A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

Épisodes

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  1st-time solo founder does 90 interviews in 90 days—closes a $25M Series A 2 years in. | Damien Lewke, Founder of Nebulock 20.07.2026 50min

  Damien left his job to start a startup solo. Two years later, Nebulock closed a $25M Series A. In between: 90 customer interviews in 90 days, a year of design partners, and a Fortune 500 deal that closed in 6 weeks. In this episode, Damien breaks down how his 90-in-90 customer discovery sprint killed his original architecture before he wasted money building it, how his design partner program converted 100% into paying customers, and how a POC playbook needing just 2 hours of customer time clo...
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  He tries 1,000 ideas a decade & kills nearly all—that's how X built Waymo & Google Brain. | Astro Teller, CEO of Moonshots at X (Alphabet) 13.07.2026 48min

  Astro has run X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, for 16 years. His teams created Waymo, Wing, and Google Brain—by testing over 1,000 ideas a decade and killing nearly all of them. His whole system rests on one uncomfortable rule: celebrate the people who kill their own projects. In this episode, Astro breaks down why you should do the hard thing first, how pre-written kill criteria force intellectual honesty, and why X maximizes learning per dollar instead of progress—and never tracks whose idea...
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  He raised $75M—but kept his team to 21 people & pays everyone the same salary. | Cos Nicolaescu, Co-Founder of Accrual 06.07.2026 57min

  Cos was the CTO of Brex, which he helped scale from 40 people to over 1,000. Before that, he led engineering at Stripe. When he finally left, he had no startup idea—just a co-founder he trusted and one rule: whatever they built had to have massive impact. Six months of brainstorming later, they landed on accounting. In this episode, Cos breaks down why he capped the company at 21 people after raising $75M, why everyone—engineers and salespeople alike—earns the exact same salary, how he hit a ...
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  He quit Stripe and hit $10M ARR in 4 years—with $0 marketing spend. | Anurag Goel, Founder of Render 29.06.2026 47min

  Anurag was employee #8 at Stripe, set for life and free to do anything next. Instead he spent a year and a half hunting for a problem worth decades of his life. He chose to build a product to make it simple for developers to ship apps, going head-to-head with AWS. In this episode, Anurag breaks down how he hit $10M ARR in 4 years with zero marketing spend, why refusing to launch a free tier was his most expensive mistake, and how putting engineers on customer support rotations quietly shaped ...
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  He shut down his last startup and gave the money back—then hit $1M ARR in 6 months. | George, Founder of Monk 22.06.2026 46min

  George had to wind down his last startup and give investors their money back. He went deep into the valley of despair, certain he'd missed his window to build something big. Then he met a co-founder, decided to start over, and started selling. In this episode, George breaks down how a customer signed a $36K pilot off nothing but a Loom and a one-pager, how cold email took him from zero to $1M ARR with no sales team, and why a "seven out of ten" is the most dangerous hire you can make. Why You...
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  He quit his $50M ARR startup to work as a paralegal—then raised a $60M Series A. | Dan Mishin, Founder of Manifest 15.06.2026 42min

  Dan founded and scaled a $50M ARR, SoftBank-backed startup—and could've stayed to make tens of millions. Instead, he handed it to his chief of staff and started from scratch. He wanted something bigger. He took an entry-level paralegal job to learn everything about law hands on. Then he built Manifest, which just raised a $60M Series A. In this episode, Dan breaks down why he did intake calls for 1,000 legal clients before building anything, how free Slack communities turned Fortune 500 HR ma...
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  He churned 100% of his revenue on purpose—then grew 10x to $2M ARR in under 12 months. | Ali Khokhar, Founder of Amigo AI 08.06.2026 53min

  Ali quit his job a few months after ChatGPT launched, convinced AI would eat labor marketplaces like Upwork. With no co-founder and no code, he collected $12K from real customers—using a faked demo and a cloned voice. Then he pitched 100 VCs in 10 days and got 47 straight 'no's. In this episode, Ali breaks down how he banked $12K in revenue before writing a single line of code, how a $20/month Slack community drove Amigo's first $1M in ARR, and why he churned every existing customer to go all...
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  He hit $1M ARR by sending 500,000 cold emails—then raised a $25M Series A in 6 days. | Mark Hughes, Co-Founder of Solidroad 01.06.2026 42min

  Mark was running a startup out of a tiny annex office in Dublin with zero product usage. Then one customer turned it on and overnight he saw usage spike to thousands of simulations. He got to $1M ARR 100% through outbound, by sending 500,000 cold emails. A few months ago he closed a $25M Series A. In this episode, Mark breaks down the pivot from sales roleplay to customer support that unlocked his first real traction, the cold outbound playbook that took him to $1M ARR (500K emails, 250 meeti...
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  Q1 2026 w/Carta: What you need to raise a Series A. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta 25.05.2026 38min

  The AI boom is making founders feel like the market is wide open, but the data tells a sharper story: valuations are up, round sizes are bigger, and the bar to “count” in a top-tier fund’s Monday meeting keeps rising. We sit down with Peter to translate Q1 2026 venture capital trends into founder reality, from seed-stage pricing distortions driven by AI infrastructure to the quieter pressure building across the rest of the startup market. We get specific on early-stage fundraising benchmarks...
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  How to get a VC (like me) to wire you $2M in under 2 weeks (the FOMO playbook) | Solo Episode 18.05.2026 21min

  I meet 1,000+ founders every year. Most are bad at fundraising. I also interview 100+ of the world's best founders on my podcast each year. Most are incredible at fundraising. One raised $14M in 17 days. another was 3x oversubscribed on a $3M round. another closed a seed in hours from a single X post. All are first-time, unproven founders. They don't waste time becoming "friends" with VCs. They have a business to build. They treat fundraising for what it is: a process where you manufacture...
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  Coinbase's ex-CPO bet on AI agents before ChatGPT—now he's closing 7-figure Fortune 500 deals. | Surojit Chatterjee, Founder of Ema 11.05.2026 37min

  Surojit spent 14 years at Google building mobile ads into a $100B+ business and then took Coinbase public as Chief Product Officer in 2021. In early 2023, before "agent" was even a word in AI papers, he started Ema in stealth—betting on a future where teams of AI agents would replace the "human glue" inside Fortune 500s. In this episode, Surojit breaks down how a Hitachi deployment across 55,000 employees became Ema's true PMF moment, why he spent the first year obsessed with SOC 2, ISO 42001...
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  How this 1st-time founder went from closing customers for $500 a month to $300,000 a year. | Sean McCarthy, Founder & CEO of BackOps 04.05.2026 55min

  Sean was spending four days a week inside customer warehouses at Amazon Shipping when he noticed the same thing everywhere: back-office admin staff churning every six months, buried under the same repetitive claims and reshipping tasks. He talked to eighty-five warehouse owners, quit Amazon in July 2024, and cold emailed his way to a pre-seed round within weeks. In this episode, Sean breaks down why he paused all sales to rebuild BackOps as an enterprise-grade platform, how an SOP recorder th...
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  He built for 2 years before raising a dollar—then hit $13M ARR and a $40M Series B. | Alex Halliday, Co-Founder & CEO of AirOps 27.04.2026 40min

  Alex spent two years building AirOps nights and weekends during the pandemic before raising a single dollar. A chance conversation with Sam Altman—while walking down the street during SF Pride—sent him down the LLM rabbit hole months before ChatGPT existed. He pivoted his product toward AI, picked marketers as his customer, and never looked back. In this episode, Alex breaks down why he picked marketers over every other AI use case after watching them build 80-step workflows on his platform, ...
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  180 VCs rejected him—then a $60K billboard got him to $2M ARR in 4 months. | Isaiah Granet, CEO of Bland AI 20.04.2026 52min

  Isaiah pivoted mid-YC, landed in the bottom 10% of his batch, and watched 180 investors say no—their reason: phone calls won't exist a year from now. Voice AI was not yet a thing. With almost no money left, he and his co-founder bet everything on building AI phone calls from scratch. Bland went from pre-seed to a $40M Series B in a year. In this episode, Isaiah breaks down how a $60K billboard and a strategic influencer campaign generated close to a billion impressions, why he fired 50% of hi...
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  She bet on a consumer app when every VC wanted B2B—then grew to $10M ARR. | Anada Lakra, Founder of BoldVoice 16.04.2026 52min

  Anada Lakra just raised a $21M Series A for BoldVoice, a $150/year pronunciation app that helps immigrants speak English with confidence. But she started from zero in her Harvard dorm room and a problem most VCs didn't think was big enough. She recruited a Hollywood accent coach, shipped a bare-bones V1, and got into YC. In this episode, Anada breaks down why she launched a consumer app when every investor was chasing B2B, how a Reddit thread called "Judge My Accent" became an early growth ha...
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  He raised a $10M seed with no revenue—then grew 30x to $30M in year two. | Bobby Samuels, Founder of Protege 13.04.2026 39min

  Bobby launched Protege in early 2024 to connect data holders with AI model builders. He raised a $10M seed with almost no demand pipeline. A year later, Protege jumped 30x to $30M in GMV and raised $30M from a16z. In this episode, Bobby breaks down how he built a 250-partner data network by leveraging prior healthcare relationships, why he flies from New York every week to close seven-figure enterprise deals, and why the "texting terms" litmus test tells you if a deal is real. Why You S...
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  He ran Prime fulfillment for Amazon—then raised $20M to replace e-commerce with AI. | Maju Kuruvilla, Founder of Spangle 09.04.2026 42min

  Maju ran Prime fulfillment technology for all of Amazon — same-day, one-hour shipping, global logistics during the pandemic. He became CEO at Bolt. Then he walked away to start Spangle in a basement with a co-founder, convinced AI could replace e-commerce infrastructure as we know it. In this episode, Maju breaks down why 40% of e-commerce traffic loses its context the moment it arrives on a brand's site, how Spangle's AI dynamically rebuilds the entire storefront in real time for each visito...
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  She got rejected by 22 VCs—then built 6sense to $100M+ in revenue. Now she's back for AI. | Amanda Kahlow, Founder of 1mind 06.04.2026 52min

  Amanda spent 16 years running a services business for Cisco and Intel. When she tried to productize her business, 22 VCs rejected her. That became 6sense, a $200M ARR company. After stepping aside as CEO and taking five years off, she's back with an AI startup called 1 mind. In this episode, Amanda breaks down why she always goes enterprise-first when everyone tells her to start small, how she used an AI clone of herself to pitch 60 VCs and raise 1mind's Series A in three days, and why ...
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  How this AI founder is on track to hit $50M ARR just 2 years after launch. | Tarek Alaruri, Co-Founder of Stuut 02.04.2026 47min

  Tarek already built a B2B software company to $30M ARR. But when the AI wave hit, he realized he could build a generational business by automating the manual world of accounts receivable. So, he left to start Stuut. In this episode, Tarek breaks down how he reached $1M ARR in a couple of months and is on track to hit up to $50M this year. He reveals how he pre-sold his first $65k contract with just wireframes, why he forces new customers to introduce him to five peers, and the brutal reality ...
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  He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar Sunkara, Founding CTO of AppDynamics 30.03.2026 44min

  Description Bhaskar was employee #1 at AppDynamics, which was sold to Cisco for $3.7B. He and co-founder Jyoti found a way to change how enterprise monitoring tools worked. From tracking low-level code metrics that ops teams didn't understand to monitoring what the business actually cares about. In this episode, Bhaskar breaks down how that one insight won them Netflix and Priceline as early customers, why they ran production POCs that no competitor would dare try, and how a free download cal...