Pixar’s Golden Age, Twitter through IPO, and Building YC’s Growth Fund | Ali Rowghani | Ep. 26

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

October 1, 2025

Duration

41m

Channel

Uncapped with Jack Altman

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

(If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe!) Ali Rowghani is the founder of First Harmonic, a go-to-market program purpose-built for seed stage founders. Ali has had a long, distinguished career in tech. He worked with Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull at Pixar for nine years holding various roles including CFO and SVP of Strategic Planning, took Twitter from $0 in revenue through IPO as the CFO and COO, and most recently was the founding Managing Director of Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund where he led investments in DoorDash, Stripe, Coinbase, Zapier, among many others. Ali has also invested as an early angel in several breakout AI companies, including Mercor, Decagon, and Cursor. He’s seen the arc from inception to IPO many times and recognizes what separates winning startups from the pack. We covered:

• Pixar’s golden age
• Exceptional leadership
• Working with Steve Jobs
• Twitter going from $0 to $2B
• Operating beliefs in venture

Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:53) Pixar’s miracle factory (6:28) Working with Steve Jobs (13:23) Ed Catmull and John Lasseter (16:28) Crazy years at Twitter (18:30) Getting monetization right (19:56) Learnings in hindsight (22:37) Elon Musk observations (24:03) Beginning of YC’s growth fund (29:31) Between pre and post traction (33:23) The second job of a CEO (34:35) First Harmonic (35:31) Beliefs in venture More on Ali: https://www.firstharmonic.com/ https://x.com/ROWGHANI More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma Link to Ali’s referenced blog post: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3k-the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: friends@uncappedpod.com

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Ali Rowghani

  guest

• Jack Altman

  host

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Uncapped with Jack Altman, featuring Ali Rowghani and Jack Altman, Pixar’s Golden Age, Twitter through IPO, and Building YC’s Growth Fund | Ali Rowghani | Ep. 26 explores ali Rowghani on miracle factories, Twitter scale, and startup saplings Rowghani frames Pixar as a “miracle factory” built on director-led passion, an uncompromising quality bar with no hedging, rapid iterative prototyping, and psychologically safe, candid feedback loops.

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