Village Global Podcast

Erik sits down with Donnie Dinch (@donnie), Michael Galpert (@msg) and Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg), to follow up on the projects they were working on a year ago when they all got together at the end of 2017 to talk about consumer social on one of our first podcast episodes. They discuss what’s changed since then and what they see ahead in the consumer social landscape. They discuss some of the unexpected twists and turns their ventures took over the course of 2018 and some of their lessons learned from the year. They talk about some of the trends that emerged during 2018 and which ones they expect to come in the year ahead. Greg points out that the big players in the space are distracted and a lot of people have given up on the space, so opportunity is ripe. He says “there have never been fewer people working on consumer social than in 2019.”They talk about where they think the next unicorn in consumer social will come from and what some of the most promising existing companies are, as well as some of the ideas they’d like to see built. They go deep on a number of trends, including audio as a medium of communication, the crossover of games and consumer social, and social fitness. The four of them also talk about why Apple is in such a good position to build something great in social (but that they never will) and play “long-short,” where Erik names a company in the space and they say whether they’re long or short and why.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.

Erik talks to longtime friend and co-author of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, Liz Fosslien (@fosslien / fosslien.com). She talks about the importance of “feeling your feelings” and not running away from them, especially at work. Liz gives some practical tips on how to give good feedback, how to approach negotiating, and how to be a good boss.She talks about the difference between diversity, inclusion and belonging, why it’s so important to strive to make people feel like they belong and how to do so (tip: learn how to pronounce *everyone’s* name, not just the easy ones). Erik asks how her own experience led her to these insights and how she’s able to find humor in the workplace. She also explains why not being so passionate about your job is actually a good thing, why you should stop feeling bad about feeling bad, and how to acknowledge your anxiety and move on.Quotable Lines From This EpisodeThis traditional notion that you should be able to check your feelings at the door when you enter the office is ridiculous, and given that we are going to have emotions at work, it’s time we learned to deal with them.Envy’s actually a really useful emotion — it really reveals what we value. If you’re jealous of someone, don’t perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to make that go away, try and really figure out what that person has that’s making you jealous.As a manager, it’s almost as important to manage your emotions as it is to manage other people.___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.

On this episode Erik is joined by Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), founder of Wordpress and Automattic, as well as Andreas Klinger (@andreasklinger), VP of Engineering at CoinList and a founding team member of Product Hunt (along with Erik).At Automattic, Matt works with over 850 employees working remotely in 70-plus countries. The three of them discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a distributed team, and why it is the future for knowledge work. Matt explains his quote that “every company over 100 people is already distributed, they just pretend they’re not.”They talk about some of the best protocols for managing distributed workers and why being able to pull from worldwide talent is such a big advantage. They mention that Invision, a large and successful company with distributed workers, requires everyone to work on Eastern Time. Matt points out that they don’t use email at Automattic and instead use their own custom tools. They also talk about some of the modifications to current collaboration tools that they’d like to see. The three of them also talk about why many of the “issues” surrounding remote work are not actually issues unique to remote work but are part of knowledge work in general. They also discuss some of the challenges of remote work, including ensuring clear communication, gauging the quality of potential hires without the usual local signals, and dealing with distractions.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.

On this episode, Erik is joined by Jd Ross (@justindross), co-founder of Opendoor. They talk about a wide variety of topics, including mental models, cities, governance, travel, founding myths, and “why all of us are solely responsible for western civilization.”They start with mental models, talking about some of the most useful mental models Jd has seen and how he identifies new ones (a mental model for mental models, if you will). They transition to talking about cities and governance, including why the Bay Area has a housing crisis, why Jd is very long on Oakland, and the policies that he would import from the UK to fix housing in the Bay Area. Jd observes that cities always endure, even through disasters and massive changes in the nation states surrounding them. He talks about founding Opendoor, the importance of founding myths, and what he’s learned from Keith Rabois. He explains what you need to scale your company effectively and the difference between entrepreneurs and executives. He talks about some of his mental models for company building and why he says “playbooks rule everything around me.” Jd also talks about taking a sabbatical and traveling around the world twice, but in his words “learning nothing.”They talk about what Jd is looking for in his next opportunity and how he thinks about what to pick. He says that he’s looking at how to create the most good for the human race over a 1000 year time horizon and explains how Carroll Quigley convinced him that all of us are solely responsible for western civilization. They talk about snark as a contagion in the world today, which Jd says emerges when people don’t feel empowered to make changes, so they fall back on sarcasm.They have a rapid-fire round where they talk about different people that Jd has learned from, and also play a game of long-short, where Erik names something (fitness cults, the Bay Area, etc.) and Jd says whether he’s long or short on it.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.

Erik is joined by Jesse Genet (@jessegenet), co-founder and CEO of Lumi. Lumi is an online platform that handles all of the packaging needs for direct-to-consumer companies. Jesse explains what the typical process for procuring these types of supplies why even huge companies like Amazon still have to navigate a maze of relationships with various brokers and suppliers to fulfill their packaging needs. She compares buying a plane ticket prior to online aggregators to the current state of supply chain procurement.Jesse explains how she got into the space and talks about the importance of beautiful packaging to companies that, without retail stores, otherwise have very few touch points with a customer. She describes the emergence of a stack of services to serve direct-to-consumer companies and lets us in on some of the ins and outs of the hidden world of supply chain management. She also talks about the consumer goods space in general and what insights she’s gathered on what makes a successful consumer packaged goods company.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. Grace Chen was our audio engineer for this episode and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

On this episode Erik is joined by Antonio Garcia Martinez (@antoniogm), author of Chaos Monkeys, and Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList. Parker is a returning fan-favorite. Erik describes Antonio’s Chaos Monkeys as half Michael Lewis of Silicon Valley and half Hunter S. Thompson. It's a great read.Parker and Antonio debate whether the corrosion of discourse and the rise of fake news are a result of specific features of social media, like the News Feed, or whether they are a result of humans being interconnected instantly via smartphones. Antonio argues that WhatsApp is “the perfect foil to Facebook” but that it is still a distribution platform for fake news.They discuss why two people can see the same high-quality video of the same event, but still draw opposing conclusions on who was the “victim” and who was the “perpetrator.” They discuss the need for media literacy, the difference between media and journalism, and how Twitter and Facebook might be fixed.They talk about the change in sentiment about social media on the left and the right through the years, starting with the election of Obama, through the Arab Spring, to Trump. They also discuss moral relativism between the US's political parties and the dichotomy of Bay Area political views.The three close with a discussion about the religious instinct that seems to be an innate part of the human psyche, even if it doesn’t always manifest via organized religions. They talk about new manifestations of religion in today’s social movements and talk about the crazy fact that there are actual “religious startups” that pitch new churches to "VCs."____Political Ideology Diagram Mentioned By Parkerhttps://twitter.com/hamandcheese/status/991408394941665285____Books and Articles Mentioned In This EpisodeThe Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel BoorstinThe Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin GurriAmusing Ourselves To Death by Neil PostmanSeven Types of Atheism by John RayMarshall McLuhan’s Playboy Interview in 1969: https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/____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.

On this episode of Venture Stories, Erik is joined by Yunus Saatci, of Uber AI labs and a founding member of OnDeck, and Lewis Gyson, founder and CEO of Ant, a Village Global portfolio company. They were interviewed recently in downtown San Francisco. Yunus talks about the unique career he's had so far, with stops at big tech companies as well as in venture capital. Lewis explains what he and the team at Ant are trying to do and how his experience working for New Zealand's version of eBay (New Zealand and China are two countries where eBay doesn't operate) helped inform what he's working on now. They break down some of the most commonly used (and overused) terms in artificial intelligence, including machine learning, deep learning and others, and explain how those techniques work. They also talk about the relevancy of academic machine learning techniques to commercial applications and why machine learning is called "a solution in search of a problem."They talk about some of the ways that AI can transform brick-and-mortar retail and direct-to-consumer, and all the advancements in retail that a company like Ant can provide when it comes to supply chain management, delivery, and point-of-sale. They also discuss big companies in AI and their motivations in making AI tools open source.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.

On this episode Erik is joined by Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay), a returning guest who was previously here to talk about Bitcoin and crypto from an Austrian perspective. Today he’s here to talk about healthcare from the Austrian perspective. He breaks down the causes for the dysfunction in the US healthcare system as he sees them and talks about what (if anything) might fix them. They discuss the factors that are distorting incentives in healthcare and why they result from a lack of free markets. Vijay talks about employer-sponsored healthcare that emerged during World War Two, which has remained the default system “by accident” ever since. He also talks about Medicare and farm subsidies and how those have contributed to consumers paying more but getting less when it comes to healthcare.Erik asks what Vijay would do if he could wave a wand and change anything about the US healthcare system, but Vijay says that it might take a collapse of the system to change how things work. Vijay talks about why the US system is still superior to single-payer healthcare systems around the world and why he would look to Singapore as an example of a country that the US could learn from. They also discuss the Austrian and libertarian perspectives on governance and monetary policy more broadly.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.Quotable Lines From This Episode:“The cost in single-payer healthcare systems is the wait. I’d rather live somewhere where the treatment is available even if it is expensive.”“Ask a doctor delivering a baby, ‘how much does this cost?’ They can’t tell you because they don’t know. This is the only industry where a provider has no idea what their service costs.”“Insurance is supposed to be for unexpected catastrophic events, so it’s strange that we use it for all these routine healthcare procedures.”

On this episode, Erik is joined by Renata Quintini (@rquintini), partner at Lux, and Brian Frank (@bfrank), early stage investor and advisor to food tech companies.They start out by talking about what food tech really is, why it’s exciting, and what some of the coolest companies in the space are doing. Brian points out that food is an 8.1 trillion dollar market worldwide, and that the industry is “all up for grabs.” They discuss what it takes for new entrants to get into the market and some of the advantages and disadvantages that the massive incumbents have.They discuss trends in the industry, including mechanization and automation, artificial intelligence, the demand for plant-based and organic food, and the newly health-conscious consumer. Renata and Brian talk about some of their investments in the space. They break down what new entrants in the space need to do to get in front of customers and talk about some of the data advantages that direct-to-consumer companies have that incumbents don’t.Erik also asks what kinds of opportunities they see in the space, what their requests for startups would be, and what kind of company they would be founding if they were an entrepreneur rather than an investor.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.

On this episode Erik is joined by his fellow general partner at Village Global, Ross Fubini (@fubini), and Misha Esipov (@mishaesipov), co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit.Ross and Village are investors in Misha’s company and Ross has been obsessed with fintech for a very long time. Misha tells the story of how his team came upon the idea and why the mission of the company has been resonating with the founding team and subsequent hires. He explains why credit reports are not shared between credit rating bureaus in different countries, making it really difficult to get a credit card, a loan, or even just an apartment, as an immigrant.Misha talks about going from a three-person founding team to where they are today and what kinds of learnings he has gathered along the way. He talks about the importance of hiring a general counsel and starting with smaller customers before bigger ones. Ross says he’s excited about how big Nova Credit could get and explains what he means when he says he likes to see entrepreneurs “own the whole problem.” Erik also asks about their requests for startups in the space and what kinds of companies they would be looking to invest in if they were running a fintech fund.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.