The VentureFizz Podcast

Klaviyo is one of the fastest-growing companies in the tech industry, but the path to their current scale is a fascinating story. It’s a story of a company that remained lean and bootstrapped for a long stretch of time. For the first three years of the company, it was just Andrew and his Co-Founder, Ed Hallen, handling everything. Even as they started to scale, it was a different philosophy versus...

When I think of Chet, I think of an entrepreneur who is a builder and a massive risktaker. He has a track record of building companies that are completely transforming industries and disrupting the status quo. It’s a go big or go home philosophy, where the stakes are high and you can’t fear taking on the very powerful and established incumbents. In order to build the next generation of transformat...

Bill has a knack for noticing market opportunities where a company can scale. As either a founder or executive, the majority of the companies he’s been involved in have exited. We discuss this topic in terms of how he decides where to focus his time and how he evaluates the potential market need. Earlier in his career, he was a founding team member of SpeechWorks which went public, merged with Sca...

Andrew is a serial entrepreneur with multiple companies under his belt like urbantag, which was tackling the trillion-dollar online-to-offline commerce market. It was acquired in 2012. His latest company is Teampay, which was born out of a realization around how software was helping companies collaborate and put controls in place across pretty much every business function. For example, Github help...

You’ve probably heard of the PayPal Mafia on the west coast. In Boston, you have the Endeca mafia, where lots of alumni have gone off to start companies like Toast, Salsify, Parallel Wireless, and many others. Andrew is part of this crew, as he joined Endeca in the early days and was part of the team that helped scale the company, which later resulted in an acquisition by Oracle. Andrew’s latest c...

I have always been fascinated by how video games are created, especially the complexity of today’s games and storylines. So, I could wait to talk with Jon about this topic since his last company created games for major franchises like Game of Thrones and Star Trek. Jon is a serial entrepreneur going back to the very young age of 13 years old when he monetized his first game. He went on to start a...

I have been a long time listener to Sal’s podcast, so I was really excited to collaborate with him for this bonus episode. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the background story of VentureFizz and The VentureFizz Podcast, then this is an episode that you don’t want to miss. In this podcast interview, we also discuss: * My background and the entrepreneurial roots and work ethic that I learned fr...

TJ has a legendary background in the tech industry having founded and run several successful companies through multiple decades. A lot of these successes have been in partnership with another tech legend, that being Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and many other companies. Their latest company together is Beyond Identity which recently announced $30M in funding. The company i...

I have been wanting to interview Lee for a long time, as he has played a key role in the early stages of two iconic tech companies. He was an early employee at PayPal and was part of the founding team at LinkedIn before becoming a venture capitalist. Needless to say, he’s worked with some amazing people like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and others. He shares some...

Jessica and Steve are serial entrepreneurs. They both started successful companies separately in other industries, but it was their personal experiences that brought them together to build ianacare. If you’ve ever had to care for a loved one who is ill, then you know first hand how challenging it can be on so many levels. You need help but you don’t want to be a burden to others and there are chal...

This episode must have been fate. I subscribe to an email newsletter about podcasting from PodReacher and they had recommended Otter for transcriptions. I had been looking for a way to include a transcript for each podcast episode on VentureFizz, but I wanted something that was accurate and cost-effective. No, this is not a commercial for Otter, but I tested out the product and was blown away by i...

Carlos is the definition of a serial entrepreneur. He has started over ten companies and many of which have exited. I first learned about Carlos back around the year 1999, as I was still cutting my teeth as a recruiter during the internet 1.0 era. He was the founder of a company called Opus360, a professional services automation software company that went public. After numerous startups later like...

It was obvious that entrepreneurship was in the future for Aubrie being that she started her first venture as a child with a neighborhood door to door art gallery. After graduating from Harvard and spending time in the finance industry, she knew that she always wanted to start a company. She had noticed a growing trend towards mass customization across different sectors and decided to start a plat...

Episode #171 - Yan Liu, Co-Founder & CEO of TVision. It is a golden era of television. There is a tremendous amount of amazing content out there across the major TV networks and subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, Apple TV+, and more. It’s hard to keep up with it all. You might be familiar with the Nielsen TV ratings system which measures what television programs p...

A lot of apps these days count on knowing your location. It is a key piece to enabling the product and offering the right user experience. However, the options for enabling a location offering from a technical point of view have been very limited. It basically has involved a lot of custom built solutions. It reminds me of the world of payments. Online payment services have existed for several year...

As you’ll hear from this discussion, data is the new oil. It is what runs businesses and the amount of data that is created daily is exploding. Every business is trying to figure out to harness and leverage this data and there are a never ended amount of use cases. Justin’s entrepreneurial journey has focused on helping companies with this challenge. While at Yale, where he received his MBA, he co...

A common question that often arises is whether or not entrepreneurship is a skill that you are born with or is something that can be taught. Based on the number of successful companies that he’s built, it’s obvious that BC was born to be an entrepreneur. For someone with his level of success, he is also extremely humble and that is a skill that really can’t be taught. BC started his first company...

One might say that Lily was destined to be a venture capitalist. She started out angel investing when she was just 23 years old. Then, the role became a bit more formal when she joined the investment committee at Yard Ventures, Harvard’s alumni angel group. As a Partner at Underscore, she is focused on making seed and Series A investments in Boston startups. The firm is focused on building a commu...

It’s no secret that diversity is an issue in the tech industry, but it is an even bigger issue when you look at the venture capital industry. Rich has conducted a lot of research on this topic and based on his last report, only 2% of African Americans were represented as investors in the venture capital industry. Rich is the type who takes action. By publishing his findings (which have been featur...

At home, my family has a Cavapoo, who basically rules the roost. She has a big personality in a small frame and when she is sick, we definitely want to give her the best care possible. In the world where personalized medicine is becoming very real for humans, why shouldn’t the same apply for pets? Enter Mixlab, the first-ever modern compounding pharmacy for animals. Mixlab customizes medication in...

The fashion industry is constantly changing. It feels as though one week something can be in style, and the next it is already out of fashion. As a company, it’s nearly impossible to be able to keep up with trends and get them manufactured in a timely manner before the look goes out of style. Choosy is utilizing social media and algorithms to tackle this problem and this direct to consumer eCommer...

The insurance industry is extremely complex and can be very challenging to break into as an industry outsider. After being in a minor car accident, Snejina’s premium increased. Like any of us, she went online to find a better option only to realize that a marketplace for insurance didn’t exist. Existing sites were all lead gen. The complexity of the insurance industry probably kept other entrepren...

Lots and lots of startups and corporations have moved to an open office environment, which was supposed to foster collaboration amongst employees. As it turns out, according to research published by CNBC, “90% of employees working in offices with an open floor plan experience increased stress levels, conflict, blood pressure and turnover rates.” Wow… shocking! So, how do you solve this issue witho...

It’s one thing to build a successful business, but it’s a whole different level if you can build a business out of doing good and creating better lives for others. As you will hear in this podcast, Liz has a heart of gold and a do whatever it takes attitude to help others out in need. She has a history of volunteering and during her time at Harvard, Liz realized that there was an opportunity to he...

It is a known fact that building a business is hard. It can be tricky because as an entrepreneur, you are filled with optimism. You are putting your blood, sweat, and tears into a business and it might feel like you are making progress and great traction. Yet, it could all just be a false positive. So, what happens if you come to this realization, then to put another layer of complexity to the sce...