Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast

Amy Nauiokas is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Anthemis, a leading digital financial services investment firm.  Anthemis manages nearly $1 billion.  Amy is also Founder and Chair of Archer Gray, a media production and content company. Straightforward for a venture capitalist, right?  Except maybe for the TV/Movie company she also runs.  But wait – she’s also a liberal arts major who joined the Peace Corps out of college.  In this episode we discuss how she made her way from the Peace Corps to leading one of the biggest fintech venture capital firms. We also talk about the early 80s women in finance who she views as pioneers truly worth paying homage to, and whose issues she contrasts to those faced by women in today’s finance/venture world. EPISODE QUOTES On the Diversity of Anthemis and Its Investments “We brought together people of very eclectic, different and diverse backgrounds to form this platform. And now we're 50 people around the world and we're working out of three physical offices and pr

Vern Howard’s story is remarkable.  Vern was a math prodigy who left high school early, when he tested into Virginia Commonwealth University to study Computer Science and Math.  He paid his way through school by teaching math and serving as a janitor on campus. He went on to sell men’s suits, which taught him the art of selling.  After joining Capital One – whose signing bonus he used to rebuild an Alpha Romeo – he built Capital One’s first mobile banking application.  He also built out the Application Security Team at Capital One before, naturally, becoming a securities trader. Hang on, we’re not done yet.  He became an entrepreneur.  He sent a book to Steve Case’s partner at Revolution and….well, listen to find out what happens! Episode Quotes On Getting Started as an Entrepreneur “So two people I met accelerated everything. Ted Leonsis kind of introduced me to this network of people. Mike Lincoln over at Cooley was like, “Yeah, everyone is raving about you. You didn't go to an Ivy League school, you're not

An episode in which I thank each of the 2020 guests.  A podcast first (probably).  I briefly recall – fondly – a bit of each of the 2020 episodes. Is it interesting?  I think so.  Can I do it in one take?  Turns out, yes.  Enjoy, and thank you for listening. Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack Founder Keller Fitzsimmons, “Lost in Startuplandia” Author Jeff Macpherson, Tiki Bar TV Creator Brianne Kimmel, worklife Founder Paul-Henri Ferrand, Brex COO Matt Hulett, Rosetta Stone CEO Mike Stutz, Television Producer Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle Senior Political Writer Kaiser Kuo, Sinica Podcast Host Eric Tarczynski, Contrary Capital Founder Somesh Dash, IVP General Partner Monique Woodard, Cake Ventures Founder Michael Ellison, Codepath Founder Promise Phelon, The Growth Warrior Founder Scott Simpson, Comedian – Cheaper than Therapy Founder Parker Conrad, Rippling Founder Brad Feld, Foundry Group Founder Domm Holland, Fast Founder Garrett Smallwood, Wag Labs CEO Deena Shakir, Lux Capital Partner Rob Chesnut, AirB

Stacey Bishop is a partner at Scale Venture Partners where she invests in “business applications driving the Intelligent Connected World”. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of companies like Abstract, Airspace, Demandbase, Extole, Lever, and Textio. Stacey is a founding member of All Raise – an organization frequently mentioned on Something Ventured. She is also an advisor to The University Growth Fund Stacey got her MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from The University of Michigan. In this episode we discuss her path to becoming a partner at a prominent Silicon Valley firm, and the role All Raise played in accelerating her career. Notable quotes from this episode:   On the Early Days of “All Raise” “Before All Raise, women in venture, we just put our heads down, did our job -- just focused on trying to get ahead and do the right thing. And I think the most eye-opening thing – when All Raise started, it changed the dynamic. It suddenly brought all the women together. And even though we h

In 2013, Fortune’s Jeff Roberts visited "Satoshi Square" in New York.  It was the name of the location where a group of crypto anarchists and Wall Street traders bought and sold Bitcoin in the open air. Since that day, Jeff became fascinated with Bitcoin and new forms of money. That fascination led him to write the new book “Kings of Crypto:  One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street”. Said Fortune Senior Writer Robert Hackett: "'Kings of Crypto' tells the story of a ragtag band of rebels who saw the future of finance before anyone else and who wrenched the revolution into their orbit. Reading this book is like using a stethoscope to open the vault containing the cryptocurrency industry's origins. Click, click, click—and a wealth of secrets spills out. Learn what made Coinbase, one of the most improbably successful Silicon Valley startups, hit it big—and what makes its founding 'Vulcan Swiss bankers' tick. As long as Satoshi Nakamoto's identity remains secret, this

Hooman Radfar is co-founder and CEO of Collective, an online back-office platform designed for freelancers, consultants and other ‘businesses-of-one’. He is also a Venture Partner at Expa, a San Francisco-based start-up venture firm and studio where he was a founding partner (along with Uber Co-Founder Garrett Camp). Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of AddThis.  AddThis was acquired by Oracle in 2016. Recently, Hooman took the somewhat rare step of leaving a perfectly good venture capital job to start a company. In this episode, he describes why the idea he is pursuing felt so compelling he had to make the move.  He also discusses his path to building and selling a company, as well as his immigrant parent’s path to the US.   On How Startups Emerge from their Initial State “There's this murky period prior to figuring things out which people tend to write out of history. Where you're kind of trying to find out what's now called ‘product market fit’. Instagram went through it with Brbn, Twitter went through

Fabrice Grinda is a wildly successful entrepreneur and investor.  In this episode he recounts in detail 4 stories that any entrepreneur – any person, really – will find fascinating. The first is the story of building one of Europe’s first marketplaces before eBay got there – and what happens when you turn down $100 million for your company. The second is the story of Zingy, and what it’s like to grind without capital and miss payroll 27 times, before ultimately succeeding. Third, Fabrice talks about building OLX, the global trading platform, after Craig Newmark refused his offer to fix Craigslist.  Learn what happens when OLX and its competitor go to war and spend billions on – TV advertising. Finally, Fabrice offers his considered view of the future:  On how climate change is being addressed through technology, and how COVID has affected startups that will ultimately change the world. https://fabricegrinda.com https://fjlabs.com https://somethingventured.us    

Jaclyn Hester has just become a Partner at Foundry Group.  So first, “Congratulations, Jaclyn”. Jaclyn joined Foundry Group – the Boulder-based tech company and venture fund investor -- after a few years at big law firms.  As a lawyer, she worked on everything from startup formation and financing to large M&A processes. During graduate school at CU Boulder, she caught the entrepreneurship bug and immersed herself in the local startup community, serving as the Executive Director of Startup Colorado. She has also built a startup with her husband, Anders.   Their family’s bootstrapped tour and activity software company was successfully acquired in 2018 by Booking.com. She becomes a partner Foundry just as it raises its first Foundry Group Next (“FG Next”) fund.  Episode Quotes: On Her Path from Lawyer to Entrepreneur “I always had a feeling that there was something more interesting about the businesses themselves than about the legal aspect. I think for me, it felt like being the attorney was just a way to b

There are only so many iconic social networks in the world – and Nextdoor is one of them.  While perhaps not as fast-growing as Facebook or even LinkedIn, Nextdoor has steadily become the hub for neighborhoods around the world. Sarah Leary founded Nextdoor, along with Nirav Tolia, Prakash Janakiraman, and David Wiesen. In this episode, Sarah tells the story of getting Nextdoor off the ground.  She talks about the painstaking work they did to figure out how to build a healthy community around a neighborhood, before they were ready to scale. We talk about the impact COVID-19 had on Nextdoor communities, and how and why she decided to become a venture capitalist at Unusual Ventures. Notable Episode Quotes On Starting Her Career at Microsoft “I joined Microsoft at really a golden time:  The early 90s.  I was on the product team that launched the first version of Microsoft Office, and that was an all-star team. It was a time when Microsoft was just taking off and went from being this software company that some peo

Trae Vassallo is co-founder and partner at Defy, a venture capital firm she built with Neil Sequeira.  She was previously a general partner at Kleiner Perkins. Trae made her way to Silicon Valley from…rural Minnesota.  As a girl, Trae fell in love with coding – on an Apple II.  She went, sight unseen, to Stanford University, where she studied mechanical and electrical engineering.  After a stint at design firm IDEO, she co-founded and led product at Good Technologies. In this episode we discuss Trae’s path to Kleiner Perkins, and her experiences being one of relatively few female venture capital partners in Silicon Valley. She contrasts the treatment of women in Silicon Valley before, and after, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit (Check out Episode 101).  We discuss why she struck out on her own rather than staying at Kleiner, and how she and her partner came together to form Defy. Finally, Trae discusses a health scare that led to her discovery of integrative medicine and lifelong quest for healthy living. EPISODE QUOTES O

William Davidow is a Silicon Valley pioneer, former Intel VP, and renowned venture capitalist.  He is author of the new book, with tech journalist Michael Malone, THE AUTONOMOUS REVOLUTION: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines (Berrett-Koehler, February 18, 2020).  It’s a provocative look at how to safeguard humanity from our autonomous future and how to harness its benefits. According to Davidow and Malone, for the third time in the history of humanity civilization is undergoing phase change.  The first was the Agricultural Revolution, the second the Industrial Revolution, and we are now in the midst of the Autonomous Revolution. Some ideas discussed: How to adapt society to our new era and transform our relationship with intelligent machines the authors propose in the new book Creating tiered personal information “safety deposit boxes” over which users would have complete control to protect internet privacy; Imposing a tax on sending emails, time spent on social networks, and gaming; Programs that

Rob Chesnut is an advisor to Airbnb, where he was previously Chief Ethics Officer and general counsel.  His recently released book is Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead An Ethical Revolution. Rob started his career as a federal prosecutor, but decided he could do more good in the world by working for companies like eBay and Chegg. Eventually joining Airbnb, he helped Brian Chesky navigate issues such as racial discrimination by Airbnb hosts.  He also helped Airbnb create a culture of “Intentional Integrity”. In this episode we discuss Rob’s journey to and through Silicon Valley, and his experience creating ethical cultures those companies.  We also discuss what happened to Airbnb when the COVID crisis hit. Hear what Brian Chesky said as Airbnb was faced with lawsuits over discrimination by its hosts Rob Chesnut Episode Excerpts On leaving the role of federal prosecutor to work for tech companies: “After a while, it's a real negative. It has a negative aspect to it.  You're putting young peopl

Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that manages more than $2 billion.  She is particularly interested in entrepreneurs building breakthrough companies enabling human and environmental health, access, and productivity. While her immediate background before joining Lux sounds familiar – she was a partner at GV (previously “Google Ventures”) – her path before that is a bit more unusual.  As a journalist, Deena once hosted the pilot episode of a bilingual Arabic-English TV news series modeled after 60 Minutes.  Deena was also a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of State under Secretary Clinton, where she helped launch President Obama’s first Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2010. She is the first-generation daughter of immigrants from Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic and French. In this episode, we discuss a range of topics, from her experiences as an Arab-American to her path from Washington to Silicon Valley.  We also discuss the impact COVID is having on the vent

Garrett Smallwood was recently promoted to CEO of Wag Labs, the popular on-demand dog-walking service backed by venture firms from Freestyle Capital to Softbank. New York Times said of the company “"Most dog owners should consider installing Wag on their phones just to have as a backup option. It is the best-designed and most efficient app for summoning a dog walker with some or no advance notice." Garrett previously founded Finrise, a startup that Wag acquired. In this episode, find out what happened to the market for walking dogs and checking in on pets when COVID-19 led to widespread lockdowns.  It’s not as obvious as you might think. We also discuss what happened to Wag’s employees -- and how they responded  -- when COVID forced them out of the office.  Finally, we answer the question,  "Is there a market for cat walking?" Wag’s investors also include: Tuesday Capital Structure Capital Social Leverage Slow Ventures RRE Ventures Ludlow Ventures Haystack Greylock General Catalyst Sherpa Capital https://wa

Fast.co has raised over $20 million from firms like Kleiner, Index and Stripe.  It bills itself as the world’s fastest checkout – one click, no passwords.  A fascinating but typical story, such as it is, in Silicon Valley.  But then there’s this: Domm didn’t go to Stanford.  He isn’t even from the US. He’s from Australia, where his first business was…a towing company.  A more than $50 million business. His co-founder is a woman.  He met her on Twitter. So in this episode – find out how Domm made his way from Australia to Silicon Valley, and how he used his status as a Twitter power user to build his business.  Also learn what it’s like when your rocket ship startup is hit by a global pandemic. Fast  https://www.fast.co Something Ventured  https://somethingventured.us

What makes communities of startups thrive, and how have they been impacted by the recession, COVID-19, and the remote work trend? Brad Feld addresses these questions in this episode and in his new book “THE STARTUP COMMUNITY WAY: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” and the second edition of his book “STARTUP COMMUNITIES: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.” You may know Brad as the legendary investor who co-founded the Foundry Group, and who has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Brad previously co-founded Techstars, and was an early investor in Harmonix, Zynga, MakerBot, and Fitbit. He writes the widely followed Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals. He currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and on the boards of Path Forward, the Kauffman Fellows, and Defy Ventures. EPISODE EXERPTS On the Chemistry of Silicon Valley “Today’s Silicon Valley, if it started from scratch, could not create Silicon Valley.”   On Initial Conditions of Sta

Parker Conrad lists himself as “customer support” at Rippling, but he is its co-founder and CEO.  He previously founded Zenefits.  In this episode he traces his journey from a journalist at Harvard, to founder and CEO of a company that has raised over $50 million. Episode Highlights: The specific thing he likes about sales “I really liked sales. I enjoyed it. But I liked it in a very specific way:  I enjoyed selling something that I had built. I didn't want anyone else explaining why it was great or what was so awesome about it, because they were going to screw it up somehow. They were not going to get it right when they were talking to people and telling them what's great about this. I wanted to build the thing that I was selling.” His fundraising ‘trick’ “Just find a way to be the Twitter guys (a fast growing company at the time which VCs were throwing money at) That was really the answer. And I think that that's actually the right answer for most entrepreneurs.  Most of the “tactics” around fundraising don

Scott Simpson worked on digital books at Amazon, then podcasting at Apple.  Thus, a key guy on two technologies that revolutionized the “long tail” of content.  And then…he left to start a standup comedy show.  “Cheaper Than Therapy”,  housed in San Francisco’s Shelton Theater, presents about 6 standup comedy shows a week, almost always sold out.  Then Covid hit Cheaper Than Therapy and standup comedy everywhere.  In this episode we discuss Scott’s path from tech to comedy, and the affects of Covid on the future of comedy.  We discuss how well jerry-rigged alternatives to standup comedy are working, as well as the dire state of performance businesses in general.   Scott’s podcast:  California King https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/california-king/id1506058005 Cheaper Than Therapy https://cttcomedy.com Scott on Twitter: @scottsimpson    

“As an entrepreneur, tech CEO and venture capitalist who is also a woman of color, I am well aware of the challenges most entrepreneurs face when it comes to raising capital.”  So Promise Phelon summarizes with typical grace what she has learned in an amazing career.  Her book, “The Way of the Growth Warrior” – well you can’t get it yet.  You can pre-order it in the link below.  In the meantime, you can hear her story in this episode. Promise Phelon started that career at BEA Systems, where she became Head of Product Marketing.  While a Black woman running marketing at BEA in the 1990s might be its own story, it was just her beginning... The Growth Warrior https://thegrowthwarrior.com Something Ventured https://somethingventured.us

“Most Black computer science students think Silicon Valley companies are racist.”  If you didn’t know this already – you should really sit down and listen to this episode. No one educates more Black students in computer science than Codepath.  Codepath is the non-profit co-founded by Michael Ellison to eliminate educational inequity in technical careers.  Every year Codepath teaches hundreds of college students the skills they need to get jobs at companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. In this episode, Michael shares his stark assessment of how Silicon Valley treats Black engineers, including CS students who may have not gone to a ‘top’ school.  He discusses the toll both Covid and the recent events like the George Floyd killing have taken on Black students. Michael shares what Silicon Valley leaders – venture capitalists and companies alike – can do to empower Black engineering students who seek jobs, or seek to start companies in Silicon Valley. https://codepath.org https://somethingventured.us