AngelList Radio

Keith Rabois knows a bit about building successful teams. As a member of the famous "PayPal Mafia," the list of companies he's helped build includes Square, Yelp, LinkedIn, Opendoor, and Khosla Ventures, where he is currently a managing director. That's the short version.

We interviewed Keith about business management. Over the course of the interview, he broke down how he puts together such world-class teams.

Summary: https://angel.co/blog/how-keith-rabois-builds-billion-dollar-businesses-radical-simplicity

We wanted to give you an update on a story we brought to you a couple years ago. In 2016, Drew Wilson had just raised money to grow Plasso (angel.co/plasso), a payment subscription business that he founded. We're happy to report that a few months ago, in September 2018, Plasso was acquired by GoDaddy

The host of AngelList Radio, Tyler Willis, recently spoke with Drew for nearly two hours. Drew speaks frankly about his learnings starting Plasso, scaling the company, and getting acquired. 

We interviewed Steve Newcomb and learned how he hires and manages top talent. 

Steve has founded several companies, including Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft and ultimately became the underlying technology behind Microsoft Bing. 

Powerset was one of the most-respected startups in the late 2000s. It launched with the mission of building a better search engine than Google, attracted top investors like Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, and built an exceptionally talented team with employees that ultimately went on to found other important startups like Github, Serious Business (acquired by Zynga), and Crowdflower. 

In 2010, after having sold Powerset to Microsoft, Steve wrote Cult Creation—one of the best guides to hiring and management at startups. Today, he's releasing an updated version of Cult Creation with all the lessons he's learned from running his current company, Famous. 

In this episode, Steve shares his favorite advice to founders from Cult Creation and talks about what additional lessons he's learned over last six years. 

Parker Thompson and Tyler Willis discuss several stories that caught their attention in tech news this week.

In this episode, we talk about some companies on AngelList that have recently raised new rounds (Eaze and Kindly), Twitter's recent challenges, the launch of Uber's driver API, and Google Fiber.

Show Notes:

At 20:40, Parker and I talk about how companies can trade structure for valuation. Here are some additional pieces of content that help explain how terms of an investment can change a company's valuation:

• Bill Gurley, On the Road to Recap.
• The Information, What Private Equity Sees in Tech (a video interview with TPG's CEO, Jim Coulter). The discussion of investment terms starts at 14:09.
• Venture Hacks, Just Say No: VC terms that can really hurt (also read Part 2).

Tyler Willis and Parker Thompson discuss several stories that caught their attention in tech news this week.

In this episode, we talk about some news from the AngelList portfolio (Shyp and Tribe), diversity in venture capital, the recent criticism of companies that work with Peter Thiel despite his support of Trump, and Tesla's ride-sharing ambitions.

Today, we're announcing the unrealized returns for all 2013 syndicate investments and A-List, our premium recruiting product for busy companies. 

Learn more in this interview with AngelList's founder and CEO, Naval Ravikant. 

We interview Dr. Jenny Rooke and learn how to invest in life sciences startups. 

Dr. Rooke is a founder of 5 Prime Ventures and has invested in companies like Caribou Biosciences, Zymergen, and Zephyrus Biosciences (acquired by Bio-Techne).

We interview Parker Thompson and learn from his attempt to raise a new venture fund and how he wants to support more professional investors on AngelList. Parker recently joined AngelList as a Partner and previously ran the San Francisco office for 500 Startups. Some of Parker's investments at 500 included AirPair, Breather, and Mayvenn.

In our fourth episode, we interview Kirill Makharinsky and learn what factors can statistically predict a company's future success.Kirill is the CEO and Co-founder of Enki and previously co-founded Ostrovok and Quid. He is an early investor in fifteen startups, including TokBox (acquired by Telefonica), AngelList, and RoboteX.

In our third episode, we interview Jason Calacanis and learn the best way to allocate capital at the seed-stage and how to use syndicates to improve your odds as a new investor.

Jason was the first scout at Sequoia Capital and is an investor in Uber, Thumbtack, and over 100 other startups.