LA Venture

The hippies were right. From music festivals, to veganism, to eastern philosophy, and now psychedelics.   In this fascinating episode, Greg Kubin tells us about the growing psychedelic movement that is gaining momentum as we start to understand more about how the brain works. Greg's fund, PsyMed is a $25M fund investing in psychedelic medicine and mental health technologies.

Should we be pouring massive amounts of time and money into web3 or is it just technology looking for a use case?  Pitbull Ventures founder Brad Zions is also the producer of Kissing Jessica Stein and the co-founder of Lemonade restaurants.  He tells us why movies and restaurants are bad investments and why, in his opinion, web3 is even worse.  Pitbull is a generalist seed/preseed fund that targets 50+ portfolio companies per fund.  

Will Bumpus from Concrete Rose joins us today.  Concrete Rose has grown quickly and is now leading rounds with $1-2M checks to support a virtuous cycle of wealth and opportunity for underrepresented communities of color.   Will tells us about his own focus on sustainability and where that came from in his life. He also shares why he and his partners may (hopefully) be part of a growing trend of VCs pledging a percent of their carry (50%!) to give back to nonprofits.

Marcy Venture Partners has grown from $30M to $900M AUM, now leading Series A and Series B rounds.   Charlie Hanna tells us how he, Jay-Z, Jay Brown and Larry Marcus work together at Marcy to evaluate and champion the brands of the future.  He points out that celebrities like Jay-Z and Rihanna didn't make their billions from their music, but from their ability to build brands.

Megan Holston-Alexander leads a16z's Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF). CLF connects the world’s greatest cultural leaders with the best new technology companies and advances young African Americans into tech.    Megan tells us about the importance of getting Black capital onto cap tables, Black talent into tech and building generational wealth. She shares how a16z has grown CLF and its influential network, how startups and cultural leaders collaborate, and her own journey into venture.

B Capital has rapidly grown to over $6B AUM and has just announced its first early-stage fund, the $250M Ascent Fund run by a superstar team that includes Eduardo Saverin, Gabe Greenbaum, Karen Page, Karan Mohla, and Howard Morgan. Raj says B Capital was not an overnight success but was built steadily on the conviction that there needed to be a firm that could be best in class on value-add and also global from the outset.

What does it mean to be more authentic online and will it lead to a nicer Internet?    How will future social networks make it easier to establish an online identity, find community and enable community ownership?   Faraz Fatemi, partner at Lightspeed, brings his perspective on consumer psychology to today's episode of LA Venture.   

Climate is eating the world.   Shomik Dutta says that climate, and specifically the need to decarbonize every major industry will "eat the world" in the same way that Marc Andreessen famously said that software would eat the world in 2011.   Shomik argues that the TAM in climate is multiples of the TAM in software today.  The immensity of the need is one of the motivations of the work that he is doing now at Overture.

Another great example of top Silicon Valley talent moving to LA!   Kyle Lui was a partner at multi-billion dollar DCM until he left to join Ben Ling at Bling Capital.  He shares thoughts on how a small fund can still build best in class playbooks and processes to support founders.  

Paige Craig shares his amazing story of sneaking into Iraq dressed as a CNN reporter, how he built a private military from scratch inside Baghdad and then how he parlayed that exit into an incredible investing career that includes Wish, Scale, Gusto, AngelList and many others.