For Episode 1 of Fund/Build/Scale, I talked to Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha about the need for founders to identify investors they can trust and why he’s specifically looking for inception-stage entrepreneurs who have “half-baked” ideas.
Our conversation covered a lot of ground: he outlined the contours of a fundable idea, shared what excites (and unnerves) him about AI investing, and offered a framework for founder teams seeking solutions to orthogonal problems that create value for customers and align with market trends.
Here’s the rundown:
1:07: AI investing and entrepreneurship
5:32: what exactly is a “fundable” idea?
7:56: fundraising, enterprise opportunities and success metrics
12:04: “the cognitive plumbing layer needs to get built”
14:19: why early-stage AI is not like B2B SaaS
17:27 the biggest challenges facing AI investors
19:11: what strong GenAI founder teams look like
22:10: leveraging inception-stage investors
26:47: why idea-stage founders shouldn't worry about revenue
31:36: pitfalls/opportunities at the enterprise level
34:25: the "impedance mismatch" between startups + enterprise customers
38:22: societal change + responsible AI innovation
42:48: how he educates himself about emerging tech
Coming up in Episode 2:
My conversation with Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova. Among other things, we spoke about digging a moat, customer discovery, and product-led growth. Here’s a short preview of that episode, which is set to drop on February 21.
Please subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on your favorite platform. If you got something out of this episode, I hope you’ll give me a great rating.
For now, you can find the Fund/Build/Scale newsletter here on Substack. The podcast theme was written and performed by Michael Tritter and Carlos Chairez. Michael also edited the podcast and provided additional music, and I’m deeply grateful.
Thanks for listening!
Links:
Mayfield: https://www.mayfield.com
Navin Chaddha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinchaddha/
Securiti: https://securiti.ai/
Cognitive plumbing: https://www.mayfield.com/cognitive-plumbing/
Impedance matching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_matching
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenhsunhuang/
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyanadella/
Thomas Kurian, CEO Google Cloud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kurian-469b6219/
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com
OpenAI: https://openai.com/
"Trough of disillusionment,” Gartner hype cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
SambaNova Systems: https://sambanova.ai/
Podcast theme: "Artificio," by Michael Tritter and Carlos Chairez: https://laroda.bandcamp.com/track/artificio
Fund/Build/Scale is sponsored by Mayfield Fund and Securiti.
