LA Venture

With AI enabling copycat products to be brought to market incredibly quickly, the ability to scale and find unique distribution is the new moat. Arteen explains distribution lessons learned and much more from his vantage as Fika's returning partner.

Nanxi Liu shares how she deliberately cultivated an extraordinary network. In interviewing, as in networking, Nanxi looks for excellence. This talent for spotting excellence helped lead her to a very successful sale of her first company, Enplug. She's now Co-CEO of Blaze.tech and a Partner at XFactor Ventures. 

LA native Katia Ameri turned her passion for community-building into a dream job at A16Z and then created #LATechWeek, a tech phenomenon. Katia tells the story of what made Tech Week successful and how she and Andrew Chen launched the first tech week in 6 weeks with 30 events and then built a platform that now supports thousands of events in 3 cities just two years later.

Matter Venture Partners recently launched their $311M Fund I. Mel Tang was previously CFO at Ring and Demand Media. In this episode he shares why he believes the future of tech lies in hardware and how to set up systems to enable good decision making and successful growth.

From side hustle to industry disruptor: John Tabis shares how his side hustle turned into Bouqs, a leading flower delivery company. Now at M13, he’s helping others bring big ideas to life!

Shrina Kurani is an investor actively writing checks to help catalyze emerging managers as part of IBank’s Venture Capital Access Program.  Shrina and the team at IBank are happy to be a part of a fund's first close and they participate with meaningful capital ($5M-$10M). It is easy to apply to the IBank program and Shrina says that she hopes to be "bombarded" with decks from amazing fund managers.

Venture capital is a team sport masquerading as an individual sport.  Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, partner at Canaan Partners, tells us why he thinks VC partnerships resemble a swim team.  

We also talk about space and defense tech, the evolution of venture capital, how generational transition can work well and why a thoughtful reserve strategy has outsized leverage, especially in early stage venture firms.

More growth rounds in 2024!  Avery Rosin is writing $50-300M checks for Lead Edge Capital. He thinks PE firms are going to continue being acquisitive, companies are going to reorient around the Rule of 40 and more reasons for his optimism.

Have VCs overreacted against investing in consumer?  Shamin Walsh has a 10x fund and numerous case studies to show that consumer can provide huge returns when done right. 

Shamin shares how to win when investing in consumer (eg: invest in a cat litter company that raises $1.5M and exits for $500M!!)