Zibby interviews Jenny Fielding, one of the most active global pre-seed investors, about her new book, VENTURE EVERYWHERE. Jenny shares her experiences traveling to over 100 countries to profile global entrepreneurs who are starting innovative companies far from Silicon Valley’s spotlight. She explores the entrepreneurial archetypes, from bold risk-takers to resilient thinkers, and then shares her unconventional path—from JP Morgan to launching her first startup inspired by the high cost of international calls. She offers practical advice on pursuing big ideas incrementally, making space for innovation even while juggling a day job.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Jenny. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked With Zibby to talk about Venture Everywhere, travel, entrepreneurship, and a roadmap for life. Congrats. 

Jenny: Thanks so much for having me. 

Zibby: Thank you for taking me all over the world with this fabulous travel log slash advice book slash memoirs slash I don't know, inspiration owed to grandparents, all of it.

Congrats. It's so great. 

Jenny: Thank you. 

Zibby: Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it?

Jenny: Yeah. The book is about global entrepreneurship and what we can all learn from founders building companies around the world. And so I've traveled, as I mentioned in the book to, over a hundred countries and I've met some of the most inspirational and very successful entrepreneurs building companies like far from the glow of Silicon Valley.

And through my kind of interactions with them, I noticed a. A common archetype and theme and perspective that started to bubble up about the way that they view the world, the impact that they wanna make. And I distilled that down to a few kind of key characteristics, and I wanted to share that with the world.

I feel that so much is being written by the same folks that we hear about all the time. The mark Zuckerberg's of the world or the Bill Gates, and those are great inspirational stories, but what about, the person that grew up in a small town in Pakistan and grew a company into, multi-billion dollars, right?

And so why aren't those stories really being shared? And so I wanted to shed some light on that. 

Zibby: Amazing. One thing you do throughout the book is you notice. Like you're on the phone with somebody and you notice when their delivery comes in India in two seconds and you just pick up on all of these things that maybe that's not even why you were on the phone to begin with, but you have this like extra sensory ability to figure out what each country is offering, what they're doing, how to get involved, what's special, whether you're, finding a place to stay in Spain or the Philippines. It's amazing. So you've uncovered all of these fabulous entrepreneurs, and you've profiled a bunch of them here. Tell me about that instinct that makes you such a great venture capitalist yourself. 

Jenny: I spent many years as a founder and I learned a lot of hard lessons, everything from, finding the right co-founders or not to having the right go to market. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way and it's been great to jump to the other side to be an investor and be able to share very openly what I didn't get right.

And, help founders see around corners. And so I think when I made the jump to the, to the dark side of entrepreneurship. I thought that my job was going to be something a little bit different. It was gonna be helping founders with kind of product and strategy and go to market.

But what I realized it was, you know much more about people and helping them get out of their own way. And this is, especially at the early stage, it's not really about numbers and metrics. It's about, inspiration and personas and, really finding folks that have these incredible visions.

And so that, that's all to say that you become a really good listener and observer of what's around you. And so my job is really to meet these incredible entrepreneurs who are changing the world and try to understand them. And the best way to understand them is to listen and to ask a lot of questions.

And so that's what I've been doing for the last decade. As I travel around the world. I meet these incredible founders and then I start teasing out what are their stories? Because you might hear something on TechCrunch or Read in The Wall Street Journal. Those aren't the real stories of what inspired these people.

And so I wanted to draw that out. And I think as an early stage investor, that is really our job. And I think there's a misperception that we go around giving people cash and that is. One part of the job, but really it's about being, acutely aware of, what the trends are and the best people to tell you who the trends are the entrepreneurs on the ground. 

Zibby: So give us the background of your founder experience and so we can understand how you ended up here. Talk about, the BBC and Techstar and all of your stuff. 

Jenny: Yeah. So like many people had a more traditional upbringing. I grew up in New York City, I went to, whatever schools and I went to law school and I found myself at JP Morgan.

I was on this track and I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur, but one day I had an issue that I just didn't see was right in the world. So I personally wanted to solve something and I didn't even think of it as a company. I just thought of it as this was an annoyance and it probably was annoying other people.

And I wanted to solve that, and that turned into my first startup. Lo and behold, 2007, New York wasn't a very entrepreneurial place, and everyone thought oh, you've got this kind of high profile job at JP Morgan. What's the side thing you know that you're doing? But I really just set out to solve a problem in the world.

Something that, wasn't really lining up with how I thought, the world should be. And that was my foray into entrepreneurship. And so I took a big risk and I decided, maybe I had checked a lot of boxes along the way. Going to certain schools and going to law school and doing all these things, but what was my real mission and passion and did I have the courage to pursue that?

So it was a real inflection point, starting my own company and breaking out of the mold and deciding to chart my own path. And from there. It happened to be in, in technology. 

Zibby: Go back to what the issue was you were trying to solve. What was the annoyance? 

Jenny: Okay. It was a fun story, which was, I had a boyfriend who was living in Germany at the time, and 2007, when you called Germany, it was like $2 a minute.

And so my phone bill was just like, absolutely outrageous. And then I noticed it wasn't just me, it was like anyone living in New York that wasn't from here, calling their family, calling their friends, they were just paying so much. And so I thought, gosh, there's gotta be a better way to solve this.

So again, I'm working as a banker at JP Morgan and I'm like hacking on this nights and weekends trying to figure out like what's a better way to make inexpensive international calls. So something that seemed small actually. Impacted a huge number of people. So everyone who's a first generation American has family internationally, anyone who's doing business is probably has business contacts that they're calling internationally.

So it turned out to actually be quite a big market. 

Zibby: Wow. And then in the end you were like, sorry, Johan, Johann has to go. 

Jenny: Yeah. Ultimately that didn't work out, but it really did set me on the path of kind of entrepreneurial endeavors and just realizing that I wanted to be part of solving problems in the world, whether they were small, like international calling or some of the stuff that I invest in now, which is a lot around healthcare and climate and really important issues.

Zibby: It's amazing. So in the book, you, after meeting all of these CEOs, founders, all of it, you have come up with these archetypes like  Moxie and tell us more about the different types of thinkers. And as I'm reading it, I'm like, okay, maybe that's me. That is definitely not me. Okay. Maybe you know the systematic, engineering brain type of founder, which is not me at all.

Jenny: Yeah. So as I'm talking to these founders, getting to know them over the years, I start realizing and distilling patterns and archetypes and how they see the world is often, colored by, how they grew up and their perspective. And so I started writing down notes on what these were.

This actually didn't start out to be a book. It actually, I do a lot of short form contact blogs and LinkedIn and all of that. And so I was working on some profiles of what these archetypes for success were. And all of a sudden as I started interviewing these founders, I was like, wow, there's so much more here.

So I distill it down to six characteristics. Some of them are really fun, like  Moxie, but what that really means is that you have to be bold. Being an entrepreneur isn't about fitting in, right? It's about taking these risks and having the courage to, charge a path that some people won't feel good about.

And so I think  Moxie's a really interesting one, especially in a world where social media and everything is about fitting in and being liked. Real entrepreneurs have a chip on their shoulder and they have something to prove to the world, and sometimes they can be a little prickly. And so I think that's a really interesting characteristic to call out.

As I'm interviewing some of these founders, I'm like, wow, these are not go with the flow people. 

Zibby: Interesting. Does that mean if you are go with the flow, you're not gonna be a good founder? 

Jenny: I think that all different types of personas can be successful. These were just some of the patterns that I noticed, especially with international founders who've had a lot of life challenges and they've had to be, in many cases, survivors.

I interview people that come from war torn countries that have had to, evacuate their countries that have had to, go from growing up in a small, village where none of their family was educated to being, plucked into United States and having to survive there.

So I think these kind of backgrounds are really what fuels the entrepreneurial journey and you can have all different types of backgrounds. These were just some of the ones that I thought, stood out in my kind of decade of meeting with founders. 

Zibby: And take us through a couple of the other ones.

Jenny: Yeah, so  Moxie's a really fun one. I think another interesting one is this idea of elasticity. 

And so maybe some people would call it resilient, but this idea of kind of flexibility and being adaptive, it's really about what I was saying before and I think maybe as a founder, I was this persona.

So it resonates. It's about being able to read the room and in any given situation in that moment, adapt to what's required. So elasticity is one that we see, very commonly founders need to, respond to data quickly, potentially pivot their business and really adapt to a lot of different stakeholders, right?

Whether it's what customers want, what their investors want. And that kind of idea of being resilient I think came up, in many of the interviews. So that's one that's very personal to me. And, I really appreciate. 

Zibby: Amazing. I feel like I related the most to the first one.

Kinetic. Kinetic, right? Where you're like, feel it. Yeah. Hold on. You have elastic, having conviction, being kinetic, having  Moxie thinking, macro being systematic. Yeah. Kinetic. Where you're just like feeling things and you're going after it and you try it and, yeah. 

Jenny: Yeah, so in one of the interviews, I think it's the first chapter, it's a founder named Lori who built a company called Kavak, which is really the leading marketplace for secondhand cars in Mexico.

And this company is a multi unicorn and one of the huge success stories of Mexico. And Lori had a very interesting background. She grew up in Venezuela. Her family had to leave for political reasons. And she really had to find her way. But really what kind of fueled her, she just had this incredible enthusiasm and charisma.

And she was able to adapt whether she came to the United States, which was very unfamiliar or moved to Mexico, which wasn't a home country, she was able to learn fast, act fast. And I think that really served her when she decided, to start vec and she's just had incredible amount of success.

So that kind of high cadence thinker who moves quickly and acts on data is something that we really look for in entrepreneurs. And I think Lori and some of the founders really exhibit that nicely. 

Zibby: So what can the average reader take from this book? Somebody who's maybe they have ideas, they're probably not gonna pursue them, but they appreciate a great new business or a great new product.

Your book takes us all over the world, right? We're introduced to so many cultures and you really have us at the table with you or in the internet cafe, wherever, we're in the. We're wherever you are. So tell us a little more about what you've gained from all these travels and you have extensive relationships now, which is amazing, but most people have not traveled as much as you have.

So what are we missing? Tell us.

Jenny: It's interesting, this book is called a business book and there's definitely some business principles in it, but I think if you peel the onion a little bit, the book is really about, having the courage to charge your own path.

And it took me a little bit of time. I was on one track and we see most people in the world, they're going through the motions and sometimes they don't exactly know why. And so the book is really, to prod yourself to really think deeply about, the world that you wanna live in and how you get there.

And for me it was around travel and exposure to new cultures, to new people, to new thinking. That really got me out of my maybe myopic view of the world. Which is funny 'cause I grew up in New York City, so you'd think I was exposed to many things. Truth is, I had a very kind of small view of the world in some ways.

And so the travel really opened it up for me, but I don't think it, you have to travel. It's about interacting with other cultures and other people. And one of the key messages in this book is like maybe 20 years ago you could do really well in your career by, just knowing people in your community or in America or whatnot.

Now, there's hardly, any organizations where you're not interacting with people around the world, right? That you don't have colleagues in other places or customers in other places. And I think we all need to learn to be global citizens. I learned it. Very firsthand by, going on a trip with my grandmother when I was very young and seeing different people and exploring the world a little bit.

But I think that we can do that, wherever we're living by just exposing ourselves to things that maybe feel uncomfortable and different. 

Zibby: I loved your opening. In particular and how vividly you describe this trip and your grandparents in general and you following your grandmother in her hot pink tracksuit and your grandfather, the rings that he gave her and the chains and her giving you the key so you could run all over the hotel and 

Jenny: Yeah.

That was the kind of entrepreneur of the time. My grandfather owned fruit stores in Brooklyn, and he had to deal with, the garbage mafia and the these people stealing from him and like it was all this drama, but like those were the original entrepreneurs. I think now we think of entrepreneurs as tech entrepreneurs.

We think of them as the Elon Musk, but the truth is like this country is fueled by entrepreneurs who are running small businesses. And that's really where my family came from. But that entrepreneurial spirit of I'm getting up every morning to run my business. No one's telling me what to do. I have to have the agency.

And so that was like a model that really resonated me with me and I saw growing up. And yet I went into, something that was way more traditional, right? I went to law school and I worked at JP Morgan and I did all these, worked for other people in a very traditional way. And one day I looked in the mirror and I thought.

You know what? I'm more entrepreneurial than this. Like I have more to offer and I am someone that takes agency and that thinks differently and moves through the world a little bit differently, and I need to act on that and have the kind of courage to do that. 

Zibby: So what's one piece of advice you could give people who have an idea or they're thinking about doing something, even if it's something as simple as reorganizing their kitchen or just something that like feels they're, whether they wanna start a business or redo the way that has been done. What do you say to those people? 

Jenny: Yeah, so I think there's this misperception that you need to go all in, right? That you need to, stop doing what, your day job to focus on this, and that's the entrepreneurial journey. In my worlds In my personal experience, I've actually never done that.

So I started my startup while I was working at JP Morgan, so I did that nights and weekends, my venture fund Everywhere Ventures. I started that while I was working at Techstars. That was my nights and weekends fund. And so my advice to people is that it seems really daunting and scary to put everything in your life aside to, to pursue an entrepreneurial endeavor or a big project or whatever that is.

But I think you can in small ways just start working towards that, reserving a few hours on the weekend or just being really focused on it. And I don't think that gets talked about a lot actually. It's you have to do it all at once. And I think many entrepreneurs are very iterative and you can learn a lot by just spending a little bit of time educating yourself, going out and talking to potential customers or partners and all these things.

And I'd encourage people to do that. When you are ready to make the leap, then you can do that. And so it was actually funny for me. I'm working at JP Morgan, I'm working on my startup, like in my living room nights and weekends with my co-founders. And we launched, this product and all of a sudden we have cash coming in, we have revenue.

And my friends looked at me, they're like, I think you're gonna have to quit the day job. And I was like, oh, really? And it hadn't even really occurred to me. And so I think that when you get really excited about something, you can just, really lean into it. 

Zibby: Amazing. Jenny, congratulations Venture Everywhere.

Thank you for the ride of a lifetime going on all the adventures with you, and thanks for all the support you give to the people who need it most. 

Jenny: Thanks. This was super fun. 

Zibby: Thank you.