Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie. Paul Navarro works with some of the best founders in Latin America, many of them guests on the podcast. I always ask my guests who I should interview next, and the only time anyone recommended a lawyer, it was Paul. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor.

👉 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

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

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

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

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

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Jumpstart is the immigration service I wish I'd had when I moved to the US. Bianca and Fabiano have helped 1,250+ founders get O-1, L-1 and EB visas with a 98% approval rate, and if it doesn't come through, they DON'T charge you.

👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/

resented by Ashurst Perkins Coie. Paul Navarro works with some of the best founders in Latin America, many of them guests on the podcast. I always ask my guests who I should interview next, and the only time anyone recommended a lawyer, it was Paul. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor.

👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro

-------------------------

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/

-------------------------

Jumpstart is the immigration service I wish I'd had when I moved to the US. Bianca and Fabiano have helped 1,250+ founders get O-1, L-1 and EB visas with a 98% approval rate, and if it doesn't come through, they DON'T charge you.

👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/

This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ⁠⁠⁠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/

This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ⁠⁠ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠

-----------------------------

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

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

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

This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro

Five years ago Esteban Sosnik brought me to the US, helped me get my visa, and gave me a seat at Reach Capital.

Those have been the best and highest-growth years of my life. Today his episode goes live, and I finally get to tell his story, because most people don't know the arc.

The wildest part? He's too humble to tell you any of this himself.

So I got it out of him on today's episode. This was a special one for me. Hope you enjoy it!

Also in this episode:

• How Argentina’s first VC circle found and backed Mercado Libre
• Why Reach invested in Replit at pre-seed in 2016
• Why AI is raising the bar for technical cofounders
• The “bloodbath” Esteban expects as companies cut ten AI tools down to one or two
• Who should move to Silicon Valley and how everyone else should spend time here

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

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

Esteban's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esteban-sosnik-779159/

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

HappyRobot went from zero to a $1.2B valuation in three years.

DHL, Repsol and Koch Industries on the customer list. Four industries, three continents. The company just raised a $150M Series C led by Prism Capital and Eurazeo.

A little over a year ago, Pablo Palafox came on the show as a YC founder building AI voice agents for freight brokers. He just came back a unicorn.

They got there by doing what the Silicon Valley playbook says not to.

Also in this episode:

* Why he almost quit his own company to work as a freight broker

* Why DHL has more in common with a telco than with a regional logistics shop

* How forward-deployed engineers became their biggest go-to-market lever

* Why they went global at Series B instead of waiting

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

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

Pablo's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablorpalafox/

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

BoldVoice reached $10M+ in ARR with a team of seven.

Five million users across 150 countries. In January, the company raised a $21M Series A led by Matrix.

What looks like a simple coaching app is powered by proprietary AI models trained to hear how people actually speak English.

That technical foundation became the moat behind BoldVoice.

Also in this episode:

• What conventional speech recognition misses about non-native speakers
• Why BoldVoice built its audio AI technology in-house
• How a seven-person team surpassed $10M in revenue
• How BoldVoice turns AI research into a better coaching product

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

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

Anada's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anadalakra/

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

GitHub Copilot started the AI coding market. Today, barely a serious developer touches it.

Not even a vibe coder like me: we mostly live in Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.

These players are at war to own the coding agent, maybe the biggest AI market there is.

Luis Bitencourt runs GitHub Copilot. So I asked him straight up: is Copilot losing the race?

His answer:

Everyone's fighting on two layers: the harness and the model. Luis thinks neither is winnable.

Also in this episode:

• Why Microsoft's distribution buys a head start of months now, not years
• Why coding agents are just the beginning: code review, SRE, debugging
• What Rappi and Loft, two messy physical-world businesses, taught him about humans in the loop

GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️

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

Luis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artificial-intelligence/

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

Rodrigo Schmidt grew up in a fishing town in the south of Brazil. No money, no network

Fifteen years later he was leading the engineering behind Instagram's feed, the personalization machine billions of people open every day.

His take on AI agents: they're making the mistake Instagram almost made. They optimize for what you want right now instead of what you actually want.

Rodrigo left Meta to do something about it, co-founding Vetto to build the research-grade data frontier models train on, betting the next leap comes from better signal, not more of it.

Also in this episode:

- Why a bigger context window can quietly make your agent worse

- Why forgetting isn't a bug, it's what makes memory work at all

- Why Instagram's early feed almost fell into the same trap

- His lessons from Facebook’s AI Research on building product & research orgs

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

Rodrigo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigoschmidt/

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