Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

Venture Unlocked occupies a niche that almost no other podcast covers well: the actual business of running a venture capital firm. Samir Kaji spent over 20 years advising startups and VC firms before launching this show, and he uses that experience to ask the questions that aspiring and emerging fund managers actually need answered. How do you raise your first fund? What should your LP base look like? How do you think about portfolio construction when you're managing $50 million versus $500 million? The show has about 158 episodes and a sterling 4.9 rating from 80 reviews, with one reviewer calling it "basically a mini-MBA" for venture capital. That's not an exaggeration. Each episode features a different VC -- sometimes a solo GP running a $20 million fund, sometimes a managing partner at a multi-billion-dollar firm -- and Kaji draws out the operational details that most VC podcasts skip over. How they source deals, how they think about reserves, what their relationship with LPs actually looks like day to day. Recent episodes have covered topics like the crisis in seed-stage investing, platform shifts driven by AI, and how to bet on founders building physical-world companies. The conversations tend to run 45 minutes to an hour and have a measured, thoughtful pace. Kaji isn't trying to create viral moments; he's trying to create lasting educational content. If you're thinking about becoming a VC, launching a fund, or you already manage one and want to hear how your peers handle the same challenges, Venture Unlocked is one of the most targeted and useful resources available. It updates roughly every two weeks and is also available through a companion Substack newsletter.