Village Global Podcast

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.

Erik is joined by Anda Gansca (@agansca), co-founder and CEO of Knotch, an independent content intelligence platform for marketers.Anda starts out by explaining the shift in the marketing world to content, the story of Knotch, and why the company has been in a great position to take advantage of that trend. She says that display advertising, including banner ads, outdoor advertising and television ads, are “basically ineffective.”She takes us behind the curtain of marketers and advertisers at major brands to tell us how they think about where to spend their money. Knotch moved from Silicon Valley to New York City to be closer to their customers and Anda explains how she made that decision and why. She talks about why blockchain in advertising doesn’t really make sense and why she thinks escaping the echo chamber in Silicon Valley helped them focus on what really matters.Anda walks us through a market map of marketing tech and talks about why “ad tech” as a sector has been written off by many VCs. She also explains what their ultimate vision is for Knotch — to give back control of ad data to consumers and talks a bit about what she expects when it comes to GDPR-style regulation in other areas of the world.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 his co-host for this episode, Brianne Kimmel (@briannekimmel), investor, advisor and Village Global network leader. They talk to Christoph Janz (@chrija), investor at Point Nine Capital, a Berlin-based early stage venture capital firm focused on SaaS and digital marketplaces. Christoph lays out their investing thesis at Point Nine and talks about why they are geography-agnostic when it comes to potential deals. He explains at which stage they like to invest and some of the difficulties in evaluating early-stage SaaS companies. The three delve into some of the more successful SaaS companies from the past few years and use them as case studies to talk about how to evaluate an early-stage product, team and sales strategy. He discusses why they invested in Zendesk and Typeform, and why he sees product and branding as very important at an early stage. They discuss some of the merits of SaaS companies that are working in specific verticals and in the enterprise, as well as why being a “SaaS company” is no longer as significant a distinction as it once was. They also talk about when a startup should be focusing on sales and whether it’s even possible to hire the VP of sales that a founder dreams of in a small SaaS company.Articles Mentioned In This EpisodeJason Lemkin: The 48 Types of VP, Sales: https://www.saastr.com/the-48-types-of-vp-sales-make-deadly-sure-you-hire-the-right-one/Christoph Janz: There’s More Than One Path To $100 Million: https://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2018/12/theres-more-than-one-path-to-100-million.htmlThanks 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 Brad Hargreaves (@bhargreaves), founder and CEO of Common and co-founder of General Assembly, and Zach Aarons (@ZacharyAarons), co-founder and partner at MetaProp, a proptech venture fund.The guests explain what exactly proptech is and why it’s an exciting space for entrepreneurs. They go over some of the sub-segments within proptech, some of the existing unicorns in the space, as well as the incumbents that new entrepreneurs might encounter and how they themselves getting involved in the crossover of tech and real estate. Brad explains how his time at General Assembly informed Common and how he “navigated the idea maze.” He points out that there are a lot of adults living with non-family roommates but that virtually none of the existing structures in real estate and property management are set up for that arrangement.They discuss the differences between residential and commercial real estate and why “they’re almost like separate industries." WeWork has even had trouble trying to add residential to their existing commercial business. They also talk about some of their requests for startups in the space and the unique structure of new investment vehicles, given that they are investing in both operating companies and real estate assets and receive returns on each of those investments in the same fund.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.

Bradley Tusk (@bradleytusk) joins Erik on this episode to talk about the intersection of politics and tech. He’s founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures and author of The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups From Death By Politics. He’s also a philanthropist, political strategist, and hosts his own podcast, Firewall.Bradley has worked with Michael Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer, Uber, and many others. He shares the lessons he’s learned throughout his experience both working in politics and helping guide startups through the political and legislative processes. He explains the psyche of politicians and says that the actions of virtually every one is guided by whether it increases or decreases the chances of winning their next election. He talks about his work with Uber and how grassroots campaigns on behalf of startups with fervid customers can sway politicians to change existing regulations that tend to benefit entrenched interests. He discusses some of the best policies that legislators can implement to benefit startups and innovation and talks specifically about some of the areas that involve the overlap of governance and tech, including charter cities, co-living, and income-share agreements.He also talks what Silicon Valley misunderstands about politics, whether a Silicon Valley candidate could run in 2020, and how he is trying to increase voter participation through his foundation’s work on mobile and blockchain-powered voting. ____Quotable Lines From This Episode“Every single politician I’ve ever worked with, with the exception of Mike Bloomberg, is solely motivated by the next election, and if you can do something that makes them think they’re going to lose the next election, or that you can do something to make them win the next election, they’re going to do what you want — and if you can’t do that it doesn’t matter what you want.”“It’s especially hard with crypto and probably harder than any other sector — how do you regulate this thing that by design is meant to avoid federal currencies, avoid sovereignty, avoid nationality and is a reaction against all that?”“The vast, vast majority of politicians, to be blunt, are desperately insecure, often self-loathing people who can’t live without the validation of holding office and running for office and they will do anything to fill that hole in their psyche.”“In my experience, the vast majority of journalists are just curious people who are trying to figure out in any given situation. Where people get into trouble is in trying to spin them.”“People in the Valley tend to not know what they don’t know, meaning that because they are very intelligent and because they have had success in some areas in life, they assume that that is applicable to everything they can do.”“Politics is its totally own world, totally own world language, totally own set of norms, and just because you were a really good engineer or you figured out how to market a product that you could figure out politics too, that’s an incredibly dangerous assumption.”“The naiveté of people in the Valley in thinking that just because they attend political fundraisers and write checks that they have some level of understanding or influence over the process. They have none.”“There’s no one in the Valley at the moment who could plausibly be a presidential candidate in 2020.”“You look at issues in this country like guns or immigration or healthcare or climate change, most polls show that 70% of people agree on the basic tenets of what to do about this stuff, and then there’s about 15% on either side that disagree but unfortunately right now the 15% on either side are the people that vote in primaries, so they really call the shots.”____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.

Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) joins Erik to talk about his new book The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture. Scott is Chief Product Officer at Adobe and was CEO and co-founder of Behance. He’s also an early stage investor.Scott discusses his experience founding, scaling and selling Behance, then working as a venture capitalist, early stage investor and as CPO at Adobe. He talks about what he means by “the messy middle” and talks about the three stages of “navigating the volatility” of the messy middle.He points out that the mission of the company is not going to keep you engaged eternally and that you need to “hack the reward system” instead. Erik asks how to know whether to quit or keep going and what some of the lessons he learned as an early stage investor are. Scott talks about the crucial importance of honesty and candor among team members and the self-awareness required to decide what one’s next career move should be.He explains why running a company can be like driving a van with all your team members, but with the windows blacked out — requiring you as leader to keep your team up to date on what is going on and narrate to them where you are as a company. He also talks about the hidden benefits of friction in a company, why when starting a company you should focus on empathy for users rather than passion for solving a problem, and the techniques he uses to remains productive.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 sits down with Donnie Dinch (@donnie), Michael Galpert (@msg) and Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg), to follow up on the projects they were working on a year ago when they all got together at the end of 2017 to talk about consumer social on one of our first podcast episodes. They discuss what’s changed since then and what they see ahead in the consumer social landscape. They discuss some of the unexpected twists and turns their ventures took over the course of 2018 and some of their lessons learned from the year. They talk about some of the trends that emerged during 2018 and which ones they expect to come in the year ahead. Greg points out that the big players in the space are distracted and a lot of people have given up on the space, so opportunity is ripe. He says “there have never been fewer people working on consumer social than in 2019.”They talk about where they think the next unicorn in consumer social will come from and what some of the most promising existing companies are, as well as some of the ideas they’d like to see built. They go deep on a number of trends, including audio as a medium of communication, the crossover of games and consumer social, and social fitness. The four of them also talk about why Apple is in such a good position to build something great in social (but that they never will) and play “long-short,” where Erik names a company in the space and they say whether they’re long or short and why.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 talks to longtime friend and co-author of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, Liz Fosslien (@fosslien / fosslien.com). She talks about the importance of “feeling your feelings” and not running away from them, especially at work. Liz gives some practical tips on how to give good feedback, how to approach negotiating, and how to be a good boss.She talks about the difference between diversity, inclusion and belonging, why it’s so important to strive to make people feel like they belong and how to do so (tip: learn how to pronounce *everyone’s* name, not just the easy ones). Erik asks how her own experience led her to these insights and how she’s able to find humor in the workplace. She also explains why not being so passionate about your job is actually a good thing, why you should stop feeling bad about feeling bad, and how to acknowledge your anxiety and move on.Quotable Lines From This EpisodeThis traditional notion that you should be able to check your feelings at the door when you enter the office is ridiculous, and given that we are going to have emotions at work, it’s time we learned to deal with them.Envy’s actually a really useful emotion — it really reveals what we value. If you’re jealous of someone, don’t perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to make that go away, try and really figure out what that person has that’s making you jealous.As a manager, it’s almost as important to manage your emotions as it is to manage other people.___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.

On this episode Erik is joined by Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), founder of Wordpress and Automattic, as well as Andreas Klinger (@andreasklinger), VP of Engineering at CoinList and a founding team member of Product Hunt (along with Erik).At Automattic, Matt works with over 850 employees working remotely in 70-plus countries. The three of them discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a distributed team, and why it is the future for knowledge work. Matt explains his quote that “every company over 100 people is already distributed, they just pretend they’re not.”They talk about some of the best protocols for managing distributed workers and why being able to pull from worldwide talent is such a big advantage. They mention that Invision, a large and successful company with distributed workers, requires everyone to work on Eastern Time. Matt points out that they don’t use email at Automattic and instead use their own custom tools. They also talk about some of the modifications to current collaboration tools that they’d like to see. The three of them also talk about why many of the “issues” surrounding remote work are not actually issues unique to remote work but are part of knowledge work in general. They also discuss some of the challenges of remote work, including ensuring clear communication, gauging the quality of potential hires without the usual local signals, and dealing with distractions.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.