Cindy Padnos (Illuminate Ventures) - An Enterprising Approach to Investment

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2013

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Illuminate Ventures Founder Cindy Padnos talks candidly with Stanford Consulting Professor Tom Kosnik about the value of leveraging advisor relationships, the sometimes surprising responsibilities of a CEO, and the fundamental differences between the roles of entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.3	You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.
0:18.6	It brings me great pleasure to introduce Cindy Podnos to you this evening.
0:23.6	Sydney is...
0:24.6	Cindy, Cindy is at her core, an entrepreneur.
0:27.6	Her first startup was actually spinning out of AT&T, the world's largest company at the time,
0:32.6	to start the Southern California branch office of a new subsidiary that was really getting into the online business at that time.
0:41.3	And then in 1999, she was the founder and CEO of a company called Vivant,
0:46.3	which she led to profitability and a successful exit when she was acquired by a publicly traded company.
0:53.0	And then in 2009, she founded Illuminate Ventures, which is a venture capital firm,
1:00.1	and we're going to focus our first set of questions on her Illuminate Ventures experience,
1:05.0	and we're going to stop, open it up to you all, and then we have some general questions
1:08.1	that we can do at the end.
1:09.1	But my goal is to not have me spending too much time asking questions because I'd like you all to have a chance to ask Cindy
1:15.1	what you want to ask her. So Cindy, what in the world possessed you to start a VC firm in 2009?
1:21.7	Probably the worst time in the history of mankind, right, to start this sort of a fund.
1:26.9	So I'm going to start just by saying that I was going to say thank you for inviting me to be here.
1:32.7	But after that question, I'm not sure I'm going to thank you anymore.
1:35.6	I'll be nice. I'll be nice.
1:37.4	So fundamentally, I was at point in my life where I knew that I really wanted to bring together
1:43.1	a whole variety of different skills
1:45.3	that I developed over time. I was in venture at the time, and I had had a career as an
	...

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