Venture with Grace - podcast cover

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

Joseph Floyd, GP at Emergence: Enterprise Cloud Investor Shaping B2B SaaS

Joseph Floyd is a General Partner at Emergence and a Kauffman Fellow. Joe’s expertise in building cloud startups has evolved from over fifteen years of advising and investing in rocketship startups like SalesLoft, project44, Mya, Total Expert, LogDNA and more. Before joining Emergence, Joe was a Senior Associate in American Capital’s technology group where he focused on investing in fast-growing internet and software companies including HomeAway. Joe was also an Associate at McKinsey & Co. i...

Mar 20, 20251 hr 4 min

Brian Peterson, CTO: Dialpad's AI Revolution in Communication

Brian Peterson is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Dialpad, a leader in AI-powered communication and collaboration. With a background as a Senior Software Engineer at Google, where he contributed to the development of Google Voice, Peterson has been instrumental in driving technological innovation at Dialpad. His leadership continues to shape the company's growth and product development in the evolving landscape of hybrid work.Topics: The evolution of AI in business communicati...

Mar 20, 20251 hr 7 min

Iliana (Accenture Innovation) & Michael (Allocator One) on VC Transformation

Iliana Oris Valiente is the Managing Director (Partner) of NA Innovation Hubs Lead at Accenture. She leads all NA innovation hubs at Accenture, working with senior exec clients and boards to support their transformation journeys. This includes a focus on our AI, metaverse/web3, and cross industry plays. In this role, she oversees teams that bring together specialists in design, data science, the venture ecosystem, tech, along with variety of industry experts to educate clients, inspire change an...

Mar 18, 20251 hr

Anna Barber: M13 Partner Shaping the Future of Enterprise AI & Commerce

Anna Barber is a partner at M13, Anna was the managing director of Techstars LA and also a partner in The Fund LA. A certified executive coach, Anna has worked as a corporate lawyer, McKinsey consultant, product exec, and entrepreneur. She serves on the Advisory Board of PledgeLA and is a member of AllRaise.Topics: The rise of solopreneurship and its impact on the business landscape How AI is transforming the economics of small businesses The concept of "business-in-a-box" solutions #v...

Mar 14, 20251 hr

Stefan Weitz: HumanX CEO & SilverCircle GP Building AI Communities

Stefan Weitz is the co founder and CEO of HumanX. He is a veteran of Microsoft with 18 years of experience, has led billion-user technologies, including Bing.com, while also pioneering strategic initiatives in online platforms and cybersecurity, showcasing a profound understanding of technology trends and a talent for transforming concepts into thriving ventures.Topics: The role of conferences in fostering innovation and collaboration Leading billion-user technologies The vision behind HumanX #T...

Mar 14, 202525 min

Yousuf Khan: Ridge Partner Bridging CIO Experience to B2B Investments

Yousuf Khan is a Partner at Ridge Ventures. Having held many operational roles in his previous positions, he’s uniquely qualified to not only grow Ridge’s portfolio, but more importantly to support founders through the vantage point of deep start-up experience. He currently serves as board director for Ridge-backed Archera, Cerby, Chisel Labs, Lightyear, Rafay, and Rewind.Prior to joining Ridge, Yousuf was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, the CIO and Vice President of Customer Success at cl...

Mar 12, 202558 min

Andrew Brown: Check Founder Building the API Backbone for Embedded Payroll

Andrew Brown, founder and CEO of Check, has built a career transforming industries through technology. After co-founding Oyster, the "Netflix for books" acquired by Google, Andrew turned his focus to solving payroll complexities for businesses. With Check, he created a payroll-as-a-service API that enables software platforms to integrate payroll seamlessly. Backed by investors like Stripe and Index Ventures, Andrew is redefining how businesses manage payroll while sharing insights from...

Mar 12, 202551 min

Jae Lee: Twelve Labs Co-founder Building the Future of Video AI

Jae Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, a leading AI research and product company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a significant presence in APAC, based in Seoul, South Korea. Under Jae’s leadership, Twelve Labs has pioneered groundbreaking advancements in multimodal neural network architecture, establishing itself as the world’s leader in video understanding AI. The company’s proprietary technology empowers enterprises and developers globally with transformative capabi...

Mar 12, 202556 min

Reed McGinley-Stempel, CEO of Stytch: Building Frictionless Auth

Reed McGinley-Stempel is the co-founder and CEO of Stytch, an all-in-one platform for modern authentication, authorization, and fraud prevention. Their mission is to eliminate friction on the internet -- without compromising security. They offer solutions that are purpose-built for the needs of both consumer and B2B apps, including features like Google One-Tap & Biometrics to optimize conversions for B2C, and SSO, RBAC, and SCIM to meet the demands of enterprise customers for B2B SaaS. Befor...

Mar 09, 20251 hr 2 min

Sam Toole, Partner at Primary Venture: Future of Healthcare

Sam Toole is a Partner at Primary, where he spearheads new enterprise and healthcare investments. The Nantucket native and Hamilton alum was previously the GM of Physician Marketplace for Nomad Health, where he helped lead the company’s sales team from seed through a Series B. Sam’s entrepreneurial career started as the founder of ACK Surf, a surf school on the island of Nantucket, then continued with the creation of a DTC lifestyle clothing brand. Outside of work, Sam enjoys golfing, surfing, a...

Mar 07, 20251 hr

Alex Bangash, Transpose Co-founder: Platform Investing Innovator

9Alex Bangash is the Co-founder/ Managing Director of Transpose Platform. Transpose Platform investing in the future of venture—backing founders, funds, and platforms that shape the next generation of market leader. Topics: The Evolution of Venture Capital The Future of Fund Structures Building Successful Venture Funds #venturecapital #ventureinvesting #transposeplatform #futureofvc...

Mar 07, 202558 min

David Blumberg, Blumberg Capital: Global B2B Tech Visionary Builder

David Blumberg is the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital, which he established in 1991. Prior to Blumberg Capital, David managed international investments with the Bronfman Family Office (Claridge), Adler & Co. Venture Capital APAX Partners and at T. Rowe Price. He also launched business development for Check Point Software Technologies as one of its top four executives.David earned his A.B. in Government, cum laude, from Harvard College and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate S...

Mar 05, 20251 hr 4 min

Jon Turow, Partner at Madrona: Shaping Future AI/ML Infrastructure

Jon Turow joined Madrona in 2022. As part of the investment team, Jon partners with founders who build products that customers love. He is interested in applied AI/ML, data infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and open-source business models.Jon is an experienced product leader with over a decade of experience in cloud computing. Most recently, Jon led the product teams for AWS Computer Vision AI services including Amazon Textract (AI for intelligent document processing) and before that Ama...

Mar 05, 20251 hr 3 min

OSS4AI CEO Yujian Tang on Democratizing Open Source AI Development

Yujian Tang is the CEO of OSS4AI. OSS4AI is an organization aimed at providing all developers access to the resources to understand, use, and contribute to the direction and development of AI. He is also a Venture Partner at Banyan Ventures, a New York City-based pre-seed, first-money-in, venture capital firm born in the AI era.We will be in person going live at AWS in SF! Topics: Open source AI projects AI infrastructure and development AI-native applications and infrastructure #VCPodcast #AI #...

Mar 02, 202557 min

Pointhound CEO Jay Reno on Travel Points & Early-Stage Venture Investing

Jay Reno is the Co-founder and CEO of Pointhound. Pointhound is helping people find and book free flights, for free, to amazing destinations using credit card points and miles. 🛫🏝️ 💳 He also leads seed and series A investments with 645 Ventures where he's a Venture Partner. Investment areas include consumer, fintech, climate tech and AI. Previously founded Feather, raised $76m, built a world-class team of 150 people, and sold the company in 2022.Topics: The Role of AI in Fintech Consumer ...

Mar 02, 20251 hr

(Smart Venture Pod watch party) Founding Partner Lauren Kolodny of Acrew Capital on the future of AI

Lauren Kolodny is a Founding Partner of Acrew Capital. Lauren leads the fintech thesis area at Acrew. She has made investments in companies including Chime, Clara, Divvy, Gusto, Klar, Papaya, Pie, & Plaid. Prior to co-founding Acrew, Lauren was a partner at Aspect Ventures. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google, where she led a number of launches for Workspace, including Google Drive.Topics: How AI is Transforming the Future of Financial Services The Evolution of Payments ...

Feb 27, 202550 min

Nosu.io CEO Audrey Chen on Building AI, Winning Hackathons & Tech Content

Nosu founder backgrounds: Audrey (CEO) won 20+ hackathons, engineering @ Intuit, Intel, NASA USRC, content creator with 68k following on instagram @jia.seed. Disclaimer: Grace is an investor in Nosu. Topics: How to Spot Successful Founders at Hackathons Content Creation and Community Building Authentically Building a Gen Z Engineering Community #hackathon #startups #womenintech #engineering #tech...

Feb 23, 202556 min

Incisive Ventures' Martin Tobias on Pre-Seed B2B Software & Building Unicorns

Martin Tobias is the founder of Incisive Ventures. Over decades of investing, he has identified seven meta themes and developed a screening process that successfully identified outlier companies and founders. Incisive Ventures is a Pre-Seed Fund in Seattle to invest in technology companies that reduce friction at scale, leveraging the partner's network built as an angel investor in 60+ companies in the sector, including 4 unicorns, that secured $2.5B+ in follow-on financing. He is a serial e...

Feb 21, 202558 min

NVIDIA VP Howard Wright on Accelerating the Global AI Startup Ecosystem

Howard Wright is the VP of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. Prior to that he was the VP of Global Head of Start Ups at Amazon Web Services. At NVIDIA, he leads their global Inception program, positioned at the epicenter of the generative AI revolution. His role focuses on democratizing access to NVIDIA's comprehensive AI platform while building strategic partnerships across the startup ecosystem. Working with over 19,000 innovative startups, leading VCs, and global technology partners, they'...

Feb 21, 202559 min

NEA Partner Aaron Jacobson on AI, DevTools & Enterprise Infrastructure

Aaron Jacobson is a Partner at NEA. He seeks to partner with founders building generational companies in AI, developer tools, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and robotics. His current investments include Databricks, Second Front, Pulumi, Martian, Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Deltastream, Rapid Robotics, Built Robotics, Outrider, Tigera, and ForAllSecure. Previous investments include Box (NYSE:BOX), NGINX (acq. by F5), Streamsets (acq. by Software AG), and Illusive Networks (acq. by Proofpoin...

Feb 21, 20251 hr 3 min

Abbas Haider Ali, VP at GitHub: Customer Success & Innovation

Abbas Haider Ali is the Vice President of Customer Success at GitHub where he lead all post-sales teams with an org size of 550+, supporting a $2B+ ARR business serving over 150 million developers, including over 90% of the Fortune 100. Prior to GitHub, he was Vice President of Customer & Partner Success at Twilio, leading the Data & Growth business ($300M+ ARR) following Twilio's $3B+ acquisition of Segment. He's held executive leadership roles at industry-defining companies, in...

Feb 16, 20251 hr 7 min

Michael Freedman, CTO at Timescale: PostgreSQL & Real-Time Analytics

Mike Freedman is the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, as well as the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.Timescale is building the PostgreSQL database cloud for modern applications, supercharging real-time analytics, intelligence (AI), and transactional workloads. Thousands of global customers, $180M raised from leading VCs. Hiring globally @ timescale.com/careersMike's work broadly focuses on distributed systems, storage systems, networking, and security. He...

Feb 16, 20251 hr 6 min

Sandy Kory, General Partner at Horizon: Seed-Stage Tech Insights

Sandy Kory founded Horizon in 2022 and has over 15 years of venture capital experience. He was an early investor in Palantir, Canva, BillionToOne, Flutterwave, Sendbird, and several other unicorns. Horizon is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in disruptive software.Topics: Evolution of Software Investing Bootstrapped vs. Billion-Dollar Rounds Inside Palantir & Canva's Early Days #SeedStage #StartupGrowth #VentureCapital #BootstrappedVsVC...

Feb 16, 20251 hr 6 min

Eugene Lee, Partner at OMERS Ventures: SaaS & Innovation

Eugene Lee is a Partner at OMERS Ventures. He is currently a board member at Postal (offline marketing automation), WorkRamp (learning engine), Klue (competitive enablement), Mosaic (strategic finance), Fonoa (tax automation), Quorso (co-pilot for retail operations), and an investor in Crunchbase (prospecting for private companies).Eugene is an experienced professional with a demonstrated ability in business, financial and sales operations, general management (GM), business development, growth, ...

Feb 13, 202559 min

Sarah Catanzaro, General Partner at Amplify Partners: AI & Data Insights

Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners. Amplify Partners investments include Intervenn Biosciences, RunwayML, Maze Design, Bayes (acquired by Airtable), OctoML, Einblick AI (acquired by Databricks), Hyperparam, Hex, Meroxa, Metaphor Data, Datafold, Modal, Eppo, Gantry, Datology, WarpStream among others. Prior to that she worked as an associate at Canvas Ventures and the head of data at Mattermark. Topics: The evolution of AI infrastructure investing Data tooling and the modern ...

Feb 12, 20251 hr 5 min

HOF Capital Partner Hansae Catlett: Early-Stage AI & Dev Tools Investing

Hansae Catlett is a Partner at HOF Capital where he invests across sectors and stages, with a particular focus on leading the firm's early stage investment strategy in applied AI, B2B application software (horizontal and vertical), dev tools & infra, and deep tech.Prior to joining HOF Capital, Hansae was a Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, helping to lead the firm's investments in cloud and AI. His investments and/or board positions included Guild, Jasper, Luxury Presence,...

Feb 12, 20251 hr 3 min

Emilio Escobar, CISO at Datadog: Security & Innovation

Emilio Escobar is the Chief Information Security Officer of Datadog. With two decades of experience in Information Security and Compliance, Emilio Escobar has worked at large enterprises, medium-sized companies, and governmental organizations. Previously, Emilio served as the VP of Information Security for Hulu, where he played a pivotal role in setting up key security functions. Prior to that, Emilio worked for PlayStation, where he built and ran the software security teams. Emilio’s unique app...

Feb 11, 20251 hr 1 min

Itamar Novick: Recursive's Pre-Seed & Seed Investor in AI/Data Ventures

Itamar Novick is the Founder & General Partner at Recursive Ventures where he invest in early stage technology companies. Supporting entrepreneurs since 2010 (100+ investment). Business insider Top 100 Global seed investor in 2021-2024.Previously Entrepreneur & Startup executive at Life360 and Gigya. Some of his portfolio companies including: Deel, Honeybook, Peerspace, Akash Network, SafeGraph among others. Topics: Journey from a Successful Investor to Fund Manager First-Time Fund Manag...

Feb 08, 20251 hr 4 min

Numeric CTO Andrew Bihl: Building AI-Powered Accounting Automation

Andrew Bihl is the co-founder & CTO at Numeric. Numeric is an AI accounting automation platform, built to take manual work off accountants' plates so they can focus on what’s impactful. Numeric is currently used by hundreds of private and public companies to organize their close, automate reconciliations, and leverage AI for auto-drafted flux explanations and technical accounting research. Topics: The AI Revolution in Financial Software Building for Scale: The Enterprise Financial Stack ...

Feb 07, 20251 hr 7 min

Tony Conrad, True Ventures Partner Backing WordPress, Slack & Blue Bottle

Tony Conrad is a Partner at True Ventures. He worked with amazingly talented founders, operating teams from companies like Automattic (WordPress), ZERO Longevity Science, Modern Animal, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, MakerBot, Voiceflow, Giftshop, Cast, Bumo, Typekit, Pluralsight, Connectifier & Holey Grail Donuts. He also co-founded about.me & Sphere, both acquired by AOL. Tony is a personal investor in Slack, Automattic, Lowercase Capital, Cygni, Ghia, Empirical Spirits, International...

Feb 06, 20251 hr 12 min
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