Alex Jekowsky is the co-founder and CEO of Cents, the all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for the laundry industry. A Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, he sold his first company at 23, and last month closed a $140 million Series C. Cents now powers more than 1 in 6 laundromats in the country and processes over $1 billion in payments a year. Somrat Niyogi sits down with Alex to go from the very beginning: the aha moment that led him to laundromats, how he got his first customers thro...
May 21, 2026•1 hr 2 min
In this episode of the Village Global Podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie joins Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman and host Ben Casnocha live on stage at a Village Global event. They get into what agents actually do to SaaS, where startups should go on offense, and what twenty years of building Box has taught Aaron about leveling up as a founder. Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or g...
May 20, 2026•58 min
Somrat Niyogi sits down with two of the most experienced comms operators in tech: Kelly Boynton, Head of Communications at Gusto, and Paul Loeffler, former SVP of Communications and Brand at BILL. Kelly spent 15 years across agency and in-house roles before Gusto, including at Facebook, Instagram, Intuit, Navan, and DocuSign. Before BILL, Paul led integrated communications at Gusto and was at Atlassian pre-IPO, helping scale it as a public company. They cover what founders get wrong about launch...
May 14, 2026•52 min
Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor. Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. They cover what he learned scaling Forethought through the GPT-1 to GPT-4 era, why the Iron Man Jarvis vision is finally within reach f...
May 07, 2026•41 min
Jake Saper is General Partner at Emergence Capital, the firm that was the first institutional investor in Zoom and an early backer of Salesforce, Veeva, Bill.com, and Together.ai. Jake has been at Emergence for over a decade and has led investments in Assembled, Unify, and Ironclad. Jake has developed Emergence's thesis on AI-native services: why he believes this is the most important structural shift in enterprise software since the move to the cloud, why most SaaS companies built before AI won...
Apr 23, 2026•1 hr 9 min
Nick Mehta is the former CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. Vista Equity Partners acquired Gainsight for $1.1 billion. Nick ran the company as CEO for 13 years before stepping into a board role last year. Nick has also co-authored four books on customer success, was named Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California, and currently sits on the boards of F5 and PubMatic. Before Gainsight, he was CEO of LiveO...
Apr 09, 2026•42 min
Dara Ladjevardian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphi, a platform that lets you create a digital version of your mind — an interactive, always-on presence that can share your knowledge, coach others, and represent you at scale. Delphi has raised $16 million in a Series A led by Sequoia, with earlier backing from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and others. Before Delphi, Dara founded Friday, a text-based commerce tool he built and sold within a year. He previously worked as a forward-deployed enginee...
Apr 03, 2026•37 min
Doug Camplejohn is the Founder & CEO of Coffee, an AI-first CRM. Doug co-founded Fliptop (acquired by LinkedIn), led Sales Navigator at LinkedIn as VP of Product, then ran Sales Cloud at Salesforce as EVP and GM. He's also had exits with Mi5 Networks (acquired by Symantec) and MyPlay (acquired by Bertelsmann). Patrick Thompson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Clarify, an AI-native CRM built for modern go-to-market teams. Clarify has raised $22.5 million. Before Clarify, Patrick co-founded Iter...
Mar 26, 2026•55 min
Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild, lays out his investing thesis for the AI era: The Model Economy. His argument is that most AI startups being built today are fighting a losing battle against the scaling laws. The models themselves will swallow the application layer. So where does durable value actually go? Sumeet walks through the Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton's foundational insight on why brute-force scale always beats domain-specific cleverness), what the mobile era ...
Mar 18, 2026•13 min
This is the first episode of Worldbuilders, a new series on the Village Global Podcast guest-hosted by Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild. Sumeet sits down with Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of the San Francisco Compute Company, to talk about the real economics of GPU compute, how SF Compute went from an accidental GPU cloud to building supercomputers, where the actual AI bubble is, and why the future of supercomputing should be calm. Topics covered include: the origin s...
Mar 13, 2026•43 min
Bhavin Shah spent years building Moveworks into the agentic AI platform behind employee support at Toyota, Siemens, Unilever, and hundreds more. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion. In this episode of Recall Sessions, Somrat Niyogi goes back to the beginning. How did four co-founders find each other? Why did Bhavin and his team run 34 CIO conversations to validate the idea before their first investor wrote a check? How did they close their first customer with nothin...
Mar 11, 2026•1 hr
Parth Patil built Reid Hoffman's AI digital twin from scratch, without engineering team or a software background. Before that, he was a data scientist at Clubhouse. When GPT-4 came out, he cashed out his 401k and spent four months talking to the model every day. He came out of that running Reid's AI work. He now manages a fleet of coding agents for most of his waking hours. In this conversation with Village Global VP Sam Kirschner, Parth talks through everything AI: how coding agents have evolve...
Mar 05, 2026•1 hr 6 min
Welcome to Recall Sessions - a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital. Each episode goes deep on how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. In this episode, Somrat sits down with Tomer London, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Gusto, to discuss how he and his co-founders built the leading payroll and HR platform for small businesses. Gusto serves over 400,000 businesses today and is valued at $9.5 billion - but it s...
Mar 03, 2026•38 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner. Celine discusses what's still non-consensus in longevity, how cognitive aging shapes our preferences and worldviews, and what society looks like when parents stay healthier longer — from socioeconomic mobility to financial planning. Listen to the full episode here: https://www.villageglobal.com/podcast Thanks for listenin...
Feb 24, 2026•11 min
Welcome to Recall Sessions – a new series on the Village Global Podcast. Hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital, each episode goes deep on go-to-market: how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. In this episode, Itai Damti, Co-Founder & CEO of Unit, joins Somrat to break down how Unit went from a year of stealth building with no committed customers to becoming the leading embedded finance platform – moving over $50 billion annually and powering programs...
Feb 23, 2026•46 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner. Celine discusses Loyal's 10-year vision for expanding into cats and humans, why the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to treat aging as a drug category, and why the biological and economic case for going dogs-first is stronger than most people realize. Listen to the full episode here: https://www.villageglobal.com/pod...
Feb 19, 2026•12 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly), and Village Global's Ben Casnocha. Shishir and Ben discuss the "Silicon Valley Inc. vs. Google Inc." framework for understanding career tradeoffs, when recruitment firms add value vs. when they don't, and how to design a hiring process that produces great outcomes — including the critical role of reference checking. Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/S7UO7AOLgBA Thanks for...
Feb 16, 2026•8 min
Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, joins Village Global VP Sam Kirschner to discuss her journey building a biotech company developing the first FDA-approved drugs for lifespan extension – going dogs first. Loyal has raised over $250M and recently closed its Series C after clearing major regulatory milestones on both efficacy and safety. In this conversation, Celine breaks down why you can't develop a human longevity drug today (and it's not because of biology – it's logistics and financ...
Feb 11, 2026•53 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Henry Shi (Anthropic, co-founder of Super.com ) and Village Global GP Anne Dwane. Henry and Anne discuss the three paths available to successful founders, why traditional venture capital often becomes a sales job, the rise of "seed-strapping" as a new funding model, and what ultimately led Henry to join a frontier AI lab instead of starting another company or becoming an investor. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Feb 06, 2026•13 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Henry Shi (Anthropic, co-founder of Super.com ) and Village Global GP Anne Dwane. Henry and Anne discuss how AI coding tools have evolved from autocomplete to junior engineers, what skills will matter when writing code becomes obsolete, and whether humans or AI will end up as the boss in the future of work. Listen to the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-global-podcast/id1316769266?i=1000746090022 Watch the fu...
Feb 03, 2026•9 min
This is an excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly). Shishir discusses why Grammarly is one of the most underestimated companies in Silicon Valley, how it's transforming from a grammar tool into an open platform for AI agents, and why "assist" AI—which meets you where you work—may be more powerful than chat or autonomous agents. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7UO7AOLgBA Thanks for listening — if you like what ...
Jan 28, 2026•12 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly). Shishir discusses the fundamental differences between working at big tech companies versus startups, why skills at large companies are less transferable than you think, and what separates world-class recruiting processes from mediocre ones. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7UO7AOLgBA Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on yo...
Jan 22, 2026•8 min
Henry Shi, founder of Super.com (scaled to $200M+ annual revenue, 50 million users, profitable), joins Village Global GP Anne Dwane to discuss his unconventional path from founder to Anthropic. Henry shares why he stepped back from his company at its peak, what he learned during his gap year building AI resources in public, the patterns he discovered tracking lean AI companies, and why he ultimately chose a frontier lab over VC or starting another company. He also gives a candid look inside Anth...
Jan 21, 2026•39 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan and LinkedIn co-founder / Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman. Eric and Reid discuss what separates companies that last from those that flame out, why hypergrowth can hide critical problems, and how founders should think about their "theory of the game" for the next ten years. Listen to the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-work-with-zoom-ceo-eric-yuan-and-reid-hoffman/id1...
Jan 19, 2026•6 min
Magnus Sandstrom and Debbie Wiss are senior partners at Swing Search, specializing in go-to-market roles at director, VP, and head levels for nearly 20 years. They joined Village Global partner Lindsay Pettingill to discuss the mistakes founders make when hiring their first sales and marketing talent, and how to get it right. Takeaways: Don't go too senior too early. Look for someone who can see around corners, not over mountains. Senior hires want teams and foundations. You need someone doing o...
Jan 15, 2026•43 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Eric and Reid discuss where startups can compete against big tech in the AI era, why enterprise adoption of AI tools remains surprisingly slow, and what founders should focus on when selling AI products to enterprise customers. Listen to the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-work-with-zoom-ceo-eric-yuan-and-reid-hoffman/id1316769266?i=1...
Jan 13, 2026•11 min
Eric Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. Both are luminary LPs at Village Global. They joined Village GP Ben Casnocha to discuss the future of AI agents, digital twins in the workplace, selling AI to enterprise, and what it takes to build companies that endure. Takeaways: Digital twins will handle meetings you're unsure about attending. Your AI can join internal meetings, summarize key points, and alert you only when your presence becomes critical. Th...
Jan 08, 2026•25 min
This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCR-zFXiXKA&t=2s Howie spent 2.5 years building Airtable before launching – and only talked to about a dozen customers in that time. In this clip, he explains why that approach made sense for a platform company, and how founders can validate ideas without drowning in customer discovery.
Jan 06, 2026•6 min
Van Jones is a political commentator, author, and former Obama White House advisor. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is founder and CEO of Promise, a software company transforming how governments deliver services to people in need. They joined the Village Global team to discuss what founders building in complex sectors need to know about power, narrative, and influence. Takeaways: Political people often operate on emotion and relationships, rather than rationality. When selling to the government, demonstra...
Dec 18, 2025•42 min
Jennifer Tejada is CEO of PagerDuty, a public company serving 30,000+ customers worldwide. She joined Village Global GP Ben Casnocha for a masterclass on scaling in the AI era, followed by live feedback sessions with four founders building AI-native companies. Takeaways: Enterprise sentiment has shifted from “fear of missing out” to “fear of getting in.” Customers are anxious about security, resilience, and managing the people transition. Know what gets your customer promoted and what gets them ...
Dec 11, 2025•47 min
