Podcasts about Techstars

Rachel ten Brink is known by many as the "Stealth Latina," and a true trailblazer. She has always believed in the power of diversity and has used her unique background and perspective to make a difference in the worlds of venture capital and tech. Her commitment to bringing value to every aspect of her life - from work to relationships to family - is a testament to her dedication and passion. As the first Latina to raise $29M for her tech company, Rachel knows what it takes to succeed in a competitive industry. She has learned the importance of what not to do as much as what should be done, and she believes in investing in companies that empower the economy and improve people's lives. Rachel's killer instinct and boundary-setting skills are equally matched by her kindness and compassion. She understands the importance of mentor relationships as a two-way street of communication and sharing, and she values education as a key to unlocking one's full potential. In this podcast, Rachel inspires us to put our own skin in the game, to believe in ourselves, and to never let anyone else define our worth. Join us as we learn from Rachel's incredible journey and gain the inspiration and insights we need to break through barriers in our own lives. Visit gobeyondbarriers.com to find show notes and links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, including the best way to connect with Rachel. Highlights: [02:44] Rachel's background [04:01] Taking the leap into tech [05:16] Importance of establishing your brand [13:31] Moving into the venture capital world [17:44] The power of diverse teams [20:01] Voicing your opinion [23:20] Building strategic relationships [27:36] Drawing boundaries around helping others [31:00] Lightning round questions Quotes: “If you want to go from Point A to Point B, think about what's going to build your bridge.” – Rachel ten Brink “When you think about building your brand, it can't all be about me, me, me. You have to think about your audience.” – Rachel ten Brink “Seek out people who compliment you and who are strong where you are not.” – Rachel ten Brink Lightning Round Questions: What book has greatly influenced you? - “Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki What is your favorite inspiring quote or saying? - “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and in heels.” What is one word or moniker you would use to describe yourself? - Stealth Latina What is one change you've implanted that made your life better? - Intentionality around my schedule. What power song would you want playing as you walk out onto a stage? - “Whenever, Wherever” by Shakira About Rachel ten Brink: Rachel ten Brink is General Partner and Co-Founder of Red Bike Capital, a Latinx and woman-led Venture Capital fund based in New York that invests in early stage, high-growth startups that drive the economy and improve people's lives. Red Bike supports US-based founders in FinTech, Ecommerce SAAS, Marketplaces, and Wellness. Rachel has been a board member and senior advisor for various companies and serves on the Board of Directors of AboveBoard and Dyper. Rachel is a Y Combinator Founder turned VC. Prior to founding Red Bike Capital, she was Co-Founder and CMO of Scentbird, a Y-Combinator backed ecommerce startup that raised $29MM in venture funding- which makes her one of just 90 Latinas to have ever raised over $1M in funding. Leading Growth, Brand and Revenue, she scaled Scentbird to 500,000 paid subscribers and built 74 partnerships with corporations including Coty, Macy's and Glossier. Before this, she spent fifteen years building global billion-brands at P&G, Elizabeth Arden, Estee Lauder and L'Oreal. Named Entrepreneur Magazines' 100 Powerful Women of 2020, she has been featured in The New York Times, TechCrunch, WSJ, and Forbes. She is a champion diversity in the tech ecosystem through her work as a mentor at Y-Combinator, Techstars, Entrepreneurs Roundtable, 500 Startups, Columbia Business School Lang Center and NYU Entrepreneurship Center, and a member of Top Latinx in Tech, LatinxVC, VCFamilia, Transact, DealmakeHers and Latino Corporate Directors Association. She graduated magna cum laude from Babson College and holds an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School. She lives in New York City with her husband and two kids. Links: Website:https://www.projectdiane.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-ten-brink-a08151/

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios. Maisha has had an amazing career in corporate innovation, company building and venture capital, and we talk about the new Venture studio model and some of the things that she's seeing in the world of venture. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcription with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture StudiosBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maisha Leek. She's the managing director of Forum Venture Studios. Welcome to the show, Maisha. Maisha Leek: Thank you Brian. I'm excited to be here.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you've spent a lot of time in all the different cross sections of innovation. So corporate innovation, company building, venture capital. Can you tell us about your path and journey in this innovation space? Maisha Leek: Sure. I'd love to say it was all brilliantly planned. There's a lot of trial error, error, error, error, and then trial again. I actually got into this world in the interesting route. I was for a long time in Washington DC. I was a policymaker and a fundraiser. And in DC we had oversight of most of the science and innovation agencies. So, everything from NASA to Noah to National Science Foundation, which is about the $54 billion proposition, which is a lot of responsibility. And we work with your tax dollars, placing the best bets we could to jumpstart the economy or to just position the United States to be competitive. And so that turned in everything from investing in commercial space flight. You see that now with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and other companies. Those aren't the only ones. And investing in the advancement of batteries, which leads to all of the electric vehicles that we have now and, and sort of their ability to compete with their combustible counter parts.I knew I was far from all the action that everybody was in, in Silicon Valley and wanted to get closer to it, but by happenstance, met the founder of United Masters. Which was a music and tech company. And did not know what I was doing, except that I was an operator. I knew how to build out teams and build out a company and spent my time doing that. And we had the right as Silicon Valley goes investors. So had Ben Horowitz on our board. And David Drummond on our board. And was really active in managing those relationships. And when I was thinking about what to do next after spent some time at that startup, I had an executive coach and friends, they were like, you got to get into venture.And I'm like, that sounds really boring. And their suggestion I think is really apt for folks who are thinking about it. They suggested I would be good in the space because I had experience to do this on Capitol Hill, operating across a range of subject matters. And knowing to be sort of a generalist that can go deep in certain areas and analyze information and make quick judgements.My first experience was at Adventure Studio at Human Ventures. And that really influenced what I decided to do after that. And most of my time in the venture space, outside of being an angel investor or participating SPVs has really been in the venture studio space. I love it because of the close connection you can have with the founder and the founding team. It's not sort of like write a check. I'll call you once a month kind of thing. We're in it with them. But it also leans into the place where I'm strong. Which is I'm a really great operator and being able to do that with founders and helping them not make the same mistakes I've made in other companies that I've built or independent of that, also gives me great joy.So, I've done four Venture Studios - Nike Valiant Labs, Human Ventures, New Lab, which are across the series of categories. New Lab is Frontier Technology. Nike is really best to describe with CPG. Human Ventures, which is in large part direct to consumer. And Forum, which is B2B SaaS. And they all have their challenges. But again, I love the model. I'm an evangelist for the model. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about that model. You know, people who've followed the show and that have heard more and more about Venture Studios, and if you've been in the space, you're hearing different flavors of what Venture Studios are. So can you talk about what is a venture studio from your definition and what were the differences between the different ones that you've started and where you're at currently with Forum. Maisha Leek: The term studio, when it's combined with venture, actually originates from Hollywood, which I did not know. Essentially, like the idea that the studio from ideation to putting it into theaters would be responsible for the build. Like they collaborate with some folks, but they wanted to sort of own the vertical of the product that went out to market. And Venture Studios do just that in a venture context. We are building small businesses as fast as possible.You do different things depending on the category, and there are few ways the model sort of shows up. On one extreme, they're starting with just the idea and there's no founder. On the other extreme, you've built out a business and you're hiring in a CEO. Most of the venture studios I've worked with sort of lean to the front end where we really are interested in and get really excited about the founder. And really help them determine what to build.And that's really a question of what the problem is that they want to solve. It's not really starting with a solution. And then we take them through a process to de-risk it, diligence it, figure out who the real customers are. What needs to be true for the MVP, and then bring it out to market. Most venture studios do that.I think that where we get variation is the degree to which the idea is evolved before the team that's going to live with the problem goes out into the world. I think that's where folks tend to have differing points of view about what's most important. And a lot of it's logical. Venture Studios exist because we have a better risk profile than a founder doing it on their own.I can get into why that is, but you can imagine it's just our expertise. And depending on the Venture Studio and their point of view about what they have to offer in terms of the early ideation, you have some organizations or groups who really want to use every insight that they have and stand up a company. And others who believe that the founder who's taking the risk should do most of that work. That's how folks are making those choices from what I've seen. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that seems to be some of the key differentiation. It's how much additional resources perhaps are put towards it. So, some venture studios are very much hands-on. They have a team of developers that the founder can work with to build out, you know, early-stage prototypes and things along those lines. All the way to, obviously capital's involved.But it, it's interesting to see even the last three or four years, how that model has evolved. You know, some of the earlier venture models, you know, High Alpha out of Indianapolis or Highland Beta Toronto, they're looking at different models. You've got Nobody's Studios out in New York and the Philippines. And then you've got, obviously some of these, what were more traditional startup accelerator programs, whether it's Techstars or others that are, are looking at kind of a venture model where again, it seems to be how do we find the early founder with some magic sauce. And then put the magic sauce together to create companies together. Rather than looking for a company out there, which would be more, I guess, a traditional venture model in general.Maisha Leek: It's interesting. I love how you put that last point. The debate, I think, amongst people who are in the venture studio space is like, well, what matters more, the idea or the founder. I think that the way they're setting up venture studios is really an answer to that individual group's point of view on that question. I personally believe that the founder is the one thing you cannot de-risk. Human beings are human. And you know, you can pivot a company, you can pivot a strategy, you can change who is sitting where. But when it comes to the founder, you really wanna have conviction before you build. And I think a ton of folks are seeing that as the whole game. In large part, because early-stage investors are only looking at the team, right? So, it stands to reason that where venture studios can really play the game super, super well is making sure they've got that really, really tight, and then getting into the idea and the problem space from there.Brian Ardinger: And that makes perfect sense. You know, at the earliest stages, most ideas are crap, and they have to be worked through. And so the uncertainty itself, you're looking for somebody who can work through that uncertainty and adapt to the changing things that they learn along the way. Maisha Leek: A hundred percent. And somebody also who has a game plan for themself, which I find doesn't come up as much. But you know, I was talking to a founder this morning that was having a rough day, early on a Monday. And essentially, am I making the right choice for my life? How do I do that? Having a plan for all of those rough moments, it's like one of the most important things an investor or even a studio or a founder can put together before they even dig into the idea, because it's your right. The way a business shows up today. Fifteen years from now, it's going to be completely different. And really having a game plan for how to address the uncertainty, the significant amount of volatility that you'll face and keep your head is probably some of the most important details about being a founder that I don't think get enough of your time.Brian Ardinger: So obviously a founder's a core component to creating any new company. What are some of the ways that you both source founders and what do you look for. Maisha Leek: This is the best question. It's also the hardest. There are a range of approaches. I think that over time you start to build a network of founders that trust and know you.And when you say that you're standing up the studio and that you want to build, they tend to refer people that they're really excited about. Just starting from scratch. I mean, you really do want to spend time doing what we're doing right now. Demonstrating your capabilities in conversations and writing. Really posting a ton. Trying to draw people in.Being a judge at competitions. Talking to your network of other investors. There are a ton of folks that are further down the line and they meet founders who are too early for them to consider for their deals. I've talked to my entire network about getting folks to refer those folks to us. And then also not being afraid to look in places that you don't suspect. And so at the studios that I've worked with, we always have a complete open door. We do not require a warm intro for you to engage us. That's intentional. You're a needle in a haystack. I don't want to have the door closed. And when I have talked to every and anyone about the studio model, about what we can offer, about how to think about joining us.From a profile perspective, there's what I'm looking for and then there's like where those people are. I have the same challenge any startup has. Who is your customer? Right? I went to the first one. There are about like three types of people, right, that are very stages of availability. There are folks that are experienced founders who seek out venture studios because they've had to do it alone before. And they know that doing it alone is not worth it. it's not efficient. They want to move quickly, understand if there's real meat to their idea, and dig into that fast. They tend to come to venture studios actively, actively always talking to founders despite how deep they are into their build. It's just going to be top of mind for them. There's a ton of people who don't see themselves as founders but have all the experience. These are my favorite to cajole and to taking the risk. They tend to be a human, we used to call them the person behind the person, right? These are folks that have COO roles or Head of Biz ops or revenue, or chief of staff roles. They spent a significant amount of time learning how to build a business by being the number one, number two, or the sidekick to the person that's doing it.They've got to learn the category really well. They have a ton of insights, and they might be thinking, well, my next role is to sort of be the number two. Invariably though, based on that experience, they have strong points of view about what's missing from the market. They just had to do it. And they have all the experience of an experience founder, and I'd like to almost always pull those people in and have them think about what it might look like if they were in a leadership chair.Brian Ardinger: In that particular environment, are founders coming to you with an idea or a series of ideas that they want to explore? Or are they coming to you saying, hey, what do you know out there? What are you seeing from an opportunity perspective? And I'll sift through that and pick one that might resonate with me. Or what's that, I guess, spectrum of coming in with an idea versus coming in with a blank slate.Maisha Leek: it's a mix of both. The last like profile of somebody who might come to us as like an entrepreneur, someone who's been inside a big company, and they're always the first task with standing up the new thing. And so, you're hearing the mechanics like that folks have internalized. To your point about ideas, it depends on the studio, right? But I've seen folks come in with a strong point of view. I know exactly what I want to build. I know exactly the problem I want to address. Sometimes that's exciting. Sometimes that's problematic. Our process in the early days is designed to tear your idea apart. And so, if you're wedded to it, it can be a bit challenging.And then folks that don't have an idea, I've spent time with a number of business designers helping them think through the problem that they're really excited about and pulling out the thread that might be the one that we want to dig into. The trick of all of that in terms of founders is like, you should have a strong point of view about a problem space. You don't have to have the idea fully formed. So, you should know I'm fired up about logistics. I've spent 10 years as like the head of business development here and I really want to pull this apart. I have less experience than that, but I have actively been tinkering. Because I think that this problem that I've experienced is really a challenge. Those are the best people. They're ready to go. They've got a chip on their shoulder and something that they want to address. And Venture studios a really great place for them. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I often talk to founders and that, and like you want to find those founders that want to spend time with that problem and or customer segment because not necessarily having a solution around it, but you know, they know they're going to be spending 5, 7, 10 years of their lives. You want to get up every day focused on that and really digging into it versus, I'm just chasing the next greatest trend because it sounds like the next thing to do. Maisha Leek: Fastest way to burn yourself out or to get frustrated really quickly. Because we're talking about years and years of your life. You got to love the problem or the customer.Brian Ardinger: You mentioned on the corporate entrepreneur side of things, and have you seen different flavors of this Venture Studio model being deployed, I guess within a company versus externally Forum Ventures? Maisha Leek: I have, yeah. I have a ton of friends that are leading innovation teams inside big companies, and they frequently connect up with Venture Studios primarily because we can help them move faster. Internally for the corporates, what can be an amazing opportunity can also be your challenge. The innovate team, is a great opportunity to build against the problems either facing the business internally, like so you're building for inefficiencies within the business, and you want to build tools, services, platforms, whatever.And then some who are only thinking externally around mark, market cap or market share. It's like, all right, we are really tight with these customers. We want to expand to these others. Let's build out small brands that can go help us expand our reach, essentially. And the challenge for folks inside a highly matrixed organization that are building a studio or building an innovation team is really like who amongst your colleagues can actually play in that sandbox?It's not always what you think. They are of the generals. The guys and gals who've been around the company forever. They know where all the bodies are buried. The new sandbox has switched on. They're like, great. I want to jump in there and play. They're the deal maker inside the company. Not always. They're great, right? But not always the profile, the founder you want to look for. You're really looking for folks that really are ambitious about standing up something new. Are great storytellers inside the company but aren't wedded to company culture in a way that will slow them down. There are a ton of tricks for leaders of innovation teams that are internal on how to draw those people in and protect yourself from the rest. That's a story for another time. Brian Ardinger: The other topic I want to dig into, obviously venture studios require money or capital and, and they differ than a traditional, I guess, fund investment and that. Can you talk about the Venture Studio model from the investor side. And why that particular path versus, I guess, a traditional fund. And what's different and, and what's good or bad about the different approaches?Maisha Leek: Like I've heard people describe it a few ways. Some LPs describe it as like investing into an index fund. When you get a batch of companies at a cheaper rate. That's fine. Feels a little off brand. I think that for investors in large part, the value is that you get a de-risk asset faster and equity in that de-risk asset cheaper than you would finding a company on your own.And so, I find that LP is into venture studios have been brought along on that narrative journey. They can see the numbers. I mean, Venture Studios at this point have so much track record. I mean, we're perhaps like maybe 20 years in in terms of Venture Studios being around. Don't quote me on that. And essentially the track record, you know, suggests right that companies that come out of venture studios have like a 30% higher success rate than the ones that are stood up on their own.They return to fund faster, they have a 72% chance of raising their subsequent rounds C day and CB that, you know, all of the conditions are really right to make it something that's super, attractive as an investment. And investors into studios I think are, are dialed into that. And more and more now that more and more venture students are coming online across a series of categories.Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about how you see the Venture Studio, the life cycle of a company. So, if it's one thing, if you build it yourself and you go out and raise venture capital, you're building all your teams yourself, you're scaling it. Where in the Venture Studio model, obviously kickstart it and stand it up, does the company itself, when does it go on its own or does it continue with the studio or talk about those inflection points. Maisha Leek: Yeah, I think it's a, that's actually a strategic question for the studio, and also a good opportunity to provide advice to founders that might be listening in. Essentially, the best studios in my experience, have a time boxed plan for your journey. Doesn't have to be rigid. There's less likelihood of success when it's a sort of a meandering X metric that we'll move you through. I mean, really strong venture studios have a plan for after your company is built, the MVP, the number of people that you need on your team, how we're going to prepare you to go into the market to raise money, the number of customers we want you to have, and then move you through.Your question was about like what's the long tail of support? Really great Studios show up in the way that great funds would. Once you're a portfolio company, our interests are aligned with yours. We are a hundred percent dialed into your success. If you need something. Phone home kind of approach. And I think that having the staffing or the plan for that is really helpful for a founder to hear when they're evaluating venture studios that they might engage with.Right after I have my set of customers, after I've done my raise, what is our relationship going to be is the right question to ask there. But I've seen a range of folks on how they navigate that. Sometimes it's ad hoc, the GP is the only person interacting and sometimes it's, there's a real plan with a platform team that folks are tapping into as they're on their growth journey.Brian Ardinger: What are you excited about? Are the particular trends or the particular things that you're really digging into in 2023 and beyond? Maisha Leek: Yeah. I am personally super excited about logistics and transportation. I think that personally that it's an exciting moment for a few reasons. One, the technology allows us to do this more efficiently than we ever had. The migratory patterns that we saw post covid are pretty fascinating. We once had Class A, class B, class C cities. It's sort of turned that entire dynamic on its head. It's sending people your way, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Exactly. Maisha Leek: Yeah, and I love that. I don't know what that means, but I love it. I'm very excited about it. From a macro perspective, you know. I'm a millennial, right? So, this is like, I guess the fourth or fifth global crisis that I've lived through. What's really exciting about that, to the degree that can be exciting, is I think that folks are in a very salt of the earth, meat and potatoes way, rethinking their relationship with work and their responsibility for their own careers and lives.And I think it's going to lead not surprisingly to a surge of people starting their own businesses because they want to be, they want to take ownership right for their futures. And I'm really excited about that. I also think that the conversations that younger generations, gen Z, for example, are having around work, will lead to hopefully the resurgence of labor unions.I think that there is a period of time where we sort of walked away from that because you know, the worker and the employer were really at a better eye to eye level sense. I think that we're seeing a lot of the convulsions out of the tech sector teach us that that's not the case. And we do need a fair arbiter to make that work.I come from a long line of union workers. And so, in the venture world, I'm excited that venture studios are no longer taboo. I was mentioning earlier when I first told people I worked at Venture Studios, they were like, oh, it's not a fund. And now all, every day I hear somebody talking about getting into the space. I think that's great. I think Venture Studios will be the really strong gateway to capture those other three trends that I mentioned. You know, people are reconsidering their relationship with work, their expectations of what good company stewardship have changed, and just our needs from an infrastructure perspective have shifted because our behavior and venture studios are going to be best suited to dig into those problems and questions for us. So that's what I'm really excited about. We'll see, I'll watch this back in five years and see if I was right about anything. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: I'm excited about it because anybody who can help move ideas faster into the ether and create value along that way, that's what we're all about. So, I'm excited to hear your journey in the future. And in the interim, if people want to find out more about yourself or about Forum Ventures, what's the best way to do that? Maisha Leek: I am hyperactive on LinkedIn and getting more and more active every day. Definitely DM me. Definitely reach out. I'm also an angel investor. I'm standing up a syndicate in the next little bit here. I'm really, really, really obsessed with small businesses and founders. I mean, my family has come from five generations of entrepreneurs. It's really game changing work, and I'd love to be a part of that. So hit me up there. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Maisha, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck. Maisha Leek: Thank you, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

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Name: Felicia Jackson Business Name: CPRWrap Inc. Current Title: CEO/Founder   About Felicia:  Felicia Jackson, a resident of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a wife, mother, entrepreneur, and inventor of the disposable CPR template, CPRWrap.  With over 20 years of experience in the medical field, she holds an A.A.S. Degree from Chattanooga State College and worked as a Physical Therapist Assistant. After experiencing a traumatic incident with her 2-year-old son firsthand, Felicia had a vision of a product that could help save lives. She was certified in BLS CPR but froze when her toddler son experienced a medical emergency in the back seat of their car. Thanks to the quick actions of her husband, an Army Veteran, their son survived, but Felicia learned a valuable lesson and walked away with a new mission. She sought help from SCORE, LAUNCH CHA, COLAB, and Techstars. After graduating, she debuted the CPRWrap to the world. To date, her invention has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc. Magazine, Medium, and many more. Most recently, Felicia became a finalist in the Nashville NEXT award and was also the winner of the Pitch for Good: Tennessee Tough Competition, and received a year long sponsorship with the NFL's Tennessee Titans.   Felicia is currently working hard to make CPRWrap accessible to everyone so that performing CPR is less intimidating. Companies such as Aero Healthcare in Australia, CHI Memorial Hospital (Cardiac Rehab), Chattanooga Police Dept, Hamilton Co School Systems and many other companies have signed on to carry CPRWrap as part of their health and safety protocol for their employees and the community.   DURING THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: How to know when you should pause on an idea  The emotions associated with delaying the process How to decide what idea to pursue How to hold yourself accountable after a history of procrastination   The importance of knowing your purpose How to deal with procrastination How to balance your work and life   For complete show notes and resources mentioned for this episode go to: blacktobusiness.com/137 Thank you so much for listening! Please support us by simply rating and reviewing our podcast!  

Hello Moneda Moves listeners and welcome to a new season of the podcast, where we serve you stories about money and cultura from first builders. For the next few episodes we will be talking with multi-hyphenates of the business world: whether they're part-time models and VCs, a journalist turned Web3 company founder, or a community builder working for Paris Hilton and Fidelity at the same time, the super power shared here is that these leaders in their respective spaces transit different worlds, and with that comes rich lessons in money. Today, we're going to speak with Cheryl Campos, called “The Multihyphenate Queen” in article we wrote for Hispanic Executive, having transited investment banking, modeling, community building and venture capital. It's some of these many skills that led her to build La Familia, an ecosystem built just two years ago for Latino founders and venture capitalists to come together. Today, it supports more than 300 venture capitalists throughout their careers from breaking into venture to creating their own funds and is backed by the likes of SVB, Comcast, Samsung Next, Techstars, and more. I met Cheryl when we were early in pursuing our careers in New York City and from one first gen kid to another have very much enjoyed seeing her growth to Head of Growth and Partnerships at Republic, the investment platform helping everyday people get access to private markets. Recently, we spoke with her from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she's getting her MBA. We talk about breaking into VC, the importance of community and the future of her career. Follow Cheryl Campos: https://twitter.com/modelvc?lang=en and https://www.cherylcampos.com/ Follow Moneda Moves on Instagram: @MonedaMoves Follow your host Lyanne Alfaro on Instagram: @LyanneAlfaro Main podcast theme song from Premium Beat. Our music is from Epidemic Sound.

Bhavini Soneji, VP of Product Engineering @ Cruise, shares her leadership journey & how she gained cross-functional experience working at both large & small organizations. We cover how to gain product experience alongside engineering, deciding which elements of your org to mature/invest in, why you should examine the role of fear in your decision-making, and strategies for asking for more experience & opportunities to gain confidence.ABOUT BHAVINI SONEJIBhavini loves using human-centered design with streamlined automation to create experiences that improve people's lives. Previously, she has led teams through different growth stages at Microsoft, Snapchat, Headspace, and Heal. Additionally, she enjoys giving back to the community, advising C-level executives, mentoring at Techstars, First Round, and has also founded a group of Women Technology Executives in Los Angeles to support and foster this group while playing an active role in the LA CTO Forum. When she's not working, she loves the outdoors and enjoys boogie boarding with her husband and twins."Just knowing kind of the imposter syndrome that is holding you back. For me, it is like I'm always having a very high bar so am I hitting myself more and how do I be kind to myself? How do I support myself better? So I think that's one thing first, looking back and saying, 'No. I've done this, this, this. So my fears are not true, otherwise, I wouldn't be here.'”- Bhavini Soneji   Check out our friends and sponsor, JellyfishTo learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcJoin us for one of our in-person community events!That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.Don't see your city on the list? No problem!Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!TO GET INVOLVED EMAIL OUR HEAD OF COMMUNITY TIM ATTIM@SFELC.COMSHOW NOTES:Bhavini's leadership journey & gaining cross-functional experience (2:47)How Bhavini tactically transitioned from each role into the next (7:24)Watch for fears & biases throughout your decision-making (11:53)Frameworks for identifying fears that are holding you back (13:41)Examples of how cross-functional leadership differs at large vs. small orgs (16:32)Conversation tips for getting stakeholders back on track (20:08)Determining which elements of an org to mature/invest in (21:32)Questions to consider when investing in technology or processes (24:03)What to invest in when an organization's scale starts picking up (26:06)Why investing in the people element can be trickier than processes or tooling (29:26)Strategies for asking for new experiences (32:03)Bhavini's favorite question for identifying/clarifying what you want next (34:22)Rapid fire questions (35:52)LINKS AND RESOURCESPrisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall - an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powers.This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, we speak to Edwina Fitzmaurice - EY Global Chief Customer Success Officer - about the potential opportunity for the Metaverse and the need to build a foundation with Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in mind Edwina is responsible for customer success and products for Client Technology globally. She leads a network of customer success technology hubs across EMEIA, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. She works with EY's largest accounts on their technology strategies and implementing innovative solutions to help transform their business. Edwina is on the board of Women in Innovation and is the chair of the Governance Committee. She is a mentor with TechStars in Los Angeles and is an active member of the G100 and World50 business community of C-suite executives. Edwina also works with major EY accounts to help them navigate the transformative age where technology, geopolitical, environmental and demographic change is disrupting their business. This episode is hosted by Dave Byrne

When you realize you are role models for millions of women, it's both exhilarating and scary. Sister co-founders Angela Muhwezi-Hall and Deborah Gladney had their reckoning this year as women of color founders. Both realized they are role models for all Black women — the 99.5 percent that haven't yet succeeded in raising capital like they have — and they feel added pressure and responsibility to succeed. Last year when we spoke, these founders covered their oversubscribed raise of $1.4M after completing the Techstars accelerator. In this episode, the sister-founder duo talks about raising more capital and share how it was tougher this time despite both being a “known quantity.” Listen to them candidly discuss race, venture capitalists, the rebrand of their career-discovery platform to WorkTorch, and their goals for 2023. And yes, we set a date to speak again in 2024 to trace their growth, hardships, and wins.  As women of color, the pair discuss role-modeling for other women in entrepreneurship and tech and how important it is to remain confident.  Tune in to hear about what they believe they've done well, where they can improve, and their respective goals until we speak next year.    2:40 Muhwezi-Hall and Gladney discuss the milestones and barriers of raising capital.  8:10 The duo talk discrimination in the tech industry as women of color founders.  11:50 Tips for staying fueled and dealing with microaggressions in the workforce  14:00 All about WorkTorch and why a rebrand was essential  19:45 How WorkTorch is positioned as a B2C and a B2B company, always free for job seekers with a subscription model for companies  23:45 The impact and responsibilities Muhwezi-Hall and Gladney face as minority founders 27:20 Three tips about entrepreneurship the founder-duo would give to their past selves  31:50 Muhwezi-Hall and Gladney discuss their goals for 2023.

David Tisch is the Managing Partner of BoxGroup, one of the leading seed-stage investment firms of the last decade having invested in over 500 seed-stage startups, including Plaid, Ro, Ramp, PillPack, Amplitude, Flatiron Health, Stripe, Warby Parker, Harry's, Oscar, Flexport, Classpass, Vine, GroupMe, Airtable and more. David is also the Chairman of GoodDog, a marketplace to find pets online. In Today's Episode with David Tisch We Discuss: 1.) From Techstars To Founding BoxGroup: How did David start his own firm in the form of Box having started at Techstars? What advice from Brad Feld does David always remember and hold close? What does David know now that he wishes he had known when started investing? 2.) The Debate: The Math Does Not Work: Portfolio Construction: Ownership Does not Matter: How does David justify writing $100K checks from a $127.5M early-stage fund? Even if it is a home run, it does not make a difference to the fund? Level of Diversification: If David is writing small checks like this, with his fund size he will have hundreds of companies, what does David believe is the right level of diversification? Reserves management: How does David think about the ratio of initial to reserves when deploying the funds today? How does reserves management change in a recession? How does David prevent other VCs from using this to try and push him down to always writing a $100K check? Why does David believe that the size of check he is able to invest is the VC's problem and not the founders? Price Sensitivity: How does David assess his own relationship to price today? Why does he believe that company valuation is not something that the investor controls? 3.) Advice to Founders Raising Rounds: What does David believe is the #1 role of the CEO? What are the three most important variables for founders to focus on when raising their round? How should founders analyze the tradeoff between the brand of the VC and the size of the round? Does signaling really make a difference when a large fund invests at seed? How did multi-stage funds change the seed landscape forever with a new product? Who does David believe are the tourists in early-stage venture? Will they leave in the recession? 4.) David Tisch: AMA: Why does David believe that consumer social is not fun anymore? Who when they send him a deal does David take it most seriously? How does David want to ensure that bad VC behaviour is exposed? What would David most like to change about the venture landscape today?

In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Anton Nicholas, Managing Partner at ICR. ICR is an integrated communications firm. Nicholas says, “We do everything from public company investor and public relations to private company consumer public relations and brand public relations. We also do a ton in the transaction support world and crisis communications.” Nicholas is responsible for managing the firm's consumer corporate and financial communications practice as well as the ICR Lifestyle Lab, ICR's consumer and brand public relations practice.Frischling asks Nicholas to share how the dramatic shift away from capital has expanded the focus on marketing and how this is affecting your business and your clients. Nicholas says that 2022 was something they have never seen before, the capital markets were shut, and getting capital for marketing was evaporated. “So I think what happened was whether you're big or small you realize that you really got to focus on your core business and in particular for restaurants you know that's about trying to attract new and also get existing customers to repeat frequency and I think we've seen a ton of people shift back to those traditional ways to do that,” Nicholas says. He adds, “In today's world with digital in particular, PR tends to be higher ROI because it's less expensive upfront investment than advertising.”Nicholas shares his thoughts on traditional media verse digital media as well as the trends and how you know people consume data. He says, “I think if you look at the way people consume media today, it's just more broad-based. They still read The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times of the world. They do it digitally probably mostly, but they still read those publications, and those publications still have influence just as much as some commentary blog.” To hear how media can influence how we consume data as well as consume food, plus get the answers for Tuesday trivia check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout.

Camilla Lopez, co-founder of access to justice legal tech company People Clerk, joins host MC Sungaila to share her journey to becoming a lawyer-entrepreneur who helps individuals navigate small claims court. She discusses what's involved in running a successful start-up, from funding the company's growth (People Clerk is a Techstars alum backed by Google's Latino Founders Fund) to finding the right mentors and listening to customer feedback in expanding and growing their services.

Founders – you work so hard to be prepared for investors' questions during your pitch presentations.But are you qualifying those investors? Your time is valuable, and you need to minimize the chance of wasting your time with investors who will not invest in your startup.Our guest, Alex Iskold, is a 4x founder, a software engineer, an investor in over 150 startups, and the Founder and a Managing Partner at 2048 Ventures, where he leads pre-seed rounds, backs visionary founders who are creating technologies of the future, with a specific focus on biotech, deep tech, platform and API companies.Alex writes one of the top startup blogs (a personal fave!), called Startup Hacks, and is a life-long learner and deeply interested in Complexity Science and Systems Thinking. (https://www.startuphacks.vc/)Prior to founding 2048 Ventures, Alex spent 5 years at Techstars as the Managing Director of its NYC program. He was also the founder and CEO of Info Lab (acquired by IBM), founder and CEO of GetGlue (backed by USV, RRE, Time Warner), and a Chief Architect of distributed computing startup DataSynapse (acquired by TIBCO).Alex currently serves as a Coach and a VC in Residence at the Harvard Business School, and he previously taught an award-winning undergraduate computer science class at NYU. 11 Questions Founders Need to Ask Investors During the First Meetinghttps://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/2016/09/21/11-questions-founders-need-to-ask-investors-during-the-fist-meeting30 Questions Investors Ask During Fundraisinghttps://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/2016/09/13/30-questions-investors-ask-during-fundraisingTo learn more about 2048 Ventures, please visit: https://www.2048.vc/Follow Alex via:Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexiskoldLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iskold/Startup Hacks: https://www.startuphacks.vc/Thank you for carving out time to improve your Founder Game - when you do better, your startup will do better - cheers!Ande ♥https://andelyons.com#bestpodcastforstartups #startupstories #startuplife JOIN STARTUP LIFE LIVE MEETUP GROUPGet an alert whenever I post a new show!https://bit.ly/StartupLifeLIVECONNECT WITH ME ONLINE: https://twitter.com/AndeLyonshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andelyons/ https://www.instagram.com/ande_lyons/ TikTok: @andelyonsANDELICIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTSJoin Innovation Women here: https://bit.ly/AndeInnoWomenArlan's Academy: https://arlansacademy.com/Scroobious - use Ande15 discount code: https://www.scroobious.com/How to Raise a Seed Round: https://bit.ly/AAElizabethYinTune in to Mia Voss' Shit We Don't Talk About podcast here: https://shitwedonttalkaboutpodcast.com/SPONSORSHIPIf you resonate with the show's mission of amplifying diverse founder voices while serving first-time founders around the world, please reach out to me to learn more about making an impact through sponsoring the Startup Life LIVE Show! ande@andelyons.com.

Without your support as listeners, we wouldn't be here in Season 4....so THANK YOU!!!!  Additionally, thank you, #CatchSitkaSportFishing and #ACMEHomes, for your continued support as sponsors of this podcast!Today, we sit down with T.A. McCann, who comes to the podcast through the talented Chase Nall and Marcus Womack.   T.A. is one of the most intelligent, curious, successful, and down-to-earth dads we've interviewed over the past few years.  He was the founder and CEO of Senosis (acquired by Google), Gist (acquired by Blackberry), and Rival IQ, a leader in marketing analytics. Previously, he was an EIR at Polaris Venture Partners, Vulcan Capital, where he built Vulcan Labs and Providence Health Services, focused on quantified health ideas and investments. He also held senior roles at Microsoft, leading Exchange and the Mobile Services divisions. In addition to his own startup experience, he is an active angel investor in companies including SkillJar, CreativeLive, Assist, Migo, and Vendor Hawk and is on the board of Guidant Financial, Volt Athletics, and Splash.org.  He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Washington Foster School of Business and an active TechStars mentor.  Prior to his startup career, he was a professional sailor, having competed in 2 America's Cups (won one, lost one) and the Whitbread Round the World race. Today's conversation is about T.A., the dad.  We learn how his parents taught him to take risks and be curious.  He shares a story of his father on the power of "look it up," which he said was very annoying, yet he is so thankful for the guidance now as an adult.  His entire family is driven, goal-oriented, and enjoys seeing the world!  In fact, his father visited over 100 countries!  Yes, that's right!   T.A. would also share a mantra that is a gift and also a gap where he finds himself happy but not satisfied.   As you listen to his story, it is no surprise to hear about his success, and I hope you enjoy learning about T.A., the dad, as much as I did today!  To connect with T.A. and learn more about Pioneer Square Labs, you can connect with him here. Catch Sitka Sport Fishing At Catch Sitka, Issam and team provide an amazing fishing experience with Halibut, Salmon and more!Established in 2006, Acme Homes WA One of the most value-based home builders in the state of Washington! Go Check them out!Please don't forget to leave us a review wherever you consume your podcasts! Please help us get more dads to listen weekly and become the ultimate leader of their homes!

Charlotte Angel Connection Episode 143: Trey Phills Today we welcome Trey Phills to the podcast. Trey is the co-founder and CMO of Gymble, a software company helping athletic facilities, personal trainers, and athletic trainers better manage their businesses and client bookings. After graduating from Yale in 2019, Trey played in the NBA G League and launched his TikTok (@tphills), quickly growing to over 800K followers and becoming a TikTok Partner. During 2019 and 2020, Trey and his cofounders (Devon Oakley and Akim Mitchell) began working on the idea that became Gymble. Today, Gymble is participating in Techstars' Anywhere Accelerator as a member of the 2023 Winter Class. We cover a lot in our wide-ranging conversation, like … Parallels between professional/collegiate athletics and building a company How being transparent about getting cut helped Trey grow a sizeable TikTok following Techstars' process for helping founders do more, faster with systems Maintaining and growing a professional network by sharing social media expertise The importance of finding true believers instead of converting skeptics in both fundraising and sales …as well as Gymble's plans for 2023, and more. Please enjoy this conversation with Trey Phills.   William Bissett is the owner of and an Investment Advisor Representative of Portus Wealth Advisors, a Registered Investment Adviser. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Opinions expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect those of Portus Wealth Advisors. The topics discussed and opinions given are not intended to address the specific needs of any listener.   Portus Wealth Advisors does not offer legal or tax advice, listeners are encouraged to discuss their financial needs with the appropriate professional regarding your individual circumstance.  Investments described herein may be speculative and may involve a substantial risk of loss. Interests may be offered only to persons who qualify as accredited investors under applicable state and federal regulation or an eligible employee of the management company. There generally is no public market for the Interests. Prospective investors should particularly note that many factors affect performance, including changes in market conditions and interest rates, and other economic, political or financial developments. Past performance is not, and should not be construed as, indicative of future results.      

Today we are joined by Rob Taylor who has founded and operated 5 vc-backed startups over the past 20 years including BlackLocus which sold to Home Depot in 2012 and TrueCar which went public in 2014. Most recently, Rob Co-founded and was the CEO of a B to B SaaS company called Convey which was acquired by Project44 in September of 2021 for $255M. In addition to being a founder, Rob has done mentorships at Capital Factory and TechStars, and he currently is a board member at LawnStarter. In this episode, Rob shares his expert insight on what is important to focus on in the growth stage of a business, what he thinks is the most important part of a pitch to venture capitalists, and how he and his co-founders were able to grow Convey. Stick around to the end to hear what his two best pieces of advice for growth stage CEOs. Please subscribe to Studying Success to hear more from the best entrepreneurs and investors!Also check out our website at www.studyingsuccesspodcast.com.And follow us on Instagram @studyingsuccesspodcast.

In this episode, we are speaking to a dear friend and powerhouse Helena Wasserman. She's on a mission to accelerate the transition to impact and sustainability as the default way of investing and building companies. Her career started at The Clinton Foundation and Ashoka and then moved into impact technology with Techstars and Big Data for Humans. She then went on to scale Top Tier Impact, the global ecosystem for impact investors and leaders. And is an angel investor herself. Helena was a Founder of the Future in 2016, Forbes 30 under 30 in 2017 and one of the 50 most inspirational women in technology in Europe in 2017. In this episode, we talk about resilience, climate tech predictions, what is angel investing and impact investing, understanding natural capital, the importance of biodiversity and so much more. I hope you enjoy this smooth conversation thanks to our sound partner Audio-Technica. Okay, it's time to live wide awake. Stay connected with Helena: Website: https://www.helenawasserman.com/ Social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenawassermaneriksson/ | https://www.instagram.com/iamhelenawass/ Stay connected & support the show Instagram: http://instagram.com/livewideawake Support: If you enjoyed the show do consider making a contribution so we can keep having conscious conversations - https://www.patreon.com/livewideawake Reach out: hola@stephldickson.com

Joey Womack has done an exceptional job developing his personal brand, in addition to founding Goodie Nation, a nonprofit agency that celebrates diverse founders and social entrepreneurs. He's been featured on Techstars, has been an instructor with General Assembly, plus he has over 13,000 followers on LinkedIn, and 57,000 followers on Instagram!We're diving into all things thought leadership today: why Joey is tactical about contributing content on LinkedIn and why we need to “get over ourselves” when it comes to sharing our voice in a bigger way with the world. As a founder, you have a responsibility to be a leader and to build a strong brand.In This Episode:3 core responsibilities of a CEO and why it's worth investing in your brand in order to best execute your vision.How Joey forced himself to simplify when it comes to delivering amazing presentations on stage.Why founders should be great storytellers in order to stand out.Personal branding and thought leadership evolves over time. Joey explains why it's essential to be thinking about what the next 10 years from now will look like.The secret to unlocking MAJOR visibility on LinkedIn without having to write your own posts.Resources & LinksConnect with Joey on LinkedIn (be sure to mention the Missions to Movements Podcast when you reach out!) and learn more about his work at Goodie Nation. Tune in to his podcast, Why Relationships Matter.Download the Hive Life Plan workbook.Want to make Missions to Movements even better? Take a screenshot of this episode and share it on Instagram. Be sure to tag @positivequation so I can connect with you. Episode Partners:We're so grateful to our partners for this episode: Feathr and Hustle!Feathr is trusted by nonprofits of all shapes and wing-spans — including Hiway 80, who used Feathr to launch new retargeting ads and email campaigns. The result? They reached 36,000 new people and brought in $13,000 in donations, 300% more than their original goal! Don't rely on magic to hit your goals next year. Use Feathr to elevate your digital marketing campaigns and grow impact in 2023. Click here to learn more.Meet Hustle's Conversational Video Platform. Their person-to-person video and text message marketing suite empowers your organization with the tools you need to humanize communication, maximize engagement efforts, and build meaningful relationships with your audiences. Click here to try Hustle today & use code POSITIVEEQUATION to receive free MMS and video messages for your organization! Click here to RSVP for my February Visibility Ads Challenge! Let's Connect! Send a DM on Instagram or LinkedIn and let us know what you think of the show! Head to YouTube for helpful digital marketing how-to videos and podcast teasers Want to book Dana as a speaker for your event? Click here!

Leyonna Barba and Monica Wheat are committed to advocating for diverse founders. Leyonna, managing director of Technology and Disruptive Commerce at JPMorgan Chase, and Monica Wheat, managing director of Techstars Detroit, have embraced diversity in funding throughout their careers. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, they sit down with Host Sam Saperstein to talk about their passion for that cause, and how they encourage investors to get more proximate to a diverse group of founders. Ecosystems and networks Monica discusses how, after spending time working with start-ups and investing on her own internationally and in San Francisco, she ended up in Detroit and being drawn to Techstars' mission. She initially tried to “copy and paste everything that was in San Francisco and bring it back to Detroit.” But she soon realized that didn't work—there simply wasn't the ecosystem in Detroit to replicate the Silicon Valley/San Francisco model. Founders didn't have a network of other founders to rely on for encouragement or resources. “And that's where Techstars came in,” she recalls. “They not only came in and said, ‘here's a check and here's some support and some resources,' but they kept coming back and they kept asking the questions like, ‘what do you need?' And it gave us the courage to really think about Detroit and some of these other emerging markets shaping themselves versus trying to copy and paste what was in Silicon Valley.” Leyonna agrees that an established ecosystem is critical for start-up success. “To be successful in venture and within the tech ecosystem, you have to have a strong network, which is why for many founders, diverse founders, female founders, they've traditionally been locked out of those markets, locked out of those rooms,” she says. She's proud of the work her team does at JPMorgan Chase in terms of being intentional around ensuring that diverse and female founders and veteran-owned business founders all have a voice at the table. “We have a lot of emerging diverse managers,” Leyonna says. “We've seen an increase in the number of those diverse focused funds over the last couple of years, making sure that they're in a room with potential opportunities for investment, bringing those networks together. I know that I sit in a very special place in intersection at JPMorgan Chase where the power of our network can be amplified if we use it to bring those parties together. And it's part of the reason that I love the work that we're doing with Techstars.”   Making change Leyonna and Monica agree that increasing the very small percentage of VC money that goes to diverse women—Sam currently notes that it stands at about 3 percent of all funding—will require funders to be deliberate in their attempts at inclusion. Monica says she doubts that any current funders are trying to purposefully divert money away from women- or black-owned businesses. “But you also have to be very intentional about the fact that you are including them. You have to be very intentional about the fact that you're making an environment that's not just for gamers and 18 to 22-year-olds, that it is for folks who are different ages and coming from different backgrounds,” she says. “The space of investing in women and investing in underrepresented founders is the biggest opportunity in investment to date because these are untapped markets that folks just really haven't had access to and the folks that are building in these spaces haven't had access to these markets.” Leyonna agrees and emphasizes that it can't just be diverse fund managers who fund diverse owners—it needs to be all investors. “Not all investments and all the people you're investing in should look exactly like you or only solve problems for certain types of people,” she says. That's one reason, she notes, that it's critical to have women and other diverse people on boards and investment committees. She describes it as following the money trail. “And I think the beauty of what Techstars is doing with this $80 million that is powered by JPMorgan Chase is they are using the fund structure to show and to amplify that investing in diversity is not charity,” she says. “It is real dollars, it is good returns. And hopefully by continuing to see that performance, it will create a fear of missing out from others.”   Full transcript here   Disclaimer: The speakers' opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of February 2, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Hoy estoy con Andrés Barreto, director de Techstars Miami.Hablamos de su pelea con las disqueras para democratizar la música en internet, cuando co-fundó Grooveshark con solo 17 años. Nos cuenta sus aprendizajes fundando varias startups, como Onswipe y Pulso Social, dándonos tips para levantar capital y hablando sobre su experiencia manejando el programa de techstars de MiamiEs un episodio lleno de anécdotas de golpes de humildad, espero que disfrutes esta plática, tanto como yo Libros recomendados:El Hombre en Busca de Sentido - Viktor Frankl Sobre el invitado:Conecta con Andrés en LinkedinVisita el sitio web de Techstars Follow Us:NewsletterEscribe una ReseñaEncuesta de AudienciaTikTokInstagramTwitterLinkedinWeb 

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise and co-founder of the new Venture Studio, Nobody Studios. Barry and I talk about the ins and outs of a new model of creating and investing in startups called Venture Studios, and we discuss the power of collaborative innovation. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Barry O'Reilly, Author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise & Co-founder of the Venture Studio, Nobody Studios Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. You may have heard of Barry O'Reilly. He has been part of the Inside Outside Innovation community for a while. He's the author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. And co-founder of Nobody Studios, which we're going to have him talk a little bit more about that. Welcome, Barry. Barry O'Reilly: Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, it's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: It's great to have you back. You've followed Inside Outside the community. You've been a huge proponent of what we've done, and quite frankly, a huge mentor to me to understand this whole world of innovation and how do we get through it.I'm excited to talk about your new venture, which is Nobody's Studios. You've spent a lot of time as an author, as a consultant, working with big companies. Helping really develop the whole lean startup movement. And now you've decided to jump into the investment space and create a a studio where you're gonna hopefully incubate some amazing new startups in the world.Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, first of all, one thing I want to congratulate you on is your new book. Literally it sits outside in my reading area. There are people that walk past it and see it all the time and pick it up. So, I just want to congratulate you on getting that done, and I really enjoyed reading through it. So, congratulations to yourself on that and highly recommend folks check it out.So in terms of Startup Studio, the real inspiration for me was, as you said, I've had the chance to work with some phenomenal people over the last number of years. Helping them either identify products that they wanted to build in enterprises or work with scaling startups that were sort of building their business and taking them as far as they could.And I was enjoying a lot of the sort of advisory side, but I've been sort of doing a lot of that now for, you know, close to a decade. And I was just getting itchy fingers, if you will. You know, I was like helping all these people, like I do a little bit of an angel investing. I, you know, would take sweat equity or be an advisor for these startups.Help enterprises build products, but I miss a daily grind of sort of being like right in there, building day in, day out. So, I knew I was just sort of looking for the right opportunity for me to bring a lot of my skills to bear and rather than put time in for money, put energy in for equity in these businesses and build something that would fire outlast me if you will.You know, started to share that with a few people and one of my good friends, Lee Dee, who was actually under advisory board of AgileCraft with me, which we sold to Atlassian and has now become JiraAlign. He introduced me to a guy called Mark McNally. And Mark was based down in Orange County. He was sort of interested or starting this idea of a company called Nobody Studios.And instantly I was just attracted to the name. Anything that's sort of contrarian and odd. I was like, why did you call this thing Nobody? And you know, part of the mission was we were going to build these companies. We really need to try and like put our egos at the door, if you will, and like be humble, challenge ourselves, work together to build these great businesses.And really the studio, it in itself is a sort of mix of all the best parts that I believe of the startup ecosystem that I can help with. We're not a VC. We do raise our own capital, but we raise our own capital so we can incubate our companies and ideas that we believe in. But we're not just an incubator.We have the capital to keep building, and we're not an accelerator where we just sort of put people through a program and give them the Y Combinator stamp and, and they go out the door. So, it's actually bringing all of these components together. We raise our own capital. We have our own ideas that we incubate these companies.We find founders and teams to help us bring these companies to life. And then the goal is to create really a repeatable, scalable business model and a fundable company where we've incubated something to the point that it's the high-quality business, it's maybe found product market fit, and they're ready to sort of go and get external capital.And that for us is sort of us doing our job well. But what we're actually optimizing from a business model point of view is to try a aim for early to mid-size exits. So, for those businesses to be actually, purchased, merged into, acquired, maybe even an early I P O, who knows? But that's necessarily our business model.So, by incubating and building these companies, we're actually looking to exit them for early to mid-stage exits. And that's how we will essentially generate more capital to go back into the studio to build more businesses. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the tactics around this. So nobody's studios you're looking to, I think, incubate a hundred companies over the next five years. That takes a lot of people, a lot of founders, a lot of great ideas. How do you tactically go about starting the studios. Barry O'Reilly: To be honest, and we share that with people. Half of the people run away from us, and half of the people run towards us when they hear that. For me, like that's actually the good sign of a big harry audacious goal, if you will.It's the calling card for some people. It helps sort of people who aren't thinking like that choose a a different option. With having a big audacious goal like that, you know, it forces you to start recalculating how you build businesses. So, when people hear a hundred companies in five years, they instantly think, oh, that's 20 companies a year.Like, how are you going to do that amount? But actually, it's a sort of exponential scale that we work on. So, on a first year, which was sort of 2021, our goal was actually to create three companies and learn and build both the systems to create companies as well as the actual businesses themselves. And then last year our goal was to try and create five companies, which was almost, if you will, like a 50% increase in company creation.And, if you sort of start to work those numbers out over the next five years, we basically go from three to five to 11 to 17 to 32, to 43, and then suddenly you're at a hundred, right? So, it's us also building the infrastructure capabilities and the systems to support and source a lot of these founders.At the same time, the studio is growing in maturity and understanding and people, if you will, as we go along. So, it's very much think big, start small, which many people probably have heard me say many times and then scale over time. And that's literally how we've got on. Currently we are into our second year. We actually have 11 companies that are in development. Four are already in market and it's working. So, it's very exciting to be sort of just like learning by doing. There's lots of mistakes we're making along the way. But the great part about it is when lessons are learned, they're compounded across the entire portfolio.Say we make a mistake about how to kick off founders on company two. If we correct it on company three, then every company benefits from that afterwards. And that's been one of the probably most unique aspects of this, is the speed at which we learn when we make corrections. We're actually able to propagate that across a huge number of companies. So, it's been very exciting. Still lots to do, but we're up and running. Brian Ardinger: So, this idea of a venture studio, there's other folks that are doing it. I've seen other folks trying to maybe pair with corporates where they work with a corporation and help incubate ideas and companies that come out of that corporation and that. Then, obviously you have the traditional kind of Techstars accelerator model, that kind of stuff. How does this actually work? So, do you have a stable of either ideas or a stable of founders and you put them together or how's it come together? Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, so there's three ways that businesses, if you will, are sort of come into the studio. First, we have our own set of ideas. Surprise, surprise, there's no shortage of ideas for businesses. But we do have an internal process where we review a lot of the ideas. We do some initial customer discovery, and the ones that we have conviction on, we start to essentially make a first small investment in.And a lot of the reasons that would make us sort of green light, if you will, one of these ideas is not only seeing that there's an opportunity in the market, but we have a potential founding team in place. And we've discovered, cuz we are co-founders of these businesses. And remember, we're not just on the sidelines cheering like I'm a co-founder, not only of Nobody's Studios, but every single company that we create. Like I'm in there in those companies, day in, day out. The next way is actually we do mini acquisitions. We think eventually we'll do like 30% of our own, probably 30% that we do these mini acquisitions. These are like typically, I'll give you an example of one of our companies is Thought Format. It's a serverless, no code platform.And these were two brothers based in London who had been sort of working their day jobs and building this product in their evenings and weekends. And I actually met them at a conference in London probably about four years ago, and they just instantly struck me as two guys who were really like figuring it out.I was impressed that they would, you know, still work a day job and then work other evenings on weekends on bringing this thing to life. So when we started the studio, I instantly called them and said, look, how about we basically give you the opportunity to go full-time and work on this product? And interestingly, one of our other businesses, Ovations, which is an on-demand speaker platform, is built on top of Thought Format.So, we instantly started to get this platform that we can accelerate our product development, but also accelerate the value of these companies by collaborating together. And then finally, we think one option will be that we will do some corporate collaborations, but the, the way we sort of think of it is more of a, a made to acquisition type model.So, what we do is we tend to have very open dialogue with a lot of these corporates who have to make acquisitions actually for their business to survive. But the price of startups are so expensive now based on the valuations that they raise at. Most founders are pricing them out of their most likely exit, which is an acquisition from day one. Right? They might be a Series A company and they take 10 million at a 50 million valuation and they have to sell that company at half a billion dollars. But so investors will get the money that they're expecting back. So, you know, no enterprise in their right mind is going to pay half a billion dollars for a Series A stage company.Yeah, exactly right. So, so what we've discovered is actually if we have these very open dialogues with a lot of businesses to say, well, you probably need a data analytics solution for your business. So, you probably need, some sort of AI automation, a service for your business. We have what we describe as sort of a open conversation with them, and if we think it's a business that we believe in, and they could potentially be an either an early investor or a acquirer of that business, we may go build it. Right. And for us, if we incubate, because most of our companies we incubate for just under a quarter million dollars, and if we incubate it for that and sell it for 20 million, we'll do that all day and twice on Sundays. Brian, and so that's sort of a very different approach for how the open market is operating, if you will. Again, I think that's going to be a big competitive advantage for us. Brian Ardinger: Do you see those corporate environments where the startups have access to an early test customer, for example, is that a, a benefit or are you seeing it more as a acquisition and or test run. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, well this is the fun thing about test customers, right? So, we have this notion of building blocks in our studio where Thought Form is a great example. It's a building block for another one of our company's Ovations because it sits on top of it. So Thought Form's first ever customer, if you will, was another company in our portfolio. One company was like, oh, we'll build on your platform, and we'll be able to give you fast feedback on your platform, how it performs, what works, what doesn't in a relatively sort of safer environment.So, what's really powerful for us is that we're building all these businesses that create capabilities that we need internally in our own business, and then we can build our more customer facing, B2C type products, if you will, on top of those services. So, we're getting this sort of virtuous loop straight out the gate.First set of early customers to testament that are also part of your portfolio, so, it's collaborative, if you will. Because they're both getting benefits from working with one another. That's sort of been another like little bit of a secret sauce for us, if you will. Where we've been able to accelerate the development of a lot of these companies.Or another company we're building is one called Web Delics, which is basically the WebMD of psychedelics to help people understand plant-based medicine and therapies. And straight away, that's a, if you will, a content business. And we've built another one, Parent Tipity, which is a parent creator community. Now, there's a lot of behaviors and aspects of these businesses that are similar, both in terms of how they're producing content and become information sources. So, when we build those capabilities for one of our businesses, we can essentially share them across all the businesses that are content focused. We just get these massive sort of uplift inefficiency about how quickly we can build. How cheaply we can build. Like some of these companies were launching for under $50,000. Right? Which is, that's as much as you pay for a pitch Deck in San Francisco. It's pretty fun. Brian Ardinger: How big is the team then? I'm as assuming that you add folks onto the particular startups as they grow and, and kind of expand. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, so we have people that work at the studio level, so folks like myself as a chief incubation officer. I'm working across the portfolio. And then we have teams that, people that work within the individual new companies or NewCos as we tend to call them, or portfolio companies. So, at, at the moment we're probably in the region of about a hundred folks, I would say, either both in the companies that we're building or in the studio itself.And the studio really comprises of everything from. A typical executive team is, Mark McNally. He's our Chief Nobody, as we call him. I look after incubation. We've a marketer, we've a C F O, Head of Operations. And then like just staff that help. Don't work across the companies. Product leaders. Technology leaders and so forth.And then within each of the companies, it can sort of vary as you mentioned, but we always look for sort of a triad to start. So, a tech lead, a product lead and design lead. And then there's a lot of marketing, business operations, team support, project management to sort of get them moving. And then engineers. So that's pretty much how the teams have formed and pretty fun making progress. Brian Ardinger: It's a great model and, and I'm excited to see where, where it goes. One of the interesting things about the model too is how you went about and how you're going about raising capital and, and making it accessible to not your traditional just, angel investors or accredited VC firms out there. So can you talk a little bit about Nobody's Studios and your partnership with Republic and how you're going about raising capital for the studio. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, so one of the core tenants of the studio is that we're global first and we're also crowd enabled. Or is what we call crowd infused. One of the questions about like, why would we create a hundred companies in five years?Like we can't hire enough people to create those companies, that it's just impossible. So, one of the things that we flipped our mind around is, well how can we actually bring more people into the Nobody community to be part of our world? Initially when we were starting to build our companies, we were thinking we're going to need a lot of people to help us ideate, to help us, do customer research, to test, as you were asking earlier.And then we started thinking also about like ownership, if you will. So many people are locked out of the venture ecosystem and have probably wondered why it might look like, imagine I could own a piece of Google before it became Google. Or how do I even get involved in owning a piece of a startup?And as you said, for a long time, that right, if you will, has only been given to very high net worth individuals or people that were in certain circles that would even have access to these type of deals. So, we wanted to try and shift that a bit and give access to all. As well as create this huge community of owners and studio and actually contributors to the studio.So, while we've raised a lot of our own capital through traditional means of angel funding, and we've done really well, we've raised close to 4 million, if you will, through private markets. But then we want to bring more people to that system. So, we became one of the first venture studios ever to offer equity crowdfunding to the world, which means anyone. You don't have to be an accredited investor, just any person on the street. You'll be a bus driver, a nurse, whatever you are. You're able to invest and own a piece of Nobody's Studios and become a venture investor. And we're really, really proud of that because we've sort of opened up and given access to all where anybody who's interested in early-stage business startups or our technology and the impact it's going to have on their future, they can actually own a piece of the studio, just like the same shares that I own.By going to Republic and making an investment from a couple hundred dollars right up to a couple of thousands and being Nobody. So, it's really special. We've had, you know, hundreds of of people already join. And what's special about that is that now these people are owners, but they can also contribute to the companies we're making. Give us feedback, bring their ideas, and that gives us more, if you will, human capital as well as financial capital to build all these businesses, we're going after. Brian Ardinger: I like the concept quite a bit. The fact that this democratization of innovation, everything from technology to access to markets to the pandemic, have all kind of converged in such a way that you can build anything from anywhere now. And why not open up that from a capital perspective as well, is an interesting take on the whole process and hopefully, yeah, like you said, it will provide a competitive advantage for you as well to actually access talent that may not have been able to access in the past because of different barriers or or ways of working.Barry O'Reilly: Absolutely. Right, and you know when, now you know when you're a Nobody shareholder. You got an idea, where do you think you're going to bring it? Right. And that's great. That's an advantage to us, as you mentioned. This is really special for us. You know, like to have so many people who want to ideate with us, build with us, challenge us, give us feedback on our ideas before they go to market.And this is really going to be something quite special, I think, where people can sort of live within a realm that they've never maybe had the opportunity to and maybe have always wanted to. And technology is going to have such a huge impact on our future, so why not own a piece of that future or own a piece of the companies that are going to shape it? And giving people that access is something that we're, we're really proud of and we're excited to see, what more we can do. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, I'm looking forward to my t-shirt and being, being a Nobody myself. If people want to find out more about, Nobody's studios or the fundraise through Republic, what's the best way to that?Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. So if you're curious to learn more about what we're doing and make an investment, please go to Republic.com/nobodystudios where Nobody Crowd on pretty much every social media platform and NobodyStudios.com if you want to dig in and see what's on our website. Thank you very much for inviting me to share a little bit of our story.I'm delighted you've become a Nobody. Your t-shirt is in the posts, where you're going to be seeing a Nobody Studios Venture investor photo on your Twitter feed, I'm sure soon. So, yeah, thank you for joining us, on this mission. I'm sure it's going to be the adventure of a lifetime. Brian Ardinger: Well, Barry, it's always a pleasure to spend time with you, so thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to having further conversations as the world unfolds. Barry O'Reilly: Thank you very much.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.   

Jason is joined by Alex Kane, CEO and Founder of Sporttrade Inc. in the latest episode of the Business of betting Pod. Alex shares his startup story, as well as his views on the growth of the American sportsbook industry, and his vision for the future of the industry and exchanges.04:01 Sporttrade: The humble beginnings06:25 Alex's Startup and Investment Round journey08:18 Techstars to launch12:31 Building the Sporttrade matching engine16:00 Pre & Post trade challenges19:33 Sporttrade vs the competition24:09 The role of market makers27:00 The Sporttrade business model29:56 Competitors and the customer acquisition challenge32:22 Sporttrade vs Prophet33:49 Why choose Sporttrade?42:28 The end of price time?Follow us on: https://twitter.com/bettingpodhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCheYAzYxx-FmWkjbnZ9sXcAGet in touch:https://twitter.com/jasontrost Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Really listen and stop thinking that you know it all. Stop thinking you have all the answers, and the sooner that you can do that, the more abundant your life is gonna become.” -George MorrisGeorge Morris is a Certified Scaling Up Coach and lifelong entrepreneur. He found his success running his digital agency, Imulus. Co-Founded TEDxBoulder, is a Techstars Alumni and former President of the Entrepreneur Organization, Colorado Chapter. George has walked the entrepreneur's journey from zero business experience and starting up during awful economic conditions in the dotcom crash, to building a best place to work and a fastest growing company. He happily shares his mistakes and lessons learned with his coaching clients. George is adamant that business fundamentals unlock the potential of teams and organizations. Too many times companies pile on unnecessary tasks, projects, and systems that slow down their growth. He helps companies shed organizational debt to accelerate their growth by focusing on the goals and the actions needed to get there.Click here to subscribe to The Sell My Business Podcast to save time and effort.SELECTED LINKS FOR THIS EPISODEgeorge@gmorris.comGMORRISGeorge Morris (@gmorris) / TwitterGeorge Morris (@gmorris) • Instagram photos and videosGeorge Morris - FacebookGeorge Morris - Business Coach - GMORRIS Certified Scaling Up Implementer & Coach | LinkedInCockroach Startups: What You Need To Know To Succeed And ProsperFREE Deep Wealth eBook on Why You Suck At Selling Your Business And What You Can Do About It (Today)Book Your FREE Deep Wealth Strategy CallContact Deep Wealth: Tweet @JeffreyFeldberg LinkedIn Instagram Subscribe to The Deep Wealth Podcast Email podcast@deepwealth.com Help us pay it forward by leaving a review.Here's to you and your success!As always, please stay healthy and safe.

This week we get to be a fly on the wall for one of Jim's recent zoom presentations with Techstars. Jim talks nitty gritty tactics about customer personas, best in class case studies, and funnel strategies before answering some specific questions from new startup owners. TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S EPISODE TechStars growth tactics Customer personas Best in class case studies for funnels Strategies and tactics Being a market of one Success stories Undervalued vs over valued tactics for small startups Offers advice  Resources: Join My Newsletter here Jim Huffman website Jim's Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook  Additional episodes you might enjoy: Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45) Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41) How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44) Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10) How We're Validating Startup Ideas (#51)  

My next guest has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Feld Technologies. He is also a co-founder of Techstars is a writer and speaker on the topics of venture capital and entrepreneurship, and co-authored the second edition of Startup Boards. Please welcome Brad Feld. Key Timecodes (00:43) - Show intro and background history. (01:23) -His background investing history (06:41) - What are the red flags about leadership teams (10:34) - How people used to react to his philosophy about the corporate world (14:13) - Deep diving into his business psychology strategies (19:44) - How he scales a company board (26:45) - How he scales his own business (33:47) - What skills does he look for in founders? (37:44) - The importance of a broad skill set and open-minded personalities instead the traditional entrepreneur archetypes (39:53) - Don't be afraid to make mistakes; learn and grow with them! (50:10) - Guest contacts Payback Time Podcast Payback Time is a podcast for investors. The goal of this podcast is to help make investing approachable and easy to understand. We will interview beginner and experienced investors and ask them to share stories on how they got started, what challenges they faced, what mistakes they made, and what strategy works for them today. The overall objective is to provide you with a roadmap that helps you become a better investor.

Nicole has worked with thousands of executives and founders from around the world in her roles at Harvard University, Techstars, Impact Hub, and Leaders on Purpose (a global organization serving Fortune 500 CEOs). She has helped grow 8 companies in the last 10 years, including a startup that was funded on Shark Tank. She is the founder of Living Leaders, an educational institute that supports conscious leaders to build regenerative companies, that: are not just sustainable for our planet, but also sustainable for people. She is the host of the (K)new Self Podcast, which hosts conversations about transforming how we do Work + Life. www.nicolebellisle.com; www.livingleaders.org https://www.instagram.com/nicolebellisle/ https://www.instagram.com/livingleadersorg/ https://www.youtube.com/nicolebellisle

Gary Stewart learned the biggest limitation life could throw at him (even at Yale) was Gary. Learning to balance self confidence and boldness with perseverance through tough times helped Gary to meet British Royals, scale billion dollar startup portfolios in Spain and U.K., and return to the U.S. to lead one of the country's most reputable accelerators.After helping European conglomerates build a multi-billion dollar portfolio, Gary returned to the States to help founders find their tribe, demystifying the "warm intro" and flipping various power dynamics on their proverbial head.Why Interview Gary Stewart and Founder Tribes?Gary sheds light on the inner mindset of a successful founder while providing practical tips for the aspiring tech entrepreneur. Listen to find out how you can elevate your founder mind, and let us know if you agree.As the Managing Director of Techstars New York, Gary wears multiple hats in this conversation and with stories that will stick with you even after our outro.Considering overlooking this episode because you don't know anything about accelerators?Listen to Part I and Part II to the end and learn why understanding your building a tribe is the key to scaling overseas and beyond.We even discuss Gary's Jamaican roots and unwavering self belief in proving others wrong, of which we all can relate.What Will I Learn From This Episode?As a founder or emerging fund manager, you'll learn what it takes to build an anti-fragile tribe.Join us for a special conversation with Gary Stewart, providing your added motivation with practical tips you can leverage to succeed in the world of early stage startups and venture capital.Subscribe and Review the #11 Podcast for Startups in 2022 as voted by Feedspot.Checkout the full list here-> https://blog.feedspot.com/startup_podcasts/Ranked in top 15% of podcasts shared globally on Spotify.Join us on our journey to earn 50 ratings on iTunes and Spotify!Start you own podcast here (we may receive a small commission if you sign up).See you inside…Questions Answered Inside:1. What is Founder Tribes?2. What do founders get out of Techstars?3. What are investors looking for at various stages?Connect with Gary Stewart using the links below:Gary StewartLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garystew/details/experience/Founder TribesWebsite: https://foundertribes.com/Techstars New York (Powered by J.P. Morgan)Website: https://www.techstars.com/

You're never too old to realize a new dream and build an innovative tech business.Our guest, Danielle D. Duplin, is the Founder and President of FreeWind Productions, an award-winning public speaking coach, and an executive producer of strategic innovation programs.She's also a beloved Mentor and Pitch Coach to hundreds of startups and scaleups via MassChallenge, FinTech Sandbox, Leading Cities Accelerator (Smart CitiesTech), TechStars, JETRO (Japan's BioTech), AGENCY (AgeTech), and AARP AgeTech Collaborative – many of which have raised millions of dollars and won ‘best in show' challenges.Danielle's latest entrepreneurial venture is Founder of AGENCY: Worldwide Innovation for Living Longer and Aging Better, a global community of innovators focused on improving the aging journey; as well as Cofounder of the Founders Over 55+ Collective to help “late in life” founders grow their companies and signal a counternarrative to ageism.Please reach out to Danielle via email: danielle@freewindproductions.comYou can learn more about launching a business after 55 by visiting: https://www.agencytoinnovate.com and connecting with them online via:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agency-cic/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AGENCYCICConnect with Danielle on these social platforms:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielledduplin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielleDDuplinThank you for carving out time to improve your Founder Game - when you do better, your startup will do better - cheers!Ande ♥https://andelyons.combestpodcastforstartups #startupstories #proaging #livelongerJOIN STARTUP LIFE LIVE MEETUP GROUPGet an alert whenever I post a new show! https://bit.ly/StartupLifeLIVECONNECT WITH ME ONLINE:https://twitter.com/AndeLyonshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andelyons/https://www.instagram.com/ande_lyons/TikTok: @andelyonsANDELICIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTSArlan's Academy: https://arlansacademy.com/Scroobious - use Ande15 discount code: https://www.scroobious.com/How to Raise a Seed Round: https://bit.ly/AAElizabethYinTune in to Mia Voss' Shit We Don't Talk About podcast here: https://shitwedonttalkaboutpodcast.com/SPONSORSHIPIf you resonate with the show's mission of amplifying diverse founder voices while serving first-time founders around the world, please reach out to me to learn more about making an impact through sponsoring the Startup Life LIVE Show! ande@andelyons.com.

My guest today is  Maëlle Gavet, the CEO of Techstars. Techstars is one of the world's largest pre-seed investors, with over 3,300 investments. Maëlle is the Author of “Trampled by Unicorns” and an advocate for Empathetic Tech. Today is a special episode. I apologize for the noise in the background because we have the pleasure of recording this episode in person at the Web Summit in Lisbon. Links More about Techstars: https://www.techstars.com/ More about Maelle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maellegavet/  More about Fintalent: https://fintalent.io/   You can find all episodes of The Wall Street Lab Podcast on https://thewallstreetlab.com/ 

In this episode of Investing In Integrity, Ross chatted with Vijay Tirathrai, Managing Director of Techstars, a juggernaut startup accelerator which has had 2,900 companies go through its accelerator programs, adding up to a combined market capitalization of over $70 billion. Vijay's journey spans founding, failing, building, scaling, and exiting as a serial startup founder – and then investing, advising, and mentoring as a venture investor at Techstars. Vijay emphasizes the role of integrity in startup leadership, especially through vulnerability and tenacity as a team-member in his own companies. “The quicker we can get to openness, the faster we build trust,” Vijay says, explaining how it's important for leaders to be forthcoming about challenges, setbacks, and the failures they face. A prolific and successful entrepreneur, Vijay explains how getting “agitated” about unsolved problems in his life inspired him to start several companies, including a cycling helmet manufacturer, an association and events management platform, and a corporate venture capital firm. And as a seasoned investor and advisor, Vijay also unpacks how Techstars operates, highlighting how they “don't have a timeline for when investors need to exit” as a firm that believes in “patient capital.” He emphasizes the role of a curated, talent-dense network in facilitating growth and collaboration. “Start a company because you're passionate about solving a problem, start today,” Vijay says. “If you fail, even better – stop procrastinating and get it done!” We hope you enjoy this conversation on entrepreneurship, integrity, vulnerability, and the principles underpinning great leadership in the startup space! 00:00 - Intro 15:06 - Entrepreneurship 29:49 - Techstars Role 36:03 - Rapid Fire

Gary Stewart learned the biggest limit in life (even at Yale) was himself. Learning to balance self confidence and boldness with perseverance through tough times helped Gary meet British Royals, scale startups in Spain, and return to the U.S. to lead one of the country's most reputable accelerators. After helping European conglomerates build a multi-billion dollar portfolio, Gary returned to the States to help founders find their tribe, demystifying the "warm intro" and turning various power dynamics on their proverbial head. Why Interview Gary Stewart and Founder Tribes?Gary sheds light on the inner mind of a successful founder while providing practical tips for the aspiring tech entrepreneur. Listen to find out how, and let us know if you agree.As the Managing Director of Techstars New York, Gary wears multiple hats and with conversations and stories that will stick with you even after this episode.Considering overlooking this episode because you don't know anything about accelerators?Listen to Part I to the end and learn why understanding building a tribe is the key to scaling overseas and beyond.We even discuss Gary's Jamaican roots and an unwavering self belief to prove others wrong, of which we all can relate. What Will I Learn From This Episode?As a founder or emerging fund manager, you'll learn what it takes to build a tribe that sticks. Join us for a special conversation with Gary Stewart, providing your added motivation with practical tips you can leverage to succeed in the world of early stage startups and venture capital.Follow and Review the #11 Podcast for Startups in 2022 as voted by Feedspot.Checkout the full list here-> https://blog.feedspot.com/startup_podcasts/Join us on our journey to earn 50 ratings on iTunes and Spotify!Start you own podcast here (we may receive a small commission if you sign up).See you inside…Questions Answered Inside:1. What is Founder Tribes?2. How did you build a tech team as a non-technical founder?3. Should founders join accelerators?Connect with Gary Stewart using the links below:Gary StewartLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garystew/details/experience/ Founder TribesWebsite: https://foundertribes.com/ Techstars New York (Powered by J.P. Morgan)Website: https://www.techstars.com/

My special guest in today's episode of If Not Now Wen is Justin Siegel. Justin is an entrepreneur and investor, and he is the co-founder and CEO of two successful mobile entertainment companies. The first company, JSmart Technologies, was a pioneer in mobile games. It was acquired by the SK Group in 2004. The second company, JNJ Mobile, backed by General Catalyst Partners and Softbank Capital, built one of the first mobile social networks. Today it is one of Android's top-grossing social applications and a leading mobile platform for HTML5 games. Justin is the founder and Managing Partner of ATX Angel, LLC, which invests in early-stage companies. He is also a Techstars mentor and advisor to Boston Seed Capital. Justin has always known that he wanted to live a life of adventure, and he has chosen paths and ideas that he finds interesting and exciting. Justin has gone from being a French teacher and journalist to becoming an entrepreneur, investor, and mentor. He is such an inspiration, and I hope you enjoy his story as much as I do. We talk about:

Tyler Bryden is an experienced business owner, marketer, and product leader passionate about improving human-computer interaction to unlock personal and professional growth. He currently leads Speak Ai, a technology company supported by Techstars that uses speech-to-text and natural language processing to automatically extract valuable insights from audio, video, and text. 7,000+ researchers, marketers, and data professionals use Speak Ai's intuitive platform to capture and analyze language data for better decision-making.

New Year, New Season! Welcome to Season 5 of the Actionable Futurist Podcast.To kick off the new season, I interviewed Sophia Matveeva CEO & founder of Tech For Non-Techies.Sophia argues that you don't have to be a tech expert to found, run or work in a technology company at senior levels.Tech For Non-Techies is an education company and consultancy. Sophia has contributed to the Financial Times, The Guardian, and Forbes on entrepreneurship and technology, and hosts the top-rated Tech for Non-Techies podcast.Tech for Non-Techies teaches non-technical professionals how to Speak Tech and succeed in the Digital Age through corporate & individual training programs.As a non-technical founder, Sophia has co-created apps and algorithms that have been used by thousands, won App of the Day by Mashable, and was featured by Inc, the BBC, and more.She has also guest lectured at the University of Chicago, London Business School, and Oxford University, and led the Blackstone x Techstars accelerator at the University of Texas at El Paso.Sophia is a start-up mentor at the Chicago Booth Polsky Center of Entrepreneurship, and has advised leading accelerators including Chicago Booth's New Venture Challenge and the Microsoft x London College of Fashion incubator.She holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and a BSc (Hons) in Politics from Bristol. She speaks English, Russian and French. Sophia also sits on the Board of the University of Chicago's Alumni in the UK.We covered a number of issues related to being “Digitally Curious™” such asstarting a tech company without a technical backgroundthe need for digital literacy among senior leaderswhy it's important to build a bridge between technical and non-technical people?what it means to be a “digital collaborator”?These issues and more will be covered in Andrew's upcoming book, to be published by Wiley later in 2023.More on SophiaSophia on LinkedInTech for non-techies websiteTech for non-techies podcastSophia on Twitter Your Host: Actionable Futurist® Andrew GrillFor more on Andrew - what he speaks about and recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com Andrew's Social ChannelsAndrew on LinkedIn@AndrewGrill on Twitter @Andrew.Grill on InstagramKeynote speeches hereAndrew's upcoming book

I first met Sravish about 10 years ago. It was an era where there was a resurgence in the Boston tech scene. A new level of excitement that was fueled by a crop of young entrepreneurs who were building companies that were powered by accelerators or incubators like Techstars, Dogpatch Labs, Bolt, and others. What is great about this era in the Boston tech scene is that many of these entrepreneurs, like Sravish, have exited and are now on to building their next startup. Having successful serial entrepreneurs is a critical part of the success of a land standing major startup ecosystem. Not only do they have more experience and lessons learned from their first company, but they can also think longer term and swing for the fences. Sravish's last company was Kinvey, a company that coined the term Backend-As-A-Service with their platform for mobile developers. The company was acquired by Progress in 2017. His current company is called Kintent, which is looking to become the trusted platform for compliance. Its Trust Cloud will help eliminate those dreaded compliance and security questionnaires that you get from companies that take forever to fill out. The company announced its $18M Series A round of funding led by OpenView earlier this year. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice for founders on the acquisition process. * Sravish's background growing up including how he got involved as an early employee at a startup called United Devices that was a pre-cursor to cloud computing. * The story of Kinvey and its acquisition by Progress. * All the details on Kintent and what the future looks like for the company. * Advice for getting started as an angel investor. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Brad Feld, co-author of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors. Brad Feld has invested in startups for over 25 years and co-founded Foundry and Techstars. He is the author of multiple books, including Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist and Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one could have imagined how the COVID-19 pandemic would shape the future of work. The number of people working from home tripled between 2019 and 2021, from 5.7% to nearly 18%, according to 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Many employees would rather quit than return to an office full-time, valuing flexibility and autonomy over higher paychecks. While several employers have adopted a hybrid model to accommodate employees' preferences, some interactions simply aren't the same over Zoom.  As a software engineer in 2017, Renji Bijoy noticed that collaborating virtually was difficult in hybrid settings. This inspired Renji to become the CEO/CTO and Founder of Immersed, a Techstars startup, to enhance remote working environments with virtual reality. It wasn't until remote work became the norm in 2020 that his company gained traction with Meta and Microsoft to build virtual reality offices. Now, Immersed has raised $12M to date and it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Renji chats with Tommy about the importance of flexibility in a startup environment, the key to selecting a high-performing team, and the role virtual offices will play in the next generation of the workforce. Key Takeaways [02:08] - Renji's entrepreneurial journey. [07:35] - The DARPA Grand Challenge. [10:20] - The idea that Renji initially brought to TechStars. [12:40] - How Renji pivoted to solve a new problem. [14:34] - How Renji secured a partnership with Meta. [15:29] - The financial hardship Renji faced in 2019. [17:23] - Renji's unconventional approach to hiring. [20:38] - Renji's secret to building a top-performing team.  [23:13] - How crowdfunding works. [25:57] - How Immerse became a fundraising success. [28:45] - The virtual reality experience. [31:37] - The future of virtual reality. [36:50] -The next step for telepresence. [39:00] - Renji's favorite business contractor. [43:54] - The best way to reach out to Renji. Quotes [35:35] - “Immersed is not something that we're building because we love remote work, it's something that we're building because we actually hate remote work. We are trying to unite our world in such a way that actually allows people to get to the same space, regardless of where you're at.” ~ Renji Bijoy [43:06] - “Zoom is not the solution for hybrid remote teams now that companies want people in the office and only half of them want to come back.” ~ Renji Bijoy [45:04] - “You start creating a global workforce as if you had everyone on-site. This is going to be the next generation of the workforce.” ~ Renji Bijoy Links  Renji Bijoy on LinkedIn Renji Bijoy in Forbes 30 Under 30 Immersed on LinkedIn The Grand Challenge Sebastian Thrun on LinkedIn Ryan Yep on LinkedIn Techstars Wefunder U.S. Census Bureau - Working From Home Connect with our hosts Mammoth Tommy on LinkedIn Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Learn more about Mammoth Scientific's Health & Tech Fund 1 When you move beyond the point of making sure your retirement goals are on track, your investment opportunities are wider than just publicly traded funds. Step into the world of investing in venture capital by learning more about Mammoth Scientific's Health & Tech Fund 1. Curated by some of the leading medical and fintech experts, Mammoth's Fund 1 is paving the way for health science and tech innovation. If you're interested in helping patient care, provider insight, and instrumentation go beyond possibility and into reality, check it out today at Mammoth.vc. Visit Mammoth.vc today!

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of B2B Sales, Marketing and Recruitment. Mark currently splits his time as Co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B Startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, The Product Onboarders and coaching 100's of SDR's through his Outbound Prospecting course via The Sales Impact Academy. He's a Techstars 18′ Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry, his work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM and Baremetrics to name a few. Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon, is addicted to travelling and exploring new cultures and places. You'll often hear him saying “por que no?” (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring. Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Mark Colgan: Website: www.speakonpodcasts.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcolganmarketing

Matthew Helt is a growth and development coach for startup founders and CEOs under his coaching practice, Prairiesattva, based in Omaha, NE. Prior to starting his business in 2020, Matthew spent a little over 6 years with Techstars as the Global Director of Startup Week, a week-long event to catalyze and celebrate startup communities, and then joined the Ecosystem Development team where he served as the Senior Implementation Consultant, working with cities around the world to help them grow their entrepreneurial ecosystems. As a former startup founder, he's intimately aware of the stress and anxiety that comes with business ownership. It's for this reason that he created his coaching practice to help entrepreneurs navigate the highs and lows of business ownership, and ultimately come home to themselves to fully understand who they are as human beings. Additionally, I'll be donating to and raising awareness for the charity or organization of my guest's choice with each episode now. This episode, the organization is called Mental Health First Aid. Any and all donations make a difference! You can connect with Matthew on: Website Instagram LinkedIn Twitter   To connect with me: Interested in working with me as your coach? Book a complimentary 15 minute call here. LinkedIn Instagram Website Subscribe to my weekly newsletter YouTube Please leave a review for this podcast on Apple Podcasts!   Resources/People Mentioned: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunryu Suzuki The Coaching Habit - Michael Bungay Stanier The Joy of Living - Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk M.D. Ravi Rothenberg Jerry Colona Ram Dass Prairiesattva  

On this episode of the Somewhat Frank Podcast, Frank Gruber (@FrankGruber) and John Guidos (@JohnGuidos) discuss the following topics and articles…   AI is taking over everything…get ready! Here's a good guide from a search engine analyst perspective. Google Faces a Serious Threat From ChatGPT - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-07/chatgpt-should-worry-google-and-alphabet-why-search-when-you-can-ask-ai?tpcc=nltermsheet&utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=mobile_web_share   AI taking over the news - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare   AI taking over portrait art with viral Lensa app - https://news.northeastern.edu/2022/12/09/portrait-ai-app/   Lensa.ai is pretty amazing - https://flip.it/jkdKZr   ChatGPT can detect Alzheimer's disease with 80% accuracy - https://flip.it/sigJB_   Frank talks about his work with TechStars and CICLA - https://cicla3d.cl   Mia Consalvo, PhD, Professor and Canada Research Chair In Game Studies & Design, Communication Studies (https://www.miaconsalvo.com/) also chats about the implications of AI impacting education.    Lastly, we hear about our upcoming trip to Las Vegas for the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show, where we'll be on the floor again at Eureka Park, where we'll be hosting the Consumer Technology Association Foundation Pitch Competition. Come join us at the Startup Stage on Friday, January 6th from 2 - 4 PM PT, for an electrifying pitch competition featuring startups with technologies that help people of all ages and abilities get out into the world, whether for work or play!   While in Las Vegas, we will also be hosting the Startup of the Year Coffee Meetup on Friday, January 6th from 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM Pacific Time at Off the Strip coffee joint. Please join us by registering at: https://soty.link/CES-Coffee    ………..   As always, thank you for listening and feel free to reach out and let us know what you think at: somewhatfrank@est.us   Get updates like this in your inbox before they hit the web by subscribing to the newsletter here: https://frankgruber.me/newsletter/ 

In today's episode, we have someone who has done it all founder, funder, and now contributor to our startup ecosystem. Excited to have Elle Bruno who is the managing director of TechStars Boulder.Here's a closer look at the episode:Elle's early days as an entrepreneurWhy Elle focuses her angel investing on female founders.What's changed in the world of investing in female founders.Elle's advice to founders that are struggling with challenges/disadvantages.Eliminate emotion and use data.The importance of the founder/VC relationshipThe quintessential element of investment is spending time with the founders.Power dynamic shift with founders and funders.Why investors and founders both need to do diligence.What brought Elle to TechStars and the imposter syndrome.The difficulty in choosing the companies for the cohorts.How TechStars has grown. What the TechStars Boulder program entails.Advice to founders thinking about applying to TechStars.What's unique about being a founder in ColoradoWhy do TechStars as a founder.What are you looking forward to on the personal front?Resources:TechStars Boulder Website: https://www.techstars.com/accelerators/boulder Elle Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellebruno/ Techstars LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techstars/ Techstars Twitter: https://twitter.com/techstars Techstars Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techstars/ Techstars Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/techstars Techstars YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/techstarstv