Village Global Podcast

Scott Page, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of The Model Thinker, discusses the power of cognitive diversity in fostering innovative solutions. He explains why a wise crowd often outperforms individual experts and emphasizes that mastery lies in knowing when to use the right mental model. Page also dives into the evolution of basketball strategies, revealing parallels to collective decision-making. Listeners will find insights on improving venture capital through diverse perspectives and predictive modeling, making this conversation a must-listen for those interested in complex systems.

Erik is joined by Deon Nicholas (@dojiboy9), founder of Forethought, and co-host for this episode, Village Global Network Leader Brianne Kimmel (@briannekimmel).They talk about…* How Forethought is “making everyone a genius at their job” through their artificial intelligence platform.* How Deon navigated the idea maze and came to the idea for Forethought.* Why customer support is a prime candidate for Forethought’s solution.* Why Deon says that they aim to “augment employees, not automate them.”* Lessons on sales, fundraising and recruiting.* What the future holds for Forethought.… and much more.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell was our audio engineer for this episode and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Matt Garratt (@mdgarratt), managing partner at Salesforce Ventures. They discuss:* Trends in enterprise software and enterprise investing, including voice, consumerization, and no-code.* How their thinking has evolved over time and where they’re looking to invest.* As a corporate VC fund, how to think about the potential for investing in companies that might come to disrupt the “parent” company.* How their fund is enabling innovation in the enterprise.* Why everyone seems to have “missed” Zoom.* How the corporate development and venture teams interact at Salesforce.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Bee Shapiro (@BeeShapiro), New York Times columnist and founder of Ellis Brooklyn, and Natalie Toren (@NatalieToren), creative consultant.They talk about:* The current landscape in the beauty sector, including the clout of the massive incumbents and some of the up-and-coming brands. * Whether successes like Kylie Jenner's line or Glossier can be replicated.* How fragrance is unique from other categories.* Where Bee would be investing if she was running a venture fund in the space.* What distribution deals with big companies look like and what the economics are.* Whether Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs could take on the space.… And much more.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Mike Duboe (@mduboe), investor at Greylock, Dan Hockenmaier (@danhockenmaier), of Basis One, and David Weinstein (@dw_stein), working on Special Projects at On Deck and TokenDaily.They talk about…* The history and different “eras” of growth as a standalone team.* Why there’s been a shift in mindset towards growth teams, how they will change in the next 5-10 years, and why relentless optimization has backfired for some companies.* Why you should think of user acquisition in terms of a loop rather than a funnel.* Why onboarding is the point that determines whether a user will be retained or not.* The fact that users acquired organically via word of mouth are much more likely to be retained than users that were acquired through paid channels.* Why investors should ask themselves, “if you took away any non-organic acquisition, are you still excited about the business?”* How to tell if a company’s growth is healthy and sustainable or not.* Stories from the guests’ time working at Tilt, Thumbtack and Stitch Fix.* The best structure for a growth team.* Common misconceptions about growth.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Dan Held (@danheld), co-founder of Interchange. He was an early advocate of Bitcoin in San Francisco and is an influential writer in the space. Dan and Erik cover the history of Bitcoin, discuss some of Dan’s most interesting blog posts, and talk about what the future might hold for crypto. Dan explains why Satoshi had a brilliant go-to-market strategy with Bitcoin. He talks about the reasons why various aspects of Bitcoin were set up the way they were, including the hard cap on the number of Bitcoin and why there is no set inflation rate.Dan explains why mining takes so much electricity, and says that the walls around fiat money that would normally take the form of a vault are instead built virtually using that energy. He contrasts proof of work and proof of stake systems and talks about the trends in Silicon Valley’s perception of the space over the last several years.They also talk about the future, including a discussion the Lightning network, whether micro-payments will take hold, and why there are so many projects with interesting ideas but without many users (and what might change that).Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Joey Krug (@joeykrug), founder of Augur and co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, joins Erik on this episode. A year ago Joey was on the podcast to talk about the launch of Augur, a prediction market platform. In this episode Joey follows up on that conversation to talk about what he’s learned in the last year and to talk about the state of crypto in 2019 more generally.They discuss the launch of Augur, how it has evolved over the last year and what’s next for the platform. Erik asks Joey what he’s changed his mind on in the past year and what his “requests for markets” are on Augur. They move on to discussing crypto more broadly, including staking-as-as-service, the state of crypto investing, what he’s excited about in the space, Ethereum, DAOs, and Keynesian versus Austrian economics.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly), Valley legend and founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, and returning fan favorite Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList.They start out talking about Tim’s piece in Quartz about the hazards of the view that scaling one’s company as fast as possible should be one's top priority above all else.He says that this approach is not for every entrepreneur and that it’s an artifact of the amount of money floating around today chasing returns. He has a biting critique of the companies that are going public without having ever been profitable or cash flow positive — but more importantly, without having a plan for getting to that point.Parker and Tim discuss the misalignment of incentives that can happen in venture capital, and some of the alternative models that are sprouting up to solve that problem. He gives his advice for what entrepreneurs should do when getting started and how they should approach raising money. They also discuss policy changes that could lead to longer-term thinking by investors, whether Tim foresees a “Silicon Valley meltdown,” as well as why inequality is such a pressing issue and how to solve it.We want to apologize for the audio quality of the second half of this episode. We ran into technical difficulties again during recording but are working on getting them sorted out for you. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.

Erik is joined by Jenny Rooke (@drjennyrooke), Managing Director at Genoa Ventures, and Jared Seehafer (@seehafer), Village Global Network Leader and CEO and co-founder of Enzyme. They start out by talking about how Jenny got to where she is today and her career journey thus far. She explains what makes the team at Genoa unique and why it’s such a competitive advantage to have a team that is able to look at the raw data that a company is putting out and understand whether it’s compelling or not.They define some commonly misused terms in life sciences and talk about how to differentiate between various areas of the space. Jenny mentions that part of being successful as a startup means choosing to stay focused and aggressively saying no to promising opportunities — and that Genoa follows the same advice.Erik asks what some of Jenny’s requests for startups in the space would be, what her advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is, and which emerging technologies in the space are over- or under-rated.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Sean Linehan (@seanlinehan), Village Global Network Leader, and former VP of product at Flexport.Sean explains how he found his way to Flexport, which he says was like “the TurboTax of customs brokerages.” He explains the trend of entrepreneurs building software companies that are not afraid to “get their hands dirty” in areas that involve a lot of people and logistics. He talks about his study of the history of different industries and why he says that today is analogous to the early industrial revolution. He says that there is a trend of “productizing professional services.”Erik asks which industries Sean would be most excited about if he was starting a venture capital fund together. Sean explains why he works as a product manager rather than a software engineer in the interest of maximizing his impact per unit of time and talks about why zero-sum thinking is pervasive in the world today but is in most cases, wrong.We apologize for the audio in this episode and the last couple episodes. We had technical difficulties the day of recording, but we’ve got them fixed now and have some great episodes coming up for you.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.