Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. Tom Loverro, General Partner at IVP is our guest as part of our Venture Unlocked Shorts series intended to go deep on a single topic. We revisit Tom’s Twitter post from early 2023, which spoke to the market shift that was in motion and the difficulties start-ups would face in a capital-constrained market. Specifically, he spoke about 2024 as being a time of reckoning for many companies that were built with growth at all costs mentality.  We went through that original po ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. We're re-joined by Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate, this time to discuss his just released new book "Pattern Breakers." Mike was first on the pod in 2021 and it was great to catch up again, this time to discuss the importance of identifying founders who are true pattern breakers. We spoke about how his observations on the last 14 years at Floodgate inspired him to write the book. We went through concepts such as founder-future fit, the winning formula of inflections and i ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. We're joined by TX Zhuo, Co-Founder and General Partner of Fika Ventures. His tech career began in college when he started an online textbook marketplace. After working at McKinsey and as a CFO at an operating company, TX joined Innovation Endeavors. He then co-founded Karlin Ventures, which was backed by a single family office. In 2016, he co-founded Fika Ventures, which now has a 10-person team and has raised three funds. During the pod, we discussed the culture needed to ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. We are back with another LP-focused episode with Michael Kim, Founder of Cendana Capital. Michael shares how he started Cendana around his thesis (at the time very early) of backing small, emerging managers. This led to early investments in firms such as IA ventures, Forerunner, and Lerer Hippeau. During our discussion, we chatted about what qualities he’s seen in great emerging managers as well as his thoughts on portfolio construction. We also get into the challenges of ra ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. Today we have another version of Venture Unlocked shorts, and this time it will be focused on topics within the GP/LP world. Joining me again is Meghan Reynolds, who leads capital formation at Altimeter Capital.  This time we discuss the significant liquidity challenges in the venture capital market, focusing on the concerns of LPs about funding future capital calls and the longer wait times for returns. With a decline in public offerings and exits, LPs and GPs are now ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. This week we're doing another special roundtable discussion with a focus on the seed stage market. Joining us are Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures, Kirby Winfield of Ascend, and Nate Williams of UNION Labs. This whole conversation was focused on seed stage investing. We spent most of our time discussing how the market reset affects seed-stage decision-making, fund sizing, and reserve strategies. We also touched on what they are seeing and hearing from LPs that invest in ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. We are thrilled to bring you a conversation with David Sacks, Founder and Partner of Craft Ventures. Based in San Francisco, Craft was founded in 2017 and currently has over 3 billion in assets under management. Across the last three decades, David has been incredibly influential as an investor, entrepreneur, and public thought leader. When starting Craft, he was able to draw from his deep operating background, having worked as an early leader at PayPal, and then later found ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. This week we are pleased to be joined by Adam Bain of 01 Advisors, a San Francisco-based firm with nearly $1 billion under management. Adam and his partners, including Dick Costolo, have taken a very different approach to the venture model, drawing from their experiences as operators. While Adam was COO and Dick was CEO at Twitter, they helped the company scale from zero to in revenue as fast as any consumer tech company in history. During this time, they spent a significant ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. Today we have another version of Venture Unlocked shorts, and this time it will be focused on topics within the GP/LP world. Joining me for this around-the-water-cooler recurring series is Meghan Reynolds, who leads capital formation at Altimeter Capital.  Meghan recently attended iConnections in Miami, one of the biggest global capital intro summits in the world, which served as inspiration for this episode. We discussed what she observed during the summit, including h ..read more

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. We have a conversation with Samir Kaul from Khosla Ventures.  Founded in 2004, Khosla is one of the largest and most well-known venture capital firms in the world and led by legendary investor and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla. The firm is known for investing in companies that are solving very large and complex problems. The firm currently has over $15B in AUM investing in companies such as Square, Doordash, Stripe, OpenAI, and Impossible Foods. During the episode, we cover ..read more