BY The Product Experience ON APRIL 21, 2021

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For many product people, it’s a dream to get in early at a startup — or to start their own.  Unless you have the ability to bootstrap, that means you’ll need access to money, which often means working with venture capital.  That can be a mysterious and scary world, so we asked Dharmesh Raithatha, CPO at Forward Partners, to join us on the podcast and give us a peek behind the curtain.

In this episode, listen to learn about:

• Venture Capital
• Becoming a PM in a VC company
• Working in Startups

Mixpanel, this episode’s sponsor, is offering The Product Experience listeners $5,000 off their product analytics solution. You can visit mixpanel.com/mtp and enter code MTP5K to claim your offer.

Quote of the Episode

With effort you can make any company get some customers and get a little bit of growth, but you can see quite early on that if you keep going in this direction it’s going to be a struggle all the way through. And so that’s the hard call when you’re working on a company, and of course you put in effort, you hustle, you will get some momentum, but you might have picked an idea that’s not going to be venture scale, that’s not going to be big enough, and to basically recognise that you need to change direction and start experimenting away from it.

Links mentioned in this episode

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Our Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Head of Innovation at Go Compare and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol (which now has 800+ members!) and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy is a product consultant and coach who has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. A recovering music journalist and editor, he launched Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, and has worked across sectors including museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Randy’s book, What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19 is out now, with all profits going to COVID-19 relief efforts.