Episode
The Fund Betting on Founders Who've Lived the Problem | Mike Saloio, Begin Ventures
- Podcast
- Top Decile Podcast
- Published
- Jun 1, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1185
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Summary
Mike Saloio spent eight years as a sell-side equity analyst at Oppenheimer, covering Cisco, Apple, and EMC, before founding Huddle, a VC-backed marketplace that helped over 150 startups assemble design and engineering teams. Now he's launching Begin Ventures to back the founders pre-seed ecosystems routinely miss: domain experts using AI to reinvent legacy consumer industries. We get into why AI is turning non-technical operators into weekend-prototype founders, why Mike believes the consumer AI application layer is still a wide-open blank slate, and what he'd tell aspiring VCs who think they haven't checked enough boxes yet.