Village Global Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Recall Sessions: Why Two Finance Leaders Are Ditching Excel for Claude Code | Jeff Cobourn (Gusto) & Rohit Divate (Tide) Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto.

Somrat Niyogi, General Partner at Recall Capital and Village Global Network Investor, sits down with Jeff and Rohit to unpack how AI has rewired the finance function from the inside out. They trace the shift from spreadsheets and BI tools to Claude Code as the default daily workflow, including how board decks that once took two weeks and five people now come together as pull requests against an HTML file. The conversation moves through what finance skills and attributes still matter in an AI-native world, whether teams will shrink or simply cover more ground, and how roles like BI, investor relations, and data visualization are starting to merge. Jeff and Rohit also get into the practical mechanics of the shift: how Gusto scores AI fluency across the entire company, how they're budgeting for token spend the way they once budgeted for headcount, and where the real build-versus-buy tension is playing out across ERP, FP&A software, and internal tools. They close with predictions on what's dead, what's dying, and what the first hire at a finance team in 2026 should actually look like.

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

Why Nobody Needs Metrics or Traces Anymore | Sherwood Callaway (Sazabi) Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

Sherwood Callaway is the founder and CEO of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform, and a repeat YC founder. He previously worked as an early infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he built the systems that kept one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world running.

Village Global Luminary LP Lindsay Pettingill sits down with Sherwood for a conversation that moves from his unconventional path into engineering to the contrarian bets behind Sazabi. They dig into why Sherwood believes logs alone can replace metrics and traces, why dashboards mostly serve anxiety rather than insight, and what a world of self-healing software could actually look like. Along the way, Sherwood reflects on the 40-page manifesto that became Sazabi's founding thesis, the angel investor strategy that brought over 100 founders and technical leaders onto his cap table, and the maximalist, Blade Runner-inspired brand built around a name pulled from a 1980s anime. The episode closes on a more personal note, touching on his orthopedic surgeon father's late-career turn toward vibe coding and his sister Hadley's stint at Sazabi as its first non-technical hire before business school.

Why AI Agents Can't Be Trusted Yet (And How to Fix It) | Moe Katib (One) Jun 11, 2026

Show notes

Moe Katib is the founder and CEO of One (withone.ai), an enterprise-level infrastructure platform that gives AI agents authenticated, reliable access to hundreds of software applications and verified actions. Before One, he spent 12 years solving enterprise integration problems, building the knowledge base that became the foundation for what he's building today.

Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Moe to trace the story behind One: from growing up in Damascus selling packaged chicken out of his uncle's factory, to building water-pump automation devices growing up, to immigrating to Canada after his invention was stolen by a government-connected company. They cover what a decade of enterprise integration work taught him about agent infrastructure, why he made the counterintuitive decision to open source all the integrations he had assembled, and why trust, not speed or scale, is the real unlock for agentic AI adoption.

Moe also shares his own experience running his email entirely through an agent, including the moment his AI sent a rude message to a major VC on his behalf, and what that revealed about the identity problem at the heart of agentic software.

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.

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Recall Sessions: He Built the Software That Runs 1 in 6 Laundromats in America | Alex Jekowsky May 21, 2026

Show notes

Alex Jekowsky is the co-founder and CEO of Cents, the all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for the laundry industry. A Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, he sold his first company at 23, and last month closed a $140 million Series C. Cents now powers more than 1 in 6 laundromats in the country and processes over $1 billion in payments a year.

Somrat Niyogi sits down with Alex to go from the very beginning: the aha moment that led him to laundromats, how he got his first customers through cold emails and contact forms, why he priced Cents at a flat $299 from day one, and what it actually took to build a durable go-to-market motion in a market most investors wrote off. They also cover the distributor strategy that unlocked scale, how the Laundry Works acquisition changed everything, what Alex gets right about hiring slow, and why he thinks agentic AI is the only version of AI that actually matters for SMB operators.

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.

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LIVE: The Bull Case for SaaS in the Age of AI | Aaron Levie and Reid Hoffman May 20, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Village Global Podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie joins Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman and host Ben Casnocha live on stage at a Village Global event. They get into what agents actually do to SaaS, where startups should go on offense, and what twenty years of building Box has taught Aaron about leveling up as a founder.

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

Recall Sessions: The PR Playbook Most Founders Get Wrong — Paul Loeffler & Kelly Boynton May 14, 2026

Show notes

Somrat Niyogi sits down with two of the most experienced comms operators in tech: Kelly Boynton, Head of Communications at Gusto, and Paul Loeffler, former SVP of Communications and Brand at BILL.

Kelly spent 15 years across agency and in-house roles before Gusto, including at Facebook, Instagram, Intuit, Navan, and DocuSign. Before BILL, Paul led integrated communications at Gusto and was at Atlassian pre-IPO, helping scale it as a public company.

They cover what founders get wrong about launches and PR, when an agency is worth it (and when it is not), why your story should be about value rather than valuation, why reporters write about trends rather than companies, why 95% of stealth companies should not be in stealth, and the comms playbook for breaking through the noise.

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.

Why Your Next Executive Assistant Will Be an AI — Deon Nicholas (Espa.ai) May 07, 2026

Show notes

Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor.

Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. They cover what he learned scaling Forethought through the GPT-1 to GPT-4 era, why the Iron Man Jarvis vision is finally within reach for everyone (not just Silicon Valley), the three pillars of Espa, why the model labs have perverse incentives that leave the door open for a new app-layer winner, the surprising network effect that emerges when one Espa starts talking to another, and where personal productivity AI is heading over the next five to ten years.

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.

Recall Sessions: Most SaaS Companies Won't Survive This - Jake Saper (Emergence) Apr 23, 2026

Show notes

Jake Saper is General Partner at Emergence Capital, the firm that was the first institutional investor in Zoom and an early backer of Salesforce, Veeva, Bill.com, and Together.ai. Jake has been at Emergence for over a decade and has led investments in Assembled, Unify, and Ironclad.
Jake has developed Emergence's thesis on AI-native services: why he believes this is the most important structural shift in enterprise software since the move to the cloud, why most SaaS companies built before AI won't survive it, and what founders have to build instead.
Somrat Niyogi sits down with Jake to unpack his thesis, the moats disappearing and rising, the risk Jake calls Mirage Product Market Fit, the three metrics every AINS founder should track, and where the biggest opportunities are playing out.
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

Recall Sessions: Building a $1.1B Category That Didn't Exist | Nick Mehta (Gainsight) Apr 09, 2026

Show notes

Nick Mehta is the former CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. Vista Equity Partners acquired Gainsight for $1.1 billion.
Nick ran the company as CEO for 13 years before stepping into a board role last year. Nick has also co-authored four books on customer success, was named Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California, and currently sits on the boards of F5 and PubMatic. Before Gainsight, he was CEO of LiveOffice, which he grew to $25 million in revenue and sold to Symantec.
Somrat Niyogi and Nick cover how a meetup with cheap wine and a cheese tray on a ping pong table became the seed of a category, why community mattered more than product in the beginning, what it was like selling software into a role that barely existed, the Box deal that involved a music video parody and memorizing the lobby Wi-Fi password, what happened when Salesforce announced they were the "customer success platform," how to think about category creation vs. joining an existing one, and why Nick got on stage at Pulse coming off pneumonia to talk about being lonely as a kid.
In loving memory of Summer Devi Mehta (2008–2026). Support The Trevor Project in Summer's honor: https://give.thetrevorproject.org/fundraiser/6961929
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

Worldbuilders: Building Digital Minds and Why Humans Still Matter | Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi) Apr 03, 2026

Show notes

Dara Ladjevardian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphi, a platform that lets you create a digital version of your mind — an interactive, always-on presence that can share your knowledge, coach others, and represent you at scale.
Delphi has raised $16 million in a Series A led by Sequoia, with earlier backing from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and others. Before Delphi, Dara founded Friday, a text-based commerce tool he built and sold within a year. He previously worked as a forward-deployed engineer at C3 AI and as a product engineer at OpenStore.
Sumeet Singh sits down with Dara to talk about the moment he knew he had to build Delphi, which started with trying to recreate his grandfather's mind using GPT-3. They cover why he chose LLMs over crypto and American dynamism, what it was like selling his first startup and joining OpenStore to find a mentor and co-founder, why human connection still matters when information is commoditized, how Delphi solved the trust problem that makes or breaks the entire platform, the micro-pivots that shaped the company, and what world Dara is trying to build.
If you have any questions about Delphi, you can talk to Dara's digital mind here: delphi.ai/dara
Delphi: https://delphi.ai
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

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