415 Stories

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 says COVID planning depends on both the crisis duration and the world that follows it.

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.