Episodes

  • Recall Sessions: Building a $1.1B Category That Didn't Exist | Nick Mehta (Gainsight)

    Recall Sessions: Building a $1.1B Category That Didn't Exist | Nick Mehta (Gainsight)
    Apr 9 2026
    Nick Mehta is the former CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. Vista Equity Partners acquired Gainsight for $1.1 billion.

    Nick ran the company as CEO for 13 years before stepping into a board role last year. Nick has also co-authored four books on customer success, was named Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California, and currently sits on the boards of F5 and PubMatic. Before Gainsight, he was CEO of LiveOffice, which he grew to $25 million in revenue and sold to Symantec.

    Somrat Niyogi and Nick cover how a meetup with cheap wine and a cheese tray on a ping pong table became the seed of a category, why community mattered more than product in the beginning, what it was like selling software into a role that barely existed, the Box deal that involved a music video parody and memorizing the lobby Wi-Fi password, what happened when Salesforce announced they were the "customer success platform," how to think about category creation vs. joining an existing one, and why Nick got on stage at Pulse coming off pneumonia to talk about being lonely as a kid.

    In loving memory of Summer Devi Mehta (2008–2026). Support The Trevor Project in Summer's honor: https://give.thetrevorproject.org/fundraiser/6961929

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    42 mins
  • Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi)

    Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi)
    Apr 3 2026
    Dara Ladjevardian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphi, a platform that lets you create a digital version of your mind — an interactive, always-on presence that can share your knowledge, coach others, and represent you at scale.

    Delphi has raised $16 million in a Series A led by Sequoia, with earlier backing from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and others. Before Delphi, Dara founded Friday, a text-based commerce tool he built and sold within a year. He previously worked as a forward-deployed engineer at C3 AI and as a product engineer at OpenStore.

    Sumeet Singh sits down with Dara to talk about the moment he knew he had to build Delphi, which started with trying to recreate his grandfather's mind using GPT-3. They cover why he chose LLMs over crypto and American dynamism, what it was like selling his first startup and joining OpenStore to find a mentor and co-founder, why human connection still matters when information is commoditized, how Delphi solved the trust problem that makes or breaks the entire platform, the micro-pivots that shaped the company, and what world Dara is trying to build.

    If you have any questions about Delphi, you can talk to Dara's digital mind here: delphi.ai/dara

    Delphi: https://delphi.ai

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    37 mins
  • Recall Sessions: AI-Native CRMs and What It Takes to Replace Salesforce | Doug Camplejohn & Patrick Thompson

    Recall Sessions: AI-Native CRMs and What It Takes to Replace Salesforce | Doug Camplejohn & Patrick Thompson
    Mar 26 2026
    Doug Camplejohn is the Founder & CEO of Coffee, an AI-first CRM. Doug co-founded Fliptop (acquired by LinkedIn), led Sales Navigator at LinkedIn as VP of Product, then ran Sales Cloud at Salesforce as EVP and GM. He's also had exits with Mi5 Networks (acquired by Symantec) and MyPlay (acquired by Bertelsmann).

    Patrick Thompson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Clarify, an AI-native CRM built for modern go-to-market teams. Clarify has raised $22.5 million. Before Clarify, Patrick co-founded Iteratively, a customer data platform acquired by Amplitude in 2021, where he served as Director of Product and GM for Amplitude CDP. Earlier in his career, he led design for Jira Software at Atlassian.

    Two founders building competing AI-native CRMs sit down together for the first time. They talk with Somrat Niyogi about why this is the moment for CRM disruption, why you can't just slap an LLM on a legacy database, what it actually takes to build table stakes in CRM, why the term "CRM" has always been a misnomer, how AI changes the business model from per-seat to work-output pricing, what Salesforce and HubSpot are doing behind the scenes, and what they'd tell founders considering the category.

    Clarify: https://clarify.ai
    Coffee: https://coffee.ai

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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    55 mins
  • Worldbuilders: Why Most AI Startups Won't Survive | The Model Economy by Sumeet Singh

    Worldbuilders: Why Most AI Startups Won't Survive | The Model Economy by Sumeet Singh
    Mar 18 2026
    Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild, lays out his investing thesis for the AI era: The Model Economy.

    His argument is that most AI startups being built today are fighting a losing battle against the scaling laws. The models themselves will swallow the application layer. So where does durable value actually go?

    Sumeet walks through the Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton's foundational insight on why brute-force scale always beats domain-specific cleverness), what the mobile era teaches us about what's coming, and the two types of companies he believes actually win: infrastructure that keeps models alive and growing, and post-skeuomorphic applications that build workflows only possible with AI.

    This is the second episode of Worldbuilders — a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Sumeet Singh, exploring the people and ideas shaping what comes next.

    Watch the first episode with Evan Conrad (SF Compute): https://youtu.be/pteKdEGYRjU

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    13 mins
  • Worldbuilders: The Largest Infrastructure Project in History with Evan Conrad (SF Compute)

    Worldbuilders: The Largest Infrastructure Project in History with Evan Conrad (SF Compute)
    Mar 13 2026
    This is the first episode of Worldbuilders, a new series on the Village Global Podcast guest-hosted by Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild.

    Sumeet sits down with Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of the San Francisco Compute Company, to talk about the real economics of GPU compute, how SF Compute went from an accidental GPU cloud to building supercomputers, where the actual AI bubble is, and why the future of supercomputing should be calm.

    Topics covered include: the origin story of SF Compute, why GPU contracts require multi-year commitments, the difference between GPU and CPU economics, what "offtake" means and why it matters, the Marriott model for supercomputing, and how SF Compute is working to reduce the risk of an AI bubble.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    43 mins
  • Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah

    Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah
    Mar 11 2026
    Bhavin Shah spent years building Moveworks into the agentic AI platform behind employee support at Toyota, Siemens, Unilever, and hundreds more. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion.

    In this episode of Recall Sessions, Somrat Niyogi goes back to the beginning. How did four co-founders find each other? Why did Bhavin and his team run 34 CIO conversations to validate the idea before their first investor wrote a check? How did they close their first customer with nothing but a vision demo — and get contractor badges to work out of the customer's office? And what made them finally say yes to an acquisition after turning down offers for years?

    Bhavin covers the full arc: the founding team, the first customers, how he chose investors, what ChatGPT changed overnight, and what he's building now inside ServiceNow.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    1 hr
  • Parth Patil on Coding Agents, Building Reid AI, and What It Takes to Operate at the Frontier

    Parth Patil on Coding Agents, Building Reid AI, and What It Takes to Operate at the Frontier
    Mar 5 2026
    Parth Patil built Reid Hoffman's AI digital twin from scratch, without engineering team or a software background. Before that, he was a data scientist at Clubhouse. When GPT-4 came out, he cashed out his 401k and spent four months talking to the model every day. He came out of that running Reid's AI work. He now manages a fleet of coding agents for most of his waking hours.

    In this conversation with Village Global VP Sam Kirschner, Parth talks through everything AI: how coding agents have evolved since AutoGPT and BabyAGI, why data analysts tend to make better vibe coders than engineers, how he thinks about multi-agent orchestration and TMUX, context engineering, and what he believes is coming next.

    Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Recall Sessions: Tomer London on Building Gusto from ZenPayroll to 400,000 Customers

    Recall Sessions: Tomer London on Building Gusto from ZenPayroll to 400,000 Customers
    Mar 3 2026
    Welcome to Recall Sessions - a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital. Each episode goes deep on how the world's most successful companies got their first customers.

    In this episode, Somrat sits down with Tomer London, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Gusto, to discuss how he and his co-founders built the leading payroll and HR platform for small businesses. Gusto serves over 400,000 businesses today and is valued at $9.5 billion - but it started as ZenPayroll, with a product scoped down to California-only, under five employees, salary only, and no benefits.

    Tomer talks about growing up in his dad's clothing store in Israel and building an inventory system at age 12, cold-calling businesses off Yelp before writing a single line of code, the Thai restaurant lunch that confirmed they were onto something, why charging $2 per employee per month was a mistake, and how building for small businesses is startup in hard mode - but worth it if the pain is big enough.

    Thanks for listening - if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

    Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

    Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup
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    38 mins