Innovation with Mark Peter Davis

I’m super excited about this week’s episode because it hits close to home. If you’ve listened to the pod before, you’ve probably heard me mention the passion project I’m involved with, a platform that’s helping to democratize access to capital called Thunder. On this week’s episode I sit down with Thunder’s Co-Founder and CEO, Jason Kirby. To give a bit more context, Thunder is a company that’s co...

On this week’s episode I chat with Sterling Campbell, CEO of Minotaur. Minotaur is a web3 platform that helps people and brands launch NFT projects. There are a lot of steps - including a fair bit of technology - required to take an NFT launch from concept to launch. Minotaur’s tech-enabled service does all of this. As they put it, they “bring together artists, blockchain engineers and community m...

This week I chatted with Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs. FJ Labs is a VC that specializes in marketplaces and invests in every geography in every category at any stage. As Fabrice puts it they do angel investing at venture scale, meaning they don’t lead rounds but do a massive number of investments every year. Last year they made almost 200 investments. Fabrice is super interesting be...

This week I chat with Zack Gray, Co-Founder and CEO of Ophelia. Ophelia is helping to combat the opioid crisis by revamping the drug rehab model. As they put it, their mission is to “replace folklore with science, drug dealers with doctors, and stigma with privacy, convenience, and choice.” Covered by either health insurance or a monthly subscription of $195, Ophelia helps people struggling with a...

John Gannon is Founder of The VC Careers Blog and Co-Founder of GoingVC. Between these two endeavors, John has become one of the goto channels for getting a job in venture capital. He started The VC Careers blog shortly after we graduated business school together in the late 2000s. Since then, it’s scaled and become one of the sources of transparency in the VC industry, listing available jobs, com...

Divya Narendra is the Founder & CEO of SumZero, an investment community where peer-reviewed professional investment research is shared amongst its members. Its network of analysts is growing rapidly and offers some extraordinary insights. If you’re interested in public equities - check it out. In addition to SumZero, Divya sits on the board of Gemini, one of the leading crypto exchanges, so -...

This week I chatted with David Rabie, Co-Founder & CEO of Tovala. As Tovala puts it, they provide impossibly convenient home-cooking. They invented a smart oven that perfectly cooks the chef-crafted meals that they offer, which makes them an interesting part hardware / part subscription hybrid. Between choosing what to eat, buying the ingredients, cooking the food and cleaning up the dishes, p...

Chris Yeh is the General Partner of Blitzscaling Ventures and author of the book Blitzscaling. Chris co-wrote the book with his good friend Reid Hoffman (who - as many of you probably know - is the founder of LinkedIn). The book explains when and how to focus on scaling rapidly to beat the competition in a winner-take-all market. The nuance is the concept of prioritizing speed over efficiency in a...

Jarred Kessler is the Founder & CEO of EasyKnock. EasyKnock is a PropTech platform that offers a way for people to access the capital that’s locked in the value of their homes through sale leasebacks. This is a big issue for folks that don’t have great credit scores because that usually means they can’t get access to mortgages. Historically, reverse mortgage products have had a bad rap, but Ea...

Vivek Sharma is the Co-Founder and CEO of Movable Ink. Movable Ink has created a marketing solution that helps brands work data into personalized content. Basically, they help businesses leverage their data to help customize content and marketing messages. And it works. Companies who switch from a one-size-fits-all-marketing model to customization tend to see large increases in...

Hey everyone, I just wanted to share an update with you. First and foremost, a big thanks to all of you for joining me on this journey. It's been a blast and I can't wait to continue to this wild ride in 2022. Second, this podcast is meant to be an educational experience for everyone involved. I know I've learned a lot and I hope you have too. If there’s a particular topic you’d like to learn abou...

For this week’s episode, I chatted with Kelly Oriard & Callie Christensen, the Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Slumberkins. Slumbkerins is a pre-school brand aiming to support families in the emotional wellness development of their children with educational products. Through carefully crafted characters and stories they’ve packaged psychological techniques up to make it easy for parents to help tea...

Stephen Kuhl is the Co-Founder and CEO of Burrow, a furniture company for the modern age that delivers the most convenient customer experience in the industry. They started out by making beautiful modular couches that come in easy to carry boxes that more or less snap together without tools. They have since expanded their product line to carry all types of more intelligent furniture. You can basic...

Mike Rudoy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Jetty, a financial services platform that helps make renting a home more affordable and flexible. Jetty offers three products to help renters get into homes: Jetty Deposit - security deposit replacement Jetty Rent - rent payment program Jetty Protect - renters insurance Not only does Jetty help renters, the services makes managing properties easier too. It's...

Ali Hamed is a Partner at CoVenture Holding Company LLC. Since his college days he’s been building an impressive network and unsurprisingly has built an impressive business.  What’s unique about CoVenture’s model is that they’ve found an interesting synergy between debt financing and venture capital. In addition to making venture investments, Ali and his team provide balance sheet capital to...

Nhon Ma is the CEO and Co-Founder of Numerade, a Los Angeles based EdTech platform that’s using AI and short form videos to democratize access to tutoring for kids around the world. What is brilliant about their idea is that they are bringing supplemental learning to students who can’t afford traditional private tutoring. Nhon is an ex-Googler so he’s a tech-savvy founder who just knows how to run...

Jason Saltzman is the Co-Founder of Relief and a well known member of the New York start-up community. Relief is an app that helps people navigate the craziness when dealing with debt. According to Jason, Relief is here to kill your debt. The statistics about debt in America are staggering: Average amount of debt = $6k/person Average number of credit cards = 8 credit cards/person 1 out of 3 people...

Nihal Mehta is the Co-Founder of Eniac Ventures, a successful seed venture firm that has invested in unicorns like AirBnb and Boxed. Nihal has been a serial founder and an active investor for over a decade.  The only way to know what a founder is REALLY going through is by being a founder yourself. IMHO, VCs who have operator experience have a great competitive advantage. Nihal is one of the...

For this week’s episode I chatted with Maureen Farrell, a New York Times reporter and the co-author of The Cult of We. The Cult of We is about the rise and fall of WeWork, which Maureen covered extensively while she was working at the Wall Street Journal. She is such an expert on the topic that she was featured in the Hulu documentary WeWork: Or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn.&nb...

On this week’s episode I chatted with Sam Lessin, Co-Founder of Fin and General Partner at Slow Ventures. Sam is, in the truest sense, a Silicon Valley insider. He’s a part of the Harvard tech mafia, friends with Zuckerberg and has built a few different tech startups. Beyond all of that, he is an extremely deep and abstract thinker. I’ve always been a fan of listening to and learning from him. Dur...

Zheng Huang is the President of the Committee of 100. Committee of 100 is a non-profit U.S. leadership organization of prominent Chinese Americans in business, government, academia, healthcare, and the arts focused on public policy engagement, civic engagement, and philanthropy. Z is incredibly smart and during our chat we cover a lot. We talk about what the Committee of 100 is and why it was crea...

For this week’s episode I chatted with Angela Lee, Founder of 37 Angels, an investment network that activates female investors through an educational bootcamp. She is also a professor at the Columbia Business School where she focuses on teaching about venture capital. Angela is great at sharing her knowledge about the world. She has a very structured way of communicating her wonderful insights. Du...

For this week’s episode I chatted with Hal Callais, Managing Partner and CIO of Callais Capital. Callais Capital is a southern Louisiana based alternative asset management firm that invests in tech companies in the South and Mississippi River Delta region.  Hal is from a multi-generational family of entrepreneurs in Louisiana. He is very connected to the geography of the region and has been p...

On this week's episode I sit down with John Lochner, the Vice President of Innovation at New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). NYSERDA was established in 1975 to support clean energy and protect the environment. They're the government entity in the state of New York that is taking the lead to help drive innovation in the CleanTech ecosystem. Not only are they helping...

On this week’s episode I sit down with Mike Tarullo, COO of Banza. Banza makes pasta, pizza, and macaroni and cheese from chickpeas. You’ve probably seen their products at your local grocery store with their signature orange packaging. They’ve raised about $30 million and have products in 18,000 stores nationally.  Before Banza, Mike helped run Venture for America, the non-profit company Andr...