Knuckle Up with Nakul

The HOW of building iconic companies.

Founders who’ve done it at the highest level on recruiting, culture, intensity, and the inner game of the job. With Nakul Mandan.

latest · ep 12
Guillermo Rauch. Vercel.

Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel - the $9.3B AI cloud company behind Next.js and v0 - explains "Recursive Founder Mode": finding people who are founders at heart and making them CEOs of their own products. He covers why he's still involved in every hire at nearly 800 people, how V - the internal agent Vercel runs on - replaced ticket queues and bent the headcount curve, the new engineering meta skill when models write the code, and where his energy actually comes from.

Will Bryk. Exa.
How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity
Aug 4
Garrett Lord. Handshake.
Handshake's remarkable refounding: a lesson in how the next AI fortunes get made
Jul 21
James Cadwallader. Profound.
How everyone will do marketing by 2027: ”Marketing engineers” and agents as the audience
Jul 7
Immad Akhund. Mercury.
Building a $5b company without 996
Jun 23
Cameron McCord. Nominal.
Startup lessons Silicon Valley won’t teach you
Jun 9
Akshay Kothari. Notion.
Business used to be go karting. Now it's Formula 1.
May 27
Ashwin Sreenivas. Decagon.
Behind the curtain of a $4.5b AI-native powerhouse
May 19
Michael Grinich. WorkOS.
$50M ARR With 3 sales reps, no CRO, and one PM
May 7
Bipul Sinha. Rubrik.
Nobody knows anything, product market fit is dead, and there's only one moat
Apr 30
Qasar Younis. Applied Intuition.
Battle-tested playbooks for recuriting, reading the market, and adapting to AI
Apr 21
Frank Slootman. Snowflake.
Frank Slootman on what most CEOs get wrong
Apr 14