Heavy Hitters: The Digital Industrial Podcast Ty Findley

Reilly details a sector-specific then-and-now look back from his more than two decades of transportation experience, shares how the venture asset class has shifted in light of the momentum in this sector and what this has meant for sector-focused VC firms, outlines why building ecosystem and collaboration across startups, investors, universities, regulators, etc. is needed for the next decade of transportation innovation to thrive, and finally shares lessons learned from investing in transportation business models that may combine both hardware and software components.  

Jason shares the origin story behind The Pritzker Organization (60 years of company-building expertise and over 200 transactions across industries representing ~$30B in equity value) and how those roots supported the launch of Fifty Three Stations $190M debut venture fund, details how the firm leverages its differentiated commercial ecosystem to drive portfolio company value-add in a repeatable manner at scale, and outlines what it will take to drive more established family office networks to setup venture investing capabilities that can further bridge legacy, established industries with the accelerating technology innovation ecosystem.  

Leo shares the origin story of why storied VC firm Susa Ventures decided to launch new fund, Humba Ventures, to invest at the intersection of deep tech and American Dynamism, details what differences are required to evaluate companies with that level of focus on deep tech, defends Humba’s thesis that deep tech is the best place to invest and build right now by dispelling 4 key misconceptions of this category, and brings us home sharing a “What’s Hot and What’s Hype” outlook.  

Paul shares the why behind a storied venture firm like General Catalyst launching a focus on Global Resilience as one of the firm’s 4 key focus areas, how the firm leverages its firm-wide global and multi-stage breadth of mandate to truly get creative in solution formation, describes a sub-segment of their thesis defined around Industrial Resilience “aligning physical systems and digital breakthroughs”, and given the nuance involved with industrial innovation, what the company signals and founder indicators are that get their team excited.  

The besties get the fleet back together to discuss how the 2024 supply chain conference blitz kicked off, what's the insiders' outlook on VC funding supply chain tech despite the macro pullback in deals & dollars, where the freight market cycle sits currently (hint: still as cyclical as ever), and finally where the crystal ball outlooks are for the remainder of 2024.

Anna explains the origin story of why PepsiCo decided to launch Labs and how those efforts for a global CPG company tie into the digital industrial ecosystem, details how the Labs team programmatically both identifies and collaborates with startups to drive a win/win for Pepsi business units and the startups (hint: Labs acts a single point of contact accelerator within the 340k employee organization), and finally details why the Labs team is specifically scouting for manufacturing operations innovation in 2024.