Podcasts about silicon valley vcs

Real estate is everything in Los Angeles. Karen Bass's absence from the city when the fires broke out, and now her seeming aloofness, has instantly made her look unfit for the job of mayor. Even Gavin Newsom is distancing himself from Bass. Meanwhile, while we wait on the facts behind the fires, all the Silicon Valley VC guys and Elon need to shut the f*** up. Plus, Mike Johnson is a disgrace, Zuck has no inner core of values, and TikTok Zoomers need to get a better understanding of free speech and fascism. Venice resident Peter Hamby joins Tim Miller. show notes Mayor Bass ignoring a reporter's questions Peter's Puck piece on Karen Bass "Ecology of Fear" by Mike Davis Tim's interview with reporter Liz Weil on wildfires Zuck being awkward at the UFC fight Peter referenced

Jeremy Au discussed the nuanced challenges faced by venture capitalists in assessing startups, emphasizing the importance of local expertise and first-principles thinking. For example, he shared how his understanding of Singaporean founders—gained through years of personal interactions—provided him with an edge over Silicon Valley VCs. He highlighted the risks of fraud in Southeast Asia, citing cases like Zilingo and comparing them to global examples such as Theranos and FTX, which underscore the need for robust due diligence. He explained how VCs use strategies like hiring fraud analysts or leveraging local networks to address these risks. Drawing parallels to the 19th-century whaling industry, Jeremy illustrated how power law dynamics dominate VC returns, with only about 6% of investments producing 60% of total returns, as seen in analysis from Horsley Bridge. This perspective frames VCs as high-performance scouts navigating a market where a single unicorn, like Grab or Gojek, can make or break a fund's success. Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/vc-edge-vs-fraud Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea English: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Bahasa Indonesia: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Chinese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Vietnamese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

If there was one phrase that captured the vibe and theme of 2024 — at least in the transportation sector — it was business whiplash. Legacy automakers changed direction on their all-EVs-or-bust strategy, startups pivoted, and some Silicon Valley VCs and executives adjusted their views to a changing political landscape Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The podcast begins with Tu and Lei briefly discussing the XPeng's AI Day where XPeng unveiled a few different strategic initiatives including the development of a robotaxi and the design of its own silicon to help run it. The biggest news from XPeng was that they are entering the EREV space. The conversation then moves over to Audi's brand launch in China and Tu and Lei's differing views of the 'why' and how successful they ultimately feel it will be. Tu points out that it won't be in production until mid-2025. Tu and Lei spend the rest of the podcast discussing the implications of another Trump presidency, one influenced by Elon Musk and the other Silicon Valley VCs that backed his candidacy. Tu emphasizes that this runs much deeper than giving Tesla the advantage in the US and points to all the AI and space exploration investments that have been made by the tech bros. 

Join D.O. as he sits down with Lower CEO Dan Snyder to uncover his journey from Wells Fargo rookie to raising $100M+ from Silicon Valley VCs. Get the inside scoop on building a mortgage empire, navigating market cycles, and creating the mortgage company of the 2030s!

E112 A walk through an NVCA VC Term Sheet for a Series A funding round with Jason Putnam Gordon, legendary Silicon Valley VC lawyer and Partner at K&L Gates, one of the premier VC-focused law firms. This episode literally walks through every term in a term sheet with a lawyer and VC discussing each term, explaining what they mean, and which ones are worth fighting for. Lawyers like Jason can be very expensive but worth every penny. Strap in for a free masterclass!   Links and Resources:   Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/F2MnHqWFBHA. Find all episodes of Fireside with a VC on your favorite podcast platform: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/FiresideVC. Learn more about the K&L Gates: https://www.klgates.com/firm-overview. Follow Jason Putnam Gordon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonputnamgordon/ Follow Andrew Romans on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/romans/. Join our Newsletter to get our insights and curated content from the VC-startup ecosystem - Fireside with a VC: https://subscribe.7bc.vc. Learn more about 7BC Venture Capital here: https://7bc.vc/.   Join the conversation, leave comments, and tell us what you think about these topics and this episode.

Silicon Valley VC and Entrepreneur Shares Insights on NFTs and Crypto Tether.to Wax.io Clearstone.com About the Guest(s): William Quigley is a veteran venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the tech and innovation industry. He was the first institutional investor in PayPal and has founded successful ventures like Tether, the world's first fiat-backed stablecoin, and WAX, a leading blockchain platform. With an impressive background in VC and entrepreneurship, William has made significant contributions to the tech and crypto space. Episode Summary: Welcome to The Chris Voss Show, where host Chris Voss interviews William Quigley, a seasoned VC and entrepreneur, about his ventures in Silicon Valley, including Tether and WAX. The discussion delves into venture capital investing, entrepreneurship, emerging markets, AI, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. Discover key insights into the evolution of digital assets and the future landscape of technology. William Quigley, a pioneer in the crypto space, shares his journey from founding Tether to launching WAX and explores the transformative potential of blockchain technology. Gain valuable perspectives on the importance of understanding blockchain, the significance of NFTs, and the challenges and opportunities in AI. Dive into the intersection of tech, entrepreneurship, and innovation with a tech visionary. Key Takeaways: William Quigley emphasizes the revolutionary impact of Tether, the world's first stablecoin, on the cryptocurrency market. The emergence of NFTs represents more than collectibles, offering a unique way to authenticate and transfer digital assets securely. The future of AI holds immense potential but requires deep understanding and strategic investments to unlock transformative applications. Building a successful venture in the tech industry demands insight, innovation, and a relentless pursuit of novel business models. The intersection of blockchain, AI, and emerging technologies presents a vast landscape for entrepreneurial opportunities and technological advancements. Notable Quotes: "Without Tether, crypto barely exists. It is the backbone of the global cryptocurrency market." "NFTs represent a revolutionary concept, allowing for the authentication and transfer of digital assets with unparalleled security." "Insight is the rarest element in the universe and comes from being deeply immersed in a subject, leading to transformative innovations." "In a complex economy, specialization and niche markets drive entrepreneurship, offering unique value propositions to consumers." "The future of technology lies at the intersection of blockchain, AI, and emerging innovations, paving the way for digital transformation."

Welcome to another episode of Funding the Future. In today's episode, we're speaking with Clancey Stahr, Managing Partner at GoAhead Ventures, a venture capital firm that has raised $180 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Founding Journey: Clancey founded GoAhead Ventures in 2015, starting with initial legwork in 2013 while still a student at Stanford. He collaborated with his co-founders to connect Japanese corporations with US startups, eventually pivoting to venture capital. Early Fundraising: The first fund was raised in 2014, totaling $6 million from a partner in Japan and three US angels. The focus was on the team's potential rather than a specific idea, leveraging the Stanford network. Investment Thesis Evolution: Initially emulating top Silicon Valley VCs, the firm evolved its thesis in 2020 with a focus on video submissions for founder pitches. This streamlined the evaluation process, making it easier to compare founders and identify the best investments. Video Submissions: GoAhead Ventures receives 60-80 video submissions per week, reviewing over 3,000 annually. The submission process includes a brief introduction and a three-minute elevator pitch, with a one-in-ten chance of leading to a first meeting. Decision-Making Speed: The firm has honed its decision-making process, providing founders with a yes or no within three days of video submission and offering a signable agreement within 24 hours of a live pitch. Focus on Fundraising: GoAhead Ventures prioritizes helping portfolio companies raise additional capital, recognizing that every company needs money and that this is an area where they can add significant value. //   Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.  www.GlobalTalent.co

Send us a Text Message.Weekly pre-IPO reports…- Valuations, revenue multiples, performance = www.agdillon.com/reports- Market update pdf = www.agdillon.com/update- Index fact sheet = www.agdillon.com/index00:07 | Stripe's $70b valuation- Online payments company- Sequoia inter-fund transaction- $27.51/share at $70b valuation, +7.7% vs its last round- Sequoia LPs get liquidity, realized returns- Emerging tech is staying private for longer- Growth companies are private not public, time to allocate to pre-IPO stocks01:41 | Revolut $40b valuation- UK online bank- Tiger Global to lead $40b round- $2.2b 2023 revenue, 2x vs 2022- $574m 2023 pretax profit vs -$33m in 2022- 18.1x revenue multiple- $25b secondary market valuation, +60% overnight return!02:25 | Anthropic, Menlo launch fund- Anthropic is AI large language model biz, Menlo is premier Silicon Valley VC firm- $100m fund to invest into AI startups- Menlo makes investment- Anthropic provides AI LLM credits- Anthropic = $22b secondary market valuation, +20% vs Jan 2024 round03:22 | $267m for Human Interest- 401k focused fintech- 3 minutes to open 401k account- 25,000 small business customers- $100m in ARR- 70% projected 2024 sales growth- IPO planned within two years04:03 | Tekion $4b valuation- Automotive technology business- $200m investment from Dragoneer- Founder is former Tesla CIO, jay Vijayan- 2025 to be 1st profitable year- Other investors = Index Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Advent International04:53 | Starlink approved in South Sudan- SpaceX's satellite internet business- Only 36% of South Sudan citizens connected to internet- SpaceX seeks official distributor in South Sudan- $210b valuation based on current tender offer in process05:44 | OpenAI GPT-4o Mini launched- AI large language model business- 4o Mini is 60% cheaper vs 4o proper- 4o Mini is replacing GPT-3.5 Turbo- Businesses like smaller models as they get job done but at lower expense- Lower expense improves ROIs- Watch for big earnings pop and acquisitions from businesses that implement AI07:32 | Pre-IPO Stock Market Weekly Performance- www.agdillon.com/reports for full pdf- Pre-IPO +0.19% for week, +65.28% for last 1yr- Up week: Revolut +8.0%, Chime +5.5%, Deel 4.4%, Ramp +3.4%, SpaceX 3.2%- Down week: Cohere -11.2%, Epic Games -3.2%, Anduril -2.8%, Neuralink -2.4%, eToro -2.3%- Top valuations: ByteDance $290b, SpaceX $205b, OpenAI $106b, Stripe $70b, Databricks $44b08:23 | Pre-IPO Stock Vintage Index Weekly Performance- www.agdillon.com/index for pdf with constituent level performance by year- 2024 Vintage Index top contributors since inception: Rippling +107%, Revolut +68%, Anduril +51%, Klarna +46%, Epic Games +32%- Key metric averages for all Vintage Indexes 5 years old or older…445% cumulative return since inception61% realized, distributed to investors5.45 TVPI; 3.31 DPI, 2.14 RVPI4.1 years to return the fund

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

Bitcoin could potentially exceed $500,000 per BTC by October 2025, based on the historical price patterns of Bitcoin cycles 2 and 3 according to billionaire Silicon Valley VC Chamath Palihapitiya. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, the guys discuss the recent prosecution of the Tornado Cash developer, the potential partisan nature of crypto regulation, and the ongoing vote on SAB 121. They delve into the history of asset seizure in the US, the shifting political attitudes towards crypto, and the potential implications for the industry. The conversation also touches on the recent GameStop saga and the return of 'Roaring Kitty', as well as the exploit engineered by 'Low Carb Crusader' and the subsequent legal consequences. - - Wormhole is a decentralized interoperability platform powering multi-chain applications and bridges. It provides developers with access to liquidity and users on over 30 leading blockchain networks, enabling use cases in DeFi, data queries, and governance. The platform is trusted by teams like Uniswap and Circle and, to date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 35 billion dollars through over 850 million cross-chain messages. Claim your unique Wormhole NFT at https://forms.clickup.com/45049775/f/1aytxf-16051/D1U8CUGM8SJWKVJ9KY - - Uniswap builds simple and secure products that help you swap smarter. Web. Mobile. Extension. Powered by the smartest protocol in DeFi. To learn more about the Uniswap's products head on over to: https://blckwrks.co/Uniswap - - Flood is the optimal DEX aggregator, giving users and developers the mathematically proven best price. Flood is built from the ground up for speed and efficiency, MEV free and redistributes all trading surplus to users, meaning you can earn money while doing your regular swapping. Join Flood tide campaign! https://flood.bid/bell-curve - - Follow Mike: https://twitter.com/MikeIppolito_ Follow Michael: https://twitter.com/im_manderson Follow Vance: https://twitter.com/pythianism Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3R1D1D9 Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3pQTfmD Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3cpKZXH Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ - - Timestamps: (0:00) Introduction (3:01) Chamath & 2024 Silicon Valley VC (20:42) Return of Roaring Kitty (27:17) CPI Sentiment (39:32) Wormhole Ad (40:46) Flood Ad (41:45) Uniswap Ad (42:39) Low Carb Crusader Arrested (49:42) Tornado Cash Dev Sentenced to Dutch Prison (57:14) SAB 121 Vote (1:06:25) Is Crypto Partisan? - - Disclaimer: Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mike, Jason, Michael, Vance and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.tt and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Protect yourself from the perils of modern technology with high-quality faraday products designed and developed by yours truly by going to RONINBASICS.com today. Welcome to The Adam's Archive, where curiosity meets deep discussion. Austin Adams is the host of this podcast, which dissects the myths, ideas, and realities that have shaped our world. From historical insights to futuristic forecasts, each episode invites you to question what you know and discover what you don't. In this episode, I interview Bryanna Robinson, a dynamic social and political commentator with a sharp intellect and a passion for uncovering hidden truths. In this episode, we dive into the mysterious world of ancient technologies lost to time, challenge the official narratives from NASA, and discuss the profound implications of the decline in human consciousness.  Join us as we unravel the complex web of history and science, offering listeners a unique perspective on how our understanding of technology and consciousness shapes our reality. Summary of Topics Innovative Thinkers: Dive into the minds that have shaped our technological landscape. From Tesla's forgotten inventions to the ethical dilemmas posed by AI, we explore how genius shapes our world. Art and Culture: Witness the transformation of art and culture through technology. Discuss the decline of traditional art forms and the rise of digital media, questioning what these changes mean for future generations. Conspiracy Theories: From moon landing skepticism to the secretive societies like the Freemasons, unravel the threads of doubt and secrecy that suggest a different narrative of history. Societal Changes: Examine how shifts like remote work and urban decay influence societal structures and what it means for communal living in the future. Technology and Privacy: Delve into the dark side of tech advancements, including the loss of privacy and the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies. If you're intrigued by the unknown and passionate about uncovering the deeper truths of our era, subscribe to Adam's Archive on platforms like YouTube, Substack, and your favorite social media channels. Your engagement fuels our journey into the mysteries and marvels of our world. Thank you for your support and curiosity! All the links: https://linktr.ee/theaustinjadams.   ----more---- Full Transcription Hello, you beautiful people and welcome to the Adams archive. My name is Austin Adams, and thank you so much for listening today on today's episode. I have a discussion with Brianna Robinson. Now, Brianna is a social and political commentator, just like myself. And she has tons of great contents, tons of great insight into plenty of different topics, including the moon landing government operations and conspiracies, historical events, really great. Really interesting stuff. So Brianna and I have a great conversation today. We jump into a ton of different topics, everything from the lost technology of Nikola Tesla and, and the utilization of modern energy and, and the death of language, the death of art, we talk about, uh, the, the moon landing and she gives some great, great insight and points into, and we have a discussion about the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, which was a cult essentially within the Freemasons that was founded by Sir Francis Bacon. And Sir Francis Bacon has a ton of deep dive rabbit holes that you can go into very, very interesting that we talk about every single one of those things and more today. So make sure you stick around to the end and. Go give her, Brianna, a follow. You can find her on Instagram at Brianna, B R Y A N N A, B R Y A N N A, xRobinson, R O B I N S O N. So go give her a follow. I hope you enjoyed the discussion as much as I did. It was an absolutely great conversation. And, without further ado, well, wanna do, Which is that leave a five star review, subscribe, and here's what I would ask of you. Something that you may not know about podcasts is the really the only way social media, no matter how many millions of views my content gets, very, very little moves the needle when it comes to podcast viewership. So what I would ask of you is if you enjoy this conversation today, send it to somebody, you know, tell them, Hey, did you know this about Sir Francis Bacon? It's crazy. Have you ever heard about the, the. Van Allen radiation belt. Have you just send it out to a couple of people and share the conversation because it was a great one. It was an absolutely phenomenal conversation. And I know you, and I know a bunch of people that, you know, we'll enjoy it as well. So please, please, if you enjoy the conversation, share it with some family, share it with some friends, talk about it with your coworkers and give them the link. All right. Now subscribe, leave a five star review and let's jump right in. Into it. The Atoms Archive  I was sitting in an hour of traffic.

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

In this episode Karen and her guest Tim Sprinkle, an experienced journalist turned venture capital marketing expert, dive deep into the dynamic world of venture capital and angel investing. Listen or Watch as they explore everything from the importance of due diligence and active involvement in startups to the evolving strategies of venture funds and the rising trend of niche markets.  Tim provides valuable insights on building trust with investors, leveraging digital marketing, and the transformative role of the JOBS Act in democratizing venture capital. We also discuss the impact of generative AI on content marketing and the crucial role of custom approaches in attracting investments. Whether you're an early-stage entrepreneur or a seasoned investor, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge on navigating the complex landscape of venture capital and achieving successful investments. So, sit back and get ready to learn from the best in the business as we unravel the intricacies of venture capital with Tim Sprinkle. Key Takeaways in this episode:  1. Venture Capital Evolution - Growth of Venture Capital and the expansion from mega firms to over 4,200 venture funds globally - Emergence of Boutique Funds with rise in serial entrepreneurs founding funds outside traditional hubs - Educational Programs contributing to the growth with training programs like Columbia University's VC course - Highlighting developments outside Silicon Valley - VC need to market themselves and to increase Assets Under Management (AUM) - From informal to more structured and formalized - Competing by focusing on niche areas - Fundraising Challenges and the need for credibility and strong track record in order to build investor trust - Challenges for a new fund raising capital is similar to starting a company - Effect of JOBS Act and democratizing access with crowdfunding models 2. Niche Venture Capital Firms - Examples like water tech and climate tech firms   - Water industry-originated fund expanding to early-stage tech   - Climate tech fund focusing on large-scale infrastructure - Industry-specific challenges and solutions -Information Accessibility and Resources   - National Venture Capital Association, Google, Crunchbase, PitchBook   - Micro Ventures for accredited investors - Challenges for Smaller Funds to gaining recognition   - Standing out in a crowded market so turning to traditional marketing strategies used by business attracting customers (investors)  3. Traditional Venture Capital Model - Investment Expectations of Company's milestones - 1 in 10 investments yielding significant returns - Investment as Art vs. Science as a combination of data analytics, AI, and investor intuition - Boutique VC Firms vs. Traditional Venture Funds - Role of Boutique Firms   - Active involvement in early stages like Series A - Traditional Funds  - Engagement at later stages, such as Series B - Distinguishing from other investment types such as angel funds 4. Venture vs. Angel Funds - Structural Differences   - Venture funds' structured mandates and timelines  - Stages of Investment   - Typical pipeline: friends and family, angel investors, venture capital, private equity   - Reliance on networks and proving success - Leveraging passionate individuals and potential investors - Differences in risk and investment profiles - Importance of Due Diligence   - VC firms' strategic support and market validation   - Angels' more diverse and informal approach but usually more involved  - Active role in helping companies succeed beyond monetary investment - Both Groups of Investors tend to contribute by making introductions, assisting with hiring - Venture Fund Structure and comparison to Mutual Funds - Family Offices Trend and investing private companies   - Younger generations driving investment in venture financing   - Growing interest in mission-driven investments 5. Tools for Engagement - CRMs, email systems, webinars, calendar planning - Strategies may include email campaigns, direct mail, social media, live events PR, Social Media, SEO Engagement - Resurgence of Webinars and Live Events - Figure out your Investor Avatar in order to target specific investor types - Marketing and Content Strategies  - Testing different messages continuously   - Managing communications and targeting - Building Trust by Selling a compelling brand or story  Bio: Tim Sprinkle is a seasoned finance writer with a particular focus on the innovation space. During a formative period from 2013 to 2015, Tim was immersed in the vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem of Colorado, notably in Boulder. He documented the rise of various startups and innovations, emphasizing the significant activities in the venture capital sector. His experiences inspired him to write a groundbreaking book, "Screw the Valley," which challenged the then-prevalent notion that Silicon Valley was the epicenter of innovation. Through his insightful writing, Tim highlighted the burgeoning innovation occurring outside of Silicon Valley, showcasing that the entrepreneurial spirit was thriving in diverse regions across the country and the world. To connect with Tim Sprinkle visit  website: http://venturecapitalmarketing.com And be sure to pick up your copy of: "Screw the Valley" Karen Rands is the President of Kugarand Capital Holdings where her extended team offers coaching and services to small business owners providing capital strategy and investor acquisition through the Launch Funding Network.  As a thought leader in Angel and Crowdfund Investing, Karen offers investors decision tools, education, screening, due diligence, and syndication services through the National Network of Angel Investors.   Karen wrote the best selling primer for new Angel Investors  - Inside Secrets to Angel Investing and now offers digital beginner and advanced courses covering  Angel and Crowdfunding Investing on the Compassionate Capitalist Academy financial education platform. More information can be found at http://karenrands.co   When you subscribe on the contact page you will receive her Compassionate Capitalist short video tips by email, her ebook 12 Secrets of Innovation and Wealth and have an opportunity to schedule time to chat with Karen directly. Please help us build the Compassionate Capitalist community by subscribing, liking, and sharing this podcast.    The Compassionate Capitalist Show is also on Youtube @angelinvesting with a library of over 280 episodes.  Keywords: due diligence, investor diversification, venture firm strategic shift, broader market potential, investor avatar, targeted investor pitches, early-stage investment, building investor trust, crowdfunding impact, generative AI in content marketing, digital marketing strategies, traditional PR, social media strategy, marketing automation tools, storytelling for investors, VC fund competition, niche venture capital firms, family offices, mission-driven investments, venture capital training, boutique venture funds, climate tech investment, water tech fund, fundraising challenges, investment stages, angel investing vs venture capital, specialized micro funds, investor engagement tools, CRM systems, email campaigns, live events for investors

(0:00) Intro.(2:27) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.(3:13) Start of interview. [Interviewer: UC Law SF Professor Abe Cable. Reference to his article "Does Trados Matter?" (2019)].(4:17) Summary of the Trados case by Vice-Chancellor Laster. (9:44) Concept of "residual value maximization." Distinguishing between standard of conduct and standard of review.(16:17) Explaining standards of review: 1) Business judgment rule, 2) Enhanced scrutiny and 3) Entire fairness standard. The impact of conflicted transactions.(23:55) Distinguishing governance standards from public companies and Silicon Valley-style private startups. (28:10) Social factors or dynamics that make Silicon Valley VC-backed startups a relatively lower risk environment for litigation.(31:07) Why directors should always try to maximize the value of the corporation for the residual. Emotional commitment and engagement in many cases.(33:31) "What made Trados a difficult case and a litigable case was that this really was a sideways situation where the value was in the vicinity of an area where the common could take."(36:36) How to think about maximizing the residual value. *reference to Credit Lyonnais opinion by Chancellor Allen (1991).(39:04)  Other trends or cases that present some litigation risk for startup corporate directors. "I don't know if there's anything super new. What we tend to see is sort of old problems recurring because these are really problems of human nature. And so things are cyclical."Redemption Rights. Example of cases: Thoughtworks (2010), ODN Holdings (2017)280G [and 409A] Valuations. "I would really like to see people treating [those valuations] as a more substantive exercise than merely as an exercise in marketing to your employees (for employees' morale)."(45:54) The importance of outside or independent directors. "I really think that somebody has to be in the room asking the proverbial dumb question, which usually isn't a dumb question. Usually it's the question that needs to be asked."The Honorable J. Travis Laster was sworn in as Vice Chancellor of the Court of Chancery on October 9, 2009. Professor Abe Cable joined the UC Law SF faculty in 2011. He is the Faculty Director of the UC Center for Business Law San Francisco. You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__You can join as a Patron of the Boardroom Governance Podcast at:Patreon: patreon.com/BoardroomGovernancePod__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

We begin this episode with Paul Rosenzweig describing major progress in teaching AI models to do text-to-speech conversions. Amazon flagged its new model as having “emergent” capabilities in handling what had been serious problems – things like speaking with emotion, or conveying foreign phrases. The key is the size of the training set, but Amazon was able to spot the point at which more data led to unexpected skills. This leads Paul and me to speculate that training AI models to perform certain tasks eventually leads the model to learn “generalization” of its skills. If so, the more we train AI on a variety of tasks – chat, text to speech, text to video, and the like – the better AI will get at learning new tasks, as generalization becomes part of its core skill set. It's lawyers holding forth on the frontiers of technology, so take it with a grain of salt. Cristin Flynn Goodwin and Paul Stephan join Paul Rosenzweig to provide an update on Volt Typhoon, the Chinese APT that is littering Western networks with the equivalent of logical land mines. Actually, it's not so much an update on Volt Typhoon, which seems to be aggressively pursuing its strategy, as on the hyperventilating Western reaction to Volt Typhoon. There's no doubt that China is playing with fire, and that the United States and other cyber powers should be liberally sowing similar weapons in Chinese networks. But the public measures adopted by the West do not seem likely to effectively defeat or deter China's strategy.  The group is less impressed by the New York Times' claim that China is pursuing a dangerous electoral influence campaign on U.S. social media platforms. The Russians do it better, Paul Stephan says, and even they don't do it well, I argue.  Paul Rosenzweig reviews the House China Committee report alleging a link between U.S. venture capital firms and Chinese human rights abuses. We agree that Silicon Valley VCs have paid too little attention to how their investments could undermine the system on which their billions rest, a state of affairs not likely to last much longer.  Paul Stephan and Cristin bring us up to date on U.S. efforts to disrupt Chinese and Russian hacking operations. We will be eagerly waiting for resolution of the European fight over Facebook's subscription fee and the move by websites to “Pay or Consent” privacy terms fight. I predict that Eurocrats' hypocrisy will be tested by an effort to rule for elite European media sites, which already embrace “Pay or Consent” while ruling against Facebook. Paul Rosenzweig is confident that European hypocrisy is up to the task.  Cristin and I explore the latest White House enthusiasm for software security liability. Paul Stephan explains the flap over a UN cybercrime treaty, which is and should be stalled in Turtle Bay for the next decade or more.   Cristin also covers a detailed new Google TAG report on commercial spyware.  And in quick hits,  House Republicans tried and failed to find common ground on renewal of FISA Section 702 I recommend Goody-2, the ‘World's ‘Most Responsible' AI Chatbot Dechert has settled a wealthy businessman's lawsuit claiming that the law firm hacked his computer Imran Khan is using AI to make impressively realistic speeches about his performance in Pakistani elections The Kids Online Safety Act secured sixty votes in the U.S. Senate, but whether the House will act on the bill remains to be seen Download 492nd Episode (mp3) You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

We begin this episode with Paul Rosenzweig describing major progress in teaching AI models to do text-to-speech conversions. Amazon flagged its new model as having “emergent” capabilities in handling what had been serious problems – things like speaking with emotion, or conveying foreign phrases. The key is the size of the training set, but Amazon was able to spot the point at which more data led to unexpected skills. This leads Paul and me to speculate that training AI models to perform certain tasks eventually leads the model to learn “generalization” of its skills. If so, the more we train AI on a variety of tasks – chat, text to speech, text to video, and the like – the better AI will get at learning new tasks, as generalization becomes part of its core skill set. It's lawyers holding forth on the frontiers of technology, so take it with a grain of salt. Cristin Flynn Goodwin and Paul Stephan join Paul Rosenzweig to provide an update on Volt Typhoon, the Chinese APT that is littering Western networks with the equivalent of logical land mines. Actually, it's not so much an update on Volt Typhoon, which seems to be aggressively pursuing its strategy, as on the hyperventilating Western reaction to Volt Typhoon. There's no doubt that China is playing with fire, and that the United States and other cyber powers should be liberally sowing similar weapons in Chinese networks. But the public measures adopted by the West do not seem likely to effectively defeat or deter China's strategy.  The group is less impressed by the New York Times' claim that China is pursuing a dangerous electoral influence campaign on U.S. social media platforms. The Russians do it better, Paul Stephan says, and even they don't do it well, I argue.  Paul Rosenzweig reviews the House China Committee report alleging a link between U.S. venture capital firms and Chinese human rights abuses. We agree that Silicon Valley VCs have paid too little attention to how their investments could undermine the system on which their billions rest, a state of affairs not likely to last much longer.  Paul Stephan and Cristin bring us up to date on U.S. efforts to disrupt Chinese and Russian hacking operations. We will be eagerly waiting for resolution of the European fight over Facebook's subscription fee and the move by websites to “Pay or Consent” privacy terms fight. I predict that Eurocrats' hypocrisy will be tested by an effort to rule for elite European media sites, which already embrace “Pay or Consent” while ruling against Facebook. Paul Rosenzweig is confident that European hypocrisy is up to the task.  Cristin and I explore the latest White House enthusiasm for software security liability. Paul Stephan explains the flap over a UN cybercrime treaty, which is and should be stalled in Turtle Bay for the next decade or more.   Cristin also covers a detailed new Google TAG report on commercial spyware.  And in quick hits,  House Republicans tried and failed to find common ground on renewal of FISA Section 702 I recommend Goody-2, the ‘World's ‘Most Responsible' AI Chatbot Dechert has settled a wealthy businessman's lawsuit claiming that the law firm hacked his computer Imran Khan is using AI to make impressively realistic speeches about his performance in Pakistani elections The Kids Online Safety Act secured sixty votes in the U.S. Senate, but whether the House will act on the bill remains to be seen Download 492nd Episode (mp3) You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

Max has decades of experience building global IT & fintech businesses. After getting his MBA at Stanford, he co-founded Russia's largest eCommerce company, Wikimart (dubbed "the Amazon of Russia" by Silicon Valley VCs) and raised $50M+ from Tiger Global. He then switched over to work with e-commerce companies in Asia, focusing mainly on payments as a CEO, investor, and advisor to numerous startups. He started Silverbird amidst the pandemic in London, in 2020, after noticing a major banking gap in international trade: millions of underserved SMEs around Africa, Middle East, and Asian regions and beyond were exposed to high fees, unfair rejections, unnecessary paperwork, and outdated regulations. The key pain point was high-value cross-border transactions - something international trade is all about. Silverbird makes cross-border banking business-friendly and international payments borderless, limitless, frictionless and affordable. It can onboard companies traditional banks can't through the use of AI and data-driven KYC which analyzes publicly open customs and supply chain data to assess the risk-profile of a particular SME.

00:09 | Circle (USDC) to IPO- Circle offers the USDC stablecoin with a $25b market cap- company was to go public via SPAC in 2021 but deal fell apart- last round was $9.0b in Feb 2022- good timing for IPO with bitcoin ETFs launching this week01:13 | Rabbit large action model hits- Rabbit R1 is an AI first personal device that could replace your iPhone- Rabbit sold out of R1's on first day of offering; 10,000 units (goal was 500)- the Rabbit OS leverages a large language model (LLM), similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and a large action model (LAM)- LAM's use AI to take action for you vs just give you information like a LLM does- Rabbit Teach allows users to train the LAM to take actions on the internet or in apps, no coding required, similar to recording an Excel macro- in the future, users will be able to sell their Teach models to other users and receive a fee- Rabbit has raised $36m, Khosla Ventures led their Series A that closed in Dec 202303:27 | OpenAI GPT Store launches - GPT Store is an app marketplace available to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus and higher-tier business plans- platform enables developers and users to create and publish custom ChatGPT applications, or 'GPTs', similar to apps on you iPhone- 3 million custom versions of ChatGPT have been created since Nov 2023- OpenAI plans to share revenue with GPT app developers in the future04:56 | Klarna replaces jobs with AI- CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski announced Klarna is under a hiring freeze- company is not hiring new employees but replacing them with AI- Klarna has a $7.1b valuation in the secondary market up 5.2% from its last round06:20 | Anthropic raises capital with VCs/SPVs vs investment bankers- Menlo Partners, a Silicon Valley VC, is using a SPV to raise capital for Anthropic's $750m capital raise- VC-backed startups are using the VCs on their cap tables to go out and raise capital from the market vs using investment bankers like Goldman or Morgan in an increasingly frequent trend- VCs stand up special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, raise capital for a specific company directly from pension, endowment, foundations, and individual wealth families.- what's interesting about this … instead of the company paying an investment bank a typical 6% fee on the raise the VCs charge their LPs a one-time upfront fee, annual management fee, carry or some combination of those08:28 | Discord lays off 17%- 170 employees impacted- 40 employees were laid off in Aug 2023- Discord has a $5b implied valuation in the secondary market down 65% from its last primary round in Sep 202109:23 | Pre-IPO -1.11% for week- Week winners: Databricks +3.35%, Neuralink +3.12%, Discord +2.06%, SpaceX +1.33%, Brex +0.53%- Week losers: Anthropic -14.60%, Hugging Face -7.71%, OpenAI -5.10%, Canva -4.60%, Klarna -4.22%- Top valuations: ByteDance $191b (current buyback at $268b), SpaceX $176b (current tender at $180b), OpenAI $68b (current primary round at $95b), Stripe $54b, Databricks $48b lead in current valuation

This week we talk about AMD, graphics processing units, and AI.We also discuss crypto mining, video games, and parallel processing.Recommended Book: The Story of Art Without Men by Katy HesselTranscriptFounded in 1993 by an engineer who previously designed microprocessors for semiconductor company AMD, an engineer from Sun Microsystems, and a graphics chip designer and senior engineer from Sun and IBM, NVIDIA was focused on producing graphics-optimized hardware because of a theory held by those founders that this sort of engineering would allow computers to tackle new sorts of problems that conventional computing architecture wasn't very good at. They also suspected that the video game industry, which was still pretty nascent, but rapidly growing, this being the early 90s, would become a big deal, and the industry was already running up against hardware problems, computing-wise, both in terms of development, and in terms of allowing users to play games that were graphically complex and immersive.So they scrounged about $40k between them, started the company, and then fairly quickly were able to attract serious funding from Silicon Valley VCs, initially to the tune of $20 million. It took them a little while, about half a decade, to get their first real-deal product out the door, but a graphics accelerator chip they release in 1998 did pretty well, and their subsequent product, the GeForce 256, which empowered consumer-grade hardware to do impressive new things, graphically, made their company, and their GeForce line of graphics cards, into an industry standard piece of hardware for gaming purposes.Graphics cards, those of the dedicated or discrete variety, which basically means it's a separate piece of hardware from the motherboard, the main computer hardware, gives a computer or other device enhanced graphics powers, lending it the ability to process graphical stuff separately, with tech optimized for that purpose, which in turn means you can play games or videos or whatnot that would otherwise be sluggish or low-quality, or in some cases, it allows you to play games and videos that your core system simply wouldn't be capable of handling. These cards are circuit boards that are installed into a computer's expansion slot, or in some cases attached using a high-speed connection cable.Many modern video games require dedicated graphics processors of this kind in order to function, or in order to function at a playable speed and resolution; lower-key, simpler games work decently well with the graphics capabilities included in the core hardware, but the AAA-grade, high-end, visually realistic stuff almost always needs this kind of add-on to work, or to work as intended.And these sorts of add-ons have been around since personal computers have been around, but they really took off on the consumer market in the 1980s, as PCs started to become more visual—the advent of Windows and the Mac made what was previously a green-screen, number and character-heavy interface a lot more colorful and interactive and intuitive for non-programmer users, and as those visual experiences became more complex, the hardware architecture had to evolve to account for that, and often this meant including graphics cards alongside the more standard components.A huge variety of companies make these sorts of cards, these days, but the majority of modern graphics cards are designed by one of two companies: AMD or Nvidia.What I'd like to talk about today is the latter, Nvidia, a company that seems to have found itself in the right place at the right time, with the right investments and infrastructure, to take advantage of a new wave of companies and applications that desperately need what it has to offer.—Like most tech companies, Nvidia has been slowly but surely expanding its capabilities and competing with other entities in this space by snapping up other businesses that do things it would like to be able to do.It bought-out the intellectual assets of 3dfx, a fellow graphics card-maker, in late-2000, grabbed several hardware designers in the early 2000s, and then it went about scooping-up a slew of graphics-related software-makers, to the point where the US Justice Department started to get anxious that Nvidia and its main rival, AMD, might be building monopolies for themselves in this still-burgeoning, but increasingly important to the computing and gaming industry, space.Nvidia was hit hard by lawsuits related to defects in its products in the late 20-aughts, and it invested heavily in producing mobile-focused systems on a chip—holistic, small form-factor microchips that ostensibly include everything device-makers might need to build smartphones or gaming hardware—and even released its own gaming pseudo-console, the Nvidia shield, in the early 20-teens.The company continued to expand its reach in the gaming space in the mid-to-late-20-teens, while also expanding into the automobile media center industry—a segment of the auto-industry that was becoming increasingly digitized and connected, removing buttons and switches and opting for touchscreen interfaces—and it also expanded into the broader mobile device market, allowing it to build chips for smartphones and tablets.What they were starting to realize during this period, though—and this is something they began looking into and investing in, in earnest, back in 2007 or so, through the early 20-teens—is that the same approach they used to build graphics cards, basically lashing a bunch of smaller chip cores together, so they all worked in parallel, which allowed them to do a bunch of different stuff, simultaneously, also allowed them to do other things that require a whole lot of parallel functionality—and that's in contrast to building chips with brute strength, but which aren't necessarily capable of doing a bunch of smaller tasks in parallel to each other.So in addition to being able to show a bunch of complex, resource-intensive graphics on screen, these parallel-processing chip setups could also allow them to, for instance, do complex math, as is required for physics simulations and heavy-duty engineering projects, they could simulate chemical interactions, like pharmaceutical companies need to do, or—and this turned out to be a big, important use-case—they could run the sorts of massive data centers tech giants like Google and Apple and Microsoft were beginning to build all around the world, to crunch all the data being produced and shuffled here and there for their cloud storage and cloud computing architectures.In the years since, that latter use-case has far surpassed the revenue Nvidia pulls in from its video game-optimized graphics processing units.And another use-case for these types of chip architectures, that of running AI systems, looks primed to take the revenue crown from even those cloud computing setups.Nvidia's most recent quarterly report showed that its revenue tied to its data-center offerings more than doubled over the course of just three months, and it's generally expected that this revenue will more than quadruple, year-over-year, and all of this despite a hardware crunch caused by a run on its highest-end products by tech companies wanting to flesh-out their AI-related, number-crunching setups; it hasn't been able to meet the huge surge in demand that has arisen over the past few years, but it's still making major bank.Part of why Nvidia's hardware is so in demand for these use-cases is that, back in 2006, it released the Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, which is a programming language that allows users to write applications for GPUs, graphics processing units, rather than conventional computing setups.This is what allows folks to treat these gobs of parallel-linked graphics processing units like highly capable computers, and it's what allows them to use gaming-optimized hardware for simulating atoms or managing cloud storage systems or mining Bitcoin.CUDA now has 250 software libraries, which is huge compared to its competitors, and that allows AI developers—a category of people who are enjoying the majority of major tech investment resources at the moment—to perch their software on hardware that can handle the huge processing overhead necessary for these applications to function.Other companies in this space are making investments in their software offerings, and the aforementioned AMD, which is launching AI-focused hardware, as well, uses open source software for its tech, which has some benefits over Nvidia's largely proprietary libraries.Individual companies, too, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, are all investing in their own, homegrown, alternative hardware and software, in part so they can be less dependent on companies like Nvidia, which has been charging them an arm-and-a-leg for their high-end products, and which, again, has been suffering from supply shortages because of all this new demand.So these big tech companies don't want to be reliant on Nvidia for their well-being in this space, but they also want to optimize their chips for their individual use-cases they're throwing tons of money at this problem, hoping to liberate themselves from future shortages and dependency issues, and to maybe even build themselves a moat in the AI space in the future, if they can develop hardware and software for their own use that their competition won't be able to match.And for context, a single system with eight of Nvidia's newest, high-end GPUs for cloud data center purposes can cost upward of $200,000, which is about 40-times the cost of buying a generic server optimized for the same purposes; so this is not a small amount of money, considering how many of those systems these companies require just to function at a base level, but these companies are still willing to pay those prices, and are in fact scrambling to do so, hoping to get their hands on more of these scarce resources, which further underlines why they're hoping to make their own, viable alternatives to these Nvidia offerings, sooner rather than later.Despite those pressures to move away to another option, though, Nvidia enjoys a substantial advantage in this market, right now, because of the combination of its powerful hardware and the CUDA language library.That's allow it to rapidly climb the ranks of highest-value global tech companies, recently becoming the first semiconductor company to hit the $1 trillion valuation mark, bypassing Tesla and Meta and Berkshire Hathaway, among many other companies along the way, and something like 92% of AI models are currently written in PyTorch—a machine learning framework that uses the Torch library, and which is currently optimized for use on Nvidia chips because of its cross-compatibility with CUDA; so this advantage is baked-into the industry for the time-being.That may change at some point, as the folks behind PyTorch are in the process of evolving it to support other GPU platforms, like those run by AMD and Apple.But at the moment, Nvidia is the simplest default system to work with for the majority of folks working in AI; so they have a bit of a head start, and that head start was in many ways enabled and funded by their success in the video game industry, and then the few years during which they were heavily funded by the crypto-mining industry, all of which provided them the resources they needed to reinforce that moat and build-out their hardware and software so they were able to become the obvious, default choice for AI purposes, as well.So Nvidia is absolutely killing it right now, their stock having jumped from about $115 a share a year ago to around $460 a share, today, and they're queued up to continue selling out every product they make as fast as they can make them.But we're entering a period, over the next year or two, during which that dominance will start to be challenged, more AI code transferable to other software and hardware made by other companies, and more of their customers building their own alternatives; so a lot of what's fueling their current success may start to sputter if they aren't able to build some new competitive advantages in this space, sometime very soon, despite their impressive, high-flying, stock-surging, valuation-ballooning performance over these past few years.Show Notes* https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304019404577418243311260010* https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121358204084776309* https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-nvidia-got-hugeand-almost-invincible-da74cae1* https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-exploring-making-its-own-ai-chips-sources-2023-10-06/* https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-to-debut-ai-chip-next-month-that-could-cut-nvidia-gpu-costs* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch* https://innovationorigins.com/en/amd-gears-up-to-challenge-nvidias-ai-supremacy/* https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/07/how-nvidia-became-a-major-player-in-robotics/* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_card* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Is it time for you to look for your next job? Should you haggle over your salary? How should you network while being busy with your current job? Having worked in the tech industry for over a decade and a half, Sriram and Aarthi are here to help you with your job hunt. 

Content this week from @gideonrachman, @Tabby_Kinder, @KateClarkTweets, @askhalid, @DanKuhn13, @mvpeers, @maskedmanmarc, @BitcoinSVTrain, @IanBremmer, @IKrietzberg, @a16Z, @JagmeetS13, @EllenYChang, @Dexerto, @elonmusk, @finkd Editorial: The Venture Wreckage Essays of the Week Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing Silicon Valley VCs rush into defence technology start-ups Antitrust Threat to Figma-Adobe Deal Thwarts Hopes for VC Rebound Spotify's podcast plan is going off the rails FTC'S Amazon Lawsuit Is ‘Silly' If Not Insulting, Analyst Says What the FTC Misses With Amazon Lawsuit In VC Ranking, New & Small Firms Make The Biggest Splash Video of the Week Ian Bremmer's ‘new globalization, a digital global order': Will it work for us, or against us? News Of the Week Molten Ventures still hamstrung by dismal trading backdrop Big Tesla Rival Latest to Partner Up With The EV Leaders Masayoshi Son Ends Seven-Month Silence to Make Case for SoftBank's Future Visualizing BlackRock's Top Equity Holdings Twitter Rolls Out 25k Character Tweets for Twitter Blue Subscribers UK Considers New Law To Label AllL AI-Generated Content Andreessen Horowitz creates ‘Perennial' evergreen fund amid market slowdown Startup of the Week Tesla Supercharger Network: Gas Station for EVs in Future Tweet of the Week Elon Must and Mark Zuckerberg to Stage a Cage Fight --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thatwastheweek/message

Following closely on the heels of last December's “Artificial Fandom Intelligence” episode, Elizabeth and Flourish bring you the extremely depressing sequel, “Artificial Fandom Intelligence 2: Rise of the Grifters.” Spurred by recent comments from a Silicon Valley VC about the potential “market” for AI-fueled chatbots amongst fanfiction fans, they take a deep dive into the state of fandom and AI in recent months. Spoiler: it's bleak. They also read to a trio of letters responding to the “Reflecting Reality?” episode, on placelessness in fic, and the centering of U.S. experiences in stories written by and for people in other parts of the world.

As a founding board member of PayPal, cofounder of LinkedIn, and a partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Greylock, Reid Hoffman has long been at the forefront of the U.S. tech industry, from the early days of social media to the launch of new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. He acknowledges that technologists are often better at seeing the benefits of their products and services than they are at predicting the problems they might create. But he says that he and his peers are working harder than ever to understand and monitor the downstream effects of technological advancements and to minimize risks by adapting as they go. He speaks about the future of A.I., what he looks for in entrepreneurs, and his hopes for the future. Hoffman is the host of the podcast Masters of Scale as well as the new show Possible.

We're covering a lot of ground today. First, we must deal with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.My initial impression upon hearing that the government would make all depositors whole despite FDIC only covering up to $250k was to go ballistic. Again with the billionaire and banker bailouts while the little guy like you and me gets screwed - and most definitely not in a good way? Well, that's not necessarily what's happening.Writer Dave Johnson lives in Silicon Valley and just posted to a listserv we're both on,"I live a few blocks from Atherton where many of the libertarian Silicon Valley VC and types live. When I open my door I can hear screams for government bailouts from my house. They started this morning and it's getting so bad I have to wear earplugs when I go for a walk."We'll find out if he was kidding or not, and what is really happening here at the beginning of the show.Then it's time for Drag Queen Storytime Gone Wild! Well, Spencer Brown and Jeff Manabat, better known as The Kinsey Sicks members Trampolina and Trixie will join us. The Kinsey Sicks just started a month-long run of performances of their new show, "Drag Queen Storytime Gone Wild!" Yes we'll have some fun, but we'll also talk about the horrible attacks on shows like their and the giant leap backwards being attempted by too many authoritarian Republicans in this country today. Now go check out their YouTube channel.So many videos to watch, so little time!

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:IntroductionPreston's 1st pick: Michael Saylor describing the importance of inflation being a vectorPreston's 2nd pick: Pablo Fernandez talking about how CBDC will drive a wedge between producers and consumersPreston's 3rd pick: Cory Klippsten describing in detail how the alt coin / Silicon Valley VC game is a professional scamPreston's 4th pick: Alex Gladstein describing how the IMF and World Bank cause debt slavery for developing countries around the world.Preston's 5th pick: Gigi, Michael Saylor, and Jeff Booth describe the difference between Proof of Work and Proof of Sake and the ESG lie.Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.BOOKS AND RESOURCESThe full interviews of: Michael Saylor's Masterclass in Economics Pablo Fernandez's full interview on CBDC Cory Klippsten's full interview on Altcoins and Silicon Valley VCs Alex Gladstein's full interview on the IMF and World Bank Alex Gladstein's Article on the IMF and World Bank Full interviews on Energy and ESGGigi's PoW InterviewMichael Saylor's Energy InterviewJeff Booth's Energy Interview NEW TO THE SHOW?Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs.Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here.Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool.Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services.Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets.P.S The Investor's Podcast Network is excited to launch a subreddit devoted to our fans in discussing financial markets, stock picks, questions for our hosts, and much more! Join our subreddit r/TheInvestorsPodcast today!SPONSORSTalk to your clients about Desjardins Responsible Investment today and support what's right for society and what's good for business.Take stock of your finances and investing strategy with Betterment.Get an overall better student loan experience with College Ave. Plus, get a chance to win a $1,000 college scholarship. No purchase is required.Set, track, and manage your financial goals as your life evolves with Scotia Smart Investor.Let an expert do your taxes from start to finish so you can relax with TurboTax.Easily diversify beyond stocks and bonds, and build wealth through streamlined CRE investing with EquityMultiple.Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Connie Chan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a leading Silicon Valley VC firm with over $35B under management. Connie joined Andreessen Horowitz in 2011 after working at HP in China and in private equity and became a general partner in 2018. She also spearheaded the firm's Asia network to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley startups looking to navigate opportunities in the Chinese consumer tech ecosystem and companies in Asia seeking to better understand Silicon Valley. Connie has been named a LinkedIn NextWave Top Professional 35 and Under, Wired's Next 20 Tech Visionary, Fast Company's Most Creative People 2017, and won a Sydney award for her writing on WeChat, and is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum. Connie received her B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. -- Get 20% off Lyvecom for your Shopify store at lyvecom.com/dulma

Cliff Obrecht is the Co-Founder & COO @ Canva, the free-to-use online graphic design tool that makes it easy for anyone to design anything from presentations to videos and social media. Cliff and Mel have scaled Canva to over 60 million monthly users, 2,000 employees, and 500,000 teams from companies like Intel and Zoom using Canva. During this incredible growth journey, they have raised over $580M with their last round valuing the company at over $40BN. In Today's Episode with Cliff Obrecht 1.) From Teacher to Billionaire Tech Founder: How did Keith make his way into the world of tech with his founding of FusionBooks? What did the process with FusionBooks teach him about how to run Canva? How did the early fundraising days for Canva go? Why does Cliff think they got over 100 no's? What are Cliff's biggest pieces of advice for founders today, not in Silicon Valley, looking to raise from Silicon Valley VCs? 2.) Scaling to $40BN: The Biggest Lessons: What does Cliff mean when he says the secret to successful hiring is looking for "distance traveled"? How does he determine this in the interview process? What have been some of the single biggest lessons in what it takes to acquire the best talent? What are some of the biggest mistakes Cliff has made in talent acquisition? How has his process changed as a result? What do Canva do to get the best operators as advisors in the company? How do they compensate these advisors? What does Cliff advise founders on how to do the same? 3.) The Art of Deal-Making: How does Cliff think through what makes a "good deal"? How does he approach negotiation? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when negotiating and doing deals? What have been Cliff's biggest lessons on successful investor relations over the years? How does Cliff and Canva approach acquisitions? What do they look for? What is their process? Why do most tech companies approach acquisitions the wrong way? 4.) Cliff Obrecht: Money, Fatherhood and Marriage: How does Cliff analyze his relationship to money today? How much money is enough? How has his relationship to money changed over time? Why have Cliff and Mel given away over $10BN to their foundation? Why is philanthropy so hard to do effectively? Why would Cliff hate for his children to be brought up in excess wealth? What does "great fatherhood" mean to Cliff? What are the most challenging aspects of parenting? What are the secrets to a happy marriage? How does co-founding a company with your other half work well? How does it work poorly?

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/world/ftx-saga-and-many-implosions-in-us-especially-in-big-tech-11709111.htmlElizabeth Holmes, the formerly celebrated founder of Theranos, got hit with a jail term of 11 years, according to the Wall Street Journal. That was a startling end to what looked at one time like a huge Silicon Valley success story.But it was not the only Big Tech or big company story. The following stories also come from the WSJ:Along with these, there have been stories about massive layoffs: Meta axes 13% of its workforce, or about 11,000 people; Amazon lays off 10,000 staff, mostly those in core areas such as engineering and marketing; and Google (Alphabet) is under pressure from activist investor TCI to do much the same for cost-cutting reasons. All this may add up to a “techno-winter” (if not a general recession), one might think; surely the “crypto-winter” is already in progress. But is that really true? I believe there are three separate things going on, and it does not make sense to mingle all of them and seek solutions. The first is just plain old-fashioned grift; the second is the normal churn in business models; and the third is whether crypto makes sense.There are always major scams in the US: examples include Enron, Bernie Madoff, and the Lehman Brothers meltdown. There is the spectacle of supposedly sensible people (e.g. bankers and venture capitalists) being completely bamboozled by a smooth-talking person with a spreadsheet, with the result that lots of investor's (and taxpayers') money goes down the drain.Elizabeth Holmes seems to have hoodwinked the whos-who of not only Silicon Valley's VCs, but also name-brand politicians and captains of industry and got them on her board of directors. I mean, George Schulz and Henry Kissinger: it doesn't get any bigger than this. Exactly what did these luminaries see in the company? Some earth-shaking vision, I suppose. To be honest, I too wondered if Theranos did have a really disruptive technology that would upend the market for diagnostic blood tests. But after an expose in Bad Blood by a WSJ reporter, it was clear that the company was really a house of cards (see my column on this in Open Magazine, where I explored, among other things, Holmes' ‘reality distortion field').It is now clear that Theranos was a scam built up by Holmes and her then-boyfriend, Ramesh ‘Sunny' Balwani, a Pakistani-American entrepreneur who was much older than her, who was also president of the company. Holmes got sentenced to 11 years, Balwani got 13. Bernie Madoff, and Jeff Epstein also got long sentences. Bernie Madoff is a champion of sorts, for he ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history: $64 billion.Now Sam Bankman-Fried is giving Madoff a run for his money. His crypto exchange, FTX, valued at $32 billion just a fortnight ago, is worth virtually nothing at this time, and billions of dollars worth of customers' money has… disappeared. John Ray III, the lawyer brought in to clean up FTX during bankruptcy proceedings (ironically the same person who did the Enron clean-up), said he couldn't believe the ‘unprecedented mess' he found there. The point is that despite all the fuss about crypto-currency, it is increasingly evident that Sam Bankman-Fried ran an old-fashioned fraud: “pump and dump”. The crypto bit was merely window-dressing to give sex appeal to the whole gig. And it worked, too. Major investors like the blue-chip VC firm Sequoia Capital were so thoroughly taken in that the purported reactions of their partners is simply astonishing, if true. Here's a screenshot of an alleged Sequoia memo. There's worse: another tweet purports to show that two partners, a male and a female, reported being sexually aroused on hearing Bankman-Fried's pitch about FTX's world-beating vision to control all money (it is too embarrassing and too crude to quote):Is crypto a scam? Stephen Diehl, author of Popping the Crypto Bubble says so in this interview with the Financial Times. He calls post-2016 crypto the Grifter Era, and that's not far from the truth. It's like the carpetbaggers have arrived and set up shop. I am personally of the opinion that crypto may have some value, only that the killer apps haven't been dreamt up yet; I do believe the underlying blockchains are useful, although successful rollouts and use cases are still too few.But the point is that the FTX meltdown has relatively little to do with crypto per se. It was just a device to dress up a rather standard, old-fashioned fraud or Ponzi scheme. We have seen this sort of thing going even way back: remember the Dutch Tulip Bubble, and the South Seas Bubble. You have fast-talking hucksters hoodwinking gullible investors, who lose their shirts.It would be unfair to blame crypto for the greed and indiscipline shown by the FTX founder, or the lack of governance and regulatory control which let insiders essentially loot investor funds. For example, here's Bankman-Fried and Nishad Singh plundering away:The other angle that's remarkable is the fact that the meltdown happened just days after the US midterm elections. Coincidence? Hard to believe, because Sam Bankman-Fried had been a major donor to the Democratic party: he donated some $30 million directly to them, and then perhaps a few hundred million to the ecosystem around the Democratic party, especially the media. Said media then lionized Bankman-Fried beyond all reason, as though he were some messiah.Once again, the media, sadly, is not covering itself with glory. They didn't do any investigative journalism; and now that the skeletons are tumbling out of the closet, they should be kicking themselves for having missed out on a juicy story. But the omerta of left-leaning, ideological journalists is a wonder to behold. This is what the WaPo is worried about now? Not fraud?The ‘effective altruism' school of thought that SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried's handle) allegedly espoused is probably another scam, even though it's dressed up in fashionable ESG and DIE memes.Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-biggest donor to the Democratic party before the 2022 midterms (George Soros was the biggest). The website Gateway Pundit quoting someone else (ok, they might have a beef with Democrats anyway, so take it with a pinch of salt) paints a staggering picture of SBF's political and government connections, which is in itself highly suspicious. All this cannot be mere coincidence. Did SBF materially affect the midterm election results? I hope the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will launch an investigation. Frankly this smells like a Deep State operation. I am sure there is a Ukraine angle as well. More generally, is the US business model facing a crisis? ‘Greed is good', declared Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Does modern corporate greed have an origin? In this interview with the Stanford Business School, David Gelles, author of The Man Who Broke Capitalism squarely blames ‘Neutron' Jack Welch of GE for what he claims is a toxic culture of profit at all cost in US corporations. That may or may not be fair to Welch, but anyway slash-and-burn, as well as short-termism and ideological metastasis seem to be the watchwords of many US CEOs these days.It would be difficult to accuse Elon Musk of seeking undue profit in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which probably is worth much less than that sum just weeks after Musk took it over. But the issue there is, as is probably the case with Disney too, that there is too much ideology permeating the firm. Disney's recently fired CEO was seriously into woke causes. What Musk has done is to sweep away the wokeness in Twitter, thereby possibly allowing it to fulfill its purported role of ‘digital town square'. Under the previous dispensation, it had become basically a far-left bubble, because anybody who didn't fit into their world-view was simply deplatformed, defenestrated, silenced, censored: the very antithesis of Freedom of Speech. I published this podcast long ago about how the explicit silencing of TrueIndology was a watershed event in the suppression of online speech in India. Shadow banning, reduction of followers, and other malign acts were common against anybody that the Twitter powers-that-be didn't consider to fit their views, which in India meant anti-Hindu perspectives. Despite all the noise in the media about how Twitter has gone down the drain, it is entirely possible that Musk will not run it into the ground. Advertisers who are now staying away will most likely return. The savage layoffs don't seem to have materially affected the actual performance of Twitter on the ground, as it were: so was there a lot of waste? Wokes are known to live well off Other People's Money, as in the very case of FTX (in the Bahamas), per the WSJ.I am betting that Elon Musk will be able to return Twitter to some semblance of a business model, not run it in the ground. After all, the platform does offer value to its subscribers, even long-suffering shadow-ban victims such as me (I have often found people I've never heard of have blocked me: I am apparently on mass-blocking lists) still find it useful.It is not clear, though, if the ‘greed at all costs' attitude of US business will survive. It is clear, for instance, that they have surrendered America's industrial capacity to China in the last 30 years, all in return for short-term profits from the ‘China price'. This is suicidal in the long run, as they are beginning to now realize. There has to be some introspection.It may be too grand to claim that Western business will now go through a sea-change, a once-in-a-generation shift to something more accountable to national interests. This is especially hard when the Deep State is so ascendant, and its friends in the military-industrial-complex thrive on war in Other People's Countries.But these woes are coming at the very time that we are seeing the limits of globalization and to the excesses of Wall Street and Silicon Valley VCs. The US business community, and regulators, should consider FTX and Theranos to be canaries in the coalmine: there are useful lessons in their failures.1675 words, 22 Nov 2022.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

Sarah Paiji Yoo is the CEO & co-founder of Blueland, a sustainable cleaning & home essentials brand on a mission to eliminate single-use plastics from our homes. She attended Harvard for her undergrad and MBA, worked at McKinsey out of college and then in private equity, then founded her first startup, a mobile shopping platform called Snapette, after business school. Snapette went on to be featured in NYTimes, Oprah, Today Show, Forbes, TechCrunch, WWD, Glamour and was named one of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. Snapette was backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs including Accel Partners and Forerunner Ventures and was sold after three years. Sarah went on to become a founding partner of LAUNCH, a venture studio that has incubated leading DTC brands like M. Gemi, Follain, and Rockets of Awesome. While on maternity leave she learned about the microplastics in our water supplies and was inspired to start Blueland in 2019. Blueland is a sustainability-driven brand that has been featured in NYTimes, WSJ, Vogue, and The Today Show as well as on Shark Tank. They've raised $35M to date from investors including Prelude Growth Partners as well as celebrity investors like Justin Timberlake and Adrien Grenier. In this conversation we discuss: Sarah's background including what she got out of her MBA experience Why she decided to start Blueland How her cultural upbringing impacted how she thinks about family, motherhood & success How she navigates being the face of her brand Her top tip for hiring great talent that she's learned from being a serial entrepreneur The main advice she'd give to early stage founders For more info: Blueland (website) Blueland TikTok & Instagram Sarah's Instagram

Welcome to another episode of The Action and Ambition Podcast! Joining us today is Rune Hauge, the Founder and CEO of Mentorcam, a marketplace where people access inaccessible mentors for 1:1 advice on business, entrepreneurship, and startups. Before co-founding Mentorcam, Rune founded three different startups with one successful exit as a founder. He also raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top-tier Silicon Valley VCs and high-profile angel investors. Don't miss a thing on this. Tune in to learn more!

Live Video Commerce is a brand new online shopping experience that is taking the world by storm and is expected to be a massive medium for NFTs, digital assets and physical assets in 2023. Why? Because Live Video Commerce combines the attributes of the Home Shopping Network, talk shows and auctions to provide online influencers with an ability to sell both physical and digital assets to a real-time audience via video. In Oct 2021 China's Austin Li (AKA ‘Lipstick Brother') sold $1.7bn of beauty products. Not for the year, the quarter, the month or even the day … in a 12 hour live video commerce show! A $425 BILLION MARKET IN CHINA ALREADY If you live in North America and don't quite see it yet, then seeing is believing when you look at these eye-popping China figures: $300 billion in China in 2021That is up 85% over 2020 Accounted for 11.7% of total retail ecommerce sales $425 Billion in 2022 ENTER OOOOO ENTERTAINMENT COMMERCE $OOOO $OOOOF The company was founded in 2020 by Sam Jones (previously with Wish.com) and Eric Zhang (previously with Musical.ly and Tiktok). $OOOO is providing the infrastructure and technology to power the live stream economy for the Western World. To prove up both the model and the technology, $OOOO had to first build their own app that generated over 500,000 installs and had the following mega brands sell product through it: Nike Lego L'Oréal The App reached the #1 spot in the UK for e-commerce

Kicking off a new series on the podcast, we brought in two of our members' CEOs, plus a bonafide industry expert, to discuss some of the key topics to have hit their in-tray this week. Regular host Yanni Andreopoulos was joined by Don White and Nathan Peterson, CEOs of Satisfi Labs and Tagboard, respectively, as well as sports sponsorship and comms guru Andy Sutherden. Andy has counselled major brands such as HSBC, Procter & Gamble and Adidas, led the sponsorship planning and activation for six of the major sponsors at London 2012 (and subsequent Olympics), and today advises companies from startups to FTSE 100s on partnership strategy. First up for dissection was the pros and cons of growing startups hiring talented people out of the big tech companies. We then turned our attention to the idea that many Silicon Valley VC firms are seeking returns so vast that they're overlooking viable investment opportunities in order to discover the next 'super unicorn'.  ----more---- In this episode we reference the following article: Napkin Math – Venture Capital Is Ripe for Disruption

My guest today is Mike Kadin.  Mike is the founder and CEO of RedCircle, a podcast platform that helps podcasters turn their hobby into a business. Mike is a self-taught software engineer, who learned to code for the web so that he could speed up his workflow as a high school teacher. After building software for educational institutions and non-profits, he spent 5 years at Uber building out all of Uber's engineering infrastructure for messaging and marketing. As a lifelong creator, Mike founded RedCircle because he discovered how hard it was for podcasters with thousands of fans to earn money for their art. With venture-backing from top Silicon Valley VCs, and an amazing 11-person team in San Francisco, RedCircle is excited to be delivering tremendous revenue for thousands of podcasters around the world.

Jesus said it's easier for a Camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of heaven if that verse freaks you out, even a little bit.  Then you're in the right place and among friends I'm Mark King, your host. and I am a Bruised Camel. So right off the bat, we need to answer the question: what exactly is a Bruised Camel? The short answer is a Bruised Camel is a wealthy person trying to enter the Kingdom of God without God's help. Because Jesus was pretty clear when he explained the whole camel and the eye of the needle thing to the disciples: what's impossible for man is only possible with God. The longer answer to “what's a Bruised Camel?” comes out two of my own struggles and bruises. My first struggle is that while sometimes I'm pretty good at setting aside everything and following Jesus, most of the time I flip flop.  The rich young ruler at least had the integrity to just go home. You have to respect the self-awareness and decisiveness. If it'd been me that day, I'd have started following Jesus and then turned around and headed home…then turned around and chased after Jesus…then bailed out for home, only to do another 1-80 and chase after Jesus. I'm bruised by my repeated attempts to get through the eye of the needle on my own. My second set of bruises comes from being a Jesus follower working in the business world and the investment industry specifically. It's a place where people (some people at least) secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, believe the Michael Douglas' character in the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, was right “Greed IS good.” Now let me be crystal clear about two things:  First, I don't think other professions and industries are any better or worse than the business world. Every profession has a dark and a light side. But I only know about and feel called to the business world. So that will be the focus of the podcast and newsletter. Second, it drives me crazy that the businesspeople are so often vilified in popular culture or reduced by Christians to being a cash spewing ATM machine who's only role is funding other spiritual superior activities. I am an unapologetic evangelist for the protestant work ethic. If you're a businessperson, I will fight to make sure people understand that you're doing God's work. We are called to be small business owners. We are called to be free lancers and corporate employees. And yes, we are called to be Wall St. financiers and Silicon Valley VCs.  But…ask any Old Testament prophet…being called doesn't make it easy. It can be a bruising experience to say the very least. Fortunately, over the course of my career, I've encountered other Jesus followers in the business world that were bruised by these same two problems. They helped heal my bruises, taught me how to avoid the mistakes they'd made, and encouraged me to keep going and be the best businessperson I could be. And that…is the purpose of the Bruised Camels newsletter and podcast. First and foremost, to point you towards Jesus and encourage you to connect with other Bruised Camels.  And secondly, to help you be the amazing businessperson that God has called you to be. I would love to hear your story and learn how the newsletter and podcast can serve you. Please…please shoot me an email at Mark@BruisedCamels.com  Hearing from you would make my day. Above all don't forget what Jesus said about getting that Camel through the eye of the needle:  with God…all things are possible.

In der Rubrik “Investments & Exits” begrüßen wir heute Otto Birnbaum, General Partner von Revent. Otto hat die Finanzierungsrunde von LiveEO und Terabase Energy analysiert: Das Berliner SaaS Startup LiveEO hat eine Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 19 Millionen Euro abgeschlossen. Mithilfe von einer KI gesteuerten Software analysiert und überwacht LiveEO Satellitenbildern, um Informationen und mögliche Risiken über Vegetation und Bodenverformungen im Bereich der Infrastruktur frühzeitig zu erkennen. Mit diesen Daten können Betreiber von Eisenbahnen, Stromleitungen und Pipelines vorzeitige und notwendige Anpassungen vornehmen. Dies soll zu weniger Reiseunterbrechungen, Stromausfällen und Engpässe in der Lieferkette führen. Zudem können so Kosten gespart und die Auswirkungen des Klimawandels bekämpft werden. Die Finanzierungsrunde wird vom Londoner DeepTech-Investor MMC Ventures angeführt. Zudem beteiligen sich die Europäische Kommission, Segenia Capital, Motu Ventures, Helen Ventures, Hannover Digital Investments, Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures, Matterwave und die Investitionsbank Berlin an der Finanzierungsrunde. Mit dem neuen Kapital soll die globale Marktexpansion von LiveEO vorangetrieben werden. LiveEO wurde 2017 von Sven Przywarra und Daniel Seidel gegründet. Außerdem verkündete Terabase Energy letzte Woche eine Series-B-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 44 Millionen US-Dollar. Der von Bill Gates initiierte CleanTech-VC-Fonds Breakthrough Energy Ventures und Prelude Ventures führen die Finanzierungsrunde an. Im Breakthrough Energy Fonds sind Namhafte Personen wie Jeff Bezos und Softbank-Gründer Masayoshi Son investiert. Des weiteren beteiligen sich SJF Venture und einige Silicon Valley-VCs. Das US-Startup Terabase Energy will Roboter nutzen, um sehr schnell effiziente und große Solaranlagen zu bauen. Diese Solarkraftwerke sollen dann Unternehmensangaben zufolge Energie im Terawatt-Bereich liefern. Das erhaltene Kapital dient zur Skalierung und verbesserung der Roboterplattform. Gegründet wurde Terabase Energy von Amine Berrada, Chris Baker, Dan Cohen, Matt Campbell und Pierre Gousseland gegründet.

This episode has been published and can be heard everywhere your podcast is available. Jamil tackles Matthew Le Merle, who is co-founder and Managing Partner of Fifth Era which manages Blockchain Coinvestors - the world's leading blockchain venture fund of funds. Matthew is also Managing Partner of Keiretsu - the most active early stage venture investors backing almost 200 companies a year. He is Chairman of CAH, Securitize (Europe), Universal Protocol Alliance and Vice Chairman of SFOX. Matthew grew up in England before living most of his life in Silicon Valley where he raised his five children with his wife Alison Davis. Today he splits his time between the US and UK. By day he is an investor in technology companies and a bestselling author and speaker on innovation, investing and the future having worked at McKinsey, A.T. Kearney, Monitor, Booz and Gap. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, writing and photography. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and Stanford and is an adjunct professor at Singularity U. To learn more go to www.fifthera.com Here are some of the things they discussed 1. What is your own background? It is a logical background to what you do now? 2.Give us with a brief overview of Blockchain Coinvestors and Fifth Era along with an overview of your investment mandate principles. 3. You are a best selling author and researcher. You recently conducted an in-depth focus study of 10,000 institutional investors and high net worth individuals about some common myths and fears concerning Bitcoin. Could you please provide us a snapshot of some of your key findings? What were they? 4. The #1 fear was Bitcoin isn't safe to own. How do you feel about that result and what measures do you feel would support your investors in changing their minds? 5. Of the remaining concerns, what one most surprised you and why? 6. What result did you most expect to see but maybe expected a larger percentage of concern? Why? 7. Bitcoin has only been adopted by a small number of Fortune 1000 companies publicly, including Microstrategy and Tesla. The actual number is in contrast to your focus group findings about Wall Street greed, though both your HNW audience and my blue collar friends feel the same way. How do you see, in actuality, Bitcoin and Wall Street playing out in the short, medium and long term? 8. What do you think it will take to really achieve mass adoption? 9. In addition to Bitcoin, I noticed your firm recently took on coin investments in both Aave and Uniswap, which are open sourced decentralized protocols on the Ethereum network. As an Aave investor, that captivated my interest. I would expect a Silicon Valley VC to be more interested in a VC backed crypto such as Maker or Compound. What prompted your interest in Aave and Uniswap? Host Jamil Hasan is the Crypto Hipster. Jamil hosts this global crypto and blockchain audio podcast series where he interviews founders and co-founders, entrepreneurs and artists, executives and stay-at-home Hipsters in crypto and blockchain from all around the world. Jamil is a five-time author and best known for being the pre-eminent author in the field of Blockchain Ethics. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crypto-hipster-podcast/support

The sales and revenue functions at today's fastest-growing companies act and think differently than their counterparts. Massive amounts of data inputs and greater coordination — and often, integration — with product, marketing and customer success have redefined the anatomy of today's sales leader.    But indicators of sales success represent only part of the broader blueprint for rapid business growth. In this episode, originally broadcast on the Gartner Sales Podcast, Craig Rosenberg, a Distinguished VP Analyst who serves heads of sales and revenue in his role at Gartner, welcomes special guest Dale Chang, an operating partner with Scale Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley VC firm. The two discuss the four vital signs that are critical to understanding growth, efficiency, churn and burn; how the expected growth trajectory for successful businesses has changed dramatically; and the most important skills for the sales leaders of today — and tomorrow.   Dig Deeper   Download: The Chief Sales Officer Quarterly: Actionable Insights for Forward-Thinking Sales Leaders https://gtnr.it/3cvyqK6   Subscribe: The Gartner Sales Podcast https://bit.ly/3RQt7VO

If Jennifer Smith is right, the way anyone shares how-to knowledge is about to change forever. A former VC and McKinsey consultant turned accidental CEO, she interviewed more than 1,200 business leaders on a quest to understand everything there is to know about processes, best practices, and productivity. Now with her startup Scribe, she's empowering people to own their processes by building the world's first operating system for know-how.
For as long as she can remember, Jennifer has been fixated on finding better, faster ways to get work done. That obsession led her to a career in consulting at McKinsey, where she spent seven years getting paid to uncover the secrets and shortcuts behind companies' highest-performing employees. From there she moved to Silicon Valley VC firm Greylock, picking the brains of over a thousand CIOs, CDOs, and CXOs in an effort to understand their biggest operational pain points.She was shocked to find that despite advances in technology, not much had changed since her early days at McKinsey — to get a true picture of their operational best practices, companies still had to hire a high-priced consultant to look over the shoulder of some overstressed employee. So she teamed up with a former Google engineer and quietly set about building a tool that could automatically capture how employees work, allowing organizations to finally understand, document, and optimize how work gets done.Growing by word-of-mouth only, Scribe has already become a hit at tens of thousands of organizations from tech startup unicorns to Fortune 500 companies. And with over $30M in funding from some of Silicon Valley's most prescient VC's, you can be sure the knowledge sharing revolution they've started is just beginning.

Episode Summary -Do you spend your time being busy, yet end up having an unproductive day?Do you ever feel like your to-do lists are getting longer daily, and you have no clue how to sort them out?
Do you find yourself focusing on the urgent all day long?If any of the situations describe you, it probably means you need to look carefully at how you are managing your time.
The most common reason people struggle with their to-do list is that they tend to spend time on the tasks that are of the least importance.
There is a vast difference between being busy and being productive.
Being productive means you focus on how you can do more with less time and how you can make your work simple. It is also about identifying the tasks that are killing your time and getting rid of them.In this episode, Jennifer Smith shares some productivity tips on utilizing your time more efficiently."Falling in love with the process is the way to overcome self-doubt and self-limiting belief."

Snapshot of the Key Points from the Episode:[02:25] Jennifer shares her background story and talks about why she started with Scribe.[05:03] Jennifer talks about Scribe - What is it, and how it helps people be productive.[09:30] Jennifer shares tips for having a productive workforce.[15:57] Jennifer talks about the skillsets that have helped her succeed.[19:35] Jennifer talks about an accomplishment that is most meaningful for her.[22:41] How to overcome your self-limiting beliefs to boost your confidence.[26:18] Jennifer talks about an obstacle she has faced and how she walked through it.[32:09] The power of asking for feedback from customers.[36:44] What does working from your happy place mean to Jennifer?

How to Connect with Jennifer Smith:Website - https://scribehow.com/LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/in/jenniferreneesmithTo upgrade to Scribe Pro, use the promo code “happy place” to get a discount.About the Host -Belinda Ellsworth is a Speaker, Trainer, Best-Selling Author, and PodcasterShe has been a professional speaker, mover, and shaker for more than 25 years. Having built three successful companies, she has helped thousands of entrepreneurs make better decisions, create successful systems, and build business strategies using her "Four Pillars of Success" system.Belinda has always had a passion and zest for life with the skill for turning dreams into reality. Over the last 20 years, she has been expertly building her speaking and consulting business, Step Into Success. How to Connect with Belinda:Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/stepintosuccessLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/belindaellsworthInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/stepintosuccess/Website - www.workfromyourhappyplace.com

#ICYMI Back in STIMY Ep 30, we met Dr Finian Tan - Chairman & Co-Founder of Vickers Venture Partners - a $3 billion deep tech venture capital fund based out of Singapore. Some things he's done: founder of J.Aron (APAC trading arm of Goldman Sachs)Deputy Secretary of Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry, where he was tasked with creating Chairman of Singapore's  $1 billion TIF Fund, to create the Silicon Valley of the East in SingaporeExecutive deputy chairman of A*Star Founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson Eplanet, a Silicon Valley VC that invested in Skype & Hotmail. While at DFJ, Dr Finian Tan made his first & most well-known investment in a little-known startup called Baidu. This is a ICYMI snippet that I felt really illustrates Dr Finian's character & it happened all the way back when he was still a student.He swept ALL the book prizes, and got perfect scores while at university.How did he do it?By planning it like a WAR.

From Goldman to Kleiner and the launch of G2VP, this Aussie has been at the forefront of support for entrepreneurs at the growth stage who are unlocking new paths to environmentally and socially responsible economic growth. Meet Ben Kortlang, Partner @ G2VP  Ep.#42  Ben Kortlang, Partner @ G2 Venture Partners (G2VP) - Tech4Climate Podcast by Startup basecamp PART 1: Meet the investor In today's episode, we are speaking with  Ben Kortlang, Partner at G2VP. G2 Venture Partners is a venture and growth firm focused on emerging technologies driving sustainable transformation across traditional industries. The firm focuses on supporting entrepreneurs at the growth stage who are unlocking new paths to environmentally and socially responsible economic growth. I was excited to have Ben on the show, a self-described “aussie, forced environmentalist” who grew up surrounded by nature and no electricity in the Australian bush, has spent his last 20 years proving that companies could be profitable and sustainable in business to win big. Prior to starting G2VP, Ben spent 7 years at Goldman Sachs and then joined the Silicon Valley VC ecosystem in 2008 with Kleiner Perkins where he started the Green Growth Fund focused on growth-stage sustainable industrial technology companies until 2020.  In this episode, Ben will share his view of the US climate tech ecosystem, the fundamentals that drive the market today compared to the early days of the Cleantech era 1.0, and the US advantages/weaknesses compared to the EU and rest of the world. Then, he will discuss the framework G2VP developed to back winning growth stage companies in sustainable industrial tech and how they support their growth with their “G2VP Growth toolkit” . Together, we will go on to explore the climate tech sectors with promising impact/cash returns and the areas he believes have exciting potential for investment, growth, and impact. Afterward, Ben will share his view on the climate crisis today, why all the nature-based and tech solutions are important to solve the climate crisis, and how you can be involved with G2VP today. Part 2: My secret sauce: In the second part of the show, Ben will give his secret sauce for founders looking to pitch to investors successfully and share the key metrics investors are looking for when making their investment decisions. Lastly, Ben will cover how he tackles challenges to maintain a healthy work-life balance and share a few inspiring reads for climate tech founders. 

Mentorcam - Book your mentor session with promo code CODE for 20% off! Topic: Funding your startupFor the first installment of Mentorcam March, we chat with Rune Hauge, the Founder and CEO of Mentorcam. Rune is an expert in funding your startup, and is a multi time founder. Prior to Mentorcam, he founded three startups and had one successful exit. He has raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top tier Silicon Valley VCs and high-profile angel investors, and also took Mentorcam through Y Combinator.Questions:How do you build a fundraising strategy?What would make one investor a better fit than another?How do you identify the right investors to go after?How do you create the best Y Combinator application?How do you find seed investors?How important is the MVP in the fundraising process?Book a call with Rune by accessing the link below:https://mentor.cam/runehauge - Use Promo Code CODESupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ali Tamaseb is a partner at DCVC, a Silicon Valley VC fund with over $2 billion under management. The investments Tamaseb led on behalf of DCVC has generated an enterprise value of over $6 billion and the companies he sits on as a board director employ over 3,000 people.Tamaseb studied Electrical Engineering at University of Tehran, Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, and general management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and he was an honoree of the British Alumni Award of 2018 by the British Council, and was the recipient of Imperial College President's Medal for Outstanding Achievement.Tamaseb has 7 publications, including two books and five academic papers, holds several patents, and has won medals in national and international Physics and Computing Olympiads. Ali's latest book “Super Founders: What Data Reveals about Billion-Dollar Startups” became the #1 bestselling Venture Capital and Startup book, is published in over 50 countries and is being translated into over 10 languages. Ali and his work have been featured in the WSJ, BBC, Fortune, Guardian, The Telegraph, and Forbes among others and he has given keynote talks at major events and conferences.We have a fascinating conversation, which I think will blow up some of your myths you might have about what it takes to be a super founder. We discussed the number of co-founders, the founder staying CEO, whether first mover is an advantage, what happens when you have competition, the importance of timing, and we talk about how success is so rarely overnight. He also suggests areas that he thinks founders should be building in for the future.“I recommend [when you raise a lot of money] to entrepreneurs, it takes a very, very good discipline of you don't necessarily have to spend the money that you raise. But if you have the discipline of being lean, and only spending that money, there's product market fit” - Ali TamasebToday on Startups for Good we cover:Misconceptions of the qualities of a founderThe value of a co-founderSurvivorship biasMyths and stereotypes of being an investorThe correlation between the amount of money raised and successCompetition can show that there is a marketConnect with Ali on LinkedIn and TwitterAli's book Super Founders can be purchased where all books are soldOther references from the show:Miles' blogpost on Survivorship biasSubscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.Don't forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose...

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby From the New York Times bestselling author of More Money Than God comes the astonishingly frank and intimate story of Silicon Valley's dominant venture-capital firms—and how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy Innovations rarely come from “experts.” Elon Musk was not an “electric car person” before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension, the world. In The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby has parlayed unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time—the key figures at Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Benchmark, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Chinese partnerships such as Qiming and Capital Today—into a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis that unfurls the history of tech incubation, in the Valley and ultimately worldwide. We learn the unvarnished truth, often for the first time, about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in Valley history, from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber. VCs' relentless search for grand slams brews an obsession with the ideal of the lone entrepreneur-genius, and companies seen as potential “unicorns” are given intoxicating amounts of power, with sometimes disastrous results. On a more systemic level, the need to make outsized bets on unproven talent reinforces bias, with women and minorities still represented at woefully low levels. This does not just have social justice implications: as Mallaby relates, China's homegrown VC sector, having learned at the Valley's feet, is exploding and now has more women VC luminaries than America has ever had. Still, Silicon Valley VC remains the top incubator of business innovation anywhere—it is not where ideas come from so much as where they go to become the products and companies that create the future. By taking us so deeply into the VCs' game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.

On today's show, Liz talks with Eva Nahari—The Queen of Garbage Collection. Eva developed her love for computer science after a strange encounter with a creepy guy on a subway platform in her native home of Stockholm, Sweden. She graduated during the post dot-com bubble and had a tough time finding a job, until she described a way to clean up garbage java code to a prospective employer. That first job launched a two-decade career solving difficult problems across a variety of Silicon Valley tech companies as a top Product Manager. But eventually, her career plateaued and she got stuck—unable to figure out how to get to the next level and increasingly angrier with her inability to solve the problem. Fortunately, a good friend introduced her to an older and wiser career coach who taught her how to allow herself to exist in an uncomfortable state with no plan and no immediate problem to solve. She told Eva that this state would allow her to be open to the most possibilities and, lo and behold, it worked. Today, Eva is applying her problem-solving skills as Principal at DNX Ventures, a Tokyo and Silicon Valley VC where she continues her love of software development as an investor in early-stage tech companies. 

Victor Gutwein, an investor and Managing Partner at M25, shares insightful stories and authentic examples of how startups evolve in the Midwest. He also reflects on opportunities for both founders and investors as the startup ecosystem there develops.In this episode, you'll learn:[6:56] Why is it challenging for founders in the Midwest to find real risk-seeking capital?[11:44] How does a conservative mindset influence founders to sacrifice hypergrowth for modest profits?[16:23] Midwest startups should capitalize on the natural advantage of being closer to customers than coastal startups.[25:02] Why is managing cultural pressure becoming more important to founders?Non-profit that Victor is passionate about: FAITHTECHABOUT GUEST SPEAKERVictor Gutwein is an investor and Managing Partner at M25. He's an entrepreneur, economist, and strategist aiming to create value in the Midwest by investing in early-stage startups. Victor grew up in Northwestern Indiana before moving to Chicago to study economics at the University of Chicago. He has worked in corporate retail fashion and e-commerce and also has entrepreneurial experience building a vending machine business, kick scooter company and the board of UChicago's first student-run venture fund. ABOUT M25M25 is a Chicago-based early-stage venture capital firm investing solely in companies headquartered in the Midwest. Their portfolio companies include Authentic, Joshin Care, Branch, Upsie, and Qooper.Next Week's EpisodeIn next week's episode, we have a special guest, Nick Moran, Founder and General Partner at New Stack Ventures, where we chat about what he looks for in founders and why it's different from what Silicon Valley VCs search.Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode that will drop next Tuesday.Follow us: Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook

Sylvia is an experienced leader and strategist helping Fortune 500 and tech companies attract audiences through powerful storytelling content. Through her mission, she co-founded a content marketing agency - https://www.bmagnetic.co/ (B Magnetic) and has directed content creation for Uber, Pokemon, Samsung, Go-Pro, Affirm, T-Mobile, and others. Previously, Sylvia created and managed content for Netflix and Apple, built two media production studios in Europe and the U.S., co-founded a tech startup backed by top Silicon Valley VCs, and run her talk show Valley Talks with over 50 episodes on behind the scenes of growing a startup in Silicon Valley. Sylvia was featured in Huffington Post, Business Insider, Times, Wistia and appeared on TV shows, radio stations and podcasts. She has spoken on stages of Google, DocuSign, Salesforce, Zendesk and has been a jury member of ‘Startup' and ‘Women Role Model' awards in San Francisco. -- CONNECT WITH THE WILD FEATHER -- Website: https://www.thewildfeatherpodcast.com/ (https://www.thewildfeatherpodcast.com) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewildfeatherpodcast (https://www.instagram.com/thewildfeatherpodcast) Twitter: https://twitter.com/thewildfeather_ (https://twitter.com/thewildfeather_) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewildfeatherpodcast (https://www.facebook.com/thewildfeatherpodcast) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thewildfeatherpodcast (https://www.linkedin.com/company/thewildfeatherpodcas)

GEMA TALKS with Rich Battista speaks one-on-one with Chris Kelly (C '91), Co-Owner of the Sacramento Kings and veteran tech and media executive and investor. Chris discusses the impact of the Coronavirus on the NBA, the Silicon Valley VC and start-up world and the media industry; he also gives his thoughts on the streaming wars and the lessons and insights from his extraordinary career from being one of the original Facebook employees to the various companies he has invested in or acted as consultant with over the years.GEMA TALKS is a podcast series from the Georgetown Entertainment and Media Alliance (GEMA), hosted by Georgetown University alumnus and GEMA Founder/Chairman, Rich Battista (B '86). In each episode, Rich welcomes a prominent Georgetown University alumnus working in the entertainment and media industry to discuss their career journey, their role in the industry, how the business has evolved and where it's headed, how being a Hoya propelled them to their place within it and their advice for those looking to break into or rise up in the industry. Producers: Rich Battista and Alex Ghaffari; Music theme: Teddy Zambetti; Logo: Ross Patrick

Jessica Katz is the founder and owner of Liberated Elephant,  she's an acclaimed agile coach, mentor and speaker. We can learn lots about change with Jessica today including: What actually are the “agile change values” How to unlock your internal predator The key themes for leading change How to liberate your elephant with an agile mindset Plus load more hacks! Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services Find out more about Jessica Katz below: Liberated Elephant - http://liberatedelephant.com Jessica on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeskatz/ Jessica on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ElephantTaming   Full Transcript Below ----more----   Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.   Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.   Today's special guest is Jessica Katz. She's a trainer, a mentor, and an Agile coach through her firm, Liberated Elephant. Before we get a chance to speak with Jessica, it's The Leadership Hacker News. The Leadership Hacker News   Steve Rush: There is a "change" theme in today's news. So, we're going to focus on a report created by Bond Capital, a Silicon Valley VC firm, whose portfolio includes Slack and Uber. The recent report, which briefed us investors has said that the global pandemic has had a similar devastating impact to Silicon Valley as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. So why does that matter to the rest of the world? Well, Bond best-known partner. Mary Meeker is a former bank analyst and renowned for her annual internet trends report, which many investors and entrepreneurs use as a touchstone for where tech is and where it's going. And her 28-page report calls out some really interesting themes that I thought I'd share with you. So, here's the top five things I've pulled out of the report.   Number one is data-driven forward planning, the biggest market cap growers, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Google, and Facebook, or possess short and long-term business plans centred around data and their data plans include execution, iteration, engineering, and science. The report goes on to say admits the current pandemic expect these business plans to be more widely focused with more scientists, engineers, domain experts, serving as board members and non-executive directors with much stronger, more relevant voices.   Number two, the continuation of remote working environments. With the coronavirus forcing companies to adapt to remote working environments to much greater degrees than they were used to. Many companies may find for certain positions, remote working is just fine, if not more efficient for them, CEOs and boardrooms will need to reflect on their companies and employees and ask management to recommend their evaluation of what their teams work best with together in person and what also needs to be effective to ensure maximum efficiency if they continue to work remotely.   Number three, interestingly, Meeker findings from an informal survey asking companies about remote work found that those who focus on effective written communication and documentation based off the Amazon way had the best and most efficient transitions to remote work. This form of collaboration can result in much more discerning and productive input. And of course, decision making.   Number four, and not surprising, accelerating digital transformation. The businesses that are doing the best and will make it through this pandemic with less difficulties and problems will be the companies who had already begun the offline to online transition. The current pandemic has accelerated these trends, which will place more emphasis and focus on a company's technological presence with its worker consumers, as mentioned by Meeker. This includes the integration of cloud-based business functions, persistently demanded products, accessible and manoeuvre online presence, efficient delivery methods with limited contact and digitally efficient products with a social media presence.   And number five is on-demand business growth models. With the change in the way that we as consumers and workers have adapted the demand on companies, such as Uber, Airbnb are struggling due to social distancing, staying at home orders. On the other hand, on-demand services such as Instacart or DoorDash or any other door delivery service provider has expensed large spikes in demand and are eagerly hiring new labour.   The on-demand economy has grown across the globe over the last few years. In Meeker report, she calls out that in 2018, there were 56 million estimated on-demand customers compared to 25 million in 2016. The Bureau of labour statistics also concluded the on-demand services has around 156 million workers, and that's in the US alone as of the middle of 2020. Meeker believes that the on-demand and door to door delivery service may be gaining a permanent market share in these unusual times, due to the clear benefits to consumers and the opportunity of displaced workers to receive work, income and schedule your flexibility around their personal schedules.   The report goes on to say that Instacart is reportedly hiring 250,000 workers now, which in more than Walmart and A3combined. So, I guess the leadership lesson here is as leaders and as business folk, are we being really thoughtful to the trends that are emerging in the future that are impacting on not just what's happening now, but how our business might need to adapt and change in the future? My final reflections is for you to consider. What are the top five things that are trending in your business area that could impact on you, your colleagues and your business in the future? That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Like always, if you have any information, stories, nudge it my way and contact us through social media.   Start of Podcast   Steve Rush: Jessica Katz is a special guest on today's show. She's the founder and owner of Liberated Elephant. She's an agile coach and mentor where she really makes the elephant in the room work for you, Jessica, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.   Jessica Katz: Hi, thank you so much for having me on today.   Steve Rush: It's our pleasure. So, before we kind of get into a little bit about what you do now, just give us a little bit of a tour if you like of your career so far, where it's taken you?   Jessica Katz: Sure. So, my career so far, well, I started in an administrative role really and recognize that if I was going to make the kind of money, I wanted to make to support my family, I needed to something different, went back to school and ended up in project management and from project management moved over into scrum, which is a type of agile process and then into agile coaching and now into my own business, which is the really abbreviated version of my history. Steve Rush: What was it specifically for you that says, right, okay. I've got this foundation of project management, you've pivoted into the world of scrum and agile, which is perhaps a precursor, isn't it for managing change in a more rapid and changing environment, but what was it specifically, you said, right. I'm now going to run my own business. I'm going to leave behind corporate America?   Jessica Katz: Yeah. So, I got passed over for a promotion and it caused me to introspect and realize that my personal values and desire for the way I thought business should be, were out of alignment with the company I was with. And I started my business there and I worked as an employee at there and at other places before it was really able to cut the wires and move into my own thing and have it just be my thing, you know, the getting passed over for promotion. I thought I was ready for, that I thought I was capable of, that I thought I was the right person for and realizing rather suddenly that the organization was going a very different direction than I thought was healthy or good for the people that work there. Caused me to say, you know, maybe I should be making this kind of change in the world and not just in the one place I work. And so that's really what kicked off my business. I wanted to start moving the culture of business elsewhere,   Steve Rush: Got it, by the way, I think your company name is an amazing, so Liberated Elephant. It just instantaneously puts most people that worked in any business environment, straight in that room, where there is that uncomfortable elephant awaiting to be attacked. How did you come up with the name or is it just blatantly obvious?   Jessica Katz: Well, it took a little work to come up with the name, cause lots of people have business names with elephants. I had to do a little digging to find the right name, but for me, one of my superpowers is that I'm able to identify chinks in the armour. And when I work for other people, when I'm in an employee position, then I'm what they call an internal predator. And I look for chinks in the armour and identify weaknesses in the processes or breakdowns in communication. And I bring those to light and I'm ready to work through them with whomever I've brought them to, right. And I'm not throwing them at people going now, you solve it, right. I want to solve it with them. And those kinds of things, breakdowns in communication, in effective processes, processes we've put in place to deal with personality instead of actually dealing with the personality. Those are the kinds of elephants you see regularly creating dysfunction in our organization. Steve Rush: Now the whole principle of managing change and leading change has really morphed over the last 10 years. And for those that are not familiar with agile, there's a number of different variants of variations of Scrum, Kanban, and others. So, for those that are not familiar, just maybe give us a summary as to how you might describe somebody that you've bumped into has no idea about leading and managing change. What agile really is?   Jessica Katz: Sure. So agile is based in four values. Individuals and interactions, over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration, over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan. Those four values are the basis. Now agile as a whole is an umbrella term that encompasses many ways that we deliver on those four values. Scrum is one of them. Kanban is another, Lean, XP, even Six Sigma. They all fall under that agile umbrella, but agile at its core is just four values and 12 principles. It doesn't have any roles. It doesn't have any instructions on how to do it. It is just a value-based system. What we hear a lot in the world is, oh, well I'm Scrum, so I must be agile. And those two things, they don't have to be the same.   Steve Rush: Right.   Jessica Katz: You can be Scrum and not actually be living the values. You can be Agile and not be doing Scrums. So, there's you know, they can be separate. So, you know, one thing that I coach people towards in change really change management is about getting from where you are, to where you want to be and the way you move an organization from where you are to where you want to be, is you shift the mindsets and beliefs so that the behaviours follow. And often when people implement Scrum, they implement the process and then, oh, we forgot. We also need to switch people's minds.   Steve Rush: Right.   Jessica Katz: And you actually need to start with the mindset and then move into the rest. And that's a big lift for a lot of organizations. Well, we want to see results. What are the things we're doing to show that we're doing this change? And the real shift happens in small moments and in the individual minds of everybody in you company.   Steve Rush: Okay. So, when it comes to coaching other project leaders and managers around Agile, what would you say maybe the one or two consistent themes that keep presenting themselves for you that our listeners could learn from?   Jessica Katz: Sure. So, the first big one is that if leadership isn't bought in, really thinks the idea of having an Agile mindset is valuable, then we won't succeed. The reality is the transformation in organizations takes every individual to transform, or at least the majority of the people in the organization to transform. And it's weighted towards leadership because the individual contributors and your system will emulate leadership, copy what they see, because that's the path to promotion.   Steve Rush: Right.   Jessica Katz: So, what you really want to do is get your leaders bought in. So, when they bring me in as a coach, if I'm coaching an organization towards that change, I'm going to spend a lot of time with leadership. It doesn't mean the teams and the individual contributors don't need coaching, but they bring me in as an enterprise coach, I'm going to bring in a couple of Agile team level coaches to handle the, you know, the individual contributors and getting them moving in the right way. So, we attack it from two fronts. We get the leadership moved, and we get the individual contributors moved.   The second problem that shows up is the middle manager, the middle manager gets stuck. In Agile, we call the frozen middle. If you shift the top and you shift the bottom, the manager has both foundational pieces sort of shaken underneath them. And they have to figure out who they become in the new way, right? If you move both of those things, it's the who moved my cheese concept, right? Oh, suddenly my cheese, isn't where it used to be. The way I get measured, the way I get promoted, the way I promote others, the way I measure others all has to shift with that. And it can be very frightening for managers.   Steve Rush: Yeah, sure.   Jessica Katz: I'm not telling people what to do anymore. I'm letting them figure it out. And their job becomes connecting individual contributors to the larger business vision. And that's not a skill set we're taught before we become managers. So, it's can be quite, yeah, it can be quite frightening for the middle management set. Steve Rush: And when you start to think about leading change, what do you think the reason is that so many leaders of change initiatives, change programs and organizations often put that whole process before mindset? What do you think generally causes that?     Jessica Katz: It's easier.   Steve Rush: Yeah, I guess it is, isn't it? Yeah.   Jessica Katz: It's a path of least resistance to say, okay, use this tool and follow this process. And then we'll be Agile. Is easier than saying, let me spend the time to convince the population that this is a good idea, and really sit with them as they work through the struggle of shifting mindset so that they can be better, right? At slow, it often even just initiating a new process, never mind shifting a mindset. It actually slows down productivity for a little while with the long-term gain of increased productivity and public organizations. You're not driven towards long-term gain. You're driven towards short term gain because that's what moves the stock market, makes your board happy. So, there's a bunch of cognitive dissonances that shows up and, you know, sort of conflicts of interest that appear.   Steve Rush: And of course, if you have to manage mindsets of others, you've also got to manage the mindset of yours. And if your mindset is perhaps less open, less growth-orientated, then you're less likely to want to be experimental and to do new things and test new ways of working. Right?   Jessica Katz: Yeah, absolutely. It takes a lot of introspection and a lot of work to look at yourself.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: And the curiosity of self and curiosity of others is probably one of the biggest leadership skills.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: If you can get curious about yourself and where you might be wrong, and you can look at others and get curious about where they're coming from and their perspective, you get a much, much richer picture. It becomes collaborative instead of directive. And everybody gets to be in the together instead of responding and being reactive to everything else going on around them.   Steve Rush: The first time I got involved in Agile was a number of years ago, and I had this experience where I'd kind of gathered my team together. We were all on point. We all felt engaged with the new ways of working. We went to our executive team who all gave us the verbal communication, they said, "yes, we're all agreed", and, "we're all aligned", but actually they still wanted to get old gunk charts. And they still wanted the regular milestones and check-ins and steer codes that came with good old fashioned waterfall projects. How do you deal with that scenario?   Jessica Katz: Okay. This is a classic Agile coach response. It depends. It depends a lot on the context. So, let's say they want those things because it's a division that's making the shift and their leaders aren't making the shift. So, they still need the same reporting to fit into the rest of the organization. So sometimes that's the situation and a well-placed project manager can be very good at the translation between what we're doing in an Agile way, to the way we used to do things in the way we need to communicate to the rest of the organization. So that can be a really beneficial asset to that kind of situation.   Another thing that I found is that there's not a good focus when they're receiving metrics. There's not a good focus on what they're going to do with that metric. So, a lot of times you can sit, you can look at somebody and go, okay, here that you want this Gantt chart, what problem are you trying to solve by having this Gantt chart and if the problem and the Gantt chart don't actually match, right? So maybe the problem is well, I want to know what value we're delivering to the customer. Well, the Gantt chart, doesn't tell you what value we're delivering. It tells you when we're delivering things, but value is usually hidden inside initiatives or features or user stories, right? And, often organizations are very bad at communicating value. They're very good at communicating output. How many, you know, how many widgets did we make? Easy communication. What impact did those widgets have on our customer base and on our interactions with the world, that's a much harder lift. And so, you sort of leave that status quo going for a while, and you start to introduce other ideas and build on that till they're satisfied that they're getting the answers, they need to answer the question. And then you let go of the initial Gantt chart type style, right? It's just like implementing a new system. You do a little AB testing, right? Here's the thing you use to get. Here's the thing we're going to give you now, which one of these better answers your question? And once they're satisfied that the new information answers their question, well, you can let go of the old information.   Steve Rush: I wrote an article about four or five years ago when I was doing exactly this kind of transitioning behaviours around how people were leading change. And I coined the phrase of water Agile for, you know, we were kind of half Agile, half Waterfall. And it just takes a bit of careful consideration, education and communication to those people, doesn't it? Not just around how you're going to move them. What can you let go of and what do you need to hold and what reporting needs to go where? But do you ever find yourself now in the world of Agile saying to your coaches, stop right there. That's just a good old traditional Waterfall project. You don't need Agile.   Jessica Katz: Well, you know, I haven't run across one of them in recent years, but I do when I teach about Agile, I do make it very clear that there are opportunities for Waterfall that make good sense.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: A Waterfall project works when you know what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, and who's going to do it.   Steve Rush: Definitely so.   Jessica Katz: If you know the answer to those three questions with real, like real definite, like you really know. Not we guessed about our requirements and we think it's going to be this, but like really know. Installing a new server, updating firmware on a server, those kinds of things, maybe don't need Agile, right?   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: Yeah, and those can work in a Waterfall way because you know what you need to do and you know how you're going to do it. And you probably have the same team that always does that kind of work. So, you have all of the pieces in play. Agile really is meant for complex projects, things where you don't know what, you don't know how and the, who is wobbly. And when I say to who is wobbly, I mean, the team is changing regularly or they're a brand-new team together. Or, you know, the team has to shift as the project shifts. That makes the who quadrant unknown as well.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: Yeah, so we're really like, Agile is best for complexity. And when it's simple, let it be simple. Waterfalls is okay; however, I would recommend that you make it small in both cases.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: Yeah, that if you do a Waterfall project, that's going to take you a year to implement, it's way too big. You want to do a really small Waterfall project, not a big gigantic thing because we're usually wrong about our estimates. Almost always wrong about our estimate. The cone of uncertainty will tell you your 0.25 to 4 times wrong on your estimate. So, if you estimate something's going to take a month, it could take you a week or it could take you four months. But if you estimate something's going to be a year, it could take you a quarter or it could take you four years. And that costs associated with that kind of risk is much higher. So, the smaller you can make it the better chance you have.   Steve Rush: Risk is also a really interesting point, isn't it? That keeps coming up in my change world. When I start introducing the whole hypothesis of experiments and testing and using some of the Agile techniques to start helping move change forward, faster and release value earlier. One of the things that keeps coming back is, surely this is much riskier than a good old traditional or to Waterfall project. How would you respond if you were positioned with that?   Jessica Katz: Yeah, it only feels like Waterfall is less risky because it feels false. Like it's more sure.   Steve Rush: Right.   Jessica Katz: Right, when we do a Waterfall project, we're certain. We've built all the requirements, we know everything, but the reality is as soon as it hits the market, we've lost our surety. Now we're getting feedback from our customer base and the market could be internal to the organization or external, as soon as it hits the market, you start getting feedback. And if you can't be responsive to that, if you spent a year building a project and now it hits the market and you find out the market, doesn't like it, you've lost a year's worth of money, where if you deliver for a couple of weeks and the market starts responding and you have an opportunity to shift your requirements so that it better suits the market. In a year's time. If it takes that long. In a year's time, you're much more likely to have satisfied your customer. And so, you know, usually when you build these big Waterfall projects, you pull like one or two people from the customer base, you have a little advocacy group. You're not really getting the full breadth of your customers and your customers are really what make the return-on-investment possible.   Steve Rush: And managed well, Agile will de-risk your project, the risk of change.   Jessica Katz: Yes.   Steve Rush: Absolutely, and I'm delighted here and it's absolutely something I experienced quite a lot, so awesome. You mentioned a little earlier, the frozen middle of the middle manager. This is taking you down a path yourself now where you're putting pen to paper and writing a book. So, we'll naturally going to have you back on the show when the books up and running to tell us a little bit about that, but from your research about that kind of frozen middle, you kind of almost identified, having you? There are three roles that typically present themselves in organizations where that kind of gets stuck. Tell us a little bit about what you found?   Jessica Katz: Sure. So, if you were a manager, you wear three hats. One is the hat of being an employee, right? I'm an employee. I'm coming here to do a job, to get paid, to grow myself, right? So that's one role,  the next role is one of advocate where you're advocating for the people that report to you. You're trying to create an environment that makes it possible for them to deliver, give them opportunities to grow, remove blockers so they can be successful. And then the other hat you're wearing is an enforcer. And this is the person who manages the status quo of the organization. Generally speaking, organizations want to stay at status quo. The pool will always be back to status quo. And the middle manager is the one making sure that continues down that path and in doing so, if they keep with the status quo and they present status quo and they lead like they're part of the status quo, then they're more likely to get promoted and have raises and be recognized for their work. So, there's a benefit to them in being an enforcer financially. And the other side of that hat is if you're advocating for the change, that's occurring in your teams and for your team, particularly if the team culture and the leadership culture is different. If you're advocating for them, then you look like you're not part of leadership and it will hurt your chances for promotion and raise because everybody wants to hire people and promote people that look and feel like them. And I'm not necessarily here talking about like physical attributes here. I'm talking about the, you know, the state of being, if you approach work the same way as the leader's approach work, they're more likely to recognize you as a good leader. Then if you approach work differently,   Steve Rush: Yeah. You need that kind of Azure and provocateur that drummer the change, Meister, call it whatever you will, but you need that to push against the status quo. How do you therefore then encourage that middle manager to manage their political corporate self-whilst still doing that effectively?   Jessica Katz: Very carefully.   Steve Rush: It's definitely true.   Jessica Katz: The first thing I recommend is that if they have a change that they think is worthwhile in the system. That in this position of middle-management, you don't actually have a lot of power. You have more power than the people that report to you, but in the organization at large, you don't have a lot. So, my recommendation then is to find a mentor in the system who's in leadership, who's known for implementing change and have them help you shepherd that idea through the system because you have to move change through the system that is. It's like, I mean, we see it all the time in the United States, the way laws are made, right? You have an idea and you have to wait until there's enough social pressure behind it before laws started to happen. It's the same kind of thing that needs to happen inside an organization. You build social pressure behind your ideas, and if you can get a mentor who is known for implementing change into your system, that's already in a high leadership position. You can leverage them to help you think it through and get it through in a way that is healthy and healthy for you as a manager and then also healthy for the organization. So, it's not jarring to the status quo.   Steve Rush: And this is also where Agile can help too. Isn't it?   Jessica Katz: Yeah.   Steve Rush: So, by running some experiments and some hypotheses, you can gather some evidence that helps the energy behind the change you want to plan or design, right? Jessica Katz: That's right. That big word that I heard you use there, the big words, hypothesis and experiment. A hypothesis looks like this. I believe, or we believe by implementing this change, we will see these results. We'll know where, right. Or we'll know we're wrong when this data is evidence and then try it a little. In fact, when I do Agile transformations, I don't recommend they changed the entire company all at once.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: I recommend that they set up a team or two fully empowered to make all the changes they need and test it in their system first and find out what blockers show up so that you can remove some of those blockers as you, it spread it further. So, you're not throwing your entire company into chaos, right? You're putting a company or two or a team or two into a chaos and deep learning for your organization. And I suppose that's really the trick around hypotheses and experiments is that you're looking for learning. Do you know that you're right? Is the change that you want to implement in the system a good one? Well, we don't know. So, test it, find a way to test it.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Jessica Katz: Small test it small.   Steve Rush: And if you get these behaviours right, as a middle manager, these middle managers will progress because they'll have the evidence to suggest that what they want to do, delete the organizations, right? And then you create that change culture at the top of the shop through kind of just natural growth and natural progression, I suspect.   Jessica Katz: Essentially, if you can get a groundswell, the company has no choice, but to move, right. But you'd probably need a, you know, a one in five for every leader that is resistant to the change you need at least, you know, five or more people that are into the idea of that change.   Steve Rush: Got it.     Jessica Katz: Because of that weigh towards leadership. Steve Rush: So, this part of the shows where we now start to turn the leadership lens of you. So, I'm going to ask you a few questions now just to hack into your great leadership mind. So, the first kind of thing I'd like to explore with you is your top three leadership hacks.   Jessica Katz: Okay. So, the first thing I want to talk about is spend 15 minutes every day planning your day. It's it feels counterintuitive. Well, that's 15 minutes. I'm not working then. Right? But the 15 minutes is used as a little bit of self-care. It lets you look at the day and decide what you need to prioritize in that day to be effective, even better. If you can do like 30 minutes on Monday or Sunday. So, you know, going into the week, what to expect. Now, those 15 minutes could be in the morning if you're an early bird or in the evening, if you're a night owl for the next day, what I have found is that if I do it in the morning, it sorts of sets me up for the whole day and I'm much more effective and the right things get done. And if I do it in the evening, it makes it easier to sleep. Cause I'm not worried about what's coming up the next day. So that 15 minutes every day is a little bit of slowing down to speed up, which is a really common Agile trend incidentally that you want to slow down to speed up. It has long-term impacts instead of short-term impacts.   Steve Rush: Love it, yeah.   Jessica Katz: Yeah, so that's my first one. My second one is don't assume you're right. Just because you have a specific role. So, if you're, for example, I'm an Agile coach. I'm going to come into an organization and I want to come from deep curiosity, I can say things like, well, common practice in the Agile community is X and somebody could say, well, I don't think that kind of practice will work for here and I'll go, okay, well, let's have a discussion about what the common practice is trying to solve, what problem you're trying to solve and find a solution that better suits your needs. In a position of leadership, you need to do the same thing. I have an idea about how to solve this problem, but I want to leave the room open for other people's ideas. And sometimes that means in environments that have a high retribution culture. Sometimes that means not saying anything until other people have spoken. But in a low retribution culture where it's easy to trade ideas back and forth and up and down the hierarchy, then just leaving that open door and stay in curious to what other people have to say would be my second suggestion.   Steve Rush: Cool.   Jessica Katz: And my third suggestion is lift others up. This is the rising tides lift all ships kind of circumstance. In traditional hierarchical organizations. It's very common for leaders to put themselves forward and try and look good and doing things, always trying to hoard and do things so that they continue to promote. One, you're going to burn out at some point and two, it doesn't give the people you're supporting, the people that report to you. It doesn't give them room to grow. So, lift them up and help them shine. And you will shine as a result of it. It is another one of those. It feels counterintuitive to do, but it's the right way to scale yourself.   Steve Rush: I love it. Often though, the most important things that we need to train ourselves to do differently feel counter-intuitive. And I love the whole, you know, 15 minutes or 30 minutes a day, getting yourself in order because ultimately you called it out. This is not about time management. Time management is kind of baloney, right? It doesn't exist, but what does exist is prioritization, love those hacks. The next part of the show, our listeners have become affectionately accustomed to hearing stories from our guests where they've had some adversity, things have maybe screwed up in the past. We call it Hack to Attack. But the key thing here is that we've learned from it. And it's now a force of good in our life and our work. What would be your Hack to Attack Jessica?   Jessica Katz: So, I have been passed over for promotions. I have received bad performance reviews. I have been fired. All of those things have happened in my history and I was contemplating them. And I was like, what's the common theme really? That came out for me in those things. And the common theme is that I'm a really fast mover and a fast thinker and it is worth it for me to slow down and observe and listen to the systems I'm in to make sure I don't misstep or inadvertently cause harm where no harm needed to be. It does require a sort of deep self-management for me. So, you know emotional intelligence is you know, the factors of self-awareness, self-management, others awareness and others management. I would say the two that I was weak on was others' awareness and self-management. Really understanding the impact of my words and actions and staying around to clean it up. If I made a mistake, cleaning it if given the opportunity, right? Because if you do harm, the other person has to be willing to have you clean it.   Steve Rush: Defiantly.   Jessica Katz: That's kind of where my big learning has come in. Steve Rush: And thank you for being so candid. There'll be many people listening to this who suffer with a similar kind of philosophy. And it's just that kind of being self-aware and organized that can make a massive difference, so awesome stuff. The very last thing that we'd like to do is to give you a chance to have a bit of time travel now. So, you get to bump into Jessica when she was 21 and you get to give her some advice, what your advice going to be?   Jessica Katz: Well, just to set the stage for your listeners. When I was 21, I hadn't yet figured out what I was going to do with myself. I chose not to go to college right away. And I was a single mom. And I was about a year out from moving to Nashville where I had no support system. And if I had a chance to do it over or had a chance to go back and talk to myself, one of the things I would say is take a breath and look at your support system. How are you going to have that support, that kind of support, no matter where you go? And a lot of what that takes is asking for help, even when you think you don't need it. It's still a hard thing for me to do, to ask for help. I'm better about it than I used to be. But man, if I could have gotten a hold of 21-year-old me and been willing to lean into that vulnerability, it could have been a huge shift in my life earlier.   Steve Rush: If only we had time travelled, right?   Jessica Katz: That's right.   Steve Rush: By then the world we're all different and we wouldn't have had the learning experiences we've had along the way.   Jessica Katz: That's true. That's true.   Steve Rush: So, what's next for you, Jessica?   Jessica Katz: What's next for me? My primary client is a training organization. I do some subcontract training through them. So, I do have some public classes available. If anyone's interested, they can go to my website to find future classes and I need to buckle down and work on that book. I've been a bit stuck, but this conversation today may have gotten me unstuck. So, I just want to say thank you for that.   Steve Rush: You're very welcome. We can unliberated your liberated elephant, right now. Jessica Katz: That's right. That's right. Get my elephant out of the room right now.   Steve Rush: Awesome, and I know that when you've concluded your book, we'll get you back on the show. We'll talk about some of the experiences in there as well, and we'll make sure we help our listeners connect with you. In the meantime, what's the best place for them to, we can send them to your website and that's liberatedelephant.com.   Jessica Katz: And if they want to follow me on LinkedIn, I do a bunch of posting there and it usually cross posts Twitter so they can follow me on Twitter. On Twitter I'm @ElephantTamer.   Steve Rush: Love that.   Jessica Katz: And on LinkedIn, you can find me as Jessica Kat.   Steve Rush: Brilliant, we'll make sure all of those links to your websites, Twitter and LinkedIn are in our show notes as well.   Jessica Katz: Wonderful, thank you so much.   Steve Rush: Jessica, listen. It's been absolutely amazing chatting to you. I've thoroughly enjoyed the whole exploration of Agile and the change and how you coach that through with your clients. Just wanted to say, wish you every success with conclusion of your book and most importantly whatever you do next and thanks for being part of our tribe on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.   Jessica Katz: Great, thank you so much. Stay healthy.   Steve Rush: Thank you, Jessica.     Closing   Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.   Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler there is @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.