Top Decile Podcast

Tahnoon Murtza is 22 years old, and has spent his entire life inside the entertainment industry as a touring musician. That put him in the group chats where celebrity brand deals get built long before any VC hears about them. He personally wrote early checks into Sommer Ray's consumer brand and Jeremy Lynch's HP-1, both before the rounds ever opened to outside investors, and now runs Grey Sheep Ventures backing celebrity-founded and viral-first consumer brands across the US and Canada.We get into why he thinks proprietary access, not capital, is the real edge in consumer investing, why celebrity brands can exit in under five years instead of the decade B2B founders wait, and why he's now betting skincare is the next category built to be sold on camera.

Navneet Kaur has launched seven consumer brands from zero to scale, worked with over 200 startups across emerging markets, and built FemTech India, the country's first and largest women's health tech ecosystem, spanning 450+ companies and one unicorn. She also wrote the first published book on the femtech industry, and now she's launching TechThrive Ventures, a San Francisco based pre-seed fund backing founders in women's health, wellness, longevity, and CPG.We get into why she built the ecosystem before ever raising a fund, the LP conversations that start with "I have a daughter" and end in a check, and why she believes every woman is already an investor whether she realizes it or not.

Vijay Rajendran led portfolio value creation at 500 Global across 2,800 companies in 80 countries before co-founding gAI Ventures. Amit Goel brings 20 years as a payments and identity operator, including building and selling a fintech company. Together they've built a venture studio around one central idea: vertical expertise should drive AI company formation, not the other way around.We get into why most enterprise AI deployments fail despite the hype, what Amit means when he says a task is not a job, and how gAI co-builds from the ground up with domain experts before carving portfolio companies out as independent businesses.

Anthony Atlas won first place at the International Science and Engineering Fair at 17, earning himself a minor planet in the process. He spent years noticing that science fair alumni kept turning up as exceptional startup founders, then built the data to prove it: finalists who go on to start companies do so at a 15 percent unicorn rate, with over two-thirds making it through Series A.We get into how he built a 55,000-person alumni database to backtest the thesis before ever pitching an LP, what the science fair experience actually trains that translates to founding, and why the 2,000-plus alumni who volunteered to help may be the fund's most underrated edge.

Lorenzo De Leo spent more than a decade as managing director at Rocker, one of Miami's leading venture studios, where he helped build over 40 companies across the US and Latin America. That operator background is now the foundation of Enya Ventures, his pre-seed AI fund targeting Latin American founders at the moment before US capital starts paying attention.We get into why Latin America is at a tipping point for founder quality, what it means to back an AI native team versus one that just bolts AI onto the product, and why in the current environment distribution and data matter more than the model itself.

Radhika Iyengar was named one of the Top 100 Women of the Future and has advised startups that generated $4 billion in shareholder value. Her co-founder Jorden Woods is a Caltech astrophysicist with her own exits and $50 million raised for portfolio companies. Together they wrote a book in 2019 predicting enterprise AI and blockchain would converge. Then, they spent six years building the track record to invest in it.We get into why they treat trust as a literal architectural requirement rather than a feature, how a portfolio company is extending hyper-personalized lending to small businesses with under a 0.2% default rate, and why micro VC math produces better returns at every performance percentile than mega funds chasing hectacorns.

J.P. Keating spent 25 years inside five Fortune 500 supply chains — Boeing, Anheuser-Busch, Allstate — before deciding insiders needed to be the ones writing the check. Now, as founder of ProChain Ventures, he's backing pre-seed and seed stage founders building the technology that makes global supply chains faster, more resilient, and harder to break.In this episode, JP and Connor dig into why supply chain is less about efficiency and more about survivability, how ProChain finds the right LPs (spoiler: industry operators first), and why a self-propelled autonomous rail car might be the most exciting investment in the portfolio.

Galit Flasterstein sold a travel company she ran in Costa Rica for a decade, then built a marketplace connecting LatAm artisans to global buyers, and concluded the real gap wasn't commerce but early-stage capital. Now she runs Danta Fund, a pre-seed vehicle backing ag tech, biotech, food tech, and climate tech founders across Latin America with a thesis built on the region's biodiversity.We get into why LatAm's biodiversity creates a scientific moat that's hard to replicate anywhere else, how a Danta portfolio company is predicting farm diseases two weeks in advance using aerial pathogen filters and AI, and why the best founders have stopped looking for generalist VCs.

Walid Aradi and Wes Schwalje spent over 15 years at Tahseen Consulting advising heads of state, ministries, and 11 unicorns on navigating the regulatory and political realities of the MENA region, including structuring two of the region's biggest exits, Uber's acquisition of Careem and the Dubizzle-EMPG merger. Together they launched Red Tape Ventures, a Dubai-based seed fund backing marketplace and enablement technology startups across 22 countries where regulation isn't the risk — it's the unfair advantage.We get into why founders who align with government national visions end up co-creating regulation rather than fighting it, and how Red Tape made its first close during an active war (and why that's less surprising than it sounds).

Nathan Maton built his career at the intersection of design, technology, and human behavior, with stints at Google, Khan Academy, and Omada. He became an angel investor and ran The Clearing, a workshop for founders navigating life after a significant exit. That work crystallized his debut pre-seed and seed fund thesis: repeat founders in FinTech and AI are systematically underserved at the earliest stage.We get into why Nathan looks for founders who have "eaten the glass and signed up to do it again," how he got into a YC deal that was way oversubscribed by building five-year conviction on a founder before the round even existed, and why he believes stablecoin infrastructure is only in the third inning of a transition bigger than the internet.

Vineet Shah spent 18 years inside the energy industry. From a 4.6 gigawatt power plant through CurtissWright and Caltrol to co-founding Honeywell's lithium-ion battery business, where he created the industry's first-ever performance guarantee product. He launched 8 Clockwise as both a venture studio and seed fund backing founders in energy access, decarbonization, and advanced materials, guided by a single organizing principle: finite to infinite. We get into why most climate tech and industrial startups fail, how a venture studio model lets 8Clockwise roll up its sleeves on high-conviction portfolio companies rather than spray and pray across 20 bets, and why senior energy executives are the ideal LP for a fund that requires patience, domain fluency, and a belief that the next wave of industrial innovation belongs in venture capital.

Anca Burke and Andrey Mikhalchuk co-founded ARTA VC around a shared frustration: 70% of enterprise AI integrations fail because companies try to attach AI to systems that were never designed for it. Their fund backs early-stage founders in the DMV who have already done the opposite.We get into how AI-powered autofocus eyeglasses gave a retired military pilot better vision than he'd ever had, why the DMV's second-largest tech talent pool in the country is still chronically underfunded, and what two decades of combined operating experience teaches you about which AI bets are actually worth making.

Mike Keymer is an MIT-trained engineer who spent two decades commercializing deep science for U.S. defense agencies, biotech analytics, and quantum computing platforms. He launched AlphaKet Capital to back seed-stage companies building the infrastructure layer that quantum needs to scale: the quantum equivalent of modems, repeaters, and memory.We get into why a massive capital influx in late 2024 fundamentally changed quantum's investment landscape, what it means to bet on sensors that can navigate without GPS by mapping the Earth's magnetic field, and why the four-to-seven-year horizon to utility-scale quantum puts us squarely inside the venture window right now.

Ryan Else spent nearly two decades working inside enterprise security, industrial markets, and frontier tech before launching Roadster Capital to back seed-stage founders modernizing the American industrial base. His portfolio already includes a company that received a $150 million commitment from the U.S. Department of Commerce for extreme ultraviolet lithography critical to national chip security.We get into why Ryan believes narrative follows execution and not the reverse, why he sometimes backs founders who know nothing about the industry they're disrupting, and what it means to invest at the point of true technical risk before institutional consensus arrives.

Garrett Smith holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC San Diego and co-founded two medtech companies acquired for a combined $600 million, one before FDA approval. After spending years investing in and partnering with early-stage companies at Johnson & Johnson, he launched Reef Haven Ventures to back life science and medtech founders at the convergence of biology, robotics, and AI.We get into why San Diego is an underserved gem for medtech seed capital, how Garrett thinks about backing AI-assisted surgical tools that could eventually move toward full autonomy, and what it means to invest in a company that can identify a patient's cancer type in real time rather than waiting weeks.

Alan Blakeborough is a military veteran and 35-year serial entrepreneur who built startup accelerator Launchpad after discovering South Carolina had no support system for tech founders. People were leaving for Atlanta, Charlotte, and Austin just to find a community. Now he's running the Launchpad Ignite Fund, which primarily invests in companies that stay on after graduating the accelerator.We get into why South Carolina's manufacturing culture creates a blind spot for tech founders, how Alan is converting local real estate investors into their first VC checks, and why the fund's Opportunity Zone status offers a tax advantage no other tech fund has figured out.

Mike Saloio spent eight years as a sell-side equity analyst at Oppenheimer, covering Cisco, Apple, and EMC, before founding Huddle, a VC-backed marketplace that helped over 150 startups assemble design and engineering teams. Now he's launching Begin Ventures to back the founders pre-seed ecosystems routinely miss: domain experts using AI to reinvent legacy consumer industries.We get into why AI is turning non-technical operators into weekend-prototype founders, why Mike believes the consumer AI application layer is still a wide-open blank slate, and what he'd tell aspiring VCs who think they haven't checked enough boxes yet.

Moy Aras spent over a decade running brand and innovation at Chobani, Nestlé, Nespresso, Aloha, and Applegate before betting on early-stage CPG founders the way he wished someone had bet on him. He wrote angel checks, built a 13-brand portfolio, and launched Lucinda Capital in 2025.We get into why the consumer brands that matter most get built by founders with audacity rather than pedigree, how operational experience inside major CPG companies creates an edge that pattern-matching VCs simply don't have, and what early indicators -- velocity, retention, margin profile -- let you spot a winner before the rest of the market catches on.Through Lucinda Capital, Aras is backing pre-seed CPG founders who have the bravery to walk into a grocery store and demand shelf space for something the world didn't know it needed.

Collette Tibbitts spent years at the intersection of music and tech, consulting for Island Records and Sony Music Nashville and working on blockchain at Universal Music Group. She co-founded Joker Deck to back the founders venture capital has consistently walked past.We get into why music tech is a proving ground for innovations that expand well beyond the industry, how misaligned access and capital created an arbitrage opportunity that major labels can't fill on their own, and what it means to find the "joker in the deck" -- founders whose ideas are too cross-disciplinary to fit a traditional VC box.Through Joker Deck Ventures, Tibbitts is building a pre-seed fund at the creative-technical frontier, backed by an artist's instinct for what catches fire.

Oscar Carreón and Roberto Nieves co-founded Cabra Ventures after careers spanning Mexico, China, the Netherlands, and the Middle East, including Roberto's time in institutional investment at Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. They set out to build the fund they always wished existed for founders who don't fit the traditional VC mold.We get into why the next wave of fintech will be built by founders that mainstream venture capital overlooks, how they validated their thesis by pitching across the GCC before writing a single check, and what it takes to build LP conviction as a first-time emerging manager.

Backing the Systems Pharmacy Needs Next | Christian Tadrus, Pharmacy Innovator FundWhy pharmacy needs new infrastructure to connect to care, payment, and clinical workflows, how economic misalignment is holding the profession back, and what it takes to build a fund from inside the industry you're trying to change.Through Tadrus Advisory Group, Christian Tadrus launched the Pharmacy Innovator Fund to back early-stage companies modernizing pharmacy operations, economics, and clinical care delivery.

Varun Turlapati spent 16 years as a software engineer before founding Chaanakya Capital, a $2M pre-seed fund backing US neurotech and medtech startups. His edge is his master's in electrical and computer engineering. He can evaluate the science-heavy deals most VCs don't even understand.Find out why neurotech is at the same inflection point AI was in 2016. Hear how one company puts a bionic hand on both amputees and robotic arms for hazardous industrial environments. And discover why Varun is focused on entering early in a field where others prefer to wait for de-risking.

Doug Griffin has founded four companies in computer vision and spatial AI. Three exited, including acquisitions by Apple and Roblox. Now he's running Spatial Capital, backing early-stage physical AI and spatial computing founders tackling the problems nobody else wants to touch.We get into why he only bets on unsexy problems, how AI can compressing 13-year mining timelines down to three, and what it actually takes to build a VC fund when you've already lived in your founders' shoes.