

A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
Mistral.vc
Every founder has 1 goal: find product-market fit. We interview the world's most successful startup founders on the 0 to 1 part of their journeys. We've had the founders of Reddit, Gusto, Rappi, Glean, Cohere, Huntress, ID.me and many more. We go deep with entrepreneurs & VCs to provide detailed examples you can steal. Our goal is to understand product-market fit better than anyone on the planet. Rated one of the world's top startup podcasts.
Episodes
Mentioned books

May 11, 2026 • 37min
Coinbase's ex-CPO bet on AI agents before ChatGPT—now he's closing 7-figure Fortune 500 deals. | Surojit Chatterjee, Founder of Ema
Surojit Chatterjee, former Google product leader and ex-CPO of Coinbase turned founder of Ema, builds AI employees for enterprises. He tells the story of a Hitachi HR deployment that proved scale and credibility. He explains Ema’s agent teams, enterprise-grade security choices, and go-to-market tactics that landed Fortune 500 deals.

12 snips
May 4, 2026 • 56min
How this 1st-time founder went from closing customers for $500 a month to $300,000 a year. | Sean McCarthy, Founder & CEO of BackOps
Sean McCarthy, Founder and CEO of BackOps, built an AI-native shipping OS after years in Amazon warehouses. He talks about interviewing 85 operators to find the real pain, pausing sales to rebuild an enterprise-grade platform, an eight-minute SOP recorder that replaces months of deployment work, and a scrappy playbook that wins big Fortune 500 deals.

33 snips
Apr 27, 2026 • 41min
He built for 2 years before raising a dollar—then hit $13M ARR and a $40M Series B. | Alex Halliday, Co-Founder & CEO of AirOps
Alex Halliday, Co-founder and CEO of AirOps, built the product for two years before turning it into an AI-driven content and agent-first search business. He explains why marketers were the perfect early customers. He recounts the pivot into LLMs, the playbook that scaled ARR rapidly, and how a consultative sales motion turned pilots into large annual contracts.

34 snips
Apr 20, 2026 • 52min
180 VCs rejected him—then a $60K billboard got him to $2M ARR in 4 months. | Isaiah Granet, CEO of Bland AI
Isaiah Granet, CEO and co-founder of Bland AI, built enterprise voice AI for high-stakes phone calls. He recounts betting the company on in-house models, a $60K billboard plus influencer push that created massive inbound, and why he cut half his customers after a big raise. He also explains the enterprise sales playbook that landed six- and seven-figure deals.

5 snips
Apr 16, 2026 • 52min
She bet on a consumer app when every VC wanted B2B—then grew to $10M ARR. | Anada Lakra, Founder of BoldVoice
Anada Lakra, founder and CEO of BoldVoice who built a pronunciation app that blends AI with expert coaching, shares her founder story. She talks about launching a consumer product when VCs favored B2B. She explains guerrilla growth via Reddit and YouTube creators. She describes how switching to annual-default pricing flipped unit economics and scaled the business to multi-million ARR.

8 snips
Apr 13, 2026 • 39min
He raised a $10M seed with no revenue—then grew 30x to $30M in year two. | Bobby Samuels, Founder of Protege
Bobby Samuels, founder of Protege who built a multimodal healthcare data network and raised rounds including from a16z. He explains raising a $10M seed with almost no pipeline, flying weekly to close seven-figure deals, building a 250-partner data network, using a “texting terms” litmus test to judge deal seriousness, and scaling GMV 30x in a year.

4 snips
Apr 9, 2026 • 42min
He ran Prime fulfillment for Amazon—then raised $20M to replace e-commerce with AI. | Maju Kuruvilla, Founder of Spangle
Maju Kuruvilla, former Amazon VP who led Prime fulfillment tech and now CEO of Spangle, built an AI startup to personalize storefronts. He explains why 40% of e-commerce traffic loses context, how Spangle rebuilds storefronts in real time, and his vision of a future battle between AI seller agents and AI buyer agents.

5 snips
Apr 6, 2026 • 52min
She got rejected by 22 VCs—then built 6sense to $100M+ in revenue. Now she's back for AI. | Amanda Kahlow, Founder of 1mind
Amanda Kahlow, repeat entrepreneur who scaled 6sense from services to a $200M ARR business and now leads 1mind to build AI sales “superhumans.” She explains why she always starts enterprise-first. She tells the story of 22 VC rejections, using an AI clone to pitch investors, and why AI will collapse SDRs, AEs, and SEs into a single agent. She outlines practical product design and where superhumans add immediate value.

41 snips
Apr 2, 2026 • 47min
How this AI founder is on track to hit $50M ARR just 2 years after launch. | Tarek Alaruri, Co-Founder of Stuut
Tarek Alaruri, a serial B2B SaaS founder now building Stuut to automate accounts receivable with AI. He explains pre-selling a $65K contract from wireframes, forcing referrals with a “closing discount,” and finding message-market fit through brutal cold calling. He also digs into audio AI outreach, rapid deployments that cut overdue invoices, and how AI scales coverage human teams miss.

Mar 30, 2026 • 45min
He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar Sunkara, Founding CTO of AppDynamics
Bhaskar Sunkara, co-founder and early employee at AppDynamics turned founder of Bicycle AI, built monitoring and analytics for software-driven businesses. He discusses turning business transactions into the unit of monitoring. He explains landing Netflix and Priceline with production POCs. He reveals how a freemium download drove over 60% of leads and fueled rapid revenue growth.


