Fast Frontiers

Today we're bringing you my conversation with Steve Santamaria, CEO of Folio Photonics in Cleveland. We dive into Steve's story and background as a boomerang, someone who moved back to Cleveland after working on the West Coast. We're also going to talk about how Steve manages the relationships with his board of directors using a Japanese concept called nemawashi. The biggest takeaway is the value of boomerangs to startups in our region. The experience of working in the coastal, hyper-growth environment along with the connections that come with it can have a huge impact.

Today we're bringing you my conversation with Niki Scevak, co-founder and partner of Blackbird Ventures in Melbourne, Australia. We're going to talk about the Australian tech ecosystem, which was virtually nonexistent in 2010 when Niki and his co-founder Rick Baker started raising Blackbird fund number one. And now today they have over $1.3 billion under management across four funds. Blackbird's investing thesis is that they value the relationship with the company first and often start by investing early before product and revenue and follow the company through every round of venture financing.

Today we're bringing you my conversation with Bruce Vojak, researcher, author, and managing director of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors. We're going to dive into some of Bruce's learnings that came out of his writing, Serial Innovators. Bruce and his coauthors immerse themselves in the problems of a people view of innovation, rather than a process and structure or cultural view of innovation. We're also going to dive into the concept of VUCA, V-U-C-A, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, a term that came out of the military. It's a concept that is invaluable to help you navigate and excel, even in the middle of chaos.

Today we're bringing you my conversation with Kevin Maney, advisor of Category Design and co-author of Play Bigger. In this episode, we're going to dive into the learnings that came out of writing Play Bigger, a book that I recommend to all of our startups. Kevin talks about how to define and own a category, as well as the timeline of successful companies that ultimately go public. So what is category design? While most companies start out with a product idea, Kevin tells us successful companies start out by designing the need and the category. So this involves asking a really simple question. What problems do you really want to solve? Spend the time defining the problem, finding that category and defining it, and aligning your team to help drive the process. If you set that North Star early, you have a better chance of attracting customers and convincing others that your journey is worth it. Ultimately you can become a category king.

Today we're bringing you my conversation with Mackey Craven, partner at OpenView. In this episode, we'll dive into Mackey's exploration mindset and how his academic experience impacted his work in venture capital. And the biggest theme that I want you to take away from this today is the concept made famous by Jeff Bezos called disagree and commit. It's something that's used often among partners in venture firms. Not everybody agrees with an investment idea, but once the investment's made everybody is pulling in the same direction. This is a concept that is very useful and helpful in any organizational setting, so I hope you can find some things to take away from this discussion.