Product Hunt Radio

Lee Jacobs and Brian Balfour join Ryan at AngelList HQ for this week's episode. Back in the day, Lee was one of the first syndicate leads on AngelList and later went on to join as a Partner. He previously started an education marketplace startup called Campus Dock. Ryan got to know Lee at AngelList a few years ago, when Lee was kind enough to help him craft his deck as he went out to raise his first fund. Lee is now a full-time investor with his own fund, Edelweiss, which he started with Brian Balfour, Elaine Wherry, and Todd Masonis. Brian Balfour invests part-time at Edelweiss and spends the majority of his time as CEO of Reforge, a professional education program for experienced practitioners. We've had some of our teammates here at Product Hunt go through the program. Prior to Reforge, Brian was the VP of Growth at HubSpot, EIR at Trinity Ventures, and the founder of several startups including Boundless Learning, POPSignal, and Viximo. In this episode we talk about: What kinds of questions Lee and Brian ask founders when they first meet them Some of the mistakes that first-time fund managers make and how to avoid them How to think about fund strategy and why the style of your fund should match your personality The importance of cultivating resilience, both as a founder and as an investor Of course, we talk about some of their favorite products as well. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Bubble, Spoka, and Dipsea for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Investing is actually a very time consuming thing. For any operators out there who are also thinking about investing, I would highly encourage you to consider finding a partner who has a completely opposite superpower than you.” — Brian “The key is figuring out who you are, what your investor-strategy fit is, and designing a strategy and a way that you’re going to get deal flow and what the right check size is going to be, based on who you are uniquely.” — Lee “There are some investors out there who are very thesis-driven and others that are very people-driven. The more I do this, the more I realize that we are not the best at forming and finding the most interesting ideas and markets. With so much interesting stuff going on, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know how it is going to play out. The entrepreneurs and people who have an organic connection are going to be the ones to find the interesting problems.” — Brian Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Dandelion Chocolate — A bean-to-bar chocolate factory in the Mission District in San Francisco. Five Minute Journal — The simplest, most effective way to be happier every day. Krisp — Mute background noise during calls. TweetDeck — Create a custom Twitter experience. Twttr — Twitter's new prototype app. YouTube TV— YouTube takes on the cable providers.

Today I'm joined by Everette Taylor, a fellow entrepreneur and community builder that I got to know back when he was building GrowthHackers.com five years ago. But well before this, Everette began his founder journey starting (and then selling) an events business in his teenage years. He later went on to join a few startups to run marketing and growth, including Skurt (a company I regularly used prior to its acquisition) and StickerMule (a company that makes our awesome Product Hunt stickers). Today Everette runs ET Enterprises, a collection of businesses that include PopSocial, Hayver, Millisense, and his newest venture, ArtX. In this episode we talk about: Everette's path to entrepreneurship, including dropping out of school The importance of being authentic in everything you do Some of his favorite self-care apps We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Bubble, Spoka, and Dipsea for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “We get so caught up in portraying an image that isn’t real or isn’t true and I think the best way to grow is just being genuine and true to who you are because people are going to see through it. What’s the point in building a huge brand and then getting exposed later for it not being true?” — Everette “Don’t get so caught up on the top layer of things, because at the end of the day if you’re able to build a skillset or provide value in some type of way, that’s where the magic really happens.” — Everette “Even though I started my own company I felt like I wasn’t really experienced in the startup space. I got offered an opportunity and I left literally a week later — dropped out of school and the rest was history.” — Everette Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Apple Music— All the ways you love music, all in one place. Cash App — Send money instantly. ChowNow — Online ordering built just for your restaurant. GOAT — The most trusted way to buy and sell sneakers on mobile. Headspace — Learn to meditate and live mindfully. Philz — Order your coffee ahead. PopSocial — Grow your social media brand. Roadtrip — A music listening app where you and your friends jam out together. Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving and search. Soothe — Massage delivered to you. Spotify — Music for everyone. Stripe — Payment integration and management. Tidal — Lossless music streaming service, backed by JAY-Z. Venmo — Make and share payments with friends.

In today's episode, Ryan interviews Mathilde Collin, CEO of Front. Front is a shared inbox for your team and the company is used by startups big and small. They raised a whopping $66 million from Sequoia last year. Mathilde and Ryan met at Y Combinator, when they were in the same batch in Summer 2014. It was at that time that Ryan recognized something special about Mathilde and her team: they build fast and embrace a very transparent culture, which has no doubt led to their success. In this episode we talk about: Why it's important as a founder to remain humble. Why, contrary to reports of its demise, email is *not *dying. How Mathilde manages company culture at a fast-growing startup with offices in both San Francisco and Paris. The products she uses to stay sane and productive. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to FreshBooks, Bubble, Spoka, and Dipsea for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “There are two types of people: there are people that join the company because it’s most likely going to be successful and there are people that join because they want to make it successful. You should try to understand if the person is joining because they want to be part of the adventure or because they want to build this adventure.” — Mathilde “People seem to be pretty happy at Front, so I try to understand why. I asked them, 'why are you happy?' The most frequent answer was the fact that they understand how their work relates to the bigger vision that we have.” — Mathilde “It’s super important to hire people who are confident enough that they won’t care if something doesn’t work because the biggest mistake you can make is not acknowledging something isn’t working and keeping doing it. Self-confidence is something that I’ve been looking for in most hires.” — Mathilde Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Five Minute Journal — The simplest, most effective way to be happier every day. Front — Efficient email for teams. Headspace — Learn to meditate and live mindfully.

In today's episode we talk to two expert storytellers in startupland — who also happen to be Ryan's good friends. Carmel DeAmicis is an editor (aka word wiz) at Figma, a company that's reinventing how people design software and which recently announced a $40M round led by Sequoia. Prior to joining Figma, Ryan met Carmel when she was a reporter at Pando. She was the first journalist to write about Product Hunt and later went on to join GigaOM and Recode. Camille Ricketts is another friend and veteran storyteller. She recently joined Notion, a hot startup building an all-in-one workspace for your notes, docs, and to-dos. Prior to joining Notion she spent nearly five years at First Round, starting and leading their content and marketing efforts. You've likely read one or many of her First Round Review articles. Earlier in her career she was a reporter at Wall Street Journal and VentureBeat and also worked at Tesla, Kiva, and the White House. In this episode we talk about: How to tell the story of your startup. Both Camille and Carmel are former reporters and they share some of the secrets they've honed over the years on what to do and what not to do when it comes to crafting the narrative around your company. How Carmel and Camille ended up in their respective jobs at Figma and Notion, why it's important to take time between jobs to find the right role, and how to leverage your network to find out what a company is really like on the inside. The wild, weird, wonderful world of TikTok, and why the constraints it imposes generate such creativity. Carmel talks about opening up the app to check it out for the first time and ending up staying up until three in the morning watching TikToks. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to FreshBooks, Bubble, and Dipsea for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “It’s easy to tell a story about a company that just comes out as a collection of features but the better way to tell the story is to emphasize the outcomes that your audience actually wants.” — Camille “At Notion, they have pictures of Engelbart. At Figma, they threw a party on a Sunday on the exact 50th anniversary of the famous 'Mother of All Demos.'” — Carmel [In thinking about which company to join next] “You go through this conversion funnel where you maximize activity at the top of the funnel by emailing anyone who might have an idea for you, and then you winnow it down.” — Camille Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Figma — Styles, prototyping and design at scale. Notion — Increase your team intelligence. Superhuman — The best email experience ever made. TikTok — A creative music video clip maker.

Two active makers in the Product Hunt community join Ryan at AngelList in San Francisco for this week's episode of Product Hunt Radio. Hiten Shah was recently awarded Product Hunt Community Member of the year. While that's the honor of a lifetime, he's also accomplished much more than that. He co-founded a few SaaS companies over the years, including KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg (which is still going strong after 13 years). He's now working on FYI, a tool that makes it super easy to find your documents in a few clicks. Marie Prokopets is also a co-founder at FYI. Prior to jumping into the tech scene she was Director at Diageo, a spirit and wine company, and worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers. In this episode we talk about: How Marie and Hiten built FYI. They talk about the challenges they faced in their product development process and how they've learned from them. Marie's transition from working in a big company (where she occasionally rode on private jets) to founder of a startup. The story of the MVP they built in just five days, and the tools they use to gather feedback from users. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList, FreshBooks and Bubble for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “If you want to get a few users using your product, that’s easy. Getting tons of usage or high retention takes a lot of work. Nail your product and then scale it is my new mantra these days.” — Hiten “We discovered we were solving the wrong problem and there was a completely different problem that we had the opportunity to solve. Sometimes you make mistakes but the really important thing is what did you learn from that?” — Marie “When I started, it was much easier to build something, launch it and get a whole bunch of users. Now it’s easier than ever to put something out — it’s harder than ever to make it work.” — Hiten Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Airtable — Realtime spreadsheet-database hybrid. Bear — A beautiful, flexible writing app for notes and prose. Coda — It's a new day for docs. Confluence — An open and shared workspace for teams. FYI — Find your documents, like magic. Glide — Create mobile apps from Google Sheets. Meadow — On-demand medical marijuana delivery. Notion — Increase your team intelligence. OneTab — Save memory by converting all your open tabs into a list. Periscope — 150X faster data analysis. Quip — Beautiful documents on any device. Vesper (RIP) — An elegant way to record your thoughts. Zapier — Connect and automate 500+ web apps.

In this episode Ryan visits Shots Studios HQ in Los Angeles to chat with the company's CEO John Shahidi (aka @john on Twitter). John and the Shots Studios team have a unique background. Ryan met John and his brother, a co-founder of the company, nearly five years ago when they were building a social network for teens. The app had no likes, comments, follower counts, or other mechanics that often enable anxiety and bullying. Their mission was to create a more positive and healthy community. They've since pivoted and built a massive network of artists, comedians, and creators that includes Alesso, Anwar, Rudy Mancuso, Lele Pons, and Anitta. In this episode we talk about: How entertainment business models have changed with the evolution of streaming platforms. Why Vine had such a major influence on the current generation of content creators. The end of the 22-minute-long TV episode. We also talk about some of John's favorite products and podcasts. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList, FreshBooks and Bubble for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Vine changed entertainment… What Vine did that no one else did is it taught a very young audience how to create a story in six seconds — beginning, middle and end.” “The streaming platforms are in the business of minutes on platform. They care about time on platform and don’t care if it’s an hour-and-a-half movie or ten nine-minute episodes. They don’t care, as long as people open up the app and stay on platform.” “Now I open up YouTube and it takes me to home, which is not what I subscribe to, it’s not trending, it’s just what the machine knows that I want and they’re almost always right.” Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Shots Studios — Entertainment company, production studio, and talent management firm. Snap — A new way to share the world. Spotify Canvas — Full-screen vertical video artwork for albums. Vine (RIP) — A community for sharing six-second video clips. YouTube — The essential video hosting site.

On this episode, Abadesi talks to Austen Allred, co-founder and CEO of Lambda School. Lambda School is a pioneer in the income-sharing agreement (ISA) space. They offer live online courses in software development, data science and design that are free until you get a job, at which point you re-pay a capped portion of your income to Lambda School. In this episode we talk about: Austen's adventures abroad prior to starting Lambda School, including what he learned through his travels as a missionary in Ukraine, and the time he booked a one-way ticket to Shanghai on a whim. The challenges inherent in the inflexibility of education and how Lambda School is hoping to change the traditional model of how people train for and find careers. Austen's leadership style at Lambda, why he took venture capital even though he had earlier said he would never do so, and how they work as a distributed team. We also talk about some of the tools that Austen and the team at Lambda School use to stay productive. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList, FreshBooks and Bubble for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Not much can influence somebody’s life and their outlook so much as their income. It’s crazy to me that there’s not a way of rapidly shifting people to where they should be in the economy.” — Austen “I crave that steep learning curve and the adventure of being extremely uncomfortable. You underestimate just how difficult day-to-day life can be when you’re trying to learn a second language.” — Austen “The problem that you want to solve is a problem that’s been around for a long time, it’s something that’s fundamental to humans — it’s not a side problem.” — Austen Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode AirPods — Wireless headphones from Apple. Amazon Echo — Smart speaker you control with your voice. Notion — The all-in-one workspace. Pocket — Save and read news, articles and videos that fuel your mind. Slack — Messaging for teams. Superhuman — The fastest email experience ever made.

On this episode, Ryan sits down with Eric Bahn from Hustle Fund in San Francisco. Hustle Fund invests in what they call “hilariously-early hustlers.” Prior to co-founding the fund, Eric worked in a number of operating roles, including as a product manager at Intuit, co-founder of a gaming company, founder of a startup to serve MBA students (that was later acquired), product manager at Facebook, co-founder of a media company called The Hustle, and EIR at 500 Startups (phew!). On this episode we take you behind the curtain to break down exactly how venture capital works. We talk about: Eric's advice on how to break into venture capital if you've never worked in the space before. Some of the common misconceptions about VC, including how much venture capitalists are actually paid (spoiler alert: unless you're at a big fund, it's not as much as you think). Hustle Fund's investing thesis, including their unique data-driven approach to investing in early stage companies. We also talk about the rise of “no code” and some of the best apps that are letting makers create amazing products without writing code. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Fundamentally our jobs are the most blessed in the world because we just surround ourselves with people who have a worldview, have a product, have an idea, that they wholeheartedly believe in. They’ve taken all the sacrifices to make that happen and you and I may not agree all the time with whether their vision is the correct one to be successful but it only leaves you with optimism.” — Eric “Our thesis is driven by the notion that the single best leading indicator of success for a team — that is discernible at the pre-seed stage, is this characteristic called hustle. Whatever the core metrics that are relevant for your business, the teams that are growing aggressively against those metrics tend to grind out the best results over time.” — Eric “These folks will look amazing on paper — maybe they worked at Facebook or Google or something previously, went to Stanford or MIT, checks all the boxes, and then you watch them work and you realize that person who was successful in the context of a larger company with more resources doesn’t necessarily have the skills that translate to cold-starting a business from scratch in a world of entropy where there’s no rules and no structure.” — Eric Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Bubble — Build a fully functional web app without any code. Retool — Build custom internal tools in minutes. Webflow — Build professional dynamic websites without any code. Articles Mentioned In This Episode Mark Suster, Both Sides: Invest in Lines, Not Dots Kate Clark, TechCrunch: This Is How Much VCs Are Paid

On this episode, Abadesi talks to Matt Navarra, a social media consultant from the UK. He is a self-described “Facebook geek” who has worked in digital communications for the UK government and was previously social media director at The Next Web. In this episode: Matt analyzes current trends in the social media landscape, including whether the current craze around ephemeral content is here to stay. He lays out his predictions for the future of social media 10-20 years from now, talks about the potential benefits of regulation of social media, and why algorithms need to have ethics. Matt also provides a ton of tips for founders and makers to help grow their social media following. We of course also talk about some of his favorite products to help up your social media game, tools that social media managers can't live without, and the smart home devices he loves. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes From This Episode “If we were to spin forwards 10-20 years from now, I think that social media will look completely different. We’ve seen social media climb up the hill of ‘oh, this is amazing, we can share everything, we can touch everyone with everything we do in our lives…’ and now we’re on a downhill slide where people are saying actually this is not good. Having everyone able to talk to everyone openly with no censorship just doesn’t work.” — Matt “One of the big reasons that Facebook is pushing us towards Facebook Stories is to do with ad revenue growth. Within News Feed at the moment you probably see an ad every sixth or seventh post. If they try to increase that and you were getting an ad every third or fourth post, that really deteriorates the quality of the experience. So Stories is a whole new innovative format for brands to advertise on.” — Matt “Don’t worry about trying to be on every single platform. Think about who is your audience in terms of location, age, their interests. How does that marry up with the product or service that you’re selling? Use that to guide you towards the most appropriate platform.” — Matt Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Beam — Create video and slideshow posts for social media. Google Assistant — Your own personal Google, always ready to help. Kinzen — Refresh your news routine. NewsWhip — Check how viral your content is. Parse.ly Pulse — Understand audience attention. Philips Hue — Programmable internet-connected lightbulbs. Twitcher — Switch Twitter accounts without having to sign out/sign in.

On this episode, Abadesi interviews Linda Xie, co-founder of Scalar Capital. Scalar Capital is a San Francisco-based hedge fund specializing in crypto assets. Linda is also an advisor to 0x and former product manager at Coinbase. In this episode: Her extraordinary story of hustling to get a job at Coinbase, what it was like growing with the company as it scaled from only a few employees to one of the best-known companies in crypto, then leaving the company to start a fund with a fellow employee. How she first became interested in crypto (back when Bitcoin was $200), the coolest projects she's come across in the space, and the most exciting (and world-changing) applications of cryptocurrencies. The investing thesis at Scalar Capital, what kinds of companies they're looking to invest in, and how they use the power of communities to source deals. Of course, we also talk about some of her favorite products and what she uses to become more productive, including a chatbot that can improve your emotional health, a way to simplify scheduling meetings, and an app that lets you save highlights from physical books by taking a picture with your phone. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I feel like people know a lot about crypto, they just feel like they don’t because they are very overwhelmed by information and news articles that people are posting.” “I wasn’t even positive that I wanted to do this yet, I was just floating the idea to him and he was like, 'yeah, that sounds awesome. Do you want to put in our two weeks today?' I was like, wow, okay, I’m not quite sure if I’m ready.” “It’s important to be able to ask dumb questions in a room. As a product manager, the worst things is if you’re totally missing something that someone’s telling you and you built the wrong product. You need to be comfortable asking someone to explain things to you.” Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Calendly — Simple, beautiful scheduling. Highlight — Save and share highlights from physical books. Superhuman — The fastest email experience ever made. Trello — Organize anything, together. Woebot — A chatbot to improve your mood using CBT.

Abadesi is back to talk to Ben Halpern, creator, founder, and webmaster of DEV, an online community where developers share ideas and help each other grow. He is also behind @ThePracticalDev on Twitter and runs DEV alongside his two other co-founders, Jess Lee and Peter Frank. Fun fact: Ben is a Canadian who moved to NYC to join a startup and never left. He spoke to Aba from Brooklyn. In this episode we talk about: Why you need to lead by example when you're building an online community and how your behavior as a founder on the site can be more effective in setting a tone than complicated rules. How DEV manages their distributed team, the advantages of working from home, and being honest with yourself about when you need to take a break from your work as a founder, even if it's not easy to do. His love for open source, his predictions for future trends on the web and his very unique personal website, which is a throwback to the web of years past. We also talk about his love for Tiles, the surprising usefulness of Android's Measure app, and why Ben says if you're not using a password manager, you're “not living your digital life to the fullest.” We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “[On creating good communities] It didn’t just happen by accident, we really tried to foster this stuff by example. Anytime we try to create something new, some kind of new behavior or anything, we really try to do it by leading the way and being good ourselves and then rewarding those who get it, who share our understanding of what a good community needs to be.” “You can really do anything you can want on the web. It’s a really fascinating platform. Anything you can hear or visualize is possible, it’s just our imagination that limits it.” “[On remote work] I would say that it’s a good idea, but it’s not going to be something you get right at first, so you’re going to have to be accepting of it being a gradual thing that you don’t give up on but you also don’t just jump in and do without the expectation that anything’s going to go wrong.” Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Amazon Alexa — Get information, news, weather, and more using just your voice. LastPass — Essential password manager. Measure — Measure anything with your phone. Phillips Hue Smart Bulbs — Internet-connected color-changing lightbulbs that you can program yourself. Tile — Track your lost items.

On this episode I'm visiting Benchmark Capital, one of the world's most renowned venture capital firms, at their offices in the heart of the Tenderloin in San Francisco to chat with two of its general partners, Sarah Tavel and Eric Vishria. Sarah Tavel has a unique background as an investor, then operator, and back to investor. In the mid-2000s she joined Silicon Valley-based Bessemer where she led an investment in Pinterest and others. She went on to join Pinterest back when they were only a few dozen people before returning to venture three and a half years later. She's now a GP at Benchmark and on the board of Hipcamp and Chainalysis. Eric Vishria started his career as an operator, working at Opsware and HP before founding Rockmelt, a social take on the web browser, back in 2008. Later the company was acquired by Yahoo where Eric joined as a VP before making a leap into venture at Benchmark. Over the past four-plus years he's lead investments in Confluent, Contentful, Amplitude, and others. In this episode we talk about: What it's like to go from operating to investing and the different skillsets involved in those jobs, and why Benchmark has bucked the trend of venture firms expanding both in headcount and fund size. What Sarah and Eric are looking for in an investment, which spaces they're most excited about (hint: they say that contrary to reports of its death, consumer is very much alive), and why each partner at the firm only does on average one or two investments in a year. The importance of starting a company in Silicon Valley (or not) and why we're seeing more startups build outside the Valley. We also discuss some of her favorite products, including a couple apps that are enabling new forms of communication on mobile, an “Airbnb for campsites,” and why Sarah has been playing Fortnite for “research purposes.” We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes From This Episode “When I meet with a company that's outside the Valley, I would get on a soapbox and talk about how they have to be here if they want to scale and I always kind of thought that from zero to a couple hundred million market cap, you can build that anywhere, but to be that multibillion-dollar company, you have to be here. I still believe that but not as a strongly as I used to and it's because you do see so many examples of companies that are getting started and are getting to some scale outside of the Valley.” — Sarah “As soon as you think it’s over, it’ll probably come from an unexpected place. It won’t be a direct competitor to Facebook, it won’t be Facebook reborn. That isn’t the way it’s going to happen, it will be something unexpected, orthogonal, that comes out of nowhere but that meets this need for people to connect. I think that it’ll happen — I don’t know where, I don’t know how.” — Eric “It's incredible to see how big many of the other venture firms are getting, and not just from a fund perspective, but from a people perspective. It's almost like they're vertically integrating. They've got seed investing, early stage investing, growth investing, some even have you know, public equity investing, debt, you know, as part of their platform. They've got talent teams and marketing teams and customer development teams and we've just decided to stay very very focused on what we do, which is being a close partner.” — Sarah “It's really about looking at a lot of stuff, falling in love with an opportunity and an entrepreneur and deeply engaging, whereas operating is mostly figuring out how to get stuff done and very little of figuring out what to do, in a lot of ways venture is like 90% or 95% figuring out what to do and like 5% getting it done.” — Eric Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode AutoSleep — Automatically track your sleep from your Apple Watch. Bitmoji — Turns your avatar into stickers and emoji. Breaker — The social podcast app. Chainalysis — Building trust in blockchains. Discord — Find people who share your interests. Hipcamp — Airbnb for campsites. Marco Polo — Keep in touch on the go. Nextdoor — Connect to your neighbors.

Aba is back to host this episode with Jessica Lessin, journalist, founder, and editor-in-chief of The Information. Founded in 2013, The Information breaks exclusive stories and publishes deeply reported articles about tech and startups. In this episode we talk about: What attracted to her to journalism in the first place, how she got her start at the Wall Street Journal, and why the distortion of the news industry's business model by the internet led her to start The Information. What she's learned after five years running The Information, her insights on leadership, and the importance of resilience and self-awareness. And of course, her take on the big tech trends on the horizon, including the possibility of tokenizing everything and the future of Facebook. We also discuss some of her favorite products, including Google Maps, Google Photos, and Asana, which they use extensively at The Information. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I caught the reporting bug early. I thought being a reporter and never having to pick one job, but having license to learn about the world and ask smart people questions, is really just an awesome profession and also believe really passionately again that the news industry has in many ways been devastated by the internet and really needs to have a renaissance.” — Jessica “Not only was digital advertising not going to pay the bills for these newsrooms, but it was also distorting the content, and I felt that the subscription business — which is what we are at The Information — was the antidote to that. It was the business that only worked if you delivered a quality product and earned your real relationship with your user and that loyalty. And so, in seeing what I felt was the bad reaction of the new industry to the internet, I felt like there was an opportunity to do it differently and approach coverage differently.” — Jessica “You know, in studying and reporting on startups for so long, you see it’s never a smooth ride. What you see is only a fraction of what’s really going on.” — Jessica Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Asana — The task management tool, completely redesigned. Google Maps — Essential mapping app. Google Photos — Automatic backup and unlimited storage for all your photos.

Bryce Roberts is co-founder and managing director of a different kind of VC firm, Indie.VC. He recently announced v3 of their fund model which is focused on backing revenue-generating companies that are seeking financial independence from the traditional VC rat race. Prior to starting the fund four years ago, Bryce invested in seed stage startups in the mid-2000's out of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). Portfolio companies include Bitly, Chartbeat, Codecademy, Foursquare, Hipcamp, OpenX, and a bunch of others. He joins me all the way from his home base in Utah. In this episode: We talk all things venture capital, including how it's changed over the past decade and where it's going in the future. We've previously talked a bit about distributed teams on the startup side, but here we also talk about distributed teams when it comes to investing, including when Bryce moved from the Bay Area to Utah in the middle of a fund. How founders can be more honest with themselves about what they really want, and why so many want to quit chasing venture funding that they don't really want, and which leaves them in an escalating cycle of constantly reaching for the next funding milestone. We talk about which geographies in Bryce is most bullish on for startups, besides the Bay Area. We also get sidetracked talking about Bryce's membership in the “first name club” on Twitter (his username is @bryce) and whether we might be seeing any of the videos he's created on TikTok anytime soon (we won't). We also talk about some of Bryce's favorite products, including the Apple Watch, a headband that is supposed to help you sleep, and why TikTok is so addictive. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Part of the idea behind Indie.VC was, what kinds of companies, ideas, products and founders could exist in the world and could have their ideas and company cultures embodied in the world through technology? How would it be different or what would it look like if they didn’t have to keep asking investors for permission to exist or if they didn’t have to keep contorting and forcing themselves into the box that looks like it has a stamp on it that says 'fundable?'” — Bryce “If you look at where funding goes, if you look at the fact that 90% of it still goes to one gender, if you look at the fact that 75 to 80% of it still goes to essentially three cities, that starts to highlight the idea that if that next milestone isn’t necessarily funding, how could you invest differently? If you could support founders who had an aversion to raising venture money because they’ve been burned by it in the past or they wanted to do things that didn’t necessarily fit that mold or people in places or who don’t look like what VCs have traditionally funded, the best way to ensure those ideas exist in them world in the short term at least is to not necessarily rely on that next fundable milestone mindset that that I think is more prevalent in venture maybe than we’d like to admit.” — Bryce Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Apple Watch — The most powerful and advanced smartwatch yet. Bevel — A complete shaving system. Domo — A digitally connected business, right on your phone. Dreem — A solution that acts on your brain to enhance sleep. Freshly Picked — Quality mom and baby products. Pluralsight — World's largest tech and creative training library. Qualtrics — Leading research and experience software. TikTok — A creative music video clip maker. Walker and Company — Making health and beauty simple for people of color.

Aba is back to host this fun episode with Taylor Lorenz. Aba is part of the team at Product Hunt and the author of Dream Big, Hustle Hard: The Millennial Woman's Guide to Success in Tech. Taylor Lorenz is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology and culture. We love the way she always finds a way to be entertaining while stirring up thought-provoking debate. She's also an all-around social media superstar. In this episode we talk about: The origins of her obsession with the web and social media, and why people always seem to be nostalgic for the internet as it was when they first discovered it. Why deeming tech either universally good or universally bad is a false dichotomy and the need for a more nuanced discussion around the topic. Her obsession with horror movies and the psychology of horror, and why she would never want to live on Mars. We also discuss some of Taylor's favorite products including “Netflix for horror movies,” one of her favorite mobile community apps, and how she uses Google Maps to discover some of the best places and events near her. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I think the most important thing is to recognize that sometimes it can feel like the entire internet hates you or is ganging up on you or is angry at you and it’s really important to remember that that’s not true and that’s why you have to have a lot of good offline friendships too.” — Taylor “The founders have a responsibility to take into account the negative ways their platforms can be used. I think so many founders are delusional about how their own products are used and they want to think it’s used in some way but you are also letting Nazis on here.” — Taylor “It’s funny, everyone seems to be nostalgic for whenever they discovered the internet, like I have a lot of colleagues that were online in the 90s and we’re just like oh, early forums or Usenets. I think maybe just being young online is a different experience.” — Taylor Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Amino — Authentic mobile communities for whatever you're into. Google Maps — Essential mapping app, now with great discovery features. Shudder — Stream horror, thrillers and suspense. Tik Tok — A creative music video clip maker.

We have a special guest host for this episode, my teammate at Product Hunt, Abadesi Osunsade. She is the author of Dream Big, Hustle Hard: The Millennial Woman's Guide to Success in Tech. She'll be hosting more episodes alongside me this year. Ann Miura-Ko is a founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm in Palo Alto. She has been called “the most powerful woman in startups” by Forbes and is an early investor in Lyft and TaskRabbit. She is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford's School of Engineering and a founding member of All Raise. In this episode we talk about: Ann recounts how she got to where she is today, including what it was like growing up with a NASA scientist for a dad. She talks about some of the formative moments in her career and explains why she says that a “career path” is a misnomer. The mentors that have helped Ann throughout her career, and why she never approaches a relationship with an expectation of mentorship, but instead always “begins with an act of service.” Why the tech industry should always take a step back to question whether everyone prospers from its work, the five values that drive her investments at Floodgate, and why they tell entrepreneurs “your life's work is our life's work.” How she manages her children's relationships with social media (“browsing Instagram feels like not being invited to every party everyone else is having”), how she is personally working to increase the number of underrepresented founders, and the business benefit of diversity. We also discuss some of their favorite products including an old-fashioned note-taking system for the digital age, a better way to organize your tabs in Chrome, and a built-in CRM for your Gmail inbox. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Rally Rd and AngelList, for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “My belief has always been that I never asked someone to be my mentor. I would start off with an act of service, and it wasn’t built on a belief that that act of service would then lead to mentorship.” — Ann “In ten years, I’ve seen huge changes in the funding landscape. The opportunity for someone to access capital is so much greater than when I first got started. The playing field is not level at all but it is so much more accessible than it was ten years ago.” — Ann “When we think about economic opportunity for the masses, when we think of better education for the masses, I believe that people envision technology playing a critical role in that. To separate out prosperity from technology advances, I think is crazy. We need to have a way of creating a better future that’s characterized by optimism and hope rather than insecurity and fear.” — Ann Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Bullet Journal — An analog note-taking system for the digital age. Streak — CRM in your inbox, for Gmail. Trello — Organize anything, together. Workona — Transform Chrome into a professional work tool for free.

On this episode I'm visiting Atrium's headquarters in SoMA in San Francisco to chat with two serial entrepreneurs, Justin Kan and Ranidu. Justin Kan's career blew up in the mid-2000s when he started livestreaming himself 24/7 on Justin.tv, a Y Combinator backed startup that he co-founded. Justin.tv eventually turned into Twitch and sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. He has gone on to found multiple startups since then, including Exec, Whale, and now Atrium. Ranidu has a unique background. Before jumping into tech, he rose to fame as an R&B and hip-hop artist (check him out here). He went on to join Google before founding the first of many startups, many of which have been centered around his passion for music. We talk about a few of them including The Drop, The Artist Union, and Audius, a decentralized audio distribution platform he started earlier this year. In this episode we talk about: What they've learned from building products and startups, what lessons they would give to entrepreneurs starting out today, and how the startup and investing landscape has changed. Justin explains why he says that 2010-2013 was the “sweet spot” for building and scaling a company in the Bay Area. We talk about whether distributed teams make sense due to the escalating cost of living and the battle for talent in San Francisco. Whether an Apple Watch can replace your smartphone. Justin talks about how he survives in Silicon Valley without a phone, how going phone-free has changed how he works and lives and why he compares compulsive smartphone use to an addiction. He says a smartphone is a “Juul for your mind.” We're all big music fans, so we also talk about artists we've been loving recently, why the lines between music genres are being blurred, and the economics of creating music for artists. We also discuss some of their favorite products including a gratitude journal app that will improve your mental health, a “social network for athletes,” and a tool to help organize your tasks at work. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Rally Rd and AngelList, for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “We [at Atrium] have some resources, [we] have expanded, but measuring your company’s success in headcount is like measuring an airplane in weight, so it's not exactly the right measure of success.” — Justin “As an independent artist today, it takes between three months and eighteen months between the time you stream my music to get paid, and we [at his new company Audius] think that’s wrong in 2018.” — Ranidu “I think the sweet spot [to build a company in the Bay Area] was in 2010 through 2013 or so, where the costs were relatively much lower on the startup salary side. Now your million dollars is good for hiring two machine learning engineers.” — Justin “A lot of days [in my gratitude journal] I write about how awesome it is to live in San Francisco and have all these resources and friends. Life here is great and I think we get caught up in the little bit that is bad and think that everything is bad. To hate on San Francisco is very fashionable.” — Ranidu Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Airtable — Real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid. Apple Watch — The most powerful and advanced smart watch yet. The Artist Union — Discover and support the next generation of artists. Atrium — Legal services for startups, powered by machine learning. Audius — The future of music streaming on the blockchain. Five Minute Journal — The simplest, most effective way to be happier every day. Headspace — Learn to meditate and live mindfully. Insight Timer — The best free meditation timer, redesigned. Monday — Simplify the way your team works. Pacemaker — DJ with artificial intelligence from your Spotify. Strava — Run and cycling tracking on the social network for athletes. The Drop (RIP) — EDM discovery community.

Today I'm at Kleiner Perkins in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood to talk to Eugene Wei and Eric Feng. Eugene Wei has worked at Oculus, Flipboard, Amazon and Hulu. He actually left Amazon in the mid-2000s to attend film school before jumping back into tech. He’s also a prolific writer on his blog, Remains of the Day. Eric Feng is co-founder of Packagd and General Partner at Kleiner Perkins. He has previously worked at Microsoft, Flipboard and Hulu, where he and Eugene worked together. Fun fact: Eugene actually married Eric! (Eugene was the officiant at his wedding). In this episode we talk about: The uniqueness of video as a medium of communication and the future of how video will be created and consumed. Eric and Eugene worked together at Hulu and they talk about the background to the recent trend of tech moving in on Hollywood's turf. Creating tighter feedback loops when you're trying to learn something new or change your behavior. Eugene tells the story of adding after-market sensors to his golf clubs that give him all kinds of information on the speed and length of his swing. He calls it a swing coach on your phone and talks about how the trend of sensors and immediate feedback could be used to improve peoples' overall health, not just their short game. As some of the most plugged-in individuals in tech these days, they also discuss some of the trends they've been seeing in the tech industry and make some predictions about what they expect to see in the future. They discuss changes in how young people communicate these days, how the Chinese tech industry is different from the West's and why they expect to see the shift to e-commerce from advertising continue. We also discuss some of their favorite products including sensors you can stick on your golf clubs to give you pro-level stats, a tech-enabled meat smoker, and a way to solve the perennial 'baby with a stuffy nose' problem. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Post-Google and post-Facebook there was this huge shift to ad-supported monetization for everything. The entire world had moved to ads and that was the only way that you could build a company… but that pendulum has swung really far back over, because of this new paradigm shift of people being comfortable with e-commerce and now mobile facilitating that more. Commerce is now a much more interesting monetization model for startups than advertising.” — Eric “VR/AR, if you lump it in with self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, generalized artificial intelligence, all of these things are going to take longer than people expect, and that’s fine. They’re going to require a lot of big hardware advances, finding the right use cases, all of that is just going to be slower. But they’re all going to change the world in huge ways.” — Eugene “Take for example the shirt I’m wearing. It got made in some textile factory, the distribution was through a retail store, I paid in cash in-person and then I put it on. But in the era of technology two of those things have really fundamentally changed — the way it’s distributed and the way I purchase it. Now I buy it online and it’s sent to my home. But the way it’s created and the way it’s used are still the same, I’m still wearing it one sleeve at a time.” — Eric “The history of Hollywood is one where the studios went from really being vertically integrated to just being financiers and marketers. The thing about SV vs Hollywood is that SV tech companies have a lot more cash than all the studios put together. They’re a lot more profitable because of all their other businesses.” — Eugene Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Blast — Sensors for sport. Hulu — Live and on-demand TV. Mindie (RIP) – 7-second music videos Nosefrida — Stuffy nose solution for babies. Reflect — AI-powered face swap. Sandbox VR — In-person, social VR experiences. Tik Tok — Creative music video clip maker. Traeger — Tech-enabled smokers.

Today I'm visiting Garry Tan at Initialized HQ, a multi-stage fund that he started with Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of reddit. The fund has grown tremendously over the past six years with nearly $1B under management, a team of more than 10, and investments in a few companies you might be a customer of, including Coinbase, Instacart, Algolia, GOAT, Opendoor, and a bunch of others. They were also investors in Product Hunt. In this episode we talk about: Garry's early years working as a software engineer in tech, including some major missed opportunities (in hindsight). He recounts the story of Peter Thiel trying to hire him away from Microsoft to join what became the multi-billion dollar company, Palantir. Initialized's decision-making framework for figuring out which companies to pass on and which companies to invest in, as well as their honey badger mascot. Why an often overlooked skill for founders is managing conflict, even when the team is still small. Garry explains why he backed a company that aims to help create harmonious startup teams founded by his former therapist. We also discuss some of the Initialized portfolio companies that Garry is most excited about and the “megatrends” that are creating opportunities for investors and founders in tech today. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “The hard part about being a founder is you have this fog of war: you have no idea why you’re growing and a lot of times you also have no idea why you’ve stopped growing.” — Garry “Peter looked at me and said, 'you’re a great engineer, why are you doing that?' Come join us, we are going to change the world. How much do you make at Microsoft? He got out his check book and started writing and said, 'here’s a personal check from me to you; you can cash this and this is a risk-free opportunity for you...' So I said, 'thank you very much Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted next year at Microsoft' and I didn’t take the check. Opportunity knocked and I said no, and that company turned out to be Palantir.” — Garry “Basically everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face, and as a startup you're going to get your face punched in. The important thing is 'what do you do next?'” — Garry Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode LogDNA — Instantly collect and analyze logs real-time on any platform. Standard Cognition— AI-powered checkout. Torch.io — Leadership growth driven by data, powered by people. Check out www.initialized.com for a shot of Initialized's honey badger mascot.

Today I'm visiting San Francisco's Mission district to chat with Winnie co-founders, Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall. They have a unique background working at large tech companies like Google, Twitter, Quora, and Postmates, where they worked together before starting Winnie, “the companion app for parents.” As someone who's built and admires community-driven businesses, it was a pleasure to dive into how Winnie is creating community and a platform for parents. As mothers, Sara and Anne exemplify founder/market fit and are uniquely qualified to build a product for parents. In this episode we talk about: How Anne and Sara found founder/market fit and how their personal experience — Sara and Anne both have two children — informs not only how they built Winnie the product, but also how they built Winnie the company. How Winnie combats fake parenting news, and why it was important for them to take a stance on certain issues and actively moderate out certain topics. The power of communities aligned around a single vertical. We compare custom-built communities to generalized community-building tools like Facebook and Reddit. Of course, we also talk about some of their favorite products, including a way to continuously share your location with other members of your family, an app to share photos with family members, and another that captures one second every day and over time turns it into a highlight reel for your life. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Anne and I were very explicit from the beginning that we wanted to build the most family-friendly startup. We decided that we are not going to work long hours, our employees are not going to work long hours, and they’re not going to work on the weekends. We’re going to give employees flexibility and have them go on vacations. It’s a huge competitive advantage to be family-friendly.” — Sara [On including the option to post anonymously on Winnie] “Sometimes parenting questions are tough — tough, real stuff that you don’t want to put on your Facebook profile, where you can’t help but use your real name. You may not even feel comfortable talking to your mother’s group about some of the problems that you are having. So, we felt really motivated to make it work from the beginning.” — Anne “Having children has helped me a ton in putting the highs and lows of a startup in perspective. It’s just not that serious. It’s helped me build that resilience because the lows aren’t really that low. The stakes just don’t seem that high, and its actually enabled me to persevere through things where other people would have quit.” — Sara “We have other special features tailored to our audience, such as the ability to mask photos. We have these cute little stickers (that are adorable) and there’s a face-detection feature that will put little animals masks over the faces of any children that are in the photos that you’re posting. We make it super-easy and even fun to anonymize that photo.” — Anne Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode 1 Second Everyday — Turn your favorite moments into meaningful movies. Google Photos — Free storage and automatic organization for all your memories. Life360 — Your new family circle.

Today I'm at the headquarters of High Fidelity in San Francisco talking with co-founder and CEO, Philip Rosedale. Philip and the team at High Fidelity are creating free and open source software that enables real-time, social virtual reality. Some of you may also know Philip as the creator of Second Life, the iconic “internet-scale virtual world.” In fact, this episode was actually recorded entirely in virtual reality. Philip and I were both wearing headsets in different rooms. You can actually watch a video capture of our 3D VR chat, featuring a slightly awkward-looking avatar of myself. In this episode we talk about: The most advanced uses of VR today, like school kids being able to take a virtual field trip into an Egyptian tomb, and where VR is headed in the future. We discuss what VR might look like 5, 10, and 20 years in the future and which companies are best positioned to take advantage of the shift to VR. How widespread adoption of VR will transform our lives, especially when it comes to how we work and go to school. Philip gives the example of kids being able to go to school together with others from the other side of the world and how that will change for the better how we relate to one another. We also get into some of the philosophical questions around VR, including how to deal with identity and anonymity in a virtual world and why VR can enable better privacy online. We also talk about some of Philip's favorite VR applications as well as some of his requests for products in the space. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, GE Ventures, Rally Rd, and AngelList for their support. 😸 Quotes From This Episode “If I can go to school on a virtual planet where there are kids from all over the whole world, look at the human impact of that versus me going to school with only the kids that are within ten blocks of my house. There’s a homogeneity to local places that is going to get completely turned off with VR.” — Philip “[In Second Life] people were surprisingly vocal with one identity. I think maybe we only have a certain amount of ability to imagine ourselves as different things and I think there’s a fatigue with really being out there far away from how you imagine yourself.” — Philip “Virtual worlds are very interesting in that they put a big spotlight on these issues around privacy, anonymity, and freedom of speech. We’re not going to have our real names floating around our heads in VR.” — Philip Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Facemoji — Emoji your face. HTC Vive — Discover virtual reality beyond imagination. Magic Leap — Lightweight wearable that brings dreams to life. Ubiquity6 — Edit reality together.

Today I'm at AngelList HQ in San Francisco for a bit of a reunion with two friends and investors: Parker Thompson and Erik Torenberg. Parker Thompson is a partner at AngelList and early stage investor. Prior to joining the family here (Product Hunt is an AngelList company), he was a partner at 500 Startups where he invested in Erik's first company, among many others. Before that, Parker spent six years at Pivotal Labs. As you'll hear, he's also behind the popular Twitter account @StartupLJackson. Erik Torenberg is co-founder and partner at Village Global, a network-driven venture firm. He is also co-founder and chairman of crypto company TokenDaily and On Deck, a community of top talent looking to start or join their next company. Erik was actually the first full-time teammate to join me at Product Hunt and prior to that, he co-founded rapt.fm, an app for participating in live online rap battles. In this episode we talk about: How investors choose which companies to bet on, including how investors think about investing in companies with distributed teams. We also run through the lessons learned from the early stage investing Parker, Erik and I have done and discuss the strategies founders should use when pricing their initial fundraising rounds. The emergence of crypto and whether it will pose a threat to Facebook as well as the challenges Facebook faces in trying to regulate what can and can't be said on their platform. We also talk about when decentralization makes sense and why some of the benefits of centralization might be overlooked in the rush to decentralize. How new business opportunities emerge through platform shifts, including whether voice as a platform is finally seeing its often-forecasted and much-anticipated shift to the mainstream. Erik and Parker also run through some of their requests for products. Of course, we also talk about some of their favorite products, including a social network for books, an app to help freestyle rappers, and a device that lets you cook food to perfection by vacuum-sealing it and submerging it in hot water. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Every time there's a platform shift you sort of have two different types of companies built on the new platform: new-old things — you take legacy products and add internet to it, like Casper, bed plus internet, or Coursera, education plus internet. Then you have the new-new thing — things that could only be created on the new platform, which for the internet is something like eBay or PayPal or Napster.” — Erik “I think just as a macro point, often we're too quick to extrapolate patterns like the new-new versus the new-old and with respect to crypto, I’m old enough to remember the lesson coming out of the 90s that open was always going to win. That’s how we built web 2.0… but then Facebook and Twitter came along… but now open/decentralized is coming back we're and saying actually we were right before and open is the future.” — Parker “You make choices in defaults — these algorithms are choices, and even when you try not to pick winners, you’re still picking winners.” — Parker “A lot of people criticize these incumbents, like Facebook or Amazon, saying these are the rent-seekers taking way too much and that we are going to build a decentralized version of them and pass on all the value to consumers. But what they don’t give enough credit to is that these products already pass along a lot of value to consumers... What I’m excited about with crypto networks is the ability to incentivize a lot more stakeholders, like the early users that contribute a lot to the platform. You have the ability to give upside to a lot more people than just early employees.” — Erik “A puzzle to me is, why is there not a billion dollar exercise video company? It just seems like something that should exist, and the way I think about investing is: you're just wandering through the world and encountering these puzzles and the answers are not obvious but then someone walks in the door with the answer because they’ve figured it out. That's when you get excited and do the deal.” — Parker Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Anova — Connected temperature-controlled cooking device. Goodreads — Popular social network for book lovers. Rhymeo — Freestyle app that provides material for your shareable raps. STEEZY — Online dance classes at your own pace. Udemy — Learn anything, on your schedule.

Today's episode of Product Hunt Radio is the largest gathering yet, featuring Arlan, Christie, Bryan, and Amiah from the Backstage Capital team. Arlan Hamilton isn't your typical VC. She went from being homeless not long ago to founding and scaling Backstage Capital, a fund dedicated to investing in underrepresented (or underestimated, as she coined) founders. Since 2015, they have invested millions of dollars into over 80 companies. Prior to starting the fund, she worked in the music industry, where she was a tour manager and founder and publisher of INTERLUDE, an internationally distributed indie magazine. Christie Pitts is the co-founder of Backstage Studio, their recently announced venture studio. Prior to teaming up with Arlan and team, she worked with Verizon Ventures portfolio and following emerging technology trends. Bryan Landers is Backstage's recently promoted COO and producer of two of Backstage's podcasts. Previously he worked as a designer and product manager at Zapier and as a consultant. Amiah Sheppard is an operations associate and analyst working on the deal flow team at Backstage. She has a particular focus on beauty and wellness startups. In this episode we talk about: Arlan's mission to find underrepresented and underestimated founders and the importance, even as adults, of being able to look up to role models who look like you. Arlan hopes to be a role model to a new generation of people of color that want to build companies. The crew, as they call the team at Backstage, walk through some of their requests for products, including waterproof headgear, online book clubs, and a way to bring the shared experience of live music online. Aspiring founders, take note! Also mullets make another appearance (see last week's episode for more chatter about mullet). Except this time it's not about a mullet strategy or mullet businesses, it's about the actual, for-real hockey hair. We also talk about some of their favorite products, like an app that lets you experience live music in virtual reality, a service that lets you search live audio, and a way to add pictures, maps or quotes to your favorite podcasts. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I cried when I saw this cover [Fast Company October 2018] because I was looking back a few years to see who I wanted to see [on a magazine cover.]” — Arlan “We’re about to have another mobile revolution [with 5G]. There are companies working on the technology, but I think there will be a whole new wave of companies that change the way we interact with each other.” — Christie “You have thousands and thousands of people who are finally getting their shot at starting a company.” — Arlan “As long as you can’t download a t-shirt, live music will always win. They said that a few years ago, but now you can download a t-shirt.” — Arlan Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode CEEK — Explore, share and live the moment in VR. Entale — Add pictures, maps and quotes to your favorite podcasts. Nēdl — Find what's playing or saying now on live audio broadcasts. Turntable.fm (RIP) — Music-streaming, chat rooms and voting. Also explore this collection of Backstage Capital's headliners (aka portfolio companies) on Product Hunt.

Today on Product Hunt Radio, I make the trek from San Francisco down to Sandhill Road to talk to Andrew Chen and Ada Chen at Andreessen Horowitz. Their matching last name is not a coincidence — yes, they are siblings. Andrew Chen is a relatively recent addition to Andreessen Horowitz team, where he's a General Partner focused on consumer and SaaS. Prior to joining the illustrious firm, he led growth teams at Uber. He's also a prolific writer with more than 650 essays over the past decade covering startups, growth, and more. Fun fact: he coined the term “mullet business” which we touch on during the podcast. (Where's a mullet emoji when you need it!?) Ada Chen has a unique background, operating at companies with massive scale, including Mochi Media, LinkedIn, and SurveyMonkey, as well as startups at the earliest stage. Today she advises several startups and is the COO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for teams, which she co-founded with her husband. In this episode we talk about: The uniqueness of the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem, how network effects conspire to create a “rich get richer” situation for cities, and why new communication tools enabling distributed teams to work together across continents could mean that there will be no “next Silicon Valley.” Ada shares her insights on the contrasting skill sets needed when working at a big company versus a small startup, after having herself gone from a small startup to a huge organization like LinkedIn back to a two-person startup with her husband. How to port the concept of OKRs — objectives and key results, a personnel management framework originated by legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove — to your personal life from your business (and why you would want to). We talk about you can use them to help manage your exercise, social life and relationship with your SO. Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including an app that lets you pop in to a luxury hotel for a few hours to shower or have a nap, a super cool way to greet visitors to your office, and a new app for emailing yourself. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “When you’re executing at a small startup, or a small team, or just by yourself, it really comes down to ideating, picking and prioritizing, and then rolling up your sleeves and just getting things done as quickly as possible. It's a night and day difference from a big company.” — Ada “If you graph cities, there's a power law: the biggest cities are really big and there's this long tail of all these little tiny cities, and the reason for that is that there's a network effect within cities. These ecosystems emerge because the designers are here, because the engineers are here, because the capital is here, because the marketing people are here, and on and on and on.” — Andrew “When it comes to working at a large company, it's much more cerebral and much more about the heart. You’re thinking about how to collaborate and communicate across a cross-functional team to get the initiative done: can you communicate what it's about; can you motivate people to get it done; can you manage all the working pieces?” — Ada “Either these network effects will continue to hold and the Bay Area will continue to be strong, or we make big structural shifts in how we organize teams and workforces and the network effects become less strong. But that doesn’t mean some other city becomes the next Silicon Valley, there won’t actually be a “next” Silicon Valley — it either continues or will just be distributed.” — Andrew “The irony of it is that sometimes when you are working on projects with such large scale, because the skill set is so different, it actually feels like you're not doing anything at all — you’re merely managing the appendages of the other groups and trying to make sure everyone is staying on track and executing.” — Ada On joining a venture capital firm: “The idea that I would do the thing I want to do for fun as my full-time job feels like I’ve won an ice cream eating competition, and the prize is more ice cream.” — Andrew Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Bose — Noise-cancelling earbuds. Breather — Peace and quiet, on-demand. Reserve a private space on the go. Captio — Email yourself with one tap. Envoy — Elegantly greet visitors to your office. HabitShare — The only habit-tracking app that is social to its core. NotaBene — Shortcuts for quickly emailing notes to yourself and others. Notejoy — Collaborative notes for your entire team. Recharge — Take a nap or shower in a luxury hotel. Reddit — r/InternetIsBeautiful, r/bestof and r/firstworldanarchists Spacious — Flexible, drop-in workspace. VIPKID — Teach Chinese children from your home. We Are The Nerds: The Birth and

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I'm in the sunny hills of Los Angeles at the home of Sophia Amoruso with Suzy Ryoo. Sophia Amoruso is an incredible entrepreneur who I've gotten to know over the past year. She got her start very young, when at 22 she founded NastyGal, selling vintage clothing on eBay. It turned into a massive company with hundreds of employees, until a decade later the company filed for bankruptcy. She's the author of the New York Times bestseller #GIRLBOSS and more recently founded Girlboss, a company focused on bringing together and helping women professionals. They put on community events, publish a daily newsletter and host a wildly popular podcast. Suzy Ryoo is a very special person to me (full disclosure: She's my SO). We met at Coachella in 2015 just before she transitioned her career from entertainment and media to venture capital. At Atom Factory, she works with entrepreneur, artist manager, and investor, Troy Carter. They manage the Prince Estate and are investors in companies like Lyft, Uber, Warby Parker, Spotify, and Girlboss. She is also a partner at Cross Culture Ventures, a seed stage fund in Los Angeles. In this episode we talk about: The best tools and techniques we've used to build healthy habits, whether it's getting more exercise, meditating more frequently (even for five minutes at a time) or just having a calmer mind. We also talk about the ways that being part of a non-judgmental online community — yes, those do exist online — can help everybody involved reach their goals. Sophia talks about her journey as an entrepreneur, including building a huge company like Nasty Gal “by accident” and the lessons she's taking from her time at Nasty Gal as she starts Girlboss, which, as she likes to say, is the first company she's started “on purpose.” Why Suzy is still a power user of location-based check-in apps like Swarm and Foursquare. We also talk about some of the unappreciated merits of what sometimes seem like “creepy” products. The ups-and-downs of investing, and why sometimes you can make a sound decision at the time that you later come to regret. Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including a $40 (!) astrology app, apps that promise “a vacation for your mind,” as well as startups that deliver the best vitamins and probiotics. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “Platforms can become really huge, but when you have a community and there's a sense of context around what they’re talking about and what they’re there to do, ultimately if they help one another, then that's as good as the internet gets.” — Sophia “Twitter can be like a dialog with yourself, especially if you don’t have a following. I promised myself that I would tweet every time I run, and little known to me, during 2017 I ran 200 miles. I think that feedback loop really helped me.” — Suzy “I like to say that I’ve started two brands on accident but this is my first business I've started on purpose.” — Sophia “Like my dad says, 'health is wealth!'” — Suzy “You don’t really count the places you go in real life, but then you do it digitally [via check-in apps like Foursquare] and you’re like wow, I do a lot of stuff!” — Sophia Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Bird — Enjoy the ride — quick scooter hires for city commutes. Complete — A community-based to-do app. Help each other GTD. Co-Star — Hyper-personalized astrology. Evernote — Note taking gets even simpler. Fair — Get a car right on your phone and return it whenever you want. 1st Dibs — It's like Fab for the 1%. Foursquare — Find the best places everywhere. Girlboss — A new media site for women. Headspace — Meditation made simple in just 10 minutes a day. Highlight (RIP) — Find friends and new people nearby. Hi Hello — Exchange contacts, seamlessly. Lime — Rent bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters. Nike+ Running — Track your runs. Polymail — A simple, beautiful, and powerful email client for Mac. Ritual — Reinventing the vitamin, delivered monthly. Sanctuary— Free daily horoscopes for the cosmically curious. Seed — Your daily probiotics + prebiotics for systemic health. Simple Habit— Meditation for people who never have time. Swarm — Keep up and meet up with your friends. Tesla — The mass market electric car. TimePassages — Astrology tools at your fingertips. Trello — Organize anything, together. Uber — Get a ride in minutes. Universe — The easiest way to make an awesome website. From your phone. Wonderschool — Airbnb for preschools and child care.

Today I'm visiting Stripe's office in San Francisco to chat with Patrick Collison and Courtland Allen, shortly after they announced their latest round of funding, valuing the company at a whopping $20B. Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, an ambitious company aiming to increase the GDP of the internet. The now 1,300 person company was started in 2010 by Patrick and his brother, John Collison, at the age of 23 and 21, respectively. While young, this isn't their first startup. Prior to founding Stripe, Patrick and his brother started and sold Auctomatic for $5M in 2008. Courtland Allen is a super talented designer and developer. In 2016 he founded Indie Hackers, an awesome community of bootstrappers and makers sharing their stories. Nine months later Stripe acquired the company. Courtland is also a Y Combinator alumnus and an MIT graduate with a degree in Computer Science. In this episode we talk about: Who Patrick and Courtland's role models were when they were building their businesses, and how the right role models today can help build a more inclusive tech ecosystem. The influence of Indie Hackers on Stripe and why even with the great tech for online communication today, some of the best interactions between its community members happen at meetups. If there's too much or too little funding in tech and how the investor-founder dynamic changes when you move outside of Silicon Valley. Why Stripe started a book publishing business (in 2018) and the reading habits of Patrick, Courtland, and others at Stripe. We of course also talk about some of their favorite products including a product to tell you how you sleep, helpful tools for building your next app, and some “oldies-but-goodies” that you might have forgotten about. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “How do we help increase the number of successful companies that get started in the world? The number of companies that get started is not some sort of cosmological constant, and if it can be increased then I think it's incredibly valuable to go and do that.” — Patrick “Indie Hackers the movement wouldn’t have been as possible ten years ago, because there's so much more knowledge being exchanged now and so many more tools to help you build things — it's just easier to do with a small team than it ever has been.” — Courtland “People are subject to extremely strong Girardian herd effects, so I don’t think investors are unique in this regard — they index on this popular conception of things. I think startups outside of the popular hubs are less popular than they ought to be and that people update too slowly based on changing trends.” — Patrick “There should be more funding in the world, but more spread out and distributed more evenly.” — Courtland “It all comes back to this idea of, 'how do we grow the GDP of the internet?'” — Patrick Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Airtable — Realtime spreadsheet-database hybrid. Firebase — App success made simple by Google. JUMP — Electrified, dockless bike rentals. Emfit — Contactless sleep sensing solutions. Pocket — Save and read news, articles and videos that fuel your mind. Retool — Build custom internal tools in minutes. Uber — Get a ride in minutes. WhatsApp — Fast, cross-platform messenger. Yelp — Crowd-sourced reviews for local businesses.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I'm visiting TechCrunch HQ to hang out with two journalists that see more startups in a month than most people in a lifetime. Josh Constine is the Editor-At-Large at TechCrunch where he specializes his analysis on social products, including everything Facebook. Two fun facts: He's a Stanford graduate with a Master's degree in cybersociology and (like myself) a big fan of live music. Sarah Buhr is a new mother and, as she announces on the show, is taking a break from reporting at TechCrunch to raise her child. I've known Sarah since she joined TechCrunch in 2014 and more recently she's focused her writing on the wild world of biotechnology. We also have one more special guest: Sarah's beautiful six month old baby boy, Hayes. If you hear crying and clapping in the background, it's probably him. In this episode we talk about: The baby boom in Silicon Valley, including some of the coolest tech-enabled baby products helping tired moms and dads, as well as the ways that tech company cultures have changed since their founders and employees started having children. Why it might be possible to beat unhealthiness with convenience. We talk about a number of startups that are trying to get you fit by making the healthy option the easier option, similar to how Spotify beat piracy by making streaming easier than pirating. The future of work and education and how it will affect the world baby Hayes grows up in. We talk about why Sarah and her husband have been debating whether they should be saving for Hayes to go to college, how AR and VR will transform education and how automation will affect the workplace. All things Facebook – whether new startups can compete with the massive social network and some quick thoughts on their first hardware product, Portal. We of course also talk about some of their favorite products including a robot that makes burgers, a time-sucking app for meme lovers, and a virtual assistant that can do things for you when you run out of time (because you were browsing memes). We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “It's not just about transferring the work from humans to robots, because I think that gives us all that empty dystopic feeling. The idea is that rather than removing the humans from the equation, you instead want to remove the robotic elements of the humans’ jobs so that the humans can actually focus on the most personable, human, empathic part of the job.” — Josh “Harvard came out with a study that said that lots of screen time isn’t bad for your child — what's critical is that you’re there present watching the screen with your child.” — Sarah “You can’t just take peoples' livelihood away and give them the money instead, because they’re not going to feel like they have any purpose anymore.” — Josh “I think what we’ve seen is that even if you make $19 billion off your startup, like WhatsApp, and you sell it to someone else, that means that you are no longer the captain of that ship and you may never get such a beautiful ship again.” — Josh Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Creator — Robot-made burgers. Fin — Virtual assistant service. Imgur — The most viral images on the internet. Libby — Borrow eBooks and audiobooks for free instantly through your local library. Mirror — The mirror that's also an interactive home gym. O.school — Original videos and GIFs to learn sex, pleasure, and dating. Snoo — The world's most technologically advanced bassinet. TBH — The only anonymous app with positive vibes. Thistle — Healthy meal subscription service. Tonal — Machine learning digital gym + personal training built in.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I'm recording from my home in San Francisco to talk to two young entrepreneurs. Tiffany Zhong interned at Product Hunt while she was still in high school. After she finished school, she worked in venture capital before starting Zebra Intelligence, a startup helping brands and old people like myself better understand Gen Z. She's also an investor with her fund, Pineapple Capital. Drake Rehfeld is CEO of Splish, a Y Combinator-backed company that's building social apps to make the internet more fun. He formerly worked at Snap, where he was one of the youngest hires, as well as at Team 10. Drake's been a tech entrepreneur since high school when he created a product for school events that made real money. In this episode we talk about: “What the kids are using these days” and all things Generation Z, including what they're looking for in products and some of the common misconceptions about this younger demographic. The projects that Tiffany, Drake and I started while still in high school, including the story of a OperationLaugh.com, a site I created with the goal of earning $100,000 that netted $70 before I shut it down. (Tiffany and Drake had more success with their high school ventures). “Digital influencers” on Instagram, what Gen Z thinks of them, and why you would start your own. Also — why any of this has anything to do with fake plants. The phenomenon of a “finsta,” the ways that “the kids these days” are reshaping how identity works on the web, and some of the experimental social apps that don't have any of the typical social features like comments, followers or likes. We of course also talk about some of their favorite products, including the HQ Trivia of music, a tool for creating your very own “digital influencer” and an anonymous app that (surprisingly) brings positive vibes. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I like calling this [Gen Z] the side hustle generation, because nothing can stop us from building a company, given the internet.” — Tiffany “I think [online identity] is less about real name versus fake name and more about the persistence of identity.” — Drake “The future is going to be digital celebrities selling digital merchandise and digital collectibles.” — Tiffany “You see someone who is 13 or 14 across the world shipping things and you see that and think, I could do that too.” — Tiffany “You make what you use and there's this wave of products feeling more like toys than full-on utilities. People want toys not tools.” — Drake Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Facemoji — Emoji your face (via webcam). IGTV — Long-form vertical videos from Instagram. IRL — Hang out with friends in real life. TikTok (formerly Musical.ly) — A creative music video clip maker. Out of Tune — The HQ trivia of music. Shots (RIP) — An online selfie-sharing app. Splish — Live photo filters and animated effects. Suprize — “Win sick sh*t.” TBH — The only anonymous app with positive vibes. Zebra Intelligence — Gen Z, Gen Z, Gen Z.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I'm in Los Angeles talking to Brian Norgard and Jeff Morris Jr., both of whom may be indirectly responsible for a generation of “Tinder babies”. Brian Norgard is an entrepreneur, investor, and Chief Product Officer at Tinder. He has worked on a number of other products and was Tinder's first acquisition. He collaborated with Sean Rad on an earlier app called Chill, which we discuss on the podcast. Brian is also an investor in Lyft, SpaceX and AngelList. Jeff Morris Jr. is the Director of Product for Tinder's revenue initiatives. He previously worked at Zaarly and has created a number of products, including one stretch over three months where he built and launched three products, reaching the top of Product Hunt. He is also an investor in Lyft, CryptoKitties, Particle, Brat and others. In this episode: The joy of turning online connections into real-world connections. Jeff is great at this. He once went biking with Lance Armstrong in Hawaii after reaching out to Armstrong on Twitter. How seemingly minor design decisions, like adding a subtle animation to a play button, can “nudge” users into a new pattern of behavior and make products more enjoyable to use. Brian and Jeff discuss the design of Tinder Places, including the thoughtfulness that went into the privacy features of the product, and how they took inspiration from Foursquare. We get nostalgic and discuss some of our favorite products from the past, like Chill and Highlight. They leveraged location on mobile in an attempt to merge the online and offline world. Jeff tells the story of the time he reached out on Twitter about a job opportunity and less than 48 hours later had moved from San Francisco to Kansas City. Why Product Hunt has gained a reputation as a positive, fun, and upbeat community and how subtle, very intentional design decisions — like our ridiculous Google Glass-sporting cat — contribute to the community and brand. Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including messaging apps, trivia games as well as a couple of now-obsolete apps that were onto something at the time but didn't end up taking off. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “I like to respond to people who I shouldn't be taking to. I'll email people I shouldn't email. I don't care if they email me back. One in one hundred responses could change your life.” — Jeff “Tinder's really a serendipity engine... It's one of the few experiences where you're actually leaning forward to meet someone you don't know.” — Brian “[After he hired me via Twitter and a Skype interview] he said 'I'm in Kansas City, will you move here?' I packed my bags, got on a plane, moved to Kansas City and didn't go back to San Francisco for nine months. That was all from Twitter, within 48 hours.” — Jeff “[When building products and communities ] follow the traffic anywhere. Things happen, a bunch of people aggregate, you find ways to give them unique value, and you reduce the friction because people are already there.” — Brian “No one wants another copycat product in any category.” — Brian Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Chill (RIP) — A fast and fun way to communicate. Discord — Free voice and text chat for gamers. Highlight (RIP) — Find friends and new people nearby. HQ Trivia — Live trivia game show by the founder of Vine. Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving & search. Telegram — Fast, encrypted messaging app. Tinder Boost — Skip the line for 30 minutes to get more matches. Tinder Places — Discover new people who hang where you hang.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I'm visiting Y Combinator's San Francisco headquarters to talk to two of the people who are integral to Y Combinator — Kat Manalac and Michael Seibel. Kat is a Partner at Y Combinator and one of the people that convinced us to apply to join the program back in 2014. She's been at YC for five years, focusing on founder outreach, company pitch perfection, and much much more.. Prior to joining YC, she was Chief of Staff to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and also worked on brand and strategy at WIRED. Michael is CEO of Y Combinator's accelerator program. He has been through YC himself a couple of times — first in 2007, as co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv — and again in 2012 as co-founder and CEO of Socialcam. Justin.tv later became Twitch and sold to Amazon, and Socialcam was sold to Autodesk. In this episode we talk about: The evolution of Y Combinator. It's changed a ton since Product Hunt went through the program four years ago. They've been working on several programs for founders — things that Michael wishes existed when he went through the program. Michael and Kat's advice for founders, including counterintuitive tips they've learned after working with literally *thousands *of startups. A key mistake that trips up new founders when pitching their company, as well as advice for founders seeking a technical co-founder. How YC has scaled the organization as a 50-person company with its 4,000 (and growing) alumni. Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including a virtual assistant that will do anything, a $1,500 smart mirror that will get you fit, and a beverage that will get you high. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode "80% of the pitch is to tell me what you do and 20% is to tell me why it's good." — Michael "[When pitching] it is always best to start [by answering] one line: 'what do you actually do'?" — Kat “The goal is always to make sure that people who are smart and want to build things have the opportunity to get funding and startup advice no matter who they know or where they come from." — Michael "I think that a lot of people try to hustle around having a technical co-founder, which is possible, but I don’t think they realize how hard it is to hustle around that, [and if they did] I think they would just hustle to get a technical co-founder." — Michael "Instead of pitching your tech friends on whatever your solution to that problem is, instead pitch your friends on how important that problem is." — Michael "I recommend talking to as many people as possible about your idea because you never know who is going to be excited about it, or who might be interested in being an early investor, or who might want to join the team." — Kat "You’ve got to get it out and into the hands of users, otherwise how do you know that they actually want what you’re building." — Michael "It takes a special personality I think [to be a startup founder] — that you wouldn’t want to do anything else — that you couldn’t maybe. A lot of startup founders I know would be terrible employees." — Michael Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Bitwise — The world's first cryptocurrency index fund. California Dreamin' — Cannabis infused sodas. DearBrightly— Personalized prescription skincare products. Fin — Virtual assistant service. Gixo — Live fitness classes wherever you are. JUMP — Electrified, dockless bike rentals. Magic — Get whatever you want on demand with no hassle, through SMS. Mirror — The mirror that's also an interactive home gym. Nanit Baby Monitor — Smart baby monitor that tracks sleep using computer vision. Peloton — World class indoor cycling experience wherever you are. Remix — The platform for designing your city’s transportation future. Robinhood — $0 commission stock brokerage. Station.io — One app to rule them all. STEEZY — Online dance classes with the world's best instructors. Titan — Built like a hedge fund. Tonal — Machine learning digital gym + personal training built in. Twindog — Find other dogs and their owners around you.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio I'm joined by two incredible people, Laura Deming and Daniel Gross, who have accomplished more before the age of 30 than most people have realized in a lifetime. Laura grew up in New Zealand and came to San Francisco when she was only 12 years old to join a lab studying aging. She was accepted to MIT at 14 before leaving to form Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm investing in companies aimed to help us all live longer and healthier lives. Daniel came to the Bay Area from Israel, accepted into Y Combinator in 2010, the youngest founder to go through the program at that time. His startup, Cue, was later acquired by Apple which led him to a leadership position across a number of AI and machine learning teams at the company. He left Apple to work at Y Combinator and recently launched Pioneer, a program to identify and support brilliant people in the world. In this episode we talk about: What it was like for Laura and Daniel to move to the Bay Area from overseas. How Pioneer is aimed to find the “world's lost Einsteins, Marie Curies and Elon Musks”. Why some animals don't age and how humans might be able to learn from creatures such as the tortoise or the naked mole rat. The challenges posed by living much longer than humans do now and how society might change as a result. Why you should sometimes call what you're creating on a project or experiment, rather than a startup. How to find your passion through experimentation. Advice Daniel and Laura have for founders and young people looking to start something big. Of course, we’ll also cover some of our favorite products that you might not know about. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “The benefit of the Ivy League is not the curriculum, I think Google's an awesome curriculum. The benefit of the Ivy League is the network and the branding.” — Daniel “There are a hundred versions of me that sent that same email and never got a response — and how many girls are out there who just never got the chance to explore science and grow in that way?” — Laura “The question is, 'can we build a digital Ivy League campus' — that's truly what we're going at here [at Pioneer].” — Daniel “Young people can do great work but I think it's really under-appreciated the extent to which that's a real phenomenon.” — Laura “I think the biggest thing we're fighting with Pioneer is this subtle enemy of self-editing.” — Daniel “We assume that the number of years we live today is the correct amount, but really it’s optimized for the savannah and different mortality conditions.” — Laura “All you have to do, if you want to become a Laura Deming or a Ryan Hoover, is you just have to take your passion seriously — no one needs to give you permission.” — Daniel “We should be able to choose when we die, and that could be later or earlier than it currently is... Everyone in the world should be able to choose how long they want to live, based on their particular circumstances.” — Laura “We want to bring the power of software to the problem of finding the lost Einsteins.” — Daniel Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode Anki— Learn more faster with better flashcards. Longevity Fund — Investing in companies that will allow us to live longer, healthier, lives. Nanopore Sequencing — DNA sequencing on a portable device for under $1,000. Pioneer — An online tournament for productivity.

In the second episode of the new Product Hunt Radio, I’m joined by two amazing community-builders based in New York, Anil Dash and Allison Esposito. Anil is the CEO of Glitch, a friendly community where developers build the app of their dreams. You'll find everything from AI-powered musical spinners to multiplayer drawing game created on the platform. He's also an advisor to Medium, DonorsChoose, Project Include, and Stack Overflow. Allison is formerly of Oyster, the Netflix for books, which was acquired by Google in 2015. Afterward she founded Tech Ladies, a community that connects women with the best jobs in tech. In this episode we talk about: The good ol' days of IRC, Friendster, AIM, and MySpace. A lot has changed since then, yet they continue to exhibit some of the same dynamics and challenges of today's massive social networks. The challenges of building a healthy community on the internet in a time when careers and reputations can be destroyed in an instant. How online communities mirror offline interactions. Opening up an app has many parallels to walking into a social gathering in real life. Some of the common misconceptions people have about creating communities online and what a founder’s goal should really be in starting a community. Of course, we’ll also cover some of our favorite products that you might not know about. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸 Quotes from This Episode “There’s something about community that if you’re doing it right, it should feel like a mix of it just happened and it’s natural.” – Allison “It turns out the hosting of the video wasn’t the thing, the community is the thing and it has a value. Whether you create an environment that you feel people can express themselves in is a rare and special and delicate thing.” — Anil “You open up the app and you’re basically walking into an event. The design, language, people and the way they talk to each other [influence how people] adapt to this community.” — Ryan “Most companies throw up a community and it’s a ghost town and nobody goes. The worst case is that they throw up a community and there’s nobody moderating or managing and it does grow. That is a nightmare.” — Anil “I also have these theories that tech is a fashion industry — it goes in cycles. Instead of hemlines going up or down, we have centralized to decentralized, or this programming language is cool and now it’s not cool…” — Anil Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode AIM (RIP) – Instant messaging in the 90s Aloe Bud — Self-care pocket companion GeoCities (RIP) – Your home on the web Glitch — The community where you'll build the app of your dreams Hello Weather — All the weather info you need, and nothing you don't LastPass — All your passwords in one place MySpace – The social network with blinky tags and auto-playing music Tech Ladies — A job board and community for women in tech ThinkUp (RIP) – Personal analytics for social networks, delivered daily Trello — Organize anything, together Yapper — Stay connected to your community

In our inaugural episode, we're joined by two notable investors, Alexia Bonatsos and Niko Bonatsos. Alexia is the former co-editor-in-chief of TechCrunch and founder of a new venture fund, Dream Machine, where she helps founders “turn science fiction into non-fiction.” Her husband, Niko is Managing Director at General Catalyst, a leading Silicon Valley venture firm with investments in companies like Airbnb, ClassPass, Snap, Gusto, Warby Parker and others. In this episode we talk about: The rise of voice. As Google Home, Amazon Echoes, AirPods, and other voice-enabled devices continue to proliferate, we’ll see user behavior shift – the same way touch screens have influenced young kids – and new opportunities arise for creative entrepreneurs. The corrosive nature of behavior online, in part influenced by today’s advertising model, and potential solutions. The evolution of venture capital, with the rise of micro VCs and accessibility of capital. Of course, we’ll also cover some of our favorite products that you might not know about, including an app to help end mobile phone addiction, a new anonymous social network (the next Secret done right?), and an app that reminds you that you're going to die. Products mentioned on the show: Arthena – Quantitative research in art assets Atrium – Legal services for startups, powered by ML Casper – Casper is changing the way the world sleeps Moment – Put down your phone and get back to your life Nuzzel – The super-easy way to see news from your friends October – A new social network built for anonymity Omni – On-demand itemized physical storage Rally Rd. – Invest in blue-chip classic cars like stocks SleepCycle – A bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep pattern Substack – Paid email newsletters made simple The Wing – Co-working and community for professional women Transit – Real-time transit data and a bot to help you commute Truebill – Find your paid subscriptions and cancel with one click WeCroak – An app to remind you of death Big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸

Today, we're re-introducing Product Hunt Radio, a weekly show with the people building and shaping the future of tech and culture. Our goal is to recreate Product Hunt in audio form. We'll discuss the latest tech trends and awesome products you probably don't know about. But this time around, we're including you on the show with community call-ins. Each week we'll host a different prompt. Call (707) 785–6152 to chime in and we might include it on the show. The first episode will drop soon, so subscribe with your favorite podcast player. And big thanks to our partners, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. You'll hear more about them on the sh

This week’s episode is with Donald Rumsfeld. Donald is the former Secretary of Defense for the US and, at the tender age of 83, released an app - a solitaire game inspired by Winston Churchill. We talk about the app, lessons learned over his career, thoughts about succeeding in politics, in business, how he thinks about the future and much more. Edited by @jennaweissberman Lavish Praise to @Rumsfeldoffice Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Jason Calacanis is a long time founder and investor, having invested in Uber, Thumbtack, and many more. We talk about Jason’s Launch Incubator, investment strategy, legacy, and much more. As always, Jason tells it straight and does not hold back any punches. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @Jason Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Arianna is the founder of The Huffington Post, board member of Uber, and author of "The Sleep Revolution". Order the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011G3HC0U/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 We talk about all things sleep, (i.e why we glamorize burnout), what inspired her to write the book, and what she’s doing to spark a sleep revolution. We also we talk about the story behind her joining Uber, her background and how she got into tech, and her long-term ambitions and thoughts on legacy. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @ariannahuff Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Josh is one of the most respected product managers in the game, having built products at Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Now he has made an name for himself at Greylock as a top vc We talk about his journey working at those companies, what it was like to work with some of the best founders of all time, his transition to investing, advice for people starting a company, and much more. Josh has been a friend and supporter and If you ever get a chance to work with Josh I highly recommend it. One of the best at what he does and he’s one of the good guys.

Tyler Willis is an angel investor and entrepreneur (former CMO of Hired). In this episode we talk about identity balancing the personal & professional self, goal setting, transparency, imposter syndrome, self-learning. the craft of angel investing, and much more. Do check out Tyler Willis' fantastic podcast about angel investing: https://soundcloud.com/angellist/episode-0-tyler-willis-intro-to-angellist-radio-s1 Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @Tylerwillis Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Bret Taylor previously built Google Maps and served as CTO of Facebook. He is now founder of Quip. In this episode we talk about what it was like working at Facebook & Google, how he’s grown as a CEO and founder of Quip and various lessons learned along the way. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @Btaylor Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Brad is an incredibly successful investor, having founded the Techstars accelerator and Foundry group, and he's also also known as one of the kindest guys in the business. In this episode, we talk about how Brad rejects the term career, his principles of time management, why he doesn’t have kids, mental health and startups, romantic relationships, ego management, and much more. As one listener remarked, this episode is basically a how-to on life. Edited by @alexkontis

Esther Perel is the perhaps world’s foremost expert on relationships. In this episode we talk about why desire wanes in relationships, how she would devise her own sex-education curriculum, why a bit of jealousy is good, how couples make non-monogamy work, how childhood affects one’s relationships, and much more. Esther has just launched a course called Rekindling Desire, which gets into all this stuff and much more. http://rekindlingdesire.com/?ims=yrbbp&utm_campaign=Discovering+Desire+2016+04&utm_source=Influencer&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Product+Hunt Here are the perks: -- Grand Opening price of $297 (After the grand opening, the normal price immediately goes up to $497 - $200 value) -- Private Facebook Group Support Community -- Signed copy of Esther’s book Mating in Captivity -- The first 300 people to register will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a private two-hour individual or couple therapy session with Esther. Edited by @alexkontis Co-host is @clairecaveny Lavish Praise to @EstherPerel Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Elisa New is a Harvard professor of poetry and founder of the non-profit, Poetry in America. Involved in the project are people like Nas, Bill Clinton, and others who want to promote a love of poetry. We talk about the role of poetry in society, the forms its taken place (academia, spoken word, hip hop), the business of poetry, and much more. For more information on Elisa's class, here is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o051ZQ6OoDI And here is the link to register: https://www.edx.org/course/poetry-america-modernism-harvardx-ampox-6

Adam Grant is the youngest professor ever to be tenured at wharton business school, and a best selling author of classics "Give and Take" and, most recently, "Originals" In this episode we talk about what separates Originals from their peers, what environments best nurture original thinking, how people can become more creative, why the effects of parenting are overrated, and much more. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @adamgrant Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Note: Apologize for poor audio quality on my part - we've transcribed the full podcast for your pleasure: https://docs.google.com/document/d/143v8O5o609f68uoco4oXRF67mPNGyzpleCiqzJR7E04/edit Larry is the former Treasury Secretary, former Chief Economist for Barack Obama, former president of Harvard, and is currently a board member for companies like Square and Lending Club. In this episode we talk about his approach to government, academia and tech investing, the rise of Donald Trump, Barack Obama’s legacy, the future of higher education, and much more. if you enjoy this episode, check out Larry's blog at larrysummers.com. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @LHSummers Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg *My apologies for poor audio in first few min.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a entrepreneur, investor, and best selling author with a new book called #AskGaryVee Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Z71HW8A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1 In this episode we talk about his new book, how he became an investor, what it’s like staring a company with his brother, the role ego plays in his life, his famous jam sessions with Chris Sacca, Travis Kalanick, Ashton Kutcher, and much more. Edited by @Alexkontis Lavish Praise to @garyvee Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Matt is managing partner at Lower Case Capital with Chris Sacca. We talk about how Matt transitioned from 8 years at CAA to the world of VC, the future of Lowercase and VC in general, advice for breaking into startups/VC, difference between LA and SF, and much more. Matt is one of the best investors in the game and also one of the kindest. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @Mazzeo Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Ruben Harris runs partnerships at Honor and is on the front lines of the diversity in tech movement. in this episode we talk about how he broke into tech, how he moved from Atlanta to SF and built a network from scratch, how before that he taught himself to be an investment banker, how he built a personal board of advisors, and more. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @RubenHarris Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Jesse Williams is an actor in the hit show Grey’s Anatomy, and founder of Ebroji. this episode we talk about the launch of his app Ebroji, emojis and gifs as extension and evolution in language, the upsides and downsides of him being famous, the role social justice plays in his life and much more . Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @jessewilliams Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg

Dhani Jones is a former NFL player, book author and founder of Proclamation. In this episode we talk about life after the NFL, his transition into the business world, the NFL as an organization, misconceptions about football players, race in america, and much more. Edited by @Alexkontis Lavish Praise to @DhaniJones Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg