Spotlight On Season 3

Accel just led Lovable’s Series A, the largest in Stockholm's history. On the eve of the announcement, Lovable CEO and Co-Founder Anton Osika sat down with Accel’s Ben Fletcher and Zhenya Loginov to talk about the startup’s remarkable growth, building from Stockholm, and what’s next for the small but mighty team.They also revisit Anton’s origins and how they shaped Lovable’s remarkable mission to unlock creativity for 99% of the world's population that doesn't code. Anton’s always be...

Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside’s career reads like a tour through the world’s most complex operational challenges: opening new markets at pre-IPO Google, wrangling billion-dollar losses at Motorola, guiding Impossible Foods from scrappy upstart to mainstream staple. At every turn, he’s proven himself as a singular operator, able to translate bold visions into strong teams, scaled business, and real results, no matter the industry or product. In this episode of Spotlight On, Accel’s Sameer Gandhi...

According to Veza co-founder and CEO Tarun Thakur, you don’t just found a startup once. Instead, you found and refound it many times over: as you achieve product-market fit, as you land your first investment, as you scale from a team of three to 200 and beyond. In this episode of Spotlight On, Tarun sits down with Accel’s Eric Wolford to discuss how this theory of continuous reinvention has shaped the identity security company’s growth—and his own. He explores how working with a coach has transf...

AI has made advanced cybersecurity methods more widely available—and put sophisticated cyberattack techniques into the hands of threat actors everywhere. CrowdStrike has spent the last decade and a half reshaping the security landscape, and now, the company continues to reimagine what state-of-the-art looks like when both the good guys and the bad actors are learning what these powerful tools can do for them.In this special episode of Spotlight On, recorded live at Accel during the RSA Conferenc...

Vercel founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch still remembers the thrill of loading new software onto his family’s computer as a kid living in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This was the Windows ’95 era, when software came on CDs and floppy disks. He’d already begun to wonder: what if this whole process of distribution and deployment was much, much simpler? This question would drive his career and, ultimately, lead him to found Vercel.In this episode of Spotlight On, Guillermo Rauch joins Accel’s Dan L...

The Netflix culture deck has been viewed over 17 million times and covered by the New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Sheryl Sandberg called it one of the most important documents to come out of Silicon Valley. Detractors called it brutal (which, Patty and Jessica reveal during our interview, was by design). Why did Netflix spend 10 years and thousands of hours creating this document? And what can founders learn about molding culture and building teams from the people behind it?In this s...

From the beginning, the backend-as-a-service platform Supabase has done things a little differently. Building on Postgres instead of a proprietary engine. Putting data portability at the core of their product. Going all-in on global hiring from day one. And yes, naming themselves after a Nicki Minaj song because they thought it would make a funny meme. The meme has stuck, but Supabase has scaled. In this episode of Spotlight On, Supabase CEO and co-founder Paul Copplestone joins Accel’s Arun Mat...

While we take a quick mid-season break, we're re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from previous seasons. This week, we're revisiting our conversation with Transcend President Kate Parker. Recent developments in artificial intelligence have sparked an outcry for control over personal data. While regulators, politicians, and the business community have been thinking about how to improve data privacy, there is still much more work to do. Kate Parker, Transcend’s President, will discuss...