The NFX Podcast

NFX has been increasingly active in LatAm over the last few years, largely drawn there by an incredibly talented pool of Founders in the region. To understand the unique challenges and opportunities of LatAm, James talked with Antonia Rojas, the youngest female partner at ALLVP and a rising star in the startup ecosystem there. They co-led the Nuvocargo Seed round together.

Based in Mexico City, she has a “boots on the ground” view of Latin America that I love. Methods for building network effects there is not what one might think -- and as a result, go-to-market in Latin America demands building trust bridges and leveraging confidence networks. Understanding the psychology of LatAm consumers is a powerful unlock for new Founders entering the region.

The Covid pandemic removed barriers to global hiring and remote team building. It exposed startups, by necessity, to all-new solutions for growing and bonding their teams. Most companies advanced through the pandemic by stages: first survival mode, then waiting it out -- and now they are ready to fundamentally shift their hiring strategies to reflect our new reality. It’s clear now that there are lasting shifts in the market, and that Founders and CEOs need to update their mental models for hiring. Our guest today, Eynat Guez, sees this recent change in strategy more clearly than most. She’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Papaya Global, a global people & payroll platform, now valued at $3.7 Billion. Eynat is also the first-ever female CEO of a unicorn company in Israel. Her insights on hiring are twofold. First, she builds from her own experience rapidly scaling her global team to unicorn status during the pandemic. Second, from working directly with Papaya’s clients to grow their teams. Today she shares with us her set of mental models for building a world-class team -- wherever it may be.

The next evolution of companies will be created in public with early customers, partners, and supporters. They’ll be community-owned and operated, building upon the playbooks created by early NFT and play-to-earn projects. Because many of the web 3.0 advantages are hard to adopt as a large web 2.0 company, as a Founder you have to focus on the big ideas: ownership, collaboration, and community.

Visionary Founders, instead of solving market failures or fixing problems that are clear, push market evolution. They commit to pushing society to the upward bend of the exponential technology curve.

Today, our friend Azeem Azhar, former VC-backed Founder, creator of The Exponential View blog, and author of the new book The Exponential Age, gives Founders specific hooks and non-obvious ways of explaining how quickly something’s going to change — right before it does.

For Founders, market needs are often a lagging indicator of technological progress. In many cases, like the iPhone, we didn’t even know that we needed a thing, until the thing made us want it.

Read the full NFX Essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/exponential-age/

Today, Mammoth Biosciences announced their series C and D at more than a $1B valuation. Mammoth is a startup story that Founders should be following because there is so much to learn from their path from the lab to unicorn status. At no other time in modern history has the need for science to lead our society toward a better future been more apparent and immense. We can meet this need by investing in the next generation of tech-bio companies like Mammoth.

NFX led Mammoth’s Pre-Seed and Seed rounds, co-led the Series A, and has invested in every round including today’s Series D. We even helped them name the company. Mammoth is the poster child for the NFX strategy of using network effects to build bio platforms — this approach to building tech-bio businesses should allow them to get 10x the size of a normal bio company. It’s also a great example of how NFX Bio supports Scientist-Founders as they become great Founders and CEOs after they leave the lab.

Listen in with Omri Drory, head of NFX Bio, and Partner James Currier as they take an inside look with Mammoth’s Co-Founder & CEO Trevor Martin at his journey from idea to unicorn — for the benefit of up-and-coming Scientist-Founders worldwide.

"We have all the technical and economic ingredients needed to build a massive economy in space. We’re not focused on Mars or the Moon, we’re singularly focused on building a space economy that makes life better on Earth.”

Today NFX Partner Morgan Beller is joined by Andy Lapsa, Co-Founder & CEO of Stoke Space Technologies, a company building reusable second-stage rockets to seamlessly Earth and orbit. Founded in 2019 and based in Renton, Washington they have been focused on the reusability aspect of rocketry to make space access more available and frequent in our future lives. Lapsa was a former employee and award-winning rocket engineer at Bezos's Blue Origin, while the rest of their team come from SpaceX and other leading aerospace companies.

As a lead investor, Morgan uncovers how they originally met, Andy's full Founder journey, why space is such an important industry to apply talented engineers to, and his overall decision to enter one of the most complex sectors in the world of tech.

Visit their website - https://www.stoke-space.com/

This is The Founders’ List – audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

Network effect businesses are reshaping the world. Network effects are still the best and most powerful force we know to create persistent value for billions of people. However, we think that too little has been said about how society should adapt to these new network effect behemoths we’re helping create.

NFX Partner James Currier outlines how the network economy works, and how power, wealth, and status all flow on the network. He then looks at the implications of this and finally specific ideas for Founders about what these new social contracts could look like.

Read the full NFX essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/network-economy/

This is an NFX Mashup, where we string thoughts from past episodes together under the same topic.

Startups today have more options than ever before — much earlier in their life cycles — for entering the public markets. Founders are constantly looking for advice on how to think about traditional IPO vs. SPAC vs. direct listing — and how to even answer the question: Am I ready to be a public company?

In this mashup, NFX Partner Pete Flint is joined by Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, Hippo founder Assaf Wand, and the IPO whisperer Lisa Buyer on their experience and advice around taking tech companies public.

'Stoner Cats' is an adult animated series centered on five house cats who repeatedly save their beloved owner created by Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, and friends, including the creative forces behind Toy Story 2, Spider-Verse, Happy Feet, and Cryptokitties.

Users will be able to buy Stoner Cats NFTs and can use those tokens to access the comedy cartoon online. The show will be an estimated five minutes long per episode. The tokens purchased will go toward funding future episodes of the series.

Today we have part of the Stoner Cats founding team including Morgan Beller (NFX Partner), Maaria Bajwa (Sound Ventures), Mack Flavelle (CryptoKitties), and Lisa Sterbakov (Orchard Farm Productions) to discuss the origin story of the show and the new future for content creation in Hollywood.

Visit the site to learn more and buy an NFT - https://www.stonercats.com/

What few people see is that Trillion-Dollar Leadership focuses relentlessly on the “who.” Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt both aligned their companies around this question: Who are we serving and who is going to get us there?

Today, Ann Hiatt (former Chief of Staff / Executive Business Partner to Bezos and then Schmidt for 14+ years) shares with NFX Partner James Currier her insider stories, analysis, and patterns of Bezos' and Schmidt's leadership principles and mental models. She gives us intimate insight to:

- What crazy, long-term vision looks like, even in its earliest days
- 3-part framework for value-alignment in $Trillion teams
- How to hire and motivate people who will invent the future
- Tthe leadership mental models she learned from working directly with Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, for the benefit of Founders everywhere.

Read the NFX essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/trillion-dollar-leadership/