How can VCs best help founders?

Episode 4 of Withers talks: founders counsel

The fourth episode of the Founders Counsel podcast, “How can VCs best help founders?,” is out now. This episode examines what it means to be considered a “founder-friendly” venture capitalist and how VCs can best help founders. Host Doug Mandell is joined by two successful Silicon Valley VCs, David Hornik of August Capital and Jim Scheinman of Maven Ventures, who are both known for building strong relationships with founders and helping their companies scale. Jim and David share their advice to founders of early-stage companies, their unexpected career paths into venture capital, what characteristics and qualities they look for in new founders, and much more.

Hear examples of entrepreneurs that our guests worked with from the early stages as their company successfully scaled up. What made these founders stand out? What led to their eventual success?

We hope you enjoy and learn from episode 4 of the Founders Counsel. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment or rating the podcast!

Guests

David Hornik – General Partner at August Capital. For the last 20 years, David has worked closely with technology companies to help them grow and prosper. Since then, has invested in dozens of companies across the software spectrum, including a number of enterprise software and SaaS (Splunk, Fastly, GitLab), consumer services (Evite, Ebates, Drop), and financial technology companies (WePay, Bill.com, PayNearMe). David has also served as the Tech Curator for the TED Conference in Vancouver and is the co-creator and host of TEDxStanford. He received Deloitte’s 2013 Venture Capitalist of the Year award and has been honored by Forbes Magazine as a member of its Midas List of top Venture Capitalists.

Jim Scheinman – Founding Managing Partner at Maven Ventures, a leading seed stage venture firm for emerging consumer software and autonomous technology startups. Jim has been fortunate to have achieved five unicorn exits ($1B+ exits/valuations) in his career in roles ranging from founder, executive, and investor. His top performers include Zoom, Cruise and Bebo. Jim is one of the leading growth experts in Silicon Valley and has a TED talk. He’s now most well-known for naming Zoom.