499. A 17 Time Midas Lister on Greatness, the $6T AI Teammate Market, Why AI Sovereignty Is Critical, and Who Wins the Battle Between Incumbents and Startups (Navin Chaddha)

Today's episode of TFR is brought to you by .techdomains. The right .com is usually taken, and adding extra words weakens your signal. I see thousands of decks every year, and a clean domain still matters. That's why founders choose .tech. It's simple, modern, and sends the right signal. Secure your .tech domain early. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Now here's the episode. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Naveen Chadda joins us today from Menlo Park. He's the managing partner at Mayfield, an early stage venture capital firm with a fifty year history of backing iconic founders. Naveen is a 17 time Midas list investor and has led early investments in unicorns and industry leaders, including Lyft, HashiCorp, Poshmark, Nuvia, and Security dot a I. Before Mayfield, he founded and led multiple startups, three of three of which were acquired. Naveen, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a privilege and honor to be spending time with you, Nick, and thank you for considering me for your podcast. It is a privilege and an honor to have you on the show. Can you give us your quick backstory and your path to venture? Absolutely. So I grew up in India. Like many others, humble beginnings, India in the seventies and eighties was a poor country, went to, grad undergrad at Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, graduated at the top of the class, was lucky for somebody to pay for my fellowship to come to Stanford in 1992, and came for grad school to pursue my master's and PhD, and the Internet happened. And I was lucky to be working in the area of video, over the Internet. The first project we had done was launching Stanford classes for distance learning on the Internet. And one thing led to the other. In 1995, VC started approaching us and said, like, hey. You can start a company. And we said, like, hey. What do we know about a company? One thing led to the other. So '96, we start a company, VXtreme, which becomes the platform for delivering video over the Internet. Very quickly, it becomes the de facto standard, gets acquired by Microsoft in June into it. And, the technology in a year is everywhere, becomes the fabric of video of the Internet. God was kind. We got financial independence. I learned what to do and what not to do through working at one of the biggest companies of that time and even today. I've worked closely with people like Bill, Steve, and others, and then left in '99 to start my second company, iBeam Broadcasting, which even grew faster and went public in 2000 …