Village Global Podcast

Village Global Podcast

The Village Global podcast takes you inside the world of venture capital and technology, featuring enlightening interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and tech industry leaders. Learn more at www.villageglobal.vc.

Episodes

June 20, 2025 58 mins
Amjad Masad (@amasad), founder and CEO of Replit, and Yohei Nakajima (@yoheinakajima), Managing Partner at Untapped Capital, joined Village Global partner Ben Casnocha for a live masterclass with Village Global founders.

Takeaways:
  • AI agents are rapidly evolving, with coding and deep research agents showing the most traction today. But general-purpose assistants are still brittle — trip-planning and high-context tasks remain hard...
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Jacob Mullins, Venture Partner at Village Global, welcomes Kristen Ostro, founder and CEO of Strut Consulting, to discuss the foundational elements that set venture capital firms up for long-term success. Kristen shares how her career began under the mentorship of Dick Kramlich at NEA, where she was trained in the core values and operational excellence that have shaped her approach to supporting dozens of VC firms across Silicon Va...
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Jacob Mullins, Venture Partner at Village Global, sits down with Ezra Roizen, General Manager of Advsr and author of "The Magic Box Paradigm," to demystify the world of startup mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on Jacob’s private podcast, VC Mastermind, which we are cross-posting on the Village Global podcast. Drawing on decades of experience as both an entrepreneur and investment banker, Ezra shares his unique framework for maxim...
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Abhay Parasnis is founder and CEO of Typeface, is former CTO/CPO at Adobe, and sits on the board of Dropbox and Schneider Electric. He joined Ben Casnocha, co-founder and partner at Village Global, for a live masterclass for Village Global founders.

Takeaways:
  • If you can break into the top tier of the enterprise market, it’s hard to dislodge you.
  • Big platforms like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are eager to prove their tech's powe...
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February 11, 2025 46 mins
Aaron Harris was a partner at YC for 7.5 years where he funded Deel, OpenSea, Scale AI, Rappi, Lattice, and others. He also built YC's Series A program where he worked with founders on over 200 Series As and Bs that raised in excess of $3B in capital. He joined Sam Kirschner, VP at Village Global, to give Village Global founders helpful tips on fundraising.

Takeaways:
  • Investors bet on stories, not just data. Your job? Tell a stor...
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Kathy Copic is founder of Fieldwork Partners, where she works closely with early stage companies on scoping technical projects, getting early ML models into production, and helping them hire. She was interviewed by Lindsay Pettingill, Investment Partner at Village Global, during this masterclass for Village Global founders. 

Takeaways:
  • Maintain at least three interview touchpoints to thoroughly evaluate candidates — rushing the p...
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Eynat Guez, founder and CEO of Papaya Global, was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and partner at Village Global, during this masterclass for Village Global founders.

Takeaways:

Show up to key meetings as the founder or executive team — don’t just send the sales team. It signals to the client that you’re personally invested and committed to making the deal a success.

Avoid being overly optimistic about where prospects stand. Se...
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Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and GP of Flex Capital, interviewed Ben Casnocha, Village Global co-founder and partner, on Auren's World of DaaS podcast. They are longtime friends and had a wide-ranging discussion on career strategy, evaluating founders, serendipity, wealth, and much more. We've cross-posted that conversation here.

Highlights:
  • The relevance of what you know vs. who you know has been a debate in the career strate...
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Howie Liu, founder and CEO of Airtable, was interviewed by Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha live in downtown San Francisco in front of an audience of Village Global founders and friends of the firm.

Highlights:

- Embracing discomfort is part of the founder's journey. Learning to tolerate and even appreciate this discomfort is important. 

- Making decisions when you feel "almost ready" rather than waiting for perfect ...
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Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel, a company that provides the developer tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. He was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Takeaways:

- Any modern cloud-native app is a nexus of services that all work ...
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Michael Balaoing, founder of Candlelion, joins Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha on this episode to discuss:

- The importance of the acronym WTF (what’s the feeling?) when you’re giving a presentation.

- The four roles that you take on as a speaker: captain, pilot, guide, and game show host.

- The five questions to ask when seeking feedback on a presentation.

- How to keep the audience engaged throughout a talk, not ju...
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Brad Feld (@bfeld), VC at Foundry Group and co-author with Dave Jilk of The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha to discuss:

- Common misconceptions about Nietzsche and why being misunderstood makes him an especially interesting philosopher.
 
- What Nietzsche can teach entrepreneurs deciding whether to pivot or persevere. Brad says that founders should view their entrepreneurial j...
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Thejo Kote (@thejo) talks to Village partner Ben Casnocha. Thejo is a two-time founder and CEO. His current company, Airbase, is a spend management platform serving companies with 100 and 5,000 employees like Coda, 15Five, Front, Marqueta, CaptivateIQ, Abnormal, and more. Airbase has raised over $200 million, has tens of millions in ARR, and is consistently ranked as a top spend management company by G2.

Highlights:

- Rather than jum...
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Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha for a masterclass with our founders in late 2020.
 
They discussed:
 
- The origin story of Cloudflare, including how the co-founders met, and how Michelle realized that she too could start a company.
 
- Her advice on fundraising after raising more than $300M for Cloudflare, including why you should keep the...
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We're excited to launch a new EIR program for data science founders in partnership with Rackhouse Ventures, founded by Kevin Novak. Learn more about the program: https://www.villageglobal.vc/rackhouse-village-global-eir-program

Kevin Novak (@novakkm), an early Uber employee, was instrumental in developing their data science program and was the creator of surge pricing.

Highlights:

- Kevin, originally a nuclear physicist, applied his a...
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This encore episode is a recording of a special masterclass roundtable session for our founders with John Donahoe. John is CEO of Nike and was previously CEO of ServiceNow and eBay. He is known as one of the most inspirational leaders in Silicon Valley and is a highly sought-after mentor to CEOs including Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Drew Houston at Dropbox, and Ben Silbermann at Pinterest. We’re honored to have him among our small grou...
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Chris Lunt is a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building web services and data platforms. He is in his seventh year as the CTO for the NIH's All of Us Research Program. He joined the NIH from GetInsured, where he worked to improve health insurance shopping and enrollment systems. Previously Chris ran VC-backed internet startups, with one IPO.

Highlights:

- Chris is hopeful about Silicon Valley going back to...
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Michael Hochberg (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hochberg/) is a physicist and a founder of four successful startup companies in semiconductors and telecommunications, including Luxtera, acquired by Cisco in 2019, and Elenion, acquired by Nokia in 2020. He won the highest awards for young scientists in Singapore (NRF Fellowship) and the United States (PECASE), is an author on over 60 patents, and has been involved in the creation of o...
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Matt Pellini, Managing Director at Hamilton Lane, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:

- Matt says the secondaries market has grown over 5x from 15 years ago to now.

- Selling in the secondary market used to be a sign of distress but is no longer. There are many different reasons for doing so and it’s mostly a sign of a manager being more active in the overall management of the fund.

- Secondaries, in contrast to other ...
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Christopher Ailman (@CJAtheCIO), Chief Investment Officer at CalSTRS, joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode. Highlights:

- CalSTRS, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, was created in 1913 and is actually older than Social Security. It has over 400 members who are over 100 years old who are still receiving their pension.

- Chris says no bear market is alike and that the key is to have the discipline during that time pe...
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