A Product Market Fit Show | Startups & Founders Mistral.vc

There is no better storyteller in the world than Matthew Dicks. He tells stories for a living. He gets paid by the world's biggest brands to create stories for them. He's won Moth StorySLAM (a storytelling competition in NYC) a record 59 times. Every founder knows storytelling is a critical skill. But 99% of founders I meet are terrible storytellers. They overcomplicate, they include too much information, they try to convince with data. Like Matthew says, "Most of what people say in...

5 years ago, Shubham had just graduated college and had no network. He bootstrapped to $3M in ARR, then raised $200M & grew to $85M ARR.But he started trying to sell AI for marketing to enterprises with no network.So for 2 months, he'd go to the lobby of a bank and sit there for an hour. He'd wait for the CMO to walk by, just so he could say hi. He'd tell receptionists he was waiting for an interview. Finally, one day the CMO had enough and asked him who he was. Shubham got his 15-minute ...

Google is in talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23B (a 40x revenue multiple). Wiz is the company that in 2021 announced it grew from $0 to $100M ARR in just 18 months. How did this cybersecurity company grow so fast in a crowded space? How does it get a 40x revenue multiple when FAANG stocks trade at 5-15x? Who are the exceptional founders that were able to create the largest venture-backed exit in history in just 4 years?In this episode, we dive into the 3 ingredients that made Wiz ...

Paul built a startup that was acquired for $2.2B. He worked on AI at Uber and Oculus. But when a farmer told him about some of the problems he was facing, he quit and went all-in on farming. He built a robot that attaches to the back of tractors, uses computer vision to identify weeds and lasers to shoot and kill them. He sells each robot for $1.5M. He's sold nearly 100 so far— & generated nearly $150M in revenue.Whether you're working on a hardware startup or not, you'll want to lis...

Elon Musk single-handedly took on the entire automotive industry. No one, including me, thought he would succeed. But he's built an $800B company. Whether sales are slowing down misses the mark: the punchline is it took well capitalized, professional automakers 15 years to catch up to a single founder. Sure, Elon Musk is special. But this goes beyond just Elon Musk. It shows that founders today have more business power than founders have ever had. They can take on the most established in...

Last month, Ashby raised a $30M Series C. Ashby is used by customers like Notion, Ramp and Sequoia. Benji built Ashby as an end-to-end Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that would replace several point solutions. He had to build heads down for 18 months and couldn't launch a simple MVP.Surprisingly, even though he raised $3.5M at seed, he didn't grow his team. He built the product with just 3 people. "We could spend time recruiting or we could spend time building"-- he decided to build.When the...