We The Builders

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

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.

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

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!

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