Builder, Inventor, or Operator? The 0-1-2 Framework for Evaluating Founders| Andre Charoo (MapleVC)

Andre Charoo is Founding Partner of Maple VC, a first-check venture firm, and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Before venture, he was employee number 25 at Uber and an early employee at Hired.com, and built or joined four seed-stage startups between 2009 and 2016.Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Andre to unpack the framework he's developed for evaluating founders: builders, inventors, and operators, and how he uses it to make sense of teams when there's little else to underwrite at the earliest stages. Andre traces the framework back to studying Uber's early team and the founders of Clay, walking through how he identifies which archetype he's actually talking to, why the most enduring companies almost always attract all three types eventually, and why founders with illegible, non-obvious backgrounds are often the ones VCs miss. He shares his personal test for conviction, deliberately seeking out smart people who disagree with a founder's vision, and breaks down real examples from his portfolio, including Clay, Stadium Live, and Inference.ai. The conversation closes with Andre's reflections on bringing new partners Jane Lee and John Edgar into Maple, the firm's newly codified investment philosophy, and the personal and professional moments where he felt truly seen at a time he least expected it.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

Tanay Kothari is co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice AI company he started with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021, building toward a Jarvis-like assistant that lets people interact with computers through natural speech instead of keyboards and screens. His younger brother, Jaisal Kothari, is co-founder and CEO of Gallium and was Wispr's first software engineer, joining as a Stanford freshman to help build the company's earliest voice dictation technology.Anne Dwane sits down with Tanay and Jaisal at a Village Global event to trace Tanay's path from building and shipping nearly 50 apps in secret as a teenager, including one that hit 2.5 million users before Google sent him a cease and desist, to founding Wispr as a hardware company and pivoting entirely to software after watching users ignore the physical device in favor of the app alone. Tanay breaks down Wispr's "zero edit rate" metric, a stricter and more user-centered standard than the industry's typical word error rate, walks through the viral Porsche-giveaway marketing stunt that pulled in tens of millions of views, and explains why he personally sat in on the company's first 500 onboarding calls. The conversation also covers how Wispr thinks about competing with frontier AI labs entering voice, why the company stacks multiple layers of defensibility instead of relying on one moat, and Tanay's approach to keeping teams small and communication overhead low as the company scales. Jaisal opens the conversation with the story of growing up alongside Tanay's secretive late-night coding sessions and how that early exposure shaped his own path into tech.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

Jade Q. Wang is an artist, investor, scientist, and founder. A Stanford grad with a PhD in neuroscience, she retired roughly a year ago from a career in tech to pursue art and angel investing full time.Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Jade to trace her path from a childhood spent training to be a concert pianist in Shanghai, through a hard pivot into computer science and neuroscience, to her current work building interactive, AI-native poetry that treats Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as collaborators rather than tools. Jade draws a striking parallel between the invention of photography and the current moment in AI, arguing that just as photography didn't destroy art but unlocked entirely new movements like Impressionism, AI may do the same for literature and poetry. She walks through her multi-phase art project, from a poetry collection structured like a codebase to a planned museum installation involving AI mirrors that roast and compliment visitors and a "computerized confessional," and explains why different AI models have developed distinct, consistent taste in which of her poems they find most powerful. The conversation also gets into her approach to angel investing and what she actually looks for in founders, plus the surreal story of discovering she'd become the unwitting subject of a viral AI-generated fan fiction universe.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

Michael Hochberg is a semiconductor entrepreneur, Caltech-trained physicist, and network investor with Village Global. He's founder and president of Periplous LLC, and has built and scaled hardware and deep tech companies through multiple market cycles, giving him a front-row seat to both the chip industry and the venture capital that funds it.Max Kilberg, Investment Partner at Village Global, sits down with Michael to unpack the state of venture right now, starting with the widening split between mega funds chasing billion-dollar checks and early-stage investors still doing artisanal, relationship-driven deal-making. They get into why Michael believes traditional moats around data and customer lock-in are eroding while speed and talent become the real differentiators, why patents rarely matter for early-stage founders, and the "VCs are stupid, scared, and reductive" framework Michael uses to coach founders on fundraising. The conversation turns to AI's economic impact, including the CapEx buildout already locked in for the next several years, the emerging question of legal liability for autonomous systems and embodied robotics, and a surprisingly detailed debate on whether commercial SaaS survives an era where founders can generate their own software from a prompt. They close on where Village is finding opportunity in Europe and what it actually takes to win a competitive allocation of a VC's limited checks per year.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

Aizada Marat is co-founder and CEO of Alma, an immigration law firm that combines the expertise of seasoned attorneys with AI to streamline the immigration process for individuals and businesses. Alma has achieved a 98% approval rate on its cases and can prosecute in half the time of a traditional firm.Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Aizada to trace her journey from a small village in Kyrgyzstan to founding one of the fastest-growing legal tech companies in the Bay Area. They cover her path to the US through the Future Leaders Exchange Program, her own frustrating experience with a mishandled immigration case that left her unable to work for over a year, and how that pain point led her from Cooley to McKinsey and eventually to starting Alma. Aizada walks through the company's early pivot from selling immigration software to law firms to becoming a law firm itself, why she believes large language models can already outperform the outsourced manual labor traditional firms rely on, and where she draws the line on what should and shouldn't be automated in legal work. The conversation also gets personal: what it's like being married to fellow founder and Village Global portfolio founder Chyngyz, the advice from him she took (and the one piece she didn't), the immigrant founders and operators who inspire her, and her long-term ambition to eventually return to Kyrgyzstan and run for president.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

JakeCooper is co-founder and CEO of Grow Therapy, a technology platform that helps mental health providers launch and scale independent, insurance-accepted practices. Since starting the company in the middle of COVID, Jake and his co-founders have scaled Grow Therapy to around a million patient visits a month across 26,000 providers, surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue while operating profitably since year two.Ben Casnocha sits down with Jake to trace Grow Therapy's founding story, from the friction he and his co-founders saw across patients, providers, and payers to the systems-level model that let them scale where others couldn't. They get into how Jake and his co-founders have divided responsibilities and built trust as the company has grown past 600 employees, his contrarian read on hiring and what most CEOs get wrong about spotting high-agency talent, and the deeply personal reason the mission matters to him. The conversation turns to AI, including where Grow Therapy is finding real leverage in matching and provider coaching tools, and Jake's frank take on whether human therapists still have a role as more people turn to LLMs for support between sessions. He also opens up about why he's deliberately stayed out of the public eye, and why that's starting to change.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

Paul Eremenko is co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI, the company building Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer that works alongside human engineering teams. Jeff Immelt is a Venture Partner at NEA and former Chairman and CEO of GE, and he's joining P-1 AI's board after leading the firm's investment in the company's $50 million Series A.Anne Dwane sits down with Paul and Jeff to unpack why engineering the physical world has lagged behind the AI boom in software, and how P-1 is closing that gap. Paul traces the idea back to his time at DARPA working on the F-35 program, where he saw firsthand how complexity, not procurement, was driving runaway costs, and explains how that thinking led to Archie's "semi-synthetic" training data approach for physical engineering domains. They dig into how Archie is built to sell as labor rather than software, why P-1 positions Archie as one AI engineer per team rather than a swarm, and how customer IP and data are ring-fenced under the company's deployment models. Jeff brings the perspective of a CEO who has advised dozens of companies on AI adoption, laying out his four-part framework for organizational readiness and the pitfalls of getting stuck in pilot purgatory. The conversation closes with a wide-ranging look at compute costs, hiring plans as P-1 scales into automotive and aerospace, and Paul's take on the technological singularity and what it means for how we build the physical world going forward.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

Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket, which he started in 2021 to help companies detect and defend against software supply chain attacks. A prolific open source maintainer whose packages are downloaded a billion times a month, Feross recently closed a Series C at a billion-dollar valuation, and Socket now protects nearly 30,000 organizations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Vercel.Anne Dwane sits down with Feross to unpack why the modern software supply chain has become such an attractive target for attackers, and what companies can actually do about it. Feross walks through real recent incidents, including the Axios and LiteLLM compromises that exposed major AI labs, breaking down how attackers used a months-long social engineering play against a single maintainer to hijack a library with 100 million weekly downloads. They get into why coding agents pull in 50% more open source code than human developers and the new risks that creates, why traditional vulnerability scanners miss most real threats, and what Socket Firewall does to protect the developer endpoint itself. The conversation also covers Feross's own path from open source maintainer to enterprise CEO, how Socket balances a free, developer-led product with enterprise sales, and how frontier AI models transformed Socket's ability to analyze code at scale. They close with practical guardrails any organization can put in place today, from lockfiles to minimum release age settings.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

Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto.Somrat Niyogi, General Partner at Recall Capital and Village Global Network Investor, sits down with Jeff and Rohit to unpack how AI has rewired the finance function from the inside out. They trace the shift from spreadsheets and BI tools to Claude Code as the default daily workflow, including how board decks that once took two weeks and five people now come together as pull requests against an HTML file. The conversation moves through what finance skills and attributes still matter in an AI-native world, whether teams will shrink or simply cover more ground, and how roles like BI, investor relations, and data visualization are starting to merge. Jeff and Rohit also get into the practical mechanics of the shift: how Gusto scores AI fluency across the entire company, how they're budgeting for token spend the way they once budgeted for headcount, and where the real build-versus-buy tension is playing out across ERP, FP&A software, and internal tools. They close with predictions on what's dead, what's dying, and what the first hire at a finance team in 2026 should actually look like.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

Sherwood Callaway is the founder and CEO of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform, and a repeat YC founder. He previously worked as an early infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he built the systems that kept one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world running.Village Global Luminary LP Lindsay Pettingill sits down with Sherwood for a conversation that moves from his unconventional path into engineering to the contrarian bets behind Sazabi. They dig into why Sherwood believes logs alone can replace metrics and traces, why dashboards mostly serve anxiety rather than insight, and what a world of self-healing software could actually look like. Along the way, Sherwood reflects on the 40-page manifesto that became Sazabi's founding thesis, the angel investor strategy that brought over 100 founders and technical leaders onto his cap table, and the maximalist, Blade Runner-inspired brand built around a name pulled from a 1980s anime. The episode closes on a more personal note, touching on his orthopedic surgeon father's late-career turn toward vibe coding and his sister Hadley's stint at Sazabi as its first non-technical hire before business school.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