Semil Shah (@semil), investor at Haystack and venture partner at Lightspeed, joins Lucas Bagno to discuss: - The trends Semil sees in the entrepreneurial landscape today: the ease of getting started as a founder, the fight for ownership among funds, and renewed attention to dilution from founders. - How he raised his most recent fund at Haystack and how he determined what size of fund to raise. - The lessons he’s learned about deploying funds. - What the downturn means for fund managers. - The s...
Mar 03, 2022•41 min
Michal Cieplinski is the Chief Business Officer at Pipe. He has also spent time as General Counsel and CCO at Fundbox as well as a Senior VP at Lending Club, among other roles. He describes himself as a lawyer who has never really been a lawyer - meaning that “no” is a rare answer for him to give his fast-moving colleagues. In this episode, we discussed the important role that a CBO plays at a high growth tech company. Michal shares tips on building legal teams, hiring speed for the rest of the ...
Mar 02, 2022•43 min
David Sneider (@davidlsneider), of Lit Protocol, and Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), partner at Collab+Currency, join Anne Dwane to discuss: - What Lit Protocol is, what it enables, and how it is being used today. - The vision for a different architecture of the internet. - How user-owned networks would work and their prospects for achieving scale. - How tokenization allows all stakeholders to capture more of the network effects of a project. - The biggest challenges present in Web3 and how they mig...
Feb 24, 2022•49 min
Olivia Chen was most recently Head of Product at Faire. She joined Faire as their first ops/business hire. By the time she left four years later, Faire had grown to over 750 employees and Olivia was managing a cross-functional team of more than 60 people. In this episode, we discussed how to build successful referral programs, how to grow a product team, how to navigate hyper-growth as an early-stage employee, and much more. Andrew Yu, Director of On Deck’s Product Management Fellowship, joined ...
Feb 24, 2022•52 min
Sarah Smith is currently a partner at Bain Capital Ventures after an early career of building elite HR teams for huge tech players, including Facebook and Quora, where she helped scale Quora from 40 to 160 people in 3 years. In this episode, we discussed hiring that first crucial people person, how to train first-time management, how to nail goal setting, and how to improve vesting schedules. --- Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, framewor...
Feb 17, 2022•55 min
Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi), founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) of Village Global to discuss: - Sheel’s reflections on raising a fund and the opportunities he sees in fintech today. - The importance of ownership in seed investing. - How the fintech landscape has evolved over the last year. - Why non-fintech companies are integrating fintech into their business. - Whether banks can be disrupted and the unique regulatory environment that influences the financial mar...
Feb 15, 2022•40 min
Anne Dwane is co-founder and partner at Village Global. She was previously CEO at Zinch, a network connecting students with colleges and scholarships. Zinch was acquired by Chegg, where she served as Chief Business Officer, before and after the IPO. Previously, Anne co-founded Military.com, a social and professional network for service members and veterans that was acquired by Monster. In this episode, they discussed how to do annual planning, how to figure out comp, why the role of a CBO is an ...
Feb 10, 2022•42 min
Today’s guest is Ben Braverman. Ben is currently Chief Customer Officer at Flexport after 6 years of being their Chief Revenue Officer during Flexport’s hypergrowth period. In this episode, we discussed how to build a good sales machine from the ground up. Ben also shares his thoughts on all things revenue - from marketing to BD to forming early SDR teams. On Deck and Flexport are co-building the future of logistics — learn more about their joint accelerator at www.beondeck.com/x/flexport . Adam...
Feb 01, 2022•52 min
Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast. Anand Chandrasekaran is a full-time angel and advisor with extensive executive experience at some of the biggest names in tech. Prior to being EVP to Five9, Anand worked at Facebook, Yahoo, and started several of his own companies. He wa...
Jan 26, 2022•48 min
Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast. Gina Gotthilf spent five years at Duolingo and helped the company grow from 3 million to 300 million users. She is the kind of VP of Marketing that isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Gina is an A/B testing vet, and shared her best fram...
Jan 26, 2022•51 min
Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast. The first guest on Execs is Jared Fliesler. Most recently, Jared was COO at Scribd. Prior to Scribd, Jared was a VP at Square, and director at Google, and a GM at Slide (acquired by Google), where he worked closely with Keith Rabios and ...
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, and Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), investment strategist, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - Whether monetary policy has been too expansionary. - Where Lyn and Scott differ on inflation. - Why interest rates have declined over the last several decades. - The nuances of the correlation between growth in money supply and CPI. - Potential downsides to being the global reserve currency. - Why the US has been able to run ...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, and Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), investment strategist, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - Lyn’s position that the US needs to inflate its debt away and the mechanics of how that works. - The similarities and differences between the 1940s and the 2020s, when an external shock hit a highly leveraged economy. - How to monetize debt. - Why interest rates have remained low. - How the fed can keep inflation at bay. - Th...
Jan 11, 2022•58 min
Elias Torres (@eliast), co-founder and CTO at Drift, joins Lucas Bagno for this episode, which was recorded as part of a special event for Villagers. They discussed: - Why Elias is so grateful for the US and the differences he noticed when he came here from Nicaragua. - How he has forged a great relationship with a co-founder who is the opposite of him in many ways. - Why people should be taking more risks. - Why they hired a recruiter as their first employee at Drift. - Why they place less emph...
Jan 04, 2022•43 min
Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, joins Erik on this episode to discuss: - Why Scott says that the fed should have been more expansionary during the Great Recession. - The usefulness of level targeting. - Why house prices are going to remain permanently high for the 21st century. - An explanation of market monetarism and its implications for monetary policy. - Why he is forecasting low inflation in contrast to many of his peers. - How market monetarism d...
Dec 28, 2021•59 min
Andrew Chen (@andrewchen), partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem, joins Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss: - Why the secret to why Bay Area tech companies have been so successful is their ability to connect people in different ways. - Stories of how different tech companies solved the cold start problem in the earliest days. For example, Tinder threw a party at USC and required people to install the app to get in. - Why colleges are such a fe...
Dec 21, 2021•36 min
Wesley Samples (@wesleysamples), founder and COO of Sora Schools, and Nick Grandy (@ngrandy), co-founder and Head of Product at Outschool, join Anne on this episode. - How the pandemic has “fractured the status quo” and how it will lead to a period of rapid change for education systems around the world. - How they’re building a world where kids love learning and why autonomous learning is so important. - How Sora and Outschool are partnering to support learners. - Why kids want, above all else, ...
Dec 14, 2021•39 min
Julio Vasconcellos (@juliov), managing partner at Atlantico, joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno to discuss: - The state of venture capital in Latin America and its vibrant yet nascent ecosystem. - Why companies shouldn't underestimate the difficulties of expanding from one country to another within LatAm. - The fact that Latin America is one of the earliest adopters of tech. Internet penetration is 75% in Brazil and 81% in Mexico, both higher than China and India. Brazil also leads the world in nu...
Dec 07, 2021•53 min
Travis Hedge (@the_hedgefund), co-founder of Vouch Insurance, and Nick Shalek (@nshalek), partner at Ribbit Capital, join Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno to discuss: - How Vouch came to be and their vision to be insurance for the innovation economy from inception to IPO. - What Travis and Nick are most excited about in insurtech. - The enormity of the market and the fact that there are so few entrepreneurs with the ability to build in the space. - How companies can grow the size of the market and...
Nov 30, 2021•51 min
Joe Garafalo, co-founder of Mosaic, and Trevor Oelschig, managing director at General Catalyst, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - How Mosaic is building the future of tooling for modern finance teams and how it started from the team’s time at Palantir. - Why finance has to be the connective tissue for the organization, given that they have a vantage point on the whole company. - Why a CFO needs to have a skillset in data science or computer science. - How to work with your investors effect...
Nov 23, 2021•32 min
Brie Wolfson (@zebriez), founder of the The Kool-Aid Factory, joins Erik to discuss: - Why there are detailed playbooks for creating products and other tactical advice for startups, but very little on building culture at your startup. - Why culture is “how it feels to get the work done” and why it’s a set of actions rather than beliefs. - Why it always starts with the founders. - What she learned from Stripe’s approach to crafting their company culture. - The power of setting your company’s “non...
Nov 16, 2021•39 min
Matt Schulman (@Matthewschulman), founder and CEO of Pave, joins Erik to discuss: - Why your company needs a compensation philosophy. - How COVID and The Great Resignation have wreaked havoc on employee compensation. - The fact that employee churn is up 2X over last year and software engineering salaries have increased by 20%. - Competing philosophies on remote employees: “cost of labor” which pays employees based on where they live and “free market” which pays employees the same regardless, and...
Nov 09, 2021•35 min
Meka Asonye (@BigMekaStyle), partner at First Round Capital, joined Ben Casnocha at a Village Global event to discuss: - Meka’s time with the Cleveland Indians and what it taught him about finding hidden talent. - Why customer obsession is so important to Meka when looking at a potential investment and concrete examples of what that looks like in practice. - Lessons on customer obsession from Stripe and Mixpanel. He says that the Collisons had lunch with users every Friday and evangelized “teach...
Nov 02, 2021•46 min
Jacob Helberg (@jacobhelberg), author of The Wires of War, joins Erik to discuss: - The “gray war” that Jacob believes the US is in with China, and why he feels it’s important to call it a war rather than a competition. - Technology and cyber weapons and how they can be used for political warfare with plausible denability. - The window of opportunity that the US and its allies have to take a proactive approach to China. - The bull case and bear case for China. - What’s at stake in Taiwan. - Why ...
Oct 28, 2021•54 min
Vance Roush (@vanceroush), founder and CEO of Overflow, joins Erik to discuss: - Overflow, the online donation platform for non-cash assets, and the story behind its creation. - Why the market is actually “sneakily big” and how he plans to create a new category that unlocks net new generosity by making donating shares, crypto, or other non-cash assets as easy as Venmo. - How the internet has changed philanthropy, the fact that philanthropic giving has never exceeded 2% of GDP, and how to increas...
Oct 26, 2021•39 min
Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha), Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg), Anne Dwane (@adwane), partners at Village Global, and David Booth (@david__booth), co-CEO of On Deck, discuss: - ODX in partnership with Village Global, the $100M+ community-backed accelerator that plans to invest in 1000 companies over the next few years: https://beondeck.com/x - The key differentiators of ODX: a dedicated partner for each company, an all-access pass to the On Deck community, and the fact that the entire community ha...
Oct 21, 2021•24 min
Andy Rachleff (@arachleff), president and CEO of Wealthfront, joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno to discuss: - What Andy learned from endowment investing and his quest to democratize excellent investing advice at Wealthfront. - Why you shouldn’t try to time the market and why in his opinion all-time highs are “absolutely irrelevant.” - Andy’s lessons from witnessing four day-trading frenzies in his career and why you should think about absolute return rather than relative returns. - How his positi...
Oct 19, 2021•43 min
Ben Reinhardt (@Ben_Reinhardt), Research Fellow at the Astera Institute and host of Idea Machines Podcast, joins Erik to discuss: - Why we don’t have as much science fiction-like technology in the world as we could, and how to turn more of it into reality. - Why venture capital does a poor job of funding new physical technology and why ten year venture cycles are too short for breakthrough technologies. Ben points out that the transistor took 15 years between the kick-off of the project and the ...
Oct 12, 2021•45 min
Leigh Marie Braswell (@LM_Braswell) of Founders Fund and Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson), who built the music recommendation system at Spotify, join Erik to discuss: - How data flows through a company and the business decisions that can be made based on data. - The waves of change in the data tooling landscape over the last decade and why we’re only a quarter of the way to easy-to-use tools. - Why there are so many data roles and how the commercialization of open source projects drives fragmen...
Oct 05, 2021•38 min
Abhijeet Patra (@abhijeetpatra88), former Deep Tech entrepreneur and venture fellow at Susa Ventures who is now leading Deep Tech at On Deck, joins Erik to discuss: - What exactly Deep Tech is and some of the examples of technologies involved, including nanotechnology, quantum computing, hardware, autonomous vehicles, space, manufacturing, machine learning, and more. - Why there’s been an explosion in talk about Deep Tech over the last several years. - The fact that there’s almost always a marke...
Sep 28, 2021•17 min
