Knuckle Up with Nakul
Nakul Mandan
Knuckle Up is about the HOW of building iconic companies. Recruiting, culture, intensity, the inner game of being a founder CEO. The stuff that actually separates great companies from good ones. Hosted by Nakul Mandan (GP, Audacious Ventures), each episode goes deep with founders who’ve done it at the highest level. Not highlight reels. Operating playbooks, straight from the best of the best. www.knuckleup.co
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 7, 2026 • 1h 12min
$50M ARR With 3 sales reps, no CRO, and one PM | Michael Grinich (CEO, WorkOS)
Michael Grinich, CEO and co-founder of WorkOS, scaled the company to $50M ARR while running an engineering-first org. He discusses why standout ideas may look bad, the “minimum awesome product” approach, running a flat team with senior ICs instead of executives, making teams AI-native, and a fast weekly operating cadence that prioritizes speed and ownership.
Apr 30, 2026 • 49min
Nobody knows anything, product market fit is dead, and there's only one moat | Bipul Sinha
Bipul Sinha, founder and CEO of Rubrik and former Lightspeed investor, built a $10B enterprise software company and shares his leadership playbook. He explains maniacal recruiting, why product-market-fit feels dead, treating AI as a junior teammate, stacking S-curves for new products, and why time is the only real moat.
Apr 23, 2026 • 1h 13min
Battle-tested playbooks for recuriting, reading the market, and adapting to AI
Qasar Younis, founder and CEO of Applied Intuition and former Y Combinator COO, built AI for the physical world and contrarian company playbooks. He talks hiring signals and why his first hires lived together. He explains monthly red/yellow/green feedback, how AI reshapes tooling and hiring, and why this could be a golden age for small, fast teams.
35 snips
Apr 14, 2026 • 1h 11min
Frank Slootman on what most CEOs get wrong
Frank Slootman, serial enterprise software CEO who scaled Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake, shares his playbook for high-performance organizations. He talks about confronting mediocrity, the drivers vs passengers framework, psychographic hiring, why back-channel references matter, his Tuesday cadence and go-direct rule, and why standards, urgency, and decision velocity beat consensus.
