"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Mentioned in the podcast: SchoolClosures.org Ben Horowitz on Layoffs HelpwithCOVID.com From our individual to our community-wide responsibilities, I chat with best-selling author, founder, and investor Eric Ries about what might be, what could be, and perhaps what should be going through each of our minds right now. I keep hearing people say this moment is surreal. I look down empty streets...
Mar 19, 2020•2 hr 36 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Mentioned in the podcast: https://twitter.com/shl/status/1229844208959152128 Today we've got another deep-dive episode and this one is on monetizing your creativity. It's with Sahil Lavingia, who is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, who's been on the podcast before. A great Below the Line episode with him going into detail in reflecting on his entrepreneurial path. Today goes a little bit mor...
Mar 09, 2020•2 hr 48 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Companies mentioned: Nori - https://nori.com/ Indigo - https://www.indigoag.com/ Joro - https://joro.tech/ LiveGreen - https://livegreen.io/ Sinai Technologies - https://www.sinaitechnologies.com/ Project Wren - https://projectwren.com/ Prometheus Fuels - https://www.sciencemag.org/ Solugen - https://www.solugentech.com/ C16 Bio - https://www.c16bio.com/ Heart Aerospace - https://heartaeros...
Mar 02, 2020•2 hr 39 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author This plog (podcast+blog post mashup) is called “Routines & How to Avoid Stupidity”. A little over a year ago, a really smart investor, Adam Robinson, was speaking with Shane Parrish on his podcast. He defined stupidity really clearly for me. I hadn't heard it defined this way before, thought it was really great, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. What makes us miss crucial infor...
Feb 25, 2020•10 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today, I’m going to be trying out something that I’ve been starting on an app called TalkShow where I record short daily plogs. It’s basically an audio post instead of a written blog. This will be anywhere from 5 to 6 minutes each but they’ll be on different topics. The first topic is about podcasting. It seems like a fitting way to kick-off this type of experiment and it’s expounding on th...
Feb 19, 2020•9 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with Ben Witte. He's the founder and CEO of Recess. You might not have heard of Ben or Recess but it is perhaps the fastest-growing beverage in the country over the last year. You can go to www.takearecess.com to check out their product which is amazingly well done from the brand to the taste of the drinks. I often have a weird quirky drink that I share with a guest on ea...
Feb 04, 2020•1 hr 16 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today’s episode is with Vlad Magdalin, co-founder and CEO of Webflow. We sat down and chatted about his insane story of failure that spanned for 15 years before getting it right, his early experiences that shaped him as a founder, and what he thinks about that he rarely gets a chance to talk about. Webflow raised $75 million from investors a few months ago and was one of the largest Series ...
Jan 29, 2020•2 hr 26 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today on the program, we've got Sarah Tavel. She’s a venture capitalist at the legendary and enigmatic venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital, which is one of the most renowned firms in the world. We covered a whole range of topics like, how her partners work together, how she chooses an investment, examples of what made her pass and then later invest in a company that she now loves, and t...
Jan 14, 2020•2 hr 8 min
Today's episode is another deep-dive (meaning it's a little bit different than the regularly scheduled episodes), and it is with a founder, Diego. This was recorded as we met and chatted about his startup. About three minutes into meeting / him pitching me his company, I said, “Hey, hold on, hold on. Could we record this? Could we actually sit down and record this as a podcast episode and just release it to the world so that people could see what it was like to have an angel investor coffee.” Ma...
Jan 13, 2020•1 hr 9 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with Kamal Ravikant, the author of the best selling books “ Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It ”, “ Live Your Truth ”, and “ Rebirth ”. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It ”, a self -published book that became a phenomenon (selling over 400,000 copies world-wide, all without a publisher), is now reprinted, updated, and re-released this month. If you haven't...
Jan 07, 2020•1 hr 12 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is another deep dive with Dr. Peter Carnochan, who the coach to some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. He spent 25+ years as a psychologist and psychoanalyst before becoming an executive coach. I love getting Peter's key takeaways from the psychological side of things from recent guests. So today we covered Dr. Andrew Weil’s episode and the topic of death, Paul Austin ...
Dec 17, 2019•2 hr 32 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Serena Dugan is a founder, an artist, and a delight to chat with — This episode is a founder story that isn't like many founder stories. She didn't set out to create a world-renowned brand. She actually just walked into a small local shop, and before she knew it, she was meeting with the shop-owner the next day... and from there, they were planning world dominance. They ended up creating Se...
Dec 10, 2019•2 hr 53 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with an anonymous guest. We're going to call him John Doe. John and I talked about the “below the line” version of the story of being a police officer. We also covered what has changed in San Francisco, some for the better, some for the worse, over the years. There's no doubt there are many good things that have happened in San Francisco in the last few decades. There are...
Nov 27, 2019•2 hr 50 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today we have another deep dive and this one is a really hot topic in the startup ecosystem and yet so little is written, discussed, researched, and talked about when it comes to how to build marketplace businesses. So after spending seven years at Airbnb, Lenny Rachitsky has been advising marketplaces around the world in 2019. He took that experience, and said his own experience at Airbnb ...
Nov 20, 2019•2 hr
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with Matt Mullenweg. The founder of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress (which powers an unbelievable 34% of the internet as of recording!). We talk about the beginning of WordPress, about getting started as a founder and organizer, about attachment theory, about what’s in his backpack at all times, his hardest days running WordPress and Automattic, and a whole lo...
Nov 19, 2019•2 hr 55 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author When it comes to productivity, there aren’t many things we do today that we did 200 years ago. We send emails instead of post mail, drive cars instead of horse-drawn carriages, and look up things on our phones instead of traveling miles to the nearest library. However, when it comes to our morning routine, 80 percent of the world consumes caffeine each day to wake them up and give them a bo...
Nov 12, 2019•18 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil has been called “the medical Nostradamus” for his foresight into what’s on the healthcare horizon. He is a world-renowned pioneer in the medical and healthcare space — leading Western healthcare toward an integrative, healing and prevention-based approach to health, decades before it was en vogue. His resume could go on for another few pages, and it still wouldn’t do it just...
Nov 04, 2019•2 hr 56 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode was actually a live recording with a good friend, a former investor and a continual mentor to me (and dozens of entrepreneurs who I also love and respect). His name is Justin Kan, and he was episode number one for Below The Line. Justin is a founder and investor based in San Francisco. He has been building startups for close to 15 years now, and he's seen pretty much everyth...
Oct 30, 2019•1 hr 21 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder, and NYTimes bestselling author A R I Z O N A, the band not the state, is one of the top 100 streamed bands in the world in the last two years, with over a billion streams of their music since their first album in 2017. Today they will talk about what the journey has been like as artists and musicians. We covered many topics like where they were 10 years ago, the path they took to form their band and what it's...
Oct 15, 2019•2 hr 33 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with Paul Austin, a social entrepreneur in a very unique space, the psychedelic space. He has been featured in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, and others for his pioneering work regarding microdosing, and his work with a psilocybin retreat center that he co-founded in the Netherlands last year, called Synthesis. I want to point out up front that I...
Oct 08, 2019•2 hr 50 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Welcome back to another episode of Below The Line. Today's episode is with Leah Busque Solivan who is the founder of TaskRabbit and now a venture capitalist in Fuel Capital. We talk about the low points of her eight year journey as a founder, running her own startup TaskRabbit, sparing no details of the reality of that role, and how she transitioned to becoming a venture capitalist after han...
Sep 30, 2019•2 hr 35 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is one of my favorite conversations I’ve had. It’s with Nir Eyal, who is a founder, an investor, and a best-selling author. His first book “Hooked” came out about five years ago and pretty much every tech founder became familiar with his insights in that book. But his latest book “Indistractible”, which came out this month, talks about how to control your attention and intent...
Sep 23, 2019•1 hr 18 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with Ann Miura-Ko a co-founder of Floodgate, one of the original seed stage investment funds here in Silicon Valley. Floodgate has been an investor in Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Cruise, Okta, TaskRabbit, and a bunch of amazing world-changing companies. We talked about a number of things with Ann including her path to becoming a VC, what she thinks about today as an early stage...
Sep 19, 2019•2 hr 41 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with Christopher Lochhead, a marketing legend and best selling author of “Play Bigger” and “Niche Down”. He is also the podcast host of “Follow Your Different” and “Lochhead on Marketing”. This episode is a really great insight into different views that his books cover from “category design” to the things that legendary companies have done to become dominant in their respe...
Sep 16, 2019•2 hr 15 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is with the founder and lead pastor of Reality SF, a church where my wife and I attend in San Francisco. Unlike the many founders that I've invited here on Below The Line, what Dave Lomas started was a church, not a company, right in the heart of San Francisco. The Bay Area is known for the tech scene... not necessarily the church scene. But his story is not unlike many...
Sep 10, 2019•2 hr 13 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today we chat with Sam Parr, founder of “The Hustle” one of the fastest growing media companies here in America. They have talented writers who create amazing newsletters and compelling content on the most important business news and trends. It covers some really interesting topics outside of what you would normally find in a business-focused media company. I met Sam in 2015 when I was invit...
Aug 29, 2019•2 hr 37 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Calvin “Cal” Fussman is a world famous interviewer, a New York Times bestselling author, public speaker, and the creator of the podcast called Big Questions. He was the Writer-at-Large of Esquire, interviewing everyone from Richard Branson to Muhammad Ali to Serena Williams to Robert De Niro. He's on a mission to increase our collective curiosity and inspire storytelling everywhere he goes. ...
Aug 27, 2019•2 hr 9 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author “Attach, you lose, detach, you gain”. That simple phrase and along with the phrase “Yoga for the intellect” on a little pamphlet in a hotel in Southern California caught my eye. I was there with my wife for a weekend and got lured into a session with a guy that looked like one of those folks at the airports dressed in orange monk garb, with few possessions, and maybe some wooden beads. That'...
Aug 22, 2019•2 hr 16 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is another deep dive experiment into a topic that every founder dreads thinking about — fundraising. Similar to what we recently did regarding a deep dive on remote work, this episode goes deep (like super deep) into the weeds on fundraising strategies, tactics, and mistakes to avoid. This is always one of the most asked about topics, and I thought it'd be fun to do an episod...
Aug 20, 2019•2 hr 25 min
"The most exciting new podcast in the startup world.” - Eric Ries, Founder and NYTimes bestselling author Today's episode is a deep dive — Something we're trying out where we go deep into certain topics that people have been asking about, and today is with an expert (maybe the expert?) on the subject of remote work (work that is distributed by many team-members in different geographical locations instead of all under one roof). This is a trend that seems to be here to stay... so we might as well...
Aug 13, 2019•2 hr
