Paul Martino is a Venture Capitalist and a Managing General Partner and Co-founder of Bullpen Capital. Before forming Bullpen in 2010, Paul was an active angel investor and personally invested in the first rounds of Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), TubeMogul (NASDAQ: TUBE), and uDemy. He sold a company to Millennial Media before its public offering (Condaptive) and to Marketo before its public offering (Crowd Factory).
He’s an eight-time company founder, movie producer, and now sports entertainment venue operator. Paul’s production company gave rise to the film Inside Game, a movie about the 2007 NBA betting scandal. Paul’s early online gaming innovations in multi-player user experience from over 30 years ago are the inspiration for several modern social gaming offerings. He holds over a dozen patents on core social networking concepts, content targeting, and recommendation systems.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Paul Martino talks about his journey to becoming a tech founder
- How Paul met Alvy Ray Smith and Bill Campbell
- How Paul sold his first company — and the lessons learned from his Bullpen Co-founder, Duncan Davidson
- Why Paul wishes to forget he had anything to do with Skypilot Network
- How Paul got involved with Tribe and the weird way he met Mark Zuckerberg
- Paul shares how Tribe’s failure birthed Aggregate Knowledge
- The inception of Bullpen Capital in 2010 and why it mattered
- Some great investments and the crazy time with FanDuel
- What Paul looks at when deciding to invest in a company
- Some common team mistakes that make founders lose funding
- Why Paul produced the Inside Game movie
- Paul talks about the Bankroll Project — and why he’s building it
In this episode…
If you walked into a meeting with the legendary CEO coach Bill Campell, would he take you on as a protégé? Imagine going into that meeting with Bill and convincing him to come out of retirement to become your coach. What type of entrepreneur would that make you?
You become a darn good one with loads of lessons for repeat success. Paul Martino had to become that type of entrepreneur after working with Bill Campbell. Paul has since built eight companies and is now a venture capitalist. What are some of the lessons he learned from greats like Bill Campbell and Randy Komisar on becoming a serially successful entrepreneur?
Listen to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz, featuring Paul Martino, Managing General Partner and Co-founder of Bullpen Capital. Paul walks through his journey as an eight-time founder, how he met and convinced Bill Campbell to come out of retirement — and become his coach, the type of companies Paul invests in now, and lots more.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Bullpen Capital
- Paul Martino on LinkedIn
- Bankroll Club
- Duncan Davidson on LinkedIn
- Richard Melmon on LinkedIn
Special Mentions:
- Steve Hoffman of Founders Space on LinkedIn
- Alvy Ray Smith on LinkedIn
- Randy Komisar
- Dave Jakubowski on LinkedIn
- Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn
Related Episode(s):
- “The Pixar Story: The Letter of a lifetime That Started Everything With Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of Pixar”
- “Why Did Nolan Turn Down Steve Jobs’ Offer of 33% Stake of Apple for 50K? with Atari & Chuck E. Cheese Founder, Nolan Bushnell”
- “Scrapping His Way to A Successful Startup with Jeremy Smith Founder of SpotHero.com”
- “[Venture Capital Series] A Framework for Making Important Decisions with Fabrice Grinda of FJ Labs”
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 0:19
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs leaders and you know I’m here with Paul Martino Bullpen Capital. Before I formally introduce Paul, Paul, I always like to mention past episodes of the interesting. And there’s a lot of overlap here. You know, I released the interview with Alvy Ray Smith, who is a co founder of Pixar and Paul actually worked with Alvy Ray Smith, he is going to maybe tell us a little bit about that story. Also, Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari, who was Steve Jobs mentor and and Paul some links to Steve Jobs through Bill Campbell. We’ll talk about that. And then I had the Founder of SpotHero on which I know Paul, you guys invested in through Bullpen Cap. So check out that episode on the app, as you know, and there was I there’s so many good ones. I love Fabrice Grinda, of FJ Labs, talks about signing a deal with Snoop Dogg and other artists late night at a party. I think that’s what it took to get the deal signed. So he showed up. And so check out that in many more episodes, and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. And we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and partnerships. We do that by helping you run your podcast and Paul, I think you’ve got a sense from hopefully past episodes that the number one thing in my life is relationships, I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships and profile them what they’re working on. And the people and companies I admire and I found no better way to do that than over the past 10 years, having them on my podcast promoting that podcast on social media and all on my email list and everywhere else. So if you’ve thought about doing a podcast you should so if you have questions, go to Rise25.com email us we’re happy to answer any questions that you have. And I’m excited A big thank you to Steve Hoffman. You could check out the website founder space he introduced me to today’s guest and founder space is a global startup accelerator with over 50 partners, 22 countries 50,000 entrepreneurs as members. Paul Martino is a venture capitalist. Paul, you’re so modest by the way I asked for a bio from everyone Paul gives me one sentence. I’m like, come on. I know. Then he said venture capitals eight-time company founder, movie producer and now sports entertainment venue operator and I’m like No Paul is there’s way more to you than that one sentence, which we’ll get into today, but he’s managing partner at Bullpen Capital. A few of his eight companies including Alpha Software, a computer security firm acquired by Intertrust Tribe, one of the world’s first social networks, which has links to Zynga I believe, and Aggregate Knowledge a big data Advertising Attribution company acquired in 2014 by NeuStar. He produced the film Inside Game about the 2007 NBA betting scandal. You can check out his website and much more Bullpencap.com Paul, thanks for joining me.
Paul Martino 3:21
It’s pretty exciting to see I think that one sentence got it all. Um,
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 3:24
it did get it all. It did get it all, you know, and like Princeton masters at computer science. I mean, you you kind of self proclaim blue collar Philly. And I look up you’re you’re a master’s in computer science from Princeton. So growing up in Philly, what did you want to be when you were growing up?
Paul Martino 3:49
I am doing exactly what I always wanted to do from a young age. Like literally when I was a kid, I was like, wow, I want to run a company. Like, I want to lead a group I want to build a product. I had an Atari. You know, way back in the day I had a TSR 80 and 1980. By the time I was in high school, I could code circles around the guys that my dad worked with a unisys in bluebell. And you know, I was just at that age where I was the youngest. I was I was the youngest you could be to have had a computer in your house your whole life. I just turned 47 last last week. And so that was a very special time where if you if your dad happened to be a computer engineer at unisys, you had a computer and you could learn how to code. And it was just an awesome time. I always knew I wanted to do this. I actually didn’t like being in school because I felt like it was holding me back from going out to do the real thing. And yeah, I ended up going to Princeton for grad school by default. I was 20 years old. I didn’t know what else I could do. There’s no internet. It’s there’s no internet at that time, right? It’s like, what do you go do I went to grad school and I stayed as long as I could to drop out and start company.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 5:01
So when you went to Princeton, what were you thinking?
