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Tyson is the founder and CEO of Notice, an investment platform that gives customers real-time access to private company data. He has an impressively diverse entrepreneurial background, including founding Affinity Circle, a professional networking and job-finding platform, a software consulting business, and even a pineapple farm in Uganda before becoming a partner at Fideras, a late-stage boutique investment advisory firm that specializes in shareholder liquidity and capital raises. While at Fideras, he realized the massive pricing inefficiencies of privately held companies and set out to build a solution. Notice’s team has already grown to ~8 people, and the company has chosen to build their team remotely for greater employee flexibility and broaden their access to talent.‌

Today on the podcast we discuss:

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Sohail is the Founder & CEO of Destiny (D/XYZ), an investment management company that provides public access to the private tech markets. Prior to founding Destiny, Sohail was the Founder and CEO of Forge, a global private securities marketplace building trading, custody, and data infrastructure to meet the needs of high-growth unicorn companies, employees, and investors. Prior to starting Forge in 2014, he was among the youngest founders to go through Y Combinator as an eighteen-year-old. Over the years, Sohail has advised and invested in over 150 startups, including notable startups such as Rappi, Rippling, Notion, Retool, Astranis, Superhuman, Mercury, and Zenefits. He continues to invest in seed stage companies through S2 Capital, and serves as its Founding Partner. He previously managed mobile product at Zynga, joined mobile advertising firm Chartboost as its second engineering hire, and has held roles at Google and the MIT Media Lab.

Today on the podcast we discuss:

1. Sim & Hiive Intro (1:15)

2. Sohail & D/XYZ Intro (4:21)

3. What has gone into starting The Destiny100? (6:28)

4. How does The Destiny100 interact with the rest of the market? (7:34)

5. What does the marketplace look like? Who are players in the private fund market? (9:26)

6. Why did Sohail choose to go the route of reaching unaccredited investors and how do they make that profitable? (12:26)

7. How do they balance the access piece with the profitability piece at Hiive? (16:48)

8. How does D/XYZ approach the oxymoron of making the private market more transparent? (20:06)

9. How does the pricing work? How do they balance the whims of the public market with their private assets? (25:49)

10. Sohail’s Thoughts on Democratization of the Markets (37:57)

11. How does management of the private companies react to the pitch of D/XYZ? (40:46)

12. Sohail’s and Sim’s Thoughts on Best Practices (50:29)

13. Closing Remarks & The Future of D/XYZ (1:05:47)

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Justin is a Managing Partner at Recharge Capital and leads venture investments. Previously, Justin founded Chaos Ventures and led over 150+ venture capital transactions spanning pre-seed through Series A. His past investment portfolio covers fintech, healthcare, and consumer with an emphasis on technology application such as AI, synthetic biology, and blockchain. Prior to Chaos Ventures, Justin held investment roles at Tusk Ventures, Argo Ventures, and Providence Equity Partners. Justin began his career in leveraged finance investment banking at Jefferies and audit professional at Ernst & Young. He is a licensed CPA.

Today on the podcast we discuss:

1. Justin’s Background + Recharge (1:14)

2. Keeping CAC Low While Addressing LTV (7:37)

3. Process for Deciding What Areas to Invest In (13:46)

4. Recharge’s End-to-End Model; How Their Cayman Holding Companies Function as Operating Companies (15:09)

5. Order of Operations for Deciding on a Venture Investment (17:35)

6. The Relationships Between Recharge and Their Investments (21:26)

7. How Justin Prioritizes His Time Across His Business Ventures (23:37)

8. Justin's Outreach/Acquisition Process (30:24)

9. What was the Pitch for Recharge? (42:12)

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Michael has amassed over a decade of experience at the earliest stages of deep tech venture creation. He has partnered with Founders on 75+ pre-seed investments via funds totaling over $150M and has held over a dozen board roles supporting Founders going from zero-to-one. His successful track record with inception-stage ventures has included TubeMogul (IPO 2014) and BuildingConnected, which sold to AutoDesk for $275M in 2018. In addition, he’s invested in nineteen pre-seed startups that have since grown to $100M+ in enterprise value. Notable companies include Rapid Robotics, Deepscribe, Crowdbotics, Embroker among others. A proud alum and continuing supporter of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Michael graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University with dual undergraduate degrees in computer science and economics.

Today on the podcast we discuss:

1. Michael Intro (1:32)

2. The Beginnings of Bee Partners (4:43)

3. Thoughts on Fund Construction and Fund Sizes (7:27)

4. Approach to Building Teams (12:56)

5. What Are the Controllable Factors When Thinking About Fund Strategy (16:00)

6. In Depth on Deep Tech (20:33)

7. Michael’s Long Term Outlook on Sourcing (24:42)

8. Which Came First, Michael’s Focus on Pre-Seed Investing or Deep Tech Investing? (26:55)

9. What Has Changed in VC in the Past 15 Years? (32:02)

10. The Future of Bee Partners (35:42)

11. Michael’s Take on the Future of VC (39:42)

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Ed Suh is the Founder and Managing Partner of Alpine Ventures, a San Francisco based technology venture capital firm. Ed previously led seed, early stage, and growth stage investments in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade across two prominent multi-stage venture firms: Goodwater Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Ed has backed multiple unicorn startups including Monzo, Everlywell, Jasper, Greenlight, and Stash. Previously, Ed was Head of Business Operations at Stitcher, the leading independent podcasting app, acquired by SiriusXM for $325 million and backed by Benchmark, NEA, and New Atlantic Ventures, as well as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch focused on technology M&A. Ed was also a member of the original growth team at Facebook, and a software engineer at Plaxo and Citadel Investment Group.

Today on the podcast we discuss:

1. What is Revere? (1:13)

2. Ed’s Background (4:33)

3. More About Alpine Ventures (8:48)

4. Network Driven Fundraising vs. Data Driven Fundraising Approaches (13:53)

5. Which came first, a love for data or a love for consumer? (21:05)

6. What is Alpine's stack for their data-driven investing approach? (22:32)

7. How is Alpine setting benchmarks to compare and analyze companies? (27:53)

8. How does data allow Alpine to be ahead of the curve on what early stage startups are going to pop? (31:30)

9. What have the reactions been from founders as a result of Alpine’s outbound process? And more on the founder/VC relationship. (37:56)

10. Two Different Types of Conversations with Early Stage Founders — Bootstrap-y and Happy or Not Quite Ready Yet (41:57)

11. Is VC still cool? (43:46)

12. What does the future look like for Ed and Alpine? (45:43)

Plus What Makes Successful Founders, and Anti-Demo Day

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Marc McQuade is a co-founder and the CEO of Arcee AI. With a long career including work at Roboflow and Hugging Face, he co-founded Arcee to be a platform that provides enterprise businesses with SLMs — small, specialized, secure, and scalable language models — trained using their own data.John Villa is a tech investor focusing on early-stage companies. He is currently the CEO of Meridian Street Holdings X LLC, an investment holdings company that works with companies from initial contact to closing and growth. John is an investor in Arcee AI.

Today on the podcast we discuss:

1. Guest Intros

- Marc McQuade (0:40)

2. Background on Arcee AI

- Why did Marc help to build Arcee AI? (6:39)

3. Who is Benefitting Most at the Current Moment in AI? (26:31)

4. What is RAG? (30:36)

5. The Future for Arcee AI (44:33)

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Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. Carta is a cloud-based solution that helps organizations in the finance industry streamline and manage cap tables, compensation, and valuations. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

Today on the podcast we discuss:

1. Carta 2024 Early-Stage Startup Cheat Sheet Background

- Where is the data coming from? (0:46)

- Key Takeaways from the Data (6:55)

2. SAFEs, Their Function, and Complications (12:31)

3. Fundraising

-The effects of the changes to the economics of joining YC (20:04)

-How much of funding for local startups is local money? (26:45)

-What factors contribute when determining funding goals and approaching negotiations? (29:14)

4. Putting the 2024 Early-Stage Startup Cheat Sheet in Context

-What in the past decade has influenced the mechanisms of early stage fundraising? (36:16)

5. VC As a Craft Business (40:55)

6. Is It a Negative Signal to IPO? (48:17)