Leadership is a learned skill, and it’s one every founder needs to master. Join guest expert Gagan Biyani and Outlander’s Paige Craig for their expertise on how founders can effectively lead their growing ventures to success.

Gagan Biyani is co-founder and CEO at Maven, a marketplace where subject matter experts teach live, cohort-based courses to the professionals seeking to level up. Maven has hundreds of courses on critical workplace skills in subjects such as engineering, product management, and design. Previously, Gagan co-founded Udemy, a platform for video-based courses or MOOCs. With over 500 million course enrollments, Udemy was the first major MOOC platform online and is the largest video courses library on the Internet. He was also co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company that raised $60M and eventually shut down. He writes about his experiences as a founder at gaganbiyani.com and twitter.com/gaganbiyani.

After serving in the Marine Corps, Paige combined his natural entrepreneurial instinct with his passion for national security and bootstrapped a private military company. Starting by driving solo into Iraq with $10k, he scaled his business to over $300M in revenue in four years, with programs across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. He has used his experience from the first half of his career focused on national security and its success to form his approach to investing.

Paige spent the next six years angel investing and crafting his investing methodology. During this period, more than ten percent of his seed investments have become unicorns, including Lyft, Wish, Gusto, Postmates, and Twitter. He credits this success to his life experiences, including many from his military service, that taught him the importance of the human element and the ability to be a contrarian thinker. Based on these beliefs and his early success, he created the 38-point Outlander Founder Framework that serves as the foundation of his institutional investing strategy today.

Since then, Paige has led two funds, Outlander Archimedes (2015) and Outlander Edison (2020), implementing and refining his Founder Framework to find incredible founders and drive superior returns. Since investing, over the course of over 140+ investments, he has driven blended returns in the top 5% of VCs globally, including seed investments such as OpenDoor, ClassPass, Scale, and Andela.

As the Managing Partner of Outlander VC, Paige leads a team that continues to invest in brilliant founders from across the US through the use of a scalable and repeatable framework, which has underpinned his success to date. He remains constantly on the hunt for the outlandish and contrarian thinking that will help Outlander VC lead the industry in early-stage investing.

The Founder's Guide to Effective Leadership with Gagan Biyani, CEO + Co-founder of Maven