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20VC: The Biggest Indicators Of Success In Founding Teams, How To Balance Both Vision and Operations & Taking Money From "The Man At The Rug Store" with Mar Hershenson, Founding Managing Partner @ Pear.vc

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Release Date: 05/24/2017

20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Co-Founder & CEO @ , the world's leading live streaming platform for gamers and the things we love. Prior to Twitch's exit to Amazon for a reported $970M, Emmett raised over $42M in funding from some of the best including Thrive Capital, Bessemer, Mike Maples, Aydin Senkut, Paul Graham and Y Combinator. Emmett is also a part-time Partner @ Y Combinator, advising YC companies on everything from fundraising strategy to product decisions to hiring and firing. Before Twitch, Emmett co-founded Kiko, a company he later sold on eBay for 6 figures. In Today’s Episode You...

20VC: Ashton Kutcher on Early Lessons From Investing in Airbnb and Spotify, Why VC Ownership Requirements Are Becoming More and More Egregious & What Being Good At Product Truly Means

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is a Founder & General Partner @ . Over the last 5 years, Ashton and his partner, Guy Oseary, have built Sound into one of the West Coast's leading new entrants with a portfolio including Lambda School, Calm, Gitlab, Affirm, Bird and many more incredible companies. As for Ashton, he started his investing career as an angel with early home runs including Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, Airbnb and Optimizely. Due to his immense success both in media and technology, Ashton has been named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”. In Today’s Episode You...

20VC: How Founders Should Think Through Distribution and Customer Acquisition Today, The Challenges of the Digital Advertising Duopoly Currently & How To Structure Company Post Mortems Effectively with Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Founder & CEO @ , the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. Over the last 12 years, Gabe has scaled DuckDuckGo to doing 1.6Bn private searches every month, a team of 83 full time fully remote employees, raising funding from some of the best in the business; USV and most importantly, being a profitable company. If that was not enough, Gabe has also written two phenomenal books, and In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Gabriel made his way into the world of...

20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Founder & CEO @ , creating the world's first self-constructing knowledge database built by artificial and human intelligence. To date, Jude has raised from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, a16z, SV Angel and one of my dearest friends, Josh Buckley. Jude is also a prolific angel having invested in over 150 companies including Carta, Airtable, Superhuman, Gusto, Linear and many more incredible companies. Prior to Golden, Jude started Heyzap (now used by 100,000 mobile apps) alongside former guest Immad, now Founder of Mercury. In Today’s...

20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Co-Founder & CEO @ , the modern fleet management platform building solutions that make drivers and fleets safer, smarter, and more efficient. To date, Shoaib has raised over $229M from some of the world's leading investors including Index, GV, Greenoaks, IVP & Scale Venture Partners. Pre-founding KeepTruckin, Shoaib was an investor @ Khosla Ventures where he led investments in Instacart, Everlane and Indiegogo to name a few. Before venture with Khosla, Shoaib was on the operations side enjoying roles at both Google and Admob. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:...

Breaking News: Meet First Round Capital's Newest Partner, How To Approach Generational Transition as a Venture Firm & The Dangers of Attribution In Venture

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is 's newest Partner (announced today) having spent the last 2 years as a Founder-in-Residence working with the FRC portfolio. Prior to his time in venture, Todd spent close to 3 years at Dropbox as VP Product & Design. Before that he was with Twitter as Director of Product Management, following his startup, Cover, being acquired by Twitter in 2014. Before founding Cover, Todd was a Product Manager @ Facebook where he helped lead major redesign of Newsfeed. Finally, Todd started his career at Google as a Product Lead taking Gmail from 0 to 200m users in 4 years. Todd is joined...

20VC: Alexa Von Tobel on Raising NYC's Largest Ever Female Led Fund , Portfolio Construction, Compression of Fundraising Timelines, Reserves Management & Personal Branding in Venture

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Founder & Managing Partner @ , announced in 2019 as the largest ever female-led VC fund based in NYC. Prior to co-founding Inspired, Alexa founded LearnVest where she enjoyed an incredible 11-year journey culminating in their $250M exit to Northwestern Mutual in 2015. Alexa is also the author of New York Times Bestseller "Financially Fearless" and is an inaugural member of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship for the White House. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Alexa made her way into the world of startups with the founding of...

20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Founder and General Partner of , investing in founders who make life and work better. Prior to Moxxie, Katie was a Founding Partner of #angels and has the most incredible angel portfolio including Airtable, Carta, Cameo, Coinbase and Modern Fertility to name a few. Katie also served in numerous executive operating roles at, , , and and also served in the (Obama) White House and State Department. If that was not enough, Katie is also on the board of Vivendi and previously sat on the board of Time Inc. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Katie made...

20VC: The Most Successful Companies Are Not Where Employees Work The Most, How To Know When To Promote From Below Or Bring in External Candidates & Why It Is A Unique Advantage To Be Building A Company Outside A Tech Hub with Rick Nucci, Founder & CEO @ G

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is the Co-Founder & CEO @ , the knowledge management platform that delivers everything you need so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. To date, Rick has raised over $38m with Guru from some of the best in the business including Thrive, Emergence Capital, Firstmark, Slack and Salesforce. Prior to Guru, Rick was the Founder of Boomi, which defined and led a new segment as the first-ever cloud integration platform-as-a-service. Boomi was ultimately acquired by Dell where Rick went on to grow the organisation into the industry leader it is today. In Today’s...

20VC: Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks on The Most Important Skill An Investor Can Have, The Right Way To Think About Price Sensitivity & Where Are We At Today; Take More Risk or Less?

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

is co-chairman and co-founder of , a leading investment firm with more than $120 billion in assets. Prior to founding Oaktree, Howard spent 10 years at The TCW Group, where he was responsible for investments in distressed debt, high yield bonds, and convertible securities. Previously, Howard was with Citicorp for 16 years, where he served as Vice President and senior portfolio manager in charge of convertible and high yield securities. Howard has also written two books, most recently , and it was Warren Buffet who said, “When I see memos from...

Mar Hershenson is a Founding Managing Partner @ Pear.vc alongside Pejman Nozad. After earning a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999, Mar had developed a ground-breaking technique for optimizing the design of analog semiconductors. Having combined a hardware/software focus during her studies, she spent the next 13 years co-founding three startups in the mobile/e-commerce, enterprise software, and semiconductor industries, work that led eventually to her registering 14 separate patents. Mar has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a Top Innovator Under 35 and named a Champion of Innovation by Fast Company.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How did Mar make her way from professor @ Stanford to startup founder to founding Pear.vc?

2.) Question from Matin @ Heap: How does Mar decide which founders have the highest potential? What are the seeds that suggest huge potential growth on initial screening?

3.) Question from Nicky @ Nova Credit: How does one look to balance the inherent challenge of vision and operations? What do the best founders do?

4.) How important is it for there to be role segmentation in a VC partnership? Why does it not matter at certain stages of the funding lifecycle?

5.) Why does Mar believe venture is an intensely service based industry? How does Mar look to maintain her scaling board roles with a scaling portfolio?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Mar’s Fave Book: The Four Steps To The Epiphany

Mar’s Fave Blog: Elad Gil, Dan Primack

Mar’s Most Recent Investment: Nova Credit

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mar on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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