Village Global Podcast

By: Village Global
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  • Summary

  • The Village Global podcast takes you inside the world of venture capital and technology, featuring enlightening interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and tech industry leaders. Learn more at www.villageglobal.vc.
    Village Global
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Economics Management Personal Finance
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Episodes
  • Auren Hoffman and Ben Casnocha on Career Strategy, Undiscovered Talent, Networks, and more

    Auren Hoffman and Ben Casnocha on Career Strategy, Undiscovered Talent, Networks, and more
    Oct 31 2024
    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
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    58 mins
  • Howie Liu on Airtable's Early Days, Scaling, and AI

    Howie Liu on Airtable's Early Days, Scaling, and AI
    Oct 23 2024
    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
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 1 min
  • Guillermo Rauch on AI, Scaling Vercel, and The Future of Web Apps

    Guillermo Rauch on AI, Scaling Vercel, and The Future of Web Apps
    Aug 16 2024
    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
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    56 mins

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