Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This is the final episode of my show on TCTV, “In The Studio.” The final guest is a good friend, Parth Shah (no relation), an engineer with VMware, and before that, at Yahoo! Parth combines the precision of CMU CS graduate’s take on web development with a hacker mentality, and has the rare skill of being able to explain some of the most complex enterprise IT concepts to those who don’t have as much context — such as me! In this short conversation, Parth shares with us his work at VMware and his generalized thoughts on how the enterprise stack is being disrupted today. This video would be a great primer for anyone who wants to begin to learn about the enterprise world.

As an added bonus, Parth and I have spent a few months collaborating on a post about the enterprise IT stack, written in lay-terms so that a wider audience can learn more about it. We are proud to publish this post today, which you can read here.

Finally, thank you for being a loyal viewer of “In The Studio” as it ends today (my Sunday column, Iterations, will continue). In the span of 18 months, the show ran for 70 consecutive weeks, producing 70 episodes featuring Silicon Valley’s up-and-coming founders, legendary venture capitalists, emergent seed investors, and focused on producing quality, primary-source content in today’s noisy tech media landscape. For me, “In The Studio” was a terrific platform to get to meet people who excelled at what they do. As someone who is new to the technology world, doing the show was a crash-course in learning by conversation, and making those conversations public will hopefully provide insight to others who are looking to learn. I have worked to organize and reproduce all the videos, which you can access here. This is a great privilege, so thanks again to all those who participated.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This is the penultimate episode of “In The Studio.” The show, which features developers and entrepreneurs working on enterprise technology, will be ending. This week’s guest is Varun Singh, CEO and founder of ScaleArc, a young startup that began in India but registered as a U.S. company with designs to expand to this country once it got off the ground in Mumbai. ScaleArc operates in the space of database infrastructure and sits between apps and database services — what Singh calls as SQL/NoSQL hybrid. Whereas Amazon Web Services would require integration and does not allow for multiple masters across multiple zones, ScaleArc offers a more distributed approach, especially in an age when certain sites (such as gaming portals) cannot afford even the slightest cloud outage.

In this short video, Singh and I discuss a range of topics that would be of interest to technical founders, especially those living outside the U.S. First, Singh incorporated in Delaware but founded his company in India. Technical talent is cheaper in India, and this allows his team to have more iterative cycles, whereas in the Valley, his runway would have been cut from 2.5 years to maybe a year. Singh then started shuttling back and forth between India and the Valley, and found that as long as he could give potential customers the right to try before they bought, the customers didn’t care where the company was located or headquartered. This is a trend I’m seeing on the enterprise technology and SaaS space, where foreign companies are now coming to the Valley and actually disrupting what the Valley considers to be upstarts.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Those who know in the Valley know the name Sam Pullara. Whether it was his time as a repeat entrepreneur and technical founder, or stints as an EIR at some of the Valley’s most premier venture capital firms, or his time as a lead technologist at two of the largest tech companies in the Valley (most recently at Twitter), Pullara has occupied nearly every seat at the table throughout his career. Now, after leaving Twitter and after years of being an angel investor, Pullara has moved himself and his blog, Java Rants, over to the venture capital side as a Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto, a firm which started back in the early 1960s and has focused on investing in SaaS, infrastructure, and other fundamental technologies.

I invited Pullara into the Studio because he isn’t the type to seek out attention, and I let the cameras run longer to capture the full arc of his career. He has started two companies, both of which were acquired, has been an EIR and consultant with Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, was the Chief Scientist at Yahoo!, and most recently was part of a small, senior team that helped rebuild Twitter’s codebase. In this discussion, Pullara details his career moves, what he learned being a technical operator, a technical founder, and now a venture capitalist (including angel investments), with the hopes of providing an example for many engineers out there today starting out in their careers. Specifically, Pullara touches on how his technical ability gave him C-level access to company leaders to pitch solutions directly to them. On a different track, he also (honestly) explains his lessons as an angel investor and shares details into the unique capital and LP structure of Sutter Hill Ventures, where he is now investing into the next wave of technology startups.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” ends April by welcoming Tim Sullivan, the CEO of MicroVentures, a San Francisco-based crowdfunding venture firm that connects retail angel investors with startups. While the venture industry itself continues to undergo a long series of shifts, contractions and market corrections, the larger trend of crowdfounding — ranging all the way from the Kickerstarters of the world to modern political campaigns — has also come into play when thinking about limited partners and investors in early-stage companies. Once upon a time, only certain people and institutions had access to invest into funds that could invest into startups, but now with secondary markets like, well, Second Market, and shifting rules in Washington D.C., the door seems to have opened for a new class of retail angel investors.

In this discussion, Sullivan sits down with me to explain his career in startups and investing, how he helped start MicroVentures, how they select investors, how they communicate with them, and how they identify, vet, and perform due diligence on startups his firm invests in. Additionally, MicroVentures purchases shares on secondary markets — not just early-stage startups. MicroVentures also doesn’t lead deals, but participates to help fill out a round. The firm calls capital on a per-deal basis, giving its own LPs a chance to review deals one by one. While there are many different twists to crowdfunding for startups and surely more to emerge, this conversation with Sullivan sheds light on one interesting angle on the trend.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” this week hosts a special guest who doesn’t typically go on camera that often. As a result, I decided to make this particular episode of the show longer to capture my entire discussion with Greylock’s David Sze. For anyone who follows the ins and outs of venture capital, Sze’s name looms large. By now, most everyone knows of Greylock’s impressive run over the last decade, a firm which originated decades ago in the Boston area and has, thanks in large part to Sze, successfully transformed to one of the premier Silicon Valley shops. Over the last decade, he has helped lead the firm to write early checks into consumer-focused companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pandora, as well as startups attacking the enterprise, such as Workday and Palo Alto Networks. More recently, he made his largest investment ever (in terms of dollar size) in NextDoor, a company which fits into larger societal trends he’s observed.

What’s not often discussed, with respect to Sze, are the careful moves he’s made to position the firm where it is today. This is the focus of our video conversation, and while it’s a bit longer than most, I would encourage anyone interested in venture capital, Silicon Valley history, and those embarking on a career in technology startups to spend the time to watch this. In this video, Sze and I discuss the following topics: The early stages of his career, when he graduated from college and went into consulting; His move out to the west coast, going to business school, and jumping into the technology world; His first operational role at a real startup; How he paired up with former classmate Aneel Bhusri to join him at Greylock; How he began investing in enterprise and was, admittedly, not that good at it; How he went back to his consumer roots and began investing in consumer companies, such as Pandora; How he met Reid Hoffman, invested in LinkedIn, and eventually recruited a team of operators; and advice he would give young folks who are interested in venture capital and/or who coming to the Valley.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” rolls on this week by welcoming a long-time Valley operator, founder, angel investor, venture capitalist, and now general partner at one of the first “super angel” funds.

Charles Hudson, now a partner with SoftTech VC, has sat on every side of every table in the startup world. With stints as an operator at Google, as an investor with In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm), and founder of companies in the gaming space, Hudson brings a wealth of experience and insights — particularly around the gaming industry — to the table. Hudson is a familiar face in the Valley’s startup ecosystem as an active angel investor, speaker, and commentator, as well as penning a great blog with nontraditional insights, such as this one which suggested beleaguered Zynga may consider going private after going public.

If you’re a founder or investor in the startup gaming world, this short video is a must-watch. In this short discussion, Hudson and I talk about a dizzying range of topics, such as how Zynga was able to scale so quickly and why their value began to fall, how Zynga mastered customer acquisition and built cash machines to subsidize other activities, how Zynga had to decouple itself from the Facebook platform and how that process inflicted pain, how Zynga’s public market valuation trickles down to all corners of the gaming industry, how the angel investing climate for gaming is growing thin, and how founders and angel investors can, most importantly, look to the future for areas and platforms to focus on, such as Apple TV.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” opens up Q2 of 2013 by hosting a three-time founder who, after stints in engineering and the biomedical industry in India, happened to team up with a young leader in the art world to create one of the art world’s most fascinating online auction houses.

Aditya Julka, a co-founder of online art and collectible marketplace Paddle8, has carved an unusual path of entrepreneurship. After growing up and studying in India, Julka began his career as a healthcare entrepreneur, founding two companies before he came stateside to pursue his MBA. After graduation, he moved to NYC and started what would become Paddle8, though the business initial began as a lead-gen engine for collectors, but Julka and his team quickly identified that, given the intricacies of the art world, the web could enable an interesting marketplace so long as they were able to secure the right art “supply.”

In this video, Julka and I discuss how Paddle8 was formed, how it transitioned from lead-gen to an auction format, lessons he’s gleaned from trying to build an online marketplace in a very complex, opaque industry, and how art moves from the artist to gallery to collector, and the potential re-sale options collector’s have. In these cases, art holders may have to sell art back to the gallery and get a haircut in return, or for works under $100,000, aren’t suitable for the big offline auction houses. This video would be valuable to anyone building an online marketplace, and Julka poses hard questions for these entrepreneurs — namely, to investigate any marketplace idea by asking “Why haven’t Amazon or eBay tried to go after this market?” The answer to that question, Julka believes, will help guide a startup to focus on being truly unique.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” welcomes a digital media savant who has hustled his way up through the music world by interning for Rolling Stone, The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum, MTV Networks (through Viacom), Hulu, and Twitter, worked as an editor and analyst for ABC News and Fuse TV, and eventually embarked down the path of entrepreneurship to be recently acquired by Live Nation.

Joel Resnicow, now the Mobile Product Lead for Live Nation’s San Francisco offices, has invested his entire career in both old and new media platforms. Before joining Live Nation, Resnicow co-founded a music application company (disclaimer: I worked with Joel there) called Rexly, which sought to aggregate digital media tastes and help users discover new content through their friends but across mediums and channels. Rexly committed to a product direction, but was timed to coincide with Spotify’s U.S. release and was never able to gain elusive mobile distribution or enough investment to continue, as music startups have created scar tissue among investors.

In this conversation, Resnicow recalls the insight that led him to help create Rexly, how Spotify’s model has disrupted iTunes in many ways, the lessons he’s learned by trying to create a product in a difficult category when big incumbents were launching competitive services, and how the Rexly acquisition by Live Nation now gives him and his team a new platform by which to create more and more tools to help artists make deeper connections with their fans. As a larger vision, Resnicow sees music discovery on mobile devices as a way for bands to find and engage with fans and eventually drive ticket sales for live shows, where the real money is. Resnicow also touches on the new seed fund by Live Nation Labs, which is looking to push innovation broadly in the music space, ranging from discovery, ticketing, social media, photography, and video. Finally, Resnicow is brutally honest about his experience in pitching Rexly to many investors and the challenge with iOS distribution, a pain point many app makers acutely feel.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” opens the spring of 2013 by welcoming one of the best-known “super angels,” who arrived to Valley, by way of Boston, Philadelphia, and Istanbul, in the mid-1990s, held early product management stints at Silicon Graphics and a little startup called Google, which ultimately catapulted his career into what it is today.

Aydin Senkut founded Felicis Ventures after leaving Google, and today is regarded as one of the best — and earliest — super angel or micro VC funds in the Valley. As Senkut describes it, however, it’s more of a “boutique VC” operation, as Felicis is actually investing in companies that meet its criteria regardless of stage or location across mobile, e-commerce, enterprise, education, and health. As a thesis-driven firm, Senkut and his colleagues have also identified “frontier markets” of interest, which include 3D printing, imaging, and vision; genomics; and connected devices.

In this conversation, Senkut and I discuss a range of tactical and investment issues which would be relevant to early-stage founders. As Google’s first product manager, Senkut brings experience of seeing a rapidly growing company expand internationally and hit scale, an operational point of view which informs his investment intuition. Now as his team has grown at Felicis, he and his colleagues have, over the years, invested in over 80 companies with nearly half of them finding exits. That type of track record underscores the fact that Felicis are active, hands-on investors who understand the pressures (and dangers) founders face with respect to rising valuations in today’s funding environment. For instance, Senkut warns against the dangers of founders wanting to minimize dilution at the cost of limiting exit options in the future. He is remarkably candid on this dimension, and I believe every early founder should hear his rationale.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” this week welcomes a Silicon Valley veteran with decades of operational and investing experience under his belt, an active board member to many successful companies, and who holds a wealth of experience around financial services and tools for both individuals and businesses.

Mark Goines, a Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, brings a true wealth of experience in financial products and services to founders. After executive stints at places like Charles Schwab and Intuit, Goines began angel investing to help the next generation of entrepreneurs in the space identify and attack new opportunities as the web grew and, more recently, as mobile platforms explode. After some angel investing success, Goines followed in line with a recent trend of prominent individual investors and operators to become an institutional VC on Sand Hill Road.

In this conversation, Goines and I discuss a range of topics related to B2B applications and the climate for founders in Silicon Valley. Specifically, Goines shares a thesis he’s developed around what he calls “RSBs,” or “really small businesses,” typically those which employ less than five people. RSBs are not served well by existing business tools, which are either too primitive or too sophisticated. Marketers can now identify and target these RSBs for next to nothing, creating opportunities to build verticalized or broad solutions for them.

Behind this thesis, more interestingly, are deep insights around a long-term trend that combines many forces: A global economy whose center is shifting; more business formation during recessionary periods; a national economy where certain jobs may not come back; attitudinal shifts away from wanting to working for larger corporations; less job security in the workplace; and the fact that individuals tend to be happier running their own businesses once they’re able to get through the initial bumps of the startup stage. For founders interested in this space, Goines advices to build horizontal or platform solutions and to resist the urge to customize in order to reach the greatest set of potential users.

Additionally, Goines shares his thoughts on how he perceives the Valley has changed over the past five years. While he notes things are great for founders overall, he does share some well-reasoned notes of caution for us all. First, there is an oversupply of early-stage capital, much of it institutionalizing, which will lead to less true angel investors, a decline that’s hard not to notice. Second, incubators and accelerators which help drive the rate of company formation even higher could help artificially inflate valuations, which could have serious consequences on what founders may be able to take home in such an acquisitive environment. It’s hard to ignore the insights of an experienced angel investor like Goines on these subjects, and especially so given his focus on the financial world and its products.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” welcomes a co-founder of a company which went public, a native Texan who studied engineering in Silicon Valley and business on the east coast, and who, upon returning to the Valley to begin investing, encountered a different path than he originally anticipated.

By now, everyone in the Valley knows or knows of Mike Maples, a co-founder of FLOODGATE. What they may not know, however, is how difficult it was, despite his success with Motive, the company he co-founded while in college and went public, to return to the Valley and embark on the next career he imagined for himself. Maples wanted to be a VC, so he was offered EIR positions at two firms, but never full-time employment. During this time, he also noticed a gap in the investment market between individual angel investors deploying their own money and larger, institutional venture capital firms, who wanted to write bigger checks. This experience gave Maples the idea for his investment firm, which is now FLOODGATE, to fill in the gap with a smaller institutional fund. Maples’ insights, company intuition, early-stage dealmaking abilities now speaks for itself, with early stage investments in companies such as Zimride (Lyft), Wanelo, Ayasdi, Weebly, Reputation.com, Playdom, Okta, ngmoco, Modcloth, IFTTT, digg, Chegg, BranchOut, Bazaarvoice, and many others. And, a little company called Twitter.

In this video, Maples and I discuss how he came back to the Valley after working in industry, how he had stints as an EIR with two large venture firms but wasn’t offered a full-time role, and how, as a result, he started angel investing which eventually led to the formation of Maples Investments, which today is FLOODGATE. This video would be of interest to any early-stage founder as well as any technology investor, given Maples’ track record of success. He also goes into detail about how he tactically started his investment fund.

Most notable to me in this video, however, is how humble Maples is, despite his successes. Around the 5:00 minute-mark in the talk, Maples actually chokes up for a second while recounting how it was founders who helped paved the way for his success. He frames his initial investments as being made possible by the graciousness of founders who let Maples into the rounds to participate. It’s become cliché for investors to attribute any of their successes to the work they do for their company, and yet Maples almost says the opposite, that it is really the entrepreneur who gives the investor the chance to begin with.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” welcomes a first-time founder with a diverse set of experiences — ranging from economics to advertising, from product management to design, and from startup CEO to advisor of a venture capital firm — who now is at the helm of one of the most interesting online education startups on the web today.

Michael Karnjanaprakorn, founder and CEO of Skillshare, has taken on the difficult work of launching an online/offline marketplace that also happens to be in one of the most competitive and dynamic industries today: online education. After working at Behance and Hot Potato, Karnajanaprakorn had the idea to start Skillshare as a way for people to teach and/or learn from others in real-world settings. Recently, Skillshare has opened online courses as well, is already revenue-positive, and while facing competition in a hot category, is well-positioned to scale because of the company’s platform and marketplace model. Karnjanaprakorn is a man of many talents, so that in the rare moments he’s not fully working on Skillshare, he’s an advisor to Collaborative Fund, is a TED Fellow, and was named one of the most 100 creative people by Fast Company. I usually wouldn’t care about such lists, but I think Michael deserves to be on that one.

In this video, we focus our discussion about the lessons Karnjanaprakorn and his colleagues face in building a platform and an online marketplace from scratch, how they solved the classic “chicken-or-the egg” problem many marketplaces face, how they viewed reaching liquidity as quickly as possible, how to prime the market, how to think about scale, how to build and prioritize the right tools for teachers and students, and a host of other lessons that would be relevant to anyone trying to build and/or maintain an online marketplace. He is a great person to learn from given his reflective nature and, in my opinion, Skillshare is well-positioned to build one of the premier online education platforms the world desperately needs.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” rolls on this week by hosting an ex-management consultant who grew tired of that career path, wrote a book about how to prepare for and perform well during case-style interviews, self-published the work and started to make money from those sales proceeds, and eventually ended up in YC to help build out his new content-publishing business, Hyperink.

Kevin Gao brings the razor-sharp analytical skills of an employee from a top management consulting firm to the world of startups. As the CEO and co-founder of Hyperink, an early-stage company with the goal of organizing the web’s blog content around people and topics, Gao and his colleagues have a bold vision to bring structure to a web overrun with content and knowledge but also face challenges to prove scalability in their model to investors who generally tend to shy away from such businesses.

In this discussion, Gao and I quickly survey a range of topics, from the state of e-books today and what we can can expect in the future, what Amazon may do in this space, and how Hyperink’s technology crawls the web for content and pairs that information with human curators to create a “book-like” experience for the customer. The folks at Hyperink also were gracious enough to create an e-book for me, which went through my entire blog and organized it quite well (you can buy a copy here). Finally, Gao shares his experience of leaving consulting to enroll in Y Combinator (during the year the “Start Fund” was announced) and how going this route provided real value to him and his team and how he learned to handle the investment process with more leverage.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a successful founder, entrepreneur, and angel investor, who happened to amass a truly eclectic set of experiences in the Valley, from running a venture-backed company to an acquisition, from investing in some of the most iconic and bold consumer-technology companies in the past decade, and going back to the well again to run his current startup focused on mobile location and messaging.

Bill Lee is a hard guy to pin down, but if you can get his attention, he has an unique wealth of knowledge of how entrepreneurship works in the Valley, from many angles and vantage points. Aside from co-founding a successful company to an acquisition in a previous life, Lee is known to many early-stage founders as one of the most thoughtful, helpful, and savvy individual angel investors around. His portfolio hits include companies like Yammer, AngelList, SpaceX, and Tesla, plus many more. Lee has co-founded a new mobile app startup, Twist, which seeks to run in the background and send messages between people who are going to meet.

In this brief discussion with Lee, we talk around many, many topics. In the first part, Lee uncovers the insight that led him to co-found Twist, how they chose to build on iOS first, how they are waiting for Samsung’s Android devices to catch up, how SMS converts better than email, how to think about virality in non-social graph products, and a host of little variables that he believes make for a compelling app that can be used daily by millions of people. In the second part of the discussion, Lee reflects on today’s investment climate and the changes he’s made as an individual angel investor. For now, with so many more seed investors out there, Lee is reducing his number of investments but deploying the same amount of capital. He’s also investing within small networks and avoiding the hyper-syndication party rounds we tend to hear about on an hourly basis. Finally, as an angel investor in both Tesla and SpaceX, Lee offers some fascinating ideas about software apps that entrepreneurs may be able to build on these platforms and behind these huge waves.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” opens up February by hosting a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned early-stage venture investor in San Francisco. Renee DiResta, an Associate with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), is relatively new to the West Coast startup scene. After finishing a CS degree in college, she worked in the fast-paced world of trading derivatives on Wall Street. During that time, DiResta began to explore an interest in technology and startups, slowly building connections with the New York City startup community. Interestingly, as DiResta notes in this discussion, she wasn’t comfortable interacting with tech folks online because, in finance, the culture is to remain quite and unseen.

In this conversation, DiResta talks about how she found out about the opening at OATV, how she was introduced to Bryce Roberts through friends at a startup, how she reflects on nearly two years as an early-stage investor, and what has surprised her most about sitting on this side of the table — such as the remarkable level of open discussion and collaboration among trusted investors that OATV seeks to work with. This discussion would be of interest to anyone (especially those in finance) who are interested in investing in early-stage companies, and what one may expect to functionally do in such a role.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on TechCrunch at @semil.

“In The Studio” rolls on this week by welcoming an experienced international venture capitalist who has spent time within the storied firms of Wall Street while also participating on a three-time national tennis championship team in college before helping guide his current firm into some of the best growth-stage deals in the Valley and guiding many companies as they expand into China.

GGV’s Glenn Solomon is the type of growth-stage investor the tech blogs don’t cover often, but a closer look at his firm’s model and global position reveals many interesting morsels that are both relevant and differentiated for the startup tech community. With a $625 million fund spread across the Valley and China (they have full partners in the same fund located in China), GGV invests in growth-stage deals, helps management expand to China, and also help Chinese companies expand from China. Solomon is also an active writer, keeping a focused blog tuned for founders who are looking to prepare to go public.

In this discussion, Solomon and I discuss a range of topics: the competitive landscape for expansion capital on Sand Hill Road today; the reasons late-stage tech valuations are climbing and potential impact on the public markets; and a fascinating look at what’s going on in China, both on the web and mobile, and why Solomon and his partners are committed, long-term, to the world’s largest and one of its most dynamic markets.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” continues this week by welcoming a former Oxford PhD student who, upon completing his long education, ended up in San Francisco, toyed with a few web ideas, and eventually was so inspired by an idea, based in part on his experience in a PhD program, that he found his passion and founded his first real startup.

Richard Price had an interesting path to be on this show. After launching his startup, Academia.edu, in 2008, and raising over $5 million in venture capital from savvy investors, it was Price who reached out to me to be on the show. I was very skeptical, I must admit. I didn’t understand how the site had been around for so long but I couldn’t get a feel of the activity on the site. To his credit, Price answered a long battery of emails quite nobly, and while we are all looking to use the web to test ideas far and wide, we too are enamored by growth and evidence of usage or impact, the validation that many seek. While Academia.edu certainly isn’t there yet, it’s clear from interacting with Price — and as you can see on this video — he is a founder who has identified a key problem and is obsessed with trying to solve it.

In this video, Price and I discuss the genesis of the site, what they’ve been doing to help architect their system, and the overall state of how academic papers are kept within the realm of academic journals, which he believes slows down the pace of discovery and innovation in science and technology. Additionally, while this conversation was originally taped on December 13, 2012, it is quite relevant today given the news around the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. A few days ago, I invited Price to comment on his views about Swartz’s attempt to free academic papers from JSTOR using MIT’s network. Price responded:

Aaron was totally right that there is an injustice about taxpayer-funded research being behind paywalls. There is a tragedy of the commons in science. Individual researchers hand over the copyright of their intellectual property to journals for free, in their desire to collect reputation metrics (i.e. the journal title on their resume). This dynamic enables the journal industry to acquire the intellectual property for the entire world’s scientific output for free, and charge the scientific community and the general public $8 billion a year to get access to it. To get out of this mess, we need to build new reputation metrics, ones that don’t incentivize scientists to put their work behind paywalls. Ironically scientists would vastly prefer to have their work open access. It is just that the system of reputation metrics that has emerged in science doesn’t allow them to do it. Building a new system of reputation metrics is one of the most important things that Academia.edu is doing.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” welcomes a quiet, unassuming early-stage company veteran who has been through the ups and downs of Valley startups before landing at a certain search engine around the year 2000, after which he spent nearly seven years in various finance leadership roles and helped steer the company to its blockbuster public offering.

Pietro Dova, now a Managing Partner at XG Ventures, is not a name that comes up much in the noise of today’s funding stories, but that’s probably just fine for him. Along with his business partner, Andrea Zurek (also a former Google executive), Dova has slowly helped steer XG (stands for X-Google) into the ever-changing world of angel investing, focusing the fund on areas such as mobile, e-commerce, analytics, gaming, and business intelligence. Like the folks from Freestyle did, Dova and his colleagues are focusing on staying small and lean, closing about 12 deals per year, and trying to prove their model before making any decions to when and how grow.

I had to ask Dova a few times to come in, and he finally relented. He was, in fact, one of the first people I met in the Valley, as we were randomly seated together at a random startup dinner event back in June 2010. Somehow, we managed to stay in touch and I was able to convince him to sit down in the studio with me. Today, four years into XG, it will be fascinating to see what Dova and Zurek do for their next move, as they’re both young, strongly positioned in the Valley and particularly within Google’s deep network (which is especially important given the increasing strength of Google Ventures), and could take their fund in many new directions. In this discussion, Dova talks about his time at Google, the formation of XG, how XG engages with founders, and how he and Zurek approach the opportunities that lay ahead.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” this week welcomes a former economist who worked for his country’s treasury department and reserve bank, a former intern with The Economist Group, and, by way of his very unique company bio page, a former windsurfer and kiteboarder who is now settled in San Francisco and the founder and CEO of one of the most interesting data companies I’ve come across.

Anthony Goldbloom, founder and CEO of Kaggle, had the foresight years ago, while he was in his home country of Australia, to build a community of data scientists from around the world in one place online. At the time, he anticipated a world in which data science applied to the web would be overrun with hollow credentials and, instead, sought to build a new reputation layer with this new community. His insight was that data science would certainly be important, but instead of potential clients hiring these scientists full-time, why not open up data sets for them to openly compete against, and let the best algorithms win.

For me, the most interesting aspect of Kaggle is that it is really an online marketplace, which just happens to be a marketplace that pairs data wizards with companies that have interesting data and want to become better at predictive marketing, pricing, or modeling. At Kaggle, these are called “competitions,” where client companies release data sets and the Kaggle community, spread across the world, compete against each other to come up with the algorithm that produces the best result. In this model, Kaggle’s revenues come from larger companies (such as insurance or banking, for instance) that don’t want to build big data-science teams in-house and just want to get to the best result, and fast.

In this discussion, Goldbloom and I talk about how he started building this community online from Australia, how the data world thinks about reputation in a time when anyone can give themselves any title, how much of Kaggle’s community is more motivated by competition than working in-house for a larger company, and how Kaggle’s marketplace approach with temporal competitions provides value without a heavy commitment to his larger corporate clients.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” kicks off its second season and 2013 by welcoming an entrepreneur with an eclectic past, ranging from time as a lab assistant, media strategist, business development manager, and consultant to many NYC startups until he and a college friend stumbled upon what could be a big idea during a short hackathon. Ever since, they have been slowly growing their addictive and highly personal product to an ever increasing audience.

Jonathan Wegener, CEO and co-founder of Timehop, may have accidentally stumbled upon a big idea. During a time when social media products, especially those revolving around digital pictures, seem to be a dime a dozen and trigger eye-rolling among many observers, Wegener, the CEO and co-founder of Timehop, and his small team in New York City are slowly hacking away at building a social network around our pasts. They begin with resurfacing images, tweets, and other media based on yearly anniversaries of when the original content was created. The result so far has been organic growth and inherently viral interest in the product, which taps into our human desire to reflect, experience nostalgia, and share the past with others.

In this discussion, Wegener and I explore the initial conception of Timehop, how the early product was built, how and why the company grew its base audience through email, how they built for iOS and are thinking about mobile growth, and how they look at platforms other than the web.

Additionally, what’s most striking to me from this conversation is just how much of a product person Wegener is. You can tell that he and his team have long, detailed debates about how to present media to users that are usually private while also paying attention to growth and retention, especially with the recent iPhone application. This video would be useful to anyone building a social product on the web and/or mobile, as Wegener goes into great detail about all the growth tactics they employ.