Village Global's Venture Stories Village Global

Mark Cuban (@mcuban) joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), head of investor relations at Village Global, on this episode. Takeaways:

- In the US healthcare system the interests of patients, providers, and payers are not aligned. This drives many of the problems in the system today and is part of what inspired Mark to get involved in trying to disrupt the system.

- Mark started Cost Plus Drugs to try to address some of the pricing issues with prescription drugs in the US. The company's pricing is completely transparent and shows their costs along with the exact fees they charge. He says that they do zero marketing and their growth comes from earned media and referrals from their existing patient base.

- Mark advises founders not to try to optimize the current healthcare system but rather to work outside of the system to bring about real change. Working within the system can bring change around the edges but commits you to working inside a system that is already broken in the hopes that an incumbent player might buy you.

- Every pitch deck that Mark sees now has an AI angle to it. He’s gone deep on the field over the last several years and says that when a person digs into many of these pitches the companies are using off-the-shelf large language models and have little defensibility.

- Precision medicine is one of the most exciting and scary emerging technologies. Mark says that in the next 50-100 years we will be able to compile all the variables that drive how our bodies and minds work and AI will be able to create a precise simulation of our bodies and how to treat them to improve our health.

- One of Mark’s favourite sayings is that “life is half random.” The conditions around a person are continually changing and contribute greatly to a person’s success.

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Eric Woo (@ericjwoo), co-founder and CEO of Revere, and Spencer Tyson (@SpencerGTyson), Head of Investment Ratings at Revere, join Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global. Revere has pioneered the world’s first rating system for venture capital funds.

Takeaways:

- Venture has changed a lot over the last couple decades and continues to evolve quickly. In the last decade emerging managers has become its own sub-category, and venture as an asset class has bifurcated into specialist and generalist investors.

- Revere has found through their extensive data analysis that funds that are diverse outperform, funds with a female GP outperform, solo GPs outperform, and career operators outperform those with a fund management background.

- Fund benchmarking requires more scrutiny. The same data can be presented in very different ways depending on the use case. For this reason, Revere uses a standardized rating system to equip allocators with the tools to evaluate funds.

- At the median, first funds do reasonably well, second funds do worse than the first, but third funds shoot up in terms of performance.

- Revere looks at data, process, and repeatability when they are evaluating managers. They consider sourcing, qualifying deals, winning deals, value add, as well as whether firms stick to their stated portfolio construction.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

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Jon Korngold joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations, on this episode. Jon is the Global Head of Blackstone Growth (BXG) and Co-Head of Technology Investing at Blackstone. Prior to joining Blackstone, Jon was Head of General Atlantic’s Global Financial Services and Healthcare sectors.

Takeaways:

- The vast reach of Blackstone, as one of the biggest asset managers in the world, allows them to apply their huge base of operational infrastructure to “make the winning company, not just find the winning company.”

- Entrepreneurs have accepted that we are not going back to 2021 valuations. There will be many casualties on the road ahead. Jon worries that VCs are doing certain complex deals to protect their marks and that there will be a number of zombie portfolios coming out in the next few years.

- The correction has a silver lining: lots of tech transformation comes out of a downturn. This is a healthy thing, like a brush fire in a forest. Also, startups have more and more talent available to them as the cost of leaving an existing job has never been lower.

- When Jon meets founders he pays attention to how often they let the people around them speak. Great founders are humble and surround themselves with people who challenge their thinking.

- Jon recommends that people spend time working and living abroad if they can. He says that his time spent overseas has informed his thinking on markets and given him a competitive advantage at work.

- The sign of a good board member is that they never show up to a board meeting and learn something they didn’t already know. They sit on a low number of boards, are actively keeping up to date on the company, and are deeply involved with the company.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

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Marc Iserlis is a film/TV producer and documentary filmmaker joins Village Global's Head of Investor Relations Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi). Marc is currently building tokenized film financing at Republic, an alternative fundraising platform.

Takeaways:

- Marc’s ambition is at Republic is to allow individuals to join in the success of film production through an equity "fan raise" that allows fans of a particular project to invest directly in its production and share in the project’s success.

- The rise of streaming platforms and recent changes in how films are financed has resulted in commoditization.

- China and India’s film industries are rising stars but the US is still the global leader in big films.

- Telling a good story is perhaps the hardest thing in the world to do.

- An audience appreciates subtlety in storytelling. Writers know the right things to withhold from an audience to make it satisfying.

- Stage is an actor’s medium, film is a director’s medium, and TV is a writer’s medium.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

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Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) and Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) are co-authors of The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. In the book, they look at the best of Silicon Valley startups and derive entrepreneurial principles that can transform the career of any professional across all industries. They revised and updated the book for the new world of work in 2022 and released a podcast series about it which you can listen to at thestartupofyou.com.

This episode of the Village Global podcast shares a few select segments from the Startup of You podcast relevant to founders, investors, and anyone working in tech.

They discuss:

- Hustle, and investor Chris Sacca's creative way of getting his foot in the door when he was first starting out in his career.


- Name dropping. Your network is a key part of your career. If you have a powerful person in your network you might be eager to let others know that, but they talk about how to let others know about your network thoughtfully and with tact.



- Navigating status. Like it or not, status matters. We talk about how status dynamics play out in the workplace and how you can skillfully navigate them.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) and Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) are co-authors of The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. In the book, they look at the best of Silicon Valley startups and derive entrepreneurial principles that can transform the career of any professional across all industries. They revised and updated the book for the new world of work in 2022 and released a podcast series about it which you can listen to at thestartupofyou.com.

This episode of the Village Global podcast shares a few select segments from the Startup of You podcast relevant to founders, investors, and anyone working in tech.

They discuss:

- How the founders of Airbnb were relentlessly resourceful and hustled to overcome hundreds of rejections when they first conceived of the business that today is worth tens of billions of dollars.

- Reference checking — why it’s important and how to do it well.

- Risk — why we're evolutionarily wired to overestimate the risks involved in a given decision, why it's important to take smart risks, and a few frameworks for thinking more rationally about them.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup