Village Global

That is a fantastic question.

And so when we started Aid, we were actually funded by great investors from the B-- from the Bay Area, uh, like Village Global, SV Angel, Kevin Carter, and a bunch of other angels, and also folks from companies like Shopify, um, Cohere from Toronto, and a bunch of other angel investors as well.

And did taking on formalized funding like that versus bootstrapping from the start help you get further faster? What...

You know, did it help you with referrals and introductions, with...

idea?Absolutely.

And it's funny, though, the alliance, I should also mention our, our other co-author, our dear friend Ben Casnocha, who actually runs Village Global, and, and Reid is the chairman of Village Global as well.

Ben and I have known each other since he was a 15-year-old high school student.

Okay.

[laughs] [gentle music]

Hey, this is Ben Kaznacha, co-founder of Village Global.

Thanks so much for tuning in to the Village Global Podcast, where we go deep on all of the biggest topics in tech.

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I built this one.

I built Village Global.

I've been in big firms before.

Those firms are all great.

What they didn't know or see or didn't have the opportunity to ask the question was that vision that, strangely, if you know what TK is doing on Atoms, he has an ambition that is still not fully satisfied, where the arc of the ambition is so big that it's coming through different entities to even achieve it.

I'm Amrit Rao, general partner at Village Global.

Today I'm joined by Andre Charoo, founding managing partner of Maple VC and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School.

Andre is a full-time venture capitalist focusing exclusively at the earliest stages of company formation.

We also dig into Andre's advice for how founders can pitch VCs, what VCs get right oftentimes, as well as what they miss and how to fill in the blanks.

All right.

Andre, welcome to Village Global's podcast.

Thank you for having me.