Posi2ive Podcast
Joe Blair, VC at Cota Capital in The Bay Area (6/8/2020)
Note: References with links are listed at the end of the show notes.
INTRO: 1:00 Shares background in engineering, sustainability, and entry into venture space. Talks about experience starting a sharing economy, and Harvard to venture—seven years ago. Highlights his interest in the impact space. Discusses path leading him to Obvious Ventures, which invests in “World Positive” impact – combining profit and purpose.
3:15 Highlights current work with Cota Capital, which focuses on transformational B2B startups. Venture is a powerful mechanism to drive impact, and views impact as an evolved view.
4:00 Talks about his upbringing with family in real estate, and how building something from nothing, led him to see the value of building. Knowing the opportunity gave him an early ambition to view entrepreneurship, creating something that wasn’t there before.
6:30 We talk about Machines and Ai – and how venture capital thinking requires a different form of thinking than technical work. He shares ideas for Founders on how VC could be augmented. Mentions part of Peter Thiel’s book, ZERO TO ONE – how Founders should move toward opportunity areas where synthesis and judgement is required, and EQ. He shares his love of the industry, for it’s complexity and opportunity for personal improvement.
9:00 Briefly discusses upcoming Cota Foundation (*planned 2020 launch). Cota can invest at all different stages of a company’s lifecycle—including Seed / Series A / Public. Has over $500M AUM. SECTION1: Impact of Remote Work
12:00 Explains macro view on what impact was originally to him. Shares passion for venture and it’s ability to provide jobs to hundreds of thousands of people. Thinking critically about mental health, and purpose people derive from their work.
13:30 Shares experience with Governor of Wyoming roundtable, to bring jobs to their state. Talk about Kanye West’s Wyoming Yeezy Campus.
14:30 Talks about the barriers to remote work, and how this question led him down path of remote work positive impact. Sees trends in entrepreneurs getting more sophisticated, in more remote places like Ohio, and aligning with places like Silicon Valley.
18:30 Tells story about forming Distributed Valley, starting last year in collaboration with Remo. Conference grew to over 450 people this year. Points to positive impacts from connections made, new learnings for the community, and the fantastic speakers who participated. Plans to branch out into other topics with Distributed Valley; open invitation.
25:00 We discuss the Future of Work, Digital Nomads, and Remote. Joe shares ideas of the hybrid Future of Work, which helps firms and individuals both succeed together. Discusses open space problem in the world – with roughly 80% living in 20% of land space (cities).
SECTION2: D&I and Digital Transformation
27:00 Shares experience as a multi-racial person. Talks about empathy as a bridge to Diversity and Inclusion. The key to bias reduction in the workplace, he feels remote can add to D&I significantly. Highlights age, geo, and race biases in hiring. Talks about value able to be unlocked from a broader D&I focus—along with lower cost components.
32:00 Bringing people out of the shadows, creates people’s best work, and acceptance of introversion through remote work, can add to this benefit, in his view. Work style and extroversion discussed (See references below).
33:00 Breaks out into Digital Transformation as a superset of Remote Work. Seed Digital Transformation as an application of understanding, and unbundling of established technologies. Sees Digital Transformation will be a continually evolving business opportunity.
35:00 Discusses opportunity space of D&I within the Digital Transformation space.