Startupable

Explora Producciones
  • 0,0 (0)
  • Entreprenörskap
  • Varannan vecka

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. 5 Ways LatAm Founders Break Into Silicon Valley

    −14 h

    5 Ways LatAm Founders Break Into Silicon Valley

    Santiago Zavala sat me down in front of the 500 Global community in San Francisco.The room was full of founders spending a few weeks in the Bay trying to crack the city.So Santiago pushed me on the one thing I get asked most: how do you actually break into Silicon Valley?Here’s what I think now after 5 years in SF Also in this episode: Why San Francisco Runs on Abundance, Not ScarcitySilicon Valley’s Real Advantage Is the Circle of TrustWhy VC Conviction Is Becoming More Psychological Than RationalWhy AI Makes “Informative” Content a Losing GameWhy San Francisco Happens Indoors GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER 🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssSantiago's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-zavala-47a68b7/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie

    59 min
  2. How I Sold 8 US B2B Clients in 3 Weeks as a Foreigner | Carlos Chavez, Braven

    10 juni

    How I Sold 8 US B2B Clients in 3 Weeks as a Foreigner | Carlos Chavez, Braven

    Carlos Chávez grew up watching his father work in insurance. Today he’s building Braven, AI agents that take over what underwriters still do by hand: processing submissions, quoting policies, binding coverage. One underwriter on Braven handles 30x the volume they did before.But the story isn’t the product. Carlos arrived from Colombia with no network in the US insurance industry. Latin American VCs told him directly that a Latin team couldn’t run commercial processes in the US.Braven raised $6M from Collide Capital, Fiat Ventures, Broom Ventures, Aito Capital, and a16z scout. Also in this episode: Moving to the US Gradually vs. Going All InSelling AI Into a Traditional IndustryRaising From US VCs as an OutsiderWhy San Francisco’s “Boring” Culture Can Be a Superpower GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Carlo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlosachavezr/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    44 min
  3. How Act One VC Became One of LA’s Top Seed Funds

    31 maj

    How Act One VC Became One of LA’s Top Seed Funds

    Act One Ventures’ Fund 1 was $4M. Their second investment was AuditBoard. Every other investor passed. “The market is too small”, they said. In 2024 it sold for $3.1 billion, one of the biggest software exits of the year, on just $43.5M ever raised. Alejandro didn't learn to spot that in venture. He learned it in music. His early career was A&R, the people who find talent before anyone signs it. He came up under the man who discovered Linkin Park, a band every label had passed on. He reads founders the way a scout reads a raw artist. Not by the resume. By whether they've lived the thing they're building. That instinct isn't an accident. Alejandro grew up fifteen minutes from the Tijuana border. Son of a mechanic, first in his family, no network. Also in this episode: - The Linkin Park analogy for how real pattern matching works - How a $73M fund accidentally became a native AI fund - The hard conversations, in person not over Zoom, with founders whose model no longer works’ - The investing principle from the border: "I try to keep it real" GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Alejandro's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alguerrero/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie

    1 tim 15 min
  4. The 25-year-old Venezuelan coming for US banks with AI | Victor Cardenas, Slash

    19 apr.

    The 25-year-old Venezuelan coming for US banks with AI | Victor Cardenas, Slash

    His name is Victor Cardenas, founder of Slash.$250M in revenue. 65 people. Profitable.2% of all Facebook ad spend runs through Slash. More than 5,000 businesses spend almost $10B a year on its corporate cards.A year ago, Mickey Malka of Ribbit Capital, the world’s #1 fintech investor (Robinhood, Nubank, Coinbase), said, “fintech is dead.”Today, Ribbit is leading Slash’s $100M round at a $1.4B valuation.Also in this episode: How Slash found a new opportunity when “fintech was dead”Why the real advantage in the AI era isn’t in softwareHow they’re using internal agents to multiply team productivityWhat to do when your startup loses 60% of its revenue overnightWhy building for one person is better than building for a marketGET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Victor's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-d-cardenas/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    40 min
  5. Techstars’ CEO: The Venn Diagram Of Billion Dollar Ideas (How To Create Unicorns)

    21 jan.

    Techstars’ CEO: The Venn Diagram Of Billion Dollar Ideas (How To Create Unicorns)

    David Cohen (founder of Techstars) was an angel investor in Uber. He also had the opportunity to invest in Lyft — and passed. Same market. Same timing. Two completely different outcomes in his portfolio. The difference? At Uber, he met Ryan Graves (the first employee) through Techstars. “I clicked with him.” He invested without ever meeting Uber’s founders. At Lyft, Matt Van Horn was a mentor at Techstars. They were friends. But the idea seemed stupid to him: “Intercity transportation for college students? I didn’t get it.” That same team pivoted, followed Uber, and built a multi-billion-dollar company. After 20 years evaluating startups, the pattern behind his misses is always the same. Also in this episode: Why AI creates a "barbell effect" for startups — the middle gets stuck Techstars’ internal meme: “Replace ‘AI’ with ‘software’” Why AI agents will do venture capital — and probably better than humans Jack Bogle’s philosophy applied to VC: “The financial industry only subtracts value” GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss David's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgcohen/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    48 min

  6. 2025-12-21

    Freepik CEO: "The Day I Realized AI Would Destroy Us" — A Company That Refused To Die

    Joaquín Cuenca, CEO and founder of Freepik, had built a $70M revenue company with a team of 500 people. For over a decade, Freepik focused on building the largest image library on the internet. Then DALL·E 2 arrived and overnight, everything they had built suddenly felt at risk.Instead of freezing, Freepik became one of the first major image platforms to integrate generative AI. Today, Freepik is one of the most widely used AI creative apps, according to a16z. This is exactly how they did it. Why launching AI without a clear strategy beat staying frozenThe “Humans vs AI” framework and what machines will never replicateThe hardest conversations with artists who thought their careers were overThe strategic mistake that made Adobe, Getty, and Shutterstock fall behind on AIWhy distribution is a temporary advantage, not a real moatHow building Freepik from Málaga—not Silicon Valley—became a competitive edge GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrssJoaquin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joaquin-cuenca-abela-905717a/Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/

    1 tim 12 min
  7. I Built a $4.4B SaaS and AI Agents Destroyed It: The End "Per Seat" Pricing

    2025-12-10

    I Built a $4.4B SaaS and AI Agents Destroyed It: The End "Per Seat" Pricing

    My guest today is Manny Medina, the founder who defined the last decade of sales tech with Outreach and is now building Paid.ai , the infrastructure for the next decade of AI. Manny’s path took him from a shrimp farm in Ecuador to the heights of Silicon Valley, where he built Outreach into a $4.4B SaaS. But in 2023, a conversation with the CEO of DocuSign handed Manny a "Red Pill" moment: if AI agents do the work of humans, companies will hire fewer people, and the seat-based SaaS model will collapse . He realized the current infrastructure—giants like Salesforce, Netsuite, and Datadog—was "conspiring against him." They could track closed deals or API calls, but they couldn't distinguish between an agent's cost (tokens) and its value (reasoning) .  Manny founded Paid to solve this: a way to interpret agent behavior so builders can stop selling cheap software and start selling valuable work. Paid has raised +$30M from investors like Sequoia, Lightspeed and EQT. What we covered Why the Agent Economy is impossible without a new metering layer Why seat-based pricing is dead and what replaces it Why generalist agents lose to specific domain expertsHow the tech recession forced Outreach to reinvent itself GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER 🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Marcelo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelocamberos/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/ Do you want AI powered productivity? Get 3 Months Free of Notion: Business Plan + Unlimited AI 👉 https://rebrand.ly/NTNENGYTR3

    48 min
  8. #1 Forbes Angel Investor: "Stay Home!" The AI Playbook for Non-US Founders

    2025-11-26

    #1 Forbes Angel Investor: "Stay Home!" The AI Playbook for Non-US Founders

    My guest today is Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of FJ Labs and one of the most prolific angel investors, with +1,100 investments and key bets like Airbnb, Alibaba, and Flexport.Prior to FJ Labs, Fabrice built multiple companies including Zingy, which he scaled from near bankruptcy into a $200M exit, and OLX, which he grew to 300M users across +40 countries, before it was acquired by Naspers.Today he runs FJ Labs as an “angel investor at venture scale,” evaluating hundreds of deals a week and backing 150–200 startups a year with a fast, founder-friendly process. Why being a public company CEO stopped being interestingWill AI kill marketplaces? The real impact on e-commerceThe next big play: buying offline businesses and 10x’ing them with AIThe trillion-dollar opportunity in B2B digitizationDo AI startups really need less capital?GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER 🗞️Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Marcelo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelocamberos/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/ Do you want AI powered productivity?Get 3 Months Free of Notion: Business Plan + Unlimited AI 👉 https://rebrand.ly/NTNENGYTR3

    54 min
Visa alla (21)

Om

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.

Information

  • Kanal
    Explora Producciones
  • Skapad av
    Enzo Cavalie
  • Aktiva år
    2024 - 2026
  • Avsnitt
    21
  • Åldersgräns
    Vuxet innehåll
  • Copyright
    © Enzo Cavalie
  • Programmets webbplats
    Startupable

Mer från Explora Producciones

Du kanske också gillar