To stand out with investors in an AI-saturated market, prove your right to win both today and five years from now. Medha Agarwal, General Partner at Defy VC, says sleek decks and cold outreach no longer differentiate anyone, because everyone has the same tools. What sets a founder apart is a clear narrative about why they’re uniquely suited to win a market, and a proactive point of view on how customer needs, pricing, and defensibility will hold up as AI reshapes the landscape.
Meet Medha Agarwal and Defy VC
Medha Agarwal is a General Partner at Defy VC, an early-stage venture firm backing founders building enduring companies. Defy writes first checks at inception through Series A, primarily leads its rounds, and invests as a generalist across vertical software, healthcare, fintech, supply chain and logistics, data and infrastructure, and even some consumer.
A former co-founder herself, Medha started her career in consulting, moved into entrepreneurship where she helped build two companies, and has spent more than a decade in venture capital. Her operating background runs deep, from doing back-office work for her father’s business as a kid to the grunt work of early startups, including a summer spent transcribing voice notes into documents.
That operating empathy is a defining feature of Defy. Everyone on the team has started and built companies before, which Medha says changes the conversation and the relationship the firm has with its founders. The partnership goes well past the check. The team talks with founders weekly, sometimes several times a week, through Slack channels, text, and email rather than only scheduled board meetings. The goal is to build enough trust that founders raise concerns early, so problems get diagnosed and fixed fast and nothing waits for a formal update to surface.
How Do You Stand Out When Pitching VCs in an AI-Saturated Market?
Ten-plus years on the investor side have given Medha a clear read on what separates the founders who break through. And lately, that starts with a question every founder is now up against. In a market flooded with AI, how do you actually stand out?
The tools that used to signal effort no longer signal much of anything. Everyone can generate a polished deck, and cold outreach can now reach hundreds of investors at once. When the surface layer looks identical across the board, differentiation has to come from substance.
Medha’s tactical starting point? Get an introduction if you can.
“I would get an intro if you can…that does make a difference on whether someone’s going to take the meeting or not.”
~Medha Agarwal
AI is Changing Startup Pricing and Defensibility
Once you’re in the room, the differentiator is your narrative about why you deserve to exist and win, not just now but years out. Medha says she thinks far more existentially than she did a decade ago, precisely because startup costs have collapsed and AI has sped up cycles for everyone.
Far more companies are reaching meaningful early-stage revenue than when Medha entered venture, when a million dollars in run-rate revenue was a rare milestone. Today, getting to a working prototype is cheaper than ever, and there are more buyers willing to test and sign up, so revenue alone says less than it used to. The harder questions are about defensibility and durability.
Her advice is to put your narrative on the future proactively, rather than leaving investors to question it and reach their own conclusions. Paint the picture yourself. Do your buyer’s needs stay the same or shift? Is today’s product the destination or a stepping stone? What are you building toward? Founders who answer those questions before they’re asked control the story.
“Conveying your right to exist and win both today and five, ten years from now is important.”
~Medha Agarwal
Pricing is where this gets concrete. Medha likes the business models AI has enabled, where companies charge for work or for outcomes rather than seats. Often that pricing is benchmarked against the cost of a human doing the same job.
That’s the defensibility question in disguise. If the comparison today is a 40- or 50-dollar-an-hour human, what happens when there are fewer humans who can do that work and it gets more expensive, or when competition drives the price down? Medha wants founders to know their effective revenue in that future state, normalized against today. As much as the math itself, she wants the conversation: what are you hearing from customers, what is your hypothesis, and how are you positioning to capture as much value as you can?
On the whole, Medha is optimistic, and specific about why. Defy is meeting founders who solve big, real problems for buyers that are unusually willing to try something new, in markets that used to be almost impossible to break into. What she finds most compelling is the human payoff. A task that once took five hours and failed 70% of the time is now automated to 80% completion. Patients get their medications and services faster because AI is finally cutting through healthcare’s red tape. Those are the outcomes that keep her bullish on where startups are headed.
Parting Advice for Early-Stage Founders
Medha Agarwal’s closing advice returns to two themes.
The first is to zoom out on a regular cadence. It’s easy to get consumed by execution, hitting the next milestone, signing the next customer, clearing the next POC, and lose sight of whether you’re pointed in the right direction. In a fast-moving world, she says, founders need to reevaluate more frequently and more thoughtfully whether the thing they are doing is still the right thing, and whether the feedback is telling them to double down or to turn five degrees, ninety, or a full 180.
The second is hiring, which she calls a superpower. Start hiring for the roles you will need three to six months out, before you feel short-staffed. By the time you feel the gap, it is usually too late.
“In this environment where so much amazing talent is getting sucked up by the large AI companies, it really feels like a knife fight on the hiring front. People are more efficient than ever, but they still need people. Work your way backwards from how long it takes to find someone, have them quit, onboard, and ramp. It can be intimidating how far in advance you have to start.” ~Medha Agarwal
📄Related Article: 10 Ways Startups Can Compete with Big Companies for Top Talent
Learn More
Thank you to Medha Agarwal for joining Startup Success. The conversation covered how founders can stand out to investors in an AI-saturated market, how Defy evaluates founder-market fit, and how AI is reshaping pricing, defensibility, and hiring. Learn more about Defy VC at Defy.vc, or connect with Medha on LinkedIn.
For more tools and resources to help you on your own startup journey, subscribe to the Startup Success podcast and visit burklandassociates.com.
Brenda Hernández Jaimes: Podcast Producer & Talent Coordinator, Ellas Media
Angela R. Chong: Audio Editor & Post-Production Producer, Amplify Podcasts
- AI is changing pricing, so pressure-test the ROI math. Outcome-based and work-based pricing often benchmarks against human labor cost today. Founders should have a view on what that math looks like in three to five years.
- Speed of learning is a differentiator. In a world of finite time and capital, how quickly a team reads signals, iterates, and course-corrects separates the winners.
- A warm intro still moves the needle. With cold outreach easier than ever, an introduction is often what decides whether a busy investor takes the meeting.
- Hiring is a superpower. With large AI companies absorbing top talent, work backward from how long hiring really takes and start months before you feel short-staffed.
Intro 00:01
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest-growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Kate 00:18
Welcome to Startup Success. In this episode, I sit down with Medha Argarwal, general partner at Defy VC, an early-stage venture firm investing in founders building enduring companies across fintech, SaaS, and AI. We explore what truly makes a startup stand out to investors, how venture firms can meaningfully support founders beyond capital, and how AI is reshaping everything from defensibility to pricing models and go-to-market strategy. Medha also shares her perspective on today’s fundraising environment and what founders need to do to break through in an increasingly crowded market. Let’s get started. So it’s so great to have you here today. Thanks for taking the time.
Medha 01:13
Thanks for having me, Kate.
Kate 01:15
Yes. So it’s always good for our listeners if we can just kind of set the stage a little bit. If you wouldn’t mind sharing your background and what led you to Defy, that would be helpful.
Medha 01:26
Of course. So a little bit about me. I started my career after college in consulting. I didn’t last very long, I guess, is what you could say in consulting. I loved the work and the people, but it didn’t feel like it was a good match for how I thought about risk and reward, so I ended up actually going into entrepreneurship afterwards. I’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur. There’s a lot of not tech. Back then, it wasn’t tech entrepreneurship, now there is, but we were kind of like small business entrepreneurship. And so I used to grow. I grew up actually weekend summers helping do kind of like back-office operations and stuff for my dad, like he was always tinkering. And so I love seeing what you could build. You know, if you have an idea and put the effort in, what you can build and create. And I had no illusions for you know the grandeur of it. I spent an entire summer, basically transcribing documents, like voice notes into documents. So you know, I’d done kind of all the grunt work as an example of the types of things I did. So ended up working on two companies, and then moved into venture actually after that, and have been in venture for the last 10 plus years across a few different firms, and have loved it. Feel really grateful for what I do. Joined Defy because of the awesome team and the mix of kind of investing experience, but also building. Everyone around the table here has started and built companies before and has the empathy for that for the seat that our founders sit in, which I think is really important, and just changes the conversation and the relationship that we have with our founders.
Kate 03:07
That’s interesting. I was gonna note that the fact that you had that experience of being, you know, an entrepreneur, I’m sure really helps. But then you shared that everyone at Defy does?
Medha 03:21
Yes.
Kate 03:22
Wow, that’s unique.
Medha 03:24
Yeah we think so and and and we think it’s important and we hear it from founders we talk to how our approach and you know the feeling of trust that they get in being able to talk to us and the you know being vulnerable with us and and how we really roll up our sleeves to help is really different from other folks.
Kate 03:44
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, because to have that perspective makes a big difference I think. So let’s talk a little bit about Defy. First, if you wouldn’t mind just sharing, like, what stage, what sectors you tend to invest in.
Medha 04:00
Yeah. So we do everything from inception, so writing that first check as someone has an idea, through Series A. We primarily lead. We are generalist investors, so we’ll look across most industries. I specifically have historically spent a lot of time in vertical software, healthcare, fintech, supply chain logistics. I have a teammate that spends a lot of time in data and infrastructure. We even do some consumer. So, we’re very much generalists in the types of things that we look at. We’re really orienting around the founder and market and the kind of founder-market fit of the businesses that we’re investing in.
Kate 04:45
Okay, so that is more important than the actual sector.
Medha 04:49
Yeah, I mean we look at the confluence of the two are definitely important for us.
Kate 04:55
Okay, okay, that makes sense. And so you lead most of your rounds. Interesting.
Medha 05:00
Yes, we do. Yeah.
Kate 05:01
And you said from the first check all the way through to Series A. Wow. So that’s a lot of flexibility for people listening, that you look at a lot of different types of companies. You don’t see that as much.
Medha 05:16
We definitely do. I think the throughline is that they’re early. Even Series A companies, they’ve achieved a lot and done a lot, and they’re in a really exciting inflection point. But our hope is that it’s the beginning.
Kate 05:30
Right. Right.
Medha 05:31
A lot more to come, and I think another throughline is a lot of our founders we’ve either known for a really long time or had been introduced to us through someone we really trust
Kate 05:44
Okay.
Medha 05:45
and value their opinion either in that sector or their network or or you know their read on people and opportunities and of all the opportunity sets out there I think we do some thesis work, but we also really value these strong relationships and the the people that they’re sending our way, and we want to meet them as early as possible.
Kate 06:04
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and we hear it over and over again on this show from investors how important the founder is. Just again and again, it’s been a recurrent theme.
Medha 06:15
Yeah, I think different people have different perspectives on it, but I think at the end of the day, it’s about people and relationships and all aspects of
Kate 06:25
Right
Medha 06:25
of company building. So, yeah.
Kate 06:28
Makes a lot of sense. So you said something when you were talking about Defy that you know everyone has a business background, and you really like to help founders. Let’s get into that a little because I do know from what I know about your firm that is unique, the way you partner with your founders is very different. You don’t just write checks. Let’s talk about that a bit.
Medha 06:56
Sure. So I think there are two – I would talk about it in two different angles
Kate 07:01
Okay.
Medha 07:02
I would say the first is just that trust that we and that relationship that we build with our founders. We truly being a founder is amazing, really rewarding, but also really hard and can be really lonely at times, and so we want to be that person they feel comfortable, or people they feel comfortable calling to talk about everything. I mean, definitely the good things, but hopefully also the things that aren’t going well and their concerns and issues, and being able to flag them early and talk through them and work through them, or just listen because sometimes you just need someone to listen, and so so kind of like that’s number one. I tell a lot of the founders that I work with, the only thing I know for sure is that you are going to misplan, you’re going to miss hire, things are going to go wrong. We are not the type of investors that are going to freak out when those things happen, right? It is a part of any every company history, you know, it seems outside in, always up into the right, but you know, no company I’ve met where you know the true story has actually gone in that direction. And so we hope they’re the first one, but there we don’t think there’ve been any companies that have done that. And so, kind of that’s number one, which is, hey, we know things are going to go wrong. We are here for you when they do. The most important thing in my mind is how do like how quickly do you realize that something isn’t working, and how quickly do you fix it? Figure out what’s diagnose it and fix it, not the fact that something’s gone wrong because that’s definitely going to happen. And so our job there is to be cheerleaders. Like, hey, you mishired. You feel really down on yourself, but if you figured out that that person was in a fit and made a change quickly, I actually think the process worked. And let’s figure out was it an anomaly that you you know maybe you got the wrong signals or is there something kind of fundamentally broken about your process to give you kind of like a specific example. And then tactically, I think a lot of people say they spend a lot of time with their portfolio companies and their founders, but we actually do. We are talking to our founders, you know, weekly, sometimes several times a week. They don’t have to be baked touch points. It can be relatively small. We have Slack groups with all of channels with all of them. We have text, email, like you know, all sorts across like all sorts of platforms. And I think a lot of our founders would say that we’ve either intro’ed them to their largest customer, or you know, one of their largest customers, pretty meaningfully meaningful kind of revenue lever inflection point for them, and/or made an introduction to a key hire, or done something that’s been really important to kind of the step function change in the business that they’re looking to achieve with the fundraising round that we’ve been a part of. So we love – I’d way rather point people to our founders and say hear it from them. And so we love to hear when they say that. And it’s been a pretty consistent message.
Kate 09:52
Wow, that is. I mean, great to hear. I mean, definitely not something we hear all the time on the show. A lot of you know investors come on and they’re like, Oh, you know, we it’s the board meeting and it can be contentious and whatnot. So that does sound like a true partnership. And are you finding that most of your founders, that must be a real selling point.
Medha 10:15
Yeah, we think so. I think we invite them to say, Hey, go call up our founders, hear it from them for sure. And I think you’ll hear that about why we’re different and what it’s like to work with us because it’s a long term relationship. It should feel like a strong fit on all sides. And to your point on how those board meetings can be contentious, I think our job is not, and we say this to founders too up front, our job is not, we’re here to support you, but our job isn’t here to be your best friend. Our job is hopefully we built that solid foundation of trust where we can really give you real feedback if we feel like it’s something important and worth seeing. Like, if we feel like you’re not, you know, maybe there’s something strategically that we should be thinking about where we’re not spending enough time, or you know, there’s something in the data or the numbers that’s not being captured. Like, we feel comfortable sharing that with you, and you feel comfortable, you know, taking that feedback, and we can have a constructive, collaborative conversation about it, which is, you know, it’s always just a conversation. That’s been my experience with our founders, and I know that’s not always the case with everyone on the cap table. And different people have different roles. We’re just not the people that get a lot of three paragraph emails that are bolded and proofread. We get a lot more kind of like off the cuff messages.
Kate 11:35
The late night text or whatever it is. Yeah, not the paragraphs they ran through ChatGPT and have it all polished to give the update to the investor. Got it. That is unique. I like how you reference trust a lot. That you’re building like trust and a rapport, because I bet then if your founders you probably found feel like they can go to you earlier about things and pull you in, have that comfort and trust to pull you in on things that they might be struggling with or aren’t sure about. I bet you see a lot of positive outcomes from that.
Medha 12:14
I mean, that’s our hope. There aren’t a lot of surprises either in a board meeting or whatever the context is because they feel comfortable sharing it to us ad hoc versus waiting for the up the formal update, whether that’s board meeting or a catch up call or whatever it is, is that they’re keeping us in the loop, and hopefully they trust us enough to, you know, get our use us as a resource if they need it when they’re going through either a decision making process or trying to take away some learnings or figure out what a next steps makes what next steps make sense in various scenarios, or after things specific things happen in the company.
Kate 12:57
Yeah, it sounds like you all would be great sounding board for a lot of different scenarios. And also because you’ve seen so much in terms of Defy and what you look for in investment, that’s always helpful for our listeners. I mean, I know you you mentioned the founder is important and the relationships, but what else are you looking for?
Medha 13:19
in terms of when we’re thinking about making investment?
Kate 13:22
Exactly. Yeah.
Medha 13:23
So I think number one is the founder. Two is the market, and three is that you know founder-market-fit, why is this person or set of people uniquely qualified and have a right to win in a specific category or or for a specific problem that they’re going after? I think it doesn’t have to be that they have spent their lives operating in this industry and now they want to reform it. Like you know, there’s various, maybe they grew up in a family where they had exposure to this industry and have some knowledge or info or passion. Or it was an internship, but they had a really unique insight that led them to feel like things and start pulling the thread that got them to this company idea. I think it can take many forms, but that kind of unique insight and understanding of you know why is this founder meant to be working on this problem and why will they win? And then I’ll add another one that’s important for me in particular is speed of learning and iteration. In a world of infinite time and capital, a lot more startups would be successful. But given the, those are both real constraints, and particularly in this world of AI and the speed at which things are moving faster than ever, it’s dizzying.
Kate 14:41
Yes.
Medha 14:41
How quickly can you take signals and input from what you’re doing? Learn, iterate, either cast things aside or double down, and keep moving forward. I think is really important and a differentiator for teams.
Kate 14:59
Absolutely, especially right now, the speed of things is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. How are you feeling and Defy about AI? Are you looking at more AI investments? Are you, you know, I’m guessing that the way you evaluate those companies are a little different.
Medha 15:18
Yeah, I mean, I think everything we look at today has AI infusion in it in some way or another. (I bet. Yeah, yeah.) I think it’s hard not to either, you know, it’s in your face because it’s an agentic platform that is using AI to execute tasks or, or you know, workflows that were not possible or couldn’t be done the way they’re being done. But sometimes it’s also just in how the companies are run. We have a company that’s not an agentic platform. They’re building actually a consumer fintech company, and so, but the whole company is AI native in how it’s built, right? The everything, the amount they’ve accomplished, what they’ve done so far with as little capital as they have, it’s incredible, and it’s has a lot to do with the team, but also a lot to do with what you can do with AI and how quickly you can build and iterate, and how much work you can do with a few people.
Kate 16:16
Yeah, less resources and iterate. As a firm Defy, are you using AI to help in your evaluation of companies and in the way you approach your business?
Medha 16:27
Definitely, yeah, I use it. I use AI every day in one form or another, but hopefully the same way a lot of other people are using it to take away the kind of rote non-value add parts of the of the job, so that I can spend more time on the human element and on the kind of things that are differentiated and and value add.
Kate 16:54
Yeah, and the more strategic, definitely, it can give you that. It’s amazing how you put in the data inputs and can get some incredible information very quickly.
Medha 17:05
It’s amazing, and it’s getting so much better. Even from a couple months ago, you can see how much these agents and chatbots and everything are changing.
Kate 17:14
Yes, absolutely. So that being said, is there any kind of tactical advice you can give to our listeners on maybe how to stand out when they’re pitching to VCs, because I know we’re getting a lot of feedback from founders that the playing field has almost been leveled in a strange way with AI. Anything that you can share?
Medha 17:44
Yeah. And when you say the playing field’s been leveled, what do you mean by that?
Kate 17:47
Like these VCs are being inundated with so much more in terms of pitches. I’m sure you always have, right? But now, the way that you can do outreach, you can really hit so many, and it’s just tough to stand out a little bit more.
Medha 18:05
Oh, I see. Like cold outreach, you mean?
Kate 18:07
Yeah, cold. And then when you’re in there with the pitch, you know, everyone’s pitch is very sleek and sophisticated now because everybody uses the tools.
Medha 18:16
Oh, I see. Yeah, I think, I mean, just tactically, I would get an intro if you can.
Kate 18:21
Yeah.
Medha 18:22
And there are various ways to do that and be creative about it. I don’t think you have to know the people personally to get the intro. I think you know, even if it takes a couple of hops or at an event or whatever it is, but I think that does make a difference on whether someone’s going to take the meeting or not. Just because you know people are busy and there’s a lot of startups out there, and it’s hard to judge outside-in without meeting the person and hearing the story. I think less about you know putting because there are a lot of tools to help you put together the story and the slide and slides and the materials. I think conveying your right to like your right to exist and win both today and 5,10 years from now is important because I think, I’ll just speak for myself, I’m thinking existentially a lot more than I was 10 years ago. (Interesting.) And so, in a world which, if I take a step back, in a world in which it’s still very, very hard to start a company and to build a very large business, but in a world in which the startup costs to do that are so much lower to get to a working prototype and get things going is so much lower than it’s ever been, a lot of tools are democratizing the ability for founders to do this. In a world where AI is speeding up cycles, good and bad, but people are trying new tools. And so in industries where maybe it was historically harder to penetrate, now there’s a lot of willingness, and they’re trying a lot of different tools. How do you stand out in that environment today, in this environment where people are learning, testing, iterating, and you know, how do you scale in this environment? And then five years from now, what does the world look like?
Kate 20:10
Yeah,
Medha 20:11
Do people have the same – your customer and your buyer or your user, do they have the same needs they have today? Are they different? What does their workflow or their needs look like then? And how are you thinking about building for that future? Is it your current product and it’s the same, or is this a stepping stone to something else, and what does that look like? I think talking about that proactively is always really helpful because I think you know I’ll just speak for myself, but I’m thinking about it a lot. I think a lot of other people are too. And so helping paint that picture and put your narrative on that versus leaving people to question it on their own and try and come to an answer is probably more important than ever.
Kate 20:51
Wow, that’s really helpful because that’s exactly what I was getting at. What’s that extra component you need when you’re giving that pitch? And that, wow, you summed it up really well. That’s what you’re looking for?
Medha 21:04
Yeah, I think maybe said another way, there are a lot of companies today that are killing it. (Yes.) It’s amazing the volume of companies that are, and I think people talk about this in the negative, but I truly mean this in the positive, when I got into venture 10 plus years ago, if a company got to a million in run rate revenue, it was amazing. It was really you know you accomplished something that most don’t accomplish, and it was worth spending time on and understanding. And today in this environment, you know it’s good and bad, in this environment, there are way more buyers. They’re really willing to test and to try products and to sign up. And so there are more companies getting to early stage meaningful revenue for an early stage company, and so it’s not just about the revenue; it’s about you know, Hey, does this revenue exist in five (if I’m charging for which I love, I love business models today that have been able enabled with AI, where you can charge for outcomes, or to you can charge for the work, or you can charge for the outcome. Many times, folks are pricing ROI on that as a comp to, at least in the short term, to the equivalent kind of dollars per hour that you would pay a human. (That’s true.) They’ll say, Hey, your chart paying 40 or $50 for a human all in, you know, plus or minus depending on the skill needed. We’ll do it for, you know, 20% of that equivalent. And so you can run your ROI math and see that we’re much better. And I think that’s awesome. And a lot of companies have grown really fast, like amazing scale, with that pitch. But my question is always, Hey, in five years, even in three years or in five years, what is the ROI math? Are they still thinking about it as the equivalent is $40 or $50, or has it actually gotten more expensive because there are fewer humans that can do that, or has it gotten cheaper because there’s more competition? Like, what does that look like? And so, what is your effective revenue in that future state relative to what you have today, if I were to normalize it for today?
Kate 23:13
Yes.
Medha 23:13
And more importantly than anything, it’s not the math, it’s just having that, for me, I love having that conversation with founders. How are you thinking about it? I want to learn from you. Like you’re deeper. You’re talking to your customers all day long, presumably. And so, what are you hearing from them? What are you seeing? What’s your hypothesis? And how are you positioning yourself to capture as much value as you can?
Kate 23:35
That makes a lot of sense. Like the fact that they’re closer to it, and they should be thinking that way, you know, without even prompting from you, right? Without the questions, like they should have already gone there and thought about it, and they’re closer to it.
Medha 23:50
I’m sure a lot of founders are already. And so it’s more sure, if you haven’t, if you’re just some folks are just too busy picking up the money that’s on the ground because there’s lots of it, and you know maybe don’t have time or don’t want to or don’t think they have to. But if you are thinking about the future, just proactively bringing it up.
Kate 24:11
Yes. And you’ve referenced this a couple times, you know the startup ecosystem being so robust right now and healthy. Are you optimistic on it? Like, is Defy feeling optimistic on where things are and startup land?
Medha 24:28
I think at the highest level, very optimistic.
Kate 24:30
Good. Okay.
Medha 24:31
We’re meeting amazing founders solving very big real problems, and buyers have buyer, users whoever have real receptivity to it across use cases and markets in a way that sometimes it was really hard to penetrate historically. And so we’re seeing a lot of positive change in their end users’ lives, whether it’s a business user or a consumer, and that’s super exciting. It’s amazing to hear these stories of people who were spending five hours doing a task and couldn’t even do it successfully. Right? It had a 30% completion rate, and now they can automate 80% of it, and it’s 80% successful, and that’s freeing them up to do more important strategic work. Stories like that, or hearing, you know, patients are getting hopefully their medication faster there, or a certain key products or services that are important to their lives faster, more efficiently, maybe more accurately than they were before, because our healthcare system just had so much red tape and inefficiency, and using AI can help solve some of that. I mean, super heartening.
Kate 25:48
That must be very inspiring for you, and why you probably love what you’re doing.
Medha 25:53
Of course, and it’s so fun to hear founder stories every day about the impact they’re having on people’s lives. It’s amazing.
Kate 25:59
Yeah, I bet. I bet. We always wrap up the show, it’s one of the favorite questions of our listeners, just any general advice you can share for early stage founders listening. I mean, we’ve heard it all from get a therapist to how to use AI. But yeah, just something that you can leave the audience with.
Medha 26:21
Honestly, it is a really good question. it’s thinking kind of long term, right, about – it goes back to what we were just talking about. I think it’s very easy, and I did this when I was a founder. I feel like there were many times where I was so busy just executing
Kate 26:40
Yes.
Medha 26:41
on what I was doing, what was in front of me tactically, and trying to hit the milestone that I’d set for myself or the tactical, like get this customer signed, onboard them, hit the metrics for the POC to get the rollout. It was hard for me to zoom out the bigger picture and the strategy and why were we doing what we were doing and was it the right thing to be doing? And I think in this world that’s moving so fast, it’s important to do that more frequently and to do it more thoughtfully than ever. And so it goes back to what we were just talking about, but constantly thinking about and reevaluating whether the thing is the right thing and whether the inputs that we’re getting and the feedback that we’re getting are make are making us want to double down, or whether we need to reevaluate either you know it’s like five degrees, or 90 degrees, or 180 degrees. And continuing to think about that. And we’ve seen some amazing examples of companies who have done that really well, and pretty large turns in their strategy really effectively, and it’s really paid off. And then the second one is hiring. I think hiring is a superpower. And in this environment where so much amazing talent is getting sucked up by kind of the large AI companies, just being really concerted and thoughtful about your strategy and your differentiation and hiring those people so that you have bodies and seats that can do the things that need to be done three to six months in advance versus scrambling to do that once you know once you need the person and you’re you have you feel short staffed it’s probably too late. You know it’s a mistake I made as well when I was an operator. If you work your way backwards of how long it takes to find someone, and then they have to quit their job, and then they have to onboard, and it’s going to take you X amount of time to even find them, and you work your way, and then they have to ramp, and so you kind of work your way backwards. And it can be intimidating how far in advance you have to start the process to get the person the right butts in the right seats in time. And in this environment. I think you know people are maybe talking about maybe they’re not talking about it, but it really feels like a knife fight on the hiring front. And so while people are more efficient than ever, they also still need people. And so just you know really spending time on that.
Kate 29:09
Excellent advice. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I think for everyone listening, that you’re getting focused on that tactile minutia, what’s in front of you today, to remember to pull up, think big picture, think about you know long term, and then the hiring. Absolutely, everybody always underestimates how long it takes, and that can really bite you when you’ve got to scale quickly. So you shared so much. Thank you for being here. Where can listeners go to learn more about Defy VC?
Medha 29:38
They can check us out on our website Defy.vc, or come find me on LinkedIn or X. We’re on all the platforms.
Kate 29:48
Awesome! Great. Thank you for your time today. Super, super interesting conversation. We appreciate everything you shared.
Medha 29:56
Thank you so much for the time.
Outro 29:58
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