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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni), author of The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, joins Ben Casnocha on this episode to discuss:

- How diversity and variety of backgrounds and opinions helped PayPal become successful.

- The fact that PayPal’s leading product was not solving a problem that they had set out to solve, but rather a problem they discovered along the way.

- The importance of sitting with your customers and really understanding their perspective and their problems.

- What he learned about Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and David Sacks.

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Joshua Steinman (@JoshuaSteinman), founder and CEO of Galvanick, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- The history of cybersecurity at big industrial companies and how he is building “Splunk for industrial systems” to solve that problem.

- His time at the National Security Council, what motivated him to work in government, and his work creating an “embassy in Silicon Valley.”

- Why, with internet-connected devices, we’ve traded predictable downtime for unpredictable downtime. He gives the example of a Cadbury plant that was completely shut down by malware.

- The different types of cyber attacks, the evolution of war over time, and how to “defend forward” by disabling malware before it shows up on systems.

- The concept of “unrestricted warfare” and the fact that the Chinese government thinks about war as a continuous process across many dimensions while the US typically thinks of war on only one dimension.

- Information operations and how they have affected public opinion in the US on various topics.

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Alex Iskold, co-founder and managing partner at 2048 Ventures and creator of 1kproject.org, joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss:

- What he is doing with 1kproject.org to help the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.

- How he and a team of volunteers are empowering families in the US to send $1,000 directly to the bank card of a Ukrainian family.

- How they use tech to vet applications to make sure the most deserving families receive funds.

- What the money that is sent to Ukrainian families is typically used for.

- The impact of the war on the startup ecosystem in Ukraine.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

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This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner.

Celine discusses what's still non-consensus in longevity, how cognitive aging shapes our preferences and worldviews, and what society looks like when parents stay healthier longer — from socioeconomic mobility to financial planning.

Listen to the full episode here: https://www.villageglobal.com/podcast

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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Martin Gurri (@mgurri), author of The Revolt of the Public, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- The genesis of the thesis about the revolt of the public while Martin was working at the CIA analyzing communications as social media and blogging began to take off.

- The challenges to authority that the free flow of information has presented and why those societies that allow for open communication have been winning.

- The internet’s reactionary moment and whether there will be a “revolt of the revolt.”

- Why he says that China is “the 20th century gone digital” and why he thinks that will not last.

- His belief that democracy will survive and why he thinks that the “psychotic conditions” in American society will not last.

- Why elites need to have humility about their ability to solve problems in society.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Chris Power (@2112Power), founder and CEO of Hadrian, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon to discuss:

- Why manufacturing is key to a strong position in the world order. 

- The changes in the landscape that have enabled a company like Hadrian to be possible now, where it wasn’t five years ago. 

- What Chris would do if he was running the United States to win the new space race.

- How to change the culture in the US so that more serious people can work on serious problems.

- Why it’s easier than you think to get involved in deep tech.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Chris Power (@2112Power), founder and CEO of Hadrian, Katherine Boyle (@KTmBoyle), partner at a16z, and Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh), co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, join Anne Dwane and Erik Torenberg on this episode to discuss:

- How Hadrian is abstracting the supply chain for space, aerospace, and defense manufacturing, and how it is analogous to AWS and Twilio in the software world.

- Why Chris is the right person to tackle this problem. He wants to do this for geopolitical and moral reasons and also has the ability to get into the weeds on a micro level.

- How tech can help people move into higher-skill jobs and how it can increase the total number of jobs in a given field.

- How COVID has made people realize that the world is no longer post-nation state nor post-borders.

- Which policy changes the US government can make to advance its position in the world, technologically and otherwise.

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Mike Maples (@m2jr), founding partner at Floodgate, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon) to discuss:

- Why there has been an “epidemic of fakery” in society over the last 50 years or so. Mike says that institutions are pretending to be working rather than doing actual work.

- Why the right “angle of attack” for societal problems is not head-on but rather to create something completely different than changes the subject entirely.

- Why he advises founders to make sure they are working on an idea that is worthy of their time and why as a founder you need to “get out of the present and start living in the future.”

- How Silicon Valley can have more empathy and make the case for broader prosperity.

- How to build connection and shared purpose in an American society that is increasingly tribal.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Ayo Omojola (https://www.linkedin.com/in/omojola/), SVP of Product at Carbon Health, joins Anne Dwane (@adwane) and Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) to discuss:

- What he noticed moving from fintech to healthtech.

- Advice for people working in a highly regulated industry like healthcare.

- What’s unique about Carbon Health and why healthtech is so promising.

- Why he likes to hire former founders and his favorite interview questions.

- How he thinks about angel investing as an operator and why “angel investing is like a really expensive email newsletter.”

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Delian Asparouhov (@zebulgar), co-founder of Varda Space Industries and principal at Founders Fund, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnammon) on this episode to discuss:

- Why he says that VCs have a moral obligation to fund companies that help keep America a step ahead of its adversaries.

- Why space matters for him personally and why expanding the economic bounds of humankind is the best way to achieve all of humanity’s other goals.

- The current state of the space economy and the space supply chain, and how he sees them evolving in the future.

- Why the US is in a new space race with Russia and China.

- His advice on building a space company for aspiring founders.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Katherine Boyle (@KTmBoyle), GP at a16z, joins Anne Dwane (@adwane) and Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) on this episode to discuss:

- What needs to change inside the federal government for more contracts to go to startups.

- How startups should think about working with state and local governments.

- How trust has declined in public institutions over the last several decades and how companies can credibly step into that void by building in public and telling their own story.

- How Starlink will change where people live and how they live their offline life.

- Why, if people are laughing at you, you’re probably taking yourself seriously enough.

- What tech misunderstands about government and vice versa, including how Silicon Valley came to have a positive sum mindset and Washington ended up with a zero sum mindset.

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Cristina Cordova was the 28th employee at Stripe and grew their partnerships arm from the ground up. Most recently, she led platform & partnerships at Notion, which included starting the Growth Product Team.

In this episode, we discuss how to build a partnerships team, what to look for in BD hires, and the ins and outs of successful deal-making. 

Cristina is an active angel and advisor. You can hear more from her by following @cjc on Twitter.

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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.  To engage further: 

Hosted by: @eriktorenberg 

Produced by: @jacksonsteger

Trae Stephens (@traestephens), co-founder at Anduril and partner at Founders Fund joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon) to discuss:

- What keeps him up at night when he looks at the US today.

- What he would change about the US government if he could wave a magic wand.

- Common mistakes made by people selling to government.

- How they think about acquisitions at Anduril.

- Advice for people looking to build in the defense space.

- What gives him hope when he thinks about the future of the US.

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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Richard Ni is the current Head of People at Scale AI after being the first recruiting hire at Cruise Automation, where he helped bring the team from 10 to 700 in three years.

Prior to leading people teams, Richard was a Software Engineer at Venmo and a Computer Science major at MIT. We discuss the unique perspective that his technical background gives him in recruiting, how to solicit genuine feedback from employees, and build a leveling system.

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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.

Share your thoughts with us on Twitter:

Hosted by: @eriktorenberg
Produced by: @jacksonsteger

Welcome to Recall Sessions – a new series on the Village Global Podcast.

Hosted by Somrat Niyogi, Partner at Recall Capital, each episode goes deep on go-to-market: how the world's most successful companies got their first customers. 

In this episode, Itai Damti, Co-Founder & CEO of Unit, joins Somrat to break down how Unit went from a year of stealth building with no committed customers to becoming the leading embedded finance platform – moving over $50 billion annually and powering programs at seven public companies.

Itai talks about the bet he and co-founder Doron Somech made on a market that barely existed, why they spent a full year building before going to market, how their first customer came through a LinkedIn message, and what he's learned about selling infrastructure that changes how buyers think.

He also shares a framework for categorizing buyers – deciders, explorers, and the "unawares" – and why minding the chasm between your first 5% of customers and the next 95% is where companies live or die.

Thanks for listening – if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

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Village Global's Solarpunk is a new podcast series about technology, space, and defense. We discuss how western society will use technology to adapt to the changing global landscape. We’re inspired by the theme of solarpunk — the mindset of what the planet will look like when humanity succeeds in solving major contemporary challenges through technology.

Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh), co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) and Ian Cinnamon (@IanCinnamon), investors at Village Global, to discuss:

- The problems that some of the leading companies working with the US government have been trying to solve.

- The threats that America faces today and how technology has been used by its adversaries against it.

- New domains where America is in conflict with other countries, including cyber, financial warfare, and space.

- The reinvigoration of space that has been led by SpaceX.

- Josh’s thoughts on polarization and tribalism in the US.

- What people who want to get involved in improving society should do to make a difference.

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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Semil Shah (@semil), investor at Haystack and venture partner at Lightspeed, joins Lucas Bagno to discuss:

- The trends Semil sees in the entrepreneurial landscape today: the ease of getting started as a founder, the fight for ownership among funds, and renewed attention to dilution from founders.

- How he raised his most recent fund at Haystack and how he determined what size of fund to raise.

- The lessons he’s learned about deploying funds.

- What the downturn means for fund managers.

- The state of seed investing.

- The impact of the changes to YC’s standard offer.

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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Michal Cieplinski is the Chief Business Officer at Pipe. He has also spent time as General Counsel and CCO at Fundbox as well as a Senior VP at Lending Club, among other roles.

He describes himself as a lawyer who has never really been a lawyer - meaning that “no” is a rare answer for him to give his fast-moving colleagues.

In this episode, we discussed the important role that a CBO plays at a high growth tech company. Michal shares tips on building legal teams, hiring speed for the rest of the org , and why you should hire for a plan, not a problem.

For anyone thinking deeply about their team’s legal function, this should be a great one.

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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.

Share your thoughts with us on Twitter:

Hosted by: @eriktorenberg
Guest: @m_cieplinski
Produced by: @jacksonsteger

David Sneider (@davidlsneider), of Lit Protocol, and Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), partner at Collab+Currency, join Anne Dwane to discuss:

- What Lit Protocol is, what it enables, and how it is being used today.

- The vision for a different architecture of the internet.

- How user-owned networks would work and their prospects for achieving scale.

- How tokenization allows all stakeholders to capture more of the network effects of a project.

- The biggest challenges present in Web3 and how they might be solved.

- Predictions for the progress of Web3 in the next decade.

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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Olivia Chen was most recently Head of Product at Faire. She joined Faire as their first ops/business hire. By the time she left four years later, Faire had grown to over 750 employees and Olivia was managing a cross-functional team of more than 60 people. 

In this episode, we discussed how to build successful referral programs, how to grow a product team, how to navigate hyper-growth as an early-stage employee, and much more. 

Andrew Yu, Director of On Deck’s Product Management Fellowship, joined as a guest co-host. We hope you enjoy. 

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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.

Share your thoughts with us on Twitter:
Hosted by: @eriktorenberg

Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivia-chen-22b38960/
Guest co-host: @andrewcyu

Produced by: @jacksonsteger

Brought to you by: @beondeck

Sarah Smith is currently a partner at Bain Capital Ventures after an early career of building elite HR teams for huge tech players, including Facebook and Quora, where she helped scale Quora from 40 to 160 people in 3 years.

In this episode, we discussed hiring that first crucial people person, how to train first-time management, how to nail goal setting, and how to improve vesting schedules.

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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.

Share your thoughts with us on Twitter:
Hosted by: @eriktorenberg
Guest: @sasmith4
Produced by: @jacksonsteger

Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi), founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, joins Lucas Bagno (@lucasbagnocv) of Village Global to discuss:

- Sheel’s reflections on raising a fund and the opportunities he sees in fintech today.

- The importance of ownership in seed investing.

- How the fintech landscape has evolved over the last year.

- Why non-fintech companies are integrating fintech into their business.

- Whether banks can be disrupted and the unique regulatory environment that influences the financial market.

- The advice he gives to founders on which investors to work with.

- Opportunities in fintech globally.

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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Anne Dwane is co-founder and partner at Village Global. She was previously CEO at Zinch, a network connecting students with colleges and scholarships. Zinch was acquired by Chegg, where she served as Chief Business Officer, before and after the IPO. Previously, Anne co-founded Military.com, a social and professional network for service members and veterans that was acquired by Monster.

In this episode, they discussed how to do annual planning, how to figure out comp, why the role of a CBO is an allocative role, and much more. 

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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.

Hosted by: @eriktorenberg

Guest: @adwane

Produced by: @jacksonsteger

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.
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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: @eriktorenberg
Guest: @braveben
Guest co-host: @Adam_Gelman
Produced by: @jacksonsteger
Brought 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.

This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Celine Halioua, Founder & CEO of Loyal, which recently raised a $100M Series C, and Village Global GP Sam Kirschner.

Celine discusses Loyal's 10-year vision for expanding into cats and humans, why the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to treat aging as a drug category, and why the biological and economic case for going dogs-first is stronger than most people realize.

Listen to the full episode here: https://www.villageglobal.com/podcast

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.

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.com/signup

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 Levchin

In 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.

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This is a short excerpt from our full conversation with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly Grammarly), and Village Global's Ben Casnocha.

Shishir and Ben discuss the "Silicon Valley Inc. vs. Google Inc." framework for understanding career tradeoffs, when recruitment firms add value vs. when they don't, and how to design a hiring process that produces great outcomes — including the critical role of reference checking.

Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/S7UO7AOLgBA

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.

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.com/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-stories

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