LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 106

Daniel Leff — Waverley Capital

July 28, 2021

Seed
Series A
Series B

From sitting on the Roku board from 2011 - 2018, Daniel Leff saw disruption in the media industry first hand.

He says that, unlike in tech, disruption in media comes from working with the incumbents rather than working against them.

Full transcript

Today I am with Daniel Leff. Daniel is the managing partner at Waverley Capital, a fund he co-founded with Edgar Bronfman Jr. Waverley is a media-centered fund and it's the successor fund to Luminary Capital, a fund that Daniel also founded. 

Daniel has an amazing list of investments that include Roku, TheAthletic, Wondery, PlutoTV, and many other important media companies. Daniel, first off, thank you for coming on the pod. And second of all, I just want to congratulate you because I do believe you are my first guest that has recognized the fluid dynamic equations in the background and I wasn't expecting it because you are a media focused investor and I didn't know you would know the Del Operator behind me.

Well Minnie thank you very much, for that introduction and for also having me on the podcast, I really appreciate it. And sadly, I know what it is because I have a PhD in physical chemistry and took lots of statistical dynamics, statistical thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, but that was another lifetime. 

Right, that PhD comes in handy a lot now. 

In more ways than, you know, but not for any specific knowledge of physics or chemistry.