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Venture with Grace

Grace Gongsvppro.com
I host a top VC podcast called Smart Venture Podcast (SVPpro.com). Past guests include C-level/VPs of Google, Meta, Amazon, Sephora, Dunkin' Donuts, Chipotle, Pepsi, Instagram, Deloitte, Reddit, Lyft, etc. Managing Partners of top funds (many were featured on the Forbes Midas List) and unicorn founders (founders of Craigslist, Square, Loom, Cruise, etc.) Venture with Grace is my new spin-off series that features top LPs, GPs, solo GPs, Angel Investors, top AI founders, and other experts in tech and business to cover specific domain expertise. Watch this Live on LinkedIn/ YouTube: Grace Gong

Episodes

Sami Ghoche Forethought CEO: Building Customer Service's Future

Sami Ghoche is the Co-founder and CEO of Forethought. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise and deploy capital faster and wit...

May 28, 202557 min

Arnav Sahu: Partner at Peak XV & Ex-YC Growth Scaling Global Startups

Arnav Sahu is a Partner at Peak XV Partners (fka Sequoia India). ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise and deploy capital fas...

May 25, 20251 hr 5 min

Ben Sun, GP at Primary VC: Building World's Largest Seed Firm

Ben Sun is a Cofounder and General Partner at Primary. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise and deploy capital faster and wi...

May 24, 20251 hr 11 min

Not Boring's Packy McCormick: Content Excellence to Venture Success

Packy McCormick (208k+ on X) is the founder and creator of Not Boring (243k+ subs). ~~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise an...

May 24, 202532 min

Notable Capital's Dan Cahana: Vercel, Neon & AI Infrastructure

Dan Cahana is an Investor at Notable Capital.~~~~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise and deploy capital faster and with grea...

May 24, 20251 hr 2 min

Josh Aharonoff, Mighty Digits: 454k LinkedIn CFO Founder/Influencer

Josh Aharonoff, CPA, is the founder of Your CFO Guy (450k+ followers) and Mighty Digits.~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise...

May 21, 202551 min

Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine: The Future of Digital Content

Tony Stubblebine is the CEO of Medium. ~~~~~This episode is brought to you by Verivend. If you’re a GP or LP looking to simplify the capital raising and deployment process, Verivend is here to help. Trusted by over 800 funds and managing more than $2 billion in transactions, Verivend offers a secure, streamlined payments platform designed specifically for private capital markets. Say goodbye to manual reconciliation and repeated follow-ups - raise and deploy capital faster and with greater trans...

May 21, 20251 hr 4 min

Prashanth Chandrasekar: Stack Overflow CEO Empowering Developer Community

Prashanth Chandrasekar is the CEO and Board Member of Stack Overflow, the world's largest and most trusted community and platform for developers and technologists. With over 100 million global monthly visitors and market-leading, fast-growing collaboration and knowledge-sharing Enterprise SaaS and AI products, Stack Overflow enables the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. In 2021, Stack Overflow was acquired by Prosus for $1.8Bn.Previously, he served as Senior Vice Presiden...

May 18, 20251 hr 2 min

VC @M13: Morgan Blumberg on AI, Healthcare & Future of Work Investments

Morgan Blumberg is a Principal at M13. Morgan spent five years in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. She worked on a presidential campaign, at Bloomberg Philanthropies and consulted for start-ups in the political media space.Topics: Healthcare and future of work Embedded AI, productivity tools, and infrastructure Frontier investing trends #AI #FrontierTech #VentureCapital #StartupInvesting...

May 18, 20251 hr 2 min

Manish Patel: Founder of Nava Ventures Backing Market-Creating Innovators

Manish Patel is the founder of Nava Ventures. He led teams that have designed, developed, and scaled products with global impact, from enterprise advertising systems like AdWords to consumer experiences like Google Maps. Prior to that, he was a GP at Highland Capital Partners. Highland has raised over $3B in committed capital and invested in more than 270 companies, resulting in category-defining businesses across consumer and enterprise technology. Investments include companies such as Rent the...

May 18, 20251 hr 2 min

Scaling Security Startups: Anna Sarnek on BD Strategy at AWS and Beyond"

Anna Sarnek leads Cyber Startup and Venture Capital Business Development at AWS, working at the intersection of investors, startups, and the CISO community. With 15+ years of experience and a technical background, she excels at identifying unique go-to-market opportunities in enterprise IT and cybersecurity. At SecurityScorecard, she single-handedly built the Cloud Partnership program, achieving 8x marketplace growth, securing a record 6-day deal cycle, and earning recognition at re 2022. Previo...

May 18, 202555 min

Tim Shi: From Early OpenAI to Cresta Co-Founder's Enterprise AI Success

Tim Shi is the Co-founder of Cresta (1.6B+ Valuation). Backed by top investors (sequoia, greylock & a16z), they are building AI agents to transform customer experiences. Tim dropped out of Stanford PhD program in 2017 to change the nature of work with AI, starting with copilots and expanded into a full platform of augmentation, automation and insights. In 2019, Cresta started deploying a GPT-2-based generative AI system in production for Fortune 500 customers. Their work is featured in the r...

May 11, 202556 min

Deedy Das: Menlo Ventures' Strategic Bets on Anthropic and AI's Future Stack

Deedy is a principal at Menlo Ventures focused on early-stage investments in AI/ML, next-generation infrastructure, and enterprise software. Having been an engineer and product leader at both a successful startup and large public companies, Deedy is well-equipped to help technical founders navigate how to build and scale enduring tech companies.Deedy has been a company builder for many years and believes that a fantastic product—not just tech—is what attracts and retains users. Before joining Me...

May 09, 20251 hr 10 min

Neel & Roy: Cluely Co-Founders Crafting AI's Final Experience Layer

Chungin "Roy" Lee and Neel Shanmugam are the founders behind Cluely AI, a startup that recently secured $5.3 million in seed funding to develop their "real-time coaching" technology that provides suggestions through a hidden overlay during professional interactions. Their project began at Columbia University where they created Interview Coder, which later evolved into Cluely—now generating over $3 million in annual recurring revenue. Roy and Neel describe their technology as the natural progress...

May 06, 202532 min

Colton Dempsey: Next47 Partner Backing AI-Powered Security Infrastructure

Colton Dempsey is a Partner at Next47. Colton joined Next47 in 2018 and is a Partner on the Palo Alto investment team. He helped lead the firm’s investments in Halcyon and Harmonic Security, Noname Security, Armorblox, DataGrail, Brilliant, Software.com, and Pando, among others. His primary areas of focus are IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, robotics, and connected devices. Colton’s interest in B2B tech began prior to Next47 while working on M&A and IPO transactions at Morgan Stanley’s Tech...

May 06, 20251 hr 3 min

Daniel Suh: Gold House Ventures Backing Next-Gen Tech Entrepreneurs

Daniel Suh is a Principal at Gold House Ventures. Gold House Ventures invests sector-agnostic in industry-shifting startups, working with the best-in-class, high-growth companies to accelerate their success. We welcome founders and investors advancing Asian Pacific culture and heritage.Topics: Identifying "industry-shifting" startups Building authentic community around a venture fund Cross-cultural investment strategies #GoldHouseVC #VC #StartupFunding #InnovationCapital...

May 05, 20251 hr 6 min

Gaurav Bhaya: Google VP on Tech Leadership in the AI Transformation Era

Gaurav Bhaya is a VP & GM at Google. He is a technologist with almost 20 years of experience in building products from early stage ideas to those used by billions of people around the world. Worked in a wide variety of roles ranging from Search Products, Lead Generation, Advertising and Voice / Chat bot on Google Assistant. A keen sense of product / business understanding with the depth of engineering challenges in system design, user experience and AI/ML.Currently, he is enabling advertisin...

May 02, 20251 hr

Kevin Jiang: Mangusta Capital Managing Partner's AI & Consumer Vision

Kevin Jiang is the Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Mangusta Capital, a venture firm backing industry-specific AI startups at the application layer to drive real-world transformation. Focused on early to growth-stage companies across key sectors, the firm leverages a disciplined approach and global partnerships to support founders creating impactful, scalable technologies that optimize workflows and unlock efficiencies.Prior to starting Mangusta Capital, Kevin was part of the founding ...

May 02, 20251 hr 3 min

Roseanne Wincek: Renegade's MD on Backing Bold Tech Founders

Roseanne Wincek is the Co-Founder & Managing Director of Renegade Partners. Roseanne is a venture capitalist, early-stage startup founder and operator, scientist, and co-founder of Renegade Partners. In more than a decade in venture, she has gravitated toward pioneering founders tackling big, bold problems or taking on the status quo. Prior to starting Renegade with Renata Quintini in 2020, Roseanne helped high-traction companies scale as a Partner at the later-stage venture firm, IVP. She i...

Apr 29, 20251 hr 3 min

Jasper Zhang: Hyperbolic's Vision for Democratizing AI Cloud Infrastructure

Jasper Zhang is the founder of Hyperbolic. Hyperbolic is building the leading open-access AI cloud. Access inference and compute at a fraction of the cost, and build AI applications without relying on centralized infrastructures.Topics: Open-Access AI Cloud The Future of AI Infrastructure Building a Collaborative AI Ecosystem #AICloud #OpenAccessAI #DecentralizedCompute #Hyperbolic...

Apr 29, 20251 hr

Mercedes Bent, Venture Partner @ Lightspeed: Shaping Consumer & Fintech Future

Mercedes Bent is a Venture Partner at Lightspeed. Mercedes’ path to VC is a true convergence of her life experiences — a childhood surrounded by inventors, finance roles at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs, managing P&Ls at two consumer startups (including growing one from $2 to $100M in revenue in 4 years), founding two startups of her own, and her long-term goal of empowering communities she cares about. She joined Lightspeed in 2019 and has led a number of investments in the LATAM re...

Apr 25, 20251 hr

Christine Yen, CEO @ Honeycomb: Revolutionizing Software Observability

Christine Yen is the Co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb is the observability platform for teams who manage software that matters. Before founding Honeycomb, she built analytics products at Parse/Facebook, and loved writing software to separate signal from noise.Topics: Building a category-defining product in the observability space The evolution of developer experience and why it matters to business outcomes Data-driven decision making #ObservabilityLeadership #TechFounderJourney #Dat...

Apr 24, 20251 hr 1 min

Mo Al Adham, Frec CEO: Democratizing Wealth Management Through Fintech

Mo Al Adham is the founder and CEO of Frec. Frec was founded in 2021 and is based out of San Francisco. They're funded by a long list of incredible investors from companies like Google, Meta, Brex, and more. Their biggest backer is Greylock. Frec has two subsidiaries: one is an SEC registered investment adviser and the other is an SEC registered broker dealer and FINRA member. Assets are housed at Apex Clearing House. Mo is a serial entrepreneur. Before Frec, he was the first advisor of Inst...

Apr 22, 20251 hr 1 min

Maitree Mervana Parekh@Acrew Capital on Health & Fintech Investing

Maitree Mervana Parekh is an early & growth stage investor @ Acrew Capital. Maitree is a student of consumer behavior shifts and a creative. She leads investments across Health and Fintech, working closely with the firm’s investments in Cometa, Future Family, Banked, ShopShops, Creative Juice, among other unannounced companies.Prior to Acrew, Maitree was an investor at Cerity Partners Ventures (fka Touchdown Ventures), where she helped launch and manage venture capital programs on behalf of ...

Apr 21, 20251 hr 1 min

Anarghya Vardhana: GP@Maveron on Healthcare & Consumer Wellness VC

Anarghya Vardhana is a General Partner at Maveron. Anarghya spends her time understanding consumer and cultural behavioral shifts, identifying the billion-dollar businesses that will emerge, and partnering with the right founders to help grow those startups into iconic consumer brands. She is particularly interested in companies improving the health and wellness of large populations and she has invested across early stages and sectors such as mental health (Two Chairs, Bend Health), women's ...

Apr 21, 202554 min

Kirby Winfield: Founding GP@Ascend on Enterprise AI & Defense Tech

Kirby Winfield is the founding GP of Ascend, a pre-seed VC fund focused on enterprise AI. The fund's flagship investment is Overland AI, which powers autonomous ground navigation for the US Defense ecosystem. Prior to Ascend, Kirby's career as a tech founder included two IPOs and two venture backed exits.Topics: Enterprise AI Investment Thesis: Defense Tech Innovation Building Defensible AI Startups #AIStartups #TechExits #VentureCapital #AIInvestment...

Apr 18, 20251 hr 6 min

Arvind Ayyala: Partner@Geodesic Capital on Enterprise Tech Investing

Arvind Ayyala is a Partner at Geodesic Capital, focused on investments across enterprise software, fintech, healthcare and sustainable technologies. He was previously co-leading North American growth investments in similar segments, for Singapore-based EDBI. Prior to EDBI, Arvind was with Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), planning and executing the country’s economic development. He worked across Energy & Chemicals, Engineering Services, Healthcare and Technology sectors and was co...

Apr 18, 20251 hr 7 min

LP Perspective: Andrea Lo, Managing Partner at Main Character Capital

Andrea Lo is the Managing Partner at Main Character Capital. She is a silicon Valley native investor with 15+ years experience as a founder, investor, and startup operator in the alternative investments space. Led $100mm+ of global VC investments from pre-seed to pre-IPO, helped launch & turnaround venture style funds, and created / innovated on new financial products later adopted by financial institutions. Previously Head of Investments for a $1B foundation investing in fintech & block...

Apr 18, 20251 hr 6 min

Emily Yu: Boost VC Investor Backing Hardware-Software Deep Tech

Emily Yu is a Deep Tech Investor at Boost VC. Boost VC invest in Pre-seed companies in the intersection of hardware + software, across robotics, aerospace, defense, climate, BCI/HCI, bio, physical infrastructure, etc. Topics: Deep tech investment thesis Emerging trends in deep tech AI robotics integration #DeepTechVC #HardwareSoftwareAI #AIAccelerators #EdgeComputing...

Apr 05, 20251 hr 5 min

Derek Xiao: Menlo VC Backing AI, Cloud & Digital Health Innovators

Derek Xiao is an investor at Menlo Ventures. Derek concentrates on identifying investment opportunities across the firm’s thesis areas, covering AI, cloud infrastructure, digital health, and enterprise SaaS. Derek is especially focused on investing in soon-to-be breakout companies at the inflection stage. Derek joined Menlo from Bain & Company where he worked with leading San Francisco-based technology investors and companies spanning a broad range of industries. In one case, he advised a gr...

Apr 05, 20251 hr 1 min
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