Cracking the box open: why we’re doing this

In the first ride, Robert and Kayvan crack open their own reasons for starting White Box Rodeo: why the entrepreneurial climate needs a lobby, what it means to whitebox-test a founder, and the rules of the rodeo.

In this episode

• Why the entrepreneurial climate needs a lobby
• What “whitebox testing” a founder actually looks like
• The difference between a pitch deck and the real internals
• The rules of the rodeo

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Cold open
• 02:14 — Why we’re doing this
• 11:40 — Whitebox vs blackbox founders
• 28:05 — The rules of the rodeo

Transcript

Robert: Welcome to the very first episode of White Box Rodeo. The idea behind this whole thing is simple: most founder conversations stop at the pitch deck. We want to crack the box open and look at how the company actually runs.

Kayvan: Right, and from the VC side you see hundreds of decks a year. The deck is the marketing. The interesting part is always the stuff underneath it, the parts nobody puts on LinkedIn.

Robert: So that’s the show. We do whitebox testing on entrepreneurs, startups and VCs. And the rodeo part, well, because building a company is a wild ride.

This is placeholder transcript copy used to verify the episode template on staging. It will be replaced by the real AssemblyAI transcript when episode one publishes on Transistor.