It’s a pleasure to finally be able to talk publicly about the work I have been doing as an Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners. A big part of my duties here has been assembling a chronicle of the highs & lows of building a startup, through candid interviews with founders, operators & advisors. We call it the Startup Tapes, and it’s our attempt at bringing conversations that happen every day in Silicon Valley boardrooms & coffee shops, to entrepreneurs everywhere.
A lot of us at Scale and in the Scale portfolio spend our days having conversations that touch on difficult challenges… Anything from how to stop making excuses and actually improve diversity in your company, to searching for an external CEO, or closing your first $1M in sales. These conversations are essential to building successful companies, but rarely become accessible to the public. The fact is, we all need advice and help, and we wanted to give you one more way to get it.
The goal of the project is to tackle one topic with each guest, to keep things at a manageable runtime, but enough to explore key topics with some depth. The interviews are recorded on-site, uncut, with the goal to immerse you into these people & companies, and give you a real sense that you’re there, as a third person in our conversations.
I wasn’t sure if everyone would play along, but the returns so far have been amazing. From Dave Finocchio opening up frankly about the personal limitations he & his co-founders had to grapple with as their company grew; to Sarah giving us counter-intuitive advice from their experience reaching 50% women at Lever; to Justin Kan’s welcoming me in his home to dissect the twists & turns he had to apply to grow justin.tv into Twitch.
Go and check them out at http://tapes.scalevp.com/ We’ll release more every few days, so be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or subscribe to our Newsletter.