ORIGINS

Gordon Ritter co-founded Emergence Capital, backing iconic brands like Salesforce, Veeva Systems, Zoom, and more.

We cover his life story in great detail — ranging from his father’s bloody face on the New York Times front page to founding Emergence in 2003. How did he realize $8 billion in fund returns, co-found a company with @benioff, AND run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps?

This conversation is a great example of the culture core to Gordon and Emergence, all underpinned by a relentless drive for competition and optimism.In the best way possible, Gordon is an animal.

He grew up moving from a suburb of Manhattan to a small seaside town in Maine. His parents, both reporters for Life Magazine, instilled in him a deep sense of curiosity, conviction, and courage.

After a successful but unfulfilling stint in banking he left to found two startups before a fateful partnership with Marc Benioff in the earliest days of Salesforce. Seeing the immense, non-consensus potential of the cloud, Gordon then co-founded Emergence. Throughout his life, he’s been driven by a philosophy of "doing hard things," not just in business but in his personal life.

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We discuss the life story of Notion’s co-founder, Akshay Kothari. Notion is a productivity tool, valued at $10B+ with over 100M users. Akshay grew up in Western India in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat. He has two brothers, Nikunj & Pranav, and is the middle child. Their family business centered around finance and loan-giving, common for some Indian families at that time. Early on, Akshay was quite terrible at school… once all-consumed by the desire of being a cricket player. A pursuit that his loving mom supported, with the caveat that he must work & practice accordingly if that was his dream. After realizing cricket wasn’t going to be his calling, Akshay took inspiration from his older brother Pranav and made his way to the USA to study engineering at Purdue. Through a series of unfortunate, yet equally fortunate, circumstances Akshay made his way to Stanford for a graduate degree. On his first day, Lehman Brothers collapsed in the Great Financial Crisis. Later in his Stanford tenure, he founded a news reader app called Pulse. That same year, Steve Jobs announced them as his favorite iPad app on stage at WWDC. Later, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $100M. This prompted Akshay’s move to India to spearhead LinkedIn’s growth there, and also a series of angel checks. The first of which was Notion. For four years, the company made minimal progress. When they finally started seeing PMF, Akshay joined as a co-founder alongside Ivan and Simon. Fast forward to the present day, Akshay has been at Notion for just over 7 years.

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This week, we cover the life story of Dwarkesh Patel, host of The Dwarkesh Podcast. Dwarkesh grew up in India until the age of eight, when his family moved to the United States for his father's medical career. His childhood was marked by frequent moves across the country, from Bismarck, North Dakota, to West Virginia and West Texas. While in college, he became deeply interested in intellectual ideas, which led him to start his podcast by sending a cold email to his first guest, economist Bryan Caplan. The podcast was nearly a short-lived experiment. As Patel was about to graduate with no job lined up, he received a cold email from Anil Varanasi offering him $10,000 to keep the project alive for six more months. Soon after, a blog post he wrote earned a public comment from Jeff Bezos, who told him to "please keep it up," cementing his decision to pursue it full-time. Today, The Dwarkesh Podcast is one of the top interview shows in the world, where Patel speaks with leaders in tech and science—including Mark Zuckerberg, Ilya Sutskever, and Patrick Collison—to develop a better model of the world.

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This week, we cover the life story of Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel. Rauch grew up in Lanús, a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He taught himself to code and by 11, he was freelancing online for clients abroad. In his teens, he became well-known for creating several influential open-source projects, including Socket.IO and Mootools. Rauch then dropped out of high school to work in Switzerland, and after a stint there, he moved to San Francisco. Around 2015, he founded Vercel (originally called ZEIT) out of Dogpatch Labs with the vision of radically simplifying frontend deployment through tools like Next.js, which his team also maintains. Today, Vercel powers the websites of Netflix, MrBeast, Supreme, and many more… and valued multiple billions of dollars.

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This week, we cover the life story of John Andrew Entwistle. He was once a Formula race car driver, during which he broke his back multiple times, and he even threw a house party that shut down his entire town. Amidst similar teenage years, John Andrew was sued by Microsoft, where he subsequently cc’d his dad on the email — a famed lawyer who did the Bernie Madoff and FTX cases. Later on, John Andrew became a Thiel Fellow and then sold his first company — Coder.com. From there, he started Wander.com… a luxury home rental company that’s now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. John Andrew has some of the most unique life stories and is a sheer force to compete with.

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Jessica Mah is the founder of inDinero and Mahway, a venture studio backing companies in aerospace, legaltech, and biotech. We discussed growing up in Westchester to immigrant parents, teaching herself to code at 10, and burning out from her first startup by 14. At 15, she dropped out of high school, enrolled in college, and later founded inDinero through Y Combinator at just 19 — at the time, the youngest female founder accepted. We covered her early struggles with retention, laying off most of her team, and rebuilding inDinero from the ground up. In her early 20s, she was on the cover of Inc. magazine and deemed “female Mark Zuckerberg". Later, Jessica stepped down as CEO after realizing she was miserable despite the company’s success. That shift led her to start Mahway — her “dream job”. Today, she lives radically transparently, races cars, flies planes, and redefines what it means to play the long game.

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Joshua Browder is the founder of DoNotPay, a legal tech company that automates consumer rights protection. We discuss the Russian mafia stalking his family, interviewing Warren Buffett at 18, building DoNotPay to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and much more. Josh is also a Thiel Fellow, Stanford dropout, and prominent early-stage investor.

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Jack Altman is the founder of Lattice, a now multi-billion dollar company. He recently launched Alt Capital, a 150M early-stage venture fund. We discuss Jack’s suburban upbringing and going from Princeton to quitting investment banking in his first year. This led to a start in venture capital, followed by a tenure at Teespring, the fastest-growing YC company at the time, and the eventual origins of Lattice.

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Haseeb Qureshi is a former pro poker player and now the founder of Dragonly, a crypto-focused venture firm managing $3B+. We discussed growing up in Texas to immigrant parents, his foray into the internet, and how he turned $50 into many millions with poker… a feat that his Muslim parents thought was fake. From there, we discussed the controversial end of his poker career and his early beginnings in tech and Silicon Valley. Haseeb is a world-class storyteller, and it was a pleasure to dive into his life story. We hope you enjoy this episode and look out for a part 2 covering the latter half of his story.

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Spenser Skates is the founder of Amplitude, a digital analytics platform. We discussed growing up in Boston to immigrant parents, his struggle of feeling like he wasn’t amazing at anything, and his path to quant, YC, and Amplitude. Spenser was mentored by Sam Altman and the now legendary Matt Huang of Paradigm, among others. Way back, Amplitude spun out of his previously hot yet failed company, Sonalight (YC W12). Now, Amplitude generates $300M+ every year and is public on the NYSE.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit originsmedia.substack.com