Episodi

  • Why Your Next Executive Assistant Will Be an AI — Deon Nicholas (Espa.ai)

    Why Your Next Executive Assistant Will Be an AI — Deon Nicholas (Espa.ai)
    May 7 2026

    Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor.

    Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. They cover what he learned scaling Forethought through the GPT-1 to GPT-4 era, why the Iron Man Jarvis vision is finally within reach for everyone (not just Silicon Valley), the three pillars of Espa, why the model labs have perverse incentives that leave the door open for a new app-layer winner, the surprising network effect that emerges when one Espa starts talking to another, and where personal productivity AI is heading over the next five to ten years.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    41 min
  • Recall Sessions: Most SaaS Companies Won't Survive This - Jake Saper (Emergence)

    Recall Sessions: Most SaaS Companies Won't Survive This - Jake Saper (Emergence)
    Apr 23 2026
    Jake Saper is General Partner at Emergence Capital, the firm that was the first institutional investor in Zoom and an early backer of Salesforce, Veeva, Bill.com, and Together.ai. Jake has been at Emergence for over a decade and has led investments in Assembled, Unify, and Ironclad.

    Jake has developed Emergence's thesis on AI-native services: why he believes this is the most important structural shift in enterprise software since the move to the cloud, why most SaaS companies built before AI won't survive it, and what founders have to build instead.

    Somrat Niyogi sits down with Jake to unpack his thesis, the moats disappearing and rising, the risk Jake calls Mirage Product Market Fit, the three metrics every AINS founder should track, and where the biggest opportunities are playing out.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    1 ora e 9 min
  • Recall Sessions: Building a $1.1B Category That Didn't Exist | Nick Mehta (Gainsight)

    Recall Sessions: Building a $1.1B Category That Didn't Exist | Nick Mehta (Gainsight)
    Apr 9 2026
    Nick Mehta is the former CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. Vista Equity Partners acquired Gainsight for $1.1 billion.

    Nick ran the company as CEO for 13 years before stepping into a board role last year. Nick has also co-authored four books on customer success, was named Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California, and currently sits on the boards of F5 and PubMatic. Before Gainsight, he was CEO of LiveOffice, which he grew to $25 million in revenue and sold to Symantec.

    Somrat Niyogi and Nick cover how a meetup with cheap wine and a cheese tray on a ping pong table became the seed of a category, why community mattered more than product in the beginning, what it was like selling software into a role that barely existed, the Box deal that involved a music video parody and memorizing the lobby Wi-Fi password, what happened when Salesforce announced they were the "customer success platform," how to think about category creation vs. joining an existing one, and why Nick got on stage at Pulse coming off pneumonia to talk about being lonely as a kid.

    In loving memory of Summer Devi Mehta (2008–2026). Support The Trevor Project in Summer's honor: https://give.thetrevorproject.org/fundraiser/6961929

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    42 min
  • Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi)

    Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi)
    Apr 3 2026
    Dara Ladjevardian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphi, a platform that lets you create a digital version of your mind — an interactive, always-on presence that can share your knowledge, coach others, and represent you at scale.

    Delphi has raised $16 million in a Series A led by Sequoia, with earlier backing from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and others. Before Delphi, Dara founded Friday, a text-based commerce tool he built and sold within a year. He previously worked as a forward-deployed engineer at C3 AI and as a product engineer at OpenStore.

    Sumeet Singh sits down with Dara to talk about the moment he knew he had to build Delphi, which started with trying to recreate his grandfather's mind using GPT-3. They cover why he chose LLMs over crypto and American dynamism, what it was like selling his first startup and joining OpenStore to find a mentor and co-founder, why human connection still matters when information is commoditized, how Delphi solved the trust problem that makes or breaks the entire platform, the micro-pivots that shaped the company, and what world Dara is trying to build.

    If you have any questions about Delphi, you can talk to Dara's digital mind here: delphi.ai/dara

    Delphi: https://delphi.ai

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    37 min
  • Recall Sessions: AI-Native CRMs and What It Takes to Replace Salesforce | Doug Camplejohn & Patrick Thompson

    Recall Sessions: AI-Native CRMs and What It Takes to Replace Salesforce | Doug Camplejohn & Patrick Thompson
    Mar 26 2026
    Doug Camplejohn is the Founder & CEO of Coffee, an AI-first CRM. Doug co-founded Fliptop (acquired by LinkedIn), led Sales Navigator at LinkedIn as VP of Product, then ran Sales Cloud at Salesforce as EVP and GM. He's also had exits with Mi5 Networks (acquired by Symantec) and MyPlay (acquired by Bertelsmann).

    Patrick Thompson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Clarify, an AI-native CRM built for modern go-to-market teams. Clarify has raised $22.5 million. Before Clarify, Patrick co-founded Iteratively, a customer data platform acquired by Amplitude in 2021, where he served as Director of Product and GM for Amplitude CDP. Earlier in his career, he led design for Jira Software at Atlassian.

    Two founders building competing AI-native CRMs sit down together for the first time. They talk with Somrat Niyogi about why this is the moment for CRM disruption, why you can't just slap an LLM on a legacy database, what it actually takes to build table stakes in CRM, why the term "CRM" has always been a misnomer, how AI changes the business model from per-seat to work-output pricing, what Salesforce and HubSpot are doing behind the scenes, and what they'd tell founders considering the category.

    Clarify: https://clarify.ai
    Coffee: https://coffee.ai

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    55 min
  • Worldbuilders: Why Most AI Startups Won't Survive | The Model Economy by Sumeet Singh

    Worldbuilders: Why Most AI Startups Won't Survive | The Model Economy by Sumeet Singh
    Mar 18 2026
    Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild, lays out his investing thesis for the AI era: The Model Economy.

    His argument is that most AI startups being built today are fighting a losing battle against the scaling laws. The models themselves will swallow the application layer. So where does durable value actually go?

    Sumeet walks through the Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton's foundational insight on why brute-force scale always beats domain-specific cleverness), what the mobile era teaches us about what's coming, and the two types of companies he believes actually win: infrastructure that keeps models alive and growing, and post-skeuomorphic applications that build workflows only possible with AI.

    This is the second episode of Worldbuilders — a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Sumeet Singh, exploring the people and ideas shaping what comes next.

    Watch the first episode with Evan Conrad (SF Compute): https://youtu.be/pteKdEGYRjU

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    13 min
  • Worldbuilders: The Largest Infrastructure Project in History with Evan Conrad (SF Compute)

    Worldbuilders: The Largest Infrastructure Project in History with Evan Conrad (SF Compute)
    Mar 13 2026
    This is the first episode of Worldbuilders, a new series on the Village Global Podcast guest-hosted by Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild.

    Sumeet sits down with Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of the San Francisco Compute Company, to talk about the real economics of GPU compute, how SF Compute went from an accidental GPU cloud to building supercomputers, where the actual AI bubble is, and why the future of supercomputing should be calm.

    Topics covered include: the origin story of SF Compute, why GPU contracts require multi-year commitments, the difference between GPU and CPU economics, what "offtake" means and why it matters, the Marriott model for supercomputing, and how SF Compute is working to reduce the risk of an AI bubble.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    43 min
  • Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah

    Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah
    Mar 11 2026
    Bhavin Shah spent years building Moveworks into the agentic AI platform behind employee support at Toyota, Siemens, Unilever, and hundreds more. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion.

    In this episode of Recall Sessions, Somrat Niyogi goes back to the beginning. How did four co-founders find each other? Why did Bhavin and his team run 34 CIO conversations to validate the idea before their first investor wrote a check? How did they close their first customer with nothing but a vision demo — and get contractor badges to work out of the customer's office? And what made them finally say yes to an acquisition after turning down offers for years?

    Bhavin covers the full arc: the founding team, the first customers, how he chose investors, what ChatGPT changed overnight, and what he's building now inside ServiceNow.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    1 ora