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A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
Every founder has 1 goal: find product-market fit. We interview the world's most successful startup founders on the 0 to 1 part of their journeys. We've had the founders of Reddit, Gusto, Rappi, Glean, Cohere, Huntress, ID.me and many more.
We go deep with entrepreneurs & VCs to provide detailed examples you can steal. Our goal is to understand product-market fit better than anyone on the planet.
Rated one of the world's top startup podcasts.
Episodes
297 episodes
He lost all 5 of his first deals—then built the next Looker and raised $250M. | Colin Zima, Co-Founder of Omni
Colin spent eight years building Looker into a $2.7B Google acquisition. Then he left to compete with his own product. He thought traction would take a month—it took nine. A hundred demos got him five verbally-committed customers, and he lost a...
He fired almost everyone, kept 2 engineers—then grew 12x and raised a $30M Series A. | Rafael Broshi, Co-Founder of Notch
Rafael launched a crypto insurance product in 47 states, backed by a real carrier. Everyone told him it was genius. Nobody needed it. He shut it down with $2M left in the bank, fired almost everyone, and rebuilt with two engineers on $20K a mon...
He worked out of a police department for free for a year—then built a $6.8B company. | Ben Rudolph, Co-Founder of Peregrine
Ben and his co-founder had no product, no law enforcement background, and no pitch—just an offer to help detectives solve cases. One commander took a chance, handed them background checks, and said "let's see what you can do." They worked out o...
1st-time solo founder does 90 interviews in 90 days—closes a $25M Series A 2 years in. | Damien Lewke, Founder of Nebulock
Damien left his job to start a startup solo. Two years later, Nebulock closed a $25M Series A. In between: 90 customer interviews in 90 days, a year of design partners, and a Fortune 500 deal that closed in 6 weeks.In this episode, Damie...
He tries 1,000 ideas a decade & kills nearly all—that's how X built Waymo & Google Brain. | Astro Teller, CEO of Moonshots at X (Alphabet)
Astro has run X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, for 16 years. His teams created Waymo, Wing, and Google Brain—by testing over 1,000 ideas a decade and killing nearly all of them. His whole system rests on one uncomfortable rule: celebrate the peo...
He raised $75M—but kept his team to 21 people & pays everyone the same salary. | Cos Nicolaescu, Co-Founder of Accrual
Cos was the CTO of Brex, which he helped scale from 40 people to over 1,000. Before that, he led engineering at Stripe. When he finally left, he had no startup idea—just a co-founder he trusted and one rule: whatever they built had to have mass...
He quit Stripe and hit $10M ARR in 4 years—with $0 marketing spend. | Anurag Goel, Founder of Render
Anurag was employee #8 at Stripe, set for life and free to do anything next. Instead he spent a year and a half hunting for a problem worth decades of his life. He chose to build a product to make it simple for developers to ship apps, going he...
He shut down his last startup and gave the money back—then hit $1M ARR in 6 months. | George, Founder of Monk
George had to wind down his last startup and give investors their money back. He went deep into the valley of despair, certain he'd missed his window to build something big. Then he met a co-founder, decided to start over, and started selling.<...
He quit his $50M ARR startup to work as a paralegal—then raised a $60M Series A. | Dan Mishin, Founder of Manifest
Dan founded and scaled a $50M ARR, SoftBank-backed startup—and could've stayed to make tens of millions. Instead, he handed it to his chief of staff and started from scratch. He wanted something bigger. He took an entry-level paralegal job to l...
He churned 100% of his revenue on purpose—then grew 10x to $2M ARR in under 12 months. | Ali Khokhar, Founder of Amigo AI
Ali quit his job a few months after ChatGPT launched, convinced AI would eat labor marketplaces like Upwork. With no co-founder and no code, he collected $12K from real customers—using a faked demo and a cloned voice. Then he pitched 100 VCs in...
He hit $1M ARR by sending 500,000 cold emails—then raised a $25M Series A in 6 days. | Mark Hughes, Co-Founder of Solidroad
Mark was running a startup out of a tiny annex office in Dublin with zero product usage. Then one customer turned it on and overnight he saw usage spike to thousands of simulations. He got to $1M ARR 100% through outbound, by sending 500,000 co...
Q1 2026 w/Carta: What you need to raise a Series A. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta
The AI boom is making founders feel like the market is wide open, but the data tells a sharper story: valuations are up, round sizes are bigger, and the bar to “count” in a top-tier fund’s Monday meeting keeps rising. We sit down with Peter to ...
How to get a VC (like me) to wire you $2M in under 2 weeks (the FOMO playbook) | Solo Episode
I meet 1,000+ founders every year. Most are bad at fundraising.I also interview 100+ of the world's best founders on my podcast each year. Most are incredible at fundraising.One raised $14M in 17 days. another was 3x oversubscri...
Coinbase's ex-CPO bet on AI agents before ChatGPT—now he's closing 7-figure Fortune 500 deals. | Surojit Chatterjee, Founder of Ema
Surojit spent 14 years at Google building mobile ads into a $100B+ business and then took Coinbase public as Chief Product Officer in 2021. In early 2023, before "agent" was even a word in AI papers, he started Ema in stealth—betting on a futur...
How this 1st-time founder went from closing customers for $500 a month to $300,000 a year. | Sean McCarthy, Founder & CEO of BackOps
Sean was spending four days a week inside customer warehouses at Amazon Shipping when he noticed the same thing everywhere: back-office admin staff churning every six months, buried under the same repetitive claims and reshipping tasks. He talk...
He built for 2 years before raising a dollar—then hit $13M ARR and a $40M Series B. | Alex Halliday, Co-Founder & CEO of AirOps
Alex spent two years building AirOps nights and weekends during the pandemic before raising a single dollar. A chance conversation with Sam Altman—while walking down the street during SF Pride—sent him down the LLM rabbit hole months before Cha...
180 VCs rejected him—then a $60K billboard got him to $2M ARR in 4 months. | Isaiah Granet, CEO of Bland AI
Isaiah pivoted mid-YC, landed in the bottom 10% of his batch, and watched 180 investors say no—their reason: phone calls won't exist a year from now. Voice AI was not yet a thing. With almost no money left, he and his co-founder bet everything ...
She bet on a consumer app when every VC wanted B2B—then grew to $10M ARR. | Anada Lakra, Founder of BoldVoice
Anada Lakra just raised a $21M Series A for BoldVoice, a $150/year pronunciation app that helps immigrants speak English with confidence. But she started from zero in her Harvard dorm room and a problem most VCs didn't think was big enough. She...
He raised a $10M seed with no revenue—then grew 30x to $30M in year two. | Bobby Samuels, Founder of Protege
Bobby launched Protege in early 2024 to connect data holders with AI model builders. He raised a $10M seed with almost no demand pipeline. A year later, Protege jumped 30x to $30M in GMV and raised $30M from a16z.In this episode, B...
He ran Prime fulfillment for Amazon—then raised $20M to replace e-commerce with AI. | Maju Kuruvilla, Founder of Spangle
Maju ran Prime fulfillment technology for all of Amazon — same-day, one-hour shipping, global logistics during the pandemic. He became CEO at Bolt. Then he walked away to start Spangle in a basement with a co-founder, convinced AI could replace...
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She got rejected by 22 VCs—then built 6sense to $100M+ in revenue. Now she's back for AI. | Amanda Kahlow, Founder of 1mind
Amanda spent 16 years running a services business for Cisco and Intel. When she tried to productize her business, 22 VCs rejected her. That became 6sense, a $200M ARR company. After stepping aside as CEO and taking five years off, she's back wi...
How this AI founder is on track to hit $50M ARR just 2 years after launch. | Tarek Alaruri, Co-Founder of Stuut
Tarek already built a B2B software company to $30M ARR. But when the AI wave hit, he realized he could build a generational business by automating the manual world of accounts receivable. So, he left to start Stuut.In this episode, Tarek...
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He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar Sunkara, Founding CTO of AppDynamics
DescriptionBhaskar was employee #1 at AppDynamics, which was sold to Cisco for $3.7B. He and co-founder Jyoti found a way to change how enterprise monitoring tools worked. From tracking low-level code metrics that ops teams didn't...
He raised $41M in one year to replace enterprise accountants with AI. | Yogi Goel, Founder of Maxima
Yogi spent 20 years living the nightmare of enterprise accounting. As a senior finance leader at Rubrik, he watched highly paid professionals spend three weeks every month manually wrangling data into spreadsheets—a problem that caused mass bur...
How he grew his AI startup from $2M to $20M ARR in 12 months. | Omar Haroun, Co-Founder of Eudia
Omar already built and sold an AI startup for over $100M. But when the generative AI wave hit, he realized the technology wasn't just the future of software—it was the future of labor. So he started Eudia to completely transform how enterprise ...
