Venture Everywhere Podcast: Jenny Fielding and Scott Hartley
Jenny Fielding and Scott Hartley, co-founders and Managing Partners of Everywhere Ventures, chat about Jenny’s new book Venture Everywhere.
In this special episode of Venture Everywhere, co-founders and Managing Partners of Everywhere Ventures, Jenny Fielding and Scott Hartley, turn the tables, as Scott interviews Jenny about her new book, Venture Everywhere. Jenny discusses the book’s unique blend of travel, entrepreneurship, and personal growth, featuring powerful stories of founders from around the world who have overcome immense challenges to build successful companies with conviction. They share experiences in building Everywhere Ventures and the borderless spirit of entrepreneurship, redefining what it means to adapt and succeed globally.
In this episode, you will hear:
Jenny's motivation for the book and its connection to Everywhere Ventures' mission.
How technology has enabled startups to thrive regardless of location.
The benefits and challenges of building companies outside traditional hubs.
AI’s impact and new tools in streamlining the writing process.
Constraints in traditional publishing and book classification.
Key entrepreneurial characteristics.
Embracing multiple identities instead of predefined roles.
The resurgence of Scott's book The Fuzzy and The Techie and its enduring relevance.
Read more from Jenny about her book here.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Scott: Hi everybody, this is an incredibly special episode we have here. I'm Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures here with my colleague, Jenny Fielding, also co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures. We're here to talk today about Jenny's new book called Venture Everywhere.
00:00:51 Jenny: I love being called your colleague.
00:00:54 Scott: Yeah, I was like, “Gosh, what do I say?” This is somebody I talked to 40 times a day for the last seven years.
00:01:02 Jenny: I love it..
00:01:03 Scott: Zoom calls, WhatsApps, everything in between.
00:01:06 Jenny: Yeah. Well, it's fun to be doing this because I feel like I'm always interviewing people on our podcast. So it's fun to be in the hot seat today.
00:01:15 Scott: Taking a step back, what motivated you to write this book as a person with a number of things already on your plate, teaching at Cornell, teaching at Columbia, running Everywhere Ventures? What inspired this extra project?
00:01:31 Jenny: Because we needed more projects.
00:01:33 Scott: Yeah.
00:01:34 Jenny: The truth is, this is the thesis of our fund, which is we believe innovation is everywhere and we want to be with the best founders wherever they are. And so I think in the last couple of years, especially it started to weigh on me that all the stories we hear are pretty similar.
00:01:50 Jenny: We know a lot about Mark Zuckerberg. We know a lot about Bill Gates. We know a lot about Elon Musk. But what about all the luminary founders that are building these incredible companies and have these really inspirational stories that grew up far from the glow of Silicon Valley and all these US destinations.
00:02:08 Jenny: So the book is really a celebration of global entrepreneurship and then what we can all learn from these inspirational founders building companies around the world. What inspired me is I just wanted to share these stories and get them out to the world because sometimes we don't hear about these people and that was the inspiration.
00:02:28 Scott: As we were going through the conversation a few years back around naming Everywhere Ventures when we were departing from our early beta name of The Fund, The Fund New York, The Fund LA, The Fund London, The Fund Everywhere, I remember this conversation about New York and just the underpinnings of New York as a cosmopolitan city that embodies the whole globe and the backdrop of The Fund, which started as 50 founders and operators in New York City.
00:02:58 Scott: But those 50 founders and operators were actually global citizens. They were New York citizens, but they were from everywhere. And then the tug of our deal flow that started to be pulled from Brazil and all these extraneous places that were outside of New York. And we kept running all those SPVs and saying, “Gosh, we're breaking our rule over and over again. Maybe we need to rebrand The Fund as Everywhere.”
00:03:18 Scott: But I love the fact that as a New Yorker and as a global citizen, these aren't mutually exclusive things. And your book is so deeply tied to both New York and then your incredible background traveling the world, living in all these different places.
00:03:33 Scott: Maybe you could walk some of the listeners through, even though you've spent a lot of your life in New York, all these places that you've traveled to, all these places that you've lived, and just you being such a global citizen yourself.
00:03:45 Jenny: I think to your first point, if you invest in a company and one founder is based in Austin, Texas, and one is in Singapore, and one is in London, where is that company based? So it might be domiciled in Delaware, which none of us has ever been to. So random, but where's that company from?
00:04:03 Jenny: And so that idea of breaking things down and the theme of the book is how we all have to figure out how we can interact with people around the world, have empathy for different characteristics and traits. And I think a lot of that was cultivated in me as you might remember from the intro, I grew up at my grandparents place in Brooklyn.
00:04:23 Jenny: I had these very charismatic characters of grandparents and the book starts with me overhearing my grandmother talking about a trip she's going for a few months throughout Europe. And I decide there and then that I'm going to get on that trip despite the fact that I have school and I have parents that may have other ideas, but spend a few months figuring out how to get on that trip, which I ultimately did.
0:04:45 Jenny: I was eight years old. It was totally eye-opening. And it was just me and my grandma rambling through Europe, not having a plan, showing up in places. I learned what it was like to explore and what it was like to not speak a language and to have to figure out how to order dinner. And so that was really where it all started, in my grandparents' house.
00:05:06 Jenny: But I think once you experience global travel and cultures and all those things, for many of us, it's just hard to go back. And so that was a good departure point for me of inspiring me to really just push my limits, go places.
00:05:21 Jenny: I've lived in multiple countries. I've traveled to a hundred, but I think it kind of all came back to just having someone push me at a young age into uncomfortable and wild and wonderful situations.
00:05:34 Scott: For those of you who haven't read the book yet, absolutely, you should pick it up. It's a tapestry of woven together stories of Jenny's travels with founder characteristics and stories of founders that exhibit these various characteristics that make them perform well and make them successful, like having moxie or having some of the chops to build big businesses.
00:05:55 Scott: But I wonder as the eight-year-old that would go to Brooklyn and hang out with your grandparents with the pair of Dobermans and the Ruby ring and a very whimsical fashion sense. I get of your grandmother as you guys traipsed around Europe and I could almost visualize her in her big glasses and her bright pants.
00:06:13 Scott: Both the combination of nature and nurture in the sense that you had the moxie to want to go on that trip and the bravery and the courage to want to put yourself out of your comfort zone, that’s probably something that just comes from Jenny and who you are.
00:06:27 Scott: But then also the coolness of your grandmother to give you the hotel key and say, “Hey, look, I'm not going to chaperone you the whole time that you're here as an eight year old. Here's your hotel key. Just run around the hotel and make friends and go eat food when you're hungry and come back when you're tired.”
00:06:41 Scott: And so there's an element of nurture as well that’s teaching and enabling somebody to have that courage and have more moxie and get out of their comfort zone more and more and more. You had some leanings in this direction, but then you were also encouraged by some of your surroundings.
00:06:57 Scott: And tying that now to your role as a teacher and steward of new entrepreneurs at Cornell, how much of this is nature and nurture and how do you teach these characteristics like moxie?
00:07:08 Jenny: I think within most of us, we have many different characteristics and many different things that pull us. And for me, you might think I went on this trip, I was just this natural, eccentric person and became an entrepreneur. Well, that's actually not true.
00:07:23 Jenny: I went to a pretty buttoned up private school in New York City. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in finance. I was on a very different path. And during that time, I think I felt a lot of conflict. Not that I didn't enjoy any of those things. I actually loved law school. Actually really loved working at JP Morgan and in Finance.
00:07:44 Jenny: But I think that there were parts of me that felt a little bit out of sorts. As an example, I was always the wacky person at JP Morgan, who, we had to wear suits, but I would always come in wearing my red high top sneakers. And everyone just be like, “Oh my God, Jenny. You and the sneakers.” And I would always get in trouble for it.
00:08:04 Jenny: I just had to express myself. Deep down, I had both these sides and you probably see it play out at Everywhere. I'm very structured in some ways and like a lot of process and kind of want things done a certain way.
00:08:17 Jenny: And then there's other things that I'm much more creative on or whimsical or fly by the seat of my pants. I don't think everyone is one characteristic and I list these characteristics in the book as some of the things that we all have within us and that we either nurture or we don't.
00:08:33 Jenny: But I think I've had a lot of that push and pull within me of a traditional career, a traditional life and something that was much more eclectic. I think you see that in entrepreneurs as well. They're very driven in many ways, but oftentimes they're the outliers or they don't exactly fit in or they have a chip on their shoulder that irritates other people or they're a little salty.
00:08:56 Jenny: But they also have to be charismatic and they also have to be exciting to be able to hire the best talent and rally their team. And so I think true entrepreneurs have to pick and choose amongst these characteristics and turn them up and down based on the situation. So I think that was something that I learned early on as well.
00:09:15 Scott: I think the thing that I learned from the book that was interesting and cool, and I think I've done this in my own life as well, is using travel and sometimes getting out of your comfort zone or getting to a new place as an escape valve that gives you a freedom to experiment or try new things or the straight and narrow path.
00:09:32 Scott: And then these escape valves that then unlock this whole other unfurling of characteristics that you say, “Oh gosh, these are actually maybe more authentic to who I am or who I want to become. And I'm going to start to deviate down these paths.” And I think a lot of the stories in your book and the things that we've talked about, they resonate with me too.
00:09:50 Scott: And I think it took me a long time and a number of years to find the self-confidence to actually self-identify as an entrepreneur. And even in the course of building Everywhere with you, at the early days of imposter syndrome or feeling like, “Can we do this?”
00:10:06 Scott: And I think looking back and thinking back to all these prior roles at Google and places like that, realizing even though these were fairly entrepreneurial ecosystems, I was always the black sheep and always the person not quite following the rules, always getting a little bit in trouble, always getting a slap on the wrist.
00:10:23 Scott: And I think that all of us when you look at the commonalities across the Everywhere family, we take for granted sometimes the fact that we surround ourselves with hundreds of people that are all these folks that left the comfortable lives of JP Morgan and places like that to go try to build audacious things out in the wild.
00:10:40 Jenny: I think one of the messages has to be that things aren't so binary that we all have or we can cultivate or it's okay to have these different personas and these different lights. It's funny, like I left a job in law and I went on this crazy six month adventure in India. I don't know if you've gotten to the India chapter yet.
00:10:58 Jenny: Previously, I'm wearing a suit to work and looking at case law and then I'm sleeping on a tent and going to see the Dalai Lama in this teeny little mountain town and it's totally natural to me. I think maybe one of my unique characteristics is to be able to live these parallel existence, but it wasn't so shocking to me to have that.
00:11:20 Jenny: And I hope that's part of the message of the book is we can be whimsical and experimental and adventurous. And we can also hold down a nine to five job and be responsible and raise a family and do all those things.
00:11:32 Jenny: I feel the world wants to put tags on us. You are X and you act like Y. That's so boring. I don't feel like that's how people are. We're so multi-dimensional and we should celebrate that and people as opposed to trying to put people in boxes. You and I have never fit in boxes. Honestly, it's cool to be able to be comfortable in those environments.
00:11:53 Scott: I think that's what's so cool about this book is it's a bit of a manifesto for being a pluralistic human that has these various pieces and not needing to self identify as one or the other. And I love this raw adventurous spirit in the book and so many of these stories.
00:12:09 Scott: The one that sticks out to me, you just alluded to going to India and needed to get to your yoga class, riding on the handlebars of your roommate's bike through the countryside, barreling down these roads in, was it Mysore?
00:12:23 Jenny: Yeah, dodging the cows at five in the morning.
00:12:26 Scott: And then the other very poignant scene that I remember was the roof in Tibet.
00:12:32 Jenny: In northern India.
00:12:33 Scott: And basically needing to sleep in the old quarters of a tent on the rooftop, but then needing to keep up your yoga practice and starting to do that with conviction every morning and I think this actually is a parallel to entrepreneurship. You sort of had a vision and had something that you were committed to and started doing.
00:12:52 Scott: And then a number of people started to follow and a number of people started to show up at the roof and perform yoga with you. And you were the ringleader of this practice at sunrise on your rooftop. And I think that was so metaphorical to me of entrepreneurship writ large of just having something that you are committed to that you start doing.
00:13:12 Scott: And at first it's an oddball thing and people don't understand it. And then two, three, four people show up and then ten people show up and then suddenly it's a thing. And suddenly you're at the helm of this new movement. And that story in the book just paralleled, I think, so many things that we have in our entrepreneurial worlds.
00:13:30 Jenny: Yeah. But getting back to your point on how we have all these different personas. And actually, it reminded me a little bit about your book, which I feel like is making a comeback right now.
00:13:39 Jenny: The book is The Fuzzy and the Techie, you can talk about it better than I can, but it's really this idea that we don't have to put ourselves in one of these camps and that the world really needs both the soft skills and the hard skills. I think that this is just another manifestation of it is through these characteristics.
00:13:58 Scott: We can go into process and how it goes to write these books. But thinking back to 2016 and the cafe in Brooklyn that I went to repeatedly and the cold dark winter months of January, February to get the first draft of the book down.
00:14:12 Scott: But yeah, The Fuzzy and the Techie, really is sort of about human skills in the world of AI and sort of this need for the timelessness of the study of liberal arts and literature, history, philosophy, psychology, all of these things as lenses to evaluate the timely.
00:14:30 Scott: And so actually in this course that I've been teaching at Virginia Tech, to your point about this comeback of these concepts, we talk a lot about the metaphor of a train station and the train cars coming through the train station change every month, every year.
00:14:44 Scott: For us sitting in DC, we saw the early internet and then we saw the app store and we saw the sharing economy and we saw blockchain and ICOs and now we see gen AI and it'll be something different two years from now.
00:14:56 Scott: Those train cars that are barreling through the station are always new and they're always changing and they can be intimidating. But the station or the lenses through which you're evaluating all these technologies and all these entrepreneurs are through these timeless lenses of what does the world need?
00:15:11 Scott: Where is the world going? What are the characteristics of the founder? And I think a lot of the topics to your book, we tend to talk about Venture Capital, not as finance, but really as psychology. And as somebody who grew up around a lot of psychologists, this is something probably as near and dear to your heart as it is to mine.
00:15:28 Scott: What are the characteristics that we look for in these train car drivers, whatever the train car that's coming through, whether it's about CRISPR and biotech or it's about gen AI, it's really these founder characteristics.
00:15:41 Scott: And we're using the lens and the modalities of the soft skills and it's sort of the fuzzy, not so much the techie to think about what are the motivations of this person? What are their values? How are they storytelling? How are they going to be able to hire and fundraise and all these things?
00:15:57 Scott: And I think maybe you could talk in your book about some of these characteristics that you highlight. We've alluded to moxie, but some of the other ones that really make for a successful entrepreneur.
00:16:08 Jenny: I think you mentioned this idea of resilience. In the book, I call it elasticity. So instead of using resilience, I think of that founder who has to react to every situation and not melt down and not blow up and not get emotional, but has to just deal with lots of different things coming in all the time.
00:16:28 Jenny: And so one of the founders that I profile is running a really cool language learning company and he's from Ukraine. And as you can imagine, he built this company that's now a unicorn or will be a unicorn, a soonicorn.
00:16:42 Jenny: He's got hundreds of employees and many of them, because it's language learning. You can imagine the company is very diverse with people from all over the world. And many of them were living in Kiev and Ukraine. When the war broke out, all of a sudden this founder had to figure out how he was going to get his employees out of the country.
00:17:00 Jenny: So this is not really what your average CEO has to deal with, but he really had no choice. And so he tells this story, which he got choked up because it was so emotional where he was in his car, driving around, picking up his employees and driving them to the Polish border.
00:17:18 Jenny: And once he'd gotten everyone out, he went around to their homes and started picking up their pets, their cats and their dogs. Again, this is a software entrepreneur who's been running a company and all of a sudden what comes at him is so unexpected and he has to just show some different characteristics.
00:17:35 Jenny: And I love talking about how you have to be adaptable and resilient in any given situation to adapt to what's required. And so hopefully the stories show that resilience isn't just you have to be tough, but you just have to be very elastic in the moment and reactive to what's coming at you.
00:17:55 Jenny: And as an entrepreneur, every day, there's just lots of stuff happening. So that's one of the ones that I really like and I think we can all incorporate into our daily lives.
00:18:04 Scott: I think one of the things that's been so interesting over the last number of years is realizing that the process itself of closing a deal, the process itself of evaluating company is in fact part of the test..
00:18:17 Scott: And we're evaluating through that whole process, the ways in which somebody navigates conflicts, the ways in which they pick up the phone and call us rather than pawning us off to the lawyer.
00:18:28 Scott: And these micro moments of conflict, whether it's a debate about pro rata rights or about a side letter, all of these are junctures where the founder is stating their level of values, their style of communication. And these are all moments of reflection for us as we consider wiring the money to this company.
00:18:47 Scott: But I love that concept of elasticity and thinking about how we train for that. Also to the point of your book, even those of us that have come from stable, good backgrounds, we've put ourselves into points of adversity.
00:19:01 Scott: And I think one of the things that we really evaluate for founders is it's not so much you could come from a place where you have a chip on your shoulder and something to prove – it's not judgmental about when and how and where you got to where you are. You could have had the great college diploma and worked at whatever investment bank.
00:19:17 Scott: But if you've put yourself into points of adversity and you've challenged yourself on those front lines, those are the tests, maybe, where you've earned some mettle or you've proven that you have this element of grit or resilience, even if you've come from this background or that background.
00:19:31 Scott: I think reading the stories about all these entrepreneurs in your book, they're not from a uniform background. They're not from a uniform place. They're from all over the world. They come from all different walks of life. But I think what they have in common is this aspect of mettle and taking risk and developing that muscle of resilience.
00:19:48 Jenny: Yeah. Another one of the founders that I interviewed, which I absolutely loved. The founder grew up in a small town in Pakistan. His family hadn't been educated. They ran a small grocery store and they were determined to change that for the next generation and get their kids educated, even their daughter, which was pretty great.
00:20:06 Jenny: Their son did great in school and he got an opportunity at the age of 16 to go to UCLA. Now he'd never been on an airplane. He'd never left the town and he shows up in Los Angeles as a 16 year old, totally shell shocked and has to navigate that.
00:20:23 Jenny: If you can imagine, it was really hard for him. He didn't have any money. That was strange and stressful. He had to have side jobs. But just small things of interacting with such a different culture and showing up there and having to figure it out, I always think about what that would have been like.
00:20:38 Jenny: Anyway, this founder stayed in the US for a while. Unfortunately, we lost him to the Middle East where he ended up starting a company, one of the most successful companies in the Middle East called Careem that was sold to Uber for about $3 billion.
00:20:52 Jenny: And so to think about where he came from, his path, which was not linear and it was not easy. And his time in the US, he tells some very challenging stories about going through the tech bubble and then ultimately ending up where he did. It's kind of an amazing journey for one person.
00:21:08 Jenny: I think about myself. I grew up on the same block I live now. And I think about his journey. I’m just in awe. It was fun for me to tease out some of these stories and talk to some of these founders. I will say I interviewed a lot of founders and a huge number of them, very successful.
00:21:28 Jenny: Some have taken their companies public, sold them for tons of money. As they're telling me these stories, as I'm interviewing them and recording them on Zoom, the number of them that had tears in their eyes, choked up, got emotional and it was very unexpected for such successful people.
00:21:44 Jenny: But when you start listening to the stories of where they came from and how they got there, it does make sense. It was one of the most surprising things about writing the book because when you read in TechCrunch and all the articles of success, you don't hear about that. You don't hear about how emotional it is that they had to go through all of this. That was pretty surprising to me.
00:22:05 Scott: On that note, I'd love to talk a little bit about the process of writing a book because this is a black box that a lot of people aspire to put pen to paper, to work on a book. I think I introduced you to Jimmy Soni, a friend who's written three books.
00:22:19 Scott: Jimmy's latest book was on the PayPal mafia. And I remember when I sent Jimmy a copy of my book when it came out in 2017 and he wrote me back and said, “Congratulations. Out of a hundred phone calls I've had about people who wanted to write books, this is the only one that I've received and you're the only one who actually did it.” I think the second one who did it was you.
00:22:38 Jenny: Wow. He said the same thing to me.
00:22:41 Scott: I had to laugh about that, but the process is solitary. It's all consuming. It's deeply intellectually challenging. I love the fact that even between two entrepreneurial people in ourselves, I remember in the early part, he came to me and he said, “What's the process of writing a book?” And I laid out this ABCD map.
00:23:01 Scott: And to your innovative entrepreneurial credit, I think you did none of those things. You just broke the mold and did it completely the Jenny way, which I would love to hear about. So maybe talk a little bit about your process. So post motivation to write the book, what were those next steps for you?
00:23:18 Jenny: It was actually an easy book to write in many ways because these stories are flowing out of me. I love telling people about the adventures I have. I love reliving them. And so it was very joyful to write.
00:23:31 Jenny: I had a lot of people say you need to have four hours a day in a dark room with no one bothering you. And it's going to be really intense and you're going to have days where you can't write. And I was like, “No, that didn't happen to me.” It was super fun. I think honestly, there's 12 countries that I go to and I think I wrote outlines for 24. So there's lots more stories in me.
00:23:53 Scott: When's the sequel coming out? That's the question.
00:23:55 Jenny: It was just really fun, which I'm not saying that that is how it will be for everyone. But I think I was lucky and then I was just writing something from the heart.
00:24:03 Jenny: What I will say is that now is an amazing time to write a book in many ways because the tools out there are just phenomenal. I was interviewing founders. I was able to do that on Zoom that was transcribed by AI. I actually can't type, right? I'm a hunt-and-pecker typer so this was great.
00:24:22 Jenny: I got the whole transcript and then I could throw it into whatever the LLM of the day is and get it organized in some paragraphs and then edited and all these things. So it's definitely not easy, right? Not saying that. But the tools out there are just mind blowing of what you can do. So I think that really helped as well.
00:24:43 Jenny: The publishing process, we'll need a whole different episode for that because that is not only a black box, but just a messy, messy situation. And publishing is really changing quickly. And so we'll see what happens there.
00:24:56 Jenny: But the whole thing of like an agent or no agent and how you get your books in different places, it's really intense. But I was lucky I had a good experience. I got connected with great people. But if you want to write a book, you need to lean on your community to fast track you to information because there's not a lot online.
00:25:14 Jenny: A lot of authors don't actually want to share, which I thought was weird. They don't want to share their contacts or their experiences. That was weird. But I think that it's a good time to write a book in many ways.
00:25:28 Scott: Yeah. The tools are absolutely amazing. It's true. It's interesting. It's such an overwhelming process, but it's not dissimilar from starting a company. And I remember talking to a friend of mine in Monterrey, Mexico a number of years back, and family does all sorts of things, metal parts, automotive manufacturing, huge business and you say, “How did you guys possibly get into that?”
00:25:50 Scott: And you realize that this business has been going for a hundred years and it's a hundred years of compounding and compounding and compounding of know how and the level of complexity that even we see with Everywhere Ventures when we look at our internal systems and you say, “Gosh. How did we get from a single idea to all of the resources that we have?”
00:26:08 Scott: It's daunting sometimes to pick up a physical copy of a book and say, “How did you get here?” But I think if you can deconstruct that process, and I think we had similar processes and how we did this. You sort of have a number of concepts and you have a number of people that you're going to interview.
00:26:23 Scott: And then you're using tools like Zoom to record the interview and some transcription service to turn that audio into text. And then you have a block of text that you're able to synthesize.
00:26:34 Scott: And for my book, one point of feedback that an editor gave to me that was very helpful was to find the cousin books of the book that you want to write. So find alternatives that are of a similar ilk and read those books for content, but then also read them for structure.
00:26:50 Scott: And what this person told me was go into the margins of, if it's a Michael Lewis book or it's a Malcolm Gladwell or whoever inspires you to write of a certain style and go paragraph by paragraph and say, “What is this paragraph about? Okay, this is an example paragraph. This is a paragraph proving the example. This is a second paragraph proving the example again.”
00:27:10 Scott: And you just sort of read for structure. And then you realize that a Michael Lewis book or a Malcolm Gladwell book or any of these books is very formulaic in how it's laid out. And each chapter is 3 stories and 10 examples.
00:27:22 Scott: And then you say, “Gosh, I now know the formula to deconstruct a 300 page book. It's just this many interviews and this many proof points and this many chapters.” And then, not unlike a startup or not unlike any business, you can take apart those pieces and they become a little bit less daunting to try to go tackle.
00:27:38 Jenny: Yeah. I think what’s challenging for me is this is three books in one. I was like, “I'm only going to write one book in my life, so I might as well cram it all in.” So it's going back to like what we talked about at the beginning of like people want to put tags on you and put you in a box.
00:27:52 Jenny: Is this book a travel journal? Is this book a venture capital book? What is this book? And it's a lot of things rolled into one and it's hard to know what shelf it goes on. And that's the number one no-no that the publishers will tell you. The first thing they want to know is what shelf does this go on? Anyone else who's out there writing a book, I don't necessarily recommend going your own way.
00:28:14 Scott: One growth hack that I've shared with you before, but it's what shelf does Venture Everywhere go on? It goes on the very front of house shelf at every bookstore. You find it in the back corner, you find it in the section of travel where it should be moved to is the front table, right front and center. This is what I try to do with mine whenever I encounter it in an airport or someplace.
00:28:34 Jenny: I love it. I'm trying to get mine in the airport. That's a whole black box. If anyone knows how to do that, that's a mystery to me. But it was funny because when I opened up the pre-sales, all of you pre-ordered the book, which was so lovely. And so then it rose to number one in venture capital.
00:28:49 Jenny: And I remember talking to my editor who was quite pleased and my heart sunk actually when I saw that. And you'd be like, “Well, why? That's a great thing.”
00:29:00 Jenny: And all I could picture was all the like tech bros or something getting the book and being like, okay, this isn’t a venture capital book. This isn't about frameworks for investing. This is about this crazy woman, Jenny, traveling around the world, living in a tent in northern India.
00:29:15 Jenny: So I think I had a moment of feeling a little bit insecure about the category that it was making the rounds in. So I actually don't think it really fits in any of those categories. It's a mystery to me as well, but hopefully people enjoy it because it's an adventure. Hopefully it has some fun principles that you can take from it. And really just inspiration because the founders are really the stars of the show.
00:29:41 Scott: I have to say I'm halfway through it and I'm loving it. It's full of really fun stories. I think it gives a lot of context to your life and your set of experiences and set of accomplishments, which is really fun to read about. And so even as somebody who knows you very well, I'm loving the book.
00:29:57 Scott: In sort of wrap up for our speed rounds, a couple of questions for you. So I know that in the book you've lived in Amsterdam, you've lived in Mysore, India, you've lived in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Of all the places you've lived, what's a place that you have not lived that you would add to that list?
00:30:15 Jenny: Yeah, it's funny. Someone asked me that at another event. And I think I said Brazil. I really like Latin cultures, the warmth of the people there. So I think having a stint in Brazil, which is a chapter where I interview one of our amazing portfolio company founders. So I think it would be Brazil, but we'll see.
00:30:36 Scott: And other than your book, I know you're a prolific reader. It's something that people may not know about you, but what's another book that is on your shelf that you're currently enjoying?
00:30:45 Jenny: Your book in Japanese.
00:30:49 Scott: You just like the hot pink cover. I know.
00:30:53 Jenny: I love your book, Scott. I do think it's so fun. You were so ahead of your time, talking about the impact of AI and really just how we need to have multiple of these characteristics within us and not be so binary. And now it's really coming to fruition with all the conversations around ethics and around are jobs going to exist, are we going to exist?
00:31:14 Jenny: So a lot of existential questions. So I do encourage people to pick up your book and hope it's having a good moment of resurgence.
00:31:21 Scott: Thanks. Yeah. It's funny that if my book were a startup, I would have run out of money a long time ago. But because the book is just quietly sitting there, it's shelf stable, it doesn't go anywhere, it can still have this perennial ability to stay relevant as a time capsule.
00:31:36 Scott: But I really empathize and it resonates with that feeling of insecurity when a book comes out. It's really a time capsule. It's a set of interviews. It's a set of statements that you make and something that you don't really get to update. And so it is something that has to stand the test of time, which is both fun, but also scary.
00:31:55 Scott: And finally, for somebody that's created so many different things, we didn't even get to touch on all the classes that you teach for Columbia and Cornell students. What's your productivity hack other than waking up at four in the morning when I get emails from you?
00:32:11 Jenny: I'd say it's own your own time. You can pack a lot in, but if you don't want to take a meeting, don't take the meeting, don't schedule it. And so I've just gotten better, I think, at saying no, or just saying, I'm just not in position right now to get on this call. So that's my current productivity hack is reclaiming your time a little bit.
00:32:31 Jenny: We take a million calls, we're super busy, and we love being out there and talking to people. But a lot of people ask us favors. Could you talk to this person, you got to this one. And of course, we want to.
00:32:41 Jenny: But I think having the ability, which is really hard, I think for a long time, I couldn't do it, but really having the ability to just say, I'm just not in position to do that right now. That's my hack.
00:32:51 Scott: Yeah. That really resonates. Some days are better than others, but occasionally you kind of have a moment where you say, I don't need to be a victim of my own calendar today. I could just cancel this and focus on the things that seem to really matter.
00:33:03 Scott: And finally, where can listeners find you other than on Twitter, LinkedIn, and via your book?
00:33:09 Jenny: Those are good places, but yeah, here's the book. So shout out to my friend Lynn, who made the cover for me. She's very, very talented and amazing. And it was exactly the cover that I wanted. So yeah, you can find me everywhere.
00:33:24 Scott: And is that a Joshua Tree Road or where is that? Do you know?
00:33:27 Jenny: I'll never tell.
00:33:29 Scott: Never tell. Okay. Well, with that, we'll leave on a note of mystery. We're awaiting the sequel with bated breath. And Jenny, thank you so much for being a guest on your own podcast.
00:33:40 Jenny: Thanks for having me. I love it.
00:33:44 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that invests everywhere. We're community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.