JE005: happy Thanksgiving from upside

The startup investment landscape is changing in world class companies are being built outside of Silicon Valley. We find them talk with them and discuss the upside of investing in them. Welcome to upside.

Jay Clouse : 00:28

Hello. Hello. Hello and welcome to the upside podcast, the first podcast finding upside outside of Silicon Valley. I’m Jay Clouse and I’m accompanied by my co-host, Mr. thanksgiving Turkey himself. Eric Hornung. Eric, how are you doing?

Eric Hornung: 00:42

I’m doing great. And you know everyone says that the Thanksgiving Turkey is the most overrated part of thanksgiving. I disagree. I think that the Thanksgiving Turkey give me that. You give me some mashed potatoes. You put little gravy on top. Everyone’s like, oh, you got to have the sides. No. All I need is Turkey mashed potatoes, little gravy. That’s my thanksgiving meal.

Jay Clouse : 01:02

You’re pro Turkey. I think I am anti Turkey, but I’m also anti ham.

Eric Hornung: 01:05

So you’re anti Turkey and anti ham. If it’s a holiday animal or a holiday meet, you’re out.

Jay Clouse : 01:11

But I’m pro family. Would you have been in favor of the national bird being the wild Turkey versus the Bald Eagle?

Eric Hornung: 01:19

I don’t think any bird with a body part called a gobble is really what you want representing your country and bald eagles while they’re strong and formidable. You ever heard them scream? They have just some screams.

Jay Clouse : 01:35

You heard them?

Eric Hornung: 01:40

I have not heard of bald eagles scream. Well, you should give it a listen because they look so fierce and they look so intimidating, but then they opened their mouth and what’s the old saying? Sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut.

Jay Clouse : 01:54

Well, speaking of our national bird, it is Thanksgiving this week, Eric, and I thought we’d talk a little bit about what we’re thankful for and give our normal standard episodes arrest here. Save some time for the listeners as they’re heading home with their families, but let’s get a couple of things that we’re thankful for here on the pod.

Eric Hornung: 02:12

Yeah. We have to start with the listeners. I am so thankful for the listeners in the audience that has kind of formed around upside, so thank you to the listeners. If you’re listening now, I think that it’s incredible how much audience engagement we get and not just in terms of downloads and listens, but on Twitter @upsidefm or on Breaker where we’re getting comments and likes on a lot of episodes that we get to engage with or more long form via email at hello@upside.fm It’s really been awesome to hear from listeners to hear back and if you’re a listener who has some thoughts generally on upside or you have one episode that was particularly striking for you, we’d love to hear from you. Jay, a couple of names that kind of come to mind as people who’ve been engaged for the last six months. We’ve got Eric. We’ve got , we’ve got Eric , we’ve got Ben, Colleen, Brett, Susie, Frank, Edward, Andrea, Ana, vow, John, Nicole, Matt, David, Nick. Well I’m going with first names here because we don’t want to out anybody’s identity, but all those folks, you know who you are. We appreciate hearing from you week after week listening to the show, giving us some feedback about things. We’re missing things that you’re hearing that you’d like. We really appreciate it that a lot of those same folks I’m sure have been some of our ratings and reviews on iTunes, which we very much appreciate. It helps a lot in discovery, so if you’re listening to this and you have not hit a rating on iTunes, you’re listening on iTunes. We would certainly appreciate that and it’s because of our listeners, Eric, that we got some PR. Well not only PR. In the last six months, we’ve got invited to some awesome events that I think we can attribute mostly to our listeners. We got to speak at two podcast festivals, which Jay and I have found extremely interesting is that space continues to grow, the Columbus podcast festival and the Cincinnati podcast festival. We’ve been invited to be one of 10 podcasts live, podcasting at the consumer electronic show in Las Vegas in January 2019. Jay will be moderating a panel at South by southwest in March of 2019. Thank you to all the listeners who voted for our panel idea and Jay spoke at a couple events around Columbus.

Jay Clouse : 04:40

Yeah, I did a presentation at Wake Up Startup, their presentation at 1 Million Cups just last week. I did a quick interview at an event called the Starting Line, which is put on by the chief innovation officer of the Ohio State University. Very exciting stuff. We’re really excited about that panel at South by Southwest. We should both be down there and hosting a panel on geography versus investing. Should location matter should be a really, really fun lineup. One of our panelists just was named a Forbes 30 under 30. We’ll have one of our podcast guests on the show, which I can’t announce yet until it’s confirmed, but very excited about. That should be a really great opportunity to connect some people in geographies outside of Silicon Valley.

Eric Hornung: 05:20

Isn’t it crazy men. We started this thing six months ago and since it’s just crazy how many awesome opportunities we’re getting and how thankful I am for those opportunities.

Jay Clouse : 05:31

Totally. This is something I wrote about this week in my newsletter, I was looking back at 2018. I was looking at the goals I set for 2018, which I said in December of 2017 and the pod was not even conceptualized yet, so I had no written goals to start the year around the podcast and I’d say I’m spending, I don’t know, 10 to 20 percent of my time on this right now, which is a significant amount of time for something that you weren’t planning for in the beginning and it’s because we keep getting more opportunities and frankly I liked doing it so you know, it’s, it’s, it’s really fun to, to be seeing some of the success and be able to spend this amount of time on the show

Eric Hornung: 06:11

And you’re spending a lot of your time. I’m spending a lot of my time but others, and this is probably the third thing I think I’m thankful for. Others are spending a lot of their time coming onto the podcast and working in areas of high ambiguity with unproven concepts. Think about like the first four people to come on our podcast. They had no idea what to expect. We have a framework that is so different from any other podcast format and some are from Tiller, Seth from Ratchet, Sky from long Giroux. Nick from Scripture Up, never heard a upside episode before coming on.

Jay Clouse : 06:49

Yeah, there was down for it.

Eric Hornung: 06:50

They were just down for it and the same thing with when we brought on our insight guests with Web and Pomp and our VC mashup guests with Ross and our first coffee chats with Andrew Goldner and John Fine. People continuously put themselves out there for us and I really appreciate those guests

Jay Clouse : 07:07

Very much appreciate it and very much appreciate the guests, whether it be our founders or our investors are community builders who had on the show. They’ve been very gracious in opening up their networks and saying, you know, you really gotta talk to this person and sending a warm introduction, which has led to probably the majority of our interviews frankly, are people that were. We’ve been referred to or introduced to from other guests. There’s someone else, Eric, that I really want to shout out for giving so much time to the show and that is our audio engineer, Nathan

Eric Hornung: 07:41

Insert clapping hands here, Nathan, is that what we’re going to do?

Jay Clouse : 07:44

Nathan has put in a ton of time and as much as we try to get ahead of the production schedule and give him plenty of time to do his work before the episode goes live more times than I’d like to say he’s been turning it around on the Monday or Tuesday before Wednesday release, so can’t stress enough how thankful we are for such a responsive and awesome audio engineer.

Eric Hornung: 08:06

Shout out to Nathan. He is incredible and is the backbone of this podcast.

Jay Clouse : 08:12

So looking ahead at 2019 Eric, we may see some new innovations from the Upside Podcasts. You wanna talk about that.

Eric Hornung: 08:19

Well yeah, I hope so. I hope that we continue to innovate on our model and we have some things planned for early 20, 19 specifically. You may have noticed that we have been having these coffee chats a little more frequently and we don’t want to lose our standard format, so our standard format episodes, that’s any episode numbered up zero number number. Those are going to take place every Wednesday, which means that we will be interviewing a new founder every Wednesday unless there’s an administrative episode like this one and the coffee chats are going to move to either Monday or Friday. We haven’t decided exactly which day yet.

Jay Clouse : 08:57

They look at the metrics, got to figure out what’s best for business

Eric Hornung: 08:59

But those will be ad hoc so they won’t be every week. They will be as we talked to community leaders, late stage founders and venture capitalists and we’re really excited about bringing this kind of opportunity to you as listener because it lets us keep what’s core about upside, what’s proven, what people love on Wednesdays and also lets us explore from other sides of the investing field outside of Silicon Valley.

Jay Clouse : 09:27

That’s right. And something else that I’m excited about being the writer that I am. In 2019 we’re going to be introducing a written update from upside which is called Aptly the Update. So if you guys are interested in hearing a wrap up beginning quarterly from Eric and I were. We talk about some of the companies that have been on the podcast following their progress as well as some editorial. You can sign up for that list at upside.fm/update. There’s a landing page there. Now. It’s pretty bare bones. It’s for people who are listening to this show and get the url. But we’re excited to send that first update off in January, so sign up now and get ready for that.

Eric Hornung: 10:09

We got some exciting things planned. That’s just January.

Jay Clouse : 10:12

That’s right. That’s just January.

Eric Hornung: 10:14

So when we started this podcast, we started off on our very first episode telling you guys that we are going to find upside outside of Silicon Valley. We hope that six months in, we’ve done a good job for you and we’re super thankful for you finding upside in us. We will talk to you next week.

Jay Clouse : 10:30

Happy Thanksgiving folks. That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening. We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s guest. So shoot us an email at hello@upside.fm, or find us on Twitter at upsidefm will be back here next week at the same time. Talking to another founder and our quest to find upside outside of Silicon Valley. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please email us or find us on twitter and let us know and if you love our show, please leave us a review on iTunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests to the show. Eric and I decided there were a couple of things we wanted to share with you at the end of the podcast, and so here we go. Eric Hornung and Jay Clouse are the founding parties of the upside podcast. At the time of this recording, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the companies which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcasts. Participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Duff and Phelps LLC and its affiliates on Unreal Collective LLC and its affiliates or any entity which employ us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation nor provided any investment advice on the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next week.