Gokul Rajaram
speaker
1,839 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 16 Mar
Gokul Rajaram’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think you've got to use the data.
You're right.
Most VC pitches look the same.
What you want to do is dig one level deeper and talk to the founders themselves and understand for each of the last five companies that they've invested in, why did this founder pick this firm?
Why do you push that?
I'll give you an example.
Trade Desk, where I'm on the board, had two seed investors, IA Ventures, Roger Allenberg, who's absolutely a GOAT, and then Founder Collective, again, GOAT firm.
So they have two completely different philosophies.
Founder Collective only does first checks.
They never do any pro rata afterwards, period.
Roger, on the other hand, doubles down again and again and again.
So Trade Desk raised, I think, two or three rounds of financing, that's it, and went public very early.
It was very hard for them to raise financing.
So the multiple that Founder Collective generated was incredible because they only invested at the seed round, and they got it at $5 billion or something like that, or even more.
I think they held for longer.
Roger generated a huge dollar return, even though his multiple was different.
So there are two philosophies.
My philosophy is more, if you look at Founders Fund, which I think is one of the best performing funds, a huge part of their success is basically doubling down on the companies that matter.
The unsung hero of Founder Fund is a guy called Napoleon Tha, who leads a growth practice.
And Napoleon basically is the one who decides which of the companies should we double down on.
Showing 641–660 of 1,839 · page 33 of 92
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