Hear Cindy Padnos’ extraordinary trajectory, her advocate for all things entrepreneurial and how she founded Illuminate Ventures and the successful exits. Illuminate Ventures is a seed and early stage venture capital firm that invests exclusively in enterprise/B2B software companies. With three funds under management, Illuminate continues to invest in and support talented entrepreneurs that are reinventing how work gets done. Join us for the last episode of Astella Around the World season one.  

Daughter of Mexicans, raised in the US, Ambar Amleh is a Managing Partner at Palestine’s investment fund, Ibtikar Fund. For the past nine years, Ambar has been directly involved in supporting Palestinian entrepreneurs, as the program manager for Palestine for a New Beginning (PNB), a Palestinian non-profit company focused on entrepreneurial development.''Being a VC in Palestine, or in a place like Palestine, where a conflict thrives, you have to be an optimistic, you have to believe so deeply...

Born in Cartagena, Esteban Reyes moved to the US, and was inspired to lead his family's entrepreneurial path. In short, he spent 21 years building startups and the last 10 years investing in them. In his words: "I realized I wanted to combine financial with productive capital by becoming an investor" when joining his first VC over a decade ago. As a solo GP at Zenda, he shares how he equips himself with other key players. Join us to hear more about how he's seen the ecosystem in Miami develop...

"I wasn't looking to start a company, I was looking to solve a problem" is what Jenny shares with us as an "empath founder" - for her previous startups and as a fund manager.  As a prior Managing Director at Techstars, she has invested in hundreds of startups, including 3 unicorns. Now as General Partner at The Fund, which is described as: by founders, for founders, first-check venture fund, she focuses on the power of the founder community to invest around the world; 170+ companies in the...

Taylor Clauson shares with us how he taught himself to write code and become part of the hacker culture, which then led him to launch Abstraction Capital, a fund focused on  tools fo developers. Join us for this episode to learn more about his inspiring story, and specifics, such as: how he manages his time as a solo VC, his impressions on his local tech community in Kansas City and some great fundraising tips and insights: "don't spend time convincing the non believers, focus on the true...

In this episode, John Duong tells us how his early childhood guided his decision to impact investment - He was born in Cambodia, and fled to the USA with his family as survivors of the Khmer Rouge concentration camp. Education and opportunity being of high value to his family, John earned his BA degree in economics and East Asian studies from Yale University.  He diversified his career in many areas of banking, until reconnecting with his passion for impact at WK Kellogg Foundation. He was...

For this episode, we invited one of our fellow VCs in Brazil, Marcello Gonçalves, from Domo Invest as a co-host, to interview his friend, and Kauffman fellow, along with Laura, McKeever (Mac) Conwell, II.  Mac has one of the most inspiring and out of the box trajectories in VC; join us to learn why not following the rules, and showing up as your authentic self can be one of the best tools you can use. From being homeless, with no formal college education, he's innovating "how to VC" in so...

As a connector and a strategist, with an interesting background in actuarial science and business, Robbie Shattuck wrote briefings for president Obama before entering the world of tech. After working with some of the brightest minds and wealthiest individuals in tech at Iconiq Capital, Robbie decided it was time to become an entrepreneur himself, launching Athos, where he focuses on working and investing for the next generation of wealth creators.  We think Robbie has the right mix of brains...

Beau Seil is a partner and Co-Founder at Patamar, SE Asia's leading impact VC firm. American born, with 10+ years investing in Asia, he has seen the evolution of the early-stage VC ecosystem in the region, as well as the rise of impact investing in backing visionary companies. Patamar backs impact-driven founders launching sector defining companies to serve the “mass market” of low and middle-income customers through financial services or tech-enabled distribution and aggregation...

Before his days focused on deep tech, Karthee was the Managing Director and VP of Qualcomm Ventures for over 10 years, where he accumulated experience investing in early stage in diverse sectors around the globe. He shares with us some of his memorable experiences from those days, such as his learnings as a board member at Waze. Now, at MFV Partners, Karthee backs visionary deep tech entrepreneurs developing products and solutions that disrupt traditional verticals and ecosystems across...

From musician to VC seems to be quite a path these days; this was Gurdane's path while he completed his degree in Computer Science, Public Policy, and Economics from Duke University. Gurdane shares how he learned the venture business "by doing" with at FundRx, a leading life sciences/healthcare investment and research marketplace he co-founded back in 2015. After 20 or so investments under the belt, they spun of the business to MBX Capital in July 2020.  Beyond any thesis, MBX's underlying...

Meet Dima Kuzmin, founding partner at 4BIO Capital, where he invests, supports and grows early stage companies developing treatments in areas of highly unmet medical needs, with an ultimate goal of ensuring access to these potentially curative therapies for all patients. Prior to becoming a VC, Dima was in academia, focusing successively on structural biology, neurochemistry, systems neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and gene therapy. It was when doing his PHD that his VC friends would...

"Proud Geek; Hacker turned VC" is what Lucas Nelson, Founding Partner at Lytical Ventures intitulates himself. In this weeks' episode, Lucas shared with us how he turned his experience and passion for hacking into his full time career, firstly as an operatior, then as a VC specialized in the corporate intelligence space: cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI. He also shares with us how spending in cybersecurity is growing at a fast rate, as CEO's are getting more scared of breaches. Acording...

Meet Christina, Founder of The One Health Company, and learn how she is revolutionizing how drugs and medical devices come to market by re-imagining how animal testing is done. From capital markets to venture, Chris spent a portion of her career specializing in emerging markets as an investor and lecturer. Diversifying her time between non profit boards, she has always been involved with exciting big issues that fuel her to wake up with energy every day! She shares with us about her...

Meet Chang Xu, Partner at Basis Set Ventures, where she focuses on developer-led products. What most excites her are opportunities where founders build a thesis around "raising the ceiling, and lowering the floor", to ease complexity or democratize access. She previously was a Principal at Upfront Ventures, the oldest and largest SoCal-based early stage venture capital firm. Prior to joining Upfront, she was a founder and an operator. She was the first Product Manager at the Minerva Project,...

  Meet Brian Hutchings, partner at global law firm Gunderson Dettmer, specialized in venture capital and tech in Latam. They currently represent over 150 companies and the leading VCs in the region with the purpose of setting up startups for success the same way they would in Silicon Valley. With an interesting view in Latam, he has been focused on the region since 2007, but curiously started his career as a musician then as an entertainment lawyer. Tune in to hear his thoughts on...

Born in Brazil from parents who migrated from India, Amit moved to US for college and has been in California ever since. Post his education at Stanford and Harvard, he spent time as a product manager at Google and as a VC at Norwest Ventyre partners,  fund with over $10Bi in AUM that has been around since 1961.  He is mission driven and health is the common denominator, in his words “it’s the foundation of everything”. At Tau Ventures, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, he invests in...

Everyone has a different path to venture, but for Brock it basically started with an amazing experience in capital markets working for Paul Tutuor then setting up his group at Citi. Not long after, his friend Michael Makrs from Riverwood Capital invited him to invest in a private company, which we can refer to as his "lucky break" -- He invested in Sol Republic and 9 months later Monster Cable bought it for 3x.  "These venture people act as its hard" lol, that's what he told us, but continued...

Mark Roberge is the MD at Stage 2 Capital, Professor at Harvard Business School and former CRO at HubSpot, (NYSE: HUBS) where he scaled annualized revenue from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark shares with us how his engineering background helped him shape a scalable and predictable sales model at a time when SaaS was just a baby, and how that experience helped him design a GTM system that he shares in his book and classes at HBS. Tune in to be inspired by...

In this episode, Jonathan Nelson, Founder of Hack Fund and Hackers/Founders, the largest group of tech founders with 200,000 members worldwide, shares with us how growing up with missionary parents and spending the first part of his career as a trauma emergency room nurse helped him build his own "killer app" as a serial entrepreneur, software engineer and a VC. He also shares with us his view on the need for diversity and on the future of non Silicon Valley founders via IPO on the London...

In our first episode of Astella around the World, our friends Chris and Jeff from Blitzcaling Ventures & Academy share with us a bit about how they brought the principles of Blitzscaling, the book Chris co-authored with Reid Hoffman, to support growth stage companies scale rapidly into winners-take-most markets.      

An interview show by Laura Constantini and Carolina Pascowitch from Brazilian Venture Capital Firm Astella, where they zoom out from the local tech and VC ecosystem to explore other perspectives from extraordinary VCs, LPs and Thought Leaders from around the world; capturing their essence, inspiration, insights and best practices.