Podcasts about combinator

In this episode of the Ardan Labs Podcast, we talk with Hana Mohan, co-founder of MagicBell, about her path through the tech industry. Hana shares her early fascination with computers, her educational journey through competitive exams, and her eventual transition from electronics to software development. The conversation also touches on her startup experience and the challenges faced along the way. Hana reflects on her career journey, discussing the importance of finding the right job fit and the decision to transition from employee to entrepreneur. She shares insights from her experiences building products, and the challenges faced in the startup world. The discussion also covers her time in Combinator, the process of raising capital, and her vision for the future of her current venture, MagicBell.00:00 Introduction04:15 What is Hana Doing Today09:56 First Memories of a Computer18:40 Early Interests / Life Growing Up30:06 Pursuing Engineering in India43:20 Transitioning from Electronics to Software52:15 Becoming an Entrepreneur1:01:30 Shifting Focus to B2B SaaS1:09:40 Learning from Experiences 1:15:30 Following Your Product's Path1:22:20 Starting MagicBell1:33:20 Contact Info  Connect with Hana: Linkedin:https://es.linkedin.com/in/unamashanaTwitter: https://x.com/unamashanaMentioned in today's episode:Magic Bell – https://www.magicbell.com/Want more from Ardan Labs? You can learn Go, Kubernetes, Docker & more through our video training, live events, or through our blog!Online Courses : https://ardanlabs.com/education/ Live Events : https://www.ardanlabs.com/live-training-events/ Blog : https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog Github : https://github.com/ardanlabs

YOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! What it is Third Coast Fam?!? April showers got us over here smoking flower if you know what we're saying lmao(secret insider 420 joke icymi) haha any who, we hope you've been bringing in the year with everything that makes you smile! This month we are ecstatic to have friends King Tut & Loss Combinator on to share their lives as an artist.    As always Third Coast fam bam; LIKE, LISTEN, SHARE, and SUPPORT!! We can't do this without your further pushing into the collective!! See you next month!  Social Medias: @losscombinator @kingtut

In this podcast, Alexander and Michael discuss the importance of working with junior sales representatives in startups. Michael shares his background and expertise in supporting startups with sales and growth. They cover topics such as hiring junior reps, tracking their progress and development, common mistakes made by junior reps, and advice for those starting out in sales. The discussion highlights the significance of proper onboarding, goal-setting, training, and providing guidance to help junior reps succeed in their roles.--Questions?Alex:alexander@sellabl.coAlex's LinkedInMichael:Michael's LinkedIn --00:00 - 04:43 Introduction04:43 - 14:25 The challenges of young startups and the importance of having experienced sales leaders.14:25 - 25:27 Benefits of Working with Junior Reps 25:27 - 31:55 Hiring Junior Reps 31:55 - 43:09 Tracking and Developing Junior Reps43:09 - 53:36 Common Mistakes and Advice for Junior Reps53:36 - 54:42 Closing Remarks

Nell'episodio di oggi della nuova serie dedicata al mondo delle start up l'intervista a Matteo Fornaca, co-fondatore di The Spiritual Machine. The Spiritual Machine nasce a Torino a dicembre 2017 con un obiettivo molto semplice: trasformare il mondo degli spirits permettendo a chiunque di creare i propri in modo semplice, veloce ed economico. Negli anni, grazie al modello innovativo sviluppato da The Spiritual Machine, decine di chef, bar tender, produttori di vino, organizzatori di eventi e imprenditori in generale hanno lanciato nuovi spirits, in un mercato internazionale che riteniamo molto interessante, con innovazioni significative in un settore tradizionale d'eccellenza italiana. Oggi The Spiritual Machine punta al traguardo delle 100.000 bottiglie e sta aprendo al mercato internazionale, dove è già presente in Svezia, UK, USA e Francia con i prodotti dei propri clienti. Il suo modello di Fundraising ha una modalità unica di cui ha parlato anche il Sole24Ore nel link:https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/the-spiritual-machine-punta-superare-milione-liquori-e-distillati-misura-AENp9eTC L'episodio vede la partecipazione di Alberto Giusti. Tra i fondatori del movimento Digital Building Blocks per la trasformazione digitale dei manager italiani e' direttore dell'European Crowdfunding Center e membro della giuria dell'European Innovation Council Accelerator. E' uno dei fondatori del movimento Rinascimento Esponenziale che trova esplicazione in Guilds42. Autore di vari saggi di economia e innovazione e' socio di 25 aziende in 7 Paesi, ha svolto oltre 5.000 sessioni di mentorship e coaching con oltre 30.000 collegamenti linked in. Alberto fornira' il suo punto di vista sul case study Spiritual Machine da investitore esperto di tecnologia, innovazione e start up.Moderera' l'episodio Vincenzo Marzetti, fondatore del podcast Inside Finance.Se apprezzate il nostro lavoro come occasione unica di divulgazione economico-finanziaria vi invitiamo a sostenere il podcast condividendo i nostri episodi nelle vostre pagine social.Maggiori informazioni sul sito zeroin.it oppure inviando una mail a segreteria@insidefinance.it Buon ascolto.

Su Reddit, il "front page of the internet", mese scorso le cose sono diventate un po'... diciamo... movimentate.Partendo da proteste dei moderatori, a blackout di subreddit, fino a un collettivo di hacker che minaccia di rivelare dati sensibili, tutto per dei cambiamenti API!Tutti i miei link: https://linktr.ee/br1brownLista completa fontiTELEGRAM - INSTAGRAMSe ti va supportami https://it.tipeee.com/br1brown

I had fun chatting with Aarthi and Sriram.We discuss what it takes to be successful in technology, what Sriram would say if Elon tapped him to be the next CEO of Twitter, why more married couples don't start businesses together, and how Aarthi hires and finds 10x engineers.Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan are the hosts of The Good Times Show. They have had leading roles in several technology companies from Meta to Twitter to Netflix and have been founders and investors. Sriram is currently a general partner at a16z crypto and Aarthi is an angel investor.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:19) - Married Couples Co-founding Businesses(00:09:53) - 10x Engineers(00:16:00) - 15 Minute Meetings(00:22:57) - a16z's Edge?(00:26:42) - Future of Twitter(00:30:58) - Is Big Tech Overstaffed?(00:38:37) - Next CEO of Twitter?(00:43:13) - Why Don't More Venture Capitalists Become Founders?(00:47:32) - Role of Boards(00:52:03) - Failing Upwards(00:56:00) - Underrated CEOs(01:02:18) - Founder Education(01:06:27) - What TV Show Would Sriram Make?(01:10:14) - Undervalued Founder ArchetypesTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.[00:00:00] Aarthi: it's refreshing to have Elon come in and say, we are gonna work really hard. We are gonna be really hardcore about how we build things.[00:00:05] Dwarkesh: Let's say Elon and says Tomorrow, Sriram, would you be down to be the [00:00:08] Sriram: CEO of Twitter Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I am married to someone. We [00:00:12] Aarthi: used to do overnights at Microsoft. Like we'd just sleep under our desk,, until the janitor would just , poke us out of there , I really need to vacuum your cubicle. Like, get out of here. There's such joy in , Finding those moments where you work hard and you're feeling really good about it. [00:00:25] Sriram: You'd be amazed at how many times Aarthi and I would have a conversation where be, oh, this algorithm thing.I remember designing it, and now we are on the other side We want to invest in something , where we think the team and the company is going to win and if they do win, there's huge value to be unlocked. [00:00:40] Dwarkesh: Okay. Today I have the, uh, good pleasure to have Arty and Sriram on the podcast and I'm really excited about this.So you guys have your own show, the Arty Andre Good Time show. Um, you guys have had some of the top people in tech and entertainment on Elon Musk, mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Yang, and you guys are both former founders. Advisors, investors, uh, general partner at Anderson Horowitz, and you're an angel investor and an advisor now.Um, so yeah, there's so much to talk about. Um, obviously there's also the, uh, recent news about your, uh, your involvement on, uh, twitter.com. Yeah, yeah. Let's get started. [00:01:19] Married Couples Starting Businesses[00:01:19] Dwarkesh: My first question, you guys are married, of course. People talk about getting a co-founder as finding a spouse, and I'm curious why it's not the case that given this relationship why more married people don't form tech startups.Is, does that already happen, [00:01:35] Aarthi: or, um, I actually am now starting to see a fair bit of it. Uhhuh, . Um, I, I do agree that wasn't a norm before. Um, I think, uh, I, I think I remember asking, uh, pg p the same thing when I went through yc, and I think he kind of pointed to him and Jessica like, you know, YC was their startup , and so, you know, there were even pride.There are a lot of husband and wife, uh, companies. Over the last like decade or so. So I'm definitely seeing that more mainstream. But yeah, you're right, it hasn't been the norm before. Yeah, the, the good time show is our project. It's [00:02:09] Sriram: our startup. Very, I mean, there are some good historical examples. Cisco, for example, uh, came from, uh, uh, husband, wife as a few other examples.I think, you know, on, on the, in, on the pro side, uh, you know, being co-founders, uh, you need trust. You need to really know each other. Uh, you, you go through a lot of like heavy emotional burdens together. And there's probably, and if you, you're for the spouse, hopefully you probably have a lot of chemistry and understanding, and that should help.On the con side, I think one is you, you're prob you know, you, you're gonna show up at work, you know, and startups are really hard, really intense. And you come home and both of you are gonna the exact same wavelength, the exact same time, going through the exact same highs and lows as opposed to two people, two different jobs have maybe differing highs and lows.So that's really hard. Uh, the second part of it is, uh, in a lot of. Work situations, it may just be more challenging where people are like, well, like, you know, person X said this person Y said this, what do I do? Uh, and if you need to fire somebody or you know, something weird happens corporate in a corporate manner, that may also be really hard.Uh, but having said that, you know, uh, [00:03:13] Aarthi: you know, yeah, no, I think both of those are like kind of overblown , like, you know, I think the reason why, um, you know, you're generally, they say you need to have you, it's good to have co-founders is so that you can kind of like write the emotional wave in a complimentary fashion.Uh, and you know, if one person's like really depressed about something, the other person can like pull them out of it and have a more rational viewpoint. I feel like in marriages it works even better. So I feel like to your first point, They know each other really well. You're, you're, you are going to bring your work to home.There is no separation between work and home as far as a startup is concerned. So why not do it together? Oh, [00:03:51] Sriram: well, I think there's one problem, uh, which is, uh, we are kind of unique because we've been together for over 21 years now, and we start for, we've been before, uh, let's not. Wow. There's gonna be some fact checking 19 on this video.99. Close enough. Close enough, right? Like close enough. He wishes he was 21. Oh, right, right, right. Gosh, feels like 21. We have do some, um, [00:04:15] Aarthi: editing on this video. No, no, no. I think 20 years of virtually knowing, 19 years of in-person. [00:04:20] Sriram: There we go. Right. Uh, fact check accurate. Um, ex experts agree. But, um, you know, but when you first met, we, we originally, even before we dating, we were like, Hey, we wanna do a company together.And we bonded over technology, like our first conversation on Yahoo Messenger talking about all these founders and how we wanted to be like them. And we actually then worked together pretty briefly when you were in Microsoft. Uh, before we actually started dating. We were on these sort of talent teams and we kind of met each of the word context.I think a lot of. You know, one is they have never worked together. Um, and so being in work situations, everything from how you run a meeting to how you disagree, uh, you know, uh, is just going to be different. And I think that's gonna be a learning curve for a lot of couples who be like, Hey, it's one thing to have a strong, stable relationship at home.It'll be a different thing to, you know, be in a meeting and you're disagreeing art's meetings very differently from I do. She obsesses over metrics. I'm like, ah, it's close enough. It's fine. , uh, it's close enough. It's fine. as e uh, here already. But, uh, so I do think there's a learning curve, a couples who is like, oh, working together is different than, you know, raising your family and being together.I mean, obviously gives you a strong foundation, but it's not the same thing. Have you guys [00:05:25] Dwarkesh: considered starting a company or a venture together at some point? [00:05:28] Aarthi: Yeah. Um, we've, uh, we've always wanted to do a project together. I don't know if it's a, a startup or a company or a venture. You have done a project together,Yeah, exactly. I think, uh, almost to today. Two years ago we started the Good Time Show, um, and we started at, uh, live Audio on Clubhouse. And, you know, we recently moved it onto video on YouTube. And, um, it's, it's been really fun because now I get to see like, it, it's neither of our full-time jobs, uh, but we spend enough, um, just cycles thinking through what we wanna do with it and what, uh, how to have good conversations and how to make it useful for our audience.So that's our [00:06:06] Sriram: project together. Yep. And we treat it like a, with the intellectual heft of a startup, which is, uh, we look at the metrics, uh, and we are like, oh, this is a good week. The metrics are up into the right and, you know, how do we, you know, what is working for our audience? You know, what do we do to get great guests?What do we do to [00:06:21] Aarthi: get, yeah, we just did our first, uh, in-person meetup, uh, for listeners of the podcast in Chennai. It was great. We had like over a hundred people who showed up. And it was also like, you know, typical startup style, like meet your customers and we could like go talk to these people in person and figure out like what do they like about it?Which episodes do they really enjoy? And it's one thing to see YouTube comments, it's another to like actually in person engage with people. So I think, you know, we started it purely accidentally. We didn't really expect it to be like the show that we are, we are in right now, but we really happy. It's, it's kind of turned out the way it has.[00:06:59] Sriram: Absolutely. And, and it also kind of helps me scratch an edge, which is, uh, you know, building something, you know, keeps you close to the ground. So being able to actually do the thing yourself as opposed to maybe tell someone else, telling you how to do the, so for example, it, it being video editing or audio or how thumbnails, thumbnails or, uh, just the mechanics of, you know, uh, how to build anything.So, uh, I, I dot think it's important. Roll up your sleeves metaphorically and get your hands dirty and know things. And this really helped us understand the world of creators and content. Uh, and it's fun and [00:07:31] Aarthi: go talk to other creators. Uh, like I think when we started out this thing on YouTube, I think I remember Shram just reached out to like so many creators being like, I wanna understand how it works for you.Like, what do you do? And these are people who like, who are so accomplished, who are so successful, and they do this for a living. And we clearly don. And so, uh, just to go learn from these experts. It's, it's kind of nice, like to be a student again and to just learn, uh, a new industry all over again and figure out how to actually be a creator on this platform.Well, you know [00:08:01] Dwarkesh: what's really interesting is both of you have been, uh, executives and led product in social media companies. Yeah. And so you are, you designed the products, these creators, their music, and now on the other end, you guys are building [00:08:12] Sriram: the, oh, I have a great phrase for it, right? Like, somebody, every once in a while somebody would be like, Hey, you know what, uh, you folks are on the leadership team of some of these companies.Why don't you have hundreds of millions of followers? Right? And I would go, Hey, look, it's not like every economist is a billionaire, , uh, uh, you know, it doesn't work that way. Uh, but during that is a parallel, which, which is, uh, you'd be amazed at how many times Aarthi and I would have a conversation where be, oh, this algorithm thing.I remember designing it, or I was in the meeting when this thing happened, and now we are on the other side, which is like, Hey, you might be the economist who told somebody to implement a fiscal policy. And now we are like, oh, okay, how do I actually go do this and create values and how? Anyway, how do we do exactly.Create an audience and go build something interesting. So there is definitely some irony to it, uh, where, uh, but I think hopefully it does give us some level of insight where, uh, we have seen, you know, enough of like what actually works on social media, which is how do you build a connection with your audience?Uh, how do you build, uh, content? How do you actually do it on a regular, uh, teams? I think [00:09:07] Aarthi: the biggest difference is we don't see the algorithm as a bra, as a black box. I think we kind of see it as like when the, with the metrics, we are able to, one, have empathy for the teams building this. And two, I think, uh, we kind of know there's no big magic bullet.Like I think a lot of this is about showing up, being really consistent, um, you know, being able to like put out some really interesting content that people actually want to, and you know, I think a lot of people forget about that part of it and kind of focus. If you did this one thing, your distribution goes up a lot and here's this like, other like secret hack and you know Sure.Like those are like really short term stuff, but really in the long term, the magic is to just like keep at it. Yeah. And, uh, put out really, really good content. [00:09:48] Sriram: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's good to hear. . [00:09:53] 10x Engineers[00:09:53] Dwarkesh: Um, so you've both, um, led teams that have, you know, dozens or even hundreds of people.Um, how easy is it for you to tell who the 10 X engineers are? Is it something that you as managers and executives can tell easily or [00:10:06] Sriram: no? Uh, absolutely. I think you can tell this very easily or repeat of time and it doesn't, I think a couple of ways. One is, uh, Uh, before, let's say before you work with someone, um, 10 x people just don't suddenly start becoming 10 x.They usually have a history of becoming 10 x, uh, of, you know, being really good at what they do. And you can, you know, the cliche line is you can sort of connect the dots. Uh, you start seeing achievements pile up and achievements could be anything. It could be a bunch of projects. It could be a bunch of GitHub code commits.It could be some amazing writing on ck, but whatever it is, like somebody just doesn't show up and become a 10 x person, they probably have a track record of already doing it. The second part of it is, I've seen this is multiple people, uh, who are not named so that they don't get hired from the companies actually want them to be in, or I can then hire them in the future is, uh, you know, they will make incredibly rapid progress very quickly.So, uh, I have a couple of examples and almost independently, I know it's independently, so I have a couple of. Um, and I actually, and name both, right? Like, so one is, uh, this guy named, uh, Vijay Raji, uh, who, uh, was probably one of Facebook's best engineers. He's now the CEO of a company called Stats. And, um, he was probably my first exposure to the real TenX engineer.And I remembered this because, uh, you know, at the time I was. Kind of in my twenties, I had just joined Facebook. I was working on ads, and he basically built a large part of Facebook's ad system over the weekend. And what he would do is he would just go, and then he con he [00:11:24] Aarthi: continued to do that with Facebook marketplace.Yeah. Like he's done this like over and over and over [00:11:28] Sriram: again. . Yeah. And, and it's not that, you know, there's one burst of genius. It's just this consistent stream of every day that's a code checkin stuff is working. New demo somebody, he sent out a new bill or something working. And so before like a week or two, you just like a, you know, you running against Usain Bolt and he's kind of running laps around you.He's so far ahead of everyone else and you're like, oh, this guy is definitely ahead. Uh, the second story I have is, uh, of, uh, John Carmack, uh, you know, who's legend and I never worked with him in, uh, directly with, you know, hopefully someday I can fix. But, uh, somebody told me a story about him. Which is, uh, that the person told me story was like, I never thought a individual could replace the output of a hundred percent team until I saw John.And there's a great story where, um, you know, and so John was the most senior level at Facebook and from a hr, you know, employment insecurity perspective for an individual contributor, and it at, at that level, at Facebook, uh, for folks who kind of work in these big tech companies, it is the most, the highest tier of accomplishment in getting a year in a performance review is something called xcs Expectations, or, sorry, redefines, right?Which basically means like, you have redefined what it means for somebody to perform in this level, right? Like, it's like somebody, you know, like somebody on a four minute mile, I'll be running a two minute mile or whatever, right? You're like, oh, and, and it is incredibly hard sometimes. You doing, and this guy John gets it three years in a row, right?And so there's this leadership team of all the, you know, the really most important people on Facebook. And they're like, well, we should really promote John, right? Like, because he's done this three years in a row, he's changing the industry. Three years in a row and then they realized, oh wait, there is no level to promote him to Nick be CEOWell, maybe I don't think he wanted to. And so, uh, the story I heard, and I dunno, it's true, but I like to believe it's true, is they invented a level which still now only John Carmack has gotten. Right. And, um, and I think, you know, it's his level of productivity, uh, his, uh, intellect, uh, and the consistency over time and mu and you know, if you talk to anybody, Facebook work with him, he's like, oh, he replaced hundred people, teams all by themselves and maybe was better than a hundred percent team just because he had a consistency of vision, clarity, and activity.So those are [00:13:32] Aarthi: the two stories I've also noticed. I think, uh, actually sheam, I think our first kind of exposure to 10 x engineer was actually Barry born, uh, from Microsoft. So Barry, um, uh, basically wrote pretty much all the emulation engines and emulation systems that we all use, uh, and uh, just prolific, uh, and I think in addition to what Fred had said with like qualities and tenets, Um, the, I've generally seen these folks to also be like low ego and kind of almost have this like responsibility to, um, mentor coach other people.Uh, and Barry kind of like took us under his wing and he would do these like Tuesday lunches with us, where we would just ask like, you know, we were like fresh out of college and we just ask these like really dumb questions on, you know, um, scaling things and how do you build stuff. And I was working on, uh, run times and loaders and compilers and stuff.And so he would just take the time to just answer our questions and just be there and be really like, nice about it. I remember when you moved to Redmond, he would just like spend a weekend just like, oh yeah. Driving you about and just doing things like that, but very low ego and within their teams and their art, they're just considered to be legends.Yes. Like, you know, everybody would be like, oh, Barry Bond. Yeah, of course. [00:14:47] Sriram: Yeah. It, I can't emphasize enough the consistency part of it. Um, you know, with Barry. Or I gotta briefly work with Dave Cutler, who's kind of the father of modern operating systems, uh, is every day you're on this email li list at the time, which would show you check-ins as they happen.They would have something every single day, um, every day, and it'll be tangible and meaty and you know, and you just get a sense that this person is not the same as everybody else. Um, by the, this couple of people I can actually point to who haven't worked with, uh, but I follow on YouTube or streaming. Uh, one is, uh, Andrea Ling who builds Serenity Os we had a great episode with him.Oh, the other is George Hart's, uh, geo Hart. And I urge people, if you haven't, I haven't worked with either of them, uh, but if I urge which to kinda watch their streams, right? Because, uh, you go like, well, how does the anti killing build a web browser on an operating system? Which he builds by himself in such a sharp period of time and he watches stream and he's not doing some magical new, you know, bit flipping sorting algorithm anybody has, nobody has seen before.He's just doing everything you would do, but. Five bits of speed. I, yep, exactly. [00:15:48] Dwarkesh: I I'm a big fan of the George Hot Streams and Yeah, that's exactly what, you know, it's like yeah, you, he's also curling requests and he is also, you know, you know, spinning up an experiment in a Jupyter Notebook, but yeah, just doing it [00:15:58] Aarthi: away way faster, way efficiently.Yeah. [00:16:00] 15 Minute Meetings[00:16:00] Dwarkesh: Yeah. That's really interesting. Um, so ar Arthur, I'm, you've gone through Y Combinator and famously they have that 15 minute interview Yes. Where they try to grok what your business is and what your potential is. Yeah, yeah. But just generally, it seems like in Silicon Valley you guys have, make a lot of decisions in terms of investing or other kinds of things.You, in very short calls, you know. Yeah. . Yeah. And how much can you really, what is it that you're learning in these 15 minute calls when you're deciding, should I invest in this person? What is their potential? What is happening in that 15 minutes? [00:16:31] Aarthi: Um, I can speak about YC from the other side, from like, uh, being a founder pitching, right.I think, yes, there is a 15 minute interview, but before that, there is a whole YC application process. And, uh, I think even for the, for YC as, uh, this bunch of the set of investors, I'm sure they're looking for specific signals, but for me as a founder, the application process was so useful, um, because it really makes you think about what you're building.Why are you building this? Are you the right person to be building this? Who are the other people you should be hiring? And so, I mean, there are like few questions or like, one of my favorite questions is, um, how have you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage? Yeah. . And it kind of really makes you think about, huh, and you kind of noticed that many good founders have that pattern of like hacking other systems to their advantage.Um, and so to me, I think more than the interview itself, the process of like filling out the application form, doing that little video, all of that gives you better, um, it gives you the, the entire scope of your company in your head because it's really hard when you have this idea and you're kind of like noodling about with it and talking to a few people.You don't really know if this is a thing. To just like crystallize the whole vision in your head. I think, uh, that's on point. Yes. Um, the 15 minute interview for me, honestly, it was like kind of controversial because, uh, I went in that morning, I did the whole, you know, I, I had basically stayed at the previous night, uh, building out this website and, uh, that morning I showed up and I had my laptop open.I'm like really eager to like tell them what you're building and I keep getting cut off and I realize much later that that's kind of my design. Yeah. And you just like cut off all the time. Be like, why would anybody use this? And you start to answer and be like, oh, but I, I don't agree with that. And there's just like, and it, it's like part of it is like, makes you upset, but part of it is also like, it makes you think how to compress all that information in a really short amount of time and tell them.Um, and so that interview happens, I feel really bummed out because I kind of had this website I wanted to show them. So while walking out the door, I remember just showing Gary, Dan, um, the website and he like kind of like. Scrolls it a little bit, and he is like, this is really beautifully done. And I was like, thank you.I've been wanting to show you this for 15 minutes. Um, and I, I mentioned it to Gary recently and he laughed about it. And then, uh, I didn't get selected in that timeframe. They gave me a call and they said, come back again in the evening and we are going to do round two because we are not sure. Yeah. And so the second interview there was PG and Jessica and they both were sitting there and they were just grueling me.It was a slightly longer interview and PG was like, I don't think this is gonna work. And I'm like, how can you say that? I think this market's really big. And I'm just like getting really upset because I've been waiting this whole day to like get to this point. And he's just being like cynical and negative.And then at some point he starts smiling at Jessica and I'm like, oh, okay. They're just like baiting me to figure it out. And so that was my process. And I, by the evening, I remember Shera was working at. I remember driving down from Mountain View to Facebook and Sheam took me to the Sweet Stop. Oh yeah.Which is like their, you know, Facebook has this like, fancy, uh, sweet store, like the ice cream store. I [00:19:37] Sriram: think they had a lot more perks over the years, but that was very fancy back then. [00:19:40] Aarthi: So I had like two scoops of ice cream in each hand in, and, uh, the phone rang and I was like, oh, hold onto this. And I grabbed it and I, and you know, I think it was Michael Sibu or I don't know who, but somebody called me and said, you're through.So that was kind of my process. So even though there was only 15 minutes, mine was actually much longer after. But even before the, the application process was like much more detailed. So it sounds [00:20:01] Dwarkesh: like the 15 minutes it's really there. Like, can they rattle you? Can they, can they [00:20:06] Aarthi: you and how do you react?Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I also think they look for how sex you can be in explaining what the problem is. They do talk to hundreds of companies. It is a lot. And so I think, can you compress a lot of it and convince, if you can convince these folks here in three months or four months time, how are you going to do demo day and convince a whole room full of investors?[00:20:27] Sriram: Yeah. Yeah. For, I think it's a bit different for us, uh, on the VC side, uh, because two things. One, number one is, uh, the day, you know, so much of it is having a prepared mind before you go into the meeting. And, for example, if you're meeting a. very early. Are we investing before having met every single other person who's working in this space, who has ideas in the space.So you generally know what's going on, you know, what the kind of technologies are or go to market approaches are. You've probably done a bunch of homework already. It's usually, uh, it does happen where you meet somebody totally cold and uh, you really want to invest, but most often you've probably done some homework at least in this space, if not the actual company.Um, and so when you're in the meeting, I think you're trying to judge a couple of things. And these are obviously kind of stolen from Christ Dixon and others. Um, one is their ability to kind of go walk you through their idea, ma. And so very simply, um, you know, the idea MAs is, uh, and I think say the biology of Christen came with this, the idea that, hey, um, uh, How you got to the idea for your company really matters because you went and explored all the data ends, all the possibilities.You're managing around for years and years, and you've kind of come to the actual solution. And the way you can tell whether somebody's gone through the idea Mac, is when you ask 'em questions and they tell you about like five different things they've tried, did not work. And it, it's really hard to fake it.I mean, we, you maybe fake it for like one or two questions, but if you talk about like how we tried X, Y, and Z and they have like an opinion what of the opinions, if they've thought about it, you're like, okay, this person really studied the idea, ma. And that's very powerful. Uh, the second part of it is, uh, you know, Alex sample.Uh, uh, one of my partner says this, Yes, some this thing called the Manifestation Framework, which sounds like a self-help book on Amazon, but it's not, uh, uh uh, you know, but what if is, is like, you know, so many, so much of early stage startup founders is about the ability to manifest things. Uh, manifest capital, manifest the first hire, uh, manifest, uh, the first BD partnership.And, um, usually, you know, if you can't, if you don't have a Cigna sign of doing that, it's really hard to then after raising money, go and close this amazing hotshot engineer or salesperson or close this big partnership. And so in the meeting, right? If you can't convince us, right? And these are people, our day job is to give you money, right?Like, if I spent a year without giving anybody money, I'll probably get fired. If you can't, uh, if you can't convince us to give you money, right? If you wanna find probably a hard time to close this amazing engineer and get that person to come over from Facebook or close this amazing partnership against a competitor.And so that's kind of a judge of that. So it is never about the actual 60 Minutes where you're like, we, we are making up of a large part of makeup of mind is. That one or two conversations, but there's so much which goes in before and after that. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of [00:22:57] What is a16z's edge?[00:22:57] Dwarkesh: venture capital, um, I, I'm curious, so interest and Horowitz, and I guess why Combinator too?Um, but I mean, any other person who's investing in startups, they were started at a time when there were much less capital in the space, and today of course, there's been so much more capital pour into space. So how do these firms, like how does A 16 C continue to have edge? What is this edge? How can I sustain it [00:23:20] Sriram: given the fact that so much more capital is entered into the space?We show up on podcasts like the Lunar Society, , and so if you are watching this and you have a startup idea, Uh, come to us, right? Uh, no. Come, come to the Lunar society. . Well, yes. I mean, maybe so Trust me, you go in pat, you're gonna have a find, uh, a Thk pat right there. Uh, actually I, you think I joked, but there's a bit of truth.But no, I've had [00:23:40] Dwarkesh: like lu this [00:23:40] Aarthi: suddenly became very different [00:23:43] Sriram: conversation. I have had people, this is a totally ludicrous [00:23:46] Dwarkesh: idea, but I've had people like, give me that idea. And it's like, it sounds crazy to me because like, I don't know what, it's, what a company's gonna be successful, right? So, but I hasn't [00:23:55] Aarthi: become an investor.[00:23:57] Sriram: I honestly don't know. But it is something like what you're talking about Lu Society Fund one coming up, right? You heard it here first? Uh, uh, well, I think first of all, you know, I think there's something about the firm, uh, um, in terms of how it's set up philosophically and how it's set up, uh, kind of organizationally, uh, and our approach philosoph.The firm is an optimist, uh, uh, more than anything else. At the core of it, we are optimist. We are optimist about the future. We are optimist about the impact of founders on their, on the liberty to kind of impact that future. Uh, we are optimist at heart, right? Like I, I tell people like, you can't work at a six and z if you're not an optimist.That's at the heart of everything that we do. Um, and very tied to that is the idea that, you know, um, software is eating the world. It is, it's true. 10 years ago when Mark wrote that, peace is as true now, and we just see more and more of it, right? Like every week, you know, look at the week we are recording this.You know, everyone's been talking about chat, G p T, and like all the industries that can get shaped by chat, G P T. So our, our feature, our, our idea is that software is gonna go more and more. So, one way to look at this is, yes, a lot more capitalists enter the world, but there should be a lot more, right?Like, because these companies are gonna go bigger. They're gonna have bigger impacts on, uh, human lives and, and the world at large. So that's, uh, you know, uh, one school of thought, the other school of thought, uh, which I think you were asking about, say valuations, uh, et cetera. Is, uh, you know, um, again, one of my other partners, Jeff Jordan, uh, uh, always likes to tell people like, we don't go discount shopping, right?Our, the way we think about it is we want to, when we're investing in a market, We want to really map out the market, right? Uh, so for example, I work on crypto, uh, and, uh, you know, we, you know, if, if you are building something interesting in crypto and we haven't seen you, we haven't talked to you, that's a fail, that's a mess, right?We ideally want to see every single interesting founder company idea. And a category can be very loose. Crypto is really big. We usually segmented something else. Or if you look at enterprise infrastructure, you can take them into like, you know, AI or different layers and so on. But once you map out a category, you want to know everything.You wanna know every interesting person, every interesting founder you wanna be abreast of every technology change, every go to market hack, every single thing. You wanna know everything, right? And then, uh, the idea is that, uh, we would love to invest in, you know, the what is hopefully becomes the market.Set category, uh, or you know, somebody who's maybe close to the, the market leader. And our belief is that these categories will grow and, you know, they will capture huge value. Um, and as a whole, software is still can used to be undervalued by, uh, a, you know, the world. So, um, we, so, which is why, again, going back to what Jeff would say, he's like, we are not in the business of oh, we are getting a great deal, right?We, we are like, we want to invest in something which, where we think the team and the company and their approach is going to win in this space, and we want to help them win. And we think if they do win, there's a huge value to be unlocked. Yeah, I see. I see. Um, [00:26:42] Future of Twitter[00:26:42] Dwarkesh: let's talk about Twitter. [00:26:44] Sriram: Uh, . I need a drink. I need a drink.[00:26:48] Dwarkesh: um, Tell me, what is the future of Twitter? What is the app gonna look like in five years? You've, um, I mean obviously you've been involved with the Musk Venture recently, but, um, you've, you've had a senior position there. You were an executive there before a few years ago, and you've also been an executive at, uh, you've both been at Meta.So what [00:27:06] Sriram: is the future of Twitter? It's gonna be entertaining. Uh, uh, what is it El say the most entertaining outcome is the most, [00:27:12] Aarthi: uh, uh, like, best outcome is the most, uh, most likely outcome is the most entertaining outcome. [00:27:16] Sriram: Exactly right. So I think it's gonna be the most entertaining outcome. Um, I, I mean, I, I, I think a few things, uh, first of all, uh, ideally care about Twitter.Yeah. Uh, and all of my involvement, uh, you know, over the years, uh, uh, professionally, you know, uh, has, it's kind of. A lagging indicator to the value I got from the service person. I have met hundreds of people, uh, through Twitter. Uh, hundreds of people have reached out to me. Thousands. Exactly. Uh, and you know, I met Mark Andresen through Twitter.Uh, I met like, you know, uh, people are not very good friends of mine. We met through Twitter. We met at Twitter, right. There we go. Right. Uh, just [00:27:50] Aarthi: like incredible outsized impact. Yeah. Um, and I think it's really hard to understate that because, uh, right now it's kind of easy to get lost in the whole, you know, Elon, the previous management bio, like all of that.Outside of all of that, I think the thing I like to care about is, uh, focus on is the product and the product experience. And I think even with the product experience that we have today, which hasn't like, dramatically changed from for years now, um, it's still offering such outsized value for. If you can actually innovate and build really good product on top, I think it can, it can just be really, really good for humanity overall.And I don't even mean this in like a cheesy way. I really think Twitter as a tool could be just really, really effective and enormously good for everyone. Oh yeah. [00:28:35] Sriram: Twitter is I think, sort of methodically upstream of everything that happens in culture in uh, so many different ways. Like, um, you know, there was this, okay, I kinda eli some of the details, uh, but like a few years ago I remember there was this, uh, sort of this somewhat salacious, controversial story which happened in entertainment and uh, and I wasn't paying attention to, except that something caught my eye, which was that, uh, every story had the same two tweets.And these are not tweets from any famous person. It was just some, like, some, um, you know, somebody had some followers, but not a lot of, a lot of followers. And I. Why is this being quoted in every single story? Because it's not from the, you know, the person who was actually in the story or themselves. And it turned out that, uh, what had happened was, uh, you know, somebody wrote in the street, it had gone viral, um, it started trending on Twitter, um, and a bunch of people saw it.They started writing news stories about it. And by that afternoon it was now, you know, gone from a meme to now reality. And like in a lot of people entertainment say, kind of go respond to that. And I've seen this again and again, again, right? Uh, sports, politics, culture, et cetera. So Twitter is memetically upstream of so much of life.Uh, you know, one of my friends had said like, Twitter is more important than the real world. Uh, which I don't, I don't know about that, but, uh, you know, I do think it's, um, it has huge sort of, uh, culture shaping value. Yeah. I thing I think about Twitter is so much of. The network is very Lindy. So one of the things I'm sure from now is like five years from now, you know, what does that mean?Well that, uh, is that something which has kind of stood the test of time to some extent? And, um, and, uh, well the Lindy effect generally means, I don't think it's using this context with ideas like things which, with withstood the test of time tend to also with some test of time in the future, right? Like, like if we talked to Naim is like, well, people have lifting heavy weights and doing red wine for 2000 years, so let's continue doing that.It's probably a good thing. Um, but, but, but that's Twitter today. What is the future of Twitter? Well, uh, well, I think so one is, I think that's gonna continue to be true, right? 10 years from now, five years from now, it's still gonna be the metic battleground. It's still gonna be the place where ideas are shared, et cetera.Um, you know, I'm very. Unabashedly a a big fan of what Elon, uh, as a person, as a founder and what he's doing at Twitter. And my hope is that, you know, he can kind of canoe that and, you know, he's, you know, and I can't actually predict what he's gonna go Bill, he's kind of talked about it. Maybe that means bringing in other product ideas.Uh, I think he's talked about payments. He's talked about like having like longer form video. Uh, who knows, right? But I do know, like five years from now, it is still gonna be the place of like active conversation where people fight, yell, discuss, and maybe sometimes altogether. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the Twitter, [00:30:58] Is Big Tech Overstaffed?[00:30:58] Dwarkesh: um, conversation has raised a lot of, a lot of questions about how over or understaffed, uh, these big tech companies are, and in particular, um, how many people you can get rid of and the thing basically functions or how fragile are these code bases?And having worked at many of these big tech companies, how, how big is the bus factor, would you guess? Like what, what percentage of people could I fire at the random big tech [00:31:22] Sriram: company? Why? I think, uh, [00:31:23] Aarthi: yeah, I think. That's one way to look at it. I think the way I see it is there are a few factors that go into this, right?Like pre covid, post covid, like through covid everybody became remote, remote teams. As you scaled, it was kind of also hard to figure out what was really going on in different parts of the organization. And I think a lot of inefficiencies were overcome by just hiring more people. It's like, oh, you know what, like that team, yeah, that project's like lagging, let's just like add 10 more people.And that's kind of like it became the norm. Yeah. And I think a lot of these teams just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think the other part of it was also, um, you lot of how performance ratings and culture of like, moving ahead in your career path. And a lot of these companies were dependent on how big your team was and uh, and so every six months or year long cycle or whatever is your performance review cycle, people would be like, this person instead of looking at what has this person shipped or what has like the impact that this person's got had, uh, the team's done.It became more of like, well this person's got a hundred percent arc or 200% arc and next year they're gonna have a 10% increase and that's gonna be like this much. And you know, that was the conversation. And so a lot of the success and promo cycles and all of those conversations were tied around like number of headcount that this person would get under them as such, which I think is like a terrible way to think about how you're moving up the ladder.Um, you should really, like, even at a big company, you should really be thinking about the impact that you've had and customers you've reached and all of that stuff. And I think at some point people kind of like lost that, uh, and pick the more simpler metric, which just headcount and it's easy. Yeah. And to just scale that kind of thing.So I think now with Elon doing this where he is like cutting costs, and I think Elon's doing this for different set of reasons. You know, Twitter's been losing money and I think it's like driving efficiency. Like this is like no different. Anybody else who like comes in, takes over a business and looks at it and says, wait, we are losing money every day.We have to do something about this. Like, it's not about like, you know, cutting fat for the sake of it or anything. It's like this, this business is not gonna be viable if we keep it going the way it is. Yeah. And just pure economics. And so when he came in and did that, I'm now seeing this, and I'm sure Sheam is too at like at eight 16 Z and like his companies, uh, but even outside, and I see this with like my angel investment portfolio of companies, um, and just founders I talk to where people are like, wait, Elon can do that with Twitter.I really need to do that with my company. And it's given them the permission to be more aggressive and to kind of get back into the basics of why are we building what we are building? These are our customers, this is our revenue. Why do we have these many employees? What do they all do? And not from a place of like being cynical, but from a place of.I want people to be efficient in doing what they do and how do we [00:34:06] Sriram: make that happen? Yeah. I, I stole this, I think somebody said this on Twitter and I officially, he said, Elon has shifted the overturn window of, uh, the playbook for running a company. Um, which is, I think if you look at Twitter, uh, you know, and by the way, I would say, you know, you know the sort of, the warning that shows up, which is don't try this at home before, which is like, so don't try some of these unless you're er and maybe try your own version of these.But, you know, number one is the idea that you, you can become better not through growth, but by cutting things. You can become better, by demanding more out of yourself and the people who work for you. Uh, you, you can become better by hiring a, you know, a higher bar, sitting a higher bar for the talent that you bring into the company and, uh, that you reach into the company.I think at the heart of it, by the way, uh, you know, it's one of the things I've kinda observed from Elon. His relentless focus on substance, which is every condition is gonna be like, you know, the, the meme about what have you gotten done this week is, it kinda makes sense to everything else, which is like, okay, what are we building?What is the thing? Who's the actual person doing the work? As opposed to the some manager two levels a about aggregating, you know, the reports and then telling you what's being done. There is a relentless focus on substance. And my theory is, by the way, I think maybe some of it comes from Iran's background in, uh, space and Tesla, where at the end of the day, you are bound by the physics of the real world, right?If you get something wrong, right, you can, the rockets won't take off or won't land. That'd be a kalo, right? Like what, what's a, the phrase that they use, uh, rapid unplanned disassembly is the word. Right? Which is like better than saying it went kaboom. Uh, but, you know, so the constraints are if, if, you know, if you get something wrong at a social media company, people can tell if you get something really wrong at space with the Tesla.People can tap, right? Like very dramatically so and so, and I think, so there was a relentless focus on substance, right? Uh, being correct, um, you know, what is actually being done. And I think that's external Twitter too. And I think a lot of other founders I've talked to, uh, uh, in, sometimes in private, I look at this and go, oh, there is no different playbook that they have always I instituted or they were used to when they were growing up.We saw this when we were growing up. They're definitely seen some other cultures around the world where we can now actually do this because we've seen somebody else do this. And they don't have to do the exact same thing, you know, Elon is doing. Uh, they don't have to, uh, but they can do their variations of demanding more of themselves, demanding more of the people that work for them.Um, focusing on substance, focusing on speed. Uh, I think our all core element. [00:36:24] Aarthi: I also think over the last few years, uh, this may be controversial, I don't know why it is, but it somehow is that you can no longer talk about hard work as like a recipe for success. And you know, like growing up for us. When people say that, or like our parents say that, we just like kind of roll our eyes and be like, yeah, sure.Like, we work hard, like we get it. Yeah. But I think over the last couple of years, it just became not cool to say that if you work hard, then you can, there is a shot at like finding success. And I think it's kind of refreshing almost, uh, to have Elon come in and say, we are gonna work really hard. We are gonna be really hardcore about how we build things.And it's, it's very simple. Like you have to put in the hours. There is no kind of shortcut to it. And I think it's, it's nice to bring it all tight, all back to the basics. And, uh, I like that, like, I like the fact that we are now talking about it again and it's, it's sad that now talking about working really hard or having beds in your office, we used to do that at MicrosoftYeah. Uh, is now like suddenly really controversial. And so, um, I'm, I'm all for this. Like, you know, it's not for everyone, but if you are that type of person who really enjoys working hard, really enjoys shipping things and building really good things, Then I think you might find a fit in this culture. And I think that's a good thing.Yeah. I, [00:37:39] Sriram: I think there's nothing remarkable that has been built without people just working really hard. It doesn't happen for years and years, but I think for strong, some short-term burst of some really passionate, motivated, smart people working some really, you know, and hard doesn't mean time. It can mean so many different dimensions, but I don't think anything great gets built without that.So, uh, yeah, it's interesting. We [00:37:59] Aarthi: used to like do overnights at Microsoft. Like we'd just like sleep under our desk, um, until the janitor would just like, poke us out of there like, I really need to vacuum your cubicle. Like, get out of here. And so we would just like find another bed or something and just like, go crash on some couch.But it was, those were like some of our fun days, like, and we look back at it and you're like, we sh we built a lot. I think at some point sh I think when I walked over to his cubicle, he was like looking at Windows Source code and we're like, we are looking at Windows source code. This is the best thing ever.I think, I think there's such joy in like, Finding those moments where you like work hard and you're feeling really good about it. [00:38:36] Sriram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so you [00:38:37] Next CEO of Twitter?[00:38:37] Dwarkesh: get working hard and bringing talent into the company, uh, let's say Elon and says Tomorrow, you know what, uh, Riam, I'm, uh, I've got these other three companies that I've gotta run and I need some help running this company.And he says, Sriram would you be down to be the next, [00:38:51] Sriram: uh, next CEO of Twitter Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I am married to someone. No, uh uh, no, uh uh, you know, you know when, uh, I don't think I was, the answer is absolutely not. And you know this exactly. Fun story. Um, uh, I don't think it says in public before. So when you, when I was in the process, you know, talking to and nor words and, you know, it's, it's not like a, uh, it's not like a very linear process.It's kind of a relationship that kind of develops over time. And I met Mark Andreen, uh, multiple times over the years. They've been having this discussion of like, Hey, do you want to come do venture or do you want to, if you wanna do venture, do you wanna come do with us? And um, and, and one of the things Mark would always tell me is, uh, something like, we would love to have you, but you have to scratch the edge of being an operator first.Um, because there are a lot of, there are a lot of ways VCs fail, uh, operator at VCs fail. Um, and I can get, get into some of them if you're interested, but one of the common ways that they fail is they're like, oh, I really want to go back to, um, building companies. And, uh, and now thing is like antis more than most interest, like really respects entrepreneurship, fraud's the hard of what we do.But he will, like, you have to get that out of a system. You have to be like, okay, I'm done with that word. I want to now do this. Uh, before you know, uh, you want to come over, right? And if you say so, let's have this conversation, but if not, we will wait for you. Right. And a woman telling me this all the time, and at some point of time I decided, uh, that, uh, you know, I just love this modoc.Um, you know, there are many things kind of different about being an operator versus a BC uh, and you kind of actually kind of really train myself in what is actually a new profession. But one of the things is like, you know, you kind of have to be more of a coach and more open to like, working with very different kinds of people without having direct agency.And it's always a very different mode of operation, right? And you have to be like, well, I'm not the person doing the thing. I'm not the person getting the glory. I'm here to fund, obviously, but really help support coach be, uh, a lending hand, be a supporting shoulder, whatever the, uh, the metaphor is, or for somebody else doing the thing.And so you kind of have to have the shift in your brain. And I think sometimes when VCs don't work out, the few operator on VCs don't work out. There are few reasons. Uh, number one reason I would say is when an operator, and I, I hate the word operator by the way, right? It just means you have a regular job.Uh, you know, uh, and, uh, but the number one reason is like when you have a regular job, you know, you're an engineer, you're, you're a product manager, you're a marketer, whatever. , you get feedback every single day about how you're doing. If you're an engineer, you're checking in code or you know your manager, you hire a great person, whatever it is.When you're at Visa, you're not getting direct feedback, right? You know, maybe today what I'm doing now, recording this with you is the best thing ever because some amazing fund is gonna meet it and they're gonna come talk to me, or maybe it's a total waste of time and I should be talking some else. You do have no way of knowing.So you really have to think very differently about how you think about patients, how we think about spending your time, and you don't get the dopamine of like, oh, I'm getting this great reinforcement loop. Um, the second part of it is because of that lack of feedback loop, you often don't know how well you're doing.Also, you don't have that fantastic product demo or you're like, you know, if an engineer like, oh, I got this thing working, the builder is working, it's 10 x faster, or this thing actually works, whatever the thing is, you don't get that feedback loop, uh, because that next great company that, you know, the next Larry and Sergey or Brian Armstrong might walk in through your door or Zoom meeting tomorrow or maybe two years from now.So you don't really have a way to know. Um, so you kind of have to be, you have a focus on different ways to do, uh, get. Kind of figured out how well you're doing. The third part of it is, uh, you know, the, uh, the feedback loops are so long where, uh, you know, you, you can't test it. When I was a product manager, you would ship things, something you, if you don't like it, you kill it, you ship something else.At, at our firm in, you invest in somebody, you're working with them for a decade, if not longer, really for life in some ways. So you are making much more intense, but much less frequent decisions as opposed to when you're in a regular job, you're making very frequent, very common decisions, uh, every single day.So, uh, I get a lot of differences and I think, you know, sometimes, uh, you know, folks who, who are like a former CEO or former like VP product, uh, uh, I talk a lot of them sometimes who went from, came to BC and then went back and they either couldn't adapt or didn't like it, or didn't like the emotions of it.And I had to really convince myself that okay. Hopefully wouldn't fate those problems. I probably, maybe some other problems. And, uh, uh, so yes, the long way of saying no, , [00:43:13] Why Don't More Venture Capitalists Become Founders?[00:43:13] Dwarkesh: um, the desk partly answer another question I had, which was, you know, there is obviously this pipeline of people who are founders who become venture capitalists.And it's interesting to me. I would think that the other end or the converse of that would be just as common because if you're, if you're an angel investor or venture capitalist, you've seen all these companies, you've seen dozens of companies go through all these challenges and then you'd be like, oh, I, I understand.[00:43:36] Sriram: Wait, why do you think more VCs driven apart? You have some strong opinions of this . [00:43:40] Dwarkesh: Should more venture capitalists and investors become founders? I think [00:43:43] Aarthi: they should. I don't think they will. Ouch. I dunno, why not? Um, I think, uh, look, I think the world is better with more founders. More people should start companies, more people should be building things.I fundamentally think that's what needs to happen. Like our single biggest need is like, we just don't have enough founders. And we should just all be trying new things, building new projects, all of that. Um, I think for venture capital is, I think what happens, and this is just my take, I don't know if Farram agrees with it, but, um, I think they see so much from different companies.And if you're like really successful with what you do as a vc, you are probably seeing hundreds of companies operate. You're seeing how the sausage is being made in each one of them. Like an operating job. You kind of sort of like have this linear learning experience. You go from one job to the other.Here you kind of sort of see in parallel, like you're probably on like 50, 60 boards. Uh, and oftentimes when it comes to the investor as like an issue, it is usually a bad problem. Um, and you kind of see like you, you know, you kind of see how every company, what the challenges are, and every company probably has like, you know, the best companies we know, I've all had this like near death experience and they've come out of that.That's how the best founders are made. Um, you see all of that and I think at some point you kind of have this fear of like, I don't know. I just don't think I wanna like, bet everything into this one startup. One thing, I think it's very hard to have focus if you've honed your skillset to be much more breath first and go look at like a portfolio of companies being helpful to every one of them.And I see Sure. And do this every day where I, I have no idea how he does it, but key context, which is every 30 minutes. Yeah. And it's crazy. Like I would go completely and say, where if you told me board meeting this founder pitch, oh, sell this operating role for this portfolio company. Second board meeting, third, board meeting founder, pitch founder pitch founder pitch.And that's like, you know, all day, every day nonstop. Um, that's just like, you, you, I don't think you can like, kind of turn your mindset into being like, I'm gonna clear up my calendar and I'm just gonna like work on this one thing. Yeah. And it may be successful, it may not be, but I'm gonna give it my best shot.It's a very, very different psychology. I don't know. What do you [00:45:57] Sriram: think? Well, Well, one of my partners Triess to say like, I don't know what VCs do all day. The job is so easy, uh, uh, you know, they should start complaining. I mean, being a founder is really hard. Um, and I think, you know, there's a part of it where the VCs are like, oh, wait, I see how hard it is.And I'm like, I'm happy to support, but I don't know whether I can go through with it. So, because it's just really hard and which is kind of like why we have like, so much, uh, sort of respect and empathy, uh, for the whole thing, which is, I, [00:46:20] Aarthi: I do like a lot of VCs, the best VCs I know are people who've been operators in the past because they have a lot of empathy for what it takes to go operate.Um, and I've generally connected better with them because you're like, oh, okay, you're a builder. You've built these things, so, you know, kind of thing. Yeah. Um, but I do think a lot more VCs should become [00:46:38] Sriram: founders than, yeah. I, I think it's some of the couple of other things which happened, which is, uh, uh, like Arthur said, like sometimes, uh, you know, when we see you kind of, you see, you kind of start to pattern match, like on.And you sometimes you analyze and, and you kind of, your brain kind of becomes so focused on context switching. And I think when need a founder, you need to kind of just dedicate, you know, everything to just one idea. And it, it's not just bbc sometimes with academics also, where sometimes you are like a person who's supporting multiple different kinds of disciplines and context switching between like various speech students you support.Uh, but it's very different from being in the lab and working on one problem for like long, long years. Right. So, um, and I think it's kind of hard to then context switch back into just doing the exact, you know, just focus on one problem, one mission, day in and day out. So I think that's hard, uh, and uh, but you should be a founder.Yeah, I think, yeah, I think more people should try. [00:47:32] Role of Boards[00:47:32] Dwarkesh: . Speaking of being on boards, uh, what the FTX Saga has raised some questions about what is like the role of a board, even in a startup, uh, stage company, and you guys are on multiple boards, so I'm curious how you think about, there's a range of between micromanaging everything the CEO does to just rubber stamping everything the CEO does.Where, what is the responsibility of a board and a startup? [00:47:54] Aarthi: What, what, what are the, this is something I'm really curious about too. I'm [00:47:57] Sriram: just, well, I just wanna know on the FDX soccer, whether we are gonna beat the FTX episode in interviews in terms of view your podcast, right? Like, so if you folks are listening, right?Like let's get us to number one. So what you YouTube like can subscriber, they're already listening. [00:48:10] Aarthi: What do you mean? Get us [00:48:10] Sriram: to number one? Okay, then, then spread the word, right? Like, uh, don't [00:48:13] Aarthi: watch other episodes. It's kinda what you [00:48:15] Sriram: should, I mean, if there's [00:48:16] Dwarkesh: like some sort of scandal with a 16 Z, we could definitely be to fdx.[00:48:21] Sriram: Uh, uh, yeah, I think it's gonna, well, it's gonna be really hard to read that one. Uh, , uh, uh, for for sure. Uh, uh, oh my goodness. Um, uh, but no, [00:48:29] Aarthi: I'm, I'm genuinely curious about [00:48:31] Sriram: these two. Well, uh, it's a few things, you know, so the multiple schools of thought, I would say, you know, there's one school of thought, which is the, uh, uh, you know, which I don't think I totally subscribe to, but I think some of the other later stages, especially public market folks that I work with sometimes subscribe to, which is the only job of a, uh, board is to hire and fire the ceo.I don't think I really subscribe to that. I think because we deal with more, uh, early stage venture, um, and our job is like, uh, you know, like lot of the companies I work with are in a cdc c, b, you know, they have something working, but they have a lot long way to go. Um, and hopefully this journey, which goes on for many, many years, and I think the best way I thought about it is to, people would say like, you want to be.Wave form dampener, which is, uh, you know, for example, if the company's kind of like soaring, you want to kind of be like kind the check and balance of what? Like, hey, okay, what do we do to, uh, you know, um, uh, to make sure we are covering our bases or dotting the is dotting the, crossing The ts be very kind of like careful about it because the natural gravitational pool of the company is gonna take it like one direct.On the other hand, uh, if the company's not doing very well and everybody's beating us, beating up about it, you're, you know, your cust you're not able to close deals. The press is beating you up. You want to be the person who is supportive to the ceo, who's rallying, everybody helping, you know, convince management to stay, helping convince, close host, hire.So, um, there are a lot of things, other things that go into being a board member. Obviously there's a fiscal responsibility part of things, and, um, you know, um, because you kind of represent so many stakeholders. But I think at the heart of it, I kind of think about, uh, you know, how do I sort of help the founder, uh, the founder and kind of dampen the waveform.Um, the other Pinteresting part was actually the board meetings. Uh, Themselves do. Uh, and I do think like, you know, about once a year or, uh, so like that there's every kind of, there's, there's almost always a point every 18 months or so in a company's lifetime where you have like some very decisive, interesting moment, right?It could be good, it could be bad. And I think those moments can be, uh, really, really pivotal. So I think there's, there's huge value in showing up to board meetings, being really prepared, uh, uh, where you've done your homework, you, you know, you've kind of had all the conversations maybe beforehand. Um, and you're coming into add real value, like nothing kind of annoying me if somebody's just kind of showing up and, you know, they're kind of maybe cheering on the founder once or twice and they kind of go away.So I don't think you can make big difference, but, uh, you know, I think about, okay, how are we sort of like the waveform, the, you know, make sure the company, [00:50:58] Aarthi: but I guess the question then is like, should startups have better corporate governance compared to where we are today? Would that have avoided, like, say the FTX [00:51:08] Sriram: saga?No, I mean, it's, I mean, we, I guess there'll be a legal process and you'll find out right when the FTX case, nobody really knows, you know, like, I mean, like what level of, uh, who knew what, when, and what level of deceptions, you know, deception, uh, uh, you know, unfolded, right? So, uh, it, yeah. Maybe, but you know, it could have been, uh, it could have been very possible that, you know, uh, somebody, somebody just fakes or lies stuff, uh, lies to you in multiple ways.[00:51:36] Aarthi: To,

A plethora of fantastic stuff has come across my digital desktop lately, so this week's Prog-Watch is a straight-up variety program full of awesome, mostly contemporary progressive rock! I've got great music from Combinator, Evership, Grombira, The Bedlam Furnaces, Numen, Robert Berry's 3.2, The Samurai of Prog, Lucifer Was, Head Spin, Porcupine Tree, and Glass Island!

This is a stunning Part 2! #NMSExclusive's from GRIM17 Shaun Panda Nicolson top and tail the episode. GRIM17's Bitter Shine is an amazing alternative track showing off yet another of his many many sides. The stems to this track will also soon be made available for artists everywhere to remix! Shaun Panda Nicolson's Everything Ends provokes a strong emotional response from Dr. Bones to close the show out, it really is a very beautiful and powerful song. Both tracks will be out on Mike's label Lights And Lines over the summer as part of the #LALSummerSingles series. Listen out for brand new tracks by 1st Base Runner, Rubber Clown Car, Abandon Playground, Russ Taylor, Damsel In The Dollhouse, Timid Deer, Megan McDuffee, Ria Rua, Cosmic Soda, Combinator, Hands Of Blue, The Sweetest Condition, and Lia Hide. For all the latest check out www.newmusicsaturday.com x --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/newmusicsaturday/message

Array Cast - April 1, 2022 Show NotesMany thanks to Adám Brudzewsky for collecting these links.00:00:50 [1] APL Seeds: https://apl.wiki/APL_Seeds00:02:31 [2] Gitte: https://apl.wiki/Gitte_Christensen00:03:42 [3] Common Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp00:03:50 [4] April: https://apl.wiki/April00:04:00 [5] Bloxl: https://bloxl.co00:04:34 [6] Aaron: https://apl.wiki/Aaron_Hsu00:05:20 [7] Combinator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic00:07:35 [8] Keyboards: https://apl.wiki/Typing_glyphs#Hardware00:08:52 [9] Mnemonics: https://apl.wiki/Mnemonics#Pairing_glyphs.2Ffunctionality_with_their_keyboard_locations00:09:13 [10] Model M: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard00:09:13 [11] Model F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_F_keyboard00:09:34 [12] IME: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method00:11:00 [13] Typing methods: https://apl.wiki/Typing_glyphs#By_method00:14:25 [14] Layouts list: https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_keyboards.htm00:21:00 [15] Books: https://apl.wiki/Books00:21:08 [16] APL Quote Quad: https://apl.wiki/APL_Quote_Quad00:21:08 [17] Vector journal: https://apl.wiki/BAA#Vector_journal00:21:10 [18] APLcart: https://aplcart.info00:22:30 [19] Chat lessons: https://apl.wiki/APL_Cultivation00:22:42 [20] Weekly interactive sessions: https://apl.wiki/APL_Quest00:23:12 [21] Susan Bryson's Understanding APL: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Apl-Alfred-handy-guide/dp/088284220X00:24:50 [22] Bob on YouTube: https://youtube.com/bobtherriault00:24:55 [23] Rich on YouTube: https://youtube.com/rikedyp00:25:00 [24] Stephen's blog: https://5jt.com/tagged/software00:25:05 [25] Advent of Code: https://apl.wiki/Advent_of_Code00:25:15 [26] Aaron on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDU0iEj6f8duXzmgnlGX4hMHJUMYh4rJq00:25:20 [27] Hacker News thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1379779700:25:23 [28] Adám on YouTube: https://youtube.com/abrudz00:25:26 [29] Rodrigo on YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCd_24S_cYacw6zrvws43AWg00:25:40 [30] Conor on YouTube: https://youtube.com/codereport00:26:14 [31] Dyalog TV: https://dyalog.tv00:26:52 [32] Array Cast at Dyalog 21: https://arraycast.com/episodes/episode14-dyalog-21-live00:36:20 [33] AST: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree00:38:10 [34] Co-dfns: https://apl.wiki/Co-dfns00:38:15 [35] Loop fusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_fission_and_fusion00:44:24 [36] Roger's list of special cases for Stencil: https://dyalog.com/blog/2020/06/towards-improvements-to-stencil00:44:45 [37] Co-dfns Performance manual: https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns/blob/master/docs/PERFORMANCE.md00:48:43 [38] New Kind of Paper: https://mlajtos.mu

Hablamos con Miguel Carranza, cofundador y CTO de RevenueCat, una compañía centrada en la gestión de suscripciones y compras dentro de las apps.• Las notas del episodio con enlaces e información adicional en: https://producthackers.com/es/podcast/haciendo-crecer-suscripciones-compras-inapp

In this episode we talk to Jason Cole and Jorge Vega Matos, who are part of the 20-person strong team at C-Combinator, a public benefit corporation creating valuable circular economies based on Sargassum that can address regenerative agriculture, sustainable manufacturing, and scalable carbon sequestration. Jason Cole is the Executive VP for Innovation and Jorge Vega Matos is VP for Marketing & Communications. To them, Sargassum is a sign of disrupted ocean ecosystems. As Sargassum is thriving with this new climate, they plan to work with the ocean to avert climate collapse. Listen to the episode to hear about: - Sargassum beaching events in Tanzania (10:00) - Mission of C-Combinator to help restore the oceans and climate through the growth of naturally occurring seaweeds (11:15) - C-Combinator is opening the first high tech biorefinery for macroalgae in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Mexico) (11:45) - Their plans to innovate with sargassum and scale a large range of products in a sustainable way (12:25) - As a public benefit cooperation they are about economy justice for island and coastal economies (13:30) - Biggest hurdle to close shore seaweed farming is regulatory, to get the permission to put lines in the water (16:00) - Deepsea seaweed farming has large potential in the future but need to still be scaled up(19:00) - Jason journey from IT to C- Combinator (23:00) - Jorge background commercial anthropologist and foresight researcher (29:00) - Seaweeds are one of the groups of obscure organisms with amazing properties that we are rediscovering (29:30) - Helping local communities through job creation and mitigation of negative effects of Sargassum (32:45) - Cultural value of beaches and the ocean (35:45) - Multitude of partners at Universities, Government and elsewhere (36:20) - Producing biostimulant from Sargassum (38:10, 41:45) - Other products they developed such as super absorbants for agriculture, replacements for leather, foam (40:45,( 47:25) - The vision of C- Combinator as the anti-oil company(43:30) - Do we need to farm Sargassum to make all these products ?(52:15) - Using Sargassum for climate mitigation (56:30, 1:02:32) - How to remove arsenic and other contaminants from harvested Sargassum in the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (59:00) Transcript Learn more about C-Combinator: ֍ C- combinator website ֍ LinkedIn ֍ Twitter ֍ Climate foundation website ֍ Movie: 2040 Join the Regeneration We love to hear from you, feel free to drop us an email to SargassumPodcast@gmx.net, and connect with us on social media: facebook, twitter, Instagram, linkedin. Can't get enough? Become one of our patrons for as little as $1 a month and take part in an exclusive monthly happy hour with our podcast guests and other Sargassum crazy patrons. We are grateful for each supporter and look forward to connecting with you. Like our music? The song is called Them Ah Pree by Drizzle Roadranna. Follow him on spotify and youtubeand Spotify

It's not often we get a Y Combinator company to pitch on Firing Squad, so let's start with 'you're welcome, listeners.' So, who's up? CEO Prem Kumar brings his A Game and Combinator credentials to the Firing Squad with Humanly. The company promises candidate screening, scheduling, and engagement at scale. Is this a broken promise? Gotta listen to this Chad & Cheese gem, sponsored by PandoLogic, to find out.

Alex discusses Kayne West tweeting about starting a Y Combinator for the music business and recaps his discussion with Benedict Evans in the previous episode. The second half of the show covers bullish comments from Snowflakes CEO and an update on the U.S. TikTok deal. Originally Aired: 09/22/20

¿Cual es la mejor manera de usar 50.000 dólares? Para los fundadores de Truora, la respuesta fue "un viaje". El mensaje de este episodio es uno: La convicción de un equipo no tiene precio.

Es gibt einen neuen Player im deutschen Energiemarkt. Der sogenannte e-combinator will verschiedene Menschen und Kompetenzen zusammenbringen, um Start-ups dabei zu helfen, uns alle in eine Energiewelt zu bringen, auf die unsere Kinder stolz sein können. Ich spreche mit den beiden Gründern Sebastian Hopp und Matthias Hoffmann sowie mit Uwe Tigges, ehemaliger Vorstandsvorsitzender der innogy SE und einer der "Silberrücken" im Netzwerk des e-combinators.

Este episodio cuenta lo que tuvo que suceder para que el 05 de diciembre de 2018, David y César tomaran la decisión de renunciar a Twillio y dedicar el 100% de su energía y de su tiempo a Truora.

---Epic Rap Battle of History: Jack Allison vs. Lin Manuel Miranda.--- Jack Allison: Its Jack Allison droppin beats like some ballast son, a weed gamer I keep a vape on me like a talisman. Aye Lin Manuel— Lin Manuel: Yo yo! Jack Allison: You aint no Vader, i’ma grind you with these verses and, smoke ya later. Lin Manuel: Yo! It’s Lin Manuel, too swell, the smooth villain, i’ma playwrite— Jack Allison: Yeah you play right. Lin Manuel: And you just play fight, you too bitter, you’re a poster? Jack Allison: Yeah a poster. Lin Manuel: Then you’ll be on my wall kid. And a coaster? Jack Allison: Huh a coaster? Lin Manuel: You’re just floating through life, kid, I'm a self made captain trappin back from the theatre— Jack Allison: Back of the theatre? Thats funny son, try the front row. When Obama was at Hammy homie where did you go? Lin Manuel: Yo, that’s not..look lets not start this shit. Jack Allison: Shits been started and Imma light your ass like I sparked a zip. So close your mouth, hold your tongue and just bite your lip.

Cardano is going to number 1. In this episode we discuss upcoming dates, the hardfork combinator, and the latest news this week. We also read some of the top posts this week on r/Cardano and answer viewer questions in the Youtube live chat. Watch Episode 97 and view more information on Youtube: https://youtu.be/aujQJzmrOE8

Esta es la historia de un gran desarrollador de software, de un bar para bailar salsa en Bogotá y de una llamada inesperada que iba transformar un "negocio" en una empresa global.

MINDSET MOVERS Positive Entrepreneurship Podcast Folge #5 Interview mit Nikolai Ladanyi. Mein heutiger Gast ist Nikolai Ladanyi. Er ist Unternehmer, Coach & Trainer der Scaling Up Methode sowie Buchautor. Nikolai ist ein sehr inspirierender Mensch und es hat mir viel Spaß gemacht, mit ihm über Unternehmertum und Persönlichkeitsentwicklung zu sprechen. Nikolai war der erste Scale Up Coach in Deutschland und hat auf Basis dessen, zusammen mit Ralph Chromik, 2015 das Unternehmen “scale up” (www.scaleup.de) gegründet. Scale up hilft Unternehmen dabei, von einem Start-up zu einem Scale-up Unternehmen zu werden. Dabei hat Nikolai die Scaling Up Methode von Verne Harnish (https://scalingup.com/) auf die Deutschen Bedingungen übertragen, hat das erste Buch von Verne Harnish (Amazon - Wachstum durch Führung) als Co-Autor ins Deutsche übersetzt und die Methoden 2011 in seiner eigenen Firma angewendet. 2014 war er dann Co-Autor des 2. Buchs von Verne Harnish “Scaling Up” (Amazon - Scaling Up Skalieren auch Sie!). Im Interview erfährst Du, was für Nikolai “Core Values” sind, was sein BHAG ist, welche Produkte sein Unternehmen „scale up“ bietet und für welche Unternehmen sie gedacht sind. Natürlich spreche ich auch mit Nikolai über die Dinge, die er für seine persönliche Weiterentwicklung macht. Was ich besonders an ihm schätze, ist, dass er uns auch Einblicke in sein Privatleben gibt und ganz offen darüber spricht. Über seine Rolle als Unternehmer und Vater von 4 Kindern und wie ihn seine Kinder wahrnehmen. Nikolai verrät uns, dass er kein Problem damit hat, abzuschalten, sondern viel mehr damit, morgens “in die Gänge zu kommen” und erzählt von den Tools, die ihm dabei helfen, den Tag erfolgreich zu starten. Was Nikolai ebenfalls bei seinem persönlichen und auch unternehmerischen Wachstum hilft, ist der Austausch in seinem EO Forum. Zum Schluss macht Nikolai noch auf das neueste Programm von scale up aufmerksam, dem “scale up Combinator” (https://www.scaleup.de/learning/), in dem Unternehmer auf der einen Seite gecoacht werden, aber eben auch ein Austausch mit anderen Unternehmen stattfindet, der einen echten Mehrwert leistet. Hier die Links: Pep Guardiola: Amazon Prime Doku “All or nothing” Alexander Osterwalder: https://www.strategyzer.com/ Navy Seals: Amazon Extreme Ownership: How US Navy Seals Lead and Win Schreib mir gerne an: arne@mindsetmovers.de

Timeline / Inhaltsverzeichnis: 00:00 Auswanderung in die USA 11:00 YC Combinator der erfolgreichste Accelerator der Welt 13:20 Steli's Co-Founder Beziehungen 23:10 Remote arbeiten bei Close 30:00 Glaubenssätze - Vergleich USA zu Deutschland 36:35 Eine mehrdimensionale Persönlichkeit sein __________ Hier findest du mehr über mich: - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sofianoweideh/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elOveArmin Liebe Grüße Sofian

Tim is CEO and co-founder of a company called Cloosiv (YC S19).   Cloosiv is a company looking to offer smaller coffee shops a mobile ordering solution that can compete with those of the mega coffee brands.    Tim had an idea when he was working at Apple, he was looking at the Apple Store app and customers could walk into the store without ever talking to anyone and buy something. This sparked Tim to build something like that for other markets, which kicked off a journey to the coffee shop market.   He became a management consultant at the North Highland Consulting firm, and they invested 300k into the winner of a startup idea. Tim was that winner and they gave him 300k to start his business. Tim found his cofounder James on UpWork to help develop the app.    Tim had to unlearn how to be a management consultant, generally, companies pay large dollar amounts and "paid for perfection". But as a startup founder Tim mentioned he had to test, removing those own expectations.    Tim's first idea was to create a unified payment app and mentioned he would stand outside stores at the mall and ask questions to the customers walking around. Tim met with the founders of DoorDash and Instacart to learn about mobile ordering. Coffee shops have never had an app that was just for them.   Tim applied to Y Combinator 4-5 times over and over again getting rejected, but Tim never gave up. Dalton Caldwell called the Cloosiv founders delivering the bad news about not getting in and Tim applied again after making progress.   In one trip to San Fransisco and through a fortunate series of events came to a meeting with Sam Altman, who made some introductions, one being Lachy Groom who was an early employee at Stripe, previously head of stripe issuing, core payments product. Lachy was one of Cloosiv's first investors. Laura Behrens, Founder & CEO at Shippo joined as one of the early angel investors.   Square is now Cloosiv's payment partner, coffee shops tend to have very little free table space and their app can run simultaneously as the Cloosiv app on an iPad.   Tim and the Cloosiv team manage a coffee shop's inventory of coffee ordering real-time working towards a platform for a coffee shop to build their brands.   More about Tim here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/griffintimothy/   More about Cloosiv here - https://www.cloosiv.com/

Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Michael Litt, Co-Founder and CEO of Vidyard. This is his second time being a guest on Leveling Up podcast! Check out the first episode with him here. Tune in to hear how Vidyard found their market-fit, find out their current conversion rates and how the Vidyard is growing with collaborations and integrations with other companies.` Click here for show notes and transcript Leave Some Feedback: What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes Get the non-iTunes RSS Feed  Connect With Eric Siu:  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Eric Siu on Twitter

My guest Sabby on today's episode is a very great friend and great dude, who I met here in Bali. Sabby details how he went from living in his parents house for one year, to achieving a successful and rewarding lifestyle working remotely anywhere around the world…AKA living that digital nomad life. But first Sabby dives into an absurd hostel hookup story that doesn’t really end well for anyone. Its a great lesson in why you don’t stay in a 30 bed Dorn in a hostel. After that, Sabby details his startup experience while he was living in the states, and then gives light as to why he wanted to leave Canada, and explore the world while working from his computer. Lots great advice and insight in the one, so listen close. Episode Highlights: A Risque Hostel Hookup Starting a Start-up: Y Combinator Optimize life, travel, and work for happiness How to work while Traveling

We headed to Silicon Valley to chat with SimpleLegal founder Nathan Wenzel in Episode 26. Nathan has a great legal tech startup story–from idea to acquisition. SimpleLegal provides legal operations software to help corporate legal teams run their departments, manage their legal operations and monitor finances. (This type of software is sometimes referred to as ELM software or “enterprise legal management” software.) The early days of SimpleLegal were spent at Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s highly respected start up accelerator. The company was one of the first legal tech companies YC accepted. After completing the program, Nathan and his team raised a seed round and then a $10 million Series A round to grow the company. Fast forward to 2019 and Onit came knocking. Onit is another company providing enterprise software for in-house legal departments and legal ops teams. Onit acquired SimpleLegal in May, 2019. Nathan talks about his legal tech journey and what it was like to raise money when investors were not as familiar with legal technology companies. Learn more about SimpleLegal, and be sure to check out their great blog covering legal ops and in-house legal topics. The company also has a great legal ops resource center too. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.  

Josh Zloof, Co-Founder & CEO of Sudden Coffee is passionate about more than just serving up a great cup of coffee. After launching several businesses that ended in some success and even more failures, Josh knew he needed to find his “why.” This led to him founding Sudden Coffee on the idea of “making one billion people happy.”  Today, Sudden Coffee has served over 200,000 cups of their single origin, speciality grade, instant coffee (delivered right to your door). With over $4.2M raised from Sudden Coffee have been featured in the New York Times, Food & Wine, and GQ.  Josh and I Discuss: Ideas on penetrating the crowded coffee/beverage space How Sudden Coffee is sourced Process of making instant coffee Funding Focus around marketing Distribution Working with coaches and mentors and much more! Use Code: marketplace for 10% off your order @ https://www.suddencoffee.com/

Guest: Oliver Jay - Head of Global Sales & Partnerships @Asana (Board Director @Grab; Formerly @Dropbox, @NEA, @HBS) Guest Background: Oliver Jay is the Head of Global Sales & Partnerships at Asana. Prior to Asana, he scaled the Dropbox sales team from 20 to 100 people across multiple geographies. Previously, Oliver worked at Morgan Stanley and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) where he invested and worked alongside entrepreneurs in consumer internet, cleantech and enterprise SaaS companies. Oliver earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Harvard Business School.  Guest Links: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - Top Talent: 4 Hiring Criteria & Step x Step Recruiting Process - The International Expansion Playbook - Upstream: Product-Market Fit to Freemium to Enterprise - Building Sales Engines - Self Serve, Online Sales, Enterprise, Partnerships & Channel - 3 Criteria for Picking Horses (the Right Hypergrowth Companies) - The Role of Unit Economics for Sales & Marketing Leaders Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Oliver Jay on the show. OJ is they call him. OJ is the Head of Global Sales at Asana, a $1.5 billion valuation company, a Unicorn with $213 million capital raised. Prior to joining Asana, he scaled the Dropbox Sales team from 20 to 100 people across multiple geographies. Dropbox IPO in 2018 $9.6 billion valuation. Previously Oliver worked at Morgan Stanley and New Enterprise Associates, NEA. We invested and worked alongside entrepreneurs in consumer internet, clean tech and enterprise SaaS companies. OJ is also on the Board of Directors for Grab, who has a $14 billion valuation and $9.1 billion capital raised. OJ earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Harvard Business School. Here we go. Naber:  Oliver Jay, awesome to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I'm so glad to be here, Brandon. Naber:  Excellent. Thank you. It's July 4th. I'm sure you don't have anything better to do, so I'm really glad that you're spending it with me this morning. and I really appreciate your time. So we've got a lot to talk about. We're lucky enough to know each other personally and professionally, so I get to talk about some of my favorite things and hear about your story personally, and we'll hop into professional as well, hop through some of your career journey and ultimately, spend the bulk of our time in your professional journey, talking about a lot of the strengths, experiences, and ultimately superpowers that you've built up over time, that you've been able to study about, but also execute on that at several different, really, really high growth businesses. So let's start with on the personal side, little bit about you growing up, a little bit about what you were like as a kid. I mean, Hong Kong, Concord, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Sydney, San Francisco 2.0, been all over the planet. And I'd love to walk through you as a kiddo and talk about some of your interests, some of the things you're interested in, and then your journey through school. And then we can get into some professional stuff. Maybe in five to seven minutes, et's talk through what was OJ as a kid? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Awesome. Yeah. Well, so I grew up in Hong Kong. My parents are still there. And, I think even as a child I was always, I was the Lego kid, I was the builder. I was a total nerd throughout. And I excelled in math and science. Not a surprise. And it got to a point where my parents were , okay, math is only going to get you so much here. So they then sent me to boarding school in New Hampshire. Naber:  And that was St Paul's? Oliver Jay (OJ):  And that would be St Paul's. So I went there. That was my entry to the US was a ninth grade. Naber:  Nice. Excellent. So, what were some of the interests you had or the hobbies you had when you were a kid? Oliver Jay (OJ):  My main thing was tennis. Tennis was my major hobby growing up. And I think a lot of who I am came from just that sport, because that sport, just like any sport, requires you to be excellent. You just have to be, continue to grind away. A lot of, how I think actually came from that sport and competing, learning how to lose graciously, learning how to stay calm when there's, when it's things are looking rough. When you're down a set, what do you do? I'm thinking about how do you change your tactics in real time? That all comes from tennis. Naber:  Absolutely. Especially in an individual sport. We have to be so iterative. Where you do things a thousand times in practice, and it just becomes a transaction when you're in the actual match. That makes a lot of sense. So when you moved to St Paul's, and you were in Concord, New Hampshire, out of your comfort zone, tell us about that transition. And then let's talk about some of the things that you were interested in when you were in New Hampshire and high school. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Boy, so the interesting thing was Saint Paul's is one of the top high schools in the US, and that's pretty much all my parents knew. And my parents said, you're very strong in math and science, but your English sucks, and it's just really bad. And they're like, you need to supercharge that. And so they looked at the list, I think it was a US News and World Report list. And they had a couple rankings and some names that people have heard of, Exeter, St Paul's, whatever. And then so I applied and got in. And I mean St Paul's is a real school, in that it's academics is intense. And it's in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you're literally in the woods. I grew up in Hong Kong, I grew up in the heart of the jungle, a concrete jungle, and then I'm literally moved into a jungle. The school had, I think 200 acres. And I mean, it was nuts. But I learned to adapt. I learned about the American way. Yeah, it was tough, but it was certainly, also the best four years of my academic career. Naber:  Nice. Very cool. And did you play tennis when you were there? Or what were some of the activities that you were doing? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, yeah. I was on the tennis team, I was captain of the tennis team there. We were decent, we were decent. I did that, and then I was just lots of part of lots of clubs. But honestly, high school was tough for me. I didn't have that much spare time. Obviously, it should be clear, I have tiger parents, right? Obvious. So I did play a violin as well, but I was terrible at it. But I did the orchestra thing, but I was, I was so bad, so bad. But I survived, and I was okay. But I mean, I just, I worked so hard because my English level was far, far, far, behind my peers at school. Naber:  That must have been so challenging. Learning all that curriculum at such a high level, while you're learning how to master the English language yourself. That is immensely complex. Oliver Jay (OJ):  It was crazy. It was crazy. But, it changed my life. Because when I went to college, I studied philosophy, politics and economics. I went to Penn, right? So I didn't go to Wharton and just do a bunch of math and talking about strategy. I mean it's funny, I'm in business now. It's so easy compared to a career, or studying old philosophy texts, and debating, and writing papers or why you disagree with Socrates. I mean that's...But if I didn't go to St Paul's, and then of gotten out of my comfort zone, I wouldn't have done that. Naber:  That's cool. That's actually a really good way of looking at it. The most challenging class I think I've ever had in Uni was my logic class, my philosophy class - deductive reasoning, and logic, and going through all those different frameworks, and squaring everyone from old philosophers, and folks that...it's just almost, it feels it's impossible with their life experiences to contend and debate with. But that's, that's really interesting. You moved to U Penn. Why did you decide to choose U Penn? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Actually it was specifically because I really liked this program. So PPE, philosophy, politics and economics, is the most popular major in Oxford, in the UK. And Penn was one of two schools that adopted this program. It sounds fancy. Sometimes when I tell people that, it sounds I tri-majored. It's not true. It's more than one, but, it's this integrated curriculum of three disciplines that I think are really, really tied together. So that's why I went to Penn, for that program specifically. Naber:  Got It. So I won't tell anyone you didn't tri-major, but it sounds really, really stimulating. So you were at U Penn, What were some of the things you're interested in at U Penn? Before we get into your first job. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Like I said, Saint Paul's really opened my eyes to the world of humanities, and that's why I really loved that. But my interest had always been in business. You grow up in Hong Kong, you're going to be in business or you're a doctor, right? Or maybe a lawyer. It's just what you do, and it's in my blood. And so even when I was in high school, I was reading Peter Lynch books on how to invest. And so I've always been interested in business, but I took a couple of business classes and I was like, especially the management ones, and I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm not gonna pay this tuition to learn how to work as a team. Not to dismiss it, but I'm like, I don't think I'm going to have a chance again to, to read about Immanuel Kant, and how he thinks about the world. So in college, what I did was I spent most of my time academically on humanities, and then extracurricular was where I got scratch my itch on business. And my biggest thing there is I started the Wharton China Business Society. And back then, it was 2000. China had just gotten into the World Trade Organization, this was before China is the China we know it as today. But you knew it was going to be big. And it's cool, that society is still running now. I'm still getting their emails. Well they keep asking me to for donations. Naber:  That's how you know you made it. All right, cool. So you're you go through UPenn, you tri-major, obviously we talked about that. And you're interested also in studying business. I know you've always been interested in studying companies. I don't know if that's at the cost of studying people, but I know you've always been interested in studying companies. Is that when that started? Or did you get more practical with investing at Morgan Stanley, at NEA, at Harvard, before you started studying companies a lot? Oliver Jay (OJ):  I think the turning point was Morgan Stanley. I mean it was probably that summer internship. I just find it really fascinating. So when I got to Morgan Stanley, and I picked Morgan Stanley because I always liked tech as well. So I've always been a geeky, nerdy guy. And so at Morgan Stanley, I joined the tech team. And I ended up joining team that covered hardware. So companies Cisco, Juniper, and all the companies that died, Nokia, Motorola, they don't exist anymore, Nortel. But I just found it so fascinating to think about how a lot of these companies basically sell commodity hardware. A Cisco router is not that much better than Juniper router, or vice versa back then, at that point. Naber:  That's like a nightmare for software, I mean you're selling on features and pricing. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Exactly, exactly. And, but you were able to see very, very different trajectories. A lot of these companies no longer exist. A lot of them are still strong today. And that's just because of a different strategy that companies took. And I had the opportunity to go really deep. So that's why I joined equity research as opposed to a lot of my colleagues that joined investment banking to work on IPO's and deals. Because, it's probably my humanities background in education that I had led me to want to dig in deep, as opposed to more of a transactional finance job. And that's why I ended up in equity research. And through that experience I've really got to learn how to dig into companies. Naber:  Yeah. Very cool. That's a great transition. So while you're at Morgan Stanley...What's the top thing you learned from Morgan Stanley? The top learning you had, before you moved into NEA. And then we'll hop into NEA after that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Ooh, top thing from Morgan Stanley. I actually, I have two things in my mind. So can I give you two? Naber:  Give me 10 if you want to, I've got time. Naber:  Yeah. Yeah. So the first, is I think of all places, I was extremely fortunate. And I had two great Managers at Morgan Stanley. They were my first bosses. And they say your first Manager really impacts you and your career, more than any other, right? I was just so fortunate because normally you don't get that on Wall Street. Naber:  Yeah. Statistics aren't on your side. Oliver Jay (OJ):  And I got placed with Scott Coleman and John Marchetti, and they were up and comers. And they rose through the ranks, and so they know what it took to move up. And they just had a very empowering mentality from the beginning. So they just pushed me, and I always asked for more. But every time, they just really gave me great feedback, pushed me, I learned so much. And they empowered me so much that by the second year I was they put me on stage at the Morgan Stanley tech conference, interviewing tech CEOs. And I was like 2 years out of school. And I think that was a very formative experience because I got to benefit from that, and I know what that did for me, and my career, and my confidence. And we'll talk more later about building teams and managing teams, but I've taken a lot of that philosophy from them. I was so lucky. I mean, that would be the number one thing. I will give you that, that was my number one thing I got from Morgan Stanley. Naber:  Nice. That's great. I mean, you're going to talk us through NEA. I mean you've worked for incredible companies, and you're on team building. Let's talk about that. Hiring great teams. One of the things that I know is your superpower from hearing from other people, from talking to you personally, talking to you professionally. But the result speak for themselves. You've hired incredible individuals that I know, because I used to work with them, or I know people that used to work with them, are just the best at what they do. And you consistently do it time, over time, over time. What's I'd love to hear is one, what's that hiring philosophy that you took away from those guys, as well as any additional things you've applied today? And then we can talk a little bit about your actual process. Because clearly there's something you're doing in execution that is better than most, if not better than almost all. So what is your philosophy around hiring that you took away from those guys as well as how you think about it? And then we'll talk through the process like, candidate profiling strategy, how do you attract and recruit, how do you close? So we'll talk about those things as well. So, what's on your mind? Naber:  I love building teams. I mean, it starts there...let me start with why I care about it. And I think for me, that's literally why I think...That's where I find meaning in my life. Bringing in high potential talent and seeing it grow, and creating opportunities. And I've always thought of myself, on my deathbed if I'm seen as the Y-Combinator of talent, I'll be really, really happy. And so because of that, I think that it impacts what I look for, because I really look for people who I believe we can go on a journey together, and they can learn from me and I can learn from them, and we're going to achieve great things together. That's the high level mentality that I have. I really don't look at...no matter how senior or whether someone's a fresh-out-of-school graduate. I think I can learn something. If I can't learn something from you, then I don't think you're a good fit. But that's how I see it. And so it's interesting, at Asana, we recently distilled down what are our Sales attributes, the hiring profile, not profile, but what are the attributes or values, depending on how you define it, that we look for. And I was very, very involved you can imagine, because in many ways I think I codified the things that I really value. So there are four pieces that I really care about in every single person that I hired. No matter, again, fresh out of school or you're going to run EMEA. The first is someone who really "pursues excellence". What I mean by that is, I want to see evidence that someone knows what excellence means. Because in high growth companies, you're growing 100%, 200% early on, 300% in the super early days. Every knows...information is everywhere now. So you can imagine you've got great competition. And so, you gotta go for people who really, really...Well, if you're not excellent, you don't even have a chance. You don't even have a chance to survive. And so, if you're fresh out of school, and I'm digging into your profile, and I don't see one thing...And I don't care, it could be a violin. If you've gotten really good at violin, I'm like, oh yeah. And this is sometimes why I think some of my best hires have been teachers. Because, gosh, if you can teach, especially if people from Teach for America, if you can teach math to inner city kids who have no interest in math, okay, you've pursued excellence here. And I think in this world, you either get it or you don't. You've either seen excellence, and you know what that means, and what it takes to be great, or you just don't. And it's very binary, and you can tell very quickly. So someone who does that is something I value a lot. The second piece is, we're calling it, you "lead with empathy". And in Sales, of course, if you don't have empathy, you're not going to understand your customer's needs, and you're not going to relate to them. You're not going to build a good relationship with them. But I think a lot of this is also empathy just in terms of how you work together, right? Like in Sales...you never win because of Sales. This is a huge thing, where a lot of times I've talked to other founders and they're like, oh, okay, it's time to monetize, but I need to hire some Salespeople. Those Sales people are gonna fail, right? Because Sales is just a part of a bigger engine, because you've got to work together. And working together is fricking hard. It's really hard. So if you don't lead with empathy, you're not going to know how to work together cross-functionally. In Sales, what do Sales people say all the time, every single Sales person, every single Sales leader, I need more leads. Marketing's not developing more leads for me. I'm like, okay, great. Tell me more. How could they be developing more leads for you? And why? Most people can't answer that. If you can't answer that, just like with a customer, you're not going to be able to partner with Marketing to generate the leads that you actually want, right? It's not transactional. So anyways, so leading with empathy I think is something really important. And really behind that, what I'm looking for is self awareness, right? In a fast growing company, you don't have the time to coach every single person. You really don't. I've got some Managers right now who are managing 14 people because we're just growing that fast. And I couldn't hire Managers fast enough. That means that of the 14 people, honestly, they're not each individually getting the top quality mentorship that, say, I got from two guys at Morgan Stanley. But, if I hire people who are self-aware, they're going to teach themselves. They're going to look for ways to learn. And that combined with pursuing excellence, you're going to get good people. The third piece is what I call, someone on our team defined it as, "do the hard". And this is simple, this is like, you've got to grind. I mean, no one has achieved excellence without grinding away. And Sales is really tough. I mean, literally it is the definition of a grinder job. But also, do you take shortcuts? Sometimes the hard way now is actually the easy way long term. And that's what I look for. Are you willing to do, the hard work today so they easier for you later. And the last thing we call it "ascending together", which is your ability to work as on a team. It's like, thinking like an owner, right? That's something LinkedIn, I think it was one of Jeff's big things. It's one of my big things too. I remember when I was Morgan Stanley, that's what John Mack said when he was running the company. Now this is a big bank, Morgan Stanley. When he first said that, I was like, yeah, how am I going to change the trajectory of Morgan Stanley as a first year analyst. But, I did think that way, I really did, and I love that. So, those are some of the high level qualities that I look for in anybody. Naber:  Nice. That's awesome. One follow up on that, that was really well articulated, thanks. And the one follow-up on that...Do you have a particular process you go through? Let's talk about hiring directly on your team, your team, your directs. Do you have a particular process you go through around candidate profiling, attracting that candidate, and you reaching out to them either personally, or the message that you craft? Going through the recruitment, and interviewing process, and then closing. Do you have any tactics that you think completely set you apart from, maybe what other people do, just based on the results that you've gotten? You know that they work. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I don't know if it's differentiated, but I'll tell you how I approach it. I think the first step is you really have to understand the nuances of the role that you're trying to hire for. This is a mistake I see a lot in companies. Especially early stage companies, at some point they have like 10 Salespeople, they're hitting quota, kind of. And then the Board's like, you need a VP of Sales. And then they go and the hire some kind of recruiting firm, and they load them up with VP Sales candidates, and they just hire someone to do VP Sales. And that happens every day. And, I think there's so many nuances to the rule. What kind of Sales? How do you want to build it? And, what types of talent would you want this person to bring in? And, so I am a big believer that you don't know how to hire for that role unless you've done that job yourself, for at least a quarter or two. I think as you get better, you use pattern matching and shortcut. But in the beginning, you have to do it yourself...in the Sales world, so you know what type of companies are you really, really going after and such. And so that's my first step. Because even though I'm desperate for bandwidth, and I would just love to hire someone right now to just take the job, if I don't dig in myself, I don't think I'll hire her right, the best person for that job. So that's first, and I think that helps a lot downstream, and I'll come back to it. Second is, I leveraged my network. So I leverage my network, and I go talk to people. You and I have talked. I'm like, hey, I'm looking for this person. And now I know what I'm looking for, right? Who's the best two people you know? And I don't need to recruit them, but I want to talk to them. Naber:  You do this a lot. You do this a lot. To the point where sometimes I know you're in the market for someone because either I'm close with someone that might be one of the best in the market, and I'm hearing that you had a conversation because he or she and I will talk, and hear that, OJ had a conversation. You do this, it is perpetual, it is in your nature, perpetually to do this all the time. Oliver Jay (OJ):  And I think part of it is, I find it interesting, right? It's like, you get to learn. It's free education, why not? And so I constantly do that, that's true. And then I get referrals. I remember when I moved out to Australia to run, to start Dropbox APAC, and back then LinkedIn when you were there, LinkedIn was one of the top SaaS organization. Smaller than Salesforce, but the talent was super high quality, right? I canvas the top three layers. I talked to every single person across Sales, Marketing, Talent Solutions, everybody...and that's how I met great people Gareth. So, that's step two. Step three is then obviously building that list and talking to people. And I think this is one where, I don't know if it's different, but I do it myself. I do it myself. I reach out. I mean, I'm looking for a Head of BD right now. I'm the one who's InMail'ing people. I don't outsource it to a recruiter. And I think that makes a big difference. Because if you're a top talent, you want to hear from...you want your best shot at this person, right? So I do it myself. And when I get in touch with these people, and I think this is where having done the job yourself for at least a quarter to really, really make a difference, because then now you can talk about the role in a much more sophisticated way. You're not like, I'm just hiring someone to run east coast...Someone is interested it when you're able to map the distinct qualities needed for someone to be successful in a certain role, and why that candidate is a perfect fit. Naber:  There's something ultra sexy about that. There's something ultra sexy about that from a candidate perspective. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Because the candidate, people have choices. There's so many great companies out there. And what candidates want to know, ultimately no matter where and who, is that they're going to be set up for success. And so I think that comes across when you actually know what you're looking for, and then you can talk about why that person...Hey Brandon, I'm talking about you, and you specifically, because of XYZ, and that XYZ is exactly what I'm looking for. And that makes it a lot better. And then I also think a lot, again, you gotta develop that relationship, especially if you're hiring General Managers...If you treat it as just a process, that's where I've seen these things fail. I mean, I've seen bad hiring practices, even at Dropbox where I was, where you meet a lot of hiring mistakes. It was when you make these critical roles that you just rush through a process. I'm gonna go find an executive recruiter from, they're gonna bring me 20, and then I'm going to whittle it down to three, bring people back onsite, pick one. Those almost never work out because you don't have that trust developed, or you can't close. Because that trust has not been built up throughout the process. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Those are great. Those are great. All right. I feel people are going to be furiously writing down notes in audience, much slower than you can talk about this stuff. All right, let's move into NEA...So you're at Morgan Stanley, you make the jump to NEA. Why do you make that jump? What are you doing there? And then I've got a couple of questions for you. Naber:  Cool. NEA was the world's largest venture capital fund. And back then they were, they had never hired pre MBA analysts before, so I was a guinea pig of the first class. Essentially all of these partners just wanted people to do their work for them. And fast forward, now NEA I think has 20 analysts because it's like, wow, that's great to get people to do great work, do all that work for them. NEA - why did I join NEA? Well, first why did I join venture, go into venture capital. And when I was in equity research, I got into the business of studying companies, and giving buy, sell, neutral ratings on every stock, right? You go to CNBC, and there's someone talking about their stock, that was me. Well, that wasn't me, I didn't go on TV, but that's the work I did. Behind that analyst on TV, there's some baby, junior OJ who is crunching numbers. What I realized about my job that I liked was actually understanding the company, the strategy of companies, and the technology of companies. Back then, that was right when iPhone came out. And I made a bad call, by the way. I was like, Blackberry, RIM, remember Research in Motion? Blackberry is for consumers. Remember this company called Palm - PalmPilot remember? Palm is for prosumers. When the iPhone came out, I was like, this is for consumers. Don't worry. Buy more Blackberry. Buy, buy, buy. Obviously I was wrong. But anyways, I love that analyses. What I did not care about was the actual finance. I can do the job, but whether Cisco is going to trade to 35 or 33, I just didn't care. It was almost too easy. It was like, okay, I can look at a stock chart, after a month be like, okay, it's going to pop back up. Naber:  Humanities OJ comes out again. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I think so. It's just not for me. It wasn't fulfilling. if I made a really great call, and I helped a client make a ton of money, I just didn't find that rewarding. So, venture sounded interesting because it sounded it was like, okay, I'm still leveraging some of my analytical background, but I can dig deep into strategy and technology. So that's why I learned to venture. And there was a really a crazy adventure where I got to work with a great farm. Also, so fortunate work with some such great Managers, who empowered me and challenged me. And that's when I got closer to entrepreneurs, and founders. And my job there was due diligence for deals that came in. NEA got great deal flow because it was one of the best firms. So the pressure was more on diligence, and then working with companies, which is great. And then as I worked more with companies, and if we fast forward, that's why I ended up working as, becoming an operator. I was like, wow, that seems fun. It was funny because it gave me that kind of exposure. Naber:  Nice. I read a quote that you had mentioned, in a couple places, that you saw the fun the operators were having, and you wanted to hop on that side of the coin. And I think it's well said. So when you were there at NEA, I've got two particular things that over your career, you've been good at...But since we're on NEA, and you've had a ton of exposure to a lot of different types of companies and deals, it could have been one of the places where the seeds were planted for these two things. The first one is around picking horses, picking the right companies that are going to take off, and understanding the process you need to go through in your mind for one, picking that business, and two, evaluating as to whether or not you would want to hop on board. You've done an amazing job with evaluating them for the companies that you've joined, Dropbox and Asana as an operator, as well as a bunch of businesses you've helped, either been a Board Observer, or you've been a Board Director on a bunch of different types of companies. So when you're thinking about picking horses, what is the criteria you think about for joining a company? And like you said, people have options that are the best...that it being worthy of one, you looking at it, and two, you hopping on board? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, it's I absolutely learned that from venture. And as a result of that, I look at everything from a investor lens now. When it comes to picking horses, I think...two of the most legendary investors in the valley, Dick Kramlich was a founder of NEA, and Forest Baskett who is still a GP there and just incredibly smart. Basically, when Tableau was founded, he worked with the early founders in the NEA offices to start Tableau. And I asked them, hey, what's what's the secret? Because there are some venture investors that are just clearly better than others. What's the secret? Naber:  Yeah, top quartile year over year. Oliver Jay (OJ):  What's the secret? I mean, when I asked them, I was amazed...Dick was like, find companies that are going after really large markets. And you're like, okay, duh. Naber:  Let me just write that down. Oliver Jay (OJ):  But as I've matured, and I've looked into different companies, and how markets have matured, I can't tell you how many times I've told people on my teams who want to go to some company gave them some VP Sales job, and it sounds great, but the category is just not that big. And I think that's number one, you have to pick a company that has an exploding market, and most importantly is timing. Is the market about to explode now. Let's take a couple of examples. Let's look at Zoom and Slack, two examples recently. Zoom was one of the best IPO's of all time. I mean incredible IPO. Messaging, I mean, I remember the days in 95 when we were using ICQ. I don't know if you ever used ICQ. I still remember my ICQ number, right? We were messaging. Slack versus ICQ, or later MS Messenger, is honestly not that different. And then there was Skype in the middle. So, why is this so different? Do I really believe that the UI is so amazing that that's the reason. Like, okay, maybe, but I don't know if that's a $20 billion difference. It's just that somewhere, in the B2B world around 2014, the market tipped. There was a need in the market for more dynamic communications because the pain of email was just too high, for that use case. And CIO's started believing in it. And that's when it tipped. And that market, the enterprise messaging market, basically tipped in 2014 to 2016, I would say. In those two years the winner, it's a winner take all market...There's good research that shows that when a category tips, you get a flood of competitors, and then within two years, 18 to 24 months, the leader ends up taking I think 78%, something that, call it 80% market share of the market. But if the market is huge, you can go into a big market and you'll still be okay, right? Remember there's a company called Jive, right? And remember Yammer? Remember there was a Chatter? All the still did okay, but if you want the get the $20 billion market cap that Slack got, you have to be the winner during that window when the market is ready to tip. And I would say the same thing about video conferencing. Zoom...this is nothing new. I mean, that's how my wife and I developed a relationship, right, over video conferencing, over Instand Messenger - AOL, by the way, another messaging tool. And look, somewhere between 2015 to 2017, maybe even later, was when the need really, really tiped, and now you see Zoom taking off. And you and I now, we're doing this podcast via Zoom, and we use it all the time. Same thing with file storage. Dropbox, is generating $1.4 billion in recurring revenue for file sharing. Naber:  Fastest company to $1 billion for a SaaS business ever? Is that right?...ARR. Oliver Jay (OJ):  That's right. That's right. And they didn't invent file storage. I remember when I first used Yahoo in 1995, I got to upload a file into Yahoo, and then download it when I was in the library. It was life changing. Yeah, it was amazing. So it's not new. Cloud storage wasn't new. It's just that the market tipped at that point where people were starting to move away from servers. And in 2013 to 2014 was when mobile adoption in the enterprise had hit a certain rate, and that's when you needed cloud storage. Because on mobile, you can't access files anyway. So number one, you've got to pick a huge market, and most importantly, you've got to join that market right before the market tips. And so you have to make a call. I joined Asana when people were like, what is this project management thing? I don't know what it is. Forrester and Gartner haven't written reports on it yet. But I asked the most progressive CIOs, what's next? They're like, well, I just put in Slack, and now all my work is fragmented even in more places than before. I need something to pull it back together. So I'm going to look into this project management, work management space. And I'm like, oh, interesting. So I developed this hypothesis that the capstone of the new modern collaboration stack is going to be something like Asana that pulls things back together, at least for the things that I really did matter to that company. And I'm seeing that market...we are in the heart of the race right now, that 18 to 24 month window. So that's number one. Number two is obviously what people generally look for which is technology, right? If this market is going to tip, does this company have the right technology to win? And this is very much a venture thing, where you need to some make some calls on the architecture, how they built it. What are customers saying about the product, right? That's when you get some feedback. So the second thing is, does this company have the right product to win the market. Because I do think, especially in the B2B now, SaaS more and more, is dictated by the end user and what they use. So you gotta make sure you're the one that people are gonna pick. And then the last part is, do you have the right team? Does this company have the right team that you're going to back? And that's probably the number one thing, besides the size of market, that venture capitalists bet on, is the people. Because early stage you don't really have much of a business yet. Or even a product. And I think in terms of picking companies to join, same thing, right? Let's say you join a Series C company, what is the management team? What are the dynamics? When things go south, which always happens, how does that management team work together to solve them? Or is there finger pointing? 90% of the time it's fingerpointing. 90% of the time Sales says Marketing didn't generate enough leads. Well, no, let me start...Customer Success and Support says Sales as closing crappy deals. Sales says well, what do you expect? Marketing is driving these bad leaves? Marketing goes, well, what do you expect our Product is missing all this stuff. Product goes well, that's because design is a bottleneck, and it's not shipping. We're not shipping fast enough because design is not ready. Design is like, well, you know what, it's not my fault. I can't hire enough designers, it's recruiting, right? Recruiting..it just goes on. And when I say 9 our of 10, I think that it's 9.8 out of 10. And I made this mistake myself. Before Dropbox, I joined a company that I probably shouldn't have. So a lot of people look at the company profile, and the executives, and where they came from. Oh, this person was at Google for 20 years. Well, you know what, so have like 10,000 other people. And you've seen this at LinkedIn, not everyone's a star at LinkedIn buddy. A lot of stars. But, quite a few duds too. Naber:  Totally. I mean, nature of large numbers like that, for every one of those businesses. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Totally. Totally. Or they haven't seen the right stage that's relevant for your company. So, finding the right team that you think you can bank on just to get through the hard times is really, really important. Don't just look at the profile. Naber:  Nice. Awesome. Great answer. Okay. So, we've gotten through NEA right now. At this point, I believe you jump into Harvard, correct? HBS. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah. Naber:  Cool. So take us through the reason you decided to go get your MBA. Why Harvard, which may be self-explanatory. And then take us all the way up through your decision to join Dropbox. So through that period, Scientific Conservation, Harvard, etc, up through the point where you're joining Dropbox. And then we'll talk about what you were responsible for there. And I've got some, a couple of questions for that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, sure. So I decided when I was at NEA that I wanted to be on the operating side. So I was like, they have all the fun. I didn't understand how much pain they had either, honestly, but I was like, it sure seems fun. And, the short answer of why I decided to get my MBA...I was like, okay, well if I got into a great school, I might as well take a break because I'm going to make this career switch anyways. So I'll just do it. And that's literally the logic. And this was mainly...I remember one of my mentors at NEA, John S., who's a fantastic guy, fantastic...Remember remember there was this company called The Ladders? Naber:  Yeah, of course. Yeah. The $100K+ jobs is their thing, right? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened with them? Naber:  They died. I have no idea. It was almost overnight. Because I remember, I mean, I did a lot of research on ladders for at some point in my career. Anyways, I don't know, they just died at some point. Oliver Jay (OJ):  So we we're going to meet with The Ladders in New York. I remember this clearly. This was right around the recession starting, and John's just like, you need to apply to business school. And this was October, and the deadline was coming up in December. So I was like, all right. He convinced me that would be good. I mean, I might as well, I'm going to try it. John's like, you're probably not going to get in, and that's cool, but why not try? Because getting into business school, certainly getting into HBS, is a total crapshoot. It's a total lottery. Yeah. I got some friends who were way more qualified than I am and didn't get in. And I now know it's for sure a crap shoot. So anyways, I applied. And I only had time to apply to one school, and that was not the plan, but I just didn't have time because I had to take the GMAT, write the essays, get the recommendation, all that. I only applied to Harvard assuming that I didn't get in. And then I got in. Naber:  Stop it. Hold on. This is unbelievable. Hold on, hold on. So you only applied to Harvard and you got end up... Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, it wasn't because I had so much confidence or that it was the only school that I would go to. I was gonna apply to like five. But dang it, man, these essays, they take like...I haven't written these essays in a long time, and they go back to humanities OJ. It took forever. I just didn't have time. I think the the application was due January 1st or something, and I remember over Christmas I was writing these essays and I was just like, I don't have time for this. And I just applied one. I really didn't think I was going to go to business school, and then I got it in. And I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I'm going. Naber:  No one can see me losing a right now. Laughing silently while I'm listening to this, and not believing it. This is a great story about getting into Harvard Business School. Such a good story. All right, so you're at Harvard, what's the biggest thing you learned there? And then take us through up to you joining Dropbox. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Ah, man. Yeah. So Harvard was great. Naber:  You must have met some really cool, interesting people. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I met some amazing people. And people that I considered to be my best friends today. That's where I met the co-founders of Grab, I'm on their board now. I met a lot of great professors.Look, I think the thing about business school...A lot of people poo poo on business school. They're like, it's expensive, you don't learn anything, it's just networking. I mean, I call bullshit on that. Because I'm a nerd, I to learn. And so I studied. I'm like, wow, this is interesting. And I'll tell you at that point I was going through this big clean tech phase in my life. I was really interested in clean tech. I was doing clean tech investments at NEA. I was part of the environment group at HBS. I was super active. I thought I was going to build a career in clean tech. And now that I'm selling productivity software for the past seven years, it's given me a different kind of perspective looking back. But I was so into clean tech. And I met some great people through that, through other who have similar interests. But I'll tell you, so my first job was Scientific Conversation - they basically sell building automation software to help optimize the equipment in commercial buildings to optimize their energy spend. Think of it as HVAC optimization software. I would not have been able...and I took a Sales role coming out of school, which is interesting because very few people go to HBS to come out to be a Sales guy. It's pretty rare. And I sold to real estate developers. And if I did not take a real estate class at HBS, I wouldn't know how to speak that lingo. Cap rates, and TNI, and whatever. I mean it's just, there's different things. I learned that from school. And then what was really interesting was then Scientific Conversation went through a big period of restructuring. And I had to be a big part of that. I took this class called turn arounds, because it's a new topic, when you learn about - how to turn around companies? How do you learn about bankruptcy law? You learn about how to negotiate with your creditors so you can live to die another day, so to speak. And then I used those skills. I literally looked up my notes on bankruptcy. Because I would call our creditors, and it'd be like, hey man, we're about to go under here. I'm going to give you, I know I owe you $2 million, I'm gonna give you $2,000, or you can have a shot at bankruptcy court. Anyways, long story short, business school was awesome. I met great people, and I learned a ton, got great exposure, and I actually implement the things that I learned. Naber:  Wow. That's great. Great Story. Okay. So Boston, Beantown, you leave. Scientific Conversationis next, you join in a Sales and Partnerships capacity. Every Harvard Business Schoolers dream, joining Sales right after that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  That's why you go to HBS. Naber:  That's right. #HBS. So what is the biggest thing that you learn at that business, and why did you join Dropbox? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Well, a lot of my lessons learned around the people, in part, was what I learned at Scientific Conservation. It had on paper, all the things that most people look for, right? I said, oh, pre rocket ship, hot industry, a team that looked really, really strong on paper. That's what I went for. You know, hypergrowth. I remember Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Accel. Everybody was like, this is the next one, this is the next OPOWER. This is the commercial version of OPOWER. I thought it was the best thing. But you know what, just didn't have the right team to execute going through the tough times. and that's what I learned. That's honestly the biggest lesson I learned. I met a lot of great people. But that's where I really realized, wow, so much of execution is the people, and the chemistry of those people. And that's what I learned there. So why did I Dropbox? Honestly, I mean...we had to do a big turn around in Scientific Conservation. Within a year we went from 30 people, to 180 people, and then I had to play a big part in restructuring down back to 90 people, and then down to 50 people. I mean it was a year that felt 10 years. So Dropbox, I showed up, people on scooters, drinking from coconuts...you've been to the office. It was just a different world. I'm over here trying to make payroll, literally. There was a payroll period where I... Naber:  And letting people go daily. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Ugh, brutal. People always ask, what's the biggest done, whatever. I'll say the biggest deal I've done was in...I broke my lease, the Scientific Conservation lease with a real estate developer...Because we had signed this Embarcadero Bay Bridge View Office for a seven year lease, even though the company was making zero in revenue, so that tells you something. But thankfully, the one thing that went in our favor was the rental rates have actually gone up in SF. Far, far greater than our committed rate of increase in her seven year lease. So they way I made payroll was, I went to the developer and I said, I will break the lease if you give me x amount of money. Well, they didn't know it was how we were going to make payroll. It was hilarious. And then negotiation, at the end the thing that clinched the deal was office furniture. I was like, I'll throw in the office furniture. Naber:  Stop it. I always find it mind blowing when in residential, someone rents someplace for like, a few grand more a month just because the furniture's included. And that was your deal with the developer. That guy has done tons of deals, tons of deals, and this guy closes over the furniture. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Honestly, I probably would have gotten it done anyways. I was actually in my head thinking, I don't want to pay to get rid of the furniture. That was what was going to be my head. Naber:  Oh, that's a good win-win. All right, so you join Dropbox. There's coconuts, there's cupcakes, there's all of it. So walk us through in one or two minutes, what you were responsible for and the jumps that you made at Dropbox. And then I've got a few questions around some of your super powers, okay? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah. So Dropbox I went in as one of the first business generalists. There wasn't a role, it really just do everything. So, looking to our payments gateway infrastructure, looked into capital financing for our data center to help raise capital. I looked into real estate because they're like, oh, now you're a real estate pro from my background. So I had to try to figure out finding office space. Andthis was all in the first three months. We were moving so fast. And and then there was this business called Dropbox for Teams that was starting to grow really, really quickly. And the Head of Business, our COO was like, can you just take a look at that. Basically, do the Sales Ops work to see what's going on. And that's how I got into it. And then one thing led to another. So took that role on, started adding some visibility into the business. And then moved into actually managing part of it. And ended up running a lot of it, growing the North America Online and Inside Sales teams to 70 or so people. And then got the opportunity to co lead our APEC expansion efforts. Naber:  With Tony, is that right? Oliver Jay (OJ):  With Tony, that's right. And they're like, all right, figure it out. I mean, that was it. Figure out APAC, period. So then we did that, that led to both of us moving out to APAC for a year and a half. Started the Australia office, Japan office, I was gonna think about Singapore, but didn't end up doing Singapore. Also looked at Latin America, when the new CEO joined. He's like, well, there's another continent. Someone's going to look at it. And they just put it on our plate. And then did that for a while. And then when I came back to the US, transitioned into the Corp Dev team, so think about M&A at Dropbox. And then through that experience I realized I really missed building teams. Which is why I went back to the Sales world at Asana. Naber:  Nice. After hearing your story, and I saw a lot of firsthand when I was working with teams at Dropbox and I'm working with teams at Asana, now I get that, why you made that jump. Or at least why that was the right time in your life, and in missing teams to want to make that jump. Wow. That's really interesting. Okay. So a couple things about Dropbox. There is a theme, and you've done this really interestingly coming at it from, let's call it the Sales Ops angle first, and then jumping into manage these teams. Which some of the best operators I know from a Sales and Marketing perspective, have come from the Ops side. I look at them as the Ying to my Yang. They speak a beautiful language and I want to hear all of it. So as you're doing that, you're building things from scratch. And you are building at one phase at Dropbox, and you go through a lot of different phases of growth in your international expansion playbook. You're also going through phases you've been in before at Asana, and planning for phases that are things you've seen before, and things you know a lot about. So let's talk about your international expansion playbook. As you're going through phase by phase, and one, making the decision as to whether or not you should do it in the first place - Expanding outside of, let's call it the US for now, into other markets? And then two, once you decide yes through that evaluation process, you want to go about doing it. What's your step by step process you're going through in order to expand internationally? You can use the Dropbox example or the Asana example, or both, If you just want to say, hey, this is what we did then and this is what we did then. But either way, what's your phase by phase and step by step approach as you're executing on this expansion playbook. Oliver Jay (OJ):  So I think the first is understanding that international operations is not...Adding international operations is, honestly from management overhead perspective, it's the minute you go international, for every new region and office you add is equivalent of adding two, and the next one you add is like adding three. There's a complexity, the overhead is so much more, and sophistication is so much greater. And that's not to say it's not worth it, right? Obviously I do it, but it's something that I think you need to be really, really honest with yourself, with your teams on whether or when are you ready for that? Because honestly, one of the things that I think about is, most companies go international too late, right? I think Slack is a good example. Slack to me, and I have a lot of good friends at Slack, so maybe you have to delete this. But, international is only 30% of their revenue, or 35% of their revenue at this scale. And I think Microsoft got a jump on them internationally. Well Microsoft has a jump on everybody, but especially internationally. And so, you want to go fast, but you got to make sure you commit. So step one, before you commit 100%, what you can do is just play the digital game. Localize your product, localize your ads, localize your website. And I would say probably even in that order. Again, it depends on what product you have, right? But if you have a user facing product...and in Enterprise it starts with the product. In many countries you may have one or two people who aren't very comfortable with English, but the rest of the team may not be. And you're not going to get good adoption that way. So I think that's important, localize your product, as long as you feel you have enough confidence that it's worth the engineering investment. Because it's a big investment. There's a certain threshold where you're going to start seeing...Whether it's tickets that come in asking for your language, or your community, you'll get that ask. Yeah, I mean, maybe French and Spanish, the website, that's as an obvious one. But what's interesting is you can some good lift from just localizing the ads, in Dutch or Japanese, and it points to an English website. You're still going to get some incremental dollars there. So play the digital game. And then at some point, and you have to come up with a framework, and it's different company to company, and you don't have to be that Scientific. But at what point do you feel you're ready to go open an additional office? And almost always, you'll see English speaking markets adopt first - UK, Australia, are the next two, and Canada. Large markets that, for many reasons, and we're not gonna have enough time talking about them, but they usually are the next to adopt technologies. And so your next move almost guaranteed is going to be somewhere in Europe, right? And you pick between Dublin, Amsterdam or London and we can talk about which one, why, but it's going to be one of those three almost guaranteed, right? So setup your Europe hub. And then depending on the type of company, you can think about growing from there. So then the most obvious, next markets would be France and Germany in Europe. And so then you got to make that decision on whether you want to service those markets in whichever hub you've picked, or you go even more local. And I think that depends on the type of company that you have. We talked about Australia, that makes a ton of sense already. The minute you're looking into the UK, if you have the bandwidth, you should look in Australia as well. I would think that the market demand would be equivalent in terms of the time. And then Japan. Japan, people forget, is the second largest IT market in the world. And they're early in their cloud adoption. But for SaaS companies, it's really starting to take off. And so Japan is a market where investing in early can pay off dividends three, four years down the road. Japan is Slack's number two market. It's Salesforce's number two market. But it takes years to build up that market. And so you can start thinking about that. So the order of sequencing, I guess I'm not even...I guess I've done it enough now to just know the sequence instead. I mean the first time I did this at Dropbox it was like, okay, how many users do we need to see before we go green light here? How much revenue? How many businesses? How many domains we want to see? And, I've traveled so much in the last couple of years. This is the order that I would go in, Naber:  Good one. Awesome. You know what's really interesting about that, is you mentioned you've looked at the data, and from the data side it says to do this, this, and this. What you're saying is don't necessarily do the work that everyone else has has done. This is an all likelihood, the chronology of the markets that you will go into next. And that's really interesting. Don't redo all the work. Do not reinvent the wheel. I have two follow-up questions to that. One is how do you know whether to hire local, even more local, versus doing it from a regional hub? How do I know whether or not I should sell from Dublin or London or Amsterdam into France, Germany, Spain, Italy, some of the Nordic countries, etc? Or hire local in that particular market? And by that I mean, when do I do it? And I'll ask the other question after that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah. To me it all depends on your target audience. Who are you trying to go after and how? So if you're going after SMBs, this is primarily going to be Inside Sales function. You're not showing up. It's not a relationship sale. Then there is so much value in centralizing to the last minute that you can because you're still trying to figure it out. So Asana is small deals, we start with small teams and then we expand them. And, we essentially have a big machine in Dublin. Why? Because the French rep who has learned some new insight selling to Mid-market & SMB companies in France can share with the Nordic Rep, and those best practices when you're early in a region, you got to learn quickly, and you're gonna to learn from the field. And that information transfer is so valuable. And then eventually you go the other way. You launch a new product, you've got to enable the team. There's a lot of operational overhead to enabling lots of people in the field, versus you just fly into in one office, and you basically enable a team all at once. So huge, huge advantage to centralizing. However, if your Sales cycle and process relies a lot on relationship building, whether it's for bigger deals, whether it's a complex deal that relies on partners, then you need to go in the field. And that's where showing up makes a ton of sense. And what changes is the unit economics of that office, where if you open an office in Paris, now showing up at a mid-market opportunity of a 10K Pounds deal, normally is not going to justify a flight in, hotels, make it work. But now it's just, down the street. I mean not down the street, but now you can justify making that visit, and absolutely everything that increases the conversion rate. So there is benefit there too. But balancing operational overhead, learning earlier, I am a big believer that you should hold off as long as you can. Because once you're decentralized, there's no way you can centralize again. Or you can, but it's very painful. You gotta shut down offices, and it's really painful. So you want to wait as long as possible. Naber:  Nice. Great answer. Thank you. And then, second question is...So you're going through this process of massive expansion, within Dropbox and Asana, and you're going through different stages of growth. One of the things that you need to constantly think about...which I don't necessarily believe that a large number of Heads of Sales and Heads of Marketing are very good at this. One of the things you need to constantly be aware of...and coming from VC, you've got interesting perspective on this, and not all the people who have gone from VC to operator and done it with the amount of, not only success, but the amount of speed that you've done it...So a Head of Sales and Marketing needs have the right mindset, with planning and execution, with unit economics in mind. So how do you make sure that you have the right mindset? What is your mindset when you're thinking about balancing, things LTV to CAC ratios, versus booking in revenue growth rate expectations, versus the growing pains of teams and the engagement of those teams. How do you think about incorporating unit economics into your approach? And how do you think about that as a Head of Sales and Marketing? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Okay. So I would say there's a couple of things. First in terms of mindset, if you're leading Sales and Marketing, let's say your company is growing at 100%, right? My mindset, and I tell this to all my Managers, is that my job is to plan and execute as if we were 12 months from now. My Manager's job is to execute and plan as if we were six months from now. Your IC's are the ones who were executing to quarter to quarter. And I think that's something that I always drill into my team, and my Manager because most people manage to the quarter. And by the time you manage to a quarter, you've already forgotten about the next one, and you're basically accumulating debt. And I think part of what's challenging and exciting about managing in high growth, is you've got to balance executing and the job at hand, but at the same time develop the vision of where you need to get to - So if you're a line Manager six months from now - and you've got to do both at the same time. So as my leads, they got the quarterly number, that's great. I just assume they're going to hit it. I mean just tell me if you're not going to hit it, but I'm assuming you're going to hit it. What are the programmatic things you're building in right now as if you're six months from now? Because that is going to take time to build it. And then once you build it, boom, now you're ready. My job is 12 months. So right now, I'm thinking about what my team needs to be doing this time next year. Because, well, my team is getting pretty big now. It's hard to steer a big ship. And so if I'm optimizing for something for the end of the year, not to say that's I don't do that, I do that. But I also push myself to think longer because for me, and from my angle, what's going to happen in the second half of this year has already been shipped. Our performance, our unit economics, our, whatever programmatic infrastructure we build is going to be, it's already too late to change that. So I'm thinking ahead. I think that's important because, you mentioned about unit economics, your unit economics need to change over time. And so you got to work with your management team, your finance team, to understand what unit economics you need to have this time next year. So that you can slowly migrate there. Otherwise you're just hiring heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, and eventually you're like, oh, one day you wake up and finance is like, okay, you're going to get three heads next year, but you have the grow revenue revenue by 50%. So that's the high level mindset that I think is really important, to understand end state first, and work with finance to understand what that looks like. And so I know next year what my unit economics need to be. Now, I can start back filling. And then this is what I do to backfill. So what I do is, I ask my teams to now start thinking about, not unit economics first though, strategy. First strategy, then tactics, then numbers. So for example, my team in Europe. Right now, it's July, and it's the end of our quarter this month. The leads are going to come over to the US and present their strategy for next year, so basically the next 18 month strategy. What do I mean by strategy? Who's our primary customer? Who are we trying to win over and outserve everybody else. Why? And where are we going to focus? Because you can't go after everything. And when I think about Europe as an example, a microcosm of the world, the UK is very different than Germany, which is very different than Spain, and very different than the Nordics. So, if someone calls me and tells me this is my EMEA blanket strategy, I'm like, that's not a strategy. I want you to define what winning looks in the Nordics, and define what winning looks in Spain. Portugal, not as important to me, lump it into that region. Iberia, right? Or something. But, I think it's important that to have a view where you define success. Okay, this is what I'm trying to accomplish in Germany. Align on that first. That's a strategy. Then the tactics. How are we going to do that? Okay. in Germany we're going to go after this segment

If you've purchased your favorite Iced Latte, or a Boba drink chances are you've used Fivestars (www.fivestars.com).  Why wouldn't you? In this episode, I got a chance to interview Matt Doka, CTO of Fivestars.  Matt is blessed with being an engineering wiz, and a financial ninja.  At McKinsey, he worked in the investment sector, where he would meet his co-founder and CEO, Vic Ho.  Both Christ followers, they capitalized on their youth, enthusiasm, and faith to give starting a company a shot.  Matt and Vic went through Y-Combinator.  With a little experimentation, and the expected pivoting, Matt and Vic set their sights on serving local and small businesses.  Through the customer loyalty framework, Fivestars' mission is to turn every transaction into a relationship! By offering a powerful marketing platform for businesses and rewards for their customers, it's a match made in business heaven.  Matt shared in this episode the influence he had while growing up in a mission-filled household.  At a young age, he got a front-row seat in witnessing how his parents dedicated their careers and skills in work and service.  So, when the opportunity came knocking, Matt shared that he jumped at it and did incredible work in Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda where he helped dairy farmers to improve efficiency, and increase their return.  With this background, Matt (and Vic) accelerated their company, which now serves over 14,000 businesses. 

Sam started his first company at 19 – and has launched many more since then. From Y Combinator to OpenAI, his insights and determination spark inspiration. Hear Sam’s ideas about career motivation, and why he thinks the human brain may be replicable in silicon. 

Michael Seibel is CEO and a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv and Socialcam. He has been a partner at Y Combinator since 2013, advised hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders. Hear his take on the future of work with a decade in learnings from YCombinator.   Missed the session? Here’s what Michael talks about: How quickly should you hire? When is the right time to sell a startup? How large a differentiator will investors make in your company? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin SaaStr Michael Seibel

What single Louisville company is part of the same fraternity as Airbnb and Dropbox? It's a company called WeatherCheck, and they now are an alumnus of the prestigious Silicon Valley accelerator Y-Combinator. They're the first and only Y-Combinator company to date from Kentucky! Demetrius Gray, Founder of WeatherCheck, and Co-Founder Jermaine Watkins recently returned from their 4-month stint with the accelerator, and it has proven to be an amazing accelerator for their company. In this podcast, I have an in-depth conversation with Demetrius and learned: ◊ more about his background and how he became and entrepreneur, ◊ how WeatherCheck got started and raised early seed capital, ◊ how they got into Y-Combinator, ◊ what they learned from Y-Combinator that can apply to our startup community, and ◊ where they're headed. This is a must-listen podcast for our startup community and aspiring entrepreneurs.   Transcript (This was machine transcribed. Please forgive the typos.) Alan: 00:00:01 Hi everybody. Welcome to the MetroStart podcast. This is Alan Grosheider, and today I'm interviewing Demetrius Gray. He's a founder of WeatherCheck and the first Louisville area company to, I think. right Demetrius, ever get into Y-Combinator? Demetrius: 00:00:18 Yeah, man. The first actually in the state of Kentucky. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's, wow. Alan: 00:00:25 That's pretty amazing because that's one of those, if you're an entrepreneur, you've heard of y Combinator and you've heard of Airbnb and I guess Dropbox and some of the big companies that have gone through y Combinator. So congratulations man. That's amazing. Demetrius: 00:00:39 Man. It was, it was a heck of an experience. I mean we, uh, we were out there for like three months and I'm like, I'm just telling you, you know, I'm out there still once a month for about a week at a time and um, it's been really cool to kind of, um, build a little bit of a bridge to the bay area, um, with a heck of a lot of access. Alan: 00:01:02 Yeah. And I think I'm excited because it seems like that access is going to be good for other companies in our area, since you guys are pretty tied into the startup community. And in fact, you know, you and I have, have, have some combined founders and, and you know, I, hopefully it's going to be good for the whole startup community. It's those connections kind of take off. Okay. All right, well why don't we start, let's kind of get an idea about, I like to find out what got somebody started being an entrepreneur and it seems like there's a lot of common common denominators that, you know, got somebody that made somebody want to be an entrepreneur. So I'm just curious, you know, about growing up and what got, what made you want to be an entrepreneur? Would you do, what was your, your childhood like were you an entrepreneur as a kid? Those sorts of things. Demetrius: 00:01:54 Yeah. So, um, so you've heard of the Book Rich Dad, Poor Dad? Yeah, I probably will eventually write a book called Black Dad White Dad. Alan: 00:02:06 Okay. Demetrius: 00:02:08 Um, my mother actually married a, um, petroleum engineer, white guy from, um, uh, central California, um, Stanford educated, um, petroleum engineer. Um, his, his, his father actually had invented the horizontal drill, um, for the oil and gas industry, which really kind of, um, opened my world. And then, um, my, uh, grandmother on that side, um, her father had invented a form of die casting, um, called Granger's. Dot Casting and southern California. And so, um, it was really my first sort of foray into entrepreneurship, having watched to them I'm running oil and gas proliferation company, um, that was eventually sold to Halliburton. Um, then, uh, before that, um, then watching my, my great grandfather Harlow's, um, die casting company, um, pass success simply through generations and eventually be sold. Um, and so, you know, every meal was about sort of like what's going on in the busin...

Greg Meredith and Mike Stay discuss updates to their latest paper, “Name-free combinators for concurrency.” Christian Williams joins the conversation.

Greg Meredith and Mike Stay discuss updates to their latest paper, "Name-free combinators for concurrency."

Daniel Gross is the founder of Pioneer. Previously he was a Partner at Y-Combinator and started its AI program. Daniel has been an angel investor in companies like Cruise, Coinbase, Gusto, Opendoor, Atrium, Figma and others. If that wasn’t enough he also co-founded Cue, a search engine that was acquired by Apple in 2013. Daniel stayed on as Director there for several years, responsible for various AI projects across the company. If you want to see how disruptive minds think than you will love this episode! *Questions for the solo podcast email info@whatgotyouthere.com* Subscribe to the Newsletter- https://bit.ly/2RH3eaD   http://whatgotyouthere.com/ NEW SPONSOR TEN THOUSAND- www.tenthousand.cc/wgyt 20% off with discount code "WGYT"  GlobeKick 10% off with discount code “WGYT” https://globekick.com/ 15% off Four Sigmatic with discount code "WGYT" http://foursigmatic.com/wgyt   https://dcgross.com/ https://pioneer.app/ https://twitter.com/danielgross https://medium.com/@danielgross   https://twitter.com/SeanDeLaney23 https://www.instagram.com/whatgotyoutherepodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/whatgotyouthere/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-delaney-00909190/   Intro/Outro music by Justin Great- http://justingreat.com/ Audio Engineer- Brian Lapres 

Amir Rubin is the co-founder of Paracosm, a company that developed a handheld device that creates 3D color maps of real-world environments. “We’ve turned reality,” says Amir, “into a video game.” Amir is a second-generation entrepreneur. Both his parents are PhD’s, but his father quit academia to start a hardware store, and later a bakery. Amir wonders if any entrepreneur would make it without some level of “blind enthusiasm.” TRANSCRIPT: Intro: 0:01 Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors in the things that motivate them. We’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles: 0:38 A three-dimensional world that used to be something only for science fiction and now it’s an everyday part of reality and we’re pleased to have here on our show this morning Amir Rubin, founder of a company called Paracosm, which deals very much in the 3D world and other inventions. Welcome to the show Amir. Amir Rubin: 0:56 Hey, thanks for having me, Richard. Richard Miles: 0:58 So, Amir, I always like to start out with the inventor themselves explaining what the invention is, the core technology at least behind it, what it does in very simple terms, and then we’ll come back and talk later on about sort of how you develop that. So what did you invent Amir ? And what does it do? Amir Rubin: 1:18 So, I co-founded a company in 2013, Paracosm, that has invented the world’s first handheld color lidar mapping system and a lot of fancy words there. But basically it’s a device that, the product is called the PX80. And it’s a device that you can hold, has a little handle, and you just go for a walk and in whatever environment you want indoor, outdoor, and when you’re done, we spit out a 3D replica, like a digital twin of the real world environment in full color. So it’s like we’ve, you know, one way I describe it is maybe you could think of it as we’ve turned a reality into a video game level. Richard Miles: 2:15 Okay. So, I’ve seen the product, the application before, and I’ve said it’s very impressive. I think one thing that struck me was the speed at which you can do it because the technology has existed I think for a w hile. A nd you can do 3D mapping, but your invention enables you and this i s as of several years ago a nd I know you’ve improved it to do it very quickly and pretty, very accurate to a degree that’s useful to a lot of t hings. Amir Rubin: 2:46 Yeah, exactly. So there’s been 3D scanning technologies that had been really good since, you know, the eighties and nineties, and they’ve been scanning for oil fields and oil rigs and other industrial applications and the way old or traditional scanners work is there like laser scanners that are mounted on the old, surveyors , tripods. You might have seen them when you drive by a construction site by the side of the road, you might see a crew with a survey, tripod doing surveys. So that’s a pretty similar to how 3D scanning is, has been done and is currently done. And our big Aha moment is what happens if we ditched the tripod and let people just go for a walk. And it lets you capture data really fast that’s never been possible before and lets people go into capturing new types of environments. Like we have customers, for example in Japan who mount our little 3D mapping pod onto a backpack and they go hiking through the mountainous forest of Japan and they’re able to 3D map in full color, the mountainous terrain and forest that covers 70% of Japan. Richard Miles: 4:16 So we’re going to come back a little bit later and talk about the company you founded Paracosm and what that was like but first I want to talk somewhat about your background. You have a very interesting background Amir just the little bit that I know about you is very interesting. You’ve been associated in town in Gainesville with a number of companies who are well known, Shadow Health, Prioria Robotics. You also have a patent for 3D cameras to weigh cows, which I wager is one of a kind. But let’s go back before even, and your a graduate from the University of Florida computer engineering. But let’s go back before that. Tell me where, where you’re from, what were your sort of early influences as a child, maybe what your parents did for a living and that sort of stuff? Amir Rubin: 5:09 Yeah, I would say that that all had an influence on me. Both my parents are PhDs. Um, and you know, it’s kinda funny. My Dad was a scientist, he was a PhD in Biology, but he quit before I was born and decided to start his own business. So, I’ve always kind of been used to seeing my dad own his own small businesses and he ran a hardware store when I was a kid and then started a bakery when I was in middle and high school. So kind of a funny combination of science. Richard Miles: 5:46 So here in Gainesville? Amir Rubin: 5:46 In a south Florida. And then my mother is a PhD in Education, PhD and as a teacher. So probably where some of the nerdiness came from I think. Richard Miles: 6:04 Were you a good student in school and starting out? Amir Rubin: 6:09 I was, I was like one of these annoying students, I never did my homework and I never studied for class, Richard Miles: 6:15 But you ended up doing well. Amir Rubin: 6:17 Yeah. Math and science. I never needed to study for the test. When I would take a test or do a report, the answer would just pop into my head. So I never really had to work too hard at it, which always drove people crazy. Richard Miles: 6:36 So, did your teachers find this endearing or frustrating and did your parents, were they thrilled by this ability for you to pull it out at the last minute? Amir Rubin: 6:45 I think it frustrates everybody. Yeah, I remember I even for math and science teachers, they’re cool with the English teachers hate it because I would, I got like the highest score on the the IB AP exam without ever actually reading any of the books. Richard Miles: 7:05 And your fellow students I’m sure were probably, Amir Rubin: 7:10 Well they were, they were super smart too. Richard Miles: 7:12 So in terms of science and math, I mean it sounds like you were always had an ability to do it. What were sort of the first, I guess, was it a class or you know, I know there are some people that their introduction to science or coding was, you know, a computer game for instance. Is there any sort of epiphany that you had in terms of that you think led you into the field you are now? Amir Rubin: 7:36 Yeah. There was two or three. The first was my parents bought a computer, went out when we were, um, when I was like 10 years old. So I’ve always had computers in the house and it was my, I spent every day on it. You know, um, learning how to code and, you know, initially basic and you know, other learning languages from back in the 90s, like Pascal and then, you know, this was the , this was, you know, dialing in to the local, you know, bbs and , and all this fun stuff. Um, but I’d never, you know, one thing that we kind of take for granted in the Cade, it’s like something that the Cade does a lot of work on is like the STEM and the STEAM, uh, you know, education and letting students know and you know, now we have first robotics and we have STEAM. So it’s, it’s a known thing now when if you’re in like a elementary/middle of school that, uh, engineering as a career. And I never know , no one ever told me that. Like, I didn’t know until I graduated. I was halfway through college that there was such a thing as engineering, let alone computer engineering. So people think it’s silly. But in high school, a big moment for me with taking, um , physics 1 and that was like the most mind opening class I’ve ever taken that to see that the world can be partially modeled by, you know, uh, physics equations and theories and our physics teacher was like, you know, you can become a physicist. And so that I came to University of Florida as a physics major, um, because that seemed like a career path. And one day, um, I went to a career fair and, uh, like my sophomore year, and there was not a single company hiring physicists, but there’s a few who are asking, who were like, hey, we’re, we’re, we’re looking for computer engineers. And I was like, wait, that’s, you can be a computer engineer? That’s a thing? Richard Miles: 9:37 What year are we talking about? Amir Rubin: 9:39 This is, um, uh, 2000-2001. And so yeah, it was , it was kind of unheard of back then to be a programmer or a computer engineer. And then I had the fun of graduating in 2003, which, um , was the collapse of the computer engineering industry and everyone had declared that, um, you know, computer programming, computer science and engineering is done . It’s done, it’s dead. They’ll never be an industry in this, in the U.S. it’s over. And, uh, there’s not a single job to be had in it. So that was fun times too. Richard Miles: 10:09 So you’re one of those rare students, uh, that before you even finish school, you’d already founded a company. So what you describe how your dad ran his own businesses. Running a business is really different than, you know, sitting in a classroom, right? And, and studying and doing assignments. What was it about, was there something about the business world that attracted you in addition to, you know, the , the content. I mean, you could’ve gone on and just gotten a graduate degree and a PhD, but you decided to found a company and then you, before you’re even at a school and you joined another startup company, Shadow Health, and then you found it in another one. So what, what was it about that side that attracted you? The business side? Amir Rubin: 10:52 It was, um, combination of all that. And I had stayed with my sister who lives in the bay area in California, um, the summer before I graduated and she worked at, before the dot com collapse in 99′-2000. She had worked at a, um , one of these San Francisco dot com companies. So I visited her and I was like, Hey, this is pretty, this is pretty cool. They have these cool office chairs and free snacks. And so, Richard Miles: 11:21 It’s always the snacks. Amir Rubin: 11:23 It’s always the free snacks. And, um , so when I graduated finally in 2003, by this time, you know, uh, by the time I had stayed with my sister, you know, and, and, and seeing all that, I was convinced you know by that time I had switched from physics to computer engineering major. And then when I graduate and graduated in 2003, there was just simply not, not an economy for, for programmers or , or , software engineers. And this was before the startup craze, you know, it was like Facebook probably was just started, you know, um, and no one outside of the few schools knew about them. There was no y Combinator or anything. So I thought to myself, well, I, there’s no, there’s no jobs here, but I’ve, I’ve seen it, seen it done before. I should probably, um, you know, start my own company with some friends. And, um, my then girlfriend now wife was, um, just, uh , accepted into UF Veterinary School. So it’s like, and I need an excuse to stay in Gainesville a few more years . So I’ll start, uh , computer engineering company right here in Gainesville. Richard Miles: 12:33 So that’s a, that’s a fascinating story. So, um , so I was just going to add an addition to the snacks, there’s always a girl involved, right? Amir Rubin: 12:39 Oh yeah, always, yeah. Richard Miles: 12:41 Um, okay. So, uh, so let’s talk about your current company Paracosm. Um , you founded that in 2013, so now going on, uh , gosh, six years close , right? What was that like? I mean you had, you already at that point had the core idea for the 3D sort of handheld or did you? Or did you found the company first and then the idea comes , or was it the other way around? Amir Rubin: 13:02 It was all the above. So it’s always a chaotic jumble. Richard Miles: 13:07 And , and so you obviously had to hire, I mean how many employees did you have at the beginning? Was it just you or did you? Amir Rubin: 13:13 It was myself and four other co-founders. We started with the team of five. Richard Miles: 13:18 And were you guys , did you have any money? I mean where? Amir Rubin: 13:20 I just, I’d put in, um, everything I got from, uh, my first startup. Okay . You know, from, from all the money I’d saved up from my previous start up and the first company I founded out of school. So, you know, I emptied out my 401k and my savings and I maxed out my credit card and you know, just put it, put it all in. Richard Miles: 13:40 And then your then girlfriend decided to become your then wife right? Amir Rubin: 13:44 Basically yeah, yeah. So that makes, that’s best financial decisions here. Richard Miles: 13:47 Pretty gutsy thing, cause at that point did Paracosm have any clients or sales or nothing? Nothing. Just an idea. It’s an idea. Um, all right. So you started out with, you said three co- founders or four co-founders and how many employees does Paracosm have now? Amir Rubin: 14:04 We , we were acquired last year by a larger startup, uh , Occipital. And the Paracosm division is currently 22 employees. Richard Miles: 14:13 And how much, are you in a manager role now or do you or are you like the chief technical officer? Amir Rubin: 14:20 I’m , I’m the equivalent of like CTO / general manager, president of the division. Richard Miles: 14:27 So do you, um, how much of your time do you get to spend on developing the technology or new technologies and how much time is sort of meant, uh , spent actually managing the division? Amir Rubin: 14:38 We have a pretty good workflow, so I spend, I spend a lot of time sitting with the engineering team, but don’t do the actual engineering work myself anymore and, Richard Miles: 14:50 Do you miss that or? Amir Rubin: 14:52 Um yeah, you know, a little, but you know, it’s kind of, um, it’s really hard to do both. I think. Um, you know, the, in order to do engineering work, you have to be able to have just singularly focus on the design problem or the engineering challenge you’re working on. You have to be able to have, you know, four to eight hour blocks of time set aside just to work on, on your, um projects. Richard Miles: 15:19 So not going to meetings, not messing with emails. Amir Rubin: 15:20 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so once you start having to, um, be in a role where you’re communicating and pitching and selling and yeah , like I said, responding to to people, then it’s really hard to do both. Richard Miles: 15:36 So I imagine the fact that you were acquired means that, uh , you were profitable and you had clients at that point. Amir Rubin: 15:43 We were on the verge of it, we, we, um, we are now. Richard Miles: 15:48 I remember when we took a tour of Paracosm offices, uh , had to been at least a three or four years ago or longer. Uh , I remember at the, at that point, the type of applications you had, I remember very distinctly one was for like a military type of application, special forces. Oh , another one that’s sort of like for designers, interior designers, and you listed a few other ones. What, what has developed as kind of like your number one application or number one industry, so to speak, that loves your product? Amir Rubin: 16:19 The short answer is, uh , surveyors really have been taken taking to our product. So, you know, it’s sort of like the, the, you know, the early adopters are people who are already doing lots of survey, uh , for their businesses and they see this as like a , a really like shiny new tool that they can do their jobs much, much faster now. And so that’s been our early adopters as people doing land survey building survey. And you know, we’re starting to expand into other use cases because early adopters just are seeing the PX80 the lidar mapping system we developed as a tool to make their jobs much easier. And that’s great for getting us a good flow of early sales. But you know, we fundamentally see this technology as enabling an entirely new class of applications. So we see what we’ve done as a way to, to always have an up- to-date digital copy of reality so that it enables entirely new ways of thinking. So we’re starting to get adoption, for example, on construction sites to be able to scan a construction site every week to precisely monitor progress and do quality control. And we’re starting to get people use the PX80 to monitor like industrial facilities, factories, warehouses, you know, data centers, things like that are constantly changing and the facility manager needs to know what, what’s happening in their facility . So, uh, we’re, we’re starting to see, you know, new classes of, um , use case that, that are pretty exciting. Richard Miles: 18:01 So these are still mostly commercial applications right? There’s, there’s not a retail in game at this point? Amir Rubin: 18:08 No, no. We started out thinking there would be some, some interesting consumer and retail or end user use cases. And for a lot of reasons it turns out that’s , that’s a , that’s a very hard sell, right? One of the companies, I think doing a really successful job at that is actually like a , the Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go. They have a incredibly popular App. It’s a Pokemon game where you hunt Pokemon in the wild. But you know, future versions of that app will start to use the players, you know, the Pokemon trainers, a camera phone to map, uh , parts of the real world environment. And so, you know, what we kind of realized is to make a consumer play, there needs to be a primary driver, uh , to the consumer beyond 3D mapping. Uh, for example, Pokemon Go or, or fun engaging games like that. Whereas, um , in the, uh, you know, enterprise industrial world people, people need their data. So you can, you can make a business just to selling tools to get people data. Richard Miles: 19:21 I had a guest, I think, you know, Randy Scott, local entrepreneur now in adventure capital and, uh , he said one issue he found with sort of adventures and co-founders is that one of the pieces of advice he gives them is the first thing they have to do is learn how to fall out of love with the science behind the invention. Um, and , and coldly look at what are the sort of commercial applications, commercial potential. Yeah . And he said once he could do that, then you know , adventures can really understand. Okay. Just as you said, there’s ultimately there’s gotta be a market or somebody wanting to use that. Amir Rubin: 19:56 Yeah, yeah. We, we, we initially thought this, that this tech we developed would be, um , really popular with game designers and, you know, like augmented reality games and, and experiences and fun things like that. And so when we realized kind of like what, what Randy is saying, they want to realize the application is industrial. Well, we made kind of a tough decision as a team to , um , just focus full time on very unsexy, very kind of nose to the grindstone industry . You know, land survey, construction, facility management, these are not, they don’t grab any headlines, but when you talk about important problems, I mean, we all live in buildings that need to be built. We all drive on roads and bridges that need to be inspected and you know, hopefully done on a budget, finished on budget and a complex facilities need to need to stay running. And so there’s real need and real budgets to um, to support that. And that was a , you know, shift for us. But as soon as we made that shift, things started going our way. So the one kind of conceit we have to our old idea of like whimsical consumer games. We’ve kept our branding and our logo as like a fun kind of whimsical characters and the branding we , we uh, and the, uh, we, we made, um, for the old vision of the company. We brought that into our new product and our new market and it actually helps it stand out. Like I company mascot is a parakeet, you know, the Paracosm parakeet and uh, you know, people, people know what the parakeet means now the industry. Richard Miles: 21:40 Yeah. So it sounds like you’ve learned a lot just in the last few years. It was something you said reminded me of uh, our , our architects that built the Cade Museum, um , did a great job and it’s a fabulous innovative building. We love it. And, um, and they were very excited to build it. And , and I remember asking one of them, I said, well, you know, don’t you guys get to build stuff like this all the time? And they said, well, no, the majority of what we build is schools, hospitals, administrative buildings. You know, we’re, we’re rarely asked hey, you know, build this museum of creativity and invention and kind of do whatever you want. Amir Rubin: 22:10 They’re very innovative. Richard Miles: 22:12 They’re very excited. But it was an insight for me to understand that that part of the business were substantial. You still need schools, you still need to outsource administrative buildings. You need Compton architects to do that. Yeah . Amir Rubin: 22:21 But we do use the Cade Museum in all of our marketing. Richard Miles: 22:24 Oh good, good. Amir Rubin: 22:24 That’s a beautiful building. So we have it scanned many times and that’s the scan we show off because it looks cool. Richard Miles: 22:30 So Amir, uh, you’re not by any means an old guy, but you do have a lot of experience, you’ve done a lot of things. Sort of looking back on your career, both sort of, in, in school and then also as an engineer and a business. I’m a guy. What, what sort of lesson learned would you give to uh , um , someone who, early twenties, maybe reminds you a little bit of yourself and they’re all charged up with a great idea and they’re , they’re off to the races, they’re going to do the next big thing. What would you sit down and tell them over a cup of coffee? Hey, here are the things you definitely should do and watch out for this. Amir Rubin: 23:09 Yeah, that’s, that’s always a tough one because I think about that question often. And sometimes I wonder, you know, if you’re not dumbly and blindly charging forward with the naive enthusiasm of just being out of school and the irrational overconfidence, you know, would you even get anywhere? And so I, Richard Miles: 23:33 So you have to be a little bit blind. Right? Amir Rubin: 23:34 Yeah. I don’t like to, um, I don’t like to give you know too much advice, you know, a lot of times I find like a lot of the advice I give might sound cynical or jaded. And when I spend with students who are starting new projects, um, Richard Miles: 23:49 Cause you probably get asked a lot, right? I mean, Amir, you’re a rockstar in Gainesville. So I’m sure people go ask Amir and he’ll tell you the Amir Rubin: 23:55 In the past week alone. Yeah. I find that at least, you know , usually between two and four hours a week meeting with people just to, you know , try to spread the love and give a little encouragement. And so I find it’s better to just sometimes give encouragement. And if someone’s about to face a very obvious pitfall, try to kind of steer them away from a pitfall. But there’s something to be said for like the high energy of when someone has a lot of enthusiasm. Like I learned from that a lot of times when I talk to people. Richard Miles: 24:27 What are some of those common questions you get from those people? I mean, is it all just tell me how you did it or do or there’s something specific that they , they, think they need to know and that you can tell them . Amir Rubin: 24:37 I prefer when there is something specific um, sometimes people just wanna kinda, you know, it’s sometimes people just want to hear like my experience and , and let themselves, they’ll draw their own conclusion. It’s just a nice little data point that they can, I could say something like, okay, well in your situation, here’s, here’s what happened to me and draw your own parallels to that. Sometimes people have a specific problem. Like there’s a company here in town that just received a very large order unexpectedly for their product. And they’re like, how are we going to build this? How are we, how are we going to get, you know, $50,000 to deliver this in a month? And I was like, well, you know, good luck with that. Um, but you know, I, I help however I can, the most difficult problems I encounter and that I usually am able to kind of see right away even if the founders don’t is, you know, like, well let’s, let’s dig into the relationship between both of you here and like, um, I think that’s probably one of the main lessons learned is the relationship aspect of starting a business, especially with your employees and your co-founders and your investors. These are all relationships that, you know, will be strained heavily from the stresses of starting a company and trying to make payroll and stay in business. And that’s, you know, my biggest advice is always for people to be mindful around that. And in fact, you know, when, when, when people get far enough along the process and if I’m like really able to be more involved in mentoring or coaching them, I always, you know, my biggest advice is to learn about mindfulness and, um, how to, you know, control your breathing and your thought processes to be a , a , you know, to be more effective communicator and in the very stressful situations that pop up when you’re starting a business. Richard Miles: 26:35 It’s interesting what you say about sort of maintain that balance, I’d say between trying to inspire somebody, right? And encourage them, but also sort of, uh , speaking realistically and honestly, Um Phoebe who, you know, my, my wife and co-founder Cade Museum was asked to speak on a panel and the subject’s panel was loosely sort of like, uh , uh, you know, starting a start a museum, you know, what do you think and Phoebe sells to be the shortest panel ever. I’ll say, don’t do it. Um, but, uh, it sounds like you have acquired, uh, you know, I almost see a budding venture capitalists here. I’m here. I gotta say, you know, you have all this, a very actual useful information and insights into how these companies are formed. Um, and, and sort of what tends to succeed in what doesn’t, what’s, what’s next on the horizon for you, do you, do you see yourself staying? Well, obviously you’re not going to tell me if you’re gonna leave, but I mean, what, what is on your bucket list, I guess, say 10 years from now? Where, where do you see yourself being? Amir Rubin: 27:34 Um, uh , you know, I always, when, when we started Paracosm, I said, I’m not going to make the same mistakes. Um , I made at, at my previous, uh , startups and my previous companies and, you know, we’ve , we’ve gotten further than, than, than I had before. And so, you know, uh , Paracosm and, uh, you know, we, we still have a lot of, uh, a lot of items on our to do lists that we’re focused on. But, um, you know, in , in 10 years, you know, life, uh, you know, the next next adventure will be, um, I, I work really hard to suppress the ideas in my head to be able to focus on Paracosm. But you know, there , there, there’s always a next idea and, and you know, in 10 years I would see myself hopefully being a right back on the hamster wheel with , with a new idea and making a new set of mistakes. Um, you know, just, uh , keep trying to, you know, refine. Um, the, the, the, I don’t like to call it a process is like keep trying to refine the experience of starting a company and, um, you know, make new mistakes, don’t re learn from the old mistakes and try to do it a little better each time. Richard Miles: 28:51 So, uh, Amir when you have that new great idea, come back on Radio Cade we’ll talk about it. We’ll charge five bucks to download the episode. Once we go platinum we’ll , we’ll give you a few percentage points. Amir Rubin: 29:03 There you go, I’ll take it. Richard Miles: 29:05 Um, Amir, thank you very much for being on Radio Cade this morning, I’ve learned a lot and uh , I hope to see you back on the show. Amir Rubin: 29:11 Yeah. Thanks for having me, Richard. This was a lot of fun. Richard Miles: 29:13 I’m your host Richard Miles. Outro: 29:17 Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support, Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor interviews, Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing, and production of the podcast and music theme . Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist Jacob lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Josh Zloof, Co-Founder & CEO of Sudden Coffee is passionate about more than just serving up a great cup of coffee. After launching several businesses that ended in some success and even more failures, Josh knew he needed to find his “why.” This led to him founding Sudden Coffee on the idea of “making one billion people happy.” Today, Sudden Coffee has served over 200,000 cups of their single origin, speciality grade, instant coffee (delivered right to your door). With over $4.2M raised from Sudden Coffee have been featured in the New York Times, Food & Wine, and GQ.  Josh and I Discuss: Ideas on penetrating the crowded coffee/beverage space How Sudden Coffee is sourced Process of making instant coffee Funding Focus around marketing Distribution Working with coaches and mentors Use Code: marketplace for 10% off your order @ https://www.suddencoffee.com/ Sponsor/Partnership: Blooom – Your 401k could earn more. Take a minute to link up your 401k to and maximize your investments. For $10/ month, we manage your nest egg so you can enjoy life.

In episode #897, we discuss raising money through Angel Investors. Tune in to hear how you can get your business initial funding. We have committed to throwing a FREE Marketing School Live Event in Los Angeles, once Marketing School reaches 1M downloads in a 30 day period. Take action: Rate, review, subscribe, and SHARE. Check the progress here! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:27] Today's Topic: How to Find an Angel Investor [00:34] Go to AngelList. [00:45] This is the easiest way to get started. [00:52] Eric just raised his original money through friends and family. [01:10] Eric only asked other entrepreneurs, so it wasn't as awkward. [01:17] Y Combinator Safe Note is a simple agreement for future equity. [01:34] It took him 2 weeks to raise $100,000. [01:51] Find relevant investors (those who understand your field). [02:18] You have to be ok with getting a “no”. [02:40] Look up how other major businesses raised money. [03:30] When raising money through Angel Investors, make sure your pitch is solid and contains all pertinent information investors would want to know. [04:20] Don't just go through the motions. [04:49] If you don't have a solid business network, go to conferences to build one. [05:27] You can also put your product up on Product Hunt, as a lot of VC's check out that site. [05:29] That's all for today! [05:33] Go here to see how many downloads the show is getting. Also rate and review to help us meet our goal of 1 Million downloads per month. Hopefully, we'll see you at the live event in L.A.! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #897, we discuss raising money through Angel Investors. Tune in to hear how you can get your business initial funding. We have committed to throwing a FREE Marketing School Live Event in Los Angeles, once Marketing School reaches 1M downloads in a 30 day period. Take action: Rate, review, subscribe, and SHARE. Check the progress here! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:27] Today’s Topic: How to Find an Angel Investor [00:34] Go to AngelList. [00:45] This is the easiest way to get started. [00:52] Eric just raised his original money through friends and family. [01:10] Eric only asked other entrepreneurs, so it wasn’t as awkward. [01:17] Y Combinator Safe Note is a simple agreement for future equity. [01:34] It took him 2 weeks to raise $100,000. [01:51] Find relevant investors (those who understand your field). [02:18] You have to be ok with getting a “no”. [02:40] Look up how other major businesses raised money. [03:30] When raising money through Angel Investors, make sure your pitch is solid and contains all pertinent information investors would want to know. [04:20] Don’t just go through the motions. [04:49] If you don’t have a solid business network, go to conferences to build one. [05:27] You can also put your product up on Product Hunt, as a lot of VC’s check out that site. [05:29] That’s all for today! [05:33] Go here to see how many downloads the show is getting. Also rate and review to help us meet our goal of 1 Million downloads per month. Hopefully, we’ll see you at the live event in L.A.! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Santiago Zavala (@dfect) es un emprendedor mexicano, fundador y socio de uno de los principales fondos de capital semilla para startups en América Latina, 500 Startups Latam. Su carrera siempre ha estado ligada al desarrollo de proyectos empresariales y startups, inicialmente desde el punto de vista del desarrollo, y finalmente como mentor de empresas. Durante los últimos años, ha ayudado a más de 130 empresas a lanzarse, fondearse y establecerse, con éxitos como Conekta o Clip. Trabajó durante algunos años en Silicon Valley, al lado de grandes nombres del mundo emprendedor y desarrollador, antes de fundar el primer fondo de inversión para startups 100% mexicano, Mexican.vc, que finalmente se convertiría en 500 Startups Latam. En este episodio, hablamos de: Sus inicios como programador. Su aventura en Silicon Valley. El nacimiento de Mexican.vc. La evolución de Mexican.vc a 500 Startups. Cómo operan en 500 Startups Latam. Por qué fracasan los proyectos. La importancia de afrontar los problemas de frente Mitos y errores del mundo emprendedor La importancia del juego en equipo Cómo es crecer en un hogar emprendedor. La importancia de gestionar correctamente los recursos. La relatividad de la urgencia y el tiempo al lanzar una startup. La importancia de mantener el equilibrio entre el trabajo y el cuidado de uno mismo. La importancia de las personas en las empresas. Por qué el fracaso nunca es una catástrofe, y cómo enfocarlo para que sea positivo. La importancia de evitar las deudas. En qué enfocar el tiempo y cómo optimizarlo a la hora de emprender. Cómo desarrollar proyectos revolucionarios en 4 horas. Cómo enfocarte en lo que controlas, y dejar de preocuparte por lo que no. Qué hacer en momentos de agobio o desmotivación. La importancia de reconocer cuándo se necesita parar. Sus recomendaciones de libros. Qué es un héroe en el mundo del emprendimiento. Conecta con Santiago en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dfectuoso Conecta con Santiago en Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/dfect

Max Child and James Wilsterman are co-founders of Volley, a company that makes games for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The Volley games Song Quiz and Yes Sire currently hold the number 1 and 2 rankings on Alexa. Volley also recently graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2018 program and has raised over $1 million in seed funding. Max was formerly an iOS developer, journalist and worked for Boston Consulting Group. James was a co-founder of Streak Trivia which held once-a-day trivia tournaments on iPhone and Facebook Messenger. Both Max and James graduated from Harvard and Max proudly lists himself as a Stanford Business School drop out. Volley traces its origins back to 2013 but it wasn't always all about voice games. In the beginning, they were developing games for mobile and innovating around games that could be played solely within mobile notifications. This week's interview covers everything from Volley's founding and the duo's past experience with games to what makes a good voice game and how to capture new users.

Join the Acquired Limited Partner program! https://kimberlite.fm/acquired/ (works best on mobile) Acquired is live on the scene following Dropbox’s public market debut. From playing a central role in the early days of Y Combinator, to having Steve Jobs famously label the company a “feature not a product”, to pivoting from consumers to enterprise to developers and back again, the silicon valley history runs deep with this one. What twists and turns lie ahead for Dropbox as a public company? We speculate!   Links: Dropbox’s Y Combinator application Original Dropbox demo video   Carve Outs: Ben: Raytracing comes to DirectX David: Lazy Game Reviews   Sponsor: Thanks to Perkins Coie, Counsel to Great Companies, for sponsoring Acquired Season 2. You can get in touch with Lee Schindler, who you heard at the beginning of this podcast, here.

In this episode we chatted to Kristin Ellis, the Scientific Development Lead at OpenTrons, about all things science. OpenTrons is a company that builds affordable open-source lab robots, that remove the need to perform tedious manual pipetting tasks, to free up valuable time for researchers.  We touched on the importance of good science communication and the unfair stigma that often impacts researchers that are keen to involve and talk to the public, and the true value of encouraging that "...and then it just clicked" moment with people previously disengaged with science.  We also spoke about the innovative ways tinkerers have adapted their open-source robots, the value of putting automation into the hands of the many, and the attitude shift required in science to promote prototyping and hacking. We were keen to see how OpenTrons has been received by academics looking to streamline their research and were fascinated by their passage through Haxclr8tr (a hardware startup accelerator, now called HAX). Their relationship to Shenzhen is also pretty amazing - described as the silicon valley for hardware, the labyrinthine market in Shenzhen allows hardware hackers to rapidly test out ideas, a concept essentially intractable even with the electronic hardware superstores elsewhere.

In this episode, Brandon welcomes Gavin Kogan of Grupo Flor to the show. Gavin is a former attorney, co-founder of Indus Holdings, and helped bring Dixie Elixirs to the California market. Brandon and Gavin dive deep into Grupo Flor's family of cannabis companies. These include Grupo Properties, Flor Cultivation, 710 Combinator, AG Pistil, and much more. Tune in, listen up, and get acquainted with one of the top operators in the cannabis industry.

We speak to Chad Rigetti, CEO of quantum computing startup Rigetti Computing. We dive deep into the challenges that face deep tech startups, the core debates within quantum computing, and what it's like to compete with the likes of Google in this brave new world of the future computer. We wanted to get an insight into what's actually going on behind the scenes in the burgeoning quantum computing industry. We were also intrigued as to how a startup is able to play competitively in a space that requires so much up front investment and such a focus on experimental and theoretical research.     

We've got a great episode today with Tom Blomfield (@t_blom), co-founder and CEO of Monzo (@monzo), a new, digital-only challenger bank in the UK.   Monzo is seeking to fundamentally change the way banking is done and challenge a lot of assumptions about the way people want to interact with their money.   Tom is a serial entrepreneur, he founded an e-commerce platform for students called boso.com while he was in college and later launched GoCardless, a B2B payments company that raised funding from the likes of Accel, Balderton and Passion Capital and went through Y Combinator in 2011.   In 2013, Tom and his GoCardless (@GoCardless) co-founders were named among the top 5 entrepreneurs by the European Commission. Tom got involved in the digital, challenger bank space in the UK relatively early, at the bank now known as Starling before moving on to found Monzo which plans to launch in early 2017.   Monzo has generated a phenomenal following and has a live beta with thousands of active users and an extremely long waiting list.   As a special treat for Rebank listeners and a profound thank you for your support through our first 17 episodes, Tom is offering up a Monzo card giving immediate access to the highly sought after beta for one lucky listener.   To participate, send an email with your name and the title of your favorite Rebank episode so far to rebank@bankingthefuture.com. We'll draw a winner at 5pm GMT on Friday, December 9th, so get your submissions in.   As always, connect with us on Twitter @rebankpodcast or with Will directly @will_beeson.    If you like the show, subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or one of the numerous other platforms where we're distributed.   Thanks, and enjoy today's episode with Tom Blomfield.

Shake your ass with this superdope guestmix by Mr. "Freedom Sessions", Petr Serkin aka Combinator aka Bip Soup from Moscow. Vinyl only.

Host Lisa Kiefer interviews UC Berkeley freshmen Joe Gleason and John Siano about their startup company ActivityAssist, bringing the field trip into the 21st century by digitizing the permission slip, fees, and attendance process with a mobile app.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Method to the madness is next Speaker 2:stay in Speaker 3:nor the snoop two method to the madness of vibe weekly public affairs show on k a l ex Berkley celebrating bay area innovators [00:00:30] and your host Lisa Kiefer. And today I'll be talking to two UC Berkeley students, John Siano and Joe Gleason about a startup they're involved with called [inaudible]. Speaker 2:Oh, activity assist. Speaker 1:You two are probably the youngest innovators I've had on this show. Would [00:01:00] you just introduce yourselves and talk about what you're doing here at UC Berkeley? I'm Joe Gleason. I cofounded activity assist. I'm from South Philadelphia. I went to high school in North Philadelphia and I went to a school where teachers had to pay for their own paper for schools, whether that meant permission slips, whether that meant homework. All teachers have to go to staples, pay with their own credit card and buy their own paper. So when I was 15 years old, I got one of my friends from outside New York and we started a company that digitize the permission slips for field shifts, [00:01:30] proms, homecomings, and sporting events. How old were you at 15 you were in high school? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I started with my own, with our own physics teachers. Uh, and my friend was in a town outside Newark, New Jersey called in south orange and I started at a high school called central high school in North Philly. Speaker 1:And you are? I'm John CNO. I'm, I'm from Cupertino, California. I'm also a freshman here at Berkeley. I actually met Joe here. Um, both freshmen. That's right. Yeah, that's incredible to me. Okay. That's how I met Joe [00:02:00] here. Um, you showed me activity assists and um, you know, I just recently got started with the team as the director of business development. So I'm, I'm pretty excited to, you know, join the team and help the uh, website grow. Let's back up a little bit. You started this in high school and you brought it here to UC Berkeley. Can you talk about that process just a little bit? That's right. So, uh, basically how that went is before I came to Berkeley, there was just me and my co founder and he's at the University of Illinois and I came over here to Berkeley all the way from the east coast. Speaker 1:[00:02:30] And it was, we, we've always worked remotely. So that's never been a problem. But I think it's been interesting in that Berkeley has such a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation and you can find people and just tell your story and people will listen to you offer great criticism, great questions, and you can move on. It's such a great place to innovate and such a great place to share your story that it's, it's perfect for me. It was perfect for activity assist and that's the reason we're happy to announce we just raised $20,000 from the dorm room fund. Okay. So we need to explain [00:03:00] what is this dorm room fund? So the dorm room fund is a, a venture backed firm that invests in college startups across the country. They're based in the bay area in, uh, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and I think they're expanding. So they're growing from a backed by first round capital and they invest in college startups on their average investment is about 20 k and we're happy to announce that we're one of the more recent investments. Speaker 1:Okay. I did a little bit of reading about the dorm room fund and they started in, is it 2012 [00:03:30] yeah, that's right. And they started in Philadelphia. Had you known about them at all when you had this idea in high school? So in my high school, a lot of my friends went to Penn just because of the nature of being so close to Penn. And I actually knew a couple of people on the dorm room fund in Philadelphia from my high school who had gone on and studied at Penn. And so I had known of the Dorm Room Fund for Awhile, but I knew activities just wasn't at the stage where we could raise the money that the money would be necessary. You know what, for what we need now [00:04:00] to build a brand name. Plus you were in high school, they didn't fund high school. Exactly. They didn't, they didn't fund high schoolers, you know, and we're surprised they even funded freshmen that were one of the youngest people that are funded. Speaker 1:So that is very exciting. Okay. So you knew about this fund and this fund was started by a company called first round capital. First round capital I think was the first company to invest in Uber. So they have this tradition of investing in very innovative and new ideas. So, um, they have [00:04:30] this division, I guess you'd call it, that controls the dorm room fund. That's right. How many projects have they funded across the United States? Universities? As of today? It's hundreds, hundreds, hundreds. I know my contacts from the bay area, Davey Bloom, Greg Guy, I connected us in the first place. I think they invested in an average of 10 a year per location. And that may, that number may fluctuate from year to year, but I think on average it's about 10 Raby last major across the country per location. So the four locations, [00:05:00] I would say 20 to 40 startups they invest in annually overall, nationwide. Speaker 1:And so we're one of that group, which is really exciting and it is exciting. And so you know, all of the INS and outs of, so what did you need here at cal to continue? So one thing I knew I needed was as I'm studying, as we're all studying, I needed a team. You need great people to make a great company, uh, and you need great people to help sort of mellow the highs and lows of startups. And so I said, okay, I need to find these people. So I said, I need a marketing [00:05:30] guy, I need a business guy. Are you a business major? I am not a business major. How Nice your major know science and Engineering Major was, you can say, oh, what's that engineering. And I just loved material science. You know what material sciences, you can tell me it's the study of how everything is made. Speaker 1:You found John. That's right. And um, what does it mean when you say you're a business development guy? So I help in outreach to schools, you know, such as like contacting schools, marketing, uh, finding teacher conferences. We can speak. I basically just to get the m word out for activity assist. [00:06:00] And uh, that's something that I've had experience with in the past. You know, in high school I worked on my own startup called study trove. And so I, I've kind of had a, where was this high school where you get to start doing a startup? Oh, it's called, it was called Cupertino high school. Just about 40 minutes away from here. I have to just intersect here and say I'm amazed that number one startups are happening in high school. So and also, and they continue on. I mean that's very exciting. So, so when I met Joe here, I was really impressed with how, how well activity assist the website was made, you know, he had all his numbers down [00:06:30] in terms of like budget, finance, stuff like that. Speaker 1:The website, he thought of all like edge cases. Like we like to say we built a website with teachers for teachers. So the whole product came about because our teachers came to us and we were designing the website. We every step of the way we showed it to our own teachers. And so you were in this high school where you were living this application? Exactly. We were building it and living it. I like to say I live for you, the neat activity assessed and so did my partner, you know, at his high school out in New Jersey. So, okay, let's go, let's talk in detail about this product. [00:07:00] And before you go into detail about that, is it up and running here yet? So activity assist is fully operational. Is it operational here in California yet in California? No, we are not live in and the schools in California citing part. Speaker 1:And that's what you're getting going here. So let's talk about the details of activity assist now. Great. So how it works is a teacher can basically go on our website, activity assist.com create activities like field trips, prompts those events, invite their students in chaperones to attend through the site [00:07:30] and then they can send permission slips to those parents, bypassing the kid. And then as a parent you can say your kid's been invited to attend the problem. You could sign and pay for that prom right from your email. No login required. So it's a, it's a completely online process. It's taking the old permission slip and modernizing. We're bringing the future into the 21st century. Okay. So how would a student, you know how in the old days you could, you could game some of these things and put a signature down for your parents. It wasn't your parents things, your, how are you getting around [00:08:00] any kind of fraudulent activity? Speaker 1:So fraud is a good, is a good question. Uh, we sort of covered that with uh, on the student side if any student tries to intercept the parent email, you know, in sign and pay for themselves digitally. What we do at the beginning of any school onboarding, we send a form home, one form that says who we are, what we're doing, and we ask the parent to legally give them, give us the most accurate email address, the one they check most often and then they have to sign therefore covering our liability. So if a student does happen to [00:08:30] access the parent's email signing pay online, we're not liable. So, okay. Yeah. So you get an electronic signature. That's right. We use docusign. Yup. We take care of that online. And it's really nice because one thing we did is we, we launched a bunch of focus groups with parents and parents are the one thing they hate most, I don't know about you is the logins. Speaker 1:They absolutely hated login. So what we did is we did something pretty unique. We, we built a link that only works with that particular. So if I send you an email saying your son or daughter has been invited to attend the senior prom, [00:09:00] only you can access that link from your computer. No one else can access that link. If someone accidentally gets access to your inbox from another, like another place, they can't get it. That's really great security. That's where it's important. So, um, you've been at this since, what year was that? Must've been 2014. The summer of 2014. Okay. Did it become profitable out in Pennsylvania? So we've been actually working on this site for about a year and then we built a mobile app. And what the mobile app does is it lets chaperones, let's say on the day of the Prom, take attendance. So as a kid comes into, say John's coming [00:09:30] into the problem, I can tap them in on my phone and send an attendance report directly to my school. Speaker 1:So there's no paper attendance list. It automatically updates to the system. And so we spent a whole bunch of time building that and then I sort of had to do the business and I did a lot of fundraising. So uh, in the beginning I started out, I self funded most of the business and I raised a lot of money from go fund me, uh, approximate about like 8,000 total among in that first round is now let's talk about what is go fund me. Go Fund me is an amazing website. Go check it out. Go Fund me.com. How it works is you go, [00:10:00] you, you make your campaign say ah, there's a lot of medical cases, a lot of educational cases. I know one, I know one friend who wanted to go to Pittsburgh and so he'd put on his, he launched the go fund me campaign advertising, how he loved robotics and how he wanted to go to Pittsburgh. Speaker 1:So this is a crowd funding sec donation crowdfunding and he raised the money that he could use to live and go to school in Pittsburgh. So it's really amazing. And it sounds like it's geared toward educational and it's geared towards educational things. It's geared towards things that the people you know want to pay for to [00:10:30] in a, in a high school startup. So you started this and then you got the attention. How did you get this $20,000 raise from dorm room fund? So I spent probably the last two months of going to events, pitches, competitions, talking to everyone. I could try to fundraise this one where we have a goal right now, 50 k over the next 12 months. That's our fundraising goal. And we've raised 20 from the doormen fund. So how do we do it? I was going from competition and competition. I'd probably, I'd probably pitched to 35 vcs with 30 vcs trying to raise this money. Speaker 1:[00:11:00] And you know, vcs were a small fish in a big pond. They don't want to invest in us. And so then we, we eventually found, I remembered, oh, the dorm room fund and then I tried to reach out. I knew a guy, I know a dorm room fund just to back up. It's run by students. That's right. It's run by Grad and undergraduate students at Berkeley and at Stanford, at least in the bay area. And so I knew a guy named [inaudible], his name's Brian Dunn. He manages the, this awesome consulting group at Berkeley called the two mead consulting group. It's an, it's an Israeli consulting group and he knew David Bloom who was sort of my [00:11:30] account rep at dorm room fund and he connected us last semester we chatted and got to know each other and then we reconnected this semester when I was fundraising and it just, it seemed like it worked and then we did a pitch, we made it and we're in, so you have 20,000 when did you get this money? Speaker 1:How long ago? We got the sort of like the acceptance about two weeks ago and then we're getting the money. Right. So you're up and running now and you're reaching out. How are you using that money right now? So we have an itemized budget. A couple of things for launching an online advertising campaign, launching a direct mail campaign. [00:12:00] Direct mail is like sending pamphlets to, to schools, you know, seeing something that you can hold in your hand. Oh we're looking at, as John mentioned, Ed Tech Conferences and teacher conferences. We think this is a word of mouth game, sort of getting this in teacher's hands because of that. At the end of the day, the teacher is our best consumer. They're the ones who are benefiting from this. They're the ones who love it. And I've not met a teacher who hasn't loved this product. It's so simple. So we need to get into those conferences. Speaker 1:And then also I'm looking to hire a couple people. So that's our fundraising outside of school mentor [00:12:30] or Advice, I mean cause you know, you come into this bay area, there's a lot of teachers and what help are you getting? So what help am I getting? I think it all started back home. Uh, when I was in middle school. Eighth Grade, eighth grade, my mom started a company I called Jelly Arts LLC. It's an art product. It's for printmaking. And so when we were first starting out in eighth grade, she was, she was shipping out product four to five pieces a day. And I would come home everyday school ended at three 30. I would run home packing ship boxes, run to the post office [00:13:00] by four 30 cause I had to get the rent four 30 otherwise I couldn't sit about product for that thing. And I have that product for my mom's saw business from my basement every day for a year, you know, and I got to see her business grow and now it's a million dollar company. Speaker 1:You know, it's, it's exciting, you know, after a lot of years. And I got to grow with that business, I got to see the mistakes she's made and she's totally been my advisor on this. Uh, my dad started a company too when he was younger. They've been my advisors. And so you grew up in a household like I did. We're a household of entrepreneurs. That's the only way around it, John. Yeah. So, um, you know, my household [00:13:30] also has been, you know, very proactive and know creating things. And um, so for example, when I was in high school, I mentioned I created my own educational startup called study trove. My parents were very active study trove. It's basically an essay edited being a website for schools and still operational. But through running that, I realized some of the mistakes that I made. And when talking to Joe, when he introduced me to activity assist, I realized a lot of those mistakes that I had made in the past, those were corrected in an activity assistant. Speaker 1:That's what really attracted me to joining the activity assist team. I [00:14:00] was just really impressed with the product. Well, there's nothing like failure to help you understand what you need to do. You can always learn from your mistakes. And I like to say, what does it like to run a small company? Uh, this is what it's like. One day you get the dorm room fund and you leave the meeting and you're saying, oh my God, we're going to make it. We're going to be a $10 billion firm. We're going to have an IPO, it's going to be amazing. The next day you're gonna have a call with the customer. It's not going to go so well. You're going to leave that meeting and you're going to say we're going to dissolve and three months it's not going to work. All this stuff. So working [00:14:30] a startup is kind of like running a wave. You've got to sort of balance the, the ups and the downs and mellow it out. So on your good days you have to say, look, we're not, we're not there yet. And on your bad days you get, you got to say, oh well we got this going for us. And I like to say my blood pressure is going through the roof all the time. Speaker 3:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to the method to the madness. [00:15:00] A biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Keifer, and today I'm interviewing two innovative UC Berkeley students, John Siano and Joe Gleason. They have a startup called activity assist that empowers teachers to create digital permission slips and send them off to parents instantly who can then grant permission and pay electronically while [00:15:30] letting chaperones take attendance on the day of the trip through their mobile app. Speaker 1:Tell me what your immediate goals are and then later goals. Cause you know, you just, you're just getting started here in the bay. That's right. That's right. So our immediate goals are traction and that's just getting the word out schools and getting our name out and that's getting us in teachers hands. I'm willing to give this product away to, to schools for free in the intermediate time, uh, for this year, for [00:16:00] the remainder of this year so that we can get them for next year. You know, a lot of public schools finalize their budgets by July 1st so we're really pushing for that July 1st deadline. What do they have to pay to get started? Right. So we charge $500 per school per year. A but when you're first starting out, we're going to give it to you for 30 days. Try it with a couple of trips and make sure you like it and make sure it works with your data and then go for it. Speaker 1:Uh, it's $500 per year per school. We don't charge per pupil. Well, you know, budgeting is really tough here in California public schools. [00:16:30] Are you also approaching private schools? We are. We are looking at private cause I was, you know, I mean they may not have that mudget budget after the field trip expenses to pay $500 sounds crazy, but it's a lot. So when I was first starting out, I did a lot of research, I did a lot of research and one thing that I found was that even these public school districts that are strapped for budget space, one place they are not strapped for, or they at least have a little bit more about room is their ed tech. They usually have 10 to 30 k available to [00:17:00] invest in things like this every year. So there's totally budget space and a lot of schools now for talking city schools that Ed tech budget space is not there. Speaker 1:But if we're talking suburban middle class, you know, family schools. What about Oakland Public Schools? Oakland public school, inner cities, inner city school districts, different story. I'm from Philadelphia, which is, I think it's the second worst public education system in the country behind Detroit. And I actually worked at a company in high school where we worked with teachers and principals to w [00:17:30] w we raised money for them or we gave money, we gave them grants. And one thing I got to do is I got to meet principals. I remember one story I heard was someone was, had a meeting with the principal. They were walking down this hallway in their high school in South Philly high and they would walk in a classroom and they would see the teacher at the desk with their feet on the desk with the magazine in their hands. The kids running aimlessly. Speaker 1:They'd walk in another classroom pitch black textbooks piled from the floor to the ceiling, some three years old, never used. And so there's totally a misallocation of resources in city school districts. [00:18:00] And we recognize that. I definitely do coming from Philadelphia, and I want to sort of tackle that. I don't want teachers to have to pay for their own paper. It's ridiculous. If you're going to go on a field trip, it requires buses. There's a lot of other expenses besides the paper. So, so the buses bus drivers are actually paid. They have tenure. Usually they usually, they have an hourly schedule, so they're already running around with a sporting events in cities. I know, I know Philadelphia at least. Uh, there's bus drivers going around all the time because of the inner study supporting us spreading clubs. [00:18:30] Yeah. But do you get my drift here? Speaker 1:I mean, when you're talking about inner city school, so number one, you have to assume, do they have buses? Do they have the budget? Do they have, can they send out a bunch of kids to, there's one thing we charge $500 per school per year for schools that can afford it. So for inner city schools, we're going to actually give activity system for free because we know that those school districts on average have 300, 400 schools. They can't afford a product like this, let alone something even cheaper so we can stand only stand to benefit [00:19:00] by giving it to them. So we're going to give it to them. It's a mutual benefit. They can save money on paper. Their teachers can save a bunch of time. What if you start to make money? I mean just theoretically this thing takes off like crazy. Who gets the money? Speaker 1:Does do University of California Berkeley get any money or is it strictly go back into your pocket or does Dorm Room Fund get money? Activity assist is an LLC of New Jersey and so we're, we're a for profit private company us the money will go to the owners, just a funding round. They Invest 20 K in permits [00:19:30] or a note, which is a sort of a debt vehicle. So technically we owe them the money back. So you've paid us back and everything else is yours. So the Dome Room Fund is full of students as well? Yes it is. So if they're taking equity that students who are becoming vcs and making money on other student projects. So true. So I work, I work part time for a company called personal capital in San Francisco. And Mike, why are you studying? That's a different guy than say a better question is when do I sleep? Speaker 1:And so on. My boss there were at the Dorm Room Fund at Berkeley, [00:20:00] he's a Hoss Grad and uh, and he always likes to say working with the dorm room fund is like working with for VC firm and you're managing the VC and firm as a kit, you know, which is like crazy, you know, cause your budget is kind of limitless and you can invest in all these cool companies, but you have to, you have to be careful, you have to be cautious and it's, you learn what it takes to invest and work in the investing world. So working for the government fund is a great opportunity. Anyone out there and then you get picked for that. Oh well it's kind of like you've got to network your way and you know, you gotta you gotta talk. So if you know someone, [00:20:30] you go talk to them, see what you can do. Speaker 1:I definitely recommend it to anyone out there who's saying, oh, the Doberman fund sounds awesome. I should go do it. It's totally worth, yeah. Especially like business majors in this major house. Oh, MBAs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well even you guys, after you're done with this project, you could be on the Dome Dorm Room. Who knows? John, what do you think? I think it's a good idea possibly, but I'd rather focus on this for now. Okay. Let's get, John, let's talk to you a little bit. Um, what is your major here at cal? Um, I'm a business major and a computer science major. Are you bringing computer skills to activity [00:21:00] assist? I'm currently, I'm learning more and more so I'm hoping that, you know, like for example this summer I'm going to be scaling up a bit. So I hope to, you know, continually bring stuff to the company. Speaker 1:Are you using big data on this or is it too early? Too early. Too early. But we have plans we have planned. Okay. So let's assume you s you start doing well and, and people get wind of your company. I know that some of the dorm room fund projects have gone on to y Combinator and other places like that and you know, taken off like a real company. Are you ready for something like that? What, [00:21:30] I mean, could this happen I think possibly a year from now that could be the best place for us to go? Quite honestly, you y Combinator is an excellent program. I like that they pick you or would you approach them? How does that work? You apply and they pick you, you interview, you go for it. That's how that works. It's a huge, it's a very small acceptance rate, uh, probably on the, on the level of Stanford's [inaudible] and uh, so yeah, you apply and I think next year wouldn't be great for us. Speaker 1:We're not where we are. We're not where we need to be. Do you have numbers that show that what you're actually [00:22:00] saving schools yet? Yes. So, so why we even started this was because a physics teacher came to us and was managing his own trip. He spent two weeks trying to manage a physics trip and he tried to manage over $10,000 for one field trip and he had to waste two weeks of class time, prep time trying to deal with this. And so in terms of teacher time, we saved schools with the most money in terms of teacher time. So what that means is if the average teacher's salary is 60 k which it is in New Jersey, we can save you somewhere in the neighborhood of five to 6,000 in terms of teacher trial [00:22:30] opportunity costs, no, that's money. Not like liquid money, but that's money that teachers could otherwise spend in the classroom. Speaker 1:You know? So there's a benefit there that you don't have to waste time passing on a trip for to every kid in my class and saying, Johnny, where's your trip form waiting two weeks for this, you know, trying to track it down. Instead you could set version subs out in the morning. Every parent can see it while they're at work in their email, send it back and you can be done in a day or two rather than weeks. Also in terms of managing it, it's really simple. All the payments run through the site so you can track all of that and it's all covered. [00:23:00] It's really something that's good. And what do you think the greatest challenges are here? You're a California and so what do you think your greatest challenges are going to be? Probably the greatest challenge that I see is just getting the word out to schools because everyone who's seen the product, they've loved it. Speaker 1:You know, not only teachers but also conferences we've been at. They've also, this is a fantastic idea and we just need to get the word out so people know that this is a service that's offered. And I feel that once people, once we have like market saturation, everyone will want to jump on this product. It seems like in the public [00:23:30] school system you would go to, you know, the county offices or you know, the head person. Have you thought about going to Sacramento and the Department of Education and presenting to those people? So Sacramento and cities of that magnitude, we're not, we don't want to go into deep yet. You know the big cities because we want to sell, we want to sort of start out smaller and make sure that everything's working, you know, doing the kinks. Our targets are small public school districts right now and private schools on the individual basis. Speaker 1:We want to start out with, you know, 20 schools fine [00:24:00] to the kinks and then see, okay, how can we get into central that you have that list right already, right? We have targets of your targets and you're beginning to, yes we are. You know, you obviously have this background in entrepreneurship and everything. When did it all become a reality for you? I like to say that it started out with Evan and I and our basements, Skype calls every day after school. We would mock up the website, we would design it. In the beginning we were designing this product as a tool for our teachers. It was not a business and so when did it become a business [00:24:30] and it's kind of like, I think it's kind of a gradual thing. I think that's when you start to talk about, oh, when you start to run focus groups with teachers and you say, Oh, and you're talking to them. Speaker 1:I think the moment for me was when we sat down in a room of 30 30 teachers, showed it all to them anonymously. Each one of them said they loved it and that they needed it for their own, for themselves. You know, it was so simple. They could do it in five minutes and be done. Been pretty exciting. Oh, I was so excited to meet you. This was a high school basement runs Skype project. I like to say that [00:25:00] those teachers, every single one of them said they loved it and that to me was a moment we can tell entrepreneurs are, can be made or are, are you born an entrepreneur? I think it's totally a, a like a malting process. You have to go through the cauldron of becoming an entrepreneur because it's not as, yeah, you know, it's not as a, it's not as simple as like going and just like coming up with an idea. Speaker 1:There are a million ideas out there. A true entrepreneur doesn't need a hundred ideas and entrepreneur can [00:25:30] have zero ideas, but if they find someone with an idea, a true entrepreneur executes, they devote themselves, they grind, they talk to people, they know their consumer, and then they move forward. And that's what an entrepreneur does. They're an executioner. They're not an ideate an idea, you know they're an executioner. Okay. John, do you agree with that? I mean, what do you feel like, what is the definition to you of what you grew up in an entrepreneurial family? Do you think that you, it's natural or is it learned or can it be acquired? I've been, I'm going to go with [00:26:00] kind of a boring answer. I think it's kind of half and half. Just referring back to what Joe said, it's kind of like a call driven that there's going to be a lot of moments in which you feel, oh, this isn't working, or maybe my idea isn't as great as I thought it was. Speaker 1:But if you keep pushing forward, you know, you keep developing your product, your keep learning from what the customers want and you just keep going. Then I think that's what can help you succeed in entrepreneurship. And just as Joe said, it's not just about the idea because anyone can can come up with a fantastic idea. You've got to go out there and execute and actually get it done, get sales, that type of stuff. [00:26:30] And besides execution, it's also a determination. Being an entrepreneur is taking those 4:00 AM nights. You know, if you have to meet a deadline, then you have to meet a deadline and no one's gonna come and cover you. You have to take care of it yourself, you know, so it's knowing that you, that you're fully responsible for it and you take ownership of it, but you love it. All the same. Speaker 1:You love every moment. You'd have to love it. You have. So if you guys get incredibly rich, are you going to drop out of school? Don, you answered that first. Will you need school anymore? I think school would be a nice, a nice backup to [00:27:00] have. Um, right now we're doing a pretty good job of balancing it though. So, um, I guess we'll just wait and see to where this takes off. Um, but for now we're, we're doing pretty well in both school and activity assist. Yeah. So how would any interested listeners get ahold of you? So to anyone out there who's interested in working on the business side or on the back end or as a full stack developer, definitely go to our website, www.activityassist.com. Reach out to us on our contact us page. Check out how the product works. [00:27:30] If you're a parent, go to our website, see how we can save your school time. Speaker 1:Talk to your teachers, talk to your friends, do see what you can do. See if you liked the product, go check out our video, I n to anyone out there who's just a young entrepreneur, definitely go and see what you can do. I would say if you have an idea and you have a, if you have a team, if you have some friends that you know, let's tackle this, do it. Don't hesitate. Take, take control. It's the greatest experience you'll ever have. And you and we should. They go look at dorm room fund. If they have traction, if they have a business model, if they have the team, [00:28:00] then later you can fundraise. I think in the beginning it's about how do we talk to our consumer, how do we make sure the market needs this product? And then it's how do we build a great team? Because like I said, you need great people for a great business. Yeah, I would say you don't just go out there and be proactive. I think it's better to fail and learn from that experience than just sit back, be complacent and not do anything and also go out there and be proactive. That's it. Well, Joe and John, thank you for being on this program today. You are absolutely the youngest entrepreneurs that had been on my program. I mean, I'm impressed. [00:28:30] So activity assist. Congratulations. Yeah, Speaker 3:and good luck on your project. Very nice. And that was UC Berkeley students, John Siano and Joe Gleason. They're only freshmen, but they've started a company called activity assist and recently received $20,000 in funding from the dorm room fund. Their idea is to empower teachers to create digital permission slips and then [00:29:00] sending them off to parents instantly who can then grant permission and pay electronically while letting chaperones take attendance on the day of the trip through their mobile app. You've been listening to a method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show onK , a l ex Berkeley celebrating bay area. Innovators. Tune in again in two weeks at the same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this special Thanksgiving episode of #ThisOldMarketing, Joe and Robert discuss the amazing new content marketing launch for Y Combinator called "The Macro". Facebook Instant Articles is (surprise, surprise) not working for the 20 publishers...Robert Rose has a solution that involves content syndication, not advertising. In addition, the boys strongly disagree with a Gerry McGovern post about quality content.  Rants and raves include what is NOT content marketing.  This week's TOM example: US Military Hospitals. This week's article links: Facebook Instant Articleshttp://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-mulls-ad-changes-for-instant-articles-after-publisher-pushback-1447281399?alg=yPaired Withhttp://www.engadget.com/2015/11/12/facebook-instant-article-ad-revenue/ Y Combinator Launches The Macrohttp://techcrunch.com/2015/11/20/sifting-through-secrets/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000634Less Content Marketing, More Quality Contenthttp://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/less-content-marketing-more-quality-contentB2B Data Driven Trendshttp://adage.com/article/digitalnext/data-transform-b-b-marketing-2016/301386/ Sponsor Message: http://ContentMarketingUniversity.com Rants and Raves 8 Examples of Content Marketinghttp://marketingland.com/content-marketing-done-right-8-examples-can-learn-149088    

Learn all about venture capital funding and how and when to get it, from Saleem Khatri of Instavest. Hear his story and learn about Y Combinator, the venture capital firm that invested in Instavest.

Lona Alia Duncan, CEO and Founder of the online fashion platform, Style Lend, talks about the new sharing economy and how you can monetize your existing wardrobe hassle free! Please subscribe and leave a review to enter into the weekly raffle! In this episode you will learn: -Lona's background the inspiration to start Style Lend. - The "Sharing Economy", how you can monetize your closet. - Style Lend is the " Airbnb" model for your wardrobe. - How they are disrupting the fashion space. - The process. -The financial process for a start up. - Y Combinator incubator program that they took part in. - 2014 - fashion on line is a 1.3 trillion dollar industry and forecasted to 2 Trillion in 2015. Enjoy the episode! Jill

Discuss Bamm.TV’s model of shooting original content from independent artists and distributing it worldwide to get the artists greater exposure and a secondary source of incomeTRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:One of our main goals of Calyx is to play music that you haven't heard before. We love doing it. We've done it for 50 years and you can help us Speaker 2:do it for another 50 by contributing during a fundraiser that starts next week. Come on. Calyx has been doing this thing to close 50 years. The music industry around us has changed dramatically. The last decade has brought turmoil with the industry revenues shifting from the offline world to the online and artists trying to find where they stand in this new economy. It ended of use with Fam TV, [00:00:30] the San Francisco startup to proposes to use technology to get art as a bigger share of profits. Stay with us. Speaker 1:My name is Chris Hansen and I am the cofounder and CEO of Bam TV. Okay. And um, so give me your problem statement. We always start with this is kind of you see from a market perspective [00:01:00] what's going on. Where did you see the opportunity? If you look at where the music industry is right now, uh, approximately 96% of recorded music sales come from 20% of musicians. And that is an extreme inequality that is a product of, uh, you know, this, this system that we've inherited, the system that was based on physical products and not on services [00:01:30] or access. And so, you know, in the process over the last decade, um, emerging artists have been left in the dust and there really is no means for them to first of all get exposure. But secondly, to monetize their content, it's, it's almost impossible. So we addressed this problem as musicians. Speaker 1:Um, two of the other early hires and I were in a band together. So [00:02:00] we, we know some of the trials and tribulations of being an unknown artist and, uh, that's really where, where the idea was born out of. Okay. And tell me a little bit about your background. You're a musician and what other kinds of experiences do you have? So I mean, to go way back, uh, the idea really germinated, uh, in Atlanta, um, where I ran a gallery in a multimedia performance space. And, [00:02:30] uh, you know, we did a, in the summer of 2000, we did an eight week series of live video streaming programs. So it was called the blue milk show. And uh, you know, we learned a lot, but we also, one of the things we learned was that the, uh, the Internet and the general public was not ready for live video streaming in 2000. Speaker 1:Um, nobody could watch it. So then, um, you know, at the time I had launched with, with some artists, friends and in [00:03:00] Atlanta and also with my brother. And during the years, my brother and I is kind of bounced the idea back and forth. I came out to San Francisco to get my MBA. And, uh, the capstone of my entrepreneurship emphasis emphasis was, uh, this idea of bricks and mortar media. And the idea at that point was to create a venue that would be open to the public, that would live stream and record performances from, uh, independent and emerging bands [00:03:30] and serve as a content creation factory basically for this next generation of video content. And, uh, we pitched the idea and investors said, well, you know, it's interesting, but, uh, first go prove that you can get traction and that you can find, uh, you know, the talent. Speaker 1:And that you can find an audience. And so that's what we did. My brother and I have bootstrapped it to this point [00:04:00] and we've recorded over a hundred bands. Um, and we've got distribution agreements in place in a 150 countries that isn't there a venue called brick and mortar in Sydney? Is that, is that just by coincidence? It is by that is by coincidence that, that you're referring to? Uh, yeah, it's a, it's a little jazz club. I think it's owned by, uh, the same person that owns the new parish. Uh, used to be Coda. Um, but there is no, uh, [00:04:30] there is no relation. Okay. And um, so you went on the fundraising trail of these investors is do you to go to like a y Combinator or those types of organizations that all this tech startups go to or where, where are you trying to find audiences? Speaker 1:I think there's, there is a place for incubators for a lot of, a lot of, uh, startup ideas. We maybe did things the hard way, but maybe in other ways we were our [00:05:00] own incubator. Um, the idea of recording live performances began in our garage that we had rehearsed in as a band. Um, so from a garage in the inner Richmond, uh, we bands actually came in and recorded a full set and you know, we kind of, we kind of winged it and uh, you know, I was operating pro tools at the time and the other directors were operating cameras. Um, then we moved into a studio in Soma and best thing we ever did for the business was [00:05:30] stop recording on protools and hand the cameras to the film school graduates who actually knew what they were doing. And that's when, um, the content really started to take off. And so about, uh, sort of incubators and an early stage investors, um, you know, I'm not sure that we would've had a lot of believers early on until we just went out and did it. You can't, you can't say, oh, we're going to make content and it's going to be great. You're going [00:06:00] to love it. Um, cause until they actually see it, Speaker 2:ah, that's all extract. You're listening to KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. This is method to the Nadis 30 minutes show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Ali desire. And today we are interviewing Chris Hanson, CEO of Pan TV. Speaker 1:A lot of companies talk about content or distribution and it's very difficult to do both. Um, [00:06:30] so how did you guys come? It sounds like you guys do both. You generate the content, but you're also building the networks that's your come to that, um, business model. So yeah. Um, I mean just the, the, the nature of the agreement that we have with the artist, uh, we don't charge them anything to record and we split net profits 50, 50. And because of that, they, you know, are more than happy to give us a global distribution license [00:07:00] to the content. And it turns out that, uh, this idea of a global, you know, frictionless distribution arrangement is extremely rare in the music industry. So in this sort of proof of concept phase, we realized a, with an all digital workflow, we could produce HD music video content at a fraction of the cost that it would have, you know, run up. Speaker 1:Even a couple of years ago, I, and B, there was an unmet demand for [00:07:30] content internationally. And it was actually about a year ago, we were at a trade show and a, a content provider from Taiwan, um, said, you know, I'm trying to get music content on onto this cable network, but you know, nobody will give me their content and I've got, I've got a shelf space for it, but nobody will give it to me. So we realized that was a, an entry point. And so a cable operator in Taiwan was actually our first client, [00:08:00] um, that served as, um, you know, a proof of concept for us to initiate a relationship with Samsung. And, uh, and so what we have done as part of our launch is, you know, we've created a unique content offering by way of an app for Samsung smartphones and tablet devices. Seems to be the Internet has enabled global distribution where you don't have to go and negotiate with all these different, [00:08:30] um, countries. Speaker 1:But why, what value add are you guys providing as opposed to them just posting on Youtube besides the production value? It seems like you guys bring, well, it starts with curation. Um, and there we've lowered the cost of production, but there still is a cost and you can only record so many bands. So really that's, you know, the used to be extremely good at this, um, back in the day and they'd go into [00:09:00] the clubs and see the opening band as well as the headliner. And you know, the equivalent of that today is going on my space, going on Facebook. Also go into it to real world clubs and just getting to know the band, seeing what other music blogs are writing about and what festivals are people getting into. And you start to see patterns, um, for bands that are just about to break through. Speaker 1:And I won't necessarily take credit for, you know, them breaking through [00:09:30] if they hit to the extent that they have, you know, some have gone on to Conan and Letterman and Bonnaroo and you know, festivals and that sort of thing. But, uh, I will say that our music director, Phil Bang is, uh, if he could pick stocks as well as he can pick bands, we wouldn't need this round of funding. I don't think. So. You mentioned the patterns. Can you give us an example of a pattern? Sure. I mean, uh, you can do anything in the studio. Uh, you can [00:10:00] add vocal filters. You can do auto tune would it doesn't matter. So one pattern obviously is how is the band well-rehearsed, you know, can the lead singer hit the notes? Uh, because if they can't, in our case, we're just getting a license to a live performance. Speaker 1:So if they can't perform live, it's a nonstarter. Um, but also, you know, how big is the crowd? How many followers do they have? Do you see them doing Kickstarter campaigns? Are they, do they have management? Are they with an Indie label? All of these things [00:10:30] kind of create a picture of the band and uh, yeah. Th then it's just about timing. Are they on a west coast tour? Are they local? You know, are they at a festival that we can go record? Yeah. So let's talk about the content cause we, we've mentioned the content quite a bit, but it's video contents, not the audio. The ban has a deal for the audio with the label, most likely. Well No. So it is the audio. Um, I mean, so I should explain. They can have whatever relationship with a label, indie [00:11:00] or major, uh, that they want with us. Speaker 1:They come in, they record the songs usually a couple of times just so we're sure we get a good take and then we get a license to distribute that, the audio, the video, and we can remix, sample, make derivative works and sub-license the live performance, the live performance. Um, and then let's say, let's say that an independent band comes in, they record, we distribute, everybody's happy, but they get signed [00:11:30] to a label and the label wants to buy back all of their previous recordings. That's fine. We agree to a, a third party appraisal of the content and that becomes the basis for, uh, the exit from, from the deal. So we're not trying to lock anybody into, you know, a lifelong commitment to Bam TV. Uh, we're just trying to know, have a deal that makes sense for, for us, for the artist and for our distribution partners and hopefully [00:12:00] for the labels as well. Speaker 1:But it, is it a, is it a potential that you guys would have your own label too and just do that work? Yeah, I mean, people ask us a lot if, if we're a digital label or, you know, label 2.0 or whatever. Um, and I, I can definitely see that comparison. Uh, there is a little bit of baggage admittedly to calling yourself a label. So, uh, I try to save that comparison for the [00:12:30] end of the pitch instead of the beginning of the pitch. But, uh, but yeah, there are definitely comparisons, but I don't, I think the nature of a label is going to have to fundamentally change in order to survive. And so the big difference from the major labels, the 50% of revenues are still from physical sales. So, you know, they're testing the waters on streaming and digital, but they can't cannibalize entirely the physical side, so they're not able to move as quickly. Speaker 1:[00:13:00] We have no physical revenues. Um, you know, the content is created, edited and distributed entirely in the digital realm. So we can just explore that territory and just find agreements that, that work for everybody. So you said that this business couldn't have, couldn't have existed five years ago because of the, the digital editing technology, wasn't there the end to end process? Can you take us through that process a little bit? Yeah. And what, I mean, it certainly would have been possible, but it would've [00:13:30] been cost prohibitive of just a few years ago. Um, so yeah, I mean, we, we, we have a soundstage, uh, in our San Francisco studio. Um, we, we shoot with anywhere from four to six cameras depending. Um, and then, and so we do a variety of things. We'll do a live switch of, um, the event. So it's available for live streaming, but we really spend a lot of time on post-production. Speaker 1:Uh, we run on final cut and we'll do, you [00:14:00] know, multi-camera editing. Um, and so that 20% of the content that we create, uh, we give away free and clear to the musician. So that's usually the single, and we really try to get creative with that and just make it sort of a spectacular, um, asset for the band to EPK or for, you know, promotional purposes to get subscribers. And then, um, you know, gradually we'll edit if it's five songs, 10 songs, whatever. [00:14:30] Um, it's, so there's any number of ways that we can distribute the final product, uh, anywhere from 60 minute episodes for our cable partner in Taiwan to a curated play mixes, which is how we present the content on Android, uh, with our Samsung partnership. The play mix is basically 10 to 12 songs is Kinda like a mixed tape for the digital age. We encourage our users to, uh, to make [00:15:00] their own play mixes and share them with their friends. So, um, you know, file sharing does not have to be illegal or immoral or give you a guilty conscience because when you get a streaming model, um, you know, we can encourage, uh, the more the merrier as far as Speaker 2:hey distribution, you are listening to k a l x Berkeley 90.7 family streaming on the worldwide web@klxscuffberkeley.edu. [00:15:30] This is method to the madness of 30 minutes share to accelerate the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host, Toby bizarre. And today we're speaking with Chris Hanson, the CEO of Bam TV. Speaker 3:So one thing I wanted to ask you about was, I was looking at your website and there's language about this was created for musicians by musicians and it's very pro musician, um, [00:16:00] business you're creating. And I guess I was gonna say pro musician software, but it's much more than you've got the production, you've got the distribution, you got the software apps, you guys are doing a lot of different things. Um, but the kind of the, the reason behind it all is to help the musician. It seems like from a monetary perspective to cut them into the deal. Can you tell us a little bit about the business of music right now and, and kind of where does the money go right now and how are you going to change that equation? Speaker 1:Sure. Um, [00:16:30] since since Spotify arrived in the u s and especially since the Facebook partnerships with music streaming services has come up, um, a lot of attention is being paid to how music streaming services pay artists, first of all, how much, and secondly, do they keep the same relationship with the labels as they do with independent artists? And [00:17:00] I have sympathy for the streaming services because 50 to 70% of their revenues go to the labels regardless of what they tell you or will disclose publicly. Um, you know, if you look at Pandora's as one as they filed for their IPO, it depends year to year, but it's 50 to 70%. And you know, Spotify is facing essentially the same thing as, as rhapsody as is RDO as is pretty much everybody. So they pay more [00:17:30] to major label artists than they pay to indie artists. Speaker 1:Um, and again, these were the negotiated terms. It was you played this way or you don't make it, you know, into this market. So if you look for independent artists, there's just, there's just no chance that going to make money through digital streaming services as they are today. So that's, that's sort of our sweet spot is addressing that audience and we feel, yes, it's nice to the artist [00:18:00] to be, to do this 50 50 profit share. But frankly, I think it's much better to, uh, to share profits 50 50 rather than to pay revenues 50 to 70%. So it just makes, from our perspective, and maybe we're more of a boutique play in this regard, but, uh, it makes a lot more business sense for us. Speaker 3:And the revenue. Is it purchases made off of the content online or is there advertising revenue as well, like Google's [00:18:30] adsense, that type of thing? Speaker 1:Yeah, it's divided into, uh, direct licensing advertising and premium subscriptions or premium services and a weed. So there are a lot of direct licensing deals where it's free to the end user in whatever market, but they're paying us directly per subscriber. Um, a good portion of the android and Ios, uh, revenues will come from advertising. Um, we have a couple of different advertising partners to help us reach [00:19:00] those international markets. Um, and then it seems to be that anywhere from you can expect anywhere from five to 10% of your, uh, your die hard fans to get some kind of a premium engagement. We also allow for downloads. Um, but you know, it just varies from market to market. Um, what makes sense. For instance, it's, it makes sense to have, it makes sense to have streaming only access in the u [00:19:30] s but if you're in a remote, you know, uh, part of India, perhaps, maybe you would rather have them downloaded to your device. Speaker 3:Okay. And speaking of India, it sounds like you have a global reach. Um, you guys are right now, but, um, you have to curate the talent, right? So that you can't have people everywhere, although you have distribution everywhere. So, um, right now it's mostly bay area based bands that you're signing or how's that working right now? Speaker 1:No, I mean I would for [00:20:00] sure there are a good number of bay area bands, um, just for convenience and there's a lot of great talent here. But, um, you know, most bands, if they're doing a west coast tour, they're going to stop in San Francisco. So we do catch a lot of touring bands that way. And then when we go to festivals like south by southwest or the photosynthesis festival or, you know, different genres, we're able to diversify, uh, quite a bit. In January, we'll be, uh, at does met in [00:20:30] the Netherlands. Um, and so that will be our first sort of European, um, content creation. [inaudible] and even, um, even in Taiwan, uh, we've tried to make the content more approachable to a Taiwanese audience. So we've hired an OnAir VJ who speaks mandarin and, uh, kind of introduces American rock or American electronic music to a, to a Taiwanese audience. Speaker 1:So we're [00:21:00] trying to, even if we don't produce content in a native country, uh, we're trying to address that market if there's interest. Um, I guess one thing I would add too is we have about a third of our content under the umbrella of Bam Latino. And so it's, you know, perfectly addressable for all audiences, but it really targets urban subcultures because it's all Spanish language or, or Portuguese language. Um, and then broader [00:21:30] markets in Latin America. So we're able to get a lot of artists who are filling stadiums in Latin America, but they're playing jazz clubs when they come to San Francisco. And so, um, you know, it increases our reach more than we could. Speaker 3:Okay. I mean, you guys are in some ways, you're, uh, your taste makers, like you are curating the talent. Um, and that's, that's, oh, there's a long tradition of that and the music business. Um, so how do you feel like you can [00:22:00] scale that kind of, you know, tastemaking or finding the people that other people aren't finding do it? Speaker 1:The great thing about scalability and being global is every new international market you, you open up to, uh, you've, you've got a new way to monetize a piece of content. [inaudible] but in terms of scaling the curation process, we actually, I mean, that's, that's one of the reasons why we are, uh, seeking a series [00:22:30] a right now. Um, and there's, in order to, instead of, you know, we do two to three bands a week, and in order to make that eight or 10, we need to have a larger studio so that we can set up multiple sound stages at a time and increase the efficiency that way. We also have plans to open up to third party licensing. There's a lot of great content that's already out there, but there's just no, there's no market for it because it's getting lost on youtube or you [00:23:00] know, nothing wrong with youtube, but it's not great for discovery. Really. Um, so once we, you know, now that we have a foothold in our own created content, um, we're opening up to third party licensing as well. Speaker 3:So, and I would assume that you guys, the content you curate will be, you'll be moving and where that people want it to go as opposed to you guys trying to push new sounds or you're looking for audiences that are looking for that stuff already, right? Speaker 1:[00:23:30] Yeah, I mean, again, it is this idea of looking for patterns, looking for bands that, that, um, are about to break through. And so there is some kind of, I mean there is a consensus with other tastemakers out there to a certain extent. You start to see familiar names. Uh, you know, as you dive in and band names is, you know, are very colorful. So, uh, you either know it or you don't. And, you know, um, so you do start, I mean, I, there, there are bands that deserve [00:24:00] to break through and the best situation for us is to be there when they're, when they're primed for that. Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. Um, so you wanna give us a couple of examples of some bands that have come through the Bam TV network and it's made an impact on their careers. Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh, I'll, I'll start with, you know, one of the first bands that we recorded in our, in our San Francisco studio is, ha ha, Tonka. And these guys work really, really hard. They're on [00:24:30] tour all the time. And uh, so the first real compliment that, uh, that we got as a, as a company was when they, they told their fans, hey, we didn't have a tie, a chance to, uh, to make a music video for this song song as close every valve of your bleeding heart. And it's wonderful, by the way. And our live performance video stood in for as a substitute for them going to make their own music video. And that I thought was really cool. Speaker 3:[00:25:00] I love to talk to entrepreneurs about their vision. You know, you start something now and you're, you kind of scrap right now in the middle of it. But five years from now, let's say this thing takes off, what kind of impact or disruption will Bam TV have on the music business? Speaker 1:Well, I, I think the best, uh, innovations come from problems that the entrepreneur feels. I mean, you maybe not always, but I think once [00:25:30] you really empathize with the problem, you get a feel for it in a way that, that you can't just intellectually understand. And so I see where the, I see the trajectory we're on as being one element of that. Um, but we also have plans for, you know, ways for artists that are on the road to, um, to earn money directly from Bam t v so now, not just the profit share, but if they get customers [00:26:00] or if they get users to come online and download our app, we'll just pay them, you know, maybe it pays for gas money. Maybe it causes more bands to go on tour and take the leap. Maybe having a, an EPK that's a little bit more polished helps, you know, early stage bands get a better gig. Speaker 1:Um, I, I don't know if the, the music industry is ever going to be as big as it was, uh, you know, in [00:26:30] 99 or 2000 or whenever it peaked and maybe a smaller music industry is okay. Um, and maybe, you know, the only way for it, for a profit share to work is if we're transparent about how much we spend as a business and where our Costco and what we count as a cost. And maybe transparency is what the music industry really needs. Um, maybe it's okay to just shed the, the structures and the vestiges of, of what we had [00:27:00] and just start making it up as we go. And I think once we put artists sort of at the forefront and create a clear path for monetization for them, um, you know, the sky's the limit there. Speaker 3:That was Chris Hanson, CEO of Bam TV, a startup that is disrupting the music industry. We'd like to think of for being on the show today, and you can learn more about Pam tp by going to www dot [inaudible] Speaker 2:damn, that's p a m m. Dot. TV. This is a method to the madness [00:27:30] or websites method to the madness.org have a great Friday. Everybody. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Discussed startup process of LocalMind, a social/mobile/local company that moved from Montreal to San Francisco a week before the interviewTRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Okay. Okay. Okay. Speaker 2:So low about, that's the hot new buzzword in the bay and it refers to the social, local mobile apps that have exploded onto the scene due to the birth of aeration of smartphones over the last few years. Today on method to the madness, we interviewed Lenny Richie, whiskey, founder and CEO of local mind and upstart in a solo most space stay with us. Speaker 3:[00:00:30] So I start, uh, let's see. Seven months ago I started a company called local mind. And the basic idea of local mind is people are sharing their location all the time, all over the world. Right now there's millions of people checking in on foursquare, on Facebook, on call, all across the world. I heard a stat, there's 3 million chickens a day [00:01:00] on, on foursquare, and people are checking in and the value of that check in is pretty low. Still. Your friends know where you are, you get good, they get notified, you get [inaudible], you get badges, you get some points. And it's really not that much value out of all this effort that we're putting in as we're going out. And so I basically realized there's a lot more that we could do with this data and we don't really have to ask anyone to do anything more to give us that data. Speaker 3:And so the basic idea of local mine is let's connect someone that's interested in knowing what's at a [00:01:30] location with someone that's actually at that location in real time. And we do that by using the data that people are already sharing, like checking in at foursquare or checking in on Google or Facebook and when you check in, if for your user of local mine, you become available at that location to be sent a question by someone that's interested in knowing what's happening at that location. And the use cases for things like for a local line for a to like local mine is I'm going out, should I, we get in my car and drive 20 minutes and park and then go to this [00:02:00] bar that ends up being full or closed or not fun or they don't have a drink that I like or not kid friendly and I'm bringing my family. Speaker 3:And so local wine aims to solve that problem. Of removing any reason to be disappointed about a place that you're thinking about going to and on a broader scale gives you this kind of, the way I look at it as creating kind of this hive mind of humanity that you can connect everyone to everyone else in real time on demand to get information and to kind of get a little piece of advice [00:02:30] from someone that's knowledgeable about either location or a topic and then disconnect kind of this little on demand warm hole into other people's worlds with their permission obviously. And then you disconnect, then you go on your way. And so that's a local mine is all about. And so in that, in building the company and in exploring the space, I've learned a lot about the social world. There's kind of this social low como acronym. Speaker 3:People are using social location and mobile and so we're right in that space. And so yeah. [00:03:00] Okay. And in that space there's a ton of players. Right. Um, and is it really been, it's been the technology that's really gotten to the point where it's exploded or why is it exploding the way it is right now? The wave I've been thinking about it is there's 10 trends that I've noticed that have converged at this moment in time. And it's kind of random that they've all happened. They've been a long time coming, a lot of them, but the fact that they've all, the fact that [00:03:30] they've all converged, the way I look at, it's kind of this big crushing wave of all these little waves have been coming our way and all of a sudden these 10 things are, are collapsing in each other. And I'm trying to remember what the 10 are, but number one is, um, is the privilege proliferation of mobile phones and smartphones. Speaker 3:Everyone's got these smart phones that are in our pockets with us all the time and they can do amazing things. Um, so that's one. And corollary to that two is always on location data. We always have data. We're connected to [00:04:00] the web. We can do stuff, not just on our phone, but kind of this little portal into the cloud that the phone gives us access to. Then there's things like gps as part of these phones. There's things like, um, sharing our location, which I talked about or sharing a location much more. There's the cloud in cloud computing, which makes it a lot easier to start companies and to do, to try things. That's the way I look at is the cloud makes it really easy to try a new idea, not spent a lot of money on it. See what happens. It doesn't work out. Speaker 3:[00:04:30] Start over, not mortgage your house on it or not spend $1 million. And so the more times people try an idea, the more likely they're going to be hitting on something that's actually successful, failing fast as the, as the Buzzword, um, other trends or things like venue databases, there's all this free information about all the places that exist in the world when they're open, where the addresses are, pictures of them, um, information about checking date and things like that. Um, that's [00:05:00] kind of the basic idea of the trends that have been seen and all that is in the other one. The other important one actually is a, the social graph. The fact that there's a quantifiable social graph that we can all plug into and use. Facebook's created that Twitter has got that Foursquare's getting that now. And so we don't have to learn who your friends are. Speaker 3:We can feed off of existing social platforms. And so these turn 10 trends, I dunno if I listed all 10. Um, we've kind of allowed us to do amazing things and being in the startup world, on [00:05:30] the one hand, it's a lot easier to start something really, really interesting because you don't have to do a lot of these things yourself. On the other hand, there's a lot more competition because everybody else can do these things too. And so you have to work really hard to differentiate and to move beyond that kind of pre chasm world. Speaker 4:You're listening to k a LX Berkeley 90.7 FM streaming on the worldwide web@kalxdotberkeley.edu. This is method to the madness, a 30 minute show about the innovative of the bay area. Speaker 5:I'm your host aliene Huizar [00:06:00] and today we're interviewing lady Richard Ski CEO of local mind. Speaker 3:And the precursor to local mine was this app that I wrote. So for squares API came out about two years ago in 2009 I think. And that was the first major new platform that came out after Twitter and Facebook. And those were extremely successful in creating an ecosystem around their data and around the rapists. And so I knew something big was going to happen with Foursquare's data as the first time that we had access to location data. And [00:06:30] yeah, location data was really the thing that was really interesting to me. And so there's this quote that the McClure Dave McClory uses the best companies and easiest companies to help succeed are ones that get you either paid to get you made or get you laid. And so I focused on the last part. How do I get users late? Because that's lot, that's easier to market to people. Speaker 3:And so what I did is I built this app called assisted serendipity that uses sports score data to notify you when the male to female ratio tips in your favor [00:07:00] at any bar or any restaurant or anything that you're wanting to watch. Let's say you pick 10 places in. As soon as there's more girls than guys, more guys than girls, you get alerted and it's still running. It's out there. You can use it still uses foursquare data. And while I was building that, I kind of realized there's a lot more we can do with this data, not just how many girls and guys that are, but what if I want to know other stuff about what's happening there? Why can I contact one of those girls or one of those guys and find out number one, is this true? Are there a lot of girls? There are a number. [00:07:30] So that's the basic idea. But what about if I want to know, is it, is it fun? Is there room to sit? Is there beer that I like? And so Mike came out of that. Speaker 5:Okay, cool. So, um, do you have any quantifiable statistics about the number of people who've gotten laid? It's just a serendipity, your metrics guy, right? Speaker 3:It's hard to track. The only thing I'd been able to track is at the bottom of the notification, you get an a have an ad that says if you'd like the service to buy me a beer [00:08:00] and people donate $3. And so I've had like five people donate $3. Oh Nice. So maybe something's happened there. Speaker 5:That's something there. All right. So, um, you know, one question I have is about these, these mobile apps, the social, mobile, local stuff, there's so many of them coming out and there's a really important, um, launch strategy that has to be in place, I think, you know, because the key is to get to a tipping point, you know, especially if something like your app where, [00:08:30] and I was playing around with and I'm looking on a map and there's a few people in Berkeley, there's a few minds that pop up. And so that's good to see. Yeah, it was an empty, but you know, worldwide people can use this app anywhere. Right. So how do you, how do you plan to get that kind of adoption that you need for such an app? Yeah. Speaker 3:Yeah. And if I, if I had the, the answer to that I would, I would, I would be very rich. It's a hard problem to solve and every, like you said, everybody's trying to tackle that and there's been a, a few successes. Instagram somehow figured it out and they're not so much location but they did something right for square. [00:09:00] It took them a while to get through there, but they figured it out. And so there's a models you can follow. Yelp kind of did that and they built a very kind of location specific service that IX exploded. And so we're, we're honestly in the center of that kind of storm is solving that problem. The, there's a few typical things you do. Number one, connect and tap your social graph as much as possible. Get everyone to tell their friends about it as much as possible. Speaker 3:The key is to create critical mass, as you said, in a specific region [00:09:30] up to now. We've been very organic across the world. Tell your friends, see what happens kind of thing. Not focused on any specific area. The next big phase for us, and actually just two days ago, we hired a head of community development who is number one job is acquire users and retain users. And the strategy is specifically focused on the bay area and get critical mass in the city because number one, it's easiest to do to get critical mass in people like new things, um, especially social, mobile location type stuff. [00:10:00] And um, and two of them were here and so it makes sense to launch here. We actually tried initially to launch in Montreal, which is where we launched the company, which is unusual, but, but that's where we launched in it. It worked out really well. Unfortunately there's not enough for square attraction there. People use it, but it's not as kind of regular day of life as it is here. And so our big push right now is let's get on the ground, start doing meetups, start doing happy hours, let's get local press, let's get people that are kind of influencers interested in local [00:10:30] mind and talking about it. Um, so that's really the big strategy in right now. Speaker 5:Okay. And um, tell me a little bit about, you went through a, um, an incubator process in Montreal ride this shows about innovation. And so that's very much, you know, when are not within our realm of interest is how do, how did that experience go down for you about getting into it and going through it? Speaker 3:Okay. Well first I'll say that if you're starting a company, I would 100% recommend finding some sort of incubator to be involved [00:11:00] in because especially if it's your first company, it's like a startup on training wheels or a startup with a rocket engine strapped to the back. It accelerates everything that you would organically do by tenfold. And there is no reason not to do it. You give up equity and you have to listen to people all day to give you and giving you advice. But it's so worth it. It's, it's unbelievable. Unfortunately, there's kind of this incubator bubble happening now where there's hundreds and hundreds of incubators out there and you can't trust them all to do a good job. There's the common ones, y Combinator, [00:11:30] techstars and guys like that. But um, so I just wanted to kind of say that up front, the way that we got involved with them, it was very serendipitous. Speaker 3:I was up in Montreal for a conference conference called bit north, but I'm going to again a month from now, which is a very small intimate conference, 50 people in Montreal in a cabin for a weekend. And everyone that comes there has to do a talk, five minutes talk. And the Tedx talk that I ended up doing came from that. So there's a lot of serendipity involved. And so the guys that were launching this incubator happened to be at the conference [00:12:00] and they knew about me from assistant serendipity actually and from web metrics, the company I worked for. And so we just started talking and we kind of went to lunch after the conference was over and local mine came out of that. We're sitting around and talking about all this data that's out there, location data and foursquare and assisted serendipity and what else could we do with that? Speaker 3:And local mine came out of that. And so the fact that the idea was kind of this mutual idea across a bunch of people and can we can incubator, I had to move up there to do it and I don't regret that for a second as is the best [00:12:30] experience of my life. Um, but that's how I got involved with them as, you know, it was almost too easy. I didn't have to go and pitch a hundred incubators or anything like that. I just met these guys and then picked up my life, left my job and moved up to Montreal. Yeah. And the, the um, simpleness of the is really, I think, really exciting. Um, so how many ideas did you kick around before you got to that one? That was, that was the only one that made sense. So, yeah. You know, that's, I'm kind of in the mode of my life or I don't want to think about any other ideas. Speaker 3:[00:13:00] Every, every kind of new idea. Urban new app. I look at it second, we take something from here, from the kernel into local mine. How do we make local money more useful? And so I'm trying not to avoid any sort of new ideas. The incubators themselves have a lot of good ideas and so if you're not sure of a company, you want to start finding incubator, I'm sure they have some ideas that they've heard that other people have abandoned or that they've kind of come up with as they hear other people's ideas. Okay. So you go through the incubator process and um, do they provide seed funding for you? Yeah, and I think [00:13:30] most of them do that. This one provided a more easy funding than most, but they take a more, the bigger chunk of equity and that's their model. And their model is very unusual. Speaker 3:It's a year long program up to a year. You don't have to stay there for year. You work in their office space. They're there every day across the desk, meet with you a few times a week. Um, it's a very lean startup oriented, you know, kind of that whole, that whole methodology. So it's very, the funding is based on these milestones and trenches of lean startup philosophy. First you get, [00:14:00] so it's a 50, you get $50,000 for this incubator, you get $10,000 up front, you get another 20 when you've made your MVP and then you get another 20 when you gotten product market fit. And so you have to kind of convince them that you've got those things and yeah, they're there every, every day giving you advice and telling you how, how slow you're working terribly. Your ideas are, that's interesting. So it would almost seem to be somewhat of an advantage to be outside of the bay areas bubble in that kind of [00:14:30] scenario because you're gonna get more attention. Speaker 3:That's, that's exactly how it worked out for us. Nothing I planned and we're kind of actually caught in this little, um, I dunno, story around people leaving Canada companies. Why are they leaving Canada? And so it's kind of an interesting kind of circle of stories around us right now. But, um, um, yeah, the uh, what was your question again? I'm sorry. Say maybe it's an advantage was already statement. Yeah. Well I guess that [00:15:00] my question would be is why did you move to California? Yeah. Well, so let me address that real quick is I totally, we found that to be very true as launching outside of the bay area. Not that I know, but it would have been like to go to start from scratch at launch year, but it ended up being really, really helpful for us is in a Montreal for example, as soon as there's an interesting idea or something people like and See a vision for it, they completely supported and love it and do everything they can to help you, which isn't gonna happen here because there's so many other people doing the same kind of thing. Speaker 3:And so you kind of raise [00:15:30] rise right to the top if you have anything worthwhile. And so that helped us tremendously. We had a lot of great attention and press, made some amazing friends and contacts there and now we kind of are riding that wave into the valley here. Hopefully it works out. Um, yeah, so launching here would be much more difficult. There's a lot more competition and especially in Montreal where they're creating through really, really focused on creating an ecosystem there. There's a lot of support, there's money, there's advisors, there's office space, there's a lot of, there's a lot of talented people there. So they worked out really well for us. But [00:16:00] then what we're seeing here, yeah, so that's, that's, that's the story we, we keep running into, you know, the way we look at it as you need a reason not to move here. Speaker 3:This is the center of gravity for our world, especially mobile, social location type stuff. You're at a disadvantage not being here, not being able to go get a coffee with an investor and a partner or employees they might want hire. And so the entire time we had, we were looking for reasons not to move here. We're like going to New York and if there was a good, a strong investor out [00:16:30] there that really wanted us to move there, we would've moved there too. But it was really the default for us. And really the decision was between the valley or or the city. And we decided in the city Speaker 4:you are listening to k a LX Berkeley 90.7 FM streaming on the worldwide web@kalxdotberkeley.edu. This is method to the madness of 30 minutes show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Ali Nasar and today we're interviewing lady Richard Ski, CEO of local mind. [00:17:00] Tell me a little bit about, you talked about the social graph, um, you're not going to accessing it. Um, so is it a big abstract data set or are there visualizations that you can use to really understand it better or how does that work? Speaker 3:The simple way to look at it is you ask Facebook, who are this guy's friends who are Lenny's friends? And it just gives you this big list of all my friends on Facebook and their Facebook ids. [00:17:30] Other services like foursquare gives you all their names and their email addresses and their phone numbers if they haven't been foursquare and where they've checked in. And so that's kind of the data you're playing with. And with that you can figure out number one, who of your friends are also members of the service. You can figure out when you sign up for the service, how many of your friends are already members. So we could show you here's who was already a member and maybe you should think about signing up, kind of the social proof idea. That's the first layer. And then you could figure out who's your friend, who's a friend of a friend. Speaker 3:And so [00:18:00] I sign up and I can see who else is on the system that's across. So let me give a concrete example. When you open up, look in mind and you sign into a local mine, you're not only see every other user that's a member of local mine. You also see all your friends that are on foursquare that aren't necessarily users because foursquare gives us access to that data. They tell us where your friends have checked in, even if they're not members of local mine. And so that allows you to send questions to friends of yours that aren't necessarily users, [00:18:30] if they provide their phone number, if they provide force with their phone number. And so that's a very concrete use of the social graph data that without that you sign up and we just know eighth Lenny, great. Now what do we do with your social graph data? We can send an email to your friends, hey, your friend signed up, you should join or allow you to invite your friends, things like that. Um, and then you know, there's Twitter too, which has a tremendous amount of social graph data. Speaker 5:So what's the um, security policies for accessing those graphs? Can anybody do it? Speaker 3:You as a user, [00:19:00] you authenticate. So you sign in and you say local Wayne is asking for permission to access this data with foursquare, sorry, with Facebook is very granular. There's trying to remember how many permissions there are. There's like 20 or 30 permissions that you asked for and so when you [inaudible], you've probably seen you sign up for an app and you say like login before scoring. It gives you a list of things that they're going to have access to and so you read through that and you're like, all right, sure. And it's an all or nothing kind of situation. You can say, look, I'm mind can only get access to these things because we require [00:19:30] all that data that we asked for it. It's all or nothing kind of kind of thing. And different services have different permission levels, Twitter and foursquare, all or nothing. Speaker 3:There's no real granularity. It's everything or nothing forced Facebook gives you very granular permission metrics, which honestly, I don't think anyone really understands. Probably from the user's perspective, they just see a big list and then I see a big allow button and I think most people just click allow, which is, it's a tough position for Facebook to be because they, you know, they're like, yeah, we're asking you what's the problem? [00:20:00] Because if you get this off down the road, you've approved it. What are you going to do? Yeah, it's like the iTunes terms of service that no one reads. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 5:Okay. Um, another thing I wanted to ask you about was, um, you're obviously about solving a big data problem, right? Right. Huge amounts of data that you're trying to do. Analytics, awning, and to extract some kind of knowledge, right? Location aware knowledge. So how do you go about [00:20:30] architecting the system to do that? Did you, you mentioned cloud computing platforms. Who using someone like that or did you have to hire architects to build you up Speaker 3:for database or? So my general philosophy with starting any sort of project is do as little as possible upfront because you have no idea where it's actually going to go. Don't waste your time architecting it over, architecting it early because you may end up realizing this isn't exactly what I wanted to build. And you spend six months building this amazing architecture, amazing data, data store [00:21:00] that you're not, not gonna end up using. And so my philosophy has always been do the bare minimum actually released something, see how people like it and iterate on that. And so we're still in that mode of let's just keep iterating and evolving from a very simple design until we've got this product market fit, which is kind of this tangential concept. What is bragging market fit? You know, it's when your users are signing up like crazy, maybe no one really knows what that means. Speaker 3:But anyway, um, [00:21:30] so we are built on the cloud where all Google app engine, which is a platform as a service, I think that's very clearly the future of software development. It's the natural evolution of assembly language to c type code to Java c plus plus to Ruby Python to platform as a service where instead of dealing with tiny registers and memory memory buckets and when you're doing assembly now you're not even dealing with servers. You just write code, [00:22:00] you say put something on a database call URL and you upload it into the cloud and it manages scalability for you, manages performance and manages servers going down over heating power being cut out. And from the perspective of an entrepreneur or a programmer, anytime you spend on something that's not a core competency is a waste of time because everybody's doing that and it's not going to differentiate you unless you're infrastructure company or you figured out a way to make it really cheap like Google, Facebook, they've kind of got to the point [00:22:30] where they have to worry about that stuff because it's a differentiator for them. Speaker 3:No one's going to be able to scale up to Google's level because they've done so much innovation on that. So I'm all about platform as a service. If I couldn't use Google app engine and I would do something like Amazon or Rackspace and I would never think about using my own hardware unless there's a really, really kind of monetary justification for that and there's not just money. It's also the opportunity cost of operations dealing with servers, waking up in the middle of the night, Google app engine. I love it as [00:23:00] it pretty much been universally adopted by this wave of entrepreneurs. Is there anybody who's like old school, I'm going to build it myself. I would say it's been almost exclusively cloud-based now and it's really, are you gonna go with Amazon or are you going to go with Rackspace or you're going to go with Google app engine and then there's, there's Heroku, which is a very popular too sure. Speaker 3:But there's still definitely a shift. There's still a kind of a divide between the regular cloud like Amazon and on the platform as a service. And I think platforms and service clouds are still very [00:23:30] early, but I'm a huge fan. I would 100% recommend using them. Okay. So one thing, an interesting quote I read from Richard Scoville last week was about, um, he's getting tired of checking out all these new apps that come out and people talking about all the users they have. Right. So you said that the real metric isn't how many users do you have? It's your attrition rate. That's what he wants to talk to people about. So how do you make it sticky? Yeah, yeah. I call it retention, engagement and retention. And I totally [00:24:00] agree. It's, it's kind of tricky. It's, as a company, we're always focused on user acquisition. And retention and you always have to figure out which one's more important. Speaker 3:When we talk to investors, they seem to be really fixated on users. How many users do you have? You know, if you say have 20,000 users, that's one thing. If you have 200,000 they're excited. If you have 2 million, they're really excited. Even if 1% of them, I wouldn't say if it's that bad, like say 5% are retained, if only 5% are actually active, it's fine for them in [00:24:30] a lot of cases, which is sad because that's not really a product if no one's sticking around. And so we as a company have to decide what's more important and where do we put our resources, because you can always only focus on a couple of things. And so yeah, so retention, that's, that's the product market fit is people are coming back to your product. They're just signed up. They actually find it useful and keep coming back. Speaker 3:And especially on the iPhone platform, like you said, there's a thousand apps coming out every day and there's only so many apps you can fit on your iPhone. It's front [00:25:00] page or first few pages. And so it's a battle for that kind of territory warfare on the iPhone. And there's a lot of tricks that you can use and you have to balance tricks between, between tricks and actual value in the product. And so some tricks, something I've been noticing is there's kind of this tragedy of the common situation around email. It's been there for a while where you want to bug your users as much as possible, as much as possible to remind them that you exist. And so email was the kind of the original version of that. And now push notifications [00:25:30] are becoming that people want to, apps want to notify as much as possible to be like, oh yeah, I exist. Speaker 3:And so, so that's a, so that's a tricky uses. Every time a user of yours joins, you notify all their friends, hey, this user's joined. So they remember, Oh yeah, local mind exists or whatever app exists. And Oh, people are joining. That's awesome. They're doing really well. So that's a trick. People use emailing users every week with some interesting information. Um, so those are tricks. Then there's actual value, you know, just make an app useful. Like [00:26:00] Facebook. People come back to it five times a day. The value is I want to know what's going on in my world, which is a really important need that we all have. And so, but that's a hard problem to solve until you get everybody on it. That's that critical mass problem, right? You're not going to know what's going on until everybody's on it. Um, so in the end, the answer to your question is to make a product that has actually useful to people. Speaker 4:Yeah, this is the mighty 90.7 FM k a l x Berkeley. You're listening to method to the madness [00:26:30] at 30 minute show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Aliene Huizar and today we've been speaking with CEO Lenny Richard, ski of local mind. Speaker 3:So let's talk about local mines use. So Speaker 5:tell us some stories about, you know, some anecdotes about people have used it in cool ways. [inaudible] Speaker 3:sure. So one, there's a few stories that I, that I like to tell the one is someone was sending a question to a concert venue. I think it was a girl talk [00:27:00] concert, I think it was actually in San Francisco and they wanted to know if it was, if there's a long line to get in and they wanted to kind of buy ticketed foods, not too crowded and they got an answer back where the guy said that's not so crowded, just getting rolling but I have an extra ticket and if you want to come by I'll give it to you. And they ended up meeting and got the ticket. So that's a great story. You know, that's, that's local. Mine is built on this theory that people have intrinsic desire to help people and they're intrinsically helpful and they enjoy helping. And [00:27:30] not to say people are intrinsically good, but that people like helping other people. Speaker 3:And so that's a great example of that. You know, you got nothing out of it. He met some guy and gave him a free ticket. Another example is when the tsunami hit Japan a few months ago, we saw a bunch of questions being sent to people in Japan about how are things going? Is there anything thing we can do to help you as the water reached the certain point. And what's interesting about local mind is he opened up the app and you see this map of the world and you can zoom [00:28:00] around and you zoom in to Japan and you see markers lit up in Japan, all over Japan. And you kind of realize I can contact some guy in Japan just from random guy, you know, either I want to go to Japan and I'll ask a real question. Or You just talking to some guy in Japan. Speaker 3:How else do you contact someone in Japan? There's no, yeah, in Japan, guy@japan.com and so look at my, allows you to do that. And so we saw people doing that, clicking on markers, reading it on the news, and then clicking markers and sending questions with what can we do to help what's happening? So that was a [00:28:30] great story and it was great to see that kind of thing. There was um, after some big lawn died, we saw people sending questions to downtown New York asking like, how's the party? And kids pay my respect. So that was really cool. And Ground Zero. Um, yeah those are some of the interesting stories. Speaker 5:Cool. So what about um, does my, you know, always ask this question to every entrepreneur I talked to you five years from now. What does it look like? Speaker 3:The Vision, I always come back to you with local mine is this kind of ammunition [00:29:00] to the service where you can see and you can know what's happening anywhere in the world in real time right now. Right now it's through other people. You ask a person a question, they give you an answer and you can see through kind of their eyes metaphorically. I think in the future we're not going to have to rely on people for that type of information. I think we're going to have a lot of interesting API APIs and sensors that are already integrated around the world that we can tap through API APIs. We can figure out how crowded is a place, have noisy as a place, how much parking is left. [00:29:30] Um, how many seats are left at a restaurant without actually having to ask anyone. We're just going to have the data available and local mine is built on this premise that there's all this stuff that people are doing that together creates this amazing products. Speaker 3:We're sitting on top of four square go all of Facebook. We use simple Jia, we use urban airship, we use, you know, we're sitting in apples, the apples marketplace, all these things that connect, that save us time. We don't have to worry about them and we can iterate and innovate a lot more quickly. [00:30:00] And so I see the same thing happening with the world tomorrow. Riley talks about sensors in the world in this kind of Internet of things where the world becomes more connected to the digital world and once real world sensors are are in place, we can do amazing things with them. Like the kind of what I'm describing, we're local mind is going, so the nerds will rule or I think everyone will will benefit to, I don't see it just being the nerds, but you have to be able to access the API to really see what you're saying. Well, it's nice as we're building this on [00:30:30] top of all that stuff so you don't have to worry about it as leisure. Ask a question or find whatever you want to know, but yeah, in spite of that, the nerds will rule. We're all over that. We're the new rock stars, right? We're changing people's lives. Speaker 4:You can check out local mind@localmind.com or check out their app in the iTunes app store for iPhones. Just go to iTunes and type local mind. This has been method to the madness. You can check us out@methodtothemadness.org have a great Friday. Everybody. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week on the show, industry software news, a gear review for you horn players, an offer of full master multitrack session files from a Trent Reznor (NIN - Nine Inch Nails) with permission to do just about anything you want with them and an unexpected dangerous donkey update! Buck Owens1929-2006 Country music legend and pioneer of the "Bakersfield Sound," Buck Owens is dead at 76. His hit songs include: Act Naturally and I've Got a Tiger by the Tail. Owens also released his own Bridge Over Troubled Water album that included two other Paul Simon songs, as well as particularly strong and moving versions of Bob Dylan's Love Minus Zero, No Limit and Donovan's Catch the Wind. Owens was Nashville outlaw that inspired the same in future artists like Dwight Yokum. We really want you to get involved in the show, so please send us your favorite recording tips and tricks in .mp3 format and we'll include them in the show! And send us pictures of your recording space and equipment which we'll also use in an upcoming new spot called Featured Studio Of The Week! Are you working on, or finishing up a project that our listeners would like to listen in on? Maybe you just recorded a track that's cooler than cool. We want to play it on the show! Get in touch with us and let us know about it! Crosstalk: Propellerhead announces Reason 3.0.5 for Intel Macs - Beta testers needed! http://www.PropellerHeads.se IK and Sonic Reality are offer free sounds for Reason���® -- Yes, you can download FREE Sonic Refills, demo patches and custom Combinator modules! Click here for the free Sonic Refills IK Multimedia announced that AmpliTube 2.0 is finally shipping. So, if you've ordered, keep your eye out for the big brown truck with goodies in it! http://Amplitube.com The Stupid Knob: Last week Mike announced the wacky but true statistic that every year, more people are injured in donkey related incidents than are injured in airplane related mishaps. It seems there may be more to it. Mike shares his insights. Gear Review: Matt Long from the Home Studio And Audio Review returns to review a very specialized piece of gear for trumpet players...the Yamaha PM7 Silent Brass System. Yamaha PM7 The System consists of the ST9 Personal Studio (the control unit), a Pickup Mute, a locking cable, and earphones. The step-up ST5 Silent Brass Performance Studio adds an array of effects plus practice tools. Spotlight: Trent Reznor (NIN - Nine Inch Nails) has been, and still is, giving away master multitrack sessions for two of his songs for you to remix / reinterpret / destroy or whatever. The Hand That Feeds GarageBand Format Only Trent Reznor Only GarageBand, Ableton Live, Pro Tools and Sony Acid Click here to download the multitrack masters! Answer To Last Week's Trivia Question: Q: What was the first commercial music CD released in the US that was also manufactured in the US? All CDs sold in the US previously had been import titles pressed for overseas labels. (These were still manufactured overseas, but for US labels.) A: According to the Tenth Anniversary of The CD supplement to the September 26, 1992 issue of Billboard Magazine, it was the September 1984 release of Bruce Springsteen - Born In The USA. This Week's Trivia Question: Q: Besides John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, what two other people were once members of The Beatles? See you next week! Tags: music recording studio home studio mixing trent reznor nin nine inch nails garageband buck ownens amplitube dwight yokum bakersfield sound propellerhead act naturally i've got a tiger by the tail bridge over troubled water paul simon frappr digidesign protools bob dylan love minus zero catch the wind no limit nashville reason combinator subtractor malstrom yamaha pm7 silent brass intel mac ik multimedia sonic reality sonic refill rex loops the hand that feeds ableton live sony acid bruce springsteen born in the usa John Lennon paul mccartney george harrison ringo starr the beatles