Alex Mather is the Founder & CEO @ The Athletic, the startup bringing you in-depth sports stories you won't hear anywhere else. To date, Alex has raised over $139M with The Athletic from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, Bedrock, Y Combinator and Emerson Collective to name a few. Before founding The Athletic, Alex spent an incredible 5 years as part of the hyper-growth @ Strava serving Vice President of Product Management and Product Design. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Alex made his way into the world of tech and startups with Strava? How did his time at Strava lead to his founding The Athletic? 2.) With the scaling of The Athletic to over 500 people, how has Alex seen his leadership style change and adapt? What does he need to improve? How did having children impact how he thinks about management? What lessons did he take from Strava on what worked for community building? 3.) What was it like raising money for a subscription media business back in 2016? Who was the first person to really take a bet on Alex and The Athletic? What value adds does Alex think are the most important for VCs to provide? What are the biggest investor misconceptions around media? 4.) How does Alex see the future structure of the media landscape? What elements of media is Alex most concerned about right now? Does Alex view Substack as competition? What does Alex believe will be the 2 ways to succeed in media moving forward? 5.) What have been the biggest customer acquisition learnings for Alex from The Athletic? How does Alex feel about platform reliance for customer acquisition with Facebook? What does it take to successfully acquire customers on Facebook at scale? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Alex’s Fave Book: The Kingdom of God is Within You As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.    

Julia DeWahl is one of the rising stars of the Silicon Valley angel investor community with a portfolio including the likes of Linear (Sequoia-backed), Modern Fertility (USV backed) and Primer (Founders Fund backed). Prior to angel investing Julia was one of the first 10 employees at Opendoor seeing their hyper-growth first hand in many different roles from Head of Seller Experience to being General Manager of Pheonix & City Operations. Before Opendoor, Julia spent 3 years as a consultant at Bain. If that was not enough, Julia is also an avid cyclist and is setting up a women's cycling apparel line alongside her investing. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups with Opendoor from Bain and how that position at Opendoor led to her angel investing? What were the 1-2 takeaways for Julia from her time at Opendoor that have most impacted how she angel invests today? 2.) Customer Discovery: When is the right time to engage in deep customer discovery work? How does one select the customers to go deep with? How does Julia structure the process? What questions are most revealing? Where do many go wrong? How does one determine the feedback to accept vs which to reject? 3.) How does Julia think about implementing systems for growth? What is the structure of these systems? Where does one start? How does Julia determine the metrics to track and focus on? How does Julia balance between growth vs profitability? 4.) Does Julia believe people can really scale with the company? What are the leading indicators that people are struggling to scale with the company? How does Julia advise generalists to survive and thrive in a scaling organisation? Should they specialise? 5.) What have been some of Julia biggest lessons of what it takes to be successful as an angel today? Who has Julia learned and gained the most from in this new discipline? How does Julia measure her own success as an angel? What are the core challenges? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Julia’s Fave Book: The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness Julia’s Most Recent Investment: Primer: Homeschool with superpowers As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!