Sara and Vas debrief on Vas’s recent trip to India, how founders use geography to their advantage, and what tech can learn from LVMH  about taste. They also share some advice for founders on pitching their stories to investors. 

This Week’s Five Takeaways

1. Where you build can shape how you win. On his recent visit to India, Vas noticed a verve for the messy work of systems integration and solutions engineering he hadn’t seen elsewhere. Different geographies impart strategic advantages, whether it’s talent with a knack for rolling up sleeves, a longtime connection to a particular industry, or simply a certain kind of ambition in the air.  

2. Commodified code requires aspirational brands. As AI lowers barriers to production, there’s been a lot of chatter about taste (we love Sarah Guo’s essay on this). But taste is more than a buzzword; it’s a durable business advantage. (Just look at LVMH and Herman Miller.) Founders should study how luxury brands build worlds for which their products are the ticket to enter.

3. Taste is more than your color scheme and logo. Aesthetic instincts are a start, but the most interesting companies right now are pairing those instincts with a nuanced, almost anthropological understanding of their customer. Taste applied is all about solving the right problems with thought and charm.

4. The founding designer is having a moment. Taste as an ascendant differentiator means designers are taking more prominent roles, earlier. And whether you’re aiming upmarket or targeting the masses, this key early hire can ensure you’re delivering on your brand promise in a way that feels coherent and consistently delights your customers and users.

   5. It’s okay to talk about the messy parts of building a company. Don’t be afraid to show your work when discussing your project with an investor. That includes false starts, discarded ideas, and tests that didn’t go as planned. These stories often contain nuggets about how you think and work that are really what’s important to a potential partner.
   

Most of us think of space as a future possibility. The reality is that space is our present: everything from our maps apps, bank transactions, and national defense depends on operations currently floating in orbit around us. That strategic importance also makes space vulnerable. Enter True Anomaly: the defense startup is dedicated to protecting the United States and its allies’ activity in space. In this episode of Spotlight On, Accel’s Jonathan Turner sat down with True Anomaly Co-Founder and CEO Even Rogers to discuss his leap from uniformed service to life as a first-time founder and the fast-evolving landscape of space defense. Their conversation covers: Even’s path into the space tech industry, why designing for space means you have to “invent the universe”, setting and sticking to your goals, selecting the right team, and why True Anomaly has learned to view failure as a critical part of the process—and developed a standard for doing it well.

AI has made advanced cybersecurity methods more widely available—and put sophisticated cyberattack techniques into the hands of threat actors everywhere. CrowdStrike has spent the last decade and a half reshaping the security landscape, and now, the company continues to reimagine what state-of-the-art looks like when both the good guys and the bad actors are learning what these powerful tools can do for them.

In this special episode of Spotlight On, recorded live at Accel during the RSA Conference, Accel’s Sameer Gandhi joins CrowdStrike Founder and CEO George Kurtz to explore the knotty challenges—and fascinating opportunities—that characterize the security industry now. They discuss how AI has changed the hierarchy of cyber threats, whether George would do anything differently if he founded CrowdStrike today, and the lessons founders can learn from F1, where team collaboration and mental toughness power the highest performers—and a fraction of a second can change everything.

Vercel founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch still remembers the thrill of loading new software onto his family’s computer as a kid living in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This was the Windows ’95 era, when software came on CDs and floppy disks. He’d already begun to wonder: what if this whole process of distribution and deployment was much, much simpler? This question would drive his career and, ultimately, lead him to found Vercel.

In this episode of Spotlight On, Guillermo Rauch joins Accel’s Dan Levine to discuss his journey founding and building Vercel. He shares the story of dropping out of high school to take his first job as an engineer, why he believes great deployment infrastructure powers innovation, and why a founder’s job is to bring their customers to the “promised land” of their vision, step by incremental step.

The Netflix culture deck has been viewed over 17 million times and covered by the New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Sheryl Sandberg called it one of the most important documents to come out of Silicon Valley. Detractors called it brutal (which, Patty and Jessica reveal during our interview, was by design). Why did Netflix spend 10 years and thousands of hours creating this document? And what can founders learn about molding culture and building teams from the people behind it?

In this special episode of Spotlight On, recorded live at the Accel People Summit, Accel’s Pete Clarke speaks with hosts of the TruthWorks podcast: Patty McCord, author and former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, and Jessica Neal, former Chief HR Officer at Netflix and Venture Partner at TCV. Patty and Jessica share the real story behind the culture deck, why Netflix chose a radically different approach to compensation, and the mistakes that still keep them up at night.

Welcome to a Very Brief Short Report: (kinda) short listens on the biggest ideas in tech right now, from Accel’s Vas Natarajan and Sara Ittelson. This week, Sara and Vas try to make sense of the “chaotic change” happening as they share observations from Accel’s latest portfolio review. They discuss why teams that collaborate in-office are thriving, how data isn’t the moat it once was, and what it means when everyone’s vibecoding (Sara and Vas’s teen nephew included).

This Week’s Five Takeaways

1. The energy is snapping back to San Francisco. Tech talent dispersed across the US (and the world) during the pandemic. Lately, we’re seeing an uptick in teams collaborating five days a week, right here in SF.

2. As switching costs ease, data becomes less of a moat. Portability is easier than ever. When platforms can quickly gather—and, more crucially, use LLMs to make sense of—enterprise data, businesses need to consider how else they can drive retention. The pain of migrating simply isn’t enough to get a contract renewed.

3. A lot of talented people are founding right now. It’s an exciting time to build, with AI lowering barriers to entry and powering rapid scale. It’s also more competitive than ever. A slick demo and a world-class team are the default assumptions—you need to bring an additional edge, like a distribution advantage or a discerning sense of taste.

4. Build vs. buy is coming to consumers. Enterprises with massive developer teams have always had the option to simply build custom solutions. Vibecoding gives end-users this option, too.

5. Creativity is in a moment of “IKEA-fication.” AI means everyone’s a medium-level creator. But there’s real hunger for products and experiences that feel deeply human. Make something that feeds people’s craving for connection and authenticity, and you can command a premium price point.

Before Eoin Hinchy founded automation platform Tines, he spent more than a decade on security teams at DocuSign, Deloitte, and eBay, where he saw firsthand the time eaten away by important but repetitive–and not-exactly-thrilling—tasks. He and Tines co-founder Thomas Kinsella decided to do something about it, launching Tines from a cramped office in Dublin. Now, Tines saves their 400+ global customers a mind-boggling amount of time, performing more than one billion automated actions each week.

In this episode of Spotlight On, Eoin joins Accel’s Luca Bocchio to discuss how Tines got here, including: why you can argue like cats and dogs and still be founder “soulmates,” why founders don’t (necessarily) need to move to the Bay Area anymore, and what he learned from throwing out parts of the startup playbook—and trusting his instincts instead.

From the beginning, the backend-as-a-service platform Supabase has done things a little differently. Building on Postgres instead of a proprietary engine. Putting data portability at the core of their product. Going all-in on global hiring from day one. And yes, naming themselves after a Nicki Minaj song because they thought it would make a funny meme. 

The meme has stuck, but Supabase has scaled. In this episode of Spotlight On, Supabase CEO and co-founder Paul Copplestone joins Accel’s Arun Mathew and Gonzalo Mocorrea to discuss how these contrarian bets have paid off, and how the platform has stayed true to its “by developers, for developers” roots. Their conversation covers: why Supabase bet early on Postgres and data portability, the difference between “playing startup” and strategy, how they manage an entirely distributed team, and how a founder’s role changes as the company grows. 

While we take a quick mid-season break, we're re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from previous seasons. This week, we're revisiting our conversation with Transcend President Kate Parker.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence have sparked an outcry for control over personal data. While regulators, politicians, and the business community have been thinking about how to improve data privacy, there is still much more work to do. Kate Parker, Transcend’s President, will discuss the progress in data governance, how companies can adopt and build secure AI servicese, and why it is critical to give power back to the user.

Questions around data and privacy will only become more important and complex as AI evolves. Since 2017, Transcend’s privacy platform has been used by major enterprises like Robinhood and Patreon to answer questions about their data: What data do we have? Where is it going? Who has access to it? With user demand for control rising, it isn’t just about ticking a compliance box—it’s the key to a company’s survival in the future.

Efforts in Europe, such as GDPR and the AI Act, along with California’s CCPA, represent tangible steps toward putting guardrails in place. On this episode of Spotlight On: AI, Kate Parker, and Vas Natarajan will discuss the latest in data governance, and share how to enhance your company’s privacy posture to keep user data safe in our AI-driven world. 

“Personal data within most companies goes off like a confetti gun. It gets into every SaaS system, every data warehouse. You have to pull the confetti back together and hand it back to the user. ” – Kate Parker

While we take a quick mid-season break, we're re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from previous seasons. In honor of RSA later this month, we wanted to revisit some of the conversations we've had with cybersecurity leaders, starting with CrowdStrike's George Kurtz.

Since its inception in 2011, CrowdStrike has had a profound impact on the security landscape. Yet, despite their wildly successful 2019 IPO, there is no finish line for CEO and Co-Founder George Kurtz. With each passing year, the company grows larger, the market opportunities expand, and the need to prevent breaches becomes even more critical. 

In this episode of Spotlight On, George and Accel’s Sameer Gandhi reflect on how their shared vision for a full suite of security solutions on a single platform, which kickstarted the partnership in 2013, has become a reality. As CrowdStrike approaches the 5th anniversary of its IPO, boasting a market cap of $72 billion, George reflects on the company’s enduring success. He shares his learnings as a second-time founder, detailing how he structures his investors and his board, and how his unwavering focus on solving the hard problems first continues to guide the company today.