Mike Ghaffary

Senior leaders Brad Feld, Sarah Robb O’Hagan, Mike Ghaffary, Heidi Roizen, and John Rogers Jr. discuss burning out on giving, the techniques they use to avoid it, and how they recognize it in their employees. Topics include navigating boundaries in generosity, preventing burnout, managing generosity burnout in the workplace and personal life, and techniques for setting boundaries and managing burnout.

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Mike Ghaffary, GP at Canvas Ventures. 00:00 Intro  02:21 Swiss army knife of education  04:04 Business school after Dotcom bubble burst   05:06 Founding Stitcher  06:14 Focusing on news  08:03 Becoming CEO of Eat24  09:39 Growing Eat24 to $700m top line  10:45 Food delivery wars  11:55 Grubhub Partnership that never launched  13:12 Jeremy Stoppelman and Steve Jobs on search on mobile  14:30 Becoming a successful angel investor  15:35 Making the most expensive iPhone app ever  16:37 Angel investment in Strava  17:20 Angel investment in Superhuman  17:50 Joining Social Capital  19:58 Mike’s experience at Social Capital  20:28 CloudKitchens investment  21:30 HubHaus investment  22:37 Joining Canvas Ventures  24:04 Flyhomes investment  27:52 Marketplace Deep Dive  28:27 Lenny Rachitsky: focus on supply or demand side?  30:06 Thomas Eisenmann: Two-sided networks  30:57 Uber: demand side vs. supply side subsidies  32:09 Local vs. global network effects  33:24 Sarah Tavel (Benchmark) on unlocking new supply 34:21 Local delivery war zones  35:36 Uber Eats entering the market  37:04 Public vs. privately held delivery war contenders  38:54 Marketplace take rate  40:38 Out-of bound marketplace take rates  41:57 Zero percent take rate 

Mike Ghaffary is a General Partner at Canvas Ventures, one of the premier thesis-driven early-stage venture capital funds in San Francisco that invests in Fintech, Digital Health, Marketplaces, and New Enterprise. Prior to Canvas, Mike was a General Partner at Social Capital and as an angel investor, some of his investments include Strava, Skip Scooters, Pocket, Philz Coffee, Atrium, and Superhuman. He also has 10 years of operating experience as CEO of Eat24, VP Business and Corporate Development at Yelp, Director of Business Development at TrialPay, and co-founder of Stitcher and BarMax. And before that, Mike started his investing career at Summit Partners. For this episode, we talk quite extensively about evaluating marketplaces. Mike has written a few articles on the subject, the one we touch on is “Where I’m Investing and 15 Marketplace Questions”. Two books that have impacted Mike professionally and personally is Give and Take by Adam Grant and Drive by Daniel Pink You can follow Mike on Twitter @newmike for updates. You are also welcome to follow your host @mikegelb and @consumervc for updates. On this episode you learn - What attracted Mike to working in startups and becoming a founder? How important having operational experience is? What’s makes him excited to invest in consumer tech in this current climate? What is a marketplace? An overview of the advantages of marketplaces. What marketplace founders need to consider when identifying and building marketplaces? Cross-side and same-side network effects & negative network effects. How important is having your own unique distribution? Evaluating switching costs. Online customer acquisition costs for both supply and demand. The current outlook of online CAC in today’s climate. One thing he would change about venture capital. How an entrepreneur should think when a venture fund says they need a lead investor in order to invest? ...and much much more! If you would like to follow along you can click “Subscribe” on the Apple podcast app or whichever platform you are listening on. If you enjoyed the episode, feel free to also leave a review. You are also to see all episodes here and learn more at www.theconsumervc.com and follow Mike on Twitter or Instagram