Superpowers Podcast

On episode 7 of Superpowers, Bill and Chris have a motivating discussion with Matt Capizzi, the CEO and co-founder of Zenrez, a software startup that offers innovative, data-powered business solutions to yoga studios. Matt’s superpower is his irrational confidence. A charismatic and confident entrepreneur, Matt’s career in product management started in the biotech industry. After working his way up to product manager at Life Technologies, Matt began to develop his superpower. As Matt says, he realized that “the biggest asset I have… is just the ability to handle pressure. The ability to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.” The idea for Zenrez came to Matt while taking high-level supply chain and operations management classes for his MBA at Carnegie Mellon. “I thought, I’m never going to use this stuff but it’s cool that I know that it exists now. And then I started getting into yoga…” Matt saw a massive opportunity to implement demand-based pricing in the yoga industry. He observed the success of Uber’s pricing model. “Once I saw consumers accept that volatility in price, then I was like – this is going to happen in every single industry,” he told Bill and Chris. Matt started Zenrez with his older brother and a talented engineer he befriended at CMU. They developed a software platform that yoga studios could use to implement demand-based pricing and growth marketing automation. “I spent the next summer doing customer development,” Matt told the hosts. He and his brother started taking yoga classes, “we’d look on the schedule [to see] when the owners would teach, and we would buy an intro pack.” They would pitch their application in person, and thanks to Matt’s irrational confidence, Zenrez grew. Today more than 1,000 studios use Zenrez.

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On Episode six of Superpowers, Bill and Chris dive into data markets with an entrepreneur who traversed the competitive landscape of computer science during the Dot-com bubble: Nick Jordan, now the founder and CEO of Narrative, a data marketplace for companies to acquire and monetize raw data sets. Nick took Bill and Chris on his journey from developing software for startups, to holding leadership roles at tech heavyweights like Adobe and Yahoo. Along the way, the hosts identified Nick’s superpower: His intuition. Nick can “identify the winners” in his industry, even when many end up losing. Nick’s superpower has helped him find needles in tech sector haystacks where others aren’t looking. When Adobe refused Nick’s pitch to build a software that aggregated mobile and web data, Nick pitched his idea to the media company Tapad, helping adapt their technology to provide the same service. Nick joined Tapad’s team, working with the company to make powerful software solutions and “run product and strategy to help them build something that was incredibly valuable.” The idea for Narrative came to Nick While working at Tapad. He found that collecting data was extremely inefficient. “We had a team of data scientists and they were constantly coming up to me and saying, ‘we need more data to build better AI,’ and we would go try and find it for them. That process just sucked... It just wasn’t scalable, and it took 6 months to go from them having a request to us getting it for them.” “I said this is a problem that I’m having and I’m sure other people are having it. Someone must have solved this... so I looked around for probably two months… I found nothing.” Six months later, Nick founded Narrative to address that very problem. What started as a small operation has now blossomed into a 40-person company. Nick sat down with Bill and Chris to talk about Narrative’s – and his – growth and transformation:

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On episode five of the Superpowers podcast, Bill and Chris look to uncover Felicity Conrad’s superpower, and how she’s used it to redefine the meaning of pro bono legal counsel. As the CEO of Paladin, Felicity is blazing the trail for the emerging justice technology industry. The idea for Paladin came to Felicity while studying abroad in East Africa as an undergrad. While there, “I realized I’m this extraordinarily privileged person and I felt very deeply that it was my responsibility to give back and be a net positive person.” Instead of rolling in guilt, she used her superpower – empathy - to do something and find purpose. As Felicity told Bill and Chris, her life’s mission statement is “to make the world a more just place.” Every decision she’s made in her career has been in pursuit of that goal. As a young graduate of NYU Law School, Felicity took her first pro bono case representing a Colombian politician who sought refuge in the US from a narco-terrorist group and was facing deportation. “He couldn’t afford a lawyer,” she told Bill and Chris. “If he was deported, he would’ve been killed… We argued his case and at the end, the judge granted him asylum - and it’s just this incredible feeling.” With that emotion came questions. “How can you help scale that feeling? There are so many people out there who lack access to justice, 5.1 billion people [globally] lack access to justice.” She created Paladin to serve the bottom half of the legal industry. “It’s over $200 an hour on average for a lawyer in America. That doesn’t work for most people,” Felicity told Bill and Chris. “So, we’re focused on building tech products to serve the really underserved sections of the population…we built the first pro-bono platform.” Paladin’s SaaS-enabled marketplace lets Felicity connect people in need of justice with talented lawyers and organizations like the ACLU to close the massive justice global justice gap. With Paladin, Felicity told Bill and Chris, “we want to actually change the world.”

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On the fourth episode of the Superpowers podcast, Bill and Chris sit down with Max Snow, the 23-year-old CEO of Yobi Ventures, a data analytics firm that helps “everything that isn’t Amazon” compete by combining all sources of user data under one roof. Throughout the interview Max’s superpower was on full display. His charisma, confidence, and innate ability to predict human behavior – or as Bill and Chris put it, Max’s ability to “be the product” - has led to meetings with fortune 500 companies before Yobi has even launched. That same superpower is what, even at the age of 23, has led Max to various stops and successes in the data analytics field. Before dropping out of Duke University, Max designed algorithms to predict songs’ success and popularity in the music industry. He then left college to create a music distribution company that leveraged those data-driven insights. In 2017, Max set out to apply the same principles to film and television script analysis, creating a first-of-its-kind service for the entertainment industry. “Never before has actual data been used to package a film,” Max said. Eventually, Max decided to tackle something bigger than entertainment. He partnered with a renowned Princeton professor researching the intersection between computer science and psychology – a connection he views as paramount to leveraging data’s full value. “Rarely do you hear in AdTech, people treating the data that they’re looking at as real people. They see it as empirical data flow,” Max told Bill and Chris. With this partnership, Max started Yobi. By strengthening the connection between data and source subjects, Max helps enterprises gain a deeper understanding of the data they mine from operations. The young CEO describes Yobi as a new source of competitive advantage for companies of all sizes. “When it comes to forecasting, you really don’t have a model yet that’s based on human behavior and human decision making.” Yobi Ventures provides that tool.

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In episode three of Superpowers, Bill and Chris share the mic with a Silicon Valley veteran turned venture capitalist. From founding startups to holding leadership positions at giants like Google and Twitter, Josh McFarland has navigated the full gamut of the tech sector’s fast-paced product development ecosystem. Through it all, Josh has consistently managed to steer his way toward success thanks to his ability to maintain product discipline. He can identify what products and services are effective and useful, and has approached his career with discipline and decisiveness that has always served him well. Now a Partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, Josh shared his winding journey with Bill and Chris, starting with his upbringing in a small Wyoming town and his college experience at Stanford University, followed by the intensity of a career developing products in Silicon Valley and how it led him to his current position. “I was so burned out on operating, like PTSD level,” Josh said of his time co-founding and running TellApart. That’s when he decided to make the jump to Greylock. For the past two years, Josh has leveraged his exceptional attention to detail and innate ability to identify game-changing companies while overseeing a $1 billion fund. He shared some of the keys to his success with Bill and Chris. “The best venture capitalists have one thing in common: Luck,” said Josh. “The more open you can be to be holding your arms wide open and seeing what the universe is handing to you, [the better]. If you’re just putting together your spreadsheet and dumping your numbers in, you’re going to miss those rare, awesome opportunities.”

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On the second episode of Superpowers, Bill and Chris set out to explore what superpowers propel an entrepreneur to success at a young age. Enter Journy Co-Founder and CEO Susan Ho, whose modest determination has grounded her with a sense of humility as she navigated the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Her journey began in 2015, when as a travel-loving recent college grad she took a trip to Buenos Aires… and had no idea how to spend her time. As she told Bill and Chris, “I ended up spending ten hours in my hotel room trying to figure what to do/where to go, only to end up in a restaurant surrounded by American tourists… looking on that experience I was like, I’m an internet savvy millennial... why couldn’t I find the types of activities I was looking for?” Where some would see a wasted trip, Susan saw an opportunity to fill a market gap between ultra-high end booking services, and non-personal mass scheduling companies. In 2015 she launched Journy, which pairs travelers with expert travel planners to create personalized trips in customized price ranges. Now one of the most respected young minds in the tech entrepreneur space – in 2018 she was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list for Consumer Technology – Susan’s success was far from guaranteed. From humble beginnings in an immigrant household, to Journy’s near-failure in 2017, her story is one of extraordinary resourcefulness and determination.

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When Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise and C2Ventures CEO Chris Cunningham set out to unmask the talents of leading entrepreneurs, innovators and entertainers, they knew their first guest would have to bring something special to the studio. Enter Josh Beckerman, AKA “The Foodie Magician.” Josh has been performing magic and mentalism since he was five years old, when his father gifted him a magic kit that changed his life. That was the moment that, in Josh’s own words, he “bit the magic bug. Today Josh spends his days touring New York City’s restaurant scene performing the one-of-a-kind blend of magic, mentalism, and comedy that has earned him a special place in the city’s entertainment scene – along with numerous write-ups and national TV appearances. “Pretty much my goal in life is to entertain, make people smile, laugh, sometimes cry with joy,” Josh told Bill Wise and Chris Cunningham on the premiere episode of the Superpowers podcast. “When I got that magic box, that’s when I started using magic as a tool to make people smile and bring joy to their lives." He hasn’t stopped. From his upbringing in Queens and Long Island to his door-to-door card-trick tour at the beginning of his freshman year at Bucknell University to a brief stint in the finance world, Josh’s passion has always been in performance. When it dawned on him that he could combine that passion with food and restaurants, a one-of-a-kind career was born. “I really am the only magician, mentalist and comedian in the entire world that eats at restaurants all day and all night,” Josh told Bill and Chris. Josh sat down with the hosts of “Superpowers” for an in-depth discussion on the passion he has for his work, some of his favorite places to grab a meal, and a few of his mind-blowing signature tricks:

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