The #ANGELS Podcast

Rachael has played a pivotal comms role at the biggest consumer internet companies of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Coinbase, where she was recently VP of Comms. And she's just taken her next leap, joining the crypto team as a partner at A16Z! 

We talk with Rachael about the often misunderstood role of comms at a start-up, why it's better to rip the bandaid off and apologize when a company makes a mistake, and why crypto is such an exciting frontier. 

We wrap up each episode with a shoutout and Rachael highlights Emilie Choi, President & COO of Coinbase. 

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them. You'll hear from our rotating set of hosts, the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. 

We’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels.

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Edit Audio.

Brianne Kimmel launched her first fund for Worklife in the fall of 2019 and has quickly broken out as a new emerging fund manager. She funds companies building the future, in her own words:  “Where work is more creative and anyone can start something. Where life is more flexible and not tied to an office. Where everyone is a triple threat.” She’s backed standout companies like Hopin, Deel, Pipe, Public, Charthop, and others and we chat with Brianne about how she’s done it as she gears up for Fund II.

We dig into how she spends her time (hint: helping companies recruit is key!), why community is an important foundation for Worklife, and how to scale the relationship driven parts of the job.

We wrap up each episode with a shoutout and Brianne highlights Paige Doherty who recently wrote a book, “Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital”, helping make venture more accessible and understandable.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. 

We’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels.

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Edit Audio.

Steven Galanis, CEO of Cameo, has built one of the most fascinating companies in the creator economy and Jana and Katie sit down with him to hear how he did it. They explore his early entrepreneurial roots of running a party business in college, how he overcame the cold start problem of getting a marketplace flywheel going, and how he founded the company in Chicago and has now transitioned to running a fully remote team while based in Miami.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

We’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels.

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Edit Audio.

Today’s episode is full of real talk with Merci Victoria Grace. Merci is an investor, advisor and product builder. She was previously a venture capitalist at Lightspeed, Director of Product at Slack, and started her career as a founder of a social gaming company after pursuing a degree in fiction writing from USC.

Jana, April and Merci talk about their family backgrounds and what it’s like to navigate Silicon Valley having no exposure to the business cultural norms of the industry growing up, what to look for in founders they back, and why understanding what they call ‘invisible work’ is crucial for building customer empathy.

We wrap up each episode with a shout out to people who have inspired us along the way. Merci gives a shout out to her husband, Yanda Erlich, and Michael Dearing, founder of Harrison Metal.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced by Matt Herrero and edited by editaudio.

Varsha Rao is the CEO of Nurx, a leading telehealth platform focused on women. Through Nurx, you can get prescriptions, like contraception, acne treatment, migraine treatment, and at-home testing delivered to your door. Jana invested in Nurx’s seed round in 2016 and introduced Varsha to the company as an angel investor and, years later, Varsha was recruited as CEO.

We talk with Varsha about how her prior roles—as COO of Clover Health, Head of Global Operations at Airbnb, and founding an ecommerce company in the 90s— prepared her to lead a company at the intersection of healthcare and consumer technology.

Varsha shares why she’s so passionate about Nurx’s work to break down barriers to accessing healthcare: “Access hurdles come in a number of forms. One is a geographic...about 20M women live in contraception deserts...second is economics - it can be expensive to access care - the third is really around stigma.”

Lastly, we like to wrap up with shoutouts to people who have helped us along the way. Varsha highlights Regina Benjamin, former US Surgeon General in the Obama Administration, and Nurx Board Director.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Jessica Ewing has an infectious energy and unstoppable determination to create a business at the intersection of literature and consumer software. She and Katie overlapped in their early careers at Google and when we heard she was starting a company, Literati, Katie and Jess jumped at the chance to be early investors.

Katie sits down with Jessica in Austin (vaccines FTW!) and Jess joins remotely to talk about her path to founding Literati, a Series B stage company. Jessica’s raised $50M+ in venture capital from Felicis, 01 Advisors, Founders Fund, and others but candidly shares the early fundraising process was hard and most VCs didn’t get the pitch. We talk about the dynamic art and tech scene in Austin, where Jessica is based, operating the company through Covid, and Literati’s expansion from kids book clubs to adult book clubs.

Lastly, we like to wrap up with shoutouts to people who have helped us along the way. Jessica highlights Bret Taylor: “When I was first starting out, he took my meeting and he was running Quip at the time. He just put an injection of courage in my arm. And he made so many intros and he was like, I love it. Let's do it. Let's build it.”

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

We started #ANGELS (“Hashtag Angels”) six years ago as an investment collective to collaborate, pool our expertise and networks, and learn and grow as investors together. Over the years, we’ve often been asked the collective model and how it works.

On today’s episode, Jess dives into this topic with the TLC investment collective, to learn from co-founders Terri Burns, Lauren Stephanian, and Casey Caruso. TLC was started in early 2020, and just one year in they’ve made 11 investments and designed a robust set of processes for tracking deals, evaluating founders, and writing investment memos.

Terri, Lauren, and Casey each have technical backgrounds and pride themselves on “making and breaking” alongside founders. The best way to learn about NFTs? Why not design and drop one? To learn in public, they open sourced their investment memo for one of their first deals, Watershed Informatics.

We talk about each of their paths into venture, where Terri is a partner at GV, Lauren is a principal at Pantera Capital, and Casey works part time as an advisor to Bessemer while also a full time engineer at Google working on research systems.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Terri highlights Freia Lobo and Dave Municello; Casey thanks Stanford professor Andrew Ng, as well as her whole Bessemer team, and Lauren shares how she’s been inspired by the peers around her.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

For our latest episode, we welcome Claire Hughes Johnson, the COO of Stripe. Claire has been an executive at Stripe for more than 6 years, joining when the company was ~160 people. She’s overseen an incredible growth cycle for the company, which has most recently been valued at nearly $100Bn+

April and Jana talk with Claire about her path into tech from her early stint in politics. Claire shares:

“It's actually very entrepreneurial too. You raise a ton of money and you spend a lot of it really fast... but it was very scrappy, you're doing seven jobs....so campaigns are actually great training for startups.”

“What I was looking for in my career was impact. You want to do something important, you want to do something that matters....And for me, that's about economic growth, job creation. Like how can we do things that help...I still have the idealistic Silicon Valley view that tech can be a helper.”

We also dig into the COO hiring process: what was Patrick and the Stripe team looking for? How did Claire get to know them? What does the COO role entail? How has it shifted over time? Claire shares:

“If you're at a growth stage company, it's whatever the company needs at any given moment. So it's going to be changing...in line with your skills. And by the way, my portfolio...has changed a lot over the years. And it's changing again right now. And I think that's because Stripe is changing so much and that's the right thing to do. In fact, we portfolio shift a lot across the executive team, which I think is really healthy because what you need in one moment is very different than another one.”

Lastly, we zoom out to talk about how serving on the Hallmark board has been a helpful reminder to broaden perspective beyond Silicon Valley.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Claire highlights Condoleezza Rice, Stacy Brown Philpot, and the next generation of founders coming up in the industry.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

For our latest episode, we welcome Tammy Sun, the co-founder of Carrot, a tech centric fertility benefits company that we've backed at #ANGELS. Carrot is making it cheaper, simpler and easier for employees to get access to fertility services through their platform. Tammy started her career in politics and made the leap to tech when she joined Evernote nearly a decade ago.

Jana and Chloe talk with Tammy about their personal fertility journeys and how her own journey led her to found Carrot. We also talk about the technology, business models and ethics of the fertility sector and how it could evolve in the coming decades.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Tammy highlights the community from Evernote and we talk about how employee mafia networks are the best support systems.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

For our latest episode, we welcome Adrian Aoun. Adrian is a serial entrepreneur who started his first company as a teenager, sold his second - Wavii - to Google, and is now building the tech-centric healthcare company, Forward.

Jessica and Jana talk with Adrian about lessons from selling his company, how he ended up on the founding team of Sidewalk, a bet within Alphabet, and how he would approach redesigning cities with a startup mindset. We wrap up hearing about how Forward navigated the challenges of 2020 and delivered care to members throughout the pandemic.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Adrian highlights what he’s learned from Marissa Mayer and his appreciation for her willingness to pay it forward.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.