Loup Ventures Podcast

Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded VidGrid. Top 3...

Dr. Kevin Luhman is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University and a renowned astronomer for having discovered both the third closest stellar system, now called Luhman 16, and the coldest brown dwarf star ever found, which...

TheLlamaSir is a content creator on YouTube and Twitch. He has over 1.1M subscribers on YouTube and his videos have been viewed over 100M times. TheLlamaSir primarily creates gameplay and guide videos for Fortnite, but has also created content for...

Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded...

Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded...

We pride ourselves on contrarian curiosity. When that curiosity leads us to new conclusions, we change our minds. As part of that exploration, the areas that we find most interesting evolve over time. What was once frontier eventually becomes commonplace...

Brave early adopters are the hallmark of an innovation set to create immense human value. In this story, the innovation is cutting-edge technology for interfacing with the nervous system, and the brave early adopter is Ian Burkhart. Ian, a young man...

CNBC reported on Friday that Amazon is building a health and wellness team inside its Alexa division to work on making Alexa a better tool for healthcare. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan recently announced plans for a joint healthcare company focused on reducing...

The core insight of science fiction is that all technologies live on a spectrum of good and evil, useful and harmful, and our perception of their place on that spectrum vacillates over time. It’s a truth that we've long known innately but are now being forcefully reminded of in our real world.

Fortnite is a battle royale game, where 100 players parachute onto an island with the goal of being the last one standing at the end. A "storm" serves as a boundary that closes in at set intervals, shrinking the playable area and forcing players closer and closer together. Players begin with no equipment and must scavenge around the island looking for weapons and supplies to give them an advantage over the opposition.

We’re bullish on esports and committed to learning more about the space. The following note is an introductory piece that ‘shows our work’ as we get up to speed. Given the recent explosion in popularity of esports leagues, we wanted to...

After our first visit to Amazon Go, Amazon's automated retail store in Seattle, we're not surprised to hear the company has plans to open up to six more cashierless convenience stores later this year. The automated retail space is getting more and more crowded, but the Go store suggests that Amazon has the pole position.

We believe that automation will make customer service — delivering empathy — the most in-demand job in tech. Humans will need to take advantage of the three core capabilities that robots can't compete with: creativity, community, and empathy, and The Empathy Economy will arise as a result of job loss from automation.

Last week we wrote about simplicity as a driving force behind the world’s biggest technology offerings. We’re extending our thoughts on simplicity into a series that explores the necessity of simplicity in frontier technology. First, we’ll dive into AR. Simplicity for AR in 2018 must start with a question: “What does AR do?” Not in the literal...

We’re investing in Enjoy as a counter-automation play on the future of retail. Enjoy enables empathic retail through a personalized product delivery and setup experience.

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, about five times bigger in that space than Walmart and its Jet.com subsidiary. Yet despite Amazon’s deep online roots and dominance over Internet shopping, I believe it will buy Target in 2018.

Simplicity is underappreciated. In many things. But most obviously right now in our world of consumer technology. Simplicity is a requirement of mass adoption. Look at the iPhone, Google, Amazon, and Uber as examples: The iPhone never shipped with a manual...

Conclusion. Get ready for another $10 a month drag on your credit card. It’s a rebranded, all in one Apple video and music offering in 2-3 years. An Emerging Area of Investment. It’s no secret that original content will be an emerging...

Every VC says they only invest in great founders, but the majority of venture-backed businesses still end in relative failure. Does that mean we as VCs are just bad judges of founders or do we not know what great founders look like? This is a question we’ve obsessed over since we started Loup Ventures — trying to define what makes a great founder and how to test for it. It’s hard.

When Apple launched the iPhone SDK in March 2008, they correctly anticipated a gold rush for iOS developers selling apps on the new App Store. Another gold rush is about to begin with the debut of iOS 11 and ARKit. Given...