EO
EO
44 episodes
College Dropout Builds $30M Startup While Fighting Cancer | Jenni AI David Park | EO
7 Nov · 27 min
- Jenni AI grows 15 to 20 percent monthly, sits near $2.5M ARR, and has over 2M users worldwide.
- CEO David Park raised from Jason Calacanis and the AI Grant after eight years of failed startups.
How Leadership Helped Me Increase My Value 200 Times | Jina Kim (2/2) | EO
7 Nov · 13 min
- Jina Kim started as Carta's employee number four and left when it was valued at $8bn.
- A 2016 survey comment that someone did not want to work with Kim led her to trace the issue to Slack messages that read like orders.
How Figma's First Marketer Built the World’s Most Beloved Product l Claire Butler & Corey Lee | EO
7 Nov · 30 min
- Claire Butler joins Figma pre-launch and argues on day one that its design tool, then called Summit, should share the company's Figma name.
- Figma launches without multiplayer and stays in beta to collect user feedback rather than wait for a complete product.
Stop Building The Tech You Need Today #windsurf #ai | EO
7 Nov · 4 min
- Founders should build for where AI technology is going, not where it is today, according to the clip.
- The clip warns that building where technology is already as good as it will be makes long-term differentiation very hard.
They Invested Their Own $1.5M For 6 Years in a Robot | Matic | EO
7 Nov · 17 min
- Matic raised $30m from investors including John and Patrick Collison, Jack Dorsey and Matt Rogers after bootstrapping for six years with $1.5m.
- Mehul Nariyawala says four of the top five most valuable technology companies are hardware startups.
In a Failed Business, Until Building a Notion and Figma-focused Startup | Partly | EO
7 Nov · 18 min
- Partly powers around 40% of all online parts orders, with backers including Figma's Dylan Field and Notion's Akshay.
- Levi Fawcett shut down Allgoods after concluding that competing with marketplaces is fundamentally a terrible idea.
How We Captured Silicon Valley in just 4 months | Crush-it Conference, Rahul Vohra | EO
7 Nov · 22 min
- Superhuman's AI email feature captured Silicon Valley after a four-month sprint led by CEO Rahul Vohra with no ML engineers.
- Vohra says users get through their inbox twice as fast and save four hours or more a week.
30 Years in Silicon Valley: My Journey Since the Internet Revolution | Nextdoor, Nirav Tolia | EO
7 Nov · 28 min
- Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia plans to run 15 years of conversations across 350,000 neighborhoods through an LLM to derive bottom-up cultural norms.
- Nextdoor's NextNextdoor integrates local news and is live in over 11 countries, generating hundreds of millions in revenue as a public company.
My 2 Startups didn't work, But here's what I've become | Meta Mick Johnson (2/2) | EO
7 Nov · 12 min
- Mick Johnson argues startups are a bad financial investment but a great personal one, teaching founders what they are truly capable of.
- He says ex-big-tech founders consistently deprioritise go-to-market, the thing that turns a pretty good product truly great.
How to Become Great at Startup SalesㅣPeter Ahn | EO
7 Nov · 23 min
- Peter Ahn says Dropbox won NBC Universal, a 42,000-employee company, as its first Fortune 500 customer by admitting its largest account had 2,000 employees.
- Bloom wanted to be first, so Dropbox signed a three-year multimillion-dollar deal despite weak enterprise features.
Best Sales Advice from a CEO at a $1B Company | Sift, Kris Nagel (1/2) | EO
7 Nov · 14 min
- Sift CEO Kris Nagel says selling is a process and a science, and advises talking less than 30% of the time.
- Nagel calls selling a team sport where reps lead engineers, marketers and executives who do not report to them.
How We Shape the Future of Hardware | Mytra's Co-Founders Interview | EO
7 Nov · 30 min
- Mytra builds a 700-pound robot that moves 3,000-pound pallets in full 3D, defining warehouses in software.
- CEO Chris Walti says Mytra avoids humanoid moonshots because industrializing legged robots may take decades.
Behind What Seems Like an Overnight Success | Runway Siqi Chen | EO
7 Nov · 17 min
- Runway's revenue triples month over month in July after also tripling the prior month, following a June website launch that goes viral.
- About a year in, Runway restarts its product around planning and forecasting for slightly larger companies.
LeetCode is F*ck #shorts #cluely | EO
7 Nov · 4 min
- An unnamed developer argues LeetCode-style interviews are pointless because they test riddles unrelated to software engineering work.
- Because questions are online, candidates memorize 1,000 of them to chase $200,000 jobs and learn nothing, he says.
From Teenage Blogger to $250M Startup FounderㅣCircle Sid Yadav | EO
7 Nov · 18 min
- Circle, founded in 2019, hit $1M ARR in three months and is on track to double to $16M.
- CEO Sid Yadav ran 1,000 demos in Circle's first year and gave the first 200 customers his phone number.
He Built $100B at Google, Then Failed. Now He Runs an $80B+ Company | Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy
7 Nov · 23 min
- Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy says Neeva failed because its search product was only slightly better than Google, not 10x better.
- At Google, Ramaswamy helped write Eric Schmidt's $100bn revenue plan, then spent five years fixing mobile search monetization.
How to Create a Beloved Product Like Figma | Yuhki Yamashita, Figma CPO | EO
7 Nov · 27 min
- Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita says storytelling is a PM's core job because PMs rarely build and must motivate teams around the right problem.
- Yamashita calls Uber's decision to show riders the price before pickup its hardest product call, betting users should know what they pay.
This Insane AI Video Search Technology Selected by NVIDIA and Snowflake | Twelve Labs, Jae Lee | EO
7 Nov · 29 min
- Twelve Labs builds video foundation models for search and summarization, with over 20,000 developers using its API.
- Twelve Labs has raised about $30m in seed funding after winning the ICCV video understanding competition.
How I Built an $80M Annual Revenue Business in Just 5 Years | Sandbox VR, Steven Zhao | EO
7 Nov · 19 min
- Steven Zhao's Sandbox VR runs 47 locations and $80M in annual revenue after pivoting from consumer games to group VR.
- It survived the winter of VR with two months of runway, cut 80% of staff and went through Chapter 11 during COVID.
How I Hit 10M Users in Just 1 Year l Creati, Ella Zhang | EO
7 Nov · 19 min
- Creati tops 10m downloads and $10m annualized revenue in a year by turning product images into marketing videos.
- Creati's flywheel has influencers post viral templates while brands pay for the platform, funding more influencers and templates.
How First-Time Founders Can Avoid Mistakes | Pelu Tran, Ferrum Health | EO
7 Nov · 18 min
- Pelu Tran says Ferrum Health has closed a $16M Series A and raised $31M total.
- Ferrum Health's first pilot in Asia found almost 50 patients with significant findings doctors had missed.
$230M at 27 — All Because of a Parking Ticket #shorts | EO
7 Nov · 4 min
- The parking-ticket appeal app is valued at $230m with seven full-time employees, or more than $23m each.
- He built software that automates parking-ticket appeals, a market where New York City alone makes $1bn a year.
What VCs Actually Want Beyond an AI Demo | Rebecca Lynn, Canvas Ventures | EO
7 Nov · 15 min
- Rebecca Lynn warns generative AI demos rarely survive production, and well-backed startups have blown up trying to scale.
- Lynn calls first-mover advantage a fallacy, preferring second movers who let others prove the market and launch without technical debt.
What It Takes to Reach $100M+ Revenue as a Startup | CircleCI | EO
7 Nov · 24 min
- CircleCI tops $100M revenue with 300 employees, counting Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, and the US government as customers.
- Jim Rose says target huge markets: a $100B market offers many routes to $10M revenue, unlike a $10M market.
Lessons from Investing in 700+ Startups | Goodwater Capital, Eric Kim | EO
7 Nov · 24 min
- Goodwater Capital has over $3.3bn in committed capital and backs more than 700 seed companies across nearly 50 countries.
- Eric Kim's early Korean bets on Coupang and Kakao, both Series A-stage, returned 100x to 300x at venture scale.
$270 Million Coffee Empire in Indonesia: The Journey Unveiled - Kopi Kenangan | Edward Tritanata | EO
7 Nov · 13 min
- Kopi Kenangan runs 900 stores in two countries six years after launch, raising $270m from Jay-Z, Serena Williams and Sequoia Capital.
- CEO Edward Tritanata built the grab-and-go chain from the Starbucks latte index: a latte costs 30% of daily income in Indonesia versus 2% in the US.
4 Lessons that resulted in a 10x growth for 100+ PMs | Meta Mick Johnson (1/2) | EO
7 Nov · 14 min
- Mick Johnson argues the first thing a PM ships is remembered only for how good it was, not how long it took.
- Mick Johnson says mid-career PMs learn consensus-building but not when to spend credibility to get teams charging up the mountain that matters.
How I Built Three Billion-dollar CompaniesㅣFrank Slootman, CEO at SnowFlake | EO
6 Nov · 17 min
- Frank Slootman says Snowflake grew from zero to $1bn in revenue faster than any company in history.
- In Amp It Up, he argues "okay is terrible" and that doing something great takes barely more mental energy than something passable.
Learn to enjoy FEAR #shorts | EO
6 Nov · 4 min
- Julius, launched in 2023, took about 18 months to reach 2m users, who have made over 10m data visualizations.
- Its founder says going all in was scary, but fear keeps you sharp and comfort breeds complacency.
We helped 100m job applicants across the world | Fountain | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Fountain says its customers hired nearly 3.5m hourly workers worldwide last year.
- SoftBank led an $85m Series C and B Capital added $100m, bringing Fountain's funding to $185m in 18 months.
How High Will Bitcoin Go? Here's the Better Question | Flare, Hugo Philion | EO
6 Nov · 16 min
- Flare, Hugo Philion's third-generation blockchain, hits one million wallets and 100,000 to 150,000 daily active users.
- Philion says DeFi oracles are trusted like banks without legal recourse, so Flare enshrines them in-chain.
When AI can do inspiring things except eliminate jobs | Whisper | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Whisper uses AI to emphasize the voice of the person speaking to the wearer, CEO Andrew Song says.
- Hearing loss affects one in eight Americans, and Song argues subscriptions make expensive hearing aids more affordable.
How I Built a $2.2B Fintech Giant Called Aven | Sadi Khan, Cofounder & CEO | EO
6 Nov · 30 min
- Aven raises over $110M in Series E at $2.2B valuation, doubling its valuation in a year.
- Its Home Equity Card pairs a HELOC with a credit card, cutting interest rates by 50% in 15 minutes.
Building the Most Loved Analytics Tool ($1.05B, $100M ARR, 60+ NPS) | Mixpanel, Amir Movafaghi | EO
6 Nov · 25 min
- Mixpanel CEO Amir Movafaghi says the company once churned almost half its customers yearly while still growing.
- Mixpanel moved from lagging retention to leading NPS, lifting retention from 50% to about 90%.
This Ex-Quant Had to Quit Wall Street to Build a 24/7 Stock Exchange | QFEX, Annanay Kapila
6 Nov · 17 min
- QFEX, Annanay Kapila's 24/7 stock exchange, raised from General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners at close to a $95m valuation pre-revenue.
- Kapila says QFEX will make him about $50m or zero and will never be a $10m ARR business.
Here’s what actually makes you irreplaceable | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh | EO
6 Nov · 30 min
- Po-Shen Loh says AI can probably surpass human creativity, citing Google's AI solving four of six International Math Olympiad problems.
- He argues the key human skill is wanting to create value and delight in others, which requires empathy.
Builders Talk | Leadership Lessons from 3x Founder | Snow Lee | Runbear | EO
6 Nov · 1 h 20 min
- Snow Lee, who sold his first two startups to Kakao and Buzzvil, argues founders and leaders are not the same and that successful founders must become good leaders.
- Runbear's Plugbear, described as Zapier for LLM apps, connects custom GPTs to Slack, Microsoft Teams and HubSpot and signed up over 1,200 companies in three months.
Knowledge of A Lifelong Software Engineer | Benjamin Mann, Delivery Hero | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Delivery Hero CTO Benjamin Mann ensures the company builds the right things for customers two to three years ahead.
- Mann says food delivery requires hundreds of near-perfect steps, and a 10-minute delay feels like a million years to a hungry customer.
Everyone's Chasing AI But This Matters The Most | Ron Gutman, Intrivo | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Gutman advises hiring missionaries over mercenaries and doers over thinkers, warning that credentialed hires can lack startup resilience.
- Intrivo CEO Ron Gutman says the company built a supply-chain platform to bring efficient COVID-19 testing to people during the pandemic.
Mistakes startups make in business plansㅣBob Tinker & Tae Hea Nahm EP 01 | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Tae Hea Nahm pivots Airespace to WiFi only, lays off half the team, and sells it to Cisco for about $500m.
- Bob Tinker says startups must solve a problem with pain and urgency.
10 Questions Every Founder Should Ask Before Scaling | Tabs, Ali Hussain
6 Nov · 26 min
- Ali Hussain spent nearly six months interviewing close to 1,000 finance professionals before starting Tabs.
- His first investor questioned chasing "the most boring problem," but finance and accounting tech was left behind.
Stop watching this video and Go build things l Paul Bragiel, Golden Gate Ventures | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Paul Bragiel argues ideas don't matter because everyone has them, and execution is the only thing that counts.
- Bragiel's early Uber investment returned more than 2,000 times his money, and he still owns 30 to 40% of his original shares.
Advice from the Top 1% of SpaceX Engineer | Sift, Karthik Gollapudi | EO
6 Nov · 22 min
- Karthik Gollapudi, Sift CEO and ex-SpaceX Dragon engineer, says prestige misleads and engineers should spend years on hard problems.
- Sift builds data tools for hardware teams and has raised about $25m, with GV leading its Series A.
Mindset Behind $50B in Revenue | Ema Unlimited, Surojit Chatterjee | EO
6 Nov · 18 min
- Surojit Chatterjee co-founded Google's Mobile Ads team, grew it to $50bn, and now leads Ema, a universal AI employee for enterprises.
- Ema stayed in stealth for a year, building with customers as design partners before announcing its fundraise.