Episodes
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Zynga's Founder on Failure, Founder Mode, and What AI Still Can't Do | Mark Pincus (Zynga)
Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga and a Village Global Luminary LP. He took Zynga public after starting it as a social poker game for Facebook, and it was his fourth company, after earlier ventures that included Tribe.net, one of the first social networks. Ben Casnocha, co-founder of Village...
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Why the Hearing Aid Industry Stopped Innovating, and How Legato Changed That |Mehul Trivedi, Legato
Mehul Trivedi is co-founder and CEO of Legato, a company building glasses that double as prescription-grade hearing aids. Before Legato, he was one of the first audio engineers on the original iPhone, led Bose's wearables and headphone group, and helped build out Luxottica's smart eyewear…
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Builder, Inventor, or Operator? The 0-1-2 Framework for Evaluating Founders| Andre Charoo (MapleVC)
Andre Charoo is Founding Partner of Maple VC, a first-check venture firm, and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Before venture, he was employee number 25 at Uber and an early employee at Hired.com, and built or joined four seed-stage startups between 2009 and 2016. Amrit Rao…
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Building Jarvis: A Voice AI Startup Making Computer Interaction Invisible |Tanay Kothari (Wispr Flow)
Tanay Kothari is co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice AI company he started with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021, building toward a Jarvis-like assistant that lets people interact with computers through natural speech instead of keyboards and screens. His younger brother, Jaisal Kothari, is...
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Why This Moment in AI is Similar to the Invention of the Camera | Jade Q. Wang, Artist & Investor
Jade Q. Wang is an artist, investor, scientist, and founder. A Stanford grad with a PhD in neuroscience, she retired roughly a year ago from a career in tech to pursue art and angel investing full time. Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Jade to trace her path from a...
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What It Actually Takes to Get a Venture Capitalist to Say Yes | Max Kilberg (Village Global) & Michael Hochberg (Periplous)
Michael Hochberg is a semiconductor entrepreneur, Caltech-trained physicist, and network investor with Village Global. He's founder and president of Periplous LLC, and has built and scaled hardware and deep tech companies through multiple market cycles, giving him a front-row seat to both the…
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From Milking Cows in Kyrgyzstan to Building a $98%-Approval Law Firm | Aizada Marat (Alma)
Aizada Marat is co-founder and CEO of Alma, an immigration law firm that combines the expertise of seasoned attorneys with AI to streamline the immigration process for individuals and businesses. Alma has achieved a 98% approval rate on its cases and can prosecute in half the time of a…
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Building the Company Behind 1 Million Therapy Visits a Month | Jake Cooper (Grow Therapy)
JakeCooper is co-founder and CEO of Grow Therapy, a technology platform that helps mental health providers launch and scale independent, insurance-accepted practices. Since starting the company in the middle of COVID, Jake and his co-founders have scaled Grow Therapy to around a million patient...
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The AI Engineer Every Industrial Company Will Need | Paul Eremenko (P-1 AI) & Jeff Immelt (NEA)
Paul Eremenko is co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI, the company building Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer that works alongside human engineering teams. Jeff Immelt is a Venture Partner at NEA and former Chairman and CEO of GE, and he's joining P-1 AI's board after leading the firm's...
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How One Hacked Library Can Take Down Thousands of Companies | Feross Aboukhadijeh (Socket)
Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket, which he started in 2021 to help companies detect and defend against software supply chain attacks. A prolific open source maintainer whose packages are downloaded a billion times a month, Feross recently closed a Series C at a billion-dollar...
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Recall Sessions: Why Two Finance Leaders Are Ditching Excel for Claude Code | Jeff Cobourn (Gusto) & Rohit Divate (Tide)
Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto. Somrat Niyogi, General...
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Why Nobody Needs Metrics or Traces Anymore | Sherwood Callaway (Sazabi)
Sherwood Callaway is the founder and CEO of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform, and a repeat YC founder. He previously worked as an early infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he built the systems that kept one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world running. Village Global…
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Why AI Agents Can't Be Trusted Yet (And How to Fix It) | Moe Katib (One)
Moe Katib is the founder and CEO of One (withone.ai), an enterprise-level infrastructure platform that gives AI agents authenticated, reliable access to hundreds of software applications and verified actions. Before One, he spent 12 years solving enterprise integration problems, building the...
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Recall Sessions: He Built the Software That Runs 1 in 6 Laundromats in America | Alex Jekowsky
Alex Jekowsky is the co-founder and CEO of Cents, the all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for the laundry industry. A Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, he sold his first company at 23, and last month closed a $140 million Series C. Cents now powers more than 1 in 6 laundromats in the...
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LIVE: The Bull Case for SaaS in the Age of AI | Aaron Levie and Reid Hoffman
In this episode of the Village Global Podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie joins Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman and host Ben Casnocha live on stage at a Village Global event. They get into what agents actually do to SaaS, where startups should go on offense, and what twenty years of building Box…
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Recall Sessions: The PR Playbook Most Founders Get Wrong — Paul Loeffler & Kelly Boynton
Somrat Niyogi sits down with two of the most experienced comms operators in tech: Kelly Boynton, Head of Communications at Gusto, and Paul Loeffler, former SVP of Communications and Brand at BILL. Kelly spent 15 years across agency and in-house roles before Gusto, including at Facebook…
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Why Your Next Executive Assistant Will Be an AI — Deon Nicholas (Espa.ai)
Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor. Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with...
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Recall Sessions: Most SaaS Companies Won't Survive This - Jake Saper (Emergence)
Jake Saper is General Partner at Emergence Capital, the firm that was the first institutional investor in Zoom and an early backer of Salesforce, Veeva, Bill.com, and Together.ai. Jake has been at Emergence for over a decade and has led investments in Assembled, Unify, and Ironclad. Jake has...
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Recall Sessions: Building a $1.1B Category That Didn't Exist | Nick Mehta (Gainsight)
Nick Mehta is the former CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. Vista Equity Partners acquired Gainsight for $1.1 billion. Nick ran the company as CEO for 13 years before stepping into a board role last year. Nick...
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Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi)
Dara Ladjevardian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphi, a platform that lets you create a digital version of your mind — an interactive, always-on presence that can share your knowledge, coach others, and represent you at scale. Delphi has raised $16 million in a Series A led by Sequoia, with...
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Recall Sessions: AI-Native CRMs and What It Takes to Replace Salesforce | Doug Camplejohn & Patrick Thompson
Doug Camplejohn is the Founder & CEO of Coffee, an AI-first CRM. Doug co-founded Fliptop (acquired by LinkedIn), led Sales Navigator at LinkedIn as VP of Product, then ran Sales Cloud at Salesforce as EVP and GM. He's also had exits with Mi5 Networks (acquired by Symantec) and MyPlay (acquired by...
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Worldbuilders: Why Most AI Startups Won't Survive | The Model Economy by Sumeet Singh
Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild, lays out his investing thesis for the AI era: The Model Economy. His argument is that most AI startups being built today are fighting a losing battle against the scaling laws. The models themselves will swallow the application layer. So…
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Worldbuilders: The Largest Infrastructure Project in History with Evan Conrad (SF Compute)
This is the first episode of Worldbuilders, a new series on the Village Global Podcast guest-hosted by Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild. Sumeet sits down with Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of the San Francisco Compute Company, to talk about the real economics of GPU compute…
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Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah
Bhavin Shah spent years building Moveworks into the agentic AI platform behind employee support at Toyota, Siemens, Unilever, and hundreds more. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion. In this episode of Recall Sessions, Somrat Niyogi goes back to the beginning. How did...
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Parth Patil on Coding Agents, Building Reid AI, and What It Takes to Operate at the Frontier
Parth Patil built Reid Hoffman's AI digital twin from scratch, without engineering team or a software background. Before that, he was a data scientist at Clubhouse. When GPT-4 came out, he cashed out his 401k and spent four months talking to the model every day. He came out of that running Reid's...
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Recall Sessions: Tomer London on Building Gusto from ZenPayroll to 400,000 Customers
Welcome to Recall Sessions - a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital. Each episode goes deep on how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. In this episode, Somrat sits down with Tomer London, Co-Founder and Chief Product...
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[Highlight] What Happens to Society When We Live to 100? with Celine Halioua
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner. Celine discusses what's still non-consensus in longevity, how cognitive aging shapes our preferences and worldviews, and…
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Recall Sessions: Itai Damti on Embedded Finance and the Art of Getting Your First Customer
Welcome to Recall Sessions – a new series on the Village Global Podcast. Hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital, each episode goes deep on go-to-market: how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. In this episode, Itai Damti, Co-Founder & CEO of Unit, joins...
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[Highlight] Why Dog Longevity Drugs Are the Fastest Path to Human Longevity with Celine Halioua
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner. Celine discusses Loyal's 10-year vision for expanding into cats and humans, why the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to...
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[Highlight] Shishir Mehrotra on Big Tech vs. Startup Careers and Building a World-Class Hiring Process
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly), and Village Global's Ben Casnocha. Shishir and Ben discuss the "Silicon Valley Inc. vs. Google Inc." framework for understanding career tradeoffs, when recruitment firms add value vs....
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Celine Halioua On The Science and Business of Making Dogs Live Longer
Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, joins Village Global VP Sam Kirschner to discuss her journey building a biotech company developing the first FDA-approved drugs for lifespan extension – going dogs first. Loyal has raised over $250M and recently closed its Series C after clearing major...
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[Highlight] Why Henry Shi Chose Anthropic Over Starting Another Company
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Henry Shi (Anthropic, co-founder of Super.com) and Village Global GP Anne Dwane. Henry and Anne discuss the three paths available to successful founders, why traditional venture capital often becomes a sales job, the rise of "seed-strapping"...
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[Highlight] The Future of Coding and Work in the Age of AI with Henry Shi
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Henry Shi (Anthropic, co-founder of Super.com) and Village Global GP Anne Dwane. Henry and Anne discuss how AI coding tools have evolved from autocomplete to junior engineers, what skills will matter when writing code becomes obsolete, and...
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[Highlight] Grammarly's Evolution into an AI Agent Platform with Shishir Mehrotra
This is an excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly). Shishir discusses why Grammarly is one of the most underestimated companies in Silicon Valley, how it's transforming from a grammar tool into an open platform for AI agents, and why…
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[Highlight] Shishir Mehrotra (Superhuman CEO) on Careers at Big Tech vs. Startups
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly). Shishir discusses the fundamental differences between working at big tech companies versus startups, why skills at large companies are less transferable than you think, and what...
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From $200 Million Revenue Founder to Frontier Lab with Henry Shi
Henry Shi, founder of Super.com (scaled to $200M+ annual revenue, 50 million users, profitable), joins Village Global GP Anne Dwane to discuss his unconventional path from founder to Anthropic. Henry shares why he stepped back from his company at its peak, what he learned during his gap year...
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[Highlight] Eric Yuan & Reid Hoffman on Building Enduring Companies
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan and LinkedIn co-founder / Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman. Eric and Reid discuss what separates companies that last from those that flame out, why hypergrowth can hide critical problems, and how founders...
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How To Build Your First Go-to-Market Team with Swing Search
Magnus Sandstrom and Debbie Wiss are senior partners at Swing Search, specializing in go-to-market roles at director, VP, and head levels for nearly 20 years. They joined Village Global partner Lindsay Pettingill to discuss the mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales and marketing...
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[Highlight] Eric Yuan & Reid Hoffman on Startups vs. Big Tech in the AI Era
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Eric and Reid discuss where startups can compete against big tech in the AI era, why enterprise adoption of AI tools remains surprisingly slow, and what founders should…
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The Future of Work with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Reid Hoffman
Eric Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. Both are luminary LPs at Village Global. They joined Village GP Ben Casnocha to discuss the future of AI agents, digital twins in the workplace, selling AI to enterprise, and what it takes to build companies…
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[Highlight] Airtable's Howie Liu on What Founders Get Wrong About Building Product
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCR-zFXiXKA&t=2s Howie spent 2.5 years building Airtable before launching – and only talked to about a dozen customers in that time. In this…
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Power, Narrative, and Influence: Van Jones and Promise CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Van Jones is a political commentator, author, and former Obama White House advisor. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is founder and CEO of Promise, a software company transforming how governments deliver services to people in need. They joined the Village Global team to discuss what founders building in...
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Scaling in the AI Era with PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada
Jennifer Tejada is CEO of PagerDuty, a public company serving 30,000+ customers worldwide. She joined Village Global GP Ben Casnocha for a masterclass on scaling in the AI era, followed by live feedback sessions with four founders building AI-native companies. Takeaways: Enterprise sentiment has...
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Vibe Coding and The Rise of AI Agents with Amjad Masad and Yohei Nakajima
Amjad Masad (@amasad), founder and CEO of Replit, and Yohei Nakajima (@yoheinakajima), Managing Partner at Untapped Capital, joined Village Global partner Ben Casnocha for a live masterclass with Village Global founders. Takeaways: AI agents are rapidly evolving, with coding and deep research...
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Executing as a Best-In-Class Firm: Operational Excellence From The Inside of Over 50 VC Firms with Kristen Ostro of Strut Consulting
Jacob Mullins, Venture Partner at Village Global, welcomes Kristen Ostro, founder and CEO of Strut Consulting, to discuss the foundational elements that set venture capital firms up for long-term success. Kristen shares how her career began under the mentorship of Dick Kramlich at NEA, where she...
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The Secret to Startup M&A: How To Set Your Companies Up for Big Outcomes with Ezra Roizen of Advsr
Jacob Mullins, Venture Partner at Village Global, sits down with Ezra Roizen, General Manager of Advsr and author of "The Magic Box Paradigm," to demystify the world of startup mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on Jacob’s private podcast, VC Mastermind, which we are cross-posting on the Village…
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Abhay Parasnis on Creating Moats, AI Strategy, and Selling to Enterprise
Abhay Parasnis is founder and CEO of Typeface, is former CTO/CPO at Adobe, and sits on the board of Dropbox and Schneider Electric. He joined Ben Casnocha, co-founder and partner at Village Global, for a live masterclass for Village Global founders. Takeaways: If you can break into the top tier…
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Fundraising in AI with Aaron Harris
Aaron Harris was a partner at YC for 7.5 years where he funded Deel, OpenSea, Scale AI, Rappi, Lattice, and others. He also built YC's Series A program where he worked with founders on over 200 Series As and Bs that raised in excess of $3B in capital. He joined Sam Kirschner, VP at Village…
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Hiring Technical Talent with Kathy Copic and Lindsay Pettingill
Kathy Copic is founder of Fieldwork Partners, where she works closely with early stage companies on scoping technical projects, getting early ML models into production, and helping them hire. She was interviewed by Lindsay Pettingill, Investment Partner at Village Global, during this masterclass...
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Eynat Guez of Papaya Global on Mastering Enterprise Sales and Building Long-Term Partnerships
Eynat Guez, founder and CEO of Papaya Global, was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and partner at Village Global, during this masterclass for Village Global founders. Takeaways: Show up to key meetings as the founder or executive team — don’t just send the sales team. It signals to the...
About this show
The Village Global podcast takes you inside the world of venture capital and technology, featuring enlightening interviews with entrepreneurs, investors, and tech industry leaders. Learn more at www.villageglobal.vc.
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