Village Global Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Somrat Niyogi sits down with two of the most experienced comms operators in tech: Kelly Boynton, Head of Communications at Gusto, and Paul Loeffler, former SVP of Communications and Brand at BILL.

Kelly spent 15 years across agency and in-house roles before Gusto, including at Facebook, Instagram, Intuit, Navan, and DocuSign. Before BILL, Paul led integrated communications at Gusto and was at Atlassian pre-IPO, helping scale it as a public company.

They cover what founders get wrong about launches and PR, when an agency is worth it (and when it is not), why your story should be about value rather than valuation, why reporters write about trends rather than companies, why 95% of stealth companies should not be in stealth, and the comms playbook for breaking through the noise.

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Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor.

Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. They cover what he learned scaling Forethought through the GPT-1 to GPT-4 era, why the Iron Man Jarvis vision is finally within reach for everyone (not just Silicon Valley), the three pillars of Espa, why the model labs have perverse incentives that leave the door open for a new app-layer winner, the surprising network effect that emerges when one Espa starts talking to another, and where personal productivity AI is heading over the next five to ten years.

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.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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Welcome to Recall Sessions - a series on the Village Global Podcast hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital. Each episode goes deep on how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. 

In this episode, Somrat sits down with Tomer London, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Gusto, to discuss how he and his co-founders built the leading payroll and HR platform for small businesses. Gusto serves over 400,000 businesses today and is valued at $9.5 billion - but it started as ZenPayroll, with a product scoped down to California-only, under five employees, salary only, and no benefits.

Tomer talks about growing up in his dad's clothing store in Israel and building an inventory system at age 12, cold-calling businesses off Yelp before writing a single line of code, the Thai restaurant lunch that confirmed they were onto something, why charging $2 per employee per month was a mistake, and how building for small businesses is startup in hard mode - but worth it if the pain is big enough.

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.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal.

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- The narrative that China can do no wrong and why Noah says it is out of date at this point.

- The long-term headwinds that China is facing, including demographic changes, resource limitations, and real estate challenges.

- Why America should raise tariffs on anything made in China where it would be strategically important for those goods to be made somewhere else.

- The state of real estate in China, including the fact that China’s economy is 30% real estate (double the percentage in the US) and that cities in China are sprawling and more akin to Chicago than Tokyo or Seoul.

- Xi Jinping’s performance to date, why he’s “picking losers” in the Chinese stock market to try to bolster certain industries, and why the Zero COVID push is about Xi trying to appear strong.

- The fact that China could be moderately competent and could still take over the world because of its sheer size.

- Noah’s book recommendations for people who want to learn more about China.

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.

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Jacob Helberg (@jacobhelberg), foreign policy expert and author of The Wires of War, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- Why he says peace through trade was the biggest foreign policy miscalculation in US history.

- How US companies have approached operating in China and why Jacob would advise them to proactively work to decouple themselves from the Chinese market.

- Why Jacob would prefer that American laws change to restrict Chinese investments in US companies.

- Why the Belt and Road Initiative has come to be seen as a debt trap.

- What keeps him optimistic and what ordinary Americans can do if they are concerned about China.

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.

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Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen) is an economist, professor, and best-selling author. His latest book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, written with co-author Daniel Gross, is available now. Tyler discusses how to discover undervalued talent, the importance of stamina, the best interview questions, peer ratings, late bloomers, 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.

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Geoff Lewis (@GeoffLewisOrg), founder at Bedrock, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- His thoughts on the markets and the advice he has for founders operating in a market like this one.

- What is driving financial nihilism and how it has changed society.

- Why he’s only investing in founders where their company is their life’s work.

- Bedrock’s investments in hardware and companies making things in the physical world.

- The perils of politics replacing religion as our mechanism for forming community.

- The crisis of meaning in society.

- The institutionalization of venture capital over the last decade and why he’s an advocate of going back to basics with small teams making fewer high conviction investments.

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.

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Bilal Zuberi (@bznotes), partner at Lux Capital, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- Bilal’s investing thesis of finding companies building solutions to interesting problems that impact a lot of people.

- Why he’s investing in space and defense companies.

- What keeps him up at night and how his investments are working on those areas.

- Why he’s optimistic about unifying America.

- How to solve the problem of different people having different sets of facts.

- Whether there will be a reckoning for American firms that have invested in Chinese companies.

- His advice to founders building in complex markets and working with the government.

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.

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Hemant Taneja (@htaneja), managing partner at General Catalyst and author of Intended Consequences, joins Anne Dwane and Village Global’s newest partner, Prateek Alsi, to discuss:

- What responsible innovation is and how tech can do good in the world using the framework.

- How founders should think about responsible innovation at the earliest stages of a company.

- The importance of thinking from first principles.

- Lessons from the creation process of the companies Hemant has been involved in.

- A better alternative to “move fast and break things.”

- Which areas he excited about investing in, including healthcare and India.

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.

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Laura Crabtree (@llcrabbie), founder and CEO of Epsilon3, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode to discuss:

- What she accomplished during her time at SpaceX and her journey to starting Epsilon3.

- Whether the biggest contribution of SpaceX to the industry will be all the amazing people leaving to start their own space companies.

- How to get into the space industry if you don’t already have a background in it.

- Why a company like Epsilon3 hasn’t been built before.

- The importance of being vulnerable as a founder.

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.

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