see yourself getting up every morning for the next ten years and being excited about going to work, don’t launch a startup.
Ajay Prakash co-founded Rinse in 2013 to take the fri…
De-Risking Deep Tech: How to Land Seed Capital for Complex Ideas
Karthee Madasamy is the founder of VC firm MFV Partners and the founding managing partner of Harper Court Ventures, both of which focus on early-stage deep tech startups.
In this episode of Fund/Buil…
Execution > Ideas: What Engineers Need to Know Before Becoming Founders
Jyoti Bansal sold his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco for $3.7 billion.
Harness, his next company, reached a similar valuation a few years later.
As an entrepreneur — and as a VC at Unusual Vent…
How to Think Like a VC When You’re Building (or Joining) a Startup
Brian Rothenberg, partner at Defy and former VP of Growth at Eventbrite, joins Fund/Build/Scale to share what really matters when evaluating early-stage startups. From spotting false signals of tract…
Cap Table Strategy: A Playbook for Early-Stage Founders
When you’re raising your first rounds, every cap table decision can echo for years. Give away too much equity early, lock yourself into restrictive pro rata rights, or over-optimize for valuation — a…
From D2C to B2B: How to Pivot Without Losing Your Mission
A turbulent flight sparked Wayne Slavin’s idea for Sure: let consumers buy insurance in real time. But after launching as a D2C app, he realized the bigger opportunity was powering insurance sales fo…
How to Sell Your World-Changing Idea to a Mission-Driven Investor
James Joaquin is co-founder and managing partner at Obvious Ventures, a VC firm that backs startups tackling intractable problems like climate change, chronic disease, and income inequality.
Their p…
Why Conviction Matters More Than TAM: The Seed-Stage Litmus Test
Uncork Capital Partner Amy Saper shares practical advice for early-stage founders building AI-enabled tools for engineering, product, and design teams, or as she describes them, "products that make y…
How (and How Not) to Pitch a Cybersecurity VC
Ten Eleven Ventures CTO and Operating Partner Scott Lundgren shares practical advice for early-stage cybersecurity founders.
He explains why founder-market fit matters more than product polish, how …
Deep Tech Without Stealth: Inside Dusty Robotics’ Origin Story
Construction workers spend hours on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines to mark where walls, plumbing and utilities should go. It’s painstaking, back-breaking labor. And that’s how it’s been d…
Leveraging Founder-Market Fit to Win Over Risk-Averse Buyers
What happens when a team of legal veterans decides to rebuild the dispute resolution process from the ground up?
To find out, I interviewed Rich Lee, co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR, a platform de…
From Side Project to API Powerhouse: How Postman Went Global
Before Postman became a category-defining platform used by millions of developers, it was a personal side project.
In this episode, co-founder and CEO Abhinav Asthana shares how he went from hackin…
When a Power User Becomes CEO: How Medium Found Its Way Back
When Tony Stubblebine took over as CEO of Medium in 2022, the platform was burning $2.5 million a month, bleeding subscribers, and was overrun with content that left founder Evan Williams cringing.
…
Muse Capital’s Approach to Finding Value in Overlooked Markets
Rachel Springate is the founding general partner of Muse Capital, an early-stage venture fund focused on overlooked sectors like women’s health, wellness, parenting, gaming, and sustainability.
In th…
Creative Ops at Startup Speed: Lessons from Superside
Fredrik Thomassen, co-founder and CEO of Superside, joins the show to unpack how startups can scale creative work without slowing down or burning out their teams.
Superside is a subscription-based de…
How to Pitch VCs Like a “Dangerous” Founder
What makes a founder dangerous?
Not credentials. Not their pedigree. And it's not who they know.
For investor and former operator Promise Phelon, a dangerous founder is someone with lived experience,…