Smart Venture Podcast

Smart Venture Podcast The best information diet for future CEOs. Follow for practical career advice from the top leaders

11/12/2025

Laura Burkhauser is the CEO of Descript, leading the company in developing innovative AI-powered tools for audio and video creators. She is recognized for her expertise in product leadership, with previous senior roles at Twitter, Rent the Runway, and Le Tote. Laura holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago. As CEO, she is focused on making creative tools radically more accessible through AI-driven content creation.

Topics:

- Leading AI-powered video editing innovation
- Championing rapid user growth and feature launches in consumer tech
- Shaping the future of media with AI

11/12/2025

Jon Callaghan is a founder, an investor, and a Managing Partner of True Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2005. With a foundational mission to empower entrepreneurs at the initial stages of company creation, True has partnered with over 1,050 Founders across more than 500 companies. The firm’s 12 funds have been a part of seven IPOs and over 60 acquisitions. Under Jon’s leadership, True was among the first institutional investors in now-iconic companies, including Automattic, Duo Security, Fitbit, Hashicorp, Peloton, and Ring. Jon continues to champion the next wave of innovation, currently serving on the boards of promising ventures such as Pipedream, Daydream, and Ernesta. True is also early and deep in AI, having made over 85 AI investments.

A prominent voice in the venture community, Jon served as Chair of the National Venture Capital Association from 2015 to 2016. He holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College and an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School.

Topics:
- How to Spot Founders Who Build Generational Companies
- Capital Efficiency & The New Age of Company Building
- Why EQ & Integrity Still Win in a Data-Driven VC World

11/10/2025

Ross Fubini is the Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital, which he founded in 2016 after a successful career as a founder and operator. A 2025 Midas List honoree ( #88) and #8 on the Midas Seed List, Ross is recognized for early investments in Anduril, the defense technology company founded by Palmer Luckey, and cloud security leader Verkada. Under his leadership, XYZ has grown to over $1.2B AUM across four funds, backing bold founders in frontier technology, AI, and enterprise innovation. Before venture, Ross founded CubeTree (acquired by SuccessFactors) and served as Director of Engineering at Plumtree Software. He also co-founded Village Global, sits on the boards of Sardine, Legion Technologies, and others.

Topics:
- What it takes to scale an emerging VC firm to $1.2B AUM
- Going from engineer and founder to top investor on the Midas List
- Early bets on Anduril, Verkada, and how to spot frontier founders

11/07/2025

Natalie Dillon is a Partner at Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco. She joined Maveron in 2018 after working at Susa Ventures, where she helped source and diligence early-stage consumer investments. Prior to that, she was a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs and a research associate at Silicon Valley Bank, where her passion for consumer businesses and identifying market patterns flourished. A San Francisco native and Stanford graduate, Natalie is known for her hustle, relationship-building skills, and deep understanding of consumer trends. She actively invests in companies like Daring, Dolls Kill, and Peoplehood, and is committed to supporting founders with the right mix of guidance, trust, and strategic connections. Natalie combines her love of consumer insights with a collaborative approach to venture investing, helping build and scale innovative consumer brands.

Topics:
- Consumer Trends and Investing
- Advice for early-stage consumer startups on product-market fit and brand building
- How AI is Revolutionizing Consumer Experiences and Shaping the Future of Brands

11/06/2025

Conor Brennan-Burke is the founder of Hyperspell (YC F25), which builds memory and context infrastructure for AI agents. Before starting Hyperspell, he helped scale software products to over $50M in ARR and advised on more than $1B in private equity and M&A deals. He’s a repeat founder with experience across five countries and a focus on making AI systems more capable and useful in the real world. Hyperspell is also featured on Smart AI 100 list as one of the most promising early stage ai companies.

Disclosure: Grace is an investor in Hyperspell.

Topics:
- Building Memory for AI Agents
- The Future of Agentic Systems
- The Next Interface for Work

11/05/2025

Lari Hamalainen is a Senior Partner at McKinsey. In the past he has led McKinsey Digital in Northern Europe and Northeast Asia and served as managing partner for McKinsey’s Finland office.

Lari’s passion is to help companies build new businesses while renewing their existing business models. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs and has from a young age been involved in building technology businesses and helping organizations better adapt technology to their needs. Over the last 15 years at McKinsey Lari has helped numerous organizations build new services, channel models, and set up digital attackers. He has also been the Chief Transformation Officer at a major technology company supporting them in their renewal journey. Recently, Lari has also been a front-runner in driving artificial-intelligence- and analytics- related thinking and in advising companies on how to best utilize the technologies at scale.

Topics:
- The Rise of Agentic AI
- McKinsey’s GenAI Strategy
- Enterprise Transformation

11/03/2025

Mahi de Silva is the Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of Higgsfield AI. Higgsfield is the AI-powered Cultural Engine for creators and marketers to amplify engagement and monetization In the new Attention Economy. Prior to that he was the Co founder and CEO of Amplify.ai. Amplify.ai is a global leader in Conversational AI, having delivered more than 10 billion interactions with more than 500 million people around the world. Higgsfield AI was also featured on our Smart AI 100 List among the top early stage AI companies.

Topics:
- AI Video Technology & Platform Evolution
- Creator Economy Disruption
- Building and scaling AI startups

10/31/2025

Tony Conrad is a Partner at True Ventures. He worked with amazingly talented founders, operating teams from companies like Automattic (WordPress), ZERO Longevity Science, Modern Animal, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, MakerBot, Voiceflow, Giftshop, Cast, Bumo, Typekit, Pluralsight, Connectifier & Holey Grail Donuts. He also co-founded about.me & Sphere, both acquired by AOL. Tony is a personal investor in Slack, Automattic, Lowercase Capital, Cygni, Ghia, Empirical Spirits, International Smoke, Saltwater Oyster Depot, Elk Fence, flour+water pizzeria, flour+water, Trick Dog, Samovar and August. He is a board member of Flour + Water Hospitality Group, the Tony Hawk Foundation and formerly a T40 National Co-Chair of Technology for President Obama.

Topics:
- What's overhyped in AI? What's underhyped?
- Building Community & Network Effects
- Craft Businesses That Scale

10/31/2025

Vivek Krishnamurthy is a Partner at Commerce Ventures. At Commerce Ventures, Vivek focuses on tech-first opportunities in FinTech & InsurTech – as well as where these two categories intersect with other verticals. He works closely with a number of CV companies, including Bureau, Canary Technologies, Flueid, Mudflap, Zeal and Zentist. Vivek was previously a member of the investment banking team at Financial Technology Partners where he worked on ~$1B of private capital raises, M&A, and IPOs for FinTech & InsurTech companies like GreenSky (Acq’d by Goldman Sachs), Marqeta (MQ), Yapstone, Enservio (Acq’d by Solera) and others. Along the way, he’s also spent stints working on credit portfolio management at GE Capital and airplane economics at Boeing.

Topics:
- Macro FinTech/InsurTech Trends
- The current M&A environment & IPO readiness for FinTech/InsurTech
- Vertical AI agents in financial services and insure tech

10/30/2025

Adam D’Augelli is a Partner at True Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2005. With a foundational mission to empower entrepreneurs at the initial stages of company creation, True has partnered with over 1,050 Founders across more than 500 companies. The firm’s 12 funds have been a part of seven IPOs and over 60 acquisitions.

Adam joined True as an analyst in 2010, immediately after graduating magna cm laude from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s degree in finance. Adam currently serves on the NVCA’s Board of Directors. Adam has led True’s investments in Splice, Pendulum Therapeutics, Deep Genomics, Kettle, Radiant Graph, Dinamo Bio, The Nuclear Company, SuppCo, Howie, and others currently in stealth. His notable past investments include HashiCorp (NASDAQ: HCP), TripleLift (acquired by Vista Equity), Ring (acquired by Amazon), Runscope (acquired by CA Technologies), and Moleculo (acquired by Illumina).

Topics:
- The State of the Seed Market 2025: Why this is the best—and hardest—time to be a seed investor

- Abundance vs. Scarcity: How compounding innovation across AI, biotech, and blockchain is reshaping early-stage opportunity

- Building for the Next 30 Years: Why the future of venture belongs to investors with clear differentiation and conviction

10/29/2025

Soham Mazumdar is a serial entrepreneur and technology leader, currently the Co-Founder and CEO of WisdomAI, an AI-powered data insights platform that helps enterprises query their data using natural language. Previously, he co-founded Rubrik, where he served as Chief Architect and helped scale the company to IPO. Soham also co-founded Tagtile (acquired by Facebook), led core search infrastructure at Google—earning the prestigious Founders’ Award—and held engineering roles at Facebook. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and UIUC, he was named an IITK Distinguished Alumnus and a Silicon Valley 40 Under 40 honoree. Throughout his career, Soham has been at the forefront of cloud, security, and AI innovation.

Topics:
- AI’s Role in Enterprise Intelligence
- From Zero to IPO
- The Shift from BI to AI-Assisted Insight

10/28/2025

Jamie Davidson is the Co-founder at Omni. Omni is a business intelligence and embedded analytics platform that empowers everyone—regardless of technical ability—to easily analyze data using SQL, spreadsheets, AI, or point-and-click interfaces. Prior to that he was the VP of product at Looker. He was also a Partner at Repoint Ventures. Before that he was the founder of PrimaTable which was acquired by HotelTonight.

Topics:
- Reinventing Business Intelligence
- Building See-Through Analytics Platforms
- Scaling Teams, Products, and Cultures

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