Maggie Stamets

In this week’s episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen talks with Precursor Ventures' Charles Hudson about the headwinds facing early-stage founders today and the most common mistakes founders should avoid in order to get funded. 

It is the path of least resistance for a growth-stage company to hire from the familiar Silicon Valley pipelines but if a founder wants a diverse team, that value has to be put into practice from the very first hire. 

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos talks with Bill Gurley, longtime venture capitalist, former Benchmark partner, and author of the new book “Runnin’ Down a Dream.” After stepping back from day-to-day investing, Gurley has turned his focus to a different question: how people build meaningful, enduring careers — and what they might do differently […]

One of the most consequential decisions early-stage founders have to make is who they will bring on as their founding team. That’s why this season on Build Mode, we’re diving into what it takes to build a world-class founding team. 

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos talks with Stacy Brown-Philpot, founder and managing partner of Cherryrock Capital. After a decade at Google and leading TaskRabbit through its acquisition by IKEA, Brown-Philpot is now building a venture firm focused on Series A and Series B software companies led by underinvested founders — targeting what she […]

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos talks with Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, the company behind USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin. With 536 million users globally, Tether has quietly become one of crypto’s most powerful players — and now it’s evolving far beyond stablecoins. Ardoino is transforming Tether into what he calls “the stable […]

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos speaks with Science Corp. founder Max Hodak to discuss how brain-computer interfaces are arriving faster than anyone realizes. The Neuralink co-founder and former president shares how his company recently achieved what may be the biggest breakthrough in vision restoration in decades, enabling 80% of blind patients to read […]

In this episode, TechCrunch’s editor-in-chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove sit down with Winston Weinberg, co-founder and CEO of Harvey, the legal AI startup that’s quietly become one of the most talked-about companies in Silicon Valley. Winston shares the origin story of how a first-year associate at legal giant O’Melveny used GPT-3 for Dungeons […]

This week on StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos speaks with Kara Nortman, co-founder of Monarch Collective, the first fund dedicated exclusively to women’s sports. Nortman launched this $250 million fund in 2023, right before women’s sports exploded into the mainstream. But she didn’t just get lucky: She helped create the market by co-founding Angel […]

Nothing stepped away from sensors in favor of a simple button to trigger your AI assistant or ChatGPT, if you have the Nothing X app, and a volume roller that can also be pressed to play, pause, and turn on and off noise canceling.

This week on StrictlyVC Download, we’re bringing you to our recent event in Menlo Park. TechCrunch’s editor in chief, Connie Loizos, was joined by Katie Haun, founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, who shared an inside look at her contrarian “harpoon strategy” that targeted distressed crypto assets during the depths of crypto winter. They explored everything from […]

After more than two decades, Skype is shutting down. The once-monolithic video calling platform wasn’t able to keep pace with competitors like Zoom and FaceTime, so its parent company, Microsoft, is rolling the product into Microsoft Teams. In this video, we’re sending off the iconic platform and some other legendary apps.

In this episode of StrictlyVC Download, hosts TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove are joined by Ali Partovi, co-founder and CEO of Neo. They talk about Neo’s evolution from a scholar program that provides grants to talented technical young people to a venture fund that recently raised $320 million in committed […]

In an ongoing antitrust case, the Federal Trade Commission says that Meta has a monopoly on “personal social networking services” and should have to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. Throughout the proceedings, there have been several internal messages and plans that have come to light. In one, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered wiping all Facebook […]

OpenAI is reportedly building its own X-like social network. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, The Verge reports. A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already use to help train […]

This AI startup raised $5.3 million to help people “cheat on everything.” But in the age of AI, how do you define cheating? Columbia University recently suspended student Roy Lee for building a tool to help people cheat on engineering interviews. He’s been making waves on X after posting a long thread detailing the saga and […]

In this week’s episode of StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove are joined by entrepreneur, futurist, and bestselling author Peter Diamandis. He’s the founder of XPRIZE Foundation and the co-founder of Singularity University. In this conversation, he lays out his vision for how tech will transform our lives and […]

This week on StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove are joined by Jonah Peretti, who has been working in digital media for the past two decades as the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed — a brand that has seen a ton of evolution. Last month, Jonah announced the next […]

This week on StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove are joined by Michael Kim, the longtime VC and founder of Cendana Capital, a fund of funds that’s now managing $2.6 billion in assets, almost all of them spread across seed and pre-seed funds, including some of the most successful […]

In this episode of StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos is joined by Aileen Lee, the founder of Cowboy Ventures. Lee coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article all the way back in late 2013. In this conversation, they discuss the ongoing liquidity crisis in the startup ecosystem, the secondary market’s evolution, […]