Jason Spievak 8:02
I think the biggest question for folks is, is there enough here to do, right. And what a lot of people don’t realize that aren’t as familiar with the greater Santa Barbara Central Coast area, is the depth of technology companies that are here, I’m going to household names that are actually born and raised here. So as we were putting together our presentation materials for Entrada, to begin to formalize that as a fund and communicate with folks. What we found is just software, just Santa Barbara, in the past 20 years, over $20 billion and realized shareholder exit value just here in Santa Barbara. So a lot of people don’t realize companies like Citrix and AppFolio and rightscale and trade desk and logic monitor and so nose, and inogen and on and on, are all based here, right? Mind Body software as well just the list goes on. And so it’s a great place for entrepreneurs to come once they’ve had some success. And they want to live their lives here. But they’re not done building companies. So there’s actually a tremendous depth of early stage technology investment opportunity here. Not just with that legacy of entrepreneurs. But so much of what’s happening here on the Central Coast really has its roots at UCSB that that party school that we went to, as you mentioned now, I think I need to get back checked on this. But I think there are more Nobel Prize winners at UCSB in the last 10 years, four of them than at Harvard or Stanford.
John Corcoran 9:30
I’ve heard something like that. Yeah, we’re talking. Let’s talk also about the constraints, right, because Santa Barbara is not a huge town. 100,000 people or so. It’s not close to Los Angeles or San Francisco. It’s about an hour and a half, two hours away from LA. It’s a plane flight away from San Francisco. It’s not next to Silicon Valley. It’s expensive, so maybe hard to get labor there. Talk about how that influences companies in the startup ecosystem.
Jason Spievak 9:57
Sure all those things are true and Santa Barbara has come a very long way from when I graduated back in the prior millennium. And Santa Barbara was where the elderly went to go visit their parents, right. There was a lot going on here other than the defense sector work and some early materials work out of UCSB. And what has evolved is a very rich framework of technology, depth and capital that exists here. The challenge is being an expensive community. And you have the city of Santa Barbara’s about 100,000 people that are we call the greater Santa Barbara area ranging from Galena and UCSB in the north down to kind of Sunderland carpentry in the south, I think that’s closer to about 250,000 people, but still very small compared to LA or Silicon Valley. The cost of living is a challenge, right? There’s not a whole lot of middle class here. And so the there’s a challenge in bringing executive leadership here. We’ve gotten better at that over the years. And I think the challenge was, hey, there’s a killer job in Santa Barbara, I’m gonna move down there and become the VP of whatever. What’s Plan B, if it doesn’t work out, I’m about to move my family down there. So I think I think folks moving here a lot more comfortable now that because of the growth in technology companies and capital here over the past 10 years, there’s a plan B, A, C, D, you can stay here forever and build a great career. The higher cost of living, obviously drives salaries up. And what I like the most, especially with software companies is there’s a lot of technology talent coming out of UCSB, and rolling off successful outcomes at companies like Procore and logicmonitor. and elsewhere. The turnover here is much, much lower than we deal with in Silicon Valley.
John Corcoran 11:39
So because there’s less competition, I guess there because people want to stick around.
Jason Spievak 11:44
There’s a greater sense of stability, I think of loyalty. A lot of working relationships are also based on friendships and personal relationships around here. We’ve started companies just because I wanted to go do something with him or her and go build something. So he is actually
John Corcoran 11:59
one of your which was that I think was it Invoca that started that way.
Jason Spievak 12:04
We did it was tell us
John Corcoran 12:05
a story. That was a great story.
Jason Spievak 12:08
Yeah, so we started in VOCA, it began with sitting at a coffee shop at Starbucks on the corner of state and coda down here with Rob Duva, who was my co founder at Invoca, along with Colin Kelley, our CTO, and column a CTO called wave before that with us and Rob was head of customer acquisition. And just two of the smartest nicest guys, I know, just creative and thoughtful and fun to be around. And Rob was kicking ideas around and we kind of came up with one that was too good not to do at the time, which is essentially extending the concept of performance marketing, right click tracking, essentially, to being able to track inbound phone calls to businesses back to their source, and feed that data into your sem your retargeting, all that stuff. And that began with an idea that was just too good to do, sitting around at Starbucks, then we pulled calling in and kind of talked him into joining us. And it was very much three friends taking a three musketeers approach, regardless of what our roles and contributions were, everything was split down the middle three ways. And that structure actually sustained us to growing with is now a company that is we’ve got about 250 employees here, the company’s got his sights on 100 million arr in the not too distant future, and it was really based on going in his friends and leverage, leveraging each other’s experiences and skill sets and and start having that social experiment fortunately worked out.
John Corcoran 13:32
So you were co founder and CEO for eight years. At what point did you decide it was time to step back from that? And was there anything that inspired that?
Jason Spievak 13:41
Yeah, it’s a good question. It was actually for me at the time not to go to YPO on him. But it was a very transformative and freeing experience for me, I was in my 40s at that point in time, and feeling the weight of the world as CEO that since we’re the ones who started this and had the original vision, then the pressures on me to continue to evolve and become that right leader, with the right sets of interests and skills for each step of the company’s growth. And as
John Corcoran 14:09
you remember where you were, where the company was, at that point, in terms of size, employees, revenue, or anything,
Jason Spievak 14:16
I’ve actually had that experience a couple of times now in my career where we crested about 100 employees, and I could no longer with 100% confidence, see someone walking down the hall and know who they were, what their name was, right? What’s their family situation, what they do, right when it got to the point where we had people on board that I hadn’t even interviewed, and they were, you know, contributing members of the team, typically around 100 125 employees is where I start to feel like there’s probably somebody better suited we’re over the the viability hurdle, which is what I really enjoy going from kind of zero, the one bringing your concept into existence, wrapping the right resources around it and beginning to create jobs and outcomes for people that didn’t exist there before. Once we get to the A, it’s time to turn this you know, a two lane highway into a 10 Lane superhighway. There’s other people who really enjoy that more than I do and are better at it. And I was fortunate to have assembled the board of directors at that time and Invoca, I’d love to drop some names here, but some really high quality people that were able to sit down with me and say, hey, it’s time to make some decisions around how we scale this. And do you want to be the person that takes this to the next level? If so, you’re going to need to start to engage differently than you have on these issues. And if not, let’s go find that right person for the next stage of the journey. And I had my Did you
John Corcoran 15:33
initiate that? Or did they initiate that? Or was it both ways?
Jason Spievak 15:36
It’s a really good question, because we’re in a lot of interaction, right? We have a lot of dynamic interaction all the time. I mean, the board members are my friends. And they’re handpicked to be there and do exactly this. So it was iterative. By the time we sat down, and it was actually after as the morning after upfront ventures conference in LA and Hollywood. I’m sitting down with Mark and Coby and John, and I think Brett was there as well. And we said, okay, it’s it’s time to plan phase B. Right. And so I think it was, it was as close to mutual as could be. And it was also a real wake up call for me that I had reached the point where my time and energy were better spent on helping earlier stage, things come into existence. And that was freeing for me when I realized I did not have to continue to be the best at everything. And every step of the way, there are very few gates and Zuckerberg out there that can take a company from concept to, you know, global scale like that I frankly, I think I’m having the pleasure of watching one of them now at Apeel in James Rogers, and I’m super excited about that.
John Corcoran 16:41
Okay, pause on that, because I want to I want to get in that story and want to talk about that. But that is it is such a phenomenal thing to think, to not appreciate how absurd it is for Elon Musk for Zuckerberg to take a company from zero and revenue, zero employees to $1,000 $100,000 $100 million 100 billion, whatever it is, it’s absolutely insane. And so for you, you know, when you reach this point, it’s interesting that you say that it felt like a relief to be okay with the fact that you don’t have to be the one to take it beyond to the next stage. And for someone listening to this, who’s running company that they’re scaling up that’s growing? What are some factors or indicators, or red flags, however you want to call it that they should be on the queue for to figure out if, if you know, there may be a stage where they should step aside? And maybe they, you know, their lane is somewhere else?
Jason Spievak 17:41
That’s a really good question. And I thought about that quite a bit, I tried to actually capture some of my thoughts in writing, as we’re bringing new leadership into Invoca. The short version of that is I think you really put yourself at risk of these blind spots. If you don’t surround yourself with peers and partners and board members and effective leaders that can be a sounding board for you. When we invest in companies, as an example. And I come across one, which we do that has no board just has an advisory board of cronies. Right? That, to me is a yellow flag, because there’s not the infrastructure there to help someone understand when they’re not making the optimal choice for all their stakeholders. And you need relatively low ego, if you can do it. And you need folks that can push back on you and give you that feedback. And if you look at folks who build as a solo entrepreneur, they they’re slow to build leadership teams, they’re slow to bring in true senior leadership, they talk about control, right? Those are the things to be mindful of where that person has a high likelihood of getting themselves into an echo chamber that could slow the company’s growth. So I think it’s really important early on to embrace others as partners in your process and trust, even if they do things 95% as well as you might do a particular thing, right, it’s really important to have breadth of leadership, have sounding boards, have folks to share ideas with and integrate with and that’s one of the biggest challenges we see in very early stage teams is typically a founder that if they get capital, they’re going to start to bring people on board without a track record of having embraced partners before that’s a real point of risk in early stage investing until you see them see it through.
John Corcoran 19:30
Alright, let’s talk about Apeel. What I love about the origin story about the founding of Apeel Sciences is that involves a podcast so the tell us this story, but James was driving at one point and he had a realization and epiphany moment So tell us a story.
Jason Spievak 19:49
Sure. And you know with the clear understanding this is this is James stories James and James Jenny Lou this this is their story and not mine, right. I came along a year plus later After some of the magic began to happen, but James Rogers was a PhD student at UCSB working on his PhD in material science, which number one Material Science University in the world now as measured by academic citation. So he’s in good company there, and was working on developing photovoltaic paint, basically paint a surface, plug electrodes into it, our your phone, probably spent years working on those devices trying to figure out how they work. He was driving through the Central Valley because he was up in the Bay Area using University resources there as part of his research and was listening to a podcast on world hunger while driving through the Central Valley looking around at this lush green environment around him thinking, how is it that half the world is starving? We have these magical seeds, we throw them in the ground, you put some water on them, they grow food, right, by the way they self propagate every year. So how is it that half the world starving so well? You and I were working our fantasy football teams. James, in his spare time while getting his PhD began to research the causes of world hunger and food spoilage and it resonated with him because the leading causes of produce spoilage are mass loss and oxidation, right water loss. h2o getting out and go to getting in to that Apple, that strawberry, that mango. And so James background, undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University. Where do you study in materials at Carnegie Mellon? You study steel, right, Andrew Carnegie. And the way that metallurgist figured out to how to prevent steel from rusting was to incorporate a certain number of sacrificial atoms in there, whether it’s you know, nickel, or molybdenum or chromium or whatever that the oxygen like better and it would diffuse to the surface form this, this oxide barrier around that block of steel creating stainless steel and last for hundreds of years, instead of oxidizing and flaking away. So James began to think about whether there was a way to create stainless food and find molecules that existed in our food stream already, that could be applied on the outside of fruits and vegetables and slow the rate at which they desiccated the rate of which they ripen and rotted. And, you know, to the, to the benefit of the planet. That has happened. And now the company is moving into global deployment, which is really exciting stage to see this leadership team grow through.
John Corcoran 22:23
This is also a scary area, because people are consuming this material, right? So did it take a lot longer to develop because of that?
Jason Spievak 22:34
It did. And actually, you you speak to a really important point there where First off, and I wish I had an avocado in my hand, it’s hard for me to actually talk about it without it’s just food, right, we’re using food to preserve food, which means in the inner layers of the skins of fruits and vegetables, there are these these molecules, right fatty acids, blister lipids, they’re in every bite of food that you take. And it’s all FDA approved. Because we’ve been eating it for 10,000 years, all we’re really doing is extracting a target set of molecules from the inner layers of the fruit of the skin, mixing them together and putting it on the outside. And so all we’re doing is adding a little bit more peel is basically the best way to think about it. But that said, right, there’s a lot of concern out there founded or otherwise around genetically modified foods and Franken foods, that stuff. So in addition to having to create world changing chemistry, and develop infrastructure to apply this at scale, globally, in an almost limitless set of environmental conditions and packinghouses James and the team also had to be very smart, and looking years ahead and how to create a brand around this that would lead moms to want to feed this to their kids,
John Corcoran 23:43
right? Because Yeah, and selling a lot of other companies on the idea that it’s that there’s not gonna be a massive horrible recall.
Jason Spievak 23:52
Yes. And there’s been a whole lot of sort of business school 101 lessons that we’ve all learned in this process. And it’s just been stunning the depth and breadth of the skills and insight needed to bring a multi billion dollar company like Apeel into existence. And it’s just been it’s it’s stunning to have a front row seat to what this team has been able to do here for the past eight or nine years now.
John Corcoran 24:14
Now let’s let’s focus on Jason. When you first met Jason, what was it about him that stood out
Jason Spievak 24:21
for James? James? Sorry, James. Yeah. So I’m happy to talk about James and send me by the way cuz he’s a hell of a lot more interesting. So when I first met James was actually at UCSB. And he had just won our new venture competition there. So yet another multi billion dollar company in the making coming out of your alma mater. And he had just won the business school competition, the use that money to incorporate the company, move himself out of his apartment in Isla Vista, and actually into a garage where you could set up a real lab bench. And I met James he was beginning to look at Capital at that point in time. And what struck me about James I’ve I’ve had the once in a lifetime pleasure, frankly, being able to travel the world with him and, and work on some of the early stuff with him. What struck me was, here’s this brilliant scientist, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And James, if you’re listening, cover your ears, man, one of the very smartest people I’ve ever met, and had, in addition to that, a set of communication skills that was incredibly disarming and engaging. And one of the things I noticed right out of the gate was, here’s this brilliant PhD scientist, he’s got patents and stuff I can’t even pronounce. And yet when he explains to you, what he’s doing, what he’s thinking about what he’s working on, he never uses a single acronym. And if he does, he’ll stop and go, shoot, let me explain what that is, you know, give it in plain English. So he is a one in a billion combination of world changing vision, deep thinking, curious scientist, and highly effective communication and people skills. So it’s, it’s hopefully got the chance to meet him. Maybe I should connect you with him. You do? Yeah.
John Corcoran 26:05
I’d love to feature him on the show. I mean, sounds like doing some interesting, really interesting work. So
Jason Spievak 26:09
yep.
John Corcoran 26:11
What was it like for you, you know, you you step down from co founder and CEO of Invoca, which is doing phenomenally well. And then you step into another startup? I don’t know how big Apeel was at that time. And and you’re not the leader anymore. You’re not the founder, you’re stepping into another company? What was that experience like for you?
Jason Spievak 26:30
So that? That’s a great question, because that was awesome. And it has really freed me up to spend the rest of my career in life doing what I enjoy doing. And so actually, I’m in a group called YPO. We talked a little bit about that, you know, YPO, and eo and
John Corcoran 26:44
yeah, some of my best guests have been YPO or so.
Jason Spievak 26:46
Yeah. And I actually a forum forum with my buddies, sternum elbow. So and I’m still informed with a lot of guys I was with at that time when I stepped out Invoca. And there was a lot of pushback there. Like, you’re not being honest with yourself about the fact that you don’t care about being CEO next. And you really need to deal with this and think I’m okay with this. Because it’s given me the green light to just say, I like doing this part, this is what I enjoy. This is how I like helping people. And I don’t need to feel responsibility for these other parts. So stepping in with James, I came in initially as an investor, then as a board member. And because I didn’t have a lot occupying my time, at the time, I was finding myself at Apeel down in the first office right down off, Milpitas, which we lovingly called the meth lab. And if you don’t understand why, we were probably 20, something people I want to say back then maybe 25 ish, when I started spending the time with James and the crew. And I was down there for lunch several days a week just trying to learn and absorb. And he
John Corcoran 27:47
was cool with that, right? The Board Member breathing down his neck,
Jason Spievak 27:52
he’s, he’s smart to take advantage of any resources he can find. James said something that he wants, which becomes sort of one of those life principles, which is, everybody knows something you don’t, everybody has something you can learn from them if you take the time. And so at the time, where he really needed the help was planning out how to capitalize the business. And that’s an area where I had a fair amount of experience. And so we just started to work through that, and pricing models and, and then from there, he asked if I would come into a role on an interim basis, to help essentially begin to transition this trillion dollar vision into a stream of cash flows. And James had a very good idea of where he wanted to go. But he was smart to take other input as well. And so I agreed to come in for I thought it would be a year. And I made up a title chief Commercial Officer, which would not impede at least I thought, the career paths of the folks that are already working hard and scaling on that leadership team. And it’s not
John Corcoran 28:51
a title you hear often, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.
Jason Spievak 28:55
I kind of made it up and then learn later that it’s actually more common in the UK. But that’s fine. And it was temporary. For me, it was really freeing to not give a crap, what my title was, who reported to me what my LinkedIn said, I mean, to be really blunt, I think I made enough money by that point that if I never made another nickel, I’d be okay. My family be okay. And that was not the driving force anymore. I wanted to see how much impact we could create for how many people and how many jobs we can create. Right. And so
John Corcoran 29:29
and also not, you know, not to diminish what you did with Invoca. But you’re moving from, you know, marketing automation technologies into world hunger, which is very mission focused, very, very purposeful. What role do you think that that played the fact that, you know, moving into that, I mean, I imagine that must have had some kind of impact for you that the fact that you’re moving to something that was incredibly meaningful?
Jason Spievak 29:52
Yeah. And again, you know, great question. And if I look over here, I can tell you what’s on my bookshelf has changed a lot in the last few years and So I got three kids, right? My youngest is home here somewhere, and she’s about turned 18. And until Apeel, if you ask my kids, what does daddy do? They go, I don’t know, technology, something software calls something. Right? But since Apeel, right? You ask my kids, especially when they’re younger, right? Yeah, 10 years ago, what does daddy do? He makes the world’s food last longer. Right? That’s clearly not me. That’s James and Jenny and Lou and the Apeel team. But to be a part of that, and have such clarity of mission and purpose, really helped me focus on what we did next, with Entrada, which is, I only want to invest my time and our money in things that have truly disruptive potential, and are also areas that I want to spend the next five to 10 years of my life becoming an expert on, because that’s required to help the company succeed as an investor and as a board member. So it really was very transformative for me, and also got me over the fear hurdle of being able to invest in hard tech, right, two of my partners at Entrada Ventures, Greg and Alex are PhD scientists and super smart. And that enables us to look at much more complex technology in material science and chemistry and biochem in disruptive computing, in robotics, right things that I probably would not have had the confidence to take on on my own 10 years ago. But the combination of that experience with Apeel and a couple of other companies and having again, coming back to the importance of strong partners, as put me in a position for this next stage of my life and career to invest in spend my time on truly interesting stuff. And not just more SaaS and ad tech and mobile and the stuff that got me here, right, I don’t begrudge it. But I’m ready to do harder stuff.
John Corcoran 31:50
Right, right. And let’s talk a little bit more about that about Entrada. And this term, disruptive technologies, it’s very popular these days. I follow a lot of what, you know, arc, invest does and Cathy wood over there. She’s kind of been a big leader, among others, and in advocating for disruptive technology. But it’s a huge world. There’s so many different categories to it. So how did you decide to put barriers around it to limit yourself?
Jason Spievak 32:24
So that’s a really good question. As we look at bringing Entrada Ventures to into the world in the coming months. That’s a lot of what we’re working on now, which is what are those guardrails for our investment focus, and we spent about the last year defining those, and there are certain areas where it’s obvious we want to pursue others, whereas less clear, disruptive has become a buzzword, right. And that’s fine. Some of the areas, for example, you can be certain that some flavors of quantum computing are going to disrupt most industries out there, right? Imagine if you can get to the time where, you know, people say that the last few bitcoins by never be mind that they will be and then we’ll take just a few minutes, a few years from now. So quantum is going to have a tremendous impact on computing and AI, and nearly every business that relies on data from drug discovery and diagnostics to global shipping logistics and manufacturing. You name it, right look at how these mRNA based vaccines were able to come to market so quickly. Not quantum but but high speed computing and AI there. So that’s an area that we know is going to have a profound impact. How does it evolve as a business, right? In fact, a lot of Google’s quantum computing is happening right here in Santa Barbara, which you may not know about. So they’re in the same building as Ori on Alex Fong, my partner’s company was in which he sold to Juniper there. So buildings lucky, like Google, a lot of their quantum work right here in Santa Barbara. So that’s gonna have a profound impact, right? When you can do in seconds, what today takes computing months or years, right? That’s going to happen, what’s the interim right, where the business is now? How are you going to, for the next five to 10 years, enable the massively distributed traditional computing architecture on this planet, to interact with quantum servers in a way where they can get the benefit of having that that speed on their data sets? Right? Is there a Is there a middleware layer here that enables quantum to come into being right, is that the next Oracle is that the next Microsoft? There’s going to be one right so we look at technologies with truly disruptive potential in compute right, disruptive compute as well as in life sciences. When you look at the ability to very rapidly paced the process of drug discovery and diagnostics, that company in our portfolio light deck, right is developing a very rapid among other diagnostics, very rapid COVID test that they’re going to get down to two or three minutes here shortly in a disposable cartridge. And that essentially has the effect of uninterrupted our lives and letting everybody get back to it. So being able to measure disruption, in very human terms, as opposed to dollar terms, is really what fires us up.
John Corcoran 35:17
Hmm, very cool. We’re running a little little short on time here. But I want to circle back to one thing we touched on earlier in the interview, which is your involvement in the university and how being, you know, in academia, at the same time, kind of helps to keep you plugged into emerging technologies and the communities to talk a little bit about the decision to do that. And that role that that has played for you in the work that you do and investing and being part of the startup community?
Jason Spievak 35:46
Sure, yeah. And as we as investors look across this sort of greater California Central Coast, entrepreneurship community, most of what we’re seeing, has its roots or UCSB in one way or another. So the first, second or third or fourth generation coming out of UCSB. And so being able to stay close to the university, as a source of investment opportunity is critical. And I would think of this sort of our top of the funnel, right? It’s, it is early stage, very unproven conceptual stuff will go walk the halls in mechanical engineering, or computer science or materials, literally pushing doors open, and asking faculty what they’re working on. Right. And you’ve got folks in there who are working on doing very hard things, which is where innovation usually comes from. And so being able to serve, keep our fingers on the pulse at UCSB, and be the first group of folks. Also, nearly all Gauchos in our fund must hang in there somewhere. But that gives us the opportunity to be the first that they think of when thinking about, hey, do I have a business here? Who should I talk to? And so we sponsor the business planning competitions. I teach the entrepreneurship program there, along with David or Neto, and just a tremendous team that scaling entrepreneurship at UCSB in the technology management program and our new venture program there. But we stay very present there we hold VC office hours at co working locations here in town, as well as at UCSB, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. So that folks who were even just at the formative stages, whether it’s a graduate student or a faculty member thinking about, oh my gosh, solving this problem and technology that’s easy, raising money that terrifies me, right, so helping them bridge that gap. And we invest a lot of time and energy into being the first people that that those folks think of when they want to explore or whether they have a business opportunity. And that to me is the fun part of going from that zero to one. And that’s happening on university campuses every day.
John Corcoran 37:46
Yeah, it’s cool that you have found a way to marry your passion and your interests and vocation all together. also really cool. You know, living here in San Francisco Bay Area and meets. Uh, you know, I come across somebody, big VC funds have been around for a long time well established. And it’s cool to hear about one that is really, you know, building yet still kind of early stages. That’s really great. I want to wrap things up two questions.
John Corcoran 38:13
First, I’m a big fan of gratitude. So, you know, if you look around at your peers or others in your industry, however you want to define that. So it could be, you know, it could be other investors, other operators, you’ve been both an investor and an operator, however you want to define it. Who do you respect? Who do you admire? It could be someone you mentioned already or someone No.
Jason Spievak 38:34
There There are several folks. I mean, I’m truly I often find my find myself looking around the room going, I’m the weakest link here, I better not say anything. And I’ve been fortunate to have some really good friends and YPO some great leaders, I’ve met through that. On the capital side. It’s kind of a funny shout out because listening to probably we’ll get a chuckle with Invoca our first real institutional investor there with was Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures down in Los Angeles. And I will say it was it was tough love and tough lessons for me in the beginning. And I look back now on the dozen plus years that Mark and I have had the chance to work together. And we still talk, you know, at least weekly, one way or another I would say and sometimes daily when stuff’s going on, we need to work on. And we also as a result of that we brought Upfront Ventures in is the series a lead at peel sciences. So I’ve stayed close with Mark and the partners there. A lot of my toughest and most meaningful lessons I look back on now as an investor are come from interactions and guidance I got from Mark SR over the years so there are others not want to just call him out. There’s a lot of great folks I’ve had the chance to learn from but when you ask that question, that’s, that’s what immediately triggered for me there.
John Corcoran 39:49
So that’s great. That’s great. All right. And then last question, you know, let’s pretend we’re at awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys. you’re receiving an award for lifetime achievement for everything you’ve done up into this point. And you know, we all thank you family and say thank you to the family and friends. But in addition to that, who who are the mentors, professors, teachers, investors, who are the people you would acknowledge in your remarks?
Jason Spievak 40:12
There are several, I would start with my wife, frankly, we’ve been together since freshman year in the dorms at UCSB, and she’s put up with this craziness and instability and risk all her life with me. And you know, we were together when we were 18. So I have to tell her what a badass I used to be. She’s absolutely been my partner in all of this. And in times of kind of feast or famine and long cycles have no income and bedding at all here and there a few times. She’s really been my partner in our most successful startups, which are our three kids. I’m so in awe of our kids. I mentioned my son the other day. He’s an entrepreneur as well. He just graduated UCLA.
John Corcoran 40:55
Yeah, he’s doing some interesting stuff. Yeah, he’s doing some interesting stuff and a fan of the show. Thank you.
Jason Spievak 41:01
He is in fact the he was the first one I asked when John connected you and me together. So but there are other folks out there as well. There are some real luminaries in the capital, community and entrepreneurship community up in the bay area where I spent the first half of my career. Some of the partners at Broadview the investment bank, folks like Javier Rojas and Paul Chrissy and Steve Smith, and Greg Rossmann that taught me the basics of business when I was just a complete poser coming out of business school and hoping nobody noticed I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Those relationships and that support I got from the team at Broadview, Rick Dalton, and some of the other folks they are Trisha. So on arrow that was really formative for me and turning from a kid into a professional. And that was kind of around the time that felt like it started to happen. So I don’t know man, I can go on but it’s you know, for me, what’s been most important is being able to maintain those relationships for 20 30 years, I look back and I don’t think I have a single professional burned bridge out there anywhere. and work hard at that and, and try to create great outcomes for for other people. And this is, you know, fortunate here, then try to do that with a pretty unique structure where we don’t take any management fees, or comp or anything, we are ourselves among the largest LPs in the fund, and we don’t pay ourselves anything. So it’s really been a labor of love to scale, early stage entrepreneurial capital here on the Central Coast. And I just love the people that we’re doing it with, and I love that I’m here in Santa Barbara and a beautiful day and, and nothing feels like work anymore. That’s awesome.
John Corcoran 42:36
That’s awesome. And you’re doing good stuff, helping to read the world a little bit of wasted food and help with poverty.
Jason Spievak 42:45
Why on Apeel, that’s, that’s gonna be pretty big.
John Corcoran 42:47
Yeah, very cool. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you, Jason?
Jason Spievak 42:52
I think just come to entradaventures.com. And you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in then share with me why we only connect and I’m happy to and feel free to reach out if there’s any way that we can be of help to to you in any of your listeners.
John Corcoran 43:09
Awesome. All right. Thanks so much, Jason.
Jason Spievak 43:11
Thanks, John. Take care.
Outro 43:13
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.