This week on episode 4, we talked about:

• Jake's train station
• A disappointing dialog at the end of Diablo 3
• What’s so incredibly great about hoodies
• Teddy Ruxpin, the original edtech product for kids
• Curiosity Labs, a Character portfolio company building educational AI companions for kids
• The founding story of YouTube Kids
• Getting new product ideas from real-world customer behavior
• Two different ways to pitch the same company
• Should founders follow “best practices” when pitching investors or try to stand out?
• Fathom’s Series A
• How we found Fathom (and then decided to invest)
• Authenticity in sales
• Why we go out of our way to pitch ourselves to founders
• Our Design Sprint with Fathom
• Almond butter in oatmeal
• A great book: Against the Gods
• And much more

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Chapters

00:00 A diabolical dialog box
03:54 The importance of throughline
05:45 Where is Jake's sweatshirt?!
07:39 How sweatshirts work
09:13 Teddy Ruxpin
11:24 Building the pitch for Curiosity Labs
17:04 How a side project became YouTube Kids
22:49 A better way to pitch VCs
33:56 How Fathom got to Series A
40:30 How VCs do outbound sales
45:48 How authenticity shows up in products
53:21 Good beans
57:14 An extended self-congratulatory ad for Character and Design Sprints