The Allegory

Anthony Hsiao is the co-Founder and CEO of Matterway, a SaaS enterprise tech company based in Berlin. He's a German serial entrepreneur, having created multiple businesses around the world, including India. In this episode get to know Anthony's upbringing, what influenced him, how he sees the world, and what philosophies he's adopted to keep going. This is a two part series. The second series, we'll get to know Anthony businesses in depth.  

Howdy listeners, I’m super excited because we have Matt Clifford, the co-founder and CEO of EF - a company he started back in 2011. Matt and his co-founder Alice pioneered a novel idea - to bring strangers together in a room, create the environment for them to create ideas and businesses EF will invest in. EF’s model has helped create over 300 startups. He’s a super interesting, smart, and honest guy.

Philippe led Accel’s investments in DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU), Algolia, Doctolib, Blablacar, PeopleDoc (acquired by Ultimate Software) and more recently Snyk and Chainalysis. He is also on the board of Fiverr and worked closely with the team at Crowdstrike.

Prior to Accel, Philippe was with Bessemer, based in Menlo Park, where he helped build the firm’s cloud practice, working on investments including Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD), Eloqua (NASDAQ: ELOQ) and Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO). He started his career with McKinsey&Co.

Let's get into the gritty with Marvin. He works with awesome startups across the globe and at the SF/SV accelerator programs – that is, when he's not practicing his signature song (Backstreet Boys ``I Want it That Way`` btw) & dealing with his book buying addiction, A recovering exec from Yahoo! he's very happy to be part of the Revolution! He invests in digital media, adtech, marketing cloud, e-commerce and mobile startups across the globe. 

500 Startups is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai.

In this opening episode I sit down with Michael Litt, co-founder and CEO of Vidyard, the leading video marketing platform. We get into his head - what drives him, what grinds his gears, and how he got his company up and running.  

Michael was recently recognized as Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year and Marketing Magazine's Top 30 Under 30.

Hi I’m Coral Movasseli - I’m going to be your curator for the new podcast I’m launching called The Allegory. I came up with it when I had a hunger to have deeper conversations with people. We are not rational actors. We are emotional animals. And I want to go beyond the technology, the brands, and the titles, to understand the individual - their drives, their motives, and the path they want to lead.

An Allegory is a narrative that has a greater meaning beyond the one that’s told. My favourtie allegory is from one of my most influential philosophers - Plato in Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave. It’s the story of a man who sees his shadow in chains and the puppeteers who feed him manufactured content in a false reality. Understanding this, he frees himself and walks out of the cave to be welcomed by sunlight.

We all have a story to tell, and I want to find out more about the people around us who influence our lives so we too can walk towards enlightenment.

Will you join me?