The Room Podcast

In this week’s episode, we welcome Jesse Draper, Emmy-nominated television star turned venture capitalist who founded Halogen Ventures, an early-stage venture firm focused on investing in female entrepreneurs. You’ve seen her on TV in The Naked Brothers Band and as the host of The Valley Girl Show, interviewing tech and business entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. As a fourth-generation venture capitalist, Jesse moved away from entertainment to build her own venture firm, Halogen Ventures, which invests entirely in female founding teams. Having recently closed her second fund, Jesse is just getting started on changing the technology ecosystem for the better.

Jesse shared with Madison and Claudia the value of building a brand for yourself, her experiences on being an angel and an institutional investor, and her thoughts on the future for female founders. Let’s open the door.

This week on The Room, we sit down with Jane Metcalfe. Jane was the co-founder of the legendary Wired magazine and media company, TCHO chocolates, and now NEO.LIFE.

In the early 1990s, Jane and her life partner and co-founder Louis Rossetto came to the Bay Area with the idea and passion to build a magazine and media company devoted to cutting-edge technology. This magazine is what we now know as the iconic Wired, home to some of the most futuristic, but also technology-defining stories. Jane and Louis launched Wired with a big story to tell: the internet becoming mainstream. Today we chat with Jane to hear about her three-time founding stories, from media to chocolates, to biotech, Jane has seen it all and has some deep wisdom to share. Let's open the door.

In this episode, co-hosts Madison and Claudia, interview Ajay Kori, co-founder and former CEO of UrbanStems. They find out more about his journey of founding and scaling this massively successful eCommerce flower delivery service business.

He shares a few of his learnings about customer satisfaction and the best way to ensure the longevity of new customers. His inspiring story of failing during the initial phases of the business, but not letting that deter him or his team from making a huge success of the company, should be a great motivation for any aspiring entrepreneur. Ajay shares why he eventually decided to hand over the CEO reins of UrbanStems and start a new business that now has the potential to help millions of people find relief from migraines.

In this episode of The Room, Claudia and Madison kick off the new season with Amy Chang, Co-Founder of Accompany, an AI-driven relationship intelligence platform acquired by Cisco in 2018 for $270 million. we hear from a first-time founder and long term product guru on the ups and downs of transitioning from big tech to founding a company. Listen here to learn about the power of early career decisions, battling anxiety and uncertainty, and the right reasons to sell your company.

And that’s a wrap on Season 1! Thank you so much to all of our listeners for joining us on The Room! We have big plans for Season 2, launching Tuesday, Feb.9, but before we enter the room where it happened with a whole new slew of entrepreneurs, we take a look back on Season 1, its guests, and our biggest takeaways.

Claudia and Madison close out The Room’s first season with guest Amit Sharma, CEO, and founder of Narvar. Madison first met Amit in Narvar’s offices back in 2019, as a customer at Gap Inc. If you’ve ever received an email about your tracking update or returned something online, odds are you’ve interacted with Narvar’s core products. Narvar is a post-purchase customer engagement platform helping over 650 retailers streamline their customer communication, returns, and exchanges. Founded in 2012, Amit saw what others did not, post-purchase is a powerful mechanism for e-commerce customer loyalty, retention, and satisfaction. Rather than “ghosting” your customers, retailers needed to handhold customers every step of the way from the “complete purchase button” to the ring of the doorbell. As we learn in today’s episode, this wasn’t Amit’s first try at start-up. Listen to the episode to hear about his journey from India, the first start-up with unfortunate market timing, his time working at multiple large retailers, and ultimately taking the plunge to start Narvar.

Alexa Buckley is the Co-Founder of Margaux - a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of insanely comfortable and beautiful shoes. If you pay attention to Instagram posts from influencers wearing handcrafted ballet flats in every color of the rainbow, then you’ve probably seen a Margaux shoe. Alexa started the shoe line during her senior year at Harvard. Alongside co-founder, Sarah Pierson, the two women realized the pervasive shoe shuffle, where working women would have to swap their walking shoes with their office shoes under their desks due to a lack of style in the former and comfort in the latter. Why wasn’t it possible to have both? It was time to take a leap of faith and disrupt the shoe industry. Landing on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and nailing a Vogue spread, Alexa and the story of Margaux inspires us all to Guax for it!

This week, we sat down with Amy Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, a digital and physical community for women. Spending 10 plus years in corporate law, Amy never thought she'd be a founder. However, after the 2016 election, she took a closer look at what mattered most to her - The Riveter was born. While it's been a challenging year for physical spaces, Amy has gallantly persevered by building a growing digital space proving our belief that "the room" is more than four walls. In today's episode, we'll explore insights and themes such as how political and venture fundraising have more in common than you might think, motherhood in the workplace, and core product pivots. Let's open the door.

This week on The Room, we interview Shishir Mehrotra, founder and CEO of Coda. Coda is a venture-backed workflow tool recently valued at over $600 million dollars. With Coda, docs are now as powerful as applications. Although Coda was started in 2014, Coda is more relevant now than ever as a key player in 2020’s “future of work.” Coda is redefining what it means to stay organized, engaged, and effective during COVID-19’s acceleration of a remote-first culture.

In today’s episode, we explore Shishir’s path to building one of the world’s most powerful work tools- where the flexibility of a doc is combined with the power of a spreadsheet and application. We’ll explore insights and themes such as prioritizing opportunities that foster personal growth, the benefits of building a company in stealth, and scaling a distributed workforce and culture well. Let’s open the door.