Mateo Vega-Sanz learned from an early age that he needed to be scrappy to be successful. As a student at Babson College in Massachusetts he taught himself to code and then dropped out of school to co-found LULARides, a peer-to-peer car sharing app for college students that picked up members on more than 500 campuses nationwide within the first five months. When the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed LULARides, Vega-Sanz sold his car to cover payroll, but he quickly pivoted the company to the world of insurance tech, and the company quickly raised $18 million in venture capital from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Strada and others.

On this episode of Something New, Vega-Sanz discusses the origins of LULA, working with his twin brother as a co-founder, how his scrappy/curious nature has helped the company endure through difficult times, the difference between millionaires and billionaires, and why he looks up to cosmetics heroine Estée Lauder.

Leeor and Steph also discuss some heuristics that seem counterintuitive to startup success.

Don’t forget to follow Leeor on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lmushin and Steph at https://twitter.com/stephmui. Learn more about the Something New podcast at https://somethingnewpod.com.

Brian McMahon doesn’t like pickles. He can’t stand them. But when it comes to Pickle - the New York-based peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace he co-founded in 2021 after shifting from the financial services industry to the world of tech - he can’t imagine anything better. On this episode of Something New, McMahon discusses making the career move as well as the origins and key early decisions of Pickle, how they pivoted from a polling app to a marketplace and why take it takes to build an early marketplace, and how the company’s daily life changed after closing on an $8 million seed round in October.

Steph and Leeor also discuss the tricky business of giving - and receiving - advice.

Don’t forget to follow Leeor on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lmushin and Steph at https://twitter.com/stephmui. Learn more about the Something New podcast at https://somethingnewpod.com.

Few business leaders have a story like Kat Cole, who rose from her days as a waitress at a Hooters restaurant in Jacksonville to where she sits now, as the Chief Operating Officer and President of AG1, a wildly popular supplement company worth a reported $1.2 billion. Cole took the AG1 job after previously serving as the President at Focus Brands, which owns popular brands such as Cinnabon, Schlotzskys, Auntie Anne’s, and Jamba Juice.

On this episode of Something New, Cole discusses how she climbed the corporate ladder at Focus, the four mindsets that all successful people have, why it’s not always better to hire externally, why she made the move to AG1.

Leeor and Steph also discuss their thoughts on a recent post from Charles Hudson, The Big Reset in Seed to Series A Graduation Rates is Real and Permanent.

David Rusenko’s path to entrepreneurship isn’t exactly the story of a wide-eyed kid becoming a successful Silicon Valley founder. But he’s used all of the skills he’s learned to become a runaway success, from the early days at Y Combinator to selling his website development company Weebly for a reported $365M to his new role as a founder at Leap Forward Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in early stage climate tech startups.

On this episode of Something New, Rusenko recounts what he learned from Paul Graham, working and hiring as a founder with non-traditional credentials, selling his company to Square, and what problems he hopes to solve in the climate crisis.

Leeor and Steph also discuss their thoughts on making the transition from VC to founder, and founder to VC.

If someone told you at a cocktail party that everyone on Earth had a disease that would kill every single person eventually, wouldn’t it be time to start some research into how to solve the problem? That’s the goal for Jacob Kimmel, the Co-Founder and Head of Research at New Limit, an ambitious biotechnology company focused on epigenetic reprogramming therapeutics to extend human health span, which raised a $40M Series A raise from Dimension, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund and others.

On this episode of Something New, Kimmel discusses making the leap from the days of earning his PhD at UCSF to becoming an entrepreneur, his thoughts on the current state of the biotech industry, why he’s been drawn to the research of human longevity, and the history of the company, which counts Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and VC Blake Byers among its co-founders.