Village Global Podcast

Amitt Mahajan (@amittm), co-founder and CTO of Rare Bits and investor at Presence Capital, joins Erik and his guest co-host Tony Sheng of Decentraland for this episode.They dive into all things non-fungible tokens, explaining how they work, why they matter, and why they have so much potential. They explain why you you really only have tenuous ownership of the virtual goods that you purchase online and how the company that sold it to you can unilaterally take it back. Amitt and Tony get you to imagine the potential use cases if you could take virtual goods purchased in one game and take them to another game, re-sell them, or tokenize them. The three carry on to discuss the issues around the discussion of crypto more generally and how to get a broader audience to use crypto by ending the fixation on the technology itself and instead focusing on the value to the end-user. They talk about how to solve the supply and distribution problems when it comes to digital goods and discuss how marketing of crypto projects might evolve in the future.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. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

In this episode, Erik talks to Ryan King (@frothcity), co-founder of FOAM protocol, and Jehan Tremback (@jtremback), founder of Althea Mesh. They explain how the blockchain makes it possible to know for certain where exactly somebody is at a given time and how that enables new technologies. For example, in the area of smart contracts, if someone bought a train ticket and the train is late, they can prove where they are to request a refund. Ryan has been working at FOAM protocol to make things like this a reality. Jehan’s work at Althea Mesh allows individuals to create their own decentralized access to the internet, which is also newly enabled by the blockchain. He explains how he hopes to create a platform in the spirit of Airbnb to enable people to become suppliers of internet to others.Ryan and Jehan discuss how their companies are complimentary to each other and how their respective technologies might work together in the future. They also cover the positive impacts of decentralization, the effects of incumbents, and what they would like to see happen in the space in the future.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. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

With Erik for this episode are:- Aaron Batalion (@abatalion), formerly partner at Lightspeed and founder of LivingSocial - Vinny Lingham (@VinnyLingham), CEO of Civic and GP at Multicoin Capital and Newtown Partners- David King (@dksf), angel investor and crypto curatorThey have a wide-ranging and lively discussion about a number of topics around the state of crypto in 2018 and make some bold predictions for the future. The three cover the geopolitics of cryptocurrency, talk about how digital currency interacts with governments around the world, and the impact of large platforms like Facebook on cryptocurrency.They debate the merits of various cryptocurrencies and predict which might be able to achieve scale first. They also talk about privacycoins, stablecoins, and the hurdles that each of those forms face. The trio also cover the recent wave of ICOs and speculate on how many of those companies will still be viable years from now.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. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined by Josh Stein, CEO of Harbor, Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), finance professor at the University of Oregon, and Parker Thompson (@pt), seed-stage investor, partner at AngelList and token skeptic. The guests give an overview of all things tokenized securities. Josh tells us why he’s so enthusiastic about the rise of the blockchain and recounts the origin story of Harbor. They talk about why it can be so complex to manage compliance with securities rules and regulations that vary around the world and how the blockchain can solve a big part of that problem.They discuss why liquidity is so important when it comes to any type of security and how the blockchain can turn illiquid assets into liquid ones. For example, in the future, you might be able to own part of a sports team or part of a famous Monet if the owner decides to tokenize those assets.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.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. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik and guest co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland interview managing partners of Multicoin Capital Tushar Jain (@TusharJain_) and Kyle Samani (@KyleSamani). They explain why many people are underestimating the potential impact of blockchain on the web and on the world in general. In their words, “tokenizing shares of Apple stock and putting it on the blockchain will be akin to PDF’ing a newspaper and putting it online in 1995 — and thinking this is how the internet will change news as an industry.”They discuss a number of other topics within the crypto universe and cover some of the more interesting recent developments in the crypto world. Tushar and Kyle also break down their recent blog post about the Web3 Stack and discuss the obstacles that crypto and the blockchain are facing and how they can be overcome.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. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined by Tim Swift and Ariel Poler on this episode of the podcast. Tim Swift is founder and CEO of Roam Robotics and Ariel Poler (@ariel) is an angel investor.They discuss how the human body could be engineered for the better and discuss a number of ways to do that, including exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces and nootropics. They fill us in on who the founders and companies are who are currently working on those difficult problems. Erik asks what those companies promise to do and what obstacles they are facing. Ethics is an important topic when it comes to bioengineering and the trio discuss some of the more important ethical considerations around these issues and how society’s view of what is ethical or not has evolved over time as new inventions have come about.They also discuss some of the unique challenges when it comes to building a business in an area where it might take ten years for one’s work to come to fruition. They talk about the type of investor who is interested in the space, plans to invest for the long-term and is willing to be patient to see a return.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/podcast or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

This special live episode was recorded at the Atrium offices in San Francisco on June 20 2018. Village Global co-founder Erik Torenberg hosted a fireside chat with Daniel Kan, co-founder and COO of Cruise Automation and Qasar Younis, former COO of YCombinator.They discussed all things fundraising, providing an inside look into the world of VC funding and exposing some of the subtler points of fundraising for seed and Series A rounds. They discuss topics like dealing with VCs, refining your pitch and the importance of metrics in a Series A round. They also talked about prepping for meetings with VCs, what motivates VCs, how to efficiently backchannel via your network and transitioning from a seed round to a Series A round.They finished with an enlightening Q&A session, taking questions from the live audience at Atrium.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/podcast or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Simon de la Rouviere (@simondlr), crypto developer and thought leader, and Trent McConaghy (@trentmc0), founder of Ocean Protocol, join Erik for an enlightening discussion of crypto.They explain the vast societal transformation that will be brought by blockchain, sometimes in ways that are hard to imagine today. They tell us why we are just at the beginning of a new revolution and how it compares to the rise of the web in the 90s.They promise that “things are going to get weird.” For example, the future your kids inhabit might be one where they earn money as “meme traders” and where cars are not only self-driving but self-owning as well. They also explain why in the future “if it’s not on the blockchain, it didn’t happen” and why it might become very difficult for us to discern what reality in fact actually is.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/podcast or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Robin Hanson, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, explains how prediction markets work and their wide variety of applications. They discuss the barriers to widespread adoption, the potential pitfalls, and the benefits of decision-making based on prediction markets. The chapter descriptions cover topics such as utilizing prediction markets for decision making, prediction markets in healthcare and politics, popularizing prediction markets and their impact on political discussions, addressing sabotage in forecasting institutions, and the challenges of implementing radical honesty.

Joining Erik for this interview are Joey Krug (@joeykrug) of Augur and Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland. Erik and Tony interview Joey about the process of building Augur, his new startup that launched on July 9 2018. Joey explains what he envisions for Augur, why it’s “the future of forecasting” and how the process of building it has unfolded over the past two years. He talks about the wide array of possible uses for prediction markets and why he thinks markets in general are the biggest opportunity in crypto. Joey also explains some common misconceptions about crypto and why he thinks we are not yet in a bubble.He explains how open source blockchain technology is like NASA giving out the code to control the space shuttle and allowing anyone to write commands for it, and why security and privacy are so important in cryptocurrency. They also have a round of underrated vs. overhyped.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/podcast or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.