The VentureFizz Podcast

Episode #328 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ellen Chisa, Partner at boldstart ventures. Back in 2016, we wrote a profile about Ellen on VentureFizz when she was leading product management at Lola.com. The profile was part of a series that we called Driven, which I think is a very fitting word to describe Ellen… and ironically, the discussion around considering a role in venture capital actually came up. So, in my opinion, it was only a matter of time. From being part of the winning team in high school for the FIRST Robotics competition, to starting a company in college, to a career path in product management, to leading a company that was developing a new programming language… Ellen has built the perfect core foundation for a successful career as an investor. boldstart is a venture capital firm that is your partner from inception for developer first, infrastructure, & SaaS founders that looking to turn your idea into a category-creating iconic company. The firm’s portfolio includes companies like Snyk, Kustomer, BigID, Superhuman and many more. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A conversation about what makes a great product manager. * Ellen’s background including the story off taking some time of to build an EdTech startup with other classmates while in college at the Olin School of Engineering, * Working on early mobile initiatives at Microsoft, then joining Kickstarter as a Product Manager, and what led her to pursue her MBA at Harvard Business School. * Meeting serial entrepreneur, Paul English, and leading product at Lola.com, a travel app. * Developing a new programming language for her startup called Dark with Paul Biggar which allows companies to build software faster, plus what this experience taught her in terms of leading a company and getting adoption with the developer community. * The future of AI developed code. * How she landed in venture capital at boldstart including what she is targeting for investments and what has been her biggest surprise as a VC. * Startup pitch advice. * And so much more.

Episode #327 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Reed Sturtevant, General Partner at Engine Ventures. This is exciting! Why? Because this episode is longer than my normal interviews, as Reed and I cover his career that spans multiple decades across major technological platform shifts. This means that based on his career, he has so many great stories to share. It is like a historical walkthrough of the Boston tech scene. We even had to do two sessions, so if you are watching this video from our YouTube channel then you’ll notice the different sweaters that Reed is wearing. Today, Reed is a General Partner at Engine Ventures, a “tough tech” venture capital firm launched by MIT and trust me on this one, as you’ll want to stay tuned throughout the whole episode! Here is an outline of what we cover: * Reed’s background story, including graduating from high school at 15 years old, his experience as a factory worker and his studies at MIT. * Developing a program called Freelance Graphics at a startup that was acquired by Lotus and his experience there, which was twice the size of Microsoft at the time. * Co-Founding Radnet, which raised the largest venture round of its time in Boston. * Running company development in Boston for IdeaLab, Bill Gross’ internet incubator which spun out companies like Compete, Picasa and others. * Meeting Katie Rae at EONS, a startup founded by Jeff Taylor, and then running Microsoft Startup Labs. * Launching Project 11 Ventures with Katie and then running Techstar Boston together which included many successful companies like GrabCAD, PillPack, and others. * Founder conflict and how it can destroy a startup. * The details of Engine Ventures and what Reed is targeting for investments, plus portfolio company examples. * What it was like leading a course at MIT with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. * And so much more.

Episode 326 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Strategy Officer of Acquia. Many of the most successful companies in tech were created by founders who built something that was to fill their own need. This was certainly the case for Dries, who back in 2000, started an internal online message board for his friends from his dorm room in Belgium which turned into Drupal. Fast forward to today, Drupal powers 2% of all websites in the world and over 10,000 people contribute to the Drupal open source project every year. In addition to running one of the most successful open source projects, Dries went on to build Acquia, along with his Co-Founder & the company’s first CEO, Jay Batson and early investor - Michael Skok. Acquia’s innovative business model has been a blueprint for other open source companies. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * The details of the Drupal community and what are the right ingredients for building a successful community. * Dries’ background story growing up in Belgium, how he developed a passion for technology, and the full story of how Drupal came to fruition. * Drupal’s growth and momentum, plus a great story of how the community stepped in to help fund this open source initiative. * The early days of Acquia in terms of figuring out the business model and then scaling the company under Tom Erickson’s leadership. * The current state of the state of Acquia as a Digital Experience Platform. * Why entrepreneurship is 80% sales and marketing, even as an engineer. * And so much more.

Episode 325 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Alex Shashou, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of 10Beauty. About 10 years ago, Peter Thiel is credited for saying “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” True, Twitter or X certainly was not in the same frame of mind as to what we saw on The Jetsons, but are we finally starting to get there? The Roomba was a step in the right direction in terms of a consumer robot success story. But… the future just might be closer than you think in terms of the possibilities of robotics and automation? Behold… I share with you 10Beauty! The world’s first and only autonomous manicure machine. I might not be the target market for this robotics company, but my wife and two daughters are definitely in the strike zone and when I told them about it… their immediate response was "WHEN AND WHERE CAN I GET ONE!" 10Beauty is not going to be available for consumers to purchase (at least not initially), as they are taking a B2B approach in terms of their go-to-market strategy. For me, it’s less about the tasks that this robot is performing and more about a team that is thinking bigger and ultimately delivering on something that is incredibly difficult. 10Beauty has raised $38M in funding from Shine Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Imaginary Ventures, and Red Sea Ventures. And, they already have serious traction as they already sold out of their entire first run of machines which means they have over $13M in annual manicure subscription revenue ahead. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A deep dive into the challenges and the complexity of building a robotics startup. * Alex’s background story and how Alex met his co-founder, Justin Effron, the first day of school at the University of Pennsylvania. * The story of their first company, Alice, a task management platform for the hospitality industry that was acquired by Expedia, plus how they connected with their technical co-founder, Dmitry Koltunov. * The definition of a good partnership between co-founders and how they divvy up roles & responsibilities. * All the details on 10Beauty… from meeting Chris Casey (one of the original Roomba engineers) to building out the initial prototype to raising funding to the company’s business model and projected launch. * And so much more.

Episode #324 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Sameer Gulati, Founder & CEO of Ordway. Sameer loves SaaS and it’s for good reason… it is expected that the size of the SaaS market may hit almost $1 trillion by 2030! Yes, the tech industry is having some challenges, but did you know that… even though the evolution to SaaS started 20 something years ago… the adoption of SaaS still only sits at a 36% adoption rate versus traditional on-premise software. There is still such a massive opportunity for growth. Ordway is a billing and revenue automation platform that is specifically designed for today’s innovative, technology-centric business models. With Ordway you can automate billing, revenue recognition, and investor KPIs for recurring revenue from subscriptions or usage-based pricing models. The company is venture backed by leading VC firms like CRV, Clocktower Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and others. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A deep conversation around the current state of the SaaS industry and the evolution of pricing models. * Sameer’s background story and how he joined one of the first SaaS companies called Intacct which exited for a billion dollars. * Working as part of the early stage team at Workday, Zuora, Zynga, GrubBeat, and Spree Commerce. * How he leveraged his experience in finance and billing software to disrupt the industry and build Ordway, plus all the details on the company. * Why it is a bad idea to over-capitalize your startup. * The importance of being a mission critical application versus a nice-to-have solution. * And so much more.

Episode 323 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Elizabeth Lawler, Founder & CEO of AppMap. A question that I ask every guest at the end of every interview is - “What do you like to do for fun outside of work?” Oftentimes, I get common answers like - hiking, traveling, etc. But, Elizabeth’s answer has by far been the best one yet and it is proof that she is not only a great entrepreneur but also a maker at heart. Elizabeth is building with her husband & Co-Founder, Kevin, and their kids, a two seater RV-12 airplane. They previously built a car together when the kids were 6 & 8 years old, so this is their next challenge. So cool! AppMap is a leading developer of code visualization and runtime code review analysis technology. Its platform is redefining how developers improve their software and has become one of the fastest-growing tools for software visualization and runtime analysis. The company has raised $10 million in funding. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A deep conversation around community building and the importance of authenticity. * Elizabeth’s background story and how she learned entrepreneurship from her parents. * Getting her career started in public health research and epidemiology after receiving her PhD. * The background story of Conjur, which was bootstrapped initially and raised a minimal amount of capital and had a successful exit to CyberArk. * Preferred versus common stock and how that affects the payout post-acquisition. * All the details about AppMap and how they built traction and got developers to engage with their product. * How Elizabeth is supporting women entrepreneurs and the role that Andy Palmer is playing, as well. * And so much more.

Episode 322 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ryan Shank, CEO & Founder of ShareWillow. Finding the right idea for building a company that will scale is hard. It’s even harder when you get influenced by all the news about the trends in tech like AI, Web 3, crypto, or whatever is the latest trend. Yet, there are still some very large industries that are still operating with very old tech and are still ripe for disruption. Case in point is Ryan’s latest company, ShareWillow, which is a modern platform that enables businesses to design, launch, and manage profit-sharing plans. It makes me think of Gusto, which modernized payroll or Stripe, that modernized payments with tech that just worked. As Ryan was looking under the hood of this industry, it became very obvious that there was a massive opportunity. Instead of stock options, lots of companies issue profit-sharing plans and come to find out businesses that have a profit-sharing plan tend to be more profitable over the long term and get more output from employees. Yet, there really isn’t an easy way for creating a profit-sharing plan on a modern tech stack that does everything from getting started to ongoing management of the plan. Bingo! Here is a massive market opportunity to build a category defining company which is in desperate need of a modern tech stack and user experience. Investors have noticed too as the company has raised $6.5m from top-tier software investors in what ended up being an over-subscribed round. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * The importance of learning sales as an entrepreneur. * Ryan’s background story growing up in Ocean City, Maryland and his early entrepreneurial roots. * A rant / business idea about how the experience of college tours is broken. * The story of mHelpDesk and its acquisition by HomeAdvisor. * The details and lessons learned about his next startup, PhoneWagon, which was a TechStars company that went on to get acquired by CallRail. * The state of the state with ShareWillow * Things to think about during the acquisition process, including how an escrow factors in. * And so much more.

Episode #321 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Gabi Steele, Co-Founder & CEO at Preql. Building a company is hard and there is no “one right way” to go about getting started, especially when you are creating a new category. But, when I talk to founders like Gabi, there was always an emphasis on generating revenue from the start. It’s a smart move, as you can obviously control your own destiny through any customer work that might seem more like a services play. But, in addition to being able to pay the bills by bootstrapping, you are also getting a tremendous amount of market research and exposure to the real world problems that your customers are trying to solve. It was this approach that allowed Gabi and her Co-Founder, Leah Weiss, the ability to spin off and launch Preql as a stand alone product company and raise capital to grow it. Preql is a no-code data transformation solution built for business users. Their technology’s core solutions help companies with data access, metric management, and data governance. The company has raised $7M from Bessemer Venture Partners. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A deep dive into the world of data visualization and the career path into this field. * Gabi background story including how her career got started at The Washington Post. * Her experience at WeWork, where she met her co-founder, and the creation of the company’s Data Cult program… plus, how the portrayal in the WeCrashed series may have been under-dramatized. * The founding of Raw Haus, a community connecting emerging talent across the art, design, technology, and entrepreneurial spaces. * The background story of Preql and how they built revenue from its consultancy and spun out a product. * The challenges of building a new category in tech and selling it to a business user. * Hiring the company’s first sales leader. * Lessons learned while building a product company. * And so much more.

Mike Duda, Managing Partner at Bullish, offers insightful perspectives on the direct-to-consumer revolution, highlighting brands like Peloton and Warby Parker. He discusses the innovative approach of Function of Beauty and the qualities that define successful entrepreneurs. Duda shares the thrill and challenges of creating Super Bowl commercials, and emphasizes how consumer validation shapes investment strategies. With a nod to the power of networking, he explores the resilience of consumer spending in changing markets and the unique qualities of "chip on the shoulder" entrepreneurs.

Episode 319 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Peter Berg, Managing Partner at M12, Microsoft’s venture capital fund. I’ve had lots of investors as guests on the podcast, but I was excited to interview Peter because I’ve never interviewed an investor from a CVC or a Corporate Venture Capital fund. I’m not sure what the number is today, but according to a 2023 report about CVCs, it counts 1,100 active CVCs. Based on this scale, it is a very meaningful opportunity for entrepreneurs in terms of raising capital. Thus, Peter and I pretty much get right into the details towards the beginning of our conversation about the world of CVCs… from what they are, differentiators, strategic advantages of raising capital from a CVC, how to evaluate a CVC, and other topics. As previously stated, M12 is Microsoft’s VC fund. The firm invests in Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds of funding across different categories like Cloud Infrastructure, AI, Cybersecurity, Web 3 & Gaming, Vertical SaaS, and Developer Tools. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * How Peter landed a first name @peter handle on Twitter / X.com. * A walk through Peter’s career including his investment into Square and the creation of Visa Ventures which scaled to a global organization and went on to invest in Stripe, LoopPay (a Boston startup that was acquired by Samsung), and many other companies. * All the details on Peter’s area of focus at M12 and what he is targeting for investments. * M12 portfolio company examples like Inworld and Typeface. * His thoughts and opinions on the current state of the market for raising capital. * And so much more.