James Currier is a Founding Partner at NFX and an angel investor in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon.

James grew in New Hampshire to a carpenter father and music teacher mother. He left home at 13 on a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy. Then Princeton, then HBS, all three on scholarship. After college, he sailed to Tahiti, then went to work for Rupert Murdoch building Asian satellite TV at STAR TV in Hong Kong. At 24, a mysterious misdiagnosis forced him back to the US and led him to Boston.

After a stint at various venture firms, James would go on to co-founder Tickle. As CEO, James grew Tickle to the 18th largest website in the world with over 150 million registered users - before being acquired in 2004 by Monster for $110 million.

James then co-founded three other successful companies — Wonderhill an online video game studio which merged with Kabam in 2010 and later sold for $800M, IronPearl a growth analytics SaaS, acquired by PayPal in 2013, and Jiff an enterprise healthcare software which raised $68M from Venrock, GE, J&J, merged with Castlight in 2017.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

01:31 Selling Worms to Fishermen at 6 Years Old

03:20 From a Dirt Road to Phillips Exeter Academy

04:49 The Hovercraft Corporation of America

07:48 Sailing Across the North Atlantic

09:18 Misdiagnosed in Communist China

10:41 Joining Battery Ventures in the 90s

12:25 Throwing Parties for Hundreds of Tech Associates

13:25 The Origins of Tickle

16:42 The $100M Healthcare IT Clusterf*ck

18:19 The Next 30-Year Technology Window

23:50 When to Start Your Own Company

26:26 The Importance of Geography: San Francisco vs. New York

29:34 AI, Consciousness, and Talking to God

31:51 Discovering Meditation and the Awakened Mind

34:27 Why You Work Best From 10 PM to 2 AM

36:07 Founder Psychology, Psychedelics and Self-Discovery

39:05 Status & Human Interaction

40:49 The Preferred Attachment Theory

42:40 The Real Value of College

44:01 People vs. Capital

47:56 What True Hustle Actually Looks Like

49:56 “Dad Talks” About Sex and Drugs

53:41 Quitting Alcohol at 21: The Ultimate Life Hack

54:42 F*cking Around at Scale

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