Podcasts about Dorm Room Fund

hireEZ, has introduced Agentic AI, a new recruitment automation that balances AI-driven execution with oversight. As part of hireEZ's all-in-one recruiting platform, Agentic AI automates sourcing, screening, outreach, scheduling, and analytics, while keeping recruiters in control of strategic decisions and high-value interactions. isolved®, the most trusted human capital  management (HCM) partner, today announced a new wave of talent acquisition  advancements, reinforcing its continued investment in hiring solutions that prioritize long term fit—not just speed.  https://hrtechfeed.com/isolved-expands-hiring-features/ Tech Job board Dice announced the expansion of its Talent Solutions offering to include contract tech talent. In addition to supporting permanent hires, multiple hires and pipeline development, Dice now sources and screens candidates for organizations looking to quickly connect with highly skilled contract professionals in AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing and other high-demand fields. https://hrtechfeed.com/dice-expands-solutions-to-contract-tech-talent/ PALO ALTO, Calif. — Lumber, the AI-powered construction workforce management platform, announced a $15.5 million Series A funding round led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Tishman Speyer, Carbide Ventures, 8VC, Sure Ventures, and FirsthandVC.  https://hrtechfeed.com/construction-workforce-management-platform-secures-15-million/ NEW YORK — Jolly, a workforce optimization platform, today announced a $16.5M Series A fundraise which was led by Zach Kirkhorn, former CFO of Tesla. In addition to Kirkhorn, who will join the company's Board, the round included participation from angel investors Gokul Rajaram, Julien Codorniou, Steve Luczo, and David Marcus, and institutional support from Bullpen Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Eigen Ventures, among others. These funds will be used to expand Jolly's product suite and scale into new verticals. https://hrtechfeed.com/workforce-optimization-platform-lands-16-5m-series-a/  

Shawn Xu is a venture capitalist and current Chief of Staff at Lowercarbon Capital. Shawn believes in audacious founders and bold solutions to the climate crisis and we wanted to have him on CLIMB because he's not just an investor; he's also a relentless builder helping to expand Lowercarbon's platform and founder products. Shawn has personally partnered with ~50 companies to date and brings with him a wealth of knowledge on helping founders go zero to one, from ideation to product-market fit. As a Partner at On Deck's venture fund and accelerator, he successfully backed companies in over 20 countries, earning a perfect founder NPS of 100. Prior stints at Floodgate and First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund propelled him into Forbes' 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital. Before his investing career, Shawn was a startup executive leading international expansion for companies like Square. His commitment to social impact led him to serve as a tech policy advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom. A Silicon Valley native, Shawn earned his MBA/MA in International Affairs from Wharton and the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania after completing his undergraduate studies at UC San Diego. About VSC Ventures: For 20 years, our award-winning ⁠PR agency VSC⁠ has worked with innovative startups on positioning, messaging, and awareness and we are bringing that same expertise to help climate startups with storytelling and narrative building. Last year, general partners Vijay Chattha and Jay Kapoor raised a $21M fund to co-invest in the most promising startups alongside leading climate funds. Through the conversations on our show CLIMB by VSC, we're excited to share what we're doing at VSC and VSC Ventures on climate innovation with companies like ⁠Ample⁠, ⁠Actual⁠, ⁠Sesame Solar⁠, ⁠Synop⁠, ⁠Vibrant Planet⁠, and ⁠Zume⁠ among many others.

Today on the show, we have Desmond Lim. Desmond is the CEO and co-founder of Workstream, a tech space hiring platform that helps business to hire faster, cutting half the time to engage, hire and onboard hourly workers. Workstream is in GGV's portfolio. Before workstream, Desmond is a graduate of Harvard University and MIT Media Lab, and a former Product Manager at WeChat and an investor for Dorm Room Fund. He's from Singapore. He splits his time between San Francisco and Utah. He also used to represent the Singapore National Youth team in basketball.

Read: https://www.latent.space/p/ai-interfaces-and-notionShow Notes* Linus on Twitter* Linus' personal blog* Notion* Notion AI* Notion Projects* AI UX Meetup RecapTimestamps* [00:03:30] Starting the AI / UX community* [00:10:01] Most knowledge work is not text generation* [00:16:21] Finding the right constraints and interface for AI* [00:19:06] Linus' journey to working at Notion* [00:23:29] The importance of notations and interfaces* [00:26:07] Setting interface defaults and standards* [00:32:36] The challenges of designing AI agents* [00:39:43] Notion deep dive: “Blocks”, AI, and more* [00:51:00] Prompt engineering at Notion* [01:02:00] Lightning RoundTranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in residence at Decibel Partners. I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space. [00:00:20]Swyx: And today we're not in our regular studio. We're actually at the Notion New York headquarters. Thanks to Linus. Welcome. [00:00:28]Linus: Thank you. Thanks for having me. [00:00:29]Swyx: Thanks for having us in your beautiful office. It is actually very startling how gorgeous the Notion offices are. And it's basically the same aesthetic. [00:00:38]Linus: It's a very consistent aesthetic. It's the same aesthetic in San Francisco and the other offices. It's been for many, many years. [00:00:46]Swyx: You take a lot of craft in everything that you guys do. Yeah. [00:00:50]Linus: I think we can, I'm sure, talk about this more later, but there is a consistent kind of focus on taste that I think flows down from Ivan and the founders into the product. [00:00:59]Swyx: So I'll introduce you a little bit, but also there's just, you're a very hard person to introduce because you do a lot of things. You got your BA in computer science at Berkeley. Even while you're at Berkeley, you're involved in a bunch of interesting things at Replit, CatalystX, Hack Club and Dorm Room Fund. I always love seeing people come out of Dorm Room Fund because they tend to be a very entrepreneurial. You're a product engineer at IdeaFlow, residence at Betaworks. You took a year off to do independent research and then you've finally found your home at Notion. What's one thing that people should know about you that's not on your typical LinkedIn profile? [00:01:39]Linus: Putting me on the spot. I think, I mean, just because I have so much work kind of out there, I feel like professionally, at least, anything that you would want to know about me, you can probably dig up, but I'm a big city person, but I don't come from the city. I went to school, I grew up in Indiana, in the middle of nowhere, near Purdue University, a little suburb. I only came out to the Bay for school and then I moved to New York afterwards, which is where I'm currently. I'm in Notion, New York. But I still carry within me a kind of love and affection for small town, Indiana, small town, flyover country. [00:02:10]Swyx: We do have a bit of indulgence in this. I'm from a small country and I think Alessio, you also kind of identified with this a little bit. Is there anything that people should know about Purdue, apart from the chickens? [00:02:24]Linus: Purdue has one of the largest international student populations in the country, which I don't know. I don't know exactly why, but because it's a state school, the focus is a lot on STEM topics. Purdue is well known for engineering and so we tend to have a lot of folks from abroad, which is particularly rare for a university in, I don't know, that's kind of like predominantly white American and kind of Midwestern state. That makes Purdue and the surrounding sort of area kind of like a younger, more diverse international island within the, I guess, broader world that is Indiana. [00:02:58]Swyx: Fair enough. We can always dive into sort of flyover country or, you know, small town insights later, but you and I, all three of us actually recently connected at AIUX SF, which is the first AIUX meetup, essentially which just came out of like a Twitter conversation. You and I have been involved in HCI Twitter is kind of how I think about it for a little bit and when I saw that you were in town, Geoffrey Litt was in town, Maggie Appleton in town, all on the same date, I was like, we have to have a meetup and that's how this thing was born. Well, what did it look like from your end? [00:03:30]Linus: From my end, it looked like you did all of the work and I... [00:03:33]Swyx: Well, you got us the Notion. Yeah, yeah. [00:03:36]Linus: It was also in the Notion office, it was in the San Francisco one and then thereafter there was a New York one that I decided I couldn't make. But yeah, from my end it was, and I'm sure you were too, but I was really surprised by both the mixture of people that we ended up getting and the number of people that we ended up getting. There was just a lot of attention on, obviously there was a lot of attention on the technology itself of GPT and language models and so on, but I was surprised by the interest specifically on trying to come up with interfaces that were outside of the box and the people that were interested in that topic. And so we ended up having a packed house and lots of interesting demos. I've heard multiple people comment on the event afterwards that they were positively surprised by the mixture of both the ML, AI-focused people at the event as well as the interface HCI-focused people. [00:04:24]Swyx: Yeah. I kind of see you as one of the leading, I guess, AI UX people, so I hope that we are maybe starting a new discipline, maybe. [00:04:33]Linus: Yeah, I mean, there is this kind of growing contingency of people interested in exploring the intersection of those things, so I'm excited for where that's going to go. [00:04:41]Swyx: I don't know if it's worth going through favorite demos. It was a little while ago, so I don't know if... [00:04:48]Alessio: There was, I forget who made it, but there was this new document writing tool where you could apply brushes to different paragraphs. [00:04:56]Linus: Oh, this was Amelia's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:04:58]Alessio: You could set a tone, both in terms of writer inspiration and then a tone that you wanted, and then you could drag and drop different tones into paragraphs and have the model rewrite them. It was the first time that it's not just auto-complete, there's more to it. And it's not asked in a prompt, it's this funny drag-an-emoji over it. [00:05:20]Linus: Right. [00:05:21]Swyx: I actually thought that you had done some kind of demo where you could select text and then augment it in different moods, but maybe it wasn't you, maybe it was just someone else [00:05:28]Linus: I had done something similar, with slightly different building blocks. I think Amelia's demo was, there was sort of a preset palette of brushes and you apply them to text. I had built something related last year, I prototyped a way to give people sliders for different semantic attributes of text. And so you could start with a sentence, and you had a slider for length and a slider for how philosophical the text is, and a slider for how positive or negative the sentiment in the text is, and you could adjust any of them in the language model, reproduce the text. Yeah, similar, but continuous control versus distinct brushes, I think is an interesting distinction there. [00:06:03]Swyx: I should add it for listeners, if you missed the meetup, which most people will have not seen it, we actually did a separate post with timestamps of each video, so you can look at that. [00:06:13]Alessio: Sorry, Linus, this is unrelated, but I think you build over a hundred side projects or something like that. A hundred? [00:06:20]Swyx: I think there's a lot of people... I know it's a hundred. [00:06:22]Alessio: I think it's a lot of them. [00:06:23]Swyx: A lot of them are kind of small. [00:06:25]Alessio: Yeah, well, I mean, it still counts. I think there's a lot of people that are excited about the technology and want to hack on things. Do you have any tips on how to box, what you want to build, how do you decide what goes into it? Because all of these things, you could build so many more things on top of it. Where do you decide when you're done? [00:06:44]Linus: So my projects actually tend to be... I think especially when people approach project building with a goal of learning, I think a common mistake is to be over-ambitious and sort of not scope things very tightly. And so a classic kind of failure mode is, you say, I'm really interested in learning how to use the GPT-4 API, and I'm also interested in vector databases, and I'm also interested in Next.js. And then you devise a project that's going to take many weeks, and you glue all these things together. And it could be a really cool idea, but then especially if you have a day job and other things that life throws you away, it's hard to actually get to a point where you can ship something. And so one of the things that I got really good at was saying, one, knowing exactly how quickly I could work, at least on the technologies that I knew well, and then only adding one new unknown thing to learn per project. So it may be that for this project, I'm going to learn how the embedding API works. Or for this project, I'm going to learn how to do vector stuff with PyTorch or something. And then I would scope things so that it fit in one chunk of time, like Friday night to Sunday night or something like that. And then I would scope the project so that I could ship something as much work as I could fit into a two-day period, so that at the end of that weekend, I could ship something. And then afterwards, if I want to add something, I have time to do it and a chance to do that. But it's already shipped, so there's already momentum, and people are using it, or I'm using it, and so there's a reason to continue building. So only adding one new unknown per project, I think, is a good trick. [00:08:14]Swyx: I first came across you, I think, because of Monocle, which is your personal search engine. And I got very excited about it, because I always wanted a personal search engine, until I found that it was in a language that I've never seen before. [00:08:25]Linus: Yeah, there's a towel tower of little tools and technologies that I built for myself. One of the other tricks to being really productive when you're building side projects is just to use a consistent set of tools that you know really, really well. For me, that's Go, and my language, and a couple other libraries that I've written that I know all the way down to the bottom of the stack. And then I barely have to look anything up, because I've just debugged every possible issue that could come up. And so I could get from start to finish without getting stuck in a weird bug that I've never seen before. But yeah, it's a weird stack. [00:08:58]Swyx: It also means that you probably are not aiming for, let's say, open source glory, or whatever. Because you're not publishing in the JavaScript ecosystem. Right, right. [00:09:06]Linus: I mean, I've written some libraries before, but a lot of my projects tend to be like, the way that I approach it is less about building something that other people are going to use en masse. And make yourself happy. Yeah, more about like, here's the thing that I built, if you want to, and often I learn something in the process of building that thing. So like with Monocle, I wrote a custom sort of full text search index. And I thought a lot of the parts of what I built was interesting. And so I just wanted other people to be able to look at it and see how it works and understand it. But the goal isn't necessarily for you to be able to replicate it and run it on your own. [00:09:36]Swyx: Well, we can kind of dive into your other AIUX thoughts. As you've been diving in, you tend to share a lot on Twitter. And I just kind of took out some of your greatest hits. This is relevant to the demo that you picked out, Alessio. And what we're talking about, which is, most knowledge work is not a text generation task. That's funny, because a lot of what Notion AI is, is text generation right now. Maybe you want to elaborate a little bit. Yeah. [00:10:01]Linus: I think the first time you look at something like GPT, the shape of the thing you see is like, oh, it's a thing that takes some input text and generates some output text. And so the easiest thing to build on top of that is a content generation tool. But I think there's a couple of other categories of things that you could build that are sort of progressively more useful and more interesting. And so besides content generation, which requires the minimum amount of wrapping around ChatGPT, the second tier up from that is things around knowledge, I think. So if you have, I mean, this is the hot thing with all these vector databases things going around. But if you have a lot of existing context around some knowledge about your company or about a field or all of the internet, you can use a language model as a way to search and understand things in it and combine and synthesize them. And that synthesis, I think, is useful. And at that point, I think the value that that unlocks, I think, is much greater than the value of content generation. Because most knowledge work, the artifact that you produce isn't actually about writing more words. Most knowledge work, the goal is to understand something, synthesize new things, or propose actions or other kinds of knowledge-to-knowledge tasks. And then the third category, I think, is automation. Which I think is sort of the thing that people are looking at most actively today, at least from my vantage point in the ecosystem. Things like the React prompting technique, and just in general, letting models propose actions or write code to accomplish tasks. That's also moving far beyond generating text to doing something more interesting. So much of the value of what humans sit down and do at work isn't actually in the words that they write. It's all the thinking that goes on before you write those words. So how can you get language models to contribute to those parts of work? [00:11:43]Alessio: I think when you first tweeted about this, I don't know if you already accepted the job, but you tweeted about this, and then the next one was like, this is a NotionAI subtweet. [00:11:53]Swyx: So I didn't realize that. [00:11:56]Alessio: The best thing that I see is when people complain, and then they're like, okay, I'm going to go and help make the thing better. So what are some of the things that you've been thinking about? I know you talked a lot about some of the flexibility versus intuitiveness of the product. The language is really flexible, because you can say anything. And it's funny, the models never ignore you. They always respond with something. So no matter what you write, something is going to come back. Sometimes you don't know how big the space of action is, how many things you can do. So as a product builder, how do you think about the trade-offs that you're willing to take for your users? Where like, okay, I'm not going to let you be as flexible, but I'm going to create this guardrails for you. What's the process to think about the guardrails, and how you want to funnel them to the right action? [00:12:46]Linus: Yeah, I think what this trade-off you mentioned around flexibility versus intuitiveness, I think, gets at one of the core design challenges for building products on top of language models. A lot of good interface design comes from tastefully adding the right constraints in place to guide the user towards actions that you want to take. As you add more guardrails, the obvious actions become more obvious. And one common way to make an interface more intuitive is to narrow the space of choices that the users have to make, and the number of choices that they have to make. And that intuitiveness, that source of intuitiveness from adding constraints, is kind of directly at odds with the reason that language models are so powerful and interesting, which is that they're so flexible and so general, and you can ask them to do literally anything, and they will always give you something. But most of the time, the answer isn't that high quality. And so there's kind of a distribution of, like, there are clumps of things in the action space of what a language model can do that the model's good at, and there's parts of the space where it's bad at. And so one sort of high-level framework that I have for thinking about designing with language models is, there are actions that the language model's good at, and actions that it's bad at. How do you add the right constraints carefully to guide the user and the system towards the things that the language model's good at? And then at the same time, how do you use those constraints to set the user expectations for what it's going to be good at and bad at? One way to do this is just literally to add those constraints and to set expectations. So a common example I use all the time is, if you have some AI system to answer questions from a knowledge base, there are a couple of different ways to surface that in a kind of a hypothetical product. One is, you could have a thing that looks like a chat window in a messaging app, and then you could tell the user, hey, this is for looking things up from a database. You can ask a question, then it'll look things up and give you an answer. But if something looks like a chat, and this is a lesson that's been learned over and over for anyone building chat interfaces since, like, 2014, 15, if you have anything that looks like a chat interface or a messaging app, people are going to put some, like, weird stuff in there that just don't look like the thing that you want the model to take in, because the expectation is, hey, I can use this like a messaging app, and people will send in, like, hi, hello, you know, weird questions, weird comments. Whereas if you take that same, literally the same input box, and put it in, like, a thing that looks like a search bar with, like, a search button, people are going to treat it more like a search window. And at that point, inputs look a lot more like keywords or a list of keywords or maybe questions. So the simple act of, like, contextualizing that input in different parts of an interface reset the user's expectations, which constrain the space of things that the model has to handle. And that you're kind of adding constraints, because you're really restricting your input to mostly things that look like keyword search. But because of that constraint, you can have the model fit the expectations better. You can tune the model to perform better in those settings. And it's also less confusing and perhaps more intuitive, because the user isn't stuck with this blank page syndrome problem of, okay, here's an input. What do I actually do with it? When we initially launched Notion AI, one of my common takeaways, personally, from talking to a lot of my friends who had tried it, obviously, there were a lot of people who were getting lots of value out of using it to automate writing emails or writing marketing copy. There were a ton of people who were using it to, like, write Instagram ads and then sort of paste it into the Instagram tool. But some of my friends who had tried it and did not use it as much, a frequently cited reason was, I tried it. It was cool. It was cool for the things that Notion AI was marketed for. But for my particular use case, I had a hard time figuring out exactly the way it was useful for my workflow. And I think that gets back at the problem of, it's such a general tool that just presented with a blank prompt box, it's hard to know exactly the way it could be useful to your particular use case. [00:16:21]Alessio: What do you think is the relationship between novelty and flexibility? I feel like we're in kind of like a prompting honeymoon phase where the tools are new and then everybody just wants to do whatever they want to do. And so it's good to give these interfaces because people can explore. But if I go forward in three years, ideally, I'm not prompting anything. The UX has been built for most products to already have the intuitive, kind of like a happy path built into it. Do you think there's merit in a way? If you think about ChatGPT, if it was limited, the reason why it got so viral is people were doing things that they didn't think a computer could do, like write poems and solve riddles and all these different things. How do you think about that, especially in Notion, where Notion AI is kind of like a new product in an existing thing? How much of it for you is letting that happen and seeing how people use it? And then at some point be like, okay, we know what people want to do. The flexibility is not, it was cool before, but now we just want you to do the right things with the right UX. [00:17:27]Linus: I think there's value in always having the most general input as an escape hatch for people who want to take advantage of that power. At this point, Notion AI has a couple of different manifestations in the product. There's the writer. There's a thing we called an AI block, which is a thing that you can always sort of re-update as a part of document. It's like a live, a little portal inside the document that an AI can write. We also have a relatively new thing called AI autofill, which lets an AI fill an entire column in a Notion database. In all of these things, speaking of adding constraints, we have a lot of suggested prompts that we've worked on and we've curated and we think work pretty well for things like summarization and writing drafts to blog posts and things. But we always leave a fully custom prompt for a few reasons. One is if you are actually a power user and you know how language models work, you can go in and write your custom prompt and if you're a power user, you want access to the power. The other is for us to be able to discover new use cases. And so one of the lovely things about working on a product like Notion is that there's such an enthusiastic and lively kind of community of ambassadors and people that are excited about trying different things and coming up with all these templates and new use cases. And having a fully custom action or prompt whenever we launch something new in AI lets those people really experiment and help us discover new ways to take advantage of AI. I think it's good in that way. There's also a sort of complement to that, which is if we wanted to use feedback data or learn from those things and help improve the way that we are prompting the model or the models that we're building, having access to that like fully diverse, fully general range of use cases helps us make sure that our models can handle the full generality of what people want to do. [00:19:06]Swyx: I feel like we've segway'd a lot into our Notion conversation and maybe I just wanted to bridge that a little bit with your personal journey into Notion before we go into Notion proper. You spent a year kind of on a sabbatical, kind of on your own self-guided research journey and then deciding to join Notion. I think a lot of engineers out there thinking about doing this maybe don't have the internal compass that you have or don't have the guts to basically make no money for a year. Maybe just share with people how you decided to basically go on your own independent journey and what got you to join Notion in the end. [00:19:42]Linus: Yeah, what happened? Um, yeah, so for a little bit of context for people who don't know me, I was working mostly at sort of seed stage startups as a web engineer. I actually didn't really do much AI at all for prior to my year off. And then I took all of 2022 off with less of a focus on it ended up sort of in retrospect becoming like a Linus Pivots to AI year, which was like beautifully well timed. But in the beginning of the year, there was kind of a one key motivation and then one key kind of question that I had. The motivation was that I think I was at a sort of a privileged and fortunate enough place where I felt like I had some money saved up that I had saved up explicitly to be able to take some time off and investigate my own kind of questions because I was already working on lots of side projects and I wanted to spend more time on it. I think I also at that point felt like I had enough security in the companies and folks that I knew that if I really needed a job on a short notice, I could go and I could find some work to do. So I wouldn't be completely on the streets. And so that security, I think, gave me the confidence to say, OK, let's try this kind of experiment.[00:20:52]Maybe it'll only be for six months. Maybe it'll be for a year. I had enough money saved up to last like a year and change. And so I had planned for a year off and I had one sort of big question that I wanted to explore. Having that single question, I think, actually was really helpful for focusing the effort instead of just being like, I'm going to side project for a year, which I think would have been less productive. And that big question was, how do we evolve text interfaces forward? So, so much of knowledge work is consuming walls of text and then producing more walls of text. And text is so ubiquitous, not just in software, but just in general in the world. They're like signages and menus and books. And it's ubiquitous, but it's not very ergonomic. There's a lot of things about text interfaces that could be better. And so I wanted to explore how we could make that better. A key part of that ended up being, as I discovered, taking advantage of this new technologies that let computers make sense of text information. And so that's how I ended up sort of sliding into AI. But the motivation in the beginning was less focused on learning a new technology and more just on exploring this general question space. [00:21:53]Swyx: Yeah. You have the quote, text is the lowest denominator, not the end game. Right, right. [00:21:58]Linus: I mean, I think if you look at any specific domain or discipline, whether it's medicine or mathematics or software engineering, in any specific discipline where there's a narrower set of abstractions for people to work with, there are custom notations. One of the first things that I wrote in this exploration year was this piece called Notational Intelligence, where I talk about this idea that so much of, as a total sidebar, there's a whole other fascinating conversation that I would love to have at some point, maybe today, maybe later, about how to evolve a budding scene of research into a fully-fledged field. So I think AI UX is kind of in this weird stage where there's a group of interesting people that are interested in exploring this space of how do you design for this newfangled technology, and how do you take that and go and build best practices and powerful methods and tools [00:22:48]Swyx: We should talk about that at some point. [00:22:49]Linus: OK. But in a lot of established fields, there are notations that people use that really help them work at a slightly higher level than just raw words. So notations for describing chemicals and notations for different areas of mathematics that let people work with higher-level concepts more easily. Logic, linguistics. [00:23:07]Swyx: Yeah. [00:23:07]Linus: And I think it's fair to say that some large part of human intelligence, especially in these more technical domains, comes from our ability to work with notations instead of work with just the raw ideas in our heads. And text is a kind of notation. It's the most general kind of notation, but it's also, because of its generality, not super high leverage if you want to go into these specific domains. And so I wanted to try to improve on that frontier. [00:23:29]Swyx: Yeah. You said in our show notes, one of my goals over the next few years is to ensure that we end up with interface metaphors and technical conventions that set us up for the best possible timeline for creativity and inventions ahead. So part of that is constraints. But I feel like that is one part of the equation, right? What's the other part that is more engenders creativity? [00:23:47]Linus: Tell me a little bit about that and what you're thinking there. [00:23:51]Swyx: It's just, I feel like, you know, we talked a little bit about how you do want to constrain, for example, the user interface to guide people towards things that language models are good at. And creative solutions do arise out of constraints. But I feel like that alone is not sufficient for people to invent things. [00:24:10]Linus: I mean, there's a lot of directions, I think, that could go from that. The origin of that thing that you're quoting is when I decided to come help work on AI at Notion, a bunch of my friends were actually quite surprised, I think, because they had expected that I would have gone and worked… [00:24:29]Swyx: You did switch. I was eyeing that for you. [00:24:31]Linus: I mean, I worked at a lab or at my own company or something like that. But one of the core motivations for me joining an existing company and one that has lots of users already is this exact thing where in the aftermath of a new foundational technology emerging, there's kind of a period of a few years where the winners in the market get to decide what the default interface paradigm for the technology is. So, like, mini computers, personal computers, the winners of that market got to decide Windows are and how scrolling works and what a mouse cursor is and how text is edited. Similar with mobile, the concept of a home screen and apps and things like that, the winners of the market got to decide. And that has profound, like, I think it's difficult to understate the importance of, in those few critical years, the winning companies in the market choosing the right abstractions and the right metaphors. And AI, to me, seemed like it's at that pivotal moment where it's a technology that lots of companies are adopting. There is this well-recognized need for interface best practices. And Notion seemed like a company that had this interesting balance of it could still move quickly enough and ship and prototype quickly enough to try interesting interface ideas. But it also had enough presence in the ecosystem that if we came up with the right solution or one that we felt was right, we could push it out and learn from real users and iterate and hopefully be a part of that story of setting the defaults and setting what the dominant patterns are. [00:26:07]Swyx: Yeah, it's a special opportunity. One of my favorite stories or facts is it was like a team of 10 people that designed the original iPhone. And so all the UX that was created there is essentially what we use as smartphones today, including predictive text, because people were finding that people were kind of missing the right letters. So they just enhanced the hit area for certain letters based on what you're typing. [00:26:28]Linus: I mean, even just the idea of like, we should use QWERTY keyboards on tiny smartphone screens. Like that's a weird idea, right? [00:26:36]Swyx: Yeah, QWERTY is another one. So I have RSI. So this actually affects me. QWERTY was specifically chosen to maximize travel distance, right? Like it's actually not ergonomic by design because you wanted the keyboard, the key type writers to not stick. But we don't have that anymore. We're still sticking to QWERTY. I'm still sticking to QWERTY. I could switch to the other ones. I forget. QORAC or QOMAC anytime, but I don't just because of inertia. I have another thing like this. [00:27:02]Linus: So going even farther back, people don't really think enough about where this concept of buttons come from, right? So the concept of a push button as a thing where you press it and it activates some binary switch. I mean, buttons have existed for, like mechanical buttons have existed for a long time. But really, like this modern concept of a button that activates a binary switch really gets like popularized by the popular advent of electricity. Before the electricity, if you had a button that did something, you would have to construct a mechanical system where if you press down on a thing, it affects some other lever system that affects as like the final action. And this modern idea of a button that is just a binary switch gets popularized electricity. And at that point, a button has to work in the way that it does in like an alarm clock, because when you press down on it, there's like a spring that makes sure that the button comes back up and that it completes the circuit. And so that's the way the button works. And then when we started writing graphical interfaces, we just took that idea of a thing that could be depressed to activate a switch. All the modern buttons that we have today in software interfaces are like simulating electronic push buttons where you like press down to complete a circuit, except there's actually no circuit being completed. It's just like a square on a screen. [00:28:11]Swyx: It's all virtualized. Right. [00:28:12]Linus: And then you control the simulation of a button by clicking a physical button on a mouse. Except if you're on a trackpad, it's not even a physical button anymore. It's like a simulated button hardware that controls a simulated button in software. And it's also just this cascade of like conceptual backwards compatibility that gets us here. I think buttons are interesting. [00:28:32]Alessio: Where are you on the skeuomorphic design love-hate spectrum? There's people that have like high nostalgia for like the original, you know, the YouTube icon on the iPhone with like the knobs on the TV. [00:28:42]Linus: I think a big part of that is at least the aesthetic part of it is fashion. Like fashion taken very literally, like in the same way that like the like early like Y2K 90s aesthetic comes and goes. I think skeuomorphism as expressed in like the early iPhone or like Windows XP comes and goes. There's another aspect of this, which is the part of skeuomorphism that helps people understand and intuit software, which has less to do with skeuomorphism making things easier to understand per se and more about like, like a slightly more general version of skeuomorphism is like, there should be a consistent mental model behind an interface that is easy to grok. And then once the user has the mental model, even if it's not the full model of exactly how that system works, there should be a simplified model that the user can easily understand and then sort of like adopt and use. One of my favorite examples of this is how volume controls that are designed well often work. Like on an iPhone, when you make your iPhone volume twice as loud, the sound that comes out isn't actually like at a physical level twice as loud. It's on a log scale. When you push the volume slider up on an iPhone, the speaker uses like four times more energy, but humans perceive it as twice as loud. And so the mental model that we're working with is, okay, if I make this, this volume control slider have two times more value, it's going to sound two times louder, even though actually the underlying physics is like on a log scale. But what actually happens physically is not actually what matters. What matters is how humans perceive it in the model that I have in my head. And there, I think there are a lot of other instances where the skeuomorphism isn't actually the thing. The thing is just that there should be a consistent mental model. And often the easy, consistent mental model to reach for is the models that already exist in reality, but not always. [00:30:23]Alessio: I think the other big topic, maybe before we dive into Notion is agents. I think that's one of the toughest interfaces to crack, mostly because, you know, the text box, everybody understands that the agent is kind of like, it's like human-like feeling, you know, where it's like, okay, I'm kind of delegating something to a human, right? I think, like, Sean, you made the example of like a Calendly, like a savvy Cal, it's like an agent, because it's scheduling on your behalf for something. [00:30:51]Linus: That's actually a really interesting example, because it's a kind of a, it's a pretty deterministic, like there's no real AI to it, but it is agent in the sense that you're like delegating it and automate something. [00:31:01]Swyx: Yeah, it does work without me. It's great. [00:31:03]Alessio: So that one, we figured out. Like, we know what the scheduling interface is like. [00:31:07]Swyx: Well, that's the state of the art now. But, you know, for example, the person I'm corresponding with still has to pick a time from my calendar, which some people dislike. Sam Lesson famously says it's a sign of disrespect. I disagree with him, but, you know, it's a point of view. There could be some intermediate AI agents that would send emails back and forth like a human person to give the other person who feels slighted that sense of respect or a personalized touch that they want. So there's always ways to push it. [00:31:39]Alessio: Yeah, I think for me, you know, other stuff that I think about, so we were doing prep for another episode and had an agent and asked it to do like a, you know, background prep on like the background of the person. And it just couldn't quite get the format that I wanted it to be, you know, but I kept to have the only way to prompt that it's like, give it text, give a text example, give a text example. What do you think, like the interface between human and agents in the future will be like, do you still think agents are like this open ended thing that are like objective driven where you say, Hey, this is what I want to achieve versus I only trust this agent to do X. And like, this is how X is done. I'm curious because that kind of seems like a lot of mental overhead, you know, to remember each agent for each task versus like if you have an executive assistant, like they'll do a random set of tasks and you can trust them because they're a human. But I feel like with agents, we're not quite there. [00:32:36]Swyx: Agents are hard. [00:32:36]Linus: The design space is just so vast. Since all of the like early agent stuff came out around auto GPT, I've tried to develop some kind of a thesis around it. And I think it's just difficult because there's so many variables. One framework that I usually apply to sort of like existing chat based prompting kind of things that I think also applies just as well to agents is this duality between what you might call like trust and control. So you just now you brought up this example of you had an agent try to write some write up some prep document for an episode and it couldn't quite get the format right. And one way you could describe that is you could say, Oh, the, the agent didn't exactly do what I meant and what I had in my head. So I can't trust it to do the right job. But a different way to describe it is I have a hard time controlling exactly the output of the model and I have a hard time communicating exactly what's in my head to the model. And they're kind of two sides of the same coin. I think if you, if you can somehow provide a way to with less effort, communicate and control and constrain the model output a little bit more and constrain the behavior a little bit more, I think that would alleviate the pressure for the model to be this like fully trusted thing because there's no need for trust anymore. There's just kind of guardrails that ensure that the model does the right thing. So developing ways and interfaces for these agents to be a little more constrained in its output or maybe for the human to control its output a little bit more or behavior a little bit more, I think is a productive path. Another sort of more, more recent revelation that I had while working on this and autofill thing inside notion is the importance of zones of influence for AI agents, especially in collaborative settings. So having worked on lots of interfaces for independent work on my year off, one of the surprising lessons that I learned early on when I joined notion was that if you build a collaboration permeates everything, which is great for notion because collaborating with an AI, you reuse a lot of the same metaphors for collaborating with humans. So one nice thing about this autofill thing that also kind of applies to AI blocks, which is another thing that we have, is that you don't alleviate this problem of having to ask questions like, oh, is this document written by an AI or is this written by a human? Like this need for auditability, because the part that's written by the AI is just in like the autofilled cell or in the AI block. And you can, you can tell that's written by the AI and things outside of it, you can kind of reasonably assume that it was written by you. I think anytime you have sort of an unbounded action space for, for models like agents, it's especially important to be able to answer those questions easily and to have some sense of security that in the same way that you want to know whether your like coworker or collaborator has access to a document or has modified a document, you want to know whether an AI has permissions to access something. And if it's modified something or made some edit, you want to know that it did it. And so as a compliment to constraining the model's action space proactively, I think it's also important to communicate, have the user have an easy understanding of like, what exactly did the model do here? And I think that helps build trust as well. [00:35:39]Swyx: Yeah. I think for auto GPT and those kinds of agents in particular, anything that is destructive, you need to prompt for, I guess, or like check with, check in with the user. I know it's overloaded now. I can't say that. You have to confirm with the user. You confirm to the user. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. [00:35:56]Linus: That's tough too though, because you, you don't want to stop. [00:35:59]Swyx: Yeah. [00:35:59]Linus: One of the, one of the benefits of automating these things that you can sort of like, in theory, you can scale them out arbitrarily. I can have like a hundred different agents working for me, but if that means I'm just spending my entire day in a deluge of notifications, that's not ideal either. [00:36:12]Swyx: Yeah. So then it could be like a reversible, destructive thing with some kind of timeouts, a time limit. So you could reverse it within some window. I don't know. Yeah. I've been thinking about this a little bit because I've been working on a small developer agent. Right. Right. [00:36:27]Linus: Or maybe you could like batch a group of changes and can sort of like summarize them with another AI and improve them in bulk or something. [00:36:33]Swyx: Which is surprisingly similar to the collaboration problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. [00:36:39]Linus: I'm telling you, the collaboration, a lot of the problems with collaborating with humans also apply to collaborating with AI. There's a potential pitfall to that as well, which is that there are a lot of things that some of the core advantages of AI end up missing out on if you just fully anthropomorphize them into like human-like collaborators. [00:36:56]Swyx: But yeah. Do you have a strong opinion on that? Like, do you refer to it as it? Oh yeah. [00:37:00]Linus: I'm an it person, at least for now, in 2023. Yeah. [00:37:05]Swyx: So that leads us nicely into introducing what Notion and Notion AI is today. Do you have a pet answer as to what is Notion? I've heard it introduced as a database, a WordPress killer, a knowledge base, a collaboration tool. What is it? Yeah. [00:37:19]Linus: I mean, the official answer is that a Notion is a connected workspace. It has a space for your company docs, meeting notes, a wiki for all of your company notes. You can also use it to orchestrate your workflows if you're managing a project, if you have an engineering team, if you have a sales team. You can put all of those in a single Notion database. And the benefit of Notion is that all of them live in a single space where you can link to your wiki pages from your, I don't know, like onboarding docs. Or you can link to a GitHub issue through a task from your documentation on your engineering system. And all of this existing in a single place in this kind of like unified, yeah, like single workspace, I think has lots of benefits. [00:37:58]Swyx: That's the official line. [00:37:59]Linus: There's an asterisk that I usually enjoy diving deeper into, which is that the whole reason that this connected workspace is possible is because underlying all of this is this really cool abstraction of blocks. In Notion, everything is a block. A paragraph is a block. A bullet point is a block. But also a page is a block. And the way that Notion databases work is that a database is just a collection of pages, which are really blocks. And you can like take a paragraph and drag it into a database and it'll become a page. You can take a page inside a database and pull it out and it'll just become a link to that page. And so this core abstraction of a block that can also be a page, that can also be a row in a database, like an Excel sheet, that fluidity and this like shared abstraction across all these different areas inside Notion, I think is what really makes Notion powerful. This Lego theme, this like Lego building block theme permeates a lot of different parts of Notion. Some fans of Notion might know that when you, or when you join Notion, you get a little Lego minifigure, which has Lego building blocks for workflows. And then every year you're at Notion, you get a new block that says like you've been here for a year, you've been here for two years. And then Simon, our co-founder and CTO, has a whole crate of Lego blocks on his desk that he just likes to mess with because, you know, he's been around for a long time. But this Lego building block thing, this like shared sort of all-encompassing single abstraction that you can combine to build various different kinds of workflows, I think is really what makes Notion powerful. And one of the sort of background questions that I have for Notion AI is like, what is that kind of building block for AI? [00:39:30]Swyx: Well, we can dive into that. So what is Notion AI? Like, so I kind of view it as like a startup within the startup. Could you describe the Notion AI team? Is this like, how seriously is Notion taking the AI wave? [00:39:43]Linus: The most seriously? The way that Notion AI came about, as I understand it, because I joined a bit later, I think it was around October last year, all of Notion team had a little offsite. And as a part of that, Ivan and Simon kind of went into a little kind of hack weekend. And the thing that they ended up hacking on inside Notion was the very, very early prototype of Notion AI. They saw this GPT-3 thing. The early, early motivation for starting Notion, building Notion in the first place for them, was sort of grounded in this utopian end-user programming vision where software is so powerful, but there are only so many people in the world that can write programs. But everyone can benefit from having a little workspace or a little program or a little workflow tool that's programmed to just fit their use case. And so how can we build a tool that lets people customize their software tools that they use every day for their use case? And I think to them, seemed like such a critical part of facilitating that, bridging the gap between people who can code and people who need software. And so they saw that, they tried to build an initial prototype that ended up becoming the first version of Notion AI. They had a prototype in, I think, late October, early November, before Chachapiti came out and sort of evolved it over the few months. But what ended up launching was sort of in line with the initial vision, I think, of what they ended up building. And then once they had it, I think they wanted to keep pushing it. And so at this point, AI is a really key part of Notion strategy. And what we see Notion becoming going forward, in the same way that blocks and databases are a core part of Notion that helps enable workflow automation and all these important parts of running a team or collaborating with people or running your life, we think that AI is going to become an equally critical part of what Notion is. And it won't be, Notion is a cool connected workspace app, and it also has AI. It'll be that what Notion is, is databases, it has pages, it has space for your docs, and it also has this sort of comprehensive suite of AI tools that permeate everything. And one of the challenges of the AI team, which is, as you said, kind of a startup within a startup right now, is to figure out exactly what that all-permeating kind of abstraction means, which is a fascinating and difficult open problem. [00:41:57]Alessio: How do you think about what people expect of Notion versus what you want to build in Notion? A lot of this AI technology kind of changes, you know, we talked about the relationship between text and human and how human collaborates. Do you put any constraints on yourself when it's like, okay, people expect Notion to work this way with these blocks. So maybe I have this crazy idea and I cannot really pursue it because it's there. I think it's a classic innovator's dilemma kind of thing. And I think a lot of founders out there that are in a similar position where it's like, you know, series C, series D company, it's like, you're not quite yet the super established one, you're still moving forward, but you have an existing kind of following and something that Notion stands for. How do you kind of wrangle with that? [00:42:43]Linus: Yeah, that is in some ways a challenge and that Notion already is a kind of a thing. And so we can't just scrap everything and start over. But I think it's also, there's a blessing side of it too, in that because there are so many people using Notion in so many different ways, we understand all of the things that people want to use Notion for very well. And then so we already have a really well-defined space of problems that we want to help people solve. And that helps us. We have it with the existing Notion product and we also have it by sort of rolling out these AI things early and then watching, learning from the community what people want to do [00:43:17]Swyx: with them. [00:43:17]Linus: And so based on those learnings, I think it actually sort of helps us constrain the space of things we think we need to build because otherwise the design space is just so large with whatever we can do with AI and knowledge work. And so watching what people have been using Notion for and what they want to use Notion for, I think helps us constrain that space a little bit and make the problem of building AI things inside Notion a little more tractable. [00:43:36]Swyx: I think also just observing what they naturally use things for, and it sounds like you do a bunch of user interviews where you hear people running into issues and, or describe them as, the way that I describe myself actually is, I feel like the problem is with me, that I'm not creative enough to come up with use cases to use Notion AI or any other AI. [00:43:57]Linus: Which isn't necessarily on you, right? [00:43:59]Swyx: Exactly. [00:43:59]Linus: Again, like it goes way back to the early, the thing we touched on early in the conversation around like, if you have too much generality, there's not enough, there are not enough guardrails to obviously point to use cases. Blank piece of paper. [00:44:10]Swyx: I don't know what to do with this. So I think a lot of people judge Notion AI based on what they originally saw, which is write me a blog post or do a summary or do action items. Which, fun fact, for latent space, my very, very first Hacker News hit was reverse engineering Notion AI. I actually don't know if I got it exactly right. I think I got the easy ones right. And then apparently I got the action items one really wrong. So there's some art into doing that. But also you've since launched a bunch of other products and maybe you've already hinted at AI Autofill. Maybe we can just talk a little bit about what does the scope or suite of Notion AI products have been so far and what you're launching this week? Yeah. [00:44:53]Linus: So we have, I think, three main facets of Notion AI and Notion at the moment. We have sort of the first thing that ever launched with Notion AI, which I think that helps you write. It's, going back to earlier in the conversation, it's kind of a writing, kind of a content generation tool. If you have a document and you want to generate a summary, it helps you generate a summary, pull out action items, you can draft a blog post, you can help it improve, it's helped to improve your writings, it can help fix grammar and spelling mistakes. But under the hood, it's a fairly lightweight, a thick layer of prompts. But otherwise, it's a pretty straightforward use case of language models, right? And so there's that, a tool that helps you write documents. There's a thing called an AI block, which is a slightly more constrained version of that where one common way that we use it inside Notion is we take all of our meeting notes inside Notion. And frequently when you have a meeting and you want other people to be able to go back to it and reference it, it's nice to have a summary of that meeting. So all of our meeting notes templates, at least on the AI team, have an AI block at the top that automatically summarizes the contents of that page. And so whenever we're done with a meeting, we just press a button and it'll re-summarize that, including things like what are the core action items for every person in the meeting. And so that block, as I said before, is nice because it's a constrained space for the AI to work in, and we don't have to prompt it every single time. And then the newest member of this AI collection of features is AI autofill, which brings Notion AI to databases. So if you have a whole database of user interviews and you want to pull out what are the companies, core pain points, what are their core features, maybe what are their competitor products they use, you can just make columns. And in the same way that you write Excel formulas, you can write a little AI formula, basically, where the AI will look at the contents of the page and pull out each of these key pieces of information. The slightly new thing that autofill introduces is this idea of a more automated background [00:46:43]Swyx: AI thing. [00:46:44]Linus: So with Writer, the AI in your document product and the AI block, you have to always ask it to update. You have to always ask it to rewrite. But if you have a column in a database, in a Notion database, or a property in a Notion database, it would be nice if you, whenever someone went back and changed the contents of the meeting node or something updated about the page, or maybe it's a list of tasks that you have to do and the status of the task changes, you might want the summary of that task or detail of the task to update. And so anytime that you can set up an autofilled Notion property so that anytime something on that database row or page changes, the AI will go back and sort of auto-update the autofilled value. And that, I think, is a really interesting part that we might continue leading into of like, even though there's AI now tied to this particular page, it's sort of doing its own thing in the background to help automate and alleviate some of that pain of automating these things. But yeah, Writer, Blocks, and Autofill are the three sort of cornerstones we have today. [00:47:42]Alessio: You know, there used to be this glorious time where like, Roam Research was like the hottest knowledge company out there, and then Notion built Backlinks. I don't know if we are to blame for that. No, no, but how do Backlinks play into some of this? You know, I think most AI use cases today are kind of like a single page, right? Kind of like this document. I'm helping with this. Do you see some of these tools expanding to do changes across things? So we just had Itamar from Codium on the podcast, and he talked about how agents can tie in specs for features, tests for features, and the code for the feature. So like the three entities are tied together. Like, do you see some Backlinks help AI navigate through knowledge basis of companies where like, you might have the document the product uses, but you also have the document that marketing uses to then announce it? And as you make changes, the AI can work through different pieces of it? [00:48:41]Swyx: Definitely. [00:48:41]Linus: If I may get a little theoretical from that. One of my favorite ideas from my last year of hacking around building text augmentations with AI for documents is this realization that, you know, when you look at code in a code editor, what it is at a very lowest level is just text files. A code file is a text file, and there are maybe functions inside of it, and it's a list of functions, but it's a text file. But the way that you understand it is not as a file, like a Word document, it's a kind of a graph.[00:49:10]Linus: Like you have a function, you have call sites to that function, there are places where you call that function, there's a place where that function is tested, many different definitions for that function. Maybe there's a type definition that's tied to that function. So it's a kind of a graph. And if you want to understand that function, there's advantages to be able to traverse that whole graph and fully contextualize where that function is used. Same with types and same with variables. And so even though its code is represented as text files, it's actually kind of a graph. And a lot of the, of what, all of the key interfaces, interface innovations behind IDEs is helping surface that graph structure in the context of a text file. So like things like go to definition or VS Code's little window view when you like look at references. And interesting idea that I explored last year was what if you bring that to text documents? So text documents are a little more unstructured, so there's a less, there's a more fuzzy kind of graph idea. But if you're reading a textbook, if there's a new term, there's actually other places where the term is mentioned. There's probably a few places where that's defined. Maybe there's some figures that reference that term. If you have an idea, there are other parts of the document where the document might disagree with that idea or cite that idea. So there's still kind of a graph structure. It's a little more fuzzy, but there's a graph structure that ties together like a body of knowledge. And it would be cool if you had some kind of a text editor or some kind of knowledge tool that let you explore that whole graph. Or maybe if an AI could explore that whole graph. And so back to your point, I think taking advantage of not just the backlinks. Backlinks is a part of it. But the fact that all of these inside Notion, all of these pages exist in a single workspace and it's a shared context. It's a connected workspace. And you can take any idea and look up anywhere to fully contextualize what a part of your engineering system design means. Or what we know about our pitching their customer at a company. Or if I wrote down a book, what are other places where that book has been mentioned? All these graph following things, I think, are really important for contextualizing knowledge. [00:51:02]Swyx: Part of your job at Notion is prompt engineering. You are maybe one of the more advanced prompt engineers that I know out there. And you've always commented on the state of prompt ops tooling. What is your process today? What do you wish for? There's a lot here. [00:51:19]Linus: I mean, the prompts that are inside Notion right now, they're not complex in the sense that agent prompts are complex. But they're complex in the sense that there is even a problem as simple as summarize a [00:51:31]Swyx: page. [00:51:31]Linus: A page could contain anything from no information, if it's a fresh document, to a fully fledged news article. Maybe it's a meeting note. Maybe it's a bug filed by somebody at a company. The range of possible documents is huge. And then you have to distill all of it down to always generate a summary. And so describing that task to AI comprehensively is pretty hard. There are a few things that I think I ended up leaning on, as a team we ended up leaning on, for the prompt engineering part of it. I think one of the early transitions that we made was that the initial prototype for Notion AI was built on instruction following, the sort of classic instruction following models, TextWG003, and so on. And then at some point, we all switched to chat-based models, like Claude and the new ChatGPT Turbo and these models. And so that was an interesting transition. It actually kind of made few-shot prompting a little bit easier, I think, in that you could give the few-shot examples as sort of previous turns in a conversation. And then you could ask the real question as the next follow-up turn. I've come to appreciate few-shot prompting a lot more because it's difficult to fully comprehensively explain a particular task in words, but it's pretty easy to demonstrate like four or five different edge cases that you want the model to handle. And a lot of times, if there's an edge case that you want a model to handle, I think few-shot prompting is just the easiest, most reliable tool to reach for. One challenge in prompt engineering that Notion has to contend with often is we want to support all the different languages that Notion supports. And so all of our prompts have to be multilingual or compatible, which is kind of tricky because our prompts are written, our instructions are written in English. And so if you just have a naive approach, then the model tends to output in English, even when the document that you want to translate or summarize is in French. And so one way you could try to attack that problem is to tell the model, answering the language of the user's query. But it's actually a lot more effective to just give it examples of not just English documents, but maybe summarizing an English document, maybe summarize a ticket filed in French, summarize an empty document where the document's supposed to be in Korean. And so a lot of our few-shot prompt-included prompts in Notion AI tend to be very multilingual, and that helps support our non-English-speaking users. The other big part of prompt engineering is evaluation. The prompts that you exfiltrated out of Notion AI many weeks ago, surprisingly pretty spot-on, at least for the prompts that we had then, especially things like summary. But they're also outdated because we've evolved them a lot more, and we have a lot more examples. And some of our prompts are just really, really long. They're like thousands of tokens long. And so every time we go back and add an example or modify the instruction, we want to make sure that we don't regress any of the previous use cases that we've supported. And so we put a lot of effort, and we're increasingly building out internal tooling infrastructure for things like what you might call unit tests and regression tests for prompts with handwritten test cases, as well as tests that are driven more by feedback from Notion users that have chosen to share their feedback with us. [00:54:31]Swyx: You just have a hand-rolled testing framework or use Jest or whatever, and nothing custom out there. You basically said you've looked at so many prompt ops tools and you're sold on none of them. [00:54:42]Linus: So that tweet was from a while ago. I think there are a couple of interesting tools these days. But I think at the moment, Notion uses pretty hand-rolled tools. Nothing too heavy, but it's basically a for loop over a list of test cases. We do do quite a bit of using language models to evaluate language models. So our unit test descriptions are kind of funny because the test is literally just an input document and a query, and then we expect the model to say something. And then our qualification for whether that test passes or not is just ask the language model again, whether it looks like a reasonable summary or whether it's in the right language. [00:55:19]Swyx: Do you have the same model? Do you have entropic-criticized OpenAI or OpenAI-criticized entropic? That's a good question. Do you worry about models being biased towards its own self? [00:55:29]Linus: Oh, no, that's not a worry that we have. I actually don't know exactly if we use different models. If you have a fixed budget for running these tests, I think it would make sense to use more expensive models for evaluation rather than generation. But yeah, I don't remember exactly what we do there. [00:55:44]Swyx: And then one more follow-up on, you mentioned some of your prompts are thousands of tokens. That takes away from my budget as a user. Isn't that a trade-off that's a concern? So there's a limited context window, right? Some of that is taken by you as the app designer, product designer, deciding what system prompt to provide. And then the

Join us in this exciting special episode as we sit down with Nicole Ripka. Nicole, currently the Managing Partner of Dorm Room Fund and the Founder of GayJoy, brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table as an early-in-career VC. As a current MBA student at NYU Stern, her insights are a goldmine for anyone looking to break into the VC scene. In this captivating conversation, Nicole shares her remarkable journey as Peleton's first intern and the valuable lessons she learned along the way. We delve into the intricacies of the venture capital industry, uncovering Nicole's top tips for aspiring VC professionals.Tune in and discover the strategies and wisdom that can help you navigate the exciting landscape of VC and turn your entrepreneurial dreams into reality. Don't miss out on this extraordinary episode! Learn more about Nicole: LinkedIn Twitter Where to find more of us:Website TwitterInstagram --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nyu-svs/support

Will Manidis is the CEO and founder of ScienceIO, which builds data solutions for health care. He was previously a managing partner at Dorm Room Fund, and a Thiel Fellow.Auren and Will discuss American dynamism and the future of knowledge work. Will breaks down his view that technology has not improved our lives as much as it should have. He explains how the nature of platform shifts have accelerated tech earnings over the last decade, but kept actual progress low. Will and Auren also do a deep dive on healthcare: why it's so expensive, why healthcare data is so difficult to work with, and what can be changed. Will emphasizes the need for more usable healthcare data and breaks down how operational workflows consume most of the healthcare dollars spent in the US. They also discuss Will's practical advice for young founders (as a founder and former Thiel fellow), his early work on classical Greek and Latin, and why everyone should believe in demons.  World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit safegraph.com/podcasts.You can find Auren Hoffman on Twitter at @auren and Will Manidis on Twitter at @WillManidis.

Jessica Leao is a Principal at Maverick Ventures, a global investment firm that has been investing in early stage companies for over 25 years. She was previously the founder and GP at The 21 Fund, a $2M seed fund building and investing in the next generation of startups out of Stanford Graduate School of Business. She's been the Managing Partner at the Dorm Room Fund, which is backed by First Round Capital. She's also held roles at Palantir, Fortress Investment Group, and Goldman Sachs. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - AI compute landscape - Trends and opportunities in AI infrastructure - "Copilot for X" business model - GTM motion of AI businesses - Using AI in legacy industries - How she invests in startups Jessica's favorite book:  Klara and the Sun (Author: Kazuo Ishiguro) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi:Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Michael Ma is the founder & CEO of CreatorDAO, a decentralized community that accelerates creators with capital & technology. He is also a VC and founded Liquid 2 Ventures alongside legendary football player Joe Montana after helping First Round Capital launch Dorm Room Fund in Boston. Prior to venture capital, Michael got his MBA at Harvard Business School and before that sold his startup TalkBin to Google 7 months after cofounding the company with Qasar Younis. In this conversation we discuss: How Michael started & sold TalkBin to Google in 7 months Choosing to sell vs. scale your startup How he met Joe Montana (and started a VC firm with him) What he got out of his time at Harvard Business School The value of an MBA degree YC vs. Harvard Business School What he looks for as an investor What is CreatorDAO And much more

Ashley is a Principal at VamosVentures. She started her career at Morgan Stanley in Capital Markets and moved into strategic roles at Shoptiques.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Estee Lauder, focused on the intersection of consumers and technology. She was previously an investor at Brand Foundry Ventures, Founders Factory, and Dorm Room Fund. Ashley holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.VamosVentures invests in diverse founding teams and mission-oriented companies across FinTech, Sustainability, Future of Work, Commerce, and Health and Wellness. 100% of their portfolio is diverse led and over 87% of their portfolio companies are Latinx led. 100% of their investment team is also diverse.Connect with Behind Company Lines and HireOtter Website Facebook Twitter LinkedIn:Behind Company LinesHireOtter Instagram Buzzsprout

Ashley is a Principal at VamosVentures. She started her career at Morgan Stanley in Capital Markets and moved into strategic roles at Shoptiques.com, Saks Fifth Avenue and Estee Lauder. She was previously an investor at Brand Foundry Ventures, Founders Factory and Dorm Room Fund. Ashley holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Ashley is a Principal at VamosVentures. She started her career at Morgan Stanley in Capital Markets and moved into strategic roles at Shoptiques.com, Saks Fifth Avenue and Estee Lauder. She was previously an investor at Brand Foundry Ventures, Founders Factory and Dorm Room Fund. Ashley holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

James & Amber are investors at Bloomberg Beta. Find their bios below.James Cham is a Partner at Bloomberg Beta, a firm focused on investing in the future of work. James invests in companies working on applying machine intelligence to businesses and society. He's currently invested in companies like Orbital Insight (satellite imaging), Primer (analyst tools), Domino Data Labs (AI model management), and AppZen (expense management). James speaks and writes on the implications of AI for companies, including a landscape of machine intelligence companies (https://t.co/jnBX6Wdr5R). In the past, he's been involved in investments with companies like LifeLock, LinkedIn, Twilio, DropCam (now Nest), and Skybox Imaging. James was previously an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners and Trinity Venture Partners, a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, and a software developer. He has an M.B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was an undergraduate in computer science at Harvard College. He currently resides in Palo Alto with his family and children.Amber Yang is an investor at Bloomberg Beta, where she invests in companies at the pre-seed and seed stages working on machine intelligence, robotics, data infrastructure, and developer tools. In the past, she founded Seer Tracking, a startup working on creating a sustainable space environment by predicting satellite collisions with space debris, which led her to be named Forbes 30 Under 30. She did her master's and undergraduate degree in computer science from Stanford University and spent a quarter abroad studying philosophy at Oxford University. While she was in college, she was an investment partner at Dorm Room Fund and a fellow at 8VC. She is based in San Francisco and writes about tech and philosophy on Twitter and Substack. ★ Support this podcast ★

Entrepreneur and angel investor, Rei Wang is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at The Grand, a group coaching platform to help people navigate transitions at the intersection of work and life. Before The Grand she served as CEO of Dorm Room Fund  at First Round Capital where she nurtured a community of 250+ startups, and counseled entrepreneurs on topics ranging from fundraising to management. For her leadership growing Dorm Room Fund from an experiment into the world's premiere university-focused venture fund, she received the Forbes 30 under 30 award in venture capital.

There is a growing number of VC firms that are focused on investing in diverse founders. It's a very important trend, as I believe these firms will continue to build a foundation that leads to more investing in great companies regardless of the founder's gender or ethnic background. VamosVentures is one of these firms that is focused on changing the dynamic. 100% of the firm's portfolio is diverse. Over 40% of their investments are women led and over 90% of their portfolio companies are Latinx led. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A deep discussion on what can be done to grow the number of diverse investors who are funding startups. * Ashley's background story including her time at Brown University and how her career got started in various roles across investment banking and eCommerce. * How she got started in the world of venture capital while at MIT Sloan with the Dorm Room Fund and other firms. * What led her to join VamosVentures and some of the details around the firm's investment thesis. * Lots of great advice for founders around fundraising regardless of the economic climate. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Darya is a native San Franciscan with a passion for entrepreneurship and has worked as both an investor and operator prior to pursing her MBA at Columbia. Prior to CBS, Darya was an early employee at a Fintech startup called Secfi, which seeks to democratize the complex world of stock options. There she focused on building the capabilities to analyze pre-IPO technology companies. She also worked in technology growth equity and started her career at Citi. Darya graduated from USC with degrees in Economics and Political Science. The moderator is our very own Rohit Malrani, Co-Founder of OfficeHours, and formerly SourceScrub and Battery Ventures. This episode covers topics such as: Day in the Life of an investment partner / How did you make the transition from growth equity to operator and then investing? How was your time with prior institutions before Dorm Room Fund? Would you advise others to follow a similar path? Would you recommend getting an MBA? What was the most valuable takeaway? Market analysis — how do you see the M&A landscape shifting going forward 5, 10 years? Are you focused on generalist companies across the board? Any interesting sector on your end? Learn more about OfficeHours here: https://getofficehours.com.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha asked: What does breaking into venture capital look like today, and how is it changing? Alex and Becca jumped on the mic to discuss this and start with a refresh on our latest op-ed: "4 views on unpaid venture internships." We talked through three buckets of venture onramps: the traditional route, the new wave and the tourist strategy. Each has their own pros and cons, and includes everything from rolling funds to the real definition of partner.We also covered more on the value of certain on ramps, and if network is the right thing to disrupt (or if its more track record based)We tried not to gang up on Dorm Room Fund too much, but did chat about why their $12.5 million fund that's run by unpaid students irked us and other initiatives we thought were better for those trying to break into VC.For more stories on this topic, read our bevy of coverage:7 first-time fund managers detail how they're preparing to thrive during the downturnEmerging managers should take advantage of the slower fundraising market by courting LPsVC fundraising gets weird as autumn nearsSome institutional LPs have started pulling back from VC, but most won'tEquity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotifyand all the casts.

This week's Espresso covers updates from uDocz, Impacta VC, DolarApp and more!Outline of this episode:[00:28] - Finaktiva raises $25M in debt[00:54] - Interview with Gustavo Ribas, K Fund's Venture Partner[03:00] - Alima closes a $1.5M seed round[03:28] - Ubii closes its first investment round at $4.5M[03:47] - uDocz secures a $2M seed round[04:16] - Salkantay Ventures closes its first VC fund at $26M[04:40] - Impacta VC launches Impact Fundraising Strategy Program[05:04] - IDB Lab approves a $2M loan for Prestamype[05:25] - DolarApp announces a $5M seed round [05:47] - New Crossing Borders and Hacking Insurance episodesResources & people mentioned:Companies & Startups: Finaktiva, Alima, Ubii, uDocz, Prestamype, DolarApp, Belo, Lizit, Efinti.VCs, Accelerators, Institutions: Bancolombia, responsAbility, K Fund, Soma Capital, Y Combinator, The Dorm Room Fund, Seed9, Pareto, Salkantay VC, GSV Ventures, Impacta VC, IDB Lab, Kaszek Ventures.People: Gustavo Ribas, Nathan Lustig, Manuel Beaudroit, Rodrigo Alfonso, Daniel Botero, Andres Tobon.

Today we are happy to welcome Jamie, CEO and Founder of Creator Fund - Europe's leading university student focused fund. Jamie launched the fund in 2019 and has since grown its presence to more than 25 UK universities. The inspiration for the model came from his time at Stanford where he was an investor at Dorm Room Fund. Jamie is a true thought leader in the space and is leading the charge pioneering a new generation of funds that we expect to see from in the future! Buckle up, ‘cos Jamie is going places - fast.In this episode you'll learn:– Why the Creator Fund is investing in top European universities and the new founder's profile coming out of those academic environments– Their strategy of not just backing great founders but supporting a generation of student investors, leaders and technology talent– How can phD founders have more ownership of the IP in their universities with Creator's alternative negotiations– Why transparency is a key value on a VC's relationship with its LPs

Ready to inspire all your entrepreneurial dreams? This episode is the PERFECT one to tune into. I was honored to sit down with luxury candle designer and founder of Otherland, Abigail  Cook Stone. I discovered her story through Entrepreneur Magazine on my recent flight from Miami to NYC. Her story jumped off the page and immediately captured my heart. I know this enchanting conversation is sure to do the same for you! Abigail shares her inspirational journey to entrepreneurship, navigating the ‘world inbetween worlds' phases, and staying strong in her passionate convictions that saw the vision through. Abigail Cook Stone, CEO & Co-Founder of Otherland, set out to build a different kind of candle brand when she launched in 2017, inspired by her passion for art and interiors, a moderately healthy obsession with candles, and her family philosophy of finding small ways to elevate everyday life with an “extra verve.” To create Otherland, Abigail married her backgrounds in art, e-commerce, and venture capital. While attending Columbia Business School, she was an associate at Founder Collective, a seed stage venture fund, and a partner at Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital's student-run VC fund. She has an MBA from Columbia and previously worked at Ralph Lauren in Art Acquisitions.CONNECT WITH ABIGAILWebsite: www.otherland.com  Instagram: @alphagail / @otherlandcoTikTok: otherlandIn-Store Location: 454 West Broadway New York, NY, 10012 

Ashley started her career at Morgan Stanley in Capital Markets and moved into strategic roles at Shoptiques.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Estee Lauder focused on the intersection of the consumer and technology. She was previously an investor at Brand Foundry Ventures, Founders Factory, and Dorm Room Fund across commerce, health and wellness, and financial technology. Ashley holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT Sloan. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyaydin/  **** FREE RESOURCES

Andrew Xu and Daniel Aboul-Hassan speak with Connor McEwen (@connormcewen) from Uniswap Labs! Uniswap allows people to swap, earn, and build on the leading decentralized crypto trading protocol. (0:32) - Introduction (1:22) - What led Connor to join Dorm Room Fund (2:52) - Deciding whether or not take a gap year during college (4:24) - Important lessons learned from returning to school (6:11) - Experience launching makeBU (8:48) - Being on the engineering side & what people on the Business and Engineering sides can learn from each other (10:55) - How Connor approached joining a large company vs. startup (14:20) - Is Connor a Bitcoin millionaire? (14:30) - Connor's funny story about mining Bitcoin (15:31) - How to land an engineering role at an attractive startup (18:10) - 2013 startups vs. 2022 startups (20:06) - Hottest Web3 take (21:43) - How should engineers working at early-stage startups view fundraising? (23:31) - Staying up to date in the crypto space -- Get in touch with Connor! Twitter: @connormcewen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmcewen/

This week, Souhail talks to Chloe Lopez-Lee and David Dellal from Dorm Room Fund's PhD Founder Track. Chloe Lopez-Lee is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at Cornell University and a Managing Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund. David Dellal is an NSF PhD Graduate Fellow at Yale University, Forbes 30 under 30, and CEO/Co-Founder at Floe, a cleantech startup. He is also a Managing Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund. -- For more information on the PhD track, check out https://linktr.ee/dormroomfund

Andrew Xu and Daniel Aboul-Hassan speak with Iris Liu, Mia Krishnamurthy & Tori Orr from Dorm Room Fund's Female Investor Track (FIT)! (1:17) - Mia's background and importance of FIT (2:03) - Iris's background and importance of FIT (2:50) - Tori's background and importance of FIT (4:16) - What to expect from FIT (6:33) - Details about the FIT community and benefits of the cohort size (8:57) - How to make your story stand out (10:32) - How students with no venture experience can showcase their interest (12:08) - How to get the most of out the FIT program (13:45) - Details about time commitment (14:33) - What makes FIT special and unique from the other DRF Diversity Tracks (16:13) - Final thoughts from Iris (16:51) - How to get in touch -- Have more questions about the Female Investor Track? Email: fit@dormroomfund.com

Andrew Xu and Daniel Aboul-Hassan speak with Ivan Zhao and Nika Duan from Dorm Room Fund's PRISM Investor Track! (0:48) - Ivan's background and importance of PRISM (4:11) - Nika's background and importance of PRISM (6:51) - What makes PRISM special and unique from the other DRF Diversity Tracks (9:19) - PRISM's cohort size (9:52) - Community fostered during PRISM (12:10) - How to get the most of out the program and time commitment (13:12) - How to get your story to shine through in the application (15:25) - How applicants can stay engaged with PRISM & VC beyond program (16:37) - Nika's advice to applicants and helpful tips (18:10) - Ivan's wall of love of people who reached out about PRISM's impact -- Have more questions about the PRISM Investor Track? Email: prism@dormroomfund.com

In this episode of the podcast, we catch up with Adriana Gadala-Maria. Adriana, or “Adri” as her Darden classmates know her, is a second year student in UVA Darden's Full-Time MBA Class of 2022. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about Adri's journey from the tech industry in the San Francisco Bay Area to Darden community in Charlottesville. She reflects upon her decision to pursue an MBA, what led her to Darden and how she has pursued her passion for venture capital during her time in business school, including internships with Cav Angels, Glynn Capital and Dorm Room Fund, as well as serving as President of the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital (EVC) club. This episode is highly recommended for prospective students with an interest in venture capital and/or private equity.  

Andrew Xu and Daniel Aboul-Hassan speak with Daniel Applewhite, Mea-Lynn Wong, Tori Orr, & Zakaria Gedi from Dorm Room Fund's Blueprint Investor Track! (0:48) - Mea-Lynn's background and importance of Blueprint (2:57) - Tori's background and importance of Blueprint (4:35) - Zakaria's background and importance of Blueprint (5:53) - Daniel's background and importance of Blueprint (8:48) - What makes Blueprint special and unique from the other DRF Diversity Tracks (12:17) - Details about the Blueprint community and benefits of the cohort size (16:32) - How to get the most of out the Blueprint program and time commitment (22:10) - Daniel's advice to applicants and helpful tips (23:10) - Tori's advice to applicants and helpful tips -- Have more questions about the Blueprint Investor Track? Email: blueprint@dormroomfund.com

Tanthai Pongstein is the founder of Wonderstruck and Godling Design Studios. He previously was a Head of Design for Dorm Room Fund, a founder of Safebox Safe Lockers, and a student at UC Berkeley. Additionally, Tanthai is the host of Proof of Love, a dating show developed by Web 3 Startup Mad Realities. -- (0:34) - Quick Note (1:35) - Tanthai's background and going from a 2.5 GPA to UC Berkeley (5:34) - Safebox and going to a Hackathon (12:37) - Tanthai's perspective on passion (21:15) - Drawing rectangles (22:01) - Favorite Artists (24:43) - Proof of Love, a Web 3 Show (27:02) - Finding what makes you happy -- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanthai

Adele Li is a growth investor at Redpoint Ventures. She previously worked in private equity roles for Ares Management Corp. Additionally, she was a managing partner at Dorm Room Fund while studying at UPenn. (1:33) - Adele's upbringing and background (3:35) - The Harker School (6:20) - Getting an internship at a family office. (8:05) - SF's entrepreneurial ecosystem (11:20) - Joining Dorm Room Fund (14:30) - Becoming a value-add in VC (19:00) - What Adele invests in and areas of interest (22:57) - Why she chose Redpoint (26:12) - Business/VC blogs, podcasts, and more that she likes (28:22) - Advice she gives to anyone interested in the industry --

Dorm Room Fund is excited to announce the return of the podcast! Subscribe for weekly episode interviews with some of the brightest minds in business, venture, and tech. This week, Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti is back! Souhail talks to him about everything from Eight Sleep's ascension to Formula 1 racing. Eight Sleep is currently used by pro athletes and top performers across multiple industries and was recognized as one of TIME's "Best Inventions" in 2018 and 2019, was named one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Companies" in 2018, and has raised over $150M in funding from leading investors, including Founders Fund, Softbank, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Valor Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Naval Ravikant, and Patrick Collison. Prior to Eight, Matteo co-founded and led GIR (acquired in 2014) and Global Investment (acquired 2011). Matteo holds multiple patents in tech and health, is a Member of the Forbes Technology Council, and graduated magna cum laude with a Law degree from University of Ferrara. (1:24) - What Matteo's sleep schedule looks like (3:20) - Matteo's Background and Upbringing (4:40) - Eight Sleep's role alongside other Health Tech (5:12) - What Eight Sleep can do (6:27) - The Motivation for starting Eight Sleep (8:28) - Eight Sleep's Vision (11:46) - Y Combinator's impact on the business (12:15) - Working with his wife (13:40) - The ideal Eight Sleep employee (15:26) - Celebrity Endorsements and meeting Mike Tyson (16:47) - Matteo's love for F1 --

Office Hours with Dorm Room Fund is back! Subscribe for weekly episode interviews with some of the brightest minds in business, venture, and tech. This week, Souhail talks to Shawn Xu, a partner at On Deck and Forbes 30 under 30. Shawn previously worked at Square, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Dorm Room Fund. He was also an investor at Floodgate, where he worked under Mike Maples. (1:42) - Shawn's background and upbringing (3:20) - How to stand out in VC (5:50) - Why Shawn loves venture (8:05) - Policy work and political background (11:10) - The limits of policy experimentation (14:30) - Biggest misconceptions about being a VC (19:00) - The positives of being a VC before starting a company (22:35) - Meeting the President and then the Vice President the next day (24:52) - Meeting Quincy Jones (26:20) - What a successful career looks like to Shawn --

Earl met David when he was in high school in the Philippines starting YouthHack, an international nonprofit helping students learn how to code in the Philippines. We discover the success a simple cold email to Huffington Post could have where he ended up becoming a contributing writer in college. David's also been a part of Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital's fund for university entrepreneurs, Growth and Analytics at Amplitude and a recent investor and now operator at Rutter building the e-commerce API layer. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/startupmindsets/support

Happily this week, we did not talk about NFTs, and I don't think that we even said “token” a single time.Instead, Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex got back to what we might consider the roots of Equity. Here's what we got into: We started with a look at the recent Fertilis round. Fertilis is an Australian startup working to make the IVF process more reliable. We are big fans of the concept, though the startup has lots of work ahead of it before it moves the needle for couples hoping to conceive.  Mary Ann brought together two very Equity topics: Fintech and SaaS, but more interestingly, fintech that only wants to serve SaaS startups. Even though we tried to define Arc's relationship with the startups it serves, Alex landed on it being a friends with benefits for the financial world. Speaking of fintech, Brex made headlines (again) with its new raise and new executive – thanks to Meta.We keep returning to the hiring conversation, and that's for good reason. Career Karma (news here) and SeekOut (news here) have two different strategies when it comes to empowering employees at companies -- and all of us agreed that retention, versus placement, is the future of hiring tech. We ended with a conversation on accelerators thanks to Y Combinator's news, and venture reaction thereof. Plus, new AngelList and Dorm Room Fund remind us that staying niche in strategy continues to be the way that early-stage venture operations are winning deals. A big hug to you all for surviving the start to the working year during a COVID surge. We can do this! We'll get through it as a big team, ok? 

This week we had on Justine Humenansky (@j_humenansky) with RabbitHole. Justine has worked as an investor at Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital, Playground Global, and she recently switched over to RabbitHole to help the next era of people gain skills for participating in the new digital economy. In this talk, we discuss: Networks based on ownership instead of association The crypto adoption cycle and bringing late adopters onboard Web3 projects staying compliant with legal ambiguity

In today's Billion Dollar Moves Breakdown, we bust some myths on the emerging markets and venture capital with THE emerging markets analyst, Mikal Khoso, VC at Wavemaker Partners, a cross border venture capital firm dual headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore and has raised over $580M across multiple funds.-- 

In this episode, Hall welcomes Neetu Puranikmath, Investor at Chisos. Chisos provides alternative financing for founders at the earliest stages and fills a massive funding gap by connecting underserved founders to capital sources. Chisos' key differentiator is its proprietary CISA or Convertible Income Share Agreement. The CISA is a hybrid financing vehicle that essentially combines a personal income share agreement with the founder and a small percentage of equity in the business. Chisos' flexible funding model enables investors to safely fund pre-traction startups at minimal risk with uncapped upside potential. The Chisos SaaS platform also provides states, regions, and universities an automated way to safely invest in underserved early-stage founders. The SaaS platform helps funds source, underwrite and service Convertible Income Share Agreement Investments at scale.Neetu is an experienced investor, operator, and startup advisor. She is a strong believer in alternative funding models such as Chisos and, as a former founder, strongly committed to providing undiscovered founders with capital and mentorship. Prior to joining Chisos, she worked at Alumni Ventures Group as a pre-seed/seed investor where she focused on Fintech and SaaS. Previously, she was Chief of Staff for a Fintech startup and worked in operations at YouTube, Google, and Facebook. She is a former 501(c)(3) founder and has been a mentor for the Clinton Foundation, First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund, and Texas' NewChip accelerator. She graduated with a Bachelor in Political Science from UC Berkeley and received her MBA from the University of Oxford.Neetu advises startups and investors and shares how she sees the startup industry evolving. She discusses some of the challenges startups and investors face, alternative financing options in the early-stage ecosystem, and she shares her investment thesis. You can visit Chisos at , via LinkedIn at , and via Twitter at . Neetu can be contacted via email at . Music courtesy of . 

Andy Salamon is a partner at Material, a venture capital fund and studio, uniquely focused on company creation. Before joining Material, Andy was a General Partner at Atomic Labs, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. While there, Andrew was a co-founding investor and advisor to several technology-driven, operationally intensive startups including Hims, Terminal, Bungalow Living, among others, which together represent over $1B of enterprise value created from a $10M investment fund. Prior to Atomic, Andrew was a venture capital investor with First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund, a senior manager at Bridgewater Associates, and an Expeditionary Combat Officer in the US Navy. He holds an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University and pursued an M.B.A. at Wharton prior to leaving to found one of his previous ventures.

Cadoo, a US-startup that's gamifying fitness by turning it into a betting opportunity, using the prospect of winning (or losing) cold hard cash to motivate people to get off the couch, has collected $1.5 million in seed funds from Sam & Max Altman's Apollo VC and the student-focused Dorm Room Fund.

Cadoo, a US-startup that's gamifying fitness by turning it into a betting opportunity, using the prospect of winning (or losing) cold hard cash to motivate people to get off the couch, has collected $1.5 million in seed funds from Sam & Max Altman's Apollo VC and the student-focused Dorm Room Fund.

Timestamps: 1:16 - An international background 5:00 - 3 crucial factors for a good investment 10:23 - Losing an investment 16:30 - Launching a student fund 23:42 - How they pick the students About Cynthia Jurytko Cynthia Jurytko is a professional Business Angel and President of the Board of S2S Ventures, Switzerland's first student-run Venture Capital firm. In 2012, Cynthia left the path of management consulting to become Head of Investment Strategy and Portfolio Management at Neue Zürcher Zeitung. This was when she also started her journey as a business angel — as of now, her points of focus are healthcare and sustainability, two traditional fields that could really benefit from extra impact and entrepreneurial innovation according to Cynthia. However, Cynthia's endeavors didn't end there! She realized how universities were often contacted by outside professional funds, but were lacking in cross-campus initiatives. Following the footsteps of American role models such as the Dorm Room Fund, S2S knows how the upcoming generations can lead the way to innovation, because they have an unbiased view on tech trends and are close to their peers and vital infrastructures, such as research centers and university clubs. The project receives its funding exclusively from board members and private investors interested in academic funds. At S2S, students are not only the focus of investment practices, but they run the fund themselves! Two students from each major university are chosen for membership. Their learning process is completely autonomous: they are the ones contacting early-stage startups with no limited industry focus and deciding the ticket sizes, which can range from 20-150k CHF. Change is never a problem: the constant renewing of students benefits the initiative with fresh ideas each academic year. As new campus funds spring across Europe, Cynthia is keen on keeping her ideals of transparency while hoping her project soon expands internationally. Resources Mentioned Village Global's Venture Stories Brené Brown's leadership advice Memorable Quotes "No investment has zero risks or weaknesses. You always find something." “With Series A startups, you evaluate it a bit differently, because you can make more fact-checking, you have more numbers to look at. You get to have a more structured and analytical approach. In pre-seed stage, you invest in the future of the company, and mostly in the team’s ability to realize that future.” If you would like to listen to more conversations on student funds, check out our episode with Edouard Treccani.

In Episode 8 of Venture Games, my guest Molly Fowler, CEO at Dorm Room Fund, talks about transitioning from a career in politics to enter the world of venture capital, the benefits of investing in student entrepreneurship, and Dorm Room Fund's initiatives to combat the diversity challenges in the industry, through masterclasses and mentorship programs for different groups of people who are underrepresented in venture, and building the strongest pipeline for students to enter the industry.

Join me in a discussion with Ashley Aydin and her path from Staten Island to the incoming Principal at Vamos Ventures. We'll talk about her Puerto Rican and Turkish roots, starting off her career at Morgan Stanley and Estee Lauder, and her passion to be at the intersection of consumer and impact investing - interning for Dorm Room Fund, Brand Foundry Ventures, Founders Factory, and Vamos Ventures all while at MIT Sloan's MBA program. #WeBreakBread

This week on Product Marketing Life we got together with Alexander Becker, PMM and Managing Partner at Dorm Room Fund to chat all about his must-read new book The Product Marketing Field Guide. Alexander shared his inspiration for the book, the history of B2B PMM, his views on product-led growth, and heaps more fascinating insights.  ---- "I don't think we're going to wake up in five years and see that markets are less competitive, or that technical trends have reversed, and all of a sudden software is more expensive to create. And so as we look at product marketing moving forward, I think that a lot of these predictions and solutions in the space are going to ultimately tie back to those two forces of cost of development and cost of growth."

Timestamps: 9:21 - Putting an end to your startup 11:12 - How does a 0 equity accelerator make money? 15:24 - Wingman Ventures' investment focus 24:14 - Launching the Wingman Campus Fund 34:45 - Dealing with an ever-changing group of students About Edouard Treccani Edouard Treccani is Head of Partnerships at Wingman Ventures, Switzerland's leading fund for tech projects in pre-seed and seed stages. From 2012 to 2014, he worked as an intern for Crédit Agricole Suisse and BCV while balancing a smashing GPA in Quantitative Economics and Finance. However, he realised deep down he craved a creative spark that the banking game couldn't give him. In 2015, he founded Incidee and built a valuable media product: his journey took off! Edouard is passionate about helping young founders build something outstanding from the get-go, and this motivation for supporting bold innovation led him to create the Wingman Campus Fund, a small-scale VC fund boosting the entrepreneurial dreams of many university students. Edouard says "the Swiss startup ecosystem is just starting to write its best success stories", and we couldn't agree more! Resources AngelList for finding your next dream opportunity. Sifted for trusty reporting and analysis. Jason Calacanis' work on Angel Investing. Naval Ravikant and his inspiring mindspace. Memorable Quotes “After my first two internships in banking, I knew I’d never enjoy my work. Sure, I could do it by default, get a decent wage and get by month after month. But I would certainly not have been happy.” “You should constantly think about how to build your network, how to make it more meaningful and resilient.” “In an ecosystem like Switzerland, which is maturing more and more, it’s important to get to know founders early — it’s never a given that you’ll be able to invest in the startups you prefer." If you would like to listen to more conversations on VC investment, check out our episode with Tanja Dowe. Don’t forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there’s no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Shawn Xu. Shawn is an early-stage investor at Floodgate. Previously, he was managing partner at Dorm Room Fund and led 27 investments made across various verticals. He was also in the international expansion of Square.In this episode;1-) Why do you care about solving this problem2-) Paint a vision for how big and world-changing the business can be3-) How to pick the right VC partner4-) A great board memberFounder's FAQ is a book for founders and you can pre-order through the website. You can also reach us through @foundersfaq on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasmansingh20/ (Jasman Singh) and I discuss the stigma around gap years, how to understand what you truly want, and how to take control of your education. Jasman is a Public Policy and International Affairs major at Princeton University who's on a gap year. Right now, he's a product intern at https://www.nabis.com/ (Nabis) and an investment partner at the https://www.dormroomfund.com/ (Dorm Room Fund). Listen on https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rajits-show/id1547154924 (Apple) | https://open.spotify.com/show/0XUMlzxwTxjY2PjrJgdwLU (Spotify) | https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5jYXB0aXZhdGUuZm0vcmFqaXQv (Google) | https://overcast.fm/itunes1547154924 (Overcast) | https://pca.st/6mlec7xf (PocketCasts)

Introductory episode of the Venture Games Podcast by Chris Quaidoo. Chris is an Associate at Griffin Gaming Partners, Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund and MBA Candidate at Berkeley Haas. In this episode, Chris provides background on himself, his career in venture capital, and his background as a competitive Halo player.

In this episode, Ashley Aydin talks to us about her interest in the consumer space and passion for impact investing. She also highlights the importance of engaging with younger women and providing them with the resources to learn more and get involved early as a means to tackle gender disparity in the industry. Her advice for breaking into VC: build relationships with founders early, be proactive and hustle.Ashley is a second year MBA student at MIT Sloan. She started her career in Equity Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley before moving to strategy and business development in the consumer/retail space. Since starting her MBA at Sloan, Ashley has taken on a number of venture roles at the Dorm Room Fund, Founders Factory, VamosVentures and Brand Foundry Ventures.

This week we had the chance to talk with Molly Fowler who serves as the CEO of Dorm Room Fund. Dorm Room Fund is the OG student-run venture fund, and since launching in 2012, the fund has invested in over 200 startups, and the community has grown to 300+ founders and 50+ mentors. Molly serves as the head of the ship for this massive and growing community of startup talent, and we are very grateful that she let us borrow 30 minutes from her extremely busy schedule. In this talk, we ask Molly about her unusual path into venture, the thesis behind investing in student-run startups, how DRF has built an unfair advantage over other similar initiatives, and how her team goes about identifying talent in an increasingly-large applicant pool.

In this episode, Angela shares her experiences with the Dorm Room Fund, Summit Partners and Norwest Ventures and gives some actionable, helpful words of advice for aspiring women investors.Angela is a managing partner at the Boston chapter of Dorm Room Fund, a national, student-run venture fund, backed by First Round. She spent this past summer working as an investor at Summit Partners and in operations at Productiv. She’s currently pursuing an MBA / MPP at Harvard. Prior to Harvard, Angela had years of experience in marketing at Freshly Picked and consulting at Bain & Co.

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Asian Hustle Network Podcast! We are very excited to have Desmond Lim on this week's episode. We interview Asian entrepreneurs around the world to amplify their voices and empower Asians to pursue their dreams and goals. We believe that each person has a message and a unique story from their entrepreneurial journey that they can share with all of us. Check us out on Anchor, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Spotify and more. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a positive 5-star review. This is our opportunity to use the voices of the Asian community and share these incredible stories with the world. We release a new episode every Wednesday, so stay tuned! Desmond Lim is CEO and co-founder of Workstream an interactive hiring platform for restaurants, groceries, retail and hospitality firms, healthcare companies and more. Both of Desmond’s parents are hourly workers, and Desmond is the first to go to college and come to America where he attended MIT and Harvard. Desmond was formerly an investor at Dorm Room Fund, Product Manager at WeChat, Infantry Officer with Singapore Armed Forces, and represented his country in basketball in the South East Asian Games (Hanoi) as starting point guard. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has lived in Boston, London, Singapore and Seoul, and has traveled to over 60 countries. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asianhustlenetwork/support

What would a remarkable job-matching newsletter look like? Tom Guthrie did just that with onejob. It was born out of his experience helping people trying to find and source primarily Chief of Staff opportunities. Tom grew this newsletter and community, and turned into a material revenue source. Through this network, Tom recently co-founded Propel, a curated network of rising stars who want to build the next big thing as founders or executives. Tom is currently in his second year at Columbia Business School and is also an investor at Rucker Park Capital and Dorm Room Fund.In this episode, you will learn:- How a good newsletter is like a good product- How to find a Chief of Staff opportunity- How so many people do not like their job, meaning you are not alone if you feel that way- How starting and growing a newsletter can lead to interesting opportunitiesAs always, this episode with notes is available at on my website

Today’s guest on the “Phil with Forbes 30” podcast is Shawn Xu – Senior Associate of Floodgate Forbes List: USA Year: 2020 Category: Venture Capital  Shawn Xu is an MBA from UPenn and is an early stage investor at Floodgate. Previously, he was the managing partner of the Dorm Room Fund that was famously focused on student-run startups. Shawn made more than 20 pre-seed investments.    Before venture capital, Shawn managed the famous Square payment device and their expansion into Europe. It is now a publicly traded company with a $27 billion market cap. He also managed Vungle’s expansion into Asia, which was eventually acquired by Blackstone for 750M dollars.   His writing on the university startup ecosystem has been featured on Forbes, TechCrunch and Startup Grind. Shawn is another example of learning from his immigrant family through their experiences and reaching the American dream. In 2016 Shawn started thinking about geopolitics and international affairs. His ultimate goal was to help American technology companies get into Asian, European and Latin American markets.   We start our conversation with Shawn discussing: The process of his MBA, the Wharton program and eventually going to North Korea His start with Y Combinator How his networking led him to Dorm Room Fund and working with student startups. Working with Village Global Fund that included Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos The benefits of working as a funder as well as a co-founder. Understanding the difference of fundraising and building a company and the mistakes made by entrepreneurs not knowing the difference. The art and science of getting people to like and buy your product. Mike Maples and his framework called back casting. The concept of Anchor List   I’m sure you learn valuable lessons from Shawn. And take a look at AnchorList.com for the best great crowdsourced rankings from one of the best startup operators in tech! “Under 30 Seconds Round” 1. What is the book you’ve gifted more often than any other book, and why? Mike Maples on Backcasting https://medium.com/@m2jr Andrew Chen on Growth and Product Market Fit https://andrewchen.co/ Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization Book by Parag Khanna 2. What’s one of the best investments and one of the worst investments you’ve ever made and why? Best - What I learned in a deal - Just because everyone else says you’re wrong, doesn’t mean you are wrong. Worst - The investment I didn’t make because I missed it. 3. What’s the most impactful thing you do in your Morning routine and most impactful thing you do in your Evening routine? AM - I take turns helping my Dad who has Parkinson’s. It humbles me. PM - I work out and use FutureFit App https://www.future.fit 4. Pretend you won the Peter Thiel Fellowship and you were going to get money to start a business instead of go to college, what’s the very first thing you’d do to start a new business? I'd go and find a co-founder. I like working with co- founders who work and live like they are living in the future. I might find someone in the area of climate change. 5 .What’s something you never knew you needed? A coach. RESOURCES:  Syrian Refugee video: Yassin Falafel at Square: https://youtu.be/Yz4Q_SlbZgQ List of the Best Startup Operators in the World: https://www.anchorlist.com Andrew Chen’s Program “Reforge” https://www.reforge.com/growth-series Shawn’s writings https://medium.com/@shawnxu   GUEST INFO: Shawn Xu  – Senior Associate of Floodgate CONTACT: Twitter @shawnxu and Instagram @shawnxu WEBSITE: https://floodgate.com/ HOST INFO: Phil Michaels SOCIAL: @iamphilmichaels YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/philmichaels PODCAST WEBSITE: www.philwithforbes30.com PHIL’s WEBSITE: www.iamphilmichaels.com

Episode 31: Shawn Xu (@shawnxu) is an early-stage investor, product launcher, and growth hacker. After graduating from UCSD in 2012 with three separate degrees - global business, political science, and psychology - Shawn worked in Silicon Valley, managing Square’s and Vungle’s business expansions into Europe and Asia respectively. After five years, he packed his bags and headed to the east coast to pursue an MBA at The Wharton School.While at Wharton, Shawn joined First Round’s Dorm Room Fund as a partner, eventually becoming their managing partner, making investments in over 20 startups founded by students. While there, he also realized the lack of diversity in the startup ecosystem, vowing to create a more inclusive space for women, people of color, and graduates of schools outside the Ivy League. He now works as a senior associate on the investment team at Floodgate.Most recently, Shawn was a part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2020, under the Venture Capital category.Show Notes:1:45 - Intro, discusing forbes 30 under 30, knowing really inventive people4:45 - Joining the founding team of startup Bayes Impact, managing international expansion for startups7:21 - Business school and his intellectual journey through geopolitics and venture capital11:23 - Getting involved into venture capital14:34 - Day to Days with working in venture capital and why he loves it17:04 - What are some of the biggest problems Shawn has seen entrepreneurs tackle?22:02 - Entrepreneurs tackling remote work and coronavirus24:10 - Politics and using a methodical approach to solve problems28:03 - The Asian American identity, low turn-out rates on elections, and Asian representation30:15 - A lack of governmental candidates, political polarization, and high level policy initiatives34:09 - The rising automation of jobs and retraining towards high demand industries37:10 - Advice to a new grad--find someone who will invest in you. Floodgate and seed investments41:20 - Start-up mafias as great resources to consult, and be intentional about the people you self select into42:58 - Do things that terrify you to go outside your comfort zone43:44 - Bucket list item--travel to places that are untouched and different from your experiences46:30 - Shawn's podcast episode on North Korea47:22 - How to contact Shawn and follow himArticle of Shawn's Experience in North Koreahttps://medium.com/@shawnxu/what-i-found-in-north-korea-c6670385d777Join the community! Follow us on Instagram @wyndpodcast and find all of our socials at whyyounodoctor.com/podcast.Support the show (http://whyyounodoctor.com/podcast)

Saurav Agarwal is an entrepreneur and engineer. He is currently the founder, CEO & CTO at his second startup, SIERA.AI, which uses AI-driven solutions to boost compliance, prevent accidents, and fill labor shortages in logistics through digital inspection software, forklift collision prevention, and automated material handling. Saurav got his start in robotics during his undergrad at IIT Bombay. He went on to do an M.S. and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University in the EDP Lab and garnered several awards including the Qualcomm Padovani Fellowship. His research work is within the field of Motion Planning Under Uncertainty and SLAM for mobile robots. In 2013 he founded an online travel marketplace for finding local guides called GuideBuddy. Over the past 12 years he has developed self-driving cars, autonomous drones and computer vision systems. In his free time, he enjoys making music with his wife, cooking, reading and writing. Connect with Saurav Agarwal SIERA.AI LinkedIn Saurav's Blog Some of the Topics Covered by Saurav Agarwal in this Episode How Saurav started SIERA.AI Getting a grant from the National Science Foundation and the customer discovery process Defining their initial product and building the first prototype How they got connected with their first customer How the company began to grow Networking and fundraising through Dorm Room Fund and angel investors Saurav's experience as a POC entrepreneur in Texas SIERA.AI's current traction and team How Saurav balances the roles of both CEO and CTO and the division of work with his co-founder Suhas How Saurav approaches hiring The why, what, how approach SIERA.AI's product offerings How they approach growth and customer acquisition SIERA.AI's response to COVID-19 and its affect on the business and team SIERA.AI's pricing model How Saurav views competition The biggest challenges Saurav has faced as an entrepreneur How Saurav approaches short term versus long term planning by being impatient with action and patient with results Saurav's advice regarding fundraising Saurav's grand vision for SIERA.AI Saurav's book recommendations How Saurav manages his time daily What Saurav does to recharge Saurav's advice for entrepreneurs Links from the Episode National Science Foundation Zoox Dorm Room Fund Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Principles by Ray Dalio Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Malcolm Gladwell High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove Jeff Bezos Paper Raven Books Just Go Grind Podcast #77: Morgan Gist MacDonald, Founder of Paper Raven Books, on How to Successfully Write, Publish, and Promote a Book

Today, we welcome Chukwunonso Arinze! Chukwunonso (aka Chooki) is a current PhD student at UChicago studying Physics. Hailing from Nigeria, he is the cofounder of Kaoshi (https://kaoshi.network/), a fintech company creating technologies that enable banks to provide financial services to their citizens living in the diaspora. So far, they’ve built an MVP for their technology which gathers financial data on immigrants in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. They have also gotten two banks to test out their technology. Chooki has mostly bootstrapped the company, but they’re also backed by Dorm Room Fund, UChicago, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. They are currently trying to close an $800K seed round. We talk: How did Chooki's Physics background lead him to fintech? Why bootstrap instead of going to VCs immediately? What are the unique challenges of being a graduate student founder? How does he balance pursuing a PhD and running a company? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/founderscouch/support

Looi Qin En is the co-founder and former COO of Glints. Founded in 2013, Glints is now the number one tech-enabled recruitment platform in Asia for employers to build successful teams. Their mission is to help all people and organizations to realize their full human potential. They were the youngest founders to have raised venture capital in Southeast Asia. They are backed by VC firms such as Monk's Hill Ventures, 500 Startups, Wavemaker Partners, Golden Equator Capital, MindWorks Ventures, Fresco Capital and Singapore Press Holdings. They have been featured on Forbes, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Yahoo News, The Straits Times, Business Times, Today, Tech in Asia, e27 and Channel News Asia. Qin En led people operations and grew the user community from zero to 250,000 across Singapore and Indonesia, managed enterprise accounts and led the internal human capital strategy. At the age of 15, he wrote his first research paper on predicting personality through social gaming and went on to publish 12 more human-computer interaction papers in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals. He fostered student entrepreneurship as a partner with Dorm Room Fund, associate lecturer at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Entrepreneur In Residence at Entrepreneur First and advisor to the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Singapore Management University. He has worked in management consulting at Boston Consulting Group, founded and sold the web design agency Half Grand and has been a brand strategist at Training Edge International. Qin En graduated with distinction in two years from Stanford University, majoring in Management Science and Engineering. He was honored with Forbes 30 under 30 and Entrepreneurs 27 under 27. His hobbies are high intensity cardio and watching action movies. You can follow him at his social media profile online in our show notes. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/looiqinen) Show notes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/looi-qin-en

Justine Humenansky is a managing partner at Dorm Room Fund, a venture capital firm designed to help student founders go from the earliest stage to the seed stage and beyond. Dorm Room Fund provides founders with a strong network of investors, world-class mentors, and a $20,000 check. They have invested in 200 startups who've raised $400 million dollars so far. If you think you have the next big idea, applications are live on their website now! Connect with Justine Humenansky: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justine-humenansky-cfa-b1036058/ Medium: https://medium.com/@justine.humenansky Website: https://www.dormroomfund.com/ Want us to address a specific topic? Message us: https://linktr.ee/thedebatewithoutdebatepodcast © 2020 The Debate Without Debate LLC

My guest today is Josh Kopelman, the founder of famed venture capital firm First Round Capital. Prior to starting First Round, which has invested at the earliest stages in companies like Square, Uber, and Roblox, Josh was a three-time entrepreneur, so our conversation spans early-stage investing, business building, and entrepreneurship. I’ll not sure forget his analogy distinguishing between navigators and cartographers, nor the rest of the interesting ideas he shared after seeing and investing in so many great businesses. We also discuss how First Round has bucked the trend to build what I’d call a platform adjacent to the core investing business which does a lot for their entrepreneurs and is a model for other professional investing firms, both in venture and elsewhere. Please enjoy my conversation with Josh Kopelman.  This episode is brought to by Koyfin. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes (2:05) – (First question) – How pandemic has impacted their investing strategies (3:54) – How this stressful environment impacts founders (6:23) – His early career as a founder and how startup culture has changed (10:15) – Most important lessons from his entrepreneurial career and building from just an idea (11:50) – How to analyze a founder (14:05) – Common disagreements when it comes to deciding on an investment (15:33) – How many opportunities they evaluate in a meeting (16:16) – The curvy road to their investment in Roadblox (17:52) – Whether the concept for a platform is overused (19:36) – Founders asking what google search they should build on (20:46) – Solving existing or forecasted problems (25:39) – How the startup scene is impacted by the huge legacy tech companies (30:28) – What makes a great early stage investor (32:19) – Do they focus on founders or themes (33:19) – Where will valuations and returns come back to after the pandemic (36:30) – How are business models evolving in technology entrepreneurship             (36:31) – Matt Clifford Podcast Episode (39:40) – The Dorm Room Fund (43:02) – Whether investment funds should have their own platform (47:31) – Product mistakes in software building (51:52) – What he’s most excited about for the future (54:05) – The kindest thing anyone has done for him  Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Tej Singh and Adele Li interview Melissa Mash, the Founder of Dagne Dover, a fashion brand that makes innovative backpacks, duffel bags, wallets, and other accessories. Dagne Dover happens to be a Dorm Room Fund portfolio company :)

Ethan sits down with Shawn Xu of Floodgate, recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in venture. Shawn shares how his passion for different cultures has guided him from launching international markets at Square, to investing in brilliant student founders at Dorm Room Fund and now to learning under the legendary Ann Miura-Ko and Mike Maples Jr. at Floodgate. Before all this, he was just a kid hustling for restaurant tips. Listen to his exceptional story and much more, here. [1:33]: Growing up an immigrant in SF's backyard [11:58]: How Shawn evaluates opportunities in international markets [16:59]: Why business school is worth it sometimes [19:45]: The exceptional Dorm Room Fund family [22:26]: On being non-consensus and right Worth website - worth.carrd.co Shawn's experience at Dorm Room Fund - https://medium.com/startup-grind/reflections-on-2-years-at-dorm-room-fund-c815e614e0dc How to evaluate international markets - https://medium.com/@shawnxu/how-to-identify-the-next-big-market-894208c118c9 Shawn's Twitter - https://twitter.com/shawnxu Book recommendations - https://www.notion.so/book-podcast-recommendations-59abba1db1db4fc2b9b9a4e08edb0b24

Tim Hwang is the co-founder and CEO of FiscalNote which uses artificial intelligence and big data to deliver predictive analytics of governmental action to determine its impact. The company has raised $230 million from investors like Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!), New Enterprise Associates, Plug and Play, AME Cloud Ventures, QueensBridge Venture Partners, Dorm Room Fund, Winklevoss Capital, Middleland Capital, Visionnaire Ventures, or 645 Ventures to name a few.

Tim Hwang is the co-founder and CEO of FiscalNote which uses artificial intelligence and big data to deliver predictive analytics of governmental action to determine its impact. The company has raised $230 million from investors like Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!), New Enterprise Associates, Plug and Play, AME Cloud Ventures, QueensBridge Venture Partners, Dorm Room Fund, Winklevoss Capital, Middleland Capital, Visionnaire Ventures, or 645 Ventures to name a few.

Rei Wang, former CEO of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, sat down with us backstage at last year’s 36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival. We chatted about the VC landscape and spent some time unpacking opportunities Dorm Room Fund is creating for student entrepreneurs. Also on the agenda: the potential for creative collaboration in a university setting, and why a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem is key for innovation.

Desmond is CEO and co-founder of Workstream.is, which helps you to hire hourly workers 4x faster. He's a MIT and Harvard grad, former Product Manager at WeChat, and investor at Dorm Room Fund. You can learn more about Desmond here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mynameisdesmond/ This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite here: http://authorsunite.com/. Thank you for listening to The Business Blast Podcast! Tyler --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/authorsunite/support

On this episode, we talk with Angelo (AJ) Damiano, the Co-Founder, and CEO of PowerSpike. PowerSpike is the turnkey tool for Twitch influencer marketing, helping streamers do what they love, full time. AJ dove into the gaming space early on, becoming ranked as a top 100 player in the world at World of Warcraft while in high school. After moving into the streaming space and doing a stint as a Shoutcaster, AJ saw the opportunity to connect brands with influencers, filling a much-needed role in the marketplace. PowerSpike took part in TechStars Atlanta’s latest class, raising around $500,000 from them, the Dorm Room Fund, the Philadelphia 76ers, and other top investors. They’re now working on building up their platform, adding new streamers, brands, and capabilities, and continuing to capitalize on the rapidly growing billion-dollar plus Esports gaming industry.

Through our partnership with the Coalition of Black Excellence founded by Angela J. we have the pleasure of sitting down with 500 Startups venture partner Clayton Bryan. He sits down with us to discuss his career journey up to this point and to share valuable advice for young leaders and founders, particularly in the VC space. We also promote CBE Week, an event designed to highlight excellence in the black community, connect black professionals across sectors, and provide opportunities for professional development and community engagement.Learn more about CBE Week here! https://www.cbeweek.com/Learn more about Transparent Collective: https://www.transparentcollective.com/Learn more about HBCUvc: http://www.hbcu.vc/Check out the Dorm Room Fund: https://www.dormroomfund.com/Check out 500 Startups' VC Unlocked: https://education.500.com/TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach, and listen, y'all. Living Corporate is partnering with the Coalition of Black Excellence, CBE, a non-profit organization based in California, in bringing a Special Speaker series to promote CBE Week, an annual week-long event designed to highlight excellence in the black community, connect black professionals across sectors, and provide opportunities for professional development and community engagement that will positively transform the black community. This is a special series where we will spotlight movers and shakers who will be speakers during CBE Week. Today we are blessed to have Clayton Bryan. Clayton has over 12 years of experience in the tech space, initially working as a marketer. He transitioned into business development and over the past 3 years has worked in venture capital. Currently, as a venture partner at 500 Startups in San Francisco, Clayton is focused on the media, e-commerce, and frontier tech. Clayton is also one of the co-founders of Transparent Collective, a non-profit launched to help founders of color connect with investors and mentors. Prior to returning to the Bay Area, as a member of the Dorm Room Fund team in New York, Clayton worked with and invested in some of the best and brightest student-funded startups on the East Coast. With that being said, welcome to the show, Clay. How you doin', man?Clayton: Zach, I'm doing great, and to all the listeners out there, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whenever you might be listening to this. Happy to be here, and looking forward to, you know, having a good conversation.Zach: Absolutely. So look, man. Of course I read your profile in the introduction, but for those of us who might be wanting to know a little bit more--I know I'm one of those people--would you mind talking a little bit more about yourself and your journey?Clayton: Sure, happy to hit on some of the high notes and the milestones. So I'm originally from the Bay. Big shout-out to Oakland. And, you know, growing up I always felt this gravitational pull towards technology. I was fortunate to be able to have an Apple II back in the day and played, you know, some games on that, everything from, you know, Oregon Trail to Mavis Teaches Typing, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Yeah, those are some of the OG titles.Zach: Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me ask you this real fast about those games though. Did you ever played this game called Gizmos and Gadgets?Clayton: I don't recall that one. That one--Zach: 'Cause man, it was really dope. Okay, okay, but you said Oregon Trail. Did you ever play that Mario typing game? Where you type and then Mario moves?Clayton: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was a classic too, you know? So for everyone from that era, you know, those were great, and I think that they did a good job of really kind of getting a lot of folks into technology and just, you know, bringing up that awareness. And so once I saw the application of that--and then I also was able to go to, you know, great places as a kid growing up in this area. Places like the Lawrence Hall of Science up in the Berkeley Hills, and, you know, really getting to see all of these cool things happen with science. And so when I got to high school I started to code a little bit, and I took CS in high school. When I got to college, I thought that was gonna be my track as well, but I happened to go to a school where there's a really tough computer science program, and I was like, "Actually," you know, "I think I'm a little more creative than this." So I wanted to touch technology, but not necessarily from the coding perspective, and so I became actually--I was a poli-sci and economics major, and then when I graduated I joined Yahoo as a content marketer, and I was there for a couple years. Then I decided I wanted to go do the startup thing, so I worked at a couple different startups, and that's when I first got--started to really hear the term "venture capital," and back in the 2000s it was a very different time and place within Silicon Valley and the way that we think of things. Investors weren't blogging, they weren't tweeting. It was very obscure as to what investors actually did. Now it's different. Now, you know, you see--it's kind of a who's who on Twitter. Twitter has a VC category you can follow. There's Medium. It's just very easy to kind of stay plugged into that scene if you really want to learn how different investors are thinking. There's a lot of information out there. Back in the 2000s that was not the case, but I was very fortunate at the time--one of the companies I was working with, we had done a Series A and a Series B--and also the check sizes were much different than a Series A and a Series B were today--but I was the seventh hire, and I got to really see, you know, what these meetings with investors look like, and I was exposed to that, and I was like, "This is kind of cool. This is interesting," and that's really, you know, kind of planted the seed for me to want to be on that side of the table. And so fast-forward a couple years. My first--my first kind of role where I was in an investor-like seat was running an accelerator program that focused on underrepresented founders, and so through that program I got to know a lot of folks who I'm gonna shout-out later on in, you know, our conversation. But I got to see--I was even closer, but the problem with that program was that we were not writing checks, and I wanted to actually deploy capital. In order for me to feel comfortable doing that I decided, "Okay. Well, I want to go back to school," which was kind of a controversial decision at the time, because I still think MBAs are not necessarily all that welcome within the space, but I think it's changing now. But for me it leads--the decision was to go back, learn more about finance, build up that skill set, and then finally venture out as a venture capitalist, and so that's what I've been doing since 2015, and I've been incredibly blessed to join a great team at 500 and incredibly blessed to be a part of something called the Dorm Room Fund. And yeah, that's my journey in 3 minutes or less.Zach: Man, that's incredible. And, you know, it's interesting--you know, to your point about some of your decisions being a little non-conventional, still--you talked about yes, there's definitely more information to learn about venture capitalism and being a venture partner. However, Clayton, I have to be honest, man, I'm still really kind of confused when I think about the role of a venture partner. So, like, would you mind sharing a little bit more and kind of breaking it down, what it is your role entails? On, like, what you actually do on a day-to-day basis?Clayton: Sure. And, you know, I think--before I answer that I'll answer a question that I think is a good kind of intro or good for just context in terms of, you know, "Well, how did I get here?" And "Is there a certain path?" Right? I think a lot of folks that want to get into venture are like, "Well, how can I also get into venture?" And I think, you know, a couple years ago there were maybe two different pathways in, where, you know, being a founder that had success. So exited a company, sold a company, right? That was a path. Another path would be, you know, becoming an executive at a top internet company, a big brand that, you know, everyone in the States would know, and then really develop a skill set in sales or marketing or even people ops, and then market yourself to one of these firms as being able to add value. But today, you know, there are so many different firms that are popping up, and I think that if you talk to the folks that are at these firms, they all have different pathways in. And so I think the primary thing is just to have that interest and really network, and be beneficial to founders. Be beneficial to folks that work at these firms. Do the job before you have the job, and I think that's a great way to do it. And there's great programs out there, like HBCUvc, Dorm Room Fund. There's a lot of different programs out there, depending on where you are in your stage of life. We have one at 500 that's called Venture Capital Unlocked. First Round Capital has one called the Angel Track. So there's a lot of programs out there that will help you, you know, kind of get the right skills, because things change so frequently within this space. So I would say that was a little bit of a prelude to the next thing, which is "What do I do on a day-to-day basis?" Well, you know, no two days look alike. I would say the core of my duties, really I'm out here trying to help founders, and so I'm meeting with founders all of the time. If you look at my calendar at any given point in time, there's a lot of meetings with some of the current investments that I have, some of the investments that are a little bit more mature, meaning that, you know, I'm not working with them on a day-to-day, because we have an accelerator program, and so we're--it's essentially like a boot camp for entrepreneurs. So we're helping them with their marketing, their sales. We're helping them really craft the way they're thinking about their investor strategy, and then also with the execution, because a lot of the folks that come through our program, you know, they might be really good at their core competency, whether that's, you know, data science or agriculture tech or spinning up something--you know, some kind of hardware play, but when it comes to the nuances around going out and fundraising and selling your business to the investor audience, it's a little bit of a different type of game. So just understanding and acquainting yourself with the language and the types of models and terms that are being used at this stage. I'm talking about things, you know, as far down as, like, customer acquisition costs, but just understanding things like, you know, your revenue, your different growth rates, right, and how to present that in a way that's meaningful, impactful, but translates well into the minds of investors. So a lot of what I do is coaching. I'm always looking for the next best--the next greatest thing, right, that I can invest in, but even if I can't invest in it right now, I still need to be able to talk to with those founders, help them as much as I can, because I'm always looking for potential, and that means a couple--that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but I'm out there always looking for potential. So a lot of what I do I categorize kind of as just, like, helping founders. That would be one big category, and then other things that I do is meeting with other investors and really trying to assess how they're looking at the market or markets right now, what's interesting to them, because as someone that's at the seed stage, I--at the end of the day, I need to have confidence that I can help my companies raise money, and if the later-stage players are not as actively looking for deals in that category, it might be--it might not be the right time. Timing is so big in what we do, right? It's a huge--I would say timing and [seeds?] are so important. So you really have to get an understanding, if you're a founder, "Is this the right time for me to go and fundraise for this business? Should I try to hunker down, just focus on product right now, and come out in 6 months when things might be a little bit different?" Right? So again, going back to that fundraising strategy piece, but a big part of what I do also is just networking with investors, networking with other stakeholders in the States, folks that might be doing products at Slack or Pinterest or wherever and just asking them, "What are you seeing that's interesting within your category," right? Because that's helping me make more informed decisions when I'm looking--when I'm crafting my theses, my investment theses, and when I'm starting to go out and I'm meeting with different founders trying to see "Can I find founders that think similarly about the way the future's going to be, and then can I back those founders?" And that's--at the core of my job, as someone that's thinking actively about my fiduciary to my [inaudible] partners, I'm constantly thinking about that, right? Constantly trying to think about the trends that not everyone else is seeing just yet, right? Especially at the early stage. That's what we have to do. We have to be able to look across--look around not the next corner but two corners, because we're investing at such an early stage.Zach: Man, that's just--that's incredible, and there's--you know, I have--I have a couple questions about that role and how you show up. Before I ask that question, you know, all of the things you're talking about and the brands that you're mentioning and the conversations that you're having, I'm curious, how many--how rare is it to see black men moving in this space? And I'll say--I'll just say people of color. I'll just say non-white folks to start, but then how--but how rare is it? It seems like it would be rare.Clayton: Yeah. I mean, like, it's rare to see women. It's rare to see Latinx. It's rare to see black men. It's rare to see anyone that doesn't fit a certain profile of what you're already named, right? And so it is rare, but I think it's starting to get better, and, you know, I can't quantify that growth rate, but I think that more and more investors are starting to realize that there's a need to have multiple perspectives, right? We can't all think the same when we're doing an investment. We can't all, you know, have been trained at the same academic institution and travel in the same social groups, because we're gonna miss out on big movements. And even on a geographical note as well. There's big things that are happening across the continent of Africa, right? And there's big things that are happening all across the world, and we can't just think in that tunnel vision of "What's the next greatest thing that's gonna come out of Northern California?" We have to think--we have to think beyond that, right? And so there are things that are helping. There are things that are getting us where we need to be, but I think that the pace can pick up. And I mentioned, you know, groups like HBCU VC, which I think are great, but we need more of that. We need more of that, and we need more funds like what, you know, Chris Lyons is doing with the Cultural Leadership Fund. We need a lot of that. We need to amplify that times 10 at least, because I'm not seeing enough folks that look like me and have similar backgrounds when I go to these different conferences, different networking events, and I think that's problematic when we start to really see, you know, what's getting invested in, who's getting invested in, right? There's steps out there that talk a lot about that, you know? Talk about the amount of fundraising going to folks of color compared to, you know, folks that are coming from, you know, I'd say more common backgrounds within tech, and it's staggering in terms of the disparity.Zach: You're absolutely right, and we actually had an--we actually had an episode about that last season where we talked about--where we talked about being in venture capital while black, being in venture capital while other, and we discussed the disparity and fund allocation to the point where--they were talking about certain demographics, it was, like--to represent it in dollars would've been, like, basically zero, right? So it's nuts, and that--to your point though about the role, you know, it seems as if your role requires, like, a cocktail of being able to kind of influence without direct authority, a lot of emotional and social intelligence, and then also all of that still being backed up by significant business competence. Can you talk a little bit about how you show up being, you know, one of the few, and what is it that you're doing in these spaces that are--that are majority white? And what challenges, if you have any, have come with that?Clayton: Yeah. I mean, I think it's just, like, being able to paint pictures. Like, for one, I mean, you definitely need to have your facts, right? You need to have your facts and your stats down, and you need to be able to help those around you, and I'm talking about other investors, see what these trends are telling me. I need to translate that over to them, right? And I need to translate it over to them in language that they will be able to understand, because at the end of the day, like, we're all here to try to, at minimum, 3X our money, if not greater, right? 5X, 10X, and sometimes, you know, if these other investors lack that background, they might not be able to understand things in the same manner, right? And this is why I think every board room--and you're starting to see this within big tech companies, like the Twitters and the Salesforces and the Googles of the world, where they're realizing that they're building products for the entire world, so they need to have a team that reflects that, right? And so--but in the venture scene, we're not seeing that as--you know, we're not seeing it develop as quickly. So for me, in order to go in, you know, I need to be able to pound the table, have the facts, but really build these theses in a way in which can align with what my firm wants to do, right? And so I think a lot of it is just, like, you have to go the extra mile, right? You have to really put in that extra work, and it's making me a much better investor, but part of me is like, "It shouldn't have to be this hard," at the same time, right? Like, if I want to do a deal that's founded by a person of color and I think that--and I'm able to show the data, the trends, all of this is really supporting going in this direction, right? And it's funny, sometimes even money that's coming from outside of the United States sees it better than money that resides within the United States, because it's--like, they understand how emerging markets work, and sometimes, you know, if you put it in that lens, like--I mean, we're not emerging, but we have the same capability of an emerging market in terms of the growth potential. Then a lot of the dollars from overseas are like, "Oh, I want in on that," right? And so sometimes it's just you have to be creative, but, like, you just have to--you have to persevere. I think that's the biggest thing, is really, like, you just have to keep willing to push through, and that's the same note that I want to give out to the founders listening, which is, you know, you have to knock on--especially the seed level. You're gonna have to knock on a lot of different doors. I have founders that come in and tell me, like, "Look, I heard "no" 91 times, and I heard "yes" 9 times, but that's all I needed to close my seed." So don't get--you know, don't get, you know, depressed. Don't have anyone try to knock you off your hustle. You're gonna just have to find the folks that your message resonates with the most, and so that's the message I want to give to the founders that's out there.Zach: No, that's incredible, and you're absolutely right. You know, my father--you know, he's a bit of entrepreneur, financial background, sales background, and what he would--he always tells me is he's like, "Son, you know, you don't need but one yes." Like, often times you just need that one. Like, people keep on--like you just said, you know, the majority said no, but you really just needed, like, a scant few to say "yes" for you to continue forward. And I think it's hard though when--you know, when you continue to present and you present and you present, and, you know, who knows what those no's look like, right? 'Cause a no is a no, but, like, you know, the way that they--sometimes the way people tell you, you know, can hurt. Like, maybe you were told no like, 10 times, even though you were just told no once. You know, so those types of experiences. It's tough, so that's great advice. Before we--before we let you go, do you have any other parting words, shout-outs, or special projects that you're working on?Clayton: Yeah. So I just want to, you know, give a shout-out to Transparent Collective. You know, it's a great initiative that we're trying to, you know, continue, and we're actually looking for sponsors for that. So that's a--it's a great initiative. It's a labor of love, and I want to see that continue in the future. So folks out there that might be interested in sponsoring, hit me up. Big shout-out to--you know, this is gonna be a little bit of a long list, and there's people that definitely if I--it could be a lot longer, but, you know, I want to keep time in mind. So big shout-out to Monique Woodard. She's done a lot to help me out professionally. Big fan of hers. Chris Lyons, Marlon Nichols, Connie LaPuebla, Richard Kirby, Eric Moore, Austin Clements, just to name a few. And then also I love what initiatives like Black VC are doing and also HBCUvc, which I mentioned a few times in this podcast. So that's it. And also one last shout-out to all the founders out there, all the hustlers, all the innovators that are grinding right now. You know, keep building. Keep moving forward. Keep persevering. I know it might be tough. I know that, you know, it might be disheartening when you hear "no" here and there, but you really gotta keep grinding, and you will find your path. And, you know, to the best extent that I can, I'm always willing to make myself available for folks that have questions on the businesses that they're building or the careers they're trying to build, because I believe that you really have to pay it forward in this world. So on that note, that's all I have, and signing off. Thank you, everybody. It's been a great pleasure to have this conversation.Zach: Clayton, man, first of all, the pleasure has definitely been ours. Wonderful feedback, thoughts, and points of advice here. We're gonna make sure that we list all of the organizations that you listed, that you named off, that you shouted out, in the show notes, and then we'll also make sure to have your LinkedIn information in the show notes as well so that people can reach out to you as they're able. Now, I think that's gonna do it for us, folks. Thank you for joining the Living Corporate podcast, a Special Series sponsored by the Coalition of Black Excellence. To learn more about the Coalition of Black Excellence check out their website CBEWeek.com, and make sure that you actually sign up for CBE Week, which is gonna be happening February 18th to the 24th of 2019--that's this year, come on, y'all--in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you go to their website, you'll be able to learn more, get your tickets, and all that kind of stuff right there. Now, make sure you follow us on Instagram though, okay? @LivingCorporate, and make sure you follow CBE at @ExperienceCBE. If you have a question you'd like for us to answer and read on the show, make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. Check out our website, living-corporate.com. This has been Zach, and you've been speaking with Clayton Bryan. Peace.

Hall T. Martin is joined by Lisette Tellez of Ocean Azul Partners. In this episode, Lisette speaks about the Dorm Room Fund, a student run venture fund that invested in student startups. The Dorm Room Fund invested in twelve student run startups per year. Lisette currently works with Ocean Azu Partners and she speaks about criteria, they look at team, product, market and investment fit. You'll also learn Lisette's thoughts on agriculture as a sector and innovation. She also shares her views on what other sectors she sees coming up that she finds interesting.   About Ocean Azul Partners- Ocean Azul Partners is a venture capital firm in Miami, Florida. Our fund was inspired by success. We invest in startups and early stage companies across various industries including, but not limited to, emerging technologies and professional services. We invest seed and growth capital with a focus on founder-owned companies that enjoy transparency and collaborate effectively. We value leadership, commitment and inspired teams. We add value through our operating experience, strategic insights and relationships.

“I found it really inspiring to be around a lot of other young people that wanted to do something meaningful and impactful.” - Mark Chung (click to tweet) Many Universities around the country support innovation and technology development. There’s groups dedicated to seeing entrepreneurs on campus move forward with their projects, and major companies have taken notice to what students are doing. Everyone knows it’s practically impossible to start up your own company while being a full time student. What’s exactly why major companies like Dorm Room Fund and Verizon Ventures has begun partnership programs where they find and fund the next generation of entrepreneurs. Welcome to Verizon Ventures! Today, we discuss on campus innovation and the different approaches companies take to seek out new talent and products in development. Download this episode today to hear from top experts and leaders who are searching for new talent, and hear from entrepreneurs who went through these types of programs. Our guests include: Lemu Coker, who is the partnerships lead on the open invitation team at Verizon. He works with campuses to bring in talent, product, and insights into verizon. Mark Chung, the CEO of Verdigris Technologies. Verdigris Technologies makes the world’s most intelligent energy monitoring systems for high end commercial building. Rei Wang, the Director of Dorm Room Fund, which is dedicated to funding student entrepreneurs. “We believe there is a LOT of innovation happening on campuses today.” (click to tweet) Highlights Rei explains that the Dorm Room Fund started in 2012 to help full time students be able to start their own business while staying in school. They recruit and trains selected students in each region they are active and let the students make investment decisions. Students meet with founders, and make the pitch. They invest in all kinds of products, not just mobile or tech. Mark discusses how working with startups at Stanford was very inspirings, surrounded by other young people who really wanted to do something meaningful and impactful. Since the beginning, standing for climate change and something really impactful stood as a unifying piece for the company. Evolving into a company means more grounded reality outside of the company’s mission You have to learn to scale what you build when making a transition to a profitable company. Verizon looks for students who have an entrepreneurial drive, but may not be ready to step out into the world and start their own business. They look for students who can help build out current products and what products should come next. Verizon has a concept studio, where they go bring in ten students with various skills. They give them a challenge to overcome and a six month deadline. At the end of 6 months they may be offered a job, or the chance to continue on that project as a startup. It’s basically a six month full time on boarding position. Verizon is willing to spend money to invest in projects, which can spin out into their own companies with Verizon as an investor. They want right to use the product, but don’t require exclusive rights to a product. Verizon engages with over 50 schools all over. Most of the investments Verizon Ventures makes are very young companies that already have a product ready to go. Both teams and individuals are supported by Verizon Ventures. “Most people who think of university founders think of consumer mobile apps, but that’s actually not the case.” -Rei Wang (click to tweet) Full Show Notes at: VerizonVentures.com/Podcast  

“It’s not just about a return on investment… It’s really about a return on relationships” -Rei Wang (click to tweet) One of the benefits of being an on campus student is the infinite amount of resources available to you at your university. You have access to professors who have been through it all, are surrounded by students full of energy and eager to get things going, and now more and more companies funding innovations. Companies like Dorm Room Fund and Verizon Ventures have been reaching out to campuses to find the newest up and coming talent. They are funding students, and letting them take the reigns on projects that would normally be just a dream. The support doesn’t end when students get their degrees. In fact, it’s the contrary. The students who join these programs become life-long members of a support group that will continue to help and nurture their ideas and companies. It’s a very exciting time to be a university student. Download this episode today to hear more about on campus integration from the leaders of top companies like Dorm Room Fun, Verdigris, and of course - Verizon Ventures. Our guests include: Lemu Coker, who is the partnerships lead on the open invitation team at Verizon. He works with campuses to bring in talent, product, and insights into verizon. Mark Chung, the CEO of Verdigris Technologies. Verdigris Technologies makes the world’s most intelligent energy monitoring systems for high end commercial building. Rei Wang, the Director of Dorm Room Fund, which is dedicated to funding student entrepreneurs. “You don’t give them (students) the guard rails, you let them create the guard rails and create the structure...” -Lemu Coker (click to tweet)   Highlights Being a student on campus means you have access to infinite resources. Stanford’s program is supportive well beyond graduation. Every year Dorm Room Fund does a giant summit where alumni and founders stay connected. Value is created through on campus integration by providing support. Giving students the resources to create their own systems is a stronger tactic than forcing them into events and situations. Your first five hires need to be complicated and skill specific. On Campus Integration gives students access to real world problems a lot of university students never get the chance to deal with. There can be a lot companies are missing by going to the administration and not directly to the students. “What I’ve seen be very effective in providing a nurturing environment is creating frameworks for experiential learning” - Mark Chung (click to tweet)   Resources VerizonOpenInnovation.com Verdigris.co DRF.VC Full Show Notes at: VerizonVentures.com/Episode  

Rei Wang, Yasyf Mohamedali, and Jenna discuss how Dorm Room Fund is creating a national community and platform to support student entrepreneurs and investors. Rei and Yasyf share a few of the moon shot ideas student founders are pursuing (including a robotic kitchen!) and their commitment to social impact, as well as how DRF aims to design the program to foster that spirit of courage and fearlessness. Rei and Yasyf give us an inside look into their new product VCWiz, which acts like a founder's fundraising assistant, and their hope that the tool will create equal opportunity for first-time founders raising capital. We also chat about the strides DRF is making prioritizing diversity and inclusion - 35% of their partners are women compared to 7% at venture capital firms - and the efforts the team is making to serve as a gateway into technology and venture for all students.  

Women make 79 cents on the dollar compared to men and that's wrong. (depending on how you cut the data it's either slightly worse or slightly better - but it's still bad). It's a systemic problem and most of us would throw up our hands and say "There's nothing I can do about it!" Instead of doing nothing, Claire Wasserman has built a powerful community called Ladies Get Paid around a powerful and critical idea: Fixing the wage gap. And while she says that "this conversation needs an overhaul" it's not just talk. Claire's organization brings women together in town halls all over the country where they focus on what woman can do with their own hands, like learn better negotiation skills and apply for jobs they might not feel ready for, but probably are. Men have been trained, somehow, to be more (slash-over) confident, while the imposter syndrome seems to effect women more strongly. Claire is an experience designer, designing in-person, transformational events in the same way that a UX designer crafts an app or an HR manager crafts a personnel policy: Thinking about the goal, the intended effect it will have on a person, and working backwards. It is, in the end, Human Centered Design. The materials change, but the goal is the same! That, after all, is the nature of, and best definition for, Design: Making something to shift the way things are to the way you want them to be. Ladies Get Paid is designed *by* Claire to make the change she wants to see in the world, to change the conversation about gender and money. Beyond her amazing story and her journey to creating this company, I dove into how Claire architects her business, her events and her community. One issue that Claire and I get into is how to include men in the conversation. What are the levers available to us to design an intimate, safe and productive conversation for women (her primary audience) while allowing men to participate, to help, to learn? How do you design a conversation about gender issues without letting gender become an issue? Claire has been tinkering with a design that allows men to ONLY ask questions...this format would draw a hard line on mansplaining. Like Jeopardy for conversations, it's a rigid restriction, but would keep men honest: Am I talking to be heard, or to be curious and to learn? It's giving men who want to come to the town halls a hard line: Ask or be silent. Don't declare or explain. When I heard that idea, I offered another option: The fishbowl, where men can *only* listen, from the outside. It's a harder line (but easier to follow for the men!)...and there's a lot of intimacy created for the inner circle of the fishbowl, with no cross-talk possible. Which is "better"? No men? Men listening in, with no input? Or men inside the circle, but only asking? Each conversation design has implications, repercussions, challenges...there's no best! Claire, like any great designer, will tinker, test and try and see which feels right for her and her community. Two conversations we didn't talk about enough: How Claire manages her own *internal* conversation. Claire is bootstrapping LGP financially and emotionally! Right now, she doesn't have the mentorship and support she is offering so energetically to others. Taking a step back and getting you core needs cared for is 100% essential for founders! The other conversation we didn't dig into is negotiation tips and perspectives. For that, you might want to listen to my interview with Harvard Negotiation Professor Bob Bordone, and download my negotiation prep sheet on the downloads page! You might also check out episode 13 with Rei Wang , Director of the Dorm Room Fund, where we talk about community building and episode 4 with Sara Mitchell of Faraday Futures, where we talk about listening to users: but not all of them!   Enjoy the conversation!   Show notes and links: Claire on the Web Ladies Get Paid Claire's Hyperakt talk

Rei Wang is the Director of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, the largest student-run venture firm in the nation. They’ve invested in over 150 startups, who’ve gone on to raise more than $300 million from investors like: Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator. Before joining First Round Capital, Rei help build products and community as a Product Manager and Global Community Lead at General Assembly. Rei joins us to share her story, how she got into startups, how she approaches building online and offline communities, what it’s like growing the Dorm Room Fund, and much more.

Today I talk with Kate Quarfordt,  the Founding Director of Arts Integration & Culture at City School of the Arts. My conversation with Kate was a rich and wonderful surprise! I found her 4-seasons framework someplace in the corners of the internet and was immediately enchanted with it. Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter as metaphors for the flow of work... The Framework is so powerful in the types of conversations it allows into the larger conversation about work, especially winter, a time to reflect and consider, to heal and incubate. It's rare to make space for that type of work! The opening and closing circles Kate hosts in her school to bookend the week...it touched my heart! It's such a beautiful way to work. And so similar to how Daniel Mezick gets organizations to shift how they work through Open Space Agility! Check that episode out here! This conversation has started to open up the idea of threads and threading in conversation design for me. I first got the sense of threading from my conversation with Nandini Stocker, Google's Head of Conversation Design Advocacy. As I see it now,  the arc of a conversation  is made of stories. And the way Kate describes our stories coming together to make a new one, using the word "Braiding", makes so much sense.  Conversations are the exchange of stories, and placing ourselves and others into the hero role, shifting perspective as empathy and generosity demands is the flow of real dialogue. Finally, we talked about how creative work requires an audience! An Audience provides a "pull" and "push" for work. At least, that's the way I experience it. Even when I don't feel like it, I push myself to finish work on an episode because I know people are waiting (pulling) for it. And there's a loop of feedback on the work: People write me to tell me what was great and where I missed the mark. That's one of the reasons that I feel the conversation between an organization and its customers is one of the most critical, missing pieces in companies that struggle with a sluggish work cadence. There's not enough urgency.  If you want to dig into that conversation more, check out the episodes from Rei Wang, Director of the Dorm Room Fund and Sarah Mitchell, Lead designer at Faraday Futures. Both helped me see principles at work in sustaining great conversations with customers and community.  Thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did making it !   Notes and Links ____ Meeting Kate on Twitter New York City Charter School for the Arts (CSA) Specials On C Gothamsmith Threading in Conversation Design: In Podcast Show notes What we need is a Montage (montage!) The X that we were solving for: Feeling out of synch, loss of clear cadence The Seasons Wheel applied to a Week or a Cultural Transformation: Open and Closing Circles: Open Space Agility with Daniel Mezick   Mary Oliver: making yourself visible to yourself in a way you never imagined! From Blue Pastures: I don't mean it's easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one piles, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.     The Inner Winter Process: Leaving yourself voicemails! (creates a third point for reflection, just as a drawing or journal does) Dave Gray on Drawing creating a clearer interface for conversations https://medium.com/the-conversation-factory/the-math-behind-drawing-in-together-1a24fe4b9084 Morning Pages http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/ The Inner Conversation https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/figuring-out-how-and-why-we-talk-to-ourselves/508487/ Spring Cleaning Script from Mama Gena: http://www.mamagenas.com/where-women-store-garbage/   Holding Space is incredible power: Who initiates the request? Who Has permission? The Paradox of Flow vs Framework: Absence of Structure vs. Structure vs. balancing who introduces the structure.   What's the Deal with Agile? http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/7/19/alistair-cockburn-on-the-heart-of-agile-jazz-dialog-and-guest-leadership   How is a school like a conversation? Moving from the School-As-Script model to the School-As-Dialogue model. Waterfall vs Agile http://agilitrix.com/2016/04/agile-vs-waterfall/   Kate's Post-call reflections on Winter and Work as a Relay Race: "As I was transitioning into the rest of my day I realized that there was one last thing that I wanted to share apropos of the winter phase and the importance of rest and rejuvenation--not just in the creative learning space, but also in the context of activism and resistance. As I mentioned, we are doing a lot of work with young folks around using the arts as a vehicle for activism, especially given how passionate they are about making their voices heard in this current political moment. On Monday night I had the chance to perform with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a women/femme-led singing group created by the leaders of the Women's March to keep the momentum of the march moving forward and also--crucially--to frame joy and rejuvenation as acts of resistance in and necessary elements of a sustainable movement. Paola Mendoza, co-artistic director of the March, and one of the producers of Monday night's event, said something that evening that resonated super powerfully with me. https://m.mic.com/articles/182826/the-womens-march-launches-resistance-revival-in-effort-to-keep-anti-trump-momentum-going#.GFf3ipI25)   She said, "The resistance is not a sprint, but it's not a marathon either. It's a relay race." I love that image because it evokes the sustainability that becomes possible when hard work and leadership are shouldered by a full community instead of by a single individual. There's a sense of permission implicit in this approach, the understanding that it's ok for each member of the community to pause and refill the tanks every so often, because there's always someone else right there who's ready to take up the baton and run the next leg. In the context of the season wheel, this is the idea that different community members can be in different phases at different times...  it's OK for you to be in winter, because you know I'm in summer and I've got you covered, and then we can switch so I get a chance to rest and reflect while you keep the work moving forward. I'm excited to bring that relay race image back to the kiddos when we gather to kick off year two.    

Michael Ma is a Founding Partner @ Liquid 2 Ventures, one of San Francisco's younger and more exciting seed funds, also unique in having Hall of Fame quarter back, Joe Montana as another Founding Partner. Their portfolio includes the likes of previous guest, WorkRamp, NerdWallet, FanDuel and many more very exciting young companies. Prior to Liquid 2, Michael was the co-founder of TalkBin, a YC alum that later sold to Google and was an Investment Team Partner @ First Round's Dorm Room Fund.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How from Michael's parents arriving in the US with $300 Michael made his way into tech ended up in YC, selling his company to Google and ultimately being a VC with Liquid 2? 2.) Does Michael agree with the common suggestion that too much money is chasing too few deals at seed? How does Michael think raising now is different to when raising for Liquid 2? How did having Joe Montana as a founder affect the fundraise? 3.) How does Michael view the optimal decision making process? Does Michael believe in unanimity or conviction driven processes when investing with a partnership? How does this change for follow on? Why is it so important to have silver bullet deals in partnerships? 4.) Does Michael agree with the commonly stated assessment that with the scaling of YC the quality has reduced? How does Michael use his own YC experience to argue against this? How should investors be approaching YC today, in this structure? 5.) How does Michael view fund cycles when investing in such deep tech as he has? Are they too short? How does Michael look to scale the learning curve on new industries and transformational technology? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Michael’s Fave Book: Count of Monte Cristo Michael’s Fave Blog: TermSheet Michael’s Most Recent Investment: Vivid Vision As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michael on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visitwepay.com/harry PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.

One of the great pleasures of hosting this show is that I have an excuse to reach out to old friends and spend some quality time with them. And I get to double the quality time! I really love gettingto listen to the whole episode again. It's a time to dig in and figure out what the episode was really about, and write these essays. Originally I was going to have the episodes transcribed and then read them, but in episode 2, I heard a different perspective. Information Architect  Abby Covert  talked about how processing her own research transcripts was essential to her work....I tried it, and she was right. It can be hard to give oneself the time for reflection and learning, even though our internal conversation is  the most critical of all the conversations I've been researching (See David Whyte's The Three marriages for more on that!) In a few weeks I'll be sharing an episode I did on Meditation, one of the key tools to maintain (and silence, occasionally) a healthyinner conversation. Redesigning your inner conversation! Who wouldn't sign up for that from time to time? In this episode I talk with Rei Wang, Director of the Dorm Room Fund. Rei and I connected way back in my Design Gym days: I think we were running an innovation day for GOOD magazine  where she was manager of GOOD Local. The workshop might have been  around connecting with your neighbors? We stayed connected as she moved to General Assembly (where I taught UX part time) as she rose up the ranks and managed their rapidly growing community efforts. She now directs the Dorm Room fund for First Round Capital, and it's an amazing and unique organization. First Round does early investing in companies like Blue Apron, Birchbox and Warby Parker. And while the Dorm Room Fund is funded by First Round, it's run completely by college student volunteers, not professional VCs! This tight community of volunteers IS the Dorm Room Fund. I think there is a lot talk about community: about building it and trying to monetize it...but few people treat their community as an living conversation to be designed.  In the opening quote I pulled, I was struck by Rei's perspective that companies develop better products in deep dialog with their communities. To some, this is obvious, but only those who cultivate their community consistently and with intentionality get to harvest insights and profit! Community can be just for celebrating and marketing a product, it can be to have customers contribute to the product...but Rei sees her community *as* the product, which means she's very careful to orchestrate it's development and evolution. The volunteer students in the Dorm Room fund must have a high level of autonomy and drive, which means she has to pull the work out of them, not push it on them! And her community is rapidly refreshing, by design: Each year they lose people as they graduate and gain students who come in: Capability leaks out of her community constantly! Rei's solution doesn't seem to have a name, so I'll call it Cohort Mixing. In her annual event, she makes sure incoming, current and outgoing groups all connect in significant ways, in large and small groups and over time. This helps keep traditions and institutional knowledge alive and constant, even as the community renews. Thinking about your own company or product...how can community transform how you develop and test ideas? And how can you empower people in the community of your company to share and pull their own work forward, without you pushing every day? Enjoy the episode! Rei's insights are solid gold. No bonus tracks this time...Rei and I somehow got it all in under the bell! Show notes: Community as Product workshop at CMX East 2015 First Round Capital Dorm Room Fund Defining Community GA Hub: Community Engagement through curation CMX Community Professionals Organization Good Magazine Foursquare's Superuser Group The Famous Designer who said internships should be paid! Rei's totally venture backable card company based on her mother's tiger mom texts Radical Candor Level Mixing In Communities CMX's excellent article on community Engagement Mutualism in Pair Relationships Tony Robbins - I am Not your Guru Slow Goodbyes : The Post-Wedding brunch Automation in Group Decision Making: Not what they use at DRF, but an interesting example of using automation to simplify group conversations at the close Balancing Privacy and Openness in Community: An office perspective Mashup Teams: The optimal density of connections in teams Motivation in Volunteer Communities: Open Source Sustainability and community building Rewarding your community Volunteers: The Creative Mornings Summit

Imagine a student-run venture fund, backed by a prestigious venture capital firm, focused on supporting the nationwide community of student entrepreneurs. Seems cool, right? Here is the best part, you don't need to imagine this. It already exists, and it is called the Dorm Room Fund, backed by First Round Capital. We're joined this week on #thePawdcast with the Director of the Dorm Room Fund, Rei Wang and discuss all things student entrepreneurship, investing, raising capital and education, wrapped into an incredible one and a half hour podcast of pure and practical bliss! We discuss Rei’s upbringing, living in multiple countries, her career path from the early days of General Assembly, and joining the First Round and Dorm Room Fund team. We learn about students becoming entrepreneurs and the keys to a student's success. We cover the insights that venture capital firms look for, and how to get noticed on an investor's radar, especially in the perspective of the Dorm Room Fund. With that said and without further ado, enjoy Episode 035 of #thePawdcast with the one, the only, Rei Wang! Listen to this episode on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pawdcast/id1071470844?mt=2 Listen to this episode on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/pawdcast/episode-035-rei-wang-dorm-room-fund Listen to this episode on ChopDawg.com: http://chopdawg.com/podcast/episode-035-rei-wang-dorm-room-fund/ Dorm Room Fund Website: http://dormroomfund.com First Round Capital Website: http://firstround.com Rei Wang's Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyreiwang Rei Wang's Website: http://www.reiwang.com About #thePawdcast — Discussing all things entrepreneurship, startups, creativity, businesses, innovations, self-awareness and everything in-between. Hosted by Joshua Davidson, Eddie Contento, and Daniel DiGangi. Brought to you by ChopDawg.com. Episode Background Music Provided by BenSound.com. #thePawdcast Theme Song Provided by the talented Eddie Contento of ChopDawg.com.

Evan Baehr is the cofounder of Able, an online lender to small businesses. It launched June 2014 with the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Interview and on TechCrunch. His passion at Able is to serve the Fortune 5 Million – the 5.8 million small businesses that represent the backbone of the American economy. His previous startup was Outbox, a consumer internet company aiming to takeover the US Postal Service and backed by venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Mike Maples, on Fox News, CNN, TechCrunch, FastCompany, Wall Street Journal, INC, the New York Times, and on Jay Leno. He is coauthor of Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams from Harvard Business Press (2015), which has hit #1 in Amazon's business new releases. Evan has worked on the Facebook platform under Sheryl Sandberg, helping shape a vision to make life better by making it social, and for Peter Thiel building a political data company. He's an honors graduate of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard Business School. He has worked for the American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, served as a legislative aid on the House Appropriations Committee under Rep. Frank Wolf, was Chief of Staff on the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, under which he wrote the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, and was the failed candidate for Princeton's City Council, despite receiving more votes than George W. Bush. He has served on the board of the Manhattan Institute's Adam Smith Society, the New Canaan Society, the Rivendell Institute, and Harvard Business School's FIELD Program, and is a mentor with First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund. He cofounded the Hoover Institute's Rising Fellows Program, Harvard Business School's Ideas@Work, Princetonians in the Nation's Service, and the Yale Forum on Faith and Politics. He is the recipient of the Lily Endowment Thesis Prize, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, and Princeton's James Madison Fellowship. He lives in Austin, TX, with his wife, Kristina Scurry Baehr, a patent litigator, and children Cooper and Madeleine. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/atribecalledyes)

Ruby Lee is a Product Partner at KPCB Edge, a team of builders, investing in seed stage founders working on emerging areas of technology. While studying at Stanford, Ruby got more into startups through entrepreneurship and business groups. She was also part of the founding team of the Dorm Room Fund - a student run investment group backed by First Round Capital. After school, Ruby joined Google as an associate product manager through their APM program started over 10 years ago by Marissa Mayer. While at Google, Ruby worked with the Chrome team, then decided to join a less established team and worked on Project Fi. Ruby was then approached by a friend to come help launch a new seed investment group out of KPCB. It’s been just over a year since KPCB Edge launched. Ruby joins us to share her story, some of the initiatives they’ve launched over the last year, advice she has for new product managers and entrepreneurs looking to create new products, what they look for when investing, and much more!

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

Kim Pham is the Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures, Europe's first community-focused fund. Kim has always had a passion for entrepreneurship and startups, landing her first job within a startup at the age of 16. Kim joins us to share her story, how she got involved in startups & hustled her way into various opportunities with companies like Onswipe, Blue Apron and more, how she helped launch Dorm Room Fund in NYC, how she got into VC, what she does as Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures in Dublin, and much more!

This lady is amazing! GeekGirl sat down with Kim Pham of Frontline Ventures, an early-stage VC based in Dublin. Listen to find out more about her role as Head of Platform, why she made the move from New York to Ireland and more about the Dublin startup scene. Bio and key links, below. Kim is currently the Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures. She graduated from New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she majored in Marketing and Computer Science. She has been working at early-stage startups in New York and Boston since she was 16, at companies like Blue Apron, Onswipe, and HowAboutWe. She led Tech@NYU, NYC’s largest developer and designer organization. Kim was also founding partner of Dorm Room Fund, a $.5M student-run venture fund investing in student startups throughout NYC. When she’s not supporting the Frontline portfolio, you can find Kim cooking without recipes or attempting to befriend strangers' dogs. She enthusiastically claims she is “made of the Internet.” Key Links: Twitter: http://twitter.com/kim617 Website: http://kimpham.org/ EU Internal Ecosystem Builders: http://euieb.com/ Frontline Ventures: http://www.frontline.vc/

Episode #22: We are joined by Adam Brudnick of the FTMBA ’19 program. In this episode, he shares with us what initially drew him to a career in consulting at McKinsey and ultimately to Berkeley Haas. Back in high school, He was inspired to work at the intersection of science and business after watching An Inconvenient Truth which led him to apply to Wesleyan University, well known for its emphasis in arts and sciences. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, Economics, and Music and joined McKinsey after a summer internship at the firm. Adam went on to join the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to further his career in learning how to accelerate the deployment of technologies to solve rising climate challenges. We hear a brief history of the New York Power Authority, how the public-benefit corporation is run by the state, and how Adam helped NYPA focus on initiatives with multiplier effects that pay economic dividends. We delve into how the multiplier effect works and how we should think about creating initiatives that spur additional, interdependent economic activity. He “got the bug” in creating things of value at NYPA, and came to the Bay Area to create and help others create more things of value. While at Haas, Adam is serving as a Venture Partner of the Dorm Room Fund, a seven-person student-run VC firm that invests $20,000 in pre-seed student ventures across the country.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations