This week on Build Mode, we’re diving back into the archives for a special best-of episode all about venture capital. Host Isabelle Johannesen and producer Maggie Nye revisit conversations from past seasons to give founders a glimpse behind the VC curtain and a better understanding of what investors are really looking for.

From choosing the right investors to building a differentiated go-to-market strategy, these venture capitalists and founder-turned-investors share hard-earned lessons on fundraising, portfolio dynamics, investor-founder relationships, and what separates the companies that successfully raise their next round from those that don’t.

In this episode, you’ll hear from:
⁠Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst⁠
⁠Ross Fubini, managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital⁠ and Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker⁠
⁠Paul Irving, partner at GTMfund⁠
⁠Leah Solivan, founder of TaskRabbit and founder of Precedent VC⁠

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:19 Yuri Sagalov (General Catalyst): The three types of investors and who founders should avoid
03:29 Ross Fubini (XYZ VC) & Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker): What great investors actually bring to the table
08:36 Paul Irving (GTMfund): The go-to-market signals investors look for
12:30 Leah Solivan (TaskRabbit / Precedent VC): Understanding the competition inside your investors’ portfolios
14:30 Outro

Subscribe to Build Mode on⁠ ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠,⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠⁠, or⁠ ⁠wherever you like to listen⁠⁠. And watch the full videos on⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠⁠. New episodes of⁠ ⁠Build Mode⁠⁠ drop every Thursday. Hosted by Isabelle Johannessen. Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development led by Morgan Little. Special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.

Go back in time with former CNET hosts Ryan Seacrest, Desmond Crisis and Richard Hart as they investigate video phones and video conferencing technology in 1995, including CU-SeeMe, Intel’s ProShare and AT&T’s Vistium Video Conferencing system.

Read more about old school tech on CNET.com
How to Go Analog in 2026

0:00 Introduction & Philips P100 Screen Phone
01:12 The Rise of Video Telephones
01:39 The 1956 Picture-Phone Prototype
02:20 Desktop Video Conferencing Emerges
04:56 Document Sharing with Intel ProShare
06:04 Comparing Video Conferencing Costs & Systems
07:01 The Importance of Frame Rate
07:21 Early Internet Video with CU-SeeMe

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#90s #nostalgia #nostalgia #ryanseacrest #videoconferencing #intel #internet #internetculture

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.

This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she’s all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for “magic moments” in the consumer business.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year’s AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:51 Tiffany Luck’s path from Lot18 to Amazon to VC

3:45 Magic moments: Waymo, healthcare, and the gap in personal agents

7:36 Privacy, security, and trusting AI with your life

10:39 IPO outlook: Anthropic vs. OpenAI on public markets

13:58 Compute, infrastructure, and where the value sits

15:41 What’s the ROI on tokenmaxxing?

27:07 Forward deployed engineers as a ‘Trojan horse’

32:49 Outro