Tank Talks By Ripple Ventures

Today we take a deep dive into the Ripple X Fellowship , with its Founder, Dominic Lau . The world of startups and venture capital can be the road to providing immense value to consumers, founders, and investors, but it also can look like a brick wall to those without insight, connections, or knowledge of it all works. The RippleX Fellowship program gives students looking to become Founders and In...

Investors from the coasts can fall into the flyover trap, looking only for opportunities in larger coastal Metros like Silicon Valley or NYC, but our guest today Chris Olsen , Founding Partner of  Drive Capital , threw conventional wisdom to the wind by leaving a job at Sequoia Capital and moving to Columbus, Ohio to raise a new fund and bet on founders in underserved geographies. Since then, Driv...

The healthcare industry offers a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs, and the Dental Instrusty, in particular, is experiencing rapid change and transformation with advancements in imaging and analysis. Our guest today, Wardah Inam , Co-Founder and CEO of Overjet is improving the accuracy of dental x-rays and reducing costs for providers and insurance companies. Overjet recently closed a $42M...

There are few experiences more loaded with lore and mystique in the western world than the Israeli kibbutz and being a soldier in the special forces. Our guest today is Lior Susan , Founding Partner at Eclipse Ventures , and he has lived both of those lives, as well as, being a successful founder and operator, and a non-consensus venture investor. Eclipse invests in founders who want to bring the...

A great launch can change the trajectory of your startup, and one of the places you can have a great launch is on Product Hunt . So how can you set yourself up for success on that platform? Our guest today, Joaquin Roca , Co-Founder and CEO of Minerva , a Chrome extension that allows you to easily create training guides, and has had multiple successful Product Hunt launches. He talks through some...

The notion that leaders are born and not made can feel oppressive to founders and others working their way up the business ladder. Leadership is isolating enough without the toxic mythology that you’re just supposed to know how to do from the get-go. Our guest today, Christine Tao , Co-Founder and CEO of Sounding Board , is working to normalize coaching for CEOs, Founders, and others who want to b...

We are changing things up with today’s episode whereby our host, Matt Cohen , is answering the questions instead of asking them, on a Dealmaker’s DNA Podcast with Ilan Jacobson. Ilan goes deep into Matt’s family upbringing and how he became so interested in business and investing. They dig into his journey starting Ripple Ventures and his path to becoming an entrepreneur. This episode gives you so...

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need better tools to work and collaborate remotely. For years engineering teams have solved this problem with GitHub and other version control systems, but for documents and other collaborative workflows, there hasn’t been a rock-solid tool. Today’s guest, Adam Nathan , co-founder and CEO of Almanac is working to change that. Almanac is working...

On Today's show, we talk about angel investing, the current venture landscape, and how the later stage investing world is being disrupted with Partner at Craft Ventures , Bryan Rosenblatt . Bryan brings a deep operations background to his investing from working at companies like Twitter and Reddit where he helped with customer acquisition. He soon added angel investing as a side hustle and was abl...

On today’s Tank Talk, we have a throwback episode with  Elizabeth Yin , Co-Founder & General Partner of  Hustle Fund . We spoke with Elizabeth in July of 2020 and covered her journey in leaving Google and starting LaunchBit, an ad-tech platform that she eventually sold to BuySellAds, and how she eventually made her way onto the investment side with 500 Startups. We dig into Elizabeth's time in run...

There’s a term one hears to describe the venture capital market in 2021—frothy. What does that actually mean and what does it mean in the larger historical context of Venture Capital? We speak with Phil Boyer , a partner at Crosslink Capital since 2014. Crosslink was founded in Silicon Valley in 1989 and has institutional memories of the beginning and end of Dot-Com bubble 20+ years ago and the gl...

Ecommerce and auctions for physical goods is a maturing space in the online world, but when you want to sell a business itself or a digital good it is much less evolved. Our guest today, Blake Hutchison , CEO of Flippa , is working to change that. Flippa has a suite of tools on its platform to help streamline these transactions and help buyers and sellers with these sometimes complicated transacti...

Podcasting as a medium has been around for close to 20 years, and it has become a vibrant channel of community and connection with little regard for gatekeepers and constraints. Which is wonderful for something like Tank Talks , but less so for communicating non-public and sensitive internal information to employees. Our guest today, JP Gooderham , founder and CEO of Storyboard , is helping compan...

Voice has long been the final frontier of computing interfaces, and now with the technology of smart speakers and other voice-enabled technologies we are finally able to access what science fiction has been writing about for decades. Our guest today, Braden Ream , founder and CEO of Voiceflow , is helping create that future. Voiceflow, then known as Storyflow, was one of the first portfolio compan...

Digital marketing is increasingly important to the success of every business, but it’s a dynamic industry, seeing major disruptions this year with the change to tracking brought by iOS 14. Our guest, Dan Pantelo , founder and CEO of Marpipe , is helping marketers figure out what’s actually working through scalable A-B testing and performance marketing with his platform Marpipe. We talk to Dan abou...

The market for cars in 2021 has been one of the most pandemic-affected markets. The supply of both new and used cars has never been tighter and our guest today is seeing it from all sides. Dan Park is the CEO of Clutch, Canada's first and largest online car retailer. We talk to Dan about the automotive industry, his path to becoming CEO, and about his plans for the $60M he recently raised from Can...

Our guest today, Gale Wilkinson , founder and managing director of Vitalize Venture Capital , is working to change how we work, how we learn, and how people can access investing in startups. Vitalize is known for investing in the future of work and the future of learning startups. They typically invest $250K-$1.5M at the pre-seed and seed stages. Portfolio companies include Placer, The Mom Project...

As we’ve seen from the last two years, BioTech holds immense promise for the future but brings along challenges as an investor into the space. Today we have a lively discussion with two sides of the BioTech investing world, Peter van der Velden, General Partner and Managing director of Lumira Ventures , and Anthony Mouchantaf, Director, Venture Capital at RBCx . About Anthony Mouchantaf: As Direct...

Data security is a huge concern, and a way to prove you take data security seriously is by obtaining a SOC 2 certificate. When obtained, SOC 2 is the gateway to larger enterprise contracts for SaaS companies, but the process of obtaining it can be labor-intensive, costly, and confusing. Drata was born to help streamline this process. We talk with Adam Markowitz, co-founder and CEO of Drata, to tal...

Subscriptions are taking over the world, but it can often be a challenge for smaller e-commerce sites to add and service this new sector on top of their existing business, Upscribe is here to fill that niche for Shopify shops and other e-commerce platforms. We talk with Dileepan Siva , founder and CEO, about what he’s building, the e-commerce landscape, and how to reduce churn and increase loyalty...

The transitions into different eras of the web can sometimes be hard to miss, but our guest today, renowned VC investor and Operator Mo Koyfman , has seen the signs clearer than others. He helped shape Web 2.0 as an operator and is now working hard shaping Web 3.0 as an investor. Mo and Matt have a fun conversation that dives into his views on the emergence of embedded Fintech and the ways he is l...

Our guest today, George Rossolatos , is the CEO of the Canadian Business Growth Fund (CBGF), which is an evergreen fund. Evergreen funds, or sometimes referred to as open-ended funds, are different than closed-ended funds which are the most typical structure we see in venture capital. With evergreen funds, capital is invested directly into an LLC on an ongoing basis with no termination date meanin...

Today’s incredible guest is Nikhil Basu Trivedi , an investor who has been on the leading edge of investing in dozens of startups just before they become the next big thing. His portfolio includes Canva, Hinge, DoctoronDemand and many more. We asked Nikhil about what sort of data points he looks for when analyzing markets, in order to time the next big thing perfectly for investment; and we dig in...

Since the onset of the pandemic, everyone became a day trader overnight, whether it was Robinhood day traders trading options in Tesla or Wall Street investors betting in meme stocks like Gamestop. On today’s show we ask Tobias why he thinks building a content creation platform for day traders is what people really want, how Trading. TV plans to integrate with other platforms who trade in stocks,...

Funding a new business to fuel growth can be done through some form of debt financing or equity funding. Venture debt is a little different from traditional debt financing and in 2020, VC-backed companies in the US alone received debt financing of more than $25B. On today’s show, we talk about when founders should consider debt financing, the ways in which startups should think about raising debt...