The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby

The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones | 20 June 2023 | 0h 38m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Sebastian Mallaby about his book The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. Discusses the factors critical to success in the venture capital industry.

See also the Thoughts in Between and Conversations with Tyler interviews. This is a fabulous book. Beyond venture capital, it is also insightful on the unusual personalities of many startup founders.

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Uri Levine on Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

The James Altucher Show | 19 January 2023 | 1h 05m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Uri Levine about his book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs. Draws on his experience founding Waze, the crowd-sourced GPS navigation platform, to advocate an approach to entrepreneurship that is problem-based rather than innovation-based.

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Ali Tamaseb on Super Founders

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc | 13 October 2021 | 0h 51m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Ali Tamaseb about his book Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. Draws from the 30,000 data points in his manually collected dataset on start-ups to bust myths about entrepreneurship and startups. Discusses his findings on founder patterns, the importance of having technical and non-technical founders onboard, VC biases funding startups, defensibility and scale, and accelerator programs.

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The Incredible Story of the PayPal Mafia with Jimmy Soni

We Study Billionaires | 28 January 2022 | 1h 02m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Jimmy Soni about his book The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. Backgrounds Paypal’s origins, who some of the key people were, their origin stories, and the flavour of what they’ve gone on to do. Discusses the many trials that Paypal endured, the culture at Paypal, and how it developed.

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How To Solve The Cold Start Problem with Andrew Chen

Venture Stories | 21 December 2021 | 0h 36m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Andrew Chen about his book The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects. Discusses Why the secret to why Bay Area tech companies have been so successful is their ability to connect people in different ways. Discusses stories of how different tech companies solved the cold start problem in their earliest days (eg Tinder threw a party at USC and required people to install the app to get in); why colleges are a fertile environment for consumer tech; the promise of Web 3 and how it differs from previous eras of the internet; his requests for startups; and his thoughts on the metaverse, the passion economy, gaming, and more.

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Mike Maples, Jr. – A Playbook for Startups

Invest Like the Best | 26 August 2021 | 1h 05m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Mike Maples, co-founder and partner of Floodgate, about his life and work in venture capital. Discusses his early insights and secrets, value hypothesis testing, customer development, growth, team orchestration, and a lot more.

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reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn

How I Built This with Guy Raz | 25 May 2020 | 1h 06m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Luis von Ahn. Describes the development of CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from bots signing up to Yahoo!; the development of reCAPTCHA to distinguish humans from bots whilst simultaneously digitising books; the development of Duolingo, a language learning app; and the iteration to find a sustainable business model for Duolingo.

Duolingo recently listed, which reminded me of this podcast, one of the most memorable and inspiring I’ve heard on innovation and business.

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What the Science of Relationships Can Teach Founders

Venture Stories | 4 February 2021 | 0h 44m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Logan Ury discussing her book How To Not Die Alone from the perspective of founder relationships. Discusses: why a great relationship is really just a culmination of a series of small decisions, and how to be intentional every step of the way; how the three dating tendencies apply to cofounders as well as to romantic partners; what leads to external CEO candidates being paid more but performing worse than internal ones; why life is happier for satisficers than for maximizers; when to end it versus when to mend it; and why people love optionality but are much happier after having made permanent decisions.

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