Tag: interview

Interview with Hampus Jakobsson (Pale Blue Dot)

MCJ Collective interviews Hampus Jakobsson of Pale Blue Dot, a Malmö-based venture capital fund investing in climate tech companies. The interview covers starting Pale Blue Dot and many technical aspects of venture investing raising capital for Pale Blue Dot from limited partners, what level of ownership to target in a startup, reserves for follow-on investment, how to make decisions, a bunch of things around investing in climate technology startups and much more.

Interesting both for investors who want to get insight into a peer and for founders who want to better understand how venture capitalists think.

Lenny’s Podcast interviews Gustav Söderström (Spotify)

Great 1.5 hour interview on product development, product strategy, AI, organizational structure/autonomy in decision making, the challenge with redesigning a popular feature used for a long-time and much more with Gustav Söderström on Lenny’s Podcast.

Two interesting, but not new, points:

  1. Spotify went from 7 person development ‘squads’ to about 20 person teams per manager. The employees per manager went up significantly.
  2. When you redesign a service or popular page (like Spotify did with the homepage), you will get a lot negative feedback. One reason is that you change the environment for old users, which means they don’t find things as easily. But you might also have broken things. One way to understand what is going on is to compare new user cohorts with old user cohorts.

Just a great listen for founders, management and employees.

Okay is terrible. You want great

Frank Slootman of Snowflake and previously ServiceNow and Data Domain on leadership, management, career, tempo and more. Obviously a very high intensity approach to building and running a company, but thoughts anyone can learn from.

One quote that stuck with me. “Okay is terrible. You want great, you want fantastic, you want wow. Everybody is just excited about it.”

Given how important momentum is in company-building excitement is very valuable in creating that and setting high standards gets people excited.

Tales from the oldest (?) venture capital firm

Invest Like The Best interviews Jeremy Levine, Kent Bennett and Brian Feinstein of Bessemer Venture Partners. Interesting listen on how to run a venture/investment firm (for nerds) and how the three partners think about what to invest in and what they like (radical product advantages + wild capital efficiency + ‘path to market leadership’).