The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
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Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Future of Work: Leveraging Technology to Provide a Better Employee Experience and Cultivate Healthy Company Culture, with Claire Schmidt of AllVoices
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
12/30/21 • 25 min
Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Claire Schmidt (@clairecaveny), Founder and CEO of AllVoices, an employee feedback management platform that empowers employees to anonymously provide feedback, ask questions, share positive input, and report harassment, bias, or culture issues directly to their company’s leadership. With AllVoices, companies gain access to real-time data and analytics that help them make proactive decisions and resolve issues before they become organizational norms. AllVoices helps companies build sustainable and healthy cultures, where engaged employees speak up and feel heard.
While Claire was working as the Vice President of Technology and Innovation at 20th Century Fox she came across Susan Fowler's blog, exposing the toxic harassment she experienced as a software engineer at Uber. The story occupied part of Claire’s mind for months. She began speaking with HR professionals and discovered that the tools available to employees to share feedback or report issues were ineffective, ominous and rarely used. The whistleblower hotlines in the market were outdated and clunky. This lack of an effective and comprehensive employee feedback management platform, was encouraging toxic workplace cultures of silence and unresolved, systemic issues. So Claire began building AllVoices. Then Susan’s voice along with countless others became the start of the #MeToo movement, and the potential of AllVoices became even more clear to investors and supporters, launching our rapid growth. Now, they’re the leading Employee Feedback Management Platform, trusted by leading companies and preferred by employees.
Website: AllVoices
Podcast: AllVoices, Reimagining Company Culture
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/clairecschmidt
Twitter: @clairecaveny
Email: [email protected]
Show Notes:
- What AllVoices is and how Claire came up with the idea
- Leveraging technology to provide a better employee experience
- How Claire’s passion led her to take the leap from leaving her full time position at 20th Century Fox to being an entrepreneur
- The pain points and gap in the market that Claire discovered in her research, which led to the founding of AllVoices
- Starting AllVoices in the midst of the Harvey Weinstein scandal
- Onboarding her first customers before she even had a product
- The challenges of rushing to build a safe and secure platform for sensitive information
- How the product has evolved over the past few years
- How the COVID-19 pandemic and the explosion of remote work impacted use cases for AllVoices
- Claire’s advice for proactively building a great company culture and how they're doing so at AllVoices
- Claire’s perspective on the decision around in-person versus remote work
- How to hire great people and actively listen to your employees
More about the show:
The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.
Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.
The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.
The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.
More about us:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212
Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/
Angel Investing: Creating Your Thesis, Building Conviction, and Investing in the Future of Work with Stella Garber, Former Head of Marketing at Trello
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
11/24/21 • 24 min
In this episode of The Vitalize Podcast, Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Stella Garber (@startupstella) former Head of Marketing at Trello and Anger Investor. Stella invests in the future of work and serves as an advisor for Origin Ventures and OpenView. She has invested in 4 women-led funds in 2021 alone and continues to add to her portfolio of more than 25 startups, some of which include Cameo, Tovala, Beam. Her experience as an investor has made her bullish on the value of creating your own investment thesis as an angel investor; being hands-on, and having conviction in your investments.
Before actively angel investing and advising early-stage tech companies and venture funds, Stella built Trello's marketing team and strategy as the first marketing executive and led the team through a $425 million acquisition by Atlassian.
Stella's Twitter: https://twitter.com/startupstella
Show Notes
- How Stella started angel investing (In 2016)
- How her first investment went public and the second one failed
- Investing as an LP in venture capital funds
- Stella's 27 investments so far
- How Stella thought about her portfolio after her first investment
- The different ways to do angel investing (LP, SPVs, AngelList syndicates, direct)
- Why Stella has been doing more direct cap table investing
- The value of creating your own investment thesis as an angel investor
- Thinking about where you can add value as an angel investor
- Areas the Stella enjoys investing in
- Why Stella invests in the future of work
- How Stella gets conviction around writing a check
- How angel investing enables wealth creation
- How Stella thinks through allocating her angel investing dollars
- Gender disparity between women sharing deals and men sharing deals
- Investor networks and the ones Stella is involved with
- Diversity on cap tables and founders saving room on their cap tables for women and people of color
- Balancing being a full-time employee and angel investor
- How hands-on Stella is with her angel investments and what she helps companies with
- The expertise investors can bring to founders
- The question to ask yourself as an investor
- Ways to get access to deals as an angel investor
- How Stella got started as an LP and the importance of getting more women and people of color LPs in VC
- Future of work trends Stella is interested in
More about the show:
The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.
Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.
The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.
The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.
More about us:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212
Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/
Startup Investing: Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures on Getting Access to Deals, Moats for Startups, and Insights from 70 Angel Investments
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
11/16/21 • 30 min
In this episode of The Vitalize Podcast, Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Leo Polovets (@lpolovets). Leo Polovets is a co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures. He invests across sectors but mostly focuses on b2b companies. A few specific sectors he's invested in heavily are enterprise software; developer tools and technical products; and logistics and supply chain. He led Susa's investments in dozens of companies, including Outlier, Pex, Scalyr, and Stedi.
Having been a software engineer for 10+ years, he approaches challenges with an engineering mindset and supports portfolio companies in vetting and hiring technical talent.
Prior to Susa, he was the second engineering hire at Linkedin where he helped build the first versions of products like LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Groups. He then worked on payment fraud detection algorithms at Google and was also an early engineer at Factual, where he built data cleaning, processing, and deduping software.
Leo's Blog: https://www.codingvc.com/
Leo's Twitter: https://twitter.com/lpolovets
Topics Discussed:
- The story around Susa Ventures' investment in Pex
- 3 big risks Pex had as a company and why Susa Ventures invested a couple of years after initially meeting them
- The importance of moats in startups and why they are a key to what Susa Ventures looks for in companies
- Moats that people don't talk much about including Robinhood's UX moat
- A "schlep moat"
- How to get access to deals as an investor
- Why being a focused investor can attract founders
- The importance of investing in underserved markets
- Sourcing, vetting, and winning when it comes to hiring technical talent
- How Susa Ventures built its reputation over time
- How Leo got started angel investing and invested in 70 companies
- What Leo looks for from angel investing
- How learning accelerates through angel investing
- Building a portfolio of angel investments
- Determining a check size for angel investing
- Why you should spread your investments out over a number of companies and years
- Thoughts on founders becoming angel investors
- What Leo is most excited about in VC
More about the show:
The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.
Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.
The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.
The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.
More about us:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212
Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/
Sid Pandiya, Co-Founder & CEO of Kona | #006
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
05/28/21 • 49 min
Sid Pandiya is the Co-Founder & CEO of Kona ( https://www.heykona.com/ ) the EQ platform for teams, that helps companies build their team culture in Slack.
Future of Work: Building Infrastructure for Modern Hiring with Kai Han, Co-Founder of Pallet
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
08/02/21 • 41 min
Kai Han is the Co-Founder of Pallet. Pallet is building an infrastructure for modern hiring through tools designed for communities and creators. Founded in 2020, Pallet has raised 7 million in funding over 2 rounds.
More about Vitalize:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Wes Kao, Co-Founder of Maven | Episode #011
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
07/15/21 • 56 min
Wes Kao is the Co-Founder of Maven, a platform for cohort-based and community-driven courses. Maven partners with the world's best instructors to deliver a live and online student experience at scale.
Prior to Maven, Wes was the co-founder of the altMBA where she helped grow it to thousands of students in over 550 cities globally. She specializes in building cohort-based courses and writes a newsletter on marketing, online courses, & thinking.
Doubling Fund I to Raise a $203M Fund II, What Makes a Stellar Founder, and Why a Market Downturn is a Great Time to Invest in Startups, with Marlon Nichols of MaC Venture Capital
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
09/01/22 • 20 min
Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Marlon Nichols (@MarlonCNichols), the founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in visionary founders building the future that the world wants to see, and helping entrepreneurs bring the future into focus to find their breakthrough moment. MaC Venture Capital is the result of the merger between successful Los Angeles and Bay Area based Seed funds, Cross Culture Ventures and M Ventures. They are focused on finding ideas, technology, and products that can become infectious, investing in technology companies that benefit from shifts in cultural trends and behaviors in an increasingly diverse global marketplace. They recently raised their $203M Fund II.
Marlon is a Kauffman Fellow who also serves on the Board of Directors. Prior to MaC Venture Capital, Marlon was founder of Cross Culture Ventures and served as Investment Director at Intel Capital. Marlon has an extensive background in technology, private equity, media and entertainment. His unique eye for global and cultural trends, along with shifts in consumer behavior, has helped him uplift and accelerate entrepreneurs and companies that are on the verge of their breakthrough moment. Some of his current and previous portfolio companies include Blavity, Gimlet Media, LISNR, Mayvenn, MongoDB, PlayVS, Pipe, Thrive Market and Wonderschool, among others.
Marlon was recently honored as a member of the 2022 class of the LA500 list and as a top early stage investor on Insider’s 2022 Seed 100 list. Additionally, he is the recipient of MVMT50’s SXSW 2018 Innovator of the Year award, Digital Diversity’s Innovation & Inclusion Change Agent award and was a TechWeek 100 winner. He was named Pitchbook’s 25 Black Founders and VCs to Watch in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and one of Silicon Republic's 26 VC professionals spearheading change. Marlon has been featured on TechCrunch, Fortune, Cheddar, MSNBC, Blavity and NBC, and is adjunct faculty in entrepreneurship and venture capital at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University.
Website: MaC Venture Capital
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marloncnichols/
Twitter: @MarlonCNichols
Marlon on the Just Go Grind Podcast in March 2021: Episode #285 on JGG
Show Notes:
- What enabled MaC Venture Capital to double their first raise, closing a $203M Fund II
- The value of a strong reserves strategy
- MaC Venture Capital’s investment in Pipe, which transforms recurring revenue into up-front capital for growth without dilution or restrictive debt
- The story behind MaC Venture Capital’s investment in Truebill, now Rocket Money (check out Co-Founder Haroon Mokhtarzada’s episode on the Just Go Grind podcast)
- What makes a stellar founder
- How they ended up investing in Mahmee and what makes their founder Melissa Hanna such an investable founder
- Where Marlon is excited to invest next
- How Marlon educates himself on new geographies and markets
- Marlon’s perspective on investing in the current market downturn
More about the show:
The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 400+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.
Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.
The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.
The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.
More about us:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline -
Austen Allred, Co-Founder & CEO at Lambda School | Episode #010
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
07/08/21 • 53 min
Austen Allred is the Co-Founder & CEO of the Lambda School, an online coding school that invests in the students by offering free tuition. Founded in 2017, the Lambda School is currently helping graduates land jobs at Fortune 500 companies to some of the top startups globally.
Austen was formerly the co-founder of Grasswire and co-author of the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce. Austen's ideas on the future of work have been featured on TechCrunch, WIRED, The Harvard Business Review & more.
Taking on Amazon by Changing Consumer Behavior, the Evolution of Customer Acquisition, and How to Vet Investors, with Zach Hudson of Deft
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
09/08/22 • 29 min
Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Zach Hudson (@nosduhz), co-founder of Deft, an ad-free, SEO-free search engine for e-commerce. A VITALIZE portfolio company, they are building the future of e-commerce search by enabling its users to find, research, and buy products all in one place.
Zach has 7+ years of experience in e-commerce and gaming technologies, and is a second-time founder. He is a product manager by trade, and a self-taught developer.
Website: Deft
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hudsonzp/
Twitter: @nosduhz
Show Notes:
- How Deft is enabling trustworthy e-commerce searches
- The evolution of Deft’s product over the last 2 years (since their presentation to Tyler Cowen)
- Zach’s background and how he teamed up with co-founder Alex Gunnarson
- Narrowing down their target and why they started in the furniture and home decor category
- Early customer discovery and product development via their “Wizard of Oz” approach
- How they drove early customer acquisition via organic communities
- From non-scalable acquisition strategies to the diversification of channels
- The challenges and complexities of indexing products
- The evolution of Deft’s business model
- Determining where to establish a paywall for their product
- Taking on Amazon and Google, and what differentiates Deft
- How they vet investors
- Establishing roles and responsibilities as co-founders
- How being data driven fuels their growth
- Which metrics they value most
- Creating stickiness in their product
- What’s next for Deft
- Developing a browser extension and making UX effortless
More about the show:
The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 400+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.
Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.
The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.
The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.
More about us:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212
Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/
Raising a $25M Fund, Implementing a Narrow Investment Thesis, and Hawke Ventures’ Unique Portfolio Construction Strategy, with Drew Leahy
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing
07/07/22 • 37 min
Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Drew Leahy, Managing Partner at Hawke Ventures (@hawkeventures), an early stage consumer and B2B marketing technology fund. He is also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Hawke Media. Prior to Hawke, Leahy was Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of SnapSuits.com, a tech-forward men’s fashion e-retailer with over $2M+ in revenue. Drew was also Entrepreneur-in-Residence at memBrain in Los Angeles, making investments with tech and entertainment angel investors Ken Hertz and Liz Heller.
He is a data-driven, product focused entrepreneur and VC, motivated by the thousands of softwares that power brands. He has extensive experience in consumer mobile & web, b2b SaaS, social media, video, apparel, and entertainment verticals.
His product mantra: Vision (big), Execution (small), Test (thorough), Revise (smart). Repeat. He obsesses over conversion rate optimization, which is part art, part science.
Website: Hawke Ventures & Hawke Media
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drewleahy/
Twitter: @hawkeventures
Email: [email protected]
Drew’s first podcast episode with Justin in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8w_JjvSokc
Show Notes:
- The journey from closing Hawke Ventures’ first $5.6M fund to raising a $25M fund
- How Drew is thinking about building out their team & how different firms approach the platform role
- How Hawke Ventures leverages the relationship with Hawke Media
- What Hawke Ventures is looking for in potential portfolio companies with their lead check fund
- Hawke Ventures’ unique portfolio construction strategy and the value of a narrow investment thesis
- Evaluating companies’ alignment with their thesis and what it means to hustle alongside their founders
- Some of the stories behind Hawke Ventures’ portfolio companies and how their “tracker checks” work
- What makes them repeat-invest in a company
- How their diversity-focused Venture Scout Program came about
- Drew’s thoughts on the current VC market
More about the show:
The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.
Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.
The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.
The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.
More about us:
Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212
Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/
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FAQ
How many episodes does The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing have?
The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing currently has 82 episodes available.
What topics does The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing cover?
The podcast is about Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Startup, Podcasts and Business.
What is the most popular episode on The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing?
The episode title 'The VITALIZE Podcast Presents: Off Topic, with Andrew Gazdecki and Gale Wilkinson Discussing Twitter Trends, AI as the Next Frontier, and Predictions for 2023' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing?
The average episode length on The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing is 33 minutes.
How often are episodes of The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing released?
Episodes of The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing are typically released every 6 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing?
The first episode of The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing was released on May 5, 2021.
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