The #ANGELS Podcast

Avichal Garg is a serial entrepreneur who started his career working on search quality at Google, had a tour of duty at Facebook (after his company, Spool, was acquired), worked with start-ups at YC and jumped full time into crypto in early 2018.

Jessica and Jana talk with Avichal about the promise of crypto—imagine a future in which Taylor Swift and her most passionate fans could own the masters to her work through NFTs—and explore, is that possible? He shares his take that “2020 was the year Bitcoin went from contrarian to consensus” and why in general, crypto is probably at the Series A stage as an industry, to use VC parlance.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Avichal highlights a strong early supporter of Electric Capital, Chris Dixon. Jess and Jana highlight a woman who brings a new perspective on crypto from her legal and regulatory background, Katie Haun.

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 Amy Chang. Amy is a legend in the tech world. She has served on the Boards of some of the largest companies on the planet, like P&G and Cisco, after starting her career at McKinsey, eBay, and Google. She’s also been on the ground floor and in the trenches of a startup, having founded Accompany, which went on to be acquired by Cisco.

We talk with Amy about her path into studying electrical engineering, having to hack her way into a PM role at Google, and the inspiration for leaving the comfortable cocoon of a big company to make the founder leap.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Amy highlights a close friend and advisor, who has helped Amy be an effective Board member, Lorrie Norrington.

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 Maia Bittner. Maia’s journey as an entrepreneur started as a kid when she was selling used cameras on the internet and learned HTML to customize her eBay page. She fell in love with computers and technology as a way to solve problems, but resists the notion of building software for software’s sake. As she shares, “99% of the time, the hard part of building a product is not a tech problem. It's building MVPs, finding customer value and often it's faster to do that stuff and better if you do it without software…I'm an engineer and I still write code and I like a lot of parts of it, but... maybe don't use software to solve everything.”

Maia talks about the transition from being a founder, where you have total control and ownership, to going through an acquisition with Chime and becoming an employee of a larger organization. She shares the secret to unlocking a role she loves: finding a place in the organization that lets her run internal experiments and launch new product tests quickly, akin to being back at a seed stage startup.

Lastly, Maia shares why fintech is such a rewarding area to work and how she’s continuing to learn and build community through her side project: FinTechBookClub.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Maia highlights two early stage founders building fintech companies: @hotgirlintech and @swaykaey

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, Sima Sistani joins us for a conversation that brings to light the personal side and vulnerable truths of trying to run a company, be a present parent, and deal with life changes and societal expectations of how to do it all. We share different perspectives on how to try and raise kids with a strong internal sense of self and how we’re each still discovering this for ourselves.

During Covid in 2020, Sima put these life lessons of empathy and grace into action in how she led the team at Houseparty. We dig into her career trajectory, from international equities trading at Goldman Sachs to working in Hollywood and into co-founding a tech startup, and advice she got along the way.

To wrap up, Chloe, April and Sima all discuss the choice to found companies in their 40s, the narrow stereotype that you have to be young to make that leap, and searching for the tingly feeling of when you know you’ve seen a glimpse of the future and when to chase it.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Sima highlights Martha Lane Fox, an internet entrepreneur and Board Director at Twitter, and Jess shines on Molly Graham, COO at Lambda School. Chloe gives a special shoutout to everyone serving on local school boards!

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 third episode, Claire Thielke joins us from Hong Kong, where she is based, having just completed 21 days of quarantine after a visit to the US. Claire shares how her path into a global career in real estate development started with an interest as a kid in throwing on her roller blades or running shoes and checking out all the houses in her Houston neighborhood.

And, we should mention, Claire’s not just an average runner. She went on to become the captain of the varsity track team at Stanford, while completing three degrees (undergrad, masters, and engineering degree), and training for the Olympics as part of Team USA Track & Field. It’s no surprise to learn, then, that she’s got tips to share on the mental attitude and approach to quarantine.

Claire has built her career with experience in Russia, Poland, Brazil and all over Asia, especially China. She teaches a class at Stanford on the intersection of technology, urban planning, and institutional real estate investment. We asked Claire about all the current tech buzz about Miami. She zooms out to put this in the context of the history of population migrations in the US, and how Covid is creating opportunities to rethink community and coliving.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Claire shares how impressed she is by a young architect in Shenzhen and April called out Madhuri Kommareddi, Director of Workforce Development in the Office of the Governor of New York.

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.

On our 2nd episode, Jessica and April catch up with Heather Fernandez, CEO and Co-Founder of Solv Health and Board Director at Atlassian. Heather started her career working on the McCain presidential campaign before finding her first job in Silicon Valley at a PR firm. In her own words, “it’s ok to be non-linear! I think there's this meme in tech that you have to have been working out of a garage...building a bunch of things to become a tech founder. And it's just not true.” 

Heather spent nearly a decade at Trulia, joining as the 12th employee and grew to become the GM and SVP running advertising product, marketing and sales before the acquisition by Zillow Group for $2.5B. She shares the real talk of hypergrowth: “I could talk about my Trulia history in four very beautiful bullet points. And it's like, wow, how great. But the reality of any company is there's a shitload of grind in there.” 

Bill Gurley led Solv’s Series A and Heather shares lessons she learned from him: “consumer marketplaces and great consumer technology companies are oftentimes amplifying a consumer trend, not creating a totally new paradigm.” And lastly, we discuss how to lead an organization amidst twin challenges of massive growth and the chaos of Covid. “There were not pivots as much as there were massive accelerations of things that we plan to do that all of a sudden became the imperative to do.”

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, April and Heather share what they’ve learned from Jennifer Tejada, CEO of Pager Duty.

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.

Welcome to the #ANGELS Podcast, where we bring you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them. Hosted by Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde, the co-founders of the #ANGELS investment collective.

For our first episode, we share our own journeys into tech and how we teamed up while building our careers together at Twitter to start #ANGELS and back over 100 startups. We’ll also give a preview of the amazing people and conversations we have coming up on the pod.

Each week, we give Shoutouts to the people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode:

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.