Warm Intro

Professor Purushottama Billimoria is a philosopher, historian, and one of the people most responsible for getting the world of philosophy to take Indian and Eastern thought seriously, not as spirituality or religious studies, but as philosophy proper. 

He's also my former professor and friend. 

Join us for a deeply human conversation about philosophy, the corrupting power of wealth, the Parsi Diaspora, and Bob Dylan.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Connie Chan is running for the most important house seat in the country. Her path here has been unlike anyone else's.

Connie is an immigrant and a daughter of San Francisco's Chinatown. She rose through the ranks of its city government, eventually coming to represent a large portion of it. She's a proud progressive from a very proudly progressive city, now in a race for mainstream power.

Join us for sentimental conversation about how Connie got her name, what went wrong in San Francisco and Chai's question that made Connie pause.

0:07 Chai's Warm Intro to Connie
1:50 Origin of her name
3:29 Moving to the US at 13
4:50 First time in San Francisco
6:30 SF Chinatown
7:15 Connie's childhood hero
8:43 Starting out as a translator
14:19 How Connie won her campaigns
17:30 Connie's view of SF politics
20:02 Connie's district 1
21:20 Daughter of Chinatown
22:50 Immigrant civil rights movement
27:54 Why run for Congress
29:26 What makes a good campaigner
37:02 Debate with Saikat Chakrabarti and Scott Wiener
38:40 SF's problems
44:42 Loss of civic pride in SF
48:10 SF is the future
49:28 Role of SF's Congresswoman
53:44 What to say to 13 yo Connie
54:45 Name after Connie Chan

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Noor Siddiqui is building technology that people call "designer babies"—and she's thought more carefully about the ethics than most of her critics. At 16, she decided she wanted to screen embryos for genetic disease. Today, as founder of Orchid, she does exactly that: scanning the full genome of IVF embryos to identify thousands of genetic risks, letting parents make more informed choices about which embryo to transfer. The result has divided the tech world, the medical world, and honestly, everyone in between.

What started as a personal mission—sparked by her mother's diagnosis with retinitis pigmentosa and the realization that genetic screening could prevent catastrophic outcomes like stillbirth and infant death—has become one of biotech's most polarizing frontiers. Orchid has helped hundreds of thousands of families, yet the company faces fierce pushback from people who see technology touching birth as inherently wrong. Siddiqui doesn't dismiss that discomfort; she engages with it, and she's surprisingly sympathetic to the concerns that matter most.

Join us for a searching conversation about what it means to grow up loved unconditionally, how a pole-vaulting face-plant teaches you to fail productively, why she's spent nearly two decades thinking about embryo screening, which criticisms of her field actually cut deep, the stranger at a party who told her she saved his life, and what legacy really means when you're hoping to someday just be a grandmother.

0:00 Chai's warm intro to Noor
1:40 Parents’ unconditional love
7:35 Chai’s thoughts on parenting
8:16 Noor’s childhood
12:29 Orchid was always the goal
18:46 What’s Orchid and why?
25:30 Early Users and Haters
30:52 Criticism that Noor understands
34:35 Orchid’s accidental life changing story
38:52 Noor’s dream world
43:48 Just being a grandma

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Jack Kuveke is a spitting image of the disgraced CEO Adam Neumann. At 20, he ran a 50 million dollar crypto fund in Belgrade, Serbia. His meme factory is called Jabroni Capital. All of this and almost everything else about Jack is objectively hilarious.

Jack is an absurd man who has had an absurd career in an absurd industry. This has given him the ability to ridicule tech and finance better than anyone else. He sincerely roasts CEOs, he ironically broetry praising Elizabeth Holmes and his fake VC firm can’t invest in you “because you’re too early”. He does all of this on the most unintentionally funny platform, Linkedin.

Join us for a ridiculous conversation about how Jack made a career posting memes, why Peter Thiel is so worried about the anti-christ, and why VCs and CEOs (including Chai) love getting roasted by Jack.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Sidra Qasim created the internet’s favorite sneaker. In getting there, she has lived a life that no one could have predicted.

Born and raised in rural Pakistan, Sidra clawed her way out of a system that afforded her no opportunities. Through sheer will, she made it to America and started a company that no one believed she could run.

But now, at 39, Sidra is the founder CEO of Atoms — notoriously the world’s most comfortable sneaker brand, with over 1,000,000 pairs sold, worn by celebrities from Malala to Marques Brownlee, funded by Silicon Valley’s greatest minds.

Join us for a deeply sentimental conversation about what true courage looks like, how things go viral, and how just about every founder deals with depression at one point.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Sebastian Fischer is a different kind of Silicon Valley engineer. He’s not a coder. He builds physical objects that move fast, blow up and generally bring about shock and awe. 

Sebastian started by building tiny rockets in his parents' backyard with his little brother. But those rockets eventually took him to NASA, Lockheed Martin, Amazon Prime Air and Cruise Self Driving. 

Now, he's onto his most wildest project yet, Wardstone — building satellites that detect missiles and shoot them down before they reach America. 

Join us for a fast-moving conversation about the ethics of building defense tech, whether America’s military is falling behind, what happens if we get lose the threat mutually-assured-destruction and the tiny California town that's building the future of war. 

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Skyler Chan wants to make humanity intergalactic and he's not entirely sure why anyone would want to work on anything else. 

At 22, Skyler has already lived a life. He flew airplanes with the Canadian Air Force, started a company, worked at Tesla, NASA and every major space organization, got into YC and had a dozen brushes with death all before he could legally drink. 
Now, he's sure. He knows what he wants to build: the first hotel on the moon. And that's just step one. 

Join us for a soaring conversation about why space is worth working on, the strange but common experience of being a 22 year old founder in SF and how Skyler wants to die.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

A message from Chai.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Congressman Mike Lawler holds a seat that no other Republican had held since the year he was born (he is a 39-year-old Republican from deep-blue New York).

The reason he was able to win — and keep — that seat is the same reason he's been ranked one of the most bipartisan members of Congress: he understands the assignment. He knows politics is about persuasion, not purity. It's about talking to people you disagree with and finding areas of agreement so you can make progress.

Join us for our final conversation of the season about Americans' love of flipping off the president, the worst part of campaigning, whether bipartisanship is even a virtue worth aspiring to anymore, what President George W. Bush is proudest of, and why you shouldn’t give up on America just yet.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.

Matt Flannery’s work has uplifted over six million families across a hundred countries.

That’s because Matt is one of the godfathers of microfinance. His creations, Kiva and Branch, have delivered billions of dollars in small loans to some of the most forgotten and overlooked people in the world.

But Matt doesn’t see himself as a philanthropist. In fact, he’s pretty down on the concept of nonprofits altogether.

Join us for a deeply honest conversation about Matt’s religious childhood, how he had over $8,000,000 stolen from him, how his board betrayed him, the strange magic of Bill Clinton, and why Matt keeps on going.

Warm Intro
A conversation, not an interview. Warm, sometimes weird, conversations with interesting people doing big things. 

Warm Intro is a video podcast. We're available on every major podcast app and YouTube.

YouTube: @warmintro
Instagram: @warm.intro

Hosted by Chai Mishra
Chai is the Founder of The Essential, an ethical commerce company funded by the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Chai served on the board of UNICEF, and has advised cities, universities, national sports teams and Fortune 500 corporations. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Chai’s work has also been covered in publications ranging from the SF Chronicle to Business Insider.

Presented by Wefunder
Wefunder created The Community Round.
— allowing founders to raise funds directly from their communities 
— allowing anyone to support their favorite founders and join their success.

Raise on Wefunder

Views here are those of the host and the guest. Wefunder makes the show possible but doesn't control who we have on or what we say.