Startup Foundations

Joshua Wöhle is a London-based founder and serial entrepreneur, currently building Mindstone — a platform that allows anyone to create a course by curating a playlist from articles, podcasts, videos, and other resources.

Here are the topics that we talked about:

- Getting first customers for Mindstone
- Backstory of London’s rise to prominence as the biggest startup hub in Europe
- How startup ecosystems are created
- Employee stock compensation in Europe and how it differs from US
- Joshua’s previous venture - Super Awesome, and a successful exit to Epic Games
- Joshua’s transition from being a fouder to also being an investor
- The history of Super Awesome and building tools for children online privacy
- Joshua’s take on Facebook and Instagram being bad for kids
- Joshua’s advice to first-time founders

Tammy Camp is the CEO and co-founder of Stronghold, a financial infrastructure company that provides fast, secure, and accessible financial services through a simple API.

Inspired by her previous entrepreneurial experiences across the technology and startup landscape, Tammy founded Stronghold in 2017 to bring better financial services to a broader range of market participants. Under her leadership, Stronghold also launched the highly successful digital currency SHx to provide real-time settlement, discounts in fees for business customers, and more, to its clients.

Tammy was also the first Head of Growth for Stellar, the open-source payments platform for fiat and digital currencies. In this role, she helped the platform attract an astounding 4 million users within its first two months of operations.

Tammy is a 2011 graduate of the Global Startup Program at Singularity University at NASA Ames and received her bachelor’s degree from Georgia State University. She holds the kiteboarding world record for most completed back loops in one minute.

In our conversation with Tammy, we cover:

- Virtual payment networks and how they work
- How Stronghold combines services of legacy payment rails like ACH or credit cards with modern payments infrastructure using blockchain, Stellar, Ripple, Solana or Ethereum
- Tammy’s startup journey, Singularity University, head of growth at Stellar, meeting her co-founder Sean Bennett, getting the idea for Stronghold
- Interesting products built on top of Stronhold API’s
- The fundraising process for Strongold
- Tammy’s experience working with 500 Startups, and her take on why startups fail
- Evolution and future of payment networks
- Interesting fintech products currently on the market
- Advice for first-time founders

Jon Edvald is the founder and CEO of Garden, an end-to-end cloud delivery platform that streamlines the process of building, deploying, and testing software applications. We chatted about Jon’s startup journey, the development of startup ecosystems in Iceland and Germany, and why Jon’s latest company is a Delaware C Corporation. We also discuss different taxation issues that European founders may face when selling their companies.

Jon shares how he got the idea to build Garden and the difference in approach when building a startup for the second time. We dive deeper into the realm of DevOps and talk about challenges that developers face when building the backend of software applications.

Jon also shares valuable advice for younger founders and talks about the importance of mental health, dealing with burnout, and maintaining the joy of building a company.

Emma Guo is the co-founder and CEO of Offsyte, a one-stop-shop for discovering and booking team-building events. We chat about the challenges that fully remote startups face when building company culture, pivoting and fundraising in the middle of the pandemic, and Emma’s previous experience working as an early engineer for Lyft.

Emma also discusses her startup journey, getting the idea for Offsyte, and finding the right co-founder. Emma also shares her insights regarding building a two-sided marketplace and using SEO to drive customer acquisition and brand awareness.

As a female engineer, Emma gives her thoughts on the issue of diversity in a workplace and how startups should approach the recruitment process to not struggle with the gender gap later on.

This time on Startup Foundations, we chatted with Chris Van Pelt, co-founder of Weights & Biases and previously co-founder and CTO of CrowdFlower/Figure Eight. We talk about neural networking, autonomous vehicles, Chris' experience building two companies in the AI and machine learning space, and whether we have to worry about machines ever taking control over humans.

Chris also shares his insights regarding different approaches to selling developer's tools and highlights the effectiveness of the bottom-up approach to customer acquisition, where the developers themselves are the ones driving the adoption.

We ask Chris about ethical issues surrounding the development of AI, particularly in the space of autonomous vehicles, and whether we can expect to see the singularity within our lifespans. Chris also shares how he got into entrepreneurship, got his first check from investors, and explains the division of labor in a company with three co-founders.

In the first installment of Startup Foundations in 2022, we chat with Vera Kutsenko, co-founder & CEO of Neverland — a marketplace and an online community for houseplant enthusiasts.

Vera explains where she got the idea to start Neverland, and discusses the process of building a two-sided marketplace connecting plant lovers with gardening shops across the US. She shares some details about the educational functionality of their app, which includes guidance and support around taking care of houseplants.

Vera talks us through the process of building an online community in an almost cult-like space of houseplant aficionados, and how they’ve used the content-first strategy to validate what consumers want. She also shares what tactics worked for her in the fundraising stage, including tips on how to effectively cold email VCs.

Vera and Greg also discuss the emotional relationship that people have to plants, where it comes from, and how Neverland tries to leverage that sentiment to appeal to the younger generation and ultimately contribute to building empathy and care for nature.

Yury Lifshits is a russian-born, SF-based mathematician, computer scientist, and serial entrepreneur, currently running Openland, a Y Combinator backed messaging platform for online communities.

Alison Greenberg co-founded Ruth Health along with Audrey Wu, to make pregnancy easier and provide better maternal care by offering at-home ultrasounds, pregnancy coaching and pelvic training. Their startup is currently a part of the S21 batch of Y Combinator.

Emily Dong is the founder and CEO of SnoutID, a software solution for streamlining veterinary practices and expanding access to pet healthcare.

Emily, a pet owner herself, talked us through her startup journey that began with Pawprint, an app that allowed pet owners to manage their pets medical records. Emily eventually sold Pawprint as a YC-fellow and moved on to start SnoutID.

Emily discussed what changed in her approach between Pawprint and SnoutID, the huge difference a business plan can make, and why she decided to give pet health another go. She speaks on the painful process of finding the product-market fit and shares her vision for SnoutID, including credit and insurance for pet owners.

Emily and Greg also discuss fundraising practices, regulatory compliance in the pet care industry, other interesting companies in the pet health space, and whether or not it's a good idea for a dog to eat vegan.

Jake Gibson is the founding partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures and formerly co-founder and COO of NerdWallet, which he started with Tim Chen back in 2010.

Jake talked to us about his professional journey, and what made him pursue a career in startups after spending a few years on a trading floor on Wall Street. As a COO and co-founder of NerdWallet, Jake has built a successful fin-tech business from the ground up. He shared some of the lessons learned along the way, including great SEO and content marketing tips.

Jake also discusses how he ended up leaving NerdWallet to eventually take up startup investing full time. This resulted in co-founding Better Tomorrow Ventures, an early stage VC fund focused on fintech companies, along with Sheel Mohnot. Jake talks about their recent investments and details the intricacies of funding overseas startups.

As a seasoned founder and investor Jake shares his insights about the common mistakes founders make when they pitch investors at the pre-seed stage, and explains the business model and incentives behind the venture capital funding.

Jake also shares tips regarding fundraising pitch tactics and general advice for founders who are just getting started.