And now I live in the house that I grew up in, which is such a treat and not just you, but your husband and your three kids. And what's it been like for them to come to your hometown?

Yeah, I know. When I said I moved back in with my parents, everyone always has. What what happened to change?

Your family is just so lovely. What was the question?

Yes, I was always so lovely as a shadow to James. So I love your family dearly. My biggest wish in life is to be an Ingersol. I think it's your special and sort of how you grew up in an athletic family, a sport, a family, a tight knit family. Like how how was that and how did it influence you? Yeah I'll just tell you, like, our thing is like we just spend a ton of time together hanging out and playing trades and whatnot. And we have I have four siblings and I have there's 13 grandkids now.

It's an amazing family. I think your uncle put me up in his attic when I moved to Brooklyn. I had forgotten that of the Hillary campaign. Yes. Made me feel even closer. I love it. Magical group. Okay.

Let's talk about your background from our DNA is sort of similar. Stanford and Harvard Business School. And then you came to Google in the very earliest of days. What was your aka Google like? What products did you work on that you're most proud of?

Yeah. So I went to Stanford, say Computer science became a product manager at a company that IPO in March of 2000. Then decide to go to business school because that kind of seemed like the thing to do.

And then and then I did it in 2002. No one was recruiting.

The staffers were coming to Harvard Business School to find MBA is. But so I moved back to the Bay Area without a job and joined Google.

And in 2002, when they were five hundred people and Google was doubling in size every six months. I don't know how long that's actually capable of doing, but, you know, for a little while.

And and, you know, those early days I worked on the billing system for the first four years I was there and that was Google was a multi-billion dollar company already, but in 20 cent increments.

And just trying to get all the logs collected and turn that into an invoice that Oracle could produce to send to the advertisers to close the books and be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, which we were like just e-mailing each other spreadsheets. So that was a really fun first project. And how I kind of. That was my introduction to Google for the first number of years.

Anything you studied computer science so people would want to know if you were doing software engineering, product management or something. I was doing product management in those early days.

Yeah, I did use product management because I didn't think I was gonna be a programmer. And it was still stayed with the engineering sort of culture that I've always been a part of.

And I I feel kindred towards being in sort of an engineering led culture and be around engineers where I feel comfortable.

Yeah. Me too. Yeah. Mm hmm. So from building then what you do next?

There was a little bit of here and there. But pretty quickly in 2006 I joined forces with Chris Sokka as part of the sort of our own initiative which became called the Access Team. But it started 2006. It was a Chris and I were both working on different things.

But we we'd been looking at muni Wi-Fi and and putting mesh networks on lampposts and got kind of excited about it and happened to be at a fundraiser for Gavin Newsom at Ron Conways Housing and got Gavin Newsom really excited.

And he announced that Samosa School was going gonna do it the next day. Yeah. And so then he announced and then that became a real project that someone had to work on. And I started working on it.

I worked really hard to try to get San Francisco to to take I think we had a few million dollars from Google dot org sort of money.

Yeah. And it got shot down by the city of San Francisco, even though we were doing it out of our philanthropic budget. And this was early days before there was a whole tech backlash.

And the reason it got shut down was because Aaron Peskin, who is the chair of the Board of Supervisors, didn't want Gavin Newsom to have a political win. So anyways, I got very involved with how do you deploy access networks at and get more people online for faster speeds and lower prices?

Yeah. So if that was 2006, that was before Google X before Alphabet, like, why was Google willing to do this sort of infrastructure project that looks so different than what Google's primary products were?

Yeah, well, we branched off into a variety of different things, so we worked a lot on the Arab Spring getting people access to information.

And the reason I brought the Arab Spring project was because was. Story then where we ended up going to Patrick Pichette, so we'd flown to Cairo and the Internet was getting shut down and satellite TV was getting shut down. We said, you know, I think the most impactful thing that Google could do would be to stream Al-Jazeera satellite news on on the Internet for people to access because the Internet had come back. And so we had to present this. It had a lot of costs to it, but not any revenues.

And Patrick said sort of a rousing speech to the executives at the time, which is we need to think of Google as half public company in and and half movement. And Patrick is the CFO at the time. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, I know because I'm an avid listener of your podcast that you once said to us, the Google board for $5 billion. Yes. Yeah. Continued your work and access. What was that about?

It was an FCC spectrum auction bidding. And so the idea there was the waste spectrum is auctioned is a really interesting sort of process where you need to essentially decide how much you're willing to bid.

In this case, it was five billion dollars, but then bid on different chunks of spectrum over the course of multiple rounds per day over multiple weeks. And it's all blind bidding. You don't really know who's the leading winner. And so we got this war room that that only a couple of people could had access to. And we are placing these billion dollar bids on spectrum. And it was all very exciting, but we didn't win.

I know. That's Hensler. Great story. It was exciting. Okay. Many you've only given me two jobs to do and I failed at both.

I was supposed to start by asking you what size of checks. Oh, yeah, right. Ten measures. Sorry about that.

We can go backwards. What size checks do you rate it? Win 10 ventures? Yes, sir.

I always say I need to get the basics up.

Friends like half a million to a million dollar checks is kind of our sweet spot. Usually someone's raising between one to three million dollars as part of the raise. So it's an interesting place that we put ourselves in, which is we're often writing a 700 K check and leading a two million dollar round. And we do like to lead, but we will also co-investor follow someone else's lead. But that means that a lot of my guests on this podcast are all my co-investors, I bet that especially as your new year to the market here, that's kind of a huge value add to co-invest with all these established players.

Yeah. And 10:01 10s actually been around since 2013.

So it's but for me it's a great way of entering a market and feeling so welcomed as a new partner and new to venture capital to to be able to build all these relationships with people who are we're looking at deals together as opposed to competing for deals.

It makes a lot of sense. And what kind of things do you miss except for Todd? Jackson, you know, he just he just elbows me. I just elbowed me out of a deal.

I know. I know what I really want. I just know. Total jerk. Sorry, Todd, we love you. Yeah, we do. We're happier in L.A., too. What kind of things you invest in?

Yes. So. Well, to go back to what we're talking about at Google, which is, you know, I'm not I'm not the most technical person, like I'm not a deep infrastructure sort of person.

And yet I. So I wasn't sure what I'd want to invest in. I like being around engineers. It is clearly where I feel the most comfortable. And so and I don't mind if someone has to explain something and really get me up to speed. So we did an investment recently in a data encryption company, which is not my sweetspot necessarily, but I like working with engineers and 10:01 10 when I joined had that as its roots. Yeah.

Gill and David have been investing in sort of engineers turned entrepreneurs, but I wasn't sure whether I would just want to, you know, have my own investment theses be, you know, around transportation in marketplaces, which is some of my background.

But it turns out that that definitely is where we all feel most comfortable. So we say sometimes we called engineers, Turn-On Partners. Sometimes we talk about having a software and data. As to what we invest in and then, as you say, look, businesses where there's like 70 percent plus gross margins, those which are software and data businesses by labor intensive hardware products, not really our sweetspot.

OK, great. Now you just have to edit this to the front. Yes. And it does seem like I did my job. The second thing was not to do too much on background. And I've always been so much tied to Google because it's exciting to talk about our shared history there.

Let's talk about when you left Google. Oh, you made a brave move to co-found your own startup. Tell us about that yet.

So I started shift with my co-founder, George Arison, and we started that when I was actually on maternity leave from Google. So Google kind of incubated that. And I know what you supposed to come back to my team.

Oh, yeah. Short term memory loss. Yeah. I'm not I'm not a good. We're gonna work together stuff. Yeah. Well.

So I went on maternity leave and got.

This was Georgias idea was to build this marketplace for used cars and to facilitate peer-to-peer sales.

And George just he tricked me. That was the problem. It wasn't you. It was George. George tricked me.

One of the first things I did was I had Angel invested in shift when he was just a PowerPoint, like real angel investing. Yeah. And so then I was motivated to help him get get it going. Yeah. And and it started by just me showing up at his house every day at 10 a.m. and it was just me and George and Joel at the time was sleeping on his couch essentially.

So so I show up every day. I'd been away for like five hours at the time.

I jump at ten o'clock and and it was so intoxicating.

Lee exciting to be able to like draw some wireframes on a piece of paper and turn those into a Web site in like four weeks.

And also to be able to walk down the street with my baby and not drive to Mountainview.

So there are a few factors

And then, you know, and then we started raising friends and family money and like we did a true friends and family.

And I got a lot of my friends to give me twenty five K. Yeah.

And that was hard and it wasn't hard. I mean it was hard to do, but then it became harder than later, which was, you know, two years into the journey I'm still thinking oh my God, I took you know, twenty five K of Matthew's money of Miras money people you know.

And I know my money and your money. Exactly. Your money is not like blind support. Many anything you do, it's great.

But then I felt very responsible for it. Yeah, of course. So you were in that role on the fund raiser? Yeah, I'm trying to raise money. What was that like? And and how did you find it as an entrepreneur?

Now, I think I just look back on how ignorant I was of it all.

Our our rule was like when we first started pitching was take the fun size and divide by 50 and just ask them for that much money. That was our simple sort of rule of thumb without knowing anything more than that.

I found it very hard like it did. It was not my strength. I'm going to pitch a roomful of investors and sort of think on my feet.

Its a different skill set than what product managers do traditionally.

Yeah. And I'm good at listening. And so if, you know, Mark Andreesen says, I think this sucks and will never work like I'm listening to that as opposed to like pushing back on that. Yeah.

And so so it was a really hard process and yet and yet it we raised a million guys lives there. So it wasn't like, you know, cry me a river.

It wasn't that bad.

But what what? Van v.c had the biggest influence on shift as a business and you as a leader there, probably our series A Investors.

So our our series A was Manish Patel, who, you know, love him.

And Emily Melton from DLJ. And there were many different things. But, you know, I learned a lot.

My my M.O. is just to execute, execute, execute, just do things. And that's good for being on. Not because I'm good at doing things, but I'm not always good at going pointing in the right direction, so I'll just get everyone to get all excited and run up a mountain. But then later realized that it was the wrong mountain.

And I got much better at using the board or the board helped me get better at it, at doing the strategic thinking that if I don't schedule it and put it on my like board deliverable in three months, then I treat it like an operational task and I'm much better at that.

And they helped. They also helped me a lot on sort of the emotional roller coaster of it. And we did a riff at one point where we had to lay off a bunch of people and my board. Not that they were blasé about it, but once we once I talked to them about it, like it took all the edge off of it. Yeah. So anyways, I could go on and on, but they were extremely helpful. That's wonderful.

Yeah. So we're gonna switch over to the podcast. All right. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of balancing time. Yeah. This has been an epic journey for you. During one of these every week.

So tell us about the podcast, why you started it. What you've found most interesting about it.

Yeah, I. Well, what you'll notice is my background is that there's nothing about content creation.

And so there is a little bit of arrogance that is, oh, how hard can it be? I know how to talk to people and interview people.

And it's been way harder than I thought to make good content, not to make content. I think that's pretty easy.

And so I hate it because I'm the host, but I'm also the producer and the editor and.

And so then I have to listen to myself every week and then I listen to what my guests say. I think, oh, I wish I'd asked that.

I wish I miss that operated day Internet thing more.

And so I always like it when I ask this sort of harder personal questions or some of my most fun ones. For me, when I'm like Tina said, well, why don't you reply to your email? Yeah. Or like Mark Mullen, like why you seem so intimidating and tough.

Like Peter Goldberg talked about like moving to L.A. because he was single and he wondered like meet more potential partners. And I wanted to be like. First thing I did is I checked whether he was wearing a ring, but I didn't ask him. So I like I always like, oh, I missed these opportunities. And yet actually the other like great things.

I really learned what people invest in. Yeah.

And so some of the more interesting ones is when we talk about our processes at 10, 110, we refer back to the episodes or I'll be like, oh, remember when Wil said that he decides on his milestones for his pro rata ahead of time and we should be doing more of that.

What do you have a favorite episode?

I mean, probably when I started, it was like the women in L.A. v.c, like Deena and Karen, even who I really wanted.

Look, I have friend crushes on these people. When I moved to L.A., I'm like, oh, I hope I get to know them and then I get to interview them on the podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. You. I don't think the music the beginning. Oh, my gosh, yes. Do you need suggestions? Can we help you get us? the music I have to listen to every time like it gets done.

It really does bug me.

It's really hard to find music that David and I agree on and it's the way I want to start the podcast.

Having said this, anyone is like just with like a couple deep breaths and just have everyone breathe in, breathe out, collective breathing.

But I don't know any other podcast that starts that way. And I think the reason you have music is it kind of helps to fade in and outs and stuff.

So you should try. We should have tried that today. No. We can do it at the end. Yeah, I want to share some trivia about the podcast. What were you initially going to name it?

Oh, I was gonna name it. Maybe I told you that I was gonna name the 21 minute Veazey, but maybe it should amend the 19 minute VCA.

Yeah, Anything? I didn't ask you about the podcasts.

You want to share it? No. I like hearing that from guess about what they want to hear about because sometimes for me, it's really interesting hearing about people's backgrounds like Michael Stoppelman, hearing about the Yelp Google feud. Oh, my God. I was. I. She didn't let me see that. It's like, wait, I know I did to get in. But but so I'm interested in hearing about like I loved hearing Eric Schaeffer, whose tech host Angels.

He talks about scaling the 99 cents only stores from like 30 stores to 300 stores.

And how do you actually sell product to move product through retail? Like, I'm interested in that. But making my guest just want to be like, no, tell me, like, what sort of traction do you look for when you're writing checks? What stands out in a pitch? And so sometimes I'm like, oh, I need to stick to that, because those are the basics.

So how should your listeners reach you? They want to tell you what they want. They should just hit me on LinkedIn. Actually, it's Peli. Like, I mean, they can send an email mini at 10 onceand dot net.

Okay. They already send you then like email on the Daina episode. Oh no.

Dana doesn't like email.  And so I've like I've been channeling that. Like I'm not an inbox zero person. I'm about ten thousand ten hundred thousand.

Yeah. So I'm telling people to email you doesn't feel great. Okay, fine. Fair enough.

But I do. I read my email. I just don't feel any obligation to read it all.

Okay, so here's an email you

So let's start talking about 10 1 10 to your personal journey again. I think people would want to know the decision to go from being an operator into investing. Yeah.

being a VC. It's the best job. It's been it's exceeded all of my expectations. So, you know, as I said, we're writing checks into someone who's raising two million dollars. So what they've done previously is for us, like the zone that we're playing in is they've raised a friends and family money. They've got a product in the market.

But to be able to take sort of an early stage thing and turn it into a real business with two million dollars, it's in it's incredibly wonderful thing journey to be a part of

Wait, so you're talking about why you love it now that you're here, which I think is awesome. Yeah. Help people understand how you made that decision. I bet a lot of operators would be listening to this and want to know like making that leap. Yeah. From one side to the other. How did you even know you would find such joy in it?

Yeah. I mean one of the things I did when I moved to L.A. was I just. I just started talking to the season in town and talking to the founders and the the startups in town and kind of figuring out where I fit in. And one of the things I did was I started going to partner meetings, did a few of those.

And and really I if I weren't doing this, I would still be doing this, which is to say going around and talking with early stage companies, whether I'm looking to invest in them or join them as an a member of their team or invest in them as an angel investor.

It's all of it is the people I know it is my world. And so I would.

It's actually just a treat that I get to be paid for it and get to write checks that are bigger than my twenty five K that I could just sort of stretch to write.

So something you enjoy doing on your own even before you kind of move back down here. Yeah.

 And it's quite similar to be an operator where you spend your time interviewing people like that's what I said, Google is on this rocket ship.

Google had this huge like crack the whip. Jonathan Rosenberg was like, if you don't get your interview feedback in 24 hours, the hammering sounds down. Yeah. So like that interviewing people. Like there's a lot of similarities between hiring people onto a startup and and interviewing people to give them money like this.

There's some similar muscle memory. I think Michael Stoppelman talked about that, too. About. Yeah. What made it possible for him to make good decisions with all his angel investing was how many people he interviewed over his career at Google and Yelp. So, yeah, I think and luckily for us, we've seen such top talent and amazing people. And then you get to see how they progressed inside of the company. Once you hire them, you you develop, like you said, muscle memory.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to look at this. Yeah. How how's the L.A. ecosystem different than the Bay Area?

I have no data on this, but it can't be harder than being in the Bay Area to hire engineers.

Google has interviewed every engineer on the peninsula. Right.

And so it feels like there is there is good talent, especially on the engineering side of things.

I think there's a little bit of product management is still really high demand.

So so one of my my red rover games right now is to get all the great product people like you to contact and hopefully work with our portfolio. Yeah and then also like the other big difference, huge difference is the the the feeling, the vibe in L.A., which is to say like a beautiful Friday afternoon where the sun is shining and everyone's walking around high fiving like L.A.

Has that feel where San Francisco is?

Really it's it's just a little hard and sad and grumpy in different ways and different people, whether it's the state of sort of the homelessness and the streets of San Francisco or whether it's the saturation of tech.

But it's, you know, my best up when I took the bus to Google from the mission, was it spray painted, go home Googlers and then the city clean it up. And then someone came right back and like that was where I stood on the sidewalk every day feeling like, gosh, I'm I I'm trying to do good in the world here and be right.

But but there's definitely stuff that's not working.

It was very apparent in the Bay Area.

Right? Well, it's nice to I mean, the warmness, the welcome, this excitement here. How about the Hollywood and media angle? Like, has that been part of your journey here? Because its content and media is such a big part of. Yeah.

This area in different ways. It has. So if you want to create new things, Hollywood still has this huge draw. So there's there's a large creative energy.

And here on the much more flippant side of it all, there's things like people who wear high heels here that are surprising to me because that's not the Bay Area doesn't have that sort of style to it. And so, you know, the fancy cars and the.

You know, I'm I've never seen people I know I went to my first women in business dinner or Pamela or something.

And it was a panel. And I was the only woman in tech.

And I had never it never occurred to me that the diversity.

And so people talk about diversity. But it's it's diverse in many different regards.

Right. So tell me more about 10:01 tenure. Who are your partners here? Who do you work with?

Yeah. Good. Good. These are the. These are basic that I need covered. Right. So David, my co-host is my partner who I'm like married at the hip with.

And David and I are different in a lot of what we're very different like.

You meet us. We are very different. You exes, as Kara says about upfront, like we have very different I'm I'm loud and gregarious.

And David is he comes across as a little bit more introverted.

But I seldom say I'm very impatient and he's very patient.

So it's a good balance. So we're a good balance for each other. But I think fundamentally, like David and Jill and I were the three main partners at 10, 110, we all have very similar sort of nerdy.

We all have technical backgrounds, love of the outdoors, family. We all have three kids.

Like there's a we have a lot of sort of the basic fundamentals are actually quite similar.

And then we have an amazing principal, Eric pocker van, who's part of our investment committee. So he plays a very important role.

And on Elbaz, who's Gil's brother, who's a very active venture partner at 10:01 10, and he gets very involved with our portfolio companies.

He's also part of our investment committee. And then we've got Todd Gitlin, who's our talent partner, and he's an executive recruiter at sapphira, a big executive recruiting firm in L.A., very prominent. And he's been extremely helpful with our portfolio companies.

And is your group drawn to similar types of deals or do all of you have different interests and passions?

I mean, Gil, I believe he thinks partly in binary, like our fun name is 10:01 10.

And so, yeah, if you're going to tell me you have a huge data set built over years and amalgamated from many different sources and yeah, I might send someone like that to Gilb, but at the same time it can come vmc to Guille and there's no LeGrande ownership issues there.

I think, you know, it more comes out almost less than the deals and almost more how when we look at the deals, I still it's a weakness and a strength of mine, which is I am very founder focused.

I really like people's journeys and understanding who they are.

And you know how my favorite question which I need to start asking my podcast guess is what your parents do. I heard you ask that I like it.

And yet I'm always a feels like is that too weirdly personal? Yeah, but it gives me a good sense of who people are.

Yeah, well you better just. You already said your dad's a Caltech professor. Yeah, but what does your mom do? My mom works at USC in neurology department. And she teaches.

Yes. Yes. She teaches also at USC. Yes.

Yeah, but but, you know, doing that sort of thing. But Gil's always the big picture. So, Gil, really always I'm thinking about, you know, what is the one year forecast? And Gil has sort of one of the macro world cosmic forces, if you will.

So, yeah.

So tell me your very first investment that you made that Tim Winton. What was it and how did it feel?

I'll tell you about strata contracts. Great strategy is they convert your your WordPress Web site to static pages and.

And but there's other services that do that. But they're sort of special sources that. They allow you to continue using WordPress as your front end. And so people who have, you know, whole marketing departments and these are not for your sort of small Web sites, but for your larger content sites to be able to continue to use WordPress as a front end. But at get all the speed security, you don't need to do any maintenance with static pages, which is a huge trend.

And WordPress has gotten really bloated and lots of plugins anyways. Female founder familythe shows female founder total bad ass lover. It's her second startup.

Get to know her dead and her name Will. No Miriam. OK. Sumerians. Fantastic. And get to know her. We're already we very sign-in terms. But then we start. Just like catch like a little bit more of like the. Let's catch up. She tells me seven children.

Oh, if I didn't think she was a bad ass beforehand. Yeah. So just a fun. Just a fun fact.

And just for people like me who have never been a variable, is their moment where you actually write a check or do you push a button? And is there like a celebration?

Yeah, there's. I should do more. Yeah. There should be like confetti or is no confetti comes out of a cannon.

You know, we there's a lot of back and forth on just like the valuation, right. Yeah. Then you come to terms. Then you get into the terms. So then you're pretty much you're pretty close. OK, we've got the basics. Then you get the term sheet and it's like all the things that I hadn't quite thought about, which is like, do we need to reset the founder vesting schedules, those little things which can come up.

But actually, the founders been working on this for three years. You don't want them to be three quarters of the way vested because then and actually you want them to reset their vesting at our stage. Otherwise, the series a investor will make you reset your vesting. And so if you anyways.

Yeah, there's all those little things that you then do

And then David where's the money.

I don't really know how it works

Well, we're going to do a speed round. Okay, great. I'm just gonna make it up. Yeah. It's my own podcast.

Now that your listeners want to know, what is your favorite place to surf in L.A my favorite.

And it's probably Sand and Overy with my dad. Old man's break with my old man. Yeah, it is sweet. But usually we just surf the Venice Pier like right on Washington. It's a total close out. I hate it, but I love it. I know.

But if you go to Minnie's house, there's like 400 surf bars and there's 400 wetsuits. You have to get there early. Yeah. So wetsuits go fast that are in the right sizes. But if you want to surf with many, I know she'll take you. What's your favorite place to hike or run in L.A.?

My sister has a cabin in Chantry Flats and so we go there and I just went there last weekend. And I mean, it has no cell phone service, no electricity. She's got some solar panels now, but that's kind of on the DL. Yeah. Anyways, it's great.

And I just we just went there is not allowed to know because they want to preserve the canyon is meant to not have anything. I see. And it's got a phone now installed. So you can't you don't get cell phone service in you go there. Yeah. It's got a phone. I'm like what is this. It's a phone.

And you pick it up and it just it rings all the other cabins. So all the cabins figure out this is cabin eight. What's going on in my cabin? Well, a screen.

And then it falls down to the pack station, which my sister almost bought

Oh, my gosh

Which of your three kids is your favorite?

Steph, that's not a fair question. No, it's completely unfair play. Steph is the godmother of my only daughter. Right. So she's our favorite

that was a trick question. Gatto's Hardman's okay.

So I think we covered everything. I think you still want your listeners to rate this podcast.

Yeah. They don't have to give reviews. I realize that with whatever I give it. Sighs I'm not gonna bother ask. Yes.

music and spelling. suggestions are welcome.

Yeah. Any suggestions are welcome? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Steph. It's such a joy. You're a joy to be here with you. Thanks.

Many thanks.

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