upside

Interview Begins : 7:37

Debrief: 45:43

Jack Greco is the co-founder of ACV auctions.

ACV auctions is an online marketplace for used cars. As of November 2019, the company was valued at more than $1.5 billion.

Jack has built a reputation for supporting other founders in the Buffalo area as one of the most active angels and advisors in the region. He created Buffalo Bridge, a weekly curation of resources, opinions and insights from Western New York startup founders. Long Live Buffalo.

We discuss:

• ACV Auctions 12:15
• 43North 15:11
• Relationship with the Community? 20:06
• Bad Attention 23:06
• Buffalo's Ecosystem 26:33
• Views on Angel Investing 30:48
• Representing Buffalo Politically 34:47
• Launching Buffalo Bridge 36:24
• Building a Forest 41:45

ACV auctions was founded in 2014 in Buffalo, New York.

Subscribe to Buffalo Bridge

Connect with Jack Greco on LinkedIn

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This episode of upside is sponsored by SPMB. 

SPMB is one of the fastest-growing retained executive search firms in the country, closing hundreds of C-level searches every year.

For over 40 years, SPMB has specialized in recruiting upper management and board members to VC-funded startups everywhere from early-stage to growth stage.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/spmb to learn more.

–

This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

Interview Begins : 6:57

Debrief: 37:08

Karla Gallardo is the CEO of Viwala.

Viwala provides loans for women entrepreneurs who have high-impact businesses as well as a network of mentors and entrepreneurs who aim to reduce the gender gap in Mexican businesses.

We discuss:

• Idea for Viwala 8:52
• Banking Culture in Mexico 11:23
• Revenue Based Lending 13:23
• Sustainable Business Ecosystem 15:38
• Gender Lens Investing 18:14
• Viwala's Growth 21:33
• Women doing Business 26:05
• Liquidity for Investors 33:56

Viwala was founded in 2019 and based in Mexico City, Mexico.

Learn more about Viwala

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This episode of upside is sponsored by SPMB. 

SPMB is one of the fastest-growing retained executive search firms in the country, closing hundreds of C-level searches every year.

For over 40 years, SPMB has specialized in recruiting upper management and board members to VC-funded startups everywhere from early-stage to growth stage.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/spmb to learn more.

–

This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

Interview Begins 6:53

Debrief 52:25

Patrick Lightbody is the co-founder of Reclaim. Reclaim is a smart calendar assistant that can save you up to 40% of your workweek.

Reclaim aligns your priorities to the time you spend every week, empowering you to rapidly rebalance your schedule and defend your time to work on what matters.

Like a power tool for your time, Reclaim enables you to focus on the stuff you’re uniquely positioned to work on, not the painful process of managing your calendar.

We discuss:

• Open Source 11:31
• Moving to Portland 14:15
• Starting Reclaim 17:07
• Reclaim's Progess 23:29
• How Reclaim Works 31:30
• Difference from Calendar Apps 36:57
• Privacy on Reclaim 41:28
• Reclaim Fees 46:39
• Vision for Reclaim 47:39

Reclaim was founded in 2019 and based in Portland, Oregon.

Learn more or try Reclaim for free

Follow upside on Twitter

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This episode of upside is sponsored by SPMB. 

SPMB is one of the fastest-growing retained executive search firms in the country, closing hundreds of C-level searches every year.

For over 40 years, SPMB has specialized in recruiting upper management and board members to VC-funded startups everywhere from early-stage to growth stage.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/spmb to learn more.

–

This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

Interview begins: 6:28

Debrief: 41:25

John Gannon is the co-founder and general partner of GoingVC.

John has mentored thousands of current and aspiring VCs through his VC Careers blog and email list, which counts VCs from top firms like Sequoia, KPCB, and Bessemer as subscribers.

GoingVC was founded in 2016 with the goal of providing individuals with a more concrete pathway into venture capital. It has continued to grow into a vibrant, collaborative, and inclusive community of like-minded individuals who have the common goal of advancing their careers in the field.

GoingVC was founded in 2016 and based in New York City.

Learn more about GoingVC

Apply for GoingVC Cohort 9

Subscribe to John Gannon’s Blog

Follow upside on Twitter

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–

This episode of upside is sponsored by SPMB. 

SPMB is one of the fastest-growing retained executive search firms in the country, closing hundreds of C-level searches every year.

For over 40 years, SPMB has specialized in recruiting upper management and board members to VC-funded startups everywhere from early-stage to growth stage.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/spmb to learn more.

–

This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

When we filmed Test City, USA in the summer of 2019 about the startup ecosystem in Columbus, Ohio, we knew the timing was special. Little did we know how good that timing was! 

Columbus has continued to gain momentum over the last two years. Here's a sample of the changes for companies and individuals featured in this film:

• Beam Dental - Raised $55M (2019) + $80M (March 2021) 
• Mobikit - Acquired by Azuga (March 2021)
• Root - IPO raising $724.4M at $27/share (Oct. 2020) - valued at $6B
• Rapchat - Raised $2.3M (May 2020)
• PopCom - $1.3M from crowdfunding (June 2020)
• ScriptDrop - $15M Series A (Oct. 2020)
• CoverMyMeds - McKesson combined five business units under the CoverMyMeds brand
• Drive Capital - Announced $350M and $300M (Overdrive) Funds... $1.2B total Assets Under Management
• Rev1 Ventures - Launched $10M Pre-Seed Fund (March 2021)
• Rev1 Ventures - Launched $20M Fund (June 2021)

Test City, USA is now available to stream for free online. Visit testcityusa.com.

Director: Kyle Skinner
Producer: Jay Clouse
Exec. Producer: Eric Hornung

WINNER:
2019 Best Ohio Feature by the Film Festival of Columbus

OFFICIAL SELECTION:
2019 Film Festival of Columbus
2020 Columbus International Film Festival
2020 Culver City Film Festival

A film by The Up Company

Interview begins: 7:16

Debrief: 43:38

Ginger Rothrock is a Senior Director at HG Ventures.

HG Ventures supports innovation and growth across The Heritage Group by investing and partnering with private companies developing new technologies and approaches in both our core and adjacent markets. We leverage the world class expertise of The Heritage Group operating companies and research center to offer a unique value proposition to our portfolio company partners.

Founded in 1930, The Heritage Group is a fourth-generation family-owned business managing a diverse portfolio of more than 30 companies specializing in heavy construction and materials, environmental services, and specialty chemicals.

We discuss:

• Doing Science and Business together 12:04
• The Heritage Group and HG Ventures 15:48
• HG Ventures and TechStars Timeline 19:32
• Measuring ROI 22:21
• HG Ventures Funding Model 24:22
• Hard Tech startup cost 30:39
• Founder Vs Product Market Fit 33:53
• What it takes to partner with TechStars 37:2

HG Ventures was founded in 2018 and based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Learn more about HG Ventures

Learn more about the Heritage Group

Learn more about the HG Accelerator powered by Techstars

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This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

This episode is sponsored by Fundboard.

FundBoard makes free tools and content for founders. FundBoard's beta helps you quickly uncover investors that write checks for startups like yours. 

Building a FundBoard is really easy… but getting one built for you is even easier! And for a limited time, they're offering to make a FundBoard FOR YOU, pre-built with five investors that are a good fit for your startup so you can hit the ground running. 

This is an incredible offer for listeners of this show, so make sure you take them up on it! You have absolutely nothing to lose.

Just visit upside.fm/fundboard.

Interview begins: 7:00

Debrief: 38:33

Tom Cottingham is the founder and CEO of Flyover Future. 

Flyover Future is a digital newsletter covering innovation and start-ups in the heartland. They cover the investors, the innovators and the ecosystems that help innovation thrive. We help our readers discover the amazing companies and initiatives throughout the midwest that make Flyover Country a vibrant center of 21st century innovation.

We discuss:

• Print Media 10:58
• Launching a Media Company 12:16
• Louisville's Business Model 13:59
• Curating Readers 17:07
• City Based vs Topic Based 22:21
• Generational Opportunity 29:39
• Who's Important? 32:41

Mucker Capital was founded in 2019 and based in Louisville, Kentucky.

Learn more about Flyover Future

Follow upside on Twitter

Advertise with an upside classified

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This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

This episode is sponsored by Fundboard.

FundBoard makes free tools and content for founders. FundBoard's beta helps you quickly uncover investors that write checks for startups like yours. 

Building a FundBoard is really easy… but getting one built for you is even easier! And for a limited time, they're offering to make a FundBoard FOR YOU, pre-built with five investors that are a good fit for your startup so you can hit the ground running. 

This is an incredible offer for listeners of this show, so make sure you take them up on it! You have absolutely nothing to lose.

Just visit upside.fm/fundboard.

Interview begins: 7:07

Debrief: 38:45

William Hsu is a founding partner at Mucker Capital. He started his career as a founder, creating BuildPoint, a provider of workflow management solutions for the commercial construction industry not long after graduating from Stanford.

Based in Los Angeles, Mucker invests in Seed and Series A rounds in Southern California and other underfunded ecosystems outside Silicon Valley. 

MuckerLab works with only 10-20 companies per year in annual cohorts. No three month bootcamps. No demo days. Just heads-down business building for one year -- or however long it takes to reach the next set of critical business milestones.

We discuss:

• Relying on one's experience 13:13
• Working on a Comeback 15:08
• Who's the Customer on VC? 18:38
• MuckerLab 21:33
• Scaling Vertically 25:49
• Mucker Environment 30:31
• Mucker being expensive 32:36
• Vision for Mucker 34:34

Mucker Capital was founded in 2011 and based in Santa Monica, California.

Learn more about Mucker

Follow upside on Twitter

Advertise with an upside classified

–

This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

This episode is sponsored by Fundboard.

FundBoard makes free tools and content for founders. FundBoard's beta helps you quickly uncover investors that write checks for startups like yours. 

Building a FundBoard is really easy… but getting one built for you is even easier! And for a limited time, they're offering to make a FundBoard FOR YOU, pre-built with five investors that are a good fit for your startup so you can hit the ground running. 

This is an incredible offer for listeners of this show, so make sure you take them up on it! You have absolutely nothing to lose.

Just visit upside.fm/fundboard.

Interview begins: 5:59

Debrief: 50:11

Rob Petrozzo is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Rally.

Rally is a liquid financial marketplace for buying & selling equity shares in ultra-rare assets the same way you buy & sell stocks. Together, we Rally to make investing behind ideas, emotions, and communities safe, easy, and accessible.

They were the first to turn tangible assets into fractionalized public securities offerings. They were the first to establish a liquid secondary market for those securities. And they were they first to do this with SEC qualification.

200+ IPOs later, hundreds of thousands of shares of trading cards, classic cars, watches, memorabilia, the world's rarest literature, and modern collectibles are all actively trading on Rally.

We discuss:

• Reg A+ 7:03
• Rally's Platform 8:09
• Fractionalization of Assets 15:11
• Rally Rd is more than about cars 16:52
• Rally's User Base Proportion 19:35
• Passion Lead Investing 21:40
• 60-40 Portfolio 25:59
• Bull Market 28:55
• Rob's view on NFTs 31:19
• What's New With Rally 34:06
• Rally's Showroom 36:44
• Investing in Securing the Assets 40:45

Rally was founded in 2016 and based in New York City.

Learn more about Rally

Follow Rob on Twitter

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This episode of upside is sponsored by Ethos Wealth Management. 

Managing wealth with an eye toward the future demands vigilance and skill in today’s global economy. Over the years, Ethos Wealth Management has worked with clients and their other professional advisors – including attorneys and accountants – to create comprehensive wealth management plans designed to make the best use of their wealth today and help ensure its endurance for future generations.

They can do the same for you. 

Visit upside.fm/ethos to learn more.

–

This episode is sponsored by SavvyCal. 

SavvyCal is the most intuitive and powerful scheduling tool on the market. In fact, we just started SavvyCal to book interviews with our guests! 

You can create personalized links in seconds and even allow recipients to overlay their calendar on top of yours. 

You really gotta see how this works, and you’ll wonder why it wasn’t always this easy.

Sign up to create a free account at savvycal.com/upside and when you're ready to test out a paid plan, use the code UPSIDE to get your first month free.

–

This episode is sponsored by Fundboard.

FundBoard makes free tools and content for founders. FundBoard's beta helps you quickly uncover investors that write checks for startups like yours. 

Building a FundBoard is really easy… but getting one built for you is even easier! And for a limited time, they're offering to make a FundBoard FOR YOU, pre-built with five investors that are a good fit for your startup so you can hit the ground running. 

This is an incredible offer for listeners of this show, so make sure you take them up on it! You have absolutely nothing to lose.

Just visit upside.fm/fundboard.

Interview begins: 5:16

Debrief: 43:55

This week we’re revisiting CC058, a coffee chat with Peter Livingston of Unpopular Ventures. In this episode, we explored syndicate investing.

Unpopular Ventures is led by Peter Livingston, whose experience is almost entirely in startups – as both an operator and investor. He was the first engineer at iRhythm (IPO 2016) and was the founder/CEO at Lifesquare (backed by Kleiner Perkins).

He has been angel investing since 2013, made >150 investments to date, and has produced investment returns well within the top decile of VC industry performance.

Peter founded Unpopular Ventures to keep investing in startups – but with a bigger family, bigger checks, and bigger impact.

We discuss:

• Disagreeing about corporate VCs (9:11)
• Syndicate Model (13:37)
• Investors and the syndicate (16:13)
• Not following the traditional fund (26:35)
• Building trust (31:25)
• Edification (39:23)

Learn more about Unpopular Ventures: http://unpopular.vc/

Follow Peter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/unpopularvc

Follow Peter’s Syndicate: https://angel.co/unpopularvc/syndicate

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