Sand Hill Road: Recent Episodes
Sand Hill Road
A place to talk about startups, venture capital and tech. For a full download, double-click on sandhillroad.io
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Gen Isayama, co-founder and CEO of World Innovation Labs, a Palo Alto and Tokyo based venture firm investing in growth-stage companies and serving as a bridge between startups and Japanese corporations.In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Gen Isayama, co-founder and CEO of World Innovation Labs, a Palo Alto and Tokyo based venture firm investing in growth-stage companies and serving as a bridge between startups and Japanese corporations.00:00 Intro01:30 World Innovation Lab04:10 From Japanese lawyer to Silicon Valley VC09:10 From DCM to WIL13:55 WIL investment thesis19:40 Japanese entrepreneurial culture26:57 Open innovation Models at WIL31:57 Raising Fund I37:00 Full spectrum of WIL Activities42:16 Investment strategy and portfolio construction48:06 Outlook for WIL III51:23 Call to action
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Dan Ahrens, founding partner at Left Lane Capital, a New York based venture capital and early growth equity firm that invests in high-growth internet and consumer technology businesses.
00:00 Intro
02:43 Consumer vs. enterprise tech
05:09 Getting into venture
07:54 Raising Left Lane I
10:35 Investing while fundraising
13:09 The Left Lane Capital playbook
17:09 Due diligence in a hot market
18:52 Scaling Left Lane Capital
21:36 Deployment pace
23:28 Focus area
26:04 Hard conversations
28:10 Arc
32:53 Exo Freight
35:28 Supply Chain Tech
37:04 Call to action
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Divyang Arora, founder and CEO of Byte Kitchen about cooking up the future of digital food halls with Byte Kitchen founder Divyang Arora.
0:00 Intro
1:24 2 minute elevator pitch
4:27 Going all in
8:07 Business Model
14:52 The Byte Kitchen playbook
18:52 Optimal Partner Restaurant Profile
25:39 End customer benefits
27:25 Raising the Seed Round
30:14 Early traction
31:54 Byte Kitchen's Use of Tech
34:50 Call to Action
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Michael Crandell, CEO Bitwarden about scaling open-source password manager Bitwarden.
00:00 Intro
00:50 What is Bitwarden
03:22 From side hustle to venture-backed
06:36 Joining a Bootstrapper at Series A
09:58 Open-source GTM
13:25 Open-source defensibility
15:35 Community vs. enterprise edition
17:37 Revenue traction
19:51 Competition
22:25 Fundraising journey
25:46 Use of funds
28:25 Go-to-market strategy
31:40 Building a remote-first company
35:11 Arbitrating talent
36:00 Next steps for Bitwarden
38:28 Not the first time at the rodeo
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Kyle Harrison, general partner at Country about everything from the economics of whale hunting, the venture product offering to his recent joining of Contrary.
00:00 Intro
01:11 Way into venture
04:58 Time of reflection
07:24 The under-innovated venture model
10:46 Your fund size is your strategy
16:16 The nature of the general partnership
20:38 Rethinking the org chart
25:13 VC product vs. VC service
28:31 VC product industry practice
31:13 From monolithic brands to solo capitalist
37:18 The future of venture tribes
39:52 Joining Contrary
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Doug Ludlow, co-founder and CEO of MainStreet, which helps startups and small businesses uncover tax credits.
00:00 Intro
01:05 Hipster
05:09 Happy Home Company
07:10 Starting MainStreet
11:22 The nature of Tax credits
16:03 The Path Act
17:52 The MainStreet Product
19:14 Customer success stories
20:41 Customer profile
22:40 Audit protection / guarantee
24:13 Moats
25:37 Whitespace vs. Switching
26:30 MainStreet traction
27:47 Fundraising
28:17 Pre-empted Series A
30:22 MainStreet layoffs
32:42 Unit economics
33:42 Unit economics
34:50 Vision for MainStreet
37:42 Fast five
39:01 Call to action
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Kelsey Bishop founder and CEO of Candor, which is a nexgen, authentic social network.
00:00 Intro
01:02 What is Candor
03:25 Single player mode
03:56 Kelsey’s background
06:19 Employee-culture fit
08:31 Getting started
10:31 Migrating from bubble
11:38 Raising the Seed
12:42 Getting pre-empted
13:50 Raising from angels
15:23 Solo founder journey
16:58 Product + traction
21:47 Business model
23:03 Talking to users
24:51 Remote first company
26:25 Becoming a CEO
27:03 Call to action
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Abhishek Nayak the co-founder and CEO of Appsmith, which is an open-source, low code internal tool builder. 00:00 Intro
03:15 Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel
05:52 Third time at the Rodeo
09:55 Validating a startup idea at his wedding
11:38 Built for Internal facing apps
13:48 The Appsmith Customer Persona
15:06 From Dataset to app
15:42 What Appsmith is replacing
17:07 The Appsmith killer feature
18:29 Getting to the first 100 users
21:40 Customer love + product iteration
23:07 Competition
25:24 Open source vs. closed source
27:53 Open source applications vs. infrastructure
31:07 Open core model
34:12 Traction and metrics
36:43 Metrics tracked over time
37:43 Fundraising for 3rd time
39:27 Fundraising journey
43:50 Remote company discounts
45:27 Call to action
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Chon Tang, the founding GP of the Skydeck Fund. Chon is an experienced Silicon Valley engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He was formerly founding partner and Managing Director of Junzi Capital Engineering, a leading quantitative hedge fund investing in the commodity space. He has been actively investing in Silicon Valley startups for 12 years, and has personal investments in over 25 deals with multiple IPOs and exits.
00:00 Intro
03:40 Starting a tech company in 2000
09:27 Founder-investor transition
17:51 The art of talent arbitrage
22:09 Raising Fund II
27:00 Portfolio construction
30:40 Skydeck Fund entry point
32:50 Success stories
37:00 Skydeck Accelerator Program + Challenges
41:00 The accidental VC
45:00 Next Skydeck batch
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Richard White, the serial entrepreneur behind Uservoice and Fathom.video. Richard is a design engineer and product visionary who has been in the first YC batch with Justin Khan and Emmett Shear for Kiko (YC S05) and most recently came back to the YC W21 to see how startup kids are doing the tricks today.
00:00 Intro
00:51 Who is Richard White
03:40 The power of cold emails
05:09 Kiko (YC S05)
08:53 The UserVoice journey
12:09 Traction and funding
16:09 UserVoice today
$18:16 Starting Fathom
22:28 The Fathom product
27:35 Fathom customer profile
30:27 Fathom in remote orgs
32:03 Richard's own use of Fathom
33:57 Fathom integrations
36:14 Zoom Marketplace + platform risk $
39:20 Going through YC (again)
42:57 Fathom seed round
46:11 The fun of fundraising
47:28 Vision for Fathom
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Shmulik Fishman, founder and CEO of Argyle, about raising the Series A through an investment memo and the firm’s mission of making user-permissioned employment data ubiquitous and reinvent credit decisioning for lenders and consumers. 00:00 Intro 00:56 What does Argyle do? 03:17 Experiencing the pain point 06:48 Raising the Series A with an investment memo 11:41 Automated form population 14:05 Real-time income/employment verification 17:52 Status quo: credit bureaus 22:18 Technical/data moats 26:59 Standing on the shoulders of giants 28:40 API integrations 30:28 Screen scraping vs. API scanning 32:41 Traction and metrics 35:26 Pricing Strategy 38:36 Argyle Team 41:36 Remote-first valuation discount/premium
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Drew Oetting, founding partner of 8VC, about building a multi-billion venture firm from the ground up with Joe Lonsdale.
00:00 Intro
01:05 Operation Mask
06:33 Resilience
12:54 Views on Venture
20:06 Building 8VC / Addepar
26:30 Raising the maiden fund
30:48 8VC Investment Thesis
40:01 Drew as a VC
50:53 Silicon Hills
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Seth Sternberg the co-founder and CEO of Honor, which is a managed marketplace for in-home care that has recently announced a USD 370m Series E led by Baillie Gifford.
00:00 Intro
01:19 Elevator pitch
02:19 Original inspiration
05:28 The Meebo experience
08:06 Serial founder problems
09:06 Getting the founder team together
10:52 The Honor MVP and marketplace model
14:52 Marketplace supply side
19:44 Marketplace demand side
21:57 Fundraising journey
25:07 Growth capital rounds
27:07 Expansion strategy
28:56 Homestead acquisition
31:45 Competitive landscape
31:45 Competitive landscape
34:08 GTM and growth strategies
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Kimberly Shenk of Novi Connect, B2B marketplace to help brands build and manufacture transparent products, which recently announced a $10.3M Series A led by Greylock
00:00 Intro 02:04 Getting started with Naked Poppy 04:09 From Naked Poppy to Novi Connect 05:17 Sustainable Chemicals Market 07:30 Kimberly’s data science background 09:19 The Novi Connect Business Model 11:11 The Novi Connect MVP 12:49 Getting the first Customers 13:42 Growth Metrics and Milestone 14:33 Fundraising journey 15:50 Series A led by Greylock 17:37 Mulit-sided B2B marketplace 21:26 Growth metrics and milestones 23:26 Acting as certification agent 24:24 Competition 26:49 AI-driven platform 28:26 Scaling Novi Connect 29:37 Newjoiner Bootcamp 30:53 Priorities and focus 31:53 Category expansion 33:14 Longterm vision
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Jordan Nof of Tusk Venture Partners, a venture firm that invests in early-stage consumer technology startups operating in heavily regulated markets.
00:00 Intro
01:39 Investment thesis 2022
02:36 Lithic
05:02 Tusk Venture Partners
08:46 Meeting Bradley Tusk
12:52 Regulatory investment thesis
14:58 The role of regulations in startups
16:37 Fanduel / repeal of PAPSA
17:33 Tusk entry stage
19:01 Consumer vs. Enterprise
19:43 Roman - men’s health
21:34 Alma - mental health care
23:31 Out of scope areas
25:14 Bird - scooter wars
29:36 First mover vs. fast follower
32:50 Sunday - DTC lawn care
37:11 Focus areas 2022
41:02 How to get in touch
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Casey Fenton, founder of Couchsurfing and Upstock, about the early days for Couchsurfing when Casey was pioneering what has since become known as the “sharing economy” and how is is now bringing the sharing economy to the cap table with Upstock.
00:00 Intro
01:13 The Couchsurfing proof-of-concept
02:46 The first Couchsurfing stay
03:49 501(c)3 non-profit status
06:34 The mechanics of the benchmark Series A
06:34 The mechanics of the benchmark Series A
08:27 The Couchsurfing MVP
10:38 The donation-based model
11:58 The demand side monetization model
15:34 The chicken-and-egg question
17:11 Casey’s philosophy on ego hacking
21:11 Building for the internet without ego
23:57 Upstock
28:34 Ideal customer moment
30:20 Switching costs
31:09 Competitors and integrations
33:40 Milestone-based equity kickers
35:03 Following Casey’s work
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Andrew Gazdecki, founder of MicroAcquire. The episode was recorded when MicroAcquire was still a fully bootstrapped one person company. A few weeks later MicroAcquire announced that it had raised a $6.3m Seed round led by Bessemer Ventures.
00:00 Intro
01:09 What is MicroAcquire?
02:55 Buying a micro-SaaS as a learning experience
05:15 Andrew’s own founder path
10:40 Key bootstrapper metrics
14:53 Solving the chicken-and-egg problem
19:17 Supply side: company profiles
20:24 Marketplace discovery vs. transaction facilitation
22:45 Microacquire marketplace monetisation
26:51 Microacquire as a curated marketplace
30:12 Dealing with inflated seller asks
33:25 Disrupting the business broker industry
35:45 Competitor marketplaces
36:50 Scaling Microacquire
38:10 Raising venture capital vs. bootstrapping
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Queenly co-founders Trisha Bantigue and Kathy Zhou about building a consumer marketplace and tackling the formalwear industry.
00:00 Intro
00:56 The Queenly Elevator Pitch
01:52 Launching Queenly during lockdown
04:04 The pageant dress market
08:06 Formal wear resale market microstructure
10:16 The Queenly minimum viable product
12:37 Go to market strategy
14:56 Queenly marketplace metrics
16:36 The Queenly fundraising journey
20:40 Raising $6.3m From Andressen Horowitz
22:58 Solving the marketplace chicken and egg problem
24:58 Unlocking supply
27:02 Offering power seller tools to boost supply
28:15 Cracking the demand side
29:12 Facilitating Marketplace Transactions
31:36 Marketplace take rate
32:43 Competition And Playbook
35:16 Formal wear Price dynamics
38:22 The Queenly Vision
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Didomoi co-founder and CTO Jawad Stouli about building consent management platform Didomi for the perfect privacy wave.
00:00 Intro
00:46 Early days of Didomi
03:29 Fighting a US patent troll
08:14 Building the Didomi MVP
12:18 Developer-centric platform approach
14:46 Early costumers: self-service vs. SDRs
18:22 Didomi data architecture
24:02 Bootstrapping Didomi
27:43 Raising the Series A
30:37 Raising the Series B
33:35 Scaling up
35:55 Competition
41:29 Call to action
00:00 Intro
00:24 Welcome to Miami
01:08 Operators Podcast
03:21 Finding the right guests
06:54 Delian’s founder/operator
08:22 Cohort analysis with Keith at Square
10:30 Nightingale
12:24 Operating experience at Teespring
14:24 Varda Space
17:45 Splitting time between Varda and FF
19:45 Varda Space incubation
23:50 Delian as an investor at Founders Fund
27:07 Faire
30:56 Tiger Global and the rise of crossover funds
35:31 Hyperscaling
36:45 Moving to Miami
39:45 Keeping up with Delian
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Remote.com founder Job van der Voort about building the future of remote work.
0:00 Intro
00:49 The first two years of Remote
02:19 Preparing for the perfect Storm at Gitlab
06:17 Leaving Gitlab
10:47 Business model
14:10 Legal war chest
15:20 Fintech-payment layer
16:20 SaaS layer
17:52 Pricing
19:47 Competitive landscape
24:12 Seed round
25:42 Series A
28:37 Remote best practices
31:52 Enabling random bump ins
34:07 The remote company handbook or “bible”
35:23 Remote company stack
36:20 Asynchronous vs. synchronous work
40:19 Remote for startups
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures about his journey as a founder, angel investor and co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures.
00:00 Intro
01:11 Guest appearance on a Justin Bieber/Ariana Grande music video
03:16 The “pronoia” mindest
03:16 The “pronoia” mindest
05:04 Sheel’s background
07:56 The Pitch
12:12 Investing with founder authority
14:16 500 Startups fintech fund
18:25 Fintech thesis and sector evolution
22:09 Fintech backend
23:43 Better Tommorrow Ventures
29:24 Differentiation
32:52 Reserve capital
34:52 The good, the bad and the ugly investments
37:40 Sheel-defining investment
41:10 …the bad and the ugly
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Reeves Wiedeman, author of "Billion Dollar Loser: the epic rise and fall of WeWork".
00:00 Adam's intro
01:11 Intro
01:38 Adam Neumann
04:11 Adam's art of persuasion
05:41 Book title
08:10 Writing process
13:01 WeWork evolution and business model
16:21 Tech vs. real estate company
19:25 WeWork community
22:01 WeWork funding journey
25:11 JPMorgan round
26:50 Masa and the Softbank round
30:39 Acquisitions and side businesses
33:16 Valuation and comps
36:59 Public persona and IPOs
38:50 WeWork today
40:07 Staying in touch with Reeves
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 IX and the A-Fund
05:36 Differentiation through US-Asia angle
07:45 DCM's Japan strategy
08:48 DCM's recent roll
10:00 Biggest winner Kuaishou
11:07 All three sides of the table
14:01 Choicepass
15:36 First 5 years at DCM
18:52 Docsend investment
21:47 Lime investment
23:57 Him’s and Hers investment
26:05 D2C unit economics
28:13 Keeping up with what Kyle is up to
29:33 Kyle's investment focus areas
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 Fundraising for Pursuit
12:53 Fundraising for Docsend
14:17 Series A
17:34 Docsend product
20:39 Initial startup client segment
22:29 Docsend fundraising network
25:20 Expanding from initial client segment
29:51 Docsend Spaces
33:07 Pricing strategy
37:50 Next steps for Docsend
39:50 Competing with Intralinks
41:00 Scaling up Docsend
42:29 Remote work at Docsend
43:29 Call to action
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 super founders
13:04 Optimal number of co-founders
16:12 Founder education
17:45 Did all of them go to Stanford?
19:38 Pre-founding work experience
21:08 Definition of the "super founder"
25:38 Painkiller vs. vitamin products
27:14 Startup competition
29:50 Defensibility factor
31:44 Venture funding vs. bootstrapping
34:41 Capital requirements
35:46 Startup fundraising
37:15 Time to hatch
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
07:08 Covid impact on commercial open-source
10:17 Go-to-market (GTM)
14:13 Managing product roadmaps in open-source
17:10 Dedicating to bottoms-up GTM
20:49 Hooks and upsells
24:54 Optimal lines between community and commercial
29:22 Firewalls between community and commercial
31:51 Inculcating community-commercial in the organization
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
14:17 The nature of the megamaker
19:46 Grow slow, grow real
24:53 Success is gradual, then sudden
31:10 VC attention to podcasting
38:00 Podcast hosting and analytics space
44:20 First version of Transitor.fm
50:45 Dealing with depression as a solopreneur
54:48 Finding out more about Justin
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
18:00 Content creation is like building a startup
21:13 Garry as a founder
25:14 Founder "what ifs"
28:26 Garry as a VC
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.
00:00 Intro
00:56 Cockroach Labs elevator pitch
04:29 Getting the band together
09:24 Exit to Square and paddling back into the startup surf
11:44 First version of CockroachDB
14:17 Open core model
20:43 Relicensing Cockroach DB
25:39 Open source as top of the funnel tool
30:25 Series A from Benchmark and Sequoia Capital
35:15 Series A extension from Index
37:01 Late state startup life at Series D
39:44 CockroachDB technology
48:11 Synchronous replication and CockroachDB
53:50 CAP Theorem and CockroachDB
58:10 CockroachDB and Kubernetes
1:01:10 Spencer's workout regime
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?
04:27 Sean Henry's entrepreneurial journey from childhood
13:00 STORD business model
19:50 Solving the two-sided marketplace problem
25:35 Competitive landscape
28:55 Software-enabled marketplace: Software as a wedge to get supply side
35:15 STORD pricing
38:50 STORD as a distributed logistics and storage systems
45:15 Acquisition of Cove Logistics in summer of 2020
48:31 Raising money from Silicon Valley as an Atlanta based startup
54:45 What's next for STORD
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
21:16 Shipping the org chart
24:29 Running experiments
28:05 Product development for innovation
31:40 Wonderschool
35:22 Ride Report
38:22 Finding out more about Andy
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
Transitioning from Airbnb to Kleiner Perkins
12:03
Daily life as an entrepreneur in residence
13:46
Defining microservices
14:53
Explaining microservices to a kid
16:28
Microservices vs. structured programming
19:55
Functionality of microservices
22:20
User microservice example
24:15
Starting out: monolith vs. microservices architecture
25:42
Microservices teams: UI, middleware, DBA specialists
28:38
Data layer of microservices
30:56
Microservices vs. monolith debate
34:36
Moving to a microservices architecture at Airbnb
37:59
Managing microservices at Airbnb
42:12
effx and Kubernetes
43:44
Go to market strategy at effx
46:07
Raising the $3.9m Seed round
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 SkyDeck LP base
09:50 SkyDeck vs. YC, 500 Startups, Techstars
12:11 Cohort profile and eligibility requirements
14:37 Accelerator milestones
15:22 Breakout success stories
16:26 Berkeley within Silicon Valley ecosystem
18:33 Future of SkyDeck
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 (MVP)
09:54 Getting the first customer
13:15 Finding customer pains and building the core product features
15:06 Core feature set: painkiller vs. vitamin
17:05 Early pricing
18:34 Selling Saas to corporate lawyers
19:59 Tech stack of Juro
21:11 Seedcamp accelerator
22:40 $750k Seed Round led by Point Nine Capital
24:24 $2m Seed extension round
25:15 $5m Series A led by Union Square Ventures
26:15 Getting a warm intro at USV
27:01 Deploying the Series A
28:12 Navigating through the Corona pandemic
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 $700m top line
10:45 Food delivery wars
11:55 Grubhub Partnership that never launched
13:12 Jeremy Stoppelman and Steve Jobs on search on mobile
14:30 Becoming a successful angel investor
15:35 Making the most expensive iPhone app ever
16:37 Angel investment in Strava
17:20 Angel investment in Superhuman
17:50 Joining Social Capital
19:58 Mike’s experience at Social Capital
20:28 CloudKitchens investment
21:30 HubHaus investment
22:37 Joining Canvas Ventures
24:04 Flyhomes investment
27:52 Marketplace Deep Dive
28:27 Lenny Rachitsky: focus on supply or demand side?
30:06 Thomas Eisenmann: Two-sided networks
30:57 Uber: demand side vs. supply side subsidies
32:09 Local vs. global network effects
33:24 Sarah Tavel (Benchmark) on unlocking new supply
34:21 Local delivery war zones
35:36 Uber Eats entering the market
37:04 Public vs. privately held delivery war contenders
38:54 Marketplace take rate
40:38 Out-of bound marketplace take rates
41:57 Zero percent take rate
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Moisey Uretzky, co-founder of Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure unicorn built for developers and headquartered in New York City. In this episode we journal the founder journey from getting into Techstars to scaling the company with venture debt to a recent unicorn valuation.
00:00 Setting the scene
03:55 The Uretzky family
05:22 Roots of intellectual curiosity
07:15 Mathematics and first principles thinking
09:18 Startups before Digital Ocean
14:16 Finding co-founders on Craigslist
19:16 Digital Ocean MVP
23:12 First major Product Iteration: 5$ SSD Plan
29:36 Getting into Techstars
32:35 Raising the Seed from IA Ventures
37:19 Raising the Series A from a16z
42:28 Using venture debt to scale up
47:19 Scaling up Digital Ocean
54:22 Competition with big tech cloud providers
59:00 Running Digital Ocean during the Corona pandemic
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 Valley' finding Zozi's on Crunchbase
6:06 Joining e.ventures in 2012
7:52 History and roots of e.ventures
9:53 e.ventures current fund and global footprint
11:10 Investing in Segment.io at the Seed along with Kleiner Perkins
15:08 Consumer-tech perspective on Segment
16:02 Passing on Musical.ly/TikTok
17:30 Warm introductions vs. metric-based discovery (digital exhaust)
20:30 Metrics requested from Musical.ly/TikTok founding team / key consumer social metrics
22:17 Machiavellian founder perspective on Musical.ly/TikTok consumer retention
24:35 Ex-post reflections why they passed on Musical.ly/TikTok
26:35 Comparison to the recent Clubhouse a16z-led Series A
28:50 Venture capital returns over the lifetime of a fund
31:10 Pattern matching for early markups
32:58 This Week's Seed Companies
35:24 EVA Growth Index / X-Factors
37:37 Nacelle: headless CMS for Shopify stores, backed by Index and Accomplice
39:05 Most recent investment: Airvet, $14m Series A led by Canvas Ventures
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 notable investments in breakout companies, such as Robinhood and Flexport, as well as his most recent investment in Scalyr. As Leo is an icon on the VC twitter, we also dig into some of his previous tweets and try to draw lessons that go beyond the 280 character limit.
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 investments, including OctoML, InterVenn Biosciences, Maze and Bayes.
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 distributed design. We also cover Index Venture's most recent COSS investment in Starburst, an open core company built around Presto, a distributed, open source query engine that has originally been developed at Facebook.
Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io
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 out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io
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 Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io
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 Doliner to explore what Pachyderm does and how it scaled from just an idea into a fast growing tech company.
Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io
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 this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij to talk about their founder, product and financing journey.
Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io
Gremlin is a fast growing company in the chaos engineering space founded in 2016. The company has pioneered the space by offering failure-as-a-service. So far, Gremlin has raised almost $27m from the likes of Amplify Partners, Index Ventures and Redpoint. In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by co-founder and CTO Matthew Fornaciari to talk about their founder, product and financing journey.
Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Joseph Jacks, founder and general partner at OSS Capital, the first and only VC fund exclusively dedicated to supporting commercial open-source software founders.
We discuss the definition of commercial open-source software (COSS) companies and how open-source software is eating software.
Check out the Youtube version on: https://channel.sandhillroad.io