Ali Rowghani is the founder of First Harmonic, a go-to-market program purpose-built for seed stage founders.

Ali has had a long, distinguished career in tech. He worked with Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull at Pixar for nine years holding various roles including CFO and SVP of Strategic Planning, took Twitter from $0 in revenue through IPO as the CFO and COO, and most recently was the founding Managing Director of Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund where he led investments in DoorDash, Stripe, Coinbase, Zapier, among many others. Ali has also invested as an early angel in several breakout AI companies, including Mercor, Decagon, and Cursor. He’s seen the arc from inception to IPO many times and recognizes what separates winning startups from the pack.

We covered:

Pixar’s golden age
Exceptional leadership
Working with Steve Jobs
Twitter going from $0 to $2B
Operating beliefs in venture

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Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(0:53) Pixar’s miracle factory

(6:28) Working with Steve Jobs

(13:23) Ed Catmull and John Lasseter

(16:28) Crazy years at Twitter

(18:30) Getting monetization right

(19:56) Learnings in hindsight

(22:37) Elon Musk observations

(24:03) Beginning of YC’s growth fund

(29:31) Between pre and post traction

(33:23) The second job of a CEO

(34:35) First Harmonic

(35:31) Beliefs in venture

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More on Ali:

https://www.firstharmonic.com/

https://x.com/ROWGHANI

More on Jack:

https://www.altcap.com/

https://x.com/jaltma

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Link to Ali’s referenced blog post:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3k-the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo

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