Knuckle Up with Nakul

How Railway says no to 90% of ideas and keeps winning | Jake Cooper (Founder, CEO)

Jake Cooper never set out to start a company. After leaving Uber in 2020, he put together a box of databases for his own side projects, kept coming back to it, and eventu

How Juicebox is building for the AI talent war | David Paffenholz (CEO)

David Paffenholz says Juicebox has not lost a single employee in two years, at a company that has grown from three people to ninety. He credits it to a formula: independe

$7B AI founder: "AI is not capable of replacing you right now"

In 2024, OpenAI asked its own investors to avoid funding five companies it saw as competitive threats: Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence

Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode"

Guillermo Rauch’s kindergarten teachers had a question for his parents: “What do you guys give this kid? He’s a freaking ball of energy.” Today Guillermo is at the gym ev

How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity

Will Bryk was working as one of the first engineers at Cresta, writing a book about the history of civilization on the side, when the research started to feel absurd. “Go

0 → $1b in a year: The remarkable story of Handshake's refounding

At a Christmas party in December 2024, Garrett Lord met a researcher who told him about the challenges with model training. This researcher was working at a frontier AI l

The new marketing playbook: “Marketing Engineers” and agents as the audience

James Cadwallader and his co-founder Dylan Babbs were working six days a week in an office before they had a company, or even an idea. James would drag Dylan into their c

Building a $5b company without 996

Most founders get more stressed as the company gets bigger. Immad Akhund has spent years engineering the opposite. “I’ve tried to make it so that the pressure kind of goe

Startup lessons Silicon Valley won’t teach you | Cameron McCord (Co-founder of Nominal)

Cameron McCord spent 484 days underwater. As a submarine officer in the US Navy, he learned to run a reactor in a space where the crew sees you 24/7, even brushing your t

Business used to be go karting. Now it's Formula 1.

Akshay Kothari has spent most of his time at Notion trying to put himself out of a job. His move, repeated for years, is to run at whatever the company's biggest unsolved

Behind the curtain of a $4.5b AI-native powerhouse

Ashwin Sreenivas spent his childhood in India waking up at 5am and studying until 8:30 at night. History, geography, physics, chemistry, math. Every day, from 4th grade t

$50M ARR With 3 sales reps, no CRO, and one PM | Michael Grinich (CEO, WorkOS)

Michael Grinich is a design-obsessed engineer who once spent days in a recording studio with an electronic musician crafting the perfect email notification sound. He now

Nobody knows anything, product market fit is dead, and there's only one moat | Bipul Sinha

Bipul Sinha grew up in dire circumstances in India, made his way to IIT, and immigrated to the US in search of the American dream. By 40 he had become a successful VC at

Battle-tested playbooks for recuriting, reading the market, and adapting to AI

Qasar Younis grew up on a farm in Pakistan, moved to Detroit as a kid, and worked at General Motors before landing at Google and becoming COO of Y Combinator. He then fou

Frank Slootman on what most CEOs get wrong

Frank Slootman is the only CEO in history to take three enterprise companies public: Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. At their peak, the companies he led were wort