Conor Holahan 5/4/22 Conor Holahan 5/4/22

Sales Excellence at Insight Partners

Travis Kassay is an Executive Vice President in the Sales Center of Excellence at Insight Partners, a leading global private equity and venture firm with over $90 billion in assets under management. Travis explains the role of the Insight Onsite Team to help guide portfolio companies in product & tech, marketing, sales, talent, business development, and more. Specifically, we discuss the key ways in which Travis helps Insight’s portfolio companies in the areas of sales and customer success. Travis breaks down some of the best tactics to scale a sales organization at a growing software company and maintain alignment between different divisions of an organization. We also dive into the Travis’ role in sales due diligence on investment deals and what characteristics Insight Partners looks for when making an investment.

Conor Holahan 2/2/22 Conor Holahan 2/2/22

Building a Unicorn Tech Startup

Jason Boehmig, CEO of Ironclad, joins the podcast to discuss his journey launching a revolutionary software company disrupting the legal industry. Jason and his team have raised capital from some of the best VCs in the world, including Accel and Sequoia, and we dive into the process of successfully fundraising in Silicon Valley. Jason also talks about the insights he learned from his time on Wall Street, how he went about early product development, and the importance of avoiding feature creep as a software company scales. Other topics include the evolving role of the CEO, goal setting and change management, strategies for hiring, and relationship building.

Guest User 1/19/22 Guest User 1/19/22

Pursuing Your Passion at Home and at Work

Alex and Conor chat with Mike Sayles, Founder and CEO of Fresh Street. Fresh Street is seeking to create a revolutionary and innovative grocery experience by creating grocery stores that exclusively offer pick-up groceries. In our discussion about his business, Mike discusses his career path and strategies for career discernment, the importance of operating experience for CEOs and how to best build and maintain a professional network. We also discuss the importance of hiring high quality employees in the early days of a startup. Mike concludes by offering his insights into work-life balance, specifically his experience being a founder and a father.

Conor Holahan 10/25/21 Conor Holahan 10/25/21

Investing in Automation & AI

In this episode, we are joined by Jason Schoettler, co-founder and managing partner of Calibrate Ventures. Jason and his investing partner have funded companies like Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever), Soft Robotics, Ring, SolarCity, and Chegg. In our conversation, we discuss his decision to start his own venture firm, synthetic data, the challenges robotics companies face over SaaS businesses, and what startups need to achieve to secure a Series A investment after seed capital.

Guest User 10/12/21 Guest User 10/12/21

Private Investing - From the Top

In this episode we speak with Peter Bell. Peter is the Chairman at Amity Ventures, a VC and PE firm investing in "category defining" technology companies, and the CEO of Epiphany Technology Acquisition Corporation, a SPAC targeting technology companies. Peter's career began in entrepreneurship and has led him to private investing. Peter has a unique view on making private investments and his firm invests across various stages from early stage VC to late stage SPAC investments and buyouts. We discuss Peter's decision-making process, fund strategy and investment strategy, and SPAC deal structure and management. Listen to learn from his stories.

Conor Holahan 9/15/21 Conor Holahan 9/15/21

Jumping into the Deep End

Jere Doyle is a Boston College professor and proven entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and angel investor across many different companies and funds over the course of his illustrious career. In our conversation, Jere gives his take on the role of innate ability and learning in becoming a successful entrepreneur and describes how entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity with total disregard for current resources.” Drawing from Jere’s company-building experience, we discuss when the best time is to take the leap into entrepreneurship and the challenging evolution of the CEO role as a company scales. We wrap up the episode with a dive into his top investment themes, including marketplaces, SaaS, Big Data, and AI.

Guest User 9/9/21 Guest User 9/9/21

Growing Money - Notre Dame’s Way

We are joined by Scott Malpass who served as the Chief Investment Officer for Notre Dame’s endowment, growing it from $400 million to over $12 billion. We discuss the strategies and practices that allowed Notre Dame’s investment office to achieve amazing long-term returns on its endowed capital. Specifically, Scott gave his thoughts on asset managers and how to find good ones, the University’s role in private investing, and acting as a co-investor for world-class private equity firms. Scott’s wisdom on long-term investing is unparalleled, don’t miss this episode.

Conor Holahan 9/7/21 Conor Holahan 9/7/21

The Bank Behind the Innovation Economy

We are joined by Brian Plamondon, a member of the Healthcare Corporate Venture Relationships team at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). With over 50% of venture-backed life sciences and tech companies in the US banking with them, SVB is engrained within the Silicon Valley ecosystem. During our conversation with Brian, we cover how SVB helped its clients during the pandemic and COVID’s impact on the venture and M&A space. Additionally, we discuss growing verticals within the healthcare industry, increased capital allocation to megafunds and solo GPs, and the state of the venture capital industry abroad.

Conor Holahan 8/31/21 Conor Holahan 8/31/21

Funding Female Founders in FinTech

Elizabeth Davis, a venture investor at Anthemis on their Female Innovators Lab team, helps us kick off the fall semester with an exciting discussion on early-stage investing and the rise of financial technology companies. In addition to diving into key sub-verticals and investment themes within fintech, we focus on how Elizabeth is working to combat inequities that women face in the venture funding space. Only about 2% of all venture funding goes towards women and Elizabeth wants to change that by helping female founders on the front lines.

Guest User 5/4/21 Guest User 5/4/21

Intro to Venture Studios

Mike Fitzgerald, co-founder and partner at High Alpha, a venture studio in Indianapolis, comes on the show to discuss the strategy and operations of venture studios. Mike’s background in software, sales, and entrepreneurship guides our conversation on starting companies at venture studios, the attractiveness of B2B SaaS, and guiding exits and innovation through large corporations. This episode also provides insight into Mike’s experience founding a venture studio and his advice from that process.

Conor Holahan 4/27/21 Conor Holahan 4/27/21

Navigating Y Combinator

Conor McCarter is the co-founder of Prequel, which helps companies set up and manage their data stacks so they can focus on what matters: getting insights to drive their businesses. We talk about with Conor about pursuing a dual engineering masters degree and MBA at Harvard and subsequently deciding to jump in full time to work on his startup. We also focus on Conor’s experience with Y Combinator, which is the premier American seed money startup accelerator. Topics include applying and interviewing for YC, maximizing time given the unstructured nature of the program, the infamous Demo Day, and the state of Prequel after going through the accelerator.

Conor Holahan 4/13/21 Conor Holahan 4/13/21

Healthcare VC Investing

With over 20 years of experience in venture capital and degrees from MIT and Harvard, Dr. Jeff Himawan, Managing Director at EW Healthcare Partners, joins the show to discuss the role of venture capital in research-intensive pharmaceutical startups. Jeff outlines the impact that longer holding periods have on healthcare venture firms’ relationships with LPs as well as the characteristics needed to raise new financing rounds for pharma startups. Other topics include the impact of the pandemic on healthcare investing, the entrance of big tech into healthcare, and the lack of innovation by big pharma.

Conor Holahan 2/7/21 Conor Holahan 2/7/21

Supercharging Startups & Corporate Innovation

Conor and Alex chat with Cristin Pacifico, manager and venture capitalist at TechNexus. We discuss TechNexus’ unique combination of businesses, corporate joint-ventures, and a fast-growing startup investment portfolio in addition to Cristin’s outlook on the biggest opportunities for technological disruption. Cristin also talks about her background in financial planning and analysis, the M&A process for a startup seeking an exit, and the rise of SPACs as a means for companies to go public.

Conor Holahan 8/21/20 Conor Holahan 8/21/20

Breaking into VC

Conor and Alex interview Caroline Yeager, a Senior Associate at Vitalize Venture Group, and discuss the fundamentals of venture capital, how to break into VC, and the role of an entry-level analyst. Drawing from her experience sourcing potential investments and managing the due diligence process at Vitalize Venture Group and GE Ventures, Caroline provides her perspective on what makes a successful startup and touches upon the differences between corporate and traditional VC.

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