Unlimited Partners Thomas McGannon

This week's Unlimited Partner is Semil Shah the GP for Haystack Ventures, one of the best performing seed-stage funds around. see: DoorDash, Instacart, Figma, Opendoor, HashiCorp, Carta, People.ai among others. Semil gives great insight into how he is as a leader, investor, parent. He's calm, structured, thoughtful and measured in his responses. 

Also, check out our Youtube page for some new video clips of Thomas and Semil!

Haystack site

Semil's LinkedIn

Semil's Twitter

Topics Include:

-Fear as a motivator

-HashiCorp

-Infrastructure as software

-Time horizons, decision making as a leader

-Family

Semil's song is Jose Gonzalez Heartbeats 



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DISCLAIMER: The host and others associated with this podcast may have investments with the guests and/or the companies associated with them. This is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research.

This week's Unlimited Partners are Rafael Lopez and JC Glancy of Zenbusiness, a platform that helps SMB users automate their business needs. They've been known to be a LegalZoom killer.

Today's episode is a bit of a pivot from us at Unlimited Partners. We recorded a 2 hour long convo and cut out the fluff to bring you a 25 min excerp, narrated by Thomas McGannon. At some point we plan to upload the full interview.

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Thomas McGannon LinkedIn

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DISCLAIMER: The host and others associated with this podcast may have investments with the guests and/or the companies associated with them. This is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research.

This week's Unlimited Partners are Lucy Wang and Katie Shea of Divergent Capital. They are both Co-Founders and General Partners. Divergent is a "first check investor backing teams taking deeply technical and scientific innovations to market with unique insights on business models and GTM beyond just enterprise and SaaS."

Topics Include:


Lucy's background, growing up in Wuhan, China and emigrated to the US when she was 12, learning English in 7th grade
Starting at Bridgewater and not liking finance, going to grad school and getting her Masters in Machine Learning
Learning about AI in 2012, and moving to venture
Katie's brother Tom Shea was on the podcast with Adgile Media previously
Growing up in an entrepreneurial family
Why they started Divergent?
What does a funnel look like as a pre-seed investor

Tags: Packy McCormick, Tom Shea, 

Lucy's song is Stuntin' Like My Daddy by Birdman and Lil Wayne

Katie's song is anything off of the Encanto soundtrack

Sponsors:

Tegus Research 

My Marketplace Builder

Links:

Thomas McGannon LinkedIn

Follow us on social media:

Like and subscribe and all that stuff...stay in touch as we will have exciting updates and content soon...

@uppodpod Twitter

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up-pod.com (Now with ListenNotes for transcripts of each episode)

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show@up-pod.com,

DISCLAIMER: The host and others associated with this podcast may have investments with the guests and/or the companies associated with them. This is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research.

This week's Unlimited Partners are Matt Gialich and Joe Wilson, Co-Founder at AstroForge and MP at Undeterred Capital respectively. Matt had been working on a submarine project and decided to pivot to freaking astro mining! How cool is that? Joe and Undeterred stepped into become the first investors on the cap table. This is an amazing conversation. How did they get funding? How does Matt know this can work? Oh man we think this is one of our favorite convos we've had to date. If this company is successful it would easily be one of the wealthiest on the planet. Oh yeah, let's just fly some rockets to asteroids and mine the metals, then refine them, then fly them back to earth, easy right!? Well, do not miss this episode. Thanks again for listening.

Topics Include:


Matt's path to AstroForge via Bird scooters, submarines
Focusing on de-risking the business side
Having to tell investors of his submarine project he was working on that he wasn't passionate about it and wanted to pivot to mine asteroids
Coming up with a plan
Attracting new investors
Learning he didn't know a lot about the business side of things so they got help
Finding 776 to help with valuations, etc.
How it will work, a 2 year autonomous journey (Bruce Willis will not be involved)

Joe's song is Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie

Matt's song is Dinosaurs Will Die by NOFX

Sponsors:

Tegus Research 

My Marketplace Builder

Links:

Thomas McGannon LinkedIn

Follow us on social media:

Like and subscribe and all that stuff...stay in touch as we will have exciting updates and content soon...

@uppodpod Twitter

@uppodpod Instagram

UP YouTube Channel

up-pod.com (Now with ListenNotes for transcripts of each episode)

Email us:

show@up-pod.com,

DISCLAIMER: The host and others associated with this podcast may have investments with the guests and/or the companies associated with them. This is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research.

This week's Unlimited Partner is Ben Dahl , an early-stage investor based in Salt Lake City. He is a Managing Director at Signal Peak Ventures, a $500M fund which specializes in relatively underserved geographies around the United States. He was also the Co-Founder at Unspam, which was the predecessor company that led to Cloudflare. He held a board seat there for over 8 years, and now at SPV is participating in a $1.25B fund launched by Cloudflare to support companies who are building on their workers platform.

Topics Include:


Growing up in Utah and being told to pursue medical school by his parents
Meeting Matthew Prince (CEO Cloudflare) at a young age
Co-Founding Unspam Technologies w/ Matthew Prince
Tech culture in SLC
Unspam's Project Honeypot as a predecessor to Cloudflare, creating an http blacklist from an IP reputation score
Getting 2nd at Techcrunch and being motivated
How Cloudflare got partners to try them out in the beginning
"I am a better advisor than an entrepreneur...and learning that earlier than later is a blessing"
Working with Co-Founders, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn at Cloudflare
Joining Signal Peak, and the importance of relationships with Founders
Datadog, Snowflake



Ben's song is The Streets of Laredo by Marty Robbins

Sponsors:

Tegus Research 

My Marketplace Builder

Links:

Thomas McGannon LinkedIn

Follow us on social media:

Like and subscribe and all that stuff...stay in touch as we will have exciting updates and content soon...

@uppodpod Twitter

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UP YouTube Channel

up-pod.com (Now with ListenNotes for transcripts of each episode)

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show@up-pod.com,

DISCLAIMER: The host and others associated with this podcast may have investments with the guests and/or the companies associated with them. This is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research.

This week's Unlimited Partner is Heather Loomis Tighe a Venture Capital Advisor and Partner and Strategic Advisor to Family Offices. She has made quite the name for herself in the fixed income world over the past 20 years. From Blackrock (Head of West coast institutional family offices), JP Morgan Chase (fixed income manager overseeing a portfolio of $13B), she has a plethora of knowledge which she was willing to share with us. 

Topics Include:


Being an Environmentalist and thinking about the future
Her career arc from being an English major at Duke University to trading Equity Securities to Fixed Income
Traveling and attending the London School of Economics, living in Asia
Almost taking a job at the CIA
"The bond market is the smarter market"
"Can you think? Can you work hard? Do you have what it takes to learn something and execute upon it?"
Managing risk

Heather's song is Bob Dylan's Tangled Up in Blue

Sponsors:

Tegus Research 

My Marketplace Builder

Links:

Thomas McGannon LinkedIn

Follow us on social media:

Like and subscribe and all that stuff...stay in touch as we will have exciting updates and content soon...

@uppodpod Twitter

@uppodpod Instagram

UP YouTube Channel

up-pod.com (Now with ListenNotes for transcripts of each episode)

Email us:

show@up-pod.com,

DISCLAIMER: The host and others associated with this podcast may have investments with the guests and/or the companies associated with them. This is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research.