Village Global Podcast

Semil Shah (@semil), investor at Haystack and venture partner at Lightspeed, joins Lucas Bagno to discuss: - The trends Semil sees in the entrepreneurial landscape today: the ease of getting started as a founder, the fight for ownership among funds, and renewed attention to dilution from founders. - How he raised his most recent fund at Haystack and how he determined what size of fund to raise. -...

Michal Cieplinski is the Chief Business Officer at Pipe. He has also spent time as General Counsel and CCO at Fundbox as well as a Senior VP at Lending Club, among other roles. He describes himself as a lawyer who has never really been a lawyer - meaning that “no” is a rare answer for him to give his fast-moving colleagues. In this episode, we discussed the important role that a CBO plays at a hig...

David Sneider (@davidlsneider), of Lit Protocol, and Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), partner at Collab+Currency, join Anne Dwane to discuss: - What Lit Protocol is, what it enables, and how it is being used today. - The vision for a different architecture of the internet. - How user-owned networks would work and their prospects for achieving scale. - How tokenization allows all stakeholders to capture...

Olivia Chen was most recently Head of Product at Faire. She joined Faire as their first ops/business hire. By the time she left four years later, Faire had grown to over 750 employees and Olivia was managing a cross-functional team of more than 60 people.  In this episode, we discussed how to build successful referral programs, how to grow a product team, how to navigate hyper-growth as an early-s...

Sarah Smith is currently a partner at Bain Capital Ventures after an early career of building elite HR teams for huge tech players, including Facebook and Quora, where she helped scale Quora from 40 to 160 people in 3 years. In this episode, we discussed hiring that first crucial people person, how to train first-time management, how to nail goal setting, and how to improve vesting schedules. ---...

Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi), founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) of Village Global to discuss: - Sheel’s reflections on raising a fund and the opportunities he sees in fintech today. - The importance of ownership in seed investing. - How the fintech landscape has evolved over the last year. - Why non-fintech companies are integrating fintech into their business. - Wh...

Anne Dwane is co-founder and partner at Village Global. She was previously CEO at Zinch, a network connecting students with colleges and scholarships. Zinch was acquired by Chegg, where she served as Chief Business Officer, before and after the IPO. Previously, Anne co-founded Military.com, a social and professional network for service members and veterans that was acquired by Monster. In this epi...

Today’s guest is Ben Braverman. Ben is currently Chief Customer Officer at Flexport after 6 years of being their Chief Revenue Officer during Flexport’s hypergrowth period. In this episode, we discussed how to build a good sales machine from the ground up. Ben also shares his thoughts on all things revenue - from marketing to BD to forming early SDR teams. On Deck and Flexport are co-building the...

Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast. Anand Chandrasekaran is a full-time angel and advisor with extensive executive experience at some of the biggest names in tech. Prior to...

Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast. Gina Gotthilf spent five years at Duolingo and helped the company grow from 3 million to 300 million users. She is the kind of VP of Mark...

Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast. The first guest on Execs is Jared Fliesler. Most recently, Jared was COO at Scribd. Prior to Scribd, Jared was a VP at Square, and direct...

Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, and Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), investment strategist, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - Whether monetary policy has been too expansionary. - Where Lyn and Scott differ on inflation. - Why interest rates have declined over the last several decades. - The nuances of the correlation between growth in money supply and...

Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, and Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), investment strategist, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - Lyn’s position that the US needs to inflate its debt away and the mechanics of how that works. - The similarities and differences between the 1940s and the 2020s, when an external shock hit a highly leveraged economy. - How to...

Elias Torres (@eliast), co-founder and CTO at Drift, joins Lucas Bagno for this episode, which was recorded as part of a special event for Villagers. They discussed: - Why Elias is so grateful for the US and the differences he noticed when he came here from Nicaragua. - How he has forged a great relationship with a co-founder who is the opposite of him in many ways. - Why people should be taking m...

Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, joins Erik on this episode to discuss: - Why Scott says that the fed should have been more expansionary during the Great Recession. - The usefulness of level targeting. - Why house prices are going to remain permanently high for the 21st century. - An explanation of market monetarism and its implications for monetary polic...

Andrew Chen (@andrewchen), partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem, joins Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss: - Why the secret to why Bay Area tech companies have been so successful is their ability to connect people in different ways. - Stories of how different tech companies solved the cold start problem in the earliest days. For example, Tinder...

Wesley Samples (@wesleysamples), founder and COO of Sora Schools, and Nick Grandy (@ngrandy), co-founder and Head of Product at Outschool, join Anne on this episode. - How the pandemic has “fractured the status quo” and how it will lead to a period of rapid change for education systems around the world. - How they’re building a world where kids love learning and why autonomous learning is so impor...

Julio Vasconcellos (@juliov), managing partner at Atlantico, joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno to discuss: - The state of venture capital in Latin America and its vibrant yet nascent ecosystem. - Why companies shouldn't underestimate the difficulties of expanding from one country to another within LatAm. - The fact that Latin America is one of the earliest adopters of tech. Internet penetration is...

Travis Hedge (@the_hedgefund), co-founder of Vouch Insurance, and Nick Shalek (@nshalek), partner at Ribbit Capital, join Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno to discuss: - How Vouch came to be and their vision to be insurance for the innovation economy from inception to IPO. - What Travis and Nick are most excited about in insurtech. - The enormity of the market and the fact that there are so few entre...

Joe Garafalo, co-founder of Mosaic, and Trevor Oelschig, managing director at General Catalyst, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - How Mosaic is building the future of tooling for modern finance teams and how it started from the team’s time at Palantir. - Why finance has to be the connective tissue for the organization, given that they have a vantage point on the whole company. - Why a CFO ne...

Brie Wolfson (@zebriez), founder of the The Kool-Aid Factory, joins Erik to discuss: - Why there are detailed playbooks for creating products and other tactical advice for startups, but very little on building culture at your startup. - Why culture is “how it feels to get the work done” and why it’s a set of actions rather than beliefs. - Why it always starts with the founders. - What she learned...

Matt Schulman (@Matthewschulman), founder and CEO of Pave, joins Erik to discuss: - Why your company needs a compensation philosophy. - How COVID and The Great Resignation have wreaked havoc on employee compensation. - The fact that employee churn is up 2X over last year and software engineering salaries have increased by 20%. - Competing philosophies on remote employees: “cost of labor” which pay...

Meka Asonye (@BigMekaStyle), partner at First Round Capital, joined Ben Casnocha at a Village Global event to discuss: - Meka’s time with the Cleveland Indians and what it taught him about finding hidden talent. - Why customer obsession is so important to Meka when looking at a potential investment and concrete examples of what that looks like in practice. - Lessons on customer obsession from Stri...

Jacob Helberg (@jacobhelberg), author of The Wires of War, joins Erik to discuss: - The “gray war” that Jacob believes the US is in with China, and why he feels it’s important to call it a war rather than a competition. - Technology and cyber weapons and how they can be used for political warfare with plausible denability. - The window of opportunity that the US and its allies have to take a proac...

Vance Roush (@vanceroush), founder and CEO of Overflow, joins Erik to discuss: - Overflow, the online donation platform for non-cash assets, and the story behind its creation. - Why the market is actually “sneakily big” and how he plans to create a new category that unlocks net new generosity by making donating shares, crypto, or other non-cash assets as easy as Venmo. - How the internet has chang...