Village Global Podcast

Eric Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. Both are luminary LPs at Village Global. They joined Village GP Ben Casnocha to discuss the future of AI agents, digital twins in the workplace, selling AI to enterprise, and what it takes to build companies that endure.

Takeaways:Digital twins will handle meetings you're unsure about attending. Your AI can join internal meetings, summarize key points, and alert you only when your presence becomes critical. This frees you to focus on what truly matters.External AI interactions are coming too. Eventually...

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu. Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCR-zFXiXKA&t=2s

Howie spent 2.5 years building Airtable before launching – and only talked to about a dozen customers in that time.

In this clip, he explains why that approach made sense for a platform company, and how founders can validate ideas without drowning in customer discovery.

Van Jones is a political commentator, author, and former Obama White House advisor. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is founder and CEO of Promise, a software company transforming how governments deliver services to people in need. They joined the Village Global team to discuss what founders building in complex sectors need to know about power, narrative, and influence. 

Takeaways:
Political people often operate on emotion and relationships, rather than rationality. When selling to the government, demonstrating genuine care matters more than demonstrating expertise.Relationships precede transactions. Government buyers want to feel like partners in solving a problem, not targets of a...

Jennifer Tejada is CEO of PagerDuty, a public company serving 30,000+ customers worldwide. She joined Village Global GP Ben Casnocha for a masterclass on scaling in the AI era, followed by live feedback sessions with four founders building AI-native companies.

Takeaways:
Enterprise sentiment has shifted from “fear of missing out” to “fear of getting in.” Customers are anxious about security, resilience, and managing the people transition.Know what gets your customer promoted and what gets them fired. Different personas care about different things. A CIO has different anxieties than a developer or CMO.Pricing is a strategic foundation, not a ta...

Amjad Masad (@amasad), founder and CEO of Replit, and Yohei Nakajima (@yoheinakajima), Managing Partner at Untapped Capital, joined Village Global partner Ben Casnocha for a live masterclass with Village Global founders.

Takeaways:
AI agents are rapidly evolving, with coding and deep research agents showing the most traction today. But general-purpose assistants are still brittle — trip-planning and high-context tasks remain hard.

Replit Agent shows how quickly full-stack applications can be built today, sometimes in under an hour — even by non-technical users. What matters most isn’t a CS degree, it’s traits like curiosity, grit, an...

Jacob Mullins, Venture Partner at Village Global, welcomes Kristen Ostro, founder and CEO of Strut Consulting, to discuss the foundational elements that set venture capital firms up for long-term success. Kristen shares how her career began under the mentorship of Dick Kramlich at NEA, where she was trained in the core values and operational excellence that have shaped her approach to supporting dozens of VC firms across Silicon Valley. Drawing on this experience, Kristen explains why establishing a clear mission, vision, and values (MVV) framework is essential for firm alignment, decision-making, and building a resilient culture.

Kristen outlines t...

Jacob Mullins, Venture Partner at Village Global, sits down with Ezra Roizen, General Manager of Advsr and author of "The Magic Box Paradigm," to demystify the world of startup mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on Jacob’s private podcast, VC Mastermind, which we are cross-posting on the Village Global podcast. Drawing on decades of experience as both an entrepreneur and investment banker, Ezra shares his unique framework for maximizing M&A outcomes, emphasizing that successful startup exits are driven not by a traditional sales process, but by building strategic relationships and unlocking future value for acquirers.

Ezra introduces the...

Abhay Parasnis is founder and CEO of Typeface, is former CTO/CPO at Adobe, and sits on the board of Dropbox and Schneider Electric. He joined Ben Casnocha, co-founder and partner at Village Global, for a live masterclass for Village Global founders.

Takeaways:
If you can break into the top tier of the enterprise market, it’s hard to dislodge you.Big platforms like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are eager to prove their tech's power. If you position your startup as a prime showcase for their platform, you become a strategic asset.When selling to enterprise, understand th...

Aaron Harris was a partner at YC for 7.5 years where he funded Deel, OpenSea, Scale AI, Rappi, Lattice, and others. He also built YC's Series A program where he worked with founders on over 200 Series As and Bs that raised in excess of $3B in capital. He joined Sam Kirschner, VP at Village Global, to give Village Global founders helpful tips on fundraising.

Takeaways:
Investors bet on stories, not just data. Your job? Tell a story of massive economic opportunity — not just how you fit into the future, but how you create it.Hype lowers the barrier to...

Kathy Copic is founder of Fieldwork Partners, where she works closely with early stage companies on scoping technical projects, getting early ML models into production, and helping them hire. She was interviewed by Lindsay Pettingill, Investment Partner at Village Global, during this masterclass for Village Global founders. 

Takeaways:Maintain at least three interview touchpoints to thoroughly evaluate candidates — rushing the process means missing vital signals about how well candidates understand your business and culture.Write job descriptions that focus on company mission and concrete first-90-day projects rather than generic skill requirements — this attracts candidates who are genuinely excit...

Eynat Guez, founder and CEO of Papaya Global, was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and partner at Village Global, during this masterclass for Village Global founders.

Takeaways:

Show up to key meetings as the founder or executive team — don’t just send the sales team. It signals to the client that you’re personally invested and committed to making the deal a success.

Avoid being overly optimistic about where prospects stand. Serious signals include active texting, detailed questions about implementation, security questionnaires, and the involvement of additional stakeholders.

Be strategic about progressing meetin...

Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and GP of Flex Capital, interviewed Ben Casnocha, Village Global co-founder and partner, on Auren's World of DaaS podcast. They are longtime friends and had a wide-ranging discussion on career strategy, evaluating founders, serendipity, wealth, and much more. We've cross-posted that conversation here.

Highlights:
The relevance of what you know vs. who you know has been a debate in the career strategy space for decades. Ben believes that the “what you know” is often dependent on the “who you know” because with the advent of the internet, public information is accessible to all but...

Howie Liu, founder and CEO of Airtable, was interviewed by Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha live in downtown San Francisco in front of an audience of Village Global founders and friends of the firm.

Highlights:

- Embracing discomfort is part of the founder's journey. Learning to tolerate and even appreciate this discomfort is important. 

- Making decisions when you feel "almost ready" rather than waiting for perfect readiness is often necessary.

- It's crucial to understand the underlying problems customers are trying to solve, not just their feature requests. Founders s...

Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel, a company that provides the developer tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. He was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Takeaways:

- Any modern cloud-native app is a nexus of services that all work together to create a coherent interface for the user. For example, Auth0 handles login, Stripe handles billing, React is used for the interface, among many mo...

Michael Balaoing, founder of Candlelion, joins Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha on this episode to discuss:

- The importance of the acronym WTF (what’s the feeling?) when you’re giving a presentation.

- The four roles that you take on as a speaker: captain, pilot, guide, and game show host.

- The five questions to ask when seeking feedback on a presentation.

- How to keep the audience engaged throughout a talk, not just during the Q&A at the end.

- How to bake stories into your...

Brad Feld (@bfeld), VC at Foundry Group and co-author with Dave Jilk of The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha to discuss:

- Common misconceptions about Nietzsche and why being misunderstood makes him an especially interesting philosopher.
 
- What Nietzsche can teach entrepreneurs deciding whether to pivot or persevere. Brad says that founders should view their entrepreneurial journey not in terms of a single company, but as the next 30-50 years of their life.

- Why Brad hates the term “passion” and says it’s overused in entrepreneurial circles.<...

Thejo Kote (@thejo) talks to Village partner Ben Casnocha. Thejo is a two-time founder and CEO. His current company, Airbase, is a spend management platform serving companies with 100 and 5,000 employees like Coda, 15Five, Front, Marqueta, CaptivateIQ, Abnormal, and more. Airbase has raised over $200 million, has tens of millions in ARR, and is consistently ranked as a top spend management company by G2.

Highlights:

- Rather than jumping into building Airbase, he built high-fidelity mockups and went back to prospective customers and asked if they’d buy it to “pre-sell” it.

- In B2B, build...

Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha for a masterclass with our founders in late 2020.
 
They discussed:
 
- The origin story of Cloudflare, including how the co-founders met, and how Michelle realized that she too could start a company.
 
- Her advice on fundraising after raising more than $300M for Cloudflare, including why you should keep the rest of the VC partnership in mind, and how to show rather than tell in your pitch.
 
- How they found the best talent, including why...

We're excited to launch a new EIR program for data science founders in partnership with Rackhouse Ventures, founded by Kevin Novak. Learn more about the program: https://www.villageglobal.vc/rackhouse-village-global-eir-program

Kevin Novak (@novakkm), an early Uber employee, was instrumental in developing their data science program and was the creator of surge pricing.

Highlights:

- Kevin, originally a nuclear physicist, applied his analytical skills to develop Uber's first surge pricing model in three weeks—a task that would typically take six months in academia.

- He says that founders shouldn’t wait unti...

This encore episode is a recording of a special masterclass roundtable session for our founders with John Donahoe. John is CEO of Nike and was previously CEO of ServiceNow and eBay. He is known as one of the most inspirational leaders in Silicon Valley and is a highly sought-after mentor to CEOs including Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Drew Houston at Dropbox, and Ben Silbermann at Pinterest. We’re honored to have him among our small group of world-class executives and collaborators whose time and expertise help power our network of founders at Village Global.
 
He shared advice on whe...

Chris Lunt is a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building web services and data platforms. He is in his seventh year as the CTO for the NIH's All of Us Research Program. He joined the NIH from GetInsured, where he worked to improve health insurance shopping and enrollment systems. Previously Chris ran VC-backed internet startups, with one IPO.

Highlights:

- Chris is hopeful about Silicon Valley going back to its roots to create sociological change by uniting people and being thoughtful about what the world should look like. Over the last couple decades...

Michael Hochberg (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hochberg/) is a physicist and a founder of four successful startup companies in semiconductors and telecommunications, including Luxtera, acquired by Cisco in 2019, and Elenion, acquired by Nokia in 2020. He won the highest awards for young scientists in Singapore (NRF Fellowship) and the United States (PECASE), is an author on over 60 patents, and has been involved in the creation of over 30 companies in biotech and applications of silicon photonics.

Highlights:

- In college Michael would tie together clusters of Dell machines to replicate the performance of supercomputers.

...

Matt Pellini, Managing Director at Hamilton Lane, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:

- Matt says the secondaries market has grown over 5x from 15 years ago to now.

- Selling in the secondary market used to be a sign of distress but is no longer. There are many different reasons for doing so and it’s mostly a sign of a manager being more active in the overall management of the fund.

- Secondaries, in contrast to other asset classes in the private markets, are typically lower risk, shorter duration, and are more IR...

Christopher Ailman (@CJAtheCIO), Chief Investment Officer at CalSTRS, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:

- CalSTRS, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, was created in 1913 and is actually older than Social Security. It has over 400 members who are over 100 years old who are still receiving their pension.

- Chris says no bear market is alike and that the key is to have the discipline during that time period to actually start buying.

- Chris says the key to success as an investor is in being intentional about the culture you create. When Chris is...

This encore episode is a recording of a special event where Mark Pincus (@markpinc) was interviewed by Ben Casnocha in San Francisco in front of a live audience of portfolio founders, friends of the firm, and LPs.

Mark is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Zynga, and is an angel investor in Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and other companies. He talked about about raising venture capital, his philosophy of product management, the early days at Zynga, and much more. He also took time at the event to meet with Village Global founders to give them his advice on growing their...

This encore episode is a recording of a special event where Bill Gates was interviewed in San Francisco by Julia Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite. It originally took place in 2018 in front of a live audience of Village Global founders and friends of the firm. We are honored to count Bill Gates among our luminary LPs whose financial capital and engagement power the next wave of Village Global founders.

They covered:

- Gates’s entrepreneurial journey starting Microsoft, including the most important turning points in the early years of the company.

- His thinking on wo...

Jerry originally joined us on the podcast in 2019. He is co-founder of Yahoo! and founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures. He was interviewed in front of a live audience in San Francisco by Village Global co-founder and partner, Ben Casnocha.

Jerry told stories from the early days of Yahoo! and explained his lessons learned from the experience. He also talked about what American entrepreneurs can learn from China and his thoughts on early stage investing.

Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Paul Budnitz, founder of Superplastic, and Jennifer van Dijk, CEO of Superplastic, join Christina Des Vaux, head of marketing and platform at Village Global, on this episode. Takeaways:
Superplastic is a creatively-led company that has managed to maintain its unique identity and artistic integrity while nevertheless running a thriving business.The team comes up with ideas for characters but the characters grow and change as the audience gives them their own identities.They’ve learned a lot from the people who make games and are willing to iterate and make changes quickly.They shy away from initiatives that would ma...

Graham Duncan (@GrahamDuncanNYC) is a longtime investor and author of a legendary essay on reference checking: https://grahamduncan.blog/whats-going-on-here/ He was interviewed by Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) during a special masterclass for Village Global founders and friends of the firm.

Takeaways:

- Be aware of how your own mindset and mood affects your analysis of a candidate as well as how it impacts how the candidate shows up in the interview. For example, you might be anxious and stressed yourself and that makes the candidate nervous — you may end up experiencing th...

Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. He joined Olga Serhiyevich, head of investor relations, for this conversation.

Takeaways:

- Sebastian wrote a book about hedge funds prior to The Power Law and he contrasts VCs and hedge fund managers by saying that VCs are much more extraverted. VCs and others around the startup...

Julio Vasconcellos (@JulioV), managing partner at Atlantico, and Ana Martins (@martinsg_ana), partner at Atlantico, join Anne Dwane (@adwane), co-founder and partner at Village Global, to discuss Atlantico’s 2023 report on digital transformation in Latin America.

Takeaways:

- If Latin America was its own country it would be #3 in the world in terms of population and GDP.

- Brazil and Mexico combined make up over half of the population of all of Latin America.

- In the US about 60% of public market capitalization is made up of technology companies but in Latin Am...

Gurdane Bhutani and Zeshan Muhammedi are co-founders and GPs at MBX, a VC firm investing in early-stage bio/healthtech companies tackling major public health threats. Prior to that they co-founded healthcare and life-science venture capital firm FundRx, where they championed the firm's build-out of its community-driven investment infrastructure, modeled on the scientific peer-review process.

Takeaways:

- Pharma companies have realized that it makes sense to develop drugs that will have a population-level health benefit rather than developing drugs for small numbers of people that cost exorbitant amounts.

- Noise pollution is actually a big...

Lee Hnetinka, founder and CEO of Future and Darkstore, joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global, on this episode. Lee and his companies are building innovative solutions in retail and e-commerce and have worked with world’s most admired brands like Nike, Adidas and Disney where they enabled same-day and 1-hour delivery for customers nationwide. They’ve also worked with tech companies like Snapchat, Shopify and Stripe to enable next generation payments and loyalty program solutions.

Takeaways:

- Lee says cities will look completely different in a few decades. Retail has been the back...

Cameron Dawson, Chief Investment Officer at NewEdge Wealth, joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations, on this episode. Prior to joining NewEdge Wealth, Cameron was the Chief Market Strategist at Fieldpoint Private Securities and a Senior Equity Analyst at Bank of America.

Takeaways:
Cameron says that wealth management firms can provide the next chapter of growth for VC. There’s a notion that clients at wealth management firms are less sophisticated but in fact managing their assets is often much more complex than managing money for an institution. At wealth management firms, each client is very different an...

Prescott Watson (@prescottwatson) joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), head of investor relations at Village Global, on this episode. Prescott is co-founder of Port Power, a software platform that aims to de-risk commercial fleets’ adoption of electric vehicles by ensuring their charging infrastructure functions flexibly and reliably. Takeaways:

- With gas or diesel-powered vehicles, drivers take the car to the energy source (the gas station). With electric vehicles, that paradigm doesn’t work for fleets of commercial vehicles that need to be charged up overnight. This means that a fleet operator needs to build charging infrastructure to charge 30, 50, perhaps 100 vehicles simu...

Mark Cuban (@mcuban) joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), head of investor relations at Village Global, on this episode. Takeaways:

- In the US healthcare system the interests of patients, providers, and payers are not aligned. This drives many of the problems in the system today and is part of what inspired Mark to get involved in trying to disrupt the system.

- Mark started Cost Plus Drugs to try to address some of the pricing issues with prescription drugs in the US. The company's pricing is completely transparent and shows their costs along with the exact fees...

Eric Woo (@ericjwoo), co-founder and CEO of Revere, and Spencer Tyson (@SpencerGTyson), Head of Investment Ratings at Revere, join Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global. Revere has pioneered the world’s first rating system for venture capital funds.

Takeaways:

- Venture has changed a lot over the last couple decades and continues to evolve quickly. In the last decade emerging managers has become its own sub-category, and venture as an asset class has bifurcated into specialist and generalist investors.

- Revere has found through their extensive data analysis that funds th...

Jon Korngold joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations, on this episode. Jon is the Global Head of Blackstone Growth (BXG) and Co-Head of Technology Investing at Blackstone. Prior to joining Blackstone, Jon was Head of General Atlantic’s Global Financial Services and Healthcare sectors.

Takeaways:

- The vast reach of Blackstone, as one of the biggest asset managers in the world, allows them to apply their huge base of operational infrastructure to “make the winning company, not just find the winning company.”

- Entrepreneurs have accepted that we are not going back to 2021 valuat...

Marc Iserlis is a film/TV producer and documentary filmmaker joins Village Global's Head of Investor Relations Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi). Marc is currently building tokenized film financing at Republic, an alternative fundraising platform.

Takeaways:

- Marc’s ambition is at Republic is to allow individuals to join in the success of film production through an equity "fan raise" that allows fans of a particular project to invest directly in its production and share in the project’s success.

- The rise of streaming platforms and recent changes in how films are financed has resulted in c...

Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) and Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) are co-authors of The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. In the book, they look at the best of Silicon Valley startups and derive entrepreneurial principles that can transform the career of any professional across all industries. They revised and updated the book for the new world of work in 2022 and released a podcast series about it which you can listen to at thestartupofyou.com.

This episode of the Village Global podcast shares a few select segments from the Startup of You podcast...

Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) and Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) are co-authors of The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. In the book, they look at the best of Silicon Valley startups and derive entrepreneurial principles that can transform the career of any professional across all industries. They revised and updated the book for the new world of work in 2022 and released a podcast series about it which you can listen to at thestartupofyou.com.

This episode of the Village Global podcast shares a few select segments from the Startup of You podcast...

Louise Story (@louisestory) most recently was the Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer at The Wall Street Journal. Louise also spent more than a decade at the New York Times. She joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode to discuss:
Her unique role at the Wall Street Journal and some of the products that she built, including AI/ML models to alert reporters when stocks were moving in certain ways that let them get ahead of emerging stories, as well as an early version of ChatGPT that let a user ask a question about what a...

David Boehmer (@DavBoehmer) speaks to Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi) about the talent intermediation industry, the evolution of business models in the sector, and creating a talent marketplace at Banff.

Takeaways:

- Chance often has a significant impact on a person’s career but David says that a life’s impact is too important to be left to chance.

- David likes to think of a career as a river. You can be swept downstream by momentum and wake up 20-30 years later without realizing that there might have been a different river that coul...

Rohit Krishnan (@krishnanrohit), venture capitalist and author of the blog Strange Loop Cannon, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Many of the people at the top of their fields today say they would never get hired if they were just starting out today. Today’s selection process at elite institutions has become more stringent but has dropped the interesting variance that exists at the top of the pyramid. Plenty of people have gamified the selection process. If you’re hiring, you want to find the interesting misfits.

- Higher ed used to be fantastic but now...

Lorin Gu, founding partner of Recharge Capital, joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global to discuss:

- Why Recharge structures its investing thematically, rather than by asset class.

- The three themes that they believe have multi-decade headwinds behind them: semiconductors, women’s health, and fintech/crypto.

- What Lorin learned from working with David Swensen, including the importance of the qualitative measurement of the people running the fund alongside any quantitative analysis of fund strategy.

- How asking fund managers about their motivations and how they make decisions ca...

Alex Chalunkal is Chief Investment Officer at a family office where he manages a $1B+ portfolio focused on impact, venture, and climate tech investing. He was interviewed by Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global.

Takeaways:

- Alex says that the consensus is that there will be a mild recession in 2023.

- He says that the energy transition, health, and climate are key sectors he is focusing on.

- Technology is an important tool to help improve the labor shortage in the US because tech creates more productive workers who...

Ian Bremmer (@ianbremmer), president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global for a conversation about global geopolitical trends and their impact on technology.

Takeaways:

- Ian has been in the room with world leaders as they make decisions about how to prepare for potential wars. He says that it’s easy to criticize their decisions afterwards but having been there has given him an appreciation for just how difficult it is to make those decisions under constraints and how little ideology plays into those de...

Mo Islam (@itsmoislam), co-founder of Payload Space, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- There is no doubt that we are in the early stages of the space economy, Mo says.

- The cost to go to Mars will be paid many times over by the young engineers who will be inspired by the mission.

- There are three main buckets in the space economy: space for earth (companies creating products for humans on earth via their space endeavors), space for space (companies serving other companies in space) and beyond...

Ari Schuler, CEO of goTenna, and Andrea Garrity, Chief Growth Officer of goTenna, join Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon join us on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- goTenna was founded after Hurricane Sandy when a brother and sister didn’t know if the other was safe because the cell network weren’t working. It has since grown into the company that it is today, selling to government as well as consumers.

- Ari and Andrea suggest that startups refrain from complaining or dwelling on how tough the procurement system is to navigate in the US gove...

Joe Connor (@josephjconnor), founder of Odyssey (@WithOdyssey_), joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways:

- ACT test scores are at the lowest level in 30 years. 42% of students met none of the college readiness benchmarks.

- District schools are not providing what parents need so children are leaving them in large numbers.

- Parents have realized that they would be better off unbundling education so that children receive different parts of their education in different places, not just at a single district school.

- Odyssey is fundamentally changing how education...

Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon), co-founder and CEO of Apex Space, and Max Benassi (@mxbenassi), co-founder and CTO, join Lucas Bagno on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- The cost per kilogram to get things into space has gone down dramatically over the last several years.

- Satellites have two parts: a payload and a bus. The bus is the actual structure of the satellite and despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in launch companies, basically no venture money has gone into satellite bus manufacturing.

- Satellite buses are currently designed from the...

Ben Van Roo (@DavidNorthStar), co-founder and CEO of Yurts AI, joins Lucas Bagno on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- The Small Business Innovation Research program was originally developed as a grant program to allow small companies do innovative research. The gene for cystic fibrosis was discovered from the program.

- If you’re a small company and you get an SBIR contract, you should not count on getting a government contract.

- It has been very difficult for software companies to get a program of record contract because that has not been the ty...

Deep Nishar (@deepnishar), Managing Director at General Catalyst and formerly of LinkedIn and Google, joins Anne Dwane on this episode. Takeaways:

- The best product hires have the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.

- When you’re interviewing people for product roles at startups, don’t ask people what they would do but rather what they have done in the past. You want people who have a sense of adventure and can work without a lot of structure.

- The first fifty hires at a co...

Christian Brose (@cdbrose), Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril and author of The Kill Chain, joins Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways:

- The US military and its procurement system has been built for equipment that is big, heavy, and hard to replace — things like ships and aircraft carriers and tanks.

- Commercial technologies can contribute to a military with equipment that is more agile, lower cost, and easier to replace.

- People in the government are, in 2022, trying to figure out what the military is going to need in 2032. This eliminates incentives for disruption and...

Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), New York Times columnist and author of The Decadent Society, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- Since the moon landing, we have entered a period of stagnation. Confidence and optimism have declined and culture has entered a repetitive spiral where patterns from the 60s/70s have been repeating themselves.

- Government has become less effective and more gridlocked over time.

- The world’s richest societies are dealing with a population problem. They are not reproducing themselves, which has led to aging societies that are “stable but...

Steve Kim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrkim/), Partner and head of Investment Strategy at Verdis, a 9-generation single family office, joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global, on this episode.
 
Takeaways:
 
Early stage venture is a power law asset class where the returns of the asset class are driven by outliers. The best way to increase probability of getting asset class rate of return is by increasing variance in the portfolio through diversification. Pattern matching tends to reduce variance and contrary to industry’s beliefs, is undesirable from the systematic approach perspe...

Raj Shah, Managing Partner at Shield Capital, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- Raj and Shield don’t care whether a founding team has experience selling to government, because the firm can help with that. They evaluate the team, the market and the tech when they’re looking at an investment.

- Ash Carter was the first sitting Secretary of Defense to come to Silicon Valley in decades when he visited to jumpstart new initiatives to encourage startups working with government.

- Raj recommends that startups work with organizations with...

Julio Vasconcellos and Ana Martins, partners at Atlantico, join Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss Atlantico's Latin America Digital Transformation Report 2022. Takeaways:

- In the rest of the world, digital adoption has reverted to the pre-pandemic mean, but digital transformation has continued at the same pace in Latin America.

- Developers in Latin America are more likely to accept remote job offers and people working remotely have more satisfaction in their jobs than those working in-person.

- Fintech deals continue to be 40-50% of volume in the region.

...

Mike Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- It can easily take 10-20 years for tech to make its way into the Department of Defense. The Defense Innovation Unit helped speed that process up dramatically.

- Some of the most important technologies being used in the war in Ukraine are commercial technologies. Mike thinks that the Department of Defense should be focusing on commercial technology much more often.

- Many founders don’t realize that government dollars are allocated for specific uses, i...

Alex Moore (@AustinGiraffe), investor at 8VC and board member at Palantir, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- Alex was one of the original team members at Palantir. He says that helping build the company helps him pattern match today to find the best founders.

- Defense investing is not like normal VC investing. The usual model of investing $2M, then $10M, then $30M to give a company momentum doesn’t work when you have to deal with budget cycles, lobbying, and politics.

- It typically requires $1B to...

Muneeb Ali (@muneeb), co-founder of Stacks, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Muneeb says that Bitcoin is winning as money, and that he wants to make that capital productive. He’s "bringing smart contracts to where the money is."

- Bitcoin’s architecture implies that there shouldn’t be much flexibility and programmability on the base layer blockchain.

- A criticism of Ethereum is that it is trying to be too many things to too many people.

- There is a basket of Layer-1s that are gaining market share against Ethere...

Dan Romero (@dwr) of Farcaster joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Dan says that his first love was information. He loved RSS and the goal with Farcaster is to improve RSS enough so that it can compete with Twitter.

- He aims to grow Farcaster large enough so that developers can innovate using their API and data permissionlessly.

- Any developer can build whatever they want on Farcaster — features are not limited to what the core team wants to see built.

- Eugene Wei’s Status as a Service theory is corr...

Nathan Picarsic, co-founder of Horizon Advisory, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- There are 17 rare earth metals that are of immense strategic importance. They are used in a vast array of everyday products like consumer electronics, medical devices, electric vehicles, and more.

- China has a strong influence in this space. They have many mines but are even more dominant downstream — they control much of the processing of these metals and the manufacturing of products from them.

- Nathan says there should be more awareness of the geo...

Joel Monegro (@jmonegro), partner at Placeholder, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Every financial asset is a contract between two or more people. The world economy is basically a set of contracts on a ledger.

- A smart contract is like an API, but on-chain, so it can’t be taken down. In many cases, not even the developers can retract a smart contract.

- Value capture and value accrual are two different things — capture is where the value is stored and accrual is where it is going. This is something that is ofte...

Steve Blank (@sgblank), creator of Hacking For Defense and author of 4 Steps To The Epiphany, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- The secret history of Silicon Valley is that it emerged from the government’s desire to develop advanced technology and weapons in universities during World War II.

- Stanford became a powerhouse in microwaves and electronics post-WWII. People were encouraged to leave to start companies, which kickstarted Silicon Valley.

- The Department of Defense needs a radical redesign. Steve says the US can’t even keep pace...

Antonio Garcia-Martinez (@antoniogm), author of The Pull Request, joins Erik Torenberg and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- The first version of ads on the web, banner ads, looked like ads in the newspaper, because often the new version of media looks like the last version of media — that’s skeuomorphism.

- Apple’s app tracking transparency is breaking the model for Facebook and Snap.

- Antonio says there won’t be a media ecosystem in Web 3 without attribution.

- The advent of balanced and nuanced journalism decades ago was a luxury b...

Avichal Garg (@avichal), founder of Electric Capital, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Downturns impact large companies much more than founders and early stage investors because the companies are so small relative to their total addressable market.

- Managing your own psychology in a downturn is the most important skill for a founder in these times.

- Crypto is like a platypus — it has properties of growth tech, a store of value, and commodities.

- People in the US sometimes look at crypto and don’t see the use case but for...

Jeff Morris Jr. (@jmj), investor at Chapter One, joins Erik Torenberg and co-host Ian Cinnamon. Takeaways:

- Jeff realized the power of subscriptions during his time at Tinder. He says that digital goods are an even better version of subscriptions.

- Web3 is almost entirely missing mobile usability.

- Crypto apps could add a reputation layer to existing Web2 use cases, like dating apps.

- People are still using Web 2.0 community products to create communities for Web3.

- Web3 games need to move away from speculation and towards building genuine...

AJ Piplica (@AJ_Piplica), founder and CEO of Hermeus, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- Every time there has been an acceleration in the speed of transportation in history, high GDP growth has followed.

- A switch to hypersonic transportation would unlock $4T in growth.

- In the future the key differentiator in air travel will be speed, rather than comfort.

- It’s currently extremely expensive to do flight testing at hypersonic speeds — $5-10M for only a few seconds of data.

- In the...

Mike Shebat (@mike_sheb), co-founder and CEO of Traba, joins Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways:

- There is a huge problem with meeting demand for workers at warehouses and fulfilment centres. There are 75% more jobs in those fields after the pandemic.

- Mike worked in warehousing and helped scale UberEats so has strong founder-market fit. Traba’s mission of connecting people to work is very meaningful to him.

- Mike met his co-founder Akshay through the On Deck Fellowship and they started working on projects together and did an extensive va...

Peter Newell (@PeterANewell), CEO of BMNT, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- Peter was “handed the Ferrari of skunkworks” when he came to be in charge of the Rapid Equipping Force. It was a program that handled over a billion dollars to deploy new technologies.

- He became more of an entrepreneur after his time at the REF and that led to starting BMNT.

- Often times procurement in the US military is HQ-centric and product-centric and does not take into account the needs of the people on t...

JD Ross (@justindross) and Justin Blau (@3LAU), co-founders of Royal, join Erik Torenberg and co-host Ian Cinnamon for this episode of our web3 series. Takeaways:

- Royal stems from their vision to invest in talent early on.

- Streaming increased by 60-70x in about 5 years from 2015 on.

- The barrier to entry for artists is much lower — they no longer need a studio, they just need a laptop.

- Royal is trying to enable the fan-artist relationship to be more of a partnership.

- When fans own a part of...

Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg), co-founder and general partner at Village Global and co-founder and co-CEO of On Deck join Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- Startups are the most effective organizations for solving our biggest problems.

- Startups disproportionately contribute to economic growth.

- Governments and startups need to work together, not against each other.

- China has the GDP per capita of Mexico but they have power because of how big their population is.

- Increasing population should be an aim of the US...

Tushar Jain (@TusharJain_), co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, joins Erik on this episode to discuss:

- The history of crypto over the last several years and the various moments that different technologies like Bitcoin, NFTs, tokens, and others have had.

- What the world looks like if the predictions for crypto’s impact comes true.

- Why Tushar thinks that Ethereum has gone past the point of diminishing returns to decentralization.

- Why it’s so hard to predict which chains will win.

- How crypto can help coor...

James “Hondo” Geurts, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:

- What kept Hondo up at night was that there was a good idea out there that wasn’t passed on to him and thus wasn’t used on the battlefield.

- A society can’t be secure without prosperity and can’t have prosperity without security.

- The challenge for startups working with government is that the public is a fickle venture capitalist. They don’t like to fund things that do...

Haseeb Qureshi (@hosseeb), managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, joins Erik for an episode of our Web3 series. Takeaways:

- This bear market is driven by macro factors rather than endogenous ones.

- It turns out crypto is in fact correlated with other assets, largely because in 2020 institutions started buying crypto.

- Projects searching for yield in a yield-starved environment drove growth in crypto. That may change with rising interest rates.

- Adoption will drive the next chapter of crypto. Gaming and NFTs will lead the way.

- Sometimes boring, stable...

- The narrative that China can do no wrong and why Noah says it is out of date at this point.

- The long-term headwinds that China is facing, including demographic changes, resource limitations, and real estate challenges.

- Why America should raise tariffs on anything made in China where it would be strategically important for those goods to be made somewhere else.

- The state of real estate in China, including the fact that China’s economy is 30% real estate (double the percentage in the US) and that cities in China are sprawling and mo...

Jacob Helberg (@jacobhelberg), foreign policy expert and author of The Wires of War, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- Why he says peace through trade was the biggest foreign policy miscalculation in US history.

- How US companies have approached operating in China and why Jacob would advise them to proactively work to decouple themselves from the Chinese market.

- Why Jacob would prefer that American laws change to restrict Chinese investments in US companies.

- Why the Belt and Road Initiative has come to be seen as a...

Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen) is an economist, professor, and best-selling author. His latest book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, written with co-author Daniel Gross, is available now. Tyler discusses how to discover undervalued talent, the importance of stamina, the best interview questions, peer ratings, late bloomers, and more.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Want to get updates from us...

Geoff Lewis (@GeoffLewisOrg), founder at Bedrock, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- His thoughts on the markets and the advice he has for founders operating in a market like this one.

- What is driving financial nihilism and how it has changed society.

- Why he’s only investing in founders where their company is their life’s work.

- Bedrock’s investments in hardware and companies making things in the physical world.

- The perils of politics replacing religion as our mechanism for forming community.

...

Bilal Zuberi (@bznotes), partner at Lux Capital, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- Bilal’s investing thesis of finding companies building solutions to interesting problems that impact a lot of people.

- Why he’s investing in space and defense companies.

- What keeps him up at night and how his investments are working on those areas.

- Why he’s optimistic about unifying America.

- How to solve the problem of different people having different sets of facts.

- Whether there will be a reckon...

Hemant Taneja (@htaneja), managing partner at General Catalyst and author of Intended Consequences, joins Anne Dwane and Village Global’s newest partner, Prateek Alsi, to discuss:

- What responsible innovation is and how tech can do good in the world using the framework.

- How founders should think about responsible innovation at the earliest stages of a company.

- The importance of thinking from first principles.

- Lessons from the creation process of the companies Hemant has been involved in.

- A better alternative to “move fast and break things.”
<...

Laura Crabtree (@llcrabbie), founder and CEO of Epsilon3, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode to discuss:

- What she accomplished during her time at SpaceX and her journey to starting Epsilon3.

- Whether the biggest contribution of SpaceX to the industry will be all the amazing people leaving to start their own space companies.

- How to get into the space industry if you don’t already have a background in it.

- Why a company like Epsilon3 hasn’t been built before.

- The importance of bein...

Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni), author of The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, joins Ben Casnocha on this episode to discuss:

- How diversity and variety of backgrounds and opinions helped PayPal become successful.

- The fact that PayPal’s leading product was not solving a problem that they had set out to solve, but rather a problem they discovered along the way.

- The importance of sitting with your customers and really understanding their perspective and their problems.

- What he learned about Peter Thiel, Max Le...

Joshua Steinman (@JoshuaSteinman), founder and CEO of Galvanick, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- The history of cybersecurity at big industrial companies and how he is building “Splunk for industrial systems” to solve that problem.

- His time at the National Security Council, what motivated him to work in government, and his work creating an “embassy in Silicon Valley.”

- Why, with internet-connected devices, we’ve traded predictable downtime for unpredictable downtime. He gives the example of a Cadbury plant that was completely shut down by malware.

- The different...

Alex Iskold, co-founder and managing partner at 2048 Ventures and creator of 1kproject.org, joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss:

- What he is doing with 1kproject.org to help the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.

- How he and a team of volunteers are empowering families in the US to send $1,000 directly to the bank card of a Ukrainian family.

- How they use tech to vet applications to make sure the most deserving families receive funds.

- What the money that is sent to Ukrainian families is...

Martin Gurri (@mgurri), author of The Revolt of the Public, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- The genesis of the thesis about the revolt of the public while Martin was working at the CIA analyzing communications as social media and blogging began to take off.

- The challenges to authority that the free flow of information has presented and why those societies that allow for open communication have been winning.

- The internet’s reactionary moment and whether there will be a “revolt of the revolt.”

- Why he says t...

Chris Power (@2112Power), founder and CEO of Hadrian, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- Why manufacturing is key to a strong position in the world order. 

- The changes in the landscape that have enabled a company like Hadrian to be possible now, where it wasn’t five years ago. 

- What Chris would do if he was running the United States to win the new space race.

- How to change the culture in the US so that more serious people can work on serious problems.

- Wh...

Chris Power (@2112Power), founder and CEO of Hadrian, Katherine Boyle (@KTmBoyle), partner at a16z, and Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh), co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, join Anne Dwane and Erik Torenberg on this episode to discuss:

- How Hadrian is abstracting the supply chain for space, aerospace, and defense manufacturing, and how it is analogous to AWS and Twilio in the software world.

- Why Chris is the right person to tackle this problem. He wants to do this for geopolitical and moral reasons and also has the ability to get into the weeds on...

Mike Maples (@m2jr), founding partner at Floodgate, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon) to discuss:

- Why there has been an “epidemic of fakery” in society over the last 50 years or so. Mike says that institutions are pretending to be working rather than doing actual work.

- Why the right “angle of attack” for societal problems is not head-on but rather to create something completely different than changes the subject entirely.

- Why he advises founders to make sure they are working on an idea that is worthy of their time and why...

Ayo Omojola (https://www.linkedin.com/in/omojola/), SVP of Product at Carbon Health, joins Anne Dwane (@adwane) and Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) to discuss:

- What he noticed moving from fintech to healthtech.

- Advice for people working in a highly regulated industry like healthcare.

- What’s unique about Carbon Health and why healthtech is so promising.

- Why he likes to hire former founders and his favorite interview questions.

- How he thinks about angel investing as an operator and why “angel investing is like a really expensive emai...

Delian Asparouhov (@zebulgar), co-founder of Varda Space Industries and principal at Founders Fund, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnammon) on this episode to discuss:

- Why he says that VCs have a moral obligation to fund companies that help keep America a step ahead of its adversaries.

- Why space matters for him personally and why expanding the economic bounds of humankind is the best way to achieve all of humanity’s other goals.

- The current state of the space economy and the space supply chain, and how he sees them ev...

Katherine Boyle (@KTmBoyle), GP at a16z, joins Anne Dwane (@adwane) and Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) on this episode to discuss:

- What needs to change inside the federal government for more contracts to go to startups.

- How startups should think about working with state and local governments.

- How trust has declined in public institutions over the last several decades and how companies can credibly step into that void by building in public and telling their own story.

- How Starlink will change where people live and how they live their...

Cristina Cordova was the 28th employee at Stripe and grew their partnerships arm from the ground up. Most recently, she led platform & partnerships at Notion, which included starting the Growth Product Team.

In this episode, we discuss how to build a partnerships team, what to look for in BD hires, and the ins and outs of successful deal-making. 

Cristina is an active angel and advisor. You can hear more from her by following @cjc on Twitter.

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Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, f...

Trae Stephens (@traestephens), co-founder at Anduril and partner at Founders Fund joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon) to discuss:

- What keeps him up at night when he looks at the US today.

- What he would change about the US government if he could wave a magic wand.

- Common mistakes made by people selling to government.

- How they think about acquisitions at Anduril.

- Advice for people looking to build in the defense space.

- What gives him hope when he thinks about...

Richard Ni is the current Head of People at Scale AI after being the first recruiting hire at Cruise Automation, where he helped bring the team from 10 to 700 in three years.

Prior to leading people teams, Richard was a Software Engineer at Venmo and a Computer Science major at MIT. We discuss the unique perspective that his technical background gives him in recruiting, how to solicit genuine feedback from employees, and build a leveling system.

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Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics...

Village Global's Solarpunk is a new podcast series about technology, space, and defense. We discuss how western society will use technology to adapt to the changing global landscape. We’re inspired by the theme of solarpunk — the mindset of what the planet will look like when humanity succeeds in solving major contemporary challenges through technology.

Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh), co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@IanCinnamon), investors at Village Global, to discuss:

- The problems that some of the leading companies working with the US government have been trying to s...

Semil Shah (@semil), investor at Haystack and venture partner at Lightspeed, joins Lucas Bagno to discuss:

- The trends Semil sees in the entrepreneurial landscape today: the ease of getting started as a founder, the fight for ownership among funds, and renewed attention to dilution from founders.

- How he raised his most recent fund at Haystack and how he determined what size of fund to raise.

- The lessons he’s learned about deploying funds.

- What the downturn means for fund managers.

- The state of seed investing. Duration: 00:41:08

Michal Cieplinski is the Chief Business Officer at Pipe. He has also spent time as General Counsel and CCO at Fundbox as well as a Senior VP at Lending Club, among other roles.

He describes himself as a lawyer who has never really been a lawyer - meaning that “no” is a rare answer for him to give his fast-moving colleagues.

In this episode, we discussed the important role that a CBO plays at a high growth tech company. Michal shares tips on building legal teams, hiring speed for the rest of the org , and why you...

David Sneider (@davidlsneider), of Lit Protocol, and Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), partner at Collab+Currency, join Anne Dwane to discuss:

- What Lit Protocol is, what it enables, and how it is being used today.

- The vision for a different architecture of the internet.

- How user-owned networks would work and their prospects for achieving scale.

- How tokenization allows all stakeholders to capture more of the network effects of a project.

- The biggest challenges present in Web3 and how they might be solved.

- Predictions for...