Founders Uncensored \\ Unfiltered startup founder stories

Kris Beevers sold one company and immediately started another. Kris Beevers is the co-founder and CEO of NetBox Labs, previously co-founder of NS1 (acquired by IBM in 2023), and he's started four companies total, including a failed wood products business. He explains why he'd rather kill a company than lose a friendship, why he built in New York instead of San Francisco, and why he never moved past "I don't know what I'm doing" even after multiple exits.

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Meta's Integrity team had 1,000 people and still couldn't keep up with bad actors. Brett Levenson, CEO and co-founder of Moonbounce, led that team before realizing human review can't scale against non-deterministic AI, so he built the control layer instead. He walks through the moment he understood AI had made application security non-deterministic overnight, why 75% of his engineering resources went into one problem: turning vague policy into decisions enforceable in real time, and the case for chatbots that redirect a self-harming teen to a parent instead of just answering the prompt. He also gets into recruiting his Apple co-founder over lunch, and the early mistake of treating enterprise sales like a technical problem instead of a relationship one.

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A pivot most founders never admit to considering out loud. Caitlin Leksana is CEO and Co-Founder of Fazeshift, an AI platform for accounts receivable backed by Gradient and Y Combinator, and she's lived the failed startup that made this one work. She and her co-founder killed their crypto marketing startup after a false-positive revenue signal, fired a Japanese conglomerate client mid-shutdown, and found the real idea from a color-coded spreadsheet she'd built just to track invoices. The company has since raised $27 million and grown to 35 people by doing the thing she almost skipped the first time: calling customers before building anything.

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A competitor raised 25 times more capital and still isn't winning. Steve Ancheta, Founder and CEO of Zig.ai, spent 16 years carrying quota before betting on a sales execution platform built to close the gaps that burn reps out. He explains why he benchmarks his messaging against AI labs instead of competitors, why the first customer signed on a working but ugly prototype over a polished one, and the five-minute whiteboard reset an early investor forced on him after funding closed.

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What separates founders who scale from founders who burn out? For the launch of Founders Uncensored, host Peter Day sits down with four-time founder and super{set} General Partner Tom Chavez to unpack the hard lessons of building companies and evolving from founder to CEO. Tom shares why founders need to move faster when a business model isn’t working, delegate real authority, master the less glamorous parts of leadership, and prioritize their health along the way. They also explore how AI is accelerating business velocity, why founders should focus on making new mistakes instead of repeating old ones, and how maintaining a strong sense of agency can help leaders navigate the toughest moments of entrepreneurship.

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