Shane Ray Show

I sat down with two friends, Caleb Thornton, founder of Seed to Table, and John Reardon, Audit Managing Director at KPMG.

Caleb built Seed to Table after one bad conference he attended. Now he throws his own events around the US to help founders fund their companies. Several startups have walked out with oversubscribed rounds and even a $10M deal. 

We talked about what gets founders funded. And what you should avoid in a pitch. 

Check out all their events here: seed2table.us

Rachel Miner, truly an exceptional person, founded Bellwether International and leads Sigma, the simulation software behind this episode - built to model how genocide and mass atrocities unfold before they happen. 

She's got degrees from the London School of Economics and Columbia, and spent years working on policy in the U.S. Senate before this.

A 2021 Truman Scholar, she's presented her genocide-prevention work to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and was recently at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

To me, this is classic PeaceTech with huge possibilities! Enjoy! 

Hosted by Shane Ray Martin - VC at B Ventures, running the PeaceTech Accelerator, LinkedIn Top Voice in Negotiation, startup builder, and mediator.

I'm humbled to share this with you! 

Because of the hard work of the founders in the PeaceTech Accelerator, we closed $1.27M in value this year (grants, contracts won, and VC raised).

All of it done with one goal: serve the person in front of us! 

At Demo Day, 225 people showed up. One attendee told me it was the best event they'd ever been to, and that it fed their soul.

We're opening 8 spots for the next cohort. If you're building dual-use PeaceTech and you're ready to turn a great product into signed revenue, apply below.

Founders Apply: https://forms.gle/hcXJzh6oTgwdvnHu5
Demo Day Dec 3: https://luma.com/9y30059y

Dom Csehill and Justin Luce are building Thalrix. They're in the PeaceTech Accelerator and they pitch at Demo Day in Arlington on July 30th.

How this all started is, they walked into airports to sell drone detection and found something worse — every site already has cameras, radar, and flight data, but nobody is looking at all of it at once. A security guard once drove onto an active runway and it took 15 minutes for anyone to realize he was about to get hit by a plane.

They built SPIDER to fix that. One screen, every sensor, alerts in under 5 seconds. 

Hosted by Shane Ray Martin — VC at B Ventures, guy running the PeaceTech Accelerator, LinkedIn Top Voice in Negotiation, startup builder, certified peace mediator.

Raising VC money soon? Don't sign anything yet.

In this episode, Shane sits down with Will Halliday, attorney at Williams Mullen and former investment banker, to break down the documents every founder faces: SAFEs, convertible notes, and term sheets.

You'll learn:

- What a SAFE is and the one number that determines your ownership
- What term sheets do and why they matter, even though they're non-binding
- How dilution works and why founders get burned

Lots of examples. No law degree required! 

Connect with Will on LinkedIn. He's based in Virginia and DC.

🎧 Hosted by Shane Ray Martin - venture investor at B Ventures and CEO of the PeaceTech Accelerator.

A chatbot told a teenager how to die.

That is the problem Arul and Shirali Nigam set out to fix.

In this episode, meet the co-founder of Circuit Breaker Labs, a startup backed by A16Z Speedrun that stress-tests AI before it ever reaches a real person.

They call it the crash test dummy for AI. Their team runs thousands of fake conversations to find the moment a chatbot breaks. Then they patch it before someone gets hurt.

✅ What you'll learn:

• Why AI guardrails pass the easy test and fail on real people
• The "grading your own homework" flaw in how most companies score AI safety
• How a homemade flyer at a conference turned into a major contract
• Why safety becomes the next big moat, the way cybersecurity did
• How the US can move fast on AI and stay safe at the same time

🎧 Hosted by Shane Ray Martin, venture investor at B Ventures, CEO of the PeaceTech Accelerator, former startup founder, LinkedIn Top Voice in Negotiation, and certified peace mediator helping founders scale technology and peace.

Maksym Tereshchenko is building a startup while his country is at war.  

✅ What you'll learn:

• Stop founder-driven sales and build a predictable machine
• Survive the mental toll of doing 10 jobs all at once
• Hire your first GTM person without taking a guess
• Spot supply chain disruption before it hits you
• Leverage relationships to close deals

Reach out to Max:

LinkedIn: Maksym Tereshchenko
Website: mantisanalytics.com

If you're a faith-driven founder or investor - this one's for you! 

I've been so fortunate to get to know Richard, Phil, Jake, and so many others in the FDI "Faith Driven Investor" community, and this conversation was a chance to go deep on how Sovereign's Capital built a $1B+ fund rooted in faith. 

Richard Cunningham walks me through the full story - from Henry Kaestner getting turned down 40 times on Sand Hill Road, to bootstrapping Bandwidth.com to IPO, to launching Sovereign's Capital, Faith Driven Entrepreneur, and Faith Driven Investor.

Then we get into the heart of the fund of funds: how they pick managers, what "descriptive vs. prescriptive" faith really means in the marketplace, and why capital might be one of the most powerful forms of influence on the planet! 

Richard is a man for the people and loves Jesus; this is a good one.

🎧 Hosted by Shane Ray Martin — investor at B Ventures, Founder of the PeaceTech Accelerator, LinkedIn Top Voice in Negotiation, author, and certified peace mediator helping founders build technology that predicts, prevents, and manages conflict.

Scott Dubin helps run RAISE, the event where 100 emerging fund managers get in front of 330 LPs in one day in San Francisco. 

What we get into:

• Why "I make intros and serve on boards" scores a 5 out of 10
• The application section where most GPs lose  
• How to use your existing LPs as a weapon onsite
• The follow up email everyone sends that gets ignored
• Why the GP who printed their logo on the sidewalk had the right idea

My honest take: most GPs treat RAISE like a conference. It's not. It's a long form sales pitch that starts the second you submit your application and doesn't end for a year. Scott walks through how the LP selection committee actually scores you, what gets you a 5 vs a 10, and the follow up game that turned one Fund 1 GP's week in SF into $16M. 

If you're raising a fund, or thinking about it, apply before June 1.

Link: https://events.raiseglobal.co/event/2026GlobalSummit/gps-apply-to-attend 

📅 Apps close June 1, 11:59pm PT.

RAISE Week is Oct 19 to 22.
Main event Oct 22 at the Presidio. 
GP Day training the day before with NVCA and Venture Forward.

🎧 Hosted by Shane Ray Martin, VC at B Ventures, CEO of the PeaceTech Accelerator, LinkedIn Top Voice in Negotiation, and certified peace mediator.

In today's episode of The Shane Ray Show, Shane sits down with Pianpian Xu Guthrie - founder and CEO of Amotions AI, and a Yale-trained sociologist who spent her career obsessing over one question: why do people trust you?

Her answer became a company. Amotions AI is a real-time AI teammate that listens live on your sales calls — detecting tone, emotional signals, and conversation patterns — then coaches you on exactly what to say next.

✅ What you'll learn:

• Why deals move at the speed of trust — and how to build it faster
• How Emotions AI detects skepticism, hesitation, and buying signals in real time
• What founders with a full pipeline and zero closes should change immediately
• How emotional intelligence differs across cultures — and why it matters for global deals
• Where AI sales tools are headed in the next 5 years

🎧 Hosted by Shane Ray Martin — venture investor, CEO of the PeaceTech Accelerator, LinkedIn Top Voice in Negotiation, and certified peace mediator.