651 episodes

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 Podcast Village Global

    • Business
    • 4.4 • 113 Ratings

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.

    Encore Episode: John Donahoe’s Lessons on Leadership and Being a Better CEO

    Encore Episode: John Donahoe’s Lessons on Leadership and Being a Better CEO

    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.

    • 54 min
    Identifying 275M Unreported Genetic Variations To Improve Healthcare with NIH All of Us Program CTO Chris Lunt

    Identifying 275M Unreported Genetic Variations To Improve Healthcare with NIH All of Us Program CTO Chris Lunt

    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.

    • 49 min
    Building Hardware Companies and Choosing Co-Founders with Michael Hochberg

    Building Hardware Companies and Choosing Co-Founders with Michael Hochberg

    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.

    • 57 min
    Secondaries with Matt Pellini of Hamilton Lane

    Secondaries with Matt Pellini of Hamilton Lane

    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.

    • 40 min
    Lessons Learned From Running CalSTRS with Chris Ailman

    Lessons Learned From Running CalSTRS with Chris Ailman

    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.

    • 52 min
    Encore: Mark Pincus on Product Management, Raising Capital, and Building Zynga

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

    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.

    • 1 hr 10 min

Customer Reviews

4.4 out of 5
113 Ratings

113 Ratings

Dan1777999877 ,

Learn something new every listen!

It is not every day that I get to learn from individuals of this caliber! Venture Stories has quickly become a favorite in my feed. Highly recommend giving it a listen!

SO***q ,

The best walk companion and source of inspiration

I love Village Stories as not only do they bring great speakers but they are excellent interviewers who bring out the most interesting elements of every topic. I find that the episodes are structured in a way that anyone who is not an expert in a topic finds value in understanding the theme’s key insights. And they are super fun to listen to on my daily walks!

LisaIsHereForIt ,

Phenomenal guests and topics 🌟

Venture Stories has quickly become a must-listen in my feed! I'm consistently impressed by the engaging conversations, insightful content, and actionable ideas. I truly learn something every time I listen!

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