The #ANGELS Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Rachael Horowitz, Comms Executive from Coinbase, Twitter, FB, and Google Jul 05, 2021

Rachael has played a pivotal comms role at the biggest consumer internet companies of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Coinbase, where she was recently VP of Comms. And she's just taken her next leap, joining the crypto team as a partner at A16Z!

We talk with Rachael about the often misunderstood role of comms at a start-up, why it's better to rip the bandaid off and apologize when a company makes a mistake, and why crypto is such an exciting frontier.

We wrap up each episode with a shoutout and Rachael highlights Emilie Choi, President & COO of Coinbase.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them. You'll hear from our rotating set of hosts, the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde.

We’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels.

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Edit Audio.

Brianne Kimmel, Founder of Worklife VC Jun 28, 2021

Brianne Kimmel launched her first fund for Worklife in the fall of 2019 and has quickly broken out as a new emerging fund manager. She funds companies building the future, in her own words: “Where work is more creative and anyone can start something. Where life is more flexible and not tied to an office. Where everyone is a triple threat.” She’s backed standout companies like Hopin, Deel, Pipe, Public, Charthop, and others and we chat with Brianne about how she’s done it as she gears up for Fund II.

We dig into how she spends her time (hint: helping companies recruit is key!), why community is an important foundation for Worklife, and how to scale the relationship driven parts of the job.

We wrap up each episode with a shoutout and Brianne highlights Paige Doherty who recently wrote a book, “Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital”, helping make venture more accessible and understandable.

We’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels.

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Edit Audio.

Steven Galanis, CEO and Co-Founder of Cameo Jun 14, 2021

Steven Galanis, CEO of Cameo, has built one of the most fascinating companies in the creator economy and Jana and Katie sit down with him to hear how he did it. They explore his early entrepreneurial roots of running a party business in college, how he overcame the cold start problem of getting a marketplace flywheel going, and how he founded the company in Chicago and has now transitioned to running a fully remote team while based in Miami.

The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them.

We’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels.

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Edit Audio.

Merci Grace, Advisor, Investor & Product Builder May 31, 2021

Today’s episode is full of real talk with Merci Victoria Grace. Merci is an investor, advisor and product builder. She was previously a venture capitalist at Lightspeed, Director of Product at Slack, and started her career as a founder of a social gaming company after pursuing a degree in fiction writing from USC.

Jana, April and Merci talk about their family backgrounds and what it’s like to navigate Silicon Valley having no exposure to the business cultural norms of the industry growing up, what to look for in founders they back, and why understanding what they call ‘invisible work’ is crucial for building customer empathy.

We wrap up each episode with a shout out to people who have inspired us along the way. Merci gives a shout out to her husband, Yanda Erlich, and Michael Dearing, founder of Harrison Metal.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced by Matt Herrero and edited by editaudio.

Varsha Rao, CEO of Nurx May 24, 2021

Varsha Rao is the CEO of Nurx, a leading telehealth platform focused on women. Through Nurx, you can get prescriptions, like contraception, acne treatment, migraine treatment, and at-home testing delivered to your door. Jana invested in Nurx’s seed round in 2016 and introduced Varsha to the company as an angel investor and, years later, Varsha was recruited as CEO.

We talk with Varsha about how her prior roles—as COO of Clover Health, Head of Global Operations at Airbnb, and founding an ecommerce company in the 90s— prepared her to lead a company at the intersection of healthcare and consumer technology.

Varsha shares why she’s so passionate about Nurx’s work to break down barriers to accessing healthcare: “Access hurdles come in a number of forms. One is a geographic...about 20M women live in contraception deserts...second is economics - it can be expensive to access care - the third is really around stigma.”

Lastly, we like to wrap up with shoutouts to people who have helped us along the way. Varsha highlights Regina Benjamin, former US Surgeon General in the Obama Administration, and Nurx Board Director.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Jessica Ewing, CEO and Founder of Literati May 17, 2021

Jessica Ewing has an infectious energy and unstoppable determination to create a business at the intersection of literature and consumer software. She and Katie overlapped in their early careers at Google and when we heard she was starting a company, Literati, Katie and Jess jumped at the chance to be early investors.

Katie sits down with Jessica in Austin (vaccines FTW!) and Jess joins remotely to talk about her path to founding Literati, a Series B stage company. Jessica’s raised $50M+ in venture capital from Felicis, 01 Advisors, Founders Fund, and others but candidly shares the early fundraising process was hard and most VCs didn’t get the pitch. We talk about the dynamic art and tech scene in Austin, where Jessica is based, operating the company through Covid, and Literati’s expansion from kids book clubs to adult book clubs.

Lastly, we like to wrap up with shoutouts to people who have helped us along the way. Jessica highlights Bret Taylor: “When I was first starting out, he took my meeting and he was running Quip at the time. He just put an injection of courage in my arm. And he made so many intros and he was like, I love it. Let's do it. Let's build it.”

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

TLC Collective (Terri Burns, Lauren Stephanian, and Casey Caruso) May 14, 2021

We started #ANGELS (“Hashtag Angels”) six years ago as an investment collective to collaborate, pool our expertise and networks, and learn and grow as investors together. Over the years, we’ve often been asked the collective model and how it works.

On today’s episode, Jess dives into this topic with the TLC investment collective, to learn from co-founders Terri Burns, Lauren Stephanian, and Casey Caruso. TLC was started in early 2020, and just one year in they’ve made 11 investments and designed a robust set of processes for tracking deals, evaluating founders, and writing investment memos.

Terri, Lauren, and Casey each have technical backgrounds and pride themselves on “making and breaking” alongside founders. The best way to learn about NFTs? Why not design and drop one? To learn in public, they open sourced their investment memo for one of their first deals, Watershed Informatics.

We talk about each of their paths into venture, where Terri is a partner at GV, Lauren is a principal at Pantera Capital, and Casey works part time as an advisor to Bessemer while also a full time engineer at Google working on research systems.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Terri highlights Freia Lobo and Dave Municello; Casey thanks Stanford professor Andrew Ng, as well as her whole Bessemer team, and Lauren shares how she’s been inspired by the peers around her.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Claire Hughes Johnson, COO of Stripe May 10, 2021

For our latest episode, we welcome Claire Hughes Johnson, the COO of Stripe. Claire has been an executive at Stripe for more than 6 years, joining when the company was ~160 people. She’s overseen an incredible growth cycle for the company, which has most recently been valued at nearly $100Bn+

April and Jana talk with Claire about her path into tech from her early stint in politics. Claire shares:

“It's actually very entrepreneurial too. You raise a ton of money and you spend a lot of it really fast... but it was very scrappy, you're doing seven jobs....so campaigns are actually great training for startups.”

“What I was looking for in my career was impact. You want to do something important, you want to do something that matters....And for me, that's about economic growth, job creation. Like how can we do things that help...I still have the idealistic Silicon Valley view that tech can be a helper.”

We also dig into the COO hiring process: what was Patrick and the Stripe team looking for? How did Claire get to know them? What does the COO role entail? How has it shifted over time? Claire shares:

“If you're at a growth stage company, it's whatever the company needs at any given moment. So it's going to be changing...in line with your skills. And by the way, my portfolio...has changed a lot over the years. And it's changing again right now. And I think that's because Stripe is changing so much and that's the right thing to do. In fact, we portfolio shift a lot across the executive team, which I think is really healthy because what you need in one moment is very different than another one.”

Lastly, we zoom out to talk about how serving on the Hallmark board has been a helpful reminder to broaden perspective beyond Silicon Valley.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Claire highlights Condoleezza Rice, Stacy Brown Philpot, and the next generation of founders coming up in the industry.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Tammy Sun, Co-Founder and CEO of Carrot May 03, 2021

For our latest episode, we welcome Tammy Sun, the co-founder of Carrot, a tech centric fertility benefits company that we've backed at #ANGELS. Carrot is making it cheaper, simpler and easier for employees to get access to fertility services through their platform. Tammy started her career in politics and made the leap to tech when she joined Evernote nearly a decade ago.

Jana and Chloe talk with Tammy about their personal fertility journeys and how her own journey led her to found Carrot. We also talk about the technology, business models and ethics of the fertility sector and how it could evolve in the coming decades.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Tammy highlights the community from Evernote and we talk about how employee mafia networks are the best support systems.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Adrian Aoun, Co-Founder and CEO of Forward Apr 19, 2021

For our latest episode, we welcome Adrian Aoun. Adrian is a serial entrepreneur who started his first company as a teenager, sold his second - Wavii - to Google, and is now building the tech-centric healthcare company, Forward.

Jessica and Jana talk with Adrian about lessons from selling his company, how he ended up on the founding team of Sidewalk, a bet within Alphabet, and how he would approach redesigning cities with a startup mindset. We wrap up hearing about how Forward navigated the challenges of 2020 and delivered care to members throughout the pandemic.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Adrian highlights what he’s learned from Marissa Mayer and his appreciation for her willingness to pay it forward.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Avichal Garg, Co-Founder of Electric Capital, a Crypto Hedge Fund Apr 05, 2021

Avichal Garg is a serial entrepreneur who started his career working on search quality at Google, had a tour of duty at Facebook (after his company, Spool, was acquired), worked with start-ups at YC and jumped full time into crypto in early 2018.

Jessica and Jana talk with Avichal about the promise of crypto—imagine a future in which Taylor Swift and her most passionate fans could own the masters to her work through NFTs—and explore, is that possible? He shares his take that “2020 was the year Bitcoin went from contrarian to consensus” and why in general, crypto is probably at the Series A stage as an industry, to use VC parlance.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Avichal highlights a strong early supporter of Electric Capital, Chris Dixon. Jess and Jana highlight a woman who brings a new perspective on crypto from her legal and regulatory background, Katie Haun.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Amy Chang, Founder and CEO of Accompany and Board Director at P&G Mar 29, 2021

For our latest episode, we welcome Amy Chang. Amy is a legend in the tech world. She has served on the Boards of some of the largest companies on the planet, like P&G and Cisco, after starting her career at McKinsey, eBay, and Google. She’s also been on the ground floor and in the trenches of a startup, having founded Accompany, which went on to be acquired by Cisco.

We talk with Amy about her path into studying electrical engineering, having to hack her way into a PM role at Google, and the inspiration for leaving the comfortable cocoon of a big company to make the founder leap.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Amy highlights a close friend and advisor, who has helped Amy be an effective Board member, Lorrie Norrington.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Maia Bittner, Fintech Engineer and Co-Founder of Rocksbox and Pinch Mar 22, 2021

For our latest episode, we welcome Maia Bittner. Maia’s journey as an entrepreneur started as a kid when she was selling used cameras on the internet and learned HTML to customize her eBay page. She fell in love with computers and technology as a way to solve problems, but resists the notion of building software for software’s sake. As she shares, “99% of the time, the hard part of building a product is not a tech problem. It's building MVPs, finding customer value and often it's faster to do that stuff and better if you do it without software…I'm an engineer and I still write code and I like a lot of parts of it, but... maybe don't use software to solve everything.”

Maia talks about the transition from being a founder, where you have total control and ownership, to going through an acquisition with Chime and becoming an employee of a larger organization. She shares the secret to unlocking a role she loves: finding a place in the organization that lets her run internal experiments and launch new product tests quickly, akin to being back at a seed stage startup.

Lastly, Maia shares why fintech is such a rewarding area to work and how she’s continuing to learn and build community through her side project: FinTechBookClub.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Maia highlights two early stage founders building fintech companies: @hotgirlintech and @swaykaey

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Sima Sistani, CEO and Co-Founder of Houseparty Mar 15, 2021

For our latest episode, Sima Sistani joins us for a conversation that brings to light the personal side and vulnerable truths of trying to run a company, be a present parent, and deal with life changes and societal expectations of how to do it all. We share different perspectives on how to try and raise kids with a strong internal sense of self and how we’re each still discovering this for ourselves.

During Covid in 2020, Sima put these life lessons of empathy and grace into action in how she led the team at Houseparty. We dig into her career trajectory, from international equities trading at Goldman Sachs to working in Hollywood and into co-founding a tech startup, and advice she got along the way.

To wrap up, Chloe, April and Sima all discuss the choice to found companies in their 40s, the narrow stereotype that you have to be young to make that leap, and searching for the tingly feeling of when you know you’ve seen a glimpse of the future and when to chase it.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Sima highlights Martha Lane Fox, an internet entrepreneur and Board Director at Twitter, and Jess shines on Molly Graham, COO at Lambda School. Chloe gives a special shoutout to everyone serving on local school boards!

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Claire Cormier Thielke, Managing Director - Hines Asia Pacific, Board Director at Zillow Mar 08, 2021

For our third episode, Claire Thielke joins us from Hong Kong, where she is based, having just completed 21 days of quarantine after a visit to the US. Claire shares how her path into a global career in real estate development started with an interest as a kid in throwing on her roller blades or running shoes and checking out all the houses in her Houston neighborhood.

And, we should mention, Claire’s not just an average runner. She went on to become the captain of the varsity track team at Stanford, while completing three degrees (undergrad, masters, and engineering degree), and training for the Olympics as part of Team USA Track & Field. It’s no surprise to learn, then, that she’s got tips to share on the mental attitude and approach to quarantine.

Claire has built her career with experience in Russia, Poland, Brazil and all over Asia, especially China. She teaches a class at Stanford on the intersection of technology, urban planning, and institutional real estate investment. We asked Claire about all the current tech buzz about Miami. She zooms out to put this in the context of the history of population migrations in the US, and how Covid is creating opportunities to rethink community and coliving.

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Claire shares how impressed she is by a young architect in Shenzhen and April called out Madhuri Kommareddi, Director of Workforce Development in the Office of the Governor of New York.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

Heather Fernandez, CEO and Co-Founder of Solv Health Feb 26, 2021

On our 2nd episode, Jessica and April catch up with Heather Fernandez, CEO and Co-Founder of Solv Health and Board Director at Atlassian. Heather started her career working on the McCain presidential campaign before finding her first job in Silicon Valley at a PR firm. In her own words, “it’s ok to be non-linear! I think there's this meme in tech that you have to have been working out of a garage...building a bunch of things to become a tech founder. And it's just not true.”

Heather spent nearly a decade at Trulia, joining as the 12th employee and grew to become the GM and SVP running advertising product, marketing and sales before the acquisition by Zillow Group for $2.5B. She shares the real talk of hypergrowth: “I could talk about my Trulia history in four very beautiful bullet points. And it's like, wow, how great. But the reality of any company is there's a shitload of grind in there.”

Bill Gurley led Solv’s Series A and Heather shares lessons she learned from him: “consumer marketplaces and great consumer technology companies are oftentimes amplifying a consumer trend, not creating a totally new paradigm.” And lastly, we discuss how to lead an organization amidst twin challenges of massive growth and the chaos of Covid. “There were not pivots as much as there were massive accelerations of things that we plan to do that all of a sudden became the imperative to do.”

Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, April and Heather share what they’ve learned from Jennifer Tejada, CEO of Pager Duty.

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

#ANGELS Introduction Feb 26, 2021

Welcome to the #ANGELS Podcast, where we bring you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them. Hosted by Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde, the co-founders of the #ANGELS investment collective.

For our first episode, we share our own journeys into tech and how we teamed up while building our careers together at Twitter to start #ANGELS and back over 100 startups. We’ll also give a preview of the amazing people and conversations we have coming up on the pod.

Each week, we give Shoutouts to the people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode:

April: Othman Laraki & Elad Gil, co-founders of Color
Katie: Erica Chidi, co-founder of Loom
Jess: Jessica Ewing, founder of Literati
Chloe: Tammy Sun, founder of Carrot Fertility
Jana: Jessica Rolph & Rod Morris, co-founders of Lovevery
Vijaya: Dominique Crenn, Executive Chef of Atelier Crenn

This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening!

The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.

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