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

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

Shoutout to my friends at Reindustrialize who put together an incredible event in Detroit mid-July. On the sides of the conference, I interviewed Christian Garrett, Partner at 137 Ventures, a $6B+ AUM growth-stage venture fund known for backing generational cateogory defining technology companies, investments include SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir, Spotify, Airbnb, Turo, and Uber.

Last month, Mario at The Generalist released an incredible four part series covering Founders Fund, their exceptional returns and what makes the firm so special. Part 2 of the series covers all associates of Thiel who have gone on to start incredibly successful VC firms, linking it below as it is worth the read and even worth paying just for the series.

There is an image in there mapping out all the Thiel and his associate founded venture firms. They left out 137 Ventures (I am sure this was an accident) which was cofounded by Justin Fishner-Wolfson (Former Principal at Founders Fund) and Alexander Jacobson (Former EIR at Founders Fund). Christian brought up in the pod that he would need to have a word with Mario about it, no need - we have issued an update along with the pod!

Christian also cofounded The Hill & Valley Forum with Delian Asparahouv (Founders Fund) and Jacob Helberg (Under Secretary of State Designate for Economic Security) to connect Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley, the event started as a small dinner gathering over 3 years ago and has quickly become the premier place to bring together decision makers from venture capital, Silicon Valley’s top startups and tech companies and decision makers in D.C.

I was at the “Winning The AI Race” Summit hosted by All-In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum last week where President Trump, JD Vance and four cabinet secretaries gave talks which is a testament to the influence and role of the forum in bridging D.C and the Valley.

In this podcast we go through a range of topics. Christian talks about his journey building his first computer as a kid to play Runescape and how that developed his love for sci-fi. He talks about playing college basketball at the University of Kansas and his learnings from being a “benchwarmer for some NBA all stars” and going deep into philosophy and theology before venturing into tech investing.

At 137 Ventures, Christian went from joining as an analyst to becoming partner in a very short period of time without taking the traditional business school detour to get into venture capital, he talks about what that taught him about finding and nurturing talent having been on the receiving end of the apprenticeship.

Timestamps and Highlights

(00:00) - Introduction 

(00:39) - Reindustrialize and Detroit 

(02:40) - Investing and growing at 137 Ventures

(10:16) - Early life and influences

(18:21) - Wanting to be an investor

(28:25) - Forging and maintaining relationships 

(37:48) - Hill & Valley Forum and rallying people 

(42:57) - Obsessions, self reflections and weaknesses

(40:37) - Capital allocation in venture 

(53:02) - Compounding in personal life

(57:43) - Portfolio Construction Debates

(1:05:36) - Remote work, city concentration and next wave of innovation

(1:10:12) - Accelerated innovation due to growing private markets

(1:15:05) - Rapid fire and closing thoughts

Watch On YouTube:

Enjoy the weekend watch. The next episode drops Tuesday. 

Tune in on YouTube, X, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Last week on We The Builders:

Feedback & Up Next

Please do share your feedback if you get a chance to tune in, I am a new interviewer and still learning to every day. I look forward to hearing from you.

If you like the episode, you can support us by sharing the show with a friend. We have some great new episodes lined up including a series in the works on New Media.

Until next Tuesday, Suffiyan Malik

Thanks for listening and reading We The Builders! If you liked what you saw, hit subscribe.

I got to sit down in San Francisco with Omri Amirav-Drory, General Partner at NFX, a $1.4B AUM pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm that invests in tech startups across various sectors, focusing on fostering network effects and defensible competitive advantages. They seek out companies in fields like AI, biotech, fintech, SaaS, marketplaces, and crypto.

He started out conducting research in Israel’s intelligence corps to pipetting at Stanford labs. Exited Genome Compiler to Twist Bioscience ($2B market cap, NASDAQ: TWST). Launching a pre-seed venture fund called TechBio which lead him to his role at NFX.

Worth reading, Omri’s “Race to 160” blog. This actually makes sense as the human lifespan has double in the last few centuries from ~40 to ~80 and up from ~20 from about 5,000 years ago - Omri discusses this in the pod.

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(00:55) - Early Life, Military, PhD

(04:00) - Learnings from the Army

(07:10) - Life at Stanford and Entrepreneurship

(11:56) - Recruiting friends to start a company

(13:30) - Race to 160

(18:05) - ABCD plan for aging

(26:59) - Companies actively working towards solving aging

(31:22) - Singularity and Ray Kurzweil

(33:12) - What it takes to be a founder

(40:12) - People investing vs Technology investing

(45:00) - DNA of a founder

(48:11) - The initial spark to become an entrepreneur

(51:37) - Agency, Risk Appetite and Perseverance

(55:21) - Network Effects

(1:04:47) - Breakthrough Innovation

(1:09:41) - Storytelling and authenticity

(1:14:58) - Role Models

(1:18:11) - Rapid fire and closing thoughts

Watch On YouTube:

Happy Tuesday y’all! Our next feature drops Friday. We have an incredible line-up. Tune in on X, Spotify, Apple, YouTube.

Best,Suffiyan Malik

This is it—the very first episode of We The Builders. Earlier this year, I sat down with Shahin Farshchi in LA. He is a General Partner at Lux Capital, a venture fund with $5B AUM. To kick us off, who better than the man who was investing in hard tech 18 years before it was cool:

Shahin has invested in companies manufacturing in space (Varda), building autonomous transportation systems (Zoox), providing robots as a service (Formic), automating industries (Covariant), using space to revolutionize the Earth observation industry (Planet), 3D printing rockets (Relativity Space) and many more.

The Jetsons Future I thought I would be living in 2025 is partly being built. We have a long way to go but this is exactly how we inspire the next generation. If someone from 1900 woke up and read this, they would call it science fiction. Thank you Shahin, for believing in and being a partner to these incredible companies and founders.

Shahin is an incredibly kind soul, helpful, accessible and a role model for younger aspiring venture capitalists. From what I have personally observed and heard from friends building companies, he will cheer you on and have incredible empathy for the fact that you had the courage to build. In many cases, more than capital, that is what you need most.

Hope you enjoy the conversation!

Follow on X:

Shahin Farshchi

Suffiyan Malik

Highlights & Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

02:13 Berkeley to Iran in teenage

05:01 Adapting to different education systems

09:05 Early transformative experiences

14:49 Mentors and role models

18:20 On breaking into research labs and flipping rejections

25:01 Story of getting into grad school, applying for funding, and early research

32:41 Going from research to venture capital

34:50 Commercializing his research and starting a company

38:04 Thoughts on ingredients of a good startup

45:11 Where do the best founders come from

50:34 Why PhDs are not equipped to commercialize

1:02 Breakthrough innovation timeline

1:05 Solving for shareholder demand

1:10:22 How to think about what problem to solve

1:14:10 State of the education system

Watch on YouTube here:

P.S. Huge thanks to Mark and the Bonfire Ventures team for hosting this recording in Brentwood!