Listen & learn: 7 best podcasts about VC, tech

VC money, CEO rage, failed startup pitches, and a dyslexic drop-out building a billion-dollar empire: it's the Flyer One Ventures top podcasts.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC)

The Twenty Minute VC interviews the world's greatest VCs like Sequoia's Doug Leone, Benchmark's Bill Gurley, or a16z's Angela Strange.

Once per week, 20VC host Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time. Expect guests from Canva, Spotify, Linkedin, Snowflake, and other top tech firms.

Inspired by the film “The Social Network,” Stebbings started his podcast as a teenager in 2015, having only $50 in his pocket. Initially, he began podcasting to help his mother pay for her medical treatment and build up his network in tech.

Stebbings was interviewing top CEOs and investors and then became an investor himself, co-founding Stride.VC and founding 20VC. In 2019, he made it to Forbes 30 Under 30 – Europe.

StrictlyVC

Every week, two StrictlyVC hosts TechCrunch Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos and venture capitalist Alex Gove discuss remarkable stories of the VC world and interview the industry’s movers and shakers.

The podcast features interviews with managers and heads of big-name VC firms, including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and Andreessen Horowitz.

On its website, StrictlyVC also publishes video interviews and discussions and offers a daily newsletter, which covers “big news events that are shaping tech” and new trends that could “change the venture landscape.”

Riding Unicorns

Riding Unicorns is a weekly interview podcast about growth startups. It has episodes with guests like Cazoo CEO Alex Chesterman, WPP founder Sir Martin Sorrell, and ex-global head of growth at Revolut Irina Scarlat.

It also publishes 5-minute episodes called Startup Spotlight that provide listeners with an insight into a company that the hosts are excited about.

Launched in 2020, the show is co-hosted by venture capitalists James Pringle (Portfolio Ventures) and Hector Mason (Episode 1 Ventures).

“We speak to the founders and investors behind the world's most exciting startups,” Mason wrote on LinkedIn about the podcast.

The podcast’s team also sends out a newsletter called the same way, Reading Unicorns, offering weekly round-ups every Monday morning.

Lenny's podcast

This is the podcast of Lenny Rachitsky, an investor in more than 150 companies, including Figma and Substack. In 2010, he founded the Localmind startup, which was acquired by Airbnb in 2012. After that, Rachitsky worked as a product lead at Airbnb for seven years.

In 2019, Rachitsky started his podcast to give practical and actionable advice on how to build, launch, and develop great products. His guests are product experts from innovative tech companies like Google, Meta, Uber, Tinder, and Tripadvisor.

He also has Lenny’s Newsletter on SubStack, a weekly advice column about “building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career.” It has over 335,000 subscribers.

The European VC (EUVC)

EUVC positions itself as “your go-to podcast for everything European VC.”

Co-hosted by investors Andreas Munk Holm and David Cruz e Silva, EUVC features interviews with some of the most prominent VCs in Europe, who talk about investment strategies and management processes.

EUVC is more than a podcast — it is a community of founders, VCs, angels, LPs, and operators. Its eponymous podcast is one of the six EUVC records. Others are called The Super Angel, The UrbanTech VC, The EUVC Lowdown, The NextGen VC, and Churn FM.

On its website, EUVC also publishes columns and event announcements and offers membership in its LP Syndicate. “We build vested communities with the funds that are changing the world. We aspire to build a family rather than a business,” reads the EUVC website.

Pitch Deck

The show’s host Nick Telson calls himself an “exited founder” of DesignMyNight (he sold the startup for more than $30 million in 2020) and a co-founder of Horseplay Ventures.

On this podcast, startup founders have 5 minutes to pitch their business to Telson and a guest investor (or a mentor). Then, the two of them ask questions an investor would ask in a real pitch and discuss the business with its founder, including why it may fail.

Pitch Deck also releases episodes in which Telson talks to leading VCs and angels about the industry.

The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett

This show is a cocktail of success, CEO rage, business, life, failures, parenthood, and love.

The host, Steven Bartlett, an ex-CEO, wanted to create a place where business leaders could tell their honest stories and reveal vulnerabilities. And he launched this podcast. Its mission is to “un-filter” success and give you “the knowledge you need to create the life you want.”

For this show, Bartlett has interviewed a wide range of guests — from Richard Branson, Greg Hoffman and Sadiq Khan to footballer Jesse Lingard and Stephen Fry.

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