Sandy Diao is one of the most exceptional growth leaders of the last decade. Sandy has scaled products to over 200M+ users and led growth teams at Descript, Meta and Pinterest. She is also a prolific writer all on things growth here. 

AGENDA: 

03:59 Biggest Growth Lessons from Pinterest

08:01 What is a Good vs a Bad Growth Hypothesis

11:11 Common Mistakes in Growth Strategies

14:57 Channel Fit: When You Have It & What To Do

25:43 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) 101: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine

30:08 How to Do SEO and Long-Term Growth Investments

33:22 Doubling Down on Successful Channels

36:31 The Unchanging Foundations of SEO

37:52 Generative AI Engines vs. Traditional Search Engines

41:12 Paid Marketing Channels: What's Overrated?

43:42 The Rise of User-Generated Content (UGC)

46:34 TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality

49:55 Brand Marketing: What is Real vs What is BS?

53:33 The Importance of Feature Launches

01:01:50 Hiring for Growth: When and Who?

01:08:55 Quick Fire Round: Onboarding, Notifications, and Growth Channels

 

 

AGENDA:

04:50 Benchmark's New Partner: Everett Randall

10:19 Revolut Raises $3BN at a $75BN Valuation: Another Loss for Public Markets?

28:39 Why Today is as Bad as the Hype of COVID in 2021

32:10 Why Vertical SaaS is a Bad VC Investment Today

36:14 Why Everyone Investing in Legal SaaS Will Lose Money

44:16 Why King Making is More Real Than Ever

55:23 Why Your Smallest Customers Need to Pay $10K Minimum

01:01:37 Why VC is a S*** Asset Class

01:09:29 Why Today is Harder Than It Has Ever Been in VC

01:25:18 Closing Thoughts and Reflections

 

Alex Bouaziz is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Deel, the $17BN global payroll juggernaut that just last week announced their latest $300M fundraise led by Ribbit, a16z and Coatue. Deel has been on the most insane journey, they do $1BN+ in ARR, they just had their first $100M revenue month and they have been profitable for over 3 years. 

AGENDA:

03:38 Announcing $300M Fundraise at a $17BN Valuation

06:24 Rippling vs Deel: WTF is Going On? Where is the Lawsuit? 

14:01 Why 1-1s Are BS and Leaders Should Stop Doing Them

17:31 Do Rich Leaders Make Better Leaders

28:33 Biggest Lesson from Ben Horowitz? Why Most CMOs Are Bad?

34:48 Lessons from Nik @ Revolut and Why Companies Need to Make Their Own Software

42:23 Deel’s Acquisition Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions

45:17 How to Price Acquisitions? How to Align Incentives with Founders?

55:45 Deel is Profitable and Growing Fast: When is the IPO?

01:01:35 Best Acquisition Ever + Worst Ever: What Did We Learn?

 

Zach Lloyd is the Founder and CEO of Warp, the next-generation developer terminal reinventing how engineers build and collaborate. Warp has raised over $70M from top-tier investors including Sequoia Capital, GV, Dylan Field, and Elad Gil. Before founding Warp, Zach was Principal Engineer at Google, where he led development of Google Docs, and later served as CTO at Time. He’s one of the most respected engineering minds redefining the future of developer tools.

AGENDA: 

04:14 Biggest Product Lessons from Rewriting Google Sheets

07:10 Why I Would Short Google: Leadership and AI Strategy

09:55 Comparing AI Models: GPT, Claude, and Gemini: Who Wins and Loses

17:04 Do Margins Matter in AI?

24:57 Adding $1M in ARR Every Week: Is Triple, Triple, Double, Double Dead?

33:58 How to Build Defensibility in a World of AI?

43:05 OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who Wins and Why?

44:25 Biggest Fundraising Lessons Raising from Sequoia, Elad Gil and GV

50:56 Why Sequoia are the Best VC

53:51 What Every Founder Gets Wrong in Fundraising

01:01:30 Quick Fire Questions and Final Thoughts

 

AGENDA:

03:44 Rory Is So Old He Worked with Arthur Rock!!!

07:28 Goldman Sachs Acquires Industry Ventures for $665M

16:37 Thinking Machines Co-Founder Raises $2BN and Then Leaves for Meta

29:36 SoftBank Goes for $5BN Leverage Against ARM Stock To Buy More OpenAI

39:35 More Data Centres Than Offices: Are We In a Bubble

43:28 Where is the Alpha in Venture in 2025

51:48 What 90% of Managers Get Wrong About Portfolio Management

 

 

 

Mike Cannon-Brookes is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Atlassian, the $50BN software giant behind products like Jira, Confluence, and Trello. Since founding the company in 2002, he has scaled it to over 300,000 customers globally, generating more than $5BN in annual revenue. Atlassian now employs over 10,000 people across 13 countries and is one of the most successful bootstrapped-to-IPO stories in tech history. Mike is also a leading climate investor and co-owner of several major sports teams.

AGENDA: 

00:00 Why Unreasonable Men Win in Startups

07:22 How to Make Co-CEOs Work 

13:22 Are We in an AI Bubble? Is Everything Overvalued?

26:46 The Future of Software Development: More or Less Devs

32:53 Do Margins Matter in a World of AI

34:02 The Future of Vibe Coding…

36:35 Does Defensibility Exist in a World of AI

42:09 Is Per Seat Pricing Dead in a World of AI

49:01 The Founder Journey and Leadership

54:28 Quick Fire Round: Parenting Advice, Relationship to Money

 

Chris Degnan is the former Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake, where he was instrumental in scaling the company from less than $1M in ARR to over $3B in annual revenue. He joined as the first sales hires and built Snowflake’s go-to-market engine from scratch, growing the team from to more than 6,000 globally. Under his leadership, Snowflake became one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in history, achieving a record-breaking IPO in 2020.

AGENDA:

04:34 How to Build a Sales Team from Scratch 07:49 How to Hire and Evaluate Sales Leaders 15:23 Four Big Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $3BN ARR 31:30 Comparing Snowflake and Databricks: What Databricks Did Better? 35:26 How to Manage Sales Team Morale in Competitive Markets 43:53 Why Customer Success is BS and What To Do With It 48:31 How Every Sales Leader Needs to Change in An AI World 49:37 Biggest Reflections on Sales Leadership 54:38 Quick Fire Questions and Final Thoughts   20Sales: Scaling Snowflake from $0-$3BN in ARR | Snowflake vs Databricks: My Biggest Lessons | Why Customer Success is BS and What Replaces It with Chris Chris Degnan

AGENDA: 

03:29 OpenAI and AMD's Major Partnership

07:35 Microsoft Have F***** Up the OpenAI Partnership 

17:08 OpenAI's Developer Day Announcements

20:45 Why VC is the Most Forgiving Asset Class on Price and Valuation

29:10 What Does it Take to IPO in 2025: Why Snyk Will Not IPO

42:30 Four Strategies Companies Need to Take to Own Their Own Destiny

49:31 Vercel Raises $300M at $9BN: Suicide Round or Strategic

55:39 Does King Making Really Work in Venture Capital: Legora vs Harvey

01:08:11 Chamath Raises Latest SPAC: SPACs are Back

01:10:56 Polymarket Raises $2BN at a $9BN Valuation

01:14:53 Quick Fire Questions and Wrap-Up

 

Andrew Feldman is Co-Founder & CEO of Cerebras, building the world's fastest AI inference and training. Cerebras recently closed a $1.1BN Series G round at an $8.1 billion valuation, backed by top names including Fidelity, Atreides, Tiger Global, Valor Equity and 1789 Capital. Under his leadership, they’ve leapfrogged GPU limits in inference, operate at trillions of tokens per month, and are filing to go public soon.

AGENDA:

02:43 Why We Did Not IPO and Raised $1BN From Fidelity

05:03 Analysis of Chip and Compute Landscape Today

07:14 NVIDIA Showing Signs They Are Running Out of Ideas

13:57 The Real Questions to Ask on Chip Depreciation

24:54 Energy Requirements for AI: Is it Feasible?

29:25 Mag7 Value Concentration: Feature or a Bug

31:57 Talent is the Bottleneck and Trump Makes it Worse

32:55 The War for Talent: Secrets No One Sees

34:22 Evaluating the Data Centre Economy: Many Will Lose Money

38:01 Three Changes the US Could Make to Beat China in AI

42:30 Why 80% of our Revenues are in the UAE

47:26 Quick Fire Questions

58:59 Why Work Life Balance is Total BS

 

Ketty Slonimsky is Chief Growth Officer at Palta, the platform behind apps like Flo (the #1 female health app with 77M+ MAU), Simple, and Zing AI, where she leads a centralized growth function across the portfolio. She was previously first VP Product & Growth at HeliosX (£900M+ ARR, bootstrapped D2C healthtech), has advised companies like SonderMind, Runna, Guardio, Cheddar, P&G Digital Ventures, and is a board advisor at HeliosX.

AGENDA:

02:33 What is Growth and When to Hire For It

06:04 Three Profiles of Successful Growth Leaders

10:07 Challenges and Learnings from Failed Ventures

21:17 How to Optimise User Onboarding for Growth

26:14 Biggest Lessons on Retention 

30:25 How to Artificially Create Organic Growth and Community Building

32:10 Why LTV Models are BS

37:35 How to Use Influencers to Grow Insanely Fast

47:07 The Metrics that Matter in Growth

49:48 Push Notifications and Engagement: What To Do vs What Not to Do?

51:57 Quick Fire Round