The MVP Show Luca Monk

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Dropping out of uni to launch a start-up in his parent’s garage seemed crazy until some former Apple execs came knocking on this Aussie guy’s door.

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About Allen Liao

After studying Electrical Engineering and Economics at the University of Sydney for two years, the 23-year-old dropped out and went to work in the basement of his familly home— building the world’s first unloseable sunglasses.

After going viral on Time and WSJ, Allen and his team secured $60,000 worth of pre-orders in just 3 days. From there, he attracted some of the best investors in the world — Ron Johnson who built Apple retail from the ground up, Wordpress Founder Matt Mullenweg and even comedian Stephen Fry.

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Show Notes

0:00 Introduction

2:29 Genesis Story of Tzukuri

8:34 First Business, Prank Bills and NZ Federal Police

15:56 Kickstarting Tzukuri, $60k Pre-Orders in 3 days

20:18 Protyping Tzukuri v1 and Raising Capital From Apple Executives

28:48 Flying to Silicon Valley and Broken Prototypes

32:44 Constructing a Good Investor Story and Meeting with a16z

41:10 Manufacturing Complexity of Bluetooth in Sunglasses

45:32 Reflection, What Could Have Been Done Better?

50:57 Mental Health

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

About Eric Bahn

Eric Bahn is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Hustle Fund invests in software startups at the pre-seed and seed stages, backing founders who exhibit great execution and high velocity (aka, hustle).

Previous to Hustle Fund, Eric was an angel investor and partner at 500Startups. And prior to becoming a professional investor, he spent over a decade as an operator (Facebook, Instagram) and entrepreneur (Beat The GMAT, The Hustle). Eric draws from his product and growth experience to advise his founders in scaling their own enterprises.

Eric is a native of Detroit, Michigan and first arrived to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford University (BA, MA), which launched his career into software and startups. Eric is happily married with two kids.

Show Notes

0:00 intro

1:05 What does great execution mean?

3:29 Tactical product building advice from Instagram and Facebook

7:41 How do you run a good experiment?

11:29 How to curb Novelty Effect?

14:34 Privilege in Silicon Valley and how to fix it

21:02 How important is it that a startup be based in San Francisco?

27:56 How Beat The GMAT started

33:22 How big is the GMAT market?

35:54 Rebuilding the GMAT today in a different vertical

39:34 The story of how Daily Mail bought Beat the GMAT

44:16 How do you view failure?

48:29 How to stand out amongst the crowd in the Hustle Fund screening process?

52:53 Fun questions to wrap up

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!


About Michael Batko

Michael started as a business student following the traditional path into consulting and corporate life (Amex, PwC, KPMG) ...but then fell in love with the startup world growing two start-ups from a team of 2 to 5 (madpaws.com.au) and 10 to 50+ (expert360.com), including a $AUD 13M Series B capital raise. He then joined Startmate as their Head of Operations and is now CEO. 


Shownotes

0:00 Introduction

0:52 From Intern to Startmate CEO in 4 Years

7:25 Startmate Business Model

15:20 Relationship between Blackbird and Startmate

18:39 Building a 1 million person startup city

27:28 BatkoOS and Productivity Hacks, Emoji Shortcuts and What CEO's Do

30:28 Emoji Shortcut

34:00 What does a CEO do?

36:00 Difference between CEO of 2 and 20

38:36 Clearly communicating vision and strategy to 30 people

45:25 Who do you think of when you hear the word successful?

This week's episode is sponsored by https://gems.closingbell.co. Sign up to this free newsletter for undervalued stocks w/ momentum and conversations from pro investors. 

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For Episode 18 of The MVP Show I talk with a very special and different guest - 10k Diver. 

With over 230k followers, 10k Diver has become the go to educational resource for finance and investing. 

In this episode we cover:

0:00 State of the public markets

10:32 Is inflation here to stay

14:36 Breaking down Financial Statements

19:05 Float in Businesses (i.e. Starbucks)

28:02 Normalising financials

35:26 Things novice investors overlook in the Balance Sheet

40:23 Management, Capital Allocation, and Buybacks

48:51 Match.com

52:04 Who do you think of when you hear the word successful?



You can follow 10K Diver on:

- https://twitter.com/10kdiver, and 

- https://10kdiver.com/twitter-threads/

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

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Currently focussed on supporting and developing the New Zealand startup ecosystem via Phase One Ventures. 

Mahesh has held multiple executive roles in some of Australia's most iconic startups. He has experienced how to build a global Unicorn from ground up as an early employee and the first Head of People at Canva (SAAS) helping to scale to 200+ people. He had the opportunity to drive operational excellence, helping Airtasker (marketplace) become profitable, go global and go public. He was the COO at Simply Wall St (Fintech), as it hit an inflection point setting up the right foundations for it to accelerate and grow. 

You can follow along with Mahesh here:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/maheshmuralidhar

- https://www.phaseone.ventures/

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In this episode, we talk about:

- Mahesh's relentless hustle, getting Uber as a client through Tim Tams

- Getting hired by Mel and Cliff at Canva to run their People Operations

- Canva's hiring process, how to hire an A+ team 

- Setting expectations w/ the Board, getting alignment

- Working at Airtasker as VP People Operations and Simply Wall Street as COO

- Supporting the NZ Startup Ecosystem and more...

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

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Jeremy Moser is a co-founder at uSERP, a digital-brand-building agency. He's also the chief marketing officer at Wordable, which he acquired in 2020. On the side, he runs www.copycourse.io to teach copywriting.

You can follow along with Jeremy here:

- https://mobile.twitter.com/jmoserr

- Learn to write high-converting landing pages in one week: https://www.copycourse.io/

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In this episode we talk about:

- Formula's for writing better landing page copy

- Most common mistakes people make when writing copy

- Building effective funnels from SEO

- Hacks for finding SEO keywords

- Substack vs custom blog to optimise SEO

- Long-form vs short-form landing pages