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Stories by the Bay, listen the founders and investors of San Francisco about how they founded their ventures and get unique insights about fundraising and scaling. In 2nd season, we decided to extend podcast's focus and now covering a variety of topics including philosophy, education, psychology, and many more.
From demo-day diligence to Nietzsche on staying childlike, your career plan gets challenged from both ends.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Kan's $970 million Twitch exit becomes a grounded look at why success can keep moving the finish line.
Justin Kan's conversation turns a blockbuster startup outcome into a study of why achievement can still feel unresolved. He remembers arriving in Silicon Valley with a million-dollar goal, then selling Twitch for $970 million and measuring himself against friends whose companies…
A grounded review of NFTs as community identity, technical experiment, and unfinished Web3 history.
NFTs enter this review as a social technology before they become a market story. Denny frames ownership as a way of taking on an identity while helping shape a community's identity, then connects the project to his familiarity with Solana, a 3D artist relationship, and…
A thoughtful, slightly loose discussion of college, risk, personal direction, and the access that helps ideas become opportunities.
This single-episode review frames college less as a yes-or-no milestone than as a question of timing, fit, and personal direction. The conversation moves easily between people who find their path early, those who discover it during or after college, and those who step away from…
A thoughtful, human-centered look at building technology for meaningful connection without treating growth as an end in itself.
Sarah's 415 Stories appearance frames community building as both a product challenge and a human responsibility. Speaking from her growth role at Upstream, she keeps returning to the idea that features should support a contribution mindset rather than flatten it.
Yosef Martins explains how HubSpot's startup philosophy grew from helping underdogs compete with big brain, not big wallet.
415 Stories brings in Yosef Martins from HubSpot for Startups to explain why HubSpot has long made sense for founders: it helps them reach likely customers without a large marketing budget.
From economic pressures to investment consequences.
AI capability meets the work of building.
Daily AI news through the lens of trust, infrastructure, and real-world deployment.
Justin Kan discusses Fractal’s effort to help players discover and trade gaming NFTs, arguing that blockchain games are still in an early stage before many promised games have shipped.
415 Stories interviews Crypto Caveman Club co-founder Danny Povolotski about why NFTs may function as digital memberships and identities rather than merely downloadable images.
415 Stories returns with co-hosts Taha and Tarkan Anlar interviewing Atta Onat about whether college remains necessary for careers, networks, and personal development.
Sarah Wood explains how work at Goldman Sachs and Launch with GS led her to Upstream, where she now leads growth and community.
Yosef Martins of HubSpot for Startups describes moving from industrial engineering in Venezuela to sales, an MBA in the United States, entrepreneurship, and HubSpot.
Dennis Crowley explains why Foursquare built Marsbot for AirPods as an audio version of augmented reality that can whisper nearby places, objects, buildings, street art, or people.
Sahin Boydas tells Tahav how he began reselling computer games and building networks in Turkey before creating Ceptikyan, an early Turkish e-commerce site that received a $50,000 investment for 90% of the company.
Robby Stein, Instagram's product director and former Google employee, describes how his college project NULink led him through Stamped and Yahoo to Instagram.
Vedika Jain, chief of staff at Weekend Fund, describes moving from Stripe and Trulayer into early-stage venture capital.
Leyla Seka describes leaving Salesforce after more than 11 years to co-found Operator Collective with Malin Yen, a venture fund built around more than 130 operating executives.
Hugo Tilmouth, founder and CEO of Charged Up, explains how a failed £20 power bank at Lord's Cricket Ground led him to build a sharing network for phone batteries.
Jessica Lee, Soma Capital’s first full-time hire, explains how the seed-stage fund evaluates founders, sources roughly 75–80% of its portfolio through Y Combinator, and uses extended observation instead of only short diligence periods.
On 415 Stories, Taha interviews Adam Draper, Managing Director of BoostVC, about backing founders working in virtual reality, cryptocurrency, space, and other “sci-fi technology” sectors.
Yigit Ihlamur explains how Vela Partners became a venture-technology firm after his five-and-a-half years working on Google cloud products in Dublin and Mountain View.
Charles Hudson explains how Precursor Venture Capital evaluates pre-seed companies with a three-by-three matrix measuring cash runway and COVID-19 exposure.
BillionToOne's protocol bypasses RNA extraction and could use 500 to 1,000 idle instruments for millions of daily tests.
An interview with Zehra Chatteltepe, co-founder and CEO of Tezzi AI, discussing her journey in automated machine learning and AI from her PhD at Caltech.
Host Taha interviews angel investor and serial entrepreneur Jason Kalkanis about his background and predictions for the 2020s tech scene.
Host Taha interviews Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag, about his career in tech and design in Silicon Valley.