Village Global Podcast

Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart and Tonio DeSorrento, CEO of Vemo Education, discuss the history and future of income-sharing agreements. They explore how income-sharing agreements align incentives and quantify value, the potential for ISAs in different industries like healthcare and sports, and the challenges and regulatory uncertainty facing startups in this space.

Erik’s co-host for this episode is Ali Hamed (@AliBHamed) of CoVenture. They are interviewing Tonio DeSorrento (@TonioDeSo), CEO and co-founder of Vemo Education.They talk about the history of income-sharing agreements, including that Milton Friedman had once proposed the idea and that Yale University had experimented with them at one point.Tonio talks about starting Vemo and how he has brought income-sharing agreements to more and more educational institutions. They discuss the fact that 88% of students entering college are doing so to improve their early career path but that most institutions would say that providing a career path is not the primary value they provide. Tonio explains that Vemo has helped students find the right institution for them by publishing outcomes from the income-sharing agreements. He says that this transparency of outcomes has in and of itself changed how colleges look at the service they provide.They move on to talking about the future of higher education in general, why there doesn’t yet exist a Kickstarter for education (and what some of the pitfalls of that model would be) and in which other industries something similar to income-share (or “value-share”) agreements might make sense. Tonio also talks about how Vemo plans to scale and where they go from here.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 Mike Merrill (@kmikeym), the world’s first and only publicly traded person, along with Mike’s friend, co-founder and shareholder, Marcus Estes (@marcusestes), co-founder and CEO of Chroma.We hear the backstory on how Mike became the world’s first “publicly traded person” and hear a funny story about an early 2000s arts group turned their group into a corporation in order to thwart an attempt by an e-commerce company to take over their domain name.They run through the ins and outs of what life is like for Mike and how having a live market where anyone can buy or sell “shares” in him distinguishes this from other experiments. He says that he originally set up the arrangement to give people input into his side projects but over time their decision-making power has expanded to his personal life. He explains how this has influenced how he thinks about the idea of owning “shares” in other people more generally.Mike talks about the element of satire present in the project and how it has poked fun at the idea in society that worth in general is tied to financial factors. He talks about how this project has revealed warped incentives for his investors.They describe the regulatory environment in America, how it has evolved to make things like this possible, and the unique way that Mike has structured this to make it legal. They talk about whether it would make sense for more people to do this, about income-share agreements more broadly and how Marcus and Chroma might get involved. 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.

In this special live episode of Venture Stories, Erik Torenberg interviews two special guests about the present and future of crypto: Naval Ravikant (@naval), CEO and co-founder of AngelList, and Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), CTO of Coinbase. They start with an overview of the history of organizing societies and the role of centralized decision-makers from kings to democracies and why decentralization — where no one in particular is in charge but everybody follows the rules — has so much potential. They talk about how this could be disruptive to a wide swath of society today, including areas like money, electricity, social networks, storage, and more. They explain why decentralization will "fulfill the original promise of the internet."Erik asks how each of them got into the space after having had success in other areas. It’s pointed out that it’s very rare that something comes along that is “technologically interesting, socially revolutionary, and that can also make you very rich.” They move on to a discussion of the history of money, the three key functions that money provides (store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange) and how good a job current cryptocurrencies are doing at fulfilling those three functions. They also point out that VCs typically didn’t buy Ether, but it has provided a 700X return in just a few years, which is better than VCs returned on Google or Facebook.They move on to what they see in the future for crypto and how it will change society at large. They paint a picture of a world where there might be virtual “instant jobs” available on-demand in a feed akin to the feeds in current social networks and where the “99%” will be investors, as opposed to the present where only 1% of individuals are investors. There might also exist in the future “instant companies” that can be created as easily as someone can create an account on a social network today and that programmable smart contracts might spread opportunity far and wide without the need for armies of lawyers and judges.They explain what it means when they say that blockchain will create “an open financial system” and what they mean when they say it will be to the current financial system what Linux was to Windows. They also talk about what kinds of facts would change their mind about blockchain, the role of identity and anonymity in a crypto world, and the concept of a “personal burn rate.”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.

Patri Friedman joins Erik on this episode of Venture Stories. He founded The Seasteading Institute in 2008 with funding from Peter Thiel. His father is political theorist David Friedman and his grandfather is Nobel Laureate in economics, Milton Friedman.Over the course of their nearly two-hour conversation they cover a lot of ground, including crypto, physical (and virtual) governance, the current state of politics, Silicon Valley, and much more.Patri starts by explaining why he is both skeptical and optimistic about crypto — and why that position is not incompatible. He says that the tech boom around 2000 had “a lot of junk” but a lot of innovation came out of it at the same time.He talks about starting The Seasteading Institute, the impetus behind the project and the successes and challenges they have had. He enumerates the issues with the structures of current countries, governments, and legal systems around the world and why by the logic of the market, one would expect countries and legal systems not to be very innovative. With experiments underway involving special economic zones incorporating novel legal systems, that might change.Patri explains what he means by the phrase “markets eating the world” and points out that platforms and sharing economy companies form half of of all current unicorns. He talks about how in the same fashion as software has been “eating the world,” he expects the same to happen with markets. He points out that the determination of resource allocation involves economics and trade-offs, whether done by a central figure or markets. He explains some of the novel uses of markets in unexpected areas and the two discuss some of the drawbacks and challenges with markets in delicate areas such as healthcare or education.He talks about some of the flaws present in democracy, including the idea that it provides citizens the illusion of control without providing any actual control and contrasts the potential distorted incentives of a central trusted authority figure versus a more decentralized market-driven approach of distributing resources. Patri says that he views the problem of figuring out the best kind of governance as an engineering problem requiring experimentation rather than a philosophical problem requiring deep thought and persuasion. They also talk about why he says in areas as varied as food, education and computing, our “desires are being hijacked” by profit-driven entities and why in the future it would be wise to return to more historically-proven strategies in those areas. He also talks about why he expects the pace of changes in the world to continue to increase, why it will take even more skill for someone to eke out a basic living, the past and present culture of Silicon Valley, and what he expects the world will look like when his kids are grown up.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 is a special episode of Venture Stories recorded in front of a live audience in San Francisco, featuring Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen), professor of economics at George Mason University and Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt), former executive chairman and CEO at Google/Alphabet.Cowen talks to Schmidt about a wide range of topics, from Schmidt’s college years, to his time as an intern at Bell Labs, to working for Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems, to the early days of Google, to today.Cowen asks about Schmidt’s formative intellectual experiences as a young person and we hear the story of Schmidt studying as an architect prior to entering into a computer science program. After graduation, Schmidt interned at both Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. He recounts stories of his time at the research labs and discusses to what extent the lab model does or doesn’t work today. Cowen astutely points out that Schmidt is one of the few people around whose career spans several significant eras in the history of computing.They move on to talking about the early days at Google, where it turns out that Schmidt was hired to run the company after a skiing trip with Larry and Sergey, whose first concern in hiring “adult supervision” was to find someone they enjoyed hanging out with. Schmidt says that he initially assumed that search wasn't very important and that Google’s ads didn’t work. He reveals that during his first year he was so terrified that their "ruse would unravel" that he made anyone who wanted to spend money come to him personally on Fridays at 10am to justify the expense.Cowen asks about Schmidt’s insights on hiring and managing talent. Schmidt explains that in the beginning Larry and Sergey primarily hired their classmates and friends, but over time Google’s hiring became highly structured. He tells the story of interviewing a single candidate 16 times and explains the logic of why initially they were so focused on school and GPA, rather than industry experience.Cowen and Schmidt also talk about in which areas even Schmidt himself has been surprised at the extent of technological progress and where he'd like to see more innovation. They discuss social media and why Schmidt says that it amplifies human weaknesses rather than strengths. The two of them also talk about transforming cities, including Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto and the Bay Area's housing crisis.They of course also have a round of rapid-fire “overrated vs. underrated,” covering subjects like Antarctica, Picasso, effective altruism, Yellowstone and North Korea. Cowen also asks his signature question about the Eric Schmidt "production function" and how Schmidt is able to be so 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 and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Jacob Evan Smith interviews Erik Torenberg, co-founder of Village Global and former founder of rapt.fm. They delve into the lessons learned from startup failures and the importance of perseverance in entrepreneurship. Erik discusses the societal misconceptions around lifestyle businesses and emphasizes the need to separate personal identity from company identity. He advocates for tackling challenges that seem easy to yourself but hard to others, and discusses the value of giving in networking without expecting returns. This conversation is rich with insights for aspiring entrepreneurs.

On this episode of Health Stories, Erik is joined by James Hardiman (@hardimanjames) and Scott Barclay (@SABarclay) of Data Collective, a deep tech and AI venture fund.Scott and James are live in-studio with Erik to discuss a number of interesting topics around the health space. Scott and James explain what they mean when they say innovation in the last 50 years was driven by the semiconductor but the next 50 years will be driven by biotechnology. The three of them discuss the state of the healthcare in the US and how entrepreneurs and investors can “take a crowbar to the health system.” They discuss the misaligned incentives in the US healthcare system and how payers might be incentivized to pay for preventative care. They mention that the US pays about 18% of GDP for healthcare while still having poorer health outcomes than countries in Northern Europe that pay about 9% of GDP. They explain why they are predicting a contraction in the number of hospitals in the US and why there are double to triple the number of hospitals per capita in the US than there are in a country like Denmark. They also talk about a number of interesting developments in health tech these days, including a company that can verify the integrity of a supply chain by analyzing the microbiome of the resultant products and a company that is using computer vision to detect falls.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 of Venture Stories, Erik and his co-host Tony Sheng are joined by Jacob Arluck (@JacobArluck) of Tezos and Peter Czaban of Polkadot and the Web3 Foundation. The four of them get into the details of the mechanisms of governance, including voting, councils, and other methods of governance.They discuss hard forks and why they are not ideal but sometimes necessary. The group also discusses common misconceptions around on-chain governance and their requests for products or startups in the space. They explain what it means to get to the decentralized ideal without re-centralizing when it comes to governance as well as why the best case scenario for crypto users is that they are not thinking about governance at all as it recedes into the background.Co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) leads product at Decentraland. He also publishes analyses on the business and strategy of crypto at tonysheng.com and is one of Village’s Network Leaders.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 James Currier (@JamesCurrier) and Pete Flint (@peteflint), of NFX. NFX is a great venture capital firm founded on the concept of network effects. Erik, James and Pete cover a bunch of fascinating topics in the interview.Pete and James explain why network effects make such good businesses — so good in fact, that they don’t have to even be run particularly well to still have great revenue, as James found out when he sold to a big incumbent.Erik asks whether it’s possible to add network effects to an existing business or whether they have to be baked into the business model from the beginning. He also runs through a variety of verticals like healthcare, real estate, education, travel and others, asking his guests to talk about where the opportunities are to build businesses that leverage network effects in those spaces. James explains what he means by the phrase “the best entrepreneurs are going to be the best historians” and they talk about why “timing is everything” and why a startup like Airbnb can be founded based on an economic impetus rather than a technological catalyst.They also talk about why network effects are so important within Silicon Valley and why NFX believes that the best startups will come from inside the Valley, despite efforts to spread the “secret sauce” to other geographies. James says that there might be a lot of failed startups outside of the Valley.They also talk about distributed teams and whether it’s possible to build a really big business with a distributed team, as well as the often overlooked importance of the name of a company.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.