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Village Global

The Village Global podcast takes you inside the world of venture capital and technology, featuring enlightening interviews with entrepreneurs, investors, and tech industry leaders. Learn more at www.villageglobal.vc.

Village Global Podcast

Tanay Kothari is co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice AI company he started with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021, building toward a Jarvis-like assistant that lets people interact with computers through natural speech instead of keyboards and screens. His younger brother, Jaisal Kothari, is co-founder and CEO of Gallium and was Wispr's first software engineer, joining as a Stanford freshman to help build the company's earliest voice dictation technology.

Anne Dwane sits down with Tanay and Jaisal at a Village Global event to trace Tanay's path from building and shipping nearly 50 apps in secret as a teenager, including one that hit 2.5 million users before Google sent him a cease and desist, to founding Wispr as a hardware company and pivoting entirely to software after watching users ignore the physical device in favor of the app alone. Tanay breaks down Wispr's "zero edit rate" metric, a stricter and more user-centered standard than the industry's typical word error rate, walks through the viral Porsche-giveaway marketing stunt that pulled in tens of millions of views, and explains why he personally sat in on the company's first 500 onboarding calls. The conversation also covers how Wispr thinks about competing with frontier AI labs entering voice, why the company stacks multiple layers of defensibility instead of relying on one moat, and Tanay's approach to keeping teams small and communication overhead low as the company scales. Jaisal opens the conversation with the story of growing up alongside Tanay's secretive late-night coding sessions and how that early exposure shaped his own path into tech.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Building Jarvis: A Voice AI Startup Making Computer Interaction Invisible |Tanay Kothari (Wispr Flow)

Jade Q. Wang is an artist, investor, scientist, and founder. A Stanford grad with a PhD in neuroscience, she retired roughly a year ago from a career in tech to pursue art and angel investing full time.

Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Jade to trace her path from a childhood spent training to be a concert pianist in Shanghai, through a hard pivot into computer science and neuroscience, to her current work building interactive, AI-native poetry that treats Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as collaborators rather than tools. Jade draws a striking parallel between the invention of photography and the current moment in AI, arguing that just as photography didn't destroy art but unlocked entirely new movements like Impressionism, AI may do the same for literature and poetry. She walks through her multi-phase art project, from a poetry collection structured like a codebase to a planned museum installation involving AI mirrors that roast and compliment visitors and a "computerized confessional," and explains why different AI models have developed distinct, consistent taste in which of her poems they find most powerful. The conversation also gets into her approach to angel investing and what she actually looks for in founders, plus the surreal story of discovering she'd become the unwitting subject of a viral AI-generated fan fiction universe.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Why This Moment in AI is Similar to the Invention of the Camera | Jade Q. Wang, Artist & Investor

Michael Hochberg is a semiconductor entrepreneur, Caltech-trained physicist, and network investor with Village Global. He's founder and president of Periplous LLC, and has built and scaled hardware and deep tech companies through multiple market cycles, giving him a front-row seat to both the chip industry and the venture capital that funds it.

Max Kilberg, Investment Partner at Village Global, sits down with Michael to unpack the state of venture right now, starting with the widening split between mega funds chasing billion-dollar checks and early-stage investors still doing artisanal, relationship-driven deal-making. They get into why Michael believes traditional moats around data and customer lock-in are eroding while speed and talent become the real differentiators, why patents rarely matter for early-stage founders, and the "VCs are stupid, scared, and reductive" framework Michael uses to coach founders on fundraising. The conversation turns to AI's economic impact, including the CapEx buildout already locked in for the next several years, the emerging question of legal liability for autonomous systems and embodied robotics, and a surprisingly detailed debate on whether commercial SaaS survives an era where founders can generate their own software from a prompt. They close on where Village is finding opportunity in Europe and what it actually takes to win a competitive allocation of a VC's limited checks per year.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

What It Actually Takes to Get a Venture Capitalist to Say Yes | Max Kilberg (Village Global) & Michael Hochberg (Periplous)

Aizada Marat is co-founder and CEO of Alma, an immigration law firm that combines the expertise of seasoned attorneys with AI to streamline the immigration process for individuals and businesses. Alma has achieved a 98% approval rate on its cases and can prosecute in half the time of a traditional firm.

Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Aizada to trace her journey from a small village in Kyrgyzstan to founding one of the fastest-growing legal tech companies in the Bay Area. They cover her path to the US through the Future Leaders Exchange Program, her own frustrating experience with a mishandled immigration case that left her unable to work for over a year, and how that pain point led her from Cooley to McKinsey and eventually to starting Alma. Aizada walks through the company's early pivot from selling immigration software to law firms to becoming a law firm itself, why she believes large language models can already outperform the outsourced manual labor traditional firms rely on, and where she draws the line on what should and shouldn't be automated in legal work. The conversation also gets personal: what it's like being married to fellow founder and Village Global portfolio founder Chyngyz, the advice from him she took (and the one piece she didn't), the immigrant founders and operators who inspire her, and her long-term ambition to eventually return to Kyrgyzstan and run for president.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

From Milking Cows in Kyrgyzstan to Building a $98%-Approval Law Firm | Aizada Marat (Alma)

JakeCooper is co-founder and CEO of Grow Therapy, a technology platform that helps mental health providers launch and scale independent, insurance-accepted practices. Since starting the company in the middle of COVID, Jake and his co-founders have scaled Grow Therapy to around a million patient visits a month across 26,000 providers, surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue while operating profitably since year two.Ben Casnocha sits down with Jake to trace Grow Therapy's founding story, from the friction he and his co-founders saw across patients, providers, and payers to the systems-level model that let them scale where others couldn't. They get into how Jake and his co-founders have divided responsibilities and built trust as the company has grown past 600 employees, his contrarian read on hiring and what most CEOs get wrong about spotting high-agency talent, and the deeply personal reason the mission matters to him. The conversation turns to AI, including where Grow Therapy is finding real leverage in matching and provider coaching tools, and Jake's frank take on whether human therapists still have a role as more people turn to LLMs for support between sessions. He also opens up about why he's deliberately stayed out of the public eye, and why that's starting to change.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Building the Company Behind 1 Million Therapy Visits a Month | Jake Cooper (Grow Therapy)

Paul Eremenko is co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI, the company building Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer that works alongside human engineering teams. Jeff Immelt is a Venture Partner at NEA and former Chairman and CEO of GE, and he's joining P-1 AI's board after leading the firm's investment in the company's $50 million Series A.

Anne Dwane sits down with Paul and Jeff to unpack why engineering the physical world has lagged behind the AI boom in software, and how P-1 is closing that gap. Paul traces the idea back to his time at DARPA working on the F-35 program, where he saw firsthand how complexity, not procurement, was driving runaway costs, and explains how that thinking led to Archie's "semi-synthetic" training data approach for physical engineering domains. They dig into how Archie is built to sell as labor rather than software, why P-1 positions Archie as one AI engineer per team rather than a swarm, and how customer IP and data are ring-fenced under the company's deployment models. Jeff brings the perspective of a CEO who has advised dozens of companies on AI adoption, laying out his four-part framework for organizational readiness and the pitfalls of getting stuck in pilot purgatory. The conversation closes with a wide-ranging look at compute costs, hiring plans as P-1 scales into automotive and aerospace, and Paul's take on the technological singularity and what it means for how we build the physical world going forward.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

The AI Engineer Every Industrial Company Will Need | Paul Eremenko (P-1 AI) & Jeff Immelt (NEA)

Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket, which he started in 2021 to help companies detect and defend against software supply chain attacks. A prolific open source maintainer whose packages are downloaded a billion times a month, Feross recently closed a Series C at a billion-dollar valuation, and Socket now protects nearly 30,000 organizations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Vercel.

Anne Dwane sits down with Feross to unpack why the modern software supply chain has become such an attractive target for attackers, and what companies can actually do about it. Feross walks through real recent incidents, including the Axios and LiteLLM compromises that exposed major AI labs, breaking down how attackers used a months-long social engineering play against a single maintainer to hijack a library with 100 million weekly downloads. They get into why coding agents pull in 50% more open source code than human developers and the new risks that creates, why traditional vulnerability scanners miss most real threats, and what Socket Firewall does to protect the developer endpoint itself. The conversation also covers Feross's own path from open source maintainer to enterprise CEO, how Socket balances a free, developer-led product with enterprise sales, and how frontier AI models transformed Socket's ability to analyze code at scale. They close with practical guardrails any organization can put in place today, from lockfiles to minimum release age settings.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

How One Hacked Library Can Take Down Thousands of Companies | Feross Aboukhadijeh (Socket)

Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto.

Somrat Niyogi, General Partner at Recall Capital and Village Global Network Investor, sits down with Jeff and Rohit to unpack how AI has rewired the finance function from the inside out. They trace the shift from spreadsheets and BI tools to Claude Code as the default daily workflow, including how board decks that once took two weeks and five people now come together as pull requests against an HTML file. The conversation moves through what finance skills and attributes still matter in an AI-native world, whether teams will shrink or simply cover more ground, and how roles like BI, investor relations, and data visualization are starting to merge. Jeff and Rohit also get into the practical mechanics of the shift: how Gusto scores AI fluency across the entire company, how they're budgeting for token spend the way they once budgeted for headcount, and where the real build-versus-buy tension is playing out across ERP, FP&A software, and internal tools. They close with predictions on what's dead, what's dying, and what the first hire at a finance team in 2026 should actually look like.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Recall Sessions: Why Two Finance Leaders Are Ditching Excel for Claude Code | Jeff Cobourn (Gusto) & Rohit Divate (Tide)

Sherwood Callaway is the founder and CEO of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform, and a repeat YC founder. He previously worked as an early infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he built the systems that kept one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world running.

Village Global Luminary LP Lindsay Pettingill sits down with Sherwood for a conversation that moves from his unconventional path into engineering to the contrarian bets behind Sazabi. They dig into why Sherwood believes logs alone can replace metrics and traces, why dashboards mostly serve anxiety rather than insight, and what a world of self-healing software could actually look like. Along the way, Sherwood reflects on the 40-page manifesto that became Sazabi's founding thesis, the angel investor strategy that brought over 100 founders and technical leaders onto his cap table, and the maximalist, Blade Runner-inspired brand built around a name pulled from a 1980s anime. The episode closes on a more personal note, touching on his orthopedic surgeon father's late-career turn toward vibe coding and his sister Hadley's stint at Sazabi as its first non-technical hire before business school.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup

Why Nobody Needs Metrics or Traces Anymore | Sherwood Callaway (Sazabi)

Moe Katib is the founder and CEO of One (withone.ai), an enterprise-level infrastructure platform that gives AI agents authenticated, reliable access to hundreds of software applications and verified actions. Before One, he spent 12 years solving enterprise integration problems, building the knowledge base that became the foundation for what he's building today.

Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Moe to trace the story behind One: from growing up in Damascus selling packaged chicken out of his uncle's factory, to building water-pump automation devices growing up, to immigrating to Canada after his invention was stolen by a government-connected company. They cover what a decade of enterprise integration work taught him about agent infrastructure, why he made the counterintuitive decision to open source all the integrations he had assembled, and why trust, not speed or scale, is the real unlock for agentic AI adoption. 

Moe also shares his own experience running his email entirely through an agent, including the moment his AI sent a rude message to a major VC on his behalf, and what that revealed about the identity problem at the heart of agentic software.

Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley.

www.villageglobal.com/signup

Why AI Agents Can't Be Trusted Yet (And How to Fix It) | Moe Katib (One)

Erik is joined on this episode by Mike Duboe (@mduboe), investor at Greylock, Dan Hockenmaier (@danhockenmaier), of Basis One, and David Weinstein (@dw_stein), working on Special Projects at On Deck and TokenDaily.

They talk about…

* The history and different “eras” of growth as a standalone team.

* Why there’s been a shift in mindset towards growth teams, how they will change in the next 5-10 years, and why relentless optimization has backfired for some companies.

* Why you should think of user acquisition in terms of a loop rather than a funnel.

* Why onboarding is the point that determines whether a user will be retained or not.

* The fact that users acquired organically via word of mouth are much more likely to be retained than users that were acquired through paid channels.

* Why investors should ask themselves, “if you took away any non-organic acquisition, are you still excited about the business?”

* How to tell if a company’s growth is healthy and sustainable or not.

* Stories from the guests’ time working at Tilt, Thumbtack and Stitch Fix.

* The best structure for a growth team.

* Common misconceptions about growth.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

A Primer on All Things Growth with Mike Duboe, Dan Hockenmaier, and David Weinstein

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