8Spotlight

In this episode of 8Spotlight, we sit down with Joshua Perk, Founder & CEO of Vector, the company transforming how revenue teams understand buyer intent.

Joshua shares how Vector evolved from early product-market fit challenges into a breakout GTM platform: launching SiteID and OffsiteID to uncover contact-level buying signals before prospects ever reach your website. We talk candidly about rebuilding focus, navigating retention, raising conviction capital, and why the future of go-to-market belongs to Contact-Based Marketing, not accounts or guesswork.

A must-listen for founders, operators, and anyone rethinking how modern growth actually work...

Biotech is one of the hardest industries to break into...regulated, slow, compliance-heavy, and notoriously resistant to new software.

Yet Jin Kim, a solo YC founder, is doing what few believed possible: building a profitable, fast-growing AI platform that transforms how biotech companies run clinical trials.

In this episode, Jin shares how he built Miracle, the platform making clinical-trial data ingestion and visualization plug-and-play for biotechs. We talk about his unusual path from USA Olympic Archery Team to MIT, and how the precision and discipline of archery shaped his founder mindset.

What if anyone, literally anyone, could build a full app without writing a single line of code?

In today’s episode we sit down with Yujian Yao, co-founder and CEO of Floot, a platform building the easiest way for entrepreneurs and non-coders to build apps with AI.

Yujian takes us inside the whirlwind of attention after launching, the challenge of keeping users engaged, and what it’s like scaling a product used by people who’ve never built software before. He also opens up about the unexpected turbulence, including Floot’s YouTube c...

Can something as complex as property ownership in India finally be simplified?

In this episode of 8Spotlight, we sit down with Sanjay Mandava, co-founder and CEO of Landeed, the Y Combinator–backed startup transforming how India verifies, buys, and manages property.

For decades, India’s real-estate system has been defined by paperwork, bureaucracy, and uncertainty — where proving ownership can take weeks and disputes can drag on for years. Landeed is changing that. Using AI and deep data integrations, they’ve created a “blue tick for property,” bringing instant verification and transparency to one of the world’s largest...

"Can something artificial create something real?" This is one of the questions we tackle in this poignant episode of 8Spotlight with Dorothy Li, the co-founder of RealRoots. A Y Combinator–backed company growing at lightning speed, RealRoots is on a mission to help women form genuine friendships in a world that often makes that harder than ever.

RealRoots started with a simple but profound realization: women experience constant disruption in their social circle. From moving cities and changing jobs to marriage, motherhood, and beyond, maintaining deep connections has become an uphill battle.

Dor...

In this episode of 8Spotlight, we sit down with Noah Palansky, co-founder of Taiv, the company turning everyday TVs in restaurants, gyms, and retail spaces into dynamic, revenue-generating media networks.

Since its early days in Y Combinator, Taiv has grown rapidly: now with more than 3,000 signed partners and a freshly closed Series A led by IDC Ventures. Noah takes us behind the scenes of that growth, sharing how Taiv built and scaled a product that works for business owners, advertisers, and consumers alike.

For anyone interested in startups, media, or the future...

In the debut episode of 8Spotlight, we sit down with Josh Gardner, co-founder of Verata, to explore his journey from early career insights to building a YC-backed company tackling big problems in private equity platforms. Josh shares the pivotal moments (I believe the exact words used in this episode are "pivot hell"), tough decisions, and lessons learned along the road to PMF, offering a candid look at what it really takes to turn an idea into impact.