Origins: Inside Venture Capital

On this episode of Origins, we sit down with Semil Shah of Haystack, an early-stage venture firm based in SF. Semil has a non-traditional background for VC and has been vocal about the unique way he's building the firm, recently making the transition into an institutionally backed fund. He's an active blogger, and an investor in startups like Instacart, Giphy, Carta, and many others. In the interv...

On this episode of Origins, we sit down with Roland Reynolds, a managing partner at Industry Ventures. Industry Ventures is a fascinating “full stack venture capital firm.” Their funds invest into companies and venture capital partnerships through both primary and secondary transactions, which is an important part of the venture ecosystem that we have yet to cover on the Origins podcast. We cover...

On this episode of Origins, we sit down with Bruce Ou, a Managing Partner at Grove Street Advisors. GSA is a unique type of investment firm in that they build customized private equity fund portfolios to address each of their LP clients’ individual investment needs. Their sole business is to manage discretionary separate accounts, investing in lower middle-market buyout, growth equity and venture...

In this episode, we sit down with Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Previous to USV, Andy was a co-founder of betaworks, and earlier in his career an executive at AOL. Andy’s one of the most thoughtful and admired VCs in the industry, and this was plain and simple one of the best episodes we’ve ever recorded.

Michael Larsen is a managing director at the global investment firm Cambridge Associates, based in Boston. Mike works with endowments, foundations and other large institutional investors on their private investment programs, particularly focused on venture capital exposure. He spends his time meeting with managers, sourcing new ideas, and implementing VC programs for his clients’ portfolios.

David Frankel is a managing partner and co-founder of Founder Collective, which launched in 2011 with a simple mission: To be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. In the years since, they've become one of the most respected and highest performing venture firms in the industry. Before starting Founder Collective, David spent most of his life as an entrepreneur, co-founding Internet...

Aaron Gershenberg is a founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s fund of funds and direct investment group, SVB Capital. Aaron joined SVB in 1999 and has been part of the venture capital industry since 1996. Under his leadership, the group has over $3.3 billion under management across fund of funds, direct funds and separate accounts. In this episode, we sit down with Aaron and discuss SVB Capital's beginn...

Bradley Tusk started Tusk Ventures to help startups work with governments at scale. To date, this unique venture capital firm has worked with companies like Uber, Fanduel, Handy, Eaze, and others to help them navigate regulatory challenges. Tusk Ventures grew out of Tusk Strategies, which Bradley started in 2010 to help major institutions run multi-jurisdictional campaigns to shape their public re...

Winter Mead is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures, where he focuses on Sapphire's fund investments in the United States and internationally. Before joining Sapphire Ventures in 2014, he worked at Hall Capital Partners. Prior to Hall, Winter founded Mead and Mead, an international food distribution and logistics business, and also spent a number of years working for several early-stage technolog...

Eva Ho is a General Partner and co-founder of Fika Ventures, a new $40M seed fund based in LA. She's also an EIR of the City of Los Angeles and a board member of the California Community Foundation. She was previously a co-founder of Susa Ventures, and before that an operator and early employee at Factual and Applied Semantics, and a co-founder of Navigating Cancer.

Graham Pingree is a limited partner at Cendana Capital, where he works with Michael Kim and invests in micro-VC funds. We discuss Graham's background working both at startups as well as firms such as Horsley Bridge and Cambridge Associates, and backing and working with funds such as Forerunner, Founder Collective, and IA Ventures.

We talk with investor Hunter Walk, founding partner at Homebrew, about his experiences building product as one of the first hires at Second Life and then at YouTube after the Google acquisition. We also dig into what it took to get Homebrew off the ground in 2013 with his partner Satya Patel.

For over a decade, Lindel Eakman managed the private investment program for the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), one of the largest endowments in the world. After 13 years at UTIMCO, Lindel left and joined Foundry Group to lead investments in other early-stage VC funds through FG's new fund, Foundry Group Next . We talk about his work at UTIMCO, where he backed iconic fi...

Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Nuzzel, is a busy man. Jonathan previously founded Friendster and Hotlinks, is an active angel in companies like AngelList and Docker, co-founded Founders Den in San Francisco, and is an LP in some great VC funds. We discuss Jonathan’s move to Silicon Valley in the late nineties to work for Netscape as an engineer, starting his first companies, and discovering t...

Thomas Lenehan is Deputy CIO at Rockefeller University, helping to manage their $2B endowment. We discuss how managing an endowment compares to his previous LP roles and committing long-term to the private markets and venture, through good and bad cycles.

We’re very excited to have Brad Feld to help us kick off season two. In addition to co-founding Foundry Group, and Techstars, Brad also co-founded Mobius Venture Capital in 1996. So he’s as qualified as anyone in the world to discuss starting venture firms, and that’s exactly what we did in this episode. Brad has already spoken at length about starting companies and angel investing, so we dug into...

Evan Jaysane-Darr is a Partner at Invesco Private Capital, a public asset management company where he focuses primarily on investing in venture. We discuss what's different about investing in venture as a public company, his experience investing in private equity vs venture funds, and why emerging managers are still important even though Invesco is in great funds like USV, Foundry, Greycroft, and...

Judith Elsea is a co-founder and Managing Director at Weathergage Capital. Judith and her Weathergage partners are investors in some of the most respected venture firms in the world. We discuss building out a venture practice at the Kauffman Foundation, where she was previously Chief Investment Officer, starting Weathergage Capital, what they look for in venture partnerships today, and Weathergage...

Michael Kim is the founder of Cendana Capital, one of the first fund of funds focused entirely on backing micro-VC firms. Since 2010, Cendana has been a very early institutional backer of firms like Lerer Ventures, Forerunner, Founder Collective, IA Ventures, SoftTech VC, K9 Ventures, among others. In this episode, we discuss Michael's path to starting Cendana and how he thinks about and decides t...

Joelle Kayden, Managing Director and Founder of Accolade Partners, joins us to discuss her deep experience as an investor in venture funds.

Josh Abramson, co-founder of Connected Ventures (CollegeHumor, BustedTees, Vimeo) and TeePublic, joins us to discuss founding and operating companies as well as investing as an Angel and as a Limited Partner.

Chris Douvos, Managing Director and member of the General Partner at VIA (Venture Investment Associates), joins us to discuss growing up in Brooklyn, investing courageously, & being the first institutional backer of First Round Capital.

Naval Ravikant, CEO and founder of AngelList, joins us to discuss sources of capital from the founder's perspective.

Elizabeth "Beezer" Clarkson, Managing Director at Sapphire Ventures, joins us to discuss her path to becoming an LP, what she looks at when considering investments, and why we're starting to see the LP world become more open and transparent.