Arteen Arabshahi’s career path has been untraditional. The son of Iranian immigrants, he grew up planning to be a surgeon and bounced through medicine and finance before finding his passion in entrepreneurship and technology. He got his first job in this industry by cold emailing 150 people and spent 5 years in traditional venture capital (Fika Ventures, Karlin Ventures) before joining WndrCo to pursue a unique hybrid of entrepreneurship and investment. At WndrCo, Arteen manages the early-stage investments. Prior to investing, Arteen helped launch BuiltinLA.com and worked at Techstars Chicago.
Arteen has been selected for Forbes 30 Under 30, Business Insider 30 and Under, and CSQ’s NextGen 10. He holds a BSBA from the University of Arizona and contributes to TechCrunch, Forbes, and Business Insider. On nights and weekends, he’ll either be enjoying the outdoors, at a concert, or at an open mic poetry slam. He cares deeply about mental health awareness, equal access to opportunity, and performing arts. You can find him at @arteeninLA.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Who is Arteen Arabshahi and how did he get started in venture capital investing?
- How Arteen involves himself in the team-building process for startup companies
- Common notions about organizational culture and how a company growing too quickly affects its culture
- Why companies should have clear mission and vision statements
- How Arteen decides on where to invest his money
- Tips for businesses who are in the process of hiring and building a team and the questions managers should avoid asking
- Greg talks about his interview process and the types of questions he likes to ask candidates
- Arteen explains why the best types of leaders elevate their team and shares his thoughts on acquihires
In this episode…
For a person with many years of experience working in different industries, Arteen Arabshahi has a wealth of knowledge to share from the tech industry, finance, investments, and early stage venture capital funding. He helps companies recruit and retain talent, expand operations and grow their revenue, and he knows the crucial role of the hiring process to a company’s growth.
In this week’s episode of Elevate Hire, Greg Toroosian interviews Arteen Arabshahi of WndrCo LLC about his perspective on hiring and retaining talent. He talks about his background and professional career, how he identifies worthwhile investments, how he helps grow early stage teams, and more. Stay tuned.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Elevate Hire
- WndrCo
- Arteen Arabshahi on LinkedIn
- Arteen Arabshahi on Twitter
- Arteen Arabshahi on Instagram
- Built In Los Angeles
- Sweetgreen
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition firm which provides leadership and senior level recruiting services for early-stage companies. Elevate Hire also offers advisory and consultancy services for select clients.
Elevate Hire was founded by Greg Toroosian after more than a decade in the Talent Acquisition space, working with startups, globally recognized brands and recruiting agencies, because I found that too many early-stage companies were struggling to recruit and retain top talent during crucial times of growth.
Because recruitment and talent retainment are keys to having a successful company in today’s fast-paced economy, Elevate Hire is committed to helping you recruit the right top tier talent, at the right time, can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field.
If your company needs assistance with talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training, or if you’re in need of an advisor, get in touch with us today to find out how we can make this work so that you can start building the company of your dreams.
Click this link to learn more about us and the services that we can provide for you and your company.
Episode Transcript
Intro
Welcome to the Elevate Hire podcast where CEOs founders and executives of early stage companies talk through their experiences of building teams.
Greg Toroosian
Greg Toroosian here , Founder of Elevate Hire and host of the Elevate Hire podcast where I talk to CEOs, founders and executives about the challenges and successes they’ve had while recruiting for their teams. This episode is actually brought to you by Elevate Hire a talent acquisition advisory, consultancy and execution firm to provide leadership and senior level recruiting services to early stage and rapidly growing companies. We believe that recruiting and retaining talent is key to having a successful company. In today’s fast moving economy being able to recruit the top tier talent at the right time can differentiate most successful companies from the rest of their field. If your company needs assistance in talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training or if you’re in need of an advisor we can help. For more details visit elevatehire.com.
In this episode, I have my friend Arteen Arabshahi, the Vice President at WndrCo. I’ve asked Arteen to be on the show, as he has been very active in seed to Series B investments for a good chunk of time. And we’re going to talk through his career, his experience identifying worthwhile investments, how he’s helped grow early stage teams and what you’ve seen along the way. Welcome, Arteen. Thanks for being on the show.
Arteen Arabshahi 1:27
Thanks for having me, man. Excited to chat. It’s good to see you doing this.
Greg Toroosian 1:31
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve caught up in person, so I’m glad we can actually do this. For all the listeners. We are deep deep in quarantine. I don’t know, we are 10. Something like that. 910 something crazy in the COVID era. So yeah, we’re doing this via zoom. Where are you right now? Are you still in LA?
Arteen Arabshahi 1:52
I’m, I actually left la last week. I’m out in a town called Driggs, Idaho. About a few hours away from Yellowstone, so I’m posted up here for a little bit of time. Yeah, yeah, change of scenery. Exactly. Yeah, my view here is a little bit better. But uh, but I was in LA for like nine or 10 weeks then home and kind of doing my part there too. It’s, it’s funny. I mean, I just remember I love seeing all the stuff around, you know, our grandparents were actually asked to go to war and we’re just asked to kind of stay inside Yeah, just take it as seriously as you can to stay inside you know?
Greg Toroosian 2:36
Yeah, it’s such a strange time. But also a great time to connect with people, which is why you know, we’re doing this and able to get on each other’s calendars, which is great. So if you could give the listeners a quick overview of yourself, your career today, what you’ve been involved with, and one of the CO that would be amazing.
Arteen Arabshahi 2:52
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for having me. You know, my, my career has kind of taken some interesting turns. But but the last, you know, six years or so predominantly has been focused on venture capital investing. I got introduced to the tech industry almost 10 years ago now. I started my first role working at TechStars, Chicago, I actually worked at a place called Accele labs that became TechStars, Chicago. And that was how I first got introduced to the tech ecosystem. I got that job by cold emailing about 150 people. So we can tell that story independently if you want. But I started at TechStars. And then I wanted to move to LA. LA felt like an ecosystem that had just really started to take off. And it was close to home, which was Arizona for me. And I started looking for a way to get to LA. And I found out that a company I knew in Chicago called built in Chicago, they wanted to launch a la market called built in LA. And so I actually ended up moving to LA to launch that. And built in is basically a localized kind of media business, where we would write articles And content about the tech community locally. And then we would also have a jobs board where people could kind of find jobs. The idea being that if you’re reading about tech in LA, you probably want to work in tech in LA. And so that’s what I’m, that’s what brought me out. And, you know, been in LA now, seven years. And after about a year of doing builds in LA, I left and I joined a venture capital firm, called Carlin ventures. And it was at Carlin for about three and a half years before my, my boss from Harlan and I decided to leave and start a fund called FICO ventures. And so I worked at a fund called FICO venters for another couple of years. And then about a year and a half ago, I left and I joined wonder co where I am now. And so for context, you know, across those Carlin and I was focused on seed stage, leading investments, mostly b2b enterprise software and consumer marketplaces. So kind of really caught my teeth doing you know lead lead stages. Lead investments at the seed stage in LA predominantly. And that was kind of at a time where seed investing was really just starting to pick up. And so that was, that was where I got started as an investor, and then more recently have been at wonder CO, which is a consumer tech and media holding company started by the founders of DreamWorks and executives from Dropbox. And so we’re focused a little bit more on consumer and productivity software and things like that. And the firm I’m at now, we, you know, with wonder CO, we’re mostly focused on acquiring majority positions in later stage businesses. But my role is actually to make early stage investments kind of across seed through Series B, mostly consumer, always kind of as a co investor, passive kind of smaller check size type type roles. So that’s what I’m up to these days. It’s a cool hybrid between kind of, you know, running companies and also investing in companies across the landscape. Very cool. Very cool.
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