Fund/Build/Scale
Fund/Build/Scale
Walter Thompson
Episode 1 | Building Trust with Your Inception Investor with guest Navin Chaddha (Managing Partner, Mayfield)
46 minutes Posted Feb 7, 2024 at 5:21 am.
: AI investing and entrepreneurship
: fundraising, enterprise opportunities and success metrics
the biggest challenges facing AI investors
: what strong founder teams look like
: leveraging inception-stage investors
: why idea-stage founders shouldn't worry about revenue
: pitfalls/opportunities at the enterprise level
: the "impedance mismatch" between startups + enterprise customers
: societal change + responsible innovation
: how he educates himself about emerging tech
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46:46
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Show notes
In the first episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha spoke about the need for founders to identify investors they can trust, how to pitch Mayfield's AI Start seed fund, and why he’s specifically looking for inception-stage entrepreneurs who have “half-baked” ideas.
Our conversation covered a lot of ground: Navin described the elements of a fundable idea, shared what excites (and unnerves) him about AI investing, and offered a framework for founder teams seeking solutions to orthogonal problems that create value for customers and align with market trends.
Here’s an episode rundown:
Coming up in Episode 2:
I spoke with Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, about digging a moat, customer discovery, and product-led growth.
Please subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on your favorite platform, and if you liked this episode, I hope you’ll give me a great rating. 
For now, you can find the Fund/Build/Scale newsletter on Substack. The podcast theme was written and performed by Michael Tritter and Carlos Chairez. Michael also edited the podcast and provided additional music, and I’m deeply grateful.
Thanks for listening!
 
Links:
Fund/Build/Scale on Substack: https://fundbuildscale.substack.com
Mayfield: https://www.mayfield.com
Navin Chaddha on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinchaddha/
Securiti: https://securiti.ai/
Cognitive plumbing: https://www.mayfield.com/cognitive-plumbing/
Impedance matching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_matching
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenhsunhuang/
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyanadella/
Thomas Kurian, CEO Google Cloud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kurian-469b6219/
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com 
OpenAI: https://openai.com/
"Trough of disillusionment,” Gartner hype cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
SambaNova Systems: https://sambanova.ai/
Podcast theme: "Artificio," by Michael Tritter and Carlos Chairez: https://laroda.bandcamp.com/track/artificio
Fund/Build/Scale is sponsored by Mayfield Fund and Securiti.