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- 🌴 Two New Speakers
👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind and The SF Grind, host the Ambition Podcast, and scout for Headline.
Happy Friday! Time for our weekly update of the Ambition Summit and Ambition Podcast before the weekend starts.
Let’s get to it.
The Ambition Summit, on September 24th, will bring 150 founders, operators, and investors together in Santa Monica to learn and connect for a full day, with a VIP dinner the night before.​
I’m excited to announce our latest speakers: Jo Phillips of Payabli and ​Dara Ladjevardian, Founder & CEO of Delphi.
​Jo Phillips is the Co-Founder of Payabli, the intelligent fintech operating system for software platforms, that most recently raised a $28M Series B led by Fika Ventures and QED Investors.
​Dara Ladjevardian is the Founder & CEO of Delphi, the platform that turns a person's knowledge, thinking, and voice into a digital mind others can talk to. Backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and the founders of YouTube, Zoom, Lyft, and DoorDash.
Jo and Dara join our other confirmed speakers:
Mehul Nariyawala: Co-Founder, Matic Robots. Mehul previously co-founded Flutter, which Google acquired for $40M, and went on to work on Nest. In January 2026, Matic raised a $60M Series C to scale their home robotics platform, a product that earned a 10/10 from WIRED (the reviewer's first 10/10 in over a decade of reviews) and a 9/10 from The Verge.
Dee Murthy, Co-Founder of Ghost, an AI-native distribution platform for the best brands in the world, that has raised $95M, most recently a $40M Series C.
Jessica Chang, Co-Founder of Upwards, the largest childcare network in the US, and a company that raised $43.3M, most recently a $21M Series B.
Shamin Walsh, Managing Director at BAM Ventures. Prior to joining BAM Ventures as a managing director, she was a consumer-focused partner at an early-stage generalist firm with tangible assets in 3PL/fulfillment, cold storage/co-packing, and manufacturing, giving her a holistic perspective through which to evaluate emerging consumer businesses.
We’ll announce more speakers soon! We had a little change to our past speaker list due to scheduling issues, but we have a great lineup with more on the way. Also, if you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, please reply to this email and I’ll share more details.
The Ambition Podcast is a show about the world's most ambitious people from history, and the lessons you can take from their lives and use in your own work and life.
Each episode is deeply researched, built around the definitive biography of one person (or in some cases, two), with dozens of hours spent reading, synthesizing, and pulling out what actually matters: what they built, how they thought, the struggles they overcame, and the tactics, strategies, and principles underneath it all.
Our fourth episode, featuring Steve Jobs, was just released. I read the 600-page biography by Walter Isaacson to create the episode and I’m excited to finally share it with you!
Ambition is available now on all podcasting platforms including:
If you enjoy the show, I’d greatly appreciate you sharing it with one other person and leaving a 5-start rating in your podcast player!
See you next week,
Justin
P.S. Want to connect?
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