# 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 being a founder-CEO. Hosted by Nakul Mandan, founder of Audacious Ventures. Operating playbooks, not highlight reels.

Each episode page has an editorial intro, a guest bio with named entities, a question-shaped chapter list (timestamped), standalone key quotes, and the full speaker-labeled transcript.

## Episodes

- [Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) — Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode"](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/guillermo-rauch): 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](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/will-bryk): Will Bryk, co-founder and CEO of Exa, is building web search for AI agents - and betting a first-time founder can take on Google. Five years in, Exa powers search for Cursor, Cognition, and 5,000+ companies, and has raised $250M at a $2.2B valuation led by a16z. Will explains why he kills process before it lays eggs, screens out NPC hires, and why nothing at Exa should ever take a month to ship.
- [Garrett Lord (Handshake) — Handshake's remarkable refounding: a lesson in how the next AI fortunes get made](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/garrett-lord): Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake, took Handshake AI from zero to $1 billion in gross revenue in about 15 months - effectively refounding his $3.5 billion career network around it. He walks through incubating the new business inside a profitable one, moving his strongest people over, holding 'Olympic Pace' as around 100 people left, and what the bear case on human data misses.
- [James Cadwallader (Profound) — How everyone will do marketing by 2027: ”Marketing engineers” and agents as the audience](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/james-cadwallader): James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, on why marketing is about to change more than it has in 25 years - your customer is now an AI agent. Twenty-one months after launch, Profound is a $1B company helping brands like Target and Walmart shape how ChatGPT talks about them. On marketing engineers, the new bottleneck when ideas cost nothing to produce, and the six-day-a-week culture he calls Profound's best product.
- [Immad Akhund (Mercury) — Building a $5b company without 996](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/immad-akhund): Immad Akhund has built Mercury into a $5B+ co on his own terms: anti-996, still remote-first while Silicon Valley snapped back to fully in person, and hiring for curiosity and humility. The throughline is that he optimized early to be a founder for life, not for a sprint. In this conversation, Immad walks me through how that philosophy actually runs a 1,200-person company. 
- [Cameron McCord (Nominal) — Startup lessons Silicon Valley won’t teach you](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/cameron-mccord): Cameron McCord spent 484 days underwater. As a submarine officer in the US Navy, he learned to run a reactor in a space where the crew sees you 24/7, even brushing your teeth, and where there is no “later” to sort out a disagreement.
- [Akshay Kothari (Notion) — Business used to be go karting. Now it's Formula 1.](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/akshay-kothari): Akshay Kothari has spent most of his time at Notion trying to put himself out of a job. His move, repeated for years, is to run at whatever the company’s biggest unsolved problem is, build the system around it, hire someone great to own it, and then remove him
- [Ashwin Sreenivas (Decagon) — Behind the curtain of a $4.5b AI-native powerhouse](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/ashwin-sreenivas): Ashwin Sreenivas spent his childhood in India waking up at 5am and studying until 8:30 at night. History, geography, physics, chemistry, math.
- [Michael Grinich (WorkOS) — $50M ARR With 3 sales reps, no CRO, and one PM](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/michael-grinich): Michael Grinich is a design-obsessed engineer who once spent days in a recording studio with an electronic musician crafting the perfect email notification sound. He now runs WorkOS, the $50M (accelerating) ARR enterprise infrastructure business powering nearl
- [Bipul Sinha (Rubrik) — Nobody knows anything, product market fit is dead, and there's only one moat](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/bipul-sinha): Bipul Sinha grew up in dire circumstances in India, made his way to IIT, and immigrated to the US in search of the American dream. By 40 he had become a successful VC at Lightspeed; he then founded Rubrik, today a $10 billion public company and one of the last
- [Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition) — Battle-tested playbooks for recuriting, reading the market, and adapting to AI](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/qasar-younis): Qasar Younis grew up on a farm in Pakistan, moved to Detroit as a kid, and worked at General Motors before landing at Google and becoming COO of Y Combinator. He then founded Applied Intuition, today a $15 billion company building AI for the physical world.
- [Frank Slootman (Snowflake) — Frank Slootman on what most CEOs get wrong](https://www.knuckleup.co/episodes/frank-slootman): Frank Slootman is the only CEO in history to take three enterprise companies public: Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. At their peak, the companies he led were worth over $200 billion combined.

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