Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero About this episode Paul Berberian is the CEO of Orbotix, the company that created Sphero, the robotic ball controlled from your smartphone. They have investment from our friends in Boulder, Brad Feld and David Cohen. Prior to Sphero, Paul was the co-founder of Raindance Communications (NASDAQ: RNDC). Paul also founded Market Force Information, an emerging information company with a vision to provide retailers. As well as, LINK-VTC, a video teleconferencing company, which was sold in 1995 to Frontier Communications. In Today’s Episode with Paul You Will Learn: 1.) How Paul came to be CEO @ Sphero? 2.) Paul has founded and run 7 businesses, How has Paul seen his style of leadership change over the past decade or so? 3.) Question from Brad Feld: When Paul disagrees with his board, how does he resolve it? What have been Paul's learnings in maintaining a happy board environment? 4.) Sphero have raised, at last count, $80m? How has Paul seen investor sentiment to hardware alter over the 5-6 years? How did he meet his investors? What did Paul do well and what would Paul like to improve upon for next time? 5.) Question from Brad Feld: ‘Sphero looks like a massive success but every startup has had failures, so what have Paul's failures been and what did he learn from them? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Paul’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Quora Paul’s Fave Book: The Black Box As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Paul on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Harry Stebbings? Hello and welcome back to the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings on Snapchat. And today I'm very excited to bring you our second parter to this double on hardware, with the first being on Wednesday with Ben Einstein at Bolt. And if you haven't checked that out, that really is a must-listen. And joining us for the show today, I'm delighted to welcome a serial founder and entrepreneur in the form of Paul Barbarian. Now, according to my count, Paul has run an incredible seven businesses and is now CEO of Orbotics, the company that created Sphero, the robotic ball controlled from your smartphone. And they have funding from our friends in Boulder, Brad Feld and David Cohen, just to name a few. And prior to Sphero, Paul was the co-founder of Rain Dance Communications,
0:41 Harry Stebbings? which floated on the NASDAQ. Now, Paul's entrepreneurial endeavours do not stop there, but in the essence of the show sticking to its name of 20 minutes, we'll leave it for Paul to reveal all in the show. But before we meet Paul, and with the weekend coming, the weekend is time to sleep and unwind. But a great mattress makes it a lot easier. That's where Eve come in. Eve are the makers of that great mattress. With three-layer technology and next-generation memory foam, it comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. They also offer a 100-night trial, so you can ensure that the bed is perfect for you with free return pickup. So what's the risk? Go to eve mattress.co.uk, enter 20VC for £50 off, and it'll be with you the next day. However,
1:24 Harry Stebbings? enough from me, so I'm now delighted to hand over to the main man, Paul Barbarian, CEO at Sphero.
1:35 Speaker 01 You have now arrived at your destination.
1:39 Harry Stebbings? Paul, thank you so much for joining me on the 20 Minute VC today. I'm so grateful to you taking the time out today.
1:44 Speaker 02 It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
1:46 Harry Stebbings? Now, I want to get started today by hearing a little background on you and how you came to be the CEO at Sphero.
1:52 Speaker 02 Well, let me start with my background. This is my seventh company. And I started running businesses when I got out of the Air Force in 1992. And my very first business was making plastic badges like, hello, my name is Paul, welcome to, you know, Albertson Supermarket. That was an absolutely terrible business. I was running it in Southern California. So to all your listeners, do not go into the badge business. But from then. I think many were thinking about it, so you just. Well, you know, I know it may sound lucrative, but it's not. And then I went into video conferencing where we provided multi-way video conferencing services. That company was called Link V T C. It was completely self-funded with money from our families. And that business did great and we sold it in nineteen ninety-five.
2:37 Speaker 02 And in the process, we ended up moving from Southern California to Boulder, Colorado. And I've been in Boulder ever since. After that business sold, Jim Legio and I and a gentleman by the name of Todd Vernon, we started a company called Brain Dance Communications, went through several iterations, but eventually went public in two thousand and sold in two thousand and six. I left that company in two thousand and three because my family and I were in a really horrific car accident. Went through a recovery period for about a year. And then I had some time to get back into business when my wife was still going through recovery. And I started a company called Market Force Information, which was a roll-up of mystery shopping companies.
3:17 Speaker 02 These are companies that go in and they pretend to be customers in stores and fast food restaurants. And then we take that data and we sell it back to those stores and restaurants. Fascinating business. I started it and then I moved into a board role. And then I took some time off with my family to travel the world. I came back. I had two businesses that didn't do well. Both of them failed. One of them was a lava lamp meets social network meets online web series meets photo sharing. And it sounds like a crazy idea and it was. It sounds like the definition of focus. Exactly, especially you throw the lava lamp in there. And then I went towards something serious, which was making this really cool high-tech solar panel for commercial real estate.
4:01 Speaker 02 And we just couldn't get any funding. It was impossible to raise money in the two thousand and nine timeframe. So in two thousand and ten, I had several successes early in my career. I had a couple of failures back to back and I didn't know what to do next. And I spoke to Brad Feld and he suggested that I get really involved with Techstars. I was always a mentor with Techstars since their founding. But particular program in two thousand and ten, I had nothing to do. So I went all in as mentor, so much so they like didn't know where to put me in the office because they didn't have space for mentors that hung around all the time. And I ended up becoming really close to Ian and Adam, the two founders of Sphero. And about halfway through the program, they asked me to be the CEO and I felt it was best to join them post their finishing the program.
4:46 Speaker 02 So in August of two thousand and ten, I became the CEO. So there was the three of us, Ian, Adam and myself, and that was the beginning of what's now Sphero.
4:55 Harry Stebbings? And I wanna run a little self-assessment on you then. As you said, you've run seven businesses, the definition of a serial entrepreneur, not just a LinkedIn title. So I wanna deep dive then on your leadership and a slight self-assessment on what you think you do well as a leader and what you'd like to improve on, having witnessed your running of seven businesses.
5:14 Speaker 02 At least my vision of a leader is you have resources, you have people and you have money and you get to focus them on some objective and it's driving those people towards an objective. So in my case, I'm a very product-focused CEO and I think you can be multiple types of CEOs, but I'm very focused on what are we delivering to the customer and I become extremely focused and maniacal about it. And I think in some of the cases where it hasn't gone well is what you mentioned in my description of one of my failed businesses is lack of focus is I can process quite a bit of information and I can make a business overly complex where I need to add this feature and this capability and make it do this and that.
5:56 Speaker 02 And any struggles I may have in the marketplace is because I haven't made the product more and more sophisticated. As I look at my leadership style, that intense focus on trying to add more and more stuff to the product can drive your team crazy because they're just trying to get the basic thing out the door. If I were to kind of constantly reflect on myself, it's trying to find that essence of the products that I think we need to create to be successful in the marketplace and not try to keep throwing stuff into it because I think it would be cool or that's something I would want, to really kind of be a little bit more patient and drive the team to become more focused.
6:34 Harry Stebbings? And when you look at your product lineup now and kind of the hardware landscape as a whole, how do you look to establish that focus on particular areas and where are the areas that you're focusing on? I I read a brilliant article the other day about software distinguishing the winners in hardware. Uh is that something that you agree with and how do you kind of apply that focus with the two diametrical worlds of software and hardware?
6:58 Speaker 02 Well, that's our constant struggle every day within the company. It's a it's a challenge. The first thing is is just recognizing that it is a challenge and that you have to get the teams talking to each other and working together. For us, what was a driving moment, uh having a major event where we needed to have the product kind of be put on display. So we've had a couple of major defining moments in our company. And they always center around an event where we the team is rallying to make a specific goal because it's an external event that we can't control the date. So the very first one was CES twenty eleven, which was just a few months after the the Techstars program ended. And we needed to show some traction for the little bit of venture money that we raised up until that point. We only had about a million dollars in the bank.
7:43 Speaker 02 And, you know, we're spending a lot of money making all these prototypes and stuff. So we had to kind of gain some traction so we could get some more money. So the hard date was first week of January twenty eleven. And having that deadline, that external deadline, really rallied the team together. I remember this one time where Ian and I were talking one late night and we couldn't make the ball roll straight. It was November, mid-November, and we came in the next morning. We said, guys, we're gonna have to pull out of CES. We can't make it. And it was a small team at that time, and we had this one engineer who said, no, we can make it. And you never expect an engineer to, you know, be that adamant that they could actually get something done. You know, typically engineers want to be conservative and take more time.
8:23 Speaker 02 And he got it working, and I remember the joy on everyone's face when we could actually make the ball roll straight. So.
8:30 Harry Stebbings? So do you as a manager try and implement those kind of strict timelines on your team then? Without them being forced on you from events like CES?
8:39 Speaker 02 We do, but the problem when you have internal deadlines is it's kind of like. Like a child pushing on their parent for against the rules of the family. If you're absolutely rigid with your child, then you become this totalitarian regime within your household. And it's the same within a company. If you are so rigid on internal deadlines and people are busting their ass to get to these internal deadlines, you feel like you're a cruel person because they're not being able to spend time with their families. They're giving up, you know, children's birthday parties and family vacations just to make these deadlines that are artificially constrained within the business. When it's external, you don't have to play the bad cop there. It just happens.
9:20 Speaker 02 One of the big external drivers for us was the launch of the new Star Wars toy line, which was called Force Friday. That was a hard deadline. We had to get our product on the shelves and the software had to be done. There was no ifs, ands or buts about it. That's when the product hit shelf. So everyone kind of rallied around that date and we made it. So having external, external launch dates is actually a really interesting component for a company like ours. Because when you launch software, you can kind of fudge your release date because you're always updating it. When you sell into retail, they say, okay, we're going to launch you on, you know, October 15th. So you have to back everything up from that date. And having external dates like that, which is very interesting for a company like ours, really drives the internal development cycle.
10:05 Speaker 02 It's been helpful to drive focus because as we try to add more stuff in, inevitably that, that data is looming in the future. So you're constantly putting stuff in and taking things out just so that you can make that date. And you try to make it the best product you can within that condensed timeframe.
10:20 Harry Stebbings? And I'm really intrigued there. You said about kind of selling to retail and, and with the rise of mobile and obviously the internet, we've seen a massive kind of B to C selling. So I'm intrigued to hear what you make of direct consumer selling and then omnichannel retail. And which one you're potentially more bullish on with Fero?
10:38 Speaker 02 Well, I can tell you what we've seen as a trend. We started off maybe having 10%, you know, direct to consumer. And that's, I consider sites like Amazon more direct to consumer than a, you know, brick and mortar traditional retail. That's now shifted closer to 25% in the last. Couple of years and last year was quite significant. We moved quite a bit through online channels. We move about ten percent through our website directly. I mean, we're bullish on that because it's obviously better margin for us, but it's a it's a US phenomenon primarily. It may be a little bit in the UK. In other markets, it's still very much brick and mortar. And so you have to take an omnichannel approach. There is no way to really expand your business rapidly
11:20 Speaker 02 unless you can get your product in front of consumers. In the US, we're so conditioned that, well, if I can't get it at my store across the street, I'll just go on Amazon, buy it, and it'll show up the next day. But it's not the case in in most places in the world, and so you have to really establish your distribution channel.
11:37 Harry Stebbings? And I want to touch on something that that Brad Feld wanted me to ask you about, and it's, let's say the retail element doesn't go so well and you're at your next inevitable board meeting. I want to hear, and this is a question from Brad, so I can't take creative license for it.
11:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, sure.
11:52 Harry Stebbings? When you disagree with your board, how do you resolve it? And what's your learnings been in maintaining a happy board environment?
11:59 Speaker 02 Uh, those are, you know, several questions wrapped into one. So when you disagree with your board, what do you do? I think the first thing you do is you need to listen intently and you need to be thoughtful and take it in as opposed to just react and get into an argument with your board. If you are arguing with your board in the middle of a board meeting, you need a mental, you know, some little light needs to go off saying you're doing something wrong. They're there to help you become better as a company and as a CEO. So first thing is you listen and then I process it and then I try to come back to them with something thoughtful or I see if they can sway me in in their viewpoint. Oftentimes, I will take it as a challenge, like, okay, they didn't understand what I was communicating here and so they had a difference of opinion.
12:44 Speaker 02 So I have to go back to them with more data, more information, a better plan to convince them. I always try to get unanimous decisions around, you know, the strategy of the company with the board. Uh, so how do you keep a happy board? Uh, the way to keep a happy board is to never surprise them. Always get in front of them. When you go to the board meeting, there shouldn't be. Any information that's presented where they're gonna look at and go, what the hell is this? Uh, I've had that happen several times in my career and even though I should know better, you know, something is so familiar to you because you're dealing with it on a daily basis that you think your board absolutely knows about it. And it turns out that maybe they didn't, they can get surprised.
13:23 Harry Stebbings? So communications key in setting.
13:25 Speaker 02 Communications and you wanna do, you wanna communicate in advance of the board meeting, one on one with each board member. So make sure you have a phone call a week or two before the board meeting with each board member or better yet, go spend some face to face time with them. Really kind of share with them the business outside of the construct of the board meeting, which is more formal, that has an agenda. You talk about the business, talk about your issues so that they're more in sync with you. Another thing is that I've been doing uh with this company is I've been using a tool called Voxer and we're doing a bunch of asynchronous communications where we can leave like these walkie talkie messages for each other so that we can have an ongoing dialogue post-board meeting about some, some strategic issues.
14:10 Harry Stebbings? And, and often board members are derived from investors. And being a, being a venture capital show, I feel we must touch on your fundraising journey as you've raised pretty substantial funds for Sphero. So I wanna touch on how the journey's been for you as CEO of Sphero, raising the, the large amounts that you have in VC money. And, and then how you've seen the sentiment to hardware investing change over the last five or six years now with Sphero.
14:35 Speaker 02 It's been fucking hard. This has been one hard business to raise money for. There is a healthy amount of skepticism when you go into any potential investor's office. They're like, well, it's hardware, it's a hit driven business, it's capital intensive. They come with all this baggage of views on the hardware industry, especially on a, a business such as ours that's a, that is driven by hits and is driven by media, what's happening in terms of, you know, pop culture and things like that. And so raising money for this company has been absolutely, I wouldn't say brutal, right? Cause brutal, brutal was the solar panel company that. We couldn't raise a dime for.
15:15 Speaker 02 What made the difference for us is we had one VC that believed in us time and time again, and that was Brad Feld and the Foundry Group. Those guys have been awesome. They kept investing in us as we showed measured progress in the execution of our business. So there have been some competitors in our space that have raised, you know, fifty, hundred million dollar rounds right out of the gate, you know, series A or series B type stuff. We raised our money a million dollars and we had to get somewhere to show that we were worthy of getting another tranche of money and that was our series B, which was five million. And then we had to do something with that to get our next five million. Then we had to do something with that to get to our next seven million.
15:55 Speaker 02 And then we did like an eleven or twelve million dollar round. And then we did a forty five that turned into like a fifty two million dollar round. So we went through six rounds of financing. We've been constantly fundraising. Now, if I've done my job right, it's been transparent that no one in the company has known that we've always been working towards this, but we mentioned about having these external deadlines to drive progress within the business and to drive focus. Another thing is, is, you know, you got a cash account that's dwindling. You've got to make some progress so that you can go out on the road and have more to your story.
16:26 Harry Stebbings? When did you like to start thinking about fundraising again? When was it? Was it because I always recommend for startups nine months is the time that gives you a bit of a bit of runway to to really start making relationships again with VCs and get the VC fundraising going again. Did you did you agree with the nine month assessment or do you have a different time scale?
16:44 Speaker 02 Yes, I agree that you want to start raising money as early as possible. Nine months is is a great runway. I mean, in my case, that means I would have never have stopped fundraising, which was pretty much the case. But typically five months, four to five months is when I would start aggressively looking for money and going out on road shows and start trying to close new investors. It's always better to use a rifle than a shotgun. Every time I've gone out and tried to meet with, you know, twenty investors, inevitably I will get twenty nerves. You know, where I go to Sand Hill Road and I, you know, go up and down and, you know, have three meetings on one day and two meetings on the next. And it's like, it's always a struggle. It's just never, and I've done it so Many times in my life, you know, between the, I've had three venture-backed companies and that's all you do.
17:29 Harry Stebbings? Has it changed with those three companies? Have you seen investor sentiment change with those changes?
17:34 Speaker 02 No, it's the same, it's the same thing. It's the same thing time and time again. It's just, you could just change the name of the company, change it like, oh, we're software as a service now, or we're, or we're making physical products. It's, the story changes, but the behavior of the investors is pretty much the same. Term sheets may change a little bit depending on the, uh, the winds, economic winds of the day. But the experience is always the same. You go into some beautiful office that, you know, nicely appointed, you're paying your whole way there. You get an hour with them, you do your pitch, you do your demo. Seven out of 10 of them won't give you a response. They'll always go into the maybe category and hedge their bets. A couple of them will be like, this isn't for us. A couple of them are saying, I'm interested, let's have a second meeting.
18:17 Harry Stebbings? So what do you think makes a good VCT? You've worked with great VCs like Brad. What makes those great VCs compared to the ones that throw you into the maybe bucket?
18:26 Speaker 02 I think just that decisiveness, right? They're not trying to hedge their bet. They're not trying to get optionality. You know, no one wants to, no one wants to miss a good deal. They have to have their own belief system around an investment thesis. So some of them, I remember early on, like it was our series B or series C, I couldn't even get a face-to-face meeting. We, I talked to 20 VCs, I have a spreadsheet. I could get a phone call, but I couldn't get a face-to-face meeting. And I remember Brad saying, says, you have to go out and get a face-to-face meeting. I go, Brad, no one wants to see us. They don't want to invest in us, you know? And it was a, it was a struggle because there, there's not a lot of VCs that invest in hardware. Every VC has one or two investments, but it's not a serious vector for them.
19:05 Speaker 02 It's not an investment theme. And so you're always trying to get the one-off investment and those typically are relationships, right? You know, it's like, oh, he was my best buddy, or he was the best man at my wedding, and so I'm going to invest in this company. They're not really strong thesis around, you know, hardware being transformed and it's, you know, it's now this software-enabled experience. And, uh, the economics of manufacturing are significantly different than they were 20 years ago. There's very few VCs that actually think like that. Most of them are just dabbling, in my opinion.
19:36 Harry Stebbings? And I wanna dive into a quick fire round with you now. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. How does that sound?
19:43 Speaker 02 Sounds good.
19:43 Harry Stebbings? So what's your favorite book and why?
19:46 Speaker 02 I don't have favorites. Uh, so all your favorite questions, I'm not gonna be answered. So um, I'll tell you what I don't like, right?
19:52 Harry Stebbings? Okay, tell me what you don't like.
19:54 Speaker 02 I don't read uh, a lot of business books. And part of the reason is, is it's like going on vacation in your own backyard. It's, it's too familiar. I, I really like to read books that expand my thinking into areas that I'm not thinking about all the time. You know, I love reading about, you know, science and math and especially the people around them. Uh, in kind of hearing the stories around, you know, some, some discovery. I love reading books of lifestyles that I would never encounter. Living in the Middle East or going to war or something like that. So I always try to uh. And then, of course, science fiction, which is, of course, in the future and contemplates a, a world that doesn't yet exist.
20:34 Speaker 02 But I always um, always try to go on vacation when I read. So I'm doing something completely different than what I do on a day-to-day basis.
20:41 Harry Stebbings? But then how impactful has Techstars been in your trajectory with Sphero?
20:45 Speaker 02 Huge, right? I mean, uh, the company was birthed through Techstars, really. Ian and Adam didn't have enough momentum to actually start their business until they got into Techstars. And then Techstars put them in contact with a whole bunch of mentors as well as expose them to investors. So the business got birthed really through Techstars. And for me personally, that's how it became associated. And then they ran a second program with Disney Accelerator in two thousand and fourteen. Going through that and the exposure we got into the Walt Disney Company, yeah, has transformed the business. I mean, it, it, it. The accelerator doesn't, you know, it put us, it gave us, you know, warp drive. That's what happened when we came out of Disney. It was just incredible what happened with Star Wars.
21:27 Harry Stebbings? And then notice the change of question here. What blog or newsletter do you like?
21:32 Speaker 02 I started thinking about this. I don't, I have a lot of. Feed, you know, so I've been getting a little bit addicted to Quora, getting some of these interesting questions and I go down a rat hole there for a while and um.
21:43 Harry Stebbings? They they they always have very gripping questions.
21:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, sometimes, you know, like, what a stupid question. What if you take all the nukes and put them in one pile and you detonate them? What would happen? It's like, that's a silly question. But some of them are really fascinating. And since I was a pilot for ten years, I love all the aviation stuff. And there's a great book, there's something that just came up. There's a, there's a book called Black Box, Voice Recorders Right Before Planes Crash. You know, so, you know, a plane's about to crash, but they pull out the black box and then they transcribe them.
22:12 Harry Stebbings? I'm a big fan of air crash investigations, sadly, so I know, I know all about black boxes. Um, but yes, okay, so it's called.
22:19 Speaker 02 It's a great book on leadership under pressure, right? How you behave in an aircraft right before a crash is going to determine largely if you're going to live or die. And it's great to see the different personalities. And that's what I think is fascinating about that book. Sorry, I diverged.
22:33 Harry Stebbings? No, penultimate question. What's the most transferable skill from your time in, in the kind of, uh, as a pilot and in the military to now being a CEO?
22:42 Speaker 02 You know, it's all about managing people. You know, it's all about getting people to move towards a common goal. What the military really teaches you is to, is to kind of develop that, that focus and that communication skill to get everyone aligned around a common objective. You can never be too focused, right? At least from my perspective. You, you know, just being aligned around a particular objective and getting everyone done. And the, and the military really helped me put some discipline around that.
23:12 Harry Stebbings? Uh, and then I want to finish today on the five-year roadmap for you with Sphero. What have we got in store?
23:17 Speaker 02 I think I see some really cool products coming out. We're now developing multiple products simultaneously.
23:23 Harry Stebbings? Good to see you're instilling that focus there.
23:26 Speaker 02 Well, the thing is, is we have to, right? We're now, we've now reached a size of you can only sell so many robot balls. So you have to start selling some other products. And so you have to expand your line. And but each line is very, very focused on what their core objective is. And so it's building multiple businesses inside of one business so that you can continue to grow. And so I think in the next five years, you will see us become, you know, one of the dominant, if not the continued to be the continued dominant connected play company. And I think you're going to see toys really transform from the plastic by the pound into some really amazing robotic entertainment experiences.
24:03 Harry Stebbings? Well, Paul, it's been such a pleasure. As I said, I heard such fantastic things about you and Sphero from Brad and David and the Techstars crew. So thank you so much for coming on. You absolutely lived up to expectations and it was so brilliant to hear your story.
24:15 Speaker 02 Thank you very much. Appreciate the time.
24:19 Harry Stebbings? A huge hand to Paul for giving up his time today to be on the show and to Brad for making the introduction to Paul. Really am very grateful. And if you're loving the show and want to stay in the loop, you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs, or you can sign up for the newsletter on the twenty minute vc dot com, all in letters. But before we head off into the weekend, do not forget the world is better after a great night's sleep and a great mattress makes that a whole lot easier. And that's where Eve come in. Eve are the makers of that great mattress with three layer technology and next generation memory foam. It even comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order it with next day delivery. They also offer a 100 night trial so you can ensure the bed is perfect for you with free return pickup. So what's the risk?
25:01 Harry Stebbings? Go to eve mattress dot co dot U K, enter the promo code 20 VC and you'll get an astonishing 50 pounds off and it'll be with you, as I said, the next day. As always, we so appreciate your support and cannot wait to bring you Monday's show.
Previous 20VC: Why Hardware Is Actually Software Wrapped In Plastic & "Of Course Hardware Is Hard, Everything Is Hard" with Ben Einstein, Founder & General Partner @ Bolt VC Next 20VC: Upfront Ventures' Greg Bettinelli on Testing For Founder 'Grit' & What It Takes To Build A Successful Consumer Brand Today Page updated October 25, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated