#015 "Gaby Goldberg - Breaking Into Venture with Chapter One"

The Brandon Zhang Show

On today’s episode I am interviewing Gaby Goldberg, Gaby is currently an investor at ChapterOne and studies Symbolic Systems, a major combining computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology at Stanford University. Chapter One is an early stage product fund focused on the future of work, developer tools and subscription businesses. On today’s episode, Gaby and I talk about curation in the age of information overload, how her background in philosophy influences how she analyzes companies and the Chapter One Product Club and Scouting Program.

Links:
1. Chapter One
2. Gaby's Medium
3. Gaby's Twitter
4. My Website
5. My Twitter

Show Notes:

For me, I'm kind of watching two different trends just personally. So first, I'm watching kind of the explosion of content and the growth of the Creator economy. So kind of along the lines of Li Jin’s passion economy thesis. And so around that I'm really excited to see new tools for creators to collaborate and monetize their passion. So I guess some examples there are Stir, which is like creator tools, Scout, which kind of gamifies fandom and allows you to put kind of all your fans in one place and then Coil which is sort of like a universal Patreon for the web.

So I was deep into constitutional law for four years and thought I wanted to go to law school. So that's how I entered college. As a philosophy major and was writing a ton of papers. And then, you know, obviously my major kind of shifted since then. But now I've channeled all of that love for writing into tech and business strategy.

A cool piece of advice I got a long time ago that I always think about is any section of the newspaper but just read, you know what catches your eye. And once you find patterns and like, where your eye always goes, then you're going to know what you're interested in.

And by the time it came time for me to pick my major, it totally fit into symbolic systems, which, as you said, is CS philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. So within that, I picked the human-computer interaction concentration. And in general, I just really like the philosophy and ethics behind how people interact and how people grow through technology and computational systems.

And there are so many aspects of college that, you know, affect you in such profound ways, but have nothing to do with the classes you take. So maybe it's, you know, the person who lives next to you and your dorm, or you know, someone you randomly bump into or meet in a random class. And it's all these little things that you totally can't plan for, but end up affecting your college career so much.

One thing that we've forgotten is the power of forgetting. We've talked about there are a huge cost and overload, but your brain is actually really amazing. And its power to forget things and prune away from the things that are less important and less valuable to you. And so if you allow that to happen, then you're kind of left with your own grounding values and the own topics that, you know, like resonate with you the most.