Mike Maples Jr. is a co-founding Partner at Floodgate.  He has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade and was also named a “Rising Star” by FORTUNE and profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was…
Thought Economics

 

In this interview I speak to Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, an AI powered answer engine that is transforming the world of search by answering questions conversationally. Perplexity extracts data from lakes including the web, images and video, before applying LLM’s to produce incredibly natural answers to questions, with…
Thought Economics

 

In this interview, I speak to Naré Vardanyan about her incredible entrepreneurship journey- growing up without electricity in Armenia, teaching herself 11 languages by candlelight, and going-on to build a business which is using state of the art AI technologies to equalise trust and access to money globally by broadening…
Thought Economics

 

In this interview, I speak to Catalina Daniels and James Sherman about their learnings from interviewing and studying some of the most successful startups to emerge from Harvard Business School. We discuss startup ideation, governance, fundraising and how to best exit.  
Thought Economics

 

Alibaba combines the economic might of Amazon, the penetration of Facebook, the ubiquity of Google and the cultural significance of YouTube. In China alone, Alibaba has over close to 1billion active customers and over 250,000 employees. At peak, the platform processed over 583,000 orders per second. Each year, Alibaba receives…
Thought Economics

 

Sridhar Ramaswamy is CEO and Co-founder of Neeva and a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners. Neeva is search re-imagined. It is subscription based and does not sell ads or track user behaviour as a part of its business model. Neeva is focused on finding exactly what matters most for its…
Thought Economics

 

In 2009, Kickstarter was born from a singular mission to help bring creative projects to life.  Since then, 18.4 million people have collectively pledged over $5.23 billion into more than 186,000 projects. The Kickstarter mission extends to the very fabric of how the business is structured. In 2015, they became…
Thought Economics