upside

We've had a lot of success in our first year of upside.

Or at least it seems that way, through the magic of post-production!

A few weeks ago, our editor + audio engineer Nathan told us he had a surprise for us. Soon after, we had an episode in our Dropbox we weren't expecting -- a collection of bloopers from the past year.

Nathan is "the man behind the curtain" who makes Eric and I sound like we know what we're talking about. If you heard the episodes in the form that he hears the episodes, it wouldn't be pretty. 

And we thought it fit perfectly between our two-week series of reflections on one year of upside.

You've heard us at our best -- and now you can hear us at our worst. Enjoy.

Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

On upside, failure hasn’t really been the default. Most initiatives have come naturally and been met with, at worst, mildly positive reception. For the last few months, Jay and I have been struggling to find to an appropriate way to commemorate one year. 

We planned a multi-week festival of podcasts. Too much. 
We reached out to Steve Case. Nothing. 
We interviewed each other. That felt wrong. 

Today, we’re going to try something different. I’m going to speak to you host to listener, one to one, on my takeaways from one year of upside and what I see in the future.

Monique Villa changed my perspective of the podcast when she said that, to her, “founders are like books.” This podcast - therefore - is a growing, curated library.

Growing up, I was fascinated by libraries. Being surrounded by books is one of the two environments in which I feel a sense of complete belonging. The ability to disappear into a rack of books or simply peruse the aisles puts me in a state of awe. The output of thousands of human brains sitting on racks of dead trees waiting for your undivided attention. But when you choose a book and you read a book, that’s where the magic happens. 

Mrs. Wilder, our grade school librarian, used to let me sneak into the library on bathroom breaks to read a few extra pages of the books I burrowed about the shelves, out of the sights of the Dewey decimal system and curious classmates. We had a book limit of 5 books per week, causing those with prominent shelving to incite a stampede during library time. When i could, I read those. When I couldn’t I read rest of the library - the undervalued titles that didn’t get the shelf space they deserved, the books with ugly covers, or boring titles on something like insect species.

Great books make you feel by teaching you something you already know in a way that’s different from what you know. When you read a great book, you aren’t being lectured, you’re having a dialogue. They say to never judge a book by its cover, and it’s my belief that you can’t truly judge a book until you’ve finished it.  I’ve found parallels between traits of great books and traits of great founders. 

First, they weave a thread through every chapter, through every answer. Sometimes unintelligible at first but always present. The history of the word “mantra” stems from Hindi and the act that ceremonializes and ratifies a ritual. To great founders, this ritual is their life’s work. They can’t answer a question about their business without hinting at the bigger vision. Nick Potts, the CEO of Scriptdrop, can hardly go 20 minutes without talking about his goal of helping one billion patients. 

Second, they embrace their abnormality. Every great founder we’ve met is odd. They’re different. They don’t fit in. They don’t fit a mold. They turn down lucrative job offers to live on couches because of a beautiful excel template. They start sports media companies in Nebraska. They fly to China to buy factories because the contractors aren’t getting Spot’s eyes right. These people aren’t typical. They use that difference it in three steps: they identify it, they call it out, and they extort it. 

Ashlee Ammon from Mixtroz literally made shirts to wear to a conference that said “Black Female Founder Fund Me” because she recognized she didn’t fit the model. Then she became the 37th black female founder to raise $1M in VC. Great founders don’t conform, they make their nonconformities shine and build a competitive advantage around it. 

Third, they come highly recommended. Early on, Jay and I learned to use scarcity in our asks. We rarely ask for intros to more than 2-3 companies in an ecosystem and give very specific guidelines for what we are looking for. Usually, the same founder or two will emerge. In the Ross Baird / Village Capital model, founders know real founders. The local tech darling isn’t usually the best company.

Ezra Galston is a fantastic example of this. We asked for the best early stage venture capitalist in Chicago and three separate people recommended Ezra. In a world where your reputation matters, and matters a lot, those kind of people are who we aspire to talk to and who we aspire to be. 

My favorite song by The Head and the Heart is called Library Magic. It’s a song about being inspired by those who live the lyrics they create. It’s a song about living your lyrics. 

In this last year, Jay and I have created a library of over 60 episodes of founders, venture capitalists, and community builders who eat, sleep, and breathe their mission. It’s inspiring. It’s eye-opening, And, it’s humbling that they spend time away from their mission with us. We constantly feel the warm embrace of Library Magic whispering through the dusty aisles.

On a note looking towards the future, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says that the unread books in a library are more valuable than the read books. Those unread books present opportunity, potential growth, and new learning. I cannot wait to find new books and pull them into our ever growing upside library. 

Thank you to everyone who has listened thus far, our fortitude would be immensely challenged without you. Thank you to our first sponsor, Taft, who took a gamble on us and a crazy non-traditional idea for sponsorship. Thank you to Nathan, without whom we would be still be podcast tadpoles. And, finally but most importantly, thank you to everyone who has been on the show - featured guests, insight guests, guest hosts - you have helped us in ways untold. 

Looking forward to another year of Library Magic.

Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

This episode comes from the Cincinnati Podcast Festival on November 1, 2018.

Eric Weissman is the Vice President of Communications, Community & Economic Inclusion at Cintrifuse.

Cintrifuse has one clear mission: to make Greater Cincinnati the #1 tech startup hub in the midwest and among the most attractive innovation hubs in the nation. It creates jobs, brings talent, attracts investment, and unlocks our region’s potential to lead innovation in a wide range of industries.

Eric was part of the founding team of Cintrifuse. Responsible for establishing the strategy, messaging, branding and positioning for the effort to catalyze growth through attracting and retaining startups. 

He leads the team credited with igniting the #StartupCincy effort, evolving it from just a social media hashtag to a movement and now a reputable community recognized from coast-to-coast.

Learn more about Cintrifuse: https://www.cintrifuse.com/
Follow Eric on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eweissmann
Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Interview begins: 07:10
Debrief begins: 55:08

Janosch Amstutz is the Founder and CEO of HoloMe. 

HoloMe creates life-sized, high definition, real humans in augmented reality. Their software allows brands and companies to easily put real people into augmented reality in a scaleable way.

HoloMe was founded in 2017 and based in London, United Kington.

Learn more about HoloMe: https://www.holome.co.uk/

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This episode is sponsored by Taft, Stettinius & Hollister, a full-service law firm known for assisting entrepreneurs across the Heartland.

Learn more about or get in touch with Taft: https://www.taftlaw.com/
Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Interview begins: 05:47
Debrief begins: 47:55

Ezra Galston is the Founding Partner at Starting Line. Starting Line is a thematic early stage venture capital fund focused on investing in consumer services and products that are both cheaper and better. They want to be the number one stop for any entrepreneur building a consumer brand outside of the coast.

Starting Line was founded in 2018 and based in Chicago, Illinois.

Learn more about Starting Line: https://www.startingline.vc/
Follow Ezra on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EzraMoGee
Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Interview begins: 07:58
Insight begins: 1:03:34
Debrief begins: 1:20:42

Erik Nieves is the Founder and CEO of Plus One Robotics. Plus One Robotics develops computer vision software to enable robotic automation in supply chain applications. The integration of off-the-shelf high-performance manipulators with Plus One's advanced vision capabilities enables robots to bridge the gap between steady state volume and surge. 

Plus One's technology mitigates the persistent shortage of manual labor and allows warehouse personnel to flow from monotonous tasks to higher-value work. Plus One's novel approach to human-robot collaboration and supervised autonomy ensures the systems are scalable, flexible and fault-tolerant.

They've received $10.6M in funding to date from Pritzker Group Venture Capital ($8.3M Series A) and Schematic Ventures ($2.4M seed) 

Plus One Robotics was founded in 2015 and based in San Antonio, TX.

Learn more about Plus One Robotics: https://plusonerobotics.com/

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Nick Solaro is an investment partner at the Columbus venture capital firm Drive Capital. One of Nick’s focuses for Drive is its investments in robotics companies, of which the firm has made a handful in recent years.

Learn more about Drive Capital: https://www.drivecapital.com/
Learn more about Devol's Dance: https://www.devolsdance.com/
Follow Nick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nsolaro

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This episode is sponsored by Taft, Stettinius & Hollister, a full-service law firm known for assisting entrepreneurs across the Heartland.

Learn more about or get in touch with Taft: https://www.taftlaw.com/
Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Interview begins: 06:02
Debrief begins: 58:45

Tyler Tringas is the General Partner at Earnest Capital. 

Earnest Capital provides early-stage funding, resources and a network of experienced advisors to bootstrappers, indie hackers, makers and real businesses. 

They offer an innovative investment structure aligned with founders and businesses that want to accelerate now and ultimately become a profitable sustainable business. They never want you to need to raise another round of funding and you’ll never be forced to exit.

Earnest Capital is a collaboration between Tyler Tringas and SureSwift Capital and was founded in 2018.

Learn more about Earnest Capital: https://earnestcapital.com
Follow Tyler on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tylertringas

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Kevin McArdle is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sureswift Capital.

SureSwift is a holding company that actively invests in, and holds on to emerging media and SaaS properties with the intent to provide exceptional value to existing and future clients. We are a team of 75+ remote individuals in 14 times zones.

SureSwift was founded in 2015 and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Learn more about SureSwift Capital: https://www.sureswiftcapital.com/
Follow Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kevin_McArdle

Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Interview begins: 07:29
Insight begins: 1:15:07
Debrief begins: 1:28:18

Jonathan Gill is the founder and CEO of Backtracks.

Backtracks is an analytics and hosting platform that helps podcasters know & grow their podcast audience. They are an audio-oriented, highly technical team that have worked on 30+ albums, voted in the Grammy Awards, worked on NASA space station software, hold multiple patents, built massive e-commerce and payments systems (for the likes of Dell, American Express, Visa, etc.)

Backtracks was founded in 2016 and based in Austin, Texas.

Learn more about Backtracks: https://backtracks.fm/

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Meb Faber is a co-founder and the Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management. Meb is the manager of Cambria’s ETFs and separate accounts. He is also the host of The Meb Faber Show podcast and has authored numerous white papers and leather-bound books. He is a frequent speaker and writer on investment strategies and has been featured in Barron’s, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Meb graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Engineering Science and Biology.

Follow Meb on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MebFaber
Visit Meb's website: https://mebfaber.com/

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This episode is sponsored by Taft, Stettinius & Hollister, a full-service law firm known for assisting entrepreneurs across the Heartland.

Learn more about or get in touch with Taft: https://www.taftlaw.com/
Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Nearly a year into publishing weekly episodes of the show, we have a lot of thoughts about the world of podcasting and specifically how startup founders, VCs, and community builders can leverage podcasting.

So this week, we are sharing with you the three main strategies for engaging with the podcasting medium. Namely, consuming, contributing to, and creating podcasts.

Especially if you plan to try to appear on podcasts or create your own, you need to hear this.

Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Last month, we had the pleasure of hosting a panel at SXSW called Geography vs. Investing: Should Location Matter?

This would not have been possible without the support and voting of our listeners, and we really appreciate your help. Please enjoy the panel, recorded in full, including audience Q&A at the end.

Panel description:
It’s never been easier for entrepreneurs everywhere to start a company.

But even with world-changing companies being built all over, access to capital is still concentrated in Silicon Valley.

But we’ve found investors inside the coasts investing in Silicon Valley, as well as Silicon Valley investors funding companies inside the coasts.

This panel examines the role geography plays in investment, what role it SHOULD play, and how investors can find companies with upside regardless of geography.

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Brandon Bryant received his degree in economics from Ohio State University and worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as an investment banker for 3 years. Afterwards he transitioned to the marketing world as a social media content creator (@wallstreetpaper) working with companies like Uber, Microsoft, Walmart, WSJ and GQ. He also co-founded Harlem Capital, an early stage venture capital fund that is focused on investing companies founded by people of color and women.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/wallstreetpaper

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Rachel Carpenter is the Chief Executive Officer and a founding partner of Intrinio, a disruptive financial data platform launched in 2015. Based in the company’s Florida office, Rachel has overall responsibility for Intrinio including driving its strategy and position for long term growth. She is an advanced front-end web developer and a graduate of The Starter League Advanced web design course. Rachel graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BBA in both Finance and Management and minors in Spanish and European Studies. Rachel is a member of the Forbes Finance Council, a member of the Data Coalition advocating for open, structured data, and a Board Member at CASA (Community Action Stops Abuse), the largest domestic violence shelter in Florida.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rachel_Ann_C

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Andy Sparks is the Co-Founder & CEO of Holloway, a new digital publishing company focused on publishing the best knowledge on navigating the challenges of modern work for all to find. Holloway is backed by NEA and The New York Times. Previously, he co-founded Mattermark, a provider of data on private companies that raised more than $17M and sold for far less than that. Andy graduated from The Ohio State University, lives in San Francisco, and will be publishing a book on how to raise venture capital later this summer.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SparksZilla

Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm