Sand Hill Road

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Garry Tan, co-founder of Initialized Capital about his journey as a content creator, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital.   00:00 Intro  02:02 Garry's Twitter game  06:00 Keeping up the content cascade  08:12 Getting started on YouTube  10:50 Paying it forward at scale  14:45 Respecting the audience  18:00 Content creation is like building a startup  21:13 Garry as a founder  25:14 Founder "what ifs"   28:26 Garry as a VC

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs about building a database unicorn backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Benchmark, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. After recording the episode, Cockroach Labs raised $160m on a $2bn valuation in January 2021, reflecting the explosive growth and product innovation of 2020.   00:00​ Intro  00:56 Cockroach Labs elevator pitch  04:29 Getting the band together  09:24​ Exit to Square and paddling back into the startup surf  11:44​ First version of CockroachDB  14:17​ Open core model  20:43​ Relicensing Cockroach DB  25:39​ Open source as top of the funnel tool   30:25 Series A from Benchmark and Sequoia Capital  35:15 Series A extension from Index  37:01 Late state startup life at Series D   39:44 CockroachDB technology  48:11 Synchronous replication and CockroachDB  53:50 CAP Theorem and CockroachDB   58:10 CockroachDB and Kubernetes   1:01:10 Spencer's workout regime

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sean Henry, co-founder and CEO of STORD about building a digital warehouse and distribution startup backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Susa Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund from Atlanta, Georgia.   00:00​ Intro  01:11 Announcing the Series B led by Founders Fund   02:57 What solution does STORD offer?   04:27​ Sean Henry's entrepreneurial journey from childhood  13:00​ STORD business model  19:50​ Solving the two-sided marketplace problem  25:35​ Competitive landscape  28:55​ Software-enabled marketplace: Software as a wedge to get supply side  35:15 STORD pricing   38:50 STORD as a distributed logistics and storage systems  45:15 Acquisition of Cove Logistics in summer of 2020  48:31 Raising money from Silicon Valley as an Atlanta based startup  54:45 What's next for STORD

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic), Partner at Unusual Ventures about his growth journey at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and Wealthfront.   00:00​ Intro  00:37 Growth at Facebook  03:50​ Growth at Twitter  05:31​ Growth at Quora   09:25​ Growth at Wealthfront  12:11​ Unusual Ventures  16:25​ A balanced approach to growth  21:16 Shipping the org chart  24:29​ Running experiments  28:05​ Product development for innovation  31:40​ Wonderschool  35:22 Ride Report  38:22​ Finding out more about Andy

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner and Cameron Weibel are joined by Joey Parsons, founder of effx to talk about moving from the monolith to a microservices architecture.   00:00 Intro  03:05 From rockstar engineer to found  06:02 Building early social network PicRave   $07:30 Taking the plunge with wife 5 months pregnant  09:00 Founder focus as a young father  10:06 Transitioning from Airbnb to Kleiner Perkins  12:03 Daily life as an entrepreneur in residence  13:46 Defining microservices  14:53 Explaining microservices to a kid  16:28 Microservices vs. structured programming  19:55 Functionality of microservices  22:20 User microservice example   24:15 Starting out: monolith vs. microservices architecture  25:42 Microservices teams: UI, middleware, DBA specialists   28:38 Data layer of microservices  30:56 Microservices vs. monolith debate  34:36 Moving to a microservices architecture at Airbnb  37:59 Managing microservices at Airbnb  42:12 effx and Kubernetes  43:44 Go to market strategy at effx  46:07 Raising the $3.9m Seed round

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by Caroline Winnett, Executive Director at UC Berkeley's accelerator and incubator SkyDeck.    00:00 Intro  01:51 What is SkyDeck?  02:57 Demo days during Covid-19  03:35 Caroline's founder journey at NeuroFocus  05:24 Joining SkyDeck and setting up the SkyDeck Fund  07:23 Berkeley SkyDeck carry split  08:35 Berkeley SkyDeck LP base  09:50 SkyDeck vs. YC, 500 Startups, Techstars  12:11 Cohort profile and eligibility requirements  14:37 Accelerator milestones  15:22 Breakout success stories  16:26 Berkeley within Silicon Valley ecosystem  18:33 Future of SkyDeck

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Richard Mabey, co-founder of London-based legaltech startup Juro, backed by Union Square Ventures.   00:00 Intro  02:01 Magic circle years at Freshfields  03:35 Catching the entrepreneurial bug  05:15 Transitioning to legaltech via LegalZoom  07:26 Meeting co-founder Pavel Kovalevich  08:43 The Juro Minimum Viable Product (MVP)  09:54 Getting the first customer  13:15 Finding customer pains and building the core product features  15:06 Core feature set: painkiller vs. vitamin  17:05 Early pricing  18:34 Selling Saas to corporate lawyers  19:59 Tech stack of Juro  21:11 Seedcamp accelerator  22:40 $750k Seed Round led by Point Nine Capital  24:24 $2m Seed extension round  25:15 $5m Series A led by Union Square Ventures  26:15 Getting a warm intro at USV  27:01 Deploying the Series A  28:12 Navigating through the Corona pandemic

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 

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Moisey Uretzky,  co-founder of Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure unicorn built for developers and headquartered in New York City. In this episode we journal the founder journey from getting into Techstars to scaling the company with venture debt to a recent unicorn valuation.  00:00 Setting the scene  03:55 The Uretzky family  05:22 Roots of intellectual curiosity  07:15 Mathematics and first principles thinking  09:18 Startups before Digital Ocean  14:16 Finding co-founders on Craigslist  19:16 Digital Ocean MVP  23:12 First major Product Iteration: 5$ SSD Plan  29:36 Getting into Techstars  32:35 Raising the Seed from IA Ventures  37:19 Raising the Series A from a16z  42:28 Using venture debt to scale up  47:19 Scaling up Digital Ocean  54:22 Competition with big tech cloud providers  59:00 Running Digital Ocean during the Corona pandemic

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Brendan Wales, general partner at e.ventures on investing in data infrastructure unicorn Segment at the Seed and passing on TikTok (then Musical.ly) at the Series A. 0:00 Sand Hill Road Intro  2:10 First job running a Golf shop while at college  3:20 First job out of college in 2009 and entrepreneurial ambitions  4:29 'I gotta get to the Valley' finding Zozi's on Crunchbase  6:06 Joining e.ventures in 2012  7:52 History and roots of e.ventures   9:53 e.ventures current fund and global footprint  11:10 Investing in Segment.io at the Seed along with Kleiner Perkins  15:08 Consumer-tech perspective on Segment  16:02 Passing on Musical.ly/TikTok  17:30 Warm introductions vs. metric-based discovery (digital exhaust)  20:30 Metrics requested from Musical.ly/TikTok founding team / key consumer social metrics  22:17 Machiavellian founder perspective on Musical.ly/TikTok consumer retention  24:35 Ex-post reflections why they passed on Musical.ly/TikTok  26:35 Comparison to the recent Clubhouse a16z-led Series A  28:50 Venture capital returns over the lifetime of a fund  31:10 Pattern matching for early markups  32:58 This Week's Seed Companies  35:24 EVA Growth Index / X-Factors  37:37  Nacelle: headless CMS for Shopify stores, backed by Index and Accomplice  39:05  Most recent investment: Airvet, $14m Series A led by Canvas Ventures