Mar 16, 2026 · 1h 18m · 20vc
Gokul Rajaram: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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In this episode of 20VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews seasoned operator-turned-investor Gokul Rajaram to explore his "eight moats of defensibility" framework, dissecting how artificial intelligence is transforming software business models, pricing structures, and venture capital investment strategies.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 24.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 5.6 Guest teaching 4.7 Guest disagreement 2.1 Harry pushing back 4.1
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:27 Gokul rejects host framing on brand moat strength
Gokul directly dissents from Harry's assertion regarding brand power, explicitly stating that brand is a weakening moat in B2B software due to zero switching costs and automated data portability.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 53:04 Harry calls BS on proprietary founder access claimsHarry forcefully rejects standard venture marketing narratives, stating that he gets extremely frustrated when every venture firm claims to possess proprietary founder access.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 8:56 Gokul outlines the Eight Moats taxonomyGokul systematically breaks down a comprehensive eight-part framework for software defensibility, educating the host on how to score durable software moats.
Harry holds his own ▶ 30:46 Harry challenges AI labor valuation multiples mathHarry uses sharp forward-growth calculations to challenge private market valuations, pointing out that paying $5B for $100M ARR forces pricing in two years of treble-treble performance ahead of time.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How Google Taught the Power of Product Remarkability | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Harry sets up the interview by asking Gokul how his early career at Google and Facebook shaped his investment lens. Gokul shares the internal story of Gmail's Caribou project and Facebook's focus on distribution and multiplayer products. Harry nods along and connects Gokul's comments to Neil Mehta's framework on customer experience. | |
| Square and the Power of Multi-Product Portfolios | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Gokul explains Square's transition from single-product to a multi-product portfolio and articulates why retention products do not need to be profitable. Harry demonstrates domain expertise by bringing up margin profiles for DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Spotify. | |
| The SaaS-pocalypse: Debunking the AI Market Overreaction | 3 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Gokul delivers a structured masterclass outlining his 'Eight Moats' framework for evaluating software defensibility (data, workflow, regulatory, distribution, ecosystem, network, physical, scale). Harry largely steps back into a listener role to allow Gokul to detail each moat. | |
| Applying the Moats: Atlassian versus Monday.com | 6 | 5 | 4 | 5 | Harry tests Gokul's framework against Atlassian and Monday.com, then defends brand moats by citing growth expert Elena Verna. Gokul politely dissents, arguing brand is a weakening moat in B2B due to zero switching costs and automated data portability. | |
| Salesforce and the Fate of Systems of Record | 6 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Harry cites Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski on AI agents making data migration seamless for systems of record like Salesforce. Gokul re-evaluates Salesforce's score under his framework and explains why systems of record must commoditize complements to survive. | |
| Successful Bolt-On AI versus Thin Wrappers | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Gokul details the limitations of bolt-on AI strategies and thin wrapper products. Harry facilitates the discussion on product roadmaps and how rapid model improvements disrupt multi-year feature plans. | |
| Model Intrusion and the Defensibility of Fintech | 6 | 5 | 3 | 6 | Harry directly pushes back on vertical AI support agents for niche professionals like dentists, calling them 'plaster on top of a wound'. Gokul agrees they are limited unless the product owns the entire full-stack workflow, contrasting ServiceTitan with Robinhood and Coinbase. | |
| Targeting BPO Budgets and the Transition to AI Labor | 7 | 5 | 1 | 5 | Harry brings concrete facts on offshore headcount (cites Goldman Sachs and Barclays having 30,000 workers in India) and questions the fate of late-stage SaaS companies growing 15% at high valuations. Gokul breaks down BPO budget capture and how legacy software companies must burn bridges to survive. | |
| Valuation Multiples and Replacing Digital Labor | 7 | 5 | 3 | 7 | Harry challenges current private valuations for AI labor companies like Podium, pointing out that paying 100x ARR forces investors to price in multiple years of hypergrowth ahead of time. Gokul clarifies the distinction between access products and work products in pricing model evolution. | |
| The Reality of VC King-Making and Fund Size Games | 6 | 5 | 2 | 5 | Harry asks whether VC 'king-making' is effective or 'complete bullshit' in competitive categories like legal and support AI. Gokul asserts king-making is real but execution remains paramount, leading into a discussion on fund size game theory. | |
| Unlocking Value through Non-Consumption Markets | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 | Harry presses on market size limits for standalone tools like Granola in the face of platform competition. Gokul forcefully reframes the issue, explaining that products like Granola and Gamma unlock entirely new 'non-consumption markets'. | |
| The Transition from Single-Product to Multi-Product | 7 | 5 | 4 | 7 | Harry catches a logical inconsistency in Gokul's framework, asking how endorsing single-product apps like Gamma aligns with his earlier insistence on multi-product portfolios. Gokul acknowledges the point and maintains that Gamma must inevitably build adjacent products. | |
| Massive Scale vs High-Ticket Enterprise Sales | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Harry brings up Chanel's semi-annual price increases as an analogy for pricing power and questions selling to mass-market SMBs versus high-ticket enterprise or ultra-wealthy customers. Gokul contrasts Robinhood's high-scale requirement with Palantir and Veeva. | |
| Shopify and the Art of Bottoms-Up Market Sizing | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Gokul reflects on missing Shopify early by underestimating non-consumption TAM expansion. He shares Mike Moritz's courage in backing Instacart despite losing hundreds of millions on Webvan as an exemplar of first-principles venture thinking. | |
| When Price Matters: Seed versus Series B Investments | 6 | 5 | 2 | 6 | Harry questions how Series A leads can maintain discipline when early rounds trade at 100x ARR. Gokul delineates between Seed stage (where price rarely destroys returns) and Series B (where price discipline is mandatory). | |
| Optimizing Fund Reserves and Inception Bets | 7 | 5 | 4 | 8 | Harry explicitly calls out venture marketing claims around 'proprietary founder access' as nonsense. Gokul defends his position by clarifying that real differentiation lies in post-investment edge and inception-stage incubation checks. | |
| LP Manager Selection: Backchanneling with Founders | 7 | 5 | 3 | 7 | Harry pushes back on fund reserve strategies, asking why maintaining a 35% reserve is superior to non-reserve, high-line-item strategies like Founder Collective. Gokul cites Founders Fund's concentrated power-law model as justification for holding reserves. | |
| Thesis-Driven Investing and the Power of Concentration | 6 | 5 | 2 | 5 | Harry notes that top winners like Linear were not obvious early on, questioning how thesis-driven investors accurately identify winners ahead of preemptive rounds. Gokul discusses maintaining close relationships with AI model labs and expresses regret over passing on Vanta. | |
| Liquidity, Selling Strategies, and Secondary Markets | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks about liquidity timelines and secondary share sales. Gokul breaks down the conflict between fund MOIC and IRR, recommending secondary sales when go-forward IRR drops below fund hurdle rates. | |
| Overcoming Pattern Matching: The Quince Regret and Seed Investing Tactics | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Gokul discusses his regret over passing on Quince's early valuation due to pattern-matching against D2C e-commerce. Harry agrees and reflects on how founder pivots can punish rigid sector rejections. | |
| The Three Founder Archetypes and Frontier AI Valuations | 6 | 5 | 2 | 5 | Gokul outlines three founder archetypes (domain repeaters, first-time consumer geniuses, and AI lab researchers). Harry asks if mega-funds are cannibalizing Series A leads by taking options via $15M checks. | |
| Investor Spin-outs: Returning to Traditional Venture Capital | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry names several high-profile VC partner spin-outs and asks if this trend will continue. Gokul predicts ongoing spin-outs as mid-level partners seek high-touch, classic venture capital alignment. | |
| Quick Fire Part 2: Lessons in Underestimation and Figma's Massive Returns | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | In the quickfire section, Gokul reflects on leaving Google, names his favorite CEOs, shares details on his Figma angel investment yielding 500-1000x returns, and highlights his optimism for young, AI-focused founders. |
Statements from this episode (80)
Rajaram: Software companies must own the full stack and go multi-product
“You cannot be a single product company. Critical products, you've got to really own full stack. It's harder otherwise to be a ten-plus-million-dollar company.”
Rajaram: No amount of distribution will save a company without remarkable products
“So I think I ultimately, my core investing thesis is that if there is not remarkable product, all the go-to marketing distribution in the world will not save you.”
Rajaram: Mark Zuckerberg is the greatest distribution genius in the world
“Mark, I think is Mark Zuckerberg is probably the best. I would say distribution genius in the world.”
Rajaram: Figma's key strength was intra-company collaborative sharing
“And so, when I saw Figma, the power of Figma I felt was, it was not just that a person could use it, but it was much easier to share with other people in your company.”
Rajaram: The best PLG software companies are multiplayer products
“And I think the best PLG software companies are those that you can use, multiple people can use, and it increases defensibility.”
Rajaram: Square had 11 products generating over $50M each upon his departure
“When I left, we had, I think, 11 products each doing more than fifty million in revenue”
Rajaram: Tech companies cannot survive long-term as single-product businesses
“You have to have, you cannot be a single product company. You've got to make sure, and most importantly, your product number two needs to emanate very naturally. It can't be like this completely separate product. It has to be very adjacent product number one.”
Rajaram: Companies must separate profit-generating products from retentive products
“Companies need to be very clear which are the profit pool products and which are the retentive products. If you confuse the two, your teams don't know and they're built for the wrong outcomes.”
DoorDash waived all restaurant revenue share for one month during COVID
“And ultimately we decided to not take any revenue share from these restaurants for a month.”
Rajaram: The public market software selloff due to AI is 100% overreaction
“I think this is 100% overreaction because not all software companies are created equal, and we can talk about what the differences are.”
Rajaram: State licenses make Coinbase irreplaceable for crypto custody
“Coinbase, when I'm on the board, is a great example. They have MTLs, money transmission licenses, state by state. There is with the Fini, CN, all of those things. It makes it impossible for a company to use anybody else than Coinbase to custody their crypto be…”
Rajaram: AI cannot replicate DoorDash's liquidity and marketplace density
“AI can vibe code the ability to access restaurants, but it can't vibe code liquidity, courier density, reputation history, all of those things. So marketplace density is a network effect, which is structural.”
Rajaram: Software companies need four of eight possible moats to stay defensible
“Any one of these modes is not enough. But what you want to do is you want to take a company and score it across them. Maybe you assign one point to each mode they have. And I think anything four or more, you're pretty damn secure. But if you have a two or thre…”
Rajaram: Atlassian possesses at least three core software defensibility moats
“Atlassian has, you could argue they have proprietary data. Now they need to use that data to build products. They have unique proprietary data on all the code out there because it's being checked in. There's a lot of stuff they have, which they need to use for…”
Rajaram: Monday.com has a much weaker defensibility score than Atlassian
“Monday probably has a score of one, I think. They have a workflow mode. I'm not sure if they have the other modes. So you're right. Monday, in theory, has a much weaker score, I guess, than Atlassian on this.”
Rajaram: Shopify will not build a competing product to Klaviyo
“I don't think Shopify will build it. Shopify is an investor, and Shopify, I think, has decided, at least in my opinion, that this is, Shopify has these things called missions, and I think they've decided this is not part of their mission to build this product.…”
Rajaram: B2B software switching costs will drop to zero within two years
“I think switching costs is less going to go to essentially zero because over the next one or two years, ability to port data, your data as a business or consumer from any ecosystem to another ecosystem is going to be very easy.”
Rajaram: AI will enable pixel-by-pixel cloning of software products
“And then people are going to be able to replicate almost pixel by pixel. The experience you have with one product in a different products, you'll have clones popping up left, right, and center and data portability is going to be easy in that case.”
Rajaram: Scale is no longer a competitive moat for pure software companies
“Software earlier was a scale game where because you had produced a lot of software, it was cheaper for you to produce a lot of the guess what? Now everybody can produce software as cheaply as anybody else.”
Rajaram: Systems of record must commoditize complementary AI products
“And I think that's the way that a net suite or a sales for the system record needs to operate. They have to commoditize a compliment. They can't just wait around for other people to build on top of them.”
Rajaram: Founder share buybacks provide the strongest confidence signal
“I think the founder buyback is the most, the strongest signal. It's not just the company, but also the founder.”
Rajaram: Bolt-on AI strategies fail unless user experience is fundamentally reframed
“The bolt on AI strategy by itself has a real ceiling, but I think the companies where the bolt on really works are the ones that reframe what the product does, not just add the capability.”
Rajaram: Most bolt-on AI products are thin wrappers over OpenAI or Anthropic
“Most bolt on players are not doing it. They're simply using a GPT or anthropic model. And they're basically just adding a thin layer. You have to rebuild the entire experience end to end.”
Rajaram: Long software roadmaps are rendered obsolete every six months by AI
“Model capabilities are improving every six months because if you have too long a product roadmap, you're going around your program and the model comes and just blows it out of the water. So you've got to really understand what the capabilities are of each new …”
Rajaram: Fintech businesses moving money possess strong and defensible moats
“If you're moving money, you're generally in a good place. So anything touches money, We feel there's a very strong moat there, a much more defensible.”
Rajaram: Data and workflow are the only reliable non-fintech software moats
“Data and workflow moats are the two things you're really hanging your hat on as a software investor, because if you're not doing FinTech and then I think it early stage is too hard to know what a distribution moat is unless they have some hack and these hacks …”
Rajaram: Robinhood has 13 product lines generating over $100M in revenue each
“Robin Hood has 13 product lines now doing over a hundred million in revenue.”
Rajaram: Coinbase has 12 product lines generating over $100M in revenue each
“Coinbase has 12 doing a hundred million revenue.”
Rajaram: Vertical software requires full-stack ownership to surpass $10B valuation
“I think vertical products, you've got to really own full stack. I think it's harder otherwise to be a 10 plus billion dollar company.”
Rajaram: Mid-sized VC funds can return $10B vertical SaaS winners
“If you're a 203 104 hundred million dollar fund, you can absolutely create a ten billion dollar company. Because remember, one of the big changes is that vertical SaaS does take over labor.”
Rajaram: AI replaces labor via BPO cuts, attrition, and finally direct layoffs
“The first thing that's happening is businesses are outsourcing to third party BPOs, many of them in India, Philippines, et cetera. That spend is the easiest to cut because now you can offer the same service, higher quality, faster, and 20, 30% cheaper. The sec…”
Stebbings: Snyk has $300M ARR growing at 15% at $7B valuation
“Your sneaks. Amazing security business that's got great customers who love it, But it was valued at seven billion dollars, and it's now three hundred million ARR growing 15%.”
Rajaram: High-valuation, low-growth startups will become zombies and sell to PE
“A bunch of them are going to become zombie companies, And they're going to try to add AI features as a last resort, not succeed and be sold to PE.”
Rajaram: Intercom's Fin and Podium reached $100M+ ARR from AI products
“Fin great example podium, another great example, both of them with the new products have gone to a hundred plus million in a couple of years.”
Rajaram: AI startups become multi-billion dollar businesses by owning full software stacks
“I believe that there'll be a multi-billion dollar company because earlier, I think they were limited to one part of the stack and they were folk. They were on top of a bunch of systems. Now they're taking over the entire software stack.”
Rajaram: Back founders who aim to replace digital labor across full stacks
“You want founders who are ambitious enough. To go after the entire stack, not just the earlier piece of the stack they were in. And you want to be the only product that the company uses and you want to replace as much of the digital labor as you can possible.”
Rajaram: Seat-based pricing will not die due to enterprise predictability needs
“Seat pricing doesn't die. You know why? If you look at Chad GPT Enterprise is priced based on based on seats, because seats provide predictability for enterprise buyers But they don't drive expansion revenue by themselves.”
Rajaram: Seat pricing fails when AI executes work instead of providing access
“Now, the big challenge is seed based pricing, which you alluded to, is it breaks when the product's core value is not about access, but it's about something doing the work on your behalf. So at that point, charging per user doesn't make sense because user isn'…”
Rajaram: Smaller venture funds lose by copying $10B mega-funds
“Somebody with a ten billion dollar fund is playing a fundamentally different game than somebody with a four hundred million dollar fund and if you try to play the same game there, you're going to lose.”
Rajaram: Jasper's ARR shot from $1M to $100M before falling to $40M
“I think we saw in the first way of AI, we saw many chat GPT, like there was a company called Jasper, not to pick on them, but they went from one to 40, and then they came back from 40 to 10 or something like, or maybe one to a hundred and a hundred to 40 withi…”
Intuit TurboTax thrived despite Microsoft's 1990s Office bundling
“Microsoft tried to crush Intuit again and again and again, back in the eighties and nineties with bundling everything into office, but Intuit TurboTax survived and thrived.”
Rajaram: Gamma will need to launch a second product
“They will need to have a second product. I'm so sure of that. They will need to have a second product.”
Rajaram: Margin expansion should come from price increases, not cost cuts
“So I would rather see margins go up with price increases than cost decreases.”
Rajaram: PayPal raised prices five times in three years early on
“And he told us that PayPal back in the day, raised prices five times. In three years, because there's such stickiness. They knew their customers really couldn't do anything.”
Rajaram: Uber expanded margins continuously by altering driver pay economics
“Uber, I have to say, I don't know how, if they have raised price or not, but I know that they have basically changed the economics of how much they pay drivers over time so that their margins have just expanded continuously. And they've also raised prices in d…”
Rajaram: Veeva Systems went public with only four customers
“Look at Viva. They went public with four customers. Four customers.”
Rajaram: Underestimating Shopify was his biggest market-size misread
“I remember seeing Shopify at a billion and I was like, how many, E-commerce merchants out there really. And that, or maybe even before, but in one of the early rounds, Tam felt really concerned. I think what I missed was that Shopify was not just selling e-com…”
Rajaram: Venture capital is about betting on new behaviors, not existing markets
“That's in some ways what venture is all about. It's not about existing. It's about new behaviors and betting on that.”
Rajaram: Zuckerberg refused to anonymize Facebook in Japan and won
“I remember when Facebook had to go into Japan, Japanese cultural norms were that all the Japanese social networks back then were incognito. You couldn't, for some reason, maybe saving face or something. You could not share your real name or your photo. So ever…”
Rajaram: Moritz's Instacart investment was the top VC bet ever
“I think the best venture capital, I, someone asked me what's the best venture capital bets. I talk about a paradoxical one. I think it's Mike Moritz betting on Instacart. Why? Because he lost three hundred and seventy million on web van less than a decade ago.…”
Rajaram: Faire seed investment generated a 100x to 200x return
“I, for example, I invested in the seed round affair at Back in the, this is about eight, nine years ago, twenty million, which is very expensive received on that. It was the highest price YC deal at that point. I think it's been a hundred or 200 X for me.”
Rajaram: Series B and growth valuations destroy venture returns
“Now I think the B, I think B plus that's when strides price starts destroying returns. I think by then you got real revenue, real traction. You got to, you can pick a generally good company and still get crushed.”
Rajaram: Benchmark made money on WeWork by investing early
“Even in V work benchmark made money. Genchmark made money at WeWork because they invested early enough.”
Rajaram: You cannot build a Series A fund at $300M–$400M valuations
“Maybe you can do a couple of deals like that, but I don't think you can build a series A fund doing deals at three or four hundred million. Because it's not going to be enough ownership. These, some of these are going to fail, et cetera. But most deals, I thin…”
Rajaram: LPs should backchannel a VC's last five founders
“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're invested in, why did this founder pick this firm?”
Founder Collective never participates in follow-on rounds or pro-rata
“Founder Collective only does first checks. They never do any pro rata afterwards, period.”
Rajaram: Founders Fund's performance stems from heavily doubling down on winners
“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.”
Rajaram: Napoleon Ta decides which companies Founders Fund doubles down on
“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.”
Stebbings: Linear will be the primary fund returner for 20VC Fund 1
“My fun one could have been, which you're an Alpean, and I'm very grateful to you for supporting me when I was 1819 but it could have been at one point the Hopin Fund, it could have been the Clubhouse Fund and it turns out that it will most likely be the Linear…”
Rajaram: Portfolio concentration removes venture capital deployment pressure
“Remember what being concentrated does. It gives you more time. It gives you more time to meet companies. It gives more time to think. It gives you more time to be helpful to companies, but you don't feel the pressure to deploy on a monthly basis.”
Rajaram: Green Oaks averages just 11 portfolio companies per fund
“Six, there's seven funds have basically what, 65 companies overall, or six funds are 65 companies, 11 companies per fund.”
Rajaram: Startups must avoid competing directly on Google's primary roadmap
“If you're a startup, which is directly in Google's roadmap, like directly, you should not be building it because Google is very good when something is directly in order. They're like a tank. It will just roll over you even slowly, slowly, but it doesn't matter…”
Rajaram: Passing on Vanta is one of his biggest investment regrets
“That's why I think my biggest regret is one of my biggest regrets is actually passing on Vanta because I met Christina But I had already committed. I was like, this person is going to win the market, but I've already committed to another company in the space. …”
Stebbings: Investors should automatically follow deal recommendations from Elad Gil
“Elad sent me and he was like, dude, this is amazing. This is amazing. Every time Elad sent me something and said, it's amazing. Just fucking do it. Do not think you're smarter is my takeaway there.”
Rajaram held Figma angel investment for 13 years until IPO
“As an angel, I used to hold till IPO. So Figma had many liquidity opportunities during the years, but I kept, kept holding it for 13 years till it went public.”
Rajaram: Most early-stage venture firms focus on MOIC instead of IRR
“One of the things I think most early stage firms get wrong is they just focus on Moik. They don't focus on IRR.”
Rajaram: VC funds must sell if go-forward IRR trails fund target
“If you go forward IRR at every liquidity opportunity is lower Then what you are basically promising your LPs or what you think your fund should have. I think you should sell. I think you have an obligation to LPs to at least sell.”
Rajaram: Passed on Quince at $100M valuation before $10B raise
“Quince recently raised a ten billion. I saw Quince four years ago when it was at a hundred million valuation. And I was like a D to C company. D to C companies are kind of on the downswing. How, how good can this company be? What do you know, so I literally ju…”
Quince achieved a 35% to 40% repeat purchase rate at $100M valuation
“Quince, for example, had an incredible 35 to 40% repeat purchase rate, which was like higher retention than most consumer apps, and so I should have paid more attention to that versus dismissing it.”
Rajaram: First Round Capital includes 80 companies per fund
“First round capital, I think, is one of the best seed firms. Guess how many companies they have in each fund? 80 companies.”
Rajaram: Marathon will not invest in frontier AI labs at billion-dollar valuations
“Not possible. I don't think with our fund it's possible. I think the ownership is just literally the first round for these companies is, like you said, a billion dollars. So I think it's just too high a, the risk reward is just not worth it.”
Rajaram: Mega funds use $15M Series A checks as options
“They've basically gone and they deploy fifteen million dollar checks almost as an option and a lead lead generation for the next run. And the strategy is obviously to have an index at the A of every single good A company and then double down on the ones that t…”
Rajaram: Partner departures leave mega fund startups orphaned
“We see many examples actually in mega funds of partners leaving the fund and the companies orphaned within the mega fund because their partner has left. And now they don't have a single person to advocate for them in any way, shape or form, and they're adrift.”
Rajaram: Mega fund investors will continue spinning out into smaller funds
“I think we are going to see a more spin out. I do think there is a limit, but I do think you're going to see the, you're going to see these mega funds train again, more waves of investors. And these investors are going to realize that being a mid-level partner…”
Rajaram: Pure remote work fails for early-stage startups
“I used to think pure remote would scale for early stage companies if you have the right culture, but I don't think that anymore. I think you've got to be in person at least a few days a week.”
Rajaram: University grads should work two to three years before founding startups
“My strong advice is to first get two to three years of work experience at a company, at a good company. You won't regret it. You learn a lot. Both the experience and the network of people will be invaluable for you. So just two or three years, don't be impatie…”
Rajaram ranks Page, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Xu as top CEOs
“I would say the best technical CEO, Larry Page, the best growth-centric CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, The best design-centric CEO, Jack Dorsey, and the best physical world operational CEO, the most likely to be Jeff Bezos next, Tony Xu.”
Rajaram achieved a 500x to 1,000x return on his Figma angel investment
“Five of, between 500 and a thousand X at the time of IPO, but it has sadly gone down since then.”