Crucible Moments
Episodes
Palo Alto Networks ft Nir Zuk & Nikesh Arora - The Grudge That Transformed Cybersecurity
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 2000s, the cybersecurity industry was dominated by incumbents focused on high margins, not innovation. Nir Zuk tells the story of how, fr...
Bolt ft. Markus Villig - From Bootstrapping in Estonia to a Global Leader in Mobility
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At 19, Markus Villig borrowed €5,000 from his parents to fix Estonia's broken taxi system. What happened next defied every conventional startup play...
Supercell ft Ilkka Paananen - How an Early Pivot Led to ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Brawl Stars’
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen set out to create a different kind of game company—one where the game development teams would have decision-making po...
Zipline ft Keller Cliffton - Reinventing Delivery with Instant Drone Transport
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, Keller Cliffton made an audacious pivot: shut down his robotic toy company and rebuild it as an autonomous drone delivery system for life-sav...
Crucible Moments Season 3: Coming October 23
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Previously on Crucible Moments, we explored the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant names in technology. Now, we're returning f...
Nubank ft. David Vélez - An Outsider Upends the Brazilian Banking System
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Nubank started 10 years ago, a few big banks in Brazil had a stranglehold on the largest economy in Latin America: they controlled nearly all the...
Dropbox ft. Drew Houston - How the Cloud Pioneer Reinvented Itself
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A scrappy upstart taking on hyperscalers in a category with lots of hand-wavers, Dropbox became the canonical example of Silicon Valley viral growth, ...
LIVE: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott on Unlocking Elite Level Execution
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier this season we heard the startup story of ServiceNow—from Fred Luddy setting out to reinvent IT workflows as a first-time founder, to Frank ...
Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a New Generation
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Millions of Americans use their smartphones to invest and manage their finances every day—but before Robinhood started in 2013, finance looked very ...
YouTube ft. Steve Chen - 18 Months That Changed the Internet
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofoun...
Natera ft. Matthew Rabinowitz - A Personal Mission That Led to a Biotech Revolution
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical e...
LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platforms—DoorDash and Wolt—which merged in 2022 t...
DoorDash ft. Tony Xu - The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and ...
UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest...
Reddit ft. Steve Huffman - The Making (and Remaking) of the Front Page of the Internet
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Reddit is one of the largest and most culturally influential sites on the internet—and its journey is one of the most unusual company stories in int...
MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the fou...
ServiceNow ft. Frank Slootman and Fred Luddy - From Starting Over at 50 to Dodging a $150B Mistake
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2004, bankrupt after the company where he’d previously worked had imploded, Fred Luddy decided to start over as a first-time founder at age 50. H...
Crucible Moments Season 2: Coming August 29
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Season 1 of Crucible Moments, we heard from founders like PayPal’s Max Levchin, Block’s Jack Dorsey, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and more about the...
Introducing "Training Data," a new podcast from Sequoia about the future of A.I.
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Crucible Moments will be back shortly with season 2. You’ll hear from the founders of YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more. In the meantime, we’d l...
Nvidia ft. Jensen Huang - An overnight success story 30 years in the making
30 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
CEO Jensen Huang tells the legendary story of Nvidia, from the company’s early days pioneering 3D graphics cards for a niche PC gaming market to pow...
23andMe ft. Anne Wojcicki - How a DNA startup took on the FDA and redefined health tech
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Millions of customers have explored their genome with 23andMe. But when the company started in 2006, the idea of consumer DNA testing was heresy to th...
Jawbone ft. Hosain Rahman - The rise and fall of the first wearable technology company
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Co-founders Hosain Rahman and Alex Asseily, and Chief Creative Officer Yves Behar, recount the meteoric rise and fall of Jawbone. One of the most inno...
HubSpot ft. Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah - How an underdog helped invent modern marketing, and then took on Goliath
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah reveal how they took a blog started as a hobby and turned the ideas behind it into a $20+ billion success. I...
Eventbrite ft. Julia Hartz - A thriving events company took 14 years to build and nearly disappeared in 14 days
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What happens to an events company when every event is canceled? “Even if you have spent 14 years building something, it could truly be gone in 14 da...
Block ft. Jack Dorsey - A controversial hack week project becomes the #1 financial services app
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
CEO Jack Dorsey reflects on Block’s origins and defining moments with host Roelof Botha. Dorsey founded Square in 2009 with a clear vision: econom...
Airbnb ft. Brian Chesky - Battling a copycat clone and rebuilding user trust to revolutionize travel
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As Airbnb took off in the early 2010s, Brian Chesky remembers worrying, “this is just one accident away from being a dead idea.” That accident fin...
PayPal ft. Max Levchin - A merger of enemies that reshaped Silicon Valley
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
PayPal was the defining tech company of its generation, with alumni going on to start YouTube, Tesla, Yelp, LinkedIn, among many others. But the compa...
Introducing "Crucible Moments"
30 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most important companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determ...