Village Global

Most founders obsess over building the perfect product. Shishir Mehrotra builds the perfect rituals. At Coda, every employee knows their "golden rituals" by their first Friday. At Grammarly, they built an AI superhighway processing 100B LLM calls per week by meeting users where they work. Shishir joined Ben Casnocha to discuss AI platforms at scale, pricing strategy that requires courage, platform thinking from YouTube, and why culture is just rituals in action. Full conversation on YouTube. https://lnkd.in/egKV3i-k

Most founders think selling is about the product. Van Jones says it's about making people feel something first. Founders get so focused on making the product great, they forget nobody's ever heard of them. Van joined us at Transformers to discuss what actually works: brand as a hack for time, relationships that matter, purpose you can't fake, and why your founding story is your biggest asset. Full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gFiaTAti

Congratulations to Max Kilberg on his promotion to Investment Partner at Village Global. In his 2 years with the firm, Max has shown an incredible eye for talent and opportunity, high conviction in backing ambitious founders on Day 0, and boundless energy in supporting entrepreneurs on their journey. If you're building a company now, Max should be on your shortlist of investors.

Congrats to Eleanor Morgan and the Liftoff team on coming out of stealth. We’re thrilled to back them as they connect incredible talent through the people they already trust. Liftoff has already grown to 5,500+ users and 250+ role searches, helping leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Seed, Clay, and Granola find their next marketing, design, product, and GM hires. Excited to see the team continue building a network that makes hiring smarter, faster, and more reliable.

We’re thrilled to back Lore, a new search platform built for the fandom age. Founded by Zehra Naqvi, Lore is reimagining how people explore their internet obsessions, from Marvel theories to One Direction timelines. We couldn’t be more excited to back Zehra and her growing team as they build the new Library of Alexandria.

Congrats to Sandeep Pyapali and the Mesta team on their $5.5M seed raise! Cross-border payments is known to be slow and costly. But Mesta is rewiring the way money moves in a way that's seamless, transparent, and reliable. We’re thrilled to back Sandeep Pyapali and his team and can’t wait to see how they transform global payments.

We haven't figured out teleportation, but if you're ambitious about using AI, you can be in two places at once. Eric S. Yuan's AI twin delivered Zoom’s latest earnings call and Reid Hoffman sends his digital self to conferences and interviews. Watch the full conversation on our YouTube channel to hear the latest takes on AI avatars and the future of work from Zoom CEO and Luminary LP, Eric Yuan, and Village Global Chairman, Reid Hoffman. Link in the comments below.

We hosted Luminary LP, Shishir Mehrotra, for a learning circle with Villagers and Network Investors. Shishir has incredible insights from building at YouTube, Coda, and now Grammarly. He also has a special talent for packaging his hard-earned lessons into maxims for making great things. We value every opportunity to learn from Shishir and look forward to sharing some of his insights with you here. Thanks to Shishir and all who attended, including Aizada Marat, Nilou Salehi, Anthony Marshi, Sasha Orloff, Sally Y. Liu, Mario R., Henry Shi, Kathy Del Gesso, Sean Hu, William Smith, JP Patil, Vitalii Dodonov, Brad Glisson, Val Avdeenko, Siyuan (Cheryl) Liang, Li Wen, and many more.

We're teaming up with Alex Song for a fintech-focused cohort of Velocity. Velocity is our bespoke program to support founders at the earliest stages. We back you with checks up to $1M, a peer cohort, compute resources, and support from Alex Song and his incredible fintech network. Alex is the Co-Founder of Made Card and the founding member of the Ramp Finance team. Prior to joining Ramp, he spent more than a decade as a credit and financials investor in the hedge fund industry. Link to apply below ↓