Top Decile Podcast

Jonathan Bragdon founded or co-founded seven companies, two of which landed on the Inc. 5000 list twice each. Capacity Capital is his seed stage fund for founders across the Southeast, where 64% of investments have gone to women, founders of color, or veterans. His 50+ LPs are almost all operators who built businesses themselves, and a third had never invested in a fund before he taught them how.

We get into why taking venture money too early can be a one way road, why he thinks deal flow should set fund size instead of the other way around, and why he only glances at total addressable market when almost every other investor leads with it.

Fehmida Kapadia has advised more than 150 medtech startups over two decades. Five went on to raise $50 million or more, and three exited. Along the way she built Amplify MedTech, an 800 person network of founders, clinicians, and academics that now sources most of her deal flow. Fay Ventures is her $1 million seed fund for AI enabled medtech founders stuck between a working prototype and FDA clearance.

She explains the product market fit question most founders never think to ask, why only 3% of US venture firms will touch medtech at all, and how lived experience turns into the perseverance a decade long device company actually demands.

Tal Schwartz spent a decade building the Canadian fintech industry before he started investing in it. He founded the Canadian Lenders Association, now the largest financial services trade group in the country with every bank as a member, writes the Canadian Fintech Newsletter, and runs the Canadian Finance Summit. North Exit Ventures is his $10 million seed fund, backed by a roster of exited fintech founders and almost fully deployed two years in.

Tal breaks down how he reads the US market to call which categories take off in Canada, what open banking arriving this year opens up against the big six, and why the best Canadian fintechs aren't always the ones racing south of the border.

Javier Cueto has reviewed more than 12,000 startups across Latin America. Through Imagine Lab, he backed 120 of them at idea stage and hit a 30% survival rate, including two acquisitions that tripled his investments. He now runs Imagine Ventures, a pre-seed and seed fund investing in the future of work and future of finance across the region, where four years in, every portfolio company is still alive.

He makes the case for why the Silicon Valley power law breaks down in LatAm, walks through the M&A math behind targeting five or six 15X exits instead of one unicorn, and explains what emerging managers get wrong about fundraising timelines in the region.

The word: "Hollywood." Seth Hallen spent 25 years on the technology side of film and television, including leadership roles at Panavision's Light Iron, Sony and Pixelogic, plus nine years as president of the Hollywood Professional Association. He cut the word from every fundraising conversation anyway, and closed Hallstone Ventures oversubscribed in 12 months.

Hallstone backs the infrastructure behind how media gets made, distributed and paid for, at a point when creators have multiplied and the systems that support them have not caught up. It's not just backing tech for Hollywood, It's backing the systems that helps how content is communicated everywhere on Earth (and beyond).

Eran Savir is a three-time founder with two exits who built and ran two prior seed funds together generating a 3.5X return and 79% IRR, taking one of them public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Now he runs Savyon Ventures, an early-stage fund in Israel backing AI, digital, and e-commerce founders.

Find out why Eran refuses to invest until a founder has sold to real strangers instead of friends and family, what changed when he moved from advising founders to writing checks, and how bets on a direct-to-consumer bra brand and an AI debt collector fit the same tight thesis.

Rob Mihalko grew Ariba Network into a $400 million B2B marketplace, has three exits to SAP, Microsoft, and Disney, and has invested in or advised more than 50 marketplace companies. He teaches the digital marketplaces course at Stanford Continuing Studies and now runs Spectus Ventures, a seed-stage fund backing founders building digital marketplaces and business networks.

We get into the term he coined, the marketplace economy, an estimated twelve trillion dollars in global commerce, the early signals he looks for before a marketplace hits product market fit, and why healthcare remains one of the most underserved verticals for the model today.

Nikhil Mittal spent nearly two decades investigating fraud, money laundering, and sanctions for major banks and fintechs, a career his own father also built. He evaluated roughly 250 startups before writing his first check, and now runs Blue Ridge Ventures, a pre-seed and seed fund backing AI native founders across every sector, part of Decile Access's inaugural cohort of 23 funds.

We get into what he calls "smart capital," why his entire LP base is drawn from his own VC Lab cohort instead of outside investors, and the medtech and edtech opportunities he's most bullish on right now. Nikhil also breaks down what actually separates an AI native founder from a traditional one.

Genevieve Lemarchal spent over a decade as a serial entrepreneur, logging more than 10,000 hours in early-stage sales, marketing, and growth strategy and coaching over a thousand founders, before she ever wrote a check. That operating background shaped Suncoast Ventures, her seed-stage healthcare fund, whose first fund is already producing distributions and on track to be fully returned next year as a top decile performer.

We get into why fewer than 10% of U.S. VCs have made even three healthcare investments, how Suncoast built an in-house health economics and actuarial practice that helped a portfolio company renegotiate its Series A pricing, and the three segments she's betting will produce healthcare's next big winners: health tech fintech, AI-driven biotech superintelligence, and women's health.

Tahnoon Murtza is 22 years old, and has spent his entire life inside the entertainment industry as a touring musician. That put him in the group chats where celebrity brand deals get built long before any VC hears about them. He personally wrote early checks into Sommer Ray's consumer brand and Jeremy Lynch's HP-1, both before the rounds ever opened to outside investors, and now runs Grey Sheep Ventures backing celebrity-founded and viral-first consumer brands across the US and Canada.

We get into why he thinks proprietary access, not capital, is the real edge in consumer investing, why celebrity brands can exit in under five years instead of the decade B2B founders wait, and why he's now betting skincare is the next category built to be sold on camera.