Village Global Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Building Hardware Companies and Choosing Co-Founders with Michael Hochberg Feb 16, 2024

Show notes

Michael Hochberg (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hochberg/) is a physicist and a founder of four successful startup companies in semiconductors and telecommunications, including Luxtera, acquired by Cisco in 2019, and Elenion, acquired by Nokia in 2020. He won the highest awards for young scientists in Singapore (NRF Fellowship) and the United States (PECASE), is an author on over 60 patents, and has been involved in the creation of over 30 companies in biotech and applications of silicon photonics.
Highlights:
- In college Michael would tie together clusters of Dell machines to replicate the performance of supercomputers.
- The core of building a successful company in Michael’s view is hiring the best people. The best can solve really hard problems but hiring mediocre people results in even trivial problems being unsolvable.
- Silicon photonics chips are replacing things that could previously only be done in silicon. Data centres and telecom systems are now dominated by silicon photonics.
- There’s a fundamental difference between co-founders and early employees but that line can often be blurred, often at the peril of the founding team.
- Michael says that founders don’t do enough diligence on their co-founders. Companies often last longer than most marriages so it’s important to throughly reference check your co-founders, ask specific and tactical open-ended questions of them, and see them deliver tangible results before you start a company together.
- It’s important to be aligned on what success means to you and your co-founders. Two people may have very different definitions of what “a lot of money” means — that could be enough money to buy a house for one person and $100M for another.
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.

Secondaries with Matt Pellini of Hamilton Lane Feb 09, 2024

Show notes

Matt Pellini, Managing Director at Hamilton Lane, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:
- Matt says the secondaries market has grown over 5x from 15 years ago to now.
- Selling in the secondary market used to be a sign of distress but is no longer. There are many different reasons for doing so and it’s mostly a sign of a manager being more active in the overall management of the fund.
- Secondaries, in contrast to other asset classes in the private markets, are typically lower risk, shorter duration, and are more IRR-focused.
- It’s key for LPs to understand the motivations behind a GP’s intentions to engage in secondaries transactions. There are very good reasons for doing so but transparency is key.
- AI is in vogue but technology is only as good as the data that it’s using. The most sophisticated data analysis is not going to give a firm much of an edge if it's using incorrect data or publicly available data.
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.

Lessons Learned From Running CalSTRS with Chris Ailman Feb 02, 2024

Show notes

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.

Encore: Mark Pincus on Product Management, Raising Capital, and Building Zynga Jan 26, 2024

Show notes

This encore episode is a recording of a special event where Mark Pincus (@markpinc) was interviewed by Ben Casnocha in San Francisco in front of a live audience of portfolio founders, friends of the firm, and LPs.
Mark is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Zynga, and is an angel investor in Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and other companies. He talked about about raising venture capital, his philosophy of product management, the early days at Zynga, and much more. He also took time at the event to meet with Village Global founders to give them his advice on growing their companies.
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.

Encore: Bill Gates on Advice For Founders, Mistakes, and Philanthropy Jan 19, 2024

Show notes

This encore episode is a recording of a special event where Bill Gates was interviewed in San Francisco by Julia Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite. It originally took place in 2018 in front of a live audience of Village Global founders and friends of the firm. We are honored to count Bill Gates among our luminary LPs whose financial capital and engagement power the next wave of Village Global founders.
They covered:
- Gates’s entrepreneurial journey starting Microsoft, including the most important turning points in the early years of the company.
- His thinking on work-life balance for founders and what he would do differently if he was starting again.
- What he’s learned from the next generation of founders.
- His perspective on the current tech landscape.
- His views on philanthropy, global development, education, and much 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 villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Encore: Jerry Yang on Yahoo!, Early-Stage Investing, and China Jan 12, 2024

Show notes

Jerry originally joined us on the podcast in 2019. He is co-founder of Yahoo! and founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures. He was interviewed in front of a live audience in San Francisco by Village Global co-founder and partner, Ben Casnocha.
Jerry told stories from the early days of Yahoo! and explained his lessons learned from the experience. He also talked about what American entrepreneurs can learn from China and his thoughts on early stage investing.
Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

How Superplastic Built a Social Media-Native Character Universe Jan 04, 2024

Show notes

Paul Budnitz, founder of Superplastic, and Jennifer van Dijk, CEO of Superplastic, join Christina Des Vaux, head of marketing and platform at Village Global, on this episode. Takeaways:

Superplastic is a creatively-led company that has managed to maintain its unique identity and artistic integrity while nevertheless running a thriving business.
The team comes up with ideas for characters but the characters grow and change as the audience gives them their own identities.
They’ve learned a lot from the people who make games and are willing to iterate and make changes quickly.
They shy away from initiatives that would make money fairly easily but don’t grab the attention of the creative team.
Paul says there is always a solution to everything and their job is to keep looking for it, whether that’s a creative solution or a business solution.
They’ve created their own tech stack that enables them to create animations in hours that used to take weeks.
Paul and Jennifer say that the edge is the new center of culture. The characters they’ve created are weird, but likeable.

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

Reference Checking and Personality Assessments with Investor Graham Duncan Sep 22, 2023

Show notes

Graham Duncan (@GrahamDuncanNYC) is a longtime investor and author of a legendary essay on reference checking: https://grahamduncan.blog/whats-going-on-here/ He was interviewed by Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) during a special masterclass for Village Global founders and friends of the firm.
Takeaways:
- Be aware of how your own mindset and mood affects your analysis of a candidate as well as how it impacts how the candidate shows up in the interview. For example, you might be anxious and stressed yourself and that makes the candidate nervous — you may end up experiencing them as nervous, but in fact you are the one that has created that dynamic in the interview.
- Ask the candidate: “If you were hiring someone to fill this role, what criteria would you use?” When someone is particularly good, they are skilled at capturing the essence of what makes someone good at it. This also lets you see how they respond without initial priming and framing.
- The ideal reference check call should take longer than you might think (e.g. 45+ mins). You sometimes need to wear them down over a long period of time before they open up about their real concerns.
- If you aren’t aware of or can’t imagine the downside of working with this person, you haven’t done enough reference checking.
- Ask: “How strong is your endorsement of Jane on a scale of 1-10? (If they answer 7, say actually sorry 7s are not allowed, 6 or 8? If the answer is an 8, ‘What is in that two points?’)”
- When someone comes from a prestigious company, we often fail to control for the weight that the reputation of the company carries when we form our impression of them.
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

Insights on Capital Power Brokers from Hedge Funds to Venture Capital with Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Power Law Sep 19, 2023

Show notes

Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. He joined Olga Serhiyevich, head of investor relations, for this conversation.
Takeaways:
- Sebastian wrote a book about hedge funds prior to The Power Law and he contrasts VCs and hedge fund managers by saying that VCs are much more extraverted. VCs and others around the startup world are eager and willing to make introductions and actually follow through where others say they will make an intro and don’t follow through.
- Venture is a fun and exciting business to be in because you’re dealing with bold visions of the future, highly talented and optimistic founders, and you get to see the progress and outcome of each startup that is trying to do something novel and ambitious.
- Sebastian says that bubbles are inevitable in venture capital because of the nature of the business. He says there’s no “off switch” or equivalent of shorting a company. There are also so many connections among venture capitalists that no one is willing to say anything negative about anyone else’s investments.
- He predicts a significant expansion of startup funding outside of Silicon Valley post-pandemic. Being able to deals over Zoom significantly expands the scope of where a VC can invest.
- He is bullish on Europe especially because it has a consumer market that is even bigger than the US and the entrepreneurial mentality is growing among prospective startup founders in Europe.
- Sebastian says that AI is the biggest development on earth since humans first developed the capacity for abstract thought. Some compare it to the printing press and he says it will be way bigger than that.
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

LatAm Digital Transformation Report from Atlantico Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Julio Vasconcellos (@JulioV), managing partner at Atlantico, and Ana Martins (@martinsg_ana), partner at Atlantico, join Anne Dwane (@adwane), co-founder and partner at Village Global, to discuss Atlantico’s 2023 report on digital transformation in Latin America.
Takeaways:
- If Latin America was its own country it would be #3 in the world in terms of population and GDP.
- Brazil and Mexico combined make up over half of the population of all of Latin America.
- In the US about 60% of public market capitalization is made up of technology companies but in Latin America that proportion is only 1.8%.
- Latin America is about 10-15 years behind where China is, which is itself about 5-7 years behind where the US is. There is a ton of catch-up that will happen over the next couple decades and that presents a huge opportunity.
- Latin America has some deep scars from hyper-inflation decades ago. They were some of the first countires to quickly raise rates in order to tame the inflation that we've been seeing globally in the last few years. That has paid off with some countries in LatAm starting to lower rates already.
Check out the full report here: https://www.atlantico.vc/latin-america-digital-transformation-report-2023
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

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