We’ve welcomed investors with unique backgrounds to First Funders before, but Sundeep Ahuja is our first operator-turned-actor-turned-investor. Sundeep is all in on all things climate tech. He’s backing founders leading the way in cleaning up our water, purifying our air, and keeping our planet the way it should be: livable. Today, his micro fund and syndicate platform Climate Capital, has over 400 climate-focused companies in its portfolio. Sundeep shares why he thinks real-world, physical tech...
May 27, 2025•42 min•Ep. 3
Canadians have been the lifeblood behind some of the biggest unicorn startups of the past few years (think Open AI, Uber, Slack, Instacart, Notion, Databricks, CloudFlare, Roblox, Ethereum, Moderna Health, and Clay to name a few), and yet no one talks about them, except for Andre Charoo. And he’s not just talking – he’s putting his money behind Canadian founders through his fund, Maple VC . Andre shares why he thinks Canadian founders are always a strong bet (and bonus points if they’re immigran...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 2
You can be a founder. You can be an investor. You can be an operator. Or, you can be Shalin Mantri and be all three. This respected product leader got his start by founding a mobile app startup in the early iPhone days in 2011 and followed it up with product leadership in the early days of Uber, Skip and more recently, Google. He angel invests with $5k – $50k checks as a true first believer, usually in companies where he has a personal connection with the founder. He shares his tiered angel inve...
Mar 27, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 1
We’ve had a lot of cool people on the pod, but Sheel Mohnot is our first guest to achieve this trifecta: 100X an investment, have a founder in his portfolio go to prison, and have his wedding sponsored by Taco Bell. He invests at the pre-seed and seed stages into startups in the financial technology (fintech) space, and he’s quick to tell you that just about everything is fintech. Through his fund, Better Tomorrow Ventures , Sheel writes $500k to $3M pre-seed and seed checks into fintech compani...
Nov 20, 2024•53 min•Ep. 16
One day soon when you see a robot squirrel on a 10-foot unicycle, think of Danielle Strachman. These are the types of ideas Danielle Strachman sees and backs on a regular basis at her VC fund, 1517. The fund, which proudly backs “dropouts, students, and sci-fi,” has had several fund multipliers in their portfolio, including Loom (Acquired by Atlassian) and Luminar Technologies (IPO 2020). Plus, her star-studded community includes Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum , Laura Deming of The Longevity Fund ,...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 15
Elizabeth Yin realized she had a problem. She wanted to be a founder, but couldn’t think of a problem she wanted to spend decades of her life working on. After soul searching, she remembered the one thing she did care about: helping other founders. She took that passion and turned it into Hustle Fund, which focuses on offering capital, knowledge, and networks to “hilariously early-stage” software startups. She also angels invests in non-software D2C companies. She’s invested in over 800 startups...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 14
An ill-fated business school fashion show led to a venture capital fund with $215 million AUM. The duo met in 2010 at the MIT Sloan School of Management and soon after became research partners investigating why VCs were shunning startups in highly regulated spaces even though AirBnB and Uber were starting to reach venture scale very quickly. Tech-enabled startups impacting how we live in the real world were new (back then). Their research sparked Tumml in 2012, an early-stage accelerator, and cu...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 13
Have you ever played with an Oculus VR headset? You probably owe thanks to Arian Ghashghai. The former founder was working at Meta when someone in his network introduced him to an opportunity to invest in gummies. Yes, gummies. That’s far and away from Arian’s machine learning roots, it’s now one of his best investments to date. Arian has since gone full-time into investing as the founder and managing partner at his own fund, Earthling VC, which specializes exclusively in making pre-seed investm...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 12
Armed with an educational background in computer science and biomedical informatics, Amit Garg switched to venture capital after a long, successful career in the corporate world, which included stints at companies like Google and Samsung. And that’s just the way he never planned it. That’s right, the almost-doctor didn’t intend to get into venture capital, and he certainly never planned on starting his own fund. He was drawn in by his innate need to build things, including relationships with peo...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 11
What do you get when you mix U.S. national security, angel investing, and kids’ pajamas? Atlee Clark. Proud Canadian Atlee took a hard pivot from the public sector to the tech world, first through a nonprofit called the C100 , which supports entrepreneurs, and later at Shopify, focusing on 0 - 1 initiatives. Similar to other angel collectives emerging at the time like Hashtag Angels and Operator Collective , Atlee tapped into her executive network at Shopify to connect with other female leaders ...
Jul 23, 2024•59 min•Ep. 10
Join Shaherose & Aamir as we reflect on our conversation with Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures . Highlights: Don’t forget the macro: Government regulations can lead to massive opportunities or failures. We discuss case studies of companies like Samsara, Movtive (fka KeepTrucking), Republic, and Zum, showing how regulatory shifts led to category-creating opportunities. Charles’ worst investment was wiped out due to changes in government regulation. Team vs market: We discussed the interpl...
Jul 09, 2024•21 min•Ep. 9
Hailing from Michigan, Charles developed an early obsession with the public markets in high school. Charles Hudson is now the Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures, a pre-seed venture fund that has defined and has become synonymous with “pre-seed”. Charles is known for his ability to identify and mentor early-stage companies that have the potential to disrupt their industries - first and early - including companies like the Athletic ( acquired by the NY Times for $550M ), Bobbie ( recently rais...
Jul 02, 2024•59 min•Ep. 8
Eric Ries has invested in over 100+ early-stage startups. He is best known as the author of The Lean Startup , a must-read for entrepreneurs worldwide. He also founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) , a new stock exchange designed to support companies with long-term goals. He recently launched a new podcast discussing ways to re-think corporate governance to be mission-first. In Part 1 of our interview, he shared insights from angel investing. In Part 2, Eric shares his new ethos for startu...
Jun 12, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 7
Rajiv Bala , GP of Clutch VC , a pre-seed and seed-stage fund exclusively investing in Texas. Rajiv is committed and bullish on the region with a hands-on approach to investing, working with founders on product feedback, team building, and more to see initial customer validation before investing. Rajiv also embraces sub $500 million outcomes to drive fund multiples rather than relying on Unicorn outcomes only. This episode pushed our thinking on what we know and practice here in Silicon Valley, ...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 6
Meka Asonye , a Partner at First Round Capital , started angel investing in 2018 while working at Stripe and joined First Round in 2021. He has made dozens of Angel investments and 13 Venture investments, and he's just getting started! While he focuses on B2B SAAS, he has not shied away from investing in audacious founders, from modernizing 911 call centers to putting the biggest satellites in space. Meka shares his approach to finding true outliers, a practice he began while uncovering hidden t...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 5
Amit Kumar , former founder and angel investor, is a generalist venture capitalist at Accel focused on dev tools, healthcare, and fintech startups. Twitter acquired Amit’s third company, and it was then that he realized his true purpose was supporting startup founders, and he shifted to venture capital. Amit shares insightful stories and lessons learned from 8 years of early-stage investing out of a large, top-tier VC fund. Amit writes checks of $2M to $4M as the lead and first institutional see...
Mar 12, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 4
Rachel Sheinbein is an angel investor with over 250 startup investments. She shares her insights on angel investing and how it allows her to work with founders “even before the seed stage,” writing $25k checks into technology startups through her vehicle Very Serious Ventures . Later, Rachel discusses how building a community drives her investing strategy and lessons from memorable startup investments. Shaherose and Aamir kick off the show with a special message for founders who like to argue an...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 3
Jenny Fielding , a pre-seed investor and angel with 300 early-stage startup investments, discusses investing in FinTech, hard tech, and consumer spaces over the past decade. From studying law to working in finance to leaving it all to found not just one but two startups, Jenny brings a founder-operator mindset to her fund, Everywhere Ventures . She writes pre-seed and seed-stage checks for $50k to $250k. Highlights from our discussion: Jenny’s first seed investment and its fast, huge outcome Her...
Feb 14, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 2
We're all discussing current market conditions - valuations, AI hype, fundraising challenges... Before we kick off our planned interview series on First Funders, we sat down with our friend Arjun Arora to discuss the Trends in Venture Capital 2024 . As investors, we always look ahead, making this a great way to start 2024. Highlights from our discussion: What to expect in round sizes and valuations Anticipated returns from the AI hype The significance of data-driven decision-making for VCs The r...
Jan 25, 2024•44 min•Ep. 1
Before you dive into our archives or the next episode, learn about First Funders and its hosts, Shaherose Charania and Aamir Virani. You'll hear about Shaherose's background as a startup builder turned VC who started as a product marketer and how she started Women 2.0, a startup ecosystem, and Founder Labs, a tech incubator. She also reviews her time at Nike, where she built their first incubator, and her role as an angel investor and now Venture Partner at Cake Ventures. Aamir then shares his e...
Jan 23, 2024•7 min
Coming soon. First Funders is a podcast for the Angels and Venture Capitalists who write first checks . Co-hosted by Shaherose Charania , startup builder turned VC. And Aamir Virani , founder turned angel investor. In each episode, you'll hear from angel and seed-stage VCs who wrote the first checks into startups that made it. How did these investors find these opportunities? How did they gain conviction? How did they decide to make a bet? And what can you learn from their journey? Sharpen your ...
Jan 12, 2024•40 sec
