Gaining early-design partners, converting your first customers, identifying your ICP & default delegating w/ Mahima Chawla

Episode notes

We cover founder conviction & tips for engaging with investors with Mahima Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO @ Cocoon, who shares the origin story of her company, tips for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build, and how it’s addressing the problem of employee leave. Additionally, Mahima reveals the process behind early research, how she gained early design partners after user interviews, frameworks for collaborating between design & legal, identifying the ideal customer profile, and her method for delegating & determining where to invest her time as CEO & co-founder. ABOUT MAHIMA CHAWLA Mahima Chawla ( @mahimachawlaa ) is the CEO & Co-founder of Cocoon. Before starting Cocoon, Mahima worked at Square building lending products for Square Capital. Prior to Square, she was at Bond Street (acquired by Goldman) and Morgan Stanley. Mahima grew up in Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and the UAE and studied Math & Economics at Brown University. She is based in the Bay Area. "We did reach out to some of our strongest sort of supporters during the research period and just asked like, 'Hey, would you be willing to pilot this? It's totally new.

• Determining when to leave to start your own company, making strategic bets, and selling to enterprise customers w/ Anhang Zhu @ TierZero56 / 100
• How to know when your company needs to pivot and the signals/principles that will help guide you through pivoting w/ Pete Nichols, Lizzie Matusov, and Tony Dong51 / 100
• Determining bets, using customer insights to pivot, and gaining developer buy in & trust w/ Tomas Reimers @ Graphite55 / 100
• Applying Agentic AI to the Supply Chain, Building Systems to Withstand Chaos, and Leveraging your Curiosity w/ Pooja Brown @ Inventry.ai
• The Product Paradigm Shift: How LiveKit Navigated High Stakes Scaling Challenges to Build the Future of Voice-First AI Interfaces w/ Russ d’Sa