#118 Ryan Petersen: How Flexport is Transforming Shipping to Create a Better World
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Release Date: 11/19/2019
154 Vern Howard: Hallo's CEO is NOT Your Deliveryman
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Vern Howard’s story is remarkable. Vern was a math prodigy who left high school early, when he tested into Virginia Commonwealth University to study Computer Science and Math. He paid his way through school by teaching math and serving as a janitor on campus. He went on to sell men’s suits, which taught him the art of selling. After joining Capital One – whose signing bonus he used to rebuild an Alpha Romeo – he built Capital One’s first mobile banking application. He also built out the Application Security Team at Capital One before, naturally, becoming a...
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153 -- 2020 Thank You-cast Extravaganza!
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
An episode in which I thank each of the 2020 guests. A podcast first (probably). I briefly recall – fondly – a bit of each of the 2020 episodes. Is it interesting? I think so. Can I do it in one take? Turns out, yes. Enjoy, and thank you for listening. Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack Founder Keller Fitzsimmons, “Lost in Startuplandia” Author Jeff Macpherson, Tiki Bar TV Creator Brianne Kimmel, worklife Founder Paul-Henri Ferrand, Brex COO Matt Hulett, Rosetta Stone CEO Mike Stutz, Television Producer Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle Senior...
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152 Stacey Bishop of Scale Venture Partners On Ascending the Venture Ladder and the Rise of "All Raise"
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Stacey Bishop is a partner at Scale Venture Partners where she invests in “business applications driving the Intelligent Connected World”. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of companies like Abstract, Airspace, Demandbase, Extole, Lever, and Textio. Stacey is a founding member of All Raise – an organization frequently mentioned on Something Ventured. She is also an advisor to The University Growth Fund Stacey got her MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from The University of Michigan. In this episode we discuss her path to becoming a partner at a prominent Silicon...
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151 Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts on “Kings of Crypto” and the Rise of Coinbase
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
In 2013, Fortune’s Jeff Roberts visited "Satoshi Square" in New York. It was the name of the location where a group of crypto anarchists and Wall Street traders bought and sold Bitcoin in the open air. Since that day, Jeff became fascinated with Bitcoin and new forms of money. That fascination led him to write the new book “Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street”. Said Fortune Senior Writer Robert Hackett: "'Kings of Crypto' tells the story of a ragtag band of rebels who saw the future of finance before anyone...
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150 Hooman Radfar: The Rise of the ‘Business-of-One’
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Hooman Radfar is co-founder and CEO of Collective, an online back-office platform designed for freelancers, consultants and other ‘businesses-of-one’. He is also a Venture Partner at Expa, a San Francisco-based start-up venture firm and studio where he was a founding partner (along with Uber Co-Founder Garrett Camp). Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of AddThis. AddThis was acquired by Oracle in 2016. Recently, Hooman took the somewhat rare step of leaving a perfectly good venture capital job to start a company. In this episode, he describes why the idea he is pursuing felt so...
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149 Fabrice Grinda: 4 Incredible Stories from the OLX and FJ Labs Co-Founder
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Fabrice Grinda is a wildly successful entrepreneur and investor. In this episode he recounts in detail 4 stories that any entrepreneur – any person, really – will find fascinating. The first is the story of building one of Europe’s first marketplaces before eBay got there – and what happens when you turn down $100 million for your company. The second is the story of Zingy, and what it’s like to grind without capital and miss payroll 27 times, before ultimately succeeding. Third, Fabrice talks about building OLX, the global trading platform, after Craig Newmark refused his offer...
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148 Jaclyn Hester: Foundry Group’s New Partner!
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Jaclyn Hester has just become a Partner at Foundry Group. So first, “Congratulations, Jaclyn”. Jaclyn joined Foundry Group – the Boulder-based tech company and venture fund investor -- after a few years at big law firms. As a lawyer, she worked on everything from startup formation and financing to large M&A processes. During graduate school at CU Boulder, she caught the entrepreneurship bug and immersed herself in the local startup community, serving as the Executive Director of Startup Colorado. She has also built a startup with her husband, Anders. Their...
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147 Sarah Leary: Nextdoor’s Co-founder Becomes a VC
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
There are only so many iconic social networks in the world – and Nextdoor is one of them. While perhaps not as fast-growing as Facebook or even LinkedIn, Nextdoor has steadily become the hub for neighborhoods around the world. Sarah Leary founded Nextdoor, along with Nirav Tolia, Prakash Janakiraman, and David Wiesen. In this episode, Sarah tells the story of getting Nextdoor off the ground. She talks about the painstaking work they did to figure out how to build a healthy community around a neighborhood, before they were ready to scale. We talk about the impact COVID-19 had on...
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146 Trae Vassallo: Defying Gravity in Silicon Valley
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
Trae Vassallo is co-founder and partner at Defy, a venture capital firm she built with Neil Sequeira. She was previously a general partner at Kleiner Perkins. Trae made her way to Silicon Valley from…rural Minnesota. As a girl, Trae fell in love with coding – on an Apple II. She went, sight unseen, to Stanford University, where she studied mechanical and electrical engineering. After a stint at design firm IDEO, she co-founded and led product at Good Technologies. In this episode we discuss Trae’s path to Kleiner Perkins, and her experiences being one of...
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145 William Davidow: “Civilization is Going Through Its Third Phase Change”
Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast
William Davidow is a Silicon Valley pioneer, former Intel VP, and renowned venture capitalist. He is author of the new book, with tech journalist Michael Malone, THE AUTONOMOUS REVOLUTION: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines (Berrett-Koehler, February 18, 2020). It’s a provocative look at how to safeguard humanity from our autonomous future and how to harness its benefits. According to Davidow and Malone, for the third time in the history of humanity civilization is undergoing phase change. The first was the Agricultural Revolution, the second the Industrial...
info_outlineRyan Petersen founded Flexport to make the world a more connected and better place. He wanted to “fix the user experience in global trade”. It’s been quite a success so far. To date – the company has raised $1.3 billion, and Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, told Bloomberg News, "There will be more international trade because of Flexport and international trade is a very big thing for there to be more of".
Before starting Flexport, Ryan was co-founder and CEO of ImportGenius.com, a data-as-a-service business for global shipping. He holds a degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Columbia University.
In this wide-ranging discussion, we cover Ryan's path to becoming an entrepreneur and why he thought international trade needing shaking up. He talks about the early days of Flexport, building a strong excutive team to compliment his strenghts and how his role as a CEO and the company have scaled through each stage of growth. Also discussed are the current trade wars’ effect on shipping and businesses, as well as the unique perspective they have as the trusted shipper for thousands of companies.