The NFX Podcast

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The Founders' List: 7 Principles of Game Design from Design Gym Jun 29, 2021

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This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community. Life is, by some measures, an infinite game, where the rules constantly change and winners turn into losers, and vice versa. This article is titled, “7 Principles of Game Design” and was written by The Design Gym - an NYC-based agency that has worked with top companies like Instagram, Netflix, Etsy, and many more. Setting up games, with clear goals and constraints helps focus our energies and efforts and can improve and clarify outcomes and motivate us to move forward to the next clearly defined challenge and reward cycle. Read the essay here - https://www.thedesigngym.com/seven-principles-of-game-design-and-five-innovation-games-that-work/

How a Top Investor Sees the World with Saar Gur Jun 28, 2021

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Saar Gur is one of the best investors in Silicon Valley and has a gift of identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most. As a General Partner at CRV, he was recently highlighted as #34 in the Forbes Midas List of the World's Best Venture Capital Investors In 2021. Saar loves products that consumers and customers love and is passionate about helping his companies succeed. His early investment in the food delivery company DoorDash was in the 2013 seed round, which eventually resulted in the company going public last December. Gur made a similar early bet on smart home company Ring the same year; Amazon acquired that company for $1 billion in 2018. Gur is also an investor in multiple fast-growing tech startups like Patreon, which is now worth $3 billion, and Classpass, which is worth more than $700 million. Others include Niantic, Bird, and Dropbox. Today, longtime friend and NFX Partner James Currier talks with Saar to uncover these early investment stories and his pattern recognition in early-stage founders. James also uncovers who he is as a person, what he looks for in early-stage Founders, and how he sees the world as a whole.

NFXBio: Why C2i is the World’s First Platform for Cancer Intelligence Jun 25, 2021

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The team at C2i Genomics is combining cutting-edge genomics and sophisticated AI to provide the world’s first whole-genome cancer intelligence platform, transforming the way cancer is monitored and treated. C2i uses a blood test that can detect and quantify tiny amounts of residual cancer to better monitor cancer treatment, progression, and recurrence. NFX was an early stage investor in C2i due to their long-term vision and world-changing technology. Listen to NFX Partner Omri Amirav-Drory talk with Asaf Zviran, Co-founder & CEO of C2i Genomics, about the future of their company, their latest technological breakthroughs, and where the industry is headed in the near future. Asaf and Omri's conversation begins at 11:15 Visit C2i to learn more - https://c2i-genomics.com/

Tony Fadell on Learning To See, Telling Stories, & Being A Troublemaker Jun 22, 2021

Show notes

It’s not often you get to see through the eyes of someone who created a product that you and hundreds of millions of other people use, hundreds of times a day, every single day, and have for a decade or more. Tony Fadell is the legendary inventor of the iPod, co-inventor with Steve Jobs of the iPhone, and Founder of Nest. Now he is the Principal at Future Shape, an investment and advisory firm coaching over 200+ startups. There’s almost an infinity of things to learn from Tony, but what we most wanted to uncover are his product frameworks and first principles for design. How can Founders think about designing products that are both high-utility and beloved -- that achieve dent-in-the-universe levels of adoption? As Tony puts it: For truly great designs, 50% of the design is the design. 50% of the design is the story behind the design. And it all begins with re-learning how to see.

The Founders' List: Shishir Mehrotra with an Inside Look at How YouTube Scaled (Rituals for Hypergrowth) Jun 17, 2021

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This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community. When Shishir Mehrotra left YouTube in 2014, a number of other company leaders wanted to understand how YouTube worked from the inside. He wrote this article summarizing their key rituals in a stage of hypergrowth. This article was originally published in 2015, but has since been expanded upon by Shishir. Read the full essay here - https://coda.io/@shishir/rituals-for-hypergrowth-an-inside-look-at-how-youtube-scaled

Super Founders with Ali Tamaseb & James Currier Jun 15, 2021

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What started as a viral medium article from two years ago has now turned into 'Super Founders', a book on what data reveals about billion-dollar startups. Today on the NFX Podcast we have Ali Tamaseb (partner at DCVC) talking with James Currier about his data-driven approach to understanding what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin, and Keith Rabois. Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more.

Major Opportunities for Young Founders with Jon Levin, Dean of Stanford GSB Jun 10, 2021

Show notes

Stanford GSB Dean Jon Levin joins NFX Partner Pete Flint to discuss his perspective on new Founders entering the industry, how Stanford encourages its students to solve real-world problems with technology, macroeconomics, and the overall state of capitalism. Jon Levin started teaching at Stanford in 2000. Has been Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business since Sept 2016 and is about to celebrate 5 years in that role. Levin received his BA and BS degrees from Stanford University in 1994, an MPhil in Economics from Oxford in 1996, and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1999. Pete got to know Dean Levin from being on the GSB Management Board after graduating in 2005. He has also co-taught a number of cases at the GSB.

The Insider Story of Waze with Noam Bardin Jun 02, 2021

Show notes

Underlying Waze's journey is a little-known approach to product thinking, super-powerful data network effects, and a guiding north star metric. This is Waze's insider story, as told by their former CEO, Noam Bardin. NFX Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss recently sat down with Noam, where they discussed the step-by-step story of the company's growth, starting from their early days in 2008 with just 2,000 monthly active users, through being acquired by Google for $1B in 2013, and hitting 140M monthly active users at the time Noam stepped down in Feb 2021. Early-stage Founders are wise to study as many successful growth stories as they can. While there is no single playbook of best practices, each case contains deeply valuable learning that we at NFX aim to pass along from Founder to Founder. Read the full NFX Essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/the-insider-story-of-waze

Heather Fernandez & Pete Flint on Startup Speed As A Public Good May 25, 2021

Show notes

Speed is routinely acknowledged as a major advantage for startups. But startup speed is not sufficiently understood as an invaluable competency for society at large. Solv Health’s growth during the pandemic is a great example. Just 4 years old, the startup managed 5 million Covid tests in 2020, compared to 7 million tests by long-established CVS. Today NFX General Partner Pete Flint is joined by Heather Fernandez, Co-Founder and CEO of Solv Health and previously a leader with him at Trulia. They analyze mental models and hard tactics for using speed to convert chaos to growth — and good. Read the full NFX Essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/startup-speed-as-a-public-good

The Founders' List: The Great Online Game by Packy McCormick May 21, 2021

Show notes

The Great Online Game is an infinite video game that plays out constantly across the internet. It uses many of the mechanics of a video game, but removes the boundaries. You’re no longer playing as an avatar in Fortnite or Roblox; you’re playing as yourself across Twitter, YouTube, Discords, work, projects, and investments. Packy McCormick is the founder of the Not Boring Club, a newsletter on business strategy and pop culture. This episode is narrated by Packy himself. We were referred to this post by Li Jin, our most recent guest on the NFX Podcast. Read the full essay here - https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-online-game

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