Episodes

Rahul Vohra is the founder of Superhuman, the email client that was acquired by Grammarly. Grammarly has since taken on the Superhuman name, and Rahul now leads Superhuman Mail. Before Superhuman, he built Rapportive, the first Gmail extension to scale to millions of users. LinkedIn acquired it 20 months after its first line of code. Rahul studied computer science at Cambridge, ran Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, and went through Y Combinator in Summer 2010. In this episode, Immad Akhund an...

Stephen Balaban is co-founder and, as of a recent leadership change, CTO of Lambda, the AI cloud infrastructure company he and his twin brother started in 2012. It took five pivots — augmented reality, a facial-recognition contact book, a camera embedded in a baseball cap, the AI image app Dreamscope, then finally workstations and servers — before Lambda found a business that made money in 2017. Along the way, Stephen kept the company alive by consulting on the side, including projects with Airb...

What if the company students use to find their first internship became one of the most important players in training AI? Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake, joins Immad Akhund and Raj Suri to break down Handshake's unlikely pivot. Handshake started as a way to help college students — regardless of where they went to school — find internships and jobs, and grew into a $200M+ ARR business used by most students in America. But over the last 18 months, Garrett has built a second business...

This week, Immad and Raj sat down for a wide-ranging catch-up on the biggest stories in tech right now — from record-breaking acquisitions to what they're each giving AI access to in their own lives. The conversation kicks off with the OpenRouter-Stripe acquisition and Cursor's $60B deal, and what both say about investing in "obvious" ideas when the underlying trend is right. From there, Immad and Raj get into the economics of secondary markets (including Immad's own purchases of SpaceX and Ant...

Mo Al Adham is the founder and CEO of Frec, a brokerage platform he describes as "brokerage 2.0" — building on core trading primitives to offer more sophisticated strategies like direct indexing, long-short direct indexing, and options overlays. Before Frec, Mo co-founded Twitvid, an early video-for-Twitter startup, and later spent five years at Twitter. He founded Frec in 2021 and launched the product in October 2023. What you'll learn: Why the $1-30M wealth segment — about 10 million US house...

Guillermo Rauch is the co-founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js, and previously created the widely-used Socket.io library. In this special episode, recorded live in front of an audience, Guillermo joins Immad Akhund and Raj Suri for an open Q&A covering pivots, ethics, investors, and the future of work in the age of AI. What you'll learn: The difference between a "lowercase p" pivot (refining focus) and an "uppercase P" pivot (starting over) — and how to know which one you need ...

Dan Teran is the co-founder and managing partner of Gutter Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing in vertical AI and marketplace businesses. He previously founded Managed by Q — an operating system for commercial spaces that grew to employ nearly 1,000 people, expanded nationally, and was acquired by WeWork in 2019. Dan joined WeWork as head of corporate development before leaving after a turbulent six months. He now runs Gutter Capital's third fund ($75M) and the Elbow Grease accelerato...

Colin Angle spent 33 years building iRobot — bootstrapping for eight years without venture capital, surviving 15 failed business models, and ultimately launching Roomba in year 12. What followed was a decade of overcoming consumer skepticism, 70%+ global market share, a public offering on Nasdaq, and eventually a blocked acquisition by Amazon. Now he's back with a new company, Familiar Machines and Magic, building robots designed for human connection — priced to compete with the cost of owning a...

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, joins Immad Akhund and Raj Suri at a live Founders in Arms event to break down the full arc of building one of the most widely used developer platforms in the world—from a contrarian bet that VCs said was already solved, to a multi-product company powering the future of the web. Guillermo walks through the three chapters of Vercel's growth: finding focus (trimming a portfolio of open source projects down to the one that had undeniable traction), building repeatab...

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the product and issue tracking platform built for high-performing software teams. A designer by training — with stints at Airbnb and Coinbase — Karri took a different path to founding than most Silicon Valley CEOs. Linear has become one of the most beloved tools in the startup ecosystem, known for its speed, design quality, and now its deep integration with AI agents. What you'll learn: How Linear evolved from issue tracking to a full product...

Michael Grinich is the co-founder and CEO of WorkOS, the enterprise authentication and identity infrastructure used by Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, xAI, and hundreds of fast-growing companies. Before WorkOS, Michael dropped out of MIT, worked at Dropbox, and founded Nihilus — where a painful first experience with enterprise features planted the seed for everything that came next. In this episode, Immad Akhund and Raj Suri sit down with Michael to talk about the SaaS apocalypse thesis, how WorkOS ...

In this candid one-on-one episode, Immad and Raj catch up on what's actually happening in tech right now — the AI narratives shifting under everyone's feet, which companies they'd bet on, and how they're thinking about building teams in an AI-native world. What you'll learn: Why Anthropic has taken the AI narrative from OpenAI — and whether that lead will hold Immad's take on whether he'd invest in OpenAI or Anthropic at $800B today How Anthropic is growing 3x in revenue in three months — and...

George Kailas is the CEO of Prospero AI, a platform helping retail investors make smarter decisions using simplified market signals and data-driven insights. In this episode, George joins Immad and Raj to break down one of the biggest debates in investing today: should you just buy ETFs, or can retail investors actually beat the market? They go deep into how modern markets really work, why retail investors are becoming more powerful than ever, and what most people get wrong about stock picking, ...

Andy Chen is the co-founder of Outcast Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on rethinking how founding teams come together. Prior to Outcast, he worked across recruiting and venture capital, including roles at Riviera Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and Coatue, where he was a General Partner. At Outcast, he’s building a talent-first approach to company creation, including a co-founder matching program designed to help founders form stronger teams from the start. What you'll learn: Why choosing a co...

David Rusenko is the founder and CEO of Leap Forward Ventures, a pre-seed and seed climate tech fund investing in energy, deep tech, and the reinvention of industrial processes. Before that, he spent 14 years as co-founder and CEO of Weebly, growing it from a college project to a platform serving tens of millions of small businesses before selling to Square in 2018. What you'll learn: Why Weebly stayed cash flow positive from early 2009 and what that meant for how they built the company How D...

This week, we're bringing back one of our most loved episodes on Founders in Arms. Ryan Gariépy is the co-founder and former CTO of Clearpath Robotics and Otto Motors, acquired by Rockwell Automation for $600M+ in 2023. He bootstrapped the company for five years with only $300K in funding, reached profitability in 18 months, and spent 14 years building mobile robotics platforms that became the industry standard for research and industrial automation. What you'll learn: Why robotics is a system...

Marco Zapacosta is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, the home services marketplace connecting homeowners with local pros for everything from plumbing to renovation. Started three weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, Thumbtack has grown to over $500M in annual run rate across 17 years of building. What you'll learn: Why Marco believes Thumbtack is still pre-product market fit at $500M in revenue How AI is shifting Thumbtack from a search engine to a matchmaker Why word of mouth ...

Noah Smith is a writer and Substack blogger behind Noahpinion, known for his contrarian, data-grounded takes on economics, technology, and geopolitics. What you'll learn: Why the viral Citrini "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" post moved markets — and whether it should have The psychology behind why "AI causes 2008" scared Wall Street more than killer robots Why Noah thinks an AI-driven financial crisis is possible but unlikely How a productivity boom could paradoxically trigger a mild reces...

We're bringing back one of our most loved episode on Founders in Arms. Parag Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Parallel, building infrastructure for the agentic web. Previously CEO of Twitter, Parag now leads a company architecting how AI agents will interact with the open web at orders of magnitude beyond current human scale. Two years after founding in stealth mode, Parallel recently announced a $100M Series B co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. What you'll learn: Why everything...

Vishwas Prabhakara is the co-founder and CEO of Honey Homes, a subscription home maintenance service that's reimagining how Americans care for their homes. After spending four years at Yelp running the restaurant business, Vishwas saw firsthand why marketplaces fail for skilled home services—and built a contrarian solution. Now operating across San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Dallas, and Austin with 3,000+ members, Honey Homes creates quality jobs for skilled workers while delivering consistent, rel...

What does it take to build a company in a category where everyone says the idea is dead? In this special live recording from Mercury's San Francisco office, Immad Akhund and Raj Suri sit down with Max Mullen, co-founder and former Chief Product Officer at Instacart, for an honest conversation about the founder journey. Max shares how Instacart started in 2012 when there was no gig economy, no Uber X, and investors repeatedly told them grocery delivery was a dead idea after Webvan's failure. The...

SaaS companies are down dramatically—Figma is 77% off its peak. In this candid conversation, Immad Akhund (CEO of Mercury) and Raj Suri (co-founder of Lima and Tribe) unpack what's really happening in tech as we head into 2026. They explore why the SaaS business model is under attack (hint: it's not just AI building software faster), the shift from per-seat pricing to API-driven usage, and why enterprises actually buy SaaS products—spoiler, it's not about the software. The conversation reveals ...

Mehul Nariyawala is the co-founder and President of Matic Robotics, a home robotics company building what he calls “robotics 2.0” — intelligent, vision-first robots designed to actually work in real homes. After early careers at Nest and a prior acquisition by Google, Mehul and his team spent seven years building Matic, challenging the assumptions behind robot vacuums, consumer hardware, and how robotics companies should scale. In this conversation, Mehul breaks down why robotics is far harder ...

Jack Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Airwallex, a global payments and financial platform valued at $5.5 billion. Founded in Melbourne, Airwallex processes billions in cross-border transactions and serves businesses expanding internationally. Jack shares his journey from starting the company to competing with giants like Stripe, navigating the complexities of global payments infrastructure, and building across multiple regulated markets. What you'll learn: Why cross-border payments remain bro...