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
The 5-Year Ramp: How Alcatraz Scaled in Enterprise Security
What kind of founder spends five years building a product before going to market?
One who's trying to solve a very hard problem.
Vince Gaydarzhiev is the founder of Alcatraz, a deep tech startup that…
From Play to Pay: How Soundtrack Uses PQLs to Drive Growth
What turns a free trial user into a paying customer?
For Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack, the answer is all about behavior. In this episode, we break down how his team uses product-led growth…
From ML Engineer to CEO: Brightwave's Mike Conover on Turning Technical Vision into Company Strategy
Mike Conover started his career as a machine learning engineer. Today, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Brightwave, an AI startup helping financial professionals make faster decisions with massive, uns…
What Investors Really Want From AI Founders
Igor Taber has sat on both sides of the table: first as a VC at Intel Capital, then as an operator at high-growth AI startup DataRobot. Now, as co-founder of Cortical Ventures, he’s backing the next …
The Art of the Waitlist: Siqi Chen on Driving Scarcity, Hype, and Feedback Loops
Runway CEO and co-founder Siqi Chen shares how his team used a waitlist not just to build hype, but to engineer smarter growth.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Siqi breaks down how Runway strat…
PR Advice for Founders in the AI Era
Ayelet Noff has spent more than two decades helping startups land meaningful press — but she’s also seen how the game has changed.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, the founder of SlicedBrand and…
The Hard Tech Hustle: Building and Selling Industrial AI
Sahitya Senapathy, founder and CEO of Endeavor AI, joins Fund/Build/Scale to talk about launching a solo-founded startup at the intersection of AI and heavy industry.
From building FEMA apps at age …
Inside a VC’s Playbook for Capital-Intensive Startups
Sophie Bakalar, partner at Collaborative Fund, joins Fund/Build/Scale for a candid conversation about early-stage investing in climate tech, consumer AI, and deep tech hardware. She shares how she ev…
Building a Market from Scratch: Generative Music for Enterprise Customers
Recorded in July 2024, Aimi founder Edward Balassanian joins Fund/Build/Scale to share how his AI-powered platform creates generative, copyright-safe music for enterprise clients. He explains how cus…
How a Broke College Student Co-founded a VC-Backed Edtech Startup
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Nectir co-founder and CEO Kavitta Ghai shares how she turned her frustration as a college student into a fast-growing, VC-backed edtech startup. Kavitta discusses…
Is AI Compute Broken? Tim Davis on Modular’s $130M Bet
Would you leave a stable, high-paying job at Google to build something that competes with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD?
That’s exactly what Tim Davis, co-founder and president of Modular, did.
Since th…
Scaling European Startups: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Changing
Building a startup in Europe presents a unique set of challenges, like fragmented markets, cultural differences in risk-taking, and a VC ecosystem that’s still maturing compared to Silicon Valley. Bu…
What Journey’s Pivot from B2C to B2B Reveals About Enterprise Sales
Journey founder and CEO Stephen Sokoler appeared on Fund/Build/Scale in June 2024 to talk about how his startup pivoted from B2C meditation services to a B2B mental health platform, along with what t…
What Your CEO Won't Tell You About Your Stock Options
When you accepted the offer, maybe you imagined being in the group photo when your boss rang the bell at NASDAQ.
But five years later, your company just raised its Series C, and an IPO isn’t on the h…
Why PR Comes Before PMF
Do you want to know the difference between marketing and PR?
Marketing is when you say something nice about yourself;
PR is when other people say nice things about you.
Jenna Guarneri is the founder…
Investor Insights for African Startups with Capria Ventures’ Mobola da-Silva
Building a startup in Africa isn’t the same as doing it in Silicon Valley.
Some challenges overlap, but many don’t, like currency volatility, limited early-stage funding, and investors who expect you…
KarmaCheck CEO Eric Ly on Customer Discovery + Early Product Development
Eric Ly is the CEO of KarmaCheck, where he’s tackling a problem he first noticed years ago as a co-founder of LinkedIn:
People don’t always tell the truth about themselves.
To address this, KarmaChec…
Inside Acceldata: CEO Rohit Choudhary on Building a Leading Data Platform
Most early-stage founders I talk to are focused on getting their first customers, hiring their first employees, or maybe, if they’re lucky, closing their first round of funding. But what happens afte…
Vouch CEO Sam Hodges on Mitigating Startup Risk and Maximizing Growth
Startups face unexpected risks every day — cyberattacks, lawsuits, market shifts —but many entrepreneurs don’t think about risk management until it’s too late.
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Vo…
Navigating Blue Oceans: Key Insights for Emerging Founders from Vectara CEO/co-founder Amr Awadallah
Amr Awadallah is the CEO and co-founder of Vectara. Previously, he co-founded Cloudera, which went public in 2017 and was acquired for $5.3 billion, and also served as VP of Developer Relations at Go…