geoffrey woo

In the final episode of season two of the Recession-Proof podcast, Alex and Kimia discuss the most impactful insights from previous episodes with Sam Mallikarjunan of OneScreen.ai, Geoffrey Woo of Anti Fund Investment Fund, Dan Chen of Deltec, Anup Singh of Illumio, Keith Masuda of Modern Treasury, Liz Christo of Stage 2 Capital, Kelly Battles of DataStax, and Ken Suchoski of Autonomous Research.

Each of them share advice on how to overcome the challenges of the current state of the market, prioritize investments, and grow your business through the end of 2022 and the start of 2023.

Here are a few highlights, check out the full episode for the rest… 

Why Sam Mallikarjunan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OneScreen.ai emphasizes the importance of connecting the finance and marketing functions

“I will say there is an adversarial relationship between finance and basically every other part of the company. But to treat the finance team and the finance leadership as if it's an adversarial relationship or to not actually proactively reach out to them, to me, that therefore has always been like, you're yelling at the person who's sitting in the top of the ship's sails being like, Hey, there's an iceberg up ahead, or, Hey, there's land over there that's just like filled with random gold. Why are we ignoring it? And we're not creating clear lines of communication in alignment with a partner whose objectives are fundamentally aligned with our own.”

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund explains why attention is more valuable than capital

“We all have 24 hours in a day times 8 billion people. That is the max limit of attention that exists in this world. You can print money, do weird financial engineering with money, but literally, the max attention cap of humanity is some 8 billion times 24 hours a day. Anything that can wield attention, I think, is going to be increasingly powerful over time.”

How Kelly Battles, a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, and Genesys thinks you can become a more well-rounded finance professional by…

“Get on a board if you can, even as a full-time executive, because it makes you a better executive. When you're a full-time exec, especially in an intense startup or private company scaling company, you can get tunnel vision. And I think having another company and seeing from a bird's eye view what they're going through gives you perspective, context, and learnings, and you start building your pattern recognition.”

Learn more about our season two guests:

• Sam Mallikarjunan on LinkedIn
• Geoffrey Woo on LinkedIn
• Dan Chen on LinkedIn
• Anup Singh on LinkedIn
• Keith Masuda on LinkedIn
• Liz Christo on LinkedIn
• Kelly Battles on LinkedIn
• Ken Suchoski on LinkedIn

Check out the full transcript here.

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player. Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

What do WhatsApp, Groupon and Uber have in common?

They all started during the 08/09 recession.

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund, believes a great business doesn’t need perfect economic conditions to launch: “it all starts with a core problem that you solve for your ideal customer.” 

In this episode of Recession-Proof, Geoffrey shares his fundamental startup principles that every entrepreneur should learn and how business owners can create an appealing narrative that will grab people's attention.

In this episode, Geoffrey and Kimia discuss:

• Startup fundamentals
• How your business should prepare for a recession
• Why your business needs an appealing narrative
• How Geoffrey de-risks new business ventures

Focusing on business essentials

An early-stage business operator should not bother with macro. It's impossible to track all market changes and come up with precise scenarios for each outcome. Better to focus on building a product people want and getting your first customers. Also, make sure you offer a product or service that is better and or cheaper than anyone else in the market.

“Just focus on making something people want and just focus on the fundamentals”

Create your narrative

Your product might be a game-changer. But if you don’t choose the right market and tell a story that will appeal to the emotions of your ideal customer, you won’t grow. Find the core narrative of your business that you want to share with the world and use tools to help you amplify and disseminate that message in the most efficient way possible.

“The core of marketing is just a scale of positive word of mouth”

Grabbing attention

All companies need two basic resources to grow: capital and attention. You could theoretically raise an endless amount of capital. But attention is scarce. The max attention cap of humanity is around 8 billion people, 24 hours a day. So anything that can wield attention is increasingly powerful.

“You want your customers to pull products from you versus you pushing products towards them”

For more episodes of Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or add our RSS feed to your favorite podcast player!

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.