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In this episode of the Paris Paysanne Podcast I'll be talking with two innovative people involved in the zero waste movement in the world of craft beer. First I'll speak with Franck Grossel, the founder of Instead Mobilier which builds “brewed” furniture made from spent grain. Then I'll talk to Elsa Raverdy of Brewsticks, a company that takes spent grain and turns it into tasty, zero waste snacks.

We welcome Daniel Vitalis onto the pod today and might I just say stoke level is pretty high! Daniel is a forager, registered Maine Guide, writer, public speaker, interviewer, and lifestyle pioneer who is deeply passionate about helping others reconnect with wildness, both inside and outside of themselves. After learning to hunt, fish, and forage as an adult, Daniel created WildFed; a show, podcast, and lifestyle brand that integrates hunting, fishing, foraging, and ecology with nutrition, cooking, community, and outdoor adventure.    "WildFed on its face is about food, but beneath the surface of that, it's about a lot more. It's about how we are in relationship with wild species and wild places." -  Daniel Vitalis   Daniel and Mason discuss: Daniel's WildFed food philosophy. The importance of becoming enmeshed into your ecosystem and utilising your local food shed. The hunting, gathering, collecting and foraging of wild foods. Staying grounded and undogmatic in your approach to living consciously, sustainably and in harmony with the earth. Applying traditional hunter gather philosophy and practice to modern day life. The significance of developing a relationship to the earth and to the species that inhabit it, especially in our modern era of artificial intelligence and disconnect.   Who is Daniel Vitalis? Daniel Vitalis is the host of WildFed. WildFed is a show, podcast, and lifestyle brand that integrates hunting, fishing, foraging, and ecology with nutrition, cooking, community, and outdoor adventure. For ten years Daniel lectured around North America and abroad, offering workshops that helped others lead healthier, more nature-integrated lives. A successful entrepreneur, Daniel founded the nutrition company SurThrival.com in 2008. Most recently, Daniel has hosted the popular podcast ReWild Yourself.  Daniel is a Registered Maine Guide, writer, public speaker, interviewer, and lifestyle pioneer who’s especially interested in helping people reconnect with wildness, both inside and outside of themselves.  After learning to hunt, fish, and forage as an adult, Daniel created WildFed to inspire others to start a wild-food journey of their own. Headquartered in the Lakes Region of Maine, he lives with his beautiful wife Avani and their Plott Hound Ellie.   Resources: Daniel Vitalis Instagram Daniel Vitalis Facebook WildFed Website WildFed Podcast WildFed Interactive Program WildFed on Facebook   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the pod, man.   Daniel: (00:04) Yeah, man, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for sharing my voice with your platform here.   Mason: (00:09) I know that there's going to be a bunch of SuperFeasters that are like super stoked to see... Already I've hinted that you are coming on and they're all just like, "Yes." Then I'm really excited about like a bunch of people who maybe... A little bit early on their onset into the health scene. I'm really excited about introducing them to your work, and then this new project. Are you at home in Maine at the moment?   Daniel: (00:35) Yeah, I am. Yep right at my house. I don't get out too much anymore. I travel a little bit, but as I get older it's like I really want to be based out of my home. I spend a lot of the time, a lot of the last 10 years on the road, but now I've got so much, I'm so integrated into this place with what I'm doing now that it's like, you got to really talk me out.   Mason: (01:00) WildFed, which we'll jump right into. That seems to be like this pinnacle declaration for your public work as well. That that's what you're doing. You're throwing your roots down, and then through that I've realised that on the stealth you've become a guide to me anyway. You've become like a guide in Maine. That's an interesting mindset already that I think is entwined into what's now culminating in WildFed from being someone who's traveling all over the world, all over America, doing the LA conferences. All that stuff to now being, really living and breathing… That was a long-term like little deviation. What was in that process psychologically and emotionally to really throw down your roots?   Daniel:  (01:46) Yeah, well, I mean you look back on 10 years and it makes sense. The journey makes sense. But if I tell you about point A and then point B, they don't seem to almost like line up. But my journey has been that I started off speaking in those conferences. I have all these raw food vegan folks because I came out of that scene. They would let me speak at their conferences. I was not a vegan and I was not a raw foodist. I had been in the past, but I wasn't by the time I started my public journey. Those are early days of YouTube before podcasting. That was before social media man, it's so strange to think about that. Because it's so recently really. Now we're really talking like 12 years ago probably. I'd get up on these stages and my message would just be like starting to contradict the whole purpose of the event.   Daniel: (02:36) It'd be this thing to push veganism, to push raw foodism. I would have stuff that touched in with that, but I was into this idea of, well, what are like natural humans? What do they do on the landscape? What do they do without superfoods? What do they do without the health food stores and internet suppliers and stuff? What's natural for people? I always wanted to talk about that and explore that idea. I would get up and I'd give my talk. Because I was popular with audiences, I kept being invited back. My message grew further and further away from that idea. I started there, but I kept on the journey following the path. Even though a lot of people are like, "I don't like this direction, Daniel, you're starting to get away from our ideals."   Mason: (03:21) Well, what was interesting, and I really I'm aware. We don't want to go too far into this thing to the history. We're here to talk about WildFed. That's what I want to talk to you about. I was someone in that audience, really loving the fact that you were up there talking about like booze. There was this subconscious awareness in one pocket that we appreciate that we're going through a change, and we liked originally what the health scene was about. We were opposing what was deteriorating us. Then there was that split of people falling in love with that push back against society into whatever.   Mason: (04:00) It happens with anything. It happens with diet. You more than anyone have led the charge in terms of making that distinction around veganism. But of course it happens with the carnivore diet and TCM diets and everything. Everyone's just a fanatic. But I really liked that anarchist energy, and I think everyone secretly did as well. That's why you kept on getting invited back and it was such a-   Daniel: (04:25) I was amazed they would have me back year after year, but eventually obviously, we parted ways and I started my podcast ReWild Yourself, which I ran for three years as a fluke. I was really writing an online magazine and I wanted multimedia. I started doing interviews and pretty quick those interviews were just so much more… People liked my writing, a small group like 6,000, 7,000 people reading what I'm writing. 100,000 people are listening to the podcast and it's like, "Okay, this is really what people want. Less of me just writing these long articles. More of me interviewing." Before I knew it, there was this podcast. It was early days of podcasts, I hadn't set out to start one. That podcast ReWild Yourself was exploring like what's natural for human beings if they step outside of our industrial system?   Daniel: (05:11) What would we be like if we lived on the landscape, and what do we know about the health outcomes of people who live that naturally? Hunter-gatherer peoples. I just got fascinated by it. I was talking to so many different characters, psychologists and doctors and nutritionists and death experts and birth experts. Just it kept coming clear and clearer to me that being divorced from nature was the root cause of our problem. That led me deeper into foraging, eventually led me to hunting and fishing and this idea of like, how do I apply this stuff? Because I didn't want to end up like the Biohackers, walking around with big orange sunglasses on and a bunch of electrodes tuned to me, and breathing some weird modulated air. Just gets so outrageous that you're like this is the opposite of what I want.   Mason: (05:56) I remember you actually because I followed along what was really interesting is you shared your inner journey in terms of your away from a superfood packet towards maybe more of a subsistence on nature. That's what I've always read in everyone's comments for you. Because people come across your work and they're like, "Oh, cool. He's hunting and gathering. He's from Maine. That's what he does. He's a hunter." In WildFed you say, "I didn't grow up this way. I've had to learn this shit." That's what has been… The people along the way. I read your comments and everyone goes, "I appreciate so much you sharing this inner journey with everyone." I remember a pivotal episode when I think you had like a sleep expert, but like a Biohacking sleep expert on the podcast.   Mason: (06:41) In reflection after that podcast, I could hear you going, “You know what, I don't want to be taping up my curtain. I don't want to be putting tape all over little electrical things all over my house.” You want to leave the window open. That was a pivotal one for me as well because there's all these crossroads as we go along in this journey. It's something I've learned from you, is how to be aware of the upcoming crossroads. That last night when we were watching WildFed, Tahnee, my fiancé, she was saying, and she's been following you before we got together as well at, a long time. She's like, "I really love that, once again you're not presenting yourself as an expert. You're very confident in what you know, you're just very adamant about your ongoing journey once again."   Daniel: (07:32) Go ahead.   Mason: (07:33) I was just going to say that allows you to be aware of crossroads coming. Then you get to go deeper rather than getting over identified with a stage persona.   Daniel: (07:43) That's a huge danger, a pitfall. I talk about it a lot that I see happen where people get so pigeonholed into something they had been into in the past, and then they feel like they can't break free. The longer you go doing that, the harder it is once you… I remember just like I cut my hair at one point. I don't know if you remember back in the day I had long hair. It's just like even that was like, people have you so, they want you to be this one character. I feel bad for like when an actor has an iconic role, it's like you're Jason Bourne in a movie, and then you want to do something radically different. People are like, "No, you're Jason Bourne." It's like, "Oh, come on." We're dynamic people. Another thing though I'll say is that I've had many opportunities along the way to root in and become the expert on the thing that I've been spending time on. I always like to push forward.   Daniel: (08:36) The challenge with that is that I'm always the beginner in a scene. I'm always the new guy everywhere I go, because I'm constantly trying to learn new stuff. It can be you have to get comfortable with that, like the discomfort of that. You have to be able to relax into the discomfort of being the new guy everywhere if you're going to constantly learn new stuff, and you surround yourself [inaudible 00:08:59]. Back to it my podcasts led me to realizing that I would be a prisoner to all of these life hacks, and all of these diet hacks and eventually the encumbrance of it. When I started off, I remember before I started speaking, I was like 19 years old, walking around in Hawaii in nothing but a pair of shorts, barefoot on the beach. That's where I felt the most real and alive. Then before you know it, you're encumbered with just all of these things to be healthy.   Daniel: (09:27) You're like, wait a second, this is the opposite of where… I noticed that anything taken too far becomes the opposite of what it starts off as. That's usually what ends up happening. You can see this in a lot of people's career trajectory, which is why I don't want to get too stuck in any one thing. What happened with ReWild Yourself is I kept learning more about wild food and I kept resonating to that. Because food was really my first passion. I realised like of all this stuff that I've learned about, the one thing that I really I'm most drawn to doing, where I want to take it next is into the wild food arena. Rather than making the mistake I made in the past, which is like, "Can I be 100% this or can I do this all the way?" That's like that vegan thing or that carnivore thing where it's like, "Well no, I'm going to make a commitment for life to only do this one thing."   Daniel: (10:12) It was just like, "Man, can I keep pursuing this idea of wild food in a more moderate..." what I think of as moderate, most people think of as still pretty extreme. Can I hunt fish and forage for calories and can I make it a real thing? Can I bring it into my house? Just to tie it back to your show theme too, that started for me with medicinal herbs. That's how I got first excited about, it was foraging chaga, foraging, reishi. Because as somebody who was into superfoods, the cost of those things is high, and the connection to the thing is less than when you go get it yourself, and that was more exciting.   Daniel: (10:45) That was my first inroad, and then eventually it was like, "Wait, can I do this to fill my refrigerator and my freezer with food?" That led me to where I'm at today, which is making this show WildFed and doing the podcast WildFed and just exploring what a modern hunter-gatherer looks like, who lives in a super developed industrial society.   Mason: (11:06) I really appreciate you saying like someone looking in, they're going to be like, "This is full on man. He's foraging for like everything." But I know you can take it way further. The fact that you're taking your ingredients to a gastropub, and allowing him to have his little injection of his other ingredients. Some of it's like a sustainable agricultural crop or even him using his own chicken stock or something.   Daniel: (11:31) I'm sure it's like mayonnaise and mustard and ketchup. I don't care anymore. My thing of like food exclusivity, because once you start to get the very best food in the world, it starts to, for me, it started to make me relax about other foods a little bit more. You know what I'm saying? It's like when you have venison to eat, if somebody wants to put it on a piece toast, you're like, okay cool man. Because I know I got this thing so I don't care as much as I used to when I was like always fretting about what I had for food.   Daniel: (12:03) So it's created a relaxation in me, which has been really healing. The relaxation comes from several different components of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that I've been promoting. But yeah, you got to see the show man. I'm curious how it landed for you and what you thought about it. Because here's the thing, I've been incubating this project for two years and I've gotten very little feedback because I've been really secretive about it.   Mason: (12:24) We know you're [inaudible 00:12:25]   Daniel: (12:25) You're one of like 20 people that's seen in it, man.   Mason: (12:28) I feel so special. I do.   Daniel: (12:30) Seriously, you're one of like 20 people that's seen it. I'm really curious how you felt about it.   Mason: (12:36) We loved it. I think especially coming from like Tahnee and myself watching it. This is off the bat. Watching the first episode. Okay, two things off the bat. I love that there's like three or four people involved in the production, and the quality is very high. I noticed that straight away because that's something that again, that is in alignment with the simplicity of this whole lifestyle. I appreciated that, and appreciated the fact that the production was really high as well because let's face it, it matters. Second of all, straight off the bat, I liked that I know you and I know that watching one episode is gonna be very good, and it was put together very well in one episode. It had a story in the beginning and middle and end. It almost has its own catalyst in there for like the emotional ride.   Mason: (13:27) However, I know that there is a plan over the entire series to take you on a journey, and you didn't shy away from that. That's what I would definitely, anyone listening, I would recommend staying in that little journey, in that path. Because off the bat, the first episode is the slowness. That was like where you got to you're like it's something about the how slow, the speed of food. There's something slow about this lifestyle. That was after you were going after, I think it was the fiddleheads and it was just like, "Fuck, we're too early. Fuck, we're too late." Then the turkey hunting. It wasn't just this, "We're going to give them a little insight into how frustrating it can be. We'll quickly go, missed it, the turkey's going away." We were there and you took us on the journey. That was something I think you were maybe consciously doing.   Mason: (14:24) It was like I want to make sure that I don't glorify this lifestyle, or just show peak experiences. I really want everyone to be involved, and then see the underlying principle, which what came out in that first episode anyway was, there's just something about the speed of food. The speedier it is, the more it tastes bland and I think you said like cardboard. That straight away there's principles. You don't deliver rules. That's what I've got out of the three episodes I've seen, there's principles that you keep slippery and non-dogmatic so that it can be integrated into wherever someone is at. That's genuinely where they're at because that's something that doesn't happen. It's like, "Wherever you're at, it's okay, you do this," but, wink, wink, you really do need to get to my point in order to like [crosstalk 00:15:15].   Mason: (15:16) There was a real, it is that softness, and that first principle anyway got me really thinking about how that pace of food even going to farmers markets, I don't feel anything is bad or wrong. It's just made me really think about the fact that it's like a king tide when you're out in the surf. The more and more you get that quick speedy food, the more you get sucked out really quick. It's hard to get back into really feeling the essence in that romance, in the slowness of food and really earning it in one sense. Then just obviously showing the respect in the currency of time that you're giving. That was my initial takeaway, man.   Daniel: (15:57) The pace of food thing is really important to me, because I like that there's tension sometimes. Even with plants as you saw, it's not just like, "Oh, they can't run away, so I'll just walk out and get them." You've got this very, as you saw with the fiddleheads, it's very delicate time window, where loading up the canoe and you and your partner going out and paddling out to the spot, it's not something you're going to do every single day. You've got to like, "Okay, when do I think they're going to be ready?" Then you paddle out and you're like, "Oh, no, we're too early, so now I've got to go back." Then you go back and it's like, "Oh man, are we too late?" Because even they can slip away from you because they got this little window where they're edible. Then as you see with hunting, I think hunting has one of the biggest PR problems.   Daniel: (16:41) People have such a mistaken idea about it because of what they see. You see people who've hunted their whole life, they got 40 years of experience. In hunter-gatherer societies, it's pretty understood that as a hunter you reach peak efficiency in your 40s. Because you've got all of those decades of experience that have built up. When you start and you're 40, I was 35 or so when I started, it's like maybe a little older than that. You don't know anything. It's like trying to get going. You make mistakes. I want to put all that in there. I mean everybody makes mistakes. I want to put that in there so people could see the pitfalls and the challenges. Another thing that happens is people will think, "Well yeah, it's real easy to hunt when you have a gun, oh it's cheating." Actually it's not really that simple. It's pretty complex.   Daniel: (17:31) You got to really understand animals, and in order to understand those animals, you've got to understand those animals' foods. You got to understand their natural life histories, and before you know it, you're becoming so enmeshed into your ecosystem, that this idea of you're an alien on earth who is like can't touch anything because humans just destroy everything they come in contact with. Instead of that you start to like reorient yourself to like, "Oh, I'm part of this ecosystem." It's not just ecological literacy, which a lot of people are lacking, but it's like integration into your landscape. You become this animal on your landscape. Sometimes predatory, sometimes herbivorous. That's one of the things that's neat about being a human is we're like a bear or a pig in that we eat both plants and animals.   Daniel: (18:14) Sometimes I'm out there foraging and I'm clearly not a predator on the landscape. Other times I'm out there as a predatory animal. We have these two different, and I want to, if you've noticed the way the show is put together I like to leapfrog scenes back and forth, where sometimes I'm a predator and sometimes I'm the forager. Sometimes I'm a squirrel and sometimes I'm a hawk. Both are legitimate ways we interact with our landscape. But what I really hope that show does, because obviously, where you live, you're seeing a different suite of plants and animals that are familiar to you. But I'm hoping that what it does is inspires people wherever they are to get involved in their food shed. Because wherever you live there's lots to hunt, gather, collect, forage, whatever it is.   Daniel: (18:58) I want people to go, "I might not have fiddleheads, but what do I have in the spring?" Then lastly, I just want to say to your point about a seasonal arc. One of the things I've noticed from this lifestyle that really excites me is, the very first thing I'm doing in the beginning of the year, a couple months from now, is I'm tapping my maple trees and I'm making maple syrup so I get all my sugar for the year. Then it goes into the, what you saw, the fiddleheads, leaks and turkeys. Then over the course of the season, I have these activities that I'm doing every year, and every year I get a little better and I learn a little bit more and it begins in the snow and then it ends in the snow. In the middle is that summer, like that beautiful peak summer growth that happens here in the temperate regions of the United States.   Daniel: (19:41) I wanted people to see a seasonal arc, because this world we're living in now is becoming so homogenous, especially with the way our tech climate control is, and the way our built environment is. Even though the weather is one way outside, inside's just always the same flat line thing. I wanted people to see these beautiful seasons. Each episode has a show arc to it and its own tensions and wins and losses and all of that. But then there's this arc of the season, and that's one of the most powerful things about this lifestyle for me is that every part of the year, I have something I'm excited about, like really excited about. It's snow on the ground right now. I can't get at the acorns, the hunting is all winding down, but I know ice fishing is coming. I'm so excited about that. When that ends, it's maple syrup time, it's just goes, goes and goes forever.   Mason: (20:34) That's the simplicity you were talking about like a calming effect on your body I think, of anything that's made in the West, it's that calming effect so that we can explore the nuances of our parasympathetic nervous system. Whenever I've had those longer periods in nature, there's a foraging friend that I haven't been out with him for a while. He's just North of Sydney though. He was always telling me he'd go out for weeks at a time, and he just watched his senses coming back online. He'd watch his hearing become acute, and he'd watch his eyes... I didn't even realise my eyesight was getting a little blurry at particular distances when he was out. It always reminded me that consistency of time in nature, that's going to be my ultimate health practice, no matter what.   Mason: (21:20) Then what you're talking about, just being on the terrain. Barefoot at times if appropriate. But even just watching the seasonality outside of a Gregorian calendar, that's something I've always really watched and considered. It's interesting because I had such a mental need, a high pace of learning the expertise of this healthy lifestyle. When you get into what you're talking about, that needs to be a slow journey. Understanding our own seasonal arc. Here, there's a beautiful Instagram here in Byron Bay in this region, koori country. It's a local mob sharing. All right. Now the winds of change, now we're getting the westerlies, now we're in this season. Right now you'll start seeing the pippies. You've got pippies over there, the little mollusc on the beach. You dig your feet in and you can go and like harvest your... It's beautiful. It's one of the easy accesses.   Daniel: (22:16) Collecting.   Mason: (22:18) Collecting, which brings me to my next point. The slowness I feel you'd probably coming from knowing the lifestyle that I come from having that raw food like 'raji baji'. For me there was a little bit of like the rules don't apply. I'm always ahead of the curve. Even if I enter into like this foraging landscape, it takes me a while sometimes to really slow down and up and think, "I will listen to this person who has that 30 years experience." Even though they don't share that baseline spring water, not bringing preservatives into their life. That's something I think I learned from you heavily as well.   Mason: (23:04) That ability to actually slow down and then what I think is important into your message you are actually willing to not just become a guide, but really understand this new terrain of foraging in terms of what are the regulations in order they are. We're new to this world. Remember these regulations are in there for a reason. There are quotas on what you can be harvesting. See for me, that would seem limiting coming from where I was coming from in the beginning.   Daniel: (23:38) Infinite consciousness, man.   Mason: (23:40) Infinite consciousness, yeah. I'm like the goose man. I can just cross borders. I don't need.. Yeah That kind of [inaudible 00:23:47]. That is something that was really like, it's really helping me go like, "Right this is community." It's already in existence and we can be bridges between those communities to an extent. This is the term that I hear in opposition to the foraging lifestyle. I just wanted that to be the context. Well, not everyone can do this. It's not sustainable. That's an interesting comment and it's like a cliché kind of thing and you go and then the cliché answer is like, "Well everyone doesn't have to do it. I'm doing it." But I feel like we can have more interesting conversations and I feel like you're important to that.   Daniel: (24:28) I'd like to explore that a little bit because it comes up so much.   Mason: (24:32) I'd love to hand it over to you, yeah please.   Daniel: (24:33) Well I just think that one's really interesting because it's like not everyone on the planet can play golf. That's not sustainable. But nobody's yelling that at people playing golf. Not everybody can do anything. There's like almost nothing that everyone can do sustainably. Why is it that I must defend against that? Also, why is the burden of planetary sustainability on my shoulders all of a sudden? I have to only do the things that everyone can do. Why? There are people more intelligent than me, and I'm not banging on their door like, "Why are you doing math problems I can't do? Not everyone can do that, so stop it." That doesn't make any sense. There's all this talk these days about privilege. It's like, I don't know, this is just what I'm doing. I'm not trying to exert a privilege. I'm not trying to say that everybody on the planet needs to do this.   Daniel: (25:23) Now I will say this, everybody on the planet used to do this. Everybody on the planet used to do this. You're only here, if you're on earth today, is because of the hunters and foragers of the past whose genetic lineage you are the current incarnation of. You do come from foragers. Now, I think of it like this, and this is an important aspect of why I created WildFed, because WildFed, I hope is a brand that goes on past me. I'm currently like a focal point in it, but that's not the long-term goal for me. I want to create a project that carries the torch of, I'll say foraging in a general sense. Because anthropologists will refer to foraging peoples as a shorthand for hunter-gatherers. I don't just mean plants here. I mean plants, animals, fungi, algae, everything. Some people need to carry the torch in this generation, especially in this generation more now than ever.   Daniel: (26:20) Although every generation for it to last, there needs to be people who carry it forward. We live in the era where the last hunting and gathering peoples are blinking out into extinction, extra patient or being assimilated into the modern lifestyle. They are probably not going to be able to carry that torch, the way that some of us are going to be able to. Secondary to that, is that they live in very remote pockets of the planet like Indonesia and parts of Africa and places in South America. But what about where we all live in the, you were saying the West earlier, in the developed parts of the world, and the industrialized parts of the world. Somebody needs to maintain that relationship. Here in the United States we have, like you there where you are, museums that are there, where there are people whose lives are dedicated to keeping aspects of the past alive.   Daniel: (27:11) Why is there nobody keeping our hunting and gathering tradition alive? Is that not more important to keep alive than memories of past wars or who invented light bulbs, or all of these things that we're keeping all that alive in museums. Or there's like museum martial arts, let's say. There's people who are practicing obscure martial arts from the past that have very little relevance to today, but they keep them alive as a museum art. You know what I'm talking about? So many things like that that we do, yet this fundamental thing that binds all humans together, which is how we got to be here, our fundamental relationship to the natural world, we need people keeping that alive, I think more fundamentally than anything. Partially what I'm doing with WildFed is just trying to pick up that torch and carry it forward. I'm most certainly not the only one.   Daniel: (28:02) I share this responsibility with a lot of my colleagues who are doing the same thing. Many of which are going to be featured in the video show, and many of which are featured on my podcast. People that I meet who are either doing it in a general, I'm doing it in a very generalist sense. Then there's people who are doing it in a much more specialized sense. My thing is a generalized hunting and gathering approach. But I really get excited when I meet somebody who's really specific on one thing, like they hunt bear, or they hunt only mushrooms or whatever it is because I throw a very wide but shallow net as a generalist. I get excited when somebody throws a very narrow but deep net, because I can learn so much from them. I'm trying to also create a platform that brings those people together.   Daniel: (28:47) Because you'll notice, I'm sure you've noticed this in the tonic herbalism thing, you'll get people who are all about foraging medicinal mushrooms. Tonic herbal mushrooms, but they don't hunt. Then the person who hunts would never even think about foraging those mushrooms. Then the person who is a dedicated plant forager might never hunt or fish. Or the fishermen might never... I'm trying to create a platform that will start to be a hub for all of those different people and those voices and those lifestyles to say, “Hey look, we're all sharing this one commonality here, which is wild foods.” It's so much more than nutrition. It's relationship to species. Because every plant, every mushroom, every animal, every algae is a living entity. It's about how we relate to that entity.   Daniel: (29:35) To me, there's a really deep thing going on here. Then how we relate to all of those identities together, those entities together is like how we relate to the ecosystem, and how we find relationship to it. It's just sad that we're at this point where we have to forge relationships with ecosystems as if we are from another planet. That really has bothered me over the years, this sense of alienness that we have to our own earth. Now where if you read headlines, you will see a lot more about people going to Mars than you will see about people making relationships with nature. You'll see stories about the Amazon burning, you'll see stories about the pollution of rivers and the extinction of species. Then you'll see stories about going to Mars. It's like, really, we're not going to stop first and fix this, we're just going to leave?   Daniel: (30:24) Isn't that like somebody in a relationship who has a bad relationship and so they split, and they get in another relationship, and the same thing happens, and they split. They never stop and face it, and face themselves and learn how to have a good relationship. It's like you just run away, run away, run away. Aren't we doing that right now? We trashed the planet and then we run to Mars and then what? Like trash Mars? Do we have a plan for Mars? What are we going to do with the garbage there? We're going to put in the ground like we did here. Where are we going with this? WildFed on its face is about food, but beneath the surface of that, it's about a lot more. It's about how we are in relationship with wild species and wild places.   Mason: (31:06) Yes, mike drop. I want to say that I definitely have got that sense over the years of creating that web weaving between all these specialised fields, and the sharing of knowledge, someone who's foraging for [inaudible 00:31:21] culinary mushrooms starting to open up into say like that medicinal mushroom world and vice versa. Creating this somewhat like beautiful fascial tensegrity between all these beautiful elements of the subsistence, on which I want to talk to you about. You were just talking about that seems like a very classic pattern of you get into a relationship, you screw it up, you bounce it, you get over to the next relationship and that's a pattern. Possibly developed genetically, who knows where it came from, maybe from parents patterns.   Daniel: (31:53) All kinds of things.   Mason: (31:57) Now what I see as you were talking about martial arts say Kendo in a dojo, what's the relevance of that? I see the relevance is that you get to do it in a very contained system that even though it's got this very certain element of making you mentally hone yourself. It's a very contained system where you can get into uncomfortable states in order to refine yourself. It's not this open ended, for lack of a better word, getting uncomfortable. Which is what I see is the difference between like a museum art and actually getting into the wild and foraging, and as you said, becoming a new beginner.   Mason: (32:35) That's uncomfortable in a beautiful, beautiful way. Now getting uncomfortable for me it seems like it's going to be the only access for us to, you know, getting out of our comfort zone to an extent, in order to deal with these patterns that we have as a species that is destroying where we came from. Can you talk about that connection through foraging, through the fishing, through the hunting? How does that actually help us in our inner world basically evolve and deal with this shit that's making us run away from the most important relationships of our lives?   Daniel: (33:14) There's a lot there, so lets unpack it. First I'll say you brought up Kendo like with full respect to practitioners of Kendo, you would be mistaken to think that that was a contemporary art that you were going to step into the octagon and fight an MMA specialist. You'd just get your ass handed to you right away. You'd be beat down. We know it because we created a forum to test people, and everybody brought their arts and pretty quick, everything went away except ground game grappling and standup game basically boxing type stuff. That survived and everything else was obliterated very quickly. Stylistic elements remain, but we see that those things are good. Kendo is good against Kendo in a controlled setting, but it doesn't work in the real world. I want to say that partially, with WildFed, one of the things I'm trying to do is show people real meals of food.   Daniel: (34:09) This isn't, "Oh, did you know dandelion is edible?" It's like, that's just some mental masturbation. Let's see you make a meal out of this stuff. Because that's where what's the saying? Like the rubber meets the road. It's like I wanted to show people the real thing because we're actually, this isn't just trail nibbling stuff where we're showing real meals coming out of these wild foods. That was important to me. Now to the meat of what you were asking about. I think that if you had lived your whole life in a small town and you knew everybody, everybody knew everybody. Maybe it's a little uncomfortable sometimes because everybody knows all your dirt, but also they all know who you are, and you have these interconnections and familial connections. You grew up with people. Everywhere you go you're just waving hi to everybody because everybody knows everybody.   Daniel: (34:59) Then I transplant you to a new place, big city let's say, and you don't know anybody. You would have a low level anxiety taking place because you would be alien to that place, and all of your connections that gave you stability and strength, they're gone. You're now in this fragile position because of the vulnerability of that. Now extrapolate that metaphor out and it's like here you are on planet earth, but you only know other humans. You don't know plants, you don't know fungi, you don't know animals. You don't know how to survive in your environment. You don't know how to source your own food, and you're totally reliant on these systems that provide you with your sustenance. Then you keep learning about, wow, not only are these systems really delicate and prone to failure and wow, that's kinda weird.   Daniel: (35:47) But also like, wait, they're also super toxic in the sense that we're poisoning this food and we're poisoning the landscape in which the food comes from and we're poisoning the watersheds. Wait a second, like this wheat was genetically modified with gamma radiation. Wait, what? This isn't just like healthy natural food? You start realizing, "Wow, I'm dependent on systems that are really fragile, super destructive to the earth and on top of it, are not good for me, and I don't even know how to solve that except through tons of money spent on really expensive products that start to encumber me." It starts to get a little bit, I think what happens is we have this low level anxiety. I think you see that anxiety projected out into the world in the form of apocalypse media, which is like a whole genre of media that most of us are kinda drawn a little bit to.   Daniel: (36:36) Whether it's Mad Max or it's The Walking Dead or it's like prepper stuff or it's whatever it is, or survival stuff. Shows about people living on the frontier of Alaska. Why are there so many dramatic reality shows where people are sent into nature naked and afraid, or they're sent into nature to survive on an island with each other and then they dramatically compete to see who's the survivor? We have so much of this media being pumped out because it speaks to the part of us that feels vulnerable on our own planet, because we don't actually know. It's not really about, "Can Joe survive the next episode?" It's not really about that. It's about can I survive and we're using him as a surrogate. We know that we can't survive and that freaks us out a little bit. The answer is not a whole bunch of cool Bear Grills survival skills where you have like some big bowie knife and you can pee in a snakeskin instead of a canteen.   Daniel: (37:32) It's not about those things. It's about for me, how many species am I familiar with that I know that are food for me? So that when I walk down my street or I drive down the road, I look out the window and go food, food, food, food, food. The difference for me of a maple tree to somebody who doesn't produce maple syrup, it's just night and day. When I look at a maple tree, I know that I can pull a gallon of sugar out of that tree next year. It's like one little step less afraid that I am internally and then it's like, the Oak trees. Like I can pull acorns off of those. That's food for me. Okay it's a little bit more confidence. Squirrels, that's food for me and I love that animal and that animal and I have a relationship. Then you start adding in all this stuff. I know where the clams are, I know where the Periwinkles are. Okay, I know how to catch fish out of that river.   Daniel: (38:26) Before you know it, you start having all these interconnections. It's like being back in that small town where you knew everybody. Earth starts to be this safe place for you because you're anti-fragile. You have this network that makes you robust. You're like, "You know what? It wouldn't matter to me if it did go Mad Max. I know where everything is. I don't care if there's a problem in the banking system. I don't care if there's a problem with the computer systems. I don't care if there's a three week shutdown because of a tsunami that takes out the grid." All those things that people talk about, it's like I'd just be good. I don't mean there'd be no hardship, but I'm saying like all those fears start to like go away and you have this sense of relaxation into your home, which is the earth.   Daniel: (39:12) I think people lack that so much and they fear that nature is so hostile. It's interesting with Australia to me because it's like this place from which all these shows come that we see here in the West about how dangerous the land, the 10 deadliest snakes. We got this whole croc hunter image of Australia of like this dangerous place. But then I'm sure people over there see shows about us about Alaska and it's like, "Oh my God, Grizzly Bears and Polar Bears," and all this stuff. It's like we just have this obsession with how dangerous nature is. It's like, man, it is, if you don't know how to coexist with it, but we know.   Mason: (39:48) That's interesting. Even just here in Byron, it's like even city slickers, I grew up in the city, always coming to the beach. Most times I'd be coming and visit here, which is now in my home. You're going to see a brown snake go across the path on your way to the beach in one way or another. You're going to find these red back spiders, and you're going to have huntsmen in your house. People go, "Holy shit, that's a huntsman" and even a city slicker, you're like, "Yeah, that's fine. They're okay as long as they're on the wall, his name's Pete, he's a friend." That's something I do appreciate about Australia. There's certain pockets through Maine and Connecticut that you can see especially seeing New Zealand, there's this ensconced connection to the natural world. As we know if you leave even the tiniest gap, nature's going to start creeping in, and then it's going to be easy to repopulate your in a world with those connections. That low level anxiety is insane.   Mason: (40:51) I mean just here, the amount of like distinction we need to make around people going like, "Right, I read that reishi is really good for anxiety, so I take reishi." It's like, well, let's take a couple of steps back. We're completely stepping out of this, "I've got a problem give me a pill," mentality, and we need to create this fabric of a personal culture and a family culture. That can, as you said, it's like, it might be this seemingly like rough, wild world, but when you do step into it, it's this inner cushioning, and this inner easing that you have because you've gained a genuine connection.   Mason: (41:30) When you were just talking about like, I assume is survivor just then, and having our experience of being able to survive through Bear Grills or through Tom surviving the next day. That's virtual reality. We're talking about the goggles coming on and us tapping out. It's on. It's a pivotal point not to get sensationalist about it, but most of us as we will be in most times of our lives, life is on and then we're at pivotal points most of the time. We do have really big choices and opportunities to take with our personal culture right now.   Daniel: (42:03) Bigger and bigger choices coming very soon. I'd like to talk about that a second. I want to add one more piece, which is in the raw food culture, which I think a lot of people don't understand how interwoven the raw food culture kinda got what psychedelic drugs too. Because those two things became very interwoven.   Mason: (42:22) Massively.   Daniel: (42:23) Massively. That culture started to get a little... those medicines are so powerful. Abused you can get pretty far out on a limb with them in your thinking. Things will feel extremely real to you that have basis and truth, but maybe aren't actually functional out in the world always. Pieces of truth. Sometimes things are true implicitly but not explicitly. It's true that we're all one internally, implicitly. Explicitly there are people who will kick your door down and hold you at gunpoint, and kill your family sometimes. Hate to say it, but that happens it's happening right now somewhere. Yet we're also all one.   Daniel: (43:08) What's happening in the explicit world and what's happening in the implicit world, they're not always the same. It's like that with the medicines you can get far out in your thinking like that the implicit reality you're experiencing that those medicines open you to is the explicit world, so you can get a little bit confused. I was thinking of just now as we were talking about a book series that some of the friends of mine in that culture were reading. I just know the name of the first book was Anastasia. Do you know these books?   Mason: (43:37) Absolutely. There's Anastasia and the other channeling texts.   Daniel: (43:44) These books people who aren't aware it's like they come out of Russia I believe, or at least they claim to and their stories about this culture in Russia where maybe in Siberia or something, where these people are living in like pure harmony with animals and with nature. All these really interesting stories. Well people I knew were taking those as anthropological reports. They were believing that those were true stories, and that this was anthropology. I would try to stop and say, “Hey listen, there are actual people scientists called anthropologists who study indigenous peoples on their landscape and this stuff is bullshit that you're reading. It's fairy tales. It's not real.” That's not real. People would be aggressively angry with me. They wanted that to be real. They wanted to know that squirrels were bringing Anastasia her nuts.   Daniel: (44:32) They wanted that stuff to be real. On one end, you have people who think nature is this ultra-dangerous place where around every corner something's about to gobble you up and you need to hide in your home. On the other side you have people who are like... I've been studying bear attacks lately because I'm around a lot of bears and I'm just curious like, what happens? Why does it happen? It's interesting that you sometimes have people who are so on the other end that they'll actually provoke an animal attack on themselves because they believe like, "No, me and this bear are friends." It's like, man you can get confused on that side too. It's like the brown snake is not your enemy, but he's also not necessarily your friend. You coexist on the planet. You have different agendas and you try not to meet in a negative way, but you also don't try to unnecessarily hug him either.   Daniel: (45:24) Now, some people get away with it, right for a while. Like who is your homeboy out of Australia, Steve Erwin. Got away with it for a while and then he gets a sting ray stinger through his heart. It's like you also learn a respect for nature too when you're part of the food chain. Because you start to understand every time you kill an animal, you take an animal's life and you open that animal up and you see its insides you are met face to face with mortality. You're met very quickly face to face with what your organs look like, and how you're a made of meat too. That there are things that'll be just as happy to consume you whether they're microbiotic or macrobiotic. You're like, both things are true. Nature is a lot safer than a lot of people think, and nature can be also a lot colder than a lot of people think. There's some Buddhist thing going on here. It's like some middle path   Mason: (46:22) Even like with TCM and that's what we talk a lot about these theories, these Taoists theories and it seems very poetic and romantic and clinical as well. It's a Yin transforms Yang. Yin Yang Wuxing, Yin Yang and the five phases of energy, it doesn't go beyond this that we're fucking talking about right now. It's very basic. We can get out of our head with it and experience it, but how far do we go down that rabbit hole of the magical thinking when it comes to far out.   Mason: (46:58) That definitely was a bit of a... I could have kept on going down that world and stayed functional in my personal egoic inner knowing. That I know the reality of what's going on in this world and despite the fact that I know that it's not appropriate for me to talk about it, these people just are not tapped in. One day they'll wake up and realise what I know internally. You can go really far with it. I didn't go so far down with the psychedelics. I definitely had a few dieter's, and will continue to when I can find I can have some grounding in terms of the appropriateness of-   Daniel: (47:28) Has its place like any medicine has its place.   Mason: (47:31) Absolutely, and the calling. I feel like we all, some of us dive into it and then step back and mature in our approach and appropriateness.   Daniel: (47:42) Or accept the healing of the medicine and don't just go to the medicine all the time. Because sometimes you just hit it and hit it, and it's like, "Hey man, how about you take 20 years and integrate some of that?"   Mason: (47:53) I love that you went two decades with that as well. That's it. Because that's an appropriate amount of time to integrate it. Well and what's giving you the medicine? Is it your chop wood, carry water, meek, mundane, day to day. That's what Buddhism is anyway. You can keep chopping wood, keep carrying water, get a little pop, get enlightened for a second. Let it go. Keep fucking going.   Daniel: (48:14) We have this happening on an experiential level too. I want to tie that in there. You were talking before like about how far out you can get with something. Sometimes we need a litmus test, like a reality test to check. Have I gotten too far out? For me what that became was like, well can I actually feed myself? Let me try to explain. I was at Burning Man, the big party right in Nevada. It's pretty far out. This is over a decade ago, maybe about a decade ago. I'm there and everybody's vibe is like, "Oh, this is the new model of humanity. This is how we can live in harmony together." I'm looking around like, "No, you're on a lunar plateau right now. There's no food here." Like you're going to live this way you brought all your food. Here's a test, are we really a tribe? Okay, let's feed ourselves, can you?   Daniel: (49:14) Or are you super reliant on these external systems that you say you're destroying, but you're actually still completely like nursing off of it? I find like this is really fake. The same thing happens in the medicine circles to a degree too. "No we can just live like this forever." It's like, "Yeah, you're going to get up tomorrow and you're going to go to the supermarket." You say you're stepping away from the system with this stuff, but you're only doing it up here. But who's chopping the wood and who's carrying the water? That's what it's really about. Your enlightenment, if you're not chopping wood and carrying water, your enlightenment isn't integrated. That I think is what I love about hunting and gathering. It's my chopping wood, carrying water. It's how I make sure that it keeps my feet on the ground.   Daniel: (50:00) Because I have one of those brains that wants to take me up into the clouds all the time. That real airy sense of exploring ideas is what I get most excited about. It's that earthy groundedness of, "Okay, I'm going to go out today and get food, and it's going to be challenging, and it's going to take time, and I'm going to have to utilise. I'm going to get into that discomfort you were talking about. I'm going to come face to face with what I don't know." Sometimes it's hard because I don't know what somebody who's done this their whole life would know. I am forced back to the ground.   Daniel: (50:33) That is I think really important for some people because it's like they've cut loose all the ballasts and they've rocketed up to 70,000 feet, and from up there, they're not really contributing very much. They think they are by just being, man like, "I'm contributing my vibe." It's like, "Yeah why don't you come down here and carry some of this wood with us?"   Mason: (50:54) My absolute favorite conversation. For people that don't know what we're talking about, I've been there going like reading the Pleiadian channeling texts getting to this. It gets confusing when you go and hang out with some of the local mob, the indigenous mob, and they will point to the Pleiades and say, where do you come from? That's where we're from. We're from the Pleiades. Then you get these modern interpretations of some of the rock art and you see the Biami, creator Biami standing on what is possibly a rocket ship until you go fuck.   Mason: (51:30) There's some like hieroglyphs here and you go, "Right, these hieroglyphs show DNA, did the Pleiadians come down and seed our DNA here?" Then there's like a little depiction and a modern interpretation of a spaceship coming down and falling into those waters between like Gosford and Sydney. This exists, and you start going into this inner world and going, "This storytelling's got something to it. I'm going to make that my exact reality on the outside world, and that completely skyrockets you."   Daniel: (52:03) The people who are telling you that will also chase like a giant porcupine down and pull it out of the ground and butcher it and share it in the tribe. It's like they will chop wood and carry water. I'm way more open to hearing that stuff from somebody who can demonstrate that they have integrated it. That's one of the things about indigenous peoples around the world, is that they have creation stories, creation myths, or sometimes what they say are their histories too, that are pretty far out to us, but they can demonstrate the viability of their worldview through their ability to live sustainably on the earth.   Daniel: (52:37) But when people who are trying to demonstrate the validity of their worldview but can't do that, it's like, "Well, I'm pretty suspect. Go back, integrate so that you can actually live here in some sustainable way, then I'm more open to your ideas." What like an Aboriginal person from Australia has to say has a lot more merit to me because they've got 60, 70,000 years of proving it. They've proved it probably longer than just about anybody who left Africa. I'm all ears. Show us how. But when somebody comes from Burning Man like that and they're telling me that stuff. I'm like, "Man, you don't even know how to like do your own laundry, your mom's still doing it."   Mason: (53:18) I think we're talking about the difference between someone that's just like, it's that same escapism. I'm going to get these beliefs and I feel superior and I'm going to become a missionary to these-   Daniel: (53:31) That's super dangerous man. That's super dangerous when you start thinking like… That was one of the things that I had to face when I started to hunt and fish. Foraging a little less so that world's a little different. But learning to hunt and fish man, I had to go speak to men who had fathers a lot of the times. Because I grew up without a father so I'm part of that culture, which is so common now in the developed world, especially as we see the breakdown of the family structure. Now, with such an emphasis on personal freedom, we'll see more and more of that probably, unfortunately, right. A lot of hunting and fishing least here in North America is passed on patrilineally. You learn it from your dad or your uncles or something. If you have a break in that like I did, you don't learn it at all. That's not to say that women don't hunt and fish, but they tend to not be the ones who pass that knowledge on at least in the past.   Daniel: (54:29) I would have to go in front of men who I did not understand and they didn't understand me. It's like I'm showing up with my man bun and my five toed shoes, and I want to do everything alternative to how they do it, because I know my ways are better. They're like, "Yeah, well, we actually get this done." Again, it's that same thing I was talking about before. They would have these political ideas, they would have religious ideas, they would have social ideas that were like, I thought I was superior to. And over time, I realised, that's like a really interesting type of armor that I was wearing. I was using health practices and ideas of consciousness as a shield, so as not to have to interface with some of the pricklier parts of reality that I didn't like. The parts of me that wanted the Anastasia reality. These guys were like, "Well get the fuck out of here acting like that."   Daniel: (55:18) Slowly, I had to learn how to humble myself to people I had thought I was superior to. Then realise like, these are the people who can teach me. This has really, really turned me around in a big way. I needed this bad. I was pretty far out there, because getting on stages and talking to thousands of people and having a podcast and all that stuff where you get this little bit of internet celebrity and you think you're sort of a big deal. Then you realise like, well in your small town nobody knows what a podcast is, and they don't care. If you want to hunt with them, this is the conditions and this is the way they're going to let it happen. You're like, have to be meek and humble.   Daniel: (55:55) I mean that was hard, and it was so good. My bullshit meter has I don't know has moved several steps back towards center because it was way out there. My bullshit meter was more like, "Well if you don't know about like green juice and you don't know about coffee enemas, and you don't know about six day meditation retreats in silence, then you don't know anything." It's like, dude, here I was way off the mark.   Mason: (56:23) You're not paranoid about parasites all the time.   Daniel: (56:25) You're not worried about what they're doing [inaudible 00:56:27]. Now it's cool though, as I feel it's that third eye idea. It's like I've got a left eye and a right eye, and they are connected to different hemispheres and those brain hemisphere see the world in kind of opposite ways. One sees the world pretty analytically, and one sees the world pretty artistically. There's a merging in the center where you take those two worldviews and you bring them together. Well, I was spending all my time with just those right-brained people, and I was avoiding all those left brain people like they were wrong. Now I got a lot of those people in my life and they've brought balance to the other side, so that I feel now like I can walk a middle path. If you lose that, you might think you're on a middle path not realising you're all the way to one side or the other because you've lost the contrast.   Daniel: (57:17) Now I've got these people who are some of my very best and closest allies and friends, who are not people I would have necessarily connected with before, but they have opened my world up to things that I didn't know what I was missing in my life. I haven't jettisoned all the other stuff I've just for every far out idea you need some earthy idea to balance it and counter oppose it. That's really important. What we're seeing right now, it's probably a very different political landscape in Australia than it is here in the States right now. But I'm sure from the outside you can see what's happening here, which is like this soft civil war, this cold civil war that's happening here with these oppositional ideas. I get frustrated because we call one left wing and call one right wing. I'm always like, "Man, every plane I see has like both wings."   Daniel: (58:02) That's how it flies. You cut one off, like, "No, we're just going to be the left wing plane." It's like we'll crash and vice versa we're just the right wing. It's like you need both. They're supposed to keep each other in balance. What's happening now is they're saying, no, only this or only this. So similarly, this is a holistic, and what's cool about that is just every mystery teaching ever is always this. Whatever place you look where there's a mystery teaching, it talks about these two oppositional forces that bring each other into, and finding that balance point in the center. I think when you have this hunting gathering component, it gives a platform for exploring consciousness in a way that you never get too far off balance.   Mason: (58:47) Dude, and that's why I love your work so much. I mean, when someone would go like, "Hey, so what does Vitalis do?" It's like, "Well, I'm going to tell you all the things." It's at some point it's experiential. What you're talking about is holding that consistent ground of integration and sharing, for lack of a better word, principles in and around these hardcore ideas that can be applied actually to your life. But that's why, if you are going to the supermarket, if you're going to farmer's markets, if you're doing a little bit of foraging, it doesn't really matter if you listen to the podcast. The WildFed podcast I've dug into a little bit, I'm really enjoying it so far. But the show's relevant wherever you're at, and you'll really get that. It's like, yes, it is absolutely about the hunting and foraging and the fishing.   Mason: (59:34) But no matter where you're at, it's not just this bullshit idea of like, "Yeah but it can work for anybody. "It is because underlying are principles that you can… Everything you've just talked about nailed it. For someone like myself that is fanatical and does shoot off into the heavens quite often as well, that's been a nice stable ground. It helps, kind of, me feel comfortable in the direction that I'm at. I always have people coming towards me who have cracked out in one particular identity and they're trying to integrate. It's interesting trying to explain what that is. I really, really appreciate that. I'm sure it gets sung a lot, but being there and sharing authentically to help us continue to integrate and not go into the excesses that can cause pathology when we are having these beautiful intention to become healthy, that's really appreciated.   Daniel: (01:00:31) We are in that time where people, like, pathology around every corner right now. We have to be really careful. There's never been a more confusing time in history. I feel like the fundamental thing that's going to be, I mentioned it earlier, I feel like big choices are coming. Because pretty soon the distinction between reality and augmented reality and virtual reality are going to get so gray, it's going to be so difficult to sort out, not for us, man, we grew up in reality. But the next generation of kids are going to grow up in augmented reality and the next generation of kids are going to grow up in a virtual world.   Daniel: (01:01:08

Two of the most powerful force users of thei era, Darth Sidious and Master Yoda. People waited decades to see the ever waited duel between the two, and finally in episode 3, we got a taste of it. Let’s get to the point, who was stronger? First I'll address a point that has been extremely debated. Who had the upper hand in episode 3’s battle? Yoda and Sidious seemed to be drawn in a stale mate, with both showcasing their force powers, acrobatics, speed, and dueling techniques, however it didn’t seem like either one was victorious. So let’s go into the comics, novelizations, and expanded universe for answers that the movies don’t give us.

In this episode of the 18th Century Podcast we'll take a look at dueling. First I'll read the Code Duello, which was practically the instruction manual for duels, then we'll take a look at a brief history of duels, then I'll tell you a little story of a duel which may have happened in 1792 called, The Petticoat Duel. read script here: https://18thcentury.home.blog/?p=125 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cj123/support

Hello and welcome!Today’s episode is called: “Procrastinating? Stuck In Perfectionism? Read this...”Procrastination. Perfectionism.You know what we're talking about, right? Resistance.“Imposter Syndrome”. Fear of Criticism. Incompletion.It’s all resistance.When life is working really well, when creativity is working really well, it flows. Now, there's work involved in that for sure. It might take a little bit to get there, but if you're stuck, if you're not even sitting down to do your work, that's generally resistance.Resistance is a pretty sneaky. It shows up as things like procrastination or self-doubt or not finishing what you start or whatever it may be for you.Resistance can feel pretty insurmountable. Especially when you have had these habits of behavior for a long time - they can feel almost impossible to break through.Believe me, though. It is absolutely possible to break through resistance - and It is possible for your writing to flow freely and easily for you and pleasurably too!So.... let's do this:First I'll talk about how I've seen resistance show up for the people I've worked with.Then I'll tell you my own resistance story and the 2 biggest things I learned.Finally, I'll give you 7 steps to breaking through resistance (and I'll link you to something else that will help...)Common Ways Resistance Shows Up:I’ve worked for quite some time as a book coach and I’ve resistance rear it’s tricky little head in different ways for different people - but here are the most common ways I’ve seen resistance shows up for people I have worked with:Procrastination - when when you find any number of reasons to avoid sitting down and writing.Perfectionism - where nothing you do feels good enough to share. Perfectionism may stop you from even starting, may keep you perpetually in “draft” mode or maybe allow you to complete a draft, but not share it with the world.“Imposter Syndrome” - This is where you feel like a fake or a fraud. You know the thoughts: “Who am I to think I could be a writer?” or “What have I got to say that is different?” or “Who would want to listen to me?”. Yep. “Imposter Syndrome”.Fear of Criticism - Fear of the judgement or criticism of others is a root cause of much resistance and ties in with the other types of resistance I’ve mentioned so far.Incompletion - Not following through. Have you got multiple project that you started but didn’t finish? Or several unfinished drafts of the one project hanging around? Incompletion.Know this: No matter how long you’ve been in these patterns or no matter how emotionally charged these resistance habits are for you they are just habits of behaviour - and I promise you that they can be changed.It doesn't matter how long you have been in resistance or how long you have been having difficulty with your creativity. All that matters is that you:commit to yourself and do the work to change and create new habits.believe that you can change - even if you have tried before. That was then so it’s totally different. This is now.My StoryAs you may know if you are reading this, I’m a book coach and a book editor, but I’m also a singer and a songwriter.Writing has always come easily for me, however, for years I was stuck in resistance in relation to singing and songwriting.I knew from the time I was really little that these were things I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to sing songs I had written myself, but I felt absolutely unable to.I was completely terrified by the idea of performing in front of people. I was consumed by the fear that I would not be good enough as a singer and a writer, but what really held me back most of all was the fear of being judged or criticised or laughed at by anybody for doing that I loved.All of this led to me really down and really low, because as the years went by I wasn't living life as I wanted to. I wasn’t allowing myself be the person I wanted to be. I wasn’t giving myself permission to do the things I wanted to and I didn't feel like I would be ever able to break through that.So the downward spiral continued - of not doing what I loved and feeling unhappy because I was not doing what I loved.This went on for years until - thankfully - at some time in my early twenties I was working at a job I hated in a cold, damp, ugly office. I had a boss who was pretty inappropriate to say the least and I turned up for work many days holding back tears. I was really unhappy.Ultimately, it dawned on me that I had spent the previous few years doing things I didn't want to and I knew that if I didn't stop and make a change this was going to be my next few years as well.In that moment I made a decision to do whatever I needed to to break through my resistance and fear so I could live my life doing the things I wanted to in the way I wanted to - singing and writing and expressing myself freely as I am.That was the start of quite a journey!I needed to become really honest about what I was or wasn’t doing in my habits, I needed to face my fears, I needed to show up for myself, I needed to do the work (to start at the very beginning of learning how to write songs and how to record and perform and all of those things. I had to overcome my resistance patterns (of procrastination and perfectionism and “Imposter Syndrome” and fear of criticism) to write and to sing.I did, too! Ultimately I traveled and toured in the States and in Europe with my own band, singing songs that I had written myself. I released albums and made videos and had my music and lots more and it was awesome!Here are the two biggest things I learned:Yes, it can feel hard or scary to do your creative work and share it with the world, and you do open yourself up criticism and whatever else you may currently be fearing - but it is much harder and much scarier not to do your creative work and share it with the world. I promise.Resistance shows up day-to-day in ways that feel so “normal” they feel impossible to change. Ways like procrastination, perfectionism, self doubt, not feeling good enough to do the very thing you most want to do, not completing and following through on the projects you start, the paralysing fear of the criticism or judgement of others… They feel so part of life it can feel unthinkable to really change them. I promise you, though, it is absolutely possible change.Ready to change?Here are 7 Steps To Break Through ResistanceRealise that nothing has gone wrong here. You are simply in habituated ways of being that do not serve you anymore. Piling on self-judgement and blame won’t help - it will just reinforce those feelings. Be kind to yourself. It’s ok. Now let’s figure out a new way to be.Get clear about what you really want in relation to your writing. FEEL why you want to write. What do you love about it? What excites you about having a finished project? Get really clear about and connected with these desires, with your motivation and inspiration.See fear as your friend and get curious. Nice and easy. Fear is giving you lots of great insight and guidance that you will use to move forward. Gently ask questions about what fear is trying to tell you, what valuable learning is held within the feelings of fear. Does your path forward look different to what you have been expecting? How can you change course?Notice what your habits are. Awareness is the first step to change. Do all this from a place of gentle curiosity. What are my habits here? Isn’t this interesting! Why do I do this? What can i learn here?Identify how you might create new habits - habits that support what you truly want to do and how you deeply want to be. Really have your own back in this.Put these habits in place. Try them out. Test them. Adapt them to improve them. Really commit to this.Expect changes and as they happen welcome them and enjoy them.This might seem like a lot of effort, but believe me, it already takes you a lot of effort and energy to procrastinate, to hold yourself back, to criticise yourself, to worry...When you release the resistance and allow your creativity to flow it becomes FUN and exciting and energising.It’s not just for you - it’s for your audience too, because:You matter in the world.Your voice matters in the world.What you have to say and what you have to share is important.Your words and work can truly impact the people you reach.(Read: Make A Real Difference With Your Writing)I am cheering you on in breaking through your resistance and I'm here to support you in any way I can!Thank you so much for being here!Aoifexo********* Want to write a non-fiction or self help book? I’ve got a gift for you! A FREE writing course designed to help you do just that! You can get that here: http://www.mymessageislove.com/free-writing-course If you’d prefer to work with me 1:1 on your writing you can find out more about that here: http://www.mymessageislove.com/work-with-meFor any other enquiries, email me at: copy@mymessageislove.comAoife MY MESSAGE IS LOVE********* Note: You might like these episodes too: #5 - 5 Ways To End Writer's Block (Without Bullying Yourself) #13 - How To Not Care What People Think About You (Or Your Work) #26 - Sensitive And Creative? STOP Blocking Yourself!*********

It’s the start of a new year, which is an exciting time all around. You’re probably excited about new opportunities, starting a company, or building product in 2018!   While I’m all for optimism, I’ve also gotta stay true to them theme of Build: debunking myths and misconceptions when it comes to building tech product, companies and your career in tech ;)   So we’re going to spend the next four episodes of Build debunking themes around fundraising for startups.   I know what you’re thinking: “Poornima, is this really necessary?! Can’t we just focus on product and engineering? How about some Build Tips with those friendly product managers, designers, and engineers from Pivotal Labs?”   Don’t worry we’ve got plenty of those in store for you! Before we dive back into the fun and friendly banter of Ronan and his team, I thought it was necessary to start 2018 debunking myths around fundraising.   Here are my reasons for doing this:   Reason #1: If you want to be a founder and start a startup in 2018, you need to know how to control your own destiny.   Gone are the days of a quick and easy seed deal. If you don’t believe me, then here are two posts from very active investors Fred Wilson and Jason Calacanis with compelling data spanning the past 5 years. They show you that investment in early-stage companies is indeed slowing down, and why the trend is going to continue. #byebyebubble   Reason #2: If you want to be a founder and fundraise, you need to know what it’s really going to take to get the first check that gives you the freedom to quit your day job.   I know I previously explored what it takes to raise capital from investors and how investors add value beyond the check. But times are changin’! As I went back and reviewed the episodes I realized that while much of the advice still applies, there are new challenges founders, especially first-time founders face.   If you’re going to be one of them, then you need to be aware of them as you build your startup. There are also going to be a lot of sacrifices that you will need to consider making. As you’re faced with them, you might feel like you’re doing things wrong, when others have had an easier time. But you cannot compare when the market is in flux.   Reason #3: Don’t want to be a founder? Even if being a founder is the furthest thing from your mind, you might be thinking about joining a startup as an employee at any stage — garage to growth.   Well you need to be able to tell fact from fiction. You don’t want to get lured into visions of billion-dollar exits, only to discover that they are going to be cutting health care benefits, won’t be able to make payroll next month, or all that equity won’t help you buy my 2005 Honda Civic!   You need to be able to ask tough questions to understand the real health of the company, and market opportunity, so that you can decide if it’s worth taking the risk.   Reason #4: As an employee at a startup, every quarter you are going to be tasked with challenging milestones.   Metrics matter more and more these days, and every department has a funnel.   For engineering, it’s making sure the team is continuing to build and ship a quality product, balancing out features with infrastructure and keeping an eye out for that pesky tech debt to avoid slowdowns.   For product, it’s making sure there is a good balance of attracting new customers, while engaging and monetizing existing ones. And holding the engineering team accountable to spending time on paying down product debt.   While marketing has to keep growing traffic no matter what!   Teams are also staying lean longer, and founders are looking for employees with generalist backgrounds who can #GSD.   Everyone’s contribution matters to achieving metrics, which makes you feel wanted as an employee. But it also means that you need to be good at prioritizing, understanding tradeoffs, and a fast learner!   At the end of the day, you need to know and understand that what you are doing is actually moving the needle and going to help attract investment and customers.   There is no point in building product or marketing just for the sake of it.   Hopefully my reasons have convinced you why learning about fundraising is integral to your own success at a startup, and we can move on to the first episode of the year! In it, we’re going to tackle the first misconception a lot of first-time founders fall prey: thinking they need to reach out to investors the moment they have an idea.   It turns out you actually don't need to reach out to investors and you can get started by funding your idea on your own. You’ve probably heard this a lot already…   Quite frankly, investors won’t even take meetings if you do reach out. I can count on two hands the number of investors who I had successfully raised from in previous years that wouldn’t even return my emails recently! Why? Because it’s getting really competitive out there and they want to make sure startups have substantial progress before they are willing to take time to meet.   To help us out, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to fund female founders as well as mix-gendered teams.   I choose Erica and her peers to come on the show because they are ALL founders first and investors second. Meaning they have sat on both sides of the table.   As you watch today’s episode you’ll learn:   Why investment may not be applicable to the type of business you are building and alternate approaches to funding your startup The questions investors ask themselves before they will respond to a meeting request or write a startup a check When startups are “too early” to fundraise and why the definition of “too early” is inconsistent — who really gets funded early and why The work that startup founders and teams must do, if they are keen on attracting investment In future episodes we’ll dive into topics like why raising capital won’t help you outdo competition, how to get over the constant rejection, and what it’s going to take to get that first check. Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. Episode Transcript Poornima Vijayashanker:           Got an idea for a tech product that you want to scale into a big business? You probably think that you need to go out and raise capital from an investor, right? Well, it turns out that you may not need to. In today's *Build* episode, we're going to explore when it makes sense to reach out to investors.                     Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each *Build* episode, I invite innovators and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One misconception a lot of first-time founders fall prey to is thinking they need to reach out to investors the moment they have an idea. It turns out you actually don't need to reach out to investors and you can get started by funding your idea on your own. In today's episode, we're going to dive in deep to understand some of the mistakes that first-time founders make when it comes to funding their idea. We'll also talk about what investors are looking for and when it makes sense to reach out to them. To help us out, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to fund female founders as well as mix-gendered teens. Thanks for joining us today, Erica.   Erica Brescia:              Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           This is the first time that you and I are meeting. Thanks for being here. I want to know a little bit more about you. Let's start with your background. What got you interested in tech?   Erica Brescia:              I've always been very interested in gadgets. It started out actually with mobile phones way back in the day, but I've always been curious about learning more about technology and gadgets and how things work. I really wanted to understand how mobile phone networks worked back in the day. Don't ask me why. I went on to study investment finance. A different path than a lot of people in Silicon Valley take. My father is an entrepreneur and I always had it in the back of my mind I wanted to start my own company. I got introduced to my co-founder and decided I was just going to help him work out a few kinks in the business and get it off the ground. Here I am now running a software company. It's really a case of being open to new opportunities, but also just having this lifelong interest in understanding how things work and learning new things.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Let's talk about Bitnami, your current company. What exactly does Bitnami do and what inspired you to start it?   Erica Brescia:              Bitnami is a catalog of open-source applications that you can deploy on servers. It's primarily like B2B software. Things like maybe Moodle or Druple or WordPress, if you're familiar with that. We also package up a lot of development environments and development tools, things like Jenkins and Get Lab or Anode or Rails or Django Development environment. We have over a million deployments a month of the applications that we package. We publish them both through Bitnami.com as well as on all of the major cloud bender platforms. Users choose Bitnami because they know everything is going to work right out of the box every time, and they get a consistent experience wherever they deploy the software. If I can just add one more thing to that, one thing I'm particularly excited about is up until now we've been bootstrapping through our relationships with cloud vendors, but we're about to launch a new product for the enterprise. We're essentially taking the next step in the company's evolution by productizing all of the automation that we've built to deliver this catalog of applications so that others can take advantage of it, too.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           It sounds like Bitnami has been going strong for a long time. How long have you guys been around?   Erica Brescia:              We've been working on the Bitnami part of the business since 2013, but the technology dates back about ten years to when we started Bitrock, which is the predecessor. We do have several years in now.   A Day In The Life of a Startup COO   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's great. As a COO, what's your day to day like?   Erica Brescia:              It was funny, when I thought through that question, there's no day to day. I spent Monday and Tuesday in some really key BD meetings. In Seattle yesterday, I was in LA for an open-source conference. I'm obviously here today. The way that we have our leadership roles between my co-founder and I might be different than a lot of other companies. I run everything except for product and engineering. That means that marketing, sales, BD, legal, finance, everything rolls up to me. That basically keeps things running and make sure that the company is growing and bringing on the right people and has revenue coming in and all those good things. Obviously as a quickly growing startup that's very, very tech heavy, I'm still involved in everything including product and engineering, too. There's never a typical day. It varies a lot and the days are long, but a lot of fun.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Very good. Now you have actually taken on another role. If Bitnami isn't enough, you decided to join XFactor as an investment partner. Tell us a little bit about XFactor and why the decision to go into investment.   Erica Brescia:              Absolutely. I'll start with XFactor and tell you about the fund. Then I'll talk about why I joined. XFactor is a $3 million seed fund. We're making $100K investments in 30 companies. Pretty easy math. The genesis was really a woman named Anna and a guy named Chip. Chip is a partner with Fly Bridge. They got together and wanted to find a way to fund more women in technology because they had read some of the statistics about how difficult it can be for women to raise funding. The truth is, it's really an untapped opportunity. There's a ton of brilliant women building some very interesting companies. They were having problems in some cases getting through the traditional VC process because of some of the biases that we've all read about. We probably don't need to go through that. The idea was that they were going to get together a group of operating female founders. I think that's really the key is we're all women who have built and scaled our own businesses across a variety of sectors. I have a lot of experience in B2B and closing very big BD deals.                     I've acquired companies and things like that. Some of the other women are very heavy on the consumer side and they're great at branding and rolling out new products. We got a really diverse team of women, but who are actually still on the ground running businesses, very in touch with the problems that founders have in getting new companies off the ground. We think we have a pretty unique perspective and also an edge in terms of what we can offer founders because we're so close to the challenges that they're experiencing. We're very focused obviously with that check size on pretty early-stage companies and helping set those founders up for success. We do expect most of them will go on to raise for their venture capital. We're there to support them in doing that. I actually haven't raised VC for my company, but all the other women have. We have a good diversity of experiences and opinions around that too.   Being A Startup Founder And Angel Investor   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Why'd you join?   Erica Brescia:              It took a lot of thought. They came to me. At first, I thought they just wanted to run the idea by me back in February. Then I get an email a few days later saying, “We'd love to have you join us.” I really did spend some time thinking about it and talking to my co-founder and my husband about whether or not I'd be able to balance everything, because it is a big commitment. If I make a commitment, I want to come through on it and make sure that I'm not letting the founders and my fellow investment partners down. It really came down to the opportunity both for personal growth for me and to give back. There's a financial opportunity, too, which is fantastic. I really saw that we have a pretty unique angle into both deal flow. Several of us are YC founders as well. We have access to the YC network and obviously just good networks in Silicon Valley and outside as well. I felt like we could do something really interesting. I could meet a lot more women in technology. Also, I really do think there's a huge untapped opportunity there. I think we'll be able to produce above-average returns. It really came down to me asking the question, “Do I have time for this?” I'm going to get less sleep for sure. That's definitely been the case.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Sure. You can make time.   Erica Brescia:              It was just too good to pass up. This is one of those things that I just couldn't say “no” to because the opportunity is so big and it's something that I'm enjoying doing so much.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Wonderful. As soon as I saw the news, I wanted to reach out to you guys because I thought it was fabulous and needed to be spread to everyone else. Let's talk about your investments then. I know everyone has probably got different things that they want to invest in. We're going to talk to some of your partners later on. Let's talk about what you like to invest in.   Why Angel Investors Focus On Making Investments In Markets and Business Models They Are Familiar With   Erica Brescia:              Sure. I right now am very focused on things that I am passionate about. I think about whether or not the company keeps me up at night thinking about it later. I am usually receiving on the deal flow that it's on B2B and enterprise sales in particular because that's where my expertise and experience is. I found myself drawn to some other things, too. One of the investments that'll be announced soon, I wish I could name some of them.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's OK.   Erica Brescia:              I think we're about to announce that we've made eight investments in the first two months.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Oh, awesome.   Erica Brescia:              We've been very busy and we've met some amazing women. One of the investments that I've led so far is very much a technology, cloud-focused company, which is absolutely my bailiwick. The other one is a fin-tech company. I was really drawn. I loved the founder. Was very impressed by her and the team that she's put together. Also, it was just the problem that they were solving, I could see it so clearly. It was palpable and I was staying up at night and I was talking to my husband about what they were doing and why I thought it was exciting. When I start thinking about how they can make the business successful and what they should be thinking about, that's a very good sign to me. I know it's not direct answer. I invest in this list of companies, but that's really not the way that it's worked out so far. I've looked at a variety of med-tech companies, fin-tech companies, more women in technology and sourcing and recruiting companies. Some people doing interesting stuff with NLP. It's really been a very diverse range of companies.   Why Women Founded Tech Companies Are Broader Than Gets Portrayed                     One of the things that I think you'll see us talking about more, which is very cool, is a lot of these companies are not what you would typically think of as the women-in-tech companies. A lot of people think all we want to work on is beauty. I like makeup and clothes and everything as much as the next person, but I don't know anything about those businesses. A lot of the deal flow that we've had, it's coming from all kinds of very hardcore tech, a lot of VR stuff, too, and AR. We've seen a broad range. Right now we're looking for the next billion-dollar businesses really. Any other VC it's, “Is this something I'm passionate about and can it be huge and can I add value in helping them make it so?”   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Actually, that's a good segue into talking about I think one of the things that confuses some folks in our audience and even first-time founders is, what qualifies as a tech product and then what—let's start there and then we can talk about maybe what a big idea is.   Understanding If Your Startup Is A Tech Enabled Business Or A Tech Product   Erica Brescia:              Sure. Almost anything these days is tech enabled. If it's not, you might have a scalability problem. I don't think we have very strict definitions as to what is tech or not. If excelling in technology and in the technical underpinnings of the product is going to give people an advantage, that's probably a tech company or something that we would think of as such. Some of the subscription businesses or there's a food device I can't talk too much about, but that we're looking at. A really novel subscription business around it. Another two companies have come through that are working on breast pumps for women. They're hardware companies but there's a lot of technology obviously that goes into the hardware. Obviously a lot of tech powering how they're approaching the businesses. It's really a pretty loose definition of what a tech company is. Even some of them are physical spaces now that we're looking at. It's a pretty broad range. It's not like we're only investing in software or we're only investing in sass or something like that.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's good to know. Tech enabled but there's probably some conversation that needs to be had around, “Are you really just selling water online or is there a distribution model that is tech enabled and it's cool if you sell water online.”   Erica Brescia:              Exactly.   Why Finding An Investor Isn’t Good Enough — You Need To Find THE Investor Who Understand Your Market and Business Model   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Got it. Then let's talk about I think another area, though, which is—you've already started talking about you enjoy the deals that are B2B, more enterprise, and maybe a little bit more saas heavy. I think one of the concerns that a lot of first-time founders have is, “I just need to find an investor.” I just need to find one investor, but they may not necessarily find that right investor. It's interesting because it's not just limited to tech. I was reading Barbara Lynch's memoir, who's a restaurateur, and she talked about going and finding the investors who invested in restaurants for her nine restaurants. Talk to me a little bit about what it means to be vertical focused as an investor.   Erica Brescia:              You want investors who understand your business or at least have the capacity and time to learn about it and who are upfront if they don't understand things, too. There's several things that make people good investors. One is, don't be an asshole, if I can say that on your show.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Sure. Of course.   Erica Brescia:              I just don't want to work with people who are not good people. To me, some people don't care about...I've actually had people come to me and say, “It doesn't matter. All VCs are going to be assholes, you just need to accept that and move on.” I'm like, “Uh, uh. No. No, I don't. There's a lot of great VCs out there.”   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's the normal assumption.   Erica Brescia:              There are a lot of good people out there, men and women in venture capital. I do think it's important that you understand somebody who understands your business and the cycles. Before, example, we've had a lot of very hardware-centric businesses come through. Those are difficult to invest in. In particular, if you don't have experience in hardware because you don't have a really good understanding of how long it's going to take and what the development cycle should look like and how capital intensive that you're going to be. It's harder to make good investment decisions. It's harder to be helpful for the founder, because if you have unrealistic expectations for the type of business they're building, nobody wins. It's the same, we've seen a lot of robotics companies doing super cool stuff, but I've told them, “Look, I'm not an expert in robotics. I'm going to have to go out.” We do have an associate who does some work for us, but we have to go out and be willing to invest our time to get up to speed in those industries in order to feel comfortable making an investment.                     It's good advice. I think what you're alluding to is, find an investor that actually knows what they're talking about in your space because otherwise they could really do damage by slowing you down, refusing to fund a second round or something like that. A follow on or just inundating you with questions all the time. The last thing you want to be doing is just educating your investors on the market when you have a company to build.   The Sacrifices Founders Have To Make To Get Their Startup Off The Ground   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Exactly. No, that's a good point. Let's talk about the other side of this, which is also, it's very tempting, as a first-time founder or somebody who’s green, to have an idea, whether it's hardware or anything that we feel is capital intensive or sometimes we just don't even have the capital as a founder. We haven't quite got to the financial point of our life. It's tempting to immediately say, “Oh my gosh, to get this thing off the ground I need to go and get investment. That might not be the right time.” Let's talk about what time horizon makes sense. I know it's going to be product specific, but I think it would be helpful to just—   Erica Brescia:              It really depends on so many different variables. One of them I think is important is to be realistic about where you are in your life and what kind of sacrifices you're willing to make. The reality is, if you have a family and a mortgage, it's a heck of a lot harder to stop taking a salary—particularly if you were to work in Silicon Valley because the salaries are quite high here right now—and go and start something from scratch. If you're 22 and right out of college and have none of those financial responsibilities, you might have more flexibility. My vote is do as much as you can before raising funding. Build as much as you can. First of all, there's so many good investment opportunities right now that I think most investors, they want to see...first they want to see that you're committed. If you just go out with a pitch deck—like I took two weeks of holiday for my job to put together a pitch deck and if you fund me, I'll go do this—you're never going to get funded because we want to see conviction.   We want to see that you quit your job, you're committed, you've been working on this with somebody else preferably for six months. You have the personality and the skills and the charm or whatever it may be, the conviction to actually get other people to join you. That's important, too. Unless you absolutely can not do it without raising money up front, I would say get at least to a prototype or as far as you can to be able to go show people and prove to people that you're there for the long haul and that you're willing to make sacrifices to make something happen. I will also plug incubators, like Y Combinator. Obviously I'm biased because we went through the program. That was a great experience for us in terms of helping us just build some momentum and we did rebranding of the company and accomplished a lot during that period. It's not about the funding necessarily, but it can give people who are cash wrapped a bit of cash to fund those first few months. It really helps you to accelerate that initial process and sets you up very well to raise from VCs after the fact.                     We've certainly sourced a lot of our deal flow from YC. We try at XFactor to be very broad and we've had people from all over the world, in fact, contacting us. Of course, we're going to look to YC because they've already been through that filter. They've achieved something during the period that they're in Y Combinator. It's a three-month sprint. We've found that looking at people that have at least gotten to the point where you would be if you've gone through a Y Combinator or similar. They've got something to show. That's when it makes sense. I will say, this is really the approach that we've taken with Bitnami is try to find money from customers. Let's not undervalue the fact that people will pay you for what you're building. Hopefully if you're building something valuable, and you're much better off going through that experience, learning what it takes to sell to people and collect their money—there's a lot of details there—and try to build your business that way. You don't need to go for VC right away. There are great examples of companies that have been hugely successful doing that like GitHub and Atlassian.   Why It’s OK To Build A Lifestyle Business   Poornima Vijayashanker:           I'm going to have you hold that thought because we are going to talk about that in a little bit. Now, the other thing I want to point out because you said customers, but I think also bootstrapping with a pay check to get off the ground. A lot of times people are worried about quitting their job and having a source of income, so using that especially for businesses that a little bit more capital intensive early on. Want to throw that out there. I want to dive a little bit deeper into this whole idea of, “I do want to get investment eventually.” Let's say I have gotten to a point, maybe I've gone to an incubator or I've gotten it off the ground, I have some customers. Then there comes that period where you're talking to an investor and they may not really understand how big your idea is. It's oftentimes that thing that people nitpick over and over again that, is this a big idea? Is this a big market? Or sadly people like to say, it's a lifestyle business. There's a stigma here in Silicon Valley against that. Let's talk about what exactly defines a big idea—if we can even define it because I know it's a little amorphous—versus a lifestyle businesses and maybe even break that stigma of that lifestyle business.   Erica Brescia:              Sure. First I'll say I don't think there's anything wrong with a “lifestyle” business. There have been a lot of deals that we looked at. There was this one amazing woman, I won't name the company, but she came through my network actually. She developed some really interesting technology. It was my belief after talking to a lot of people that she's going to sell the company for somewhere between $30–50 million within two years. Awesome for her. Not a great VC investment?   Why Venture Capitalist Don’t Invest In Lifestyle Businesses   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Why?   Erica Brescia:              Because we can't produce the kind of returns that we're looking for. We have LPs just like any other VC fund. We have a responsibility to them to generate returns. I told this woman I want to help her in any way I can. She's incredibly bright. I just couldn't see a path to them building a billion-dollar business. That's really what it needs to be. There needs to be a path that you can understand for how this can be huge. It's going to be very risky. I should say we always know that businesses are going to change and evolve and you're very much betting on the founders. That's absolutely true, but at the same time, if they have conviction around a specific idea and we don't see how it can get to be a huge business, and some of the great hardware companies we're looking at are like that. I think they will have fantastic businesses and fantastic exits. I certainly wouldn't call them lifestyle businesses because they're life changing in terms of the returns that they'll create for the founders. They may not be appropriate for a VC fund. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.                     You need to take a dispassionate look about what you're building, how big the market really is, how much of it you have an opportunity to grab, and be realistic about that. Then think about the kind of funding that makes sense. You might be able to find a family office or something or angel investors who are not looking for the same VC-style risk and returns. They'll be totally happy with the company selling for $10, $20, $30 million. In a couple years, they'll double their money and everybody's fine.   Where Do Venture Capitalist And Angel Investors Get Money To Fund Startups   Poornima Vijayashanker:           On that note, let's actually define what an LP is and why VC versus angels that people understand if they're not familiar.   Erica Brescia:              Sure. An LP is limited partner and they're the people that put money into the funds. They're often wealthy. They always have some money coming from somewhere. Often wealthy individuals, but depending on the fund, they might also be pension funds or endowments and things like that from universities or different trusts and things like that. Basically the people who put money into the hands of the venture capitalists who are the people who actually invest that money. In the case of angels, angels I think have evolved a lot. Now we have the super angels.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           We'll get into that in a future episode. I keep saying this, but it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen guys.   Erica Brescia:              I won't take us to off course then. There are a lot of different kinds of angels. I was an angel investor before joining XFactor. I mean, not at a huge scale, but I'd made a few investments myself.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           What's the scale?   Erica Brescia:              I was writing like $10,000 checks.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Perfect.   Erica Brescia:              Smaller checks. Then there are people like—I'll take my father, who's one of my closest friends and heroes and has inspired me to do all of this. He built a brick and mortar contracting business that did quite well. He's been making tons of angel investments and all kinds of different things. Some tech, some very, very nontech. You have people like that. Then you have people like Eric Han for example. My company did raise a bit of angel funding primarily to get some really great folks involved with the company. Some of these people were like Eli Gillin, Eric Han. Eric Han was the CTO of Netscape. He went on to be a very early investor in Red Hat. Since then, has been one of the first checks into a ton of companies that have IPO'd. He was on the board of Red Hat after they IPO'd. Eli Gillin is running his own company now, but he started and sold a company to Twitter and ran a bunch of stuff there. These are people who have done well in their career, typically understand tech. They make a lot more investments than somebody like maybe me or my father who might've written a couple of checks a year. These people are doing several key deals a year, usually only investing their own funds. That's one of the big differences. They don't have LPs. It's their own money. They might be doing it more at scale. We call them usually professional angels or super angels.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Business angels.   Erica Brescia:              Exactly. Who are making a lot of investments, but they don't have LPs to answer to.   When Does It Make Sense To Approach An Investor With Your Startup Idea — First Know What You Are Going To Do With It!   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Great. Let's end with this question. When does it make sense then when you think you have this big idea, to approach an investor? I know you guys said early, but what is maybe too early and what's a reasonable early to get a meeting?   Erica Brescia:              It depends on what you need. Let's start with why do you need the money? That's the first question you should be asking yourself. Where is this money going to get you? You better have a good answer before you go talk to VCs. What milestone are you going to hit with this? Then the second question you should ask is, could I get it from anywhere other than VCs? Do I have friends and family who might want to just give me some money? Could I even take out a loan? Sometimes these other things make sense. There are a bunch of diverse opinions on this, but my view is you don't take VC unless you absolutely need it. Until it's holding you back from scaling. In the particular case of Bitnami, for example, we've primarily bootstrapped. We've only taken a million dollars in outside funding in total. I have over 70 employees in 12 countries. We're cash-flow positive. We've built quite a stable and steady business. We are starting to talk about potentially raising venture capital because we're launching this enterprise product that I mentioned before.                     That involves building out an entirely new part of the business. I can do that off of cash flow, but I'll probably go a lot slower and we see that there's a limited window of opportunity here. I think it really depends on your specific case and whether you can do it any other way. Or if there's an investor that you can feel or that you feel can add a lot of value. There are certain investors who might have a ton of experience in your space. Maybe they started an earlier company and exited it and are just itching for the chance to do it better now that the technology is evolved or what have you. If you find people like that, I think they can be really helpful to building the business. Otherwise, it's like, you should raise when you need to raise. If you feel like you could run out of money in the near future and not be able to actually execute on your plan.   Yes There Is Such A Thing As Being Too Early To Fundraise For Your Startup And Yes It’s Inconsistent!   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Let's admit. There is a time that's too early.   Erica Brescia:              Oh yeah. There always is. It's funny. We funded a company that was quite early and quite a high evaluation. That's one of the deals I led actually. I knew the founder and he'd already built a successful company.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           There you go.   Erica Brescia:              You're much more willing then, almost eager, to get in because this is a male, female team. I happen to know the male better than the female. I told him I wanted into that deal because I think this guy has a ton of potential. Even though it was early, I would write him a check, but he's proven. That matters.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Exactly. I think that's a big stigma, or rather a big misconception around who's getting a deal, who hasn't built a product yet, or it's not on the market. It's great that you mentioned that. I think for most other folks, they need to see something. They need to see product. They need to see at least a concierge-style minimal bible product or service, some cash flow, some customers. They really want to...those who don't have a track record need to step up their game and show a little bit more credibility.   Questions Investors Ask Before They Take A Meeting Or Write A Check To A Startup Founder   Erica Brescia:              Yeah. The things I look at is, are they committed is the number one thing. Starting a company is hard and a lot of people underestimate how hard and how many sacrifices you make. You can do a whole episode on what's involved in that. Are they committed? Can they build a team? I look at that a lot. That's one thing where people who want to move to Silicon Valley who have no connections there, that's one of my questions. How are you going to find people and convince them in a highly competitive job market to join your team? If you can do that, it also speaks pretty highly of you and your ability to convince people and help them see the vision. Then can they build the product? Is it something that people will pay for? Those are the checklist items that I have. The more that you can demonstrate, the easier the time you're going to have with fundraising.                   If you can't prove that people will pay for your product, if you can't prove that people will use it, especially if you can't prove that you can build it, that's when we're going to have a lot of challenges getting to the next step. That's when I try to give people a clean “yes” or “no.” Sometimes it's like, “You're just not there yet. If you do these things, then I might be interested. I'm sorry. I need to see more before I can make the call.”   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. I think that's fair. Thank you so much Erica for sharing all this information with us today.   Erica Brescia:              Thank you for having me.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where we'll continue the conversation and talk about when it makes sense to transition from angel investment to seeking investment from venture capitalists and what you need to do in that interim period. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor Pivotal Tracker.   Blog Post 2 Subject: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup Title: Startup Funding: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup Subtitle: Interview with Erica Brescia COO and Co-Founder of Bitnami and Investment Partner at XFactor Ventures   Ready for more myth busting around startup funding? Let’s get to it then!   Last week I shared a number of reasons you should share care fundraising whether you’re a founder or startup employee. Here’s they are again, and in the Build episode we talked about why it’s a bad idea to reach out to investors when you have an idea.   This week we’re going to continue our theme and focus on what compels us to think we need to raise capital like competition heating up, the belief that the business will stop growing, or that the idea we’re pursuing isn’t really BIG enough. We’ll also be diving into the mechanics of investment talking about the nuances of an angel versus a venture capitalist, and why it’s important to look for investors that have knowledge of your marketing or industry.   Erica Brescia is back to help us out with this episode. Erica the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor Ventures as an investment partner. XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to fund female founders as well as mix-gendered teams.   Erica is a founder and investor, and having sat on both sides of the table, she knows how to dispel fact from fiction!   As you watch today’s episode you’ll learn:   Why Erica and her partners at XFactor are putting their money where their mouth is and starting a fund to invest in female founders and mix-gendered teams What the XFactor investment partners and other angels look for versus venture capitalists, and how much they are willing to invest Why competitors will come and go, and you cannot let their actions intimidate you or direct your business goals Why only you as a founder, can decide when is the right time to raise for your business     In the next two episodes we’ll explore handling all the rejections you receive from investors, how to motivate yourself to keep going, and what it’s going to take to get that first check!   Listen to the episode on iTunes! You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.   Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   ## Startup Funding: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Last time, we talked about how as a first-time founder, you don't necessarily need to immediately rush out and get investment to get your tech product off the ground. We discovered some alternate ways of funding your product development and company growth. If you missed that episode, I've included it in the link below this video.   In today's episode, we're going to dive in a little bit deeper, and talk about when it makes sense to go out for that angel investment, and then how do you transition from getting capital from angels to eventually getting it from venture capitalists, and what you need to do in the interim to make sure you're growing your company. So stick around.   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, I invite innovators, and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.   What Compels Startup Founders To Fundraise   One myth a lot of founders fall prey to is the need to constantly fundraise. They're worried that if they don't, their competition is going to swoop right in and outpace them. Or their business is just going to stop growing, and even worse than that, people might not think that they are actually onto a big idea.   To debunk these myths and more, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. For those of you who aren't familiar, XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to invest in female founders and mixed-gender teams. Thanks again for joining us.   Erica Brescia:      Thanks for having me!   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah! I know we talked a little bit in the last segment, but let's just quickly do a refresher, tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at Bitnami.   Erica Brescia:      Sure. Bitnami automates the packaging and maintenance process for server software for containerized, cloud, and behind-the-firewall deployments. We're most known right now for the Bitnami Application Catalog, which contains over 150 different pieces of server software, ranging from business schools, like content management systems, more project management systems, to development tools like GitLab and Jenkins for building out your development processes and pipeline, to stacks of things for building applications, like Node, or Rails, or Django. We work with all of the major cloud providers, and have over a million deployments a month of the apps we package across all the platforms that we support.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Awesome. In addition to Bitnami, you recently joined XFactor as an investment partner.   Erica Brescia:      I did, yes.   The Difference Between Angel Investors And Venture Capitalists   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah! We talked a little bit about that last time, and I want to pick up the conversation from our last time and dive a little bit more into not only what does XFactor do, but this whole position between angels and venture capitalists. How do you guys think of XFactor? Are you considering yourselves as angels or VCs? Would it help to start with defining angels and VCs?   Erica Brescia:      Sure. I mean, I tend to think of angels as primarily investing their own capital, and VCs are investing other people's capital. We all actually have our own funds in the fund as well, so we're LPs in addition to being the investment partners.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         What does that mean?   Erica Brescia:      That means that we're the people who put money into the fund, as the limited partners, who just put money in the fund, and then they step away, and they entrust, basically, the team of investment partners to invest that capital in companies that will produce ventures that yield returns.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Where is that money coming from? Is that your own hard-earned money, or is that from somewhere else?   Erica Brescia:      In the case of the LPs for the XFactor fund, it's from a range of different people. Some of them have just been very successful in business. Some may be managing endowments or trusts, or other investment vehicles, and they invest both in the stock market and in VC and angel funds as part of their diversification strategy.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. I think some of you have also contributed personal funds, right?   Erica Brescia:      Yes. We have put our own funds into the plan as well.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That's important to note. Yeah.   Erica Brescia:      You've got to put your money where your mouth is, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Great! No, I certainly appreciate you guys doing that.   Erica Brescia:      Plus, honestly, I think we're going to make money off of it! So why would you not do that?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Exactly!   Erica Brescia:      That is the whole point.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. You guys are operating a little bit like angels, but a little bit like VCs as well, but let's dive into more of a traditional VC model. What does that look like?   What Seed Stage Investors Are Really Looking For And The Size Of Check They Write   Erica Brescia:      Sure. The distinction there is interesting, because I would say there's seed-stage financing, which a lot of people think of as coming from angels a lot, but VC funds do as well. Those are typically much smaller rounds and much earlier stage. The company probably has something built, probably has some users, probably can show some traction, but they're usually not raising huge amounts of money, at least not by Silicon Valley standards, which are different than the rest of the world.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Let's get some ranges. Because I know some seeds can get crazy.   Erica Brescia:      Huge. Yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         So let's do a more middle-of-the-road seed. What would that look like?   Erica Brescia:      These days, I would say they're usually between $500K and $2 million. I know that's a wide range, sometimes it's smaller, sometimes it's bigger, but the fundraisings that we're participating in are usually somewhere around there. We have had some companies raise significantly more than that, and we've almost gone in more at like a Series A stage. But typically you're raising $1 million or $2million to get your idea off the ground and show a little bit more traction, before you go and raise at a Series A. Those used to be maybe $2 or $3 million. Now, most of the time, you're looking at maybe $6, $7, even $10 or $15 million as a Series A, which we certainly see in the cloud and container space in particular, which is where I'm focused with Bitnami.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK. That makes sense. Now, I'm not going to dive into microfunds and syndicates, and all that stuff. We're going to do that in a later episode. But let's go back to you, and let's talk a little bit about how you initially funded Bitnami.   How To Initially Fund Your Startup When You Cannot Attract Investment   Erica Brescia:      Customers.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Customers!   Erica Brescia:     We sold stuff. Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. When was this, by the way?   Erica Brescia:      We started with a company called BitRock over 10 years ago, and BitRock built some really interesting technology around application packaging and deployment, which has become the foundation of Bitnami. We're very unique, I would say, for a Silicon Valley company. We developed a package software product. We sold it to customers, and we generated money that way.                     Then we started providing a subscription service to a lot of software companies that needed us to build, we called them "stacks" of software, so their products could be installed and distributed very easily, and we worked with a lot of the biggest names in open source, in those days. So we had that money coming in—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         If you don't mind sharing, how big were some of those contracts?   Erica Brescia:      They were in the tens of thousands of dollars a year. So reasonably sized, but we now, in retrospect, we charged far too little. But that's one of the lessons that you learn as a founder, you're always underpricing yourself in the early days.   So we did that, and built up the company that way. Then we decided to evolve into Bitnami. We went through Y Combinator in 2013—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         So before you did that, you actually had revenue coming in?   Erica Brescia:      Yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Give us a range of how big you were at that size?   Erica Brescia:      We had 12 people, and seven figures in revenue, when we—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh! That's fabulous!   Erica Brescia:      —went through Y Combinator.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. OK. So why even bother going to—   Erica Brescia:      That's a great question! It was a subject of much debate, but again, interesting story, I suppose. My co-founder's wife had gone through Y Combinator with her own company, and had a great experience with it. And we knew that we wanted to send the company on a different trajectory—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Which was?   Erica Brescia:      Growth.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK. OK!   Erica Brescia:      We wanted to build a huge business, and the model that we'd had previously was really what we talked in the last episode about, more of a lifestyle business. Right? We built a solid business, but that's not what we were there to do. We wanted to build a huge and very meaningful company. And we felt like Y Combinator was the right way to do that.                  It gave us a lot of focus, and helped us make some interesting and difficult decisions. It also helped us a lot with hiring in the early days, and bringing more folks to the team. We've been on a pretty healthy  trajectory since then. Over 75 people. I don't give out revenue numbers, but we're profitable and growing, and doing well.                     All of that money, except for a million dollars, which we still have sitting in the bank, has come in through customers. And that million dollars we raised after going through Y Combinator. We brought in some angel investors whom we really liked, for different reasons. Some of them have a lot of experience in building companies, specifically in our space, and we felt like they could help us a lot with that.                     A couple of them are VCs who invested personally in us, because we didn't want to raise a VC fund, and a few were overseas venture investors, but they make seed stage investments. One from Japan, and one from China. And that was purely because we plan on going into those markets, and we thought it would make sense to have some people over there with a vested interest in our success.                     Y Combinator served as a good catalyst to bring that round together-   Poornima Vijayashanker:         How big was that round?   Erica Brescia:      It was just a million dollars?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh! OK. But you were already in the seven-figure revenue at that point, when you raised that million.   Erica Brescia:      Exactly.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK.   Erica Brescia:      And that money is still sitting in the bank, and we've added a healthy amount to it, and—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That was what year?   Erica Brescia:      2013.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh! It's been a while. It's been four years.   Erica Brescia:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Now, interestingly enough, you have that million, you're raising revenue, and you had grown without a lot of outside capital. I mean, you were already growing, so in that span of time, weren't you afraid that some competitor was just going to swoop right in and go out and raise $10 million or $100 million dollars, and put you out of business?   Don’t Let Competitors Intimidate You Into Fundraising For Your Startup   Erica Brescia:      What's actually funny about that question is we had a bunch of competitors do that, and they all went out of business..   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh, OK! Yeah!   Erica Brescia:      OK! Some spectacularly so. One raised $40 million, had huge names. One of the people on their board tried to come and intimidate me, and say I could never compete with—it was actually a woman running that company, too. But I won't name her, because that's not good for anyone.                     Yeah. We had a lot of companies come and raise money, but the model wasn't there yet. And that's why we didn't raise, either, right? There's a time, and we talked about this in the last episode. It's my belief that in most cases, you're better off raising when you have product-market fit. We had that at small scale, but we hadn't found what was really going to fuel exceptional growth of the company. It took us a while to get there, and a bunch of other companies tried to come in and do that, and they all went bust.                     I mean, there is a time and place when I think it does make sense, and when you do have to worry about competitors, because the truth is, once a big name competitor raises a big round, it's really hard to get anyone else to invest in you. I think Docker's a pretty good example of that in my space, right? They have tons of money. Nobody's going to invest in another container startup. Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense for investors.                     It is something to consider, but I think a lot of people spend way too much time worrying about their competitors, and not enough time worrying about their own business.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Or their customers.   Erica Brescia:      Yeah! Or their customers. Exactly. So, yeah, that matters, but you need to do what's right for you, and what's right for what you want out of your life and your business. You should ask yourself those questions. Taking on VC is taking on a lot of additional responsibility, too—   What Kind Of Return Venture Capitalists Look For   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Like what?   Erica Brescia:      Well, they're expecting a certain level of return, right? A $100 million exit is not something a VS wants, where it might be completely life changing for you, if you don't have venture capital in the company. If you're taking venture capital, you're committing to running the company for at least 5–10 years, providing they don't push you out, which happens sometimes, too, if you're not doing things the way they want.                     You're committing to managing a board, with outside parties who are going to have sometimes divergent interests from you. It could even be the case that the fund cycles are usually 10 years, and they have to return the capital to their limited partners, which we talked about earlier. They might need to get out, and want to push you to sell when you don't want to. They might want you to sell to somebody you don't want to.                     There are a lot of great things that come from venture capital, if you partner with the right people. Obviously, you get the capital you need to fuel the growth of your business, and that can be incredibly important, especially to support go-to-market activities, or SaaS business models, where customer acquisition costs might be high, but the LTV is huge. There are reasons to take money.                    I'm not against that. But you also need to understand what you're signing up for, and what it really means, and that there may be an alternative path for you if that's not the path that makes the sense for you. If you don't want to run this company for 5–10 years, and you don't expect to sell it for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, don't take venture capital. Startups That Focused On Growing Their Business First   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Some folks in our audience might be thinking, "Erica, that's fabulous for you and Bitnami, and all of the success, but I could never do that. I couldn't just sit and wait for my business to grow organically." Are there other examples of companies here in the Valley, that you're familiar with, who have done a similar approach? I know I can think of a couple, but I'm curious—   Erica Brescia:      Absolutely! Well, Atlassian, they're in the Valley now, but they came from Australia, and that's a spectacular story. They really couldn't raise, because they were in Australia, and especially back then, the VC climate in Australia was almost nonexistent. They raised very late, and a lot of it was secondary to the employees, and they've done spectacularly well. GitHub's another example. They raised very, very late in the process, in a very big round, and that gave them a lot of flexibility to do other things.                     We've seen that happen a lot. It really depends. Again, I think, going back to what I said before about product-market fit. It's my view that the best time to raise is when you just need fuel for the engine. You already know how the engine works, and it's already built, and the machine is there, and you know, "If I put X in, I'm going to get Y out." Right? That's when you can really take advantage of venture capital, and that's when it can really make a difference.                    I'm not saying take a long time to build your company like I did. I would certainly do a lot of things differently this time around, but a lot of it just has to do with where the business is, and what the capital's going to be used for.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         It's been a four-year period, right? Where you haven't taken outside investment. You took the initial million. But in that period of time, how has not taking capital, or not thinking about fundraising, how has that helped you and Bitnami?   Erica Brescia:      Well, several ways. I think the most important thing is focus. Not having $10 or $20 or $50 million in the bank makes you focus on what's really going to move the business forward. It's really easy, and I have seen this countless times with companies that I will not name. They raise a ton of money, and they go out and hire a ton of people, and everything falls apart.                     Because humans are humans, right? These are not just cogs in the machine, especially when you're trying to build a breakthrough or game-changing product. You need incredibly smart people. They're going to have strong personalities. They're going to have past experiences from other companies. And you need to be able to get those people to work well together. So many startups have failed in doing that, and it's led to their own demise, or at least slowed them down a lot, and really burned a lot of bridges with fantastic employees.   I'd say it's allowed us to build out the infrastructure to responsibly scale the team, and it's helped us to focus, again, on making the right investments in terms of where we're spending our time. It's also great for negotiating business deals, I will tell you. That doesn't come up a lot—   How To Compel Customers To Do Business With Your Startup   Poornima Vijayashanker:         How so?   Erica Brescia:      I was in meetings, even earlier this week, and these are quite big, multimillion-dollar-a-year deals, and they were asking some questions about what the business model looked like, and I could look at these people with a straight face and say like, "Look, we're not VC backed. My company needs to make money. You want me to be around. This needs to make sense for us, financially."                     That drives a lot of my decision making. I'm very, very involved in the corporate and business development stuff that we do. I need to do deals that make sense for my business. For some reason, it's a lot easier for people to get their heads around that when you don't have venture capital, which is kind of a funny thing, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Well, people understand where you're coming from, and what resources you have at that level.   Erica Brescia:      Yeah! I'm not BSing them. "I have to pay people, and you're going to get a lot of value out of this, and you need to pay me, and I'm not going to do it on a bet that the relationship itself is going to benefit me enough, because that wouldn't be responsible business." That's what I go to all the time. It's not responsible business, you're not doing it. I think being bootstrapped and funding through customers really helps you think through that and make very good business decisions. We say no to all kinds of things, too. And I think that's easier, as a result of that.                    The one other aspect I'd say is, we don't have to manage investors. It takes a lot of time to build investor relationships, which I do do that anyway, because we may r

In this episode I finish the series I've been doing about Brexit in the same way that I started it, by having a conversation with my Dad. First I'll highlight some vocabulary and phrases, then you can hear my Dad giving his comments about what has happened since the UK voted to leave the EU three weeks ago. http://wp.me/p4IuUx-6DX 

Today I'm answering questions sent in by 4 of my listeners. They are questions I picked because I know they will benefit all of you. First I'll address what I mean when I say to, "clean up your thinking." Then I'll talk more about holding the space and helping friends and children with these tools. Next is a question centered around Mormon doctrine and I'll end with help on dealing with a difficult manager or person in your life. Don't forget to send me YOUR question for next time. The post Ep 40. Questions and Answers appeared first on Jody Moore.

Welcome to episode #27 of the Gay Business & Marketing Made Easy Podcast! This episode is going to look at Duck Dynasty, A&E and Cracker Barrel as a case study that you can learn from. I am going to frame up the whole conversation by breaking it down into 5 digestible parts that highlight the controversy, the different sides to the story and the immediate outcome for the show. So here are today's show notes, which are more lengthy than usual. Enjoy! Listen to the episode by clicking the play button below. Episode 27 - (1/23/14) - Duck Dynasty, A&E and Cracker Barrel: A Case Study You'll see now that I am using "Professional Lesbian" as an official title. I've jokingly called myself this for years, but after a recent experience at New Media Expo in Las Vegas at the beginning of this month I realized introducing myself as a professional lesbian and explaining that "I teach straight people how to market to gay people" really got a solid reaction. The next webinar is on Feb. 19th at 1PM My next webinar "Increasing your LGBT Market Share through Authentic Communications" is on Feb 19th at 1PM and you can RSVP by going to http://www.jenntgrace.com/webinar. It's an hour long presentation with plenty of time for Q&A, so any questions you might have please feel free to bring them with you. Also if you are listening to this podcast episode in the future and it is after Feb 19 - fear not I hold webinars monthly, so still head on over to http://www.jenntgrace.com/webinar RSVP. The best way to stay in touch is by joining the mailing list. You can do so by clicking here; http://jenntgrace.com/podcastlist Duck Dynasty - The Facts - GQ Magazine - January 2014 edition I am going to frame up the Duck Dynasty story in 5 parts. First I'll recap the GQ Magazine article, then I will share what A&E did as a result of the article, I'll outline the two sides of the story, and explain how Cracker Barrel plays into this, and finally, show what the immediate end result is for Duck Dynasty. I suggest you read the whole GQ Magazine article which you can do so here; http://www.gq.com/entertainment/television/201401/duck-dynasty-phil-robertson?currentPage=1 Part 1: A recap of the GQ article First couple of paragraphs in he is quoting Genesis 9 "Oh, and no sinners, too. So here’s where things get a bit uncomfortable. Phil calls himself a Bible-thumper, and holy shit, he thumps that Bible hard enough to ring the bell at a county-fair test of strength." Out here in these woods, without any cameras around, Phil is free to say what he wants. Maybe a little too free. He’s got lots of thoughts on modern immorality, and there’s no stopping them from rushing out. Like this one: “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.” The show—a reality sitcom showcasing the semiscripted high jinks of Phil, his brother “Uncle Si,” his four sons, Alan, Willie, Jase, and Jep, and the perpetually exasperated but always perfectly accessorized Robertson-family ladies—has become the biggest reality-TV hit in the history of cable television, reportedly earning the family a holy shit–worthy $200,000-an-episode paycheck. And then, of course, there is their faith, which plays no small role here. During the family’s initial negotiations about the show with A&E, Jase told me, “the three no-compromises were faith, betrayal of family members, and duck season.” That refusal to betray their faith or one another has been a staple of every media article about the Robertson family. It’s their elevator pitch, and it has made them into ideal Christian icons: beloved for staking out a bit of holy ground within the mostly se...

President Obama recently presented some fairly detailed proposals to make changes in the tax code. This is sure to be a major subject of controversy in the months ahead.Here's a road map for you of today's show:First I'll give you some historical background about where we stand, economic justice-wise.Next, the details of Obama's plan. Knowing exactly what's in there is crucial, because it's

Today we're going to discuss an incredibly immoral way to make huge sums of money: vulture funds which prey on destitute Third World nations. As you might imagine, there's a strong right-wing connection.First I'll give you an overview of the vulture fund process. Next we'll go over some specific examples of vulture funds in action. Finally we'll discuss the right-wing connection to all this,