First Funders

This episode of First Funders is a little different… It's a conversation between two friends who made the leap from to VC from two shared and unique paths. Shaherose is joined by Mel Strong, an operator-turned investor, whom she met while working at Nike. Today, Mel is a founder of NEXT VENTURES, a fund dedicated to supporting early stage companies in the health and wellness space. In this episode...

Shahram Seyedin-Noor isn’t a physician. Nor is he a chemist. And he’s not a software engineer, either. But you wouldn’t know by the way he commands all of these spaces to invest in some truly cutting edge bio technology like genomics, therapeutics, and diagnostics just to name a few.  He’s been at this for almost 20 years, with almost half of that time spent as the founder and managing partner of...

What could you do with a free weekend and a few subscriptions to some AI tools? Probably start a billion dollar company.  This is the reality for so many startups and tech companies that can suddenly ship projects that previously would’ve taken a couple of months (and a couple of developers) to deploy. So in a world where everyone can build, what’s the differentiator?  Monique Woodard has a few id...

Some investors are motivated by the thought of multiplying their fund, securing a bigger slice of the cap table, or, of course, successfully filing for a coveted IPO. But for Tahira Dosani, all she has to do is remember the economic instability of her childhood and she’s immediately re-anchored to her why behind it all. First came the career, starting as a Bain Capital consultant and moving on to...

We’ve welcomed investors with unique backgrounds to First Funders before, but Sundeep Ahuja is our first operator-turned-actor-turned-investor.  Sundeep is all in on all things climate tech. He’s backing founders leading the way in cleaning up our water, purifying our air, and keeping our planet the way it should be: livable. Today, his micro fund and syndicate platform Climate Capital, has over 4...

Canadians have been the lifeblood behind some of the biggest unicorn startups of the past few years (think Open AI, Uber, Slack, Instacart, Notion, Databricks, CloudFlare, Roblox, Ethereum, Moderna Health, and Clay to name a few), and yet no one talks about them, except for Andre Charoo. And he’s not just talking – he’s putting his money behind Canadian founders through his fund, Maple VC .  Andre...

You can be a founder. You can be an investor. You can be an operator. Or, you can be Shalin Mantri and be all three. This respected product leader got his start by founding a mobile app startup in the early iPhone days in 2011 and followed it up with product leadership in the early days of Uber, Skip and more recently, Google. He angel invests with $5k – $50k checks as a true first believer, usual...

We’ve had a lot of cool people on the pod, but Sheel Mohnot is our first guest to achieve this trifecta: 100X an investment, have a founder in his portfolio go to prison, and have his wedding sponsored by Taco Bell. He invests at the pre-seed and seed stages into startups in the financial technology (fintech) space, and he’s quick to tell you that just about everything is fintech. Through his fund...

One day soon when you see a robot squirrel on a 10-foot unicycle, think of Danielle Strachman. These are the types of ideas Danielle Strachman sees and backs on a regular basis at her VC fund, 1517.  The fund, which proudly backs “dropouts, students, and sci-fi,” has had several fund multipliers in their portfolio, including Loom (Acquired by Atlassian) and Luminar Technologies (IPO 2020). Plus, h...

Elizabeth Yin realized she had a problem. She wanted to be a founder, but couldn’t think of a problem she wanted to spend decades of her life working on. After soul searching, she remembered the one thing she did care about: helping other founders. She took that passion and turned it into Hustle Fund, which focuses on offering capital, knowledge, and networks to “hilariously early-stage” software...

An ill-fated business school fashion show led to a venture capital fund with $215 million AUM.  The duo met in 2010 at the MIT Sloan School of Management and soon after became research partners investigating why VCs were shunning startups in highly regulated spaces even though AirBnB and Uber were starting to reach venture scale very quickly. Tech-enabled startups impacting how we live in the real...

Have you ever played with an Oculus VR headset? You probably owe thanks to Arian Ghashghai. The former founder was working at Meta when someone in his network introduced him to an opportunity to invest in gummies. Yes, gummies.  That’s far and away from Arian’s machine learning roots, it’s now one of his best investments to date. Arian has since gone full-time into investing as the founder and man...

Armed with an educational background in computer science and biomedical informatics, Amit Garg switched to venture capital after a long, successful career in the corporate world, which included stints at companies like Google and Samsung. And that’s just the way he never planned it.  That’s right, the almost-doctor didn’t intend to get into venture capital, and he certainly never planned on starti...

What do you get when you mix U.S. national security, angel investing, and kids’ pajamas? Atlee Clark. Proud Canadian Atlee took a hard pivot from the public sector to the tech world, first through a nonprofit called the C100 , which supports entrepreneurs, and later at Shopify, focusing on 0 - 1 initiatives. Similar to other angel collectives emerging at the time like Hashtag Angels and Operator C...

Join Shaherose & Aamir as we reflect on our conversation with Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures .  Highlights:  Don’t forget the macro: Government regulations can lead to massive opportunities or failures. We discuss case studies of companies like Samsara, Movtive (fka KeepTrucking), Republic, and Zum, showing how regulatory shifts led to category-creating opportunities. Charles’ worst inve...

Hailing from Michigan, Charles developed an early obsession with the public markets in high school. Charles Hudson is now the Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures, a pre-seed venture fund that has defined and has become synonymous with “pre-seed”. Charles is known for his ability to identify and mentor early-stage companies that have the potential to disrupt their industries - first and early -...

Eric Ries has invested in over 100+ early-stage startups. He is best known as the author of The Lean Startup , a must-read for entrepreneurs worldwide. He also founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) , a new stock exchange designed to support companies with long-term goals. He recently launched a new podcast discussing ways to re-think corporate governance to be mission-first. In Part 1 of our...

Rajiv Bala , GP of Clutch VC , a pre-seed and seed-stage fund exclusively investing in Texas. Rajiv is committed and bullish on the region with a hands-on approach to investing, working with founders on product feedback, team building, and more to see initial customer validation before investing. Rajiv also embraces sub $500 million outcomes to drive fund multiples rather than relying on Unicorn o...

Meka Asonye , a Partner at First Round Capital , started angel investing in 2018 while working at Stripe and joined First Round in 2021. He has made dozens of Angel investments and 13 Venture investments, and he's just getting started! While he focuses on B2B SAAS, he has not shied away from investing in audacious founders, from modernizing 911 call centers to putting the biggest satellites in spa...

Amit Kumar , former founder and angel investor, is a generalist venture capitalist at Accel focused on dev tools, healthcare, and fintech startups. Twitter acquired Amit’s third company, and it was then that he realized his true purpose was supporting startup founders, and he shifted to venture capital. Amit shares insightful stories and lessons learned from 8 years of early-stage investing out of...

Rachel Sheinbein is an angel investor with over 250 startup investments.  She shares her insights on angel investing and how it allows her to work with founders “even before the seed stage,” writing $25k checks into technology startups through her vehicle Very Serious Ventures .  Later, Rachel discusses how building a community drives her investing strategy and lessons from memorable startup inves...

Jenny Fielding , a pre-seed investor and angel with 300 early-stage startup investments, discusses investing in FinTech, hard tech, and consumer spaces over the past decade. From studying law to working in finance to leaving it all to found not just one but two startups, Jenny brings a founder-operator mindset to her fund, Everywhere Ventures . She writes pre-seed and seed-stage checks for $50k to...

We're all discussing current market conditions - valuations, AI hype, fundraising challenges... Before we kick off our planned interview series on First Funders, we sat down with our friend Arjun Arora to discuss the Trends in Venture Capital 2024 . As investors, we always look ahead, making this a great way to start 2024. Highlights from our discussion: What to expect in round sizes and valuation...

Before you dive into our archives or the next episode, learn about First Funders and its hosts, Shaherose Charania and Aamir Virani.   You'll hear about Shaherose's background as a startup builder turned VC who started as a product marketer and how she started Women 2.0, a startup ecosystem, and Founder Labs, a tech incubator.  She also reviews her time at Nike, where she built their first incubat...

Coming soon. First Funders is a podcast for the Angels and Venture Capitalists who write first checks . Co-hosted by Shaherose Charania , startup builder turned VC. And Aamir Virani , founder turned angel investor. In each episode, you'll hear from angel and seed-stage VCs who wrote the first checks into startups that made it.  How did these investors find these opportunities?  How did they gain c...