Even with advent of online listing services, the fundamental means of renting an apartment hadn’t changed for decades, that is, until Rentberry came along (www.rentberry.com). Alex Lubinsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Rentberry joins us on this addition of Bay Area Ventures to tell us how his new startup is radically changing the process renting or leasing a property for both the renter and the landlord.

Rentberry goes beyond simply listing properties and leaving it up to each individual renter and landlord to find each other and make a match. Instead by allowing the landlord to host an auction for their property, Rentberry is creating a new paradigm for facilitating the transaction. This new and highly transparent process gives information to the renters to see just how much a property in their desired location is renting for and allows landlords to optimize their revenue to meet the true demand for their market.

Rentberry started in a handful of cities and is now expanding across the US. Demand is very strong and Alex is dealing with scaling his company as well as adding new features to improve and enhance the service. In the episode you’ll learn how Alex came up the idea and how he and a handful of co-founders got the company off the ground.

In addition to talking about the company, we also talk about how Lubinsky funded his startup and how he left a career in international investment banking and mergers and acquisitions to start Rentberry because of a problem that he and his co-founders ran into.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. If you have questions for Alex or me please feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Recorded on May 22, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time. For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

#auctions #Realestate #innovation #rentals #gigeconomy #Marketing #landlord #renter #apartment #lease #entrepreneurship #startup #SanFrancisco #SiliconValley

Paul Charney, an advertising creative expert and former improv comedian, is the founder of Funworks www.howfunworks.com. Along with his Creative Architect, Erica Foretescue, Paul joins me on this episode of Bay Area Ventures. Funworks helps their clients discover their true message by hosting "fun workshops" where a group of comedians who are experts in improvisation techniques work with the clients to bring out stories, images and issues.

Together they have put together a series of great advertising campaigns for companies like HP and Comcast, many of which you will likely have seen.

In addition to talking about the company, we explore what makes a company's message memorable. We also talk about how working in the San Francisco Bay Area is unique and what are some of the best attributes that make it so. Finally, we talk about some of the neurological aspects of communication and how a company can build a culture of trust with its customers and its employees.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. If you have questions for Paul, Erica or me please feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Recorded on May 22, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time. For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

#Advertising #Improvisation #Comedy #teambuilding #Marketing #FunatWork #Leadership #entrepreneurship #startup #SanFrancisco #SiliconValley

This is Part 2 of our special Bay Area Ventures follow-up episode where we check in with guests from the first three seasons of the show. We start off part 2 with Martin Plaehn, CEO of Control 4, Inc. (www.control4.com). Martin made his first appearance on Bay Area Ventures in August of 2015. Back then, Control 4’s annual run rate was about $160 Million. For 2017, the company’s first quarter revenues were over $50 Million which puts them on a healthy $200 Million trajectory. Also, Control 4’s stock has more than doubled since his last appearance on our show.

Control 4 manufactures automation systems and software for smart homes and offices. They are one of the fastest growing companies, if not the leader, in the emerging Internet of things and connected home technology sector.

Martin is a thoughtful, smart and concerned CEO who has lectured on leadership and has been at the helm of some of earliest and most famous tech companies including RealNetworks, Viewpoint Digital and Bungee Labs. In this interview we learn what changes have occurred at Control 4 since his last appearance and how Martin has adapted his management style to deal with them. We also learn about how he divides his mind-share to achieve everything required of him as a manager and board member.

In the second half of the show we’ll follow-up with Mark Chung, Co-Founder and CEO of Verdigris Technologies, Inc. (www.verdigris.co). Mark was a guest back in February of 2016. At the time, Verdigris was a young startup running on seed capital but already shipping product and generating revenue. Today, Verdigris is fresh off of a recent $7M Series A financing with backers such as Verizon and Jabil Manufacturing.

Mark and his brother started Verdigris after an incident in their home where their electricity bill spiked for some unknown reason. They developed a monitoring system that can automatically detect every type of device on an electrical circuit and track and monitory its electric usage. Today, they’ve developed an industrial strength product used by hotels, factories and other commercial customers around the world. The technology sends a customer’s energy usage data up to The Cloud and Verdigris’ software helps those customers track usage and anomalies helping them to cut their energy usage by as much as 50% in many cases.

Mark talks about the challenges of doubling his company’s headcount, building a world class sales team and scaling fast. It’s a real success story and Mark shares his philosophy of how to handle the stresses and challenges of being the leader of a fast company.

Mark is a brilliant engineer who has worked at AMD, PA Semiconductor and Netlogic. PA semiconductor was acquired by Apple while Mark was there and Netlogic was acquired by Broadcom. Either he’s been very lucky at choosing companies to work for or, more likely, these great companies spotted Mark’s enormous talent. Now you can be the judge.

This is a jam-packed show with a lot of takeaways for your business.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. If you have questions for Martin, Mark or me please feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Recorded on April 24, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time. For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

#IoT #HomeAutomation #SmartHomes #Homelink #Alexa #GoogleHome #EnergyUsage #EnergySavings #ClimateChange #CloudComputing #Leadership #entrepreneurship #startup #SanFrancisco #SiliconValley

Bay Area Ventures presents this first of two special follow-up episodes where we check in with guests from the first three seasons of the show. First up, we’ll be speaking with Christopher Farm, Co-Founder and CEO of Tenjin, Inc. (www.tenjin.io) Christopher made his first appearance on Bay Area Ventures in April of 2016. Back then, Tenjin was a new startup fresh out of the Y-Combinator incubator. Chris will share with us how Tenjin has fared over the past year and talk about some of the biggest surprises and challenges he’s faced. Did his staff grow? Have sales grown? How difficult has it been to attract and retain technical talent in the San Francisco Bay Area in a period of extreme economic growth and competition. Christopher will tell us all about it.

In the second half of the show we’ll follow-up with Dave McLean, Founder of Magnolia Brewing (http://magnoliabrewing.com). Dave was my first guest on Bay Area Ventures back in March of 2014. At the time, Magnolia Brewing was operating its flagship Magnolia Gastropub on the fabled Haight Street in San Francisco and was still building out a new restaurant and a new brewing facility. We’ll see how those facilities have done and also learn about their recent entry into retail sales with a new line of canned beers.

Dave has been brewing beer since the 1990s and is one of the leaders of the modern San Francisco Bay Area craft brewing industry. Dave was the founder of the San Francisco Brewer’s Guild which now boasts a membership of hundreds of craft brewers and hosts dozens of major events in the Bay Area each year including San Francisco Beer Week and the annual Brews by the Bay festival.

McLean is passionate about beer and business. He has built a thriving enterprise with thousands of devoted fans in a city whose roots as a brewer’s haven go back to the gold rush days of the 1800’s. That’s no small feat and Dave will tell you how he’s done it.

This will be a jam-packed show with a lot of takeaways for your business.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. If you have questions for Christopher, Dave or me please feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Recorded on April 24, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time. For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

#onlinemarketing #PPC #SEO #SEM #mobileadvertising #entrepreneurship #startup #SanFrancisco #beer #craftbrewing #marketing #restaurants

On this special Bay Area Council Quarterly Update edition of Bay Area Ventures we speak with Jim Wunderman, CEO of The Bay Area Council about the first quarter 2017 economic state if the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Bay Area economy continues to move along at a blistering pace in 2017 but the flip side of economic growth is the tremendous pressure it places on transportation, housing and prices.

Jim and his organization have been working for years on policies and bills to address the key issues affecting the Bay Area and the first quarter saw several new laws passed by the California State Senate as well as a huge gas tax and fee package ushered in by Governor Jerry Brown. In this episode Jim talks about those initiatives and how they will impact the Bay Area. He also talks about when to expect these initiatives to make an impact and what he’ll be working on next.

Finally, the Bay Area Council just completed their 2017 poll and Jim discusses what questions were asked and the results of his analysis. Find out which key issues are on the top of minds of Bay Area residents and which one, in particular, is considered a crisis.

The Bay Area Council is a public policy organization focused on making the San Francisco Bay Area and the Silicon Valley the most globally competitive and economically productive region in the world. The Council’s membership is comprised of CEOs from hundreds of the top businesses in the Bay Area and Jim has been its CEO since 2004. For more information on Jim and to see the full 2017 poll results go to www.bayareacouncil.org.

This interview was recorded on April 24, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.

For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

On this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sara Margulis, co-founder and CEO of Honeyfund and the companion site Plumfund (www.honeyfund.com and www.plumfund.com). Honeyfund began when Sara and her the fiancé Josh were looking for an alternative to a gift registry for their wedding. Instead they wanted so set up a honeymoon registry where their friends and family could gift components of their awesome honeymoon.

The site worked, and then, their friends and their friends’ friends all wanted a honeymoon registry page for their weddings. Viola and startup is born. Honeyfund grew organically for a number of years and customers began using the site to fund other needs and charities. To segregate the traffic Sara and Josh launched Plumfund to help fund all of the people and things we love. Both sites were growing nicely but Sara and Josh decided to appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank and wound up receiving offers from three sharks, ultimately striking a deal with Mr. Wonderful himself, Kevin O’Leary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uelp3-lOvD4

Honeyfund is based in the Bay Area town of Sebastopol in the North Bay’s Sonoma County. It’s a beautiful area known more for vineyards and dairies but, is also home to many tech companies as well.

Sara discusses her transition from Marketing Director at a San Francisco University to tech entrepreneur. She walks us through some of the challenges she’s faced along the way and how life and business changed after their Shark Tank experience. We talk about the Shark Tank process (except for the NDA parts) as well as Sara’s take on the Bay Area way of business.

It’s a fun interview with lots of great takeaways for your business, wherever you may be.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. If you have questions for Sara or me please feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Recorded on March 27, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time. For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

#onlinemarketing #venturefinance #entrepreneurship #startup #sonomacounty #giftregistry

Bay Area Ventures welcomes Jeremey Dann, Professor of Innovation at the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies https://www.marshall.usc.edu/departments/lloyd-greif-center-entrepreneurial-studies at the USC Marshall School of Business https://www.marshall.usc.edu/ and Wenyi Cai, Managing Partner of Polymath Ventures www.polymathv.com based in Bogota, Colombia.

Professor Dann is making his third appearance on Bay Area Ventures and this time he is here to talk about his new case study about Wenyi and Polymath. The case, which is used as the basis of discussion by entrepreneurs and business students at business schools throughout the world, walks us through the challenges and issues that Wenyi and her team face in creating, incubating, funding and growing startup companies in emerging markets like Latin America.

Wenyi is an ultra-bright woman, who was working on mathematical models of fluid dynamics at the age of 15 for the Argonne National Laboratory. She earned a degree in Physics from Harvard and founded Tuesday Magazine while still an undergraduate. She worked for McKinsey & Company on management consulting assignments in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia before becoming COO of the startup Milo.com which was purchased by eBay for $75 Million. Not wanting to join another startup in the Bay Area, Wenyi decided to start a fund and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging markets. After working with her team to identify the best place to found Polymath Ventures, the settled on Bogota, Colombia.

Jeremy picks up the case from there and walks the reader through Polymath’s first six ventures.

This lively conversation brings the listener up to date on how Polymath is doing and what has transpired since the case was written. We speak at length about the difference between entrepreneurship, venture financing and customer acquisition between the Bay Area and Colombia. We also discuss extracting the lessons the Jeremy and Wenyi have learned and how that applies to new venture formation in the US, Latin America, Asia and just about anywhere.

For students of business, this is a rare opportunity to fill in the blanks and close the loop on a well written case study. And Jeremey Dann is an expert at writing case studies, having now authored more than 30 of them.

Jeremy’s Case Study of Wenyi and Polymath Ventures can be purchased at https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/product/SCG521-PDF-ENG or http://www.thecasecentre.org/main/products/view?id=139181

Recorded on March 27, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.

For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.

This episode of Bay Area Ventures features Tim Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of www.nerdwallet.com. Tim is a former investment banker and private equity financer who was simply trying to help his sister find the best credit card. In doing so Tim discovered that it was not as simple as he first thought. Besides the obvious brand names such as Visa, Master Card and American Express, all cards vary in their annual fees, interest rates, sign-up promotions, cardmember services and whether they do or do not offer points or cash back. The list was long and the task was a real challenge.

When he was through he posted his results to his friends on social media and the demand was so great that he realized there might be a business opportunity to offer similar information to the public and, not only for credit cards but, for a host of other financial services from life insurance, to travel rewards to mortgages and banking.

Tim was not a tech entrepreneur but quickly learned to think like one and a soon decided to move Nerdwallet from his apartment in New York City to San Francisco. He discovered that the ecosystem and human talent of the Bay Area with their propensity for taking on something new to their deep network of like-minded startup veterans, was the ideal place to build and grow his company.

In this interview Tim talks about scaling his team and about how they all share knowledge internally and challenge each other to think about solving problems for the organization and their customers. He also talks about the financial industry as a whole drawing from his participation as a member of the Consumer Advisory Board to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal agency set up after the 2008 financial melt-down to protect consumer from banking, mortgage and credit card abuse and fraud.

Tim gives some great tips on managing your finances and, more importantly on being a successful entrepreneur.

Recorded on February 13, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.

For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.
To participate in our monthly Bay Area Ventures Conversation of the Month visit www.BAVConversation.com

Jonathan Swanson, Co-Founder and President of www.thumbtack.com joins me on Bay Area Ventures to talk about his journey from White House economic aide to building a high-growth fast-pace technology startup.

Founded in 2009, Thumbtack is now a Silicon Valley “unicorn”, a privately held company with a valuation over $1 billion. The company is vying to be the Amazon of the gig-economy by creating the ultimate marketplace for getting things done. To do so, Thumbtack provides a marketplace for local services allowing one to find providers for just about anything from music lessons, to construction, to janitorial services, to … you name it. Unlike most sites which force you to do all the research for choosing the best provider, Thumbtack asks you some meaningful questions and then does the research for you, finding you the best match for your project.

Jonathan, is a thoughtful, highly motivated entrepreneur who looks at Thumbtack as a way to help people around the world improve their lives. He helps independent providers find customers but, also helps them promote their skills, increase their confidence and change their lives. With over a million active customers and hundreds of thousands of providers, Thumbtack is out performing Yelp and Angie’s List and could be the Yellow Pages for the twenty-first century and beyond. Jonathan provides some solid examples of people who have achieved great personal success on the Thumbtack platform.

Jonathan, talks about forming his founding team and figuring out how to scale Thumbtack for growth. Thumbtack has over 1,000 employees in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and the Philippines. Founded in Washington, DC, Jonathan and his co-founders moved Thumbtack to San Francisco to take advantage of the Bay Area’s ecosystem. Hear how he compares the Bay Area way of business to other areas.

There is a powerful interview with a brilliant young entrepreneur. It’s a must listen.

Recorded on February 13, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.

For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.
To participate in our monthly Bay Area Ventures Conversation of the Month visit www.BAVConversation.com

On this episode of Bay Area Ventures we speak with Abe Sher, Managing Partner at Energetico Ventures of Bal Harbor, Florida (www.energetico.com).

Abe is a serial entrepreneur, attorney, inventor and venture capitalist. He’s creating products and services that are making a profound impact on humanity. From creating water out of thin air to bringing “neural reality” to human-machine interactions, he’s creating large scale solutions to big problems and saving lives around the planet.

Abe is an “accidental entrepreneur”. He started out as an attorney but wound up as an executive in the companies he was representing. Along the way he’s crossed paths with and helped the founders of dozens of companies and been involved in over $1 billion dollars of transactions. From helping the founders of Skype in their early days, to the King of Saudi Arabia to speaking to the council of Nobel Laureates on behalf of the King of Morocco, Abe has found himself in situations that few people could even imagine.

His work has won innovation awards from the Wall Street Journal and KPMG as well as the Artemis Prize. He’s won contracts from the Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin, the United States Army, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security.

Learn why Abe looks for ideas and companies that are pulled by the markets rather than having to push your goods and services out. Here about how to gauge how well a company is doing just by walking around its offices or factories. There is so much packed into this short interview, it’s a must listen.

This interview was recorded on January 23, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.

For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link.
To participate in our monthly Bay Area Ventures Conversation of the Month visit www.BAVConversation.com