Sand Hill Road

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Kyle Lui, Partner at DCM, about the recent IPO roll that DCM has been on. The Menlo Park-based firm has generated a 61x return on investments that have gone public in the past two years. Kuaishou is the standout, with its market cap to entry valuation at 2,000x.   00:00 ​​ Intro  00:50 Who is Kyle Lui  01:33 Intro to DCM   03:30 DCM...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Russ Heddleston, founder of Docsend. The episode was recorded one month before the announcement that DocSend would be acquired by Dropbox for $165m.   00:00 ​​ Intro  00:37 What is Docsend  01:51 Selling Pursuit to Facebook in a talent acquisition  04:12 Leaving Facebook and starting Docsend  07:03 Product idea  09:00 Fund...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Ali Tamaseb, partner at DCVC, about his recently launched book "Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups".   00:00 ​​ Intro  01:00 Who is Ali?  03:02 Spark of motivation for the Super Founders book  05:49 Primary data collection  08:13 Data set: timeframe and selection criteria  10:28 The age of supe...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Vivek Saraswat, who has been a venture investor at Mayfield at the time of the recording and previously a product leader at Docker/VMware/AWS. Since recording this episode, Vivek has joined Immersa as a founding VP of product.     00:00 Intro  00:56 Who is Vivek?  03:12 Joining Mayfield  05:07 Portfolio companies  07:...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm about his journey as a mega maker, bootstrapping his podcast hosting and analytics platform to $1m+ in ARR in less than 3 years.   00:00 ​​​ Intro  01:55 ​​ Getting Real  04:30 ​ Business is like surfing  7:43 ​ Selling ice cream on a busy beach  11:33 ​ Why your business idea matters...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Garry Tan, co-founder of Initialized Capital about his journey as a content creator, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital.   00:00 Intro  02:02 Garry's Twitter game  06:00 Keeping up the content cascade  08:12 Getting started on YouTube  10:50 Paying it forward at scale  14:45 Respecting the audience  1...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs about building a database unicorn backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Benchmark, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. After recording the episode, Cockroach Labs raised $160m on a $2bn valuation in January 2021, reflecting the explosive growth and product innovation of 2020. &...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sean Henry, co-founder and CEO of STORD about building a digital warehouse and distribution startup backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Susa Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund from Atlanta, Georgia.   00:00 ​ Intro  01:11 Announcing the Series B led by Founders Fund   02:57 What solution does STORD offer?...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic), Partner at Unusual Ventures about his growth journey at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and Wealthfront.   00:00 ​ Intro  00:37 Growth at Facebook  03:50 ​ Growth at Twitter  05:31 ​ Growth at Quora   09:25 ​ Growth at Wealthfront  12:11 ​ Unusual Ventures  16:25 ​ A balanced approach to growth&n...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner and Cameron Weibel are joined by Joey Parsons, founder of effx to talk about moving from the monolith to a microservices architecture.   00:00 Intro  03:05 From rockstar engineer to found  06:02 Building early social network PicRave   $ 07:30 Taking the plunge with wife 5 months pregnant  09:00 Founder focus as a young father  10:06 Tra...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by Caroline Winnett, Executive Director at UC Berkeley's accelerator and incubator SkyDeck.    00:00 Intro  01:51 What is SkyDeck?  02:57 Demo days during Covid-19  03:35 Caroline's founder journey at NeuroFocus  05:24 Joining SkyDeck and setting up the SkyDeck Fund  07:23 Berkeley SkyDeck carry split  08:35 Berkeley...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Richard Mabey, co-founder of London-based legaltech startup Juro, backed by Union Square Ventures.   00:00 Intro  02:01 Magic circle years at Freshfields  03:35 Catching the entrepreneurial bug  05:15 Transitioning to legaltech via LegalZoom  07:26 Meeting co-founder Pavel Kovalevich  08:43 The Juro Minimum Viable Product...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Mike Ghaffary, GP at Canvas Ventures. 00:00 Intro  02:21 Swiss army knife of education  04:04 Business school after Dotcom bubble burst   05:06 Founding Stitcher  06:14 Focusing on news  08:03 Becoming CEO of Eat24  09:39 Growing Eat24 to $700m top line  10:45 Food delivery wars  11:55 Grubhub Partnership that ne...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Moisey Uretzky,  co-founder of Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure unicorn built for developers and headquartered in New York City. In this episode we journal the founder journey from getting into Techstars to scaling the company with venture debt to a recent unicorn valuation.  00:00 Setting the scene  03:55 The Uretz...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Brendan Wales, general partner at e.ventures on investing in data infrastructure unicorn Segment at the Seed and passing on TikTok (then Musical.ly) at the Series A. 0:00 Sand Hill Road Intro  2:10 First job running a Golf shop while at college  3:20 First job out of college in 2009 and entrepreneurial ambitions  4:29 'I gotta get to the...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Leo Polovets,  co-founder and general partner at Susa Ventures. As a partner at Susa, Leo focuses on investments in enterprise software, developer tools, technical products and logistics and supply chain. In this session we discuss his journey from being the second engineer at LinkedIn to starting his own venture firm. We discuss some of his notab...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sarah Catanzaro from Amplify Partners. As a partner at Amplify, Sarah focuses on startups that apply technological advances in machine intelligence and enterprise infrastructure to solve real-world problems. In this session we discuss her journey from data scientist to venture capital, her take on recent data sciences trends and her most recent investm...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Bryan Offutt from Index Ventures, which is an active investor in the open source vertical, having invested in the likes of Hortonworks, Confluent, Elastic, Kong, Cockroach Labs and most recently Starburst. In this session we talk about  the next frontier of open source, such as the open sourcing of pre-trained ML/NLP models (such as BERT) and dist...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner talks with Brian Leonard (@bleonard), the technical co-founder of TaskRabbit, which has pioneered the gig economy alongside Airbnb and Uber. In the session, they talk about the journey from the early days of TaskRabbit when it was just a few hundred Taskers to how they scaled it to one of the largest gig economy marketplaces that was eventually sold to IKEA. Check o...

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner talks with John Lin, who is a Principal from Trinity Ventures about his key learnings from being an entrepreneur himself and his transition to VC at Trinity. We take a deep dive into his portfolio companies Branch, Grow, Squire and Side. Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io

Venture capital used to be about 'financing what would not otherwise be financed'. This is exactly what Root Ventures is all about. In this session I talk to Lee Edwards about his journey from CTO at Teespring to venture and about financing deeply technical founders who are tackling interdisciplinary engineering problems. Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io

Simmer is a recent Y Combinator company that is challenging Yelp's restaurant discovery through dish-level reviews. In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by the co-founders Richard Wu and Vaibhav Verma about their startup journey so far, which challenges they have had to overcome so far and how they are planning to change the way in which foodies discover the best cuisine. Check out the Youtub...

Patrick Chase is an investor with Redpoint Ventures who specializes on investments in the open source vertical. In this episode, I talk with him about the different business models in open source, challenges around defensibility and open source software moving from the backend to the application layer. Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io

5 years ago, Joe Doliner and his co-founder Joey Zwicker decided to focus on the hard problems in data science, rather than building just another dashboard on top of the existing mess. It's been a long road, but it's really payed off. Last year, after an adventurous journey from their seed round, they  closed a $10m Series A led by Benchmark. In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by Joe D...

Gitlab is a unique tech unicorn. Last valued at $2.75bn, the company is fully remote. The two co-founders worked fully separately on the company for more than a year, knowing only each others avatars. As such, Gitlab is defying not only how code is deployed, but also how companies are run. So far, Gitlab has raised $436m from the likes of Khosla Ventures, August Capital and Google Ventures. In thi...