Podcast appearances and mentions of Shasta Ventures

Send us a textReady to unlock the secrets of meaningful parenting? Join us as we sit down with Tod Francis, a dynamic venture capitalist (Shasta Ventures) and devoted father. Thank you to last week's guest (Don Goldberg), who graciously made the introduction with Tod to join our show.Tod shares his transformative experiences, from backpacking in the High Sierra with his sons to embracing digital communication through Snapchat. He reveals how these moments without distractions have enriched his family life, and delves into the profound impact of being truly present with one's children. Discover how you can cultivate gratitude and joy in your family, creating bonds that last a lifetime.Our conversation takes an inspiring turn as we highlight the stories of incredible individuals who defied societal norms. From a trailblazing woman in Indianapolis who became a community pillar to personal anecdotes of parenting challenges, we explore the legacy of grit, curiosity, and love for learning. Reflecting on our own experiences, we consider how such resilience shapes lives well beyond childhood, reinforcing the enduring influence of parental figures. This episode invites you to reflect on your own family connections and the lasting memories you are building.Finally, Tod shares a popular talk that he gave at a conference, which provides actionable strategies for fostering more profound connections with your children. From the importance of choosing the right environment for genuine interactions to adjusting your approach based on their interests, he provides practical advice for creating meaningful family memories. Learn how to break away from routine conversations, embrace shared experiences, and become a better leader at home through self-reflection and growth. Whether you're dreaming of an adventurous family outing or exploring new ways to connect, this episode is packed with insights and inspiration for every parent.Please don't forget to leave us a review wherever you consume your podcasts! Please help us get more dads to listen weekly and become the ultimate leader of their homes!

Communicating with your customers is a good thing, right? Well, what about when some of your outbound communications end up repelling customers rather than attracting them? Today we're going to discuss advanced customer interaction strategies with John Kim, Co-Founder & CEO of Sendbird. We'll dive into the effectiveness of in-app messaging, the rise of mobile engagement, and the evolving machine-to-machine economy. John S. Kim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sendbird (YC W16), the customer communications platform powering 4,000 of the world's most popular digital applications. 7 billion messages sent and received between over 320 million people every month are routed using Sendbird, whose customers include DoorDash, Match Group, Virgin Mobile, Noom and Paytm. The company has raised $220 million USD to-date, backed by reputable investors including ICONIQ Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, Shasta Ventures, Y Combinator and more. John is a successful serial entrepreneur and CEO. His first startup Paprika Lab (social gaming) was acquired by GREE, and he was Korea's all-time no.1 pro gamer in the Unreal Tournament. RESOURCES Sendbird website: https://www.sendbird.com Wix Studio is the ultimate web platform for creative, fast-paced teams at agencies and enterprises—with smart design tools, flexible dev capabilities, full-stack business solutions, multi-site management, advanced AI and fully managed infrastructure. https://www.wix.com/studio Attend the Mid-Atlantic MarCom Summit, the region's largest marketing communications conference. Register with the code "Agile" and get 15% off. Register now for HumanX 2025. This AI-focused event which brings some of the most forward-thinking minds in technology together. Register now with the code "HX25p_tab" for $250 off the regular price. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Communicating with your customers is a good thing, right? Well, what about when some of your outbound communications end up repelling customers rather than attracting them? Today we're going to discuss advanced customer interaction strategies with John Kim, Co-Founder & CEO of Sendbird. We'll dive into the effectiveness of in-app messaging, the rise of mobile engagement, and the evolving machine-to-machine economy. John S. Kim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sendbird (YC W16), the customer communications platform powering 4,000 of the world's most popular digital applications. 7 billion messages sent and received between over 320 million people every month are routed using Sendbird, whose customers include DoorDash, Match Group, Virgin Mobile, Noom and Paytm. The company has raised $220 million USD to-date, backed by reputable investors including ICONIQ Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, Shasta Ventures, Y Combinator and more. John is a successful serial entrepreneur and CEO. His first startup Paprika Lab (social gaming) was acquired by GREE, and he was Korea's all-time no.1 pro gamer in the Unreal Tournament. RESOURCES Sendbird website: https://www.sendbird.com Wix Studio is the ultimate web platform for creative, fast-paced teams at agencies and enterprises—with smart design tools, flexible dev capabilities, full-stack business solutions, multi-site management, advanced AI and fully managed infrastructure. https://www.wix.com/studio Attend the Mid-Atlantic MarCom Summit, the region's largest marketing communications conference. Register with the code "Agile" and get 15% off. Register now for HumanX 2025. This AI-focused event which brings some of the most forward-thinking minds in technology together. Register now with the code "HX25p_tab" for $250 off the regular price. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Rob Coneybeer co-founded Shasta Ventures in Silicon Valley in 2004. They invested in companies like Nest and Dollar Shave Club, have over $1B of funds under management and, unusually for US VC, have a deep and active interest in Aotearoa. We cover his journey into venture capital, how he got connected to NZ, how he's creating more links between NZ and the US and what it takes to spot the next big thing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tod Francis is the founder of the world-renowned investment firm Shasta Ventures. He has made early investments in companies like Canva, Tonal, ClassDojo, LiquidSpace, Task Rabbit, Mint and more. About 15 years ago Tod started on a journey to understand why and how great memories and connections are formed between kids and their parents. He surveyed over one thousand young adults, analyzed that data, and developed a framework for memory making and building meaningful connections. He has presented his findings to standing-room-only conferences, parents groups, and more! We talk about his findings on today's episode and what you can do right away to build lasting memories with your kids. Tod is a husband and the father of two adult children. In today's conversation we discussed: * Growing up without a father* How losing a child motivated him to focus on every moment* The research behind building meaningful connections* The Pyramid of Connection and its different stages* Tear-jerking stories from Tod's research* What parents can do right now to change their thinking on memory making and connectionListen now on Apple, Spotify, Overcast and YouTube. —Where to find Tod Francis- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todfrancis/- Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/bio/tod-francis/Where to find Adam Fishman- Startup Dad Newsletter: startupdadpod.substack.com- FishmanAF Newsletter: www.FishmanAFNewsletter.com- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/—In this episode, we cover[1:49] Welcome[2:28] Tod's childhood[3:52] Growing up without a Dad[4:47] What is life like now?[6:28] Did child loss change your priorities as a dad?[8:49] Why did memory making matter to you as a dad?[12:24] The research behind connection[18:51] The Pyramid of Connection[33:56] How do parents get out of the bottom layer?[39:44] Making memories with adult kids[42:36] Parting thoughts[44:12] How are his sons involved in this project?—Show references:Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com/Mint: https://mint.intuit.com/Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/Canva: https://www.canva.com/Tonal: https://www.tonal.com/Class Dojo: https://www.classdojo.com/Liquid Space: https://liquidspace.com/Task Rabbit: https://www.taskrabbit.com/—For sponsorship inquiries email: podcast@fishmana.com.For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com Production support for Startup Dad is provided by Tommy Harron at http://www.armaziproductions.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit startupdadpod.substack.com

Tod Francis is the founder of the world-renowned investment firm Shasta Ventures. He made early investments in companies like Canva, Tonal, ClassDojo, LiquidSpace, Task Rabbit, Mint and more. About 15 years ago Tod started on a journey to understand why and how great memories and connections are formed between kids and their parents. He surveyed over one thousand young adults, analyzed that data, and developed a framework for memory making and building meaningful connections. He has presented his findings to standing-room-only conferences, parents groups, and more! We talk about his findings on today's episode and what you can do right away to build lasting memories with your kids. Tod is a husband and the father of two adult children. In today's conversation we discussed:  Growing up without a father How losing a child motivated him to focus on every moment The research behind building meaningful connections The Pyramid of Connection and its different stages Tear-jerking stories from Tod's research What parents can do right now to change their thinking on memory making and connection — Where to find Tod Francis - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todfrancis/ - Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/bio/tod-francis/   Where to find Adam Fishman - Newsletter: https://startupdadpod.substack.com/ - Newsletter: https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/ — In this episode, we cover [1:49] Welcome [2:28] Tod's childhood [3:52] Growing up without a Dad [4:47] What is life like now? [6:28] Did child loss change your priorities as a dad? [8:49] Why did memory making matter to you as a dad? [12:24] The research behind connection [18:51] The Pyramid of Connection [33:56] How do parents get out of the bottom layer? [39:44] Making memories with adult kids [42:36] Parting thoughts [44:12] How are his sons involved in this project? — Show references: Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/ Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com/ Mint: https://mint.intuit.com/ Shasta Ventures: https://www.shasta.vc/ Canva: https://www.canva.com/ Tonal: https://www.tonal.com/ Class Dojo: https://www.classdojo.com/ Liquid Space: https://liquidspace.com/ Task Rabbit: https://www.taskrabbit.com/ — For sponsorship inquiries email: podcast@fishmana.com. For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com  Production support for Startup Dad is provided by Tommy Harron at http://www.armaziproductions.com/

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork, an early-stage focused venture firm investing its first fund. In his venture career, he has invested in the early rounds of several companies that have exited or are currently valued at over $1B, including Athelas, Canva, ClassDojo, Color Health, Frame.io, Imperfect Foods, Lattice, and The Farmer's Dog. Prior to Footwork, Nikhil was a Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, on the investment team at Insight Partners, and on the founding team at Artsy. In Today's Episode with Nikhil Basu Trivedi We Discuss: 1. From Summer Intern to Founding a Firm: The 13 Year Journey: How did Nikhil first make his way into venture as an intern at Insight Partners in NYC? What does Nikhil know now that he wishes he had known on his first day in venture? Why does Nikhil advise all young VCs to "not look at their business card"? Why does title not matter in venture? Should founders meet with Juniors as well as GPs and more senior people? 2. Small Funds Outperform Large Funds: Why does Nikhil believe that small funds outperform large funds? Why is AUM the biggest bullshit metric in VC? How does Nikhil advise seed stage founders who have offers from seed firms for smaller rounds at lower valuations and are weighing them against larger rounds with higher valuations from multi-stage funds? Does Nikhil believe that platform value-added services really provide any value? 3. The Art of Investing: What has been Nikhil's biggest investing win? How has it changed his approach to investing? How does Nikhil prioritize between people, traction, and market? What is most important? What has been Nikhil's biggest investing miss? How has that changed his approach? Does Nikhil believe the great founders are immediately obvious? Why is market size the single question that keeps Nikhil up the most? 4. The Dysfunctions of Venture Capital: What are the single biggest areas of misalignment between GP and LP? What do many GPs see and know well that LPs should know and see more of? What are the biggest ways that decision-making breaks down in a venture fund? Why does Nikhil believe that so much of the investment in AI is going to go up in flames?

LeanData's sales organization's head count might seem too costly to some. It was derived out of a constant quest to map internal resources to support customer success - not revenue, yet it is highly profitable.  One example, split the customer success manager role into two positions. One checking in to monitor the account health and ensure renewal. The other, a coach to provide ongoing best practice advice to customers.Join us to learn the customer-centric sales enablement process that makes LeanData recession-proof.Chapters:00:00 LeanData - Revenue Orchestration 04:08 Pitching the Problem Not the Solution 06:17 Scaling the Sales Team 08:10 Hiring a VP Sales 11:51 Letting Sellers Sell: 1 to 1 ratio of SDR to AE 16:41 Adding Enablement & Customer Virality 18:57 Revisiting The Customer Journey - Adding Coaches 23:09 Certified Users Have Higher Renewal Rate 27:40 What's Next for LeanDataAbout Our Guest:Evan Liang is the Co-founder and CEO of LeanData. Prior to launching LeanData in 2012, Evan worked in product, strategy, and business development roles at Microsoft, Ebay, Caring.com and Smart Modular Technologies as well as associate positions with venture capital firms Shasta Ventures and Battery Ventures.About LeanData:LeanData is an essential element of the modern revenue tech stack. The LeanData Revenue Orchestration Platform simplifies buyer journeys while accelerating time to revenue through no-code, drag-and-drop lead routing, lead-to-account matching, automated meeting scheduling, engagement analytics, and strategic integrations.Social links:https://www.linkedin.com/company/leandata/https://twitter.com/LeanDatahttps://www.facebook.com/LeanDatahttps://www.youtube.com/@leandatainc​​You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.comConnect with Alice on LinkedIn

“Overseeing your own health is so valuable – and we're at the cusp of it in America. We are giving people the information that can finally help themselves in a unique way.” - Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer   Did you know trillions of dollars are being poured into chronic conditions in America – and many of them are unknowingly rooted in glucose challenges or mismanagement? During today's show, Dr. Michelle Robin invites Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer to share his reasons for co-founding Signos – a CGM technology that shows how your body uniquely reacts to what you eat, plus other lifestyle factors such as stress patterns and sleep habits that are affecting your glucose levels. Sharam tells his personal journey of weight management issues growing up and why he finally figured out that glucose spikes and dips were causing more harm on the overall body than he realized. He explains how Signos technology works and some stories of people who have tried everything from diets to exercise, but the Signos CGM monitor is the first thing that has made them feel empowered to see what their bodies need on an individual level to reach their goals. Sharam also unpacks why glucose monitoring is not just for people who have diabetes, and why this can be a powerful tool in life to manage pain, weight management, increase energy, and even impact mental health. About Today's Guest:  Growing up in upstate New York, Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer fluctuated between obese, overweight, athletic, and back again before he founded Signos to tackle the obesity epidemic in America. Sharam is also the Board Director and Co-Founder at Onclusive, an Al software company to measure the impact of PR, as well as originally serving as the company's founding CEO. Prior to Onclusive, he was an entrepreneur in residence at Shasta Ventures focused on consumer internet and the social graph. Before joining Shasta, Sharam was a Venture Capitalist at Sierra Ventures and served on the Board at Makara (sold to RedHat) and TouchCommerce (sold to Nuance). Sharam began his career as an early employee at Appian (NASDAQ:APPN), a low-code software company. He graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He played NCAA D-1 ice hockey and lives with his family in California.   Mentioned in the Episode:  Signos website  What is Signos?  Dr. Georgia Nab's podcast  Signos is hiring

Find out more about this event on our website: https://bit.ly/3X9PIyK The UN announced a crackdown on carbon net zero greenwashing at COP 27 as global emissions are still heading in the wrong direction despite record multi-trillion-dollar trade in carbon credits and climate bonds. Tightened accounting and verification standards are to follow. Meanwhile, scientists have produced breakthroughs in measuring local emissions. Very high spatial resolution from the WorldView-3 satellite has detected and located point methane plumes. Ground sensor networks have confirmed locally that some cities and countries that imposed Covid-19 lockdown measures significantly reduced carbon dioxide levels while others didn't. Learn more about the greenwashing-busting tech poised to hold companies and cities accountable and supercharge climate investing. Speaker: Tac Leung is CEO of Secured Carbon, a climate fintech building a data appliance for cities to scientifically monitor emissions, accountably raise capital from green bond investors, allocate capital efficiently, and verify the progress of net zero carbon emissions projects. It is forming a coalition with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards linking climate science measurement and goals to financial performance. Tac is a materials scientist and engineer the has contributed to more than a dozen venture and corporate-backed fintech and insurtech startups and served as entrepreneur in residence for Shasta Ventures, State Farm's venture incubator, and Standard Chartered Bank's SC Ventures. Andressen Horowitz led the seed round on Anzen, his previous startup. Tac's transportation scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions are zero, and his scope 3 will be net zero by 2023. Professor Paul Palmer, Group Leader and Professor of Quantitative Earth Observation at The University of Edinburgh

In this episode of the OpsStars Podcast, Evan Liang, CEO & Co-Founder of LeanData, joins Rachael to talk about the revenue tech stack - because who better to share his perspective on this fast-evolving landscape within which LeanData sits at the center?

On the episode we dive deep into working for a venture capital fund. Our friend, Kenn So, drops in to provides insight into being an associate at a top tier VC Firm in Silicon Valley, Shasta Ventures.  We uncover how to assess startup deals and what truly goes into making a million dollar investment in early stage startups. Kenn also talks about landing an ultra competitive hard to get associate position at a Venture Capital firm, how VCs can diligence markets and prospective deals, and an overview on the AI and Big data industry. Kenn talks about growing up in Manila, being in a family of restaurateurs, going to Kellogg for his MBA, and charting his own trail in America as an immigrant. Read more about his work at https://www.quild.xyz/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Episode 89 is with Rachel Star, Principal at Unusual Ventures! Unusual Ventures is an early-stage firm that invests in both enterprise and consumer startups. They lead pre-seed to Series A investments in software startups, supporting founders from idea to IPO, enabling startups with hands on support and expertise during their early journey. Rachel is Principal at Unusual helping to build and support the firm's consumer investments. With a passion for products and people, she started her career as a consultant with McKinsey & Company with a focus on consumer brands, retailers, supply chain, and manufacturing. Most recently, Rachel was an early-stage investor on the consumer team at Shasta Ventures. She has been a speaker at TED events, for the Aspen Institute, and at Autodesk University. We chat with Rachel about her career journey from Consulting to VC. She details key learnings and transferrable skills, what makes a great mentor in this space, how to manage the stress of the job, and ultimately, how to become a VC. This was an insightful conversation that we hope you enjoy! Unusual Ventures https://www.unusual.vc/ Timestamps 2:30 - Intro to Rachel 4:55 - Transferrable Skills 7:28 - What Makes a Great Mentor 12:30 - Managing Pressure on the Job 14:27 - Key Learnings 18:18 - Should You Become a VC? 21:11 - Unusual Ventures 25:37 - Investment Criteria 31:57 - Understanding Your Business Needs 33:28 - Working @ Unusual Ventures 35:24 - Hiring @ Early Stage StartUps 45:55 - What Makes a Visionary? 49:35 - How to Become a VC 51:45 - Lightning Round

Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Mike Trigg. We'll be talking about the intricacies of Silicon Valley and his book Bit Flip. Prior to becoming an author, Mike Trigg was an executive, founder, and investor in various technology start-up companies for over 25 years. Born in Kentucky and raised in Wisconsin, he earned a BA from Northwestern University and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. After several years working for a U.S. Senator in Washington, D.C., Mike began his career in the technology industry, working for telecommunications giants MCI and 3Com. He was an early employee of Octane Software, which was acquired by Epiphany during the first dot-com boom. He went on to co-found a data analytics company called Truviso (acquired by Cisco) then became VP of marketing at hi5, one of the world's largest social networks. More recently, Mike was Chief Marketing Officer and GM at Entelo, a recruiting software company, and Chief Operating Officer at cloud file sharing vendor, Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), which was acquired by OpenText. Mike was an entrepreneur-in-residence at AI Fund and SymphonyAI, both AI-focused, early-stage venture funds, and an advisor at Shasta Ventures. Mike has been a contributor to TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company. He lives in Menlo Park, California, with his wife and two sons. Launching August 16, 2022, Bit Flip is his first novel. You can find him on his website or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.   In this episode Mike Trigg and I discuss: Ensuring a story about an industry insider has universal appeal. Keeping authenticity in the industry language used after editing. How to balance backstory with the fast pace of your story. Plus, his #1 tip for writers. For more info and show notes: diymfa.com/424

Before co-founding Footwork, a venture capital firm that manages $175M, Nikhil Trivedi was a Managing Director at Shasta Ventures where he invested in many companies including Canva's seed round. Additionally, he was a part of the founding team of Artsy while he was still at Princeton. In this episode, Nikhil tells us about his experiences starting businesses while still in college, how one goes about pitching a venture capital firm to investors, and his most recent investment in the map startup, Felt. If you listen to the end you will hear Nikhil's thoughts on business school and what it takes to have an outlier career.Please subscribe to Studying Success to hear more from the best entrepreneurs and investors!Also check out our website at www.studyingsuccesspodcast.com.And follow us on Instagram @studyingsuccesspodcast.

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is the Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork, an early-stage focused venture capital firm investing its first $175M fund. Footwork leads and co-leads Series A and Seed rounds, in companies with early signs of product-market fit, focusing on consumer technology and the consumerization of enterprise technology. Before Footwork, Nikhil was Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, a boutique, early-stage venture capital firm in Silicon Valley investing in consumer and enterprise technology startups. Nikhil invested in the likes of Canva, Hinge and ClassDojo. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com

Rob Coneybeer, co-founder of Shasta Ventures and a 24-year veteran of the venture capital industry, joins Professor Karl Ulrich to talk about his three month Sabbatical all around Europe! https://medium.com/theclutchpedal/why-i-flew-my-land-cruiser-to-europe-a35df754f124 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Wisq, the first platform designed for the social connection needs of employees, announced that it closed $20 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from True Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Following a seed round that closed in May 2021, Wisq has raised more than $40 million to fuel its growth and expand its platform and team. https://hrtechfeed.com/employee-connections-platform-raises-40-million-to-combat-social-isolation-at-work/ Assessment platform GoodJob® announced that it has raised $5.75M to fuel its next stage of growth initiatives. GoodJob uses its proprietary tool called the PATH Assessment® to identify a person's work traits and behaviors and then match those to people who are most successful in the job.  https://hrtechfeed.com/goodjob-secures-5-75m-in-funding/ Moveworks, an AI platform that powers the best places to work, has introduced Moveworks for HR: a sophisticated artificial intelligence solution built for human resources. The platform now automatically resolves employees' HR requests, including benefits inquiries, PTO applications, payroll questions, and more. https://hrtechfeed.com/moveworks-is-a-new-hr-support-platform/ Bearmery has made an acquisition…accordign to analyst Josh bersin: Beamery just acquired an exciting company called Flux which has been building a groundbreaking new talent mobility system. https://hrtechfeed.com/beamery-acquires-flux-a-new-type-of-talent-marketplace/

Zuben Matthews is the cofounder and CEO of Brigit which is a Holistic financial health app that helps Americans relieve stress, save for tomorrow and guides them to a state of financial well-being. The company has raised to date over $140 million from top tier investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, DCM Ventures, CRV, Shasta Ventures, DN Capital, Abstract Ventures, and Sound Ventures to name a few. 

Zuben Matthews is the cofounder and CEO of Brigit which is a Holistic financial health app that helps Americans relieve stress, save for tomorrow and guides them to a state of financial well-being. The company has raised to date over $140 million from top tier investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, DCM Ventures, CRV, Shasta Ventures, DN Capital, Abstract Ventures, and Sound Ventures to name a few. 

SingleStore raises $80M in Series F to innovate and expand its footprint and team to offer customers more resources and a better choice. The company revealed a 150 percent increase in cloud revenue and a 300 percent growth in customer acquisitions for its cloud service.Zeotap, a SaaS customer intelligence platform, announced a second extension of $11 million to its Series C funding, where it received $18.5 million from SignalFire in the first extension last year. The new extension involved the backing of Liberty Global Ventures.myCOI raised $5M in debt financing from SaaS Capital, a provider of growth debt for B2B SaaS companies. The proceeds would be used to continue innovation, improve customer experience and hire primarily for sales, marketing, product and development departments.ThinkIQ, a digital manufacturing transformation SaaS, has announced the launch of the Alliance Partner Program to assist customers in getting the most out of their strategic technology investments with the firm.PolyAI, a conversational AI company, raised $14 million in a Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures. PolyAI, according to the company, creates and installs voice assistants for customer service automation that sound like actual people.TrueFort, a company that safeguards zero-trust apps, has secured $30 million in a Series B investment led by Shasta Ventures. The funds will be used to improve company-wide recruiting, go-to-market operations, and a variety of R&D projects.Duda, a professional web development platform for SaaS enterprises and digital agencies, has acquired Snipcart. Duda intends to put a lot of money into expanding the team and improving the basic Snipcart platform's capabilities and features.To further its vision for hybrid work environments, Google announced a series of innovations in the Google Workspace to help employees collaborate equally regardless of location, device preferences, role or language, a press release from Google said. The updates on the G Suite include a rollout of Spaces in the Google Chat for all users, in addition to new meeting enhancements and conferencing hardware for organizations to bridge the gap while navigating hybrid work environments.Sumo Logic, a log management and analytics provider, and IBM announced the availability of Sumo Logic's continuous intelligence platform on the open cloud Red Hat Marketplace to help companies running on the Red Hat OpenShift platform achieve insights into their cloud and hybrid infrastructure.

Today’s incredible guest is Nikhil Basu Trivedi, an investor who has been on the leading edge of investing in dozens of startups just before they become the next big thing. His portfolio includes Canva, Hinge, DoctoronDemand and many more. We asked Nikhil about what sort of data points he looks for when analyzing markets, in order to time the next big thing perfectly for investment; and we dig into some of the biggest lessons he’s learned in the process.About Nikhil:Nikhil Basu Trivedi is Co-Founder and General Partner of Footwork, an early-stage VC firm focused on consumer technology and the consumerization of enterprise technology. Previously, he was Managing Director of Shasta Ventures and an investor with Insight Venture Partners. He graduated from Princeton University with a degree in molecular biology and finance.He writes at nbt.substack.comA message from our sponsor:Now more than ever, entrepreneurs need committed partners to help them navigate the hardest pain points of scaling a technology business. Created by one of Canada’s largest banks, RBCx is re-imagining what it means to create meaningful and impactful technology companies in Canada.RBCx – the tech banking arm of the Royal Bank of Canada - is a full-service platform that accelerates the entrepreneurial journey at every stage of growth – providing access to a complete suite of capital solutions, innovative products and services, and operational expertise to help technology companies scale.Sid Paquette – former Managing Partner at OMERS Ventures, is leading the group and has recruited a bunch of new faces to the bank from the Venture and Tech industry. Tony Barkett and Tyler Kirk – two former Silicon Valley Bank leaders in addition to Nicole Kelly and Anthony Mouchantaf have also joined Sid from OMERS Ventures.RBCx has been incredibly active since their launch in June as an LP, and have already backed some of Canada’s most notable VC funds including Golden, Amplitude, Version One and Lumira Ventures. To learn more about RBCx visit www.rbcx.com or follow them on Twitter or Linkedin.In this episode we discuss:03:38 How does Nikhil define the “next big thing”04:48 The biggest lesson Nikhil has learned07:18 How to think about timing when to step in10:05 The NFT wave and opening up of new opportunities12:53 How to think about potential sizes of investment16:57 Staying grounded in reality rather than being driven by hype19:09 What Nikhil looks for in founders20:36 Analyzing product market fit24:59 Viewing competitors in the early-stage market27:14 Enterprise trends post-pandemic that Nikhil is excited about29:50 Thoughts on clean tech/ deep tech32:34 Staying a generalist when investing35:54 What to look for from Footwork VCFast FavoritesPodcastsThe All In PodcastNewsletter/BlogNot Boring by Packy McCormickTech GadgetAirPodsNew TrendFounders working on climate related solutionsBookLeading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United by Alex Ferguson and Michael MoritzFollow Matt Cohen and Tank Talks here!Podcast production support provided by Agentbee.Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanktalks.substack.com

On episode 1, season 2 of the Founders Forward Podcast we welcome on Kenn So of Shasta Ventures. Kenn is an associate at Shasta and invests in B2B enterprise software companies with a personal focus in Machine Learning. Kenn joins the Founders Forward to break down the trends taking place that are influencing company valuations. We also dig into how founders can leverage investor updates and cold email to create momentum in a fundraising process. 

There aren't many 32 year olds in VC with stronger pedigree than Nikhil Basu Trivedi. He moved to Silicon Valley at the age of 13 and worked his way up through the ranks at Insight Partners and Shasta Ventures, where he refined his craft and revealed a knack for finding and winning competitive deals with great founders. This podcast is a must-listen for anyone considering starting their own VC fund. Nikhil has just started Footwork with his partner, Mike Smith, anchored by many of the best investors in the world.    Nikhil shares their roadmap for Footwork. Why now? What stage companies should they invest in? What industries? What core values should drive the firm? The conversation offers insights both for how to get started on laying out the framework for a new fund, but it also reveals the level of thought and planning required to "build a firm, not a fund." We're betting on Footwork becoming one of the next great names in Silicon Valley lore. Check out this conversation with Nikhil Basu Trivedi to see if you agree.

Meron Capital, an early-stage VC fund, has announced its second fund of $50 million. The fund will invest in Israeli companies developing software-based solutions for enterprise, cybersecurity, digital health, finance, DevOps, and other areas. Ten firms have received further funding, with Immunai, Solugen, and Armory alone revealing total investments of more than $300 million so far.Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has officially launched a new website, an a16z subdomain, for publications called Future. The publication will initially focus on themes relevant to the firm's investment sectors. Still, it will grow over time with the help of a mix of their employees, paid writers, and industry insiders such as founders, professors, and entrepreneurs.Flexmoney, a full-lifecycle digital credit network platform for lenders and merchants, has raised $4.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Pravega Ventures. Other participants include Z5 Capital and other marquee investors. The fund will be used to expand the Mumbai-based startup's credit network reach to include many more lenders and merchants and introduce several new products and solidify its position as India's premier digital credit and BNPL infrastructure, the company said. Crate.io, a database platform developer, has received an extra $10M in financing. According to the firm, it has raised around $31M in total funding. CrateDB Edge extends the capability of CrateDB Cloud to clients' remote and offline locations. CrateDB is available in the cloud, at the edge, and on-premise, giving Crate.io complete flexibility in digital transformation.Iterable, a cross-channel customer experience platform, has secured $200 million in a Series E investment round. Glynn Capital, Silver Lake, Adams Street, and Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners are among the participants. Post-money, the firm is valued at $2 billion. Big data analytics are used in Iterable's solutions to assess user behavior and enhance engagement time, channel, and frequency.OCR Labs, an Australian digital id verification company, has raised $15M (€12.5 million) in Series A funding led by Oyak Group amid growing demand for digital id verification. Reports state that the ID verification market is expected to be worth $15.8 billion by 2025. OCR Labs will use the proceeds in expansion.Multi-channel commerce platform Shopify has announced that it will extend its one-click checkout product, Shop Pay, to businesses and other non-Shopify merchants selling on Facebook, Instagram and Google. This marks the first time that a Shopify product is made available to non-Shopify users.10x Future Technologies, a London-based digital banking platform helping financial providers transform the way they operate, has raised $187 million in a Series C round co-led by BlackRock and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), reports state.Uberall, a company that helps enterprise resellers to deliver memorable ‘Near Me' (location-based search) brand and marketing SaaS solutions, has announced its raise of $115 million in funding led by Bregal Milestone. Alongside its fundraising, Uberall, as a part of its growth strategy, has also announced its acquisition of MomentFeed, a provider of proximity search operations in North America. Duda, a responsive website builder for digital marketing agencies, hosting companies, and SaaS companies, has announced its %50 million Series D funding led by Claridge IL and its existing investors- Susquehanna Growth Equity and Vintage Investment Partners. The company stated that this is its largest-ever fund raised, taking the total amount to over $100 million.San Jose-based Elisity, which provides identity and behavior-based enterprise security, has announced the close of its Series A funding, where it raised $26 million from Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital. Previous investor Atlantic Bridge participated in the round.Bengaluru-based Apna. a professional networking platform working towards solving India's unemployment at the grassroots level, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global, reports state. Apna's valuation post the funding stands at $570 million.Upflow, a French startup, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. The business wants to assist you in pursuing late payments. Other participants include 9yards Capital, existing investor eFounders, N26 co-founder Maximilian Tayenthal, auxmoney co-founder and CEO Raffael Johnen, Uber SVP of Delivery Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty. The firm intends to expand to the United States as a result of the fundraising round.Macrometa, an edge computing startup, has announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Pelion Venture Partners. Other participants include DNX Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Partech Partners, Shasta Ventures, Fusion Fund, and Sway Ventures. Cord, a startup automating annotation processes for computer vision, has announced that it has raised $4.5 million in a CRV-led seed round. As the firm prepares to hire more staff, the funds will be used to grow Cord's client base, and platform.

Nikhil is the cofounder and GP of Footwork. Prior, Nikhil was Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, where he invested in Canva, ClassDojo, Frame.io, Imperfect Foods, Lattice, Literati, Pill Club, Tally, and The Farmer's Dog. He was previously at Insight Partners and on the founding team at Artsy. Nikhil found his footwork growing up in the UK, India, and the San Francisco Bay Area, playing cricket and tennis.★ Support this podcast ★

Tod Francis, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, starts with a discussion on the history of retail, all the way from shoe stores, to departmental stores, and back to specialty retail. This is followed by a similar overview of the history of e-commerce ranging from Amazon’s strategy to how specialty retail is translating into niche e-commerce,Read Full Article »

This week we dove deep on what in the world is going on in venture capital - we started off in March with a Black Swan Memo from Sequoia on how COVID was going to fundamentally disrupt the economy. There’s no question that happened, but what’s happened for startups and technology hasn’t been as intuitive - the capital markets are more active then ever, technology businesses are booming and deals are getting done at breakneck speed. This week I chatted with Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Former GP at Shasta Ventures to unpack what’s going on. Nikhil coined the term “solo capitalist” this year and it speaks to a really interesting dynamic in the venture landscape. In this conversation we talked about: (1) agglomerators vs. specialists and how to chart positioning of different firms in the ecosystem, (2) price elasticity on venture deals and why different firms’ have different sensitivity thresholds when pricing deals, (3) what matters the most in a fundraise, (4) and the rise of social capitalists.

This week's guest is Kenn So, who works as an associate at Shasta Ventures. We wanted to bring on Kenn because he recently published the most comprehensive book we have found on breaking into venture, but we touch on a lot of other things as well. In this talk, we cover: Kenn's path into venture, the benefits and tradeoffs of having a banking and consulting background, Shasta's pivot towards investing exclusively into B2B, and the idea behind Shasta Elevate and taking a more hands-on approach with portfolio companies Check out Kenn's book here: https://kenn.so/Breaking-into-early-stage-VC-55bec51b43254c858abfceb16b21827f

Nikhil is a venture capitalist who spent several years at Shasta Ventures after beginning his career with Insight Venture Partners. He is currently investing independently and has made several early-stage venture investments in the second half of 2020 alone. These investments include Canva, daring, and Roam Research, among others. During his time at Shasta, Nikhil led or co-led investments in companies including Athelas, ClassDojo, Color Genomics, Imperfect Foods, Lattice, Literati, The Farmer’s Dog, The Pill Club, and several others. Before beginning his career in VC, Nikhil was a part of the founding team at Artsy and graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Molecular Biology. He received the Spirit of Princeton Award and was advised by the school’s President in writing his thesis, “Beyond the $1000 Genome: From Third-Generation Sequencing to Personalized Medicine”. Nikhil writes regularly and publishes his essays about the “next big thing” on his Substack at nbt.substack.com -- Thank you for listening to Pod of Jake! All shares and reviews are appreciated! If you enjoy this podcast, you might like reading blogofjake.com If you prefer listening over reading, you might prefer Blog of Jake's blog on tape, available through any of your favorite podcast providers. Website: podofjake.com Twitter: @blogofjake Email: jake@blogofjake.com Call: superpeer.com/jake Support: patreon.com/blogofjake Bitcoin: 3ESGQxrJZmGqd2SifqCUiHPvah1uWtN1Zd Bitcoin Cash: qznma8vxf8kjn4v9phsfkhzd0559gm7yfsx0gkl4sf

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Mustard (www.teammstrd.com) an AI sports coaching application that helps athletes improve their baseball pitching technique using machine learning. The platform is based on data from legendary pitching coach Tom House among others. In this episode, Rocky talks about how they are taking data from 40+ years of traditional coaching techniques and turning it into AI, how he tailored hit pitch for different VCs, how he compensates his advisory board, how he made a short list of the best-fit investors, and more. The Company raised $1.7 million of venture funding in a deal led by Shasta Ventures and Intersect VC. David Novak, Drew Brees, Nolan Ryan, Mike Dixon and Reid Ryan also participated in the round. This series is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $2.5 Billion since 2016. Create a free account at www.foundersuite.com

Kenn So is on the investment team at Shasta Ventures, one of the most respected enterprise software investors in Silicon Valley. He evaluates AI-first companies every day and has a few opinions about what's working and how to get your AI company funded.On this week's episode, Ken shares his perspective on venture capital, AI, and what the best pitches have in common.Listen and learn... How the best SaaS companies are evolving their operating plans in lean times.Why AI explainability matters. What is AI bias and what are innovative companies doing to address it.Why it's ok that AI innovation is slowing down while AI accountability is catching up.The biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when managing in a crisis.How diversity in the VC community directly impacts innovation.The pitch that made Kenn say "wow!"What Kenn learned backpacking around the U.S. before starting his venture career.

Kartik Tiwari has a background in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and was the CTO and co-founder of Starsky Robotics, a driverless truck startup that aimed to make roads safer and allow truck drivers to work closer to home. Starsky began moving freight on the highway in early 2017, and one year later became the first company to take the safety driver out of a truck when it drove fully unmanned for seven miles on a closed road in Florida. In June 2019, Starsky did the first-ever fully-unmanned test on a public highway with live traffic. But was shut down in early 2020 after raising over $20 million in venture capital from the likes of Shasta Ventures and Unshackled Ventures. In today's episode you will learn: 1. What was Kartik's journey from India to the US, and his leap of faith into the startup world 2. What is the entrepreneur's dilemma and how to go about it? 3. What are the challenges of starting a startup in the unmanned vehicle sector? 4. How does the team impact the development of products and technology in a space where things have not been built before? What kind of dynamic should exist? Contact: Linkedin, Kartik Tiwari You can follow me on Twitter, Linkedin, or email me at mindgravity2020@gmail.com.

Coronavirus and The Importance of Smart City PlatformsHyperlocal Coronavirus DiscussionsIn my local community in south Palm Beach County, Florida  the importance of community cohesion and a coordinated response to the coronavirus pandemic has been demonstrated through citizen dialogues on NextDoor, a community building smart city platform. Of course, many other community platforms are also just as important – from Twitter to Facebook and even Meetup.In the NextDoor example, here in South Florida, over the past weekend, news was shared by citizens about a local confirmed case, quickly community information began to be shared about national, state, city and many other very local “hyperlocal” resources. This includes neighbors helping neighbors through doorstep delivery of food, medical and other supplies.National and Local Coronavirus ResourcesAdditionally, like many other social media platforms, NextDoor has formally been in contact with the CDC and WHO in order to act as a conduit to local residents. Perhaps more importantly Nextdoor has enabled local public agencies to bring relevant Coronavirus information to their areas, down to very small areas of even a few hundred residents – or smaller.As NextDoor is active in 11+ countries, and the Coronavirus is having a dramatic impact worldwide, you might consider participation in the hyperlocal discussions being hosted by this unique platformSo what is NextDoor?Founded in 2011, Nextdoor is an online platform positioned as the “world's largest social network for the neighborhood”.  Specifically, its mission is to facilitate conversations that empower neighbors to create stronger and safer communities.  Nextdoor is pursuing this objective by defining the physical boundaries of individual neighborhoods, and building an associated, private online community site for each. Users are required to verify that they have a local address before they are allowed to join a neighborhood's Nextdoor site.  Once an online neighborhood has a critical mass of members, those members can begin creating discussion forums on a range of topics.  For example, users commonly leverage the platform to find babysitters, locate lost pets, sell personal items and review local businessesNextdoor is based in San Francisco, California, the company was founded in 2008 and launched in the United States in October 2011. Nextdoor is a privately-held company based in San Francisco with backing from prominent investors including Benchmark, Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Riverwood Capital, Bond, Axel Springer, Comcast Ventures and others.Other Useful Coronavirus Links:CDC Social Distancing Guidance: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/index.htmlCDC Updates: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summary.htmlWorld Health Organization https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019Next Door www.nextdoor.comJohns Hopkins Corona Virus Statistics Map: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Managing Director, Shasta Partners Key Takeaways: 1. There are a number of behavioral changes that are happening through this environment that will shape the strategy of companies born in the near future. 2. The health of your employee base should be of paramount focus. That includes ensuring that founders monitor themselves. 3. New leaders will be accelerated into leadership positions as a result of this pandemic, and funds will look more diverse as a result. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

We do something a little different in this episode: We turn the mic around and answer the question: “What does the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council do?” To help us answer this question, we talk to several Princeton alums whom PEC has helped, and more.  For more Princeton Spark, follow us on Twitter @PrincetonSpark and Instagram @PrincetonSpark, and check us out on the web at princetonspark.com.  SHOW NOTES Lauren Bender is the Princeton AEF Program Manager. You can reach her at labender@princeton.edu. Read more about AEF at entrepreneurs.princeton.edu/aef. Get in touch if you're interested in career opportunities with these exciting startups.  Vaidhy Murti ‘15 and his startup Friendsy was in the first Princeton AEF cohort. Check out his new app Wit at the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Friendsy does still exist! Check it out at friendsyapp.com. Vaidhy appeared in our first and in our third episodes.  Allan Amico '13 founded DonorUP, a giving platform that helps you connect with causes you care about. You can get DonorUP at the Apple App Store.  Princeton AEF's Bryton Shang ‘12 is the founder of Aquabyte, which uses computer vision, machine learning and AI to help make fish farms more sustainable.  Princeton AEF's Vivian Wang ‘15 is the co-founder of Friendshop (gofriendshop.com), a beauty e-commerce site where friends get deals on makeup and skin care products. She obtained funding from Nassau Street Ventures, headed by Tom Meyer '87. Along with Chaac Ventures (led by Luke Armour '13) and FitzGate Ventures (led by Jim Cohen '86 and Mark Poag '93), these venture funds are focused on Princeton startups.  Marcus Stroud ‘16 of TXV Partners appeared on the first episode of the Princeton Spark. Matthew Quilter '74 is partner at Fenwick & West. Both participated in a panel discussion on capital fundraising at the 2019 Bay Area Tiger Entrepreneurs Conference.  Princeton Alumni Angels are located in San Francisco and New York City.  Before PEC, there was the “E-Club” (Princeton Entrepreneurship Club) and the Keller Center.  The strategic framework adopted by the Board of Trustees gave rise to the Princeton Entrepreneurial Advisory Committee (PEAC). As recommended in their report, PEC was created. A member of PEAC, John Diekman '65 is founder of 5AM Ventures.   Nikhil Basu Trivedi '11 is managing director at Shasta Ventures.  Princeton Innovation Center BioLabs is the University's wetlab an

We do something a little different in this episode: We turn the mic around and answer the question: “What does the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council do?” To help us answer this question, we talk to several Princeton alums whom PEC has helped, and more.  For more Princeton Spark, follow us on Twitter @PrincetonSpark and Instagram @PrincetonSpark, and check us out on the web at princetonspark.com.  SHOW NOTES Lauren Bender is the Princeton AEF Program Manager. You can reach her at labender@princeton.edu. Read more about AEF at entrepreneurs.princeton.edu/aef. Get in touch if you’re interested in career opportunities with these exciting startups.  Vaidhy Murti ‘15 and his startup Friendsy was in the first Princeton AEF cohort. Check out his new app Wit at the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Friendsy does still exist! Check it out at friendsyapp.com. Vaidhy appeared in our first and in our third episodes.  Allan Amico ’13 founded DonorUP, a giving platform that helps you connect with causes you care about. You can get DonorUP at the Apple App Store.  Princeton AEF’s Bryton Shang ‘12 is the founder of Aquabyte, which uses computer vision, machine learning and AI to help make fish farms more sustainable.  Princeton AEF’s Vivian Wang ‘15 is the co-founder of Friendshop (gofriendshop.com), a beauty e-commerce site where friends get deals on makeup and skin care products. She obtained funding from Nassau Street Ventures, headed by Tom Meyer ’87. Along with Chaac Ventures (led by Luke Armour ’13) and FitzGate Ventures (led by Jim Cohen ’86 and Mark Poag ’93), these venture funds are focused on Princeton startups.  Marcus Stroud ‘16 of TXV Partners appeared on the first episode of the Princeton Spark. Matthew Quilter ’74 is partner at Fenwick & West. Both participated in a panel discussion on capital fundraising at the 2019 Bay Area Tiger Entrepreneurs Conference.  Princeton Alumni Angels are located in San Francisco and New York City.  Before PEC, there was the “E-Club” (Princeton Entrepreneurship Club) and the Keller Center.  The strategic framework adopted by the Board of Trustees gave rise to the Princeton Entrepreneurial Advisory Committee (PEAC). As recommended in their report, PEC was created. A member of PEAC, John Diekman ’65 is founder of 5AM Ventures.   Nikhil Basu Trivedi ’11 is managing director at Shasta Ventures.  Princeton Innovation Center BioLabs is the University’s wetlab an

Steve Newman is the Founder of Scalyr which offers a cloud platform for high-speed log management and server monitoring. The company has raised over $30 million from investors such as Google Ventures, Shasta Ventures, or Bloomberg Beta. His most recent company prior to Scalyr, Writely, was acquired by Google to become Google Docs. Steve Newman has co-founded 6 companies so far. In this episode you will learn: How to pick an idea that serves you where you are a representative of the customer How to survey customers to get to product-market fit, quickly Why he finally raised money for his latest startup, after bootstrapping all the others What traits to look for when seeking investors The importance of competition – and of sharing your ideas The advantage of being the underdog, even against a giant like Google SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. .alg-cta-consulting { grid-template-columns: minmax(-webkit-min-content,-webkit-max-content) 1fr; grid-template-columns: minmax(min-content,max-content) 1fr;; } .post-719 .wp-block.alg-cta-consulting.book .title { font-size: 40px !important; margin-bottom: 30px; } .post-719 .wp-block.alg-cta-consulting.book .red { font-size: 24px; color: #ff5e00; font-weight: 600; } .post-719 .wp-block.alg-cta-consulting.book p.btn-w { margin: 20px 0; } .sumo-wrapper .sumo-form .btn.btn-wrr { background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Montserrat", sans-serif; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; font-size: 28px; line-height: 1.5; text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 15px 0px; margin: 25px 0 0; display: block; width: 100%; height: 100%; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px inset; cursor: pointer; color: #fff; letter-spacing: 0; border-radius: 0; } .sumo-form .wpcf7-form-control-wrap.email input { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-size: 25px; text-align: left; border-width: 1px; border-color: rgb(218, 218, 218); border-style: solid; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px inset; text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 7px; margin: 0px; display: block; width: 100%; max-height: none; height: 64px; transition: none 0s ease 0s; } .sumo-form .wpcf7-form.init .wpcf7-form-control.wpcf7-submit { color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Montserrat", sans-serif; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; font-size: 25px; line-height: 1.5; text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 10px 0px; margin: 0px; display: block; width: 100%; height: 100%; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 0px 0px 0px inset; cursor: pointer; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); text-transform: uppercase; } #left-area .entry-content .sumo-form p { padding-bottom: 10px; } .sumo-wrapper .content-block .sumo-form { padding: 0px 5px; } .sumo-wrapper .sumo-form-wrapper.listbuilder-popup-embedded { position: relative; margin: 20px 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 992px) and (max-width: 1199px){ .sumo-wrapper .content-block h3 { font-size: 38px; } .sumo-wrapper .content-block h4 { font-size: 35px; } } @media screen and (min-width:768px) and (max-width:991px){ .sumo-wrapper .

Steve Newman is the Founder of Scalyr which offers a cloud platform for high-speed log management and server monitoring. The company has raised over $30 million from investors such as Google Ventures, Shasta Ventures, or Bloomberg Beta. His most recent company prior to Scalyr, Writely, was acquired by Google to become Google Docs. Steve Newman has co-founded 6 companies so far. In this episode you will learn: How to pick an idea that serves you where you are a representative of the customer How to survey customers to get to product-market fit, quickly Why he finally raised money for his latest startup, after bootstrapping all the others What traits to look for when seeking investors The importance of competition – and of sharing your ideas The advantage of being the underdog, even against a giant like Google SUBSCRIBE ON: For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here). Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below. About Steve Newman: Steve Newman is the Founder and Chairman of Scalyr. Steve learned to program at the age of eight and is a lifelong engineer and entrepreneur. Scalyr is the sixth company he has founded. His most recent company prior to Scalyr, Writely, was acquired by Google to become Google Docs. Prior to Writely, Steve started San Andreas Systems (the second graphical web page builder, acquired by Claris), Bitcraft (acquired by Macromedia), and Peninsula Game Works (makers of Spectre). He also spent a few years at Intuit, where he built the Quickbooks Customer Manager. Steve studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and received his Master of Computer Science at Stanford University. Connect with Steve Newman: Website Linkedin Twitter * * *FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW: Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today, we're going to speak with someone that has the engineering chops, and I think that we're going to learn quite a bit from all of his experience. So without further ado, Steve Newman, welcome to the show today. Steve Newman: Thank you. Alejandro: Steve, originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan. How was life growing up there? Steve Newman: It was nice. It's a college town. It's the University of Michigan. I grew up outside of town. Just a nice, classic, mid-western upbringing with the addition of a computer. I was one of those kids who was on my computer from a young age. A nice place to grow up. Alejandro: Cool. At what point did you start engaging with mathematics and with computers? Steve Newman: It was pretty early on. My father was in the computer business, and he brought a Commodore PET home when I was eight years old. I started learning to code in Basic all the way back then. Alejandro: Really cool. Then you got your mathematics degree from the University of Michigan, and then you did Stanford. What was Stanford about? What happened there. Were you studying the Masters of Computer Science? Steve Newman: Yes. Side note: I never actually finished my undergraduate degree. The Masters in Computer Science is the only degree I ever finished. I dropped out of Michigan to go work at a software startup. A decision I don't necessarily recommend, but it turned out okay. That was mathematics. My passion has always been computers. I found myself working at a software startup. That led to a move out to California. But I never had any formal education in computer science or software.

Erik is joined on this episode by Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46), investor at Union Square Ventures, Nikhil Basu Trivedi (@nbt), VC at Shasta Ventures, and Jonathan Yoni Regev (@jyonni), CEO and co-founder of The Farmer’s Dog.They talk about where we are in the evolution of the consumer packaged goods space. Rebecca explains why this is a unique moment where consumers are eager to try new things from new brands. They discuss the three types of defensibility in a CPG startup and Nikhil points out that it’s difficult to figure out whether a business model can really be defensible at such an early stage. Jonathan explains what they’re trying to do a The Farmer’s Dog and Rebecca and Nikhil talk about why they love the pets space for new investments, including some of the unique forces at play in the pet landscape.They also talk about communities that have sprung up around certain CPG brands and how communities could be the future of both CPG and consumer social. They discuss the potential for another huge horizontal community like Snap or Instagram to emerge and what they would be looking for in “the next Instagram.”We apologize for the quality of Jonathan’s audio.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46), investor at Union Square Ventures, Nikhil Basu Trivedi (@nbt), VC at Shasta Ventures, and Jonathan Yoni Regev (@jyonni), CEO and co-founder of The Farmer’s Dog.They talk about where we are in the evolution of the consumer packaged goods space. Rebecca explains why this is a unique moment where consumers are eager to try new things from new brands. They discuss the three types of defensibility in a CPG startup and Nikhil points out that it’s difficult to figure out whether a business model can really be defensible at such an early stage. Jonathan explains what they’re trying to do a The Farmer’s Dog and Rebecca and Nikhil talk about why they love the pets space for new investments, including some of the unique forces at play in the pet landscape.They also talk about communities that have sprung up around certain CPG brands and how communities could be the future of both CPG and consumer social. They discuss the potential for another huge horizontal community like Snap or Instagram to emerge and what they would be looking for in “the next Instagram.”We apologize for the quality of Jonathan’s audio.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

SendBird, a San Francisco area startup, helps developers add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code. It's an idea similar to Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications. Today, the company announced a $52 million Series B investment. The round was led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, August Capital, Y Combinator, and Funders Club also participated. Today's investment brings the total raised to over $70 million, according to Crunchbase.

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

Doug Pepper Contributor Doug Pepper is a managing director at Shasta Ventures. More posts by this contributor A New Revolution Modernizes The Revenue Supply Chain With Adobe's acquisition of Marketo, I have been reflecting on what an amazing and pioneering company Marketo has been since it was founded in 2006.

Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer is the Co-founder and CEO of AirPR, a technology solution to measure the impact of PR. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Shasta Ventures focused on consumer internet and the social graph. Prior to joining Shasta, Sharam was a Senior Associate at Sierra Ventures focused on consumer internet, enterprise software (cloud computing / virtualization), and mobile. He served on the Board at Makara (sold to RedHat) and TouchCommerce (sold to Nuance). Sharam began his career as a technologist at Appian, a BPM software startup where he managed the first enterprise-wide tracking system for the Department of Homeland Security. Sharam has lectured at universities, events and conferences, and judged business plan competitions at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Syracuse. He is also an advisor and mentor to eLab (Princeton University's Accelerator), Dorm Room Fund (First Round Capital's Accelerator), and Acceleprise (Enterprise Technology Accelerator). Sharam graduated with honors with a BS in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He played NCAA D 1 ice hockey and is fluent in Farsi. Follow him on twitter @sharamfm.

Ravi Mohan is Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, a firm that has invested in three SaaS Unicorns. Ravi discussed these investments: Apptio, Anaplan, and Zuora.

Phil Fernandez is a Silicon Valley veteran, with more than 35 years of experience building and leading breakout technology companies. Phil co-founded Marketo in 2006 and led the company as Chairman and CEO for a decade, overseeing its successful IPO and acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. Prior to Marketo, Phil served as president and COO of Epiphany, an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) software company. Today, Phil is a Venture Partner with Shasta Ventures, the fund with a portfolio including the likes of Nest, eero, Zuora, Canva and many more incredible companies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: When is the right time to hire your first CRO? Where did Phil make a big mistake in who owns what revenue numbers? What are the traits that make the best CROs? How should they look to work with both sales and marketing to drive efficiency internally? Why does Phil believe you must hire the most senior Chief People Officer as soon as you can? What does the role of “Chief People Officer” really embody? How should they look to work with HR internally? Who should they report to? How does this role change with a scaling organisation? How has Phil seen the relationship between average contract value and potential for expansion change? What is the correlation between and ongoing services component and both customer NPS and expansion? Where did Phil go wrong with this at Marketo? How should emerging SaaS startups today be thinking about technical legacy debt? Why does Phil believe it is never to early to have a Head of Research function? How should this function work with the team to build the latest technology into new products? Why did Steve sell Marketo to Vista Equity Partners? What was the thesis and big learnings from that experience? What does Phil mean when he says he did not “watch the clock properly’’? How can founders today be proactively thinking about ramp time for sales reps, new product engagement etc.     Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Phil Fernandez  

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Scott Abel, CEO of Umuse.io. Umuse is an app that consolidates email, text, chat, and other communication channels into one stream. The Company recently raised $5 million of seed funding from Shasta Ventures, Next Coast Ventures and Floodgate Capital. In this episode, Scott talks about the evolution of the Austin startup scene, getting to know VCs well before fundraising, the importance of storytelling when raising capital, when to raise the next round, and more.

The David and Goliath story of startups entering an entrenched industry and disrupting its leading players isn’t a new one. Yet within the smart home space, an unlikely development has birthed a particularly startup-friendly environment. Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have provided the right financing dynamics and access to early customers for startups to successfully launch smart home products. In the second episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew investigates the evolving role of crowdfunding for smart home startups that have been making waves with innovative hardware devices. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Crowdfunding: A Success I Didn't Bet On My personal relationship to Kickstarter is not one that I enjoy repeating. I met Perry Chen in 2007 when I was introduced to him by Sunny Bates, a long-time friend and Kickstarter’s first investor. While Chen’s initial idea was around getting fans of bands to fund the bands’ music, he quickly came up with this idea that people would pay for a product in advance simply because they wanted to see that product created. He offered me the chance to invest and I turned him down. Why would people devote their time offering to buy products that didn’t exist? I’ve done a fairly good job in my career in sizing up entrepreneurs and the opportunities in front of them. But here’s a story of a company that I badly misjudged, and it’s because I didn’t appreciate the dynamic behind the vision and how vital it would become to the future disruption of so many industries. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, it should be obvious why a platform where you can visually or verbally describe a future product would be appealing. Why waste time on building something that people don’t want when you can ask people ahead of time whether they would buy your product? For those of you who haven’t used Kickstarter or aren’t familiar with it, that’s exactly how it works. You can browse products that people want to build. And if you like what you see, you can commit to buy the product if and when it’s ever built. What surprised me was that, in a world where you might think every conceivable product is available on Amazon, there are still lots of products people are willing to pay for that are yet to be conceived. When innovation comes in a form so dramatic that it can disrupt an entire industry, it almost always comes from startups. In the case of technology giants like Amazon, Uber, and Tesla, these companies followed the same path as so many of their predecessors: they relied on venture financing. In all of their cases, the venture capital came from the bluest of blue chip Silicon Valley venture firms. Some of the most well-known startups in the smart home space have followed a similar path. Nest, the smart thermostat, started with two engineers who had considerable experience in building mass market products. Together, they had worked at Apple on the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad. Their Series A round of financing included capital from two of the best-known venture firms in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins and Shasta Ventures. In 2009, Dropcam was formed by two former startup engineers from Google this time: Greg Duffy and Aamir Virani. Dropcam reimagined the way security cameras should operate inside of a home and constructed a hardware device that seamlessly connected to your WiFi network, enabling you to stream video from your home directly over the Web. The company was also backed by a top venture firm in Silicon Valley, Accel Partners. Both Nest and Dropcam eventually sold to Google. These companies aren’t outliers in their financing strategies, but in the smart home vertical (as in others), a new path has emerged for funding this type of company. It’s worth noting that hardware companies are often more expensive to build than their software company counterparts,

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is Partner at Shasta Ventures, leading investments in a variety of consumer-oriented businesses. He also has a strong interest in industries that have yet to be transformed for the better by mobile and web technology, including healthcare, education, energy, and the life sciences. Nikhil has co-sponsored many of Shasta's investments since joining the team in 2012. In 2015, he was named to Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 list for Venture Capital. We talk to Nikhil about D2C business trends, the success of subscription business models, and metrics that matter to investors. For previous episodes and more on the Subscription Economy, head to www.zuora.com/podcast

News for Mid-October Hello Listener! Thank you for listening. If you would like to support the podcast, and keep the lights on, you can support us whenever you use Amazon through the link below: It will not cost you anything extra, and I can not see who purchased what. Or you can become a Fluffle Supporter by donating through Patreon.com at the link below: Patreon/Hare of the Rabbit What's this Patreon? Patreon is an established online platform that allows fans to provide regular financial support to creators. Patreon was created by a musician who needed a easy way for fans to support his band. Please support Hare of the Rabbit Podcast financially by becoming a Patron. Patrons agree to a regular contribution, starting at $1 per month. Patreon.com takes a token amount as a small processing fee, but most of your money will go directly towards supporting the Hare of the Rabbit Podcast. You can change or stop your payments at any time. You can also support by donating through PayPal.com at the link below: Hare of the Rabbit PayPal Thank you for your support, Jeff Hittinger. Busy bunny bussing around London causes commuter commotion https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/bunny-rabbit-bus-london/ Have you heard the one about the London Overground and the hare? One fluffy bunny is going viral after hopping aboard a London bus and casually going for a ride, without an owner in sight. Twitter user Matt Hepburn captured the Petter Cottontail (or Cottontransit, perhaps? Cottontrain?) aboard the bus with a single photo and the only caption that could possibly describe the seriousness and serendipity of the situation: “There’s a rabbit on my bus.” Naturally, the internet wanted to know, where did he come from? And where did he go? Where did he come from, this Cottontail Joe? Well, apparently this li’l bun gets around and was spotted on the Overground once before. Perhaps the bus bunny was bugging out over being a tad bit tardy for a seemingly momentous occasion? Could it have been related to at least one of these bunnies in Manchester? It’s OK though—Hepburn was able to talk to the bunny’s owner, and as it turns out, this is like, a normal day for it. “Apparently he does this often,” Hepburn wrote, stating the owner was sitting a few seats away. However, though it’s not completely clear if the hare is the one who “does this” and rides the bus often, or if the owner rides the bus with the bunny often, but just gives it space. In fact, this “laid back space hippy” of an owner has sparked more questions than answers: If he rides with the rabbit, does he wait for the rabbit’s signal to hop off the bus? If the rabbit rides alone, how does it reach the buttons letting the driver know it would like to get off at the last stop? What circumstances in this world have brought together a bus-riding rabbit and a space hippy? The world may never know.   Steampunk Alice in Wonderland coming to Bristol http://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2017-09-29/steampunk-alice-in-wonderland-coming-to-bristol/ Rehearsals are gathering pace for a production of Alice in Wonderland... with a twist! The young actors at ITV WEST Television Workshop are bringing a steampunk-themed family version of the classic tale to Bristol next week. The show will be performed by a cast of more than 30 actors aged from 9 to 59. It is suitable for all ages. Alice is bored. Sitting on the riverbank with her Sister who has her head stuck in a book. Again. Nothing exciting ever happens to Alice. Ever. That is, until a sarcastic and frenetic White Rabbit appears with a waistcoat and a pocket watch, obsessing over how late he is. I mean, have you seen a rabbit with a watch before? Alice hasn't! Then he rudely disappears down a rabbit hole... Should Alice stay on the riverbank, bored out of her mind? Or follow him down into a utopia of Steampunk madness - with grinning cats, chaotic twins, mad tea parties and a crazy Queen who's lost some tarts? Boredom loses. Curiosity wins. Welcome to Wonderland. – ITV Television Workshop Alice in Wonderland is being performed at the Redgrave Theatre in Clifton from Tuesday 3rd to Thursday 5th October @ 7.30pm. Tickets are priced at£10/£12 and are available by calling the box office on 0117 3157800 or from the Redgrave website at www.redgravetheatre.com.   Fish and Game to take ownership of New England cottontail habitat http://www.unionleader.com/article/20170928/NEWS01/170929214/-1/mobile?template=mobileart MANCHESTER — The endangered New England cottontail has found a friend in the state Fish and Game Department, which soon is expected to own a prime piece of the rabbit’s habitat. The Fish and Game Department said it is glad to take over ownership of 57 acres of conservation land near the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, saving the airport about $30,000 a year. “We’re happy to take it,” said Glenn Normandeau, executive director of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. “We’re actively doing management at the property to help with the rabbit situation.” The endangered cottontail needs thick shrub cover, which can be found on the site, to avoid predators, which is “pretty much everything,” he said. Airport officials are working to transfer ownership to Fish and Game. Deputy Airport Director Tom Malafronte said the airport was spending $30,000 annually in recent years to maintain the site, including picking up discarded tires and construction materials. In 2001, the airport purchased the property in Manchester and Londonderry for $1.1 million to offset filling in 13 acres of wetlands as part of expanding the southern portion of the airport’s north-south runway more than a decade ago. “Preserving the New England cottontail habitat was an important consideration for NH Fish and Game, and one of the reasons that we felt strongly that they would be best suited to own and manage the property,” Malafronte said. To protect the endangered species, the state has closed off areas of the Merrimack Valley area from Concord south as well as a section of Rochester south to near Exeter from hunting any cottontail rabbit year-round to avoid any confusion. “Just because it’s difficult to tell them apart” from other more populated rabbit species, Normandeau said. The protection means people can’t harm, harass, injure or kill the rabbits, which run 15 to 17 inches long with brown and gray coats. Humans sometimes confuse them with Eastern cottontails. “I’m not aware we’ve ever prosecuted anyone for the taking of a listed species, but we certainly try to discourage it,” said Normandeau, who’s been to the property several times. He called the parcel southwest of the airport “a good wildlife spot in the middle of what’s become a pretty significantly developed area.” The Londonderry-Merrimack area “is definitely one of the hot spots of their existing populations,” Normandeau said. A notice in the Federal Register last week said Fish and Game would “continue to maintain the property in its natural state as a wildlife corridor in perpetuity.” Had homes or businesses been built on that land, it “would probably eliminate the rabbit’s habitat, which in effect means they’re going to disappear, leave the area,” Normandeau said.     The innocent reason Hefner named Playboy girls ‘bunnies’ http://nypost.com/2017/09/28/the-innocent-reason-hefner-named-playboy-girls-bunnies/ Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire was as famous for its “Bunnies” as it was for its saucy centerfolds. The stunning waitresses, dressed in skin-tight bodices with rabbit ears and tails, became an iconic part of the mogul’s brand — serving at his parties, his clubs and even on his private jet. But have you ever wondered why they were called “Bunnies” in the first place? According to the magazine mogul — who died Wednesday at the age of 91 — the real inspiration behind the Playboy Bunny was a student bar from his college days. When Hefner was a student at Illinois University, in the 1940s, his favorite hangout was a bar called Bunny’s Tavern named after its original owner, Bernard “Bunny” Fitzsimmons. The bar, which opened in 1936, was a favorite for poverty-stricken students because of its 35-cent daily food specials and draft beer for 10 cents a glass. When Hefner set up his Playboy empire, in the 1950s, he came up with his rabbit logo and consequently the Bunny girls as a tribute, which he revealed in a letter to the bar which now hangs on its wall. However, he also admitted that the Bunny costume was a saucy reference to the sexual reputation of rabbits. The iconic costume was designed by Zelda Wynn Valdes and made its formal debut at the opening of the first Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960. Bunnies, who were chosen after a series of auditions, were given designated roles — so they could be a Door Bunny, a Cigarette Bunny, a Floor Bunny or a Playmate Bunny. There were also trained flight attendants, known as Jet Bunnies, who served on the Playboy Big Bunny Jet. Every Bunny went through a strict training regimen and had to be able to identify 143 brands of liquor and know how to garnish 20 cocktails. They also had to master the “Bunny stance” — with legs together, back arched and hips tucked under — as well as the “Bunny perch” for sitting on the back of a chair and the “Bunny dip,” which required them to bend their knees to serve drinks elegantly. Dating customers was forbidden and clients were banned from touching the girls in the clubs.     Giant rabbit, moon sculptures welcome coming Mid-Autumn Festival in Jinan, East China’s Shandong http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1068642.shtml Inflatable sculptures of a moon and rabbit are displayed on Baihuazhou lake in Jinan, East China’s Shandong Province on September 27, 2017. The illuminated moon model measures six meters tall, while the rabbit stands at a respectable four meters.   Ikea’s Latest Acquisition Will Help Assemble Your Ikea Furniture http://fortune.com/2017/09/28/ikea-task-rabbit/ One of the most popular jobs on TaskRabbit, a service that lets you hire workers for quick gigs, is assembling Ikea furniture. So perhaps it's no surprise that the Swedish retail giant has reportedly acquired the startup for an undisclosed price. TaskRabbit has only a few dozen full-time employees, but it is a platform for a large number of independent contractors who help customers with all sorts of errands, handymen tasks and, of course, furniture assembly. According to tech news site Recode, Ikea will treat TaskRabbit, which is reportedly profitable, as an independent subsidiary and keep on its CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot. Recode sees the deal as a strategic acquisition at a time of rapid change in the world of retail and home delivery: The purchase of TaskRabbit was fueled by Ikea’s need to further bolster its digital customer service capabilities to better compete with rivals likes Amazon, which has stepped up its home goods and installation offerings. The purchase is Ikea’s first step into the on-demand platform space. TaskRabbit had already struck a pilot partnership with Ikea around furniture assembly in the United Kingdom and also had marketed its workers ability to put together Ikea items in the U.S. and elsewhere. TaskRabbit has received investments from a number of prominent venture capital firms, including Shasta Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Founders Fund. Currently, customers are able to hire "rabbits" in around 40 U.S. cities. TaskRabbit is one of the most high profile of the so-called "gig economy" companies, which connect customers with workers on an independent contractor basis. Other such companies include home cleaning service Handy, and the car-hailing services Uber and lyft. The "gig" business model is popular with investors because it can grow quickly, and allows companies to try to avoid the costs and legal entanglements of hiring staff. In recent years, however, workers on such services have won several court challenges claiming they are not contractors, but are instead employees. Ikea did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the acquisition.     The Peter Rabbit film trailer has been released - and it looks incredible http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/whats-on/film-news/peter-rabbit-film-trailer-been-13676775 The new trailer for the forthcoming Peter Rabbit movie has been released. The jaw-dropping trailer ahead of the CGI/live-action film has left viewers stunned - and fans ready to see it. The film is being shot in Cumbria and takes in the stunning scenery of Windermere and Ambleside that inspired Beatrix Potter to write her stories. Billed by Sony Pictures Animation as a 'contemporary comedy with attitude', it follows the story of Peter Rabbit, the mischievous and adventurous hero who has captivated generations of readers. Starring James Corden as the voice of the titular bunny, Peter Rabbit promises thrills, spills and badgers playing darts with hedgehogs. The film features voice roles played by Corden, Margot Robbie, Daisy Ridley and Elizabeth Debicki, and live-action roles played by Domhnall Gleeson, Rose Byrne and Sam Neill. The film is scheduled to be released on February 9, 2018.   5 Rabbit Cervecería Papi Chulo Bottle Release Details https://thefullpint.com/beer-news/5-rabbit-cerveceria-papi-chulo-bottle-release-details/ (Bedford Park, IL) – At 8.5% abv, Papi Chulo was produced using the Solera method by incorporating 3 vintages blended over 4 years. It is aggressively sour. Acerola, also known as Barbados cherry, is native to Central and South America and is considered a superfood due to its nutritive value and antioxidant powers. If you love sour beers, you do not want to miss this release! 5 Rabbit Papi Chulo The bottle release will take place at our brewery in Bedford Park, on Saturday 10/7/17 at 2pm. These bottles are limited and we will do our best to spread them out as much as possible. We are anticipating to offer 2 bottles per person, however if turnout is larger than expected this number may change. Thank you in advance for understanding.     Short Film Friday: ‘Rabbit’s Blood’ Is The Best Kind Of Weird Read more at Film School Rejects: https://filmschoolrejects.com/short-film-friday-rabbits-blood-best-kind-weird/#ixzz4uJc3hxBW Lynchian” doesn’t really begin to describe it. A stark, darkly funny animation whose styles evoke those of Japan and Eastern Europe, Rabbit’s Blood creates an odd world at the intersection of cartoonishness and realism. The fluctuating colors filling in the clothes combined with the jarringly natural sound design make for an uneasy viewing experience that can create moments of fear and humor as easily as it puts us on edge. Animator Sarina Nihei finds a bit of Don Hertzfeldt and David Lynch, then jostles them together with a repugnant cuteness that’s almost too much to watch. https://vimeo.com/232458407       After the latest supermarket chicken scandal, is it time to reappraise the humble bunny? http://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/after-supermarket-chicken-scandal-time-554274 In 1947 the Government came up with a cunning way of measuring inflation. The Retail Price Index took a typical British shopping basket and measured the average cost of its contents. This exercise, carried out annually, allowed statisticians to work out inflation and its effect on the public. Alongside the corned beef, herrings, boiled sweets and cauliflower that typified the diet of the day was wild rabbit. Since the 12 Century, when bunnies were introduced to this country to be raised in managed warrens, they had been a staple of the British diet, particularly in rural areas. We may refer to modern times as “austerity Britain” but with a gourmet burger joint on every corner and supermarket shelves groaning I think the levels of austerity in this country pale into insignificance compared to the post war era, when rabbit would have provided a welcome and tasty protein hit. I’m not sure why rabbit fell out of favor. The deliberate introduction of myxomatosis in an attempt to control burgeoning bunny populations probably had something to do with it, even though this horrible disease apparently doesn’t affect the meat. The introduction of battery farming made the price of poultry tumble, and steadily chicken has replaced rabbit on the nation’s dinner table. With the latest story about dodgy practices at one of the country’s largest processing plants I wonder if it’s time to reappraise the humble bunny. Trendy chefs tell us we’re supposed to eat lean, sustainable, local, organic produce, something our grandparents were doing decades ago when they tucked into a rabbit stew. I was going to describe the Guardian’s revelations about 2 Sisters as shocking, but really only the naive can be even surprised at their undercover reporter’s findings. We all know that cheap meat involves an “ask no questions” pact between producer and consumer. When Aldi sells you a kilo of chicken for £1.79, it’s with a nudge and a wink – we’re getting ridiculously cheap meat – just so long as we don’t glimpse behind the plastic curtains of the processing plants it uses. Evacuee Teddy Neale, 14, with a catch of rabbits on August 10,1944. And the real shame is that while chickens live out pointless and short lives in unpleasant conditions, farmers are obliged by law (The Pests Act 1954 if you’re interested) to kill the rabbits that run wild in the fields next to the battery sheds. There are between 35m and 45m in this country and they breed like, well, rabbits. Yet because there is no longer a market for these animals most will end up buried and rotting – it’s an incredible and epic waste of a natural resource and I think something of a national scandal. So next time you pass a proper butcher why not invest a couple of quid in an animal which has led a wild and free life in a field close to your home?     TOKiMONSTA puts forth her beat-making savvy on ‘Lune Rouge’ after nearly losing it all http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/tokimonsta-brings-beats-losing-musical-abilities-article-1.3532927 TOKiMONSTA is back — and doing better than ever. The seasoned Los Angeles producer, real name Jennifer Lee, has reemerged with her third full-length record after a tumultuous time in her life — she had two surgeries for a rare brain disorder called Moyamoya she was diagnosed with in 2015. Lee penned an essay detailing her experience regaining the ability to speak as well as comprehend and make music after the surgeries, the first time she publicly addressed her health scare. The artist, whose name translates to rabbit monster (toki means rabbit in Korean), caught up with the Daily News at Panorama over the summer to talk about her love of making beats and “Lune Rouge,” which officially drops Friday. “In a generation where everyone is very playlist-focused, I would say that this album is a playlist of songs for one person,” Lee said. “It represents who I am right now as an artist, how I’ve progressed over the many years that have passed since the last one … I just set the intentions to make the kind of music that makes me happy.” The new music will likely make listeners happy, too. “Lune Rouge” offers 11 hypnotizing tracks suited for the likes of hip-hop and R&B collaborators Yuna, Joey Purp and Isaiah Rashad. MAD creates inflatable pavilion shaped like a rabbit's head https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/01/mad-inflatable-pavilion-rabbit-ears-beijing-design-week/ For this year's Beijing Design Week, architecture studio MAD has created an inflatable pavilion with two big floppy ears. Beijing-based MAD created the giant-rabbit-shaped pavilion in a hutong – one of the city's old courtyard-house neighbourhoods – near Lama Temple. Titled Wonderland, it is designed to provide a public space where children in the area can meet and play with each other. Beijing Design Week pavilion by MAD architects. The inflatable structure is white and its two lop ears protrude at a jaunty angle. "Through the form of a rabbit, Wonderland brings a carefree spirit and sense of whimsy to this old Beijing neighbourhood," said MAD. "Its playful attitude provides an escape from reality." Beijing Design Week pavilion by MAD architects. At night, the interior of a structure is illuminated with a white light that provides a safe environment for children to socialise. "Surrounded by its soft walls, under the blue sky and green trees, children can play, daydream and drift off into their own fantasy wonderland, in pursuit of happiness," added MAD. Beijing Design Week pavilion by MAD architects. Led by architect Ma Yansong, MAD is best known for projects including the undulating Harbin Opera House, the horseshoe-shaped Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort and the twisted Absolute Towers. The firm – which ranked at number 61 on the inaugural Dezeen Hot List – is currently working on a variety of projects in California, including the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which recently gained approval from Los Angeles city officials. Let sleeping dogs – and their masters – lie http://www.kansas.com/living/health-fitness/article177536371.html President John F. Kennedy’s family had several dogs that cuddled with Caroline and John-John (as well as a beer-swilling rabbit that was a gift from a magician) while they were in Washington. Calvin Coolidge had nine canines lodged in the White House’s family quarters. And the Obamas’ Portuguese water dog, Bo, was allowed to sleep on the bed with the first lady when the president was out of town. Meet the People Rescuing Cuban Cuisine https://www.cntraveler.com/story/meet-the-people-rescuing-cuban-cuisine Even if you’ve never been here, you probably know that only 20 years ago the people on this island just 90 miles from Florida were starving. When the 37-year-old Soto was growing up, during the “special period” when resources vanished after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he and his parents, both government employees, lived on little more than bread, rice, and occasionally beans. Sometimes a meal was simply sugar water. “Cuba has the most complicated relationship with food,” Soto says. “People will tell you there’s no food in Cuba. Or there are no traditions anymore; we lost all our traditions”—of hearty lunches of Caribbean staples like roasted suckling pork or rich gumbos. As food became increasingly scarce, cooking techniques and recipes were forgotten. “And I thought, Even the absence of food is a story about food.” But when he started work on the film two years ago, Soto discovered a new turn in Cuba’s culinary evolution: Young entrepreneurs have picked up the mantle from Nuñez del Valle to open dynamic, pulsating restaurants like O’Reilly 304 and Otramanera that serve lamb burgers and sous vide lobster and innovative takes on standards like pressed pork sandwiches. As the regime has loosened restrictions on private businesses, and as tourists come flooding in from around the world, Cuban cuisine is in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. The question is whether this ambitious new generation of restaurant rookies will chase gastronomic trendiness or help restore and reinterpret all that was lost—the kind of deeply satisfying simplicity that travelers are hungering for today. The difference today is that some can—and that travelers are coming here to eat it, too. “Enrique is the godfather of the new paladares,” says Soto, the Havana-born producer-director of the forthcoming documentary Cuban Food Stories and an expert on the island’s cooking. Back when Nuñez del Valle opened one of the country’s first paladares, or privately owned restaurants, they’d just been legalized by the regime and were limited to 12 seats. Now, La Guarida (“the Animal Den”) has expanded to 100, with an elegant shaded patio that’s drawn the likes of Prince Albert II, Jack Nicholson, and Julian Schnabel—plus today’s young crowd in cool summer garb. After a lunch of lobster ceviche, roasted rabbit with caponata sauce, and pavé of suckling pig with crispy skin, Nuñez del Valle sits down with us for coffee and a selection of Montecristos and Cohibas. His own fat cigar in hand and a glass of Havana Club Selección de Maestros close by, the godfather settles into his chair but doesn’t want to take too much credit for what he’s started. “It’s the new generation that’s trying to do gastronomy differently,” he says in Spanish as Soto translates. “They’re doing a great job of rescuing Cuban cuisine. Like thousands of others, Cano jumped at the chance to list his place on Airbnb, which started operating in Cuba in 2015, and which suddenly turned his relatively modest farm into an ecotourism destination, on the radar of people worldwide. (During my visit, a German-Australian couple happens to be staying in Cano’s $33-a-night one-bedroom cabin. “We love it,” they tell us before setting out on a hike, “though it’s very rustic.”) Cano also puts on epic lunch spreads, given enough notice through Airbnb, centered around a young pig rubbed with garlic and salt and roasted over a wood fire until the skin crackles. As Soto and I watch, Cano plops the cooked pig onto a wooden table and swiftly hacks the meat into hand-size pieces with a machete. His wife, who goes by “China,” then lays out a plastic tablecloth and platters of avocado, black beans, cucumber-and-tomato salad, rice, taro chips, and yucca. We eat overlooking the fields, the thatched tobacco-curing hutch, and chickens pecking at the dirt. It’s a fabulous country spread, made all the more remarkable in that Cano grew all of the food himself—and raised the pig. After our meal, we have coffee from beans he grew, lightened with milk he collected at 5 a.m. Cano then pulls out a white plastic bag filled with tobacco leaves he cultivated and cured, and he rolls us each a cigar. Considering the surroundings and the straight-from-the-field leaf, it rates as the best I’ve ever smoked.   Will the Bunny Park become a housing complex? https://citizen.co.za/news/1681935/will-the-bunny-park-become-a-housing-complex/ The park will keep at least 50 sterilised rabbits. More than 2 000 rabbits were donated from Benoni Bunny Park to Johannesburg Zoo as food for carnivores. Fifty rabbits were, however, left behind at the bunny park so that visitors could enjoy still enjoy them, but they are not happy with current small number of bunnies, Benoni City Times reports. One of the visitors John Priestley wrote to the media as follows: It saddens me greatly to read about the ongoing saga of our beloved Bunny Park. For a facility that has given joy and happiness for decades to so many children, to be limited to 50 sterilised rabbits in an enclosure, is a travesty. A child might as well sit at home and look at pictures of bunnies and farm animals on a computer screen. The fun was when a child could spend a day outdoors running around clutching a carrot trying to feed the ever-elusive rabbit and seeing farm animals up close. The outing, costing no more than a few vegetables, made it accessible to all. Well done to the council for spending money on the park and making it more attractive, but please don’t let the whole concept of a bunny park be destroyed by the ‘experts’. You cannot but wonder if all these changes means authorities have an ulterior motive planned for the future. Perhaps a housing complex?   Age before beauty – Grants bring attention to need for ‘young forests’ in N.H. http://www.concordmonitor.com/young-forests-ecology-environment-cottontail-songbird-12908739 YoungForest.org is the name of a website created by the institute and a number of other organizations to help convince people that healthy forests in New Hampshire and other locations need trees with a mix of ages – even if that requires cutting down a lot of trees now and then so that new ones can grow. “We don’t have a lot of age diversity in our forests,” said Scott Hall, a senior bird conservation biologist for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, noting that most of New England’s forest were cut a century ago for logging or farmland and have since grown back. “We have a resilience problem when all the trees you have are 60 to 100 years old. You need more diversity.” The topic came up last week when the NFWF said it was giving about $1.2 million to 10 environmental projects in New England, combined with $1.4 million in contributions from private partners including Eversource. Several projects focused on the effects of successional forests. In ecological circles, “succession” refers to the gradual replacement of one type of ecological community by another in the same area – in this case, that means trees growing up in areas that had been cleared by human activity, fire, flooding from beavers or other causes. Young forests, defined loosely as those with most trees less than two decades old, are valuable for a number of species that depend on the plants, insects and animals drawn to them. Those species include the New England cottontail, a small rabbit that is the target of restoration efforts in southeastern New Hampshire, a project that received $175,000 in NFWF grants. The grants will help UNH researchers study how best to estimate the population of this elusive rabbit in 28,800 acres of restored habitat, using capture-recapture methods and “pellet surveys,” in which piles of rabbit fecal pellets are collected or counted. Getting $103,000 is an ongoing UNH project studying songbird populations in rights of way for power lines, to see how they can function as long, skinny strips of young forest. A summer’s worth of counting and banding songbirds caught in nets underneath Eversource transmission towers in Strafford found at least 68 species in the brushy, tangled growth, according to UNH graduate student Erica Holm, working with professor Matt Tarr. “It seems that the rights of way contribute as many species as a clearcut,” she noted. The counter-intuitive idea of the environmental benefits from huge power-line towers reflects the complexity of creating and maintaining young forests. For one thing, they don’t stay young very long – when the trees get too big, the environmental benefits change. Williamson said the Wildlife Management Institute’s goal is to have 10 percent of forestland in the region be young forest – the best they’ve done so far is 6 percent in some areas. “In 10 or 15 years, it’s going to be gone. This is not something we can do once and stop,” Williamson said. “We’re always thinking, “Where can we go next so I have a constant supply of this habitat?’ ” In New England, that requires dealing with private landowners, convincing them to cut down the mature trees and put up with scrubby, bramble-filled properties that don’t have obvious value. “It’s tough to sell the first three years after a clear cut,” Williamson said. “Commercial forestry has to be the driver on this,” he added, noting the effect of commercial firewood prices on woodlot owners’ decision whether to cut mature trees. “When the firewood market goes down, we just sit on our heels,” he said. But he argued that education can change people’s views about the value of even the ugliest of scrubland. “There was a time when people were afraid of wetlands,” Williamson noted. “Old-growth forests were once regarded as a waste of the value of the forest. Native grasslands – another area that we didn’t use to think had any value.” The grants were awarded through the New England Forests and Rivers Fund, a public-private partnership. Kung fu rabbit game Overgrowth adds story mode in final beta version http://deathrattlesports.com/kung-fu-rabbit-game-overgrowth-adds-story-mode-in-final-beta-version/98623 More than nine years after it was announced, Overgrowth’s surreal mix of wild animals, fast-paced martial arts, stealth, and gore is nearly upon us. The last beta version before a proper release arrived this week, bringing with it the game’s full story mode. Those who have purchased the game early will be able to play through the full campaign now, which sees our rabbit hero Turner fight to protect the island of Lugaru from slavers. Expect hand-to-hand combat that relies upon timing and counters, segments where you sneak through shrubbery, and lots of blood. The amount of gore in the game is emphasized by another tweak in this beta: you can now be impaled by spikes. That means some pretty gory clips of Turner’s limp body sliding down a wooden spear, blood spurting. Other changes will make the game’s different animals more distinct. Cat enemies, for example, can now throw smaller weapons such as daggers, while rats can attach bits of the environment to their head as camouflage. Developer Wolfire Games has fixed lots of bugs, too, and added new settings options including a brightness slider. The full change log is here. Overgrowth is currently £22.99/$29.99 on Steam and the Humble Store. There’s no word on a final release date, but it shouldn’t be too long.   One-Of-A-Kind Rabbit Brings $18,000 At Alderfer Auction https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/one-of-a-kind-rabbit-brings-18000-at-alderfer-auction/   HATFIELD, PENN. —Alderfer Auction conducted a two-day auction of dolls on October 3 – 4 both online and at its auction gallery. On October 4 a bisque-headed rabbit with no ears came to the block with a $500/750 estimate—it went on to sell for $18,000 including premium. “This is a wonderful piece—fashioned after the 1920s ‘Jack Rabbit’ series of books by ‘Uncle Dave,’ David Cory, and published by Grosset & Dunlap,” according to Ranae Gabel of Alderfer Auction. The 18-inch tall, rabbit has big stationary brown eyes and an open smiling mouth. It sports a curly gray wig, cloth body with white leather arms, and individual fingers on its hands. It sports a curly gray wig, cloth body with white leather arms, individual fingers on hands. Dressed in cotton plaid dress, red petticoat, white pantaloons and bonnet, the rabbit has on brown oilcloth heeled shoes. The winning bidder said it was a “one-of-a-kind.” Inclusive art studio hides 200 rabbit sculptures in Rochester parks http://wxxinews.org/post/inclusive-art-studio-hides-200-rabbit-sculptures-rochester-parks Sarah Beren is a licensed creative art therapist and owns Spotted Rabbit, a studio with art classes, art therapy and an apprenticeship program for a population within the disability community she saw was underserved. "I went to a training about job development for them. And I started asking, 'Well, what about these people that need staff with them or are nonverbal who can’t be left alone in the community?' " What she found was hardly anything. To fill this void, Beren created the program, which she says gives people who are highly functional yet can’t quite work independently a purpose, a structured schedule and a job - artists sell their work around Rochester. Ellie Anolik is one of those artists; she said her favorite medium is clay. "I like how you can get mad at it, and you can take it all out on the clay.” Beren said they would like to do more shows and participate in galleries, but many art spaces in the city are more “do it yourself”-type spaces presenting a number of challenges to their artists. Allergies are an issue, or how maintained the buildings are; whether or not snow is plowed in the winter. "A lot of the galleries are on the second floor with no wheelchair accessibility. So we've had a lot of potential partnerships with folks, but then it’s like well, our artist can’t come to her own show opening.” The latest project to come out of the studio, with the help of a Livingston Arts grant, is 200 rabbit sculptures. For seven months, artists molded and glazed and baked 200 rabbits, giving them names and hiding them in 41 parks around Rochester. "The idea was that we would have individuals who don’t normally have an opportunity to make public art, make public art. And then also people who may not have an opportunity to go see art or own a piece of artwork actually be able to find it in their local park, pick it up, and take it home." Beren says they have heard back from only 45 owners who have found rabbits, meaning there are many more out there waiting for a new home. Word of the Week: Sterile Plant of the Week: Bread © Copyrighted

Evan Liang. He’s the CEO and co-founder of LeanData which he founded after managing a data cleanup project at his first company and felt the pain of cleaning Salesforce data by hand. Prior to LeanData, he was the GM and VP of products at Caring.com where he grew a small acquisition within the company’s main business. Generally, he owned 50% of the company’s revenue over 2 years. Before Caring.com, Evan worked at Shasta Ventures, a leading venture capital firm focused on end-user driven businesses. Before that, he worked in project management at eBay and business development at Microsoft where he helped launched the Xbox 360. Evan started his career at Battery Ventures where he specialized in software and ecommerce investments. He holds his MBA from Kellogg and BS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Rich Hagberg Favorite online tool? — Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I want to be an entrepreneur and not a VC first”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:03 – Nathan introduces Evan to the show 03:04 – LeanData helps marketing and sales scale their lead management processes 03:11 – They’re focused on two business processes: lead routing and marketing attribution 03:20 – Cloudera is one of their customers 03:30 – With all the leads that are coming into Cloudera’s system, LeanData will figure out which sales rep should follow up 03:43 – LeanData works well with lead scoring predictive vendors 04:30 – LeanData is a SaaS business 04:36 – Average customer pays $20-30K a year 04:42 – Large enterprises are paying 6 figures 04:54 – The pricing depends on the number of seats 05:24 – Marketing attribution is an upsell from the product 05:34 – LeanData was launched in 2012 05:46 – Evan has always been passionate with startups and he was just waiting for the right idea to come along 06:18 – Evan was at Caring when he saw the problem that LeanData was able to solve 06:40 – They had a large amount of data in Salesforce that was a big mess 07:25 – First year revenue of LeanData was $200K 08:08 – LeanData raised $1.3M from their seed round 08:19 – Total funds raised $18M 08:28 – The seed round was a priced round 09:12 – Current team size is 50 09:28 – 15 are engineers, 15 in sales, 5 in marketing, 8 in CS 09:48 – LeanData currently has 250 enterprise customers 10:13 – MRR is around $600K and ARR is around $7.5M 10:34 – The weirdest marketing strategy of LeanData’s was sending pizzas to people 11:00 – It was a marketing campaign and the customers picked the pizza place where they wanted their pizzas from 11:27 – The problem was some chosen pizza places wouldn’t deliver so one of the SDRs would have to buy the pizza and deliver it 11:56 – They were still able to get some sales from that campaign 12:08 – The primary CAC is for events 12:32 – One event is the Lunch and Learn Event 13:05 – They spent around 600K in strategizing conferences over a year 13:17 – Paid advertising spend is less than 10K 14:04 – Annual logo churn is 15% 14:13 – LeanData is currently net negative revenue churn 14:30 – ARPU expansion is between 5-10% 14:48 – LTV is around 5 years 15:35 – LeanData’s competitors in the ABM lead scoring space 16:27 – Gross margin is 80% 16:42 – LeanData benefits from Salesforce 17:16 – LeanData doesn’t need backend servers 17:30 – Evan answers about their exit strategy since it seems like Salesforce is the only one who can acquire them 18:30 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Organizing your data is crucial for the company’s operations. The weirdest marketing strategy can take people aback and still win business for you. The exit of a company depends upon the possibility of an acquisition; however, there will always be other options.   Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Jason Pressman is a Managing Director @ Shasta Ventures who have made investments in the likes of Nest, Dollar Shave Club, Smule, Class Dojo and more. With 10 portfolio company investments under his belt, Jason invests in both enterprise and consumer, currently serving on the boards of Crittercism, subscription billing unicorn Zuora, as well as Nextdoor and mobile music platform Smule. Prior to joining Shasta, Jason was Vice President, Strategy and Operations at venture-backed Walmart.com, where he took the online retailer from zero to large scale revenue in five years. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Jason made his way into the world of venture from Walmart? What were the big takeaways from seeing Walmart enter their hyper-growth phase? 2.) Why does Jason believe it is bullshit to say, "you never regret paying a high price for getting into a good company"? How does Jason evaluate entry point? What makes one entry point attractive and another not? 3.) What does Jason see as the catalysts for the opening of public markets to tech companies? How long does he think this will continue? Is he concerned by the likes of Yext, IPOing with less than aggressive growth rates? 4.) Why does Jason believe there are only 2 price points that work in SaaS? What are they? How does this affect the structure and operations of your SaaS startup? What are the circumstances in which these price points do not apply? 5.) Why does Jason believe that eSports will be bigger than the NBA in 5 years? What are the catalysts driving this change? What needs to be formulated within eSports for this to happen? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Jason’s Fave Book: First, Break All The Rules Jason’s Most Recent Investment: Plays.tv As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users - within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.

For this holiday weekend Tod Francis shares some of the research he has done on how you build meaningful relationships with children and other important people in your life.

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

Tod Francis, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, starts with a discussion on the history of retail, all the way from shoe stores, to departmental stores, and back to specialty retail. This is followed by a similar overview of the history of e-commerce ranging from Amazon’s strategy to how specialty retail is translating into niche e-commerce, and how Tod is looking at investments in the category.

Jason is a partner at Shasta Ventures and invests in consumer, cloud computing, SaaS and open source software. He also serves on the boards of Zuora, Crittercism, Nextdoor and Smule. We talk to Jason on his confidence in the Subscription Economy, 2017 IPO trends, and what it takes to convince him to invest in a company. For transcripts and more on the Subscription Economy, head over to www.zuora.com/podcast

Sean Flynn is a Managing Partner @ Shasta Ventures where he invests in mobile-enabled consumer Internet and enterprise software companies. Sean has led Shasta's investments in Dollar Shave Club, Whisper and serves on the board of directors for the likes of TimeHop, Zefr, Swipely, Bloc and TigerText. Before joining Shasta, Sean worked at Yahoo, where he focused on growing the company's communication and messaging products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Groups and Flickr. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Sean made his way into VC from the titan that is Yahoo? Now today I want to do something slightly different and do a myth busting episode, take a couple of sectors and discuss whether they are truths and complexities to the core statement. 2.) Starting with the most common assumption in VC that it is all about team, to what extent does Sean place team ahead of product and is this a slight misconception? 3.) Many are saying mobile is a dying space. Sean previously said, 'it is not dead yet'. Why is there promise for mobile? What will be the catalyst of it's death? How does this affect Sean's investment decision making? 4.) Another much hyped topic is AR/VR, is the excitement surround AR and VR justified? Where does Sean stand on investing in the installation phase of cycles? 5.) Similar to AR/VR is the hype surround bots justified? What will be the sustainable business model for bots? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Sean’s Fave Book: What Do You Do With An Idea  Sean’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Nuzzel, 538 Blog Sean’s Most Recent Investment: Tally As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sean 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 Snapchat here!   This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world.     How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.  

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is an early stage investor with Shasta Ventures, where he focuses on consumer, mobile and SaaS. Prior to joining Shasta, Nikhil was a member of the Insight Venture Partners team in NYC. Before making the move into venture, Nikhil co-founded Artsy in his sophomore year at Princeton University, Artsy now employs over 100 people and has raised over $50m in venture financing. One of Nikhil's main passions is self driving cars and so today's show will be centred around the proliferation of autonomous vehicles and what that means for us as a society? In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Nikhil come to be a VC in SF having spent his early years in the UK? 2.) Why is Nikhil so excited about self-driving cars? What is the enabler that is allowing this mass rise of the autonomous vehicle? 3.) What happens in a world of little mechanical engineering at all, where repairs can be achieved with software updates? How does this change the complexity of production? How does this change what the supply chain might look like? How does this change the capital structure required? 4.)How does the rise of the autonomous vehicles effect the sharing economy? Is Nikhil bullish on Lyft, Uber, Didi? With on demand, when will we reach a point of equilibrium when the supply of drivers that gets drawn in and the price that attracts consumers will be equivalent? 5.) Who is the leader, is this a winner take all, will the acquisition of GM and Cruise mean a dominance? Who has Nikhil been impressed by? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Nikhil’s Fave Book: Leading by Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz  Nikhil’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily, CB Insights Nikhil’s Most Recent Investment: Tally  As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Nikhil 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!   The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!  

I am thrilled to welcome, Doug Pepper, Partner @ Shasta Ventures to the show today. Doug is a master when it comes to SaaS investments with his companies generating over $500m in revenue in 2015, having funded the likes of Marketo, Optimizely and Flurry. In today's show with Doug we discuss:  How Doug made his approach into investing? What metrics are required for startups to get Series A investors interested? What are the guidelines for a startup to manage their burn rate? In future tough markets, we will see greater consolidation? How can startups stand out when selling to CIO, CEO's and VPs?  In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: What has been the scariest moment of Doug's VC career? Why Doug is so excited for the future of mobile SaaS?  What the main effects are of the rise of bottoms up sales strategies? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Doug Pepper

Nikhil Basu Trivedi gives 33voices a special look into his investments at Shasta Ventures, how the firm works with startups, and why he loves 10 minute meetings.

This week Kat Manalac (Partner at Y Combinator), Nikhil Basu Trivedi (VC at Shasta Ventures), and Jack Altman (Growth at Teespring) join me (Ryan Hoover) in the second episode of PHR. We chat about online-to-offline apps, a product to fight those darn San Francisco parking tickets, and the trend toward anonymous communication. Products mentioned: Flock - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/flock Jukely - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/jukely design+code - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/design-code Cloak - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/cloak-ios Fixed - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/fixed Patreon - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/patreon Secret - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/secret Rando - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/rando Facebook Nearby Friends - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/fb-nearby-friends Intro/outro music by eldienneproductions -https://soundcloud.com/eldienneproductions/hip-hop-beat-instrumental --- Product Hunt is a daily leaderboard of brand new products. Visit producthunt.co.