Episoder
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Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel, a company that provides the developer tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. He was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the worldâs most successful entrepreneurs.
Takeaways:
- Any modern cloud-native app is a nexus of services that all work together to create a coherent interface for the user. For example, Auth0 handles login, Stripe handles billing, React is used for the interface, among many more services all working in concert. Vercel helps ensure that the user has an amazing experience no matter what services are all working together on the back end.
- Guillermo tells the story of open source Unix winning out over proprietary versions of Linux, even though the proprietary versions had an early lead. He suggests that over the long term, open source will win, more often than not, and that the same story will likely play out when it comes to AI models, with open source models winning out in the end.
- When it comes to investing, Guillermo loves to bet on someone who has been obsessed with a topic for years and years. He recounts the story of the Auth0 team who had written books and given talks and spent years of their lives just on logging in and logging out. He also says that he prefers a leadership team that lives and breathes a companyâs problem space. He says that he's allergic to the idea of a professional leadership team swooping in at a certain stage.
- Rauch was born and raised in Argentina. He says that he has a sense of urgency and that tomorrow is not promised that stems from his childhood experience growing up in Argentina. He tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg keeping the Sun Microsystems logo on the back of the Facebook sign at their headquarters when they moved in to cultivate a sense that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
- Guillermo believes in giving his team leads radical ownership of their products. He provides the leads with frameworks that explain clear principles for how they build products at Vercel but beyond that he gives the leads a long leash and a sense of ownership over the product.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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Michael Balaoing, founder of Candlelion, joins Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha on this episode to discuss:
- The importance of the acronym WTF (whatâs the feeling?) when youâre giving a presentation.
- The four roles that you take on as a speaker: captain, pilot, guide, and game show host.
- The five questions to ask when seeking feedback on a presentation.
- How to keep the audience engaged throughout a talk, not just during the Q&A at the end.
- How to bake stories into your presentations and remix your talks for different audiences.
- The keys to virtual communication.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Brad Feld (@bfeld), VC at Foundry Group and co-author with Dave Jilk of The Entrepreneurâs Weekly Nietzsche, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha to discuss:
- Common misconceptions about Nietzsche and why being misunderstood makes him an especially interesting philosopher.
- What Nietzsche can teach entrepreneurs deciding whether to pivot or persevere. Brad says that founders should view their entrepreneurial journey not in terms of a single company, but as the next 30-50 years of their life.
- Why Brad hates the term âpassionâ and says itâs overused in entrepreneurial circles.
- Why to focus more on whether someoneâs words and actions line up rather than the strength of their beliefs.
- The lessons that Brad has for making decisions among groups today given Nietzscheâs aphorism that âinsanity in individuals is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.â
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Thejo Kote (@thejo) talks to Village partner Ben Casnocha. Thejo is a two-time founder and CEO. His current company, Airbase, is a spend management platform serving companies with 100 and 5,000 employees like Coda, 15Five, Front, Marqueta, CaptivateIQ, Abnormal, and more. Airbase has raised over $200 million, has tens of millions in ARR, and is consistently ranked as a top spend management company by G2.
Highlights:
- Rather than jumping into building Airbase, he built high-fidelity mockups and went back to prospective customers and asked if theyâd buy it to âpre-sellâ it.
- In B2B, build for a specific, recognizable buyer. You want to sell to a specific role within the org who will be your champion. Ideally this is someone who also has influence within the org.
- Select the kinds of customers who arenât likely to switch in the early days. Team with early customers who actually want to be partners and are motivated by the relationship. Flatter them by asking: âare there any other innovative, forward-thinking leaders you know who I should also talk to?â
- 6-8 months later after proving value and showing they could be a good partner, he said âhey, I want to get your feedback on our pricing model. Is this fair for the next set of customers?â 100% of the customers converted when he asked if they were willing to opt in to the pricing structure with a significant discount for their initial partnership.
- When hiring salespeople, Thejo focuses more on personality traits rather than prior experience selling to the same segment. Also, if candidates are drawn to the liquid comp at a large, public company, theyâre likely going to have a hard time transitioning to a startup. Find people who have been comfortable taking risks.
- Airbase is fully remote and Thejo doesnât think in terms of onshore vs. offshore within the company because that instantly creates a class system. Anyone anywhere in the world is part of their single, remote team, which has the internet as its headquarters. Each member of the team is âequitably inconveniencedâ in his words.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. -
Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha for a masterclass with our founders in late 2020.
They discussed:
- The origin story of Cloudflare, including how the co-founders met, and how Michelle realized that she too could start a company.
- Her advice on fundraising after raising more than $300M for Cloudflare, including why you should keep the rest of the VC partnership in mind, and how to show rather than tell in your pitch.
- How they found the best talent, including why their blog brought them plenty of inbound interest, and why searching far and wide around the globe for engineers helped them build their team quickly.
- Why they donât use recruiters at Cloudflare.
- How to turn a weakness into a strength.
- How to process feedback and when it makes sense to ignore it.
- Stories of extreme frugality in the early days of the company, including building their own Ikea desks.
- How an emotional response by customers helped them know they had product-market fit.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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We're excited to launch a new EIR program for data science founders in partnership with Rackhouse Ventures, founded by Kevin Novak. Learn more about the program: https://www.villageglobal.vc/rackhouse-village-global-eir-program
Kevin Novak (@novakkm), an early Uber employee, was instrumental in developing their data science program and was the creator of surge pricing.
Highlights:
- Kevin, originally a nuclear physicist, applied his analytical skills to develop Uber's first surge pricing model in three weeksâa task that would typically take six months in academia.
- He says that founders shouldnât wait until they have plenty of data to make decisions â instead, start with first principles thinking while also building a virtuous data cycle by ensuring you are collecting data that will inform future decisions.
- He comments that AI might be âoverhyped on averageâ at the moment. The first breakthrough product is essentially an API, which has led to incumbents responding more quickly and more aggressively. Kevin argues that if you are founding a generative AI company, you are effectively making the claim that incumbents wonât be able to respond and implement an LLM themselves.
- Kevin cautions founders not to fall in love with any one idea too early. Itâs better to hedge your bets and experiment with one or two. Through trial and error, you can eventually decide on one idea that has the potential to be a strong business.
- For the Village Global-Rackhouse EIR program, weâre looking for founders with deep passion for founding a company. We donât require you to have your idea and team established.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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This encore episode is a recording of a special masterclass roundtable session for our founders with John Donahoe. John is CEO of Nike and was previously CEO of ServiceNow and eBay. He is known as one of the most inspirational leaders in Silicon Valley and is a highly sought-after mentor to CEOs including Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Drew Houston at Dropbox, and Ben Silbermann at Pinterest. Weâre honored to have him among our small group of world-class executives and collaborators whose time and expertise help power our network of founders at Village Global.
He shared advice on when to hire ahead, invest in and train, or replace personnel on your team and gave insight into his most common piece of advice on professional growth when advising CEOs.
Quotes From This Episode
"When you talk about priorities at an aspirational level, they overlap a lot. People start realizing we're more similar than we're dissimilar."
"Adversity never feels fun. I don't seek adversity. But I'm no longer scared of adversity. When it emerges, instead of trying to run from it, I now accept that it is a reality and I say, 'well, at least I'm going to learn and grow.'"
"My experience has been that around any issue that involves change, you have roughly 20-25% of people who want to be part of it, no matter what the topic is, you have 25-30% of people who want to fight it, and you have the 50% of people in the middle saying 'which side is going to win?'"
"[When someone is let go] The fear is humiliation usually. That's almost a bigger fear than actually leaving the company."
"We're never as good or as bad as labels make us out to be."
"I would say in general, for every 10 hours of business development conversations, 8 of them are a waste."
"I do gratitude practice driving into work every morning. It's proven in brain science that your brain becomes more negative over time. But it's also been proven in brain science that you can counteract that."
"The older I get, the more I've made friends with uncertainty. I don't avoid uncertainty. Uncertainty is as present to me today as it was before but I'm a little more comfortable with it today."
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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Chris Lunt is a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building web services and data platforms. He is in his seventh year as the CTO for the NIH's All of Us Research Program. He joined the NIH from GetInsured, where he worked to improve health insurance shopping and enrollment systems. Previously Chris ran VC-backed internet startups, with one IPO.
Highlights:
- Chris is hopeful about Silicon Valley going back to its roots to create sociological change by uniting people and being thoughtful about what the world should look like. Over the last couple decades it has become more venal.
- Chris believes in the power of investing public money to create opportunities. He says that Silicon Valley is largely the story of a public private partnership and that itâs hard to do certain fundamental research in a purely market-based economy.
- Chris says that the initiatives around Web3 werenât grounded in a realistic understanding of human nature and the result was not a good outcome.
- Healthcare is one of the most conservative industries but a way to drag it into the future is for the government to mandate change. Health records are currently built for billing purposes rather than for improving health. Itâs also not all that long ago that hospitals were using paper records until the Affordable Care Act required that they digitize.
- There is a moment coming soon where there is an opportunity to completely reimagine healthcare delivery. A generalist will be able to help a person navigate between various providers and specialists instead of the current fragmented approach.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. -
Michael Hochberg (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hochberg/) is a physicist and a founder of four successful startup companies in semiconductors and telecommunications, including Luxtera, acquired by Cisco in 2019, and Elenion, acquired by Nokia in 2020. He won the highest awards for young scientists in Singapore (NRF Fellowship) and the United States (PECASE), is an author on over 60 patents, and has been involved in the creation of over 30 companies in biotech and applications of silicon photonics.
Highlights:
- In college Michael would tie together clusters of Dell machines to replicate the performance of supercomputers.
- The core of building a successful company in Michaelâs view is hiring the best people. The best can solve really hard problems but hiring mediocre people results in even trivial problems being unsolvable.
- Silicon photonics chips are replacing things that could previously only be done in silicon. Data centres and telecom systems are now dominated by silicon photonics.
- Thereâs a fundamental difference between co-founders and early employees but that line can often be blurred, often at the peril of the founding team.
- Michael says that founders donât do enough diligence on their co-founders. Companies often last longer than most marriages so itâs important to throughly reference check your co-founders, ask specific and tactical open-ended questions of them, and see them deliver tangible results before you start a company together.
- Itâs important to be aligned on what success means to you and your co-founders. Two people may have very different definitions of what âa lot of moneyâ means â that could be enough money to buy a house for one person and $100M for another.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. -
Matt Pellini, Managing Director at Hamilton Lane, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:
- Matt says the secondaries market has grown over 5x from 15 years ago to now.
- Selling in the secondary market used to be a sign of distress but is no longer. There are many different reasons for doing so and itâs mostly a sign of a manager being more active in the overall management of the fund.
- Secondaries, in contrast to other asset classes in the private markets, are typically lower risk, shorter duration, and are more IRR-focused.
- Itâs key for LPs to understand the motivations behind a GPâs intentions to engage in secondaries transactions. There are very good reasons for doing so but transparency is key.
- AI is in vogue but technology is only as good as the data that itâs using. The most sophisticated data analysis is not going to give a firm much of an edge if it's using incorrect data or publicly available data.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. -
Christopher Ailman (@CJAtheCIO), Chief Investment Officer at CalSTRS, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:
- CalSTRS, the California State Teachersâ Retirement System, was created in 1913 and is actually older than Social Security. It has over 400 members who are over 100 years old who are still receiving their pension.
- Chris says no bear market is alike and that the key is to have the discipline during that time period to actually start buying.
- Chris says the key to success as an investor is in being intentional about the culture you create. When Chris is evaluating a portfolio manager he likes to and sit on the floor with the employees and see what the vibe is like.
- A lot of investors take a lot of econ and business classes but should take more psychology classes to deal with the human side of things (vs. the numbers side). He says that selecting portfolio managers is much more difficult than picking stocks.
- Chris says that the energy transition will dwarf all trends over the next fifteen years. He says that by 2035 parts of the earth will start to become uninhabitable and there will be mass migrations to other areas.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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This encore episode is a recording of a special event where Mark Pincus (@markpinc) was interviewed by Ben Casnocha in San Francisco in front of a live audience of portfolio founders, friends of the firm, and LPs.
Mark is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Zynga, and is an angel investor in Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and other companies. He talked about about raising venture capital, his philosophy of product management, the early days at Zynga, and much more. He also took time at the event to meet with Village Global founders to give them his advice on growing their companies.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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This encore episode is a recording of a special event where Bill Gates was interviewed in San Francisco by Julia Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite. It originally took place in 2018 in front of a live audience of Village Global founders and friends of the firm. We are honored to count Bill Gates among our luminary LPs whose financial capital and engagement power the next wave of Village Global founders.
They covered:
- Gatesâs entrepreneurial journey starting Microsoft, including the most important turning points in the early years of the company.
- His thinking on work-life balance for founders and what he would do differently if he was starting again.
- What heâs learned from the next generation of founders.
- His perspective on the current tech landscape.
- His views on philanthropy, global development, education, and much more.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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Jerry originally joined us on the podcast in 2019. He is co-founder of Yahoo! and founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures. He was interviewed in front of a live audience in San Francisco by Village Global co-founder and partner, Ben Casnocha.
Jerry told stories from the early days of Yahoo! and explained his lessons learned from the experience. He also talked about what American entrepreneurs can learn from China and his thoughts on early stage investing.
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Paul Budnitz, founder of Superplastic, and Jennifer van Dijk, CEO of Superplastic, join Christina Des Vaux, head of marketing and platform at Village Global, on this episode. Takeaways:
Superplastic is a creatively-led company that has managed to maintain its unique identity and artistic integrity while nevertheless running a thriving business.The team comes up with ideas for characters but the characters grow and change as the audience gives them their own identities.Theyâve learned a lot from the people who make games and are willing to iterate and make changes quickly.They shy away from initiatives that would make money fairly easily but donât grab the attention of the creative team.Paul says there is always a solution to everything and their job is to keep looking for it, whether thatâs a creative solution or a business solution.Theyâve created their own tech stack that enables them to create animations in hours that used to take weeks.Paul and Jennifer say that the edge is the new center of culture. The characters theyâve created are weird, but likeable.Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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Graham Duncan (@GrahamDuncanNYC) is a longtime investor and author of a legendary essay on reference checking: https://grahamduncan.blog/whats-going-on-here/ He was interviewed by Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) during a special masterclass for Village Global founders and friends of the firm.
Takeaways:
- Be aware of how your own mindset and mood affects your analysis of a candidate as well as how it impacts how the candidate shows up in the interview. For example, you might be anxious and stressed yourself and that makes the candidate nervous â you may end up experiencing them as nervous, but in fact you are the one that has created that dynamic in the interview.
- Ask the candidate: âIf you were hiring someone to fill this role, what criteria would you use?â When someone is particularly good, they are skilled at capturing the essence of what makes someone good at it. This also lets you see how they respond without initial priming and framing.
- The ideal reference check call should take longer than you might think (e.g. 45+ mins). You sometimes need to wear them down over a long period of time before they open up about their real concerns.
- If you arenât aware of or canât imagine the downside of working with this person, you havenât done enough reference checking.
- Ask: âHow strong is your endorsement of Jane on a scale of 1-10? (If they answer 7, say actually sorry 7s are not allowed, 6 or 8? If the answer is an 8, âWhat is in that two points?â)â
- When someone comes from a prestigious company, we often fail to control for the weight that the reputation of the company carries when we form our impression of them.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. He joined Olga Serhiyevich, head of investor relations, for this conversation.
Takeaways:
- Sebastian wrote a book about hedge funds prior to The Power Law and he contrasts VCs and hedge fund managers by saying that VCs are much more extraverted. VCs and others around the startup world are eager and willing to make introductions and actually follow through where others say they will make an intro and donât follow through.
- Venture is a fun and exciting business to be in because youâre dealing with bold visions of the future, highly talented and optimistic founders, and you get to see the progress and outcome of each startup that is trying to do something novel and ambitious.
- Sebastian says that bubbles are inevitable in venture capital because of the nature of the business. He says thereâs no âoff switchâ or equivalent of shorting a company. There are also so many connections among venture capitalists that no one is willing to say anything negative about anyone elseâs investments.
- He predicts a significant expansion of startup funding outside of Silicon Valley post-pandemic. Being able to deals over Zoom significantly expands the scope of where a VC can invest.
- He is bullish on Europe especially because it has a consumer market that is even bigger than the US and the entrepreneurial mentality is growing among prospective startup founders in Europe.
- Sebastian says that AI is the biggest development on earth since humans first developed the capacity for abstract thought. Some compare it to the printing press and he says it will be way bigger than that.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Julio Vasconcellos (@JulioV), managing partner at Atlantico, and Ana Martins (@martinsg_ana), partner at Atlantico, join Anne Dwane (@adwane), co-founder and partner at Village Global, to discuss Atlanticoâs 2023 report on digital transformation in Latin America.
Takeaways:
- If Latin America was its own country it would be #3 in the world in terms of population and GDP.
- Brazil and Mexico combined make up over half of the population of all of Latin America.
- In the US about 60% of public market capitalization is made up of technology companies but in Latin America that proportion is only 1.8%.
- Latin America is about 10-15 years behind where China is, which is itself about 5-7 years behind where the US is. There is a ton of catch-up that will happen over the next couple decades and that presents a huge opportunity.
- Latin America has some deep scars from hyper-inflation decades ago. They were some of the first countires to quickly raise rates in order to tame the inflation that we've been seeing globally in the last few years. That has paid off with some countries in LatAm starting to lower rates already.
Check out the full report here: https://www.atlantico.vc/latin-america-digital-transformation-report-2023
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Gurdane Bhutani and Zeshan Muhammedi are co-founders and GPs at MBX, a VC firm investing in early-stage bio/healthtech companies tackling major public health threats. Prior to that they co-founded healthcare and life-science venture capital firm FundRx, where they championed the firm's build-out of its community-driven investment infrastructure, modeled on the scientific peer-review process.
Takeaways:
- Pharma companies have realized that it makes sense to develop drugs that will have a population-level health benefit rather than developing drugs for small numbers of people that cost exorbitant amounts.
- Noise pollution is actually a big public health issue that is linked to various diseases. Companies are working on making society less noisy using things like concrete that is quieter when cars drive over it.
- Gurdane and Zeshan have learned from working together for a long time how to engage in productive disagreement well by acknowledging what their respective strengths and weaknesses are and weighing the strength of one personâs enthusiasm against the strength of the other personâs skepticism.
- Genomics has been a huge story in medicine in the last several decades but hasnât lived up to its promise because weâve been missing an understanding of how environmental triggers drive diseases that our genes prime us for.
- In the future, given changes at the FDA and EPA, drugs and chemical products will be tested on âorganoids on a chipâ or high-throughput systems that can give us higher fidelity data than actual tests on living animals.
- Studies are often powered to look for benefits of a drug rather than find rare long tail side effects. It often takes years and years for the downsides of a treatment to become apparent.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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Lee Hnetinka, founder and CEO of Future and Darkstore, joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global, on this episode. Lee and his companies are building innovative solutions in retail and e-commerce and have worked with worldâs most admired brands like Nike, Adidas and Disney where they enabled same-day and 1-hour delivery for customers nationwide. Theyâve also worked with tech companies like Snapchat, Shopify and Stripe to enable next generation payments and loyalty program solutions.
Takeaways:
- Lee says cities will look completely different in a few decades. Retail has been the backbone of cities for a very long time but as more and more commerces goes online, physical stores will transform into more of a place to go to have an experience.
- In the old days loyalty programs used stamps to provide a potential discount on a future purchase but now provide the customer with more convenience and a better experience.
- Loyalty programs have been transforming into tiered programs where a customer can pay for status. Lee predicts that every single loyalty program will turn into a tiered program with multiple paid options in the future. For example, there may be multiple levels of Amazon Prime in the same way that there are multiple tiers at American Express.
- Dark stores were pioneered in the UK and leveraged existing stores that had excess space to carry products from many different retailers in one place. Lee partnered with companies like Office Depot, Mattress Firm, and Iron Mountain to make Darkstore a reality. Fun fact: 90% of the population of the US lives within 5 miles of an Office Depot, and on average only three people a day walk in to a mattress store.
- FastAF, the consumer-facing brand at Darkstore, provided high-end versions of the products that someone would typically find in a convenience store. A lot of the core value was the curation that went into which products to carry.
- One of the keys to success for a business like Darkstore is to consider unit economics on a per-building basis and to make sure that there is enough population in any one place to support a physical location.
- Running two companies has made Lee better at both of them as compared to running only one. He says that many insights are transferrable between them. Also, when making decisions, Lee asks whether a decision is reversible or not and spends most of his time on the irreversible decisions and errs towards moving quickly on the reversible ones.
Thanks for listening â if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
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