This week on episode 4, we talked about:
- Jake's train station
- A disappointing dialog at the end of Diablo 3
- What’s so incredibly great about hoodies
- Teddy Ruxpin, the original edtech product for kids
- Curiosity Labs, a Character portfolio company building educational AI companions for kids
- The founding story of YouTube Kids
- Getting new product ideas from real-world customer behavior
- Two different ways to pitch the same company
- Should founders follow “best practices” when pitching investors or try to stand out?
- Fathom’s Series A
- How we found Fathom (and then decided to invest)
- Authenticity in sales
- Why we go out of our way to pitch ourselves to founders
- Our Design Sprint with Fathom
- Almond butter in oatmeal
- A great book: Against the Gods
- And much more
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Chapters
00:00 A diabolical dialog box
03:54 The importance of throughline
05:45 Where is Jake's sweatshirt?!
07:39 How sweatshirts work
09:13 Teddy Ruxpin
11:24 Building the pitch for Curiosity Labs
17:04 How a side project became YouTube Kids
22:49 A better way to pitch VCs
33:56 How Fathom got to Series A
40:30 How VCs do outbound sales
45:48 How authenticity shows up in products
53:21 Good beans
57:14 An extended self-congratulatory ad for Character and Design Sprints