Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left, hiring founders as FDEs, and building a $1B company with your wife and a newborn
Summation with Auren HoffmanShow Notes
Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across rounds led by Redpoint and Sequoia at a $1B+ valuation. Before Serval, Jake spent five years on the product team at Verkada and earlier founded NeuroPlus, a brain-sensing hardware company that made video games for kids with ADHD. In this episode of Summation, Jake and Auren discuss: Why Anthropic has added more ARR in the pa...
More from Summation with Auren Hoffman
Noah Glass is the founder and CEO of Olo, the digital commerce platform behind ordering, payments, and loyalty for many of America's biggest restaurant brands. He started Olo in 2005 with ordering by text message, before the iPhone existed, took it public in 2021, and took it private with Thoma Bravo last year in a roughly $2 billion deal. In this episode of Summation, Noah and Auren discuss: The $65 million sale that collapsed the night before he told his teamHow Five Guys strong-armed point...
Bobby Samuels is the co-founder and CEO of Protege, a platform that licenses real-world data from industries like healthcare and media to companies building AI. Protege has raised $65 million from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, and Flex Capital. Before Protege, Bobby led partnerships at LiveRamp and ran Privacy Hub at Datavant. In this episode of Summation, Bobby and Auren discuss: The auction for Spirit Airlines' emails, and what a model learns from a failed airlineWhy synthetic data has been "18...
Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios, the news company known for smart brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million sale to Cox Enterprises. He's now co-founder and CEO of Axios HQ, an AI-powered internal communications platform spun out of Axios. He co-wrote Smart Brevity, and his new book is Simplify. Before Axios, he was chief revenue officer of Politico. In this episode of Summation, Roy and Auren discuss: Meeting bankruptcy: wiping every recurring meeting off the calendar twice a yearAI as a c...
David Kirtley is the co-founder and CEO of Helion Energy, the fusion company. Helion has raised more than $1.5 billion at a $15.5 billion valuation, and Sam Altman is its biggest investor and former chairman. Before fusion, David worked on rocket and space propulsion. In this episode of Summation, David and Auren discuss: Skipping the steam turbine and pulling electricity straight out of a starHow a Best Buy network card helped make fusion possibleRegulating a 150 million degree machine like ...
Alex Rampell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $2.7 billion Apps practice and has driven much of the firm's fintech investing, including Plaid, Mercury, and Opendoor. Before a16z, Alex co-founded multiple companies including Affirm (NASDAQ:AFRM), FraudEliminator (acquired by McAfee in 2006), Point, TrialPay (acquired by Visa in 2015), TXN (acquired by Envestnet in 2019), and Yub (acquired by Coupons.com in 2013). In this episode of Summation, Alex and Aure...