Escape Velocity

Latitude Capital

Escape Velocity is a podcast series with industry-leading founders. What too often looks like an overnight success, always starts with an idea and a founder looking to get to scale. This early part of building a company - the “0 to 1” journey - is often the most messy and least linear part of any successful company.  In these conversations, I ask the most successful founders and leaders to unpack key lessons from those early days before they became the household name we know today. Escape Velocity is hosted by Ansaf Kareem, a venture capitalist and founder of Latitude Capital. Visit Our Website: www.escape-velocity.io Follow Us On Twitter: @0to1podcast

Episodes

  1. Farooq Malik & Charles Yoo-Naut, Co-Founders of Rain

    12/03/2025

    Farooq Malik & Charles Yoo-Naut, Co-Founders of Rain

    Rain, a leading stablecoin infrastructure company, recently announced a $58M Series B round, but the journey began with a simple idea born from a dissatisfaction with traditional finance. Ansaf Kareem, who led Rain's initial seed round, unpacks the zero to one journey of Rain's co-founders as they detail how a quick weekend hack on a notary website revealed the massive opportunity in money movement and how their diverse backgrounds (from traditional finance to scaling products at Intuit) provided the perfect Founder-Product Fit to navigate crypto's regulatory and technical challenges. In this episode: (0:49) Introduction to Escape Velocity Podcast (1:40) Farooq’s Early Entrepreneurial Journey (5:08) From Stanford to Intuit: Charles’ Path to Entrepreneurship (12:04) Founder-Market-Fit: Why They Felt Uniquely Situated for this Problem (14:09) What Big Companies Taught Them (and What They Had to Unlearn) (20:29) Building Rain Cards and Finding Early Product–Market Fit (23:14) How Farooq & Charles Chose Partners for Their Financings (40:38) The Rain Platform Today & Customer Use Cases (48:49) Stablecoin Adoption, Regulation & Why Enterprises Should Care (55:23) Competing with a Technical Moat in a Crowded Market (1:16:31) How Their Roles Evolved as Rain Scaled (1:19:45) The People Who Shaped Them & Final Reflections Follow Escape Velocity: https://x.com/0to1podcast Host - Ansaf Kareem: https://x.com/AnsafK Farooq: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhmalik Charles: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesnaut/ Where to find Latitude Capital: • Twitter/X: https://x.com/LatitudeCapital • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/latitude-capital

    1h 21m
  2. Soham Mazumdar, CEO of WisdomAI

    11/11/2025

    Soham Mazumdar, CEO of WisdomAI

    Soham Mazumdar turned a knack for math into a role at Google, helped build the multi-billion-dollar company Rubrik, and is now pioneering the next wave of AI with Wisdom AI. Ansaf Kareem sits down with Soham Mazumdar, a three-time founder, including the massively successful, newly public Rubrik (NYSE: RBRK) to dive into the non-linear path of finding Product-Market Fit. Soham shares the hard-won lessons from his career, starting from early theoretical research to building a massive enterprise business and his pivot into Generative AI In this episode: (0:00) Introduction to Escape Velocity Podcast (0:43) Early Life, Math, and the Path to Technology/Engineering (1:46) Joining Google (2004) & The Importance of Search Infrastructure (3:28) The First Spark: Leaving Google to Start Tagtile (6:37) Biggest Lessons from First-Time Entrepreneurship (8:06) Jumping Back In: The Genesis of Rubrik (10:06) Key Learnings from Rubrik (14:42) Why Start Wisdom AI? (16:40) Why This Space Now? (17:57) Building the Team: High Bar for Talent and Co-Founders at Wisdom AI (20:38) Wisdom AI V1: The Core Problem Statement (22:48) New Muscle: Shifting from Infrastructure to Application (24:58) The Strategy of Building in Quiet (26:55) Philosophy on Early Fundraising and Seed Capital (28:29) Go-to-Market Strategy: Horizontal Platform & New Category (34:25) Defining a New Category: Telling the Wisdom AI Story to Enterprise Buyers (38:48) Defensibility, The AI Trough, and Future Vision (42:46) Scaling the GTM Team & The Role of Forward-Deployed Engineers (55:20) Personal Drive and Key Influencers Sign up for new podcasts: www.escape-velocity.io Follow Escape Velocity: https://x.com/0to1podcast Host - Ansaf Kareem: https://x.com/AnsafK Where to find Latitude Capital: • Twitter/X: https://x.com/LatitudeCapital • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/latitude-capital/

    58 min
5
out of 5
12 Ratings

About

Escape Velocity is a podcast series with industry-leading founders. What too often looks like an overnight success, always starts with an idea and a founder looking to get to scale. This early part of building a company - the “0 to 1” journey - is often the most messy and least linear part of any successful company.  In these conversations, I ask the most successful founders and leaders to unpack key lessons from those early days before they became the household name we know today. Escape Velocity is hosted by Ansaf Kareem, a venture capitalist and founder of Latitude Capital. Visit Our Website: www.escape-velocity.io Follow Us On Twitter: @0to1podcast

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