Village Global Podcast

Erik is joined on this episode by Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46), investor at Union Square Ventures, Nikhil Basu Trivedi (@nbt), VC at Shasta Ventures, and Jonathan Yoni Regev (@jyonni), CEO and co-founder of The Farmer’s Dog.They talk about where we are in the evolution of the consumer packaged goods space. Rebecca explains why this is a unique moment where consumers are eager to try new things from new brands. They discuss the three types of defensibility in a CPG startup and Nikhil points out that it’s difficult to figure out whether a business model can really be defensible at such an early stage. Jonathan explains what they’re trying to do a The Farmer’s Dog and Rebecca and Nikhil talk about why they love the pets space for new investments, including some of the unique forces at play in the pet landscape.They also talk about communities that have sprung up around certain CPG brands and how communities could be the future of both CPG and consumer social. They discuss the potential for another huge horizontal community like Snap or Instagram to emerge and what they would be looking for in “the next Instagram.”We apologize for the quality of Jonathan’s audio.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 Steve Schlafman (@schlaf), partner at Primary Venture Partners, and David Marcovitz, addiction psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University.They talk about the opportunities and challenges facing startups looking to tackle mental health and substance use disorder. They tell Erik what they would focus on if they were building a company in the space and some of the different models for treating addiction that could be amenable to a startup.The three of them move on to talking about some of the challenges in selling to employers, large health providers and state governments, and how those potential roadblocks affect their view of the best business model for startups in the space.They also talk about some of their personal experiences with these topics as well as the macro-level changes over the last several years around mental health and substance use disorder.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 Ryan Caldbeck (@ryan_caldbeck), co-founder and CEO of CircleUp.Ryan starts out by explaining how he got started in CPG and the mission of CircleUp. He talks about why some VCs don't realize that the market is worth paying attention to and some of their biases when evaluating CPG opportunities.He explains the data-driven approach that CircleUp uses to predict which companies will be most valuable and explains why a fund needs to have CPG as its only focus to succeed.Ryan also opens up about his personal experience as a founder dealing with mental health challenges and talks about why it’s so difficult for founders, employees and investors in the startup ecosystem to be vulnerable about what they're facing. He discusses what he thinks needs to happen for mental health to be addressed properly by the Valley.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.

Dick Costolo (@dickc), former CEO of Twitter, joins Erik and co-host Jayni Shah (@shahjayni), in this special live episode. Dick explains why is focusing on travel and tells some stories from a recent trip to Tanzania where he met with a hunter-gatherer tribe. He recounts what it was like trying to make it as a comic in Chicago alongside Steve Carrell and Tina Fey, and how the lessons he learned from improv apply to being a CEO.He discusses polarization on social media, how it might be ameliorated, and regales us with stories from his days at Twitter. He also talks about his theory of why digital fitness apps are not compatible with human nature, why you should use more exclamation marks in emails, and some of the most common mistakes that he sees the entrepreneurs he mentors making.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.

This episode features Ben Casnocha, Village Global co-founder and partner, in conversation with Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.Cal starts out by defining what digital minimalism is exactly. He talks about why he refrains from using social media and explains how the mechanics of social apps create something resembling an addiction. They discuss Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of time management as explained in Walden, and why you should “think of your phone like the closet in the Marie Kondo show.” Cal explains why a 30-day reset is necessary and how exactly to use that time to find clarity around what is most valuable to you.Cal talks about the kinds of offline activities that new digital minimalists start to engage in, his unique definition of solitude, and why solitude is so important.They also give a sneak peek of Cal’s next book, on digital minimalism in the workplace.Quotes From This Episode“Minimalism says if you really want to maximize your quality of life, find the things that are really valuable, focus on those, and miss out on the things — not that are bad — but that are good but not that good.”“The cost of the clutter is going to overwhelm the benefits that each of these things causing the clutter actually creates.”“You can think about your phone like the closet in the Marie Kondo show.”“Never before in human history could we get rid of every single moment of solitude in the day.”“Clean out the proverbial closet and rebuild your digital life from scratch, but just do it much more intentionally.”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.

We were thrilled to host a Masterclass roundtable session with our founders and John Donahoe (@Donahoe_John), CEO of ServiceNow. Prior to ServiceNow, John was CEO of eBay for more than seven years. He is known as one of the most inspirational leaders in Silicon Valley and is a highly sought-after mentor to CEOs including Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Drew Houston at Dropbox, and Ben Silbermann at Pinterest. We’re honored to have him among our small group of world-class executives and collaborators whose time and expertise help power our network of founders at Village Global.When we asked John to deliver a Masterclass to 12 diverse and determined founders in our portfolio, John gladly invited us all to the ServiceNow HQ where he riffed on topics of leadership, culture building, talent development, and how to grow as a CEO in the tech industry.He shared advice on when to hire ahead, invest in and train, or replace personnel on your team and gave insight into his most common piece of advice on professional growth when advising CEOs. John also did an in-depth demonstration of how to let someone go with dignity and grace.Quotes From This Episode"When you talk about priorities at an aspirational level, they overlap a lot. People start realizing we're more similar than we're dissimilar." — John"Adversity never feels fun. I don't seek adversity. But I'm no longer scared of adversity. When it emerges, instead of trying to run from it, I now accept that it is a reality and I say, 'well, at least I'm going to learn and grow.'" — John"My experience has been that around any issue that involves change, you have roughly 20-25% of people who want to be part of it, no matter what the topic is, you have 25-30% of people who want to fight it, and you have the 50% of people in the middle saying 'which side is going to win?'" — John"[When someone is let go] The fear is humiliation usually. That's almost a bigger fear than actually leaving the company." — John"We're never as good or as bad as labels make us out to be." — John"I would say in general, for every 10 hours of business development conversations, 8 of them are a waste." — John"I do gratitude practice driving into work every morning. It's proven in brain science that your brain becomes more negative over time. But it's also been proven in brain science that you can counteract that." — John"The older I get, the more I've made friends with uncertainty. I don't avoid uncertainty. Uncertainty is as present to me today as it was before but I'm a little more comfortable with it today." — JohnThanks 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.

Eric Ries (@ericries) recently joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) in San Francisco to chat with some of the founders of our portfolio companies. Eric is a Village Global LP, friend of the firm, and author of The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.Over the nearly 75-minute session, Eric gave a masterclass in Lean Startup techniques, addressed questions from founders on some of the finer details of the framework, and shared what he has learned from his entrepreneurial journey in the early 2000s as well as more recently as founder of the Long Term Stock Exchange.Eric and Ben start out by talking about uncertainty as the core of a startup and the stark contrast between planning in an early-stage company versus in a large enterprise. Eric points out that those in the startup world take for granted certain startup best practices that “would get you fired in any big company.” He talks about the need for structure around entrepreneurial exploration, including making one’s hypotheses explicit and rigorously testing them.Eric discusses the difference between customer discovery and customer validation. He tells the story of a founder who interviewed prospective customers and was told that the product was great and that they would use it, but that when he asked those same customers to put their name to a letter recommending their bosses purchase the product, not one would do so.“The ideas that sound big are usually not the things that end up big.”They move on to a discussion of pivots and why Eric says that in virtually all cases, after having pivoted, founders say they wish they had done so sooner. He explains why every six weeks is an ideal cadence for a “pivot or persevere” meeting.MVP (minimum viable product) has become household term that was popularized by Eric. He discusses how founders can get over their fear of shipping something they perceive as incomplete and why he says the ideal MVP has “way fewer features than you think it needs.” He fields questions from Village founders on MVPs and talks about how small companies should think about their MVP when targeting large companies as customers.“Engineers always think that more features will solve any problem.”Eric explains what he means when he says that “entrepreneurship is a process of self-discovery” and why managing yourself and your own emotions as a founder can be equally as important as managing those of your team. He also addresses some of the criticisms of the Lean Startup methodology and common misunderstandings of the framework.“I truly believe that entrepreneurship is a process of self-discovery. I think that two people working on the exact same company, encountering the exact same evidence, and deciding on a pivot, would probably choose two different pivots if they had different values. You discover something about what you really care about.”Along the way, they discuss some of the seminal works in entrepreneurship, like The Four Steps To The Epiphany by Steve Blank and Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.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 Cyan Banister (@cyantist), partner at Founders Fund, and Niv Dror (@Nivo0o0), founder of Shrug Capital.They start out talking about why they’ve each been successful investors and what their respective “superpowers” are. Cyan tells a story about hearing Chris Sacca talk about his fund on a bus and meeting Travis Kalanick in a hot tub. Niv talks about the playbook for micro VCs and why after suggesting as a joke that he start his own fund, he actually ended up doing so. In contrast, Cyan explains why she would never start a fund of her own.Cyan talks about how the team at Founders Fund works together, how they hired Keith Rabois even though they thought they never would be able to, and what kind of talent they’re looking for. They move on to some of the most exciting spaces in consumer social, including AR/VR gaming, virtual celebrities, live, and new applications that are enabled with AirPods. They finish by talking about career development, why connecting people is such a valuable skill, and Cyan’s unique Twitter photo.Quotable Lines“I tend to be a listener, not a talker. I will sometimes be in a room or a party or an event and I hear what someone is working on and I say, hey, tell me more. With Chris Sacca’s fund, I heard him talking about it on a bus.” — Cyan“Most people just try to shoot down things. I just want to believe and see what can be. I want to say yes. Pessimism is not very good in this business.” — Niv“The thesis of the fund is things that I’m excited enough to talk about for an hour with a non-technical audience.” — Niv“We are incredibly lean and nimble. When we want to get something done, it’s a small office, and we just pull whoever needs to be in a meeting into a meeting and it just happens and then it’s done.” — Cyan“We probably wouldn’t hire Peter [Thiel] when he was just starting. He had to go do PayPal and all the other things that he did to become the Peter that he is today.” — CyanThanks 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.

Mark Goldenson (@goldenson), Village Global Network Leader, creator of VentureKit, and formerly founder and CEO of Breakthrough, joins Erik to talk about his requests for startups in the mental health space and in digital health more broadly.Mark recounts his entrepreneurial journey so far, including his experience at Breakthrough, a mental health startup he created and ran that was later acquired. He talks about the four key problems in mental health and how connecting therapists and clients through the internet can solve those problems. He explains how they tackled the problem in a unique way at Breakthrough and explains some of the nuances of operating in the health market. He points out that health is not a product-driven market and that at Breakthrough, instead of running a technology company as they had intended, they were running (virtual) clinics.They talk about telehealth and what opportunities exist in digital health more broadly. He also lists some of his requests for startups, including the intriguing idea of a “Fitbit for mood.”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.

Jonathan Swanson (@swaaanson), co-founder and chairman of Thumbtack, and John Kobs (@johnkobs), co-founder of Apartment List join Erik to talk all about marketplaces.John and Jonathan talk about their lessons from running their respective companies about what makes a good marketplace, and how prospective founders can find opportunities in the space. They break down what it takes to get initial supply and demand, and the merits of two-sided marketplaces. They talk about some of the trends in real estate more broadly and the key limiting factors in marketplace businesses. They talk about their requests for startups in the space, where the opportunities are and what they would stay away from if they were a potential founder.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.