Village Global Podcast

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.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

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

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.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

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.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

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