Matt Burns spoke with CEO and co-founder of Tonkean, Sagi Eliyahu, and Foundation Capital partner, Joanne Chen all about addressing blind spots in leadership and the best ways for founders to work with their board of directors. Tonkean started in 2015 as a no-code development platform, and added Joanne to its board of directors when it raised its seed round in 2019.

Matt Burns went live with CFO-turned-CEO Christina Ross and her Mayfield Fund partner, Rajeev Batra, to talk about the story behind Ross's company, Cube, and how it meets its customers where they’re at. Hear how this novel approach was developed, and attracted investments from major firms.

This week, Matt Burns is joined by Sameer Shariff, CEO and co-founder of Cambly, and Sarah Tavel, a long-time investor at Benchmark and previously Graylock to talk all about raising first dollars.

The TechCrunch Live Podcast is back for season 2 on February 6! Matt Burns sits down with experienced entrepreneurs and investors -- including market leaders from Benchmark, Sequoia, Index and Kleiner Perkins -- to help founders build better venture-backed businesses.

If you listen to Ursheet Parikh, partner at Mayfield, Trevor Martin has a unique trait: He's always the best listener in the room. And as the leader of a leading CRISPR startup, it's a critical ability. Mammoth Biosciences employs leading bioengineers including Jennifer Doudna, the Noble prize winning scientist who co-developed CRISPR. Doudna co-founded Mammoth Biosciences with Martin, Lucas Harrington, and Janice Chan. In this TechCrunch Live event you'll hear how Martin attracted the best partners to form Mammoth Biosciences including Parikh, who wrote an early funding check. Step one? It starts with the vision and mission.

So you've made an API. It connects one thing to another, and it works well. How do you turn that into a business? On this week's TechCrunch Live, I host the perfect pairing of guests to talk about this. Stephany Kirkpatrick co-founded and runs Orum and has raised $82m for the company, which sells the Momentum API Orum calls it "A simple, smart payments API." It enables customers and businesses access to real-time payment rails without requiring a bank integration. This is a hugely impressive feat – but we're not here to talk about the API itself but how you get investors to fund an API. With Stephanie, we have Matt Sueoka from AMEX Ventures – the VC arm of American Express. They participated in Orum's Series A. And I think this makes for an interesting setup. AMEX Ventures is a corporate venture capital firm, and they tend to have different goals and operational input than a traditional VC fund. And because of that, you, as a startup founder, should have different approaches and expectations. We'll talk about it. But first, let's talk about TechCrunch Disrupt. The show is coming up in October, and tickets are still available. It's live and in person in San Francisco's Moscone Center. We have five stages of content with huge newsmakers on the Disrupt stage, more content like TechCrunch Live on the TC + stage, breakouts sessions, Q&A events, and Startup Battlefield, which is huge this year. Anyway, I hope you can make it. If anything, come to the event and watch me mess up live and in person. I'm hosting Startup Battlefield, which means there are so many names I'll going to miss pronounce.

TechCrunch Live took a virtual trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota for this week's event. And it was a great trip! This event is extra long, and includes conversations with some of the best founders and investors from the region. Following the panels and interviews, three Minneapolis startups competed for free tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt.

This TechCrunch Live is all about raising a Series A. Jenny Lefcourt from Freestyle Partners and Guillaume de Zwirek CEO and co-founder of WELL Health talk on the specific steps founders should follow. We start the event talking about fundraising WELL Health’s seed round, and hear the lessons Guillaume de Zwirek learned along the way. As you’ll hear from Lefourt and de Zwirek, there are notable differences between raising a seed round and a Series A round. Investors look at different aspects of the company, and the founder must prepare for the fundraising differently. Rather than selling a story, they’re selling a company. This is a serious topic for Jenny Lefcourt. To help even more founders, she’s prepared an extensive blog post to go along with her TechCrunch Live appearance that goes even deeper into raising a Series A. Read that post here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/31/how-to-fundraise-a-series-a/

Benchling's success didn't come overnight. Some ten years after its founding, the company is worth more than $6 billion, and the founder sees the company going public in the future. The company's future looks like its past: talking to customers and building for power users. Benchling's CEO and co-founder, Sajith Wickramasekara, recently spoke at a TechCrunch Live event along with one of its early investors, Miles Grimshaw, general partner at Benchmark. Together, the two explained Benchling's early strategy that tapped a small entry market, which eventually led to widespread adoption. As Wickramasekara explained, early funding was hard to secure. It was 2012, and Benchling sat alone between SaaS companies and biotech. "Every software investor thought what we were doing was small and unimportant," Wickramasekara said, adding later, "and then we went to science investors, and every science investor understood the challenges of R&D, but they didn't understand software; they invested in drugs."

No one likes compliance training, but Ethena aims to improve the experience for everyone involved. Join Ethena’s CEO and co-founder, Roxanne Petraeus, and Homebrew’s Hunter Walk on this TechCrunch Live event to hear the strategies used to tackle and grow in underserved market segments. As you'll hear in the event, Roxanne Petraeus founded Ethena after the realization that compliance training hasn't evolved to meet the modern workplace. Instead of forcing employees to watch hour-long videos, Petraeus's company presents employees with bite-sized, quick takes that when completed in series, achieves the same compliance goal. During the early days of the company, Petraeus turned to Hunter Walk at Homebrew for venture capital fundraising. He somewhat turned her down, he said during this TechCrunch Live event, though still participated in the company's seed round -- just at a much smaller size. Why? Petraeus pitched Ethena's business rather than her vision for the company. This TechCrunch Live event is focused on the need to sell the company's vision, rather than just its business. Hunter Walk and Roxanne Petraeus walk through the steps to develop the company's vision and later lead fundraising efforts using this process. TechCrunch Live records weekly at 12:00 PT/3:00 ET. Visit TechCrunch.com for more information.