🎙 Weekly podcast series with leaders in the startup ecosystem hosted by @mattybcohen & @ripple_ventures 🎙
Joined August 2020
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For decades, law firms have run on the billable hour. So the slower a lawyer works, the more they make.
At most firms today, associates’ bonuses are still tied to the hours they bill. So when legal tech builds copilots to make lawyers faster, it’s working against the very system lawyers are paid by.
@jrbluth , a @Harvard_Law grad, saw this problem firsthand. Instead of building another legal tech tool like most players in the industry, he’s rebuilding the firm itself.
At Blackletter, Canada’s first AI-native law firm, Jonathan and his team are redesigning entire legal workflows end to end, pairing technology and people to deliver better outcomes for clients, not more hours.
“It’s no longer about providing tooling to people doing the work, but saying end-to-end, how do we do this better?”
On Tank Talks, Jonathan breaks down the perverse incentives holding legal back, and why the only way to make top-tier legal services more abundant is to become the firm.
The legal industry is on the edge of a major shift. Bookmark this episode to see what's coming.
Full episode on Tanktalks.fm
Fusion can only move as fast as it can measure.
Every fusion company needs plasma diagnostics to prove its reactor works, and almost every one builds them in-house.
Last month, we had the chance to sit down with the founder in Canada who is changing that.
Henry Gould, founder and CEO of Daedal, is building a standardized platform that plugs into any approach, from tokamaks to stellarators to hybrids. As he puts it:
"This company does not stop at the R&D phase of the fusion industry."
Daedal is starting where the need is most urgent today, then expanding into adjacent industries like SMRs and semiconductor plasma processes. In the long term, they plan to become the operating infrastructure for the fusion power industry.
The fusion race is accelerating fast. This episode is the fastest way to catch up.
Full episode on Tanktalks.fm.
Fusion's billion-dollar bottleneck might be sitting in Ontario.
In the fusion industry, a single reactor could need around 55 kg of Tritium to get started, requiring $1.5–2B in fuel just for one reaction.
What people are starting to realise is that Canada holds most of the world's civilian supply.
With fusion attracting a record $4.48B in funding over the past 12 months, that makes Ontario one of the most strategic places in the industry.
Henry Gould, founder of Daedal Systems, joined us in the Tank to break down Canada's tritium advantage, why the province and federal government are finally waking up to it, and why, after years at @GeneralFusion, he chose to build Daedal right here in Toronto.
If you are interested in the current state of nuclear energy, as well as where the industry is headed, this episode is a must-watch.
Full episode on Tanktalks.fm
He first went to @McKinsey, and then to @Cohere as their first non-technical hire.
During his time at Cohere, he saw what scaling alongside a generational company looks like. Now, he has moved on to build his own company, Blackletter. Canada’s first AI-native law firm.
This week, Jonathan Rosenbluth joined us on Tank Talks to discuss Blackletter, his career progression, as well as his advice for people to make the jump to startups early.
“I think it is far riskier just to stay on the traditional path where you're growing incrementally year over year. Whereas if you go into a hypergrowth environment…You're so much more capable”
Full episode on Tanktalks.fm or in bio.
Tank Talks retweeted
He went from @Harvard_Law to employee #20 at @cohere . Now he's building Canada’s first AI-Native law firm, Blackletter (blackletterfirm.com) .
Jon Rosenbluth was one of the few in his Harvard Law class who didn't go into law. But after seeing countless founders lose time and money to billable hours, he wanted to build a firm that would change that.
So, he left Cohere to fix a system that hasn't changed in 70 years.
Now, his team at Blackletter consists of elite lawyers AND machines working together. The system checks for errors and stays online 24/7. But most importantly, the lawyers remain the key judgment layer, and clients are charged a flat fee.
This week on @TankTalkPodcast with Jon Rosebluth, we cover:
02:14 - His career journey from Harvard to McKinsey to Cohere
07:48 - The real case for joining an early-stage startup
15:47 - Why build an entire law firm instead of just another legal tech tool?
19:39 - Problems that most founders face with the current legal system
24:51 - Where software hands off to human lawyers
32:15 - What the law firm of the future actually looks like
The founder of Canada's newest unicorn (backed by @OpenAI) thinks we need to stop glorifying being a "founder."
"I don't think it's healthy to wanna do entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship." "It's probably not the shortest path to happiness."
Anthony Mouchantaf is the founder of Biossil, and as a Founder himself, his advice is to really think about motivation.
Ask whether you have something distinct to contribute, and If you're genuinely obsessed with a problem, the process of chasing it would fulfill you on its own.
Being the founder will be the byproduct of your passion.
However, If you're only chasing the identity of being a founder, don't be one.
Boomark this episode for more insights from a founder & CEO behind a billion $ company.
Episode available on tanktalks.fm
CEO and Co-founder of Canada’s newest unicorn, backed by @OpenAI, shares his biggest learning as a first time founder:
@TonyMouch is a founder who's been an operator, a VC, and an LP.
Last week, he joined us on the Tank to talk about Biossil (now at a $1B valuation), his career, and key life lessons he has learned along the way.
A huge congrats to Biossil for the raise! Bookmark this episode on Tank Talks to hear how Anthony built it.
Full episode on Tanktalks.fm
Rahul Parmar was one of @googlecloud's first sales hires in their London office.
On Tank Talks, he shares his biggest lessons and takeaways from his career at Google to @DrataHQ , and now, GTM at @Railway.
Bookmark this episode if you want everything Rahul learned from 6 years selling at Google and scaling Drata from under $5M to $50M+, in under an hour.
Some of the top Canadian founders (Turbopuffer, Maple, Opslevel) are all ex-Shopify
The Shopify mafia is real.
This week, Rahul Parmar (Ex-Google Sales, GTM at Railway) tells us why Shopify is secretly such a great founder factory, and it all boils down to the culture:
- extremely fast moving
- high agency, high autonomy
- entrepreneurship actively encouraged
Canada doesn’t need to be like SF, we just need more Shopify’s
This startup just raised $4M to build game-changing technology for the nuclear industry.
As a teenager, Henry Gould watched a 2014 TED Talk by @GeneralFusion founder Michel Laberge.
Years later, he became an engineer, then physics lead, at General Fusion, one of the oldest fusion companies in the world, backed by @JeffBezos.
Now he’s left to build Daedal Systems where they are providing the measurement infrastructure for the entire fusion industry.
Daedal is on a journey to transform the nuclear industry, and today, @ripple_ventures is proud to announce that we’re backing Henry in Daedal’s pre-seed, alongside @OMERSVentures .
Hear more about Daedal from Henry himself on this week’s episode of Tank Talks, where we cover:
- Henry’s experience working at General Fusion
- The history and current state of the “Holy Grail of Energy”
- The moment in 2022 that changed the trajectory of the fusion industry
- The 18-month bottleneck that fusion companies have to face
- The one thing every fusion company is missing that Daedal is building
Bookmark this episode for a comprehensive overview of the fusion industry and a first look into the company that is redefining the frontier.
links below.
Substack - tanktalks.substack.com/p/the…
YouTube - youtu.be/XxGLJ91aNCA
Apple Podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/6rD…
He was one of @googlecloud's first Sales hires. He then scaled @DrataHQ from under $5M to $50M+ in about 20 months. Now, he runs GTM at @Railway without a sales team:
This week on Tank Talks, we welcomed Rahul Parmar (@parmstar) to cover:
06:30 – The 3-step sales rule he learned selling Google Cloud to Fortune 500 Companies
13:37 – Why Toronto reps become killers once they sell to the US
18:56 – Why he decided not to hire a sales team at Railway
41:36 – The sales job that's already gone
42:47 – The AI cost everyone is overpaying for
Bookmark this episode to understand what GTM looks like when the team is tiny, and how to develop founder-led instincts that never switch off.
"Canadian buyers are the hardest to sell. Reps trained on them crush it in the US."
Rahul Parmar (@parmstar) co-founded Lighthouse Labs, was an early @googlecloud sales lead in London, scaled @DrataHQ from $5M to $50M+, and now runs GTM at @Railway solo.
New @TankTalkPodcast 👇
Links to Episode:
Youtube: youtu.be/tQC1AJcWe6k
Substack: tanktalks.substack.com/p/sel…
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3NY…
A founder who's been an operator, a VC, and an LP, is now backed by @foundersfund and @OpenAI to resurrect drugs that big pharma companies have left behind.
This week on Tank Talks, we welcomed @TonyMouch to the Tank where we covered:
02:24 – the Alexander Hamilton obsession behind a biotech CEO
11:22 – why most VCs cluster around mediocrity
20:10 – the marathon metaphor for how billion-dollar drugs die
30:50 – running a biotech like an operating hedge fund
48:47 – the regulatory reform AI-era medicine actually needs.
Full episode on Tank Talks. Bookmark & watch.
Most people only know @foundersfund for @PalantirTech and @anduriltech
Few know that @peterthiel was also early in Canadian bio.
Now his fund has led the A and co-led the B in a Toronto company called Biossil (biossil.co) alongside @OpenAI to rescue abandoned drugs from pharma’s graveyard.
This week, I welcome my good friend and @ripple_ventures former anchor LP, Anthony Mouchantaf (@TonyMouch), to sit down with us on @TankTalkPodcast to share his read on why the AI labs are leaning into biology.
With so many people fearing AI everywhere, there's one place it's not feared, and that's healthcare, biotech and life sciences.
On this episode, we cover:
- Why promising drugs die three-quarters of the way to approval
- How an 8-person team runs biotech like an operating hedge fund
- The CSI-style hunt to track down a drug’s original owner
- Why most VCs, in his words, “cluster around mediocrity”
Full episode links below.
Youtube: youtu.be/Go5aQJGfW0g
Substack: tanktalks.substack.com/p/how…
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7HL…
Tank Talks retweeted
$120 trillion in investor capital just landed in Toronto, and Canada still can't explain what it wanted out of the US trade talks.
New @TankTalkPodcast with @ruffoloj:
Why the trade deal collapsed
@MarkJCarney's $1T pitch to global capital
@AnthropicAI's IPO goes political
Miro's fall from $17.5B to @bendingsppon
Watch 👇
A 40 min masterclass on grit, ownership, and reinventing yourself after the peak given by @NHL MVP and @HockeyHallFame of Fame defenseman Chris Pronger .
His heart stopped on ice, he got booed in his own building and even failed for two years straight.
But these hardships were what allowed him to come up on top, becoming one of the most feared players of his era.
His whole philosophy in one line:
"Once you decide I want to be the best player in the world or try to be the best player in the world, reverse engineer that and put the time and effort in and the work in to become that player."
Full link to the episode in comments below:
Substack: tanktalks.substack.com/p/how…
YouTube: youtu.be/-acFI4hhnlU
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0p3…
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…