Village Global Podcast

Erik is joined on this episode by Dan Held (@danheld), co-founder of Interchange. He was an early advocate of Bitcoin in San Francisco and is an influential writer in the space. Dan and Erik cover the history of Bitcoin, discuss some of Dan’s most interesting blog posts, and talk about what the future might hold for crypto. Dan explains why Satoshi had a brilliant go-to-market strategy with Bitcoin. He talks about the reasons why various aspects of Bitcoin were set up the way they were, including the hard cap on the number of Bitcoin and why there is no set inflation rate.Dan explains why mining takes so much electricity, and says that the walls around fiat money that would normally take the form of a vault are instead built virtually using that energy. He contrasts proof of work and proof of stake systems and talks about the trends in Silicon Valley’s perception of the space over the last several years.They also talk about the future, including a discussion the Lightning network, whether micro-payments will take hold, and why there are so many projects with interesting ideas but without many users (and what might change that).Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Joey Krug (@joeykrug), founder of Augur and co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, joins Erik on this episode. A year ago Joey was on the podcast to talk about the launch of Augur, a prediction market platform. In this episode Joey follows up on that conversation to talk about what he’s learned in the last year and to talk about the state of crypto in 2019 more generally.They discuss the launch of Augur, how it has evolved over the last year and what’s next for the platform. Erik asks Joey what he’s changed his mind on in the past year and what his “requests for markets” are on Augur. They move on to discussing crypto more broadly, including staking-as-as-service, the state of crypto investing, what he’s excited about in the space, Ethereum, DAOs, and Keynesian versus Austrian economics.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly), Valley legend and founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, and returning fan favorite Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList.They start out talking about Tim’s piece in Quartz about the hazards of the view that scaling one’s company as fast as possible should be one's top priority above all else.He says that this approach is not for every entrepreneur and that it’s an artifact of the amount of money floating around today chasing returns. He has a biting critique of the companies that are going public without having ever been profitable or cash flow positive — but more importantly, without having a plan for getting to that point.Parker and Tim discuss the misalignment of incentives that can happen in venture capital, and some of the alternative models that are sprouting up to solve that problem. He gives his advice for what entrepreneurs should do when getting started and how they should approach raising money. They also discuss policy changes that could lead to longer-term thinking by investors, whether Tim foresees a “Silicon Valley meltdown,” as well as why inequality is such a pressing issue and how to solve it.We want to apologize for the audio quality of the second half of this episode. We ran into technical difficulties again during recording but are working on getting them sorted out for you. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.

Erik is joined by Jenny Rooke (@drjennyrooke), Managing Director at Genoa Ventures, and Jared Seehafer (@seehafer), Village Global Network Leader and CEO and co-founder of Enzyme. They start out by talking about how Jenny got to where she is today and her career journey thus far. She explains what makes the team at Genoa unique and why it’s such a competitive advantage to have a team that is able to look at the raw data that a company is putting out and understand whether it’s compelling or not.They define some commonly misused terms in life sciences and talk about how to differentiate between various areas of the space. Jenny mentions that part of being successful as a startup means choosing to stay focused and aggressively saying no to promising opportunities — and that Genoa follows the same advice.Erik asks what some of Jenny’s requests for startups in the space would be, what her advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is, and which emerging technologies in the space are over- or under-rated.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Sean Linehan (@seanlinehan), Village Global Network Leader, and former VP of product at Flexport.Sean explains how he found his way to Flexport, which he says was like “the TurboTax of customs brokerages.” He explains the trend of entrepreneurs building software companies that are not afraid to “get their hands dirty” in areas that involve a lot of people and logistics. He talks about his study of the history of different industries and why he says that today is analogous to the early industrial revolution. He says that there is a trend of “productizing professional services.”Erik asks which industries Sean would be most excited about if he was starting a venture capital fund together. Sean explains why he works as a product manager rather than a software engineer in the interest of maximizing his impact per unit of time and talks about why zero-sum thinking is pervasive in the world today but is in most cases, wrong.We apologize for the audio in this episode and the last couple episodes. We had technical difficulties the day of recording, but we’ve got them fixed now and have some great episodes coming up for you.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.

Arjun Sethi (@arjunsethi) of Tribe Capital joins Erik on this episode to talk about Tribe Capital’s approach to investing. He talks about the “first principles” approach they take to evaluating companies and why he says rather than the company pitching their firm to Tribe, instead he tells prospective investments, “we will pitch you.”He breaks down the data-driven analysis that Tribe does of the companies they look to work with, and talks about the kinds of data that work best for their analysis. Erik asks why the bigger venture capital firms aren’t taking the same approach and runs through a number of industries to get Arjun’s take on what the keys to success are in that sector. Arjun talks about some of the writing on his blog over the past few years and points out that “any successful company is not successful because they have copied someone else’s framework.” We apologize for the audio quality of this episode. We ran into technical difficulties during recording.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.

Elad Gil, an entrepreneur and investor known for his market evaluation insights, discusses the unpredictability of life and careers, emphasizing a long-term perspective. He highlights how evaluating market quality takes precedence over founder qualities, sharing his thoughts on what defines a favorable market for startups. Elad contrasts different philosophies on market evaluation, offers insights into overlooked sectors in Silicon Valley, and shares rapid-fire assessments of current trends like VR and longevity. His perspective on innovation in professional services also sparks intrigue.

Ryan Delk, COO of Omni, and Jared Fliesler, COO of Scribd, dive into the dynamic role of COOs in startups, likening their work to that of bumblebees—always buzzing around to ensure smooth operations. They tackle effective hiring tactics for senior roles, emphasizing personal involvement and alignments with company culture. Goal-setting and transparent performance reviews are highlighted as keys to team success. Lastly, they discuss the balance of compensation, championing equity to foster long-term commitment from employees.

Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen), research fellow at Y Combinator Research, joins Erik for a wide-ranging discussion about a variety of topics, including:* Why the top names in the S&P 500 change over time, but the top names in global university rankings don’t — and how to fix that.* How Michael thinks about the role of risk in science, and why he'd like to see more risk-taking.* Memory, including how to improve yours and why professional athletes seem to have such good ones.* The “compliment deficit” in the world and how to fix it.* The silver lining of the Bay Area housing problem.* The reproducibility problem in social science.* Why he’s a fan of chaos.…and much 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 villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined on this episode by Auren Hoffman (@auren), former co-founder and CEO of LiveRamp and Tod Sacerdoti (@tod), former CEO and founder of BrightRoll. They are now working together on a new fund.They talk about how they came to the idea they’re working on, including how to find the right intersection of ideas among those that are interesting to you, that you are uniquely skilled at, that others don’t yet appreciate, and that are worth working on.They explain what data co-ops are and the unique value that they can bring. Auren says he believes that the future is about managing vendors rather than people, and points out that WhatsApp didn’t even build their core messaging functionality themselves in the first place.Erik asks what’s changed in company building since they started their companies in the 2000s and what the next ten years will look like in venture capital. They also talk about why the Valley is flush with cash and whether they are long San Francisco in an era of distributed teams.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.