Ann Miura-Ko (@annimaniac) has been called “the most powerful woman in startups” by Forbes and is a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford. The child of a rocket scientist at NASA, Ann is a Palo Alto native and has been steeped in technology startups from when she was a teenager. Prior to co-founding FLOODGATE, she worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey and Company. Some of Ann’s investments include Lyft, Ayasdi, Xamarin, Refinery29, JoyRun, TaskRabbit, and Modcloth. Given the success of her investments she was on the 2017 Midas List of top 100 venture capitalists. [spreaker type=player resource="episode_id=18590677" width="100%" height="200px" theme="light" playlist="false" playlist-continuous="false" autoplay="false" live-autoplay="false" chapters-image="true" episode-image-position="right" hide-logo="false" hide-likes="false" hide-comments="false" hide-sharing="false" hide-download="true"] Subscribe on Apple Podcast | Google Podcast | Android | Overcast | Spotify | Youtube You can listen right here on iTunes In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including:

* How the space race and a NASA dad lead Ann to venture capital

* How the venture ecosystem has evolved, especially for women, since 2001

* The importance of living through and experiencing an economic downturn

* What Ann believes needs to be changed about our education system to adapt to the coming changes

* How AI will impact the job market/economy and why Ann is fundamentally optimism

* Why we need more women and diversity in tech

* How Ann sees developments in blockchain and cryptocurrency affect our society

* Why Ann passed on investing in Airbnb

* The little known truth about startup success

  Transcript Producing this podcast and transcribing the episode takes tons of time and resources. If you support FringeFM and the work we do, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. If you can’t afford to support us, we completely understand as well, but an iTunes review or share on Twitter can go a long way too!   Ann: So, let's take a company like AirBnb when we saw it. It was called Air Bed and Breakfast. They had sold you know tens of thousands of dollars worth of cereal boxes McCain scrunchies and Obama owes to finance their business. They had sold only a small number of air bed space but could show that that was working to some extent but the business was selling air bed space not even a room not a couch and not definitely not a house and especially crowded locations where hotels had sold out. And so it's a very different business from what you see today. And you have to make that dotted line from what do I see today. What's different about this and where will it go. And sometimes you're wildly wrong on where will it go. But you're trying to figure out how this entrepreneur takes this idea there. Can she make it a reality? And what I found was that every time we bad on founders where we say absolutely they can make that a reality it doesn't matter if we were wrong on our hypothesis of where it would go. They would make something interesting happen.   Matt: As a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. I'm of the belief that startups and early-stage companies change and define the world. I've seen a world and I believe many of us have corporations and governments have failed to innovate and change things that t...