Village Global Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel, a company that provides the developer tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. He was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Takeaways:

- Any modern cloud-native app is a nexus of services that all work together to create a coherent interface for the user. For example, Auth0 handles login, Stripe handles billing, React is used for the interface, among many more services all working in concert. Vercel helps ensure that the user has an amazing experience no matter what services are all working together on the back end.

- Guillermo tells the story of open source Unix winning out over proprietary versions of Linux, even though the proprietary versions had an early lead. He suggests that over the long term, open source will win, more often than not, and that the same story will likely play out when it comes to AI models, with open source models winning out in the end.

- When it comes to investing, Guillermo loves to bet on someone who has been obsessed with a topic for years and years. He recounts the story of the Auth0 team who had written books and given talks and spent years of their lives just on logging in and logging out. He also says that he prefers a leadership team that lives and breathes a company’s problem space. He says that he's allergic to the idea of a professional leadership team swooping in at a certain stage.

- Rauch was born and raised in Argentina. He says that he has a sense of urgency and that tomorrow is not promised that stems from his childhood experience growing up in Argentina. He tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg keeping the Sun Microsystems logo on the back of the Facebook sign at their headquarters when they moved in to cultivate a sense that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.

- Guillermo believes in giving his team leads radical ownership of their products. He provides the leads with frameworks that explain clear principles for how they build products at Vercel but beyond that he gives the leads a long leash and a sense of ownership over the 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

Michael Balaoing, founder of Candlelion, joins Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha on this episode to discuss:

- The importance of the acronym WTF (what’s the feeling?) when you’re giving a presentation.

- The four roles that you take on as a speaker: captain, pilot, guide, and game show host.

- The five questions to ask when seeking feedback on a presentation.

- How to keep the audience engaged throughout a talk, not just during the Q&A at the end.

- How to bake stories into your presentations and remix your talks for different audiences.

- The keys to virtual communication.

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

Christopher Ailman (@CJAtheCIO), Chief Investment Officer at CalSTRS, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:

- CalSTRS, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, was created in 1913 and is actually older than Social Security. It has over 400 members who are over 100 years old who are still receiving their pension.

- Chris says no bear market is alike and that the key is to have the discipline during that time period to actually start buying.

- Chris says the key to success as an investor is in being intentional about the culture you create. When Chris is evaluating a portfolio manager he likes to and sit on the floor with the employees and see what the vibe is like.

- A lot of investors take a lot of econ and business classes but should take more psychology classes to deal with the human side of things (vs. the numbers side). He says that selecting portfolio managers is much more difficult than picking stocks.

- Chris says that the energy transition will dwarf all trends over the next fifteen years. He says that by 2035 parts of the earth will start to become uninhabitable and there will be mass migrations to other areas.

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

Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

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-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

Meka Asonye (@BigMekaStyle), partner at First Round Capital, joined Ben Casnocha at a Village Global event to discuss:

- Meka’s time with the Cleveland Indians and what it taught him about finding hidden talent.

- Why customer obsession is so important to Meka when looking at a potential investment and concrete examples of what that looks like in practice.

- Lessons on customer obsession from Stripe and Mixpanel. He says that the Collisons had lunch with users every Friday and evangelized “teaching with every touch,” meaning leaving every user with more knowledge about the product at every interaction.

- How an early-stage startup can get in the door at a large organization. He says to make sure to target the right person at the organization and offer tidbits about how other organizations are looking at a problem.

- Common mistakes that founders make when pitching investors, including why having all the answers can be a red flag, and how to nail the right balance of confidence and humility.

- How much money to raise at the early stage, including why you shouldn’t just raise as much money as you possibly can and instead should be most concerned with finding the right fit with the right firm.

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