Startups Decoded

Every week, another investor posts that there’s never been more money for great founders. Eric Newcomer runs an anonymous survey of top VCs and hosts the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, so he hears the version they don’t post. What he hears is a market split hard into haves and have-nots.

That gap is where first-time founders make their worst calls, planning around a story that was never written for them. Maya walks away knowing how investors actually read a pitch, why one lead beats a hundred maybes, and how to filter the noise without bouncing between ten experts.

Episode outline

• From a school newscast to first hire at The Information to going independent
• Why audiences trust people over brands, and what AI is doing to the inbox 
• Transparent bias versus the view from nowhere
• Haves and have-nots: who holds the leverage in venture right now
• VCs as energy-sensing machines, and why you only need one believer
• What anonymous VCs say about AI, robotics, energy and Anthropic

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Eric Newcomer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericpnewcomer/

Founder of Newcomer, the startup and venture media company read by 100,000+ investors and operators. He spent six years covering tech for Bloomberg, breaking stories on Uber, Stripe, Sequoia and a16z, after starting out as the first employee at The Information. He also hosts the Cerebral Valley AI Summit and publishes a quarterly VC Sentiment Report built from anonymous interviews with top investors.

Andy Walsh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.

Access All Areas.

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Web: startupsdecoded.com 

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Most first-time founders treat angel money as the warm-up act before the real investors show up. Cheryl Kellond thinks that view is about five years out of date, and Play Money's data backs her up. 

Buzzy AI companies are raising nine figures at seed. Meanwhile, she argues the signaling bias has flipped, and the strongest fundamentals now sit with founders raising from angels, syndicates, and small funds.

We get into her three-stage approach to early fundraising. She explains why Play Money makes founders pull $30K to $50K from their own network before showing a deal to anyone else, and why she'd rather read a year of your monthly updates than open your data room. Maya, if you're about to raise, you walk away with a sequence to follow and permission to stop chasing strangers first.

Episode outline

• Why Cheryl refused to start a fund and built Play Money instead
• The accredited investor math that could rival early-stage VC
• Three stages of early fundraising, from your own network to strangers
• How an SPV turns a hundred small checks into one clean cap table line
• What angels want to see: your pace of learning, not a polished data room
• The $5,000 angel who closed a million-dollar deal

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Cheryl Kellond - https://www.linkedin.com/in/c2kprofile/

Founder and CEO of Play Money, an angel investing platform that helps founders raise from strategic angels. She’s a concept-to-launch operator with more than $750M in revenue from version-one products. Her second company, Apostrophe, hit roughly $10M ARR in four years before Centivo acquired it in 2021.

Andy Walsh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.

Access All Areas.

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Web: startupsdecoded.com 

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Angus Dobbie spent fifteen years inside corporate recruiting, then built JobPass because the job hunt had turned into AI talking to AI.

Applicants use it to fire out resumes, companies use it to filter them, and the recruiters who used to read them got cut to pay for the software.

What struck me is how closely this mirrors building a company. You’re a solo operator with no boss, several pipelines to keep moving, and a front door so crowded the only reliable way in is a side door someone holds open for you. Maya walks away with the order of operations: relationships first, applications second, and a system that forces you to act on both.

Episode outline

• Perth to a Sydney trading floor to New York, then losing it all in 2008
• Why the job market always feels bad, and what AI changed for real
• Risk-averse hiring and the slide back to the average candidate
• Four opportunity pipelines, and why the spreadsheet dies in 24 hours
• Text roulette, dealer’s choice, and networking with no ask attached
• The post-launch flat spot and a note that says “I am not special”

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Angus Dobbie - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adobbie/ 

Angus Dobbie spent two decades in international financial markets, then fifteen years in corporate recruiting, hearing the same job search frustrations from almost every candidate he met. In 2026, he walked away from corporate life to build JobPass, a system that helps job seekers run their search like a sales pipeline. Being his own boss was a long-held ambition, and in his words, it sounds good and is hard.

Andy Walsh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.

Access All Areas.

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Subscribe: Substack

Connect: LinkedIn

Web: startupsdecoded.com 

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

James Oliver Jr. emptied a retirement account to build his first startup, got into an accelerator, then watched his twins arrive at about two pounds each, days before the program started. He spent the following weeks driving between the NICU and the pitch room while his savings, his marriage, and his mental health ran out. The company died, and for years the story was about the product.

This conversation is about the founder. James thinks hustle culture is trash, that the wrong investor will make your life miserable, and that self-awareness is the skill nobody teaches you. Now he's relaunching the same company as a different person. If you're running on fumes, this one gives you permission to stop, and a plan for what to do instead.

Episode outline

• Cashing out his retirement to build WeMontage, and the IVF twins nobody planned around
• An emergency C-section, the NICU, and crying inside the accelerator
• Why three Today Show appearances didn't fix a customer acquisition problem
• Hustle culture, misaligned investors, and knowing when your tank is low
• Walks, meditation, journaling and the habits that actually stick
• Why he's relaunching WeMontage, and why this time is different

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James Oliver Jr. - https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-oliver-jr/

James is a Techstars and gener8tor alum, co-author of Burn Bright Not Out, and host of the Founder Exhale podcast. Through the Kabila Founder Mental Health Fund, he pays for therapy for founders who can't afford it.

I joined James on his podcast, The Founder Exhale. Take a listen

Andy Walsh
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

Access All Areas.

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Subscribe: Substack

Connect: LinkedIn

Web: startupsdecoded.com 

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Rob D. Willis once earned €3.50 for a three and a half hour walking tour of Berlin. He knew more history than most guides on the street, and that was the problem. The guides making real money told fewer facts and more stories, so Rob opened a spreadsheet, tracked every tour, and spent 3,000 tours and 100,000 people working out what moves a crowd to act.

His take will sting if you've spent weeks polishing a deck. 

School trained you to prove how much you know, to a reader who was paid to pay attention. Investors are paid to filter you out. 

You'll walk away with three questions to answer before any meeting, a structure that gets a skeptical room to a decision, and a few simple exercises for finding the stories you already have. Meet the extremely talented Rob D. Willis, fresh off Simon Sinek’s podcast.

Episode outline

• From €3.50 a tour to hosting 100,000 people, and what the best guides did differently
• Why school taught you to communicate the wrong way
• The story that counts is the one that forms in your listener's head
• Three questions to answer before any pitch
• Finding your own stories: Homework for Life, the shape of stories, and "why do I X"
• AI gives you the average, so you need a point of view

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Rob D Willis - has given over 3,000 presentations to 100,000+ people, and he built the IMPACT framework to know exactly what moves people to act. Now he helps senior leaders turn strategy into stories that survive contact with a skeptical room. https://www.linkedin.com/in/robdwillis/ 

Andy Walsh
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

Access All Areas.

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• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com 
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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Most founders treat exit readiness as a phase you enter later, something a banker packages once the numbers are big enough to matter. 

Aaron Alpeter, founder and CEO of Izba Group, has helped founders realize more than $2.5B in exits, and he thinks that timeline is backwards. Buyers are grading the decisions you make at month six, from who makes your product and how it ships to whether the company still works when you step away.

For a first-time founder, that reframe takes pressure off, because you don't need a banker yet. You need to know what a buyer would actually pay for, then stop making choices that quietly discount it. Aaron breaks down the three things every acquirer looks for, why an earnout is a signal of distrust, and why some of the leanest AI-run brands are close to unacquirable.

Episode outline

• From Unilever to Hubble, The Flex Company and Lululemon Studio: how years inside scaling brands shaped Aaron's lens on operations.
• What buyers are really buying: profitability, a unique capability, and room left to grow, plus why the D2C-to-retail sequence matters.
• Earnouts, ego, and why smart companies bring in new leadership 18 months before a sale.
• The agentic trap: why tiny AI-run brands with big revenue scare off strategic buyers.
• M&A as R&D: what Hero Cosmetics, Poppi and LesserEvil tell you about who gets bought.
• The 2026 reshuffle: megadeals, boomer succession, and exits that stop short of a full sale.

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Aaron Alpeter - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-alpeter/

Aaron Alpeter is the founder and CEO of Izba Group, where he helps CPG brands start, scale, and exit through a portfolio of companies spanning sourcing, fulfillment, and M&A prep. He's guided over $2.5B in realized exits and currently advises brands and investors representing $3B in client enterprise value.

Andy Walsh
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

Access All Areas.

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• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com 
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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Vanessa Larco went from shipping product at Microsoft, Twilio and Box to most of a decade as a partner at NEA, and now runs Premise VC.

She assumed moving into venture meant shelving her product brain. It turned out to be her edge. Founders and investors stare at the same signals of product market fit, and they often read them in opposite directions.

Her sharpest idea is product curiosity fit. AI has made it easy to sign customers who are spending experimental budget, and that revenue looks like traction right up until renewal. In this episode you will walk away knowing which signals seed investors trust, why the playbook that won you seed will lose Series A, and why constraints are an asset (with some help from Bluey).

Episode outline

• Burning floppy disks at four: growing up in a family of founders
• Kinect, Facebook gaming, and the swing from pure qual to pure quant
• The acqui-hire that felt like a breakup, and the secret plan behind joining NEA
• Product curiosity fit, and why bookings stopped proving anything
• Seed backs the founder, Series A backs execution: every round is a new game
• What Bluey teaches founders about constraints and repairing conflict

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Vanessa Larco - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessalarco/

Vanessa Larco is co-founder of Premise VC, backing early-stage software founders after nearly a decade as a Partner at NEA investing in category creators like Robinhood and Mejuri. Before venture, she built product at Microsoft, Disney, Twilio, and Box, the resume Premise's whole thesis is built on.

Andy Walsh
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

Access All Areas.

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• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com 
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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Carina Cunha is an investment banker, founder, and advisor who's worked with over 100 companies from pre-seed to IPO. She helped build Crimson Education into a unicorn, then landed two offers on Dragons' Den UK for her own startup, Nosy, and pulled a billion views out of less than $5,000 in ad spend. Favikon now ranks her a Top 3 LinkedIn voice for sales.

Here's the tension. Founders treat a raise as the win. Carina treats capital as fuel, not proof. Fundraising is just another sale, and the real proof is traction. Capital should scale something that already works, not pay for finding out if it does.

We get into running your own operating system instead of the market's default one. Why being told you're wrong feels personal, but being shown you're wrong is a gift. And what to say in a first meeting when you've got no traction and no leverage yet.

Episode outline

• Personal systems first: you can't change rules you never stopped to see
• Capital as fuel: traction is the proof, capital should scale what already works
• Fundraising is another sale: what investors are actually buying
• Identity and being wrong: why it stings, and why it's a gift
• Compress the failure cycle: hypothesis, failure, analysis, iteration
• The first meeting: no traction, no leverage, and the move that still works

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Carina Cunha - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carinacunha/

Carina Cunha is building an investment bank and writing a book on human consciousness. She structures capital raises across venture, debt, and private equity, work that showed her a broken system up close. She's advised over 100 companies from pre-seed to IPO.

Andy Walsh
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

Access All Areas.

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• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com 
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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Founders treat early decisions like they're reversible. 

A board seat, a deal term, who gets hired first. None of it is as flexible as it looks. By the time a bad call costs you something, it's already baked in, and nobody tells you that on day one.

Andy hosted a live panel in front of 60 plus founders for Startups Decoded Live, presented by J.P. Morgan. On stage: Elizabeth Vincent (J.P. Morgan Asset Management), Emma Usich (Girl Math Capital), and Breen Sullivan (The Fourth Effect).

Two exits taught Andy the same lesson twice: nobody warns you because the people around you usually haven't made these calls before either. Governance, fundraising structure, and the money decisions that show up after the term sheet, laid out by people who've sat on the other side of the table.

Episode outline

1. Boards and governance: why the timing of your first seat matters
2. Advisors vs. investors: when to formalize the relationship
3. Fundraising structure: how terms shape control before you feel it
4. Cap table strategy: trade-offs founders skip when defining terms
5. After the term sheet: capital preservation and budget protocol
6. Lessons from SVB's collapse: why founders should bank early with a firm like JP Morgan

Presented by J.P. Morgan: Helping venture-backed founders navigate the financial decisions that come after the term sheet. From capital preservation to liquidity strategy, we help companies make the most of every dollar they raise.

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Andy Walsh 2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale.

Elizabeth Vincent: VP at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, advising founders on post-raise cash management.

Emma Usich: Co-founder of Girl Math Capital. Previously M&A at Uber, investment banking at Bank of America.

Breen Sullivan: Founder and CEO of The Fourth Effect, connecting startups with board-ready advisors after a decade as general counsel at high-growth tech companies.

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Brett Turner has built four companies and sold three of them for a combined $500 million plus.

His sharpest insight has nothing to do with pitch decks or growth hacks, it comes down to cash. Most founders treat treasury as a back office problem, something you hand off the moment you can afford a CFO. Brett spent over a decade as a CPA at Deloitte, ran corporate finance inside Amazon, then worked Controller and CFO roles across a string of startups before he ever founded one himself.

This episode traces that arc, from CPA to three time founder, and lands on Trovata, the AI native treasury platform he calls his last hurrah, now pulling stablecoins directly into corporate cash management. The takeaway is not to go learn accounting. It is that the boring disciplines, cash visibility, liquidity planning, financial literacy, are the actual infrastructure that lets founders survive long enough to get “lucky”. Skip them and speed is what kills you, not the market.

Episode outline

1. The accountant's apprenticeship: a dozen years across CPA, Controller and CFO roles at Deloitte, Amazon and early-stage startups, before he ever touched a company he owned.
2. Amazon and the SEC grind: corporate finance discipline inside Amazon, the unglamorous training ground for the founder he'd later become.
3. Four companies, three exits: the pattern connecting the lessons, and how it spawned Trovata, saving his best for last.
4. From operator to founder: the shift from CFO to building and owning as CEO.
5. Trovata: ten years building the treasury platform he wishes had existed for every company before it.

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Brett Turner - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-turner/

Founder and CEO of Trovata, an AI-native treasury platform bringing stablecoins into corporate cash management. This is his seventh startup, following three prior exits.

Andy Walsh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com 
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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.