Top Decile Podcast

Епизоди

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  The LA MediaTech Fund That Banned a Word From Its Deck | Seth Hallen, Hallstone Ventures 06.08.2026 24мин

  The word: "Hollywood." Seth Hallen spent 25 years on the technology side of film and television, including leadership roles at Panavision's Light Iron, Sony and Pixelogic, plus nine years as president of the Hollywood Professional Association. He cut the word from every fundraising conversation anyway, and closed Hallstone Ventures oversubscribed in 12 months.Hallstone backs the infrastructure behind how media gets made, distributed and paid for, at a point when creators have multiplied and the systems that support them have not caught up. It's not just backing tech for Hollywood, It's backing the systems that helps how content is communicated everywhere on Earth (and beyond).
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  Anyone Can Build a Marketplace Now. He Knows Which Ones Last. | Rob Mihalko, Spectus Ventures 28.07.2026 20мин

  Rob Mihalko grew Ariba Network into a $400 million B2B marketplace, has three exits to SAP, Microsoft, and Disney, and has invested in or advised more than 50 marketplace companies. He teaches the digital marketplaces course at Stanford Continuing Studies and now runs Spectus Ventures, a seed-stage fund backing founders building digital marketplaces and business networks.We get into the term he coined, the marketplace economy, an estimated twelve trillion dollars in global commerce, the early signals he looks for before a marketplace hits product market fit, and why healthcare remains one of the most underserved verticals for the model today.
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  Great Idea, No Revenue? This VC Passes Every Time. | Eran Savir, Savyon Ventures 30.07.2026 24мин

  Eran Savir is a three-time founder with two exits who built and ran two prior seed funds together generating a 3.5X return and 79% IRR, taking one of them public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Now he runs Savyon Ventures, an early-stage fund in Israel backing AI, digital, and e-commerce founders.Find out why Eran refuses to invest until a founder has sold to real strangers instead of friends and family, what changed when he moved from advising founders to writing checks, and how bets on a direct-to-consumer bra brand and an AI debt collector fit the same tight thesis.
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  He Spent 20 Years Catching Fraud. Now He Vets AI Startups. | Nikhil Mittal, Blue Ridge Ventures 23.07.2026 23мин

  Nikhil Mittal spent nearly two decades investigating fraud, money laundering, and sanctions for major banks and fintechs, a career his own father also built. He evaluated roughly 250 startups before writing his first check, and now runs Blue Ridge Ventures, a pre-seed and seed fund backing AI native founders across every sector, part of Decile Access's inaugural cohort of 23 funds.We get into what he calls "smart capital," why his entire LP base is drawn from his own VC Lab cohort instead of outside investors, and the medtech and edtech opportunities he's most bullish on right now. Nikhil also breaks down what actually separates an AI native founder from a traditional one.
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  The VC turning Healthcare Economics into a Cheat Code | Genevieve LeMarchal, Suncoast Ventures 21.07.2026 27мин

  Genevieve Lemarchal spent over a decade as a serial entrepreneur, logging more than 10,000 hours in early-stage sales, marketing, and growth strategy and coaching over a thousand founders, before she ever wrote a check. That operating background shaped Suncoast Ventures, her seed-stage healthcare fund, whose first fund is already producing distributions and on track to be fully returned next year as a top decile performer.We get into why fewer than 10% of U.S. VCs have made even three healthcare investments, how Suncoast built an in-house health economics and actuarial practice that helped a portfolio company renegotiate its Series A pricing, and the three segments she's betting will produce healthcare's next big winners: health tech fintech, AI-driven biotech superintelligence, and women's health.
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  The 22-Year-Old VC Getting First Checks Into Celebrity Brands | Tahnoon Murtza, Grey Sheep Ventures 16.07.2026 24мин

  Tahnoon Murtza is 22 years old, and has spent his entire life inside the entertainment industry as a touring musician. That put him in the group chats where celebrity brand deals get built long before any VC hears about them. He personally wrote early checks into Sommer Ray's consumer brand and Jeremy Lynch's HP-1, both before the rounds ever opened to outside investors, and now runs Grey Sheep Ventures backing celebrity-founded and viral-first consumer brands across the US and Canada.We get into why he thinks proprietary access, not capital, is the real edge in consumer investing, why celebrity brands can exit in under five years instead of the decade B2B founders wait, and why he's now betting skincare is the next category built to be sold on camera.
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  The VC Who Wrote the Book on Femtech | Navneet Kaur, TechThrive Ventures 14.07.2026 24мин

  Navneet Kaur has launched seven consumer brands from zero to scale, worked with over 200 startups across emerging markets, and built FemTech India, the country's first and largest women's health tech ecosystem, spanning 450+ companies and one unicorn. She also wrote the first published book on the femtech industry, and now she's launching TechThrive Ventures, a San Francisco based pre-seed fund backing founders in women's health, wellness, longevity, and CPG.We get into why she built the ecosystem before ever raising a fund, the LP conversations that start with "I have a daughter" and end in a check, and why she believes every woman is already an investor whether she realizes it or not.
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  Vertical First, AI Second: Why Domain Experts Win | Vijay Rajendran & Amit Goel, gAI Ventures 03.07.2026 25мин

  Vijay Rajendran led portfolio value creation at 500 Global across 2,800 companies in 80 countries before co-founding gAI Ventures. Amit Goel brings 20 years as a payments and identity operator, including building and selling a fintech company. Together they've built a venture studio around one central idea: vertical expertise should drive AI company formation, not the other way around.We get into why most enterprise AI deployments fail despite the hype, what Amit means when he says a task is not a job, and how gAI co-builds from the ground up with domain experts before carving portfolio companies out as independent businesses.
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  Science Fair Winners Are Founding Unicorns at 3x the YC Rate | Anthony Atlas, Science Fair Fund 01.07.2026 24мин

  Anthony Atlas won first place at the International Science and Engineering Fair at 17, earning himself a minor planet in the process. He spent years noticing that science fair alumni kept turning up as exceptional startup founders, then built the data to prove it: finalists who go on to start companies do so at a 15 percent unicorn rate, with over two-thirds making it through Series A.We get into how he built a 55,000-person alumni database to backtest the thesis before ever pitching an LP, what the science fair experience actually trains that translates to founding, and why the 2,000-plus alumni who volunteered to help may be the fund's most underrated edge.
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  The VC Finding Latin American Founders Before US Funds Do | Lorenzo De Leo, Enya Ventures 29.06.2026 24мин

  Lorenzo De Leo spent more than a decade as managing director at Rocker, one of Miami's leading venture studios, where he helped build over 40 companies across the US and Latin America. That operator background is now the foundation of Enya Ventures, his pre-seed AI fund targeting Latin American founders at the moment before US capital starts paying attention.We get into why Latin America is at a tipping point for founder quality, what it means to back an AI native team versus one that just bolts AI onto the product, and why in the current environment distribution and data matter more than the model itself.
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  Betting on AI and Blockchain Before Anyone Else | Radhika Iyengar & Jorden Woods, StarChain Ventures 26.06.2026 30мин

  Radhika Iyengar was named one of the Top 100 Women of the Future and has advised startups that generated $4 billion in shareholder value. Her co-founder Jorden Woods is a Caltech astrophysicist with her own exits and $50 million raised for portfolio companies. Together they wrote a book in 2019 predicting enterprise AI and blockchain would converge. Then, they spent six years building the track record to invest in it.We get into why they treat trust as a literal architectural requirement rather than a feature, how a portfolio company is extending hyper-personalized lending to small businesses with under a 0.2% default rate, and why micro VC math produces better returns at every performance percentile than mega funds chasing hectacorns.
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  Supply Chains Don't Just Fail Companies — They Fail Nations | J.P. Keating, ProChain Ventures 23.06.2026 25мин

  J.P. Keating spent 25 years inside five Fortune 500 supply chains — Boeing, Anheuser-Busch, Allstate — before deciding insiders needed to be the ones writing the check. Now, as founder of ProChain Ventures, he's backing pre-seed and seed stage founders building the technology that makes global supply chains faster, more resilient, and harder to break.In this episode, JP and Connor dig into why supply chain is less about efficiency and more about survivability, how ProChain finds the right LPs (spoiler: industry operators first), and why a self-propelled autonomous rail car might be the most exciting investment in the portfolio.
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  Betting on LatAm's Biodiversity Advantage | Galit Flasterstein, Danta Fund 18.06.2026 24мин

  Galit Flasterstein sold a travel company she ran in Costa Rica for a decade, then built a marketplace connecting LatAm artisans to global buyers, and concluded the real gap wasn't commerce but early-stage capital. Now she runs Danta Fund, a pre-seed vehicle backing ag tech, biotech, food tech, and climate tech founders across Latin America with a thesis built on the region's biodiversity.We get into why LatAm's biodiversity creates a scientific moat that's hard to replicate anywhere else, how a Danta portfolio company is predicting farm diseases two weeks in advance using aerial pathogen filters and AI, and why the best founders have stopped looking for generalist VCs.
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  Backing the Founders that Ate Glass | Nathan Maton, Basal Capital 12.06.2026 23мин

  Nathan Maton built his career at the intersection of design, technology, and human behavior, with stints at Google, Khan Academy, and Omada. He became an angel investor and ran The Clearing, a workshop for founders navigating life after a significant exit. That work crystallized his debut pre-seed and seed fund thesis: repeat founders in FinTech and AI are systematically underserved at the earliest stage.We get into why Nathan looks for founders who have "eaten the glass and signed up to do it again," how he got into a YC deal that was way oversubscribed by building five-year conviction on a founder before the round even existed, and why he believes stablecoin infrastructure is only in the third inning of a transition bigger than the internet.
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  The VC Fund That Sees Opportunity in Red Tape | Walid Aradi & Wes Schwalje, Red Tape Ventures 15.06.2026 28мин

  Walid Aradi and Wes Schwalje spent over 15 years at Tahseen Consulting advising heads of state, ministries, and 11 unicorns on navigating the regulatory and political realities of the MENA region, including structuring two of the region's biggest exits, Uber's acquisition of Careem and the Dubizzle-EMPG merger. Together they launched Red Tape Ventures, a Dubai-based seed fund backing marketplace and enablement technology startups across 22 countries where regulation isn't the risk — it's the unfair advantage.We get into why founders who align with government national visions end up co-creating regulation rather than fighting it, and how Red Tape made its first close during an active war (and why that's less surprising than it sounds).
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  Finite to Infinite: Why Energy Innovation Needs Operators, Not Observers | Vineet Shah, 8 Clockwise 11.06.2026 23мин

  Vineet Shah spent 18 years inside the energy industry. From a 4.6 gigawatt power plant through CurtissWright and Caltrol to co-founding Honeywell's lithium-ion battery business, where he created the industry's first-ever performance guarantee product. He launched 8 Clockwise as both a venture studio and seed fund backing founders in energy access, decarbonization, and advanced materials, guided by a single organizing principle: finite to infinite. We get into why most climate tech and industrial startups fail, how a venture studio model lets 8Clockwise roll up its sleeves on high-conviction portfolio companies rather than spray and pray across 20 bets, and why senior energy executives are the ideal LP for a fund that requires patience, domain fluency, and a belief that the next wave of industrial innovation belongs in venture capital.
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  The Fund That Bets on AI Built In, Not Bolted On | Anca Burke & Andrey Mikhalchuk, ARTA VC 08.06.2026 23мин

  Anca Burke and Andrey Mikhalchuk co-founded ARTA VC around a shared frustration: 70% of enterprise AI integrations fail because companies try to attach AI to systems that were never designed for it. Their fund backs early-stage founders in the DMV who have already done the opposite.We get into how AI-powered autofocus eyeglasses gave a retired military pilot better vision than he'd ever had, why the DMV's second-largest tech talent pool in the country is still chronically underfunded, and what two decades of combined operating experience teaches you about which AI bets are actually worth making.
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  The VC Window Into Quantum Is Finally Open | Mike Keymer, AlphaKet Capital 05.06.2026 24мин

  Mike Keymer is an MIT-trained engineer who spent two decades commercializing deep science for U.S. defense agencies, biotech analytics, and quantum computing platforms. He launched AlphaKet Capital to back seed-stage companies building the infrastructure layer that quantum needs to scale: the quantum equivalent of modems, repeaters, and memory.We get into why a massive capital influx in late 2024 fundamentally changed quantum's investment landscape, what it means to bet on sensors that can navigate without GPS by mapping the Earth's magnetic field, and why the four-to-seven-year horizon to utility-scale quantum puts us squarely inside the venture window right now.
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  Can VC Rebuild America's Industrial Base? | Ryan Else, Roadster Capital 03.06.2026 21мин

  Ryan Else spent nearly two decades working inside enterprise security, industrial markets, and frontier tech before launching Roadster Capital to back seed-stage founders modernizing the American industrial base. His portfolio already includes a company that received a $150 million commitment from the U.S. Department of Commerce for extreme ultraviolet lithography critical to national chip security.We get into why Ryan believes narrative follows execution and not the reverse, why he sometimes backs founders who know nothing about the industry they're disrupting, and what it means to invest at the point of true technical risk before institutional consensus arrives.
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  The MedTech Founder Backing Surgical AI | Garrett Smith, ReefHaven Ventures 01.06.2026 18мин

  Garrett Smith holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC San Diego and co-founded two medtech companies acquired for a combined $600 million, one before FDA approval. After spending years investing in and partnering with early-stage companies at Johnson & Johnson, he launched Reef Haven Ventures to back life science and medtech founders at the convergence of biology, robotics, and AI.We get into why San Diego is an underserved gem for medtech seed capital, how Garrett thinks about backing AI-assisted surgical tools that could eventually move toward full autonomy, and what it means to invest in a company that can identify a patient's cancer type in real time rather than waiting weeks.