In this conversation we chat about so many key moments in Sanders journey cofounding, building and scaling Thumbtack into a $3.2b business with 900+ employees over 13 years. We start with the founding story and weekly brainstorm calls that led to the company. We then talk about the four key phases of building a successful marketplace startup, from finding product-market fit to hyper-scaling. And finally, we talk about how Sander and his co-founders built incredible long term relationships, worki...
Jan 12, 2022•48 min•Season 2Ep. 1
In this conversation with Alanna we talked about pivotal moments in Alanna’s journey from working on emerging markets research on Wall St, to founding a YC backed marketplace startup, to growth marketing leader at Afterpay. Alanna has a broad and unique perspective on startups, fintech and crypto, and in this conversation we cover a wide range of topics across all three. Episode Highlights Starting her career on Wall St during the 2008 financial crisis Culture working in finance vs tech Founding...
Jan 05, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Summary In this conversation with Vrinda we cover a wide range of topics including how the current credit system works, why women are more likely to have negative credit experiences, and how Sequin solves that inequity gap with a new debit card for women that helps build credit. We also talk about the process of launching a new card based product at a bank vs. a startup, and both opportunities and challenges to innovate in the space. Episode Highlights Working on Chase Sapphire card at Visa and ...
Dec 16, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Summary: Conversation with Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Sila. Prior to Sila, he was co-founder of Bank Simple, which was the first US neobank and early fintech pioneer. For many it was one of the most exciting and groundbreaking products of the last decade. We talk about the Bank Simple story, banking and fintech landscape, and his new company Sila. Sila makes it easy for any business to program money through APIs for digital wallets, linked accounts, ACH, money storing, transferring and payouts...
Nov 14, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Summary: Conversation with Paul Sawaya, co-founder of Human Interest, $1b company that makes it easy for SMBs to provide 401k savings plans to their employees, and helps employees save for their retirement. We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation across the Human Interest story, numerous lessons learnt, and technologies he's most excited about for the future. Episode Highlights: Early experiences like building an FB app at Bloomberg Interviewing with Emmett Shear to interview at...
Oct 30, 2021•55 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Conversation with Jim Brusstar, co-founder of Treasury Prime, which is building APIs to connect a network of banks to fintechs. They make it easy for fintechs to partner with the right bank, and reduce the time to market for a neo bank or embedded banking product from years to months. We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation — starting with being early at Sidecar and lessons learnt from competing with Uber and Lyft, being early to fintech with Standard Treasury which built bankin...
Sep 16, 2021•43 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Conversation with Sam Corcos, CEO of Levels health, who is a prolific serial entrepreneur and building one of the most exciting companies in healthcare today. Levels is a groundbreaking product that helps people track their blood glucose in real-time to understand and improve their metabolic health. We talk about key lessons Sam learnt from his first few startups, why he took a year off before starting levels, how he honed in on the idea for Levels, his approach towards building a radically open...
Sep 10, 2021•44 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Conversation with Brian Ma - who interned at Zillow when it was 15 people, joined as employee #32, and went on to become a prolific serial entrepreneur. We talk about his entrepreneurial journey founding Decide.com , Weave, Divvy Homes ($2b unicorn), and most recently, a SE Asia focused Seed fund and accelerator. Some highlights from the conversation include how he skipped high school, why he joined Zillow, his first few companies, going on a "vision quest", his approach to exploring new ideas, ...
Sep 04, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Conversation with Prasanna Sankar - whose most recent company, Rippling, went from zero to $1.35b valuation in less than 4yrs. We talk about his experiences working on startups for over 10 years, finding and scaling success at Rippling, and why he believes crypto will be a transformative new economic engine. Episode Highlights: Getting started as a programmer in high school Approach to building from first principles and becoming the top ranked coder in India Moving from Microsoft Bing team to Si...
Aug 16, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Conversation with Bo Jiang - founder and CEO of Lithic, which offers an API for card issuing. We talk about Bo's incredible journey starting out as a consumer focussed company (Privacy.com), and pivoting to Lithic, which is an easy to use API for card issuing. Today, Lithic is one of the fastest growing company in Fintech and recently announced a Series C at an $800m valuation. In this conversation, we focus on the early days and pivotal moments in Bo's journey. Episode Highlights: Growing up in...
Aug 16, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Interview with Jonathan Wegener -- one of the most innovative product thinkers we know. We talk about his experience founding Timehop, working on Evan Spiegel's design team at Snap, and what he's working on next ("active" audio-based products). Episode Highlights: How Jonathan got started building products How he got into startups and started building online businesses How Timehop started at a Foursquare hackathon Timehop early traction and explosive growth Lessons from raising Series A and hype...
Apr 12, 2021•53 min•Season 1Ep. 1
