Alice Bentinck discusses how Entrepreneurs First helps someone to go from “no team, no idea” to funded company. EF has helped create companies now collectively worth more than $10,000,000,000 and many participants go from zero to raising $2-15 million from top-tier VCs within months. Bentinck argues that capital is the easiest part of the journey, while co-founder fit, community, and early guidance are what really accelerate success.

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AI may feel new to many investors, but Glasswing Ventures founder Rudina Seseri has been betting on it for more than a decade. In this episode, she breaks down how Glasswing evaluates AI startups, why workflow and productivity are key entry points, and what founders still get wrong. Plus, her unlikely journey from a teenage immigrant to a leading AI investor.

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Adeo Ressi says his organization helps launch between 60 and 70 percent of new venture capital firms worldwide. In this episode, the Decile Group and VC Lab founder explains why starting a VC fund is far harder than most people expect, why big institutions rarely back first-time managers, and why fundraising is really a numbers-driven grind. Ressi also argues that venture capital remains concentrated in a small number of cities — and that expanding it to hundreds more could reshape who gets funded and where innovation happens.

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Alex Halliday made his first fortune at 15 building fan sites in the early web. Now he’s back at the center of another digital reset — helping brands survive AI-driven search. In this episode, he explains why “information gain” beats spam, why Google is under threat, and how AirOps grew from Series A to B in record time as CMOs woke up to the danger.

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Dr. Christina Smolke runs a brewery, except the yeast isn’t making alcohol. It’s making medicine. At Antheia, Smolke has turned a long-shot Stanford research project into a new way to manufacture critical pharmaceutical ingredients, using biology instead of traditional chemistry.

The approach is already being used to produce opioid precursors for Narcan, with more drugs in the pipeline aimed at chronic shortages and supply-chain failures. Smolke talks about regulation, security, and why some of the hardest problems in science are worth chasing—especially when everyone says they won’t work.

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Legendary Stanford immunologist Dr. Ed Engleman helped create the foundations of modern cancer treatment. From early breakthroughs in immune-cell training to a brand-new discovery, Engleman explains how the immune system can now be switched on and off like circuitry, with implications for cancer, autoimmune disease, infections and more.

He also breaks down his role at Vivo Capital, the global life-sciences venture firm where he evaluates and guides new biotech startups. Engleman describes how Vivo’s more conservative, data-driven investment style matches his own approach: digging deep into the science, waiting for real clinical signals, and backing teams that can translate discoveries into actual drugs.

A rare conversation with a scientist-founder-investor whose discoveries and companies have reshaped medicine — and who’s still chasing the next breakthrough.

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Scott's conversation with Freestyle Capital's Maria Palma ranges from venture capital hype cycles to ethics, engineering creativity, venture regret, and even the art of naming startups (“Cluster Fudge” stays). Palma also offers a personal take on her own journey—from GE supply chain to Harvard Business School to eventually discovering she was built for venture—all while keeping an engineer’s mindset and a founder’s empathy.

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Gamma co-founder and CEO Grant Lee and lead series A investor Vas Natarajan of Accel are building one of the fastest-growing creative-tools startups in tech. With 70 million users, 100M ARR and just 50 employees, Gamma has become the “anti-PowerPoint”—a visual communication platform for the AI generation.

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