Venture Studio

This week, Dave interviews Paul Martino, founder and General Partner at Bullpen Capital, one of the pioneers in post-seed round funding.

Remember to subscribe to Venture Studio on iTunes so you never miss an episode. As always, you can find us on twitter @ventureStudio and you can listen to prior episodes at venturestudio.org or on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher or TuneIn.

Paul founded Bullpen in 2010 and has led several of its key investments including FanDuel, the leader in daily fantasy sports. Prior to starting Bullpen Capital, Paul was the founder of four companies and an active angel investor in companies such as Zynga, TubeMogul, uDemy, and PayNearMe.

In today’s episode, Paul discusses how the herd mentality of most venture investors presented a huge opportunity for Bullpen, how to effectively manage a board and what its like to be coached by Bill Campbell.

This week, Dave interviews Brad Hargreaves, founder of Common, co-founder of General Assembly, Venture Partner at Maveron and angel investor.

Remember to subscribe to Venture Studio on iTunes so you never miss an episode. As always, you can find us on twitter @ventureStudio and you can listen to prior episodes at venturestudio.org or on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher or TuneIn.

In today’s episode, Brad introduces Common - the first company combining brand, technology and design in the residential real estate market at scale. Later in the episode, Brad discusses the fundamental friction between consistency and coherence in great branding.

Finally, a fun fact: Brad is our third consecutive guest who started his career selling weird stuff online.

This week, Dave interviews Phil Toronto of Vayner/RSE, an early stage venture capital fund formed by VaynerMedia and RSE Ventures.

Make sure to subscribe to Venture Studio on iTunes so you never have to worry about missing an episode. As always, you can find us on twitter @ventureStudio and you can listen to prior episodes at venturestudio.org or on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher or TuneIn.

In today’s episode, Phil and Dave discuss the importance of marketing and branding, even for early stage companies, some advice for startups as they consider partnering with a Fortune 500 company, and a few predictions for 2016. We wrap up with quick discussions about VR, verticalized brands and the art of storytelling.

Welcome back to Venture Studio and welcome back to our fascinating two-part interview with Bitcoin Jesus, Roger Ver.

We pick up part 2 right after Roger described how and why he renounced his US citizenship. Dave kicks off episode two on the same thread, asking Roger about the repercussions of his actions and beliefs, including a stint in federal prison. After discussing the justice system and unauthorized explosive sales, we reel it back to bitcoin by digging into blockchain, fixed supply and some predictions for 2016.

We have a very special two-part episode coming at you starting this week. Our guests is Roger Ver, entrepreneur, bitcoin investor, bitcoin evangelist, and voluntaryist. If you think we’re just going to talk about bitcoin on this episode, think again.

Roger Ver, nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” is an interesting guy. Credited as the first person in the world to invest in bitcoin startups, he’s been the leading voice and catalyst in bitcoin ecosystem for years. Why? according to his website rogerver.com, Bitcoin is the most important invention in the history of the world since the internet and if you don't already know about it, google it.

In part 1 of our two-part series, Dave and Roger discuss why people should care about bitcoin, a few companies that are accelerating mainstream bitcoin adoption and why bitcoin is a non-political means to freeing up the entire world’s economy. We take a quick foray into macroeconomic and government theory and then, for good measure, they’ll talk about George Washington, Vietnam and World War 2.

This week, we are thrilled to welcome Huoy Ming Yeh to the show. Ming is co-founder and managing partner of CSC Upshot Ventures, the largest fund dedicated to financing seed-stage startups, ever. If you’re the type of person who listens to the Venture Studio podcast regularly, you probably heard about CSC Upshot launching in October.

If not, it was a big deal. Here is some background- CSC Upshot is a $400MM venture fund created to invest primarily in US seed-stage technology startups via AngelList. It’s biggest LP is CSC Group, one of China’s 3 largest private equity firms, with $12B under management.

Remember, if you’re a fan Venture Studio, please subscribe on iTunes so you never have to miss an episode. If you’re feeling up to it, do us a favor and leave a 5-star rating and review in the iTunes store- it helps other people find the show. As always, you can connect with us on twitter @ventureStudio and you can listen to prior episodes at venturestudio.org, and on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and TuneIn.

Now that the words “$400MM” and “AngelList” have sunk in, lets dissect this a bit. Earlier this month, you learned about the Angel List’s Syndicates product in our interview with Dustin Dolginow of Maiden Lane. Today, we dig further into the massive opportunity. Some stats: as of October 2015 (when CSC Upshot was announced), AngelList Syndicates had helped over 650 companies raise $205MM from 4,400 individuals and Maiden Lane’s $25MM vehicle. Now, CSC Upshot joins the Syndicates ecosystem with a fund nearly double the size of all Syndicate activity to date.

Today Ming and Dave talk all about CSC Upshot, the need for more liquidity at the seed stage, the difference between Chinese and US entrepreneurs, and whether we’re seeing the great unbundling of VC or just a natural evolution of the venture financing market.

This week, we welcome Dustin Dolginow to The Studio. Dustin a co-founder of Maiden Lane Ventures, the first institutional venture fund built for AngelList Syndicates.

Here’s an excerpt from Maiden Lane’s AngelList page: Raising seed capital is unnecessarily complicated. Great angel investors have always helped founders cut through the noise. Maiden Lane's mission is to make partnering with world-class angels more impactful. To do that, we use capital and software to rethink the workflow of seed investing.

Seems pretty logical, right? Maybe even a bit boring? Well, not really. Syndicates and funds like Maiden Lane have been called, progressive, disruptive, cute and fraudulent, and everything in between. Today, we’ll learn why.

Dave and Dustin discuss the facts behind Syndicates, the massive opportunity for individual investors and founders that Syndicates presents, and the support, critiques and criticisms from others in the venture capital industry.

They’ll also talk more broadly about how thought leaders like like Chris Sacca, Brad Feld, Paul Graham and Mark Suster have approached innovation and unbundling in venture capital.

This episode is just the first installment of our series on AngelList Syndicates. Later this month, we’ll catch up with Ming Yeh, Founder and Managing Partner of CSC UpShot Ventures, a $400 million venture fund formed to invest in startups on AngelList. Dave and Dustin talk a bit about CSC UpShot in this week’s episode as well.

You can find Dustin on AngelList (obviously) and on twitter and Medium under @dolginow.

This week, Dave interviews Craig Shapiro, the founder and managing partner of Collaborative Fund. In this episode, Craig talks about his views on the future of consumption, how to court and land awesome LPs like Pharrell, and how your company’s values can be used as a weapon.

Collaborative Fund is centered on two macro themes: the growth of the creative class and the concept of collaborative consumption. Their portfolio companies include AngelList, Codecademy, Earnest, Grand St, HelloSign, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maker Studios, Reddit and TaskRabbit. In addition to those, Dave and Craig discuss a few other portfolio companies in depth on today’s episode, including Hampton Creek, Walker & Co and AltSchool.

In this week's episode, Dave continues a fascinating two-part interview with John Frankel, the founder of ff venture capital.

When we left part 1 last week, John was just starting to describe a tech future with just a few behemoths owning the lion’s share of every market. This week, in part 2, Dave and John discuss how to find growth in a zero growth world and the potential down sides of tech shrinking the globe.

Finally, they revisit John’s prognostications (from four years ago on this very show) about about the late-stage valuation bubble that we find ourselves in today and the implications on today’s early-stage environment.

In this week’s episode, you’ll hear part 1 of an amazing two part interview with John Frankel, the founder of ff Venture Capital. Dave and John discuss how ff approaches investing, what functions ff provides to it’s portfolio companies and why they do it, the label on the back of the honey bottle, and what it means to be living in a world of abundance.

John Frankel is the founding partner of ff Venture Capital, and has been an early-stage investor since 1999. John has served as a director of over 35 companies and an investor in more than 76 companies, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Indiegogo, Ionic Security, Klout, SkyCatch, Plated, 500px, Distil Networks, and Bottlenose.