Village Global's Venture Stories

Today’s guest is Ben Braverman. Ben is currently Chief Customer Officer at Flexport after 6 years of being their Chief Revenue Officer during Flexport’s hypergrowth period. In this episode, we discussed how to build a good sales machine from the ground up. Ben also shares his thoughts on all things revenue - from marketing to BD to forming early SDR teams.On Deck and Flexport are co-building the future of logistics — learn more about their joint accelerator at www.beondeck.com/x/flexport.Adam Gelman, On Deck’s Head of Go-To-Market, joined Erik in this episode as a guest co-host. We hope you enjoy.___Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We will be simulcasting the podcast on the Village Global feed.Share your thoughts with us on Twitter:Hosted by: @eriktorenbergGuest: @bravebenGuest co-host: @Adam_GelmanProduced by: @jacksonstegerBrought to you by: @beondeck

Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast.Anand Chandrasekaran is a full-time angel and advisor with extensive executive experience at some of the biggest names in tech. Prior to being EVP to Five9, Anand worked at Facebook, Yahoo, and started several of his own companies.He was most recently EVP at Five9 after three years as director of Facebook’s Messenger platform and five years at Yahoo. He has extensive founding, advisory and C-Suite experience with both American and Indian companies.In this episode, Anand shares incredible frameworks for product leadership. You can read his thoughts in more detail @anandc on Twitter.Rishi Tripathy, group product lead at On Deck, joined Erik in this episode as a guest co-host. We hope you enjoy.

Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast.Gina Gotthilf spent five years at Duolingo and helped the company grow from 3 million to 300 million users. She is the kind of VP of Marketing that isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.Gina is an A/B testing vet, and shared her best frameworks and lessons for how to A/B test well. She also shares her PR and influencer strategy tips, as well as her thoughts on how to hire your first marketing person.She is now cofounder of Latitud, which supports early-stage entrepreneurs in Latin America solving some of the biggest problems in emerging markets across the globe.Her passion for her job and life are evident throughout this episode. We hope you enjoy.

Execs is a show from Erik Torenberg and On Deck for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. We're simulcasting the series on the Village Global podcast.The first guest on Execs is Jared Fliesler. Most recently, Jared was COO at Scribd. Prior to Scribd, Jared was a VP at Square, and director at Google, and a GM at Slide (acquired by Google), where he worked closely with Keith Rabios and Max LevchinIn this episode, we discuss symmetry in execs’ ability to hire and fire, how to build world-class onboarding experiences, what it means to be vulnerable as an exec, and much more.

Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, and Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), investment strategist, join Erik on this episode to discuss:- Whether monetary policy has been too expansionary.- Where Lyn and Scott differ on inflation.- Why interest rates have declined over the last several decades.- The nuances of the correlation between growth in money supply and CPI.- Potential downsides to being the global reserve currency.- Why the US has been able to run trade deficits without a day of reckoning (so far).- The bull and bear cases for the US and China.- Why the US has been able to dominate the world in high-tech industries.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, and Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact), investment strategist, join Erik on this episode to discuss:- Lyn’s position that the US needs to inflate its debt away and the mechanics of how that works.- The similarities and differences between the 1940s and the 2020s, when an external shock hit a highly leveraged economy.- How to monetize debt.- Why interest rates have remained low.- How the fed can keep inflation at bay.- The transitory inflation hypothesis.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Elias Torres (@eliast), co-founder and CTO at Drift, joins Lucas Bagno for this episode, which was recorded as part of a special event for Villagers. They discussed:- Why Elias is so grateful for the US and the differences he noticed when he came here from Nicaragua.- How he has forged a great relationship with a co-founder who is the opposite of him in many ways.- Why people should be taking more risks.- Why they hired a recruiter as their first employee at Drift.- Why they place less emphasis on resume and more on culture fit, as well as how to test for fit.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Scott Sumner (@scottsumnertmi), economist and author of The Money Illusion, joins Erik on this episode to discuss:- Why Scott says that the fed should have been more expansionary during the Great Recession.- The usefulness of level targeting.- Why house prices are going to remain permanently high for the 21st century.- An explanation of market monetarism and its implications for monetary policy.- Why he is forecasting low inflation in contrast to many of his peers.- How market monetarism differs from modern monetary theory and Austrian economics.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Andrew Chen (@andrewchen), partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem, joins Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss:- Why the secret to why Bay Area tech companies have been so successful is their ability to connect people in different ways.- Stories of how different tech companies solved the cold start problem in the earliest days. For example, Tinder threw a party at USC and required people to install the app to get in.- Why colleges are such 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.- Andrew's thoughts on the metaverse, the passion economy, gaming, and more.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Wesley Samples (@wesleysamples), founder and COO of Sora Schools, and Nick Grandy (@ngrandy), co-founder and Head of Product at Outschool, join Anne on this episode.- How the pandemic has “fractured the status quo” and how it will lead to a period of rapid change for education systems around the world.- How they’re building a world where kids love learning and why autonomous learning is so important.- How Sora and Outschool are partnering to support learners.- Why kids want, above all else, to engage with others who share their interests.- How they’ve overcome early ideas of what an online school would look like.- The explosive growth they’ve seen over the course of the pandemic and how they’ve kept up.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Julio Vasconcellos (@juliov), managing partner at Atlantico, joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno to discuss:- The state of venture capital in Latin America and its vibrant yet nascent ecosystem.- Why companies shouldn't underestimate the difficulties of expanding from one country to another within LatAm.- The fact that Latin America is one of the earliest adopters of tech. Internet penetration is 75% in Brazil and 81% in Mexico, both higher than China and India. Brazil also leads the world in number of hours a day the average person spends online.- Advice on pitching, including why Julio needs to see authentic excitement from a founder for a company to last for the long term.- Why he had half local and half global investors on his cap table when he was building his companies in LatAm.- The bull and bear case for LatAm.- How the rise of distributed teams has impacted the region and the talent landscape in LatAm.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Travis Hedge (@the_hedgefund), co-founder of Vouch Insurance, and Nick Shalek (@nshalek), partner at Ribbit Capital, join Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno to discuss:- How Vouch came to be and their vision to be insurance for the innovation economy from inception to IPO.- What Travis and Nick are most excited about in insurtech.- The enormity of the market and the fact that there are so few entrepreneurs with the ability to build in the space.- How companies can grow the size of the market and why this has led to investors missing out on companies like Coalition.- Requests for startups in the space, including opportunities in crypto.- Why it’s never too early to have a board if you’re building in insurtech, even if it’s a synthetic one.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Joe Garafalo, co-founder of Mosaic, and Trevor Oelschig, managing director at General Catalyst, join Erik on this episode to discuss: - How Mosaic is building the future of tooling for modern finance teams and how it started from the team’s time at Palantir.- Why finance has to be the connective tissue for the organization, given that they have a vantage point on the whole company.- Why a CFO needs to have a skillset in data science or computer science.- How to work with your investors effectively and what companies should expect from their venture firm.- Why to think of your relationship with investors as a marriage, the importance of transparency, and the concept of the “trust battery” that gets recharged or depleted as you work with someone.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Brie Wolfson (@zebriez), founder of the The Kool-Aid Factory, joins Erik to discuss:- Why there are detailed playbooks for creating products and other tactical advice for startups, but very little on building culture at your startup.- Why culture is “how it feels to get the work done” and why it’s a set of actions rather than beliefs.- Why it always starts with the founders.- What she learned from Stripe’s approach to crafting their company culture.- The power of setting your company’s “non-values.”- The importance of treating internal comms as a first class product.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Matt Schulman (@Matthewschulman), founder and CEO of Pave, joins Erik to discuss:- Why your company needs a compensation philosophy.- How COVID and The Great Resignation have wreaked havoc on employee compensation.- The fact that employee churn is up 2X over last year and software engineering salaries have increased by 20%.- Competing philosophies on remote employees: “cost of labor” which pays employees based on where they live and “free market” which pays employees the same regardless, and why the “free market” philosophy is gaining ground.- Why consistency is key when it comes to granting equity to candidates. Get access to Pave's benchmarking data for free: https://www.pave.com/benchmarking/village-global-venture-storiesThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup