The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Founder Obsession and Funding Options with Jonathan Bragdon of Capacity

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the show, everyone. We have a great time planned today because my friend Jonathan Bragdon has joined us for the show. And Jonathan is the founder of Capacity, which is a VC firm. And they have a very unique approach that I've loved learning about recently.

But you also have a background in data and technology. So we have tons to cover. Thanks for joining us, Jonathan. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks, Eric. All right, well, give us the brief background. You started in tech and now you're a VC. So give us the 30-second connect the dots. Yeah, sort of eased into tech through consumer packaged goods, a little bit of like way back in the day, even 2000s and barcodes and trade marketing. But eventually ended up in deeper in tech,

doing 3D simulation, modeling, some data science, some IoT stuff, built a few companies, a couple were venture backed, a couple weren't. And then started to do a little bit of a studio inside one of those companies. Never got that far, really wanted to get into doing a fund to accelerate a studio, and ended up going over to the dark side after that company, the fund, about four years ago. All right. That's great. So before the show, we were talking a little bit about

a few different things. One of the topics I'm excited to dive into is what matters. So if you're say you're one of our listeners that you're an early stage startup, what matters other than your financials and growth plan, like maybe some of the obvious things, but what actually matters when you're growing your business, if you're looking to raise money. So we want to talk about that. And then what are some topics you're interested in digging into? Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. I love really early stage companies, but ones that have gotten a little bit of revenue along the way. And so the obvious conversation is how's the interaction with the customer happen? But more basic than that is what problem are they trying to solve and what's the founder obsessed with?

And then how do we move back from that? And for me as a VC, yeah, I get really interested in how do you fund those things? And so a lot of the, even the language around tech investing overlaps. And Eric and I were talking about this a little bit, just the, there's a tech stack, but there can also be a capital stack. And so I get pretty deep into the capital stack. So it'd be fun to talk about that too. Awesome. Well, let's dig in. All right, let's do it. All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.