Lessons from the Early Days at Uber and Advice for Founders with Kevin Novak

Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and GP of Flex Capital, interviewed Ben Casnocha, Village Global co-founder and partner, on Auren's World of DaaS podcast. They are longtime friends and had a wide-ranging discussion on career strategy, evaluating founders, serendipity, wealth, and much more. We've cross-posted that conversation here.Highlights:The relevance of what you know vs. who you know has been a debate in the career strategy space for decades. Ben believes that the “what you know” is often dependent on the “who you know” because with the advent of the internet, public information is accessible to all but the insights that live in the heads of the smartest people are not shared widely and require a personal relationship with someone to be able to access that information.Talent spotting is about finding value in the unexpected and recognizing the strengths in those who may not fit the typical mold. Sometimes people who have clear and obvious flaws in one area are overlooked by people who can’t see the brilliance beyond that particular flaw.Certain seasons of life are good for maximizing for serendipity and taking random coffee meetings. The key is to know what season of life you are in and whether it’s better in the long-term at that moment to be maximizing for serendipity or not. The pendulum will swing back around at some point.There’s a certain level of wealth where your wealth actually starts to detract from your level of happiness. Sometimes people are better served by aiming for a lower level of wealth in order to maximize for happiness.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

Howie Liu, founder and CEO of Airtable, was interviewed by Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha live in downtown San Francisco in front of an audience of Village Global founders and friends of the firm.Highlights:- Embracing discomfort is part of the founder's journey. Learning to tolerate and even appreciate this discomfort is important. - Making decisions when you feel "almost ready" rather than waiting for perfect readiness is often necessary.- It's crucial to understand the underlying problems customers are trying to solve, not just their feature requests. Founders should resist the temptation to become "feature checklist machines" and instead focus on core problems.- There's growing fatigue around AI hype in enterprises. Successful AI implementation requires focusing on specific, valuable use cases rather than broad promises.- Airtable spent 2.5 years building their initial product, focusing on creating a platform rather than just a simple collaboration tool. They balanced building a horizontal platform with targeted use case marketing to appeal to different users.- It's crucial to understand the context and biases of advice-givers, no matter how successful they are. Having strong conviction in your vision, while being open to feedback, is essential for success.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

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

Brad Feld (@bfeld), VC at Foundry Group and co-author with Dave Jilk of The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha to discuss:- Common misconceptions about Nietzsche and why being misunderstood makes him an especially interesting philosopher. - What Nietzsche can teach entrepreneurs deciding whether to pivot or persevere. Brad says that founders should view their entrepreneurial journey not in terms of a single company, but as the next 30-50 years of their life.- Why Brad hates the term “passion” and says it’s overused in entrepreneurial circles.- Why to focus more on whether someone’s words and actions line up rather than the strength of their beliefs.- The lessons that Brad has for making decisions among groups today given Nietzsche’s aphorism that “insanity in individuals is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”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

Thejo Kote (@thejo) talks to Village partner Ben Casnocha. Thejo is a two-time founder and CEO. His current company, Airbase, is a spend management platform serving companies with 100 and 5,000 employees like Coda, 15Five, Front, Marqueta, CaptivateIQ, Abnormal, and more. Airbase has raised over $200 million, has tens of millions in ARR, and is consistently ranked as a top spend management company by G2.Highlights:- Rather than jumping into building Airbase, he built high-fidelity mockups and went back to prospective customers and asked if they’d buy it to “pre-sell” it.- In B2B, build for a specific, recognizable buyer. You want to sell to a specific role within the org who will be your champion. Ideally this is someone who also has influence within the org.- Select the kinds of customers who aren’t likely to switch in the early days. Team with early customers who actually want to be partners and are motivated by the relationship. Flatter them by asking: “are there any other innovative, forward-thinking leaders you know who I should also talk to?”- 6-8 months later after proving value and showing they could be a good partner, he said “hey, I want to get your feedback on our pricing model. Is this fair for the next set of customers?” 100% of the customers converted when he asked if they were willing to opt in to the pricing structure with a significant discount for their initial partnership.- When hiring salespeople, Thejo focuses more on personality traits rather than prior experience selling to the same segment. Also, if candidates are drawn to the liquid comp at a large, public company, they’re likely going to have a hard time transitioning to a startup. Find people who have been comfortable taking risks.- Airbase is fully remote and Thejo doesn’t think in terms of onshore vs. offshore within the company because that instantly creates a class system. Anyone anywhere in the world is part of their single, remote team, which has the internet as its headquarters. Each member of the team is “equitably inconvenienced” in his words.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.

Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha for a masterclass with our founders in late 2020. They discussed: - The origin story of Cloudflare, including how the co-founders met, and how Michelle realized that she too could start a company. - Her advice on fundraising after raising more than $300M for Cloudflare, including why you should keep the rest of the VC partnership in mind, and how to show rather than tell in your pitch. - How they found the best talent, including why their blog brought them plenty of inbound interest, and why searching far and wide around the globe for engineers helped them build their team quickly. - Why they don’t use recruiters at Cloudflare. - How to turn a weakness into a strength. - How to process feedback and when it makes sense to ignore it. - Stories of extreme frugality in the early days of the company, including building their own Ikea desks. - How an emotional response by customers helped them know they had product-market fit. 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

We're excited to launch a new EIR program for data science founders in partnership with Rackhouse Ventures, founded by Kevin Novak. Learn more about the program: https://www.villageglobal.vc/rackhouse-village-global-eir-programKevin Novak (@novakkm), an early Uber employee, was instrumental in developing their data science program and was the creator of surge pricing.Highlights:- Kevin, originally a nuclear physicist, applied his analytical skills to develop Uber's first surge pricing model in three weeks—a task that would typically take six months in academia.- He says that founders shouldn’t wait until they have plenty of data to make decisions — instead, start with first principles thinking while also building a virtuous data cycle by ensuring you are collecting data that will inform future decisions.- He comments that AI might be “overhyped on average” at the moment. The first breakthrough product is essentially an API, which has led to incumbents responding more quickly and more aggressively. Kevin argues that if you are founding a generative AI company, you are effectively making the claim that incumbents won’t be able to respond and implement an LLM themselves.- Kevin cautions founders not to fall in love with any one idea too early. It’s better to hedge your bets and experiment with one or two. Through trial and error, you can eventually decide on one idea that has the potential to be a strong business. - For the Village Global-Rackhouse EIR program, we’re looking for founders with deep passion for founding a company. We don’t require you to have your idea and team established. 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.

This encore episode is a recording of a special masterclass roundtable session for our founders with John Donahoe. John is CEO of Nike and was previously CEO of ServiceNow and eBay. He is known as one of the most inspirational leaders in Silicon Valley and is a highly sought-after mentor to CEOs including Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Drew Houston at Dropbox, and Ben Silbermann at Pinterest. We’re honored to have him among our small group of world-class executives and collaborators whose time and expertise help power our network of founders at Village Global. He shared advice on when to hire ahead, invest in and train, or replace personnel on your team and gave insight into his most common piece of advice on professional growth when advising CEOs. Quotes From This Episode "When you talk about priorities at an aspirational level, they overlap a lot. People start realizing we're more similar than we're dissimilar." "Adversity never feels fun. I don't seek adversity. But I'm no longer scared of adversity. When it emerges, instead of trying to run from it, I now accept that it is a reality and I say, 'well, at least I'm going to learn and grow.'" "My experience has been that around any issue that involves change, you have roughly 20-25% of people who want to be part of it, no matter what the topic is, you have 25-30% of people who want to fight it, and you have the 50% of people in the middle saying 'which side is going to win?'" "[When someone is let go] The fear is humiliation usually. That's almost a bigger fear than actually leaving the company." "We're never as good or as bad as labels make us out to be." "I would say in general, for every 10 hours of business development conversations, 8 of them are a waste." "I do gratitude practice driving into work every morning. It's proven in brain science that your brain becomes more negative over time. But it's also been proven in brain science that you can counteract that." "The older I get, the more I've made friends with uncertainty. I don't avoid uncertainty. Uncertainty is as present to me today as it was before but I'm a little more comfortable with it today." 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.

Chris Lunt is a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building web services and data platforms. He is in his seventh year as the CTO for the NIH's All of Us Research Program. He joined the NIH from GetInsured, where he worked to improve health insurance shopping and enrollment systems. Previously Chris ran VC-backed internet startups, with one IPO.Highlights:- Chris is hopeful about Silicon Valley going back to its roots to create sociological change by uniting people and being thoughtful about what the world should look like. Over the last couple decades it has become more venal.- Chris believes in the power of investing public money to create opportunities. He says that Silicon Valley is largely the story of a public private partnership and that it’s hard to do certain fundamental research in a purely market-based economy.- Chris says that the initiatives around Web3 weren’t grounded in a realistic understanding of human nature and the result was not a good outcome.- Healthcare is one of the most conservative industries but a way to drag it into the future is for the government to mandate change. Health records are currently built for billing purposes rather than for improving health. It’s also not all that long ago that hospitals were using paper records until the Affordable Care Act required that they digitize.- There is a moment coming soon where there is an opportunity to completely reimagine healthcare delivery. A generalist will be able to help a person navigate between various providers and specialists instead of the current fragmented approach.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.