The VentureFizz Podcast

It’s impressive when an entrepreneur builds a company from scratch that ultimately scales, but I think it is even more impressive when you can combine a strong social mission to a company that scales, as well. This is what Rodney and his Co-Founder, Travis Holoway, have built with SoLo Funds, a leading community finance platform focused on underserved communities. It’s a marketplace where you can lend money to those who are looking to borrow. It’s working, as the company has over 1.3M downloads and has surpassed 600K in loans funded and $300M in transaction value. As the only Black owned B Corp Fintech in the U.S. and Canada, the company is backed by a variety of investors including Rich Dennis’ fund, New Voices and Serena Williams’ fund, Serena Ventures. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice for entrepreneurs of color on raising funding for their startup. * Rodney’s background story including obtaining his MBA from Howard University and his time at Proctor & Gamble as a Brand Manager. * We break down the tech and use cases for LISNR, a leading ultrasonic data platform company that he co-founded. * All the details about SoLo Funds in terms of how the company came together and the impact that it is making. * The story of his recent TV appearance on the Peacock series called Founding in Color. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Fate, luck, destiny… whatever you call it, it seems very apparent that all three founders of Bevi were meant to build a company together. They all shared a common interest in sustainability, a desire to build a company, and experience in a field that had water at its core. Eliza grew up sailing and was always interested in ocean stewardship which led her down the path of evaluating different ideas where she could leverage her industrial design knowledge to build a product that could make an impact on the bottled water crisis. Sean spent three years working in an environmental non-profit and worked on wetland conservation projects in China and later attended MIT Sloan and was president of the MIT Water Club. Frank comes from entrepreneurial roots and worked for an irrigation startup before meeting Sean in China only to learn that they would be attending MIT Sloan together that fall and ultimately roomed together. So, when investors ask themselves - why are these founders uniquely qualified to build this company… I don’t know if you could ever find a better founding team. Bevi is disrupting the beverage industry with its bottleless water dispenser for offices and commercial spaces. The company has over 5,000 customers and has raised multiple round of funding, include a $70M Series D last year which was led by Cowen Sustainable Investments. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * The story of how a Bevi machine ended up in HBO’s Silicon Valley. * The background story of each founder and more info on how the three came together to start a company. * A brief history of the bottled water industry and the staggering number of plastic water bottles that are sold each year which is massive. * Early foundational years of building Bevi and early interations of the machine while figuring out product market fit. * Scale of the business and the launch of the counter-top version, plus some insight into the possibility of a consumer version. * Navigating the pandemic and how some critical decisions ended up benefiting the business over the long term. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

What do the following brands have in common? Casamigos, Skims, Fenty Beauty, Aviation Gin, and Beats by Dre. Well, they all have a celebrity as a co-founder. While celebrities can land a lucrative endorsement deal, it pales in comparison to what the outcome can be if you own part of a company that is successful. The pairing of a brand with a celebrity founder just makes sense as one of the core ingredients that they typically bring to the table is a massive following. However, you can’t just launch a brand and expect that consumers will be customers, especially over the long haul. It needs to be a quality product that is filling a void for consumers. Plus, it needs to be a match for the celebrity with a compeling story behind it, which I think is the other key ingredient. This is where Jobi comes in and specializes. Its startup venture studio is focused on launching consumer brands in partnership with celebrities and influencers. Ryan is a Co-Founder and board member of Homecourt, a home-focused consumer brand founded by Courteney Cox with a collection of fragrance infused luxury cleaning and household products. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Ryan’s advice, as a mixed race professional, on what can be done to improve the diversity numbers across investors and employees at startups. * His background story, plus the details of his own startup and lessons learned. * Jobi’s approach and role it play around building companies, plus how they identify products and partner with celebrities. * The full story of Homecourt and why Courteney Cox was a perfect match. * Information about Jobi’s experiential division and its interactive art experiences like INTER_. * eCommerce predictions and the key elements that go into building a successful consumer brand. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

It goes without saying, but we need more capital going towards female founded companies. While we still have a long way to go, there has been some progress in this regard with dedicated funds like XFactor Ventures. The fund, which is focused on pre-seed and seed investments, was launched in 2017 by Flybridge with Anna as a Co-Founder with a strategy of having women founders invest in other women founders. Fast forward, XFactor now has a portfolio that consists of over 70 companies that are all founded by women and an investment team of successful female founders who have started companies like Away, Figs, and others. After two startups, which were both acquired, Anna transitioned to a role as a fulltime venture capitalist by joining the Flybridge team in 2020 as a General Partner. She is focused on making investments in sectors such as commerce 3.0, marketplaces, mobile, consumer and eCommerce. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Examples of community driven companies like Chief and how they are leveraging this model as a strategic advantage, plus the details of the laptop sticker test at Flybridge. * Anna’s background story and her transition from law to entrepreneurship. * All the details on Fashion Project, an online designer clothing donation company and a great story of how a pitch contest saved the company. * How Anna made the transition to investing fulltime and the process for making an investment. * Various reasons why a VC might not fund your company. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

For non-technical founders, the thought of building a tech startup might seem very intimidating and downright impossible. But for Jordan, what started out as a blog with editorial recommendations evolved to something much greater and to kickstart her product, she kept it simple. She thought through how the product might work by drawing rectangles of each screen. Later, she would learn that she was actually wireframing and that led her to a point where she could narrow things down and then have an MVP built. It’s advice that she shares in this podcast and hopefully, it will be an inspiration for others to just get started down the entrepreneurial path. You don’t need to be technical to build a product, as long as you are able to articulate the vision to those who can build it. Cobble is solving that long standing problem that we’ve all experienced - what do you want to do tonight? Which often leads to the response - I don’t know, what do you want to do? Cobble is an app that ends decision fatigue for couples or groups and solves this problem through the combination of curated content and a suite of social decision making tools. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * The pros and cons of being a solo founder. * Jordan’s background story and her career in media, plus what led her down the path of leaving CBS News to launch a company. * All the details on Cobble and how it works, plus how the company was able to have a successful launch during the height of the pandemic. * Building a product that serves multiple markets and advice on scaling. * How to lead as a startup CEO. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

One piece of advice that many successful entrepreneurs share with other founders is to wait as long as possible before you raise outside funding. The longer you can stay as a successful bootstrapped company, the more leverage you will have when you are finally ready to raise capital and negative the company’s valuation. For Oisin and his Co-Founder, Mike Flynn, they took a very smart approach to building their business. They built a product development agency and launched several products to solve different problems with a focus on eCommerce. From this approach, they were able to fund their business until they had the right product where they could built a massive business. This ended up being Recharge, a subscription payments solution helping eCommerce merchants of all sizes launch and scale subscription offerings. Case in point to my earlier statement, the company was self funded for over five years before raising capital. It’s latest round of funding was a $277M growth round of capital at a $2.1B valuation. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice on building a remote-first company and how to create a vibrant and inclusive culture. * Oisin’s background story and why he chose the entrepreneurial path. All the details on their product development agency and how it funded the business. * Finding product market fit with Recharge and how the company has scaled over the years. * Product Distribution Fit - what is it and why does it matter for entrepreneurs. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Unless you were already in the sector, topics within the manufacturing and supply chain industry were probably not on the radar for most people. As consumers, when you went to the store, you bought what you needed and that was that. However, people became very aware of the importance that these industries play in our lives during the pandemic when everything changed. Supply chain and manufacturing issues were the topics of the nightly news as shelves were bare with lots of essential items missing or purchasing a new car was almost impossible due to inventory shortages. Even though technology has helped these industries evolve over time, there is still a massive opportunity for disruption within the manufacturing and supply chain industries. It is a topic that Colin is thinking deeply about in terms of making investments and we start out our conversation with a discussion around the trends and opportunities for technology to make an impact to these sectors. Two Sigma Ventures is an early stage venture firm that was started in 2012 under the Two Sigma umbrella. The firm has made over 100 investments across many industries. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Colin’s professional background including how he gained experience in the tech industry and then as an Investment Banker at Lehman Brothers. * What led him down the path of early stage investing and starting Two Sigma Ventures. * An overview of the firm today including portfolio examples. * His decision making criteria for making new investments. * How the tech scene has evolved in NYC. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Many entrepreneurs have aspirations to make an impact and change the world, which is admirable. However, building a company that impacts billions is obviously very hard and very rare. In the case of Rich Miner, his professional career has been very successful on several levels including the change the world category. As a co-founder of Wildfire, he was part of the team that built the world’s first digital assistant which also includes having his name on the patent for using words to wake up your voice based assistant - which is something that we are all familiar with via our Hey Google, Alexa, or Siri commands. Then, as a co-founder of Android, he helped revolutionize the smartphone industry with a product that has over 3 billion active users and what is now the most popular operating system in the world. Next, he disrupted the corporate venture fund industry by helping to launch Google Ventures (now known as GV) which is one of the top investors in the industry with billions of dollars under management. Last year was another accomplishment that will make an ongoing impact to students for years to come in the naming of the school that he graduated from which is the UMass Lowell Richard A. Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences. We obviously had a ton to cover over the course of this podcast, so stay tuned to hear lots of great stories about his background and all the companies he’s built, plus lots of great advice along the way. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

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

Building a startup is tough in any industry, but for a healthcare startup, there is a whole different level of complexity. It is a heavily regulated industry that has been slow to change in terms of digital transformation. As you’ll hear from Troy, the majority of healthcare records are transmitted via a fax machine. How is that possible in our modern world of technology? But, it is opportunities like this that catch the eye for entrepreneurs like Troy. Particle Health’s mission is to enable simple and secure access to actionable healthcare data for digital health innovators. It’s user-friendly API platform lets healthcare providers get patient records from over 270 million patients across the United States. The company announced a $25M Series B round of funding back in July led by Canvas Ventures. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Some of the biggest challenges around building a startup in a heavily regulated industry like healthcare. * Troy’s background story including his time as an EMT and how he got involved in the healthcare industry and joining Startup Health in its early days. * All of the details on Particle Health and how they are disrupting the healthcare industry. * Advice for recruiting and attracting a world class team. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.