Mrinalini Loew

🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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GPU power is advancing so fast -- and companies are willing to spend so aggressively that they'll only rent the newest model GPUs -- that previous-gen GPUs are effectively worthless. That means data center economics don't work, because you can't recoup the cost of installing GPUs before they become un-rentable. https://lnkd.in/gagATgG2

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I'm Jeremy Loughnot, and I run The Consilio. We specialize in placing design and creative leaders at venture-backed AI companies — VP of Design, Head of Design, CDO — primarily Series A through C. We also work on engineering and product leadership searches when they're part of the same founding team conversation, because these hires don't happen in isolation. A little about me: 15 years in recruiting, 11 of them at Meta, where I scaled a recruiting team from 22 to 140. I left because I wanted to spend my time doing the work directly — one founder, one search, one placement at a time. How I work: I take a small number of clients at once. I focus on early-to-mid-stage AI companies because that's where leadership hiring decisions have the most leverage — and the highest consequences when they go wrong. Most of the candidates I place aren't actively looking. They're people I've known for years who trust me to bring them something worth their time. What I'm not: not a staffing firm. Not a database. Not a high-volume shop that sends you 50 resumes and hopes one sticks. Every search I run is one I've personally chosen to take on because I believe I can find the right person. If you're building an AI company and thinking about your first design or technical leadership hire — or you're a VC talent partner who works with companies that are — I'd love to connect. #designleadership #AIstartups #executivesearch #venturecapital #startupfounders

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I was CPO at Blend before their $4 billion IPO. We rejected the “forward deployed engineer” Palantir model that everyone is copying now. Here’s why: Blend could have followed the forward-deployed engineer approach. Both our CEO and CTO were early Palantir. They'd seen it work. Instead, we built a SaaS product with core components. Move fast, iterate, use data to learn. Not custom code for every client. That Palantir model is having a resurgence. Now Sierra, Decagon, and others are hiring forward-deployed engineers. But it’s not the right approach for every company. It’s fundamentally the wrong answer for Assembled’s customers. Here's what we understand about support teams and why we’re not going the forward deployed route: Customer Support teams are used to getting no resources and no support. On the surface, you'd think they'd be excited about engineers building custom solutions. "Finally, someone's offering us developers!" The reality is support teams are terrified of getting help they can't afford to keep. Support teams are wary because they know the math. They don't have budget for expensive, scarce resources. At some point the shoe drops. The engineers disappear when priorities shift. And custom solutions break. Support is left holding the bag with something they can't maintain. They're resource-starved by design. The idea of a dependency on resources they can't control is terrifying. So instead, the goal should be to give support teams the ability to manage, change, and solve their own problems. Not dependencies on engineers they can't keep. Smart, competent people who teach them to do it themselves. Palantir wasn't even a product company for years. They were a custom development shop with reusable components. Show up, build something bespoke, maybe extract learnings. That's not scalable for any but the largest support teams who need sustainability. Forward-deployed engineers are the new shiny object. I wasn’t a fan of it at Blend. And I’m not a fan today either. What I see in the customer support space is that teams need empowerment, not dependency. I want the teams we work with to be able to say: "I love that you’re partnering with me. And I love that I can do this myself too." That's the difference between building a product and building a consulting practice.

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Leadership in 2025: Designing for Alignment, Not Control Many leaders continue to confuse alignment with control, leading to over-engineered processes and unnecessary layers of oversight that hinder momentum. The most effective leaders, including those at TPG, prioritize alignment around mission and outcomes. When the vision is clear and metrics are established, teams require space rather than micromanagement. This environment fosters creativity and accelerates execution. A recent article in Harvard Business Review emphasizes that the strongest organizations thrive not on tighter control, but on cultivating systems of trust and alignment that promote speed and resilience. Today’s leadership is about removing friction, clarifying communication, and trusting the systems in place. #Leadership #Alignment #StrategicOps #TPG #CapitalEfficiency

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I wrote about how product managers should deliberately decide which features should be built to an A grade and which ones should be built to a B or even only a C grade. Making the resource tradeoffs to optimize business outcomes is a core job of product management, and building every capability to an A grade is a poor use of scarce resources. https://lnkd.in/gTXBfNYE

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Highly recommend watching this episode from Lenny Rachitsky's podcast with the one and only Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO of Vercel) on the future of GTM in an AI world. She provides a deep dive into how Vercel is using AI to benefit their sales org today. Must watch.

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Ever been part of a team pour months into building something "custom," only to quietly switch to an off-the-shelf tool a year later? Yeah, me too. In the age of AI, I’m seeing this pattern everywhere. The lure of “build” - the feeling of ownership and that maybe you’ll outcompete by doing it in-house - runs deep. But the catch? AI is evolving so fast that what you architect today can be outclassed by a plug-and-play tool next quarter. The ground keeps moving under your feet, while you’re still writing integration tests. I've lost count of how many times I’ve watched teams get stuck maintaining baggage, when they could’ve been iterating on the actual experience that matters to users. I get it: not everything should be handed to vendors. But the calculus has changed. Especially with AI tools, “buy” now often means you get to leapfrog, ship faster, and focus the team’s energy where it counts. Own your secret sauce - rent the rest. https://buff.ly/pwu4bZ8

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Most leadership advice skips over the real multiplier of scale: the founder. Your instincts, energy, and decision-making patterns don’t stay in your head, they shape how your company runs, feels, and performs. I work with high-growth founders navigating the shift from scrappy momentum to designed scale. Every journey is different, but the same core realities keep surfacing. Here are a few of the 9 beliefs driving this work: 🔹Founder-Led, by Design – This isn’t just a phase—it’s a choice. When purpose-built, founder-led companies scale because of the founder: your clarity, instincts, customer insight, vision, and relentless conviction. 🔹You Are the Source Code – Your logic, instincts, and energy become the company’s default OS. What’s inside you—presence, pace, avoidance—echoes in everything from culture to product. 🔹Your Patterns Become the Playbook – What you don’t examine, your company inherits. Your nervous system becomes theirs, your emotional rhythm becomes theirs. First: notice the patterns. Then: rewrite them. 🔹Self-Awareness Is a Scaling Tool – You can’t upgrade what you don’t see. Self-awareness isn’t indulgence—it’s infrastructure. It’s how you shift from reactive to intentional leadership. 🔹What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – Startup traits—speed, control, instinct—fuel initial traction. At scale, they start to stall things. Real growth requires new leadership calibration. 🔹It’s Not Just Better Ops—It’s Founder–Company Coherence™ – Scale only works when you and your org grow together, built with intention, reflecting your edge. Without that design, you scale noise, not signal. I go through all 9 here → https://lnkd.in/gdpSgF-f I’ll be unpacking each of these in the coming months – the ideas and field stories. This isn’t just theory—it’s how companies scale with soul. Follow along and let’s walk through it together. I'd love to hear your thoughts or moments. Share them in the comments or DM me. #Startups #Founders #Leadership #FounderSupport #Scaling #StartupJourney

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In the San Francisco Bay Area, founders are relentless about growing and scaling their companies. They spot opportunity, scale through uncertainty, and create companies that redefine industries. Recently, we gathered a group of founders and tech leaders to discuss the intersection of company growth and long-term personal success. Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Communications, shared the inspiring story behind his company’s growth and eventual IPO. Eric reiterated that the founders who create the most impact don’t just plan for an exit – they prepare for what comes after. Too often, personal wealth planning lags company growth, and that gap can become costly at the most pivotal moments. The rest of the evening was focused on closing that gap. Our colleagues in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Pawan Tewari and Nick Giovanni, shared a candid outlook for M&A and IPOs in this environment, along with important steps founders should take to prepare for a strategic exit. We ended with a conversation around the key considerations for maximizing founders’ personal outcomes. Pre-transaction planning isn’t defensive - it’s opportunistic. Your company’s exit strategy and your family’s long-term planning work should not be done in isolation. When investment banking and private wealth work in sync, founders can cohesively optimize outcomes on all sides of the equation. To learn more about the practical “do’s and don'ts” for founders, we are happy to share our ‘Goldman guide’ for navigating wealth planning, business exists, and IPOs: https://lnkd.in/ewhEGjV3. Thank you, Eric, and to all the founders who joined us at The Battery in SF. On behalf of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management and Investment Banking, we look forward to the next conversation.

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Last year’s Series A was a milestone, but it wasn’t a stopping point. As proof that we’ve only been moving faster than before, I’m excited to share that Numeric raised a $51M Series B, led by investors like IVP, Menlo Ventures, Founders Fund, and more. Over the past year, we've launched AI-powered flux analysis that accountants actually trust, built out cash management tooling, and worked with some of the best finance teams in the industry. This raise funds what’s next: more AI agent capabilities, building a strong finance data layer, and expanding the team. If you're interested in working on hard problems in finance infrastructure, let's talk. More on the round: https://lnkd.in/gvkWqiDx

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