LA Venture

Loved talking with Kerry about how startups should think about their marketing org and how that has changed. Also fun to hear about Upfront's brand and the brand of the partners at Upfront.

Great talk with Zach White about managing Sinai Venture's $600M Fund II.   We talk about investing in Pinterest, buying secondary shares, and independent thinking in the venture business.

With their recently raised $500M, Westlake Village BioPartners is catalyzing the LA biotech ecosystem. Sean Harper, former Head of R&D at Amgen, tells us about his focus on therapeutics to improve human lives and starting Westlake Bio with Beth Seidenberg.

Great discussion about next gen robotics and next gen bioscience with Gil Demeter from Pontifax AgTech.  With over $465M in AUM, Pontifax is one of the largest food and agtech funds in the world.

Lux invests in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what is possible. Lux will write $10- 15M checks and they are not afraid to invest pre-product and sometimes pre-company.   Shahin has fascinating insight on automation, autonomous cars, AI and more.

When we started this podcast people asked if we'd run out of guests after a year of weekly episodes with LA VCs.  Not even close.   Hope you enjoy a few highlights from LA venture and hope we get to see more of each other in 2021!

Tracy shares insights on manufacturing, why exports matter, industry 4.0, and the state of diversity in venture today.

Scott has invested in Uber, Facebook, Slack, Square, Robinhood and others... there was probably more than 30 mins worth of stuff I could have learned. Before starting ACME, Scott was the co-founder of Sherpa Capital and before that he was head of Internet investment banking at Goldman Sachs.     And now proudly part of the LA venture community!

If you have any questions if debt can help your startup, feel free to give Dan Zinn a call. Dan's firm, Rivonia Road, provides a much more bespoke solution than traditional venture debt.   We also talk about how Dan built a billion dollar hedge fund and XPRS, a small business lender.

Nicole Quinn says "you can't be called Lightspeed and move slowly" and explains how they can get a term sheet done in 2-3 days. Lots of insights on building an enduring brand that are applicable whether you are in the consumer space, or building an insurance company.