The Startup Stack

Follow The Startup Stack

Apple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle PodcastsAmazon MusicStitcherSoundCloud

Secret agents. International rendezvous. Big bags of money.

This week, a journey into the weird and wonderful world of domain brokerage with longtime expert, Bill Sweetman. Bill’s business, Name Ninja, rode the wave as domain buying transformed from a cottage industry into a complex international market of (literally) unknowable size. He journeyed back — and took us along for the ride.

Highlights include:

– Why domain brokerage is a little like home-buying

– How NOT to acquire a domain name

– Current trends, including a COVID-19 uptick and social media handles

– How to pick a great domain name (and buy it!)

[Guest / Host bios] 

Guest: Bill Sweetman is the founder of Name Ninja, a company that helps entrepreneurs acquire domain names and social media handles. A self-confessed domain name fanatic, Bill registered his first domain in 1994. He later sold it for five figures.

Host: Louis Beryl is the founder and CEO of Rocketplace. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not building businesses (or talking about them!) Louis enjoys cooking for his family and talking at length about it to anyone who will listen.

More on today’s episode, including a full transcript @ https://rocketplace.com/blog/podcast-episode-4-who-owns-the-internet-bill-sweetman/.

In this week’s special *bonus episode* executive coach Jason Gore quizzes Louis about his own experience being coached.

If you haven’t yet, you can listen to Jason’s full episode on executive coaching here. 

[Guest / Host bios] 

Guest: Jason Gore is half of the founding team of Neuberg, Gore & Associates, an executive coaching firm that supports startup CEOs in Boulder, SF, NYC and LA. 

Host: Louis Beryl is the founder and CEO of Rocketplace. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not building businesses (or talking about them!) Louis enjoys cooking for his family and talking at length about it to anyone who will listen. 

More on today’s episode, including a full transcript @ https://rocketplace.com/blog/podcast-episode-6-bonus-executive-coach-jason-gore/.

There’s no shortage of things that can go wrong when you’re a founder just starting up. Cashflow issues. Botched patents. That one time you literally ran out of product.

Few people understand this as well as Jessica Davidoff. She’s built a business around expecting these kinds of mistakes and stopping them before they happen.

Sprezzatura, a business and production management company, helps startups at every stage, from pre-launch ideation, to fundraising, financial planning, production pipelines and more.

We talked to Jessica about the strange art of starting up and how 2020 has complicated that alchemy.

Highlights include:

-The biggest hurdles for early-stage founders and how to avoid them

-Changing trends in entrepreneurship

-Financial planning considerations for 2020 & 2021 and how to think about runway in uncertain times

[GUEST BIO] Jessica Davidoff is the CEO and Managing Partner of Sprezzatura, a business and production management company in NYC. An experienced founder and a turnaround CEO, Jessica is known by her friends and colleagues as ‘The Wolf.” If you’ve seen Pulp Fiction, you’ll know why.

[HOST BIO] Rocketplace is a curated marketplace of high quality professional service providers. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not working or podcasting, Louis enjoys cooking for his family. His pizza, he’d like you to know, is incredible. 

For more from this conversation, including the episode transcript, visit: https://rocketplace.com/blog/podcast-the-wolf-jessica-davidoff/

Jess Mah is a wunderkind. She started the company that would become inDinero with a handful of other undergrad computer science students while still at UC Berkeley. The team was young, scrappy and smart, with hundreds of mistakes ahead of them. For one, it would be years until the financial services outfit hired their first accountant. 

Almost a decade later inDinero company is thriving, with clients including Pinterest and Slack.  

Louis talks with Jess about the decade she spent building (and sometimes rebuilding) inDinero, the challenges and benefits of being a young founder, what happened to all those small business stimulus checks, and — yes — the future of financial services.  

Highlights include: 

– A terminology breakdown: What is a CFO, a controller, an accountant? 

– Advice for hiring a financial services company

– Jess’s story of building inDinero, including her “no a**holes” policy 

– The importance of being guided by your business plan & how Jess has changed hers

– inDinero’s response to the pandemic & financial roadmapping 

[Guest / Host bios] 

Guest: Jess Mah is the founder & CEO of inDinero, which she launched from her undergrad dorm room in 2010. She’s since been featured in Forbes and Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 Lists.  

Host: Louis Beryl is the founder and CEO of Rocketplace. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not building businesses (or talking about them!) Louis enjoys cooking for his family and talking at length about it to anyone who will listen. 

More on today’s episode, including a full transcript @ https://rocketplace.com/blog/podcast-episode-9-financial-services-jess-mah/.

What do speech writers do? Outside of what we’ve gleaned from reruns of “The West Wing,” most of us have no clue. On this week’s podcast speechwriter Lloyd Rang joins Louis to clear things up. 

The Toronto-based communications specialist spent decades writing for top-ranking Canadian officials before starting LRC, a boutique communications firm. 

Who better to dissect this particular moment in U.S. politics, media & tech than an outsider who thinks about those things for a living? 

Lloyd and Louis talk about how social media has transformed communications — from how companies create buzz around product launches, to announcing an IPO — and what companies can do to cut through the noise. 

Highlights include: 

– The story of Lloyd’s life as a speechwriter & the parallels between political work & startup work   

– “Social listening” and the importance of understanding the conversation you’re entering 

– How to evaluate communications companies & measure impact 

– Tips for crafting your company’s online presence during a particularly noisy time

– Pandemic communications advice

[Guest / Host bios] 

Guest: Lloyd Rang is CEO & lead speechwriter at LRC. Before launching his own boutique narrative & content firm, Lloyd spent years writing for top-ranking Canadian officials and the Canadian government. 

Host: Louis Beryl is the founder and CEO of Rocketplace. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not building businesses (or talking about them!) Louis enjoys cooking for his family and talking at length about it to anyone who will listen. 

More on today’s episode, including a full transcript @ https://rocketplace.com/blog/podcast-episode-10-speechwriter-lloyd-rang/.

Failure is life’s greatest teacher. And god knows, it’s been a year full of them. 

So with 2021 just weeks away, as we all struggle to understand what went wrong and what comes next, we thought — why not give in? Instead of pushing all the bad stuff away, what if we reveled in it instead?

Afterall, what could be better than a long list of other people’s mistakes to remind us that the bad stuff passes? It always does.

This week, we got back through the archives to tell some of The Startup Stack’s greatest stories of failure. F***-ups to learn from, stories to inspire.

So enjoy this special episode of The Startup Stack and we’ll see you in the new year — older and wiser and with loads of mistakes still ahead.

[Guest / Host bios] 

Host: Louis Beryl is the founder and CEO of Rocketplace. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not building businesses (or talking about them!) Louis enjoys cooking for his family and talking at length about it to anyone who will listen.

For more from this episode, see the show notes: https://rocketplace.com/blog/bonus-episode-the-big-whoopsies/

We’re kicking off the new year with a conversation about all things fintech. Louis is joined by an expert, Hugh Norton-Smith, whose executive recruiting firm Intersection Growth Partners works with both incumbent financial institutions and fintech up-and-comers. Hugh has an insider’s perspective on what went on in 2020  — and what’s next. 

Highlights include: 

– Hugh’s unusual path to executive recruitment 

– The convergence of old and new world financial services companies 

– Segmentation in the recruiting industry 

– When to hire an executive recruiter

– Why incumbent institutions are having their “Kodak moment”

[Guest / Host bios] 

Guest: Hugh Norton-Smith is Founder of Intersection Growth Partners, a San Francisco-based executive search firm focussed specifically on fintech. Intersection builds out leadership teams for scrappy startups, incumbent banks working on digital transformation, as well as the investors into fintech. 

Host: Louis Beryl is the founder and CEO of Rocketplace. A 3x founder, investor, and board member, Louis began his tech career as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. When he’s not building businesses (or talking about them!) Louis enjoys cooking for his family and talking at length about it to anyone who will listen. 

More on today’s episode, including a full transcript @ https://rocketplace.com/blog/podcast-episode-11-fintech-recruiter-hugh-norton-smith/.

Plus, why #UGC is on it’s way out. Get more performance marketing tips on this week’s episode of #TheStartupStack with #Pearmill’s Nima Gardideh. Episode description & link to the full pod below

Find out on this week’s episode of #TheStartupStack with EPAD hiring expert Mike Morell. Episode description & link below