Village Global Podcast

Blaine Hatab (@blainehatab), CEO of Distru, joins Erik to talk all about the cannabis space. He explains what he is doing at Distru, how he got into the business and why the cannabis space is ripe with opportunity. He talks about the changes that have occurred in the market over the past several years with legalization in various localities and why that has led to a challenge for companies trying to comply with varying and changing rules. He discusses the different types of companies that exist currently, including his assessment of which ones will succeed and which will face challenges.Blaine also talks about the wide variety of uses of the cannabis plant, including in industrial materials, and some of the potential changes to the market with more widespread legalization of recreational use.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.

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.

Ashu Garg (@ashugarg), partner at Foundation Capital, joins Erik for a primer on the marketing tech space. They talk about how Ashu got started in the space and Ashu discusses a blog post he wrote predicting that this decade will be the decade of the CMO. He says that marketing is key in the current business landscape, in the same way sales, finance and IT held that mantle in previous eras.He talks about some of the big trends in marketing tech over the last several years, which ones are in vogue right now and what waves he expects in the future. He also talks about his advice for founders in building a marketing tech company and which areas he would avoid.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 by Vincenzo Iozzo (@_snagg), Village Global network leader and director at CrowdStrike, as well as Jamie Butler (@jamierbutler), CTO at Endgame.James and Vincenzo talk about where opportunities are in the space and what their requests for startups are. Vincenzo says that he’d like to see cybersecurity risk securitized to create financial incentives for companies to insure their operations against cyberattacks.The two of them create a market map of the space and talk about the thesis they would have if they were running a fund in the space. They talk about where to avoid building and some of the nuances of the security market, including that there are rarely novel ideas, only great execution.They also talk about how cryptocurrencies and blockchain are spurring developments in the space and the the reversal that is happening with data becoming more important than the code that it runs on. 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.

Elaine Wherry (@elainewherry) joins Erik on this episode to give us the playbook for recruiting for your startup. Elaine was co-founder of Meebo and is now investing at Edelweiss VC (https://www.edelweiss.vc) alongside co-founder Lee Jacobs (https://www.leejacobs.co).Elaine explains her superpower — being able to build quantitative systems around qualitative characteristics. She talks about how to evaluate candidates with your team and the way she uses TaskRabbit workers to calibrate her team’s assessment of a candidate. Elaine discusses why work simulations are so important in hiring and breaks down how you create a good simulation. She explains why she asks behavioral questions exclusively in interviews. She tells founders that it's okay (and ideal) if they are spending more than half of their time recruiting. Elaine points out that an employee’s experience on the first day is the best predictor of the length of their tenure.She talks about the “recruiter honeypot” that she set up — a fake profile on LinkedIn of a Javascript programmer. She looked at how recruiters approached it in order to potentially hire those recruiters to her company.She also addresses some of the biggest misconceptions about recruiting and talks through how to deal with some of the thorniest aspects of managing people, including annual reviews, compensation, and having difficult conversations.Quotes From This Episode“The test of a work simulation is that any smart, well-intentioned person should fail that simulation.”“[When interviewing someone] within the first five minutes, you have a tendency to have a reaction. It’s easy to fall into first impressions, but it’s your job to challenge that first response.”“If people just want to get their review to find out whether they got their raise or their bonus, that isn’t going to be a great conversation, so my goal is to de-couple that.”“People always seem to care more about where they stand in the organization than they do about where they stand outside the organization.”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 by returning guest, Simon de la Rouviere (@simondlr), co-founder at Ujo and ConsenSys, and Achill Rudolph (@AchillRudolph), lead link and initiator at Convergent.They start with an introduction of what personal tokens are, how they work, and why they have the potential to empower people around the world. Achill explains how they are thinking about them at Convergent and how they’ve been used so far by creators. Erik asks why blockchain is necessary for an application like this and Achill explains how they’ve been able to replace a long and complicated process with a one-click issuance of a personal token.The three of them discuss the ideas and issues around trading personal tokens, whether derivatives and short-selling should be enabled, and what kinds of regulations should apply.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 and co-host Anuj Abrol (@nujabrol) interview Keith Rabois (@rabois), newly announced GP at Founders Fund. Keith starts out by talking about why he joined Founders Fund and the reason that the structure of VC means we don’t see more people moving from one fund to another. They talk about the future of venture and whether there will be more M&A in the space and where he sees things going in the next 10 years. Keith explains why being an effective VC is much more an art than a science.Erik asks about Keith’s goals at this point after all that he has already accomplished and why it’s thus far not been possible to scale one’s investing model beyond one’s self. Keith also has a well-known theory about breaking down businesses into equations and Erik asks whether one can do the same with careers as well. Keith recounts the story of working for Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel at PayPal and how he has learned to trust his instincts in the absence of specific quantitative metrics. He talks about why being vertically integrated is important for a startup, why getting the timing right is part of a founder’s job (and can’t be a founder’s excuse for failure), and why in his view founder quality trumps all other factors when evaluating a business.He also talks about some of his requests for startups, including an integrated fitness and nutrition company. They also talk about some of the places where he agrees or disagrees with prominent thinkers in tech and how Keith’s politics and contrarianism have evolved.Quotable Lines From This Episode"You want to solve your biggest risks first. Mediocre founders solve the easiest risks first. Take the three most risky things and conquer them. I always counsel a founder to address risks in order of difficulty not in order of ease.""To me when a founder says they didn’t get the timing right, that means they just didn’t do their job.""I focus all on the people and a lot less on the market, a lot less on the product and a hell of a lot less on the technology." 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 by Justin Kan (@justinkan), founder of Atrium, Twitch and others, as well as Anuj Abrol (@nujabrol), Justin’s Chief of Staff and Erik's co-host for this episode.Justin talks about the wisdom he’s gained over the past few years after selling Twitch and founding Atrium. He explains why it’s important to stay humble, not get too attached to any particular outcome for your startup and why he wishes that someone had told him ten years ago that no amount of accomplishment will create lasting happiness.They discuss Atrium and the services for startups space more broadly, including some ideas for “Atrium for X” startups. He explains how he came to the idea for Atrium and why he raised funds for the company when he could have bootstrapped it himself. They also cover the fundraising process more broadly and why Justin insists he isn’t that great of an investor.Justin also talks about his time as a “Snap star,” how Silicon Valley has changed, and what he’s learned from Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Michael Seibel and others. Quotable Lines From This Episode“I used to spend a lot of time thinking about, how I am going to be remembered and thought about and optimize the way people thought about me but I don’t care anymore. However you think of me today, as someone who's been an entrepreneur and had some success, maybe you think I’m really smart, it doesn't matter. In 10, 20, 50 years it will fade away and you probably won’t remember me at all. That’s okay, it’s just part of life.”“Startups in general are a great vehicle for your own personal growth and development, to learn new skills, to learn what it’s like to lead a big organization, to see if you can do it — if you deserve to at all — it’s not a foregone conclusion.”“You build up these castles in your mind about things that are going to bring satisfaction… none of those things will ever build any lasting long-term happiness. Even if you accomplish them and build a great reputation, it’s going to fade. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. I wish someone had told me that ten years ago.”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.

On this episode Erik is joined by Christina Cacioppo (@christinacaci) of Vanta, and Amjad Masad (@amasad) of Repl.it.They discuss the reasons why developers tools are for the most part “primitive” and the cause of the mess of different technologies and utilities that a developer needs to know how to use in order to create an app. They talk about the concept of “end user computing” and the progress that’s been made in allowing non-developers to do more and more sophisticated things that were previously restricted to developers.Amjad explains how the way developer tools work can be traced back to the early days of computing with punch cards and Christina talks about why there has been a lack of venture investment in dev tools, even as developers and CTOs have seen a huge rise in their status within large organizations. They talk about the idea that new businesses either involve bundling and unbundling and why although some companies moan about the fact that their product is being used by hobbyists, they are in fact a powerful group of users. They also talk about some of their requests for startups in the space, which areas they are most excited about, and whether everyone learning to code will be the future or not.Quotable Lines From This Episode:“There’s still this artifact coming from an era where computing time was more valuable than human time. We write code in a way that we appease the machine more than we appease the human and this is reflected in our tools and everything we do.” — Amjad“Software engineering has this weird attribute where people believe in leverage and changing the world and then they put up with just such bad tools for themselves.” — Christina“If you really think about it, our tools really suck. Being a software engineer is one of the highest leverage things you can do… yet we don’t really invest in the developer tools that much.” — Amjad“It’s mostly been hobbyists that have driven computing.” — Amjad“Look, should everyone have to learn what a static class is in different languages? I hope not. There are more interesting things to think about.” — Christina“Most of the good work that happens, happens in low-hype periods.” — AmjadThanks 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.

On this episode Erik talks to Andrew D’Souza (@andrewdsouza), founder and CEO of Clearbanc, and Ali Hamed (@AliBHamed), investor at CoVenture, recurring guest and fan favorite.Andrew breaks down how Clearbanc works, why now is a unique time to build a new model of funding, and how they are using quantitative metrics in a business that has typically relied heavily on qualitative factors. He says that he would like to see venture capital go back to funding technical risk, and that for a lot of companies raising equity, 50-80% of their equity is going to Facebook and Google (via ad buys).He explains how Clearbanc is able to plug in to a startup’s finances to model and keep track of their progress in real time. Ali says that he would like to see founders taking the right kind of capital for their company's needs and talks about some of the perverse incentives in venture. Andrew points out that Clearbanc wants and needs all of their companies to succeed, which isn’t always the case in venture.They talk about the moment that consumer goods are having and some of the insights Clearbanc has gleaned from amassing a ton of data via their investments in a ton of CPG companies. He says that because Clearbanc invests based on a company's metrics and not factors such as where the founder went to school or via introductions, they (without a mandate) have invested in 8X as many female founders as traditional VC. Finally, Andrew and Ali talk about how the funding landscape will evolve in the coming years, including what the big VC firms will do, what the aspirations for Clearbanc are, and whether tokens can be an effective form of financing.Quotable Lines From This Episode:"My perfect utopian future is: all of the money that’s in venture capital goes to solving truly hard problems. Instead of MBAs running spreadsheets trying to figure out CAC to LTV, they’re funding companies that are trying to cure cancer, develop flying cars, extend life, get us to the moon… Those are the outsized bets that equity is uniquely designed to fund." — Andrew"We have to get out of our heads the idea that the only types of capital in the world are seed, series A and series B rounds and start thinking about: what’s the type of capital that’s right for this situation?" — Ali"I would love to see venture capital go back to funding technical risk. I would hope that people go back and look at 2018 and 2019 and say I can’t believe that founders sold 50-80% of their companies before IPOs to pay for Facebook and Google ads. You’re basically selling 50-80% of your company to Facebook and Google." — Andrew"Venture capital branded itself really well, right? You have these really smart people who put together these fancy websites and basically said that if you raise from XYZ firm, you’re going to be successful. We just sort of glamorize the whole asset. It’s so fascinating that venture capital figured out a way to turn their capital into not a commodity. But it was this false promise. It’s caused a lot of people to take on a lot of capital that they otherwise wouldn’t have because of the social validation." — Ali"Imagine if in the public markets investors said, ‘you should give me shares in GM at a lower rate because I’m such a good investor.’ VCs are intuiting a sort of causation and saying ‘hey, because I invested in Uber, it turned out to be great, rather than saying, hey, I was able to get into Uber and it was great.’ The promise of value-add from VCs often doesn’t materialize and when it does, its something that you could probably get from independent advisors, and other people. It probably doesn’t warrant the cost of that equity." — AndrewThanks 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.