Sand Hill Road

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Garry Tan, co-founder of Initialized Capital about his journey as a content creator, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital.  

00:00 Intro 

02:02 Garry's Twitter game 

06:00 Keeping up the content cascade 

08:12 Getting started on YouTube 

10:50 Paying it forward at scale 

14:45 Respecting the audience 

18:00 Content creation is like building a startup 

21:13 Garry as a founder 

25:14 Founder "what ifs"  

28:26 Garry as a VC

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs about building a database unicorn backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Benchmark, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. After recording the episode, Cockroach Labs raised $160m on a $2bn valuation in January 2021, reflecting the explosive growth and product innovation of 2020.  

00:00​ Intro 

00:56 Cockroach Labs elevator pitch 

04:29 Getting the band together 

09:24​ Exit to Square and paddling back into the startup surf 

11:44​ First version of CockroachDB 

14:17​ Open core model 

20:43​ Relicensing Cockroach DB 

25:39​ Open source as top of the funnel tool  

30:25 Series A from Benchmark and Sequoia Capital 

35:15 Series A extension from Index 

37:01 Late state startup life at Series D  

39:44 CockroachDB technology 

48:11 Synchronous replication and CockroachDB 

53:50 CAP Theorem and CockroachDB  

58:10 CockroachDB and Kubernetes  

1:01:10 Spencer's workout regime

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sean Henry, co-founder and CEO of STORD about building a digital warehouse and distribution startup backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Susa Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund from Atlanta, Georgia.  

01:11 Announcing the Series B led by Founders Fund  

02:57 What solution does STORD offer?  

04:27​ Sean Henry's entrepreneurial journey from childhood 

13:00​ STORD business model 

19:50​ Solving the two-sided marketplace problem 

25:35​ Competitive landscape 

28:55​ Software-enabled marketplace: Software as a wedge to get supply side 

35:15 STORD pricing  

38:50 STORD as a distributed logistics and storage systems 

45:15 Acquisition of Cove Logistics in summer of 2020 

48:31 Raising money from Silicon Valley as an Atlanta based startup 

54:45 What's next for STORD

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic), Partner at Unusual Ventures about his growth journey at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and Wealthfront.  

00:37 Growth at Facebook 

03:50​ Growth at Twitter 

05:31​ Growth at Quora  

09:25​ Growth at Wealthfront 

12:11​ Unusual Ventures 

16:25​ A balanced approach to growth 

21:16 Shipping the org chart 

24:29​ Running experiments 

28:05​ Product development for innovation 

31:40​ Wonderschool 

35:22 Ride Report 

38:22​ Finding out more about Andy

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner and Cameron Weibel are joined by Joey Parsons, founder of effx to talk about moving from the monolith to a microservices architecture.  

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In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by Caroline Winnett, Executive Director at UC Berkeley's accelerator and incubator SkyDeck.   

01:51 What is SkyDeck? 

02:57 Demo days during Covid-19 

03:35 Caroline's founder journey at NeuroFocus 

05:24 Joining SkyDeck and setting up the SkyDeck Fund 

07:23 Berkeley SkyDeck carry split 

08:35 Berkeley SkyDeck LP base 

09:50 SkyDeck vs. YC, 500 Startups, Techstars 

12:11 Cohort profile and eligibility requirements 

14:37 Accelerator milestones 

15:22 Breakout success stories 

16:26 Berkeley within Silicon Valley ecosystem 

18:33 Future of SkyDeck

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Richard Mabey, co-founder of London-based legaltech startup Juro, backed by Union Square Ventures.  

02:01 Magic circle years at Freshfields 

03:35 Catching the entrepreneurial bug 

05:15 Transitioning to legaltech via LegalZoom 

07:26 Meeting co-founder Pavel Kovalevich 

08:43 The Juro Minimum Viable Product (MVP) 

09:54 Getting the first customer 

13:15 Finding customer pains and building the core product features 

15:06 Core feature set: painkiller vs. vitamin 

17:05 Early pricing 

18:34 Selling Saas to corporate lawyers 

19:59 Tech stack of Juro 

21:11 Seedcamp accelerator 

22:40 $750k Seed Round led by Point Nine Capital 

24:24 $2m Seed extension round 

25:15 $5m Series A led by Union Square Ventures 

26:15 Getting a warm intro at USV 

27:01 Deploying the Series A 

28:12 Navigating through the Corona pandemic

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Mike Ghaffary, GP at Canvas Ventures.

00:00 Intro 

02:21 Swiss army knife of education 

04:04 Business school after Dotcom bubble burst  

05:06 Founding Stitcher 

06:14 Focusing on news 

08:03 Becoming CEO of Eat24 

09:39 Growing Eat24 to $700m top line 

10:45 Food delivery wars 

11:55 Grubhub Partnership that never launched 

13:12 Jeremy Stoppelman and Steve Jobs on search on mobile 

14:30 Becoming a successful angel investor 

15:35 Making the most expensive iPhone app ever 

16:37 Angel investment in Strava 

17:20 Angel investment in Superhuman 

17:50 Joining Social Capital 

19:58 Mike’s experience at Social Capital 

20:28 CloudKitchens investment 

21:30 HubHaus investment 

22:37 Joining Canvas Ventures 

24:04 Flyhomes investment 

27:52 Marketplace Deep Dive 

28:27 Lenny Rachitsky: focus on supply or demand side? 

30:06 Thomas Eisenmann: Two-sided networks 

30:57 Uber: demand side vs. supply side subsidies 

32:09 Local vs. global network effects 

33:24 Sarah Tavel (Benchmark) on unlocking new supply

34:21 Local delivery war zones 

35:36 Uber Eats entering the market 

37:04 Public vs. privately held delivery war contenders 

38:54 Marketplace take rate 

40:38 Out-of bound marketplace take rates 

41:57 Zero percent take rate 

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Moisey Uretzky,  co-founder of Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure unicorn built for developers and headquartered in New York City. In this episode we journal the founder journey from getting into Techstars to scaling the company with venture debt to a recent unicorn valuation. 

00:00 Setting the scene 

03:55 The Uretzky family 

05:22 Roots of intellectual curiosity 

07:15 Mathematics and first principles thinking 

09:18 Startups before Digital Ocean 

14:16 Finding co-founders on Craigslist 

19:16 Digital Ocean MVP 

23:12 First major Product Iteration: 5$ SSD Plan 

29:36 Getting into Techstars 

32:35 Raising the Seed from IA Ventures 

37:19 Raising the Series A from a16z 

42:28 Using venture debt to scale up 

47:19 Scaling up Digital Ocean 

54:22 Competition with big tech cloud providers 

59:00 Running Digital Ocean during the Corona pandemic

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Brendan Wales, general partner at e.ventures on investing in data infrastructure unicorn Segment at the Seed and passing on TikTok (then Musical.ly) at the Series A.

2:10 First job running a Golf shop while at college 

3:20 First job out of college in 2009 and entrepreneurial ambitions 

4:29 'I gotta get to the Valley' finding Zozi's on Crunchbase 

6:06 Joining e.ventures in 2012 

7:52 History and roots of e.ventures  

9:53 e.ventures current fund and global footprint 

11:10 Investing in Segment.io at the Seed along with Kleiner Perkins 

15:08 Consumer-tech perspective on Segment 

16:02 Passing on Musical.ly/TikTok 

17:30 Warm introductions vs. metric-based discovery (digital exhaust) 

20:30 Metrics requested from Musical.ly/TikTok founding team / key consumer social metrics 

22:17 Machiavellian founder perspective on Musical.ly/TikTok consumer retention 

24:35 Ex-post reflections why they passed on Musical.ly/TikTok 

26:35 Comparison to the recent Clubhouse a16z-led Series A 

28:50 Venture capital returns over the lifetime of a fund 

31:10 Pattern matching for early markups 

32:58 This Week's Seed Companies 

35:24 EVA Growth Index / X-Factors 

37:37  Nacelle: headless CMS for Shopify stores, backed by Index and Accomplice 

39:05  Most recent investment: Airvet, $14m Series A led by Canvas Ventures