If you’ve spent any time in tech over the past few years, you’ve probably read Not Boring or at least seen a screenshot of it on X/Twitter. Packy built it from a Substack assignment during David Perell’s Write of Passage course into one of the most-read newsletters in technology, now at over 250,000 subscribers.

Encouragement goes a long way. David in that course told him his first assignment was the best piece of writing he had seen in the class which gave Packy the confidence to keep going. He talks about his fear of being made fun of (by your friends) if you publish on the internet or nobody caring and ever reading. I can relate, it is one of the reasons I recorded for 6-7 months before hitting publish in July last year. The funny thing is, 250,000 subscribers later that feeling never completely goes away. We touch on that too.

Every Not Boring essay is a full-stack teardown, part history lesson, part strategy memo, part “why this would matter in 10 years.” Today, Packy sits at the intersection of media and venture, David Perell described this new era of creators and personalized business models as building a personal monopoly. This applies to podcasting, newsletters or blogs and any other form of new media at the intersection of tech and business where the differentiation lies in the creator - they are like Hollywood talent and the brand they represent is secondary and in some cases irrelevant. They are the brand. We live in the era of what my friend Christopher Lochhead🏴‍☠️ would call creator capitalism.

For Packy, great writing is deal flow. He has invested in companies like Ramp (now valued at over $32B) and Astro Mechanica (bringing back supersonic air travel) and many more through his fund. What he now spends most of his time on is doing well researched deep dives which are a function of the relationships he builds along the way.

If you are chronically online on X/Twitter, you would have seen his latest masterpiece, a deep dive on a16z and if you’re not chronically online, here is the link:

We have a wide ranging conversation including about his prior life in coworking industry and takeaways from being in that business, we talk about starting on Substack vs other platforms, business models in new media, his thesis for vertical integrators and more. Hope you enjoy!

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro

01:11 - Why publish on Substack and the origins of Not Boring

01:42 - Write of Passage with David Perell

04:51 - The content pyramid and compounding experiences

15:46 - Insights from working in co-working industry

28:07 - The Ramp case study and the concept of uncertainty window

36:56 - Ramp vs Brex

41:32 - Vertical integrators thesis

51:45 - Media, venture, and the future of tech media

00:00:55 - Twitter vs Substack for creators

1:10:19 - Advice to We The Builders

1:12:59 - Growing the team, getting better, and hiring

1:21:57 - Playing the long game, measuring success over decades

1:33:32 - Wrapping up — favorite shows and books

1:40:53 - Signing off

Watch on YouTube:

- Suffiyan Malik

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

New Year’s Eve special: I recorded this one at the Founders Fund office on Nov 6, 2024, right after election day. It was originally scheduled to be over zoom but I read Delian’s blog post called “Thirty Observations at Thirty” where one of the things he talked about was prioritizing in-person whenever possible so I decided to make the trip to Miami.

Delian dropped out of MIT, became a Thiel Fellow, a program with ~300 fellows who have started companies valued at over $750B. I saw a chart according to which Thiel Fellowship has a 5.9% unicorn hit rate, which probably makes it the best program for entrepreneurs ever. We will cover this story with friend of the pod Danielle Strachman who built the program in Q1 2026 but for now, sharing a tweet below to sum it up:

He interned at Square $XYZ when it was around ~100 employees, got to see Jack Dorsey at work and got to meet operators like Kieth Rabois who he would go on to work with at Khosla Ventures. This would turn out to be an apprenticeship that put him on the path to be one of the best seed investors in the industry.

His record as a seed investor:

Ramp is now valued at $32B, Hadrian and Sword are also unicorns and Varda is going to be probably be the biggest among them. (Disclaimer: I am a proud tiny shareholder in the company)

The narrative around why college doesn’t work at least in my echo chamber is well understood but I wanted to ask Delian what college was actually useful for so we had a conversation around that.

We also talk about that, the experience at Square, what led to the apprenticeship with Kieth Rabois, learning cult building and the very Silicon Valley like pay-it-forward culture of mentoring from the college fraternity and up-skilling for Varda Space among other things.

Delian on the incredible access and opportunity of working with Kieth as his chief of staff of sorts:

“Maybe you have to get a diet coke or coffee but you get to be in an Affirm board meeting with Max Levchin”

Happy New Year and hope you enjoy!

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro00:30 - Writing and Flow State05:12 - Dropping Out 12:13 - What MIT was good for20:16 - Early days at Square25:16 - Parents reaction to joining Thiel Fellowship29:44 - Transferrable skills from frat days34:02 - Lessons from Keith Rabois45:15 - Building Varda52:58 - How Mafias are built57:53 - Culture at Varda

Watch on YouTube

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

I got to sit down with Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, the largest travel company in the world. $BK NG market cap was $160B as of Dec 3, when I am publishing this. For context, it’s market cap is ~2x that of Marriott and AirBnB, which are 2 and 3. Here is a chart of the rest on the list:

I knew travel was big but I did not know it was roughly 10% of Global GDP. According to World Travel & Tourism Council, in 2025 travel is expected to contribute an all-time high of $11.7 Trillion to the global economy, a 7.3% growth since 2024. The global travel industry has seen a better growth rate than the $AMZN stock over the last year. (6.5% growth over the last year and this is not investment advice)

We have all made restaurant reservations through Opentable, booked a flight through Kayak, a place to stay with Booking.com or found great deals at Priceline, these brands along with Agoda and Rentalcars make up what is now known as Booking Holdings, previously known as Priceline Group.

Glenn has been at the company for 25 years, started out leading corp dev and has now been CEO for almost 9 years. When he joined the company in 2000, it was in the middle of the dot com crash and the company was at it’s lowest with a market cap of $0.25B at the end of the year. He has been there for the dot com crash, the global financial crisis of 2008/09 and COVID. Since Glenn took over as CEO in 2017, both the market cap ($72B - $160B) and revenue ($12.6B - $23.8B) have roughly doubled. Founding history: Booking was known as Priceline Group until 2018. Priceline was founded back in 1997 by Jay Walker with a “name your own price” model for hotels, flights, car rentals etc and went public on NASDAQ in 1999. Many might not know this, but Priceline was spun out of Walker Digital which was sort of a venture studio/IP research lab that Jay founded in 1994 and ran out of Stamford Connecticut. Glenn led the charge on acquiring Booking (a Netherlands based company) way back in 2005 for $133m. Accommodation bookings now account for more than 85% of total Booking Holdings revenue which back in the day was a smaller subsidiary of then Priceline Group. He credits his prior career in investment banking to preparing him for the M&A role at Booking, where he saw a lot of deals not be successful for the acquirer.

Interestingly, Expedia was also started around the same time, in 1996 (their market cap is around $27B). One thing Booking has done really well is growing all brands independently with different CEOs post acquisition. It is interesting how they have managed to successfully operate under a more decentralized management structure.

Glenn is incredibly candid and a joy to talk to, we tee it off by talking about history. Hope you enjoy!

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction00:15 - Getting into world history08:19 - Peter Thiel on Rise and Fall of empires11:34 - The India-Pakistan partition19:45 - Glenn Interviews Suffiyan28:05 - Groundbreaking programs from the past32:27 - The start if Glenn’s career at booking35:57 - How Glenn thinks about acquisitions41:48 - Acquiring Expedia? What went right for Booking51:59 - Current issues in travel that are billion dollar business opportunities57:27 - Leadership and training talent1:05:58 - Passing down the torch 1:10:53 - The best use of the CEO’s time1:18:52 - Importance of storytelling 1:26:47 - Important of decision making and compounding1:32:26 - Changing how airports operate and speed of travel1:36:40 - Advice to younger audiences and the state of schooling1:42:24 - Leaders Glenn admires1:45:44 - Rapid fire ending

Watch on Youtube:

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Around 11,000 Americans are retiring every single day, ~60m people in the US are retired. Medicare is one of the biggest problems among this community, there are 100s of providers and choosing the wrong one could either mean losing thousands of dollars or your life (I think Cobi quoted a report citing ~20% fatality on choosing the wrong provider). If your parents are not in that age group yet, you probably haven’t started thinking about this but it is one of the biggest and most underserved markets in the US.

The opportunity is not to just help senior citizens with Medicare, the opportunity is to redefine what retirement means for people over the age of 65. My maternal grandfather retired at the age of 82 and was one of the healthiest and fittest people up until then. Your health cannot be wholly defined by your diet and exercise routine, purpose in life plays an equal if not one might argue a bigger role. In my day job I work with Tim Draper, his dad Bill Draper who I met a couple of years ago was going to office twice a week at 95 years of age. Charlie Munger did the Berkshire Annual Shareholder meeting with Warren Buffett at 99.

If you can figure out a way to give purpose to people over 65 and activate them that is ~23% of the US population by 2050. What impact could that have on the GDP? I will leave that for you to imagine. You probably have an uncle, grandparents or parents where you can see the difference between the ones who hang up their boots and the ones who never retire. There is something about the keeping your brain active which is more meaningful in many ways then even your diet or gym routine. In our last episode we had Colin Greenspon on the show who started Narya Capital with Vice President JD Vance. Narya is an early investor in Chapter, cofounded by Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz and Vivek Ramaswamy. JD Vance and Peter Thiel were on the board of the company and maybe that is why the company is widely misunderstood or MAGA labelled, hear from the CEO Cobi on the masterplan of Chapter to redefine what retirement means in the long term. My conversation with Cobi is his first ever long form podcast and it is one of the best ones I have recorded so far. He was incredibly candid and insightful as we got to dive into his time at Palantir where he spent 5 years, why he chose to go after the ~60m seniors (aged above 65) in the US to make Medicare easier for them, utility of AI in its current state, recruiting and some common myths in business.

Hope you enjoy!

In case you missed my conversation with Colin, you can catch up below. It was a pure masterclass on thesis driven investing and was Colin’s first ever long form podcast.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro02:38 – Why Chapter is Misunderstood?5:48 - What Chapter is doing?8:14– Why founder market fit is a joke09:13 - What does Palantir actually do?12:31 - Building Conviction 16:50 - What are tech enabled service businesses21:08 - Recruiting without bias 27:12 - AI in Chapter and Building a lean team32:33 - Allocating time as a CEO37:53 - Building Culture and interviewing50:29 - Choices that compound 57:55 - Casting at Palantir & Alternate career choices1:03:41 - China vs US1:13:12 - Has innovation stagnated?1:15:52 - Chapter’s business model innovation1:23:41 - Zero To One-isms1:31:05 - Helpful mentors in life1:36:37 - What does a business plan mean for early stage companies?1:39:54 - Other problems to solve1:46:27 - Rapid fire and signing off

Watch on YouTube

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

Colin Greenspon is the co-founder of Narya Capital, a venture capital fund he cofounded with Vice President JD Vance and Falon Donohue (also cofounder of Reindustrialize). Before Narya, Colin was on the investment team at Mithril Capital, working alongside Peter Thiel.As a technologist if you go over the Twitter/X timeline, it will be hard to miss hype videos of hardtech companies announcing their new funding rounds or showcasing early prototypes of their product. You see photos of founders in a giant warehouse with the American flag hanging at the back, this represents a crop of builders and entrepreneurs who are re-shoring manufacturing, building defense-tech (war-tech? think Navier Boat, Epirus etc) or going for moonshots like humanoid robots (think Figure AI), manufacturing in space (think Varda Space or Outpost Space) and so on.

As a technologist if you go over the Twitter/X timeline, it will be hard to miss hype videos of frontier tech companies announcing their new funding rounds or showcasing early prototypes of their product. You see photos of founders in a giant warehouse with the American flag hanging at the back, this represents a crop of builders and entrepreneurs who are advancing manufacturing (Atomic), building defense-tech (war-tech? think Navier Boat, Epirus etc) or going for moonshots like humanoid robots (think Figure AI), manufacturing in space ( Varda Space or Outpost Space) and so on.

In 2022, I clearly remember hardware was still an outlier category very few VCs invested in. Fast forward to 2024, 38% of total funding raised by venture funds had a hardware thesis. There has definitely been a shift. 2023, the “American Dynamism” micro-cultural movement is born as a16z launched their new fund with a focus on critical technologies. This also coincided with the e/acc micro-cultural movement many might remember which represented technology acclerationists, technologists on Twitter/X including Marc Andreessen had e/acc as postfix in their names.

Narya had this thesis in 2019. Four years before it went mainstream on at least the X timeline, before more funds flocked into the space and raised millions of dollars against the thesis, back then it was truly contrarian to go actively look for founders outside Silicon Valley or founders working on critical problems outside of the Silicon Valley flavor of the year. Majority of the capital was still being deployed into SaaS, then crypto and now its AI. Majority of the capital was still being deployed into SaaS, then crypto and now its AI (to be fair it still is, according to Carta’s pre-seed funding report only 19% of funding went into frontier tech in 2024).

Narya invested in Rumble with a thesis around free-speech before Twitter was acquired by Elon, they invested in Atomic, an advanced manufacturing startup out of Detroit and started the movement on Reindustrializing America and continue to develop theses 3-5 years before they go mainstream.

Colin explains in our conversation how Narya continues to come up with a contrarian thesis and stay away from technology hype cycles (including AI), what he learned working at Mithril Capital which has produced an incredible talent mafia of its own with former associates now in leadership roles at 8VC, Linux Foundation, DARPA and so on including the Vice President of the United States of America.

Colin has never really sat down for a long form conversation like this. This was one of my favorite episodes, hope you enjoy the show as much as I did recording it!

One takeaway for me was that Twitter/X, tech podcasts and blogs are a lagging indicator of where the most value will get accrued on a 5 year timeline and our job as founders of ideas, companies and early stage investors is to identify the biggest markets, the unique ideas, find or assemble the right team and have a differentiated business model with some sort of a masterplan for going after the market. The question one should always ask themselves is how would you create a monopoly on a 10 year timeline? But in the short term you should be able to zoom in and work on pushing out your version of the Tesla roadster not the Optimus humanoid robot.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro

01:44 – What Narya VC does

03:57 – Working with Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Falon Donahue

09:35 – Why are harder problems solved away from SF

13:24 – The Mithril “Mafia” and getting into Venture

20:26 – The origin story and the Ohio thesis

27:01 – Why Reindustrialization Matters

31:45 – Narya’s core investment theses

39:10 – Narya’s investments

43:48 – Co-creating Reindustrialize

51:25 – Evaluating founders

57:41 – Why Betting on America’s Industrial Future Was the Contrarian Move

1:03:41 – Contrarian frameworks at Mithril

1:09:08 – How Colin Spends His Time

1:25:41 – Partnering With Scientific Investors

1:36:32 – Advice to Young Builders

1:52:57 – Lessons from Mithril alumni

Watch on YouTube:

— Suffiyan Malik

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

Intro

Today’s episode features Auren Hoffman founder of LiveRamp ($RAMP), Flex Capital, Dialog, Safegraph and NQB8. This is one of the most interesting conversations I have had on the show so far and probably the best.

He grew LiveRamp to a $300m exit, has invested in 180+ companies through Flex Capital, a seed stage fund, is chair of Safegraph ($370m data company backed by Sapphire Ventures, Peter Thiel, Ridge Ventures) and is host of World of DaaS, a podcast and community for data nerds.

Auren is thinking of and validating new ideas on almost a weekly cadence. He continues to start new companies through NQB8 which includes a few successful spin outs. He also has a great blog post on it if you are interested in exploring different type of spinouts and how you should think about them as a startup.

Highlights

* Choosing What To Pursue. Why LiveRamp’s bet on vendor sprawl (not consolidation) was right, and how SafeGraph’s bet on a “data-buying explosion” may find its moment with AI.

* Succession Planning. Why founders should promote from within even if it means higher failure rates.

* Who You Know vs. What You Know. Why skills matter more than connections in today’s economy (but not in every industry), and how AI could shift the balance again.

* Career Time Horizons. Why optimizing for the mid-term is a trap, and how Auren thinks about fun in the short term while keeping eyes on the long game.

* Why Community is the Future. Why repeated, in-person interactions compound and why the most powerful communities will never be replaced by AI.

* Spotting 10x Talent & Founders. After funding, hiring, and working with hundreds of people, he explains why identifying 10x talent is more art.

* Decision Making. His framework for understanding micro-time, short-time, long-time, and big-time thinkers and why most CEOs thrive in the “hours-to-days” zone.

Hope you enjoy the show!

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:14 - Can you categorize founder archetypes?

02:36 - Upbringing & early entrepreneurship

04:10 - College and job experiences

09:05 - Hiring for age v. experience, succession planning

19:20 - Choosing What to Pursue

29:15 - Insight for Safegraph

37:05 - The importance of community in the AI age

42:42 - Capitalizing on a successful podcast

47:09 - Outsiders vs Insiders

51:32 - Why founders like Thiel are not in the government

53:53 - When should founders transition to board Chair

56:30 - Investing at Flex Capital

1:01:05 - Decision Makers: Short Time, Long Time and Big Time

1:09:41 - Learning from people below the ladder

1:12:27 - Conspiracy Theories

1:18:18 - Favorite interview questions and evaluating talent

1:26:23 - Are ambition and persistence linked?

1:30:10 - Reading fewer books and favorite TV shows

1:42:18 - Signing off

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

Hi all,

This was happening week, I was in NYC and recorded 3 really fun episodes with Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Colin Greenspon (Cofounder of Narya Capital with VP JD Vance and Peter Thiel) and Abe Murray (AlleyCorp - firm that incubated MongoDB and Business Insider) - stay tuned for those to drop within next month.

In today’s episode, I got to sit down with AJ Piplica, founder and CEO of Hermeus, a company on a mission to build the world’s fastest aircraft. We made a special trip to Atlanta for this one.

Sharing summary of the interview below.

Hermeus fundraise and progress so far

In just over six years, AJ and his team have raised more than $200M led by Sam Altman with participation from Founders Fund, In-Q-Tel and Khosla Ventures. They have built a 200+ person team in Atlanta, and built three full-scale prototype aircrafts. The goal? Hypersonic flight at Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, enough to take you from New York to London in 90 minutes (Concorde did that in 3.5 hours).

Hermeus has gone defense-first: delivering uncrewed hypersonic aircraft to the U.S. Department of Defense and allied partners.

We forgot how to build planes

AJ mentions, in the 1940s to 70s, America would manufacture multiple aircrafts all in under 5 years. Now, that same process takes 20-25 years. In a world where China can field new systems faster than the U.S., AJ is betting on a one-aircraft-per-year cadence to flip the script. That requires iterating at a pace most would say is impossible for aerospace.

The DNA of risk appetite

His childhood obsession for “building things that move”, and being a SciFi fan from Star Trek to Star Wars, led him to Georgia Tech. After college, he got his start at Generation Orbit, where a team of fewer than 20 built and tested a rocket-powered hypersonic demonstrator for the Air Force. It was a crash course in doing more with less: avionics, rockets, flight tests, all with a minimal crew.

AJ’s family escaped communist Yugoslavia, with his grandfather literally jumping off a train to make it to North America before reuniting the family. Later, AJ learned his own parents once moved states for a startup job that collapsed within six months, a risk he didn’t even realize he grew up inside.

This taste of a small team, frontier aerospace foundation and the inherent entrepreneurial and risk taking, has now laid the foundation for Hermeus’s “life and death” motto.

This episode is a masterclass in solving hard problems fast. What it means to truly iterate at a pace you rarely see in hardware. Hope you enjoy as much as I did filming it!

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:41 - Why Atlanta

* 02:42 - Childhood obsession and early life

* 05:44 - Hypersonic vs Supersonic

* 10:21 - Defense first approach

* 16:22 - Fielding aircraft, then vs now

* 23:18 - Building in America

* 31:00 - Hermeus long term vision

* 38:23 - Business, numbers, incentive, deadlines

* 47:23 - Trust and co founder relationships

* 55:12 - Culture fit and hiring

* 59:51 - Why airplanes?

* 1:04:59 - Risk appetite and the migration story

* 1:12:15 - Optimists vs pessimists

* 1:18:21 - AJs LinkedIn cold messaging strategy

* 1:23:18 - Mentors

* 1:27:42 - Raising money and investor stories

* 1:29:45 - Closing thoughts

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

I sat down with Vivas Kumar, founder & CEO of Mitra Chem, a company commercializing iron-based cathode battery materials. They have raised $100M in equity but more interestingly they have secured $150M+ in grants from the Department of Energy and the state of Michigan. Backers include bestie Chamath Palihapitiya (who personally led the $20M Series A), and Mitra Chem is now building America’s first large-scale iron-based cathode factory.

Born in India, and an immigrant twice over, first to Singapore, then to the US, Vivas talks openly about how the survival instincts of immigration hardwire the founder’s mindset. Before founding Mitra Chem, he spent years at Tesla, where he signed the company’s first-ever 10-year lithium supply contracts (previous industry record: 3 months), jetting across 50 countries and 250+ days a year on the road. He was Tesla’s #2 travel spender after Elon Musk. Those deals are still the backbone of Tesla’s supply chain today.

Vivas took an education leave from Tesla to attend Stanford Business School (MBA). During this time, Tesla’s stock price skyrocketed 25x, and the unvested equity he would have resumed vesting into was worth millions. Returning to Tesla would have meant near-guaranteed financial security, what he called “generational wealth.”

But he made what he calls a “supreme decision” to walk away, one of many such supreme decisions at critical moments that have contributed to Mitra Chem’s rise. Instead of cashing in millions, he chose to found Mitra Chem, betting that solving the US battery supply chain problem was a billion-dollar opportunity and a chance to create thousands of jobs.

Some of what we cover:

* The Immigrant Mindset as Superpower - Why code-switching across cultures made him a sharper CEO and why immigration hardwires founders for survival.

* Supreme Decisions - Choosing Chamath over every other VC, leaving millions in unvested Tesla stock on the table to chase billions, and carrying lessons from a family chemicals business older than independent India.

* Fundraising at Scale - What it takes to raise $100M+ in venture capital and secure $150M+ in U.S. government grants and why being backed by the DOE is the toughest diligence process a startup will ever face.

* Tesla Lessons - From signing decade-long lithium supply contracts to watching Elon Musk make existential calls that kept Tesla alive when it had only weeks of cash left

* Building Mitra Chem - At the intersection of electrification, AI, and deglobalization. From a garage in Palo Alto to becoming a flagship U.S. battery champion competing with China.

* Cultural Compounding - Why small, high-trust teams work best, how equity becomes religion in Silicon Valley, and why the American Dream remains the world’s strongest brand.

Timestamps:

00:00 -Intro

00:46 -Transformational experiences and Immigrant story

08:41 - An Amalgamated American experience

15:46 - What is MitraChem and the Founding moment

17:44 - Asian business mindset

22:41 - Making “Supreme Decisions”

24:41 - Meeting Chamath Palihapitiya

25:40 - Early Tesla Employee experience

30:01 - Leaving Millions on the table

33:35 - Long Term Battery Contracts

37:40 - The Stanford Business School brand

41:22 - The birth of MitraChem

56:01 - Entrepreneurial journey post marriage

58:46 - Metrics for a successful life

1:05:37 - Lessons in fundraising

1:19:14 - Evaluating Agency

1:22:48 - The art of a good deal

1:25:01 - Raising money from the Government

1:34:19 - Future Predictions

Watch on YouTube here:

Also available on X, Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Last Episode:

I saw down with another former Elon employee, Karan Talati who was early at SpaceX and built their entire manufacturing supply chain processes. He shares his insights from working at the company when they were blowing up rockets every other week and what he learnt from the culture of extreme ownership.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

This is another one from the Reindustrialize conference in Detroit. I got to sit down with Karan Talati, CEO and co-founder of First Resonance, the factory operating system used by companies like Astranis, Radiant and now nearly 60 companies across mission-critical industries—think aerospace, defense tech, energy (including nuclear), heavy machinery, and robotics. With $30M raised and a rapidly growing 50-person team in Los Angeles, First Resonance is streamlining the orchestration of chaotic, high-stakes factory environments so that "good designs get into the process, good products get built, and we can manage all the chaos that inherently happens in the physical world."

His journey started just over a decade ago: Illinois engineering grad, early SpaceXer (he arrived when Falcon 9 launches were still cool and they risked blowing up more engines than they landed), then a key player connecting engineering and production as SpaceX transitioned from “N of 1” rocket builds to genuine factory-scale assembly lines.

He almost got his start in manufacturing accidentally. His father helped bring up Motorola’s early global supply chains, and would bring early prototypes for him to test, play and hack. But how does one go from hacking into pre-release phones to building scalable companies?

What SpaceX early days looked like, how does SpaceX compare to legacy brands like Boeing in terms of culture and what Elon Musk’s relationship with Gwynne Shotwell taught Karan about co-founder relationships.

Some other things we talk about:

* How the average age at SpaceX was 26, and what it meant to be forged in an environment of “high agency, high accountability, and directness”, traits now baked into First Resonance’s culture (every new hire writes a one-pager on why they want to join, and references are non-negotiable).

* His journey from seeing rocket blow up every other week at SpaceX to launching a platform helping the next generation of hardware companies iterate, scale, and hyperscale

* What it means to test early and fail often

* Take on co-founder relationships (real trust and complementary ways of thinking)

* Why “organizations are organisms”?

* The art of relationship building (“social capital compounds just like any other capital”), and Karan’s learned nuance from pitching to skeptical senior execs at SpaceX, to now selling software infrastructure to peers, many of whom came up beside him on those aerospace factory floors

Hope you enjoy this one! As always, DMs are open, would love to hear your feedback.

– Suffiyan Malik

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

03:00 - Marriage, Startup, Early Life

07:30 - Early SpaceX life and intersection with Tesla

11:39 - Gwynne Shotwell & Elon Musk and co founder relationships

15:52 - Learnings from SpaceX

24:45 - Boeing vs SpaceX, difference in company culture

34:41 - Relationship building and nurturing

41:20 - How to build company culture and hiring

50:22 - Evaluating agency in new hires

58:50 - Defining high agency and importance in founders

1:04:49 - Making intentional choices that compound

1:07:48 - Early interest in hardware and father’s impact

1:12:58 - Why hacking appealed to Karan?

1:16:52 - Mentors in career

1:20:09 - The art of soft influence

1:24:00 - Internship at Samsung in Korea

1:27:50 - Software, taste and distribution

1:32:48 - What makes a good story?

Also available on X, Spotify and Apple Music

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us

Hi all,

I was traveling for work the last couple of weeks which pushed back some of our episodes but excited to get back on schedule. This is one of the Lex Fridman-like long form ones, there will be 3-4 of these. I am still experimenting with the format and would love to hear your feedback. I am aiming to do 70-80 min pods post editing for future recordings but curious to hear if we should keep it under 1 hr.

Mehul has spent the last 20+ years in Silicon Valley. He’s gone from moving to the US at 15 barely speaking English, to an early career in DC-area dot-com startups, to product leadership at Salesforce (back when it was just 300 people), and building and working with teams that launched like.com (acquired by google for ~$100M), Flutter (vision-based gesture recognition; acquired by Google for ~$40M), and key parts of the Nest camera and home hardware lineup where he worked closely with Tony Fadell, the father of iPod and Nest.

From all his companies, he was compounding skills, relationships and experiences that led to Matic. This included his long term relationship with Navneet (Cofounder Matic) from Like.com days, insights from computer vision based products like Flutter which were ahead of their time and learning from Tony Fadell about building consumer hardware products.

In this episode:

* Value of compounding

* How to create your own opportunities, “create a job for yourself rather than finding one”

* How building companies is different from creating cool technology

* Finding and keeping motivation after a $40M exit

* Raising kids with ambition

This is for if you are doing laundry, house chores or hiking.

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

01:10 - Early life and the Immigrant Journey

04:43 - How Mehul started his career

11:42 - Role of proximity and entrepreneurship

14:51 - Risk appetite

16:56 - Value of compounding: Life, skills and work

23:37 - The first Computer Vision startup

27:42 - Cool tech vs useful product

36:44 - The Tony Fadell story

41:33 - Lessons in hardware by Tony

46:37 - Building products through deletion

52:22 - Safety in hardware products

54:07 - How people emotionally connect to products

58:44 - WhatsApp: Simplicity and failure to monetize

1:01:04 - Defining breakthrough innovation

1:10:49 - Identifying agency and hiring

1:15:58 - Raising a teenager and the education debate

1:27:42 - What motivated Mehul to keep building after million dollar exits

1:33:19 - The Matic masterplan

1:45:38 - The importance of storytelling

1:51:51 - The role of Apprenticeships

1:58:31 - The art of cold emails

2:06:17 - Being shameless

2:11:16 - Solving hard problems and being optimistic

2:18:25 - Recommended reading and watchlist

2:23:00 - The art of paying it forward

On Youtube:

Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethebuilders.us