Cats are 40% of the pet market, but are somehow still chronically overlooked. Every innovation goes to dogs first. Even your vet's office is built for dogs first. Matt Michaelson, cofounder and CEO of Smalls, and his team have built an incredible cat-first brand precisely because of that blind spot. In this episode, I sit down with Matt to break down: • Why the cat industry is structurally underinvested (which includes VCs simply saying "I don't really like cats") • What "human-grade" actually means for pet food — and the sustainability trade-offs nobody talks about • Ingredient splitting: the regulatory hack that lets pet brands disguise what's actually in the bag • "Wrestling in the mud": a feedback culture where every hire is expected to disagree • Founders Pledge, and why committing 5% early changes the giving conversation later Big thanks to Matt for coming on the pod and sharing the playbook behind Smalls.

Anduril: $5B raise, $61B valuation. The same week was the largest defense-tech VC week on record. Silicon Valley is re-enlisting — and it's worth remembering the Valley was born defense (Fairchild → Minuteman, Apollo → ~60% of all ICs, DARPA → ARPANET). Then it drifted. Cold War wound down in '91, the web arrived in '93, and by the late 2000s the dominant Valley archetype — Google, Facebook, Twitter — had near-zero federal exposure. The near-divorce hardened in 2018, when 3,000 Googlers signed the letter that killed Project Maven. The reversal came quietly: Palantir (In-Q-Tel → 2020 IPO → $300B ), Anduril (founded 2017 to rebuild a prime the Valley way), SpaceX (the Pentagon's biggest launch provider). Today's Stanford/MIT grads compete for the offers that were career suicide in 2018. What changed? A hot geopolitical backdrop, DoD on-ramps (Replicator, OTAs) that fit startup timelines, and a founder generation that decided ceding the frontier was the bigger ethical risk. The $5B isn't the story. The story is there's no longer a contradiction. Full piece: interplay.vc/blog/silicon-va…

holy shit. it happened they just edited human embryo DNA. this is the beginning of the end of genetic diseases.

Most law firms are already using AI, but agentic AI is a whole different level. It doesn't just generate content. It qualifies leads, routes inquiries, triggers follow-ups, and flags bottlenecks automatically. See how it fits into your intake workflow: na2.hubs.ly/H05X4-g0

US manufacturing output is rising. Headcount is not. Q1 2026 BLS: factory productivity 3.6% — 5x the rest of the economy. Output up, hours down. That's the AI/automation story showing up in government data. interplay.vc/blog/manufactur…

US manufacturing PMI: 52.7 in April — 4 straight months in expansion. Factory construction: $189B SAAR — 2.5x the pre-CHIPS baseline. Soft and hard data agree. That is rare. interplay.vc/blog/us-manufac…

We’re excited to announce that @KnotAPIs is now available within @Q2_Software. For years, credit unions and community banks have faced the same challenge: delivering the modern experiences customers expect without the engineering resources of the largest institutions. That gap has made it increasingly difficult to compete for top-of-wallet. Today, that changes. The 1,000 credit unions and community banks running on Q2 can now enable Knot’s CardSwitcher™ with just a few clicks. Cardholders can seamlessly set their card as the default payment method across Amazon, Netflix, DoorDash, Uber, and many of the merchants that drive recurring and everyday spend. Huge thank you to the team at Q2 for partnering with us. We believe the future of banking belongs to the institutions that make it effortless for customers to choose them, and we’re proud to help bring those capabilities to financial institutions of every size.

The elevator pitch is dead. For years, founders have been coached to cram their entire business into a 60-second monologue, in case they corner a VC in an elevator. That's not how real conversations work — and it's not how investors decide what to look at next. When I meet a founder and ask what they're working on, I want a normal answer. One sentence. "We're helping people do X by offering a service that does Y." If I'm interested, I'll ask questions. If I'm not, I'll say so and we both move on. A canned, rapid-fire pitch doesn't make me lean in. It makes me wonder why you're talking at me instead of with me. The founders who actually raise well speak plainly about their business, answer questions directly, and send a clean executive summary afterward. The pitch isn't a performance. It's the start of a conversation. If you're prepping to fundraise, throw out the script. Be able to explain what you do in plain English, and trust the investor to ask for the rest. From The Fundraising Rules — the chapter on getting the meeting.

Venture studios are quietly becoming one of the most effective models for company creation, but most people still don't understand what happens inside one. For this podcast episode I sat down with @AndyBilinsky, Partner at Interplay leading our Studio, to break down exactly how we build companies from the ground up. During our conversation, we covered: - What a venture studio actually is and how it differs from traditional VC - Why we research industries deeply before ever writing a business plan - The role of operating partners as true co-founders - Why second- and third-time founders are choosing to build with a studio instead of going solo - How Interplay went from 3 new companies in Q4 2025 to targeting 10 in 2026 Big thanks to Andy for pulling back the curtain on how we build. Grateful to have him here at Interplay.

"VC is back" is a misread. Q1 2026 hit an all-time record — and 43% of it was one round (OpenAI, $122B). Strip out four AI labs and the other 5,996 startups split what was left. There are two venture markets right now. Most founders live in one of them. interplay.vc/blog/two-ventur…

B2B procurement is getting a complete overhaul. Not incremental improvement. A full rebuild of the stack, from the agents executing purchases to the ERPs integrating them to the payment rails settling transactions. @navya_prab breaks down where the opportunity is for investors and builders: interplay.vc/blog/the-future…

Most founders treat fundraising like a finish line. It isn't. It's a pit stop. You stop racing for a few weeks. Fresh tires, souped-up engine, the right advisors on board. If the raise doesn't make you faster after, you ran the wrong play.

You can have a great team, a real problem, and a working product — and still fail because you're not in a big enough market. Market size isn't just a slide in a pitch deck. It's the single biggest factor that determines whether a startup can return a venture fund. We covered the key criteria for evaluating whether your idea is big enough — market size, scalability, venture potential, and whether the pain is real: lnkd.in/eQmHkhrk

Most VCs fund <1% of what they see. That means 99 of every 100 founders hear no — and founders take their company personally. It's their baby. A successful VC has to tell 99% of parents their baby isn't the one. Don't take the no personally. The math forces it.

The biggest mistake founders make with their board: they treat the meeting like a status update. Good board meetings flip the ratio. 45 min on KPIs, two hours on the one strategic problem you're actually wrestling with. That's where boards earn their keep.

We’re excited to announce that @KnotAPIs is now live with @CashApp. The Cash App Card is one of the largest debit card programs in the United States. With Knot's CardSwitcher™, Cash App cardholders can instantly add their card across the merchants they use most, including Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Uber, and 100 more, without ever leaving the app. Cash App has always focused on creating intuitive financial experiences. Knot builds on that by driving activation and spend for Cash App, reducing churn and abandoned carts for merchants, and giving users a frictionless way to use their Cash App Card. We’re proud to power an even more seamless Cash App Card experience and excited for what’s ahead. More to come.

Keep in mind - they'll only be better tomorrow. Humanoid robots have arrived.