Podcast appearances and mentions of hunter walk

In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Hunter Walk, co-founder of Homebrew, joins Fabian Tausch for an in-depth conversation about his journey from product management at Google and YouTube to building one of the most respected early-stage venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Hunter shares the story behind Homebrew's evolution, why he and his co-founder Satya Patel decided to rethink the traditional VC model after nearly a decade, and how they now operate as a self-funded evergreen fund. What You'll Learn in This Episode: The Transition from Builder to Investor: Why Hunter left YouTube and Google after a decade to explore what truly mattered to him in his career. How Hunter and Satya Patel created Homebrew out of a shared desire to work together and support founders authentically. The Philosophy Behind Homebrew: Why Homebrew recently transitioned into a self-funded evergreen model after a decade of operating traditional VC funds. How this shift allows Hunter and Satya to focus on what they love: helping founders succeed without the constraints of managing external LP capital. How to Evaluate Investors as a Founder: The importance of speaking to other portfolio founders to understand how investors behave in both good and tough times. Why do the best investors focus on backing founders, not just companies, and how do you identify those who align with your needs? Key Traits for Long-Term Success: Why joy and purpose are critical for sustainable professional success. How to avoid being trapped in "good enough" situations and make bold career decisions that align with your values and ambitions. ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery  Where to find Hunter: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterwalk/  Website: https://homebrew.co/  Join our Founder Tactics Newsletter: 2x die Woche bekommst du die Taktiken der besten Gründer der Welt direkt ins Postfach: https://www.tactics.unicornbakery.de/  Chapter: (00:00:00) Why did Hunter decide on the identity-change? (00:08:50) How to make bigger decisions (00:14:24) Hunter's advice for potential founders (00:20:15) The hardest part about building a venture firm (00:24:14) Hunter's advice on finding an excellent investor (00:27:51) Longterm-Building vs. Short-term-Building: Not to be the loudest (00:32:47) "The Homebrew 2.0" (00:37:07) The journey to more self-fulfillment (00:40:50) What would set me apart from the mediocre when building a venture? (00:46:50) On top of the world and NOT crazy: What are the characteristics of these people?

In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Hunter Walk, co-founder of Homebrew, joins Fabian Tausch for an in-depth conversation about his journey from product management at Google and YouTube to building one of the most respected early-stage venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Hunter shares the story behind Homebrew's evolution, why he and his co-founder Satya Patel decided to rethink the traditional VC model after nearly a decade, and how they now operate as a self-funded evergreen fund.What You'll Learn in This Episode:The Transition from Builder to Investor:Why Hunter left YouTube and Google after a decade to explore what truly mattered to him in his career.How Hunter and Satya Patel created Homebrew out of a shared desire to work together and support founders authentically.The Philosophy Behind Homebrew:Why Homebrew recently transitioned into a self-funded evergreen model after a decade of operating traditional VC funds.How this shift allows Hunter and Satya to focus on what they love: helping founders succeed without the constraints of managing external LP capital.How to Evaluate Investors as a Founder:The importance of speaking to other portfolio founders to understand how investors behave in both good and tough times.Why do the best investors focus on backing founders, not just companies, and how do you identify those who align with your needs?Key Traits for Long-Term Success:Why joy and purpose are critical for sustainable professional success.How to avoid being trapped in "good enough" situations and make bold career decisions that align with your values and ambitions.ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY:https://zez.am/unicornbakery Where to find Hunter:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterwalk/ Website: https://homebrew.co/ Join our Founder Tactics Newsletter:2x die Woche bekommst du die Taktiken der besten Gründer der Welt direkt ins Postfach:https://www.tactics.unicornbakery.de/ Chapter:(00:00:00) Why did Hunter decide on the identity-change?(00:08:50) How to make bigger decisions(00:14:24) Hunter's advice for potential founders(00:20:15) The hardest part about building a venture firm(00:24:14) Hunter's advice on finding an excellent investor(00:27:51) Longterm-Building vs. Short-term-Building: Not to be the loudest(00:32:47) "The Homebrew 2.0"(00:37:07) The journey to more self-fulfillment(00:40:50) What would set me apart from the mediocre when building a venture?(00:46:50) On top of the world and NOT crazy: What are the characteristics of these people? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lots of healthy disagreement in this week's THAT WAS THE WEEK tech show with Keith Teare. We debate the impact of AI on coding jobs, with Keith suggesting that while traditional coding skills may become less important, system architecture and AI guidance skills will be crucial to maintaining the value of human labor. We also discuss the rise of early-stage unicorns, military-tech AI start-ups, and disagree strongly on the status of billionaires, with Keith arguing that it's “not hard” to be a billionaire in Silicon Valley today. Here are the five KEEN ON takeaways from today's conversation:* Divergent Market and Valley Sentiment: While the stock market is having its worst performance since Trump's inauguration, Silicon Valley remains optimistic, particularly about AI. Keith argues there's no short-term correlation between Silicon Valley sentiment and market performance.* Evolution of Tech Skills: The rise of AI is changing the nature of technical skills needed in startups. Keith suggests that traditional coding skills are becoming less crucial, while the ability to architect systems and guide AI is becoming more important. He notes that universities are already adapting their computer science programs to include AI.* Rise of Efficient Startups: AI is enabling lean startups to do more with fewer people. Keith uses his own company Signal Rank as an example, noting they've built a complex system with just five people, two of whom are coders, highlighting a shift in how startups can be built efficiently.* Military-Tech Convergence: There's a growing trend of Silicon Valley companies entering the defense sector, exemplified by Saronic raising $600 million for autonomous warships. This represents a broader shift in how military technology is being developed and funded through private companies.* Debate about Wealth Creation: The conversation concludes with a debate about wealth accumulation, sparked by Robert Reich's controversial X post about billionaires. Keith argues that technology's global reach and distribution capabilities have made it easier than ever to build valuable companies, with Andrew strongly disputing the idea that becoming a billionaire is "not that hard."That Was The Week - February 22, 2025With Andrew Keen and Keith TeareAndrew Keen: Hello everybody. It is Saturday, February the 22nd, 2025. The last Saturday in February, the last Saturday we're going to do That Was The Week tech roundup. It's been an odd week. On the one hand, the stocks notched the worst week since Trump's inauguration six weeks ago. It's been a long six weeks. According to the Financial Times, the geopolitical rupture, which of course has been caused by Trump, has sparked a quiet market rebellion. Niall Ferguson had an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal about the demise of the United States because of its massive debt, and Elon Musk has been continuing to make a public fool of himself this week, waving a chainsaw and pretending to be an Argentine politician, which I'm not sure reflects that well on him. However, in spite of all that bad news, Keith Teare's That Was The Week newsletter is actually very optimistic. Unicorns are back, according to Keith, and we have an image, of course, created by AI of these imaginary beasts horses with horns. Keith is joining us, as always, from Palo Alto, the home of optimism. Keith, do you think it's coincidental that suddenly everyone is optimistic again in Silicon Valley whilst the market is sliding to those two things in an odd way, kind of go together?Keith Teare: There's no correlation between Silicon Valley and the markets at all in any day to day sense. There's long term correlation, but not short term. Silicon Valley is having a moment because of AI, and Grok Three was launched this week. Crunchbase launched its new AI driven data platform, and the CEO declared that historical data is dead, meaning only future predictive data is any good anymore.Andrew Keen: And historical data being dead. The future is predictive intelligence. What does that mean?Keith Teare: He means that it's now possible, because of AI, to see patterns and trends and predict them. Just knowing the past is not the point anymore. Obviously it's stretching a point. You still need the history from the past to see the trends. But he's saying the needle has turned from looking backwards to predicting the future because of data. That's true in biology as well. There's a massive arc this week announced a new model that understands DNA and can predict the likelihood of solving diseases.Andrew Keen: Your editorial this week, Keith, is quite personal. You know that as the person in charge of Signal Rank, your startup, AI has been remarkably helpful in it. You refer in the editorial to an interesting piece in the New York Times about how AI is changing Silicon Valley build startups like your own Signal. What does your experience at Signal Rank tell us about the future of startups?Keith Teare: Signal Rank is five people. Two of us have coding skills. We've raised $5 million ever to spend on building Signal. All the other money we raised is to invest in companies. That article is focusing on the fact that it's almost like the Lean Startup story from the early 2000s, except it's true this time, because the most expensive thing in a startup is people. And the one thing you need less of is people. That's a massive shift. Of course, if you're building large language models, the opposite is true, because the most expensive thing is GPUs, which you pay Nvidia for. And that's super expensive. But everything else that's sitting on top of that is getting faster, cheaper and better.Andrew Keen: You also refer to a New York Times piece about how AI is prompting an evolution, not an extinction for coders. Your son's a coder, in a sense, you're a coder. Ultimately, one and I was at this thing with Tim Draper a couple of weeks ago where he was talking about companies, billion dollar companies built and managed by single people won't ultimately make most coders extinct. Maybe not all. But when founders like yourselves simply become coders and you won't have the need for other help.Keith Teare: I make the point in an editorial that I didn't write a single line of code, but I've built a very complex system with lots of AI agents working together and delivering results for users. Learning to code is going to be a low requirement. A very high requirement is learning to architect and guide the AI because the AI can code, but it can't imagine systems to build or know when it got it right or when it got it wrong. The skill base is going to shift to what normally would be the domain of a product manager who has coding skills and can understand what's happening and can understand what it can ask for and what it can't ask for. But coding itself, learning Python, learning JavaScript or Java? Probably less essential.Andrew Keen: So what happens to kids like your son who just graduated and now works in Silicon Valley as a coder?Keith Teare: He'll still be needed for some time. In his company, they're not allowed to use AI yet. It's a little bit like dying skills always protect themselves until they can't. Engineers that are defensive or companies that are defensive about using AI are going to fall behind a little bit. But eventually everyone gets there because it's just a better way of doing things.Andrew Keen: You're an innovator and instinctive in terms of innovation. But are people going to start going to college and doing majors and working with AI rather than learning how to code? Will computer science be really about how to ask the right questions and ask it to do the correct things?Keith Teare: Yes, but to do that you need to understand systems architecture. My youngest son just got an offer from my old university in the UK, Kent, and it's for a course called Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, so they're already evolving the courses to teach the new skills. I think it's going to be imperative if you can talk to a machine and you can imagine what you want it to build. Imagine you could describe to a machine the website you'd really like for Keen on America, and it would build it, and then you'd look at what it built and say, no, I didn't mean that, I meant this. It gives you massive power to produce things.Andrew Keen: And I think it's also true with writers. I'm not a coder. But the thing with AI is it's not designed to replicate human writing. It's designed to answer questions and organize ideas in ways that are instant as opposed to taking hours or days for humans. So it's similar in that sense. Meanwhile, let's go back to your unicorns. It's all coming out of Crunchbase that your wife works for. She writes for it. And what is Crunchbase telling us this week about quote unquote minting early stage startups? Are unicorns back in fashion? We haven't talked about unicorns for about a year. We talk about them every week.Keith Teare: The rates of unicorn production declined massively from 2021 onwards and reached the bottom last year.Andrew Keen: While the market was strong and now it's falling and unicorns are back.Keith Teare: This article is specifically about early stage unicorns. These are unicorns that become unicorns at a series A or a series B round. They're raising very large sums of money. The top six series A raises this week all raised more than $50 million.Andrew Keen: And the average valuation I guess early round has jumped to 3.3 billion. But doesn't the unicorn term become slightly absurd if you're raising hundreds of millions of dollars? It's given that you're going to be a unicorn. But does that really mean anything?Keith Teare: If you try to put it into a rational framework, the amount of money put into a company and the valuation is determined by supply and demand and likely outcomes. Investors who are writing these checks are making a calculation of what this company will be worth in the next five to ten years. They're writing checks appropriate to a gain of at least ten times that money. They're projecting into the future a likely outcome from writing the checks and the competition to invest in these companies is so intense that the checks get bigger earlier. Obviously that creates risk. The risk is that you're making the call too early and you're going to be wrong in your predictions. The upside is that you know you're right and you'll be smiling all the way to the bank. That's just the nature of any technology transfer.Andrew Keen: Is this different from any other hysteria boom? Just the numbers are larger. Is this different from the dot-com boom where huge amounts of money were poured in? Most companies failed. Some succeeded, like Amazon or like web 2.0, or like social media or like crypto.Keith Teare: It's very similar. It's more like the gold rush because there really was gold. There really is gold. Even in the dot-com boom, the asset class of venture capital did very well. Individual investments failed, but the asset class as a whole did very well. When you allocate to a tech boom like AI really is and the AI boom is real, there's real value being produced and real change in human experience that's going to generate lots of money. Placing those bets at the asset class level makes sense. Individual investments is a totally different story.Andrew Keen: You also refer to Hunter Walk, who is a very smart guy. He said, you have to assume every company will have access to the same LLMs and voices. The challenge then is to build a company that thrives despite this reality. Given the commodification of AI and all these platforms from xAI to OpenAI to Anthropic AI to Google Gemini, that are basically now all the same. We're seeing this commodification of LLMs. Doesn't that point to a weakness in this AI hysteria?Keith Teare: You have to distinguish between LLMs, reasoning agents and agents that can do things. This week, Grok Three was launched. It's very good, by the way. But it's only a little bit better than all the others. So it didn't get the attention that say deepfaked.Andrew Keen: And next week someone will come out with something else that will be a little better. And as this race continues, the differences between the products will become less and less.Keith Teare: But for you and me, that's fantastic. You use Anthropic, I use Perplexity, I use Claude, we're basically getting free intelligence to do work.Andrew Keen: I wonder whether in that sense it's rather like the early days of the internet where we got a lot of stuff for free, and then everyone woke up and started charging. I mean, we are paying. I pay my $20 a month to Anthropic. You pay your monthly fees, but it's still pretty small amounts of money.Keith Teare: OpenAI now has 400 million daily active users and is making billions of dollars.Andrew Keen: I hope so because it's raised tens of billions of dollars.Keith Teare: But that is the game. Think of the Andrew Keen world. You wouldn't want to constrain yourself to investing almost nothing and making almost nothing. You want to invest as much as possible as long as you know you can make more than that back.Andrew Keen: On the unicorn front, you've been at this rodeo before many times. You're about as experienced as it gets. Are you taking these arguments about unicorns seriously, or should we be taking them like unicorns themselves with a pinch of salt?Keith Teare: When you build startups, the valuation of the startup is not even in your mind as a variable. You're just building whatever your vision is and it costs money to build it. So you're raising money. You sell shares in your company at the highest price you possibly can. It's good news if you're a unicorn from the point of view of the company you're building. Founders don't really think about valuations as much as they think about how much money they need and what they're going to do with it. Normal people read the headlines and think that Silicon Valley is awash with irrationality. It isn't really true.Andrew Keen: Well, you're providing us with those headlines. One of the other pieces you linked to this week is from the FT about Silicon Valley fighting EU tech rules with backing from Trump. Most of the news this week has been about Trump outside technology. It's Trump changing the rules in terms of big tech and particularly Europe and tariffs completely.Keith Teare: Coinbase announced yesterday that the SEC has withdrawn its lawsuit against Coinbase. That's the latest little indication of the trend. There are rumors that Ripple, which was also subject to an SEC case, will have that case withdrawn. The Trump administration does not want to stand in the way of big tech or little tech for that matter, and it sees Europe, rightly so, as a bit of a backwater. The zeitgeist is changing. Even in Europe, the innovators are fairly pro the Trump message even if they're not pro Trump. The need to innovate and relax constraints.Andrew Keen: The German economy now seems to be in crisis or German culture is in crisis. But they probably left it too late. The horse or the unicorns, so to speak, has left the barn here, hasn't it?Keith Teare: Apple yesterday announced that it's turning off encryption in Europe, in the UK now, not the whole of Europe, because the UK asked for a backdoor. So now UK users of the iPhone have no security on their phones because Apple, rather than comply with a backdoor, would turn the whole security layer off. That's going to be a bit of a trend. The governments trying to control tech, especially if they're snooping on their citizens. Tech is not going to bend over and agree with them anymore. And Trump is going in the opposite direction. He's not trying to get them to do back doors.Andrew Keen: The interview of the week, my interview was with Tim Wu, who was perhaps the most influential critic of monopoly Big Tech in the Biden administration. He has an interesting new piece out on decentralizing capitalism. With the help of Claude, we came away with five points from my conversation with Wu. It's all about decentralizing capitalism, getting away from monopoly capitalism, which I think he sees in companies like Google and Facebook and even OpenAI. I know you're not a big fan of regulation, but do you think Wu has a point? He's in favor of decentralizing capitalism. He's not against the market. He's in favor of innovation.Keith Teare: What does he mean? Because you could frame that as being nation states that are too centralized or you could frame it that big tech is too centralized. How does he frame it?Andrew Keen: He frames it as capitalism lends itself to a winner take all economy. He goes over the argument that America has always been a more innovative and wealthier society when you attack the monopolies, whether it's the oil monopolies, the railroads, pharma. And the same needs to be done now to unleash creativity, to unleash guys like yourself. One of your close friends, Lina Khan, was on MSNBC this week, talking about what she calls an anti-monopoly hunger in America. I'm not sure whether that's an exaggeration, but certainly there is an anti-monopoly feeling, both on both sides of the aisle. It's one of the few things that unite Democrats and Republicans, isn't it?Keith Teare: No, I disagree. The zeitgeist is exactly the opposite. The desire to control, especially big tech is nonexistent. The Democrats live in their own bubble world on MSNBC, and they really don't know how normal people think. Most people think Google's awesome. They think Amazon is awesome. They like using AI. More and more people are using it.Andrew Keen: You can like using AI and not be in favor of monopolies. That's two different subjects.Keith Teare: Normal people don't even use the word monopoly. It's not a word in the normal lexicon. It's a purely political word, used only in the circles of the Democratic Party that have this kind of Stalinist influence. The word state monopoly capitalism came out of Stalin.Andrew Keen: But I think you need to read Wu's piece on decentralizing capitalism, because he's as much a critic of Stalinism and centralization as you. He uses models from postwar East Asia, particularly Taiwan, and of course, the Danish model to talk about reforming the US. So what would you advise guys like Wu to be arguing? Should they just throw in their chips with Donald Trump and say you're right?Keith Teare: Where I would agree with them, and this is the common thread where we can agree, is capitalism has the tendency to create what I think of as greater socialization. You get bigger and bigger units, more interconnected. The interconnected piece is super important. It's not just that they're big, they're interconnected and that tends to be global. There's a globalizing tendency within capitalism. As you globalize and you socialize production, small individual industries tend to go by the wayside. Artisan industries. All of that is true. But you don't fix that by trying to break it up. The real social good is that the human race increasingly becomes interconnected and interdependent. That's a good thing. What's wrong is the private ownership of the wealth that it produces.Andrew Keen: Last week we talked about Alva van Gogh's critique of Vance's Paris speech, although he agreed with it in part. This week, you connect with Albert's humanist vision for AI. The speech at the Paris AI summit he would have given. What is Albert's vision?Keith Teare: It's a little bit 1960s cumbayah-ish. I am one of those, so I agree with him. But it's basically saying that AI is a tool for humanity, not a tool against humanity. And he makes the case for that. He doesn't say there are no safety risks, but he minimizes safety risks and places human good first, which I think does correlate to Tim Vance. It's an opportunity to be taken, not a safety risk. So I think he's kind of on the same page as Vance, to be honest.Andrew Keen: Whenever anyone uses the word humanist, it always makes me slightly skeptical. I'm not entirely sure what it means. I mean, who's anti-humanist except for a few Marxist philosophers in Paris? Meanwhile, lots of other tech news. Microsoft announced what it sees as a breakthrough in quantum. Is that right, Keith?Keith Teare: You and I probably are not clever enough to know, but I think we are safe. The answer is yes. That headline says they've created a new state of matter, and that pertains to something called a topological qubit, which is a qubit that can be programmable. And they're so tiny and there's so many of them that a quantum computer can do calculations at much greater scale, much faster than anything before. And they claim to have reduced this new state of matter down into a chip that can be plugged into a computer, an electrical computer, not a quantum computer, and can run. And the claim is that that will accelerate quantum computing by decades, to the point where there are promising programs that mean something within five years. And so that's a new timeline from Microsoft.Andrew Keen: I think quantum is like we're going to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, and everyone will be skeptical. Some people will say it's for real, and then suddenly something will come along, the equivalent of OpenAI or ChatGPT and quantum, and it will be real. But that certainly isn't this week. Meanwhile, your startup of the week is exactly what you've been talking about. A unicorn Saronic, which raised this week $600 million to mass produce autonomous warships. It's another example of how Silicon Valley and the Pentagon and the defense industry seem to be becoming one. Tell us about Saronic.Keith Teare: Saronic is part of that trend for Silicon Valley and military spending to converge. The same investors in Saronic are also in Anduril and some of the other companies we talked about from time to time, space as well. So it's symptomatic of two things. The first is militarized investment coming out of Silicon Valley, and the second is the valuations. I should disclose, by the way, that Signal Rank owns shares in Saronic. So this was good news for us this week.Andrew Keen: Or at least your investors own shares. It's interesting that this week Palantir also has done very well for the first few weeks of 2025. But it also crashed. This is a very frothy market, tech military startups isn't it?Keith Teare: I wouldn't say crashed. It's up like 200%. If you're an investor in Palantir and you've been holding, you wouldn't be too upset by this pullback. The world we're living in, and I'm not a fan of this by any means, but military investment by private companies selling to governments is going to be a rising trend because governments can't really innovate the military. They're so stuck with old fashioned views of what conflict might look like. It's interesting that even Musk and DOGE this week and Trump announced they're going to try to reduce the U.S. military budget by 10% annually.Andrew Keen: And they've seen some cuts. And I think when historians look back, the rise of companies like Saronic, the DOGE initiative, and the behavior which I'm like most people, I think rather critical of, of pulling back from Ukraine, they're all going to be part of the same narrative. Something is profoundly changing here on the military industrial, but the military political from the US's involvement in the world and the technological piece of this.Finally, post of the week and it comes back to the conversation you and I were just having about Tim Wu. Robert Reich, a well-known MSNBC type who was in the Clinton administration, posted that there are basically five ways to accumulate $1 billion: profiting from a monopoly, insider trading, political payoffs, fraud and inheritance. And Brad Gerstner, amongst others, was horrified with this. He said it was such a terrible, bitter and sad take on America. I'm assuming you're in the Gerstner camp, Keith.Keith Teare: I am, but that isn't why I posted it. I posted it because I wanted to focus on the absolute chasm between the democratic intellectual elite and the rest of us. Robert Reich almost is saying that you have to be a criminal to get rich. And that isn't how most people think.Andrew Keen: The American dream, right? But I, being a great fan of Reich, think he is the dinosaur of dinosaurs, but he isn't saying that. He's talking about being a billionaire. That's not being rich. So you have to distinguish.Keith Teare: This might be shocking to the listeners and maybe even to you, but it isn't that hard to become a billionaire if you do the right things these days, because 4 billion people on Earth are consuming technology outputs at increasing rates and paying for that. Being a billionaire is like what used to be being a millionaire. And it's only going up.Andrew Keen: I've got my title of this week's show Keith. "Keith Teare says it's not that hard to be a billionaire." How close are you to being a billionaire?Keith Teare: I've been very close twice in my career.Andrew Keen: No you haven't. When?Keith Teare: Absolutely have. Both RealNames and Easynet were valued at well over $1 billion.Andrew Keen: Yeah, but you didn't own the whole thing.Keith Teare: I owned a lot. And by the way, it was early in the life of the companies, and that was in 1994 and 1999. In 2025, those would be small outcomes. Today's outcomes, getting a company to be worth $1 billion happens early. That early stage unicorns point happens early.Andrew Keen: But let's be clear as well. What Reich is talking about is not billionaires. And as I said, I'm not particularly sympathetic to what he's saying either. But he's talking about real billionaires, people with $1 billion in the bank or with investors.Keith Teare: Let's just ask this question. Look back at what Reich says, and let's answer a few questions. Where would the brothers who run Stripe fit on that list? They're worth much more than $1 billion. They're not anywhere on that list. Where is Musk on that list? Where is Bezos on that list? Where are the founders of Google on that list?Andrew Keen: No, I agree with you. I think that he's wrong to say there are basically five ways to accumulate $1 billion: profiting from monopoly, insider trading, political payoffs, fraud and inheritance. You're absolutely right. But my disagreement with you is it's still incredibly hard to be a billionaire. How many billionaires are there in the US?Keith Teare: Of course it's hard.Andrew Keen: But you just said it was not that hard to be a billionaire.Keith Teare: Let me tell you what I mean by that. It's the easiest it's ever been, and it's going to get easier.Andrew Keen: Or it's easiest it's ever been because of inflation.Keith Teare: No, because of the scale of distribution networks and the revenues that come back from them. It used to be super hard. When I did Easynet, we had to put floppy disks on the front of magazines to distribute our software. When I did my most recent startups, you put an app in two app stores, and it's in the whole world the next day. And so the flow of money that comes from the ease of distribution of software to people who can pay for it if they like it, has completely changed the dynamics.Andrew Keen: I take your point. But coming back to this issue, how do you consider wealth? Who is rich? How much do you have to earn?Keith Teare: I think rich is totally subjective from your point of view. I thought I was rich when I didn't have credit card debt back in the day.Andrew Keen: Meaningless term, then. It's just entirely subjective.Keith Teare: Yes, but you can build the pyramid of wealth in terms of a smaller number of people at the top with very large amounts of wealth and go down to the bottom where lots of people have nothing. And that pyramid will change its shape and the scale at different levels through history, usually in a positive direction. That's one of the results of the socialization of production and the coming together of the human race into a single GDP growth. There's never been a period in human history recently where that pie or pyramid hasn't improved in both scale and distribution.Andrew Keen: As a bit frothy Keith, your new middle name is Keith "It's not that hard to be a billionaire" Teare. But coming back to Reich, I do agree with you. I think his approach is absurdly negative and reactionary, and the idea that you can't become a billionaire unless you're basically cheating, unless you're an inside trader or fraudulent or inherit money from someone else. He couldn't be more wrong on that, given, as you say, the Stripe guys, the Google guys, the Amazon people, even Musk. I'm no great fan of his but he didn't cheat to become a billionaire.Keith Teare: And you've got to believe, and this is why I put it in, that what he's saying is received wisdom in the minds of people like Lina Khan and Elizabeth Warren.Andrew Keen: That you're going to pick on your friend Lina Khan and Tim Wu as well. Wu teaches at Columbia. I wonder what Wu would say about that. I wonder whether Wu would argue that in a decentralized capitalism, it would be possible to be a billionaire. I'd have to get him back on the show to talk about that. Would we want a society, Keith? A decentralized capitalism where nobody was a millionaire, where the wealthiest people were worth 50 or $100 million?Keith Teare: No, I think the nightmare scenario for the future is that as production socializes and globalizes, a very small number of people control the wealth. But I think that's the right place to discuss how does the wealth get distributed to everyone? So you uplift human life, not just a few individuals, but I don't think you achieve that by trying to break up monopolies.Andrew Keen: The point is, it's not even breaking up monopolies. Reich's point is that one way to get $1 billion is to profit from monopoly. But the Google people, it's back to Peter Thiel's argument. Any entrepreneur wants to be a monopoly, that's the nature of doing startups. You want to win and winning becomes a monopoly, right? For better or worse. Google didn't start as a monopoly. Maybe it is one now because it's successful.Keith Teare: That's correct. If everyone was a failure, there'd be no monopolies. It's only success that creates market power and monopolies. It's a little bit like the word fascist. It's become a swear word to describe anything big. And fascist has become a swear word to describe anyone you disagree with. The truth is, these words mean things. Monopolies do get built. Google isn't one, in my opinion. And when they do, there's usually benefits that people are enjoying, which is why they're successful. And the key is how do you transition the world from massively concentrated private wealth to widely distributed aggregate wealth?Andrew Keen: And that's not about breaking up companies.Keith Teare: No, it's about distributing wealth, not breaking up companies.Andrew Keen: Also with Reich, there are lots of politically responsible or politically liberal billionaires. Reed Hoffman comes to mind. We talked about him last week. Finally, and this comes back to your point, Gerstner had another interesting post this week. He said the DOGE dividend could be a massive, game-changing legacy for Trump. Just one day of DOGE savings, apparently - this is what they claim, who knows whether they're really saving it - $3.7 billion could fund a private investment account with $1,000 for each child born in America. With just a little added per year, this could grow to $200,000 by age 30. Do you think Trump needs to do something radical on this front because he's not getting a great deal of good press on DOGE? A lot of people are losing their jobs every day. There are heart-rending stories of laid-off people. And it's not the billionaires losing their jobs. They're being fired by the billionaires. It's people working at poorly paid jobs in the first place. So does he need to do something with all the money he's supposed to have saved? Maybe in terms of a sovereign wealth fund or something more innovative?Keith Teare: What Gerstner is talking about there is about the distribution of wealth. It's one example of it. I think it's unlikely that Trump has the DNA to really follow through on anything like that. I don't think Donald Trump has any kind of social awareness at all about uplifting everybody. I do think there are people that do think like that. Sam Altman is one of them, and Reed Hoffman may be another, where the question of if there is abundance, how does everyone benefit from it? That's a real question. Gerstner's idea is not terrible, but I think it's a macro idea. There's a much bigger conversation needed than how to deploy the DOGE savings.Andrew Keen: I agree with you. And I think that I also agree with you on the Reich front that his kind of thinking, which is purely negative, is pointless. And what's missing on the progressive side amongst Democrats are creative, innovative thinking about the redistribution of wealth, rather than just taxing the rich or making it illegal to be a billionaire.Keith Teare: Yes.Andrew Keen: Well, we're in agreement, Keith.Keith Teare: Shocking.Andrew Keen: Shocking agreement. Although we disagree, I think it is still hard to be a billionaire. One thing I can guarantee is I've never been close and I never will be a billionaire. You say you've been close. What are the chances in the next few years, Keith, that you're going to be a billionaire from Signal Rank?Keith Teare: Don't even think about it. I think about what Signal Rank can do for everyone else. And if it does well, I'll do well.Andrew Keen: Go on bro. If it does well, I hope you'll pay me for this show. Keith Teare, publisher of That Was The Week. The man who argues that it's not that hard to be a millionaire. It's still a little hard, Keith, but we will be back next week to talk more billionaires, unicorns, AI, and everything else in the world of tech. Have a great week and we'll be back at this time next week. Thanks, Keith.Keith Teare: Bye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Noam Lovinsky has had a distinguished career in product, leaving an indelible mark at Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack, and currently as the chief product officer at Grammarly. At Facebook, Noam helped establish the New Product Experimentation team; at Thumbtack, he was chief product officer; and at YouTube, he was one of the early product leaders overseeing the consumer experience. In our conversation, we discuss:• Challenges and lessons from reviving growth at YouTube and Thumbtack• Lessons from building Facebook's New Product Experimentation team• Insights into Grammarly's success• Knowing when it's time to kill your project• Why diversifying your growth channels is critical• The power of visioning and storytelling in shaping product strategy• How to create space for innovation at large companies• The resilience and motivation of Grammarly's team in Ukraine—Brought to you by:• Whimsical—The iterative product workspace• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.• LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-happiness-and-pain-of-product-management-noam-lovinsky-grammarly-facebook-youtube-thumbtac/—Where to find Noam Lovinsky:• X: https://twitter.com/noaml• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noaml/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Noam's background(04:18) Noam's lack of online presence(08:06) Lessons from YouTube: advocating for what's best for yourself and the team(14:31) Prioritizing what's best for the business(19:37) Knowing when it's time to kill a project(21:47) Lessons from Thumbtack: diversifying growth channels and overcoming challenges(26:24) How Thumbtack turned growth around(31:44) Building Airbnb's instant booking feature(35:28) Lessons from Thumbtack: team collaboration and product strategy(38:38) Lessons from Facebook: building the New Product Experimentation team(40:43) The importance of starting small and building community density(46:07) Advice for building a startup within a startup(48:52) Having an incentive system(49:34) Lessons from Grammarly: adapting to changing user needs and building for the masses(54:20) The scrappiness and profitability of Grammarly(56:56) The resilience and motivation of the Grammarly team in Ukraine(59:08) General career advice(01:01:02) When to pull back(01:02:58) Closing thoughts(01:03:56) Lightning round—Referenced:• Substack: https://substack.com/• Hunter Walk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterwalk/• The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-rituals-of-great-teams-shishir-mehrotra-coda-youtube-microsoft/• Salar Kamangar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salar-kamangar-5a059712/• Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com/• Thumbtack: https://www.thumbtack.com/• FRED on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/FRED• How Airbnb Proved That Storytelling Is the Most Important Skill in Design: https://www.inc.com/yazin-akkawi/the-surprising-technique-airbnb-uses-to-better-sell-an-experience.html• Google+: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B• Marco Zappacosta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcozappacosta/• Bryan Schreier on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanschreier/• Whitney Steele on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitneydsteele/• David Shein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshein/• The magic of thinking big, by Lenny Rachitsky: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-magic-of-thinking-big-by-lenny-rachitsky/• What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-seven-years-at-airbnb-taught• New apps, new experiences: NPE Team, from Facebook: https://tech.facebook.com/engineering/2019/7/npe-team-from-facebook/• The Origin Story of the BRC Trash Fence: https://journal.burningman.org/2016/05/black-rock-city/leaving-no-trace/the-origin-story-of-the-brc-trash-fence/• Nike opens high-tech research and innovation lab: https://www.just-style.com/news/nike-opens-high-tech-research-and-innovation-lab/• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/• Microsoft Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/• How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-grow-a-subscription-business-yuriy-timen-grammarly-canva-airtable/• “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”: https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/the-cave-you-fear-to-enter-holds-the-treasure-you-seek-d624e28c3848• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Unorthodox-Guide-Making-Things/dp/0063046067• For All Mankind on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/for-all-mankind/umc.cmc.6wsi780sz5tdbqcf11k76mkp7• Fargo TV series on Hulu: https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/fargo• Arc browser: https://arc.net/• Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/competing-with-giants-an-inside-look-at-how-the-browser-company-builds-product-josh-miller-ceo/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

The Wobcast 2.0 discusses the edge rushers for the Minnesota Vikings and how the team can improve in this area. The conversation highlights the lack of depth and injuries that affected the performance of the edge rushers in the previous season. The importance of resigning Danielle Hunter is emphasized, along with the need to develop young players like Patrick Jones. The hosts also discuss potential strategies for acquiring new edge rushers through free agency and the draft. The chapter concludes with a call to action for the Vikings to follow the suggested plan.   Takeaways 1. The Vikings' edge rushers struggled due to injuries and lack of depth in the previous season. 2. Resigning Danielle Hunter is crucial for the team's success. 3. Developing young players like Patrick Jones is important for the future of the edge rushing group. 4. The team should consider acquiring new edge rushers through free agency and the draft. 5. Depth and experience are key factors in building a strong edge rushing unit.   #MinnesotaVikings #DanielleHunter #NFL #Football #Skol #Vikings #Defense #Passrush #SackMaster #SKOLnation #Hunter #Minnesota #NFLnews #FreeAgency #DefensiveEnd   Subscribe to the Wobcast 2.0 YouTube Channel: http://bit.ly/3lUxnIN For more Minnesota Vikings content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFl0FmZ6VGzR5DDEGUcPvqQ   Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wobby Follow Us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewobcast/ Listen to our Podcast: https://linktr.ee/thewobcast   Hosted by Mike Wobschall and Gyles Uhlenhopp

In this episode of Redefining Work, I'm joined by Ethena CEO Roxanne Petraeus and Homebrew partner Hunter Walk. We discuss how Ethena is modernizing compliance training, the importance of the investor-founder relationship and much more.

Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Superhuman—The fastest email experience ever made | AssemblyAI—Production-ready AI models to transcribe and understand speech—Julia Schottenstein is a product lead at dbt Labs, a data transformation company, and an active angel investor in data and infrastructure startups. She first got excited about dbt in 2019 when she was a VC at NEA and decided to make the leap from investor to operator by joining dbt Labs. She also co-hosts the dbt Labs Analytics Engineering Podcast, a show about data trends that impact analytics engineers' work. In today's episode, we discuss:• Advice for founders hoping to improve their M&A outcome• How to strategically think about competition• How to determine your paid features and have willingness-to-pay conversations• Why Julia lives by “worse is better” and “tech debt is a champagne problem”• Lessons from dbt Labs• What PMs can learn from investors—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/ma-competition-pricing-and-investing-julia-schottenstein-dbt-labs/#transcript—Where to find Julia Schottenstein:• Twitter: https://twitter.com/j_schottenstein• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-schottenstein-25424318/• Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4BKMMeVXk4jJnAQSqGSJvE—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Julia's background(04:15) How Julia went from VC to working in product at dbt Labs(08:24) Four things Julia uses to evaluate a company's potential (11:10) How to identify whether or not you have product-market fit(12:05) Distribution strategies(13:11) M&A strategies(15:54) Lessons from the Transform acquisition(18:01) Competitive values at dbt(20:25) Keys to dbt's success(26:35) An offsite exercise Julia used to help her team internalize upcoming changes(29:32) Determining what features are included in open source(31:56) Pricing and willingness to pay(33:34) Lessons from dbt Labs's first pricing change(36:33) Whether or not to be public about selling your startup(40:08) How to utilize connections during acquisitions(44:57) How to communicate selling your company(46:33) M&A market forecast(47:28) Values at dbt Labs (50:14) Lessons from working with strongly opinionated users(52:02) The importance of shipping, learning, and iterating (54:08) How VC skills translate into product(57:03) Lightning round—Referenced:• dbt Labs: https://www.getdbt.com/• Tristan Handy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristanhandy/• dbt Labs acquires Transform to enhance Semantic Layer tool: https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/news/365530993/DBT-Labs-acquires-Transform-to-enhance-Semantic-Layer-tool• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567• Red strings training clip from Ted Lasso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVe3Iwy10MA• Monetizing Innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product/dp/1119240867• Madhavan Ramanujam on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-art-and-science-of-pricing-madhavan#details• Pricing survey: https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/vanwesterndorp-pricing-sensitivity-study/• Hunter Walk's blog post about publicly selling your startup: https://hunterwalk.com/2023/05/13/the-acquihire-market-for-early-stage-startups-is-ice-cold-one-better-strategy-announce-youre-for-sale/• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214506/• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life: https://www.amazon.com/Snowball-Warren-Buffett-Business-Life/dp/0553384619/r• Sam Walton: Made in America: https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Walton-Made-America/dp/0553562835• Succession on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/succession• In Depth podcast: https://review.firstround.com/podcast• dbt community Slack: https://www.getdbt.com/community/join-the-community/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.On this week's show we're fortunate to be joined by Hunter Walk and Satya Patel, founders of Homebrew, a seed-stage firm founded over a decade ago that's backed companies such as Chime, AngelList, and Gusto. Just over a year ago, Homebrew announced that it was moving away from a seed-focused traditional LP-backed fund to an open-ended evergreen structure that is funded from the proceeds of prior investments.Additionally, they are also leading up efforts of Screendoor, a fund of funds focused on supporting underrepresented fund managers by offering capital and counsel. Satya is coming back on the show for the second time, and it was fun to have Hunter on with him this time, as we dove deep into their learnings from building homebrew, what they look for when back fund managers, and their view on what makes a great partner for founders. This was a fun one, and we think you'll really enjoy hearing their thoughts. Let's now get right into it!A word from our sponsor:Privately owned and headquartered in New York City, Grasshopper Bank is built to serve the business and innovation economy. As a client-first digital bank, Grasshopper combines the best of banking technology and years of industry expertise to deliver best-in-class experiences with trusted security and unparalleled support. Grasshopper's digital solutions are tailored for venture capital and private equity firms, startups and small businesses, fintech-focused Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and commercial API banking platforms, and more. Serving clients globally, Grasshopper provides flexible, firm-focused lending solutions, as well as a dedicated Relationship Manager committed to meeting the unique needs and strategic focus of your firm across all entities, including funds, general partner and management companies. Grasshopper is a member of the FDIC and an Equal Housing Lender.For more information, visit the bank's website at www.grasshopper.bank or follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.About Satya Patel:Satya Patel is a Founding Partner of Homebrew and Co-Founder of Screendoor. Prior to Homebrew, he was VP Product at Twitter, building and leading the Product Management and User Services teams. Before Twitter, he was a Partner at Battery Ventures, where he co-led the seed and early-stage investing practices. He joined Google in 2003 and was responsible for AdSense product management and partnerships.Before heading to Silicon Valley for Google, he worked for DoubleClick, in venture capital, and as a strategy consultant.He has a BS in Finance and a BS in Psychology from The University of Pennsylvania.About Hunter Walk:Hunter Walk is a Founding Partner of Homebrew and Co-Founder of Screendoor. Prior to Homebrew, Hunter led consumer product management at YouTube, starting when it was acquired by Google. He originally joined Google in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for AdSense, Google‘s contextual advertising business.His first job in Silicon Valley was as the founding product and marketing guy at Linden Lab.Before graduate school, he was a management consultant and also spent a year at Late Night with Conan O‘Brien. He has a BA in History from Vassar and MBA from Stanford University.In this episode we discuss:(03:32) The decision to move to an evergreen fund structure with Homebrew(07:32) The biggest constraints when early-stage fund sizes balloon(17:34) How to survive a down market and become a force multiplier on a cap table(24:58) The inspiration to start Screendoor(33:33) The type of managers they are looking to back at Screendoor(37:54) Patterns they've seen in great investors(42:13) The most important question they ask GPs(44:42) The biggest lessons from their time as investorsI'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Satya and Hunter. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Dovetail—Bring your customer into every decision | LMNT—Zero-sugar hydration—Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan are founders, angel investors, and product leaders who host the podcast Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show. They have both held leadership roles at major technology companies including Meta, Twitter, Snap, Microsoft, and Netflix. In today's episode, we dive into how and why to build your personal brand, how to deal with impostor syndrome, and stories from Aarthi's time at Clubhouse and Sriram's time working with Zuck. Aarthi and Sriram share their lessons from past failures, their experience building communities, and their techno-optimism, and Sriram offers his hot take on the Jobs to Be Done framework.Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/hot-takes-and-techno-optimism-from-techs-top-power-couple-sriram-and-aarthi/#transcriptWhere to find Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy:• Aarthi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarthir• Sriram's Twitter: https://twitter.com/sriramk• Good Time Show Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarthisrirampod• Good Time Show website: https://www.aarthiandsriram.com/Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/Referenced:• Naval Ravikant on Twitter: https://twitter.com/naval• Marc Andreessen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pmarca• Clubhouse: https://www.clubhouse.com/• Eugene Wei's Status as a Service: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service• Kylie Jenner on Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/add/kyliejenner• The Rock on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therock/• Cristiano Ronaldo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cristiano• Charli D'Amelio on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@charlidamelio• Addison Rae on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@addisonre• The founder of TikTok's speech: https://ludlow.notion.site/Alex-Zhu-TikTok-4631f80fdcc4423a845e145e807d8e2b• Naval's network tweet: https://twitter.com/naval/status/847134295600746496?lang=en• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/• How Duolingo reignited user growth: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth• Hunter Walk on impostor syndrome: https://hunterwalk.com/2023/03/01/imposter-syndrome-is-definitely-misnamed-might-be-a-condition-of-privilege-has-a-fascinating-history/• On Reviews: https://boz.com/articles/reviews• Jobs to Be Done framework: https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-customer-needs-c883cbf61c90• First-principles thinking: https://fs.blog/first-principles/In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Sriram and Aarthi's backgrounds(04:16) How Sriram and Aarthi got Elon Musk on their podcast(08:47) Reflections on Clubhouse and other social networks(14:14) Why Aarthi and Sriram are optimistic about tech(25:53) Why you should put yourself out there and build your personal brand(27:09) Why you should build a network with authentic relationships, and how to do it(28:56) Sriram's curated communities(31:20) What you need to get right when starting a community(38:35) Why everyone who wants to should create content(44:22) Why you shouldn't try to project expertise when you're still learning(47:54) Dealing with impostor syndrome, and why you should lean into your strengths(54:01) Transitioning to a role of authority(57:30) What Sriram learned about effective management from Mark Zuckerberg(1:01:20) The biggest failure Aarthi had, and why you shouldn't fall for fads(1:02:08) Sriram's lesson from building mobile(1:09:21) Why Sriram hates the Jobs to Be Done framework(1:18:06) Advice for immigrantsProduction and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Hunter Walk and Satya Patel are Co-Founders and Partners @ Homebrew, one of the leading seed funds of the last decade. Following 10 years of stellar returns with investments in the likes of Chime, Plaid, Gusto and many others, they decided to not accept any further LP capital and to only invest their own money moving forward through Homebrew Forever. In Today's Discussion on Homebrew We Breakdown: 1. ) The Foundings of a Great Partnership: What was the moment when Hunter and Satya decided they were going to go out and raise their first fund with Homebrew I? What are the core principles that all founding partners need to align on before they start a firm together? What questions should they ask of each other? Why does being independently wealthy coming into a partnership make the partnership easier and more efficient to operate? What changes when the partners have money already? 2.) What Changes When Moving From LP Dollars to Personal Capital: Why did Hunter and Satya decide to not raise any further capital from external LPs? Asset allocation-wise, how did they determine how much is the right amount to set aside for the first 2 years of investing? How many investments do they want to make with that cash? How does investing their personal capital change their deployment pace and cadence? How does it change their approach to reserves management and follow-on financing? How does it change their approach to pricing? How price sensitive are they today? 3.) Analyzing the Seed Landscape Today: Why do Hunter and Satya not think that a $100M seed fund is enough to properly execute a world-class seed strategy today? Who is their competition with the new strategy? How does it change their relationship with large multi-stage funds? How does it change their relationship with seed funds? Do they agree that the last generation of sub $20M micro-funds will not raise another fund in this cycle? How did their entrance impact the seed landscape over the last few years? Why are LPs also to blame for many of the original seed managers raising larger and larger funds? 4.) Companies: Money and People are The Problem: Why has too much money been such a problem for many Homebrew portfolio companies over the last few years? How has too much money changed their execution plans? What happens to the "living dead" companies with many years of runway but no product market fit? Who does this market cater to well? Who will thrive in this market? What have people forgotten about both startups and venture in the last 2 years that we have to remember? Why is this generation so entitled and expectant? Why are startups not a get-rich-quick scheme?

No one likes compliance training, but Ethena aims to improve the experience for everyone involved. Join Ethena's CEO and co-founder, Roxanne Petraeus, and Homebrew's Hunter Walk on this TechCrunch Live event to hear the strategies used to tackle and grow in underserved market segments.As you'll hear in the event, Roxanne Petraeus founded Ethena after the realization that compliance training hasn't evolved to meet the modern workplace. Instead of forcing employees to watch hour-long videos, Petraeus's company presents employees with bite-sized, quick takes that when completed in series, achieves the same compliance goal. During the early days of the company, Petraeus turned to Hunter Walk at Homebrew for venture capital fundraising. He somewhat turned her down, he said during this TechCrunch Live event, though still participated in the company's seed round -- just at a much smaller size. Why? Petraeus pitched Ethena's business rather than her vision for the company. This TechCrunch Live event is focused on the need to sell the company's vision, rather than just its business. Hunter Walk and Roxanne Petraeus walk through the steps to develop the company's vision and later lead fundraising efforts using this process. TechCrunch Live records weekly at 12:00 PT/3:00 ET. Visit TechCrunch.com for more information.

So today, Shamus Madan sits down with two very special guests, Hunter Walk, the founding partner at Homebrew, and Kate Beardsley, the Founding Partner of Hannah Grey, an early-stage VC Fund revolving around investing in customer-centric founders. Prior to Homebrew, Hunter led consumer product management at YouTube, starting when it was acquired by Google back in 2003. Hunter's first job in Silicon Valley was in Product Management for SecondLife or LindenLabs, an early version of the metaverse, which still exists today. Prior to Hannah Grey  Kate, lead Special Projects with Martha Stewart. After that position, Hannah became Chief of Staff at Huffington Post and a founding member of Lerer Hippeau. Twitter of Host: @mbitpodcastTwitter of Guests: @hunterwalk & @kshillo

And they say "can we get a piece of glow tape on this bar?" ***crickets*** We're taking things a little bit lighter this week! (and a little bit cheesier..you know you love it.) Sarah starts out with Southeast Asia's Folklore Feminist Icon "The Pontianak". Her legend has its roots in Malaysia, Indonesia, & Singapore. And believe us, you don't want to meet her...or hear her...or even look at her! Stephanie wraps up by telling us all about the one white man who wanted to hunt witches before hunting witches was cool (hipster). Though Heinrich Kramer never successfully "convicted" a witch, he did write the book that would become the basis of the witch trials that started in 1560 (55 years after his death!) We're so excited to bring you our first partnership!!! Magic Mind is a fantastic energy-boosting, focus-flowing, stress-relieving supplement. We've been drinking one a day ourselves and been LOVING the results. Pop on over to: magicmind.co/storiez and use promo code: STORIEZ20 to save 40% on your subscription, or, 20% off your first purchase!

Hunter Walk, co-founder of the venture capital firm Homebrew, is a staple of tech Twitter. Walk worked on Second Life and at YouTube before founding his own venture fund along with Satya Patel.A month ago, the duo announced that they were dramatically changing their strategy. The firm had previously raised three funds from limited partners — $35 million in 2013, $50 million in 2015, and $90 million in 2018 — and invested in companies like Chime, Plaid, and Honor. Then, late last month, Walk and Patel announced that they had decided to change course and start investing their own money.That strategy shift will drastically reduce their pool of capital. And it will mean forgoing lucrative management fees that provide a guaranteed income as they wait around for their portfolio companies to mature. Walk came on Dead Cat to explain the decision to embrace an “evergreen” capital model. We chatted about founder archetypes and what types of founders he’s looking to invest in. In the second half of the conversation, we talked about how his views on content moderation have developed since his time at YouTube. And he bristled at the idea that I saw his brand as a “good liberal” VC. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Hunter Walk, co-founder of the venture capital firm Homebrew, is a staple of tech Twitter. Walk worked on Second Life and at YouTube before founding his own venture fund along with Satya Patel.A month ago, the duo announced that they were dramatically changing their strategy. The firm had previously raised three funds from limited partners — $35 million in 2013, $50 million in 2015, and $90 million in 2018 — and invested in companies like Chime, Plaid, and Honor. Then, late last month, Walk and Patel announced that they had decided to change course and start investing their own money.That strategy shift will drastically reduce their pool of capital. And it will mean forgoing lucrative management fees that provide a guaranteed income as they wait around for their portfolio companies to mature. Walk came on Dead Cat to explain the decision to embrace an “evergreen” capital model. We chatted about founder archetypes and what types of founders he's looking to invest in. In the second half of the conversation, we talked about how his views on content moderation have developed since his time at YouTube. And he bristled at the idea that I saw his brand as a “good liberal” VC. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Hunter Walk, Co-founder and Partner at Homebrew. Homebrew is a seed-stage venture firm with investments like Chime, Plaid, Gusto, and many more. Prior to Homebrew, Hunter received his BA from Vasser and MBA from Stanford and then spent time at Youtube as a director of product management. Episode Highlights: Lessons learned at Google and Youtube as a director of product management The Screen Door initiative: supporting VCs from all different backgrounds and perspectives to invest in early-stage fund managers through capital and mentorship 99% humble 1% brag - how Hunter has used his blog to create a space for people to learn, share and support Hunters shares his perspective on imposter syndrome and his experience and insights into overcoming these feelings

Gregg and Maya are back to ring in the New Year with another episode of All Queued Up! This week, they discuss Reno! 911: The Search For QAnon over on Paramount Plus. Then they talk about the newest entry into the Matrix franchise with Matrix: Resurrections, available on HBO Max. Finally, they round out the conversation discussing episode one of The Book Of Boba Fett, only on Disney Plus!  Also, our new designs are up at Teespring, and to celebrate, we are offering you 15% off your entire order by using the code AQU15 at checkout! All Queued Up YouTube All Queued Up Twitch Channel All Queued Up Discord Server All Queued Up Merchandise All Queued Up Facebook Page All Queued Up Discussions All Queued Up Twitter All Queued Up Instagram

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) Partner at Homebrew - Providing early-stage investment, assistance & love to entrepreneurs building companies for the Bottom Up Economy. Investments include ShieldAI, Plaid, Gusto, Chime, Cruise, Bowery Farming, and other FinTech, SaaS, API, marketplace, commerce businesses.Before Homebrew, he led consumer product management at YouTube, starting when it was acquired by Google. He originally joined Google in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for AdSense, Google‘s contextual advertising business. His first job in Silicon Valley was as the founding product and marketing guy at Linden Lab. Before graduate school, he was a management consultant and also spent a year at Late Night with Conan O‘ Brien. His parents are proud of his BA in History from Vassar and MBA from Stanford University.Hunter Walk's Twitter: https://twitter.com/hunterwalkTopics Discussed:  Leaving google and launching his own venture Different ways of being an investor Angel investing  Blogging as an investor The value of Twitter Screendoor, an organization supporting underrepresented General Partners of emerging venture capital funds How Hunter's time at Google impacted him More about the show:The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series. The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors. The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital. More about us:Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.The Vitalize Team:Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVCCaroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/

This week, Alexis gets non-technical with Hunter Walk, Investor at Homebrew. They talk money-makin' Strong Island, public access cinéma vérité, honoring the water, and being literally trapped at a silent meditation retreat.You can find Hunter on Twitter at twitter.com/hunterwalk and Alexis at twitter.com/yayalexisgay or instagram.com/yayalexisgay and twitter.com/NonTechnicalPod.This episode is sponsored by Betts Recruiting. If you're looking for your next big opportunity, you can join the Betts network and get connected with the world's most innovative companies hiring go-to-market professionals like you. Learn more about hiring top talent or finding your next role at bettsrecruiting.com/nontechnical.

Hunter's BioHunter Walk is a co-founder and Partner at Homebrew, which is an early-stage venture capital firm based in the Bay Area.  Before Homebrew, I led consumer product management at YouTube, starting when it was acquired by Google. I originally joined Google in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for AdSense, Google‘s contextual advertising business. My first job in Silicon Valley was as the founding product and marketing guy at Linden Lab. Before graduate school, I was a management consultant and also spent a year at Late Night with Conan O‘ Brien. My parents are proud of my BA in History from Vassar and MBA from Stanford University.★ Support this podcast ★

Inspired by this Hunter Walk tweet and the ensuing chatter. TechCrunch recently sat down with Leading Investor from Well Known Firm to chat about their investing theses, the state of today's venture capital market, and why prices are so high for early-stage startups. We've been hunting down Leading Investor for some time, so it's great […]

Inspired by this Hunter Walk tweet and the ensuing chatter. TechCrunch recently sat down with Leading Investor from Well Known Firm to chat about their investing theses, the state of today's venture capital market, and why prices are so high for early-stage startups. We've been hunting down Leading Investor for some time, so it's great […]

Listen now | On this week’s show, we’re excited to bring you Satya Patel, co-founder and partner at Homebrew, who he started in 2013 with Hunter Walk. Without a doubt, the firm is one of the top seed firms in the industry, counting companies such as Chime, Cruise, Eero, and Anchor as some of their investments. Get on the email list at ventureunlocked.substack.com

This week on the program, a conversation with Homebrew Co-Founder and Partner Hunter Walk. Homebrew is a San Francisco-based venture firm that boasts a portfolio, including Chime, Anchor, Cruise, Cheddar, and the only Stir. In this episode, we discuss the inception of Homebrew, navigating hype cycles as a venture investor and why Hunter believes founder market fit is mission-critical when investing. This conversation was recorded on March 02, 2021, thanks for listening! Stay in the loop: Visit My Website Follow me on Twitter Follow me on Instagram Follow me on TikTok

Today's interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren't too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. He started his own company with Hardbound and was the first employee and VP of Product at Substack in the early days.Now Nathan runs a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. In this episode we dive into how Nathan creates tons of high-quality content every week, and how to facilitate your ideas with a newsletter “mastermind” group.We also get into a great discussion about pricing and churn for premium newsletters, and what it means for creators to have Twitter, Facebook, and other big media companies getting into the newsletter game.Links & Resources Gimlet The Nathan Barry Show 023: Tiago Forte – Building a Second Brain & Lessons From a $1M/yr Newsletter scuttleblurb – A Value Investing Blog Clubhouse: Drop-in audio chat Andreessen Horowitz - Software Is Eating the World Slow Boring Substack Teachable: Create and sell online courses and coaching Gumroad Nathan Baschez's Links Every Twitter: @nbashaw Episode TranscriptN Baschez: [00:00:00] At the end of the day, writing is an act of communication. It's a good form of communication. When you have thought deeply about what you want to say, and you've really crafted it, but in order to get to that point, you want to start with the more informal, casual, everyday way of talking. I think the feeling that this is a fascinating conversation is the key thing we want to get to because that's the spark that you're trying to like recreate for readers down the road. Nathan: [00:00:29] Today's interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren't too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. And so it's really fun to talk to him. He's got a great background. He started his own company with Hardbound and he was the first employee and VP of product at Substack in the early days.And he was at Gimlet Media for awhile. And now he's running a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. They're really focused on incredibly high quality content. And this episode we dive into how to write great content, facilitating your ideas with sort of a mastermind group.There's a fun discussion around that. We talked about Twitter and Facebook and others getting into the newsletter game and what that means. Otherwise monetize your newsletter pricing churn. There's actually, it's a great discussion on insurance. You're gonna want to stay tuned for that. Anyway. There's a lot of good stuff,So let's dive in and I'd love for you to meet Nathan.Nathan. Welcome to the show.N Baschez: [00:01:20] Thank you for having me.Nathan: [00:01:22] Yeah, well, we can have the Nathan and Nathan talk newsletters show.N Baschez: [00:01:27] Two white guys named Nathan talk in the newsletter business.Nathan: [00:01:31] Exactly. We have all the diversity of newsletters represented right here. I just want to call it out right away. So I love, first at a high level for you to tell listeners whatever he is and, you know, kind of where it's at right now and, and what you and Dan have done with it.N Baschez: [00:01:50] Yeah, totally. So Every is a bundle of business-focused newsletters. And basically we cover right now, mostly strategy productivity, and then we're kind of getting into some industry specific stuff, but that's pretty nascent. So we have a newsletter that covers the passion economy called Means of Creation.We also have some podcasts that we do that are kind of, they're very related to the newsletters, but basically it's just this cluster of people that work together to create cool stuff. But there's kind of, a lot of, we don't really publish anything under the Every name. We publish it all under one of our individual publications.And each of those are incredibly kind of like specific is the goal. and, the interesting thing about our bundle is we're structured as this. Thing that we're calling a writer collective where it's somewhere between getting a job at the New York times and running your own paid newsletter, like, you know, on, on your own sort of like whatever convert kit or sub stack or whatever other platform.And it, it gives you some of the upsides of, you know, having an editor, having some financing, having some distribution, all that kind of stuff, that you'd get by working at a traditional media company. But. Unlike working at a traditional media company, you're building your own creative vision. Like you've got the final say on edits and stuff.And you know, you have the most important thing is obviously the shared upside. So you get like a huge chunk of the profits. We typically split them 50–50, but it's a little bit case by case, depending on like what kind of team we're assembling around a specific newsletter. And sometimes there's more than one, you know what more than one person working on one.But roughly it's like a 50–50 split. And, we're also trying to kind of come up with creative ways to split the IP. But anyway, long-winded way of saying it's like this interesting kind of new experiment, at least interesting to me, a new experiment in how to structure a media company.Nathan: [00:03:31] Yeah, I love it. So, as an example, let's say I have a newsletter that I've started, I'm running separately, and I want to come to you guys and say like, Hey, let's do a paid thing together. You know, I don't know. I've got 10,000 subscribers and I'm looking to join every, what does that look like as far as what are you looking for?And, and, you know, some of the more mechanics of that.N Baschez: [00:03:55] Totally key thing that it all starts with for us is we're really focused now on. W things that wouldn't exist otherwise. So if you're starting, if you've got your own newsletter and you've got 10,000, you know, free subscribers on your email list and they love what you do and you know exactly what you want to do to, to, you know, create a paid subscription around what you offer, where you're going to maybe write one thing a week, and now you're going to write three things a week.And two of them are going to be for people who are paying or whatever. Like ma maybe it'll make sense to work with us. I think that it really depends on kind of like, your goals, but we're more focused on things where like, maybe we're really helping you like really deeply edit thing. Cause there's like a thing you're trying to do that, that you really value this sort of like editorial feedback.And you're kind of figuring out what you're writing about as you're going. or, maybe you already have a newsletter and you want to create a new sort of like. Version of it. That's like, maybe it's more researchy and we could like help find someone who like, can, can do some of that research or crunch some of the numbers or whatever.And kind of like build a team around it. or maybe you just want to show up and like, we can kind of cue up some, like you're an expert on an industry and we like aggregated a bunch of news and we're like, Hey, here's what happened in the industry this week? Like, what's important. Like, what does it mean?Tell us. And we'll like record the conversation and turn it into a newsletter. Like there's a lot of different ways. That we might work with people, but yeah, for the most part, we're looking for things now, another way that things may not exist, otherwise it's just literally money, right? Like if you're a freelance writer and you're, you know, want to start a paid newsletter, then you're basically cannibalizing your, the kinds of articles you may pitch to, you know, I would say you're normally getting paid like a pretty good fee for, and a lot of cases.And so it's hard to get the subscriber base up to the point where it might make sense to do that financially. And so we could be like, sort of hopefully a better version of, of, of, the normal kind of client you'd sell to, because you're really building your own creative vision and it's building towards this sort of like profit share thing.That can be a great, like long-term long-term thing. So those are some of the examples of like, how we think about it, but really every project is kind of like. Case by case basis. And we're really figuring out a lot of the patterns that, we think can scale and where we make the most sense. And, but the core of it is just w you know, as consumers we realized we really wanted a bundle of these kinds of things.Because you know, it's hard to, there's a lot that we really like out there, and it's hard to subscribe to a bunch of it separately, and it's really hard to discover a lot of it separately. but then also, just as writers, we just prefer kind of like working together, like really value, editorial feedback, feedback, feedback, and like developing ideas with people and kind of like creating a community and a culture that, can help unlock the best.I think people are meant to like operate in groups and that doesn't mean every group needs to be structured as a writer collective or whatever. Like, you know, plenty of still a newsletter writers form their own sort of ad hoc groups. But this is just the kind of group that felt like it worked for us.Nathan: [00:06:47] Yeah, that makes sense. So we've had, for example, Tiago on the show before, and, and, he's got a paid newsletter as part of every, so how does that work when you know, his main business model is courses, you know, and he's mainly monetizing this newsletter. There is it individual articles he's writing a little less frequently that are become part of every, or, or how does that work?N Baschez: [00:07:11] Yeah. So in the case of Tiago, his, yeah, he had his own paid newsletter for like a while and it was doing really well and had had a bunch of subscribers. but he felt like, you know, it could make sense to also offer it as a bundle. So you can still subscribe to . Newsletter independently, but basically we struck a deal with him where it's like, okay, cool.Like if people want to buy as a part of the bundle, then we'll share the revenue back to you from that deal. But in his case, a lot of it is really about the archives, because for years he's been writing this great stuff, that's behind a paywall. And so it was like sort of a win-win for him to, make content that's still behind a paywall, but like gets discovered.Discovery from like a little bit of a new audience, you know? and then for us to have more great stuff behind her paywall that like is, is content we believe in, from a creator we really love. so that's, that's another one of those unique situations where it's, it's kind of a, it's like, it wouldn't exist without us or whatever.It's like, well, it already did exist, but like, you know, the whole reason to do it is like, we, you know, Basically to extend his existing paid content, to like a new audience, and introduce his work to new people, but like keep it behind the paywall so that it's not like he has to like, you know, make everything free and shut down the subscription business or whatever.Nathan: [00:08:22] Yeah, that makes sense. you mentioned any, a few numbers as far as where you're at on subscribers.N Baschez: [00:08:28] Yeah, we, so we just basically we've been around for a year in some form or another before we, before we launched. And so we just hit the 2,400 subscriber Mark and, launched kind of like officially we had, we were operating sort of, it's sort of weird, cause it's like, we're kind of joked that we were like in stealth, but we're a media company and like publishing articles and building anNathan: [00:08:49] You can't you be invoked N Baschez: [00:08:52] but like, you know, we were just like kind of a sub stack basically for a while. Right? Like, and then we're a collection of sub stacks and then, you know, then we sort of launched it. We sort of said like, Hey, like, you know, we've been doing this thing for a year.Here's kind of like the model. Here's how it works, et cetera. but yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of funny where we, we, we had this name in mind, every cent for like a year and we were like built up this whole subscriber base. And then we it's like, we just launched the company, but also we've been operating for a year.It's like kind of weird, but anyway, it was fun.Nathan: [00:09:19] I think it goes to show that you can feel like you can launch these things, iterate, figure out what you're doing, and you can have a clear idea of your end state. Like every right now is a custom built rails application. We can dive into that, you know, and talk about, more there. So you can know what it is and you don't have to like, build exactly that before you can start working on it.Right? Like you launched on some stack, they handle the payments, it's working, it's growing, you're getting subscribers. And then you, then you migrate everything. And it's sort of, there's some entrepreneurs who come in and they're like, Nope, I cannot make a sale until I have a logo and business cards and everything.And you're like, No you need, in this case, you need content and people to read the content, you know, you need a product and customers, and then you can iterate everything else from there. And it sounds likeN Baschez: [00:10:11] Yeah. Yeah, totally. And it's just so, so important. And so core to our kind of like DNA is like first, just see if you can do the thing and don't even worry that much about like what kind of response you get, just like you try and do it and like, see if it was good. See if you can do it again, do it three or four times.And okay. Now start thinking about whether or not. People like it and what people liked about it and how to get more of like a hit when you do the thing. And then once you do that, then you can think about charging or, you know, trying to convert people to paying. And then once you've done that, then you can think about like, whatever, more growth and like sustainable like marketing channels, whatever.But we try and do things very incrementally and very like step-by-step, just because there's a lot of really important stuff you have to learn at every step of the way, and you just can't learn anything if you're trying to do everything at once, you know? So, it's really important to try and like, you know, strike a balance between, you know, whatever, trying to like deconstruct the process to do just one thing at a time and like, you know, moving quickly enough, all that kind of stuff.Nathan: [00:11:11] yeah, that makes sense. Along those lines, I'd love to dive into some of. You know, those lessons that you learned, but maybe let's zoom out in the newsletter industry for a little bit, which first of all, it feels a little weird that newsletters industry, I don't know that a year ago or 18 months ago, anyone would've would've said that.But what are some of the things that you see that make newsletters great. You're plugged into so many of these newsletters and I feel like you, and maybe you're in your co-host on means of creation Lee. Are two of the most like plugged into the newsletter world, people that I know. And so I'm curious, what are some of the newsletters that you're just like, I love these and here's why here's what makes them great.N Baschez: [00:11:53] Oh yeah, totally. I mean like the one that I always say first, because I love his work and also because it's massively, I think underrated and under the radar still is, this guy scuttle blurb. So scuttle, scuttle blurb is, it's, it's a value investing newsletter, but it's very, it's like, it's like literary almost it's super well written and researched and each.Company, he analyzes, he goes super in depth on. And, it's funny cause like there is a newsletter component to it, but it's more of like a website kind of a thing. Like it's like I think he uses member full and WordPress. uh, but the email, you just get like an email saying a new post has been published and like the headline in the first paragraph, you know?So it's like any publishes them infrequently. Cause they're super in-depth so, you know, maybe one a month or something like that. and no, it's just so good. Like there's some. There's some posts on there, like, like about random companies that like, they're not buzzy companies. Like there's one, there's one on Gartner that was just like, yeah.Like Gartner and Forrester. Like what's the deal with those companies? Like, why is one better than another? Why do you want to grow faster? What's the like competitive advantage or moat or defensibility or whatever you want to call it. Like. you know, and like he uses, I think the right amount of finance for me, you know, it's not like overly financial or quantitative, but like the numbers are there and he'll tell a story about how, like they were getting increasing, operating leverage, and you can see that in their cost of goods sold as the thing scaled, you know, like, and, and I will have to look up some of those words every once in a while, but like, it stretches me and just the right amount, you know?Just really an in-depth and good. so I love scuttle Barb. I mean, I can't, I can't not say Ben Thompson, because I think that the reason why I'm writing the kind of stuff I'm writing is, in no small part due to Ben Thompson. and I think through him, I got into like, You know, clay Christianson and Michael Porter and a bunch of other Hamilton, Homer, and a bunch of other people that really are more like academics or write books rather than are kind of in the current newsletter thing.But, in terms of like strategy theoreticians, you know, like that's like the kind of stuff that I, that I really like. And, so I, I love, I love reading all those people. What else is good. just as in terms of like more kind of like current stuff, like media industry stuff, diesel links by daily at Chi media light by Mark Stenberg.Those are both really good newsletters. Just kind of like, what's the latest, like what's going on in media, kind of like quick, really, really voicey fun, kind of like tone. there's yeah, there's a lot of good. There's a lot of good newsletters. There areNathan: [00:14:28] There are, it's so much fun. The amount of content that is being produced right now from a unique perspective. And. And like the commentary that you're getting in your ways, I think really fun. what are some of the things like as you've watched these newsletters that you've really tried to build into every, some of these, these takeaways, either from strategies that they've employed or, or like voice or any of those other things?N Baschez: [00:14:52] It's so interesting. because like, I think we think about ourselves as like we deliver our posts via email. but we think about ourselves as like trying to write, articles or essays in most cases more than we think of ourselves, like a newsletter. But then like now we're rediscovering some of the more newslettery elements of what we do are like, yeah, we could have some formats that are more like topical and timely and a little bit more like you've got a formula like every week there builds some familiarity, which I think readers really love, or, or even every day or more frequently than every week.And it's been so fascinating to try and figure out the balance with the mix of what we do. The stuff that I feel like has worked the best for us so far is the stuff that's more like we're going to spend a couple of weeks polishing an essay, kind of a thing, and then we'll deliver it via email to let people know that it's out.But like, you know, I don't know what percent of people like read it in their inbox that day versus go on the site later or, you know, whatever. we really think about it like, you know, like ideally looking back 20 years, it'll feel like we've created something. That's kind of like a modern version of a magazine or something like that with really high-quality feature writing.And also like more snackable kind of like shorter, more timely series. But, it feels like the feature writing is kind of like the backbone of all of what we do. and, at least. Definitely for my own writing. But I think also for, for other parts of the, of the bundle, that seems to be what people like best, which is so interesting because of people say like, Oh, you know, attention spans, whatever.Like, but people really like depth. Cause it's, it's, not about how many people find it. Okay. It's about how many people love it, you know? And so it's fine. If a smaller number of people like actually get all the way through, if the people who do get all the way through are like, this is so great. I'm so glad I'm like paying for this, you know, like that, that's the, the core goal.Nathan: [00:16:48] Is there actually, I'm gonna grab something real quick. We have. So my, my question is, is there any plans to like, bring those into other media forms? Cause like, we have this I'm a creator we did in the first edition that was Island blogger, like coffee table books of the stories that we've done. And I was just thinking.You know, I imagine every subscribers, every subscriber, no subscribers to every, I don't know. Yeah. we'd like, you know, to, to pick up, like, to have some of that in-depth articles in maybe a long form, yeah. In print. I was going to say in a hard bound format, which ties back to your previous company, what are you thinking on that?N Baschez: [00:17:38] Yeah, I think we would love to do that. One idea we had is like to do a sort of yearbook thing almost where it's like every year we do an anthology that's like sold at cost or something to subscribers. That's kind of like, you know, there's probably a little bit of new material, but we're kind of like, here's like the best of this year or something like that.I dunno. That would be cool. I don't know. I don't know what the right thing to do is with print right now. Our, our whole focus is really like. Building an editorial culture and organization because, you know, I think we've got the first year, this past year was really a lot about like figuring out a lot of the basics of like, are we going to do this at all?Or what are the, like the B, like how to basically, how do we work with people and what, you know, all of that. It's like doing things for the first time. And now it feels like next year, And it kind of culminating with being on our own platform, honestly. And now it's like, all the pieces are basically in place and now we need to like, kind of grow into it, you know, like, okay.Like, We're on our own website, but we need to make it like amazing. And we're, we've got like a team of people, but the team needs to really gel and we need to like go through a lot of cycles working together and like we're writing articles, but like, you know, how do we write better and more consistently and all this kind of stuff.And like, we're working with people, but how do we really recruit new people in a way that's a little bit more structured and systematic. So. I think a lot of this year is about just sort of like fo doing the things we already do and like doing them as best we can and learning how to do them. Just like staying really, really focused. so, I forgot Nathan: [00:19:12] makes sense. Well, I mean, It goes into this idea of solo versus versus a team, right? With the rise of Substack We've seen so much of people making the jump from a big publication, right? Where they they're part of a larger editorial team and then going entirely solo. I come from the world of, you know, individual bloggers, podcasters, where people have always been doing it solo.And now honestly, some of them are starting to, eye a team and say, Okay. I'm earning enough that I could have help. I can speak for myself when I'm working on a book right now, and I have an editor for it. And The times that I'm like, Oh, this is good. I'm a good writer. And then I submit it. And the editor just tears it apart.And I'm like, what are you doing? And then I go through all their suggestions and I rewrite it based on the areas they push me and I'm like, okay, now, now it's actually pretty good. And so I'd love your take on, on this, this idea of solo versus team then. And when. Creators should think of yeah.Going one way or the other. N Baschez: [00:20:13] Yeah, this may be a kind of weird thing, but I think everyone needs a team at some point in their career and they may not always need the team once they really figure something out. But like, and the team may not always be literally a team, like of people that you are employed with or whatever, but like, I don't think anyone can do it in a vacuum, and like start from scratch and be totally in a vacuum and then like succeed from scratch.Like I think people either have a good friend or like a, like a partner, whoever that, like, they are always running their pieces by, or they, you know, maybe used to work somewhere where they had an editor and they like learned a lot. From that. And then now that it's a little bit less necessary, but they probably still have people that they send their pieces to and all that kind of stuff.It just feels like, I mean, I don't know, at least for me there's maybe there's, but like for me, and for most people that I talk to it's, you know, to create really great writing, it's like, it's, you need to sort of be inculturated in it. It's like any other thing, if you want it to be a really great product manager, how do you become a great product manager or to be a great software engineer?How do you become a great software engineer? You have to be in an environment where you can see other people who are better than you doing at it and pick up how they do what they do. you learn all the little things to look for little, little things like, you know, Little vocabulary words, almost like, Oh, you know, these sentences don't fully connect or like this section wasn't really motivated, you know, like there's just like little things you can kind of pick up on that, that I think you can incorporate into your own consciousness, but start somewhere else.That's just like basic. Why are humans a special species of animal, is it because of like this cultural kind of like learning things? So we're not born with it, like it comes from traditions basically. and you've got to get those somehow. so I think, I think everyone does it. then maybe, you know, our goal is to create a group that is very intentional about those intentions and spreading them and making osmosis happen.By, you know, creating structures that facilitate it rather than just like rolling on everyone to figure it out on their own. Or maybe, you know, I think that the sad thing is a lot of people probably come to the conclusion that like writing isn't for them because you know, it's hard and maybe they don't get super positive feedback after publishing a couple of pieces or whatever.They think a lot more people would succeed if they had a little bit more support and accountability. and so, I mean, certainly for me, I don't think that I would have written nearly as good of stuff as I wrote this year. Not saying it's like, whatever, amazing, but just as good as it is, it would have been probably about 50% as good, if not less, you know, in terms of quantity and quality, than, than, than it, than it was because I had, you know, like Dan and Rachel, and there's just like a lot of people who I work with on pieces that I really value their feedback.Nathan: [00:23:05] Yeah, that makes sense. I think even like in the range of things you could have, one side would be, it's just you writing completely solo. And then kind of the next step is like the informal editorial advisory board, which is really just like four of your friends that you respect. I think about two of my pieces, that I'm proud of is the ladders of wealth creation and the billion dollar creator, which like, Barrett Brooks our COO at ConvertKit and James Clear.Who's a good friend and part of a mastermind group for the last. Eight years. Like I riffed with them on those pieces for probably, you know, off and on for 3–5 months before it turned into the final thing. And then like they gave lots of feedback and some of the sections that I was the most proud of.They're like, like just cut it out. You, you already said that in these two sentences, you don't need to say it in three more paragraphs.N Baschez: [00:24:01] Yeah, totally. No, it's crazy. It's crazy how important that stuff is. And another thing that you said there that I, that stood out to me is, you know, especially for it took you 3–5 months or whatever you said to like where you were like kind of riffing and you're, I think that. Period of distillation is so important where it's like you have some time to think about something and to notice things and to pick up little you're like accumulating little moments where each one individually is like, kind of interesting, but when you give yourself a little bit more time to like experience life and, and observe things and learn things and notice things that are all kind of gathering.It's almost like a crystal having time to grow. And it's like, you're finding all these things that connect, you know, like that process is really important. And I think essays that come after that are way better than essays where it's like, all right, I got three days, like, what am I going to write? You know what, you know what I mean?And I think a lot of times when people experience, the agony of writing it's because they don't know what they want to say. And, You know, sometimes you just need more time to like know, you know, and, and it's really, but it's really hard to do that. If you have your own solo paid subscription audience, like you need to publish something probably every week to make a paid subscription newsletter work.And so it's pretty hard to carry that on your own shoulders. If you want to write the kinds of things that take a month of like, Chewing on an idea or whatever, and accumulating, insights or, or perspectives or whatever. but that, that, that's the cool thing about the bundle is, people are subscribing for a collection of people rather than just one.And again, this is like nothing new. It's like the new Yorker, you know, if you, if you get in every, every week or two, like, and you look at the table of contents, it's not the same writers in there every single time. They kind of rotate in and out because it takes a while to create one of those things. and so hopefully we can have a similar type effect. and it will be a lot easier to justify the paid subscription then than as a standalone. But as a reader, it's like even better because every week you get something that has been distilled for like a month or longer potentially. rather than whatever I could come up with in like three hours.Nathan: [00:26:04] Because I send my newsletter at the same time every week and three hours is coming up really soon. there's two sides of that. I wanna dive in on the paid newsletters in just a second, but, on the other side, what systems do you have in place or you're like you encourage for the writers as part of every, to have in place to sort of start on those ideas early and then be able to refine and develop them over time.Right because that requires somewhat of a research system. It requires some productive procrastination, I guess. Like it's more than just like working on this article for five months. There's there's gotta be more of a process.N Baschez: [00:26:42] Yeah, totally. Oh, this is so interesting. And we're actually just starting to develop some of this and I'm so excited to like, see just what happens over the next year as we really like start to systematize it. So, basically, what we realized is we were thinking about it, like how we imagined, You know, a magazine or a newspaper might handle this kind of thing, which is like, you have a pitch meeting and like, you come up with an idea for what you want to write and you roughly know like kind of vaguely, this is the headline.This is what the story is about. It may not be the exact wording of the headline, but like you basically, you know what the piece is going to be. And, you come and you're like pitch it to people and people say, if it sounds interesting to them or not, basically, and then you move on and we, and we S we did that a little bit, and it was just like, this sucks.Like, this is not. This is not it. so first of all, whether something is fully formed or interesting, or not as like sort of a spectrum or like a binary of like, just how interested am I? It's like, that's not even the point. Like the point is, I, and like just the sort of adversarial ish relationship between like a pitch.It's like, I'm, I'm selling you something and you're deciding whether or not you want to buy it. You know what I mean? Like, Really, what we want is what comes prior to that, because I think there is a time and a place for pitching stories, but it's after you've done a lot of the work to figure out what the story really is.And so how do you, what is that work like and how do you, how can it be made more efficient or better? by the sort of like. You know, by, by the fact that you can do it with other people. So we, I don't know if we're actually going to call it this, but my, my goal is for us to call it inkling cultivation, where you have an inkling about something.That's interesting. And I think another thing that we'll probably actually call it is what's interesting. It's just a meeting called what's interesting. And you show up and the goal is like to get into interesting conversations, basically. Like if they're, if people are enjoying talking through an idea, then like it's working, it's, it's all about that feeling of actual, like enjoyment, you know, But the by-product of it is, I can say like, Hey, you know, I was thinking about like clubhouse and I think that I'm not sure if it's like a feature or a business, like clearly there's something compelling about the audio room format, but like, is that just going to be a thing that exists in a lot of products, like Snapchat stories or is that going to be like its own network effect, business type, type thing.That's like going to be, you know, an important company with like some real defensibility and revenue and all that stuff. Like, I dunno. I just, you know, it's interesting question to me and I'm like, Then other people will tell you what they think, and you can get into a conversation about it and it's fun and you can take notes and stuff.And then, then you're in a much better position to like write a draft or do some more research or whatever. Then if I had just kept that thought to myself, you know, yeah,Nathan: [00:29:15] When I can see, someone saying like, Oh, well, that's. That reminds me of this article. Right. And that someone else wrote and they share with you and you might be like, Oh, okay. It's been written already. I'm done. But most likely you'd be like, no, actually I disagree here. I like, yes, it has a similar title, but I think it's going to go this direction.And so, you know, that's the sort of thing that your very first commenter is going to be like, ah, this has been written before. And so if you have them read that article, because someone in the, in this what's interesting meeting, Uh, brought it up then you can like, it's a better research, more thought out piece,N Baschez: [00:29:53] Totally. I think that, I think the core idea is like at the end of the day, writing is an act of communication. And so it's, it's, it's a good form of communication when you. Have thought deeply about what you want to say and you've really crafted it. But in order to get to that point, you want to start with the more informal, casual, everyday way of talking.And I think the feeling that this is a fascinating conversation is the key thing we want to get to because that is ultimately, it's like, that's the spark that you're trying to like recreate for readers down the road. It's like the thing that feels interesting now, Is ultimately the same feeling in some ways that the reader is going to have later, you're just serving it up to them on a platter in like a guided journey, as opposed to like the sort of like rough, you know, loose thing that happens in like life live conversations.Nathan: [00:30:38] What I love about that is not just the refinement of the ideas, but you're also taking writing, which can be a very solo. Sometimes lonely task and turning it into a, a, a social engaging, you know, having that connection. And it's something that, right. Someone might start a newsletter it's growing and they get advice like, Oh, you should hire an editor, they'll push your ideas.But then you're like, look, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars per article on an editor yet. I'm not quite there yet, but you could make your own like, I've recommended mastermind groups a lot,N Baschez: [00:31:12] Yeah,Nathan: [00:31:12] And so you can make your own like, What's interesting group of like get together with four or five newsletter creators in the same space and have a weekly or a monthly call where you just kind of riff on each other's ideas, on, so it's amazing that you're creating that for, you know, members like, publications inside of every.N Baschez: [00:31:32] Yeah, totally. I'm so curious, like mastermind, I didn't even make that connection, but I think it's completely apt. Like, are there any structures from masterminds that you think would be useful for, you know, groups of writers talking about what stuff they're interested in, potentially writing about.Nathan: [00:31:47] Well, there's two sides of it. One with the mastermind. It's using that word. It's more commonly going to go to, to like, how should I grow my publication? What strategies should I use? And so a lot of people are going to fall into that side of like, Oh, well, Nathan, if you did this, then you would grow 5% faster per month.And that has its place. and can be like highly recommended, very useful. I think what we're both saying is you need both. Yeah, like that's the business side. And then for a second, let's just set aside everything about business and growth and let's just talk content and make sure that those stay like there's a wall between those.Yes, exactly. that would be funny if you're like this. This is Church N Baschez: [00:32:37] Church. Yeah. Oh my God. We should totally call it church. That is actually a great idea. And then we can have another meeting called state and it'sNathan: [00:32:46] Yeah. It's just about the business logistics of everything else. What's the conversion rate on that in, and you're like, I don't care. This is a church meeting.N Baschez: [00:32:55] Oh, my God. I actually kind of love that idea. I mean, there is a problem with media companies where there's sometimes too much separation between church and state, but I think having a cheeky plan that could be like a really fun, I'm going to pitch Dan on this. Okay.Nathan: [00:33:06] I love it. So structured for the mastermind. You know, I've, I've seen, hot seats. You know that that's probably the most common one where say, if you have four people in a mastermind group, they're, they're rotating, who's in the hot seat every week. Another important thing would be accountability. often you have these ideas that maybe you've you've pitched it or thrown it out in a what's interesting meeting.N Baschez: [00:33:32] Right. And then you follow up and you're like, so whatever happened, did you write that thing?Nathan: [00:33:37] Right. And so there's some visibility, let's say there's like five or six of us on the, on this meeting. If there's some visibility into what's in your rough drafts article list. And you're like, Hey, that one is actually good. Like I have one from quite a while ago. It's like, Oh man, it's probably 70% written.Or at least the first draft of it is, and it sat there and I haven't worked on it in six months. And so to have that accountability where someone is like, Hey, You got to actually put work into it. Like you went from productive procrastination and now you're just straight up procrastinate.N Baschez: [00:34:11] Avoidance. Yeah, totally. Or anything. If you want to join the collective, there's always a seat for you at the, yeah.Nathan: [00:34:18] I might just have to be.N Baschez: [00:34:20] Interesting meeting or should we call it church?Nathan: [00:34:22] Yes, exactly. I like that I'm being recruited to church. I did not expect that on, I don't know.Well, I love that approach of getting more support beyond like the editorial. Are there other areas that you think of, you know, individual, newsletter creators should be looking to, to add some more support?N Baschez: [00:34:47] Yeah, I think, I, I mean, there's a, there's obviously a whole bunch of, kind of like just the logistics of running a subscription business. That it's really nice to not have to, you know, like someone wants to cancel and, you know, they just emailed, you cancel me instead of clicking a couple buttons or whatever, like doing customer support, email is like, you know, always, never, never fun.And when we were on sub stack, they did that for us, as they do for all of their writers. but you know, like we do that now. but I actually liked that. Like, I think it's really good for us not to be insulated from those types of things and to have the control, to make it a better experience or whatever.If we want, like in whatever way is like best, best kind of like suited to our, to our strategy and to our customers and all that stuff. but like as a writer, you know, you don't necessarily want to be doing, doing a ton of that. what else? I actually think it really helps to have someone to help you look at your data.Cause understanding kind of like benchmarks and the gotchas and like, it's really like. Being able to confidently draw insights from data is requires a decent amount of, of, experience. Just like understanding how the technical systems work that create your data. So whether, you know, it's, even if you, even if you're on sub stack and you've got like sub stack has certain data, but it's kind of a black box or whatever to you, you know, you still have your Stripe account.And there's a lot of different tools that can help you visualize your Stripe account and like every sub stack. You know, paid subscription, writers should be looking at their cohorts and you can do that in subs or in Stripe and in other services that you can connect to Stripe, but like it doesn't show you what and sub stack.And it's like really important to look and see if your cohort performance is improving over time. Nathan: [00:36:27] At a high level. Can you share what you're looking at in cohorts? Cause I think, you know, coming from SAS, both you and I spent tons of time diving into cohort performance, ensuring and all of that.N Baschez: [00:36:37] Totally.Nathan: [00:36:37] I think a lot of other people won't have that same context.N Baschez: [00:36:39] Yeah, definitely. I mean, at the highest level, basically, if you're running a subscription business, you can really only grow so fast or you can only go so far if you have high turn. Cause even if you're signing up a bunch of new customers all the time, if just as many customers are canceling, then you're not gonna end up with a business that has a lot of longevity.Whereas if you have a very small percent of your people leave, then you don't need to add as many norms. As many new customers in order to grow. And even maybe if you haven't quite figured out your marketing or whatever, it can still be a pretty quickly growing business. just by the sheer fact that everyone's sticking around.So like churn, churn is incredibly important. and a lot of ways more important than, how, how well you can attract new subscribers. because it shows if there's really like. Longevity there and like real value being created. and you know, the best way to measure that is just by looking at how long people stick around on average.But it's interesting because it's more useful to look at this in some sort of segmented way than just in general. Like if you're looking and you're like, okay, Whatever, like 2000 people have ever signed up and I have 1,600 that are active now. So I've got like, whatever percent turn that, that would turn out to like, that is one way of doing it.And it is, it is like a somewhat useful metric. But if you want to get pretty actionable and figure out like, okay, Why are people churning or like, can I co can I connect any of this churn to like trends or whatever? It's nice to, it's nice to segment it in some way or another. And the most common way to do that is just based on cohorts, where it's like the cohort of people who signed up in may, what percent of them were still there in June?What percent of them are still there in July? What percent of them were still there? And you can kind of like draw these lines almost that it's like the X axis is months since joining. And the Y axis is percent that are still around. And so it starts in the top left at 100%, zero months since joining.Okay. A hundred percent of those there. And then in month one, what percent and what to what percent and what three, what percent, and you want it to basically flatten out at some point, if it just keeps going and it's approaching zero, then like, You know, overall the business's revenue will eventually approach zero.And, and, but, you know, good is it's hard to benchmark. It's like, that's always, the hard question is like, what is good? Well, it's like good, bad, whatever is less important than just doing the math and extrapolating what your business is likely to do. You can make projections based on these kinds of like averages.But you know, it's probably, you want to have greater than like 50%, terminal cohort retention, especially after like a year of being around. And, if you don't, it's important to kind of like really figure out, like it's probably important to refocus efforts and say like, Oh, we're not going to focus so much on new customer acquisition.We're going to focus on really understanding what's going on with our existing customers and why, they, they seem to be leaving so frequently. so anyway, that was kind of like a long-winded answer, but it's, it's really, really important for any subscription business. consumer, you know, media subscriptions is really no different in principle than like.SAS B2B software and a lot of ways, once you get to the really core principles, of course, They'll have different, you know, once you start to get into more of the nuances, there's very different levers. There's different specific numbers you may want to look at, but like at the core, looking at your retention on a cohorted basis is like really, really nice.And also you want to see it go like up over time, ideally. So it's like maybe you had some cohorts that churned a lot early on, and then, but as you're making improvements to your, to your product, whether that's an editorial product or any other type of product, you hope that new cohorts tend to stick around better.Cause that sort of shows that you're actually creating. Value like the things you're doing to improve your customer's experience are, are actually creating value. so anyway, it's been interesting to us to observe what kinds of things make a difference in what don't, it's, it's, it's its own whole big thing to dive down, but yeah,Nathan: [00:40:26] One thing that I've often seen in intern cohorts is the very first cohorts, tend to do decently well, the next there's like this Valley, the next hole don't do so well. And you climb out of it. And basically what happens is you get the people who love you and would buy anything and pay for it forever.And they signed up the moment you launched. They're just like. And they'll never cancel. And then after that, you're into the people who are like, okay, I'm signing up. Cause you say it's good. You know, I'm, I've been marketed to when I converted, but then your product isn't that good, you know, as in they cancel and then the product gets better over time.And as more people sign up, then they're like, Oh, this is actually what I expected to get. And, they're sticking around because of the product, not just because of an existing relationship or they're a true fan and that's what you want to see. Like, so don't be. You were sad when it goes down immediately, because when you goN Baschez: [00:41:19] Yeah,Nathan: [00:41:20] Fans to just, you know, subscribers, but you do want it to climb over time.N Baschez: [00:41:24] And, it's so interesting, like learning what causes it to go. Like you'll try different things and there'll be some things that. You think will make a huge difference in it? Like maybe honestly can't tell if there's any effect in the data. Like maybe the turn got a little bit better, but you're not sure what exactly caused it.And then there's other things where there's like, it's a pretty clear difference. And for us, what that thing has been, you know, without giving away too much of the secret sauce is, when someone new joins the bundle that people already like, it's like, that's the feeling of the value proposition of the bundle is like, Oh, My price didn't go up, but I'm getting more value now.And it causes the expectation of like, this is going to keep happening. So I might as well stick around and kind of like, see what's going on here. You know, even when we have like a hit article, it's kind of like, not as powerful as someone new joining the bundle.Nathan: [00:42:14] Oh, interesting. Okay. I was also going to ask how pricing plays into it because I noticed that on the new site you're pushing, you know, the annual plan is the default. So $200 a year for every, $20 a month is available. You know, but it's sort of like, Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. In the FAQ, if you want the monthly, here it is.N Baschez: [00:42:33] Yeah, I couldn't decide if that was like bad or not like to do it that way. I really don't want to design anything. That's like user hostile. but I really didn't want to prioritize the monthly thing very much in the design. And it's hard to like, what's the difference between like having a dark pattern and just having something that's like deprioritized prioritized in the design.I don't know. Yeah.Nathan: [00:42:55] Well, I think, I mean, you're S you're saying this is the product that we're selling, that doesn't work for you. We do have other options, and I feel like that's different than like, I don't know, dark patterns and user experiences, a whole different road, and all you've done. Is like on the site, your, your user interfaces is just copy.N Baschez: [00:43:15] So the question was basically like why the $200, why focus on annual, all that kind of stuff.Nathan: [00:43:20] Yeah. And what effect has that had on churn?N Baschez: [00:43:23] That's an interesting one. So we have very few people that have been around for over a year. So our initial customers from when we very first launched, paid subscriptions, are a lot of like, sort of true fans that signed up, like on day one ish. And so those have retained fantastically, well, we're a little bit more curious about what's going to happen.Like come, I think June-ish is when we start to really get beyond just like people that knew us, you know, and like, yeah. We're kind of hitting a stride with some of our writing and we added, Tiago to the bundle and all that kind of stuff. That's when we start to get beyond a little bit. And, when those yearly renewals come up, it'll be more of a true test.A lot of the reason why we decided to focus on annual instead of monthly is because if we can convince you to be around for a year, that gives us a lot longer to improve. Whereas if it's a decision every month, like we're only going to get so much better in a month, but in a year, we'll have a lot. I mean, I hope we're going to feel like very different in a year, you know?And, so it just lengthens the decision time. And like in exchange, we give you $40 off because you would be spending $40 more if you stuck around for a year on a monthly plan. and also in exchange, we give you if it's only $1 for 30 days and then we charge you for this. So there's a pretty long, it's not a free trial cause we want to make sure, like, you know, you're a little bit bought in and kind of like there's some skin in the game to like, Give this a real try and like read some stuff, because I do think that there is some activation energy around like reading things.Like it takes some effort in order to get the benefit out of it. But once you do that effort, you may be bought in, or maybe you're not. And in which case we need to do a better job, or maybe you weren't like the right target, kind of like the right kind of person we were targeting. But, Anyway, that was the kind of theory behind the $1 for 30 days.Thing is like, you should have a pretty good idea of if this is like, basically good enough for you to like stick around for a year. And then once the year happens, like then we have a year to get better, to Nathan: [00:45:12] Right.N Baschez: [00:45:12] Prove, improve the productNathan: [00:45:13] Yeah. That makes sense. Is there anything else that you've learned on running the paid subscription that, you know, people would want to know if they're either thinking about moving to paid or they're, you know, they have the free and a paid and they're thinking about, okay, how do I drive more value or increase revenue?N Baschez: [00:45:30] Yeah. I mean, I think if you're thinking about going paid, the key thing is if you're not already paid, is that because it's sort of like a part-time thing for you and there's something else you're doing for your primary income. And, if so, like how much it focuses you really going to be able to dedicate to the paid thing?Because it is like really hard. It's some people do have them as side projects, like paid newsletters, but. I personally feel like there's this kind of bifurcation that happens and that most people in this sort of like buzz about paid, paid, paid, paid newsletters right now, like aren't focused enough on which is like, these things tend to either work and then work really well.Or people try am for a little while, and then it's not right. It's not right for them at that moment or whatever. And so, Most people who it's not right for are the ones who had a newsletter that was free. And they have some sort of other job that's like takes up pretty much their full time. And then they want to just tack on a little bit to what they're already doing.And then they, they struggle with it. because it is hard to sustain a solo subscription where it's like, you definitely will have those people that are just like your super fans that are going to buy anything you do, because they love you. and if that's so many people that. You know, you don't even have to almost write that much and people will still stick around and that'll support you then.That's great. That's awesome. There are definitely people who are in a position to do that. Like, you know, when slate, star codex moved on to sub stack and like, it was the first time he'd ever offered, paid subscriptions for his writing. I'm like, I don't care. Like, just as a thank you for like all the years of like, Whatever, like hard work that love his work that I loved.I'm just like, I'm paying, I just want like to be on the list. It's like, so, you know, and so, so for him, it doesn't even really matter what he's putting behind the paywall, because he has such a big audience of people who like, love it so much. whereas like, you know, for me, I have to prove a lot more value.And I haven't, I haven't built that thing up yet with very many people, maybe like a couple dozen, but not, you know what I mean? Like people with, you know, whatever in my family or something. so, you know, I think that's a real thing for people that are like considering going paid. there was another part to your question though.I forgot what it was. Cause I rambled for a long time.Nathan: [00:47:52] I think just noticing what your other commitments are in life, that's really important. Right. Cause if you're like, yeah, I've got the newsletter. I do that on the side, then I've got the full-time job and then like, Oh yeah, I just had a kid or I just got married, you know, or some other things.And it's like, yeah, let's also do a paid newsletter. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Versus if you're like, you're like, okay, I'm at the New York times as a journalist, I'm going to, I've been building up my free newsletter on the side and I'm going to leave this and now do a paid newsletter as my job. and not only do you have the professional experience of like, yeah, I write on deadline every single day, you know?And I have that habit, but also I'm going to be able to dedicate, you know, 10, 20, 30 hours a week just to this paid newsletter. That's very different from just like, there's a quick opportunity to say I'm going to stack one more thing onto my list of side hustles.N Baschez: [00:48:45] Yeah. And I think that is, it kind of speaks to what I was getting at earlier with like the inculturation thing of like, you know, if you like have been a full-time journalist and you have a beat and you have sources and you know what it's like to publish like a couple of things a week, on a regular basis, like, yeah, you're a really well, and you have the audience or whatever, like you're in a great position to like, do your own Substack and like.You know, more power to you. That's amazing. We're big fans of Substack We're glad that that, or just in general, the idea of having a solo subscription newsletter, right? Like that's, that's awesome. that's not going to be right for everybody. Like, you know, maybe, and that's not to say that, you know, like, I think if you wanted to write something that just like, you want to write one thing a month, you know, like some people maybe that would work as like a solo subscription, but like in a lot of cases, I think that may end up being tougher.So I don't know. I think, I mean, in terms of really tactical advice, I really do think frequency matters a lot and it really, if you can get up to like three, four times maybe even like daily or like weekday weekday-ly Like those do tend to do better. I, I don't remember a lot of the specifics of like when I was at Substack and I had access to the numbers and stuff, but like there was, we did look at that and there was a real correlation.Nathan: [00:49:58] Yeah, that makes sense. let's talk platforms for a little bit, cause we're seeing obviously sub stack has grown. Like crazy. we can get into the broader macro things of review and Facebook and Twitter and everything else. but for just a minute, I'd love to talk about obviously the growth that people are seeing on sub stack.And then there's this category of newsletters, especially over the last, probably three months in particular, every being one of them that have made the switch off of sub stack either to. MailChimp plus Pico or convert kit or a custom built platform. and I'm curious what you're seeing and, and you know, what drove you to make the switch to a custom built platform?N Baschez: [00:50:39] Yeah, I think, I mean, subsets and amazing place to get started. I was their first employee there and like a huge fan. I'm biased. I'm a shareholder still like, you know, like that's. You know, we should put that on the record. like, so I think that, I think that they're very focused on, on a very specific thing, which is like the solo writer, you know, and I think to some extent they're very interested in, groups of writers working together.And to some extent they have a thing, but it's more like individual publications with multiple by-lines rather than like a bundle of publications really, you know? and so, It's all, it's all built around that very specific thing. And I think they've done the reason why, you know, we've heard so much about sub stack, but like, you know, other platforms that, I mean, like review was around, I think before sub stack remember full, like the reason why sub stack took off is because I think a, of the simplicity of what they created, there's just.Zero setup costs. I think B because it's a little bit more constrained and it's a little bit more branded, substan just felt a little bit more visible than something like remember fall, which is like totally behind the scenes. review had a little bit of that same branded feeling. but I think, you know, maybe not quite as much as sub stack, but then see, and I think really the most important thing is they.Had a new vision for what writers, what solo writers could do. They were like going out to people who are talented writers that had big audiences and saying, Hey, I know you right now, you're focused on. Getting a book deal or getting a job at wherever the next step is for you and your career path. But like, have you considered doing a paid subscription thing?There are some people that are doing it that started from a place that didn't even have as big of audience as you. And it worked really well. And they got a lot of writers to like change their career plans, basically to try a new model. And that's what I mean when I was at sub SAC, like we would call it jokingly like the religion, you know?And it's like, we didn't like. You know, it's like faith that you can make your own business. You can be your own publisher. You can, you can, it's better to have an ARR than a salary. You know, it's better to have an audience whose email addresses, you know, they're looking forward to hearing from you in their inbox and you own the list of their email addresses or whatever.It's better to have that than to have that to be published. And it's really appealing religion. You know what I mean? it's, it's something that I think, I think that they just aggressive. They are, I understand writers cause Hamish is one and you know, was a journalist for a lot of years. And but he also has that kind of like sales person, you know, of like, he, he, he knows that's like their DNA is like, have you considered this?Basically? I know you probably haven't, but you really may, will actually want to. and then I think also what really. Supercharged. It was just honestly, Andreessen Horowitz, like does a great job at like they're very well networked and they use their network and we're seeing it now with clubhouse too.And that really can there's there's sort of network effects that they understand around cultural stuff. That's like, You know, it's acceptable to like have a sub stack in a way that going on a platform that maybe people haven't heard of as much as like, might feel more risky to people who like, you know, are, are more, like if you're, you know, a journalist or whatever, that, that you, you want to do something that feels like it's a little bit more well understood or whatever, subset gets kind of like blazed that trail. So I think there's a lot of huge advantages to being on sub stack. I think that it's awesome. That sub stack is sort of like realizing that vision in a way that, you know, we talked about when I was there, but like, There wasn't a ton of people publishing on sub stack. When I was, you know, it was really amazing to see kind of like the growth over time.And, I think that there's definitely at the kind of like, high-end some, some possibility that there'll be more, people who kind of have a vision more to create their own publication. That's like multiple authors, like maybe it's structured as a writer, collective like us. Maybe not. but, I think that some of those, it will make sense for them to like own their own stack and, and, and leave the platform to have a little bit more control.But maybe some cycle also build to be like more supportive of that use case. Like I could imagine them if they had given us like, You know, a lot more customization. Like they could've kept us for a little longer probably, and it doesn't seem like something that doesn't fit with their business model.I mean, at the end of the day, if they're providing, you know, the infrastructure and they've got their percent take, and if you want to go in and do other customization, you can, but like you don't have to, you know, there's, it could, it could have. Stuck around a little longer potentially. so I don't know.It'll be very interesting to see kind of like what happens at the high, I think at the high end, it kind of will bifurcate what, where, some will kind of form their own media companies that are like multi, multi author type deals, whether it's a bundle thing or like a, just a normal publication type thing.But then I think there was also going to be a lot of people who want to just write, you know, and like they know what they're right. They know their audience, they've got their thing figured out. And now they're kind of cashing in on it rather than it's a different situation from like, you know, like Matt Yglesias, for example, like when Matt Yglesias, like, you know, 15 years ago or whatever was coming up, it was probably very important that he had like colleagues and editors and all this stuff now, like he's been doing it for awhile.He can, like, he knows what he's doing and. You know, a little bit of different needs. So it's an interesting, like thing to observe kind of the market evolve

Hunter is a partner at Homebrew, a seed stage venture fund. Before Homebrew, he led consumer product management at YouTube, starting when it was acquired by Google. Hunter originally joined Google in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for AdSense. Prior to Google, he was a founding member of the product and marketing team at Linden Lab, the creators of the online virtual world, Second Life. [0:10] - Hunter's story [2:44] - Thoughts on the ongoing exodus from major cities [6:51] - The future balance of hybrid work models [10:04] - Online serendipity [15:52] - Hunter's early career experiences [19:28] - Hunter's role in YouTube's growth [22:25] - The Homebrew origin story [23:43] - Investing in problem-solving founders -- Thank you for listening to Pod of Jake! All shares and reviews are sincerely appreciated! LINKS: Twitter: @blogofjake Website: podofjake.com Blog: blogofjake.com Email: jake@blogofjake.com Call: superpeer.com/jake Support: patreon.com/blogofjake Bitcoin: 3ESGQxrJZmGqd2SifqCUiHPvah1uWtN1Zd Ethereum: blogofjake.eth 0xF89aCC1f8c4FeEAc372997006BfE7c0fdD99F80c Bitcoin Cash: qznma8vxf8kjn4v9phsfkhzd0559gm7yfsx0gkl4sf

The Meta-Creator CeilingHow many people should be teaching people how to succeed instead of just succeeding in their own way?As independent creators carve out a new career path for themselves, I suspect that some are unintentionally picking a path that limits their growth and robs the world of their true potential.This theory was triggered by this Hunter Walk tweet:Of course it is too reductive to reduce pluripotent people to "A players" and "B players". And of course this is nowhere near as bad as the real-life "glass ceiling" or a "bamboo ceiling" in normal careers, where a certain set of the workforce is unable to progress by sheer fact of who they are. That is obviously despicable and is a far more important societal issue.But the meta-creator ceiling is interesting to me because it is a path that new creators follow by choice, yet without being aware of it's limitations because nobody is incentivized to warn them. Perhaps because it is an easier game than others, or perhaps because of hype and marketing.No judgment — I of all people know that there are many ways to avoid asking what it is I really want to do with my life.Perhaps some definitions are in order: A "Meta-Creator" is someone who creates content about creating, instead of just creating.The temptation toward being a Meta-Creator is extremely high. There are three paths: The A-B-C Loop: People want success porn. They are oblivious to the narrative fallacy and ignore luck and complicating details. Your success creating success porn gains you access to more successful people who are only too happy to let you write their hagiography. You can spend an entire career mythologizing successful people, living a life of a bard rather than a hero. The Creator Strange Loop: To quote the always-brilliant Philip Kiely: "First you do X, then you make content about doing X, then you make content about that content... One day you realize you haven't done X for six months. And there is only so much room for content at the highest levels of abstraction." Every single step makes logical sense because you have credibility from having just done the thing. Yet after a few steps you look back and you have wandered far from your original interests. The Audience-Building Loop: The natural end game of the current Audience-First and Build in Public memes is that you naturally attract an audience of wannabe builders. There are only so many topics they want to buy, and so many things to incestuously sell to each other. The successful cohorts will be supported by the far bigger unsuccessful ones in a self-organizing pyramid scheme. To be extremely clear: You can be enormously successful and happy being a Meta-Creator, and bring success and happiness to millions, and that is no small feat. I enjoy Tim Ferris' podcasts and Tren Griffin's blogposts. No judgment if that's your thing. The economics make sense too — in a gold rush, go mine a bit of gold, then sell the shovel you used because it is proven to work.But, one, you may have a lower chance of success pursuing this path than others, because it is both available to everyone and zero-sum.But I write for reason two: the sneaking suspicion that even if you win and are top of the heap at the Meta-Creator game, you are still limiting yourself from what you could be doing with your life. What the people you actually look up to are doing with theirs. What the world could be benefiting from if the greatest minds of our generation just applied themselves to other problems than "How to Crush it on Twitter" or "How to Get A Million Subscribers on YouTube" or the 3923rd "How Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Think" blogpost.Smart, capable people like you and I can often approach life with more ambition than direction. We want success more than we want to solve problems. I think the way to approach the question of "what do I do to be successful", may be to flip it on its head:Assume you will be successful at whatever game you play. Are you playing a game you want to win?

COVID-19 has been no friend to our collective mental health. Rates of anxiety and depression have soared since the pandemic began, as has alcohol and drug use. In this episode of Brainstorm, Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O'Keefe talk to business leaders leveraging technology to address the problem. Robin McIntosh, co-founder and co-CEO of Workit Health, a virtual rehab service, extols the ability of telemedicine to increase accessibility for those seeking treatment. And while that's unquestionably a good thing, says venture capitalist Hunter Walk; investors in these companies can't adopt a growth-at-all-costs mentality. He explains why. Finally, Cisco's Chief People Officer, Fran Katsoudas, discusses how the company is protecting employees' mental health in these unprecedented times. Visit MakeItOK.org to get resources, tips for talking about mental health, and more. If you or anyone you know is struggling, there's help available, any time. It's free and you'll reach a trained volunteer. You can reach the Crisis Text Line by texting the word HOME to 741-741, or call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.

Whether you're an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry leading security and wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today. Bryce Hall & Anthony Pompliano have partnered up to bring Capital University to you. This show is a new age business/entrepreneurship podcast, geared towards helping young entrepreneurs and influencers create long term wealth. Throughout the show, Pomp and Bryce will be discussing investing, business, social media, and much more. They will also be bringing on world-class entrepreneurs and business leaders to further the learning. Be sure to subscribe to the show, share the episode with your friends, and check out the show on YouTube for the full uncut video. Meet Hunter Walk, a founder and partner at Homebrew. He also has extensive experience in product development and played a key role in making YouTube one of the internet's largest websites.

Hunter Walk is a founding Partner at Homebrew.Homebrew is a Seed stage venture firm providing capital and assistance to entrepreneurs who are building the companies that they envision within the Bottom Up Economy. Some notable investments are Plaid, Cruise, ShieldAI, and theSkimm.Prior he led customer product management at YouTube and was on the founding team at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life.

Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) is Co-founder & Partner at Homebrew, a seed-stage venture firm he founded in 2013 with Satya Patel. Homebrew has invested in the likes of Plaid, Gusto, Chime, Bowery Farming, Stir, Finix Payments, Honor, Lumi, Tia, theSkimm, Winnie, and many more (see full portfolio). Prior to founding Homebrew, Hunter led consumer product management at YouTube, spent time on the product and marketing team at Linden Lab, and worked in management consulting at Deloitte. In this episode, Hunter and The Takeoff's Michael Spiro discuss: Founding Homebrew with Satya Patel How Homebrew adds value to portfolio founders Changes to the seed investing landscape since Homebrew started in 2013 Optimizing for processes and learning early on, not just hitting milestones Consulting at Deloitte out of school Why you should focus on learning early in your career Advice for aspiring VCs & more You can find Hunter's blog at https://hunterwalk.com/about/. He's on Twitter @hunterwalk (I highly recommend following him if you aren't already!). If you dig what we're doing with The Takeoff, go ahead and subscribe to our newsletter https://thetakeoff.substack.com/ and follow us on Twitter @_TheTakeoff. We're a student-run podcast & newsletter hoping to become the go-to spot for students and young professionals looking to learn more about startups, tech, venture capital, and more. Items reference in the episode: Mark Suster's blog post (Upfront Ventures): https://bothsidesofthetable.com/is-it-time-for-you-to-earn-or-to-learn-34270acd2f4 Influence by Robert Cialdini: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X (Apologies for the suboptimal audio in the first few minutes of the episode. I was recording out of my college apartment and a bunch of background noises popped up. We did our best to get rid of them all, but, unfortunately, we're not audio engineers)

This week on the program, a conversation with Stir Co-Founder/CEO Joe Albanese. Stir is a startup aimed at building tools for creators and their collaborators and empowers them to run great businesses. The company has raised around 4m in seed funding to date from notable investors, including YouTube Luminaries Casey Neistat and Mythical Media, in addition to Anchor Co-Founder Mike Mignano, Patreon CEO Jack Conte, Blake Robbins at Ludlow Ventures and Hunter Walk from Homebrew. In this episode we discuss, Joe's lessons learned from Zuck while working at Facebook, why Joe started Stir, Joe's process for fundraising, why creators are businesses, what is the future of media looks like and more. This conversation was recorded on November 9th, 2020, thanks for listening! Stay in the loop: Subscribe to my YouTube Channel | Follow me on Twitter | Follow me on Instagram | Check out my My Newsletter

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.The full Equity crew was on hand to debate the current venture capital market, curious about how risk-on, or risk-off things really are today. Danny, Natasha and I framed the conversation around a number of news items from the week, including:Wrkfrce has launched, and we wanted to chat more about the future of niche media, bringing The Juggernaut's own recent round, and the Quartz shakeup into the conversation.And on the media front -- always a risky venture capital investing domain -- Spotify has snapped up another podcasting company, this time paying $235 for Megaphone. Our take? A string of small exits probably won't encourage VCs to take on more risk in the space (Hunter Walk said the same thing here.)Turning to risk more generally, I asked Natasha to weigh in on the earlier-stages of the venture market, and Danny on its later tranches. There's still lots of money, but it appears more focused on chasing winners than bolstering or supporting less-obvious startups.That market is not slowing a risk-on move towards more venture capital players, as the Spearhead news showed a new focus for the firm to invest in emerging fund managers.And there's still plenty of risk tolerance in remote-work solutions like Hopin, which just raised $125 million at a $2+ billion valuation. We're torn on the round, but Danny likes it and he's a former VC.And we wrapped with a chat about upcoming IPOs, and the recent SoftBank results. If DoorDash, Airbnb and others are going to go this year, they need to go soon. So far, no dice.It was a busy week, despite the month. Expect more of the same next week.https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/how-softbanks-vision-fund-turned-losses-into-gold-this-summer/Finally, don't forget that our own Chris Gates is cutting Equity videos out of every episode that you can find over on YouTube. He does a great job and it's great to be on video, as well as audio platforms.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.The full Equity crew was on hand to debate the current venture capital market, curious about how risk-on, or risk-off things really are today. Danny, Natasha and I framed the conversation around a number of news items from the week, including:Wrkfrce has launched, and we wanted to chat more about the future of niche media, bringing The Juggernaut's own recent round, and the Quartz shakeup into the conversation.And on the media front -- always a risky venture capital investing domain -- Spotify has snapped up another podcasting company, this time paying $235 for Megaphone. Our take? A string of small exits probably won't encourage VCs to take on more risk in the space (Hunter Walk said the same thing here.)Turning to risk more generally, I asked Natasha to weigh in on the earlier-stages of the venture market, and Danny on its later tranches. There's still lots of money, but it appears more focused on chasing winners than bolstering or supporting less-obvious startups.That market is not slowing a risk-on move towards more venture capital players, as the Spearhead news showed a new focus for the firm to invest in emerging fund managers.And there's still plenty of risk tolerance in remote-work solutions like Hopin, which just raised $125 million at a $2+ billion valuation. We're torn on the round, but Danny likes it and he's a former VC.And we wrapped with a chat about upcoming IPOs, and the recent SoftBank results. If DoorDash, Airbnb and others are going to go this year, they need to go soon. So far, no dice.It was a busy week, despite the month. Expect more of the same next week.https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/how-softbanks-vision-fund-turned-losses-into-gold-this-summer/Finally, don't forget that our own Chris Gates is cutting Equity videos out of every episode that you can find over on YouTube. He does a great job and it's great to be on video, as well as audio platforms.

We're now in a business climate transformed by Covid. And founders need help figuring out how to impress investors, find new customers, and connect with potential cofounders in this uncertain time. We wanted to help out. So we got investors Elizabeth Yin from Hustle Fund and Hunter Walk from Homebrew to hop on The Pitch hotline to take your calls. The Callers: Rebecca Colett, Calyxeum Graham Hawley, TRID Shwetha Maddur, Catalyst Bryan McGehee, GATR Coolers Jeff Walsh, Illuminent

This all Conquer The Gauntlet Pro Team episode features the newest female Pro, Jenny Overstreet.  Jenny has been winning all the races that come through Kansas City over the last several years and won her Age Group at 2019 North American OCR Championships 15k.  She talks with Ultra-OCR Man Evan Perperis and guest co-host Lisa Nondorf fresh off her first CTG win.  The episode gets a little weird at the end with surprising facts about the teammates.  (Podcast Clarification: Gigantopithecus lived sometime between 2.5 million years ago and 11,500 years ago.)   Episode brought to you by HYLETE, the makers of the best fitness apparel available. Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church Podcast Link: http://annunciation.podbean.com/ Music provided by Dino Sinos

In today's brand new episode, we are joined by Hunter Walk, Founder & Partner at the Venture firm Homebrew, which has invested in a variety of successful companies including Chime, Plaid, Cruise, and Gusto. Prior to founding Homebrew, Hunter led consumer product management at YouTube and managed product and sales efforts for Google's contextual advertising business. Hunter is a proud husband and father residing in San Francisco.

Bradley speaks with Hunter Walk, partner at Homebrew, a seed stage VC fund that provides early stage investment assistance to entrepreneurs and former Product Lead of virtual world, Second Life. Bradley and Hunter discuss his career in product development and investing, the benefits of small vs. large funds, and how the pandemic creates a culture shift for investors.

Looking to the past doesn't always work. For one, many current founders or CEOs were "still in high school" during the last economic crisis, according to Homebrew partner and co-founder Hunter Walk. For another, even for those entrepreneurs who survived the last global downturn, the big takeaways might not apply to current circumstances. "The answers from those entrepreneurs in 2008 may or not be the right answers for companies in 2020. But the questions they asked themselves might be the things that are evergreen. And so asking some of those questions of yourself as a founder who might be going through this the first time -- I think that's where it gets valuable," Walk said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Homebrew, the investment company Walk co-founded in 2013, has invested in companies ranging from the worlds of kids' clothing to aerospace technology and farming robots. Another evergreen spot for him is in the qualities of the founders he invests in, "which have remained consistent and help us do our job during a time like this," Walk said. "You ask yourself 'why is this founder working to solve this problem?' And if the answer is something that usually comes from a personal interest in the problem, a deep insight or connection, then when they hit a speed bump (or in this case a very large speed bump, from a global standpoint) they don't stop. They pause, maybe, and say 'OK, how do I have to rethink my business?' But they're not just doing this opportunistically. They're doing it because they couldn't imaging doing anything else."

The full interview hereHunter Walk thinks your TAM slide is stupid.That's one viewpoint that the seed-stage investor shared with TechCrunch that made us laugh during our recent conversation. Walk joined us for an Extra Crunch Live chat late last week that was a mix of advice and insight about what the seed-stage Homebrew partner looks for in founders and companies to invest in.In the case of founders, "attitude matters as much as aptitude sometimes," Walk said, adding that "grit" and "resilience" are things he favors in entrepreneurs. Why do those qualities matter? Walk cited the Mike Tyson quip about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the face, saying that "building an early-stage startup, you get punched in the face almost daily."Form one line, folks considering building a new company.We also dug into fintech, where Walk and his Homebrew partner Satya Patel have made a number of investments that have turned out well, including Plaid, Finix, Chime and so on. According to Walk, his firm has made investments into the startup category across funds because it felt that two things were going to happen. First, that "a lot of data that had been siloed and unavailable was going to become available," citing Plaid as an example of the trend.Second, that the top-down model of building tooling that made chiefs happier than front-line workers was going to flip in the financial world. New software was going to look quite different and focus on the individuals' needs. Chime, the American neobank, was his example of this trend bearing out in the market.

The full interview hereHunter Walk thinks your TAM slide is stupid.That's one viewpoint that the seed-stage investor shared with TechCrunch that made us laugh during our recent conversation. Walk joined us for an Extra Crunch Live chat late last week that was a mix of advice and insight about what the seed-stage Homebrew partner looks for in founders and companies to invest in.In the case of founders, "attitude matters as much as aptitude sometimes," Walk said, adding that "grit" and "resilience" are things he favors in entrepreneurs. Why do those qualities matter? Walk cited the Mike Tyson quip about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the face, saying that "building an early-stage startup, you get punched in the face almost daily."Form one line, folks considering building a new company.We also dug into fintech, where Walk and his Homebrew partner Satya Patel have made a number of investments that have turned out well, including Plaid, Finix, Chime and so on. According to Walk, his firm has made investments into the startup category across funds because it felt that two things were going to happen. First, that "a lot of data that had been siloed and unavailable was going to become available," citing Plaid as an example of the trend.Second, that the top-down model of building tooling that made chiefs happier than front-line workers was going to flip in the financial world. New software was going to look quite different and focus on the individuals' needs. Chime, the American neobank, was his example of this trend bearing out in the market.

This week's episode took a different turn than our normal programming. COVID-19 has ravaged every sector of the economy; while BigTech has stayed relatively flat and certain areas have seen unprecedented demand, the vast majority of the world is working through an excruciatingly tough, once-in-a-century type event. This week I chatted with Hunter Walk, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Homebrew Ventures. Hunter and team have $200M in assets under management and have invested in some of the biggest generational winners of our time including Plaid, Bowery Farming, Chime, BuildingConnected and Cruise amongst others. We talked all things tech and venture capital during this incredibly trying time.

Andrew Mauck is a soon-to-be father, former football player, and hunter. This episode, Andrew tells us about his football career and how it was cut short by concussions, and he breaks down some common misconceptions about hunting and hunters. We also hear the story of how he almost died during a job interview (he got the job).

The Talon-T Talk show hosts Hunter Walk and Tyrone's Head Wrestling Coach Terry Tate to talk about Hunter's run at the PIAA AA State Championships.

Vedika Jain (@vedikaja_in (https://twitter.com/vedikaja_in)) is an investor and Chief of staff at Weekend Fund (https://weekend.fund/), an early stage venture capital fund that is backing your next favorite thing. Previously she worked for high profile startups like Stripe (https://stripe.com/) and True Layer (https://truelayer.com/). Weekend Fund was started in 2017 by Ryan Hoover (https://ryanhoover.me/), the founder of Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/) (an amazing site to discover new products. Product Hunt was acquired in 2016 by AngelList (https://angel.co)). While Ryan and Vedika invest broadly, they are particularly excited about distributed/remote working, audio/voice technology, and tools for creators/makers. The fund invests in early stage startups with check sizes ranging from $75K to $200K. Limited partners of the fund include high profile venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Ben Rubin, Chris Sacca, Hunter Walk, Kevin Rose, Garry Tan, and others. Vedika has a really interesting background story and approach how she made her way into "the wonderful world of venture capital". In this episode you will hear about her tactics how she got into VC and general career advice for picking the right companies & startups to work for. In addition, you will learn more about Weekend Fund, Vedika’s favorite books & blogs, and much more! Please follow me on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/leaptakerspodcast/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheRemoKyburz), and my Website (http://www.leaptakers.com/), where I post new episodes, share interesting articles I found, and blog occasionally about cool startups! Sign-up for the mailing list to stay in the loop (https://www.leaptakers.com/subscribe)! Show notes: * 03:48 -- Who is Vedika & Intro * 04:55 -- How Vedika became fascinated with technology and startup investing * 07:08 -- How Vedika joined two fast growing tech startups - Stripe and True Layer * 09:45 -- Vedika’s lessons learnt for picking your first jobs / companies * 13:00 -- Writing personal investment memos and how to "hustle" your way into Venture Capital * 18:05 -- Vedika’s investment areas and future trends * 20:57 -- How Vedika met Ryan Hoover and joined Weekend Fund * 22:35 -- Starting your own fund vs. joining an existing VC * 25:16 -- Introduction to Weekend Fund * 28:16 -- Favorite books and resources for aspiring VCs * 30:41 -- Vedika’s favorite non-entrepreneurship related books * 32:07 -- Most worthwhile investment of Vedika If you're enjoying the podcast, the best way to support the show is by leaving a review on Apple Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/ch/podcast/the-leap-takers-podcast/id1468975811?l=en) or in your favorite podcast app. Special Guest: Vedika Jain.

We interview state-qualifying wrestler Hunter Walk about the 2019-2020 Golden Eagles wrestling season.

The Daily Lottery Was Originally a Harlem Game. Then Albany Wanted In. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/nyregion/numbers-harlem-new-york-lottery.html --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Jean-Patrice Anciaux est VC chez le fonds de seed de BPI, F3A depuis 4 ans. Un épisode qui permet notamment, de comprendre le fonctionnement de BPI sur la partie Venture Capital (et les différences avec la partie financement/endettement) mais aussi d'aider les entrepreneurs à mieux assimiler les enjeux de la phase de seed et son implication pour la trajectoire de leurs startups. Avant cela, Jean-Patrice avait tenté l'expérience entrepreneuriale puis avait rejoint Paris Business Angels en tant que de délégué général. Dans cet épisode, vous allez apprendre : 1) Qu’est ce que le fonds BPI F3A ? Quel est le parcours de Jean-Patrice ? Retour sur son expérience entrepreneuriale et son passage chez Paris Business Angel. Quelles différences entre BPI financements et investissements ? Comment est structuré BPI investissement ? Quelle est la thèse du fonds F3A seed ? 2) Comment adapter son fonds aux startups qui lèvent en seed ? Comment est réparti le capital du fonds entre les investissement en seed et les follow on en serie A/B ? 3) Quel est le quotidien et le rôle de JP chez F3A ? Pourquoi veut-il toujours avoir un pied dans le sourcing et le screening des deals et ne pas tout déléguer aux juniors analystes ? 4) C’est quoi le seed pour Jean-Patrice ? Est-ce une étape ou un tour ? Quelles sont les deux tactiques de levées de fonds que peuvent utiliser les entrepreneurs ? 5) Quelles sont les bonnes raisons de lever des fonds en seed ? Quelles questions se poser ? Quid du montant levé en seed ? Pourquoi lever “trop d’argent” en seed n’est pas forcément une bonne idée ? Pour quel runway lever en seed et pourquoi ?  6) Pourquoi sommes-nous dans un “haut de cycle” ? Comment fonctionne ces cycles ? Que se passe t’il lors d’une correction d’une marché ? Quelle thématique intéresse le plus actuellement Jean-Patrice ? Ressources mentionnées : Article d'un VC américain, Hunter Walk, sur le seed "For Fundraising, Seed is No Longer a Round, It’s a Phase" Sur la route de Jack Kerouac Pour recevoir les futurs épisodes de ce podcast, abonnez vous à ma newsletter. (un mail chaque lundi à 16h30 envoyé à plus de 900 personnes) Si vous aimez ce podcast, le meilleur moyen de me le faire savoir est d'aller le noter (et mettre un commentaire) sur Apple Podcast.

“Airbnb's unit economics are quite legendary — the S-1 is going to be MOST disrupted FASTEST in the next 3 YEARS? Caps for effect.” Who Tweeted that? Initialized Capital's Garry Tan? Homebrew's Hunter Walk? Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham? Or perhaps one of the dozens of other venture capitalists active on Twitter . No, it was Parrot.VC, a new Twitter account and website dedicated to making light of VC Twitter.

In this episode, I’m excited to speak with Vivek Saraswat of the Mayfield Fund. Vivek is a venture investor and experienced product leader in next-generation enterprise application and infrastructure technologies. You’ll definitely want to hear how he answered my question about how to raise your first $10M, his advice for CEOs who want to pitch investors, and much more. You’ll also hear why he spotlighted a few noteworthy investors: Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures, Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures, Hunter Walk of Hombrew, and Navin Chaddha of Mayfield. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/murray-newlands7/support

Today we got a chance to sit down with Hunter Walk and discuss his career, what he looks for in founders and products that he’s investing in and, perhaps the most interesting, how he analysis someone’s career path when looking to invest in them… and it’s not exactly what you would expect. Hunter Walk is a founder and partner at Homebrew. He also has extensive experience in product development and played a key role in making YouTube one of the internet's largest websites. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at Gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest this week is Hunter Walk, the co-founder of Homebrew, a unique venture capital firm. Hunter is a tool builder, having spent his career before venture at companies like Google and YouTube. The topic of our conversation is the intersection of creative expression, technology, human behavior, and problem solving.  We discuss his time at the company behind the video game Second Life, building tools for creators at YouTube, and why a very hands-on style of early stage venture investing represents an interesting use of his skillset at this stage of his career.  Please enjoy my conversation with Hunter Walk. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes 1:24 - (First Question) – Background on Second Life and what role Hunter had there 6:10 – The virtual currency system at use in Second Life 9:51 – Measuring how people behaved in this virtual world 12:21 – How closely is the Second Life world mimicking real life 15:13 – The market for platforms that lets people take on creative ventures 17:58 – Investments that interest Homebrew 20:21 – Lessons learned while working at YouTube 28:34 – The idea behind Homebrew 33:44 – How to best describe good problems to solve for 36:10 – The Shadow economy and investing in companies operating there 42:17 – Monetization of attention 47:22 – His interest in fintech companies 54:03 – Major trends of change he’s observed over his first three funds 1:04:13 – What is there take on the state of returns for VC’s 1:09:52 – What is the most common way that founders need help and what advice is more helpful 1:14:35 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Hunter   Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The post E866: “Future of Early-Stage Investing” with Garry Tan (Initialized Capital), Hunter Walk (Homebrew), Andrea Zurek (XG Ventures): Insights on founder-market fit, the value of operators, outdated venture models, & helping startups break through Series A bottleneck appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The post E866: “Future of Early-Stage Investing” with Garry Tan (Initialized Capital), Hunter Walk (Homebrew), Andrea Zurek (XG Ventures): Insights on founder-market fit, the value of operators, outdated venture models, & helping startups break through Series A bottleneck appeared first on This Week In Startups.

Hunter Walk, a partner at early stage venture firm Homebrew, says reactions around brand safety are overblown. He talks advertising, investing and the problem of platforms in this show.

Hunter Walk is a Venture Capitalist and successful operator. He's perhaps best known for being the Head of Product at a little company called Youtube. So is everything Youtube accomplished good? We talk to Hunter about that and more. We ask Hunter about tech culture, his experience moving to San Francisco, and his perspective on the infamous James Damore memo (which lit up a major controversy here in the Bay Area). Should Google have handled it any differently?

Think you’re onto something BIG, and surprised you’re receiving so many NO’s from investors? It can really make you second guess yourself, and shake your confidence... … but it shouldn’t! Receiving a LOT of NO’s is natural. You may be tempted to listen to the feedback after receiving some NO’s and think you just need to launch your product, change your business model, or grow your customer base, and then you’ll be more attractive to investors. Guess again. The reason you receive for the NO and the feedback you get may not be aligned. Why? Because at the end of the day, investors are human. They don’t want to hurt the feeling of a first time founder, and don’t want to seem rude in case they want to invest later. Yes they just might invest later. So how can you tell what is really going on? Well that’s what we’re going to debunk in today’s episode of Build! To help us out I’ve invited Ooshma Garg who is the CEO and Founder of Gobble, and Danielle Morrill who is the CEO and Founder of Mattermark. They've both recently become investment partners at XFactor Ventures, an investment firm that's focused on investing in female founders and mixed-gender teams. We’re going to help get comfortable with receiving NOs and deciphering what they really mean. You’ll learn: How Danielle and Ooshma learned to keep their spirits up despite all the NOs they received How to be politely persistent with investors who won’t bother taking a meeting with you The various tests investors put first time founder through How to maintain a relationship with an investors even after they say NO -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## Why Investors Keep Saying NO To Your BIG Idea Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker: In the previous two episodes of *Build*, we talked about why, even if you have an idea, you might not get investment from it, and it needs to be a big idea in order to even attract interest. But even if it's a big idea, chances are investors aren't going to say “yes.” In today's *Build* episode, we're gonna uncover all the reasons an investor may say “no” to your big idea, so stay tuned.   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now, one misconception that a lot of first-time founders fall prey to is if they have a big idea, some investor's gonna want to put capital and fund it.   The truth is that a lot of funders face nos, and just because they face nos doesn't mean that someone won't eventually invest in them. In today's *Build* episode, we're gonna explore all the reasons that investors may say “no” to your big idea. And to help us out, I've invited both Ooshma Garg and Danielle Morrill.   Ooshma is CEO and Founder of Gobble, and Danielle is CEO and Founder of Mattermark. They've both recently become investment partners at XFactor, an investment firm that's focused on investing in female founders and mixed-gender teams. Thanks a lot for joining me today.   Danielle Morrill: Absolutely.   Ooshma Garg: Thanks for having us.   Poornima Vijayashanker: We've come a lot way since that first South by Southwest where we all shared a hotel room in 2010, and all of us have gone out and fundraised a number of times. I want to start by asking the two of you, what was that first no like that you got from an investor?   Danielle Morrill: I was bummed. I mean, I think the first 10 investment meetings were just nos back to back. First, you're like, "I guess that it would happen. I would get a no," but I'm like, kind of the straight-A's type kid. I keep thinking, “Of course I would get a yes every time," and then after you get them over and over, you're like, "Oh, maybe this just happens. Maybe this is true that you get way more nos than yeses." What do you think?   Ooshma Garg: Man, you know, your company is like your baby. It's a reflection of yourself, so the first no, and even ongoing nos, they're always so personal. I think you get a little bit used to it because you just build some armor and build some strength every day and every year as an entrepreneur, but especially in the very beginning, it's kind of like a survival-of-the-fittest process. You have to be able to psychologically get through the nos, take some feedback, and develop that never-quit attitude early on if you're going to be successful ultimately.   How To Get Over Rejection When Fundraising And Keep Going   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So, how did you get over that? How do you even know that you should just take the feedback, deal with the rejection, and keep going?   Danielle Morrill: I made a fundraising playlist on Spotify.   Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.   Danielle Morrill: I think it's Jay-Z who says, "On to the next one." I used to blast that song, like after every pitch, actually after the good ones, too. But honestly, you kind of just have to keep living, and I think part of it is just putting it in context with the rest of your life. Having a playlist for me was sort of a reminder of, “Oh, life just kind of goes on.” It's fun with your team too, I think, to just be...I guess not everyone does this, but with my team at the very early stage, it's not like you can hide the fact you got turned down.   Later on when you're raising, maybe you don't tell everybody that you're raising a series A, but when you're raising early stage money, you get your team to cheer you up. They buy you beers. You do silly things. You kind of have to let life keep happening so that it doesn't get too serious.   Ooshma Garg: Yeah, I agree. What's funny is my fundraising song is "Survivor," by Destiny's Child.   Danielle Morrill: How many people do you think have a fundraiser song?   Ooshma Garg: I don't know. This is the first time we're talking—   Danielle Morrill: We need to make a playlist.   Ooshma Garg: We need to make a playlist.   Danielle Morrill: That's a good idea.   Ooshma Garg: We need to make a playlist for our portfolio.   Poornima Vijayashanker: We'll link with the playlist to you guys. So, do you ever go back to the people that said “no?” Because you guys have done multiple rounds now, where you might have had to go back to those early investors who said “no” and ask for more.   Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. In our case, even our first check as a seed investment, it took me three different introductions, multiple follow-ups, to even get in the door before the no. After someone says “no,” it feels very final, but I think that the big secret is that you have to go back and that you should keep following up. Time and time again, I hear friends talk about series As, series Bs, and so on, where they got a no. They were...they kind of welcomed it and took all the feedback. They updated different investors every week for two months, three months, sometimes six months, and then they close that same investor. They might be a Sequoia, or Andreessen Horowitz, or what have you.   All those funds are looking for stamina and looking for breakout businesses. A breakout business has to have someone that's willing to listen, iterate, and improve. So, the funny thing is, you should see that as just the beginning of your relationship. For our venture financings, we had multiple failed fundraising attempts and then ultimately successful ones. Our funds that invest in us now, Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, etc., absolutely said “no” once or twice before. But I maintained that relationship.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. What about—   Why It’s Valuable To Reconnect With People Who Said NO   Danielle Morrill: You have to think about it like sales. Like, would you have never contacted a lead again because they didn't convert at the end of the trial? No. If you are in my database, I am going to be talking to you for the rest of your life. If you're in this business, there's a certain set of investors that you really wanna work with. Frankly, they're looking for the people who don't take it so hard that they never come back, to your point about stamina.   I think also, once you go back to people a few times and kind of...you have that feeling of like, “This feels like it's against the rules to go back.” Then you realize that it's actually respected, and so it's a self-fulfilling thing, and you start to find yourself going back more and more.   How To Push For Specific Feedback   Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, it's great that you got feedback, but I think a lot of times, you get this generic feedback, where it's like, "I wanna see more traction," and you're like, "I'm already at, you know, 10k in monthly recurring revenue," or, "I'm already at, like, a million-dollar run rate," like, "How much more traction do you want to see," right? So, how can you kind of push an investor to give you more directed feedback in that note?   Danielle Morrill: Well, I mean, I think...We sit on both sides of the table now, so I think sometimes it's laziness that causes people to ask for these things. So, for example, the "I wanna see more traction." It's kind of like going into Macy's and being like, "Why isn't this a Dior dress?" It's like, OK, if you want a Dior dress, maybe you should go buy one. If you wanna find a company that has, like, $5 million a year of revenue, and you're at seed stage, sorry, this is what we have, and this is what I'm selling, and if it's not what you're interested in, it's fine for you to turn me down, but I'm not...this is not a buffet where you can come back anytime between 10 and 1. I'm trying to raise a round.   You kind of have to, at least inside, hold a certain amount of entitlement over your time. It's not that you need to be entitled to their money, but you're running a process, and I think that that is really important. So, for a lot of these unclear feedbacks, I think it's more important to say, like, "What do you think of what I'm selling now? And if it's not clear what I'm selling, let me remind you and redirect." Honestly, you have just as much a right to claim your time as they do.   Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. And you have to kind of draft or pick your draft, in a way, with your investors. There are ones that I really wanna follow up with, and I would love to work with, and it's not just from my side of the table. I think, just like with employees or anyone else, or with a relationship, you want it to be good with both sides. So, you might see something that they don't, but they've only known you for 30 minutes. You've done all your homework. You know what they've invested in. You know the other founders.   So, you don't just follow up with everyone. You hear the nos. Sometimes, it's not even worth following up. Sometimes it was an introduction, and you didn't really connect. A no is OK. Other times, it comes with something that says, "Our fund requires x, y, or z. Someone at this stage. We need this much ownership." It's important to know what's a BS no and what's actually a valid no. Sometimes...it took me a long time to learn that funds vary drastically in size, and that actually has a huge impact on who can invest in you at different times in your lifecycle. So, timing is important.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, hold that thought. We're gonna come back to that in a little bit, the whole fund size, and what makes sense and what doesn't. So, but let's go on to some of the more easy things that you hear and might get rejected. So, I don't know if either of you have faced this, but the whole, "You don't have a technical co-founder." And somehow that's like a gating factor to even get a dollar out of this investor, right? You hear things like this where you're just not meeting a certain checkbox. What's been your response to that sort of stuff?   Danielle Morrill: It depends on the checkbox. Basically, what I would say for technical co-founder or a lot of these is, they're like risk boxes. So, each one...it's almost like if it was a survey, and you added up enough points, then there's too much risk here. It's probably no one reason that's gonna knock you out, but they're trying to figure out where you fit. So, technical co-founder is not necessarily a problem if you nail everything else, but if you don't have a product, and there's no one to build it, then of course, that's gonna be expensive.   So, I think it's—sometimes the way it seems to be coming across to the investor is like it's a checkbox thing, but they're really trying to ask a bigger question. So, I think one thing I've found is that it's good to say, like, "Tell me more about why you're worried about that," rather than just answering the question, making them elucidate more. Cause I've been surprised by some of the answers that I get. The technical co-founder question, I think the assumption is, who's gonna build the product? And they might just be thinking, "Dang, we're gonna need to go raise a big round because you need to hire two or three engineers instead of building it yourself."   They're not actually worried about you not being technical. They don't care that you're not technical. They're more like, "OK, so now I have to assess fundraising risk cause this person's gonna need to go build a team." So, it's easy to think it's about you, and, "Oh, you can't code." And then you kinda like lock down and feel guilty, but I think that's not always the case. A lot of these things are not actually what they seem on the surface.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Yeah, I think another one along those lines is also, "Why are you working on this idea?" Right? So it's, what puts you in that unique position to kind of own domain expertise? Have you guys ever gotten that question, like, "Why this? Why Gobble, Ooshma? Why help people with cooking at the end of their day?"   Ooshma Garg: Right. Well, Gobble is a lucky one for me because it's a mission-driven company, and it started out of my family. What we do is we help people cook home-cooked food in 15 minutes in one pan, and we bring this tradition, and ritual, and love of a household into the modern, busy life. That's something that's very near and dear to me. So, because of that, it shows that I'm just gonna give it my all and not quit.   I think some folks stumble on an opportunity sometimes. You are...you're just a inventor, and you want to tinker around, and you try finding what's gonna fit in today's zeitgeist. Just like founders come in different flavors, I think investors come in different flavors, too. There are investors who are great at investing in arbitrage opportunities. There's investors who really wanna back founders, or social good, or mission-drive folks. Or they wanna back moon-shoots. Or some people wanna back things that have a linear, direct, immediate path to growth.   So, I think having that context when you assess someone's response to you is really important because you kinda, just like with your friends, you have to find your tribe with your investors, as well.   Is The Market For Your Product Big Enough?   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So, there's definitely this sizing-up thing, and I think one of the early signals is, they don't feel like your market is big enough, maybe because they're not aware of that market, or maybe they don't get the space. Have either of you had that situation where you come in, you've already got traction, you've got the go-to market team, products in the hand of customers, and they're just kind of scratching their head, like, "Oh, is food...do people eat dinner still these days? Is that still a thing?" How do you deal—   Danielle Morrill: Oh my gosh. I actually don't think it's worthwhile to continue to have the conversation, and I have to shout out to Hunter Walk, who wrote an excellent post about this, I don't know if you guys saw, around a woman who was pitching, and someone said like, "Convince me this market's big enough." And she just said, "Look, I don't wanna work that hard. I've already got traction, people eat dinner, right?" I think there are times when you're looking at this investor, and you have to consider, if they don't get it at this point, especially if you're doing something where you have traction, and it's fairly obvious that the market is big...   I mean, most of us...if you're building breakthrough tech, you might find a situation where markets are unclear in terms of size, like Blockchain, for example. But in most cases, these are professional investors, and they may be testing you, and they might wanna know what you know, so it's worthwhile to at least give them a rough answer, but I would take it as serious data, if they need to be convinced that the market's big enough.   The other side is that, not all markets need to be big to be interesting. It's more about if you can create something that can grow. Obviously creating a market that doesn't exist is a really valuable thing. So, again, I think it goes back to flipping the script a little bit in terms of trying to make sure you understand what they're really getting at. Like, do they not know? Are they testing you? Are they gonna be a huge waste of your time?   How To Get To The Real Question They Are Asking   Poornima Vijayashanker: How can you kind of suss that out? Are there questions or techniques?   Danielle Morrill: I would just start getting curious, like, "How much do you know about the market? Have you invested in this space? Obviously you're interested in us. What do you think?" And it doesn't have to become combative. It's much more of just, like, how does this become a dialogue instead of playing 20 questions, where you're doing all the talking? I think about it kinda like a job interview, I think, in both parties are confused about who's interviewing who, and you really wanna make sure that you find a balance where it's not you, as the founder, talking 80% of the time.   Ooshma Garg: The framing is so important. So, if you're getting some feedback repetitively that, "I don't understand your market," or, "I don't understand your path forward, or your path to revenue, or how you're gonna hire," then you do have to take that feedback and try to iterate and improve your pitch itself. I think that every company...it's very hard that you meet a perfect de-risked company at an early stage. They all have some mini risks, and often times, one big risk. So, sometimes it's, "Wow, there isn't a market for this, but we see that being the future."   Other times, there's a really big market, but maybe it's crowded. So, the question is, how are you gonna be, for example, defensible in the food space? Other times, it's...you have something defensible and proprietary. It's a huge market, but no one's willing to pay for it. So, people aren't willing to pay for music, or TV, or whatever. So, how are you even gonna make money for something that everybody's using?   Whether it's revenue, market, defensibility, IP, every business typically gets stuck, I find, on one big discussion. The better you can hone your slide and your couple lines to make sure that your message is getting across properly, and that resonates, it's just to your advantage cause people have such limited time with you and attention span. You know what is gonna be the hot button in your pitch, so identifying that early and practicing that part the most would probably do you well.   How To Get At An Investors Hot Buttons   Poornima Vijayashanker: So, we previously had Marie Perruchet on the show, and she talked about taking your pitch and then seeing how other people reformulate it, or what are the pieces that they extract? That usually becomes these hot-buttons, or the thing that is most memorable that maybe you need to dive into. Are there other ways that you guys have found to extract that information?   Danielle Morrill: I think...reformulating, literally having someone pitch it back to you, is that what you mean?   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. As one technique to, like...what's sticky, what is impactful, but then there's the other case of, yeah, what is the hot button that people are probably gonna step away from?   Danielle Morrill: I mean, I think one of the things that is really interesting is whenever you're opening the conversation with an investor, at the very beginning. If you can get them to tell you, like, "Hey, what do you know about my company?" Because that actually is gonna tell you a ton about what they've already decided you're doing, and it's sometimes really wrong, or it's like...you know, there's a lot there, and then you can kind of work from there. If you notice that, pretty consistently, people are having the wrong idea, I mean, kinda to your point about feedback, it's another way of getting—   The reality is, people act like you setup your pitch, and then you go out. But you actually create your pitch, start to go out, and then you're continuously iterating on the pitch. So, you have so many opportunities to make the pitch better. I actually look at the first 10 pitches or so. I kind of set up pitches with targets where I would be interested in working with them, but they're not my top picks, so that I'm actually running the pitch against those folks. That way, if the first three or four say that their first impression of you is different, then you can realize, “Oh, the market already knows who I am.” Very rarely do you get to just go pitch, and no one knows who you are. That's another tactic that I think can be really helpful.   Finding Investors Who Are a Fit   Poornima Vijayashanker: So, coming back to kind of Ooshma's point around finding investors who fit into one of many opportunities, like arbitrage, moon shots, love the space, etc., there's also people who really get beholden to certain stages, right? They're like, "Oh, come back and talk to me once you've figured out your customer acquisition cost, or your lifetime value," right? Are there ways in which you've been able to address that, even if you don't have those metrics yet?   Ooshma Garg: One concept I keep running back to is that MVP concept, or minimum viable product, or even like a prototype. So, with my first company, the vision was to make this recruiting platform for universities all around the country. I made...I started by making wireframes, and envisioning the product, and keeping it simple, but thinking through those wireframes. But then, an advisor kind of looked at that, told me to scrap the whole thing, and said, "Why can't you just start with a mailing list? You're making a recruiting platform. Why don't we just see if there's people interested in your concept, and can you get 10,000 people, or 50,000 people, or how ever many students on your mailing list?"   At first, I was offended because I thought, "Oh my gosh, a mailing list is not a tech company." But often times, you can think about some scrappy proxy or prototype to prove what the person is asking, even if you don't have that exact number or the software or resources to get what exactly they want.   Poornima Vijayashanker: So, what's an example...yeah, if somebody throws out, like, "Ooshma, early days, three years ago, what was your LTV?" And you're like, "I don't have an LTV because I don't know," what would your response be to that?   Ooshma Garg: You know, I probably do two things. So one is, I would look at comparables in the market, and so, just doing studies of the general food industry, in my case, like how often people order takeout, or how often...what are people paying for SAS for these particular products each day, or whatever's relevant to your market. I mean, I'm assuming that you're...that you have some prototype. Very few companies pitch pre-product, so whatever data you have for three months or six months, there has to be something there, some monthly active users, how many times people are logging in, how many purchases people have made.   So, you just have to...I mean, our seed round was raised off of two to three months of early prototype data. I think that's all you need. It's just some prototype that shows some user willingness to pay or engage for three months, and then you can extrapolate that into your vision.   How To Handle Disagreements   Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, there's obviously times where people may disagree, right? They may say something like, "You know what, Danielle, I don't like your distribution strategy. I really just don't think it's gonna work. So, you know, cause I think it's gonna be expensive. Come back when you've figured out something that's a little bit cheaper. Then let's have the conversation. But, for now, no."   Danielle Morrill: It seems like an opportunity for them to prove their value-add as an investor. You know, I think that's valid for people to challenge strategy, but I think, what I would wanna know in that situation is, "If you were my investor, what would you suggest that I do? I totally hear your concerns." Make sure to show them that you're listening, but I think that's their opportunity to step up and actually offer something constructive. I think if they're gonna be in an investor where they're gonna be critical without being constructive, that's actually data for you.   The truth is that strategy's tough. Strategy often breaks down, and we change strategy all the time in startups. That's a huge part of what you're testing. So, I think being gracious and not taking it personally is important, but also making sure that you're asking them to demonstrate their value. I actually think that's gonna make them want to work with you. If that goes well, that's actually gonna be a way to test out, what would this working relationship be? So, I think that's...see it as an opportunity.   Poornima Vijayashanker: I like that.   Ooshma Garg: Yeah. And most people kind of...they send you that no via email, and I'm sure that the large majority don't even ask further questions. Some may not even respond, and others might respond and say, "Thanks for your time. I'll move on." But some small percentage are asking follow-up questions, and I think that's just making them stand out and starting that relationship that we said is so important.   I think that if you really did like someone, and their no isn't tactical or directional enough for you, to ask for a 10-minute phone call just to get a little bit more detail or their advice on strategy towards de-risking that investor's concern, I think can go a really long way. So, I think folks should just practice embracing the no and getting that 10-minute call and feedback as much as possible because that will help give them building blocks for another three months, if they can, and not just sort of wander aimlessly, wondering what someone was saying, or worse, completely ignoring it.   Danielle Morrill: Right. If you're gonna go and worry a bunch about the feedback but not ask for the follow-up, go round and round in circles over three glasses of wine, it would be much less painful to just have that awkward 10-minute call and just know where you stand. I think I've seen founders go in circles over this stuff. Literally years later, they'll tell these stories. It's just not worth the energy. The investor's also probably super uncomfortable giving the rejection. We're gonna talk a little bit about saying no on the other side. So, they're kinda beholden to you to give you that 10 minutes, honestly, so you should take it.   How To Know When An Investor Isn’t A Fit   Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, there's a lot of times where it's very obvious, you know, they tell you, "Here's the no," but...aside from some of the ambiguous feedback around the traction, there are times, though, where they may see a signal. Maybe it's something that happened in a meeting between you and your co-founder, or something else. Maybe they did some back-channeling, right? How do you handle those situations where they might feel like, “Oh, there's no chemistry,” or “I'm not sure where this is going?”   Danielle Morrill: It's tough cause they usually don't tell you.   Ooshma Garg: Yeah, they usually don't tell you. I think that's quite rare, as well. I think the way...the best way to handle that or avoid that is actually to construct your own back-channeling. So, like I said, some of the biggest investors, they will only invest based upon referral. Then, when you get so, kind of, well-known and in high demand, they'll only invest based upon two or three referrals. So, every single step is just like hard work. You can't ask for one intro. You can't just take the no on face value. You have to ask for three intros. Then you have to ask for follow-ups. Then you go to the meeting. Then you follow up on the meeting, and if they say “no,” you follow up again. There's all those little, little, extra steps that other people are doing that I think more folks should know about.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and invest their energy in that versus what Danielle said, around the drama in their heads. So, anything else you guys have heard from your experience? Any other nos that we maybe haven't covered? I know there was some of the stuff that Ooshma was talking about, like the type of investors. Maybe we can dive into that a little bit?   Ooshma Garg: Yeah. I think...Well, with regards to the nos that people give, one of the toughest ones is simply just environmental. There are times when you're starting a company, and it's just a rough funding environment where it's just rough for your market. There might be bigger companies who are...for whatever reason, they're not doing well on the public markets, and that's affecting you. So, like the stamina, managing your psychology, being frugal, focusing on just the minimum prototypes, all of that's so important because the main thing you need to get to yes and get funding is time. You can correct a lot of things in the nos overtime, but there's some environmental factors you just have to weather.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit more. What do you mean by like, public companies? "How does that impact me? I'm just a two-person start-up, why should I care what Google or Facebook is up to?"   Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Well, hopefully your aspiration is to be a big public company, or to just be a big organization in general, and to be, one day, going from wherever you are to making hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of value for your shareholders, for your employees, for your customers, and so on. So, investors will look at the current state of the market, at the public market, to understand what's happening in your industry. How are those companies valued? What are your chances of getting there, of breaking out? What is it gonna look like when you IPO? That trickles all the way down and influences your valuation, even as early as at the seed stage. So, it's very well-advised to not be delusional and to take a look at the public markets of your industry—   Poornima Vijayashanker: The landscape, yeah.   Ooshma Garg: —and be able to speak to that. I think people will be very impressed.   Paying For A Previous Founder’s Mistakes   Poornima Vijayashanker: I think another situation is, often, we have to pay for previous mistakes. So, the investor might have invested in a space when it was too young, or maybe the founders that they invested in weren't that knowledgeable or were the first. You know, just a number of factors to where, now, they just aren't willing to look at the space, or even...no matter how amazing you are, they're like, "No, sorry, not interested in the space. You might be amazing, unicorn person, but I'm just gonna say ‘no.’"   Ooshma Garg: I would take that no. It's kinda like in relationships. Someone had some issues with another girl that looked like you, or whatever, like it is not your—   Danielle Morrill: He is never gonna stop saying that.   Ooshma Garg: That is not the best guy for you. So, there are many investor fish in the sea, and I think that's just when the numbers game comes into play, and you have to make sure that you're not just talking to five, you're not talking to 10, but you have a big target list that you're just setting up and rolling through.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome.   Danielle Morrill: I think one other thing that is valid but complicated is, people might say to you, "This isn't venture-backable." I actually think that's very helpful feedback to hear. Whether you agree is sort of beside the point. Find out why they think that. Sometimes, investors know things about markets that you never...can't learn until you're in them for a long time, and they can save you years of your life.   So, part of why people get a bad taste in their mouth often has to do with, like, a poor-margin business that can never get better, or a business that caps out somewhere, and there's this trough of sorrow that seems to go on forever and ever, and you don't get to find out until you're a $50-million company, which is great, except for when you have a huge burn rate and expectations. So, especially if you're entering a market where you're fairly new, maybe you're a software-centric person, but you don't have domain expertise, those types of nos can tell you a ton about things that.   It's easy to say, "I don't care. If I get to $50 million of revenue, I'll deal with that then." And you can still make that decision, but I think the key is to actually make sure you understand that no because they are in the business of billion-dollar outcomes. They might know something that you don't, and they might be able to help you redirect towards something that is worth it.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Alright, well thank you, Danielle and Ooshma, for walking us through all those nos. For all of you out there who are watching, if there was a no that you recently received that maybe we didn't unpack, feel free to share it with us in the comments below this video.   That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel where we'll continue the conversation and talk about what it's gonna take to get that yes from an investor. Ciao for now!

We talk with Christina Mulligan about the salutary effects of smashing robots that have wronged you. Join us for a chat about revenge and satisfaction in the emerging human-robot social space. This show’s links: Christina Mulligan's faculty profile (https://www.brooklaw.edu/faculty/directory/facultymember/biography?id=christina.mulligan) and writing (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1557395) Christina Mulligan, Revenge Against Robots (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3016048) About Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn_(novel)) About the Tree that Owns Itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself) The Trial of the Autun Rats (http://www.duhaime.org/LawMuseum/LawArticle-1529/1508-The-Trial-of-the-Autun-Rats.aspx) Oral Argument 70: No Drones in the Park (http://oralargument.org/70) Scott Hershovitz, Tort as a Substitute for Revenge (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2308590) Kate Darling, Palash Nandy, and Cynthia Breazeal, Empathic Concern and the Effect of Stories in Human-Robot Interaction (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2639689); Kate Darling, "Who's Johnny?" Anthropomorphic Framing in Human-Robot Interaction, Integration, and Policy (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2588669) Office Space, the printer scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8) (nsfw) Hunter Walk, Amazon Echo Is Magical. It’s Also Turning My Kid into an Asshole. (https://hunterwalk.com/2016/04/06/amazon-echo-is-magical-its-also-turning-my-kid-into-an-asshole/) Hannah Gold, This Mirror that Forces People to Smile Is Going to Piss Everyone Off (https://jezebel.com/this-mirror-that-forces-people-to-smile-is-going-to-pis-1819828956) Special Guest: Christina Mulligan.

Hunter Walk, the San Francisco based partner of the venture fund Homebrew and former Google and YouTube wiz, joins us to chat about what it's like to have millions of people use your product, what a venture fund is, and how Hunter plays a role in other companies' successes.Read Hunter's blog at hunterwalk.comSay hello to Hunter on twitterAbout EurekaThinker Talk is where we chat with people turning ideas into reality. Hosted by Joey Cofone and Adam Kornfield, co-founders of Baronfig in New York City.More at eureka.baronfig.comEdited and mixed by Eric Silver

Hunter Walk is a partner at Homebrew Ventures, a seed stage venture fund. Over a decade ago, while Hunter was a Product Manager at Google, working on the newly acquired YouTube platform, Apple had approached them before Steve Jobs had even announced the world's first iPhone. There was no public App Store at that time and no third party apps. Apple wanted to have complete control over the experience and built the first video app for the iPhone that would pull YouTube content. It was a risky move, but the alternative to working with Apple was - at that time - going directly to a carrier and paying them large sums of money to include you app on all their devices. It was an exciting but challenging time as Hunter recounts - because there were so many moving pieces and not everyone saw that smartphone were going to play such a huge role in our daily lives in just a few more years. So if you’re a Product Manager yourself, love YouTube, or are just curious about how a startup like YouTube sold to Google for $1.65B in 2006 (the largest consumer tech acquisition at the time) and then went on to work with Apple to ensure they’d make the jump to smartphones - get ready, cause Hunter is going to share his insights and experiences into all this and more.

Anthony Pompliano is the General Partner @ Full Tilt Capital, the firm that wants to reinvent friends and family investingby democratizing access to opportunity for the thousands of founders who are underserved. They have done 22 deals in just 90 days and shows no signs of pulling back. Prior to VC, Anthony lead the growth team at Snapchat and before that ran product and growth teams @ Facebook.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Anthony made his way from leading startup exec with Facebook and Snapchat to being General Partner @ Full Tilt Capital? 2.) Anthony has previously said that he likes to 'prioritize the founder over the company', is this any different to the traditional 'founder-friendly VC'? How does Anthony like to stress test the founder's ability to withstand stress *& establish comfort with unpopular decisions? 3.) How does Anthony respond to suggestions that 39 investments in 9 months is 'spray and pray'? Why does Anthony believe that cheque size and follow on allocation does not matter? 4.) How does Anthony differentiate between 'picking' and 'building' investments? Why do most VCs go wrong with their thesis around this and the belief in the 'J Curve'? Is it possible that the traditional J curve does not correspond to outsized returns? 5.) How does Anthony respond to Hunter Walk's thesis around the presence of 'dark deal flow'? With such a growing portfolio, how does Anthony scale his ability to add value with the ever scaling portfolio number? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Anthony’s Fave Book: Rich Dad Poor Dad Anthony’s Fave Blog/Podcast: Polina Marinova: The Profile Anthony’s Most Recent Investment: Everly Well As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anthony on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business. ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.    

How do you know if management is right for you? Maybe you’re thinking about becoming a boss, or you’re already a boss but aren’t sure you want to be. Kim and Russ are joined by guest Hunter Walk, Partner at Homebrew, to share stories and advice for making this decision.

This week has been a delightful clown car of technology earnings, so we dove into Twitter’s surprisingly strong report that drove its share price higher, Alphabet’s results -- largely from a Google-focused perspective -- Amazon’s stellar cloud incomes, and Dropbox’s improving financial performance. Whether the Dropbox drip of released financial data points to an IPO was our main question. Place your bets now.

This week has been a delightful clown car of technology earnings, so we dove into Twitter’s surprisingly strong report that drove its share price higher, Alphabet’s results -- largely from a Google-focused perspective -- Amazon’s stellar cloud incomes, and Dropbox’s improving financial performance. Whether the Dropbox drip of released financial data points to an IPO was our main question. Place your bets now.

Hunter Walk is a founding partner @ Homebrew, one of Silicon Valley's breakout seed funds of the last 5 years. They have investments in the likes of Shyp, the Skimm, Managed By Q just to name a few incredible companies. As for Hunter, prior to Homebrew, Hunter led consumer product management at YouTube, which he originally joined in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for Google Adsense. Hunter is also a thought leader in the industry and his excellent blog can be found here. CLICK TO PLAY In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Hunter made the transition from Google to VC with the founding of Homebrew? 2.) How does Hunter view the bridge round? Does he agree with Mike Maples @ Floodgate in stating, 'it is often not a bridge but a pier to nowhere'? 3.) How does Hunter look to package his portfolio companies for the next round of investors? Does Hunter agree with Jason Lemkin in stating, 'the best investors are those that specifically know the metrics required to achieve the next round'? 4.) Why does Hunter not believe there is a Series A crunch? How can founders look to describe their story in a narrative that is attractive for VCs? What one trait does Hunter look for in founders more than any other? 5.) What is the biggest challenge in the coming year for Hunter with Homebrew? How does he measure his success as a VC? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Hunter’s Fave Book: Harold and The Purple Crayon Hunter’s Fave Blog: Ben Thompson: Stratechery Hunter's Most Recent Investment: JoyMode As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hunter on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout. Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.  

We talk with Hunter Walk, founding partner at Homebrew about his experiences building product as one of the first hires at Second Life and then at YouTube after the Google acquisition. We also dig into what it took to get Homebrew off the ground in 2013 with his partner Satya Patel.

When seed stage venture capitalist Hunter Walk is evaluating whether to invest in a company, he doesn’t look at the product. To him, it’s all about finding a great team. Before Homebrew, he worked at YouTube and Google - and even worked for a time on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In this episode, Hunter explains why Conan was the first startup he worked for, how he identifies great companies when there’s no data to evaluate, and the three factors every company needs to be successful when taking VC fu

In a conversation with Intercom Content Marketing Manager Adam Risman, Hunter Walk reflects on his lessons learned as Director of Product Management at YouTube. He shares why empathy and prioritization are key for a product manager's success, and also explains how he selects his seed investments at Hombrew.

Special Note: We’re testing something new this week. You can read a full transcription of this episode here.Everyone’s favorite, friendly neighborhood Venture Capitalist, Hunter Walk, discusses four amazing segments of his career: Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Second Life, Google Adsense and YouTube. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Venture capitalist Hunter Walk, the co-founder of Homebrew, talks with Peter Kafka about his pre-investing career at Second Life, YouTube and "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." He also joined Google in 2003, when the 1,000-employee company was only known for search and before it went public. He discusses why venture capitalists like him need to be patient; how YouTube started making money and paying its users; and why Vine, Instagram and Snapchat should follow YouTube's example. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Satya Patel is a Partner @ Homebrew alongside Hunter Walk. Prior to Homebrew, Satya was VP Product at Twitter, building and leading the Product Management and User Services teams. Before Twitter, Satya was a Partner at Battery Ventures, where he co-led the seed and early stage investing practices. In 2003, Satya joined Google and was responsible for AdSense product management and partnerships. Before heading to Silicon Valley for Google, I worked for DoubleClick, in venture capital and as a strategy consultant. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Satya made his way into the world of tech and came to Partner with Hunter @ Homebrew? 2.) Is hustle the key component of a great VC? What does Satya believes makes a great investor? 4.) How can startups present emotion and depict their narrative to the VC? What are the benefits of doing so? What founder is most 5.) From Satya's experience, what are the most common reasons startups fail at the seed stage? What can they do to maximise their chances of survival? 6.) We always hear that products should focus on a niche but how then do you attract VC money that is looking for a broad opportunity that can return the fund? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Satya’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: CB Insights, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld Satya’s Fave Book: A Fine Balance As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Satya on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!  

Today we have a conversation between Kevin Gibbon the co-founder of shyp and seed investor Hunter Walk. Kevin co-founded shyp in attempt to revolutionize the shipping industry by making shipping any item as easy as snapping a picture of it. They raised over 60 million dollars from firms like sherpa ventures, home-brew vc and, and Kleiner Perkins. With markets in a few cities in the us they are quickly expanding to help make shipping goods as easy as possible. Hunter walk is the co-founder of and partner at Homebrew VC. He lead product at YouTube for several years and interviews keyin at our chapter in San Francisco. Lets listen in.      A quick break from Kevin Gibbon of Shyp for some recent startup headlines. 

This week we interview Hunter Walk, cofounder of Homebrew (check him out on Twitter), and Vidya joins us again to announce our brand-spanking new startup, Popily!

Ryan and Hunter chat it up! Hunter Walk:   VC Investing, YouTube and The Bottom Up Economy (Partner @ Homebrew VC) Ryan chatted with Hunter Walk, Partner at Homebrew Venture Capital, during Ryans’ recent trip to San Francisco.  Homebrew is a seed stage investment firm, that focuses on the “Bottom-Up Economy.”  Hunter calls his company a start-up, and instead of "writing code," he is "writing checks" to help founders build companies. Hunter previously lead consumer product management at YouTube (Google).  Hunter and Ryan discussed what it was like working at YouTube very early on in the company's history.   They each talk about their love for platforms “that bet on people.  And that give people the tools to create where their efforts can turn into dollars.”  [soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/165053662" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=true&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /] When reflecting on his time at YouTube, Hunter said with YouTube:  “You can build a TV-sized audience without having to ask for approval from anybody wearing a suit.  There are no gatekeepers.  It doesn’t mean that everyone succeeds to the same success, for there’s near equal access for everybody.” Please subscribe to The Influencer Economy  on Stitcher and on iTunes Ryan also asked Hunter about his blog, and how that effects deal flow (Thanks for the listener Edward for that question).  Hunter says blogging does help his investment business, although he doesn't know to what extent. He also believes in paying it forward and that it's important to be accessible to entrepreneurs via the blog/Twitter.   Finally Hunter talked specifically what types of investments he likes to make. Hunter details how his investment philosophy was shaped by working on Google Adsense and while at YouTube.  Getting down into a few of his investments, Hunter dives into his portfolio companies:   Shyp and TheSkimm.  He discusses why he bet on them and what types of companies he is looking for.  Hunter and Homebrew's info: Homebrew’s website:  www.homebrew.com Hunter’s blog:  www.hunterwalk.com Hunter on Twitter:  www.twitter.com/hunterwalk Hombrew on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/homebrew Homebrew’s investments discussed: The Skimm:  Daily email newsletter that gives you what you need to know to start your day:  http://www.theskimm.com Shyp:  Enabling users to simplify the process of shipping items basically anywhere in the world.  http://www.shyp.com  

This week I, Ryan Hoover, visited the colorful Homebrew headquarters to catch up with Hunter Walk and Satya Patel. We chatted about their latest portfolio addition, the qualities they look for in a founder, and the awesomeness of "crazy" products like Vessyl and Yo. Products mentioned: - Nuzzle for iOS (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/nuzzel-for-ios) - See top news surfaced by your friends on Twitter & Facebook - theSkimm (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/theskimm) - Daily summary of current events in your inbox - Refresh (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/refresh-1-6) - Get Insights about the People You Meet - Slack (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/slack) - Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving & search - Fancy Hands (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/fancy-hands) - Assistants for Everyone - SHADOW (alpha) - Dream-based social network - Yo (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/yo) - A simple app to say "yo" to friends - Outdoors - AirBnB for Outdoors Equipment - Vessyl (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/vessyl) - A cup that knows what you're drinking - TravelbyDrone (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/travelbydrone) - Collects travel videos taken by drones - Snapchat Our Story (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/snapchat-our-story) - Experience live, real-time events together - shortwave (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/shortwave-2) - Short-range anonymous messaging (Secret meets Firechat) - Leo (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/leo-1154) - Ephemeral group photo chat with text that last 24 hours

A Vampire and a Vampire Hunter Walks Into a Bar-by Keith R. A. DeCandido is rated AD PG (Rating System)                       A Vampire and a Vampire Hunter Walk into a Bar was written by Keith R.A. DeCandido, Produced by Gwendolyn Jensen-Woodard and post-Produced by Alex Gilmour. With Alex Gilmour […]

Tech UK - Episode 8UK specific: 1. Digital TV Switchover begins in Northern Scotland - http://www.cable.co.uk/news/digital-tv-switchover-begins-in-northern-scotland-19759075/2. UK Best Buy sales best in world - http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=4552833. Tories use YouTube to get last minute  votes - http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/tories-use-youtube-for-final-voting-push-6876934. UK iPad prices announced and Orange data plans announced - http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/ipad-uk-price-and-release-date-announced-687980 and http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/orange-unveils-ipad-data-plan-costs-6880183 minute news bulletin:1. Gmail back in the UK - After a company claimed that it had the rights to the gMail name in October 2005, Google only allowed UK users to use the @googlemail.com suffix in their email address. UK users can now sign up to gmail with an @gmail.com email address. Previous users of @googlemail.com accounts can receive their email at the same @gmail.com email address  - so if your email address was hello@googlemail.com, all email from hello@gmail.com will also be redirected there. http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-resurrects-gmail-in-the-uk-6871072. YouTube to let users charge for rentals - YouTube's product manager, Hunter Walk, revealed that they will be allowing some content owners to charge for their uploads and creations. This could potentially be fantastic for both indie film makers who want to make money while getting their work out online, or it could spell disaster as consumers pay for sub-standard material.http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20004114-36.html3. Group video chat coming to Skype - Skype announced Thursday that it will be offering 5-way video chat starting on May 10th, this will initially be free but SKype has said that they will soon charge for this feature. Caling plans have also been changed and there are savings of up to 60% for users. Unlimited calls to one country, calling landlines costs £3.39 a month. If your subscription includes any of the following countries, calls to both landlines AND mobiles are included: Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, United States.4. Google Goggles Now Translates - Google Goggles, Google's visual search app for Android is getting a new update. Now, users can take a photo of any text in a foreign language, the app with use Optical Character Recognition software to turn it into text and subsequently puts into Google translate - translating back to English. So next time you're abroad and need to know what something is on the menu, take a photo and find out in seconds! Just watch that data bill...http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/google-goggles-turns-cameraphone-into-translation-tool-6877975. Apple and Visa Partner Up - "This summer, Visa will make it possible for iPhone users to wave their device in front of a contactless payment terminal to make transactions, thanks to an Apple-certified hardware accessory.You will need an iPhone case that will include a secure memory card that will hold Visa's contactless payment application, called Visa payWave. The application, which is compatible with the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, can be password protected and includes advanced security technology to uniquely identify each contactless transaction."http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/06/visa_apple_aim_to_simplify_transactions_with_iphone_payment_terminals.htmlGeneral tech news:1. Ubuntu 10.04 arrives - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/ubuntu-1004-arrives-with-extended-support-and-less-brown.ars2. iPad reaches 1 million sales, faster than the iPhone - http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/03/apple_announces_ipad_sales_top_1_million.html3. Major security flaw found on facebook - http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/serious-security-flaw-found-in-facebook-s-privacy-settings-6875154. Internet Explorer's Market Share below 60% - http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/internet-explorer-market-share-dips-under-60--6873695. Google to launch e-book store this summer - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1273138/Google-Editions-launches-summer.html?ito=feeds-newsxmlEMAIL! techukpodcast@gmail.com    feed://feeds.feedburner.com/TechUKPodcasthttp://techukpodcast.blogspot.com/--------

During Donald Trump’s presidency, tech products b ecame explicitly political. Operatives from both sides picked apart their algorithms and features, examining how they shaped society’s beliefs. And the companies, meanwhile, made choices about what parts of the administration they’d work with. Hunter Walk, who spent nearly a decade at Google and is now a partner at Homebrew, has watched the evolutions firsthand. He joins the Big Technology Podcast to discuss tech’s impact on politics and where it goes next under a Joe Biden presidency. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/big-technology-podcast/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands