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Episode 353 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Giuseppe Stuto, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of 186 Ventures.
Did you know that the venture capital industry originated in Boston back in 1946 with the founding of American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) which backed Digital Equipment Corporation and saw a 1200X return when the company went public.
Since then, Boston has been very fortunate to have a steady stream of VC investors at all stages to foster the local startup ecosystem and one of the newest firms is 186 Ventures.
Co-Founded by Giuseppe and Julian Fialkow, 186 Ventures is a pre-seed & seed stage VC firm investing broadly across technology. I kept hearing about the firm, so I was excited to interview Giuseppe for the podcast as they have been out there hustling and have been earning the respect from entrepreneurs and their peers in the VC industry.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover:
- A discussion around the importance of investor & founder alignment.
- How a conference at Stanford changed the trajectory of his career into entrepreneurship.
- The full background story of SmakHigh and how they evolved to Fam, the first live group video application for iMessage, including how Jeff Bussgang’s book - Mastering the VC Game - helped them raise venture funding from Jeff.
- The full story of how the acquisition by DraftKings came to fruition.
- The details about 186 Ventures and what they are targeting for investments.
- The 4 fundamental parts of a business that matter.
- The importance of building a repeatable sales model for not only your go-to-market strategy but also how it factors into raising capital.
- Why Boston is the best place to build an AI startup.
- And so much more.
Link to Giuseppe's blog post about the conference at Stanford: