Startupable

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 https://rebrand.ly/ASHSP10

Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://rebrand.ly/JUMPSP10

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Andre Charoo of Maple VC wrote Clay's first check in 2017. Clay is now valued at $7B, a 300x on that check. Back then his peers didn't understand the ambition: give "superpowers to non-developers" with a spreadsheet connected to the internet. Clay then spent six years rebuilding the product before it landed on sales, and most investors read that pace as a bad sign. Andre watched something else. "People think it was a pivot. It wasn't. AI capabilities caught up to their ambition."

Also in this episode:

• Why he still doesn't feel accepted in Silicon Valley, even after a 300x return on Clay
• Why you may never get to 100% conviction at seed, and why that's okay
• Why he's skeptical of startups raising $50M at seed

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Andre's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/acharoo/
Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 https://rebrand.ly/ASHSP7

Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://rebrand.ly/JUMPSP7

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Netlify has 10M developers and raised $105M at a $2B valuation. If it had pitched itself as hosting, cofounder Chris Bach says, "there was no way we could have raised a dime." Chris studied film, not code, and he explains why storytelling, the chain from insight to product, adoption, business and scale, is what many technical founders skip.

Also in this episode:

* How to raise when you don't fit Silicon Valley's "Stanford hacker and MBA" mold

* How to market to developers, who hate being marketed to

* Why AI lets a full-service company scale

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Chris's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianbachdk/

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 https://rebrand.ly/ASHSP6

Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://rebrand.ly/JUMPSP6

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Bernardo Tavares was the founding CTDO of Kenvue, the $40B+ company behind Tylenol and Listerine.

He led its separation from Johnson & Johnson, which meant rethinking more than 3,000 systems and reevaluating 700 software vendors.

In other words, he is the enterprise buyer AI startups are trying to convince.

I asked him what actually makes him buy, and when he wants your forward-deployed engineers to leave.

Also in this episode:

* Whether the executive backing your pilot can actually buy

* What makes him bet on an early-stage startup

* How he used VCs to find startups to buy from

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Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss

Bernardo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tavaresbernardo/

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 https://www.ashurstperkinscoie.com/en/people/paul-navarro/

Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/p/startupeable#contact

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Joaquín Quiñonero Candela spent nearly 20 years building AI at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Meta.

He founded Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning team and built the AI platform behind its products.

Then he joined OpenAI, where he led Preparedness, the team that tests frontier models for catastrophic risks, and later ran recruiting and people.

I asked him what founders should do differently now that AI is everywhere.-------------------------

Also in this episode:

• Why careers are helixes, not ladders
• Why the labs warning loudest about AI keep racing to build it
• Why no lab can tell its investors it’s slowing down

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Joaquin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joaquincan/

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 https://www.ashurstperkinscoie.com/en/people/paul-navarro/

Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/p/startupeable#contact

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a16z just led a $28M Series A in Hilbert, a company that puts AI agents to work on growth. One of its first customers is a Fortune 10 company.

Most people building with AI agents think more context is the fix.

Nazli Tan, cofounder and CEO, who previously led growth at Getir ($12B), thinks the opposite.

Context usually means someone writes down what a "good customer" is and the agent runs with it. But those definitions are mostly human guesses.

Her answer is that the definition is already sitting in your data. Hilbert trains deep learning models on years of history, and those models decide who's a good customer. Same customer, same answer, every time. Their agents aren't even allowed to do math beyond rounding.

Also in this episode:

* Why "more context" makes your AI agents worse

* How to price AI when a 1% improvement is worth millions

* Why Silicon Valley growth playbooks don't work for 99% of enterprises

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

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Nazli Tan's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazlitan/

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro

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95% of your team doesn't use the AI you're paying for.

That's the gap Matt Kropp keeps finding inside the biggest companies in the world.

He advises Fortune 500 boards on AI at BCG, and lately he hears the same thing in every room.

“I'm not seeing ROI from this thing.”

Also in this episode:

• Why AI-native startups keep outrunning companies 100x their size
• How he cracks open an AI skeptic CEO in the first five minutes
• Why "adoption" numbers lie, and what actually gets people using AI
• What running a company entirely on AI agents taught him about where AI still breaks

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Matthew's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kropp/

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

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Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro

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Every founder is taught to avoid crowded markets.

Zeno Rocha bet his company on one of the most crowded markets in tech: email. He started Resend in 2023, and they're now at 4M users and 100k paying customers.

Every other developer category had been rebuilt. Auth0 led auth until WorkOS and Clerk showed up. Heroku led hosting until Vercel. But in email, SendGrid was bought by Twilio for $2B and the product decayed. The rest got acquired too, and stopped improving.

His bet was care: dark mode, animated icons, details nobody in the category had bothered with. Then AI turned email into a hot market again, and what he had to care about changed.

Also in this episode:

* Why the giants in your category are more vulnerable than they look

* The advantage of knowing nothing about the market you enter

* What changes when your fastest-growing customer is an agent

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss

Zeno Rocha's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zenorocha

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

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Presented by Jumpstart Immigration: 1,250+ founders with US visas. If you're not approved, you don't pay 👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠⁠

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When Dan Mishin set out to build legal services powered by AI, every investor gave him the same feedback: why not just sell software?

He refused. Selling software to law firms didn’t fix the system and incentives behind expensive legal services.

The bet underneath it: AI is the leverage that finally makes a services business as good as SaaS.

When each lawyer is 10x more productive, the company stops scaling with headcount. Dan’s benchmark: the largest law firm in the world does $7B in revenue with 1,200 attorneys.

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Also in this episode:

• The case for and against the hype of AINS
• The ownership innovation that made Manifest venture-backable
• Whether AI services can hold quality and margins as they scale

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: ⁠⁠https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss⁠⁠

Dan Mishin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmishin/

Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠

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Frontier AI labs have no shortage of companies willing to collect data for them.

Their harder problem is determining which data will actually make their models better.

José Nunes built Vetto to solve that problem. Instead of waiting for a lab to specify the data it needs, Vetto studies where a model is underperforming and designs the work required to improve it.

Also in this episode:

• His journey from a small town in Brazil to Silicon Valley
• Why the most valuable part of AI data happens before collection
• How Vetto competes with the labs in research
• How it recruits researchers it cannot outbid the frontier labs
• Why researchers hired in Brazil can perform alongside people from DeepMind

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: ⁠https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss⁠

José Nunes´s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-andrenunes/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

At 12, one of Brazil's biggest soccer clubs offered Nicolas a spot on its pro track. Saying yes meant dropping out of school. He said no.

Today he's playing the "main league" of Silicon Valley: building an AI company in SF, against the smartest, best-funded people in the world. In his words, "you're playing against the Pelés and Kakás."

That company became Firecrawl, the biggest web-scraping repo on GitHub. 170k stars from a team of 20.

Firecrawl does one unglamorous job: it reads webpages for AI. It takes a page full of code and turns it into clean text a model can use. Almost every AI agent needs that and agents now browse the web more than people do. (according to Cloudflare).

Also in this episode:

• His path from Brazilian soccer to Silicon Valley
• The "indie hacker test" for defensibility
• What he means by building the eyes for AGI
• Why the best product is the one your users never see
• Why, if you're not building for agents, you may not be here in 5 years

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Nicolas's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-silberstein-camara/
Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie: 3,000+ lawyers in 23 countries for founders building globally 👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro