Outliers with Daniel Scrivner: Explore the Greatest Innovators, Founders, and Investors

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In Episode #123, we deconstruct Steve Vassallo's peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. Steve is General Partner at Foundation Capital. We cover translating non-human languages, enlightened procrastination, and his insatiable curiosity.

“Go deep, go early, go big.” – Steve Vassallo

EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED)

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/steve-vassallo-playbook/ 

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/steve-vassallo-playbook-transcript/ 

CHAPTERS

In this episode, we deconstruct Steve Vassallo’s peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. In it we cover:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:03:52 – Translating non-human languages

00:06:35– Having insatiable curiosity and a deep love of building hard things

00:08:27 – Investment philosophy can be distilled down to conviction

00:10:21 – You can always find a way to build something you’ve already sold, but you can’t always sell something you’ve already built

00:12:08 – Enlightened procrastination

00:14:44 – Thinking, Fast and Slow

00:17:10 – Invest in people you want to work with

00:21:01 – Take stock of what you’re granting your attention to

ABOUT STEVE VASSALLO

Steve Vassallo has been a general partner at Foundation Capital for the last 15 years. At Foundation, he's led the firm's investments in Stripe, Cerebra, Sunrun, Loft Orbital, Solana, and many other incredible firms. Steve is also the author of The Way to Design, which is a guide to how companies of all sizes should approach design. The book is a compendium of interviews with more than 50 designers, design scholars and tech founders who have gotten design right from day one.

Steve began his career at IDEO where he worked closely with IDEO's founder, David Kelly, to research design and deliver innovative products and services across industries. Because of Steve's early experiences at IDEO he's drawn to product-centric founders and has a wonderful knack for bringing design and engineering together to create incredible products.

In this episode, we cover why Steve has been fascinated with the wicked problems that exist in Crypto and why he thinks we're still in the earliest innings there. He talks about his work with the earth species project, whose goal is to decode non-human language in mammals of all sizes from whales to monkeys. Talks about how he combines insatiable curiosity and a deep love of building hard things in his investing work. He shares his advice for founders and investors, and he shares his favorite books, including why he loves Thinking Fast and Slow and Poor Charlie's Almanack.

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ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY

Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

Website: https://www.outlieracademy.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/outlieracademy

ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER

Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts.

Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner

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Listen to one of our favorite moments from tomorrow’s 20 Minute Playbook episode featuring Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital. In it, Steve Vassallo shares his favorite books, tools, habits, and more.

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In Episode #120, we explore reinventing a well-established venture capital firm. We’re joined by Steve Vassallo, General Partner at Foundation Capital. We cover Minimum Awesome Product, the prepared mind vs. open mind, and learnings from tearing down and rebuilding an investment firm.

“The best product matters, but it is not what defines a generationally important company.” – Steve Vassallo

EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED)

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/foundation-capital-steve-vassallo 

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/foundation-capital-steve-vassallo-transcript 

CHAPTERS

This episode is our definitive guide to reinventing a venture capital firm. In it we cover:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:39 – From electro mechanical engineering to product design

00:06:22 – Interdisciplinary innovation and missionary misfits

00:10:24 – How investing snuck into Steve’s career

00:15:33 – Working at the intersection of building and investing

00:19:24 – A 15-year window into the investment world

00:24:45 – Tearing down and rebuilding an investment firm

00:39:04 – Identifying a firm’s turning point

00:41:21 – Going down the rabbit hole of crypto and enticing investors to follow

00:51:35 – The prepared mind vs. open mind

00:54:44 – Building the best product matters, but it doesn’t guarantee success

00:57:56 – The Minimum Awesome Product and evolving product-market fit

01:02:07 – Advice for new founders

ABOUT FOUNDATION CAPITAL

Steve Vassallo is General Partner at Foundation Capital and author of "The Way to Design." In this episode, we explore what it's like to reinvent a venture capital firm. Foundation Capital was founded in 1995, 27 years ago by Bill Elmore, Catherine Gold, and Jim Anderson. One of the foundation's early claims to fame was that it was one of the first investors in Netflix back in the early 2000s. 

This episode is our definitive guide to reinventing a venture capital firm. In it, we cover Steve's early years bringing design, product, and engineering together at IDEO, and what that taught him about building successful products and companies, the early warning signs he saw that made it clear Foundation Capital needed to be reinvented, how Foundation rediscovered who they were and who they wanted to be as a team, how they changed the way they operated and made investment decisions to giving partners more latitude to invest in the ideas they thought could be massive companies in the years to come, how they began making crypto investments, which led to massive wins in Solana and Brave by making small bets and winning over LP support as the wins added up.

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ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY

Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

Website: https://www.outlieracademy.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/outlieracademy

ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER

Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts.

Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner

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Listen to one of our favorite moments from tomorrow’s Spotlight episode featuring Foundation Capital with Steve Vassallo.

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In Episode #111, we deconstruct Illia Polosukhin's peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. Illia is the co-founder of NEAR Protocol and Unchain Fund. We cover why context switching is a necessary skill for founders, Illia’s recommended books, and the nuance of the Russian language in writing.

“Find a mentor who's a few years ahead of you, like not too far, but like two, three years ahead of you, because those are people who still remember what they were doing in your position. And so they will be able to give you the most useful advice.” – Illia Polosukhin

EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED)

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/illia-polosukhin-playbook 

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/illia-polosukhin-playbook-transcript 

CHAPTERS

In this episode, we deconstruct Illia Polosukhin’s peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. In it we cover:

(00:00:00) – Introduction

(00:01:59) – Designing social graph in Web3

(00:04:01) – Why context switching is a necessary skill for founders

(00:05:51) – Finding mentors who are just a few years ahead of you in business

(00:10:56) – Building a great decentralized ecosystem requires high-level, small, agile teams

(00:13:29) – Books Illia recommends

(00:16:59) – The nuance of the Russian language in writing

ABOUT ILLIA POLOSUKHIN

Illia Polosukhin is co-founder of NEAR Protocol. NEAR is a layer one blockchain that's incredibly fast, has very low transaction fees and is climate neutral, in part because of its proof of stake model.

It's traded on crypto exchanges under the ticker symbol NEAR, and has a market cap of just under $5 billion today. From 2020 through 2021, the developers working in NEARs ecosystem, that's everyone building applications on top of their blockchain quadrupled, making NEAR the second fastest growing chain behind only Solana. 

In this episode, Illia shares why he loves running daily and how it helps him remember to just put one foot in front of the other to accomplish anything; why he loves the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and how he applies that principle in his life and work; why he's fascinated with the concept of a social graph and how to build it into the NEAR protocol and why it's so important for building a better world in Web3; why he thinks everyone should find mentors that are two to three years ahead of them in terms of where they'd like to be and why he'd tell his younger self to focus on speed and velocity shipping quickly in everything that he does.

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Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1523851182

ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY

Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

Website: https://www.outlieracademy.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/outlieracademy

ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER

Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts.

Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner

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Listen to one of our favorite moments from tomorrow’s 20 Minute Playbook episode featuring Illia Polosukhin of NEAR Protocol. In it, Illia Polosukhin shares his favorite books, tools, habits, and more.

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In Episode #108, we explore building a global blockchain that’s high-speed, climate neutral, and low-fee. We’re joined by Illia Polosukhin, NEAR Protocol’s Co-Founder. We cover why proof of stake beats proof of work, how NEAR approached scaling, and how Illia raised more than $10M to help fund aid in war-torn Ukraine. 

“For me, web3 is not about decentralization. I think decentralization is just a tool. What it is about is low switching costs.” – Illia Polosukhin

EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED)

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/near-protocol-illia-polosukhin-spotlight 

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/near-protocol-illia-polosukhin-spotlight-transcript 

CHAPTERS

This episode is our definitive guide to building a layer-one blockchain that’s incredibly fast, has very low transaction fees, and is climate neutral. In it we cover:

(00:00:00) – Introduction

(00:02:35) – How NEAR Protocol is imagining your world

(00:04:46) – Why decentralization is just a tool

(00:09:14) – Dethroning monopolies and leveling the playing field

(00:14:02) – NEAR Protocol’s origin with scaling crowdsourcing

(00:20:18) – Lack of intellectual honesty in crypto

(00:24:19) – NEAR’s approach to sharding

(00:31:03) – The importance of bringing the community into decision making

(00:37:47) – How the co-founder’s role can evolve from centralized to decentralized

(00:43:17) – Illia’s Web3 mindmap and staying decentralized while preserving privacy

(00:46:36) – NEAR’s approach to sustainability in blockchain

(00:49:46) – Founders: Build credibility and ship fast

(00:54:19) – Handling fear and anxiety when building in crypto: Keep calm and build on

(00:58:52) – The Unchained Fund and helping Ukraine

ABOUT NEAR PROTOCOL

Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. NEAR is a layer-one blockchain that’s incredibly fast, has very low transaction fees, and is climate neutral—in part because of its Proof of Stake model. It’s traded on crypto exchanges under the ticker symbol NEAR and has a market cap of just under $5B today. From 2020 through 2021, the developers working in NEAR’s ecosystem—building applications on top of their blockchain—quadrupled, making NEAR the second-fastest growing chain behind Solana. 

Illia is an incredibly impressive founder, but more importantly, he’s an incredibly thoughtful engineer, leader, and community builder who has built something incredible slowly and methodically, one step at a time.

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Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1523851182

ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY

Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

Website: https://www.outlieracademy.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/outlieracademy

ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER

Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts.

Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner

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Listen to one of our favorite moments from tomorrow’s Spotlight episode featuring NEAR Protocol with Illia Polosukhin.

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In Episode #107, we deconstruct Howie Schwab's peak performance playbook—from their favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on their life. Howie is the Lead Portfolio Manager for Emerging Markets Growth of Driehaus Capital. We cover regime shifts in the market and obsessing over failures.

“In terms of how we invest, I think integrating and overlaying macro as well as behavioral components, not simply wedding ourselves to this bottom up, here's our specific template and it's time tested is really important.” – Howie Schwab

EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED)

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/howie-schwab-driehaus-capital-playbook-show-notes 

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT

https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/howie-schwab-driehaus-capital-playbook-transcript 

CHAPTERS

In this episode, we deconstruct Howie Schwab’s peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. In it we cover:

(00:01:41) – Regime shifts in the market

(00:06:51) – Learning from investing mentors

(00:10:08) – Great investors obsess over their failures

(00:12:48) – Advice for young investors

(00:16:43) – Howie’s investment philosophy

(00:24:24) – Challenging yourself

ABOUT HOWIE SCHWAB

Howie Schwab manages more than 5 billion in emerging market growth funds for Driehaus which is a firm that's based in Chicago and where Howie has worked for the last 20 years. At Driehaus, Howie is the lead portfolio manager for the emerging market's growth. And he's a portfolio manager for the emerging market, small cap equity and emerging markets opportunities.

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Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1523851182

ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY

Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

Website: https://www.outlieracademy.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/outlieracademy

ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER

Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts.

Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner

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