Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast

In this episode Jeremy interviews Noah Glass, Founder & CEO of Olo, the fastest-growing digital ordering provider for the foodservice industry. Noah recounts his experience building the Endeavor South Africa office and the decision to withdraw from Harvard Business School to seize the opportunity to reinvent e-commerce in the food industry using smart phones.

In the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy sits down with Neil Capel, serial entrepreneur and Founder & Chairman of Sailthru. Jeremy and Neil talk about why choosing the right VC is key to the success of a startup, building a company's culture, and why Neil pays for his employee's fencing lessons.

We are excited to present our very first interview with a VFA Fellow on the Venture for America Podcast! This week Jeremy talks to Brian Rudolph, Co-Founder and CEO of Banza, a chickpea pasta company aiming to do for pasta what Chobani did for greek yogurt. In this interview Brian shares the trials and tribulations of perfecting a difficult recipe, scaling to service hundreds of grocery stores around the country, convincing his older brother to leave a stable job in private equity to join the company, and what is feels like to be the first VFA Fellow to hire another Fellow.

Interview with Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Co-Founder of Gilt Groupe and CEO of Glamsquad. In this episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy interviews Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Co-Founder of Gilt Groupe and current CEO of Glamsquad, on-demand, app-based beauty provider delivering professional and affordable hair, makeup and nails (currently available in NYC only) services to your home, office, hotel, or wherever you may be. Alexandra gives Jeremy the inside scoop on what she learned while building Gilt Groupe and what's it's like to be the matriarch of the "Glam Fam".

In this episode, Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Scott Reich and Mike Winik, childhood friends and Co-Founders of OurHarvest, a company that works with local farms to bring fresh food directly to consumers at an affordable price. The duo discuss the inception of OurHarvest, the 24/7 reality of working with fresh food, doing their part to eliminate food insecurity, developing partnerships with established brands like Equinox and Uber—and trading corporate jobs "for being hugged by farmers every day."

In the latest episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy interviews Charlie Kroll, Co-Founder and President of Ellevate Financial and Founder and CEO of Andera, a venture-backed provider of customer acquisition solutions for the financial services industry, which he started from his dorm room at Brown University. Charlie brings us along on his journey from naive 22 year old founder struggling to make payroll, to profitable industry leader with hundreds of employees and $17MM in investment.

In this episode, Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Will Nathan, Co-Founder of Homepolish, a company attempting to change the design industry one interior at a time, skipping commissions to charge hourly rates for budgets of all shapes and sizes. Will walks us through his early career in finance and his first failed startup, Brilliant.li, all the way through his fruitful stint at Buzzfeed and his fateful encounter with his current co-founder Noa Santos.

In the third episode Jeremy Shinewald and Miles Lasater interview Shara Mendelson, Founder of Plum Benefits and Board Member of Venture for America. Shara shares her journey from play house volunteer to founder of Plum Benefits - a company that moves ticketed entertainment inventory through a private network of B-to-B relationships partnering with 20,000 corporations to give millions of employees exclusive discount and access offers to live entertainment events, including Broadway shows, sporting events, attractions and family events.

In this episode Jeremy Shinewald, along with guest host Miles Lasater, interviews Dan Porter - former teacher and CEO of Teach for America, serial entrepreneur, and current Board Member of Venture for America. Dan may be most well known for serving as the CEO of OMGPOP, where he created Draw Something, an app that had over 100 million downloads and is one of the most downloaded games ever in the history of the iPhone. Dan sold OMGPOP to Zynga for $180 million in 2012. Listen to Dan tell his story and how he landed his current role as Head of Digital at William Morris Endeavor.

In the pilot episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, host Jeremy Shinewald chats with longtime friend Andrew Yang about being a dissatisfied lawyer, how he recovered from launching a failed startup and the inspiration for building Venture for America from the ground up.