Village Global Podcast

Doug Camplejohn, a former Salesforce and LinkedIn product leader turned founder of Coffee, and Patrick Thompson, ex-Atlassian designer and co-founder of Clarify, discuss AI-native CRMs. They explore why now is the moment for CRM reinvention. They debate why LLMs alone fail, the heavy engineering behind true CRM replacements, migration strategies from incumbents, and how agentic interfaces and pricing models are shifting the market.

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/pteKdEGYRjUThanks 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

Evan Conrad, founder and CEO of SF Compute, who turned an accidental GPU cloud into a supercomputing marketplace. He describes surviving huge monthly cluster costs and building a manual order book for GPU time. He explains why GPUs need multiyear contracts, what offtake means, and the Marriott-like financing model for building and operating large GPU clusters.

Bhavin Shah, founder who built Moveworks into an agentic AI platform and later led its AI business at ServiceNow. He recounts forming a four‑founder team, validating the idea with 34+ CIO conversations, landing the first customer with a vision demo, choosing investors for domain expertise, and how ChatGPT forced a major platform rearchitecture and sped acquisition talks.

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

Tomer London, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gusto, scaled a payroll and HR platform from a YC startup to hundreds of thousands of small businesses. He recounts cold-calling first customers, the Thai-restaurant moment that validated the idea, an early pricing mistake, why SMBs are startup-in-hard-mode, and how AI is reshaping product and support.

Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal and longevity entrepreneur, discusses biological interventions and how approved drugs could reframe aging as treatable. She talks about cognitive aging shaping cultural preferences, the social effects of healthier parents on mobility, and financial and planning implications of longer healthy lifespans.

Itai Damti, Co‑founder and CEO of Unit, which builds embedded finance infrastructure for accounts, cards, and money movement. He recounts building in stealth, landing the first customer via LinkedIn, and why embedded finance beats old‑school fintech. He explains buyer types, a feature‑prioritization color framework, and the tricky gap between early adopters and the mass market.

Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal, who raised a $100M Series C to develop pet longevity drugs. She outlines Loyal's 10-year plan to move from dogs into cats and humans. She explains why pharma ignored aging, why dogs mirror human aging better than mice, and how dog-first drugs lower cost and speed translation to human therapies.

Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman and former Google leader, shares career frameworks and hiring wisdom. He contrasts centralized big-tech career systems with decentralized startup markets. He breaks down when recruiters truly help and how to design a world-class hiring process. He also highlights the critical importance of thorough reference checking.