Village Global Podcast

Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga and a Village Global Luminary LP. He took Zynga public after starting it as a social poker game for Facebook, and it was his fourth company, after earlier ventures that included Tribe.net, one of the first social networks.
Ben Casnocha, co-founder of Village Global, sits down with Mark at a Village Global Luminary Gathering to dig into the core ideas of Mark's book. Mark's central claim is that your instincts are probably right more often than you know, while your ideas are usually wrong more often than you'd like. He explains how that led to his "Proven Better New" framework, which came out of a product management class he created at Stanford Business School, and why he thinks most founders do too much "new" and ignore too much "proven." He illustrates with an SMS taxi idea from 2003, before GPS and smartphones existed, and with an instinct he's still chasing today. They also get into the difference between hope and conviction, and why Mark says to kill hope before hope kills you. Mark walks through the lowest point of the Zynga story, when a Facebook algorithm change cost the company about a third of its traffic in a day and he went from Founder of the Year to one of the 5 worst CEOs in America within a year. He shares what he learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Bing Gordon, Reid Hoffman, and his father, gives his own version of founder mode, and explains where AI is strong (proven) and where it's "absolutely terrible" (new, intuition, and taste). The conversation closes with audience questions, including how he'd build Zynga today and how he stays grounded.

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Mehul Trivedi is co-founder and CEO of Legato, a company building glasses that double as prescription-grade hearing aids. Before Legato, he was one of the first audio engineers on the original iPhone, led Bose's wearables and headphone group, and helped build out Luxottica's smart eyewear division, including collaboration on Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Amrit Rao sits down with Mehul to trace his path from a childhood built around music and engineering at Stanford to building hearing technology hidden inside a pair of glasses people are actually proud to wear. Mehul breaks down why the hearing aid industry has barely innovated in 70 years, a classic case of regulatory capture dominated by a handful of companies, and how Legato's approach using sparse AI processing instead of traditional DSP let the team build a device that outperforms not just over-the-counter hearing aids but most prescription devices under $6,000, according to third-party benchmarks. He shares the story of meeting co-founder Steve at Bose, why finding the right co-founder was one of the two most important decisions of his life, and how the company has tried to build without sacrificing balance or making anyone sleep on the floor eating ramen. The conversation also touches on his time co-founding Stanford's a cappella group Ragapella, the grandmother who shaped how he thinks about unconditional support, and his long-term vision for Legato addressing far more than hearing loss.

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Andre Charoo is Founding Partner of Maple VC, a first-check venture firm, and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Before venture, he was employee number 25 at Uber and an early employee at Hired.com, and built or joined four seed-stage startups between 2009 and 2016.
Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Andre to unpack the framework he's developed for evaluating founders: builders, inventors, and operators, and how he uses it to make sense of teams when there's little else to underwrite at the earliest stages. Andre traces the framework back to studying Uber's early team and the founders of Clay, walking through how he identifies which archetype he's actually talking to, why the most enduring companies almost always attract all three types eventually, and why founders with illegible, non-obvious backgrounds are often the ones VCs miss. He shares his personal test for conviction, deliberately seeking out smart people who disagree with a founder's vision, and breaks down real examples from his portfolio, including Clay, Stadium Live, and Inference.ai. The conversation closes with Andre's reflections on bringing new partners Jane Lee and John Edgar into Maple, the firm's newly codified investment philosophy, and the personal and professional moments where he felt truly seen at a time he least expected it.

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

Tanay Kothari is co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice AI company he started with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021, building toward a Jarvis-like assistant that lets people interact with computers through natural speech instead of keyboards and screens. His younger brother, Jaisal Kothari, is co-founder and CEO of Gallium and was Wispr's first software engineer, joining as a Stanford freshman to help build the company's earliest voice dictation technology.
Anne Dwane sits down with Tanay and Jaisal at a Village Global event to trace Tanay's path from building and shipping nearly 50 apps in secret as a teenager, including one that hit 2.5 million users before Google sent him a cease and desist, to founding Wispr as a hardware company and pivoting entirely to software after watching users ignore the physical device in favor of the app alone. Tanay breaks down Wispr's "zero edit rate" metric, a stricter and more user-centered standard than the industry's typical word error rate, walks through the viral Porsche-giveaway marketing stunt that pulled in tens of millions of views, and explains why he personally sat in on the company's first 500 onboarding calls. The conversation also covers how Wispr thinks about competing with frontier AI labs entering voice, why the company stacks multiple layers of defensibility instead of relying on one moat, and Tanay's approach to keeping teams small and communication overhead low as the company scales. Jaisal opens the conversation with the story of growing up alongside Tanay's secretive late-night coding sessions and how that early exposure shaped his own path into tech.
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

Jade Q. Wang is an artist, investor, scientist, and founder. A Stanford grad with a PhD in neuroscience, she retired roughly a year ago from a career in tech to pursue art and angel investing full time.

Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Jade to trace her path from a childhood spent training to be a concert pianist in Shanghai, through a hard pivot into computer science and neuroscience, to her current work building interactive, AI-native poetry that treats Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as collaborators rather than tools. Jade draws a striking parallel between the invention of photography and the current moment in AI, arguing that just as photography didn't destroy art but unlocked entirely new movements like Impressionism, AI may do the same for literature and poetry. She walks through her multi-phase art project, from a poetry collection structured like a codebase to a planned museum installation involving AI mirrors that roast and compliment visitors and a "computerized confessional," and explains why different AI models have developed distinct, consistent taste in which of her poems they find most powerful. The conversation also gets into her approach to angel investing and what she actually looks for in founders, plus the surreal story of discovering she'd become the unwitting subject of a viral AI-generated fan fiction universe.

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