Gaurav Misra is the co-founder and CEO of Captions, the leading video AI company building the future of video creation. Captions has raised over $80M from leading investors Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Index and A16Z. We dig into:  Launching in the app store and the product taking off on its ownUnintentionally making their first $500K in revenueWhy raise venture capital vs. bootstrap given the early traction Not starting a company before working at a startupScaling to 10M+ global creators on the...

Nichole Wischoff is the founder and Managing Partner at Wischoff Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm with $80M in AUM. Nichole is the host of the First Money In Podcast. This episode is her first solo session focused on the latest in the tech world at the earliest stages:  - Whats hot at pre-seed and seed stage right now - Massive secondary sales replacing IPOs and the implications - Should CEOs of big companies be building their own personal brands online 

Maria Davidson is the co-founder and CEO of Kojo, a startup building a construction materials management platform for contractors and suppliers. Merge has raised over $85M from leading investors 8VC, Tiger Global and Battery Ventures. We dig into:  - VCs passing on their $4M seed because construction tech was unproven- How to acquire sub-contractors when they can't be found online and during Covid- What most construction tech startups get wrong about the market opportunity- Raising growth...

Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, a startup that helps B2B companies build customer-facing integrations. Merge has raised over $75M from leading investors like NEA, Addition and Accel. We dig into:  - VCs passing on the seed round because $4.5M was "too large" - Why giving their seed investor a board seat was great for the company - The trouble with pitching non-technical investors a very technical product - AI and its impact and opportunity for Merge  Thank you to todays...

Leif Abraham is the co-founder and co-CEO of Public.com, an investing platform with a mission to make the public markets work for everyone. Public.com was founded in 2019, scaled to over 1M users in the less than 18 months post launch and has since raised over $300M from notable investors like Accel and Tiger Global.  In Today's episode you will hear from Leif about:  - Pitching almost 100 VCs for his first company before getting a single yes from Thrive Capital - What founders often get...