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How to Find the Be About It Podcast

So, I have been getting quite a few questions from folks on how to find my podcast. So here is an easy guide:

Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/be-about-it
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/sydney-thomas/be-about-it
TuneIn: https://tunein.com/radio/Be-About-It-p1043466/
GooglePlay: https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Ik37ohrus75gdz4bkcyl7x2nkvq?t%3DBe_About_It%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/be-about-it/id1303606342
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/thebeaboutitpod
Spotify: Coming Soon!

Let me know if I’m missing any of your favorite podcast players and I’ll add those.

Thanks for listening!

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Creating a Company with Intention

On this episode, we speak with Morgan Babbs, CEO and Founder of Colibri. Through our conversation, she shares how she isn’t taking the freedom and ownership that she has as a founder lightly. She is building each piece of her company with clear intentions to change the status quo. Learn more about Colibri here: http://www.colibri-global.com/.

*Please note that in the opener I describe Colibri as being located in Colombia. This is incorrect. It is located in Nicaragua.

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How to Build with Empathy for Diverse Consumers

I am so excited about this episode. I sit down with Jimmy Chen, CEO and Founder of Propel who shares some really interesting insights on how he built his company. After finding a really interesting problem with the UX/UI experience for food stamp recipients, he decided to build a company to support this market that holds 1/10 of the entire grocery market.

Learn more about Propel here: https://www.joinpropel.com/.

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Why I Decided to Become Pipeline Angels’ 1st VC-in-Residence

In September, I added another job to my title. I’m still the Investment Associate and Head of Ops at Precursor Ventures and have now joined Natalia Oberti Noguera and her team at Pipeline Angels as their first ever VC-in-Residence.

It started with a simple e-mail. I’m not yet an accredited investor, but I was inspired with what Natalia was building. So I filled out the Pipeline Angels application and included a short note about how excited I was to get involved wherever I could be useful. Luckily, my application aligned with a new idea Natalia had brewing to get more women like me involved in Pipeline Angels.

Natalia and I hopped on the phone and she shared her vision for extending her pipeline initiative to not just help women and non-binary femmes become angel investors, but also help women, non-binary people, and men of color become GPs at investment firms.

The road to GP is usually paved with a stint in angel investing and a demonstrated ability to bring quality LP leads to the table.

But these prerequisites to the job require one huge piece that many women and non-binary femmes lack → access to capital.

As a VC-in-Residence, her vision was that I would be given the opportunity to learn both. Through working on a team alongside angel investors, I would get to learn the ins — and — outs of the angel investment process, support their decisions on who to invest in and be a contributing member of their investment team. Through working with accredited investors, I would be able to build relationships with women and non-binary femmes who could be tomorrow’s LPs.

As Natalia put it: Pipeline Angels created the role of VC-in-Residence to inspire our members and broader network to help change the face of venture capital by becoming LPs in VC firms led by #morevoices.

I’m grateful for Natalia’s vision and even more grateful for Precursor Ventures’ sponsorship. Professional
development opportunities in venture capital are few and far between. I’m lucky to have found a crew that understands the importance of growth.

Interested in learning more? Check out Megan Rose Dickey’s feature about the VC-in-Residence role in TechCrunch.

Posted on

Why I Decided to Become Pipeline Angels’ 1st VC-in-Residence

In September, I added another job to my title. I’m still the Investment Associate and Head of Ops at Precursor Ventures and have now joined Natalia Oberti Noguera and her team at Pipeline Angels as their first ever VC-in-Residence.

It started with a simple e-mail. I’m not yet an accredited investor, but I was inspired with what Natalia was building. So I filled out the Pipeline Angels application and included a short note about how excited I was to get involved wherever I could be useful. Luckily, my application aligned with a new idea Natalia had brewing to get more women like me involved in Pipeline Angels.

Natalia and I hopped on the phone and she shared her vision for extending her pipeline initiative to not just help women and non-binary femmes become angel investors, but also help women, non-binary people, and men of color become GPs at investment firms.

The road to GP is usually paved with a stint in angel investing and a demonstrated ability to bring quality LP leads to the table.

But these prerequisites to the job require one huge piece that many women and non-binary femmes lack → access to capital.

As a VC-in-Residence, her vision was that I would be given the opportunity to learn both. Through working on a team alongside angel investors, I would get to learn the ins — and — outs of the angel investment process, support their decisions on who to invest in and be a contributing member of their investment team. Through working with accredited investors, I would be able to build relationships with women and non-binary femmes who could be tomorrow’s LPs.

As Natalia put it: Pipeline Angels created the role of VC-in-Residence to inspire our members and broader network to help change the face of venture capital by becoming LPs in VC firms led by #morevoices.

I’m grateful for Natalia’s vision and even more grateful for Precursor Ventures’ sponsorship. Professional
development opportunities in venture capital are few and far between. I’m lucky to have found a crew that understands the importance of growth.

Interested in learning more? Check out Megan Rose Dickey’s feature about the VC-in-Residence role in TechCrunch.

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Bodega

I’m really excited to bring you this week’s episode of Be About It.

In this episode, I feature the CEO of Access Bazaar, Julian Rodriguez. I’m so excited that he took time from his busy schedule being in FastCo and running his company to teach me more about the large market he’s tackling – selling to bodegas.

Check it out below + let me know what you think!

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Introducing: The Be About It Podcast


Enough with the tech bros. This podcast is dedicated to shining a light on the founders building companies for real people.

Each episode will feature a different founder who is solving major problems of the day like immigration, climate change and more.

Check out this short intro to learn more about my vision for the pod. Click “Subscribe” to stay in the loop for my first real interview coming out soon.

Excited to have you along for the ride!

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How Can VCs Make Entrepreneurship Suck Less?

So much ink has been spilled on how difficult entrepreneurship is.

And rightfully so! The more I talk to entrepreneurs, the more respect I gain for them. Living years without a paycheck, managing investors who are telling you to run fast in 10 separate directions and working with a team who is there because they believe in you when you aren’t sure if you believe in yourself is physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting. Yet, much of the VC rhetoric I hear praises someone’s ability to go through this process. They glorify the struggle. They say that if it was easy, everyone would do it.

But I think there is a fundamental problem in the entrepreneurship ecosystem today.

It is becoming so hard and so irrational to start companies that the people who we need the most (i.e. rational, smart people) are opting out. I am inspired by this post on Why More Women Don’t Run for Office. So much of what Raina Lipsitz discusses can be applied to entrepreneurship.

It doesn’t make any sense for highly qualified women (particularly women of color) to start companies.

After foregoing wages that they need to feed their families and communities, they are going to go through a round of disappointing interviews with VCs that will give them a 1-2% chance of receiving funding.

If we continue to structure a path to successful entrepreneurship as we do, we will continue to get the egomaniacs to enter and succeed.

Do you only want Travis Kalanick 2.0 running the companies of the future? I don’t. So how do VCs make entrepreneurship easier? I think there are a few fundamental things that VCs can do to make entrepreneurship more friendly. We should normalize taking a meaningful salary.

  • I have seen burn rates all over the place. Entrepreneurs I’ve talked to are everywhere between living at the poverty line to living in the SOMA Grand. This is crazy.
  • Why isn’t there more excitement amongst VCs to help entrepreneurs meet the lowest rank of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? Why isn’t there more acceptance of the fact that the opportunity costs to these individuals is high already – with or without a salary?

We should treat entrepreneurs with humility.

  • As Kanye put it – You Ain’t Got the Answers, Sway. Entrepreneurs are building from scratch. Yes, we may have seen things similar to what they’re creating in the past, but almost everything since then has changed. The timing, competitors, funding environment.
  • We have so much to learn from each and every entrepreneur that walks through our doors. And the only way we’ll succeed in our jobs is if we take each opportunity to soak up the knowledge from these founders seriously and respectfully.

We should not ask entrepreneurs to sacrifice their lives for their companies.

  • When we’re doing this, what we’re saying is – making me money is more important than anything else you could be doing.
  • NYTimes describes this phenomenon in a recent article: “The guy is developing an app that lets you visualize how a coffee table from a catalog might look in your living room. I suppose that’s cool, but is it really more important than seeing your kids? Is the chance to raise some venture capital funding really “the ultimate reward”?” 

What is the ultimate reward is deeply personal to each person. But I hope that as VCs, we empathize with entrepreneurs who may have thoughts, lives and dreams outside of building the company we invested in. They are better entrepreneurs for it.

Sydney Paige Thomas