Startupable

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Entrepreneurship
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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.

3h ago

Ex-Kenvue CTDO: Your FDEs Should Teach Us to Fish, Then Leave | Bernardo Tavares

Presented 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. 👉 https://rebrand.ly/ASHSP6 Presented by Jumpstart Immigration. 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. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor. 👉 https://rebrand.ly/JUMPSP6 ------------------------- Bernardo Tavares was the founding CTDO of Kenvue, the $40B+ company behind Tylenol and Listerine. He led its separation from Johnson & Johnson, which meant rethinking more than 3,000 systems and reevaluating 700 software vendors. In other words, he is the enterprise buyer AI startups are trying to convince. I asked him what actually makes him buy, and when he wants your forward-deployed engineers to leave. Also in this episode: * Whether the executive backing your pilot can actually buy * What makes him bet on an early-stage startup * How he used VCs to find startups to buy from GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Bernardo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tavaresbernardo/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/
Oct 7

🎧 Built AI at Meta and OpenAI: 3 Must-Dos for Founders | Joaquin Quiñonero

Presented 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. 👉 https://www.ashurstperkinscoie.com/en/people/paul-navarro/ 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/p/startupeable#contact ------------------------- Joaquín Quiñonero Candela spent nearly 20 years building AI at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Meta. He founded Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning team and built the AI platform behind its products. Then he joined OpenAI, where he led Preparedness, the team that tests frontier models for catastrophic risks, and later ran recruiting and people. I asked him what founders should do differently now that AI is everywhere.------------------------- Also in this episode: Why careers are helixes, not laddersWhy the labs warning loudest about AI keep racing to build itWhy no lab can tell its investors it’s slowing down GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Joaquin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joaquincan/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/
Sep 30

Hilbert: a16z $28M Bet on an AI That Can't Do Math | Nazli Tan

Presented 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. 👉 https://www.ashurstperkinscoie.com/en/people/paul-navarro/ 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/p/startupeable#contact ------------------------- a16z just led a $28M Series A in Hilbert, a company that puts AI agents to work on growth. One of its first customers is a Fortune 10 company. Most people building with AI agents think more context is the fix. Nazli Tan, cofounder and CEO, who previously led growth at Getir ($12B), thinks the opposite. Context usually means someone writes down what a "good customer" is and the agent runs with it. But those definitions are mostly human guesses. Her answer is that the definition is already sitting in your data. Hilbert trains deep learning models on years of history, and those models decide who's a good customer. Same customer, same answer, every time. Their agents aren't even allowed to do math beyond rounding. Also in this episode: * Why "more context" makes your AI agents worse * How to price AI when a 1% improvement is worth millions * Why Silicon Valley growth playbooks don't work for 99% of enterprises GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Nazli Tan's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazlitan/ Enzo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzo-cavalie/
Sep 23

BCG CTO: Only 5% Use the AI You Pay For | Matthew Kropp

Presented 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 ------------------------- 95% of your team doesn't use the AI you're paying for. That's the gap Matt Kropp keeps finding inside the biggest companies in the world. He advises Fortune 500 boards on AI at BCG, and lately he hears the same thing in every room. “I'm not seeing ROI from this thing.” Also in this episode: Why AI-native startups keep outrunning companies 100x their sizeHow he cracks open an AI skeptic CEO in the first five minutesWhy "adoption" numbers lie, and what actually gets people using AIWhat running a company entirely on AI agents taught him about where AI still breaks GET THE BEST OF THE INTERVIEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER🗞️ Read it: https://rebrand.ly/tssnwsrss Matthew's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kropp/ 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/
Sep 16

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/
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/
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/
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

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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.