PODCAST · technology
Fund/Build/Scale
by Walter Thompson
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
Episodes
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How Much Proof Does a Consumer Startup Need to Raise Money?
“Follow your dreams and quit your day job” is terrible advice. That’s not me saying it. That’s Jon Keidan, founder and managing partner of Torch Capital, where he’s backed companies including Sweetgreen, Acorns and Zocdoc. He has a better suggestion: before you blow up your life for a startup…
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What You Permit Is What Gets Produced
Most of us learn culture by adapting to one that already exists. We join a company, figure out what gets rewarded, who has power, what people say in meetings, and what they say after the meeting ends. Founders don’t have that luxury. They’re not fitting into a culture. They’re creating one…
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How VCs Judge Founders With No Track Record
What makes a startup worth backing if it has no product, revenue or meaningful traction to evaluate? Paige Craig, founder and managing partner of Outlander VC, invests at the idea stage, which means much of his job involves assessing founders before the usual signals exist. In this episode, Paige...
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What Investors Learn When They Watch You Talk To Customers
Selling your pitch to an investor is one thing. Showing that you understand how to sell your product to customers is another. Amy Cheetham, partner at Costanoa Ventures, sometimes watches founders talk to prospective customers as part of her diligence. Those conversations can reveal how well they...
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How to Get Through a Tech Layoff Without Losing Yourself
If you work in tech long enough, there’s a good chance you’ll go through a layoff. Either your own, or one that leaves you wondering whether you’re next. Shanon Olsen, COO of Henley Leadership, works with executives and organizations navigating growth, disruption, and change. In this episode, we...
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Before You Build in Senior Care, Figure Out Who Pays
America is getting older. Tens of millions of people are caring for parents, grandparents and other family members. The problems are everywhere, and many of them are painful, expensive and still poorly served by technology. That does not mean every care-related startup is a good business…
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How to Know If Your Startup Idea Is Worth Pursuing
If you have a startup idea, how do you know whether you’re onto something—or just really good at convincing yourself? Pete Martin has spent his career finding out. He’s worked at six cybersecurity startups, most of them in the pre-product, pre-revenue days, with two IPOs along the way. Today…
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Why Technical Founders Should Stop Answering Questions
Peter Wang is co-founder and Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Anaconda, a company he helped start in 2012 after years of working as a software developer and consultant. In this episode, Peter draws on Anaconda’s early days and the entrepreneurship lessons he shares with scientists and engineers...
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If It’s Not on Paper, It’s Not Real: Canvas Prime's Rebecca Lynn
Canvas Prime Co-founder and Managing Director Rebecca Lynn has spent 25 years in venture capital, backing companies including LendingClub, Doximity and Casetext and helping founders navigate more than a dozen exits. In this conversation, we get into why taking venture capital puts founders on a...
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Why Technical Founders Hire Marketing Too Late
Head of Marketing for Observe at Snowflake Shruti Bhat has spent her career helping highly technical companies explain why their products matter, find the customers who need them most, and build go-to-market systems that can actually scale. In this episode, she talks about how founders identify...
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CVC Is Not Your Exit Strategy or GTM Plan
Tamara Steffens is managing director of Thomson Reuters Ventures, where she invests in early-stage companies building around legal, tax, accounting, and enterprise workflow. Corporate venture capital can look like a shortcut to customers, distribution, and credibility, but Steffens says founders...
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AI Makes Building Easier. Selling Is Still Hard.
Thanks to AI, you could have an idea for a startup on your way home from work Thursday and finish a rough prototype by Monday morning. That's great news for founders, but it also raises the bar: if everyone can build a convincing demo, what actually separates a durable company from a clever...
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The Most Expensive Money You'll Ever Raise
A lot of founders assume raising venture capital is just part of the process: you have an idea, build a deck, find some investors and start pitching. But what if you don't actually need the money yet? Elia Wallen is the founder and CEO of Engine, a business travel platform valued at $2 billion.…
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Why Most Startups Shouldn't Raise Money (Even If They Can)
Most startup fundraising advice focuses on how to get investors interested. Ryan Ziegler sees the process from the other side of the table. As a General Partner at Edison Partners, Ryan evaluates startups that have already survived one of the hardest phases of company building: finding customers...
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Money Is the Only Customer Validation That Matters
Conventional wisdom says the hardest part of building a startup is building the product. Shanea Leven says the harder challenge is figuring out what customers will actually pay for. Before co-founding Empromptu.ai, Shanea spent more than 15 years building products at companies including Google,...
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What Hospitals Are Actually Buying in the AI Boom
If you're building a startup, there are easier industries to choose than healthcare. Sales cycles are long, regulations are complex, and earning the trust of providers and patients takes years. In this episode, Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate Director Jamie Sundsbak explains how healthtech…
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The 10x Rule: Turning a Research Paper into an AI Company
Most startup advice assumes the biggest challenge is finding customers. But what happens when the demand is obvious and the real question is whether the technology can actually work at scale? In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sit down with Stanford professor and Inception Labs founder and…
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Your First Marketing Hire Is Probably Not a CMO
Most technical founders can explain how their product works. Far fewer can clearly explain why a customer should care. In this episode, Cribl CMO Abby Strong shares what she has learned from building go-to-market teams and helping scale one of the fastest-growing companies in data infrastructure....
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How AI-Native Startups Actually Get Built
What does it actually mean to build an AI-native company? In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I talk with True Ventures Managing Partner Puneet Agarwal and Gather CEO/co-founder Mayank Mehta about how the startup evolved from an AI-powered customer feedback idea into a broader research and…
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Why Great Founders Are “Angry at the Problem”
For this episode, I interviewed Eugene Malobrodsky, partner at One Way Ventures and former founder of AnchorFree, the company behind HotSpot Shield, one of the first consumer VPN products to scale globally. Before becoming a VC, Eugene spent 15 years building and scaling a startup through the…
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Before There Is Proof: Build a Startup Story That Shows You Can Execute
A lot of early-stage founders can explain their company five different ways — and all five might be technically correct. The problem is that often, those answers don’t fully line up. That gap in a startup’s narrative creates friction. Investors may understand the problem but still don’t feel like...
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How to Hire Your First Offshore Team Without Screwing It Up
Hiring is one of the hardest things for first-time founders to get right, especially if you’re building a distributed team that spans the globe. For this episode, I spoke to Isaac Saul Kassab, co-founder of Pearl Talent, a recruiting firm that helps startups hire offshore teams. We break down the...
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How Technical Founders Win the First 5 Minutes With Investors
Technical founders don’t usually struggle with what they’re building. They struggle with explaining it clearly, quickly, and in a way that makes someone want to invest. In this episode, I spoke with Sheena Jindal, Managing Partner and Founder of Sugar Free Capital, about how technical founders…
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Don’t Wait for the IPO: How Tech Employees Actually Get Liquid
Startup employees are encouraged to believe in the mission. But IPO timelines now stretch well past a decade — and many never happen at all. In this episode, Ben Black, co-founder and managing director of Akkadian Ventures, explains how tech workers can think more strategically about the equity...
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Turning Utility Into Habit: Beyond Basic Gamification
I interviewed Play Ventures General Partner Phylicia Koh to explore what founders outside of gaming can learn from two decades of game design. Play Ventures began as a gaming-focused VC fund. Today, it also invests in what Phylicia calls “playable apps,” consumer products that combine utility…
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The Day You Raise Money Is the Day You Stop Focusing on Technology
In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Sentry co-founder David Cramer joins host Walter Thompson for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about what founders actually struggle with — and why so much conventional startup advice falls apart in practice. David shares how he dropped out of high school,...
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Selling Unproven AI to Skeptical Enterprise Buyers
Building an early-stage startup isn’t just about the technology — it’s about earning trust before the proof exists. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I’m joined by Jeff Smith, CEO and co-founder of 2nd Set AI, a startup building generative image and video tools for media, entertainment, and...
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From Seed to Growth: What African Founders Need to Know
As African startups mature, the leap from seed to growth brings a new set of challenges — longer fundraising cycles, institutional expectations, governance, and the realities of scaling across fragmented markets. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sit down with Ngetha Waithaka, partner at...
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What Investors Actually Look For in the First 18 Months
In this episode, I’m joined by Jon Callaghan, co-founder and managing partner at True Ventures, and Julie Bornstein — CEO and co-founder of Daydream, founder of The Yes, and former COO of Stitch Fix — to break down what investors really evaluate in the first 18 months of a company’s life. Drawing...
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Is the Defensible Moat a Myth in AI?
For years, founders have been told to build a defensible moat. But in AI, where platforms, models, and capabilities can shift overnight, that advice is starting to feel outdated. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Simular CEO and co-founder Ang Li talks about what it actually means to build a...
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Building Against Giants: Turning Insider Expertise into a Startup Advantage
When most founders look at markets dominated by Google or Apple, they see a dead end. Ariel Seidman saw an opening. Before founding Hivemapper, Ariel helped scale Yahoo Maps during a period when search and mapping were rapidly evolving. That experience gave him a front-row seat to how large-scale...
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From Scarcity to Scale: Building Startups in Latin America’s Earliest Stages
Odille Sánchez leads the Tech and Scientific-Based Entrepreneurship Center of Excellence at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where she works with hundreds of early-stage founders across Latin America. In this episode, she explains how mindset, methodology, and community are reshaping what it means to...
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Why Black Startup Founders Have to Play a Different Game
When you don’t have generational wealth or a built-in network, the startup path isn’t just harder — it’s different. In this episode, I’m joined by James Norman and Sean Green of Black Operator Ventures for a candid conversation about what early-stage founders actually need to understand to raise...
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Building an Enterprise AI Startup from Day Zero
Lexi Reese has scaled companies at every stage — from building Google’s programmatic advertising business, to helping Gusto grow revenue from $10M to $300M. Now she’s co-founder and CEO of Lanai, an enterprise AI startup tackling a problem most companies don’t even realize they have: they can’t...
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Building in Layers: The Compound Startup Playbook
April co-founder and CEO Ben Borodach joins Fund/Build/Scale to break down how he built a compound startup in one of the hardest markets in fintech: U.S. taxes. We talk about why some problems can’t be solved with a simple wedge product, how to sequence engineering, compliance, and distribution,...
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How to Build in a Market That Won’t Let You In
In most industries, if you’ve got a solid idea, a few engineers, and a working prototype, you can at least get in the game. Professional sports is not one of those industries. When Jordy Leiser co-founded Jump with Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore, he wasn’t just building software — he was trying to...
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How to Prove You’re Building a Venture-Scale Company
Most founders think VCs want a pitch deck full of market numbers, a roadmap, and a feel-good story about the future. Hoxton Ventures Partner Payton Dobbs isn’t looking for any of that. He wants to know if you actually understand the game you’re trying to play. In this conversation, Payton breaks...
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The "Marionette Threat" of Generative AI with All Tech is Human’s David Polgar
Today’s episode is something a little different. I’m doing a feed swap with Humans of AI, a podcast from the team at Writer. What you’re about to hear is their conversation with David Ryan Polgar, the Founder and President of All Tech Is Human, a leading organization in the Responsible Tech...
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Cyan Banister & Cristian Cibils Bernardes: Early Signals, Founder-Investor Fit, and Trustworthy Consumer AI
Recorded live in San Francisco during TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 week, this Fund/Build/Scale session brings together Cyan Banister (Long Journey Ventures) and Cristian Cibils Bernardes (Autograph) for a practical look at building consumer AI and the investor-founder dynamics that make it work. We…
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From Engineer to CEO: Ryan Wang on Building Assembled and Finding Product-Market Fit
I interviewed Ryan Wang, co-founder and CEO of Assembled, in his San Francisco office to unpack how he turned lessons from Stripe into a fast-growing startup that powers customer support teams at Robinhood, Canva, and Notion. We talk about: Finding the right co-founders and surviving a CEO…
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The Starting Five: How to Build a Leadership Team That Can Scale
When startups fail to scale, it’s rarely because of bad code or bad luck. More likely, it's because they didn’t hire the right people at the right time. Chris Barbin, founder and CEO of Tercera, shares a playbook for assembling your “Starting Five” — the essential leadership roles every...
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From Code to Customer: The Strategic Power of a Field CTO
I’ve explored different aspects of product-market fit on the podcast, but when you’re scaling an open-source business with enterprise customers and a global developer community, you also need customer–engineering fit — the ability to translate between what’s being built and what the market…
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Dead Weight on the Cap Table: Inside the Ugly World of Founder Breakups
More startups die from co-founder breakups than from running out of money. Attorney David Siegel, a partner at Grellas Shah LLP, has spent years inside these conflicts, helping founders navigate everything from equity disputes to emotional meltdowns. In this conversation, he explains: Why greed…
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An Operator’s Playbook for Monetizing Product-Led Growth
What do you do when everyone loves your product but no one’s paying for it? That was the challenge facing Beautiful.ai. Founder Mitch Grasso nailed the product, but to build a sustainable business, he brought in operator Jason Lapp as CEO. In this conversation, Jason shares how Beautiful.ai…
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Building a Bridge Across the Valley of Death
Frontier tech startups don’t fail because the science is bad — they fail because no one needs what they’re building. In this episode, Roadrunner Venture Studios CEO/co-founder Adam Hammer explains how to avoid that fate. We talk about why the U.S. struggles to turn research into startups, why…
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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 practical advice for founders who are prepping to raise capital, including what he looks for in pitch...
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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 most active users were in sales development — and that investors were starting to reach out — he...
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Building Hard Tech: Lessons on Funding, Teams, and Timelines
UPDATE: On 9/8/2025, ZEI announced "the conclusion of its operations." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zeroei_zero-emission-industries-zei-announces-activity-7371012829409177601-yQph? ******* Transforming breakthrough research into a sustainable company is never simple — especially in hard tech.…
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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 explains why so much of the conventional wisdom around startups is actually counterproductive. He...
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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 friction out of laundry and dry cleaning — for consumers, and for the small, family-owned businesses...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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
HOSTED BY
Walter Thompson
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Fund/Build/Scale have?
Fund/Build/Scale currently has 133 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Fund/Build/Scale about?
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...
How often does Fund/Build/Scale release new episodes?
Fund/Build/Scale publishes regularly with 133 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Fund/Build/Scale?
You can listen to Fund/Build/Scale on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Fund/Build/Scale?
Fund/Build/Scale is created and hosted by Walter Thompson.
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