Sand Hill Road

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Didomoi co-founder and CTO Jawad Stouli about building consent management platform Didomi for the perfect privacy wave.  

00:00 Intro 

00:46 Early days of Didomi 

03:29 Fighting a US patent troll 

08:14 Building the Didomi MVP 

12:18 Developer-centric platform approach 

14:46 Early costumers: self-service vs. SDRs 

18:22 Didomi data architecture 

24:02 Bootstrapping Didomi 

27:43 Raising the Series A 

30:37 Raising the Series B 

33:35 Scaling up 

35:55 Competition 

41:29 Call to action

00:00 Intro 

00:24 Welcome to Miami 

01:08 Operators Podcast 

03:21 Finding the right guests 

06:54 Delian’s founder/operator 

08:22 Cohort analysis with Keith at Square 

10:30 Nightingale  

12:24 Operating experience at Teespring 

14:24 Varda Space 

17:45 Splitting time between Varda and FF 

19:45 Varda Space incubation 

23:50 Delian as an investor at Founders Fund 

27:07 Faire 

30:56 Tiger Global and the rise of crossover funds 

35:31 Hyperscaling 

36:45 Moving to Miami  

39:45 Keeping up with Delian

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Remote.com founder Job van der Voort about building the future of remote work.

0:00 Intro 

00:49 The first two years of Remote 

02:19 Preparing for the perfect Storm at Gitlab 

06:17 Leaving Gitlab 

10:47 Business model 

14:10 Legal war chest 

15:20 Fintech-payment layer 

16:20 SaaS layer 

17:52 Pricing 

19:47 Competitive landscape 

24:12 Seed round 

25:42 Series A 

28:37 Remote best practices 

31:52 Enabling random bump ins 

34:07 The remote company handbook or “bible” 

35:23 Remote company stack 

36:20 Asynchronous vs. synchronous work 

40:19 Remote for startups

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures about his journey as a founder, angel investor and co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures.  

00:00 Intro 

01:11 Guest appearance on a Justin Bieber/Ariana Grande music video 

03:16 The “pronoia” mindest 

03:16 The “pronoia” mindest 

05:04 Sheel’s background 

07:56 The Pitch 

12:12 Investing with founder authority 

14:16 500 Startups fintech fund 

18:25 Fintech thesis and sector evolution 

22:09 Fintech backend 

23:43 Better Tommorrow Ventures 

29:24 Differentiation 

32:52 Reserve capital 

34:52 The good, the bad and the ugly investments 

37:40 Sheel-defining investment 

41:10 …the bad and the ugly

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Reeves Wiedeman, author of "Billion Dollar Loser: the epic rise and fall of WeWork".  

00:00 Adam's intro 

01:11 Intro 

01:38 Adam Neumann 

04:11 Adam's art of persuasion 

05:41 Book title 

08:10 Writing process 

13:01 WeWork evolution and business model 

16:21 Tech vs. real estate company 

19:25 WeWork community 

22:01 WeWork funding journey 

25:11 JPMorgan round 

26:50 Masa and the Softbank round 

30:39 Acquisitions and side businesses 

33:16 Valuation and comps 

36:59 Public persona and IPOs 

38:50 WeWork today 

40:07 Staying in touch with Reeves

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Kyle Lui, Partner at DCM, about the recent IPO roll that DCM has been on. The Menlo Park-based firm has generated a 61x return on investments that have gone public in the past two years. Kuaishou is the standout, with its market cap to entry valuation at 2,000x.  

00:00​​ Intro 

00:50 Who is Kyle Lui 

01:33 Intro to DCM  

03:30 DCM IX and the A-Fund  

05:36 Differentiation through US-Asia angle 

07:45 DCM's Japan strategy 

08:48 DCM's recent roll 

10:00 Biggest winner Kuaishou 

11:07 All three sides of the table 

14:01 Choicepass 

15:36 First 5 years at DCM 

18:52 Docsend investment 

21:47 Lime investment 

23:57 Him’s and Hers investment 

26:05 D2C unit economics 

28:13 Keeping up with what Kyle is up to 

29:33 Kyle's investment focus areas

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Russ Heddleston, founder of Docsend. The episode was recorded one month before the announcement that DocSend would be acquired by Dropbox for $165m.  

00:00​​ Intro 

00:37 What is Docsend 

01:51 Selling Pursuit to Facebook in a talent acquisition 

04:12 Leaving Facebook and starting Docsend 

07:03 Product idea 

09:00 Fundraising for Pursuit 

12:53 Fundraising for Docsend 

14:17 Series A 

17:34 Docsend product 

20:39 Initial startup client segment 

22:29 Docsend fundraising network 

25:20 Expanding from initial client segment 

29:51 Docsend Spaces 

33:07 Pricing strategy 

37:50 Next steps for Docsend 

39:50 Competing with Intralinks 

41:00 Scaling up Docsend 

42:29 Remote work at Docsend 

43:29 Call to action

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Ali Tamaseb, partner at DCVC, about his recently launched book "Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups".  

00:00​​ Intro 

01:00 Who is Ali? 

03:02 Spark of motivation for the Super Founders book 

05:49 Primary data collection 

08:13 Data set: timeframe and selection criteria 

10:28 The age of super founders 

13:04 Optimal number of co-founders 

16:12 Founder education 

17:45 Did all of them go to Stanford? 

19:38 Pre-founding work experience 

21:08 Definition of the "super founder" 

25:38 Painkiller vs. vitamin products 

27:14 Startup competition 

29:50 Defensibility factor 

31:44 Venture funding vs. bootstrapping 

34:41 Capital requirements 

35:46 Startup fundraising 

37:15 Time to hatch

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Vivek Saraswat, who has been a venture investor at Mayfield at the time of the recording and previously a product leader at Docker/VMware/AWS. Since recording this episode, Vivek has joined Immersa as a founding VP of product.    

00:00 Intro 

00:56 Who is Vivek? 

03:12 Joining Mayfield 

05:07 Portfolio companies 

07:08 Covid impact on commercial open-source 

10:17 Go-to-market (GTM) 

14:13 Managing product roadmaps in open-source 

17:10 Dedicating to bottoms-up GTM 

20:49 Hooks and upsells 

24:54 Optimal lines between community and commercial 

29:22 Firewalls between community and commercial  

31:51 Inculcating community-commercial in the organization

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm about his journey as a mega maker, bootstrapping his podcast hosting and analytics platform to $1m+ in ARR in less than 3 years.  

00:00​​​ Intro 

01:55​​ Getting Real 

04:30​ Business is like surfing 

7:43​ Selling ice cream on a busy beach 

11:33​ Why your business idea matters 

14:17​ The nature of the megamaker 

19:46​ Grow slow, grow real 

24:53​ Success is gradual, then sudden 

31:10​ VC attention to podcasting 

38:00​ Podcast hosting and analytics space 

44:20​ First version of Transitor.fm 

50:45​ Dealing with depression as a solopreneur 

54:48​ Finding out more about Justin