Louise Story (@louisestory) most recently was the Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer at The Wall Street Journal. Louise also spent more than a decade at the New York Times. She joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode to discuss: Her unique role at the Wall Street Journal and some of the products that she built, including AI/ML models to alert reporters when stocks were moving in certain ways that let them get ahead of emerging stories, as well as an early version...

David Boehmer (@DavBoehmer) speaks to Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi) about the talent intermediation industry, the evolution of business models in the sector, and creating a talent marketplace at Banff. Takeaways: - Chance often has a significant impact on a person’s career but David says that a life’s impact is too important to be left to chance. - David likes to think of a career as a river. You can be swept downstream by momentum and wake up 20-30 years later without realizing that there...

Rohit Krishnan (@krishnanrohit), venture capitalist and author of the blog Strange Loop Cannon, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways: - Many of the people at the top of their fields today say they would never get hired if they were just starting out today. Today’s selection process at elite institutions has become more stringent but has dropped the interesting variance that exists at the top of the pyramid. Plenty of people have gamified the selection process. If you’re hiring, you want to...

Lorin Gu, founding partner of Recharge Capital, joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global to discuss: - Why Recharge structures its investing thematically, rather than by asset class. - The three themes that they believe have multi-decade headwinds behind them: semiconductors, women’s health, and fintech/crypto. - What Lorin learned from working with David Swensen, including the importance of the qualitative measurement of the people running the fund alongside...

Alex Chalunkal is Chief Investment Officer at a family office where he manages a $1B+ portfolio focused on impact, venture, and climate tech investing. He was interviewed by Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global. Takeaways: - Alex says that the consensus is that there will be a mild recession in 2023. - He says that the energy transition, health, and climate are key sectors he is focusing on. - Technology is an important tool to help improve the labor...

Ian Bremmer (@ianbremmer), president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global for a conversation about global geopolitical trends and their impact on technology. Takeaways: - Ian has been in the room with world leaders as they make decisions about how to prepare for potential wars. He says that it’s easy to criticize their decisions afterwards but having been there has given him an appreciation for just...

Mo Islam (@itsmoislam), co-founder of Payload Space, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways: - There is no doubt that we are in the early stages of the space economy, Mo says. - The cost to go to Mars will be paid many times over by the young engineers who will be inspired by the mission. - There are three main buckets in the space economy: space for earth (companies creating products for humans on earth via their space endeavors), space for space (companies serving...

Ari Schuler, CEO of goTenna, and Andrea Garrity, Chief Growth Officer of goTenna, join Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon join us on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways: - goTenna was founded after Hurricane Sandy when a brother and sister didn’t know if the other was safe because the cell network weren’t working. It has since grown into the company that it is today, selling to government as well as consumers. - Ari and Andrea suggest that startups refrain from complaining or dwelling on how...

Joe Connor (@josephjconnor), founder of Odyssey (@WithOdyssey_), joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways: - ACT test scores are at the lowest level in 30 years. 42% of students met none of the college readiness benchmarks. - District schools are not providing what parents need so children are leaving them in large numbers. - Parents have realized that they would be better off unbundling education so that children receive different parts of their education in different...

Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon), co-founder and CEO of Apex Space, and Max Benassi (@mxbenassi), co-founder and CTO, join Lucas Bagno on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways: - The cost per kilogram to get things into space has gone down dramatically over the last several years. - Satellites have two parts: a payload and a bus. The bus is the actual structure of the satellite and despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in launch companies, basically no venture money has gone...

Ben Van Roo (@DavidNorthStar), co-founder and CEO of Yurts AI, joins Lucas Bagno on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways: - The Small Business Innovation Research program was originally developed as a grant program to allow small companies do innovative research. The gene for cystic fibrosis was discovered from the program. - If you’re a small company and you get an SBIR contract, you should not count on getting a government contract. - It has been very difficult for software companies to...

Deep Nishar (@deepnishar), Managing Director at General Catalyst and formerly of LinkedIn and Google, joins Anne Dwane on this episode. Takeaways: - The best product hires have the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat. - When you’re interviewing people for product roles at startups, don’t ask people what they would do but rather what they have done in the past. You want people who have a sense of adventure and can work without a lot of structure. -...

Christian Brose (@cdbrose), Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril and author of The Kill Chain, joins Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways: - The US military and its procurement system has been built for equipment that is big, heavy, and hard to replace — things like ships and aircraft carriers and tanks. - Commercial technologies can contribute to a military with equipment that is more agile, lower cost, and easier to replace. - People in the government are, in 2022, trying to figure out...

Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), New York Times columnist and author of The Decadent Society, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways: - Since the moon landing, we have entered a period of stagnation. Confidence and optimism have declined and culture has entered a repetitive spiral where patterns from the 60s/70s have been repeating themselves. - Government has become less effective and more gridlocked over time. - The world’s richest societies are dealing with a...

Steve Kim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrkim/), Partner and head of Investment Strategy at Verdis, a 9-generation single family office, joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global, on this episode.   Takeaways:   Early stage venture is a power law asset class where the returns of the asset class are driven by outliers. The best way to increase probability of getting asset class rate of return is by increasing variance in the portfolio through...

Raj Shah, Managing Partner at Shield Capital, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways: - Raj and Shield don’t care whether a founding team has experience selling to government, because the firm can help with that. They evaluate the team, the market and the tech when they’re looking at an investment. - Ash Carter was the first sitting Secretary of Defense to come to Silicon Valley in decades when he visited to jumpstart new initiatives to encourage startups working with...

Julio Vasconcellos and Ana Martins, partners at Atlantico, join Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss Atlantico's Latin America Digital Transformation Report 2022. Takeaways: - In the rest of the world, digital adoption has reverted to the pre-pandemic mean, but digital transformation has continued at the same pace in Latin America. - Developers in Latin America are more likely to accept remote job offers and people working remotely have more satisfaction in their jobs than...

Mike Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways: - It can easily take 10-20 years for tech to make its way into the Department of Defense. The Defense Innovation Unit helped speed that process up dramatically. - Some of the most important technologies being used in the war in Ukraine are commercial technologies. Mike thinks that the Department of Defense should be focusing on commercial technology much more often. -...

Alex Moore (@AustinGiraffe), investor at 8VC and board member at Palantir, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways: - Alex was one of the original team members at Palantir. He says that helping build the company helps him pattern match today to find the best founders. - Defense investing is not like normal VC investing. The usual model of investing $2M, then $10M, then $30M to give a company momentum doesn’t work when you have to deal with budget cycles,...

Muneeb Ali (@muneeb), co-founder of Stacks, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways: - Muneeb says that Bitcoin is winning as money, and that he wants to make that capital productive. He’s "bringing smart contracts to where the money is." - Bitcoin’s architecture implies that there shouldn’t be much flexibility and programmability on the base layer blockchain. - A criticism of Ethereum is that it is trying to be too many things to too many people. - There is a basket of Layer-1s that are...

Dan Romero (@dwr) of Farcaster joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways: - Dan says that his first love was information. He loved RSS and the goal with Farcaster is to improve RSS enough so that it can compete with Twitter. - He aims to grow Farcaster large enough so that developers can innovate using their API and data permissionlessly. - Any developer can build whatever they want on Farcaster — features are not limited to what the core team wants to see built. - Eugene Wei’s Status as a...

Travis Kling (@travis_kling) of Ikigai Asset Management joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways: - Bitcoin’s value proposition is the most challenged in the five years that Travis has been paying attention to it. It has underperformed in the market downturn and turned out not to be as much of an inflation hedge as people thought. - Bitcoin loves quantitative easing and hates quantitative tightening. - Travis figures that we are headed into a recession. - The single biggest driver for crypto...

Nathan Picarsic, co-founder of Horizon Advisory, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways: - There are 17 rare earth metals that are of immense strategic importance. They are used in a vast array of everyday products like consumer electronics, medical devices, electric vehicles, and more. - China has a strong influence in this space. They have many mines but are even more dominant downstream — they control much of the processing of these metals and the...

Joel Monegro (@jmonegro), partner at Placeholder, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways: - Every financial asset is a contract between two or more people. The world economy is basically a set of contracts on a ledger. - A smart contract is like an API, but on-chain, so it can’t be taken down. In many cases, not even the developers can retract a smart contract. - Value capture and value accrual are two different things — capture is where the value is stored and accrual is where it is going....

Steve Blank (@sgblank), creator of Hacking For Defense and author of 4 Steps To The Epiphany, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways: - The secret history of Silicon Valley is that it emerged from the government’s desire to develop advanced technology and weapons in universities during World War II. - Stanford became a powerhouse in microwaves and electronics post-WWII. People were encouraged to leave to start companies, which kickstarted Silicon...