"Age of Miracles"

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a product-led sales platform backed by First Round Capital. Alexa started the company while getting her MBA at Stanford GSB based on her experience leading up sales strategy and operations at Dataminr. We discuss a wide range of topics including defining a new category, setting up a co-founder relationship for success, how to get the most out of early design partners (and what a design partner is), and how companies can add product-led sales to their toolkit. This one is packed with wisdom and practical insights.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

As we speak, thousands of people are contributing funds to the ConstitutionDAO in order to win a copy for the last remaining private copy og the US Constitution when it goes up for auction at Sotheby's on Thursday night. It's expected to fetch roughly $20 million.  We'll cover the backstory, what a DAO is, and the significance of a group of people using web3 tools to buy the US Constitution together.  You can read the full post at Not Boring.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Imagine a place...     Built for gamers Home to everyone playing the Great Online Game Has 150 million MAUs Generates $130 million in revenue Is a web3 sleeper This week, I teamed up with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist to tell Discord's story. You can read the full piece here.  We cover: The circular origin story. Discord’s lore involves more headfakes and false starts than almost any other business. A dizzying product. Discord can be hard to understand, especially for aged millennials like Packy and me. We do our best to dissect the chaos of Discord’s chat. A forking user base. Though it began as a tool for gamers, Discord is now widely used. We’ll talk about its primary constituencies. Slow monetization. While it has grown rapidly, Discord’s been conservative when it comes to extracting money from users. The web3 opportunity. Discord has become the platform-of-choice for web3 entities, but it doesn’t seem to have totally won over hearts and minds. The company needs to capitalize on its lead and protect its positioning. We have some ideas. The Great Online Game. How Discord has become the home for those learning, living, and winning on the internet. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Neuro-ID is a real-time behavioral analytics tool that analyzes all of our very human and unique taps, clicks, and swipes to help its customers fight fraud and better understand their customers. The company, based out of beautiful Whitefish, Montana, announced a $35 million Series B yesterday, in which Not Boring Capital is participating. I sat down with CEO Jack Alton to discuss:   - What Neuro-ID does  - Transitioning from fighting fraud to a wide range of use cases  - The unlikely advantage of the Whitefish HQ   - How the Series B came together  - What the company plans to do with the money  - How to do a founder --> outside CEO transition right.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Last week, Facebook announced a rebrand to Meta and an all-in bet on the Metaverse. Zuck said all of the right things about openness and interoperability.  The question people are asking is, "Can we trust him?" The more interesting question is, "Do we even need to?" In a world in which people are more used to ownership of their digital assets and identity, Meta’s best strategy will be to operate more like a Minimally Extractive Coordinator than an extractive platform. To reach its full potential, Meta needs to disrupt Facebook by turning itself into something that behaves more like a protocol than a platform. Plus, Meta will be a better influence on the Metaverse than Apple.  You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Since February, I’ve been writing an accidental series on how web3 is impacting culture, work, and the way that we all interact with each other.  Power to the Person was about how technology is empowering individuals as the new atomic units of commerce, The Great Online Game was about how the internet blurs the line between work and play for those individuals, and The Cooperation Economy was about how we play the game as teams of individuals or small groups.  This essay goes one layer up to figure out how it all fits together: we’re all part of a great global Scenius. We’re all gonna make it. Let’s call it the WAGMI Scenius. You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Lauren Rothwell is the co-founder and CEO of Retrera, a platform for remote employee engagement that makes it really easy to host team offsites and retreats. Every founder that I talk to with remote employees, even those who have offices, is organizing at least one offsite per year, and often one per quarter. They love getting the team together in a new location to build bonds, but organizing it all can be a huge headache full of hidden costs. Retrera makes that simple, with one tool to survey employees, book hotels, organize meals, purchase flights, and even follow-up to get feedback from employees and track their engagement over time.  The corporate offsite market is massive -- something like $27 billion annually and $12 billion just for tech companies -- and Lauren is taking the smartest approach I've seen to bringing order to it. Before Retrera, Lauren studied math & econ grad from Trinity College Dublin, traded at Goldman Sachs, and went to business school at Stanford GSB. Her co-founder, Chirag, was an engineer at Airbnb and Facebook. Their skill is evident in the product and the growth they've seen: in just two months live, they've done 14 offsites for over $1 million in GMV. They're making remote work more fun and engaging.  Your team should do a retreat. Go book a Retrera. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Not Boring Capital has invested $8 million in 79 companies over its first two quarters. That's fast. This weekend, I sent an LP Update to Not Boring Capital's LPs. In this episode, I share the update with a particular focus on Not Boring Capital's strategy and the trade-offs I need to make to lean into my comparative advantages and away from areas where I'm weaker.  You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

ScienceIO decodes the language of medicine to unlock the full potential of healthcare data. Its industry-leading clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform structures data in real-time to enable search, analysis, and insight generation.  Not Boring Capital invested in ScienceIO's $8M seed round, and in this episode, I'll explain what they do and why I invested, covering:  The Investment Thesis The Challenge: Unstructured Zettabytes The Team: Building on a Strong Foundation The Products: The Model of Everything The Business: 💰📈 The Future: Patient 360 and Healthcare Infrastructure You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Ayush Jaiswal is the founder and CEO of Pesto, a Not Boring portfolio company that connects companies with the most valuable resource in the world: engineers.  Ayush founded Pesto because he realized that remote was coming even before COVID, and that companies working anywhere meant that they could hire the best talent from anywhere. He also saw that in India, his home country, some of his friends who were talented engineers were making a fraction of what they could working for a western tech company. Pesto fixes that, identifying top engineers globally, starting in India, training them on soft skills, and matching them with higher-paying tech jobs. And it's working -- the average Pesto developer makes 4x what they made before Pesto and hiring companies come back to hire as many as 12 (and soon 30) Pesto developers.  We discuss:   - What remote will look like  - How to identify top engineers  - Expanding into web3   - Why Pesto has focused on growing within existing clients   - How to hire Pesto engineers Listen, or if you just want to hire an engineer right now, go check out Pesto to see profiles of available developers today: Try Pesto. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message