This Week in Startups - Video

Loic Le Meur is a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco. He co-founded one of the largest European tech events, LeWeb. Loic is an active business angel and was an early investor in LinkedIn, Evernote and Lending Club, among many others. In this episode, he shares insights around his new startup, Leade.rs, a speakers-events marketplace that enables you to discover the top people doing amazing things in their field right now—the Nobel Prize, the Forbes top 30 under 30,, the Young Global Leaders, LinkedIn Influencers, and TED speakers. Currently, the process to book keynote speakers for events is broken. Most events aim to maximize revenue, but compromise engaging topics. Leade.rs wants to answer questions such as, “Who makes VR?” “Who are best people in VR in Asia?” “In Latin America?”, and connect those speakers with event planners. Join us as Loic shares his vision to create transparent optionality in discovering speakers and the sustainable revenue experiment paired with it.

Filmed at 2016 LAUNCH SCALE, Tom Patterson sits down with Jason and shares his wisdom around his massively successful high-end men's underwear brand, and how he went from being a medical device salesman to leading Tommy John to exceed $100M in sales by 2018. Then, Jason interviews a panel of investor thought leaders. Paul Judge (Luma), Christine Tsai (500 Startups), Ryan Feit (SeedInvest) convene to discuss the future of fundraising, what this means in relation to the election, and the differences between accredited and non-accredited investors.

Filmed at 2016 LAUNCH SCALE, David Sacks of Zenefits and Cyan Banister of Founders Fund sit down with Jason to hash out the trials and successes in scaling culture. David Sacks talks openly about the transformation of culture at Zenefits--how he fixed the company's problems and helped to rapidly scale the business. Then, Cyan Banister shares tips on how to create and preserve company culture as you scale. She then takes questions from the audience about how to handle subcultures and 1099 employees, stay present from a distance, and maintain culture when a company is growing rapidly.

With over 85 investments and 26 high-profile exits under his belt, technology- and investment guru Yossi Vardi sits down with Jason and imparts his advice for hopeful startups. Yossi then takes questions from the audience about raising money or staying bootstrapped, defining the grey line between chasing a bad idea and staying persistent through tough times, and how to get over the hump of trying to convince investors of a good idea. Join us in a candid conversation with Yossi as he reveals the secrets of his success.

Filmed at 2016 LAUNCH SCALE, Glenn Kelman of Redfin and Pejman Nozad of Pear.vc sit down with Jason and share how their stories of staying obsessively focused and persistent led them to building great companies. Glenn Kelman demonstrates how Redfin is reinventing real estate in the consumer’s favor, with the goal of restoring honor to the otherwise underappreciated profession. Then, Pejman Nozad takes us on his 20-year journey that started when he got a job at a car wash in San Jose while living in an attic above a yogurt shop, to then selling rugs, closing sales — $8 million worth of rugs in his best year — and starting a tech venture fund.

News Roundtable! Molly Wood (Marketplace) & Eric Newcomer (Bloomberg) on Trump's triumph, tech, Thiel, the flaws of polling & data journalism, the future of jobs, & the fate of Silicon Valley

New York is an important ecosystem that combines the art scene, media companies, Wall Street, the advertising industry, and news organizations. What it didn’t have in the early days was any kind of infrastructure--angel investors, incubators--which meant that if you were an entrepreneur, you were on your own. Now, there is a lot more infrastructure, including startup incubators. Joining Jason today are the two leaders of R/GA Ventures Incubator, Richard Ting and Nick Coronges. R/GA supports companies that are looking to build their brand, while partnering them with their client base of major players, including Nike, Verizon Wireless, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung and Google. Join us as Nick and Richard reveal what startups need the most help with, which young companies have the most demonstrable success, and how R/GA is playing an integral role in supporting the community and helping entrepreneurs.

E-commerce is growing, and direct-to-consumer e-commerce is becoming a trend. Andy Katz-Mayfield is the co-founder and co-CEO of the men's razor subscription company Harry's, along with Jeff Raider, one of the co-founders of Warby-Parker. The shaving startup rethinks how grooming products could be sold by focusing on higher-quality razors at lower prices than its much larger competitors. The science of customer acquisition has changed with the introduction of Facebook, custom audiences and re-targeting. Andy explains that being vertically integrated has allowed them to move quickly and commit to their millions of customers. Teaming up with Target, taking on established giant Gillette, thoughts on Dollar Shave Club’s acquisition by Unilever — all this and much more.

Media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff joins Jason to discuss the current economic environment. The two talk about Douglas’ latest thought-provoking book, “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity," the digital economy, the growth trap, and solutions to create sustainable marketplaces for the future. Douglas presents the problem that digital companies extract value without distributing wealth. They're taking money and value away from us and storing it in share price. He argues that you should make everyone in your ecosystem wealthy--your customers/vendors/suppliers--then you can circulate money, rather than just extract it.

When John Shahidi, co-founder and CEO of Shots Studios, was building an app that finds the next big digital stars, he looked to the behaviors of his users—10 million users who were mostly 15 years old. What he found out was, less than 9% of shots users watch TV, but over 60% of them would watch a video on YouTube. Shots Studios started as a “teen selfie app” and recently turned its focus to online comedy videos, with Floyd Mayweather as their first investor and Justin Bieber as a partner. Content creation has become a growing business, and Shots Studios has taken stars who built their fame in Instagrams, Vine and Snapchat, and helped them shoot high-production four-minute YouTube videos. What people want more than anything else is discoverability—more than a connection with celebrities or content with celebrities. John looked at what and why people were watching particular content, and enhanced that experience. He reveals how he did this, stays relevant and caters towards a younger audience, and more.

Jason “jams out” a number of marketing and growth tips with founders in this special “Jam Session” episode of This Week in Startups. Scott Abel, CEO of The Content Wrangler, shares 10 lessons to creating your own influencer campaign. Arjun Moorthy is currently the CEO of CivikOwl, and previously spent 5 years at HubSpot as the VP of Business Development and then as the Head of Channel Program. He shares lessons learned from HubSpot, and talks about how to widen your sales by paying resellers to become a channel for your product. Then, founder of Credo, John Doherty, explains why startup founders should do less content, but do it much better.

A recurring theme in our society and in the technology industry is suicide, depression, people in crisis. Nancy Lublin is a social entrepreneur, author and philanthropist that previously founded Dress for Success, the organization that helps women transition from welfare to work, and DoSomething.org, a non-profit organization with the goal of motivating young people to take action around social changes through national campaigns and grants for projects that make an impact. Her latest venture, Crisis Text Line, is the nation’s first free, 24/7 text line for people in emotional crisis. Teenagers love to text, and Crisis Text Line turns this into a way to help them through their hardest times: family issues, stress or suicidal thoughts. Trained counselors text back and forth with advice and resources—and, in the process, collect anonymous data that ultimately helps save lives. As a social entrepreneur, Nancy has observed people debating this issue, but not collaborating to solve the problem, and her vision is to inspire young people to take action to make an impact.

David Helgason is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Unity 3D, a platform creating 2D and 3D games. In 2003, he had the crazy idea of revolutionizing the gaming industry and his pioneering days started in a garage during a time when VR and AR were still only speculative. In the last 10 years on this adventure, the future caught up with David, and things like AR, Pokemon Go, and other video games needed to create a 3D world. Unity 3D is like a stage where you put digital assets all together, make it interactive, compile it with one button, and then deploy it to all platforms. Unity 3D has received funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital, WestSummit Capital, and iGlobe Partners. David shares his challenges as well as his predictions for VR/AR and the future of mobile games.

Shivani Siroya is the CEO and founder of Tala, a company is tackling a massive problem: there are 3 billion people around the world that are currently underserved from financial services—they don’t have bank accounts, access to formal credit options, traditional loan products, small business loans, or insurance products. Tala makes micro-loans in Kenya, Tanzania and the Philippines by using a person’s smartphone, transactions, and app usage to figure out if they are creditworthy. To evaluate creditworthiness, Tala built an Android app that scores would-be borrowers in 20 seconds by using data on their phone. In addition, they make a credit decision to lend money in that 20 second timeframe and acts as the lender. Tala dynamically prices between 5%-11% for the term, which is dramatically lower than the average APR in these markets, which is 350%. In this episode, Siroya describes how she pioneered this new form of micro-lending.

There will be 11 billion people on the planet by the end of this century, and the challenge will be to sustainably and efficiently feed them. Food is becoming a big business, and big agriculture is taking over the Monsanto’s of the world with strong interests in profits. Amol Deshpande, CEO and co-founder of the Farmers Business Network, has raised $50M for the network and created a tool that uses data to help farmers thrive and maintain the family businesses they’ve had for generations. FBN takes an unconventional and disruptive approach by asking: “What good is the data if you can’t take action on it and do better for yourself?” Amol demos his product and bridges the divide in understanding in how our food supply actually works. Jason and Amol explore the world of GMOs and organics, and the future of feeding humanity.