This Week in Startups - Video

There are two things that startups need: money and growth. Money is the fuel, and growth happens typically through investments, and through making better products and technique. Filmed at LAUNCH Festival 2017, Jason interviews an all-star panel of investor thought leaders. Gil Penchina is a super angel of super angels that has dominated the syndicate space. Cyan Banister started as an angel investor and has moved upstream to be a venture capitalist at Founders Fund. SeedInvest CEO and co-founder Ryan Feit is making a huge bet on the equity crowdfunding revolution.

Filmed at LAUNCH Festival 2017, Jason sits down with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison to explore his journey to solving one of the toughest barriers to a global e-commerce economy: payments. About a decade ago, companies were mostly working with legacy players like banks, gateways and processors, and they were essentially looking to buy a technology service from them. These financial institutions were huge, but focused on particular markets, which provided an opportunity for Stripe. Today, Stripe works with companies in 124 countries and handles billions of dollars of aggregate revenue every year. Join us as Patrick shares an inspiring story of his early days at Y Combinator, mistakes and triumphs, opening the Atlas program to US-based startups, and his views on public/private markets.

E722: Bill Gurley of Benchmark, SV leader & legendary investor (Uber, Twitter, Snapchat) at LAUNCH Festival April 6 2017

E721: News Roundtable! Iain Thomson (The Register) & Austin Smith (Inside): ISP privacy shattered, Palmer Luckey leaves, FB rips off Snap (again), Elon’s Neuralink & SpaceX hits, Trolls & Idiots of the Week

Filmed at Cisco Spark Haus, SXSW 2017, Jason sits down with Capital Factory Mentor founder of Josh Baer, who helps people quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. Josh is a tireless supporter of startups, but more specifically, has made Austin a center of gravity for entrepreneurs. Capital Factory Mentor boasts a mentor network of 100+ experts from diverse backgrounds and uses it to grow startups. Josh discusses his investment successes, failures & greatest misses, the thriving entrepreneurial scene in Austin and growing venture community, and why bridge loans are usually a bad deal for both entrepreneurs and VCs. He then takes questions from the audience about crowd-funding, why it’s only easier to be a founder in today’s times, and the importance of setting the stage for international entrepreneurs.

This week’s LAUNCH Incubator features Pear.vc partner Mar Hershenson as she gives an instructive talk about turning seed companies into series A companies. There is a lot of confusion among seed founders as to the right approach. Depending on what vertical you’re in, whether it’s e-commerce, consumer, SaaS, or marketplace, there is different knowledge that people have as to what you need to hit to be a series A company. She explains the importance of planning, executing and iterating an Ops plan, which metrics are predictors of success, and why it’s effective to communicate with data. Mar wraps up her talk by answering questions from the class about lessons learned from mistakes she has made as an angel investor, social distribution, and women in entrepreneurship.

Zach Nelson is one of Silicon Valley's most experienced business leaders. After roles at Oracle, Sun, and McAfee, he became the CEO of cloud provider NetSuite in 2002. NetSuite started with less than $1m in revenue and Zach ran it up to a billion dollar run rate, with a recent acquisition by Oracle for $9.3b. Join us for an insightful interview with Zach as he shares unique CEO insights around the founding story of NetSuite, how he transformed the enterprise resource planning (ERP) space, keeping a team motivated, what makes a great product launch, and more.

News Roundtable! Rolfe Winkler of the Wall Street Journal and Tess Townsend of Recode are in the studio to talk with Jason about the latest tech news. On tap: Google Allo and the future of personal assistants, a bot that turns your texts into faxes to elected officials, the pros and the cons of Trump's Twitter use and the future of Twitter, Parker Conrad’s new startup Rippling, and more.

Intercom co-founder Des Traynor returns to the LAUNCH Incubator with another powerhouse talk. There are 3 ingredients to a company: people, product and profit. Today, Des focuses on people and product by extracting key principles from his experience at Intercom. He explains the importance of alignment and how it touches every aspect of running a company – from how a company behaves, to the hiring process, to how you speak to customers. Then, he shares 6 principles on building a product first company. Des wraps up his talk by answering questions from the class about lessons learned from Intercom’s early days, net negative churn, and ways to avoid the massive churn problem.

News Roundtable! Liz Gannes of 60dB and Ben Parr of Octane AI are in the studio to talk with Jason about the latest tech news. On tap: Snap's IPO timing, Uber moving forward, the Trump factor, Bitcoin, drone-bearing cars & 3D-printed houses & more.

Aside from having an idea and a product, there are two things that every startup needs: money and growth. We are starting to open up the aperture of who can invest in a company. There is a global competition for ideas that requires entrepreneurs, and those entrepreneurs require capital to grow their companies. In today’s episode, Jason talks to SeedInvest CEO and co-founder Ryan Feit about his equity crowdfunding platform and the revolution that’s happening in that landscape. Also joining us today is Wolf3D CEO Timmu Tõke, a 3D scanning startup that launched a business initiative on SeedInvest. Insights are shared from Timmu’s entrepreneurial perspective on why he chose equity crowdfunding for his business, and from Ryan’s investment perspective on the process of accepting a company like Wolf3D. Jason explores questions about accredited vs. non-accredited investors, doubling down on startups, risks and market potential, and much more.

In this Part 2 episode, Jason continues to answer questions from founders and superfans -- from convincing an angel investor that being a solo founder is good to starting a social network, from advice around risk-taking to the future of transportation and housing. Plus, find out what he is passionate about outside of angel investing and how he defines success.

As an angel investor, as a founder, and as host of 700+ episodes of TWiST, Jason constantly receives questions from founders and superfans. Today, he answers 15 -- from how to passively support viable startups if you have a day job to best fundraising advice, from how much confidentiality founders should expect, to tips for female entrepreneurs to successfully navigate the tricky waters of owning and running a company in a male-dominated landscape. Plus, find out some of Jason’s investment strategies to choosing winners to invest in. This is only the first of two parts, so stay tuned for much more.

Linden Tibbets is the co-founder & CEO of IFTTT, one of the leading IoT solution platforms that automates simple tasks and controls a variety of devices. Linden comes from the world of programming, and worked as an engineer connecting API’s together at the world renowned design firm, IDEO. He had the original insight of getting services like Twitter, DropBox, and Instagram working together, and the vision of a platform that is the standard for information access. The simplest way to describe IFTTT is as a personal automation platform. Users create simple "Applets" that can execute simple "If This Then That" statements. Currently, IFTTT has about 10 million users, 50m+ applets, and 400 partners. From FitBit to Philips Hue, from finding your phone with Alexa to turning on your TV, IFTTT is paving the way to an automated lifestyle that can save you time and make the technology you use every day a seamless part of your life.

One of the biggest problems that we face in the world today, specifically here in the U.S. and in Europe, is the electrical grid. The energy market is going through a rapid transition - increased penetration of renewable energy. The energy market is evolving into a more sustainable market, but with that comes challenges for the electricity grid. Essentially, because renewable energy is intermittent in nature, there are sometimes misforecasts that create imbalances on the grid. REstore wants to help solve that problem through technology that can analyze, predict and adjust power-using devices to balance out those minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour fluctuations. Then, Greylock Partner Josh Elman shares his insights around virality. Every entrepreneur wants their startup’s product to go viral, but many fail to understand how virality actually works. All virality has one common element: inception and motivation. Join us as Josh explores some of the ways that products can go viral.