Village Global Podcast

On this episode of Venture Stories Erik is joined by Sean Byrnes (@sbyrnes) and Shastri Mahadeo (@ShastriMahadeo). Sean is CEO of Outlier, a company using AI to create better business intelligence, and previously founded Flurry Analytics. Shastri is co-founder and CEO of Union Crate, a demand-planning tool for consumer packaged goods companies.Sean shares an anecdote about how when he was in grad school for machine learning 20 years ago his classmates joked that what they were learning would never be relevant. He says that two things changed to make machine learning one of the hottest technologies of today: 1. the amount of data that companies have access to has exploded, and 2. the cost of computing has gone down dramatically. He also mentions that there have been no new machine learning techniques developed in the last 20 years and that the algorithms from his printed textbook from 20 years ago still encompass the breadth of techniques that are in use today. Shastri previously ran a consumer packaged goods company for five years before founding Union Crate. He and Sean say that any company in the space needs to start with a solid value proposition that goes beyond just “AI for X.” They talk about why some of the companies in the space have failed to create real value and why Shastri pitches “ROI, not AI.” They also talk about some of the opportunities in AI and their requests for startups in various verticals, including finance and insurance, healthcare, construction, and manufacturing. Sean talks about marketing being taken over by AI over the past few years while HR is still mostly human-driven.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 Jonathan Gheller (@jgheller), founder of OneFix. Jonathan is a former product manager at Facebook and aims to use that experience to create retentive, easy-to-use products that create lasting behavior change. OneFix helps people eat better through a team of individuals who provide personalized support.Jonathan talks about why preventable disease is such a big problem in the US today and the types of conditions like heart disease, stroke and diabetes that are entirely preventable, yet cause one in three deaths in the US. He explains why he decided to create a startup in the healthcare industry and why he chose nutrition as an area to focus on. He also talks about the healthcare industry more broadly, including the misalignment of incentives between the parties involved, and why the industry does very well at acute care but not preventive care. He runs through what a prospective founder should think about when deciding what to work on in the health space and some of his requests for startups in the space as well.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.

Joining Erik on this episode is Jarrod Dicker (@jarroddicker), who is CEO of Po.et. He has a background in journalism and tech and formerly worked at the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. Jarrod explains how he came to the idea for Po.et, why blockchain technology is important, and how it can augment journalism. He points out that if the protocol is successful, the company is likely to go out of business since the network will be self-managing. He talks about the idea of “proof of effort” and how it enables third party verification and smart contracts via the blockchain for journalists, photographers, and hopefully in the future all kinds of content creators.They talk about the news business more broadly, including how the big tech platforms have been encroaching on the businesses of news organizations and why Slate makes more money on 50,000 pageviews on its own site than it would make through 6 million pageviews via Apple News. Jarrod explains why he says that we are in the “Napster era” of the news business.Jarrod also talks about the future of the news business, and why journalists will become more like free agents. He says that readers and advertisers will have more direct contact with journalists outside of any given news organization, similar to the way that fans attend an artist’s concert not because of the artist's label, but for the artist specifically. This is in contrast to the prominence of the name of the news outlet in a journalist’s work.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 three guests, each with a personal connection to elder care:- Natalie Dillon (@ntdillon), investor at Maveron- Shawn Xu (@shawnxu), managing partner at Dorm Room Fund- Lisa Marrone (@marronelisa), VC at August CapitalThey start off by discussing Lisa's recent post about how we can better care for our elders and how to solve the often-occurring problem of loneliness in the elderly.Throughout the episode the guests mention a bunch of startups doing great things, such as preventing falls using technology, connect college students and elders, and even detecting Alzheimer's using artificial intelligence. They talk about the three main categories that they see in the space: digital therapeutics, virtual companionship and new models for residential care. Baby Boomers have different needs than those a decade or more older than them, and the four of them talk about how Boomers plan to age differently. They also point out how connected to technology Boomers are (60% of 65-69 year olds in the US have a smartphone).Erik asks what their requests for startups would be in the space as well as what some of the challenges are for companies looking to create a business in the area.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 of Venture Stories, Erik is joined by Lee Jacobs (@leejacobs), partner at Edelweiss Capital. He recently wrote a great post about breaking up with his co-founder at a previous company. Lee and Erik discuss the post, some of the thorny issues around co-founder relationships, and investing strategy more broadly.Lee tells the story of the startup he co-founded and how he came to realize that he and the company needed to part ways. He talks about what he did well in the situation, including getting third-party coaching, and what he would do differently next time. Lee’s former co-founder was one of his groomsmen at Lee’s wedding, so in his case things worked out for the best in the long-run.He talks about how to avoid blowing up your startup via a "co-founder breakup" and why open and honest communication is so important. They talk about having a “startup prenup” between the co-founders, how to pick a co-founder, and why these relationships are analogous to other types of non-work relationships.They also talk about investing more broadly, including how Lee and Erik have gotten into investing globally, how to choose founders to back, why as Lee says “it’s okay to be a generalist,” and why he is sector-agnostic when it comes to companies he backs.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.

This episode is part of a three-part series taking listeners behind the curtain to discuss the inner workings of venture capital. On this episode Erik is joined by Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList, and angel investor Dustin Dolginow (@dolginow).The trio discuss the past, present and future of scout programs. They start out by talking about Sequoia’s creation of the scout program nearly ten years ago and why it was considered a “loss leader” for the firm, meaning that it generated goodwill and created a network, but the return on the deals was not actually very good. The three of them discuss some of the potential pitfalls of the scout program, whether it can create good returns on its own, and the similarities and differences of Village’s Network Leader program to existing scout programs.Both Dustin and Parker have worked at AngelList, and the two discuss why AngelList’s model, which Parker calls a “1099 VC model.” They talk about how and when we might see a recreation of the consensus decision-making system that pervades the industry today and why that change is needed. They also talk about how someone seeking to get into venture or being a scout for a venture fund can do so.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.

This episode is part of a three-part series taking listeners behind the curtain to discuss the inner workings of venture capital. Erik is joined by co-host for this episode, Adam Corey (@frumpy), partner at Village Global, and Clint Korver (@ckorver), managing director at Ulu Ventures. They discuss Ulu’s approach to portfolio construction and how it is using data to figure out which companies to invest in. As you'll notice, Clint is a wealth of fascinating statistics about venture investing.Clint explains why venture investing is analogous to other industries like pharmaceuticals and oil and gas extraction that follow a power law distribution. He points out that 100 venture investments out of 4,000 total in a given year create nearly all the profit in the venture industry. Clint explains how, taking cues from other industries mentioned above, Ulu uses data to predict which companies will be worth investing in.He says that the two main tenets of their investing thesis at Ulu are: 1. Invest early, and 2. Have large portfolios. Clint runs through the rationale for these ideas and why they diverge from VC “conventional wisdom.” Erik and Adam discuss the approach that Village is taking and compare it to what Ulu and other VC firms are doing, in order to flesh out the differences in investing theses.Clint also talks about the differences in returns between folllow-on and early stage and why Ulu doesn’t have a rigid reserve fund size. The three of them also talk about why the approaches of some of the biggest and most successful firms these days don’t scale down to smaller funds.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.

This episode is part of a three-part series taking listeners behind the curtain to discuss the inner workings of venture capital. Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList, and Ash Fontana (@ashfontana), general partner at Zetta Ventures, join Erik on this episode.They start off by discussing why topics around VC and portfolio construction in particular are so controversial. Parker and Ash give a rundown of how they invest with their respective funds and what their theses are when it comes to venture investing. They address the perennial debate of how much money to allot to initial round investing versus reserves for follow-on investing. It gets pointed out that based on the data, new funds are as likely as existing funds to succeed, and they talk about whether there’s a universal answer to the question of how much money under management a VC would ideally like to have. The three of them talk about the possibility of scaling up a fund with operating partners and discuss research that shows that the more companies invested in, the better the returns. That trend continues to hold, in theory, no matter how big the fund gets. However, Parker brings up the "math versus reality dichotomy," and they talk about why in practice scaling up infinitely doesn’t work.Erik asks both of them how they would set up their fund if they had no constraints, and they talk about why "fund size is destiny" in venture. Ash and Parker explain why even though venture firms say that the founder is their customer, really the LPs are the actual customers. They also talk about why innovation is needed on the standard “2 and 20” model (2% management fees and 20% carry), discuss potential replacement models, and explain why Y Combinator has the best business model in venture, even though there are some pitfalls for entrepreneurs.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 of Venture Stories Erik is joined by Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList, and Parker Conrad (@parkerconrad), CEO of Rippling. In this episode they talk about how much value investors provide to founders, if any at all. They agree that the number one piece of value that an investor provides is as therapist for the founder. They get into the issues around mis-alignment of incentives between investors and founders and discuss some investor horror stories they’ve heard from founders that you typically won’t hear discussed out loud. Parker Conrad says that sometimes investors are value-destroyers.They discuss why investors need to market themselves as “founder-friendly” and why if someone needs to point out that they “add value” then they likely aren’t adding as much value as they’d like you to think. Parker and Parker talk about the amount of signalling in investing and why VCs do things as much for their LPs as for the founders. They agree that the impact of investors on your company is overrated and that a good investor has about the same effect as a good director-level hire. They also discuss the idea of a union for entrepreneurs, the effects of standardized deal terms and why the idea of a “Glassdoor for investors” hasn’t found traction yet.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.

Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) joins Erik on this episode. Noah is an economist and Bloomberg Opinion writer. The two have a wide-ranging discussion on a number of topics around tech, economics, politics, and more.Noah explains why concern over big Silicon Valley tech companies is perhaps overblown. They discuss cryptocurrency and why in Noah’s opinion the Austrian economists have it wrong. He also explains why he is not a fan of techno-libertarianism and runs through the gun as historical example of why technologists shouldn’t just build new tech to circumvent laws they don’t like.The two talk about why the government drives more innovation than it commonly gets credit for, what kinds of policies Noah would implement to reduce inequality, including why he would like to see an inheritance tax. Erik also asks about charter cities and Noah explains why they are a great idea in theory but that they will be a “hard sell.”Erik asks about a blog post of Noah’s from 2015 that seems quite prescient given the current moment, in which he describes a cycle of history involving globalization, financialization, economic decline, political polarization, leading to feuding between the right and the left. He talks about which stage he thinks we are in today and some of the historical parallels between the current moment and earlier eras in which war later broke out.Erik also asks what Noah would do if he could change anything about how education is delivered in America, why Noah says that UBI could be potentially destructive, and how his criticisms of macroeconomics have evolved.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.