Sand Hill Road

Latest Episodes:

E23 Insights from building a VC firm in public with Initialized Capital founder Garry Tan Apr 23, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Garry Tan, co-founder of Initialized Capital about his journey as a content creator, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital.

00:00 Intro

02:02 Garry's Twitter game

06:00 Keeping up the content cascade

08:12 Getting started on YouTube

10:50 Paying it forward at scale

14:45 Respecting the audience

18:00 Content creation is like building a startup

21:13 Garry as a founder

25:14 Founder "what ifs"

28:26 Garry as a VC

E22 Engineering the atomic cockroach of databases with Cockroach Labs co-founder Spencer Kimball Apr 13, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs about building a database unicorn backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Benchmark, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. After recording the episode, Cockroach Labs raised $160m on a $2bn valuation in January 2021, reflecting the explosive growth and product innovation of 2020.

00:00 Intro

00:56 Cockroach Labs elevator pitch

04:29 Getting the band together

09:24 Exit to Square and paddling back into the startup surf

11:44 First version of CockroachDB

14:17 Open core model

20:43 Relicensing Cockroach DB

25:39 Open source as top of the funnel tool

30:25 Series A from Benchmark and Sequoia Capital

35:15 Series A extension from Index

37:01 Late state startup life at Series D

39:44 CockroachDB technology

48:11 Synchronous replication and CockroachDB

53:50 CAP Theorem and CockroachDB

58:10 CockroachDB and Kubernetes

1:01:10 Spencer's workout regime

E21 Building a distributed warehouse network one parcel at a time with STORD co-founder Sean Henry Mar 05, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Sean Henry, co-founder and CEO of STORD about building a digital warehouse and distribution startup backed by some of Silicon Valley's top venture firms, incl. Susa Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund from Atlanta, Georgia.

00:00 Intro

01:11 Announcing the Series B led by Founders Fund

02:57 What solution does STORD offer?

04:27 Sean Henry's entrepreneurial journey from childhood

13:00 STORD business model

19:50 Solving the two-sided marketplace problem

25:35 Competitive landscape

28:55 Software-enabled marketplace: Software as a wedge to get supply side

35:15 STORD pricing

38:50 STORD as a distributed logistics and storage systems

45:15 Acquisition of Cove Logistics in summer of 2020

48:31 Raising money from Silicon Valley as an Atlanta based startup

54:45 What's next for STORD

E20 Unpacking growth with Andy Johns, Partner at Unusual Ventures Jan 08, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic), Partner at Unusual Ventures about his growth journey at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and Wealthfront.

00:00 Intro

00:37 Growth at Facebook

03:50 Growth at Twitter

05:31 Growth at Quora

09:25 Growth at Wealthfront

12:11 Unusual Ventures

16:25 A balanced approach to growth

21:16 Shipping the org chart

24:29 Running experiments

28:05 Product development for innovation

31:40 Wonderschool

35:22 Ride Report

38:22 Finding out more about Andy

E19 Moving from the monolith to a microservices architecture with effx founder Joey Parsons Dec 24, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner and Cameron Weibel are joined by Joey Parsons, founder of effx to talk about moving from the monolith to a microservices architecture.

00:00
Intro

03:05
From rockstar engineer to found

06:02
Building early social network PicRave

$07:30
Taking the plunge with wife 5 months pregnant

09:00
Founder focus as a young father

10:06
Transitioning from Airbnb to Kleiner Perkins

12:03
Daily life as an entrepreneur in residence

13:46
Defining microservices

14:53
Explaining microservices to a kid

16:28
Microservices vs. structured programming

19:55
Functionality of microservices

22:20
User microservice example

24:15
Starting out: monolith vs. microservices architecture

25:42
Microservices teams: UI, middleware, DBA specialists

28:38
Data layer of microservices

30:56
Microservices vs. monolith debate

34:36
Moving to a microservices architecture at Airbnb

37:59
Managing microservices at Airbnb

42:12
effx and Kubernetes

43:44
Go to market strategy at effx

46:07
Raising the $3.9m Seed round

E18 Looking for the next Cal moonshots with Caroline Winnett of UC Berkeley's SkyDeck Dec 08, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is joined by Caroline Winnett, Executive Director at UC Berkeley's accelerator and incubator SkyDeck.

00:00 Intro

01:51 What is SkyDeck?

02:57 Demo days during Covid-19

03:35 Caroline's founder journey at NeuroFocus

05:24 Joining SkyDeck and setting up the SkyDeck Fund

07:23 Berkeley SkyDeck carry split

08:35 Berkeley SkyDeck LP base

09:50 SkyDeck vs. YC, 500 Startups, Techstars

12:11 Cohort profile and eligibility requirements

14:37 Accelerator milestones

15:22 Breakout success stories

16:26 Berkeley within Silicon Valley ecosystem

18:33 Future of SkyDeck

E17 Migrating lawyers to the cloud with legal technologist Richard Mabey, co-founder of Juro Sep 17, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Richard Mabey, co-founder of London-based legaltech startup Juro, backed by Union Square Ventures.

00:00 Intro

02:01 Magic circle years at Freshfields

03:35 Catching the entrepreneurial bug

05:15 Transitioning to legaltech via LegalZoom

07:26 Meeting co-founder Pavel Kovalevich

08:43 The Juro Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

09:54 Getting the first customer

13:15 Finding customer pains and building the core product features

15:06 Core feature set: painkiller vs. vitamin

17:05 Early pricing

18:34 Selling Saas to corporate lawyers

19:59 Tech stack of Juro

21:11 Seedcamp accelerator

22:40 $750k Seed Round led by Point Nine Capital

24:24 $2m Seed extension round

25:15 $5m Series A led by Union Square Ventures

26:15 Getting a warm intro at USV

27:01 Deploying the Series A

28:12 Navigating through the Corona pandemic

E16 Unpacking marketplaces and modern food delivery wars with Mike Ghaffary from Canvas Ventures Aug 29, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Mike Ghaffary, GP at Canvas Ventures.

00:00 Intro

02:21 Swiss army knife of education

04:04 Business school after Dotcom bubble burst

05:06 Founding Stitcher

06:14 Focusing on news

08:03 Becoming CEO of Eat24

09:39 Growing Eat24 to $700m top line

10:45 Food delivery wars

11:55 Grubhub Partnership that never launched

13:12 Jeremy Stoppelman and Steve Jobs on search on mobile

14:30 Becoming a successful angel investor

15:35 Making the most expensive iPhone app ever

16:37 Angel investment in Strava

17:20 Angel investment in Superhuman

17:50 Joining Social Capital

19:58 Mike’s experience at Social Capital

20:28 CloudKitchens investment

21:30 HubHaus investment

22:37 Joining Canvas Ventures

24:04 Flyhomes investment

27:52 Marketplace Deep Dive

28:27 Lenny Rachitsky: focus on supply or demand side?

30:06 Thomas Eisenmann: Two-sided networks

30:57 Uber: demand side vs. supply side subsidies

32:09 Local vs. global network effects

33:24 Sarah Tavel (Benchmark) on unlocking new supply

34:21 Local delivery war zones

35:36 Uber Eats entering the market

37:04 Public vs. privately held delivery war contenders

38:54 Marketplace take rate

40:38 Out-of bound marketplace take rates

41:57 Zero percent take rate

E15 Building a cloud unicorn for developers with Digital Ocean co-founder Moisey Uretzky Aug 08, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Moisey Uretzky, co-founder of Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is a cloud infrastructure unicorn built for developers and headquartered in New York City. In this episode we journal the founder journey from getting into Techstars to scaling the company with venture debt to a recent unicorn valuation.

00:00 Setting the scene

03:55 The Uretzky family

05:22 Roots of intellectual curiosity

07:15 Mathematics and first principles thinking

09:18 Startups before Digital Ocean

14:16 Finding co-founders on Craigslist

19:16 Digital Ocean MVP

23:12 First major Product Iteration: 5$ SSD Plan

29:36 Getting into Techstars

32:35 Raising the Seed from IA Ventures

37:19 Raising the Series A from a16z

42:28 Using venture debt to scale up

47:19 Scaling up Digital Ocean

54:22 Competition with big tech cloud providers

59:00 Running Digital Ocean during the Corona pandemic

E14 The great hits and misses of venture capital with Brendan Wales of e.ventures Jul 21, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Brendan Wales, general partner at e.ventures on investing in data infrastructure unicorn Segment at the Seed and passing on TikTok (then Musical.ly) at the Series A.

0:00 Sand Hill Road Intro

2:10 First job running a Golf shop while at college

3:20 First job out of college in 2009 and entrepreneurial ambitions

4:29 'I gotta get to the Valley' finding Zozi's on Crunchbase

6:06 Joining e.ventures in 2012

7:52 History and roots of e.ventures

9:53 e.ventures current fund and global footprint

11:10 Investing in Segment.io at the Seed along with Kleiner Perkins

15:08 Consumer-tech perspective on Segment

16:02 Passing on Musical.ly/TikTok

17:30 Warm introductions vs. metric-based discovery (digital exhaust)

20:30 Metrics requested from Musical.ly/TikTok founding team / key consumer social metrics