Smart Venture Podcast

Avery Akkineni is the President of Vayner3, a leading consultancy with a mission to guide the world's largest enterprises and intellectual property owners in navigating the next iteration of consumer behavior, Web3. In July 2021, Avery launched the VaynerX consultancy, Vayner3 (previously known as VaynerNFT), alongside serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. In less than twelve months, she successful...

Brandon Yahn is the Partner and Co-founder of Convivialite Ventures, a VC firm backed by Pernod Ricard. Pernod Ricard is the #1 premium spirits organization and the second largest wine and spirits company in the world. The Group represents 240 premium brands available in more than 160 countries. Brands under their portfolio include Absolut Vodka, Jameson, Malibu, Ricard, and Chivas Regal, among ot...

Angelic Vendette is the VP, and Global Head of Marketing at Alo Yoga, a luxury performance clothing and lifestyle brand among supermodels, influencers, TikTok icons, etc. Under her leadership, the company launched collaborations with Saint Laurent, partnerships with fashion icons like Irina Shayk, celebrities like Diplo, TV stars from The Bachelor, accepting crypto payment and employee salary in c...

Todd Kaplan is the CMO of Pepsi, the leader of PepsiCo's US Cola business and flagship brand. Under Todd's leadership, Pepsi created and Launched LIFEWTR (premium water) and BUBLY (sparkling water) - two of the most significant new product innovations in PepsiCo history. Todd and the Pepsi team also produced the The Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show, which was nominated for 5 Emmys and was recognized...

Moritz Baier-Lentz is a Partner at BITKRAFT, the world's most active VC firm and lead investor in the gaming industry with over $800 million in assets under management and more than 100 portfolio companies. Some of their portfolios include Epic Games (the creators of Fortnite and Rocket League), Horizon Blockchain Games (co-investors including co-founder of Reddit, Coinbase, Polychain Capital, and...

Cooper Turley is a leading collector of Music NFTs. He's an angel investor in Sound, Catalog and Royal and an advisor at Audius, a decentralized streaming protocol. He's a co-founder of Friends with Benefit (FWB), an exclusive, token-gated community. He was a former venture partner at Variant and included in Fortune Magazine's "NFTy 50" - a list of the "most influential builders, creatives and inf...

Jake Brukhman is the founder and CEO of CoinFund, a cryptoasset-focused investment firm. Their portfolio includes CoinList, Dapper, Republic, Polkadot, NEAR protocol among others. Prior to CoinFund Jake served as a Partner at Triton.ai, an intelligence platform that helps institutional investors, private equity, strategy, corp dev, and innovation professionals size, analyze and value companies for...

Kevin Chou is Managing Partner of SuperLayer, the leading web3 venture studio. He is also a co-founder of Rally, a crypto platform funded by a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and others that allows creators and artists to launch their own digital currency and to build sustainable, independent economies with their fan communities. Kevin currently serves as the Chairman of Forte, a new blockchain whos...

Jack Lu and Zhuoxun Yin are the Co-Founders of Magic Eden, a leading NFT platform on Solana. Magic Eden recently raised $130 Million in series B funding at a $1.6 Billion valuation, co-led by Electric Capital and Greylock and with new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, also alongside previous investors Paradigm and Sequoia Capital. Prior to founding Magic Eden, Jack worked on partnerships & cor...

Dan Nguyen-Huu is a partner at Decibel VC where he invests in enterprise software companies (cloud & data infrastructure, machine learning / AI, cyber-security, DevOps, and open source) in seed and series A startups. Prior to that, he worked as a VC at Battery Ventures where he was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 venture capital list. Some of his investments include Databricks, Sumo Logic, Mati...

Shiva Rajaraman is the VP of Product at OpenSea, where he leads a team of designers and product managers to build the top NFT trading platform. Prior to OpenSea he worked as the VP of Commerce at Meta, VP of Product at Spotify, and CTO at WeWork, he also worked on products at many other iconic tech companies such as Google (YouTube).  You can learn more about:  1. The commonality and differences t...

Jeff Zirlin ( Jiho ) is the co-founder and growth lead at Sky Mavis. Sky Mavis is revolutionizing how people play, live, work and earn within virtual worlds through the use of blockchain technology. Sky Mavis' first game, Axie Infinity, is one of the largest NFT gaming ecosystems and has amassed millions of players around the world. At Sky Mavis, Jeff spearheads the growth of products through mess...

Lauren Riihimaki is a YouTuber who has over 8.5Million followers on YouTube channel LaurDIY and 21M+ followers over social media. She is also the host and executive producer of an HBO Max competition series called Craftopia. Prior to that Lauren won the YouTube Streamy Award in the "Lifestyle" category, and a Shorty Award in the "House & Home" Category. Lauren started her YouTube career in her fir...

100 Olivia Nottebohm is the Chief Revenue of Notion where she leads the Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Customer Experience teams. Prior to Notion, she held multiple leadership positions at various well-known companies. Such as COO of Dropbox, VP at Google, and Partner at McKinsey & Company.  Check out our brand new YouTube Video Podcast!   https://www. SmartVenturePod.com IG/ Twitter / FB...

099  Jim Louderback worked as the CEO of VidCon, one of the leading conferences in the world of digital creators and innovators. Under his leadership, the company was sold to Viacom in 2018. He is also a Venture Partner at seed investment firm Social Starts. Prior to VidCon, Jim was the CEO of Revision3, where he helped drive a 20x increase in viewers and a 12x increase in revenue. He eventually s...

097 Yoni Assia is the Co-founder and CEO of eToro, a leading social investment platform with over 27 million users who exchange investment strategies, connect and share thoughts about the market across the platform. Yoni was an early believer in Blockchain technology. Beyond founding eToro, he had worked on the Colored Coins project with Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. He also establishe...

096 Bill Barhydt is the founder and CEO of Abra, a leading crypto wealth management service. Prior to founding Abra, Bill worked as a research engineer at NASA, the CIA, as well as a VP of Goldman Sachs. Bill also served as CEO at multiple companies such as Boom Financial and WebSentric. He gave the first-ever TED talk on bitcoin back in 2012 when bitcoin was trading at $5. He also created the wor...

095 Imran Khan is the founder and CEO/Core Contributor of Alliance DAO, a top accelerator for Web3 companies. He formerly served as the General Partner at Token Daily Capital. Prior to that Imran worked at Microsoft, where he helped launch One Note for Education, Surface, and HoloLens. He was also a Partner at zk Capital and led investments into Dharma and Namebase. Prior to that, he worked at Com...

094 Dan Roth is the Editor In Chief and VP at Linkedin, where he oversees a team of editors across the globe. He and his team curate breaking news and views on Linkedin and cultivate top contributors across the site. Under Dan's leadership, his team also built influencer programs to help leaders like Barack Obama, Richard Branson and other top CEOs, VCs and business leaders to share their thoughts...

093  Baek  Kim is the General Partner at #Hashed, one of the leading crypto startup investing funds. Hashed has grown to $4B+ in AUM investing in Web3 and crypto companies. Their investment includes some of the top crypto companies such as Terra Money, Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, ZKSync, among others. Prior to crypto investing,  Baek  has worked at Amazon Web Services and founded a Robotics startu...

092 Richard Oppy is the VP of Global Brands at Anheuser Busch InBev, the largest consumer goods company in the world with leading beer brands in over 100 countries. He is responsible for the global marketing efforts of some of the world's most iconic beer brands, including Corona, Stella Artois, Michelob Ultra, and the world's most valuable beer brand – Budweiser. Under his leadership Budweiser pu...

091 Ravi Mehta is the Co-founder and CEO of Scale Higher, a company that helps professionals match with career coaches to accelerate their career growth. Prior to starting a company, Ravi was the Chief Product Officer at Tinder where he led the product strategy for the world's #1 monetizing app. He also led teams on Gen Z engagement and consumer products at Facebook and Tripadvisor.  Check out our...

090 Colin Bryar is the former VP of Amazon, Technical Advisor to Jeff Bezos, COO at IMDb and COO at Singapore-based RedMart. He is also the co-author of the book  Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon , which takes you in the room and show how the principles and practices were used to create four key Amazon business: Kindle, Amazon Prime, Prime Video and Amazon Web S...

089 Amy Kelly Lauer is the Senior Vice President of Sephora, General Manager at Sephora @Kohl's. Prior to leading Sephora @ Kohl's, Amy was the VP, Head of Digital at Kendo Holdings, Inc., where she led and managed end-to-end eCommerce, paid digital & social marketing, and product management for Kendo Brands (including Fenty Beauty, Kat Von D Beauty, Marc Jacobs Beauty, etc.) Prior to that Amy spe...

088 Emmanuel Straschnov is the Co-CEO & Founder of Bubble, a no-code platform that helps non-technical founders build influential tech companies. Bubble has raised $100 million in series A. Prior to founding Bubble, Emmanuel worked as the special assistant to the CEO of Prada USA. He also received an MBA from Harvard Business School.  Check out our brand new YouTube Video Podcast!   https://www. S...