Startupable

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The outsider’s guide to Silicon Valley. I came here as a foreigner to learn what truly sets the best apart: the decisions, strategies, and mindsets that outsiders often see more clearly than insiders. Each week, I go deep with founders, investors, and operators to uncover the real reasons behind their success. Past guests include the founders of Vercel, Auth0, Nubank, Mercado Libre and Kavak.

  1. 1d ago

    Resend CEO: Why Great Startups Enter Bad Markets | Zeno Rocha

    resented by Ashurst Perkins Coie. Paul Navarro works with some of the best founders in Latin America, many of them guests on the podcast. I always ask my guests who I should interview next, and the only time anyone recommended a lawyer, it was Paul. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor. 👉 ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro ------------------------- Every founder is taught to avoid crowded markets. Zeno Rocha bet his company on one of the most crowded markets in tech: email. He started Resend in 2023, and they're now at 4M users and 100k paying customers. Every other developer category had been rebuilt. Auth0 led auth until WorkOS and Clerk showed up. Heroku led hosting until Vercel. But in email, SendGrid was bought by Twilio for $2B and the product decayed. The rest got acquired too, and stopped improving. His bet was care: dark mode, animated icons, details nobody in the category had bothered with. Then AI turned email into a hot market again, and what he had to care about changed. Also in this episode: * Why the giants in your category are more vulnerable than they look * The advantage of knowing nothing about the market you enter * What changes when your fastest-growing customer is an agent GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Zeno Rocha's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zenorocha Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/ ------------------------- Jumpstart is the immigration service I wish I'd had when I moved to the US. Bianca and Fabiano have helped 1,250+ founders get O-1, L-1 and EB visas with a 98% approval rate, and if it doesn't come through, they DON'T charge you. 👉 https://www.gojumpstart.com/

    Resend CEO: Why Great Startups Enter Bad Markets | Zeno Rocha

  2. Sep 9

    Manifest: The $100B Bet on AI-Native Law Firms

    This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ⁠⁠⁠ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠⁠ ----------------------------- When Dan Mishin set out to build legal services powered by AI, every investor gave him the same feedback: why not just sell software? He refused. Selling software to law firms didn’t fix the system and incentives behind expensive legal services. The bet underneath it: AI is the leverage that finally makes a services business as good as SaaS. When each lawyer is 10x more productive, the company stops scaling with headcount. Dan’s benchmark: the largest law firm in the world does $7B in revenue with 1,200 attorneys. ----------------------------- Also in this episode: The case for and against the hype of AINSThe ownership innovation that made Manifest venture-backableWhether AI services can hold quality and margins as they scale GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: ⁠⁠https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss⁠⁠ Dan Mishin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmishin/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    Manifest: The $100B Bet on AI-Native Law Firms

  3. Sep 2

    🎧 The 25 yo Brazilian vs Scale, Mercor & Surge | José Nunes, Vetto AI

    This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ⁠⁠ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro⁠ ----------------------------- Frontier AI labs have no shortage of companies willing to collect data for them. Their harder problem is determining which data will actually make their models better. José Nunes built Vetto to solve that problem. Instead of waiting for a lab to specify the data it needs, Vetto studies where a model is underperforming and designs the work required to improve it. Also in this episode: His journey from a small town in Brazil to Silicon ValleyWhy the most valuable part of AI data happens before collectionHow Vetto competes with the labs in researchHow it recruits researchers it cannot outbid the frontier labsWhy researchers hired in Brazil can perform alongside people from DeepMind GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: ⁠https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss⁠ José Nunes´s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-andrenunes/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    🎧 The 25 yo Brazilian vs Scale, Mercor & Surge | José Nunes, Vetto AI

  4. Aug 26

    The CTO Who Turned Down Pro Soccer to Build Firecrawl | Nicolas Silberstein, Firecrawl

    At 12, one of Brazil's biggest soccer clubs offered Nicolas a spot on its pro track. Saying yes meant dropping out of school. He said no. Today he's playing the "main league" of Silicon Valley: building an AI company in SF, against the smartest, best-funded people in the world. In his words, "you're playing against the Pelés and Kakás." That company became Firecrawl, the biggest web-scraping repo on GitHub. 170k stars from a team of 20. Firecrawl does one unglamorous job: it reads webpages for AI. It takes a page full of code and turns it into clean text a model can use. Almost every AI agent needs that and agents now browse the web more than people do. (according to Cloudflare). Also in this episode: His path from Brazilian soccer to Silicon ValleyThe "indie hacker test" for defensibilityWhat he means by building the eyes for AGIWhy the best product is the one your users never seeWhy, if you're not building for agents, you may not be here in 5 years GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Nicolas's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-silberstein-camara/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/ This episode is presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie, the law firm guiding emerging companies from incorporation to exit. → ashurstperkinscoie.com/professionals/paul-l-navarro

    The CTO Who Turned Down Pro Soccer to Build Firecrawl | Nicolas Silberstein, Firecrawl

  5. Aug 19

    From no English at 18 to founding Reach Capital ($1B fund) - Esteban Sosnik

    Five years ago Esteban Sosnik brought me to the US, helped me get my visa, and gave me a seat at Reach Capital. Those have been the best and highest-growth years of my life. Today his episode goes live, and I finally get to tell his story, because most people don't know the arc. The wildest part? He's too humble to tell you any of this himself. So I got it out of him on today's episode. This was a special one for me. Hope you enjoy it! Also in this episode: How Argentina’s first VC circle found and backed Mercado LibreWhy Reach invested in Replit at pre-seed in 2016Why AI is raising the bar for technical cofoundersThe “bloodbath” Esteban expects as companies cut ten AI tools down to one or twoWho should move to Silicon Valley and how everyone else should spend time here GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Esteban's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esteban-sosnik-779159/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    From no English at 18 to founding Reach Capital ($1B fund) - Esteban Sosnik

  6. Aug 4

    0 to $1.2B: HappyRobot’s anti-Silicon Valley playbook

    HappyRobot went from zero to a $1.2B valuation in three years. DHL, Repsol and Koch Industries on the customer list. Four industries, three continents. The company just raised a $150M Series C led by Prism Capital and Eurazeo. A little over a year ago, Pablo Palafox came on the show as a YC founder building AI voice agents for freight brokers. He just came back a unicorn. They got there by doing what the Silicon Valley playbook says not to. Also in this episode: * Why he almost quit his own company to work as a freight broker * Why DHL has more in common with a telco than with a regional logistics shop * How forward-deployed engineers became their biggest go-to-market lever * Why they went global at Series B instead of waiting GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Pablo's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablorpalafox/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    0 to $1.2B: HappyRobot’s anti-Silicon Valley playbook

  7. Jul 25

    BoldVoice: How 7 People Built a $10M AI Company

    BoldVoice reached $10M+ in ARR with a team of seven. Five million users across 150 countries. In January, the company raised a $21M Series A led by Matrix. What looks like a simple coaching app is powered by proprietary AI models trained to hear how people actually speak English. That technical foundation became the moat behind BoldVoice. Also in this episode: What conventional speech recognition misses about non-native speakersWhy BoldVoice built its audio AI technology in-houseHow a seven-person team surpassed $10M in revenueHow BoldVoice turns AI research into a better coaching product GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Anada's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anadalakra/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    BoldVoice: How 7 People Built a $10M AI Company

  8. Jul 11

    GitHub's Plan for the Agents War Isn't an Agent

    GitHub Copilot started the AI coding market. Today, barely a serious developer touches it. Not even a vibe coder like me: we mostly live in Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. These players are at war to own the coding agent, maybe the biggest AI market there is. Luis Bitencourt runs GitHub Copilot. So I asked him straight up: is Copilot losing the race? His answer: Everyone's fighting on two layers: the harness and the model. Luis thinks neither is winnable. Also in this episode: Why Microsoft's distribution buys a head start of months now, not yearsWhy coding agents are just the beginning: code review, SRE, debuggingWhat Rappi and Loft, two messy physical-world businesses, taught him about humans in the loop GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Luis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artificial-intelligence/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    GitHub's Plan for the Agents War Isn't an Agent
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About

The outsider’s guide to Silicon Valley. I came here as a foreigner to learn what truly sets the best apart: the decisions, strategies, and mindsets that outsiders often see more clearly than insiders. Each week, I go deep with founders, investors, and operators to uncover the real reasons behind their success. Past guests include the founders of Vercel, Auth0, Nubank, Mercado Libre and Kavak.

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