After interviewing Janet Comenos, CEO of Spotted, for Episode 21, I asked her to introduce me to one of her favorite people in the startup world. That night, she connected me with Sarah Hodges, Partner at Pillar VC. Literally 10 seconds into our coffee meeting I realized that A.) she's an absolute force of nature, and B.) I had to figure out a way to share her insights with all of you.

After spending years as a a business, strategy, and marketing leader at a number of successful startups, Sarah is now making early stage investments in machine intelligence, AI, ML, robotics, and blockchain. All these subjects were fairly new to Sarah at the outset of her time at Pillar -- she refers to her first partner meeting as if it was spoken in another language! Over the past two years, she has gone deep into these new technologies with hundreds of founders and has been a driving force for the blockchain movement in Boston.

In this episode, we played a fun game called "Pass or Play" in which she shared:

- A cool startup in the region she wishes she had money in.

- The most satisfying round she's been able to get into

- An under-rated city for startups

- An overhyped technology that needs to cool off a bit

- The best founder to get a beer with

- Which founder she'd go skydiving with

- Her biggest fear as a venture capitalist

- How she looks at competition with VCs for deals

- Whether she gets stressed when making contrarian investments

- Her perspective on ICOs

Enjoy "Funding Friday," a fun conversation with Sarah Hodges.

You can reach Sarah anytime @Hodges on Twitter.