Corporate venture capital has evolved.

In this episode of the Influencer Series Fireside Chat, Ravi Belani sits down with Jay Eum, Founding Managing Director of GFT Ventures and one of the few investors who has helped build three venture initiatives, including Samsung Ventures and TransLink Capital.

They explore how CVC has moved from slow, strategically entangled “dumb money” to independent, performance-driven CVC 3.0 models. Jay breaks down what makes corporate venture capital successful today, how reputation shapes access to deal flow, and why some CVCs create real strategic leverage while others struggle.

They also dive into hard tech fundraising:

• When founders should approach CVCs

• Why proof of concept matters before engaging strategics

• How to avoid getting burned in capital-intensive industries

• Why reputation is everything in tight venture ecosystems

• How to think about leverage when you only have a few possible partners

Plus, Jay shares his perspective on today’s AI revenue explosion and what founders should focus on during this unprecedented market cycle.

If you’re a hard tech founder, enterprise startup, or emerging fund manager, this conversation is essential.

Enterprise AI startups don’t fail because the tech is weak. They fail because they sell the wrong way.

In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi Belani sits down with Gnani Palanikumar, former Head of Product at Apigee (acquired by Google for $725M) and chair of Alchemist’s GenAI track.

Gnani shares a tactical, operator-level playbook for turning AI pilots into real enterprise adoption.

They discuss:

• Why traditional enterprise org structures break AI deployments
  

• The mismatch between 2-year AI cycles and 12-month buying cycles
  

• Why founders should sell at the department level, not enterprise-wide
  

• How to find pre-approved budgets and avoid multi-stakeholder gridlock
  

• The “4-week proof” tactic for voice AI in financial services
  

• Why domain expertise and fractional operators matter
  

• How to identify whether a company is AI-native or stuck in SaaS thinking
  

• Why AI projects must deliver value within a quarter
  

Gnani’s 5-word takeaway says it all:

Lead with trust. Deliver proof.

If you’re building enterprise AI, this episode is pure tactical insight.

Agentic AI is everywhere right now, but most teams are still struggling to price it, deploy it, and make it work in production.

In this Fireside Chat, Ravi Belani sits down with Vibhor Rastogi, who leads AI investing at Citi Ventures, to unpack what’s actually happening inside enterprise AI adoption and what founders often get wrong.

They dive into why pricing agentic software is still an unsolved problem, what’s genuinely overhyped in the “agent” wave, and how startups can build defensible AI businesses in a world of reskinned workflows and runaway costs.

Topics covered include:

• Why seat-based, consumption-based, and outcome-based pricing all break in different ways
  

• How CIOs think about predictability, guardrails, and runaway AI costs
  

• What investors really want to see from agentic AI startups
  

• Why many “agents” today are just rebranded APIs and workflows
  

• The importance of memory, learning, and real autonomy in agentic systems
  

• How founders can solve the data cold-start problem through design partnerships
  

• Why an “Agentic Ops” layer may be the missing piece for enterprise adoption
  

If you’re building, investing in, or deploying agentic AI, this episode will help you separate signal from noise.