Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP

Winter Mead is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures, where he focuses on Sapphire's fund investments in the United States and internationally. Before joining Sapphire Ventures in 2014, he worked at Hall Capital Partners. Prior to Hall, Winter founded Mead and Mead, an international food distribution and logistics business, and also spent a number of years working for several early-stage technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eva Ho is a General Partner and co-founder of Fika Ventures, a new $40M seed fund based in LA. She's also an EIR of the City of Los Angeles and a board member of the California Community Foundation. She was previously a co-founder of Susa Ventures, and before that an operator and early employee at Factual and Applied Semantics, and a co-founder of Navigating Cancer.

Graham Pingree is a limited partner at Cendana Capital, where he works with Michael Kim and invests in micro-VC funds. We discuss Graham's background working both at startups as well as firms such as Horsley Bridge and Cambridge Associates, and backing and working with funds such as Forerunner, Founder Collective, and IA Ventures.

We talk with investor Hunter Walk, founding partner at Homebrew, about his experiences building product as one of the first hires at Second Life and then at YouTube after the Google acquisition. We also dig into what it took to get Homebrew off the ground in 2013 with his partner Satya Patel.

For over a decade, Lindel Eakman managed the private investment program for the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), one of the largest endowments in the world. After 13 years at UTIMCO, Lindel left and joined Foundry Group to lead investments in other early-stage VC funds through FG's new fund, Foundry Group Next . We talk about his work at UTIMCO, where he backed iconic firms like USV, Foundry Group, Spark Capital, and True Ventures, and his decision to move to Boulder to work with Foundry Group.

Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Nuzzel, is a busy man. Jonathan previously founded Friendster and Hotlinks, is an active angel in companies like AngelList and Docker, co-founded Founders Den in San Francisco, and is an LP in some great VC funds. We discuss Jonathan’s move to Silicon Valley in the late nineties to work for Netscape as an engineer, starting his first companies, and discovering the layer of capital and people behind the venture community.

Thomas Lenehan is Deputy CIO at Rockefeller University, helping to manage their $2B endowment. We discuss how managing an endowment compares to his previous LP roles and committing long-term to the private markets and venture, through good and bad cycles.

We’re very excited to have Brad Feld to help us kick off season two. In addition to co-founding Foundry Group, and Techstars, Brad also co-founded Mobius Venture Capital in 1996. So he’s as qualified as anyone in the world to discuss starting venture firms, and that’s exactly what we did in this episode. Brad has already spoken at length about starting companies and angel investing, so we dug into getting a first fund off the ground, building a firm that’s consistent with one’s belief system, and investing as a personal LP into dozens of funds including Lowercase, SoftTech, Techstars, USV, and now institutionalizing that endeavor with Foundry Next.

Evan Jaysane-Darr is a Partner at Invesco Private Capital, a public asset management company where he focuses primarily on investing in venture. We discuss what's different about investing in venture as a public company, his experience investing in private equity vs venture funds, and why emerging managers are still important even though Invesco is in great funds like USV, Foundry, Greycroft, and LHV.

Judith Elsea is a co-founder and Managing Director at Weathergage Capital. Judith and her Weathergage partners are investors in some of the most respected venture firms in the world. We discuss building out a venture practice at the Kauffman Foundation, where she was previously Chief Investment Officer, starting Weathergage Capital, what they look for in venture partnerships today, and Weathergage’s unique approach to backing managers, which is partially informed by an internal product they’ve built called “Weathervane.”