Mike Ghaffary is a General Partner at Burst Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in marketplace, software, and AI companies. With an impressive background spanning roles at Canvas Ventures and Social Capital, as well as co-founding Stitcher, he has been instrumental in the growth of companies like Yelp and Eat24, demonstrating his expertise in scaling businesses. Mike has a background in computer science and holds both a JD and MBA from Harvard, and he’s invested in high-growth companies like Strava, Superhuman, Faire, and Optimizely.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:13] Mike Ghaffary recalls his childhood ventures, including trading cards and running a lemonade stand
- [4:44] How moving to Silicon Valley at age 11 influenced Mike’s career in tech
- [8:37] The founding story of Stitcher and the early challenges of podcasting
- [11:04] Why timing matters in startup success
- [13:00] The game-changing business development deal Mike closed with Facebook at TrialPay
- [16:39] What is Mike’s three-part framework for business development?
- [19:44] Challenges of managing a large team and achieving a $750M–800M revenue run rate
- [24:47] Transitioning into venture capital and why operational experience matters
- [29:52] Why AI will create more jobs than it eliminates and how to prepare for it
In this episode…
The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked widespread anxiety about job displacement and economic upheaval. With rapid advancements outpacing traditional training models and workforce development, many are left asking: Will AI only benefit a select few, or can it create meaningful work opportunities for the broader population?
Mike Ghaffary, a seasoned investor and founder in tech and marketplaces, believes AI has enormous potential to generate — not eliminate — jobs, if applied wisely. Drawing on historical parallels from the Industrial Revolution and the early internet era, Mike explains that while disruption is inevitable, new opportunities always emerge. He highlights the importance of equipping workers to collaborate with AI, especially in skilled trades like HVAC and electrical, which are essential to supporting infrastructure like data centers. Mike also cautions founders about the risks of chasing venture-scale growth at all costs, advocating instead for profitability and strategic patience.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Mike Ghaffary, General Partner at Burst Capital, about how AI will fuel job creation and transform Main Street. Mike also shares insights on scaling Eat24, landing a game-changing partnership at TrialPay, and why the future belongs to software-powered small businesses.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Mike Ghaffary: LinkedIn | X
- Burst Capital
- Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
Quotable Moments:
- “The best investors I found are actually former founder-operators who know how to build companies.”
- “If you’re not making a good friend after every major BD partnership, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
- “AI won’t just displace jobs; it will create entirely new roles we haven’t imagined yet.”
- “Sometimes you have to know when to get off the venture treadmill and build sustainably.”
- “We need a minimum viable bureaucracy, just enough structure to scale, but not enough to slow you down.”
Action Steps:
- Learn AI tools relevant to your field: Mastering the latest AI applications can make you indispensable in the job market. This is especially critical for early-career professionals seeking a competitive edge.
- Map your business development relationships: Identify influencers, decision-makers, and skeptics in your target organization to close high-impact deals. Strategic mapping boosts clarity and conversion.
- Invest in timing, not just ideas: The success of a startup often hinges on market readiness. Evaluate whether your product is too early or just right for your target audience.
- Support job transition platforms: Build or invest in tools that help reskill workers displaced by automation. Empowering people during tech transitions builds loyalty and long-term value.
- Think Main Street, not just Silicon Valley: Many SMBs remain underserved by AI and software tools. Investing in these areas unlocks enormous market potential while fueling local economic growth.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to generate new jobs with AI. Everyone’s talking about job losses with AI. My guest today is Mike Ghaffary. He’s going to be talking about how you can create new jobs with AI. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:15
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:31
Hey everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show, and you know, if you’ve listened before, you know, each week we feature smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, Gusto, Kinko’s, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes for you to check out. And of course, this episode brought to you by our company, Rise25 and Podcast Copilot, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things strategy, accountability, and full execution. In fact, we invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform podcast Copilot. So go check out our website Rise25.com, or you can email us at [email protected].
All right. As I mentioned, my guest today is Mike Ghaffary. He is a General Partner at Burst Capital. It’s a venture capital firm founded by former Yelp executives, where he was instrumental in building that platform. He’s got an incredible background involved in so many different companies. I know how we’re going to get through all of them, including even ones in the podcast space. Stitcher is one of the co-founders of Stitcher, but it’s such a pleasure to have you here, Mike. And you said earlier when we were getting started that you were a founder hound and you started profit and nonprofit companies and lemonade stands and all this kind of stuff, and then, like me, buying and selling trading cards, probably back in the heyday when we all thought that we were going to retire off of the off the comic.
Mike Ghaffary: 02:00
Books, too. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 02:01
Oh, God. They’re still in my garage, and they’re worthless. Or they’re worth the same amount as they were 30 years ago. Yeah. But tell me a little bit about that. So lemonade stands and then buying and selling trading cards. What are some of the side hustles that young Mike had?
Mike Ghaffary: 02:14
Yeah. I mean I did, I did everything, I even had one where I got a very burly friend to pull this sled on wheels that we did called it sled Co. That’s funny I still have pictures of that. We anything we thought that there was a market for kids would pay money for. We were. Me and a couple of friends were trying to start businesses around it. And trading cards. At one point I found there was a big interest in X-Men trading cards. Marvel. So we would get all these binders full of X-Men cards and put them together and create our own packs. And at some point we got in trouble with the sixth grade teacher. He’s like, there’s too much of this going on like this back. So yeah.
John Corcoran: 02:48
And what drove all.
Mike Ghaffary: 02:49
These start ups?
John Corcoran: 02:50
Were you around? Were your parents entrepreneurial? Where were we like, what drove all this? What was it? You just don’t.
Mike Ghaffary: 02:55
I know what it was because I think, you know, maybe it skipped a generation because my grandfather and grandparents were very entrepreneurial, but my parents were, you know, my dad was my dad worked in software and technology. So I saw that side of it and had worked for startups. But he was more on the software and engineering side, engineering management. Not necessarily like going and starting things himself, although when he was younger he had done, I think one startup and then and my mom was a social worker for many years and had like different career for that. So it’s not like they were telling me, oh, you got to go do startups and things like that. But I just something I had it in me. I don’t know, I just liked starting things.
John Corcoran: 03:35
And and our background is Persian, right. Were your grandparents immigrants to this country?
Mike Ghaffary: 03:41
Yeah. Well, both my grandparents immigrated and my parents really came. They came here when they were 18 years old to study, you know, undergrad and grad school and then ended up staying here.
John Corcoran: 03:51
Because sometimes you see, you know, first generation immigrants that come to this country become entrepreneurs by, you know, not by choice, but because they have to.
Mike Ghaffary: 03:59
Yeah. Necessity. Yeah. I mean, for my parents, they were lucky that it was good timing when they came and they were 18, they came at a young age, were able to do all their schooling here. And that was before there was a revolution in Iran. And it was like a lot better relations and easier to come. So they were able to be very credentialed, I guess going into the workforce here versus, like you said, by necessity, coming like post their education and having to start over here.
John Corcoran: 04:22
You do hear stories like that. People have got like they were a doctor in their home country and they come to the United States and they have to be a janitor or some crazy stuff. Yeah, they.
Mike Ghaffary: 04:29
We’re more fortunate than that, but still obviously a grind to like, start a new life in a new country and get everything off the ground.
John Corcoran: 04:36
And you grew up in LA, but then you moved to Cupertino, the heart of Silicon Valley. What was that? What kind of an impact did that have on you?
Mike Ghaffary: 04:44
I mean, I think it had a huge impact. Right. I remember when I was and what did I know? I was like a 11 year old kid and my dad was saying, hey, we should move the family up from Southern California to Northern California, and you know, all the actions over there, and they’re changing the world. So he really saw that. To his credit, it was really impressive. And at the time, what did I know? I was 11 or 12. I didn’t want to change. My mom didn’t like change. And we were like, no, no, let’s not move. It’s warmer here, it’s colder there. I quickly realized, and that was the best thing that ever happened to our family, because I just got exposed to so many new people, ideas and just the and maybe, you know, I was already entrepreneurial before that, but it wasn’t about tech. And then I started getting, you know, starting at age 12, I started taking apart computers and rebuilding them. I taught myself how to do assembly language and C plus plus and software programming, all in like middle school and high school. And all my friends’ parents were somehow in the tech industry. And so that really fueled even more interest in what was going on. And this idea that I could do a tech startup or get really involved, you know, so starting by age 17, 18, 19, my friends and I were all talking about what tech startups we could do, and I started working at a software company at age 17, so it really just helps, I think, get ingrained. I know for some kids and now it’s gotten so extreme it could probably feel overwhelming. So that’s the balance you got to see with your kids. But for me, it was really motivating and cultivating.
John Corcoran: 06:06
And one of your first startups was around age 1819 when you were in college. What was that one?
Mike Ghaffary: 06:14
That was called college. It was an online intern recruiting platform. You know, it’s so long ago, I don’t even have it on my LinkedIn and stuff anymore. But it was really cool because I got to work with a couple of close friends who are both actually really successful investors and founders on their own right now. And I learned so much from those early experiences. You know, I worked for this first at 17. I worked for this software company, Marc Analysis Research Corporation, that became part of MSC software, doing computer aided engineering like CAD and CAE software. And you do virtual prototyping and you know, and then I got this other idea. And so it is just that you learn a lot from hiring people, recruiting. You know, we had Cooley Godward as our law firm. We’d have board meetings at their offices. We recruited Roger Craig, this football player, to be on our board. In addition,
John Corcoran: 07:02
You’re 18, 19 years old, and you get Roger Craig.
Mike Ghaffary: 07:05
Yeah, yeah. Tibco software if you know Tibco middleware, they were like one of our first big customers and we’re going to Tibco. So we were just. And then we got Sun Microsystems, and we actually pitched Max Levchin early on and got PayPal before it was part of eBay and eBay separately as customers, just like you’re in the mix and you’re seeing you’re meeting all these other entrepreneurs.
John Corcoran: 07:25
There had to be some downsides to that because this is like this is like the before and then there has to be some downside to that. Was there any negative side to all that or.
Mike Ghaffary: 07:34
Oh yeah. I mean, first of all, I didn’t sleep. My parents were like, why? They saw how much I was working all the time during school. At one point they tried to bribe me. They’re like, if we tried to give you some allowance, they really weren’t giving me any money. I had a full scholarship and paid my own way mainly. But they’re like, if we did give you some money, would that somehow get you to like, work less, because it seems like you have bags under your eyes, like you’re not. You’re not sleeping at night, but it’s so there’s health trade offs. You get to eventually have to learn how to balance, you know, sleep and exercise and things like that. And luckily, I was able to still, you know, do great for going to grad school and everything. But it can obviously have trade off with school if you’re trying to, to go to school at the same time. But I think doing a startup in college, if you can think of one and do one and find a group is an incredible learning experience, everyone should try.
John Corcoran: 08:17
Oh yeah, for sure. So you end up co-founding Stitcher. I want to hear about this. This is one of the very early podcasting apps. As a long time podcaster, I want to hear the story about how you came up with this idea, 2007, which is, you know, actually, I started my podcast around 2010, so it’s three years before that.
Mike Ghaffary: 08:37
Yeah, very early probably. We were a little too early to market in hindsight. You know, it’s taught me as an investor now that timing is a big part of I don’t know if it’s everything, but it’s, you know, a critical part of the equation. So I had done one summer in business school. I’d worked at BCG, Boston Consulting Group, and I made a friend there. This guy Noah, he was one of the first five employees at StubHub, the online ticketing marketplace. So he was very entrepreneurial even though he was working in the stiffer corporate environment, BCG like I was for that summer, and he had gone to Wharton Business School and I had gone to HBS. And so we stayed in touch as two entrepreneurial guys. I think we both realized we had this kind of startup energy. And so I was working at a venture fund, Summit Partners. He left his job and started thinking of startup ideas. And I was kind of advising him, giving him perspective. And he came up with this idea. He’s like, what about this podcast recording? And I had heard many ideas he was saying, but I was like, this is the one. Like, this is super interesting. You should tell. I got really excited about that one. And eventually that led to him recruiting me to come join him full time as a co-founder. So it was an amazing experience. But we were very early to the market. You know, we had the name like you could stitch together different shows was our concept. We actually helped a bunch of First Venture Beat and other smaller publications, and then we got TechCrunch. We launched the TechCrunch headline, so we helped a lot of these publications launch their first podcast because we realized there wasn’t enough podcast content out there, but we also liked it.
John Corcoran: 10:04
Kind of had to become an agency as well then.
Mike Ghaffary: 10:06
A little bit. Yeah. And then I led business development. So I did deals with all these like CNN and Fox Sports and all these different publications. I remember this gaming network, which this guy Robert, who’s now a Bloomberg Beta investor, like he was running at the time. He was one of our first BD deals. So I’d cut these deals to get all the content on our platform and then started creating shows. So it was really fun, but very, very early.
John Corcoran: 10:35
Yeah. I mean, you must have been explaining to people what a podcast was from the beginning and why it mattered. Yeah.
Mike Ghaffary: 10:40
So that was the thing. We knew it was the future, but it was, you know, that’s the question. And now obviously it’s validating to see how much podcasting has exploded. And the company eventually sold to Sirius Satellite Radio for a decent outcome. But as founders, we had already had our equity mainly wiped out from then. So it’s like a long journey.
John Corcoran: 10:59
So what’s the lesson in that? How was your why? Was your equity wiped out?
Mike Ghaffary: 11:04
Well, the first company sold an earlier time for basically nothing. And then and then it sold again and again. So it kind of built up. So a few lessons are one. Be really careful of timing. Really ask yourself if there’s going to be an exit market. It’s so tough because the environment you’re predicting is like 7 to 10 years from now. Right. But you’ve got to have that ability. Some of the best entrepreneurs have some of that sense of where the puck is headed, and you can’t be too, too early. So you really have to be honest about that. But that’s a very difficult part. And the investors, I think, help you gauge that as well. And then number two is if you do have something, maybe we should have held on like go profitable or go if you see it’s not going quite on the hockey stick to be the super venture, venture backed venture scale kind of operation as quickly as you can go profitable and maybe try and just run it longer so you can catch the wave and maybe, you know, I left the company. I didn’t stay the long haul the way my co-founder Noah did. Like maybe one co-founder who wants to do more lifestyle or stick around through profitable, not venture scale. They can do that. Maybe you hire someone else to do that, but why give up your assets? Like in hindsight, maybe we could have just somehow found a way to hold on to it. I think more founders are wising up to that like a be careful getting on the venture. You know, a brutal kind of scale of where you have to keep climbing this ladder and hitting these milestones. Be careful not getting onto it unless you really want to get on the treadmill as the right analogy, but also knowing when to get off the treadmill. I’ve helped some founders with that, and it’s okay to say, hey, maybe this wasn’t the right thing, and now I’ll just go slower and I’ll be profitable and I’ll grow off my own profits and wait to catch some tailwinds later. Maybe.
John Corcoran: 12:43
You also strike me as the kind of person that’s drawn to new ideas, and probably wouldn’t want to stick with something for 15 years, you know, grinding it out over a 15 year period because something new would come along that you’d be excited about, which is what happened. TrialPay you start shortly after Citra?
Mike Ghaffary: 13:00
Yeah. So I joined TrialPay. My friend Alex Rampell had co-founded it with Terry Angelos. Alex has since now moved on to Andreessen. He’s been one of the longest standing partners there. And that was super interesting. But like you said yeah, I, I did not stay too long there, but I did make a big impact with business development deals. I got more and more starting with Stitcher than TrialPay and later Yelp more and more into business development. And I saw like we were able to double our revenue from, I think, 20 to 40 million overnight by doing this deal with Facebook. But I put a ton of work in. I remember Alex had told me, Mike, I think there’s a 1% chance we could be the exclusive monetization partner for Facebook platform and all the stuff they’re launching with all these social games and Facebook Marketplace or Facebook platform. Sorry. So he said, I think there’s a 1% chance we could be the exclusive or de facto exclusive partner.
John Corcoran: 13:52
But you went after it anyway. Do it. Yeah.
Mike Ghaffary: 13:54
Just focus. He likes to. And I did it. And that helped get my reputation as a business development miracle worker a little bit.
John Corcoran: 14:01
And tell us what you do. Were you sending bottles of wine to Zuck? What are you?
Mike Ghaffary: 14:05
No, no.
John Corcoran: 14:05
That’s showing up at his house. Knocking on that.
Mike Ghaffary: 14:07
Actually it would backfire. And no. So there’s a lot we could spend a whole podcast just on, like, business development. But I’ll give three highlights. One is really getting to know the whole mapping of the organization. It’s not just about like Zuck. Although of course I did do anything I could do with Zuck. And I cold called like Sheryl Sandberg. I’d met her through some alumni event like a reunion, and I saw, like I pinged her, I got to so I got time with everyone I could obviously.
John Corcoran: 14:33
Did you pitch Zuckerberg himself?
Mike Ghaffary: 14:36
I sent him emails and he was like, involved. He came to one of the meetings. But again, you also don’t want to bother the CEO of a rocket ship like that, right? If he personally wasn’t going to be like he was the personal final decision maker, but he didn’t want to, like, weigh in on all the meetings. You have to be careful, like know your audience and know who actually wants to talk to you and cares about it. We luckily had there like Deb, Lou and all these great people there who actually really did care. So I had a map of like 30 different people. So it’s a lot of enterprise sales.