Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture For America Podcast

David Greenberg loves the excitement of moving but hates the drama. While working as a lawyer at a prestigious lawfirm in New York City, David experienced the hassle of wasted hours trying to update his contact information with 20+ companies. David couldn't believe that there wasn't a solution to this inconvenience and after a friend dared him to start a company to solve it, he did! Four years later Updater has raised over $15million and has pivoted from a B to C model to B to B sales, partnering with some major real estate companies. Listen to the latest episode to hear David's story and how he negotiated an option to buy the Updater url.

Olga Vidisheva was born in Kyrgyzstan and moved to the US to attend Wellesly College. Her story is the quintessential 'American Dream'. Olga learned english while working in a Japanese retaurant (of all places!) and put herself through college by modeling. While she was at Harvard Business School Olga discovered her passion for boutiques and saw an opportunity to help small clothing stores develop a digital presence. Enter Shoptiques.com, a website that started with only 25 stores and now represents thousands of boutiques across the globe. Download this week's episode to hear about Olga's journey and what it was like to be accepted to Y Combinator as the first single non-technical founder.

This week's guest, Benzi Ronen, is not a farmer or a chef. This didn't stop him from founding Farmigo, a company that serves as an online farmer’s market that connects consumers directly to local producers in their area where they can get all of their fresh food needs. Download this week's episode to hear about how Farmigo is attempting to "deconstruct the supermarket" while maximizing gains for the partners- the farmers themselves.

Meet Ashley and Danielle, college roommates and the co-owners and designers of the private label ash&dans, an affordable line of luxury jersey accessories. This week Jeremy chats with Ashley and Danielle about falling into entrepreneurship upon arriving in NYC, finding the right manufacturer and hustling to get their products into luxury department stores like Bloomingdales and Bendels.

It's hard to sum up in a few sentences all that Amol Sarva has accomplished already in his career. While getting his PhD at Stanford he co-founded Virgin Mobile and has been heavily involved in the mobile phone industry. Amol is the CEO of Knotable, a teamwork app for shared notepads, and serves as a mentor to Techstars accelerators, NYC Seed, and Columbia University startup programs. He built an architecturally ambiguous building in Long Island City and he has a photograph in the permanent collection at the MoMa. Listen to this week's fascinating episode to learn about Amol's journey and current work on Halo Neuroscience, a company developing easy to use, novel, and effective neuroscience-based technology for improving brain performance in the healthy and impaired.

Have you ever wanted to tear your hair out while trying to find the perfect mattress? Adam Tishman and his 2 co-founders feel your pain. After several horrible mattress purchase experiences, they decided to start a company that focuses on optimizing mattress constructions based on body types and sleeping preferences. Once a customer fills out a questionnaire about their sleeping preferences, Helix uses proprietary technology to create the perfect customized mattress, compress it, and ship it in a box directly to their customers' doorsteps. In this episode Adam chats with Jeremy about the fragmented mattress industry and his experiences launching Helix Sleep.

In this episode of Smart People Should Build Things, Jeremy chats with Daniel McRorie, Owner and Operations Manager at Knickerbocker MFG, a private label manufacturing company operating out of a 60 year old warehouse in Bushwick, New York, attempting to recreate the American manufacturing model by combining new and old techniques, machinery, and technology.

Dane Atkinson is one of the most experienced entrepreneurs we have had on VFA Podcast thus far! He was the COO of a company at the age of 18, owned a bar in Williamsburg for 3 years, and was the CEO of Squarespace from 2007-2011, among many other things. Today Dane is working on his company SumAll, which democratizes data and analytics for small businesses, pulling from over 40 platforms and synthesizing the data in a simple visualization tool.

This week, Jeremy sits down with Brian Buchwald, Co-Founder & CEO of Bomoda, a company that helps leading brands connect the dots to understand what drives customer behavior around the world. Download this week's episode to hear about Brian's fascinating career and how he helped get Hulu off the ground!

This might be one of the most entertaining episodes of The Venture for America Podcast we've had thus far! This week, Jeremy chats with Ben Hindman, Co-Founder & CEO of Splash, a marketing software the maximizes event impact- before, during and after. Ben gives Jeremy the rundown on his storied career as a tour guide in DC and how Splash pivoted from their initial budgeting tool to a world class marketing and events product.

In the latest episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy interviews Katia Beauchamp, co-founder & CEO of Birchbox and pioneer in the subscription box service industry. Download this week's episode to hear about Birchbox's scrappy cold emails to beauty CEOs and their rapid growth, spurring copycats and competitors all over the globe.

This week Jeremy sits down with Jon Stein, Founder & CEO of Betterment, an automated investing service that helps clients better manage and grow their wealth through smarter technology for a fraction of the cost of traditional financial services. Download this week's episode to hear Jon's journey as a Columbia Business School grad passionate about using technology to better align customers with their financial institutions and why the New York Times named Betterment one of the next "startup unicorns".

In this week's mouth watering episode, Jeremy chats with Kristen Tomlan, Founder & CEO of DŌ, Cookie Dough Confections, a young startup that uses the highest quality ingredients and zero preservatives to make individual batches of ready-to-eat cookie dough perfection. Download the interview to hear why cookie dough is "the new cupcake"!

In this episode, Jeremy interviews Nick Taranto, Co-founder of Plated.com, a service that delivers a weekly box of fresh and seasonal ingredients, pre-portioned for the recipes you choose, so you can create great food with less effort. Nick shares his journey from the Marine Corps to Wall Street to budding entrepreneur trying to accomplish what he calls BHAG, "big hairy audacious goals".

This week Jeremy sits down with Laura Mather, Founder & CEO of Unitive, a company that is working to eliminate unconscious biases from hiring decisions. As a former employee at the NSA and Director of Trust and Safety at eBay, Laura shares her fascinating insights on cyber security and lessons she learned while starting her own cyber security company, Silver Tail.

In the most recent episode of the Venture for America podcast, Jeremy chats with Charlie Bonello and Matt Harrigan, high school buddies and co-founders of Grand Central Tech, a unique New York City based accelerator that provides free office space, support and resources without taking ANY equity.

This week, Jeremy interviews Eric Cantor: serial entrepreneur, current VP of Product Development at Neighborhood Trust, and VFA Board Member from the very beginning. Eric talks about his vast range of experience, from building two internet infrastructure companies, establishing Africa's first mobile application laboratory in Uganda, teaching a course on technology solutions for international development at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and more.

In this week's episode, Jeremy sits own with serial entrepreneur David Kidder, the co-founder of Nex-X, Renaissance Integrated Solutions, Clickable, Bionic, and more. David talks about his experience making a career out of building things, what he learned writing The Startup Playbook, in which he interviews some of the most successful entrepreneurs working today, and what it took to learn how to work for himself.

In this episode, Jeremy chats with Jess Brondo Davidoff, Founder & CEO of Admitted.ly, a company that gamifies the college admission process for high school students to help match them with colleges and universities. Jess shares what it was like to walk away from a very successful business that she founded to follow her passion and gives advice from her experience participating in 2 accelerators.

This week Jeremy sits down with Gary Chou, Founder of Orbital, a company that helps people develop side projects and 'a space to do awesome stuff'. A long time Venture for America supporter and incredibly interesting individual, Gary shares his storied history as a film producer, General Manager at Union Square Ventures and much more.