The {Closed} Session
Tom Chavez, Vivek Vaidya, super{set}
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Top 10 The {Closed} Session Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The {Closed} Session episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The {Closed} Session for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The {Closed} Session episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Creating a People-First Performance Culture for Startups
The {Closed} Session
02/07/24 • 50 min
Talent and career development in startups is typically nonexistent - so at super{set}, we're changing that. While a startup’s opportunities for rapid growth and trial by fire are incredible, we believe startup employees can still benefit from intentional mentorship and development. No - it's not about bringing in professional coaches who lack hands-on company-building expertise. And no, it's more than advice from the balcony unmarried to what life is actually like in the startup trenches.
Joining Tom and Vivek in the studio are the first graduates of super{set}’s coaching program for its employees: Jen D’Amico (Head of Business Development at Ketch), Anupam Gupta (Head of Customer Success at Ketch), and Ted Flanagan (Chief Customer Officer at Habu, recently Acquired by LiveRamp).
How can startups improve outcomes by becoming more self-aware and assessing strengths and development areas better? How can entrepreneurs create the soil conditions for their employees to perform, even within the fast-paced startup environment? What advice do Jen, Anupam, and Ted have for startup employees - and the founders at the helm - around the globe?
Join us in the first episode of Season 5 of The {Closed} Session!
Listen (or watch) all episodes of The {Closed} Session at www.theclosedsession.com
Learn more about Ketch at www.ketch.com
Learn more about Habu (acquired by LiveRamp) at www.habu.com
Learn more about super{set} - including co-founding with us and open roles across our portfolio of companies - at
Calling BULLSHIT
The {Closed} Session
11/02/22 • 25 min
A core value at super{set} is passion. Life is too short to phone it in. We bring our authentic selves to work and give our employees the opportunity to do their best. Yes, this extends to the podcast, too - so Tom and Vivek bring their most authentic selves to the pod this episode with some hot takes as they call BULLSHIT.
Whether it’s VCs, remote work and productivity, or fetishizing the CEO - we got the takes in this episode. Listen to what’s on Tom and Vivek’s “fuck-it list.”
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.
Early Stage Customers
The {Closed} Session
09/06/22 • 52 min
super{set} is in the business of solving real-world problems, meaning disentangling actual customer problems - not building a product in a vacuum because it looked cool to us. You can’t wait for every feature of your product to be built before you start having conversations - and testing the market-message fit. As your product launches, early customers are less about maximizing revenue streams (mistakes will be made along the way: customers will fire you) and more about earning valuable product feedback before the scale stage for your company. Metrics like ACV and ARR don’t matter in the earliest stages. What matters is losing the fear of failure to rally the entire company - not just a sales team in a corner - to land those customers and learn from them.
Tom and Vivek chat about how founders must experience the thrill of being in the sales arena, even if they aren’t from a sales background, and how entrepreneurs must show up to those early conversations with high conviction, even if the product isn’t there. They then discuss the staging and sequencing for building out the anthropological customer profile, ensuring a feedback loop to product, and evolving from founder-led sales to standing up a proper BDR function. Finally, special guest Matt Kilmartin, CEO of Habu, joins to give his perspective on operating as a former Chief Revenue Officer and his current role as a founder and CEO scaling a Series B cloud data technology company.
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.com
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The Product Heist
The {Closed} Session
07/29/22 • 45 min
super{set} is unabashedly all about building great products. We have to be: all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and the easy things in tech have all been done before. It used to be a couple of engineers (or even a lone engineer), a bunch of functional and technical specs, and six months later you’ve built something. Doesn’t work that way anymore. The ecosystems, the platforms, and the problems to be solved are much more complex - and on top of this, the speed at which product has to be built and evolve has never been faster. The paradox is that even while the founder and the product team have to be on a swivel, moving at light speed, organized thinking and careful planning have never been more critical.
Tom and Vivek describe how building the best product is like planning the perfect heist. Like Danny Ocean, it always pays off to spend the time upfront to plan every move and contingency carefully. It’s not about building cool tech for the sake of cool tech: always keep the big prize in mind. To get into the Casino, you need an insertion product - something perfectly timed for the market and your first customers. And you need to identify the perfect customer - the guy on the inside - to make it happen. Finally, to drill inside the safe and make the escape, know that no plan fully survives contact with the enemy. But that doesn’t mean your product roadmap can’t peer around the corners and anticipate the needs and challenges of the future.
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.com
People, First: Co-founding at super{set}
The {Closed} Session
06/13/22 • 30 min
Everything we do, every company we build is based on a philosophy of “People, Product, Customers” - in that order. We mean it: people first. We don’t build alone. At every company we start, we do it alongside a talented product-oriented co-founder whom we recruit to join us. Our success is predicated on starting with the best outside talent.
Tom and Vivek share what they look for in the very first hire for every super{set} company: a Head of Product Co-founder with grit, humility, organized thinking, and clock speed. They discuss why the Head of Product is the first hire and their views on the Product Manager role and discipline in the context of their decades of experience in Silicon Valley. Finally, Pankaj Rajan joins for a Q&A - about where he was before super{set}, his previous startup scar tissue, what he is doing at MarkovML (super{set}’s new MLOps company), and how his experience as a super{set} co-founder has been so far.
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.com
New Venture Ideation
The {Closed} Session
05/02/22 • 33 min
Good ideas are hard work.
Nobody plucks tech startup ideas out of the air like butterflies. Ideas actualize over time. It takes hard work and persistence to ideate a new formation opportunity that will have the wherewithal to become a company.
Tom and Vivek make the distinction between ideas rooted in data versus software, and why super{set} pursues only these data-driven ideas.
Not all ideas are easily comprehensible from the get-go. Some ideas are straightforward and clear - like making kids' boxed mac and cheese - and others take a bit more work to unfold - like a delicious, steamy, Michelin star soufflé. At super{set}, we discern one from the other through writing a detailed Solution Memo.
Similarly, not every idea makes it out of the kitchen and onto the dining table. At the ideation stage, Tom and Vivek think about market-message fit. Market-message fit is the proto product-market fit. It is estimating product-market fit before the product even exists.
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.com
The Studio Model
The {Closed} Session
04/13/22 • 34 min
What's a startup studio? Is it just "venture capital" with another name?
It's still early for the studio model - case in point, people still are asking "you have a fund right? aren't you just a venture capital firm with a different label?"
Tom and Vivek detail just what we're doing at super{set} - what the model is, how we're different from VC, craftsmanship versus critique, what's in it for LP's, and most of all what's in it for co-founders?
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.com
To SPAC or not to SPAC
The {Closed} Session
06/18/21 • 38 min
Back to the Office, Kinda Sorta
The {Closed} Session
04/10/21 • 42 min
When and Why to Bring on VCs
The {Closed} Session
11/16/22 • 36 min
We have a venture fund at super{set} but aren’t Venture Capitalists. What’s the difference? We’re operators, while the VCs are helpers. The best VCs come in asking the catalytic questions that encapsulate risks and delineate opportunities, but they aren't hands-on with the company. They know when they are needed and when they are not.
In the over-caffeinated recent years, seed investments have started to look like Series A. And it reminds us a lot of Tom and Vivek’s first foray into entrepreneurship - Rapt, which began in 1999. Rapt’s Series B was much larger than Krux’s Series B over a decade later, yet Krux had the more robust exit.
It’s not that we are proponents of bootstrapping - taking on outside investors for your company is necessary to move at the speed of business today - it’s that the right sized check at the right time is what matters.
That’s why part of our model at super{set} is giving seed-stage co-founders the space to be disciplined about product, product, product in the earliest stages. We create the soil conditions and the capital so that great entrepreneurs can focus on company-building, not pitching outside investors.
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.
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FAQ
How many episodes does The {Closed} Session have?
The {Closed} Session currently has 50 episodes available.
What topics does The {Closed} Session cover?
The podcast is about Tech, Venture Capital, Management, Entrepreneurship, Startups, Podcasts, Ceo, Business and Artificial Intelligence.
What is the most popular episode on The {Closed} Session?
The episode title 'super{set} Celebrates First Exit: LiveRamp Acquires Habu for $200M' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The {Closed} Session?
The average episode length on The {Closed} Session is 36 minutes.
How often are episodes of The {Closed} Session released?
Episodes of The {Closed} Session are typically released every 28 days.
When was the first episode of The {Closed} Session?
The first episode of The {Closed} Session was released on Feb 1, 2019.
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