Episodes

We’ve been communicating all our lives, so we’re probably pretty good at it, right? Wrong. Poor communication has arguably been responsible for more startup failures than any other single cause. In this episode, Yaniv is join...

Darker times in venture have seen the return of some old investment terms that haven’t had much of an airing lately: warrants, participating liquidation preferences, tranches, and more. These aren’t always bad, but if you’re ...

Communicating with your investors can seem like an annoying chore when you’re grinding away as a founder trying to make something out of nothing. But there are a lot of good reasons why you should keep your investors in the l...

Netflix popularised the term “talent density” to describe the key plank of its approach to building a high-performing organisation. But what is it? Why is it important? And of course, how can you ensure your startup possesses...

The days of easy startup money are over (for now, at least). With the change in capital raising climate has come a tsunami of stupid advice—especially for the many startups facing the challenge of raising at the Seed stage. T...

Chris braves his vocal issues to rejoin Yaniv in our latest Listener Q&A episode. Five great questions, lots of great discussion and actionable advice. * How do you break into startups when you only have corporate experience?...

If using your product becomes an ingrained habit for your users, you’re well on your way to massive success. But how do you make your product habit-forming? On this episode of The Startup Podcast Yaniv talks to Nir Eyal, the ...

Without a clear communication path back to leadership, creating autonomous teams doesn’t lead to an empowered organisation… it just leads to chaos. Escalation is that clear communication path. Far from being a minor practice,...

It is nearly impossible for a startup to succeed if its leaders do not have a clear sense of conviction about the direction they are going. But what is conviction? Why is it so critical? And what are the ingredients that are ...

Amir Shevat was in charge of Twitter's developer platform, until he was fired (along with his whole team) by Elon Musk. Twitter no longer has a developer platform. In this episode, Amir talks with Chris and Yaniv about Twitte...

The great disruptors of Silicon Valley are nearly all product led. In this episode, Chris and Yaniv dive deep on how a product-led organisation works, what is necessary for it to be successful, the various responsibilities of...

The great disruptors of Silicon Valley are nearly all product led. In this episode, Chris and Yaniv explain what a product-led organisation looks like, how it thinks, and why it is the right model for massive disruption at sc...

All season, Chris and Yaniv have talked about the mindset that is needed to succeed at venture-backed startups. For the final episode of Season 1, we tie it all together with an analogy: tournament poker. It is amazing how ma...

Mike Scott is a serial entrepreneur who found himself working at a large tech unicorn when they acquired his business. As newly-minted Head of Product Partnerships, Mike has questions! Luckily, Yaniv and Chris have (some) ans...

Alignment is about making sure that everybody in an organisation is working in such a way that their efforts build on each other, rather than cancelling out. If you’re not aligned, it doesn’t matter how hard you work—you’re n...

This bonus episode is a collaboration with Yan Kruger’s fantastic Growth Ripples podcast. Startups can survive a bad culture to achieve product-market fit, but once they reach the scale-up stage the effects of poor culture hi...

Most startups limp along with way too many priorities—and the lack of focus will kill them. Ruthless and deliberate prioritization and sequencing is *the* secret ingredient behind successful startups. In this episode, Chris a...

Emil Michael was Uber’s Chief Business Officer during the company’s glory years, and is one of the small handful of people who shaped the modern ridesharing economy. Emil is one of Silicon Valley’s most legendary business dev...

It’s no secret that the investment environment has changed quite drastically in the last six months, and for many founders out there it has become much more difficult to raise the needed funds. We have recently had the privil...

Yaniv is joined by Jessy Wu, Investor at Afterwork Ventures, to talk about how excessive niceness in a startup ecosystem can turn toxic, and what can be done to fight back against it. This episode is the perfect mix of though...

Time for another Listener Q&A episode! Chris and Yaniv give clear, actionable answers on the following questions: How to prioritise which features to build? How to think about PR for your startup? When is the right time to st...

The modern software ecosystem is made possible by developer platforms and APIs. Many of the most successful tech startups of recent years have succeeded by offering powerful tools to developers. So what exactly are devekoper ...

There comes a point in the journey of most startups when it all turns to sh*t. A crisis looms large and it is up to you, as a leader, to get things back on track. What do you do? How do you talk about it? How do you move quic...

You can’t disrupt the status quo by accepting it. Too many startup founders accept constraints on what they can do without seriously challenging them, and in doing so miss the opportunity to fundamentally rethink what is poss...