A Product Market Fit Show Mistral.vc

Arvind Jain was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he’s credited with making Google “faster than the blink of an eye”. He quit that job and founded Rubrik, a company that does $500M in revenue and will go public later this year. But that wasn’t enough. 

He left Rubrik in 2019 and founded Glean, an AI-powered work assistant. That company raised a $200M Series D at a $2.2B valuation just two months ago.

Arvind didn’t follow lean startup principles. He didn’t quickly build an MVP and iterate. He ignored early market feedback. 

And it worked. 

Check out this episode if you want to learn why sometimes doing things differently can produce massive outcomes. 

Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.

In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit. 

Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M valuation (!!). 

He shares his four-part B2C framework that helped him understand why Evan and Snap were special before anyone else. 

If you want to understand why Snapchat took off when so many other consumer startups fail to do so, check this episode out. 

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M. 

But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him. 

So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed startup world, it’s a totally different way to play the game. It won’t make you a billionaire. But it very well may make you $10M— with less stress, less work, and less risk. 

If you want a transparent account of the pros/cons of a venture-backed vs a bootstrapped startup, check this episode out.

While Voice AI is all the rage now, it wasn't a hot sector in 2017. After Dylan graduated from YC, VCs rejected him. He couldn't raise a round. They all assumed Google would do it. So he raised what he could from angels and made it work for the next 3 years.

He's now built the world's most accurate Speech AI model. He's grown to 5,000 customers and raised $115M in venture capital. Last quarter, he raised a $50M Series C from Accel. 

Just this week,  Assembly launched Universal-1, their most powerful speech recognition model to date. Trained on over 12.5 million hours of multilingual audio data, Universal-1 is 22% more accurate than APIs from Azure/AWS/Google and has 30% fewer hallucinations than competing models.

In this episode, we go through how Dylan came up with the idea, how he saw Gen AI coming long before others, and what he did in the early days to grow to $1M in ARR.

Andrew is the founder/CEO of Enable. And he is riding a rocket ship:
2020: $17M Series A
2021: $45M Series B
2022: $94M Series C 
A few months ago he raised $120M at a $1B valuation. 

But it took him five years from the time he started Enable in 2015 until he was able to raise his first round in 2020. 

Andrew was running a profitable development shop as he built the first version of Enable. He often had to chase down customers so he could make the next payroll. He had to balance serving existing customers while building an entirely new startup. Ultimately, he had to move to SF to raise a round and accelerate growth.

We go through the details of how Andrew turned a 'boring' enterprise software company from the UK into one of America's hottest new unicorns.

Alex started Apt2B in 2010. He sold couches online before IKEA did. It took him over 3 years to make as much money as he used to as a furniture salesperson. But it paid off. After growing the business to $6M in revenue, he sold the company.

Post-acquisition he grew the company to $40M in sales. In this episode, we dive deep into what Alex did to get started, how he closed his first few customers and what he did to grow to $1M in revenue.

From landing a Super Bowl ad to selling couches at Costco, this episode is full of sales and marketing anecdotes you can steal. You don't want to miss it.

Following the sale, Alex is now back at it as the founder and CEO of couch.com, a platform to help people find great furniture.