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

Mike Mangini, SignalFire Partner: Building World-Class Tech Teams

Mike Mangini is a partner at SignalFire. Mike joined SignalFire in 2016 to lead the Executive and Technical Talent teams, focused on developing relationships inside and outside the portfolio, and improving SignalFire’s proprietary Talent Tools. Prior to SignalFire, Mike led special projects executive recruiting initiatives for Facebook (2015–16), partnering directly with the senior leadership team to execute key strategic talent assignments and acquisitions. Mike joined Facebook from True Search...

Dec 13, 20241 hr 3 min

Somesh Dash, IVP GP: Backing Enterprise, Consumer & Digital Health Leaders

Somesh Dash is a General Partner at IVP. He has been an investor at IVP for 19 years, where he focuses primarily on growth investments in enterprise software, consumer and digital health companies. He led or actively participated in IVP's investments in Accompany Health, Aledade, Amplitude, Brex, Business Insider, Datadog, Discord, Expanse, H1, Hello Heart, Humu, Lime, Klout, Lyra Health, Perplexity, Pindrop Security, Pure Storage, Qubole, Rubrik, Snap, SoundCloud, Tanium, Thrive Global, Uber, U...

Dec 11, 20241 hr 7 min

Aseem Datar, VP at Microsoft: The Future of Next-Gen Computing & AI

Aseem Datar is a Vice President at Microsoft building the next generation computing business. Most recently he was a Partner at Madrona Venture Group investing in Enterprise companies. Aseem scales businesses and is a seasoned operator. Prior to Madrona, Aseem spent over 17 years at Microsoft, working in a wide variety of roles from a developer writing deep installer level code to building and creating business models for Office 365. Aseem also has global sales experience, led growth for SaaS an...

Dec 10, 202454 min

Adeyemi Ajao, MP at Base10: Investing in Real Economy Automation

Adeyemi (“Ade”) is co-founder & Managing Partner at Base10 Partners. Before Base10, Ade had a successful career as an entrepreneur and investor. Ade was the co-founder and CEO of Tuenti (The “Spanish Facebook” which was acquired by Telefonica in 2010 for $100M), co-founder and CEO of Identified (“AI for HR” acquired by Workday in 2014) and a founding investor of Cabify (the largest ridesharing company in Latin America currently valued at over $1B). While at Workday, Ade led the launch of Wor...

Dec 07, 20241 hr 1 min

Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed: SaaS & Enterprise Tech

HEMANT MOHAPATRA is a partner with Lightspeed Venture Partners India. He focuses on global SaaS, Enterprise Infrastructure, and frontier / deep tech areas such as crypto, space/satellite, AR/VR and more. Lightspeed has offices in Silicon Valley, India, China, Israel, Europe and South East Asia, with companies such as SnapChat, Byju's, OYO Rooms, Affirm, Docker, Nutanix, AppDynamics, Mulesoft and many more in our portfolio. Prior to that, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm based i...

Dec 06, 20241 hr 1 min

Gary Swart, GP at Polaris Partners: Tech & Healthcare Investments

Gary is a partner investing in technology and healthcare companies out of our San Francisco office. He represents Polaris on the boards of Quantcast, SimplyInsured, FloQast, Faro Health, Qstream, Foresight, and Livara, and he also works with Wellthy, Naked Poppy, Falkonry, and Novi. He previously served on the board of CliQr (Cisco) as well. Previously, Gary was the CEO of oDesk (now UpWork, NASDAQ; UPWK), the world’s largest online workplace. He guided the company to industry leadership through...

Dec 05, 20241 hr 3 min

Eliot Durbin, GP at BOLDstart Ventures on SaaS, Security, and AI

Eliot is General Partner @ boldstart ventures, day one true believer for dev first crypto infra and saas founders. Eliot’s investments include Divide (acquired by Google), Replicated, Preact (sold to Spotify), SecurityScorecard, Rapportive (acquired by LinkedIn), Snyk, BigID, Front, Kustomer, Superhuman, Catalytic, Blaze (acq. by Akamai), Look.io (acquired by LivePerson), GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce), TrulyWireless, YHat, Handshake, WeVR, Techstars (NYC), and Amplify.LA. He previously co-f...

Dec 01, 20241 hr 11 min

David Booth, Blackbird/Ex-CEO On Deck: Building Global Tech Communities

David Booth is an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) & investor at Blackbird. That means he gets to both sit on the investments team in NZ — on the lookout for ambitious Kiwis doing their life's work, wherever in the world they may live today; and also build cool stuff... in his case communities, products you'll be seeing more of soon. He's a community builder at heart, and gets a kick out of making connections. For nearly 7 years he did this at extreme scale as CEO of On Deck — where they've h...

Dec 01, 20241 hr 1 min

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai: Transforming AI Customer Service"

Raghu Ravinutala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Yellow.ai, a global leader in generative AI-powered customer service automation. The entrepreneurial bug had been conceded deep inside him for long before he co-founded Yellow.ai in 2016, with a vision to make customer and enterprise interactions more effective and effortless. Since its inception, Raghu and his team have successfully expanded Yellow.ai’s presence across North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America w...

Nov 28, 20241 hr 3 min

Farooq Abbasi: Building Global Enterprise Giants at Preface VC

Farooq Abbasi is the founder and sole general partner of Preface Ventures. Prior to founding Preface, Farooq was with Costanoa Ventures where he led investments in companies such as Alpha Health, Lively, Auterion, and Leap. Prior to Costanoa, he spent time with DN Capital and Mosaic Ventures on both sides of the Atlantic investing in enduring businesses such as Remitly (RELY) and Auto1 (A1G). He began investing as a sole VC in companies including but not limited to Redlock (PANW), Truebill (RKT)...

Nov 28, 202456 min

Cody Ng from 01 Advisors: Insights on AI and Early Growth Investing

Cody Ng is an investor at 01 Advisors, a growth stage (Series A-C) vc firm founded by operators for operators, focusing on AI, devOps/infrastructure, and vertical SaaS companies. 01A is founded and led by Dick Costolo (ex-Twitter CEO), Adam Bain (ex-Twitter COO), and David Fischer (ex-Meta CRO). As a team, they’ve scaled high-growth companies like Twitter, Meta, Airtable, Yahoo, Benchling, etc. from $0 to $120B+ of combined yearly revenue and over $1T of market cap. Prior to 01A, Cody was at Poi...

Nov 23, 202455 min

David Cheng, Partner at DCM: Shaping SaaS, Marketplaces & Fintech

David Cheng is a Partner at DCM. He focuses on opportunities in Vertical SaaS, Marketplaces, Consumer Applications, Fintech and Digital Health. David's investments include Brigit, EvenUp, LARQ, Lighthouse, Metafy.gg, Musely, OpenArt, Plenty, and Tempo. Previous portfolio companies include AVA (acq. by DSM), Bill.com (NYSE: BILL), Musical.ly (acq. by Bytedance), SoFi (NASDAQ: SOFI), Weekend Health/Sequence (acq. by Weight Watchers) and X.ai (acq. by Bizzabo). David was named to the 2019 Forbes 30...

Nov 21, 20241 hr 1 min

Demi Obayomi, Sapphire: The Evolution of Enterprise SaaS & GTM Innovation

Demi Obayomi is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures where he invests in application layer software. He is a Board observer at Yellow.ai, Simpplr, Qualified and Rewst and has also worked on additional investments in GTM Software, Finance/CFO Software, HR Software, and Vertical SaaS. Demi has been recognized for his work in the industry, most recently by the Emerging Venture Capitalists Association (EVCA) in its inaugural list of top investors. Previously, Demi was a venture capital investor at ...

Nov 20, 20241 hr 1 min

Brett Perlmutter, Bulletpitch: Revolutionizing VC Through Media & Deal Discovery

Brett Perlmutter is the founder of Bulletpitch. Bulletpitch is on a mission to redefine venture through media. Their flagship product is a publication that highlights and performs high-level diligence on top-tier startups each week. The publication has become a staple for thousands of founders and investors, with hundreds of companies that apply per month, and many of these featured companies going on to raise millions of dollars through the publicity. Bulletpitch is also known for hosting some ...

Nov 20, 20241 hr 4 min

Timur (AWS) & Jack (Securiti): Building Safe Enterprise AI Solutions

🚀 This episode is brought to you by AWS. 🚀 Timur Cuceloglu Yarnall is a senior AI and digital products executive and entrepreneur, and is Head of AI/ML Startups Business Development at Amazon Web Services. His team works with the best GenAI startups to support their founders in creating transformational products. Jack Berkowitz serves as Chief Data Officer at Securiti, former Chief Data Officer of ADP and former VP of Oracle. Securiti is the pioneer of the Data Command Center, a centralized pl...

Nov 16, 202436 min

Phil Boyer: Investing in Enterprise Software Leaders at Crosslink Capital - YouTube

Phil Boyer is a Partner at Crosslink Capital. Phil brings over a decade of venture capital experience with a primary focus on themes within AI, data, developer tools, and deep tech in enterprise and vertical markets. He is passionate about serving as a partner with early-stage founding teams, with an eye towards helping strong technical teams build category-defining companies. At Crosslink, Phil’s investments include BetterUp, Forma.ai, Inscribe, Overjet, Syncari, Verodin (FEYE), and Weave (IPO ...

Nov 16, 202458 min

Bob Muglia: Tech Pioneer & Former Snowflake CEO on Building Giants

Bob Muglia was formerly the Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake Computing SNOW (NYSE), a data warehousing company. Bob is known for managing divisions at Microsoft that supported the Microsoft Office Suite, Windows Server and MSN Network product families. He was one of four presidents that reported directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Bob held several executive positions at Microsoft before resigning from the company in 2011. He worked briefly for Juniper Networks as the EVP, then accepted ...

Nov 15, 20241 hr 7 min

David Shim: Revolutionizing Meetings with AI at Read

David Shim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI. Read AI empowers you to enhance the effectiveness of your meetings. By applying AI and analytics to video conferencing, Read analyzes, prescribes, and prevents bad meetings. Experience the ultimate app for hybrid meetings with Read available on Zoom as part of Essential Apps. Prior to Read AI, David was the CEO of Foursquare. Topics: Leveraging AI to solve common pain points in virtual meetings The future of hybrid work and the role of AI in enhan...

Nov 15, 202458 min

Aditi Maliwal: Investing in the Future of AI at Upfront Ventures

Aditi Maliwal is a partner at Upfront Ventures, investing in early stage companies across financial technology and enterprise software. Aditi partners with founders at their earliest stages of inception and supports them throughout the stages of company building. While at Upfront, she has partnered deeply in this way with Arcade, Clair, Renew, Stem, WriterAI and ZestAI amongst others. Before joining Upfront, Aditi was at Google, first on the Corporate Development team leading acquisitions across...

Nov 13, 20241 hr

Paul Martino: Building Bullpen Capital's Gaming & Consumer Tech Future

Paul is a Managing General Partner at Bullpen Capital. Paul is the founder of eight companies including Ahpah Software (a computer security firm acquired by InterTrust);Tribe (one of the world’s first social networks), and Aggregate Knowledge (a big data advertising attribution company acquired in 2014 by Neustar). Paul’s early online gaming innovations in multi-player user experience from over 30years ago are the inspiration for several of the modern social gaming offerings. He holds over a doz...

Nov 06, 202458 min

Pablo & Christopher: Building OneSixOne's AI & Cloud Venture Network

Pablo Casilimas is the Managing Partner at OneSixOne Ventures. Christopher Kennamer is a Venture Partner at OneSixOne Ventures. A VC fund investing in US-based pre-seed startups with a focus on dual-use tech and infrastructure for cloud & AI. Topics: Building a national VC network Remote Deal Evaluation Best Practices Early-stage investment trends outside Silicon Valley #VCNetwork #CrossCountryDeals #NationalVC #RegionalInvesting #vc...

Nov 06, 20241 hr 6 min

Clayton Bryan: 500 Global's Mission to Empower Founders Worldwide

Clayton Bryan is a Partner at 500 Global. Clayton has spent time at some of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley. He has built expansive online communities, scaled marketplace businesses, and facilitated million dollar deals. At Yahoo he worked on award winning products. Later, at Payvment, he helped a team pioneer a new set of tools that started the social commerce movement. With Diversity as a guiding principle, Clayton has spent the entirety of his career within venture capital foc...

Nov 05, 20241 hr 4 min

Nomad Ventures' James Mumma on Betting Big on Network Effect Startups

James Mumma is a Founding Partner Nomad Ventures. Nomad Ventures is an early stage venture fund focused on strong network effect businesses and marketplace solutions including Fintech, peer-to-peer economy, and the transformation of archaic industries. Investments include: Alt, Autopilot, Minoan, Cameo, Lunch Payments, Ink, Zoe Financial, Returnmates, Aquifer Motion, Packsmith, Bezel, Thermal, Beacon, Stonks, and others. Topics: Lessons learned from marketplace investments Evaluates potential ne...

Nov 05, 20241 hr 9 min

Primer Sazze Partners' Partner Ian Park: Bridging US-Asia Early Stage Tech

Ian Park is a Partner at Primer Sazze. Prior to joining the firm, Ian invested in startups and VC funds at KIC, one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds. He also spent time at VMG Partners and Bertram Capital identifying and reviewing investment opportunities using A.I. He started his career in consulting at BRG and McKinsey & Company. As an aspiring economist, Ian studied mathematics and economics at University of Minnesota and pursued Ph.D. in economics at Boston College where he ...

Nov 02, 20241 hr 27 min

Aidan Madigan-Curtis: Eclipse Partner on AI & IoT in Essential Industries

Aidan Madigan-Curtis is a Partner at Eclipse. As an investor, board member, public company executive and entrepreneur, Aidan’s career has centered around the innovation and transformation of critical industries. As a Partner at Eclipse, Aidan invests across core, disruptive themes in today's world including geopolitical disruption, supply chain dislocation, energy transition, manufacturing onshoring, and industrial autonomy. She sits on eight corporate boards spanning defense and industrial sect...

Nov 01, 202458 min

AlleyCorp's Partner Susannah Shipton: Leading B2B & Consumer Marketplaces

Susannah is a Partner at AlleyCorp, focused on investments in a range of tech categories, with an emphasis on B2B and consumer marketplaces. She has invested in and incubated marketplaces across a diverse range of industries from global logistics to the creator economy. In addition to investing, Susannah is deeply involved with AlleyCorp’s incubation process, dedicating substantial time to supporting portfolio companies at their earliest stages. Prior to AlleyCorp, Susannah was Director of Strat...

Oct 31, 20241 hr 1 min

Samsung Ventures' MD Jihong Kim: Investing in Deep Tech & B2B Software

Jihong Kim is a venture capitalist at Samsung Ventures and has led both financial and strategic investments in software, digital media, and services. Noteworthy exits include SentinelOne (NYSE: S), Couchbase (NASDAQ: BASE), BigCommerce (NASDAQ: BIGC), Raxium (acquired by Google), ClassPass (acquired by Mindbody), Centrify (acquired by Thoma Bravo), Pluto.tv (acquired by Viacom), Fetch Robotics (acquired by Zebra Technologies), and Loom.ai (acquired by Roblox). He works closely with multiple busi...

Oct 31, 20241 hr 8 min

Dave Anderson & Erasmus Elsner: Early Stage Tech & AI Investing

Dave Anderson is the founding partner of Beat Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in companies that use AI to enhance humans in overlooked legacy industries. Early checks into Ziva Dynamics (acq. by Unity), Bipi (acq. by RBI), AEYE (NASDAQ: LIDR), Common Sense Machines, Drishti, Operant AI, Volur, Stack AI, Oxen AI, Bitpart AI, Bolo AI, Middleware, Hireguide, Treehouse, Fishtail, Clockwork, Safe, Mentorcam, Dropverse, Truewind, Athenic AI, Universal Hydrogen, Carbice, Nauto, ...

Oct 30, 20241 hr 21 min

Ben Huh: Orange Fund GP on Crypto Founders' Zero-to-One Journey

Ben Huh is the founder of Orange Fund. Orange Fund is the seed-stage venture investing partner of the Orange DAO, a community of more than 1,000 experienced tech founders working in crypto. He is also the former CEO of The Cheezburger Network, which at its peak in 2010 received 375 million views a month across its 50 sites. Topics: The intersection of AI and blockchain technology Evolution of Internet Culture Managing large online communities #CryptoVC #Web3Future #OrangeDAO #BlockchainInnovatio...

Oct 26, 20241 hr 4 min

Suman Natarajan from B Capital on Enterprise Growth Investing

Suman Natarajan is a Principal at B Capital’s San Francisco office, where she invests in startups powering the enterprise, across domains such as cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, data and ML/AI, and B2B SaaS. Previously, she was a Senior Vice President at Citi Ventures and an investor at Intel Capital, where she drove investments in companies such as Cribl, Tessian, Snyk, Styra, Nylas, Transmit Security, Immersive Labs, Netskope, Verodin (acq. by FireEye), and Kenna Security (acq. by...

Oct 24, 20241 hr 1 min
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