Podcasts about true ventures

Portland Startup Week 2025 (06:55) is only 2 weeks away. Get the latest news on PDX Startup Week and all of the events, Portland startup raises $11.2M, some interesting guests in town, and a couple of startup applications that are due. Let's get into it…PORTLAND STARTUP LINKS- Photon Marine https://photonmarine.com/- Newlab https://www.newlab.com/- Pitch Black Podcast https://www.pitchblack.org/podcast/clarence-bethea- Show up for small business (Ankeny Alley) https://www.meetup.com/pie-portland-startup-community/events/307221148/- Portland Startup Week 2025 https://lu.ma/pdxstartupweek- Araceli Biosciences - https://www.aracelibio.com/ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jvx0Kaupm4- Oregon UAS Accelerator https://oregonuas.org/apply- TiE Oregon Columbia River Pitch https://www.tieoregon.org/pitch-oregon/columbia-river-pitch- Portland startup news weekly newsletter https://siliconflorist.substack.comPORTLAND STARTUP NEWS00:00 Portland startup news intro00:30 Celebrating the small wins01:13 Shoutouts for Yalda, Caroline, Marcelino, and  @newlabplatform  04:00 Clarence Bethea of True Ventures on the Pitch Black Podcast05:12 A top secret bonus special thing especially for you06:55 Portland Startup Week 202512:21 Araceli Biosciences raises $11.2M13:47  @OregonUASAccelerator  applications due15:06  @TiEOregon  Columbia River Pitch applications due16:30 Trivial fun fact17:27 TiE Oregon Westside Pitch 2025 companies18:59 Daily Silicon Florist link arrangementFIND RICK TUROCZY ON THE INTERNET AT…- https://patreon.com/turoczy- https://linkedin.com/in/turoczy- Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/portland-oregon-startup-news-silicon-florist/id1711294699- Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2cmLDH8wrPdNMS2qtTnhcy?si=H627wrGOTvStxxKWRlRGLQ- https://bsky.app/profile/turoczy.bsky.social- https://siliconflorist.substack.com/- https://pdxslack.comABOUT SILICON FLORIST ----------For nearly two decades, Rick Turoczy has published Silicon Florist, a blog, newsletter, and podcast that covers entrepreneurs, founders, startups, entrepreneurship, tech, news, and events in the Portland, Oregon, startup community. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a startup or tech enthusiast, or simply intrigued by Portland's startup culture, Silicon Florist is your go-to source for the latest news, events, jobs, and opportunities in Portland Oregon's flourishing tech and startup scene. Join us in exploring the innovative world of startups in Portland, where creativity and collaboration meet.ABOUT RICK TUROCZY ----------Rick Turoczy has been working in, on, and around the Portland, Oregon, startup community for nearly 30 years. He has been recognized as one of the “OG”s of startup ecosystem building by the Kauffman Foundation. And he has been humbled by any number of opportunities to speak on stages from SXSW to INBOUND and from Kobe, Japan, to Muscat, Oman, including an opportunity to share his views on community building on the TEDxPortland stage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj98mr_wUA0). All because of a blog. Weird.https://siliconflorist.com#pdx #portland #pdxsw #oregon #startup #entrepreneur

Join Chris and Anne for a candid conversation with Clarence Bethea, investor and executive in residence at True Ventures, as he shares his incredible journey from a troubled youth to startup success with Upsie and becoming a VC. Clarence discusses how AI is shaping the future of retail and startups, the importance of empathy and honesty in funding decisions, and share practical advice for early-stage entrepreneurs, including why early money matters. Key Moments: (1:00) Clarence's personal journey from Georgia to VC success (3:00) Building Upsie and disrupting the warranty market (7:00) True Ventures' focus on seed-stage investments and AI (11:00) Challenges for women and black founders in securing funding (17:00) The importance of having 3 key people in your entrepreneurial journey (22:00) Advice for entrepreneurs on persistence and overcoming breaking points #startupfunding #vcinsights #entrepreneuradvice #aiinvestments

#197: Together with Kevin Rose, we'll dive into points and miles strategies, credit card optimization, travel tips, and career growth. Specifically, we'll cover everything from underrated credit card tricks, tactics for earning multiple welcome bonuses, navigating the complexities of family travel, staying updated on the best deals, our favorite podcasts, and so much more. Kevin Rose is a partner at True Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that has invested over $4 billion in a portfolio of over 400+ founders. Kevin previously founded Digg, Zero, Oak, and was a Partner at Google Ventures. Link to Full Show Notes: https://chrishutchins.com/kevin-rose-ama-1 Partner Deals Stable: 50% off your first year of my favorite digital mailbox Superhuman: Free month of the fastest and best email with code ALLTHEHACKS Daffy: Free $25 to give to the charity of your choice Vuori: 20% off the most comfortable performance apparel I've ever worn Oracle: Free trial of the next generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure For all the deals, discounts and promo codes from our partners, go to: chrishutchins.com/deals Resources Mentioned Kevin Rose: Website | Newsletter DEXA Scan: DexaFit Credit Cards Best Credit Cards Offers Page Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card U.S. Bank Altitude® Reserve Visa Infinite® Card Bank of America Preferred Rewards Robinhood Gold Credit Card Bilt Mastercard® Wells Fargo Autograph Journey℠ Card Wells Fargo Autograph℠ Card Citi Strata Premier℠ Card Credit Card Optimizer Tool How to Get Approved for Business Cards Pepper Rewards App (Referral code: 612342) Points and Miles Websites Frequent Miler Doctor Of Credit One Mile at a Time Travel point.me AwardCat 10xTravel Savanti Travel Hyatt Globalist Guest of Honor: A Complete Guide Podcasts Frequent Miler On The Air Animal Spirits The Memo by Howard Marks MoneyWise with Sam Parr The Peter Attia Drive diggnation Huberman Lab The Aliquot (Rhonda Patrick) ATH Podcast Chris' Newsletter: Sign Up | Past Issues Chris' Membership Ep #47: Finding Happiness, Success and Deep Purpose with Arthur Brooks Ep #86: The Best Deals for Vacation Rentals, Exchanges, Fractionals, Timeshares and More! Ep #170: Cash Back vs. Points: Are We Doing It All Wrong? Ep #196: Optimizing Metabolic Health to Live a Longer and Healthier Life with Dr. Casey Means Full Show Notes (02:11) Introduction (03:32) Strategizing Your Next Home Purchase (07:42) When Should You Consider REITs? (08:25) Mastering the Skill of Spending (12:15) Why You Should Invest Toward Your Pain Points (14:28) Maximizing Earnings in Less Than 6 Months (16:51) Most Overrated Credit Card Trick (20:55) Underrated Credit Card Strategies (23:30) Chris' Credit Card Optimizer Tool (25:34) Secret Perk on Amazon Visa Card (26:49) How to Earn Multiple Welcome Bonuses (30:26) Cancelling/Recycling Credit Cards (35:20) How to Get Weekly Alerts on Deals & Finds (37:01) Earning Points Beyond Regular Spending (40:00) Pepper Points (41:16) Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines Merger (44:03) Adding Authorized Users on Your Card (45:48) How to Search for Hotel Availability by Occupancy (46:49) Chris' Favorite Websites to Earn Points From (47:22) Best Credit Card Pairings (49:33) Using Consultants to Maximize Points (51:04) Relaxing on Vacation (54:03) Rental Car Protection on Points (55:57) Chris and Kevin's Favorite Airline Cabins (58:10) Splitting Kids & Nanny into Different Class Flight Seats (1:02:20) Earning Hyatt Globalist Status (1:05:52) Optimizing Vacation Rentals or Extended Trips (1:07:07) Chris and Kevin's Favorite Podcasts (1:09:31) How to Decide to Quit Your Job (1:13:49) Accelerating Your Career With Kids (1:20:13) Future Q&A Preview (1:21:04) The Reason We Have Ads in the Show (1:22:53) Where to Find Kevin

Jonathan Schneider is Co-Founder & CEO of Moderne, the platform for code migrations. Moderne has raised up to a Series A from investors including Intel Capital and True Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the importance of software refactoring and the security and engineering challenges that come up when code isn't maintained, why they started with Java refactoring, their rewrite open source project, how the amount of code created with GenAI has made refactoring an even bigger challenge & more!

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.This week I'm excited to sit down with Lindel Eakman from Foundry. Lindel has been an investor in funds and companies since the early 2000s when he started at UTIMCO.In our conversation, Lindel talks about being one of the first investors in Union Square Ventures, his preference for smaller partnerships, and the art of conducting quality reference calls on GPs. Having known each other for a while, our chat felt like a fun and casual water cooler conversation about the venture capital world.About Lindel Eakman:Lindel Eakman is a partner at Foundry, where he focuses on early-stage investing. Since joining in 2015, Lindel has been active across the portfolio, working closely with partner funds and leading new direct investments. He is known for his humble and supportive approach, valuing the hard work of founders.Before Foundry, Lindel managed the private investment program at the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) from 2002 to 2015. At UTIMCO, he built the venture capital program and invested in firms like IA Ventures, True Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Foundry.Lindel began his career in finance at KPMG in the M&A Tax Practice from 1997 to 2001 and then worked as a Corporate Finance Associate at Stephens, Inc. in 2002. He holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business and a BBA in Accounting and Finance from Texas Christian University. He is a CPA and a CFA charter holder.In this episode, we discuss:(01:14) Early Career and Union Square Ventures and moving to Foundry(03:00) Investment Philosophy and Strategy(04:28) The value of partnering with emerging managers(05:55) Selecting GPs and Making Investment Decisions(10:30) The Current Venture Market Landscape in 2024.(13:00) Challenges and Opportunities for New Managers(17:00) Future of Venture Capital(21:00) Importance of People in Venture(25:00) Secondaries and Liquidity Opportunities(29:00) The importance of evaluating partnership dynamics in emerging managers(33:00) Best practices for conducting reference checks.(37:00) How virtual interactions affect partnership assessments and fundraising(42:00) Advice for new managers on constructing a venture portfolio, focusing on sectors and small funds(47:00) Role of Large Funds in a Venture PortfolioI'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Lindel. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

The Guardrails Came Off!!!Michael Koenig, COO of Tucows, shares his strategy for leading his organization in a time where are limitless opportunities AND endless risks.The "guardrails" of AI haven't been established, so EVERY team in EVERY industry must have the framework for focus, progress, and execution.That's where Michael's message comes in...An executive at the largest internet domain wholesaler in the world.An early team member of Automattic, the organization that gave us Wordpress.A remote work pioneer dating back to 2006 with his team, featured in the WSJ bestseller Running Remote.Accelerate your success with Michael's strategy and prepare for the monumental shifts ahead.-----Michael is also the host of “Between Two COO's”, a podcast dedicated to filling the knowledge gap about the COO role by bringing exceptional COO's and execs from the likes of LVMH, Vodafone, Lyft, Lime, Cotopaxi, Symantec, True Ventures, Techstars, and other multi-billion dollar institutions together to share their expertise and stories.LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-koenig514/Company Link: https://www.tucows.com/What You'll Discover in this EpisodeThe Company He Worked For that Became the "Backbone of the Internet".The Punk Band that Started His Career.Advice from the “Father of the Ipod”.A Strategy to Prioritize in the Midst of Chaos.What He Learned from Legendary PRIMUS Bass Player, Les Claypool.How Starting a Podcast Transformed Him.How to Harness the Power of Tech.-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter

Puneet Agarwal brings a strong mix of operational and investment experience to his partner role at True. He began his career as a product manager at CrossWorlds Software, an early startup focused on software integration, which was sold to IBM. He then spent time in technology investment banking at J.P. Morgan and later in venture capital at the Mayfield Fund, where he invested in early stage technology companies. Puneet spent four years at BEA Systems in various product management and marketing roles in which he initiated and ran BEA's RFID initiative. Following BEA, he joined Geodesic Information Systems, a mobile messaging company, where he filled the role of vice president of product management. As part of his work, he moved to India for several months. He joined the True team in 2008. Puneet holds a bachelor's degree and master's degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University, where he was a Mayfield Fellow.    You can learn more about: Trends and Opportunities in Early-Stage Investing 2. Due diligence on early-stage companies 3. Evaluating Founding Teams    ===================== YouTube: @GraceGongCEO Newsletter: @SmartVenture LinkedIn: @GraceGong TikTok: @GraceGongCEO IG: @GraceGongCEO Twitter: @GraceGongGG ===================== Join the SVP fam with your host Grace Gong. In each episode, we are going to have conversations with some of the top investors, superstar founders, as well as well-known tech executives in silicon valley. We will have a coffee chat with them to learn their ways of thinking and actionable tips on how to build or invest in a successful company.

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

On this podcast episode, Amir Bormand interviews Madeline Minshew, the Vice President of Culture at True Ventures. They discuss the importance of hiring your first head of people and what to look for when taking a job as the first people leader hire. True Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in extraordinary founders and their innovative ideas. They are sector-agnostic and focus on backing exceptional individuals in various markets. This episode explores the characteristics of successful founders and the significance of building a strong team. Highlights:  [00:02:26] Characteristics of extraordinary founders. [00:07:11] Letting go of control. [00:09:25] Preserving culture while scaling. [00:13:40] Building the right company. [00:18:58] Questions for job seekers. [00:24:14] HR's evolving role in organizations. [00:27:21] Asking questions and viewing problems. Guest: As True's VP of Culture, Madeline guides True Founders as they evolve as leaders, grow their teams, and intentionally build organizational cultures. She believes authentic, honest relationships that value trust, diversity of perspectives, and open feedback are the quintessential cornerstone of healthy, high-performing teams. Above all, Madeline is a super-connector across the True Portfolio; she brings together founders, executives, and portfolio team members to create deeper synergy, build collective wisdom, and encourage a sense of belonging. Prior to joining True, Madeline was the VP of people and talent at Handshake, a True Portfolio company that's since grown into the leading career development network for college students and recent graduates. Before Handshake, Madeline focused on hiring high-performing talent and building strong, inclusive cultures at Cadre, Tumblr, and Google. A San Francisco native, Madeline also speaks French and German fluently. Madeline graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University with a major in political science and a minor in French literature. ---- Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and we would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player. Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.comHave questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests? Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)

Jim Myers, CTO & Co-Founder of Flipside Crypto Jim Myers is an engineer, early-stage investor, and the CTO & Co-Founder of Flipside Crypto, a leading blockchain data analytics and business intelligence platform. Prior to co-founding Flipside, Jim developed the core technology that took products from 0 to 1 at companies such as Mylestone, Pluralsight, and Smarterer. Jim's journey into the crypto industry began in 2015, eventually co-founding Flipside Crypto in 2017 to help empower crypto communities to create and share data-driven insights on the projects they care most about. Jim's passion for building extends to the broader startup community via his developer event series, Stack Dive, and as an angel investor to several local Boston-area startups, including AdHawk and LinkSquares. In a previous life, Jim developed advanced models to quantify risk and abnormal returns in the market for Financial Transmission Rights, a type of energy derivative. About Flipside Crypto Flipside Crypto is a leading on-chain data analytics and business intelligence platform, that empowers the web3 community to build with and leverage accurate, reliable data across 20+ blockchains. Our data is labeled with proprietary algorithms for developers and analysts to query, create, and build. The Flipside product suite provides everyone from individuals to enterprises with flexibility on how and where they access on-chain data. Founded in 2017, Flipside has grown to be one of the world's foremost blockchain analytics providers with over 50,000 analysts and key partnerships with L1 & L2 ecosystems including Solana, NEAR, Flow, and Avalanche. Flipside is backed by leading investors including Republic Capital, True Ventures, Galaxy Digital, M13, and more. Profile Links:  Website: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz  Blog: https://blog.flipsidecrypto.com  Flipside Crypto on Twitter: https://twitter.com/flipsidecrypto Jim Myers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JimMyersTech Jim Myers on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfmyers/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crypto-hipster-podcast/support

On this episode of the podcast, the Amir Bormand  interviews Madeline Minshew, the Vice President of Culture at True Ventures. They discuss the importance of hiring your first head of people and what to look for when taking a job as the first people leader hire. True Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in extraordinary founders and their innovative ideas. They are sector-agnostic and focus on backing exceptional individuals in various markets. This episode explores the characteristics of successful founders and the significance of building a strong team. Highlights:  [00:02:26] Characteristics of extraordinary founders. [00:07:11] Letting go of control. [00:09:25] Preserving culture while scaling. [00:13:40] Building the right company. [00:18:58] Questions for job seekers. [00:24:14] HR's evolving role in organizations. [00:27:21] Asking questions and viewing problems. Guest: As True's VP of Culture, Madeline guides True Founders as they evolve as leaders, grow their teams, and intentionally build organizational cultures. She believes authentic, honest relationships that value trust, diversity of perspectives, and open feedback are the quintessential cornerstone of healthy, high-performing teams. Above all, Madeline is a super-connector across the True Portfolio; she brings together founders, executives, and portfolio team members to create deeper synergy, build collective wisdom, and encourage a sense of belonging. Prior to joining True, Madeline was the VP of people and talent at Handshake, a True Portfolio company that's since grown into the leading career development network for college students and recent graduates. Before Handshake, Madeline focused on hiring high-performing talent and building strong, inclusive cultures at Cadre, Tumblr, and Google. A San Francisco native, Madeline also speaks French and German fluently. Madeline graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University with a major in political science and a minor in French literature. ------ Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Talent Tango, and we would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player. Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests? Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)  

Maia Benson and Joe Lynch discuss A SaaS Gal in VC Land. Maia is a SaaS gal in VC land and a Managing Director at Forum Ventures where she works with SaaS founders from inception to scale.  About Maia Benson Maia Benson is a Managing Director at Forum where she works with SaaS founders from inception to scale.  She has spent over 20 years founding, building and scaling award-winning SaaS products for Entrepreneurs and SMBs at places like LexisNexis, Pitney Bowes and most recently at Shopify, where she helped found, launch and scale their Shipping and Fulfillment products from inception to 60%+ merchant adoption and $Bs of transportation spend. About Forum Ventures Forum Ventures is the leading early-stage fund, program and community for B2B SaaS startups. Founded in 2014 as Acceleprise, we're on a mission to make the B2B SaaS journey easier, more accessible and successful for early-stage founders, through pre-seed and seed-stage funding, high touch programming, corporate perks and introductions, and an active SaaS community. Forum For Founders, our pre-seed program, provides founders with $100k in funding and 15 intense weeks of talks, events, mentorship and 1:1 guidance focused on go to market and fundraising. Forum Seed, our seed fund, backs exceptional SaaS startups at the seed-stage both from within and outside of our pre-seed program. With over 250 portfolio companies, Forum founders have gone on to raise from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncork Capital, 8VC, Founders Fund, Menlo Ventures, Canaan, Bowery Capital, Susa Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, SV Angel, True Ventures and many more. Our private peer community for Innovation executives -- The Innovation Forum -- brings together like-minded intrapreneurs from all backgrounds to share best practices, insights, and advice, and support one another. In addition to our incredible peer community, members get access to industry trend reports, collaborative events, emerging technology, and startup introductions. Key Takeaways: A SaaS Gal in VC Land Forum Ventures is the top choice for early-stage B2B SaaS companies looking for funding. Forum Ventures is different and better for the following reasons: Founder-focused: Their team consists of former SaaS founders, offering deep understanding of the early-stage journey and expertise in GTM, sales, and fundraising. Pre-seed and seed investments: They empower early-stage B2B SaaS companies with pre-seed and seed funding, ranging from $100k to $2 million. High-touch programs: Beyond funding, they provide high-touch programs like "Forum For Founders" (15 weeks of talks, mentorship, and guidance) and a dedicated fundraising track. Thriving community: They foster an active SaaS community with over 450 founders, mentors, and experts, offering connections, support, and valuable insights. Accessibility champions: Committed to diversity and inclusion, they strive to make the B2B SaaS ecosystem more accessible to underrepresented founders. Proven success: With over 250 successful pre-seed and seed investments, their track record speaks for itself. Fractional co-founder approach: They act as a "fractional co-founder" with world-class expertise, helping startups navigate crucial steps like product development, go-to-market strategy, and fundraising. Mission-driven: Driven by a genuine passion for aiding founders, they prioritize their success and strive to make the B2B SaaS journey easier and more impactful. Learn More About A SaaS Gal in VC Maia Benson | LinkedIn Forum Ventures | LinkedIn Forum Ventures | Homepage The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Explore the latest entrepreneurial chapter of John Foley, the visionary behind Peloton, as he embarks on a new journey with Ernesta, his innovative custom rug startup. Foley discusses his pivot from revolutionizing the fitness world to shaking up the home decor industry. With $25 million in venture capital from Addition and True Ventures, Foley, along with his former Peloton colleagues, is reimagining the rug market with a focus on community, culture, and unique design. Learn how Ernest Hemingway and Bob Marley inspired the company's name and discover Foley's approach to creating a design brand set to redefine home interiors. Neither the information, nor any opinion contained in this podcast, constitutes an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell securities or other financial instruments or to participate in any advisory services or trading strategy. Nothing contained in this document constitutes investment, legal or tax advice or is an endorsement of any of the investments/companies mentioned herein.

Om is a former journalist, Partner Emeritus at True Ventures, and—in my words—a true internet OG. He was one of the first serious tech bloggers, and founder of Gigaom. We spoke about the current state of technology from both of our perspectives, and he shared where he believes the puck is going. We also went deeply into the topic of photography and creativity, which will be shared in next week's episode.

Om is a former journalist, Partner Emeritus at True Ventures, and—in my words—a true internet OG. He was one of the first serious tech bloggers, and founder of Gigaom. We spoke about the current state of technology from both of our perspectives, and he shared where he believes the puck is going. We also went deeply into the topic of photography and creativity, which will be shared in next week's episode.

In this episode, I speak with Jyri Engestrom, an investor and partner at YesVC, about angel vesting. Jyri shares his insights on how to get into angel investing and how it can benefit your career as a founder or executive. We discuss the popularity of angel investing and the platforms that allow investors to deploy small tickets into companies. Jyri emphasizes the importance of building a diversified portfolio, even if you're running your own company. Tune in to learn more about the world of angel investing. Disclaimer: The content shared on this podcast should not be considered as legal, financial, or any other type of advice. We encourage you to seek guidance from qualified professionals and conduct your own research before making any investment decisions. Highlights: [00:00:40] Angel investing and career benefits.  [00:04:00] Investing in startups for equity.  [00:09:09] Investing too much in startups.  [00:12:30] Skipping angel investing vintages.  [00:17:10] Angel investing ticket size.  [00:20:04] Legal protection when investing.  [00:24:19] The value of angel investors.  [00:28:05] Private investments and angel investors.  [00:34:37] Cultivating relationships as an investor.  [00:37:06] Investing in competitors for success. Guest: Jyri Engeström co-founded Jaiku, a mobile social network acquired by Google, and Ditto, a recommendations app acquired by Groupon. He is an early investor in Unity (NYSE:U), Oura, Iceye and many other companies. Before co-founding Yes VC with Caterina, he was on the investing team at True Ventures (early investors in Peloton, Ring, WordPress and others). LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jyriengestrom/ --- Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and we would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player. Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests? Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)

On Episode 18 of The KindlED Podcast, hosts Kaity and Adriane are joined by Garrett Smiley, co-founder of Sora Schools. Garrett shares his journey into education, driven by a desire to revolutionize traditional education methods. They delve into how to help students discover their passions and develop a deeper sense of purpose over time. They also talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, emphasizing the importance of embedding multiple meanings into activities to keep students engaged and the importance of mindsets over content. Tune in to learn how you can balance autonomy and rigor and empower kids with personalized, purpose-driven learning. ABOUT THE GUEST: Garrett Smiley is the Co-Founder of Sora Schools. Garrett has also worked as a software engineer and a venture partner.Garrett Smiley has always been interested in technology. Garrett started their first software company while they were still in college. After graduation, they worked as a software engineer for Madison Reed. Garrett then joined True Ventures as a TEC Fellow, where they worked with startups and studied the startup ecosystem.In November 2017, Garrett joined Contrary Capital as a venture partner. As part of this role, they evaluated dozens of companies and sat on the investment committee for pitches from other universities. In May 2019, they left Contrary Capital to co-found Sora Schools.Garrett Smiley's educational career began with a Field in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Garrett then went on to earn their E Lab Certificate from Teachers College, Columbia University.RELEVANT LINKS: Episode 4 of The KindlED Podcast - https://youtu.be/ql_CS8IRjQs

In this episode of the Dealmakers' Podcast, we dive into the inspiring journey of a true visionary, Dan Shapiro. Raised by parents deeply rooted in academia, Dan's upbringing was steeped in the worlds of communications and computer science. His venture, Glowforge, has attracted funding top-tier investors like DFJ Growth, Foundry Group, Revolution Growth, and True Ventures.

On this episode of Investor Connect, Hall welcomes Michael Cardamone, CEO and General Partner at Forum Ventures. Located in New York, NY, USA, Forum Ventures is the leading early-stage fund, program, and community for B2B SaaS startups. Founded in 2014 as Acceleprise, they are on a mission to make the B2B SaaS journey easier, more accessible, and successful for early-stage founders, through pre-seed and seed-stage funding, high-touch programming, corporate perks and introductions, and an active SaaS community.  With over 250 portfolio companies, Forum founders have gone on to raise from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncork Capital, 8VC, Founders Fund, Menlo Ventures, Canaan, Bowery Capital, Susa Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, SV Angel, True Ventures and many more. Michael Cardamone focuses on developing our investment strategy with the mission to make the B2B SaaS journey easier, more accessible, and more successful for early-stage founders. As one of the first 30 employees at Box, as well as leading partnerships at AcedemixDirect, Michael has had direct experience growing SaaS companies from small startups to large-scale enterprises. He is also an angel investor in a dozen companies including a seed investment in Flexport. Michael shares insights about his background in tech, the evolution of Foreign Ventures, and their unique approach to investing in startups. He discusses the challenges of raising pre-seed capital in the current market and outlines the criteria they look for in founders and startups. Michael also explains the differences between Foreign Ventures and other venture funds, emphasizing their hands-on approach and extensive resources.  Visit Forum Ventures at , and on . Reach out to Michael at , and on . _______________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:    Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out    For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group    Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

Ryan speaks with Kevin Rose about the pros and cons of his entrepreneurial drive, the calming effects of reducing the amount of stuff that you have, the overlap between Zen Buddhism and Stoicism, the dangers of social media, why being vulnerable is the hardest thing to do, and more.Kevin Rose is an entrepreneur, podcaster, and television host. Having co-founded the companies Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk, and having been a venture partner at GV, Kevin's work focuses on tracking and contributing to rising trends in the tech industry. As a host, he has worked on the G4 shows The Screen Savers, Unscrewed With Martin Sargen, and Diggnation, for which he also started a weekly podcast. He currently serves as the CEO of Proof and a partner of True Ventures. You can find Kevin's work at his website kevinrose.com, and on Instagram @kevinrose and Twitter @kevinrose.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

In This Episode You Will Learn About:  How to place integrity at the center of your organization What it means to bring empathy to the workplace Finding the best GENIUS in you Resources: Website: www.madison-reed.com  Email: AE@madison-reed.com  LinkedIn: Amy Errett Instagram & Twitter: @AmyErrett Facebook & Twitter: @MadisonReedLLB   Instagram: @madisonreed TikTok: @madisonreedcolor Visit heathermonahan.com Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Go to 4Patriots.com and use code CONFIDENCE to get 10% off Visit Indeed.com/monahan to start hiring now. Get 55% off at Babbel.com/MONAHAN  Show Notes:  What would happen if you created a life and a career where you could authentically show up as your true self? It is time to recognize what you do BEST and stop conforming! You can create a work and a culture that VALUES you and those around you. Amy Errett, CEO of Madison Reed, is here to reveal how she innovates in her industry while keeping love, joy, and integrity at the forefront. Join us as we discuss her journey, what pillars she builds her company on, and how you can revitalize your approach to life! About The Guest: Amy Errett's multifaceted career has ranged from founding and operating companies, to investing in startups, to volunteer nonprofit leadership. Currently, Amy is Founder and CEO of Madison Reed, an omnichannel beauty brand that is challenging industry titans in the hair color space. She is also a Partner at True Ventures, focusing on investments in consumer and ecommerce startups. Amy believes in the power of giving back and dedicates herself to supporting humanitarian organizations. Amy is a member of San Francisco's Barbary Coast chapter of YPO (Young Presidents' Organization), and serves on the boards of the University of Connecticut Foundation, Common Sense Media, Glide, and Madison Reed. If You Liked This Episode You Might Also Like These Episodes: The Secret To Picking Yourself UP When You're Down, With Heather!  The Simple Steps That Lead To Extraordinary Wealth, With Candy Valentino, Entrepreneur, Author, & Philanthropist  How To Turn A Negative Situation Into A Positive One, With Heather!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amy Errett founded Madison Reed with 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and social-mission visionary. She's the CEO of Madison Reed, an omnichannel beauty brand challenging industry titans in hair color. Amy is also a Partner at True Ventures, focusing on consumer and ecommerce investments.Before Madison Reed, Amy was a general partner at Maveron, a VC firm co-founded by Howard Schultz. She served as Chief Asset Gathering Officer at E*TRADE and has been featured on Fast Company's Queer 50 and Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 lists.Amy noticed the need for at-home hair color with salon-quality results using clean ingredients. Inspired by her daughter, she created Madison Reed, empowering colorists to earn more. Amy believes in empowering women in their lives, not just their hair color.In our episode, Amy shares her journey to Madison Reed, validating the idea, and what she looks for in entrepreneurs as a Venture Capitalist. She discusses finding your superpower, balancing head and heart, managing fear and anxiety when starting a business, and more.In this episode, we'll talk to Amy about:* Amy's advice on finding passion. [02:52]* Amy's pivotal moment shaping her into a businesswoman.[05:57]* Escaping the victim mindset.[10:20]* Amy's career journey and decision to leave finance. [15:12]* Amy's "Aha!" moment leading to leaving finance. [21:28]* Reflecting on regrettable decisions. [28:34]* Traits Amy looks for in founders. [33:40]* Acknowledging anger and fear. [38:52]* Why Amy didn't invest in Dollar Shave Club. [40:35]* Testing the idea before launching Madison Reed. [47:48]* Understanding customer values. [51:32]This episode is brought to you by Beeya:* If you or anyone you know have been struggling with hormonal imbalances and bad periods, go to https://beeyawellness.com/free to download the free guide to tackling hormonal imbalances and to learn more about Beeya's seed cycling bundle.* Plus, get $10 off your order by using promo code BEHINDHEREMPIRE10.Follow Yasmin:* Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yasminknouri/* Website: https://www.behindherempire.com/Follow Amy: * Website: https://www.madison-reed.com/* Madison Reed Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madisonreed/* Amy's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amyerrett/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tony Conrad of True Ventures joins Nick to discuss Avoiding Attribution, The 50.1% Rule of Life, How to Invest in Red Oceans, and Why Investor Inaction is Often Best. In this episode, we cover: The importance of building camaraderie What does it take to get 20% Ownership in a Company How to Invest in Red Oceans Investing in Hardware Selling Hardware vs. Software Impact of Consumer Trends on Tech Startups Is AI a threat to humans and what is the role of AI in the market Guest Links: LinkedIn Twitter True Ventures

Tony Conrad is a Partner at True Ventures who gets to work with amazingly talented founders and operating teams from companies like Automattic (WordPress), Hodinkee, Blue Bottle Coffee, MakerBot, and Holey Grail Donuts, to name but a few. Tony also co-founded About.Me & Sphere, both of which were acquired by AOL.He has personal invested in Slack, Automattic, Lowercase Capital, International Smoke, Saltwater Oyster Depot, Elk Fence, flour+water pizzeria, flour+water, Trick Dog, Salumeria, Central Kitchen, Samovar and August.He is also a board member of the Tony Hawk Foundation and formerly a T40 National Co-Chair of Technology for President Obama. Tony also genuinely has great parking karma, communicates well with animals, is a Cubs fan, a former bowler, a wannabe surfer, and a lover of languages, art, and architecture.He grew up in a small farming community in Indiana and has since lived in cities such as New York, New Delhi, Jakarta, Chicago, Paris, and San Francisco. He has worked various jobs not listed on his resume, including being a baseball umpire, basketball camp counselor, pharmacy stock person, high school sports reporter, book bindery glue machine operator, janitor, college newspaper ad salesman, and yogurt merchandiser. It has been an exciting journey for him so far.___Get your copy of Personal Socrates: Better Questions, Better Life  Connect with Marc >>>  Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter Drop a review and let me know what resonates with you about the show!Thanks as always for listening and have the best day yet!*Behind the Human is proudly recorded in a Canadian made Loop Phone Booth*Special props

Muddu Sudhakar has already enjoyed several of his companies being acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars in value. His latest startup, Aisera, has already raised well over $100M and is on its way to disrupting yet another industry. Which may also be one of the few companies out there that are currently hiring, and in every department. The venture has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Webb Investment Network, World Innovation Lab (WiL), True Ventures, and Thoma Bravo.

Gene Hoffman has started and sold several startups. As well as becoming one of the youngest CEOs of a public company in the United States ever. His latest venture, Chia Network, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like True Ventures, Richmond Global Ventures, Breyer Capital, and Naval Ravikant.

Om Malik is a partner emeritus at True Ventures and a former tech journalist. Chris Tolles is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former CEO of Topix. The two longtime tech insiders join Big Technology Podcast to discuss the aftermath of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. We cover not only what the bank meant to the tech industry — and how its failure will change the landscape — but why so many people were happy to see it fail, and sought to prevent a bailout. Join us for a nuanced discussion of Silicon Valley's place in society, and whether it can continue operating effectively with its favorite bank in shambles.

Kaego Ogbechie Rust & Shea Tate-Di Donna describe themselves as entrepreneurial and experimental. They discovered that breaking into the venture capital world was a challenge, so they wanted to help other people (especially women) by giving them practical steps to do what they were able to do. Their book, “The Venture Fund Blueprint” was written with this in mind. Kaego & Shea noticed that people expected only capital when they sought funding from them, and they wanted to provide more. In this podcast, they talk about the pay-it-forward culture of the venture capital world. Their roots are in helping businesses grow and launch, and they share with us how to ask other people for help. First of all, you want to give more than you get, and secondly, you want to make it easy for others to help you (think craft the email for them.) We also learn from these successful women how to not take rejection personally. When asking for something like funding, you'll hear an incredible amount of no's to get to that yes, and that takes perseverance. In this podcast, you'll also hear about strategies for building trust and how to prioritize your personal life. Diversity in the fund management field is a priority to Kaego & Shea, and they also share what they're doing to promote this important topic. Even if you aren't familiar with the venture capital world, you'll learn a wealth of information about managing your own business in this podcast. Visit https://www.gobeyondbarriers.com, where you will find show notes and links to all the resources in this episode, including the best way to get in touch with Kaego & Shea. Highlights: [02:40] How Shea & Kaego got into the venture capital world [05:40] Challenges they overcame to find space in the funding industry [06:46] Leveraging community to overcome barriers [14:50] Making the easy ask [16:31] Overcoming fears [20:20] Moving past limiting beliefs [24:58] How to deal with no's and setbacks [28:11] Getting to the yes [32:07] Keeping boundaries [37:28] Diversity in fund management [42:45] Lightning round questions Quotes: “One of The things we love about the VC industry is the pay it forward culture.” – Shea Tate-Di Donna “You only build a community by giving much more than you receive.” – Kaego Ogbechie Rust “If you want to learn how to take rejection and get a no and move on, fundraising is the perfect way to do that.” – Shea Tate-Di Donna “Trust is a key element of brand building.” – Kaego Ogbechie Rust “How can we give back to our community? Sometimes it's just sharing what you know.” – Kaego Ogbechie Rust “I'm trying to divorce myself from the word should.” – Shea Tate-Di Donna Lightning Round Questions: What book has greatly influenced you? - “The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding (Kaego) - “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership” by Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer (Shea) What is your favorite inspiring quote or saying? - “There are two types of people in this world, the energy givers and energy takers.” (Kaego) - “Be the change you want to see in the world.” (Shea) What is one word or moniker you would use to describe yourself? - Entrepreneurial & Experimental (Kaego & Shea as a team) - Tenacious (Shea) - Paced (Kaego) What power song would you want playing as you walk out onto a stage? - “I'm Every Woman” by Chaka Khan (Shea) - “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston (Kaego) About Kaego Ogbechie Rust: Kaego Ogbechie Rust is a career business advisor, entrepreneur, and author — with more than a decade of financial services experience in the public and private markets at Goldman Sachs and her consulting practice, KHOR Consulting, Kaego has worked with hundreds of companies in alternative investing, venture capital, private equity, small business, and startups. About Shea Tate-Di Donna: Shea Tate-Di Donna is a career venture capitalist, entrepreneur, product creator, and author. With more than a decade of early-stage high tech venture experience, she has advised hundreds of emerging fund managers. Shea was part of the founding team at True Ventures, creator of Founder Services, and originator of Venture Productization. Links: Website: https://www.venturefundblueprint.com/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Fund-Blueprint-Capital- Actualize/dp/1544535953/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=16750 88374&sr=8-1 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaegorust/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheatatedidonna/ A new Best Selling book, The Venture Fund Blueprint, helps emerging managers in venture capital learn to launch, grow, and scale funds. The book's pages are filled with tangible examples, real peer advice, and step-by-step guides from building pitch decks and fundraising to running operations and legal. Co-authors Shea Tate-Di Donna and Kaego Ogbechie Rust are long-time collaborators who have brought together their learnings from Shea's time on the founding team of True Ventures and with Melinda Gates' Pivotal Ventures, plus Kaego's decade at Goldman Sachs in alternative investments and with KHOR Consulting. This book aims to empower a diversity of intellect across emerging venture capital managers, to establish a precedent for operational excellence, and to facilitate peer-led knowledge exchange amongst GPs. We see a future where GPs and LPs are even more aligned around shared values, desired impact, and meaningful returns — where the ladder of capital, from investors to fund managers to startups, is constantly driving towards mutually beneficial outcomes. Learn More: www.venturefundblueprint.com Get The Book: https://amzn.to/3YkMF7E

Jamie Siminoff is the Founder and Chief Inventor @ Ring, with Ring Jamie, created the world's first Wi-Fi video doorbell while working in his garage in 2011. Since Ring's launch in 2013, Ring has helped make thousands of neighborhoods safer all around the world. As part of the journey, Jamie raised over $385M from the likes of True Ventures, Felicis, First Round, CRV, Upfront and more. In 2018, Amazon acquired Ring for a reported $1BN. Prior to Ring, Jamie founded several successful ventures including PhoneTag, the world's first voicemail-to-text company, and Unsubscribe.com, a service that helped email users clean commercial email from their inboxes. He successfully sold both companies in 2009 and 2011 respectively. In Today's Episode with Jamie Siminoff We Discuss: 1.) From Creating the First Wi-Fi Doorbell to $BN Acquisition: When was the moment Jamie realized he had to create the world's first Wi-Fi-enabled doorbell? How di Richard Branson come to be an investor in Ring? What was the process? How does Jamie advise other founders when it comes to the question of whether it is valuable having business moguls as investors in their business? 2.) Crucible Moments: From Lawsuits and Near-Death to $22M in Sales in a Day: When Jamie hears the words "near-death experience" what is the moment in the Ring journey that comes to mind? How did Jamie get through a crippling lawsuit and come out selling $22M in 24 hours on QVC? How did Jamie feel when he placed a $500M order with manufacturers when he only had $100M? What does Jamie believe was the hardest phase of the business? 3.) Jamie Siminoff: The Leader: Why does Jamie want to hire marathon runners? Why does the analogy make for good hires? Does Jamie start from a position of trust with new hires and it is there to be built or start with no trust and it is there to be gained? Does Jamie believe he is a tolerant leader? What does he mean when he says, "I want to see the dirt under your fingernails"? Why does Jamie believe that building a brand is like making great wine? Why does Jamie really hate customer surveys? What should be done instead? 4.) Selling for $1BN to Amazon: How did the Amazon acquisition come to be? How did the discussion go? Why did Jamie decide then was the right time? When you sell for a $1BN, does the cash hit your account soon? When did Jamie actually receive the money? How did he feel when he saw it is in his account? What does Jamie believe Ring did so well to make the acquisition a success? What did Amazon do well to ensure Ring was integrated most effectively? What are 1-2 of the biggest lessons Jamie has learned from being within Amazon?

Amy Errett is the founder & CEO of Madison Reed, a hair color brand that sells direct-to-consumer and offline through third-party retail stores like Ulta and through over 50 of their own hair color bars around the U.S. They have raised over $200M in venture capital including most recently from Sandbridge and Marcy Venture Partners, Jay Z's venture firm. Amy Errett is a partner at True Ventures and prior to founding Madison Reed was a general partner at Maveron, a consumer fund founded by Dan Levitan and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in 1998.

Produced by Foundersuite (www.foundersuite.com), "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders and investors who have raised capital. This episode is with Dan Shapiro of Glowforge (www.glowforge.com), makers of a desktop 3-D laser printer. In this episode, we discuss his experience as a multi-startup founder, why it's a mistake to ask for intros, when to play the "CEO card" with your employees, tips for building investor relationships at events, and much more. Glowforge has raised a total of $70 million since its 2015 founding, including the most recent round, a $43 million Series E led by DFJ Growth. Co- and previous investors include Foundry Group, Revolution Growth, True Ventures, and others. The Company also raised a crowdfunding round of over $29 million. How I Raised It is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $9.7 Billion since 2016. Create a free account at www.foundersuite.com.

In the last episode before we hit Ledger Op3n, we are very pleased to meet with a serial Web entrepreneur and early stage investor in companies such as Twitter, Facebook & Square to name a few. Today he's considered to be one of the leading voices in Web3, Co-founder and CEO of Proof and a partner at True Ventures, you might've guessed it already, this time we have Kevin Rose on the show, in discussion with a man you surely know by now, Ian Rogers, Ledger's Chief Experience officer. In less than an hour, they will cover how to shift from NFT curiosity to a podcast, from a podcast to a rock solid collective built with communities rather than VC funds, what will drive the new wave of adoption and how big Internet companies will soon try to become your next NFT wallet provider, why Bored Apes and Richard Mille are the same thing (?), and also why Proof is such a cool and relevant name. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeff Veen is design partner and head of platform at True Ventures. He brings his design and product experience, management skills of large-scale programs, and common sense knowledge of being a founder to the mission and initiatives of True's Founder Platform. Jeff was the vice president of design at Adobe after the company acquired Typekit, the startup he co-founded and ran as CEO. Jeff was one of the founding partners of the user experience consulting group Adaptive Path. While there, he led Measure Map, which was acquired by Google. INTERVIEW VIDEO:https://youtu.be/CeRkpEOrhWUCONNECT WITH JEFF VEENTwitter - https://twitter.com/veenLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyveen/Podcast - https://www.relay.fm/presentableCONNECT WITH MELinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayneil Twitter - https://twitter.com/jayneildalal 

Description: Amy Errett joins the show today to chat about her journey to becoming the Founder and CEO of Madison Reed, the hair color company revolutionizing the way women color their hair. Amy shared about her experience as a child being the peacekeeper of the family, her experience working as an investor at True Ventures and Mavron Ventures, how she came up with the idea for Madison Reed, and why she runs things by her astrologer first, before making any significant decisions.Exclusive Deals from Our Sponsors:Get 30 days FREE with Okendo by clicking HERE!In This Episode You'll Hear About:(00:50) More about Madison Reed, the hair color company revolutionizing the way women color their hair using proprietary color matching technology, and a team of on-call colorists, Madison Reed helps women choose the perfect shade of hair color delivered straight to your door, or you can visit one of their 60 hair color bar locations throughout the U.S.(2:35) What it was like growing up in Philadelphia as the youngest of three with parents of divorce and always finding herself as the peacekeeper of the family(12:20) How she feels about failure, that it's your best friend and something to learn from(16:00) Why she believes some of her flaws are and why she's excited about them (21:00) Why having an astrologer in her life helps her(26:00) Her career journey from being a financial analyst, to working at Ture Ventures and Mavron Ventures as a Venture Capitalist, to coming up with the idea for Madison Reed(35:00) How she became obsessed with the idea for Madison Reed and took her dreams and started making them a reality (41:00) How they handled having to close their stores due to COVID, but their online sales skyrocketed(45:00) Some of the big challenges she didn't see coming, even with her background and experience in VC(58:51) The final fundraising and entrepreneurial advice she has for aspiring founders and those struggling with raising fundsTo Find Out More:https://www.madison-reed.com/Quotes:“I grew up thinking that I want to have groups of people that get together to do extraordinary things.”“We're all flawed and recovering from something, and when you recognize that, then you can start to find the path in your life that works for you.”“Life is an inside job and the entire game at the end of the day will be how much joy, gratitude, and love that we spread and receive.”“Possibilities of crazy ideas can actually disrupt an entire industry.”“Everything you need to know is why you're hooked into the rage you have.”“The infrastructure of scaling culture that is different and unique and disruptive is really hard when you grow.”“I'm in this to win it for the company, not myself.”“As a business leader, you have an obligation to better your employees' lives.”“The big trip up for most people is being naive about marketing. Whether it's the cost, the scale, what it takes, who do you have? The other part is, you need to show up with a team and you need to show up. So it's always product, size, and people. Once you can get that right, then you're gonna find there's plenty of money.”

Karl Jacob is a serial entrepreneur who has been building, advising, and investing in companies for the last 20 years. During his career, Karl has raised 23 rounds of financing from a wide range of investors, including True Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Microsoft, eBay, Integral Partners, Norwest Ventures, Greylock, Benchmark Capital, FT Ventures, Ignition Partners and Vulcan Ventures. Many of Karl's companies have been successfully acquired, including Dimension X, acquired by Microsoft; Keen/Ingenio, acquired by AT&T; Cloudmark, acquired by ProofPoint; and Coveroo, acquired by Zazzle. Across his various tenures as a start-up CEO, Karl has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in investor returns and up to $150 million in revenue per year. In 2005 he joined Facebook as one of its first advisors and has gone on to advise several other companies. Karl is also a prolific angel investor and mentor for start-up companies including Mayvenn, June, Healthtap, Everlane, Skillshare, Rescale, Memsql, Haven, Shippo and many others. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California's Engineering School, where he sits on its board of counselors.

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Shruti Gandhi (@atShruti), founder and General Partner of Array Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on solving impactful problems in the world leveraging revolutionary technology. Often that means category-leading startups that take advantage of data, analytics, workflows, and new platforms to change the way an industry works. They invest in smart people with a bold mission who take big risks in large or new markets.Shruti brings a strong mix of operating and investing experience. She spent her early career as a developer on mainframe security, collaboration tools, and data analytics. Post engineering, she was an early stage venture capital investor at True Ventures, Samsung Electronics, Lightbank, HighBAR Partners, and the i2A Fund. She is also professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University.Website: Array VenturesLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shrutigandhi/Twitter: @atShrutiShow Notes: Array Ventures' investment focus How a failed company led Shruti to found Array Ventures and determine their thesis Raising a fund as a solo female GP back in 2015 and her early pitch to investors Investing in solutions that solve agitating pain points in enterprise tech stacks What founders can expect with Array on their cap table How Shruti's extensive background impacts where she invests Signals that Shruti looks for to identify breakout companies at a very early stage, such as Placer.ai The complexities around being a solo GP How raising Fund III differed from the first two Growing the Array Ventures team after raising a $56M Fund III Array Ventures' portfolio construction and ownership targets The impact Shruti has personally felt with the increasing number of women in VC How Shruti views trends and evaluates innovation in enterprise software Shruti's unique view on remote work How Shruti manages her mental wellbeing Balancing the many stakeholders in VC More about the show:The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 400+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series. The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors. The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital. More about us:Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.The Vitalize Team:Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVCCaroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/

Amy Errett is the founder and CEO of the fast-scaling Madison Reed hair color company and a partner of True Ventures. Featured in Forbes 50 over 50 last year, Amy has raised almost $200 million for Madison Reed, now on track to hit the $1bn revenue mark. Today we dig deep into what it takes for women founders to raise venture capital, why it's vital to trust your own gut instinct in business with a mix of “resilience and gratitude”, and her own journey scaling Madison Reed, as well as Olivia, Spectrem, and E*TRADE and investing in startups. Download Podopolo to get the video of this podcast, live streamed from Napa at Feast it Forward during the BottleRock music festival. Follow Wings of Inspired Business on Podopolo to keep the conversation going in the episode comments section and invite your friends to connect around podcasts recommended to you by what interests and inspires you.

I'm excited to bring my good friend Om Malik back for a third round of Panic. Om is a partner at True Ventures, a $2B venture capital firm in San Francisco. They have made over 300 investments including WordPress, Peloton, Fitbit, and Blue Bottle Coffee. He's a super smart guy to talk to. He worries about the future, invests in the future, and talks about the future. It's important to talk about the future especially when the current situation is bleak – with a tech crash and valuations coming down. I don't think there's a panic, we're just witnessing the end of an era. We could whine about it, or we could look past it and figure out where technology is going next; which is what I'm doing. I don't think what's worked for me over the last 12 years will work going forward. Om is here to help me sort it out.  Guest - Om Malik, Partner Emeritus at True Ventures  howardlindzon.com, trueventures.com, om.co Twitter: @howardlindzon, @PanicwFriends, @trueventures, @om, @knutjensen  linkedin.com/in/ommalik #fintech #invest #investment #venturecapital #stockmarket #finance  Show Notes: Introduction (00:42) Welcome Om (02:52) The world aligning to new technologies (04:01) Valuation and tech decoupled (04:51) The core thesis hasn't changed (6:06) Today tech is bigger, bolder, more impactful (07:26) 5 trillion dollar companies created in the last 12 years (07:37) The unknowns make the future of tech exciting (08:43) Moving towards a 3D interface with data (09:38) Apple M1 chip changes everything (10:02) Identity and Authentication are key (14:14) Understanding the future of tech (16:07) Fixating on ‘labels' instead of the tech (17:55) The digital wallet is the future (18:33) The ‘MetaMask' of the future may come from Apple (19:28) The future doesn't have to be Instagram and Twitter (20:31) Trust and Big Tech (21:54) Apple is one Tim Cook away from things falling apart (22:01) The disappearance of the App store (22:44) The wallet is tightly connected to your Smartphone (23:16) Policy always lags tech (24:15) The ‘Wild West' analogy for Web3 (25:57) Software is important, authentication will be key (26:32) Distinguishing between the artificial and real ‘us' (27:52) Metaverse is a euphemism for next gen tech (29:12) How will China define the future (30:11) Globalization versus Deglobalization (30:44) End of one-size-fits-all tech (31:32) The current reality of centralization (32:44) Twitter is social media marketing (33:17) Small subsets of decentralized social networks (33:49) Opportunity comes after a crisis (36:47) Silicon Valley is a state of mind (37:24) Closing thoughts (39:08) Wrapping up (41:55) 

Amy Errett is the founder and CEO of the fast-scaling Madison Reed hair color company and a partner of True Ventures. Featured in Forbes 50 over 50 last year, Amy has raised almost $200 million for Madison Reed, now on track to hit the $1bn revenue mark. Today we dig deep into what it takes for women founders to raise venture capital, why it's vital to trust your own gut instinct in business with a mix of “resilience and gratitude”, and her own journey scaling Madison Reed, as well as Olivia, Spectrem, and E*TRADE and investing in startups. Download Podopolo here to get the video of this podcast, livestreamed from Napa at Feast it Forward during the BottleRock music festival, and keep the conversation going in the Wings comments section and invite your friends to connect around podcasts recommended to you by what interests and inspires you.

How future focused are you? An important part of living longer is living well longer, which begins with understanding future trends that will play pivotal roles. Today's guest is Venture Capitalist Fiona O'Donnell-McCarthy where we will take a deep dive into all things emerging technology. Brought to you by GlycanAge, InsideTracker and Oxford Healthspan.     Fiona is a principal at TrueVentures. For more than a decade, she has partnered with founders to drive product innovation and help them to create the futures they envision. Her experience spans product management, strategy, and business development for both consumer and B2B companies. Fiona studied human biology and published research on cognitive development at Stanford University, which influenced her distinct perspective on how technology shapes human behavior and vice versa. She accredits her competitive swimming career, which led her to Olympic Trials in 2008, for igniting her curiosity around breakthroughs in human performance — and how innovation can bolster wellness.   Please enjoy!    This episode is brought to you by GlycanAge. GlycanAge tests are based on over three decades of scientific research and give a true indicator of biological age by looking at your immune system and inflamm-aging level, all from the comfort of your own home with a simple finger-prick test. Once you get your results back, their “healthspan doctors” guide you on getting on an even healthier path to reducing your biological age through proven personalized lifestyle interventions - all included in the initial price. To find out your biological age and start improving your health, check out GlycanAge.com and use the code CLAUDIA at checkout to get 15% off your order. * This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker.If you're looking for ways to extend your health span and slow down the aging process, the keys to health and longevity run in your blood. That's why InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. Created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics, InsideTracker analyzes your blood, DNA, and fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized—and where you're not. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to InsideTracker.com/CLAUDIA. * This episode is brought to you by Oxford Healthspan. Oxford Healthspan's Primeadine Original and Primeadine GF Spermidine supplements are the cleanest, purest food-derived spermidine supplements on the market, with zero fillers or flow agents. Spermidine has been shown to support cell renewal, cognition, and trigger autophagy, the body's inbuilt system of cellular cleaning and recycling, as well as improved deep sleep and thicker, glossier hair, stronger nails and better skin. Most fascinating to me, Spermidine also inhibits 6 of the 9 Hallmarks of Aging. So check out oxfordhealthspan.com and use code CLAUDIA10 at checkout for 10% off today!    * Learn how to become a peak performance powerhouse: optimize your life, health and business through my FREE Training by signing up here: https://longevity-and-lifestyle.com/sneakpeak   For Podcast Show Notes & Transcript visit: https://longevity-and-lifestyle.com/podcast   Follow Fiona on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionaodmc/  Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/fodmc True Ventures: https://trueventures.com/team/fiona-odonnell-mccarthy/   Follow Claudia on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/longevityandlifestyle/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/longevityandlifestyle/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZF-s8jsUejc0TpVqnFE1lQ/featured LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudia-von-boeselager/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LongevityLifest Website: https://longevity-and-lifestyle.com/  Past guests on The Longevity & Lifestyle Podcast include Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Amy Killen, Sergey Young, Dr. Dale Bredesen, Dr. Kristen Willeumier, Dr. Louise Newson, Dr. Kien Vuu, Dr. Carolina Reis, Nikolina Lauc, Mohamed Massaquoi, Nick Potter, Dr. Pamela Kryskow, Dr. Julia Mirer, Isabella Channing, Dina Burkitbayeva, Mario Chamorro, Mariko Bangerter, Dr. Stephanie Manson Brown, Dr. Mohammed Enayat, Helen Reavey, Elena Letyagina, and many more!

Hello my beautiful Woman Inc. listeners! My guest this week Amy Errett, Founder and CEO of Madison Reed, an at-home and in-salon hair-dye company with over 50 locations and 55+ color shades, free of Parabens, Ammonia, Phthalates, and more.  Amy has over 30 years of business and operating expertise as a four-time entrepreneur, venture capitalist and social-mission visionary. Amy is a Venture Partner at True Ventures, focusing on investments in consumer and e-commerce startups.  Prior to founding Madison Reed, Amy was a general partner at Maveron, a leading venture capital firm co-founded by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz - focused on investments in consumer facing companies. She also previously served as Chief Asset Gathering Officer at E*TRADE, where she ran a $200 million business. She was also featured on Fast Company's first ever Queer 50 list of LGBTQ women and nonbinary innovators in business and tech in 2020. 

Welcome back, this week Lucas and Anita discuss turmoil and heartbreak in the crypto markets as Bitcoin and Ethereum get hit hard, a number of other popular tokens get crushed, and crypto-aligned public stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood see their share prices tank. What caused this bloodbath? Well, a major catalyst was the disastrous implosion of Terra's Luna token as a result of ongoing stablecoin woes.In their interview this week, Lucas and Anita chat with Kevin Rose. Kevin is a serial entrepreneur who founded Digg in the early 2000s and is now an investor at True Ventures and a co-founder of the Proof Collective. His startup recently raised $10 million from Seven Seven Six and launched its NFT project Moonbirds, which has quickly become one of the most popular NFT efforts out there. Listen along as we discuss the crypto crash and its fallout, and the challenges up ahead for NFTs.Helpful links:https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/10/bitcoins-backers-trying-to-turn-it-into-one-blockchain-to-rule-all-crypto/11:09https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/11/ust-founder-do-kwon-shares-plan-to-save-its-stablecoin-from-mass-destruction/11:09https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/11/terras-ust-crash-will-make-life-harder-for-crypto-as-regulation-looms/Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper: https://techcrunch.com/newsletters

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

Today, my guest is Karl Jacob, the co-founder, and CEO of LoanSnap. Karl is a serial entrepreneur who has been building, advising, and investing in companies for the last 20 years. LoanSnap invented the world's first smart loan technology that uses AI and machine learning to analyze a person's entire financial picture and show them how to benefit from a smart home loan. LoanSnap is the parent company that built the Bacon Protocol, a decentralized mortgage lending protocol created using smart contract technology on the Ethereum blockchain. Anyone with a Web3 wallet can lend money and earn interest, all while seeing exactly which homes they're lending against. Moreover, anyone with a home that meets the protocol's criteria can create an NFT and use it as collateral to borrow money. Karl's career has been focused on founding companies that solve big problems, and those companies have helped tens of millions of consumers. He has raised 23 rounds of financing from investors, including True Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Microsoft, eBay, Integral Partners, Norwest Ventures, Greylock, Benchmark Capital, FT Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Vulcan Ventures. Many of his companies have had successful acquisitions, including; Dimension X, acquired by Microsoft, Keen/Ingenio, acquired by AT&T, Cloudmark, acquired by ProofPoint, and Coveroo, acquired by Zazzle. While CEO, Jacob has generated hundreds of millions in returns to investors and over $150 million in revenue per year. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California Engineering School, where he sits on the board of counselors. We discuss a wide range of topics, including LoanSnap, Bacon Protocol, the real estate industry, the benefits of blockchain, and much more. We begin our discussion by delving into why the banking/loan industry has been tough to disrupt. Our conversation leads us to how he and his team have finally found a way to disrupt their value chain. Karl explains how the Bacon Protocol works and what makes it unique. Karl elaborates why they decided to build the bacon protocol on blockchain/crypto rails instead of building on the traditional financial stack. He illustrates this by explaining how blockchain removes the barriers and overhead that plague the conventional loan and real estate industry. Karl discusses the fallacies that persist throughout the loan industry and how the Bacon Protocol democratizes access to affordable housing and the loan industry. We also discuss the socioeconomic impact of foreclosures on neighborhoods and how blockchain technology can be used to solve the misalignment between individuals and corporations. Karl also addresses the impediments that currently make it challenging to tokenize real-world assets and how they've optimized the Bacon Protocol to avoid these issues. We finish our conversation by discussing how Karl envisions the entire loan industry to be disrupted by blockchain technology. Please enjoy my conversation with Karl Jacob. -- This podcast is powered by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at https://blockworks.co

Shruti Gandhi is the founder of Array Ventures - an early stage fund with multiple exits, investing in enterprise deep tech companies. Previously, Shruti invested in early stage companies at True Ventures and Samsung's venture fund. She is a developer on mainframe security, collaboration tools, and data analytics. Shruti completed MBA from University of Chicago and MS from Columbia University. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theindustryshow/support

Kevin Rose is an experienced investor and builder with a proven track record of being early to internet trends. He co-founded the social news site Digg in 2004, and currently works as a partner at True Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage tech startups. Passionate about the community surrounding NFTs, Rose co-founded the PROOF Collective, a members only collective of 1,000 dedicated NFT collectors and artists. On April 16, the PROOF Collective team is launching a new large-scale PFP NFT endeavor called Moonbirds. Moonbirds will act as an expansion to the PROOF ecosystem, onboarding each new owner into the collective and incentivizing them to keep their NFTs with unique staking mechanics and ownership rewards. In this episode we cover: His inspiration behind the PROOF CollectiveThe importance of utility and community in MoonbirdsAs an investor, what he looks for in NFT projectsWhy he feels the metaverse is being set up for failureTo listen to the audio version of this episode, go to http://smarturl.it/nftnowTo sign up for the nft now newsletter where we break down the NFT market into actionable insights each week, go to: https://www.nftnow.com To follow Kevin Rose on Twitter, go here: https://twitter.com/kevinroseTo follow Kevin Rose on Instagram, go here: https://instagram.com/kevinrose See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Why is hibernation something that bears and squirrels do, but humans don't? Even more interesting, what's going on inside a hibernating animal, on a physiological and genetic level, that allows them to survive the winter in a near-comatose state without freezing to death and without ingesting any food or water? And what can we learn about that process that might inform human medicine?Those are the big questions being investigated right now by a four-year-old startup in California called Fauna Bio. And Harry's guests today are two of Fauna Bio's three founding scientists: Ashley Zehnder and Linda Goodman. They explain how they got interested in hibernation as a possible model for how humans could protect themselves from disease, and how progress in comparative genomics over the last few years has made it possible to start to answer that question at the level of gene and protein interactions. The work is shedding light on a previously neglected area of animal behavior that could yield new insights for treating everything from neurodegenerative diseases to cancer.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 8. If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out. 9. After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible.That's it! Thanks so much.TranscriptHarry Glorikian: Hello. I'm Harry Glorikian, and this is The Harry Glorikian Show, where we explore how technology is changing everything we know about healthcare.It's April and spring is well underway, even though it's been a pretty cold one so far here in New England.It's the kind of weather that makes you want to pull the covers over your head in the morning and just sleep in. Or maybe just hibernate like a bear until summer is really here.But when you think about it, what is hibernation? Why is it something that bears and squirrels do, but humans don't?Even more interesting, what's going on inside a hibernating animal, physiologically, that allows them to survive all winter without freezing to death and without ingesting any food or water?And what can we learn about that process that might inform human medicine?Those are the big questions being investigated right now by a four-year-old startup in California called Fauna BioAnd my guests today are two of Fauna Bio's three founding scientists: Ashley Zehnder and Linda Goodman. I asked them to explain how they got interested in hibernation as a possible model for how humans could protect themselves from disease.…And how progress in comparative genomics over the last few years has made it possible to start to answer that question at the level of gene and protein interactions.We've always looked to the natural world, especially the world of plants, for insights into biochemistry that could inspire new drugs. But what's exciting to me about Fauna Bio is that they're shining a light on a previously neglected area of animal behavior that could yield new insights for treating everything from neurodegenerative diseases to cancer.So, here's my conversation with Ashley Zehnder and Linda Goodman.Harry Glorikian: Ashley. Linda, welcome to the show.Ashley Zehnder: Thanks, Harry, we're excited to be here today. It's going to be fun.Linda Goodman: Yeah, thanks for having us.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I mean, well, you guys are someplace sunny and warm, and I'm actually I shouldn't say that it's actually sunny right now on the East Coast. So I'm not I'm not.Linda Goodman: Don't jinx yourself.Harry Glorikian: But the temperature is going to drop. Like to I think they said 18. So everything will freeze tonight for sure. So it'll, you know, it's one of those days, but. I want to jump right into this because we've got a lot of ground to cover. Like there's so many questions that I have after sort of looking into the company and sort of digging in and, you know, but even before we jump into what you're working on. Right, I really want to talk about hibernation. Maybe because I'm jealous and I'd like to be able to hibernate. I have sleep apnea. So sleep is a problem. But humans don't hibernate. But there's a ton of other mammalian species that that do. And sometimes I do feel, though, that my teenager hibernates, but that's a different issue. So, but, what what is interesting to you about hibernation from a physiological point of view. What what goes on with metabolism or gene expression during hibernation, that's that's not found in humans, but that could be relevant to human health?Ashley Zehnder: Yeah, I think this is a great question, Harry, because I think both Linda and I came to fauna from different backgrounds. I came from veterinary science, Linda from comparative genomics. We can go into our details later, but neither of us really appreciated the amazing physiology of these species. There are some of the most extreme mammals on the planet, and there are hibernating bears and literally every group of mammals. Right. This is something Linda specializes in. But there are primates in Madagascar that hibernate very similar to the 39 ground squirrels that we tend to work with. So it's this really deeply conserved trait in mammals, including primates. And, you know, it kind of highlights for us what our genes can do when they're adapted for extreme environments. And so that's kind of the lens that we take when we look at hibernation. It's how do these species protect their own tissues from being nearly frozen for six, seven months out of the year, having to protect their brains, their hearts, all their vital organs? They're not eating, they're not drinking. They're not moving for these really deep bodied hibernaters. When you think of 100 kilogram animal that's not eating for seven months, how do they survive that? Right. And it has to do with metabolic rates that change 200- to 300-fold over the course of a couple of hours. It has to do with oxygenation changes and protection from oxidative stress and ischemia reperfusion. And so if you look at a tissue by tissue level, you can start to see how these animals are finally adapted to protecting themselves from from damage. And then we can start to say, well, this is similar damage to what we see in human diseases. And that's why this is such an interesting system, because it's so dynamic and because it happens across so many groups of mammals, it really lends itself to this comparative genomics approach that we take to drug discovery.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. Because I was wondering sort of like what ways of healing from different sort of traumas and conditions do hibernating animals have that that humans don't, that we sort of maybe wish we did? It's sort of like, you know, almost Marvel or one of those things where you like go to sleep, you wake up, you've totally healed again, which kind of be kind of be cool. Yeah. So, you know. But when did scientists first begin to think about whether having a better understanding of hibernation might help us solve? Some of these riddles that we have in human health. I mean, it surely it can't be like a new concept. It has to go further back. I mean, what has changed recently to make it more actionable? I mean, is it, you know, omics, costs coming down that are making it easier, computational capabilities that are, you know, making all these come together? I mean, those. What do you guys. What's. What's the answer? You guys know the answer better than I do.Ashley Zehnder: I'll comment on a little bit on the physiology, and I will let Linda talk about the data revolution, because that's that's really what she knows very intimately. So from a physiology standpoint, these are species and not just hibernaters, but a lot of other species that we've been studying since the early 1900s, 1950s. I mean, these are some of our earliest biological experiments and our earliest understandings of biology. We're not necessarily done by studying humans. A lot of that was done by studying natural disease models, right? How did we figure out that genes cause cancer? So it's a little bit of a tangent, but bear with me, it was not by studying human cancer, it was by studying Rous Sarcoma Virus and how that virus picked up bird genes and then turn them on. Right and other in other individuals. So but then kind of this almost the same year in 1976 that we figured out that genes cause cancer by studying chickens. 1974 we figured out how to genetically modified mice. And we sort of figured out that like, okay, maybe we don't need to study natural biology anymore. And so I feel like we sort of lost a lot of those skills and figured out we had humans and we had model organisms and we were done. And I think now we're kind of in this renaissance where people are realizing that actually there's still a lot of natural biology that we can learn from. But it's being powered now by this data revolution and the decrease in cost and sequencing and availability of omics data like RNA. Seq and then I will pitch that over to Linda because that's really what she knows best.Linda Goodman: Yeah, yes, absolutely. You know, Ashley's right. And I think just to add on to that, that there was this issue in which there were a lot of field biologists out there working with these really fascinating hibernating animals. They knew a lot about what these animals could do, the extreme environments they were exposed to, that they could overcome, they could protect all of their tissues. And there was so there was a group of field biologists who knew all that information. And then on the other side, you have all of these geneticists who are studying the genomes of probably humans and mouse and rat. And they weren't really talking to each other for a long time. And I've been in the genomics field for at least a decade, and not until very recently did I even hear about all these amazing adaptations that these hibernating mammals have. So I think some of it was just a big communication gap. And now that the genomics field is starting to become a little more aware that all these exciting adaptations are out there that we can learn from, I think that's going to be huge. And yes, of course, it certainly does not hurt that there's been a dramatic drop in sequencing costs. We can now sequence a reference genome for around $10,000. That was unheard of years ago. And so a lot of these species that people would previously consider untouchables because they were not model organisms with a pristine reference genome, we can now start to approach these and thoroughly study their biology and genomics in a way that was not possible several years ago.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I was thinking I was, you know, I was laughing when you said $10,000, because I remember when we did the genome at Applied Biosystems and it was not $10,000.Ashley Zehnder: Yeah.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. And it took I remember Celera, we had an entire floor of sequencers working 24/7 I mean, it was an amazing sight. And now we can do all that, you know, on a.Ashley Zehnder: Benchtop. Benchtop. Exactly. On a benchtop.Harry Glorikian: So. But, you know, it's interesting, like in a way, studying animals to learn more about disease mechanisms seems like a no brainer. I mean, we share a, what, about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees. And for those listening. Yes, we do. You know, I'm sure there's people out there that, like, bristle when I say that. But what is it, 97.5% of our DNA with rats and mice. That's why we use all these things for sort of safety and effectiveness of drugs meant for humans. But. Still, I'm not used to drug hunters starting out by looking at animals, you know? Why do you think it's taken the drug industry, although I'm I say that very loosely, [so long] to wake up to that idea?Ashley Zehnder: Yeah. I think it's I think it's again, this almost reversal of the paradigm that exists today, which is let's take a human disease that we want to make a new drug for. Let's take a mouse and let's try to genetically manipulate that mouse to mimic as closely as possible what we see in the human disease. And those are always imperfect. I mean, I did a cancer biology PhD at Stanford, and there's that trope of like, Oh, if I had a dollar for every time you occurred mouse in a human right, it would need to work anymore. That's replicated across many fields, right? They're not good models. And so we're saying like obviously that doesn't really work for discovery. It's fine for preclinical and safety and you have to use those models. But for pure discovery, that's not where you want to be, right? Instead, you want to take the approach of saying, where has nature created a path for you? Where is it already solved this problem? And I think there are companies like Varian Bio who are doing this in human populations. We're saying, let's look at humans that have unique physiologies and a unique disease adaptations. And of course then you have to find those niche pockets of human populations.Ashley Zehnder: So that's not a not a simple problem either. But the approach is very analogous. What we're saying is we can use that rare disease discovery approach and just expand that scope of discovery. Look at highly conserved genes, look at how other species are using them to reverse how phosphorylation in the brain to repair their hearts after damage, to reverse insulin dependence. To heal, we'll heal their tissues or regenerate stem cells. Let's just see how nature did it right and just mimic that instead of trying to fix something that we artificially created. So it's literally reversing that paradigm of how we think about animals and drug discovery. But you have to know how to do that. You have to know which models are correct. You have to know how to analyze 415 genomes together in an alignment which is really complicated. Linda knows how to do that, so you have to know how to do it correctly, although you could screw it up very badly. So there's a lot of expertise that goes into these analyses and also again, the data availability, which wasn't there nearly a decade ago. So.Harry Glorikian: So I asked this question out of pure naivete, because I'm not sure that I could sort of draw a straight line. But, you know, which drugs were have been discovered through research on genetic mechanisms of disease in animals. Is there, are there?Ashley Zehnder: You know, I think directly it's a new field. Right. So I think, Linda, you and I have looked at some examples of looking at drugs for narcolepsy, looking at dog genetics and studies, looking at muscle disorders in certain species of cattle that have naturally beefed up muscles and translating those into therapies. I mean, there are examples of looking at animals for things like genotype, right, came from Gila monster venom, although that's not strictly a genetic program. Right? So I think this idea of looking at natural animal models is a source of innovation. It's just that, again, the data wasn't really available until fairly recently, but we know the strategy works by what's been done on things like PCSK9 inhibitors in humans, right? It's a very similar approach to that. It's just expanding that scope of discovery.Harry Glorikian: So because you guys raised money and you guys are moving this forward, sort of and I don't want you to tell me anything that's confidential, but. So what was the pitch when you when you put that in front of everybody?Ashley Zehnder: It was really that, look, drug discovery right now is really been hampered by a lack of innovation. And we're really stuck in looking at these very kind of currently limited data sources, which is humans and again, these handful of really imperfect animal models. But we can take what we've learned from working with human genomics and really greatly expand the opportunities for a number of diseases that still don't have good therapies. Right. We've had the human genome for really close to 20 years now. We spent a lot of money sequencing it. And still, if you go back and look at the FDA approvals in the last two years, which I did by hand a while ago, or more than three quarters of those are not new targets. They're new drugs for a new indication or new drugs, same drugs before a new indication or they're kind of meta pathway drugs or they're drugs for which we still don't know the mechanism. It's some small molecule. It's been around since fifties. And so like where is the innovation in the top ten diseases of people still have it changed? So like where I pulled these two headlines right not too long ago, one from 2003, which is like the era of the genomics revolution. Right? And then one from 2019, which was the genomics revolution question mark. Right. Like we're still sort of waiting for it. And so what is that missing piece of data that's really going to allow us to really leverage the power that's in the human genome? And to do that, we have to put our own genes in an evolutionary context to understand what's important. That's been that third dimension of genomics that's been missing. So it's really not necessarily about any particular species that we work on, all of which are amazing. It's really about using that data to shine a better light on what's important in our own genome. And so that's a lot of the pitches, like how are we going to use our own genome better and find better treatments?Harry Glorikian: Yep. Understood. So. You have a third founder, Katie Grabek. Right. So. Tell me about yourselves. I mean, did the three of you get interested in comparative genomics and hibernation? How did you come together? How did you decide like, oh, hey, let's do a startup and get this thing going in this area? So tell tell me the origin story.Ashley Zehnder: Linda, do you want to kick off?Linda Goodman: Sure. I think it all really started, Ashley and I initially started batting a few ideas around. We both had this understanding that that drug discovery today did not look outside of human mouse rat very much. And we both understood there was this wealth of animal data that's just waiting to be used and no one was doing it and we couldn't really figure out why. And we were having trouble figuring out exactly which animal we wanted to study and which diseases we wanted to study. And it just so happened that we lucked out. There was another woman in our lab at Stanford, Grabek, who had the perfect study system for what we were thinking about. She had these amazing hibernates our animals that have exquisite abilities in terms of disease, resistance and repair. And once she started talking about all the amazing phenotypes these animals have, we thought, wow, that would make a great study system to make the next human therapeutic. Yeah. And I think it's interesting that both Katie and Linda have human genetics PhDs. Right. So I think both of them and Linda can expound on this. But from Katie perspective. Right, she she went in to do a human genetics Ph.D. trying to understand how genes can be used to improve human health and shouldn't be rotating the lab of somebody who studied the 39 ground squirrel and said this physiology is way more extreme than anything we see in humans, but they're doing it using the same genes.Linda Goodman: What are those genes doing in these animals that we can adapt for human therapeutics? And so she brought that work with her to Stanford and was really one of the preeminent researchers studying the genetics and genomics of these species. My background is I'm of Marion, so my clinical training is in exotic species. So as a clinician, I treated birds, mammals, reptiles and saw that they all presented with different kinds of diseases or in some cases didn't present with diseases like cancer that were super interesting. And then coming to a place like Stanford to do a PhD, it was working with a bunch of human researchers, human focused researchers. They're all generally human researchers, but you know what I mean? It's a little bit tricky with the nomenclature. Generally, I have my doubts about, you know, maybe there's some chimpanzees doing research somewhere, people studying human diseases, right from a human lens who are completely ignorant of the fact that animals often also had these disease traits or in some cases were resistant to them. So there was this huge disconnect there of of biologists and veterinarians and physiologists who understood all these traits across different species and the people who knew the molecular mechanisms, even though a lot of those are shared.Linda Goodman: And so one of the things that I found really interesting just from a cancer perspective was that a lot of our major oncogenes are highly conserved because these are core biological genes that if you screw them up, will give you cancer. But there's an evolutionary pressure to maintain these genes. And so there's a reason why they're conservative, because they're really important biologically, and that's true across many other diseases as well. So from that perspective, I was really interested in this intersection of human and animal health. I always wanted to do more genomics myself and just never had had the training. Linda had always been interested in veterinary science, and so we kind of immediately started collaborating and saying, Look, look, there's a huge opportunity in this, again, third space, third dimension of genomics that people are not looking at. What do we do trying to start a comparative genomics company? I'm using air quotes here for the podcast listeners is a little bit broad. Where do you start? And I think Katie really gave us that start in saying, here's a model. We have a biobank of samples that are proprietary to fauna. We have an expert in this field. We have a model that's good for so many different diseases. Let's prove that the process works here and then we can expand into multiple disease areas.Harry Glorikian: You know, you got to love, people I think, underestimate that magic that happens when the right people get together and the spark happens, right? I mean, I'll take that. Any day. I mean, I love coming up with a plan and then, you know, working to the plan. But when it happens, when the right people in the room and they're all get excited, those are those are the most incredible start ups, in my opinion. Yeah. So you're starting off with targets in heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes, very different areas, right? Cardiovascular, neurodegenerative and metabolic. So. Why start with those areas in particular?Linda Goodman: So I think for us it was really again showing showing what we can translate from this model. So some of the phenotypes that we see, the traits that we see in the ground squirrel, which is predominantly one of the species we use for our work, is that they're exquisitely resistant to ischemia, reperfusion injury. So the kind of injury that gets, if you have a heart attack and you go and get the heart attack on block, you get this rush of warm, oxygenated blood back into your heart that can actually be damaging. And that's a lot of what causes damage after a heart attack, what these animals happen, they do this 25 times over the course of a 6 to 7 month hibernation cycle. And if you look at their hearts in the peak of one of these periods, there is an upregulation of collagen, which is cause of fibrosis. There's an upregulation, there's histologically, there's a little bit of damage. It's less than you would I would have, but there's a little bit there. But if you get to the end of that whole cycle and look at their hearts, they look normal and they do it again next year. Right. So you and I could not survive 25 of these attacks over six or seven month period, right? Obviously not. So let's pick the strongest phenotypes we have in these animals and let's show that we can use information from that and come up with genes and compounds that are protective in our more standard models of these diseases.Linda Goodman: And that's what we did really with the first round of data that we had is we generated four genetic targets and two compounds that came out of the heart data that we had from hibernating and that we tested them in human cardiomyocytes in a dish and said if we take oxygen and glucose away from these cells, they get really unhappy and die and we could double survival of human heart cells in a dish. And then we said, okay, great, let's actually move this into animals. And so we used AAV or some of these viral vectors to then knock down genes in vivo in hearts of rats. So we literally tied off a coronary artery and then let the blood come back in and saw that we could almost fully protect these hearts from damage by knocking down genes that we found in the hibernating data. So it was really closing that loop and saying, where are the strongest traits? Can we show that this works? And then it was really figuring out where are the really large areas of unmet need. And so in terms of metabolism, we end up connecting with Novo Nordisk, which is a publicly disclosed partnership. They are very focused on obesity. We have a model that increases this metabolism, 235 fold over an hour. Name another model that can do that, right?Harry Glorikian: I need that. I need that. I need like, because...Ashley Zehnder: We all need that!Harry Glorikian: I could get rid of a few pounds right around here.Linda Goodman: Exactly. So then it's really just figuring out where are the unmet needs, who is really interested in these areas we're looking at and do we have unique data that speaks to those models? And that's really we just try to be guided by the biology and saying, where do we have unique data sets that can answer high unmet needs?Harry Glorikian: Okay. Well, all I mean, all sounds super exciting if we can make the translation, you know, in the right way and find those targets. But. You guys have built up a significant biobank, right? I understand you have a huge database of genomic readout from various hibernating animals. Can you tell us a little more about the extent of that biobank? How did you collect the data and how unique is that database in the industry?Ashley Zehnder: Yeah. Linda, do you want to talk a little bit about the data sources that we're currently using at Fauna?Linda Goodman: Yeah. So maybe, you might be the best person to talk about the Biobank and then I can talk about all the other data sources layering on top of that.Ashley Zehnder: Yeah, I'll talk a little about the BiobanK. So we have yeah, we have a number of different data sources. The Biobank is one of them and probably one of the main ones that we use. So Katie, during her PhD, built a really unique biobank of very precisely time tissue samples from 39 ground squirrels across the whole hibernation cycle. And the reason why that timing is so important is because the cycle is so dynamic. If you don't have really precise sample timing, you end up with a big kind of smush of data that you can't tease apart by having really precisely timed data points, you can separate these genes into clusters and know exactly kind of where you are in time. And that timing relates to the physiological injuries that we study. So we know what time points their hearts are protected because those physiological studies have been done. We've looked at those time points very specifically. So we have that biobank of samples that we in licensed as founding IP at Fauna CANI literally drove it across the country in a U-Haul because we didn't trust anybody to move it. So that's that's now in our freezers and Emeryville with a cadre of backup batteries to protect it.Ashley Zehnder: So that's the founding data that we have. And that's been really crucial because I look at other companies trying to use data for drug discovery, particularly in the early stage. A lot of it is kind of publicly available data or cell lines or kind of shared data sources. And part of what is unique about font, as we literally have truly novel data sources that we're starting with that are wholly owned that we control and we know the quality of those. So that's really the Biobank that we have is and it's 22 different tissues. I mean, it's brain, it's kidney, it's lung, it's hard. It's liver or skeletal muscle. Right? Pretty much every kind of tissue you would want in that founding biobank. But then on top of that, I think what we've done with the other data is super important. Yeah. And so we layer on top of that all sorts of publicly available data and also data we've been able to source, such as human data from the UK Biobank. But I really want to hit on the point of, of why the model species hibernate or data is so different. All of the other data that most people work with is trying to compare animals that are healthy to animals that are diseased, or people that are healthy to people who are have disease. What's really unique about the model species that we're working with is we're trying to figure out why they have these superpowers in terms of disease, resistance and repair.Ashley Zehnder: So it's kind of the other end of the spectrum that we're making this comparison between a normal, normal hibernate or during, say, the summer months and then a hibernate or that has gene expression patterns that mean that it's resistant to many diseases and it can repair tissues when it gets damaged. So it's actually quite different from the normal types of comparisons that others would make. But yes, and then we integrate publicly available data from sources like Open Targets Reactance. And one of the other data sets that we work with that's that's valuable is that we go back through literature that is relevant to the disease, indications that we're going after. And we have a team of curators that mines these papers that where the biology is relevant and we integrate those transcriptomic studies generally into our database. And that that really helps with our comparisons. And I can kind of give you an example of the way that we would do this type of cross-species analysis compared to what other what others in the industry might do if they were just looking at humans or say, just looking at mouse and rat is that, you know, if you're if you're just looking at at a human study and you're trying to say, look, for what genes do we think are involved in heart failure? You would look at, say, transcriptomic, differences between healthy human hearts and failing human hearts.Ashley Zehnder: And then you would have some type of gene list where you'd see the genes that have differential regulation between those two groups. And it fa not we we look at that type of data and then we also look at hibernate or data and then we can compare that. And that's really where the magic happens because we can look at hibernate hours when their hearts are protected during the winter months. So we have an example of these are genes that are involved in protection and then compare that to the summer months where they're not protected. And then we can integrate both of those to analyses so we can say what's really different about a human heart when it is failing to a hibernating heart when it is protected. And we do very fancy types of network analyses and then we layer on all of these data from external sources and the really exciting moments where we see these networks light up with the exact regulation patterns we are expecting that is relevant to our biology. Those are really fun. And I would say the other data source, Linda, that would be good to touch on is the genomic data, right? I think the comparative genomics data. So maybe give a little context on that. I think that really broadens the the views point of what we work with.Linda Goodman: Yeah, absolutely. So that's another data source that we work with. We have a collaboration with the Broad Institute that is one of the leaders of the Zoonomia Project that has in the neighborhood of 250 mammals in a in a big alignment. So we can do comparative genomics across all of these animals. And what we like to look for are comparing the genomes of animals that have a specific phenotype to others that don't. So for example, what is different in the genomes of hibernaters compared to the mammals that cannot hibernate? And we typically do this with how fast or slow evolving genes are, right? So if a gene doesn't accumulate very many mutations in hibernate hours, then it's probably pretty important for hibernation because there's a lot of purifying selection on that versus say, in other mammals that are not hibernaters, like like a human or a rat. It got a lot of mutations in it because it didn't matter as much for those animals. So that's another way of pinpointing the genes that are really important to hibernation. And we know, of course, that some of those might relate to the overall hibernation trait, but many of them are going to be disease relevant because they've had to evolve these genes in a way to protect their hearts and their other organs from these extreme environments they're in during hibernation.Harry Glorikian: So that, if I'm not mistaken, so did the Zoonomia Consortium, there was a big white paper about comparative genomics published in Nature.Ashley Zehnder: Nature last year? Yep. Two years ago. Yeah. A little bit.Harry Glorikian: Yes. Time seems to blur under COVID.Ashley Zehnder: Yeah.Harry Glorikian: How long have I been in this room? Wait. No.Harry Glorikian: But. Can you guys I mean, because doing comparative genomics is not, you know. It's not new necessarily, but can you guys summarize sort of the. Arguments or the principles of that paper, you know, quickly. And then, you know, my next question is going to be like, do you feel that Fauna Bio is part of a larger movement in science and drug discovery that sort of gaining momentum? So I'll, I'll I'll let you guys riff on that launch.Ashley Zehnder: Linda, you're you're the best one to do a perspective on that paper for sure.Linda Goodman: Sure. Yeah. You know, I think this is really born out of the concept that in order to identify the most important genes in the human genome, we need to be looking at other animals and more precisely, other mammals to see their pattern of evolution. Because if you see a gene that looks nearly identical across all other mammals, that means that it's really important. It means that it has been evolving for somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million years, not accumulating mutations, which really translates to if you got damaging mutations in that gene, you were a dead mammal. Those have been selected out. And that's really how you can tell these are the key genes that are important to to your physiology, the difference between life and death. And you can't understand those things as well by just looking within humans and human populations. We're all too similar to each other. But it's really when you get to these long time scales that the statistics work out where you can see, okay, this has been this mutation has not happened in 100 million years. We don't see it in anybody's genome. So that is obviously very important. And that's just this other way of looking at our own human genome that helps highlight the genes that are going to be important to diseases. And I think, you know, another side to this paper related to conservation and the fact that a lot of these animals with really exciting genomes, the ones that are exciting to people like us, are those that have these really long branch lengths where they're they're kind of an ancient lineage. And that's really where the gold is, because that helps us even more understand how quickly or slowly some of these genes are evolving, and it related to trying to conserve some of these species as well.[musical interlude]Harry Glorikian: Let's pause the conversation for a minute to talk about one small but important thing you can do, to help keep the podcast going. And that's leave a rating and a review for the show on Apple Podcasts.All you have to do is open the Apple Podcasts app on your smartphone, search for The Harry Glorikian Show, and scroll down to the Ratings & Reviews section. Tap the stars to rate the show, and then tap the link that says Write a Review to leave your comments. It'll only take a minute, but you'll be doing a lot to help other listeners discover the show.And one more thing. If you like the interviews we do here on the show I know you'll like my new book, The Future You: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help You Get Healthier, Stress Less, and Live Longer.It's a friendly and accessible tour of all the ways today's information technologies are helping us diagnose diseases faster, treat them more precisely, and create personalized diet and exercise programs to prevent them in the first place.The book is now available in print and ebook formats. Just go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and search for The Future You by Harry Glorikian.And now, back to the show.[musical interlude]Harry Glorikian: I should say congratulations because you guys did raise a $9 million seed round last fall from a group of venture funds, some in life sciences, some more general. Right. What does that funding do? What is it? What does that unlock next?Ashley Zehnder: You. I will answer that question. I do want to jump back to your other question that was kind of is this part of a larger movement and comparative genomics? Right. I think that's an important question. I think you sort of hit the nail on the head there. We were invited to a symposium in August of 2019 called Perspective and Comparative Genomics that was held at NHGRI in Bethesda. And I think there's a recognition and actually some of our grant funding is also through NHGRI. And I think there's a recognition from the folks who sequenced the human genome, that they don't have all those answers. And so it's an interesting time where we realize that there is this kind of other data out there that can help us really understand that better. And it does feel a little bit like a rising tide. And so that's that's something that I think is important to recognize. But in terms of the seed round, really, that was meant to expand the platform and the pipeline that we built with our initial funding back from Laura Deming and Age One and True Ventures, who led around for us in early 2019. It's really saying like that initial $3 million or so is really to say like, does this work or is this crazy, right? Can we it's just a crazy idea.Ashley Zehnder: And that's what we really started to generate those first few animal studies that said, yes, actually we can find genes and compounds from this data that meaningfully affect not only human cells, but animal models of human disease. And now we're really expanding into new disease areas. We're looking at areas like fibrosis. We're looking at areas like pulmonary disease. We've got some really interesting data coming out of animal models of pulmonary hypertension with a compound that we found on our platform. We've got the collaboration with Novo Nordisk, which of the five genes that they tested in animals? We have one that has a significant obesity phenotype. So I mean, 20% hit rate on a novel target discovery in vivo is not bad, right? So we've gotten to the point now where repeatedly over multiple disease areas, we've seen that between 20 and 30% of our either compounds or genes are hits, which shows us that this is not only kind of a we got lucky in cardiac disease, but actually this is a process for enriching for important drug targets. And now it's a matter of really expanding the pipeline. We brought on a really experienced head of Therapeutics Discovery, Brian Burke, who spent 20 years at NIBR running very early discovery programs and then seeing programs go into the clinic.Ashley Zehnder: He worked on drugs like Entresto and then worked on a couple of startups after that. So he's kind of gotten both big pharma and startup experience, and his job at Fauna is to really look at the menu of things that we're presenting him from an early research and discovery phase and picking the winners and really figuring out how to take them forward and also killing the programs that are less exciting to him for a number of technical or practical reasons. So that's been really, really helpful to have someone come in truly from the outside and take a look at the science at Fauna and say this is as good or better as anything that I've worked on before. I'm really excited to work on this, and that's been kind of a nice external perspective on on the science and the pipeline at Fauna. So that's really what the $9 million is for. It's really expanding a lot of the computational expertise and and progress and Linda can talk a little bit about that, but also just expanding into new disease areas as well.Harry Glorikian: Understood. So, you know, on this show, like, I talk a lot about, you know, technology, data, and how it's all affecting health care, which this all fits into. But one of the things we talk about a lot is how crappy, terrible, I should use, you know, terrible, right, electronic health records are in the lack of interoperability between them. And Ashley, you actually wrote a paper.Ashley Zehnder: I did, yeah, veterinary medical records are just as bad, actually, veterinary medical records are probably a little bit worse, if it's possible.Harry Glorikian: And to be quite honest, I'm sorry, I just hadn't thought about Fifi or Rover and their...Ashley Zehnder: Their medical records.Harry Glorikian: EHR. Is like is the problem bigger, even, when it comes to functional genomics? I'm trying to think of like obtaining and storing and analyzing 'omics of different species. I mean, who's working on this? Is that part of the Zoonomia consortium? Right. I'm just trying to think it through, like, how do you get all this information and then look at it across all these different species. And at some point, you know, look looking at it against humans also.Ashley Zehnder: Yeah. I'll let Linda talk about the genomics side. I'll comment on sort of some of the validation, some of the externally curated data that Linda talked about. I think this is actually becoming a really important data set. It was a little bit of a slow burn to figure out how to get it and to curate it. But there are a lot of studies now coming out and not just your traditional model organisms, but naked mole rats and long lived rock fishes and primate studies and bats and all kinds of people looking at genomics and RNA seek metabolomics and proteomics across these species that have interesting phenotypes. The problem is, every one of those researchers really heads down on their own species of interest, right? Nobody's saying, oh, well, actually, we're seeing the same genetic signature in these bats that we're seeing in the naked mole rats that we're seeing in some of these long lived fish. Right. But that data is not in a very friendly format. So we were like originally we were like, okay, we're going to write some scripts, we're going to try to pull some of the stuff out of supplemental tables. It's going to be awesome. No, no, no. We have very highly trained curators who work on this data and bring it in. And we have a very standard pipeline and a process and a way to normalize the data across different studies and standard ontologies and ways to clean up this data in a way that it can be integrated with the genomics coming out of the platform. And that is a tedious and painful and ongoing effort to bring in all this data.Ashley Zehnder: Now, we have data from well over 330 individual studies, over 30 species. I think Linda, you told me it was like more than 800,000 gene entries at this point that's curated and that's kind of growing month over month. So now that's becoming part of our defensible moat, is that we've taken the last two or three years, again, slow burn, pulling all this data together in a way that it can be reused. And now we can turn a paper around and put it on a platform in a week or two. So we're kind of always scanning for these studies. But yeah, it's, it's, it's out there, but it's not always in a usable format without a lot of pain and effort. And so we've kind of put that pain and effort into getting that data in a place that we can use it. And then, of course, the comparative genomics is like a whole 'nother level of complexity.Linda Goodman: Yeah, so I can talk a little bit about how we do that within the comparative genomics community and how we've done that for Zoonomia. Because I referenced before that we like to do these sorts of studies to examine the genomes of hibernate ers and non hibernate and figure out what's different. And you'd think it would be a trivial question who is a hybrid nature amongst mammals? But it's actually not. And so along with our collaborators Alison Hindle and Cornelia Santer, as part of the Genome Project, Fauna tried to go through and categorize every every genome that was in Zoonomia. So we're talking about around 250 mammals for is it a hibernater, or is it not? And you'd be surprised how often it was digging through literature from the 1970s and someone would say, this animal is not often seen during the winter. So we think it hibernates and it's not always the most satisfying. And so it is an extremely tedious effort, but well worthwhile to go through and say this animal, I'm very sure, hibernates. This one, I'm very sure does not. And then there's this third category of animals that were unsure about we're going to remove those. And it's tedious, but you have to do that part, right? Because if you do the analysis with bad data, you're never going to find the genes that you want. And Linda, I remember you telling me when you were going through this very painful process, I think your threshold for being a perpetrator, quote unquote, was that you could drop your metabolism like 50%. Correct me if I'm wrong, and humans could go down to like 40 like in certain instances, like humans are almost there. You know, it's it's hard to know when there is only one paper about it, but certainly there are some really deep meditative states and humans and low oxygen environments where, you know, we're getting kind of close to the area where we might say that that's a hibernated, but certainly not the duration that you get out of hibernation. But it's it's it surprised me to see how close how much how much metabolic flexibility there really is when you start to look at it. Yeah.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. We've got to go talk to the monks.Linda Goodman: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, we have that in mind. It sounds like an interesting travel experience. Yeah.Harry Glorikian: So I want to jump back for a second because. You guys don't necessarily have from what I have pieced together, the normal sort of like startup story. Right. First of all, you're an all female founding team, right? Highly unusual, right? Not something I see every day. You guys started at an accelerator program in San Francisco called Age One.Ashley Zehnder: Age One.Harry Glorikian: And then you moved to QB3 and the East Bay Innovation Center.Ashley Zehnder: Yep.Harry Glorikian: And then I think they helped you with some paid interns.Ashley Zehnder: Well, we got some from Berkeley. Yep, we did.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. And then you went through a SBIR grant.Ashley Zehnder: A couple of them.Harry Glorikian: From the Small Business Administration. And then a small business technology transfer grant from the Human Genome Research Initiative at NIH. Right.Ashley Zehnder: Yep.Harry Glorikian: I'm hopeful, hopefully my notes are all correct. Talk a little bit about the on ramp or infrastructure today for sort of seed stage startups like you. I mean, what were the most important resources?Ashley Zehnder: This is such an important conversation. I'm really glad you're asking this question. We had a call with a reporter from Business Insider yesterday who was talking to all three of us about this early founder ecosystems in biotech and sort of East Coast versus West Coast ways of starting biotechnology companies. Right. And that is a whole do a whole podcast on that, let me tell you. But I will say that there are a lot of resources for, let's call them founder led bio. Right. In the West Coast, which is kind of the buzzword these days, but people really supporting the scientists who originate the concepts and training them to be founders as opposed to assuming that you need to bring in an experienced CEO to run a company at this stage. Right. So I think we were very fortunate to meet Laura Deming at Stanford, who is one of the founding VCs. And longevity before that was a buzz word, right? She was one of the first longevity funds, literally Longevity Fund, and is really been a champion of founders, starting companies and really training founders to start companies who are deep science founders. So we started in age one. It was the first batch of age one. We're still very close to that cohort of companies doing interesting things from machine learning and image analysis through pure therapeutics development. And then Laura really helped us, her, her. We asked her later, like, why did you end up investing in us? She said, Well, the science was amazing.Ashley Zehnder: This is totally a field with so much promise. I just needed to teach you guys how to pitch. The science was there, right? So she helped me just how to pitch and how to use less science words in our pitches, which we're still working on to some extent. But then it was this balanced approach of taking in some venture money to really support the growth of the company, but balance with some of this non-dilutive funding for specific projects where it made sense and some of that was some of that in the early stage is validation, right? Having having funding through groups like NHGRI, having an early partnership with a company like Novo Nordisk, which provided also some non-dilutive funding for the company, really validated all of the science that we were doing because we were first time founders, because we're a little bit outside of the normal profile. For me, I don't feel weird being a female founder only because 80% of veterinarians are female. Like, I'm used to being in a room with all women. You go to a bio conference, it's not the same thing, right? So for us, we're just we are who we are. Right. But it's helpful, I think, to get some of that external validation and then really be able to use that to to start to build on programs and show progress.Ashley Zehnder: And then it becomes more about the data and the progress and what you can do with it. So that's a lot of how we started the company. There's I said there's a lot of support in the West Coast for this kind of thing. There's great programs like Berkeley Foreman Fund Talks, which I worked, which I was in as well, just about logistics around starting companies. There's a lot of good startup accelerators. I've got a really amazing all of us, how amazing a network of founders who we can reach out to on different. I got four or five different Slack channels of founders that I could reach out to for all kinds of advice. And usually it's always good to have a company that's one or two stages ahead of you, like talking to folks who IPO'd or something last year is is not as helpful as folks who recently raised a series B, right. And figuring out what those milestones look like and then particularly those that have taken mostly money from tech investors like we have all the lifeforce capital who led our last round is also has funded some very good therapeutics companies, Sonoma Therapeutics and Second Genome and other therapeutics companies as well. So I think it's it's helpful to see how people balance the needs of the companies at different stages in what you need.Harry Glorikian: But so do you guys think that you could have started Fauna ten years ago? I mean, did the support systems exist for starting a company like this?Ashley Zehnder: Well, no, for two reasons. We couldn't have started Fauna ten years ago. One is the data just simply wasn't in a place that the company was a tractable strategy. Everything was still too expensive and we had really shitty genomes for a few species at that point. And B, I think there really wasn't the kind of groundswell of support for deeply scientific technical founders to start their own companies and train them to be the kind of leaders they need to be to run those companies for a longer term. So I think it's a confluence of those things and being in an environment like Stanford that really encourages people to to try startups, it's not a crazy idea. Like people don't look at you like you're your heads backwards. If you start to start a company at Stanford, it's like, okay, cool. Like, when are you launching? You know.Harry Glorikian: I think it's the opposite.Ashley Zehnder: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like, why aren't you have a company yet? Whereas you know, a lot, many, many, many, many other places like that is seen as a very strange thing to do. So I think the environment plays a huge role. Yeah, for sure.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I think between East Coast and West Coast too, there's.Ashley Zehnder: That's a whole, we should have a whole 'nother podcast on that.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, I live here and I was I was born and raised on the West and I remember there and I came here and I was like, Oh, this is where you are not in Kansas anymore. Like, this place is different. So, I mean, I'm hoping that the East Coast is actually embracing risk a little bit more and sort of stepping out on the edge. But it's really slow. They don't call it New England for nothing. So. But, you know, it was great having you both on the show. I this was great. I we covered a lot of ground. I'm sure people's heads are spinning, thinking about, you know, you know, different animal species and how that's going to play into this. And I mean. It really does sound like I know we have to do the hard work, but there's a lot of computational effort that has to go on here to sort of. Make sense of this and bring it all together and align it so that you can be looking at it properly and make the right decisions going forward.Ashley Zehnder: Yep. Millions of data points coming together to find drug targets for sure.Harry Glorikian: So thanks for being on the show. And you know, I wish you guys incredible luck.Ashley Zehnder: Thanks, Harry, so much. This was fun.Linda Goodman: Thanks for having us.Harry Glorikian: Thanks.Harry Glorikian: That's it for this week's episode. You can find a full transcript of this episode as well as the full archive of episodes of The Harry Glorikian Show and MoneyBall Medicine at our website. Just go to glorikian.com and click on the tab Podcasts.I'd like to thank our listeners for boosting The Harry Glorikian Show into the top three percent of global podcasts.If you want to be sure to get every new episode of the show automatically, be sure to open Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player and hit follow or subscribe. Don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And we always love to hear from listeners on Twitter, where you can find me at hglorikian.Thanks for listening, stay healthy, and be sure to tune in two weeks from now for our next interview.

In today's episode, I speak with Jeff Veen. Jeff is a Design Partner and Head of Platform at True Ventures, where he spends his time helping founders create better products. He does this as an advisor, as well, for companies like about.me, Medium, and WordPress. Previously, Jeff was VP of Design at Adobe after they acquired Typekit, the company he co-founded and ran as CEO. Jeff was also one of the founding partners of the user experience consulting group Adaptive Path. While there, he led Measure Map, which was acquired by Google. During his time at Google, Jeff designed Google Analytics and led the UX team for Google's apps. Much earlier, Jeff was part of the founding web team at Wired Magazine, where he helped build HotWired, Web Monkey, Wired News, and many other sites. During that time, he authored two books: HotWired Style and The Art and Science of Web Design.We dive into ways in which trust is established at work and how it's necessary in order for people to be as creative – and successful – as possible. 

Voice has long been the final frontier of computing interfaces, and now with the technology of smart speakers and other voice-enabled technologies we are finally able to access what science fiction has been writing about for decades. Our guest today, Braden Ream, founder and CEO of Voiceflow, is helping create that future. Voiceflow, then known as Storyflow, was one of the first portfolio companies backed by Ripple Ventures. Back then it was a platform that helped build skills on Alexa, but has since grown to become the go-to platform for voice and chat-based interfaces and is being used by global Fortune 500 companies like USAA, McDonalds & BMW.About Braden Ream:Braden Ream is the Co-Founder and CEO of Voiceflow, a platform that helps teams design, prototype and launch voice & chat assistants. Founded in 2018, Voiceflow currently powers 300M monthly messages and is deployed across 75,000 teams. Prior to Voiceflow, Braden worked at RBC and founded a social media app.A word from our sponsor:Ripple Ventures is always focused on helping our founders and CEOs find the best partners to work with. But before we introduce any provider to our companies, we always make sure we try the product first. And when it comes to managing business expenses at Ripple, we were super excited when the team at Jeeves came knocking on our door.Jeeves helped get me and my team setup with physical and virtual credit cards in days. I was able to allow my teammates to expense items in multiple currencies allowing them to pay for anything, anywhere at any time. We weren’t asked for any personal guarantees or pay any setup or annual fees either.Not only does Jeeves save us time, but they also give us up to 3% cashback on our purchases including expenses like Google, Facebook, or AWS every month. The best part, Jeeves puts up the cash, and you settle up once every 30 days, unlike some other corporate card companies that make you pre-pay every month.Jeeves offers a truly all-in-one expense management corporate card program for international startups and we at Tank Talks could not be more excited to partner with them. Listeners of Tank Talks can get set up with a demo of Jeeves today and take advantage of a $700 discount and skip the waitlist by visiting tryjeeves.com/tanktalks to learn more.In this episode we discuss:03:12 The history of voice tech leading to Voiceflow09:32 Why Alexa, Siri, and other voice-enabled platforms are succeeding where prior platforms have failed14:02 How the pandemic has helped shape the voice tech industry16:36 The other factors pushing forward voice tech21:42 How the voice apps are the new landing pages and the next internet25:23 Becoming a standard toolset for developing voice interfaces31:32 Addressing privacy concerns around voice tech36:02 How wake words work on Alexa and other platforms38:29 Plans for their recent raise from Felics Ventures, Ripple Ventures, True Ventures, Craft Ventures and othersFast Favorites:PodcastEconomics ExplainedNewsletter/BlogPaul GrahamTech GadgetiPad/Apple PencilNew TrendChessBookCrossing the ChasmBlue Ocean StrategyLife LessonThe world is run by people no smarter than you.Follow Matt Cohen and Tank Talks here!Podcast production support provided by Agentbee.Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanktalks.substack.com

Use Code: MOLLIE10 – for 10% off the first bottle of a subscription order. BIO:Colleen Cutcliffe, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Pendulum Therapeutics, a biotech startup in San Francisco. The company's mission is to fill the chasm that exists between unregulated supplements and prescription drugs. In this middle ground, Colleen envisions a future in which medicines are derived not from chemistry but one of nature's greatest gifts: the human body's microbiome.The safety and effectiveness of the company's first microbiome-bolstering probiotic, Pendulum Glucose Control, is welcome news for more than 120 million Americans living with diabetes and prediabetes, struggling to control their blood sugar.Colleen's pursuit is personal. Her daughter was born nearly eight weeks premature, spending the first month of life hooked up to machines. Doctors loaded her up with antibiotics, which is the standard, often lifesaving, a protocol for preemies. But the antibiotics wreak havoc on babies' microbiomes and could result in chronic conditions as adults [source]. Now 12 years old, Colleen's daughter already suffers from gut issues and food sensitivities that no one else in the family has.There has to be a better way – therapies that spare the microbiome while treating chronic conditions – and Colleen is determined to forge a new path. Prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms are keen to help her: Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, and Khosla Ventures have invested $57 million since 2014.Colleen received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. in biochemistry from Wellesley College. She completed her postdoctoral research at Northwestern Medicine's Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. Colleen lives in Menlo Park, Calif., with her husband, two daughters, and two rambunctious dogs.LINKS:https://www.instagram.com/pendulumlifeco/https://twitter.com/Pendulum_Cohttps://www.facebook.com/PendulumLife/https://www.linkedin.com/company/pendulumco/https://www.pendulumlife.comUse Code: MOLLIE10 – for 10% off the first bottle of a subscription order.  SHOW NOTES: