
Running a Hardware Startup: Hind Hobeika on Staying Motivated Through Failure & Cultural Isolation
Hind Hobeika shares her insights on the founder's journey, including her decision to launch Instabeat as a solo-founder and staying motivated after manufacturing challenges caused her to miss delivering on a crowdfunding campaign. She reflects on manufacturing hurdles and other obstacles hardware startups face, as well as the difficulty navigating cultural differences and social isolation that she experienced as a young founder-CEO.

Dinesh Moorjani Shares Tips on How Investors Evaluate Teams & Ideas, Navigating Growth, the Role of Your Board, and Pivoting
Dinesh Moorjani reflects on Tinder’s journey and shares his insights on how investors evaluate teams and ideas, how growth affects teams, the role of your board, and tactics to use when pivoting.

Sunil Nagaraj on “Failing Well” & Investing in Early-Stage Deep-Tech Ventures
Entrepreneur and investor Sunil Nagaraj reviews how and why he decided to close his first venture and "fail well," despite some encouraging signals. Learn the factors that influenced Nagaraj's decision of whether to remain afloat or close and the steps he took to exit, and his transition to investing. Now the founder and Managing Partner at Ubiquity Ventures, a seed-stage institutional venture capital firm, Nagaraj shares the criteria he uses for investing in "nerdy and early"—early-stage deep-tech—ventures.

Practical Tips for Scaling CEOs: Rob Gierkink on Evolving Roles, Managing Your Board, Hiring & Firing
Serial entrepreneur Rob Gierkink discusses common challenges CEOs face when scaling their ventures. Reflecting on how the CEO's role evolves, he shares insights on hiring, leadership challenges, and managing your board. He also provides tactical advice for CEOs about how—and when—to fire wisely.

Dinesh Moorjani: Insights on the Founder’s Journey & Tips on Hiring a Co-Founder or Product Head for B2C Startups
In an informal interview with Shikhar Ghosh, Moorjani discusses what he learned about hiring co-founders or heads of product for B2C startups.

Adam Enbar on the Power of Mission, Culture & People in Scaling Startups
Flatiron's CEO, Adam Enbar shares his observations and experience on starting and scaling. Learn how having a co-founder, a strong mission and company culture can help you as you scale. And get tips on adapting your role as CEO, building your team, and managing your board.

Nick Grouf Shares Insights on Fundraising & Scaling
What do common mistakes do most founders make when raising money and scaling? Nick Grouf shares insights on fundraising, founding teams, and how the role of founder-CEO changes as you scale.

CEO Matthew Bellows Shares Tips on Managing, Recruiting & Firing as You Scale
In a conversation with Shikhar Ghosh, serial entrepreneur Matthew Bellows discusses challenges CEOs commonly face while scaling, including building your team, recruiting, and assessing your staff—and yourself as a leader—as your venture scales. He also shares practical tactics for firing an employee when needed.

CEO Dulcie Madden on Navigating Cash Flow Shortages & Adversity while Raising Your Family & Team
How do you handle the more extreme lows on the founder's journey, that you couldn't predict, like an unexpected acquisition offer or being sued by a large manufacturer? Entrepreneur Dulcie Madden shares lessons she's learned growing her hardware startup, Rest Devices. Madden's story is compelling and unique. But her insights on founding team dynamics, marrying your business partner, being CEO while raising a family, leading a company through legal problems and cash flow shortages are useful to any entrepreneur.

Insights on Ideation, Founding Teams, and Hiring from AlleyCorp’s Wendy Tsu
AlleyCorp's Wendy Tsu shares how she—and other investors—evaluate ideas, CEOs and other executives, and founding teams. She shares tips on ideation and recruiting, including practical steps for interviewing.

Essential Tips for Starting & Scaling Ventures from Serial Entrepreneur Lara O’Connor Hodgson
NOW Corp's Lara O'Connor Hodgson reviews essentials for starting and scaling a business, including choosing a co-founder, assigning value to contributions as your venture grows, dividing founder equity, navigating change, building your team, and managing your board.

Rescale’s Joris Poort on Sales, Fundraising, Market Testing, Team-Building and Culture at Technical Hardware Startups
Rescale's Joris Poort shares the insights he gained starting and scaling a technical hardware startup, including identifying key metrics for SaaS businesses. He discusses the challenges that fundraising, B2B sales, and product testing pose for hardware startups and he reviews how the role of CEO evolves and the importance of establishing culture as you scale.

AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan Shares Insights on Hiring, CEOs & Company Culture
AlleyCorp founder and CEO, Kevin Ryan has launched and scaled several billion-dollar tech ventures in divergent industries. He shares his insights on founding companies, including hiring CEOs, building strong and capable teams, scaling, establishing company culture, and having difficult conversations.

The Race to $1 Billion—How Rent the Runway Became a Unicorn
Rent the Runway co-founders Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss reflect on what they learned scaling their startup into a unicorn. Learn what they discovered about the importance of understanding market conditions, developing and testing your MVP, and unit economics when launching and scaling their venture.

Sales Fundamentals for Startups: Insights from Lou Shipley
Lou Shipley and Shikhar Ghosh discuss sales fundamentals for startups, including the sales learning curve, the sales mentality, the sales funnel, sales forecasting, common mistakes in sales, and selling in a global market.

Matthew Bellows on Mindfulness & Meditation for Entrepreneurs
Can regular meditation strengthen leadership abilities, enhance decision-making, and increase innovation? In an informal conversation with Shikhar Ghosh, serial entrepreneur Matthew Bellows discusses how mindfulness can benefit entrepreneurs at any stage. Bellows has spent decades building and scaling three startups while cultivating a meditation practice.

Sunil Nagaraj on Starting, Pivoting & Exiting
Sunil Nagaraj reflects on leadership lessons he learned while starting his first venture, Triangulate. He shares his insights on starting a venture, choosing a co-founder, formalizing a founders' agreement, changing directions, and exiting.

Sanchali Pal’s Journey Founding & Growing a Mission-Driven Startup
Sanchali Pal, co-founder and CEO of Joro—a technology platform that enables users to track their carbon footprints on their smartphones and make choices that positively impact climate change— engages in an informal discussion with Shikhar Ghosh about her decision to found and build a social impact startup. She shares insights she gained on raising capital and adapting to the constantly evolving role of CEO at a growing early-stage company.

Sunil Nagaraj on the Mindsets of Entrepreneurs & Investors
Sunil Nagaraj, founding partner of Ubiquity Ventures and co-founder of Triangulate, reviews the key differences between the mindsets of entrepreneurs and investors. And he shares tips to help founders better understand their investors' mindsets and help them succeed.

Careem’s Mudassir Sheikha on Co-Founders, Establishing Culture & Balancing Family at a Rapidly Scaling Startup
Mudassir Sheikha, co-founder and CEO at Careem, reflects on leadership lessons he learned while scaling Careem into a unicorn almost overnight. Learn how having a company-wide culture helped Careem thrive during the chaos of meteoric growth and why Sheikha believes that disseminating culture and hiring the right people is one of the most important jobs the CEO can do while scaling.

Insights for Scaling Startups from Serial Entrepreneur Lara O’Connor Hodgson
Lara Hodgson, Co-Founder and CEO of NOW Corp, shares practical lessons she learned while scaling 2 startups, including how to build a powerful and passionate founding team, get the most from your board, and maintain balance as you scale.