Head of Operations & Marketing @Interplay Connector of Dots Music/Music Tech Enthusiast Go @nyknicks
New York, USA
Joined August 2010
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wrichardson.eth retweeted
Most people only see the front end of fintech. The app. The card. The payment. But underneath that experience is an enormous amount of infrastructure and some of fintech’s biggest opportunities are hiding there.
@RoryOReilly, cofounder and CEO of @KnotAPIs, joined me on the pod to talk about how Knot is rewiring fintech and transforming financial connectivity.
We dive into:
- Why keeping a card “top of wallet” is harder than it sounds.
- The infrastructure required to connect financial institutions with thousands of merchants.
- Why security and compliance are foundational, not afterthoughts, in fintech.
- Where blockchain and stablecoins could fit into the financial stack.
- Rory’s unconventional path from selling shoes with his family to building fintech companies with his brother.
What I particularly enjoyed about this conversation is that Knot is tackling a problem most consumers don't even realize exists. The biggest innovations in fintech may not be the products we see, they may be the infrastructure quietly making everything work.
Special thanks to Rory for joining me on the pod.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Every founder I know is asking the same question: “How should we actually implement AI across our company?”
The reality is that every playbook will require customization, but there are clear patterns beginning to emerge.
In this episode, Chetan Narain, Cofounder of Pepper, joins me and my colleague, Interplay Senior Partner @kevinwtung , to share how Pepper is integrating AI across its products and organization — and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
We discuss:
- Where vertical SaaS ends and vertical AI begins
- AI agents and guardrails
- Organizational redesign
- How to move fast without creating chaos
If you're building a company and thinking beyond AI features toward AI transformation, I think you'll enjoy this conversation.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
What happens when technology evolves faster than the venture capital model built to fund it?
In this episode, I sit down with my longtime friend @jefielding , Cofounder and General Partner of @EverywhereVC , to explore how venture capital is adapting to a world where competitive advantages can disappear faster than ever.
We discuss what it takes to raise a pre-seed round in today's market, why traditional assumptions around defensibility are being challenged, and how AI is reshaping the economics of software companies.
Jenny also shares lessons from her time as a Managing Director at Techstars and explains why Everywhere Ventures built a community-driven approach to investing — leveraging founder networks and real-time market insight to identify breakout companies at the earliest stages.
Whether you're a founder raising capital, an investor navigating a changing market, or simply curious about where technology is headed, this conversation offers a practical look at how venture is evolving for the next generation of companies.
Special thanks to Jenny for joining the show and sharing her perspective on the future of venture.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Socks are the #1 most requested item at homeless shelters. Dave Heath turned that single fact into @BOMBAS . The brand has donated over 200 million items of clothing and built a billion-dollar business along the way. What makes Dave a builder worth studying isn't just the scale. It's the discipline behind it. He reverse-engineered an exceptional product from a mission. He learned to test before betting. And he protected the brand as it grew.
In this episode, I sit down with Dave to break down:
• How he reverse-engineered an "exceptional product" from a donation mission and brought athletic-sock innovation to the mass market.
• The Shark Tank effect, going from $800K to $2M in revenue in the six weeks after airing.
• The expensive lesson of expanding into adjacent products too fast and the MVP-testing discipline that replaced it.
• Radical-ish transparency.
• The self-awareness to evolve his own role as the company scaled and how he screened his successor for humility
• How Bombas is approaching AI.
Big thanks to Dave for coming on the pod and sharing the playbook (and the mindset) behind Bombas.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
America just stopped building offices for people. In April 2026, US data-center construction ran at a $50.7 billion annualized rate, passing general office construction at $43.8 billion for the first time on record.
This is the cleanest single-chart refutation of the "services-led growth" narrative we have seen. The next investment dollar is no longer funding a software-company office in Austin. It's funding a hyperscale data-center campus (the giant cloud-compute halls run by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta) in northern Virginia, Phoenix, or central Texas — and the entire industrial supply chain underneath: electrical switchgear, transformers, liquid cooling, specialized cleanroom build-outs, concrete, copper, steel.
Two things are converging. Raw computing power is now the binding constraint on every frontier tech company. And the office category itself is shrinking in real terms after a generation of remote/hybrid work and a wave of conversions of mid-tier ("Class-B") offices into apartments. The compute curve is doubling every five years; the office curve has flatlined.
The opportunity for industrial and AI-infrastructure founders is wider than the headline. Anything that touches the data-center supply chain — grid interconnection, electrical equipment, liquid cooling, prefab construction, on-site power, fiber, security, system commissioning — sits on a multi-decade tailwind that does not depend on AI models continuing to get better. Even if the AI software layer becomes a commodity, the compute infrastructure has been built and someone has to run it.
The $50.7B number being quoted is in the spotlight, but the real insight is the crossover.
Read more here: interplay.vc/blog/america-st…
#industrialAI #datacenter #venturecapital #infrastructure
wrichardson.eth retweeted
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reports March 2026 chip sales hit $99.5B — up 79.2% YoY. Q1 totaled $298.5B. The industry is on track for the first $1T year in semiconductor history, ~2 years ahead of the most aggressive 2024 forecasts.
The number matters less than the shape of the curve. For 40 years, semis were textbook cyclical: 18–24 month up-cycles (PCs, mobile, cloud), then 12–18 month corrections. Investors learned to underwrite the cycle, not the trend.
The 2024–2026 data shows the cycle didn't correct. It accelerated. March's +79% follows a +28% comp in March 2025 — this isn't a base-effect bounce. One end-market explains nearly all of it: AI infrastructure. HBM is sold out through 2027. The constraint is no longer demand — it's fab capacity, packaging, and power.
For VC, the takeaway isn't about chip companies themselves. It's that the cost of running AI — training and inference — is falling faster than any prior compute shift, because the underlying chip supply is compounding at 70%+ annually. That cost decline flows downstream to every company building on top of it. In the cloud era, infrastructure costs flattened within a few years; here, they're still dropping. Anything built on this base inherits that.
The first trillion-dollar year isn't the story. The story is that it no longer looks cyclical.
interplay.vc/blog/the-chip-i…
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Anduril: $5B raise, $61B valuation. The same week was the largest defense-tech VC week on record. Silicon Valley is re-enlisting — and it's worth remembering the Valley was born defense (Fairchild → Minuteman, Apollo → ~60% of all ICs, DARPA → ARPANET).
Then it drifted. Cold War wound down in '91, the web arrived in '93, and by the late 2000s the dominant Valley archetype — Google, Facebook, Twitter — had near-zero federal exposure. The near-divorce hardened in 2018, when 3,000+ Googlers signed the letter that killed Project Maven.
The reversal came quietly: Palantir (In-Q-Tel → 2020 IPO → $300B+), Anduril (founded 2017 to rebuild a prime the Valley way), SpaceX (the Pentagon's biggest launch provider). Today's Stanford/MIT grads compete for the offers that were career suicide in 2018.
What changed? A hot geopolitical backdrop, DoD on-ramps (Replicator, OTAs) that fit startup timelines, and a founder generation that decided ceding the frontier was the bigger ethical risk.
The $5B isn't the story. The story is there's no longer a contradiction.
Full piece: interplay.vc/blog/silicon-va…
ALT Silicon Valley defense funding cycle chart: born defense, 30-year consumer drift, re-enlistment, with Anduril's $61B mark highlighted
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Cats are 40% of the pet market, but are somehow still chronically overlooked. Every innovation goes to dogs first. Even your vet's office is built for dogs first. Matt Michaelson, cofounder and CEO of Smalls, and his team have built an incredible cat-first brand precisely because of that blind spot.
In this episode, I sit down with Matt to break down:
• Why the cat industry is structurally underinvested (which includes VCs simply saying "I don't really like cats")
• What "human-grade" actually means for pet food — and the sustainability trade-offs nobody talks about
• Ingredient splitting: the regulatory hack that lets pet brands disguise what's actually in the bag
• "Wrestling in the mud": a feedback culture where every hire is expected to disagree
• Founders Pledge, and why committing 5% early changes the giving conversation later
Big thanks to Matt for coming on the pod and sharing the playbook behind Smalls.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
US manufacturing output is rising. Headcount is not. Q1 2026 BLS: factory productivity +3.6% — 5x the rest of the economy. Output up, hours down. That's the AI/automation story showing up in government data.
interplay.vc/blog/manufactur…
wrichardson.eth retweeted
The elevator pitch is dead.
For years, founders have been coached to cram their entire business into a 60-second monologue, in case they corner a VC in an elevator. That's not how real conversations work — and it's not how investors decide what to look at next.
When I meet a founder and ask what they're working on, I want a normal answer. One sentence. "We're helping people do X by offering a service that does Y." If I'm interested, I'll ask questions. If I'm not, I'll say so and we both move on.
A canned, rapid-fire pitch doesn't make me lean in. It makes me wonder why you're talking at me instead of with me. The founders who actually raise well speak plainly about their business, answer questions directly, and send a clean executive summary afterward. The pitch isn't a performance. It's the start of a conversation.
If you're prepping to fundraise, throw out the script. Be able to explain what you do in plain English, and trust the investor to ask for the rest.
From The Fundraising Rules — the chapter on getting the meeting.
RT @mpd: Venture studios are quietly becoming one of the most effective models for company creation, but most people still don't understand…
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Most founders treat fundraising like a finish line. It isn't. It's a pit stop.
You stop racing for a few weeks. Fresh tires, souped-up engine, the right advisors on board.
If the raise doesn't make you faster after, you ran the wrong play.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Is the global economy stronger than it looks or more fragile beneath the surface? If you’re trying to reconcile booming markets with rising geopolitical risk, this week’s episode brings an important perspective.
I sat down with Chris Zhang, Partner & CIO of Ascend Interplay, to break down the real forces shaping 2026:
- How AI is shifting from a narrative to a measurable economic impact
- Why labor markets may determine where we go next
- Global structural shifts that are underway - from escalating Middle East tensions to the rise of protectionism - and what they imply for supply chains, inflation dynamics, and U.S. debt sustainability.
Big thanks to Chris for a thoughtful, data-driven discussion.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
We're proud to share that @interplay Ventures portfolio company @olliepets has been acquired by Agrolimen. This is an exciting outcome; the Ollie team deserves a big congratulations on building a defining brand in the human-grade pet food space. Read more about our investment and the Ollie story here: interplay.vc/blog/ollie-is-a…
wrichardson.eth retweeted
We’ve all been there: wanting to resell clothes but dreading the 'listing' process. For your customers, that friction is the #1 barrier to a circular economy. Relist is changing that, and we’re proud to announce they’ve joined the Interplay Accelerator. 🚀
Resale is already happening around every brand and Relist makes that process brand-safe, easy, and scalable by letting customers resell past purchases in one click across major marketplaces.
If you’re a brand ready to make resale as easy as the initial purchase, this is the infrastructure you’ve been waiting for.
Huge credit to founders Maneesh K., Ben Leitner, and Ben Tatsuoka for building core resale infrastructure at the intersection of commerce, sustainability, and customer experience.
We're excited to partner as they build the future of brand-led resale.
Read the blog here: interplay.vc/blog/building-t…
wrichardson.eth retweeted
@bradsvrluga has been a mentor and a close friend of mine for years. Watching him build @PrimaryVC - one of the most respected firms in the industry - has been a masterclass in itself, so sitting down with him for this episode was a highlight I've been looking forward to and a great way to kick off the year.
We went deep on an often overlooked topic in VC: How do you actually scale a firm's infrastructure?
Whether you're a GP or a founder, Brad’s perspective on building a modern, institutional-grade firm is unmatched.
wrichardson.eth retweeted
The legal sector has long resisted automation, but that resistance is finally breaking down. With GenAl, shifting economic incentives, and new regulatory flexibility, legal tech is entering a phase of real structural transformation. In this blog post, Marina Perez-Llorca shares how we're thinking about the opportunity from an investor and builder perspective, including:
• Why adoption is now being pulled by the market, not pushed by vendors
• How outcome-based pricing and tech-enabled services unlock real leverage
• Where we're seeing the strongest momentum: litigation, IP, and hybrid service models
Read the full post here: interplay.vc/blog/legal-tech…
wrichardson.eth retweeted
Our 2026 predictions are in. From IPOs to AI to robots - check out what we think is actually coming in 2026.
To wrap up 2025, I regroup with @Mikeyjrog and @PhuongIreland for our annual end-of-year episode, where we look back at last year's predictions (they passed with flying colors) and set our sights on what’s ahead.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the topics covered:
✅ AI’s real impact on blue and white collar jobs.
📈 The slow thaw of the IPO market.
💸 The maturing of venture capital into a robust capital market ecosystem.
🤖 Why humanoid robots might finally enter the chat.
🚀 How seed-stage startups have fundamentally changed - and what will make or break them next year.
If you're a founder, investor, or just trying to stay ahead of the curve, this one’s packed with insight.
🎧 Listen & let us know what YOU think is coming in 2026? Drop your predictions in the comments. 👇
wrichardson.eth retweeted
What if you approached philanthropy like a startup? The results might shock you and completely rewire how you think about giving.
I sit down with the one and only @markgerson, Cofounder and Chair of 3i Members, to dive deep into how you can treat generosity like a capital allocation decision. We unpack a framework for ROI-driven giving that prioritizes measurable impact over emotional check-writing.
Whether you give already or you’re just starting to think about it, this is a practical, purpose-driven guide to doing the most good in a faster and smarter way.
Special thanks to Mark for joining me on the pod and for all the amazing work he does.
RT @mpd: Congrats to Tyler Maloney, Nick O'Brien, and the entire TeachMeTo team on their $3M raise as they build the go-to marketplace for…
