The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch13 Touko 2016

20VC: Creating A Competitive Process Between VCs & Having Bill Gurley As A Board Member with Aaron Hirschhorn, Founder & CEO @ DogVacay

Aaron Hirschhorn is the founder, CEO and "Top Dog" of DogVacay, the leading online and mobile pet sitting company. DogVacay connects pet parents in need of services with more than 25,000 vetted and insured pet caregivers in 10,000 cities across the country. Founded in March 2012 and based in Santa Monica, CA, the company has over 80 employees and has raised $47M from investors including Omers, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to DogVacay, Aaron spent several years in venture capital and technology, working at Monitor Group, Upfront Ventures, and Monitor Ventures. Previously, Aaron was an analyst at Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How did Aaron come to found one of the startup hits to come out of LA? In the beginning what was the harder element the demand or the supply side?

2.) How did Aaron know when he had achieved product market fit with DogVacay? What were the signs and how did he follow this up? How did Aaaron react to VCs laughing at his concept and how did he stay energised and positive?

3.) How was the fundraising process for Aaron with DogVacay and Benchmark, Andreesen and First Round? How can founders look to control the dialogue? How many investors should founders look to target? What makes Aaron want and not want a particular investor?

4.) What business fundamentally work in the on demand economy and what don't ? How should marketplace founders be approaching the issue of unit economics and should growth still be the priority?

5.) What is it like having Bill Gurley as a broad member ? What will be the enabler that will allow DogVacy to achieve that market penetration required?

Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Aaron's Fave Blog Or Newsletter: Bill Gurley, Jason Calacanis: Inside As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Aaron on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(1492)

20VC: Airtable Sold for $1.285BN | Leo Achenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up | Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B | Anthropic Model Breaches Three Companies' Security | Big Tech Earnings: Why Palantir Beat The Rest

Special Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO @ Palo Alto Networks. AGENDA: 04:50 Airtable Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B 17:00 Leo Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up as Citadel Buys His $16BN Bo...

6 Elo 1h 15min

20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the la...

3 Elo 1h 4min

20VC: The Best AI Companies Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies | Will Simile Kill Kalshi, Polymarkets and NASDAQ | How to Sign Fortune 500 Companies As Customers in Weeks with Joon Sung Park, Simile

Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before ma...

1 Elo 1h 3min

20VC: Jensen's Open-Weights Letter | Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks | Francisco Partners Raises $21BN | Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia

AGENDA: 05:00 Jensen's Open-Weights Letter Puts Anthropic on an Island 10:00 OpenAI's Model Targets Hugging Face in a Cyber-Security Scare 18:00 America's Open-Model Push Accelerates as China Looms La...

30 Heinä 1h 17min

20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo

Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, who just raised $3 billion in fresh capital, its largest pool ever. Matt's portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora, OpenRouter, Chai Discovery, Axiom,...

27 Heinä 1h 2min

20VC: Mercor CPO on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs | Why Large Enterprise is Scared to Partner with Frontier Labs | Why Small Specialised Models is the Future with Osvald Nitski

Osvald Nitski is the Chief Product Officer at Mercor, the AI-training and expert-data marketplace powering frontier-model development. Mercor last raised a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valua...

25 Heinä 1h

20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell & Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know

AGENDA: 00:04 China's Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned 00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion? 00:21 Ope...

23 Heinä 1h 23min

20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks

Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the...

20 Heinä 1h 17min