Morado Venture Partners is a Silicon Valley based seed fund investing mostly at B2B and SaaS companies. Dominik meets about 50-100 startups every month and listens to their pitch. Since his role is to further recommend (or not recommend) startups to the fund’s parters, I’m asking him several (not necessarily most comfortable) questions to help us understand the investor’s point of view while meeting with a startup.

What do investors pay attention to most during a pitch meeting? What do they like and what they don't like? How do they measure "quality of a founder"? What were the funny situations? Do they really mean they want to hear back from founders when they say "no" to them? In how many startups does Morado Ventures invest per month? What's their attitude towards "married founders"? What's the first thing founders should do when arriving to Silicon Valley?

Listen to the interview and find out! You can also watch it at www.valleytalks.com.

Big THANK YOU to our sponsor: UnStock — Mobile-First Video Marketplace

Ondrej Homola comes from Czech Republic. He is a co-founder and CEO of Lifeliqe – a tool for learning science with virtual and augmented reality currently used by 15K schools around the world.

How did Ondrej and his team start their partnership with Microsoft? How did Ondrej’s company approach schools and convince them to start using virtual reality in classes? How is Ondrej financing his business and why is he avoiding raising money from investors? What were the reactions to Lifeliqe in Czech Republic?

Watch the interview and hear about Ondrej’s impressive story!

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our sponsor UnStock www.unstock.io – an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers!

Joe Vasquez has been involved in startups ever since. While he was at Stanford University, he co-founded StartX Accelerator – one of the top accelerators in USA. For the last couple years he’s been managing partnerships at Runway Incubator. Now he is starting Michelson Runway Accelerator that focuses on educational technology.

Joe was born deaf, but as he says, he has the ability to listen incredibly well (not to mention that he also fluently speaks several languages!). Joe strongly emphasizes the importance of empathy, listening to users and continuous learning – components of lean startup method that Joe implements in his programs.

In the interview we talk about: Why Joe decided to focus on startups that are working on improving educational system? What was his experience in gaining education as a deaf child? What’s the difference between an accelerator and an incubator? Do accelerators in Silicon Valley compete with each other? What’s the most common mistake that startup founders make? Is it true that Silicon Valley is very welcoming to the founders who have failed before? What founders should remember about in their pitch to investors? How they can make the best use of Silicon Valley when they arrive here?

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partners Runway Incubator, StyleBee and our sponsor UnStock – an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers!

Petcube is the first ever smart camera for pet owners that lets you watch, talk to, and play with your pet remotely from a smartphone. Founders come from Kiev, Ukraine, and this is where in 2012 they came up with the idea. Soon, they decided to go for a Kickstarter campaign and moved to China to work on manufacturing. Their Kickstarter campaign just blew out, ending with impressive $250,000!

Today, they are selling in Best Buy, Nordstrom and many other retail and online stores. However, things were not always so optimistic…

What's the secret behind their great success on Kickstarter and how did they get so much press? Why did the company almost die right after the Kickstarter? How did they deal with so many pre orders? How and when did they start to get investors? When and how did they get to Y Combinator and what did YC help them with? How did they get the deal with Best Buy? What does Yaroslav think of the new competition coming in?

Listen to the interview get insights on incredible Petcube story!

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partners Runway Incubator, StyleBee and our sponsor UnStock – an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers!

Ryan Rogowski created a very helpful, for some people even anxiety eliminating, product – Waygo – an app that allows to instantly translate Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Ryan, apparently not alone, experienced a huge language barrier during his one-year stay in China. He had trouble especially in restaurants, since he had no idea what he was ordering. He soon decided to develop an app, that would translate Chinese in real time while hovering a phone camera over the text. Today, after 5 years, it translates from three Asian languages and users have made over 7M translations.

What were the first steps for Ryan to work on the idea? At what point did he decide to move to Silicon Valley? How did he end up on a 2-week trip with Dave McClure, Founder of 500 Startups, and did he get to the program? What user acquisition strategies does he use for Waygo? What would he do differently now?

Listen to the interview and hear Ryan’s incredible story!

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partners Runway Incubator and StyleBee!

Priya is a founder of Fidl – an intelligent shape wear that tracks body measurements. She studied engineering, gained lots of programming skills and won several hackatons in her home country – India (despite the fact that, as she underlines, she was not 100% good at math).

Her dreams came true as she did several own projects and managed businesses in India. Eventually, she decided to leave her comfort zone and move to Silicon Valley for love. Today she works on an invention that stole women's hearts on one of San Francisco hackatons, where she and her team won the 1st prize.

How did Priya start a new venture in Silicon Valley? How did she make it to legally work in USA? What's her strategy in devoting time and money into a new hardware startup? How is she approaching the smart body measurements market?

Listen the interview and learn more about Priya's story!

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partners Runway Incubator and StyleBee!

Doug Rogers is a co-founder and Director of Product at Pretty Instant – a service that disrupts the industry of hiring photographers for family and business events. Pretty Instant started as an event photo booth service, then they (kind of by accident) applied to Y Combinator, got approved for the program and narrowed their focus to what they were doing extremely well – matching photographers with events.

How come did they actually get clients before really having a product? How do they prevent any problems in delivering the service by their photographers? What is their story behind getting approved to YC? Do investors mind that the company is spread between Silicon Valley and Boston?

Listen to the interview and learn lots of incredible insights on Pretty Instant’s story and their experience with Y Combinator!

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partner Runway and to our sponsor UnStock — an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers.

Adryenn Ashley is a movie and TV Producer, social media influencer (200K total followers on FB, Twitter, Instagram) and founder of CrowdedTV – a crowdfunding platform for reality TV, movies and talk shows. It is pretty much like Kickstarter for shows that aim to be broadcasted on TV.

Adryenn decided to build the platform, in order for TV productions be easier and more independently funded than via traditional ways, which often act against the interest of producers. With CrowdedTV people can back shows not only with money, but also with their social media profiles, so that producers will know what type of audience is interested in watching their show.

Why TV industry is so much behind with implementing the social aspect of their audience and why is it so important? What’s the hardest part in getting a show broadcasted on TV? How did Adryenn gain 200K social media followers? What does she mean by saying that she was doing online marketing even before the internet was born? How did she build the platform, how did she get the first projects on CrowdedTV and how is she growing her user base? Is she looking for investors and what would she spend the first money on?

Listen to the interview, learn lots of incredible insights about TV industry and learn why Adryenn takes matters into her own hands!

You can also watch the interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partner Galvanize and to our sponsor UnStock — an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers.

Did you know that today hotel’s rooms availabilities need to be uploaded in excel spreadsheets, in order to submit updates to some of the biggest booking databases? Maksim Izmaylov is a co-founder and CEO of Roomstorm – a company that helps airlines and hotels deal with booking emergencies.

Maksim’s B2B business targets hotels and airlines to help them reduce negative effects of overbooking or flight cancellations and deliver great customer experience. Also, Maksim is on his fantastic mission to disrupt travel industry by introducing automatization in various fields.

Having been born and raised in Russia, how Maksim managed to start a business in Silicon Valley? How did he make a living before his project really took off? How did he make it into Y Combinator and what did the program help him with the most? How did he find first customers, including big, national airline? Why does he think travel industry is archaic and how is he going to change it? — Listen to the interview to find out! You can also watch video interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partner Runway Incubator and to our sponsor UnStock — an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers.

Peeple allows rating other people, much like Yelp allows rating restaurants, services and places. As soon as the app concept became public, media storm broke out accusing Peeple founders of creating a tool for bullying people. Ironically, Julia Cordray — the app co-founder and CEO — became a bullied victim herself, she received thousands of aggressive messages and phone calls, even death threats. After this first media nightmare in the fall of 2015, she's now receiving a second wave of media attention after Peeple's launch in March 2016.

We talked about the full story of Peeple app — from the idea to building the first version of the app, through Julia's thoughts on the media attention, their launch difficulties, and future plans for Peeple.

Did Julia expect all the media controversy? Did she modify the app concept? How many people are using the app today? What does she think of their current 1.5 star review in the App Store? Does she believe the media storm worked for the better or worse for the company? Listen to the interview to get insight on what was happening behind the scenes while press and social media were loosing their mind about Peeple. You can also watch video interview at www.valleytalks.com.

A lovely shout out to our partner Galvanize, where me and Julia could comfortably meet and chat, and to our sponsor UnStock — an on demand community and marketplace for mobile videographers.