Taking Notes with NextGen

In this episode of Taking Notes, NextGen Managing Partner Dan Mindus speaks with Vinayak Ranade, CEO of Drafted. NextGen recently invested in Drafted which offers software to human resources departments to help them fill open positions by empowering their employee base to find referrals via their own networks. NextGen is excited about the good Drafted can do under Vinayak's leadership including helping companies source great talent, improving diversity at companies, helping job hunters find great roles and more.

Dan Mindus (Managing Partner at NextGen) and Immad Akhund (Co-Founder and CEO of Mercury) discuss building a bank from scratch that is specifically built for tech startup entrepreneurs. Immad shares why he started Mercury, and how it is benefitting his large and growing client base.

In this episode of Taking Notes, Dan Mindus (co-founder and managing partner of NGVP) speaks with Venture Partner John Duncan (Principal at Meridian Research Group and Capital Point). Capital Point provides analysis to institutional investors and corporate executives with a heavy focus on the technology industry. The two discuss the potential impact of new policies out of Washington, D.C. on big technology companies, with John drawing from his expertise in both worlds at Microsoft, the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Department of Commerce and elsewhere.

In this episode of Taking Notes, NextGen Managing Partner Dan Mindus speaks with Carter McJunkin. Carter is a Venture Partner with NextGen and was the COO at Grindr for nearly 8 years, from employee # 1 to exit. Grindr describes itself as the largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans and queer people.

Dan and Carter discuss growth at Grindr to millions of daily active users, and the company's recent news on the global stage.

In this episode, Dan Mindus (managing partner at Nextgen) chats with Jason Yeh (co-founder at Tape - video tool for sales/NextGen portfolio company) about pursuing the opportunity to productize innovations in mobile video for the enterprise.

"Mobile video has given the consumer world a lot in terms of a natural way to communicate, a way to present human contact between friends and family, and we started thinking about the ways that could be applied to the business world...we stumbled across a huge pain point in the area of B2B leads."

In this episode of Taking notes, Dan Mindus (managing partner at NextGen) and Ajay Kori (co-founder and chairman at UrbanStems) discuss the broken flower industry and Ajay's motivations for entering the space, why Amazon is unlikely to compete here and why he handed off his position as UrbanStems' chief executive officer.

In this episode of Taking Notes, NextGen Managing Partner Dan Mindus speaks with Andrew Yang. Andrew founded Venture for America (VFA), a fellowship program for recent college graduates who want to become entrepreneurs. VFA trains its fellows then sends them to work at early-stage growth companies and startups in Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland and other cities with the goal of generating job growth in cities across the country.

After seeing the impact of increasingly automated jobs on cities, Andrew realized that startup job growth was akin to tossing water into a leaky bucket. He stepped down as VFA's CEO and launched his 2020 presidential campaign with Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a central pillar.

In this episode, product guru Ben Foster shares the (sometimes counterintuitive) lessons he has learned. Ben was the vice president of marketing at Opower, now a publicly traded company. He has also advised over 50 startups on product over the years, including four currently. Today, Ben is the chief product officer of GoCanvas, a startup with a team of over 200.

Cherian Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of NextGen portfolio company Play Octopus, the premiere rideshare entertainment platform. Cherian discusses the company's value proposition to its three key stakeholders, fostering team buy-in after a major pivot, and its traction to date.

Ben Sardella is the co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer of OutboundWorks, which is an automated sales development platform that deliver customers ~1.5x the average output of the best performing sales development reps at ~65% of the cost. Ben shares how his experience as a sales leader as VP of Sales at Kissmetrics and co-founder of Datanyze helped him build OutboundWorks, a NextGen portfolio company.