Jenny Fielding, VENTURE EVERYWHERE: Travel, Entrepreneurship and a Roadmap for Life
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[0:45]Jenny Fielding is the author of Venture Everywhere, Travel, Entrepreneurship, and a roadmap
[0:49]for life.
[0:50]Jenny is a seasoned venture capitalist and technology trailblazer with a diverse background
[0:55]in law, finance, and entrepreneurship.
[0:57]As the founder of two tech startups, she understands the challenges of building companies
[1:01]from the ground up, now with a decade of investing experience, and a portfolio valued
[1:06]at $10 billion.
[1:07]Jenny leads everywhere ventures that go to Venture Fund for early stage founders around
[1:12]the world.
[1:13]Beyond investing, Jenny is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and Cornell Tech,
[1:17]where she inspires the next generation of entrepreneurs.
[1:20]A sought-after speaker, Jenny has been featured on Bloomberg TV, The Wall Street Journal,
[1:24]Forbes, and TechCrunch, among many others.
[1:26]Welcome Jenny, thank you so much for coming on totally booked with Zibi to talk about
[1:31]Venture Everywhere, Travel, Entrepreneurship, and a roadmap for life.
[1:35]Congrats.
[1:36]Thanks so much for having me.
[1:37]Thank you for taking me all over the world with this fabulous travel-log, slash, advice
[1:43]books, slash memoirs, slash, I don't know, inspiration, ode to grandparents, all of
[1:48]it.
[1:49]Congrats.
[1:50]It's so great.
[1:51]Thank you.
[1:52]Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it?
[1:56]Yeah.
[1:57]Well, the book is about global entrepreneurship and what we can all learn from founders,
[2:01]building companies around the world.
[2:03]And so I've traveled, as I mentioned in the book, to over 100 countries, and I've met
[2:07]some of the most inspirational and very successful entrepreneurs, building companies
[2:12]like far from the globe, Silicon Valley.
[2:14]And through my interactions with them, I noticed a common archetype and theme and perspective
[2:21]that started to kind of bubble up about the way that they view the world, the impact
[2:26]that they want to make.
[2:28]And I distilled that down to a few kind of key characteristics, and I wanted to share that
[2:32]with the world.
[2:33]I feel that so much is being written by kind of the same folks that we hear about all
[2:38]the time, the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world or the Bill Gates.
[2:41]And those are great inspirational stories.
[2:43]But what about the person that grew up in a small town in Pakistan and grew a company
[2:49]and to, you know, multi-billion dollars, right?
[2:51]And so why aren't those stories really being shared?
[2:54]And so I wanted to shed some light on that, amazing.
[2:56]Well, one thing you do sort of throughout the book is you notice, like you're on the phone
[3:01]with somebody and you notice when their delivery comes in in India in like two seconds.
[3:06]And you just pick up on all of these things that maybe that's not even why you were
[3:11]on the phone to begin with, but you have this like extra sensory ability to figure out
[3:18]what each country is offering, what they're doing, how to get involved, what special
[3:22]whether you're, you know, finding a place to stay in Spain or the Philippines.
[3:28]I mean, it's amazing.
[3:29]So you've uncovered all of these fabulous entrepreneurs and you've profiled a bunch of them
[3:34]here.
[3:35]Tell me about that instinct that makes you such a great venture capitalist yourself.
[3:39]Well, I spent many years as a founder and they learned a lot of hard lessons, you know,
[3:43]everything from, you know, finding the right co-founders or not to having the right go
[3:48]to market.
[3:50]And I made a lot of mistakes along the way and it's been great to kind of jump to the
[3:54]other side to be an investor and be able to kind of share very openly what I didn't get
[4:00]right and, you know, help founders kind of see around corners.
[4:03]And so I think when I made the jump to the, you know, to the dark side of entrepreneurship,
[4:08]I thought that my job was going to be something a little bit different.
[4:11]It was going to be helping founders with kind of product and strategy and go to market.
[4:16]But what I realized it was, you know, much more about people and helping them kind of get
[4:21]out of their own way.
[4:22]And this is, especially at the early stage, it's not really about numbers and metrics.
[4:26]It's about, you know, inspiration and personas and, you know, really finding folks that have
[4:32]these incredible visions.
[4:34]And so that's all to say that you become a really good listener and observer of what's
[4:39]around you.
[4:40]So my job is really to meet these incredible entrepreneurs who are changing the world and try
[4:45]to understand them.
[4:47]And the best way to understand them is to listen and to ask a lot of questions.
[4:51]And so that's what I've been doing for the last decade.
[4:53]You know, as I travel around the world, I meet these incredible founders and I start kind
[4:57]of teasing out what are their stories?
[5:00]Because you might hear something on tech crunch or read in the Wall Street Journal.
[5:04]Those aren't the real stories of what inspired these people.
[5:07]And so I wanted to kind of draw that out.
[5:09]And I think, as an early stage investor, that is really our job.
[5:12]And I think there's kind of a misperception that we go around kind of giving people cash.
[5:16]And that is one part of the job.
[5:19]But really it's about being acutely aware of what the trends are and the best people
[5:25]to tell you who the trends are, the entrepreneurs on the ground.
[5:28]So give us the background of your founder experience.
[5:32]And so we can understand how you ended up here and talk about the BBC and tech starting.
[5:38]all of your stuff.
[5:40]Yeah.
[5:41]So like many people had a more traditional upbringing.
[5:43]I mean, I grew up in New York City.
[5:45]You know, I went to, you know, whatever schools and I went to law school and I found myself
[5:49]at JP Morgan.
[5:50]I was kind of on this track and I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur.
[5:54]But one day I had an issue that I just didn't see was right in the world.
[6:00]So I personally wanted to solve something and I didn't even think of it as a company.
[6:03]I just thought of it as this was an annoyance and it probably was annoying other people.
[6:07]I wanted to kind of solve that.
[6:10]And that turned into my first startup.
[6:12]So, you know, lo and behold, 2007, New York wasn't a very entrepreneurial place and
[6:17]everyone thought like, oh, you've got this kind of high-profile job at JP Morgan, like,
[6:21]what's this side thing that you're doing?
[6:23]But I really just set out to solve a problem in the world, something that, you know, wasn't
[6:28]really lining up with how I thought, you know, the world should be.
[6:31]And that was kind of my foray into entrepreneurship.
[6:34]And so I took a big risk and I decided, you know, maybe I had checked a lot of box
[6:37]is along the way, you know, going to certain schools and going to law school and doing
[6:42]all these things.
[6:43]But what was my real mission and passion?
[6:46]And did I have the courage to pursue that?
[6:48]So it was a real inflection point, starting my own company and kind of breaking out of
[6:52]the moles and deciding to chart my own path.
[6:55]And from there, it happened to be in technology.
[6:58]Go back to what the issue was you were trying to solve.
[7:01]What was the annoyance?
[7:03]Okay, well, it was kind of a fun story, which was I had a boyfriend who was living in
[7:08]Germany at the time and 2007 when you called Germany, it was like $2 a minute.
[7:13]And so my phone bill was just like absolutely outrageous.
[7:17]And then I noticed, well, it wasn't just me.
[7:19]It was like anyone living in New York that wasn't from here calling their family, calling
[7:23]their friends.
[7:24]They were just paying so much.
[7:25]And so I thought, gosh, there's got to be a better way to solve this.
[7:28]So again, I'm working as a banker at JP Morgan and I'm like, kind of hacking on this
[7:33]nights and weekends trying to figure out like, what's a better way to make inexpensive
[7:37]international calls.
[7:39]So something that seemed kind of small actually like impacted huge number of people.
[7:44]So everyone who's a first generation American has family internationally.
[7:49]Anyone who's doing business is probably has business contacts that they're calling internationally.
[7:55]So it turned out to actually be quite a big market.
[7:57]Wow.
[7:58]And then in the end, you were like, sorry, Johan has to go, right?
[8:01]Yeah, ultimately that didn't work out, but it really did set me on the path of kind of
[8:07]entrepreneurial endeavors and just realizing that I wanted to be part of solving problems
[8:13]in the world, whether they were small, like international calling or some of the stuff that
[8:17]I invested in now, which is a lot around healthcare and climate and, you know, really important
[8:22]issues.
[8:23]It's amazing.
[8:24]In the book, you, after meeting all of these CEOs founders, all of it, you have come up
[8:29]with these archetypes like Moxie and tell us more about the different, the different
[8:36]types of thinkers.
[8:37]And as I'm reading it, I'm like, okay, maybe that's me.
[8:40]That is definitely not me.
[8:41]I think maybe the systematic, you know, engineering brain type of founder, which is not
[8:49]me at all.
[8:50]Yeah.
[8:51]So as I'm talking to these founders, getting to know them over the years, I start realizing
[8:55]and kind of distilling patterns and kind of archetypes and how they see the world is often,
[9:01]you know, colored by, you know, how they grew up and their perspective.
[9:05]And so I started kind of writing down notes on what these were.
[9:08]This actually didn't start out to be a book.
[9:10]It actually, I do a lot of short form contact blogs and LinkedIn and all of that.
[9:14]And so I was kind of, you know, working on some profiles of what these archetypes for
[9:19]success were.
[9:20]And all of a sudden, as I started interviewing these founders, I was like, wow, there's
[9:23]so much more here.
[9:25]So I distill it down to six characteristics.
[9:28]You know, some of them are really fun like Moxie.
[9:30]But what that really means is that you have to be bold, like being an entrepreneur isn't
[9:35]about fitting in, right?
[9:36]It's about taking these risks and, you know, having the courage to, you know, charge a
[9:42]path that some people won't feel good about.
[9:45]And so I think Moxie's a really interesting one, especially in a world where social media
[9:50]and everything is about fitting in and being liked, real entrepreneurs have a chip
[9:54]on their shoulder.
[9:55]And they have something to prove to the world.
[9:56]And sometimes they can be a little prickly.
[9:58]And so I think that's a really interesting.
[10:00]and characteristic to kind of call out
[10:01]as I'm interviewing some of these founders.
[10:03]I'm like, wow, these are not go with the flow people.
[10:07]Interesting.
[10:08]Does that mean if you are go with the flow
[10:09]you're not gonna be a good founder?
[10:10]I think that all different types of personas
[10:13]can be successful.
[10:14]These were just some of the patterns that I noticed,
[10:16]especially with international founders, right?
[10:19]Who've had a lot of life challenges
[10:21]and they've had to be in many cases survivors.
[10:24]I mean, I interview people that come from war-torn countries
[10:27]that have had to evacuate their countries,
[10:30]that have had to go from growing up in a small village
[10:35]where none of their family was educated
[10:36]to being plucked into United States
[10:40]and having to survive there.
[10:41]So I think these kind of backgrounds
[10:43]are really what fuels the entrepreneurial journey
[10:47]and you can have all different types of backgrounds.
[10:49]These were just some of the ones
[10:50]that I thought kind of stood out
[10:53]in my kind of decade of meeting with founders.
[10:55]And take us through a couple of the other ones.
[10:57]Yeah, so Moxie's a really fun one.
[11:00]I think another interesting one is this idea of elasticity.
[11:03]And so maybe some people would call it resilient,
[11:06]but this idea of kind of flexibility and being adaptive.
[11:10]It's really about kind of what I was saying before.
[11:13]And I think maybe as a founder, I was this persona.
[11:16]So it resonates.
[11:17]It's about being able to read the room
[11:20]and in any given situation in that moment,
[11:23]adapt to what's required.
[11:25]So elasticity is one that we see very commonly,
[11:28]founders need to respond to data quickly,
[11:32]potentially pivot their business
[11:34]and really adapt to a lot of different stakeholders, right?
[11:37]Whether it's what customers want,
[11:39]what their investors want.
[11:40]And so that kind of idea of being resilient,
[11:44]I think came up in many of the interviews.
[11:46]So that's one that's very personal to me
[11:50]and I really appreciate amazing.
[11:53]I feel like I related the most
[11:54]to the first one, Kinetic, Kinetic, right?
[11:57]Where you're like, feel it, yeah, hold on.
[11:59]You have elastic, having conviction,
[12:02]being kinetic, having Moxie,
[12:04]thinking macro, being systematic.
[12:06]Yeah, Kinetic, where you're just like feeling things
[12:08]and you're going after it and you try it.
[12:10]And yeah.
[12:11]Yeah, so in one of the interviews,
[12:13]I think it's the first chapter.
[12:15]It's a founder named Lori,
[12:17]who built a company called Kavak,
[12:19]which is really the leading marketplace
[12:21]for secondhand cars in Mexico.
[12:24]And this company is a multi unicorn
[12:26]and one of the huge success stories of Mexico.
[12:28]And Lori had a very interesting background.
[12:31]She grew up in Venezuela.
[12:32]Her family had to leave for political reasons.
[12:36]And she really kind of had to find her way,
[12:38]but really what kind of fueled her.
[12:40]She just had this incredible enthusiasm and charisma.
[12:43]And she was able to adapt
[12:45]whether she came to the United States,
[12:47]which was very unfamiliar or moved to Mexico,
[12:50]which wasn't a home country.
[12:52]She was able to kind of learn fast, act fast.
[12:56]And I think that really kind of served her
[12:58]when she decided to start Kavak.
[13:01]And she's just had an incredible amount of success.
[13:04]So that kind of high cadence thinker
[13:06]who moves quickly and acts on data as something that
[13:09]we really look for in entrepreneurs.
[13:11]And I think Lori and some of the founders
[13:14]really exhibit that nicely.
[13:15]So what can the average reader take from this book?
[13:19]Somebody who's like, maybe they have ideas.
[13:21]They're probably not gonna pursue them,
[13:23]but they appreciate a great new business
[13:25]or a great new product.
[13:27]Your book takes us all over the world, right?
[13:29]We're introduced to so many cultures.
[13:31]And you really have us at the table with you
[13:34]or in the internet cafe or wherever.
[13:37]We're wherever you are.
[13:39]So tell us a little more about what you've gained
[13:43]from all these travels.
[13:44]And you have extensive relationships now,
[13:46]which is amazing.
[13:48]But most people have not traveled as much as you have.
[13:51]So what are we missing?
[13:52]Tell us.
[13:55]Well, it's interesting.
[13:56]This book is kind of called the business book.
[13:59]And there's definitely some business principles in it.
[14:01]But I think if you kind of peel the onion a little bit,
[14:04]the book is really about having the courage
[14:07]to charge your own path, right?
[14:08]And it took me a little bit of time.
[14:10]I was kind of on one track.
[14:11]And we see most people in the world,
[14:14]they're kind of going through the motions.
[14:16]And sometimes they don't exactly know why.
[14:18]And so the book is really to prod yourself
[14:21]to really think deeply about the world
[14:24]that you want to live in and how you get there.
[14:27]And for me, it was around travel and exposure
[14:30]to new cultures, to new people, to new thinking
[14:32]that really got me out of my maybe myopic view of the world,
[14:36]which is kind of funny, because I grew up in New York City.
[14:38]So you'd think I was exposed to many things.
[14:41]Truth is, I had a very kind of small view
[14:44]of the world in some ways.
[14:45]And so the travel really opened it up for me.
[14:48]But I don't think you have to travel.
[14:49]It's about interacting with other cultures and other people.
[14:52]And one of the key messages in this book
[14:55]is maybe 20 years ago, you could do really well
[14:59]in your career by just kind of knowing people
[15:02]in your community or in America or whatnot.
[15:04]Now, there's hardly any organizations
[15:07]where you're not interacting with people
[15:10]around the world that you don't have colleagues
[15:12]in other places or customers in other places.
[15:14]And I think we all need to learn to be global citizens.
[15:18]I learned it very firsthand by going on a trip
[15:22]with my grandmother when I was very young
[15:24]and kind of seeing different people and exploring
[15:27]the world a little bit.
[15:28]But I think that we can do that wherever we're living
[15:31]by just exposing ourselves to things that
[15:33]maybe feel uncomfortable and different.
[15:36]I loved your opening in particular
[15:39]and how vividly you describe this trip
[15:42]and your grandparents in general
[15:43]and you following your grandmother
[15:44]and her hot thing tracksuit and your grandfather,
[15:47]the rings that he gave her and the chains
[15:50]and her giving you the keys so you can run all over the hotel.
[15:53]And that was the kind of entrepreneur of the time.
[15:57]I mean, my grandfather owned fruit stores in Brooklyn, right?
[16:00]And he had to deal with the garbage mafia
[16:03]and these people stealing from him
[16:05]and I like it was all this drama,
[16:07]but those were the original entrepreneurs.
[16:09]I think now we think of entrepreneurs
[16:11]as kind of tech entrepreneurs.
[16:12]We think of them as the Elon Musk,
[16:14]but the truth is like this country is fueled by entrepreneurs
[16:18]who are running small businesses.
[16:19]And that's really where my family came from
[16:22]but that entrepreneurial spirit of like,
[16:24]I'm getting up every morning to run my business.
[16:26]No one's telling me what to do.
[16:28]I have to have the agency.
[16:30]And so that was like a model that really resonated me
[16:33]with me and I saw growing up.
[16:35]And yet I went into something that was way more traditional.
[16:39]I went to law school and I worked at JP Morgan
[16:41]and I kind of did all these, you know,
[16:42]worked for other people in a very traditional way.
[16:45]And one day I kind of like looked in the mirror
[16:47]and I thought, you know what?
[16:48]I'm more entrepreneurial than this.
[16:50]Like I have more to offer and I am someone
[16:53]that takes agency and that thinks differently
[16:56]and kind of moves through the world a little bit differently.
[16:59]And I need to act on that
[17:00]and have the kind of courage to do that.
[17:02]So what's one piece of advice you could give people
[17:05]who have an idea or they're thinking about doing something,
[17:10]even if it's something as simple as like reorganizing
[17:14]their kitchen or just something that like feels like,
[17:17]you know, whether they want to start a business
[17:19]or redo the way that has been done, right?
[17:23]What do you say to those people?
[17:25]Yeah, so I think there's this misperception
[17:28]that you need to go all in, right?
[17:30]That you need to, you know, stop doing your day job
[17:34]to kind of focus on this.
[17:35]And that's the entrepreneurial journey.
[17:37]Well, in my world and my personal experience,
[17:41]I've actually never done that.
[17:42]So I started my startup while I was working at JP Morgan.
[17:46]So I did that nights and weekends.
[17:48]My venture fund everywhere ventures.
[17:50]I started that while I was working at Techstars.
[17:52]That was my nights and weekends fund.
[17:55]And so my advice to people is that it seems really daunting
[17:58]and scary to kind of put everything in your life aside
[18:02]to, you know, to pursue an entrepreneurial endeavor
[18:05]or a big project or whatever that is.
[18:07]But I think you can kind of, in small ways
[18:10]just start working towards that.
[18:11]Reserving a few hours on the weekend
[18:14]or just being really focused on it.
[18:16]And I don't think that gets talked about a lot actually.
[18:19]It's kind of like, well, you have to do it all at once.
[18:22]And I think many entrepreneurs are very iterative.
[18:25]And you can learn a lot by just spending
[18:28]a little bit of time educating yourself,
[18:30]going out and talking to potential customers
[18:32]or partners and all these things.
[18:34]And I'd encourage people to kind of do that.
[18:36]And when you are ready to make the leap,
[18:38]then you can do that.
[18:39]And so it was actually funny for me.
[18:41]I'm working at JP Morgan.
[18:43]I'm working on my startup in my living room nights and weekends
[18:46]with my co-founders.
[18:47]And we launched this product and all of a sudden,
[18:50]like we have cash coming in, we have revenue.
[18:52]And my friends looked at me.
[18:54]They're like, I think you're going to have to quit the day job.
[18:56]And I was like, oh, really?
[18:58]And it hadn't even really occurred to me, right?
[19:00]And so I think that when you get really excited about something,
[19:03]you can just really lean into it.
[19:06]Amazing.
[19:06]Well, Jenny, congratulations.
[19:08]Venture everywhere.
[19:09]Thank you for the ride of a lifetime going on all the adventures
[19:13]with you.
[19:14]And thanks for all the support you give
[19:16]to the people who need it most.
[19:18]Thanks.
[19:18]This was super fun.
[19:19]Give.
[19:20]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[19:23]formerly momstone have time to read books.
[19:26]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[19:29]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens.
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[19:33]Thanks so much.
[19:34]Go and buy the books.