Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast

Startup insider Kent Lindstrom explores the reality behind the Silicon Valley headlines as he sits down with the established veterans and up-and-comers who are shaping the way we view the world online and beyond. Topics include technology trends, startups, Silicon Valley politics, women in silicon valley and more. Learn the histories of each guest and be enlightened by their area of expertise. New episode released each Tuesday at Noon, Pacific Time.

146 Trae Vassallo: Defying Gravity in Silicon Valley 09/18/2020

146 Trae Vassallo: Defying Gravity in Silicon Valley 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 relatively few female venture capital partners in Silicon Valley. She contrasts the treatment of women in Silicon Valley before, and after, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit (Check out Episode 101). We discuss why she struck out on her own rather than staying at Kleiner, and how she and her partner came together to form Defy. Finally, Trae discusses a health scare that led to her discovery of integrative medicine and lifelong quest for healthy living. EPISODE QUOTES On Her Early Experience with Computers “It was like third or fourth grade where I have vivid recollections of seeing Oregon Trail (a video game), playing that game, and then learning how to build simple graphics programs. And that really was a spark for me: That, you can logically build a sequence of steps and then have it go execute. And that kind of problem solving to me was incredibly exciting. And so that was the spark that made me realize I'm a problem solver, I'm a creative.” On Palm Pilot and Women Leaders “I was fortunate to get on the engineering team that worked on the Palm V. And through that, I got to work with Donna Dubinsky (Palm’s CEO) and Jeff Hawkins (Palm’s Founder). And this was when they were justgetting started and they had this runaway kind of success. That was my first exposure to a startup into what it meant to be an entrepreneur and frankly, a female CEO, a woman CEO who is just amazing at her job. And so I thought, OK, I love this engineering thing, but I want to do what she's doing.” On Integrative Medicine “When I left Kleiner, one of my top goals was” I'm going to get my health back. I want to feel better than ever. I started reading up and looking at less conventional options, because I literally had been to Mayo and Cedars and Stanford and UCSF and nothing. Nothing, nothing. And I finally found this whole world of integrative medicine, which I'm now a huge fan of. The thesis behind it is really about root cause analysis instead of giving you a drug to alleviate the symptom of that issue. Rathere, we're going to figure out why you have that issue to begin with and get to the root cause and solve that problem so we don't have to cover up your symptom.” Defy: Something Ventured: /episode/index/show/somethingventured/id/16057928

145 William Davidow: “Civilization is Going Through Its Third Phase Change” 09/10/2020

145 William Davidow: “Civilization is Going Through Its Third Phase Change” 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 Revolution, and we are now in the midst of the Autonomous Revolution. Some ideas discussed: How to adapt society to our new era and transform our relationship with intelligent machines the authors propose in the new book Creating tiered personal information “safety deposit boxes” over which users would have complete control to protect internet privacy; Imposing a tax on sending emails, time spent on social networks, and gaming; Programs that automatically block phone use while we’re driving; Regulation that puts limits on Artificial Intelligence; Proactive investment in the infrastructure of the future to offset inevitable job loss. More on William Davidow: William Davidow is a Silicon Valley pioneer who ran the microprocessor division at Intel at the dawn of the chip revolution and was later senior vice president of marketing and sales. Prior to Intel Corp., Bill worked in various managerial positions at Hewlett Packard and General Electric. He cofounded Mohr Davidow Ventures, one of the Valley's premier venture capital firms, in 1985. Bill serves on the boards of California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy. He is the author of three books and the coauthor of two, including The Virtual Corporation, which sold more than 100,000 copies. Episode Exerpts: On the Evolution of Technology Innovation “When I was at Intel, you know, we used to get up and feel like we were putting on our Superman shirts and going out and changing the world. And what we were doing was automating existing processes: In other words, we made a stoplight run better or we made a typewriter into a word processor. But if you looked at it, there was still a factory or there was still a stoplight. We didn't change the structure of things. And what is different today is that our technologies are changing the social and economic structure of things.” The Problem of Virtual Worlds like Facebook “We have real problem that people are choosing to live in a virtual world. It turns out that you evolved in a physical world, YOU controlled the physical world. A tree was not created to be firewood. You managed the world and made the tree firewood. The physical world had no purpose and you were running the physical world. But when you go to a virtual world, a virtual world DOES have a purpose. And the purpose of the virtual world is to control your behavior. you you're down to two senses, both of which are impaired. “ On the Accelerating Pace of Job Destruction “We keep finding new work for people to do, so we keep creating opportunities, I think today the challenge is that we may not be able to create the opportunities fast enough. I mean, these technologies have such broad impact. Netflix put Blockbuster Video out of business, when Blockbuster Video had nine thousand stores and 60,000 employees. And Netflix, I think, had one thousand employees. And those are the kinds of things will continue to happen. It’s going to turn everything upside down. I believe in a free market, but free markets have their flaws. They do not allocate wealth based on social contribution, they allocate wealth based on your ability to make money. In the future we may be living in a society where we're going to have to find ways to compensate people based on their social contribution as opposed to whether they're just a great high speed trader. “ Kent Lindstrom (host): William Davidow: Something Ventured: /episode/index/show/somethingventured/id/15967814

144 Rob Chesnut: Airbnb’s Former Chief Ethics Officer on Intentional Integrity 09/03/2020

144 Rob Chesnut: Airbnb’s Former Chief Ethics Officer on Intentional Integrity Rob Chesnut is an advisor to Airbnb, where he was previously Chief Ethics Officer and general counsel. His recently released book is Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead An Ethical Revolution. Rob started his career as a federal prosecutor, but decided he could do more good in the world by working for companies like eBay and Chegg. Eventually joining Airbnb, he helped Brian Chesky navigate issues such as racial discrimination by Airbnb hosts. He also helped Airbnb create a culture of “Intentional Integrity”. In this episode we discuss Rob’s journey to and through Silicon Valley, and his experience creating ethical cultures those companies. We also discuss what happened to Airbnb when the COVID crisis hit. Hear what Brian Chesky said as Airbnb was faced with lawsuits over discrimination by its hosts Rob Chesnut Episode Excerpts On leaving the role of federal prosecutor to work for tech companies: “After a while, it's a real negative. It has a negative aspect to it. You're putting young people in jail for long periods of time, and you feel like you're not contributing in a positive, proactive way to society.” “On the Future of Travel” “I don't think that the pandemic is going to push people to stay in their homes forever. I think that people are going to travel. But what I think we're going to see is that there's a maybe a different type of travel. One thing that there's a trend, I think, that may come out of the pandemic, which is really going to help Airbnb and that is ‘work anywhere’. So if you can work and do your job from literally anywhere that has Internet access, that suddenly frees you to go places and do things 52 weeks a year that you might otherwise have only been able to do three weeks a year.” On Intentional Integrity “I think that integrity is a word that people are often uncomfortable talking about because it gets to people's morals, their purpose, maybe even their religion. And so leaders are uncomfortable talking about it and what they do is outsource it to lawyers and it becomes compliance. There's a difference, though, between compliance and integrity. So the point of the title is we have to get over the discomfort, we have to have the conversation. And if we want integrity to be part of our company, we can't just assume that it's going to happen, that we're just going to hire good people and that it's going to happen. We have to make an intentional effort to weave it into our culture. And so the point of that title, is a call for getting through that discomfort and taking affirmative steps to make it part of what you do in business.” Intentional Integrity Rob Chesnut Something Ventured /episode/index/show/somethingventured/id/15878024

143 Deena Shakir of Lux Capital on her Amazing Journey, The Post-COVID Future 08/26/2020

143 Deena Shakir of Lux Capital on her Amazing Journey, The Post-COVID Future Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that manages more than $2 billion. She is particularly interested in entrepreneurs building breakthrough companies enabling human and environmental health, access, and productivity. While her immediate background before joining Lux sounds familiar – she was a partner at GV (previously “Google Ventures”) – her path before that is a bit more unusual. As a journalist, Deena once hosted the pilot episode of a bilingual Arabic-English TV news series modeled after 60 Minutes. Deena was also a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of State under Secretary Clinton, where she helped launch President Obama’s first Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2010. She is the first-generation daughter of immigrants from Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic and French. In this episode, we discuss a range of topics, from her experiences as an Arab-American to her path from Washington to Silicon Valley. We also discuss the impact COVID is having on the venture business, and families like hers. Also covered: The unique craziness of online parenting groups. EPISODE EXERPTS On Education “Education, is an area I’m passionate about, where I've made investments like that in a company called Mos. Mos is using artificial intelligence to make the process of searching for financial aid easier. Clearly, there were already platforms for you to search for scholarships. However, they've made that much more sophisticated, and the process is so much easier now. And this was meaningful for me personally because that was a process I went through. I paid for college by myself, patching together all these scholarships. And now that is something that is changing the lives of students on a daily basis.” On Women in Venture Capital “ In terms of women in venture, I think we've obviously we've come a long way, particularly in the last three years. I joined the venture world maybe three months before that moment, if you want to call it that, where everybody realized this was an actual problem. It was in the summer, I think, of 2017 when a lot of this came to light. I think we still have a very long way to go. Some of the solutions may have potentially created additional problems around tokenism, for example, around cliques around certain folks or groups taking up all the oxygen in the room, et cetera. But that being said, I've seen some really great progress.” On Software “When it comes to software specifically, the democratizing piece of it is what gets me really excited. I get really excited about technology that streamlines analog industries -- that allows people to do things more quickly -- whether that means grassroots organizing or whether it means accounting.” On the Impact of the 9/11 Attacks “Being in high school, a teenager, during 9/11 -- being a Muslim and Iraqi American, that was a really pivotal moment for me. It was the first time where I felt like these two parts of my identity that really always felt like they were fluid and just part of who I am -- all of a sudden it seems like they weren’t to some people. That really was troubling for me.” Deena on Twitter Lux Capital Something Ventured /episode/index/show/somethingventured/id/15769127

143 Deena Shakir of Lux Capital on her Amazing Journey, The Post-COVID Future 08/26/2020

142 Wag's CEO Garrett Smallwood on Pets in the Time of COVID-19 08/18/2020

141 Domm Holland: The Fast CEO on Guiding a Rocket Ship Through a Pandemic 08/11/2020

140 Brad Feld: Thoughts on Startup Communities in a Post-COVID-19 World 08/06/2020

140 Brad Feld: Thoughts on Startup Communities in a Post-COVID-19 World What makes communities of startups thrive, and how have they been impacted by the recession, COVID-19, and the remote work trend? Brad Feld addresses these questions in this episode and in his new book “THE STARTUP COMMUNITY WAY: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” and the second edition of his book “STARTUP COMMUNITIES: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.” You may know Brad as the legendary investor who co-founded the Foundry Group, and who has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Brad previously co-founded Techstars, and was an early investor in Harmonix, Zynga, MakerBot, and Fitbit. He writes the widely followed Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals. He currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and on the boards of Path Forward, the Kauffman Fellows, and Defy Ventures. EPISODE EXERPTS On the Chemistry of Silicon Valley “Today’s Silicon Valley, if it started from scratch, could not create Silicon Valley.” On Initial Conditions of Startup Communities “The punch line is that you don't have a deterministic outcome. When you have a child, raising a child is a complex system. You can't say that when the child is twenty-four years old, these are the things that child will be doing and will have done and how they will be living. All of the interaction effects over time in the moment affect what happens in the evolution of that child. Same thing with the startup community.” On Racism in Startups and Venture Firms “There is no question that empirically the number of non-white, black and brown voices and black and brown founders' is a very low single digit percentage of the (startup and venture) population. And if you add in women into that mix and say black or brown women, that's an even smaller percentage of the population. And so then the question is in now, what do you do? Its a complex system so you can't just say, ‘OK, here are the new rules and this is what's going to happen’. Rather you've got to have participation of ALL of the different actors that have influence and ability in order to change things.” On the Effect of COVID-19 on the Importance of Place for Startups “Startup communities are complex systems that go through phase changes. In February, if you had said to anyone: “In three months, ninety nine percent of office workers around the world will be working from their houses.” That person would have said, you're crazy, that'll never happen. It can't happen. The technology won't support it. People won't tolerate it. Not possible. But lo and behold, that's what happened. And it works OK. We understand that place still has a lot of importance, especially around startup communities. However, the notion of connecting places together and building things that have a virtual component or that have a bigger geographic spread is also important.” /episode/index/show/somethingventured/id/15513722

139 Parker Conrad: Rippling's CEO on His Entrepreneurial Journey 07/28/2020

139 Parker Conrad: Rippling's CEO on His Entrepreneurial Journey Parker Conrad lists himself as “customer support” at Rippling, but he is its co-founder and CEO. He previously founded Zenefits. In this episode he traces his journey from a journalist at Harvard, to founder and CEO of a company that has raised over $50 million. Episode Highlights: The specific thing he likes about sales “I really liked sales. I enjoyed it. But I liked it in a very specific way: I enjoyed selling something that I had built. I didn't want anyone else explaining why it was great or what was so awesome about it, because they were going to screw it up somehow. They were not going to get it right when they were talking to people and telling them what's great about this. I wanted to build the thing that I was selling.” His fundraising ‘trick’ “Just find a way to be the Twitter guys (a fast growing company at the time which VCs were throwing money at) That was really the answer. And I think that that's actually the right answer for most entrepreneurs. Most of the “tactics” around fundraising don't really matter. They're such a rounding error. The important thing is to build a business that's so compelling that they can't afford to ignore you. And then all the other rules go out the window. And then it's like very easy to raise. And if you can't build something that is that compelling, then God help you.” Why he’s motivated to build an HR management company "I am an unusually resentful of the sort of busy work, administrative work. It’s why I was so resentful of having to of fax in insurance applications at my first company. If you can connect all of those underlying system and you can automate that and make it really seamless, that all disappears. And so in this sort of perverse way I really get excited about stomping that out for customers, because I'm the primary user of our product.". /episode/index/show/somethingventured/id/15385862