JE011: happy July 4th // the update issue two

Eric Hornung 0:06
Hey, guys, it’s Eric,

Jay Clouse 0:07
And Jay.

Eric Hornung 0:08
And we’re coming to you with a quick episode today, because we want you to take some time, spend it with the family, enjoy your vacation, enjoy your day off work.

Jay Clouse 0:19
Yeah, we want you to enjoy your holiday didn’t want to take up a whole lot of your time. But we thought we’d jump in here and share one new thing that we worked on recently that we wanted to check out if you did have the time. And that is issue two of the update, which we are calling the work issue.

Eric Hornung 0:34
That a lot of work going on here, Jay.

Jay Clouse 0:36
Work, well we’re working today. So if you guys checked out issue one of the update, you know, this is our quarterly written publication, showing some of the trends happening outside of Silicon Valley. And we have a few different elements that we wanted to highlight and call out. After a brief editor’s note from Eric and I, the issue opens up with an editorial from both Eric and I and Eric I’ll let you speak to your editorial.

Eric Hornung 1:01
Yeah, so one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, is the macro economic trends surrounding Silicon Valley and talent and how it follows a similar City, New York City with the financial wave that happened in the 80s. So I talked about what I’m calling the Innovation Hub cycle and the future of Silicon Valley. Jay, what do you talk about?

Jay Clouse 1:23
My editorial, I look at the role of talent and startup companies and dispelling what I think is a myth that the need for talent and the shortage of talent stops with engineers. Living here in Columbus, Ohio, I share some of the short history of the last five years in growth, entrepreneuriaIIy with the startup ecosystem here in what I see in here as a talent shortage for a lot of different roles, including product managers, data scientists, digital marketers, sales and executive talent. So that was what I shared. And we follow that up with a cover story on our first interview ever on the podcast Tilr in Cincinnati.

Eric Hornung 2:02
And that’s a fun one. It’s all about growth. It’s it kind of links back to the first episode as well, because our deal memo ended with questions about growth and how they were going to grow. And this profile, I think, really like flushes that out and kind of comes full circle.

Jay Clouse 2:18
Something I remembered from our Tilr interview was just how unique their funding journey had been to that point. And this as a part two follows that trend. Because although Tilr has now scaled into 20 states, and 30 plus markets, they’re doing it in a very different way than your traditional Instacart, Uber or Lyft city launching model.

Eric Hornung 2:41
Next, we’re going to talk about the meat of the update. I mean, this is where you come for some real brainpower, Jay,

Jay Clouse 2:47
That’s right. This is where the good writing is. And that is our guest editorials. We had four guests editorials in this issue. And they are for the most part aligned with the work issue. The first ever editorial being Kevin McArdle, the CEO of SureSwift Capital, talking about the future of work, and why more companies should be remote first.

Eric Hornung 3:09
Quick aside on that one, we posted that article to Hacker News, with the hopes that it might get a couple of reads and it actually hit number one on Hacker News, which you know, some people been working on for a decade, and we got it on our first day on the site. So thank you to Kevin for that amazing piece.

Jay Clouse 3:26
Number one for a few hours front page just about all day, I highly recommend checking that out. And it’s followed by a very related article by Ryan Merket, a partner at our friends, Firebrand ventures, talking about best practices in managing remote teams.

Eric Hornung 3:41
After that, Amy Nelson, who’s the CEO of Venture for America tells us about why geography still matters.

Jay Clouse 3:49
Amy was a guest on the podcast just a couple of weeks ago, I would recommend listening to that episode as well. But she wrote a great piece about Venture Capital in the United States and why geography still matters. And that was followed up by Holly Beilin, the editor in chief of Hypepotamus her article was called Yes, their startup media outside of the valley. Here’s how to find them. It’s a very tactical how to to pitch your startup to media and find media outside of Silicon Valley.

Eric Hornung 4:17
And Jay, we’ve been putting together a database of media companies outside of Silicon Valley for a while. So this article was really helpful for me finding media companies.

Jay Clouse 4:25
Very timely. And we follow that up with our what we call the finger on the pulse section, which is a curation of a few regional articles that we think are must reads about what is going on in areas outside of Silicon Valley. We’ve got a piece from CityLab on brain drain, a piece from Forbes on the Midwest, driving top venture returns. We have an awesome report from Embarc collective, our friends in Florida on the southeast capital landscape, a piece from crunchbase and CNBC as well.

Eric Hornung 4:56
And then throughout the rest of the update, we have a bunch of trinkets, some GIFs and a ton of other content that we think you guys would enjoy, including some news on our podfolio companies, some podcast recommendations, and some further listening and reading recommendations. We think you’ll love.

Jay Clouse 5:12
You obviously like listening to podcasts, check out those recommendations. It wasn’t just from us. It was also from Justin Jackson, Natalie Sportelli and Colby Donovan, so highly recommend checking out that curated list. We’re really proud of this guys. We think it’s a step increase from issue one and we were proud of issue one as well. So if you have a chance go to upside.fm/update or just go to upside.fm will be easy to find issue two from there. And if you want to contribute to a future issue of the update, we also have a page explaining how you can do that as well. Issue three will come out in September.

Eric Hornung 5:47
Until then have a great Fourth of July. Hope you have some hot dogs and get to see some fireworks. Jay and I will be.

Jay Clouse 5:55
Eating hot dogs and watching fireworks.

Eric Hornung 5:57
Jay and I will be doing the same.