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)

**Nick Moran** (0:00)
Today's episode of TFR is brought to you by.tech domains. 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:44)
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.

**Nick Moran** (0:59)
Navin Chaddha joins us today from Menlo Park. He's the managing partner at Mayfield, an early-stage venture capital firm with a 50-year history of backing iconic founders. Navin is a 17-time Midas List investor and has led early investments in unicorns and industry leaders, including Lyft, Hashicorp, Poshmark, Nuvia, and security.ai. Before Mayfield, he founded and led multiple startups, three of which were acquired. Navin, welcome to the show.

**Navin Chaddha** (1:30)
Thank you. It's a privilege and honor to be spending time with you, Nick, and thank you for considering me for your podcast.

**Nick Moran** (1:37)
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?

**Navin Chaddha** (1:45)
Absolutely. I grew up in India, like many others, humble beginnings. India in the 70s and 80s was a poor country. Went to 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, hey, you can start a company. And we said, hey, what do we know about a company? One thing led to the other. So in 96, we started a company, VXStream, which becomes the platform for delivering video over the internet. Very quickly, it becomes the de facto standard, gets acquired by Microsoft in June of 97, 18 months into it. And the technology in a year is everywhere, becomes the fabric of video over 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, and then was acquired in 2001 Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, went on to get my third company during the worst time, it was Rivio, went through the downturn. One thing led to the other. Luckily, we were able to land it, get acquired. And in 2004, by serendipity, I joined the venture capital business, came in as an entrepreneur in residence, and one thing led to the other.
I have been a venture entrepreneur for 21 years, and I have been extremely lucky and had the honor to work with 60 plus entrepreneurs as a board member, 17 of whom have created public companies, and another 29 now have been acquired. So it's just been a delight God has given me, a gift of my life to be able to work with such spectacular people who are great and amazing human beings.

**Nick Moran** (4:30)
Unbelievable. You know, if you were doing video in the early days of the internet, there were so many bandwidth constraints and other constraints. Like, you know, how did you overcome those?

**Navin Chaddha** (4:43)
So I think there were actually two big issues. One was the connectivity was the last mile was through modems at 14.4 kilobits per second. Nowadays, we are 100 megabits per second.

**Nick Moran** (5:00)
Yeah.

**Navin Chaddha** (5:01)
That's, you know, 10,000x. Then it went to 28k. So we needed innovation with what's called video compression so that we could compress the bits down to send it on those pipes.
And the second thing was, at that time, video could only be encoded in hardware and decoded in hardware. So you needed special cards on PCs. So we came up with an algorithm where you could do this on basic 8086 machines, which are probably in the mid-90s, 1,000 lower speed, forget about GPUs of CPUs today. So that was our fundamental innovation, software-only video compression and decompression, and the magic of making it work on thin pipes. And then that's what happens. You have breakthrough technology and luck happens, right? People come along the way and companies get created and the rest is history.