Turner Novak

This startup used a secret pizza strategy to grow from zero to $1B ARR outside of Silicon Valley: "Anytime a company had a security breach, we'd send them pizza. The CISO is running around. Their...

I asked Dug Song and Jon Oberheide how they remained so customer focused while growing Duo Security to $1B ARR: "Every employee was a radical advocate of the customer. We had a whole system for an...

One of my biggest takeaways from talking to Dug Song and Jon Oberheide about building Duo Security: Early on, market size doesn't matter. When they started the company, the TAM was only $2 billio...

🎧🍌 New podcast out today with Dug Song and Jon Oberheide, Co-founders of Duo Security. Duo might be one of the most underrated software stories of all-time. Starting in 2010, they burned only $14 ...

Last year, Standard Capital raised a $425m fund to bring YC's model to Series A. I asked Jacqueline Cheong what it's been like working with them: "They don't take a board seat. Instead, they fund...

I asked Jacqueline Cheong at Artie what it's like raising a Series A from Standard Capital: "The entire process took less than two weeks. "It starts with an online application. Similar to YC, but...

Buying software is a lot like buying a wedding cake. "When you buy a wedding cake, you're looking for a finished cake. But a lot of infrastructure providers only give you the ingredients. There's...

AI has a data problem: "Moving data feels like a deceptively simple thing. But you're working with heterogeneous systems. Postgres is built differently than Snowflake. There's different data type...

As software starts doing the work for us, every AI product will need live data: "Software is now making decisions on its own, automating workflows, and interacting with users. Companies are realiz...

🎧🍌 New podcast out today with Jacqueline Cheong at Artie Artie moves data across your systems in real-time. We talk why that’s so important + so hard in the age of AI (95% of streaming projects fa...

I asked AI investor Nathan Benaich if he thinks we’re in an AI bubble: “10 years ago, if you showed anyone in AI this magic box that gives you any answer you want, everyone would have told you tha...

This trick from Marcelo Lebre on how to get your team to automate is genius. "In the first year of Remote, we relied heavily on spreadsheets. And I was not going to build a company that was duct t...

🎧🍌 New podcast out with Marcelo Lebre, Co-founder of European unicorn Remote. We get into why payroll is such a hard problem, why most of the industry still runs on spreadsheets, the edge cases of...

I asked Kevin Hartz if we're in an AI bubble: "It's the mother of all bubbles. It will be a bubble that makes every other bubble in history look like a blip. I always see capitalism as a pendulum...

I asked Eventbrite Co-founder Kevin Hartz on the challenge of building a startup with a "hidden TAM": "I hated this part. Coming from fintech, you could just look up public data and get a TAM that...

TIL Palantir was started off early insights from PayPal "The day they sold PayPal to eBay, I had lunch with Peter Thiel. And he told me he was going to start a new company based on PayPal's fraud ...

I asked Kevin Hartz why he invested 100% of his first startups exit proceeds in PayPal's Seed round: "It's all about the team. I had known Peter Thiel since we were students at Stanford. He was an...

🎧🍌 New podcast with Kevin Hartz, Co-founder of A*, Eventbrite, Xoom, A PayPal Service, and Sauron Kevin has been building and investing in technology companies for 30 years. We talk about how the ...

I asked Nichole Wischoff how she went from growing up on food stamps in Arkansas to starting her own VC firm: 1) Get in the mix. Get in the culture. Start building your network. Show up to events,...

This startup fellowship has a 10% unicorn hit rate. "It's the best kept secret in Silicon Valley." I asked Zaid Rahman what makes the Thiel Fellowship so successful: "When it started, we were ju...