Playing With Unicorns

Dec 16 2024 47 ep. 63 mins 25

Playing With Unicorns Podcast artwork

Playing with unicorns is a new weekly show on startups, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. I cover everything I learned as an entrepreneur, angel investor and venture capitalist during the last 22 years, focusing on everything I wished I knew when I first got started as a tech entrepreneur.

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#47 Marketplace Trends

Dec 16 2024 55 mins

Episode 47: Marketplace Trends Given that I have been building and investing in marketplaces for 26 years you might think that everything that needed to be built has already been built, but nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, we are still at the beginning of the marketplace revolution with lots of exciting new trends. In this episode, I cover: Cross border comm

#46 FJ Labs’ AI Thesis

Nov 18 2024 73 mins

While AI investing continues to reach new highs, we have been contrarian. Given how non-consensus we are, I wanted to share our thoughts and perspective. In this episode, I cover: The general state of venture. The explosion in AI investing. The varying fortunes of AI startups. FJ Labs’ perspective on AI. FJ Labs’ AI investments. The episode was highly interactive with doze

#45 Ask Me Anything

Apr 10 2024 110 mins

I had not done an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in over a year which led to many questions on a wide variety of topics: AI, augmented reality, crypto, macro and much more. Here are the key questions we covered: • 00:01:44 Artificial Intelligence: Where are we now? Where are we heading? What is the timeline? Why is FJ Labs a way contrarian on the AI trend? • 00:09:42 What's your

#44 Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose

Jan 11 2024 71 mins

People often ask me how I manage to accomplish so much while leading such a rich, passionate life as illustrated by my 2023 year in review. In this episode I share all my secrets. I will cover everything from general productivity tips to how and what you can outsource in your professional and personal life.

#43 Julio Vasconcellos and the state of Latin American tech

Sep 10 2023 74 mins

I had the pleasure of receiving Julio Vasconcellos on the show. Julio is the Founder and Managing Partner of Atlantico, a leading early-stage venture fund in Latin America. It was Julio's role as the inaugural Facebook employee for Latin America that initiated his path in the startup world in the region after starting his career in Silicon Valley. He later co-founded Peixe Urbano,

#42 Kevin Ryan, Unicorn Builder

Mar 17 2023 68 mins

I had the pleasure of being joined by my good friend Kevin Ryan. He’s often been called the “Godfather of NYC tech.” Kevin is one of the leading internet entrepreneurs and investors in New York. He is a co-founder of MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Nomad Health, and founds new companies with AlleyCorp every year. Earlier in his career, Kevin helped to grow D

Episode 41: Ask Me Anything

Feb 12 2023 113 mins

It had been over a year since we did the last Ask Me Anything (AMA) so the time had come. As requested by the audience, my son François joined us for the first part of the show. He was his usual epic self: calm, poised, and playing along cutely. His presence clearly played a part in the success of the episode which was one of the most watched ever across all the platforms and was

#40 Oskar Hartmann: Unicorn Accumulator

Dec 20 2022 72 mins

This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with my good friend Oskar Hartmann. He’s had the most incredible unicorn experience: He was part of 10% of all German unicorns Made a $300M mistake on Ozon Managed to make money on Fab.com despite it going from $1.5B in value to $0 in 6 months Why selling at the point of maximum secondary liquidity is probably a bad time to sell Much mor

#39: Simpl and the Indian Fintech Ecosystem

Dec 20 2022 55 mins

On this week’s episode I had the pleasure of welcoming Nitya Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Simpl, to conclude our mini-series on the Indian tech scene. We had a fascinating conversation on the state of Indian Fintech, which in many ways is more advanced than the US. I am beyond impressed by the free C2C / B2B / B2C instantaneous real time payments allowed by UPI and the business

#38 The Indian Tech Ecosystem & FJ Labs’ Thesis in the region

Oct 13 2022 41 mins

This week we are covering the state of the Indian tech ecosystem. We are joined by Luke Skertich, senior associate at FJ Labs, who is leading the charge with our Indian investments. In this episode, we cover: The history of India’s tech ecosystem and the recent explosion in unicorns Why we are short term pessimistic, but medium and long term super bullish Why we are focusing on