Village Global Podcast

Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor.Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. They cover what he learned scaling Forethought through the GPT-1 to GPT-4 era, why the Iron Man Jarvis vision is finally within reach for everyone (not just Silicon Valley), the three pillars of Espa, why the model labs have perverse incentives that leave the door open for a new app-layer winner, the surprising network effect that emerges when one Espa starts talking to another, and where personal productivity AI is heading over the next five to ten years.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

Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence and developer of the AI-native services thesis, explains why many pre-AI SaaS firms are at risk. He discusses shifting from selling seats to selling outcomes. He covers disappearing and emerging moats, Mirage Product-Market Fit, the three metrics AINS founders should track, and where the biggest opportunities lie.

Nick Mehta, former CEO of Gainsight who led a $1.1B exit and helped define customer success. He recounts how cheap meetups and community-building birthed a category, selling into a role that barely existed, quirky early sales wins like the Box music-video deal, facing Salesforce staking claim, and the three pillars for creating a category: community, authority, and culture.

Dara Ladjevardian, CEO and cofounder of Delphi who builds interactive digital minds, reflects on recreating his grandfather’s mind with GPT-3 and why he chose LLMs. He discusses trust, avoiding clone culture, product pivots, scaling expertise, and a vision where digital minds amplify human presence while keeping people central.

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.