Origins: Inside Venture Capital

Ciaran O'Leary is a co-founder and general partner at BlueYard, a thesis-driven early-stage venture capital firm based in Germany. In the past several years, BlueYard has backed companies like Protocol Labs (Filecoin) and Open Source Coin in the Blockchain space, Meatable and Bit Bio at the intersection of science and technology, Pitch and Vectary in open data, among other fascinating companies an...

Mark Suster is the Managing Partner at Upfront. He previously was the founder & CEO of two successful enterprise software companies, the most recent of which was sold to Salesforce.com where Mark became VP, Products. He's also one of the OG VC bloggers at https://bothsidesofthetable.com. In this episode, we discuss Mark's journey as both an entrepreneur and VC going back to the dot com, how he joi...

This is a special episode of Origins focused entirely on the concept of VC portfolio construction. We recorded this discussion as a panel with three guests that provide different perspectives on this important topic. Beezer Clarkson is an LP and managing director at Sapphire Partners, Alda Leu Dennis is a partner at Initialized, a seed-stage venture firm, and Trae Vassallo is a founder and partner...

Chad Byers is a co-founder and partner at Susa Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund based in SF that has backed companies like Robinhood, Flexport, and Andela. Chad discusses growing up in Silicon Valley, his path to venture, the unusual founding story of Susa with his partners, and how they've strategically planned their funds over time. Chad is one of the smartest young seed investors in SF, and...

Lo Toney is the founding managing partner of Plexo Capital, a new $42.5 million fund incubated inside of GV focused on making investments in seed-stage VC firms led by women or people of color. In addition to investing as LPs, Plexo Capital makes direct investments in startups that are funded by firms where Plexo has an LP position. The fund’s investors include Alphabet, Intel Capital, Cisco Inves...

Fabrice Grinda is the founder of FJ Labs, a company co-creation and investment firm, focused on marketplace businesses. FJ Labs has invested in companies such as Flexport, Shippo, Lime, Brightroll, among many others. Fabrice is also a serial entrepreneur, previously founding three companies - Zingy, Aucland, and OLX - All of which scaled to significant size. He was born in France and is an avid tr...

Paul Mace is the Director of Investments for Private Equity and Real Estate in the Tufts University Investment Office. He is responsible for evaluating private market managers and their investment strategies to potentially include in the university’s portfolio. Before joining Tufts, Paul was an investment banker evaluating M&A and private equity transactions for a boutique advisory firm. In this e...

In this special episode of Origins, Beezer Clarkson of Sapphire Partners hosts Anne Martin, the Chief Investment Officer of Wesleyan University. Anne was previously a Director of Investments at Yale University, where she oversaw the private and natural resource portfolio. At Wesleyan University, she oversees all aspects of the endowment and reports to the university's board and investment committe...

Bryce Roberts is the founder of Indie VC, a 12-month program and venture fund designed to fund and support founders on a path to profitability. Before that, Bryce was a co-founder of OATV in 2005, one of the earliest seed focused VC firms, where they invested in companies like Fastly, Foursquare, Planet, Hipcamp, and others. On this episode, we discuss the earliest days of seed investing and raisi...

David Fauchier is the co-founder of Cambrial Capital, an investment firm based in London deploying a thesis-driven fund of funds strategy focused on the digital assets space. David has previous experience as a product leader and angel investor in Europe, and has one of the most thoughtful approaches to investing in the blockchain space that we've seen. We cover a wide range of topics in this episo...

Lindsay Larsen is a managing director at UVIMCO, which represents the University of Virginia's $9B+ endowment. At UVIMCO, Lindsay co-heads the endowment's venture capital investing, as well as hedge fund investing and the growth equity portfolio. She previously held roles at Sequoia Heritage and Bluestem Asset Management, and she started her career at Goldman Sachs after attending UVA as an underg...

Manu Kumar is the founder of K9 Ventures, a technology-focused Pre-Seed fund based in Palo Alto, California. K9 Ventures was the first "pre-seed" venture firm in the industry, and Manu was the earliest investor in companies like Twilio, Lyft, Carta, Crowdflower, and many more. Manu has a truly unique outlook on the VC business, and has a highly disciplined investment model that he's stuck with sin...

Conrad Shang is a Director at UTIMCO, The University of Texas and Texas A&M Endowment, where he leads the VC portfolio for one of the largest university endowments in the country. He’s been on both sides of the table, having also previously been a VC at Norwest Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. This was a particularly fascinating conversation because Conrad now oversees what is probably...

Zach Aarons is a co-founder and partner at Metaprop, an early-stage venture firm and accelerator focused on real-estate related technology. Zach has been working at the intersection of real estate and venture capital for the past decade, and he's the most active early-stage PropTech investor in the United States, having funded over 60 startups in the space as an individual as well as 40 startups (...

On this episode of Origins, we interview Sarah Anderson and Emily Geiger, who are responsible for two critical components of Cintrifuse, a unique organization and public-private partnership established to drive the next phase of growth in the Cincinnati region. Sarah is the Managing Director of the Cintrifuse Syndicate Fund, a fund of funds that invests in VC managers across the U.S. Emily is the...

David Tisch is a founder and managing partner of Box Group, the most prolific angel and seed investing firm in NYC, where they're investors in companies such as Pillpack, Flatiron Health, GroupMe, Plaid, Roman, among many others. He previously co-founded Techstars New York, a fixture of the NYC tech community for many years, and is the head of Cornell Tech's Startup Studio. In this episode, we dis...

Rob Mazzoni is a principal and one of the earliest members of the TrueBridge investment team, an alternative asset management firm founded in 2007 and focused on the venture capital industry. Rob first worked with TrueBridge co-founder and general partner Mel Williams at UNC Management Company, Inc. (UNCMC) as an investment and performance analyst. In this episode, we discuss Rob's professional pa...

Shan-Lyn Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Zola, the fastest growing wedding registry and planning site in the U.S. Before Zola, Shan-Lyn was the chief product officer of chloe + isabel, and an executive at Gilt Groupe. In this episode, we cover a wide range of topics, including Shan-Lyn's experience growing up in Australia, discovering the Internet at a young age, and eventually moving to the U.S....

Mike Maples is the founding partner at Floodgate and has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (IPO TIVS, acquired by IBM) and Motive (IPO MOTV, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.) Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, ngmoco, Weebly, Che...

Ryan Nece is a Managing Partner at Next Play Capital, a mission-driven co-investment and fund of funds focused on venture capital. He started his career playing football for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he played for eight years, winning a super bowl championship as a rookie. After retiring from football, Ryan co-founded Straightcast Media, which he successfully exited to FOX Sports in 2015. Ry...

Jeff Fagnan is a founder of Accomplice and more recently Spearhead, in partnership with AngelList. Jeff is well known as a founding investor, working with most of his portfolio since inception, sometimes as a co-founder including Veracode (Sold to CA Technologies for $614M in 2017). Jeff sits on the board of many scaling startup‍‍‍s including AngelList, Carbon Black, InsightSquared, PillPack, and...

Leah Busque is a General Partner at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture firm based in SF. Before Fuel, she was the co-founder and CEO of TaskRabbit for eight years, and before that an engineer at IBM. In this episode, we discuss Leah's path to founding TaskRabbit, moving to SF, and partnering with Chris Howard as Fuel's second GP just over a year ago. We also dig into how she discovered and has n...

Ro Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Carmera, a street-level intelligence platform. The company's flagship product is CARMERA Autonomous Map, which delivers real-time, 3D maps and navigation-critical data for autonomous vehicles. Ro previously spent six years with Disqus, the web's largest community discussion network. He's also the first Notation portfolio company founder we've had on Origins! I...

As CEO of the Danish Growth Fund since 2001, Christian Motzfeldt has been instrumental in building the new Danish ecosystem of entrepreneurship. Through the Danish Growth Fund, he has built one of the largest portfolios of venture and small-cap funds in the Nordics, and now has 2 Billion USD under management. This is the first sovereign wealth fund that we've had on the show, so we dive deep into...

In this episode of Origins, Beezer Clarkson turns the tables and interviews Nick Chirls and Alex Lines of Notation. Having just closed Notation II, we figured this would be a good time to explain who we are, what we do, and why we do it. We cover our time working together in the early days at betaworks, our decision to ultimately leave and start Notation, the process of raising our first and now s...