Sound Investments - Conversations with Pacific North West Venture Investors hosted by Ed Barker

About Sound Investments - Conversations with Pacific North West Venture Investors hosted by Ed Barker

Sound Investments features candid, in-depth conversations with venture capitalists and community leaders shaping the Pacific Northwest startup ecosystem. Each episode explores how fund managers think, where they invest, and what drives their strategies. Hosted by Ed Barker - Seattle-based strategist, investor, and founder of Studio 1878, a podcast studio - Sound Investments offers insider perspectives on capital, innovation, and the future of startups in the region. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Studio 1878

Category

business · business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Feb 2025

Latest episode

20 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

50 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Jun 2026

   Investing in Mavericks with Jordan Baker, Athenaeum Ventures

   Ed Barker sits down with Jordan Baker, founding general partner of Seattle's Athenaeum Ventures, whose path to running a fund looks nothing like the standard resume. He left home at 14, passed through three high schools, dropped out at 16, skipped college, and built a career across music, streaming, and gaming, most prominently the brand agency Moonrock, before raising his first fund. Baker argues that venture has drifted from its original job, backing insane people with insane ideas, into what he calls consensus capital, where investors crowd the same credentialed founders and price out everyone else. His edge, he says, is finding mispriced founders and ideas before the rest of the market does, sourcing them inside the Discord servers, Reddit threads, and gaming communities most investors cannot reach, then committing to a hands-on stretch that runs from a blunt five-minute fit test through weeks of diligence and real help with hiring, customers, storytelling, and the next round. He runs the firm with unusual openness, sending LPs data-rich updates that log every cold outreach and conversion, and reports a 4.3x paper markup roughly seven weeks into a deliberately small $5M fund. He also explains why he refuses SPVs, shares dealflow freely with other managers, and is happy to back founders as unorthodox as a startup that cryogenically freezes pets. His sharpest words are for Seattle, a city he calls brilliant at producing business owners and poor at producing founders, where pedigree is prized, tech wealth sits idle, and the most interesting builders keep leaving for the Bay. 00:00 Introduction: Jordan Baker, Athenaeum Ventures 02:02 Leaving Home at 14: An Atypical Origin 12:01 The Investor as Mispriced Founder 12:28 Why Raise a Fund at All 18:33 Sourcing and Vetting Mispriced Founders 23:05 LP Strategy and Fund Metrics 30:15 Media, Storytelling, and Radical Honesty 36:20 Reach Versus Value: Building Niche Audiences 38:13 What Seattle Gets Wrong About Founders 47:16 Conviction, Risk, and the Future of Venture About Your Host Ed Barker has enjoyed a weird and varied career. Ed is a Brit now resident in Seattle and has founded three startups, enjoyed a long career in corporate strategy, and most recently as a VC. Sound Investments shines a small light on the fantastic work being done in the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial community. Studio 1878 Ed is Founder of Studio 1878, a podcast strategy and production studio focused on helping brands tell smarter, more human stories. We work with founders, operators, and marketing leaders to design shows that serve clear strategic goals. Studio 1878 handles the full process - from concept and positioning through recording, editing, and distribution. Our work blends editorial thinking with production craft, prioritizing substance over noise. The result is podcasts that build trust, credibility, and long-term brand value. Jordan Baker Jordan is the founder and general partner of Athenaeum Ventures, a $5 million Seattle micro-fund with a contrarian thesis: back mispriced founders the consensus has overlooked, often before any other investor finds them. His own story is that thesis in miniature. He left home at 14, moved through three Arizona high schools before dropping out at 16, and skipped college, building instead through music, streaming, and the Minecraft creator economy that grew into his gaming agency Moonrock, where he ran brand activations for Walmart, Samsung, and HR Block. He still finds founders the way he once found audiences, deep inside the Discords and game communities most VCs never enter, and he tracks the hunt obsessively: 481 cold outreaches, a 67% response rate, and a 4.3x paper markup about seven weeks into the fund. He is enough of a lifelong gamer that his wife walked down the aisle to the Minecraft theme. Connect with Alexandra: Athenaeum: athenaeum.vc (athenaeum.vc) LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jordan-baker-4319bb225 (linkedin.com/in/jordan-baker-4319bb225) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

2. 

   9 Jun 2026

   Decarbonising Heavy Industry with Alexandra Iljadica, BHP Ventures

   Ed Barker talks to Alexandra Iljadica, Principal at BHP Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the global mining and minerals company, about what hard-tech and climate investing looks like from inside a major industrial. Alexandra traces her path from a nutrition science degree in Australia through founding and scaling a sustainability nonprofit, then burnout, a year in Croatia, and a 2018 move to Seattle where she helped build the 5G Open Innovation Lab. She walks through the fund's three-part thesis covering novel energy for BHP's own decarbonisation, mining operations from AI-led exploration to novel extraction and processing, and changing end-market demand around the energy transition; the mandate is follow-on, $3 to $10 million, stage-agnostic, and free to invest in non-core commodities like hydrogen and lithium. The conversation gets into copper substitution and recycling, the resurgence of nuclear and uranium, fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting tape, tailings repurposed into cementitious materials, and the capital-stack squeeze on climate companies trying to get from facility one to facility ten in the wake of Fervo Energy's IPO, where BHP was an early Series B investor. There are hard-won lessons in CVC deployment and a reflection on Seattle's introverted culture. The episode closes with practical advice for founders: meet strategic investors years before you need them, think carefully about which strategics belong on your cap table and when, and do the basic homework on what each one actually produces. 00:00 Introduction 01:41 Alexandra's Origin Story 05:25 About BHP Ventures 07:33 Critical Minerals and Where BHP Invests 10:59 Inside the Fund 13:58 Lessons from Corporate Venture Investing 23:07 Thesis Building and Looking Ahead 27:50 Nuclear, Copper and the Climate Rollercoaster 29:29 Founders in Mining 32:19 Seattle's Venture Scene 41:30 Advice for Founders About Your Host Ed Barker has enjoyed a weird and varied career. Ed is a Brit now resident in Seattle and has founded three startups, enjoyed a long career in corporate strategy, and most recently as a VC. Sound Investments shines a small light on the fantastic work being done in the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial community. Studio 1878 Ed is Founder of Studio 1878, a podcast strategy and production studio focused on helping brands tell smarter, more human stories. We work with founders, operators, and marketing leaders to design shows that serve clear strategic goals. Studio 1878 handles the full process - from concept and positioning through recording, editing, and distribution. Our work blends editorial thinking with production craft, prioritizing substance over noise. The result is podcasts that build trust, credibility, and long-term brand value. Alexandra Iljadica Alexandra is an Investor at BHP Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the global mining and minerals company BHP, where she invests in industrial decarbonisation, novel mining operations from AI-led exploration to extraction and processing, and the commodities of the energy transition. She joined BHP Ventures four years ago after helping stand up the 5G Open Innovation Lab, the Seattle-based accelerator. Her earlier career was in Australia, where she co-founded Youth Food Movement Australia and spent seven years scaling it into a national community of more than 20,000 young people, serving as CEO. She describes her own career as a series of moves "upstream" toward root causes, and is a visible presence in Seattle's climate community. Connect with Alexandra: BHP Ventures: bhp.com/about/our-businesses/ventures (https://www.bhp.com/about/our-businesses/ventures) LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alexandra-iljadica (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-iljadica/) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

3. 

   30 May 2026

   Innovating Circular Economies with Sarah O'Sell, UW CoMotion Labs

   Ed Barker talks to Sarah O'Sell manager at CoMotion Labs’ Climate Tech Incubator at the University of Washington and a partner in the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub with Virtue Lab, NineZero, and the City of Seattle. Sarah recounts her circular-economy education in industrial design, early supply-chain work with Starbucks, and a career pivot after witnessing environmental harm and labor issues in China. She explains how the hub is designed to create “flow” from research to commercialization, and details the incubator’s application, review, and six-month program covering team-building, sales/marketing, operations, fundraising, mentor matching, and concluding with a demo day. Prior teams have raised about $1M each on average. The conversation defines sustainability, net zero, regenerative and degrowth, and highlights Ocean Made’s kelp-based seedling pot as an example of regenerative innovation. There's the impact of long timelines for materials and infrastructure innovation; it assesses venture scalability and identifies regional gaps like mobility/transportation amid shifting federal climate policy. 00:00 Introduction 01:47 Welcome Sarah O'Sell: Origin Story 08:08 The Seattle Climate Innovation Hub 10:08 Inside the Accelerator Programme 16:59 Defining the Language of Climate 20:42 Ocean Made: A Regenerative Company Case Study 24:30 The Pace of Breakthroughs 30:39 The Pacific Northwest Climate Ecosystem 35:54 Policy, Hype and What's Missing 41:47 Advice for Founders About Your Host Ed Barker has enjoyed a weird and varied career. Ed is a Brit now resident in Seattle and has founded three startups, enjoyed a long career in corporate strategy, and most recently as a VC. Sound Investments shines a small light on the fantastic work being done in the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial community. Studio 1878 Ed is Founder of Studio 1878, a podcast strategy and production studio focused on helping brands tell smarter, more human stories. We work with founders, operators, and marketing leaders to design shows that serve clear strategic goals. Studio 1878 handles the full process - from concept and positioning through recording, editing, and distribution. Our work blends editorial thinking with production craft, prioritizing substance over noise. The result is podcasts that build trust, credibility, and long-term brand value. Sarah O'Sell Sarah O'Sell is Manager of the CoMotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator at the University of Washington, the six-month cohort-based program housed inside the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub and run in partnership with the City of Seattle's Office of Economic Development, 9Zero, and VertueLab. She came to the role from Anim8 Collective, the circular economy strategy consultancy she founded after a decade of work spanning sustainable product design, supply chain transformation, and clean technology. Her introduction to the field was hands-on: at Western Washington University's industrial design engineering program, she sourced waste from local businesses and turned it into commercial products, and later co-founded a college solar startup that won EPA grants. She identifies publicly, including in her LinkedIn handle, as a circular economy practitioner. Across two cohorts she has reviewed 63 applicants and accepted 14, with portfolio companies spanning kelp-based agriculture, biochar, building performance software, EV adoption, and biodegradable materials. Connect with Sarah: Comotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator: comotion.uw.edu/startups-incubation/comotion-labs/comotion-labs-climate-tech-incubator/ (comotion.uw.edu/startups-incubation/comotion-labs/comotion-labs-climate-tech-incubator/) LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/circular-economy/ (linkedin.com/in/circular-economy/) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Who has been a guest on Sound Investments - Conversations with Pacific North West Venture Investors hosted by Ed Barker

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Elisa La Cava
• Pablo Casilimas
• Amish Patel
• Sarah Applebaum

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 19 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

25

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32