We The Builders

Intro

I sat down with Ritankar Das founder of Titan Holdings and cofounder of Prentis AI. Ritankar graduated from Berkeley at 18, studied at Oxford, and left his Cambridge PhD to build companies applying machine learning to real-world problems.

His early company was funded with money he earned consulting as a graduate student. We spent much of this conversation on what it takes to keep going through that uncertainty.

Ritankar approaches entrepreneurship as a series of hypotheses and experiments. Your starting idea can be wrong. What matters is how effectively you learn, how honestly...

Intro

This is my first conversation with Sal Churi, Founder and Managing Partner at Trust Ventures. Before starting the firm, Sal practiced at Kirkland & Ellis and taught law at the University of Chicago. Trust Ventures was the first investor in Base Power and an early investor in Oklo, and its portfolio includes Antora and Physical Intelligence.

One detail from our conversation stayed with me: in the early days of Base Power, Sal rented his house to the founders. By the end, they had 50-plus people working out of his three-bedroom house, and they had yanked...

Intro

I sat down with Ross Fubini, Founder and Managing Partner at XYZ Ventures. Ross has been a venture capitalist for 15 years, cofounded Village Global, and was an early investor in Anduril. XYZ now manages billions in AUM and has over 140 companies in its portfolio, 42 of them founded by ex-Palantir people.

When Anduril went to raise its A round, Ross couldn’t get firms to take a meeting. Investors were confident you couldn’t make money building products for the government.

We discuss why this moment feels like the dot com era, how AI c...

Intro

Every product we use depends on businesses coordinating behind the scenes. A shipment moves because someone calls a carrier, confirms an appointment, checks inventory, or follows up on an email. Those small interactions add up to an enormous amount of work.

I sat down with Harish Abbott, Cofounder and CEO of Augment. He previously cofounded Deliverr, which Shopify acquired for $2.5 billion, and spent part of his early career at Amazon. He is now building AI teammates for the people who keep goods moving.

One detail from our conversation stayed with me: Harish...

Intro

This is my first conversation with Chris Buskirk, Cofounder and Chief Investment Officer at 1789 Capital and author of America and the Art of the Possible. We explore his investment thesis for American renewal: backing technological innovation, rebuilding industry, and creating the conditions for a thriving middle class. We discuss defense tech, China, political conviction, charter cities, and what the people at the top of society owe the country.

What we cover:

• Inside 1789 Capital: the ambition to build a multi-strategy asset manager and why Chris backed defense technology before it became a popular in...

Intro

This is my first conversation with Ali Tamaseb, General Partner at DCVC, a $5B AUM fund and author of Super Founders. Ali spent years studying billion dollar startups to understand what separates their founders from the rest. We discuss the myths around age, education, cofounders, and industry experience and what the data reveals about building exceptional companies.What we cover:

* The young founder myth: why age alone doesn’t predict success, and what Ali’s research reveals about billion-dollar founders.

* Why repeat founders have an advantage and the early signs of ambition, reso...

Intro

My first conversation with Bryon Hargis, Cofounder and CEO of Castelion. This is a special edition of our show recorded at Reindustrialize. Since then, Castelion has announced a $1 billion Series C funding valuing the company at $13 billion making it one of the most valuable defense technology companies in the ecosystem. What we cover:

* Why Bryon sold his SpaceX stock to bootstrap Castelion and bet two-thirds of his savings on the mission.

* Why affordable, mass-produced hypersonic missiles are central to his vision of American deterrence.

* Building Blackbeard, winning the first Navy...

Intro

My first conversation with Michael Thompson who is on the board of Joby Aviation ($JOBY) and Oklo ($OKLO). He previously started Reinvent Capital with Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman where he was Managing Partner and made early investments in the physical economy through Joby, SpaceX, Nimble Robotics, Oklo and many other companies. This is a special edition of We The Builders conversation from Reindustrialize.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 Intro02:35 From hedge fund to physical-world techonolgies03:45 "Where is all this power gonna come from?" The case for nuclear04:50 Why nuclear stalled07:05...

Intro

Somesh Dash has been investing in startups for over 20 years at IVP where he is a General Partner. IVP is one of the most prominent venture firms in growth stage investing founded in 1980. In the last almost five decades, they have invested in over 400 companies, with over 135 of them going public.

IVP is an investor in generational companies like Anthropic, Uber, Snap, Twitter, CrowdStrike, Snap, Robinhood, Figma, Discord, Coinbase.

I had a wide ranging conversation with Somesh about his thoughts on the craft of investing itself, immigration, IVP’s firm structure, his ro...

Intro

This is my first conversation with Adam Grosser, a Silicon Valley OG. Adam has had a front row seat to what Silicon Valley is today from being at the centre of personal computing in the early days of Apple in the 1980s as Director of Engineering to directing products at LucasFilm in 1990s and investing in the still early internet days in the 2000s at Foundation Capital. Adam went on to be a Managing Director at prominent technology focused private equity firm SilverLake and co-created the Up Summit, an exclusive annual event for the future of...

Intro

This is my first conversation with Evan Burns, CEO of State Affairs. I think Evan is building one of the most interesting companies at the intersection of politics and capitalism, with the ambitious goal of creating the category of “policy markets” which he says is more important than financial markets. In this conversation we discuss the state of media, the thesis and business of State Affairs and more.

Keith Rabois was one of the first believers in the idea and they just came out of stealth with a $70m seed round funded by Khosla Vent...

Intro

Mike Solana is the CMO of Founders Fund and Founder of Pirate Wires. Marketing and media teams in technology and venture seem to be in this competition of capturing attention of the right people. The consensus strategy is covering entrepreneurs and investors on a podcast. All that has its own place but you don’t create cultural institutions or artifacts while following consensus strategies.

I often think about how few cultural institutions get built that matter. They are usually decades in the making and when they arrive, they are timeless and etched in memory. Th...

Intro

I had a conversation with Justin Lopas on building Base Power a few months back, last week they announced $1B in new funding at a $13B valuation. Justin cofounded Base Power with Zach Dell in 2023. I first met him at one of the deeptech dinners I was hosting in Austin back when they were still in stealth (adding to the list of incredible markups for anyone investing in founders from these dinners).

The latest round was led by Addition with participation from friends of the show at A16Z, Trust Ventures, 137 Ventures and others.<...

Intro

Scott Kupor was the first employee at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms in the arena today with over $90B in AUM. The firm started with the ambition to build a product to serve founders and with Michael Ovitz joining the board, it took inspiration from how talent agencies operated. Today, it is part a media company with venture capital as a business model and part recruiting firm for the startup ecosystem. Scott shares the story of how it possibly could have been Andreessen Horowitz Kupor.

He worked with Marc Andreessen...

Intro

Ian Cinnamon is the Cofounder and CEO of Apex Space. He was previously at Zynga and Palantir (after selling his company). He joined Palantir after selling his weapon detection company to them which had gotten impacted by covid since all live events came to a halt for ~1 year. Interestingly, my final year project in electrical engineering was also weapon detection using Computer Vision - which I take no credit for since my teammates did all the work, I even back then thought I could just support on the BD/research side since my dad was working...

Intro

Austen Allred is the Cofounder and CEO of Gauntlet AI which is running an AI training school which through its intensive bootcamp makes engineers AI-first operators. Austen originally founded Lambda School as a coding bootcamp, which later became Bloom Institute of Technology - backed by venture firms like GigaFund, Y Combinator, Ashton Kutcher and Google Ventures. Their business model for Lambda School was income share agreements for which there wasn't really a regulatory framework, this was the eventual reason for why the company went almost bankrupt as they got sued and couldn't keep operating. This is...

Intro

Brian Hooks is the CEO of Stand Together, President of Charles Koch Foundation and co-author of “Believe in People” with Charles Koch. He has scaled Stand Together to a network of 1,000 partner organizations and has deployed over $1B using a framework he called “venture philanthropy”. They are driven by problems and don’t get restricted by whether the vehicle through which they fund the problem is a donation or an investment. Which is a very interesting approach.

He also described some of his work as backing “social entrepreneurs”. My career actually started in social entrepreneursh...

Intro

This is a special edition of our show from Reagan National Economic Forum where I interviewed Dan Wright, Cofounder and CEO of Armada, a decentralized cloud for the edge. They are valued at $2B according to their last round and are funded by some of the friends of the show at Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8090 Industries, Overmatch and strategic capital from firms like M12 (Microsoft's venture fund), Pinegrove and a few others.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction01:16 - Dan Wright's early journey04:32 - Hyperscaling the remote edge data center06:41...

Intro

Eric Jorgenson started a nights and weekends projects compiling the most useful ideas Naval Ravikant had publicly shared, this has sold five million copies so far. He has since doubled down on this niche of curating the best ideas from the best thinkers and entrepreneurs in the technology industry. He went on to write the Anthology of Balaji and most recently, The Book of Elon. I talked to him about the process of writing ideas with a high density of useful ideas and compiling, curating and shaping the final form of the book.

He...

Intro

Chauncey Hamilton is a General Partner at XYZ, a firm which was started with the thesis of backing Palantir alumni. I met Chauncey earlier in the year and had the chance to hang out a few times at Chapter’s office in NYC. I know founders who camp at their investor’s office, I don’t know many investors camping at their portfolio company’s offices. She explains how this helps her at her job, we discussed archetypes of venture capitalists and how to identify which one you are or what you are best suited to doing. <...

Intro

David Ulevitch is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture firms by AUM with $90B. He cofounded the American Dynamism practice with Katherine Boyle about 4 years ago. Since then, it has taken over the timeline and become the language many use to describe frontier, deep or hard tech. Friend of the show Christopher Lochhead calls this Category Design, where you don’t necessarily have to be the first to become a category leader, you need to frame the problem and do it better than everyone else.

American Dynamism focuses on in...

Intro

Sunil Dhaliwal has been in investing for 27 years, he was a General Partner at Battery Ventures for 14 years before starting Amplify Partners. He founded Amplify 13 years ago with the thesis of backing technical founders. Interestingly, the “business guy” was more investable back in the 2010/11 era.

Amplify is an investor in companies like Datadog, Fastly, Recursion, Chai Discovery, Langchain, Anchorage Digital, Covariant, Runway ML, Temporal, Luma AI to name a few. These are either publicly traded or have privately achieved unicorn valuations.

They have launched a dedicated bio fund after their latest $900m fund...

Intro

Todd Klein is a currently a Managing Partner at Revolution Growth, a VC firm founded by Steve Case. He has been in venture investing for over 25 years, his notable investments include companies like AirBnB, CAVA, Square, Pinterest, CustomInk.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction 01:44 - What have you changed your mind on?03:19 - How capital has become a commodity?05:28 -Why truly talented founders are a rare asset? 07:11 - How founders must evolve through personality transformations? 09:56 - The extraordinary velocity of job obsolescence 13:55 - Has the software industry gotten too big? 15:08...

Intro

I first met Christian Keil over Twitter/X DMs probably 3 years ago or so. He started building the Astranis media function in public, he was the face of it as he figured out Twitter and video in real time. When he joined, they were a team of 50 and by the time he left they were about 500 people.

How to be an elite operator at a startup? Take on more projects. I agree with Christian on this and can relate. Some of them become whole orgs, Christian was hired for a finance job, got looped...

Intro

Jonathan Lacoste, is the founder of SpaceVC, a pre-seed frontier tech fund with at least a 20% unicorn hit rate, this is my observation based on publicly reported valuations of the companies listed on their website.

Before starting his fund, Jonathan was an entrepreneur, he dropped out of college to start his company Jebbit for which he raised for $90m and successfully exited to BlueConic. Their product was similar to a better version of SurveyMonkey or Qualtrix, like a Canva and SurveyMonkey fusion. Highlight of the company was that they sold billions of questions in...

Intro

Matt Ocko is the Cofounder and Co-Managing Partner of DCVC, a firm he started with Zachary Bogue 16 years ago. Matt started his career at Oracle and then went on to join a $1B AUM fund called Helix Investments in the 90s where he learnt the lesson that venture is 90% people from Ben Webster.

Matt coined the term “deeptech” almost a quarter of a century ago with Steve Jurvetson on a late 1999 winter night when they were talking about quantum computing being an investable category.

DCVC has been investing in deeptech since its ince...

This is a special edition of We The Builders recorded at The Hill & Valley Forum 2026. Billy cofounded Regent, building all-electric Seaglider vessels for fast, safe, and low-cost coastal transportation. The company is backed by Founders Fund, Lockheed Martin, Mark Cuban, Caffeinated Capital, 8090 Industries and more.

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction 04:45 - Dual-Use Framework 08:45 - Strategizing for the Indo-Pacific 12:45 - Reinvigorating American Shipbuilding: Addressing the Competitiveness Gap 16:45 - Rhode Island's Maritime Hotbed: Proximity to Talent and Capital 20:45 - Hardware as a Durable Moat

Intro

Seth Winterroth is a Partner at Eclipse where he has been investing in the physical world for over a decade. They now have fresh $1.3B in funds taking their AUM (Assets Under Management) to ~$10B to build and invest in critical technologies in the physical world.

His portfolio alone is collectively worth over $13B and includes:

* Wayve - valued at $8.6B as of their last round. Their global team is advancing AV2.0, a next-generation embodied AI system that can learn from real-world experience and large-scale data, and generalize across cities, vehicles, and...

Intro

Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz cofounded Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy. This is his second appearance on the show and is a special format we recorded at the Hill & Valley Forum. The company is backed by Narya Capital, Generation (Al Gore), XYZ Capital, Addition (Lee Fixel), Peter Thiel, Kivu Ventures and more.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction01:08 - The rise and fall of empires, and the arc of history04:38 - The “spin-off” to the British Empire06:44 - Stagnation 07:43 - Scientific advances vs. Systemic decline in the American health landscape09:01 - Why insurance carriers aren...

Intro

Rob Leclerc is the Cofounder and General Partner of AgFunder which is $300m AUM venture fund focused on food and agriculture. He also started AgFunder News which has over 100,000 subscribers and is the largest publication and source of news for the world of venture and startups focused on food & ag.

In this conversation we discuss how media and venture have always gone together and how Rob was able to use that as a platform to build the venture business. We also dive into his personal story of why and how he got started in...

Intro:

Leland Miller is the Cofounder of China Beige Book, which according to some media reports has been labelled as a firm having more data on China than even the CIA. He is also a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission. He has advised Fortune 50 CEOs and top government officials including the Congress on China.

In this conversation we talk about:

—> The espionage in the tech industry from universities to companies

—> Why China has long-term strategy for Taiwan where they expect the West to self-implode

—> How U...

Special conversation with Shahin Farshchi at Hill & Valley Forum 2026 now available wherever you get your podcasts. Lux Capital has deployed over $7B in deeptech and have been accelerating us towards SciFi future for over 20 years.

Shahin has invested in companies manufacturing in space (Varda), building autonomous transportation systems (Zoox), providing robots as a service (Formic), automating industries (Covariant), using space to revolutionize the Earth observation industry (Planet), 3D printing rockets (Relativity Space) and many more.

Watch on YouTube

WTB Intro

Narya keeps a low profile so perhaps you might not see them pop up on your Twitter or Linkedin but they have quietly worked their way to having what is probably the best unicorn hit rate of any active fund that I know of since 2020. Now, I haven’t checked with the firm but from our last conversation I know they make 2-3 investments a year, if you go and check out their website and see the list of featured companies, a simple Google search on those companies and their publicly reported valuations reveals that at...

Special episode from Hill & Valley Forum 2026: A conversation with Dmitri Alperovitch Cofounder of CrowdStrike (a $100B company), Silverado Policy Accelerator and Author of World on the Brink

Dmitri has correctly predicted three wars including the Russia-Ukraine war and has a prediction for China going after Taiwan.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction00:53 - The mission of Silverado Policy Accelerator 02:00 - Predictions of war and the state of Ukraine - Russia conflict02:31 - Timeline for conflict in Taiwan and the 2028 elections04:15 - Operation Causeway: Why Taiwan is a complex military feat 06:40...

Special Episode of We The Builders from Hill & Valley Forum 2026: Conversation with David Friedberg on rise and fall of empires, the state of US economy, robots as an economic platform, what has changed since the Winning AI Race Summit featuring President Trump, reindustrialization, the end of institutional education and of course the California bankruptcy.

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps:

01:21 - Shifting landscape between Silicon Valley and DC

02:51 - AI has become a political attack vector

04:46 - Late-stage empires and the impact of national debt

07:03 - Potential for AI...

Intro

New SciFi writing and film started declining at the end of the 20th century and we have seen a continued decline in the first quarter of the 21st century. Sci-fi is and always has been the source of inspiration for a better future. It is where the greatest builders of our time got inspired to work on the hardest problems of their era. Whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars or the Foundation Series, if you talk to entrepreneurs building frontier technologies or products; people like Elon Musk, Brett Adcock, Peter Beck, Blake Scholl, Sam Altman...

Intro

Seth Berman is the cofounder of Susa Ventures and Kivu Ventures. He started angel investing at Y Combinator demo days back when there used to be twenty companies and a handful of investors looking at them. He then went on to start one of the early few seed funds funding 10 unicorns across ~100 investments. Some of these include companies like Robinhood, Flexport and Chapter (Cofounded by Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, who has also been on the show). See link below to the original episode.

Special thanks to Cobi for the intro. We filmed this in Aspen CO...

Who is Ali Jehangir Siddiqui and why I was interested in having a conversation with him?

Ali is an entrepreneur, investor, diplomat and industrialist. When I first met Ali in 2017, he was the Special Assistant to Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan. For my friends in the US, that would be like the President’s Chief of Staff. He also didn’t need the job. He had built one of Pakistan’s fastest growing banks in JS Bank (now over $4B in assets), built the largest carbon-neutral private steel industries in the UAE (Arabian Gulf Steel Indust...

I had a conversation with Jonathan about choosing what to work on, getting the government as a customer, fundraising and how too much money can hurt the culture, favorite interview questions and more.

Check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts or right here on Substack. Sharing some of my highlights below.

How do you know you are working on a problem worth solving?

- You can feel if you’re solving a big enough problem for someone through their like reactions to things, such as people falling off chairs in co...

Of all the guests I have had on the show, Bharat has probably had the most dynamic career. He has been an executive at public companies, been a venture capitalist, an investment banker and a founder.

Our story goes back to when I got David Friedberg (Cohost All-In Podcast, Cofounder Ohalo, The Production Board) for the Building Atoms Summit in Nov 2023. My internal champion was the Chief Brand Officer of The Production Board at the time, Rachel Konrad who has become a friend and mentor. She just found the story of how I just orchestrated running into...