Blog

Q1 has been busy. Stay up to date on our new investments, portfolio news, podcast episodes and team activity.

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By Tim Young, Founding General Partner

For too long women have not received the recognition they deserved for discovering, inventing, building, inspiring across all industries and sectors. We know the stories of Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Jon of Arc, Margaret Sanger and Rosa Parks, but there still remain millions of women who have been instrumental to shaping the world whose stories are untold.

In celebration of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, the Eniac team wanted to honor the women in our lives who inspire us daily and the two women from history that were the inspiration behind one of our designs.

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On board members: what to look for, how to optimize, expectations at each funding round and managing bad behavior

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Jeff Richards, Managing Director of GGV, speaks with Eniac Ventures’ Founding General Partner Tim Young on all things managing a board, expectations when recruiting & building out your early team and how being a founder is a lot like his experience being a father.

As a two-time founder with more than 13 years of building and operating his companies across the U.S. and Asia, Jeff joined the world of venture capital with a wealth of first-hand experience. Today, at GGV, Jeff focuses on enterprise, cloud, and consumer/internet-based brands. His investments include HotelTonight, Flipboard, Voicera and has been involved in Opendoor, Domo, Square, and Wish. He currently sits on several boards, including Boxed, Brightwheel, Namely, Tile, to name a few, and most recently joined Electric.ai.

Having sat on more than a dozen boards, Jeff digs into all things board members — what to look for, how to optimize, expectations and how to handle bad behavior. He also gives his advice on the biggest differences between your board and team between Seed to A.

Jeff discusses when it is time to start building out your team, why it is important to have an org chart, expectations when recruiting top talent and how founders should be building teams outside tier one markets.

Jeff also shares some personal anecdotes from his life, like how being a founder prepared him for fatherhood and how he maintained his resilience during when his company crashed right before his wedding.

He also speaks to his biggest misses as an investor and the worst advice he’s received lately.

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Why we led our latest round with BRIQ

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By Tim Young & Nihal Mehta

At Eniac, we see the eventual shift of construction companies to data-driven decision making an enormous opportunity. Over the last five years, we have been closely tracking construction saas and placing bets in the space. With the recent news of Procore valued at nearly $3b, Katerra raising $865m from Softbank, and Autodesk’s back-to-back acquisitions of PlanGrid ($875m) and BuildingConnected ($275m), we are starting to see this vertical heat up.

Globally, construction output is forecasted to reach upwards of $12.7 trillion by 2022, and the average spend on IT for construction companies is extremely low, relatively. Gartner reports that construction ranks last for IT spend, averaging just over 1% on IT, compared to the overall average of about 3.2%in other industries. And with 81% of decision-makers across the construction industry planning to spend more on technology in 2019, this momentum is only going to continue.

Today, we are excited to announce our latest construction SaaS investment in BRIQ, a Santa Barbara-based company that is bringing data intelligence and machine learning to allow builders to make better strategic decisions. We led their $3m seed round, along with our friends at MetaProp NYC and mState.

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And why we co-led their seed round

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By Hadley Harris, Founding General Partner

One of the areas we’re most excited about right now at Eniac is how the combination of data and AI will impact healthcare. Despite the inertia caused by structural aspects of the U.S. healthcare system, there are strong signs that we will see a seismic shift in how humans are cared for over the next 10 years. With 17.9% of the GDP spent on U.S. healthcare, this impending change will create unparalleled opportunities for innovative companies to emerge.

Today, we are excited to announce that we’ve co-led 1upHealth’s $2.38M Seed round of funding, along with our friends at Meridian Street Capital and Social Leverage. We believe 1upHealth has the potential to be a fundamental player in the digital healthcare evolution.

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By Hadley Harris, Founding General Partner, Eniac Ventures

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Today, we’re announcing that our portfolio company Anchor has agreed to be acquired by Spotify in a significant acquisition. In the three short years since we led their seed round, Anchor has created significant value, becoming the dominant platform for creating, distributing and monetizing podcasts. As of January 2019, Anchor powers 40% of all new podcasts.

We led Anchor’s seed round in 2015 because we believed audio was an underserved form of content and a platform that enabled people to easily create and distribute podcasts was a natural way to address that unmet opportunity. While huge platforms had been built around photos (Instagram), video (YouTube) and text (Twitter), there wasn’t a platform that let users share audio as a way of communicating and expressing themselves.

My partners at Eniac and I have thoroughly enjoyed working closely with Mike Mignano, Nir Zicherman, and the incredibly talented team they’ve built. We are thrilled that Anchor will continue to execute on their vision of democratizing podcasts.

Reflecting on our time with Anchor, there are four key takeaways we feel will continue to drive how we work with founders.

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Authentic. Bold. Curious. Scrappy.

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By Vic Singh, Founding General Partner, Eniac Ventures

Over the past decade, we have lived a set of core values at Eniac that we recently codified. This value system forms the ethos of the firm we’ve built and the values we like to see in our partners including founders, LPs, the Eniac Network and the broader tech community. Together, these core values constitute the Eniac Creed and we work hard every day to ensure our work meets our creed.

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On raising capital, scaling teams and funding the underserved

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Shivani Siroya, Founder & CEO of Tala, speaks with Nihal Mehta about her journey from finance to entrepreneurship, and now a CEO of a fast-growth company with more than 270 employees across 5 countries and $100M in venture funding.

Tala is a mission-driven tech company opening financial access across emerging markets. Working for the UN Population Fund across Africa, Shivani saw the lack of access available to millions of people firsthand and started working on ways to solve the problem. Less than 5 years later, she had attracted some of the biggest names in venture capital, such as Chris Saca and Steve Case, and now has landed the support of financial giants including PayPal.

In this episode, Shivani talks about the inception of Tala and how it was born to close the huge financial access gap from traditional banking practices. She warns founders to not focus on name brand funds, but shares advice on staying true to your vision and focus on what you are solving and the opportunity will follow.

Shivani speaks about the challenges of hiring and finding the right people who can bring diverse viewpoints, but share Tala’s vision, as well as her responsibility for ensuring the workplace is not only diverse but an environment that is equitable and gives everyone the opportunity to succeed.

She also speaks to how she manages time, the importance of her CEO letters and why she holds a weekly AMA.

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On building the company that democratized podcasting, overcoming challenges of early-stage hiring and what is next for podcasting.

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Founding General Partner Hadley Harris talks with Michael Mignano, Co-founder & CEO of Anchor, the company making it easy for anyone to create a podcast.

Michael built Anchor to democratize audio. By putting a free, full-stack podcasting platform in the pocket of anyone with a smartphone, Anchor is changing the way people think about audio, empowering everyone to have their voices heard, and pioneering new ways for creators to generate revenue. Anchor now powers one-third of all new podcasts in the rapidly growing market.

Prior to founding Anchor, Michael was VP of Product for Aviary, growing the company’s audience to over 100M users before being acquired by Adobe in 2014. Previously, Michael led Digital Product Development for Atlantic Records.

In this episode, Michael talks about how his passion for music and his drive for creativity lead him to build a company that aims to remove the friction from podcasting. He speaks about the challenges he and Co-founder & CTO Nir Zicherman faced early on, and how their roles and approaches to business have changed as they grew.

Michael also speaks to the learning curve they faced early on when hiring. As new entrepreneurs, they learned a lot about finding the right people who align and can execute on your vision and, on the flip side, how to pivot talent with the business needs.

He also shares his views on the industry, their latest new features and the podcasts he has in rotation – they are some good ones!

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On current startup and venture ecosystem in LA, why the city embraced Bird and the challenges facing cities as we embrace the future of transportation.

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Founding General Partner Nihal Mehta talks with Mark Suster, one of the very best VCs in the biz and a true pioneer of LA venture capital.

Mark is the Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest and longest-serving fund in LA – all the way back to 1996, long before the region became known as Silicon Beach. To date, they’ve invested in more than $1 billion, with about 50% going to tech companies from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Mark’s investments include Bird, Density, Imbellus, Invoca, MakeSpace, mitú, Nanit, Osmo, and Tact.

In this episode, Mark speaks to how his prior experiences influence how he approaches his work today. Most importantly, how his mother was his earliest role model as an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and activist, and how he got into programming on his mother’s computer while still in high school which lead him to become a computer programmer in the late ’80s (when it wasn’t as sought after as it is today). Mark discusses what he learned during his time at Accenture and how it laid a strong foundation for understanding how businesses operate at scale.

Mark speaks to the current startup and venture ecosystem in LA, and why more influencers outside traditional VC are becoming investors. He also addresses the future of transportation, including the rapid adoption of Bird in Los Angeles and what cities are doing to solve the many challenges.

He also addresses the current state of politics, something he covers often on his blog Both Sides of the Table.