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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: 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

Katie Stanton is the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, 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 Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Color 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...

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

Rick Nucci is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Guru, 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...

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

Howard Marks is co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, 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 Mastering the Market Cycle:...

20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta

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

Sumeet Gajri is the Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta, the startup that helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. Sumeet is largely responsible for all things fundraising and M&A and Carta have raised over $485m from a16z, USV, Thrive, Spark, K9, Lightspeed and Meritech to name a few. Sumeet is also Managing Partner @ Original Capital, where he has partnered with companies including Front, Tonal, Instabase, Everlywell and Cockroach Labs to name a few. Finally, Sumeet is also an LP in world-leading firms such as USV and Valar...

20VC: Khosla Ventures Founding Partner, Samir Kaul on Why Pro Rata Is A Cop Out, Why He Likes Technical Risk and Does Not Take Market Risk & How To Approach Time Allocation Across The Portfolio In Venture

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

Samir Kaul is a Founding Partner and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures, one of the valley's most renowned firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Square, Affirm, DoorDash, Impossible Foods and OpenDoor just to name a few. As for Samir, he led the firm's investment in Guardant Health, Impossible Foods, Nutanix [NASDAQ: NTNX], Oscar, among others. Prior to Khosla, Samir spent five years at Flagship Ventures where he started and invested in early-stage biotechnology companies, including Helicos Biosciences which went on to IPO. Samir was also...

20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor

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

Kurt Rathmann is the Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor, the startup providing an automated bookkeeping solution at its core, bringing all of your company’s important financial information into one place. To date, Kurt has raised over $105m with ScaleFactor from the likes of Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, Coatue, Canaan Partners, Stripes Group and Firebrand to name a few. As Michael @ Coatue told me before the show, there is no way Kurt was not going to be the founder of a bookkeeping company given his background. Prior to ScaleFacotr, Kurt was the CFO of KNS Communications and a...

20VC: Why Now Is The Hardest Time To Raise an Institutional Pre-Seed in the Last Decade, What To Do When The Founder and VC Interests Do Not Align & The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds with Gaurav Jain, Founder & Managing Partner @ Afore Capital

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

Gaurav Jain is Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Afore Capital, one of the west coast's leading pre-seed funds with a $124M fund focused purely on pre-seed. To date, they have backed the likes of Petal, BetterUp, BenchSci and Modern Health to name a few. Prior to co-founding Afore, Gaurav was a Principal @ Founder Collective where he was directly involved with some incredible companies including Cruise (Acq. by General Motors for $1B+), Periscope (acq. by Twitter), Airtable and Dia & Co. Before venture, Gaurav spent time in operations both at Google as one of the...

20VC: Rahul Vohra @ Superhuman, The Most Downloaded Founder Episode of 2019

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

Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO @ Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world. Fun fact, users get through their inbox twice as fast — and many see Inbox Zero for the first time in years! To date, they have raised funds from our friends at Boldstart, First Round, John Collison, Sam Altman, Wayne Chang, Mike Ghaffery and Yes VC just to name a few. Previously, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Rahul make his way into the...

20VC: Inside The Acquisition Decision-Making Process at Cisco, How To Measure True Success in M&A Evaluation & Why By Not Speaking To Corp Dev Teams You Are Closing The Door On The Biggest Potential Accelerator To Your Business with Rob Salvagno, VP of Co

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

Rob Salvagno is VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments at Cisco, where he is responsible for leading all M&A efforts as well as managing Cisco’s strategic venture capital which invests hundreds of millions of dollars annually. At Cisco, Rob led the $1.2 billion acquisition of Meraki, one of the most successful platform acquisitions in Cisco’s history, and the $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics, cementing Cisco’s place in the business intelligence, analytics and IT operations market. Most recently, Rob engineered the $2.3 billion acquisition of Duo,...

20VC: Most Downloaded Episode of 2019 with Bill Gurley, General Partner @ Benchmark Capital

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

Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many many more. As for Bill, widely recognised as one of the greats of our time having worked with the likes of GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix and Zillow. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Before entering venture, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First...

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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