Venture Capital Podcasts

The most distinctive shows sit with limited partners, the institutions that fund the funds. Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP pairs Beezer Clarkson with Nick Charles. In Franchise Funds: Becoming (and Remaining) One with Stephen Bluestein, a prestige word becomes arithmetic. Of funds studied from 1995 to 2014, the guest says those reaching a fourth fund are "less than 20%," and only 3% reach an eighth.

Capital Conversations: Insights into the World of Venture Capital, produced by IMD, is drier. The rules of VC, with David Clark CIO at VenCap International runs 22 minutes. The guest argues that the top 1% of companies, typically "30 or so" a year, generate more than half of the industry's exit value. On that view, a young manager's portfolio is hard to judge until those companies emerge, which takes years. Swimming with Allocators covers similar terrain in a lighter, jokier register.

Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers is best heard with its incentives in view. Host Samir Kaji co-founded Allocate, and episodes such as Unpacking "A Crisis Moment In Seed" carry a disclaimer that Allocate or its clients may hold positions in guests or securities mentioned. In that episode the guest describes a worldview in which "the main inefficiency is actually people underestimate the best companies." He argues that this view has narrowed where capital goes. It is offered as a thesis, not a forecast.

Once you know who supplies the money, the next question is how a manager raises it. In The Full Ratchet (TFR): Venture Capital and Startup Investing Demystified, Nick Moran and Nate Pierotti turn the microphone on each other. Over 81 minutes they recount raising a $42.6 million fund, mistakes included. Their first fund had what they recall as 42 LPs, the investors in the fund. At one summit their top 10 prospects cancelled, and number 11 closed with what Moran recalls as a $2 million check.

"Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing works at the scale of whole firms. In E63: How Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman Continued Kleiner Perkins’ Legacy, choosing partners becomes an NBA front office: who you draft, who you groom, who you trade for.

For anyone raising money, Venture Capital is plainer and more useful than its generic title suggests. In Why Founders Get Rejected by VCs: Kamran Ansari on AI, Fund Strategy, and Venture Capital, the conversation turns to funds that cite their own rules to avoid giving the real reason for a pass. One speaker admits: "I can't find any like statistical correlation in my portfolio with like, outcomes, and whether they send update emails."

The Startup Tank Climate Investor Pitch Show and Climate Techies Sustainability Series is a live pitch session: five minutes, a gong, then questions. In TST 1/8: Digital Renewable Energy as a Service, Farming Drones and Quantifying Natural Asset Carbon Credits with Elemental Excelerator, two investors dropped out at the last minute. The questioning still bites: "You think it does or customers have told you that it does?"

The Perfect Pitch Podcast by Lucidity Insights brings in investors from the Middle East and Africa, between promotions for its own investor-matching service.

Specialist shows trade breadth for texture. On Consumer VC: Venture Capital I B2C Startups I Commerce | Early-Stage Investing, host Mike Gelb's guest in The Billion Dollar Opportunities in Misunderstood Markets // Helene Servillon, Founder of JourneyOne Ventures lists what cannabis companies cannot use, from Visa and FedEx to federal banks. The guest argues that this kind of regulatory friction is where venture opportunity lies. The show calls its own content "not investment advice."

Billion Dollar Moves™ with Sarah Chen-Spellings | Global Venture Capital supplies founding stories. Rick Baker of Blackbird VC describes a first fund sitting at 13 times its money before a sale of part of the portfolio returned about three and a half times the fund. Those are his figures.

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology carries real stakes. Erin Platts recalls four all-nighters after SVB in the U.S. was taken over by the FDIC, followed by rewiring the UK bank inside HSBC in a little over a hundred business days.

Distilling Venture Capital strays into crypto lending with Fuse Capital. For that strand, see the Cryptocurrency page.