This week, Jeremy interviews Chris Webb, Co-Founder & CEO of ChowNow, an online ordering system and marketing platform for restaurants. At just 19 years old Chris's interest in markets and trading led him to start his career at Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers. While working in the financial sector, Chris's family made a founding investment in the now popular Tender Greens restaurant chain in California. Chris's experience with Tender Greens brought to light the gap in the market for online ordering solutions for local groups and independent restaurants. To prove the market need, Chris and his co-founder created a fictional product that mimicked the service that ChowNow would offer and traveled to Santa Barbara to see if they could sell their fake service to restaurateurs. Within a few days they had more than sixty restaurants interested and knew ChowNow would be a hit. Tune in to this week's episode to hear more about ChowNow and why Chris and his co-founder were courted by three LA based accelerators without even applying.

In the startup world, failure happens. And who knows that better than a company founder? This week we are excited to broadcast a panel from San Antonio Startup Week (planned and executed by a VFA Fellow!). From losing major clients to handling customer service nightmares, these panelists have seen it all. Tune in for a lively conversation with Magaly Chocano, CEO of Sweb Development, Lorenzo Gomez, CEO of Geekdom, Jason Straughan, CEO/Software Engineer of Grok Interactive, and Melissa Unsell, Vice President and Found Member of elumicor. The conversation is expertly moderated by Paul Flahive, Journalist and Producer at Texas Public Radio.

This week Jeremy is joined by Sam Rosen, Founder of Makespace (and previous podcast guest!), to interview Otto Cedeno, owner of Otto's Tacos, a Southern California inspried Taqueria in New York City. Tune in to this week's episode to hear about the trials and tribulations of opening up a restaurant in New York and why Otto was ahead of the curve in the single serve restaurant craze.

In his sophomore year at Yale, Brad Hargreaves noticed that the university was selling a lot of antique furniture and spotted an opportunity. With a rented U-Haul and a newly caught entrepreneurial bug, Brad and his friend Matt Brimer bought antique furniture at very low prices and resold it for a profit. They called the company Aloysius. Since their days at Yale, Brad and Matt have worked on several businesses together including General Assembly, a global educational institution, which they co-founded in 2011. General Assembly has grown tremendously over the last 5 years, raising over $100M in investment. Now Brad is working on Common, a company that offers flexible, community-driven housing by providing fully furnished, month-to-month memberships, beginning in New York City. Listen to this week's podcast to hear about how General Assembly aims to democratize technology education and how Common is changing the way we look at housing.ly

Jessica O. Matthews is one of the most decorated guests we have had on the #VFApodcast. Her accolades include Fortune’s Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs (2015), Forbes 30 under 30 list (2014), Black Enterprise’s Innovator of the Year (2013), and Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation (2012). Jessica is the daughter of an entrepreneur and was always tinkering as a child - she even has the scars to prove it! While getting her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, Jessica enrolled in a class that eventually led to her idea for the SOCCKET a portable, power generating soccer ball designed to promote physical activity and spread awareness about the global energy problem. Designing and manufacturing the SOCCKET wasn't easy and Jessica candidly shares the ups and downs of a messy kickstarter campaign and all that she learned about manufacturing, supply chains, and customer service. Download this weeks episode to hear more about Jessica's journey and how President Clinton motivated her to quit her day job to pursue Uncharted Play full time.

Ethan Anderson graduated from Duke University and began his career at McKinsey working on tech projects. Ethan stuck it out for 1.5 years and then left McKinsey to found QuickReturns, a company to help provide reverse logistics services to online retailers. Although Ethan & his team wrote an award winning business plan and received initial funding, they decided not to continue after the internet bubble burst. In true VFA fashion, Ethan felt that he had to gain experience working at an online retailer to better understand the business before he could go on to found something else. He became the Director of Strategy & Analysis at Buy.com where he developed pricing models with machine learning algorithms. After leaving Buy.com, Ethan attended Harvard Business School, worked at Google, and founded another company, Redbeacom, which won first place at TechCrunch 50 and was eventually acquired by Home Depot. Listen to this week's long distance podcast (sometimes the sound quality isn't the greatest- bear with us!) to hear more about Ethan's career and how he came to found his current company, MyTime.

Amanda Moskowitz started her career in audience analysis at ABC before making a name for herself in mobile messaging SaaS companies - one of which was focused on mobile for brands and advertisers and other, government and non-profits. Today she has "more than one foot" in two different companies which she founded, Stacklist and Nine Naturals. Listen to this week's episode to hear how Amanda juggles both gigs and the importance of finding the right business partner.

In the second part of this exciting interview, Sam Rosen discusses why operations and logistics are so important to the success of his company MakeSpace, and why a company is best positioned when it is "high volume and low margin".

We are excited to bring you a two part interview with Sam Rosen, Founder & CEO of Makespace, a convenient, simple, on-demand storage solution and takes the "self" out of "self storage." In the first episode, Sam chats with Jeremy about his career as a corporate banking analyst turned entrepreneur.

This week, Jeremy chats with Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend. Russ graduated from Stanford University with a masters degree in computer science and, forgoing offers from major firms, joined Greystripe after graduation where he quickly became the Director of Engineering at 22 years old. After 3 years at Greystripe Russ went on to HBS with the intent of starting a company while in school and co-founded pursuit.com, a social referrals product to improve how companies source referral candidates which was acquired by Facebook. After helping to redesign Facebook pages and timelines Russ and some friends came together to start DocSend, a company that makes salespeople more effective by enabling them to track, control, send, and present sales materials with real-time document analytics. Download this week's episode to learn more about Russ's journey and how to craft the most effective pitch deck.