[Array] Podcast

Roy Bahat is one of the founder of Bloomberg Beta. I met Roy through my friend Shivon Zilis who is also a partner at Bloomberg Beta. Shivon was in one of our earlier podcasts on Array talking about AI. Bloomberg Beta is one of my favorite firms to work with and not only because they are also an LP in my fund Array Ventures but because I respect how they have built their firm and constructed their portfolio in a thoughtful way. They are the only firm I know that sends a survey to their companies asking for feedback on what they can do better. Bloomberg Beta was born out of Roy's frustration when he was raising money for his own startup. That's when Roy saw a need to start a fund with transparency, focus on their experience with the founders, and clear thesis on future of work. With so many VC firms being formed in last few years differentiation is important to be able to attract the right entrepreneurs. Let's dive into how Roy thought about building a new VC firm from scratch and how he thinks about the VC industry today with all the changes in recent years. Shruti's twitter: @atShruti, Roy's twitter: @roybahat Bloomberg Operating Manual: https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Manual Array VC: www.array.vc

Brad Feld is a legend in the venture industry. Brad started out as a founder of Feld Technologies then became an angel and institutional investor and recently also expanded his firm, Foundry Group, into fund investments. Amongst the many things he is known for Brad started Techstars and was an early investor in well known public companies such as Zynga, and Fitbit. He has been one of the few investors bringing transparency to this opaque industry by blogging about his perspectives. In this podcast Brad shares his thoughts on what it takes to be a good investor and fund manager. You can follow us on twitter at @bfeld and @atShruti

It’s amazing how Cloudflare a company that was a mere dream 8 years has become core part of the internet infrastructure today making websites more secure and scalable. Cloudflare sees all kinds of traffic and attacks from Neo Nazis, largest phasing attacks, political campaigns before you know about it. Tighten your seat belts to get on a roller coaster with Cloudflares's co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, and her journey to becoming a fast unicorn from her early days of starting Cloudflare at Harvard Business School with her cofounder Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway. Follow Michelle Zatlyn on twitter @zatlyn and your host Shruti Gandhi @atShruti

If you look up the word hustle in wikipedia, You might find a section on today's founder, Tawheed Kader (TK). TK shares his honest thoughts on how he successfully sold his company ToutApp to Marketo in 2017. This did not come without challenges. Even while he was growing fast and at $5m in recurring revenue difficulties came from stock market crash in early 2016. Emergence of highly funded competitors in the category made it tough to fundraise and TK had to layoff a large portion of his company. This is a perfect example of making lemonade out of lemons. TK takes us through how he came out on the other side despite opposing external forces.

On our podcast from a few weeks ago on All things AI we heard from Lucas Baker of Google Deepmind on his perspective on current state of AI. Today we chat with Shivon Zilis who is an investor at VC firm Bloomberg Beta and gives an investment perspective on AI. Shivon became somewhat of a celebrity in AI after she first launched the state of machine intelligence in 2014. She has continued to add to that over the years. Let’s have a chat with her about investing in machine intelligence. Follow us @atShruti and @Shivon

Tim Campos, former CIO of Facebook talks about importance of culture at a company, impact of a life coach on his career and challenges he faced as a CIO of two Fortune 500 companies - Facebook and KLA Tencor

With a breadth of experience unusual for a young engineer, Lucas Baker has traveled a winding path through the tech industry leading from Stanford through Square, Y Combinator, Pinterest, Google, and most recently DeepMind. Find out what he's learned along the way and what he thinks about the future of machine learning.

In this podcast we'll hear the story of a college dropout, but not the glamorous Steve Jobs-type story you might expect. Learn how Leslie Miley worked his way up through engineering roles at Walmart, ODesk, Apple, Google, Twitter, to become director of engineering at Slack, one of Silicon Valley's most beloved startups, find out his struggles along the way and what he's up to now at Venture for America.

Lukas Biewald, founder of Crowdflower, will be talking about the Future and problems in AI, training data sets, and how AI is used at bigger companies.

In the space of nine years, Justin Kan pivoted from aimless post-collegiate soul-searching to a massive exit on his company, Twitch, which he sold to Amazon for $1B. Before that he sold his company Kiko Software on ebay! Justin went from being a partner at Y-Combinator to starting his own incubator Zero-F.

Auren Hoffman is a founder of Safegraph and previously LiveRamp. LiveRamp was acquired by Axiom for $310m in 2014. Auden shares his views on why smart people make wrong decisions with optionality, how focus in life important, and how to pick markets for your new venture.

Esther Dyson trained to be in space and wants to retire on Mars. Esther's global perspective has made her an effective investor and valued board member. A medical scare led her to start Way to Wellville (http://waytowellville.net), a health intervention program for American health system to get healthier. Esther launched her entrepreneurial career in a unique way by acquiring a company she was working for.

Sean Byrnes was founder of Flurry. Flurry was founded during a recession and almost insolvent 3 times until 2014 when it was acquired by Yahoo for $300-$350m. Sean is now a CEO of Outlier.ai which helps businesses make better decisions using AI. Sean shares his insights on staying afloat, keeping up with trends, and his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence

Lauren Kelly is the CEO of Opex Engine (https://www.opexengine.com) where they benchmark metrics for SaaS companies. Lauren tells us what metrics should companies track depending on who they are selling to.