Astella Around The World

Hear Cindy Padnos’ extraordinary trajectory, her advocate for all things entrepreneurial and how she founded Illuminate Ventures and the successful exits.

Illuminate Ventures is a seed and early stage venture capital firm that invests exclusively in enterprise/B2B software companies. With three funds under management, Illuminate continues to invest in and support talented entrepreneurs that are reinventing how work gets done.

Join us for the last episode of Astella Around the World season one.  

Daughter of Mexicans, raised in the US, Ambar Amleh is a Managing Partner at Palestine’s investment fund, Ibtikar Fund. For the past nine years, Ambar has been directly involved in supporting Palestinian entrepreneurs, as the program manager for Palestine for a New Beginning (PNB), a Palestinian non-profit company focused on entrepreneurial development.

''Being a VC in Palestine, or in a place like Palestine, where a conflict thrives, you have to be an optimistic, you have to believe so deeply in every single company, in every single founder that you are investing. And I think that definitely I am an optimistic. I definitely see that peace will come from these young men and women that are doing great things despite the conflict."

Join us for another episode of Astella Around the World to hear what Ambar has to share about promoting change through investments.

Born in Cartagena, Esteban Reyes moved to the US, and was inspired to lead his family's entrepreneurial path. In short, he spent 21 years building startups and the last 10 years investing in them. In his words: "I realized I wanted to combine financial with productive capital by becoming an investor" when joining his first VC over a decade ago. As a solo GP at Zenda, he shares how he equips himself with other key players. Join us to hear more about how he's seen the ecosystem in Miami develop throughout the years, and his view on humanity for the years to come.

"I wasn't looking to start a company, I was looking to solve a problem" is what Jenny shares with us as an "empath founder" - for her previous startups and as a fund manager. 

As a prior Managing Director at Techstars, she has invested in hundreds of startups, including 3 unicorns.

Now as General Partner at The Fund, which is described as: by founders, for founders, first-check venture fund, she focuses on the power of the founder community to invest around the world; 170+ companies in the last 4 years and counting. We can't wait to watch these seeds grow. 

Join us for another episode of Astella around the World to learn more about what moves Jenny and her outlook on the future of humanity. 

Taylor Clauson shares with us how he taught himself to write code and become part of the hacker culture, which then led him to launch Abstraction Capital, a fund focused on  tools fo developers. Join us for this episode to learn more about his inspiring story, and specifics, such as: how he manages his time as a solo VC, his impressions on his local tech community in Kansas City and some great fundraising tips and insights: "don't spend time convincing the non believers, focus on the true believers!"

Stay tuned till the end of the episode for some funny "behind the scenes"

In this episode, John Duong tells us how his early childhood guided his decision to impact investment - He was born in Cambodia, and fled to the USA with his family as survivors of the Khmer Rouge concentration camp. Education and opportunity being of high value to his family, John earned his BA degree in economics and East Asian studies from Yale University. 

He diversified his career in many areas of banking, until reconnecting with his passion for impact at WK Kellogg Foundation. He was formerly the Managing Director and Founder of Lumina Impact Ventures, the $50M impact investing arm of Lumina Foundation, until spinning of to building an impact investing platform at Kind Capital. 

Join us to learn more about how John looks at impact investing Vs. traditional philantropy and a sneak preview on the book he is self publishing very soon: "A Guide on Impact Investing" - a must for anyone who is interested in building an impact investing business or fund.

For this episode, we invited one of our fellow VCs in Brazil, Marcello Gonçalves, from Domo Invest as a co-host, to interview his friend, and Kauffman fellow, along with Laura, McKeever (Mac) Conwell, II. 

Mac has one of the most inspiring and out of the box trajectories in VC; join us to learn why not following the rules, and showing up as your authentic self can be one of the best tools you can use.

From being homeless, with no formal college education, he's innovating "how to VC" in so many ways - tune in to learn how he founded Rarebreed Ventures, whats his "Why", how Twitter played an important role in his journey and what's next... 

Before his days focused on deep tech, Karthee was the Managing Director and VP of Qualcomm Ventures for over 10 years, where he accumulated experience investing in early stage in diverse sectors around the globe. He shares with us some of his memorable experiences from those days, such as his learnings as a board member at Waze.

Now, at MFV Partners, Karthee backs visionary deep tech entrepreneurs developing products and solutions that disrupt traditional verticals and ecosystems across automotive, manufactoring, retail, agriculture and knowlege services. 

Join Laura and Carolina as they explore concepts such as 'tech market fit VS product market fit', capital and time to maturity in deep tech startups, the future of deep tech and autonomous biped humanoids !