Evolving for the Next Billion

Today's episode is a recording of a virtual fireside chat with Tony Fadell-iPod inventor, iPhone co-inventor, Nest founder, and now New York Times best-selling author of "Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making". It is hosted by GGV's managing partners Jeff Richards and Hans Tung.

Today's episode is a live recording of a panel discussion at GGV's 7th annual Evolving Economy conference in NYC last year. It is moderated by Hans, featuring four exceptional operators in the FinTech space: Bradley Riss, Chief Commercial Officer at Checkout.com Huey Lin, Founding COO at Affirm; Venture Partner at GGV Capital Michael Rangel, Founder & CEO at Novo Rares Crisan, VP of Technology at GGV Capital

In this crossover episode between Evolving for the Next Billion and Founder Real Talk, co-hosted by Glenn Solomon, we chat with Dani Grant, the co-founder and CEO of Jam.dev. Jam is a developer tool that streamlines communication between product engineering teams about bugs and fixes. Founded in 2020, Jam has helped nearly 15,000 product, QA, engineering, and design leaders ship bug-free software to customers including Unilever, Staples, T-Mobile, and Dell. Prior to founding Jam, Dani worked as a product manager for Cloudflare and Union Square Ventures. Jam raised $3.5M in a seed round led by Union Square Ventures and Version One Ventures, with participation from angels including GitHub CTO Jason Warner and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. Jam is a GGV portfolio.

It's not the first time we are in what the media called a "crypto winter". In the last crypto winter of 2018, Emilie, the guest of today's show, made the unconventional choice to join Coinbase from her senior role at LinkedIn. She is now the President and Chief Operating Officer of Coinbase. What was her journey like? How do you navigate through a crypto winter? You'll hear it from her in today's episode. The episode is recorded in July 2022. Enjoy!

To commemorate International Women's Day this year, we are thrilled to introduce a special series featuring some of the inspiring female founders in GGV's portfolio. Kicking off the series is Carolyn Childers, co-founder and CEO of Chief, a network designed exclusively for high-achieving women in leadership positions. Chief membership provides a private networking platform to connect and support women executives from all industries. Currently, Chief has over 20,000 paid members across 12,000 organizations, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Disney, IBM, Nike, Goldman Sachs, Netflix, Pfizer, Walmart, HBO, Lyft, and New York Times. That's a long and distinguished list. Chief is a GGV portfolio company. Prior to founding Chief, Carolyn was the SVP Senior Vice President of Operations at Handy, a home services marketplace. Previously, Childers led the launch of Soap.com, where she was the general manager through its acquisition by Amazon. She has also held strategy and business development roles at Victoria's Secret and Avon Products. Carolyn began her career in finance, working in investment banking at Deutsche Bank.

Today we have a bonus episode in which GGV’s managing partner Jenny Lee shared why she invested in BUD, existing companies in her game tech portfolio, and her take on NFT. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

In this episode, we asked Hans about his 2021, in which he shared his view on Web3, investing at an unprecedented pace, ESG, and the global capital market in 2021. Stay tuned till the end for some proudest moments shared by our listeners over the past 2 years! For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show, we have the cofounders of BUD - Risa and Shawn. BUD is a global virtual platform for Gen Z and Gen Alpha to create and share 3D interactive experiences. It is also one of the world's largest 3D item markets. Before founding BUD, Risa and Shawn were colleagues at Snapchat where they worked as interactive and software engineers. Risa graduated from Cornell in 2017 with a degree in Computer science and math. With a deep interest in computer graphics, she started building her own indie game since college. After graduation, she joined the Snapchat AR team as an interactive engineer working on frontier AR experience and the developer community Snapchat’s AR engine.  Shawn graduated from Rutgers with a major in Computer Science. He interned at Meta in 2015 as a software engineer working on video-ads recommendation in the news feed. In early 2016, he joined Snapchat full-time, where he worked on Android performance optimization, rewrite, and friending recommendation. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Happy New Year, everyone! For the 1st episode of 2022, we brought you the yearly reflection from our global managing partner Jixun Foo, in which he shared how he experienced 2021, the new norm for global venture capitalists, and some of the most exciting startups he has seen. Enjoy! For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show, we have Dane Atkinson, CEO, and Founder of Odeko. Odeko is a hidden platform supporting thousands of Coffee shops with the technology once only held by the public giants. It uses AI and automation to provide a single source of supplies that is loaded into stores in the closed hours, and consumer apps making all cafes easily discoverable and accessible and soon a host of other building bricks. Odeko is a GGV portflio. Dane is a serial entrepreneur who started his first company at the age of 18. Since then, he has built a successful career running tech companies, mostly in the SMB tech space, such as Squarespace, SumAll, and Odeko. Dane was the CEO of Squarespace from 2007 to 2011. He also serves as a board member, mentor, and advisor to numerous other companies. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show we have Stephen Kalb. Stefan Kalb is the CEO and co-founder of Shelf Engine. Kalb co-founded Shelf Engine in 2016 to address the global food waste pandemic he experienced first-hand with grocers. Prior to Shelf Engine, Kalb spent 7 years as the CEO of Molly’s, a healthy grab-and-go food company he started in 2009. While Kalb grew the company to more than 400 regional retail locations, food waste was eating into Molly’s bottom line. Hungry for a solution, Stefan and Shelf Engine co-founder Bede Jordan developed a model to considerably improve perishable food forecasting. After successfully cutting Molly’s food waste in half, Kalb and Jordan quit their day jobs to launch Shelf Engine with a mission of transforming the food supply chain by helping grocery stores reduce waste and increase sales through intelligent forecasting. Today, Shelf Engine has nearly 200 employees and manages orders for leading grocers at thousands of locations nationwide. Shelf Engine is a GGV portfolio. For opportunities at Shelf Engine: https://www.shelfengine.com/careers/ For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community  

Today on the show we have Timo Recker and Andre Menezes, co-founders of Next Gen Foods, a Singapore-based food tech company that's harnessing the power of plant proteins to create the most delicious and satisfying food imaginable. Next Gen Foods is a GGV portfolio. A serial entrepreneur, Timo comes from a life-time background in the food space. Before Next Gen Foods, Timo founded German-based LikeMeat, where he was responsible for the successful conceptualization, growth, and expansion of the brand into ten European countries, with products sold through 15,000 supermarkets. A Brazilian native, Andre has lived and worked in many countries. He served as General Manager of Country Foods Singapore, the largest meat distributor and processor in the country, as well as the company responsible for scaling Impossible Foods from a newcomer on the scene, to a household name in the region. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show we have Fabián Gómez Gutiérrez, CEO and Founder of Frubana. Frubana is a one-stop operating platform for restaurants – with B2B ecommerce and fintech offerings. It aims to make food in Latin America more accessible and currently operates in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Before founding Frubana, Fabian is the expansion leader and an early employee of Rappi, Latin America's 1st Super App. Fabian receives his bachelor of engineering from The University of the Andes in Colombia. Frubana is a GGV portfolio. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show, we have le Hong Minh, founder and CEO of VNG. VNG is one of the largest internet companies in Vietnam, founded in 2004, VNG began as a gaming company. Today, its digital services span across several verticals including social media, which is Zalo; digital content, which is Zing mp3; financial Services, which is Zalo pay; cloud services, which is VNG Cloud. Minh got his bachelor's degree in finance from Monash University. Before starting VNG, he has been doing investment banking for many years, and honored as one of the 10 most influential people on the internet in Vietnam for the last decades. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show we have Irving Fain. Irving is the founder & CEO of Bowery Farming, the largest vertical farming company in the US. Based in New York City, Bowery’s smart farms are powered by their proprietary operating system the BoweryOS. Their produce is available in almost 800 grocery stores and many e-commerce platforms. Bowery is a GGV portfolio. Before founding Bowery in 2015, Irving was the co-founder and CEO of CrowdTwist, a loyalty marketing SaaS business later acquired by Oracle. Prior to that, he launched iHeartMedia at Clear Channel and began his career helping early-stage companies raise capital as an investment banker at Citigroup. This is a crossover episode with Unscripted, a video series hosted by GGV managing partner Jeff Richards. Jeff and Hans host this episode. You can check out the video on GGV’s YouTube channel. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today’s episode is a rerun of our conversation with Grab’ President Ming almost 2 years ago. If you have been following the news, you probably know that Grab recently announced its plan to go public in the US via SPAC. It is the world’s largest SPAC merger deal up to date and is expected to be the largest IPO by a Southeast Asian company in the US. We’re very fortunate to be part of Grab’s journey since 2014 and it’s truly inspiring to see how consistent the team has been in pursuing its mission.  For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show we have Binny Bansal. Binny cofounded Flipkart in 2007 and played a pivotal role in scaling it to a market leading e-commerce space which still has so many fundamental customer and supply problems along the way. From a small beginning, Binny along with his friend Sachin Bansal turned Flipkart into a massive online commerce venture that was bought over by Walmart in 2018, for a whopping $16 billion. He's also a prolific angel investor and mentor, with over 30 investments in startups ecosystem in India. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Colleague Madhu Yalamarthi.  For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today we have our first ever husband and wife duos on the show, Sonny Vu and Christy Trang Le from Arevo. Arevo develops technology to enable direct digital additive manufacturing parts for end-use applications in high volume. It makes advances in materials science, 3D printing software, and robotics to automate the production of carbon fiber reinforced polymer structures, otherwise known as CFRP.  Sonny is a serial entrepreneur, currently the CEO of Arevo. Previously, Sonny founded various startups including Misfit which was bought by Fossil for $260 million. Before that, he worked at Microsoft Research NLP, under Kai-Fu Lee, and worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT under Professor Noam Chomsky. Both Arevo and Misfit are GGV portfolio. Christy is the CFO and president of the Vietnam operations for Arevo. Previously, Christy was a country director for Vietnam at Facebook, and before Facebook, she built Misfit along with Sonny. Prior to Misfit, Christy was a consultant at McKinsey and an investment banker at HSBC. She graduated Double First in Economics at Oxford (BA & MPhil) and an MBA from MIT Sloan.  This episode is co-hosted by GGV Colleague Dimitra Taslim.  For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today on the show, we have Allon Bloch, CEO and co-founder of K Health. K Health is America's number one most downloaded medical app with over 4 million users. It uses AI and advanced technology to provide better and more affordable health care. Unlike other symptom checkers that rely on static rules or protocols to give you the best guess at a diagnosis, K was trained on millions of real anonymized medical records to give you more accurate results that are personalized to your situation. K Health is a GGV portfolio.Since this episode was recorded, K Health has expanded into Pediatrics to help the whole family access high quality care, 24/7. Allon is also a board member and former co-CEO of Wix, and has served as the co-founder and CEO of Vroom. Allon is a partner at Jerusalem venture partners, and spent time as a consultant at McKinsey&Company. He holds a BS in biology from Tel Aviv University, and an MBA from Columbia University. He was born and raised in Israel and moved to the US in 1995. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community

Today's episode was recorded back in 2019, way before Affirm became a 27 billion dollar public company, and the BNPL (that is buy now pay later) won over young consumers across the world. Before Affirm, Max was known as the co-founder of PayPal, where he designed the company's system to detect fraud. A "fintech nerd", as he called himself and serial entrepreneur, Max shared how Affirm was a product of his guiding principle in life, and how his wife was the voice of reason when defining what was fun for him. This episode is co-hosted by GGV managing partner Glenn Soloman and first appeared on Glenn's podcast Founder Real Talk. For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or assets are for illustrative purposes only; such references do not constitute any recommendation to either buy or sell such securities or assets and are not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision, nor do they constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services. Any information provided by third parties in this content does not reflect the views of GGV Capital and its subsidiaries or affiliates. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon, when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by GGV Capital. Any investment or portfolio company mentioned, referred to, or described is not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by GGV Capital, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results.