Traction: How Startups Start | NextView Ventures

DraftKings' Jason Robins -- In this episode, NextView partner Rob Go  talks to the CEO of the newest unicorn -- Jason Robins  of DraftKings . Jason is generous with his storytelling and tactical tips for fundraising when VCs aren't receptive, partnering with larger players in your industry (as DraftKings was able to do with brands like Disney/ESPN, the MLB, the NHL, etc.), and building a company t...

Kathryn Minshew , co-founder and CEO of career platform The Muse, shares tactical details from her scrappy founding story. Today, The Muse generates over 4 million monthly views and offers job postings from and visual windows into hundreds companies, ranging from Uber and Facebook to HBO and Adidas.   STARTUP LESSONS YOU'LL LEARN: - Tactics to build audience for a startup - What the very FIRST ste...

Bootstrappin' CEO  Patrick Campbell , cofounder of SaaS startup Price Intelligently , shares his story of leaving Google, bootstrapping a startup, beating cancer, and more.  STARTUP LESSONS YOU'LL LEARN
 What tradeoffs a bootstrapped startup's CEO must make How to price a software product correctly to maximize revenue and avoid leaving money on the table early on A definition of content marketing...

Tech Journalist Dennis Keohane -- Imagine you were told to enter a brand new field tomorrow and that you had 18 months to get hired by one of the top brands in that space. What would you do? That's where the story of Dennis Keohane , national tech reporter for Pando Daily , begins. Dennis shares the story of his whirlwind year and a half, during which time he went from innovative teacher to writer...

General Assembly CEO Brad Hargreaves -- When Brad set out to create General Assembly, he had to face both an unusual and a difficult decision: the "Chicken, Egg, or Farm to Put It All" problem. Listen for an explanation, as well as his story of how GA gained its first few results on the way to a global organization in the education space. Also on the show: Horrible improv comedy When students walk...

LinkedIn Co-Founder Lee Hower -- Imagine being on the founding team of not one, but TWO of the startup world's biggest legends: PayPal and LinkedIn. Lee Hower  experienced exactly that. In the episode, he shares his stories of how LinkedIn scrapped towards early results back before most of the tech we all use today was even around -- it'll sound pretty archaic to most young entrepreneurs today. Le...

NatureBox Co-founder/CMO, Ken Chen -- If ever there was a sneaky way to learn and gain initial traction, this is it. NatureBox currently ships millions of healthy snacks to consumers everywhere, but they all started with a single observation, a single hack using some free tools, and a single weekend of effort. Fastforward to 2015, and they're a Series C startup some would call a success, relative...

Fred Shilmover, InsightSquared -- In Traction's first-ever episode, NextView's VP of platform  Jay Acunzo  briefly explains the concept behind the show - to share the stories of the creative, unusual, and brilliant ways entrepreneurs scrap their way to early results. Then, Jay and co-founding partner  Rob Go  hear the seed-stage story of InsightSquared , a successful SaaS startup that's exploded i...

Launching this spring, a podcast from  NextView Ventures  about the creative, unusual, clever, and downright brilliant things that entrepreneurs do to gain early results. While everyone gets told to "do things that don't scale," we don't often hear what those things actually are -- at least not until a company succeeds and the story gets polished for the press. NextView partner Rob Go  and VP of P...