Podcasts about cowboy ventures

Skippy and Doogles sit down with the one and only Aileen Lee. Aileen is the founder of the venture firm Cowboy Ventures, and created the term "unicorn" for companies worth at least $1 billion and less than 10 years old. Awesome convo.Join the Skippy and Doogles fan club. You can also get more details about the show at skippydoogles.com, show notes on our Substack, and send comments or questions to skippydoogles@gmail.com.

Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF. Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock, discusses going all-in on AI. Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Brad Stone shares the sights and sounds of the Bloomberg Tech Summit. Aileen Lee, Founder & Managing Partner at Cowboy Ventures, talks about the pulse of venture capital investing. Monique Woodward, Founding Partner at Cake Ventures, looks at work shifting in the age of AI. Anthony Aguirre, Executive Director of the Future of Life Institute, addresses the AI risks that businesses are facing. Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.Today's episode features an enabler of the micro VC movement who has now scaled his business into one of the industry's larger fund administrators. Braughm Ricke is the Founder and CEO of Aduro Advisors, a leading fund administrator that has carved out a sterling reputation in the VC world.He's grown the business to over $114B+ AUA and over 450+ customers, that counts many of the leading VC funds, including Lowercarbon, Cowboy Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Craft, Haystack, Boost VC, and others, as customers. They've also managed to combine a high-quality service with innovative technology and a partnership strategy that has enabled them to differentiate from other fund admins.Prior to founding Aduro, Braughm was the founding CFO of True Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley VC fund. Braughm is incredibly knowledgeable about the private markets space more generally and is also an active investor in the private markets startup ecosystem, investing early in the likes of Carta, Allocate, Passthrough, Arch, and others.Braughm and I had a fascinating conversation about the evolution of fund administration. We discussed:Why Braughm started with emerging managers and the unmet need he saw to serve them.Why he believed the emerging manager landscape would grow.How he's moved upstream beyond venture capital clients.How fund admin can integrate technology.Will AI change fund administration?Advice Braughm would give to founders building in private markets.Thanks Braughm for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom on building a core infrastructure provider for private markets.

This week, Tyler and Adrian discuss Cyera's $300M Series C, which lands them a $1.4B valuation! But is that still a unicorn? Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, who coined the term back in 2013, recently wrote a piece celebrating the 10th anniversary of the term, and revisiting what it means. We HIGHLY recommend checking it out: https://www.cowboy.vc/news/welcome-back-to-the-unicorn-club-10-years-later They discuss a few other companies that have raised funding or just come out of stealth, including Scrut Automation, Allure Security, TrojAI, Knostic, Prompt Armor. They discuss Eclipsium's binary analysis tooling, and what the future of fully automated security analysis could look like. Wiz acquired Gem, and Veracode acquired Longbow. Adrian LOVES Longbow's website, BTW. They discuss a number of essays, some of which are a must read: Daniel Miessler's Efficient Security Principle Subsalt's series on data privacy challenges Lucky vs Repeatable, a must-read from Morgan Housel AI has Flown the Coop, the latest from our absent co-host, Katie Teitler-Santullo Customer love by Ross Haleliuk and Rami McCarthy We briefly cover some other fun - reverse typosquatting, AI models with built-in RCE, and Microsoft having YET ANOTHER breach. We wrap up discussing Air Canada's short-lived AI-powered support chatbot. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-357

This week, Tyler and Adrian discuss Cyera's $300M Series C, which lands them a $1.4B valuation! But is that still a unicorn? Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, who coined the term back in 2013, recently wrote a piece celebrating the 10th anniversary of the term, and revisiting what it means. We HIGHLY recommend checking it out: https://www.cowboy.vc/news/welcome-back-to-the-unicorn-club-10-years-later They discuss a few other companies that have raised funding or just come out of stealth, including Scrut Automation, Allure Security, TrojAI, Knostic, Prompt Armor. They discuss Eclipsium's binary analysis tooling, and what the future of fully automated security analysis could look like. Wiz acquired Gem, and Veracode acquired Longbow. Adrian LOVES Longbow's website, BTW. They discuss a number of essays, some of which are a must read: Daniel Miessler's Efficient Security Principle Subsalt's series on data privacy challenges Lucky vs Repeatable, a must-read from Morgan Housel AI has Flown the Coop, the latest from our absent co-host, Katie Teitler-Santullo Customer love by Ross Haleliuk and Rami McCarthy We briefly cover some other fun - reverse typosquatting, AI models with built-in RCE, and Microsoft having YET ANOTHER breach. We wrap up discussing Air Canada's short-lived AI-powered support chatbot. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-357

In the days when Mirai emerged and took down DynDNS, along with what seemed like half the Internet, DDoS was as active a topic in the headlines as it was behind the scenes (check out Andy Greenberg's amazing story on Mirai on Wired). We don't hear about DDoS attacks as much anymore. What happened? Well, they didn't go away. DDoS attacks are a more common and varied tool of cybercriminals than ever. Today, Michael Smith is going to catch us up on the state of DDoS attacks in 2024, and we'll focus particularly on one cybercrime actor, KillNet. Segment Resources: Understanding DDoS Attacks: What is a DDoS Attack and How Does it Work? - I know the title makes this blog post sound rather basic, but it will get you up to speed on all the latest DDoS types, actors, and terminology pretty quickly! What is An Application-Layer DDoS Attack, and How Do I Defend Against Them? 2023 DDoS Statistics and Trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killnet This week, Tyler and Adrian discuss Cyera's $300M Series C, which lands them a $1.4B valuation! But is that still a unicorn? Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, who coined the term back in 2013, recently wrote a piece celebrating the 10th anniversary of the term, and revisiting what it means. We HIGHLY recommend checking it out: https://www.cowboy.vc/news/welcome-back-to-the-unicorn-club-10-years-later They discuss a few other companies that have raised funding or just come out of stealth, including Scrut Automation, Allure Security, TrojAI, Knostic, Prompt Armor. They discuss Eclipsium's binary analysis tooling, and what the future of fully automated security analysis could look like. Wiz acquired Gem, and Veracode acquired Longbow. Adrian LOVES Longbow's website, BTW. They discuss a number of essays, some of which are a must read: Daniel Miessler's Efficient Security Principle Subsalt's series on data privacy challenges Lucky vs Repeatable, a must-read from Morgan Housel AI has Flown the Coop, the latest from our absent co-host, Katie Teitler-Santullo Customer love by Ross Haleliuk and Rami McCarthy We briefly cover some other fun - reverse typosquatting, AI models with built-in RCE, and Microsoft having YET ANOTHER breach. We wrap up discussing Air Canada's short-lived AI-powered support chatbot. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-357

In the days when Mirai emerged and took down DynDNS, along with what seemed like half the Internet, DDoS was as active a topic in the headlines as it was behind the scenes (check out Andy Greenberg's amazing story on Mirai on Wired). We don't hear about DDoS attacks as much anymore. What happened? Well, they didn't go away. DDoS attacks are a more common and varied tool of cybercriminals than ever. Today, Michael Smith is going to catch us up on the state of DDoS attacks in 2024, and we'll focus particularly on one cybercrime actor, KillNet. Segment Resources: Understanding DDoS Attacks: What is a DDoS Attack and How Does it Work? - I know the title makes this blog post sound rather basic, but it will get you up to speed on all the latest DDoS types, actors, and terminology pretty quickly! What is An Application-Layer DDoS Attack, and How Do I Defend Against Them? 2023 DDoS Statistics and Trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killnet This week, Tyler and Adrian discuss Cyera's $300M Series C, which lands them a $1.4B valuation! But is that still a unicorn? Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, who coined the term back in 2013, recently wrote a piece celebrating the 10th anniversary of the term, and revisiting what it means. We HIGHLY recommend checking it out: https://www.cowboy.vc/news/welcome-back-to-the-unicorn-club-10-years-later They discuss a few other companies that have raised funding or just come out of stealth, including Scrut Automation, Allure Security, TrojAI, Knostic, Prompt Armor. They discuss Eclipsium's binary analysis tooling, and what the future of fully automated security analysis could look like. Wiz acquired Gem, and Veracode acquired Longbow. Adrian LOVES Longbow's website, BTW. They discuss a number of essays, some of which are a must read: Daniel Miessler's Efficient Security Principle Subsalt's series on data privacy challenges Lucky vs Repeatable, a must-read from Morgan Housel AI has Flown the Coop, the latest from our absent co-host, Katie Teitler-Santullo Customer love by Ross Haleliuk and Rami McCarthy We briefly cover some other fun - reverse typosquatting, AI models with built-in RCE, and Microsoft having YET ANOTHER breach. We wrap up discussing Air Canada's short-lived AI-powered support chatbot. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-357

Aileen Lee, Founder and Managing Partner at Cowboy Ventures recently wrote an article entitled "Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later" (1/18/24) which was a follow up to an article she wrote in November, 2013 entitled "Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups".Our SaaS Talk™ with the Metrics Brothers co-hosts, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike do a deep dive into how private and public company valuations are calculate, explore the difference between Market Capitalization and Enterprise Value, and uncover a few of the "inside baseball" secrets to how $1B Unicorn may be worth much less.Topics discussed include:Market CapitalizationEnterprise ValueParticipating vs Non-Participating Preferences1x, 2x and 3x Liquidation PreferenceCommon vs Preferred Stock in a Private CompanyStock Option Re-pricing - beware the last post money Unicorn valuationOnceacorn, Decacorn, Supercorn, ZIRPicorns, Papercorn, Zombiecorn, UnicorpseThe number of unicorns has grown from 39 in 2013 to 532 in 2023 per Cowboy Ventures (1,000 according to Battery Ventures). Unfortunately ~ 40% are trading for a much lower price on secondary markets than the last post-money valuations.If you love the idea of creating or being part of a VC backed company worth more than $1B, or are just interested in the material reduction in the creation of new unicorns, this episode is full of detail, insights and a little humor!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hats Off To This Week's Contributors: @RyanMorrisonJer, @geneteare, @mgsiegler, @spyglass_feed, @saulausterlitz, @ClareMalone, @benedictevans, @mikeloukides, @ErikNaso, @kateclarktweets, @finkd, @mattbirchler, @imillhiser, @jaygoldberg, @ron_miller, @btaylor, @sierraplatform, @eladgilContents* Editorial: * Essays of the Week* AI Leads New Unicorn Creation As Ranks Of $1B Startups Swells * Behold: The Sports Streaming Bundle* 40 Years Ago, This Ad Changed the Super Bowl Forever* Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?* Video of the Week* AI and Everything Else - Benedict Evans from Slush* AI of the Week* The OpenAI Endgame* OpenAI Sora– The most realistic AI-generated video to date* I Was Wrong. We Haven't Reached Peak AI Frenzy.* News Of the Week* I tried Vision Pro. Here's my take* The Quest 3 is better than you might expect* The Supreme Court will decide if the government can seize control of YouTube and Twitter* Arm Results Set The World On Fire* Startup of the Week* Bret Taylor's new AI company aims to help customers get answers and complete tasks automatically* X of the Week* Elad Gil on AIEditorial: And The Oscar Goes to SoraOpenAI teased its new video creation model - Sora - this week.In doing so it released a technical report and several examples of prompts and outputs.Cautious to not over-state the end game the company said:We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable durations, resolutions and aspect ratios. We leverage a transformer architecture that operates on spacetime patches of video and image latent codes. Our largest model, Sora, is capable of generating a minute of high fidelity video. Our results suggest that scaling video generation models is a promising path towards building general purpose simulators of the physical world.All of the videos are incredible, albeit only a minute or less each. My favorite is the Dogs in Snow video:Although the ‘Closeup Man in Glasses' is also wonderful.I mention this because the speed at which AI is addressing new fields is - in my opinion - mind-boggling. Skills that take humans decades to perfect are being learned in months and are capable of scaling to infinite outputs using words, code, images, video, and sound.It will take the advancement of robotics to tie these capabilities to physical work, but that seems assured to happen.When engineering, farming, transport, or production meets AI then human needs can be addressed directly.Sora winning an Oscar for Cinematography or in producing from a script or a book seems far-fetched. But it wasn't so long ago that a tech company doing so would have been laughable, and now we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV Plus regularly being nominated or winning awards.Production will increasingly be able to leverage AI.Some will say this is undermining human skills, but I think the opposite. It will release human skills. Take the prompt that produced the Dogs in Snow video:Prompt:A litter of golden retriever puppies playing in the snow. Their heads pop out of the snow, covered in.I can imagine that idea and write it down. But my skills would not allow me to produce it. Sora opens my imagination and enables me to act on it. I guess that many humans have creative ideas that they are unable to execute….up to now. Sora, DallE, and ChatGPT all focus on releasing human potential.Google released its Gemini 1.5 model this week (less than a month after releasing Gemini Ultra 1.0). Tom's Guide has a summary and analysis by Ryan MorrisonGemini Pro 1.5 has a staggering 10 million token context length. That is the amount of content it can store in its memory for a single chat or response. This is enough for hours of video or multiple books within a single conversation, and Google says it can find any piece of information within that window with a high level of accuracy.Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist wrote on X that the model also comes with advanced multimodal capabilities across code, text, image, audio and video.He wrote that this means you can “interact in sophisticated ways with entire books, very long document collections, codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines across hundreds of files, full movies, entire podcast series, and more."In “needle-in-a-haystack” testing where they look for the needle in the vast amount of data stored in the context window, they were able to find specific pieces of information with 99.7% accuracy even with 10 million tokens of data.All of this makes it easy to understand why Kate Clark at The Information penned a piece with the title: I Was Wrong. We Haven't Reached Peak AI FrenzyI will leave this week's editorial with Ryan Morrison's observation at the end of his article:What we are seeing with these advanced multimodal models is the interaction of the digital and the real, where AI is gaining a deeper understanding of humanity and how WE see the world.Essays of the WeekAI Leads New Unicorn Creation As Ranks Of $1B Startups Swells  February 13, 2024Gené Teare @geneteareFewer startups became unicorns in 2023, but The Crunchbase Unicorn Board also became more crowded, as exits became even scarcer.That means that 10 years after the term “unicorn” was coined to denote those private startups valued at $1 billion or more, there are over 1,500 current unicorn companies globally, collectively valued at more than $5 trillion based on their most recent valuations from funding deals.All told, fewer than 100 companies joined the Unicorn Board in 2023, the lowest count in more than five years, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows.Of the 95 companies that joined the board in 2023, AI was the leading sector, adding 20 new unicorns alone. Other leading unicorn sectors in 2023 included fintech (with 14 companies), cleantech and energy (12 each), and semiconductors (nine).Based on an analysis of Crunchbase data, 41 companies joined the Unicorn Board from the U.S. and 24 from China in 2023. Other countries were in the single digits for new unicorns: Germany had four new companies, while India and the U.K. each had three.New records nonethelessDespite the slower pace of new unicorns, the Crunchbase board of current private unicorns has reached new milestones as fewer companies exited the board in 2023.The total number of global unicorns on our board reached 1,500 at the start of 2024, which takes into account the exclusion of those that have exited via an M&A or IPO transaction. Altogether, these private unicorn companies have raised north of $900 billion from investors.This year also marks a decade since investor Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures coined the term unicorn for private companies valued at a billion dollars or more.In a new report looking at the unicorn landscape 10 years later, Lee said she believes the unicorn phenomenon is not going away, despite a sharp downturn in venture funding in recent years. She expects more than 1,000 new companies in the U.S. alone will join the ranks in the next decade.Unicorn exitsIn 2023, 10 unicorn companies exited the board via an IPO, far fewer than in recent years. That contrasts with 20 companies in 2022 and 113 in 2021.However, M&A was more active in 2023. Sixteen unicorn companies were acquired in 2023 — up from 2022 when 11 companies were acquired and slightly down from 2021 with 21 companies exiting via an acquisition.December numbersEight new companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in December 2023. The highest monthly count last year for new unicorns was 10 and the lowest was two.Of the new unicorns, three are artificial intelligence companies. Other sectors that minted unicorns in December include fintech, cybersecurity, food and beverage, and health care.The new unicorn companies minted in December 2023 were:..MoreBehold: The Sports Streaming BundleIt just makes sense. Sports was the last thing holding together the cable TV bundle. Now it will be the start of the streaming bundle.That's my 5-minute reaction to the truly huge news that Disney, Warner, and Fox are launching a new sports streaming service, combining their various sports rights into one package. Well, presumably. The details are still quite thin at this point. Clearly, several entities were racing to this story, with both WSJ and Bloomberg claiming "scoops" by publishing paragraph-long stories with only the high level facts. I'm linking to Varietyabove, which at least has a few more details, including (canned) quotes from Bob Iger, Lachlan Murdoch, and David Zaslav.Fox Corp., Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney are set to launch a new streaming joint venture that will make all of their sports programming available under a single broadband roof, a move that will put content from ESPN, TNT and Fox Sports on a new standalone app and, in the process, likely shake up the world of TV sports.The three media giants are slated to launch the new service in the fall. Subscribers would get access to linear sports networks including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, truTV and ESPN+, as well as hundreds of hours from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL and many top college divisions. Pricing will be announced at a later date.Each company would own one third of the new outlet and license their sports content to it on a non-exclusive basis. The service would have a new brand and an independent management teamYes, this is essentially running the Hulu playbook of old, but only for sports content. No, that ultimately didn't end well, but Hulu had a decent enough run before egos got involved.1 Here, the egos are once again being (at least temporarily) set aside to do something obvious: make money. Sports is the one bit of content that most people watch in one form or another, live no less (hence why it was keeping the cable bundle together). And increasingly, with the rise of streaming, it was becoming impossible to figure out what game was on, where. You could get access to most games online now, but it might require buying four or five different services. And again, then finding which one the game you wanted was actually on...More40 Years Ago, This Ad Changed the Super Bowl ForeverAn oral history of Apple's groundbreaking “1984” spot, which helped to establish the Super Bowl as TV's biggest commercial showcase.By Saul AusterlitzPublished Feb. 9, 2024Updated Feb. 10, 2024Four decades ago, the Super Bowl became the Super Bowl.It wasn't because of anything that happened in the game itself: On Jan. 22, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated Washington 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII, a contest that was mostly over before halftime. But during the broadcast on CBS, a 60-second commercial loosely inspired by a famous George Orwell novel shook up the advertising and the technology sectors without ever showing the product it promoted. Conceived by the Chiat/Day ad agency and directed by Ridley Scott, then fresh off making the seminal science-fiction noir “Blade Runner,” the Apple commercial “1984,” which was intended to introduce the new Macintosh computer, would become one of the most acclaimed commercials ever made. It also helped to kick off — pun partially intended — the Super Bowl tradition of the big game serving as an annual showcase for gilt-edged ads from Fortune 500 companies. It all began with the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs's desire to take the battle with the company's rivals to a splashy television broadcast he knew nothing about.In recent interviews, several of the people involved in creating the “1984” spot — Scott; John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple; Steve Hayden, a writer of the ad for Chiat/Day; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager for Chiat/Day; and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer — looked back on how the commercial came together, its inspiration and the internal objections that almost kept it from airing. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.JOHN SCULLEY On Oct. 19, 1983, we're all sitting around in Steve [Jobs's] building, the Mac building, and the cover of Businessweek says, “The Winner is … IBM.” We were pretty deflated because this was the introduction of the IBM PCjr, and we hadn't even introduced the Macintosh yet.STEVE HAYDEN Jobs said, “I want something that will stop the world in its tracks.” Our media director, Hank Antosz, said, “Well, there's only one place that can do that — the Super Bowl.” And Steve Jobs said, “What's the Super Bowl?” [Antosz] said, “Well, it's a huge football game that attracts one of the largest audiences of the year.” And [Jobs] said, “I've never seen a Super Bowl. I don't think I know anybody who's seen a Super Bowl.”FRED GOLDBERG The original idea was actually done in 1982. We presented an ad [with] a headline, which was “Why 1984 Won't Be Like ‘1984,'” to Steve Jobs, and he didn't think the Apple III was worthy of that claim...MoreIs the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press's relationship to its audience.Clare MaloneFebruary 10, 2024My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political magazine in Washington, D.C., that offered a promising foothold in journalism. I helped with the print order, mailed checks to writers—after receiving lots of e-mails asking, politely, Where is my money?—and ran the intern program. This last responsibility allowed me a small joy: every couple of weeks, a respected journalist would come into the office for a brown-bag lunch in our conference room, giving our most recent group of twentysomethings a chance to ask for practical advice about “making it.” One man told us to embrace a kind of youthful workaholism, before we became encumbered by kids and families. An investigative reporter implored us to file our taxes and to keep our personal lives in order—never give the rich and powerful a way to undercut your journalism. But perhaps the most memorable piece of advice was from a late-career writer who didn't mince words. You want to make it in journalism, he said? Marry rich. We laughed. He didn't.I've thought a lot about that advice in the past year. A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast—the publisher of The New Yorker—all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees. In just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork's staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it “the big one”); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well. One journalist recently cancelled a networking phone call with me, writing, “I've decided to officially take my career in a different direction.” There wasn't much I could say to counter that conclusion; it was perfectly logical.“Publishers, brace yourselves—it's going to be a wild ride,” Matthew Goldstein, a media consultant, wrote in a January newsletter. “I see a potential extinction-level event in the future.” Some of the forces cited by Goldstein were already well known: consumers are burned out by the news, and social-media sites have moved away from promoting news articles. But Goldstein also pointed to Google's rollout of A.I.-integrated search, which answers user queries within the Google interface, rather than referring them to outside Web sites, as a major factor in this coming extinction. According to a recent Wall Street Journalanalysis, Google generates close to forty per cent of traffic across digital media. Brands with strong home-page traffic will likely be less affected, Goldstein wrote—places like Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Mail, CNN, the Washington Post, and Fox News. But Web sites that aren't as frequently typed into browsers need to “contemplate drastic measures, possibly halving their brand portfolios.”What will emerge in the wake of mass extinction, Brian Morrissey, another media analyst, recently wrote in his newsletter, “The Rebooting,” is “a different industry, leaner and diminished, often serving as a front operation to other businesses,” such as events, e-commerce, and sponsored content. In fact, he told me, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the end of the mass-media era. “This is a delayed reaction to the commercial Internet itself,” he said. “I don't know if anything could have been done differently.”..Much MoreVideo of the WeekAI and Everything Else - Benedict Evans from SlushAI of the WeekThe OpenAI EndgameThoughts about the outcome of the NYT versus OpenAI copyright lawsuitBy Mike LoukidesFebruary 13, 2024Since the New York Times sued OpenAI for infringing its copyrights by using Times content for training, everyone involved with AI has been wondering about the consequences. How will this lawsuit play out? And, more importantly, how will the outcome affect the way we train and use large language models?There are two components to this suit. First, it was possible to get ChatGPT to reproduce some Times articles very close to verbatim. That's fairly clearly copyright infringement, though there are still important questions that could influence the outcome of the case. Reproducing the New York Times clearly isn't the intent of ChatGPT, and OpenAI appears to have modified ChatGPT's guardrails to make generating infringing content more difficult, though probably not impossible. Is this enough to limit any damages? It's not clear that anybody has used ChatGPT to avoid paying for a NYT subscription. Second, the examples in a case like this are always cherry-picked. While the Times can clearly show that OpenAI can reproduce some articles, can it reproduce any article from the Times' archive? Could I get ChatGPT to produce an article from page 37 of the September 18, 1947 issue? Or, for that matter, an article from the Chicago Tribune or the Boston Globe? Is the entire corpus available (I doubt it), or just certain random articles? I don't know, and given that OpenAI has modified GPT to reduce the possibility of infringement, it's almost certainly too late to do that experiment. The courts will have to decide whether inadvertent, inconsequential, or unpredictable reproduction meets the legal definition of copyright infringement.The more important claim is that training a model on copyrighted content is infringement, whether or not the model is capable of reproducing that training data in its output. An inept and clumsy version of this claim was made by Sarah Silverman and others in a suit that was dismissed. The Authors' Guild has its own version of this lawsuit, and it is working on a licensing model that would allow its members to opt in to a single licensing agreement. The outcome of this case could have many side-effects, since it essentially would allow publishers to charge not just for the texts they produce, but for how those texts are used.It is difficult to predict what the outcome will be, though easy enough guess. Here's mine. OpenAI will settle with the New York Times out of court, and we won't get a ruling. This settlement will have important consequences: it will set a de-facto price on training data. And that price will no doubt be high. Perhaps not as high as the Times would like (there are rumors that OpenAI has offered something in the range of $1 million to $5 million), but sufficiently high enough to deter OpenAI's competitors.$1M is not, in and of itself, a terribly high price, and the Times reportedly thinks that it's way too low; but realize that OpenAI will have to pay a similar amount to almost every major newspaper publisher worldwide in addition to organizations like the Authors Guild, technical journal publishers, magazine publishers, and many other content owners. The total bill is likely to be close to $1 billion, if not more, and as models need to be updated, at least some of it will be a recurring cost. I suspect that OpenAI would have difficulty going higher, even given Microsoft's investments—and, whatever else you may think of this strategy—OpenAI has to think about the total cost. I doubt that they are close to profitable; they appear to be running on an Uber-like business plan, in which they spend heavily to buy the market without regard for running a sustainable business. But even with that business model, billion-dollar expenses have to raise the eyebrows of partners like Microsoft.The Times, on the other hand, appears to be making a common mistake: overvaluing its data. Yes, it has a large archive—but what is the value of old news? Furthermore, in almost any application but especially in AI, the value of data isn't the data itself; it's the correlations between different datasets. The Times doesn't own those correlations any more than I own the correlations between my browsing data and Tim O'Reilly's. But those correlations are precisely what's valuable to OpenAI and others building data-driven products...MoreOpenAI Sora– The most realistic AI-generated video to dateERIK NASOOpenAI Sora is an AI text-to-video model that has achieved incredibly realistic video that is hard to tell it is AI. It's very life-like but not real. I think we have just hit the beginning of some truly powerful AI-generated video that could change the game for stock footage and more. Below are two examples of the most realistic AI prompt-generated videos I have seen.Prompt: A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.Prompt: Drone view of waves crashing against the rugged cliffs along Big Sur's garay point beach. The crashing blue waters create white-tipped waves, while the golden light of the setting sun illuminates the rocky shore. A small island with a lighthouse sits in the distance, and green shrubbery covers the cliff's edge. The steep drop from the road down to the beach is a dramatic feat, with the cliff's edges jutting out over the sea. This is a view that captures the raw beauty of the coast and the rugged landscape of the Pacific Coast Highway.Prompt: Animated scene features a close-up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle. The art style is 3D and realistic, with a focus on lighting and texture. The mood of the painting is one of wonder and curiosity, as the monster gazes at the flame with wide eyes and open mouth. Its pose and expression convey a sense of innocence and playfulness, as if it is exploring the world around it for the first time. The use of warm colors and dramatic lighting further enhances the cozy atmosphere of the image.Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user's prompt. OpenAI SOra states they are teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction...MoreI Was Wrong. We Haven't Reached Peak AI Frenzy.By Kate ClarkFeb 15, 2024, 4:16pm PSTAfter Sam Altman's sudden firing last year, I argued the chaos that followed his short-lived ouster would inject a healthy dose of caution into venture investments in artificial intelligence companies. I figured we'd finally reached the peak of the AI venture capital frenzy when a threatened employee exodus from OpenAI risked sending the value of the $86 billion AI juggernaut almost to zero. There was plenty of other proof that the hype for generative AI was fading. Investors were openly saying they planned to be a lot tougher on valuation negotiations and would ask startups harder questions about governance. Some companies had begun to consider selling themselves due to the high costs of developing AI software. And an early darling of the AI boom, AI-powered writing tool Jasper, had become the butt of jokes when it slashed internal revenue projections and cut its internal valuation after having won a $1.5 billion valuation in 2022. I forgot that everyone in Silicon Valley suffers from short-term memory loss. After a week sipping boxed water with venture capitalists from South Park to Sand Hill Road, I'm convinced I called the end of the AI frenzy far too soon. In fact, I expect this year will deliver more cash into the hands of U.S. AI startups than last year, when those companies raised a total of $63 billion, according to PitchBook data. Altman's fundraising ambitions will surely boost the total. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal said Altman plans to raise trillions of dollars to develop the AI chips needed to create artificial general intelligence, software that can reason the way humans do. Even if that number is actually much smaller, talk of such goals lifts the ceiling for other startup founders, who are  likely to think even bigger and to be more aggressive in their fundraising. Investor appetite for AI companies is still growing, too. These investors claimed last fall that they were done with the FOMO-inspired deals, but they're pushing checks on the top AI companies now harder than ever...MoreNews Of the WeekI tried Vision Pro. Here's my takeThe Quest 3 is better than you might expectPosted by Matt Birchler13 Feb 2024Alex Heath for The Verge: Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is “the better product” vs. Apple's Vision ProHe says the Quest has a better “immersive” content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there's the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, “like seven times less expensive.”I currently own both headsets and while I'm very excited about the potential in the Vision Pro, I actually find it hard to fully disagree with Zuck on this one. I think a lot of people have only used the Vision Pro would be surprised how well the Quest 3 does some things in comparison.For example, the pass-through mode is definitely not quite as good as the Vision Pro's, but it's closer than you might expect. And while people are rightly impressed with how well the Vision Pro has windows locked in 3D space, honestly the Quest 3 is just as good at this in my experience. When it comes to comfort, I do think the Vision Pro is easier to wear for longer periods, but I find it more finicky to get in just the right spot in front of my eyes, while the Quest 3 seems to have a larger sweet spot. And let's not even talk about the field of view, which is way wider on the Quest to the point of being unnoticeable basically all the time. I kinda think field of view will be similar to phone bezels in that you get used to what you have and anything more seems huge — you can get used to the Vision Pro's narrower field of view, but once you're used to wider, it's hard to not notice when going back.The Vision Pro has some hardware features that help it rise above (the massively higher resolution screen jumps to mind), but I'm just saying that if you're looking for everything to be 7x better to match the price difference, I don't think that's there.Beyond this, the products are quite different, though. As Zuckerberg says, the Quest 3 is more focused on fully immersive VR experiences, and while the Vision Pro has a little of that right now, it's not really doing the same things. And when it comes to gaming it's not even close. The Quest 3 has a large library of games available and that expands to almost every VR game ever made with Steam Link.On the other hand, the Vision Pro is much for a “computer” than the Quest ever was. If you can do it on a Mac or an iPad, you can probably already do it on the Vision Pro. And I'm not talking about finding some weird alternate version of your task manager or web browser that doesn't sync with anything else in your life, I'm talking about the apps you already know and love. This is huge and it's Apple leveraging its ecosystem to make sure you can seamlessly move from Mac to iPhone to iPad to Vision Pro. And if you can't install something from the App Store, the web browser is just as capable as Safari on the iPad. If all else fails, you can always just bring your full Mac into your space as well. I will say the Quest 3 can do this and has the advantage of working with Windows as well, but if you have a Mac, it's much, much better.This is more words than I expected to write about a CEO saying his product is better than the competition's (shocker), but I do think that Zuck's statement is less insane than some may think it to be...MoreThe Supreme Court will decide if the government can seize control of YouTube and TwitterWe're about to find out if the Supreme Court still believes in capitalism.By Ian Millhiser Feb 15, 2024, 7:00am ESTIan Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.In mid-2021, about a year before he began his longstanding feud with the biggest employer in his state, Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation attempting to seize control of content moderation at major social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter (now called X by Elon Musk). A few months later, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, signed similar legislation in his state.Both laws are almost comically unconstitutional — the First Amendment does not permit the government to order media companies to publish content they do not wish to publish — and neither law is currently in effect. A federal appeals court halted the key provisions of Florida's law in 2022, and the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Texas's law shortly thereafter (though the justices, somewhat ominously, split 5-4 in this later case).Nevertheless, the justices have not yet weighed in on whether these two unconstitutional laws must be permanently blocked, and that question is now before the Court in a pair of cases known as Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton.The stakes in both cases are quite high, and the Supreme Court's decision is likely to reveal where each one of the Republican justices falls on the GOP's internal conflict between old-school free market capitalists and a newer generation that is eager to pick cultural fights with business...MoreArm Results Set The World On FireFebruary 13, 2024 · by D/D Advisors · in Analyst Decoder Ring. ·Arm reported its second set of earnings as a (once again) public company last week. These numbers were particularly strong, well above consensus for both the current and guided quarters. Arm stock rallied strongly on the results up ~30% for the week. These numbers were important as they go a long way to establishing the company's credibility with the Street in a way their prior results did not.That being said, we saw things we both liked and disliked in their numbers. Here are our highlights of those:Positive: Growing Value Capture. One of our chief concerns with the company since IPO has been the low value they capture per licensed chip shipped – roughly $0.11 per chip at the IPO. That figure continued to inch higher in the latest results, but critically they pointed out that their royalty rate doubles with the latest version of their IP (v9). This does not mean that all of their royalty rates are going to double any time soon, but it does point very much in the right direction. Critically, they noted this rate increase applies to architectural licenses as well.Negative: The Model is Complex. Judging from the number of questions management fielded on the call about this rate increase no one really knows how to model Arm. The company has a lot of moving parts in its revenue mix, and they have limits to their ability to communicate some very important parts of their model. We think that at some point the company would be well served by providing some clearer guide posts on how to build these models or they risk the Street always playing catch up with a wide swing of expectations each quarter.Positive: Premium Plan Conversion. The company said three companies converted from their AFA plan to the ATA model. We will not get into the details of those here, but these can best be thought of in software terms with customers on low priced subscription plans converting to Premium subscription plans. This is a good trend, and management expressed a high degree of confidence that they expect to see it continue. They have spent a few years putting these programs in place and seem to have thought them through. This matters particularly because these programs are well suited for smaller, earlier-stage companies. The old Arm struggled to attract new customers in large part because of the high upfront costs of Arm licenses. Programs like AFA and ATA could go a long way to redressing those past wrongs.Negative: China remains a black box. Arm China is of course a constant source of speculation. In the latest quarter it looks like a large portion of growth came from China which does not exactly square with other data coming from China right now. It is still unclear to us how much of Arm's revenues from China's handset companies gets booked through Arm China as a related party transaction and how much is direct. Investors are confused too. There is no easy solution to this problem, digging too hard into Arm China's numbers is unlikely to make anyone happy with the answers, but hopefully over time it all settles down.Positive: Growing Complexity of Compute. Management repeatedly mentioned this factor, noting that this leads to more chips and more Arm cores shipping in the marketplace. Some of this is tied to AI, but we think the story is broader than that. It is going to be tempting to see much of Arm's growth as riding the AI wave, but this does not fully capture the situation. The AI story is largely about GPUs, which are not particularly heavy with Arm cores. But those GPUs still need some CPU attach, and AI accelerators can sometimes be good Arm targets.Negative: Diversification. Arm remains heavily dependent on smartphones, and we suspect the return to inventory stocking by handset makers is playing a big role in their guidance. When asked about segmentation of their results the company declined to update the model provided during the IPO. We hope to see some diversification here when they do update their figures later in the year.Overall, the company did a good job in the quarter. They still have some kinks to work out with their communication to the Street, but this was a good second step as a public company...MoreStartup of the WeekBret Taylor's new AI company aims to help customers get answers and complete tasks automaticallyRon Miller @ron_miller / 6:36 AM PST•February 13, 2024Image Credits: mi-vector / Getty ImagesWe've been hearing about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor's latest gig since he announced he was leaving the CRM giant in November 2022. Last February we heard he was launching an AI startup built with former Google employee Clay Bavor. Today, the two emerged with a new conversational AI company called Sierra with some bold claims about what it can do.At its heart, the new company is a customer service bot. That's not actually all that Earth-shattering, but the company claims that it's much more than that, with its software going beyond being an extension of a FAQ page and actually taking actions on behalf of the customer.“Sierra agents can do so much more than just answer questions. They take action using your systems, from upgrading a subscription in your customer database to managing the complexities of a furniture delivery in your order management system. Agents can reason, problem solve and make decisions,” the company claimed in a blog post.Having worked with large enterprise customers at Salesforce, Taylor certainly understands that issues like hallucinations, where a large language model sometimes makes up an answer when it lacks the information to answer accurately, is a serious problem. That's especially true for large companies, whose brand reputation is at stake. The company claims that it is solving hallucination issues.Image Credits: SierraAt the same time, it's connecting to other enterprise systems to undertake tasks on behalf of the customer without humans being involved. These are both big audacious claims and will be challenging to pull off...MoreX of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thatwastheweek.substack.com/subscribe

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.This is our second episode of Venture Unlocked Shorts where we highlight a specific point of view of our guest. These points of view may come through a tweet, an article, or an offline conversation, and our goal is to unpack these interesting views in a short conversation. In this week's Venture Unlocked Shorts, we're joined by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures. Aileen wrote a now famous article in 2013 where she coined the term Unicorn to describe technology companies that reach a billion-dollar valuation within 10 years of founding.Recently she and her team published a successor article looking at the last 10 years of these Unicorns, and what they believe will happen in the future.It was fun to unpack the articles through this discussion, and I think you'll enjoy hearing her findings and thoughts on what we may see in the future. About Aileen Lee:Aileen is the Founder and Managing Partner of Cowboy Ventures, a firm that invests in early-stage enterprise and consumer startups. With over two decades of experience in venture capital, she has a history of involvement from seed stage to beyond, including her time at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.Before her venture capital career, Aileen held roles at Gap Inc. and started at Morgan Stanley. She holds degrees from MIT and HBS. Additionally, she co-founded All Raise and sits on the board of Castilleja School.Aileen is known for introducing the term “unicorn” in the context of business. She has been recognized in Time 100's most influential people and has appeared on the Forbes Midas List.In this episode, we discuss:(02:30) Marking a decade of the term Unicorn and how many Unicorns have been created in the last ten years(05:46) The impact of macroeconomic factors like zero interest rate policies on the venture capital industry(06:37) Aileen describes the situation as a 'perfect storm' of factors leading to a surge of capital in the industry(08:18) The future of unicorns in the venture capital landscape(15:46) What happened in 2021?(17:13) The importance of founders understanding the business model of the funds they are engaging with (19:00): Aileen predicts a mix of outcomes for startups and whats aheadI'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Aileen. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Ketone-IQ is a clean energy boost without sugar or caffeine. Get 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone-IQ at http://www.hvmn.com/TWIST The Paintbrush Loan is the earliest startup financing on the internet. No pitch deck, no business plan, no minimum time in business, and no warm intros. Plus, you get to keep your equity. Visit http://www.getpaintbrush.com to see if you qualify for a $50K startup loan in less than 2 minutes. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. And they introduced an AI-powered assistant to take the BUSY out of the WORK! Get started for free at https://www.coda.io/twist * Today's show: Aileen Lee join Jason to talk about her origins and overcoming challenges as a woman in a male-dominated tech space (2:12), the Unicorn Club and the effects of the ZIRP era (11:51), predictions on which startups will maintain their unicorn status (33:09), and more! * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * LINKS: Check out Cowboy Ventures: https://www.cowboy.vc/ Read Aileen's 2024 article here: https://www.cowboy.vc/news/welcome-back-to-the-unicorn-club-10-years-later Read Aileen's original Unicorn article here: https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/ Check out All Raise: https://www.allraise.org/ * Thanks to our partners: (10:26) Ketone-IQ - Get 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone-IQ at http://www.hvmn.com/TWIST (20:39) Paintbrush - Visit http://www.getpaintbrush.com  to see if you qualify for a $50K startup loan in less than 2 minutes (31:38) Coda - Get started for free at https://www.coda.io/twist * Follow Eileen X: https://twitter.com/aileenlee LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aileenwlee * Follow Jason: X: ⁠https://twitter.com/jason⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/jason⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Kara and Scott discuss Ron DeSantis' departure from the 2024 race and the Biden/Trump rematch that everyone is dreading. Then, with the good news about the economy and the stock market, what's the best move for investors? Plus, Nelson Peltz continues his Disney proxy fight, and a new report sheds light on the anti-DEI movement. Our Friend of Pivot is Aileen Lee, the founder and managing partner of the VC fund, Cowboy Ventures. She also happens to be the person who coined the term "unicorn" for billion dollar start-ups and shares her latest analysis on those companies. Follow Aileen at @aileenlee Follow us on Instagram and Threads at @pivotpodcastofficial. Follow us on TikTok at @pivotpodcast. Send us your questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is our interview show, where we sit down with interesting, knowledgeable folks and dive deep into their favorite topics. This time around, we invited Cowboy Ventures' Aileen Lee to chat through her massive new article concerning the unicorn world. If you didn't know, it was Lee who initially coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article back in 2013.Lee talked us through the data and taught us all sorts of new terms. You can sort of understand what one means when they say “unicorpse” or “zombiecorn,” but apparently there are even more exotic unicorn forms out there. We even wound up comparing venture capital returns to peaches in a bucket of piss (her words, not ours!).We also talked about where unicorns are based today (19% in New York, for example), and why seed rounds are getting bigger. But really, you should read her post while you listen so you can have all the context while we chew through the numbers!And for those of you who are here for the answer to our question, “How are Fortune 500 companies ranked?”, well, the answer is revenue and not market cap.For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity's Simplecast website.Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! Credits: Equity is hosted by Editor in Chief of TechCrunch+ Alex Wilhelm and TechCrunch Senior Reporter Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

Stocks closed near session highs and powered higher throughout the final hours of trading; RBC Head of US Equity Strategy Lori Calvasina on if the early-year mini-swoon is over. Humana's worst day since June 2023 after warning its costs would be higher-than-expected; Mizuho's Jared Holz on what it means and how to play the sector. Nuveen CIO Saira Malik, who oversees $100B+ in AUM, talks her 2024 playbook. Cowboy Ventures' Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” for private companies in 2013; now she's back on what the next decade will look like. Plus, former Fed Vice Chair Alan Blinder on the Fed's next moves and Citi's Drew Pettit on playing fintech names. 

The term unicorn to describe a private technology company with a valuation of more than $1 billion has become a common currency since it was first coined by Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures. Unicorns have even become a symbol of national achievement with politicians [Rishi Sunak] vowing to transform the UK from a United Kingdom to a Unicorn Kingdom in 2023. There has been a surge in the number of unicorns over the past decade with valuations pumped by more than a decade of cheap money. But recent geopolitical crises and rising inflation and interest rates have exposed the rampant overvaluation of some unicorns. The collective noun for unicorns is a blessing: now many investors might consider them a curse. Frontier IP Chief Executive Officer Neil Crabb outlines the perils to investors of ignoring fundamental valuation metrics and explains the company's approach to building companies, the factors needed to achieve outstanding success and what narwhals can teach us that unicorns can't.

In the vast landscape of entrepreneurship, stories of resilience, innovation, and the pursuit of dreams stand out as inspirations. Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, founder and CEO of Samooha, is one such trailblazer whose journey from the bustling streets of Mumbai to the forefront of data-driven technology is nothing short of remarkable. Samooha has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Snowflake Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and Altimeter Capital.

Amanda “Robby” Robson is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures and the co-host of the Open Source Startup Podcast. In this episode, Robby shares insights on what she's looking for in open-source founders to potentially invest in, including the importance of being able to manage both your community and your paid model simultaneously. Robby and I also discuss the importance and pitfalls of choosing a monetization strategy, as well as the dangers of having too many monetization models too soon. Throughout our conversation, Robby highlights the specific challenges that open-source founders face, and how she's seen successful founders either avoid or overcome them. Highlights: I introduce Robby, who is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures and the co-host of the Open Source Startup Podcast (00:22) Robby gives some insight into how she evaluates startups from an investment perspective, and the peculiarities that go into evaluating an open-source startup (00:45) The nuances of evaluating the market opportunity for an open-source company (05:20) A common mistake Robby seeks early stage founders make when evaluating their market size (08:06) Robby shares what she's learned about best practices for seed-stage startups who are looking to determine their monetization strategy (10:02) The dangers of having too many monetization models as an early stage startup (13:22) Traits that Robby feels are most valuable for an open-source founder to possess (14:48) Robby reveals the common traps that open-source founders fall into (17:13) Why Robby feels that successfully monetizing an open-source company has more to do with resources than timing (19:46) Robby's thoughts on whether she would ever found an open-source company and how she would approach it (21:18) How Robby's thoughts have changed on whether open source projects need to intentionally become a company or vice versa (23:44) What it's like to advice against the open-source business model as a venture capitalist (29:10) Links:Robby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-robson-7227685b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/amanda_robs Company: https://www.cowboy.vc/

This week we chat with Miri Buckland! In this episode, Miri and Erica talk about how they each define creativity and how Miri's business, Landing, was created to help members find their inner creative voice. She shares the origin stories of the business (originally was targeting interior designers!) and what it's been like to scale their community and uncover trends before the rest of the world sees them (ex. tomato girl summer, which you can learn about in the episode)!Miri Buckland is the COO and co-founder of LANDING, an online social commerce platform that allows users to tap into daily creativity, discover collective inspiration, deliver authentic expression, and nurture meaningful connections. As someone who discovered her identity as a 'creative' later in life, Miri is on a mission to empower everyone to be and feel creative. Together with her team, she is developing LANDING's platform to ignite creativity across its growing +200k global LANDING VERSE community.Landing is backed by leading investors including Cowboy Ventures, Defy VC, DreamMachine Ventures, and Progression Fund. By trade, Miri is a marketer, community builder and consumer tech operator. Prior to co-founding LANDING, Miri held roles at Sky TV in London and in venture capital in San Francisco. Miri was a 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 recipient and a Graduate of Stanford University School of Business.Follow Us!Miri Buckland: @miribucklandLANDING: @landing__space, website hereErica Wenger: @erica_wengerDear Twentysomething: @deartwentysomething

In this episode, Amir Bormand interviews Utkarsh Sengar, the Director of Engineering at Webflow, about growth engineering and measuring customer behavior. They discuss Webflow's mission to make website building accessible to everyone, regardless of their coding skills, through their no-code platform. Utkarsh explains his role in managing the growth team and building the third-party ecosystem. This episode provides valuable insights into growth engineering and its importance in driving business success. Highlights 00:03:13 Growth engineering bridges product and business needs. 00:09:21 Partnership with data drives growth. 00:12:03 Impact measurement challenges for growth teams. 00:20:14 Balance FOMO with concrete use cases. 00:22:35 Importance of growth engineering collaboration. Utkarsh Sengar is a Director of Engineering at Webflow, leading their Growth and Ecosystem pillars. He has previously held various roles at eBay, OpenTable, and Upwork. Moreover, he utilizes his expertise as a technical advisor for startups and as a scout for Cowboy Ventures. https://www.linkedin.com/in/utsengar --- Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and we would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player. Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests? Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)

When markets are volatile and times are turbulent, being a VC can be a nerve-wracking experience. How should a seasoned board member handle themselves when anxieties are high? In this podcast conversation, Jerry sits down with Aileen Lee from Cowboy Ventures and Brad Feld from Foundry Group to discuss how to be an effective board member in stormy times. This conversation offers much to think about if you're a board member, new VC, or CEO. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Follow our step by step guides: - How To: Leave a Review on Your Computer: - How To: Leave a Review on Your iPhone: Never miss an episode! Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on all our episode releases.

In this episode, I sat down with Anna De Paula Hanika, Co-Founder & CEO of Uno Health. Founded in 2019, Uno enrolls Medicare members in the federal and state programs – Medicaid, the Medicare Savings Program, SNAP, energy assistance programs, and more – that they are eligible for, benefiting both the member and payor. Uno has put over $10M back into the pockets of low-income Americans. Its investors include Google Ventures, General Catalyst, Floodgate, and Cowboy Ventures. Anna and I discuss: 1) How she became interested in solving challenges related to the US healthcare systems and identified enrolling seniors in federal and state programs as the particular problem she wanted to solve, 2) Uno's business and operational model and value proposition to payors and members, 3) The ways Anna has seen these safety net programs work really well and less well and how supplemental benefits programs from payors can fill some existing gaps, and 4) Lessons she's learned during her journey as an entrepreneur and advice she has for people starting tech-enabled services businesses.

Today, we welcome Matt Lu from Cowboy Ventures, based in NYC. Cowboy Ventures is a Pre Seed and Seed stage-focused fund. Cowboy has made over 100 early-stage investments, with 70% being pre-product. Before joining Cowboy in late 2022, Matt was an investor at Bullpen Capital in San Francisco. Episode Chapters:Breaking into Venture and Cowboy Ventures - 1:00East Coast Versus West Coast Investing - 10:30Sourcing Best Practices - 18:20Generative AI and Focus Areas - 25:20Overall Market Thoughts - 32:20What Motives Matt? - 36:00As always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.

Amanda Robson is a partner at Cowboy Ventures. She works with enterprise companies focusing on software infrastructure companies. She has a passion for open source companies and co-hosts the Open Source Startup Podcast. Before joining Cowboy, she was an early-stage investor at Norwest where she worked with a number of enterprise software companies including 6 River Systems, Fossa, and Dremio. She is the proud founder of Modern Angels - a community and database of 200+ female and non-binary angel investors. She also co-leads the VC Champions program for All Raise, and co-chairs NextGen Partners, an organization that helps up-and-coming investors get the support and access they need to be successful. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - How she got into VC - Open source projects - How she invests in open source companies- Software infrastructure market landscape - Investment framework - Trends in AI/ML - The role of AI in software infrastructure --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: http://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Real Estate is one of the best ways to build wealth, and travelling is a great way to spend it! What if there was a way to combine both of those ideas into a single platform? Our guest today is Ali Nichols, Co-Founder of Getaway, who thinks she has figured out a way to combine both of those passions for millennials. On today's show, we cover how Getaway is combining the demands of younger generations to not only invest in real estate but also enjoy the perks of that investment along the way. About Ali Nichols:Ali Nichols is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Getaway. Prior to founding Getaway, Ali spent over 4 years as an executive at Bungalow, a technology-enabled residential real estate company, where she ran Operations, Growth, Marketing, Sales, and Real Estate. She spearheaded raising and operating a $700M real estate fund focused on acquiring single-family rentals. Before that Ali was a Strategy & Planning Sr. Manager at Uber and a Consultant at IBM. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University.A word from our sponsor:At Ripple, we manage all of our fund expenses and employee credit cards using Jeeves. The team at Jeeves helped get me and my team setup with physical and virtual credit cards in days. I allowed my teammates to expense items in multiple currencies allowing them to pay for anything, anywhere at any time. We weren't asked for any personal guarantees or to pay any setup or monthly SaaS fees.Not only does Jeeves save us time, but they also give us cash back on our purchases including expenses like Google, Facebook, or AWS every month. New users can earn up to 3% cashback for their first 90 days.The best part is Jeeves puts up the cash, and you settle up once every 30 days in any currency you want, unlike some other corporate card companies that make you pre-pay every month. Jeeves also recently launched its Jeeves Growth and Working Capital initiative for startups and fast-growing companies to enable more financial freedom for companies. The best thing is that Jeeves is live in  24 countries including Canada, the US and many other countries around the world.Jeeves truly offers the best all-in-one expense management corporate card program for all startups especially the ones at Ripple and we at Tank Talks could not be more excited to officially partner with them. Listeners of Tank Talks can get set up with a demo of Jeeves today and take advantage of our Tank Talks special with a‍ $250 statement credit after the first $2,500 in spend or a $500 statement credit after the first $5000 in spend. Lastly, all Jeeves cardholders receive access to their Lounge Pass program and access to over 1300 airports globally.Visit tryjeeves.com/tanktalks to learn more.In this episode we discuss:(02:33)  Ali's journey into tech(04:56)  Ali's experience at Uber(05:46)  Where Ali's passion for Real Estate developed(07:35)  Uber's real estate division(10:03)  The biggest takeaway from Uber(11:12)  Ali's time at Bungalow and helping it grow(13:52)  Bungalow's model for sourcing(15:18)  Why she started Getaway(19:11)  Finding her co-founder and why their partnership works(23:03)  Why vacation rentals is an exciting asset class(26:11)  Who Getaway is targeted at(28:09)  How this is different from a traditional timeshare(29:56)  How Getaway actually works(32:21)  Target annual returns to users on Getaway(35:03)  Plans to build out their portfolio of Real Estate holdings(36:53)  What Getaway is doing with their recent $5.9M raise led by Cowboy Ventures, XYZ, and Night Ventures(37:59)  Benefits from having a strong network of angel investorsFast Favorites:*

We're excited to announce the third episode release of our new podcast, Beyond Two Percent!Beyond Two Percent analyzes the critical questions, issues, and dynamics that affect people differently by gender - and the intersection of those dynamics with finance. This week's roundtable focuses on venture capital, and we're lucky to be joined by Jillian Williams, Partner at Cowboy Ventures, and Ana Cristina Gadala-Maria Principal at QED Ventures.As always, our guests join our two fabulous hosts, Julie VerHage-Greenberg and Helen Femi Williams. We'll publish Beyond Two Percent monthly - if you'd be interested in joining an upcoming episode, let us know! Reach out to sponsor@thisweekinfintech.com.SPEAKERS* Jillian Williams, Partner at Cowboy Ventures* Ana Cristina Gadala-Maria Principal at QED Ventures* Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Head of Content and Community at Orum* Helen Femi Williams, Fintech Journalist Get full access to This Week in Fintech at thisweekinfintech.substack.com/subscribe

Maggie Hott is the Director of Sales @ Webflow where she leads their Sales Dev, Account Executive, and Solution Engineering orgs. Prior to Webflow, Maggie spent an incredible 6 years at Slack in a period of hypergrowth for the company having joined as the founding AE scaling to a Sr Enterprise Leader. Before Slack, Maggie was the founding Sales hire at Eventbrite. If that was not enough, Maggie is also an active angel investor, an advisor to Cowboy Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and is a Founding Operator and LP @ Coalition Partners. In Today's Episode with Maggie Hott We Discuss: 1. The Cold Email that Led to a World-Class Sales Career: How a cold email to Kevin Hartz @ Eventbrite led to Maggie's career in sales? What are the 1-2 biggest takeaways from her time at Slack? How did they impact her mindset? What does Maggie know now that she wishes she had known when she entered sales? 2. The Sales Playbook: PLG and Enterprise: How does Maggie define the sales playbook? What is it? What is it not? Is it possible for early-stage companies to do both enterprise and PLG at the same time? When is the right time to add enterprise to a PLG motion? What are the steps to build an outbound sales engine in enterprise? Where do many go wrong? 3. Building the Bench: Hiring Your First Sales Team: Should founders look to hire a Senior Head of Sales first or a more junior sales rep? Should they be hired one at a time? What are the benefits of hiring many at the same time? What is the right process to hire your first sales hire? What are the core traits and habits that make the first 10x sales hire? What are the right questions to ask to unveil those characteristics? 4. Making the Machine Work: The Process: What can sales leaders do to proactively build relationships with other parts of the org? How can more junior sales reps build relationships with other functions? Why does Maggie believe that mis-hiring can be a $1M mistake? What are the early signs that a new hire is not working out in sales? How does this differ for outbound? Why is it dangerous to make your self-serve product too good?

Hello fintech friends! This week, we have a special podcast episode with guest Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures, who sat down with Nik at the Money2020 MoneyPot Podcast Stage for a candid conversation on life, the universe, and all things fintech.KEYWORDSfintech, people, companies, world, feel, happening, starting, money, bit, absolutely, honestly, big, terms, interesting, durbin amendment, point, build, investor, products, biggestSPEAKERS* Nik Milanović, TWIF* Jillian Williams, Cowboy VenturesNik  00:00All righty. Hi everybody. How's it going? You've got Nik Milanovic and Jillian Williams recording live at Money2020 In the MoneyPot. Hey there, Jillian, good to see you again. Good to see you as always really excited to have you on the show. Hey, FinTech friends, the podcast that we've been doing for about a half a year now. And it is normally hosted by the fantastic Helen Femi Williams on our team, but she has otherwise occupied in the UK. And so I hope to be somewhat not mediocre replacement for her.Jillian  00:43Bet you'll be great.Nik  00:46It sounds like you'll carry the conversation for us both if I mess up. So no pressure. Good to have you on. I think that you're probably like one of the most well known people in FinTech, but for the sake of our audience, who may not have come across you before, we'd love to just get your quick background and overview and what you're focused on today.Jillian  01:05Absolutely. That's very kind of you. But I'm Jillian Williams. I am a principal at Cowboy Ventures. We are an early stage venture fund. Seed focused, generalist focused on the US and I focus on fintech. So I've been focused on FinTech for last like seven years. Previously, I was at Anthemis, a FinTech fund, and then was in traditional finance before that.Nik  01:26So what brought you into fintech? When you start your investing journey,Jillian  01:29Jonestly stumbled into it. I was in financial services, like financial institutions group at Barclays. And it was just like good timing, where they were starting to focus more on fintech. And because of that, I like being Junior there, they kind of just pushed us towards figuring out what was happening in the new like that next wave of tech. And I thought that was a lot more interesting than what was happening with the large asset managers, insurance companies, obviously, now, like, joke's on me, because I still have to deal with a lot of them. But I realized I really love just working closely with the people who are kind of building for that next generation. And so that was kind of my foray into it. I wouldn't say that, like I immediately loved in tech. But when I realized how much I understood it and what was happening in it, I kind of grew to fall in love with it.Nik  02:21Yeah, I feel like it's not as intuitively exciting as like some maybe more like consumer friendly areas when you get involved to start withJillian  02:29Exactly when all my friends were like getting free products from their, like, from their companies that they were meeting with. And I was like, Well, no one's giving me free money. I was jealous, honestly.Nik  02:40My credit card, my bank account are still held with a like Big Five bulge bracket Bank, which is like embarrassing for me. My head I'm like, oh, maybe that just means that there's like still more banking space for FinTech to capture, capture. But really, anytime I like without my car to pay for something people are like you're a trader. And, you know FinTech has, it's interesting, like talking with somebody who has kind of this longevity of investing background and exposure to fintech. You know, a lot of people have become FinTech investors, for the first time over the last call it like three years, which really felt like an inflection point in FinTech. And we'll get to that in a minute. But you know, myself included, I think that FinTech now looks really different for an investor than it did a few years ago. And I'm kind of curious, like, what still gets you excited? You know, you've seen kind of multiple cycles now in this space.Jillian  03:30Absolutely. I mean, you've been around the FinTech space for a while. So I feel like you've been seeing whether it's not directly as an investor about from the outside as an operator. But it's interesting, because I think when I joined in the US in 2016, there were very few people in FinTech, I remember, especially in New York, especially on the female side, there were like probably four of us. And so the same four of us, like did everything together, because I only became very good friends because like, we were the only people who would like talk to each other at any like, honestly events. And so it's funny just to see how much that's changed and how exciting the FinTech world is now compared to Ben. And so I mean, I think it's such a massive industry globally, that even with kind of the growth in popularity, and what's been happening both ebbs and flows in the market. There's, like, I'm still extremely bullish of it. But obviously, the past two years have just been kind of like the Wild West, where, like both in terms of valuations both in terms of like the number of whether it's like the exact same companies all popping up and all getting funded. Or even, like, honestly, probably some unnecessary companies that like you don't need X, Y and Z for like, I don't know, like a new bank for every single thing that giving you rewards and like some things that are probably irrelevant. And so I think that's something that you're starting to see weed out a little bit but I think honestly, that's more of a testament to like the infrastructure that's been built and people realizing what can be built. And so I think what's interesting is like, as that falls away more of the things that are like long term sustainability will continue to grow out of it. And so I think that's what I'm excited about. And also, it's the, like, kind of, in my view, the first time that we're having, like, mafias really come out, where like we have all of these, like, really big companies have been built in FinTech. And now we can have those exciting people that are leaving those companies actually build the next wave and people that I know FinTech really well start to buildNik  05:37Our market going to ask you to name those companies that don't need to be built. But it's true, there's like, it's been such a it's been such an attractive money pot from like a founder perspective, because it's almost like you had a guaranteed venture check if you're starting a FinTech company for the last two years that maybe some spaces have gone like over verticalized. But to what you're saying at the beginning of your comment, it is really cool kind of how the composition of people in FinTech has changed over the last couple years to like, it's finally like a hot area to work in. I feel like it was kind of the unloved tech child for a long time. You had to have these like hyper nerds who themselves are just, you know, working in, you know, obscurity at a bank for 10 years and saying like, there's a better way to do this. But when you're competing with like Fang companies for talent, it's like, well, we don't have any free lunches. And we're not working on a problem that your parents will ever know how to understand.Jillian  06:24Exactly. I remember telling someone that was like excited about some insurer tech company at one point, and they just like gave me the weirdest look. And I was like, I do get I'm the weirdo here. Like, that's fair.Nik  06:34Yeah, I don't know. There's something to love about that, though, like unsexy areas, it just feels like there's a better opportunity to go in there and be smart about what can be done better. You're not kind of chasing the same problems that that everybody else is chasing completely agree. And now that like, you know, in the last YC cohort, there are three Buy now pay later companies, which like for me, you know, knock on Buy now pay later, there's like fantastically successful companies and category but I'm like, How much more can really happen in this space in a different way? And maybe we need to like see like a little bit more like normalization in FinTech?Jillian  07:08Exactly. And I mean, I know that probably happens, or not probably it does happen in every sector. But that is absolutely something that you're seeing more and more of, and I think that also is a factor because of how much help or easily is, you're able to build FinTech products as well, like an endless we are early investors into simple bank. And like, it took years to be able to build the initial bank because you didn't have infrastructure company is like snaps, unit rides, etc. And now that those exist, you can spin one up in like months. And so because of that, you can have copycats so much more easily that if something's taking off, someone can just be like, You know what, like, that worked. I want to build that. And so you miss that, like, drive that a founder has to like, actually why they want to build something.Nik  07:55It's so annoying, honestly, I like where were the service providers when we were building pedal? Well, when we were building funding circle, we could have used like fraud KYC out of the box, we could use like you kids don't understand how hard it was to build a fintech. But I know that you get a lot of time, not just at the conference, but outside of it, and in interviews to talk about FinTech and to talk about your thesis and your path as an investor. And so I was hoping maybe we could use this time to just draw outside the lines a little bit and go off field and just talk about kind of broader themes, especially like those that tie back to this base, but just see where the conversation goes. I'd love that. So thank you for helping me by putting together some really good question prompts for the conversation. I'm super curious to dive in to some of the bullet points that you wanted to cover. And so we might as well just start at the top and work our way through. Let's do it. So for anybody listening, Julia and I kind of talked about what conversation topics we could cover outside of fintech. And she had some fantastic suggestions. And I'm really excited to hear a little bit more on these. And so we have three general question prompts that we're going to try and get through today. And the first one is what are the three moments that defined FinTech in the last 10 years? What were the three kind of biggest inflection points that happened in this space over the last 10 years?Jillian  09:24All right, I guess I'll start. I think probably the first one that I'll say is the, I guess, like the passing of the Durbin amendment, because that was in 2011. It's a little off of 10 years ago, but I think that that was just honestly like fueled a lot of what has been been tech revenue for the last 10 plus years. Now, in terms of in terms of interchange fee. I think most recently, probably this past month has been increasing amendments to the Durbin amendment that may continue to change that and interchange fee The revenue hasn't been as loved anymore. But honestly, that created the opportunity for so many fintechs like time, current, etc. To exist without charging their customer and to compete with the large institutions in a way where it's like, hey, these companies are charging you tons of fees, etc. And we can actually give you a free offering. And so I think that honestly just propelled that space from a consumer standpoint, in a huge way. And I think honestly, probably more than any other regulation that I can that I can think of impure, impure, FinTech honestly.Nik  10:39Totally agreed. There's a great write up that I read from ao Majola who used to be blocking I think, is a carbon health called like children's urban, but he was just talking about how like that waterfall created. I couldn't agree more. For me, one was, this isn't obviously it's not like people say this a lot. But I feel like the plaid visa acquisition was kind of a watershed moment where for the first time you saw that like, a large scale with a $5 billion price tag that there were a possible existent FinTech and that kind of precipitated, you know, all this late stage activity, all these growth rounds. And then like this back wave, you know, money line nerd while I painted all these companies that went public over the last few years in FinTech. And so now for the first time, you kind of have proof that it's like a multi company category, and that it's a really viable asset class at scale. And that you can just indefinitely kind of tranche up like different companies that can actually still grow. And my guess is, over the next year, you know, in the environment we're in, we'll probably see a lot more m&a activity. And so it's kind of interesting to see how that shakes out with these acquisitions and kind of what that says about the exit landscape, but it feels like that really kind of kick started all this.Jillian  11:49It's funny, because when that happened, it was such a huge deal. And then I remember it wasn't like six months later how everyone was like, wow, Visa got was getting that for a steal like that. So well. And then now, like, some people are like, yeah, maybe that should have like, we they probably wish that went through like, who knows now just given how quickly how quickly the markets have changed. And so it's crazy, just how much last like year and a half really, how muchNik  12:15It's kind of stuff because like MasterCard that acquired Felicity and I think either acquired, like, has a strategic partnership with like tanking Europe and it's like, yeah, these apply fell through yet. MasterCards got an open banking acquisition now. Yeah, somebody I was meeting with earlier at Chase was telling me that plaid when the acquisition happened was a top five venture return acquisition of all time, which like blew my mind.Jillian  12:40That's crazy. I didn't know that. I mean, but to your point, I think plaid in general was also on my list. As just a guest. That's not like a moment. But like, some thing in FinTech, that was huge, because it really unlocked almost everything else in FinTech in a way that I don't think most people actually think about. Because your bank really just owned every single aspect of data of yours. And especially in the US, like there was really no other way of getting that. And for most of the companies that exist now, they usually need Platt or now like there's MX, ethnicity, etc. But like, eventually need one of these companies to be able to exist. And so I think like the existence of plaid and the fact that like, especially early on, now they have more partnerships, but like they were scraping your data, they were being shut down by the banks constantly, like they were doing everything kind of like a backdoor to get into stata was like really huge for growing the FinTech space, and even enabling all of these other apps to exist. And so that's something that I constantly think about that, like how massive of an opportunity to plaid was.Nik  13:49Yeah, totally agree. I mean, that's kind of perfectly, you know, one of the inflection points, I guess, or kind of key dynamics that was really interesting to me over the last 10 years is that you have this move down the stack. And a lot of people who tried to solve second order problems and realize they should be working on first order problems. I think Stephanie overt or am is a good example where she wanted to build basically like real time intelligent money movement, and like automatic optimization, I might move in and realize, oh, there's actually like a fundamental problem about like, how money is able to move in real time we're gonna go down the stack and plaid feels like a great example of that. Yeah. What are some? What are some other moments or other kind of big trends that I thinkJillian  14:27the another one for me is? It kind of goes back to like, Alright, so the Durbin amendment is probably the biggest regulation I think of but other things that have been the big biggest catalysts in FinTech have honestly been like the macro economic. I don't know what the word is, like, macro environment events have been the biggest catalyst. So I think of like COVID FHA is a more recent one has been a huge one, especially in terms of consumer adoption. And just like consumer awareness of FinTech like if you ask most people that like aren't FinTech nerds like us before, like how many of them unheard of chime, probably bear view. And then they went from like, what like 3 million to like 14 niche million users in the span of a year, year and a half. That's tremendous growth. And like more people now know it, they exist or even like Robin Hood, Coinbase, etc, and the growth of those companies. But then you even think back to like, the global financial crisis in 2008. Like, that was the impetus for so many companies start, like, if you look at interviews of like, John Stein from Betterment, like, that is why he started Betterment was like, basically, in response to the global financial crisis. And so many of these companies were like, We need to take back what is happening with the banks, and also this kind of unbundling of the financial stack. It's interesting, now we're seeing kind of like a re bundling. But at that time, it was like, let's build something that we can actually have a better customer experience and build it for the customer. Because it was such a missed like, this, like loss of trust between the customer and consumer. And the banks at that time after that did a crisis.Nik  16:02Yeah, it's super interesting, when you read accounts of the financial crisis, and people talking about how difficult was to recruit at these, like prestige banks afterwards, if you're a smart Ivy League accomplished, you know, could walk and chew gum at the same time, you know, graduate, you could get a job at a bulge bracket bank, and you know, these investment banks were really kind of the premier, like status, occupation, and then all of a sudden that gravitated to like the fang companies and the tech companies of the world. We're making the world a better place, you know, in quotes. But that changed a lot. And I totally agree with you. I mean, the other answer I had in mind for this question was COVID, specifically, as a big macro driver. You know, you nobody knew what a QR code was three years ago. And now, I think we all hope restaurants are gonna bring back paper menus, because we're sick of using them or nobody put a card into a digital wallet before but then all of a sudden, you don't want to touch the point of sale system. And so now everybody's loading up Apple Pay and Google Pay. And I definitely feel like there's kind of a big paradigm shift. Like even like, so many news stories over the past couple years have kind of been FinTech adjacent, like the Gamestop mania, and all these meme stocks, you know, that were facilitated by the Robin Hood's of the world?Jillian  17:11Absolutely. I mean, I did teach my nine year old grandfather how to deposit a check on his phone during COVID. I don't think he ever thought he was going to do that. For a second,Nik  17:20I thought you're gonna say I had to teach my 90 year old grandfather how to trade options. And I was like, why? I mean, you know, YOLO, honestly,Jillian  17:30honestly, yeah, like the money sign.Nik  17:35Okay, question number two. What do you think the biggest lifestyle change? We'll see in our lifetime? Is? I'll take a jump on this one, since I think it's only fair not to make the answer first, every time. One of the biggest lifestyle changes, I think we're gonna see is is just kind of the endpoint for globalization. Like, especially since the this is as far out of my domain expertise as you go. So we'll see how many people call me out for being like, very out of pocket on this one. But like, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, you had like a much more interconnected world. And you had this kind of growth of the Chinese economy too. And a lot of manufacturing moved from centers like the US and Europe offshore to low cost areas, and you didn't really have like labor capital, moving across borders as much. But now all of a sudden, especially like with COVID, and as an accelerant, you have more and more people working remotely, like even in larger companies like in a sustainable way, like not on a contract basis. And Bain published like 10 years ago, this report called like a world awash in capital about how capital is moving really seamlessly to investment opportunities across borders, and it feels like something where you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Once globalization started, it's gonna be really hard to turn that off. And it's gonna be kind of a good test with like, Russia and China now, D dollar rising like whether you get trade bloc's, but it feels like capital, labor or investment should kind of chase the maximum points of return. And borders don't really matter for that. And so I feel like we're likely to see a much more globalized world, you know, kind of regardless of like little hiccups and like geopolitical events over the next 50 years, we're really you're working with an international team, and you're also competing against international competitors, regardless what industry you're in. And you have a supply chain that's diversified between like three different, like countries, like low cost centers, and that's just going to change like, the composition of what jobs are available and where and, you know, maybe it's the case that the best lawyers in the world all you know, are educated like Buenos Aires, Argentina, and so they become like the lawyers for like international corporations rather than like the Harvard Law graduates of the world. The interesting to say,Jillian  19:45I completely agree in terms of the long term moving there. I think, maybe this is like I jaded side a little bit, but like, there are a lot of hiccups along the road, especially due to politics that we're seeing kind of like across the world, not just the US, but like all around the world that are kind of trying to be like, very anti globalization right now. And so I think it's interesting to see how that tension plays out in the short term. I think long term, it's really hard to kind of fight that. And because of a lot of the a lot of what you said, but I do think it's interesting to see how that continues to play out. This kind of like back and forth tension. But I do agree with you in terms of like the long term, that's absolutely where we're moving.Nik  20:29Yeah, no, I think that's totally right. Like you, you have the pendulum swing, and then it needs to swing back a little bit. There's always a reaction. And I feel like there's a lot of political issues where that's the case where you have like, forward movement, but then you have the reaction, that forward movement, and you think it was Obama who is saying at the end of his term, he's like, you know, what, sometimes things Zig is sometimes things and you have to realize that like the trend lines go in the right place, even if you have setbacks in the way they'reJillian  20:52no, absolutely. I think kind of, maybe my first point is somewhat similar to yours, because I'm thinking about a little bit us focus, but I think there's gonna be a really big shift in the like structure of how we think of employment. And I don't actually think of this just because of COVID. And like remote work, but I think so much of our lives are tied to our employer, especially around our finances, like in terms of, obviously, how we get paid, but like 401k, or health care, and everything like that. And that's not necessarily the most sustainable. And then when we think about like, I mean, this is a problem that, like so many people have been talking about, but like to get loans, you basically need to be a typical salaried worker, because it is so much harder for people that don't have that normal structure job, when like, we are increasingly seeing people have alternative income. And even if they have a traditional job, they might be making a lot more money elsewhere, or having two jobs. I think there was like some employer recently that I think it was a big thing on LinkedIn, where like, they fired two employees, because they were having two jobs. And like he didn't know for months that he was they were having two jobs like,Nik  22:06it's like says like a little bit more about you as an employer. It's like, are you really getting everything?Jillian  22:10Exactly? Like maybe they were doing a good enough job to do jobs? I don't know. And so I think that we're probably going to see some sort of a shift in terms of really like how, and if it's just like the benefits, but how a how we structure employment in the US and what that looks like. And everyone exactly know what that will look like, whether it's like we move away from the typical w two, or that format, but also how we structure a lot of what's tied to it and how we structure all of the like, financial benefits that's tied to it as well, because I think that's just like so prohibitive towards most people, and how we're moving in the world. And so I think that that will be really interesting to see how that continues to play out over time.Nik  22:52Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, to to kind of like quick fire ideas that that makes me think about your comment is one, the emergence of Dows and web three over the last year, you know, there's a lot of hype, this base grew too quickly, it consolidated again, and we'll see kind of what the long term viability of like dals looks like. But it's kind of the first attempt to re architect like the, like, corporate Corporation structure that we've had new assets like persistent for, you know, hundreds of years. And it's interesting, it's like, do you have this third path from WTS, or 10 eyes? Do you have kind of a spectrum of options available to you, where instead of being a salaried worker, for one company, you are a participant in four days, and you work on four different products, and the amount that you get paid is like relative to your input, and you just kind of like move seamlessly between them. And the other thought I had was, when you talk to people who come to the US, especially from Western Europe, or like Nordic countries, they're always shocked, like you said, by kind of how much of your life outside of work is immediately dependent on like, Where specifically you're working, like not even the work you're doing, but like the company that you're tied to. And there's this quote, you know, a developed country is not one where everybody has a car, but it's one where rich people ride public transit, I feel like that kind of applies here to where the shift in labor classification might mean that hopefully, you get kind of better social services and a better social safety net. And so stuff like having like your, you know, healthcare tied to like we're working specifically isn't as much of like the model that we have going forward.Jillian  24:24Yeah. I mean, I think it's crazy that like you change jobs, and like you might have to entirely uproot, like what doctor you're seeing or might not be able to get like a specific procedure because of that, that like doesn't, that shouldn't make sense. So that's wild. But maybe I'll continue because I think maybe like next one is sort of tied to the healthcare system. I think one area and fintech that I've been like wanting to invest in forever is at the intersection of healthcare and in FinTech. And part of that's because like, I shouldn't shock everyone that like our healthcare system is fully broken, and I think like will continue to just get worse and implode upon itself, and so at some point in our life, I kind of hope it does, mainly so that it can hopefully be rebuilt. And actually, in a format that works is I think, one of the challenges as much as I continue to like, look at a lot of investments and really want to make an investment of space, I think that a lot of them are probably more so like, band aids. Yeah. And that, we probably just need to actually fix the structure because none of the incentives work.Nik  25:31Yeah. Tyler Durden Fight Club approach, just blow up the healthcare. Start from scratch. Exactly.Jillian  25:36And so I think that that is probably one of the things that I look at quite a bit because like, both in terms of like how people live their lives, whether it's a one of those spectrum, like some people are uninsured, and or people don't want to be insured, because like, they can't afford it, or people just like, then don't go to the doctor. And then it makes themselves worse. And so then when they have a catastrophic issue that like impacts our healthcare system, even worse, but then just like the impacting costs of our healthcare system, like compounding over and over, is, is insane to me. And it's both like internally within, like, between payers and like how I'm not gonna go into like, how billing is done and things like that. But also, just in terms of like, how consumers operate. And so I think that like, hopefully, I'm not sure it looks like another just like, new presidential health care plan fixes up other than, like, we actually need to do something to fix the entire structure of it. It's interesting,Nik  26:34you know, you being a FinTech investor and wanting to look at the intersection of healthcare and fintech, because like just from that description alone, you feel like you can see the parallels there. There's a lot of legacy architecture and regulation that creates a certain system in the way it's set up. And so even if you take a step back and say, Oh, this is actually the Pareto optimal way. To solve this, there's a lot of path dependency for how the system is now where you're going to kind of make incremental improvements within the bounds that you have. And like, it would probably be better to be able to just start over from scratch. But easier said than done. When you have a very strong vested interest from companies have poured a lot of money into lobbying.Jillian  27:07Exactly. Yeah, too many people get paid way too much for this to ever happen. So it's a little bit of a pipe dream for me. But we'll go can wish not me that's exactly.Nik  27:21Alright, well, I want to make sure that we're staying on top of our time here. What one other one? Oh, man, this is like come given the most basic answers. So this is where you can start tuning out if you're listening in. But another kind of trend that I think is gonna change our style and quality of life is more mass adoption of different like point solutions and AI. You're starting to seeJillian  27:44crbc Yeah, exactly. Yeah, as the new hot topic.Nik  27:47I'm investing at the intersection of AI crypto. All the buzzwords. Yeah, exactly. please invest my fun to not a general solicitation. But, you know, alright, so like, there's all this hype around these, like consumerize AI products like GPT, three and Dolly and stable diffusion. Now that like, I don't know, if there are like proven commercial use cases yet. So it's like really cool to play around with these tools. But, you know, there's a couple of interesting companies like Jasper that's like building like a marketing specific engine on top of GPD. Three, but not, it seems like early days. And I don't know, kind of how investable a category it is yet because a lot of the market hasn't been proven out a lot of kind of scale, like enterprise use cases are not there yet, are still very early. But eventually, you're starting to kind of see that what a lot of what's considered to be creative work or knowledge work is actually pattern recognition, like it did to kind of an extreme point where even writing a good book, or making an evocative piece of art, is actually kind of just pattern recognition, where if you look at enough, really, you know, vontade artists, you too, can make a painting that kind of looks like it should be, you know, high art. And then for whatever the you know, goal is of art or writing a book or doing anything creative. You can you know, pass off that product and monetize it and do it and automatically do it like this massive amount of scale, within seconds, rather than actually have like a human creative process. And so it feels like there's gonna be a big labor dislocation from that. And all of a sudden, you have, you know, the lawyers of the world who are not as necessary in bulk to be able to put together you know, all the underlying documents for like a large m&a deal or like a take private or, you know, an LBO. And so what the world looks like after that is really interesting. You know, what new jobs and like sectors and jobs crop up after that, and like, is that dislocation, you know, really disruptive to like a huge swath of the population who all of a sudden find that like their jobs are replaced by like aI they can do like or work like more efficiently than they can. War is like gradual and like do you have retraining programs? I think it's it's kind of it's gonna be an interesting question. See that play out?Jillian  30:09No, I absolutely agree. And I think that I mean, you see it across the board with, obviously AI, but then automation in general, like I remember even I interned my freshman or sophomore year in college on investor sales and trading. And like, there was like nobody on the equity floor, it was like three people or something like that. And because most of it was automated, and they just didn't need to do anything, like they didn't need to pick up the phones really, like everything was on IV, like Bloomberg chat, like, that's all they need to do. And like, they would talk about that. And I remember there was one guy on there who started his career, like on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as like a ticket runner. And like, he would talk about how like how much it had changed and how crazy it was for him to see like how basically, his job had been automated away. And to see that now happening in more and more spaces, where to your point, like, you think like a human is fully necessary, and you kind of need that like mental capacity. It's kind of like, it's it's very strange to be like, oh, yeah, no, like, we're actually not that necessary, like reading a book now. Like, have ai do that as well.Nik  31:22Yeah. What does it mean, when all of a sudden society progresses, like, in spite of humans, just not needed to like move the wheel forward anymore, it's probably a good time to come out and just admit that my newsletter and my tweets are all written by GPT. Three. I've been on vacation for the last two years. All right. And so final topic. This is actually the question I'm most excited about. I think it's a super interesting one. And I'm gonna let you answer first. Have we experienced the defining moment of the decade? If so, what is it? If not why?Jillian  31:57So it's interesting, because like, obviously, we're very early in the decade, but a lot. That's gonna say a lot of s**t. I think I was told. So apologies if I'm not a lot has happened already. In this decade. I was asked this question, actually, like, probably a year ago. And at that point, I said, Yes. Now?Nik  32:23I don't think so. And was that COVID? A year ago?Jillian  32:26Yes. Now? I don't think so. However, I would probably say that, like, the catalyst for whatever is going to be the defining moment has already begun, and has already been said, meaning like, could that catalyst be like Russia? Is War On Ukraine, starting a much broader war? Potentially? Could that be us going into a much bigger financial crisis and recession? And like, Yes, I think there's a number could be like a much bigger political crisis that we have, potentially. And so I think there's a number of things that like, have already you're seeing like the sparks kind of starting, that I think could be a lot bigger. But I don't think that we've actually seen the climax of it quite yet. And I think that's where I kind of stand on that.Nik  33:22I like that I would have totally said, either COVID, or the war in Ukraine is the defining, like, touch point, like this decade? And when you said, No, I was like, okay, maybe I should up my game in this answer a little bit, like Think harder. And I was trying to think back of, you know, think back on what other defining moments and other decades have been, and you can kind of see, you know, in the in odd Suez, like the global financial crisis really feels like it stands out more than anything else, as an example. And so it feels like our understanding of the world order, and like the Pax Americana that we've had, since, you know, most people like the millennial generation have grown up, ended and abruptly shifted with the Russia Ukraine war. And so the outputs of that, to me feel like a very compelling answer for a defining moment of the decade. But if I had to align with you and say, No, there's something that's gonna be even more defining. In my mind, this is like, I want another one of my basic thought boy answers, but we've watched China grow their economy and grow their influence on the world stage over the last 30 or 40 years, and a lot of people refer to it rightfully so as a Chinese miracle. Because if you look at like the rates of extreme poverty, like they've pulled an amazing amount of people out of poverty that if you look at like the skyline of like Shenzhen or like, Shanghai, like over a 30 year period, like it's just crazy how fast it's grown. And you know, the economy has grown by like low double digits, high single digit percentages every year, and now you're starting to see that slowed down a little bit. I'm sure that a lot of it is due to like supply chain issues and COVID. But like, there's probably also some kind of secular slowdown in that growth as well. And so it feels like this decade is kind of could be a transition point between growing your influence and establishing, establishing yourself in the world stage and starting to exert your influence. And what exactly that looks like, I think is could be a defining moment for us politically, like, do we continue to live in like a unipolar world or a multipolar world? You know, do we have kind of another cold? Where where like, countries independently decide who they want to align with and whose model they accept? You know, a lot of the, like soft power influence like the Belt and Road Initiative, does that become hard power and kind of a more, a more kind of like overzealous foreign policy that feels like, it'll have ramifications for like, where we sit in the US and like, our position in the world, and like how we are perceived. And so that, to me is like, it's another like, raise and ensure that everybody's talking about but it feels relevant.Jillian  35:54No, I like that answer a lot. And I think my only answer, oh, my only rationale for why like Russia, Ukraine, currently isn't is. And again, this a little bit US centric, is because I think a lot of Americans have like a very short attention span. And so like, for awhile, it was like the worst thing ever. And then they kind of forgot about it for a little bit. And I think like, it's come back a little bit, but like until it is, unfortunately, like impacting our day to day a little bit more. People aren't going to think it's like the end of the world. And so I think that's where it's like it needs to progress, unfortunately, out outside Ukraine a little bit more. For it to, at least from the US perspective, be the defining moment. But I do think that Russia invading another country is a huge, huge, like moment in the world. I do think though, maybe it's also more so from my perspective that I do think it can easily lead to more and more of an expansion of of the war globally. And then also, like, there's the risk of like China and Taiwan and things like that as well. That don't seem as far off anymore inNik  37:11this world. So yeah, exactly. Like now, it's like what we thought was unthinkable is no longer unthinkable. Exactly. If you read like early stories of World War One, World War Two, you have all these, like populations that didn't want to go to war. And it was just like, the inevitability of all these, like international agreements that kind of dragged you in there. And I feel like now steps are being taken to avoid that. But to your point, it's kind of hard to tell what steps will escalate things and how, like, what looks like to be to country conflict, spiral and have broader, like more severe international implications? Exactly. Definitely trying to place a premium on good leadership. Yes. Okay, now that we've covered all the easy topics. And I'm sure when this gets published, they'll have million VCs who become experts on the war on Russia, Ukraine. That's my word wrong. But we can we can take the blowback when it comes. I love the idea that you had for a FinTech rapid fire, just power through some questions like popcorn like top of your mind, right. And so let's start. Let's start with a question that I really have no good answer for but favorite FinTechJillian  38:26ad. Recently, maybe this is just because it's top of mind. Cash App has a ad with Kendrick Lamar, Ray Dalio and some comedian his name I do not know I apologize. And it's basically like Kendrick Lamar is like the translator for Financial Services and Financial Literacy between the two of them because like they can't understand each other and it's actually very funny.Nik  38:53Yeah, that was wild, who saw Kendrick and Ray Dalio getting into a room together. So I want that podcast that's a podcast you're listening to Well, we talked about this for a second but I was I thought it was really interesting at the Super Bowl a couple years ago and so if I ran an ad about who should not apply for so if i car and I heard some reports afterwards I was like actually increase like their average like, applicant quality but I was just like, wow, like IT tech is like such a like positive and like, like you kind of paper over a lot of like, the underlying, like difficulties like products. They're just like, leaning into it. I was like, That was that was an interesting way. Roleplay Yeah, I guess. All right. Favorite FinTech or finance relatedJillian  39:41book is probably the lamest answer possible, but like I love Michael Lewis. So The Big Short, like that was the book that like made me want to get into financial services officially. So I'll take that.Nik  39:54That's awesome. I want to trade the world. Actually, in the same vein, I would say My favorite book about that terrifying that I've ever read is the ascent of money by now for and and it's like very, like I feel like Michael Lewis is such an evocative writer and Ferguson also has like a great way of just like taking what should just be a really boring topic, like the history of like money movement, and like Western Europe developing the monetary systems like actually make like super engaging. More recently, I am a big, this is no secret to anybody who sees my twitter but I'm a big fan of Sofia Goldberg is the founder of word answer. And I picked up her book Field Guide to global payment systems. And yeah, it was really just easy to understand. And also kind of like, maybe appreciate, like how much domain expertise you build up in FinTech like, oh, yeah, like these are actually like, not accomplices, like everybody, like comes out of the womb, knowingJillian  40:46Oh, yeah, and actually making it where people can understand like, that's like the payment stack is very impressive. And that making it interesting as well.Nik  40:55Yeah, totally agreed. It's a Christmas present, I'm getting for all my family. Getting invited back to Christmas. All right, FinTech app or product that you use the most.Jillian  41:09I would say. I don't want to say lame, but sorry. Marcus and betterman are probably the two I like automated to take to my paycheck every two weeks. So I'd say probably those two.Nik  41:23They love that. I mean Fintech is FinTech, even if you're getting it from Goldman Sachs. I mean, my answer is equally lame. It's like, it's definitely Venmo I think just you know, real time instant peer peer payments with my entire network, it just made my life so much easier. I have an issue actually, where I created a merchant account for this week in FinTech because we had to accept like Venmo payments at events way through. And they're like, threw me into like a, like a bottomless rabbit hole of KYC for my personal Venmo account, cuz like they're both linked to like the same, like, Chase Bank profile, even though they're two separate accounts. And so like, there was like, a little period where I went without Venmo. And I was like, this is awful.Jillian  42:05I had to, like, ask people to pay back your friends.Nik  42:09That was like, honestly, like, you think it'd be awful because like, people can't pay me back. But it was like, even worse for me. Like when somebody was like, Yo, can you hit me up for dinner? And I'd be like, can I write you a check? Or can I send you a zombie? Like, what kind of sketchy stuff? Have you been doing that? You know? I just realized how much I relied on it. All right, number one item on your FinTech wish list. I thinkJillian  42:31it would be in like, there are some companies kind of trying to do this. But it'd be something that like, told me how to optimize my finance better, but at the point of action, and like, I hate no offense to anybody, but like, I hate PFM. Like, I don't want to see how poorly I'm spending my money. Like I know, I am not good at it. But like, at the point of me buying something, tell me what I'm supposed to use? Is it better for me to use? Like, which credit card? Is it better for me to use a affirm? Or is it better me to do X, Y, and Z? At the point of me getting paid when I move money into betterman, Marcus or anything else like which one is best for me to do and optimize? Or like doing it at that point of actual action, I think is the most impactful versus, like, just kind of giving me advice later on. I just don'tNik  43:20$200 at restaurants last week. Yeah. Like I know,Jillian  43:23all my money goes to food. That's not helpful. I'm not going to change that.Nik  43:27Okay, but who's released here? I actually have the exact same answer as you. I would love just an app that tells me where all my money is at any one time all my money like all three or $49. But like we're all my money, is it any one time and then like has a little flag that can tell me if something's not being used ultimately, like, you've got this much sitting in a digital wallet. Like you should be like, you know, investing in like, you know, T bills or something like while it sits there. Yeah, exactly. Okay, most underrated FinTech founder. Oh, God.Jillian  44:01I don't want to do anyone that I've I've invested intoNik  44:04Silla portfolio. So I will ignore that.Jillian  44:06This might be a little bit top of mind because I saw the person today. But I'd say two of my favorite fin tech founders, just because they're like two of the nicest people are Tommy Nichols and or Sigrun. They're just like, really great humans. And Allah is a great company.Nik  44:28I totally agree. It's been. It's been awesome. Like watching. We like beta, that company pedal. And I was like, Oh, this is like an interesting tool. And it's just grown so much. And I feel like they are so intentional about how they grow and structure the company and what they do and the kind of environment that they're trying to create their workforce and I'm a huge admirer of theirs. Absolutely. Oh man, this is like also top of mind, but not a company that I've invested in and I just want to shout her out but Daraja clued in her co founder of her right foot They're kind of in the same mold. Like, I feel like they're intentionally working on a problem that matters to a lot of people debt repayment, and doing it in a thoughtful way with a good product and kind of the right mentality. You know, do to reach out to me one point about making introductions to prospective investors to diversify, you know, her own cap table, and I feel like caring about that, like, not just like, that you're getting money in but like, where your money is coming from is like a level of intentionality that like I kind of hope to carry and like really respect,Jillian  45:31absolutely, Stephanie's her, Patrick, or I'm also really paid a lot of attention to that. And that's something I respect so much.Nik  45:38Yeah, I totally agree. So shout out to all of you. Okay, we're coming towards the end here. But who would be the mayor of FinTech town?Jillian  45:50I think this probably changes. But right now, it's probably the founders of stripe. I'd say they're just like, consistently the top dogs in FinTech. And I've really changed. FinTech probably the most in general. So shout out to Patrick.Nik  46:07Yeah. And they'd like to it was such a positive attitude to I feel like they're very, like, positive. So we're not going to get involved in petty infighting, we're not going to compete. We're going to layer climate into all of our products, which we don't have to do we have, you know, an oil Geyser of payments, revenue, and yet we're going to be intentional about what we see as bigger social issues. I love that answer. Mine is much more shallow. It's based on like, Twitter activity following alone, but I feel like it's hard to make a case against shield mo note.Jillian  46:40You know, I had a feeling you were gonna say him, for INik  46:42know, I'm too much of a fanboy. But I just feel like, he also I don't know. He He's older than I am. I'm 33. And he has the intellectual curiosity and energy of somebody who just learned about what FinTech was yesterday. And it's like really hard to retain that over time. Like you get kind of calcified. You get set in your ways you like develop beliefs, and it's something that I admire a lot, but like I see it, like, kind of go into like, how many people he wants to meet how he engages all of them and like to me, that's like, just going out and shaking hands and kissing babies and being being mayoral. Absolutely. Okay, we have three minutes. So we have three questions. So let's close the rapid fire. If FinTech were a movie, who would the bad guy be?Jillian  47:26I would say, you could argue like the regulator's for when they stop things from being able to happen. You could argue the bank sometimes. And also, like I think lenders are kind of oftentimes don't have really great intentions with consumers. So those are like probably my three that I'd say. Cuz you can always argue that they could be the bad guys.Nik  47:50Yeah, I feel like it's a play to another question we have, but I feel like there are a lot of non incentive aligned with customer products that exists in the traditional financial world. And crypto definitely and and fintech. And so being able to like understand kind of weed out those customer adverse products, I think would be like the thesis of like the FinTech movement. If you want FinTech to be around, you need to weed the bad guys out. Most transformative slash impactful FinTechJillian  48:21I'd probably have to go plaid or stripe.Nik  48:25Totally, for reasons already discussed, like they just facilitated this whole ecosystem. This is like a little bit like outside of like my, like tight aperture, but I'd say UPI in India. Now it takes in Brazil a little bit, but like it's crazy, like how much innovation and building has been enabled, like government backed initiative for payments rails, like is the government of India, the number one FinTech innovator the last decade, you know, probably not, but like, it's just crazy how much has been built off of that.Jillian  48:54And pace. It was another one I was gonna say, Well,Nik  48:57yes, absolutely. I mean, like pick up like how big like the, like Pan African remittances ecosystem is now in terms of companies and like different quarters, and it's all from a pace. It's insane. Okay, last question. Why don't get down here? Is all FinTech net good for the world. No.Jillian  49:18No, I think that I think a lot of companies even when they want to necessarily do good, don't necessarily always have the best intention for the consumer. And I think it's very given that we are dealing with people's money, I think it's very easy. Whether or not there's intention behind it to get people in trouble because you're dealing with money. Other people don't know how to manage their own money. And so you can easily get people in trouble in that way. But then also, oftentimes, business models are not necessarily aligned with consumers as well. And so that can be a challenge.Nik  49:52Totally. I agree. Maybe a weird question or way to answer to end on but you know, finance is a tool the end of the day and the tool can be used for good and it can be used for not good I think it's our role as stewards of FinTech to make sure that we're moving more resources towards the good side. So, thank you for coming on to the show today and talking a little bit more about how you're making FinTech better.Jillian  50:11Absolutely. This has been fun. Cool. All right. Thank you are You didn't hit record Get full access to This Week in Fintech at thisweekinfintech.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 90 is with Amanda Robson, Partner at Cowboy Ventures! Originally from Ancaster, Ontario, Amanda, better known as Robby, invests in B2B seed & pre-seed founders and focuses on innovations in developer tooling, data management, security, applied AI, and supply chain. In November 2020, she led a US$3.2-million investment round in a securities-software company called Drata, now worth US$1 billion. When she's not crushing it as a newly minted and youngest partner at Cowboy Ventures, she's running her organization, Modern Angels, which seeks to democratize funding for women and non-binary people. She also co-hosts her own podcast, The Open Source Startup Podcast. Cowboy Ventures is a seed-stage focused fund investing in digital startups that seeks to back exceptional founders who are building products that re-imagine work and personal life in large and growing markets. We sit down to speak with Robby about her career journey from Ontario to Silicon Valley. She details the tech landscape across North America, the importance of DEI, why she's big on Open Source, the art of cold outreach, and much more. Cowboy Ventures https://www.cowboy.vc/index Timestamps 2:45 - Intro 5:24 - Importance of Cold Outreach 9:57 - Tech Industry - Canada vs. USA 12:32 - Amanda “Robby” Robson 15:59 - Joining Cowboy Ventures 18:25 - Cowboy Ventures Investment Thesis 25:17 - What Makes a Successful Founder 28:00 - Common Hiring Mistakes Founders Make 29:40 - Importance of Diverse Teams 32:50 - What is Open Source? Why is it important? 41:50 - The Open Source Podcast 47:20 - Modern Angels 51:24 - Time Management 55:40 - Lightning Round --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

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The number of global venture capital (VC) investments dipped in 2022, thanks to ongoing geopolitical tensions, turbulence in global capital markets, supply chain issues, and increasing interest rates. This has caused VC investors to be increasingly wary. With no end in sight to the economic uncertainty, VC investment could remain soft, with downward pressure on valuations resulting in decreasing levels of investment. Founder and Managing Partner at Cowboy Ventures, Aileen Lee, discusses the state of the VC market in 2022 with Founder and CEO of SaaStr Jason Lemkin—the change in VC activities and seed deals, the importance of the board in the success of a startup, profitability and much more.   Full video: https://youtu.be/R3G6P19qHY4   Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the

Chad Sanderson is the Head of Data at Convoy. He is a scout for Sequoia Capital investing in ML and data startups. He has previously been a scout for Cowboy Ventures and Innovation Endeavors. He's been an advisor to Tola Capital and an LP to Essence Venture Capital. He is a prolific builder of products. And has built everything from feature stores, experimentation platforms, streaming platforms, data discovery systems, and workflow development platforms.In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:- Modern data stack- How he identifies great ML startups- Being a scout for Sequoia Capital- Investment themes in ML and data- Data modeling- Data collaboration tools

In today's episode, Jason Henrichs connects with Jo K Jagadish to discuss TD's innovation journey. As EVP, Head of Corporate Products, Services and Innovation, Jo centers TD product design efforts on customers, even corporate customers, figuring pains, gains and jobs to be done, rather than finding solutions and looking for a problem. Design thinking is leading the way and enabling TD to think small and then scale large to benefit customers and the financial institution. Then, host Amber Buker shares an engaging conversation with one of Forbes' 30 under 30 (Venture Capital 2022) and co-Fintech Girl Gang member, Jillian Williams. Jillian is a Principal at Cowboy Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm where she applies her deep expertise in fintech and SaaS startups. Jillian started on the fintech investing path via a stop at Barclays before fintech was cool! Listen as she shares her journey and the intellectual rabbit holes she's falling down lately thinking about the future of finance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-jlkH17QGA

Welcome to In Check with Fintech!   Felix Gerlach is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Passbase, a privacy focused identity infrastructure company. Launched in 2018, Passbase has since raised over $17 million in funding from Cowboy Ventures, Eniac & Lakestar with offices in Berlin and New York. Prior to Passbase, Felix worked in leading product roles in multiple startups around the world including San Francisco, London as well as for Rocket Internet in Singapore & Bangkok. He was a guest-lecturer at Stanford CSP and brings in deep experience in growth-driven product design. Together with his co-founders, Felix was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe Finance list.   In this episode, Felix shares his insights on identity infrastructure for the next wave of builders.

Jomayra Herrera is a Partner at Reach Capital, an ed tech and future of work focused ventured fund. She was born in Orlando, Florida to two parents who always believed that education was not only important to prioritize, but it was one of the few things that no one could ever take from you. With that mindset, Jomayra devoted herself to her studies and eventually became the first person in her family to go to college. At Stanford, she fell in love with education and ended up getting a MA in education policy, organization, and leadership studies. She started her career as an operator at an ed tech startup called BloomBoard and eventually started a career in venture capital first at Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs' family office. Before Reach Capital, she was at Cowboy Ventures, where spent a lot of her time working with consumer internet and marketplace companies.

Unicorn is a term used in the venture capital industry to describe a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion. The term was first popularized by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, California.Unicorns can also refer to a recruitment phenomenon within the human resources (HR) sector. HR managers may have high expectations to fill a position, leading them to look for candidates with qualifications that are higher than required for a specific job. In essence, these managers are looking for a unicorn, which leads to a disconnect between their ideal candidate versus who they can hire from the pool of people available.

Leland Takamine, CEO & Co-founder, mobile.dev Leland Co-founder & CEO of mobile.dev, the first "shift left" mobile development platform for high-quality mobile experiences. Their software finds bugs and performance issues before a new mobile release goes out. The origins of mobile.dev are in the project nanoscope, which Leland open-sourced while at Uber. The number and quality of companies using nanoscope signaled the need for better mobile development tooling. Since launching, mobile.dev has signed enterprise customers such as Reddit and raised funding from Cowboy Ventures along with strategic funds and angels such as Essence VC, President of Coinbase Emilie Choi, VP Engineering from Robinhood Surabhi Gupta, "Building Mobile Apps at Scale" author Gergely Orosz, Founder of Kong Marco Palladino, and mobile influencer PY Ricau among others. In this episode, we discuss the decision to create and open-source nanoscope, how nanoscope led to mobile.dev, the "Shift Left Mobile" movement, and Leland's journey as a leader - particularly on going from technologist to CEO. mobile.dev is also hiring. Check out open reqs for Android Lead, Frontend Lead, and Device Cloud Engineering Lead (all remote)!

Data security is a huge concern, and a way to prove you take data security seriously is by obtaining a SOC 2 certificate. When obtained, SOC 2 is the gateway to larger enterprise contracts for SaaS companies, but the process of obtaining it can be labor-intensive, costly, and confusing. Drata was born to help streamline this process. We talk with Adam Markowitz, co-founder and CEO of Drata, to talk through SOC 2 and what Drata does for its customers.About Adam Markowitz:Adam is a former aerospace engineer who worked on rocket engines for NASA’s next-generation space launch vehicle as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine. He went on to be the founder and CEO of Portfolium (Acquired by Instructure – 2019), proudly serving millions of students and grads from over 3,600 colleges and universities. He co-founded Drata in 2020 and recently closed a $25M Series A with GGV Capital, SVCI - Silicon Valley CISO Investments, Okta Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and Leaders Fund.In this episode we discuss:01:58 What does SOC 2 Compliance and why is it so hard to achieve?05:03 The SOC 2 process with and without Drata06:48 Why SOC 2 is a growing concern for startups08:22 Is SOC 2 standard for B2B companies?09:53 What’s the first thing you should know if you’re asked for a SOC2 report?12:12 The difference between SOC 2 Type I and SOC2 Type II13:07 What the best case turnaround time for a SOC 2 Type I report13:48 Why many companies do a SOC 2 Type I on the way to get a SOC 2 Type II14:43 What type on content is in a SOC 2 report16:43 How founders should think about SOC 2 requests from clients18:25 How can startups instill a culture of cybersecurity20:59 Who should manage the SOC 2 process at smaller startups23:07 What Drata does to help simplify and automate the SOC 2 process26:13 What is the overlap between SOC 2 and HIPPA27:23 When is the right time to add a CISO position to a startup?28:50 Drata’s traction and recent Series A financingFast FavoritesPodcastMasters of ScaleNewsletter/BlogTed TalksGadgetAirpodsTrendHybrid/Remote workBookExtreme Ownership: How the US Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko WilinkRelentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim Grover and Shari WenkFollow Matt Cohen and Tank Talks here!Podcast production support provided by Agentbee.Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanktalks.substack.com

Anna de Paula Hanika is the Co-Founder and CEO of Uno Health. Uno Health unlocks financial equity for low-income seniors so millions can afford better health. Uno enrolls and re-certifies the Medicare members in all state and federal programs they are eligible for - putting thousands of dollars in their pockets and creating direct revenue and savings for their insurance company. Anna has raised a successful seed round from Floodgate and Cowboy Ventures. She also worked in product and operations and product and marketing at places like Google, Clover, mHealth, and Sum. She has also been a fellow at HITLAB Healthcare Innovation Lab. Bachelors from University of Oxford in Psychology & Neuroscience.On knowing when to expand your team - “So it's a combination of, data driven, but also a good amount of gut that gets you to identify when you need to actually hire someone and give your hat to them.” - Anna de Paula HanikaToday on Startups for Good we cover:Helping consumers on the enrollment sideHow company ideas evolve throughout the startup processDiffering CEO roles for product based business vs service basedKnowing when to expand your teamTesting your hypothesis How to create a good relationship with your co-founderVulnerabilitiesSome of the books that Anna discussed were:Never Split the Difference by Chris VossTeam of Teams by Gen. Stanley McChrystalGetting More by Stuart DiamondAnd Chris Voss does have a MasterclassConnect with Anna: LinkedIN and on the UnoHealth WebsiteSubscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.Don't forget to visit our website startupsforgood.com/, connect with Miles on Twitter https://twitter.com/Startups4Good or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mileslasater/, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about The Giving Circle https://www.startupsforgood.com/giving-circle/

Marianna Tessel (CTO @ Intuit) & Aileen Lee (Founder/Managing Partner @ Cowboy Ventures) cover how to navigate the build vs. buy decision! They share the frameworks they use to make a “buy” decision, how they assess engineering talent during acquisitions, how they decide between vendor software vs. open-source vs. building yourself. Plus the leadership skills that help Marianna lead a 5,000+ person team! MARIANNA TESSEL, CTO @ INTUIT Marianna oversees Intuit's technology strategy and leads all of Intuit's product engineering, data science, information technology and information security teams worldwide. Marianna's been at the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. Marianna previously served as Executive VP of Strategic Development at Docker, held leadership roles at VMware, Ariba, and General Magic working on the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. AILEEN LEE, FOUNDER & MANAGING PARTNER @ COWBOY VENTURES Aileen is founding Partner at Cowboy Ventures, a team that backs seed-stage technology companies re-imagining work and life through technology, what they call “life 2.0”. Cowboy Ventures works with startups like Guild Education, Lightstep, Dollar Shave Club, and Tally. Aileen periodically writes about technology insights and is known for coining the business term “unicorn” for public and private companies valued over $1bn. She has been named to the Forbes Midas List of best investors and Forbes Most Powerful Women, as well as to Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. Prior to Cowboy, Aileen was a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was founding CEO of RMG Networks, and worked at Gap Inc in operating roles. She has degrees from MIT and HBS, is mom of 3, wife to a startup founder, an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and co-founder of the non-profit All Raise - aiming to accelerate success for women in the technology ecosystem. SHOW NOTES About Marianna's role at Intuit (2:33) How many acquisitions / build vs. buy decisions have you had to make? (4:35) Marianna's evaluation framework for buying companies (6:26) Assessing engineering talent in acqui-hires (9:37) How do you decide to buy vendor software or build yourself? (15:41) How do you define what's core to the business vs. context? (19:11) Where are you looking to buy instead of build right now? (21:40) Hard & soft skills that helped Marianna advance her career and run a 5000+ person team (23:48) Were you always good at the "developing talent" and "managing" part of being a CTO? (26:50) BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Jellyfish - Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Listen to our Bonus Episode w/ Guillermo Fisher, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure @ Handshake on internal mobility, mission-driven decisions, & self-service infrastructure! Listen HERE: https://spoti.fi/3zdNnXn Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

Invite-only social audio app, Clubhouse, has launched its direct messaging feature- Backchannel- for all users, which allows them to slide into a one-on-one chat mode or a group text format.Microsoft has unveiled Windows 365 that takes the OS to the cloud to offer a personalized PC experience for users and organizations, a new approach to cloud computing amid hybrid working.Simpplr has raised a $32M Series C from Tola Capital. Simpplr will use the new funds to develop its platform, expand its development team, and scale up to serve worldwide commercial clients.Crayhill Capital Management invests $300 million in Unybrands as growth capital. Unybrands is an eCommerce platform that helps Amazon fulfill and direct-to-consumer businesses scale.Deskimo, a Y Combinator's S21 batch startup providing on-demand access to work desks in professional workspaces, has launched in Singapore and Hong Kong after its inception in February this year, reports state.Cybereason, an end-point detection and response platform has raised $275 million in a crossover Series F funding round led by Liberty Strategic Capital, with participation from Irving Investors, certain funds advised by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC and Softbank Vision Fund 2*, it said in a press release.Bevy, an enterprise-grade virtual conference and community events platform, has acquired Eventtus, an engagement platform managing events for an undisclosed amount to offer a comprehensive end-to-end management solution and a seamless experience for event attendees.Flymachine, an organizer of digital live events, has raised $21 million in a round co-led by  Greycroft Partners and SignalFire, with participation from Primary Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Red Sea Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.Untitled Ventures has announced its second fund of USD 118.3 million. It will collaborate with InnMind to deliver high-quality deep tech startup deal-flow to the fund's pipeline.Railsbank, a provider of APIs for fintech services, has raised $70 million in equity funding led by Anthos Capital. Other participants include Central Capital, Cohen and Company, and Chris Adelsbach's new fund Outrun Ventures.Cardless, a platform developer for companies launching credit cards, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Activant Capital. Other participants include Accomplice, Pear VC, and the owners and management of NBA teams Phoenix Suns and Boston Celtics. The funding increases the company's total raised since its debut in 2019 to $50 million.The Moot Group (TMG), an eCommerce technology startup, has raised €5 million (approx. USD 6.9 million) in a seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures. The new funds will be used for the company's next growth stage. Great Question raises $2.5 million in a seed funding round. Great Question is an online platform that provides product managers, designers, researchers, and research operations with UX research services. Great Question was part of Y Combinator's winter program of 2021.  BHyve, a future of work platform, has raised $300,000 in a JITO Angel Network, LetsVenture, and other angel investors. BHyve is a platform for disseminating tacit employee knowledge and allowing peer learning networks in the future of work.Mobile.dev, a startup providing pre-production workflows to help mobile teams automatically detect problems, has raised $3 million in seed round funding from Cowboy Ventures.Acelerate, a software company helping restaurants operate efficiently, has announced the raise of $14.4 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. Taking the announcement to its LinkedIn handle, the company expressed delight at the investment after a year of bootstrapping.Stytch has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital with participation from Coatue and existing investors, Benchmark and Index, the company wrote in an official blog. Multiplier, a Professional Employment Organization (PEO) platform, raises a $4 million investment round. It provides complete solutions that enable businesses to hire individuals globally. Proper, a property accounting services provider for the real estate industry, has announced the raise of $9M in Series A from QED Investors, with participation from our partners at MetaProp, Expa, and Bling Capital. 

Julie is joined by Jillian Williams, Early Stage Investor at Cowboy Ventures to discuss:- Jillian's FTT+ premium article that "Celebrated Juneteenth" (1:59)- why previous attempts to specifically assist Black Americans via banking failed (4:36)- issues w/underwriting to black people (9:50)- types of common financial discrimination examples (16:55)- will noticeable progress occur in the near future (19:35)New episodes every Monday and Thursday!For daily updates on the fintech space sent right to your email, subscribe to the FTT Newsletter HERE.For a more in-depth breakdown and analysis of the fintech space, subscribe to the premium newsletter, FTT+, HERE.Follow us on Twitter:FTT - @fintechtoday_Julie - @julieverhage[Theme Song Credit]

ZoomInfo, a market intelligence company, has acquired Insent, a conversational platform provider for businesses, in an undisclosed deal.With the acquisition of Insent, companies, ZoomInfo's clients, will use the chat at a large scale.Marqeta, a payments service company, has gained a market capitalization of over $17.2 billion on its debut. This is due to the company's share rise of more than 20%. Marqeta's clients include Uber Technologies and DoorDash, Inc. The shares of the financial technology firm started at $32.50, up from its initial public offering (IPO) price of $27 per share. Genasys Inc. has acquired Zonehaven. First responders, public safety organizations, and communities can use Zonehaven's planning, training, and resources to handle evacuations and repopulations successfully. Zonehaven's services are trusted by more than 170 fire districts, 140 law enforcement agencies, and 200 communities.Zenoti is an all-in-one cloud-based platform for salons, spas, and medi-spas founded in 2010 by Sudheer Koneru and Dheeraj Koneru has raised an additional $80 million in its Series D round. This additional funding was led by TPG, a global alternative asset fund. Appointment scheduling, online booking, billing, built-in marketing, inventory management, CRM, and loyalty functions are included. ChartHop, an organization management platform that builds the data-driven status of a company to help them design their future, has announced its raise of $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Elad Gil, Cowboy Ventures, and SemperVirens had participated in the round. ChartHop will use the proceeds from the investment to accelerate its roadmap, build and improve its existing features, and in growing its team.Vancouver, Canada-based Commit, which works with remote-first startups, connecting engineers to founders, has raised its first round of funding worth $6 million in a seed round led by Accomplice, with participation from Kensington Capital Partners, Inovia, and Garage Capital. BukuWarung, an Indonesian fintech focused on digitizing business for MSME merchants, has raised its Series A funding worth $60M. The proceeds shall be used to double the workforce, improve payment infrastructure. The total funding for the startup now crosses over $80M, and before Series A, in February this year, BukuWarung had raised $20M from rocketship.vcUnified experience management (UXM) software solutions provider 1E has announced that global investment firm Carlyle Group has acquired a majority stake in it in a deal that reportedly values the company at $270 million. Other financial details of the transaction were not disclosed by either of the companies. According to Carlyle's press release, Sumir Karayi, founder and CEO of 1E, will retain a significant minority stake in the company now and shall remain the CEO. Most of 1E's senior management staff will be retained, while Cormac Whelan will be appointed as the chairman. Employees will own a portion of the business and share in the company's future growth.Sinch, a Swedish cloud communications company, has acquired MessageMedia, a messaging service provider for businesses, for $1.3 billion. The $1.3 billion transaction comprises $1.1 billion in cash and the remaining in shares. The transaction would be completed in this year's second half. Pennylane, a full-stack financial management platform, has raised $18.3 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital.The company has been working on an accounting platform that would benefit both clients and their accountants. The organization, which focuses on small and medium businesses, has already attracted hundreds of clients.Contentstack, a headless content management system provider, has raised $57.5 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners. Other participants include new investor Georgian and existing investors Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital. With this round, the company's total has gone up to $89 million.The new fund will be used to accelerate the company's investments in this technology, drive its worldwide expansion, and extend its partner network.Cash flow problems that stem from the payments cycle of an organization continues to be a major problem for businesses today, Jesse Ghansah, co-founder and CEO of Float, said in an interview with TechCrunch. Float solves the problem with its credit solution. Originally named Swipe, Float aims to tackle cash flow problems for small and medium-sized businesses in the African region. According to Mr. Ghansah, cash flow problems occur, typically after the product is serviced, when businesses have to wait for 30-90 days to receive payments for service. This causes them to fall behind in meeting their own expenses.Aserto, a cloud-native authorization service that provides enterprise-ready permissions for SaaS applications, has raised $5.1 million in its first seed round funding led by Costanoa Ventures and Heavybit Industries. Aserto creates a sophisticated service for developers, giving them fine-grained control over roles access control based on policies that it calls “policy-as-code approach to authoring, editing, storing, versioning, building, deploying and managing authorization rule”. 

Welcome to More Equity. Today, we're bringing you a special Moms in VC episode featuring Aileen Lee, Founder & Managing Partner, Cowboy Ventures, Anarghya Vardhana, Partner, Maveron, and Deena Shakir, Partner, Lux Capital. Harlem Capital Principal, Kelly Goldstein leads the conversation with these power house VCs to learn from their experiences, perspective, and advice on VC and motherhood. Listen in to discover what it's like to be a mom in vc and how the broader investing and entrepreneurial ecosystem can foster a supportive and empowering workplace culture.

Fabian Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Eddie.Eddie Hartman:Thank you so much.Fabian Geyrhalter:Well, thrilled to have you here. I've been a customer of LegalZoom for, I don't know, I believe it must be 15 years or so by now, creating DBAs, and trademarks, and all of that good stuff one has to deal with as an entrepreneur. You created LegalZoom 20 years ago with two friends, as a digital tech company that helps its customers create legal documents without necessarily having to hire a lawyer. And you built it into the best known legal brand in the United States. Last year, one in four LLCs in California were started through LegalZoom. It might have been more by now. And you have over four million customers. More than half of all Americans know the brand. How did it start? Take us back 20 years ago, you and two friends, how did you come up with this quite revolutionary idea that point in time?Eddie Hartman:What a great question. And I have to say, when we began, we had no idea that we would be founding what I'm told is the oldest unicorn. Did you know that?Fabian Geyrhalter:Yes, I actually heard that. I heard that too. It's quite impressive.Eddie Hartman:Aileen Lee at Cowboy Ventures coined the term unicorn, at the time of course it didn't exist. But can you imagine? LegalZoom is now the oldest unicorn. When we began it, we thought it might top out at 16 million. That was our dream. You know maybe, maybe. My two friends were both lawyers and they had great jobs at great law firms. And Brian Lee, in particular, who went on to found the Honest Company with Jessica Alba and ShoeDazzle with Kim Kardashian, he said, "You know, I didn't leave my job at a very good law firm, Skadden Arps, to become an employee of a small company that I started. I love to become the founder of a large company. But for us, large was maybe 16 million at max. Brian used to show us with his hand, where he thought maybe one day, the stack of outgoing LLC packages might reach. Because this was the most important thing to us, and I think any entrepreneur can relate. The big sale, the big purchase, the biggest ticket item that we sold was a gold incorporation or LLC package.             And it went in a special FedEx box, a flattish box, not a big carton, but a box that maybe was an inch and a half, two inches high. And we would ship them out, they'd sit on the front desk, and we'd look at that stack of boxes, and it was the measure of our success. And Brian, once in the early days, put his hand on top of that box, and he said, "Eddie, someday, this stack is going to be up to here." And you know, by his chin. I want to let you know, we now have a separate dedicated facility-Eddie Hartman:Of course.Eddie Hartman:Just to handle those. It grew from a stack into sort of a back bay of the building, because we would have to have a truck come up and take all the packages. And finally, it outgrew that and we now own a separate facility just to handle all those packages. And it's been extraordinarily rewarding to see the growth, which really means the acceptance, how many people see value in what LegalZoom brings to their lives, how many people find that their opportunities are unlocked by what legalism gives them. We had a really great guy, Daniel Kent, came to work for us for a few years. He's now a Berkeley PhD. But at the time, he did a study and he found that LegalZoom had started more than one in six charities in the United States.Fabian Geyrhalter:Oh wow.Eddie Hartman:Yeah, you don't start a business thinking that, "Oh, we're also going to have an enormous charitable impact." But there we were looking at the numbers, one in six, more than one in six American charities were started. And my partner said to me, "You know, this is a great number. This is a really amazing thing. We should let people know this number." I said, "Yeah you know, that is great. But here's a bigger question that we'll never really be able to answer. How many of those charities never would have started if it weren't for an easy way to get a 501(c)(3), that is to say tax exempt designation?" How many charities are never started? Is maybe the better question. How many businesses are never started? How many families go unprotected, because the benefits the law are out of reach? And reach doesn't necessarily mean too expensive. It may simply be too complex or too time consuming.            We're in a democracy. The benefits of the law that's supposed to be our birthright, but if it's too cumbersome... Again, which might be inconvenient or complex, but it also might be too expensive, something we can't afford, inaccessible in one way or another. We are cheated in a way. We're cheated of our birthright. We're cheated of the basic promise that we're supposed to have as participants in a democracy, that we have equal protection, that we have equal access, that we have equal benefit. And so when I think about those charities that were never started, or those businesses that were never launched, or those families that are unprotected, I think this is a crisis. This is a plague. This is something that could be corrected. There needs to be more LegalZooms. LegalZoom is just one player. And even though we're very proud of what it's done, when you think about the latent legal market, the millions of unlaunched ships, that's honestly, what keeps me up at night.Fabian Geyrhalter:Well, a couple of questions about this. This was extremely interesting. On the LegalZoom site, the brand states, "We are not going to rest until everyone has access to legal care." And based on what you just said, it almost sounds like a not-for-profit organization's manifesto, right? Like a rallying cry. How does LegalZoom push how it's done? And do you also have a nonprofit arm as part of it? Or do you just organize in a way and run the business in a way where you feel like you want to empower as many as possible, and hence, there doesn't need to be a nonprofit part of it?Eddie Hartman:Well, I believe deeply, that the blood that pumps through a company's veins, is the profit that it generates. Without that, of course, you can't pay people. But more importantly, you can't innovate. You can't get the word out. I think, in fact, the mark of value... And in my new role, I'm now a partner at Simon-Kucher, and I'm very frankly honored and grateful for my role there. It's an amazing organization. But one of the things that we have as a mantra, if you think about it this way. If I asked you, "How do you measure value?" You might say, "Well, I think about what a thing is worth." Well, okay, sure. But how can you put a number on it? I would argue that the best way to measure value is to ask, "What would you pay for it?" And if you could stack up dollars or coins, whatever it might be, and measure that stack.             Just like Brian used to measure that stack of gold LLC packages. That's a measure of value right there. We don't have a yardstick, we can't measure it in gallons or something, miles. We need a different way to measure. And I would argue that the money that you exchange is a great proxy for value. So when we think about LegalZoom, it's a mission-driven company that makes a profit. It makes a profit because it delivers value. Without the profit, it would not be able to pursue its mission. That is how I see it. The test of LegalZoom as an organization, really any organization, is are you providing sufficient value that you can continue to provide value and expand the value you provide?Fabian Geyrhalter:Absolutely, absolutely. Love this. Listen, going back to the founder story, just for one more second there, because I'm sure everyone is asking themselves the same question. When you were eliminating the need for small businesses, in the very beginning, right? And I mean, continuously so. But in the beginning, to hire a lawyer, right? That was a tremendously disruptive thought. It was you literally fighting the good fight, so to speak. How was that uphill battle until you were legally ready to offer your services? And I'm almost sure that there must have been lawsuits by law firms or industry groups earlier on to try to stop you from what you were about to do, because it was obviously harming their trajectory.Eddie Hartman:I love this question. I wonder if you ever had a time of your life, probably in your mid 20s, when it felt like every weekend was taken up with a friend's wedding over the summer. It's the time of life when everyone's getting married all at once. And then when the weather's turning nice, you know, May, June, July, suddenly, every single weekend, you're going to a wedding. That was me for a period of time, except instead of weddings, I was going to depositions. [I was the most heavily deposed person. I've never encountered anyone that's been deposed as often as I have. And I think it stems from a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is that LegalZoom somehow does not want people to speak to lawyers or hire lawyers, which is almost baffling to me at this point. LegalZoom has many lawyers, then it has as employees it works with. We work with a network of law firms.            We pass more... I would guess I don't know any numbers about this. But I would guess that we pass more people to consult with lawyers than any other single organization in the world. We love businesses hiring lawyers, and using lawyers appropriately. I think all we tried to do was say that there's some things where if you choose to, you don't need a lawyer. So when you form your LLC, you can use LegalZoom to get that done, if you choose, and a lawyer doesn't need to be involved, which may make it more affordable for you, or make it more in your control. Some people really like the feeling of power of control. I've done this for myself. However, I would say that LegalZoom really tries to make sure that anyone who starts a company or frankly, forms a will or anything else through Legal Zoom, then speaks with a lawyer. And in fact, we took advantage of something that was, I think, less well known, which is a prepaid legal plan. These were plans established in the 1970s by unions.             Unions wanted their members to have access to good legal counsel, but it's hard to afford. Especially, for a lot of people, very difficult to afford. So they created these special plans, which were approved by authorities in every state. And as a union member, you could buy into a prepaid plan and then have access to a lawyers counsel. LegalZoom followed in that model- So honestly, and the thing, I think, also you should know is that I am a lawyer, and I became a lawyer while at LegalZoom. I never went to law school though. I taught very briefly at Yale Law, and I taught briefly at Stanford Law. And I had to tell my class that it was my first time at a law school. I became a lawyer [inaudible 00:13:25] for the bar after doing an apprenticeship. So I never went to law school, but I did become a lawyer because I believe so deeply in the importance, and really the primacy of lawyers. I actually named my firstborn son, my sweet little boy, Darrow, after Clarence Darrow. The lawyer that famously gave up his high paying job for the railroads, and started fighting for the common man. I believe that lawyers are some of the most civic-minded, good hearted, and intelligent, and often brave people among us.            But unfortunately, I think the legal system that they find themselves employed by often betrays them. They have this idea that they're going to be able to fight for right and go to court and defend justice. And what they get instead is a mind numbing, soul crushing job, where they're required to, at the end of the day, measure up their worth in six minute increments. Because that's what a law firm lawyer does. They have to mark down their time in six minute increments and justify what they did. It's a [inaudible 00:14:39] system. So what did LegalZoom do in the early days? I think we stepped into a crazy imbalanced system, where most people felt that the benefits of the law were beyond their reach or too cumbersome, and hopefully, created an alternative where we still do try to connect people with lawyers, but perhaps in a healthier and more effective structure. I think that was the big change.Fabian Geyrhalter:I mean, it was extremely liberating. I mean, even for myself. Being an entrepreneur and having started my companies and going through LegalZoom, I mean, it's been... I don't know, how many interactions I had with LegalZoom over the years. And for me, I'm kind of the generation where I was born into it, right? When LegalZoom came out 20 years ago, that's about when I got really serious about doing the legal portion of my business. Before, I was just running a business. Let's talk a little bit more about lawyers. And what you just said about how lawyers are being seen and the reality of it. Influencer marketing is huge today, right? But it really has been for decades, just under different names. The idea of affiliating a brand with an influential person from within their segment has its benefits, and it has its risks, and you might know where I'm heading with this. It seems like you guys were living that story having celebrity lawyer, Robert Shapiro, as your co-founder, who...            For those of you who are not in LA, or maybe not even in the US. Robert Shapiro was infamous for successfully defending O.J. Simpson back in 1995. But he was a co-founder. How did this come about? And I think he already talked a little bit about a shift in how lawyers pursued their career. How did it come about and did it have the desired effect on the brand? And how did you guys all work together?Eddie Hartman:Well, I'll say two things; the first of which is anyone who... And I mean this in the best spirit. Anyone who has anything bad to say about Bob Shapiro is going to have to do a fist fight with me. I love that man. He is one of the most... I'd say in some ways, he's one of the kindest people in the world, and he's been through personal tragedy that people don't understand. And I won't belabor it, but his son, Brent, used to... He had, I should say, two sons. And his older son Brent was my employee, when he tragically died at age 23. And people, I think, they don't realize. Bob Shapiro has been through... In his long career, he has done so many things, so many things. Defend major, major lawsuits, major, major actions, huge clients, vast things settled, and yet... Of course, what he is best known for is a moment in the 90s.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yep.Eddie Hartman:Okay. I actually was off the grid when that was happening. I was living in Montana. I didn't catch the whole O.J. thing. Only I only heard about-Fabian Geyrhalter:Well timing.Eddie Hartman:I found out about it afterward. But I will say, of course, the notoriety of that case, and I think we can say notoriety here, made Bob famous. And his fame helped us in more than one way. Obviously, it brought attention to LegalZoom, which was great. I was once asked on a plane. You know, you're always asked on a plane, "What do you do?" And I explained, "Oh yes, I started this company." And she said, "Oh, what does the company do?" And I said, "Well, it helps you, you can use it to form a will or an incorporation or trademark or patent." And she said, "Oh. Wow, you must get a lot of competition from Robert Shapiro's company." [crosstalk 00:18:40] [inaudible 00:18:40]. She said, "Oh, no, I don't think so." Then I said, [crosstalk 00:18:48]. But the other thing that it brought us was, because of his fame... Bob had a lot of business experience that we lacked.             He had been involved with Wolfgang Puck, early in the day, who became so famous. The founder of Spago, and a chain of other restaurants. So Bob brought a lot of business acumen. And he had the business acumen because the O.J. Simpson case had propelled him to fame. That's definitely true, definitely true. But I would say the other thing about the relationship is that it brought us knowledge on so many different levels than just his just a celebrity. And I want to tell you one more fun fact. My dear partner, Brian Lee, was the one who brokered the introduction to Robert Shapiro. And at the time, he really was Robert Shapiro. He's this famous lawyer that we'd never met. His office is at the top of... If you liked the movie, Die Hard... Nakatomi Plaza, where the action takes place, his actual office was in that building where [inaudible 00:20:06]            And so we got to meet him, and it's very intimidating. A very huge office, beautiful. Barely looks up. We're doing our song and dance. He told us we had five minutes. We've taken much longer, and he's not really paying attention to us. And finally, he says, "You know, because of my fame, a lot of people come to me, and they've got this business idea and that business idea." And I'm thinking, "Okay, so the answer is no. Will this guy just hurry up and say no." But to my surprise, he doesn't say no, he says, "If this is such a good idea that I want to be part of this, I don't just want to be an investor. I don't just want to put my name on this. I want to be part of this." He literally meant something like chief of marketing. He wanted to be that involved. And I called my mom. I said, "Mom, you're never going to believe this. Robert Shapiro is joining LegalZoom." And she said, "My dentist?"Fabian Geyrhalter:That is hilarious.Eddie Hartman:Yeah. So [inaudible 00:21:18], people think about he's celebrity, celebrity, celebrity. And that's true, it was very helpful. But I think what was even more helpful was that we had this incredibly knowledgeable lawyer with great business skills, who was part of our team.Fabian Geyrhalter:That is a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing this. Absolutely, that's great. You're in the legal business, and in the business of trademarks. Well, not you, but LegalZoom. And this being a branding podcast, I have to ask this question.Eddie Hartman:Sure.Fabian Geyrhalter:LegalZoom, launched officially in 2001. So 10 years prior to Zoom. Does Zoom own their name to you to a certain degree? I know there was this time where that idea of Zoom was kind of an internet thing, but is it bizarre for you that 2020... Like all this time later, turned into a year where the word "Zoom" became the thing? And LegalZoom owned it first?Eddie Hartman:You know, it's such a funny question. So just a small question. The incorporation was created in 99.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah.Eddie Hartman:And we did a soft launch. We made our first sale in the last quarter of 2000. But yes, of course, our big launch to the public, 2001, very true. And for 10 years, if you said Zoom, you probably meant LegalZoom. A competitor of ours, to tweak us, had signs put up around his office that said, "We believe in legal grooming, not legal zooming." The word, Zoom, is a funny word. And for a long time, it was ours. And now, yes, you may have heard of this small company called Zoom. I do remember meeting them at a conference. Because lawyers were one of the early adopters of Zoom. And I walked up and I said... Hopefully they found it funny. I said, "I won't sue you." That they're Zoom, and we're LegalZoom.             But yeah, a friend recently posted to an entrepreneurial group that I'm part of, "Hey, can anyone connect me with Zoom?" And I was about to write back, "Sure," and then I realized [inaudible 00:23:41] blocked me.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah, I just thought it was interesting right? Because here, we're Zooming around all day, and I've been using Zoom for all the time. Listen, at some point, LegalZoom... And I just really realized this, prepping for our chat here. At some point, LegalZoom moved past business customers and started offering services really to anyone. So from wills and trusts to divorces, how does a brand known for entrepreneurship and business move its perception to become a bit more of a generalist? Or was a shift in brand story and marketing not even necessarily since he already had this huge amount of business customers who were just happy to start using your other services, hence spreading the word organically without even diluting your brand?Eddie Hartman:What a great question!Fabian Geyrhalter:It was a long one.Eddie Hartman:So the first product set that we launched was incorporations, LLCs, last will and testament, copyright... I want to say copyright and trademark were part of the first trough, but I'm actually not a 100% sure. We also considered restraining orders, but we understood after a while that that was a business that was better occupied by municipal and state authorities. We also had divorce early on, although we found that divorce is quite a difficult product to fulfill. However, that was the initial product set. So we-Fabian Geyrhalter:Interesting.Eddie Hartman:Yeah, we always had wills in there. Oh, you know, and trusts were in there as well, in the early... Oh, and living will. That's right, living will was there as part of the early batch. So for people who don't know, there's a medical power of attorney, living will, which is a document that, as the name implies, covers you when you're alive, but maybe incapacitated, versus a last will, which in the UK they will just refer to as a will and testament, which happens to cover you after you die. So two different documents. But I say this to say we found that there was so little crossover between product categories. A person who came to know us for an incorporation, would not have any inclination to use us for a will. A person who came to us for a will would not have a natural inclination to use us for a trademark, which is interesting if you got it.Fabian Geyrhalter:How interesting. Yeah. Eddie Hartman:We once did a program where we gave people $50, or later an opportunity to enter into a drawing to potentially go to a week long vacation to Hawaii, if they would refer us to a friend or family member. And we got very little uptake. And when I called around to some of these people to say, "Hey, you obviously love LegalZoom. You gave it incredibly high marks all around, but then you didn't refer us to anyone. Why is that?" I would get responses like this, "I don't know anyone else who is going through a divorce." "I don't know anyone else who's getting a trademark." And when you ask them, "Well, did you know that LegalZoom does all these other things?" They would respond, "Well, no, I really didn't." And so we will promote in the email itself, we would say, "Popular services from Legal Zoom." We created the idea of like, what are the top 10 services from LegalZoom? What are the most popular uses of LegalZoom? What are people using LegalZoom for?             And we would say, "Oh, you know..." Obviously, these were factual, but we would say, "Oh, number one is, setting up LLCs. And number two is..." let's say, "Registering a trademark." "And number three is filing for an uncontested divorce." Now, if people decided, upon seeing that list, "Hey, you know what? I have been thinking, I ought to divorce my wife. Now that I see [crosstalk 00:27:43] LegalZoom, let me go ahead and do it."Fabian Geyrhalter:What an impulse buy!Eddie Hartman:What an impulse buy, right? "Hey, I should get a patent." Hopefully, that didn't really motivate behavior, and yet it was a blockbuster move in terms of generating sales. So if you'd stopped to think about it, and said, "Why would you ever show people what the top products are?" If a person is going to get divorced, they're going to get divorced, if a person is going to declare bankruptcy or start a business or something. That's a big decision, they've already made it." Never underestimate the impact of assurance. The impact of, "Many people are also doing this." The impact of safety and numbers. And I think that leads you right to the brand question, because after all, what is brand? Brand is a promise. Brand is a question of reliability. A brand is almost always a promise about the future. In an unknown future, when you don't know what's coming next, the brand matters more.            If you're going to pop a pharmaceutical into your mouth, if you are going to take a pill, if you are going to sign up with an insurance company, if you are going to have someone do a legal service for you, you have no idea what the future reliability is going to be, and so the brand has to stand in. I mean, ask yourself, would you ever put a drug in your body from a source you've never heard of? Of course not. Certainly you wouldn't give it to your children. Why? Because brand matters so much. It's the future promise of something that you cannot guarantee today.Fabian Geyrhalter:Very, very well said. You and I both are mentors at The Founder Institute. Or you have been, and you're on and off. I found out because I read your bio and your Global 40 Mentor. And I'm a Global 100 Mentor, so I thought I was special until I met you. Now, I'm not anymore. Thank you for that. But when you talk to entrepreneurs about branding, what do you tell a startup? Like how important do you... So you're a partner at Simon-Kucher, which is a strategy and marketing consultancy. You have started and operated multiple companies with a total valuation in excess of, I don't know, $3 billion. Right? So you have seen it all when it comes to brands, but how do you advise startup founders and entrepreneurs? Like what do you tell them about the importance of branding to them at that point in time?Eddie Hartman:Well, for the more hard-nosed listener, I would point out that brand has a tangible value. Whether you're thinking about valuation, there's a concept goodwill, which is essentially brand equity, so it attributes to your enterprise value. Another way to look at it though, is we've run tests on buying the very same batch of Google keywords for a generic website that has a name, of course, and has a design scheme and everything. But with the brand no one's ever heard of, versus the LegalZoom brand... And I can tell you that the LegalZoom brand is much more effective in converting and generating revenue. So brand is very powerful and quantifiable, in terms of the impact that it gives you. You really need to take it quite seriously. But then, the next question is, what should your brand state? As I say, brand is a... I saw a great definition of brand when I was in business school at Wharton.             It said that, "Brand motivates irrational behavior." In other words, if a promise motivates rational behavior, then that's not brand. If I tell you that, "Well, this vehicle gets a certain number of miles per gallon, and that's why you should buy it." Or if I say, "This copper has a certain purity per kilo of weight." Those are statements, but they're not brand statements. That's literally a value statement that's merely attributable to an attribute of what's being sold. If I tell you on the other hand that, "Kids love Oreos." Okay, that's a promise that you can't tie to something rational. It's not a rational criteria. It's appealing to an irrational side. I mean, why do we love Oreos and hate Hydrox? Hydrox was first. You know that? Oreo was a copy of a Hydrox. I mean, okay, please don't sue me in saying so.             But certainly, if you look at them side by side in a store, you might be tempted to conclude, and I certainly would, that an Oreo is a copy of a Hydrox. But Oreo dominated the brand. They stand for something. They stand for comfort, they stand for snowy days with a glass of milk, and an Oreo cookie. And we all love them. But if you look at the list of ingredients, they're no different than a Hydrox.Fabian Geyrhalter:Interesting, yeah. They built the brand.Eddie Hartman:If you are buying from a rational basis, and the Hydrox were cheaper, you should surely reach for the Hydrox, but people don't. They read for the Oreo. And companies, not just in consumer, but in business-to-business, also understand that brand promise really means something. I think it's probably a bit more rational in a business context. There's the old saying, "No one ever got fired for going with IBM." [crosstalk 00:33:39]Fabian Geyrhalter:That changed.Eddie Hartman:Okay, this has changed. But what are we saying when we make statements like that? What we're saying is that the brand adds something to the value equation of a current purchase, because it makes a promise about the future, "This will be reliable. We are a organization that stands behind the offer that we're making." Brand should convey a penumbra, a halo effect, beyond the the specific product that you sell. It should augment and extend beyond. Selecting the words to use for brand, then becomes very important. And honestly, here's where you can use some fairly standard methodology. You can ask your customers or prospects, say Listen, "I want you to tell me of eight..." You come up with somewhere between eight and 12 attributes, and you say, "Listen, I want you to tell me of these eight to 12 attributes, which are the ones that are the most important to you? Rate them." And then say, "Okay, same set of attributes, how do we rate versus competitors?"            And then plot this on a grid and you'll see a pattern emerge. And the pattern will tell you, this is where your brand can reach and this is where your brand cannot reach. Where you are strong and the attribute matters, that's where your brand thrives. Where the attribute matters and you're not strong, those are areas that you have to avoid. And if you can find in that map a story, then that can be the through-line for your brand. Listen, LegalZoom is never going to be able to say something like, "We have lawyers that will grind themselves to the bone working around the clock, and our brand name is feared in courtrooms across America the way that a major law firm could." But what LegalZoom can say is, "Simplicity, ease of use, convenience." Right?Fabian Geyrhalter:You're going right into one of my final questions on every one of my shows. So now that we talk about brand boards, and what you just explained is really fantastic for anyone, not just entrepreneurs, right? I mean, even someone who's a CMO, to revisit their brand that it's basically a brand SWOT analysis, right? Like using emotions versus rational thinking. If you could take the LegalZoom brand, and I gave you no warning of this question so... Let's just see where this takes us. If you would take the LegalZoom brand, and you would put it through a funnel. And at the end, there's really one word or two words that you feel like your brand really captures and can own. When you think about Zappos, it's not D2C shoe sales, right? And it's not e-comm. It's customer service. It's delivering, "Wow." That's what they are about.             if you think about Everlane, its transparency. And I always love to, when I work with clients, at the end of my workshops, I like to say, "Everything we've just done for the last, God knows, four or eight hours, can we distill it into one word that everyone in the company can say, "This is what we stand for." I just assume that accessibility must be very near the top of the list for LegalZoom. But what comes to mind? Like that one word that you feel like LegalZoom could actually own?Eddie Hartman:What a fantastic question. And you'll also please permit me if I'd like to make a small detour after I've answered to sort of show you the power of this very question, frankly, in many walks of life. But with LegalZoom specifically, I think the phrase that really captured us was one that my dear friend and partner, Brian Liu... So you said it was three of us. It was me, Brian Lou and Brian Lee, came up with, which was, "Hassle-free." And studies have shown that was the issue that was stopping so many people from accessing the benefits for law was... It wasn't hassle-free. Yes, it was expensive. But it also seems so complex, so daunting, and Brian would say, "Hassle-free. Ah, yeah, that's what people want." They want a hassle-free legal experience. Absolutely. I will say though, we've gone through many phases, we said that LegalZoom's mission is to democratize the law. I believe in that. I really do.            But I think that may be a little too highfalutin for many people. It's reaching a bit too academic, I think. It's great when I am talking to my friends who are in sort of a academic setting about what's the importance of LegalZoom. We want to democratize the law? Sure. But I think for most people, the personal benefit was once hassle-free. But I'll tell you what I hope it becomes; empowerment. Hey, if you're in the sound of my voice, or if you live in America, anyway, or the UK, you are supposed to have the benefits of the law as part of your right to exist. And you don't have them. You don't. A wealthy person has a lawyer that they can turn to... She can turn to her lawyer, her lawyer will do onerous work on her behalf, or potentially a law firm will do onerous work. That's a tremendous amount of power that you don't have, but you ought to. You ought to have equal benefits under the law, and you don't.             Hopefully, what LegalZoom stands for in the future is empowerment. Connecting you back to the benefits that you have been, I would say, unfairly denied access to.Fabian Geyrhalter:Absolutely. I mean, there's so many Gen Z and millennial born-brands that are all about democratizing this, democratizing that. And there's like every [crosstalk 00:39:59]Eddie Hartman:[crosstalk 00:39:59] was democratizing juice.Fabian Geyrhalter:Exactly.Eddie Hartman:We don't need that.Fabian Geyrhalter:But coming from you, after these 20 years of having LegalZoom out in the wild, the word empowerment... And I'm sure my listeners can agree with that, the way that you said it and in the context of LegalZoom, how much more... Well, pun intended, how much more powerful that actually is to own for an organization like yours, than for an organization like many others that just want to empower the customers. But that being said, it is also wonderful, how many brands say that that's what they stand for. Because it shows the idea of customer first, and it shows the idea of, "We're with you." Right? And there is kind of this nice shift in brands and in brand thinking over the last 10, 15 years, which I really... I mean, that provides me so much joy that everything is becoming more purposeful. Right?Eddie Hartman:Absolutely. I had a client recently in the cybersecurity space, and I did this exact study, and I did the exact graphing technique that I just said hopefully your listeners will do themselves. And I said, "Well, the one thing that people don't care about is security." And he said, "You have really messed this up Mr. Hartman. We're talking about cybersecurity firm." Well, when we show them the comments though, it became immediately clear that people assume a cybersecurity company is secure. That's not what you're buying on.Fabian Geyrhalter:It's in the name. Exactly.Eddie Hartman:[crosstalk 00:41:38]. You're buying on the other attributes. Things like ease of use, simplicity. So for LegalZoom, you can imagine that people might say, "Oh, the brand should be that, 'What do you provide quality legal?' Quality legal." People assume that we have quality legal. If you listen closely to your customers, what are they really asking for? And that should be the underpinning of your brand. In LegalZoom's case, it was hassle-free. In the future? Hopefully, yes. It gives me the power I always should have had, but was wrongfully blocked from my grasp. That's what LegalZoom ought to be in the future, if you ask me.

Jomayra Herrera is a principal at Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage focused venture firm where she focuses on investing in the […]

After spending time at Facebook and Dropbox, Russ Heddleston saw the need for a secure document sharing platform. So he created the SaaS platform DocSend, where he’s now CEO. Based in Silicon Valley, DocSend now has 15,000 customers & 60 employees. Plus, talented investors like DCM Ventures, August Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Uncork Capital (You may never send an attachment again.) Russ says “A Rockstar at one place might not be a Rockstar someplace else” I couldn’t have said it better myself. In this 20-minute conversation, Russ reveals how he’s scaled a team of Rockstars.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week, we're doing a first-ever for the show and taking a deep dive into one specific sector: Edtech.Natasha Mascarenhas has covered education technology since Stanford first closed down classes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the wake of the historic shuttering of much of the United States' traditional institutions of education, the sector has formed new unicorns, attracted record-breaking venture capital totals, and most of all, enjoyed time in a long-overdue spotlight.For this Equity Dive, we zero into one part of that conversation: Edtech's impact on higher education. We brought together Udacity co-founder and Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun, Eschaton founder and college drop-out Ian Dilick, and Cowboy Ventures investor Jomayra Herrera to answer our biggest questions.Here's what we got into:How the state of remote school is leading to gap years among studentsA framework for how to think of higher education's main three products (including which is most defensible over time)What learnings we can take from this COVID-19 experiment on remote schooling to apply to the futureWhy ed-tech is flocking to the notion of life-long learningAnd the reality of who self-paced learning serves -- and who it leaves outAnd much, much more. If you celebrate, thank you for spending part of your Thanksgiving with the Equity crew. We're so thankful to have this platform and audience, and it means a ton that y'all tune in each week.Finally, if you liked this format and want to see more, feel free to tweet us your thoughts or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Talk soon!

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week, we're doing a first-ever for the show and taking a deep dive into one specific sector: Edtech.Natasha Mascarenhas has covered education technology since Stanford first closed down classes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the wake of the historic shuttering of much of the United States' traditional institutions of education, the sector has formed new unicorns, attracted record-breaking venture capital totals, and most of all, enjoyed time in a long-overdue spotlight.For this Equity Dive, we zero into one part of that conversation: Edtech's impact on higher education. We brought together Udacity co-founder and Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun, Eschaton founder and college drop-out Ian Dilick, and Cowboy Ventures investor Jomayra Herrera to answer our biggest questions.Here's what we got into:How the state of remote school is leading to gap years among studentsA framework for how to think of higher education's main three products (including which is most defensible over time)What learnings we can take from this COVID-19 experiment on remote schooling to apply to the futureWhy ed-tech is flocking to the notion of life-long learningAnd the reality of who self-paced learning serves -- and who it leaves outAnd much, much more. If you celebrate, thank you for spending part of your Thanksgiving with the Equity crew. We're so thankful to have this platform and audience, and it means a ton that y'all tune in each week.Finally, if you liked this format and want to see more, feel free to tweet us your thoughts or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Talk soon!

Aileen Lee would be near the top of any short list of the most influential women, and people, in VC. After 13 years at Kleiner Perkins, Aileen struck out on her own, founding seed stage firm Cowboy Ventures, which has invested in many eventual unicorns, a term Aileen actually coined in her famous NYT article.    Her conversation with Next Play Founder Ryan Nece explores many of the ways she has felt like an outsider in VC. Her gender is the most obvious, but she also confesses to sometimes feeling like a "guppy swimming with sharks." She's found her swim lane enough to now feel more like a dolphin, not less than, just different.   Aileen also shares some insight on where Cowboy is investing these days, and why they increasingly love "un-sexy" businesses, especially those that build software for businesses that rely on archaic systems and infrastructure. Aileen is full of actionable pearls of wisdom that apply to many walks of life. This great friend of Next Play does it all with a humility that almost makes it hard to appreciate just how accomplished she really is.

In this episode we speak with Jomayra Herrera, a Senior Associate at Cowboy Ventures - a seed-stage venture fund based in the Bay Area. She shares her thoughts on the pandemic's effects on the future of education, current trends in K-12 education technology, and opportunity areas for aspiring ed-tech entrepreneurs and funders like her. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/acorn-labs/support

In this episode of DNA of a MAKER, we asked Aileen Lee, one of the biggest names in tech and founder of Cowboy Ventures, one of the first venture capital firms launched by a woman, to name the traits that have propelled her toward success. Aileen also discusses how she managed the blindspots that may have hindered her personal and professional growth and reveals why this new generation of female leaders impresses and inspires her.Plus, an insightful round of rapid fire questions that will shed light on the characteristics that makes each woman unique and interesting. This series is funded by 23andMe. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the brand.

Aileen Lee is a U.S. seed investor. A venture capital investor, she is the founder of Cowboy Ventures. Lee coined the often-used Silicon Valley term unicorn in a TechCrunch article "Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups." In this episode of the SaaStr podcast, Aileen and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin take a deep dive on how Aileen finds deals, her tips for a winning pitch, and the state of VC in 2020. 

My guest for Ep116 of The Startup Playbook Podcast is Mina Radhakrishnan, the co-founder of :Different. Mina started here career at Goldman Sachs, before transitioning into the Associate Product Management (APM) Program at Google. From there she jumped into startups, initially joining ModCloth as it's first Product Manager, before moving to a small 20 person startup (at the time) Uber. She was the first product manager at Uber and later ran the company's product team for three years, leading initiatives such as new driver onboarding and the addition of other types of car services. She is also one of five inventors who jointly hold Uber's 2013 patent on surge pricing. After leaving Uber, she served as an entrepreneur in residence at startup investment firm Redpoint Ventures, and as special adviser to Cowboy Ventures. In 2017, Mina Co-founded :Different, a full-service property management platform, for just $100 a month. :Different is already managing over $1B worth of residential properties across Australia, has grown to over 50 staff and has recently closed a $7.1M series A funding round, backed by PieLAB, AirTree, Spring Capital and Warburton Group. We covered a range of topics in this interview including: Her experience as Ubers first Product ManagerFrameworks for decision makingHow to find and hire great Product ManagersHow to build relationships with investors& much more! Full interview below! Show notes: Google APM programModclothTravis Kalanick Redpoint VenturesCowboy VenturesMarissa MayerLarry PageSergey BrinInklingCraig BlairCraig Blair podcast interview (Episode 81)AirTreeVenture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson (book)Elicia McDonald podcast interview (Ep 113) Join our next live podcast interview with Fred Schebesta, the Co-founder of Finder.comDate: 23rd June 2020Time: 8-9am (AEDT)Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/Ep117Finder Feedback/connect/say hello:Rohit@startupplaybook.co@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)My Youtube Channel Credits:Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams Other channels:Don't have iTunes? The podcast is also available on Soundcloud & Stitcher Audio Player and now also available on Spotify. https://youtu.be/zpXkguj0IsA The post Ep116 – Mina Radhakrishnan (Co-founder – Different) on frameworks for decision making appeared first on Startup Playbook.

Introduction Welcome to Distilling Venture Capital.  I am your host, Bill Griesinger Distilling VC is a visionary podcast that provides an insightful and informed view of the key trends affecting the VC and tech startup world.  My mission is to cut through and go beyond the hype and Silicon Valley pop-jargon that tends to dominate the tech landscape.  I seek to provide transparency and    Opening Observations: Given that this is my inaugural episode under the Distilling VC label, I thought it would be appropriate and useful to provide you with some brief background regarding the podcast and the type of content you can expect in the future and a little about me… First, the podcast;   The vast majority of episodes I will bring will take you inside the insights, challenges, successes and the journeys revealed and shared directly through the words and experiences of tech company entrepreneurs, sometimes from the VCs who back them and others in the tech and VC community…So, I’ll usually have very interesting guests.   Some brief background on me, your host:  I have spent a large part of my professional life (last 20 years) working in the Venture Finance business assisting VC-backed tech companies in procuring the capital they need to grow Over the years, I have had the opportunity and good fortune to meet and work with incredible, visionary management teams, many savvy investors and have had the privilege of underwriting and financing ground-breaking technology companies, many of which continue to have an impact on the technology landscape today (like Google; a $10M deal in 2001, for example).    With that as backdrop, today I want to focus on a topic that I believe signals something has gone awry in tech startup and VC land over the last 4-5 years.  And it concerns me greatly.   Have you noticed, Everyone seems to be fascinated with “unicorns?”  Venture capitalists, tech company founders and management teams, the tech press and the financial press and many others,   So, today’s episode will delve into and distill down, “Unicorn-mania” so we can make sense of what’s really going on. Let me state for the record, It Is a big distraction from what’s really important in evaluating and valuing venture-backed tech companies.  Furthermore, it really touches upon the issues of transparency and accuracy, and ultimately the credibility of the industry itself, in my view  The longer this mania continues, I believe it presents dangerous consequences for multiple players inside and outside the VC industry.     So, what am I talking about?   Let’s unpack this…  First, some definitional context:  What is a Unicorn company that we hear so much hype about today?  In tech and VC parlance, it is a private startup tech company that is valued at $1B or more, in theory, referred to as its “Post-money Valuation.”   Great, what does that mean?  Not what you may think it does, as I will explain… And for historical context, The term unicorn, in VC, originated…in late 2013 when Cowboy Ventures Partner, Aileen Lee, coined the term for what she described as a tech company with a $1B valuation – and noted it was a pretty rare thing, as she pointed out then – which was correct.  There were 39 companies identified then in the ‘Unicorn Club.’  27 of those were in the Bay Area!   So, it really was just a Silicon Valley phenomenon in the beginning…   Lee admitted the term probably wasn’t the best or most well-thought-out description but went with it nonetheless.   “Yes we know the term “unicorn” is not perfect – unicorns apparently don’t exist, and these companies do – but we like the term because to us, it means something extremely rare, and magical” Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures, Nov. 2013   The term was reinforced further in a 2015 interview with Crunchbase, and it has unfortunately, been with us ever since, to the detriment of the industry, in my view.   The Cowboy Ventures’ website, even contains, to this day, a link to what it calls its “Unicorn Handling Guide” or protocol insisting that anyone using the term give proper attribution to the firm.  No one actually adheres to this “guideline” today, of course – but there it is.        This is not to malign or denigrate Cowboy Ventures as a reputable VC firm in any way.  It is, by most measures, a successful venture firm boasting a number of impressive investments and it has had a substantial number of notable exits, which you can find on their website.  So, I’m sure their LPs and their portfolio companies alike are pleased… The real issue is not about Cowboy Ventures at all…but rather a group-think mentality that has gripped and permeated venture capital…with no discernable benefit…   How Many Unicorns Are There?  It depends on who you ask & upon whose data you rely: (Q2 2019), there were around 450 companies globally designated as ‘Unicorns’ Fast fwd to Feb. 2020 and it’s alleged to be 580! Valued at ~ $2T (From Recent Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard) Q4 2019 CB Insights states there are about 390  (CB Insights) Roughly 48% to 50% are in the US About 24%-25% are in China UK and India come in 3rd and 4th with roughly 5% each   Here’s the central problem – The $1B+ valuations ascribed to so-called unicorn companies are not true market valuations at all.  They all utilize a metric called “post-money valuation” that inflates their value.  In fact, based on a Stanford Univ. Study, which I will dig into in a moment, 100% of all unicorns are actually over-valued to some degree when applying proper market valuation metrics based upon the terms and conditions found in the Preferred Stock rounds.   There is both Good News and Bad News to report with respect to this phenomenon:   The Good News:  There is a solution, a remedy, if you will, for this self-inflicted malady of unicorn-mania.  It is The Stanford Graduate School of Business Study - And it has been readily available for several years.  Stanford GSB  (By Prof. Ilya Strebulaev and his colleague, Will Gornall) – which I’ll dig into in a moment Now, The Bad News:  Few are paying attention, and some are deliberately ignoring the solution that’s been made available.  Why?   The Study:  Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality Downloadable pdf found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455   So, let’s dig into the study.  The results are astounding and vitally important to EVERYONE connected to Venture Capital, tech startups, capital markets and even consumers – I’ll explain.    Released in April 2017 by the Stanford Univ. Graduate School of Business  The Authors:  Prof. Ilya Strebulaev, Prof. of Private Equity & Prof. of Finance, Graduate School of Bus., Stanford University Will Gornall, Sauder School of Bus., University of British Columbia, (Gornall earned his PhD from the Stanford Graduate School of Bus.)   Summary of Findings – From the Study Abstract: We develop a valuation model for venture capital--backed companies and apply it to 135 US unicorns, that is, private companies with reported valuations above $1 billion. We value unicorns using financial terms from legal filings and find that reported unicorn post--money valuations average 48% above fair value, with 14 being more than 100% above.  Reported valuations assume that all shares are as valuable as the most recently issued preferred shares.  We calculate values for each share class, which yields lower valuations because most unicorns gave recent investors major protections such as initial public offering (IPO) return guarantees (15%), vetoes over down-IPOs (24%), or seniority to all other investors (30%).  Common shares lack all such protections and are 56% overvalued. After adjusting for these valuation-inflating terms, almost one-half (65 out of 135) of unicorns lose their unicorn status.   Important takeaway regarding the findings of the Stanford Study:  The results and findings are not predicated upon some intricate mathematical or econometric model requiring reliance on multiple assumptions and conditions to arrive at its conclusions.  On the contrary, the Stanford Study valuations are derived directly from the legal, contractual terms and conditions negotiated between the venture investors and the companies.  Therefore, the study utilizes the actual economic terms of each Preferred round as it was negotiated – No assumptions or conjecture about the values in the Study are necessary.  This is a critical point.   It’s a Consumer Protection Issue: A number of the largest US mutual fund companies (Fidelity, JH, T. Rowe Price and Vanguard) have invested directly in private co. unicorns In 2015, Fidelity > $1.3B into unicorns!  That’s more than any US-based VC fund invested that year.  Including $235M in WeWork, $129M in Zenefits – A company that hired too many people, grew too fast, and the company culture spiraled out of control, and $118M in Blue Apron, the food delivery startup that IPOd in June 2017 and is now looking for a buyer… What is the common thread on all these investments by major mutual fund companies?  They all used the meaningless post-money valuation to value these private tech company assets in their portfolios.  Let that sink in for a moment.  It’s Mind-boggling Incredibly, they have accepted and used these meaningless valuations to mark their holdings of these private tech companies w/o further analysis – a completely irresponsible methodology.  It surely doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to perform proper valuation analytics  Where’s the adherence to the fiduciary responsibility of these investment firms to their clients?  There are real financial implications for any retail investor in a mutual fund (401k or directly) related to this high-risk category.  How about institutions?  Univ. endowments, public pension funds, etc.? Are mutual fund companies fully disclosing real risk of this asset class to their retail investors?  Accurately?  How so, if at all?  (e.g. – Fidelity had to recently write down its WeWork holdings to reflect the difficulties the company has “reported” after the cancelation of its IPO.)   In addition, 3rd party equity market platforms, such as EquityZen, are providing average retail investors exposure to this class of priv. company unicorns…never before available.      Where are the Real Journalists? On the Media side - There exists an almost a schizophrenic-like behavior exhibited by the technology press in its years-long coverage of unicorns; To be sure, at the beginning there were some real attempts by a handful of outlets to highlight the findings of the Stanford Study, which were astounding; On the one hand, tech & financial media and the data analytics groups (CB Insights, Pitchbook) seem to recognize the lack of rigor and reality associated with over-valued unicorn companies.  They openly refer to it at times in their reporting e.g.  - CB Insights CEO, Anand Sanwal, recently opined in an August 2019 piece that it (unicorn status) is often used as a scheme to attract top talent in a very tight hiring market for key tech talent… At the same time, however, they ALL seem to vacillate between this recognition that something isn’t quite right about the valuations, yet still breathlessly, gleefully and even feeling duty-bound to report on the next stable, class, pack, leaderboard or club of unicorn companies, which have allegedly “achieved” unicorn status as a result of their last preferred stock financing round;   Some of which are even “born,” as has been reported!  Who knew?  Just a matter of being born into the unicorn aristocracy, I guess.   From my experience, a $1B tech company isn’t ‘born.’  They are built, nurtured and grown with talent, hard work and execution with a value proposition geared to solving real, identifiable needs and wants of customers.   Did you ever notice that the PE industry doesn’t have an equivalent designation (Unicorns) for its $1B+ value companies, even those that are in the tech category?     Let’s Summarize Where We Are:   So, The widely touted tech unicorn is a myth…So, why are so many tech and business news outlets breathlessly reporting about it as if there is some meaningful significance behind these widely hyped values?   We surely know that unicorns are mythical and not real – just like the post-money valuations touted and hyped by Silicon Valley and many others… How do we know that?  The Stanford Study proves it!  Again, we’ve had the empirical evidence showing exactly that since the Study was first published in 2017.    Keep in mind, that I don’t care or decry that Pref. equity investors desire, negotiate and receive such terms.  It’s a matter of proper disclosure…not economics.  The market will make its own determination of value associated with such economics. However, the economics must be disclosed…before an IPO or other exit.   Every claim that a tech firm has allegedly achieved what is fondly referred to in the Silicon Valley bubble of “Unicorn” status, a valuation of $1B+, should be required to apply an asterisk * next to that proclamation.   A footnote detailing and clearly explaining that “post-money valuation” is not market value nor market capitalization and explain how it’s derived.   However, there is no such reporting requirement for these private companies.  Should there be?  You know, in the interest of transparency and accuracy;  In other words, some real “truth-in-advertising” I believe it says a lot about the state of reality in tech-land today;  A loss of focus on business fundamentals, a willingness to kid ourselves, our LPs and the public about true value… In the long run, history will reflect upon this episode in tech history, as nothing more than a silly aberration…and hopefully a forgotten footnote    Conclusion:  It’s been fun and, and I will admit, even entertaining at times, but we need to put a stop to this game before it all gets out of hand…and someone gets hurt. The WeWork debacle, among other examples, indicates some have already been harmed…And major mutual funds are in on the game and failing to uphold their fiduciary responsibility to retail investors.     Caveat:  While unicorns are definitely mythical characters, there is an identifiable, measurable valuation of priv. tech companies – it just isn’t what has been used to arrive at the purported $1B+ valuations promulgated today that are masquerading as unicorns… What I am really hoping we can do is just move on, refocus on the important and relevant metrics in building and growing successful companies, and dismiss the unicorn-mania phase as nothing more than an idyllic aberration and distraction, to be forgotten, for good…because it has served no useful purpose in understanding VC and technology.  NONE!   [Also See:  Silicon Valley has a Media Problem and it’s Getting Worse – Yahoo Finance]  [Note:  It’s not a media problem. It is a credibility and transparency problem, which is creating negative coverage, that SV finds uncomfortable.]

Jaleh Rezaei is the Founder & CEO @ Mutiny, the startup that allows you to personalise your website for each and every visitor. Jaleh has raised from some of the best in the early stage business with Mutiny including the likes of Y Combinator, Uncork Capital and Cowboy Ventures on the fund side and then Mathilde @ Front, Henrique @ Brex and Shan-Lyn Ma @ Zola on the operator side. Prior to founding Mutiny, Jaleh spent an incredible 4 years at Gusto seeing their hypergrowth first hand as one of the first 10 employees. If that was not enough, Jaleh has also enjoyed advisory roles at both Google and Y Combinator.  In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Jaleh made her way into the world of SaaS as one of the first team members at Gusto and how that led to her founding Mutiny most recently?  What were Jaleh’s biggest takeaways from her time at Gusto? How did that time impact her operating mentality with Mutiny today? How did her time at Gusto teach her about the right way to build company culture? Where do so many go wrong with this? What does Jaleh believe is the biggest problem in SaaS marketing today? How does Jaleh specifically use ABM to acquire customers and leads effectively? What price points is required for an ABM strategy to be viable?   How does Jaleh approach the issue of determining the success of marketing? Should marketing be held accountable to a number tied directly to revenue? How does brand marketing play into this? Where are the nuances here?      Jaleh’s 60 Second SaaStr: What is the hardest role to hire for today? Hardest element for Jaleh of her role with Mutiny today? What does Jaleh know now that she wishes she had known when she entered the world of SaaS? Read the transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Jaleh Rezaei

Apenas han pasado siete años desde que la inversora neoyorquina Aileen Lee, fundadora del fondo de capital riesgo Cowboy Ventures, emplease el término en su artículo “Bienvenido al Club del Unicornio: aprendiendo sobre las nuevas empresas de los 1.000 millones de dólares”. Desde entonces, ese selecto club de startups cuya valoración en el mercado privado alcanza esa cifra se ha multiplicado por más de diez. En esta moneda al aire hablamos con Juan de Antonio (CEO y fundador de Cabify), sobre el periplo hasta lograr ser un unicornio y sobre los planes a futuro de la empresa de movilidad madrileña; con Francisco Canós (socio inversor de Cyber C), analizamos qué tipo de ecosistemas favorecen la aparición de 'unicornios' y por qué hay tan pocos en España; con Luis Martín Cabiedes (profesor de Iniciativa Emprendedora del IESE) y con el periodista Jesús Martínez, compañero de La Información y experto en tecnología, analizamos las dificultades que afectan hoy día a este tipo de startups y cómo puede afectarles el frenazo económico.

In 2013, Aileen Lee coined the term "unicorn" to refer to the growing field of startups with $1 billion valuations. At the time, she was a year into her role as a founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and her team was preparing a now-influential internal report examining how (and how often) companies with these massive valuations tend to emerge. Her summary of the report, published by TechCrunch, uncovered many insightful datapoints, but also revealed that only 2 of the 39 unicorns they studied had female co-founders, a finding that catalyzed her advocacy for increased diversity in technology startups. She more recently became a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the representation of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem. She describes her circuitous path to a job in venture capital, surfaces some of the central strategies of seed-stage investing, and encourages people from diverse backgrounds to help transform the venture capital business.

In 2013, Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to refer to the growing field of startups with $1 billion valuations. At the time, she was a year into her role as a founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and her team was preparing a now-influential internal report examining how (and how often) companies with these massive valuations tend to emerge. Her summary of the report, published by TechCrunch, uncovered many insightful datapoints, but also revealed that only 2 of the 39 unicorns they studied had female co-founders, a finding that catalyzed her advocacy for increased diversity in technology startups. She more recently became a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the representation of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem. She describes her circuitous path to a job in venture capital, surfaces some of the central strategies of seed-stage investing, and encourages people from diverse backgrounds to help transform the venture capital business.

In 2013, Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to refer to the growing field of startups with $1 billion valuations. At the time, she was a year into her role as a founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and her team was preparing a now-influential internal report examining how (and how often) companies with these massive valuations tend to emerge. Her summary of the report, published by TechCrunch, uncovered many insightful datapoints, but also revealed that only 2 of the 39 unicorns they studied had female co-founders, a finding that catalyzed her advocacy for increased diversity in technology startups. She more recently became a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the representation of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem. She describes her circuitous path to a job in venture capital, surfaces some of the central strategies of seed-stage investing, and encourages people from diverse backgrounds to help transform the venture capital business.

On this episode, meet Meg He, the co-founder of ADAY, a direct-to-consumer clothing brand that creates versatile, long-lasting apparel with a sustainable approach. ADAY was recognized as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company, and Meg was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list with her co-founder, Nina Faulhaber. Prior to ADAY, Meg worked at Poshmark, Cowboy Ventures and Goldman Sachs, and received degrees at Oxford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. On this episode, you will hear Meg talk about: Her struggles and achievements as a Chinese immigrant living and going to school in Wales and in England  Her career, which ranges from working in investment banking in London, to venture capital and technology in Silicon Valley, to her own start-up in New York City  What inspired her to become an entrepreneur and innovate within the fashion and apparel industry You can find ADAY online at www.thisisaday.com, on Facebook, Twitter, and at their showroom in New York City.  

In this episode of we focus exclusively on enabling boundless female entrepreneurship, along with the formation of female - friendly angel capital & venture capital funds. The progress in this domain has been extraordinary over the past few years and it deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. We start off highlighting female entrepreneurial role models, specifically the founders of Eventbrite, Rent the Runway, 23&Me, Stitch Fix & Glossier as beacons to a new generation of female founders, and female investing partners in VC Funds, including Forerunner Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Backstage Capital.

The post E988: Aileen Lee, Founder & Managing Partner of Cowboy Ventures, pioneered actionable change to diversify tech & VC, shares early days innovating in e-commerce, insights on current funding landscape, dangers of prioritized growth over sustainability, & lessons learned from backing winners like Dollar Shave Club from LAUNCH Scale 2019 appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The post E988: Aileen Lee, Founder & Managing Partner of Cowboy Ventures, pioneered actionable change to diversify tech & VC, shares early days innovating in e-commerce, insights on current funding landscape, dangers of prioritized growth over sustainability, & lessons learned from backing winners like Dollar Shave Club from LAUNCH Scale 2019 appeared first on This Week In Startups.

Ben Sigelman is a co-founder and CEO at LightStep, a company that makes complex microservice applications more transparent and reliable. The company has raised $70 million from investors like Sequoia Capital, Redpoint, Harrison Metal, Cowboy Ventures, and Altimer Capital. Prior to this, he was an employee at Google for nine years. 

Ben Sigelman is a co-founder and CEO at LightStep, a company that makes complex microservice applications more transparent and reliable. The company has raised $70 million from investors like Sequoia Capital, Redpoint, Harrison Metal, Cowboy Ventures, and Altimer Capital. Prior to this, he was an employee at Google for nine years. 

A new season of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders starts on October 9th! Guests this season include Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital; Barbara Liskov, Institute Professor at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab; Srin Madipalli, accessibility and product manager at Airbnb; Sarah Nahm, co-founder and CEO of Lever; and Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures and All Raise. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes delivered straight to you every Wednesday!

Eric Lagier co-founded and is a general partner of ByFounders, a 100 million Euro venture firm focused on Nordic and Baltic startups. As you grab your map to find where the Nordics and Baltics actually are, think about this: Since 2013, 41 startups built in Europe are now worth more than a billion dollars. (These are known as “Unicorns”, a term coined by Ailene Lee of Cowboy Ventures). Even more extraordinary is the fact that 10 of those 41 are from the Nordics. So an area comprising of 4% of Europe’s population has generated 25% of Europe’s Unicorns. This includes companies like Unity, Spotify, Just Eat, Sitecore, Klarna, Zendesk and Tradeshift among others.    Yes, a lot of numbers! Join us as Kent and Eric talk about why such huge outcomes occur in Nordic countries, and what cultural differences define the Nordics vs. the U.S.  Learn who is behind ByFounders, how the fund came together and more.    https://somethingventured.us    Links: ByFounders https://byfounders.vc 

Bloomberg's Emily Chang sits down Maha Ibrahim, General Partner, Canaan Kirsten Green, Founding Partner Forerunner Ventures and Aileen Lee, Founder & Partner, Cowboy Ventures to discuss the need for more women in venture capital,  trade tariffs impacting VC spending, Facebook's future leadership and regulation in tech.

Ted Wang is a Partner @ Cowboy Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's leading early-stage funds with the likes of Philz Coffee, Dollar Shave Club, Brandless, DocSend, Accompany and Brit + Co all in their portfolio. As for Ted, prior to VC, Ted spent X years as a leading Silicon Valley lawyer with Fenwick & West where he worked with some of the most notable companies of our times including Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Square and Spotify just to name a few. Ted also created the Series Seed Documents - a set of open-sourced financing documents posted on Github used by thousands around the world today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ted made his way from one of the most renowned lawyers in the valley with Fenwick & West to partner @ Cowboy alongside Aileen Lee? 2.) How does Ted fundamentally approach risk today? Given this mindset, how does this impact Ted's thinking on optimizing portfolio construction? On the flip side, how has Ted seen many founders wrongly approach the theme of risk? What is the question they need to be asking? What is Ted's story about risk related to his time working with Jet? 3.) What is it that makes Ted believe that "advice is often oversimplified"? If so, how can VCs provide tangible advice to their portfolio companies today? How can founders determine what is the right advice to accept and integrate vs listen and disregard? How does this lead Ted's thinking on the 2 core value adds a VC can provide? What advice did Dropbox Founder, Drew Houston give Ted on when to accept advice? 4.) What does Ted mean when he says "there are 4 parts to venture"? How does Ted think about the theme of learning and self-improvement when assessing founders? How does he look to do this pre-investment? What questions reveal the most? Applying it to himself, where will Ted place his biggest efforts on learning within the realm of venture over the next 12 months? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ted’s Fave Book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Ted’s Most Recent Investment: Fullcast As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ted on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Much like how Carta changed how private companies manage their cap tables and 409A valuations, Carta are now doing the same for fund administration. With Carta’s new, modern fund administration software and services, you get a real-time dashboard of your general ledger, can securely share info with your LPs, and issue capital calls–from the same platform, you accept securities and request cap table access. So essentially, Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, fund administration, and valuations. Go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off.

Christian Rolon (WG '19) is joined by Jason Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Tally Technologies. Tally is the first automated debt manager, helping consumers pay down high interest rate credit card debt. Tally was founded in 2015, and was launched on iOS in October 2017. Tally now manages hundreds of millions of dollars in credit card debt and has saved people millions of dollars in interest and late fees since its launch. Tally has raised $42m in total from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Shasta Ventures, and Cowboy Ventures. Jason is the co-founder and CEO of Tally Technologies. Tally is Jason's third startup. His second startup Gen110 was also co-founded with his Tally co-founder Jasper Platz and was invested in by Kleiner Perkins. Gen110 was acquired by Solar Universe in 2013. Jason also worked at Voyager Capital, a VC firm focusing on early-stage software firms. Jason has his MBA from Chicago Booth, where he ran the Venture Capital and Private Equity Club and concentrated in Finance and Entrepreneurship. Jason received his BA from Boston University, graduating summa cum laude.

Recode’s Kara Swisher talks with three tech leaders about actual solutions for advancing diversity in the industry. Cowboy Ventures partner Aileen Lee, theBoardlist founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy and former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith talk about the factors that have historically held back women, people of color and other under-represented groups in tech, and what comes next after the reckoning of the #MeToo movement. The group debates how men can best help their female peers succeed and how companies can avoid falling into the trap of thinking that the solution is just to keep men and women apart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aileen Lee is the founder of Cowboy Ventures.Kirsty Nathoo is CFO and a Partner at Y Combinator.

Jason Brown is the Founder & CEO @ Tally, the startup that is building a better credit card experience giving power to the consumer. They have investment from some of the leading names in early stage finance including Shasta Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Ludlow Ventures and Blake Byers @ GV just to name a few. As for Jason, prior to Tally, he founded 3 further startups including most recently Gen110 where helped to bring a new consumer debt product market that finances residential solar installs.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Jason come to found Tally following his 3 prior startup founding experiences? 2.) Why does Jason think you should never settle with candidate hires? What shall startups do when they are growing fast and need someone now? Why does Jason believe you should never use external recruiters? 3.) As this is Jason's 4th startup and he has raised from the likes of Kleiner Perkins in the past, what has Jason learned in terms of fundraising through his past entrepreneurial experiences? What does Jason believe founders should look for from their VCs? 4.) Why does Jason believe that in the majority of cases 'move fast and break things is completely wrong'? What industries does Jason believe you have to lean into the regulators? 5.) How does Jason look to instill radical candor within Tally as a fast scaling startup? What does Jason think this is important for all startups to have engrained in them? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Jason’s Fave Book: Science of Interstellar Jason’s Fave Blog: First Round Review As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com - and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount! FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.

Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee, previously a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about being one of the few female venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. After leaving Kleiner Perkins in 2012, Lee set out to amass data about the small percentage of startups that become breakout success stories, and she coined the term "unicorn" to describe the small fraction that would be valued at more than $1 billion. She says entrepreneurs today have to be tougher now that investors' fervor has cooled off, and says those investors will have to change, too, by becoming more diverse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle McHargue, Talent Partner with San Francisco based Venture Capital fund, Cowboy Ventures, shares what is it like to work in the Talent Acquisition space. Some of the areas we touch upon in this episode include: 1. What is Talent Acquisition 2. How do recruiters find talent 3. Typical process for filling up positions 4. Interesting and challenging aspects of this job 5. What kind of person would enjoy working in this space Thank you for listening! Follow the show on Twitter @LED_Curator Email us learneducatediscover@gmail.com. We will reply!! Subscribe to the show on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/learn…ver/id1049159321 Blog: bit.ly/1R1nTDk

Noah Lichtenstein from Cowboy Ventures and Kimono Labs co-founders, Pratap Ranade and Ryan Rowe, swung by Product Hunt HQ to chat about products. We discuss Twitter’s new Group DM’s, Snapchat’s media play with Discover, and halfway through the show we accidentally make an announcement. Listen in.

What do venture capitalists actually do all day? And what is the path that leads to a career investing in startups? Hummer Winblad's Ann Winblad, Cowboy Ventures' Aileen Lee, Aspect Ventures' Theresia Gouw, Intel Capital veteran and UPWARD founder Lisa Lambert, and Andreessen Horowitz's Margit Wennmachers discuss VC trends, the importance of technical chops, and how to build the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors. And finally, in front of an appreciative crowd attending the UPWARD event at a16z, Ann Winblad reveals the secret to truly kicking ass.