Smart Venture Podcast

Matt Madrigal is the Vice President and General Manager of Merchant Shopping at Google. In this role, Matt leads the product and engineering teams that build Google Shopping's tools, partner integrations, and infrastructure to help businesses and merchants grow and thrive. Bringing an extensive background in retail, platforms, and technology, Matt is passionate about helping businesses through dig...

Peter Wagner is a Founding Partner of Wing Venture Capital, where he focuses on the Modern Enterprise, an agile workplace built on data and powered by AI. Peter has led investments in dozens of early-stage companies, including Snowflake, Gong, and many others, which have gone on to complete IPOs or successful acquisitions. Recently Wing has announced Wing Four, a new $600 million pool of capital d...

Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures, a classic seed-stage investment firm focusing on B2B software applications, B2C software and services, and connected hardware. Charles also serves as the Board Chair at the National Venture Capital Association and is a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Before launching Precursor, Charles was a Partner at S...

Ben Lerer is the Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau, a prominent early-stage venture capital fund in New York City. Lerer Hippeau has a portfolio that includes Allbirds, Glossier, Thrive, BuzzFeed, Warby Parker, Casper, Mirror, and more. Besides his role at Lerer Hippeau, Ben is renowned for founding Thrillist Media Group and serving as the former CEO of Group Nine Media.   You can learn more about...

Daniel Kan is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Cruise, a leading self-driving car company sold to General Motors for over $1 Billion 2 years after its founding. Before building Cruise, Daniel co-founded EXEC with his brother Justin Kan, the founder of  Justin.tv (which later became Twitch). After founding the company in 2011, EXEC was sold to Handy in 2014.    You can learn more about: ...

Mar Hershenson is Pear VC's Founding Managing Partner. Pear VC's portfolio includes DoorDash, Gusto, Affinity, among others. After earning a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Mar co-founded three startups in mobile/e-commerce, enterprise software, and semiconductor industries and has registered 14 separate patents. She is currently a Lecturer at Stanford Univeristy, teachi...

Sam Blond is a Partner at Founders Fund, a top Venture Capital firm founded by Peter Thiel and other Co-Founders of PayPal. Founders Fund's total assets under management are around $11 Billion (according to TechCrunch 2022), and their portfolio includes SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Facebook, Airbnb, and Spotify, among others. Before joining Founders Fund, Sam was the former Chief Revenue Officer at B...

David Sobie is a Vice President at PayPal, and he is also a co-founder of Happy Returns. Happy Returns is a Los Angeles-based software and reverse logistics company that works with online merchants to handle product returns. Their clients include Gymshark, Everlane, Levi's, and Revolve, among other popular e-commerce brands. Prior to that, David served as Chief Marketing Officer at REVOLVE Clothin...

Sri Viswanath is a General Partner at Coatue, where he leads AI and enterprise investments in private companies. Prior to joining Coatue, Sri served as Atlassian's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), where he oversaw Atlassian's cloud-native journey – assuming responsibility over the building and scaling Atlassian's cloud platform. Before joining Atlassian, Sri was also CTO and SVP of Engineering at G...

Keith Peiris is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tome, the AI-native storytelling platform that unlocks your best work. It lets users generate full visual presentations in seconds using simple prompts. In January, Tome became the fastest productivity tool to reach 1M users. Since, it raised a $43 million Series B led by Lightspeed. Other investors include Coatue, Greylock (Reid Hoffman sits on Tome's boa...

Casey Rosenberg is a popular TikTok creator with over 3M+ followers and over 500 million views. As a creator, Casey has worked with multiple brands, including Honey, Notion Labs, and ABC, among others. Beyond working as a creator, Casey is also an attorney focusing on business law.     You can learn more about:   1. The business side of being a creator   2. Structuring deals with brands as a creat...

Casey Rosenberg is a popular TikTok creator with over 3M+ followers and over 500 million views. As a creator, Casey has worked with multiple brands, including Honey, Notion Labs, and ABC, among others. Beyond working as a creator, Casey is also an attorney focusing on business law.     You can learn more about:   1. The business side of being a creator   2. Structuring deals with brands as a creat...

Noah Jennings is a popular content creator with over one million followers on TikTok. He is a designer with previous clients, including popular e-commerce brands and top Youtube Creator like Glamnetic (505k+ on IG), Fanjoy (493k+ on IG), Sniperwolf (33M+ on YouTube), and has recently launched his own subscription-based design agency called Compound Creative.   You can learn more about:   1. How to...

Jeff Morris Jr. is the founder and Managing Partner of Chapter One, an early-stage fund backed by Sequoia, Marc Andreessen, and Chris Dixon, among others. Portfolio including Dapper Labs, The Graph, Compound Finance, Moonpay, and many others. Before starting his own fund, Jeff was Tinder's VP, leading revenue products. Under his leadership, Tinder became the world's #1 top grossing revenue app.  Y...

David Beisel is a Co-founder and Partner at NextView Ventures, where he invests in technology-driven companies that are redesigning the Everday Economy. Some of his past portfolios include Attentive, TripleLift, Code Climate, Parsec (acquired by Unity for $320M), BookBub, thredUP (IPO'ed), MealPal, The Nudge, Hatch, and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter for $100M) among others. Prior to NextView, h...

Niko Bonatsos is a Managing Director at General Catalyst where he invests in early-stage companies. Niko focuses his investment strategy on finding first-time technology founders with strong product instincts, a robust appetite for learning, and a desire to create innovations with the potential to benefit millions. Some of his portfolio companies include Discord, Snap (NYSE: SNAP), Wag! (NASDAQ: P...

Alex Gurevich is a Managing Director at Javelin Venture Partners, an early-stage VC fund with portfolio companies like MasterClass, Thumbtack, Carbon Health, Niantic Labs, and many more. Alex serves on multiple boards of startups such as MasterClass, Thumbtack, Pair Eyewear, Mythical Games, and HitRecord (founded by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt) amongst others. Prior to joining Javelin, Alex worked...

Hamish McKenzie is a Co-founder of Substack, a platform that makes it simple to start a paid newsletter. Substack is currently valued at $650 million, and has raised over $80 million dollars from a16z, YC among other top funds.  Prior to founding Substack, Hamish is a journalist and former lead writer for Tesla, and a one-time reporter for tech blog PandoDaily. He is also the author of Insane Mode...

Latif Peracha is a General Partner at M13, a venture capital firm with over $900 AUM focused on early-stage consumer technology companies. Latif leads the Web3 strategy for the firm which has invested in Lightning Labs, Stepn, and Nori among many other companies and networks. The broader M13 portfolio includes Lyft, Daily Harvest and Ring. Latif previously worked as the Managing Director of Virgin...

Austin Evans is a successful American YouTuber and social media influencer who creates videos of technology, from console reviews to comparisons between old and new tech and everything in between. Since starting his channel in 2009, Austin's main channel has gained 1,265,270,681 video views and has involved the collaboration of big names in the industry, such as Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) and Bitwit...

Kong Pham is a YouTuber and video creator with more than 2.4 million subscribers and more than 125 million video views. In his channel, he creates innovative, clever, and fun videos such as social experiments, entrepreneurship advice, and pranks. He is the founder of Jumpcut, a startup that creates online courses for entrepreneurs, encouraging them to develop their business skills while learning t...

Melissa Cohen is a former Vice President at Polo Ralph Lauren, where she was in charge of production for their iconic Childresnwear line. She later moved to managing production for Chaps Mens and RTW. Prior to that she led production teams at Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ann Taylor, among other iconic fashion retail brands. She is also the founder and owner of MBC Consulting Solutions where she wo...

Wayne Hu is a Partner at SignalFire, a multi-billion dollar fund that operates as a technology company comprised of data scientists, engineers, and investors trained at Google, Meta, Slack, General Catalyst, KPCB, and A16z (Andreessen Horowitz). Their portfolio includes Uber, Alchemy, Frame.io, and more. Before working at SignalFire, Wayne worked at Google, McKinsey, and KPCB. Wayne is also a YouT...

Matthew Graham is the founder and CEO of Sino Global Capital, a $200 Million fund with backing from FTX. His prior investments include FTX, FTX.US , Solana, and Polygon, to name a few. Before founding Sino Global Capital, Matthew served as a Managing Director for international business at technology-focused investment bank China Bridge Capital. You can learn more about: 1. How to start a crypto fu...

Rex Woodbury is a Partner at Index Ventures, where he focuses on early-stage and growth investments in consumer technology businesses. He mainly focuses on online communication, Gen Z, commerce, marketplaces, and the future of work. Before Index, Rex was an investor at TPG Growth and The Rise Fund, TPG's global growth equity and social impact funds, where he oversaw the launch of TPG's impact meas...