The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world’s greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia’s Doug Leone and Benchmark’s Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Linkedin’s Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake’s Frank Slootman.
If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.
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20VC: Figma's IPO: The Full Breakdown | Index Returns $3.5BN on Two Deals | Why Melio's $2.5BN Acquisition is "Discouraging" | Asana's New CEO and the Great Founder Exodus | Oracle's $30BN AI Deal and What it Means for Incumbents
AGENDA:
00:00 – $400B in AI CapEx: Rational Investment or Madness?
05:00 – Figma's IPO: Rule of 80, $1.5B in cash, 40% margins. Unreal.
08:00 – Adobe Screwed the Deal—Should They Have Just Bought Canva?
16:00 – Pay-to-Play Deals: Heroic Hail Mary or Guaranteed Write-Off?
21:30 – How Index Is Returning $3.5B on 2 Deals
24:00 – Melio’s $2.5B Exit: Insane Growth… So Why Did They Sell?!
35:00 – Massive Penthouses and the Death of Focus: AI Founders Beware
39:00 – Chime, Anthropic, Menlo & The Art of Selling LPs the Future
41:00 – Couchbase Acquired: PE Buyers Are Back… Or Are They?
44:00 – Why No One’s Buying These 9-Figure SaaS Zombies
48:00 – If You Didn’t Grow from AI By June 30, You’re Already Dead
53:00 – Superhuman vs The AI-Natives: Who Wins the Replatforming War?
54:30 – Oracle's $30B AI Deal: Larry Did It Before You Even Started
56:00 – Scale Is Dead. Long Live Surge. The AI Data War Gets Bloody.
01:01:00 – Asana CEO Move & the Great Founder Exodus of 2025
01:06:00 – Will Cluely’s Founder Be a Billionaire by 2029? Place Your Bets
20VC: Inside KKR's Monster $8BN European Fund | The $500M Turkey Gamble That Went Wrong | Do Andreessen & General Catalyst Scare KKR? | Will AI Kill the PE Model? | Can The PE Model Survive without IPOs and Where is the Liquidity with Philip Freise
Philipp Freise is Co-Head of European Private Equity at KKR, where he manages the largest private fund in Europe with $8BN in the latest fund. Philip has led KKR's investments in FGS Global, Superstruct, Axel Springer SE, BMG Rights Management, Fotolia, GetYourGuide, GfK SE, Leonine, Mediawan SAS, Scout24 Switzerland and Trainline. Previously, Philip worked at McKinsey & Company in and co-founded Berlin-based VC firm Venturepark, Europe's first pan-European incubator.
Agenda:
00:00 – "We Lost $500M in Turkey. Here’s Why We’ll Never Do It Again."
01:40 – Inside Europe’s Biggest PE Fund: $8B of Pure Firepower
03:55 – The $100M Dot-Com Failure That Changed My Career
06:45 – Why Picking the Wrong VC Will Destroy Your Company
10:20 – KKR’s $500M COVID Gamble: Genius or Insane?
12:35 – Why We Ignored the Market & Deployed 40% of Our Fund
15:55 – KKR’s Ruthless Portfolio Discipline: Love Doesn’t Matter
17:10 – Do Power Laws Apply in PE? Freise Destroys the Myth
18:45 – The Truth About Capital Intensity in the Age of AI
20:10 – Can AI Kill the PE Model? Here’s What Philipp Says
26:00 – The Secret to Great Investment Decisions at KKR
32:40 – Why There’s a $3T Liquidity Time Bomb in Venture
34:25 – The Death of IPOs? How KKR Exits Without Going Public
40:05 – Will KKR Europe Hit $20B? Freise's Bold Prediction
43:45 – Helsing, Space, and Defense: The New Age of DeepTech Bets
45:30 – Tariffs, China, and the Future of the German Car Empire
47:00 – Freise vs. Bitcoin: Will USD Still Rule in 10 Years?
48:15 – 4 Global Shocks Happening Right Now That You Need to Know
51:30 – KKR Missed Spotify AND Alibaba?! The Painful Stories
53:00 – Do Andreessen & General Catalyst Scare KKR? Freise Responds
54:30 – The One Metric That Will Define KKR’s Next Decade
20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves
Kim Graves is GM, Americas at Notion, where she oversees all Sales and Customer Success efforts across the region. She brings extensive experience in building and scaling high-performing sales organizations, most notably at Slack where she helped grow revenue from $6M to over $1.5B. In addition to her operational role, Kim serves as a founding partner at 20SALES, a GTM-focused VC firm, where she advises early-stage companies on scaling revenue and optimizing sales processes.
Agenda:
07:00 – The Secret to Winning a Discount Conversation
09:30 – Notion’s Wild New Sales Method: Mindsets Over Stages
12:00 – Why Great Sellers Never Talk Product Too Soon
14:00 – How Slack Avoided the Biggest PLG Trap of All
17:00 – The Fatal Mistake Founders Make Layering Sales on PLG
20:00 – The “Renaissance Reps” That Build Billion-Dollar Motions
23:00 – How to Spot True Grit in a Sales Hire (Without Asking Directly)
26:00 – The Case Study Test That Filters Out Bullshitters
30:00 – The Real Reason Most Reps Fail Onboarding
33:00 – Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline? Kim’s Take Is Clear
36:00 – Why Cold Calling Works in 2025 (And Nobody Does It)
39:00 – The Sales Team Audit: The REKS Framework That Changes Everything
43:00 – How to Avoid Hiring the Wrong Rep Under Pressure
45:00 – When Sales Feels Second Class: PLG vs Enterprise Tension
47:00 – The One Thing Reps Still Do That AI Will Obliterate
50:00 – AI Sales Tools: Why Every Startup Is Failing to Get It Right
53:00 – Will We Have More or Fewer Reps in 5 Years?
56:00 – Enterprises Are Scared of AI – Here’s How You Break In Anyway
59:00 – Kim’s Secret for Getting Past Gatekeepers and Fake Champions
1:09:00 – Kim’s Hardest Phase at Slack and How She Survived It
20VC: Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross Bought with Zuck's $100BN AI Budget | Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens | Why Larry Ellison is the Smartest Man in Tech | Substance or Sizzle: What is Real and What is BS in AI
Agenda:
04:21 - The Meta Acquisition Bombshell: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross Join Facebook?!
06:00 - Facebook’s $100 Billion Gamble: Can Zuck Buy the Future?
09:27 - The “Magic Room” Theory: Why Only Insiders Get Billion-Dollar Paydays
11:27 - Is Loyalty Dead in Silicon Valley? The Great Talent Exodus
16:00 - Harvey’s $5 Billion Valuation: Genius or Bubble?
19:00 - The AI Gold Rush: Can Software Really Eat Human Labor?
22:00 - The B2B Unicorn Dilemma: Are There Enough $100B Companies?
25:00 - IPO Mania: Why Navan, Canva, and Circle Are Shaking Up the Markets
29:00 - Meme Stocks & Market Madness: The Circle Rollercoaster
32:00 - Canva’s Billion-Dollar Question: Why Stay Private?
36:00 - Larry Ellison’s Power Play: How to Buy Back Your Own Empire
39:00 - The Sales Tech Revolution: Why “Cheating” Tools Are the Next Big Thing
42:00 - Slack Lockdown: Is B2B Software About to Get Ugly?
45:00 - The Ultimate Quickfire: Will Trump Launch a Smartphone? Will the US Seize AI?
20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide
Johannes Reck is the Founder and CEO of GetYourGuide, the $2BN company that started with a holiday to China and nothing to do. For the first two years, GetYourGuide received only 5 bookings. Today the platform is worth $2BN. They have raised from some of the best, including an amazing story with Masa Son and Softbank.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
01:45 – “I Regret Our Series A — Too Much Dilution”
03:50 – US vs Europe: Why European Founders Are Tougher
06:10 – “Germany Spends €100B on Pensions, €7B on VC – It’s Insane”
08:40 – Why Europe Fails to Build $10B Startups
10:25 – 90% of Our Team in Berlin Aren’t German. Here’s Why.
12:20 – Recruiting Netflix’s Head of Growth Nearly Killed Me
16:20 – “We Had 5 Bookings in 2 Years. 3 Were My Mum.”
18:00 – “I Asked My Parents to Remortgage Their House for a Pivot”
21:15 – The Vatican Tour That Changed Everything
23:30 – Why VCs Rejected GetYourGuide 100+ Times
28:30 – The $14M Series A That Nearly Killed the Company
31:00 – “I Hired All the Wrong People – Then Laid Off 30%”
36:30 – The $450M SoftBank Deal... Then COVID Hit
40:00 – “We Went to $0 in Revenue in 3 Weeks”
42:10 – The Sequoia Tree Mindset: Grow Through Fire
49:30 – What SoftBank’s Masa Son Was Really Like in Person
52:00 – How He Thinks About Secondary, Wealth, and Not Losing His Soul
55:30 – “My Worst Hires Came from Listening to VCs Too Much”
58:30 – Angel Investing in Trade Republic and TravelPerk: My Lessons
01:01:00 – Do You Have to Work 7 Days a Week to Win?
20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo
Cem Kansu is the Chief Product Officer at Duolingo, where he leads product strategy for over 90 million monthly active learners. Since joining Duolingo, Cem has played a pivotal role in driving record user engagement, revenue growth, and product innovation, including the launch of Duolingo Math and the wildly successful Duolingo Music. Under his leadership, the company has consistently ranked as the #1 education app globally.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:12 – Cem’s Origin Story: From Google Ads to Saving Duolingo’s Business
06:45 – “Mini CEO” Myth: Why PMs Need to Ditch the Ego
08:55 – The Truth About Design Speed and Pixel Perfection
11:30 – The INSANE Story Behind Duolingo’s Viral Chess Launch
14:42 – Why Smaller Teams Are the Future of Product
17:20 – Duolingo’s AI Playbook: How They’re Building 10x Faster
20:05 – Will Engineers Even Exist in 5 Years? Cem Gets Real
26:10 – Do AI Tools Have ANY Defensibility? Cem Doesn’t Hold Back
29:00 – Why Duolingo Took So Long to Monetize (And What They Learned)
33:05 – Cem on Killing Ads, Tasteful Monetization, and Investor Doubt
38:30 – The Secret to Duolingo’s Paywall Strategy (And What Not to Do)
42:05 – Cem’s Weirdest Retention Hack? A Single Emoji…
46:25 – The Crazy Science Behind Push Notifications at Duolingo
50:00 – In-App Purchases Done Right: GEMS, Freeze, and the Psychology of Value
53:15 – Why Cem Thinks Daily Retention Is the King Metric
55:10 – The ONE Product Feature That Changed Duolingo Forever
57:45 – Will Duolingo Become the Disney of Gen Z?
01:00:00 – Dating on Duolingo?! Cem Reacts to Harry’s Craziest Product Ideas
01:03:45 – Cem’s Biggest Product Mistakes — And What He’d Kill Tomorrow
01:12:00 – The One Thing Every PM Must Do to Survive the AI Wave
01:14:00 – Duolingo in 20 Years: Cem’s Wildest Vision Yet
20VC: Scale's $14.8BN Acquisition: Is Scale a Dead Man Walking / What Did Meta Buy | Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever | Ramp Hits $16BN Diluting Only 1% | Salesforce, Slack and Dropbox Falling Behind: Are Incumbents Losing Ground
Agenda:
00:00 – Meta’s $14.8B Deal for Scale: The Analysis
05:40 – Will Scale Lose Their $800M ARR? Will All Customers Leave?
13:00 – Who is the Winner from All Scale Customers Leaving?
21:30 – Who Made the Most Money From Scale?
24:00 – LPs Just Got $14B Back. Are They Reinvesting?
26:45 – Chime IPO: The Breakdown
29:20 – Ramp Hits $16B Valuation: Are We Back in 2021?
31:10 – Ramp vs Brex vs Mercury: Who’s the Real Winner?
34:00 – Gusto Going Public with $900M in ARR???
36:40 – Dropbox vs Glean: Can the Old Guard Survive the AI Wave?
38:50 – Is Slack Dead as a Platform? Salesforce Shutdown Slack API?
41:15 – Will China Dominate AI? The Bets Are In
43:00 – S&P Prediction, iPhone Assembly in the US, and Rory's Rants
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: How We Made $800M on Coursera | We Lost Money on Uber and Made Money on Lyft | We Did 3x on Postmates in 18 Months | DPI is King, MOIC is BS | We Dodged Theranos and I Still Lost Millions with Larry Aschebrook @ G Squared
Larry Aschebrook is the Founder and Managing Partner of G Squared in what is one of the wildest stories of venture capital. Larry started G Squared with nothing, dialling for dollars having personally invested in Twitter and Uber. In his first fund, Larry made sizable bets into SpaceX, Palantir, Alibaba and Twitter. Larry has also had mega losses along the way (discussed in the show) in Getir, 23andme and more. Today, Larry manages over $5BN and has invested in all the best from Wiz to Spotify to Revolut and Anthropic.
Agenda:
00:00 – From Broke to Billion-Dollar Bets
03:40 – The $800M Coursera Windfall
06:10 – Lyft Made Millions, Uber Lost $50M
09:05 – “We Fcked Up”: The Billion-Dollar Vintage
11:50 – How a $150M Spotify Bet Made a Billion
15:10 – The Gut Call That Dodged Theranos
18:00 – Vampires vs Zombies: The Coming Startup Purge
20:30 – When Success Almost Killed the Firm
24:20 – DPI Is King, MOIC Is Bullsht
27:40 – Why I’d Buy Anthropic at $61BN Today
30:05 – Losing $70M on 23andMe
32:10 – The Janitor of Venture Capital
34:00 – The Getir Deal That Nearly Broke Me
36:25 – Does Money Actually Make You Happy?
39:00 – What Cal Ripken Jr. Taught Me About Venture
20VC: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink: Elon’s Empire After the Firestorm | Are Circle and Coreweave Meme Stocks: IPO Analysis | Anduril Raises $2.6BN & Becomes Founders Fund's 1st and 2nd Largest Check Ever | Cursor Now 20% of SaaS Spend and the SaaS Slowdown
Agenda:
00:03 – Circle’s IPO: Investors Just Left $BNs on the Table
00:06 – CoreWeave & Circle: Are We Back to Meme Stock Madness?
00:11 – Should Stripe and Databricks Finally Go Public?
00:17 – US Stock Markets: How They DOMINATE the Global Game
00:21 – 50% of Unicorns Are DOOMED. What Happens Now?
00:25 – Founders Fund Just Dropped $1B on Anduril. Why?!
00:29 – What Would You Do If LPs Let You Go Wild?
00:36 – What Missing Out on Millions for Docusign Taught Rory
00:44 – Cursor is 20% of SaaS Spend: The Shocking Data Behind the SaaS Slowdown
00:47 – AI vs. SaaS: The Great Budget War Begins
00:48 – Can AI Take Budget from the Talent Budget or Will It Remain in Software Budgets?
00:56 – SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink: Elon’s Empire After the Firestorm
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: Fiverr CEO: ‘If You’re Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You’re Done | Why "Time to Copy" is the Most Important Metric in Startups Today | Why 99% of AI Companies Today Will Die | Why Governments Will Take Control of AI with Micha Kauffman
Micha Kaufman is the Founder and CEO of Fiverr, the leading online marketplace for freelance services. Fiverr has had an insane ride in the public markets, in 2019 the company went public with a $650M market cap, at their peak that hit over $8BN. Today, facing a wave of AI, the company has a market cap of $1.121BN on an estimated $430M EOY revenues. Prior to co-founding Fiverr, Micha successfully founded and led several startups over the last 30 years.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
00:00 – “Fuck you. It’s not my job to make you better.” Micha’s viral internal email that sparked a company-wide awakening
05:00 – The real reason Micha thinks Fiverr is vulnerable to AI
07:00 – “Replace 100% of your job with AI”: Micha’s challenge to every employee
11:00 – The brutal truth about entitlement in the modern workforce
13:00 – Wake the f*** up: Micha on the crisis of work ethic and ambition
15:00 – “Too many startups, zero value”: Why AI is the new dot-com bubble
17:00 – The time-to-clone has collapsed: Why your startup can be copied in 10 days
21:00 – Why distribution, not code, is the moat that matters now
23:00 – The new game of investing: Why backing “missionaries” is all that counts
25:00 – The seed investment Micha wrote off… that became his biggest win
38:00 – “Being a CEO today is like captaining a ship in a storm”
39:00 – Will governments take control of AI? The Manhattan Project analogy
42:00 – The rise of AI superpowers—and the brutal decline of everyone else
46:00 – The single-person unicorn: Is it real? Micha says yes
47:00 – Why Micha’s hiring more engineers—not fewer
48:00 – Marketing is being disrupted faster than engineering. Here’s how
54:00 – What cost Micha wants to cut—but can’t
56:00 – Why Micha would tell his kid: “Don’t go to university”
57:00 – The business Fiverr could have built before OnlyFans—and why they didn’t
59:00 – How Micha decides every year whether he should still be CEO
01:00:00 – The ultimate metric: When meaning matters more than happiness
20VC: The Science of Storytelling: Three Steps to Master the Perfect Story | From Near Death Experience to Unicorn Startup: The Untold Story of Omaze with Matt Pohlson
Matt Pohlson is the co-founder and Chairman of Omaze, the most insane story in startups that you have never heard. From near death experience to working with Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney and The Pope. Omaze has raised over $200 million for charity by offering once-in-a-lifetime celebrity experiences and luxury house draws. He's a master storyteller, a purpose-driven builder, and one of the most creative entrepreneurs in modern philanthropy.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
00:00 — He Died for 4 Minutes… Then Built a $400M Startup 04:00 — The Magic Johnson Moment That Sparked Omaze 06:30 — From $780 to $1.7M: The Breaking Bad Campaign That Changed Everything 09:00 — Star Wars, Schwarzenegger, and Selling Dreams 13:00 — He Flatlined in Surgery… And Everything Changed 18:00 — How Near-Death Killed Fear and Transformed His Leadership 22:00 — Why Fear Isn’t Real — And How to Beat It 24:00 — The $250K Bet That Changed Omaze’s Business Forever 27:00 — Launching Houses: The Pivot to $100M+ Revenue 34:00 — The Science of Storytelling: Make the Customer the Hero 38:00 — Why TV Still Works: $35M Ad Spend Secrets 45:00 — How They Almost Went Out of Business—Twice 50:00 — The Deck That Saved Omaze Mid-COVID 53:00 — Loneliness, Therapy, and the CEO Mental Game 55:00 — From Self-Doubt to Self-Love: The Hoffman Process 58:00 — How to Lead With Story, Science, and Soul 1:02:00 — Should Omaze Go Public? Matt's Unfiltered Take 1:05:00 — Addiction, Ambition, and Why Fulfillment Can Kill Hunger 1:10:00 — Revenue Per Employee: $7M a Head! 1:15:00 — Matt’s 10-Year Vision: Fortune 500. #1 in Charity.
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: Is Chamath Right: Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters | Does OpenAI Even Matter | Mary Meekers AI Report: The Analysis| IPO Breakdown: Chime, Circle & Thoma Bravo's New Fund
Agenda:
00:00 – The Most Unfiltered Episode Ever Begins
03:30 – Does OpenAI Even Matter? Sam Lessin Says Maybe Not.
05:45 – TVPI Is Bullshit?
09:20 – Asset Gatherers vs Real Investors: Who Actually Wins?
12:15 – The Death of the Billion-Dollar VC Fund?
16:00 – Mid-Tier VC Funds Are Getting Annihilated
21:00 – Chime: Great Exit or Missed Opportunity?
27:00 – The War on Relevance: What Companies Truly Matter?
33:00 – If You’re Not a Billion-Dollar Company, Do You Even Count?
37:10 – Mary Meeker’s AI Report: What Everyone Missed
39:50 – $600B in AI CapEx—Where Is the Revenue?!
43:40 – What Could Trigger the First AI Crash?
51:10 – The Existential Dread Missing in Most B2B Startups
58:30 – Will AI Reduce Your Startup to Just a Pipe?
01:01:10 – IPO Market Is Back: What Actually Matters Now?
01:06:50 – YC Startups at $60M Valuations: How Should You Play It?
01:10:00 – Why 3% Ownership Could Still Work—Maybe
01:11:30 – Will Elon Still Be Tesla CEO by 2027? Place Your Bets
01:14:10 – Will Meta Release a Closed AI Model? And Does It Even Matter?
01:17:30 – The Real Challenge of Managing 11 Companies and 58 Kids
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: Windsurf Founder on Will Model Companies Own the App Layer | Why Moats Do Not Exist in a World of AI | Why the Notion of Single Person $BN Companies is BS | Lovable vs Bolt & Cursor vs Windsurf: How Does it All End with Varun Mohan
Varun Mohan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Windsurf, the leading AI-native IDE, which has over a million users and generates over 50% of all committed software across thousands of companies. Prior to Windsurf, Varun graduated with a Master’s in Computer Science from MIT and led a team at Nuro focused on large-scale deep learning infrastructure for autonomous vehicles.
Today's Agenda:
[00:00] The $3B Startup That Only Happend on the Third Pivot
[05:12] When to Give Up vs When To Stick at It
[08:55] “Never Fall in Love With Your Idea” — Here’s Why
[10:38] What Founders Get Wrong About Being First
[13:52] What Would Windsurf Do If They Had Unlimited Resources
[16:45] Will Lovable and Bolt Ultimately Compete with Windsurf and Cursor
[19:25] The Product Development Rule That Breaks All Startup Rules
[21:20] The Cold Truth About Moats in the AI Era
[24:30] The OpenAI Question You’re Not Supposed to Ask
[32:50] Who Actually Counts as an Engineer in 5 Years?
[35:10] Will Product Managers Even Exist in 2030?
[37:30] Async Agents Are Coming—But Most Will Fail.. Why?
[41:00] The Truth About Agent-Only Workflows
[44:20] The One Area of Engineering That AI Will Eat Next
[46:12] What Cursor Got Right (That Windsurf Didn’t)
[47:55] Are LLM APIs Already Commoditized?
[50:30] Why Anthropic Won’t Win by Default
[52:10] Should Model Companies Own the App Layer?
[58:05] What Does Varun Want to be Remembered For?
20Sales: From $2M ARR to $40M ARR: The Playbook | How to Use AI To Supercharge Your Sales Team | Why Pipeline Reviews are BS | The Sales Call Script that Closes 99% of Prospects and How to Hire the Best Sales Reps with Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner
Kyle Norton is the Chief Revenue Officer at Owner.com, where he scaled revenue from $2M to $40M ARR in under 3 years while selling to one of the toughest markets: SMB restaurants. Before Owner, Kyle led sales at Shopify, where he helped architect one of the most operationally elite GTM orgs in SaaS.
Agenda:
00:00 – From Shopify to $40M ARR at Owner.com
06:40 – Why Founders Who Skip Sales Get Burned
11:50 – 90% Inbound, Then 70% Outbound — And Why Neither Is Enough
17:40 – How to Use AI in Sales to Massively Increase Outbound
24:30 – BDRs Don’t Get Paid for Demos. Only Closed Revenue.
30:50 – The 3-Part Sales Scorecard That Replaced My Gut
36:20 – I Posted a Job on LinkedIn and Got 1,200 Applicants
42:15 – I Fired a Rep on Day 11. Here’s Why.
49:40 – We Don’t Do Pipeline Reviews. The Secret...
55:00 – The One Call Close Script That Wins in 99% of Cases
1:03:10 – Why YouTube Is Our Underrated Growth Weapon
1:14:30 – Sales Is a Personal Development Exercise Disguised as a Career
1:20:45 – The Night We Closed Until 1AM and Hit the Number
20VC: OpenAI's $6BN Jony Ive Deal | YC Is Both Chanel and Walmart—and Has Officially Won | Builder.ai Implodes and Hinge IPOs: Who Wins & Who Loses | Seed Is Easy. Series A Is Brutal & The Dirty Truth About Late-Stage Venture
Agenda:
00:00 – Why “Fund Returners” Are a Myth in Late-Stage VC
05:02 – Builder.ai Implodes: $500M Gone & Fraud Allegations Begin
11:40 – The Dirty Truth About Late-Stage Venture Math
15:57 – The Hinge IPO: Who Won, Who Lost, and Why It’s a Game Changer
23:03 – The Chime Bombshell: Late-Stage VCs Forced to Crystallize Huge Losses
27:14 – Why YC Is Both Chanel and Walmart—and Has Officially Won
33:41 – Seed Is Easy. Series A Is Brutal. Here's Why
39:50 – The Silent Killer: How Dilution Is Screwing VCs Without Them Realizing
46:04 – OpenAI’s $6B Jony Ive Deal: Genius or Delusion?
50:47 – Does OpenAI Win the Hardware War
1:02:09 – Duolingo, Klarna, and the Truth About AI Layoffs
1:13:10 – Only 20% of Unicorns Are Real. The Other 80%? Zombies
1:15:44 – Why 2021 Had an IPO Every Day — And Why That Won’t Return Soon
1:18:00 – Quickfire: AGI Dates, Half-Trillionaires, and Trump Tax Moves
20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang
Airwallex is the most insane story in startups:
- The best angel investment ever: The angel that turned $1M into $1BN.
- One of the world's best VCs pulled a term sheet and lost $1BN.
- The company turned down a $1.2BN offer from Stripe.
- The company scaled to $1BN in transaction volume in 9 months.
- The company has never not grown 100% in a year.
Jack Zhang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Airwallex, one of the world’s fastest-growing global payments and financial infrastructure companies. Since founding the company in 2015, Jack has scaled Airwallex to over $130B in annual payment volume, $720M in ARR, and a global team of 1,800+ employees. Under his leadership, Airwallex has raised over $1.2BN from investors including Square Peg, Lone Pine, and Tencent.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
00:00 – The Best Angel Investment Ever: From $1M to $1BN
06:55 – From Lemon Factory and Petrol Station to Billionaire: The Early Days
15:20 – $5M side hustle while working full-time: how Jack did it
24:45 – Failing Three Times Before Product-Market-Fit
31:00 – The Term Sheet That Got Pulled and Lost Matrix $1BN
34:40 – Why We Rejected Stripe’s $1.2BN Acquisition Offer
49:05 – 0-$1B transaction volume in 9 months: How Shein Saved Airwallex
1:03:40 – We F****** Up Scaling internationally... & Burnt $200M/year
1:08:00 – When COVID hit, they lost 50% of revenue overnight
1:11:45 – Why Jack raised at 6x revenue and is now buying back stock himself
1:15:00 – The truth about secondaries and how much is “enough”
1:18:00 – The hiring mistakes that almost broke the culture
1:20:15 – Why Jack is Taking Out a Line of Debt for $70M
20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries
Luke Harries is Head of Growth at ElevenLabs, where he leads marketing, product, engineering, and developer experience. ElevenLabs has raised $281M with the latest round pricing the company at $3.3B valuation. Previously, Luke held roles at PostHog and Microsoft, and is also an angel investor supporting startups like Lovable and Runna.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
00:00 – The $3.3B Growth Engine Behind ElevenLabs
04:55 – Why Luke Said “No” to Investing in ElevenLabs (and Why He Was Wrong)
15:40 – How ElevenLabs Makes a Horizontal Product Strategy Work
20:15 – How to Build Sharded Growth Teams That Actually Scale
26:30 – The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product
33:00 – The Truth About CAC, Payback, and Performance Marketing in AI
39:05 – SEO Isn’t Dead: The Mini-Tool Strategy You Should Steal
44:10 – Kill Your Inbound SDRs—The Case for Voice AI in Sales
48:40 – Why You Don’t Need PMs and the Rise of Growth-Led Product Teams
20VC: Chime IPO: The Breakdown | Why Fund Returners Are Not Enough & Seed is for Suckers | Are IPOs Dead & The Future of the Late Stage Private Market | Rippling vs. Deel Lawsuit: WTF Happens Now?
Agenda:
04:34 Chime's IPO Announcement: Who Wins & Who Loses06:28 The Lopphole That Means Chime Has a Better Business than JP Morgan
10:51 Why Investors Who Invested at $25BN Will Make Money When it IPOs at $12BN
18:59 Are IPOs Dead & The Future of the Late Stage Private Market
27:32 Exits are Larger Than Ever: So What? What Happens? Who Wins? Who Loses?
40:51 Is Europe Totally F*******
43:48 Challenges of Going Public & What Needs to Change?
46:12 OpenAI's Future and Predictions
49:45 Rippling vs. Deel Lawsuit: Is Deel Screwed?
59:28 Why So Many Companies Are About To Become Database Companies
01:08:07 The Future of Salesforce: Buy or Sell?
01:13:28 Quickfire Round
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker
Severin Hacker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Duolingo, the world’s most downloaded education app with over 100 million monthly users. Since its 2021 IPO, Duolingo has reached a market cap of $20BN. The company has raised over $183M from top-tier investors including CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures, NEA, Ashton Kutcher, and Tim Ferriss. Severin is also an active angel investor, with standout bets including Decagon, one of the fastest-growing AI-native dev shops globally.
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
00:00 – Why It's Harder to Raise $3M Than $100M
02:10 – The Real Reason Duolingo Couldn't Have Started in Europe
04:40 – Duolingo’s AI Pivot: What “AI-First” Actually Means
07:00 – The 12-Year Bottleneck Duolingo Crushed with AI
11:40 – How Duolingo Uses AI Internally (and Why They Love Cursor)
13:30 – Where AI Still Sucks (Especially in Engineering)
16:00 – Will AI Kill the CS Degree? Severin’s Surprising Take
18:00 – The End of Work? UBI, Purpose, and the Future of Labor
25:20 – OpenAI vs Duolingo: Are They Coming for Language Learning?
29:20 – Duolingo’s Biggest Mistake: “We Waited Too Long on This…”
39:30 – Duolingo’s Secret Sauce: What Investors Always Get Wrong
45:00 – Would You Go Public Today? Severin’s Surprising Answer
49:00 – Best and Worst Parts of Going Public—A Rare Honest Take
51:00 – Should Europe Give Up? Severin's Unfiltered Opinion
56:00 – Harsh Truth: “Europe Can’t Win Unless the U.S. Screws Up”
59:10 – Why Founders Have to Move to the US to Optimise Their Chance of Success
1:01:00 – Why Union Square Was the Only VC to Say Yes
1:03:00 – The Real Value of Tier 1 VCs (Even at Worse Terms)
1:05:00 – From PhD Student to Billionaire: Does Money Buy Happiness?
1:09:00 – Why Severin Sometimes Lies About His Job
1:10:20 – Founder Marriage Advice: “Write a Contract”
1:11:50 – How to Pick a Life Partner – Severin’s Tuesday Night Test
20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on The Doomed Future of Europe, Reflections on Money, Marriage and the Future of AI
20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita
Yuhki Yamashita is the Chief Product Officer at Figma, where he leads the development of one of the world’s most beloved design platforms. Previously, he was Head of Product at Uber, overseeing the core rider experience used by millions globally. A master of product storytelling and team-building, Yuhki has redefined how world-class digital products are built and scaled.
Items Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
04:30 – "Simple is Lazy?" — Yuhki Challenges Product Dogma
07:45 – The Secret Behind Figma’s New Product Ideas (Hint: Users Hack It First)
09:00 – From Hack Week to Roadmap: How New Figma Products Are Born
10:00 – Are PRDs Dead? Yuhki's Spicy Take on the Death of Specs
12:30 – The ‘Screenshot Test’: Can Your Product Explain Itself in 1 Frame?
14:15 – Code Layers and ‘Living Designs’—This Demo Blew Everyone’s Mind
15:30 – Designers vs Coders: Who Really Owns the Future of Product?
17:45 – The Most Controversial Product Decision Inside Figma
19:00 – Why Figma’s Org Structure Could Kill the PM Role (For Real)
21:00 – Should Everyone Be a Designer and a Builder Now?
23:15 – Will Figma Have Fewer Engineers in 5 Years?
24:00 – Cursor, Windsurf & AI Coding Tools—What Figma Engineers Really Use
25:30 – AI’s Dual Power: Lowering the Floor, Raising the Ceiling
27:00 – Figma’s Biggest Product Flop? Yuhki Owns It
29:30 – The Magic of Product Storytelling—Even for Boring Compliance Tools
31:00 – Why Joy Must Be in the Product (and How Figma Bakes It In)
33:00 – Does Product Market Fit Even Mean Anything in 2025?
35:30 – Is Great Design Enough? Or Is It ALL About Distribution?
37:15 – Dylan’s Secret to Early Growth: Hacking Design Twitter
39:00 – Community Mistakes Startups Keep Making
41:00 – The One Thing Yuhki Wishes He Could Change at Figma
43:00 – Should They Have Launched 4 Products at Once? Time Will Tell
45:00 – When Do You Know a New Product Is Doomed?
46:30 – Why Designers Still Don’t Ship What They Design (and How to Fix It)
48:00 – From Uber to Figma: Yuhki’s Playbook for Massive Product Swings
53:00 – The Adobe Deal Breakup—How Figma Rallied
56:00 – What Yuhki Needs to Improve as a Leader (His Own Feedback Review)
58:00 – The Product Leader He Admires Most—and Why
59:30 – What Figma Still Gets Wrong About Product Culture
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: Tiger Global Saved by OpenAI | Coatue's New Fund: Hype or Substance | Why SBF is the Greatest Investor of the Last 5 Years | Why Big Funds are Investing in Perplexity
Items Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
04:11 Owner’s New $120M Round at $1BN
06:05 Why Series A is F****** Today
14:55 Could Tiger Global Be Saved by OpenAI and Scale
22:43 Why SBF is the Greatest Investor of the Last Decade
31:34 Why No Individuals Should Invest in Venture Funds
36:27 Why Microsoft Laying 3% of Their Workforce Off is not Enough
41:38 OpenAI’s New CEO: Non-Technical CEOs Running OpenAI
44:48 Why Big Funds are Investing in Perplexity
54:43 Why Clay Should Raise a Warchest and Go to War
01:00:05 The Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales
20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund
Immad Akhund is the CEO of Mercury. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $500M in funding from Sequoia, Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz and others. He is a former part-time partner at Y Combinator and is an active angel investor, with more than 350 investments in startups including Rippling, AirTable, Rappi, Applied Intuition, and Substack.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:38 Exclusive News: New Fund Announcement
05:15 Lessons from 350 Angel Investments
12:27 Why Founders Should Always Push for the Highest Price
14:40 Biggest Wins and Misses in Angel Investing
22:56 How Sequoia Came to Lead the Series C for Mercury
31:32 Why Move From Angel to VC
33:41 Is It Wrong For Founders to Also Have Funds with LP Capital?
36:28 AI Investments: Overhyped or Worthwhile?
41:14 Raising a First Time Fund: Challenges & Surprises
49:47 The Future of Venture Capital
54:36 Quickfire Questions and Reflections
20VC: Four Traits of the Most Successful Founders | How to Hunt and Close Talent Like a Pro and Where All Founders Go Wrong | Lessons Raising $397M From the Best Investors in the World with Eléonore Crespo @ Pigment
Eléonore Crespo is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Pigment, one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. With Pigment, Eleonore has raised over $397M from the best in the world including ICONIQ, Greenoaks and IVP to name a few. Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was on the other side of the table as an investor with Index Ventures.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
[04:10] “I had 3 surgeries. That’s when I knew I had to become a founder.”
[06:50] Why Index Ventures isn’t on her cap table
[08:40] Eleonore’s CIA-style co-founder hunt (she literally made a target list)
[11:50] Co-CEOs: “We talk 3x a day. That’s our superpower.”
[13:30] The boutique coffee metaphor for product excellence
[15:40] Yuri Milner’s 4 traits of legendary founders (one is shocking)
[17:30] “Hiring is everything. I hunt talent like a football scout.”
[19:00] Wild Olympic Games story → led to hiring a top CFO
[24:50] How she filters out title-chasers and political hires
[29:30] “Too much process? I make teams list the dumbest ones.”
[33:00] Her blunt answer on whether Europe can produce scale execs
[35:00] Why she raised so much money… even when they didn’t need it
[38:50] Board power is real: “They can fire you. I’ve seen it.”
[43:30] Rob Ward’s counter-cyclical advice: double down during a downturn
[44:50] “We closed a massive US deal… at 2am… while drenched in rain.”
[47:10] Selling into the US as a European founder—her full playbook
[50:20] The hardest part of being a CEO no one talks about
[54:00] “Children remind you what happiness is.”
[56:30] “I don’t fast. That would make me unhappy.” On longevity culture
[59:20] Why her husband knows nothing about Pigment
[01:04:20] “Forget $50B. I want to build a $200B company.”
Follow Eleonore Crespo-
LinkedIn: Eleonore Crespo
-
Pigment: pigment.com
Subscribe to 20VC for more conversations with the world’s best founders and investors.
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: Benchmark vs a16z: Why Stage Specific Firms Win | Windsurf Sells For $3BN | Decagon Raises at 100x ARR | Do Mega Funds Win the Future of VC | What Does Harvard's Losing Their For-Profit Status Mean for VC
Today’s Topics:
04:44 Analysis of $3 Billion Windsurf Acquisition
12:39 Will Mega Funds Win the Future of Venture Capital
18:39 Does Every Fund Have to do Pre-Seed to Win Series A and B Today
27:53 Why AI Will Create Massive Unemployment
31:06 The $100,000 Bet on the Future of Work
35:52 Why Venture Has Become a Bundled Good
37:52 Why Stage Specific Firms Will Win: a16z vs Benchmark
40:16 What Does Harvard Losing It’s For Profit Status Mean for Venture
42:57 Why AI is Maiming and Not Killing Growth Companies on the Path to IPO
45:41 Decagon Raises 100x ARR: The Breakdown
52:50 Why VCs Are Upside Junkies and What That Means Today
01:03:37 Olo Looking to Sell: What Happens When Public Companies Want to Sell
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore
Bucky Moore is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, announced exclusively in the show today on 20VC. Prior to Lightspeed, Bucky spent an incredibly successful 7 years at Kleiner Perkins working with Mamoon Hamid to build one of the most successful early stage firms of the last decade. Bucky has made investments in the likes of Prisma, Netlify, Browserbase and more.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:07 Big News: Joining Lightspeed Venture Partners
04:09 Why Mega Platforms Will Win the Next 10 Years of VC
09:33 Are Foundation Model Companies Good Venture Investments
16:04 What Applications Will Model Providers Buy/Build? What Will They Not?
22:03 How to Approach Price Sensitivity in a World of AI
28:25 Why is it BS to do Market Sizing When Making Investments in AI
34:03 Is the Future of VC Domain Specialization
38:38 How to Know What Company Wins in Super Competitive Markets
41:06 Why Every Firm Has to do Pre-Seed To Win in VC Today?
44:43 The Risks of Multi-Stage Investing: Is Signalling Risk Real?
48:53 Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Glean and Windsurf
56:54 Quick Fire Round: Lessons from Mamoon, Fave CEO, Next 10 Years
20Sales: Sierra: Inside Silicon Valley's Fastest Growing Sales Machine & How to Prospect, Outbound and Close Enterprise Deals in AI
Reggie Marable is the Head of Global Sales at Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. Sierra enables companies like ADT, Sonos, SiriusXM, and WeightWatchers to build AI agents that transform customer experiences. The company has rapidly become a hypergrowth leader in Silicon Valley, recently securing a funding round that values it at $4.5 billion. Before joining Sierra, Reggie was the Head of Sales in North America at Slack and the Area Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Salesforce.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
02:50 “What I Learned from Failing Early as a CRO”
06:06 The Most Effective Sales Strategy and the BS Sales Methodology
06:55 How to Build Sales Processes from Scratch
12:28 When and How to do Verticalised Sales Teams
14:15 How to Become World Class as Sales Prospecting and Outbound
17:21 How to Use Proof of Concepts to Win Enterprise Deals
22:04 Enterprise vs. Self-Serve: Both or One and How
30:09 Building a Sales Team from Scratch
37:39 Structuring the Hiring Process
41:14 How Founders F*** Up Hiring in Sales
46:25 Handling Salary and Title Expectations
51:36 How to Run Effective Deal Cycles
57:06:07 How to do Onboarding for New Sales Hires
59:07:48 How to do Post Mortems in Sales Processes
01:04:24 Negotiating Enterprise Deals
01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Sales Tactics and Strategies
This episode is brought to you by Capchase, helping software and hardware companies close deals while accessing TCV upfront. Learn more at capchase.com/20vc.
20VC: Why Fund Returners Are Not Enough Anymore | Why Sequoia Had the Best Strategy at the Worst Time | What it Takes to Be Good at Series A and B Today | Benchmark Leads Manus Round: Should US Funds Invest in Chinese AI
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:56 Why The Risk Lever Has Been Turned Higher than Ever in VC
06:04 Why IRR is the Hardest Thing to Control
09:36 Is Lack of Liquidity Short Term Temporary or Long Term Structural
12:17 Why Fund Returners Are Not Good Enough Anymore
16:03 Sequoia: The Best Strategy at the Worst Time
26:30 What it Takes to be Good at Series A and B Today
34:14 Only Three Company Types Survive AI
41:35 ServiceNow: 25% Pop, WTF Happened
45:29 Palantir and SAP Ripping: Do Incumbents Win AI
49:43 Are Benchmark Wrong to Invest in Chinese Made Manus
01:00:52 Geopolitical Risks in Investments
01:11:36 European vs. US Tech Culture
20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus
Taavet Hinrikus is a Partner at Plural, the early-stage fund that backs the most ambitious founders on a mission to change the world through technology. He co-founded Wise in 2010, where he was CEO and later Chairman, which went public in the first-ever direct listing in Europe in 2021. Prior to that, Taavet was Skype’s Director of Strategy until 2008, having joined as its first employee. He’s been an active investor for more than a decade,with personal investments in the likes of Bolt and Synthesia.
In Today’s Show We Discuss:
04:08 VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys
05:41 Why Banker European VCs Suck More Than The Others
11:20 Why Serial Entrepreneurs Are Better
14:48 Why the 2:20 Fee and Carry Model in VC is Broken
18:01 What are the Biggest Ways VC Investment Decision-Making is Broken
28:26 Why is it BS when VC Firms Need Every Partner to Meet the Founder
31:24 When and Why Will Founders Realise Multi-Stage Firms are Bad Early Investors
34:35 Why Does Europe Need to Build it’s Own Tech Now More Than Ever
37:24 Will Putin Invade More European Countries
39:29 What are the Dangers of Having US Made Tech in Europe
47:12 How Does the Change in Relationship Between the US and Europe Impact How We Build Our Tech Ecosystem?
52:36 Quick Fire Questions and Reflections
20Growth: Inside Kraken’s $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn’t and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta
Mayur Gupta is currently the CMO at Kraken, one of the largest crypto platforms in the world. Prior to that, he lead Marketing, Business Transformation and Growth at Gannett - USA Today Network, led Growth at Spotify and was the CMO at Freshly which eventually got acquired by Nestle. He was the first ever Chief Marketing Technologist at Kimberly Clark.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:25 Biggest Growth Lessons from Spotify
08:21 Role of Marketing in Product-Led Companies
13:35 How to Build a Growth Engine
20:40 Organic vs. Paid Growth Strategies
27:36 The Branding Dilemma: Performance vs. Brand Marketing
28:37 Creating Demand: The Role of Upper Funnel Marketing
29:35 Balancing Investment: Immediate vs Long Term Bets
30:03 Channel Saturation and Experimentation
31:42 Growth Strategies and Performance Metrics
34:54 Growth: Big Swings or Moving % Points
40:04 Successful Growth Experiments and Tactics
44:56 Quick Fire Questions and Final Thoughts
20VC: OpenAI's $3BN Acquisition of Windsurf: The Breakdown | Are Endowment Funds F******* & How LP Deployment to Venture Will Change in 2025 | Why Revenue Multiples are BS, The Rise of AI Rollups and Multi-Stage Funds Destroying Seed Investing
In Today’s Show We Discuss:
04:49 Breaking Down the $3BN Windsurf Acquisition
06:18 Why Sam Altman is Playing a Master Game
12:40 Why Multi-Stage Funds are Destroying Seed Managers
21:52 Are Endowment Funds F******
27:38 What Would Rory Do If He Was CFO of an Ivy League Endowment Fund
43:38 The Denominator Effect and It’s Impact on Venture Allocations
49:36 Why Revenue Multiple is BS & What You Need to Know
51:34 The Rise of AI Rollup Plays & Are They Good Businesses
55:29 Competitive Markets: How to Make Money in Them?
01:02:58 Why If You Can Guarantee 5x, You Should Always Do the Deal
01:11:56 Is SF The Only Place to Be Building Today
20VC: Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders | The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time | Why SPACs Will Come Back | Why Short Sellers Should Be Banned | Is Trump Better for Business than Biden with Jason Wilk @ Dave
Jason Wilk is the Founder and CEO of Dave, the greatest turnaround in the public markets of the last 12 months. Dave went public with a market cap of $4BN, just months later the company had a market cap of $50M. Today, they are back with a market cap of $1.1BN. In 2024, CNBC named Dave the best-performing financial stock in the country, achieving 900% growth.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:09 Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders
07:45 The Best Performing Fund Would Only Invest in YC Founders on Their Second Time
11:25 “We Went Public Too Late, It Was a Big Mistake”
17:53 Why Did Jason Choose to SPAC?
24:21 Why Does Jason Believe SPACs are Unfairly Demonised and Will Comeback?
29:47 How Does AI Change the Margin Structure of the Next Generation of Companies
33:14 Is Trump Better for Business than a Biden Administration?
38:35 Are We Heading into a Recession? Predictions for Next 12 Months?
46:26 Why Have No Neobanks Reached the Heights of Revolut in the US?
48:08 Why is the Opportunity in Low Income Banking Not High Income in the US?
50:07 Why Short Sellers Should Be Stopped and How Immoral They Are
20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com
Rich Socher is the Founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of the AI startup MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. He is widely recognised as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Winners & Losers: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude
08:59 How Partnerships Could Decide the Winners in AI
12:42 China vs US: Who Wins the War for AI
25:50 How Society and Economics Needs to Change in a World of AI
34:04 What Jobs Will Be Replaced, What Will Not
36:04 How Europe Needs to Change It’s Approach to AI
41:06 How AI Will Change Health and Longevity
43:10 AI in Consumer and Enterprise Markets
49:30 Quantum Computing and AI Misconceptions
56:57 Longevity, Personal Reflections, and Future Outlook
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20VC: Why Seed is for Suckers | a16z's $20BN Fund & Founders Fund's $4.6BN: What Makes Them So Good | Why Josh Kushner Is the Master of Venture Capital Strategy | Why Extended Private Markets Screw US Citizens with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
Jason Lemkin is one of the leading SaaS investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat, Saleloft and more.
Rory O’Driscoll is a General Partner @ Scale where he has led investments in category leaders such as Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), and WalkMe (WKME), among others.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:23 What is Wrong with Billionaires on Twitter: Are They Depressed?
08:49 Why Does product Market Fit Mean Less Than Ever
11:50 Why is Venture Capital More Risky Than Ever and No One is Discussing It
16:17 Will Private Equity Save a Generation of SaaS Companies and VCs
23:53 a16z’s $20BN Fund: Seriously?
31:29 Why Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital are Masters of the World
38:21 Why is Seed Investing for Suckers
45:49 Why Are $50 Million Seed Funds Useless
46:21 Founders Fund Raises $4.6BN: Analysis
52:00 How WIll LPs Change Their Approach to Venture in the Next Five Years
59:53 When Will IPOs Comeback?
01:09:15 Why Does it Not Make Sense for the Best Companies to IPO
01:09:51 Lost Ethics and Morals in Founder Secondaries and Term Sheets
01:22:58 Quickfire: OpenAI, Cursor, Deel vs Rippling
20VC: Benchmark's Victor Lazarte on Why Portfolio Construction is BS| Why SaaS Spreadsheet Investing is Dead | Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US | Three Traits All the Best Founders Have & The Lie All Big Tech Companies Have Been Telling
Victor Lazarte is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the mot renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Victor has led deals into the likes of HeyGen and Mercor. As an angel, he was the first investor and board member of Brex, and as a Founder he scaled Wildlife Studios, bootstrapping into the largest gaming company in LatAm, with about 4 billion downloads.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Lessons Scaling Wildlife Studios to 4BN Downloads
04:49 Why Predicting the Future is Wrong When Starting a Company
07:11 Three Different Categories of Company in an AI World: Who Wins & Loses?
09:25 Why You Should Always Ask What a Founder Does in Their Free Time?
17:30 Two Traits That All the Best Founders Have?
23:17 Why If You Start a Company in SF You are 1,000x More Likely to be Successful?
35:30 Why Spreadsheet SaaS Investing is Dead
36:10 Why Replacing Humans is the Most Exciting Opportunity in AI
37:02 Why Knowledge Work Will Be Destroyed and What Happens Then?
37:30 Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US
38:59 China vs. US: The AI Race
42:33 Why All Students Today Should Study Computer Science
44:38 Why Portfolio Construction is BS
47:04 What Makes Peter Fenton One of the Best Ever
51:31 Why Duolingo Will Be One of the Most Valuable Companies in the World
01:00:17 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions
20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak
Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:21 Biggest Product Lessons from Scale AI
7:18 Why Product Managers Are Wrong: They are not the CEO of the Product
12:28 Why Market Selection is More Important than Anything Else
16:40 If Distribution is King then Product is President
22:06 Effective Product Strategy and Execution
26:24 How to Write the Best PRDs
31:01 Balancing New Features and Technical Debt
33:17 Analysing Retrospectives and Postmortems
33:55 Introduction to Pre-mortems
38:25 Biggest Product Mistakes and Lessons Learned
41:40 Evaluating AI Models and Lessons Learned
45:03 The Future of AI in Product Management
55:21 What Should Product People Learn to Win in a World of AI
59:37 The AI Talent War in San Francisco
01:01:26 Quickfire Round
20VC: How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem | Why We Need to Flood the UK with Venture Capital | What the UK Can Learn From Sequoia, Stripe and Norway | Why Now is the Time to be Bullish on China & Lessons from Jensen Huang with Tom Hulme & Stan Boland
Tom Hulme is a General Partner @ GV and leads GV’s European investing. He has led rounds in Monzo, Nothing, GoCardless, Lemonade, Snyk and is widely considered one of the best investors in Europe.
Stan Boland is one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the UK. In 1999, he co-founded Element 14 which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 for $640 million. Following this, Boland co-founded Icera Inc. in 2002, a fabless semiconductor company which he sold to Nvidia for $367 million.
In Today’s Discussion We Cover:
04:26 Is The UK’s Biggest Problem a Talent Problem
09:50 Why We Need to Flood the UK With Venture Capital
10:38 What Europe Can Learn from Stripe and the Collisons
15:21 How the UK Can Use Visas to Retain the Best Talent
16:46 Why the Government Needs to Put 10x More Cash Into Fund of Funds
24:32 Is the London Stock Exchange F****** and Does it Matter?
34:38 What The UK Can Learn From Sequoia and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund
40:42 What is a “National Goal for Wealth Creation” & How Do We Implement It?
48:10 What are the Most Broken Elements of the UK Tax Regime
52:11 Is It Stupid to Remove the Non-Dom Tax Status
53:15 Why is Now the Time to Be Bullish on China
01:00:19 Biggest Lessons from Working with Jensen Huang
01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions
20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America
Ernest Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Carvana. Under Ernie’s leadership, Carvana went from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a $50+ billion public company, became the fastest-growing online used car retailer in U.S. history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right, in 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just $400M. Today they are back with a market cap of $35BN, that is a 100x in the public markets and selling 400,000 cars sold annually, with a logistics network that rivals Amazon.
In Today’s Episode with Ernie Garcia We Discuss:
04:12 Are all great founders just “stubborn egomaniacs”?
06:55 How Carvana Almost Died on Several Occasions
08:46 Is Carvana’s Inability to get VC Funding a Sign the VC Model is Broken?
11:58 Operators vs. Strategists: What Hires Can Make or Break a Company?
21:46 Billionaire’s Biggest Lessons on Parenting
26:52 Is Life About Happiness or Achieving
32:21 The Reality of Being a Public Company CEO
39:07 Why Companies Should Go Public
43:55 Why You Should Price Your IPO to Perfection with No Pop
50:50 “What I Wish I Had Known About Debt in Building Carvana”
52:32 Quick Fire Round: Favourite CEO, Marriage Advice, Carvana in 10 Years
20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital
Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more.
In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss:
1. The Rules of Investing:
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What have been Nabeel’s biggest lessons on price sensitivity? When did he not pay up and with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had of paid up?
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How important is ownership to Nabeel and Spark? How does Nabeel think about reserve investing and doubling down?
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Why does Nabeel not engage in secondary markets? How does Nabeel think about when is the right time to sell?
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Why does Nabeel think the majority of market sizing is total BS?
2. The Venture Landscape: Run by Principles and Broken:
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Why does Nabeel believe this generation of AI investing will require a different mindset to the one that made VCs successful over the last decade?
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Why does Nabeel believe that venture is currently run by principals and associates? Why is that such a problem?
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Why does Nabeel believe that the majority of venture firms today are dead but do not know it yet?
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What does Nabeel believe happens to the mega multi-stage firms who have raised billions and billions?
3. How to Win the VC Game in a World of AI:
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Infrastructure, models, apps: where does Nabeel believe the most value will accrue in the next decade of AI investing?
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What does Nabeel mean when he says there are three categories of AI apps today? Where does Nabeel believe the most valuable will be built?
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Does Nabeel believe Deepseek hurt or helped the future for Anthropic? How could Anthropic be a $100BN company from this point?
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What does no one see about the next 10 years of AI that everyone should see?
20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox
Ishan Mukherjee is the Co-Founder/CEO of Rox, a Sequoia-backed AI-powered sales productivity platform. Before Rox, he was the Chief Growth Officer at New Relic where he scaled the self-serve business from $0-$100M in ARR. Prior to New Relic, Ishan founded Pixie Labs (acq by New Relic). Before that he led product at Siri Knowledge Graph at Apple, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), Premise Data, and Amazon Robotics. Ishan was also an early engineer in Kiva (acquired by Amazon) where he joined after graduating from MIT.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:50 Biggest Lessons Scaling New Relic’s PLG to $100M in ARR
05:59 How to Do PLG and Enterprise at the Same Time
07:00 How to do Content in a PLG World
08:50 Performance Marketing or Organic Content: What Works for PLG
10:27 Why You Should Stop Marketing at Events
11:47 Why SEM is a Cartel
14:15 Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS
17:17 How AI Changes the World of Enterprise Sales: Commit-Based vs. Usage-Based
20:49 How to do Sales Compensation Plans
24:44 How to Ramp New Sales Reps
25:03 The Impact of AI on Sales Research
29:18 How to do Deep Customer Research in an AI World
35:56 Changing Spending Patterns in SaaS
41:41 Retention and Churn in Enterprise AI
43:31 The Future of Sales Teams with AI
44:45 Hiring and Scaling Sales Teams
54:28 Quickfire
20VC: The Daily Deal: Coreweave IPO | Scale Hits $25BN on $2BN EOY Revenue | Sequoia's 25x Return on Wiz | Tech Stocks Tank with Tariffs | Cursor: Defensible or Dangerous Example of Lost Moats in Tech
Welcome to The Daily Deal — the new show with Harry Stebbings and Jason Lemkin, where we break down the biggest stories in tech, venture, and B2B. From market meltdowns to billion-dollar raises, wild valuations, and the drama behind the deals. We’re covering it all! Plus, we’ll be joined by some incredible guests to go deeper on the moves shaping the future of our industry.
Today we discuss:
- Tech stocks were hammered in late trading today in response to the Trump administration's plans to levy tariffs of between 10% and 49% on imported goods, with Apple shares falling more than 6%.
- Rippling Deal: Illegal or Hustle?
- Emergence Raises $1B for B2B Investments
- Cursor, Replit, Windsurf: Who Wins?
- Lots of gen AI startups are crossing into the $100M ARR club. The latest entrant is talent marketplace Mercor, last valued at $2B. Is triple triple double double dead?
- ScaleAI at $25B: Pricey or Potential?
Discussion with Bhavin Shah @ Moveworks:
- ServiceNow Acquires Moveworks for $2.5B: AI Craze Continues
- Sequoia Makes 25x on Wiz: Is M&A Open Again?
- USD Stablecoin issuer Circle has filed to go public. The company, which has raised $1.2 billion in VC money, reported $1.7 billion in 2024 revenue, with $155.7 million in net income.
- Oracle Cloud Revenue Up 23%: Old Guard Wins in AI?
- Salesforce Customers Love AgentForce, But Will They Pay?
- Dustin Moskovitz Retires from Asana: Is SaaS Too Tough?
Discussion with Andrew Feldman @ Cerebras:
- Coreweave’s Redemption Provision: A Time Bomb for Coatue?
- Can OpenAI’s $12B Deal Save Coreweave from $5B Loss?
- OpenAI Won’t Profit Until $127B in Annual Revenue
- A lot of young founders raising big in chips; bullish or bullshit?
20VC: Microsoft CTO on Where Value Accrues in an AI World | Why Scaling Laws are BS | An Evaluation of Deepseek and How We Underestimate the Chinese | The Future of Software Development and The Future of Agents with Kevin Scott
Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft, where he leads the company’s AI and technology strategy at global scale and played a pivotal role in Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Prior to Microsoft, Kevin spent six years at Linkedin as SVP of Engineering. Kevin has also enjoyed advisory positions with Pinterest, Box, Code.org and more.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Where is Enduring Value in a World of AI
10:53 Why Scaling Laws are BS
12:26 What is the Bottleneck Today: Data, Compute or Algorithms
15:38: In 10 Years Time: What % of Data Usage will be Synthetic
20:04 How Will AI Agents Evolve Over the Next Five Years
23:34: Deepseek Evalution: Do We Underestimate China
28:34 The Future of Software Development
31:53 The Thing That Most Excites Me in AI is Tech Debt
35:01 Leadership Lessons from Satya Nadella
41:13 Quickfire Round
20VC: Will Revolut and Monzo List in the UK | How Does London Compete Against the US To Win The Best UK IPOs | Are UK Public Companies Punished on Price for Listing in London | The Myths and the Reality of The London Stock Exchange with CEO, Julia Hoggett
Dame Julia Hoggett is the CEO of the London Stock Exchange. Julia previously worked at the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority as Director of Market Oversight and Head of Wholesale Banking Supervision.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:25 How to Become CEO of a National Stock Exchange
05:36 Why The Domestic Economy is F***** Despite the Boom in Financial Services
06:45 How Pension Fund Reform Dmaaged the UK Economy
09:31 Should the UK Copy the Canadian Pension Fund Structure
16:30 Will the Best Companies Like Revolut and Monzo List in London
24:17 Why Are Revolut Wrong to Want to List in the US
27:32 Are Companies Priced Lower in the UK vs US
32:05 Why is Stamp Duty a Perversity We Have to Change
35:46 Why is the Way the UK Thinks About Financial Services So Wrong
40:31 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Reflections
20VC: Why Traditional VC is Broken: How VCs Learned Nothing from 2021 | Why LPs are More Important than Founders & Advice to Emerging Managers | Bull Case for Bytedance & Why TikTok's Ban Doesn't Matter with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital
Mitchell Green is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lead Edge Capital. Mitchell has led or co-led investments in companies including Alibaba, Asana, Benchling, ByteDance, Duo Security, Grafana, Mindbody, and Xamarin, among several others.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:31 How Bessemer Taught Me The One Golden Rule of Investing
06:48 Why AI Infrastrcture is the Worst Investment to Make
08:51 Why it is Comical to think there will be $BN one person companies?
09:26 WTF Happens To The Cohort of SaaS Companies With Slow Growth, Not Yet Profitable and $50M-$200M in Revenue
16:12 What is the Biggest Problem with the IPO Market
23:24 When is the Right Time to Sell in VC and How a Generation F******* it Up
27:37 Biggest Advice to Smaller Emerging Managers
40:13 The One Question That Tells You if a Business is Good
43:01 Why LPs are More Important than Founders
45:03 One Question Every LP Should Ask Their VCs
46:03 Why TikTok Does Not Matter to ByteDance and It Is a Screaming Buy
51:30 Why We Drastically Underestimate the Power of Chinese AI?
55:18 Why Social Media is the Most Dangerous Thing in Society
01:00:07 Quick Fire Questions
20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg
Niklas Östberg is the Founder and CEO of Delivery Hero, a global juggernaut now present in over 70 countries across four continents. In Q4 2024, the company announced GMV of $49BN with $12.8BN in revenue and $750M in EBITDA. They have made an astonishing 35+ acquisitions including $2BN for Glovo. Before launching Delivery Hero, Niklas co-founded Pizza.nu, leading its expansion across Sweden, Poland, Finland, and Austria.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:09 How Skiing Prepared Me For Life As An Entrepreneur
10:12 Losing $200M on Gorillas Investment
17:58 Quick Commerce: Does the Business Model Work?
25:09 How to Master M&A: Lessons from 35 Acquisitions
31:45 Evaluating Acquisitions: The Glovo Example
32:39 Cohort Analysis: Lessons from $49BN in GMV
34:35 Growth Strategies: What Worked? What Did Not Work?
38:27 Competing Against Uber and Doordash
41:40 Is Cash a Weapon in the War for Food Delivery
44:29 Why Are Emerging Markets a Good Investment?
48:21 Why Are European Markets Broken? Are Regulators Killing Europe?
51:57 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
20VC: AI Chip Wars: How Cerebras Plans to Topple NVIDIA's Dominance | Why We Have Not Reached Scaling Laws in AI | What Happens to the Cost of Inference | How We Underestimate China and Shouldn't Sell To Them with Andrew Feldman
Andrew Feldman is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Cerebras, the fastest AI inference + training platform in the world. In Sept 2024 the company filed to go public off the back of a rumoured $1BN deal with G42 in the UAE. Andrew is the leading expert for all things inference.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:23 Where Was AI Landscape in 2015 When Cerebras Founded
05:57 NVIDIA’s Biggest Strength Has Become Their Biggest Weakness
07:09 What Happens to the Cost of Inference?
08:55 Why Are AI Algorithms So Inefficient?
20:30 Why is it Total BS That We Have Hit Scaling Laws?
23:07 What Will Be the Ratio of Synthetic to Human Data Used in 5 Years?
31:37 What Specifically Was So Impressive About Deepseek?
31:51 Why is Distillation Not Wrong and OpenAI Need to Look in the Mirror?
32:34 Where Will Value Accrue in a World of AI?
34:08 How Will NVIDIA’s Market Position Change Over the Next Five Years?
39:59 Why is the CUDA Lockin for NVIDIA BS? What is Their Weakness?
40:46 Why is Trump Better for Business than Biden?
49:41 Do We Underestimate China in a World of AI?
52:33 What is the Most Underappreciated Segment of AI?
54:00 Quickfire Round
20VC: Selling Drift for $1.2BN is the Biggest Failure: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company | Why Incumbents Are Slower & Worse Than Ever | Why the Most Valuable Companies in a World of AI Will Not Have More Than 100 People with Elias Torres
Elias Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of Agency, the AI agent for customer success teams. Prior to Agency, Elias was the Co-Founder of Drift, a company he sold to Vista for $1.2BN Before that he started Performable, which he sold to Hubspot.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:50 Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders: How Backgrounds Shape You
06:23 Speed: Why are Incumbents Slower than Ever
10:00 Quality: Why are Incumbents Worse than Ever
25:34 Why Was Selling Drift For $1.2BN a Massive Failure
33:30 How Did a Cushy Culture Kill Drift
37:01 What They Never Tell You About Selling for $1.2BN
41:08 How to Hire F******* Rockstars
46:52 The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Hiring
54:52 Everything You Think You Know About Working Parents is Wrong
01:02:00 Quickfire
20VC: The 10 Question Framework a $217BN Manager Uses to Make Investment Decisions | Lessons from Turning Down Stripe, Coinbase and Losing Money on Northvault | The Bull Case for Bytedance | How Anduril Could Be a $200BN Company with Peter Singlehurst
Peter Singlehurst is the Head of Private Companies at Baillie Gifford. He has led research on a wide range of private investments including Epic Games, Bending Spoons, Anduril, Solugen, Scopely, and Grammarly, as well as a number of private holdings that have since transitioned to the public markets such as Airbnb, Affirm, Warby Parker, Wise and Tempus AI.
In Today’s Episode with Peter We Discuss:
04:24 How I Accidentally Came to Manage One of the Largest Private Investment Firms in the World
07:29 What I Learned Losing 100s of $Ms
10:22 The 10 Questions Baillie Gifford Needs to Answer to Make an Investment
15:53 Why We Did Not Double Down in Stripe and Turned Down Coinbase
33:10 The ByteDance Investment Case
36:33 Why Would Any Good Company Go Public Today
39:19 Growth Stage Investing Trends
40:46 How Anduril Becomes a $200BN Company
45:39 Is 2024 Different to the Madness of 2021 and 2022
47:18 The Decision-Making Process Inside a $217BN Firm
49:00 How Does Re-Investment Decision-Making Differ from Original Investments
55:56 Future of Growth Equity Investing
58:12 Quick Fire Questions
20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan
Yamini Rangan is the CEO at HubSpot. The $32BN juggernaut that has revenues of $2.6BN, over 247,000 customers and 8,200 employees. Prior to Hubspot, Yamini served as Chief Customer Officer at Dropbox, and before Dropbox, she was VP of Sales Strategy and Operations at Workday.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:16 Taking Over the CEO Role from the Founders
07:58 Wartime vs Peacetime CEOship
11:18 How to Scale Into Enterprise: What Everyone Gets Wrong
22:20 Why is B2B Not Winner Take All
29:33 How Does HubSpot Compete Against Salesforce
33:26 Where Does Value Accrue in a World of AI
37:40 How Does Yamini Use AI Everyday
41:17 What Does HubSpot Do When It’s Core SEO Channel Dies
44:10 Quickfire Round: Satya Nadella, Parenting Advice, Biggest Concern
51:35 Closing Thoughts and Reflections
20Product: How to Design and Build Products in a World of Agents | Why AI Will Kill Many SaaS Products | What Products Will Thrive and Die in a World of 100M Developers with Matt Biilmann, Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify
Matt Biilmann is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify. Under his leadership, Netlify has become one of the fastest-growing platforms for modern web development. Matt recently introduced agent experience (AX), a new way of thinking about how software is built and experienced in the AI era. Matt is also known for coining Jamstack, a concept that redefined how developers build for the web.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:43 How Does the Design Process Change When Designing For Agents
06:27 How Does the Product Building Process Change When Building for Agents
12:52 Will AI Kill SaaS Tools
16:12 If Prototyping Becomes Phase 1: Does Figma Survive?
17:35 Is Chat the Best Interface for a World of AI
21:52 Why AI Services Will Be One of the Biggest Economies
27:24 Open vs. Closed Platforms in an Agent-First World
31:09 Specialization of Large Language Models
35:13 Shifting Labor Costs to Agent Spend
36:28 The Future of Stripe and What Happens with 100M Developers in the World
38:39 Quickfire Round: Insights and Predictions
20VC: Lessons from Investing $2BN and Returning $8BN in Cash | Why Most Venture Partnerships are Broken | We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions | Are The Best Deals Always Expensive and Competitive with Jake Saper @ Emergence Capital
Jake Saper is a General Partner @ Emergence Capital, one of the leading venture firms of the last 20 years. Their many wins include being early investors in Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva and more. In total, the firm has invested $2BN and returned an astonishing $8BN in cash with much more to come.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:45 The Zoom Investment Story
10:21 Founder, Market, Traction: Rank Them
26:37 Why Market Pull is the Most Important Thing and How to Know
27:23 Are the Best Deals Always Expensive?
28:25 What is the One Framework Emergence Use for Every Investment
29:08 Lessons from the 16x DPI Zoom Fund
30:44 Why Does Every Partner Do Reference Calls on Every Deal?
35:16 We Have Lied to SaaS Founders: The Revenue Rules Changed
37:53 Where Will Value Accrue in a World of AI?
41:37 Three Reasons Why AI Will Not Replace Vertical SaaS
46:38 Who Wins in AI: Startups or Incumbents?
50:09 Why Should Every Company Aim to Be a “Board Discussion”
55:12 Why is Jake Worried About AI’s FTX Moment?
56:00 What Losing Billions on Salesforce Taught Us About Selling
01:00:07 Why Most VC Partnerships are Broken
01:03:07 Grok vs Anthropic vs OpenAI: Buy and Sell?
01:14:25 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
20Sales: Everything You Know About Sales Playbooks is Wrong | How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires | How to Crush Pipeline and Deal Reviews as a Team | How to Structure Sales Teams and Sales Comp Plans with Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password
Julian Teixeira is the Chief Revenue Officer at 1Password, where he has grown B2B revenue over 8x and scaled a team of more than 450 in go-to-market. 1Password set the record for the largest raise in Canadian history at the start of 2022 and has raised nearly $1B in capital throughout his time with the company. Prior to 1Password, Julian served as the head of global sales at Lightspeed Commerce, a company he helped scale from startup to IPO and through over 10 acquisitions throughout his decade-long tenure.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:27 Sales Lessons from Scaling to $1BN in ARR
05:20 How to Create and Master a Sales Playbook
07:53 Lessons on First Sales Hires
09:41 Setting Goals and Targets for Sales Teams
13:22 The Reality of Tech Sales Today
16:19 Evaluating and Managing Sales Reps
19:07 Outbound Prospecting and Pipeline Generation
22:22 Hunter vs. Farmer Sales Models
24:15 Compensation and Specialization in Sales Teams
28:56 Outbound vs Inbound Sales
32:47 Pipeline and Deal Reviews
37:37 Sales Tech Stack and Tools
38:40 Maintaining Sales Morale
44:55 Are Remote Sales Teams Less Effective
46:44 Final Thoughts and Advice
This episode is brought to you by:
Gong, the revenue AI platform centralising all your revenue workflows in a single unified platform.
Capchase, helping SaaS companies grow without dilution. Learn more at capchase.com/20vc
20VC: Lovable on Hitting $17.5M in ARR in 3 Months | Adding $2.1M ARR Every Week | Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention: Better than ChatGPT | The Story of Europe's Fastest Scaling Company with Anton Osika
Anton Osika is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Lovable, the fastest growing startup in Europe. With Lovable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt. After just 3 months, the company has scaled to $17.5M in ARR. They are adding $2M in net new revenue every single week. Even better, Lovable has 85% Day 30 retention rate, making it more retentive than ChatGPT.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:41 How a Side Project Turned into a $200M Company
05:39 Why Talent is 10x More Valuable Than Experience
08:57 How to Use a Waitlist Pre-Launch to 10x Growth
12:29 How to Master a Public Launch: $0 - $1M ARR in a Week
18:02 Why Raise a Large Seed Round
22:22 How Sustainable is Lovable and AI Revenue
25:22 What are Lovable’s Biggest Threats: Incumbents or Open Source
27:00 Raising Series A: Should You Always Take the Money
27:46 How to Compete in the US from Europe
28:25 Is Europe as F****** as the World Thinks
29:02 Building in Europe vs. Silicon Valley
31:20 The Future of Foundation Models: Who Wins
33:47 Grok vs OpenAI vs Anthropic: Buy and Short
41:37 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
20VC: Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: Where Will Value Be Created in a World of AI | Have Foundation Models Commoditized | When Do Model Providers Become Application Providers | What Anthropic Learned from Deepseek
Mike Krieger is the Co-Founder of Instagram and now CPO @ Anthropic.
In Today’s Episode with Mike Krieger We Discuss:
03:07 Where Will Value Be Created and Sustained in a World of AI?
04:59 Are Foundation Models Commoditised Today?
08:36 Should Founders Build for the Models of Today or Build for Models of the Future
12:19: Why Will Models Become More Different Than More Similar
16:38: Will Human or Synthetic Data Be More Prominent in the Future
19:28 Model Quality vs. Product UX
23:36 The Competitive Landscape of AI
32:27 Do We Underestimate China's AI Capabilities
33:59 What Did Anthropic Learn from Deepseek
34:07 Is Deepseek a Sustaining and Credible Threat?
37:04 Transitioning from Model Provider to Application Provider
38:26 Where Has Anthropic Chronically Under-Invested
39:08 Why Has Anthropic Been Slow On Consumer Product Development
43:50 What is the Role of a Software Developer in the Future
48:29 Balancing API and Consumer Products
51:09 Is Europe Stronger or Weaker in a World of AI
52:40 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
George Bonaci is the VP of Growth at Ramp, where he’s helping one of the fastest-growing fintech companies scale even further. Prior to Ramp, George was VP of Growth at Gong. Before Gong, George was at Samsara where he helped grow revenue from $650M ARR, and played a pivotal role in the company’s successful IPO.
In Today’s Growth Masterclass We Discuss:
03:57 How the Best Growth Teams Experiment
05:10 How to Allocate Bets and Resources for Growth
07:09 Velocity vs. Quality in Growth
15:05 The Role of Postmortems and How to Do Them
19:16 Growth Team Structure and Standalone or Not?
20:01 The Three Ways to Find Alpha in Growth
30:01 How to Hire for the Best Growth Hires
31:30 How to do Take-Home Assignments When Hiring for Growth
32:51 Common Pitfalls in Hiring Growth Talent
34:16 Investing in Management and Learning
42:43 How AI Changes Growth Products and Strategies
46:43 Quick Fire Round: Common Mistakes and Growth Channels
20VC: The Insane Story of Glovo: Selling 30% of the Company for €100K | The McDonalds Deal That Saved Them | Running out of Money Three Times | Burning $1M Per Day | Being Acquired for $2.2BN with Oscar Pierre, Founder @ Glovo
Oscar Pierre is the Founder and CEO @ Glovo, the food delivery site that will get you anything you want to your doorstep. This story is insane, the company was started by Oscar 11 years ago, in their pre-seed round they sold ⅓ of the company for €100K. The company was later saved by a deal they made with McDonald's. The company nearly ran out of money on several occasions, one time the funding round came from the CEO of Rakuten who Oscar met an FC Barcelona drinks. Today, they are a part of DeliveryHero who acquired them for $2.2BN, they have delivered 1BN orders and have almost 60M customers.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:27 Starting with Nothing
07:30 The First Funding Round: Selling ⅓ of the Company for €100K
09:23 Marketplace Dynamics and Expansion
15:34 The McDonald's Deal That Saved the Company
18:38 Running out of Money Three Times: Fundraising Hell
25:57 International Expansion: What Worked
29:25 Lessons from Failures: What Brazil Taught Us
31:36 How to Win in Emerging Markets
32:02 The Burn Rate (Burning $1M per day) and Investor Concerns
33:29 Scaling Challenges and Competitor Threats
34:29 The Biggest BS Elements of Company Values
35:40 How I Ruined the Culture of the Company
41:14 Layoffs and Talent Management
42:06 Biggest Lessons from M&A
44:41 The Future of Quick Commerce
45:38 Acquisition by Delivery Hero
48:56 Post-Acquisition Reflections
54:47 The CEO on Trial and Facing Prison
20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML
Steeve Morin is the Founder & CEO @ ZML, a next-generation inference engine enabling peak performance on a wide range of chips. Prior to founding ZML, Steeve was the VP Engineering at Zenly for 7 years leading eng to millions of users and an acquisition by Snap.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:17 How Will Inference Change and Evolve Over the Next 5 Years
09:17 Challenges and Innovations in AI Hardware
15:38 The Economics of AI Compute
18:01 Training vs. Inference: Infrastructure Needs
25:08 The Future of AI Chips and Market Dynamics
34:43 Nvidia's Market Position and Competitors
38:18 Challenges of Incremental Gains in the Market
39:12 The Zero Buy-In Strategy
39:34 Switching Between Compute Providers
40:40 The Importance of a Top-Down Strategy for Microsoft and Google
41:42 Microsoft's Strategy with AMD
45:50 Data Center Investments and Training
46:40 How to Succeed in AI: The Triangle of Products, Data, and Compute
48:25 Scaling Laws and Model Efficiency
49:52 Future of AI Models and Architectures
57:08 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
01:00:52 Why OpenAI’s Position is Not as Strong as People Think
01:06:47 Challenges in AI Hardware Supply
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO @ Mercor, an AI recruitment platform and one of the fastest-growing companies in technology. They have scaled to $70M in ARR in just 24 months. They are famed for working 6 days per week, 9AM to 9PM. All of their founders are Thiel fellows, they are also the youngest unicorn founders ever with the fundraise announced today raising $100M led by Felicis at a $2BN valuation.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:36 How Debating Makes The Best Founders
06:05 Do People Treat You Differently When a Unicorn Founder
10:58 Scaling to $70M ARR in 24 Months
13:42 How Culture Breaks When Scaling So Fast
23:49 The Future of Foundation Models
24:05 OpenAI vs Anthropic
24:32 Data: Synthetic vs Human
27:10 The Future of Programming and AI
28:15 The Impact of AI Tools on Software Development
28:51 Why Software Will Become Commoditised
29:55 Network Effects and Marketplaces
33:13 Raising From Benchmark After a Helicopter Ride
37:30 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
20VC: NVIDIA vs Groq: The Future of Training vs Inference | Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments: Who Wins | Data, Compute, Models: The Core Bottlenecks in AI & Where Value Will Distribute with Jonathan Ross, Founder @ Groq
Jonathan Ross is the Founder & CEO of Groq, the creator of the world’s first Language Processing Unit (LPUTM). Prior to Groq, Jonathan began what became Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first-generation TPU chip. Jonathan next joined Google X’s Rapid Eval Team, the initial stage of the famed “Moonshots Factory”, where he devised and incubated new Bets (Units) for Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:20 Interview with Jonathan Ross Begins
04:59 Scaling Laws and AI Model Training
06:22 Synthetic Data and Model Efficiency
12:01 Inference vs. Training Costs: Why NVIDIA Loses Inference
17:06 The Future of AI Inference: Efficiency and Cost
18:15 Chip Supply and Scaling Concerns
20:57 Energy Efficiency in AI Computation
25:40 Why Most Dollars Into Datacenters Will Be Lost
31:05 Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments
41:11 Distribution of Value in the AI Economy
42:10 Stages of Startup Success
43:17 The AI Investment Bubble
45:00 The Keynesian Beauty Contest in VC
48:40 NVIDIA's Role in the AI Ecosystem
53:39 China's AI Strategy and Global Implications
57:51 Europe's Potential in the AI Revolution
01:10:14 Future Predictions and AI's Impact on Society
20VC: From Penniless Printing Shop Offices to Public Company and One of the Largest Entertainment Companies: The Story of LADbible | The Future of Content & Social Media | US vs Europe: Is Europe F****** with Solly Solomou
Founder and CEO of LADbible Group, Solly Solomou has built one of the largest and most engaged digital media entertainment companies in the world. Under his leadership, LADbible has grown to reach two-thirds of 18-34-year-olds in the UK, with a global audience of over 494 million followers, including 141 million in the US. The company’s content now has a total reach of over 1 billion people worldwide.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
From Printer Shop Office to Ringing the IPO Bell:
-
How did Solly start LADbible with no money and no experience?
-
How did a moment with Kevin Hart and Ice Cube show Solly that he had something special with LADbible?
-
In the expansion of the business, what new products did not work? What did Solly learn from the failures of products?
-
Why did Solly always want to build the business without an external funding?
-
What are the top 3 pieces of advice Solly gives to young entrepreneurs starting a business today?
The Future of Content and Social Media:
-
How does Solly see wearables changing the future of media and social?
-
Does Solly agree that the friendship graph has been eradicated by interest graphs?
-
Does Solly think TikTok should be banned?
-
Why does Solly think TikTok Shop is the most interesting product in social today?
Europe vs US: Is Europe F******:
-
What are the single biggest differences between doing business in the US vs Europe?
-
Why did Solly decide to go public in London on The London Stock Exchange?
-
How tough is it being a public company in London?
-
How important are local liquidity markets if Europe is to regain competitiveness?
-
If Solly were advising Keir Starmer on how to stimulate growth in the UK, what would he say and advise?
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
TS Anil is the CEO @ Monzo, where he has been the mastermind behind the greatest turnaround in tech in the last 10 years. When TS took over at Monzo they had £40M in revenue, very little runway, had a 40% down round and had large layoffs and low employee NPS. Today they are at £1BN in revenue, profitable and the UK’s largest digital bank with more than 10m customers.
From $40M Revenues to $1BN Revenues and Profitable:
1. What are the most profitable elements of Monzo’s business today? How will that change in time?
2. What did TS do with Monzo that he wishes he had not done? What did he not do that he wishes he had done?
3. How does TS approach expansion? How will he win Europe against the competition of Revolut?
4. Why have no European fintechs won when expanding into the US? What do they do wrong?
5. How does TS think about the decision to go public? Will he go public in London?
6. How does TS respond to the notion that Monzo has a “work life balance” culture in the face of the fierce culture of Revolut?
7. What have been TS’ biggest lessons from raising $1BN for Monzo from the largest institutions in the world? What was the easiest round? What was the hardest?
8. What three core traits does TS believe all great leaders need to have? If you do not have them, how can you develop them most efficiently?
20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo
Fabien Pinckaers is the Founder & CEO of Odoo, one of the most incredible businesses that you might not have heard of. Built from the countryside of Belgium, they do an astonishing $650M in ARR, they have over 5,000 employees and have over 50,000 companies as customers. Even better, Fabian openly does not ever want to sell the company, IPO, believes that titles in companies are total BS and most management is done completely wrong.
In Today’s Episode with Fabien We Discuss:
1. Everything You Know About Management is Wrong:
-
Why is it BS to give people titles in a company?
-
How does Odoo hire people after only one interview?
-
Why does Odoo prefer to hire really young people under 30?
-
Why does Fabien think it is the worst to build a team in Silicon Valley?
2. The Billionaire Who Does Not Care About Money:
-
Why does Fabien literally not care about money and does not even own a house?
-
Why does Fabien refuse to ever sell or IPO Odoo?
-
How does Fabien plan to offer liquidity to investors if he never wants to sell or IPO?
3. Why Did Every VC Turn Down the $5BN Odoo:
-
What are Fabien’s biggest lessons from being rejected by every VC for Odoo?
-
What did they not see that they should have seen?
-
Why did Fabien always want the price of the company on every funding round to be as low as possible?
-
How does Fabien advise founders on pitching VCs today, knowing all he knows?
4. Scaling to $650M in ARR: The Biggest Lessons:
-
Why does Fabien believe the biggest mistake companies make is they lose focus?
-
What did Fabien not do with Odoo that they should have done?
-
What did Fabien do and invest in, that with the benefit of hindsight they should not have done?
-
When did the business start to break with scale? What would Fabien have done differently knowing all he does know?
20VC: Why Model Providers Will Kill Many Startups Moving into the Application Layer | Why Deepseek is not a Threat to OpenAI & Why OpenAI Beats Anthropic | Apps vs Models vs Infrastructure: Where is Value in AI with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake CEO
Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO @ Snowflake, the $60BN public company with $3.5BN in revenue growing 30% per year. Sridhar joined Snowflake following his company, Neeva, being acquired by them for $150M. Prior to founding Neeva, Ramaswamy spent 15 years at Google where he had an integral part in the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
1. OpenAI vs Deepseek vs Anthropic:
-
Why will OpenAI beat Deepseek? What does no one see with Deepseek that they should see?
-
Why has OpenAI beaten Anthropic? What elements turn a model from a commodity into a sustaining product suite?
-
Will model providers become application providers?
-
Will OpenAI be the biggest killer of startups in the next 10 years?
2. Snowflake vs Nvidia & Databricks:
-
To what extent is Sridhar concerned NVIDIA will move into the data layer and compete with Snowflake?
-
How does Sridhar view the competition from Databricks? What have they done better than them? What have they done worse than them and lost on?
-
Does being private hurt or help Databricks in their fight against Snowflake?
-
If Sridhar could, would he take Snowflake private today?
3. Leadership, Parenting, Money:
-
Do richer leaders make better leaders? How does being rich change the mindset of a leader?
-
What are Sridhar’s biggest lessons when it comes to parenting?
-
What about the way that Sridhar was brought up, did he do deliberately differently with his kids?
20Product: Product Secrets Behind Uber and Opendoor | How AI Changes the Role of the PM & The Product Development Process | How to Hire the Best Product Teams & What No One Does That Everyone Should Do with Brian Tolkin
Brian Tolkin is the Head of Product @ Opendoor where he has spent the last 6 years and is responsible for product strategy and product and design teams. Before Opendoor, Brian spent an incredible 5 years at Uber through their wildest growth periods.
In Today’s Episode with Brian Tolkin:
03:53 Brian's Journey at Uber: Launching China Pool
05:07 Product Lessons from Uber's China Launch
08:22 The Role of a PM in a Pre vs. Post AI World
10:16 Product Development Process in an AI World
17:43 The Importance of Simplification in Product Management
19:21 OKRs and Prioritization in Product Management
23:12 The Importance of Feedback Loops in Product Development
23:38 Evaluating Product Changes: User Adaptation vs. Bad Decisions
25:00 Balancing Gut Instinct and Data in Product Leadership
25:38 The Role of Simplicity in Product Design
27:02 Consensus vs. Dictatorial Product Leadership
27:54 Hiring for the Best Product Teams
31:33 How to do Effective Sprint Management
38:39 Quickfire Round: Insights and Advice
20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap
Max Levchin is one of the great founders and technologists of our time. As the Founder and CEO of Affirm, he has built am $18.7BN monster in the buy no pay later space. Prior to Affirm he was one of the original co-founders of PayPal. Max is also the co-founder and Chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. Max is also an immensely successful angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Yelp, Pinterest and Evernote.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:19 How to Hire the Best People in the World
05:05 How to Manage Extreme Personalities
08:18 Biggest Lessons on Trust and What Happens When Lost
12:05 Is Grading Talent A and B Players Total BS?
15:31 How to Think About Calculated vs Uncalculated Risk
27:18 How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems: Step by Step
32:08 Why Every Person Must Write and How to Create a Writing Culture
36:01 Leadership Lessons from Layoffs
38:38 Is Affirm Losing or Beating Klarna in the US?
47:03 Peter Thiel or Elon Musk: Who Would Max Rather Start a New Company With?
48:37 Quickfire Round
20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting
Wayne Ting is CEO of Lime. The global leader in micromobility, the first to achieve a fully profitable year (2022). Last year, Lime did over $600M in gross bookings, $90M in EBITDA. Their 4-year top-line CAGR is 30%. Before joining Lime, Wayne spent four years at Uber in various roles, including Chief of Staff to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and General Manager of Uber's Northern California business. Wayne previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor on the White House’s National Economic Council under President Obama.
In Today’s Episode with Wayne Ting We Discuss:
-
Is Lime Really a Good Business:
-
How did Wayne turn Lime from losing $3 on every $1 to $90M in EBITDA?
-
What worked? What did not work?
-
What did Lime do that he wishes they had not done?
-
What did they not do that he wishes they had done?
-
The Moments that Changed Everything:
-
COVID: Lime lost 95% of their revenues overnight. What did Wayne and Lime do to save the business in such a short space of time?
-
Uber Deal: How did the Uber deal led by Uber CEO, Dara, save Lime as a business?
-
Battery Innovation: How did an innovation on the transportability of batteries and replacing them change the entire Lime business?
-
The Dangers of VC Funding and Capital Efficiency:
-
Why does Wayne believe that VC hype cycles are so damaging for companies and sectors?
-
How did the heat around micromobility damage Lime?
-
What did Wayne and Lime do to increase their capital efficiency so much? What worked? What did not?
-
AMA with the CEO of Lime:
-
What company did Lime not acquire that Wayne wishes they had?
-
How did having a stroke change the way that Wayne leads?
-
Which competitor does Wayne most respect and admire?
-
What were his biggest lessons from working with Dara @ Uber?
20VC: Deepseek Special: Is Deepseek a Weapon of the CCP | How Should OpenAI and the US Government Respond | Why $500BN for Stargate is Not Enough | The Future of Inference, NVIDIA and Foundation Models with Jonathan Ross @ Groq
Jonathan Ross is the Co-Founder and CEO of Groq, providing fast AI inference. Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan started Google’s TPU effort where he designed and implemented the core elements of the original chip. Jonathan then joined Google X’s Rapid Eval Team, the initial stage of the famed “Moonshots factory,” where he devised and incubated new Bets (Units) for Alphabet.
The 10 Most Important Questions on Deepseek:
-
How did Deepseek innovate in a way that no other model provider has done?
-
Do we believe that they only spent $6M to train R1?
-
Should we doubt their claims on limited H100 usage? Is Josh Kushner right that this is a potential violation of US export laws?
-
Is Deepseek an instrument used by the CCP to acquire US consumer data?
-
How does Deepseek being open-source change the nature of this discussion?
-
What should OpenAI do now? What should they not do?
-
Does Deepseek hurt or help Meta who already have their open-source efforts with Lama?
-
Will this market follow Satya Nadella’s suggestion of Jevon’s Paradox?
-
How much more efficient will foundation models become?
-
What does this mean for the $500BN Stargate project announced last week?
20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness
Carlos Delatorre is one of the legendary go-to-market leaders of the last 20 years. Today, Carlos is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Harness, where he oversees global sales and go-to-market (GTM) operations. Before Harness, Carlos was the CRO @ MongoDB and Navan. Carlos is also an investor with a portfolio including the likes of Modern Treasury and Starburst to name a few.
In Today’s Sales Masterclass We Discuss:
03:48 The Art and Science of Sales
04:42 How to Hire Sales Talent
06:26 How to Build a Sales Team
15:28 Why Every Sales Rep Should do Pipeline Generation
19:45 How the Best Reps to Pipeline Generation
21:34 Biggest challenges of Pipeline Generation
22:44 Pipeline Generation Success Stories
34:59 Sales Metrics and Conversion Rates
35:32 Customer Acquisition Strategies
37:17 Evaluating Sales Performance
39:14 Effective Sales Training
43:10 Pipeline Generation and Deal Reviews
45:05 Maintaining Sales Team Morale
46:20 Verticalized Sales Playbooks
48:37 Addressing SaaS Churn Rates
49:49 Discounting and Deal Slippage
52:02 Transitioning to CEO Role
54:15 Hiring Mistakes and Sales Rep Evolution
57:03 In-Person vs. Remote Sales Teams
57:55 Account Management Strategies
01:02:47 Creative Sales Tactics
01:04:12 Final Advice for Sales Leaders
01:04:46 Adapting Sales Strategies During Crisis
20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, is one of the fastest-growing gen AI companies and they recently raised a $130M series B. Investors include the company include hailed names such as a16z, Peter Thiel, Index, GV and others.
In Today’s Episode with George Sivulka We Discuss:
04:47 Three Traits The Best Founders All Share?
08:11 How Cold Calling NASA Changed My Life
12:01 From Stealing Food From Stanford to Pitching Peter Thiel
17:22 Lessons working with Peter Thiel
26:39 The Future of AI and Business Applications
33:03 The Future of Employment with AI
33:45 Debunking the Myths of AI Job Displacement
35:09 The Future of Models: Many specialised or few generalised?
35:56 Scaling at Inference: A New Frontier
38:10 The Impact of Scaling Laws on Foundation Models
40:40 The Future of AI and Enterprise Value
43:43 The Geopolitical Influence on AI
45:03 The Commoditization of AI Models
47:47 Why Foundation Models Will Not Follow the Same Path of Cloud
52:53 Why All Companies, Both AI and Non-AI Are Undervalued
20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji
Hussein Kanji is the Founder and Managing Partner of Hoxton Ventures, one of Europe’s leading early-stage firms with mega wins in the form of Darktrace and Deliveroo. Hussein cut his teeth in venture at Accel Partners in his early years.
In Today’s Episode with Hussein Kanji We Discuss:
1. How to Raise a Fund:
-
What are Hussein’s biggest lessons from his first fund taking 39 months to raise?
-
Why does Hussein believe you should fundraise for a set amount of time and not to achieve a certain amount of capital?
-
Does Hussein believe governments should be investing in venture funds?
-
What are the biggest mistakes Hussein sees emerging managers make when raising?
2. How to 10x a Fund:
-
What is Hussein’s formula for knowing when to sell an investment?
-
How did Hussein miss out on making $400M in Darktrace? What did he learn from it?
-
How much money did Hoxton make from Deliveroo? How did doing 37x on Deliveroo impact how Hussein invests today?
3. How to Build a Team in Venture:
-
Why does Hussein believe the incentive mechanism for young VCs is broken? Why do they just want to get cash out the door and not worry about quality?
-
Why is it hard to hire female partners today? What needs to happen for this to change?
-
What are the single biggest ways that venture partnerships break down? What went wrong between Hussein and his partner, Rob?
4. Is Europe Totally F*******:
-
Why does Hussein believe small seed rounds are a massive problem in the UK?
-
Why does Hussein believe the dire state of the London Stock Exchange is not a problem?
-
Why does Hussein advise companies that the best way to scale is in the US?
-
What advice would Hussein give to Keir Starmer on how to stimulate growth in the UK?
-
Why does AI mean that the UK can now compete with the US?
20VC: Monday.com: Scaling from $6M to $120M in ARR in 3 Years | How Monday Have Built the Best Performance Marketing Engine in SaaS | Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product; The Biggest Lessons and Mistakes with Eran Zinman
The story of Monday.com is insane, turned down by most VCs, then scaled from $6M to $120M ARR in just three years. Today the company is public with a market cap of $12BN. Joining us in the hotseat today is Monday's Co-Founder and CEO, Eran Zinman.
In Today's Episode with Eran Zinman We Discuss:
03:03 The Role of Video Games in Founders' Success
04:12 The Fail That Taught a $10BN Founder Everything
09:40 Pivoting to a $12BN Company: How, When and Advice on Pivots
14:15 Why 99% of Investors Turned Monday Down: Fundraising Lessons
17:05 Building a Performance Marketing Engine
21:25 How to Scale ACV and Move Upmarket
28:54 What Have Been the Most Effective Marketing Strategies
29:08 How Have Monday Been So Successful with Youtube Ads?
29:43 Biggest Challenges and Lessons in Channel Spend
30:50 Building a Multi-Product Strategy: The Rise of Monday CRM
34:37 Competing in the SaaS Market: Is Competition Good?
39:30 The IPO Journey: Why Then? Pros and Cons of Being Public?
42:38 How a Co-CEO Structure Works
43:55 How to Manage a Board
45:04 Quick-Fire Q&A
20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia
Victor Riparbelli is the CEO and Co-founder of Synthesia, the world’s leading AI video communications platform for enterprises. To date, Victor has raised over $250M from Accel, GV, NEA, and more. More than 1,000,000 users and 55,000 businesses, including 60% of the Fortune 100, use it to communicate efficiently and share knowledge at scale using AI avatars.
In Today’s Episode with Victor Riperbelli:
1. The Future of Models:
-
Are we seeing the commoditisation of models?
-
Will scaling laws continue to prove out?
-
How far into the application layer will model providers go?
-
Will we see a world of few large generalist models or many fragmented smaller models?
-
X.ai, Anthropic, or OpenAI? Which would Victor most want to invest in and why?
2. The Future of Content:
-
What will the future of content look like? In 5 years time will we have more AI or human made content?
-
What will be the future of distribution for content? Why is TikTok the future for content distribution?
-
How does Victor think about the future of identity verification? What is the right approach?
-
What does everyone think will happen in the future with content that will never happen?
3. Startup Rules That are BS:
-
Why does Victor believe it is total BS to say you have to be the first to a market?
-
Why does Victor believe the speed of execution religion is BS?
-
Why does Victor believe that London and Europe is a great place to start a startup?
-
Does Victor believe Americans work harder than Europeans? Why does Victor believe Europeans are more loyal to their companies?
20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years
Shervin Pishevar is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Shervin is famed for leading Uber’s Series B at Menlo alongside leading Warby Parker’s Series A and investing in Tumblr, all in just 18 months at Menlo. Following Menlo, Shervin co-founded Sherpa Capital and today Shervin is averaging over 73x on his investments. As an angel investor, Shervin made over 100 investments in the likes of Dollar Shave Club, Postmates, Facebook and more.
In Today’s Episode with Shervin Pishevar:
08:09 Meeting Travis Kalanick: The Start of a Game-Changing Partnership
11:08 The Uber Series B: Securing a Billion-Dollar Deal
12:49 The Rise of Uber: Global Expansion and Strategic Moves
19:01 The Lyft Rivalry: Missed Opportunities and Lessons Learned
20:57 Recruiting Emil Michael: Building a Strong Leadership Team
24:29 Uber China: The Challenges and Triumphs
27:19 The $15 Billion Raise: Fueling Uber's Global Dominance
30:57 The Beginning of the End: Betrayal by Benchmark
35:33 Sam Altman's Coup and Lessons from the Past
36:22 The Uber War: Legal Battles and Boardroom Drama
37:36 Fusion GPS and Fabricated Reports
39:43 The Me Too Movement and Its Impact
40:51 The SoftBank Investment and Leadership Changes
41:29 The Downfall of Uber's Visionaries
51:09 The Future of Venture Capital
57:01 Quantum Computing and AI: The Next Frontier
20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno
Mikey Shulman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Suno, the leading music AI company. Suno lets everyone make and share music. Mikey has raised over $125M for the company from the likes of Lightspeed, Founder Collective and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Prior to founding Suno, Mikey was the first machine learning engineer and head of machine learning at Kensho technologies, which was acquired by S&P Global for over $500 million.
In Today’s Episode with Mikey Shulman:
1. The Future of Models:
-
Who wins the future of models? Anthropic, OpenAI or X?
-
Will we live in a world of many smaller models? When does it make sense for specialised vs generalised models?
-
Does Mikey believe we will continue to see the benefits of scaling laws?
2. The Future of UI and Consumer Apps:
-
Why does Mikey believe that OpenAI did AI consumer companies a massive disservice?
-
Why does Mikey believe consumers will not choose their model or pay for a superior model in the future?
-
Why does Mikey believe that good taste is more important than good skills?
-
Why does Mikey argue physicists and economists make the best ML engineers?
3. The Future of Music:
-
What is going on with Suno’s lawsuit against some of the biggest labels in music?
-
How does Mikey see the future of music discovery?
-
How does Mikey see the battle between Spotify and YouTube playing out?
-
How does Mikey see the battle between TikTok and Spotify playing out?
20VC: Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets: From $60BN to $400M and Back to $40BN | The Biggest Opportunities, Mistakes and Challenges Ahead for One of the Public Market's Only 100x Investments
Carvana is one of the most wild stories in the public markets. The company IPO’d with a market cap of $2BN before skyrocketing to $60BN, only for the company to lose 99% of it’s value hitting a bottom of $400M market cap. Today the company is stronger than ever and with a market cap of $41BN. Joining us in the hotseat is Dan Gill, Carvana’s CPO, the man who oversees all technology functions, as well as strategic partnerships for the business.
In Today’s Episode with Dan Gill We Discuss:
-
From $60BN to $400M Market Cap:
-
What did Carvana do that Dan wishes they had not done?
-
What did Carvana not do that Dan wishes they had done?
-
How do you maintain morale in a team when the company has lost 99% of it’s value?
-
From $400M Back to $40BN Market Cap:
-
What have been the core needle movers in Carvana’s market cap surging?
-
How does the Carvana business model benefit from economies of scale?
-
How does vertical integration of the different products Carvana sells change the margin structure of the business?
-
The Future of Carvana:
-
Why does Dan believe there is a massive market for Cavana in selling new cars?
-
Why does Dan want to move into the peer to peer market, a market where so many before have failed?
-
Why does Dan think Carvana should sell Chinese cars on the platform if American citizens want to buy them?
-
What revenue line does Carvana not have today that Dan believes will be the biggest in 10 years time?
-
Product Advice, North Star Metrics, Idea Selection:
-
What is the product advice that Dan gives more than any other?
-
How does Dan advise startup founders on how to know they have the right north star metric? What is his framework?
-
How does Dan advise founders on how to select the right idea to work on?
-
What is Dan’s prioritisation framework for if an idea will have a larger enough impact and is therefore worthy of being worked on?
20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate
Mike Maples is one of the OG seed investors of the last two decades. As a co-founding Partner at Floodgate, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade. Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, Clover Health, Okta, Outreach, Chegg, Demandforce, and Applied Intuition.
In Today’s Episode with Mike Maples We Discuss:
04:02 Does Seed Even Make Sense as an Asset Class?
05:16 Fund Size and Strategy: How to Do a 10x Fund?
08:12 Follow-On Investments: Are they BS?
16:41 Finding Inefficiencies in the Market
26:31 Exit Strategies and Liquidity Events: When to Sell?
35:14 How Floodgate Lost Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest
35:43 3 Frameworks for Evaluating Startups
36:23 Case Studies: Zoom and Okta
43:34 How to Truly Analyse Product-Market Fit
45:22 Challenges with Overfunding Startups
50:02 2024 in Review: Company and Fund of the Year
54:25 Predictions for 2025
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Matt Plank is Rippling's Chief Revenue Officer where he oversees all Sales and Account Management functions in the US and Internationally. Matt joined Rippling in the very early days when Parker Conrad (founder) was building V1 in a basement with $0 in revenue. Today the company is a market leader with 100s of $Ms in ARR. Prior to Rippling, Matt was a Sales Director @ Zenefits where he helped the company scale to $70M in ARR.
In Today’s Show with Matt Plank We Discuss:
08:25 Challenges and Strategies in Outbound Sales
10:29 Building Effective Sales and Marketing Partnerships
13:37 Founders and Sales Playbooks: Who Should Create Them?
20:45 Pricing Strategies and Customer Success
24:43 Discounting and Urgency in Sales
33:57 Building Relationships for Successful Deals
34:22 Effective Deal Reviews: Asking the Right Questions
35:30 Pipeline Reviews: Frequency and Participants
35:59 Handling Deal Slippage: Acceptable vs. Non-Acceptable Reasons
39:17 Maintaining Morale in Volatile Times
42:14 Outbound Sales Strategy: Lessons Learned
46:03 Scaling Sales Teams: Hiring and Promoting
47:15 Challenges and Strategies in International Markets
01:00:45 Signs of Scaling Issues in Sales Leadership
20VC: UiPath's Daniel Dines on Why Agents Do Not Mean RPA is F***** | Why We Have Reached the Upper End of Scaling Laws | The Future of Work in an Agent World and What Everyone Misunderstands About Enterprise AI
Daniel Dines is the Founder & CEO @ UiPath, one of the most incredible journeys in startups. For 10 years, UiPath was a bootstrapped company that scaled to just $500K in revenue. Then it all changed, product market fit became obvious and the rest is history. The company went on to raise funding from Sequoia, Accel, Kleiner Perkins and more. Today, the company is worth over $10BN, listed on the NASDAQ and does $1BN+ in revenue.
In Today’s Episode with Daniel Dines We Discuss:
1. The Future of LLMs:
-
Why does Daniel believe that we are at the upper end of scaling laws and more compute will not lead to increased performance?
-
Does Daniel believe we will see a world of many specialised models or fewer generalist models?
-
OpenAI, Anthropic, Xai. Which would Daniel most want to invest in? Why them?
2. Is RPA F******* in a World of Agents:
-
What is the core difference between RPA and agents? How do the tasks they complete differ?
-
Why must we have a neutral meta layer coordinating RPA processes and agents?
-
Why will siloed applications like Salesforce be unable to expand beyond their initial function?
-
Why does Daniel believe that agents will not complete tasks but make recommendations?
3. The Future of Work: WTF Happens with Agents:
-
How long will it be before agents are fully utilised in the enterprise?
-
What is the role of the human in a world of agents?
-
What are the single biggest concerns of enterprises considering implementing agents in their companies?
-
Why has GenAI not been successful in enterprise so far? Will this change?
4. Daniel Dines: The Billionaire Behind the Brand:
-
How does Daniel deal with the loneliness of being CEO?
-
What problem did Daniel struggle with for much of his twenties and thirties? How did he overcome it?
-
Why does Daniel fear that he is becoming more and more disconnected?
-
Why does Daniel believe 1-1s are BS?
-
What is Daniel’s single biggest advice to a new parent today?
20VC: Reid Hoffman on The Trump Administration | Elon Musk and DOGE | The US Defence Budget, NATO and The War in Ukraine | China, Tariffs and TikTok | The Future of Chips, Nuclear Energy, Quantum Computing and Climate
Reid Hoffman is one of the most impactful people in technology and startups. As a Founder he founded Paypal and Linkedin before moving to the investing side where he has led deals in Facebook, Airbnb and more.
In Today’s Episode with Reid Hoffman We Discuss:
1. China and Tariffs:
-
Should the US ban Tiktok and other Chinese companies, given China banning US companies presence in their country?
-
How does Reid evaluate the rise of the Chinese car industry? What are his concerns?
-
How does Reid hope Trump uses tariffs to advantage the US position?
-
What is Reid concerned about what Trump could do with tariffs? What would be bad?
2. Elon Musk and DOGE:
-
What impact will Elon Musk have on the future of AI in America?
-
Why does Reid believe that it is impossible for DOGE to achieve it’s targets?
-
What should Elon must be given credit for? What does he not deserve credit for?
-
What are Elon’s greatest strengths? What are his greatest weaknesses?
3. The US Defence Budget and Ukraine:
-
Why does Reid believe that the US should reduce their defence budget?
-
Does Reid believe the US should continue to finance the war in Ukraine?
-
Should the US continue to subsidise NATO’s lack of defence spending?
4. NVIDIA and The Future of Chips:
-
Will NVIDIA be able to sustain their monopoly?
-
What is the biggest threat to their position?
-
Should both the US and Europe have their own chip sovereignty?
-
How does Reid evaluate potential conflict between China and Taiwan impacting chip supply?
5. Nuclear, Quantum and Climate:
-
Why does Reid believe nuclear fusion can solve climate change?
-
Does Reid believe that with the rise of global conflict and AI, the importance of climate change is reduced in the attention of the world?
-
Why does Reid believe that AI does more to help than harm climate change?
-
Why is Reid so excited for a future with quantum computing?
-
What are the biggest dangers of quantum that we need to be mindful of?
20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire
Guillaume Moubeche is the Founder of Lempire, a company he has bootstrapped in the most competitive market in technology and scaled to a staggering $30M in ARR. Guillaume has never raised primary funding for the business but sold $10M of secondary at a $150M valuation. Guillaume is also an angel investor and and best selling author.
In Today’s Episode with Guillaume Moubeche:
1. How to Build a Sales Machine:
-
What is the biggest mistake founders make when crafting their ideal customer profile?
-
What are Guillaume’s biggest lessons in scaling from $0-$1M in ARR?
-
Why are most founders afraid to sell? What can they do to overcome this?
-
What is the ultimate equation to success in sales?
2. How to Build a Content Machine:
-
How does Guillaume come up with ideas for new content?
-
How does he structure his content creation time?
-
How does Guillaume advise founders on which platform and content type they should focus on? What are the biggest mistakes they make?
-
How does Guillaume think about content repackaging and reposting? What have been some of the biggest lessons in how to get the max out of existing content?
3. How to Build a Hiring Machine:
-
Why does Guillaume think you should pay people well above market rate? What does it allow you to do as their employer?
-
Why does Guillaume think in 90% of times, more people equals more problems?
-
What have been Guillaume’s biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn?
4. Making $10M, Ironman and Family:
-
How does Guillaume reflect on his own relationship to money? How has it changed post making $10M?
-
Why does Guillaume believe that endurance sports makes for better entrepreneurs?
-
When asked if all the sacrifices were worth it, how does Guillaume respond? What does his life not have yet that he would most like?
20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing
Torsten Reil is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Helsing, a new type of defence company providing artificial intelligence to protect our democracies. Torsten has raised over $825M from the likes of Prima Materia, Elad Gil, Accel and General Catalyst. Previously Torsten founded NaturalMotion, one of the UK's most successful games and technology start-ups. Torsten was named as one of MIT's Top 100 Innovators and is a member of the Munich Security Conference Innovation Board.
In Today’s Episode with Torsten Reil We Discuss:
1. The World Around Us: China, Russia and Trump:
-
What will happen between China and Taiwan?
-
What will happen between Russia and Ukraine?
-
How will a Trump administration impact the US’ commitment to fund European defence?
-
What conflict do people not pay enough attention to in the world today?
2. Are We Ready and What Needs to Be Done:
-
Are the west ready to fight against our adversaries as we stand today?
-
What do we need to do to equip ourselves?
-
What needs to change in our defence budgets? Where do they need to go?
-
How does the procurement process for defence need to change?
3. The Future of War:
-
Why does Torsten believe the future of war is contactless?
-
In the next wave of defence, what are the most important elements for allies to own? What elements concern Torsten the most?
-
What role does AI and autonomous play in the future of war?
4. Is Europe F********:
-
Why does Torsten believe that Europe’s biggest problem is ambition not capital?
-
Why does Torsten believ that we put too much weight on the location in which companies are founded? Why does it not matter?
-
How does Torsten respond to the statement that we do not have the depth of experienced talent in Europe to recruit?
20VC: Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff on The Future of LLMs | The Future of Agents | The Future of Labour | Management Lessons from Steve Jobs
Marc Benioff is one of the iconic founders and visionaries of our time. From the founding of Salesforce 25 years ago, Marc has in many ways created an entire industry. He has scaled the company to a market cap of $346BN, $38BN in revenue and over 72,000 employees.
Ask Me Anything with Marc Benioff:
The Future of Models:
-
Why does Marc believe we are at the upper end of LLMs and they are commoditising?
-
Why does Marc believe the future of models is many smaller, verticalised models specialised in different areas?
-
OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Xai. Which would Marc buy and which would he short?
-
What is the single biggest barrier to Salesforce winning the AI war in the next 10 years?
The Future of Agents:
-
What does Salesforce need to do to prevent becoming a database in the next generation of AI?
-
To what extent do agents hurt vs help Salesforce?
-
What do very few people understand about agents that is very important?
The Future of Labour:
-
Will Salesforce replace it’s human labour with digital labour? Will Salesforce be bigger or smaller in 10 years time, people wise?
-
Why does Marc believe that layoffs are a crucial tool for CEOs to win?
-
How will a future of digital labour change the pricing model of SaaS tools today?
Management Lessons from Marc Benioff:
-
How did one meeting with Steve Jobs change how Marc views leadership?
-
How does Marc analyse the required mindset to win as a CEO today?
-
What has Marc changed his mind on most in the last 12 months?
20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov
Zachary Bookman is Co-Founder and CEO of OpenGov, the GovTech cloud software leader that was acquired for a staggering $1.8BN earlier this year. Prior to acquisition, Zac raised over $180M from some of the best of the best including Marc Andreesen, Josh Kushner, Joe Lonsdale and Founder Collective to name a few. Zac is also a successful angel investor with investments in Flexport, Flock Safety and Addepar.
In Today’s Show with Zac Bookman We Discuss:
04:27 Navigating Enterprise Sales and Pricing Strategies
07:49 The Importance of High Gross Retention in SaaS
11:03 Investor Relations and the Power Law in Venture Capital
14:32 WTF is Product Market Fit
18:14 What No One Knows About M&A
20:05 Fundraising Challenges and Lessons Learned
32:51 What Marc Andreesen Taught Me About Boards
34:18 Why Founders and Investors are Misaligned
35:29 The OpenGov Acquisition: Selling for $1.8BN
37:22 What Does It Feel Like to Sell for $1.8BN
43:58 Why Venture Capital is a S*** Asset Class
45:13 Investment Mistakes and Lessons
01:02:05 The Importance of In-Person Collaboration
20VC: Revolut Founder Nik Storonsky on When and Where Revolut Will IPO & What Revolut Need to Do to Hit $100BN Valuation
Nik Storonsky is the Co-Founder and CEO of Revolut, one of the fastest-growing companies in the world with a $45BN valuation and 50M customers around the world. In July 2024, Revolut posted a whopping $2.2BN in revenue with $545M in pre-tax profit in 2023. To date, Nik has raised $1.8BN for the company from the likes of Index, Balderton, Ribbit, DST and TCV.
In Today’s Show with Nik Storonsky We Discuss:
1. When & Where Will Revolut IPO:
-
What does Revolut need to do or change before they are ready to go public?
-
When would Nik like for Revolut to go public?
-
When they do go public, where would Nik list? Would it be in London?
-
How does Nik respond to claims that he has moved to Dubai for tax reasons?
2. What Revolut Needs to Achieve to Hit $100BN:
-
Why has no challenger bank won the US market yet?
-
What will Revolut do differently to allow them to win the US market?
-
What market share will Revolut have in Europe in 3 years time?
-
What line of the business that does not exist today, will be the biggest in 5 years time?
3. How to Build an Execution Machine:
-
Why does Nik believe the biggest mistake he made was hiring senior managers?
-
What have been Nik’s biggest lessons on how to hire for roles you have never hired for before? What works? What does not?
-
How does Nik retain insane velocity of execution at scale?
-
How does Nik bucket people into three different buckets? What does each bucket mean for the type of work they do and the expectations placed on them?
4. How Revolut Tests New Products:
-
How does Revolut use a portfolio approach to test new product ideas?
-
How are teams for new ideas structured? What roles do they have?
-
How much time and resources are they given?
-
What is the tracking process to determine the success of new products?
-
What % of new products do succeed and progress to the core app?
-
Which product did Nik think would be massive but turned out to be a flop?
-
What did Nik not expect to be massive and turned out to be mega hit?
5. The UK and Europe: Are We F******:
-
The Chancellor has said we will have no growth in the UK for the next 3 years. How does it feel for Nik to grow Revolut in this environment?
-
If Nik could advise Keir Starmer on how to turn the UK around, what would he say?
-
Why does Nik believe the US has created so many more $100BN companies?
-
Why does Nik believe that work/life imbalance is the secret to success and happiness?
20VC: Grindr: The Most Insane Story in Startups | How the Chinese Bought and Lost Grindr | The Successful IPO with $300M Revenues and 40% EBITDA Margins | How Grindr Built a Free Cash Flow Machine
George Arison is the CEO of Grindr. The app that results in 40% of lesbian and gay marriages, the average user uses the app for 1 hour per day and sends more messages on Grindr than they do Whatsapp. The company will do over $300M in revenue in 2024 with a 40% EBITDA margin. One of the insane public company success stories. Prior to Grindr, George was the Founder and CEO of Shift, which he took public in 2020.
In Today’s Episode with George Arison We Discuss:
1. Wild Story of How the Chinese Bought and Lost Grindr:
-
How did the Chinese come to buy Grindr and then fire the founder?
-
Why did the US government force the sale of the company from the Chinese?
-
What happened when the whole development team was in Taiwan and then resigned overnight?
-
George got the CEO role in Sept and the company went public in Oct. How did that all happen so fast?
2. How Grindr is a Free Cash Flow Machine:
-
What are the three core ways that Grindr is able to print money with a 40% EBITDA margin?
-
Why does Grindr not spend any money on marketing or customer acquisition?
-
Why does George think that most companies have way too many people?
-
Why does George believe that most startups are very badly managed?
-
What will Grindr do with the insane amount of free cash flow the company is producing?
3. Lessons Building Grindr to $300M in Revenue:
-
What has George done with Grindr that he wishes he had not done?
-
What has he not done that he wishes he had done?
-
Why does George not make political statements today? Does George think we have freedom of speech when CEOs face such repercussions for political views?
-
What does Wall St not understand about Grindr that it really should understand?
20Product: Is an AI Winter Approaching | The Future of AI Software Development: What is Real & What is BS | OpenAI: WTF is Going on & How Far Into Application Layer Do They Go | The Future Role of Software Engineers with Guy Podjarny
Guy Podjarny founded Tessl, Snyk and Blaze. Tessl is reimagining software development for the AI era and shaping AI Native Development. Snyk created and leads the Developer Security category, and is now a multi-billion dollar company with over 1,000 employees. Guy was previously CTO at Akamai (following its acquisition of Blaze), is an active angel investor, and co-hosts of the AI Native Dev podcast.
In Today’s Episode with Guy Podjarny We Discuss:
03:02 Discussion on NVIDIA's Market Position
04:14 Will We See a Trough of Disillusionment in AI
07:36 The Future of AI Development and Specialized Models
10:17 Challenges and Opportunities in AI Dev Tools
17:41 Concerns About Closed vs. Open Development Platforms
21:27 Speculations on AI's Role in Application Layers
24:40 Google's Competitive Edge
25:28 IPO and M&A in the Trump Era
26:45 The Future Role of Software Developers
32:20 Security Challenges in AI Development
33:41 Spicy Questions and Charity Donations
36:05 Quickfire Round: Insights and Advice
20VC: Why Price Sensitivity is BS | Why "Portfolios" are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy | Why the Best Investment Never Happen in "Fundraising Rounds" | What Europe Needs to do to Become a Superpower Again | Klaus Hommels, Lakestar
Klaus Hommels is one of Europe’s leading start investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Spotify, Airbnb, Facebook, Coinbase, Revolut and more. Among his many responsibilities, Klaus is the Founder of Lakestar, his own venture fund and chairs the board of directors of the NATO Innovation Fund.
In Today’s Episode with Klaus Hommels We Discuss:
1. The Investing Rules that are BS:
-
Why does Klaus totally reject the idea of price sensitivity?
-
Why does Klaus hate the idea of “building portfolios”?
-
Why does Klaus believe the best investments are made when there is not a fundraising round in motion?
-
Why does Klaus believe that capital concentration limits on a per company basis are BS? How concentrated is Klaus happy to be?
2. Europe: What The F*** is Going On:
-
Why is Europe underfinancing innovation by a factor of eight?
-
Why is Europe unable to send satellites into space for six years?
-
What should Europe do to become a global superpower once again? What needs to change?
-
Why should European pension funds be forced to invest in venture capital?
3. The Stories Behind the $BN Returns:
-
How did a dinner with Klaus’ son lead to his investing in Revolut?
-
How did Klaus analysis of Friendster and MySpace lead to his buying Matt Cohler @ Benchmark’s Facebook shares?
-
How did a small investment in a Swedish company, Stardoll, lead to Klaus investing in the seed round of Spotify?
-
How did a conversation with Madonna’s manager lead to Klaus investing in Airbnb?
20VC: Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS | Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? | Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users
Jason Citron is the Co-Founder and CEO of Discord, a voice, video and text platform for friends playing games. Jason has raised $1BN for the company and was able to scale to 200M users. Prior to co-founding Discord, Jason founded OpenFeint, the biggest social mobile gaming platform, which sold to GREE in 2011 for $104 million.
In Today’s Episode with Jason Citron We Discuss:
1. Leadership Lessons That are Total BS:
-
Hiring: Why does Jason believe hiring experienced executives is the worst thing you can do for your company? What did he learn by doing it?
-
Culture: Why does Jason believe that empowerment and alignment are total BS? How does Jason empower people when they are told what to do vs choose what to do?
-
Strategy: What does Jason believe is the most effective way to drive and implement the strategy?
2. The Untold Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users:
-
Why did Jason offer to give investors their money back at one point? What was the hardest round to raise and why?
-
Why did Jason turn down the chance to sell to Microsoft for $12BN?
-
What one single change in how Jason communicated with the first 100 users changed the trajectory of the entire company?
-
What do most founders think they know about product market fit that they do not?
3. The Makings of a Unicorn Founder:
-
Does Jason believe that richer founders make better founders?
-
Why does Jason believe that entrepreneurs who play video games have a higher chance of being successful in the future?
-
What single trait does Jason believe he has that has made him such a successful founder? Does Jason ever have imposter syndrome? When?
20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere
Dan Fougere is one of the most successful sales leaders of the last decade. Most recently, Dan was Chief Revenue Officer for Datadog, growing revenues from $60 million to $1BN ARR. Before Datadog, Dan was Head of Global Sales at Medallia where he created the Mediallia sales playbook. In addition, Dan is also a minority owner of the New York Yankees.
In Today’s Episode with Dan Fougere:
1. Lessons Scaling Sales to $1BN in ARR at Datadog:
-
What did Datadog not do that Dan wishes they had of done?
-
What did they not do that Dan wishes they had done?
-
What does Dan know about scaling sales to $1BN in ARR that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
-
What stage of the scaling process was hardest? Why?
2. How to Hire the Best Sales Team:
-
What are the top signals of the best sales candidates?
-
How does Dan structure the interview process for new candidates?
-
How does Dan use tasks and take-home assignments to test candidates?
-
What does Dan think of hiring panels?
-
What are the biggest hiring mistakes Dan has made? What did he learn?
3. Discounting, Logos and Deal Reviews:
-
Is discounting always wrong? How should sales leaders use it?
-
How important is the quality of logo in the early days vs revenue in the door?
-
What is the right way to structure deal reviews? What makes good vs great?
-
Is outbound dead in 2024? Advice to founders on outbound?
20VC: Turning $16.5M into $2.1BN; Lessons from the Greatest Venture Investment in European History: UiPath | Why VC is Not Being Commoditised | Why Price Does Not Matter | Lessons on Loss Ratio, Selling and Signalling with Cem Sertoglu
Cem Sertoglu is one of the great venture investors of the last decade. Cem is famed for writing the first check into UiPath and over several rounds turning $16.5M into $2.1BN. Cem recently started Bek Ventures, a $250M fund that was 3x oversubscribed.
In Today’s Show with Cem Sertoglu We Discuss:
1. Has Venture Capital Been Commoditised:
-
Why does Cem believe that VC has not been commoditised?
-
Why does Cem believe many VCs today are not even VCs anymore?
-
How does Cem advise founders who have offers from large multi-stage firms? What questions should they ask them pre-working with them?
-
How do the best founders select the VC they choose to work with?
2. Price, Reserves, Loss Ratios:
-
Why does Cem believe that price does not matter?
-
How does Cem approach reserves and reserves management?
-
What does Cem know now about reserves that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
-
Does Cem care about loss ratio? Does he do scenario planning when making investments?
3. Making $2.1BN on UiPath:
-
How did Cem meet Daniel for the first time? Was it obvious he was incredible?
-
Why did they only write a $1M check and not take the whole round with $1.5M?
-
Why did 40 of the best investors in Europe all turn down UiPath for the Series A?
-
What did doing the bridge round for UiPath teach Cem about reserves?
-
When was it obvious UiPath was going to be a mega hit?
-
How did they continue to concentrate capital with each round?
-
When did they first start to sell shares in UiPath?
-
What was their approach to the selldown of their position?
-
When the company IPO’d, how much of it did they have?
4. AMA with One of Europe’s Best:
-
Does signalling exist? How does Cem advise founders on this?
-
What has been his biggest loss? How did that change his mindset?
-
What has been Cem’s biggest miss? What did he not see?
-
Why does Cem always believe you should manufacture arguments with founders before investing?
-
Why does Cem believe a high GP commit can actually misalign the GP and the LP?
20VC Alain De Botton on Why Companies Are Not Families | Why Status is Making You Miserable | Why Parents Want Their Kids to Fail | Why We Are Richer Yet More Anxious Than Ever & Why You Should Not Always "Be Yourself"
Alain De Botton is one of the greatest philosophers of our time. His work has had a profound impact on me more than any other. I have wanted to do this episode for the last 8 years.
In Today’s Episode with Alain De Botton We Discuss:
1. Why Status is Making You Miserable:
-
Why are we richer yet more anxious than ever?
-
What is the right way to define status? Why do we want it so much?
-
Is it bad to want status? What are some non-obvious signs that you are seeking status when you do not realise it?
-
Does social media enhance the desire for status? How so?
-
Do the happiest people want status the least? What are Alain’s biggest observations in how truly happy people think about status?
2. Why Parents Want You To Fail:
-
Why is the sign of good parenting when your child does not want to be famous?
-
Why do your parents sometimes want you to fail?
-
What should parents do if their child wants to chase an unachievable goal?
-
Why should parents encourage their children to start very early?
3. Why Meritocracy is a Fallacy & Meaningful Work:
-
Why does Alain believe a true meritocracy is an impossible dream?
-
Why is meritocracy a bad thing when taken to the extreme?
-
Why does Alain believe that companies are not families?
-
Why does Alain tell people that they should not bring their full selves to work?
4. WTF is “Meaningful Work”:
-
What does it mean to do “meaningful work”?
-
Why do humans need to do “meaningful work” today in a way that we did not many years ago?
-
What are Alain’s biggest pieces of advice to young people today, unsure of what they should do with their lives and careers?
-
Why does Alain believe the idea of a “calling” is BS?
5. Ambition, Achievement and Sacrifice:
-
What does Alain mean when he says “you have to tolerate your own averageness”?
-
What does Alain say to the young generation who want work/life balance?
-
What does Alain mean when he said you “cannot be at war with yourself”?
-
Does Alain agree that to achieve you must sacrifice?
20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik
Raman Malik is the Head of Growth at Perplexity where he is responsible for growth marketing, onboarding, activation, retention, and monetisation. Prior to Perplexity, Raman, was an early member of the growth team at Lyft and joined Perplexity earlier this year after his own startup journey.
In Today’s Episode with Perplexity’s Head of Growth:
1. Inside the Perplexity Growth Machine:
-
What have been the single biggest needle movers in the growth of Perplexity?
-
What has not worked? What have they learned from that?
-
How have partnerships driven growth? Lessons on what makes a good vs bad partnership?
-
Why does Raman think paid acquisition is a drug and Perplexity do not do it? How does Raman advise other founders when it comes to paid acquisition?
2. Acquisition, Retention, Churn: Mastering the Basics:
-
Why does Raman think that brand marketing is BS? When does it become more important?
-
What are the simplest things startups and product teams can do to drive retention up?
-
How do Perplexity count an “engaged user”? What metric suggests they have a retained user?
-
What is the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to A/B tests?
3. How Perplexity Built a Growth Machine:
-
Why does Raman advise all founders to hire more former founders?
-
How does the way you manage founders turned employees differ from employees who have never been founders?
-
What is the must under appreciated growth channel today that has worked for Perplexity?
-
What growth channel has been the biggest flop for Perplexity? What did Raman learn from losing money on the channel?
20VC: Bolt; The Most Insane Story in Startups | Turning a $5K Loan into an $8BN Company | Why Every VC Turned Down One of Europe's Biggest Winners | Competing with Uber & The Future of Micromobility and Self-Driving
Markus Villig is the Founder and CEO of Bolt, a global mobility platform with more than 200 million lifetime customers in more than 50 countries and 600 cities. Bolt has raised over €1 billion in funding from investors like Sequoia, D1 and G Squared, making Markus the youngest founder of a billion-dollar company in Europe.
In Today’s Episode with Markus Villig:
1. Starting an $8BN Company:
-
How did Markus come up with the idea for Bolt before Uber existed?
-
How did Markus find his co-founder? Why did 30 people turn down the chance to co-found Bolt? What are Markus’ biggest tips on finding a co-founder?
-
How did Markus use a $5K loan from his parents as the pre-seed round?
-
How did Markus get the first riders for Bolt? What worked? What did not work?
-
How did Markus get the first driver for Bolt? What worked? What did not work?
2. Expanding to be a Global Champion:
-
How did Markus expand Bolt to $10M in ARR on just $1M of funding?
-
What did the international expansion playbook look like? What worked? What did not work? How has it changed over time?
-
What one simple change led to their becoming the leader in Africa?
-
What was the best country to launch? What was the worst?
-
What is the most profitable country today? What is the least?
3. The $8BN Company that no VC Wanted to Fund:
-
Why did every large VC in Europe turn down Bolt early on?
-
How did a real estate company in the Baltics save Bolt with lifeline funding?
-
When did Sequoia come into the mix? Does Sequoia move the needle for your company when they invest?
-
How do New York financially driven investors differ to the traditional VC ecosystem?
-
What would Markus most like to change about the world of VC?
4. The Future: Micromobility, Self-Driving Cars, Uber:
-
Will the rise of self-driving cars harm or help companies like Bolt and Uber?
-
What is the future for micromobility? Does it cannibalise the core business for Bolt and Uber?
-
What is Uber better at Bolt doing? What are Uber worse at than Bolt? How will that change moving forward?
-
Waymo, buy or short? Why?
20VC: Anduril Co-Founder on How a Trump Administration Changes the Defence Industry | What Happens Between China vs Taiwan, Israel vs Palestine, Russia vs Ukraine | How Software Changes War & Why TikTok Should Be Banned with Matt Grimm
Matt Grimm is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Anduril Industries, an American defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems. To date, Anduril has raised over $3.7BN with the latest round pricing the company at a whopping $14BN. Before Anduril, Matt was a Principal at Mithril Capital Management alongside Peter Thiel. Before Mithril, Matt was an early hire at Palantir, where he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure U.S. forces had the best technology for the mission.
In Today’s Episode with Matt Grimm We Discuss:
1. China/Taiwan, Ukraine/Russia & Israel/Gaza:
-
How will a Trump administration change US foreign policy and approach to conflict?
-
Will China invade Taiwan? What does Matt expect to see happen there?
-
Will Trump put an end to the war in Ukraine? What will be the outcome?
-
Is Israel wrong to defend itself in the way it has? How will the situation in Gaza be resolved?
2. The Future of War:
-
What will war look like in the future?
-
How is software and autonomy changing the world of war?
-
Why does the incentive structure of governments buying military equipment need to change around the world?
-
Will we see a world of robodogs fighting on battlefields? What does weaponry of the future look like?
3. Are We In a Defence Bubble:
-
With the massive increase in funding to defence companies, does Matt think we are in a defence bubble?
-
What does Matt believe all investors should know about the defence industry before they make investments in the space?
-
What should defence founders at the early stage know about building a defence company at scale? What changes?
-
Who will be the buyer for the many defence companies that have raised early rounds of funding and go out of business?
4. Matt Grimm: AMA:
-
Does money make you happy?
-
What is the biggest luxury purchase you have made?
-
Should TikTok be banned in the US?
-
What would Matt do today if he knew he would not fail?
20VC: Sam Altman on The Trajectory of Model Capability Improvements: Will Scaling Laws Continue | Semi-Conductor Supply Chains | What Startups Will be Steamrolled by OpenAI and Where is Opportunity
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, one of the most important companies in history. OpenAI is on a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Prior to OpenAI, Sam was the President of Y Combinator and an angel investor in Stripe, Airbnb, Reddit and Instacart.
15 Questions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman:
1. Will the trajectory of model capability improvement keep going at the same rate as it has been?
2. When did Sam doubt the continuance of scaling laws most? What has been the hardest technical research challenge OpenAI have overcome?
3. How worried is Sam about semiconductor supply chains and international tensions around them?
4. What is Sam’s biggest worry today? How has it changed over the last 12 months and 5 years?
5. In what ways does Sam feel he was and is unprepared for the role of CEO of OpenAI?
6. Was Masa Son right to suggest that $9TRN of value will be created every year by AI?
7. Why does Sam disagree with Larry Ellison’s statement that it will cost $100BN to enter the foundation model race?
8. Was Keith Rabois right that the best way to build companies is to hire under 30s?
9. What unmade decision weighs on Sam’s mind most often?
10. What is Sam most grateful to Y Combinator for?
11. What would Sam build if he were a 23 year old starting today with the foundational AI technology that is already in place?
12. What should startups not try and build as OpenAI will steamroll them? What should they try and build where OpenAI will not go?
13. What does Sam believe is the most exciting use of agents that he has not seen created yet?
14. How does Sam believe that human potential is most wasted today?
15. Who does Sam most respect in the world of AI today? Why them?
20VC: Robinhood's Vlad Tenev on Founder Mode | Building 8x $100M Revenue Lines | Lessons from Raising $5BN and the Gamestop Saga | The Future of Artificial Intelligence, Wealth Management and Home Ownership
Vlad Tenev is a Co-Founder and CEO of Robinhood, the commission free stock trading and investing app with a market cap today of $20.7BN. Over the incredible 11 year journey Vlad has raised over $5BN from some of the world’s best investors including Sequoia, a16z, DST, Ribbit and Index. Before Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City.
In Today’s Episode with Vlad Tenev We Discuss:
1. Surviving a Scandal: The Gamestop Saga:
-
What was the single hardest element of the sage for Vlad?
-
What did the sage teach Vlad about how to tell stories effectively?
-
What did Vlad not do in the period that he wishes he had of done?
-
What did he do that he wishes he had not done?
-
What advice does Vlad have for any founder going into a crisis?
2. Founder Mode and The Biggest BS Myths of Leadership:
-
How does Vlad analyse and assess Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode”?
-
Where is Founder mode right? Where is it dangerous?
-
What canonical leadership statements and lessons does Vlad most disagree with?
-
How has Vlad changed most significantly as a leader?
3. 8x $100M Revenue Lines: Scaling a Juggernaut:
-
What have been the single biggest challenges of scaling 8 lines of revenue each with over $100M in them?
-
What have been Vlad’s biggest lessons on when and how to release new products?
-
Why did Vlad decide to abandon the Europe launch? Was it right with the benefit of hindsight?
-
What did Vlad not invest in with Robinhood that he wishes he had of done?
20VC: Linear's Karri Saarinen How to be Grow Capital Efficiently in a World of BS Growth | How to Fundraise with Leverage | How to Select Investors and How to Give Them Homework in the Raise Process & Growth Lessons from Airbnb and Coinbase
Karri Saarinen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Linear. The company has raised from some of the best in the business including Sequoia and Accel. Before founding Linear, Karri was the principal designer at Airbnb and the founding designer at Coinbase.
10 Lessons with One of Silicon Valley’s Most In-Demand Founders:
How to Become a Master Fundraiser:
-
Why does Karri believe it is BS advice that founders should “always be raising”?
-
What is Karri’s biggest advice to founders on minimising dilution?
-
What do most founders think they know about fundraising but do not?
-
What is the best way to put your VCs to work? How can you give them homework to do?
-
What has been the single best VC meeting Karri has had?
-
What has been the worst VC meeting?
Product and Growth:
-
What does Karri mean when he says “founder must focus on quality growth over hypergrowth?”
-
How does Karri advise founders on how soon to release and monetise their first product? Wait for platform ready or ship more feature products and monetise?
-
What have been the single biggest product lessons for Karri from Airbnb and Coinbase?
-
What are the most commons ways that growth plateaus? What breaks first?
Karri AMA:
-
Brian Armstrong or Brian Chesky; who would you invest in first?
-
Would you sell Linear today for $3BN in cash?
-
What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started?
-
What did you believe that you now no longer believe?
20VC: Why SaaS is Dead | Why AI First Companies Will Win | We are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent | Why Europe is F******* and We Need to Stop Whining with Daniel Khachab, Co-Founder @ Choco
Daniel Khachab is the co-founder and CEO of Choco. Today, Choco’s AI platform facilitates half of all food traded in major cities like New York, Paris, London, and Berlin, cutting food waste and streamlining distribution. Since its founding in 2018, Choco has raised $330 million from Bessemer, Coatue (its first European investment), and Insight, reaching unicorn status within 2.5 years. Previously, Daniel was the youngest Managing Director at Rocket Internet, where he oversaw growth across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.
From Seed to $1BN in 30 Months:
1. We Killed a $BN SaaS Business to be AI First:
-
Why does Daniel believe that SaaS is dead?
-
What does an AI-first company mean?
-
Why does Daniel believe AI-first companies will win the next 10 years?
-
What foundation models does Daniel and Choco use today?
-
How has the cost of using different models changed?
-
What categories are vulnerable to being attacked with vertical products from the foundation model providers?
2. Europe is F*******: Why and What To Do:
-
Why does Daniel believe Europe is at a massive disadvantage in the next 10 years of AI?
-
Chips: What can Europe do to encourage chip production and manufacturing to take place on European soil?
-
Energy: What can European governments do to encourage energy providers and new forms of renewable energy to innovate to provide the energy AI needs?
-
Talent: Why does Daniel believe AI talent is the hardest problem that Europe faces? What can governments in EU do to resolve this problem?
3. Lessons Scaling to $1BN in 30 Months:
-
Does Daniel regret raising at a $1.1BN valuation?
-
Why did he throw a unicorn party with the round? Why does he regret it so much?
-
What did Daniel spend money on that he wish he had not spent money on?
-
What did Daniel not spend money on that with the benefit of hindsight, they should have spent money on?
-
When your competition raises a lot of funding, does that mean you should also?
20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry
Mark Goldberg is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Chemistry, a $350M fund announced just yesterday with the mission to lead the best seed and Series A rounds. Before Chemistry, Mark was a Partner at Index Ventures, where he led early stage investments in Plaid, Bridge, Pilot, Anrok and Persona. Prior to Index Ventures, Mark was one of the first business hires at Dropbox.
In Today’s Episode with Mark Goldberg We Discuss:
1. The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms:
-
Why are portfolio services there to help the investing partners and not the founders?
-
What are the most broken elements within a multi-stage firm?
-
How does decision-making break down in large partnerships?
-
When is the right time to work with multi-stage firms? When is not?
2. From Boutique High Margins to Commoditised Low Margins:
-
With the immense amount of cash that has entered VC, will returns simply get worse?
-
Who will be the winners in the next 10 years of venture?
-
Who will be the losers? What can they do today to change this?
-
What element of the future of venture are not enough people spending time on?
3. Lessons from Leading Unicorn Company Rounds:
-
What happens to all the unicorns with insanely high prices they cannot grow into?
-
What has been Mark’s biggest hit? What did he learn?
-
What has been his biggest miss? How did that change his go-forward approach?
-
Does Mark agree that 90% of VC do not add value?
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean
AJ Tennant is the Vice President of Sales & Success at Glean, Glean has more than 20x'd its revenue and 100x'd its user base in the just two and a half years he's been there. Before Glean, AJ had incredible runs at Slack and Facebook. At Slack, AJ helped grow revenue from $6 million to more than $1 billion.
In Today’s Episode with AJ Tennant We Discuss:
1. How to Sell AI Tools in 2024:
-
Are we still in the experimental budget phase for AI?
-
How does selling AI tools differ to selling traditional SaaS?
-
What are enterprises biggest concerns when it comes to adopting AI tools?
-
What buzzwords get enterprises most excited in the sales process?
-
Will we see a massive churn problem when the first renewal cycle for many of these AI products comes?
2. Outbound, Discounting, Closing:
-
Is outbound dead in 2024? What does no one do that everyone should do?
-
How does AJ approach discounting? Biggest lessons and advice?
-
What can sales teams do to create a sense of urgency in a sales cycle?
-
How does AJ do deal reviews and post-mortems? What is the difference between good and bad post-mortems?
3. How to Master Customer Success:
-
What are the biggest mistakes founders make today in managing their CS teams?
-
Should CS be compensated for upsell? How should the comp structure of CS teams change?
-
What can be done to create a good handoff experience for the customer when handing from AE to CS?
-
What are the most common ways CS teams break over time?
4. Hiring the Best Sales Teams:
-
How does AJ structure the hiring process for all new sales hires?
-
What questions does AJ always need to ask when hiring sales reps?
-
What are clear signs of outperformers when hiring new reps?
-
Does AJ give candidates a take-home assignment? What does he want to see from them?
20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner @ Kleiner Perkins and one of the greatest venture investors of our time. In the past, Mamoon has led rounds in Figma, Slack, Rippling, Intercom, Glean and Box. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon was a Co-Founder of Social Capital, and prior to that a Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP).
In Today’s Episode with Mamoon Hamid We Discuss:
1. The Greatest Venture Deal of All Time: Figma or Slack:
-
What is Mamoon’s highest returning deal?
-
What did Mamoon see in Dylan and Figma when they had no revenue and very little user data?
-
What compelled Mamoon to write Stewart the check with Slack? What did he not see with Slack that he should have seen?
2. Taking Control of the Great Brand in Venture: Kleiner Perkins:
-
Is it true that Kleiner approached Mamoon and gave him the keys to the Kleiner kingdom? How did it go down?
-
Will Kleiner go back to having multiple products, large growth funds, international funds? What does Mamoon want Kleiner to be in 5 years?
-
What was the hardest element of the transition into Kleiner? What did Mamoon not know that he wishes he had known?
3. Becoming a Generational Defining Investor:
-
Market, founder, product, how does Mamoon rank them 1-3?
-
How has Mamoon changed most significantly as an investor?
-
What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he became a VC 19 years ago?
-
What is his biggest loss? How did it shape his mindset and go forward investing approach?
4. AI Supercycle: The Greatest Time to Invest
-
Where does Mamoon believe the value will accrue in this wave of AI?
-
Where are many investors spending a lot of time but Mamoon believes is not worthy of that time?
-
Will scaling laws continue?
-
Have we ever seen an incumbent set spend like this incumbent class? How does that change the game for VCs?
20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel
Antoine Le Nel is the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut, one of the fastest growing fintechs on the planet. Prior to Revolut, Antoine spent an incredible 7 years at King (Makers of Candy Crush) overseeing continuous expansion of the world's most famous mobile game as VP of Growth.
10 Questions with Revolut’s Chief Growth Officer:
-
Why does Antoine believe that the best product and growth teams do not need to do A/B tests?
-
Why does Antoine believe the best growth teams do not believe in anything?
-
What growth tactics have worked best for Revolut? What did they learn?
-
What have been the biggest growth flops? How did that change their approach?
-
Why does Antoine believe localisation in product is BS and overrated?
-
Why does CAC never come up at Revolut? Why do they not believe it is a metric to focus on? What metrics do they focus on instead?
-
What does Antoine mean when he says “growth is a bidding war”? How does one win the “bidding war” today?
-
Why does Antoine believe the best growth teams focus on optimisations and 1% gains not moving the needle for a company?
-
What are the single biggest mistakes growth teams make today? What used to work that no longer works?
-
What growth tactic is most effective but also most under-utilised? How can startups take advantage of this?
20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid
Zach Perret is the CEO and Co-Founder of Plaid, a technology platform reshaping financial services. To date, Zach has raised over $734M for Plaid from the likes of NEA, Spark, GV, Coatue and a16z, to name a few. Today, thousands of companies including the largest fintechs, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks use Plaid. In addition, Zach is also a Co-Founder of Mischief, an early-stage venture fund in San Francisco.
In Today’s Episode with Zach Perret We Discuss:
1. Founder Mode:
-
Why “Founder Mode” will be the most dangerous blog post written in the last decade for founders? What is most misleading about it?
-
What are “grinder problems”? Why does Zach believe that grinder problems are the best problems for startups to try and solve?
-
Why does Zach believe that OKRs are BS and should be removed? What should be used instead?
2. Lessons from Raising $734M for Plaid:
-
What is the worst advice that VCs give that most founders take?
-
Why does Zach believe that angel investing is more distracting than helpful for founders to do? What are the pros of investing alongside running a company?
-
Why does Zach encourage founders to raise money as infrequently as possible? What does this mean for the size and price of rounds Zach thinks we should see occur?
3. The $5BN Exit and the $13.4BN Round:
-
Why did Zach turn down the $5BN exit to Visa? Was it the right choice?
-
Does Zach regret raising at such a high price of $13.4BN when the exit did not happen?
-
Would Zach sell the company today for $13.4BN if offered it?
-
What did Zach not do that he wish he had done? What did he do that he wishes he had not done?
20VC: Investing Lessons from FC Seeding Uber, Airtable and Coupang | Why Pro Rata is the Original Sin in VC | Why Liquidity Has Died in 2024 | Why LPs are Pissed with VCs | The Hard Truth About Seed Fund Economics with David Frankel @ Founder Collective
David Frankel is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Founder Collective, one of the best seed firms of the last decade. David has led rounds in companies such as Suno, Coupang, SeatGeek and PillPack (sold to Amazon for ~$1B). Previously, David was Co-Founder and CEO of Internet Solutions (IS), the largest ISP in Africa, ultimately acquired by NTT Japan. David has been named to the Midas List six times. In 2023, he was #11 and in 2024, he appeared at #15 on the Midas List of the world's best venture capital investors and at #2 on the Midas list of seed investors.
10 Questions With One of the World’s Best Seed Investors:
1. Reserves: Why are reserves the hardest part of venture? What have been David’s biggest lessons in how to do them well?
2. Why does David believe that pro-rata is the original sin of VC?
3. Has DPI died in 2024? Is PE the salvation for the VC exit market and liquidity?
4. Why does David believe LPs are so pissed of with VCs right now? What will change that?
5. When will IPO markets open? Are M&A markets shut? What would cause them to open?
6. How does David reflect on price today? When will he pay up and break his rules?
7. Biggest lessons for David on knowing when is the right time to sell? Why does David believe you should never sell your winners? What has David sold that he regrets most?
8. What companies returned the most to Founder Collective Funds? Uber? Coupang? Airtable? The Trade Desk? What did he learn from those mega hits?
9. What have been David’s biggest losses? How did losing the company change his mindset and approach to investing?
10. What does David believe is the future of venture capital? How can seed funds play in a world of mega multi-stage funds? Who wins? Who loses?
20VC: Why Most AI Investments Will Do Worse than the S&P 500 | Why Early Stage VC is F******* | The Danger of Kamala Harris and Why Trump and Vance are Best | Freedom of Speech, Censorship and Government Control with Eoghan McCabe @ Intercom
Eoghan McCabe is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Intercom, one of the largest private software companies in the valley with hundreds of millions in revenue and thousands of customers. To date, Eoghan has raised over $238M from Index, Kleiner Perkins, ICONIQ, GV, Bessemer and more incredible firms. Intercom’s goal is to reinvent customer service with AI agents replacing human agents over the next 10 years.
10 Questions with One of the Largest Private Company CEO’s:
-
AI Investing: Why will most AI investments not do better than the S&P 500?
-
Building SaaS Tools with AI: Why is it crazy for companies to follow Klarna and use AI to build their own tools?
-
Going Public: Why is Bill Gurley wrong that more later stage companies should go public? Why did Intercom shelve plans to go public in 2022?
-
Early-Stage is F*******: Why is the early-stage venture ecosystem as an asset class f******?
-
Founder Mode: Why does Eoghan believe all of the best founders are unbalanced? What is the difference between Founder vs Manager mode?
-
Political Voice: Why did Eoghan decide he had to voice his political opinions now?
-
The Danger of Harris: Why does Eoghan believe a Harris administration would rob the US of immense freedom, democracy and civil liberty?
-
Why Vote Trump: Why does Eoghan believe that Trump will regain immense freedom for the sovereign individual?
-
Freedom of Speech: How does Eoghan determine right vs wrong when freedom of speech leads to harm and injustice?
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Middle East and Nuclear War: Why does Eoghan believe that nuclear war is much closer than we think? Will we see the Middle East descend into war?
20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE
Jeff Wang is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital Global Equities (SCGE), a public/private crossover investment firm with investments spanning from late-stage private companies to public companies. As Managing Partner, Jeff has primarily focused on public growth technology companies but has also invested $3 billion in private companies including Bytedance, SpaceX, and Stripe. Prior SCGE private investments that have since gone public include Airbnb, Doordash, MongoDB, Nubank, and Snowflake. Before joining SCGE in 2010, Jeff also worked at TPG Capital and Silver Lake Partners where he focused on investments in technology buyouts.
10 Questions with the Leader of Sequoia’s $9BN Global Equities Fund:
1. Crossover Fund Opportunity: Why are crossover funds more attractive today than ever? Have the tourists gone?
2. Public Market Opportunity: Why is the opportunity in the public markets, not the private markets today?
3. IPO Markets: When will IPO markets open? What will cause them to open?
4. Breaking Hedge Fund Rules: What are the biggest ways that Sequoia break the traditional rules of hedge funds?
5. Google: Why does Jeff believe that Google’s cash cow of search is under threat?
6. Meta: Why does Jeff believe Meta will be the biggest competitor to Google?
7. NVIDIA: Why is NVIDIA’s price today reasonable? What is the bull and bear case?
8. China: Is there a recovery for China? How do Sequoia play China in this market?
9. AI in Public Markets: How are Sequoia playing the AI game in the public markets?
10. Investing Lessons: What have been Jeff’s biggest investing lessons from Mike Moritz, Doug Leone and Roelof Botha?
20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside
Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside.ai, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $500M Series B valuing the company at $3BN. Prior to Poolside, Eiso founded Athenian, a data-enabled engineering platform. Before that, he built source{d} - the world’s first company dedicated to applying AI to code and software.
1. Raising $600M to Compete in the AGI Race:
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What is Poolside? How does Poolside differentiate from other general-purpose LLMs?
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How much of Poolside’s latest raise will be spent on compute?
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How does Eiso feel about large corporates being a large part of startup LLM provider’s funding rounds?
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Why did Poolside choose to only accept investment from Nvidia?
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Is $600M really enough to compete with the mega war chests of other LLMs?
2. The Big Questions in AI:
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Will scaling laws continue? Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns in model performance for LLMs?
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What is the biggest barrier to the continued improvement in model performance; data, algorithms or compute?
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To what extent will Nvidia’s Blackwell chip create a step function improvement in performance?
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What will OpenAI’s GPT5 need to have to be a gamechanger once again?
3. Compute, Chips and Cash:
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Does Eiso agree with Larry Ellison; “you need $100BN to play the foundation model game”? What does Eiso believe is the minimum entry price?
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Will we see the continuing monopoly of Nvidia? How does Eiso expect the compute landscape to evolve?
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Why are Amazon and Google best placed when it comes to reducing cost through their own chip manufacturing?
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Does Eiso agree with David Cahn @ Sequoia, “you will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice”?
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Can the speed of data centre establishment and development keep up with the speed of foundation model development?
4. WTF Happens to The Model Layer: OpenAI and Anthropic…
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Does Eiso agree we are seeing foundation models become commoditised?
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What would Eiso do if he were Sam Altman today?
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Is $6.6BN really enough for OpenAI to compete against Google, Meta etc…?
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OpenAI at $150BN, Anthropic at $40BN and X.ai at $24BN. Which would Eiso choose to buy and why?
20Product: How the Best Teams Do Product Reviews | What Everyone Gets Wrong in Hiring Product Teams | Product Lessons Leading Facebook App Monetisation Team to Billions in Revenue with Maria Angelidou, CPO @ Personio
Maria Angelidou is a seasoned product leader, having spent close to a decade at Meta where she was VP of Product and General Manager for some of the largest products such as Facebook Groups (2B+ users), Events, Profile, and Search. Before that, Maria led the Facebook App Monetization team, driving billions of dollars in revenue. Today, Maria is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Personio, an HR tech company with an ambitious mission to unlock the power of people for SMEs.
In Today's Episode with Maria Angelidou
1. How to Hire the Best Product Teams:
- What are the three different archetypes for PMs today?
- What non-obvious traits does Maria look for in new product hires?
- How does Maria structure the hiring process? What works? What does not?
- Does Maria do take home assignments? How has her approach changed here?
- What is Maria's biggest advice to candidates on both compensation and title?
2. How the Best Product Teams Do Product Reviews:
- What does every team get wrong in how they do product reviews?
- What are the four different type of product reviews?
- How often does Maria do a product review? Who is invited?
- Who sets the agenda? How is it structured?
- What makes good vs great product reviews?
3. Europe vs US: How Product Teams Differ:
- What is the single biggest difference when comparing product teams in the US vs EU?
- Does Maria agree that the work ethic is less in the EU?
- Which class of employee would Maria say is more entitled?
- What could Europe do to be more competitive with the US?
- What was the biggest surprise to Maria on returning to Europe from the US?
20VC: Bret Taylor: The AI Bubble and What Happens Now | How the Cost of Chips and Models Will Change in AI | Will Companies Build Their Own Software | Why Pre-Training is for Morons | Leaderships Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg
Bret Taylor is CEO and Co-Founder of Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. Previously, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
In Today's Discussion with Bret Taylor:
1. The Biggest Misconceptions About AI Today:
- Does Bret believe we are in an AI bubble or not?
- Why does Bret believe it is BS that companies will all use AI to build their own software?
- What does no one realise about the cost of compute today in a world of AI?
2. Foundation Models: The Fastest Depreciating Asset in History?
- As a board member of OpenAI, does Bret agree that foundation models are the fastest depreciating asset in history?
- Will every application be subsumed by foundation models? What will be standalone?
- How does Bret think about the price dumping we are seeing in the foundation model landscape?
- Does Bret believe we will continue to see small foundation model companies (Character, Adept, Inflection) be acquired by larger incumbents?
3. The Biggest Opportunity in AI Today: The Death of the Phone + Website:
- What does Bret believe are the biggest opportunities in the application layer of AI today?
- Why does Bret put forward the case that we will continue to see the role of the phone reduce in consumer lives? How does AI make that happen?
- What does Bret mean when he says we are moving from a world of software rules to guardrails?
- What does AI mean for the future of websites? How does Bret expect consumers to interact with their favourite brands in 10 years?
4. Bret Taylor: Ask Me Anything: Zuck, Leadership, Fundraising:
- Bret has worked with Zuck, Tobi @ Shopify, Marc Benioff and more, what are his biggest lessons from each of them on great leadership?
- How did Bret come to choose Peter @ Benchmark to lead his first round? What advice does Bret have to other VCs on how to be a great VC?
- Bret is on the board of OpenAI, what have been his biggest lessons from OpenAI on what it takes to be a great board member?
20VC: How SHEIN Got So Big So Fast: Behind the Scenes at One of the Fastest Growing Companies in History with Donald Tang, Executive Chairman @ SHEIN
Donald Tang is the Executive Chairman of SHEIN, with oversight of public affairs, business strategy, corporate development, and finance. Donald began his career at Merrill Lynch & Co. He later joined Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. in Los Angeles as Senior Managing Director of Investment Banking. At Bear Sterns, Donald quickly rose to become the Vice Chairman of the firm, as well as Chairman and President of Bear Stearns International Holdings, Chairman and CEO of Bear Stearns Asia, Ltd, and a member of the board of directors at Bear Stearns & Co.
In Today's Episode with Donald Tang We Discuss:
1. How SHEIN Became a Global Giant:
- As specifically as possible, what did you and the SHEIN team do that enabled you to be one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet?
- Real-Time Retail: What is this? How is it the core of SHEIN's growth and efficiency?
- Supply Chain Innovation: How did SHEIN innovate on the supply chain to give them such an advantage over the competition?
- Price King: How does Donald respond to the statement that SHEIN wins due to price, not quality?
- Social Media: What social media tactics allowed SHEIN to grow so fast? What did not work?
- Paid Media: How have SHEIN approached paid marketing? What works? What does not?
2. The Big Questions: IPOs, Impact on Climate and Worker Conditions:
- IPO: Why does SHEIN want to go public? Is London the right place for the company to go public?
- Climate: How does Donald respond to the common idea that "SHEIN is bad for the climate" and encourages fast fashion like never before?
- Tariffs: How does Donald respond to the common question around tariffs and SHEIN benefitting from being under a certain tariff threshold?
3. Marriage, Fatherhood and Happiness:
- Marriage: What have been Donald's biggest lessons on how to have a successful marriage?
- Fatherhood: What does being a great father mean to Donald? If he could call himself up the night before his first child was born, what would he advise himself?
- Happiness: How does Donald think about happiness today? What does everyone get wrong about happiness?
20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani
Jeetu Mahtani was an early member of the HubSpot team. Under his leadership and the sales organization, the business grew its non-US revenue from $3M ARR to close to $1B ARR. After running the International business as the global MD and Sales leader, he then moved to lead the customer success org which expanded to managing 1,500 people in customer success.
In Today's Episode with Jeetu Mahtani We Discuss:
1. How to Go International for Startups:
- What are Jeetu's biggest lessons from Hubspot on what startups can do to make their international expansion a success?
- What were the biggest mistakes Hubspot made in their international expansion?
- How should every team in each new location be structured?
- What should the ramp time and onboarding process look like or each new team and expansion?
2. Scaling Sales from $3M to $1BN in ARR:
- What did Hubspot do so well to successfully scale to $1BN in international ARR?
- What were the biggest mistakes Jeetu made in the expansion of Hubspot's sales teams?
- What are the first things to break in sales teams? How do you handle them?
- Why does Jeetu hate discounting? Why does Jeetu not like customer references?
3. Scaling Customer Success to 1,500 CS Reps:
- When should founders make their first customer success hires?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make in the scaling of CS teams?
- Why should customer success be incentivised in the same comp plans that sales teams have?
- How do the best CS teams work with sales and product teams most effectively?
4. Hiring the Best and Ramping Them:
- What does Jeetu's hiring process look like for all new sales reps?
- What are the must ask questions for Jeetu in all candidate interviews?
- How fast do you know when you have made a mistake with a new hire?
- What is the secret to effective onboarding? What are the biggest mistakes people make in onboarding?
20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani
20VC: Benchmark's Eric Vishria on Where is the Value in AI: Chips, Models or Apps | Why Nvidia Will Not Be The Only Game in Town | The Commoditisation of Foundation Models | Which AI Apps Have Sustaining Value vs Hype and Short Term Revenue
Eric Vishria is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms. At Benchmark, Eric has served on over 10 boards including Confluent (CFLT), Amplitude (AMPL), Benchling, Contentful, Cerebras and several other private companies. Prior to joining Benchmark, Eric was the Co‐Founder and CEO of RockMelt, acquired by Yahoo in 2013.
In Today's Episode with Eric Vishria We Discuss:
1. How to Make Money Investing in AI Today:
- How does Eric think through where value will accrue in the stack between chips, models and applications?
- Why does Eric believe foundation models are the fastest commoditising asset in history?
- Why does Eric believe that Nvidia will not be the only game in town in the next 3-5 years?
2. How to Invest in AI Application Layer Successfully:
- How does Eric analyse between a standalone and deep product vs a product that foundation model will commodities and incorporate into their feature set?
- How does Eric differentiate between the 10 different players all going after customer service, or sales tools or data analyst products etc?
- How does Eric analyse the quality of revenue of these AI application layer companies? What does he mean when he describes their revenue as "sugar high"?
3. How the Best VC Firm Makes Decisions:
- What is the decision-making process for all new deals in Benchmark?
- As specifically as possible, how does the voting process inside Benchmark work?
- What deal was the most contentious deal that went through? What did the partnership learn?
- How has the Benchmark decision-making process changed over 10 years?
4. Does AI Break Venture Capital Models:
- Does the price of AI deals and size of their rounds break the Benchmark model?
- Will foundation model companies all be acquired by the larger cloud providers?
- Unless multiples reflate in the public markets, does venture as an asset class have hope?
- Why does AI make paying ludicrously high prices potentially rational?
20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski
Dmitry Gurski is the Co-Founder and CEO of Flo Health, the leading women's health app and the first European femtech unicorn. Launched in 2015, Flo Health has grown to over 70 million monthly active users and 5 million paid subscribers. The app is recognized as the #1 recommended tool for period and cycle tracking, and it recently achieved a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Beyond Flo, Dmitry is a partner at Palta, a co-founding company with a portfolio of successful startups including Simple App, MSQRD (acquired by Facebook), AIMatter (acquired by Google), and Wannaby (acquired by Farfetch).
In Today's Episode with Dmitry Gurski We Discuss:
1. Why 99% of Startup Advice is BS:
- Why does Dmitry believe that speed is not the most important thing?
- Why does Dmitry believe that competition is actually a good thing?
- Why does Dmitry believe that craziness not intelligence is the most important trait in founders?
- Why does Dmitry believe that fundraising is simply a numbers game?
- What does no one understand about retention that everyone should know?
2. From Potato Farms to Billion Dollar Apps:
- What a childhood in potato farming taught Dmitry about leadership and technology?
- How mushroom farming taught Dmitry about diversification and focus?
- How does Dmitry advise people analyse the hardest moments in their life?
- Why Dmitry does not believe in talent? What else is there?
3. Scaling to Flo's First 1M Users:
- What were Dmitry's biggest lessons from two failed prior versions of Flo?
- What is the secret to success in consumer subscription?
- How did Flo acquire their first customers? What worked? What did not work?
- Why does Dmitry not believe in brand and PR?
4. Building a $200M Revenue Market Leader:
- What have been Dmitry's biggest lessons on monetisation?
- How does Dmitry think about retaining product simplicity with time?
- What are the first things to break in the scaling of a company?
- What did they do with Flo that he wishes they had not done?
20Growth: The 7 Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Packaging, Notifications, Discounts, Paywalls | The Breakdown with Phil Carter
Phil Carter is one of the best growth leaders of the last decade helping world-class companies like Faire, Quizlet, and Ibotta accelerate their growth. Today, Phil is a growth advisor and angel investor who helps Seed - Series C consumer subscription businesses define their growth strategy.
In Today's Episode with Phil Carter We Discuss:
The Seven Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription:
- How to Optimize Subscription Pricing and Packaging:
Step:
- Single vs multiple subs tiers?
- Monthly, weekly or annually?
- How often should it be revisited?
- Biggest mistakes companies make with pricing and packaging?
- How to deliver immediate value through new user onboarding?
Target Metrics:
- Best tactics for delivering value in the shortest amount of time?
- Biggest mistakes companies make in user onboarding?
- Thoughts on the very long surveys companies like Noom make people fill out pre getting access to the product?
- How to boost paid marketing efficiency by investing in desktop web flows?
Target Metrics:
- Why is now the time to be investing in desktop workflows?
- What are the most effective and specific tactics to do so?
- How to optimize paywall visibility and conversion?
Target Metrics:
- Why is paywall view rate so important?
- What is good vs bad?
- What are the most common places to trigger paywall?
- Thoughts on hard paywall vs consumer value first?
- Specific tactics to refine paywall design to maximize conversion?
- Single biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to paywall conversion?
- How to distinguish and emphasize premium value props?
Target Metrics:
- What are the most effective ways to do this?
- Who does it best? Lessons from them?
- How to leverage motivation tactics (stats, streaks, badges, leaderboards, notifications)?
Target Metrics:
- What is the most effective?
- Do we not have notification overload?
- What used to work but now does not work?
- Who does this best? Why them?
- How to leverage strategic discounts and promotions?
Target Metrics:
- What are the most effective discounting methods used?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies make when using promos or discounts?
- Who does it best? What do they do?
20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari
Akshay Kothari is Co-Founder at Notion, one of the fastest-growing companies of the last decade. Akshay has run every function in the company from sales, to marketing to finance and even led their fundraising efforts raising $340M+ from Sequoia, Index and Coatue with the latest round pricing them at $10BN. Before Notion, Akshay was VP Product at Linkedin for 5+ years, leading all of their content efforts. He joined LinkedIn when his previous company, Pulse, was acquired by LinkedIn in 2013.
In Today's Episode with Akshay Kothari We Discuss:
1. Founder Mode, Veto Powers and Focus:
- Does Akshay agree with "founder mode"? What are the biggest downsides to founder mode that not enough people are discussing?
- Why does Akshay believe that the single greatest power of a founder is their "veto power"?
- What is the biggest opportunity that Notion jumped on that they should not have done?
- What is the biggest opportunity that Notion did not jump on that they should have jumped on?
2. Raising $50M @ $2BN Valuation:
- Why did Ivan and Akshay decide to do this raise when they did not even need the money?
- How did the fundraising process for this round go? Why did they choose Coatue and Index?
- Why did Sequoia say no to this round?
- With the benefit of hindsight, what does Akshay wish that they had done differently?
3. Raising $270M @ $10BN Valuation:
- How did Sequoia come back into the frame with this round? Why did they say yes here when they did not before?
- Why does Akshay believe that of all the investor brands, Sequoia is the most powerful? In what way does having Sequoia as an investor change the trajectory of the company?
- Is Akshay concerned about how he will be able to scale into the $10BN valuation?
- How does Akshay address the challenge of bringing new team members in with stock options priced at $10BN? How much of a blocker is that?
4. Boards and Social Media are F*******:
- How is the way in which boards are constructed broken?
- How does Akshay believe that boards should be constructed?
- What roles should founders hire for in their board members?
- Why is Akshay most concerned about the "Tiktokification of everything"?
- Why does Akshay believe that social media has never been more concerning?
20VC: Index's Shardul Shah on Why Market Size is a Trap | Biggest Lessons on Pricing from Leading Rounds in Wiz & Datadog | Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | How Index Makes Decisions and Why Growth & Early are the Same Investing Style
Shardul Shah is a Partner at Index Ventures and one of the greatest cyber security investors of the last two decades. Among his many wins, Shardul has led rounds in Datadog, Wiz, Duo Security, Coalition and more. Shardul is also the only Partner investing at Index to have worked in every single Index office from London, to SF, to NYC to Geneva. Prior to Index, Shardul worked with Summit Partners, focusing on healthcare and internet technologies.
In Today's Episode with Shardul Shah We Discuss:
1. Investing Lessons from Wiz and Datadog:
- Why does Shardul believe that TAM (total addressable market) is BS?
- Why does Shardul believe that every great deal will be expensive?
- How does Shardul evaluate when to double down and concentrate capital vs when to let someone else come in and lead a round in an existing company?
- How does Shardul think about when is the right time to sell a position in a company?
2. How the Best VCs Make Decisions:
- How does Shardul and Index create an environment of truth-seeking together, that is optimised for the best decision-making to take place?
- What are the biggest mistakes in how VCs make decisions today?
- Why does Shardul believe that all first meetings should be 30 mins not 60 mins?
- Why does Shardul believe it is so much harder to make investment decisions when partnerships are remote? What is better remote?
3. The Core Pillars of Venture: Sourcing, Selecting, Securing and Servicing:
- Which one does Shardul believe he is best at? What is he worst at?
- Does Shardul believe with the downturn we have moved into a world of selection and not just winning every new deal?
- Does Shardul believe that VCs provide any value? What are the biggest misnomers when it comes to "VC value add"?
4. Lessons from the Best Investors in the World:
- Who is the best board member that Shardul sits on a board with?
- What has Shardul learned from Gili Raanan and Doug Leone on being a good board member?
- What have been some of Shardul's biggest investing lessons from Danny Rimer?
- Why does Shardul hate benchmarks when it comes to investing?
20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack
Mike Hudack is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sling, a peer-to-peer payments app whose vision is to simplify the way the world connects financially. Previously, he held roles at Monzo Bank as Chief Product Officer, Deliveroo as Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Facebook where he led ads product and sharing product.
In Today's Episode with Mike Hudack We Discuss:
1. Product: Art vs Science:
- What is the true art of product? What makes the great product leaders and PMs?
- Is simple always better in product? How do you retain product simplicity with time?
- When should data be used over intuition in product building?
2. Lessons from Leading Ads at Facebook:
- What are Mike's single biggest product lessons from building the ads product at Facebook?
- How did a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg discussing a product change, alter how Mike thinks about product today? What makes Zuck so special on product?
- What are the biggest mistakes that Facebook made when it came to the ads product?
- What did they not do that he wishes they had done?
3. Leading Product at Deliveroo: What I Learned:
- What are Mike's biggest takeaways from his time at Deliveroo on how to make consumer products?
- What did Deliveroo do from a product perspective that worked so well? What did he learn?
- What were the single biggest product mistakes that Deliveroo made? What did he learn?
- How fast do you know when a consumer app is working or not working? When do you go against data and follow your intuition?
4. Building the Biggest Bank in Britain with Monzo:
- What are Mike's biggest lessons on product building from his time at Monzo?
- What did Monzo not do that he wishes they had done?
- Why does Mike think the US is crucial for Monzo?
- How did Monzo change how Mike thinks about competition? What do you do when your competitor, Revolut, is outshipping you at such a speed?
20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"
David Schneider is a General Partner @ Coatue and one of the great operators of the last 20 years. Prior to Coatue, David was instrumental in ServiceNow’s growth to over $100B+ public market value. David led the growth of the company from $100M to $5BN in revenue. Before joining ServiceNow, David held senior positions at Data Domain, the company he joined at $0 in revenue and scaled to $1BN in revenue and an IPO and acquisition.
In Today's Episode with David Schneider We Discuss:
- ServiceNow: Secrets to Scaling to $5BN in ARR:
- What are David's biggest lessons from scaling ServiceNow to $5BN ARR?
- What worked? What did not work?
- What are the most common reasons companies plateau?
- How did ServiceNow roll out so many different products so effectively?
- How did David hire and ramp 180 people in 90 days?
2. From OG Operator to Newbie Investor:
- What have been the single most challenging elements of making the transition to VC?
- What advice did David get from the biggest names on entering venture?
- How long did it take David to do his first deal? What advice does he give other operators entering?
- How does doing deals in 2024 compare to when David started doing deals in 2021?
3. VC Value: Do 90% of VCs Really Damage Companies:
- Does David agree that 90% of VCs actually detract value?
- What does David mean when he says that the worst VCs are "seagull VCs"?
- What are David's biggest tips to founders on how to get the most out of their board?
- What is enough ownership for David to really give the time needed to a company?
4. Lessons from the Greats: Doug Leone, Bill McDermott, Frank Slootman:
- Doug Leone: What has David learned from Doug on what it takes to be a great investor and board member?
- Frank Slootman: What has David learned from Bill on how to be the best leader of a mega company?
- Bill McDermott: What has David learned from Frank about decision-making and execution.
20VC: Tinder Founder Sean Rad on Lessons Scaling Tinder to the Fastest Growing Consumer Social App in History | Leadership Lessons Scaling Tinder | The Future of Love, Dating and Social Media | The Secret to Your Relationship with Money and Marriage
Sean Rad is the Founder and former CEO of Tinder. Sean has made more romantic connections between humans than anyone in history with Tinder having matched 50BN different people. Sean is also the Founder of Rad Fund which has made over 100 investments in companies and funds.
In Today's Episode with Sean Rad We Discuss:
1. Lessons Scaling Tinder to the Fastest Consumer Social App:
- Starting: How did the idea for Tinder come to Sean in a restaurant in LA?
- Scaling: What are Sean's biggest lessons for consumer apps scaling to their first 10,000 users?
- User Acquisition: How did a party change the entire user acquisition strategy for dinner?
- What did Tinder not do that Sean wishes they had done?
- What did Tinder do that with the benefit of hindsight, they should not have done?
2. Leadership Lessons from Tinder CEOship:
- Annual Product Redesign: Why does Sean believe that every consumer company should have a complete redesign of the app every year? What are the benefits?
- Detachment: How does Sean advise founders when it comes to detaching their happiness from the performance of the company? What works? What does not work?
- Common Mistakes: What are the most common mistakes that Sean sees early-stage founders make when it comes to leadership?
3. Money, Wealth and Creating a Family Office:
- How does Sean analyse his own relationship to money? How has it changed over time?
- At what stage of wealth does Sean believe you have true financial freedom?
- What is the single best investment Sean has made? What did he learn?
- What is the worst investment he has made? What did he learn?
- What have been the single hardest and most surprising elements of creating a family office?
4. Love, Death, Marriage:
- In what ways does Sean think love has changed with time? How do we deal with the loneliness pandemic?
- What does Sean believe are the most non-obvious but important secrets to a happy marriage?
- How does Sean approach and think about his own spirituality today? Why does he not fear death?
20VC: Why VC is a Ponzi Scheme Today | Why Most VCs are Bankers | Why Big VCs Ruin Startups | Why Incentives in VC are Broken | Why American Dynamism is a Tool for VCs to Raise Money with Nick Chirls, Asylum Ventures
Nick Chirls is the Founder of Asylum Ventures, a new venture firm dedicated to the creative act of building companies; treating founders like artists, not assets. Asylum raised $55 million to invest $1-2 million in early-stage founders practising the art of making startups. Prior to Asylum, Nick co-founded Notation Capital, one of NYC's most successful pre-seed firms.
In Today's Episode with Nick Chirls We Discuss:
1. Why Venture Capital is Broken Today:
- Why is VC a ponzi scheme today?
- Why are most VCs sheep and have lost all creativity?
- Why are most investors today incentivised to get dollars out of the door and not to make great investments?
- Why are services functions within VC firms total BS?
- Why do no VCs provide significant enough value to a company that it is needle-moving?
2. How to Make Money in VC in 2024:
- What are the two ways to make money at seed in 2024?
- Why do founders in unloved markets care more than those in hot markets?
- Why will large institutions lose a ton of money investing in the large firms of today?
- Why does Nick believe VCs should always sell when their founders sell shares?
3. Lessons from 3xing a Fund on One Check:
- Why does Nick think about not purchasing preferred shares and only buying common shares?
- Why does Nick believe that investing in competitive markets is stupid?
- What does Nick believe are the conditions you must accept if you are doing a $5M on $25M seed?
20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World
Zico Colter is a Professor and the Director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research spans several topics in AI and machine learning, including work in AI safety and robustness, LLM security, the impact of data on models, implicit models, and more. He also serves on the Board of OpenAI, as a Chief Expert for Bosch, and as Chief Technical Advisor to Gray Swan, a startup in the AI safety space.
In Today's Episode with Zico Colter We Discuss:
1. Model Performance: What are the Bottlenecks:
- Data: To what extent have we leveraged all available data? How can we get more value from the data that we have to improve model performance?
- Compute: Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns where more data does not lead to an increased level of performance?
- Algorithms: What are the biggest problems with current algorithms? How will they change in the next 12 months to improve model performance?
2. Sam Altman, Sequoia and Frontier Models on Data Centres:
- Sam Altman: Does Zico agree with Sam Altman's statement that "compute will be the currency of the future?" Where is he right? Where is he wrong?
- David Cahn @ Sequoia: Does Zico agree with David's statement; "we will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice?"
3. AI Safety: What People Think They Know But Do Not:
- What are people not concerned about today which is a massive concern with AI?
- What are people concerned about which is not a true concern for the future?
- Does Zico share Arvind Narayanan's concern, "the biggest danger is not that people will believe what they see, it is that they will not believe what they see"?
- Why does Zico believe the analogy of AI to nuclear weapons is wrong and inaccurate?
20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick
Scott Gorlick was employee #99 at Uber. Over 6 years, Scott built Uber in Atlanta and helped the company scale from 10 cities to $10B in revenue. Scott is also a prolific angel investor having written early checks into Lime and Standard Cognition to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Scott Gorlick We Discuss:
1. The Driver Acquisition Playbook: Scaling to 1M Drivers
- How did Uber acquire 1M drivers? What was the playbook?
- What worked? What did not work?
- How much of a role did driver-to-driver referral payments have in driver acquisition?
- What did Lyft do on the driver acquisition side that Uber should have done?
- What did the retention look like for drivers on a 30, 60 and 90 day period?
2. The City Expansion Playbook:
- What was the expansion playbook that Uber used for new cities?
- What worked in ramping demand in a new city? What did not work?
- How much of a role did promotions and discounting play? Lessons from them?
- Why did Uber often let Lyft launch in a new market first? What was the benefit of this?
- How did Scott see the maturation rate change with new markets opening? How fast did each subsequent market reach profitability?
3. Travis Kalanick and What Uber Could Have Been:
- How would Uber be different today if Travis was still in charge?
- What are the biggest mistakes that Dara has made with their M&A strategy?
- What are some of Scott's biggest leadership lessons from working with Travis?
- How did Travis create such strong followership and cult around him?
- What were the single biggest management mistakes made by Travis?
20VC: AI Scaling Myths: More Compute is not the Answer | The Core Bottlenecks in AI Today: Data, Algorithms and Compute | The Future of Models: Open vs Closed, Small vs Large with Arvind Narayanan, Professor of Computer Science @ Princeton
Arvind Narayanan is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a co-author of the book AI Snake Oil and a big proponent of the AI scaling myths around the importance of just adding more compute. He is also the lead author of a textbook on the computer science of cryptocurrencies which has been used in over 150 courses around the world, and an accompanying Coursera course that has had over 700,000 learners.
In Today's Episode with Arvind Narayanan We Discuss:
1. Compute, Data, Algorithms: What is the Bottleneck:
- Why does Arvind disagree with the commonly held notion that more compute will result in an equal and continuous level of model performance improvement?
- Will we continue to see players move into the compute layer in the need to internalise the margin? What does that mean for Nvidia?
- Why does Arvind not believe that data is the bottleneck? How does Arvind analyse the future of synthetic data? Where is it useful? Where is it not?
2. The Future of Models:
- Does Arvind agree that this is the fastest commoditization of a technology he has seen?
- How does Arvind analyse the future of the model landscape? Will we see a world of few very large models or a world of many unbundled and verticalised models?
- Where does Arvind believe the most value will accrue in the model layer?
- Is it possible for smaller companies or university research institutions to even play in the model space given the intense cash needed to fund model development?
3. Education, Healthcare and Misinformation: When AI Goes Wrong:
- What are the single biggest dangers that AI poses to society today?
- To what extent does Arvind believe misinformation through generative AI is going to be a massive problem in democracies and misinformation?
- How does Arvind analyse AI impacting the future of education? What does he believe everyone gets wrong about AI and education?
- Does Arvind agree that AI will be able to put a doctor in everyone's pocket? Where does he believe this theory is weak and falls down?
20VC: Why the IPO Market is not Closed | Why Revenue Multiples are BS and Founders Need to Change | Advice From Jack Ma, Jamie Dimon and Evan Spiegel | Lessons from Taking Snap & Alibaba Public with Imran Khan
Imran Khan is the OG of IPOs having taken some of the biggest companies public including Alibaba, Snap, Box, Weibo and more. Today, Imran is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Proem Asset Management. Prior to co-founding Proem, Imran served as Snap Inc.’s Chief Strategy Officer. Under his leadership, Snap’s annual revenue run rate increased to $1.6 billion from zero in less than four years. Previously, Imran was a Managing Director and Head of Global Internet Investment Banking at Credit Suisse where he advised on more than $45 billion-worth of Internet M&A and financing transactions.
In Today's Episode with Imran Khan We Discuss:
1. The IPO Market: When Does it Open:
- How does Imran assess the state of the IPO market today?
- Can companies really go out with $100-$200M in revenue?
- Will we see revenue multiples reflate? Can venture continue as an asset class if they do not?
- When does Imran expect the IPO market to really open?
2. Is M&A F******:
- How does Imran assess the state of the M&A market today?
- How do founders need to change how they think about M&A? Why are they to blame for the lack of M&A activity we have today?
- To what extent can we blame Lina Khan for the lack of M&A?
- Why would a company go do an M&A process today when it is unlikely to be approved by the SEC?
- Why does Imran believe in the case of Wiz, it was a mistake for the company not to do the M&A?
3. AI's $600BN Question: Capex Spend:
- How does Imran analyse the insane capex spend we are seeing from Meta, Google and Amazon?
- How does Zuck not having his cash cow as the cloud business change how he can act?
- How does this compare to Google's capex spend 20 years ago? What can we learn from that?
4. Going Public: The Process, The Players and Jack Ma & Jamie Dimon:
- What is the literal process to take a company public?
- Who sets the price? What do large institutions want in companies going public?
- What are some of Imran's biggest lessons from taking Snap and Alibaba public?
- What are some of Imran's biggest lessons from Jack Ma, Jamie Dimon and Evan Spiegel?
20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets
Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on the boards of Clumio and Sigma Computing. He previously served as a board member for Astronomer, Transposit, and others. He was an early-stage investor at Snowflake, Sigma, Observe, Lacework, and Clumio.
In Today's Discussion with Chad Peet's We Discuss:
1. You Need a CRO Pre-Product:
- Why does Chad believe that SaaS companies need a CRO pre-product?
- Should the founder not be the right person to create the sales playbook?
- What should the founder look for in their first CRO hire?
- Does any great CRO really want to go back to an early startup and do it again?
2. What Everyone Gets Wrong in Building Sales Teams:
- Why are most sales reps not performing?
- How long does it take for sales teams to ramp? How does this change with PLG and enterprise?
- What are the benchmarks of good vs great for average sales reps?
- How do founders and VCs most often hurt their sales teams and performance?
3. How to Build a Hiring Machine:
- What are the single biggest mistakes people make when hiring sales reps and teams?
- Are sales people money motivated? How to create comp plans that incentivise and align?
- Why does Chad believe that any sales rep that does not want to be in the office, is not putting their career and development first?
- Why is it harder than ever to recruit great sales leaders today?
4. Lessons from Scaling Sales at Snowflake:
- What are the single biggest lessons of what worked from scaling Snowflake's sales team?
- What did not work? What would he do differently with the team again?
- What did Snowflake teach Chad about success and culture and how they interplay together?
20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast
Aman Narang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Toast, one of the best-in-class vertical SaaS companies of our time with a market cap today of $13.5BN. Five astonishing stats that show the quality of the Toast business today:
- $1.2bn in ARR with 48.4% from payments.
- Toast Capital has reached $1bn in annualised loans originated.
- 875k restaurants in the US (Toast has 112k: 13% market share)
- 75% of locations are coming from inbound channels
- The first investor in the company invested $500K at a $3M price
In Today's Episode with Aman Narang We Discuss:
1. The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make:
- Why does Aman believe that founders should spend more time fundraising and with investors early?
- Why does Aman believe founders should hire managers before they think they need them?
- Why does Aman believe that founders do not give up control early enough?
2. Lessons Scaling to a $14BN Market Cap:
- What did Aman and Toast do so successfully that allowed them to scale to $14BN market cap in 12 years? What worked?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Toast made that hindered their growth most?
- What are the first things to break in hyperscaling companies?
- What opportunity did Aman and Toast not take that with the benefit of hindsight, he wishes they had taken?
3. Crucible Moment Decisions: Expansion:
- How did Aman and Toast know when was the right time to release a second product?
- What has enabled Toast Capital to scale to $1BN in loans so efficiently?
- How did Aman and Toast scale so successfully into both enterprise and SMB? What are the biggest lessons from doing so? What did not work?
- How do Aman and Toast approach geographic expansion? How do they choose which countries to expand into?
20VC: Chips, Models or Applications; Where is the Value in AI | Is Compute the Answer to All Model Performance Questions | Why Open AI Shelved AGI & Is There Any Value in Models with OpenAI Price Dumping with Aidan, Gomez, Co-Founder @ Cohere
Aidan Gomez is the Co-founder & CEO at Cohere, the leading AI platform for enterprise, having raised over $1BN from some of the best with their last round pricing the company at a whopping $5.5BN. Prior to Cohere, Aidan co-authored the paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced the groundbreaking Transformer architecture. He also collaborated with a number of AI luminaries, including Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean, during his time at Google Brain, where the team focused their efforts on large-scale machine learning.
In Today's Episode with Aidan Gomez We Discuss:
1. Compute vs Data: What is the Bottleneck:
- Does Aidan believe that more compute will result in an equal increase in performance?
- How much longer do we have before it becomes a case of diminishing returns?
- What does Aidan mean when he says "he has changed his mind massively on the role of data"? What did he believe? How has it changed?
2. The Value of the Model:
- Given the demand for chips, the consumer need for applications, how does Aidan think about the inherent value of models today? Will any value accrue at the model layer?
- How does Aidan analyze the price dumping that OpenAI are doing? Is it a race to the bottom on price?
- Why does Aidan believe that "there is no value in last year's model"?
- Given all of this, is it possible to be an independent model provider without being owned by an incumbent who has a cloud business that acts as a cash cow for the model business?
3. Enterprise AI: It is Changing So Fast:
- What are the biggest concerns for the world's largest enterprises on adopting AI?
- Are we still in the experimental budget phase for enterprises? What is causing them to move from experimental budget to core budget today?
- Are we going to see a mass transition back from Cloud to On Prem with the largest enterprises not willing to let independent companies train with their data in the cloud?
- What does AI not do today that will be a gamechanger for the enterprise in 3-5 years?
4. The Wider World: Remote Work, Downfall of Europe and Relationships:
- Given humans spending more and more time talking to models, how does Aidan reflect on the idea of his children spending more time with models than people? Does he want that world?
- Why does Aidan believe that Europe is challenged immensely? How does the UK differ to Europe?
- Why does Aidan believe that remote work is just not nearly as productive as in person?
20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund
Laela Sturdy is Managing Partner of CapitalG, Alphabet’s $7 billion independent growth fund, where she has invested in Stripe, Duolingo (DUOL), Gusto, UiPath (PATH), Webflow and Whatnot. Laela joined CapitalG shortly after its inception in 2013 and was promoted to Managing Partner in 2023, making her one of few women to be promoted into the sole leadership role within an established multibillion-dollar venture firm. Before joining CapitalG, Laela served as Managing Director of emerging businesses at Google and held leadership roles on the YouTube and Google Search teams.
In Today's Episode with Laela Sturdy We Discuss:
1. Lessons from 10 Years Investing:
- What does Laela know now that she wishes she had known when she entered VC?
- What is the biggest miss for Laela? How did it change her mindset and approach?
- What are Laela's biggest takeaways from Stripe and UiPath? How did they change what she looks for in companies today?
- What is Laela's biggest advice to all new entrants to venture today?
2. How to Build a $100BN Company: Market Timing, Sizing and Staging:
- What does Laela mean when she says she will never take a risk on a company being able to complete a "second act"?
- How does Laela approach market sizing? How does Laela think about the notion that the best companies will always expand their markets?
- Is Laela willing to take market timing risk? What have been her biggest lessons on timing?
- Does Laela prefer founders who are new to a market and have optimistic naivety? Or prefer an expert in a market who knows every element of it?
3. The Deal: Pricing, Sizing and Upside:
- How does Laela think about price today? When is she willing to pay up vs not?
- What price did Laela pay that at the time seemed super high but turned out to be super cheap?
- What price did Laela pay that seemed super cheap but turned out to be super high?
- What upside is Laela underwriting towards? What does she need to see in base and best case?
4. VC Value Add: Is it all BS:
- Does Laela believe that the best founders really need help from their VC?
- Who is the best board member Laela works with? Why are they so good?
- What are the core areas where the VC and the founder are misaligned?
- What would Laela most like to change about the relationship that founders and VCs have?
20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify
Kaz Nejatian is Shopify’s VP of Product & Chief Operating Officer. Before Shopify, Kaz founded Kash, a payment technology company which was acquired in 2017 by one of the largest fintech companies in the U.S. Kaz then served as Product Lead for Payments and Billing at Facebook, reducing the barriers for businesses in cash-dependent markets to purchase digital ads without a credit card.
In Today's Episode with Kaz Nejatian We Discuss:
1. Learnings From the Greats:
- Mark Zuckerberg: What are Kaz's biggest lessons from working with Zuck? Why does Kaz believe Zuck is massively under-appreciated?
- Keith Rabois: What are Kaz's biggest lessons from working with Keith? How did it change how he operates on a day to day basis?
- Tobi Lütke: What have been Kaz's biggest lessons from working with Tobi? What has he changed most significantly since working with Tobi?
2. Shopify: Why We Build Our Own Tools:
- Why does Kaz believe it is crucial for Shopify to build their own tools?
- When did he doubt this strategy most? What caused him to question it?
- Why does Kaz believe the Stripe Shopify partnership is the most important in business?
- What is the role of a PM at Shopify?
- Why do Shopify focus on how not what product is built?
3. Eight Truths The Startup World Gets Wrong:
- Why does Kaz believe "The Lean Startup" has done more damage than any other startup book?
- Why does Kaz believe that 90% of companies do not know what they want when they hire?
- Why does Kaz believe the way that companies pay their staff is totally wrong?
- Why does Kaz believe that most companies pick fights they do not need to pick?
- Why does Kaz believe that for 90% of companies remote work is a terrible idea?
- Why does Kaz believe that everyone in sales and marketing should be able to code?
- Why does Kaz believe that married people with kids are more, not less productive?
- Why does Kaz believe that we totally misunderstand divorce rates?
20VC: Sequoia's Shaun Maguire: Will We See WW3 Shortly | Why DEI is a Cancer for Society | Why Iran is the World's Greatest Evil | Why Trump is the Only Hope for Peace in the Middle East | Trump vs Harris: Who Wins & What Happens
Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. At Sequoia he led their investment into SpaceX, The Boring Co and X among many others. Before Sequoia he co-founded a cybersecurity company called Expanse which Palo Alto Networks acquired for $1B. Before Expanse, Shaun worked at DARPA and was deployed to Afghanistan.
In Today's Episode with Shaun Maguire We Discuss:
1. Why Iran is the Greatest Evil in the World:
- What specifically makes Iran the greatest danger to the world today?
- How should the US respond to the threat posed by Iran?
- Does the US have to go to war with Iran knowing that they now have nuclear weapons?
- How did the Biden-Harris administration worsen relations both with Iran and Saudi?
- Is Trump the best chance we have of bringing peace and stability to the Middle East?
2. Russia, Ukraine, Gaza and Israel: What is the Right Next Step:
- Does Shaun believe that the US should remove funding from Ukraine?
- How would Trump change the US' relationship with Putin?
- What does Shaun believe is the right next step for the US in Gaza and Israel?
- What does Shaun mean when he says the public have no idea how much crazy s**** happens?
3. Freedom of Speech and DEI: Remnants of the Past:
- Does Shaun believe we live in a society with freedom of speech? How does it differ between the US and Europe?
- Is Shaun negative on the future of Europe? Does he agree with Larry Summers that "it is a museum"?
- How does Shaun evaluate the state of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)?
- Why does Shaun believe that wokeness and cancel culture is one of the greatest dangers to society?
- When does Shaun believe that transgender becomes a problem in children? Where is the line?
4. The Election: Who Wins and What Happens:
- Does Shaun agree that Kamala is pulling ahead and Trump is now chasing her?
- How does Shaun analyse the chances of Trump winning?
- To what extent is it a real threat that there will be civil unrest if Trump does not win?
- Why does Shaun argue that too much blame is placed on Trump for Jan 6th and he did nothing that Hilary Clinton had not done in disputing prior elections?
- How does Shaun evaluate the appointment of JD Vance? Does Shaun agree with the echoes from the crowd for Trump to remove him?
5. Elon Musk, US Selling All BTC & Inside Sequoia:
- What does Shaun believe are the three qualities that make Elon Musk one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time?
- Why does Shaun believe that it is a massive mistake for the US to sell all BTC holdings?
- Who is the best picker in Sequoia? Who is the best at sourcing?
- Does Shaun get told off internally for his opinions being shared so freely externally?
- What have been Shaun's biggest lessons from working alongside Doug Leone?
20VC: Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on Will We See WW3 Shortly | Why DEI is a Cancer for Society | Why Iran is the World's Greatest Evil | Why Trump is the Only Hope for Peace in the Middle East | Trump vs Harris: Who Wins & What Happens
20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed
Dax Dasilva is the Founder & CEO Lightspeed Commerce, one of the most incredible stories in startups. For 7 years they did not raise outside funding and ran a very profitable business. Ultimately they partnered with Accel and Innovia before going public on the Canadian Stock Exchange with just $70M in ARR. Lightspeed also undertook 9 acquisitions over the course of a four year period to consolidate the global market. Today they have a whopping $900M in ARR but are only valued at $2.6BN. Today we ask the question, is Lightspeed one of the public market's most misunderstood companies?
In Today's Episode with Dax Dasilva We Discuss:
1. VC Funding is Distorting SaaS:
- Why did Dax decide not to raise money for Lightspeed in the early days?
- Does Dax believe Lightspeed would have been successful had they have raised a seed round like many do today in SaaS?
- Why does Dax believe venture funding is distorting a generation of SaaS companies today?
- How does Dax advise founders scaling their business today from $0-$1M in ARR?
2. What Went Wrong: The Founder Returns:
- Why did Dax feel he had to come back to the role of CEO in 2024? What was not working?
- What was the single biggest problem that the public markets had with Lightspeed?
- What were some of the biggest challenges that came with the intense amount of M&A?
- What would Dax most like to do that the public market will not allow?
3. What Makes a Great Leader: How it Changes:
- What required skills in leadership change with the changing scale of the company?
- What skill does Dax have that he is slightly ashamed of but has most contributed to his success?
- What did Dax not know when he founded Lightspeed that he wishes he had known?
- What question is Dax never asked that he should be asked more?
20VC: How a Angel City Makes $31M per Season | How Sports Teams Can and Should Be Better Businesses | Why Every Sports Team Will Look Like a Media Agency and Founding The Most Valuable Women's Sports Team with Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Ohanian is the Founder and General Partner of Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm with $970M AUM. Prior to 776, Alexis was the Co-Founder of Initialized, one of the most successful early-stage firms in history with their first fund returning 56x DPI. Before Initialized, Alexis was a Partner at the world-famous Y Combinator and before that was one of the Co-Founders of Reddit.
In Today's Discussion with Alexis Ohanian We Touch On:
1. $31M in Revenue: The P&L of a Sports Team:
- What are the core revenue drivers for Angel City Football Team?
- How did Alexis convince Tony @ Doordash to write the largest-ever brand sponsorship check to have the Doordash name on the Angel City shirt?
- How much money does Angel City make from ticket sales per year?
- What does the revenue from merchandise look like for Angel City? How has it changed with time?
2. How to Spend $31M Annually To Run a Team:
- What are the single biggest costs in running a sports team?
- Does Alexis believe that salary caps are good or bad for leagues?
- How much money is spent by clubs on content and software today? How should that change?
3. More Cash in Sports Than Ever:
- Prices for teams are at an all-time high. Are we in a bubble for sports assets?
- What remains under-priced and what is over-priced today?
- What are the pros and cons of private equity entering sports ownership in a meaningful way?
- Who is the worst sports team owner who despite his mismanagement, still made billions?
4. Alexis Ohanian: AMA:
- How did Alexis and Serena William's children become millionaires through sports team ownership?
- How did Alexis turn a $10,000 check into $17.1M?
- How did a $10,000 check into a shoe company make Alexis $7M?
- Why does Alexis believe that sports becomes even more valuable in a world of AI?
20VC: Sequoia's David Cahn on AI's $600BN Question | Why the Data Centre is the Most Important Asset | Servers, Steel and Power: The Core Pillars Powering the Future of AI
David Cahn is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the great venture firms of the last 5 decades. Before joining the Sequoia partnership, David led Coatue's venture business as a General Partner and COO where he led investments in Hugging Face, Runway and Supabase. David also joined the boards of Weights & Biases and Replit.
In Today's Episode with David Cahn We Discuss:
1. AI's $600BN Question:
- What is the $600BN question in AI today?
- Is it possible to believe "AI will change the world" and "Capex levels are too high" at the same time?
- Why do the cloud players have to act now? When does the Capex reduce for them?
- How does Meta not having a core cash cow in cloud change the way they can respond?
- Why is all the risk today being borne by the large incumbents? Why is that good for startups?
- How will we see Satya and Zuckerberg change their narrative towards their Capex spend to the public markets?
2. The Data Centre is the Most Important Asset:
- Why does David believe that data centre is the most important asset?
- What does he mean when he says "servers, steel and power" are the pillars of AI?
- What happens when the development of models outpaces the construction of data centres?
- Why does David believe no one will ever train a frontier model on the same data centre twice?
3. The Biggest Opportunities in AI:
- Why does David believe the biggest opportunity right now is in the build-out of data centres?
- What does the supply chain look like for the build-out of data centres? Who are the winners?
- Why does David believe the biggest opportunity in finance is in creating new debt instruments that will allow the largest incumbents in the world to move this data centre spend off balance sheet?
- Why does David believe that AI will drive more energy innovation than any policy has done?
4. The Secrets of Sequoia: Inside the Walls of the Greatest Firm in Venture:
- What does David and Sequoia believe is the one definition of success in venture?
- Who is the best at find companies in Sequoia? Who is the best at picking?
- Why does David believe conviction, not picking is the hardest part in venture?
- How do Sequoia want to shape and mould every investor in the firm?
20VC: Sequoia's David Cahn on AI's $600BN Question | Why the Data Centre is the Most Important Asset | Servers, Steel and Power: The Core Pillars Powering the Future of AI
20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari
Ben Fiechtner is Chief Revenue Officer at Clari, where he drives global go-to market & revenue operations. Ben previously served as SVP at UiPath, growing their key accounts and regulated industry verticals from $150m to $450m. Before UiPath, Ben was at Salesforce where he held multiple senior roles, achieving significant year-over-year growth and always on the bleeding edge of Vertical teams.
In Today's Episode with Ben Fiechtner We Discuss:
1. How to Close Deals Faster:
- What are the top 3 ways sales reps can increase urgency in a deal cycle?
- Should reps be discounting? If so, what level can be appropriate?
- What is the right way to ask prospects for their internal buy process? How do you know if you are dealing with a champion?
- What are the single biggest reasons that deals are delayed in closing?
2. SMB to Enterprise: How and When:
- When is the right time to move into the enterprise?
- What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when making the transition?
- How does Ben advise startups to do it but with minimal spend and investment?
3. Verticalisation: Why, When and How:
- Why is it important for founders to consider a verticalised sales strategy? What are the benefits?
- When is the right time to consider a verticalised approach?
- What is the right way to resource each sales team for a verticalised approach?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies make when verticalising sales teams?
4. How to Hire the Best Reps:
- What are the top signals that a candidate will make for an amazing sales rep?
- What question does Ben ask in every interview? What do the best answers have?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring sales reps?
- How fast do you know when a hire is a good hire or not?
20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick
Ethan Mollick is the Co-Director of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, which builds prototypes and conducts research to discover how AI can help humans thrive while mitigating risks. Ethan is also an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship, and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. His papers have been published in top journals and his book on AI, Co-Intelligence, is a New York Times bestseller.
In Today's Episode with Ethan Mollick We Discuss:
1. Models: Is More Compute the Answer:
- How has Ethan changed his mind on whether we have a lot of room to run in adding more compute to increase model performance?
- What will happen with models in the next 12 months that no one expects?
- Why will open models immediately be used by bad actors, what should happen as a result?
- Data, algorithms, compute, what is the biggest bottleneck and how will this change with time?
2. OpenAI: The Missed Opportunity, Product Roadmap and AGI:
- Why does Ethan believe that OpenAI is completely out of touch with creating products that consumers want to use?
- Which product did OpenAI shelve that will prove to be a massive mistake?
- How does Ethan analyse OpenAI's pursuit of AGI?
- Why did Ethan think Brad, COO @ OpenAI's heuristic of "startups should be threatened if they are not excited by a 100x improvement in model" is total BS?
3. VCs, Startups and AI Labs: What the World Does Not Understand:
- What do Big AI labs not understand about big companies?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies are making when implementing AI?
- Why are startups not being ambitious enough with AI today?
- What are the single biggest ways consumers can and should be using AI today?
20VC: Twitter's Most Controversial VC Delian Asparouhov on Inside the Walls of Founders Fund: What the World Does Not See | Why Western Europe Will Be Like the Third World | Why SaaS as an Industry Might Be Dead
Delian Asparouhov is a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder and President of Varda Space Industries, which is building the world's first space factories. At Founders Fund Delian has led deals in the likes of Ramp ($7BN) and Sword Health ($3BN) among others. Before joining Founders Fund, he was a Principal at Khosla Ventures, Head of Growth at Teespring, and Founder of a healthcare company called Nightingale.
In Today's Episode with Delian Asparouhov We Discuss:
1. Venture Capital: Winners, Losers and Everyone Else:
- Who are the Top 3 venture firms in the world today according to Delian?
- Why does Delian believe that Benchmark are not the firm they were?
- Who will be the winners in venture in the next 10 years?
- Who will be the losers in venture in the next 10 years?
2. Inside Founders Fund: What No One Sees:
- What are the most important and impactful elements of Founders Fund that no one knows about?
- What does Delian believe that the Founders Fund partnership will strongly disagree with him on?
- Why does Founders Fund believe the path of most resistance is the best way to make decisions?
- What single topic has Delian publicly disagreed with Peter Thiel on most? How did it go?
3. What Every Young VC Needs to Know:
- What are Delian's single biggest tips to young VCs looking to scale the VC ladder today?
- What are the five core pillars of venture according to Delian? What should young VCs focus on?
- Why does Delian disagree with Founders Fund partners that "the best founders do not need the help of their VCs?"
- Does Delian agree with Vinod Khosla that "90% of VCs do detract value?"
- What are the biggest ways that Delian believes VCs can and do detract value?
4. Europe Will Be Third World, Parenting and Marriage:
- Why does Delian believe that Western Europe will become like the third world?
- What are Delian's single biggest tips on finding a life partner?
- What have been the biggest changes to Delian since becoming a father?
- What question does no one ask Delian that someone should ask him?
20Growth: How Transferwise Acquired Their First 5M Customers: The Two Types of Content All Companies Must Create, How to Crush Competition With Performance Marketing, What Growth Hacks Worked and Did Not with Nilan Peiris, CPO @ Wise
Nilan Peiris is Chief Product Officer at Wise, where he leads on growth across channels including product and platform. Prior to Wise, Nilan was VP Growth at HouseTrip, in charge of scaling the company’s growth in the European market. He’s also worked as Chief Marketing Technology Officer at Holiday Extras, where he was responsible for all areas of technology, marketing and customer acquisition. Nilan also advises a number of early-stage startups on growth and getting to traction.
In Today's Episode With Nilan Peiris We Discuss:
- Lessons Scaling Transferwise to the First 1M Users:
- What growth tactics worked in scaling Wise to 1M users?
- What growth tactics did not work? What did they learn?
- What did Wise not do that Nilan wishes they had done?
- What single product change completely changed the trajectory of their growth?
2. How to Use Content to Crush Competition:
- What are the two different types of content that all companies must now make?
- What are the single biggest mistakes companies make with content today?
- What do you do when your competition can spend 7-8x more on marketing?
- Is SEO and SEM dead today or does it still play the same prominent role?
3. Wise's Framework on How to Win at Performance Marketing:
- What have been Nilan's single biggest lessons on how to win in performance marketing?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies make today in performance marketing?
- When is the right time to diversify and add new channels?
- What level of channel concentration would concern Nilan to see?
4. The Secret to Adding More Products:
- When is the right time to add a second product?
- How does Nilan define great product marketing today?
- How can one do amazing and targeted product marketing with several products aimed at different customers?
- What are the single biggest mistakes that companies make with brand marketing?
This Week in SaaS: Should Wiz Have Accepted Google's $23BN Acquisition Offer, Crowdstrike: WTF Happens From Here: The Bull and the Bear Case & $1BN into Legal Tech in a Day with Clio and Harvey with Jason Lemkin
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
In Our Second Episode of This Week in SaaS:
1. Wiz Rejects Google's $23BN Acquisition Offer:
- How does Jason analyse the price of the offer? $23BN for a $500M ARR business growing 120% YoY?
- What is the reasoning for Google in pursuing the acquisition?
- If Wiz had of proceeded in the process, what are the chances it would have made it through regulators?
- Why did Wiz walk away from the offer? If Jason were on the board, what would he have done?
- Is there a correlation between the downfall of Crowdstrike and Wiz turning down the offer?
- What does this mean for the M&A market moving forward?
- Will there be a secondary round now in place for Wiz at $23BN?
2. Crowdstrike: WTF Happens from Here:
- Did Crowdstrike manage the crisis in the right way? What would Jason have done differently?
- What is the bull case for Crowdstrike moving forward from this point?
- What are the bear case for the company? Could this snowball and be the end?
- What will this do to company requirements on having single point of failure solutions?
- Where will the market cap of Crowdstrike be at the end of 2024?
3. LegalTech: Show Me the Money: $1BN in a Single Day:
- Clio announced a $900M round at a $3BN valuation. How does Jason analyse this?
- What does Jason make of Harvey's $100M raise at a $1.5BN valuation?
- Why does Jason think 2025 will be the year for AI parity? Why will we see the majority of SaaS features be commoditised in 2025?
- What is the single biggest regret that Jason has in his investing career?
20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A*
Kevin Hartz is a Co-Founder and General Partner at A*, an early-stage venture capital firm. Prior to founding A*, Kevin co-founded Eventbrite, a publicly traded company, and served as the CEO for the first 11 years of the company. Before Eventbrite, Kevin co-founded Xoom, a money remittance company that was acquired by PayPal in 2015 for over $1BN. Kevin is also a prolific angel investor having backed companies such as PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest, Ramp, Trulia, and Anduril at the seed stage, and was an early investor in Uber, Palantir, SpaceX, Square, Gusto and many others.
In Today's Episode with Kevin Hartz We Discuss:
1. What Makes the Best Founders:
- What questions does Kevin always ask founders in the investment process?
- Does Kevin prefer serial or first time founders? Why?
- Does Kevin prefer founders who are new to a problem or who are insiders and experts?
- When Kevin has gotten a founder bet wrong, what did he not see that he should have seen?
2. The Exploding Term Sheet That Cost $10BN:
- How did an exploding term sheet for the seed round of Airbnb cost Kevin $10BN?
- What did Kevin see in the seed round of Airbnb that so few other investors saw?
- Does Kevin agree that the best businesses often start off as ridiculous or toys?
3. From World's Greatest Angel to VC with $600M AUM:
- Why does Kevin think a barbell strategy of Seed and Series C is best today?
- Does Kevin agree that the Series B and growth stage is dead today?
- Why does Kevin strongly disagree that seed is the hardest stage of the market?
- Why does Kevin think that venture is less collaborative than ever?
- How does Kevin approach when to sell vs when to hold a position?
- What are his biggest lessons from seeding and holding Opensea?
4. Learning From the World's Best Investors:
- What have been Kevin's lessons from his relationship with Peter Thiel?
- What have been Kevin's biggest takeaways from investing alongside Roelof Botha in many deals?
- What have been Kevin's biggest lessons from watching and observing the great Pierre Lamond?
20Product: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? The Top 5 Product Lessons in Scaling to 185M Monthly Active Users with Canva Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams
Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Canva where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. Since launching in 2013, Canva’s global community has grown to over 185 million monthly users in over 190 countries. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion, following a $200m funding round. This saw it become one of the most valuable private software companies in the world. Prior to joining Canva, Cameron found himself working closely with Lars and Jens Rasmussen (co-founders of Google Maps) to realise the design vision for Google Wave.
In Today's Episode with Cameron Adams:
1. From Accidental Joining to Most Valuable Private Company:
- How did Cameron go from working on Google wave with Lars Rasmussen to co-founding Canva with Mel and Cliff?
- What was the single closest near-death experience in the life of Canva?
- Why did Canva fail as a social network? What did Cameron learn from that?
2. How to Create Users that Truly Love Your Products:
- What have been Canva's biggest lessons on what it takes to do world class onboarding?
- What is Cameron biggest advice to founders on how to create moments of delight in your product?
- Is simplicity always best in product? What, when made more complex, is better for the user?
3. Scaling Canva into the Enterprise:
- What are the biggest product changes that are required to move into enterprise?
- What does Cam know about moving up market that he wishes he had known when he started?
- What are the biggest product and design mistakes founders make when making the transition from PLG to enterprise sales?
4. AI Changes Everything: More Money or Better Products Only
- Who will win the foundation model layer landscape? What will it be in 10 years?
- Will companies actually make more revenue from having AI in products or will it just create better products?
- How does Canva's implementation of AI in their products impact the margins of their products?
20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders
Pedro Franceschi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Brex, the AI-powered spend platform with tens of thousands of customers, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood and Roblox. Pedro has raised over $1.2BN for the company from the likes of Greenoaks, Ribbit, DST, Bond and YC. The latest reported valuation was $12.3BN. Before Brex, Pedro was the first person to “jailbreak” the iPhone 3G in Brazil and co-founded payments company Pagar.me with Dubugras when he was 15. In three years, Pedro scaled it to over 100 people and US$1.5 billion in transactions processed.
In Today's Episode with Pedro Franceschi We Discuss:
1. The Challenge is in Your Own Head:
- Why does Pedro believe all founders underestimate their own mental health?
- When was Pedro most anxious/depressed in the Brex journey? Why?
- What have been the single biggest needle movers for increasing his own mental health?
- How does Pedro advise other founders struggling with their own mental health?
2. From a 13-Year-Old Hacker in Brazil to Billionaire in LA:
- How did Pedro come to make $200K on the internet when he was just 12?
- Does Pedro agree that the best founders always started entrepreneurial pursuits young?
- How does Pedro reflect on his own relationship to money today? How has it changed?
- Pedro has famously taken large secondaries, how did that impact his mindset?
- How does Pedro advise other founders and VCs when it comes to secondaries?
3. The Importance of the Idea: What Everyone Misunderstands:
- What does Pedro mean when he says everyone does not appreciate enough how important the idea selection process is? How does he advise founders entering this process?
- Why does Pedro believe it is not that easy for founder to just pivot to a new idea?
- How did YC almost miss out on investing in Brex, now a $12BN company, due to the original idea?
4. Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins:
- How does Pedro feel when I say, "Ramp have gotten ahead on marketing and visibility"?
- Why does Pedro believe that "Ramp is a marketing company"? What does he mean when he says "great products will win over time"?
- Why does Pedro fundamentally disagree with Ramp's positioning of the best companies focus on saving and their giving away their software for free?
- How does this market play out over time? Winner take all or gains split across several?
20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock
Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock, where he has led investments in Abnormal Security (incubated at Greylock), Apiiro Security and Opal Security, as well as AI companies like Adept, Braintrst, Cresta, Predibase, Snorkel, and more. Before Greylock, Saam founded Guru Labs, a machine learning-driven fintech startup, and worked in product management at RelateIQ, one of the first applied AI software companies.
In Today's Conversation We Discuss:
1. Seed Today is Frothier than 2021:
- How does Saam evaluate the seed market today?
- With seed pricing being so high, how does he reflect on his own price sensitivity? When does he say too much and does not do it?
- Despite seed pricing being higher than ever before, why does Saam believe it is rational?
- How has the competition at seed changed in the last few years?
2. Series B and Growth are not a Viable Asset Class Today:
- Why does Saam believe that you cannot make money at Series B today?
- Why has pricing gone through the roof? Who is the new competition?
- When does it make sense to "play the game on the field" vs say this is BS and do something else?
- What would need to happen in the public markets for Series B to be a viable asset class again?
3. Markets vs Founders: The Billion Dollar Mistake and Lessons:
- How does Saam prioritise between founder vs market?
- What have been Saam's biggest lessons when it comes to market sizing and timing?
- What is Saam's biggest miss? How did it change his approach and company evaluation?
- Which other VC would Saam most like to swap portfolios with? Why them?
4. Saam Motamedi: AMA:
- What does Saam know now that he wishes he had known when he got into VC?
- Saam has had a meteoric rise in Greylock, what advice does Saam have for those younger investors look to really scale within a firm?
- Sourcing, selecting and servicing: Where is he best? Where is he worst?
- Why does Saam believe that most VCs do not add value?
20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot from $0-$100M in ARR, The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise, How to do Channel Partnerships Right and How to Construct Sales Comp Plans Early On with Mark Roberge
Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark was the founding CRO at HubSpot, where he scaled ARR from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. He was also awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year at the MIT Sales Conference.
In Today's Episode with Mark Roberge We Discuss:
1. Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot to $100M in ARR:
- What are Mark's biggest lessons in what worked in their sales strategy in scaling to $100M in ARR?
- What elements of Hubspot's sales strategy did not work? What would he have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?
- What does Mark know now that he wishes he had known when he started at Hubspot?
2. How the Best Startups Scale into Enterprise:
- What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise?
- When is the right time? What do founders get most wrong on timing of scale into enterprise?
- What do you need to have in place both from a team and product perspective to make the transition?
3. Second Product and Second Channel:
- When is the right time to launch the second product?
- Why does Mark believe that you should be turning down customers in the early days? Why is not every customer right for your company?
- How does Mark think about channel diversification? Does Mark agree you only need one channel to scale to $50M in ARR and two to scale to $100M in ARR?
4. 99% of SaaS Founders Do Partnerships Wrong:
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when doing channel partnerships?
- What can and should they do to set channel partnerships up for success?
- What do the channel partners need to have to be equipped to sell the partner solution?
- What level of buy-in and from who on the channel partner side is needed for the partnership to be successful?
- What did Mark learn from Hubspot's partnership with Salesforce scaling to 10% of Hubspot's revenue?
20VC: ServiceTitan Would Not Be the Success if We Raised VC Earlier: How to Build a Dominant Vertical SaaS Business, How to Master Going Into Enterprise, When & How to Launch Second Products with Ara Mahdessian, Co-Founder @ServiceTitan
Ara Mahdessian is the Co-Founder and CEO @ ServiceTitan, one of the great vertical SaaS business of the last decade. Today the company powers over 11,800 trade customers and has raised over $1.4BN from some of the best including Bessemer, Battery, Index, ICONIQ and more. Their latest valuation pegged the business at a reported $7.3BN.
In Today's Episode with Ara Mahdessian We Discuss:
1. We Did Not Want To Raise VC Money:
- Why did Ara not want to raise VC funding in the early days?
- What convinced Ara to change his mind? Why did he choose Byron and Bessemer?
- Does Ara believe that ServiceTitan would have been the success that it is, if it had raised in today's market, a $5M on $25M seed round? What would they have done differently?
2. How to Master Going Upmarket:
- What are Ara's biggest lessons on what it takes to go upmarket?
- How does the product need to change? How does the org of the company change?
- When is the right time to go upmarket?
- What did ServiceTitan get wrong in their move into enterprise? What did Ara learn from this?
3. How to Build a Brand in SaaS and Have Premium Pricing:
- What are some of Ara's biggest lessons in how to build the best brand in vertical SaaS?
- What works in brand building in SaaS? What does not? What would he do differently?
- What have been Ara's biggest lessons on pricing? ServiceTitan is 3x their competitors, how does Ara think about what is required to have such premium pricing?
4. How to Master the Second Product & Be the Best at Customer Success:
- When is the right time to do a second product? Why is it too late to wait for PMF with your first product to do the second product?
- What product did ServiceTitan wait too long to release? What did they learn?
- What product did they release too early? What did they learn?
- What are the two core reasons why customer success is the most important element in a business?
5. The Core Pillars of Great Leadership:
- Why do product builder founders have such an increased chance of success in startups?
- Why do you have to have expertise in the domain you are hiring for to hire the best?
- What does truly great leadership mean to Ara today? How has his style of leadership changed?
- What has Ara learned from soccer that he has applied to being a CEO?
20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady
Pat Grady is one of the most successful growth investors of the last decade. As the Head of Sequoia's growth investing practice, Pat has invested in companies with a combined market cap exceeding $250BN. Among Pat's immense portfolio is Hubspot, Snowflake, ServiceNow, Okta, Amplitude, Zoom and Qualtrics. Pat is also one of the best acquirers of talent in venture hiring Andrew Reed, Matt Huang, Julien Bek.
In Today's Episode with Pat Grady We Discuss:
1. The Sequoia Investment Process:
- What is the Sequoia investment process today? How has it changed over time?
- What could be improved about the process? Where is it weak?
- What is the biggest strength of the process?
- How do Sequoia remove politics from the investment decision-making process?
- Are the best deals "contrarian"? What does Pat mean when he says you do not "get extra points for being contrarian and right"?
2. What Sequoia Look for When Investing:
- What is Pat's framework for assessing founders? How does it differ when investing early vs late?
- Team, traction, TAM, how does Pat rank the three when investing?
- What have been Pat's biggest lessons on market sizing? Does Pat take market timing risk?
- How much weight does Pat place on "traction" when investing? How sustainable is PMF?
3. The Three Core Pillars of Venture:
- Sourcing: What does Pat rank Sequoia for sourcing? Who is the best at sourcing in the firm?
- Selecting: How does Pat rank Sequoia at picking? How has it changed over time? What could Sequoia do to improve their picking ability?
- Servicing: What does Pat give Sequoia for their "value add"? To what extent does Pat truly believe that venture investors do add value?
4. Pat Grady: AMA:
- Pat has hired some of the best in the next generation of venture investors; what are his biggest lessons in what he looks for when hiring investing talent?
- What is his single biggest takeaway from working with Alfred Lin, Roelof Botha and Doug Leone?
- What are his biggest takeaways from working with Hubspot, Snowflake and ServiceNow?
20VC: Turning a $15M Investment in Monday into $1.5BN in Cash | The Strategy Behind a 37x DPI $45M Fund | The Three Step Process to Selling Positions that has Netted Top Percentile Returns with Avi Eyal, Co-Founder @ Entrée Capital
Avi Eyal is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Entrée Capital, an early-stage VC fund with a portfolio including the likes of Monday.com, Stripe, Coupang, PillPack, and Snap. From their $15M investment into Monday, Entrée distributed a whopping $1.5BN, one of their $45M funds is a whopping 37x DPI. Avi is one of the greatest venture investors you might not have heard about.
In Today's Episode with Avi Eyal We Discuss:
1. The Biggest BS "Rules" in Venture Capital:
- Why does Avi believe that it is BS for every deal to need to be a homerun and return the fund?
- Why does Avi believe that signalling is real and it is BS to suggest otherwise?
- Why does Avi believe that it is BS that ownership is crucial to make mega venture returns?
- Why does Avi believe that you do not have to win every deal to be one of the best in venture?
- Why should venture investors not manage the positions of their companies when they go public? Why is it BS to think they have asymmetric information when the company goes public?
2. What Makes the Best Founders:
- Does Avi prefer first or second time entrepreneurs? Why?
- Would Avi rather back a founder that is an expert in a market or one that is new to a market and has the naivety to not know what is hard?
- Are the best CEOs the best fundraisers?
- How does Avi rank the following when investing; team, market, traction and technology?
- When Avi has misread a founder, what was it that he missed?
3. The Biggest Hits and Biggest Misses:
- Monday: How did Entrée build such a large position in Monday over time? How did a Series A lead dropping out leading to a $1.5BN gain for Entree?
- Stripe: Entrée has now 50% of his Stripe position. Why? What is the three step process for Avi in selling positions? How does he know when to and what is the right amount?
- PillPack: Entrée made $15M from PillPack's exit. What did that teach Avi about ownership?
- Cazoo: How was Entrée the only one to make money from Cazoo? How did Entrée's sell strategy help him make millions when everyone else did not sell?
20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF
Matt Clifford is the Co-Founder of Entrepreneur First (EF), the leading global talent investor and incubator. EF has incubated startups worth over $10bn, including Cleo, Tractable and Aztec Protocol. Matt is also Chair of ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and advises the UK government on AI and in 2023 served as the Prime Minister’s Representative for the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park.
In Today's Episode with Matt Clifford We Discuss:
1. The Most Important Questions in AI:
- Are we seeing diminishing returns where more compute does not lead to a significant increase in performance?
- What is required to reach a new S curve? What do we need to see in GPT 5?
- Why does Matt believe that search is one of the biggest opportunities in AI today?
2. The Biggest Opportunities in AI Today:
- How does Matt see the future for society with a world of autonomous agents?
- What is the single biggest opportunity around agents that no one has solved?
- Is society ready for agentic behaviours to replace the core of human labour?
- How does warfare change in a world of AI?
- Does AI favour states and good actors or criminals and bad actors more favourably when it comes to offence and defence?
3. China and the Race to Win the AI War:
- Does Matt believe that China are two years behind the US in terms of AI capability?
- What are Matt's biggest lessons from spending time with the CPP in China working on AI policy?
- In what way is the CCP more sophisticated in their thinking on AI than people think?
- What is the bull and the bear case for China in the race for AI?
- What is the core impact of US export controls on chips for China's ability to build in AI?
- Does a Trump vs a Biden election change the playing field with China?
4. What Makes Truly Great Founders:
- Does Matt agree that the best founders always start an entrepreneurial activity when they are young?
- What is more important the biggest strength of one of the founders or the combined skills of the founding team?
- What did EF believe about founders and founder chemistry that they no longer believe?
- Does Matt believe that everyone can be a founder? What are the two core traits required?
20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada
Samir Vasavada is the Co-Founder & CEO of Vise, a technology-powered asset manager. Samir and his co-founder, Runik founded Vise from the Midwest at 16 years old. They bootstrapped the company before dropping out of high school and raising $128M in just 6 months from some of the best including Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. The company achieved unicorn status when the pair turned 20 years old, making them the youngest founders of a $BN company at the time.
In Today's Episode with Samir Vasavada We Discuss:
1. The Biggest Hiring Mistakes That Broke Us:
- Why is hiring people who come with a playbook one of the most damaging things you can do?
- Why is it impossible to build a remote company that performs the same as in person?
- Why is it the worst thing to hire people who have a reputation they are obsessed with maintaining?
- Why do you never want to hire people who join because of who your investors are?
- Why does Samir regret not firing people faster? How much time is enough time to know?
- Why is hiring in a hot market one of the most dangerous things you can do?
2. Fundraising: 3 Rounds and $126M in 6 Months:
- Does Samir regret raising so much money so soon in the company life?
- What did Samir do that he regrets doing, having had so much money so early?
- How did the need for free food at an event lead to a term sheet and $50M from Sequoia?
- Did Samir feel that he could talk to investors when things were going really badly?
- Why does Samir believe that liquidation preference matters more than valuation?
3. The Depression, The Pressure and Wisdom From Jensen Huang:
- What did Jensen Huang teach Samir when it comes to wealth and leadership?
- How did Samir deal with the pressure of raising $126M in 6 months and being the youngest unicorn founder, ever at the time?
- Was Samir hurt when people he thought were his friends, no longer stuck with him when the company was no longer "hot"?
- What was Samir's darkest time? How did he overcome and get out of it?
- Does Samir blame his parents for the pressure they put on him from such a young age?
20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game
Andrew Bialecki is the Co-Founder and CEO of Klaviyo, the platform that powers smarter digital relationships for businesses and their data. To date, Klaviyo has raised over $778M from the likes of Accel, Summit Partners, Sands Capital, and Shopify, and raised an additional $700M after its IPO in September 2023.
In Today’s Episode with Andrew Bialecki We Discuss:
-
Founding a $6.23BN Machine in Klaviyo: The Aha Moment
-
What was the aha moment for Klaviyo?
-
How important does Andrew think it is for founders to stick with their initial vision vs when is the right time to pivot?
-
Does a great product sell itself? If you build it, will they come?
-
Bootstrapping Klaviyo: Would it Have Worked with More VC Cash Earlier?
-
Why did Andrew decide to bootstrap & not take VC money with Klaviyo?
-
Does Andrew think Klaviyo would have been successful if they raised a seed round? What would they have done differently?
-
Why does Andrew believe companies should take their time to find product-market fit? What are the most common mistakes founders make?
-
What is Andrew’s advice to founders on fundraising?
-
When did Andrew decide to raise a seed round when he did?
-
How to IPO in an IPO Winter: Advice & Lessons
-
Why did Andrew decide to take Klaviyo public in a bad public market?
-
How was the IPO roadshow process? What were Andrew’s lessons from it?
-
How has Andrew’s role as CEO changed after taking Klaviyo public?
-
Does Andrew think Klaviyo is undervalued today?
-
What is Andrew’s advice to founders on secondaries?
-
Behind the Shopify Partnership
-
How did Klaviyo’s partnership with Shopify happen? What were Andrew’s lessons working with Tobi Lütke & Harley Finklestein?
-
How does Andrew define a win-win partnership?
-
What does Andrew mean by “Partnerships are like a tug of war?”
-
What does Andrew think are the most common reasons partnerships go sideways?
20VC: Why Foundation Model Performance is Not Diminishing But Models Are Commoditising, Why Nvidia Will Enter the Model Space and Models Will Enter the Chip Space & The Right Business Model for AI Software with David Luan, Co-Founder @ Adept
David Luan is the CEO and Co-Founder at Adept, a company building AI agents for knowledge workers. To date, David has raised over $400M for the company from Greylock, Andrej Karpathy, Scott Belsky, Nvidia, ServiceNow and WorkDay. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at OpenAI, overseeing research on language, supercomputing, RL, safety, and policy and where his teams shipped GPT, CLIP, and DALL-E. He led Google's giant model efforts as a co-lead of Google Brain.
In Today's Episode with David Luan We Discuss:
1. The Biggest Lessons from OpenAI and Google Brain:
- What did OpenAI realise that no one else did that allowed them to steal the show with ChatGPT?
- Why did it take 6 years post the introduction of transformers for ChatGPT to be released?
- What are 1-2 of David's biggest lessons from his time leading teams at OpenAI and Google Brain?
2. Foundation Models: The Hard Truths:
- Why does David strongly disagree that the performance of foundation models is at a stage of diminishing returns?
- Why does David believe there will only be 5-7 foundation model providers? What will separate those who win vs those who do not?
- Does David believe we are seeing the commoditization of foundation models?
- How and when will we solve core problems of both reasoning and memory for foundation models?
3. Bunding vs Unbundling: Why Chips Are Coming for Models:
- Why does David believe that Jensen and Nvidia have to move into the model layer to sustain their competitive advantage?
- Why does David believe that the largest model providers have to make their own chips to make their business model sustainable?
- What does David believe is the future of the chip and infrastructure layer?
4. The Application Layer: Why Everyone Will Have an Agent:
- What is the difference between traditional RPA vs agents?
- Why is agents a 1,000x larger business than RPA?
- In a world where everyone has an agent, what does the future of work look like?
- Why does David disagree with the notion of "selling the work" and not the tool?
- What is the business model for the next generation of application layer AI companies?
20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut
Val Scholz is the former Head of Growth @ Revolut, where he led the company to their first 10M users. Post Revolut, Val played a crucial role in scaling several high-growth companies including VEED, Simple & Busuu (exited for $400M). Today, Val is the Head of Growth at Kittl, an intuitive design platform empowering graphic designers.
In Today’s Episode with Val Scholz We Discuss:
-
Lessons from Scaling Revolut to 10M Users
-
What were Val’s biggest takeaways during his time at Revolut?
-
What does Val consider the secret sauce behind Revolut’s success?
-
What did Val think Revolut understood about customers that no other bank did?
-
The Secrets to Revolut’s Growth Playbook
-
What was Val’s best growth decision? What was his worst?
-
Why does Val think most companies don’t do referrals well?
-
What made Revolut’s signup strategy so successful?
-
What are Val’s two ways to master content marketing?
-
Does Val think it’s good to diversify growth channels? When should founders diversify?
-
What are Val’s strategies to make Youtube influencers successful?
-
Product Marketing 101:
-
Why does Val think traditional marketing methods are outdated?
-
If traditional marketing methods are outdated, what should startups do instead?
-
What does Val think is the most dangerous myth around product-led growth?
-
What does Val believe are the most common mistakes founders make on optimizing products?
-
Growth Hires: Who, What, When & How
-
When does Val think is the best time to hire a head of growth?
-
What is the profile Val looks for in a growth hire? What traits does he look for?
-
What are the most common reasons founders fail at hiring?
-
What does Val think are the biggest red flags to look out for in a CV?
-
How does Val define good culture? Did Revolut have a good culture?
20VC: Foundation Models are the Fastest Depreciating Asset in History, Lina Kahn is a Threat to American Capitalism, PE is Not Coming to Save the M&A Market & How China Could Overtake the US in the AI Race with Michael Eisenberg
Michael Eisenberg is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Aleph, one of Israel's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Wix, Lemonade, Empathy, Honeybook and more. Before leading Aleph, Michael was a General Partner @ Benchmark.
In Today's Show with Michael Eisenberg We Discuss:
1. The State of AI Investing:
- Why does Michael believe that "foundation models are the fastest depreciating asset in history"?
- Are we in an AI bubble today? As an investor, what is the right way to approach this market?
- Who will be the biggest losers in this AI investing phase?
- Where will the biggest value accrual be? What lessons does Michael have from the dot com for this?
2. Where Is the Liquidity Coming From?
- Why does Michael believe that it is BS that private equity will come in and buy a load of software companies and be the primary exit destination?
- Why does Michael believe that IPO windows are always open? Should founders go out now? What is good enough revenue numbers to go out into the public markets?
- Why does Michael believe that Lina Kahn is a threat to capitalism? How does Michael predict the next 12-24 months for the M&A market?
3. AI as a Weapon: Who Wins: China or the US:
- Does Michael agree with the notion that China is 2 years behind the US in AI development?
- Does Michael agree that AI could be a more dangerous weapon in wars than nuclear weapons?
- Why does Michael suggest that for all founders in Europe, they should leave?
- US, China, Israel, Europe, how do they rank for innovating around data regulation for AI?
4. Venture 101: Reserves, Selling Positions and Fund Dying:
- Why does Michael only want to do reserves into his middle-performing companies?
- What framework does Michael use to determine whether he should sell a position?
- Which funds will be the first to die in this next wave of venture?
- Why does Michael not do sourcing anymore? Where is he weakest in venture?
- Why does Michael believe that no board meeting needs to be over 45 mins?
20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on Investing Lessons from Hits like Figma, Discord and Etsy to Missing Snapchat, Airbnb, Facebook & Spotify | Why Valuation is a Trap and Market Sizing, Signalling and Sector/Geo-Specific Funds are all Noise
Danny Rimer is a Partner @ Index Ventures and one of the most prominent VCs of the last two decades. Danny has led Index to be one of the top global firms on both sides of the Atlantic. Among Danny's incredible portfolio, he has led or been involved with Figma, Discord, Dream Games, Etsy, Glossier and Patreon.
In Today's Discussion with Danny Rimer We Cover:
1. The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook:
- How did Danny miss investing in Brian Chesky and Airbnb when Brian says "Index is the best investor that Airbnb never had"?
- What was Danny's biggest takeaway from turning down Daniel Ek and Spotify multiple times?
- Why did Danny turn down the chance to invest in Facebook at $10BN? What did he learn from this?
- Why did Index not lead Snapchat's Series B? How did that decision change Danny's mindset towards the concentration of positions in a fund?
2. The Biggest BS Rules in Venture: Market Sizing, Valuations and Signalling
- Why does Danny believe that "valuation is a mental trap"?
- Why does Danny believe that TAM is "noise" and should not be used to assess an investment?
- Why does Danny believe that stage, sector and geo-specific funds are BS?
- Why does Danny believe there are no IPO windows? Are IPO markets always open to the best?
- Why does Danny believe that signalling is BS and does not exist today?
3. Lessons from the Biggest Wins and Losses:
- What are Danny's biggest lessons from Index's $BN win in King (Candy Crush)?
- How did the Discord deal come to be? What are Danny's biggest takeaways from it?
- What are Danny's biggest reflections from losing 10s of millions on Nasty Gal?
- What is Danny's biggest advice to a new investor today?
4. Lessons from Two Decades Building Index into a Premier Firm:
- What specifically has Index done to enable them to do what no one else has done and win on both sides of the Atlantic?
- How did the Benchmark partnership shape much of how Danny has constructed Index today?
- Who does Danny view as Index's biggest competition? How has it changed with time?
- Why is Danny more bullish than ever on the UK despite Brexit?
20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density
Janie Lee is the Head of Product and the owner of the Self-Serve business at Loom. Janie previously worked at Rippling, leading the Identity Management and Hardware teams. Prior to that, she worked at Opendoor launching markets and developing pricing algorithms. During this time, Opendoor scaled from 2 to 20+ markets, $5B+ revenue, and 1500+ employees.
In Today's Episode with Janie Lee We Discuss:
1. Inside the Product Building Machine of Rippling and Opendoor:
- What are Janie's single biggest product lessons from Rippling? How do they build so much product so fast? Can you have breadth and high quality?
- What are Janie's biggest lessons from Opendoor on talent and pricing?
- What does Janie know now that she wishes she had known when she started her product career?
2. What Makes a Truly Great PM:
- What core skills do the best PMs have? What is the difference between good vs great?
- Writing: What are Janie's biggest pieces of advice to PMs who want to write better?
- Communicate: How do the best PMs and product leaders communicate with their teams?
- Question Asking: How do the best PMs ask questions of their team and other orgs?
3. How to Find and Pick the Best PMs:
- How does Janie structure the interview process when hiring new PMs?
- What questions should one ask in every interview with a PM?
- Does Janie do a case study? What is she looking to achieve from it? How do the best do?
- What are Janie's biggest mistakes in hiring PMs? How did she change from it?
4. Onboarding PMs and Crushing Product Reviews:
- What do the first 30 days look like for new PMs?
- What are the biggest signs that a new PM is not going to work out?
- How does the product review process work at Loom?
- How does Janie prioritise when there is so much volume and data?
- How has AI changed the way Loom builds products today?
20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's
Alex Wang is the Founder and CEO @ Scale.ai, the company that allows you to make the best models with the best data. To date, Alex has raised $1.6BN for the company with a last reported valuation of $14BN earlier this year. Scale tripled their ARR in 2023 and is expected to hit $1.4BN in ARR by the end of 2024. Their investors include Accel, Index, Thrive, Founders Fund, Meta and Nvidia to name a few.
In Today's Show with Alex Wang We Discuss:
1. Foundation Models: Diminishing Returns:
- What are the three core pillars that can meaningfully improve foundation models performance?
- Why is data the single largest bottleneck to the performance of models today?
- What data do we need to capture that we do not currently, that will have the biggest impact on model performance moving forward?
- Will we see the largest companies in the world revert back to on-prem with the increasing security challenges of migrating all customer data to foundation models?
2. AI: A Military Asset in Global Conflict: China + Russia
- Why does Alex believe that AI has the potential to be an even more powerful military asset than nuclear weapons?
- If this is the case, should we have open systems? Do we not have to have closed systems?
- Why does Alex believe that the CCP's approach to industrial policy is better than anyone else's?
- How does Alex evaluate the rise of Chinese EV car manufacturers in the last few years?
- Does Alex really believe that China is two years behind the US in the AI race?
3. "I Get Fairer Treatment in Congress than in the Press":
- Why does Alex believe that the best PR is no PR?
- Why does Alex believe that he got fairer treatment in congress than he does in the media?
- Why does Alex believe that all founders should look to own their own distribution channels today?
4. Alex Wang: AMA:
- What are some of Alex's biggest lessons from Patrick Collison on the impact that a hot company brand has on the ability for that company to hire the best?
- Does Alex think Trump is going to win? What would be the impact if he were to?
- Why does Alex believe that enterprise software will be changed forever in the next few years?
- What question is Alex never asked that he thinks he should be asked?
20VC: Reid Hoffman on Foundation Models: Who Wins & How Do Incumbents Respond | The Inflection AI Deal: How it Went Down | Why Trump is a Threat to Democracy | The Future of TikTok | Lessons from Sam Altman, Brian Chesky and the OpenAI Board
Reid Hoffman has been one of the most impactful people in technology over the last two decades. He is the Co-Founder of Linkedin (acq by Microsoft for $26BN) and Co-Founder of Inflection.ai. As an investor, Reid has backed the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, Zynga and more. Reid is also a Board Member @ Microsoft and was on the board of OpenAI.
In Today's Show with Reid Hoffman We Discuss:
1. Foundation Models: Commoditisation, Business Models, Incumbents:
- Does Reid believe we are seeing the commoditization of foundation models?
- Is it too late for new foundation models to be born today? Are they VC backable?
- How will foundation models eventually make money? What will be the sustainable business model?
- Does Reid believe that foundation models will be acquired by large cloud providers? Who goes first?
2. Inflection & Microsoft: What Went Down:
- How did the Microsoft and Inflection deal go down? Did Satya call up one day and make it happen?
- With the decay rate of models, Microsoft did not do it for the models, so why did they do it?
- Was Inflection a sustainable business in it's own right?
- Does this not prove that to win at this game, you have to be an incumbent with incumbent cash?
3. OpenAI: Board, Lessons and Management:
- What are 1-2 of Reid's biggest lessons from being on the OpenAI board with Sam?
- Why did Sam ask Reid in front of the whole company if Reid would fire him if he did not perform?
- Scarlett Johannsen, super alignment team quitting, NDAs tied to equity, this is a lot in a short amount of time, how does Reid analyse this?
4. Trump is the Biggest Threat to Democracy: What Lies Ahead?
- Why does Reid believe that Trump is a threat to democracy and evil?
- What were Reid's biggest takeaways from a two hour lunch with Joe Biden?
- How does a Trump administration change the world of AI, technology and startups?
5. The Future of TikTok:
- Is TikTok a threat to US democracy? Should it be banned?
- What will be the outcome of the current judicial process? Will they sell to a US entity?
- How could Trump impact the future of TikTok in the US?
6. Reid Hoffman: AMA:
- What are Peter Thiel's biggest strengths and weaknesses?
- I believe Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most unappreciated public market CEOs, what are the core components that Reid believes makes Mark so special?
- How did Reid miss out on investing in SpaceX's first round? What did he not see that he should have seen?
- What do we think is crazy today but will be a no brainer and very normal in 10 years?
20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team
Ashley Kelly is the VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling, the all-in-one platform for HR, IT, and finance. Before Rippling, Ashley played a crucial role in scaling Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR, and has hired over 800 SDRs during her time in some of the best tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Lever and Zenefits.
In Today’s Episode with Ashley Kelly We Discuss:
-
From NASCAR to Silicon Valley SDR
-
How did Ashley make her way into the world of sales?
-
Why does Ashley think the best AEs and leaders start off as SDRs?
-
What is Ashley’s advice to new SDRs starting their jobs today?
-
Age of AI: Is SDR Outbound Dead?
-
Does Ashley agree that outbound is dead today? Is SDR dead?
-
How will AI change SDR? Why is Ashley hesitant to adopt AI?
-
Why does Ashley think founders should always build the first sales playbook?
-
What did Ashley mean by SDR is the 3rd pillar between sales and marketing?
-
What does Ashley think most companies get wrong about outbound?
-
SDR Hiring: Who, What, When & How
-
When does Ashley think founders should hire their first SDR?
-
How does Ashley structure the hiring process? What questions does she ask?
-
What profile does Ashley look for when hiring for an SDR?
-
How does Ashley structure the finance package? How is it different for each team?
-
Why did Ashley avoid hiring SDRs with SDR experience? Why has she changed her mind?
-
What was Ashley’s biggest hiring mistake? What were her takeaways?
-
Onboarding New SDR Hires
-
How does Ashley onboard new SDR hires? What is her onboarding timeline?
-
How does Ashley set targets for new hires? When should they be fully productive?
-
When does Ashley know if a new hire isn’t working?
-
What are common traits among Ashley’s most successful hires?
20VC: Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas on Will Foundation Models Commoditise, Diminishing Returns in Model Performance, OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who Wins & Why the Next Breakthrough in Model Performance will be in Reasoning
Aravind Srinivas is the Co-Founder & CEO of Perplexity, the conversational "answer engine" that provides precise, user-focused answers to queries. Aravind co-founded the company in 2022 after working as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. To date, Perplexity has raised over $100 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Susan Wojciki.
In Today’s Episode with Aravind Srinivas We Discuss:
-
Biggest Lessons from DeepMind & OpenAI
-
What was the best career advice Sam Altman @ OpenAI gave Aravind?
-
What were Aravind’s biggest takeaways at DeepMind?
-
How did DeepMind shape how Aravind built Perplexity?
-
What did Aravind mean by “competition is for losers?” What did he learn about talent assembly at DeepMind?
-
The Next AI Breakthrough: Reasoning
-
Does Aravind think we are experiencing diminishing returns on compute & model performance?
-
Does Aravind agree reasoning will be the next big breakthrough for models?
-
What are the reasons Aravind thinks models suck at reasoning today?
-
What is the timeline for reasoning improvement according to Aravind?
-
What does Aravind think are the biggest misconceptions about AI today?
-
Will Foundation Models Commoditise?
-
Does Aravind think foundation models will commoditise? What will the end state of foundation models look like?
-
Why does Aravind think the second tier models will get commoditised?
-
Why does Aravind think the subscription model will not work for AI models with true reasoning?
-
Why does Aravind think the application layer companies will benefit from foundation models commoditising?
-
Why does Aravind think foundation models will not verticalize?
-
When does Aravind think is the right time to go enterprise? What is his strategy to differentiate Perplexity from its competitors?
-
AI Arms Race: Who Will Win?
-
Who does Aravind think will be the winners of foundation models?
-
What do AI companies need to do to win the model arms race?
-
How does Aravind think startups can compete against incumbents' infinite cash flow?
-
What are the reasons Aravind thinks Perplexity’s browsing is better than ChatGPT?
-
What is Aravind’s biggest challenge at Perplexity today?
This Week in SaaS: PluralSight Goes to Zero, Salesforce and Mongo Hit Hard, The Next IPO Candidates and How Do We Solve the Problem of Liquidity in Venture Capital
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
In Our First Ever Episode of This Week in SaaS
1. PluralSight Goes to Zero:
- WTF happened to PluralSight? How did it go from $3.5BN to $0?
- Will this have a wider impact on the willingness of PE to buy tech companies?
- Who are the next contenders to go from hero to zero? Zendesk? Anaplan?
- Will this generation of PE funds be let off by their LPs for a poor vintage?
2. Salesforce's Worst Stock Market Drop Since 2004 + Mongo Takes a 23% Hit:
- Why did Salesforce lose $50BN of market cap in a single day?
- Is the same true for MongoDB taking a 23% hit in one day?
- What does it mean when the new normal is these once hyper-growth companies now growing only 6% per annum?
3. The Settlers into Slow Growth:
- Why does Jason believe that Dropbox and Box have both settled into a world of slow growth?
- What happens to Twilio from here in a world post Jeff Lawson?
- What happens to Retool from this point on?
- Would Jason be a buyer of Notion at $10BN?
4. Venture Capital is Broken:
- Why does Jason believe that we need to see a relation of public multiples for the math in venture capital to work again?
- Why does Jason believe that the way we mark portfolios with TVPI leads to corrupt and bad behaviour?
- How does Jason think we will solve the problem of liquidity with IPOs being shut, M&A being out of the window and now PE being a doubt as the source of buyers?
20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner
Matt Lerner is one of the OGs of growth having spent 11 years leading growth teams at PayPal. Post PayPal, Matt led the growth marketing program at 500 Startups. He is also the bestselling author of Growth Levers and How to Find Them. Today, Matt is the Co-Founder and CEO of SYSTM, an accelerator program helping startups find their growth drivers.
In Today’s Episode with Matt Lerner We Discuss:
-
From Philosophy Student to PayPal Growth Leader:
-
How did Matt make his way into the world of growth?
-
What were Matt’s biggest lessons from 11 years at PayPal?
-
What did Matt know now that he wished he’d known when he entered the world of growth?
-
How to Master Growth in a World of AI:
-
What is growth to Matt? What is it not?
-
Why does Matt think growth is more science than art?
-
Does Matt Agee with Adam Gross @ Vimeo that paid acquisition below $100M ARR isn’t PLG?
-
How does Matt think AI will change the world of growth today?
-
What does Matt think are the most common growth mistakes founders make?
-
Optimizing Growth Channels: Dos & Don’ts
-
Why does Matt believe there are only six types of growth channels?
-
What is the “locksmith moment" & how do startups find channels that work for them?
-
How does Matt pick a Northstar metric?
-
What are the most common mistakes founders make when picking North Star metrics? When is the right time to change them?
-
How does Matt approach horizontal product messaging? What works? What doesn’t work?
-
How to Hire & Manage Growth Teams
-
What does Matt look for in the first head of growth hire?
-
What questions does Matt ask when interviewing?
-
What were Matt’s biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn?
-
Why does Matt think the best growth hires have no marketing experience?
-
What are Matt’s two steps to master onboarding?
-
What are the 3 most common patterns in leaders according to Matt?
20VC: Former Meta CTO, Schrep on Why Climate is a $10TRN Problem, Operating Lessons Scaling Products to Billions at Meta and Why the Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors
Mike Schroepfer (Schrep) is the Founder & Partner @ Gigascale Capital, a new kind of climate-focused investment firm. Prior to Gigascale, Mike was the CTO @ Meta where he scaled products to billions of users, shipped millions of units of consumer hardware, constructed tens of millions of sq ft of data centres, built teams of up to 35,000, and made breakthroughs in AI. Before Meta, Mike led engineering at Mozilla and founded a company acquired by Sun Microsystems.
In Today's Show with Mike Schroepfer We Discuss:
1. Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg and Meta:
- What are Schrep's biggest lessons from Zuck on truly effective leaders?
- Why does Schrep believe the best leaders are like music conductors?
- What does Schrep mean when he says, "building a company is a game of inches"?
- Why does Schrep believe "inertia is one of the most underappreciated forces in company building?"
2. The Future of Energy:
- Why does Schrep believe that the "availability of cheap, clean energy is the biggest rate limiter to human progress?"
- Does Schrep agree with Sam Altman that energy will be the currency of the next decade? Or does he believe Mustafa Suleyman is right and it will soon be free and abundant?
- How does Schrep predict the next five years for both fusion and nuclear?
- Why does Schrep believe the next few years will be "messy but with huge opportunity"?
3. Investing in Climate: It has to be Profitable:
- Why does Schrep believe that markets and not governments or philanthropy will solve the climate challenges we face?
- What leads Schrep to suggest that the climate change transition is a $10TRN opportunity for investors?
- What is the single hardest element of investing in climate change solutions today?
- Why do climate change solutions need to reshape how they market to consumers?
- How much capital does it take to build a defensible moat in climate?
4. Schrep: The Man Behind Whatsapp and Instagram: AMA:
- How does Schrep reflect on his own relationship to money? How has it changed?
- How does Schrep think about what it takes to be a great father?
- How did Schrep manage the physical stress and pressure of managing engineering for products that serve billions of people in WhatsApp and Instagram?
20VC: Why Seed is Systemically Broken | Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | Benchmarks for Churn, Retention and Growth Rates - Good vs Great | Why Last Vintage for Private Equity Will Suck with Jason Lemkin
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com.
In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin We Discuss:
1. Growth Rates and Churn Rates: Average/Good/Great:
- What is a growth rate that would excite Jason in a SaaS company? What is average?
- What levels of churn would worry Jason to see? What would excite him to see?
- What does Jason never tolerate when it comes to either growth rate or retention?
2. What Founder Combination Always Wins:
- Why does Jason believe you cannot lose money on a CEO salesperson and a technical CTO founding partnership?
- Why does Jason always meet the CTO for a second meeting in the diligence process? What questions does he ask? What do the best CTOs do or say?
- Why does Jason always want to sell his shares when the founders want to sell?
- Why does Jason believe that a company is never the same when the founders leave?
3. WTF is Happening in the World of VC:
- Why does Jason believe that pricing is worse than it has ever been in venture?
- Why does Jason believe that traditional seed VC is systemically broken?
- Why are companies getting stuffed with more cash than ever before?
- What does Jason know now about dilution that he wishes he had known when he started?
- Why does Jason believe that you should always recycle everything?
4. WTF is Happening in PE and Later Stage Markets:
- What happens to all the overpriced acquisitions like Zendesk and Salesloft where private equity way overpaid for them, they have no growth and no product innovation?
- What happens to the generation of public companies like Box, Dropbox and Twilio, all with low growth and little product innovation in the single-digit market caps?
- Why does Jason believe that Klaviyo is the most undervalued public company today?
- What does Jason believe will happen to Anaplan with Pigment eating their lunch?
20VC: OpenAI's Sam Altman, Mistral's Arthur Mensch and more discuss: Will Foundation Models Be Commoditised | Which Startups Are Threatened vs Enabled by OpenAI | Is the Value in the Infrastructure or Application Layer?
Sam Altman is the CEO @ OpenAI, the company on a mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is one of the fastest-scaling companies in history with a valuation of $90BN and $2BN+ in revenue.
Brad Lightcap is the COO @ OpenAI and the man responsible for the incredible scaling of sales, GTM, partnerships and business to today being over $2BN in revenue.
Arthur Mensch is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mistral AI. Since its inception in May 2023, Mistral has raised over $520M in funding from investors like Andreeseen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Microsoft with a current valuation of $2 billion.
Des Traynor is a Co-Founder of Intercom, and has built and led many teams within the company, including Product, Marketing, and Customer Support. Today Des leads all of Intercom’s R&D efforts, and parts of Intercom’s marketing.
Tom Hulme is a Managing Partner of GV (Google Ventures), and leads the European team. Today, GV has over $10BN in AUM and Tom has led investments in Lemonade.com (IPO), Snyk, Secret Escapes, Blockchain.com, GoCardless, and Currency Cloud (exited to Visa).
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, just announced last week, Theory is a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in early-stage companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
Sarah Tavel is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful and renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Sarah has led rounds in Chainalysis, Hipcamp, Medely, Rekki, Glide, Cambly and more.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
- Will foundation models be commoditised?
- What is the end state for the foundation model landscape in 10 years?
- How will large cloud provider incumbents approach M&A with smaller foundation model providers?
- When will we see marginal revenue exceed marginal cost in the foundation model business model?
- Where is the value: the application layer or the infrastructure layer?
- How can startups know whether they will be threatened by OpenAI?
- What are good tests/questions to know if you are in the path of one of the large foundation models?
- How does the business model of SaaS fundamentally change in a world of AI?
- Will we see the end of per-seat pricing in a new world of AI?
- What is the right way to approach pricing in a world of AI? Consumption? Tokens?
20VC: Box's Aaron Levie on Predictions for the Next Wave of AI: Will Foundation Models Be Commoditised | How the Business Model of SaaS Changes Forever | Startups vs Incumbents: Who Wins | App vs Infrastructure Layer: Where is the Value?
Aaron Levie is one of the OG founders of the last two decades as the Co-Founder and CEO of Box. Today, Box does over $1BN in revenue with a market cap of $3.85BN, and has raised over $560 million from the likes of DFJ, Andreesen Horowitz, and Coatue.
In Today’s Episode with Aaron Levie We Discuss:
-
What You Need to Know Entering This AI Wave:
-
Why does Aaron think we are currently in a transformative window in AI?
-
What does Aaron think it takes to be successful in this next wave?
-
Which areas does Aaron think founders should be focusing on today? Where should they not?
-
AI Adoption: Business Model, Implementation, Regulation.
-
How does Aaron think AI will change how we work & run a business?
-
What does Aaron think is the single biggest obstacle to AI adoption in large organizations?
-
Does Aaron agree with Sarah Tavel @ Benchmark AI companies will be selling work not tools?
-
How does Aaron think AI will change the SaaS business model?
-
Why is Aaron not as worried about AI regulation? What are his biggest concerns today?
-
The Next AI Breakthrough: AI Agents
-
Why does Aaron believe the next big breakthrough in AI will be agents?
-
How does Aaron think AI agents will change org structures?
-
How does Aaron think agents will differ from RPA? How will RPA companies benefit from AI?
-
What does Aaron think AI agents will look like in five years?
-
Startups vs Incumbents: Who Wins?
-
What is Aaron’s advice to startups today building against OpenAI?
-
Does Aaron think startups have more advantage in foundational models or the application layer?
-
What advantages do incumbents have? What are their biggest weaknesses?
-
Who does Aaron think are the biggest winners in AI today? Who is underperforming?
-
Why does Aaron think Apple isn’t losing the AI race?
20VC: Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora on How to Create and Sustain Competitive Advantage and Defensibility | What Makes Masa Son a Genius Investor of Our Time | How the Best Leaders Communicate and Delegate
Nikesh Arora is the CEO @ Palo Alto Networks, the leading cybersecurity company in the world with a market cap of $102BN. Before joining Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh was the President and COO of SoftBank Group. Before that, he spent ten years at Google as a senior exec, and President of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Before that Nikesh was CMO for the T-Mobile International Division of Deutsche Telekom AG. Nikesh serves on the board of Compagnie Financière Richemont S.A. Previously, he served on the boards of SoftBank, Sprint, Colgate-Palmolive Inc., Yahoo! Japan and Tipping Point.
In Today's Episode with Nikesh Arora We Discuss:
1. From Investing with Masa @ Softbank to CEO of Largest Cyber Company:
- What are Nikesh's biggest lessons from working and investing with Masa @ Softbank?
- What are Nikesh's biggest takeaways from 10 years at Google and working with Eric Schmidt?
- What does Nikesh know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?
2. What Makes the Most Valuable Businesses in the World:
- How does Nikesh think about competition and monopolies?
- How does Nikesh assess the idea of defensibility, moats and sustaining competitive advantages?
- What are the most common reasons why incumbents are overtaken?
- How have Palo Alto Networks been so successful in their M&A strategy?
- What has worked in M&A? What has not worked? What is their process?
3. What Makes the Best Leaders in the World:
- Does Nikesh agree that the best CEOs are the best resource allocators?
- How do the best leaders communicate with large teams at scale?
- How do the best leaders approach decision-making? What is Nikesh's framework?
- How does Nikesh approach the idea of delegation? What does he delegate vs what does he not?
4. Behind the CEO: Nikesh Arora: Husband and Father:
- How does Nikesh reflect on his own relationship to money today?
- What are Nikesh's biggest lessons in what it takes to bring children up in a world of affluence and ensure they have hunger and ambition?
- What are some of Nikesh's biggest lessons on parenting?
- How does Nikesh reflect on what it takes to have a great marriage?
20Product: How Linktree, Webflow and Airbnb Used Rituals and Product Principals to Guide Product Roadmap, Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard and How to Use it & How to Run the Best "Product Jams" with JZ, CPO @ Linktree
Jiaona “JZ” Zhang is the Chief Product Officer at Linktree, the world’s leading link-in-bio platform empowering 45M+ creators, brands and SMBs. JZ joined Linktree from Webflow, where she served as SVP of Product. Before that, she spent four years at Airbnb where she built and led numerous teams on the host side. JZ’s also held leadership roles at the likes of Wework, Dropbox and teaches at Stanford University and Reforge.
In Today’s Episode with Jiaona Zhang We Discuss:
-
Entry into the World of Product
-
How did JZ first fall in love with product?
-
Why does JZ believe the best PMs have experience in the gaming industry?
-
Does JZ think Linktree could be a $100BN business? How could Linktree become a $100BN business?
-
Mastering Product Metrics
-
Why does JZ think product is the most chameleon role? Where does product start & end?
-
Why does JZ think every function should have tension with product?
-
What is a KPI tree? How does JZ branch business & product metrics?
-
When does JZ think startups should set up a metric infrastructure?
-
What are the three levers of product? How does JZ determine which ones to trade off?
-
How to Run Product: Planning, Strategy, & Rituals
-
Why does JZ think planning should not exist?
-
What are strategy and rituals? When should founders do either?
-
What are JZ’s three core rituals?
-
What is the scorecard method? How do they help team transparency?
-
What are product jams? When does it work? When does it not work?
-
Product Career Advice
-
When does JZ think founders hire a product person?
-
What are the most common mistakes early stage founders make when hiring for product?
-
Does JZ think domain expertise is important? What does she look for in product hires?
-
What is JZ’s advice to PMs who want to get promoted today?
-
What is JZ’s advice to young people who want to get into product?
20VC: Fundraising Wisdom that is Total BS; Dilution, Meeting Associates, Taking the Highest Price, Always Be Raising | Why Second Time Founders Are More Investable & Why Not To Hire People Out of College with Dan Siroker, CEO @ Limitless
Dan Siroker is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Limitless, a personalized AI powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard. For his latest funding round, Dan took an unusual approach resulting in 1,000 preliminary offers with valuations as high as $1BN — and resulted in a $350 million Series A valuation. Prior to founding Limitless, Dan was the Founder of Optimizely, scaling the company to $120M in ARR and raising from some of the best in the business including Peter Fenton @ Benchmark who led the Series A.
In Today's Episode with Dan Siroker We Discuss:
1. Serial Entrepreneurs are More Investable:
- Why would Dan always prefer to invest in serial entrepreneurs than first time founders?
- How do serial entrepreneurs approach team building and size of team differently?
- How do serial entrepreneurs approach focus and prioritisation differently?
- How do serial entrepreneurs approach pivoting differently to first time founders?
- What is Dan's advice from Elad Gil and YC's Dalton Caldwell on when to pivot?
2. The Secret to Fundraising: How to Speak VC
- Should founders always be raising?
- What is the right thing to respond to investors when they reach out to you outside of a round?
- What question are investors really asking when they ask, how much are you raising?
- How should founders approach valuation, what should they say when they are asked for it?
- How can founders create urgency in a funding round? What works? What does not?
3. How to Raise the Best Funding Round:
- Should founders engage with associates or only worth it with decision-makers?
- Why should founders always choose the investor who is on the early arc of their career?
- Why was Dan's first meeting with Peter Fenton the best meeting he has ever had with a VC?
- Why does Dan believe that taking the highest price is never the right answer?
- To what extent does having a true Tier 1 VC lead your round, change the game for your company?
4. Dan Siroker: AMA:
- How did becoming a father change the way that Dan operates?
- Why is Dan scared we might see technological progress stall for the next 20 years?
- Why did Dan not do YC the second time around with Limitless?
- What is the story of how Optimizely nearly bought Amplitude?
20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield
Tom Blomfield is a Group Partner at YC. Before YC, Tom founded two unicorns in the UK. He was co-founder of Monzo (most recently valued at $5BN), one of the first challenger banks in the UK. Monzo raised more than £1bn and counts 15% of the UK population as customers. Before Monzo, Tom founded GoCardless (YC S11), an online payments processor, most recently valued at $2.1BN.
In Today's Episode with Tom Blomfield We Discuss:
1. From Founding Two Unicorns to YC Partner:
- Does Tom believe that all great founders show signs of exceptionalism early?
- What does Tom know now that he wishes he had known when he started his first company?
- Why did Tom decide now was the right time to switch from founder to investor with YC?
2. The YC Application Process: How it Works:
- How do the YC partners select which companies are accepted vs rejected?
- What specifically does Tom look for in the problem the company is looking to solve?
- In the interview, what are the signals of the highest quality founders?
- What questions does Tom always want to ask in YC interviews with founders?
3. The YC Batch: How it Works:
- How do the YC partners work with the 25 companies in their batch? What is the interaction?
- What are the single biggest mistakes companies make while in YC?
- What are the biggest pieces of advice YC gives founders on fundraising approaching demo day?
- How do the best YC founders fundraise and use demo day? How do the most nervous fundraise?
- How are YC partners measured in terms of their success and effectiveness?
4. AI: Consumer vs Enterprise/ Infrastructure vs Application Layer:
- Does Tom believe there is money to be made investing in infrastructure layer models today?
- Why is the commoditization of foundation models the best outcome for society?
- Why is Tom most excited about the application layer for the next wave of AI?
- What are the most exciting opportunities in consumer AI that are wide open today?
20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield
20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys
Larry Shurtz is the Chief Sales Officer at Genesys where he oversees the company’s global go-to-market strategies, including commercial activities, field sales and partner ecosystem operations. Larry has nearly three decades of experience in the software industry, from leading Confluent to delivering more than 60% revenue growth and doubling customer count as Chief Revenue Officer, to scaling a 1,300-person team at Salesforce to $2.1 billion in revenue.
In Today’s Episode with Larry Shurtz We Discuss:
-
From Robotics Student to $2.1BN Sales Leader at Salesforce
-
How did Larry lead 1300 people to $2.1 billion revenue at Salesforce? What were his takeaways?
-
What did Larry learn about building vertical sales playbooks at Salesforce?
-
Which framework did Larry learn at Salesforce that he still uses at Genesys?
-
Mastering Sales Leadership
-
What are the biggest mistakes sales leaders make on prioritization today?
-
What are Larry’s “3 Rs” to master prioritization?
-
What does Larry think are the most common reasons fast-scaling teams break in sales?
-
Has Larry ever caused bad culture in a sales team? What did he learn from the experience?
-
Does Larry think sales is more art or science? How does Larry blend the two?
-
Building the Best Sales Team
-
How does Larry structure the hiring process for a new sales hire?
-
How big should your recruitment team be?
-
What are Larry’s most commonly asked questions when interviewing?
-
What were Larry’s biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn from them?
-
How does Larry structure the comp? How does he get it right? What do most new hires care about today?
-
The Onboarding: The Dos & Don’ts
-
How does Larry structure the onboarding process?
-
Why does Larry onboard new hires with big customers? What is the buddy system?
-
How does Larry tell if a new hire is bad? What are the biggest red flags to look out for?
-
What does Larry mean when he says “You can make all the physical errors, you cannot make mental errors?”
-
Does Larry agree with Max Levchin @ Affirm that “When there’s doubt, there’s no doubt?”
20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber
Tom Hulme is a Managing Partner of GV (Google Ventures), and leads the European team. Today, GV has over $10BN in AUM and Tom has led investments in Lemonade.com (IPO), Snyk, Secret Escapes, Blockchain.com, GoCardless, Blue Vision Labs (exited to Lyft), and Currency Cloud (exited to Visa). Prior to joining venture full-time, Tom was one of Europe's most successful angel investors with a 5x DPI track record and 20x+ TVPI.
In Today's Episode with Tom Hulme We Discuss:
1. Lessons from a 24x TVPI Angel Track Record:
- What are Tom's biggest lessons from his biggest winners angel investing?
- What are Tom's biggest takeaways from the 0's in his angel track record?
- What is the biggest advice Tom would give to angel investors starting out today?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Tom sees angel investors make today?
2. The Four Pillars of Venture Capital:
- What does Tom believe are the four key components of being successful as a VC?
- Why does Tom describe VC as "being a founder on anti-depressants"?
- How does Tom categorise the three different types of investors that exist?
- Sourcing, selecting, servicing: What is Tom best at and what is he worst at?
3. The Conventional Wisdom in Venture That is Not True:
- Why does Tom believe it is BS that you should never sell your winners?
- Why does Tom believe he has never had complete conviction in any of the companies he invests in?
- Why does Tom believe the "everything has to be a fund returner mindset" is BS?
- Why naivety doesn't lead to great founders? Why employees at rocketships are the best founders?
4. AI: Foundation Models, Generative AI, The Incumbents: Where Does the Value Go:
- Does Tom believe there is money to be made investing in foundation models?
- Why does Tom liken investing in foundation models to investing in power stations?
- Where does Tom believe there is value in the application layer?
- Why does Tom think that generative AI is largely a sustaining innovation?
- Why does Tom think Microsoft will win the next wave of AI? Who else is well-positioned?
- Why does Tom believe there is a correlation between those that fear monger around AGI and those that need funding for their businesses?
20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Are Foundation Models Commoditising | Why Frontier Models Will Be Closed Source | Why the Value is in the Application Layer | The Future of AI is "Selling the Work" Not the Tools
Sarah Tavel is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful and renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Sarah has led rounds in Chainalysis, Hipcamp, Medely, Rekki, Glide, Cambly and more. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners. Before Greylock, Sarah was the first 30 employees at Pinterest. Sarah joined Pinterest in 2012 after co-leading the Series A investment while at Bessemer Venture Partners.
In Today's Episode with Sarah Tavel We Discuss:
1. Becoming a GP at The Most Renowned Firm in Venture:
- How did the process of Sarah joining Benchmark start? How did it progress? What was it that convinced her to leave Greylock and join Benchmark?
- What does Sarah believe makes Peter Fenton the world-class investor that he is?
- What does Sarah know now that she wishes she had known when she started in venture?
2. Foundation Models: Is it All Going to Zero:
- Will foundation models be commoditised?
- Will 99% of the funding going to foundation models go to 0?
- How does Sarah view the future of open vs closed source?
- Why does Sarah believe that all frontier models of the future will be closed-source?
- Why does the business model of foundation models remind Sarah of the food delivery business?
3. Application Layer: Where $BN Companies Will Be Built:
- Why does Sarah believe that sustainable value-creating companies will be in the application layer?
- How does Sarah determine between a wrapper on top of ChatGPT and true product value?
- Are enterprises opening real budgets for AI today or are we still in experimental budgets?
- How does Sarah think about how AI companies differentiate when there are so many in the same space of customer service, sales team support etc etc?
- Why does Sarah believe that it is rational to pay more for these companies when investing in them?
- What does Sarah mean when she says the future is "selling the work and not the tools"?
4. Inside Benchmark: How the Best Do Venture:
- What is the one rule that Benchmark is willing to break when doing a deal?
- Why do Benchmark aim to be the best recruitment firm in the world?
- Why do Benchmark not agree with the concept of reserves?
- In a case where Benchmark have lost, why did they lose? How did they change their approach?
20VC: The Memo: Keith Rabois and Ramp's Eric Glyman on Behind The Scenes at The Best Run Private Company on the Planet; The Tools, Tips, Secrets and Process That Drive Efficiency
Eric Glyman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ramp, America's fastest growing corporate card and finance automation platform. Under Eric’s leadership, Ramp has raised more than $1 billion in financing, with a valuation of $8.1 billion. Prior to Ramp, Eric co-founded Paribus, a price-tracking app to help consumers save money (acquired by Capital One). Ramp recently raised another $150 million series D round co-led by Founders Fund and Khosla ventures, with a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion.
Keith Rabois is a Managing Director @ Khosla Ventures and one of the most respected venture investors of the last decade. Keith has led investments in Stripe, Faire, Ramp, Affirm and many more. Prior to Khosla Ventures, Keith was General Partner at Founders Fund, where he led investments for Ramp, Trade Republic, and Aven.
In Today’s Episode with Eric Glyman and Keith Rabois We Discuss:
-
Behind Ramp’s Partnership with Founders Fund & Khosla Ventures
-
How did the first Founders Fund deal come to be? How was the first meeting?
-
What does Keith mean when he says Ramp has the “secret sauce” to be successful?
-
What are 1-2 things Keith thinks Eric is world-class at? What are 1-2 things Eric thinks Keith is world-class at?
-
How did the latest Khosla deal come to happen?
-
Ramp: The Fastest Executing Company on the Planet.
-
How is Eric so good at executing at Ramp? What is his biggest advice to founders on speed of execution?
-
What are Eric’s biggest challenges in the next 12 months at Ramp?
-
Why does Keith believe momentum is crucial for early stage startups? What are some easy ways founders can build momentum?
-
How does Eric think AI will accelerate Ramp and the world of finance?
-
Leadership Lessons From the Best Founders
-
What are Keith’s biggest lessons from Brian Chesky @ Airbnb?
-
What did Keith learn from Jack Dorsey @ Square about leadership?
-
What does Eric think founders today should build? What should they not build?
-
What did Eric learn from Keith on how founders should measure time & progress?
-
Hiring & Team Management
-
How did Ramp build a solid talent team? What did they do differently?
-
Does Keith & Eric believe it is better to hire externally or promote internally? What is the right balance?
-
Does Keith agree founders should hire & get out the way or micromanage?
-
How many direct reports does Keith think is enough?
20VC: Mark Suster on The Biggest Fundraising Lessons for VCs, Why the Correction in Venture is Still to Come, Why Private Equity Will Replace IPOs and M&A as the Exit Path & The Woke Left and a Trump Administration; What Happens?
Mark Suster is a General Partner @ Upfront Ventures, one of LA's leading early-stage venture firms. Prior to leading Upfront, Mark was a serial entrepreneur having founded two software companies, selling both with the last selling to Salesforce.com. Mark is also a prolific writer and one of his favourite pieces, Lines Not Dots is one for the ages.
In Today's Episode With Mark Suster We Discuss:
1. From Serial Entrepreneur to Leading VC:
- How Mark made his way into the world of venture having sold two prior companies?
- What does Mark know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture?
- What advice does Mark give to all young investors starting their career today?
2. How to Raise a Fund:
- What are Mark's single biggest lessons from 15 years of fundraising for funds?
- Should managers look to institutions or friends and family first?
- Are LPs sheep? Do institutions anchoring funds lead to many others jumping in?
- What is the right amount to do a first close on? What is the right way to message the first close?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Mark sees managers make when raising?
3. Exit Environments are F******: What Now:
- Why are IPOs not the liquidity events that everyone thinks they are?
- When does Mark believe IPO windows will open again?
- How does Mark evaluate the M&A landscape today?
- With little M&A and IPO activity, why does Mark believe private equity will step into their shoes?
- With the change to private equity being the buyer, what does that mean for the sale price of the assets? What does that mean for the future of venture returns?
4. Trump, The Woke Left and The World Around Us:
- Is Mark concerned about the potential of Trump winning the election?
- Would Mark rather a Biden administration as the alternative?
- Why is Mark so worried by the woke left?
- Does Mark always believe there has been this deep-seated anti-semitism in the US education system? What can be done to remove this from our education system?
20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position
Arthur Mensch is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mistral AI. Since its inception in May 2023, Mistral has raised over $520M in funding from investors like Andreeseen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Microsoft with a current valuation of $2 billion. Before founding Mistral, Arthur was a research scientist at DeepMind, one of the leading AI institutions in the world.
In Today’s Episode with Arthur Mensch We Discuss:
-
From Models to Team Building: Arthur’s Greatest Lessons at DeepMind
-
What were Arthur’s biggest lessons from his time at DeepMind?
-
How did DeepMind shape how Arthur built Mistral?
-
Why does Arthur believe smaller teams are better for AI?
-
Why did Arthur decide to leave DeepMind and start Mistral?
-
Scaling Mistral to $2 Billion Valuation Within a Year
-
What made Mistral 7B so successful? What did Arthur learn from the model release?
-
What are the biggest barriers at Mistral today?
-
How does Arthur balance the sales and research teams at Mistral?
-
What does Arthur know now that he wishes he had known when he started Mistral?
-
How to Win in AI: Open Source, Cost, & Adoption
-
Why did Arthur open-source some models? Why did he close some?
-
How quickly will the cost of compute go down? Why does Arthur believe marginal costs will not go to zero?
-
How will open-sourcing LLMs affect the marginal cost?
-
Does Arthur think open source is ready for enterprise adoption?
-
What questions should enterprises be asking about AI adoption today?
-
What are the biggest challenges to AI adoption today?
-
The Future of LLMs
-
What does Arthur think are the largest bottlenecks of model quality today?
-
Does Arthur think future models will be more generalized or vertical-focused?
-
What does Arthur think about the future of commoditization in models?
-
Why is Arthur optimistic about the profitability of the application layer of AI?
-
How should models differentiate themselves today?
20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo
Adam Gross is one of the masters of product-led growth (PLG). Most recently, Adam was Vimeo's interim CEO. Before Vimeo, Adam was CEO of Heroku, which he joined after selling his startup, Cloudconnect in 2013. Additionally, Adam has held executive leadership roles at Salesforce and Dropbox, and has been an active angel investor & advisor to companies, including Buildkite, Cribl, and Tailscale.
In Today’s Episode with Adam Gross We Discuss:
-
PLG Tactics from Dropbox, Heroku and Salesforce:
-
What were Adam’s biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce? How did it shape his growth mindset?
-
What did Adam learn about customer acquisition at Dropbox?
-
What would Adam most like to change about growth today?
-
Product-Led Growth: The Fundamentals:
-
What is growth? What is it not? What do founders get wrong about growth?
-
Why does Adam think PLG is not for everybody?
-
What do most great PLG businesses have in common?
-
How are value propositions segmented in PLG? How can startups transition from individual to enterprise clients?
-
Why does Adam think startups doing paid acquisition sub $100M aren’t actually PLG?
-
The Secrets to Optimizing Growth Channels:
-
What are the most common reasons fast-growing companies plateau?
-
How does Adam advise founders on diversifying channels?
-
What are the biggest mistakes founders make when scaling into enterprise?
-
How should startups do effective product marketing in horizontal products?
-
What is emotive & strategic marketing? How should startups balance both?
-
How Angel Investing Changes How You View Companies:
-
What are Adam’s top 3 pieces of advice for founders?
-
What does Adam mean when he says you are either hiring a poet or a librarian?
-
What are the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring?
-
What was Adam’s biggest investment miss? What did he learn from it?
20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip
Rujul Zaparde is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zip, the world’s leading Intake-to-Pay solution, adopted by leading enterprises and startups including Snowflake, Canva, Airtable, Webflow, and others. In 2023, Zip raised $100 million in a Series C round, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Before founding Zip, Rujul was a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and a product manager at Airbnb.
In Today’s Episode with Rujul Zaparde We Discuss:
-
From Airbnb PM to $1.5BN Founder
-
How did Rujul’s first company fail? What were his lessons?
-
What did Rujul learn from his time at Airbnb?
-
How did Rujul come to co-found Zip? What was the aha moment?
-
What did Rujul wish he’d known when he started Zip?
-
Standing Out in a Hyper-Competitive Market
-
Why did Rujul pick such a competitive market? How did they stand out?
-
Does Rujul think founders should focus on pain points or platform solutions on day one?
-
What is Rujul’s advice to founders who are in the discovery process?
-
Does Rujul agree with Trae Stephens @ Founders Fund that serial entrepreneurs doing B2B enterprise SaaS are wasting their talent?
-
The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation
-
Which key moment caused Zip to accelerate?
-
Why does Rujul think speed is the most important element in startups?
-
Why does Rujul not believe in design partners?
-
Why does Rujul believe repeatability is the most important thing when pitching?
-
Does Rujul think AI will destroy outbound sales?
-
How to Hire & Manage Teams
-
What was Rujul’s “rude awakening” building a sales team?
-
What was Rujul’s biggest hiring mistake? What did he learn from it?
-
How does Rujul decide where to focus his attention and resources?
-
Why does Rujul believe younger managers are more creative?
20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath
Daniel Dines is the Co-Founder @ UiPath, one of the most incredible journeys in startups. For 10 years, UiPath was a bootstrapped company that scaled to just $500K in revenue. Then it all changed, product market fit became obvious and the rest is history. The company went on to raise funding from Sequoia, Accel, Kleiner Perkins and more. Today, the company is worth over $10BN, listed on the NASDAQ and does $1BN+ in revenue.
In Today's Episode with Daniel Dines We Discuss:
1. From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man:
- How would Daniel's parents and teachers have described the young Daniel?
- How did Daniel first learn to code? Why was his first programming job on $300 per month the best?
- How did Daniel learn English by playing bridge with his friends?
- What was the a-ha moment for Daniel with UiPath?
2. Becoming a Billionaire: The Mental Journey:
- What does Daniel mean when he says everyone is a prisoner of their own mind?
- How does Daniel reflect on his own relationship to money?
- How did having absolutely nothing impact Daniel's relationship to risk?
- Why does Daniel think that he does not really experience or feel happiness?
3. 10 Years to $500K ARR: The Miracle Bootstrapping Journey:
- After 10 years, UiPath had just $500K in ARR, what was the one single moment that changed everything in 2014?
- How did raising the seed round change everything for Daniel? How did it change his approach to operating?
- What was the impact of having Sequoia invest? Does it change the game? Why did Daniel say no to them the first time they tried for the Series B?
4. Journey to a $10BN Public Company: The Crucible Moments:
- How did the company almost go bust when it spent $400M against a plan of $150M in 2021?
- What is the single proudest moment Daniel has of the 19 year journey with UiPath?
- What have been Daniel's biggest management lessons in scaling UiPath to $1BN in ARR?
- Knowing all that Daniel does today, what would he have done differently about the UiPath journey?
20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks
Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and CEO of Freshworks, India’s first SaaS company to list on NASDAQ. Today, Freshworks has over $596M in ARR with a $5.27BN market cap, with investors like Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, and CapitalG. Girish is also a founding member of SaaSBOOMi, Asia’s largest community of founders and product builders, and has invested in over 60 startups. On top of that, Girish is also the Founder of Together Fund, a $150M fund focusing on Indian B2B companies going global from day 1.
In Today’s Episode with Girish Mathrubootham We Discuss:
-
From Online Forum to the Founding of a $5BN Company:
-
How did a horrible customer service experience prompt Girish to start Freshworks? What was the aha moment?
-
What were Girish’s biggest challenges founding Freshwork in 2010?
-
How was building the first product? What worked? What didn’t work?
-
Biggest Lessons on Product, Pricing and People Scaling to $5.2BN:
-
Why does Girish believe Indian companies have to win globally before winning India?
-
What were Girish’s biggest mistakes scaling Freshworks? What were his lessons?
-
Why does Girish believe starting high and going down never works in software?
-
When does Girish think is the best time to build the second product?
-
How did Freshworks lose against Slack? What did he learn from the experience?
-
The Biggest Lessons to Becoming the Best Leader:
-
How has Girish’s leadership style changed over time?
-
What were Girish’s biggest hiring mistakes?
-
What was Girish’s biggest challenge in building culture during COVID?
-
What is one piece of advice Girish believes every CEO should follow?
-
How India Will Become a Global Player in Tech, AI and Football:
-
Why does Girish believe now is the time for India tech?
-
What are the most common misconceptions of India tech?
-
What traits does Girish look for in founders he invests in?
-
What was Girish’s biggest investment mistake? What did he learn from it?
20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital
Vickie Peng is a Product Partner at Sequoia and the co-creator of Arc, their company-building immersion programme for pre-seed and seed stage founders. Prior to Sequoia, Vickie was a product manager at Polyvore (acquired by Yahoo for $200M) and Instagram, where she grew SMB advertising from $200M to $1BN.
In Today’s Episode with Vickie Peng We Discuss:
-
Lessons from 15 Years in Product
-
How did Vickie make her way into the world of product?
-
How did Vickie turn a small side business into a massive revenue machine at TrialPay?
-
How did Vickie scale Instagram SMB ads to $1BN? What were her takeaways?
-
What was Vickie’s business model at Polyvore that eventually led to the $200M acquisition by Yahoo?
-
Lessons from Scaling 100+ Companies in Sequoia
-
What does Vickie believe are the biggest mistakes early stage founders make when telling stories?
-
Which 2 components does Vickie believe every great product mission should include?
-
How should pre-product-market fit founders set their north star metric?
-
Perfecting Product Strategy
-
What was Vickie’s biggest product mistake? What were her lessons?
-
Why does Vickie think the best product people build less product?
-
What is Vickie’s advice to product leaders starting their first day on the job?
-
What are the most common mistakes founders make when hiring product teams?
-
Product-Market Fit Masterclass
-
Why does Vickie believe product-market fit is a journey not a destination?
-
What are the biggest reasons founders fail to get product-market fit?
-
What are the 3 types of product-market fit?
-
How does Vickie advise founders to differentiate themselves in competitive markets?
-
What is Vickie’s framework for competing against incumbents?
20VC: OpenAI's Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap on The Future of Foundation Models: Will They Be Commoditised | How to Solve the Problem of Compute | Open vs Closed: Which Dominates and Why | Which Companies and Verticals Will Be Steamrolled by OpenAI
Sam Altman is the CEO @ OpenAI, the company on a mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is one of the fastest-scaling companies in history with a valuation of $90BN and $2BN+ in revenue. Prior to OpenAI, Sam was the President and CEO @ Y Combinator and made angel investments in the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Pinterest, Asana and more.
Brad Lightcap is the COO @ OpenAI and the man responsible for the incredible scaling of sales, GTM, partnerships and business to today being over $2BN in revenue. Before OpenAI, Brad was an investor at Y Combinator, where he met Sam and before that led finance and operations initiatives at Dropbox.
In Today's Episode with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap We Discuss:
1. The Partnership: The Most Powerful Double Act in Tech:
- How did 25 people rejecting OpenAI's CFO positions 6 years ago, lead to Brad joining OpenAI before Sam even did? What did he see that the world did not?
- What does Brad think is Sam's biggest superpower that the world does not know? What does Sam think it Brad's biggest superpower that the world does not now?
- How do decisions get made between Brad and Sam? How do they decide what to delegate vs what not to? What is the most recent disagreement they had? How did they resolve it?
2. The Next 12 Months for OpenAI: Bottlenecks, Compute and Commoditisation:
- What are the core bottlenecks facing OpenAI in the next 12 months?
- How does Sam believe we solve the fundamental problem of compute?
- What is the single biggest barrier to the quality of models improving?
- What is the end state for the model landscape? Will models become commoditised?
3. OpenAI: The Fastest Scaling Company in History:
- What has been the secret to how OpenAI has scaled to $2BN in revenue in 24 months?
- Why does Sam believe that he is "not a great operator"? What drives this thinking?
- What have been the first things to break in the scaling of OpenAI?
- What do Brad and Sam know now about the scaling that they wish they had known at the start?
- Why does OpenAI lean towards hiring more experienced people in the team?
4. How to Invest and Operate in a World of OpenAI:
- What single question can founders ask that will reveal if they will be steamrolled by OpenAI?
- Does Sam believe huge numbers of companies will be steamrolled by OpenAI?
- For investors, is there money to be made investing in the application layer of AI today?
- What question should all businesses be asking about how to adopt and use AI in their business?
5. Sam Altman: AMA:
- What have been the single biggest lessons Sam has learned from the founders he has invested in?
- Which founders has he learned the most from? What did he learn from each?
- What is Sam most concerned about in the world today? Why what?
- What unexpected traits or characteristics does Sam most look for in the founders he invests in?
- Why does Sam say that he is not happy but he is grateful?
20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex
Sam Blond is the former CRO at Brex, where he led the company from near $0-$400M in ARR and a $12.5B valuation. Before Brex, Sam was VP of Sales at Zenefits, where he led the company from $0-$70M ARR in 2 years and a $4.5B valuation. Sam joined Founders Fund as a Partner in 2022 and recently left to focus more on operating.
In Today's Episode with Sam Blond We Discuss:
1. Lessons From Scaling Brex to $400M ARR & Zenefits to $70M ARR:
- What are the secrets that very few people know, that led to the success of Brex and Zenefits?
- What was the single worst sales investment Brex made? What was the best?
- What are Sam's biggest tips to people picking the rocketship they will join?
2. Who, What and When to Hire:
- When is the right time to hire your first sales rep?
- Should the founder be the one to create the sales playbook?
- What is the right profile for the first sales hire?
- Does it matter if the new hire has domain experience?
- Why does Sam always advocate to hire through network and not recruiters?
3. How to Hire the Best Sales Reps:
- What are the questions Sam always asks in interviews with sales hires?
- Does Sam do case studies with candidates? What is he looking for?
- What are the biggest green and red flags a candidate can show in an interview process?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring sales teams?
4. How to Have the Best Performing Sales Team:
- What are the three ways to measure the success of a rep in the first 30-60 days?
- Why does Sam believe most startups are doing outbound wrong? What should they change?
- Why does Sam believe demand gen is the bottleneck for all companies?
- What can be done to solve the demand gen challenge?
- How does outbound change in a world of AI?
20VC: Are the Best CEOs the Best Fundraisers, Are the Best Founders Insiders or Outsiders to a Problem, Why Ownership Should Not Be a Focus in VC & The Biggest Lessons Scaling MongoDB to $26BN Market Cap with Kevin Ryan, Founder @ AlleyCorp
Kevin Ryan is one of the leading serial entrepreneurs and investors in New York. Previously he co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, Nomad Health, Pearl Health, and was the CEO of DoubleClick (Acquired by Google for $3.1B). Today, Kevin is the founder and CEO of AlleyCorp, a venture capital firm that incubates and invests in transformative companies in healthcare, diversified tech, robotics, and impact. Just yesterday, Alleycorp announced their $250M fund, their first ever external capital.
In Today’s Episode with Kevin Ryan We Discuss:
-
Early Signs of Entrepreneurship
-
How did Kevin’s early life shape his career? How would his parents and teachers describe him?
-
Does Kevin agree that successful entrepreneurs always show signs early?
-
What does Kevin think about luck vs. skill? Why does Kevin think that most things are out of your control as an entrepreneur?
-
Lessons from Founding 10+ Companies Worth $27BN
-
Does Kevin agree the best CEOs are also the best fundraisers?
-
What were Kevin’s biggest lessons from scaling DoubleClick from 20 to 2000 employees?
-
What was Kevin’s a-ha moment behind Business Insider? What was the reason behind its success?
-
Why does Kevin believe the best founders are always in unfamiliar fields?
-
Incubating World’s Best Companies
-
How does Kevin allocate resources between incubations vs. investments?
-
What are the biggest commonalities between successful companies at AlleyCorp?
-
Is Kevin a market-led or people-led investor?
-
What does Kevin think is the most important element in achieving product-market fit?
-
What was Kevin’s biggest miss on selecting founders? What were his takeaways?
-
Current State of Venture
-
Why does Kevin believe venture is more competitive now than ever before?
-
What does Kevin know now that wish he’d known when he started investing?
-
Does Kevin agree rich investors make better investors?
-
Why does Kevin not care about ownership?
-
Does Kevin agree with Doug Leone that venture has transitioned from a high boutique margin industry to a low margin commoditised industry?
-
Does Kevin agree with Peter Fenton that price is a mental trap?
20VC: Postmates Founder Basti Lehmann on How the Uber Deal Went Down and How a $2.65BN Deal Turned into $5BN, Why Great VCs Add No Value and VC Value Add is BS Marketing & Why The Biggest Companies in History Will be Born Today and Replace Incumbents
Basti Lehmann is the co-founder and former CEO of Postmates, the on-demand delivery service that raised over $900M from the likes of Tiger Global, Founders Fund, Spark Capital and Andreesen Horowitz. Following Uber’s $2.65BN acquisition in 2020, Basti founded TipTop, a platform for fast tech sales which Marc Andreesen led the $20M seed round for.
In Today’s Episode with Basti Lehmann We Discuss:
-
From US Immigrant to Billion Dollar Founder
-
How did Basti start his career hacking AT&T?
-
How did early hardships shape Basti’s work ethic?
-
What were Basti’s biggest challenges building Postmates?
-
Lessons from Raising $900M
-
How did Basti raise $20M from Marc Andreesen?
-
How does Basti select which VCs to work with?
-
Why does Basti think 99% of VCs are sheep?
-
Why does Basti think great VCs add no value?
-
Why does Basti think having to educate investors is a massive red flag?
-
Selling Postmates for $2.65BN
-
Why did Basti sell Postmates to Uber? How did the acquisition happen?
-
Was there anything Basti would have done differently?
-
What does Basti think makes Dara Khosrowshahi a great CEO?
-
What is Basti’s biggest advice to founders on acquisitions?
-
Future of AI: Startups or Incumbents?
-
What does Basti think is the biggest challenge of LLMs today?
-
Why does Basti think inference computing will be the future of AI?
-
Why does Basti think incumbents can be replaced?
-
Why does Basti think the biggest companies are being born today?
20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health
Mario Schlosser is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Oscar Health. The public company that went public with a market cap of $7.1BN. Following a tumultuous time in the markets, their stock price dropped 94%. Today, the company has rebounded and has a market cap of $3.2BN with an astonishing $5.8BN of revenues. Before co-founding Oscar, Mario also co-founded the largest social gaming company in Latin America.
In Today's Episode with Mario Schlosser We Discuss:
1. From German Middle-Class to Public Company Founder:
- How did Mario make his way into the world of tech and come to co-found Oscar with Josh Kushner?
- Does Mario agree with Jensen Huang that "we should all have lower expectations"?
- What does Mario know now that he wishes he had known when he started Oscar?
2. Why Did Oscar Tank 94% in the Public Markets:
- What was the core reason why Oscar tanked 94% in the markets?
- What would Mario have done differently knowing all he knows now about public markets?
- Does Mario regret going public? What are the biggest pros and cons?
3. The Mental Challenge of a 94% Market Cap Decline:
- How did Mario mentally deal with the company being down 94%?
- What does he say to himself in the truly hard times?
- How did Mario use his co-founder, a coach and his family, to get through the really bad times?
- What are Mario's experiences like with anti-depressants? What worked? What did not?
4. Firing Yourself as CEO:
- Why did Mario decide to step aside as CEO? What was the decision-making process?
- On reflection, does Mario think he was a good CEO? Where was he good? Where was he bad?
- What are the biggest management pieces of advice that Mario thinks are BS?
20VC: Founders Fund's Trae Stephens on Why The Most Competitive Deals are the Worst, Why No Company is Successful Because of their VC, Why We are Making ZIRP Mistakes Again Today, Why Loss Ratio is BS and Upside Maximisation is Everything
Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund, one of the world's leading funds where he has worked with some of the best and backed the likes of Palmer Luckey with Oculus and Ryan Peterson @ Flexport since the very early days. Trae is also Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next-generation wearable e-reader. Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings.
In Today's Episode with Trae Stephens We Discuss:
1. From Hustling into Georgetown to Peter Thiel Ushering You into VC:
- What is Trae's story of how he got into Georgetown University, despite being rejected the first time?
- How did Trae make his way into the world of VC? How did Peter Thiel recruit him to Founders Fund?
- What advice did Brian Singerman give Trae in his first week in VC? Why is it so important?
2. How the Best Venture Firm in the World Invests:
- Decision-Making Process: Why do Founders Fund not have partner meetings? What is the investment decision-making process? Why does more process lead to mediocre outcomes?
- Competitive Deals: Why does Trae believe the most competitive deals are always the worst? What do Founders Fund do to specifically avoid the "herd mentality"?
- Upside Maximisation: Why does no one at Founders Fund care about "downside protection"? How do the team approach scenario planning and upside maximisation?
3. Do VCs Really Add Value:
- Why does Trae think putting VCs on a board for "value add" is total BS?
- Are there any cases in which Trae believes the VC can really move the needle for a company?
- Why does Trae believe venture would be better if it were just operator investors?
- Why does Trae believe platform approaches to VC value add is BS?
4. The Future of VC: Who and How to Win:
- How did being an operator at the same time as investing, make Trae a better investor?
- Why does Trae believe that vertical investing is BS and generalised is better?
- How does Trae favour; market, product and people? Will Trae back a founder when he hates the idea?
- What have been Trae's biggest lessons from his biggest hits and biggest misses in 10 years?
20VC: The Memo: The $23BN Company You Might Not Have Heard Of: Tradeweb, The Story of 27 Years of Compounding Growth Leading to the Market Leader with $1.4BN in Revenue and 50% EBITDA Margins
Billy Hult is Chief Executive Officer of Tradeweb Markets (Nasdaq: TW), as Billy puts it, they are the "electronic interface that connects Citadel and Goldman". They are also one of the most under the radar but incredible businesses of the last 20 years. Through no glitz acquisitions or specific moments, TradeWeb has compounded organic growth for the last 27 years to today, with a market cap of $22BN.
In Today's Episode with Billy Hult:
1. From Betting Shop Worker to Public Company CEO:
- How would Billy's teachers and parents have described the young Billy?
- Why does Billy think it is so important to have a hard first job when growing up?
- What does Billy know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. What it Takes to be a World-Leading CEO:
- How does Billy define the role of the CEO? What are the core tenets?
- What has been the single hardest element of CEOship to learn?
- Does Billy care about being liked? How does that impact his management style?
- Why does Billy think it is so important for CEOs to make "big bets"? What have been his biggest?
3. Hiring World-Class Teams in 2024:
- What have been some of Billy's biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn from them?
- How does Billy weigh IQ vs EQ and hustle? Which wins? Why?
- Does Billy think this generation of millennials is too soft?
- What are the single biggest lessons Billy has on when to delegate vs when to retain control?
4. Money, Power and Family:
- How does Billy approach his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time?
- Fame, power or money, rank them from 1-3. How does Billy rank them?
- How does Billy describe his own style of parenting? How has it changed over time?
20VC: a16z's Chris Dixon on Who Will Win the Next Generation of Venture, The Two Ways to Make Great Venture Investments and Find the Best Entrepreneurs & Why AI Will Strengthen the Position of the Incumbents Moving Forward
Chris Dixon is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with investments in Oculus (acquired by Facebook), Coinbase, and many more. Chris also founded and leads a16z crypto, a division of the firm that he has grown from $300 million in 2018 to more than $7 billion of committed capital. Due to his many successes, Chris was named #1 on the Forbes Midas List in 2022.
In Today’s Episode with Chris Dixon We Discuss:
- From Founder to Leading GP in Venture:
- How did Chris make his way into the world of venture and startups?
- When did he realize investing was his calling?
- How did Chris Dixon come to co-found Founder Collective with Dave Frankel and Eric Paley?
- Lessons from 12 years Investing:
- What are Chris’ biggest lessons from working with Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz?
- Does Chris agree with Doug Leone, “venture has transitioned from a boutique high margin business to a low margin commoditised industry”?
- What are the two ways to win in venture?
- Does Chris agree the best founders don’t need their VCs?
- What is Chris’ biggest investing miss? How did it impact his mindset?
- Are Incumbents Too Big To Be Replaced:
- What is the biggest problem with open-source internet today?
- Does Chris think incumbents can be replaced?
- Why does Chris think AI will strengthen incumbents?
- Does Chris think OpenAI should be open-sourced?
- Biggest Challenges in Crypto:
- What is the biggest misconception of crypto today?
- Does Chris think speculation is bad for crypto?
- What would Chris most like to change in the world of crypto?
- How does Chris think Trump will affect crypto?
20VC: Lessons from 32 Years of Fund Investing | Why Exits Will Be Larger & Funds Sizes Bigger | Top Reasons to Turn Down Potential Fund Investments | Fees, Carry, Deployment Pace; What Do LPs Inspect When Fund Investing with David Clark, CIO @ Vencap
David Clark is the CIO of Vencap, one of the leading fund of funds in the venture landscape. David has been at Vencap for 32 years and has been an LP his entire career.
In Today's Episode with David Clark We Discuss:
1. From Unemployed Student in Love to Leading LP:
- How did a girlfriend lead to David taking his first steps into the world of fund investing?
- What does David know now about fund investing that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. Is Being an LP Harder than Ever Before:
- Does David agree with Doug Leone, "venture has transitioned from a boutique high margin business to a low margin commoditised industry"?
- Does David agree with Ryan Akinna @ MIT, "it is harder than ever to be an LP"?
- Does David think that venture returns will worsen in the coming years?
- Has the denominator effect for LPs gone? Do LPs have liquidity today?
3. What Makes the Best Performing Funds:
- What are the single biggest commonalities in managers that did a 3x net DPI fund?
- Of managers with a 3x net fund, how many had a single company return the fund?
- How do the best firms do generational transition?
- How do the best firms take cash off the table and sell part or all of their position?
4. Five Things LPs Hate In Potential VC Investments:
- What are the two most common reasons David will turn down a manager?
- How does David feel about the varying fee and carry levels?
- How does David feel about the compression of deployment times of funds?
- How does David feel about managers increasing fund size so significantly on every cycle?
5. Fund Sizes, Exits and Concentrating Returns:
- Why does David believe exit sizes will increase and fund sizes could be even larger?
- Why does David think that despite the above, the concentration of returns will be even smaller?
- Is David concerned by the IPO window being largely shut and the increased regulation on M&A?
20VC: Bryan Johnson on Why Humans Are No Longer Qualified to Manage Our Own Affairs, How Algorithms Will Run our Bodies and How to Process New Ideas and Challenge Conventional Beliefs
Bryan Johnson is the founder of Blueprint, the man is at war with death and is mastering longevity. Bryan is on a mission aimed at enhancing human intelligence and being respected by people in the 25th century. Before starting Blueprint, Bryan also founded Braintree (acquired by PayPal for $800M) and OS Fund – a $100M venture capital fund investing in genomics, synthetic biology, and complex systems.
In Today’s Episode with Bryan Johnson We Discuss:
-
The Philosophy of Don’t Die
-
What does Bryan think is the biggest existential threat to humankind?
-
Why does Bryan believe humans are unfit to manage their own affairs?
-
Why does Bryan care about being liked by the 25th century?
-
Does Bryan think society is ready to adapt to immortality?
-
How to Process New Ideas
-
What 3 questions does Bryan ask to test new ideas?
-
How does Bryan combat against his own biases?
-
How does Bryan adapt to change? What has been his most painful experience?
-
Why does Bryan think religion is humanity’s most durable technology?
-
The Most Measured Human in the World
-
What did Bryan learn about himself as the most measured human in the world?
-
How does Bryan use algorithms to take care of himself?
-
What has been Bryan’s most expensive test?
-
How did Bryan use data to rejuvenate his sexual function?
-
How will tech & AI play a role in human longevity?
-
Health & Parenting Advice
-
How does Bryan raise his children?
-
How does Bryan get perfect sleep every night? What are his tips?
-
What is Bryan’s advice to people who think it’s too late to start becoming healthy?
-
What health advice does Bryan think is BS?
20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux
Jean-Michel Lemieux is one of the OGs of engineering and product having been the CTO at Shopify and the VP Engineering at Atlassian. Jean-Michel helped grow both Shopify and Atlassian from single-product to multi-product companies and led the building of their platforms.
In Today’s Episode with Jean-Michel Lemieux We Discuss:
-
From band class to Shopify CTO
-
How did Jean-Michel make his way into the world of product?
-
What were Jean-Michel’s biggest lessons from his time at Atlassian & Shopify?
-
How are Shopify & Atlassian the same? How are they different?
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Why does Jean-Michel think Shopify could have been 10x bigger?
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Building the Perfect Product
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How does Atlassian & Shopify build movements instead of product?
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What does Jean-Michel know now that he wishes he had known before he joined Atlassian & Shopify?
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How does Jean-Michel balance between shipping speed vs. quality?
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Why does JM think scrums and TDDs are BS? How did his last year at Shopify change his approach in product development?
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What is a time horizon friction? And how does it impact teams?
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How to Lead a Product Team:
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What is micro alignment, and why does Jean-Michel think it is so important?
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What 3 types of decisions every team makes?
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What does Jean-Michel think are the most common reasons teams become average? How does he prevent it?
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What do Jean-Michel think are the most common mistakes CEOs make today?
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Hiring the Best Product Team:
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How does Jean-Michel structure the interview process for new product hires?
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What signals does Jean-Michel look out for when hiring? Why does he believe experience does not matter?
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What are Jean-Michel’s biggest hiring mistakes? What were his lessons?
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What are 2 of the most common mistakes founders make when hiring a product team?
20VC: 19 Company Portfolio: 1 Decacorn, 7 Unicorns, 4 Acquisitions; One of the Best Seed Investors of All Time on How to Pick Generational Defining Founders, Why Nothing but the Founder Matters & Why the Best Investors are Never Happy w/ Gili Raanan
Gili Raanan is the Founder of Cyberstarts and one of the most successful seed investors ever. In his 19 company portfolio, Gili has invested in a decacorn (Wiz), seven unicorns and had three others acquired. Prior to Cyberstarts, Gili spent over 15 years as a General Partner @ Sequoia Capital investing in some of the world's best cyber security companies.
In Today's Episode with Gili Raanan We Discuss:
1. From Founder to World's Best Seed Investor:
- How did Gili make the move into the world of venture with Sequoia?
- How did Mike Moritz and Doug Leone recruit him? What was that process like?
- What are 1-2 of Gili's biggest takeaways from working with Doug and Mike?
2. How to Find and Pick the Best Founders:
- What did Mike Moritz teach Gili about getting to know founders?
- Why does Gili look for the pain in the eyes of the founder? What questions does he ask?
- What are the most common signals of truly exceptional founders, having backed 7 unicorns?
- Why does Gili believe that both market and product is BS? Why are the founders all that matters?
- Why does Gili believe that the founder does not have to be a domain expert in a market to create a massive company in that market?
3. What it Takes to be the Best Seed Investor:
- Why does Gili believe that the best seed investors do not have theses?
- How important does Gili feel the brand of the VC firm is? What were his biggest lessons on brand from spending 15 years as a General Partner @ Sequoia?
- Why does Gili believe that the best investors are never happy? When you are happy, you lose.
4. 2021 is Back: Pricing, Uprounds and more
- Why does Gili believe that the best companies are always expensive and will always be expensive at every round?
- Why does Gili believe that 2021 pricing and funding is back?
- Is this a good thing? How does Gili advise founders on how much to raise and what valuation to set with investors?
- What does Gili believe are the single biggest sins from the zero interest rate environment?
20VC: Bending Spoons: The Most Untold Success Story in Startups: Lessons Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation... Bootstrapped with Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder and CEO @ Bending Spoons
Luca Ferrari is Co-Founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, one of the most incredible but untold success stories in startups. Luca has scaled Bending Spoons to 100M monthly active users, $380M in sales in 2023 and aiming to reach $500M in EBITDA by the end of 2026. The company’s products include Evernote, Meetup, Remini, and Splice and their products have now been downloaded more than 500M times.
In Today’s Episode with Luca Ferrari We Discuss:
- From McKinsey Associate to $2BN Founder
- What was Luca like as a child? How would his parents have described him?
- Why did Luca share his McKinsey salary with his co-founders?
- What were Luca’s biggest lessons from his failed startup?
- Bootstrapping Bending Spoons
- Why did Luca decide to bootstrap Bending Spoons?
- What does Luca think about the EU vs. US startup environment?
- Why did Luca kill a $7M project? What were his lessons?
- How did Luca pick his investors?
- How to Find the Best Talent
- What are the 3 key traits Luca looks for when picking the best talent?
- Why does Luca think traditional interview strategies do not work?
- What tests does Luca conduct for each candidate?
- What were Luca’s biggest hiring mistakes?
- Mastering Acquisition & Growth
- How does Luca determine which products to acquire? How does he identify signals?
- How does Luca approach pricing assets? How does he win every bid?
- What are Luca’s biggest lessons from acquiring Evernote?
- What key lessons on risk management does Luca wish he’d known 10 years ago?
- What are Luca’s biggest challenges on user acquisition?
20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan
Chandra Narayanan is one of the growth and analytics OGs having spent 7 years at Facebook leading analytics for the Facebook App and for Instagram. After Facebook, Chandra became Chief Data Scientist @ Sequoia Capital, helping Sequoia, find, select and help the best entrepreneurs in the world. Today, Chandra is the Founder & CEO @ Sundial, building products to help builders make meaningful use of data to fulfill *their* mission.
In Today's Episode with Chandra Narayanan
1. From Working on the Weather to Leading Analytics at Facebook:
- How did Chandra make his way from analyzing weather patterns to leading analytics for Facebook?
- What does Chandra know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in growth?
- How did one piece of advice from his manager at Paypal change Chandra's mind forever on "quitting" and when to "quit"?
2. Growth and Analytics 101:
- What does growth mean to Chandra? What is it? What is it not?
- When is the right time to hire a growth team/person?
- What is the right profile for the first growth hires?
3. How to Hire the Best Growth Teams in the World:
- What are the must-ask questions when hiring for growth?
- How does Chandra use case studies to determine the quality of a candidate?
- What does Chandra believe are the four main reasons people go to work?
- What are the three different types of execs in tech? How do you know when you need each one?
4. Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Sequoia:
- What are 1-2 of Chandra's biggest takeaways from leading analytics at Facebook?
- What does Chandra believe are the two core skills needed to do analytics well?
- How can you easily test if someone is good at analytics?
- How did being Chief Data Scientist @ Sequoia change Chandra's perspective on growth?
20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda
Joe Lonsdale is the Founder and Managing Partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in capital. In 2003, he founded Palantir Technologies. Since then, he has founded over a dozen companies, including Addepar, a wealth management platform helping investors manage over $5 trillion, and OpenGov, recently sold for $1.8BN.
In Today’s Episode with Joe Lonsdale We Discuss:
The Making of a Multi-Unicorn Founder:
- What was Joe like as a child? How would his parents and teachers have described him?
- What does Joe know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?
- How does Joe view the importance of luck and skill in success?
America’s New Dawn: Navigating Frontiers and Accountability
- What did Joe mean by describing America as a “frontier nation”?
- How does Joe contrast America’s frontiers with Europe’s social safety nets?
- How does Joe propose restoring America using the “scalpel over the sledgehammer” approach?
- How can America introduce accountability to non-profit institutions? What role do for-profit prisons play?
Woke Mind Virus
- Why does Joe consider the Woke Mind Virus a “Bad Postmodern Religion”?
- Why does Joe see Elon Musk as a key figure in challenging “woke minds”?
- Why does Joe believe the education system is a core problem? What needs to change?
- Is it too late to reverse the current state of “woke mind virus”?
TikTok, China, Israel:
- What does Joe believe is the right solution for TikTok’s ownership?
- To what extent is TikTok a danger to American national security?
- What does Joe predict will happen to China from here? What needs to change?
- How does Joe predict the next 24 months for the conflict in Israel and Gaza?
Investing Lessons: Wish, Palantir and more
- What are Joe’s biggest takeaways from the failing of Wish?
- What did Joe learn from the failed project with Lady Gaga?
- How does Joe reflect on when is the right time to sell?
- How does Joe reflect on his own relationship to money?
20Sales: Outbound Sales is Dead Today, Why Demand Generation Will Move Back Under Marketing, "Wisdom" that Everyone Needs to Unlearn About Sales & Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires with Brendon Cassidy
Brendon Cassidy is one of the OG of enterprise sales of the last decade, having advised the likes of Gong.io, Pipedrive, Showpad. Previously Brendon was first Head of Sales at LinkedIn and VP of Sales at Talkdesk.
In Today's Episode with Brendon Cassidy We Discuss:
1. From Recruiter to Sales OG and Linkedin's First Head of Sales:
- How did recruiting prepare Brendon for a career in sales?
- What impact did the dot-com bubble burst have on his early career?
- What does Brendon know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in sales?
2. The Sales Playbook and Hiring The Team:
- How does Brendon define the "sales playbook"?
- Should the founder be the one to create and execute V1 of the playbook?
- Should the first sales hire be a rep or a sales leader?
- When is the right time to make that all-important first sales hire?
3. Why Discovery and Outbound Are Broken Today:
- Why does Brendon feel discovery is useless in today’s sales process?
- Why does Brendon believe outbound will move under the marketing function?
- How does AI change the world of outbound sales?
- Why will no great sales leaders join a company that doesn’t have an inbound machine?
4. How to Master Onboarding and Increase Sales Performance:
- What is the right way to onboard new sales reps?
- How quickly do you know if a sales rep is not good? What are the signs?
- What is the right way to measure the effectiveness of sales teams today?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make in onboarding sales teams?
20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing
Peter Wagner is a Founding Partner of Wing. Peter has led investments in dozens of early-stage companies including Snowflake, Gong, Pinecone, and many others which have gone on to complete IPO's or successful acquisitions. Prior to founding Wing, Peter spent an incredible 14 years at Accel, starting as an associate in 1996 and scaling to Managing Partner, before leaving to start Wing.
In Today's Episode with Peter Wagner We Discuss:
1. From Associate to Managing Partner to Founding Partner:
- How did Peter first make his way into the world of venture as an associate at Accel?
- How important does Peter believe it is to have early hits in your career as an investor?
- What is the biggest mistake Peter sees young VCs make today?
2. The Venture Market: What Happens Now:
- Does Peter agree with Roger Ehrenberg that venture returns will worsen moving forward?
- How does Peter answer the question of how large asset management venture firms co-exist in a world of boutique seed players also?
- Does Peter agree with Doug Leone that "venture has transitioned from a high-margin boutique business to a low-margin, commoditized industry?
3. Investing Lessons from 27 Years and Countless IPOs:
- What have been some of Peter's single biggest investing lessons from 27 years in venture?
- Why is Peter so skeptical of capital-intensive businesses? Will defense and climate startups suffer the same fate as clean tech did in the 2000s?
- How does Peter reflect on his own relationship to price? When does it matter? When does it not?
- What have been Peter's biggest lessons on when to sell positions vs when to hold?
- What has been Peter's biggest miss? How did it impact his mindset?
4. Building a Firm from Nothing:
- How was the fundraise process when leaving the Accel machine and raising with Wing?
- What have been the single hardest elements of building Wing? What did he not expect?
- What advice does Peter have for someone wanting to start their firm today?
20VC: Managing the Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the World: $1.55 Trn of Assets & Owning 1.5% of all Listed Companies with Nicolai Tangen, CEO @ Norges Bank Investment Management
Nicolai Tangen is the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world with $1.55 Trn in assets, owning on average, 1.5% of every listed company. Tangen was previously Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer in AKO Capital, which he founded in 2005. Prior to this, Tangen was a partner and senior analyst at Egerton Capital and an equity analyst at Cazenove & Co.
In Today's Episode with Nicolai Tangen We Discuss:
From Religious Town in Norway to Leading the Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund:
- What was Nicolai like as a child? How would his parents have described him?
- Why does Nicolai think that loners have a greater chance/ability to make money?
- What does Nicolai know now that he wishes he could tell a 20-year-old Nicolai?
The Top 10 Questions:
1. US Tech Firm Concentration: Is Nicolai concerned by the concentration of enterprise value in US tech firms? Have incumbents ever been as strong as they are today?
2. Impact of AI: What does Nicolai believe the impact of AI will be on society and productivity? What is his approach to investing in it moving forward?
3. Bitcoin: Why does Nicolai not want to hold Bitcoin? Why does he not understand it?
4. China: What would need to happen for China to be investable? How will the China situation play out?
5. Europe: Does Nicolai believe Europe is so far behind the US? Why? What can we do to improve?
6. Climate Change: How does Nicolai approach investing in climate? What works? What does not?
7. Sam Altman: Would Nicolai invest in Sam's new $7Trn project? What are some of Nicolai's biggest lessons from the time he has spent with Sam?
8. Investment Psychology: How does Nicolai retain a neutral investor psychology? How does he not get too up when doing well and too low when not doing well?
9. Investing Lessons: What are Nicolai's biggest investment hits and misses? What did he learn from them?
10. The Future: Why is Nicolai so optimistic about the future? What is he concerned about? How will we overcome our greatest challenges?
20VC: Are IPO Windows Shut? Has Regulation Killed the M&A Market? M&A OG Frank Quattrone on Lessons from 650 M&A Deals Worth Over $1TRN and Taking Amazon, Cisco and Netscape Public
Frank Quattrone is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Qatalyst and served as its CEO from the Firm’s founding until January 2016. Over more than four decades, Frank and the teams he has led have advised on more than 600 mergers and acquisitions with an aggregate transaction value over $1 trillion and on more than 350 financings that raised over $65 billion for technology companies worldwide. Frank led the IPOs of Amazon.com, Cisco, Intuit, Netscape, among many others. He advised Apple on its $400 MM acquisition of NeXT (which led to Steve Jobs’ return to Apple); Concur on its $8.3B sale to SAP; LinkedIn on its $28.1B sale to Microsoft; Qualtrics on its $8B sale to SAP and Twitch on its $1B sale to Amazon.com.
In Today's Episode with Frank Quattrone:
1. Has Regulation Killed M&A:
- Why does Frank disagree that regulation has killed M&A?
- What is the real reason why M&A is so down at present?
- What would impact would a Trump administration have on the M&A environment?
- What are some of Frank's biggest lessons from 600 prior transactions over dour decades of what happens when an M&A market shuts down?
2. When Will the IPO Window Re-Open:
- Does Frank agree that the IPO window is currently closed for tech companies?
- How does this IPO window compare to the dot com bust and 2007?
- What is needed for the IPO window to re-open?
- What is the timeline that Frank puts on the IPO window opening again?
3. M&A: How Do Companies Get Bought:
- What is the process for a company to be bought?
- What are the single biggest mistakes the seller makes in the process?
- What do the best buyers and sellers do to get the best price?
- Does Frank agree with the notion that "companies are bought and not sold"?
4. IPOing Amazing, Selling Linkedin and Qualtrics:
- What is the story behind, Frank, Bill Gurley, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr pricing the Amazon IPO?
- How did Linkedin come to be bought by Microsoft? What did that process look like?
- How did Frank structure an event to ensure that Ryan @ Qualtrics and Bill McDermot @ SAP would meet and lead to the acquisiiton?
20VC: Startups Only Fail When Founders Stop Trying, Why the Two Weeks Following Our IPO Were the Worst of my Life & Why Tieing Your Identity to Your Company is the Most Dangerous Thing and How to Avoid It with Sami Inkinen, Co-Founder & CEO @ Virta Health
Sami Inkinen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Virta Health, the company reversing type 2 diabetes. Before Virta, Sami was the Co-Founder of Trulia, steering the company to a successful IPO and its eventual sale to Zillow Group. Outside of the boardroom, he launched Fat Chance Row, a daring venture to row 2,750 miles across the Pacific, unsupported with his wife, rowing 18 hours straight per day.
In Today's Episode with Sami Inkinen:
1. From Farm in Finland to IPO Founder: Relationship to Money
- How did Sami's humble upbringing on a farm in Finland impact his early mindset and ambition?
- How does Sami analyze his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time?
- Why was the two weeks following Trulia's IPO the worst two weeks of his life?
2. The Secret to Marriage: Rowing 2,750 Miles Together:
- What are some of the biggest lessons on marriage Sami has from spending 45 days rowing the Pacific with only his wife for company?
- What was their single biggest argument over the 45 days? What did Sami learn from it?
- Sami worked with his wife, what are the biggest pros and cons of working with your spouse? Would Sami recommend it?
- What does Sami believe are the core fundamentals that underpin the best marriages?
3. The Secret to Parenting: The Regret of Delegation:
- What is Sami's biggest regret when it comes to parenting?
- How does Sami think about what it means to be a great father today? How has that changed?
- How did Sami's relationship with his wife change when they had kids?
4. Relationship to Identity:
- Why does Sami believe tieing your identity to the company, as a founder, is so dangerous?
- How does Sami advise on creating multiple personas to prevent this?
- Why does Sami believe that all the best founders are addicts to some extent?
20VC: What it Takes to be Top 1% in Private Equity | Why the Best Companies are Talent Systems | Three Traits Required to Succeed in Private Equity | Marriage, Fatherhood and Sports Team Owner, What it Takes to Do It All, with Justin Ishbia, Founder @ Sho
Justin is the Founder and Managing Partner of one of the nation’s best-performing private equity firms, Shore Capital Partners (“Shore”). Since the firm’s inception in 2009, Shore has grown from 4 to over 140 team members managing over $6 billion in AUM, representing 900+ acquired companies and more than 33,000 employees. Shore is also one of the most active private equity firm in the world by deal volume according to PitchBook while continuing to achieve return profiles that rank Shore among the top 1% of private equity firms. Justin is an avid sports fan/investor and is the Alternate Governor for the Phoenix Suns (NBA), Phoenix Mercury (WNBA) and Nashville SC (MLS).
In Today's Episode with Justin Ishbia:
1. From Law Student to Founding Shore Capital:
- How did seeing Justin's father operate impact how he thinks about building Shore today?
- What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he started Shore?
- How important a role does luck play in success? How has his mindset changed on this?
2. How to Make Top 1% PE Returns:
- Why does Justin see private equity done well like "using a flashlight in a dark room"?
- What are the top 3 elements that Justin looks for in all acquisitions they make at Shore?
- When did Justin think there was an advantage of scale/network effect but was proved wrong?
- How does Justin think about downside protection and risk mitigation?
- Why does Justin like to back and invest in first time founders more than any other type?
3. Building World-Class Investing Teams:
- Why does Justin believe the best companies are talent systems?
- How does Justin structure the talent system at Shore to ensure consistent incredible talent?
- What does Justin believe are the three traits required to win in private equity?
- What question does Justin ask all potential CEOs he hires for acquired companies?
- What has Justin learned is the single clearest sign of the top .1% talent?
4. Justin Ishbia: The Family Man and Husband:
- What metric does Justin use to track whether he is being a good and present father?
- Is it possible to be top 1% and have balance with a wife and family?
- What does "great fatherhood" mean to Justin? How has his thoughts on this changed?
- How does Justin think about bringing kids up in a world of immense privilege and ensuring they remain ground and ambitious?
20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab
Scott Williamson was most recently Chief Product Officer for GitLab, where he led a team of 65 in Product Management, Product Operations, Growth, Pricing, and Corporate Development functions. Before GitLab, Scott was VP of Product for SendGrid for over six years, where helped lead the company to a successful IPO and $3B acquisition by Twilio.
In Today's Episode with Scott Williamson We Discuss:
1. From Sales to Product Leader:
- Why does Scott believe sales is a great starting point for product people?
- To what extent does an MBA help someone wanting to pursue a career in product management?
- What does Scott know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in product?
2. What, Who, When: How to Build a Product Team:
- Is product management art or science? What is the ratio?
- What are the four core roles of a product manager today?
- When is the right time to hire your first PM?
- What is the ideal profile for this first PM hire?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring PMs?
3. Hiring the Best Product People:
- What does Scott's hiring process look like for all new product hires?
- How does Scott test for systematic thinking and problem-solving ability?
- What questions does Scott always ask in interviews?
- What are the best case studies to use to test a candidate's skill set?
- How important is it for the candidate to have domain expertise in your product category?
4. The Best Product Teams are the Best Writers:
- What are the two different types of documents that product teams must use?
- How do you know when to use a one-pager vs a six-pager?
- How does the discussion and planning cycle for the different documents differ?
- How important is it for PMs to be great writers also?
20VC: Why VC Returns Will Get Worse, Why LP Incentive Structures are so Broken, What is the Answer to Liquidity with No M&A or IPOs, When to Sell vs Hold Your Winners & Turning $5M into $250M with The Trade Desk | Roger Ehrenberg, Eberg Capital
Roger Ehrenberg is a legend of the venture industry as the Founder of IA Ventures, among the most successful seed-stage venture firms of this generation, having seeded companies including Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG), Digital Ocean (NYSE: DOCN), The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) and Wise (LSE: WISE.L). Today Roger is the Founder and Managing Partner of Eberg Capital, a pioneer in bridging the gap among sports franchises, sports betting, media and entertainment. Roger’s current sports investments include stakes in the Miami Marlins, Real Salt Lake, Alpine Racing, Betr, Commonwealth, Kero Sports, Simplebet, SlamBall, Smarkets and WagerWire.
In Today's Episode with Roger Ehrenberg We Discuss:
1. The Commoditisation of Venture and Worsening Returns:
- Why does Roger disagree with Doug Leone that "we have moved from a boutique high margin business to a commoditised low margin industry"?
- Why does Roger believe we will see consistently worsening returns in venture?
- Is this influx of LP capital cyclical or is it here to stay?
2. The New LPs and The Broken Existing LP World:
- Why does Roger think the existing incentive structure for LPs is totally broken?
- Who are the most important new LPs entering the venture market?
- How do sovereigns and pension funds entering venture change the industry?
- Which players have capitalised on this new LP class best?
3. Where Does the Liquidity Come From:
- With the closed IPO window and lack of M&A, where will liquidity come from in the next 24 months?
- Would a Trump administration open M&A markets? Does Roger agree M&A markets are shut down?
- When does Roger believe IPO markets will open again? Will Databricks and Stripe go out in 2024?
- If Roger were to run a continuity fund strategy, how would he structure it? What would he do?
4. When to Sell and When to Hold:
- How does Roger advise managers on when to sell vs when to hold?
- How important is it for a new firm to have a company go public in the first five years?
- What are Roger's biggest lessons from selling The Trade Desk at a $2.5BN valuation?
- How does Roger think about managers thinking they should manage the public book of their portfolio for their LPs? What are the pros and cons?
5. Relationship to Money:
- Do rich investors make better investors? How does investing when you have a lot of cash already change your mindset around investing and exiting?
- How does Roger analyse his relationship to money today?
- What have been the single biggest needle movers in his wealth journey? How did it feel when he made a $6M bonus?
6. The Secrets to Parenthood and Marriage:
- What does it mean to be a great father for Roger?
- How does Roger think about bringing his children up with the same level of hunger and ambition, despite being brought up with such wealth?
- What are Roger's two biggest lessons on the secret to a great marriage?
20VC: From Selling 75% of Trade Republic for €600K to Raising $1.3BN at a $5.3BN Valuation, The Biggest Fundraising Lessons Having Raised $1.3BN From the Best in the World; Trade Republic CEO, Christian Hecker and Creandum General Partner Johan Brenner
Christian Hecker is the Founder and CEO of Trade Republic, the company making it easy and inexpensive for everyone with a smartphone to invest. To date, Christian has raised over $1.3BN for the company from the likes of Sequoia, Founders Fund, Accel and Creandum to name a few. Previously, Christian worked in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Investment Banking department.
Johan Brenner is a General Partner at Creandum. Johan has led Creandum’s investments in iZettle (acquired by PayPal for $2.2bn in 2018), Trade Republic, Klarna, Pleo, Neo4J, Vivino and more. Johan was previously a repeat entrepreneur, founding one of the first online brokers in Europe in 1997 (sold to E*TRADE in the US), then JobLine (sold to Monster), Bookatable (Michelin) and Tradera (Ebay).
In Today's Episode with Christian Hecker and Johan Brenner We Discuss:
1. Selling 75% of Trade Republic for €600,000:
- How did Christian come to sell 75% of Trade Republic for €600K?
- How did Johan and Creandum solve this challenge when they invested?
- What are some of Christian's biggest pieces of advice on cap table construction?
2. Raising $1.3BN From the Best Investors in the World:
- What are Christian's biggest fundraising lessons from raising $1.3BN from the best in the world?
- How did Doug Leone and Sequoia come to lead Trade Republic's round? What was the meeting with Doug like? What questions did he ask? How did it go?
- How important of a skill does Johan believe being a great fundraiser is for founders?
3. Scaling into Europe's Next Decacorn:
- What are the single biggest issues that arise when scaling so fast? What breaks first?
- Does CAC increase with time or decrease?
- Why did Christian decide to stop paid marketing on Google and Facebook and stop spending $100M+ there overnight?
- Why is Christian so bullish on influencer marketing? What works? What does not work?
4. Europe: A Hub for Innovation or a Retirement Home:
- Does Christian believe that young people in Europe work hard enough?
- What are the biggest challenges to scaling teams in Europe?
- Why does Johan believe the biggest challenge in Europe is the lack of exit markets?
- What can Europe do to improve and increase our chances of being successful?
20Growth: How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprise, How to Assess "Bets" in Growth; Which to Take and Which to Not with Gonto, Interim CMO @ Vercel
Martin Gontovnikas, a.k.a Gonto, is a software engineer at heart who moved to the “dark side” to focus on Marketing. With this career transition, he found a way to combine his 2 passions by applying his “engineering thinking” model to Marketing. He is now a B2B SaaS Advisor to Vercel and Airbyte among others and Co-Founder & GP of Hypergrowth Partners. Previously, he was SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0.
In Today's Episode with Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto) We Discuss:
1. From No Idea to Growth Leader:
- How Gonto made his way into the world of growth when it was not a thing?
- What does Gonto know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of growth?
- Why does Gonto believe product and marketing is more important than sales and marketing?
2. Growth: What, When and Who:
- What is growth? What is it not? What do people misunderstand most with growth?
- When is the right time to hire your first growth person?
- What is the right profile for the right first growth hire? Junior? Senior?
3. Mastering PLG and Enterprise:
- What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise?
- Why does Gonto believe that all PLG companies should start with 6-8 design partners?
- Is it possible to do enterprise and PLG at the same time?
- How does one provide enough value in a PLG motion to convert enterprise buyers?
4. Data vs Intuition: Art vs Science:
- Is growth more art or science?
- Why does Gonto believe qualitative data is more important than quantitative?
- How does Gonto think about psychology when selling and marketing? What do so few startups? understand about the psychology of their customers?
- How does Gonto approach messaging and what is truly great product marketing?
20VC: The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces, Why Rule of 40 and EBITDA Optimisation is BS, How Founders & VCs Should Approach Market Sizing and Outcome Scenario Planning and Why Europe is Failing with Vinted CEO, Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig
Thomas Plantenga is the CEO @ Vinted, one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the world with a valuation of $4.5BN. Prior to becoming CEO, Thomas worked with a range of organisations including Bookaboat, OLX, Sellit/Wallapop and FJLabs.
Alex Taussig is a General Partner @ Lightspeed and co-leads the fund's Consumer investment team. Alex's portfolio includes the likes of All Day Kitchens, Archive Resale, Daily Harvest, Faire, Found, Frubana, Keychain, Kikoff, Vinted, YaySay, and Zola.
In Today's Episode with Thomas Plantenga and Alex Taussig We Discuss:
1. The CEO Who Did Not Want to be CEO:
- How did Thomas come to be CEO @ Vinted? Why did he not want the job at first?
- What does Thomas know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. The Mechanics of the Fastest Growing Marketplace:
- What is the single most important metric for Vinted?
- How does Vinted determine what market to open next? What do they look for?
- How does Vinted think about depth vs breadth in each country?
- What is the AOV today? How does it vary by country?
- How long does it take for each country to be cash flow positive?
3. The Biggest BS in Startups: Rule of 40 and EBITDA:
- Why does Thomas think VC's obsession with "Rule of 40" is BS?
- Why does Thomas believe EBITDA optimization is BS and useless?
- What are the hardest elements of scaling a marketplace that no one knows?
4. The Bull, Bear and Investor Approach to Vinted:
- Alex, what was Lightspeed's pre and post-mortem when investing in Vinted?
- How does Lightspeed analyze TAM and market sizing when investing?
- What was Lightspeed's single biggest concern when investing in Vinted?
5. Europe: A Hub of Innovation or a Retirement Home:
- Does Thomas believe that European young people have a worse work ethic than those in the US?
- Is Thomas concerned by the state of regulation hampering innovation in Europe?
- What can be done to improve work ethic and the state of regulation today?
- Why is Alex and Lightspeed more bullish than ever on Europe today?
20VC: Doug Leone, Bill Ackman, Bill Gurley and Orlando Bravo on "Does Price Matter"; When to Pay Up vs When to Stay Disciplined, The Biggest Lessons on Price Discipline from 8 of the World's Best Investors
Doug Leone is the Global Managing Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s most renowned and successful venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Google, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Stripe, Zoom and many more.
Marcelo Claure is the Founder & CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm. He is the Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Bicycle Capital, a $500M Latin America-focused growth equity fund, and was appointed Chairman in Latin America of SHEIN, the global #1 on-demand fashion company in the world. Claure was also the CEO of SoftBank Group International where he launched SoftBank’s $8B Latin America Funds, and had direct oversight for SoftBank’s operating companies.
Geoff Lewis is a Founder and Managing Partner of Bedrock, one of the breakout and new venture firms of the last decade, famously in search of narrative violations. He serves or has served on the Board of Directors for companies including Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), Nubank (NYSE: NU), Epirus, and Vercel.
Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P., an SEC-registered investment adviser founded in 2003. Pershing Square is a concentrated research-intensive fundamental value investor in long and occasionally short investments in the public markets.
Martín Escobari is Co-President, Managing Director and Head of General Atlantic’s business in Latin America. Martín is Chairman of the firm’s Investment Committee and also serves on the Management and Portfolio Committees.
Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo. He led Thoma Bravo’s early entry into software buyouts and built the firm into one of the top private equity firms in the world.
In Today's Episode on Price Sensitivity We Discuss:
- Doug Leone: Why the attitude of "deploy, deploy, deploy will get so many in trouble"?
- Marcelo Claure: How to know when price matters and when it does not?
- Geoff Lewis: What is the right framework to assess price at an early stage?
- David Tisch: How does the importance of price change vis a vis company vs portfolio?
- Orlando Bravo: What have been Thoma Bravo's biggest lessons on price?
- Cyan Banister: Why does Cyan believe there will be a reckoning?
20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com
Erik Allebest is the CEO @ Chess.com, the #1 online chess service on the planet with more than 150+ million members and 15+ million games played each day. Erik has scaled the company to over 700 people and $100M+ in revenue with no venture funding.
In Today's Episode with Erik Allebest:
1. From Unemployable to $100M+ Revenue Founder:
- How did Erik make his way into the world of tech and startups?
- Was his MBA worth it? How does he advise others on whether to get one or not?
- What does Erik know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. Scaling to $100M Revenue with No Venture Funding:
- Why did no one want to invest in Chess.com in the early days?
- What did Erik do differently as a result of not raising any venture funding?
- What would Erik have done if he had money from the start?
- What are Erik's biggest pieces of advice to founders with funding today?
3. Hard Lessons Scaling to 150M Members:
- What are 1-2 of Erik's biggest lessons on how to scale users with zero budget?
- What customer acquisition worked? What did not work?
- How important was COVID and The Queen's Gambit to memberships and sign-ups?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Erik sees founders make on customer acquisition today?
4. Parenting, Marriage, Metrics and Money:
- Why does Erik not care about money or capitalism today?
- How has Erik's style of parenting changed over the years? What works? What does not?
- What does Erik believe is the secret to marriage? What have been his biggest lessons?
- Why does Erik hate metrics? If so, how does he run the business towards goals and output?
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20VC: The Biggest Misconceptions & Hardest Truths About Seed Investing Today; Why The Best Founders Don't Need You, Why Uncapped SAFEs Are Good, Why Reserves Are Bad, Why Signalling is BS, Why Price Doesn't Matter with David Tisch & Terrence Rohan
David Tisch is the Managing Partner of BoxGroup, one of the leading seed-stage investment firms of the last decade having invested in over 500 seed-stage startups, including Plaid, Ro, Ramp, PillPack, Amplitude, Stripe, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Flexport, Classpass, Airtable and more.
Terrence Rohan is the Managing Director @ Otherwise Fund, a fund that discretely empowers a network of today's top founders to make multi-stage venture investments. Terrence has invested in the likes of Figma, Hugging Face, Vanta, Notion and Robinhood to name a few.
In Today's Seed Investing Special We Discuss:
1. Is Seed Investing Now a Commoditised Asset Class:
- Why does Dave Tisch believe seed investing will remain the most inefficient market? What does that mean for the future of returns at seed?
- Why should you always pay up and be price-insensitive at seed rounds?
- Why does David believe that no one is great at seed investing?
- Why does David believe that you cannot index the seed market?
2. The Biggest BS Elements of Venture Capital:
- Signaling: Why does David believe that the theory of signaling is total BS? Why does Terrence disagree and think it is valid and common?
- Group Decision-Making: Why does Terrence believe that investing decisions should be made solo and groups merely encourage consensus decision-making?
- Reserves: Why does Terrence believe reserves hurt DPI and are not good? How does David respond given his growth fund?
- Venture Value Add: Why do David and Terrence think venture value add services platforms are BS and not worth it?
3. The World of LPs:
- What is the single biggest misalignment between VCs and LPs?
- What are David and Terrence's biggest pieces of advice for emerging managers today?
- Should LPs expect depressed returns from venture as the asset class commoditises?
20Product: Top Five Product Lessons from Creating Snapchat "Discover" and "Chat", How to Hire the Best Product Talent and Why Case Studies in Interviews are not Helpful & How AI Impacts the Future of Product Design with Will Wu, CTO @ Match Group
Will Wu is the CTO @ Match Group, the owner and operator of the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, and Hinge to name a few. Prior to Match, Will was VP of Product at Snap Inc. As the 35th employee, Will spearheaded the creation of Snapchat’s “Discover” content platform. He also led the creation and growth of the “Chat” messaging feature, which today is a primary Snapchat engagement driver that connects hundreds of millions of people each day.
In Today's Episode with Will Wu We Discuss:
1. The Journey to Snap CPO:
- How did Evan make his way into the world of product and come to meet Evan Spiegel?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from his time at Snap?
- What does Will know now that he wishes he had known when he started in product?
2. How to Hire Product Teams:
- How does Will structure the interview process for new product hires?
- What are the most telling questions of a candidate's product skills in hiring?
- What case studies and tests does Will do to assess a candidate?
- What are 1-2 of Will's biggest hiring mistakes in product?
3. How to Do Product Reviews Effectively:
- What are Will's biggest lessons on what it takes to do product reviews well?
- What are the biggest mistakes product leaders make in product reviews?
- How can teams drive focus in product reviews? What works? What does not?
4. Product: Art or Science?
- How does Will balance between gut/intuition and data in product decisions?
- Is simple always better in product design?
- What is human-centered design? How does it impact how Will approaches product?
20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K
Dave Kellogg is one of the OGs of Saas. Among his many accomplishments, Dave was the CMO of Business Objects where he helped scale the business from $30M to $1BN in revenue. Dave has also been a CEO twice, once scaling the business from $0 to $80M and the other business from $8M to $50M before selling it. Dave is also an advisor to some of the best including GainSight, Logickull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
In Today's Episode with Dave Kellogg We Discuss:
1. What are the Metrics That Matter:
- Why is CAC payback period such a flawed metric?
- What is CAC ratio? Why is it more effective than understanding payback?
- Why is gross revenue retention more important than net revenue retention?
- What are the single biggest mistakes that founders make when using metrics today?
2. How to Build and Scale the Best Sales Teams:
- Why should founders hire three sales reps at one time? What is the benefit?
- What are the three different types of sales calls all teams must have?
- What should all CEOs and Heads of Sales ask of their sales team in forecasting?
- What is the single biggest mistake most companies make in forecasting?
- How should a CEO/board member respond to a sales team that lets a deal slip to next quarter?
3. Are CFOs Buying New Tech and How to Win Renewals:
- Are CFOs open for business? How has the top down sales process changed in the last year?
- Why is the way that startups think about renewals completely broken?
- What are the three different types of customer success teams we have today?
- What is the core role of customer success? How can we incentivise them to sell more?
4. Mastering Product Marketing, Customer Profiles and Crossing the Chasm:
- How can we use product marketing to increase sales velocity?
- What is the single biggest risk in product marketing today?
- What does Dave mean when he says "an ICP starts as an aspiration and becomes a regression?"
20VC: How MIT Selects Venture Managers to Invest in | The Three Categories of Check MIT Writes Into Funds | How MIT Builds Their Venture Fund Portfolio | How MIT Approach Direct Investing | Why Being an LP Has Never Been Harder with Ryan Akkina @ MIT
Ryan Akkina is a member of the Global Investment Team at the MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo), which is responsible for managing MIT's endowment and pension plans. Ryan has invested in the likes of Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, a16z, Greenoaks and Initialized to name a few. Ryan also leads many of MITIMCo's direct co-investments including most notably into Coupang and Rippling. Prior to joining MITIMCo, Ryan was a consultant at McKinsey & Company.
In Today's Episode with Ryan Akkina We Discuss:
1. From Engineer to LP with MIT:
- How did Ryan make his way into the world of fund investing as an LP with MIT?
- Why did he turn down the chance to be a VC early in his career?
- What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he started at MIT?
2. The Manager Evaluation Process for MIT:
- What does Ryan look for most when investing in new managers?
- How important is track record when evaluating a new manager?
- What is the biggest mistake Ryan has made in picking a manager? What did he not see that he wish he had seen? How did that change his process?
3. How MIT Builds Their Portfolio:
- How does MIT construct their portfolio from private to public to everything in between?
- What are the three different types of check sizes that MIT writes when investing in new managers?
- What are the most common reasons why MIT will not re-up with a manager?
- What are the single biggest reasons why great managers turn bad?
4. MIT: The Direct Investor:
- Why does MIT see so much opportunity in direct investing?
- How does MIT approach the direct investing process? How do they approach underwriting themselves vs working with their managers in the process?
- How do MIT think about the right number of direct deals to make up their portfolio?
- How do they approach check sizing on a per-company direct investment?
- What has been Ryan's biggest direct investing mistake? How did that change his approach and mindset?
5. LP Markets Today and Where We Go From Here:
- Are LPs open for business today? What type of firms will not struggle? Which will?
- How does Ryan view liquidity windows today? When will M&A and IPO markets open?
- What would Ryan most like to change about the world of LPs?
- Why does Ryan believe the LP incentive structure in terms of compensation is broken?
20VC: Are the SEC Overreaching with its Approach to Crypto? Should Gensler Step Down? How do US Elections Impact Crypto Markets? How Did SBF and FTX Impact Crypto Long Term and more with Dave Ripley, CEO @ Kraken
Dave Ripley is the CEO @ Kraken, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, valued in 2022 at a whopping $10.8BN. Prior to Kraken, Dave was the Co-Founder of Glidera, a market-leading Blockchain technology company that Kraken acquired in 2016.
In Today's Episode with Dave Ripley:
1. From Boston Consulting Group to CEO of Kraken:
- How did Dave first make his way into the world of crypto?
- What are the single hardest elements of a CEO transition?
- What does Dave know now that he wishes he had known about CEOship?
2. What is the Usage for Crypto:
- Other than as a store of value, what application usage does crypto serve?
- Global payments are fine as is and are improving, why do they need crypto?
- Global remittance is served by Remote and Deel, why do they need crypto?
- No applications have been provided well, what really is the use case that makes sense?
3. Should Gensler Be Let Go and The SEC is Wrong:
- Why is the approach of the SEC completely flawed?
- Should Gensler be fired for his ineffectiveness?
- What is the right policy stance and approach to take from here?
20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse
Sean Murray is the CRO @ Greenhouse which is the fourth company Sean has scaled successfully into the enterprise. Sean's prior roles include revenue leadership positions at Saleloft (CRO), Xactly (VP Sales), and CEB, now Gartner (Head of MID Global Sales).
In Today's Episode with Sean Murray
1. The Origin Story: Is a Love of Sales Born:
- How did Sean first fall in love with Sales?
- What does Sean know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in sales?
- What is Sean's biggest advice to a young person entering the sales world today?
2. Sales has Changed; You Need to Change with It:
- Why do CMOs need to be good sellers and CROs need to be good marketers today?
- Have we seen the total blending of sales and marketing today?
- Should we get rid of all sales teams and just have content marketing teams?
3. How to Move into the Enterprise Successfully:
- What are the three biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into the enterprise?
- What easy wins can they do early in the sales process to enterprises to get a good start?
- How important are logos? Does social validity really work in enterprise?
- How should sales teams use discounting in enterprise sales most effectively?
- What is the right way for sales leaders and CROs to budget for enterprise?
- Is there a way to test enterprise without committing the company and a lot of resources?
4. How to Build the Best Sales Team Today:
- What is the right hiring process for all new sales hires?
- What are the questions you have to ask in the interviews?
- What do the case studies entail? What are signals of the best reps?
- What are the biggest mistakes teams make when hiring new sales reps?
- What have been Sean's biggest lessons on comp and negotiation with new reps?
20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer
Adam Fisher is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the most successful investors in Israel over the last two decades with seed investments in Fiverr, Wix, Melio, HiBob and more. Adam has now made over 60 investments and has had an incredible 23 successful exits. Adam has now been in venture for over 27 years having started his career at Jerusalem Venture Partners in 1996.
In Today's Episode with Adam Fisher We Discuss:
1. Lessons from 27 Years in Venture Capital:
- How did Adam first make his way into the world of venture straight out of college?
- Does Adam agree with Doug Leone that VC has changed from a "boutique, high margin business to a commoditized, low margin industry"?
- What does Adam know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture?
2. How to Pick Winners: 23 Exits in 60 Investments:
- To what extent does Adam think pattern recognition is a good thing? When is it bad?
- Does Adam prefer to invest in outsider founders approaching a problem with fresh eyes or insider founders who know the problem back to front?
- Why does Adam believe that "category creation is BS"?
- Why does Adam not like to invest in big, hugely ambitious markets? Why are smaller markets best?
3. The Deal: Mastering the Art of Negotiation and the Deal:
- How does Adam reflect on his own relationship to price?
- When doing an investment, does Adam think about who would do the next round?
- How important is ownership to Adam? Does he want it all on first check?
- Why does Adam not like to invest in hot AI rounds?
- What have been Adam's single biggest investing mistakes? How did it change his approach?
4. Mastering the Art of Portfolio Management:
- Why does Adam believe that it is impossible to know which of your portfolio will be the breakout winners early on?
- How does Adam approach reserve allocations with this in mind?
- How does Adam know when is the right time to sell a position?
- What does Adam believe was the biggest sin of the zero interest rate environment period?
20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo
Zaria Parvez is Duolingo’s Senior Global Social Media Manager where she is famed for scaling Duolingo's TikTok from 50K followers in September 2021 to 8M followers today. The Duolingo TikTok has 143 viral videos (view counts of 1M or higher) due to Zaria’s creativity. What started as a test-and-learn initiative has become Duolingo's most successful social buzz and word-of-mouth initiative to date – all because of Zaria's insights, instincts, and expertise.
In Today's Episode with Zaria Parvez:
1. From College Student to TikTok Star:
- How did Zaria make her way into the world of social media and Duolingo?
- When did Zaria realize the power of TikTok? What did she do as a first step?
- What does Zaria know now about growing on TikTok that she wishes she'd known when she started?
2. How to Create a Viral Video:
- What have been Zaria's biggest lessons in what it takes to create a viral video?
- What does Zaria mean when she says the best content is "medicine to candy"?
- What does the ideation process look like for new content ideas?
- How much budget should be set aside for new content?
- What does Zaria mean when she says Duolingo's TikTok needs to view like a "sitcom"?
3. How to Tie Success in Content Back to Hard Dollars:
- How is "success" in content measured at Duolingo?
- How fast does Zaria know if a video is a hit or not? What is the right cadence to post?
- How should companies determine whether content is ultimately successful or not?
- What is the single metric that Zaria is focused on today?
4. How to Build the Best Content Team:
- Why should companies not work with content agencies if they want the best results?
- Why does Zaria believe you have to hire troublemakers if you want success in content?
- What are the single biggest mistakes companies make w
20VC: Palantir CTO on The Broken Incentive Structure of How Governments Buy Defence, The Danger of Defence Spending at Historic Lows, How Elections and Wars Change Government Defence Buying & Why Budgets are Anti-Creative with Shyam Sankar
Shyam Sankar is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Palantir Technologies in addition to the Chairman of Ginkgo Bioworks. Shyam holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
In Today's Episode with Shyam Sankar:
1. Journey to the Top of Defence:
- How did Shyam make his way into the world of startups and get a role with Kevin Hartz at Xoom?
- How did seeing Shyam's parents lose everything impact his mindset and drive?
- What does Shyam know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?
2. How the World's Governments Buy Defence:
- What is the playbook for selling defence to different governments?
- Why is the way that governments purchase and procure so broken?
- If Shyam were head of the DOD, what would he change?
- Why does the DOD "need to pick winners"?
- Which governments are the best to work with? Which are the worst?
3. A World In Conflict: What Changes:
- How does conflict change the buying process and urgency for governments?
- How do elections change the buying cadence and process for different governments?
- Looking forward to 2024, how does Shyam predict the state of different global conflicts?
4. Hiring 101: You Have To Hire Artists:
- What have been Shyam's single biggest lessons on what it takes to hire the best of the best?
- Why does Shyam believe that hiring great people is like talent management in Hollywood?
- Why does Shyam believe talent should be "shielded from budgets"?
- What have been some of Shyam's biggest hiring mistakes? How did he learn from them?
20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Brian Halligan on Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to a $28BN Market Cap | The Best Series A Investment in Venture History & What Makes Sequoia so Successful?
Brian Halligan is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairperson of HubSpot. Brian led the business as CEO for 15 years from Day 1 to a $30BN public company with 7,000 employees. Among Brian numerous achievements, Brian is famed for coining the term "inbound marketing", he is a globally recognised author, he is also an incredible teacher having developed MIT’s popular Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures class. In addition to all of this, he is also the Co-Founder of Propeller Ventures, a $100 million climate tech venture fund, specializing in ocean innovation investments.
In Today's Episode with Brian Halligan We Discuss:
1. The Makings of a Generational Defining Entrepreneur:
- How did the first job as a paperboy lead to the founding of a $30BN company?
- How does Brian analyse the importance of luck vs skill in success?
- What is Brian running from? What is he running towards?
2. How to Be the Best Leader from 15 Years as CEO:
- What are Brian's biggest lessons in leadership from Elon Musk and Jensen Huang?
- How has Brian's leadership style changed over time?
- Why is the way leaders prioritise what they do today completely broken?
- How can leaders use quarterly goals to prioritise most effectively?
- Does Brian believe people are born CEOs? Are MBAs worth it for CEOs?
3. How to Build the Best Team:
- What is the #1 failure condition of teams today?
- Why does Brian believe most of your employees are mercenaries and not missionaries? Is that ok?
- Why do recovery plans never work? Once lost, can trust in teams be regained?
- Are people destined for certain stages of company growth?
- Why does culture always break when teams hit 100 people?
4. The Best Deal in VC History:
- Why did Hubspot sell 47% of the company to General Catalyst in their Series A?
- How did Sequoia come to lead their Series D?
- How much of a needle mover is it for companies and founders to have Sequoia invest?
- Why did Brian sell secondary to Sequoia in the Series D? Is it the most costly mistake he has made?
20VC Exclusive: Keith Rabois on Rejoining Khosla Ventures
Keith Rabois is a Managing Director @ Khosla Ventures and one of the most respected venture investors of the last decade. Keith has led investments in Stripe, Faire, Ramp, Affirm and many more. Just last week, Keith announced he would be rejoining Khosla from Founders Fund, where he spent an immensely successful 5 years as a General Partner. Prior to Founders Fund, Keith started his career at Khosla where he spent 6 years and led investments in DoorDash, Opendoor, Webflow and more.
In Today's Episode with Keith Rabois We Discuss:
1. The Decision to Rejoin Khosla Ventures:
- Why did Keith decide to rejoin Khosla Ventures from Founders Fund?
- What did Keith miss most that Khosla did, that Founders Fund did not?
- How did Delian take the news?
2. Comparing Two Great Firms: Founders Fund vs Khosla Ventures:
- Investing Style: How does Keith compare the investing styles when analyzing FF and KV?
- Price Discipline: Which firm is more price-disciplined? Does price discipline even matter?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Keith has made on price? How did it change how he invests?
- Founder Type: What sort of founder would choose KV? What founder would choose FF?
- How did the depth & quality of investment decision-making compare between KV and FF?
3. What It Takes To Win in Venture in 2024:
- Liquidity: What have been Keith's biggest lessons on when is the right time to sell positions?
- Capital Planning: What have been Keith's biggest lessons on the most effective use of reserves?
- Why does Keith believe if you do not lose some deals as an investor, you are not competing for the right companies?
- Khosla Ventures recently raised $3BN. How important is the ability to support companies across their lifetime in 2024 vs stage specific?
4. Where is The Best Place to Invest:
- Why does Keith think seed is the best place to be investing today?
- Why despite the better risk/reward profile, does Keith think Series A is not the best place to invest?
- Does Keith believe we will see the return of growth investing in 2024?
- What does Keith predict for the M&A market in 2024? Did Figma kill all activity?
- When will the IPO windows open again? Why would Stripe go out this year?
5. Keith Rabois: AMA:
- Why did Keith not want to start his own fund? Will he ever?
- What have been Keith's biggest lessons from working with Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel?
- What were Keith's biggest lessons from Roelof Botha on what it takes to be an effective board member?
- How does Keith think about bitcoin in 2024?
20VC: Did Figma Kill M&A Markets in 2024, The Three Biggest Mistakes Made in Growth Investing, The Three Requirements Companies Need to Go Public in 2024 with Ed Sim and Jamin Ball
Jamin Ball is a Partner @ Altimeter Capital where he sits on the board of Airbyte, Clickhouse, dbt Labs, Prisma, Tabular. Jamin has also led investments in Deel, MotherDuck, Personio and Starburst. Prior to Altimeter, Jamin spent 5 years at Redpoint where he led investments in Workato, Monte Carlo, Cityblock Health, Root Insurance.
Ed Sim is one of the best seed round investors in venture as the Founder and Managing Partner @ Boldstart, Ed focuses specifically on developer, infra and SaaS at pre-seed and seed round. Over the last decade, Ed has backed some of the best including Snyk, BigID, Kustomer, Front and Superhuman.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1. How to Invest Successfully in 2024:
- What are the three biggest mistakes growth investors can make in 2024?
- Why should founders not start a platform company?
- What were Jamin and Ed's biggest mistakes from the ZIRP era?
- How does Jamin justify paying an $8BN price for Hopin? What were his lessons?
2. The M&A Markets in 2024:
- Did Figma kill the M&A markets for 2024? What should we expect in M&A?
- Why will private companies buying private companies be a massive segment in 2024?
- What are Ed and Jamin's biggest tips to founders considering selling their company in 2024?
3. When Will IPOs Come Back:
- What will be the catalyst to the opening of the IPO markets?
- Will Stripe and Databricks go public in 2024? What others should we expect?
- What are the three requirements for a company to go public in 2024?
4. Firesales: Investors Need Cashback:
- Why does Ed believe now is the time in the cycle where late-stage investors want cash back to distribute back to their LPs or to recycle?
- What should we expect to see in terms of acqui-hires and firesales?
- What are the different incentives when comparing founders vs early stage VCs vs late stage VCs when it comes to acquisitions?
20VC Crypto Roundtable: How Will US Elections Impact Crypto? Why Will Trump Lean Into Crypto in 2024? Should FTX Investors Have Known About SBF? Will Opensea Ever Be Worth $13BN Again? Will NFTs Come Back with Kyle Samani and Nick Tomaino
Nick Tomaino is the Founder and General Partner @ 1confirmation, one of the leading seed firms fueling the decentralization of the web and society. The fund started with $26M and the firm now has over $1B in assets under management. Nick is famed for being one of the first investors in OpenSea.
Kyle Samani is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Multicoin Capital, one of the leading crypto native funds of the last decade with positions in Solana, FTX, Fractal, and Helium to name a few.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1. Moving Away from a Shitcoin Casino:
- What will it take for crypto to move away from being shitcoin casino?
- Why does Nick believe that "crypto has been a free for all and greed got the better of people"?
- Why does Nick believe that crypto shilling will reduce the amount of violence in the world?
2. FTX: The Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Plain sight:
- How does Kyle reflect on SBF and FTX today? Should he have known it was a fraud?
- How did Nick see so far ahead of time that SBF was not genuine?
- What are the most striking lessons when comparing Coinbase's Superbowl advert to FTX's?
3. Where Politics and Crypto Collide:
- SBF was one of the largest donors to Biden, what does this say about the rise of "crony capitalism"?
- What candidates running in the election will be best for crypto?
- Why will Trump win the election and be the first President to rule from a prison cell?
- Why is the strategy pursued by Gensler and the SEC so flawed?
4. The Great NFT Comeback, The Crypto IPO Season:
- What will be the next crypto company to IPO? When?
- When will NFTs come back? What will cause this?
- Will Opensea ever be worth $13BN again? What is their future?
20VC: Predictions for 2024: What Happens to Early Stage VC Funding, Do a Load of Venture Funds Die, What do LPs Do in 2024, Does Figma Kill the M&A Market, Will IPOs Comeback & What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups with Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr
Joining Harry in the hot seat today is Jason Lemkin, Founder @ SaaStr and one of the OG SaaS investors of the last decade. The discussion today is broken into two segments:
2023: A Year in Review:
- Breakout company
- Best early-stage fund
- Best late-stage fund
- Most surprising event
- Founder of the Year
2024: Predictions: What is to Come:
- Does the IPO window open?
- Do Stripe, Databricks, and more go public?
- What happens to early-stage venture markets?
- Does the growth stage come roaring back?
- What happens to the M&A market?
- How does Trump change the startup ecosystem?
- Will a generation of young VCs be washed out the system?
- Will a ton of venture firms shut down?
20VC: From a $1.1M Acquisition to $1.4BN in Revenues; The Meteoric Rise of Hoka Running with Deckers CEO, Dave Powers
Dave Powers serves as President and CEO of Deckers Brands, a global footwear and apparel company where he focuses on the company’s five high-performing brands: UGG®, Teva®, Sanuk®, HOKA One One® and Koolaburra®. Prior to Deckers, he held executive leadership roles at Converse and Timberland, where he led worldwide retail merchandising, marketing, visual and store design as well as the creation of a sustainable line of footwear and apparel.
In Today's Episode with Dave Powers:
1. The Unlikely CEO of a Global Footwear Company:
- How did Dave make his way into the world of consumer and fashion from the ground up?
- Why did Dave never think he was the type of person to be a CEO?
- What does Dave know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?
2. From $1.1M Acquisition to $1.4BN Revenues: The Hoka Story:
- Why did Deckers acquire Hoka for $1.1M? What did they see in this, at the time, futuristic running shoe that no one else saw?
- Was the growth of Hoka linear or were there needle-moving moments that propelled the brand?
- What did they do so right that led to their success?
- What would Dave have done differently in the Hoka journey if he had his time again?
3. From $14.7BN Acquisition to Oprah's Favourite: The UGG Journey:
- How much of a needle mover was it for UGG when Oprah added it to her list of favourite items?
- Why did UGG go through a tough period? What did they do wrong?
- What does it take to resurrect a brand? How can they bring UGG back to life and make it cool?
4. From Abercrombie to LVMH: An Analysis of the Industry:
- How does Dave analyse the rise and fall of Abercrombie and Hollister? Where did it go wrong?
- What does Dave believe LVMH are the best in the world at? What does he learn from them?
- How important is it for consumer companies to have a hero product?
- How can consumer companies scale to mass markets without losing their core audience?
20VC Roundtable: Spotify, Adobe & Linkedin CPOs on How AI Changes The Future of Product, Why AI is Now the Product, How TikTok Changed Product, Why Cost is the Biggest Barrier to LLM Usage & Why Incumbents Can Adopt AI Faster Than Any Prior Innovation Cyc
Gustav Söderström is the Co-President, CPO & CTO at Spotify. Gustav has been instrumental in taking Spotify from a 30-person operation in Sweden when he joined to being the global leader of the space.
Scott Belsky is Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Scott oversees all of product and engineering for Creative Cloud, as well as design for Adobe.
Tomer Cohen is the Chief Product Officer @ Linkedin where he is responsible for setting and executing the global product strategy at LinkedIn.
In Today's Episode on How AI Changes The Future of Product and Design We Discuss:
1. Why AI Is Now the Product that UI Serves:
- Why does Gustav believe that AI is now the product?
- How has the importance of UI changed with the rise of AI?
- How did TikTok change the product paradigm over the last few years?
2. What Matters More Models or Data:
- What is more important the size of the model or the amount of data a company has?
- Will companies use many models at the same time?
- Why will companies using many models at once create a huge opportunity for startups?
- Will every company have their own model? What will be the decision-making framework of whether to have your own model or leverage another?
- How does the rise of AI change how companies approach data acquisition, collection and cleaning?
3. The Workforce Needs to Change with AI:
- How do product leaders and teams need to change in an AI-first world?
- What do designers need to do to stay up to date in an AI-first world?
- What does it mean to be good at prompting? How can people get good at prompting?
- Why will AI kill companies that charge by the hour?
- Why will seat pricing die in a world of AI? What will be the business model for AI?
4. Incumbents vs Startups: Who Wins:
- Do incumbents win in a world of AI or do startups?
- Why is AI primed for incumbents to win and move fast in a way they could not in prior technology cycles?
- What are the biggest hurdles and challenges incumbents have to face that startups do not?
- What are the biggest barriers that startups have to win in a world of AI that incumbents do not have?
20VC: Why Now is the Best Time to Invest in Emerging Managers, Biggest Mistake Emerging Managers Make When Fundraising & Investing Lessons from Investing $1.5BN Per Year and Being Early Investors in Thrive, a16z and Founders Fund with Peter Lacaillade
Peter Lacaillade is a Managing Director @ SCS Financial Services where he leads its private investment program where he oversees the firm’s activities in private equity, opportunistic credit and private real assets. Peter has been an early backer of Thrive, Founders Fund, a16z, Greenoaks and 20VC. Before SCS, Peter was an Associate at HarbourVest Partners in its Secondary Group where he analyzed venture capital, growth equity and buyout investments.
In Today's Episode with Peter Lacaillade We Discuss:
1. Becoming One of the Great LPs in Venture:
- How did Peter make his way into the world of fund investing as an LP?
- What does Peter know now that he wishes he had known when he started as an LP?
- Why does Peter believe now is the best time to be investing in newer, emerging managers?
2. How to Pick the Best Venture Managers:
- What are the commonalities in the best VCs Peter has invested in?
- How important is track record for Peter when evaluating managers?
- What mistakes has Peter made when it comes to manager selection? What did he learn?
- How do the best managers build relationships with their LPs?
3. Building a Portfolio That Can 5x:
- In a venture fund portfolio, what is the distribution between those that outperform, perform as planned and then underperform?
- How does Peter invest in both large franchises and emerging managers with a barbell approach? How much in established franchises and how much in emerging managers?
- Are managers actively marking down their portfolios in the last 18 months? Who has been the best at this and who has been the worst? How much should portfolios be marked down?
- How does Peter evaluate the compression of deployment timelines we saw in the last 18 months?
4. A Breakdown of the LP Landscape:
- Family Offices: What are the biggest dangers of having family offices as LPs? Why do multi-family offices tend to be better?
- Endowments: Are they really as stable as people think they are? What separates a good vs great endowment? Who stands out?
- Fund of Funds: Why does Peter think fund of funds deserve more credit? How should managers think about working with FoFs most effectively?
- What is the right level of concentration managers should have between these different LP profiles?
- What are the biggest mistakes emerging managers make when approaching LPs?
20VC: Cotopaxi: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling $150M in Revenues and Challenging Patagonia, Fundraising Lessons from 100+ Rejections & What Founders Do Not Understand About VC with Davis Smith, Founder @ Cotopaxi
Davis Smith is the Founder and Chairman of Cotopaxi, an outdoor brand with a humanitarian mission. The company has assisted over 4 million people living in poverty. The company has been profitable for the last 4 years and is expected to do $160M in revenue in 2023, up from $55M just two years before. In April 2023, Davis resigned after 10 years as CEO to lead a mission for his church in Brazil for three years. Davis is an EY Entrepreneur of the Year and was recognized as Utah’s Businessperson of the Year in 2022. He is an adventurer who has floated the Amazon on a self-made raft, kayaked from Cuba to Florida, and explored North Korea.
In Today's Episode with Davis Smith We Discuss:
1. From Selling $6M Worth of Pool Tables to the Amazon of Brazil to Founding Cotopaxi:
- How did Davis scale a pool table business to $6M in revenue?
- What were Davis' biggest takeaways from building the Amazon of Brazil, raising millions in VC funding and the business failing?
- How did depression and 36 hours on a sofa lead to the a-ha moment for Cotopaxi?
2. The Billion Dollar Company, Rejected by 100 Investors:
- How was the early fundraising journey for Davis with Cotopaxi? Why did so many investors say no?
- What was the best VC meeting he has ever had? Why do women understand Cotopaxi better?
- What does Davis believe are the biggest misalignments between VCs and Founders?
- Why does Davis believe we need a new type of financial product to fund long term projects?
- What are the biggest elements of fundraising that Davis believes founders do not understand?
3. Scaling Cotopaxi to $150M in Revenue:
- What are Davis' biggest lessons on what works and what does not from scaling Cotopaxi to $150M in revenue?
- Why did Davis not lay anyone off but decide everyone should take a pay cut instead? How did that go down?
- Why does letting people leave work earlier lead to better talent wanting to join your company?
- Why does Davis believe that you absolutely can build a huge business with balance in your life?
4. Life, Parenting, Marriage:
- Why does Davis believe that so many entrepreneurs chase the wrong thing? What do they chase? What should they be chasing instead?
- How does Davis analyze his relationship to money today? Does it make you happy?
- What does great parenting mean to Davis? How has that changed over time?
- How does marriage change when comparing pre-kids and post-kids?
- Was Davis nervous about becoming a father for the first time at the age of 24?
20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft
Steve Goldberg is the Chief Revenue Officer at Salesloft, the sales engagement platform that was acquired by Vista in 2022 for $2.3BN. Prior to Salesloft, Steve was Group Vice President of Enterprise at Yext and before that was a Senior VP @ InsideSales.com.
In Today's Episode with Steve Goldberg:
1. Becoming a Sales Leader:
- When did Steve first fall in love with sales?
- Why does Steve believe sales is more psychology than anything else? What can sales reps do to master the psychology of their prospects?
- What does Steve know now about sales that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
2. How to Close Prospects Faster Than Ever:
- How does Steve build relationships with prospects very fast? What questions does he ask?
- How does Steve know if he is really speaking to a buyer? What are the signals?
- How does Steve advise sales reps on getting multiple relationships within an account to prevent the potential of losing your champion?
- How does Steve feel about discounting? When is the right time to do it?
3. How To Do The Best Deal Reviews:
- What makes good vs great deal reviews? Who is invited? Who is not?
- Who sets the agenda? Who is responsible for what?
- How do deal reviews change throughout the quarter and throughout the year?
- Is a deal slipping into the next quarter an acceptable excuse for a sales rep to give?
4. How to Ensure Renewals in a World When They are Not Guaranteed:
- Have all budgets centralized back to the control of the CFO?
- Are people right to say that no CFOs are buying new technology today?
- What is the best way to show to customers the value you provide?
- Why does Steve believe revenue operations is the most valuable role within an org?
20VC: Why Founders Should Take as Many VC Meetings as Possible, Should Founders Meet Associates, How to Get Intros to the Best VCs, How To Extract the Most Value From Your Investors, Why Post IPO Operators Are the Best Angels with Sam Corcos @ Levels
Sam Corcos is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Levels, the company helping you see how food affects your health with data from biosensors like continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). To date, Sam has raised over $89M for Levels from the likes of a16z (Jeff Jordan sits on his board), Founder Collective, Breyer Capital and Shrug Capital to name a few. Prior to Levels, Sam founded two prior companies, CarDash; a Y Combinator company that makes automotive repair and maintenance convenient. Before Cardash, Sam founded, Sightline Maps, an intuitive platform for 3D printing and visualizing topographical maps, marketed primarily towards the U.S. military.
In Today's Episode with Sam Corcos:
1. The Founding Moment:
- What was the a-ha moment for Sam with the founding Levels?
- What were the big mistakes Sam made with prior companies that he did not take with him to Levels?
- What does Sam know now that he wishes he had known when he started Levels?
2. How to Fundraise Like a Pro:
- Why does Sam believe that founders should take as many meetings with VCs as possible?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when meeting investors?
- Should founders meet with associates in the fundraising process?
- What does Sam mean when he says, "you have to create theater" when pitching?
3. How to Extract the Most Value from Your Investors:
- What have been Sam's biggest lessons on how to put your investors to work?
- What is the right and most strategic way to ask investors for specific help?
- How can founders create a competitive environment where VCs are competing to help?
- Which investors have been the most helpful?
- Why are post-IPO operators the best angels to have as investors?
- How has the a16z platform team been such a needle mover?
4. How to Find Your Partner and Master Parenting:
- What does Sam mean when he says he had a "one pager" in what he wanted in a partner?
- What was in the one-pager? How did dates respond?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make when dating?
- What is Sam most nervous about on becoming a parent?
- How does Sam think having a child will impact his marriage?
20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara
Sanjit Biswas is the Founder and CEO @ Samsara, allowing businesses that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data. Over the last 8 years, Sanjit has scaled Samsara to $1BN in ARR and a public company with tens of thousands of customers. Before Samsara, Sanjit was the CEO and co-founder of Meraki, one of the most successful networking companies of the past decade. Sanjit grew Meraki from his Ph.D. research into a complete enterprise networking portfolio. Meraki's sales doubled every year from inception and in 2012, Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion. Huge thanks to Doug Leone for some fantastic question suggestions pre this episode.
In Today's Episode With Sanjit Biswas We Discuss:
1. From Founding to $1BN in ARR in 8 Years:
- What was the founding a-ha moment for Sanjit with Samsara?
- Sanjit sold his prior company Meraki for $1.2BN, what worked with Meraki that Sanjit took with him to Samsara? What did not work that he left behind?
- What does Sanjit know now that he wishes he had known when he started Samsara?
2. The Man Who Found Product Market Fit Time and Time Again:
- What is the one single moment that Sanjit believes you know you have product market fit?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when chasing product market fit?
- How does being a bootstrapped company change how a company approaches chasing PMF?
3. Mastering a Multi-Product Company:
- How do you know when it is the right time to launch a second product?
- Does the second product have to make the first product better?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies make when going multi-product?
4. The Art of Great CEOship:
- Does Sanjit believe that the best CEOs are the best capital allocators?
- What has been the single best and single worst capital allocation decision in Samsara's journey?
- What are the biggest mistakes Sanjit has made in leadership? How did he learn and grow from them?
20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp
Geoff Charles is the VP of Product at Ramp, leading the product management, operations, and support teams. Prior to Ramp, Geoff helped spin off Mission Lane and scale credit products to millions of consumers. He started his career advising Fortune 100 financial services companies.
In Today's Episode with Geoff Charles We Discuss:
1. How to Become a Product Leader:
- How did Geoff make his way into the world of product?
- What are the single most important skills for product people to learn early?
- What are the biggest mistakes that product people make early in their career?
2. When and Who to Hire for the First Product Team:
- When is the right time to hire your first product people outside of founding team?
- Why are the best product teams in the early days professional services teams?
- What is more important; the person has stage or sector experience, when joining?
- Should you hire senior product people or junior product people as the first hires?
3. How to Increase Velocity Using Sprints:
- How does Geoff and Ramp use two-week sprints to have insane product velocity?
- How are they structured? How are goals set? Who is included?
- What makes a good vs a bad sprint? How is accountability tied to sprints?
- When do two-week sprints no longer become possible? What happens then?
4. Going Multi-Product, Will Incumbents Kill You and Product Re-Usability:
- When is the right time to add a second product?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies make when going multi-product?
- Why is it unlikely that an incumbent is the one to kill you? What competitor should worry you?
- What does Geoff mean when he speaks of "product re-usability"? Why is it crucial to velocity?
20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche
Tooey Courtemanche, Jr. is the Founder, CEO, President, and Chairman of the Board of Procore. He founded Procore in 2002 with a mission to connect everyone in construction on a global platform. After 13 years of business, the company had just $9.6M in revenue, 8 years after that they have over $890M in revenue. Under his leadership, Procore has grown to become a leading global provider of construction management software, connecting over 2 million users across 150+ countries. Today Procore trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PCOR. Huge thanks to Brian @ Bessemer and Will @ Iconiq for some amazing question suggestions today.
In Today's Episode with Tooey Courtemanche:
1. The Founding of a $8.5BN Company:
- How did Tooey's wife, Hilary and their house-building lead to the idea for Procore?
- What does Tooey know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
- Did Tooey always know he would be a success? What was the moment of most doubt?
2. The 13-Year Journey to $9.6M in Revenue:
- Why did it take so long to hit the $10M revenue mark? What changed in 2015?
- What is Tooey's biggest advice to founders and investors who face market timing risk?
- Why was Tooey laughed out of VC offices in 2008? What are his biggest pieces of advice to founders raising from VCs today?
- How does Tooey advise founders on the balance between vision and sticking to a mission vs realising when it is not working and giving up?
3. The Art of Great CEOship:
- What advice did Tobi @ Shopify give Tooey on being a great CEO? How did it impact his approach?
- What are the biggest differences between the reality of being a CEO and the Instagram version?
- What have been Tooey's biggest lessons on hiring? Why does hiring smart, ambitious but not humble people never work?
- Why does Tooey believe the idea of "becoming an entrepreneur" to be BS?
4. Parenting, Money and Marriage:
- Why does Tooey believe great parenting is like great CEOship?
- How does one bring up children to be ambitious and humble in a very privileged upbringing?
- What are the secrets to being there as a husband while also being a rockstar CEO?
- How does Tooey reflect on his own relationship to money and wealth today?
20VC: HelloFresh CEO on Why When You Raise VC You Only Have Two Options, Why Your IPO Price is Irrelevant, Why Timing is So Important in Going Public & Why D2C is Not Dead with Dominik Richter
Dominik Richter is the Founder & CEO @ HelloFresh, one of the largest direct-to-consumer businesses of the last decade and the #1 recipe box delivery service. Fun fact, two of the three biggest cooking facilities in North America are HelloFresh facilities with the third being Disney World Orlando. Dominik has made over 40 angel investments in the EU and the US.
In Today's Episode with Dominik Richter We Discuss:
1. The Founding of One of the Largest D2C Companies:
- How did Diminik's dreams of being a footballer translate to founding HelloFresh?
- What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
- Why does Dominik respect the brands that large banks have built?
2. To Raise or Not to Raise:
- Why does Dominik believe when you raise VC, you either have to sell or go public?
- What are the single biggest differences between raising in the US vs Europe?
- What are Dominik's biggest pieces of advice to founders raising today?
- Why does Dominik believe so many of the D2C companies should not have raised venture funding?
3. The IPO: When, How and Why:
- Why did Dominik decide to IPO the business so early?
- Why does Dominik believe that the first-day trading price is irrelevant?
- Why does Dominik believe that timing is so important when going public?
- What are the biggest pros and cons of being public?
4. The Rise and Fall of D2C:
- D2C has been crushed lately, why? Is this the end of D2C as a category?
- Is D2C an investable category for VC? HelloFresh is one of the biggest and $2.5BN market cap?
- What have been the best and worst resource allocations Dominik has made?
- Do recessions help or hurt recipe box businesses?
20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane
Guillaume Cabane is a growth advisor to high-growth SaaS Startups, including Ramp, Spot, Airbyte, G2, Gorgias, Metadata, Madkudu, and others. Guillaume held VP of Growth roles at Drift, Segment, and other successful startups, where he helped them grow from ~50 to 300. Prior, Guillaume spent 6 years at Apple.
In Today's Episode with Guillaume Cabane We Discuss:
1. Entry into Growth:
- How did Guillaume make his way into the world of growth?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from him time at Segment where he 4x revenue?
- What does Guillaume know now that he wishes he had known when he entered growth?
2. Enterprise vs SMB & CAC/LTV:
- Why does Guillaume think it is harder to go enterprise down than SMB up?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies make when scaling into enterprise?
- What are the biggest mistakes startups make with product-led-growth motions?
- Why does Guillaume believe it is impossible to analyse CAC/LTV in early companies?
3. Activation, Engagement and KPI Setting:
- What are the biggest mistakes companies and teams make in activation?
- What can growth and marketing teams do to guarantee engagement in prospects?
- Why are all KPIs not tied to revenue BS?
4. Hiring the Growth Team:
- What are the core characteristics of great growth hires?
- How quickly does it become apparent when you have made a bad growth hire?
- Why do founders make the best profiles when hiring your first growth hire?
- What are the biggest mistakes Guillaume has made when hiring for growth?
5. Why Growth is Like Venture:
- What is the secret to building a great growth portfolio?
- Why is it impossible to scale to $50M ARR with only one good channel?
- What is the right way to spread resources across channels?
- When is the right time to add new channels and diversify?
20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?
Keith Rabois is a General Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the world's best venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, SpaceX, Anduril, Tesla and many more. For the last 23 years straight, Keith has either invested in or founded a $BN company. Keith is also the Co-Founder and CEO @ Openstore, the company that will buy or run your Shopify business.
Mike Shebat is the Founder and CEO @ Traba, the company providing industrial staffing when and where you need it. To date, Mike has raised $49M with Traba from some of the best including Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1. What it Takes to Build a Great:
- Why does Mike expect everyone to work in office 12 hours per day, 4 days per week?
- At what point does an extra hour of work not lead to more output?
- What are the expectations in terms of emails, out of office, the weekends?
- Keith, from the 23 BN companies you have worked with, is this insane work ethic aligned to all of them? Which had it? What did not?
- What core components of PayPal's work ethic made it so strong? What does Keith mean when he says Linkedin could and should have been 5x bigger?
2. The Hiring Process for the Swat Team:
- What does the hiring process look like for this type of work environment?
- What are the signs that someone is really aligned to it vs faking it for the interview process?
- What have been Keith's biggest lessons on both compensation and title in the hiring process?
- Why does Keith believe that culture is like concrete? What are the biggest mistakes he has made on culture and what would he have done differently?
3. First-Time Founders, Innate Entrepreneurs & Europe's Failing:
- Does Keith agree the best founders always show signs of early entrepreneurship in their teens?
- Why does Keith prefer first-time founders to serial entrepreneurs? Why are they better?
- Why does Keith believe that Europe has not created a $100BN company since 1990?
4. Remote Work, Network Effects and Baseball:
- Why does Keith believe being great in venture is like baseball?
- Why does Keith and Founders Fund not invest in remote teams? How does he explain Gitlab?
- Why does Keith believe Airbnb has the best network effect he has ever seen?
20VC: AI's Biggest Questions: The Commoditisation of LLMs, Open vs Closed: Who Wins, Model Size vs Data Quality, Why Google are Vulnerable and Apple are the Dark Horse
Des Traynor is a Co-Founder of Intercom, and has built and led many teams within the company, including Product, Marketing, and Customer Support.
Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science. He was the founding Director of FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science.
Emad Mostaque is the Co-Founder and CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. Stability are building the foundation to activate humanity’s potential.
Jeff Seibert is the Founder & CEO @ Digits, building the future of AI-powered accounting. Digits have raised funding from the likes of Peter Fenton @ Benchmark and 20VC.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, just announced last week, Theory is a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in early-stage companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses.
Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation.
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
- Foundational Models: Analysis
- Will foundational models become commoditized?
- Who are the major players? What are their different strengths?
- Who will win? Who will lose?
- How important is the size of the model vs the quality of the data?
2. Open vs Closed:
- What are the biggest pros and cons of an open ecosystem for LLMs?
- Why is it naive to think that open-source LLMs will prevail?
- What will determine which method wins?
3. An Analysis of the Incumbents:
- Why is Google the most vulnerable? What can they do to regain ground?
- Why is Apple the sleeping giant? How could they win the next wave of AI?
- What should Amazon do today to compete with Microsoft?
4. The Future: Doom and Gloom?
- Why is it ridiculous to assume AI systems want to dominate?
- Why will AI create a renaissance of creativity and human freedom?
- What role should regulation play in the advancement and progression of AI?
20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits
Jeff Seibert is the Founder & CEO @ Digits, building the future of AI-powered accounting. Digits have raised funding from the likes of Peter Fenton @ Benchmark and 20VC. Jeff previously served as Twitter's Head of Consumer Product, a position he came to following the acquisition of his prior company, Crashlytics. Today, Crashlytics is the de-facto mobile crash reporting solution for iOS and Android and runs on over 6 Billion monthly active smartphones worldwide.
In Today's Episode with Jeff Seibert We Discuss:
1. The Art of the Pivot:
- What are Jeff's biggest pieces of advice to founders pivoting?
- How do you know when you have enough data to make the decision to pivot?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when pivoting?
2. AI: Who Wins and Who Loses:
- Why does Jeff believe that OpenAI will transition into an infrastructure play?
- What are the most significant challenges OpenAI will face moving forward?
- Why does Jeff believe that Apple are best positioned to win in an AI world?
- Why does Jeff believe that Google are the most vulnerable incumbent?
- What would Jeff do if he was CEO of Google?
3. LLMs: What Happens Now:
- Will we see the commoditization of LLMs?
- What are the biggest misconceptions people have on training and fine-tuning LLMs?
- Will we see LLMs increasingly specialise to vertical-specific models or will they remain horizontal?
- What is the difference between a thick and a thin wrapper when building on top of LLMs?
4. Angel Portfolio in Review:
- How many angel checks has Jeff written? How many failed? How many home runs?
- Does Jeff believe that company valuations are being kept artificially high?
- How did Jeff make 200x selling through the secondary market for a now failing company?
- What are Jeff's three biggest pieces of advice for angels today?
20VC: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | What Makes Truly Great Leaders and How They Give Feedback | Do VCs Really Add Value; Lessons from Hard Fundraises with Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder @ Eight Sleep
Matteo Franceschetti is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Eight Sleep, a company dedicated to fueling human potential through optimal sleep. To date, Matteo has raised over $160M for the business from the likes of Founders Fund, Ryan Petersen, Naval Ravikant, Kevin Hart, AROD and many more.
In Todays Episode with Matteo Franceschetti We Discuss:
1. Why Did Sleep Need "Solving":
- Why did Matteo decide he wanted to spend decades of his life-solving sleep?
- If Matteo has known how hard it was going to be, would he do it again?
- What does Matteo know now that he wishes he had known at the start of the journey?
2. Hiring the Best Team:
- What is Matteo's playbook for hiring?
- What are the five questions that Matteo asks in every interview?
- What are big red flags? What are strong signals of great talent?
- If people have been let go in a RIFF, is that a concern?
- How does Matteo construct hiring panels? What vote count is enough for an approved hire?
- What are Matteo's biggest lessons on title and pay a new hire receives?
- What are some of Matteo's biggest lessons when it comes to firing people?
3. Funding the Business:
- What was the hardest round to raise? Why?
- Are investors justified in their skepticism of hardware?
- What are the single biggest pieces of advice Matteo would give to founders on raising?
- How impactful has it been having Keith Rabois and Founders Fund as an investor?
- Do VCs really add value?
4. Mastering Health, Sleep and Nutrition:
- How does your diet impact the quality of sleep you have?
- How does exercise and the time of exercise impact your sleep?
- What are some common rules on sleep that are BS and myths?
- What are some of the most non-obvious truths about getting great sleep?
20VC Will Seed Pricing Remain High | Where is the Funding Crunch? | Three Core Elements Required to Raise a Series B/C | Why AI is Like the Lottery Today | Why Now is the Best Time to be Investing in Crypto | Why Investors Do Not Want to Reprice Companies
Rebecca Kaden is a Managing Partner @ Union Square Ventures, one of the leading early-stage firms of the last decade with investments in Twitter, Twilio, Coinbase and many more.
Nicole Quinn is a General Partner @ Lightspeed where she has led investments or sits on the board of Calm, Cameo and LunchClub to name a few.
Eurie Kim is a Managing Partner @ Forerunner Ventures, the leading early-stage consumer fund. Eurie has led investments and sits on the board of Oura, The Farmers Dog, Curology and more.
In Today's Roundtable We Discuss:
1. Seed Rounds:
- Is it even possible for traditional seed funds to play in a world of multi-stage funds investing so aggressively at the seed stage?
- Is seed immune to the macro environment? Will seed pricing remain as high as ever?
- What advice does the team have for seed founders approaching a Series A? What do they need?
2. Series A:
- How is the Series A market looking today? Is there a crunch at the Series A?
- To what extent are valuations compressed at the Series A?
- What 3 core elements do companies at the A stage, looking for a Series B next, need to focus on?
3. Series B and Beyond:
- Is the real crunch at the Series B?
- Why are down rounds so much better than structured rounds for companies raising?
- Will we see a wave of M&A in the next 12 months?
4. Crypto, AI and Hot Takes:
- Why is now the best time to be investing in crypto?
- Why is investing in AI a lottery right now?
- What is the most controversial thing that each believes today?
20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn
Des Traynor is a Co-Founder of Intercom, and has built and led many teams within the company, including Product, Marketing, and Customer Support. Today Des leads all Intercom’s R&D efforts, and parts of Intercom’s marketing.
In Today's Episode with Des We Discuss:
1. From Consultancy to Founding a Unicorn:
- What was the founding a-ha moment for Des and the team with Intercom?
- Why does Des believe that most startup advice is BS and outdated in 5 years?
- What does Des know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. LLMs: The World is Not Equal:
- What does Des mean when he says the world of LLMs is not equal?
- How do the different LLMs very in quality, price and speciality?
- Does Des agree with Alex @ Nabla, "the best companies in the future will work with many LLMs at the same time and switch between them for different things"?
- To what extent does Des believe LLMs will be commoditised and it will be a race to the bottom?
- Would Des be a buyer of OpenAI at a $90BN price? Why not?
3. How to Survive in a World of OpenAI:
- What two simple questions will determine if Open AI will kill your existing business?
- What 3 criteria will determine if there is a new business to be built on top of OpenAI?
- What is the different between a thin layer on top of an LLM and a thick wrapper with real value?
- Which traditional incumbents are most vulnerable? What should they do in this new world?
- How long does it take for incumbents to really be impacted?
4. The Titans of Tech: Who Wins:
- Why does Des believe that Apple could be a massive winner in the next wave of AI?
- Why does Des believe that Google have not been impressive and failed to keep pace?
- Why does Des think OpenAI should be wary of Amazon? What could they do to threaten them?
- What opportunity does Facebook have here? How could Instagram and Whatsapp win?
5. Startup and Investing 101:
- Why does Des believe that every founder should write a blog post per week?
- Why does Des believe that most B2B marketing sucks? What makes great B2B marketing?
- What are Des' biggest lessons from the Hopin journey?
- How has Des' angel investing changed in the last year with the rise of AI?
20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen: Reflections on Leadership from 13 Years Leading Flexport, Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building, How Money Creates Inefficiencies in Scaling, The Future of Trade with China & Why Remote Work is so Cha
Ryan Petersen is Founder & CEO @ Flexport, a leader in global supply chain technology. In 2022, Flexport moved more than $26 billion of merchandise. Over the last 10 years, Ryan has raised close to $2.5BN for the business with the latest valuation pegging the business at $8BN. Prior to starting Flexport, Ryan was the founder and CEO of ImportGenius, a premier provider of transaction data for the global trade industry.
In Today's Episode with Ryan Petersen We Discuss:
1. The Origins of a Generational Defining Leader:
- What did Ryan want to be when he was growing up?
- How did scooters and motorbikes in China lead to the idea for Flexport?
- What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he started Flexport?
2. Speed and Money: The Secrets To Execution:
- Does Ryan believe speed is key to execution? What is the difference between speed and velocity?
- What advice does Ryan have to founders who raise a lot of money? How should it impact hiring?
- What are the most common ways founders become inefficient post-fundraising?
- Why does Ryan look to invest in founders with jaded pasts and a chip on their shoulder?
3. The Art of Resource Allocation:
- Are the best CEOs the best resource allocators?
- What is the single best resource allocation Ryan has made? What did he learn?
- What is the worst? What did he learn?
- What have been Ryan's biggest hiring mistakes? How did that change his approach?
4. The Wider World:
- Is Ryan long or short on China? Why?
- Will we see global trade become nationalized? Why?
- Will we see interest rates raised further? What impact does that have on trade?
- What has been the impact of war on trade and the shipping industry?
5. Ryan Petersen: The Father and Husband:
- How has having kids changed how Ryan approaches leadership and management?
- How does Ryan juggle 2 young kids and leading a 2,500 person company?
- How does Ryan retain romance with his wife while also being a full-on CEO of a large co?
- Does money make you happy? What does it help with? What does it not help with?
20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake
Chris Degnan serves as Snowflake’s Chief Revenue Officer and has been with the company since 2013. Starting as employee #13 and Sales employee #1, Chris built a go-to-market strategy from the ground up, driving sustained high growth and global reach. Under his sales leadership, Snowflake has grown its annual product revenue from $0 to over $1 billion. Prior to Snowflake, Chris served in Sales leadership roles at EMC and Aveksa, and worked in enterprise sales at Informatica and Covalent Technologies (acquired by VMware).
In Today's Episode with Chris Degnen We Discuss:
1. From SDR To World Leading CRO:
- How did Chris first make his way into the world of sales?
- What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he started in sales?
- What are the single biggest mistakes young sales people make today scaling their careers?
2. The Secret to Hitting Quota in Sales:
- Why does Chris believe all reps need to do 8 customer calls per week?
- How do the best sales reps approach sales prospecting today?
- Is cold outbound dead? How does Chris advise his teams on cold calls and emails?
- What are the best reasons reps should say no to customers?
- Should reps be discounting today? What is an acceptable level?
3. Sales and Product: The Most Important Relationship:
- Why does Chris believe sales and product is the most important relationship?
- What can leaders do to ensure sales and product communicate effectively?
- How does Chris use sales calls today both with his sales team and with product?
- What are the single biggest reasons comms between sales and product breaks?
4. Mastering Sales Leadership:
- How does Chris approach sales forecasting? What works? What does not work?
- Does Chris celebrate when quota is hit? How do you find the balance between pushing further and harder but also celebrating the wins?
- How do the best sales leaders train and develop their talent? What do the worst do?
5. Customer Success is BS: Professional Services for the Win:
- Why does Chris believe that customer succeed is BS and you should get rid of it?
- Why are professional services so much better?
- How should the org be structured then when removing CS and adding professional services?
- Who is then responsible for upsell?
20VC: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist, The Biggest Similarities and Differences Between the Best Founders and the Best Actors & The Future of Media; Legacy vs New, The Creator Economy, The Rise of TikTok and more with Danny Cohen
Danny Cohen is the President of Access Entertainment, a division of Len Blavatnik's Access Industries. Access Entertainment’s corporate investments include film and television studio A24; Europe’s fastest-growing company Tripledot Studios; creator economy leader Spotter; and a new immersive arts’ experience launched in collaboration with David Hockney and Lightroom. Before joining Access, Danny was the Director of BBC Television where he had responsibility for all of the BBC's network channels and the greenlighting and production of the BBC's drama, entertainment, comedy, arts, history, science, educational content and documentary.
In Today's Episode with Danny Cohen We Discuss:
1. From Leading the BBC to Investing for Len Blavatnik:
- How did Danny make his way from leading the BBC to investing for Len @ Access?
- What was he most nervous about when making the transition to investing?
- What has been the hardest investing skill to learn?
2. Great Founders are Like Great Actors:
- What are the biggest similarities in what makes the best founders and the best actors?
- How are the best founders different from the best actors?
- Why does Danny believe the risk that an actor takes is so different to the risk founders take?
- How does Danny feel both founders and actors can and should be managed?
3. The Future of Media:
- What does Danny mean when he says he looks for "eyeballs and attention" when investing?
- How does legacy media respond to the threat created by social media today?
- How does AI change the future of content creation and distribution today?
- How do the strikes in Hollywood impact the future of content supply?
4. Marriage, Children and Loneliness:
- Why does Danny believe that loneliness will continue to be the biggest problem we face?
- What are Danny's biggest pieces of advice from 17 years of happy marriage?
- Why did Danny decide to not have children? What did that decision-making process look like?
20VC: From $4.1BN to $142M Market Cap; Why Public Markets Have Written Allbirds Off, What Allbirds Need to Do to Get Profitable, Why Growth has Slowed and The Bull Case for Allbirds Next Five Years with Joey Zwillinger, Co-Founder @ Allbirds
Joey Zwillinger is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Allbirds, the company behind the world's most comfortable shoe. In Nov 2021, Joey took the company public and the stock soared to an all-time high of $4BN, today the company has a market cap of $137M. Prior to Allbirds, Joey spent six years at biotechnology firm, Terravia, leading its renewable chemical business, developing and selling high-performance algae-based chemicals into various industries such as CPG, personal care, and industrials.
In Today's Episode with Joey Zwillinger We Discuss:
- The Founding Moment:
- How did Joey's wife's friendship lead to the co-founding of Allbirds?
- What does Joey know now that he wishes he had known at the founding moment?
- What does Joey believe he is running away from? What is he running towards?
2. Public Market Performance Review:
- Why has Allbirds lost 97% of it's value since going public? What mistakes were made?
- Why has revenue declined for the first time this year?
- What strategic investments have Allbirds pulled back on or paused entirely?
- When will Allbirds be profitable?
3. The Competition:
- How do Allbirds compete and catch up with On and Hoka?
- What strategic mistakes did Allbirds make in COVID that allowed others to take the crown?
- Was the movement into running and athletics a mistake for Allbirds?
4. Joey Zwillinger: The Leader and Person:
- Did Joey take secondaries out during the Allbirds journey?
- How does Joey reflect on his own relationship to money?
- How has Joey dealt with the last 12 months personally? How does he manage the stress effectively?
20VC Roundtable: Why Early Stage Founders Should Not be Investing, Why Great Founders Have Low EQ, How the Structure of VC Firms Will Change, Will Founder-Led Funds Compete with Sequoia & Is Investing a Team Sport?
Jack Altman is the Founder and CEO @ Lattice, the #1 people management platform, last valued at $3BN. Jack is an investor through his founding of Jack Altman Capital where he has invested in WorkOS, NexHealth, Owner.com, Mercury and more.
Auren Hoffman is the Founder and CEO @ Safegraph, the most accurate database of global points of interest, last valued at $550M. Auren is an investor through his founding of Flex Capital where he has invested in Chime, Checkr, Coinbase, Flexport, Vercel and more.
Jason Lemkin is the Founder and CEO @ SaaStr, the world's largest SaaS community. Jason is an investor through his founding of The SaaStr Fund. In the past, Jason has invested in Pipedrive, Algolia, Salesloft, Front, GreenHouse, Owner.com, Gorgias and more.
In Today's Episode on Founder-Led Funds We Discuss:
- Why have we seen the rise of "Founder-led Funds"?
- Are founder-led funds more empathetic to the founders they invest in?
- How do founder-led funds source and pick investments in a way that traditional VC does not?
- Will we see founder-led Funds truly compete against the Sequoias of the world?
- How does being an operator make you a better investor?
- How does investing help you be a better founder and operator?
- How do you communicate your investing practice and firm to your company and team?
- What are the biggest excitements and concerns LPs have for Founder-led Funds?
- Will we see the face of venture changing much more broadly and structurally?
- How do founder-led funds manage both time and company conflicts?
20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer
David Meyer is the SVP Products at Databricks where he drives product strategy and execution. He previously ran Engineering and Product Management at OneLogin, where he grew the company to thousands of customers and market leadership. Before OneLogin, he cofounded UniversityNow, an accredited open university system, running Product and Engineering. Prior to that, David managed a $1 billion portfolio of business intelligence products at SAP and co-led cloud strategy. His first software journey was at Plumtree which went public before being acquired by BEA in 2005.
In Today's Episode with David Meyer We Discuss:
- Entry into Product:
- How did David make his way into the world of product? Why did he not want to go into it?
- Why does David advise everyone "do not go into product management"?
- What does David know now that he wishes he had known when he entered product?
2. How to be a Great Product Leader:
- Why does David think most leaders suck at leading?
- Why is the most important thing to make your team feel seen? What can leaders do to ensure this?
- Why does David help his team members to find other roles outside of the company?
3. Building the Best Product Team:
- How does David hire for product today? What questions does he ask? What signals does he look for?
- What are David's biggest hiring mistakes? How did they change his approach?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring for product?
- Why should you hire people who are not in product today?
4. David Meyer: The Art or Science of Product:
- Is product more art or science? If David were to put a number on it, what would it be?
- Is simple always better when it comes to product?
- Will AI remove the importance and focus on UI?
- Why are the most impressive companies business model innovations not product innovations?
20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation
Nick Tomaino is the Founder and General Partner @ 1confirmation, one of the leading seed firms fueling the decentralization of the web and society. The fund started with $26M in backing from individuals including Peter Thiel and Mark Cuban and it has been reported that the firm now has over $1B in assets under management. Nick has led seed investments in OpenSea, dYdX, SuperRare, Polkadot and Cosmos among others. Prior to 1confirmation, Nick was a Principal @ Runa Capital and before that led business development and marketing at Coinbase in the early days of the company.
In Today's Episode with Nick Tomaino We Discuss:
- From Cryptokitties to founding the Leading Seed Crypto Firm:
- How did Nick first come into contact with crypto and bitcoin specifically?
- How did getting fired from Coinbase catalyse his move into venture?
- What does Nick know today that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
2. The Landscape Today: Funds and SBF
- Are the current generation of crypto funds too large? Should they give money back to their LPs?
- Will the next generation of crypto funds be smaller? Are any crypto funds able to raise right now?
- Why does crypto Twitter hate crypto VCs? Who are the worst VCs for pump and dump?
3. SBF & FTX: What Actually Happened, Who is to Blame, What Happens from here?
- What is the biggest misconception on SBF and FTX today?
- Who should be held accountable? What else would Nick like to see?
- How should FTX change the way that LPs invest into venture managers?
4. How to Build the Best Crypto Portfolio in Venture:
- How large are the funds? How does Nick determine the right size for a fund?
- How many investments does Nick make per fund? How do loss rates look in crypto?
- What have been Nick's biggest investment hits and losses? How did that impact his mindset?
5. The Future for NFTs and Opensea:
- Why does Nick remain bullish on the future of NFTs?
- How is Nick able to remain optimistic about the future of Opensea given their volumes?
- Where does Nick believe the fair price for Opensea should be today?
- Did Nick sell their Opensea at the $13Bn round?
20VC: The Three Types of Seed Round Today, Why Seed Has Never Been More Competitive, Why Pricing Has Never Been Higher, Why Boards at Pre-Seed Can Be Helpful & How Too Much Cash Too Soon Can Harm Companies with Ed Sim, Founder @ Boldstart
Ed Sim is one of the best seed round investors in venture as the Founder and Managing Partner @ Boldstart, Ed focuses specifically on developer, infra and SaaS at pre-seed and seed round. Over the last decade, Ed has backed some of the best including Snyk, BigID, Kustomer, Front and Superhuman.
In Today's Episode on Seed Rounds We Discuss:
- What are the three different types of seed round today?
- Has seed ever been this competitive?
- Will seed be unimpacted by the macro decline we are seeing?
- Why are growth and multi-stage funds being more active than ever in seed?
2. Too Much Cash Will Kill You!
- Why does Ed believe that too much capital can kill companies at the seed round?
- Why does Ed believe that the best founders are not always optimising for the highest price?
- What are the single biggest negatives of taking a high price at the seed round?
- What advice does Ed have for founders who have large offers from multi-stage funds at seed?
3. Is Growth Dead?
- Why does Ed disagree and suggest that growth is not dead?
- What do multi-stage and growth funds now what to see that they did not before?
- How will the growth market evolve over the next 12-18 months?
4. IPOs, AI and M&A:
- What will cause the IPO windows to crack open again?
- Why does Ed believe that many investing in AI are simply giving money to Nvidia?
- Does Ed agree that 95% of the cash going into AI from venture today will go to zero?
- Will we see more or less M&A in the next 12 months?
- How did Ed evaluate the Loom acquisition by Atlassian?
20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner
Ely Lerner is an EIR at Reforge and an advisor for startups transitioning from traction to hypergrowth. Previously he was Head of Consumer Product at Chime, and before that spent an incredible 8 years at Yelp in a number of different roles including Head of Product at Eat24, and Product Leader/GM at Yelp.
In Today's Episode with Ely Lerner We Discuss:
1. Entry into Growth:
- How did Ely make his way from engineering manager to growth leader?
- What are a couple of his single biggest takeaways from his time with Yelp and Chime?
- Why do employees in large companies have to have P&L ownership when innovating within the larger company they are in?
2. Advisors: What, When and How:
- What are the three different types of advisors founders can work with today?
- When is the right time to engage with each of them?
- Should the advisor have had direct experience with the problem you need help with?
- How should these advisors be compensated; what is normal?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest reasons startup advisory roles do not work out?
3. Offense vs Defence: The Tricky Balance:
- What is the difference between offense and defense in product strategy?
- What should the resource allocation be between the two?
- What is the right amount of offensive strategies to have on at the same time?
- How can leaders prevent their defensive teams from feeling like second-class citizens?
4. Ely Lerner: AMA:
- Why does Ely disagree with many and suggest that horizontal products do have a core ICP?
- Should growth teams sit on their own or within functions in the org?
- What are the core reasons teams fail to ship fast?
- What state should your data be in when you bring in your first growth hire?
20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom
Matthieu Rouif is the Co-Founder and CEO @ PhotoRoom, one of the fastest-growing YC companies having scaled to an astonishing $50M in ARR in just 3 years. Their capital efficiency is immense having scaled to $20M in ARR on just $2M of invested capital. Prior to founding PhotoRoom, Matthieu founded several start-ups, including an app for ski resorts, HeyCrowd, and Replay, a video editor which was ultimately acquired by GoPro. Whilst at GoPro, Mattheiu led all image editing products.
In Today's Episode with Matthieu Rouif We Discuss:
- From GoPro to One of YC's Fastest Growing Companies:
- How did Matthieu make the move from GoPro to founding PhotoRoom?
- What are the big mistakes Matthieu made on prior companies that he did differently with PhotoRoom?
- What does Matthieu know now that he wishes he had known when he started PhotoRoom?
2. Scaling to $20M in ARR with $2M of Cash:
- What allowed Matthieu and PhotoRoom to be so capital-efficient in their scaling?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when it comes to resource allocation and capital efficiency?
- On reflection, what did Matthieu not spend money on that he wishes they had spent money on?
3. Consumer Subscription + Photo Editing: Is it a Good Business:
- What are the customer acquisition costs by channel for PhotoRoom?
- What are their payback periods on a per-customer basis?
- How can it be a good business when the churn rate annually is 30-40%?
- How does this space play out with Canva, Adobe, Veed, Kapwing? Who wins?
4. The Future of AI:
- Who wins; incumbents or startups?
- What matters more; data size or model size?
- Will UI be more or less important in an AI-first world?
- Why does Matthieu believe that everyone hates command line prompts?
- Will we see $BN revenue companies created with just 10 people?
20VC: NEW FORMAT: Harry Stebbings on Why Seed Pricing is as High as Ever, Why Series A is the Best Place to Invest Today, Why Growth Founders Need to Reshape Expectations, Why M&A Windows Remain Shut and When Will IPO Windows Crack Open
Harry Stebbings is the Founder of 20VC, building the next great financial institution at the intersection of media and venture capital. 20VC has reached over 125M downloads in 100+ countries and has featured the likes of Doug Leone, Bill Gurley, Marc Benioff, Daniel Ek and more. On the investing side, Harry has raised over $400M and made investments in the likes of Pachama, Linear, TripleDot, Superhuman, AgentSync, Linktree, Sorare and more.
In Today's Episode We Cover:
- Are LPs Open for Business:
- How has what LPs look for in new manager investments changed?
- What type of funds will be able to raise? Which will not be able to raise?
- What can managers do to significantly increase their chances of raising a new fund?
2. The Seed Investing Landscape: Harder Than Ever
- Why is seed pricing as high as ever?
- Why are multi-stage funds more active in seed than ever? How does this impact seed?
- How will seed change and evolve over the next 6-12 months?
3. Series A + B: The Best Place to be Investing
- Why is Series A the best risk/reward insertion point when investing today?
- How has the competition level at Series A and B changed?
- What do many people not see or know about this stage of the market today?
4. Is Growth Dead: Are Growth Deals Getting Done:
- What two core elements are needed if you want to raise a growth round today?
- How have growth round valuations been impacted over the last 12 months?
- To what extent do founders need to change their expectations on the price of rounds they will be able to get done today?
5. M&A and IPOs: Tough Times Ahead
- Why will we see continued low levels of activity in M&A markets?
- What acquisitions are we seeing take place?
- When will the IPO window crack open?
- Why were Klaviyo, Instacart and Arm not enough to open the windows?
20VC: Are LPs Open For Business? What Does it Take to Raise a Fund Today? How Has What LPs Want to See in Fund Investments Changed? Why Do LP Incentive Mechanisms Need to Change? Which Funds Will be Hit Hardest with Beezer Clarkson @ Sapphire Partners
Beezer Clarkson leads Sapphire Partners‘ investments in venture funds domestically and internationally. Beezer has invested in some of the best firms of a generation including USV and Point Nine to name a few. Beezer began her career in financial services over 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley in its global infrastructure group. Prior to joining Sapphire in 2012, Beezer managed the day-to-day operations of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Global Network, which then had $7 billion under management across 16 venture funds worldwide.
In Today's Episode with Beezer Clarkson We Discuss:
- LP Landscape: WTF is Going On:
- Are LPs really all closed for business?
- What has changed in what LPs want to see from managers they are looking to invest in?
- What has changed about the size and pace of new commitments for LPs?
- Are all LPs moving away from growth?
2. 2020-2022: Years in Review:
- Are LPs frustrated by managers who reduced deployment timelines to 12-18 months?
- Are LPs frustrated with managers who did not take liquidity when they could have done?
- How does Beezer advise managers on when and how to take liquidity in their best positions?
- Are managers accurately marking their portfolios to their LPs today?
- Why does Beezer believe the incentive mechanism for LPs is broken today in many ways?
3. How To Build a Top Decile Firm:
- Why does Beezer believe if you want to have the best returns, you have to have one company that returns the fund? Can you not do it with multiple half-fund returners?
- Is ownership core to all the best firm's top performance? Is it the size of outcome or the size of ownership that drives the best performance across the board?
- What does data show on how the best funds take significant risk? What are their loss ratios?
- What are the core tradeoffs to Beezer between scaling AUM and providing top decile returns?
4. LP Markets: The Times They are a Changing:
- Does Beezer believe LPs will remain cold on large $1BN+ growth firms?
- Which segments of the market are hot? Which are cold?
- What are the most significant changes we will see in the LP markets moving forward?
- Is today the new normal or are we in a downturn that we will come out of?
20VC: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes, Why Founders Are Not Ambitious Enough Today, Why Having a Narrow Target Customer is Dangerous & The Three Possible Outcomes in Company Building with Matthew Prince, Co-Founder @ Cloudflare
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, on a mission is to help build a better Internet. Matthew has scaled Cloudflare to over $1BN in revenue, $20BN in market cap, and over 3,200 employees. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks, which spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law.
In Today's Episode with Matthew Prince We Discuss:
1. From Selling Fireworks to Public Company CEO:
- How did Matthew first make money selling fireworks as a kid?
- Does Mathew believe in the trope "you have to love what you do"?
- What does Matthew know now that he wishes he had known when he started Cloudflare?
2. Money, Identity and Happiness:
- Why does Matthew feel many of the most successful founders lose their way when they leave their companies? How does he assess Gates, Bezos and others?
- Does Matthew tie his own identity to Cloudflare and the success of the company?
- How does Matthew evaluate his own relationship to money today? How has it changed over time?
- How does Matthew keep score today on how he is doing? What is success to Matthew?
3. The Three Outcomes for Companies Today:
- What are the three outcomes available to companies today?
- What is the worst and why?
- What are the two biggest mistakes Matthew sees founders make today?
- Why does Matthew know that diverse teams are more successful? What is the proof?
- What is Matthew's single biggest advice to founders when it comes to selecting a co-founder?
4. Focus is BS: You Have to Have Mega Ambition:
- Why does Matthew believe it is BS to have a very specific target customer from the offset?
- What does Matthew believe are the benefits of not having an ICP in the early days?
- What are the biggest pieces of VC advice to founders that Matthew knows to be wrong?
20VC: Israeli Resilience From Tech and Beyond with Michael Eisenberg and Adi Levanon
Michael Eisenberg spent 15 years as a General Partner @ Benchmark working alongside Bill and the Benchmark partnership. Following Benchmark, Michael co-founded Aleph, one of the leading Israeli venture funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Lemonade, Melio and HoneyBook, just to name a couple of Aleph’s unicorns.
Adi Levanon is the Founder & Managing Partner @ Selah Ventures, a solo-GP-founded venture fund investing $500k checks into AI-based solutions that enhance financial services, healthcare organizations, fintechs, and SMBs, with a focus on founders in the US and Israelis globally.
In Today's Episode on Israeli Resilience We Discuss:
- Where are we at today? What is it like on the ground, today?
- Have the international community reacted as expected? What more can be done?
- What does it mean to be called up for "reserve"?
- How are companies dealing with 25% of their teams being called into the armed forces?
- Are VCs investing still? Does work carry on?
- Whose reactions are exemplary and we should look to follow?
- Whose have been woeful and should be called out?
- What are the single biggest misconceptions of the situation?
- What can people do to help? What can be done?
20VC Roundtable: Are IPOs Back? Is Growth Dead? What Does it Take to Raise a Growth Round Today? How Do VCs Solve The Liquidity Challenge? Will We See a Massive Resetting of Valuations? AI Hype Growth Rounds?
Deven Parekh is a Managing Director at Insight Partners, one of the leading investing franchises of the last 25 years. Deven has made more than 90 investments since joining in 2000 including in the likes of Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Chargebee and Automattic (WordPress) to name a few.
Woody Marshall is a General Partner @ TCV, one of the most successful growth funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, AirBnB, Spotify, LinkedIn and many more incredible companies.
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1. The Growth Landscape Overview:
- Is growth dead? Are any growth deals getting done?
- How has the price changed for growth deals that are getting done?
- Which type of growth companies will vs will not be able to raise?
- What happens to all of the growth companies with $300-$500M in cash but little revenue?
2. The Great Reset: Valuations Need to Change:
- Why should companies be actively resetting their valuations? What are the benefits?
- What will happen between VCs and LPs when there is no incentive for VCs to reset their portfolio valuations when they need to go out and raise from those same LPs?
- Structure is often part of these valuation resets, is structure to rounds always bad? When is it good? What type of structure is acceptable vs unacceptable?
3. Are the Public Markets Creeping Open:
- Should we take comfort from ARM, Instacart and Klaviyo and assume the public markets are going to open again? If not, what will cause them to open?
- How should we analyze the performance of the IPOs above? Many have been negative, are they right to suggest this is not the response we wanted?
- Why does Woody believe, like Instacart taking a 75% discount to their last round, we should have more and more companies go public at discounts to their last private round?
4. Late Stage Growth is Dead and Revenue Multiples:
- Why is late-stage growth dead? How long do we think this will last?
- How should we assess revenue multiples today? New normal? Same as always? How will revenue multiples look in 12 months from now?
- How should we analyse the large late stage growth rounds for hyped AI companies? What happens there?
20VC: Atlassian Co-Founder Scott Farquhar on The Biggest Lessons Scaling Atlassian to $50BN Market Cap; The Four Roles of the CEO, The Funding Round That Net Accel $6BN, The Regrets of Omission and Commission & The Honeymoon Cut Short
Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ Atlassian. Scott co-founded the company with his university friend, Mike Cannon-Brookes, in 2002 from Australia. Over an incredible 20-year journey they have grown to a market cap of $50BN today, over 11,000 staff globally and serving over 260,000 customers. Scott is also a co-founder of Skip Capital, a private investment fund with a portfolio including Figma, Snyk, Canva and more.
In Today's Episode with Scott Farquhar We Discuss:
1. The 20-Year Journey to $50BN Market Cap:
- How did Scott first make his way into the world of tech and come to co-found Atlassian?
- What does Scott know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
- From 20 years with Mike, what is Scott's biggest advice on choosing your co-founder?
2. The Fundraising Masterclass with Atlassian:
- An emergency phone call, a honeymoon cut short; how did the first funding round for Atlassian come to be? Where was the business revenue-wise at the time?
- Why did Scott not like the traditional fundraising process? What did he do to add game theory and ensure that they got the best deal as a company?
- Why did Scott choose Accel with their offer? How did Peter Fenton lose a $3BN deal with Atlassian?
3. Lessons Scaling Atlassian to $4BN in Revenue:
- What does Scott believe are the 4 core roles of the CEO? Is resource allocation the most important?
- What are the single biggest acts of commission and omission that Scott regrets?
- What are the biggest lessons Scott has from shutting down Stride, their Slack competitor?
4. Scott: The Father, Husband and Philanthropist:
- What does great fatherhood mean to Scott today?
- What is the secret to a truly successful marriage?
- How does Scott assess his relationship to money today? How has it changed with time?
- How does Scott think about bringing children up in a world of affluence and abundance?
Fun Fact: Every single 20VC episode is recorded with Riverside.FM. It is the one product that I could not live without. Try it today here (https://creators.riverside.fm/20VC) and use the code 20VC for 15% off.
20VC: Why Great Companies are Defined by How Many Things They Say No To, Why Being First Does Not Matter & Why Market Over Traction or Team is the Most Important Thing with Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO @ Vercel
Guillermo Rauch is the Founder and CEO @ Vercel, giving developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized Web. To date, Guillermo has raised $312M from Accel, Bedrock, Greenoaks, GV and more. Prior to founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup where he served the company as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013.
In Today's Episode with Guillermo Rauch We Discuss:
1. From Argentina to SF: The Boy Making Money Online:
- How did Guillermo first get into computers and start making money online?
- Does Guillermo still believe the US and SF offers the same opportunities it did when he came?
- Did Guillermo feel the weight of responsibility of providing for his family at a young age?
2. Timing, Markets and Narrative Violations:
- Why does Guillermo believe it does not matter being first but being right?
- Why does Guillermo believe the most important thing for a company is market selection?
- Why does Guillermo believe it is crucial that founders and companies have "narrative violations"?
3. The Future of AI:
- What model will win in the future; open or closed?
- Where does the value accrue; startups or incumbents?
- How will the SaaS business model change in a world of AI?
4. Silicon Valley's Most Successful Angel You Did Not Know:
- What are some of Guillermo's biggest lessons from angel investing?
- What is his single biggest miss? How has it changed how he thinks?
- What have been his biggest hits? How did they impact how he thinks about what it takes to win?
20Sales: Why the Founder Should Not Be the One to Create the Sales Playbook, Why You Should Hire a Sales Leader Before Sales Reps & Why You Should Not Hire Sales Leaders From Big Companies with Matt Rosenberg, CRO @ Grammarly
Matt Rosenberg is Grammarly’s Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Grammarly Business. He leads all B2B revenue, operations, and growth for Grammarly Business, Grammarly for Education, and Grammarly for Developers. Previously, as CRO of Compass, he took the company into the Fortune 500 and contributed to a more than eightfold increase in business growth. Prior to Compass, Matt served as Eventbrite’s CRO leading them to become the largest event platform in the world by event count.
In Today's Episode with Matt Rosenberg We Discuss:
1. From Miserable Lawyer to World Beating Sales Leader:
- How did Matt make the transition from lawyer to sales leader?
- What does Matt know now that he wishes he had known when he started in sales?
- What are Matt's biggest pieces of advice for anyone who wants to make a career change and is lacking confidence?
2. The Playbook and Hiring The Team:
- How does Matt define the "sales playbook"?
- Should the founder be the one to create and execute V1 of the playbook?
- Should the first sales hire be a rep or a sales leader?
- When is the right time to make that all-important first sales hire?
3. Discounting, Champions and Urgency:
- What can sales team do to create urgency in deal cycles? What works? What does not?
- How does Matt approach discounting? When to do it vs when not to? What level is acceptable?
- What are the biggest secrets to creating champions within prospects?
- Why does Matt believe that deals are won and lost in prospecting?
4. Developing Great Sales Talent:
- How does Matt use sales call recordings to train teams? What is his 3x3 matrix for coaching calls?
- What is a good reason to lose a deal vs a bad reason? How does Matt do deal reviews?
- What are the single biggest elements sales leaders can do to nurture sales talent?
- What are the biggest mistakes sales leaders make when developing talent internally?
20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP
Phin Barnes is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of The General Partnership (TheGP), a venture capital firm that’s redefining what partnership means for founders. Previously, Phin spent over a decade at First Round Capital, where he was responsible for over 60 investments including Blue Apron, Notion, Clover Health, Gauntlet and Persona. Before First Round, he created an independent video game company and before that was an early employee at AND 1 Basketball where he helped scale the brand from $15 to $225 million in revenue and served as the Creative Director for Footwear.
In Today's Episode with Phin Barnes We Discuss:
- From Creative Director to Venture Capitalist:
- How did Phin make his way into the world of venture having been a Creative Director at a basketball brand?
- What does Phin know now that he wishes he could tell himself on his first day in venture?
- What are 1-2 of Phin's biggest lessons from his 10 years at First Round which shapes how he invests?
2. The Venture Capital Model is Broken:
- Why does Phin believe the current services model of venture is broken?
- Do the best founders need your help?
- What have been some of the biggest lessons in what the best founders want from their VCs?
- What happens to this generation of firms with massive support teams?
- Do VCs use these support teams merely to justify massive fund size scaling to LPs?
3. The Venture Landscape Today:
- How can we compete in a seed landscape of $5M on $25M against large multi-stage firms?
- What founders types are attracted to big brands? What founder profiles are taken in by large rounds and high prices?
- Is Phin more or less excited about seed-stage investing now than he has been before?
4. Investing Lessons 101:
- What is Phin's biggest hit? How did seeing their success impact his mindset?
- What is Phin's biggest loss? How did the loss impact how he views investing?
- Traction, team, market; how does Phin rank the three in prioritisation?
- What should all young people know when entering the venture landscape?
20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio
Kevin Niparko is the VP of Product @ Twilio. Kevin joined Twilio through the acquisition of Segment where he spent an incredible 8 years in numerous different roles including as Head of Product. Before entering the world of product, Kevin was a Management Associate at the world-renowned, Bridgewater Associates.
In Today's Episode with Kevin Niparko We Discuss:
1. From Bridgewater to Head of Product:
- How Kevin made his way from the world of asset management and analytics to leading product teams?
- What are 1-2 of Kevin's biggest takeaways from his time at Bridgewater with Ray Dalio?
- How did the 8 year journey with Segment leading to their $3BN acquisition impact his approach to product?
2. What Makes a Great Product Person:
- Does Kevin believe that product is more art or science? If he were to put a number on it? What would it be out of 100?
- Why does Kevin believe that all product people should learn to write?
- Why does Kevin believe that the best product people are generalists and not specialists?
- Why does Kevin think that analytics is an insanely good start for product people?
3. How to Hire the Best Product People:
- How does Kevin approach the hiring process for product hires today?
- What are the non-obvious traits of hires he looks for? How does he test for them?
- Does Kevin use case studies? Where do many fall down? What do the best do?
4. Product Reviews: Good vs Great:
- How often does Kevin do product reviews? Who is invited?
- How have product reviews changed in a world where the company is now fully remote?
- What is the difference between good and great product reviews?
- What is the single best product decision Kevin has made? What did he learn?
- What is the worst product decision Kevin made? How did that change his approach?
20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng
Christian Lanng is the Founder and Former CEO @ Tradeshift, a company he took from garage to unicorn raising over $900M for with a latest price of $2.7BN in 2021. Just last month, Christian stepped away from the company and is now Chairman @ Beyond Work, building a better work experience through AI native software.
In Today's Episode with Christian Lanng We Discuss:
1. Burnout: When it Hits:
- How did Christian know when something was really seriously wrong? What were the signs?
- How did being a founder literally almost kill Christian? How was that not a wakeup moment?
- How does being a founder make you so out of touch with reality?
2. The Things We Are Never Told:
- Why does Christian think one of the biggest crimes is the myth that everyone can be a founder?
- What are the single biggest things about VCs that founders are not told?
- Why does Christian believe fundraising is absolutely a game? What are the rules to win it?
- What makes the best VCs? What makes the worst VCs?
- Why does Christian not like to take a discount for a brand name VC?
3. The Chaos That Happens Inside a Company:
- Why does Christian believe politics should not be discussed within companies?
- What are Christian's biggest lessons on working with friends? Why after 14 years does Christian only have 3 friends that still talk to him?
- How did Christian fire 50% of his leadership team and productivity not change at all?
- Why does Christian believe US startups are inherently better than European ones?
4. Parenting and Relationship to Money:
- Does Christian regret not being a present father for his child when building Tradeshift?
- What are the two options as a founder you have when bringing up kids?
- Was Christian scared to leave Tradeshift? How does he reflect on his relationship to money?
5. AI: Co-Pilot is BS, The Future Business Model and more...
- Why does Christian believe co-pilot is the last dying breathe attempt from incumbents?
- Why does Christian believe that per-seat pricing will die? What will replace it?
- Why does Christian believe that AI will negate the importance of consumer-facing brands?
- In what way does Christian believe that UI is total BS? How does it change over time?
20VC: Marc Benioff on The Future of San Francisco and What He Would Do if in Charge? Marc Benioff's Five Step Process to Priorities and Why Money Does Not Make You Happy & Work From Home vs In-Person; How to Manage in Changing Worlds
Marc Benioff is Chair, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Salesforce and a pioneer of cloud computing. Under Benioff's leadership, Salesforce is the #1 provider of CRM software globally and one of the world's fastest-growing enterprise software companies. Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, and it is now a Fortune 150 company with 70,000+ employees. Benioff is the owner and co-chair of TIME, and the founder of TIME Ventures. Benioff is the author of the New York Times bestseller Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change. Benioff was named “Innovator of the Decade” by Forbes and is recognized as one of the World’s 25 Greatest Leaders by Fortune.
In Today's Episode with Marc Benioff We Discuss:
1. The Future of San Francisco:
- What would Marc do if he were in charge of San Francisco today?
- What would he change with regards to housing, policing and crime?
- Why does Marc believe there are doomsday proclaimers on SF? What do they have to gain?
- Will Dreamforce always be held in San Francisco?
2. Money and Ambition: The Mind Behind a $200BN Machine
- Does Marc believe that money makes you happy?
- How has Marc's relationship to money changed over time?
- How does Marc think about bringing children up in a more affluent home?
- What does Marc advise anyone who is seeking "happiness" today?
3. Mastering Decisions and Prioritisation:
- How does Marc assess his own decision-making framework today? Has it changed with time?
- What is Marc's 5 step process to understand your own priorities today?
- What does Marc believe are the three biggest priorities for Salesforce today?
- What are the single biggest blockers that would prevent Salesforce from achieving their goals?
4. Marc Benioff: AMA:
- What does great fatherhood mean to Marc?
- Who would win the cage fight, Zuck or Elon?
- What does a day in the life of Marc Benioff look like?
- What does Marc think about work from home?
20VC: Are Foundation Models Becoming Commoditised? Do OpenAI and Anthropic of the World Have a Sustaining Moat? Why Smaller Models May Work Better? Why Incumbents with Data Power Win the AI War with Christian Kleinerman, SVP Product @ Snowflake
Christian Kleinerman is the SVP of Product @ Snowflake. Before Snowflake, Christian spent close to 5 years at Google as a Senior Director of Product Management @ YouTube working on their infrastructure and data systems. Before YouTube, Christian spent over 13 years at Microsoft serving as General Manager of the Data Warehousing product unit where he was responsible for a broad portfolio of products.
In Today's Episode with Christian Kleinerman We Discuss:
1. Lessons from the Greats:
- How did Christian first make his way into the world of product?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from working with Satya Nadella and Frank Slootman?
- What are 1-2 of hs biggest product lessons from Google and Microsoft?
2. Generative AI: Real vs Fake:
- How does Christian analyze the current generative AI landscape?
- Which segments will be the fastest to adopt? Which will be the slowest?
- What aspects of the ecosystems are overblown? Which are under-appreciated?
- How does Christian respond to many VCs who suggest that many startups are simply wrappers on GPT?
3. Models 101: Why Size is Not Everything!
- What matters more, the size of the data or the size of the model?
- Will any of the models used today be used in a year?
- Does Christian believe Alex @ Nabla is right in saying that "the most successful companies will be those that are able to transition between models the easiest"?
- How are we seeing the evolution of model size impact the accuracy of result snad size of data required?
4. Incumbent vs startup & Open vs Closed:
- Who is best positioned to win; startups or incumbents?
- What are the nuances; which spaces are best served for startups to win vs incumbents?
- Will open or closed source be the dominant mode?
- What are the single biggest challenges preventing open from being successful?
20VC Roundtable: Is the VC Model Broken? The Biggest Disconnect Ever Between TVPI & DPI, Why Market Size is Dangerous, Why "Go Fast" is Terrible Advice, The Dangers of Raising Large Rounds at High Prices & Why Next Year Will See the Biggest Hiring Spree i
Eric Paley is the Managing Partner at Founder Collective, one of the world’s most successful seed funds with investments in the likes of Uber, The Trade Desk, Coupang and Airtable.
Mike Maples is one of the OGs of seed investing. As the Co-Founder of Floodgate, he has backed the likes of Twitch, Okta, Lyft, Twitter and more.
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds with a portfolio including Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few.
In Today's Episode on Is the Venture Model Broken? :
- Is the classic seed model dead? Can seed funds play in a world of $25M valuations?
- Why is having a firm grasp of the present the best thing an early-stage investor can have?
- Why does Mike Maples believe no company with true product-market-fit has ever failed?
- Why does Eric Paley believe "go faster" is the worst startup advice?
- Why does Mike Maples believe there is a direct relationship between price and risk?
- Why does Mike Maples believe that outliers by their very nature are lower priced?
- Why does Eric Paley not focus on ownership? Why can it be dangerous?
- What are the biggest risks for founders raising at valuations that are too high?
- Why does Eric Paley believe we will have the biggest chasm between TVPI and DPI in the prior vintage of venture capital returns?
- Why does Eric believe the majority of SPACs were BS and great companies can always go public?
- Why does Jason believe that if multiples do not reflate, the venture model is broken?
- Why does Jason believe we will see the biggest hiring spree in tech next year?
- How has illiquidity allowed Eric Paley to make some of the best investment decisions?
- What is Mike Maples biggest lesson from selling Twitter stock early at $1BN?
20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate
Miles Grimshaw is a General Partner @ Benchmark, widely considered one of the best venture capital firms in history. Prior to joining the Benchmark Partnership, Miles was a General Partner @ Thrive Capital where he led investments in Airtable, Monzo, Lattice, Github, Segment, Slack and Benchling to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Miles Grimshaw We Discuss:
1. Straight into VC From University: From Yale to Thrive
- How did Miles come to land a role with Josh Kushner and Thrive right out of Yale?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from working with Josh @ Thrive for 8 years?
- What does Miles know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture?
2. The Pillars of Venture Capital: Sourcing, Selecting, Servicing:
- What does Miles believe are the 5 core pillars of successful venture capital?
- 1-5, what is his strongest and what is his weakest?
- Does Miles really believe that VCs add value today?
- What are the most clear ways that Miles have seen VCs destroy value in portfolio companies?
3. Investment Decision Making: From Github to Segment:
- What is the single most important question that Miles has to answer to say yes to an investment?
- How does Miles think about both market sizing risk and market timing risk?
- What have been Miles' biggest hits? What did he learn from making those investments?
- What have been Miles' biggest misses? What did he learn from missing Figma and Plaid?
- What have been 1-2 of Miles's biggest lessons so far from working with Bill Gurley and Peter Fenton?
4. AI: What Happens Next:
- Does Miles believe we are in an AI bubble today? How does he assess the landscape?
- Why does Miles believe that the "Co-Pilot" strategy is an incumbent strategy?
- Where does Miles believe the value will accrue; the application layer or the infrastructure layer?
- What does Miles mean when he says the future is in "selling the work and not the software"?
- What business model disruption and adoption disruption does Miles believe AI will enable?
- Why does Miles believe that the analogy of AI to the rise of mobile is wrong?
20VC: The Biggest AI Leaders on What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size & Where Does The Value in AI Accrue; to Startups or to Incumbents
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce.
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.
Alex Lebrun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nabla, an AI assistant for doctors. Prior to Nabla, he led engineering at Facebook AI Research. Alex founded Wit.ai, acquired by Facebook in 2015.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, just announced last week, Theory is a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in early-stage companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve “Software 3.0” companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock where she made investments in the likes of Figma, Coda and Neeva.
Emad Mostaque is the Co-Founder and CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. Stability are building the foundation to activate humanity’s potential. To date, Emad has raised over $110M with Stability with the latest round reportedly pricing the company at $4BN.
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. To date, Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few.
Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation. To date, Cris has raised over $285M for the company from the likes of Lux Capital, Felicis, Coatue, Amplify, and Nvidia to name a few.
Noam Shazeer is the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI. A renowned computer scientist and researcher, Shazeer is one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP).
The Two Most Pressing Questions in AI:
- What matters more the size of the model or the size of the data?
- Where does the value accrue in the next 5-10 years; to startups or to incumbents?
20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash
Suchit Dash is the VP of Core Product Experience at Reddit, responsible for the surfaces that millions of users interact with daily. Prior to Reddit, Suchit was a cofounder at Dubsmash, a short video platform that was used by millions globally and acquired by Reddit in December 2020. In just 10 days, Suchit scaled the product to an immense 43M users, and gained fans such as Neymar and Jimmy Fallon. Suchit previously held roles at Soundcloud and PayPal.
In Today's Episode with Suchit Dash We Discuss:
1. The Founding of Dubsmash & V1:
- How did the founding of Dubsmash come to be?
- Suchit scaled V1 of the product to 43M users in 10 days, what was the secret? What worked?
- What were the first signs that all was not right?
- How did the team respond to the realization that their retention numbers were terrible?
- What are Suchit's biggest lessons and pieces of advice from this massive V1 and launch?
2. Data: Retention, Cohorts and The Smiley Face:
- What specific data did Suchit and the team really use to understand their level of product market fit?
- What level of retention were they looking for? What is average, good, and great in terms of retention in consumer social?
- What is really important for founders to try and observe and analyze in net new user cohorts?
- When and why did the team start to see the hailed smiley face of consumer returning to the app?
3. Battling TikTok:
- Despite the resurgence, TikTok was roaring, what did TikTok do so well to take the market?
- How did TikTok leverage both FB and Snap's ad platform to acquire so many users so fast?
- What did TikTok not do well? What could they have done better?
- How did TikTok pay and incentivize the creator community?
- What are some of Suchit's biggest lessons and advice for founders battling a better-funded incumbent?
4. The Decision to Sell: Being Acquired by Reddit:
- Ultimately, why did Suchit decide to sell the company to Reddit?
- Why did the first two acquisition attempts fail?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest pieces of advice Suchit has for founders debating whether it is right to sell their company?
- What do all founders being acquired need to remember?
- With the benefit of hindsight, if Suchit could do the acquisition process again, what would he do differently?
20VC: Lessons Building Nubank to the Largest Neobank in the World, How AI Changes The Future of Finance, Leadership Lessons from Sequoia's Doug Leone & What European and US Fintech Can Learn From LATAM with David Velez, Founder @ Nubank
David Velez is the Founder and CEO of Nubank, one of the largest and fastest-growing financial institutions in the world. 1 in 2 people in Brazil alone have a Nubank account. Nubank's purple credit card in Mexico is the highest-rated NPS product of any consumer product in the world. Before founding Nubank in 2013, David was a partner at Sequoia Capital between 2011 and 2013, in charge of the firm’s Latin American investments group. Before Sequoia, David worked in investment banking and growth equity at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and General Atlantic.
In Today's Episode with David Velez We Discuss:
1. From Sequoia Partner to Creating One of the Largest Financial Institutions:
- What was the Sequoia interview process like?
- What questions did Doug Leone really dive into when hiring David?
- What impressed David most about how Sequoia interview and win talent?
- What are 1-2 of David's biggest lessons from working with Doug Leone?
2. From a Small House to a $BN Public Company:
- What does David believe are the 1-2 core but non-obvious reasons why Nubank scaled so fast?
- What does David believe are the most non-obvious but massive opportunities Nubank has to 10x from here?
- Why does David believe emerging market fintech providers will be more valuable than Western fintechs?
- What does David believe Western fintechs and regulators can learn from BRIC economy fintechs?
3. How AI Changes The Future of Financial Services:
- How does David believe AI will change financial services?
- What products are the lowest-hanging fruit? Which products will be harder for AI to serve?
- How will AI handle the ambiguity of which master to serve; the consumer and their experience or the bank and their fees and profit motive?
- Will banks need to own and operate their own models? If using other models, what will differentiate them when they are layers on top of someone else's technology?
4. David Velez: The Leader and Father:
- What does it mean to be a great listener? How does David approach it?
- What has been David's biggest lessons from Sequoia on culture? What works? What does not?
- What are David's biggest pieces of advice to raise kids that are not spoiled and are hard-working and humble?
- How does David think about "efficient giving" with the philanthropy he does today?
- What is the big paradox and challenge in philanthropy today?
20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex
Doug Adamic is the CRO @ Brex and leads the company's revenue and growth strategy. Prior to Brex, Doug was most recently the Chief Revenue Officer at SAP Concur, a provider of travel spend management solutions and services. During his 16-year tenure oversaw an organization of 600+ employees. He was responsible for all aspects of revenue, generating go-to-market strategies and departments. Prior to SAP Concur, he had a five-year tenure as an Enterprise Sales Manager for Kronos, Inc.
In Today's Episode with Doug Adamic We Discuss:
1. Entry into Sales:
- Does Doug believe that love of sales is innate or can be learned? When did he discover his love?
- What does Doug know now about sales he wish he had known when he started?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from leading 600+ people at SAP?
2. Discovery, Pipeline and Qualification:
- What are the three core reasons why companies buy software today? How do the best sales teams use those needs to get deals done fast?
- What does great sales discovery mean today? Why do you have to make customers feel uncomfortable to understand their true needs?
- What are the biggest mistakes sales teams make when asking questions, determining customer pain, willingness to pay etc etc?
- Why does Doug believe that everyone in the company is responsible for demand creation?
- What are the core pillars to success in qualification? Where do so many go wrong?
3. Getting Deals Done:
- Why does Doug disagree that now is the hardest time to be selling? Are companies buying new software today?
- What is the secret to opening up organizations that say they are not open for buying new software?
- How can sales teams create multiple champions in a prospect? How can they determine who is really a buyer vs who is an influencer in a prospect?
- What are the biggest tactics that can be used to reduce sales cycles and create urgency in a sales process?
4. Discounting, Trust and Deal Reviews:
- What is a good reason to lose a deal?
- What is a bad reason to lose a deal?
- How does Doug and Brex conduct deal reviews? What makes a good vs a bad deal review?
- What is the fastest way to lose trust either with prospects or with customers?
- Why does Doug believe discounting is BS and should not be used?
20VC: Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds & AUM is a Vanity Metric | Why 99% of Investments in AI Startups Will Go To Zero | Being a "Traction First" VC & Investing Lessons from Investing in Canva and Missing Figma with Nikhil Basu-Trivedi
Nikhil Basu Trivedi is Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork, an early-stage focused venture firm investing its first fund. In his venture career, he has invested in the early rounds of several companies that have exited or are currently valued at over $1B, including Athelas, Canva, ClassDojo, Color Health, Frame.io, Imperfect Foods, Lattice, and The Farmer's Dog. Prior to Footwork, Nikhil was a Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, on the investment team at Insight Partners, and on the founding team at Artsy.
In Today's Episode with Nikhil Basu Trivedi We Discuss:
1. From Summer Intern to Founding a Firm: The 13 Year Journey:
- How did Nikhil first make his way into venture as an intern at Insight Partners in NYC?
- What does Nikhil know now that he wishes he had known on his first day in venture?
- Why does Nikhil advise all young VCs to "not look at their business card"? Why does title not matter in venture?
- Should founders meet with Juniors as well as GPs and more senior people?
2. Small Funds Outperform Large Funds:
- Why does Nikhil believe that small funds outperform large funds?
- Why is AUM the biggest bullshit metric in VC?
- How does Nikhil advise seed stage founders who have offers from seed firms for smaller rounds at lower valuations and are weighing them against larger rounds with higher valuations from multi-stage funds?
- Does Nikhil believe that platform value-added services really provide any value?
3. The Art of Investing:
- What has been Nikhil's biggest investing win? How has it changed his approach to investing?
- How does Nikhil prioritize between people, traction, and market? What is most important?
- What has been Nikhil's biggest investing miss? How has that changed his approach?
- Does Nikhil believe the great founders are immediately obvious?
- Why is market size the single question that keeps Nikhil up the most?
4. The Dysfunctions of Venture Capital:
- What are the single biggest areas of misalignment between GP and LP?
- What do many GPs see and know well that LPs should know and see more of?
- What are the biggest ways that decision-making breaks down in a venture fund?
- Why does Nikhil believe that so much of the investment in AI is going to go up in flames?
20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem
Mudassir Sheikha is the CEO and Co-Founder of Careem. Over the last 11 years, Mudassir has scaled the service to more than 80 cities in 10 countries, with 1,400+ colleagues and more than 2.5 million Captains. With such success, in 2020 Uber announced they would be acquiring Careem for a reported $3.1BN. Prior to Careem, Mudassir co-founded “DeviceAnywhere”, a company that was acquired by “Keynote” in 2008 before joining the management consulting firm “McKinsey & Company” in Dubai.
In Today's Episode with Mudassir Sheikha We Discuss:
1. From McKinsey to $3.1BN Exit to Uber:
- What was the founding a-ha moment for Mudassir with Careem?
- What does Mudassir know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
- What does Mudassir believe he is running away from?
2. Finding Product-Market Fit:
- What is the single biggest mistake founders make when trying to find product-market fit?
- Does Mudassir believe you have to do things that do not scale, to scale? What did Careem do?
- What are some of Mudassir's biggest pieces of advice to founders on finding a core target audience and doing customer discovery the right way?
3. Competing with Giants: How To Win When You Cannot Outspend:
- How did Careem beat Uber when they had 1/100th of their budget?
- What advice does Mudassir have for founders who have competition that is much better funded?
- What is the story of spending the night in bunk beds and barely sleeping before raising $300M the next day? How did that happen?
4. The Acquisition: How it Went Down:
- How did Mudassir and Dara @ Uber first come to meet?
- How did Dara's approach contrast with the prior approach of Travis Kalanick?
- Why did Mudassir decide to sell and join Uber?
- What were the main reasons or arguments against the acquisition?
5. Talk to me About:
- Careem's Pakistan MD having to flee Pakistan for his safety post a marketing campaign?
- Elon Musk likes one of Careem's promotional videos and why?
- An investor who wired $1M with absolutely no paperwork?
- The catch up meeting that turned into a $3BN offer?
20VC: Spending $2M to Train a Single AI Model: What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size | Hallucinations: Feature or Bug | Will Everyone Have an AI Friend in the Future & Raising $150M from a16z with Noam Shazeer, Co-Founder & CEO @ Character.ai
Noam Shazeer is the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, a full-stack AI computing platform that gives people access to their own flexible superintelligence. A renowned computer scientist and researcher, Shazeer is one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). He is a key author for the Transformer, a revolutionary deep learning model enabling language understanding, machine translation, and text generation that has become the foundation of many NLP models. A former member of the Google Brain team, Shazeer led the development of spelling corrector capabilities within Gmail, the algorithm at the heart of AdSense.
In Today's Episode with Noam Shazeer We Discuss:
1. Entry into the World of AI and NLP:
- How did Noam first make his way into the world of AI and come to work on spell corrector with Google?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from spending 20 years at Google?
- What does Noam know now that he wishes he had known when he started Character?
2. Model Size or Data Size:
- What is more important, the size of the data or the size of the model?
- Does Noam agree that "we will not use models in a year that we have today?" What is the lifespan of a model?
- Does Noam agree that the companies that win are those that are able to switch between models with the most ease?
- With the majority of data being able to be downloaded from the internet, is there real value in data anymore?
3. The Biggest Barriers:
- What is the single biggest barrier to Character today?
- What are the most challenging elements of model training? Why did they need to spend $2M to train an early model?
- What are the most difficult elements of releasing a horizontal product with so many different use cases?
- Where does the value accrue in the race for AI dominance; startups or incumbents?
4. AI's Role on Society:
- Why does Noam believe that AI can create greater not worse human connections?
- Why is Noam not concerned by the speed of adoption of AI tools?
- What does Noam know about AI's impact on society that the world does not see?
20VC: Why AI Models are not a Moat, Where Does the Value in AI Accrue; Startups or Incumbents, What the World Has Got Wrong About AI, Why AI Needs a New Story and Who is the Right People to Tell it with Cris Valenzuela, Co-Founder & CEO @ Runway
Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation. To date, Cris has raised over $285M for the company from the likes of Lux Capital, Felicis, Coatue, Amplify, and Nvidia to name a few. Runway’s customers include academy-nominated movies, TV shows, media companies, and creatives across industries.
In Today's Episode with Cris Valenzuela We Discuss:
1. From Childhood in Chile to Founding one of the Hottest AI Startups:
- What was the founding moment for Cris with Runway?
- His investors described Cris as an "outsider". Does Cris believe he is an outsider? What are the biggest pros and cons of being an outsider?
- What does Cris believe he is running from? What is he running towards?
2. Models are not a Moat: Models 101:
- What does Cris believe is more important; model size or data size?
- Why does Cris believe that models are not a moat?
- How does Cris think about the lifespan of models? Will any used today be used in a year?
- Are hallucinations a feature or a bug? What are the nuances?
3. The World Has Got AI Wrong: We Need Different Stories:
- Why does Cris believe the world has got AI wrong?
- Why do we need different stories for what AI can do and will be? Who should tell them?
- Why do groups like screenwriters riot and protest if the tool is empowering and not replacing?
4. Company Building 101: Hiring and Fundraising:
- What are the biggest pieces of startup advice that are total BS?
- What has been the single biggest lesson Cris has learned when it comes to fundraising?
- Does Cris believe that VCs really add value?
- What have been the single biggest hiring mistakes that Cris has made?
- How has Cris structured their interview process to make it the best interview process in the world?
20Product: Enterprises are not Adopting AI Yet, When Will AI Break Into Enterprise, What are the Blockers, What Do Enterprises Need from AI & Why Services Companies Will Win in the Next 10 Years of AI Implementation with Howie Liu, Founder & CEO @ Airtabl
Howie Liu is the Founder and CEO @ Airtable, the fastest way to build apps for your business. To date, Howie has raised over $1BN with Airtable with the last round valuing the company at $11BN and an investor base including Benchmark, Thrive, Caffeinated, Greenoaks and Coatue to name a few.
In Todays Episode with Howie Liu We Discuss:
1. Scaling into Enterprise:
- What are the single biggest challenges when moving from PLG to enterprise?
- Why does Howie believe you have only truly hit enterprise when you sign $1M contracts?
- How long did it take for Airtable to sign their first $1M ARR contract?
- How can founders know when is the right time to scale into enterprise?
- How does the product need to change with the scaling?
2. Enterprises: Do They Really Love AI:
- Why does Howie believe that enterprises are not jumping on AI yet?
- When does enterprise interest turn into enterprise buying and purchasing?
- What are the single biggest barriers to enterprises buying AI solutions today?
- Post-purchase, what are the biggest implementation challenges for enterprises with AI?
3. The Changing Sales Process:
- Are we seeing the bundling of tools within large enterprises today?
- Which categories and vendors are most vulnerable? Which will survive the cuts?
- What do vendors need to do to prove to CFOs that they need to remain in their budget?
- How has the customer success process changed over the last year with tightening budgets?
4. Howie Liu: AMA:
- Airtable famously got Benchmark to lead their Series C, how did this come to be when they famously always only do Series A?
- Why does Howie believe that it is total BS to suggest post-PMF, everything is good?
- What does Howie know now that he wishes he had known when he started Airtable?
20VC: NEW FORMAT: Mega Funds Will Come Back, Why Markups Have Corrupted VC, Why RIFs Should Always Be An Embarrassment To SaaS Founders and Why Pitching is BS and Fake with Jason Lemkin and Rick Zullo
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.
Rick Zullo is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Equal Ventures. Prior to co-founding Equal Ventures, Rick was an investor at Lightbank, Prior to Lightbank, Rick worked with investment firms Foundation Capital, Bowery Capital, and Lightview Capital.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1. Why Venture Capital Needs It's Jerry Maguire Moment:
- Why does Rick believe that VC needs it's "Jerry Maguire" moment?
- What needs to change? What needs to stay the same?
- Why does Jason believe we will see even more mega funds in 2024 and 2025?
2. Unicorns are So 2019:
- Why does Jason believe that "unicorn investing is mostly dead for bigger funds and none of them are looking for a $1BN outcome anymore?"
- Why does Rick believe that multi-stage fund investing at seed simply does not make sense?
- What does Rick believe many founders need to know when they take multi-stage money at seed?
- Of the over 1,000 unicorns created over the last few years, how many of them do Rick and Jason feel are actually unicorns today?
3. Efficiency and Growth: We Need it All:
- Why does Jason believe, as a founder you should be embarrassed if you ever had a RIF (reduction in force)?
- Last year many founders got a pass on growth as they were more efficient. Is that pass over? Do they need to get back to growth?
- What is the single biggest reason that companies do not scale from seed to Series A?
- What happens to the many companies with years of runway but no product-market-fit?
- Are we entering a new age of efficient company building or will we go back to high burn environments and excessive spending?
4. Entering the World of LPs:
- If Jason and Rick were to advise LPs today on how much to discount the value of their venture books, what advice would they give?
- How have markups completely corrupted the venture ecosystem?
- How does LPs being incentivized by paper-marks make the industry even more screwed?
- What are the single biggest misalignments between GP and LP?
20VC: The Biggest Lies of Silicon Valley, Why Entrepreneurship is Not For Everyone, Why VCs are Out of Touch, Why Many Would Be Great Entrepreneurs Will Burn Out, Why You Should Let Your Children Suffer and Why You Will Choose The Wrong Partner with Nick
Nick Huber is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and content creator focused on real estate and small business. In the last 9 months, Nick has co-founded 6 companies including RE Cost Set, RecruitJet, Titan Risk, Blue Key Capital, Tax Credit Hunter, and WebRun Labs. His primary business, Bolt Storage, owns 1.8M sqft of self-storage facilities across 62 locations in 11 states.
In Todays Episode with Nick Huber We Discuss:
Wealth:
- What the richest families in the world all understand and what the majority of people forget?
- What are the two best ways to make money as an employee? What do most forget/not do?
- Why money does make you happy and why society drastically undervalues wealth today?
- Why we should not be concerned by the levels of income inequality?
Marriage and Parenting:
5. Why it is BS to not pass your wealth down to your children? 6. Why you have to let your kids suffer in order for them to grow? 7. How do you stop kids from becoming assholes if they are brought up with money? 8. Why the majority of the time, people choose the wrong partner? What should we look for? 9. What is the number one thing you can do to set your child up for success?
Silicon Valley and Entrepreneurship:
10. Why entrepreneurship is not for everyone? Who is it for?
11. Why VCs are out of touch and naive?
12. What is the single biggest lie of Silicon Valley?
13. Why will so many would-be great entrepreneurs burn themselves out when they should not have to?
Management and Brand Building:
14. How to build a brand today? Why you have to be controversial to be interesting?
15. How to deal with hate and criticism? Why you cannot please everybody?
16. Why woke culture can give you an advantage if you do not have it?
17. How to build a strategic network the right way? How to become a card in someone's rolodex?
18. What is the single worst thing you can do when hiring?
19. What do you do when you lose trust in an employee?
20VC: Does Value Accrue to Incumbents or Startups in the AI Race, Why Model Size Matters More Than Data Size, Why Artificial General Intelligence is Far Away, Why Carpenters Will Be Paid More Than Software Engineers & Future of Jobs with Richard Socher
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.
In Today's Episode with Richard Socher We Discuss:
1. The Decade-Long Journey to Becoming an AI OG:
- How did Richard first make his way into the world of AI over a decade ago?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from working with Marc Benioff?
- How did 5 years at Salesforce impact how he both thinks and operates?
2. Models: Does Size Matter:
- How important is model size? Is data size more important?
- What are the biggest misconceptions people have around models today?
- How does Richard respond to the suggestion that "many startups are wrappers around LLMs"?
- Are hallucinations a feature or a bug?
3. Where Does Value Accrue:
- Where does Richard believe most of the value will accrue; startup or incumbent?
- Which incumbents are best positioned to win? Which are the laggards and behind?
- What do many not see about the startup vs incumbent race in the AI war?
4. Open vs Closed: Which Wins:
- Does Richard favour Yann LeCun's open approach? Or is the world of AI more closed?
- What are the biggest challenges of an open ecosystem?
- What are the nuances that make both challenging?
5. Richard Socher: AMA:
- Why will carpenters be paid more than software engineers in 10 years?
- Why is AGI still way off? Are people too unrealistic?
- How much money does Google make off search every day? Why does that leave them vulnerable?
20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge
Brian Balfour is the Founder and CEO of Reforge. Previously, he was the VP of Growth @ HubSpot. Prior to HubSpot, he was an EIR @ Trinity Ventures and founder of Boundless Learning and Viximo. He advises companies including Blue Bottle Coffee, Gametime, Lumoid, GrabCAD, and Help Scout on growth and customer acquisition.
In Today's Episode with Brian Balfour We Discuss:
1. Entry into Growth and Lessons from Hubspot:
- How did Brian make his entry into the world of growth?
- What does Brian know now about growth that he wishes he had known when he started in growth?
- What are 1-2 of his single biggest takeaways from his time at Hubspot that impacted his mindset?
2. The Foundations:
- What is growth? What is it not?
- What does Brian mean when he says "all growth can be boiled down to 4 things"?
- When is the right time to bring in your first growth person?
- Should the first growth person be senior or junior?
- Should the growth team be standalone or sit within an existing function?
3. The Importance of Product Channel Fit:
- What is product channel fit? How should founders approach it?
- How do you know when you have it?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make with regards to PCF?
4. Next Comes Channel Model Fit:
- What is channel model fit? How should founders approach it?
- What are clear indicators that you have or do not have channel model fit?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make with CMF?
5. Finally, Model Market Fit:
- What is model market fit? How should founders approach it?
- What are clear indicators that you have or do not have model market fit?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make with MMF?
6. Brian Balfour: AMA:
- Why is product market fit not enough?
- What does Brian mean when he says "revenue does not create usage"?
- What are the biggest dangers of mixing customers and users?
- What do Hubspot do better than anyone else to know when an existing product/strategy is dying?
- Is it always better to diversify marketing channels?
20VC: Scaling Wait But Why to 600,000 Subs; Behind the Scenes on The Research Process, How to Learn Entirely New Topics Fast, The Writing Process and Building Good Habits & The Distribution Process and the Business Behind the Blog with Tim Urban
Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator and co-founder of Wait But Why, a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of half a million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Tim’s 2016 TED main stage talk is the third most-watched TED talk in history with 66 million views. In 2023, Tim published his bestselling book What’s Our Problem? A Self Help Book for Societies.
In Today's Episode with Tim Urban We Discuss:
1. The Founding of Wait by Why:
- What was the a-ha moment for Tim that Wait but Why should be his life's work and sole focus?
- What does Tim know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
- What does Tim believe he is running away from? Why is he so fearful of constraints?
2. Wait But Why: The Scaling Journey to 600,000 Subs:
- What was the first piece to really go viral? How did that change the trajectory?
- What single piece is Tim most proud of? What piece is he least proud of?
- What has been the hardest element of scaling Wait But Why?
- What was the most surprising and unexpected elements of Wait But Why's scaling?
3. Topic Selection: Choosing What To Write:
- What does the process look like for Tim when deciding what topic to write about?
- How does Tim know what his audience will want to hear about vs what they will not?
- What topics has Tim thought would be interesting but post initial research, are not?
4. The Writing Process:
- How does Tim approach the writing process? How has his changed over time?
- What mechanisms does Tim put in place to avoid writers block?
- What are some of Tim's biggest tips to aspiring writers and authors?
5. The Distribution Process:
- How does Tim approach distributing the content once produced? What works? What does not?
- Why did Tim choose newsletter, Twitter and Instagram as his channels of choice?
- How important has the newsletter been to the growth of the business?
6. AI: Super-Intelligence and The Future:
- On reviewing his pieces on AI back in 2015, what does he believe he got right? What would he change with the benefit of hindsight?
- Is Tim more or less positive looking forward at AI proliferating through all of society?
- What is Tim most concerned about in the world right now?
20VC Roundtable: NEW FORMAT: Why the Seed Investing Model is Broken, How to Make Money at Seed Moving Forward; Who Wins and Who Loses, Why Venture Value Add Platforms are BS and Failed and Why There Will be an IPO per Week in H2 2024
Sam Lessin is a Co-Founder and Partner @ Slow Ventures with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Robinhood, Slack, Solana, PillPack and many more unicorn companies. Prior to Slow, Sam was a VP Product at Facebook having sold his company to Meta.
Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors, one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms investing today with a portfolio including the likes of Klarna, Kavak, Quinto Andar, Credit Karma and more. As for Frank, prior to QED, Frank was one of the earliest analysts hired into Capital One and spent almost 13 years there helping build many of the company’s business units and operational areas.
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.
In Today's Discussion on Why Seed is Broken We Discuss:
1. The Seed Model Was Broken and What Comes Now:
- Why does Sam Lessin believe the model for seed of a "factory line" was broken?
- What does he believe will replace it?
- Why does Jason Lemkin argue that this might not be the case for SaaS and enterprise?
2. Round Construction: YC, Multi-Stage Funds and Party Rounds:
- Why does Sam Lessin believe we have seen the end of party rounds? Why does Jason Lemkin disagree and we will see more than ever?
- Why does Sam Lessin believe the factory model of YC churning out companies is over? Where does Jason Lemkin believe the value lies in the YC model?
- Will the multi-stage funds remain in seed? How has their entrance and deployment changed the seed market?
3. VC Value Add at Seed: Is it BS?
- Why does Jason believe all talent arms in venture firms have failed?
- Why does Sam believe that no VCs provide value?
- Do the best founders really need help? Why do Jason and Sam disagree?
4. What Happens Now:
- Why does Jason believe that every manager can write off their fund from 2021?
- Who will be the winners in seed in the next 10 years?
- Why does Sam believe if you want to bet on AI, just bet on Meta or Microsoft?
- What will happen to the many companies with no PMF but 10 years of runway?
20VC: The Memo: The State of the VC Market: Why Seed Funds Can't Invest in "Hot Startups" Anymore, Why Series A & B is Terrible, Why the IPO Market Will Explode in 2024 & Why VC DD is BS & Every VC Has More Fraud in their Portfolio with Jason Lemkin
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.
In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin We Discuss:
1. WTF is Happening At Seed Right Now:
- Why does Jason believe seed is more active than ever?
- Is the pricing of seed rounds impacted since the downturn?
- Why does Jason believe it is not only not the end of party rounds but just the beginning of them?
- Why does Jason believe you cannot fail if you have $1M in ARR and an amazing founder?
- Why does Jason believe that seed investors cannot participate in "hot seed rounds" anymore?
2. Is Series A a Dead Zone:
- How does Jason analyze the Series A and B environment today?
- What has changed in what investors expect and want to see in potential Series A and B investments?
- What happens to the many companies who raised pre-emptive Series As and have 10 years of runway but no product-market fit?
- Why does Jason believe founders should offer to give the money back when it is not working?
- What happens to the Series A and B market in the next 18 months? When does it come back?
3. Growth: People are Too Negative!
- Why does Jason believe that growth is more active than many are giving credit for?
- What are the ARR benchmarks required to get a good growth round term sheet today?
- Why does Jason believe that VC DD is a load of BS?
- Why does Jason believe that every VC has fraud in their portfolio? Will they come out?
4. Ring That Bell: IPOs and M&A:
- Why does Jason believe 2024 will be an amazing year for IPOs?
- Why does much of the IPO market rely on Stripe and Databricks?
- What is needed for an amazing 2024 IPO market?
- How does Jason evaluate the M&A market in 2024? Will regulation get in the way?
5. Jason Lemkin: AMA:
- Why does Jason Lemkin believe this generation of workers will never work hard again?
- What is the only way for seed funds to make money investing in serial entrepreneurs?
- What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
20VC: Vinod Khosla on How AI Impacts The Future of Healthcare, Education, Income Equality, Geo-Politics, Music and Climate Change
Vinod Khosla is the Founder of Khosla Ventures, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with investments in OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. Prior to founding Khosla, Vinod was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems.
In Today's Episode with Vinod Khosla We Discuss:
1. The State of AI Today:
- Does Vinod believe we are in a bubble or is the excitement justified based on technological development?
- What are the single biggest lessons that Vinod has from prior bubbles?
- What is different about this time? What is Vinod concerned about with this AI bubble?
2. The Future of Healthcare and Music:
- How does Vinod evaluate the impact AI will have on the future of healthcare?
- How does Vinod analyse the impact AI will have on the future of music and content creation?
- Does Vinod believe that humans will resist these advancements?
- Who will be the laggards, slow to embrace it and who will be the early adopters?
3. Solving Income Inequality:
- Does Vinod believe AI does more to harm or to hurt income inequality?
- What mechanisms can be put in place to ensure that AI does not further concentrate wealth into the hands of the few?
- Does Vinod believe in universal basic income? What does everyone get wrong with UBI?
4. The Future of Energy, Climate and Politics:
- Why is forcing non-economic solutions the wrong approach to climate? What is the right approach?
- Why is Vinod so bullish on fusion and geothermal? How does fusion bankrupt entire industries?
- How does the advancements in energy and resource creation change global politics?
- Does Vinod believe Larry Summers was right; "China is a prison, Japan is a nursing home and Europe is a museum"?
5. Vinod Khosla: AMA:
- What is Vinod's single biggest investing miss?
- What does Vinod know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
- Why did the Taylor Swift concert have such a profound impact on him?
- What was Marc Andreesen like when he backed him with Netscape in 1996?
20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela
Ilir Sela is the Founder and CEO of Slice, the all-in-one ordering and marketing tech platform for local pizzerias. Through its partnerships, Slice has driven over $1B in earnings for over 18,000 independent pizzerias nationwide. Fun fact, Slice is also one of the largest employers in Macedonia and at one point, employed so many people there, they had to start their own school to train more people. Before Slice, Ilir started Nerd Force and sold it in 2008. Huge thanks to Jeff Richards (GGV) and Ben Sun (Primary) for some amazing questions today.
In Today's Discussion with Ilir Sela We Discuss:
1. From Macedonia to the Bright Lights of NYC and Bentley Buying:
- How Ilir made his way into the world of startups having grown up in Macedonia?
- How did his less affluent upbringing impact his approach to company building?
- How does Ilir think about the importance of money? How did he come to buy a Bentley?
- What does Ilir know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. Why Bootstrapped Was Best & The Decision to Fundraise:
- Why did Ilir scale the business to $4M in revenue without ever fundraising?
- What does Ilir believe are the benefits of scaling businesses with less money?
- What would Ilir have done differently had he raised money earlier?
- What advice does Ilir have for founders who see competitors raising more money than them?
3. Why Delegation is BS and Your Upbringing F***** You Up:
- Why does Ilir believe that much of our upbringing can instill principles which make us a worse leader?
- Why does Ilir believe it is BS to hire great people and get out of the way?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Ilir sees founders make in company scaling?
- What have been some of Ilir's biggest lessons in talent acquisition?
4. Decision-Making 101:
- How does Ilir analyze his decision-making framework today?
- Where does he need to improve as a leader today? What does he need to do to get there?
- What has been the single best decision he made with Slice? What did he learn from it?
- What has been the worst decision he has made in the scaling process? How did that change his mindset?
20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp
Lori Jimenez is the Chief Revenue Officer at WorkRamp where she is responsible for sales, customer success, solutions engineering, sales development, and revenue operations. Over her 25-year career, Lori has a track record of scaling high-growth GTM teams at companies including Google, TripActions/Navan, Facebook, and Box.
In Today's Episode with Lori Jimenez We Discuss:
1. From a First Sales Job at 15 Years Old to Leading Sales Teams at Google and Facebook:
- How Lori made her foray into the world of sales at the age of 15?
- What are 1-2 of Lori's biggest takeaways from her time at Google, Facebook and Box?
- What does Lori know now that she wishes she had known at the start of her career in sales?
2. The Sales Playbook: What, When and How:
- How does Lori define the "sales playbook"? What is it not?
- Should the founder be the one to create the sales playbook?
- When is the right time for founders to make their first sales hires?
- What is the right profile for the first sales hires?
- Should founders hire 2 sales reps at a time? What are the pros and cons?
3. The Hiring Process: Building the Sales Team:
- How does Lori structure the hiring process for all new sales hires?
- What are the must-ask questions to ask in every sales hiring meeting?
- What are the biggest red flags founders should look for when hiring for sales?
- What are Lori's biggest lessons on how to navigate compensation discussions with potential sales hires?
- What are Lori's biggest lessons on what title negotiation says about a candidate?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring for sales teams?
4. Scaling the Machine: Bringing the Dollars In:
- How does Lori approach discounting? When is the right time to do it?
- Is old-school enterprise sales and entertaining dead? How has it changed?
- How does Lori structure deal reviews? What is a good vs a bad reason to lose a deal?
- How does Lori approach multi-year deals? What is good? What is bad?
20VC: Marcelo Claure & Shu Nyatta on Lessons from Investing $7.5BN at Softbank & Why Dumb Money has Gone, Why "LATAM is Under Construction" and the Next 10 Years Will Be the Best & Investing Lessons from Missing Nubank & OpenAI & Investing in FTX
Marcelo Claure is the Founder & CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm. He is the Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Bicycle Capital, a $500M Latin America-focused growth equity fund, and was appointed Chairman in Latin America of SHEIN, the global #1 on-demand fashion company in the world. Claure was also the CEO of SoftBank Group International where he launched SoftBank’s $8B Latin America Funds, and had direct oversight for SoftBank's operating companies. As an entrepreneur, Marcelo built Brightstar from a small local distributor to the world’s largest global wireless distribution and services company. In addition, Claure led the turnaround of US wireless telecommunications company Sprint and helped orchestrate its US$195 billion merger with T-Mobile.
Shu Nyatta is the founder of Bicycle Capital. Before Bicycle, Shu was most recently a Managing Partner at SoftBank Group International, where he launched and managed two separate funds - the SoftBank Latin America Fund and the Opportunity Fund for early-stage investments in US-based founders-of-color. In the first part of his SoftBank career, Shu was a founding Partner of SoftBank's Vision Fund. Several companies have retained him on their boards as an independent board member following his departure from SoftBank, including Lemonade (NYSE: LMND), Kavak and Tribal Credit. Shu also serves on the board of Endeavor Global - the leading global community of, by and for high-impact entrepreneurs.
In Today's Episode Featuring Bicycle Capital We Discuss:
1. From Deploying $10BN at Softbank to Founding Bicycle Capital:
- What was the founding moment for Marcelo and Shu in the founding of Bicycle?
- What does Shu believe is Marcelo's superpower? How has working with Marcelo changed the way he thinks?
- Why does Marcelo believe that he is not a good investor? How does Shu make him better, specifically?
2. Lessons from Investing $10BN at Softbank:
- What are 1-2 of the biggest lessons from investing $10BN over the last few years at Softbank?
- How did missing OpenAI and Nubank impact how Shu and Marcelo think and invest today?
- Why was losing $150M on Softbank's FTX investment, the biggest lesson of Marcelo's career?
- What are Marcelo and Shu doing differently at Bicycle, having seen how it went at Softbank?
3. The Venture World is Changing:
- Why do Marcelo and Shu believe the world of venture is changing? How is it changing most?
- Why are founders going directly to LPs to raise rounds today, over going to VCs?
- Do Marcelo and Shu believe that many VCs provide value?
- Who will win in the next 10 years of venture? Who will lose?
- Why do Marcelo and Shu believe you should not invest in founders that do not take your advice?
- Do Marcelo and Shu agree with the statement that "the best founders do not need your help"?
4. LATAM is Under Construction: It is Time to Build:
- What are the two reasons that the next decade will be the best ever for LATAM?
- What are the biggest misconceptions about the LATAM tech market?
- How do Marcelo and Shu answer the question of the lack of liquidity available with few M&A deals taking place and very few LATAM companies listing on the NASDAQ?
- How do Marcelo and Shu evaluate the withdrawal of foreign capital from LATAM tech markets? Is it good or bad? Have a load of US funds lost money on early-stage LATAM deals?
20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures
Stephane Kurgan is widely considered one of the best operators in Europe. During his tenure as COO @ King, King went from $65m to $2.4B in bookings, from 100 to 2,400 employees, and did a $7B IPO before being acquired by Activision Blizzard. Prior to joining King, Stephane served as CFO of Tideway Ltd. (acquired by BMC Software) and was the co-founder and CEO of Digital Reserve. Today, Stephane serves as a Venture Partner at Index Ventures, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade and more recently as an executive advisor at Technology Crossover Ventures.
In Today's Episode with Stephane Kurgan We Discuss:
1. From Belgium Boy to Europe's Leading Operator:
- How a CD Rom company was the starting place for one of Europe's best executives?
- What does Steph believe he is running away from?
- What does Steph know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. Four Criteria of Truly Great Leaders:
- What four traits do all truly special leaders have?
- What are the 1-2 that are the hardest to find in great leaders today?
- Why does Steph believe that even the best leaders are wrong 40% of the time?
- How does Steph approach decision-making? How has it changed over time?
- What is the most toxic element of decisions within companies today?
- When does Steph change plan because a decision is wrong vs stick to it?
3. Speed of Execution and Mission Statements:
- How important does Steph believe speed of execution is today?
- What are the elements that one can go fast on vs go slow and be very deliberate on?
- What elements has Steph gone fast on in the past that led to a mistake? How would he have changed his approach with the benefit of hindsight?
- Why does Steph believe that mission statements have different value at different company stages?
- What is Steph's biggest advice to founders on creating mission statements?
4. Delivering Feedback and Maintaining Trust:
- What are 1-2 of Steph's biggest lessons when it comes to delivering feedback well?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when delivering feedback today?
- Can trust be regained once lost? How?
- Does Steph start from a position of full trust or is it gained gradually over time?
20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram
Sri Batchu currently leads Growth at Ramp. He previously led Growth Strategy and Operations at Instacart where he also helped grow their Ads business. Prior to that, he was one of the first 50 employees at Opendoor where he built, scaled, and managed a variety of business teams including Analytics, Sales, and Pricing. During his time, the company grew from $100M to $5B+ revenue and to 1500+ people. He started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and also held various investing roles including in private equity at Bain Capital.
In Today's Episode with Sri Batchu We Discuss:
1. From Harvard to Private Equity to Leading the Best Growth Teams:
- How did Sri make his way into the world of growth with Instacart and Opendoor?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from his time at Instacart? How did it change his approach and mindset towards growth?
- How did Zilllow burn themselves by buying homes? What did that teach Sri about hitting metrics and goal setting in growth teams?
2. Growth Teams Should Fail and Fail Fast:
- What is the right ratio of success to failure within growth teams?
- What are specific ways that growth teams can increase the speed with which they fail?
- How are the best post-mortems run? Who joins them? Who leads the agenda?
- What are Sri's biggest lessons on how to set the right goals?
- Where do so many growth teams go wrong with the North Star that they set for themselves?
3. Building the Bench: Hiring a Growth Team:
- When is the right time to make your first growth hires?
- What profile should your first growth hires be?
- How should one structure the interview process when hiring growth teams?
- What is the first question Sri asks all new hires?
- Why does Sri believe you have to hire slowly?
- Should candidates do case studies as part of the process, if so, on a new company or on the company they are interviewing for?
4. When Operators Become Investors:
- Why does Sri believe the best investors of the next 10 years will be operators?
- Why does Sri believe that operators can do due diligence to a higher level than traditional VCs?
- Why does Sri believe that investors should not take cold emails?
- Why does Sri believe that it is not wrong for an investor to hire from their portfolio companies?
- What does Sri believe the future of venture holds over the next 10 years?
20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G
Adam Mosseri is the Head of Instagram, where he is responsible for overseeing the engineering, product, and business teams and leading Meta’s efforts on creators and Reels. Adam has been at Meta for more than fifteen years. He started at Meta as a designer for Facebook's mobile app before moving to product management, where he led the Facebook News Feed product and engineering teams, and served as the Head of Facebook News Feed. Adam began his career founding a design consultancy focused on graphic, interaction, and exhibition design before joining TokBox as the company’s first designer.
In Today's Discussion with Adam Mosseri We Discuss:
1. From Designer to Product Leader to Instagram CEO:
- What did Adam learn from his first job bartending? How did it impact his approach to customer support and research?
- What are the top 1-2 pieces of advice Adam would give to someone wanting to make the move from individual contributor to leader?
- If Adam was "not amazing at anything", what did he do that enabled him to rise above the rest and become CEO of Instagram?
- What have been 1-2 of the biggest lessons from working with Mark Zuckerberg for 15 years?
2. A Deep Dive on the Wild Times as Instagram CEO:
- What has been Adam's single biggest mistake as CEO of Instagram?
- What does Adam believe is the least known feature within Instagram that has made them successful?
- What does Adam believe has been the biggest product decision he has made as CEO?
- Why does Adam believe that Instagram is too complicated as a product?
- Who does Adam believe is the most formidable competitor to Instagram?
- Was Instagram Reels a simple copy of TikTok? What have Instagram learned from TikTok?
- How does Adam respond to the statement that Instagram is a "copy-cat machine" and lacks innovaton?
3. Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users in Three Days:
- Did Adam and the team expect the response they got to Threads?
- Why did they decide to break Threads out into a separate app?
- What went into bootstrapping the Threads friendship and interest graph?
- What was the Threads influencer activation strategy? What worked? What did not? Did they pay influencers? How did they choose which verticals to focus on?
- What is Adam's core focus with Threads today?
- How is the team analysing and measuring retention? What are their goals?
- What are the 1-2 core reasons why Threads would not work? How do they aim to prevent them?
- In 12 months, where will Threads be?
4. The Future of Consumer Social: What Happens Now?
- Does Adam believe we have seen the transition from the social graph to the interest graph? Is it that binary?
- Is it possible to have both the interest and the friendship graph all in one app?
- How does the monetization potential differ when comparing Threads (text) to Instagram (visual)?
- How important is it for the next consumer social platforms to have stars that are native to their platform (Mr Beast on Youtube, D'Amelio on TikTok etc.)
20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai
Jean-Denis Greze is Chief Technology Officer at Plaid where oversees global product business units across North America and Europe. Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Jean-Denis is also a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Nex Health, Merge.dev and Rupa Health to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Jean-Denis Greze We Discuss:
1. The Journey to One of the Most Powerful CTOs:
- How JD made his way into the world of tech with his first role at Dropbox?
- How does JD analyse a Linkedin CV today? What are the signals of outperformers?
- What does JD know now that he wishes he had known when he started in tech?
2. Hiring the Best: 101:
- What are JD's single biggest lessons on hiring the best talent?
- What have been some of JD's biggest hiring mistakes?
- Why does JD believe founders need to be as good at firing as they are hiring?
- Does JD believe people can scale with the scaling of a company? If they do not scale, do you layer them or do you let them go?
- How does JD determine whether to bring in an external candidate vs promote someone from within?
3. Product Differentiation is not Sustainable:
- Why does JD believe that product differentiation is not sustainable? Why is UX as a moat BS?
- How does this lead JD to suggest Salesforce is a short in the public markets?
- Why does JD believe that Snowflake is also a short?
- What does Snowflake teach us about the different stages of product market fit?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when analyzing product market fit?
4. Remote Work, Titles and Entitlement:
- Why does JD believe most tech employees treat their employer in the same way French citizens treat the French government?
- How does JD analyse the impact of remote work on both productivity and culture?
- Why does JD believe titles are BS in the beginning but matter with scale?
- Why does JD believe that you should not hire for the long term?
20Product: The Secret to Successful Onboarding from Notion and Airtable, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make in PLG Today& Why 90% of Onboarding Today is Done Poorly with Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth @ Notion
Lauryn Isford is the Head of Product Growth at Notion, managing Notion's product-led growth engine and self-serve business. Before Notion, she led growth at Airtable, and previously worked on growth teams including Meta, Dropbox, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Lauryn is an active angel investor and advisor supporting companies building product-led go-to-market motions.
In Today's Episode with Lauryn Isford:
1. From Blue Bottle to Airtable and Notion:
- How did Lauryn first make her way into the world of product and growth?
- What are 1-2 of her biggest takeaways from Dropbox, Facebook and Blue Bottle?
- What does Lauryn know now that she wishes she had known when she started?
2. What is Growth: 101:
- How does Lauryn define growth? What is it not?
- When is the right time to make your first growth hire?
- What profile should your first hire in growth be?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring growth teams?
3. Mastering the Onboarding Experience:
- What are the core elements of a successful onboarding experience?
- How important is time to value in onboarding today?
- What are the biggest mistakes product teams make in company onboarding?
- What is the most effective onboarding technique and workflow in PLG today?
- Why are 90% of current onboarding's done badly?
4. Making Growth work with the Rest of the Org:
- What are the single biggest barriers to growth and product working together well?
- What can leaders do to make their growth teams work well with product teams?
- How can growth teams experiment and test with product without messing up codebases?
20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport
Dave Clark is the CEO of Flexport, the global freight forwarder and logistics platform that has now raised over $2.5BN to build the category leader. Prior to Flexport, Dave began his career at Amazon in 1999 as an Operations Manager, working his way up to become the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business in 2021. By the time Dave left, he was responsible for over 1 million employees. Dave spearheaded the launch of Amazon Robotics and grew the company’s logistics divisions to include Amazon’s own planes, trailers, and last-mile delivery vehicles through Amazon’s own delivery network (which today ships more packages than FedEx and UPS). Huge thanks to Ryan Peterson for some amazing question suggestions today.
In Today's Episode with Dave Clark We Discuss:
1. From Operations Manager to CEO @ Amazon:
- How did Dave Clark make his way into the world of startups with Amazon in 1999?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from spending 23 years at Amazon?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from working alongside Jeff Bezos for 23 years?
2. How Big Leaders Make Big Decisions:
- What is Dave's decision-making framework when it comes to big decisions?
- What is the biggest decision Dave made that went wrong? How did it impact his mindset?
- How does Dave think through prioritisation as a leader today?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when it comes to focus?
3. How Big Leaders Hire Big Talent:
- What are 1-2 of Dave's biggest lessons on what it takes to acquire the best talent?
- Does Dave believe that people can scale with the scaling of the company?
- How does Dave think through the challenge of promoting internally vs bringing in external talent?
- Why does Dave like to hire people straight out of college? What are the benefits?
4. How Big People Deal with Big Problems: Kids, Money and Ego
- What are 1-2 of Dave's biggest lessons when it comes to parenting?
- How does Dave think about giving his kids the same hunger and ambition, when they are brought up in such affluent environments?
- How does Dave assess his own relationship to money? How has it changed over time?
- What does a truly great marriage mean to Dave? Where do so many go wrong in trying to find work-life balance?
20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV
Sheel Mohnot is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Better Tomorrow Ventures, a $225M fund that leads rounds in pre-seed and seed-stage fintech companies globally. Sheel and Jake (his co-founder) invested for many years together before founding BTV and wrote checks into Mercury, Flexport, Ramp, and Hippo Insurance to name a few. As for Sheel, before BTV he ran 500 Fintech for close to 7 years, and before that was a founder, founding two companies, both of which were acquired.
In Today's Episode with Sheel Mohnot We Discuss:
1. VC Needs to Change:
- Why does Sheel believe that VCs should have smaller funds?
- What are the biggest misalignments between founders and VCs today?
- What are the biggest points of friction between VCs and their LPs today?
2. VC in 10 Years Time:
- Who are going to be the winners in venture in 10 years time?
- Who are going to be the losers?
- Will micro-funds be bigger or smaller as a segment of the ecosystem?
- Will solo-GPs be bigger or smaller? Were they a zero-interest rate phenomenon?
3. The Errors of a Bull Market:
- What does Sheel believe are the single biggest mistakes made by VCs between 2020-2022?
- Did Sheel take liquidity off the table in the last few years? What have been some of his biggest lessons on when to sell?
- How does Sheel evaluate the flood of capital into emerging markets in the bull market? What happens now?
- Fintech is also experiencing the same challenging time, how does Sheel assess what is happening in the fintech financing market today?
4. Building a Fund: Lessons, Mistakes and Advice Scaling to $225M:
- What are the single biggest mistakes Sheel and Jake have made in the fun scaling? How has it impacted their mindset?
- What does Sheel know now about fund management that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
- What advice does Sheel give to emerging managers today, raising their first and second funds?
20Sales: Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox: Five of the Biggest Lessons on Starting, Scaling and Managing Sales Teams from 25 Years Leading the Best with Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian
Kevin Egan is the Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian and brings more than 25 years of enterprise sales experience and leadership to the company. Prior to his current role, Kevin served as the Vice President of North America Sales at both Slack and Dropbox and has held various senior sales leadership positions at Salesforce.
In Todays Episode With Kevin Egan We Discuss:
1. The Makings of a Truly Great Enterprise Sales Leader:
- How did Kevin first make his way into the world of enterprise sales?
- What does Kevin know now that he wishes he had known when he entered sales?
- What advice would Kevin give to a new sales leader today starting a new role?
2. The Sales Playbook:
- How does Kevin define "the sales playbook"? Does the founder have to be the one to create the sales playbook
- When is the right time to hire your first salespeople? Should they be senior or junior first?
- What are the different types of reps to hire in the early days? Should you hire two at a time?
3. PLG vs Enterprise:
- Does Kevin believe it is possible to run both PLG and enterprise playbook at the same time?
- How does one know when they are ready to scale from PLG into enterprise? What are the signs?
- What do companies need to change in the way their sales team, is structured to make the transition from PMG to enterprise sales?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Kevin sees founders make in the scaling from PLG to enterprise?
4. Hiring the Sales Team:
- What non-obvious characteristics and attitudes should we look for in sales reps?
- How does Kevin structure the hiring process for all new additions to sales and revenue teams?
- What makes good PLG sales leaders? How are they different from enterprise sales leaders?
- What questions and case studies are most revealing for you in identifying them?
- What have been some of Kevin's biggest lessons on comp structure for these early rep hires?
5. Making the Machine Work:
- How does Kevin build trust with his early sales rep hires? What works? What does not?
- How does Kevin balance hitting the quarterly revenue target with longer-term pipeline strategy?
- How does Kevin manage when a quarter is missed? What is the right approach?
- How does Kevin approach post-mortems and deal reviews? How often? What do the best entail?
20VC: Simon Sinek on Trust; How it is Gained and Lost | Why Millennials Avoid Conflict | How to Listen Effectively | What Makes The Best Feedback and How to Provide It | Why Humans Do Not Change & How To Find Out Who You Really Are
Simon Sinek is an optimist and author, as we discuss in the show today. Simon is best known for his TED Talk on the concept of WHY (62M views), and his video on millennials in the workplace (80M views in 7 days). Simon is also a bestselling author including global bestseller Start with WHY, Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game. In addition, Simon is the founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development company, and he publishes other inspiring thinkers and doers through his publishing partnership with Penguin Random House called Optimism Press.
In Today's Discussion with Simon Sinek We Discuss:
1. The Makings of Simon Sinek:
- In what ways does Simon believe that his parents and upbringing shaped who he is today?
- What does Simon want to be when he grows up?
- What was the catalytic moment to the "Simon Sinek brand"? When was that big break moment?
2. Identity:
- Simon has said before, "I define myself by who I am and not what I do". Is it wrong to define yourself by what you do?
- What do you do if you do not know who you are? What do you do if you do not like the answers to who you are?
- Is it possible to change who you are? What does that process look like?
- What is Simon's biggest advice to those looking to find a greater sense of self and identity?
3. Trust:
- Does Simon start relationships with inherent trust and it is there to be lost or no trust and it is there to be gained over time?
- When has someone broken Simon's trust? How did it impact how he approaches trust today?
- In the case of cheating in a relationship, does Simon believe it is possible to regain trust over time?
- Simon has said before, "trust is built on telling the truth". Does it ever make sense or is even right to tell a little white lie in a relationship?
4. Creating Safe Spaces:
- How can we create safe spaces for our partners to be their full selves?
- Does this differ professionally and personally?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make in building safe spaces?
5. Listening:
- What does great listening in a relationship mean? How can we do it better?
- Often people jump from listening to solution mode, is that wrong?
- Why does Simon have a rule of “no crying alone”. What does it do and how is it productive? When was the last time Simon cried?
6. Simon Sinek: AMA:
- What is success to you?
- Can one be “successful” and unhappy?
- What is the difference between happiness and joy?
20VC: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size, Why The Google Employee Was Wrong; OpenAI and Google Have the Advantage & Why Open Source is Not Going to Win with Douwe Kiela, Co-Founder @ Contextual AI
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Last month Contextual closed a $20M funding round including Bain Capital, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and 20VC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.
In Today's Episode with Douwe Kiela We Discuss:
1. Founding a Foundational Model Company in 2023:
- How did Douwe make his way into the world of AI and ML over a decade ago?
- What are some of his biggest lessons from his time working with Yann LeCun and Meta?
- How does Douwe's background in philosophy help him in AI today?
2. Foundational Model Providers: Challenges and Alternatives:
- What are the biggest problems with the existing foundational data models?
- Will there be one to rule them all? How does the landscape play out?
- Why does Douwe believe OpenAI's data acquisition strategy has been the best?
3. Data Models: Size and Structure:
- Why does Douwe believe it is naive to think the open approach will beat the closed approach?
- What are the biggest downsides to the open approach?
- Does the size of data model matter today? What matters more?
- How important is access to proprietary data? Are VCs naive to turn down founders due to a lack of access to proprietary data?
4. Regulation and the World Around Us:
- How does Douwe expect the regulatory landscape to play out around AI?
- Why is Europe the worst when it comes to regulation? Will this be different this time?
- How does Douwe analyse Elon's petition to pause the development of AI for 6 months?
- Do founders building AI companies have to be in the valley?
20VC: The Rent the Runway Memo: How Paid Marketing & Growth Hacking Ruined a Generation of Companies, When Will Rent the Runway Be Profitable & How Does it Compare to Other Fashion Co's and Why "I Wish I Ran My Startup Like a Public Company"
Jennifer Hyman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, the world’s first and largest shared designer closet. Under Jennifer’s leadership, RTR has made history by being the first company to go public with a female founder/CEO, COO, and CFO. Jennifer serves on the Board of The Estée Lauder Companies and Zalando, and also is a Founding Member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council, a Member of the Women.nyc Advisory Board and a Member of the Launch with GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs.
In Today's Episode with Jennifer Hyman We Discuss:
1. The 14-Year Overnight Success: Scaling Rent The Runway To IPO:
- What was the a-ha founding moment for Jennifer with RTR?
- What does Jenn know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
- Does Jenn believe that naivete is good or not when starting a business?
2. Building the Best Team:
- What have been Jenn's single biggest lessons when it comes to acquiring the best talent?
- What have been Jenn's biggest hiring mistakes over the years?
- How does Jenn approach the interview process? Why does Jenn not focus on their professional career and achievements? What questions does she ask?
- What does Jenn believe are the single biggest mistakes founders make when building their teams?
3. Building the Business for IPO and Beyond:
- Why does Jenn wish she had run RTR as a private company in the same way she does now as a public company? How does the way you run the company differ?
- What about the unit economics of RTR suggesting it is a fundamentally better business than apparel competitors? How have their margin profiles changed over time?
- Why does Wall St not love RTR? What is required for that to change? Why does Jenn believe the street is wrong on how they analyse RTR?
4. Boards 101: Leading and Learning from Estee Lauder:
- What are Jenn's biggest lessons to founders on how to manage boards successfully?
- What have been 1-2 of Jenn's biggest lessons from being on the Estee Lauder board?
- What do the best board members do? What do the worst board members do?
20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios
Akin Babayigit is a serial entrepreneur and an active angel investor. He is currently the Founder and COO of Tripledot Studios, one of the fastest-growing mobile gaming companies in the world, which was recently valued at over $1.4BN. In just 4 years, Tripledot grew to generate several hundred million dollars per year in revenue and currently entertains over 50 million people every month. Tripledot was recently named as the #1 fastest-growing European company by FT, as well as being named as the fastest-growing Tech business in the UK, in the annual “UK Tech Awards”.
In Today's Episode with Akin Babayigit We Discuss:
Entry into the World of Startups and Gaming:
- How Akin made his way from Turkey to HBS and founding a unicorn in Tripledot?
- How did the lack of a father figure impact Akin's approach to parenting?
- What are 1-2 of Akin's biggest takeaways from his time at Facebook, Skype and King.com?
- What advice would Akin give to all new joiners at a company today?
90% of Startup Advice is Total BS:
- BS Myth #1: "You have to be passionate about your domain". Why does Akin disagree with this? If you do not have passion for the domain, what do you have to have?
- BS Myth #2: "You have to be solving a real problem". Why does Akin disagree with this mantra? If you are not solving a real problem, what should you be solving?
- BS Myth #3: "When you do a startup, your life will suck for a long period of time". Why does Akin strongly disagree with this? Does it get easier over time? What does Akin advise founders to make the earlier days easier?
- BS Myth #4: "Focus is everything. You should focus on a single thing and only do that." Why does Akin believe that focus can be dangerous? How should founders know when to pivot vs when to keep going?
- BS Myth #5: "Mission and vision statements are so important." Why does Akin believe that the majority of mission statements are BS? Is it worth having them at all?
- BS Myth #6: "You should hire people with domain experience." Why does Akin believe you should hire people who do not have domain experience? What does Akin look for in these candidates? What have been his biggest hiring mistakes? How has his hiring changed over time?
- BS Myth #7: "Speed is the most important thing." Why does Akin believe that speed can be dangerous? When is it right to go fast vs go slow?
- BS Myth #8: "Valuations matter and you should optimize." Why does Akin believe that valuations do not matter in the long run? How should founders approach the valuation discussion with this in mind?
20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview
Rob Go is a co-founder and Partner at NextView, one of the leading seed firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Attentive, Devoted Health, Whoop, and Grove Collaborative. Prior to co-founding NextView, Rob was an investor at Spark Capital and held product and product marketing roles at Ebay. He began his career as a consultant at The Parthenon Group.
In Today's Episode with Rob Go We Discuss:
1. Entry into the World of Venture:
- How a cold call from a VC firm led to Rob entering the world of venture?
- Why does Rob believe venture is a young person's game?
- What does Rob know now that he wishes he had known when started in venture?
2. Preparing Docs for a Fundraise:
- What docs should fund managers have ready before they start the raise?
- How should they structure their data room?
- Where do the majority of LPs spend their time, document-wise?
- What are the single biggest mistakes emerging managers make preparing docs for a raise?
3. Meeting Your First LPs:
- What is the best way for emerging managers to meet LPs for the first time?
- Should they send the deck before or after the meeting?
- What questions should emerging managers ask to qualify LPs in or out of a meeting?
- What are some clear early signs that a first meeting went well?
4. Closing LPs: The Tips and Tricks:
- How important is it for a fund to have an anchor?
- How much of a fund should the anchor be?
- Are there different qualities of anchor LPs?
- Should managers ever sell part of their GP or give an LP part of the carry?
- What can managers do to enforce a sense of urgency to get LPs over the line?
- What are signs that an LP will not invest in the fund without rejecting you yet?
- Should emerging managers impose a minimum check size on new LPs?
20Growth: How to Master PR and Comms, How to Get Your Startup Written About; Press Releases, Fundraising Announcements, Embargos etc & Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users with Gina Gotthilf, Co-Founder @ Latitud
Gina Gotthilf is a Co-Founder and COO at Latitud, an a16z-backed platform supporting the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America through digital products, a community and fund. Previously, Gina led growth and marketing at Duolingo from 3 to 200 million users via organic strategies and was part of the executive team. She also worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign, helping oversee the creation of digital ad campaigns at a historical budget, and led growth and community for Tumblr in Latin America.
In Today's Discussion with Gina Gotthilf We Discuss:
Entry into the World of Growth:
- How Gina went from working on a farm to leading growth for Tumblr in LATAM?
- What are 1-2 of Gina's biggest takeaways from her time leading growth for Duolingo?
- What does Gina know now that she wishes she had known when she entered the world of growth?
15 Top Tips and Secrets to Being Featured in the Best Publications:
- What is the best way to get in touch with journalists? What mistakes do founders have when they reach out to journalists?
- Should founders get in touch with more than one journalist at a publication?
- Should founders be explicit about the embargos they have on a story? Should they stick to them?
- Should founders be more wary of being published in a publication with a paywall?
- What materials should they send to journalists to get their attention?
- Should founders send press releases in early messages to journalists?
- How can founders control in some way what the journalist will ultimately publish?
- How long before the company wants the piece to come out, should they reach out to journalists?
- How can founders create FOMO when trying to get journalists to write their story?
- How can founders create social validity with journalists, when they are a small company?
- Once published, what should the distribution strategy look like?
- How can you get people you know to like and share content you are featured in?
- What are the top tips and tricks to get people to share content with you in?
- Should PR and Comms be an ongoing effort or static projects with news stories?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make in getting their company in the press?
20VC: Why No Models Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why Open Will Always Beat Closed in AI, Why Proprietary Data is Less Important Than Ever And Why EU AI Regulation is a Disaster with Alex Lebrun, Founder & CEO @ Nabla
Alex Lebrun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nabla, an AI assistant for doctors. Prior to Nabla, he led engineering at Facebook AI Research. Alex founded Wit.ai, an AI platform that makes it easy to build apps that understand natural human language. Wit.ai was acquired by Facebook in 2015. Prior to Wit, Alex was the Founder and CEO of VirtuOz, the world pioneer in customer service chatbots, acquired by Nuance Communications in 2013.
In Today's Episode with Alex Lebrun We Discuss:
1. Third Time Lucky and Lessons from Zuckerberg:
- How did Alex make his way into the world of startups with the founding of his first company?
- What worked with Alex's prior companies that he has taken with him to Nabla? What did not work that he has left behind?
- What were the single biggest takeaways for Alex from working with Mark Zuckerberg? How does Mark prepare for meetings? How does Mark negotiate so well?
2. Open vs Closed:
- Why does Alex believe the winning AI models will always be open?
- Why are open models not as transparent as people think they are?
- What are the biggest downsides to both open and closed models?
- Does Alex agree with Emad @ Stability that we will have "national data sets"?
3. Incumbent vs Startup:
- Who wins in the AI race; startups or incumbents?
- How important is access to proprietary data in winning in AI today?
- How does Alex respond to many VCs who suggest so many AI startups are merely "a thin layer on top of a foundational model"? Is that a fair critique?
- Which startups are best placed to challenge incumbents? Which incumbents have been most impressive in adopting AI into existing product suites?
4. Models 101: Size, Quality, Switching Costs:
- Why will the best companies switch the models that they use often?
- Will any models in action today be used in a year?
- How important is the size of the model? How will this change with time?
- In what way is new EU regulation around models going to harm European AI companies?
5. Location Matters: Who Wins:
- When looking at China, US and Europe, who is best placed to win the AI war?
- What are the biggest challenges Europe and China face?
- Why is the US best placed to win the AI race? What does it have to overcome first?
- If Alex were a politician, what would he do to ensure his country were best positioned?
20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise
Noah Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, overseeing the product team’s strategy and development. Over his seven years at Slack, Noah has led various parts of the product organization, including the self-service SMB business and product-led growth; the Virtual HQ team that launched huddles and clips; and the search and machine learning teams. Prior to Slack, Noah served as SVP of Product and Analytics at Foursquare. He started his career at Google leading the structured data search team and working on display ads.
In Today's Episode with Noah Weiss We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Product and Road to Slack CPO:
- How did Noah make his first foray into the world of product with Google?
- What are 1-2 of his single biggest takeaways from his time with Google and Foursquare?
- What model did Noah learn at Google that he applies to product today?
2.) Product 101: The Foundations:
- Is product more art or science? If Noah were to put a number on it what would it be?
- What are product principles? What makes good vs bad product principles?
- What are the biggest mistakes that founders make when instilling product principles?
- Does Noah believe with Gustav Soderstrom, "talk is cheap and so we should do more of it"?
3.) How to Master Product-Led-Growth:
- What are some of Noah's biggest lessons on how to master PLG?
- What are the biggest mistakes Noah sees early stage founders make today when going for the PLG approach? How does he advise them?
- When is the right time to move into enterprise? What needs to change?
- How do you change who you build product for? The buyer or the user?
- Why does Noah believe product speed will always be the most important thing in product?
4.) The Internals of Slack:
- How does Slack do post-mortems today? Who comes? Who sets the agenda? How has this changed in a world of remote? What does it take to do them well?
- How do Slack do product testing pre-launch of new products? Do they know when something is going to be a hit? What did they think would be a massive hit that turned into a flop?
- What does Noah believe is the biggest near death product experience for Slack? What happened? How did they get through it?
- Why do Slack buy other companies? How do they think through the decision of buy vs build?
- When do acquisitions work? When do they not work?
20VC: UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak on Investing More in AI Safety Research Than Any Other Country in the World, How AI Changes the Future of Education, His Top 5 Priorities as Prime Minister Today & How to Make the UK the Centre of AI
Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was previously appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer from 13 February 2020 to 5 July 2022. He was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 24 July 2019 to 13 February 2020, and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government from 9 January 2018 to 24 July 2019. Before entering the world of politics, Rishi co-founded an investment firm.
In Today's Episode with Rishi Sunak We Discuss:
1. The United Kingdom: Open for AI: Open for Business
- Why does Rishi believe the UK is best placed to lead the way for innovation in AI?
- What can the government do to ensure the public and private sectors work together most efficiently?
- Why has Rishi created an entirely new division just for this? How does this change how decisions for AI and technology are made?
2. $100M Funding: The Largest Government Funding in the World:
- Why did Rishi decide to allocate the largest pool of capital of any nation toward AI safety?
- What is the strategy for the $100M? How will it be invested? Who will manage it?
- What are the challenges and opportunities in setting up this $100M funding program?
3. Education: Attracting the Best in the World:
- What has Rishi done to ensure the best talent in the world, wants to and can work in the UK?
- What new initiative has Rishi put in place to ensure the world's brightest students can freely move to and work in the UK?
- What can be done to ensure the UK continues to foster the same level of homegrown talent that we always have done? What can we do to improve our current education system for AI even further?
- Why does Rishi believe one of the greatest opportunities for AI lies in education and teaching?
4. Making Regulation Work Effectively:
- How does Rishi think about creating regulation which is both effective and not prohibitive?
- What can we do to create a government that moves at the speed of business?
- What does Rishi believe are the biggest mistakes made in regulatory provisions? What are we doing to avoid them with AI in the UK?
20VC: Larry Summers on How to Manage Inflation; Should We Increase Rates Even Higher, Why We Need To Change The US Tax System, Why Europe is a Museum, China is a Jail and Bitcoin is an Experiment & How a Trump Win Would Hurt the US Economy
Larry Summers is the Former Treasury Secretary and one of America's leading economists. In addition to serving as 71st Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Summers served as Director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, as President of Harvard University, and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank. Huge thanks to Sarah Cannon for the intro to Larry today.
In Today's Episode with Larry Summers We Discuss:
1. The Journey to Being One of the World's Leading Economists:
- How Larry's mother and father both being economists shaped his early thinking as an economist?
- How did Larry's parenting teach his children economics at an early age?
- What does Larry know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the workforce?
2. How to Get the US Out of Debt:
- What would Larry do to save the US economy today?
- What can be done to increase revenues for the US economy?
- Why does Larry believe carried interest should be taxed as income tax?
- Why does Larry believe we need more billionaires? How would he tax them more efficiently?
- Why does Larry believe cutting taxes is indefensible?
- What can be done to reduce inflation without massively hurting the poorest in society?
3. The World Around Us:
- What does Larry mean when he says, "Europe is a museum, China is a jail and Bitcoin is an experiement"?
- Why does Larry believe the next 5 years will be difficult for China?
- Why does Larry believe the next 5 years will be challenging for Europe?
- Which nation is Larry most confident about when projecting forward for the next 5-10 years?
4. Politics and a Trump Administration:
- How does Larry reflect on the role of Biden on the US economy and state of inflation?
- Would a Trump administration be better or worse for the US economy?
- What are the chances of Trump beating Biden in the next election?
- What would Larry most like to change about the US political system?
20VC: What are the World's Tech Leaders Running From? Fear? Insecurity? Poverty? What Drives the Best with Orlando Bravo, Bill Ackman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Parker Conrad, Tobi Luttke, Brian Armstrong and more..
Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo. He led Thoma Bravo’s early entry into software buyouts and built the firm into one of the top private equity firms in the world.
Tobi Lütke is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shopify, the powerhouse company allowing anyone to start and grow their e-commerce business.
Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber, where he has managed the company’s business in more than 70 countries around the world since 2017.
Parker Conrad is the Founder & CEO @ Rippling, the company that lets you easily manage your employees’ payroll, benefits, expenses, devices, apps & more—in one place.
Jamie Siminoff is the Founder and Chief Inventor @ Ring, with Ring Jamie, created the world’s first Wi-Fi video doorbell while working in his garage in 2011. The company sold to Amazon for $1BN.
Martín Escobari is Co-President, Managing Director and Head of General Atlantic’s business in Latin America. Martín is Chairman of the firm’s Investment Committee and also serves on the Management and Portfolio Committees.
Ariel Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Navan (formerly TripActions), the #1 travel management super-app used by over 8,000 companies.
Tarek Mansour is the Founder and CEO @ Kalshi, the first regulated exchange where you can trade directly on the outcome of events.
Brian Armstrong is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Coinbase, the easiest place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Over the last 10 years, Brian has led Coinbase to today, a public company with over 3,500 employees and revenues of over $7.5BN in 2021.
Question of the Day:
What are the world's tech leaders running from?
20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw
Rich Liu is the CRO @ Everlaw and a unicorn GTM exec having scaled five multi-billion dollar tech unicorns across two IPOs, a successful acquisition, and numerous funding rounds. Prior to Everlaw, Rich architected the GTM motions for companies like Navan (TripActions), MuleSoft, and Meta (Facebook). As a result of his incredible success, Rich has been recognized as a 2021 Top 100 Global Sales Leader.
In Today's Episode with Rich Liu We Discuss:
1. Entry into the World of Sales:
- How Rich made his way from biochemistry into the world of sales?
- What is 1 takeaway from his time at Navan, Meta and Mulesoft that has shaped how he thinks about sales today?
- What does Rich know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of sales?
2. Sales Today: What is Happening?
- What are the biggest sales leaders saying today about price sensitivity and deal cycles?
- What has changed in the way companies buy software with the macro downturn?
- What do companies need to do to get deals over the line today?
- How do startups need to change the way they message to enterprises in order to sell today?
- How has the renewals process changed? What does this mean for customer success teams today?
3. PLG vs Enterprise: When and How?
- Is it possible to do both PLG and enterprise at the same time?
- Is it easier to start with enterprise and move to PLG or visa versa?
- How does the type of sales leader you need change dependent on the motion?
- When is the right time to move from founder-led sales to sales team?
- How does one know whether to hire a junior jack of all trades or a senior sales leader?
4. How To Hire The Best in Sales:
- How does Rich structure the hiring process for all new reps today?
- Does he use case studies to determine their depth and ability? Is the case study of the company they are interviewing at or a fresh company?
- What questions does Rich ask every candidate for a new role?
- What are some of the biggest red and green flags in how candidates talk in interviews?
20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack
TJ Parker is the co-founder and former CEO of PillPack. TJ Raised over $100M in financing, grew the company to more than 1k employees, and successfully sold the business to Amazon for $1B in 2018. As of last week, TJ was announced as the newest Partner @ Matrix Partners where he will initially focus on health opportunities from concept to series A.
In Today's Episode with TJ Parker We Discuss:
1.) From Growing Up in Pharmacies to Selling to Amazon for $1BN:
- How did TJ seeing the pharmacy industry from his parents lead him to believe there was a $BN company to be built in the space?
- What does TJ know now that he wishes he had known when he started the company?
- What does TJ believe he is running from? How does that impact his own style of parenting?
2.) The Truth About Entrepreneurship:
- Why do the best founders have to get comfortable in an environment of uncertainty? What have been some of TJ's biggest lessons in how to do this?
- Why does TJ believe the role of the CEO is to set the vision and get out of the way? What roles can only the CEO do? How does TJ approach delegation? What have been some of his core lessons?
- Does TJ believe being naive is a superpower when starting a company? What do founders need to know vs what do they not need to know when starting a business?
3.) Speed of Execution and Decision-Making:
- How important does TJ believe speed of execution is for startups today?
- What can founders do to create a culture of rapid decision-making? What works? What does not?
- What does TJ believe are 1-2 of the single best and worst decisions he made with PillPack?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes TJ sees founders make both in speed of execution and then also in decision-making processes?
4.) The Crucible Moments: Lawsuits & Acquisitions:
- How did an incumbent come days away from shutting down PillPack?
- How did they save the company? How does TJ deal with those moments of intense stress?
- How did the Amazon acquisition come to be? Why and how did the prior acquisition fall through?
- Does TJ regret the sale to Amazon? How was life at Amazon post-acquisition?
20VC: Who Wins the AI Race; Startups or Incumbents & Does Having Proprietary Data Really Matter For Startups Today?
One of the core questions in AI and investing today; who wins, startups or incumbents? Startups have speed and innovation but incumbents have scale, resources, and distribution?
Today we hear from 6 leading investors and founders discussing where they place their bets who has the advantage; startups or incumbents?
Emad Mostaque is CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. To date, Emad has raised over $110M with Stability with the latest round reportedly pricing the company at $4BN.
Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Professor at NYU. He was the founding Director of FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science.
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few.
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve “Software 3.0” companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock.
Vince Hankes is a Partner @ Thrive Capital where he has led the firm’s investments in OpenAI, Melio, and Airplane.dev. Prior to Thrive, Vince learned the craft of venture from Lee Fixel @ Tiger.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
The Question of the Day:
- Who wins? Startups or Incumbents?
20VC: The On Running Memo: From Swiss Mountains to NASDAQ IPO: The Story of Three Friends Who Built a Sports Giant
David Alleman is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman @ On Running one of the fastest-growing global sports brands with over 17 million products sold in 60+ countries. In 2021, On went public on the NASDAQ and today has a market cap of $8.7BN. However, it all started with three friends in the mountains experimenting with making shoes with pieces of garden hose to create a running shoe with a totally different feel.
In Today's Episode with David Alleman We Discuss:
1. From the Swiss Mountains to NASDAQ IPO:
- What was the initial a-ha moment for David and his co-founders with On Running?
- How did they make the first shoes?
- What are some of the biggest lessons for David in V1 product build?
- What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the start? Is naivete always good?
2. The Launch: First Customers:
- How did On get their first customers?
- What can products and companies do to instill true customer love in those first customers?
- What was the hardest element of launching On to their first customers?
- How does David analyze and use customer feedback? What does he listen to vs not?
3. Retail: Expanding into Own Store vs Partnerships:
- What are some of David's biggest lessons in how to make retail partnerships successful?
- How can brands create amazing experiences for customers in retailers that are not their own?
- Why did On decide to also have their own stores? How did this change the business?
- What have been David's biggest learnings on what it takes to do retail well with own stores?
4. Roger Federer: Working with a Legend:
- How did the relationship with Roger begin? Where was the first meeting? What was it like?
- How did Roger come to invest in On Running? Why did On not want to do the traditional athlete endorsement deal?
- What role does Roger play in the company today? How does he impact product development?
- What have been some of the biggest lessons for David from working with Roger?
- How much of an impact has Roger had on On Running as a business?
5. Financing, IPOs, and Brand:
- Does David wish they had raised venture capital sooner?
- If they had more money sooner in their journey, what would David have invested in earlier?
- Why did they decide to go public when they did? How has the journey been post being a public company? What changes? What is the same?
- What brand does Davist most respect and admire? Why? What brand decisions does David most regret? What would he have done differently?
20VC: Why Financial Models at Seed, $5M Seed Rounds & The Fear of Signalling Risk is all BS | Why Multi-Stage Firms Have Destroyed Seed & Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next 10 Years of Venture with Adam Besvinick, Founding Partner @ Looking Glass Capital
Adam Besvinick is the Founder of Looking Glass Capital, a pre-seed-focused firm started in 2020. Before starting Looking Glass, Adam spent about 5 years at Deep Fork Capital and Anchorage Capital Group investing in pre-seed through Series C. Adam's portfolio across funds includes the likes of BigID, Transfix, NomNom, and Hone Health, to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Adam Besvinick We Discuss:
1. How Twitter Led to Founding a Venture Firm:
- How did Adam make his way into the world of venture through Twitter?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from working with the legend, Chris Sacca?
- What does Adam know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his time in VC?
- What do most young VCs misunderstand when it comes to reputation?
2. Raising Fund I: The Process:
- How many LP meetings did Adam have to close Fund I?
- What docs and materials did he have for the fundraise? How does he advise other managers on doing docs for fundraises?
- How do different LP profiles want different things in the managers they work with?
- How did Adam approach first vs final close? How does he advise others managers on closing?
- How did Adam instil a sense of urgency in LPs to move and commit to the fund?
- What are 1-2 of Adam's biggest pieces of advice to managers raising a first-time fund?
3. Looking Glass: The Very Disciplined Pre-Seed Strategy:
- How did Adam decide on the fund size? Why is it the optimal fund size?
- What is the desired ownership for Adam? What level of dilution does he expect across the lifecycle of the company?
- What is the average check size? What is the average entry price?
- How does Adam approach reserves and follow-on checks?
- How does Adam reflect on his own relationship to price?
- Why does Adam not like the majority of pre-seed micro-fund strategies?
4. The Market: Multi-Stage Firms Destroying Seed
- Does Adam agree that "multi-stage firms have destroyed seed rounds"?
- How does Adam advise founders when they have multi-stage offers and seed firm offers?
- Who will be the winners and losers in the next 10 years of venture?
- Why is it harder than ever to advise founders on fundraising rounds today?
20Product: How Linkedin Does Product Reviews, A Post-Mortem on Stories, Linkedin Messenger and Spam & Why the Data Advantage in AI is Diminishing with Tomer Cohen, CPO @ Linkedin
Tomer Cohen is the CPO @ Linkedin. Since joining in 2012, Tomer has served in key leadership roles, helping launch and scale new innovative member and customer experiences. He previously led the growth and development of LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions portfolio and LinkedIn's consumer and mobile products. Prior to LinkedIn, Tomer worked as an entrepreneur with Greylock Partners and founded a company in the personal CRM space.
In Today's Episode with Tomer Cohen We Discuss:
1.) From Israeli Military and Chip Design to CPO @ Linkedin:
- How did Tomer make his way from the Israeli military to being CPO @ Linkedin?
- What does Tomer know now that he wishes he had known when he became CPO?
- What have been some of his biggest lessons from working with Reid Hoffman?
2.) Product: Art or Science:
- How does Tomer determine whether product is art or science? If he were to put a number on it, what would it be?
- How does Tomer determine whether to go with his gut vs go with the data on product decisions?
- How is AI changing the role of product managers and product leaders?
- What do product leaders and PMs need to do to stay up to date with the latest changes in AI?
3.) Linkedin: Review of Current Products: Feed, Stories, Messenger
- How does Tomer analyse the success of "the feed" in Linkedin? What worked? What did not work?
- Why did "Stories" not work in Linkedin? What went wrong? What did they learn?
- What is Tomer doing to tackle the spam issue in Linkedin? What are the biggest challenges associated?
- Why does Linkedin still have such poor messaging service? Why is it a difficult problem to solve for?
4.) AI Changes Everything:
- Why does Tomer believe this wave of AI is the most significant technological shift in our lifetime?
- Who will win the race in AI; startups or incumbents?
- Which model will work most efficiently; open or closed?
- Will we see large enterprises prefer bundled AI options or unbundled with specialised providers?
20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn
Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, the leading Developer Security platform, helping developers secure as they build. Guy was previously CTO at Akamai, co-founded Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai), and was the product manager of AppScan, the first AppSec scanner, through Sanctum, Watchfire and IBM. Guy is a public speaker, O’Reilly author, and an active early stage angel investor.
In Today's Episode with Guy Podjarny We Discuss:
1.) From Israeli Military to Founding a $10BN Company:
- How Guy made his way into the world of startups from the Israeli military?
- What is Guy running away from? Why does he hate tribalism so much?
- Does Guy believe serial entrepreneurship is valuable or naivety of young founders is good?
2.) The Secret to Finding Product Market Fit:
- Why does Guy believe PMF is a poorly defined term? How does Guy define PMF?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make while searching for PMF?
- What are the most important elements on messaging when it comes to PMF?
- If you have a horizontal tool, how do you message and resonate with specific audiences?
3.) Defensibility and Being First to Market:
- Does Guy believe that being the first to market is really that valuable?
- Does Guy agree that investors expecting defensibility on day 1 is wrong?
- Why does Guy think market leadership is way more important than first to market?
- What are the true defensible moats that can be built early today?
4.) Lessons from 100 Angel Investments:
- What have been the single biggest lessons for Guy from his 100 angel investments?
- What are the biggest mistakes angels make when investing today?
- How should founders present their market size to investors? Where do they go wrong?
- Does Guy invest in both painkiller and vitamin businesses? How does he compare them?
- Why is Boldstart Guy's favorite venture capital firm?
20VC: Why Your Fund Model Should Not Rely on $10BN+ Outcomes, Why the Large Funds Got Too Large, The Rise of Solo GP's; The Pros and Cons & Is Consumer Subscription Even a Good Sector to Invest in with Nico Wittenborn @ Adjacent
Nico Wittenborn is the Founder of Adjacent, one of the best early-stage firms created over the last 5 years. Before starting Adjacent, Nico spent over 3 years at Insight Partners in New York and before that learned the craft of venture from some of the best in early-stage, Point Nine, where he spent over 4 years. Nico's portfolio across funds includes the likes of Revolut, Chainalysis, Oura, RevenueCat and PhotoRoom to name a few.
In Today's Show with Nico Wittenborn We Discuss:
1.) From Selling Mobile Phones to Leading Early-Stage Investor:
- How did Nico first make his way into the world of venture with Point Nine?
- What did Nico learn from his time with Point Nine and Insight? How did his time at each impact how he invests and runs Adjacent today?
- What does Nico know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
2.) Is Consumer Subscription Even a Good Place to Invest?
- With Calm ($2BN) and Duolingo ($6BN) as the market leaders and there only being two of them, is consumer subscription even a good place to invest?
- How does Nico pushback that retention for consumer subscription apps is so bad? What do many not see about consumer subscription retention numbers?
- How does Nico respond to the challenge of high customer acquisition cost and navigating challenging platform shifts in advertising, when investing in consumer subscription?
- What will the consumer subscription landscape look like in 5 years time?
3.) Adjacent: The Fund, The Strategy:
- Why does Nico believe if your fund model relies on $10BN outcomes, you are in trouble?
- How large is the latest Adjacent fund? What does the portfolio construction look like for the fund?
- How much diversification is the right level of diversification? How many companies per fund?
- How does Nico think about capital concentration on a per company basis?
- What are Nico's ownership requirements? How have they changed with funds?
- What is it about Nico's structure which enables him to be more collaborative than others?
4.) Nico: The Investor: Lessons:
- How does Nico reflect on his own relationship to price? When does he pay up? When does he not?
- What has been one of Nico's biggest misses? How has that changed his approach?
- Why does Nico not really compete with the large multi-stage funds?
- Why is Nico deliberately trying to reduce the amount of companies that he sees?
5.) The Future of Venture:
- How does Nico analyze the rise of solo GPs? What are the biggest pros and cons of the model?
- Why does Nico believe the large generalist funds are in trouble?
- Who is set to win and who is set to lose in the next 10 years of venture?
- Which seed firm would Nico invest in? Which Series A firm? Which growth firm?
20Growth: Three Growth Lessons Scaling Whatsapp from 0-100M, Why You Should Hire a Head of Growth Sooner Than You Think & The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth with Ryan Wiggins, Head of Growth @ Mercury
Ryan Wiggins is the VP of Growth and Analytics at Mercury where he oversees a Growth team and founded the Analytics function. Prior to this, Ryan built Growth teams at WhatsApp, where he helped grow WhatsApp Business from 0->100M users, Workplace, and Facebook Ads. If that was not enough, Ryan is also an active angel investor.
In Today's Episode with Ryan Wiggins We Discuss:
1.) From US Department of Commerce to Leading Growth Teams:
- How Ryan made his initial foray into the world of growth with Facebook and Whatsapp?
- What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he made the entry into growth?
- What advice does Ryan have for people who want to change their career but are not sure what they want to do?
2. ) Who and When: Building the Team:
- Should we hire a Head of Growth or a more junior growth hire first?
- What are the different profiles of growth hires? How do they change with business model?
- When is the right time to hire your first growth hire?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make on the timing of growth hires?
3.) How to Hire: The Process:
- Structurally, what is the right way to hire for a growth team? What does the interview process look like? What do you want to get out of each meeting?
- Should case studies be used, if so, should they be used for the company hiring or of the company where the candidate is from?
- What does the comp package look like for different growth hires?
- Who should be brought into the growth hiring process? What stage should they be involved?
4.) Onboarding: Setting Growth Up for Success:
- What is the ideal first 30,60 and 90 days for new growth hires?
- What can leaders do to ensure they are set up for the maximum chance of success?
- What are three of the biggest red flags bad growth hires show in the first 30 days?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make in the onboarding process of growth hires?
20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @
Emad Mostaque is the Co-Founder and CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. Stability are building the foundation to activate humanity's potential. To date, Emad has raised over $110M with Stability with the latest round reportedly pricing the company at $4BN. Investors include Coatue, Lightspeed, Sound Ventures, OSS Capital and Airstreet Capital, to name a few. Prior to Stability, Emad was in the world of hedge funds, that was until his son was diagnosed with autism and he left to make a difference in the space and help find treatments and solutions.
In Today's Episode with Emad Mostaque We Discuss:
1.) From Hedge Funds to Finding Treatments for Autism to Leading the World of AI:
- How Emad made his way from the world of hedge funds to founding one of the leading AI companies of our time?
- How did Emad find a solution to parts of his son's autism with a $6 drug?
- How does Emad believe we can use AI to solve the majority of medical problems today?
- What does the future of healthcare look like with AI at the centre?
2.) Models: What is Real? What is False?
- Why no models today will be used in a year?
- Why all models are biased and how do we solve for it?
- Why hallucinations are a feature and not a bug?
- Why the size of your model does not matter anymore?
- Why will there be national models specified to cultures and nations? How is this implemented?
3.) Who Wins: Startups or Incumbents:
- Why does Emad believe there will only be 5 really important AI companies? Which will they be?
- How does Emad review Google's AI strategy following their news last week? Was their integration of Google and Deepmind recently a success?
- How does Emad assess Meta's AI strategy? Why does Zuckerberg now acknowledge the metaverse play was a mistake?
- How does Emad evaluate the approach taken by Amazon? Why are they the dark horse in the race?
- What can startups do to get a meaningful edge on the large incumbents? How do they compete with their distribution?
4.) The Next 12 Months: What Happens:
- Why does Emad believe the .ai bubble will be bigger than the dot com bubble?
- Why does Emad believe that the biggest companies built-in AI in the next 12 months will be services-based companies? How does the ecosystem look if this is the case?
- Why will India and emerging markets embrace AI faster than anyone else? What happens to economies that have large segments reliant on freelance work that AI replaces?
- Why will we see the death of many large content publishers and media companies? What does Emad mean when he says we will see the rise of "AI first publishers"?
5.) Open or Closed: What Wins:
- Why does Emad believe we must be open by default? Why does open win?
- Why does Emad side with Elon and believe we must pause the development of AI for 6 months?
- How does Emad evaluate the leaked memo from Google stating that neither Google nor OpenAI are ahead? What does this mean for the AI ecosystem?
- Where will the best AI talent concentrate? What do companies need to do to win the best talent?
20VC: Yann LeCun on Why Artificial Intelligence Will Not Dominate Humanity, Why No Economists Believe All Jobs Will Be Replaced by AI, Why the Size of Models Matters Less and Less & Why Open Models Beat Closed Models
Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science. He was the founding Director of FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science. After a postdoc in Toronto he joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1988, and AT&T Labs in 1996 as Head of Image Processing Research. He joined NYU as a professor in 2003 and Meta/Facebook in 2013. He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing". Huge thanks to David Marcus for helping to make this happen.
In Today's Episode with Yann LeCun:
1.) The Road to AI OG:
- How did Yann first hear about machine learning and make his foray into the world of AI?
- For 10 years plus, machine learning was in the shadows, how did Yan not get discouraged when the world did not appreciate the power of AI and ML?
- What does Yann know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in machine learning?
2.) The Next Five Years of AI: Hope or Horror:
- Why does Yann believe it is nonsense that AI is dangerous?
- Why does Yann think it is crazy to assume that AI will even want to dominate humans?
- Why does Yann believe digital assistants will rule the world?
- If digital assistants do rule the world, what interface wins? Search? Chat? What happens to Google when digital assistants rule the world?
3.) Will Anyone Have Jobs in a World of AI:
- From speaking to many economists, why does Yann state "no economist thinks AI will replace jobs"?
- What jobs does Yann expect to be created in the next generation of the AI economy?
- What jobs does Yann believe are under more immediate threat/impact?
- Why does Yann expect the speed of transition to be much slower than people anticipate?
- Why does Yann believe Elon Musk is wrong to ask for the pausing of AI developments?
4.) Open or Closed: Who Wins:
- Why does Yann know that the open model will beat the closed model?
- Why is it superior for knowledge gathering and idea generation?
- What are some core historical precedents that have proved this to be true?
- What did Yann make of the leaked Google Memo last week?
5.) Startup vs Incumbent: Who Wins:
- Who does Yann believe will win the next 5 years of AI; startups or incumbents?
- How important are large models to winning in the next 12 months?
- In what ways does regulation and legal stop incumbents? How has he seen this at Meta?
- Has his role at Meta ever stopped him from being impartial? How does Yan deal with that?
20VC: Why The Future of AI Is Open Not Closed, Why We Are Years Away From AI Being Autonomous, Why AI Founders Do Not Need to Move to the Valley & Why Founders Should Not Meet Investors in Between Rounds with Clem Delangue @ Hugging Face
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. To date, Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few. Prior to Hugging Face, Clem was in product and marketing at two different startups both of which were acquired.
In Today's Episode with Clem Delangue:
1. From Tamagotchi to Leading the World of AI:
- How did a Tamagotchi startup turn into one of the hottest AI startups in the world?
- What does Clem know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
- What are Clem's biggest pieces of advice to founders on pivoting?
2. AI: Trend or Transformation:
- To what extent does Clem believe the current hype in AI is justified?
- What is overblown? What have been some true and groundbreaking developments?
- How far away does Clem believe AGI is?
- What is a massive misconception the public has that Clem wishes he could change?
3. Open vs Closed: Which Model Wins:
- Why does Clem believe the future of AI will be won by open-source?
- What is his reasoning to suggest closed is fundamentally a weaker model?
- Does Clem acknowledge that in the short term, enterprises will buy from a closed model with greater ease? How does he plan to tackle this?
4. Regulation: What Happens Now:
- What regulatory changes need to be made in the world of AI most urgently?
- Is Elon Musk right to suggest the immediate pausing of developments in AI?
- What does Clem believe to be the most likely scenario to AI regulation in the next 12 months?
5. Fundraising: Lessons and Reflection on Raising $160M:
- Do AI startups fundamentally cost more money than normal startups to build?
- Why does Clem not meet investors in between rounds?
- What does Clem believe is the most helpful thing an investor can do?
- What are Clem's spiciest takes on venture as a financing model?
20Sales: How to Scale a Career While Scaling a Family, Strategies and Specific Tools To Help Maintain Work-Life Balance, What Companies Can Do To Empower Parents To Be Their Best Selves & How to Prevent Parental Leave Being an Inhibitor To Your Career
Today's 20Sales is a special Mother's Day edition where we are joined by 6 of the best sales leaders who also happen to be rockstar mothers.
The Profiles
Maggie Hott is on the GTM Team (Go-To-Market) at OpenAI. Before OpenAI, Maggie was Director of Sales @ Webflow and before Webflow spent an incredible 6 years at Slack.
Stevie Case is the CRO @ Vanta. Prior to Vanta, Stevie spent an immensely successful 6 years at Twilio as VP of Mid-Market Sales.
Renu Gupta is an advisor and sales consultant to some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies today. Previously she has held sales leadership roles at Slack, Thrive and Dropbox.
Lauren Schwartz is the VP Enterprise Sales @ Fivetran. Before Fivetran, Lauren spent 4 years at Segment as Senior Director of Enterprise Sales leading to their acquisition by Twilio.
Julie Maresca is the Head of Global Accounts at Atlassian. Prior to Atlassian, Julie spent an immensely successful 6 years at Slack in numerous roles including Head of Enterprise Sales for North America.
Jessica Arnold is the VP of Global Sales Development @ Amplitude. Before Amplitude, Jessica was the Senior Director for Inside Sales North America at Dropbox for close to 6 years.
In Today's 20Sales Mothers Day Episode We Discuss:
1.) How have you navigated growing in your career at the same time, growing your family?
2.) How do you balance your career and being a mother - when do you lean in and out?
3.) What are some specific strategies or tools that have helped you maintain a work-life balance?
4.) How do you prioritize your mental health and wellbeing while juggling your responsibilities at work and at home?
5.) How do you handle the guilt that many working mothers experience when they have to focus on their career?
6.) What are the unique challenges and advantages of being a mother in a sales leadership role?
7.) How has your experience as a mother influenced your leadership style and decision-making?
8.) How have you navigated going out on maternity leave without it having an impact on your career?
9.) America has one of the worst parental leaves of any country in the world. How can you advocate for parental leave if the existing policy isn’t up to par?
10.) What are some ways that companies can create a more inclusive and supportive environment for working mothers in sales leadership roles?
20VC: Why VC Subsidizes the Wrong Type of Business, Why Capital Gains Tax is Crazy, The Biggest Misalignments Between VCs, Founders and LPs, Why Business Model - Product Fit is as Important as Product-Market-Fit with Chris Paik @ Pace Capital
Chris Paik is a General Partner @ Pace Capital, an early-stage venture firm in NYC. Pace's first fund was $150M and their second was $250M. Before co-founding Pace, Chris was a General Partner at Thrive Capital where he spent an incredible 8 years having joined the firm when they were on their first $10M Fund.
In Today's Episode with Chris Paik We Discuss:
1. From Hipster to One of NYC's Best VCs:
- How Chris made his way from not knowing about venture capital to being one of the most prominent in NYC?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from his 8 years at Thrive? How did they impact how he thinks about building Pace today?
- What are Chris' biggest lessons from working with Josh Kushner? What did Josh do to spot young talent in a way like no one else did?
2. The Core Pillars of Successful Venture Investing:
- "Invest in companies that can be described in a single sentence". What does Chris mean by this? How does that impact the type of companies he looks to invest in?
- "Business Model Fit is as important as PMF". What does Chris mean by this? How does he determine where a company has business model fit?
- How does Chris analyze his relationship to market sizing? How does Chris think about how willing he is to take a bet on market timing?
- Why does Chris believe that the more "virtuous" a company is, the less enterprise value it will have?
3. What is Wrong with Venture Capital: The Misalignments:
- What does Chris believe are the single biggest misalignments between VCs and Founders?
- What does Chris see as the biggest misalignments between VCs and LPs?
- Why does Chris believe we should scrap capital gains tax and all be taxed as an income tax?
- Why do acquisitions allow investors to be screwed over by the acquiring company?
4. The Future of Social and User Generated Content Platforms:
- How does Chris analyze consumer businesses according to "The Seven Deadly Sins"? Why does he call them, "The Seven Deadly Motivators"?
- What does Chris believe is the future for Substack? Why does it not have Business Model Fit?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from being on the Twitch board? How did that experience impact his mindset and approach to what good is in UGC and social?
- What does Chris believe is the number one thing to look for in a potential consumer social investment? What do so many miss?
20VC: Alex Rodriguez (AROD) on Investing Lessons from Warren Buffet, How a Meeting with Magic Johnson Changed His Approach to Business and The Single Best and Worst Investment Decisions he has Made and Why AROD Is Not Buying More Real Estate
Alex Rodriguez is a businessman and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of A-Rod Corp, a broad-based investment firm that bets on world-class startups and partners with leading global companies across the real estate, health and wellness, technology, and sports & entertainment industries. While best known as one of the world’s greatest athletes (a 14x MLB All-Star and a 2009 World Series Champion with the New York Yankees), for more than 25 years, Alex leads a team of experts building high-growth businesses and is co-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
In Today's Episode with Alex Rodriguez
1.) From MLB to Business MVP:
- How Alex made his transition from one of the world's greatest athletes to the world of business?
- What does Alex know now that he wishes he had known at the start of his business career?
- What is Alex running away from? How do his insecurities drive him?
2.) Lessons from Magic Johnson and Warren Buffet:
- What are some of the single biggest lessons Alex has learned from his time with Warren Buffet?
- How did Magic Johnson impact Alex's approach to business?
- What is Magic Johnson's framework? How can others use it as a blueprint for their career?
3.) Alex Rodriguez: The Business Builder and Investor:
- What has been Alex's single biggest investing hit? What did he learn from it?
- What has been Alex's single worst investment decision? How did that change his approach?
- Why is Alex not buying real estate currently? How does he view the future of real estate buying?
4.) Alex Rodriguez: The Father and Son:
- How did having two daughters impact Alex's approach to business and life?
- What have been Alex's single biggest lessons from seeing his single mother operate?
- How does Alex reflect on his own relationship to money? How has it changed?
20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive
Vince Hankes is a Partner @ Thrive Capital where he has led the firm’s investments in OpenAI, Melio, and Airplane.dev. He currently sits on the board of Airtable, Benchling, Lattice, and Melio. Prior to joining Thrive, Vince was an investor at Tiger Global where he learned the craft of venture from the legend that is Lee Fixel.
In Today's Episode with Vince Hankes We Discuss:
1. From Tiger Global to Partner @ Thrive Capital:
- How Vince made his way into the world of investing with Tiger Global?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from working alongside the legendary Lee Fixel?
- Why did Vince make the move from Tiger to Thrive? How do the two firms differ?
2. The OpenAI Investment: The Memo:
- How did the OpenAI deal come to be? What were the round dynamics?
- Market Evaluation: How did Vince and the team analyze the market top down?
- Competition: Who did Vince identify as the core competitors to OpenAI?
- Defensibility: How did Vince think through the long-term defensibility of OpenAI's model? Does Vince believe these models will become commoditised?
- Price: How did Vince and the team get comfortable with the $29BN price?
3. AI: Hype or Generational Defining Transformation:
- Trend or Transformation: Why does Vince believe AI will be the defining technology of our generation?
- Startup vs Incumbent: Does Vince think the value will accrue to the incumbent or the startup?
- Open or Closed: Does Vince think we will operate in a closed (one model rules them all) environment or an open-source environment with many models?
- AI Talent: Where does Vince think the majority of the best AI talent will concentrate?
- Speed: Why would Vince be scared if he were a startup today looking at the incumbents?
4. The Changing Investor: Lessons from Good and Bad:
- How has Vince changed most significantly as an investor over time?
- What has been his single biggest investing mistake? How did he learn from it?
- What has been his biggest investing success? How did that change his mindset?
- What has Thrive done in their org structure to allow them to make bets very few other firms can do?
20VC: First Republic; Management Responsibility or Result of Contagion in the System, The Future of Regional Banks, Will Interest Rates Go Higher | Net Zero, Where Are We? The Best and the Worst Actors with Mark Carney, Former Governor of The Bank of Engl
Mark Carney is the Vice Chair and Head of Transition Investing @ Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world's leading asset managers with over $800BN in AUM. Mark is also United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He has also served as Finance Advisor to the British Prime Minister. In addition to this, Mark is on the board of Stripe, PIMCO and The World Economic Forum. In a previous life, Mark spent over a decade as a Central Banker, most recently as Governor of The Bank of England and before that as Governor of The Bank of Canada.
In Today's Episode with Mark Carney We Discuss:
1. Is The Banking Crisis Over? What Happened?
- Why does Mark not believe we are in a banking crisis?
- Why does he not believe the banking turmoil is over?
- Was SVB the fault of regulatory mistakes or management mistakes?
- Is FRB a damaged asset in it's own right or the result of contagion within the banking ecosystem?
2. The Impact of the Banking Turmoil: What Happens Now?
- What does Mark believe is the future of regional banks?
- Why does Mark believe we will see massive consolidation in banks coming soon?
- Should the Fed be guaranteeing all deposits automatically?
3. What Happens To The Macro Now?
- How does the banking turmoil impact growth rates? Will we definitely go into a recession now?
- What is the impact on monetary policy? Can the Fed raise rates even higher?
- What does this mean for the future of money? Why is it a silver bullet for stablecoins?
- If Mark could bet on China or the US for the next 10 years, who would it be?
- Does Mark believe the UK is in a weaker situation than ever? What about Europe?
4. The Future of Climate and Net Zero:
- Where are we at with Net Zero? Are we ever going to make progress?
- Is it possible to make progress without the cooperation of China?
- Why does Mark disagree and suggest China has done more than most to help the climate?
- Who is talking more than they are acting in the fight to save the climate?
- On the flip side, who is acting more than they are talking?
20VC: In AI Who Wins? Startups or Incumbents? What Happens to Wealth Inequality? Why Will $10BN+ Companies Only Have 10 People | Why Defensibility in Startups is BS & Speed is Everything? Why Large Groups Worsen Decision-Making with Sarah Guo
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve “Software 3.0” companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock where she made investments in the likes of Figma, Coda, Neeva and many more incredible companies. Sarah also hosts her own podcast, No Priors with the wonderful Elad Gil.
In Today's Episode with Sarah Guo We Discuss:
1. From Large Multi-Stage Firm to Founding Conviction:
- Why did Sarah decide to leave Greylock?
- What are 1-2 of her biggest lessons from her time at Greylock? How did they impact her mindset when building Conviction today?
- What does Sarah believe are the most surprising or hardest elements of firm building?
2. The Future for AI: The Opportunities and the Challenges:
- Why does Sarah believe AI is the most foundational technology of our lifetime?
- Why did Sarah decide to centre the entire fund around AI? Is AI not an enabling technology that will power all sectors in technology?
- Is Sarah concerned by the further wealth inequality that AI and billion dollar companies created by 10 people, will inevitably bring?
- How does Sarah think about the potential for malicious AI use? What can be done to prevent this?
3. Startup and VC Principles That Are BS:
- Why does Sarah believe that defensibility is BS?
- Why do Sarah and Harry both believe that reserves in venture funds are a suboptimal use of funds?
- "Great founder, bad market, market wins". Does Sarah agree? How does Sarah prioritize the centrality of founder vs market?
4. Sarah Guo: The Investor
- How has Sarah changed most significantly as an investor over the last 5 years?
- What is Sarah's biggest miss? How did it impact her mindset today?
- What is Sarah's biggest win? How did that alter her risk appetite?
- How does Sarah see the future of venture?
- If Sarah could invest in one multi-stage firm and one seed-stage firm, which would it be?
20Product: Snap's VP Product on How Snap Hires 10x Product People, What Makes Evan Spiegel So Special at Product, Three Ways to Prioritise Product Ideas in Teams, The Future of AR, Why Snap Glasses Will be Huge and Snap Will Be Massive in Japan with Jack
Jack Brody is the VP Product @ Snap. Jack joined Snap in 2014 as a Product Designer, and ultimately helped build out the design organization as the Head of Design before taking on his current role overseeing all of Product for the Snapchat application and Hardware. In his 9 years at Snap, he helped create Memories, the Snap Map, and AR Lenses like Face Swap.
In Today's Episode with Jack Brody We Discuss:
- The Shortest Internship in Tech:
- How did Jack get an internship with Evan Spiegel and Snap while he was still at college?
- How did it turn into the shortest internship in tech history?
- What are the single biggest product lessons Jack has from working with Evan Spiegel?
2. Product 101: Art vs Science:
- Does Jack believe product is more art or science? If he were to assign numbers to them, what would they be?
- How does Jack define creativity? What can founders and product leaders do to ensure their teams are as creative as possible?
- What is the 3 step framework through which product leaders should prioritize product ideas?
- Does Jack believe that when the CEO is no longer the Head of Product, the company is dead?
- Does Jack agree with Gustav Soderstrom, "talk is cheap, so we should do more of it"?
3. The SNAP Hiring Process: What Works and What Does Not:
- What is the hiring process for the product team at SNAP?
- What questions are most revealing of 10x product people in the interview process?
- What case studies and tests does Jack use in the interview process?
- What other roles and functions does Jack bring into the interview process as part of the decision?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make in the hiring process for product?
4. SNAP, The Future, and The World Around Us:
- What do Jack and SNAP believe will be the future for augmented reality?
- What country is SNAP not big in today but will be in the next 5 years? Why that one?
- Why did SNAP tear down its android app and start again? What has been the impact?
- Were the SNAP glasses a success? What is their future?
20VC: WTF Is Going On In Venture Capital; Seed Round Pricing Will Remain High, Series B & C Has Gone Completely, Downrounds Are Coming | Why Defensibility is BS on Day 1, Why Market is More Important Than Founder & Why Being First To Market Doesn't Matter
Avlok Kohli is the CEO @ AngelList. Under his leadership, Avlok has taken AngelList from an SPV provider to a company that is becoming the software platform for the entire industry. Today, AngelList supports over $15BN in assets and 40% of US unicorns have had a GP invest in them through AngelList. Prior to becoming CEO @ AngelList, Avlok founded 3 companies, all of which were acquired including by the likes of Square and eBay.
In Today's Episode with Avlok Kohli We Discuss:
1. From 3x Founder to Scaling AngelList to $15BN in AUM:
- How did Naval convince Avlok to join AngelList and be CEO?
- Does Avlok believe in startups having defensibility in the early days?
- How important does Avlok believe it is for companies to be "first to market"?
- Why does Avlok believe all the last-mile grocery delivery companies will go bust in the downturn?
2. What is Going On in Venture: New Funds, LPs, Secondaries:
- Are we seeing the amount of net new funds reduce in the downturn?
- Are we seeing the size of new funds being raised, being smaller?
- Is the time to first close increasing in time?
- Does AVlok agree that the fund segment hit hardest by the downturn is micro fund managers?
- Which LP class has pulled back from fund investing most significantly?
- Why does Avlok believe institutions have returned to fund investing more than ever right now?
- Are we seeing an increase in fund secondary positions?
3. What is Going on in Startups: Rounds, Valuations, Party Rounds
- Are we seeing the number of startups able to close their round reduce?
- Are we seeing the size of startup funding rounds reduce? How does this depend on the stage?
- What are we seeing for startup valuations? Why is seed as high as ever? What is the most hit?
- How is the composition of funding rounds changing? More or fewer party rounds?
- When does Avlok believe we will see down rounds and pay-to-play, really come into effect?
4. The Business of AngelList and its Future:
- What are the margins on AngelList products today?
- What is the best margin AngelList product? What is the worst?
- What product did AngelList do that in hindsight, Avlok wishes they had not done?
- Why did AngelList back out of Europe? Was it a mistake?
- How does Avlok think about AngelList's fierce competition with Carta today?
20VC: Who Wins in AI; Startup vs Incumbent, Infrastructure vs Application Layer, Bundled vs Unbundled Providers | From 150 LP Meetings to Closing $230M for Fund I; The Fundraising Process, What Worked, What Didn't and Lessons Learned with Tomasz Tunguz
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, just announced last week, Theory is a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in early-stage companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages. Prior to founding Theory, Tom spent 14 years at Redpoint as a General Partner where he made investments in the likes of Looker, Expensify, Monte Carlo, Dune Analytics, and Kustomer to name a few. Tom also writes one of the best blogs and newsletters in the business which can be found here.
In Today's Episode with Tomasz Tunguz We Discuss:
- Founding a Firm: The Start of Theory:
- Why did Tom decide to leave Redpoint after 14 years to found Theory?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from Redpoint that he has taken with him to his building of Theory?
- What does Tom know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
2. From 150 LP Meetings to Closing $230M: Raising a Fund I
- How would Tom describe the fundraising process?
- How many meetings with LPs did he have? How many did he know previously?
- What documents did he share with LPs? Did he have a dataroom? How did he use it?
- How did Tom create a sense of urgency to compel LPs to come into the fund?
- How does Tom feel about the debate between one close and multiple closes?
- What was the #1 reason LPs said no to investing?
- What worked and Tom would do again for the next raise? What did not work and he would change for the next raise?
3. Where Will Value Accrue in the Next Decade of AI:
- Startup vs Incumbent: Will incumbents embrace AI before startups are able to acquire distribution?
- Infrastructure vs Application Layer: Where will the majority of value accrue in the next decade; infrastructure or application layer?
- Bundled or Unbundled: Will bundled services be the dominant consumer and enterprise choice or will unbundled specialized solutions win?
4. AI and The World Around It:
- How does Tom believe AI could save the US economy?
- Why does Tom believe Google are the losers in the AI race?
- Which incumbents have responded best to AI?
- Why does Tom believe we will be in a worse macro place at the end of the year than we are now?
20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp
Mark Goldberger is Head of Enterprise Sales at Ramp, the fastest-growing corporate card and bill payment software in America, and recently named Most Innovative Company in North America by Fast Company. Prior to joining Ramp, Mark was the first enterprise rep at TripActions (now Navan), where he helped bring in more than $100m of ARR as an IC and sales leader. Before TripActions, Mark worked at Highfive, a video conferencing company since acquired by Dialpad.
In Today's Episode with Mark Goldberger We Discuss:
1. From Wine Industry to Sales Leader:
- How Mark made his way into the world of enterprise sales having been in the wine industry?
- Mark sent out 100 CVs for his first sales role, why did they not respond? How should companies think differently about the people they hire? What could he have done better with the outreach?
- What does Mark know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of sales?
2. The Sales Playbook and Why You Should Never Hire a Sales VP First:
- Why does Mark believe that you should never hire a Sales VP as the first sales hire?
- What does Mark mean when he says product-customer-fit is more important than product-market-fit?
- Why does Mark believe that revenue does not matter with your first customers? If revenue does not matter, what should you be trying to get out of them?
- When should the founder handover sales to either a junior or more senior hire?
3. How to Hire 10x Sales Teams: The Process:
- How does Mark structure the process for hiring 10x sales reps?
- What questions are most revealing in identifying a 10x sales rep? How do they respond?
- Why does Mark want candidates to pitch his own product back to him?
- How does Mark make the hiring process more challenging to really test the quality of candidates?
- What is the core difference between losers and winners in sales?
4. Discounting, Champions, Creating Urgency:
- Why does Mark not like discounting? Where do many sales teams use it poorly?
- How does Mark like to create urgency in a sales process? What works? What does not?
- How can sales reps know whether they truly have a deal champion within a buyer?
- What is the right way for sales reps to ask to meet the exec buyer?
- When is the right time to ask to meet the exec buyer?
- What are some clear signs that you are not speaking to a decision-maker?
5. Building a High-Functioning Sales Org:
- What is the right way to do deal reviews? How often? Who should be invited?
- What is the right way to do sales onboarding for all new reps?
- Why is traditional outbound still the most important thing in a sales process?
- Why do so many people get pipeline qualification so wrong?
20VC: Scooter Braun on Being Enough, Insecurity, Wealth, Investing, Fame, Marriage and so much more...
From college party promoter to managing global stars to CEO and investor. Scott “Scooter” Braun is one of the most powerful people in media and one of the most multi-faceted entrepreneurs we have ever met. As the founder of media company SB Projects and the co-founder of TQ Ventures, he has backed prominent companies such as Pinterest, Spotify and Uber and managed some of the world’s biggest names in music including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato. Braun’s other accolades include founding Ithaca Ventures (acquired by HYBE for $1BN+) in 2021, and philanthropic efforts such as being a Make-A-Wish board member, raising $55M+ for Hurricane Harvey and Irma relief and continuing to instill the value of social good wherever possible.
In Today’s Episode with Scooter Braun We Discuss:
1. From College Party Promoter to Managing The World's Biggest Superstars:
- What was the single most catalytic moment of Scooter’s career?
- What was Scooter's most painful professional mistake, and what did he learn from it?
- What was the decision-making behind Scooter's HYBE deal?
- What is the biggest challenge in scaling the trajectories of the people Scooter works with?
- If Scooter could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?
2. College Party Promoter Turned Venture Investor:
- How did Scooter originally get into investing?
- How did Scooter’s party promoting business almost lead to an early investment in Facebook?
- Do people approach Scooter differently as an investor because of his success in the music industry?
- Why is vulnerability helpful for investing?
3. Scooter's Lessons on Success (And How to Deal With It):
- Why does Scooter believe happiness and success are not aligned?
- How does Scooter approach deal-making?
- Is work-life balance bullshit? Does Scooter think you have to break your back to become as successful as Jeff Bezos?
- Is Scooter scared of mediocrity?
- Why does Scooter think all entrepreneurs are bad at having faith?
4. The Secrets to Being a Better Parent, Child, and Partner:
- How does Scooter approach trust?
- How did having kids impact Scooter's mindset?
- Why was divorce the biggest catalyst in Scooter's entire life?
- Does Scooter worry that money will negatively influence how his children are brought up?
- What is the most important thing a child can hear from a parent?
5. Finding the "Scott" Buried Inside "Scooter":
- It's easy to become the brand you create. How does Scooter prevent losing himself when that happens?
- What does Scooter need to unlearn in the future?
- What has Scooter changed his mind on in the past 12 months?
- How does Scooter approach his relationship to regret?
- What single lesson you most would Scooter most want a young person listening to this conversation to take away?
20VC: Biggest Challenge Facing Crypto Today & The Winners and Losers of the Next 10 Years | Why AI Will Lead to More Wealth Equality Than Inequality | Why The Current State of the US Feels Like the End of an Empire with David Marcus, CEO @ Lightspark
David Marcus is the co-founder and CEO of Lightspark, building infrastructure that extends the capabilities and utility of Bitcoin. Prior to Lightspark, David led all payment and crypto efforts at Facebook/Meta and scaled Messenger to 1.5BN users. David previously founded three other companies: Zong (acquired by eBay/PayPal for $240M), Echovox (acquired by MBO), and GTN (acquired by World Access).
In Today's Episode with David Marcus We Discuss:
1. From Losing Everything to Becoming Changing the World of Fintech:
- How did seeing his family lose everything lead to David starting his first company, GTN?
- Does David believe that great companies can be built in Europe?
- What are the biggest mistakes David made with Zong? How did they impact his mindset?
2. The Secret to Building a Great Company from Mark Zuckerberg's ex-Right Hand Man:
- Where does David think Paypal lost its way?
- How did David "brutally" change PayPayl's company culture when he came in?
- What worked and what didn't in scaling Messenger to 1.5BN users?
- Why did Diem (formerly Libra) fail? How did David know when to give up that fight?
- What is David's biggest lesson from working with Mark Zuckerberg?
3. Crypto & AI's Ripple Effect on The Rest of The World:
- What will be the fallout from the de-banking of crypto?
- How does David think the future of AI will impact income equality?
- If David was in charge of the SEC, what would he do first?
- What worries David most about the next 1-5 years in the crypto industry?
- What are the most significant signs that the tea leaves not looking great for the US dollar?
4. How The Best Leaders Hire The Best Talent:
- Why does David believe that naivety is good for entrepreneurs?
- Does David believe we'll be in a worse macro position by the end of the year?
- How has David changed most as a leader over time?
- What is David's biggest piece of advice in regard to hiring across many different companies?
20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast
Joost De Valk is one of the OGs of SEO. As the Founder of Yoast, he scaled what was a side project plugin into a multi-million dollar business, used by 13 million sites and selling to Newfold Media in 2021. As one of the early SEO pioneers he is also an extremely coveted angel investor and invests through his company, Emilia Capital.
In Today's Episode with Joost De Valk We Discuss:
1. From Side Project to Multi-Million Dollar Business:
- Why and how did Joost create the first version of Yoast?
- When did he realise that this was not a side project and could be a big business?
- What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he started Yoast?
2. When, How and Why To Invest in SEO:
- When is the right time to invest in SEO?
- How should one determine how much budget to allocate to SEO?
- Once decided on budget, what are the first steps to investing in SEO?
- Which part of the org should SEO team specialists sit in?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when investing in SEO/
3. AI Changes The World of Context:
- How does AI change the way businesses create content?
- How can startups leverage AI to create and distribute more content for SEO?
- What are the biggest challenges/problems to leveraging AI for content creation?
4. Creating a Developer-Led Brand and Mastering PLG:
- What is the secret to creating the best developer-led brand?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make when marketing to developers?
- How does Joost navigate the balance between having enough value in a freemium product but also retaining enough value to be able to charge for the premium product?
- Is Joost concerned that budgets will revert back to CFOs and away from individual contributors with the financial downturn that is ensuing?
20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher
Rob Lacher founded Visionaries Club in 2019, in just 3 years he has scaled the firm to $600M AUM and backed some of Europe's best including Xentral, Personio, Miro, and Ledgy. Prior to Visionaries, Rob founded the fashion platform AMAZE in 2014 which he sold to Zalando, and founded the European seed and growth stage venture capital fund La Famiglia in 2016.
In Today's Episode with Rob Lacher We Discuss:
1.) From Novice Tennis Player to Investing on a Global Stage:
- When Rob realized beating Federer wasn’t an option, how did he make his way into the world of venture capital?
- When did Rob know he wanted to be a VC?
- What did Rob learn about himself after leaving La Famiglia?
- What characteristics make business partners compatible?
2.) The Secret to Building a Fund? Hire People With No Experience:
- What does Rob think is the hardest element of building a firm?
- What advice would Rob give to emerging managers when starting their firms?
- What is the single biggest mistake that Rob sees hiring managers make?
- Why does Rob prefer to hire people with no VC experience?
3.) The Red Ocean of European Venture:
- Does Rob think the Series A product in Europe is any good?
- How would Rob advise founders debating a US multi-stage fund or a European offer?
- If Rob could choose one European board member, who would it be and why?
- In Rob's dream, what would the Europe venture ecosystem look like in 2028?
- How does Rob think Europe’s family institutions can become Europe's Google?
4.) Lessons on Investing From a Pro:
- Where does Rob think VCs, founders, and boards are misaligned?
- When Rob invests, how central of a role does price actually pay?
- What is Rob’s single biggest investing mistake? How did it impact his mindset and approach?
- What are the three ways reserve management strategy has changed?
- What does Rob absolutely hate about VC?
20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox
Mike Salguero is the Founder and CEO @ ButcherBox, the meat delivery subscription service that he has scaled to $600M in revenue, 215 employees and the national leader in the space. All of this achieved while raising $0 of venture capital. Prior to ButcherBox, Mike was the Founder & CEO @ CustomMade, an online marketplace that, unlike ButcherBox, raised millions in venture funding from prominent VCs.
In Today's Episode with Mike Salguero We Discuss:
1.) The Makings of a Great Entrepreneur:
- How did Mike's father not being present in his childhood impact the type of leader he is today?
- How does Mike's fear of abandonment show itself in his leadership style?
- What does Mike know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2. Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backabale Business Model:
- Why does Mike believe consumer subscription D2C businesses are not VC backable?
- What are the biggest challenges of running a consumer subscription business?
- Why did all the D2C food prep and delivery companies fail? What did they do wrong?
- What happens to all the heavily funded D2C subscription companies of the last 5 years?
- Why does Mike believe now is the hardest time ever to do D2C consumer subscription?
3. The Secret to Efficient Marketing:
- How did ButcherBox scale to $50M in revenue with just one marketing channel working?
- When should founders think about the second channel? How should they choose which one?
- Why does Mike not like "brand marketing"? How did ButcherBox burn $8.5M on brand marketing? What are Mike's biggest lessons from doing this?
- What emerging channel does Mike see as having the biggest potential over the coming years?
- Why does customer acquisition increase with time? Why do elections cause it to increase?
4. The Economics of a $600M Revenue ButcherBox:
- How much does it cost ButcherBox to acquire a customer?
- What is their payback period on that customer? How has this change with time?
- What is the single metric that drives the profitability of ButcherBox?
- What are the single biggest points of margin in the business?
- What is the lifetime value of a ButcherBox subscriber?
- What are the single biggest points of churn in the customer lifecycle?
5. Venture Capital: To Raise or Not to Raise:
- Why did Mike never raise venture capital for ButcherBox?
- Has Mike ever sold secondary? Why not?
- What would Mike most like to change about the world of venture capital?
- What are his biggest lessons from raising VC with CustomMade? How did that impact how he approached building ButcherBox?
- What does Mike believe all founders need to know about raising VC?
20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality
Tobi Lütke is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shopify, the powerhouse company allowing anyone to start and grow their e-commerce business. Over an incredible 18 years, Tobi has scaled Shopify to 10% of total US e-commerce, millions of merchants in over 170 countries, and a market cap today of over $60BN. Huge thanks to Harley Finkelstein for making this happen.
In Today's Episode with Tobi Lütke We Discuss:
1. From a Small German Town to One of the World's Most Powerful CEOs:
- What did Tobi want to be when he was growing up?
- Who did Tobi learn most from in his younger years? How does Tobi think about the importance of mentorship in learning?
- What does Tobi know now that he wishes he had known when he started Shopify?
2. You Can Learn More from World of Warcraft Than You Can Companies:
- Why does Tobi believe you can learn more from World of Warcraft than you can from studying companies?
- Why does Tobi believe that humans are terrible at company building? What are the most obvious ways we can improve the quality of the companies we build?
- Why does Tobi believe that in-person is far superior to remote working? What are the nuances?
3. The Best Companies Operate with Many Constraints:
- Why does Tobi believe in all cases, constraints produce creativity?
- What is the difference between an enforced constraint and an artificial constraint?
- How can leaders create and enforce artificial constraints when they are not real?
- How do the best leaders use constraints to ensure their companies move faster and faster?
4. Inside the Mind of Tobi Lütke: Decision-Making & Prioritisation:
- How does Tobi reflect on his own decision-making process? How has it changed?
- Why does Tobi believe that sunk cost fallacy is BS and only leads to your outsourcing approval to someone else?
- Why does Tobi hate "black boxes"? How does he remove them from the org entirely?
- How does Tobi decide what to learn? What is his learning process once he has made this decision?
- How does Tobi decide what to prioritise in terms of strategic initiatives for Shopify?
20VC: The Secret to Negotiating; Making $50BN for Yahoo on Alibaba | Why Everything You Know About Hiring is Wrong; Domain Knowledge and Past Experience are Dangerous | The Next 10 Years for Fintech; Winners, Losers and Crypto with Jackie Reses, CEO @ Lea
Jackie Reses is the Chair and CEO of Lead Bank, a community bank in Kansas City. Previously, she was the Executive Chairman of Square Financial Services and Capital Lead and Head of the People Team at Block Inc (Square). Prior, she had leadership positions at Yahoo! and was a Partner at Apax Partners Worldwide. Jackie also spent seven years at Goldman Sachs in mergers and acquisitions and the principal investment area. Jackie is on the board of directors of Endeavor, Affirm and Nubank. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Alibaba Group. She has been named one of Forbes' “Self Made Women”, Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business,” and American Banker “Most Powerful Woman in Finance”.
In Today's Episode with Jackie Reses We Discuss:
1. From Humble Beginnings to "Most Powerful Woman in Finance":
- What is Jackie running from?
- How did Jackie's upbringing impact her approach to business and management today?
- What does jackie know now that she wishes she had known when she started her career?
2. Building the Best Teams: Lessons from Square and Yahoo
- Why does Jackie believe that past experience is BS in hiring candidates for a role?
- Why does Jackie deliberately not look for domain knowledge when hiring?
- Why does Jackie believe employers should tell candidates what they suck at in hiring?
- What does Jackie mean when she says, "you have to invest in people for 20 years"?
3. The Best Deal-Maker in the Business: Secret to Negotiating:
- What does Jackie believe is the secret to successful negotiations?
- How did Jackie do the Alibaba deal for Yahoo and make $50BN for them?
- Why does Jackie believe the Laffonts and Coatue are the best risk managers?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make in deal-making today?
4. The Next Wave of Fintech:
- Who wins and who loses in the next wave of fintech?
- What will happen to the crypto industry? How will crypto be regulated?
- Why does Jackie believe that financial super apps are BS?
- Why does Jackie believe that Goldman tried and failed to innovate?
- Will we see a wave of M&A in fintech over the coming years?
20Product: Nubank's CPO on Why Product is 90% Science and 10% Art, Why Execution is Overrated and Strategic Clarity is Under-Appreciated, Why You Should Never Fall in Love With Your Own Ideas & Nubank's Biggest Product Challenges Scaling to 80M Users
Jag Duggal is the CPO @ Nubank where he is responsible for product strategy and roadmap reporting to CEO David Velez. Jag leads over 200 professionals across different functions within his role. Before Nubank, he was the Director of Product Management at Facebook, leading monetization of video and third party content. Before Facebook, Jag spent close to 7 years at Quantcast as a Senior VP of Product Management & Strategy. Finally, pre-Facebook, Jag was at Google for 5 years as a Group Product Manager and Head of Strategy (Display).
In Today's Episode with Jag Duggal We Discuss:
1. From Cushy Valley Job to CPO @ Brazilian Startup:
- Why did Jag leave the life of luxury in the valley at Facebook to join David as CPO @ Nubank?
- What does Jag know now that he wishes he had known when he took the position?
- What one piece of advice would Jag give to a product leader starting a new position today?
2. Product: The Playbook, Art vs Science:
- Why does Jag believe that product is 90% science? What is the final 10%?
- Why does Jag believe that you should not listen to your customers?
- What is the right way to ask customers questions to determine their pains?
- Why does Jag believe that you should not fall in love with your own ideas?
3. Building the Bench: Hiring the Best Team:
- How does Jag approach the hiring process for all new product hires?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Jag has made when hiring for the product team?
- What are the must ask questions when hiring for product?
- What hiring lesson did Jag learn from Kevin Systrom? How has he applied it today?
- What did Jag believe about hiring that he now no longer believes?
4. Go Time: Build, Manage and Execute:
- Why does Jag think execution is overrated and strategy deserves more credit than people give it?
- How does Nubank utilise small teams to operate fastest? What have been lessons here?
- What are the best ways to do product post-mortems? What works? What does not work?
- What has been Jag's best product decision? What has been his worst?
20VC: Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi on Why Uber Eats is Not Losing the Fight to Doordash | Uber's M&A Strategy; A Scorecard Analysis from Careem to Postmates & Skip | Why Uber's Investment in Scooters was a Mistake | Secret to Marriage, Parenting & High Per
Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber, where he has managed the company’s business in more than 70 countries around the world since 2017. Dara was previously CEO of Expedia, which he grew into one of the world’s largest online travel companies. Dara was promoted to Expedia CEO after serving as the Chief Financial Officer of IAC Travel. Before joining IAC, Dara served as Vice President of Allen & Company and spent a number of years as an analyst. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Expedia and Catalyst.org and was previously on the board of the New York Times Company.
In Today's Episode with Dara Khosrowshahi We Discuss:
1. From the Iranian Revolution to One of the Most Powerful CEOs:
- What is Dara running from? What is he running towards?
- How did seeing his family lose everything impact his mindset to life and business?
- What are 1-2 of Dara's biggest lessons from working with the legendary Barry Diller?
- How did Daniel Ek @ Spotify convince Dara to take the CEO role at Uber?
2. Dara Khosrowshahi: The Foundations of Great Leadership:
- What does high performance in business mean to Dara?
- Does Dara agree, "the best CEOs are the best resource allocators"?
- Does Dara believe he is a better peacetime or wartime CEO? Which is he at Uber?
- What decision-making framework does Dara use to make really hard decisions?
- How does Dara does what to focus on and what to prioritise?
3. Investments and Acquisitions: The Scorecard:
- Why did Dara decide to make the Kareem acquisition? Has it been successful?
- What was the thinking behind the Postmates acquisition?
- What does Dara believe is the single best acquisitions he has made at Uber?
- What has been the worst acquisition he has made at Uber?
- Why does Dara believe that Uber entering scooters was a mistake?
4. The Future: Food Delivery, Parenting, Marriage:
- What does Dara say to those who suggest Uber Eats has lost the war to Doordash?
- What does Dara believe is the secret to a happy marriage?
- How does Dara define great parenting? What does Dara do to be the best father he can be?
- What would Dara like to improve or change about himself? Why?
20VC: Three Core Lessons for Founders From the SVB Crisis From Financial Agility (Banking) to Constructing Scenario Plans and Mastering Crisis Communications | How The Western World Has Not Been Responsible with its Money & Why The Fed Is Backing Itself I
Mike Maples is one of the OGs of seed investing. As the Co-Founder of Floodgate, he has backed the likes of Twitch, Okta, Lyft, Twitter and more. Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade and was also named a “Rising Star” by FORTUNE and profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship.
In Today's Episode with Mike Maples We Discuss
1.) Lesson from SVB #1: The Importance of Scenario Planning:
- What is the right way to do scenario planning in startups?
- What is the difference between good vs bad scenario planning?
- What do the best scenario plans include and involve?
- What is the right way to communicate these scenario plans to your stakeholders?
2.) Lesson from SVB #2: The Importance of Financial Agility:
- What does it mean for a startup to be "financially agile"?
- From a banking relationships perspective, what can startups do to be financially agile?
- How many accounts should a startup have? How much runway should be in each?
- Should startups bank with startup banks as well as traditional banks?
- Should startups have their money in sweep accounts and money market accounts?
3.) Lesson from SVB #3: How to Master Crisis Communications:
- Why is it so important for founder to over-communicate in tough times?
- How transparent should they be in these communications?
- What does Mike mean when he says "be radically human"?
- If Mike were to face a crisis, what would he do differently in the way he communicates to his LPs?
4.) Lessons from SVB: The Wider World:
- Why does Mike believe the level of quantitative easing that occurred in COVID was scandalous?
- Does Mike believe the USD will continue to be the reserve currency of the world?
- Will we be in a better or worse macro situation by the end of the year?
- Has Mike ever had a company that achieved true PMF and failed?
20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia
Frank Fillman is CRO/Country Leader Australia for Salesforce where he is responsible for responsible for the overall strategy, execution, success, and growth of the $1B+ Australian market across all industries. Prior to Salesforce, Frank was SVP/GM @ Tableau where he was responsible for the strategy, execution, and growth of Tableau's Top Accounts. Over the last 10 years at Salesforce, Frank's accomplishments include $500M+ new revenue closed in 5 years and $1B+ revenue managed. As a result, Frank has been awarded #1 Sales VP of the Year, North America, 3 times! Huge thanks to Zhenya Loginov @ Miro for the intro to Frank today.
In Today's Episode with Frank Fillman We Discuss:
1.) From Selling Kitchen Utensils to Leading $1BN Revenue Line for Salesforce:
- How did Frank first make his way into the world of sales selling kitchen utensils?
- Why does Frank believe, "how you handle tragedy defines you"? How did it define him?
- What does Frank know now that he wishes he had known when he started in sales?
2.) Build and Execute the Sales Playbook:
- How does Frank define what a "sales playbook" is today? What is it not?
- Literally, what are the first steps to building a sales playbook? Is it the founder who does it?
- What does a good playbook have? What does a bad playbook have? What makes the best?
- What tools should founders and sales leaders use to create their playbook?
3.) Enterprise Deal Dynamics 101:
- Why does Frank believe that you should never start with the price or "send over numbers"?
- How can enterprise sellers create urgency in a deal cycle? What works? What does not work?
- How does Frank advise sales teams on the use of discounting?
- How open should reps be in communicating the win for them as well as the win for the customer of closing a deal?
4.) Building the Bench:
- How does Frank structure the hiring process for all new sales reps?
- Why does Frank believe that all sales leaders want to be super reps?
- How does Frank rank high potential vs high experience when hiring reps?
- What matters more; the exec have experience in the sector you are selling into or the deal size?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders and leaders make when hiring sales?
5.) Setting Quota and Deal Reviews:
- How does Frank advise founders on setting quotas? Why does Q1 set the tone for the year?
- How does Frank conduct deal reviews? How often? With who? What is the agenda?
- What is the one question that Frank always asks when a rep says, "the client told us it was not a priority and so it slipped into next quarter"?
- How does Frank advise founders and sales leaders on multi-threading large enterprise accounts?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Frank's Most Recent Book: The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea
20VC: Bill Ackman on The Banking Crisis, What the Fed Should Do, The Three-Tiered Banking System, Why SVB is the Safest, Why Jamie Dimon Should Run For President & Investing Lessons; Losing $400M on Netflix and Making $2.8BN in COVID
Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P., an SEC-registered investment adviser founded in 2003. Pershing Square is a concentrated research-intensive fundamental value investor in long and occasionally short investments in the public markets. Bill is also a member of the board of Universal Music Group N.V. He serves as a member of the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a member of the Board of Dean’s Advisors of the Harvard Business School. Prior to forming Pershing Square, Mr. Ackman co-founded Gotham Partners Management Co., LLC.
In Today's Episode with Bill Ackman We Discuss:
1.) From HBS to Starting Your First Fund:
- How did Bill go from HBS to raising his first fund in Gotham Partners? How was that first fundraise?
- From 100 meetings, what worked? What did not work? What were the core fundraising lessons?
- What did Bill learn about great partnerships from his time with David building Gotham?
2.) Bill Ackman: A Winner's Mindset: How To Deal with the Highs and Lows:
- On reflection, what have been the most challenging times for Bill professionally?
- What does he say to himself when he is going through the hardest times? What is his mind talk?
- When the war is lost and it is time for learning, how does Bill reflect and learn from losses?
- Bill has previously described himself as "the most persistent man in America". How does Bill know when enough is enough, he was wrong and it is time to change his approach?
3.) Bill Ackman: SVB + Bank Runs and The Future of our Financial System:
- Why does Bill believe that the depositor guarantees for SVB and Signature Bank have created a "Three Tier Banking System"? What are those three tiers?
- Why does Bill believe that SVB is now the safest place to deposit your money? Why is First Republic Bank and SVB very different in terms of their exposure?
- What can be done to prevent further bank runs? What should the Fed be doing? Why are they not doing it? What would Bill do if he was in charge of the Fed?
- Why does Bill believe the current levels of FDIC insurance are insufficient and outdated? What should be used in their place?
4.) Bill Ackman: The World Around Us & Potential Politician
- Why does Bill want Jamie Dimon to run for President? If it is Trump vs Biden, who wins?
- Why does Bill believe Biden's tax policies destroy the US economy? What should we have instead?
- Why does Bill believe we should give every newborn baby $6,500 and invest it for them when born?
- What are Bill's 10-Year Long's and 10-Year Shorts? Why them?
- Would Bill ever run for politics? When is the right time?
20VC: Why Growth Investors Ruined the Venture Market, Why Marketing in Venture Has No Substance, Why Follow-On Investing Can Damage Returns and The Mistakes VCs Made in the Last 18 Months with Ophelia Brown, Founder @ Blossom Capital
Ophelia Brown is the Founder of Blossom Capital, one of Europe's newest but leading early-stage venture firms. Ophelia and the Blossom team have invested in stand-outs including Checkout, Duffel, Tines, and Moonpay. Prior to Blossom, Ophelia was a GP at LocalGlobe and a Principal at Index Ventures where her investments included Robinhood and Typeform.
In Today's Episode with Ophelia Brown We Discuss:
1.) From Restaurant-Owning DJ to Leading European VC:
- How Ophelia made her way into the world of venture and came to found Blossom?
- What does Ophelia know now that she wishes she had known when she entered venture?
- What does Ophelia feel she is running away from?
2.) Venture Capital: The Market:
- Why does Ophelia believe the best venture firms focus either by stage/theme/geography?
- Why does Ophelia believe that marketing in venture has no substance? How can founders determine between what is real and what is false?
- Why does Ophelia believe that growth investors have ruined the venture market?
- When does Ophelia believe VCs will realise that FOMO investing is not a good strategy?
3.) Ophelia Brown: The Investor and Fund Manager:
- What has been Ophelia's biggest investing mistake? How did it change her mindset and approach?
- In a world where everyone does seed investing, why does Ophelia not?
- How was raising the first Blossom fund? What were some of her biggest lessons?
- Why does Ophelia believe that follow-on investing can damage returns?
- How does Ophelia reflect on her own relationship to price? When has she paid up and it worked? When has she paid up and it not worked?
- Does Ophelia think it is fair that many find her curt and abrasive to work with?
4.) Europe: Is Now Really The Right Time?
- What would Ophelia like to see change in the way European VCs act?
- If Ophelia could invest in one seed firm, one Series A firm and one growth firm in Europe, what would they be? Why?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest barriers Europe must overcome in the next 5 years?
20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier
Adam Grenier is an OG of the growth world. His first role in growth, was none other than Uber where he was Head of Growth Marketing and Innovation building the global marketing growth infrastructure and team from the ground up. He then enjoyed successful spells at Lambda School and Masterclass as VP Growth and VP of Marketing, respectively. If that was not enough, Adam is also a prolific angel having made investments in Superhuman, Table22, and FitXR to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Adam Grenier We Discuss:
1.) Entry into the World of Growth with Uber:
- How did Adam make his way into the world of growth with Uber and Ed Baker?
- What are the single biggest takeaways from his time at Uber, Lambda and Masterclass?
- What does Adam know now that he wishes he had known when he started in growth?
2.) Growth: What it is? Why You Do Not Need a Team for it?
- How does Adam define the term "growth" today? What is the role of "Head of Growth"?
- Why does Adam believe that you do not need a growth team?
- How can leaders infuse growth principles, mindsets and metrics into existing teams?
- WHat are the single biggest mistakes founders make when thinking about growth?
3.) Hiring Growth Mindsets: How to Ask the Right Question:
- What are the clearest signs to Adam that someone has a growth mindset?
- What are the right questions to ask to see how they think?
- How does Adam use tests and case studies to determine the growth mindset of a person?
- What did Uber teach Adam about the best practices to hire for growth?
4.) Uber: Scaling a Monster and Spending $1BN on Ads:
- What are some of Adam's biggest lessons from spending $1BN on advertising at Uber?
- Why at anytime were there 200 people paying for ads with their personal credit cards?
- Why does Adam believe China was "the wild-west"? How did all of their competitors in China have Uber data?
- How do growth mechanics, channels and disciplines compare between US vs China?
20VC: SVB: What Happened? What Happens Now? Will Depositors Have Deposits Guaranteed? How Long Will It Take? Will There Be a Buyer? Who is the Most Likely Buyer? What is the Best and Worst Outcome?
Jackie Reses is the CEO of Lead Bank and previous Exec Chair of Square Financial Services and Head of Lending and Banking. One of only people to have started a bank as a de no; Only tech company to get approved for a de novo. Chair Economic Advisory Council of SF Federal Reserve.
Kris Dickson is the CFO of Lead Bank and previously the CAO / CFO of post-BK Lehman Brothers parent co-estate for 10 years. Lehman Holdco estate has liquidated and distributed $129 billion to unsecured creditors through the end of 2022.
In Today's Episode on SVB We Discuss:
What Happened?
- How and why did SVB fail so fast?
- Was it the result of systemic problems or a series of management mistakes?
- What role did VCs play in the downfall of SVB?
- What role did social media and online banking play in the failing of SVB?
What Now?
- What happens now?
- Will depositors have their deposits guaranteed?
- Will there be a buyer for SVB? Who is the most likely?
- Should founders be worried about moving their money to neo-banks?
- Should founders in any circumstances transfer money to their personal accounts?
- What is the best and worst outcome?
20VC: Why AI Will Lead to Thousands of Billionaires and Elon Musk's, Will TikTok Be Banned and How Facebook Should Be Investing in AI & Why Startups Have Become Too Soft; We Need a Spiritual Reform with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO @ Replit
Amjad Masad is the Founder and CEO @ Replit, whose mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. With Replit, Amjad has raised over $100M from the likes of Peter Thiel, a16z, Coatue and Addition, to name a few. Before founding Replit, Amjad was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team at Facebook. Before Facebook, Amjad was #1 employee at Codecademy.
In Today's Episode with Amjad Masad We Discuss:
1.) From Troublemaker Child in Iran to Silicon Valley Founder:
- How did Amjad make his way into the world of tech and Silicon Valley having grown up as a misbehaving child in Iran?
- In what ways did Amjad show early signs of exceptionalism? Why does he always look for this in people he is hiring for Replit?
- What does Amjad know now that he wishes he had known when he started Replit?
2.) The Future: A New World with AI at the Centre:
- Why does Amjad believe we will see thousands of billionaires created from the innovation in AI?
- Why does Amjad believe AI will lead to 100 more Elon Musks?
- If Amjad were CEO of Facebook, what would he do? Why and how do they have to invest in AI?
- Will TikTok be banned in the US? How will this be resolved?
- Why does Amjad believe that 300 people control the future of AI? Is that not concerning?
3.) The Future of Society, Employment and Wages:
- Why does Amjad believe in 10 years, 1 engineer will be able to do what 100 do today?
- What will happen to the real wages of engineers?
- How does Amjad see the inclusion of universal basic income in the future?
- Is Amjad concerned about societal and civil unrest with wealth disparity widening further?
4.) Building the Replit Army:
- Why does Amjad believe that so many in tech have gotten too soft in the last few years?
- Why does Amjad release a "Why You Should Not Join Replit" page and share it with all candidates?
- How can a founder know if they have good company values or not?
- Why does Amjad feel we need a spiritual reform in company building? Why are startups and religion the same?
20Product: Shopify's VP Product on Why the Founder is Always the Head of Product, What Makes Truly Special Product Managers, Why The Majority of Product Managers Need to Change, Why Top-Down Decision-Making in Product is Good & How Shopify Will Be Bigger
Glen Coates is the VP of Product @ Shopify, leading the development of Shopify’s core commerce platform. He also oversees the core developer platform and Shopify’s partner ecosystem, which includes over 10,000 publicly available apps in the Shopify App Store. Originally a CompSci grad, Glen moved from Sydney to San Diego in 2008 to run US distribution and e-commerce for an Australian eco-products company. In 2010, he attended Columbia Business School for one whole day before quitting to start Handshake, a SaaS B2B e-commerce platform. Glen joined Shopify in May 2019 when the company acquired Handshake. Glen has been in the Vice President role since October 2020.
In Today's Episode with Glen Coates We Discuss:
1. From Game Developer in Sydney to Running E-Commerce Warehouse in NYC:
- How Glen made his way into the world of product and e-commerce having started life as a game developer?
- Why does Glen believe that the best founders and product people often have their roots in gaming?
- What does Glen know now that he wishes he had known when he joined Shopify?
2. The Art of Product and Product Management:
- Is product more an art or a science? If you had to put a number on it, what would it be?
- What is "product management"? Why can it not be reduced to frameworks?
- What are "product principles"? How do Shopify use them? How should product teams set them?
- What makes the very best PMs today? What are the commonalities in them?
- What is the sign of a poor PM? What would Glen most like to change about the world of PMs?
3. The Art of Product Marketing:
- What does Glen believe is the true art of product marketing?
- How did a CEO group teach Glen how to tell truly great stories?
- How can one tell great stories when you have to cater to multiple different customers/personas?
- How does Glen evaluate the current state of Shopify's product marketing?
4. Shopify and The Future of Shopify:
- Why does Glen think it is important for Shopify to have a tops down decision-making process for product strategy?
- What does Glen believe is the #1 reason why Shopify is such a large and successful company?
- What is the single hardest element of Glen's role today?
- How does Glen believe that Shopify will be larger than Amazon in 5-10 years time?
20VC: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on The Crucible Moments Scaling Facebook to 1BN Users, Turning Facebook Reels Into a Monetisation Engine, Competing Against TikTok and SNAP, Coming Out in the World of Tech; The Challenges and What Needs to Change
Alex Schultz is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics for Meta (formerly Facebook), leading Marketing, Analytics, and Internationalization. Previously, Mark Zuckerberg stood up and said, "Facebook would not be a BN user company without Alex". At Meta, Alex has pioneered the integration of product and direct response marketing at Meta and helped launch many of the company’s most impactful products and initiatives. Alex is gay and is the executive sponsor of Facebook’s LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group.
In Today's Episode with Alex Schultz We Discuss:
1. From Paper Planes to CMO of Facebook:
- How Alex started his career in the world of paper planes and how that led to his getting a role at an early eBay? What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from eBay?
- How did the role at Facebook come about in 2008? Why did he decide to join the early Facebook?
- What does Alex know now that he wishes he had known when he started his time at Facebook?
2. The Secret to Scaling to 1 Billion Users:
- Mark Zuckerberg has said that "Facebook would not be a billion-user company without Alex". So what does Alex believe are the 1-2 biggest needle movers in FB scaling to 1 billion users?
- Why does Alex believe that the best leaders are patiently right?
- How can management be direct and effective but also show they care and be kind?
- What have been some of Alex's biggest lessons on people management across different phases of the company?
3. Crucible Moments in Facebook History:
Facebook Messenger Split:
- What was the decision-making process behind splitting Messenger from the core Facebook App?
- What did they do right and well in the split? What mistakes were made?
Rebrand to Meta:
- Why did Facebook decide it was right to rebrand to Meta?
- Has the rebrand gone well? How does Alex define success with the rebrand?
Reels vs TikTok vs SNAP:
- Does Alex believe we are moving away from the social graph and moving to content discovery only?
- How does Alex feel Reels is doing in the race against TikTok? What have they done well?
- Why does Alex believe SNAP hasn't innovated in the way people think and copied Kakao in cases?
- What is the key to turning Reels into a monetization machine for Facebook?
4. Alex Schultz: The Person and Leader:
- How was the coming out process for Alex in the tech community?
- How did his parents respond to the news? What does Alex mean when he says, "everyone has to mourn their own version of your future self"?
- Why when he moved to the states was Alex advised to go back in the closet?
- Does Alex feel we have a long way to go in equalizing the playing field both for homosexuality and trans-gender participation?
20VC: Will LPs Pull Out of Existing Managers, How Will Fund Sizes Change Moving Forward, Is Now The Time to be Aggressive on Secondaries, What is the Discount on Secondaries Today, Who Will Win and Lose in the Next Five Years with Hunter Somerville, Partn
Hunter Somerville is a Partner @ Stepstone, one of the largest secondary buyers, fund investors and players in our ecosystem with over $600BN in capital responsibility and over $100BN AUM. Additionally, Hunter serves on the LP Advisory Boards for Felix Capital, Foundry Group, Imaginary Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and more. Prior to StepStone, Hunter was a general partner with Greenspring Associates, a venture capital and growth equity investment firm that merged with StepStone in 2021. Before that, he worked as an associate for Camden Private Capital.
In Todays Episode with Hunter Somerville We Discuss:
1. Three Types of Secondaries:
- What are the three different types of secondaries?
- What is the current situation with company secondary opportunities today?
- What is the current landscape for fund secondary opportunities today?
- What are GP-led restructuring or strip sales? How do they work?
2. LPs Today and Moving Forward Investing in Funds:
- Will we see a wave of LPs not commit to their existing managers?
- What is the denominator effect and how does that impact LP deployment into funds?
- What are the top 3 reasons why LPs will not re-commit to existing managers?
- Do LPs feel VCs have fairly marked down their venture books in the last 6 months?
- Does Hunter agree that if you have not returned cash to your LPs when you could have done ijn the last 5 years, then you are most in trouble?
- Why does Hunter believe we will see more international LPs entering venture than ever before?
3. Liquidity: When Does the Cash Hit:
- Why was liquidity so bad in 2022? How did that compare to 2021?
- How does Hunter forecast liquidity environments in 2023? What could drive them?
- How active were Stepstone in secondary buying over the last few years?
- Is now the time to be greedy when others are fearful in secondaries?
- What discount was Hunter seeing both on fund and company side secondaries in 20-22?
- What is the current level of discount being applied to both company and fund secondaries?
4. AMA with One of the Largest Secondary Buyers:
- Which LP class will be hurt the most from the last fund cycle?
- What would Hunter most like to change about the world of venture?
- What was Hunter's biggest mistake on a company investment?
- What are the biggest mistakes LPs make when they do direct investing?
- Why are big-name people entering firms as GPs not always a good sign?
20VC: The Story of Ring: Scaling from an Idea in a Garage to Richard Branson Investing and a Reported $1BN Amazon Acquisition | Why Building a Brand is Like Making Great Wine | The Secret to Hiring Success; Hire Marathoners and more with Jamie Siminoff
Jamie Siminoff is the Founder and Chief Inventor @ Ring, with Ring Jamie, created the world’s first Wi-Fi video doorbell while working in his garage in 2011. Since Ring’s launch in 2013, Ring has helped make thousands of neighborhoods safer all around the world. As part of the journey, Jamie raised over $385M from the likes of True Ventures, Felicis, First Round, CRV, Upfront and more. In 2018, Amazon acquired Ring for a reported $1BN. Prior to Ring, Jamie founded several successful ventures including PhoneTag, the world’s first voicemail-to-text company, and Unsubscribe.com, a service that helped email users clean commercial email from their inboxes. He successfully sold both companies in 2009 and 2011 respectively.
In Today's Episode with Jamie Siminoff We Discuss:
1.) From Creating the First Wi-Fi Doorbell to $BN Acquisition:
- When was the moment Jamie realized he had to create the world's first Wi-Fi-enabled doorbell?
- How di Richard Branson come to be an investor in Ring? What was the process?
- How does Jamie advise other founders when it comes to the question of whether it is valuable having business moguls as investors in their business?
2.) Crucible Moments: From Lawsuits and Near-Death to $22M in Sales in a Day:
- When Jamie hears the words "near-death experience" what is the moment in the Ring journey that comes to mind?
- How did Jamie get through a crippling lawsuit and come out selling $22M in 24 hours on QVC?
- How did Jamie feel when he placed a $500M order with manufacturers when he only had $100M?
- What does Jamie believe was the hardest phase of the business?
3.) Jamie Siminoff: The Leader:
- Why does Jamie want to hire marathon runners? Why does the analogy make for good hires?
- Does Jamie start from a position of trust with new hires and it is there to be built or start with no trust and it is there to be gained?
- Does Jamie believe he is a tolerant leader? What does he mean when he says, "I want to see the dirt under your fingernails"?
- Why does Jamie believe that building a brand is like making great wine?
- Why does Jamie really hate customer surveys? What should be done instead?
4.) Selling for $1BN to Amazon:
- How did the Amazon acquisition come to be? How did the discussion go?
- Why did Jamie decide then was the right time?
- When you sell for a $1BN, does the cash hit your account soon? When did Jamie actually receive the money? How did he feel when he saw it is in his account?
- What does Jamie believe Ring did so well to make the acquisition a success?
- What did Amazon do well to ensure Ring was integrated most effectively?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest lessons Jamie has learned from being within Amazon?
20VC: How Multi-Stage Funds Changed The Game For Seed Rounds, Why Signalling Risk is BS, The Three Most Important Variables for Founders When Raising Rounds & A Debate on Portfolio Construction: Does Ownership Matter with David Tisch
David Tisch is the Managing Partner of BoxGroup, one of the leading seed-stage investment firms of the last decade having invested in over 500 seed-stage startups, including Plaid, Ro, Ramp, PillPack, Amplitude, Flatiron Health, Stripe, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Oscar, Flexport, Classpass, Vine, GroupMe, Airtable and more. David is also the Chairman of GoodDog, a marketplace to find pets online.
In Today's Episode with David Tisch We Discuss:
1.) From Techstars To Founding BoxGroup:
- How did David start his own firm in the form of Box having started at Techstars?
- What advice from Brad Feld does David always remember and hold close?
- What does David know now that he wishes he had known when started investing?
2.) The Debate: The Math Does Not Work: Portfolio Construction:
- Ownership Does not Matter: How does David justify writing $100K checks from a $127.5M early-stage fund? Even if it is a home run, it does not make a difference to the fund?
- Level of Diversification: If David is writing small checks like this, with his fund size he will have hundreds of companies, what does David believe is the right level of diversification?
- Reserves management: How does David think about the ratio of initial to reserves when deploying the funds today? How does reserves management change in a recession?
- How does David prevent other VCs from using this to try and push him down to always writing a $100K check?
- Why does David believe that the size of check he is able to invest is the VC's problem and not the founders?
- Price Sensitivity: How does David assess his own relationship to price today? Why does he believe that company valuation is not something that the investor controls?
3.) Advice to Founders Raising Rounds:
- What does David believe is the #1 role of the CEO?
- What are the three most important variables for founders to focus on when raising their round?
- How should founders analyze the tradeoff between the brand of the VC and the size of the round?
- Does signaling really make a difference when a large fund invests at seed?
- How did multi-stage funds change the seed landscape forever with a new product?
- Who does David believe are the tourists in early-stage venture? Will they leave in the recession?
4.) David Tisch: AMA:
- Why does David believe that consumer social is not fun anymore?
- Who when they send him a deal does David take it most seriously?
- How does David want to ensure that bad VC behaviour is exposed?
- What would David most like to change about the venture landscape today?
20VC: Why Value Investing is BS, The Most Insane Elements of SPACs, Why Simplification is the Secret to High Margins & Why Good Values Should Make You Uncomfortable with Joey Levin, CEO @ IAC
Joey Levin is the CEO of IAC where he has overseen the constant evolution of the company, including the initial IPO and subsequent spin-off of Match Group, the spin-off of Vimeo, and the acquisitions of Angie’s List and Care.com. If that was not enough, in October 2022, Joey was also appointed as CEO of Angi Inc. In addition to this, Joey also serves on the boards of IAC, Turo, and MGM Resorts International.
In Today's Discussion with Joey Levin We Discuss:
1.) The Makings of a Great Leader:
- When Joey was younger, what did he want to be when he grew up?
- What is Joey's biggest advice to people coming out of college/university at this time?
- What 1-2 things does Joey credit his internal and fast rise in IAC to?
2) Value Investing is BS & The Markets Today:
- Why does Joey believe the idea of "value investing" is BS?
- What 1-2 behavior traits of investors in the last few years were most dangerous?
- Why does Joey believe that the current market is reasonable and now is the new normal?
- How does Joey keep internal morale high when people have become accustomed to high stock prices?
- Does Joey believe in the statement, "be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy"?
3.) Simplification is the Secret to Margin & Messaging 101:
- Why does Joey believe simplification is the core of high margins?
- How can startups and scale-ups identify where to simplify first? What are the subsequent steps?
- Why does Joey believe that the best values should make you feel uncomfortable?
- What is a lesson from Joey's father on what makes truly great messaging?
4.) Parenting, Money and Marriage:
- How does Joey reflect on his own relationship to money today?
- What are 1-2 lessons taught by his mother on how to approach money and wealth?
- What does Joey believe is the secret to truly happy marriages?
- What are Joey's biggest lessons on what it takes to be an effective and good father?
20VC: Instagram Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger on Why Social Networks Should Be Less Social & The Next Wave of Social | Why San Francisco Will Return with a Vengeance and The Future For Remote Work | Let's Get Personal: Relationships to Money, Be
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are the co-founders of Instagram. Since its release in 2010, Instagram has become of the most significant products in modern society shaping the way millions of people engage with the world around them. In January this year, Kevin and Mike announced their return to the founding arena with the launch of Artifact, a personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence.
In Today's Show with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger We Discuss:
1.) The Perfect Partnership:
- Question from Josh Kushner @ Thrive: What makes Kevin and Mike such a great partnership?
- What was the last disagreement they had? How was it resolved?
- They built Instagram in person, in an office. They are building Artifact remotely, what has changed in the way they operate when comparing remote to in-person?
2.) Why Social Networks are Broken & The Next Frontier:
- Why does Kevin believe social networks today are broken and should be less social?
- What fundamental premise are social networks built on that Kevin believes is wrong?
- How will AI and machine learning be central in the next wave of social?
- How do Kevin and Mike evaluate TikTok and the next wave of content discovery?
3.) Welcome Artifact: The Comeback:
- Why does Kevin believe they chose the worst idea for their new company? Why is it?
- Were they nervous about founding Artifact and expectations being so high given Instagram?
- Why does Kevin argue that Artifact is not actually a "news app"?
- What does Kevin believe is the biggest lesson Apple taught us about messaging?
4.) Family, Money, San Francisco:
- Why does Kevin believe that SF will return as the centre of tech once again?
- Why does Kevin believe that many millennials in the workforce today are entitled and soft?
- How has becoming a father changed the way Kevin and Mike operate and execute?
- How do Kevin and Mike assess their relationship with money today? How has it changed?
5.) Hiring, Investing, Managing:
- What are some of Kevin and Mike's biggest lessons when it comes to hiring?
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes they have made?
- Is it wrong to not hire someone because they are really really boring?
- What are the biggest lessons for Kevin and Mike from their angel investing?
20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling
Zach Lawryk is Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling, what is solutions consulting? They are the product expert in the solution that ties a business value to help support the sales rep in the execution of their quota. And there is no one better than Zach, prior to leading the solutions consulting team at Rippling, Zach was VP of Solutions Consulting at Slack where he scaled the SE team from 10 to 200. Before Slack, Zach was Head of Solutions Engineering @ Optimizely and before that was Director of Sales Engineering at Box.
In Today's Episode with Zach Lawryk We Discuss:
1. ) WTF is Solutions Engineering:
- What is Solutions engineering and why is it important?
- How does a software developer turned lawyer become one of the OGs of Solutions Engineering?
- What is the single biggest piece of advice Zach gives to graduates entering the workforce today?
2.) When and Who: Building the Foundations:
- When is the right time to hire your first solutions engineer?
- Should this be a senior hire or a more junior hire? What experience is ideal?
- Would Zach rather have someone who has sold to the same customer segment or sold to the same deal size? What are the challenges with each?
3.) Making the First Hire: The Process:
- What is the right hiring process for solutions engineers?
- Which members of your existing team should be involved in the process?
- What are some of Zach's favourite questions on the candidates past to determine quality?
- What are the best case studies and tests to give potential hires to test their aptitude?
- What are the biggest red flags in the hiring process for solutions engineers?
4.) Integrating into the Team: Making it Work:
- What is the optimal onboarding process for solutions engineers?
- Why does Zach think it is important they spend time with customer success in their first month?
- What is the right way to measure the effectiveness of SE's?
- How should the entrance of SE's impact the close rate and comp structure for AE's?
- How can sales leaders prevent division and friction between AEs and SEs?
20VC: Grammy Nominee Aloe Blacc on Working with Avicii on "Wake Me Up", The Art of Great Storytelling, Behind The Scenes on the Songwriting Process and Why Rules Are Just "Good Suggestions"
Aloe Blacc is a GRAMMY nominee and the voice behind such hits as Wake Me Up, The Man, SOS, I Need A Dollar, and many more. Aloe has toured the world, won countless awards but his latest album, All Love Everything, is the singer-songwriter’s first collection of material written as a father. “Becoming a father made me want to share those experiences in music,” he says, admitting it’s a challenge to translate such a powerful thing into lyrics and melody. If that was not enough, Aloe is also an entrepreneur with the founding of his new company, something we discuss in the show today.
In Today's Discussion with Aloe Blacc:
1.) Entry into Music and Running From Fame:
- How Aloe first fell in love with music and made his foray into the world of music from Ernst & Young?
- Why does Aloe believe he is running from fame? What does it bring that he does not like?
- What does Aloe believe he is running towards? How has this changed?
2.) The Art of Storytelling:
- How does Aloe think about what it takes to be truly great at storytelling?
- What is the difference between a great vs an average story?
- How has his style of storytelling changed over time?
- What are the biggest mistakes that people make in storytelling?
3.) The Songwriting Process 101:
- What is Aloe's process for writing new songs?
- How does he take an idea and expand it, test it and execute against it?
- How did "Wake Me Up" with Avicci come about? What was the creation process there?
- What was it like working with Avicci? What did Aloe learn from him about being liked?
4.) Marriage, Fatherhood, and Global Stardom:
- What does Aloe believe is the key to truly successful marriages?
- How does Aloe retain a sense of romance with intense work pressures?
- How has becoming a father changed the way in which Aloe thinks and operates?
- What is Aloe's love language? How has doing this with his wife changed their relationship?
20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock
Mike Duboe is a Partner @ Greylock where he sits on the board of Builder, Inventa, Novi, Pepper, Postscript. Prior to entering the world of venture, Mike was the first in-house growth hire at Stitch Fix, where he built and led the Growth organization helping take the company through to their IPO. Before Stitchfix, Mike was the first growth hire at Tilt, where he built and oversaw multiple teams, including analytics, marketing, community, and growth product. He also served on YC’s growth advisory council and was a growth lecturer at Reforge.
In Today's Episode with Mike Duboe We Discuss:
1.) Entry into the World of Growth:
- How Mike made his way from consulting at Bain to leading the growth team for Stitchfix?
- What did Mike believe about growth 5 years ago that he no longer believes?
- What does Mike know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of growth?
2.) When and Who To Hire:
- How does Mike define the term "growth team"? What is their core role and responsibility?
- Should the first growth hire be a senior growth lead or a more junior analytical lead?
- What data foundations should founders have in place prior to their growth hire joining?
- What are the most common ways founders fail to prepare for their first growth hires joining?
- When does Mike believe is the right and crucial time for growth hires to be made?
- Should these growth hires join existing teams or be put in standalone "growth teams"?
3.) The Hiring Process: How to Detect and Win the Best:
- How should founders structure the interview process for their first growth hires?
- What are the best questions to ask to reveal the quality of a potential growth hire?
- What are the right case studies and tests to do to assertain their quality?
- What are the different levels of comp package for different growth execs?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make in the hiring process?
4.) Mastering Paid Marketing: Lessons from Stitchfix:
- Why is CAC/LTV a BS metric? What should be used instead?
- When is the right time to start really engaging with paid marketing?
- How should marketing and growth teams determine budget on a per channel basis?
- How much is the right mix between paid vs organic?
- What are Mike's biggest lessons from making paid work so well at Stitchfix?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today with paid marketing?
20VC: Why This Time Will Be Worse Than The Great Financial Crisis, Why Down-Rounds, Firesales and Shutdowns Will Happen & The Ultimate Startup Survival Guide; 7 Steps to Ensure Your Company Survives The Storm
Tom Loverro is a Partner @ IVP where he has led or was actively involved in investments in Amplitude, Coinbase, Hashicorp and Datadog to name a few. As a result of his investing success, Tom was named to Forbes Midas List in 2021. Prior to joining IVP, Tom was a Principal at RRE Ventures.
In Today's Episode with Tom Loverro We Discuss:
1.) The Entry into Venture:
- How did Tom make his way into venture first with RRE? How did the role with IVP come about?
- Does Tom believe we will see many venture investors move firms with much of their existing expected carry cut in half with the changing landscape?
- What is Tom's biggest advice to someone looking to make their way into the venture world?
2.) The Calm Before the Storm:
- Why does Tom believe now is the calm before the storm?
- Why does Tom urge founders to go out and raise now before the storm hits?
- Is Tom already seeing pricing coming down for both early and late-stage companies?
3.) When The Storm Hits:
- When does Tom believe the storm will hit?
- Why does Tom believe when it does hit, it will be worse than The Great Financial Crisis?
- How will VCs respond when the storm hits? How will it impact their investing cadence?
- How will LPs respond when the storm hits? Will they cut back their manager commitments?
- Does Tom have hope that their will be a new class of LPs in this new economic cycle?
4.) The Rounds That Happen When The Storm Hits:
- Does Tom believe we will see a wave of down rounds when the storm hits? Why are they less common than people think?
- In the eye of the storm, will we see further layoffs? Will we see firesales? Will we see a tidal wave of shutdowns?
- Will large multi-stage funds with huge amounts of dry powder change their deployment pace?
The Survival Guide for the Storm:
1.) Raise Now:
- Why does Tom believe that startups should raise now, not later? What amount of runway should they raise for in this environment?
2.) Cut, Cut and Cut Some More:
- What amount of runway should startups be cutting to get to?
- How will this impact marketing spend? Why are your marketing dollars more powerful now than ever before?
3.) Focus on Survival Not Valuation:
- What does Tom mean by this? How can founders gain leverage with VCs when raising today?
- How can founders instil a sense of urgency in their raise with investors?
4.) Bring on Operators with Experience:
- Why would operators with experience join a struggling startup?
- Will operators with experience not have a flight to safety and stay at their well-paid FANNG role?
- Does this potential operator not shorten runway even further as they are often expensive?
5.) Unit Economics over Growth:
- How can founders show investors a superior profile of unit economics moving forward?
- Do investors not want both unit econ and growth today?
6.) Play Your Cards Right and Then Go on Offense:
- How does Tom advise founders on the right time to go on offense?
7.) Be Decisive, Half Measures Rarely Succeed:
- How does Tom define a half-measure? What is so wrong with half-measures?
20VC: Boston Celtics' Steve Pagliuca on The Future of Sports Team Ownership; What Happened with the Chelsea Acquisition | Why More Money is Pouring Into Sport Than Ever & Do These Assets Keep Increasing in Value
Steve Pagliuca is a Senior Advisor at Bain Capital, the firm he joined in 1982 and as a Managing Director of Bain Capital, he has helped build the firm into one of the world’s leading investment companies with over $160 billion in assets under management. Steve is also a Managing Partner and Co-Owner of the World Championship Boston Celtics Basketball franchise. Steve is also co-owner and co-chairman of the Serie A professional football club, Atalanta Bergamasca Calcio. If that was not enough, Steve currently, serves on the Board of Directors of Burger King, Gartner Group, HCA, Warner Chilcott, and FCI. Huge thanks to Moshe @ Shrug Capital for making the intro.
In Today's Episode with Steve Pagliuca We Discuss:
1.) From Duffel Bags at Duke to Buying Sports Teams:
- How Steve went from having a single duffel bag arriving at Duke University to entering the world of private equity with the founding of Bain's PE funds?
- Did Steve always know he would be successful? What does Steve think about the importance between luck and timing?
- How did Steve's mother impact how he approaches parenting and self-belief with his children?
2.) Buying Sports Teams: Not So Different to Companies:
- When buying and running a sports team, what is the same, and what is different from buying and running a company?
- What is Steve's biggest advice to new owners of sports teams?
- What are the single biggest mistakes sports team owners make when they buy a team?
- What happened with the Chelsea bid? Why did Steve lose? How did debt change the deal?
3.) The Future of Sports Ownership:
- Why does Steve believe we have seen a massive rise in American and private equity buyers of both global sports teams but also European sports teams?
- How has "new media" changed the inherent value that can be placed on a team? Why does it change the value? Which forms of "new media" are most important?
- How much further can the value of these sports teams increase?
- Does this massive increase in the price and assets of certain clubs not lead to a massive inequality in sports? What can be done to prevent this imbalance?
4.) Steve Pagliuca: The Person and Capital Allocator:
- What is the single best investment advice Steve has ever received?
- How does Steve think about his relationship to wealth today? How has it changed over time?
- What does it take to have an amazing marriage and be at the top of your profession?
- What were 1-2 elements that made Bain able to scale to the proportions of AUM that they have done? What would he have done differently?
20VC: Why Salesforce, SAP and Concur Will Die | Scaling 3x and Raising at a $9.2BN Valuation in COVID | How OpenAI is Changing the Travel Industry Forever | Never Before Revealed Margins on Travel and Expense Management with Ariel Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO
Ariel Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Navan (formerly TripActions), the #1 travel management super-app used by over 8,000 companies. Ariel has raised over $2BN for Navan from some of the best including a16z, Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed, Greenoaks, and Elad Gil. Prior to TripActions, Ariel co-founded streamOnce, a business multimedia integration platform that was successfully acquired by Jive Software, where Ariel had previously served in a senior position following his time at Hewlett-Packard.
In Today's Episode with Ariel Cohen We Discuss:
1.) Why Education is Outdated and Wisdom to People Entering the Working World:
- Why did Ariel not really attend many classes when he was a student?
- What would be his biggest advice to young people leaving school today? Where would he focus?
- Why does Ariel believe that traditional education is more outdated now than ever before?
2.) Why SAP and Salesforce Will Die:
- Why does Ariel believe that SAP and Salesforce have not innovated for a decade?
- Why does Ariel believe that Slack is a disaster inside of Salesforce?
- What are the single biggest advantages that startups have over these large incumbents?
- What can startups do to retain innovation and speed as they scale into becoming an incumbent?
- Why are the best founders willing to kill their own projects?
3.) Growing a Business 3x and Raising at a $9.2BN Valuation in COVID:
- How did Ariel grow the business 3x with all travel being banned?
- What were the tactics to blitz scaling during COVID?
- How did Ariel approach his investors for a new round in the middle of COVID? How did he get such a high price in the midst of a global pandemic?
- What is the bull case for how Navan can be a $40BN company?
4.) Margins Matter: Gaining Leverage Through Additional Margin:
- With Navan's 80% margin, they have 30% higher margins than other competitors, how do they have such high margins?
- With the additional 30%, how does Ariel plan to scale Navan's reach and use the margin to do so?
- How does OpenAI play a role in helping Navan increase its margin even further?
20VC: Thoma Bravo's Orlando Bravo on Why Now is The New Normal, Why Every Company in the World is Worth its Future Cashflows, The Three Core Elements Thoma Bravo Need to See in Any Potential Deal & Orlando's Relationship to Risk, Wealth and Parenting
Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo. He led Thoma Bravo’s early entry into software buyouts and built the firm into one of the top private equity firms in the world. Today, Orlando directs the firm’s strategy and investment decisions. Orlando has overseen over 420 software acquisitions conducted by the firm, representing more than $235 billion in transaction value. Forbes named him "Wall Street’s best dealmaker" in 2019, and he was dubbed "Private equity’s king of SaaS" by the Financial Times in 2021.
In Today's Episode with Orlando Bravo We Discuss:
1.) From Puerto Rico Roots to Wall Street's Best Dealmaker:
- How did Orlando come to co-found Thoma Bravo? What was that a-ha moment for him?
- Orlando mentioned 2 mentors that shaped how he thinks, who were they? What are his single biggest lessons from those mentors?
- What does Orlando know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?
- Why does Orlando disagree with setting timelines in life? Why does it not help?
2.) The Secret to Success in Value Investing:
- What is good value investing today? What is it not?
- What three things does Orlando look for when doing a deal and acquiring a company?
- Why is every company in the world worth its future cash flows?
- How important is price today? How does Orlando reflect on his own price sensitivity?
- Many suggest Coupa and Anaplan were extremely expensive. How does Orlando respond and defend the prices he paid for companies in 2020-2022?
3.) WTF is Happening In Markets Today:
- How does Orlando reflect on where the market is today?
- Is this the new normal? How does Orlando expect the market to change over the next 12 months?
- Why does Orlando believe that the best companies win in the worst times?
- Is this the result of quantitative easing on behalf of central banks? Who is to blame?
- How does Orlando balance the mindset of his team between risk on and taking advantage of lower prices in market but also not catching a falling knife?
4.) Orlando Bravo: The Leader, Father and Husband:
- What is Orlando's biggest fear in investing? How has this changed over time?
- How does Orlando reflect on his own relationship to money today? How has that changed?
- What are Orlando's biggest parenting lessons from his mother?
- Why does Orlando believe that for most people, their late twenties are their toughest?
- How does Orlando instill the same drive and ambition in his children that he had, despite very different financial profiles growing up?
- How does Orlando maintain being at the top of his game in his profession but also being a great husband? What is the secret to a happy marriage?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Orlando's Fave Book: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
20Product: When to Hire a CPO, The Three Different Types of CPO, How To Know What You Need, How To Structure the Hiring Process, What Are the Must-Ask Questions, What Tests and Case Studies Should Be Used, How Should Their Compensation Package Be Structur
Annie Pearl is the CPO @ Calendly, the company that makes scheduling meetings simple and painless. Before Calendly, Annie led Glassdoor’s product vision and user experience, managing a 70-person product and design org.
Shreyas Doshi is an investor, advisor, and all-around product OG. Most recently Shreyas spent over 5 years at Stripe where he was Stripe’s first PM Manager and helped grow the PM function (from ~5 to more than 50 people). Before Stripe, Shreyas was a Director of Product Management @ Twitter.
David Lieb is one of the product OGs of the last decade. As the founder of Bump David pioneered how over 150M users shared data, contacts and more before the company was acquired by Google. At Google, David took this one step further by creating Google Photos.
Marty Cagan is one of the OGs of Product and Product Management as the Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group. Before founding SVPG, Marty served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.
Aparna Chennapragada is the former CPO @ Robinhood, revolutionizing consumer finance with commission-free investing. Prior to Robinhood, she spent an incredible 12 years at Google, most recently as VP and GM for Consumer Shopping and also as the lead AR and Visual Search products.
Lenny Rachitsky is one of the OGs of product, having spent over 7 years at Airbnb as a product lead he left to start his newsletter, find it here. This has scaled to thousands upon thousands of readers and one of the most popular newsletters on Substack.
For the last 7 years, Kayvon Beykpour has been at Twitter where he led all of the teams across Product, Engineering, Design, Research, and Customer Service & Operations. Kayvon came to Twitter through Periscope, the live broadcasting app he founded that was acquired by Twitter in 2015.
Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, investor, and currently serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer. Scott oversees all of product and engineering for Creative Cloud, as well as design for Adobe. In 2006, Scott founded Behance, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012.
In Today's Episode on How to Hire a Product Manager, We Discuss:
1.) When to Hire Your First PM:
- What are the core signs that the founder must delegate and hire their first PM?
- What are the first things that are breaking when you do not have one but need one?
- How does the timing of the first PM differ when comparing B2B vs B2C?
2.) What is the Right Profile:
- What should founders look for in this first PM hire? What traits make the best?
- What are the biggest red flags in the personalities and styles of potential candidates?
- Should they have experience in the product domain they are entering?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when analyzing the resumes of potential PM candidates? What should they look for in their resume?
3.) The Hiring Process: How To Hire a Product Manager
- How do we structure and run the hiring process for this person?
- What tests can we do to understand if they have the skill set we need for the role?
- How do we structure a hiring panel to make this process more effective?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make in the hiring process for PMs?
20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel
Alex Bouaziz is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Deel, the all-in-one platform made to simplify all things HR, built for global teams near and far. In the last year alone, Alex has scaled Deel from $57M in ARR to $295M, EBITDA positive since Sept 2022, 85%+ gross margins, and over $5BN paid out to 250,000 people. Alex has raised over $679M with Deel, pricing the company at the last round at $12.1BN. Investors in the company include a16z, Spark Capital, Coatue, and many more.
In Today's Episode with Alex Bouaziz We Discuss:
1.) From Student in London to Decacorn Founder:
- How Alex made his way into the world of startups and how he came up with the idea for Deel?
- Did Alex always know he would be successful when he was growing up?
- What does Alex know now that he wishes he had known when he was starting?
2.) The Importance of Execution:
- How important does Alex think speed of execution is for startups?
- What can startups do to deliberately increase their speed of execution?
- How does Alex think about the dilemma of losing quality with speed?
- What does Alex think you do need to go slow on to ensure it is perfect?
- How does Alex think about focus and prioritisation today with Deel?
3.) Scaling to $295M in ARR in 3 Years:
- When did Alex know he had true product-market fit with Deel?
- How did Alex use a 50-person Whatsapp group to both determine product market fit and to navigate product direction for the company?
- What was the key to Deel's blitz scaling strategy? What worked? What did not work?
- How did Alex hire 2,000 people in such a short space of time?
- What broke first in the organisation? How could they have prevented it?
4.) Secondaries, Angel Investing and Wealth Management:
- How much did Alex take out in secondaries in the last round of funding?
- How did Alex determine how much cash to allocate to angel investing?
- Why does Alex believe most founders make poor angel investments when they have cash?
- What have been Alex's biggest lessons from investing? How has it changed how he operates?
- Why should all founders be super transparent in investor updates?
20VC: Homebrew's Hunter Walk and Satya Patel on Why $100M is Not Enough To Execute a Seed Strategy Today | Why They Decided not to Raise New External Funds | Where Are We in the Cycle & What is Truly F***** | Why Founders Should Take Secondaries Earlier
Hunter Walk and Satya Patel are Co-Founders and Partners @ Homebrew, one of the leading seed funds of the last decade. Following 10 years of stellar returns with investments in the likes of Chime, Plaid, Gusto and many others, they decided to not accept any further LP capital and to only invest their own money moving forward through Homebrew Forever.
In Today's Discussion on Homebrew We Breakdown:
1. ) The Foundings of a Great Partnership:
- What was the moment when Hunter and Satya decided they were going to go out and raise their first fund with Homebrew I?
- What are the core principles that all founding partners need to align on before they start a firm together? What questions should they ask of each other?
- Why does being independently wealthy coming into a partnership make the partnership easier and more efficient to operate? What changes when the partners have money already?
2.) What Changes When Moving From LP Dollars to Personal Capital:
- Why did Hunter and Satya decide to not raise any further capital from external LPs?
- Asset allocation-wise, how did they determine how much is the right amount to set aside for the first 2 years of investing? How many investments do they want to make with that cash?
- How does investing their personal capital change their deployment pace and cadence?
- How does it change their approach to reserves management and follow-on financing?
- How does it change their approach to pricing? How price sensitive are they today?
3.) Analyzing the Seed Landscape Today:
- Why do Hunter and Satya not think that a $100M seed fund is enough to properly execute a world-class seed strategy today?
- Who is their competition with the new strategy? How does it change their relationship with large multi-stage funds? How does it change their relationship with seed funds?
- Do they agree that the last generation of sub $20M micro-funds will not raise another fund in this cycle? How did their entrance impact the seed landscape over the last few years?
- Why are LPs also to blame for many of the original seed managers raising larger and larger funds?
4.) Companies: Money and People are The Problem:
- Why has too much money been such a problem for many Homebrew portfolio companies over the last few years? How has too much money changed their execution plans?
- What happens to the "living dead" companies with many years of runway but no product market fit?
- Who does this market cater to well? Who will thrive in this market?
- What have people forgotten about both startups and venture in the last 2 years that we have to remember?
- Why is this generation so entitled and expectant? Why are startups not a get-rich-quick scheme?
20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions
Cliff Obrecht is the Co-Founder & COO @ Canva, the free-to-use online graphic design tool that makes it easy for anyone to design anything from presentations to videos and social media. Cliff and Mel have scaled Canva to over 60 million monthly users, 2,000 employees, and 500,000 teams from companies like Intel and Zoom using Canva. During this incredible growth journey, they have raised over $580M with their last round valuing the company at over $40BN.
In Today's Episode with Cliff Obrecht
1.) From Teacher to Billionaire Tech Founder:
- How did Keith make his way into the world of tech with his founding of FusionBooks? What did the process with FusionBooks teach him about how to run Canva?
- How did the early fundraising days for Canva go? Why does Cliff think they got over 100 no's?
- What are Cliff's biggest pieces of advice for founders today, not in Silicon Valley, looking to raise from Silicon Valley VCs?
2.) Scaling to $40BN: The Biggest Lessons:
- What does Cliff mean when he says the secret to successful hiring is looking for "distance traveled"? How does he determine this in the interview process?
- What have been some of the single biggest lessons in what it takes to acquire the best talent?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes Cliff has made in talent acquisition? How has his process changed as a result?
- What do Canva do to get the best operators as advisors in the company? How do they compensate these advisors? What does Cliff advise founders on how to do the same?
3.) The Art of Deal-Making:
- How does Cliff think through what makes a "good deal"? How does he approach negotiation?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when negotiating and doing deals?
- What have been Cliff's biggest lessons on successful investor relations over the years?
- How does Cliff and Canva approach acquisitions? What do they look for? What is their process? Why do most tech companies approach acquisitions the wrong way?
4.) Cliff Obrecht: Money, Fatherhood and Marriage:
- How does Cliff analyze his relationship to money today? How much money is enough? How has his relationship to money changed over time?
- Why have Cliff and Mel given away over $10BN to their foundation? Why is philanthropy so hard to do effectively?
- Why would Cliff hate for his children to be brought up in excess wealth?
- What does "great fatherhood" mean to Cliff? What are the most challenging aspects of parenting?
- What are the secrets to a happy marriage? How does co-founding a company with your other half work well? How does it work poorly?
20Sales: Why You Should Not Do PLG and Enterprise Sales at the Same Time | How To Move Into Enterprise Sales Gradually | How To Make a Comp Plan For Sales Teams | Why Discounting is Good and Can Be Used with Stevie Case, CRO @ Vanta
Stevie Case is the CRO @ Vanta where she oversees Vanta’s go-to-market team to support the company’s rapid growth. Prior to joining Vanta, Stevie was Vice President of Mid-Market Sales at Twilio, joining as one of their first account executives, Stevie helped to grow the sales team from a dozen to over 1,000 team members and played a pivotal role in establishing Twilio’s enterprise business with key Fortune 500 customers, generating more than $400 million in annual recurring revenue. If that was not enough, Stevie is also a Founding Operator @ Coalition Network and a prominent angel investor.
In Today's Episode with Stevie Case We Discuss:
1. ) From World's First Pro Female Gamer to CRO:
- How did Stevie make her way from pro gamer to CRO? How did her career in gaming make her a better CRO and sales leader?
- In her early sales career, how did being a single mother with a child impact her approach to sales?
- What can founders do to make workplaces more inclusive for parents today?
2.) Enterprise or PLG: Which One To Choose:
- Why does Stevie believe it is not right to do both PLG and enterprise at the same time for startups?
- How can startups and sales teams move into enterprise selling gradually through testing and without committing a significant budget to an enterprise sales team?
- How do founders know when is the right time to move from PLG to enterprise? What are the signs?
3.) The Mythical Sales Playbook:
- How does Stevie define the term "sales playbook" today? What is it not?
- Should the founder be the person to create the sales playbook? If not them, then who?
- When is the right time to make your first sales hire? When is the wrong time?
4.) Mastering the Hiring Process in Sales Recruits:
- How should we structure the interview process for new sales reps?
- What is the right profile for these first sales hires?
- How do the best sales talent answer questions and perform in interview processes?
- How can we really test for grit and curiosity in the interview process?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring for sales?
5.) Discovery, Discounting, Deal Velocity:
- With sales cycles being so long, how do you know if enterprise sales reps are good?
- What is the difference between good discovery vs bad discovery?
- Should founders engage in discounting to get deals over the line? When does it work?
20VC: USV's Albert Wenger on What Elon Musk Should Do with Twitter | The State of Crypto Today; The Impact of SBF and Why Now is the Best Time To Invest in Crypto | Are We Too Late to Save The Climate and Why Civil Disobedience is Required | Will TikTok b
Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Coinbase, Twitter, Twilio, Etsy, and many more. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early-hosted data analytics company.
In Today's Episode with Albert Wenger We Discuss:
1.) From Failed Startup Founder to Leading VC:
- How Albert transitioned from being a failed entrepreneur to being one of the most respected venture investors with USV today?
- What were the clear signs for Albert that he was not a good entrepreneur?
- Why does Albert believe this downturn is different compared to the dot-com bubble? Why was there more hope and promise coming out of the dot-com bubble?
2.) Income Inequality, The Rise of Depression & The Role of Politics:
- Why is income and wealth inequality more concerning than ever? Why does Albert believe universal basic income is the right solution?
- Why is mental health worse than ever? What can be done to improve this?
- Why are our politicians failing us? What should our politicians be doing?
- How does the rise of Trump show us what society is looking for in politicians?
3.) Climate Change: Misnomers, Developing Countries, Civil Disobedience:
- What are the single biggest misnomers people have when it comes to climate change?
- How can we shift spending on climate change solutions from 5% of GDP to 50%? Is that possible?
- Why do developing nations have an advantage when implementing climate change solutions over more developed economies?
- Why is civil disobedience the right course of action to ensure society is on a path to change our approach to climate change?
4.) Crypto and Central Banks: The Future of Finance:
- Why does Albert believe that over the past few years, for many, crypto was a good hedge against inflation?
- How damaging does Albert believe SBF and FTX will be to crypto in the long term?
- How does Albert evaluate the potential for governments to create a "central bank digital currency"?
- What would Albert like to see in a potential currency like this? How could stable coins be the solution to this? What is Albert fearful of with central bank digital currencies?
- Why does Albert believe now is the best time to be investing in crypto?
5.) The Future of Social Media: Twitter & TikTok:
- What does Albert believe is wrong with Twitter today? Why was the blue check mark such a mess?
- What does Albert believe Elon should do with Twitter from this point on? How should Elon deal with the debt providers he has?
- What happens to Twitter moving forward? Why is it so hard to kill?
- What is the future of TikTok? Will it be banned in the US?
- How concerned should the consumer be concerning their data being shared with the Chinese Government?
20VC: Turning Canned Water into a $700M Media and Health Company, What Makes Truly Great Brands, How Founders Can Build Their Brand From Day 1 Today & How to Create Viral Content with Little to No Budget with Mike Cessario, Founder and CEO @ Liquid Death
Mike Cessario is the Founder and CEO @ Liquid Death, the man hacking the healthy beverage market with the first hilarious water brand. It is working, Liquid Death's latest valuation was over a staggering $700M and Mike has raised over $200M since founding the company from the likes of Science Inc. Away's Jen Rubio, Dollar Shave Club's Michael Dubin, Swedish House Mafia and Tony Hawk to name a few. Prior to founding Liquid Death, Mike was in the advertising industry at a number of dirrect firms including VaynerMedia.
In Today's Episode with Mike Cessario We Discuss:
1.) From Canned Water to $700M Business:
- How did rockstars' hydration problems lead to the founding of Liquid Death?
- How did growing up with guns and heroine needles around him at school, impact how Mike sees the world today? What is he running from? What is he running towards?
- Everyone said, "canned water, that is a stupid idea". What does Mike tell to all entrepreneurs who are told their idea is stupid? How does Mike advise on picking your idea?
2.) How to Build a Truly Great Brand:
- What does the term "brand" mean to Mike?
- What does he mean when he says, "truly great brand transcends functional value"?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today on branding?
- Why does Mike believe people will always hate your brand, if it is good?
- What are the biggest brand mistakes Mike has made with Liquid Death?
- What brand does Mike most respect and admire? Why that brand?
3.) Marketing: The Secret to Reaching Millions of People with Little Budget:
- How does the Liquid Death team come up with the ideas they have for content? Why does Mike believe the label "storytelling" is kinda BS?
- Why does Mike believe people will always hate your marketing? What was Mike's biggest lesson from their Superbowl commercial with kids drinking Liquid Death, looking like beer?
- How does Mike decide which channel to prioritise? How has the rise of TikTok and short form video changed their approach to content?
- How does Mike approach resource allocation for new pieces of content? Do they spend big on few bits of content or spend little on many and see what works?
20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor
Hila Qu is one of the leading growth execs of the last decade. Hila helped scale Acorns from 1 million to 5 million users as their VP of growth. Hila then joined GitLab, where she launched their PLG motion (on top of an established sales motion), and built their first-ever growth team. Today Hila is an advisor to amazing companies like Replit and funds like Mucker Capital, Openview and First Round Capital.
In Today's Episode with Hila Qu We Discuss:
1.) From Biology and Explosions to Growth:
- How Hila made her way into the world of growth with growthhackers.com?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways from her time with Acorns and Gitlab?
- How do B2B growth orgs compare to B2C growth orgs? What is different? What is the same?
2.) WTF is Growth? When? How & Why:
- How does Hila define growth today? What is it not?
- When is the right time for early-stage founders to hire their first growth hire?
- Why does Hila always look for data analysts in this first growth hire?
- From a data standpoint, what should founders have ready and accessible for their first growth hire to have access to and learn from? Is Google Analytics enough?
3.) Hiring Your First Growth Hire:
- How should early-stage founders structure the hiring process for the first growth hire?
- What do the best growth job descriptions include? What do they not include?
- Once applications are in, how does Hila advise founders screen for the best candidates?
- How should founders structure the interview process post-screening? What are the must-ask questions? Who is involved in the interview process? What are some red flags?
4.) The Master of Onboarding:
- What should new growth hires want to achieve in the first week?
- What should they want to complete in the first month?
- In the first quarter, what do the best candidates have completed?
- What can founders do to set their growth hires up for success in the best way at this time?
5.) Growth Models, North Stars, Activation and Onboarding and Key KPIs:
- What really is a growth model? How do founders and growth teams create one?
- How does Hila advise founders on how to pick the right North Star Metric to focus on?
- Why are activation and conversion Hila's two favorite growth metrics?
- What are growth loops? What are growth funnels? How do they work together?
20VC: a16z's Jeff Jordan on The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Marketplaces, Two Core Features to Look for in All Marketplace Investments, Why Fragmented Supply is so Important & Lessons from Airbnb, Pinterest and Instacart on What Makes the Best Cohorts
Jeff Jordan is a General Partner @ a16z where he serves on the boards of Airbnb, Incredible Health, Instacart, Lookout, and Pinterest, just to name a few. Before a16z, Jeff was CEO OpenTable, where he led the company during a period of hyper-growth and oversaw its IPO. Prior to OpenTable, Jeff was Senior VP and General Manager of eBay North America where he oversaw eBay's early growth into one of the Internet's leading commerce brands. In this role, he drove the successful acquisitions of PayPal and Half.com and went on to become President of PayPal, where he was responsible for establishing the company as the global standard for online payments.
In Today's Episode with Jeff Jordan We Discuss:
1.) From Taking Opentable Public to Being a GP @ a16z:
- What led to Jeff making the jump from CEO @ Opentable to becoming a GP at a16z?
- How does Jeff believe his operating career impacted how he thinks and acts as an investor today, both positively and negatively?
- What is his 1 biggest learning from eBay and then Opentable that has really shaped his mindset today as an investor? How did those experiences impact what he looks for in companies?
2.) The Two Core Features To Look For in Marketplaces:
- Fragmentation of supply side: Why does Jeff look for fragmented supply sides? Does this not take longer and is more expensive? How fragmented is fragmented enough?
- What are the most common reasons founders fail to acquire a fragmented supply side?
- Intelligent Lead Generation: What does Jeff really want to see in the way that new marketplaces acquire their customers? How does this change with the rise of TikTok and short-form video?
- What are some other really core features or traits that excite Jeff when he sees them in an early marketplace? What are some massive red flags for Jeff when he sees them early?
3.) How to Acquire and Retain the Demand Side of a Marketplace:
- Messaging and Brand: What are the biggest lessons Jeff has on how to craft the messaging of a marketplace to make it resonate with the target consumer?
- What are Jeff's biggest lessons from working with Brian Chesky on how they craft their messaging at Airbnb? What works? What does not work?
- Perfect Customer Cohorts: What does Jeff most want to see when examining prospective marketplace investment cohorts? What do the best have?
- What is the sign of a truly retained user in a marketplace? What is a good date duration to measure retention against? What are the biggest mistakes founders make presenting their cohorts?
- Lessons from Instacart: What are Jeff's biggest lessons from being on the Instacart board on cohorts? What makes good cohorts? How cohorts can seem bad but be good?
4.) Growth vs Profitability, CACs and LTV:
- Uber, OfferUp, Instacart, Deliveroo, respectfully, the level of profits these businesses are able to drive is questionable, why does Jeff believe marketplaces are good investments still?
- Many marketplaces start with poor unit economics, how does Jeff think about having the mental plasticity to project out to a time when unit economics could be better?
- Does Jeff pay attention to CACs at all? When are they important? When are they not? How can they be misleading? What is the best way for founders to present their CACs?
5.) It's Time to VC: Jeff Jordan: The Board Member
- What are the single biggest misalignments between VCs and their founders?
- How would Jeff describe his style of board membership today? How has it changed with time?
- What is the best way to deliver hard feedback as a board member? What are the biggest mistakes board members make? What does Jeff advise young board members today?
- What are the single best and worst changes that have happened at a16z in the last 24 months?
20VC: WTF is Going On in VC? Are VCs Still Investing? How Has What VCs Want in Investments Changed? Are LPs Investing in New Funds? Why VCs That Invest in Public Markets Are Losers? Dec 2023; Will It Be Better Or Worse with Jason Lemkin
The question is: "are VCs still investing?". Today we are joined by Jason Lemkin; one of the OGs of SaaS of the last decade. As the Founder of SaaStr, he has inspired more SaaS founders than one can imagine building “The World’s Largest Community for Business Software.” Jason also invests out of the $100M SaaStr Fund and in the past Jason has led rounds into TalkDesk, Pipedrive, Algolia, Gorgias, Salesloft, and many more incredible companies. Prior to founding SaaStr, Jason was the Co-Founder of Echosign, an early e-signature business, funded by Emergence Capital and that was acquired by Adobe for $100M.
In Today's Episode on "Are VCs' Still Investing" We Discuss:
1. What Does it Take To Get Funded Today:
Early-Stage:
- How has what VCs want in early-stage investments changed in this new environment?
- Should startups prioritize growth? Profitability? Capital efficiency?
- How long a runway is sufficient enough for founders to feel comfortable?
- Why does Jason believe most founders are still deluded that they are fundable?
Growth Stage Companies:
- Is the growth stage totally dead?
- What will we see happen to all the companies that raised $50M+ at large valuations that have very little revenue?
- Why does Jason believe that any operator who joined a $BN company in the past few years will not make any money on their equity? What should they do now?
- Will we start to see down rounds and structured rounds at the growth stage? If so, when?
Public Markets:
- Why does Jason believe this is a time unlike any he has seen before?
- Are we in full recession now in Jason's mind? In Dec 2023, will this be better or worse?
- Which are the most under-priced assets in the public markets today?
- Why does Jason believe VCs investing in public markets are losers?
2. Micro Funds Will Be Decimated and LP Behaviour in 2023
- Why does Jason believe that micro-funds in 2023 will be decimated and unable to raise new funds?
- How will the majority of LPs approach new fund investments?
- How will LPs approach re-investing in their existing managers? How has what they need to see changed?
3. Marketing and Sales: We Need To Change Budgets and Targets
- How should CEOS be changing their marketing budgets in 2023?
- What are the single biggest mistakes CEOs are making in this downturn with regard to their marketing budget?
- How do sales targets need to be amended in the face of changing buying patterns?
- How do the best sales and marketing leaders respond to these changing budgets and targets? How do the worst respond?
20VC: The Memo: How to Raise a Venture Capital Fund (Part I) | The Core Lessons from Raising $400M Over The Last Four Years| The Biggest Mistakes VCs Make When Fundraising | How To Find and Build Relationships with New LPs
How To Raise a Venture Capital Fund
Over the last 4 years, I have raised around $400M across different vehicles from many different types of investors. Today I am going to break down the early stages of how to raise a venture capital fund and then stay tuned for a follow-up to this where we will break down a fundraising deck for a fund, what to do, what not to do etc. But to the first element.
Your Fund Size is Your Strategy:
The most important decision you will make is the size of fund you raise. So much of your strategy and approach will change according to your fund size target (LP type, messaging, documentation, structure etc). Remember, your fund size is your strategy. If you are raising a $10M Fund, you are likely writing collaborative checks alongside a follower, if you are raising a $75M fund, you will likely be leading early-stage seed rounds. These are very different strategies and ways of investing.
MISTAKE: The single biggest mistake I see fund managers make is they go out to fundraise with too high a target fundraise. One of the most important elements in raising for a fund is creating the feeling of momentum in your raise. The more of the fund you have raised and the speed with which you have raised those funds dictate that momentum. So the smaller the fund, the easier it is to create that heat and momentum in your raise.
LESSON: Figure out your minimum viable fund size (MVFS). Do this by examining your portfolio construction. In other words, how many investments you want to make in the fund (the level of diversification) and then alongside that, the average check size you would like to invest in each company. Many people forget to discount the fees when doing this math and so the traditional fund will charge 2% fees per year and so across the life of the fund (usually 10 years), that is 20% of the fund allocated to fees.
Example:
We are raising a $10M Fund.
20% is allocated to fees for the manager and so we are left with $8M of investable capital.
A good level of diversification for an early-stage fund is 30 companies and so with this fund size, I would recommend 32 investments with an average of $250K per company. That is the $8M in invested capital. Big tip, I often see managers raising a seed fund and are only planning to make 15 investments, this is simply not enough. You have to have enough diversification in the portfolio if you are at the seed stage. No one is that good a picker. Likewise, I sometimes see 100 or even 200 investments per fund, this is the spray-and-pray approach, and although works for some, your upside is inherently capped when you run the maths on fund sizes with this many investments.
A big element to point out in this example is we have left no allocation for reserves. For those that do not know, reserves are the dollars you set aside to re-invest in existing portfolio companies. Different funds reserve different amounts, on the low end there is 0% reserves and on the high end some even have 70% of the fund reserved for follow-on rounds.
In this example, given the size of the fund being $10M with a seed focus, I would recommend we have a no-reserves policy. Any breakout companies you can take to LPs and create SPVs to concentrate further capital into the company. This is also better for you as the manager as you then have deal by deal carry on the SPVs that are not tied to the performance of the entire fund.
So now we know we know $10M is our MVFS as we want to make at least 30 investments and we want to invest at least $250K per company. Great, next step.
Set a target that is on the lower end, you can always have a hard cap that is significantly higher but you do not want the target to be too far away that LPs question whether you will be able to raise the fund at all. This is one of the biggest reasons why many do not invest in a first time fund, they are unsure whether the fund will be raised at all.
The Team:
Alongside the size of the fund, the team composition is everything, simply put, LPs like managers who have invested in the stage you are wanting to invest in moving forward. They like to see track record.
IMPORTANT: I see so many angels write checks into breakout Series B companies and then go out and try and raise a seed fund with this as their track record. Do not do this, this does not prove you are a good seed investor but merely shows you have access at the Series B. These are very different things.
With regards to track record, in the past, TVPI or paper mark-ups were enough, now there is a much greater focus on DPI (returned capital to investors). LPs want to see that you have invested before at that stage and they also want to see that the team has worked together before. You want to remove the barriers to no. If you have not worked with the partners you are raising with before, LPs will have this as a red flag, and as team risk, it is that simple.
Navigating the World of LPs (Limited Partners)
The size of the fund you are raising will massively dictate the type of LPs that will invest in your fund.
MISTAKE: You have to change your messaging and product marketing with each type of LP you are selling to. A large endowment fund will want a very different product to a Fund of Funds.
Example: If you are a large endowment, you will invest in early funds but you want the manager to show you a pathway to them, in the future, being able to take not a $10M check but a $50M check from the endowment. Whereas the Fund of Funds will likely want you to stay small with each fund. So when discussing fund plans, it is crucial to keep these different desires in mind.
If you are raising a $10M fund, you will be too small for institutional LPs and will raise from individuals and family offices. An LP will never want to be more than 20% of the LP dollars in a fund and so the size at which an institutional LP (really the smallest fund of funds) would be interested is when you raise $25M+ and they can invest $5M. Generalisation but a good rule of thumb to have.
LP Composition of Your Fund:
Speaking of one LP being 20% of the fund dollars, it is helpful to consider the LP composition you would like to have for your fund. The most important element; you want to have a diversified LP base. A diversified LP base is important in two different forms:
- No LP should be more than 20% of the fund at a maximum. That said you do not want to have so many investors in your fund it is unmanageable. LPs need time and attention and so it is important to keep that in mind when considering how many you raise from. Some LPs will want preferred terms or economics for coming into the first close or being one of the first investors, if you can, do not do this. It sets a precedent for what you will and will not accept and then for all subsequent investors, they will want the same terms and rights.
- You want to have a diversification of LP type (endowments, fund of funds, founders, GPs at funds etc). Why? In different market cycles, different LPs will be impacted and so if you only raise from one LP type, if a market turns against that LP class, then your next fund is in danger.
Example:
We will see the death of many mico-funds ($10M and below). Why? The majority raised their funds from GPs at larger funds and from public company founders. With the changing market environment, most GPs are no longer writing LP checks and most public market founders have had their net worths cut in half by the value of their company in the public market and so likewise, are no longer writing LP checks. In this case, the next funds for these funds will be in trouble as their core LP base is no longer as active as they used to be. We are seeing this today.
Prediction:
- 50% of the micro-funds raised in the last 2 years will not raise subsequent funds.
Going back to the question of diversification, my preference and what we have at 20VC, the majority of dollars are concentrated from a small number of investors. Of a $140M fund, we have $100M invested from 5 large institutions. These are a combination of endowments, Family Offices, a High Net Worth Individual and a Fund of Funds. The remaining $40M originates from smaller institutions or individuals, for us we have over 50 making up that final $40M. For me, I really wanted to have a community around 20VC Fund and so we have over 40 unicorn founders invested personally in the fund as LPs.
Bonus Points: The best managers select their LPs to play a certain role or help with a potential weakness the manager has. For example, I was nervous I did not have good coverage of the Australian or LATAM startup market and so I was thrilled to add founders from Atlassian, Linktree, Mercado Libre, Rappi and Nubank as LPs to help in regions where I do not have such an active presence. If you can, structure your LP base to fill gaps you have in your ability.
Status Check In:
Now we know our minimum viable fund size, we know the team composition we are going out to raise with, we know the LP type that we are looking to raise money from and we know how we want our desired fund cap table to look.
Now we are ready to move to the LPs themselves.
Fill Your Restaurant with Friendlies:
As I said, the appearance of your raise having heat and momentum is important.
Mistake: The biggest mistake I see early fund managers make is they go out to large institutional investors that they do not have an existing relationship and spend 3-4 months trying to raise from them. They lose heat, they lose morale and the raise goes nowhere.
Whatever fund size you are raising, do not do this. Fill your restaurant with friendlies first. What does this mean? Go to anyone you know who would be interested in investing in your fund and lock them in to invest. Create the feeling that progress is being made and you have momentum.
BONUS POINTS: The best managers bring their LPs with them for the fundraise journey. With each large or notable investor that invests in your fund, send an email to the LPs that have already committed to let them know about this new notable investor. This will make them feel like you have momentum, they are in a winner and many will then suggest more LP names, wanting to bring in their friends.
MISTAKE: Do not set a minimum check size, some of the most helpful LPs in all of my funds have been the smallest checks. Setting a minimum check size will inhibit many of the friendlies from investing and prevent that early momentum.
The bigger the name the incoming investor has the better. You can use it for social validity when you go out to raise from people you know less well or not at all. Different names carry different weight, one mistake I see many make is they get a big name invested in their fund but it is common knowledge to everyone that this LP has done 200 or 300 fund investments, in which case, it does not carry much weight that they invested in your fund. Be mindful of this as it can show naivety if you place too much weight on a name that has invested in so many funds.
Discovery is Everything:
The world of LPs is very different to the world of venture. 99% of LPs do not tweet, write blogs or go on podcasts. Discovery is everything. When I say discovery I literally mean finding the name of the individual and the name of the organization that is right for you to meet.
This can take the form of several different ways but the most prominent for me are:
- The Most Powerful: Create an LP acquisition flywheel. What do I mean by this? When an LP commits to invest in your fund. Say to them, “thank you so much for your faith and support in me, now we are on the same team, what 3 other LPs do you think would be perfect for the fund?” Given they have already invested, they already believe in you and so 90% of them will come back with 3 names and make the intro. Do this with each LP that commits and you will create an LP acquisition flywheel.
Bonus Point: The top 1% of managers raising will already know which LPs are in the network of the LP that has just committed and will ask for those 3 specific intros. They will then send personalized emails to the LP that has just committed. The LP is then able to forward that email to the potential LP you want to meet. You want to minimize the friction on behalf of the introducer and so writing the forwardable email is a great way to do this.
- The Most Likely to Commit: LPs are like VCs. When one of their portfolio managers makes an intro and recommendation to a potential fund investment, they will place a lot more weight on it than they would have otherwise. So get your VC friends to introduce you to their LPs, it is that simple. Remember, you have to remove the friction from the introducer. So, make sure to send the email they can forward to the LP. Make this personalized and concise.
Mistake: Many VCs do not like to introduce other managers to their LPs as they view it as competition. This is moronic. If the manager asking for the intro is really good, they will raise their fund with or without your intro. If they are not good, then you can politely say it would not be a fit for your LP and move on. Do not be too protective of your LPs from other managers.
- The Cold Outbound: I am not going to lie cold outbound for LPs is really hard. Here is what I would suggest:
- Pitchbook: It is expensive and many cannot afford it but if you can, it is worth it for LP discovery. They have thousands of LPs of different types on the platform all with their emails and contact details. Those are less useful as a cold email to an LP is unlikely to convert but just finding their names and the names of their organization is what is important. You can then take that to Linkedin to then find the mutual connections you have with that person and ask for a warm intro.
- Linkedin: Many LPs have the funds that they have invested in on their Linkedin profiles with the title “Limited Partner”. If they are invested in a fund that is aligned with the strategy that you are raising for, there is a strong chance they might be a fit. For example, I invest in micro-funds and have invested in Chapter One, Scribble, Rahul from Superhuman and Todd’s Fund, and Cocoa Ventures, so you see this and see I like sub $25M funds with a specific angle.
- Clearbit: Often you will know the name of the institution but not the name or position of the person within the institution that you are looking to raise from. Download a Google Chrome Plugin called Clearbit. With Clearbit you can simply insert the URL for the organization you would like to speak with and then all the people within it will appear and you can select from title and their email will be provided. Again, if you do not want to cold email, you now have their name which you can take to your community, to ask for the intro.
MISTAKE: LPs invest in lines, not dots. Especially for institutional LPs, it is rare that an institution will meet you and invest in you without an existing relationship and without having followed your work before. A mistake many make is they go to large institutions and expect them to write a check for this fund, it will likely be at best for the fund after this one or most likely the third fund. This does not mean you should not go to them with your first fund but you should not prioritize them and you should not expect them to commit. I would instead go in with the mindset of we are not going to get an investment here, so I want to leave the room understanding what they need to see me do with this first fund, to invest in the next fund. The more detailed you can get them to be the more you can hold them to account for when you come back to them for Fund II.
Example: If they say, we want to see you are able to price and lead seed rounds and we are not sure you can right now. Great. Now when you come back to them in 12 months' time, you can prioritize the fact that you have led 80% of the rounds you invested in, and their core concern there has been de-risked.
In terms of how I think about LP relationship building, I always meet 2 new LPs every week. I ensure with every quarter, I have a check-in with them and ensure they have our quarterly update. This allows them to follow your progress, learn how you like to invest, and communicate with your LPs. It also really serves to build trust. Doing this not in a fundraising process also removes the power imbalance that is inherent within a fundraise and allows a much more natural relationship to be created.
20VC: From a $5,000 College Fund to a $10BN+ Public Company, How to Beat People Who Are Smarter Than You, Why Happier Teams Outperform and How Software Buying Patterns are Changing in 2023 with Henry Schuck, CEO @ ZoomInfo
Henry Schuck is the Founder and CEO @ ZoomInfo. From ZoomInfo's founding moment, putting $25,000 on a credit card, Henry has led the company to today, with over $1BN in ARR, a market cap of over $10BN, and a team of over 3,600. This is one of the untold but truly great stories in software.
In Today's Episode with Henry Schuck We Discuss:
1. From a $5,000 College Fund to Founding a $10BN Company:
- Why did Henry always believe early in life that he would be successful?
- Along the way doubt sets in, what did Henry do to combat that doubt when he questioned his own ability and potential?
- What does Henry believe he is running from? What is he running towards?
- How did seeing the work ethic of his single mother impact his work ethic with ZoomInfo?
2. Henry Schuck: The Leader:
- What does Henry believe is the difference between trust vs safety in team culture?
- Why does Henry believe safety is built through performance? How does Henry manage and communicate underperformance? How long do you give an under-performer?
- Why does Henry believe that happier teams outperform? What does Henry do deliberately and specifically to drive happiness in the business?
- ZoomInfo is magnitudes larger than some competitors who receive a lot more attention, how does Henry think about this? How does he manage his own ego as a leader today?
3. Henry Schuck: A Leader in a Changing Market:
- How does Henry maintain internal morale when employees see their stock options get smashed every day?
- Does it suck to be a public company CEO in the current market? What element is the worst?
- How are the buying patterns and behaviors of customers changing in 2023 vs 2021?
- How does this impact the sales cycle, retention rates, upsell plans, and the structure of the customer success teams?
- Dec 2023, will we be in a better or worse macroeconomic position?
4. Henry Schuck: Relationship to Money and Fatherhood:
- How does henry evaluate his relationship with money today? How has it changed over time?
- Why does Henry very rarely fly private planes? What does he believe this says about his values?
- How does Henry instill the same desire and worth ethic within his children despite being a billionaire?
- What does Henry know now that he wishes he could give to his 23-year-old self founding the company?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Henry's Favourite Book: The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work
20VC: Why Financial Planning and Goals Do Not Work, The Decision to Ban Politics in the Workplace and Losing 1/3 of the Team Overnight & The One Question That Will Drive All Decision-Making for Leaders with Jason Fried, CEO @ 37Signals
Jason Fried the Co-Founder and CEO at 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY. Over an incredible 21-year journey, Jason and his co-founder David have scaled Basecamp to become the communication tool trusted by millions. Jason is also the co-author of the widely acclaimed, ReWork and has also made several angel investments in the likes of Intercom, Gumroad and Hodinkee to name a few.
In Todays Episode with Jason Fried We Discuss
1. From Web Design Agency to Founding Basecamp:
- What was the a-ha moment for Jason when they had to make the pivot from a design agency to going full-time launching and running Basecamp as a SaaS company?
- What is Jason running towards? What is he running from?
- What is the single biggest fear that Jason is trying to avoid?
2. Jason Fried: The Leader:
- Why does Jason believe he is running from his position as leader and CEO @ Basecamp?
- Why does Jason not like or agree with goals or targets? Why are they not helpful?
- How does Jason make decisions today as a leader and CEO? What one question does he ask that determines his decision-making process?
- Why does Jason never compare himself to the competition? Why does he believe competition is for losers?
3. Jason Fried: The Politicisation of Leadership:
- Why did Jason and David decide to not allow politics in the workplace?
- How did they manage with 1/3 of their team leaving overnight? How was that experience for them personally? How did it impact the company? Is there anything they would do differently?
- Does Jason believe we will see the continued politicization of leadership in the coming months?
- How would Jason advise other CEOs when it comes to taking a stance on politics?
4. Jason Fried: Building the Best Team:
- What is the one question that determines whether you made a good hire?
- Why does Basecamp start with hiring all employees on a week-long project contract?
- Why does Jason believe the best CEOs approach management as the art of the individual?
5. Jason Fried: The Partner, Father, and Husband:
- Jason and David have been partners for 21 years, why does Jason believe it is helpful that they do not see each other much?
- Is it right for co-founders and partners to be friends?
- What have been Jason's single biggest lessons on what it takes to be the best husband?
- What does great fatherhood mean to Jason? How has it changed over time?
20VC Special: How To Fundraise Like a Pro: How to Size and Price a Round, How to Create FOMO and Urgency in a Fundraise, How to Structure Angel Allocations, The 7 Deadly Sins of Fundraising Decks, The 3 Signs a Potential Investor is Bad News
20VC: Fundraising 101
Today we are going to walk through the process of raising a funding round for a hypothetical company. We will break it down by different stages in the fundraising process and at those stages I will talk about how each element differs according to the round being raised.
First, for 99% of fundraises it is a game of shots on goal. You need to have enough investors in the pipeline, it is a sheer numbers game. Miki Kuusi @ Wolt said on 20VC recently for his Series B he got 68 rejections before Laurel Bowden @83North said yes. Wolt sold in 2021 for $7BN to Doordash making a monster return for the company's investors. But 68 meetings before that yes, for the Series B. Also goes to show, you sometimes just need one true believer.
How to Create a Target List of Investors
Now we know we need enough shots on goal, we need to bring together a target list of investors, put these investors in three buckets:
- Priority (5 names of people you really want.)
- Tier 2 (15 names of people you would like)
- Tier 3 (15 names of people you would take money from but would not invite to your birthday!)
So how do we choose who goes in what bucket? First, founder references speak volumes and lead to warm intros, so speak to your friends who are founders, ask which of their VCs have been the best, place even more weight on their recommendation if the company has not been a success. It is easy to be a VC champion when the company is flying, you often see the true colours of the VC when a company is really struggling or fails. Get a couple of names there and then analyse the VC landscape, you can do this on Twitter or the VCs website or blog and find the VCs that resonate best with your company. Look at the types of deals they have done before, are they interested in pre-seed fintech in Europe, do they do enterprise SaaS Series A in the Silicon Valley. You can see their portfolio, make sure it is a fit for them. I get about 200 inbounds per day across channel, about 150 are clearly not a fit for me because of stage, sector or location and so making sure the obvious are aligned is crucial. Then double down on their Twitter or public profile to see as much as you can about their values and how they portray themselves. Rule No 1, never work with assholes. Value alignment is really important. Now we have the five priorities and then I would say do the same for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 bucket, make sure they invest both in your stage, sector and geography.
The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make Pitching:
So now we have our pipe of investors. A couple of big mistakes I see founders make in this next step.
- They go to their priority names first. Do not do this. Your pitch both in delivery, style and messaging will improve so much with each meeting. Start with a couple where you would not be sad if they said no. Analyse in real time in those meetings what messages are hitting and what are not, where are investors spending the majority of the time, are there common questions that keep coming up. If so, create an FAQ page that is in the deck and that will prevent you from having to answer the most obvious in other meetings. With each meeting, you will find ways to iterate the deck, the messaging and the way you present.
- Another massive mistake founding teams make, if you are doing a Zoom call and it is a first meeting, do not have more than 2 people on the call from your team. It makes it tough to get to the core of the discussion and removes a lot of the relationship building with too many people too soon. If the investor likes the opportunity, they will ask to meet more team members but do not put too much in front of them to the point it dilutes the message and pitch.
Now we have done the first investor meetings and we have iterated our deck and messaging in accordance with the feedback we got. We now progress to taking meetings with investors we want as our partners.
How to Master the Subtleties of a First VC Call:
- Every investor call usually starts with each side telling a little about themselves and how they came to be the founder or the VC. As the founder, practice your intro, make it succinct, concise, break it into three chapters, a minute per one is a good guidance. In these you want to show a couple of things, founder problem fit or in other words, why you specifically have the right experience or skills to attack this problem. I also like to understand “insight development” as taught to me by the famous OG of seed investing, Mike Maples @ Floodgate. Insight development is the notion that the best companies are founded on a unique insight that the founder has about a product or market that is different to the way the world currently sees it. Include these two in your intro. Keep the intro to no more than 3-4 mins.
- For the VCs intro, it is important to try and understand a little more about them. Many VCs give boring and bland intros; “we do Series A and B in Europe and like to lead rounds.” Very standard response and so you should ask them how they like to work with their founders, ask them about a company that struggled and how they worked with the founder to help. Ask them about their decision making process for reserves and pro rata. This creates more of a conversation which will instantly give you as a founder more gravitas in the eyes of the VC.
- Use the deck as a vitamin and not a painkiller. I hate pitches where it is read off slide by slide. I would not have the slides showing at all, I will have asked for a deck pre the meeting and I should have gone through it before. The call is for me to ask about questions I want to understand more or double click on. That said, the deck can often be useful as a crutch and so it can work well to have it ready and refer to certain slides as and when necessary.
The 7 Sins of Fundraising Decks:
So while we are on the deck, I want to go through a couple of elements that I so often see and they are killer mistakes:
- Length: Keep the deck less than 10 slides. If you need a couple more to show data or additional research, put it in the appendix at the end of the deck.
- Introduction: First slide, company name and then answer the question; if I had a billboard in Times Sq, what would it say on it? 10 words max. From your first slide alone, there should be no doubt about what your company does.
- The Team Slide: where do people go wrong here. They put 12 faces on it with their names. No information about the people, where they worked, why they are the best team to solve this problem. A totally useless slide if done like this. So do not do this. Instead, take 4 of those people, break the slide into quadrants and expand on those 4 people’s backgrounds to why they are perfectly suited to do what they are doing. Fewer people more context.
- The Useless Advisor Slide: Aligned to the terrible pictures of many team members with no context, the advisor slide, honestly, advisor slides just carry such little weight these days, they are not worth having. Take it out, it is not needed.
- Market Sizing Errors: This is a massive one. I see so many make the mistake on market size slide. Say we have a CRM for hairdressers, taking a very random example here, so often I will see a $100BN market, thats the TAM for the hairdressing market or the CRM market, but we are CRM for hairdressers so that is not the right representation and is entirely misleading. It is much better to start with that, then show the slither of wallet spend that hairdressers spend on software and then show the even smaller slither that they spend on CRMs. Use the market sizing slide as a way to show your insight and intellect both into how the market is carved up today but also how it is going to change in the future. There is always the debate of what matters more, large market or amazing founders, the truth is, a massively growing market can cover a lot of operational sins and so showing how the market is and will expand and what causes this, the why now, will always be important. But do not show the massive market for hairdressing or whatever it is, I have seen more $1TN TAM for pet grooming businesses that you can imagine. So do not do that.
- Exit Slides are Terrible: I do not see this so often now but do not have an exit slide in the deck for your early stage company, the wrong type of investors will be attracted to you if they like this slide, it encourages short term thinking and is not the right way to present for a company that will reshape an industry so no exit slide.
- Why You Should Not Invest: One thing I love in startups and always have when I present my funds is a slide, why you should not invest in me. I think the most important thing for all founders is to be aware of their biggest weaknesses and then have clear action plans on what they are doing to mitigate the chances of them impacting their success. So have a slide that says, hey, these are our 3 biggest weaknesses and then tied to each one, this is what we are doing to solve it. This inspires trust in the relationship with the investor and really shows your self-awareness and strategic thinking.
How To Structure The Size and Composition of Your Funding Round:
Now at some point in the discussion the size of the round and the price of the round will be asked. Use this as a chance to show your calibre as a founder.
- You Cannot Sit With Us (You Get The Joke!!!): Massive mistake founders make is they structure a round that does not allow for a VC to invest. What do I mean by this? VCs that lead rounds need to own at least 8% very minimum and if you come in raising $2M on a $25M cap, that is not enough allocation for the VC and pro-rata amount and then angels as well. Do not prohibit the VC from investing because of the structure of your round. For that example, $5M on $25M would allow for the VC to have 12.5% ownership, a smaller fund to have 3-4% and then a 3-4% allocation for angels.
- Is This Check Meaningful?: An important question to ask is: is the check size being invested by the lead a material check size for them and their fund? For example, if the check size they are investing is less than 1% of their fund, it is not that meaningful, if it is less than .5%, it really is not meaningful. Now this could be bad as it means they are unlikely to be able to provide you with the same time and attention they would larger checks. That said, Jason Lemkin has also commented before on the benefits of this as they will leave you alone to execute, they will not put much pressure on you as you are not a core position and it is really yours to execute from there.
- Do Not Do a Range: In terms of the actual size of check being raised, I do not like ranges. There is a massive difference between 3 and 5 million, and that impact on your runway is huge and so state a clear and direct number you are raising and what runway that will provide.
- Milestone Hitting and Showing Resource Allocation: Use the question of how much are you raising to show your insight into the milestones that you need to hit over the next 18-36 months. Never raise less than 18 months, you also do not need to raise more than 36 months. Plan for a 6 month fundraise and execution 99% of the time always takes longer than you anticipate. With that in mind, I always prefer 24 months as the right period to raise for, this will give you 18 months heads down execution and then 6 months to raise.
- Fundraising Rounds are To Prove Hypotheses: If we assume that fundraising rounds are science experiments and you have to prove or disprove a set of hypothesis with this time and money, make sure you can clearly articulate what you need to prove and by when. For the love of god do not say, this is the last round we will ever need to raise before we are immensely profitable, I could have a fund the size of Softbank if I had a dollar for everytime someone said that to me.
How to Answer the Question of Valuation:
When you say the size of the raise, say $2M, the basic assumption is that each round will dilute 15-20% and so the average VC will think of a $10M post money valuation straight away when you say a $2M raise. That said, you do not want to anchor yourself to a price, you are running a process as transactional as it sounds and I am not saying you want to optimise for price by any means but the majority of the time, it is best to say, “hey we are raising $2M and we will let the market decide on the price”. This is a great way to answer the question as this will not put anyone off, it will not anchor you to a price and it will also show you are savvy as to the raise process which any incoming investor should want to see as your ability to raise the next round is fundamental for them. Again, use this question to show your sophistication and knowledge as to the finer details of how to navigate a fundraise successfully.
How to Choose Your Lead Investor?
The biggest problem of the last 2 years was people chose their lead having met them once. They will be a partner to you for 10 years and you will not be able to get rid of them, it is literally harder to remove an investor than it is to get divorced. Brian Singerman @ Founders Fund said on the show recently about how he was unable to do his job in COVID as he could not meet founders in person. It is so important to meet your lead investor in person before signing the deal, so much can be gained and learned from those meetings in person. Then there is the question of how do I really get to know someone, especially if it is in a compressed timeline, there are ways that you can accelerate a relationship and getting to know someone, make sure to ask:
- What would success look like to them with this investment? What are the 1-2 core ways they believe that you will not achieve your outcome? What worries them?
- Can they give you a reference for founders they have worked with where it has not gone to plan? Also do off sheet references and try to find others where it did not go to plan. You can find their email with the Google Plugin by Clearbit and that is super easy. That should reveal alot.
- I also find really being vulnerable, talking about ambitions, inspirations, fears, childhood, my mother has MS and it is a tough and horrible thing to see your mother suffer with, I will discuss that and how it has changed me and my mindset in many ways.
How to Set a Timeline in a Fundraise?
In this deliberation phase where you are waiting for a term sheet, you do need to create some form of urgency. Investors often need a reason to move and so it is good to put a timeline on the raise. 14 days is perfect, this is enough time for any VC to do the work they need to do but also if they cannot do it in that time without a plausible excuse, it is unlikely that they would have done the deal and so it will force timewasters to a no sooner and save you time.
Your Term Sheet is Ticking:
One thing to be wary of is exploding term sheets. If any VC says you have to sign this here and now, that is BS. Do not do it and that is no way to start a 10 year relationship. That said, it is fair for them to set some form of timeline, otherwise, you can shop the term sheet; share it with everyone and use the first people to commit as leverage to create FOMO to get other people to commit. This can be a disadvantage of being a first mover as a VC but that is why they will often have some form of expiry date and that is not unreasonable.
When You Have Multiple Term Sheets: KISS (KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID)
Then you have leverage and you can optimise the round on price, size of round, size of lead check to angel allocation etc etc. My advice here would always be do not over optimise. If the chosen partner is slightly lower, take it. Do not lose the right partner because of a small 5% difference in price or size of round. Another big mistake founders make when they have multiple term sheets is communication. It is fine if you need another couple of days to consider the decision but keep everyone updated. Let each investor who is waiting know, you are still thinking it through and will be back to them shortly. Name when you will have an answer, a communicated delay is fine, no communication is not. Then another massive mistake founders make is for the VCs they choose not to go with, they do not turn them down graciously. These investors could likely fund your next round, a bridge round and you never know when you might need them and so always turn them down super well and keep them on side, they could be helpful in the future.
If a VC Does These 3 Things: Forest Gump It:
Now the massive red flags with leads in this process that we need to call out:
- Pay to Pitch: If any VC ever makes you pay to pitch them. This is unacceptable and we have to remove this from the industry. Tweet me the details of these investors, it can be anonymous but these bad actors need to be called out.
- Investment Tranches Kill Companies: If it is an early round and they want to do the investment in tranches. No. This is such an inhibitor for the business it will not allow you to allocate resources effectively or with confidence. Do not allow for tranches. A bad deal can sometimes be worse than no deal. Tranches does not set you up to execute against a plan, build a world class team and achieve what you can. Say no.
- Early Signs of Excess Control and Ego: If they haggle immensely on salary over small amounts, if they suggest you should be on $60K not $62K and they make a big deal out of it. This is a sign of what they will be like to come. Do not accept it.
So now we have our lead VC locked in and we have to allocate the rest of the round. I would work hand in hand with my VC to construct the rest of the round. They will have angels they work closely with and think highly of. Use them to help map out those people and then make those intros for you.
How to Allocate Your Angel Allocation:
Assemble your angel cap table as you would a sports team. Each person has a specific position which they are specialised to and have a world class skill in. Someone for marketing, hiring, regulation, PR, partnerships etc. A massive mistake I see so often is founders try to cram down all their angels to their smallest allocation so they can fit as many as possible. Do not do this. Give fewer people more allocation. The only thing that matters is that the check size matters to them. For some it will be $10K for others it could be $50K but fewer with more skin in the game is important.
Next I see so many founders drag out the process meeting just one more investor and just one more, after a certain time, just get it done, get it closed and move on.
Just Closed: Time to Prep for the Next Round
So now we have closed the round, congrats. Now time to start prepping for the next round, one thing to remember, as a founder, you are always raising. So here is what we should do next:
- Sit down with our new lead investor and align on what we believe we need to hit to unlock the next round of funding. Will that next round come from them or external financing?
- If external financing, what 5 names should we focus on?
- Make sure to send those 5 names monthly updates with your progress. Investors invest in lines not dots.
- Make sure to meet them on a quarterly basis.
- By the time of your next fundraise, following 6 face to face meetings and 18 updates, the investor and you will know if this is a partnership you want to pursue.
I want your feedback. Did you enjoy this post? Let me know on Twitter here.
20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family
Barry McCarthy is Peloton’s CEO and President. McCarthy is a seasoned executive who served as CFO of Spotify from 2015 to January 2020, and CFO of Netflix from 1999 to 2010. Prior to Netflix, McCarthy held various leadership positions in management consulting, investment banking, and media and entertainment. McCarthy has served on the boards of directors of Spotify and Instacart since January 2020 and January 2021, respectively. In addition, McCarthy has served as a member of the boards of Chegg, Eventbrite, MSD Acquisition Corp, Pandora, and Rent the Runway.
In Today's Episode with Barry McCarthy We Discuss:
1. From Netflix to Spotify to Leading Peloton:
- How did Barry make his way into the world of startups and come to work with Reed Hastings at Netflix? What are his single biggest takeaways from working with Reid?
- Why did Barry decide to move to cold Stockholm to work with Daniel Ek and Spotify? What makes Daniel the special leader that he is?
- Was Barry nervous about assuming the role of CEO @ Peloton? Are the elements he was most worried about the elements that are his biggest challenges today?
2. Barry McCarthy: The Leader
- What does "high performance" in business mean to Barry?
- Daniel Ek has described Barry as the "most strategic dealmaker in the world". What does Barry believe makes him so good at dealmaking? Where do so many go wrong?
- Barry pioneered the model of the direct listing, why does he believe they are better? Why was it right as an approach for Spotify? Will we continue to see more?
- What is Barry's framework for making tough decisions? How has it changed over time?
3. Barry McCarthy: The Master of Boards:
- Barry has sat on some of the best boards from Netflix to Spotify to now Peloton and Instacart, what does Barry believe makes the best boards?
- Where do many boards go wrong? Where do they become dysfunctional? What can and should be done to stop that?
- How does Barry advise other board members on the right way to deliver tough news constructively?
- What is the single biggest advice Barry would give to young board members assuming their first boards? Where do many young board members go wrong?
4. Barry McCarthy: Mastering the Mechanics:
- Daniel Ek suggested that I had to ask about “demand creation theory and your ideas about whether the market is efficient”. What did he mean by this? How does Barry think about it?
- How does Barry think about the interplay between gross margin, experience and retention?
- Why did Barry decide it was the right decision to evolve the strategy from owning distribution to working with Amazon etc?
20VC: Leadership Lessons from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, The Early Days of TheFacebook Advising Mark Zuckerberg and Why Now is Not the Right Time For Startups to Stockpile Cash with Hadi Partovi, CEO @ Code.org
Hadi Partovi is a tech entrepreneur and investor, and CEO of the education nonprofit Code.org. Before founding Code.org, Hadi founded two prior startups: Tellme Networks (acquired by Microsoft, discussed on 20VC with Emil Michael), and iLike (acquired by Newscorp). Hadi has also been an active advisor and angel investor to some of the best including Facebook, Dropbox, airbnb, and Uber. If that was not enough, Hadi currently serves on the Board of Directors of Axon and MNTN.
In Today's Episode with Hadi Partovi:
1.) From the Iran-Iraq War to Founding Startups:
- How Hadi and his family made their way from war-torn Tehran to the US and Silicon Valley?
- How did seeing his family have nothing and struggle financially impact Hadi's mindset as an entrepreneur?
- What does Hadi believe he is running from? What is he running toward?
2.) Lessons from Ballmer and Zuckerberg:
- How did Hadi first come to meet a young Mark Zuckerberg when TheFacebook had less than 10 employees? Why did Hadi believe he was so special from that first meeting?
- What are Hadi's biggest takeaways from working with Steve Ballmer? How did the reign and leadership of Ballmer compare to the reign of Bill Gates?
- Hadi has helped both Facebook and Dropbox with their engineering hires, what is the secret to hiring amazing engineers? How does he structure the process? Where do so many go wrong?
3.) Hadi Partovi: The Leader:
- How does Hadi define "high performance" in leadership? How has it changed with time?
- What is Hadi's framework for making tough decisions? How does Hadi teach that framework to his team? What are the biggest mistakes leaders make in decision-making?
- How important does Hadi believe speed of execution is? How does Hadi determine when is the right time to go slow to go fast?
4.) Hadi Partovi: The Person:
- How does Hadi analyze his relationship with money today? How does it change over time?
- Hadi stepped off the for-profit treadmill with Code.org, why did he make that decision? How does he avoid the trappings of chasing wealth?
- How does Hadi think about ego and ego management today? How does Hadi separate self-worth from financial gain and accomplishment?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Hadi's Favourite Book: Sapiens: The #1 bestselling journey through human history and anthropology
20 Sales: Webflow's Maggie Hott on When to Start and How to Scale the Best Outbound Sales Team, Why Founders Should Not Hire a Head of Sales First, The Must Ask Questions When Hiring Sales Reps and How To Structure the Process
Maggie Hott is the Director of Sales @ Webflow where she leads their Sales Dev, Account Executive, and Solution Engineering orgs. Prior to Webflow, Maggie spent an incredible 6 years at Slack in a period of hypergrowth for the company having joined as the founding AE scaling to a Sr Enterprise Leader. Before Slack, Maggie was the founding Sales hire at Eventbrite. If that was not enough, Maggie is also an active angel investor, an advisor to Cowboy Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and is a Founding Operator and LP @ Coalition Partners.
In Today's Episode with Maggie Hott We Discuss:
1. The Cold Email that Led to a World-Class Sales Career:
- How a cold email to Kevin Hartz @ Eventbrite led to Maggie's career in sales?
- What are the 1-2 biggest takeaways from her time at Slack? How did they impact her mindset?
- What does Maggie know now that she wishes she had known when she entered sales?
2. The Sales Playbook: PLG and Enterprise:
- How does Maggie define the sales playbook? What is it? What is it not?
- Is it possible for early-stage companies to do both enterprise and PLG at the same time?
- When is the right time to add enterprise to a PLG motion?
- What are the steps to build an outbound sales engine in enterprise? Where do many go wrong?
3. Building the Bench: Hiring Your First Sales Team:
- Should founders look to hire a Senior Head of Sales first or a more junior sales rep?
- Should they be hired one at a time? What are the benefits of hiring many at the same time?
- What is the right process to hire your first sales hire?
- What are the core traits and habits that make the first 10x sales hire?
- What are the right questions to ask to unveil those characteristics?
4. Making the Machine Work: The Process:
- What can sales leaders do to proactively build relationships with other parts of the org?
- How can more junior sales reps build relationships with other functions?
- Why does Maggie believe that mis-hiring can be a $1M mistake? What are the early signs that a new hire is not working out in sales? How does this differ for outbound?
- Why is it dangerous to make your self-serve product too good?
20VC: Mailchimp's Ben Chestnut on The Biggest Leadership Lessons Scaling to a $12Bn Acquisition and $1BN+ ARR, The Secret to Happiness, Being a Great Husband and Father & Why 2021 was the Right Time To Sell to Intuit
Ben Chestnut is the Co-Founder of Mailchimp, the all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses. Last year, in Sept 2021 it was announced that Intuit would acquire Mailchimp for a reported $12BN. There are so many things to love about the Mailchimp journey to this point. First, Mailchimp was founded as the result of a side project of a design agency Ben and his co-founder, Dan, used to run. Second, Mailchimp is and has always been based in Atalanta, eschewing the notion you have to be in SF or NYC to build a massive business. Then third, they never raised venture funding for the business all the way until their $12BN acquisition. Ben led Mailchimp to over 1,200 employees and millions of global users.
In Today's Episode with Ben Chestnut We Discuss:
1. From Mama's Kitchen to the Smell of Business and Founding Mailchimp:
- How did Ben turn a mediocre agency into the founding of Mailchimp? What was the a-ha moment?
- At what stage of the business did Ben quit the agency and go all in on Mailchimp? What sign did he need that Mailchimp had true product-market fit?
- When Ben's mother died, he bought every flower in the local town to commemorate her. How did Ben's mother impact the type of father and husband he is today? How did she impact the way that he led Mailchimp as CEO?
- Ben's fishing trips with his father played a big role in his early years, what were the single biggest lessons for Ben from his fishing trips with his father?
2. Ben Chestnut: The Leader:
- How does Ben define the term "high performance" in leadership?
- What does Ben mean when he says "the secret to happiness is to stay in your lane"?
- Why would Ben describe himself as the "leader of the misfits"? How did that early experience and labeling impact both the people he hired and the culture he created at Mailchimp?
- What does Ben mean when he says he used to have a "hands off, eyes off" leadership style? What have been the single biggest drivers in his development as a leader?
3. Ben Chestnut: The Person:
- Relationship to Money: How does Ben reflect on his relationship to money? How has it changed over time? Why does Ben still to this day buy lottery tickets with his wife?
- Conquering Fatherhood: What does being a great father to Ben mean? How does Ben attempt to instil the same work ethic and drive when his children are born into immense wealth?
- The secret to Marriage: What does Ben believe is the core to a successful and thriving marriage? How does Ben view his role in the marriage? How has it changed over time?
- Potential Lost Identity: A founder's identity is so closely tied to their company, how did Ben manage the challenge of selling his company but retaining his identity? What did Ben learn about himself through many different acquisition processes?
4. Mailchimp: The Business:
- Why did Ben never raise venture money in the 21 year journey of Mailchimp?
- Why did Ben never accept any of the acquisition offers that came before Intuit?
- How did Ben motivate his team after they knew each acquisition offer was being turned down?
- Why did Ben decide the acquisition by Intuit was the right decision for the company?
- How does Ben view his role in the company now and moving forward?
20VC: The Story of Turning Around MTV, AOL and Time Warner | How To Be Effective When Making Hard Decisions | Tactics vs Strategy and Why Plans Are BS with Bob Pittman, CEO @ iHeartMedia
Bob Pittman is Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc., the number one audio company in America. Prior to iHeart, Bob has just had the most amazing career as a co-founder and programmer who led the team that created MTV. He has also led some of the most incredible turnarounds as CEO of MTV Networks, AOL Networks and Time Warner Enterprises and as COO of America Online, Inc. and later AOL Time Warner.
In Today's Episode with Bob Pittman We Discuss:
1. From Flying Lessons to Radio:
- How Bob first made his way into radio at the age of 15?
- What does Bob know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?
- What is the most painful lesson Bob has learned in his career that he is pleased to have learned?
2. Decision-Making in Leadership:
- How does Bob structure all decision-making as CEO today?
- Why does Bob ensure that all decisions are made within 24 hours? What are the pros and cons?
- How does Bob prevent consensus decision-making? How does Bob create dissent in a discussion?
- How do the best leaders know when to kill a project? What do most do instead?
3. Tactics vs Strategies: Why Plans Are BS!
- What is the difference between a tactic and a strategy?
- When is the right time to change your strategy and tactics?
- What have been Bob's biggest lessons on how to get teams on board with tactical changes?
- Why does Bob believe that plans are BS? When can they be useful?
4. The Secret to Messaging and Storytelling:
- What does Bob believe is the universal truth to successful consumer messaging?
- What has changed and what has not changed in the way companies tell stories to their customers?
- Is there a difference between a great product and a great company? What are examples?
- What excites Bob most about consumer habits today?
5. Bob Pittman: AMA:
- What does Bob believe is the success to successful parenting? How has it changed?
- How does Bob analyze his own relationship to money today? How has that changed?
- Why does Bob not believe in legacy? What do people get most wrong when it comes to ego?
20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest
Marty Cagan is one of the OGs of Product and Product Management as the Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group. Before founding SVPG, Marty served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay. He worked directly alongside Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz at Netscape and Pierre Omidyar at eBay.
In Today's Episode with Marty Cagan We Discuss:
1. Entry into the World of Product From Engineering:
- How Marty first made his way into the world of product, having started life as an engineer?
- What does Marty know now that he wishes he had known when he started in product?
- What are Marty's biggest tips to anyone making the move from engineering to product?
2. Lessons from Marc and Ben at Netscape and Pierre @ eBay:
- What are the single biggest lessons Marty took from working side by side on product with Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreesen?
- What did Netscape do right? What did they do wrong? With hindsight, what would Marty have done differently?
- How did Marty break all of his rules by working with Pierre Omidyar?
3. Hiring a World Class Early Product Team:
- When is the right time to make your first product hire as a startup?
- What is the right profile for that first product hire? Senior or junior?
- If you go for the junior hire, how do you structure the rest of the team? If you go for the Senior hire, how do you structure the rest of the team?
- What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when hiring their first in product?
- Does Marty prefer someone with or without expertise in the domain you are in?
4. Mastering the Onboarding Process:
- What is the optimal onboarding process for all new product hires?
- How can leaders ensure that product hires see and understand all areas of the business?
- What can product leaders do to proactively impress in the first 30-60 days?
- What are clear red flags that a new product hire is not working out? How long do we give them?
20VC: a16z's Martin Casado on How the Venture Model is Broken, Why VCs Should Be Running Wall St, Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next Generation of Venture & Investing Lessons from Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon
Martin Casado is a General Partner @ a16z where he focuses on enterprise investing. At a16z, Martin has led investments and serves on the board of dbt Labs, Fivetran, Material Security, Ambient AI and many more incredible companies. Before venture, Martin was previously the Co-Founder and CTO at Nicira, acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin served as Senior VP and General Manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a $600 million revenue run-rate business.
In Today's Episode with Martin Casado We Discuss:
1. From $1.26BN Founder to Leading Enterprise Investing for a16z:
- How did Martin make his way into the world of VC and come to lead enterprise investing for a16z?
- What does Martin know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?
- What have been some of his biggest investing lessons from Marc and Ben?
2. The VC Model is Broken and Why:
- Why does Martin believe that the current model for venture is broken?
- Why does Martin believe that VCs are not oracles and they were not gifted with picking ability?
- How will asset allocation more broadly fundamentally change over the next decade? Why will Silicon Valley take over and run Wall St?
- Why does Wall St not care about innovation and true technological development?
- Who will be the winners and who will be the losers in the next 10 years of venture?
3. Surviving a Crash - What Founders Need To Know:
- Layoffs: What is Martin's advice to founders on doing layoffs today? How much is the right amount to cut? Should it be done in one go? How should this be communicated to investors and the board?
- Scenario Planning: What three scenario plans should all founders be creating right now? How should they know which one is the right one to execute against?
- Comparisons: How should founders use and look to public company performance and market cap to determine which plan they should choose?
- Hiring Freeze: Why does Martin believe the biggest companies in the world make massive mistakes by freezing hiring? What should they do instead?
4. The Changing Guard at a16z:
- What have been the single best and worst changes a16z have made over the last 24 months?
- What are the first things to break when a firm scales as fast as a16z has done?
- Does Martin agree a16z returns will reduce with the scaling of their funds larger than ever?
- How does Martin look to train and educate his junior team? How does he advise them on surviving a downturn? What should they do? What should they not do?
5.) The Makings of a Great Board:
- What are the three types of board members? What is the best? What is the worst?
- What does Martin believe makes the truly great boards?
- What is the biggest advice Martin gives to young board members today?
- How has Martin changed as a board member over time? What does he need to improve?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Martin's Fave Book: The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
20VC: Plaid and Column Co-Founder, William Hockey on Why the Brands that Win in Fintech Will Not Be Financial Services Brands, What US Banking Can Learn from China & Why Companies Can Be Built Slower than People Think?
Will Hockey is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO @ Column, the only nationally chartered bank built to enable developers and builders to create new financial products. Before co-founding Column, Will was the Co-Founder, President, and CTO @ Plaid, a world-leading data network and payments platform. In 2020, Visa attempted to acquire Plaid for $5.3BN, however, this was blocked due to regulatory issues and the company went on to raise at a reported $13.4BN valuation just 9 months later. Additionally, Will is on the board of Scale.ai.
In Today's Episode with Will Hockey We Discuss:
1.) The Founding of $13.4BN Plaid:
- How did Will make his way into the world of startups and come to found Plaid with Zach?
- If we are all a function of our histories, what is Will running from? What is he running toward?
- What does Will know now that he wishes he had known when he started Plaid?
2.) Will Hockey: The Makings of a Decacorn Founder:
- What does the term "high performance" mean to Will? How has this changed over time?
- Having had such a successful time building Plaid to $13.4BN, how does Will assess his own relationship to risk and his relationship to money?
- How does Will approach his own personal portfolio planning? Equity, debt, real-estate? How does Will optimize his own personal wealth?
- Column is his second time founding a company, what did Will decide to take from Plaid that worked well? What did he decide he would not do having seen it work badly at Plaid?
3.) The Building of Truly Great Teams:
- Why does Will believe that companies can be built so much slower than people think?
- How does Will determine the decisions that have to be made fast vs those with time?
- How does Will ensure the same size of urgency and speed within his team without this time or funding pressure?
- What have been Will's single biggest lessons when it comes to people acquisition and retention?
4.) Fintech: The Next 10 Years:
- How will the next 10 years look different from the last in fintech? What changes will be better? What will be worse? What is Will worried about? What is he excited about?
- What does Will mean when he says, "the US financial system can function like a protocol"? What does Will believe are some of the core myths of the US financial system?
- Why does Will believe the current financial system can and will fix a lot of what crypto is trying to solve? What barriers will prevent this from happening?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Will's Favourite Book: The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World's Food Supply
20VC: Jason Lemkin on Why Founders Do Not Care About Their VCs Anymore, Why Zoom Made Us All Worse Investors, Why 80-90% IRR Should Have Been Warning Signs and the Algolia Journey From Seed to $2.25BN Valuation
Jason Lemkin is one of the OGs of SaaS of the last decade. As the Founder of SaaStr, he has inspired more SaaS founders than one can imagine building "The World’s Largest Community for Business Software." Jason also invests out of the $100M SaaStr Fund and in the past Jason has led rounds into TalkDesk, Pipedrive, Algolia, Gorgias, Salesloft, and many more incredible companies. Prior to founding SaaStr, Jason was the Co-Founder of Echosign, an early e-signature business, funded by Emergence Capital and that was acquired by Adobe for $100M.
In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin On Algolia We Discuss:
1.) Meeting the Unicorn: Algolia:
- How did Jason first come to meet Nicolas (Founder) and Algolia?
- What specific elements of cold emails make the best attract Jason's attention? What do they have in them? What are the most common mistakes people make with cold emails?
- What is the single biggest mistake Jason made when making the deal with Algolia? How did Jason lead their seed round when their round was "oversubscribed"?
2.) Competition and TAM: The Reasons To Say No:
- Competing with Free: How did Jason analyze the competitive landscape Algolia was facing? How did he gain comfort that they could compete and win against free and open-source?
- TAM Analysis: The TAM at the time for Algolia was $2M. How did Jason analyze the TAM at the time? How did he get comfortable with such a small TAM?
- What are the single biggest mistakes investors make when analyzing competition today? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when presenting the competitive landscape?
- What are the single biggest mistakes investors make when analyzing TAM today? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when presenting the TAM and how it breaks down?
3.) Investing Lessons Transition from CEO to VC:
- Jason has previously said one of his biggest lessons is "bet on what you know when you go from CEO to VC"? What did he mean by this?
- How can one keep this operator knowledge and mentality when one is a VC for a long time?
- What are the biggest pieces of advice that Jason would give to operators becoming investors?
- What are the biggest mistakes that Jason made in his first 3 investments as a VC? How did he change?
4.) Mastering the World of Venture Today:
- Why does Jason believe that he has become a worse investor with the rise of "remote investing"?
- Why does Jason believe he is a worse investor without having a partner in SaaStr Fund?
- Why does Jason believe that even the best founders do not want hard feedback anymore? Should we as VCs still give it to them? What has Jason learned here?
- Will we see great LP churn and many LPs leaving the asset class? What will happen to the existing incumbents with massive AUM and reduced performance?
20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin
Miki Kuusi is the CEO of Wolt and Head of DoorDash International. In 2014 Miki founded Wolt with a mission to turn the smartphone into a remote controller for life, starting with delivering your favorite restaurant food, to you at home. Today Wolt operates in 23 countries, across several different categories, has over 4,000 employees, and last year, Doordash made the move to join forces with Wolt in a deal worth a reported $8.1BN. Previously, Miki was the CEO of Slush, one of the leading tech and investor events in the world attended by more than 25,000 people annually.
In Today's Discussion with Miki Kuusi:
1.) Founding Slush and Wolt: An Entry into Startups:
- How did Miki come to found Wolt? What was that a-ha moment?
- Did Wolt have product-market-fit from Day 1? What was the turning point when they did?
- What does Miki know now that he wishes he had known when he started Wolt on Day 1?
2.) The Makings of a Truly Great Leader:
- How does Miki define "high performance" today in leadership?
- How does Miki think about what focus means in leadership? What is the hardest decision Miki has had to make when it comes to focusing the company? What did he learn from Ilkka @ Supercell?
- What does Miki believe is the KPI of success as the CEO? How does it change?
- What does Miki believe is the difference between good vs great leadership?
- What does Miki believe is the biggest sacrifice he has made as the CEO?
3.) Hiring a Team to Compete on a Global Stage:
- How does Miki use compensation to create a culture of ownership and accountability?
- Does Miki start from a position of trust and it is there to be lost or no trust and it is there to be gained?
- What is the difference between a team and a family in company building?
- What is the core difference between trust and safety in company building? Why does Miki always want to have trust but not want to have safety?
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes that Miki has made? How has he learned from them?
- Why does Miki believe you do not want to hire people that have done it before but hire the people who have seen those people do it before?
- Why does Miki believe most companies are merely glorified recruiting operations?
- Does Miki believe that companies need to be as big as they have grown into, headcount-wise?
4.) Miki Kuusi: The Personal Journey
- What single day was the hardest day of the Wolt journey for Miki? How did it change him?
- Why does Miki believe that for their Series B, all-bar one VC turned them down?
- How does Miki assess his own relationship to risk and money today?
- Why is Miki an advocate for founders taking secondaries along the journey?
- What can Europe do to become a powerhouse in tech moving forward?
- Why did Miki decide to sell the company to Doordash? What is he most excited to learn from Tony Xu, Doordash Founder and CEO?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Miki's Favourite Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
20VC: When to Make Your First Growth Hire? Senior or Junior? How To Onboard Them? How To Monitor Their Progress? from Growth Leaders @ Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Instacart, Miro and more
Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey led the growth product team at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Casey started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub’s demand-side acquisition and retention strategies.
Elena Verna is the Interim Head of Growth at Amplitude. Former exec @ Miro, Netlify, SurveyMonkey. Growth Advisor to companies including Krisp, MongoDB, Ledgy, Builder.io and SimilarWeb.
Kieran Flanagan is SVP Marketing at HubSpot, where he has helped the business grow internationally, move to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand, and built out its media team, including the acquisition of ‘The Hustle.’
Andy Johns career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President.
Bangaly Kaba is the Director of Product Management @ Youtube. Prior to Youtube, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, helping grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs.
Ed Baker is a growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook.
Adam Fishman was the Chief Product and Growth Offer @ Imperfect Foods. Before Imperfect, Adam was VP of Product and Growth @ Patreon, Before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth @ Lyft, Adam was the first growth and marketing employee hired and grew the team to 18 people.
In Today's Discussion on When To Hire a Head of Growth:
1.) When is the right time to hear your first growth hire?
2.) Is this hire a senior growth leader or a more junior growth engineer?
3.) What can early-stage startups do to entice senior growth leaders to their early-stage company?
4.) What data infrastructure should be in place prior to hiring your first growth hire?
5.) What does the optimal onboarding process look like for all growth hires?
6.) What can founders and CEOs do to set their growth hires up for success?
20VC: Why Operating Experience Becomes Irrelevant Fast and Operators Often Give Bad Advice to Founders, Is Silicon Valley Really Dead? Are Gen Z the Most Entitled Employees? What Will Happen to a Generation of Pre-PMF Companies with $50M in the Bank with
Jeffrey Katzenberg is an entertainment industry executive and entrepreneur, who throughout his career has repeatedly reshaped the media landscape. Jeffrey co-founded DreamWorks SKG, serving as CEO of DreamWorks Animation, which he grew into the world’s largest animation studio, known for Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar and more. In 2016, DreamWorks Animation was sold to Comcast for $3.8 billion. Before founding DreamWorks, Jeffrey was Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios, where he took the studio from last place to first at the box office with hits like Three Men and a Baby, Pretty Woman, Father of the Bride and Sister Act. Most recently, Jeffrey co-founded WndrCo alongside Sujay Jaswa and has led WndrCo’s investments in Airtable, Frame.io, Quibi, Vise, Placer.ai, NexHealth, Deel, and ID.me.
Sujay Jaswa is one of Silicon Valley’s leading business innovators. At Dropbox, he created and led the company’s global business and finance organizations. Sujay and his teams raised over $1 billion, launched and scaled Dropbox’s products for businesses, created partnerships responsible for over 100 million users, executed some 20 acquisitions, and scaled the global business team from two to more than 500 employees in seven global offices. During this period, the company significantly scaled overall revenue from $12 million in 2010 to over $500 million run rate, Dropbox for Business revenue from $1 million to over $200mm run rate, and users from 15 million to 300 million. Most recently, Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg co-founded WndrCo and Sujay has led WndrCo’s investments in Figma, 1Password, Databricks, Pango, Pilot, Rally, Zagat / The Infatuation, and other great companies.
In Today's Episode with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa:
1.) From Dreamworks and Dropbox to Venture with WndrCo:
- How did Jeffrey and Sujay both make their way into the world of venture from Dropbox and Dreamworks?
- What was Jeffrey's single biggest lesson from his time leading Dreamworks and being in Hollywood?
- What was Sujay's biggest takeaway from being at the helm as COO at Dropbox?
2.) Operating Experience is Irrelevant and Can Be Dangerous:
- Why does Sujay believe that operating experience is irrelevant?
- What are the single biggest mistakes that operator investors make when it comes to advising their founders?
- What do both Sujay and Jeffrey do to try and refresh their operating experience in real time?
- How did Quibi impact their willingness and desire to take large risk both investing and operating?
3.) Building Teams and Hiring People:
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes Jeffrey and Sujay have made?
- What did Jeffrey mean when he said at Disney, “if you do not come in on Saturday, do not bother coming in on Sunday”.
- How do Jeffrey and Sujay feel about remote work? Why did it not work for them?
- What did Alfred Lin @ Sequoia teach Sujay about the question all managers need to ask themselves on questing whether they should let someone go?
4.) Silicon Valley: Dead and Entitled?
- Why does Jeffrey strongly disagree with the death of Silicon Valley?
- What will happen to the generation of companies that raised too much with no product-market fit?
- How will the mass layoffs in the valley change the valley as it is today?
- Does Sujay agree that millennials are the worst segment to hire from? Are they entitled?
20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager
Semil Shah is the Founder of Haystack, one of the leading pre-seed and seed firms of the last decade. Among Semil's portfolio include the likes of DoorDash ($DASH), Instacart, Hashicorp ($HCP), Opendoor ($OPEN), Figma (acquired by Adobe), Carta and many more exceptional companies. Semil's first fund is marked between a 30 and 40x fund, astonishing.
In Today's Episode with Semil Shah We Discuss:
1.) The Makings of Semil Shah:
- What is Semil running away from? What is he running towards?
- What does Semil know now that he wishes he had known when entering venture?
- What is Semil's biggest advice to managers raising their first funds now?
2.) Fund Sizing: Growing vs Staying Disciplined:
- Question from Hunter Walk: How does Semil determine the right size fund to raise with each fund
- Question from Satya Patel: Why have you resisted increasing AUM?
- In the last episode Semil mentioned a three-year deployment cycle for the fund, did he stick to it? What are the benefits and drawbacks?
- What investing mistakes did Semil make over the last 3 years that he wishes he had not made?
3.) The Secret to Fundraising for a Fund:
- What is Semil's biggest advice to emerging managers on finding new LPs? What works?
- What materials do managers need to have in place for a new fundraise? Deck? Dataroom?
- What are the most common mistakes VCs make when pitching LPs their funds?
- How does Semil follow-up with potential LPs post-call? What works? What does not?
- How does Semil suggest creating a sense of urgency for LPs to commit to a fund?
- How does Semil feel about giving preferential terms to convince LPs to commit to the first close?
4.) The Current Landscape:
For VCs:
- How will the current landscape impact emerging managers' ability to raise?
- What advice would Semil give to them? Raise smaller?
- Kyle Harrison said on the show recently, “differentiation will kill 80% of venture firms, especially the so-so ones”. Does Semil agree? Who is set to struggle? Who is set to thrive in this environment?
For LPs:
- What does Semil think are the biggest mistakes LPs made over the last 2-3 years?
- How will they respond in this market cycle?
- If Semil were handed an endowment fund, how would he allocate today?
- Does Semil agree, we will see a denigration of venture returns to those of PE like multiples? Why?
For Founders:
- How does Semil advise founders on raising today when everyone says they are investing but very few really are?
- How does Semil advise founders on how to think about valuation inflection points with respect to raising capital?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Semil's Favourite Article: Master of Play
Semil's Most Recent Investment: Impart Security
20VC Rising Star: Why Founders Should Expect More From Their VCs | How To Know Pre-Investment Whether a VC Will Be Valuable and How to Get the Most Value Out of Them | Is There a Misalignment Between Founders and VCs with Oana Olteanu, Partner @ SignalFir
Oana Olteanu is a Partner @ SignalFire where she focuses on enterprise software at Seed, Series A and Series B. Prior to joining SignalFire, Oana was at Scale Venture Partners where she invested in applied ML and developer tooling. Oana sourced Scale’s investments in Observe.ai, Flatfile, and Proscia. She was part of the deal teams for Honeycomb and AllyO (acquired by HireVue). She also supported existing portfolio companies such as Dialpad, Matillion, and BigID. Prior to Scale, Oana was an AI seed investor at SAP.io, SAP’s $35M seed fund, where she sourced the investments in Plum.io, Oto.ai, and Akorda.
In Today's Episode with Oana Olteanu We Discuss:
1.) From Tank Driving in Romania to VC's Rising Star:
- How Oana made her way from driving tanks in Romania to becoming a VC?
- How did leaving Romania for Germany and then moving to the West Coast impact her mindset?
- What does Oana know now that she wishes she had known when she entered VC?
2.) How to Assess a VC: The Founders Guide:
- Pre-investment, how can founders know whether a VC can add value? What are the signs?
- What three core questions will reveal how much value a VC can add?
- Post-investment, what can founders do to extract the most value from their VCs?
- What should the founders ask their investors for help with? What should they do themselves?
3.) The VC Founder Relationship:
- Oana has the highest founder NPS of any VC I have ever had on 20VC, what does Oana believe makes her founders rate her contribution so highly? What works? What does not?
- How does Oana give sometimes very hard feedback to founders but retain that relationship of trust and safety at the same time? What mistakes do other VCs make in giving feedback?
- What does Oana believe are the single biggest misalignment between VCs and founders?
4.) VCs Behaving Badly: 101
- What are the single biggest ways Oana sees VCs behaving badly?
- How does Oana think founders expectations of the product of venture should change?
- Does Oana believe boards are valuable? What can be done to improve them?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Oana's Favourite Book: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius
20 Sales: The Ultimate Guide to Sales Onboarding for New Sales Reps and Sales Leaders, The Biggest Red Flags in the First 30 Days & What Can Be Done to Set Them Up for Success with Leaders from Figma, Dropbox, Miro and more.
Oliver Jay (OJ) is one of the most successful sales leaders of the last decade. Most recently, OJ spent 6 years as CRO @ Asana and grew the team from 20 to over 450, becoming a master in sales onboarding in the process. Before Asana, OJ spent 4 years at Dropbox, where OJ was Head of APAC & LATAM.
Jordan Van Horn is a Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo. Prior to this role, Jordan spent 4 years at Segment as VP of Sales, leading a sales team of 50+ Account Executives. Before Segment, Jordan was at Dropbox for 4 years leading enterprise sales for Dropbox Business.
Dannie Herzberg is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital and before Sequoia, Dannie spent 4 years at Slack as their Head of Enterprise Sales, growing the business from $100M – $1B in revenue. Before Slack, Dannie spent over 5 years at Hubspot building sales teams.
Zhenya Loginov is the CRO @ Miro. At Miro, Zhenya runs the go-to-market team of 700+ people across. Prior to Miro, Zhenya was the COO @ Segment where he built and ran the global go-to-market team of 200+ people. Pre-Segment, Zhenya led a 100-person team at Dropbox across different functional areas.
Lauren Schwartz is VP of Enterprise Sales at Fivetran, where she has scaled the team to nearly 100, while more than tripling enterprise revenues. Previously, Lauren spent close to 4 years at Segment where she started as the first female AE and ultimately built and led sales teams in enterprise and growth.
Kyle Parrish is VP Sales @ Figma, where he built the sales engine from scratch to today, with over 100 in sales. Before Figma, Kyle spent over 5 years at Dropbox in numerous different roles including Head of Sales, and Global Partnerships lead, responsible for growing Dropbox’s partner ecosystem.
In Todays Episode on Sales Onboarding We Discuss:
1.) How should the onboarding process for all new sales reps be structured?
2.) How should the onboarding process for a new sales leader be structured?
3.) What specific things can leaders do to set both reps and leaders best up for success?
4.) What are the single biggest red flags in the first 30 days that a rep is not going to work out?
5.) What tools and software can be used to improve this process of ramping new reps?
20VC: ARK Invest's Cathie Wood on Why ARK Has Not Had More Outflows Despite Performance, How the Global Tech Equities Market Will Go From $7Trn to $210Trn in 8-10 Years, The Future for Facebook and How Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey Could Create the Biggest Di
Cathie Wood is the CEO & CIO @ ARK Invest, focusing solely on disruptive innovation, primarily in the public equity markets. ARK has become renowned for opening up its research and becoming a ‘sharing economy’ company in the asset management space. Prior to ARK, Cathie spent twelve years at AllianceBernstein as CIO of Global Thematic Strategies where she managed over $5 billion. Cathie joined Alliance Capital from Tupelo Capital Management, a hedge fund she co-founded, which managed $800 million in global thematic strategies. Prior to Tupelo Capital, she worked for 18 years with Jennison Associates LLC as Chief Economist, Portfolio Manager and Director.
In Today's Episode with Cathie Wood We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Hedge Funds at 20:
- How did Cathie get her first role in the world of finance at the tender age of 20?
- What is Cathie running from? What is Cathie running towards?
- What are some of Cathie's biggest lessons from seeing the dot com bust at Tupelo?
- What does Cathie know now that she wishes she had known when she started investing?
2.) Why Benchmarks and Passive Investing are Bad:
- Why does Cathie believe that benchmarks and indexes have become dangerous for consumers?
- Why does Cathie not believe what everyone else does regarding inflation?
- How much of the performance of large-cap tech stocks is tied to the growth of passive investing?
- Why does Cathie think the Fed is making a huge mistake?
3.) Time to Pick Companies:
- Why does Cathie believe that Facebook is emerging as an attractive value stock?
- How does Cathie believe Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey could build the largest universal wallet?
- If Cathie were to put all her money into one of their companies, what would it be?
- Why does Cathie believe Zoom is one of the most misunderstood companies?
4.) Why Venture: Why Now:
- Why did Cathie decide to do a venture fund with ARK now?
- Why did Cathie decide to do a no-carry structure with a higher management fee? How does that align incentives with investors?
- In venture, the asset chooses the capital, how does Cathie analyze why the best founders in the world will pick and work with ARK over other amazing VCs?
- What is the single biggest risk you are underwriting when investing in ARK's venture fund?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Cathie's Favourite Book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
20VC: Why Market Size is Everything | Three Signs of a Bull Market and How To Remain Disciplined | Why Investing is a Young Person's Game | The Secret to Negotiation | Missing a $200M Opportunity in Nubank and more with Martín Escobari, Co-President @ Ge
Martín Escobari is Co-President, Managing Director and Head of General Atlantic’s business in Latin America. Martín is Chairman of the firm’s Investment Committee and also serves on the Management and Portfolio Committees. Before joining General Atlantic in 2012, Martín was a Managing Director at Advent International. Prior to that, he was Co-Founder and CFO of Submarino.com, a leading Brazilian online retailer that went public and was sold to Lojas Americanas in 2006. Martin started his career as a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. Thanks to Seba Kanovich @ dlocal for the introduction today.
In Today's Episode with Martín Escobari:
1.) From Bolivia to Harvard to Leading General Atlantic:
- How did Martin make his way into the world of venture from a small town in Bolivia?
- How did being an operator going through a bust impact how Martin invests and works with founders?
- How does Martin advise young members on his team about surviving through a bust?
2.) Market Matters: Founders, Product or Market:
- Why does Martin believe the single most important element when investing is the market you are entering?
- How does Martin assess both market size and market growth?
- What does Martin believe makes a "beautiful business model"? What is the difference between good vs great? Why have we seen a generation of bad business models?
- How did Martin's analysis of Nubank's market lead him to turn them down? How did Martin change his approach to investing on the back of turning down Nubank?
3.) The Venture Landscape:
- What made Martin believe there was a downturn last year? What three signs always suggest we are in a bubble?
- As a result, how did General Atlantic retain their discipline when others did not? Where did they lose their discipline and invest at the top of the market?
- How does Martin analyse the performance of the crossover funds in the last 24 months? Who did well? Who did not? Do they remain in the market?
- Is Martin concerned by the exodus of capital out of South America with the bust?
4.) Martin Escobari: The Investor and Board Member:
- How has Martin's style of investing changed over the last decade?
- How does Martin reflect on his own price sensitivity? Does Martin engage in outcome scenario planning?
- What has been Martin's biggest hit? How did it change his mindset?
- How would Martin analyze his own style of board membership? How does Martin advise young board members gaining their first boards?
20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview
Hugo Barra is the OG of consumer hardware of the last decade. In Hugo's current position, he is the CEO @ Detect, building tools that empower people to understand their health and make informed, timely decisions. Before Detect, Hugo spent an incredible 4 years as VP of VR @ Meta with Oculus. Prior to Oculus, Hugo was in China as VP of Global @ Xiaomi, the 3rd largest phone maker in the world. Finally before Xiaomi, Hugo was a product leader @ Google for over 5 years including as VP of Android Product Management.
In Today's Episode with Hugo Barra We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Product:
- How did Hugo make his way from Brazil to Silicon Valley and Beijing Product OG?
- What is one takeaway from Google, Meta, and Xiaomi that influenced the way Hugo approaches product today?
- What is 996 Chinese work culture? How does the experience of working and leading teams in China impact his approach to team building today?
2.) The Secret to Success in Hardware:
- Why is hardware so much harder than software? What are the main differences?
- What are the biggest challenges faced when building V1 and V2 in hardware? How much do you rely on data vs gut and intuition?
- What are some of Hugo's biggest consumer product hardware failures? What did he learn from them?
3.) Feature King vs Budget King:
- Previously Hugo has said, "in the beginning, there is only two types of consumers." What does he mean by this? How does that impact his approach to product building?
- Can a budget king product leader also be an amazing feature king leader? What is the difference in the two? Why is it harder to be a budget king product leader?
- What happens if you have both budget king and feature king in one product? What happens then?
4.) Product Management 101:
- How does Hugo define product management today? What does it really mean to Hugo?
- Gustav @ Spotify has said before, "details are not details, they are the product." How does Hugo think about this statement in terms of great product management today?
- When do product orgs start to break down? What are the catalysts? What can be done to stop this?
5.) Brand Marketing vs Product Marketing:
- What is the difference between product and brand marketing?
- Why does Hugo believe you should always start every product build with the press release? What is the difference between good and great in a press release? What do the best have?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders and product leaders make in storytelling today?
6.) Masterclass in Hiring:
- Why does Hugo do 3-and-a-half-hour interviews when hiring new candidates?
- What are the benefits of their being so long? What does he want to achieve?
- What core questions does he ask every time? What differentiates good from great?
- How does he get people to really open up and show true vulnerability?
20VC: Coinbase's Brian Armstrong on Real vs Fake Emergencies, Coinbase's Failed NFT Launch, The Politicisation of Leadership, Why This Crypto Winter is Different From The Past & Brian's Development and Insecurities as a Leader
Brian Armstrong is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Coinbase, the easiest place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Over the last 10 years, Brian has led Coinbase to today, a public company with over 3,500 employees and revenues of over $7.5BN in 2021. Brian also raised venture funding before going public from some of the best including Fred Wilson @ USV, Micky Malka @ Ribbit, Marc Andreesen @ a16z and Garry and Alexis at Initialized. Prior to founding Coinbase, Brian was a Product Manager @ Airbnb.
In Today's Episode with Brian Armstrong We Discuss:
1.) Founding Coinbase:
- How did Brian make his way from PM @ Airbnb to founding Coinbase?
- What is Brian running from in his past? What is he running toward in his future?
- What does Brian know now that he wishes he had known at the start of Coinbase?
2.) Brian Armstrong: The Leader:
- What does "high performance" mean to Brian in leadership?
- How does Brian think about stepping off the treadmill for a second and appreciating what has been achieved? How does one celebrate as a team without creating laziness or arrogance?
- How has Brian most changed as a leader over the last 10 years?
- On reflection, what does Brian believe are his biggest weaknesses today?
3.) Crucible Moments in the Coinbase Journey:
- What does Brian mean when he says, "you need to be able to differentiate between a real emergency and a fame emergency?" What is the difference?
- When Brian made the speech to the Coinbase team on political views in the company, was that a real or fake emergency? What happened? What would he have done differently?
- Is the failed NFT launch, a real or fake emergency? What big mistakes were made? What are Coinbase doing to correct and improve them?
- "Bankrupt Coinbase" campaign on social earlier this year, real or fake emergency? What has been Brian's biggest lessons on how to deal with fake news?
4.) Crypto and The Ultimate Mission for Coinbase:
- What is different about this crypto winter from all other crypto winters?
- Why did Brian ban discussion on the market cap from employees within Coinbase?
- How does Brian maintain morale internally when everyone sees the stock at all-time lows?
- How does the Coinbase mission extend far beyond financial freedom for the world? What does Brian want Coinbase to be in 10 years?
20VC: Michael Mauboussin on Good vs Bad Investment Decision-Making Processes, How To Improve Your Process, How To Know When it Needs Improving and The Single Biggest Mistakes People Make In Their Decision-Making Process
Michael Mauboussin is Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global. Previously, he was Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital, Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse, and Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management. He is also the author of three incredible books, including More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, named in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time by 800-CEO-Read. Michael has taught at Columbia Business School since 1993 and received the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009 and 2016.
In Today's Episode with Michael Mauboussin We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Venture and Finance:
- What does Michael actually do as "Head of Consilient Research"?
- What does Michael know now that he wishes he had known when he entered finance?
- How did Michael and Bill Gurley meet in business school? What does Michael believe makes Bill such a special investor today?
2.) Booms and Busts: How This Compares?
- How does the current macro downturn compare to prior crashes Michael has worked through?
- What is the same? What is different? How do political and health events impact the macro?
- Why was 1987 the end of the world at the time? How did the recovery take place?
- How does Michael analyze the duration of bull markets vs the duration of recovery time?
- What advice does Michael give to young people today questioning if they are good investors?
3.) The Investment Decision-Making Process:
- How does Michael advise on the structuring of your decision-making process?
- What makes a good process vs a bad process?
- What can be done to remove politics from the decision-making process?
- What can be done to ensure all people, regardless of hierarchy feel safe in the process and feel they can share their thoughts without repercussions?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Michael sees people make in their decision-making process?
- How do you know when is the right time to change your process?
4.) Everything is a DCF:
- What does Michael mean when he says that "everything is a DCF"?
- How does Michael advise and apply this thinking to early-stage venture investors?
- How does Michael think through highly diversified portfolios vs super concentrated portfolios in venture?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Michael's Favourite Book: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O Wilson
20VC: The GoPuff Memo: Why 10-15 Minute Delivery is an Unsustainable Model, The Plan to Make GoPuff Profitable by 2024, Mistakes Made in Europe and What the Europe Plan Should Have Been and What Does Quick Commerce Look Like in 5 Years with Rafael Illisha
Raf Illishayev is the Co-Founder and CEO @ GoPuff, one of the market leaders delivering daily essentials in minutes. GoPuff’s latest funding round priced the company at a reported $8.9Bn in March 2021 and to date, Rafael has raised over $2.4Bn for the company from the likes of Accel, Softbank, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, D1 Capital and more. Rafael has scaled the company to over 1/3 of the US with over 12,000 employees nationwide.
In Today’s Episode with GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev You Will Learn:
1.) From Student to Global CEO:
- How Raf came up with the idea for GoPuff and started the company as a student with no funding?
- What were the early signs of product-market fit that Raf observed in the early days?
- In hindsight, does Raf wish they had raised external funding sooner than they did? What would raising external funding sooner have changed about the way they run the business?
2.) The Rise and Fall of Quick Commerce:
- What are the core drivers that have led to capital drying up for players in the quick commerce space?
- With the changing environment, is it a race to profitability for all providers in the space?
- Is this the perfect time for GoPuff to acquire? What are the characteristics of businesses in the space that GoPuff would vs would not like to acquire?
- How does Raf see the quick commerce space looking in 5 years time?
3.) Getting to Profitability: The Levers That Matter:
- Customer Service: Why does Raf believe that all players pulling back on investing in customer service are making a massive mistake? What can be done instead?
- Delivery Time: Why does Raf believe the 10-minute delivery model is fundamentally unprofitable? How do GoPuff approach it as a result?
- Inventory: With a changing macro-environment, why does Raf believe it is prudent to focus more attention on alcohol and convenience goods? What do prior recessions show us about consumer spending patterns changing?
- Metrics: What are the single most important metrics which dictate the speed of getting to profitability? Why is the amount of orders a driver can deliver per hour the most important metric?
4.) Business Expansion Opportunities:
- How does Raf analyze the opportunity for GoPuff in Europe?
- Why does Raf believe they should have pulled out of Spain much sooner? Why are they so focused on the UK now?
- Why does Raf believe it is the right decision to stop investing in GoPuff pharmacy?
- Why is Raf so bullish on GoPuff kitchens? How does the unit economics of the kitchens compare to the core business for GoPuff? What are the positive effects of kitchens on GoPuff core product?
- What was the most recent disagreement the board has had when it comes to determining what to prioritize vs what not to?
Mentioned in Today's GoPuff Episode:
Raf's Mentor and Advisor: Emil Michael, Former Chief Business Officer @ Uber
20VC: Founders Fund's Brian Singerman on The Price Mismatch Between Public vs Private, Why Now Is Not The Best Time To Be Investing, Why Brian Never Thinks About Reserves and Believes in Cross-Fund Investing & Writing a $400M Check Into Anduril Across Rou
Brian Singerman is a Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the best-performing funds of the last two decades. Among their portfolio, they have the likes of Airbnb, Facebook, Stripe, Anduril, and many more generational-defining companies. As for Brian, he has led investments in the likes of Affirm, Oscar Health, Wish, Asana, Oculus, and Postmates to name a few. Brian also sits on the board or is an observer to The Long Term Stock Exchange, Solugen, Cloud9, Modern Health, and of course, Anduril. Prior to Founders Fund, Brian spent a very successful 4 years as an engineer and executive at Google.
In Today's Episode with Brian Singerman We Discuss:
1.) From Google to Befriending Sean Parker to Founders Fund:
- How Brian's friendship with Sean Parker led to his joining Founders Fund over 15 years ago?
- What does Brian believe makes Founders Fund such a unique fund?
- What does Brian know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture?
2.) The Landscape Today: Where Are We Now?
- Why does Brian believe there is a huge price mismatch between private vs public companies?
- How does this impact the pace with which Founders Fund invest? Why does Brian not feel any pressure to invest in this environment?
- What are the 10 hypergrowth companies that Brian is looking to invest in today?
- What advice does Brian give to young investors today who are concerned at their first market correction and questioning if they are actually any good at this?
3.) Brian Singerman: The Investor:
- How does Brian reflect on his own investing style? What is he world-class at? What is he bad at?
- Why does Brian think boards are a waste of time? What is better than a board?
- Why does Brian not ever think about reserves? How does Brian answer LPs concerns when they cite them on the topic of cross-fund investing?
- What does Brian believe is the secret to venture capital? What elements make those at Founders Fund thrive? What characteristics make those that do not work out, fail?
4.) Founders Fund: The Firm:
- How does Founders Fund structure and optimize its decision-making process today?
- How does Founders Fund approach the hiring process for all new team members? What one question do they need to be able to clearly answer with all team members joining?
- How do Founders Fund approach the reference checking process for all new hires? What questions do they find most revealing of the true talent of the candidate?
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes Brian has made? What did he learn from them?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Brian's Most Recent Investment: Anduril
20VC: Chris Sacca, Chamath Palihapitiya, Gary Vee, Brad Gerstner and more on Their Relationship To Money, How It Has Changed with Time and Wealth, How They Bring Up Their Children To Engender the Same Values of Ambition and Hard Work?
Chris Sacca is the Founder and Chairman @ Lowercase Capital, one of the best performing funds in the history of venture capital with a portfolio including Uber, Stripe, Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Docker and many more.
- From interviewing some of the world's richest married couples, how did gaining wealth change their relationship and marriage?
- What does Chris do to actively ensure his children remain hungry and know the value of money?
Chamath Palihapitiya is Founder & CEO @ Social Capital. Social’s portfolio includes the likes of Slack, Yammer, Front, Intercom and Carta to name a few.
- What does Chamath mean when he says we need to think through the mindset of "infinite games" not finite games? How does this change how you think about money?
- How does Chamath think about his relationship to risk today as a result?
Brad Gerstner is the Founder and CEO of Altimeter. Brad’s notable deals that he has helped lead include Snowflake, Mongo, Bytedance, Gusto, Unity, Okta, dbt, Modern Treasury, EPIC Games, Hotel Tonight and Zillow.
- What is the most important thing parents can do to ensure that despite wealth, their children remain grounded and ambitious?
- Why does Brad, despite being a billionaire, still live in a modest house and not spend on the excesses of life? How does Brad embrace essentialism with wealth?
Cyan Banister is one of the most successful and renowned early-stage investors in the last decade. Her portfolio includes the likes of SpaceX, Uber, Affirm, Opendoor Postmates, Niantic and Thumbtack to name a few.
- Why did Cyan used to hate money? Why was she "anti-capitalist"?
- How does Cyan approach risk management today? Why does she invest every dollar she makes back into the ecosystem?
George Zachary is a General Partner @ CRV, one of the nation's oldest and most successful early-stage venture capital firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, DoorDash, Dropbox, Niantic and many more.
- What did George learn about how the way people view you changes with your increasing wealth?
- Why does George believe rich people like to hang out with rich people?
Biz Stone is best known as the Co-Founder of Twitter and Medium. Biz is also an investor in the likes of Slack, Square, Intercom, Beyond Meat and Blue Bottle Coffee.
- What does Biz mean when he says, "wealth only serves to amplify the person you are?"
20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP
Vaibhav Sahgal is VP of Consumer Product @ Reddit where he has been for close to 5 years. Prior to his leading consumer product, Vaibhav spent 3 years as Head of Growth at Reddit. Before Reddit, Vaibhav spent an incredible 8 years at Zynga across different roles including Director of Product and GM for "Words with Friends".
In Today's Episode with Vaibhav Sahgal We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Product + Growth:
- How did Vaibhav come to lead some of the best growth orgs in the world at both Reddit and Zynga?
- What are 1-2 of Vaibhav's biggest takeaways from working with Mark Pincus @ Zynga?
- What is the most painful growth lesson that Vaibhav learned that he is also pleased to have learned?
2.) WTF Really is "Growth":
- How does Vaibhav define growth today? What is it not?
- How does Vaibhav fundamentally differentiate between value connection and value creation?
- Is growth an art or a science? What tactics have died a death? What remains stronger than ever?
3.) Hiring Your Growth Team:
- How does Vaibhav advise founders on when is the right time to hire their first growth professionals?
- Where should they sit within the org? In product? In marketing? Standalone growth team?
- What are the biggest mistakes Vaibhav sees founders make when hiring their first growth hires?
4.) The Interview Process:
- How does Vaibhav structure the interview process for all new growth hires? What are the steps?
- What are the must-ask questions when hiring for growth? What are good answers?
- How can founders use case studies and data to determine the quality of a growth candidate?
5.) The Onboarding and Integration:
- What is the optimal onboarding process for all new growth hires?
- What are signs in the first 3 days that a growth hire will vs will not work out?
- What can leaders do to ensure growth hires are integrated with the rest of the teams?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when onboarding growth hires?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Vaibhav's Favourite Book: Andrew Chen: The Cold Start Problem
20VC: Uber's Journey to Becoming the Most Valuable Private Tech Company in History, Raising $3BN From Saudi in Just 60 Days, Uber's $30BN Mistake in Food Delivery, Why Recent Uber M&A Will be the Worst in Tech & Mastering Negotiations and Deal-Making with
Emil Michael is the Former Chief Business Officer at Uber and is commonly referred to as Travis Kalanick's right-hand man. At Uber, Emil was instrumental in raising nearly $15BN from some of the largest investors in the world, making Uber the most valuable private tech company ever. Emil was also core to Uber's China strategy and led deals with Didi and Baidu. Before Uber, Emil spent 9 years at TellMe Networks where he was central to Microsoft raising their acquisition price from $300M to $800M. Emil is also an advisor to some of the greats including Raf @ GoPuff, Zach @ Codeacademy, Jared @ Fundera and many more.
In Todays Episode with Emil Michael:
1.) From Politics to Travis's right-hand man at Uber:
- How did Emil make his way into the world of startups with TellMe networks?
- Harvard, Stanford, Goldman, Politics, which career shaped Emil the most?
- When Emil looks at his cohort of Ali and Hadi Partovi, Alfred Lin, and many others, what did they have that Emil believes is core to their success today?
2.) Negotiations 101: A Masterclass:
- What is Emil's framework for dealmaking? How has it changed over time?
- What are the single most important elements to remember when making deals?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make when negotiating?
- What is the right way to use leverage in negotiations?
- How can one handle an opponent that is emotional or irrational when negotiating?
- How did Emil make Steve Ballmer @ Microsoft increase his offer for TellMe from $300M to $800M?
- What is the single deal that Emil made that he regrets the most?
3.) Uber: The Journey to the Most Valuable Private Company:
- Why were Emil and Travis removed from Uber? Does Emil think it was fair?
- Is it true that Travis lost the support of the team? How did his removal take place?
- How did the Uber China deal go down with Didi? What got DiDi over the line on the deal?
- How did Emil raise $3BN from Saudi in just 60 days with Travis needing to attend only one meeting?
4.) Uber: The Review:
- How does Emil assess the management and performance of Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi?
- If Travis and Emil were still in charge, what would Emil have done differently?
- Why does Emil think Dara and Uber have made a $30BN mistake in food delivery?
- Why does Emil think Postmates, Careem, and others have been the worst acquisitions in tech?
5.) The Venture Landscape:
- Emil entered the world of VC with Coatue, why did he decide that VC was not for him?
- How does Emil analyze the VC landscape today? Who are risers? Who are fallers?
- What are the single biggest points of misalignment between founder and VC?
- What are the core improvements that Emil would like to see made to the VC world?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Emil's Favourite Book: Sun Tzu: The Art of War
20VC: Why 75% of Active Investors Will Disappear in the Next Few Years, The Death of "So So" Venture Firms is Coming, The Rise of Blackstone of Venture Firms and What That Does To Venture Returns, How the World of LPs is Broken and more with Kyle Harrison
Kyle Harrison is a General Partner @ Contrary and one of my favorite writers on the venture space with his blog, Investing 101 2.0. Before joining Contrary, Kyle worked in the ranks of some of the biggest and best names in venture, starting with a spell at TCV before moving to Coatue and making his final stop at Index. Across firms, Kyle has led or participated in investments including Ramp, Pave, Anduril, Gitlab, Databricks and Snowflake to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Kyle Harrison:
1.) From Film Lover to Technology Investor:
- How Kyle went from creating a professional services marketplace around film to joining the ranks of TCV and investing in breakout technology companies?
- What was Kyle's biggest takeaway from TCV? How did it impact his mindset?
- What was Kyle's biggest lesson from working with the Laffont's at Coatue? How did it change the way he thinks about price and market sizing?
- Why was Index such a transformational school of venture for Kyle? How did that experience change how he thinks about what it takes to be a great investor?
2.) The Death of So So Venture Firms:
- Why does Kyle believe many of the "so so" venture firms will die?
- What does Kyle believe makes a venture firm "so so"? Who is vulnerable then?
- How does Kyle think the lifespan and "death" of venture firms will change in the next decade?
3.) The Rise of "The Blackstone of Venture Firms":
- How does Kyle define "the Blackstone of VCs"? Who are they?
- With increasing fund sizes will we see VC returns denigrate to PE returns?
- How is the world of family offices changing the venture environment? Will we see more or less money flood into venture over the coming years?
- Of the incumbents, who has done "The Blackstone" model well? Why? Who has failed? Why?
4.) The Rise of Community in Venture:
- What does "community" really mean to Kyle? Why does he believe it will play such a prominent role in the way the best invest in the future?
- How have existing players failed to build, sustain and productize communities?
- What are the best opportunities for new entrants to create and utilise communities to invest?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Kyle's Favourite Book: Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet
20 Sales: How To Structure The Interview Process for All Sales Reps, The Must-Ask Questions When Identifying Potential Sales Talent & The 3 Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Their First Reps with Lauren Schwartz, VP of Enterprise Sales @ Fivetran
Lauren Schwartz is Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Fivetran, the leading platform for modern data movement. She has helped scale Fivetran's enterprise business from its infancy to a team of nearly 100, while more than tripling enterprise revenues. Previously, Lauren spent close to 4 years at Segment where she started as the first female AE and ultimately built and led sales teams in enterprise and growth. Lauren earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business after 6 years at Google where her enterprise sales career began.
In Today's Episode with Lauren Schwartz:
1.) How Being Rejected as an Eighth Grader Can Lead to World Class Sales Leader:
- How Lauren made her way into the world of enterprise sales with Google?
- Why, for a while, Lauren wanted to get away from the label of a salesperson? Why "salesperson" does not do the job of sales justice?
- Why does Lauren believe that one of the core traits the best salespeople have is being able to cope with rejection? How has Lauren been rejected? How did she respond? What changed their mind?
2.) The Sales Playbook: What, Who, When:
- How does Lauren define the term "sales playbook"? What are the nuances?
- Does Lauren believe the founder should always be the first sales rep? What are the core signs that a founder is now ready to bring in their first sales hires?
- What are the 3 biggest mistakes founders make when they hire their first sales reps?
- What are the core traits that the best early sales reps have?
3.) The Hiring Process: Building the Best Sales Team:
- How does Lauren structure the hiring process?
- What are the most unconventional but useful questions Lauren uses to determine the depth and quality of potential sales hires?
- What are the glaring red flags that Lauren looks for in this interview process?
- How does Lauren use case studies and deal reviews in the interview process to determine the quality of a candidate?
4.) Scaling the Machine: The Onboarding Process:
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when onboarding sales reps?
- How should sales team onboarding be structured?
- What materials should the founder have in place for the sales team to learn from on Day 1?
- How can sales leaders ensure new sales team members engage across functions?
20VC: Dropbox's Drew Houston on Leadership; Hiring, Firing, Breakpoints in Company Scaling, The Story of Nearly Getting Acquired by Steve Jobs and Apple, How Founders Should Think Through Potential Investors and Acquisitions
Drew Houston is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Dropbox, for over 700 million users and +600,000 teams, Dropbox is the choice for storing and sharing their most important files. Prior to their IPO in 2018, Drew raised funding from some of the best including Sequoia, Index, Greylock, and IVP to name a few. Drew also currently sits on the board of Meta and is a seasoned angel with a portfolio including Gusto, Scale AI, Pilot and Superhuman to name a few. Prior to Dropbox, Drew founded Accolade, a bootstrapped online SAT prep company he started while in college.
In Today's Episode with Drew Houston We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Startups and Y Combinator:
- How did Drew make his way into the world of startups with an SAT prep planning startup?
- How did Drew convince Paul Graham to accept him and Dropbox into Y Combinator?
- If we are all a function of our pasts, what is Drew running towards and what is he running away from?
2.) Drew Houston: The Leader and CEO:
- How does Drew define "high performance" today?
- How would Drew describe his style of management? How has it changed over time?
- How did taking an enneagram test change how Drew leads? What did he learn?
- What have been Drew's biggest hiring mistakes? What mistakes does he see others make?
- What have been Drew's biggest lessons in how to let people go the right way?
3.) Crucible Moments: Getting Sequoia, Acquisitions and Steve Jobs:
- How did Drew convince the Sequoia team to invest in Dropbox? How did it all start in a rug shop thanks to Pejman Nozad @ Pear?
- Has Drew had opportunities to sell the company? Why did he not take them? How does he advise founders on the decision to sell or not?
- How did Drew come to meet Steve Jobs? How did the meeting go?
4.) Drew Houston: AMA:
- Is Dropbox a B2B company or a B2C company?
- What is the hardest element of Drew's role with Dropbox?
- What has Drew recently changed his mind on?
- When press cycles were against him, how did Drew get through those tough times?
- What is Drew's biggest takeaway from joining the Meta board?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Drew's Fave Book: High Output Management by And
20VC: Why The CEO Should Make As Few Decisions As Possible, The Trade-Off Between Freedom and Raising Big From VCs & Why Our Jobs Are Not As Hard As We Think and How To Assess Talent and Potential As a Result with Tristan Handy, Founder & CEO @ dbt Labs
Tristan Handy is the Founder and CEO @ dbt, a data transformation tool that enables data analysts and engineers to transform, test and document data in the cloud data warehouse. To date, Tristan has raised over $400M from the likes of Sequoia, Altimeter, Coatue, ICONIQ and GV with the latest funding round valuing the company at $4.2BN. Prior to founding dbt, Tristan was the VP Marketing @ RJ Metrics and got his break in the world of startups through former 20VC guest, Anthony Casalena with a Director of Operations role at Squarespace.
In Today's Episode with Tristan Handy:1.) Entry into Startups:
- How did Tristan make his way into the world of startups with his first role at Squarespace?
- How did Tristan's time with Squarespace impact how he builds dbt today?
- What does Tristan know now that he wishes he had known when he founded dbt?
2.) Our Jobs Are Not That Hard:
- Why does Tristan believe that our jobs are not that hard?
- If going down this line, how does Tristan hire? What does he look for? How does he test for it?
- When does experience matter? When does it not matter?
3.) dbt: The Company
- Why does Tristan believe that remote work does not work?
- What financial packages have dbt put in place to allow their employees this physical interaction?
- What does Tristan believe is the hardest element of building a hybrid company? When does everything start to break?
- What are the biggest lessons Tristan and dbt have taken from Gitlab?
4.) Tristan: The Leader
- How does Tristan conduct and execute on the best performance reviews?
- How does Tristan create an environment of safety where people feel they can be honest and transparent?
- What are the elements that you cannot be transparent on? Where does transparency break down?
5.) Trading Freedom for Scale:
- dbt could have been a small and super profitable company, why did Tristan decide to trade off the freedom and raise big from VCs?
- How did Tristan raise over $414M without ever talking about an efficiency metric?
- Is Tristan concerned about living into the $4.2BN valuation in what is a very different time?
- With the benefit of hindsight, is Tristan pleased he went big and raised venture?
20 Product: Spotify's Gustav Söderström on Why Product is 100% Science and 0% Art, Why You Should Look at the Competition and then Do Something Completely Different & Why Talk is Cheap and Product Teams Should Do More of it; Structuring the Best Debate
Gustav Söderström is Spotify’s Chief Research & Development Officer. He has the CPO & CTO responsibility, overseeing the product, design, data, and engineering teams at Spotify and is responsible for Spotify’s product strategy. Gustav is also an entrepreneur and investor who has founded and sold startups that he co-founded to Meta’s Oculus in 2014 and then also his first startup which he co-founded and led as CEO, up until their acquisition by Yahoo! Gustav is also the host of the podcast mini-series -- Spotify: A product story -- which offers a glimpse into the decisions that have guided Spotify’s product evolution.
In Today's Episode with Gustav Söderström1.) From Selling Companies to Yahoo and Meta to Leading Spotify's Product:
- How did Gustav first make his way into the world of tech and startups?
- What was it that made Gustav so compelled to join Daniel Ek and build Spotify?
- What does Gustav know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
2.) "Never Fight a Macro Wind":
- What does Gustav mean when he says "never fight a macro wind"?
- What models can product leaders construct to measure the size, importance and timing of a macro wind?
- What can product leaders do to change the macro wind and have it blowing in their back and not their face?
- When did Gustav experience this? What did he change to have the wind blow in his back? How did this alter his mindset and mentality?
3.) "Do Something Completely Different to the Competition":
- Why does Gustav believe startups should do the complete opposite to the competition? Does this change if your competition is other startups vs incumbents?
- What is the story of how Spotify did the complete opposite to Youtube? Why did it work?
- On the flip side, when did Spotify do the complete opposite and it did not work out?
4.) Mastering the Learning Process:
- How does Gustav approach the learning process for all new skills and disciplines?
- Why does Gustav believe that all technology leaders have to be the master of their domain? How did this lead to Gustav going back to University to study machine learning?
- What are the single biggest mistakes people make in the learning process?
5.) Gustav: The Product Leader:
- Why does Gustav believe that product is 100% science and not art?
- What does Gustav mean when he says, "talk is cheap and so we should do more of it"?
- How does Gustav structure internal debates? Who sets the agenda? Who is invited? What makes a good vs a bad internal debate?
- How does Gustav make everyone feel safe? What can leaders do to ensure an environment where everyone feels they can debate with the boss?
6.) Spotify: The Crucible Moments:
- What is Gustav's favourite near-death experience in the Spotify journey?
- Why did Spotify decide to make the move into podcasting and video? How does that additional complexity change the product paradigm of an audio-only platform?
- How do the single most impactful platforms in the world approach market expansion and when to add new products?
- What are the best companies in the world not merely technology innovations but also business model innovations?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/20vc Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!
20VC: Altimeter's Brad Gerstner on Why Supercycles and the Powerlaw is the Most Important Thing In Investing, Why Portfolio Diversification is the Opposite of Risk Mitigation and The #1 Question Brad Asks All New Recruits
Brad Gerstner is the Founder and CEO of Altimeter, a life-cycle technology investment firm that manages public and private portfolios. Brad has personally participated in more than 100 IPOs as a sponsor, anchor, and investor. Brad’s notable deals include Snowflake, Mongo, Bytedance, Gusto, Unity, Okta, dbt, Modern Treasury, EPIC Games, Hotel Tonight, and Zillow. Prior to founding Altimeter, Brad was a 3-time co-founder where he sold all three businesses (to IAC, Google, and Marchex), a founding principal at General Catalyst; a securities lawyer, a former Deputy Secretary of State of Indiana, and a pilot.
In Today's Episode with Brad Gerstner We Discuss:
1.) From Humble Beginnings in Indiana to 100 IPOs:
- When did Brad realize his original love of finance and entrepreneurship?
- What one single question does Brad ask all potential new recruits to determine if they have hustle?
- What does Brad know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career?
2.) The Power Law and Supercycles:
- What is a power law? Why is it the single most important thing in investing?
- How do the best investors in the world build a framework around supercycles?
- How does Brad approach market sizing? How does Brad think about market creation when aligning that to his thesis of investing in power laws?
- How does Brad determine if a large opportunity is a "super-cyle" or a short, time-stamped fad that is unsustainable? How does Brad assess the importance of market timing?
3.) Building Anti-Fragile Portfolios:
- Portfolio Construction: Why does Brad disagree that the answer to risk mitigation is portfolio diversification? How many companies is enough companies for a diverse portfolio?
- Price Sensitivity: How does Brad reflect on his own relationship to price? How does this process and mindset change on re-investments? What is needed for Brad to re-invest?
- Time to Exit: How does Brad analyze when is the right time to exit a position? What are the single biggest mistakes people make when it comes to timing their exit?
4.) The Venture Landscape: Today, What is Happening?
- Why does Brad believe what has happened over the last 24 months is a great disservice to founders?
- What are the biggest examples of a complete lack of investor discipline?
- Why does Brad believe that for all positions valued over $500M, we should apply a 20% discount?
- Is today's pricing actually just the new normal? How has the public market pricing impacted the deployment of growth stage checks? How will this play out in the next 12 months?
- Why does Brad believe there is "not blood on the streets yet"? How does the speed of interest rate change impact our ecosystem so dramatically?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Brad's Favourite Book: The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life
20VC: Kevin Weil on The Biggest Lessons from Leading Product at Instagram and Twitter | How Working With Kevin Systrom Impacted His Approach To Product | 3 Things Instagram Did To Make Stories So Successful and Why Investing Makes Operators Better at Thei
Kevin Weil is President of Product and Business @ Planet and Operator in Residence @ Scribble Ventures. In the past, Kevin has been Head of Product at Twitter, Instagram, and Novi (the digital currency effort within Facebook). During his seven years at Twitter, he helped the company scale from 40 to 4000 people and from $0 to $2B in revenue. He then moved to Instagram in 2016 to lead the product and data teams and led through an inflection point as Instagram grew from 400M to over 1B users, including launching Instagram Stories. Kevin then co-founded Diem (formerly known as Libra) and Novi and built both for three years before moving to Planet in 2021. If that was not enough, Kevin is also on the board of Strava, the Nature Conservancy, and the Black Product Managers Network.
In Today's Episode with Kevin Weil We Discuss:
1.) Lessons From Leading Product for Instagram and Twitter:
- What does Kevin believe makes Instagram so inherently good at product? How did leading product for Instagram change the way Kevin thinks and operates?
- What are 1-2 of Kevin's biggest lessons from working with Kevin Systrom, Instagram's Founder?
- What are the biggest takeaways for Kevin from leading product at Twitter?
2.) Launching Products, Customer Discovery and Product Sessions:
- What were Kevin's biggest learnings from launching Instagram stories? How did Kevin's conviction impact the product building and success of Instagram stories?
- How does Kevin advise founders on the best way to approach customer discovery? What are the best questions to ask to reveal the truth?
- How does Kevin approach product testing today? Why does Kevin not like softly softly testing new products?
3.) Kevin Weil: Leadership 101
- What are some of the biggest leadership mistakes that Kevin made in his time at Twitter?
- How does Kevin approach decision-making frameworks? How does one balance the speed vs the quality of the decision?
- What makes a great product strategy? Where do so many go wrong in their product strategy?
- How do the best leaders communicate with their team? How does this change over time?
- What is Kevin's preferred medium and style of communication with his teams?
4.) Kevin Weil: The Athlete, Father and Husband:
- Kevin is an ultra-marathon runner, what does his training routine look like?
- What 1-2 changes has Kevin made that have had the biggest impact on performance?
- How does Kevin manage, investing, advising, training and being a father and husband?
20VC: The Rippling Memo: Bedrock's Geoff Lewis on The Conviction Building Process to Write a $200M Check and Co-Lead Rippling's Series D | Why No Competitor Can Out Execute Rippling | Uncapped SAFE's Why You Should Never Do Them and Why Geoff Broke The Ru
Geoff Lewis is a Founder and Managing Partner of Bedrock, one of the breakout and new venture firms of the last decade, famously in search of narrative violations. He serves or has served on the Board of Directors for companies including Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), Nubank (NYSE: NU), Epirus, and Vercel. Additionally, he has led sizable early-stage venture capital investments in dozens of companies including Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), Tilray (NASDAQ: TLRY), Leafly (NASDAQ: LFLY), Wish (NASDAQ: WISH), Workrise, and Rippling. Prior to founding Bedrock, Geoff served as a partner at Founders Fund for several years.
In Today's Episode with Geoff Lewis:
1.) Meeting Parker Conrad: A Generational Defining Entrepreneur:
- How did Geoff first come to meet Parker Conrad, over a decade prior to making the first Rippling investment?
- What was it about Parker that compelled Geoff so much in the early days?
- How did Geoff analyze the chip on Parker's shoulder from Zenefits? How does he believe it has driven him with Rippling?
2.) Searching for Narrative Violations in Rippling:
- Why does Geoff believe Parker himself is a "narrative violation"?
- What does Geoff believe is the foundational narrative violation in the way Parker is building Rippling?
- Rippling has a large portion of its team as former founders, how does Geoff believe this impacts the culture of Rippling?
- What does Geoff believe are the single biggest barriers to Rippling being the "App Store for Business"?
- On the upside case, if Rippling goes right, how big could this be?
3.) Rippling: The Financing:
- What has been Geoff's biggest lesson on price and price sensitivity that he has learned through Rippling?
- Why does Geoff never do uncapped notes? Why did Geoff break that rule with Rippling?
- What gave Geoff the conviction to write Bedrock's largest ever check in Rippling's Series D?
- What was the massive mistake that both Geoff and Bedrock made in not financing their Series C?
4.) Geoff Lewis: The Investor
- What single trait does Geoff believe all generational defining founders share? How does he test for it?
- Does Geoff believe he has a chip on his shoulder today? How has his relationship to the chip on his shoulder changed over time?
- To what extent does Geoff engage in outcome scenario planning when making investments?
- What upside scenario plan does Geoff need to be able to see for him to make an investment?
- Has Geoff ever lost money in an investment? What were his takeaways from this experience?
20VC: Rippling's Parker Conrad on The Four Main Benefits From Building a Compound Startup | Why There Should Never Be a Trade-Off Between Speed and Quality | How Zenefits Gave Parker a Chip on the Shoulder and Why That is so Important?
Parker Conrad is the Founder & CEO @ Rippling, the company that lets you easily manage your employees’ payroll, benefits, expenses, devices, apps & more—in one place. To date, Parker has raised over $697M for Rippling from some of the best including Sequoia, Founders Fund, Greenoaks, Bedrock, Kleiner Perkins and Initialized to name a few. Prior to founding Rippling, Parker was the Co-Founder and CEO @ Zenefits and if that was not enough, Parker is also a prominent angel having invested in Census, Pulley and then also AgentSync and TrueNorth, alongside 20VC Fund.
In Today's Episode with Parker Conrad:
1.) Entry in Startups and Zenefits:
- How did Parker make his way into the world of startups?
- How did Parker end up being kicked out of his own company, Zenefits? How did he respond?
- How did that experience of being kicked out of Zenefits inspire him to build Rippling?
2.) Parker Conrad: The Leader:
- How does Parker define "high performance"? How would Parker describe his leadership style today?
- Why does Parker fundamentally disagree that with speed comes a trade-off in quality? How does Parker ensure Rippling does all things fast and to the best of its ability?
- How would Parker break down his decision-making framework today? How does he decide what to prioritize vs not? How does he decide what to delegate vs not?
- What are Parker's biggest insecurities in leadership today? How have they changed over time? What does Parker do to combat and mitigate them?
3.) Rippling: The Compound Startup
- How does Parker define a compound startup?
- What types of business do this verticalized approach work for vs not work for?
- What does Parker believe are the 4 core benefits of this approach?
- What are the single biggest challenges of building a compound startup?
4.) Rippling: The Economics:
- How does this compound startup approach impact ability to cross-sell? How much net new ARR today comes from cross-sell?
- What have been some of Rippling's biggest lessons on what it takes to do cross-sell so effectively?
- How do the margin profiles differ across their different products? How have the margin profiles changed over time?
- Why does Parker not believe that most startup margins are accurate?
- How does the compound startup approach change the amount invested in R&D? How does that impact the fundraising requirements of the business?
5.) Rippling: The Partner Ecosystem:
- How does Rippling think about building out the best partner ecosystem? What will it take for that to work?
- Why do Rippling want to introduce services that compete with their own products? Why do they not only build their own?
- How do the margins differ when comparing revenue share on partner products vs Rippling products?
- What are the single biggest barriers to this partner ecosystem working?
20VC: Lessons from Alfred Lin and Ron Conway | Why the World Does Not Want Your Startup To Exist and How the Best Founders Fight It | How To Build Moats and Defensibility Against Large Incumbents with Tarek Mansour, Founder & CEO @ Kalshi
Tarek Mansour is the Founder and CEO @ Kalshi, the first regulated exchange where you can trade directly on the outcome of events. Tarek has raised funding from some of the best including Alfred Lin @ Sequoia, Ali Partovi @ Neo, Ron Conway, Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis. Before founding Kalshi, Tarek worked at the likes of Citadel, Palantir and Goldman Sachs, in various different roles.
In Today's Episode with Tarek Mansour We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Startups:
- How did Tarek make his way from a nerdy kid in Lebanon to having his first startup funded by Sequoia and billionaires likes Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis?
- How did his mother's continuous desire for excellence change Tarek's mindset?
- What are the biggest lessons that Tarek took from his mother's strict parenting and how did he apply them to how he manages the team at Kalshi today?
2.) What it Takes to Succeed:
- Why does Tarek believe that the world does not want your startup to exist?
- In that case, what are the core traits that founders need to fight this headwind?
- Does Tarek believe in work-life balance? What are some of the struggles of this?
- Does Tarek believe you should work on your weaknesses or double down on your strengths?
3.) Building the Team:
- Does Tarek believe that naivete is a strength or a weakness? At what point does it change between being a strength to being a weakness?
- Does Tarek prefer to hire more senior experienced people or younger hustlers with more energy?
- What have been the single biggest hiring mistakes that Tarek has made? How has it changed his approach to team building?
- What is the one single trait that if Tarek sees, he will not hire?
- How does Tarek make the interview process both fun but different and challenging?
- Where do so many founders make mistakes in how they construct the hiring process?
4.) Tarek Mansour: AMA:
- What have been the single biggest lessons from working with Ron Conway and Alfred Lin?
- What are some of Tarek's biggest insecurities in leadership today?
- What does Tarek know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his time with Kalshi?
- What would Tarek most like to change about the world of startups?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Tarek's Favourite Book: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It
20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop
Kipp Bodnar is the Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot, where he sets HubSpot’s global inbound marketing strategy. Prior to his role as CMO, Kipp served as VP of Marketing at HubSpot, overseeing all demand generation activity worldwide and building out the EMEA and APAC marketing teams. Kipp serves as a marketing advisor for SimplyMeasured, InsightSquared and Guidebook. Kipp is the co-author of “The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More.”
In Today's Episode with Kipp Bodnar We Discuss:
1.) The Journey to CMO @ Hubspot:
- How Kipp made his way into the world of marketing and came to be CMO @ Hubspot?
- What does Kipp know now that he wishes all CMOs knew when they started?
2.) Choosing The Channel:
- How does Kipp advise founders on which channel they should focus on? What is the framework which will tell them which channel is right for them?
- How many different channels should they try? How focussed should they be? Should they have independent teams for each channel?
- How do the best founders allocate resources to new channels? How do you know when one is not working and you need to stop? When do you just need to keep going and persisting?
- What have been some of Kipp's biggest mistakes when entering new channels?
3.) Product Marketing, Brand Marketing and Founders Marketing:
- How does Kipp advise founders who say that, "social and personal brand is just not for them"?
- In what two ways does Kipp believe that all businesses are constrained?
- Does Kipp agree that the state of product marketing has never been worse? What is truly great product marketing to Kipp?
- How does Kipp distinguish between good and great brand marketing? How has what it takes to be great at brand marketing changed over time?
4.) The Best Marketing People:
- What are signs of clear 10x performers in marketing?
- What advice would Kipp give to someone aspiring to be a CMO? What mistakes do 95% make that they should change?
- How do the best CMOs manage up and manage their team? Why does Kipp compare the role of the CMO to the general manager in NFL teams?
- Why does Kipp believe the role of the CMO is a lonely one? What are the hardest elements?
- What framework for learning does Kipp use to learn all new topics? What works? What does not?
20VC: Clubhouse Founder Paul Davison on What Went Right and What Went Wrong | What Does Clubhouse Do Now To Regain Mindshare? | Why Clubhouse is not a Content Platform? | What is the Next Wave of Consumer Social and Does Web3 Play a Role? |
Paul Davison is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Clubhouse, the startup that believes people are at the centre of every moment, providing a platform to talk with friends and meet new friends. To date, Paul has raised over $310M with Clubhouse from a16z, DST, Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, and many more. Prior to co-founding Clubhouse, Paul was the Founder of Highlight, a location-based consumer social service backed by Benchmark. Before Highlight, Paul actually spent time at Benchmark as an EiR.
In Today's Episode with Paul Davison We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Startups:
- How Paul came to found Highlight in the early days of consumer social?
- What elements worked with Highlight that he took with him to Clubhouse? Which elements did not work that he learned from?
2.) Clubhouse: What Worked:
- What does Paul believe are the primary reasons that Clubhouse grew so fast?
- What metrics does Paul use to determine true product-market-fit and stickiness?
- What is good retention on Day 1, Day 7 and Day 30? How important is 12-month retention?
3.) Clubhouse: What Did Not Work:
- COVID: Does Paul believe that Clubhouse was the COVID antidote we all needed? How sustainable is that if so? What trends make it more sustainable?
- Live Does Not Work: How does Paul respond to Mike Mignano's comments that "live does not work"? Why does Paul believe that Clubhouse is not a content platform?
- Quality: Does Paul agree that the quality of live is not as good as the quality of produced content? Is that a problem? If the quality is worse, what is significantly better about live?
4.) The Future of Social:
- Does Paul agree that we are seeing the disregard of the once hailed social graph in favour of a new era of recommendation media? What does this mean for Clubhouse?
- With the rise of the likes of BeReal, how does Paul think about the importance of authenticity in the next wave of consumer social?
- How does Paul forsee Web3 and the next generation of consumer social being interlinked? What will it take for Web3 to break through? What are the core barriers today?
- Does Paul agree that the best consumer social tools empower creators with Superhuman powers?
5.) Lessons on CEOship:
- What are Paul's biggest lessons on successful company building?
- How does Paul manage the criticism and negativity of the press personally?
- How does Paul maintain the morale internally when the press cycle is so negative?
- How has Paul adapted himself to gain a thicker skin and not pay as much attention?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Paul's Favourite Book: Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico
Julio Vasconcellos is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Atlantico, one of the leading early-stage funds in Latin America. Prior to the world of venture, Julio got his break in the world of startups as Facebook’s first country lead for Brazil. Julio then went on to co-found Peixe Urbano, a company he scaled to over 1,200 employees and $100M+ in revenue. Post the sale of Peixe Urbano, Julio became an EiR @ Benchmark Capital where he met Scott Belsky. Scott and Julio went on to co-found Prefer, a Benchmark backed company transforming the future of work. If that was not enough, Julio has a stellar angel track record with prior investments in the likes of Ipsy and Quinto Andar.
In Today's Episode with Julio Vasconcellos We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Startups:
- What are 1-2 of Julio's biggest takeaways from being Facebook's first hire in Brazil?
- What does Julio know now that he wishes he had known at the start of his career in startups?
2.) Lessons from Scaling Peixe Urbano to $100M in Revenue:
- How does Julio advise founders on when is the right time to launch a second product or market?
- How does Julio advise founders on the right balance between growth and unit economics?
- When times are tougher, should founders cut fast or cut slower? What is irreversible?
- What are the single biggest and worst things to break in hyper-scaling?
3.) Investing: Why Not Enough Play To Win:
- What is more important, a great market or a great founder?
- Why do not enough VCs today play to win? If they do not play to win, what do they play to do?
- Why is greed the number one enemy of venture returns?
- What are the single biggest investing lessons Julio has learned from Benchmark Founder, Andy Rachleff? How have they impacted his investing mindset?
- Why does Julio believe you can have a close relationship with founders as an angel and not a VC?
- How did Julio's approach to investing change with the transition from angel to VC?
- Does Julio believe that boards really add any value? If so, how?
- What is Julio's biggest investing hit? How did it change his approach?
- What is his biggest miss? How did that impact his mindset?
4.) The Future for LATAM:
- Is Julio as concerned as I am by the removal of growth stage capital from the LATAM ecosytem?
- Does this mean a higher mortality rate for LATAM companies? How does Julio advise founders?
- How did COVID adoption of technology in LATAM fundamentally differ to the US?
20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb
David Lieb is one of the product OGs of the last decade. As the founder of Bump David pioneered how over 150M users shared data, contacts and more before the company was acquired by Google. At Google, David took this one step further by creating Google Photos, which he has led with immense success for the last 9 years. In the last few weeks, David announced his latest move, to join Y Combinator, one of the world's leading accelerators as a Visiting Group Partner. If that was not enough, David also has a stellar angel portfolio with the likes of Rippling, Flexport, Tally, Maven and many more.
In Today's Episode with David Lieb We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Product:
- How did an idea at business school turn into Bump and ultimately the creation of Google Photos?
- What are the single biggest mistakes David made with the early Bump product?
- What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the start of Bump?
2.) Scaling the Team Alongside the Product:
- What is product-market fit to David? What is it not?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when they think they have it?
- What should founders do first and most importantly, when they do have it?
- Why does David believe individual user data is more important than relying on data?
3.) Product: Art or Science:
- Why does the description we have for product managers need to change?
- How does David determine when to act on customer feedback vs stick to the current product plan?
- What is the right way to do customer discovery? What questions are best to ask? Where do founders make the biggest mistakes in customer discovery?
- Ultimately, is product more art or science? Is this changing with ever-increasing data?
4.) Product: The Process:
- How does David conduct product reviews? What are the biggest mistakes founders and product leaders make when managing product reviews?
- Who is invited? Who sets the agenda? Who determines who is accountable for what?
- How do product reviews change in a world of Zoom? What is better? What is worse? What can product leaders do to build culture in remote worlds?
- How can product leaders make everyone feel safe and comfortable to share how they feel, regardless of seniority, in product reviews?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
David's Best Performing Investment: Flexport
20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal
Seba Kanovich is the CEO @ dlocal, the #1 payments leader with a single solution focused on Latin America and other emerging markets. In June 2021, dlocal raised $617M in their NASDAQ IPO listing valuing the company at nearly $9BN. Before their IPO, dlocal raised from some of the best including General Atlantic, Bond Capital, and Oren Zeev to name a few. Prior to dlocal, Seba was CEO @ AstroPay, a leading payment solution provider in Emerging Markets.
In Todays Episode with Seba Kanovich We Discuss:
1.) The Journey to CEO of an $8BN Company:
- How Seba made his way to the role of CEO of an $8BN company through dinner at his mother-in-law's house?
- What does Seba know now that he wishes he had known when he first became CEO?
2.) Leadership 101:
- What does "high performance" in business and leadership mean?
- How important are velocity and speed of execution in startups? When should one trade speed for quality? Where is the nuance?
- How does Seba approach prioritization? What framework does he use to determine what to focus on?
- How does Seba think through effective delegation? How can leaders determine what only they can do?
3.) Leadership: The Challenges and Lessons:
- What are Seba's biggest insecurities in leadership today? How does he manage them? How have they changed over time?
- What is the single most painful leadership lesson Seba has learned that he is also pleased to have learned?
- What gets easier with scale as a leader? What gets harder?
- In a scaling organization, what is the first thing to break? What can be done to mitigate this?
4.) The Funding and The IPO:
- Why did dlocal bootstrap for 4 years instead of raise funding? How did that process change their mindset toward capital efficiency? What was good about it? What was bad?
- What are the single biggest advantages great investors can bring to the table?
- Why did Seba decide 2021 was the right time to go public?
- What was the biggest surprise about going public? What is better and what is worse about being a public company?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Seba's Favourite Book: Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret
Eleanor Dorfman is a Sales Leader @ Retool, the company that allows you to build internal tools, remarkably fast. Prior to Retool, Eleanor joined Retool when there were only three account executives and has scaled the sales org sales to over 30 AEs, many SEs, and an entire SDR team. Before Retool, Eleanor was at Segment, where she built out the company’s customer success operations team before pivoting to creating an expansion sales team, renewals team, and a new business sales team. Finally, before Segment, Eleanor made her way into startups, starting as an unpaid intern at Clever, just four years later, Eleanor was Head of Customer Success and Solutions Engineering.
In Today's Episode with Eleanor Dorfman We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Sales from Working with the US Education Department:
- How did Eleanor get her first role as an unpaid intern at Clever?
- What are 1-2 of her biggest takeaways from her time at Segment?
- What are the biggest advantages of sales reps having experience in customer success?
2.) The Sales Playbook:
- How does Eleanor define, "a sales playbook"? When does it need to be created?
- Does it need to be the founder who creates it or can it be a Head of Sales?
- Is it possible to run a PLG and enterprise motion from Day 1? How does this change your sales playbook?
- How does Eleanor advise founders on when is the right time to layer on an enterprise motion, on top of a PLG motion?
3.) Who, What and When: Building the Sales Team
- Should founders hire a Head of Sales first or sales reps first? If sales reps, should founders always hire sales reps in two's?
- How does Eleanor structure the hiring process for all new sales team recruits?
- What are the clearest signals of 10x sales hires? What are red flags in the interview process?
- How does Eleanor use demo's and case studies to determine technical ability?
4.) The First 30, 60 and 90 Days: The Onboarding:
- What is the right structure for all new sales hires to be onboarded?
- Why does Eleanor believe you will always hire your Head of Sales Enablement too late?
- What are the signs that now is the right time to hire your Head of Sales Enablement?
- What tools, materials and resources can founders provide to shorten the ramp time for new AEs?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make in the onboarding of new sales reps?
20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures
Will Quist is a Partner @ Slow Ventures. Over the last decade, the team at Slow Ventures have invested in the earliest rounds of over 500 companies including Robinhood, NextDoor, Airtable, Solana and many more. As for Will, prior to Slow he spent over 8 years at Industry Ventures and before industry, cut his teeth in the world of finance at Banc of America.
In Todays Episode with Will Quist We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Venture:
- How Will made his way from 6th generation San Francisco to Partner @ Slow?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways from his early 1-1s with Don Valentine?
- What does Will know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture with Industry?
2.) WTF Really is Venture Capital?
- Why does Will believe that 95% of venture capital today is not really venture capital?
- What is true venture capital in Will's mind?
- How does Will divide the world of VC into two with; venture classic and new venture?
- How are they different? How are their return profiles different?
3.) The Questions: Discovering Greatness:
- Why does Will believe “for the most part, investors across asset classes are just asking the same questions”?
- What are those questions? What different answers are each looking for?
- What are the 5 core questions that will needs to understand to determine conviction and accurately price an asset?
- How does Will think through and analyze the question when meeting founders of; “what needs to come true for this business to become a great business”?
4.) The Future of Venture Capital:
- How does Will predict the venture capital ecosystem will look in 5 and then 10 years?
- What are the most concerning traits of the venture ecosystem for Will today?
- Who will be the winners of the next decade? Who will be the losers?
- What happens to the crossover funds? What will happen to Tiger?
20VC News: Anchor Founder, Mike Mignano Joins Lightspeed as Partner: The Future of Social Media | Why Clubhouse Has a Challenging Model | Why TikTok Could be a $2TN Company | Why BeReal is Defensible | What Happens To OpenSea in a New World for NFTs
Mike Mignano is a Partner @ Lightspeed, one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snap, Affirm, Epic Games, Mulesoft and more. As for Mike, prior to venture, he was Head of Talk for Spotify where he led the podcast, live, and video businesses for the world’s leading audio streaming platform. Michael came to Spotify through their acquisition of Anchor, a company he co-founded and is credited for democratizing podcasting globally. Mike has also been a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including Cameo, Pipe, Sandbox VR and Stir.
In Today's Episode with Mike Mignano We Discuss:
1.) Exclusive News:
- What exclusive news does Mike have to share today?
- What would Mike most like to change about the way founders experience the product of venture capital? How can VCs be better?
- What is Mike most nervous about in the new role?
2.) The World of Social is Changing Forever:
- Why does Mike believe there has never been a better time for the next social media giant to be born?
- Why are the largest social giants leaving behind the social graph?
- What is recommendation media? Why is it a better business model?
- How does the shift from social graph to recommendation media change the way large social giants operate and interact today?
3.) Startups: Risers, Fallers and Is There Room For Another Giant?
- What does Mike believe Clubhouse did well? What was their undoing?
- Does Mike believe BeReal is defensible? What features make it both sticky and defensible?
- Will TikTok be a $2 trillion dollar company? Will Meta catch TikTok or have they gone too far ahead?
- Will OpenSea be able to sustain and make the market for NFTs, despite crypto crashing?
- Should startups be concerned about large social giants "copying" their features?
- What does true defensibility look like in consumer social today?
4.) Angel Investing: Hits, Misses and Lessons:
- From writing over 50 angel checks, what are the single biggest lessons Mike has learned?
- What has been his biggest hit? How did that change the way he thinks about investing?
- What has been his biggest miss? In what way did that change how he invests?
- What advice does Mike give to all angel investors looking to invest today?
20VC: Arm CEO Rene Haas on How The Best Leaders Make Decisions and The Trade-Off Between Speed and Quality | Leadership Lessons from 7 Years at Nvidia | How Companies Can Retain Speed, Innovation and Agility at Scale
Rene Haas is the CEO @ Arm. The technologies that Arm creates are used in over 230+ Bn devices with everything from sensors to smartphones to servers. In 2016 Softbank made Arm it's largest ever acquisition with a reported price of $32Bn. As for Rene, he was appointed CEO in February 2022 having spent the last 8 years in numerous different roles within the company. Before Arm, Rene was Vice President & General Manager of the Computing Products Business Unit at Nvidia where he enjoyed a very successful 7 years with the team there.
In Today's Episode with Rene Haas We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Tech from Eastman Kodak:
- How did Rene make his way into the world of technology and innovation?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways from his 7 years at Nvidia?
- How did working with Jensen impact his leadership approach and philosophy?
2.) Decision-Making in Leadership:
- What is the single biggest mistake leaders make when making decisions today?
- How does Rene balance the trade-off between speed vs quality of decision?
- At what point does Rene believe leaders have enough data to make a decision?
- What does Rene know now that he wishes he had known when he started on decisions?
3.) Scaling the Org and Remaining Nimble:
- Agile: How does one retain the speed and agility of a startup when one is the size that Arm is today?
- Ambition: How does Rene as a leader inspire the same level of ambition and vision in his team when Arm is as large as it is?
- Risk: How does Rene encourage his teams to take large risks when they have so much more to lose?
- Breakage: What are the first things to break in scaling? What can leaders do to get ahead of them?
4.) Leadership 101:
- What really is strategy? What is it not? What mistakes do all leaders make when it comes to strategy?
- How does Rene define "high performance" in leadership? How has his style of leadership changed over time?
- How does Rene approach vulnerability in leadership? What are the pros and cons?
20Product: Calendly CPO Annie Pearl on Why All PLG Companies Eventually Need to Embrace Enterprise, Why it is Easier to Scale into Enterprise than Visa Versa and the Calendly PLG Playbook; What Works and What Does Not?
Annie Pearl is the CPO @ Calendly, the company that makes scheduling meetings simple and painless. The company now has over 10M users around the world and over 50,000 companies loving the product. As for Annie, before Calendly, Annie led Glassdoor's product vision and user experience, managing a 70 person product and design org. Prior to Glassdoor, Annie led enterprise product teams at Box both before and after their 2015 IPO. If this was not enough, Annie is also on the Board of WorkRamp and Well Health.
In Today's Episode with Annie Pearl We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Product From Consulting:
- How did Annie make her way into the world of product and come to lead product teams at Box and GlassDoor?
- What are 1-2 of her biggest takeaways from her time at Box and GlassDoor? How did they impact her product mindset?
- What does Annie know now that she wishes she had known when she started in product?
2.) PLG vs Enterprise: What, When, How:
- Is it possible to do PLG and top-down enterprise strategy together from Day 1?
- Why does every PLG company eventually have to adopt an enterprise strategy?
- What are the single biggest challenges companies face when moving to enterprise?
- How do founders know when is the right time to make this transition?
- How do founders need to restructure their org to make the transition to enterprise?
3.) Building the Product Bench: Hiring:
- When is the right time to hire your first product leader? What are the core signals?
- What are the core character traits needed for a first product leader?
- How do we specifically structure the interview to test for them?
- Who do we bring into the interview process from other parts of the org?
- Do we do case studies with candidates? If so, how long do they have with the data? What is the difference between good vs great with case studies?
4.) Product Strategy, Reviews and Alignment:
- How does Annie assess how often product strategy should be reviewed? When should it change?
- How does Annie approach post-mortems? What is the right way to structure them?
- How does Annie create alignment between sales and product? Why is this so important?
- What is the single biggest product mistake Annie has made? What did she learn?
20VC: Is Now Really the Best Time to Be Investing? WTF is Happening at Growth Stage Investing? Why VCs Have Gotten Lazy Over the Last 2 Years? Investing Lessons from Hitting with Braze and Missing with Snowflake with Logan Bartlett, Managing Director @ Re
Logan Bartlett is a Managing Director @ Redpoint, a firm with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Nubank, Twilio, Netflix, Snowflake and many more incredible names. As for Logan, at Redpoint he has led investments in the likes of Ramp, Monte Carlo, Cribl, Crossbeam and Acuity MD to name a few. Before joining Redpoint, Logan spent over 5 years with the team at Battery where he made investments in Pendo, Amplitude, Dataiku, Braze and Kustomer.
In Today's Episode with Logan Bartlett We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Venture:
- How Logan made his way into the world of venture joining Battery Ventures?
- What are 1-2 of Logan's biggest takeaways from his time with Battery?
- What does Logan know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture?
2.) The Venture Landscape Today:
- Is now really the best time to be investing? How does Logan compare today to prior vintages? How does this differ when comparing consumer to B2B?
- How does Logan analyze the state of the growth market? Is anyone really doing deals today? If so, what is the discount on price vs last year?
- How do the public markets impact the later stage financings which have disappeared in the last 3 months? How do the later stage financings impact the early stage?
- Does Logan agree that "venture has never been less collaborative as it is today"?
3.) The Role of the Venture Investor:
- Why does Logan believe that VCs have gotten lazy over the last 2 years? Does Logan believe we will see even more GPs at the top retire in the downturn?
- How does Logan analyse his role as a board member today? How has his style changed over time?
- What is the single best board Logan is on? Why that one? Who is the best board member Logan works with? What makes this board member so good?
- How does Logan assess the importance of personal brand in venture today? Why does Logan believe no company should hire PR firms from the early days?
4.) Investing Style and Lessons:
- What has been Logan's single biggest hit as an investor? How did seeing that impact his mindset?
- What has been Logan's biggest miss? How did not doing the investment change how he thinks about making new investments today?
- How does Logan assess his own relationship to price? How has it changed over time?
- As a growth investor today, how important is ownership? How does this change with stage?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Logan's Favourite Book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Logan's Most Recent Investment: AcuityMD
20VC: Bumble's Whitney Wolfe Herd on How The Best Leaders Manage Intense Pressure, How To Think Through Risk vs Reward Frameworks & What it Truly Means to Listen so Your Teams Will Talk
Whitney Wolfe Herd is the Founder and CEO @ Bumble, changing the way people date, find friends, and the perception of meeting online, for the better. Women make the first move. Over an incredible 6 year journey, Whitney has scaled Bumble to a community of over 100 million across six continents. Bumble has facilitated an incredible 1.8 billion first moves as of 2021 and so many more by now. Prior to founding Bumble, Whitney was the Co-Founder and VP of Marketing @ Tinder.
In Todays Episode with Whitney Wolfe Herd We Discuss:
1.) Founding Bumble:
- How Whitney made her way into the world of startups with her co-founding Tinder?
- What happened when Whitney left Tinder in a very public way?
- How did that and the scrutiny that came with it, impact her? How did she change?
2.) CEOship 101:
- What does "High Performance" mean to Whitney?
- What are the biggest benefits and biggest downside of transparency? What are the few things that as a leader, you cannot be transparent about them?
- What does it mean to truly listen as a leader? What are the biggest mistakes leaders make when it comes to listening?
3.) Risk and Pressure in Leadership:
- What is the single moment of highest pressure Whitney has been through in the Bumble journey?
- How does Whitney deal with pressure as a leader today? How has that changed?
- How does Whitney approach risk as a leader today? What is too risky?
- How does Whitney think through her own decision-making framework?
4.) Whitney: The Mother and Wife
- What does Whitney believe makes a truly successful marriage?
- How does Whitney not lose an inch of performance as a public markets CEO and also be an amazing mother to two children under the age of 2?
- What does Whitney know now that she wishes she had known when she started Bumble?
- As a leader and mother, what gets easier with time, what gets harder?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Whitney:
Whitney's Favourite Book: Shantaram
20VC: 10 Lessons on Scaling 20VC to 100M+ Downloads | How To Build an Audience and a Next-Generation Media Company
Over the last 7 years, I have scaled 20VC to 100M+ downloads, and listeners in 117 countries, and all of this with a spend of less than $1,000. Here are 10 of my biggest lessons:
Lesson 1: Persistence: This is a game of who can last the longest.
Lesson 2: Platform Selection: Choose the platform that best aligns to your skills and passion, not the one that is "hottest" at the time.
Lesson 3: Just Start: The biggest reason people fail is because they do not take the first step. The V1 will never be perfect but it will improve. Press publish.
Lesson 4: Consistency: You have to create a habit within your audience. You have to let them know when they should expect your content. This will also creating a forcing function for you to stick to.
Lesson 5: Be Targeted on your Content Topic: Do not be vague. You have to be very specific in the topic you choose. Start very niche. Find your 100 true fans. Expand from there.
Lesson 6: Every Piece of Content is Born Multi-Channel: You do a talk. This is not a single talk. This can be turned into a podcast. Several TikToks. A medium piece. No content is in isolation.
Lesson 7: The Right Ratio Between Creation and Distribution: Do not create content and then press publish and think the work ends there. You have to spend the same amount of time distributing the content as you do creating it.
Lesson 8: Create Champions: In the early days it is all about finding your 100 true fans. DM people that follow you. Make them feel special. They will retain and tell their friends. Create champions.
Lesson 9: Bring People Into the Creation Process: When people feel a part of the creation of content, they will share it actively. Make more people feel part of the creation process.
Lesson 10: Each Channel is Different, Optimise for Them: Different channels require different content types, formats, audio, optimise on a per channel basis.
20VC: Why Market Always Wins Over the Founder & Why I Do Not Do Market Sizing | Why it is not the Best Time to be Investing but it is the Best Time to Have a Fund & The Type of Deals to do Today | Why The Best Founders Have 100 Year Plans with Wes Chan, C
Wes Chan is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at FPV Ventures, a $450M early-stage fund, launched earlier this year. Wes is an investor in five $10B+ "decacorns," his most notable being Canva where he is a member of the board of directors and led the Series A and C rounds. Wes also wrote the first or very early check into Plaid, Flexport, Gusto, Lucid, and RobinHood. Before FPV Wes was a Managing Director at Felicis Ventures and before Felicis Wes founded GV’s seed investing program. If that was not enough, as an operator, Wes co-founded Google Analytics and Google Voice and holds 18 US patents for his work in creating Google AdWords.
In Today's Episode with Wes Chan
1.) From Founding Google Analytics to Venture:
- How did Wes make his way from founding Google Voice and Google Analytics to starting GV's seed investing program?
- What are 1-2 of the single biggest product takeaways from working closely with Larry and Sergey @ Google?
- How did Wes make his way from Google to Felicis and scaling the firm with Aydin Senkut?
2.) Market vs Founder: Why Market Sizing is BS:
- Why does Wes believe that the market always wins over the founder?
- That said, what does Wes mean when he says "the best founders have 100 year plans?"
- How does Wes question and analyse 100 year plans? What makes the best? What makes the worst?
- Why does Wes not do market sizing? Why does Wes not do outcome scenario planning?
- What does Wes believe is the biggest fallacy of outcome scenario planning?
3.) The Venture Landscape:
- Does Wes believe that now is really the best time to be investing?
- Why does Wes believe there are some treacherous deals being done now? What are the signs that these deals are challenging?
- What advice does Wes give founders fundraising in these markets?
- What does Wes believe are elements that traditional VCs decide to do, which prevents founders from choosing to work with them?
- Does Wes believe VCs on board truly provide value? If so, which ones and why them?
4.) FPV: Firm Building and Portfolio Construction:
- With the new $450M fund, what is the portfolio construction that Wes chose?
- Why does Wes prefer to have more lines in the portfolio than a concentrated portfolio?
- Does Wes believe you can increase your ownership in your best companies over time?
- How does Wes think about capital concentration on a per company basis?
- What have been Wes' biggest lessons from his biggest hits and misses?
Items Mentioned in Todays Episode:
Wes' Favourite Book: Liar's Poker
20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo
Jordan Van Horn is a Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo, the world's first data observability company. Prior to this role, Jordan spent an incredible 4 years in sales at Segment including as VP of Sales leading a sales team of 50+ Account Executives and leading the first international expansion for the company into Dublin. Before Segment, Jordan was at Dropbox for 4 years leading enterprise sales for Dropbox Business in California.
In Today's Episode with Jordan Van Horn We Discuss:
1.) Entry into the World of Sales:
- How did Jordan make his way into the world of sales first with a vineyard?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways for Jordan from seeing the scaling sales teams at both Segment and Dropbox? How did seeing that impact his mindset?
- What does Jordan know now that he wishes he had known when he entered sales?
2.) The Sales Playbook:
- How does Jordan define "the sales playbook"? What is it not?
- What five core things should the sales playbook help you accomplish?
- Should the founder be responsible for the sales playbook? Can it be created by a Head of Sales?
- How does Jordan advise founders on three signals that now is the right time to bring in a sales hire?
- How does Jordan advise founders on whether the first sales hire should be a rep or a leader?
3.) The Secrets to Pricing and Discounting:
- Why does Jordan not care what price customers pay in the early days? If it is not about ARR, what should teams be optimizing for?
- When does price discipline become important in a company journey? What are the dangers of not having price discipline?
- What two tools do sales leaders have to use in order to create urgency in a deal closing process?
- How should sales leaders think about building multiple champions within a potential customer? At what price point is it worth it?
4.) The Hiring Process:
- How does Jordan structure the hiring process for all new sales hires?
- What are the must-ask questions that Jordan asks all new candidates? What does he want to see in those answers?
- Who else does he bring into the hiring process? At what stage do they get involved? What are they testing for?
- Does Jordan use case studies with candidates? What makes the best? What makes the worst?
5.) The Onboarding:
- What is the ideal onboarding process for new sales reps?
- What should founders do and prep for when onboarding their first sales hires? What materials and recordings should they have ready?
- What are some early signs that a new hire is not working out? How do we measure their impact?
- For enterprise sales, it takes a long time to close new deals, how can one determine effectiveness of new reps when the sales cycle is so long?
20VC: Fintech OG Sheel Mohnot on Lessons from Investing in Flexport and ChipperCash and Missing Robinhood and Chime, Why Overly Large GP Commits are Dangerous, Biggest Mistakes Managers Make with Fund I and Emerging Markets; Which Survive?
Sheel Mohnot is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Better Tomorrow Ventures, a $225M fund that leads rounds in pre-seed and seed-stage fintech companies globally. Sheel and Jake (his co-founder) invested for many years together before founding BTV and wrote checks into Mercury, Flexport, Ramp, and Hippo Insurance to name a few. As for Sheel, before BTV he ran 500 Fintech for close to 7 years, and before that was a founder, founding two companies, both of which were acquired. If that was not enough, Sheel is also a master at measuring the width of swimming pools and making cameo appearances in music videos with Justin Bieber.
In Todays Episode with Sheel Mohnot We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Venture:
- How Sheel made his way into the world of venture having founded 2 fintech companies?
- Why did no LPs give Sheel money in the early 500 Fintech days? What were some of his biggest lessons from investing in 100s of companies with 500 Fintech?
- How did BTV with Jake come together most recently? What are the biggest differences to Sheel of being a fund manager vs being an investor?
2.) The Power Law:
- How does Sheel define "the power law" in venture capital? What multiple of return would be power law status?
- Given the size of outcome available with these power law returns, how does Sheel approach portfolio construction? Would it not be best to invest in 100s of companies?
- Who does Sheel believe has done the indexing approach best? Why?
3.) Venture Capital has Never Been Less Collaborative:
- Why does Sheel disagree with Harry that venture capital has never been less collaborative?
- Why now, for the first time, are large multi-stage funds taking single-digit ownership?
- Does Sheel agree with Harry it is moronic to have "guaranteed pro-rata"? How does Sheel approach re-investment decision-making? When does he pay up vs not?
4.) The Biggest Wins and Misses:
- What have been Sheel's biggest wins from a cashback and a multiple perspective?
- How did Sheel miss the chance to invest in both Robinhood and Chime early on? What did he not see? How would he have thought differently with the benefit of hindsight?
- How have Sheel's biggest hits and misses impacted how he invests today?
5.) Emerging and Frontier Markets:
- Does Sheel share Harry's concern for the removal of capital from emerging markets?
- Why does Sheel believe that India, South East Asia and LATAM will be fine?
- Why does Sheel believe Pakistan and Africa are most in trouble?
- What advice does Sheel give to his emerging markets founders today?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Sheel's Favourite Book: Enders Game
20VC: 13 of the Great Investing Minds on When to Pay Up vs When To Remain Disciplined and Walk Because the Price is too High: The Ultimate Guide to Price Sensitivity
Marcelo Claure is an entrepreneur and investor who has founded and led some of the world’s most iconic businesses. He is currently the Chairman & CEO of Claure Capital, a newly founded multi-billion-dollar global investment firm. Before this, Marcelo was COO @ Softbank Group, the world’s largest technology investment company.
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, Modern Treasury, Snapchat, StitchFix, and many more.
Michael Eisenberg spent 15 years as a General Partner @ Benchmark working alongside Bill and the Benchmark partnership. Following Benchmark, Michael co-founded Aleph, one of the leading Israeli venture funds of the last decade.
David Tisch is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Box Group, one of the leading seed focused firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Airtable, Glossier, PillPack, Plaid and many more.
Cyan Banister is one of the most successful and renowned early-stage investors in the last decade. Her portfolio includes the likes of SpaceX, Uber, Affirm, Opendoor Postmates, Niantic and Thumbtack to name a few.
Zach Weinberg is a Co-Founder of Operator Partners, operators funding operators, with no outside LPs, just their own capital.
Luciana Lixandru is a Partner @ Sequoia, one of the world’s most renowned and successful venture firms with Sequoia-backed companies accounting for more than 20% of NASDAQ’s total value.
Jeff Lieberman is the Managing Director @ Insight Partners, one of the leading investing franchises of the last 25 years with their most recent flagship fund announced earlier this year being a staggering $20BN.
Nick Shalek is a General Partner @ Ribbit Capital, specializing in fintech they are one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Robinhood, Coinbase, Revolut, Nubank and more.
Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors, one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms investing today with a portfolio including the likes of Klarna, Kavak, Quinto Andar, Credit Karma and more.
Geoff Lewis is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Bedrock, now with over $1BN in AUM, Bedrock invests in breakout technology companies that are incongruent with popular narratives.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson is founder and the managing partner of 137 Ventures. Their portfolio includes SpaceX, Wish, Anduril, Flexport, and WorkRise (formerly Rigup) to name a few.
David Sze is a General Partner @ Greylock where he has led some of the firms most notable investments including Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora.
In Today's Episode We Discuss Price Sensitivity:
1.) How do you assess your relationship to price and price sensitivity?
2.) When is the time to pay up and have less price discipline?
3.) When should we remain disciplined and not pay up for a deal and walk away because of price?
4.) Of the deals you have paid up for, did their growth rate justify the high entry price?
5.) Knowing all you know now on price, how do you advise younger investors today?
20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @
Kieran Flanagan is SVP Marketing at HubSpot, where he has helped the business grow internationally, move to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand, and built out its media team, including the acquisition of 'The Hustle.' He is also an advisor and investor in early-stage companies.
In Today's Episode with Kieran Flanagan We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Growth and Marketing:
- How did Kieran make his way into the world of growth and marketing?
- What has been 1-2 of Kieran's biggest lessons from seeing firsthand the hyper-scaling of Hubspot?
- On reflection, how would Kieran summarise both Hubspot's community building attempts and also their product messaging?
2.) Why You Need Growth Hires Pre Product Market Fit:
- What does "growth" mean to Kieran? Where do so many get it wrong?
- Why does Kieran believe that you should have a growth team/people before product market fit? What specifically do they do and work on during this stage?
- Pre PMF, what is the core metric that all startups should focus on? How does it change with time?
3.) Building Your Growth Team:
- What does Kieran believe are the 3 key stages to hiring for growth?
- How should founders determine whether to have external standalone growth teams or integrate them into existing functions?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring for growth?
4.) The Future is Content:
- Why does Kieran believe every great tech brand will have to become a media brand?
- Why is Elon Musk an example of the perfect brand? What has he done right?
- Why does Kieran say that data is the best and worst thing that has happened to marketing?
5.) WTF Really is Community:
- How does Kieran define "community"? What is it? What is it not?
- What makes the best communities? Why do some work and others not?
- Should every company have a community approach? Who does it make sense for?
- Have Hubspot done a good job at community building? On reflection, is there anything that Kieran would have done differently?
20VC: Investing Lessons from Fred Wilson and Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds | Why the Secret to Winning in Venture is Splitting Deals |Learnings From the Biggest Hits and Biggest Losses | Why Anyone That Always Does Their Pro-Rata is Wrong with Mo
Mo Koyfman is the Founder and General Partner @ Shine Capital, who announced earlier this year Shine II, a $200M early-stage fund, and Shine Opportunities I, a $100M vehicle. Prior to founding Shine, Mo was the Managing Member @ Moko Brands where he made angel investments in Coinbase, Polychain, Harry's to name a few. Before Moko, Mo spent over 7 years as a General Partner @ Spark Capital where he made investments in Plaid, Warby Parker, Skillshare and Hivemapper, to name a few. Finally prior to Spark, Mo spent over 5 years at IAC where he oversaw group of companies that included Connected Ventures, parent of Vimeo, CollegeHumor & BustedTees.
In Today's Episode with Mo Koyfman:
1.) From Entrepreneurial Parents to IAC, Spark Capital and Founding Shine:
- How did Mo make his way into the world of venture having worked with Dara Khros, Barry Diller and Jeremy Liew?
- What were some of the biggest takeaways from his time with Barry Diller and IAC?
- How did Mo's time at Spark impact his investing mindset? What did he learn that he took with him to founding Shine?
2.) Investment Firm vs Investment Partnership:
- What are the biggest differences between investment firms and investment partnerships?
- What are the biggest risks founders are taking when they take money from investment firms?
- Mo has very strong beliefs, how does he manage and inspire debates within his firm without shutting down or intimidating younger, less experienced team members?
- What does Mo mean when he says, "firms are great but partners matter".
3.) How To Win in Venture:
- Why does Mo always believe that small funds outperform large funds?
- What have been some of Mo's biggest lessons from Fred Wilson on fund strategy and sizing?
- How much of an emphasis does Mo place on the importance of ownership?
- Why does Mo believe the way to win in venture is to be collaborative?
- Why does Mo believe in the macro conditions we are entering, the landscape is about to become a lot more collaborative?
- Why does Mo believe any firm that says they will always do their pro rata is lying?
4.) The Lessons: Success and Failure:
- What are some of Mo's biggest lessons from his biggest wins, like Plaid at seed?
- That said, why does Mo believe it is so dangerous to try and learn lessons from the wins?
- What failures have been most impactful to Mo? What did he take away from them?
- Why does Mo believe that making great burgers is like building great companies?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Mo's Favourite Book: Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
20VC: Raising $60M and Not Touching a Dollar of It; The 3 Decisions That Led to a Cash-Flow Positive Business, Why Not Being Able To Fundraise in the Early Days Can Help Build Your Business & What are the First Things To Break in Scaling Orgs with Sameer
Sameer Shariff is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Cambly, the company that allows you to become fluent faster through one-on-one video chat lessons with native English tutors. To date, Sameer has raised over $60M with Cambly from the best including Jeremy Levine @ Bessemer, Sarah Tavel @ Benchmark, Monashees, YC and more. Prior to founding Cambly, Sameer spent close to 5 years at Google on the Search Quality team and became the Tech Lead of the Search experiments team helping make experimentation a core part of the launch process.
In Today's Episode with Sameer Sharif We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Startups and Co-Founding Cambly:
- How did Sameer make his way into the world of tech with his joining Google straight out of college?
- What were the 1-2 biggest takeaways from his time at Google? How did it shape his mindset?
- What was the a-ha moment for Sameer with Cambly?
2.) The Trials and Tribulations of Leadership:
- What does "high performance" mean to Sameer in business? How has it changed over time?
- What are the first things to break in a scaling company?
- How do the best companies retain speed and agility with scale?
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes Sameer has made? What did he learn?
3.) The Fundraise that Led to Cash Flow Positive:
- Why does Sameer think it was so hard to fundraise for Cambly in the early days?
- When they failed to raise their Series A, what 3-4 core decisions did they make to get Cambly to cash flow positive as fast as possible?
- How did Sameer communicate their failed fundraising to the team? How did he do this in a way that rallied the troops and did not worry or scare them?
- What was the tipping point for fundraising to become much much easier for the company?
- Given they have not touched any of their Series A or Series B funds, how does Sameer think about the balance of growth vs profitability?
4.) Marketplace Dynamics 101:
- How did Cambly acquire the first 100 customers on the demand side?
- What is the most challenging dynamic of Cambly; demand or supply side?
- Where does Sameer see most marketplace founders make the biggest mistakes?
- What does Sameer know now on the intricacies of marketplace dynamics that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode with Sameer Shariff:
Sameer's Favourite Book: The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive
20 Product: Shreyas Doshi on The Three Different Types of Product Leaders and How To Hire Them, The 6 Different Product Metrics You Need To Know and What Good is For Each of Them & Table Stakes Features vs Wow Features; What To Prioritise
Shreyas Doshi is an investor, advisor, and all-around product OG. Most recently Shreyas spent over 5 years at Stripe where he was Stripe's first PM Manager and helped define and grow the Product Management function (from ~5 to more than 50 people). Before Stripe, Shreyas was a Director of Product Management @ Twitter and prior to Twitter spent over 6 years as a Group Product Manager @ Google. Today Shreyas has invested and advises some of the best including advising Airtable, Kalshi, Lendflow, to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Shreyas Doshi:
1.) Entry into Product:
- How did Shreyas make his way into the world of product and product management?
- Why did Shreyas decide not to do business school when it was the conventional route for everyone going into product management?
- What were some of Shreyas' biggest takeaways from his time at Stripe and Google? How did they impact his product mind today?
2.) Product Management 101:
- How does Shreyas define product management today? How do many confuse it?
- How does Shreyas define product success today? What is the single biggest mistake Shreyas sees founders make when determining the success/PMF of their product?
- Does Shreyas believe that great product management is science or art? Data or intuition? When should you listen to customers? When should you not?
3.) Metrics 101 & How To Use Them:
- What is the single biggest mistake Shreyas sees founders make when it comes to selecting their North Star metric?
- How should founders think about input vs output metrics? What is the difference between the two?
- What are the 6 types of metrics that all founders and product teams need to focus on? How does their importance change over time?
- How should the responsibility for these metrics be split between different people and teams?
4.) Three Types of Product Leader:
- What are the three different types of product leaders?
- The Craftsperson: What is their core strength? What is their core weakness? How do they interact with the rest of the team and company?
- The Operator: What is their core strength? What is their core weakness? How do they interact with the rest of the team and company?
- The Visionary: What is their core strength? What is their core weakness? How do they interact with the rest of the team and company?
20VC: Forerunner's Kirsten Green on The Biggest Challenges Scaling Both Teams and AUM, What Truly is High Performance in Fund Management & Why Parenting and Relationships are an Enabler To Your Best Work
Kirsten Green is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Forerunner Ventures, one of the leading firms of the last decade investing at the intersection of innovation and culture. As a founder, Kirsten has led efforts to raise over $2B+ from leading institutional investors and invest in more than 100 companies. She currently serves as a board member at Glossier, Ritual, Faire, Hims & Hers, and Curated, to name a few. She has also invested in other smash hits including Chime, Jet, Warby Parker, Hotel Tonight and many more. Due to her immense success, Kirsten has been honored in Time’s 100 Most Influential People and named a Top 20 Venture Capitalists by The New York Times in 2018 & 2017. Prior to Forerunner, Kirsten was an equity research analyst and investor at Banc of America Securities.
In Today's Episode with Kirsten Green We Discuss:
1.) Entry in Venture at 40 and Founding Forerunner:
- How did Kirsten make her way into VC at 40 with the founding of Forerunner having never had a role in VC before?
- What did everyone tell Kirsten when she was looking to break into venture? What did she tell herself when she heard this?
- What does Kirsten believe she is running from? What does she believe she is running toward?
2.) Fund Management and Leadership:
- How does Kirsten define high-performance today? What are the nuances of high performance in fund management?
- How would Kirsten describe her leadership style today? How has it changed over time?
- What have been some of Kirsten's biggest lessons in terms of what it takes to retain quality with scaling AUM and teams?
- What have been Kirsten's biggest lessons when it comes to giving hard feedback with kindness?
3.) The Venture Landscape Today and Forerunner's Position:
- Why does Kirsten believe the venture landscape is more dynamic today than ever?
- Does Kirsten agree with the statement that venture is less collaborative than ever?
- Why did Kirsten and Forerunner seem to amend strategy and move into B2B?
- Why does Kirsten disagree with the delineation between B2C and B2B?
4.) Parenting, Relationships and Life:
- What have been Kirsten's biggest lessons since becoming a parent? How has it impacted her mindset?
- Does Kirsten agree that relationships attract from sheer input on work? How does Kirsten separate relationships into two kinds of relationships?
- What does success in marriage mean for Kirsten? How has she seen that in her own marriage?
20VC: Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on The Yahoo Turnaround Plan; What Needs To Happen | Leadership 101: The 4 Things To Look For When Hiring | Surviving a Crash; Biggest Advice on Cuts, Layoffs, Investor Communications
Jim Lanzone is the CEO @ Yahoo, a company that today reaches nearly 900 million people around the world and is the third largest property on the Internet. Prior to Yahoo, Tim was the CEO of Tinder, the world’s most popular app for meeting new people, downloaded by more than 400 million people. Before Tinder, Jim spent a decade as President and CEO of CBS Interactive, a top 10 global Internet company with brands ranging from CBS All Access to CNET. He joined CBS Interactive in 2011 when CBS Corporation purchased Clicker Media, where he was founder and CEO. Before founding Clicker, Jim served as CEO of Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves).
In Today's Episode with Jim Lanzone
1.) Jim's Entry into the World of Startups:
- How did Jim go from law school to founding his first tech startup in the dot com boom?
- How did seeing the crash and the first company going bust, shape Jim's perspectives on great leadership?
- What does Jim know now that he wishes he had known when he started way back in 1999?
2.) Leadership 101:
- How does Jim define "high performance" in business today?
- What are the 4 things Jim always looks for when hiring new people?
- Why does Jim believe the standard interview process and questions are broken? How does he do it differently? What are his biggest lessons on how to hire effectively?
- How does Jim know when to let someone go? How long do you give under-performers?
3.) Crashes and Turnarounds:
- Jim has seen three crashes as a CEO, what are Jim's biggest lessons from 3 prior crashes?
- How does Jim advise founders to be acting today? What should they focus on?
- How can leaders maintain morale and optimism in the face of tough macro times?
- How does Jim advise founders to communicate both with their investors and board when it comes to reduced performance in harder times?
4.) The Yahoo Turnaround:
- What does Jim believe the 1-2 core things Yahoo needs to fix is? Why are they priorities?
- How does Jim approach turning round the Yahoo brand? How does he plan to make it attractive?
- What is the biggest misnomer that people have about Yahoo today?
- How does Jim think about running a portfolio approach with Yahoo moving forward?
- How has Jim changed the org structure and management of Yahoo most significantly?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Jim's Favourite Book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
20VC: The Memo: What is a Sales Playbook? Does the Founder Need to Create It? Should the First Sales Hire Be a Leader or a Rep?
Today we deconstruct the canonical question in early-stage sales. Does the founder need to create the sales playbook? Then secondly, if not, should the first sales hires be reps or a sales leader? Today we are joined by 7 of the best sales leaders to share their thoughts.
Jordan Van Horn is a Revenue Leader @ Montecarlo. Previously Jordan spent 4 years with Segment and before that spent another 4 years at Dropbox.
Oliver Jay (OJ) most recently spent 6 years at Asana where he was hired as the company’s first revenue leader. Before Asana, OJ spent 4 years at Dropbox where he scaled the sales team from 0 to 50 while tripling ARR.
Dannie Herzberg is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital and previously spent 4 years at Slack as their Head of Enterprise Sales. Before Slack, Dannie spent 5 years at Hubspot building sales, opening an SF office, and then joining product to launch CRM & platform.
Zhenya Loginov is the CRO @ Miro, where he runs the go-to-market team of 700+ people across 11 global offices. Prior to Miro, Zhenya was the COO @ Segment. Finally, before Segment, Zhenya led a 100-person team at Dropbox across numerous different functional areas.
Kyle Parrish is VP Sales @ Figma, where he has scaled the sales team from 0 to over 100 people in sales. Before Figma, Kyle spent over 5 years at Dropbox in numerous different roles including Head of Sales, where he scaled the Austin, Texas office from 3 to over 80 people.
Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Customer Success @ Loom, at Loom Sam leads Revenue Org including: Direct Sales, Customer Success, Self-Serve Revenue Growth/Assist. Prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce, following their acquisition of Quip, where he was the first sales leader. Before Salesforce and Quip, Sam spent over 3 years at Dropbox as a mid-market sales leader.
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser is Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ Stripe. Pre-Stripe, Jeanne was CRO @ Dialpad and also spent many years at Google in numerous different roles including most recently as Director of GSuite SMB & Mid-Market Sales, North America and LATAM.
Mitch Tarica is Head of North America Sales at Zoom Video Communications. Before Zoom, Mitch spent over 5 years at RingCentral and before RingCentral, Mitch was at Oracle for over 7 years in numerous different sales roles.
In Today's Discussion on Sales Playbooks We Learn:
1.) What is the right definition for a "sales playbook"?
2.) When is the right time to change your "sales playbook"?
3.) What are the biggest mistakes or misnomers made around the "sales playbook"?
4.) Should the founder be the one to create the first sales playbook or can it be a sales leader?
5.) When is the right time for founders to hire their first sales leaders?
6.) For the first sales hire, should founders hire sales reps or a sales leader?
7.) When should you hire a rep vs a sales leader? What are the nuances?
20VC: Tony Fadell on The 3 Hats of Being a CEO, How the Best Leaders Inspire, How to Create Your Own Role within a Company, The Art of Parenting and Teaching Children Resiliency & New York Times' 36 Questions on Love!
Tony Fadell, often referred to as the father of the iPod is one of the leading product thinkers of the last 30 years as one of the makers of some of the most revolutionary products in society from the iPhone and iPod to more recently founding Nest, creating the Nest Thermostat, leading to their $3.2BN acquisition by Google. Tony recently released Build, a masterclass taking 30 years of product and company building lessons and packaging them for you, check it out here.
In Today's Episode with Tony Fadell: New York Times' 36 Questions of Love
1.) On reflection, what would Tony most like to change about his childhood?
- How did moving so much as a child change who Tony was as a person?
- How can parents instill that same grit and desire in their kids today?
- What does Tony think is the biggest problem with modern parenting?
2.) As a leader, should the company you are building be a family or a team?
- What does Tony believe are the 3 hats of being a great CEO?
- What is the biggest challenge in the transition between hats?
- Where does Tony see many founders make the biggest mistake?
- Which hat was Tony strongest with? What was he weakest with?
3.) How to solve the loneliness of being a solo founder?
- Why does Tony believe that everyone needs a co-founder?
- Why does Tony not like to invest in teams with a solo founder or more than 4 founders?
- For Tony, what is the ideal composition of that founding team?
- How does he test for these skills and traits pre-investing?
4.) How to think differently in the face of adversity?
- Tony has made bold bets when everyone says he is crazy, how does he not question himself and remain strong in the face of criticism?
- How does Tony know when to change his mind? When to accept that the bold idea was not right?
- Is Tony concerned in the face of macro challenges today, investment and commitment to climate change will be cut heavily?
20VC: Why Market Matters So Much More Than Founding Team | Why Crypto Investing is Less Collaborative Than Ever | Why Bitcoin is Not a Hedge Against Inflation | Why Solana Will Beat Ethereum | The Network Effects You Need To Understand with Kyle Samani, C
Kyle Samani is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Multicoin Capital, one of the leading crypto native funds of the last decade with positions in Solana, FTX, Fractal, and Helium to name a few. As for Kyle, before moving to the world of venture and crypto, he founded Pristine, a health IT startup that raised more than $5M in VC, and was acquired by Upskill.
In Today's Episode With Kyle Samani We Discuss:
1.) The Founding of Multicoin Capital:
- How did Kyle make his way from a healthcare startup to founding Multicoin?
- What was his a-ha moment with the realization of the opportunity we have ahead of us in crypto?
- What does Kyle know now that he wishes he had known when he started Multicoin?
2.) Crypto Investing in 2022:
- Why does Kyle believe the crypt investing landscape is less collaborative than ever?
- What are the biggest challenges of token issuances today?
- How does the option of liquidity help and hurt Kyle's investor psychology?
- Is Kyle concerned the volatility in the market will harm institutional investor sentiment for crypto?
3.) Constructing a Crypto Portfolio in 2022:
- Why does Kyle not believe in temporal diversification?
- Why does sector-centric company diversification suck?
- Why are the loss ratios in crypto so much lower than in traditional venture?
- Why does Kyle believe a no reserves model is optimal in crypto?
4.) Multicoin vs Traditional Venture Firms:
- Why does Kyle believe that every person over 10 people in a venture firm is a net negative towards the investment decision-making process?
- What do Kyle and Multicoin do reach the truth together? How do they aggressively use writing and word docs to progress their thoughts?
- Their discussions are "brutal", how brutal can one be in a discussion on a deal? How does one make team members feel safe but also really push them for the truth and debate?
Item's Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Kyle's Favourite Recent Reading: Eugene Wei
Kyle's Most Recent Investment: Delphia
20 Sales: The Biggest Challenges Building Outbound Sales Teams and How To Overcome Them | How The Best Sales Reps Do Customer Discovery | 2 Elements Sales Teams Are Always Responsible For | Sam Taylor, VP Sales and Customer Success @ Loom
Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Customer Success @ Loom, an essential tool for hybrid and remote teams allowing you to record quick videos of your screen and cam. At Loom Sam leads Revenue Org including: Direct Sales, Customer Success, Self-Serve Revenue Growth/Assist, Sales Development, Global Customer Support, Revenue Ops + Strategy and Sales Enablement. Prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce, following their acquisition of Quip, where he was the first sales leader. Before Salesforce and Quip, Sam spent over 3 years at Dropbox as a mid-market sales leader.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1.) Entry into the World of Sales:
- How did Sam land his first big role in sales at Salesforce?
- How did the sales orgs differ when comparing Salesforce to Dropbox?
- What are 1-2 of Sam's biggest lessons from his time at Salesforce and Dropbox that shapes how he thinks today?
2.) Sales People Should Be Customer Therapists:
- What is the right way to approach customer discovery?
- How can sales reps get potential customers on a call in the first place?
- What are the right questions to ask? What engenders the most honesty?
- What are the wrong questions to ask? What are common mistakes?
- How do the best sales reps then feed that back to customer success and product?
3.) The When and The Who:
- When should founders consider hiring their first sales hire?
- Should this hire be a sales leader or a sales rep? What are the nuances?
- What are the characteristics of the best first sales hires?
- What are the first sales hires really on the hook for?
- Why does Sam disagree with the word "playbook" and instead suggest "frameworks"?
4.) How To Hire The Best: The Process
- What are Sam's lessons on what it takes to hire the very best sales reps?
- What are the right questions to ask in the interview process?
- What tangible case studies or tests are done to measure quality?
- Who is brought into the hiring process and at what stage?
20VC: Why Being First Does Not Matter, Why Defensibility on Day 1 Does Not Exist, Three Core Elements To Move into Enterprise Effectively and What Makes Truly Great Product Marketing Today with Des Traynor, Co-Founder @ Intercom
Des Traynor is a Co-founder and the Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, the modern customer communications platform that unifies every aspect of the customer journey. To date, Intercom has raised over $238M from some of the best including Index, ICONIQ, Kleiner, GV, and Bessemer. As for Des, before co-founding Intercom, he was a UX consultant, a university lecturer in computer science, and also a Ph.D. researcher. Des is also a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Algolia, Notion, Miro, and many more.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
1.) Origins of Intercom:
- How did Des make his way into the world of startups and come to co-found Intercom?
- When did they realize they really had something with Intercom and had to focus on it?
- What does Des know now that he wishes he had known at the start of Intercom?
2. Two of the Biggest Myths in Startups: Being First and Defensibility
- Why does Des believe that being the first does not matter? Why is it not an advantage?
- Why does Des believe that no company has defensibility on day 1? How does Des believe defensibility is built?
- What does Des mean when he says, when investing in companies he looks for a "long road to the starting line"?
3.) Product 101: A Masterclass on Product:
- How does Des answer the question of when to release a second product?
- How should the second product be resourced? MVP and lean or full budget and committed?
- What are the biggest mistakes people make when releasing a second product? What mistakes have Des and Intercom made when releasing new products?
- How does Des advise founders on when to stop working on a product? How do you know when it is not working?
- How does Des determine between a feature and a product both when building and when investing?
4.) Moving to Enterprise:
- What does Des believe are the three core things all companies need to scale into the enterprise effectively? Which should they do first? Which is most challenging?
- How does Des advise founders on when is the right time to move into the enterprise?
- How does the product need to change to meet enterprise needs and requirements?
5.) The Makings of Great Product Marketing:
- What does Des believe makes truly great product marketing? Who does it well today?
- How does your product marketing need to change as you scale from SMB to enterprise?
- If product marketing to both an end user and a separate buyer, which persona should one prioritise their messaging towards?
- How does Des advise founders on product marketing when they have a horizontal product with a very broad customer base?
6.) Angel Investing 101: From Stripe to Miro to Notion:
- Why does Des believe it is beneficial for operators to also be investing?
- What are the biggest lessons Des has learned from angel investing?
- How does Des approach both market sizing and outcome scenario planning today?
- How price sensitive is Des today? How has that changed over time?
Item's Mentioned in Today's Episode with Des Traynor:
Des' Favourite Book: How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen
20VC: The Most Powerful Investor You Might Not Know | Why The Distinction Between Public vs Private is BS | The Misalignments Between GPs and their LPs | Portfolio Construction 101: Diversification, Capital Concentration, Loss Rates with Peter Singlehurst
Peter Singlehurst is the Head of Private Companies at Baillie Gifford. As of 31st March 2022, funds under Baillie Gifford's management and advice totaled £277bn. The firm is owned and run by 51 of its senior executives who operate as a partnership, a structure that has endured for over a century. As for Peter, he has been with Baillie Gifford since graduating from Durham University 12 years ago and has backed some astonishing breakouts such as Wise, Grammarly and Zymergen to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Peter Singlehurst We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Venture:
- How Peter landed his role with Baillie Gifford straight out of university?
- Why does Peter and Baillie Gifford prefer to hire young people without backgrounds or studies in finance? Why do they tend to be better investors?
- What does Peter believe are the basic building blocks that can be taught in investing? What cannot be taught and needs to be learned with experience and time?
2.) The Biggest Misnomers and Misalignments in Venture:
- Why does Peter believe the distinction between public vs private markets is BS?
- Why does Peter believe it is an advantage to invest at the same time in both public and private markets?
- Why does Peter think there is an inherent misalignment in venture between GPs and their LPs?
3.) Baillie Gifford: Constructing a Portfolio with £277BN:
- How does Baillie Gifford approach portfolio construction today?
- How many lines do they want to have in their portfolio? What is the right level of diversification?
- How does Peter think about sizing each position? How does Peter think about capital concentration across rounds vs first check being the largest?
- How does Peter approach outcome scenario planning? How does Peter think about downside protection and loss rates?
4.) Peter Singlehurst: The Investor:
- How has Peter's investing style changed over the last 10 years? What has gotten easier? What has gotten harder?
- What is Peter's biggest miss? How did it change his approach?
- What is Peter's biggest hit? What did he learn and take from this?
- How did the crossover funds change and impact the way that later stage venture was conducted?
Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Peter's Fave Book: The Myth of Sisyphus
Peter's Most Recent Investment: Grammarly
20 Growth: Shopify's VP of Growth on Why Standalone Growth Teams Operate More Efficiently than Integrated Ones, Why You Should Hire as Senior Growth Leaders as Possible and The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Making Their First Growth Hires
Luc Levesque is currently the VP of Growth at Shopify and also advises companies like Twitter, Pinterest, and Quora. At the age of 21, Luc founded TravelPod, the world’s first travel blogging platform. 10 years later, TravelPod was acquired by Expedia, where Luc led the creation of two award-winning products: TripWow and the Traveler IQ Challenge. Luc then served as an executive at TripAdvisor, where he built and led the growth team which helped TripAdvisor become the world’s largest travel site. Luc was then recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook where he was an executive and led the creation of Messenger Kids.
In Today's Episode with Luc Levesque We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Growth:
- When did Luc realise the power of "growth" within every company?
- How did Luc subsequently make his way into the world of growth pose-selling his first company?
- What does Luc know now that he wishes he had known when he made the entry into growth?
2.) Growth and Viral Loops:
- How does Luc define "growth" today?
- How should leaders choose what is the right north star to focus on for their business?
- Should this north star change? If so, how often should the north star change?
- How does Luc define "viral loops"? What makes the best viral loops today?
3.) Growth: Building the Team:
- When is the right time for founders to start thinking about building a growth team?
- Should it be standalone or integrated into other functions in the company?
- Should the first growth hires be senior and tasked with hiring the team or junior and be more lean as a way to test growth as a new function?
- What are the signals Luc looks for when hiring for growth?
- What are the best questions that reveal the characteristics growth leaders need to have?
4.) Growth: The Action:
- What is a growth decision Luc made without data? How did it go?
- What are some growth tactics that have become stronger over time? What have died a death?
- How should leaders know when to kill a new project vs continue and keep testing?
- What are the biggest mistakes Luc sees founders make when building and scaling their growth team?
20VC: Matt Mullenweg on Relationships to Risk, Money and Insecurity as a Leader | Lessons from a Parent's Passing and the Pre-Grieving Process | What is High Performance in Leadership Today?
Matt Mullenweg is the Founder of Automattic, the force behind WordPress, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Longreads, Simplenote, Pocket Casts, and more. What started as a simple open-source blogging platform, Matt has turned into one of the most significant internet properties of our generation, now powering over 43% of sites on the internet. Alongside Automattic, Matt also invests through Audrey Capital and has backed the likes of Stripe, SpaceX, Gitlab, and Sendgrid to name a few.
In Today's Episode with Matt Mullenweg We Discuss:
1.) The Origins of WordPress:
- How did Matt start the for-profit, Automattic, as a 19-year-old, having been a lead developer for WordPress?
- What were the clearest signs to Matt in the early days that WordPress could change the world?
- What does Matt know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of WordPress?
2.) Matt Mullenweg: The Essence of Leadership:
- What does high performance mean to Matt? How has that changed over time?
- What does truly great listening mean to Matt as a leader today? Where do many get this wrong?
- How does Matt approach decision-making today? What are the two types of decisions?
- What are Matt's biggest insecurities in leadership today? How have they changed over time?
3.) Matt Mullenweg: The Person:
- Why does Matt have insecurities around his body? How do those insecurities manifest?
- What did Matt learn about himself in the pre-grieving process before his father's passing?
- How does Matt assess his own relationship to risk today?
- How does Matt think through his relationship to money today? Has it changed?
4.) WordPress: The Company:
- Why did Matt decide it was the right decision to buy Tumblr? Why did Matt make himself the CEO earlier this year?
- With many strong cashflow businesses within Automattic, how does Matt think through the balance between growth and profitability?
- Why does Automattic not have any emails within the company? How do 2,000 people communicate so effectively?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Matt's Favourite Book: Principles by Ray Dalio
20VC: How to Build Anti-Fragile Venture Portfolios Today | Why Diversification is Overrated in Portfolio Construction | How to Think Through Sizing Investments, Market Sizing and Pricing in Today's Environment with Mike Chalfen @ Chalfen Ventures
Mike Chalfen is a solo GP with Chalfen Ventures and one of the most respected and successful early-stage investors in Europe over the last two decades. Among Mike's incredible portfolio includes the likes of King.com (makers of Candy Crush), Houzz, Tipalti, Snyk, and Tray.io, to name a few. Some incredible facts on Mike, he has a 15x career track record, he has a portfolio value of over $40BN+ and he joined the venture industry, the year of my birth!
In Today's Episode with Mike Chalfen You Will Learn:
1.) Entry Into Venture and The Broken Customer Experience of VC:
- How did Mike make his original entry into venture way back in 1996?
- What does Mike mean when he speaks of the difference between "managing your career vs the money you invest"?
- What does Mike believe are some of the greatest challenges of venture partnerships today?
- What does Mike believe that the customer experience in venture partnerships for founders is broken today?
- How did seeing the prior booms and busts impact Mike's investing mentality today?
3.) Portfolio Construction 101:
- How does Mike think about portfolio construction today?
- With 9-10 core positions, why does Mike disagree with the traditional notion of "diversification"?
- How does the decision-making framework for Mike change when considering new investments vs re-investments?
- Does Mike believe that pro-rata is a lazy notion? What does Mike need to see on the upside to re-invest?
- How does Mike feel about the importance of temporal diversification? Why did Mike increase the cadence of his investing in 2021? Does he regret the increased speed?
3.) The Market 101:
- How does Mike think about the importance of market sizing? If we always underestimate the size of our winners, is this market sizing exercise not destined for failure?
- Why does Mike believe so many over the last few years have poorly sized markets they invested in?
- How does Mike assess market timing risk? What market risk is he willing vs not willing to take?
- What have been some of Mike's biggest mistakes when analyzing markets in the past? How did it change his perspective?
4.) Boards 101:
- How would Mike describe his style of board membership today? How has it changed over time?
- Why does Mike believe that boards at seed are not valuable? When do they become valuable?
- What is the single biggest mistake Mike sees so many young board members make today? What is his biggest advice to young board members?
- How does Mike advise founders on preparing for boards? What does he want to see?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when conducting board meetings?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Mike Chalfen:
Mike's Favourite Books: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Days Without End
Mike's Most Recent Investment: Opply
20 Product: The Ultimate Guide to Product Reviews: What Makes the Best vs the Worst | How Often Should They Be | Who Should Be Invited | Who Sets The Agenda | How to do Follow-Ups Post Product Reviews
Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, master of product reviews, author, investor, and currently serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud.
Tony Fadell, often referred to as the father of the iPod is one of the leading product thinkers of the last 30 years as one of the makers of some of the most game-changing products in society from the iPhone and iPod to more recently founding Nest.
Lenny Rachitsky is one of the OGs of product, having spent over 7 years at Airbnb as a product lead he left to start his newsletter, find it here.
Kayvon Beykpour is one of the most prominent product leaders of the last decade. For the last 7 years, Kayvon has been at Twitter where he led all of the teams across Product, Engineering, Design, Research and Customer Service & Operations.
Aparna Chennapragada is Chief Product Officer @ Robinhood, the company revolutionising consumer finance with commission-free investing.
In Today's Episode Breaking Down Product Reviews We Discuss:
1.) What makes a truly great product review?
2.) What are the biggest mistakes that product leaders make when leading product reviews?
3.) Who should be invited to the product review? How does this change with scale? How does this change in a world of remote work and Zoom?
4.) Who should set the agenda for the product review?
5.) How can leaders assign accountability and ensure that the follow-ups from product reviews are executed on?
6.) How can leaders ensure that they do not dominate product reviews with the weight of their words? How can they give designers and devs the space to share their thoughts without being judged?
20VC: Hiring 101; The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in the Hiring Process | Fundraising; What to Optimize for, How Profitability Changes Leverage When Raising | SMB to Enterprise; When to Move, What Changes and Dangers of Moving Too Early with Daniel Yan
Daniel Yanisse is the co-founder and CEO of Checkr, a leading HR technology company, currently valued at $5 billion. During the journey, Daniel has raised over $679M for Checkr from some of the best including Accel, Bond, Coatue, GV, Elad Gil and IVP to name a few. Prior to Checkr, Daniel was a software engineer and helped develop prototypes of the Mars Rover for NASA. Daniel has been recognized in Forbes “30 Under 30” and recently Checkr was recognized by Forbes as one of America’s best start-up employers.
In Today’s Episode with Daniel Yanisse You Will Learn:
1.) The Origins of Checkr: The $5BN Company
- How did Daniel come to co-found Checkr? What was the a-ha moment?
- How did Daniel's experience with his prior company impact how he thought about building Checkr?
- What does Daniel know now that he wishes all first-time founders knew when they started?
2.) Hiring 101:
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes Daniel made in the early days of Checkr?
- How does Daniel structure his interview process for new candidates today? How has it changed?
- How does Daniel test for ego and humility in the interview process?
- How does Daniel approach giving feedback today? How has it changed over time?
- What does Daniel believe is the right way to let someone go? How long does one give a team member who is not performing?
3.) Fundraising 101:
- How does Daniel advise founders going out to raise today in the challenging market conditions?
- What terms should founders optimize for? What terms should they not optimize for?
- What are the single biggest mistakes Daniel sees founders make when raising?
- What does Daniel wish he had done differently with Checkr's raises?
- What was the hardest raise for Checkr? Why was it so hard? What was the outcome?
4.) Going into Enterprise:
- Why does Daniel believe they went into enterprise too soon? What was the result of this?
- How does Daniel advise founders on when is the right time to go into enterprise?
- What changes in both your company and your product when moving to enterprise?
Items Mentioned in Today’s Episode with Daniel Yanisse:
Daniel’s Favourite Book: Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
20VC: The Memo: Bill Gurley, Doug Leone, Keith Rabois; Investing Lessons from Prior Busts, How Their Investor Psychology Changed, What Can Be Applied To Today's Market
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, Bill, is widely recognized as one of the greats of our time having worked with the likes of GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, and Zillow.
Doug Leone is the Global Managing Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s most renowned and successful venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Google, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Stripe, Zoom and many more.
Keith Rabois is a General Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the best performing funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX, Stripe, Anduril, the list goes on.
Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz founded Accel in 1983. Under their leadership, they have built Accel into one of the most prominent venture firms of the last 4 decades.
Michael Eisenberg is a Co-Founder and Equal Partner @ Aleph, with a portfolio including the likes of Lemonade, Melio and HoneyBook, they are one of the leading early-stage firms of the last decade.
Sonali De Rycker is a Partner @ Accel, one of the leading firms of the last 3 decades with a portfolio that includes the likes of UiPath, Miro, Spotify and many more incredible companies.
Fabrice Grinda is the Founding Partner @ FJ Labs, with over 700 investments, Fabrice has had over 250 exits and built a portfolio including Alibaba, Coupang, Airbnb, Instacart, Flexport, and many more.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How does the current environment compare to prior busts?
2.) How will the changing interest rates impact the startup funding climate moving forward?
3.) Why is the rate of inflation the only true metric which reveals the ultimate fate of the economy?
4.) What are the world's leading investors telling their founders?
5.) How are the best investors in the world thinking through reserves management?
20VC: Accel's Sonali De Rycker on Building a Generational Defining Venture Firm; Hiring, Culture, Incentives | Investing; Biggest Mistakes, Biggest Lessons from Prior Crashes, Why Market Size is Dangerous to Focus On | Decision-Making; Type 1 vs Type 2 Ri
Sonali De Rycker is a Partner @ Accel, one of the leading firms of the last 3 decades with a portfolio that includes the likes of UiPath, Miro, Spotify, and many more incredible companies. As for Sonali, Sonali led Accel’s investments in Avito (acquired by Naspers), Spotify (NYSE: SPOT), Primer, Monzo, Letgo (acquired by Naspers), Kry/Livi, Soldo, Hopin, and Sennder. Prior to Accel, Sonali was with Atlas Venture (now Accomplice). She also previously served on the board of Match.com (NASDAQ:MTCH).
In Today's Episode with Sonali De Rycker You Will Learn:
1.) From Small Town in India To Leading Venture Capitalist:
- How Sonali made her way from a small town in India to becoming one of the most prominent VCs of the last decade?
- What were some of Sonali's biggest lessons from seeing the booms and busts of 2000 and 2008? What climate does the crash today resemble more? Why so?
- How does Sonali advise younger investors who have not lived through a downturn? What should their investor psychology be right now?
2.) Firm Building: Accel:
- What are the most challenging and non-obvious elements of building a firm today?
- What have been some of the biggest mistakes Accel has made when adding to the team?
- What qualities do Sonali and Accel specifically look for when interviewing candidates to join the team? What specific questions tease out whether the candidate has these traits?
- What specific structures does Accel have in place to encourage the team to work together as one cohesive unit? How do they use bonuses as a team incentive?
3.) Sonali: The Investor:
- How has Sonali's investing style changed over the years? What moments caused these changes to happen?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes Sonali has made in her investing career? What did she learn from them?
- On the flip side, from winners such as Spotify and Supercell, what did Sonali learn from her biggest winners?
- Why does Sonali believe that market sizing and outcome scenario planning is useless and will lead you to make the wrong decision?
4.) Decision-Making and Risk:
- What does Sonali mean when she speaks of Type 1 and Type 2 decisions? How should one's decision-making process change according to which type of decision it is?
- What are the two biggest risks startups are facing today? Does Sonali believe that seed-stage companies will take money from crossover funds?
- What does Sonali do when she loses faith in the founder? How does she communicate that to them in the right way? What have been some of her biggest lessons here?
- What have been some of Sonali's biggest lessons when it comes to reserves management? How does Sonali determine when to double down vs reserve cash?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Sonali De Rycker:
Sonali's Favourite Book: A Fine Balance
Sonali's Most Recent Investment: BeReal
20VC: From Kitchen Table to $134M Fund II; Raising Your First Time Fund: Lessons from 400 LP Meetings, How To Find New LPs, What Materials to Use, How To Get LPs To Commit, The Challenges on Minimum Check Sizes and GP Commits and more with Henri Pierre-Ja
Henri Pierre-Jacques is Managing Partner of Harlem Capital, on a mission to change the face of entrepreneurship by investing in 1,000 diverse founders over the next 20 years. From a kitchen table with his Co-Founder, Jarrid, Henri has scaled Harlem in just a few years to their latest fund last year of $134M, well over-subscribed from their $100M target. Prior to Harlem, Henri was in Private Equity at ICV Partners, and before PE was an Investment Banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
In Today's Episode with Henri Pierre-Jacques
1.) From Kitchen Table to $134M Fund:
- How did Henri make his way into venture having had the idea for Harlem at the kitchen table with his best friend?
- How did Henri use his angel investing strategically to position him to raise Fund I?
- How did Henri's mindset change when making the transition from angel to VC?
2.) The First Fundraise: Harlem I
- How long did it take to raise the first fund? How many meetings did they have?
- What were the most common reasons LPs said no for the first fund?
- What were their biggest lessons around what potential LPs did and did not like?
- How does Henri advise new managers when it comes to meeting new LPs?
- How does Henri use past deal memos to serve as discussion material with LPs?
3.) Building the Firm: The Strategy:
- What was the portfolio construction for the first fund?
- How does Henri separate the world of funds into 3 distinct groups?
- How did they approach reserves management with the first funds? What are some of Henri's biggest lessons when it comes to effective reserves management?
- How does Henri assess his own relationship to price and ownership? How does that change with fund size?
- What are some very important nuances that Henri does not believe many managers think about?
4.) It Is Time For Change:
- Specifically, what are Harlem street doing to ensure the next generation of investors is much more diverse? How do they leverage their intern program to achieve this?
- What would Henri like to see change in the world of LPs when it comes to allocating to more diverse managers?
- What legacy does Henri want to leave with Harlem? What will be a success for Henri?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Henri Pierre-Jacques:
Henri's Most Recent Investment: Mueshi
20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro
Zhenya Loginov is the CRO @ Miro, the leading visual collaboration platform that helps bring teams together and meaningfully improves the way people work. At Miro, I run the go-to-market team of 700+ people across 11 global offices. Prior to Miro, Zhenya was the COO @ Segment where he built and ran the global go-to-market team of 200+ people, expanded the product-market fit into the Enterprise and grew revenue 6x, leading to their acquisition by Twilio for $3.2Bn. Finally, before Segment, Zhenya led a 100-person team at Dropbox across numerous different functional areas.
In Today's Episode with Zhenya Loginov You Will Learn:
1.) Entry into Sales as an Outsider:
- How Zhenya made his way into sales as an outsider and came to be one of the most powerful revenue leaders today with Miro?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways for Zhenya from his time at Segment and Dropbox? How did they impact his mindset today?
- Why did Dropbox not win the enterprise when they had the chance? What mistakes did they make?
2.) The Sales Playbook: What, Why and How:
- What does "the sales playbook mean to Zhenya?
- Does the founder need to be the one to create the sales playbook?
- What are the signs that the founders needs to bring in their first sales hire?
- Should this sales hire be a sales leader or more junior sales rep?
- Is is possible to run a PLG and enterprise sales motion at the same time in the early days of the company?
- What do many founders misunderstand when contemplating adopting an enterprise sales strategy?
3.) Hiring the Team:
- How does Zhenya structure the interview process for new sales hires?
- Zhenya spends 5 hours with each candidate, what does he look to get out of each meeting?
- How does Zhenya break down the criteria for what he wants to see? What are some examples of this?
- How does Zhenya test to determine if the candidate has these criteria? What questions does he find to be most revealing? Why does Zhenya find case studies to not be useful?
- How does Zhenya use interview panels to ensure he makes the right hiring decision? Who is on the panel? At what stage do they meet the candidate? How does Zhenya like to use the panel?
4.) Laying the Groundwork: The Onboarding Process:
- What is the right way to structure the onboarding process for all new sales hires?
- What are some early signs that a new sales hire is not working?
- What can sales leaders do to ensure new reps get "early wins" on the board?
- What can leadership do to ensure the sales team has good cross-functional communication across the org? What works? What does not work?
- What are some of the biggest challenges of running a remote sales team?
20VC: Gary Vaynerchuk on The Most Painful Lessons Learned but Why it was Good to Learn Them, Why You Have to Change the Timeframe You Have For Success, His Relationship to Money and How it Has Changed Over Time & His First 3 Angel Investments; Twitter, Fa
Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur and serves as the Chairman of VaynerX, the CEO of VaynerMedia and the Creator & CEO of VeeFriends. Now Gary is a content machine and documents his life as a CEO daily through his social media channels which have more than 34 million followers and garnishes over 272 million monthly impressions/views across all platforms. He is also a five-time New York Times Best-Selling Author and is a prolific angel investor with early investments in companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Venmo, Snapchat, Coinbase and Uber. If this was not enough, Gary serves on the board of GymShark, MikMak, Bojangles Restaurants, and Pencils of Promise.
In Today’s Episode with Gary Vaynerchuk We Discuss:
1.) From Wine Library to One of The Great Angels in Tech:
- How did Gary make the transition from scaling the wine library to $60M in revenue to angel investing in Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr?
- To what extent does Gary think luck plays a role in one's success today?
- What are Gary's biggest lessons from having FB, Twitter and Tumblr as his first investments? How has his style of angel investing changed over time?
2.) Hard Lessons Learned and Insecurity:
- What is the most painful lesson Gary has learned that he is also pleased to have learned?
- How did Gary's relationship with his father impact how he engages with his children as a father today?
- What are Gary's biggest insecurities today? How does he try and combat them? What works?
3.) Money and Success:
- How does Gary evaluate his relationship with money today? How has it changed over time?
- Why does Gary believe that most people think too short-term? What can one do to inspire a more long-term mindset to building?
- Does Gary believe that everything has a price? What is the one thing for Gary that does not have a price?
4.) Resource and Time Allocation:
- How does Gary determine the projects to do vs not to do?
- How does Gary know when to quit a new project? How does Gary advise founders on when something is not working and knowing when to quit?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes Gary sees founders make when it comes to resource allocation in the early days?
20VC: The Scaling Story of Soho House: Overcoming Dyslexia, Building a Global Brand, Scaling into The US, Retaining Exclusivity with Scale and The Journey to Going Public with Nick Jones, Founder & CEO @ Soho House
Nick Jones is the Founder & CEO @ Soho House, it all started in 1995 when Nick opened the first location above his restaurant, Cafe Boheme, a members’ club for the local artists and actors of London. Today, Soho House is a global brand, a private members club that includes 33 Houses in 14 countries, with more openings in Europe, Asia, and North America on the horizon. In 2021, Nick took Soho House public on the NASDAQ, 25 years since opening the first location. If that was not enough, Nick is also the owner of Babbington House and Cecconi's, one of my favorite restaurants in London.
In Today's Episode with Nick Jones You Will Learn:
1.) The Start of Soho House:
- What was the founding moment for Nick with Soho House?
- What were the biggest lessons from his 3 prior restaurants not working? How did that experience change his approach to Soho House?
- Why does Nick believe resilience is the most important skill of any entrepreneur? When something is not working? What does Nick tell himself?
- With the rise of Instagram, how have the demands of the consumer changed over time in terms of what they expect from hospitality?
2.) The Art of Storytelling:
- What does Nick believe is the essence of truly great storytelling?
- What do all great stories contain? How do the best storytellers tell those stories?
- Where does Nick believe many founders make mistakes when it comes to storytelling today?
3.) The Art of Leadership:
- How does Nick define his style of leadership today? How has it changed over time?
- What does high performance mean to Nick?
- How does Nick think through retaining high performance while also having a family?
- How does Nick approach hiring? Why does Nick find interviewing so tough?
- How does Nick think through when to hire someone external vs promote internal talent?
4.) The Scale of Soho House:
- What was the single most challenging time in the scaling journey of Soho House?
- What changes when you go public? What are the good? What are the bad?
- What does Nick know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
20 Growth: Viral Loops; How To Create and Sustain Them, Why Interviews for Product and Growth Hires are BS and What To Do Instead, Mastering the Onboarding Process; Structuring the First 90 Days with Adam Fishman, Former Head of Growth @ Lyft
Adam Fishman is one of the leading growth practitioners of the last decade. Most recently, Adam was the Chief Product and Growth Offer at Imperfect Foods, where Adam built a 40-person product and growth organization, responsible for 70% of overall company metrics and growing revenue by 400% in one year to $600M annually. Before Imperfect, Adam spent 4 years as VP of Product and Growth @ Patreon, driving the company pivot and rebrand and helping the company scale to $1BN GMV and $100M in revenue. Finally, before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth @ Lyft, Adam was the first growth and marketing employee hired, grew the team to 18 people, and reported directly to the founders.
In Today's Episode with Adam You Will Learn:
1.) Entry into Growth:
- How Adam first made his way into the world of growth when "growth" did not exist as a function?
- What were Adam's biggest lessons from leading Lyft's growth team? How did that impact his mindset?
- What are some of Adam's biggest takeaways from his time at Patreon? What are some of the biggest mistakes he made at Patreon?
2.) The Basics: Growth 101: What and When:
- How does Adam define "growth" today? What is it? What is it not?
- When is the right time to hire your first growth hires?
- Should this first hire be a seasoned growth leader or a more junior growth rep?
- What characteristics and skill sets should this growth hire have?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How should founders structure the hiring process for their first growth hire?
- What 3 questions should all founders ask in the hiring process for growth?
- How can founders use data and case studies to really test the skillsets of growth candidates?
- Why does Adam believe that the hiring process for growth and product is so broken?
4.) The Onboarding Process:
- What is the right way to structure the onboarding process for new growth hires?
- How should growth hires create cross-functional relationships and communication with the rest of the team? What has worked for Adam in the past? What has not?
- What are the signs that are new growth hire is not working? How long should they be given?
- What are the signs that are a new growth hire is working? What is the sign of "exceptional"?
5.) Adam Fishman: AMA:
- What growth decision has Adam made without data? How did it go?
- How does Adam define "viral loops"? What makes one better than another? Where do so many make mistakes with viral loops?
- Adam led the rebrand for Patreon, what is the secret to a successful rebrand? What are some of the most common pitfalls to avoid?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Adam Fishman
Adam's Favourite Book: First 90 Days, Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah on The 3 Risks All Startups Face, Angel Investing Rules; No Founder Meetings and No Due Diligence, SMB vs Enterprise; Lessons on Pricing, Distribution and Why You Should Resist Going Enterprise
Dharmesh Shah is the Founder and CTO @ Hubspot, a full CRM platform with marketing, sales, service, and CMS software. Dharmesh started Hubspot in 2006 and today it is a publicly-traded company (NYSE: HUBS) with over 3,500+ people and a market capitalization of $16.9 billion. Prior to founding HubSpot, Dharmesh founded Pyramid Digital Solutions, which he bootstrapped with less than $10,000 and after 11 years of CEOship, Dharmesh helped the company get acquired in 2005 by SunGard Business Systems. In addition to co-authoring “Inbound Marketing" Dharmesh founded and writes for OnStartups.com -- a top-ranking startup blog and community with more than 1,000,000 members. Finally, if all of this was not enough, he is an angel investor in over 90 startups, including Coinbase, AngelList, Gusto, Okta and many more. and a frequent speaker on startups, growth, and the business of technology.
In Today's Episode with Dharmesh Shah We Discuss:
1.) The Founding of Hubspot:
- How did Dharmesh's wife help Dharmesh find his co-founder in Brian?
- What about SMB did both Dharmesh and Brian find a shared passion for?
- What is the single biggest mistake Dharmesh made in the early days of Hubspot?
2.) The Culture Code:
- What is Dharmesh's single biggest advice to founders when it comes to culture?
- What does Dharmesh mean when he says "you have to treat culture like a product"?
- What does Dharmesh mean when he says he looks for a "low ego to accomplishment ratio"? How does he test for this when hiring new hires?
- How do the best people approach both responsibility and accountability? How does this show in their work and behaviour?
3.) The 3 Kinds of Risk in Startups:
- What does Dharmesh believe are the 3 core risks all startups face in the early days?
- How does Dharmesh advise founders when it comes to "testing for a market"? What is the right way to do customer discovery? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in the discovery process?
- How does Dharmesh advise founders on when to release their second product? What is the right framework for this decision? Where do so many founders make mistakes here?
- How does Dharmesh approach market timing risk? What have been his biggest lessons here?
4.) SMB vs Enterprise:
- Why does Dharmesh believe that SMB is the single best market for founders to choose?
- What are the single biggest challenges with enterprise? How do the long sales cycles and contracts in enterprise hide both customer satisfaction and prevent product development?
- What are some of Dharmesh's biggest lessons on pricing? Does Dharmesh agree you should always "raise your prices"?
- How does Dharmesh advise founders on when is the right time to go into enterprise from SMB?
- What are the single biggest changes founders need to know when making the move from SMB to enterprise?
5.) Angel Investing 101:
- What are Dharmesh's rules when it comes to angel investing?
- What have been some of Dharmesh's biggest lessons from analysing thousands of emails to founders pre-investing? What are the biggest signs in emails of future founder success?
- Why does Dharmesh not have calls with founders before investing?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes Dharmesh has made when angel investing?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Dharmesh Shah:
Dharmesh's Favourite Book: Les Miserables
20VC: Why and How Traditional Venture Firms Need to Innovate, Building Spreadsheets To Figure Out Relationships to Money, Ego and Identity Management with Success and The Biggest Lessons from Working with Mark Zuckerberg in the Early FB Days with Ruchi Sa
Ruchi Sanghvi is a Founder and Partner @ South Park Commons Fund, a home for the most talented technologists, builders, and domain experts figuring out what's next. Prior to SPC, Ruchi was the first female executive at Dropbox and served as their Vice President of Operations. Prior to Dropbox, Ruchi was the first female engineer at Facebook, and was instrumental in implementing the first versions of key features like News Feed, Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect and Privacy. Ruchi has also served as a director on the board of Paytm, India’s largest mobile payments platform. Prior to SPC, Ruchi was an active angel investor in 50+ companies including Gusto, Pinterest, Paytm, Brex, Figma, and Stemcentrx.
In Today's Episode with Ruchi Sanghvi:
1.) From First Female Engineer To Community Leader and Fund Manager:
- How Ruchi made her way into the world of tech becoming the first female engineer at Facebook?
- What were her biggest lessons from her time at Facebook?
- What does Ruchi believe makes Mark Zuckerberg the special leader he is?
- How did Ruchi's time at Dropbox impact how she operates today?
- Does Ruchi agree with the Facebook motto, "move fast and break things"?
2.) Answering Life's Big Questions: Ego, Money, and Insecurity:
- What advice did Ruchi's father give her before he passed away that really impacted how Ruchi operates and acts in the world today?
- How does Ruchi assess her own relationship to money? How has it changed over time? How does she use a spreadsheet to measure her relationship to money?
- Having had such success so young, how does Ruchi approach ego management? When has Ruchi been arrogant in the past? How does she manage her ego today?
- What are Ruchi's biggest insecurities today? Why are they?
3.) Will DAOs Replace Venture Capital:
- How does Ruchi analyze the crypto fund landscape today? Where are the opportunities?
- Does Ruchi believe that large multi-stage firms can simply hire crypto partners and win in the new world of Web3 and crypto?
- How does Ruchi believe DAOs will disrupt the venture model today? Will DAOs displace institutional LP dollars from venture funds and be directed to DAOs?
- How are DAOs governed today? Who makes the decisions? How are tokens allocated?
4.) -1 to Zero: The Art of the Pick:
- What does Ruchi mean when she speaks of -1 to zero? What stage of company formation is this?
- What is the right framework by which founders should approach picking an idea to work on?
- How should a founder know when to give up and try a new idea?
- What are the most common mistakes founders make in this stage of idea picking?
20 Product: Twitter's Former Head of Product, Kayvon Beykpour on How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews, The Core Set of Questions to Ask All Potential Product Hires and When To Continue vs Quit on New Products
Kayvon Beykpour is one of the most prominent product leaders of the last decade. For the last 7 years, Kayvon has been at Twitter where he led all of the teams across Product, Engineering, Design, Research and Customer Service & Operations. Kayvon came to Twitter through Periscope, the live broadcasting app that raised from GV, Bessemer, Scott Belsky and was ultimately acquired by Twitter in 2015. If that was not enough, Kayvon is also an active angel investor today.
In Today's Episode with Kayvon Beykpour You Will Learn:
1.) Entry into Product:
- How did Kayvon make his way into the world of tech and come to be Head of Consumer Product @ Twitter?
- What were some of Kayvon's biggest lessons from the journey with Periscope?
- What were some of Kayvon's biggest takeaways from working closely with Scott Belsky?
2.) Building Your Product Team:
- How does Kayvon advise on your first product hires? Should it be Head of Product or more junior product team members?
- When is the right time for the founder to hand off some core product decisions to these hires?
- What are the core traits and characteristics of some of the best first product hires?
3.) Perfecting the Hiring Process for Product Teams:
- How does Kayvon approach the hiring process for all new product team members?
- What are the stages? What does he look to learn at each stage?
- What questions reveal the most in product candidates? How do the best respond?
- How does Kayvon use case studies and product demos in the process?
4.) Building Product: 101:
- How does Kayvon approach product reviews? Who is invited? Who sets the agenda? How often?
- What have been Kayvon's biggest lessons about what leaders need to do to get the most from their product teams? How do they communicate?
- What has been one of Kayvon's biggest product mistakes? What did he learn?
- How does Kayvon advise founders on when to give up on a new product vs when to iterate and persist?
20VC: Why DAOs Will Replace Venture Capital, What Existing Incumbent Venture Firms Can Do To Survive, The Biggest Challenges Facing New DAOs Today and Whether Web3 Will Bring More or Less Income Inequality
Ian Lee is the Co-Founder of Syndicate, a web3 startup that has raised over $28M from a16z, Kleiner Perkins, IDEO, and 300+ investors. Previously, Ian was Managing Partner of IDEO CoLab Ventures, a crypto venture fund backed by IDEO focused on web3, crypto, and blockchain startups. From 2017-2021, Ian led investments and helped incubate 80+ crypto startups in the areas of DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and more. From 2014-2017, Ian was the Head of Crypto at Citigroup and Citi Ventures globally. Listen to our prior episode on DAOs with Avichal Garg here.
In Today's Episode with Ian Lee We Discuss:
1.) Ian's Entry into Tech and Crypto:
- Why did Ian decide early on that he did not like being a VC?
- What was it that changed his mind, showing him the impact investing can have?
- What have been the most significant but non-obvious developments in crypto?
2.) Why DAOs Will Replace Venture Capital:
- Why does Ian believe that DAOs will replace venture capital firms over time?
- How does Ian analyze the current landscape of Web3 investing and VC?
- Can existing firms layer on a Web3 Partner or Fund and win in the new Web3 landscape?
- How will the next generation of Web3 native firms be structured?
3.) DAOs 101:
- What really is a DAO? What is not a DAO?
- How are DAOs structured? How many people are invited? Who decides who is invited?
- How are decisions made within DAOs? How does this differ dependent on structure?
- What are the single biggest challenges that DAOs face today in operations?
4.) Crypto is The Future of the Internet:
- What does Ian mean when he says "crypto is the future of the internet"?
- What does this mean for the distribution of ownership and wealth in the next generation of the internet?
- Do DAOs and Web3 do more to harm or hurt income inequality today?
- What are the drivers that would lead Web3 to centralize wealth even further?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Ian Lee:
Ian's Fave Book: The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
Ian's Fave Web3 Resources: a16z's Crypto Canon, Jesse Walden's: The Ownership Economy 2022
20VC: The Most Revealing Breakdown of Unit Economics for Quick Commerce; AOVs, Retention, Delivery Costs and more, Why The Business Model is Different for Emerging Markets & Will This Be a Market of Consolidation or Many Players
Over the last 10 days, we have seen unprecedented levels of layoffs from some of the biggest quick commerce providers in the world from Getir to GoPuff to Zapp and Gorillas. Today we dive into the world of quick commerce in emerging markets to uncover what is the same and what is different about the model in emerging markets.
Usman Gul is the Founder & CEO @ Airlift, one of the fastest-growing quick commerce providers in the world with core operations in Pakistan. Airlift has raised over $100M in funding from First Round, Josh Buckley, Sam Altman, and 20VC.
Ralf Wenzel is the Founder & CEO @ JOKR, a unique provider in the quick commerce market with their dual operations in both the US and LATAM. They are one of the only providers to operate in both emerging and developed economies. To date, JOKR has raised over $288M from Softbank, Balderton, GGV, and Kaszek to name a few.
Aadit Palicha is the Founder & CEO @ Zepto, they have taken the Indian quick commerce market by storm since their early days in YC. To date, Aadit has raised over $360M with Zepto from YC, Lachy Groom, Breyer Capital, and Rocket Internet to name a few.
In Today's Episode on Quick Commerce in Emerging Markets You Will Learn:
1.) Emerging Markets vs Developed Economies: Where is Quick Commerce Best?
- What are the single biggest benefits for quick commerce providers in emerging markets?
- What are the single biggest challenges of operating quick commerce companies in emerging markets as compared to developed economies?
- From a cost of goods and delivery perspective, what is the single biggest difference comparing operating in emerging markets?
2.) Warehouses, Picking and Delivery: The Economics Broken Down:
- What % of revenue does Zepto, Airlift and JOKR spend on average for new warehouses in mature markets? How does this change over time? How do they select warehouse locations?
- What % of revenue is picking costs for Zepto, Airlift and JOKR? What are some needle moving things that could reduce this picking cost?
- What % of revenue is delivery costs for Zepto, Airlift and JOKR? What levers can make this driver efficiency and delivery cost more efficient?
- What % of AOV does Airlift and Zepto charge for delivery? How does Zepto leverage power users to subsidise the delivery costs for newly acquired users?
- Why does JOKR not agree with charging delivery fees? How does charging delivery fees impact usage, frequency and AOV?
3.) Product Selection and Margins: Who Goods Have The Highest Margins?
- How do Zepto, Airlift and JOKR select the products they sell? How do the margins differ across different product categories?
- Why is fruit and vegetable the most important category for all three providers? What other metrics are heavily impacted by large spend on fruit and vegetable spend?
4.) AOV and Customer Spend: What is Good?
- What is the AOV for Airlift, JOKR and Zepto today? How do new markets compare to more mature markets? What are the drivers of the increase?
- Why does Zepto not believe that AOV is the right metric to be tracking? Why is gross profit per order the right metric to be tracking?
5.) Additional Business Models: Advertising:
- How much revenue does JOKR, Airlift and Zepto make from advertising revenue today?
- What can be done to increase this?
- How have JOKR been able to scale advertising revenue in such a short space of time? What has worked? What has not worked?
- How important is advertising revenue to the future sustainability of the business model?
20VC: Keith Rabois on Why Buy Low, Sell High Does Not Work in Venture, Keith's Biggest Lessons from Prior Crashes, Why Today's Public Markets are not an Over-Reaction, Why Valuation is a Trap & Why Wokeness is a Function of Entitlement
Keith Rabois is a General Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the best performing funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX, Stripe, Anduril, the list goes on. As for Keith, he has led the first institutional investments in DoorDash, Affirm and co-founded Opendoor. He has also led investments in Faire, Ramp, Trade Republic, and Stripe. As an operator, Keith has an unparalleled track record as a Senior Exec at Paypal, he then went on to influential roles at Linkedin and being COO at Square. Finally, as an angel, Keith made early investments into Airbnb, Lyft, Palantir, Wish and more.
In Today's Episode with Keith Rabois:
1.) Buy Low, Sell High: What BS!
- Why does Keith believe that "buy low, sell high" does not work in venture?
- Why would it lead you to very dangerous investment decisions at the early stage?
- How does the size of your fund impact the appropriateness of "buy low, sell high"?
2.) The Current Landscape:
- Does Keith believe the current state of public markets is an over-reaction or a new normal?
- How does Keith respond to the suggestion that Founders Fund has paused new investments given the uncertainty in the market?
- How does Keith think about investing through cycles and temporal diversification?
- How does Keith advise young investors today questioning whether they are actually any good at this?
- What does Keith believe are his biggest fears and insecurities today?
3.) Outcome Scenario Planning and Competitor Analysis:
- Does Keith believe outcome scenario planning is important?
- Why does Keith believe you can always tell your biggest hits early? What have been the core signs for him?
- What have been some of Keith's biggest lessons from Mike Moritz and Vinod Khosla when it comes to upside maximization? What are the right questions to ask?
- Why does Keith believe you do need to look through public market comps when investing in startups?
4.) Time Allocation and Losing Faith in Founders:
- How does Keith approach time allocation across the portfolio? Spend time with the winners or help the struggling companies? What have been his biggest lessons here?
- What does Keith do when he has lost faith in the founder? How does he communicate it to them?
- What does Kieth believe VCs do wrong when they no longer believe in the founder or company?
5.) Do VCs Add Value?
- What does Keith believe is the acid test for whether he is doing his job as a VC properly?
- Why does Keith believe there are only 5 board members that add true value to their companies at scale?
- Who is the best board member Keith has ever worked with? Why?
- Why does Keith believe that age is not your friend as an investor? How does he combat this?
6.) The Downfall of SF and Wokeness:
- Will we see a reduction of wokeness in companies with the public markets correcting and power shifting from employees to employers?
- Is Keith concerned by the lack of coherence in the US today when it comes to politics?
- What are the core reasons for the downfall of SF to Keith?
- Why does he believe it is a net negative to build a company in SF today?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Keith's Most Recent Investment: Found
20VC: Scaling from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M, Why Seed May Be The Best priced Asset Class and Not Overpriced At All & The 3 Stages of Fund Scaling and What it Takes To Build a Firm with Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner @ Felicis
Aydin Senkut is the Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis. An original super angel turned multi-stage investor, he has been named on the Forbes Midas List for the past nine years (2014-2022). Felicis has been an incredible 16-year journey starting with a $4M Fund I back in 2006, their most recent fund in 2021 was $900M. Along the way, Felicis has invested in over 45 unicorns including Adyen, Canva, Shopify, Notion, Opendoor, and Plaid. Prior to starting Felicis, Aydin was a Senior Manager at Google where he spent an incredible 6 years.
In Today’s Episode with Aydin Senkut:
1.) The Founding of Felicis:
- How did Aydin transition from a successful angel to the first $41M institutional fund with Felicis?
- How did Aydin's mindset change moving from investing personal to LP capital?
- What does Aydin know now that he wishes he had known when he started Fund I?
2.) Fund Mechanics: Building a Portfolio
- Why does Aydin believe portfolios need to have 40-50 positions to be diversified enough?
- Given Aydin being multi-stage, how important is ownership on first check for Aydin and Felicis?
- Does Aydin believe it is possible to really concentrate capital into your best performers?
- How does Aydin think through outcome scenario planning? What is his biggest takeaway from this?
3.) Aydin Senkut: The Investor
- What have been the biggest changes in Aydin's style of investing over the last 16 years?
- What was Aydin's biggest miss? How did it impact his mindset moving forward?
- What is Aydin's biggest insecurity as an investor today? How has it changed?
- Where does Aydin still believe he is weak as an investor? What is he doing to combat it?
4.) The Venture Landscape:
- Why does Aydin believe that despite the pricing, seed is the best risk-adjusted asset class?
- How does Aydin evaluate where crossover funds will move with the death of many growth rounds?
- What segment of the market will be hit hardest by the crunch? What worries with this?
- What would Aydin most like to change about the venture landscape today? Why?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Aydin Senkut
Aydin’s Favourite Book: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
20 Sales: How To Create and Execute a World-Class Sales Playbook, Why You Should Do Both PLG and Enterprise Sales at the Same Time, Three Non-Obvious Qualities the Best Sales Reps Have & The Four Steps To Sales Team Onboarding with Oliver Jay, Former CRO
Oliver Jay (OJ) is one of the most successful sales leaders of the last decade. Most recently, OJ spent 6 years at Asana where he was hired as the company's first revenue leader. As CRO, OJ was responsible for product-led and sales-led revenue and grew the team from less than 20 to over 450. Before Asana, OJ spent 4 years at Dropbox in a period of hyper-scaling for the business where OJ was Head of APAC and LATAM. At Dropbox, OJ scaled the sales team from 0 to 50 while tripling ARR. If that was not enough, OJ is also an independent board member at Grab, the leading Super app in Southeast Asia.
In Today’s Episode with Oliver Jay You Will Learn:
1.) Entry into Sales:
- How did OJ make his way into sales with Dropbox?
- If OJ were to choose 1-2 lessons from his time at Dropbox and Asana that have stayed with him, what would they be? How did they impact his mindset?
- What were some of the non-obvious but crucial things Asana and Dropbox did in sales that led to success?
2.) The Playbook:
- Why does OG disagree with so many definitions of "the sales playbook"? What is the sales playbook to OJ? What are the different chapters?
- Should the founder be the one to create the sales playbook?
- What are the signs that the founder has a repeatable and scalable playbook?
- When is the right time to hire the first sales rep? Should it be a Head of Sales or Sales Rep?
- How does the first hire depend on whether you are PLG or enterprise sales led?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How does OJ structure the hiring process?
- How does OJ know the qualities that he wants to uncover in each candidate?
- What questions does OJ ask to unpack whether the candidate has those qualities?
- How does this differ when hiring sales reps vs sales leaders?
- How does OJ use the sales demo to test the quality of a candidate? What does he want to see?
- Who does OJ bring into the interview process? When do they get involved?
- What are two questions that will immediately tell whether someone is a good manager?
4.) Sales Onboarding:
- How does OJ segment sales onboarding into 3 crucial steps?
- Chapter 1: Support: Why does OJ believe it is so important for reps to spend their first week with support? What should they look to learn? What questions should they be asking?
- Chapter 2: Market Knowledge: How can sales leaders teach and educate new reps on market landscape, dynamics and competition? Why does this have to come before sales training?
- Chapter 3: Sales Training: In the final step, what does the sales training process? What does OJ look for in the final sales demo? When does OJ let reps speak to customers? How does this differ when comparing enterprise to PLG?
20VC: Oren Zeev on Raising 3 Funds and $1BN in 12 Months; Why Temporal Diversification is BS, Why Both LPs and GPs are Way Over-Diversified & Why Venture Partnerships are Sub-Optimal and Challenging
Oren Zeev is the Founding Partner @ Zeev Ventures and one of the OGs of solo capitalism. Oren has an incredible portfolio including investments in Audible, Houzz, Chegg, Riverside, Tipalti, TripActions, and Firebolt to name a few. Oren is also very unlike any other VC firm, he does not employ any associates, principals, or staff. He doesn't have partners or partner meetings. No LP meetings. No processes. No investment committees or memos. Nada. Oren is doing it differently. Prior to starting Zeev Ventures, Oren spent 12 years as a GP @ Apax Partners where he c-headed their technology practice in their Silicon Valley office.
In Today’s Episode with Oren Zeev You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How did Oren make his way into venture over 20 years ago?
- How does the crash of today compare to the dot com and 2008? What is the same? What is different?
- Why did Oren decide to leave Apax and start Zeev Ventures on his own?
2.) Deployment Pace:
- Why does Oren believe that the benefits of temporal diversification are overstated?
- Oren raised 3 funds and over $1BN in a year, how does this current environment impact how Oren thinks about deployment pace? Will he change anything?
- How does Oren explain deployment pace to LPs who question him?
3.) Ownership:
- How central a role does ownership play for Oren in terms of his investor psychology?
- Does Oren believe it is possible to increase your ownership in subsequent rounds, in your best companies?
- What are the biggest mistakes that big funds make with regards to ownership requirements?
- Why is there a misalignment between GP and LP when it comes to increasing ownership vs markups?
4.) Price Sensitivity:
- How does Oren evaluate his own relationship to price today?
- What have been some of Oren's biggest lessons on price from his biggest wins and losesses?
- What mistake do the majority of investors make when it comes to price?
5.) Diversification:
- Why does Oren believe that both GPs and LPs are wildly over-diversified in their portfolios?
- What is the right amount of companies for GPs to have in their portfolio?
- How does Oren advise LPs on the right amount of funds for them to be invested with?
6.) Oren Zeev: AMA:
- What does Oren know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career in venture?
- What elements of the world of LPs would Oren most like to change?
- Why does Oren feel that the concept of pro-rata is a lazy one?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Oren Zeev
Oren’s Most Recent Investment: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
20VC: The Job of the CEO is Do As Little As Possible; How To Hire, What Questions To Ask, Why Pointy People are Always 100xers, How To Tell Great Stories Today & How Leaders Must Determine What To Delegate vs What To Control with Ian Siegel, Co-Founder an
Ian Siegel is the Founder and CEO @ ZipRecruiter, a leading online employment marketplace that uses AI-driven matching technology to actively connect millions of businesses and job seekers to their next great opportunity. Since co-founding the company in 2010, more than 1.8M employers have used ZipRecruiter to find their next great hire and over 500 million job applications have been submitted through the site. Prior to their IPO last year, Ian bootstrapped the company for many years to many millions in revenue before taking venture funding from IVP, Wellington Management and Basepoint Ventures to name a few. Before founding ZipRecruiter, Ian served in key leadership roles at CitySearch, Stamps.com, and Rent.com (an eBay company).
In Today’s Episode with Ian Siegel You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding of Olo:
- How did Ian co-found ZipRecruiter from his kitchen with no venture funding and his 3 friends?
- Why did they decide to not raise venture funding in the early days?
- What was the catalyst at $50M in revenue for realising now was the right time to raise funding?
2.) The Art of Great Storytelling
- What does truly great storytelling mean to Ian? What are the components of a great story?
- Why do so many people today f*** up their product marketing and messaging?
- Why does Ian believe Version 1.0 is the only one that takes true courage?
3.) CEO's Do As Little As Possible
- Why does Ian believe his job as CEO is to do as little as possible?
- How does Ian determine between the things he, the CEO should do, vs those those he should delegate?
- Why does Ian believe the art of leadership and the art of parenting are the same?
4.) The Art of Hiring:
- How has Ian's approach to hiring changed over the years?
- What does Ian mean when he says, "I look for pointy people"? How does he detect them?
- What are the two qualities that make the best execs? What questions reveal them?
5.) Parenting and Marriage:
- Does Ian worry that with increasing family commitments, he loses an inch on work?
- Why does he believe he is in an advantage as a CEO to those that do not have children?
- What was the biggest argument he has had with his wife? How did it change his perspective?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Ian Siegel
Ian’s Favourite Book: Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet
20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Darius Contractor is one of the pre-eminent growth leaders of the last decade. As a growth OG, he has been VP Growth @ Airtable, where he led the growth, engineering, and product teams. Before Airtable, Darius was Head of Product Growth @ Facebook Messenger and finally, before Facebook, Darius spent 4 years as Head of Growth Engineering at Dropbox; here, Darius helped drive Dropbox to $100M in net new revenue through Dropbox Business. If that was not enough, Darius is also an active angel and fund investor with a portfolio including Calm, Airtable, Clubhouse, Census and LP checks in Maven Ventures and Long Journey Ventures.
In Today’s Episode with Darius Contractor You Will Learn:
1.) Darius Contractor: Entry into Growth:
- How did Darius make his way into the world of growth? What was that first entry position?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways for Darius from his time at Airtable, Dropbox and Facebook?
- What 1-2 pieces of advice would Darius give to a growth leader starting a new role today?
2.) When is the Right Time:
- What does the term"growth" really mean to Darius? How do so many confuse it?
- When is the right time to make your first growth hire as a startup?
- Should this hire be a junior growth person or a growth leader?
- Should this initial growth team be placed inside an existing team or as a standalone team?
- Where do so many startups make mistakes when making this first hire?
3.) Who To Hire:
- How does one structure the process for your first growth hire? What are the stages?
- What are the qualities that we are looking to uncover in these first hires?
- What are the 4 interview stages to go through to test for these qualities?
- How should founders use case studies and practicals as a way to test for these qualities?
4.) Onboarding and Integration:
- What does the optimal onboarding process for new growth hires look like?
- What do the best growth hires do in the first 30/60/90 days?
- What are some early red flags that a new hire is a mis-hire?
- How can leaders encourage cross-functional communication between growth and the rest of the org?
20VC: The Founding of General Catalyst, What it Takes to Build a Firm That Stands the Test of Time, Why VCs Need to Give Founders Greater Permission to Go For It & Why Venture Capital is Like Tennis with David Fialkow, Co-Founder @ General Catalyst
David Fialkow is the Co-Founder and Managing Director @ General Catalyst, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Stripe, Snap, Airbnb, Anduril, Canva and many more amazing names. Prior to founding General Catalyst with Joel Cutler, David was a serial entrepreneur building and selling 4 successful companies.
In Today’s Episode with David Fialkow:
1.) Everything Great Starts Small:
- How did David and Joel decide on a Hawaiin beach that they wanted to start General Catalyst?
- Why did they decide to name it General Catalyst?
- How did the first fundraise go for GC Fund I?
2.) Creating a Firm: The Early Days
- What design objectives did Joel and David have when they started the firm?
- How did Joel and David think about firm expansion; going to the West Coast? Coming to Europe? Going multi-stage? What drives their decision to do new products?
- On reflection, what were some of the toughest elements of the early days with GC?
- What does David believe they got right? Why? What did they get wrong? How would he change it?
3.) The Partnership:
- What does David believe makes for a truly successful venture partnership?
- How does a great venture partnership align to what makes a successful marriage?
- How does David approach trust? How does he build it with people?
- What situations would cause David to lose trust? Why do so few people understand it?
- What does David believe is the true secret to authentic relationship building?
4.) Doing the Impossible: Generational Transition:
- What does David believe they did so right in their generational transition at GC?
- What do many firms get wrong in handing over the reins to the next generation?
- What are the biggest commonalities between venture partnerships and filmmaking?
Mentioned in Today’s Episode with David Fialkow:
David’s Favourite Book: The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People
20 Product: iPhone Creator, Tony Fadell on Marketing Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs, What is Truly Great Product Marketing, How The Best Product Teams Do Post-Mortems and Product Reviews & Is Product Art or Science, Data or Gut?
Tony Fadell, often referred to as the father of the iPod is one of the leading product thinkers of the last 30 years as one of the makers of some of the most game-changing products in society from the iPhone and iPod to more recently founding Nest, creating the Nest Thermostat, leading to their $3.2BN acquisition by Google. Tony recently released Build, this is a masterclass taking 30 years of product and company building lessons and packaging them for you, check it out here.
In Today's Episode with Tony Fadell:
1.) Everything Great Starts Small:
- How did Tony make his way into the world of product in the early days?
- What were his biggest takeaways from the massive flop of General Magic?
- How did Tony come to Apple and what were the early creation days of iPod and iPhone?
2.) Data and Brand:
- Does Tony believe great product building is art or science? When should teams listen to their gut vs the data?
- When was a time that Tony listened to his gut? When was a time Tony listened to the data? How did each situation evolve and turn out?
- How does Tony think about creating a truly special first mile experience? Where do so many companies go wrong in the first mile today?
- How does Tony balance between business decisions (COGs etc) and product decisions that will delight customers?
3.) Lessons from Steve Jobs on Product Marketing:
- How does Tony define great product management? Why do so many people get it wrong?
- What are Tony's biggest lessons from working with Steve Jobs on what makes great product marketing?
- Where does Tony see so many companies make the biggest mistakes when it comes to messaging?
- What is the difference between messaging, marketing and communications?
4.) Hiring Product Teams:
- What are the clearest signals of the best product talent when interviewing them?
- What questions does Tony always ask product people to determine quality?
- How do great product teams remain upbeat when launches fail and remain modest when they are wildly successful?
5.) Apple Watch, iPod and Apple HiFi:
- Why was the product messaging for the Apple Watch wrong in the early days? How did it change?
- Why was the iPod a bad business until the 3rd Generation? What changed?
- Why did the Apple HiFi fail? How did that impact Tony's mindset?
Mentioned in Today's Episode with Tony Fadell:
Tony's Favourite Book: Only the Paranoid Survive
20VC: WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture & Why Catastrophe is More Likely Than Ever and Switzerland Could Be a "H
Fabrice Grinda is the Founding Partner @ FJ Labs, with over 700 investments, Fabrice has had over 250 exits and built a portfolio including Alibaba, Coupang, Airbnb, Instacart, Flexport, and Delivery Hero, and many more. Prior to FJ Labs, Fabrice served as CEO for three multinational companies; including OLX, one of the largest websites in the world with over 300 million unique visitors per month. As a result of his incredible investing success, Fabrice was named the #1 Angel Investor in the world by Forbes.
In Today's Episode with Fabrice Grinda:
1.) Everything Great Starts Small:
- How did Fabrice make his way into the world of investing from founding 3 companies?
- How does Fabrice feel about founders raising funds with external LPs?
- Why does Fabrice feel that investing as an angel made him a better CEO?
2.) WTF is Going On: The Market Today
- How does Fabrice assess what is happening in the market today?
- What is causing the massive public market drops we are seeing?
- How do inflation rates and interest rates have such an impact on where we are?
- How much of this is a result of COVID, the shift to goods from services and supply chains?
3.) The Optimistic Case:
- How does Fabrice think things could get better from here? What needs to happen?
- What could the Fed do to enable this optimistic outcome to take place?
- What would need to happen in geo-politics and Russia for this to happen?
- What is the probability today of this optimistic case happening?
4.) The Great Stagnation:
- How does Fabrice think the economy could go sideways from here?
- What are the core drivers of this?
- Why is this the most likely outcome of all? What is the probability of this happening?
5.) The Catastrophe:
- How could this market get so much worse?
- What level of interest rate change would cause this outcome to occur?
- Why does Fabrice think that Switzerland is a "House of Cards"? What would this mean if Switzerland fell? What other European countries does Fabrice think are vulnerable?
6.) What this Means for Venture:
- How will LPs respond to these differing situations?
- How does this impact how Fabrice thinks about his rate of deployment?
- What segment of the market is Fabrice most excited for; early or growth?
Mentioned in Today's Episode with Fabrice Grinda:
Fabrice's Favourite Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
20VC: Why the Traditional Seed Fund Model No Longer Works, Why Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed Bring Signaling Risk but also Less Pressure, The One Criteria All Potential Sales Hires Need to Have and The Clear Signs of 10x Sales Hires with Jason Lemki
Jason Lemkin is the Founder and Managing Partner @ SaaStr, a social community of 500,000+ SaaS founders and a $100M venture fund. In the past, Jason has made investments in the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Pipedrive, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was the Co-Founder and CEO @ Echosign, backed by Emergence Capital, Echosign was bought by Adobe and is Adobe Sign as we know it today.
In Today’s Episode with Jason Lemkin You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How Jason made his way into the world of venture having sold EchoSign?
- What were some of Jason's biggest lessons from his first 4 investments being unicorns?
2.) The Importance of Ownership & Multi-Stage Funds
- How does Jason assess the importance of ownership today?
- If companies can be $20BN, does ownership really matter?
- How does Jason advise founders who have offers from multi-stage funds at seed?
- Why does taking multi-stage money at seed result in less pressure for founders?
- Does Jason believe that signaling risk from large funds is real, when investing at seed?
3.) Building Your Sales Team
- Does the founder have to be the one to create the sales playbook? What are the nuances?
- Should you hire a Head of Sales or sales reps first? What should you expect from each?
- What are the one criteria that you must look for when hiring your first sales reps?
- What are the signals that a sales rep or leader is a 10x hire?
- What works when hiring sales reps, 80% of the time?
4.) Boards and VC Value Add:
- Why has Jason changed his mind when it comes to boards? Why are some inefficient and some very efficient?
- How do the best founders manage their board? How do they bring in their exec team?
- What is the right documentation to prepare for board meetings? Why does Jason prefer slide decks over Notion and Coda?
- How can leaders use board meetings to direct and goal set with functional leads?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Jason Lemkin
Jason’s Most Recent Investment: Owner
20VC: The Memo: Chris Sacca on Why We Are Breeding a Generation of Entitled Assholes, Harley Finkelstein on What Great Fatherhood Really Means, Deena Shakir on How Kids Make You a Better Investor and Anne Wojcicki on How Children Change Your Approach to R
- Why does Chris believe we have bred a generation of asshole kids?
- What is the right way to negotiate with children? How has that impacted how he manages his team?
Anne Wojcicki is the Founder & CEO @ 23andMe, offering DNA testing with the most comprehensive ancestry breakdown, personalized health insights, and more.
- How did having kids change Anne's approach to time allocation and risk?
Harley Finkelstein is the President of Shopify. Over the last 12 years, Harley has partnered with Tobi to the tune of building Shopify’s revenue to over $4.6BN in 2021 and the team to over 10,000 employees.
- Does Harley believe he has always been a good father?
- What changes has Harley made to be more present and there for his children?
- Why does Harley advise couples therapy as early in a relationship as possible?
Deena Shakir is a Partner at Lux Capital, one of the leading firms investing in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what is possible.
- What specific negotiation tactics from parenting can be applied to business?
- How can a parent show their children they listen, they understand and are there for them?
- Why does Deena believe children make you more productive and more efficient?
Eric Liaw is a General Partner @ IVP, one of the leading later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms of the last decade with $8.7 billion of committed capital and a 40-year IRR of 43.1%.
- What have been the biggest challenges for Eric of managing family and work?
- What have been some of Eric's biggest lessons in terms of how he communicates about his work to his family?
Scott Dietzen is Vice Chairman of the Board of Pure Storage and served as the Company’s CEO from 2010 to 2017. Under his leadership, Pure grew to thousands of employees and completed an IPO in 2015.
- What can parents learn from nature programs?
- What core elements of parenting are directly transferrable to management?
20VC: Scaling to $2BN AUM in 3 years, Fundraising Lessons and Tactics from 2,500 LP Meetings & What it Takes to Build a Firm That Stands the Test of Time with Harley Miller, Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Left Lane Capital
Harley Miller is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Left Lane Capital, one of the fastest-growing growth equity firms of the last five years. Just yesterday, Left Lane announced the closing of their new fund taking their AUM to over $2BN with an early portfolio including M1 Finance, Masterworks, Choco, GoStudent, to name a few. Prior to founding Left Lane, Harley spent over 9 years at Insight Partners investing in the likes of DeliveryHero, HelloFresh, N26, Calm, Udemy and many more breakout companies.
In Today’s Episode with Harley Miller You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How Harley made his way into the world of venture with his first role at Insight?
- What were Harley's biggest lessons and takeaways from 10 years at Insight?
2.) Left Lane: Fundraising
- What are harley's biggest takeaways on fundraising from speaking to 2,500 LPs for Left Lane I?
- With that experience in mind, what advice does Harley give to other first time fund managers on what it takes to raise successfully?
- How did the Left Lane pitch to LPs change over time? What worked? What did not work?
- With the benefit of hindsight, what fundraising elements would Harley have done differently?
3.) Left Lane: Firm Building
- What are the hardest elements of building a firm today?
- How did Harley navigate the transition from investor to fund manager? What was challenging?
- What is Harley's biggest advice to young people in venture looking to scale their career fast?
- What are 1-2 core inputs aspiring VCs should focus on as they build their career?
4.) Left Lane: Investing and Consumer
- How does Harley approach portfolio construction with the new fund?
- How does Harley think through outcome scenario planning and ownership requirements with the new fund?
- How does Harley think traditional growth equity models can be applied to consumer investing?
- What will Left Lane be in 20 years? What firm does Harley want to build?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Harley Miller
Harley’s Most Recent Investment: Masterworks
20VC: Scaling to $122M ARR IPO with $6M in Net Burn, Olo. The Ultimate Journey of Capital Efficiency, What Worked, What Did Not Work and How Leaders Need To Reshape Thinking Around Resource and Attention Allocation
Noah Glass is the Founder and CEO @ Olo, the interface between restaurants and the on-demand world powering millions of orders per day. Olo is an incredible tale of capital efficiency, at IPO the company had a net burn of just $6M with $122M in ARR. Noah raised from some of the best in the business with names such as David Frankel @ Founder Collective, Danny Meyer, Scott Shleifer @ Tiger Global, all on the cap table. Prior to founding Olo, Noah was International Expansion Manager for Endeavour Global, launching the first African Endeavour affiliate. If that was not enough, Noah is also on the board of Portillo's, Share our Strength and the Culinary Institute for America.
In Today’s Episode with Noah Glass You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding of Olo:
- What was the founding a-ha moment for Noah with Olo?
- What did David Frankel do that compelled Noah, now was the time to start Olo?
- What have been some of Noah's biggest lessons from working with David Frankel?
2.) Capital Efficiency: Scaling to $122M ARR with $6M Net Burn
- Why did Noah and the team not raise more money in the early Olo days?
- How does Noah advise early founders who are concerned if they do not raise, their competition will?
- What are 2-3 of the core levers that allow Olo to be so efficient? What can others learn from them?
- What would Noah have done differently fundraise wise, with the benefit of hindsight?
3.) Decision Making: The Secret
- What does Noah mean when he says; "capital allocation and attention allocation are intertwined"?
- How has Noah changed and evolved his decision-making as a leader?
- How does Noah use a CEO coach? What do they discuss? How often? What works? What does not?
- What decision did Noah make that proved to be the wrong one? How did he come back from it?
4.) Noah Glass: The Father and Husband
- How does Noah do so much as CEO and also not lose an inch on being an amazing father and husband?
- What does Noah believe is the secret to a truly successful marriage, while also being public markets CEO?
- How has Noah changed as a father and husband over the years? What has worked? What has not worked?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Noah Glass
Noah’s Favourite Book: Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
20 Sales: Zoom's Head of North America Sales on When To Hire a Head of Sales, Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Before Sales Reps, The 3 Traits to Look for When Hiring Sales Reps & What Sales Leaders Can Do To Make Their Sales Team Feel Like They Are Wi
Mitch Tarica is Head of North America Sales at Zoom Video Communications. Before joining Zoom, Mitch spent over 5 years at RingCentral including as Senior VP of Worldwide Sales and Customer Success. Finally, before RingCentral, Mitch was at Oracle for over 7 years in numerous different sales roles.
In Today’s Episode with Mitch Tarica You Will Learn:
1.) Entry into Sales:
- How did Mitch make his way into sales with one of the first SaaS companies in the world?
- What were his early lessons on what truly great sales entails?
- What elements does Mitch fear we have lost in the art of sales over time?
2.) The Playbook:
- Should the founder be the one to create the sales playbook?
- What are the signs that the founder has a repeatable and scalable playbook?
- When is the right time to make the first sales hire? Should it be a Head of Sales or Sales Rep?
- How does the first hire depend on whether you are PLG or enterprise sales led?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How does Mitch structure the hiring process? Step by step, what does he want to achieve?
- What questions does Mitch ask in the first interview, always?
- What are the 3 traits that Mitch believes all great sales hires have? How does he test for them?
- How do Zoom use practical sales tests to determine the ability of a potential sales hire?
- How does Mitch see many founders make mistakes in the sales hiring process?
4.) Sales Onboarding:
- What are the crucial steps to do sales onboarding right?
- How should leaders structure the first 30,60 and 90 days for their new reps?
- What are some early red flags that leaders should watch for with new reps?
- What more can leaders do to make sure their reps are as successful as possible in the early days?
20VC: Why You Should Think Twice Before Taking Multi-Stage Money at Seed, Why Venture Has Never Been Less Collaborative, How Becoming a Parent Made Me a Better Investor and Why We Should Be Optimistic About the Future of Diversity in Venture with Deena Sh
Deena Shakir is a Partner at Lux Capital, one of the leading firms investing in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what is possible. Deena has led a number of investments including in Maven Clinic, Mos, Ramp, Alife and SteadyMD to name a few. Before joining Lux, Deena was a Partner at GV and previously led product partnerships at Google for early-stage products in healthcare, AI/ML and search at Google. Before tech and venture, Deena was an aspiring anthropologist, journalist, diplomat, aid worker and was a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of State under Secretary Clinton. There Deena helped launch President Obama’s first Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2010.
In Today’s Episode with Deena Shakir You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How Deena made her way from journalism and the world of politics to rockstar healthcare investor?
- What were Deena's biggest takeaways from seeing her parents build a new life in the US?
2.) Competition in Venture:
- Why should founders not take multi-stage fund money at seed?
- What problems does it cause? How do VCs try and justify it? What red flags should founders look for?
- How does Deena advise her companies when it comes to pre-emptive rounds? When should they take them? When should they not take them?
3.) Deena Shakir: The Person
- How has becoming a parent changed Deena's operating mentality?
- Why does Deena believe she has never been better as an investor post becoming a mother?
- Why does Deena feel so many questions around parenting are wrong? In what ways would she like those questions of female operators and investors to change?
4.) Diversity and Inclusion: We Should Be Optimistic
- Why is Deena optimistic about the future of diversity and inclusion in tech and venture?
- What drives her optimism? What remains a cause for concern for Deena on this topic?
- What more can both companies and venture funds do to improve the landscape?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Deena Shakir
Deena's Favourite Book: The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption
Deena's Most Recent Investment: Mos: Banking for Students
20VC: How Today's Market Changes How Companies Should Approach Burn and Runway, Are Financing Markets Closing? How To Know When To Pay Up vs Stay Price Disciplined & Why The Most Important Thing in Venture is Generating Positive Selection with Bill Cilluf
Bill Cillufo is Partner and Head of International Investments at QED, one of the leading fintech venture firms today with a portfolio including Nubank, Kavak, Klarna, Quinto Andar and Bitso to name a few. As for Bill, he has led investments in Nubank, Loft, Wagestream and Creditas among others. Prior to joining QED, he spent nearly 20 years at Capital One, spanning several roles and leading several businesses. During Bill’s last 3 years at Capital One, he led its Co-Brand and Private Label credit card business, building the business nearly from scratch to one of the top few players in the US market.
In Today’s Episode with Bill Cillufo You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How Bill made his way from 20 years at Capital One to becoming a Partner @ QED?
- How did Capital One inform his mindset around unit economics?
- Having seen booms and busts firsthand with Capital One, how did that impact his investing mindset today?
2.) The Landscape: What is Happening?
- Where does Bill believe the biggest crunch in funding markets is today?
- Does Bill believe this will trickle down to the early stage?
- How does Bill advise his portfolio companies on runway and burn given the environment?
- What does Bill believe that many have not seen that is coming?
3.) Bill Cillufo: The Investor
- How does Bill analyse his own relationship to price and price sensitivity?
- How has Bill changed as an investor over the last 5 years? What caused the changes?
- How does Bill reflect on reserves management given the new landscape we are in?
4.) QED: The Expansion
- Does Bill believe that expanding geographically has become easier with time?
- What has become harder about expanding into new geographies?
- How important does Bill believe partnering with local firms is when VCs enter new territories?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Bill Cillufo
Bill’s Favourite Book: Tom Clancy: The Hunt for Red October
Bill’s Most Recent Investment: Refyne
20 Product: Robinhood CPO on The 3 Stages of Product Management, How to Structure and Execute Great Product Reviews, The Secret to Building a World-Class Hiring Funnel in Product Team Building with Aparna Chennapragada
Aparna Chennapragada is Chief Product Officer @ Robinhood, the company revolutionizing consumer finance with commission-free investing, and tools to help shape your financial future. As for Aparna, prior to Robinhood, she spent an incredible 12 years at Google, most recently as VP and GM for Consumer Shopping and also as the lead AR and Visual Search products. Aparna is also an active angel investor with a portfolio including Khatabook, Statsig and On Deck to name a few. If that was not enough, Aparna is also a board member at Capital One.
In Today’s Episode with Aparna Chennapragada You Will Learn:
1.) Origins in Product:
- How Aparna made her way into the world of product and product management?
- What were Aparna's biggest takeaways from her 12 years at Google?
- What does product management mean to Arpana today?
2.) Customer Discovery: 101
- What are the 3 different stages of product management?
- What does great customer discovery look like?
- What are the best questions to ask? How should one dig deeper?
- Where do so many make mistakes in customer discovery?
- What should product people take from the answers? What should they disregard?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How should founders breakdown the process of hiring for their first in product?
- What does the interview process look like? How should founders structure it?
- What core questions should teams ask of prospective candidates?
- What are red flags when interviewing potential product hires?
- What literal tests and case studies can founders do to test the quality of candidates?
4.) The Onboarding Process:
- How should founders structure the onboarding process for new product hires?
- What can founders do to make PMs successful in their first 30 days?
- Where do many product hires make the biggest mistakes in the first 30 days?
- What can product hires do to build trust with their new team?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Aparna Chennapragada
Aparna's Fave Resource: Shishir's Executive Onboarding
20VC: Brex's Henrique Dubugras on Advice from Evan Spiegel and Eric Schmidt on CEOship, The Biggest Hiring Mistakes When Scaling, What Everyone Gets Wrong with Product Messaging and When is the Right Time to Launch Secondary Products
Henrique Dubugras is the Founder and CEO @ Brex, the company re-imagining financial systems so every growing company can realize its full potential. To date, Henrique has raised over $1.1BN for Brex from some of the best including Ribbit, Greenoaks, DST, IVP, Caffeinated Capital and Elad Gil to name a few. Henrique is also a board member at Mercado Libre. Prior to co-founding Brex, Henrique co-founded Pagar.me, there he scaled the company to $15BN in GMV and over 100 people before selling the company in 2016.
In Today’s Episode with Henrique Dubugras You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding of Brex:
- What was the founding a-ha moment for Henrique and Pedro with Brex?
- What advice did Evan Spiegel give Henrique when it comes to being a great CEO?
2.) Hiring: The Trials and Tribulations
- What have been Henrique's biggest hiring mistakes?
- How do founders know when they are ready to bring in the seasoned exec vs the younger jack of all trades candidate?
- What have been Henrique's biggest lessons in what it takes to hire true A* talent?
- Where does Henrique see other founders make big hiring mistakes?
3.) Product Expansion and Marketing:
- How does Henrique assess when is the right time to release a second product?
- What have been Henrique's biggest mistakes and lessons when it comes to product marketing?
- How can one retain the simplicity of product messaging with scaling the product?
- Brex expanded the product too far, too fast. How did they walk it back so successfully?
4.) Henrique: The Leader
- How does Henrique approach his own relationship to money today? How has it changed over time?
- What luxury expenditure has Henrique made over the last 12 months that he feels is worth it?
- How does Henrique think about ego management? What does he do to keep his in check?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Henrique Dubugras
Henrique’s Favourite Book: The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
20VC Exclusive: Fast's Domm Holland on What Really Happened at Fast? Were they really Burning $10M per Month? Where did Bolt Succeed Where Fast Did Not? What is It Really Like To Have Stripe Invest in your Company?
Domm Holland is the Founder and CEO @ Fast.
Last week Fast announced they would be shutting down the company.
In this exclusive 20VC episode we discuss:
- What really happened with Domm's towing business in Australia?
- What are the 1-2 biggest mistakes made at Fast?
- Why has Bolt worked in a way that Fast has not worked?
- What is it like having Stripe as an investor in your company?
- Could the board have done more to prevent what happened at Fast?
20VC: Why Crypto is Software Eating Money, Why Crypto Firms Will Outcompete Traditional Venture Firms, How To Price Tokens and When To Have Them, DAOs: How Are They Structured and What Makes One Successful with Avichal Garg, Co-Founder @ Electric Capital
Avichal Garg is Co-Founder & Partner @ Electric Capital, last month Electric announced they had raised $1BN for their new fund making them one of the largest independent and crypto-native VC firms in the world. As for Avichal, prior to Electric, he was an investor in crypto projects such as Anchorage, Bitwise, Lightning Labs, and OpenSea and unicorns such as Airtable, Cruise, Deel, Figma, Notion and many more. On the operating side, Avichal successfully sold his last company to Facebook where he became Director of Product Management for the Local product group, a team of 400 engineers responsible for billions in revenue.
In Today’s Episode with Avichal Garg You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How did Avichal make his way into the world of startups and angel investing?
- How did Avichal make the pivot from software to crypto investing?
- Was Avichal nervous when making the move to institutionalize what had been personal investing?
- What does Avichal know now that he wishes he had known at the start of Electric?
2.) The Landscape: Crypto Investing
- How does Avichal assess the crypto fund landscape today?
- Will we continue to see a small number of firms (a16z, Katie Haun, Paradigm, Electric) dominate the market?
- What happens to all the small crypto funds that have been raised in the last year?
- Why does Avichal believe crypto investing is much more collaborative than venture investing?
- How can venture size returns be made if the ownership levels are so much smaller?
3.) Crypto Firms vs Traditional VC Firms:
- Why does Avichal believe that crypto is software eating money?
- What does this mean for traditional venture? Who will survive? Who will die? Who will thrive?
- Why can generalist firms not compete with crypto native firms?
- How are the teams of crypto native firms structured so differently to those of traditional VCs?
- Do crypto projects and investments need the same level of service and help that generalist VCs provide with their platform services?
4.) Tokens - Equity - Liquidity:
- How does Avichal advise investors on how to think through token vs equity investing?
- When does it make sense to have a token vs not having a token?
- How are crypto tokens priced and valued? What do you need to know when buying tokens?
- How does the liquidity of crypto markets make it challenging for investor psychology?
- What is the biggest lesson Avichal has learned on when is the right time to sell?
5.) DAOs: 101
- What are DAOs? Are they not just another form of government?
- What makes one DAO successful and another not?
- What tooling and infrastructure are required to manage a DAO successfully?
- What does Avichal believe the vision of a DAO should be? How should they define success?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Avichal Garg
Avichal’s Favourite Book: The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
Avichal’s Most Recent Investment: Magic Eden
20VC: What Happens To Growth Rounds in this New Environment? Where is the Funding Crunch? How Does This Impact M&A and Going Public? How do Crossover Funds Respond? What Does it Mean For Early Stage and more with Eric Liaw, General Partner @ IVP
Eric Liaw is a General Partner @ IVP, one of the leading later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms of the last decade with $8.7 billion of committed capital and a 40-year IRR of 43.1%. At IVP eric has led investments in Datadog, Github, Klarna, Robinhood and UiPath to name a few. Prior to joining IVP, Eric was with Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and was actively involved in originating, executing and managing investments, including Netflix, Zillow and eHarmony. As a result of his investing success, Eric was recognized by GrowthCap as one of the Top 25 Software Investors of 2021 and 2020.
In Today’s Episode with Eric Liaw You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How did Eric make his way into the world of venture way back over 20 years ago?
- What were some of Eric's biggest lessons from his early years at TCV?
- What are the most significant changes in venture over the last decade?
2.) Eric Liaw: The Investor:
- How has Eric changed as an investor over the last decade? What caused those changes?
- How does Eric reflect on his own relationship to price? How does he determine when to pay up vs when to remain disciplined?
- What has been Eric's biggest miss? How did it alter his style of investing?
- From UiPath to Supercell, what has been Eric's favourite story of travelling around the world to win a deal?
3.) The Market: Venture
- How does Eric expect IPO markets to behave as we move further in 2022?
- How does Eric expect large M&A to play out for the rest of the year?
- With the public markets crashing; how does this impact the large growth rounds of 2021?
- What does Eric expect to happen to early stage pricing with the crash at late stage?
- How does Eric expect crossover funds to behave in this new environment?
4.) Eric Liaw: The Person
- How does Eric think about being an awesome Dad and also not losing an inch on being a world class investor?
- How does Eric reflect on his own ego when having such large investing wins? Where does he feel he is most insecure?
- How did having children really impact his mindset towards investing and working with founders?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Eric Liaw
Eric’s Favourite Book: No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Eric’s Most Recent Investment: Aiven
20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Brian Hale is Vice President of Consumer Product & Growth @ Doordash. Before joining Doordash, Brian spent an incredible 10 years at Facebook, most recently as VP of Product Growth working across Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp and more. Prior to Facebook, Brian was Director of Growth @ Uptake.com and it all started for Brian in 1999 working at ACDSee in Canada where he was asked to “figure out that search engine thing”.
In Today’s Episode with Brian Hale You Will Learn:
1.) Brian Hale: Entry into Growth:
- How Brian made his way into the world of growth from being a "marine ceramic engineer"?
- What were 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from his 10-year journey with Facebook?
- What are 1-2 of the biggest misconceptions about the Facebook growth team?
2.) When is the Right Time:
- When is the right time for startups to hire their first growth leads or reps?
- How should the founder allocate resources to the growth team? Hire new designers, engineers etc for the team or pluck them from existing teams within the company?
- What are the biggest mistakes startups make on the timing of this hire?
- How can startups accurately assess whether they have product-market-fit?
- What levels of retention suggest PMF? How does this change by industry?
3.) Who To Hire:
- Step by step, how does Brian structure the interview process for all new growth hires?
- What are the must-ask questions for growth leaders to ask candidates in interviews?
- What are the clear signs and answers that suggest a 10x growth hire? How do the very best interact with data? What do they really hone in on?
- What literal tests does Brian do to determine the quality of a hire? How do the best perform?
4.) Onboarding and Integration:
- What is the optimal onboarding process for all new growth hires?
- What can leaders do to set their new growth teams up for success?
- What are the biggest ways new growth hires can mess up in the first 60 days?
- What have been some of the biggest challenges for Brian in his onboarding at Doordash?
20VC: Founding Legendary Entertainment and Creating Batman, The Hangover and 300, The Importance of Luck vs Skill in Success, How Relationships to Money Change & Why Velocity is the Most Important Factor in Company Building Success with Thomas Tull
Thomas Tull is a leading entrepreneur and investor as the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Tulco, LLC. he has made notable investments in the likes of FIGS, Colossal, IL MAKIAGE, Pinterest, Zoox and Oculus Rift. Previously, Tull was the founder, CEO and Chairman of Legendary Entertainment, the film company that produced blockbusters including The Dark Knight trilogy, 300 and The Hangover franchise. Outside of his investment work, Thomas is a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University, Yellowstone Forever, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. If that was not enough, Tull is also part of the ownership group of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the six-time Super Bowl champions.
In Today’s Episode with Thomas Tull You Will Learn:
1.) From Laundromats to Legendary Entertainment:
- How did Thomas first make his way into the world of business starting with laundromats?
- How did growing up without money impact Thomas' early mindset?
- What advice does Thomas give to young people today on starting their own business?
2.) Thomas Tull: The Investor:
- How does Thomas approach risk today? Where is the boundary of acceptable vs unacceptable risk?
- How does Thomas assess his own relationship to money? How has it changed over time?
- How does Thomas protect himself from people and occasions where one is being used for their money or status?
- To what extent does Thomas believe success is luck vs skill?
3.) Legendary Entertainment:
- How did Thomas make his way into the movie business with the founding of Legendary Entertainment?
- How did Thomas first meet Chris Nolan? What did the early days of making Batman Begins look like?
- What were some of the most memorable times from making 300 with Gerard Butler?
- What were some of the most challenging elements of scaling Legendary? With the benefit of hindsight, is there anything that Thomas would do differently?
4.) The Macro:
- Why does Thomas believe public markets are the least rational they have ever been?
- From geo politics to climate change, what is Thomas most worried about today in the world?
- What does Thomas believe we should focus on as positives moving forward? What should we be excited about?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Thomas Tull
Thomas' Favourite Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Thomas' Most Recent Investment: Colossal
20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated
Eduardo Vivas is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Curated, a network where product experts monetize their passion and help consumers make the perfect purchase. To date, Eddie has raised over $141M from some of the best including CapitalG, Greylock and Forerunner to name a few. Eddie is also a stellar angel investor with a portfolio including Telegram, Truebill, AppLovin and Dollar Shave Club among others. Prior to Curated, Eddie spent 3 years at Linkedin as Head of Talent Solutions, following his startup, Bright, being acquired by them in 2014.
In Today’s Episode with Eddie Vivas You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding of Curated:
- What was the aha moment for Eddie with Curated?
- What were Eddie's biggest takeaways from his prior companies? What did he take with him that worked? What did he disregard that did not work?
- What were some of Eddie's biggest lessons from Linkedin? How did it impact his mindset?
2.) The Compound Startup:
- Why did Eddie decide it was right to build so much of the tooling themselves?
- How does Eddie determine when to buy vs build?
- What are the biggest mistakes Eddie sees founders making when building multiple internal tools at the same time?
- How does build a compound startup increase the strategic value of a company?
3.) Hiring: Missionaries not Mercenaries
- How does Eddie structure his hiring process at Curated? Why does he not believe that startups are for everyone?
- What are the biggest signals that a person is a missionary and not a mercenary? How do mercenaries act in a way that is different to missionaries?
- What questions in an interview process show these traits?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes Eddie has made when hiring?
4.) Equity and Compensation:
- What is Eddie's biggest advice to founders when it comes to equity allocations for the team?
- Why does Eddie believe it is crucial to offer and provide secondaries for the team?
- How does Eddie feel about the amount of secondaries founders take today so early?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Eddie Vivas
Eddie’s Favourite Book: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
20 Sales: Notion's CRO Olivia Nottebohm on How To Build Great Operations at Your Company, How To Use The Trust Equation in Hiring, How To Do Referencing Most Effectively and Whether To Fill Seats or Wait for the Perfect Hire?
Olivia Nottebohm is the Chief Revenue Officer @ Notion where she leads the Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and Customer Experience teams. Prior to Notion, Olivia was the COO @ Dropbox where she achieved the first 4 quarters of profitable growth. Before Dropbox Olivia spent over 5 years at Google including as VP Cloud GTM Operations and Global SMB Sales. Finally, before Google, Olivia spent a whopping 15 years at McKinsey & Company.
In Today’s Episode with Olivia Nottebohm You Will Learn:
1.) Origins:
- How Olivia made her way into the world of startups and tech?
- What are 1-2 big takeaways Olivia has from her 5+ years at Google? How have they shaped her operating mindset today?
- How does Olivia balance her love for analysis and data with speed and agility of decisions?
2.) Good vs Great Operations (Ops):
- What does great ops really mean to Olivia? What are the 1-2 things founders can implement today to improve their ops immediately?
- What are the core mistakes founders make when instilling ops for the first time?
- How does Olivia coordinate the global Notion team to be as effective as possible?
- What has worked? What has not worked?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- Why does Olivia believe all leaders will have to accept they will not have all the talent they need over the coming years?
- With that in mind, is it best to hire B players or always keep the bar high? If and when can the bar be lowered?
- How does Olivia construct the hiring process? What are the core questions she will always ask?
- What is the secret to great referencing? How does Olivia enable the other side to feel safe telling her everything they know about the candidate?
4.) Cross-Functional Communication:
- How does Olivia advise founders on the best way to get different functions working together?
- What works? What does not? What are some big mistakes Olivia sees over and over?
- At what point in company scaling does this comms begin to breakdown?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Olivia Nottebohm
Grow Fast or Die Slow: The role of profitability in sustainable growth
20VC: Lessons Scaling Insight Partners to a $20BN Latest Fund, The Two Biggest Learnings on Price, How to Manage and Train Young People in Venture, Why Business Classrooms Do Not Work and How to Assess the Two Commodities in Life; Money and Time with Jeff
Jeff Lieberman is the Managing Director @ Insight Partners, one of the leading investing franchises of the last 25 years with their most recent flagship fund announced earlier this year being a staggering $20BN. As for Jeff, over the last 24 years at Insight, he has led investments in leading companies such as Qualtrics, DeliveryHero, HelloFresh, Cvent, Mimecast, and Udemy. As a result of his many investing successes, he has been selected by AlwaysOn as a Venture Capital 100 winner and by Forbes as a member of the Midas List.
In Today’s Episode with Jeff Lieberman You Will Learn:
1.) Origins into Venture:
- How did Jeff's roommate at college open his eyes to the world of venture capital?
- What were Jeff's biggest lessons from seeing the work ethic of his parents?
- How does Jeff imbue the same level of ambition on his children that he had growing up with no money?
- Why is Jeff keen for his children not to go to college? How does he advise them?
2.) Jeff Lieberman: The Investor:
- What are Jeff's biggest observations on the current landscape given his seeing first hand the dot com bust and 2008? How is now different? How is it the same?
- Price Sensitivity: How does Jeff reflect on his own price sensitivity? How has it changed over time?
- Deployment Pace: How does Jeff analyse deployment pace today both for the industry and for Insight? Does Jeff agree with the notion of "playing the game on the field"?
- The Biggest Miss: What have been some of Jeff's biggest misses? How did those misses impact the process with which he invests?
3.) Insight: The Firm
- What are the most challenging elements of firm building today?
- Why do all juniors have control over the Partners calendars? How does this work in practice?
- How does Jeff create an environment of safety where very young, junior people feel like they can challenge anyone and have discussion?
- How do Insight train young people? What is the process? What works? What does not work?
4.) AMA:
- What does Jeff know now about venture that he wishes he had known when he started?
- What would Jeff most like to change about the world of venture capital?
- What advice does Jeff give to young people today entering the industry?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Jeff Lieberman
Jeff’s Favourite Book: Man's Search For Meaning
Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Choco
20VC The Memo: Inside the Growth Engines of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Instacart with the Growth Leaders Who Built Them; How Instagram Went from 440M to 1BN, How Twitter Changing Their Signup Flow was a Needlemover and How Removing Card Payment Requ
Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite where he leads the PM, product design, research, and growth marketing teams. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey spent close to 3 years at Pinterest where he led the growth product team.
Andy Johns is one of the pre-eminent growth leaders of the last decade. Andy’s career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President.
Bangaly Kaba is the Head of Platform Growth @ Popshop Live, a live streaming mobile marketplace that combines commerce, entertainment, and social. Prior to Popshop, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, where he built and led the product team that helped grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs.
Elena Verna is a master when it comes to all things starting and scaling growth organizations. Previously, Elena spent over 7 years as SVP Growth @ SurveyMonkey where she ran product, growth marketing, and data teams. Post SurveyMonkey, Elena worked with the rocket ship that is Miro both as Interim CMO and as an advisor.
Ed Baker is an angel investor and growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook.
Rob Schutz is Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder at Ro, the healthcare technology company building a patient-centric healthcare system. Under Rob’s growth leadership, Ro has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the country. Prior to Ro, Rob was VP of Growth at Bark, the makers of BarkBox, and helped scale revenue from zero to $100 million.
In Today’s Episode with Ed Baker You Will Learn:
1.) Casey Winters:
- How does Casey define "growth"? How does it differ from product?
- How do the best growth leaders decide between art vs science when making growth decisions?
2.) Andy Johns:
- What is Andy's biggest advice to founders looking to build their first growth team?
- What unexpected choice did Andy decide to make at Twitter that moved the needle for new user acquisition?
3.) Bangaly Kaba:
- What were some of Bangaly's biggest takeaways from scaling Instagram from 440M users to 1BN?
- What decisions did Bangaly make without data? How did they go? What did he learn?
4.) Ed Baker:
- What are Ed's biggest takeaways from facebook around structuring growth teams?
- What are Ed's biggest pieces of advice for startyups looking to grow internationally?
- What were some of Ed's biggest learnings from working with Travis @ Uber?
5.) Elena Verna:
- What is the difference between a good vs great growth model?
- When does one need to change or amend their growth model? How does one know when it is working?
6.) Rob Schutz:
- Why does Rob believe that startups should not diversify their customer acquisition channels too quickly?
- How does Rob assess resouirce allocation and spend on new channels? How did this process look when partnering with the MLB for Ro?
20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
Grant LaFontaine is the Founder & CEO @ Whatnot, the fastest-growing marketplace in the US, empowering people to make a living off their passion. To date, Grant has raised over $225M for Whatnot from the likes of CapitalG, a16z, YC, Scribble Ventures and Wonder Ventures to name a few. Prior to Whatnot, Grant was a PM @ Facebook working on the Oculus App Store and before that was the founder of Kit.com, ultimately acquired by Patreon.
In Today’s Episode with Grant LaFontaine You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding of Whatnot:
- How did Grant make his way into the world of tech and startups?
- What were some of his biggest lessons from Facebook? How did that impact how he has built Whatnot?
2.) Impossible To Hire Product Managers:
- Why does Grant believe it is impossible to hire product managers today?
- How does this impact the decision-making powers of engineers?
- How does Grant test for this product knowledge in all engineers he adds to the team?
- What are clear signals of 10x engineers in hiring processes?
3.) A/B Testing and Risk Mindset:
- Why does Grant not believe in the effectiveness of A/B testing? Why does it not work?
- Why does Grant believe one of the biggest reasons for startups failing is they do not take enough risk?
- How does Grant try to ensure that his team takes as much risk as possible with everything that they do?
- How does mindset to risk change with scale of company and with leadership?
4.) AMA:
- Why does Grant disagree with founders angel investing?
- What are the biggest challenges Whatnot has faced in scaling?
- CEO coach? Who? When? What is the biggest lesson?
- What is the single driving metric of Whatnot? How does Grant advise founders to determine their North Star metric?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Grant LaFontaine
Grant’s Favourite Book: Foundation: 1/3 (Foundation Trilogy)
20VC Exclusive: Sequoia's Luciana Lixandru Unveils Sequoia's New 8 Week Accelerator, Arc | Biggest Takeaways from Working with Doug Leone and Roelof Botha | The Journey From a Small Town In Romania to Partner @ Sequoia
Luciana Lixandru is a Partner @ Sequoia, one of the world’s most renowned and successful venture firms with Sequoia-backed companies accounting for more than 20% of NASDAQ's total value. As for Luciana, at Sequoia she has led investments in the likes of PennyLane, Xentral, Veed and Ledgy to name a few. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2020, Luciana was a Partner @ Accel where she made investments in Hopin, Miro, UiPath, Tessian and Deliveroo. As a result of such investing success, Luciana was #2 on the Midas List in 2021.
In Today’s Episode with Luciana Lixandru You Will Learn:
1.) Origins:
- How did Luciana make her way from a small town in Romania to being Partner @ Sequoia?
- What were the 1-2 crucible moments in her life that changed the course of her life?
2.) Luciana: The Investor
- How has Luciana's investing style changed and developed over the years?
- How does Luciana reflect on her own relationship to price? What misses caused these changes?
- Hopin, Miro, Deliveroo, UiPath, how did having such winners so early impact Luciana's investing mindset?
- What would Luciana say is her biggest insecurity today? What drives this?
3.) Sequoia: The Team
- What are Luciana's biggest takeaways from working with Doug Leone, Alfren Lin, Roelof Botha and Pat Grady?
- What does the decision-making process look like for new deals within Sequoia?
- How does the Sequoia partnership create an environment of safety where everyone can discuss and debate freely?
- How does Luciana approach training and mentorship? What works and what does not?
4.) Sequoia in Europe + Sequoia's Arc:
- What is Arc? Why was now the right time for Sequoia to do it?
- What is the structure for the program?
- How many startups are part of it? Who is able to apply?
- How much capital do the startups receive? What else do they receive in mentoring etc?
- In 5 years time, what would success look like for Luciana with Arc?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Luciana Lixandru
Luciana’s Favourite Book: The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
20 Product: Lenny Rachitsky on The 3 Key Roles of the Product Manager, 5 Skills All The Best PMs Have, When To Hire Your First PM, How to Structure the Hiring Process for PMs & What Leaders Can Do to Make Their PMs Successful
Lenny Rachitsky is one of the OGs of product, having spent over 7 years at Airbnb as a product lead he left to start his newsletter, find it here. This has scaled to thousands upon thousands of readers and is one of the most popular newsletters on Substack. Lenny is also an extremely active angel investor with a portfolio including Figma, Sorare, Clubhouse, Vanta, WhatNot and many more incredible companies. If that was not enough, Lenny also has the best course on product management, check it out here.
In Today’s Episode with Lenny Rachitsky You Will Learn:
1.) Origins in Product:
- How did Lenny make his way iunto the world of product management at Airbnb?
- What were some of his biggest takeaways from his time at Airbnb on product?
- What mistakes did he make on product at Airbnb? How did it impact his product thinking?
2.) Product Management: 101
- How does Lenny define product management today? How is the role of PM changing?
- When is the right time to hire your first PM as a startup?
- What is the difference between Head of Product and CPO? When do you hire each?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring their first product hires?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How should founders breakdown the process of hiring for their first in product?
- What does the interview process look like? How should founders structure it?
- What core questions should teams ask of prospective candidates?
- What are red flags when interviewing potential product hires?
4.) The Onboarding Process:
- How should founders structure the onboarding process for new product hires?
- What can founders do to make PMs successful in their first 30 days?
- Where do many product hires make the biggest mistakes in the first 30 days?
- What can product hires do to build trust with their new team?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Lenny Rachitsky
Lenny's Fave Book: The Mom Test
20VC: David Friedberg on The Framework for Business Value Creation, The Bifurcation in Venture Today That No One Talks About, The Impact of Interest Rate Hikes on Venture and Step by Step; How TPB Incubates, Funds and Exits The Next Generation of Companie
David Friedberg is Founder and CEO of The Production Board (TPB), a holding company established to solve the most fundamental problems that affect our planet, by reimagining global systems of production. Prior to founding The Production Board, David founded The Climate Corporation, a 10-year journey that culminated in their $930M acquisition by Monsanto. If that was not enough, David is the Founder and Chairman at Metromile and also sits on the board of Soylent, Clara Foods, Tillable, Cana Technologies and more.
In Today’s Episode with David Friedberg You Will Learn:
1.) Origins:
- How David made his way into the world of startups and technology from academia and physics?
- What were David's biggest takeaways from scaling The Climate Corp to $930M exit to Monsanto?
- How did the exit put pressure on David for all future companies he builds? How does he manage that?
2.) The Macro: Venture + The Economy
- How does David foresee the impending rate hikes? What impact will this have on venture and the economy?
- What segment of the market will be first to be hit? Why is growth investing last to be hit? How does early stage play out in this very new environment?
- How will we see the velocity of capital deployment change in this new period? What does David believe are some of the crucial flaws of the venture model?
- How does David reflect on his own price sensitivity? What lessons has he learned from deals he has done or missed that have changed his perspective?
3.) David Frankel: The Business Builder
- What is David's rubrik for business value creation? How has this changed with time?
- How mentally plastic does one have to be around the time it takes to see margins, unit economics etc change from negative to positive?
- How does David and the team approach building new companies at TPB? Where do they find the founding teams? How do they incentivise them?
- How does TPB approach continuous funding for the companies they create? What milestones need to be hit? How do they assess them?
- How does David approach liquidity with regards to exits for the companies they create? Why does their holding company structure mean they have different incentives to VCs?
4.) David Friedberg: Father and Husband
- How does David reflect on his own relationship to money today? How has it changed over time?
- What have been David's biggest realisations on what provides him true happiness?
- How did having children change his operating mentality? What does being a great father mean to David?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with David Friedberg
David’s Favourite Book: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
20VC: Gitlab CEO Sid Sijbrandij on Why You Are Not Allowed to Present in Meetings at Gitlab, Why it is a Pipedream We Will Go Back to Offices and What is the Future of Work & CEO Coaches; What Makes The Best, When To Have Them and When To Change Them
Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder & CEO @ GitLab. GitLab’s single application helps organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently while strengthening their security and compliance. Prior to their IPO last year, Sid raised funding from some of the best including ICONIQ, GV, Tiger, Coatue and D1 to name a few. Under his leadership, the company has grown to over 1,500 employees and over 30 million registered users. If that was not enough, Sid is also an active angel and sits on the board of Meltano, a spinout of Gitlab that allows you to manage all the data tools in your stack.
In Today’s Episode with Sid Sijbrandij You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding of Gitlab:
- How did Sid make his way into the world of tech and startups?
- What was it about Gitlab as a project that excited Sid so much from Day 1?
- How did Sid convince his co-founder to turn Gitlab from a project into a company?
2.) The Future of Work:
- Why does Sid believe it is a fallacy that everyone will go back to the office?
- What are the 1-2 most important things for companies to do when moving to a remote work environment? Where does Sid see many make mistakes?
- What have Gitlab done to create a remote working environment so successfully? What have they tried that has not worked?
- What stage of company building does remote work best for? When is it most challenging?
3.) Sid: The Leader
- How has Sid changed and evolved as a leader over the Gitlab journey?
- How does Sid look to get as much feedback as possible on his leadership?
- How does Sid create an environment of safety where everyone feels they can provide feedback?
- How does Sid work with his CEO coach? Should every CEO have one? What should one look for in them? How do you know when you need to change your CEO coach?
4.) Sid: The Board Member:
- What have been Sid's biggest lessons on what makes successful board management?
- In prep for the meeting, what materials does Sid provide? When does he send them? Does he present to the board? What mistakes do founders make in boards?
- From being on the other side as a board member, what does Sid believe the best members do?
- What would Sid most like to change about board meetings today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Sid Sijbrandij
Sid’s Favourite Book: High Output Management
20 Sales: The Stripe Sales Playbook; Who Should Create It, When Should it Be Done, Where Do Many Go Wrong | How To Identify 10x Sales Hires and How To Structure the Hiring Process in Sales with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ St
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser is Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ Stripe. In this role, Jeanne is responsible for all sales functions across the region including Sales Development, AEs, Solutions Architects, and many more. Jeanne also continues to spearhead Stripe's Enterprise strategy. Prior to this role, Jeanne was Stripe's Head of North America Sales where she built out Stripe's Acquisition Sales teams. Pre-Stripe, Jeanne was CRO @ Dialpad and also spent many years at Google in numerous different roles including most recently as Director of GSuite SMB & Mid-Market Sales, North America and LATAM.
In Today’s Episode with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser You Will Learn:
1.) Entry into Sales:
- How did Jeanne make her way into her first sales job in tech?
- What did Jeanne learn from her many years at Google about how sales should interact with engineering?
- In hindsight, what would Jeanne have done differently/improved from her time with Dialpad?
- How did the role with Stripe come about?
2.) The Playbook:
- Does the founder need to be the one to create the sales playbook?
- When is the right time to bring in the first sales hire? Should they be a sales leader or rep?
- How does both the playbook and the type of sales hire change when hiring for a product-led-growth motion vs a traditional enterprise motion?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring their first in sales?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How should founders structure the hiring process for their first sales hires?
- What did Dialpad do in the sales hiring process that worked well? How has Jeanne taken that to her hiring process at Stripe?
- What should be achieved or learned in each consecutive interview?
- How can founders use sales case studies most effectively? How can founders know if sales candidates truly have a strong grasp of the product?
- What are early signs of a 10x sales hire? What are red flags to look out for in the process?
4.) Sales Onboarding:
- What does the ideal onboarding process look like for new sales hires?
- What tasks and duties should all sales hires perform in the first 60 days?
- What are early signs that a new hire is not performing to the right standard?
- How does the first few months differ for sales reps when comparing a product-led-growth company to an enterprise company?
- What should sales leaders do to ensure that new hires engage with product and customer success efficiently?
20VC: Shopify President, Harley Finkelstein on What is Being a Good Husband, What is Being a Good Father & How to Embrace Vulnerability and Authenticity in Leadership and Marriage
Harley Finkelstein is the President of Shopify, the platform modern commerce is built on. Over the last 12 years, Harley has partnered with Tobi to the tune of building Shopify's revenue to over $4.6BN in 2021 and the team to over 10,000 employees. On the side, Harley is an Advisor to Felicis Ventures and in the past has held board seats at CBC, Omers Ventures and The C100. If that was not enough, you can see Harley on a screen near you as one of the “Dragons” on CBC’s Next Gen Den.
In Today’s Episode with Harley Finkelstein You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding Story:
- What was Harley's first entrepreneurial endeavour?
- How did seeing his family lose everything impact Harley's mindset and ambition?
- How did Harley first meet Tobi @ Shopify? How did the Shopify journey begin?
2.) Leadership Lessons:
- How has Harley changed as a leader over the 13 years with Shopify?
- How does Harley embrace vulnerability and authenticity in his communication with the team?
- What is Harley most insecure about when he looks at leadership today?
- What have been some of the biggest lessons Harley has learned from his board on what great leadership is?
3.) The Art of Marriage:
- What does Harley believe makes the most successful marriage?
- Why have Harley and his wife been seeing a marriage therapist from the early days?
- What is the biggest mistake people make when communicating with partners?
- How has Harley changed as a husband over the years?
4.) The Joy of Fatherhood:
- Does Harley always believe he has been a good father?
- What was his realisation moment that he was not being the father he wanted to be?
- What core elements of his behaviour did he change? How did that impact his relationship with his kids?
- How does Harley ensure he performs at the highest level while also being there and being present for his family?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Harley Finkelstein
Harley’s Favourite Book: The Book of Ichigo Ichie: The Art of Making the Most of Every Moment, the Japanese Way
20VC: 3 Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling, Management 101 on Trust Building, Morale Maintenance and Hiring & What We Can Learn About Parenting From Nature Programs with Scott Dietzen
Scott Dietzen is Vice Chairman of the Board of Pure Storage and served as the Company’s CEO from 2010 to 2017. Under his leadership, Pure grew to thousands of employees and completed an IPO in 2015. Dietzen is a four-time successful entrepreneur with WebLogic, Zimbra, and Transarc. Before Pure, he was President and CTO of Zimbra (now part of VMware), but originally acquired by Yahoo!, where Dietzen served as interim SVP of Communications and Communities. Prior to Zimbra, Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems, where he helped craft the technology and business strategy for WebLogic that drove BEA from $61m in annual revenues prior to the WebLogic acquisition to over $1B.
In Today’s Episode with Scott Dietzen You Will Learn:
1.) The Journey to Pure Storage CEO:
- How did Scott make his way into the world of tech and startups?
- What was the hardest element of making the transition from CTO to CEO?
- What advice would Scott give to more technical leaders looking to make the move to CEO? Where do so many make mistakes?
2.) How To Build Trust in a Team:
- What are the most important ways that leaders can build trust with their teams?
- How can leaders be honest and share the hard truths without damaging role?
- What is the right tone to communicate both the big wins and big losses?
- Why does Scott always believe the losses teach more? How does Scott approach post-mortems?
3.) The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make:
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes that founders make?
- What are the single biggest firing mistakes executives make?
- Why should founders sometimes say no to customers?
- How should founders approach investor selection and valuation for rounds?
4.) How to Optimise a Board:
- What specifically can founders do to optimise their board?
- What are the biggest errors founders make when communicating with their board?
- What is the value per word framework? How does it tell which board member is the best?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Scott Dietzen
Scott’s Favourite Book: The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing
20VC Exclusive: Sahil Bloom on Raising his Debut Venture Fund (SRB Ventures), Why Traditional Venture Firms Are Going to Lose and How Sahil Built a Twitter Audience to 500K+ in 18 Months
Sahil Bloom is the Founding Partner @ SRB Ventures, a $10M fund that leverages the 500K followers Sahil has amassed to invest at the intersection of venture and media. Previously, Sahil spent 7 years at a large investment fund managing >$3.5 billion in capital and serves on the board of 4 companies. He has also been an active angel investor in over 30 companies.
In Today’s Episode with Sahil Bloom You Will Learn:
1.) How Sahil made his way from a career in traditional finance to building a media company and leveraging that to raise the latest SRB fund? How does Sahil advise others is the best way to "find their zone of genius"?
2.) How To Build a Media Engine:
- What have been some of Sahil's biggest lessons on what works on Twiter and what does not work?
- What is the golden rule for Twitter?
- How does Sahil plan and come up with ideas for his Twitter threads? What tools and software does he use? How long does each thread take?
3.) The End of the Road for Traditional Venture:
- Why does Sahil think traditional venture is dying?
- What newcomers will take the place of the existing incumbents?
- Why does he think they are weak? What do new players provide that they do not?
- Which existing players will remain and be strong? Which will fade out?
- Does Sahil believe that VCs really provide any value?
4.) SRB Ventures:
- Why did Sahil decide to raise the new fund?
- How did he decide on size of the fund? What is the strategy? What is the portfolio construction?
- How does SRB provide media services others do not?
- How did Sahil meet Tim Cook and get him to invest in the fund?
- What is the biggest thing Sahil believes most people misunderstand about luck?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Sahil Bloom
Sahil’s Favourite Book: When Breath Becomes Air: Kalanithi Paul
Sahil’s Most Recent Investment: Wander
The Tiger Global Memo: From Sequoia Capital to Benchmark and Thrive: The World's Best on the Rise of Tiger Global
Tiger Global are one of the most discussed venture firms on the planet. With a deal cadence and capital deployment speed that is unmatched, they have made their mark on the venture landscape like no other over the last 24 months. Today we are joined by leaders from Sequoia, Benchmark, Thrive Capital, General Atlantic, GGV and Aleph to discuss the rise of Tiger and how it impacts the venture ecosystem.
In Today’s Episode on Tiger Global You Will Learn:
1.) Doug Leone: Sequoia Capital
- Why we need to change the words when use in venture? Why we need to get rid of "the game"?
- How does the rise of Tiger compare to the rise of prior entrants with the same approach?
- Why does Doug believe that the craft of venture will persist despite these new entrants?
2.) Bill Gurley: Benchmark Capital
- How does Bill analyse the change in late stage venture today?
- What are the main drivers of the increased competition in late stage venture?
- Why does Bill get concerned not by Tiger but how others respond to Tiger's model?
- How does Bill analyse the entry of hedge funds and PE funds into traditional venture models?
3.) Michael Eisenberg: Aleph
- How does Michael think about the "weaponisation of capital"?
- What are the significant benefits for a fund of having more capital than their competitors?
- How does this capital advantage change in boom and bust times?
4.) Anton Levy: General Atlantic
- Why does Anton believe that funds are leveraging their assets more efficiently than ever?
- How does Anton approach the mindset of AUM scaling without lowering returns?
- Why does Anton never want to compete on price?
- How does GA think about competing in a world of Tiger and hedge funds investing in tech?
5.) Hans Tung: GGV
- Why did Hans always believe the model to look at moving forward was Tiger?
- Why does Tiger's business model allow them structural and financial advantages over their competitors?
- What does Hans make of the data network effects of Tiger with their strategy?
6.) Kareem Zaki: Thrive Capital
- Why does Kareem think Tiger's approach makes absolute sense?
- Why does Kareem believe so many in venture like to try and discredit the Tiger model?
- How does Tiger's approach differ to Thrive's?
20VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
Max Rhodes is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Faire, the online marketplace where retailers discover their next bestsellers from independent brands across the globe. To date, Max has raised over $1.1BN with Faire from some of the best including Sequoia, Founders Fund, DST, Forerunner, Lightspeed and many more. Prior to starting Faire, Max spent close to 5 years at Square in numerous different roles including Director of Consumer Product at Caviar.
In Today’s Episode with Max Rhodes You Will Learn:
1.) The Founding Story:
- How Max made his way into the world of startups with his joining an early Square team?
- How did his 5 years at Square impact how he approaches company building with Faire?
- How did Square's approach to product and mission impact Max's thinking?
2.) How To Hire Effectively:
- How does Max construct the hiring process? Where do many founders make mistakes?
- What does Max mean by "deep behavioural interview"? What questions does he ask?
- What are the signals of 10/10 candidates? What are red flags he looks for?
- How does Max determine capability? What literal tests can be done to test for this?
3.) How To Reference People:
- How does Max approach the referencing process when hiring people?
- How does Max make the other side feel comfortable, so they will open up and share everything?
- What have been some of Max's biggest lessons on what it takes to do referencing well?
- Where do many make mistakes with referencing?
- How does Max use an "out of 10" system to determine the quality of the candidate?
4.) How to Strategise:
- How does Max use strategy docs to orient the direction of the company?
- How often does Max write them? How long do they take to write?
- What are the core components of the strategy docs?
- Who else is involved in their writing? Once written, what is the right format to discuss with the team?
- How does Max approach how rigid he is to the strategies outlined? How does he determine whether he should change strategy or stick to plan?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Max Rhodes
Max’s Favourite Book: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Who: The A Method for Hiring
20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @
Ed Baker is an angel investor and growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook, a company he joined after they acquired a startup he co-founded called Friend.ly, which had grown to over 25 million users.
In Today’s Episode with Ed Baker You Will Learn:
1.) Ed Baker: Entry into Growth:
- How Ed made his way into the world of growth from his start founding a dating site while at Harvard?
- How he made his way to lead international growth at Facebook? How his time with Facebook led to his joing Uber to start Uber's growth team?
- What were Ed's biggest lessons from Uber and Facebook? How did his approach to growth and mindset change as a result of his time there?
2.) When is the Right Time:
- When is the right time for startups to hire their first growth leads or reps?
- How should they determine whether to promote from within or hire externally?
- What are the biggest mistakes startups make on the timing of this hire?
- How can startups accurately assess whether they have product-market-fit?
3.) Who To Hire:
- Step by step, how does Ed structure the interview process for all new growth hires?
- What are the must ask questions for growth leaders to ask candidates in interviews?
- What are the clear signs and answers that suggest a 10x growth hire?
- What literal tests does Ed do to determine the quality of a hire? How do the best perform?
4.) Onboarding and Integration:
- What is the optimal onboarding process for all new growth hires?
- How do the best growth hires start in the first 60 days? What do they achieve?
- What are some of the early signs that a growth hire is not working out?
- How should the relationship be between the CEO and the Head of Growth?
- How can the Head of Growth foster a strong relationship between growth and product teams?
20VC: Bedrock's Geoff Lewis on Whether VCs Actually Provide Value or Not, Why Bedrock Does Not Have An Ownership Focus and The Difference Between Principles and Rules When Building a Firm or Company
Geoff Lewis is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Bedrock, now with over $1BN in AUM, Bedrock invests in breakout technology companies that are incongruent with popular narratives. In the past, Geoff has backed some generational defining companies such as Wish, Lyft, Nubank, RigUp, Vercel, Anduril and many more. Prior to founding Bedrock, Geoff was a Partner @ Founders Fund.
In Today’s Episode with Geoff Lewis You Will Learn:
1.) How Geoff made his way into the world of venture with his joining Founders Fund? How his time with Founders Fund led to his co-founding Bedrock with Eric?
2.) Geoff Lewis: The Investor:
- How does Geoff reflect on his own relationship to price? How does he determine when to pay up vs walk away?
- How does Geoff approach the re-investment decision-making process? Where do most go wrong when it comes to allocating reserves?
- What have been some of Geoff's biggest misses? How did they impact his investing mindset?
- Why does Geoff not believe that ownership is as crucial as other VCs suggest?
3.) Bedrock: The Firm
- What have been some of the biggest challenges in building Bedrock?
- Where does Geoff believe many firms make core mistakes in firm building?
- What are the differences between principles and rules? Why does Geoff believe all firms need to have principles?
- How does Geoff approach internal talent building? What are the signals of people that will succeed in venture? How do they approach learning?
4.) The Market:
- How does Geoff analyse the current state of the venture market?
- Does Geoff agree with the notion of "play the game on the field"?
- Why does Geoff think markups are BS and just VCs looking for external validation?
- How has Geoff learned to isolate from the VC community and retain that purity of mindset working with great entrepreneurs?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Geoff Lewis
Geoff’s Favourite Book: Friedrich Nietzsche
Geoff’s Most Recent Investment: Praxis
20VC: Box's Aaron Levie on Why Founders Cannot Hedge Their Bets, The 2 Categories of Wrong Decision and How To Avoid Them & The Biggest Dangers of Being Over-Funded as a Startup
Aaron Levie is the Founder and CEO @ Box, the company incorporating the best of secure content collaboration with an intuitive user experience suited to the way people work today. Prior to their IPO in 2015, Aaron raised from some of the best in the business including the main man Mark Cuban, a16z, Emergence, DST, Coatue, DFJ and many more. Aaron founded the company from his dorm room at the University of Southern California and has led the company to 1,900 employees and over $770M in revenue, as of 2021 data.
In Today’s Episode with Aaron Levie You Will Learn:
1.) How Aaron founded Box from his dorm room at the University of Southern California? What was that founding a-ha moment? What did the first year look like? Does Aaron agree, "serial entrepreneurship is overrated"?
2.) Phases of Leadership and Company Growth:
- How does Aaron define the different phases of leadership required as a company grows?
- Which phase did Aaron find the most challenging? How did he overcome it?
- What are the first things to break when companies grow? What can founders do to prevent this?
- Does Aaron agree, "the best CEOs are the best resource allocators"?
3.) The Market:
- How does Aaron thinkj about the dislocation between private company valuations and public company market caps?
- What does Aaron believe are the biggest challenges founders face when they are over-capitalised?
- What does Aaron mean when he says, "raise when cash is cheap, spend as if it was expensive"? How does Aaron advise founders on fundraising today?
4.) The Team and Culture:
- How does Aaron create a safe space where all team members can come to him with anything?
- How does Aaron approach effective goal setting? How does one balance between achieveable and also aggressive goals?
- How does Aaron approach the art of delegation? What is his decision-making framework for what to delegate vs what to control?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Aaron Levie
Aaron’s Favourite Book: Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)
20 Product: Scott Belsky on How to Hire Your Product Leader and Team, 3 Questions All Great Product Leaders Ask, How To Structure and Run Effective Product Reviews & Is Product More Art or Science?
Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, investor, and currently serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Scott oversees all of product and engineering for Creative Cloud, as well as design for Adobe. In 2006, Scott founded Behance, the leading online platform for the creative industry, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Behance now has over 25M members. Scott is also an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, Sweetgreen, Carta, Flexport, Airtable, and several others. Finally, if that was not enough, Scott is the author of two national bestselling books - Making Ideas Happen and The Messy Middle.
In Today’s Episode with Scott Belsky You Will Learn:
1.) Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality:
- What does Scott believe is the core challenge in product?
- What was the single biggest product challenge Scott faced at Behance? How did they overcome it?
- When should product teams listen to customer feedback vs ignore it?
- What are the core questions product teams should ask user groups to extract the most feedback and value?
2.) The Importance of the First Mile:
- What does Scott believe makes a great first mile when it comes to the product experience?
- Where do so many companies go wrong in creating the first mile user experience?
- Which company at scale has retained this simplicity of the first mile? How did they do it?
- What does Scott mean when he says, "the devil is in the defaults"? What can product teams learn from this?
3.) The Makings of a Great Product Leader:
- What are the 3 core questions every great product leader should ask on every screen?
- How do the best product leaders structure product reviews?
- Who is invited to product reviews? How often are they? Who sets the agenda? When is it sent?
- What do the best product leaders do to retain direction and productivity in reviews when there are many people and many ideas? How do they stay on track?
4.) The Hirings of a Great Product Team:
- How can founders know whether to hire the product leader or retain the role? When is the right time?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring their first product hires?
- How should founders structure the hiring process for product hires? What should they look to gain from each interview?
- What are the must ask questions in those interviews? How do the best respond?
- What case studies or physical tests can be done to determine the quality of a candidate?
20VC: Biggest Lessons and Challenges Building One of the Most Successful Seed Funds, How To Manage Investor Psychology, Self-Doubt and Insecurity & The Secret to Truly Successful Venture Partnerships with David Frankel, Co-Founder @ Founder Collective
David Frankel is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Founder Collective, one of the great seed firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Uber, Coupang, Airtable, Whoop and many more incredible companies. Previously, David was Co-Founder and CEO of Internet Solutions (IS), the largest ISP in Africa, ultimately acquired by NTT. David is also a founding board member of Endeavor SA and in the past has been selected by the World Economic Forum for the Global Leader of Tomorrow (GLT) program.
In Today’s Episode with David Frankel You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of angel investing? How his mindset changed when making the transition from angel to an institutional investor with the founding of Founder Collective?
2.) Building the Firm: Founder Collective
- What are the biggest challenges in venture firm building today?
- Why is "deploy" and "the game" banned as words within Founder Collective? What terms are promoted as an alternative?
- How does David construct investment decision-making in the partnership?
- How does David create a safe space where all team members can share their thoughts in a non-judgemental, safe environment?
- What are the biggest mistakes or challenges that David sees firms make when building?
3.) David Frankel: Investor Mindset
- How does David analyse the current seed market today? What does he like? What worries him?
- Does David agree that early stage investing has never been less collaborative?
- How does David reflect on his own relationship to price today? How does he determine when to pay up vs when not to?
- How does David think about the compression on fund deployment timelines? Will this change?
- How does David keep a fresh and clean mind when viewing new opportunities, having seen many work and not work? How does one retain that mental purity when investing?
- What have been some of David's biggest misses? How did it impact his style of investing?
4.) The Partnership:
- What was the most recent disagreement David had with the partnership? How was it resolved?
- How does David approach self-doubt and insecurity within the partnership? How can this be managed successfully?
- What have been some of David's biggest lessons on how to give effective feedback without being judgemental?
- In a world of Zoom, how did the partnership retain the same level and quality of connection that they had in person? What works? What does not work?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with David Frankel
David’s Favourite Book: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
David's Most Recent Investment: PairTree
20VC: Mark Cuban on Reshaping the Pharmaceuticals Industry, How To Hire and Build Truly Great Teams and What Brand Really Means Today and How To Build One Successfully
Mark Cuban is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Today we are focused on Mark's latest entrepreneurial endeavor, starting Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company, the online pharmacy taking out the middlemen, meaning no price games and huge drug savings. As mentioned, Mark is also the proud owner of Dallas Mavericks, since his taking over they have competed in the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history in 2006 – and became NBA World Champions in 2011. Before Dallas Mavericks, Mark co-founded Broadcast.com – streaming audio over the internet. In just four short years, Broadcast.com (then Audionet) was sold to Yahoo for $5.6 billion dollars. If that was not enough, Mark is also one of ABC’s “Sharks” on the hit show Shark Tank.
In Today’s Episode with Mark Cuban You Will Learn:
1.) Cost Plus Drugs: Origin
- Why Mark decided to build Cost Plus Drugs?
- Why has no one done it before?
- How does Mark think about resource and time allocation with Cost Plus?
2.) Building the Team: Hiring
- How does mark analyze his approach to hiring? Where is he weak? Where is he strong?
- What one motto does Mark always use when it comes to hiring?
- What is the most common mistake Mark sees founders make when it comes to team build?
- How does Mark identify stress removers? What are the core signals?
3.) Brand + Capital + Business Strategy:
- Why is the current cost structure of healthcare so damaged in the US? How does Cost Plus change this?
- How does Mark think about what it takes to build great brand today? Why will Cost Plus not be doing big TV and traditional media advertising?
- What types of guerilla marketing is Mark most excited by? Why will Mark never have a billboard in Times Square?
4.) AMA with Mark Cuban:
- What 3 traits does Mark most want his children to adopt?
- What worries Mark most today?
- What are Mark's biggest strengths? What are his biggest weaknesses?
- What single purchase has brought Mark the greatest joy?
20 Sales: How To Build Sales Teams with a Product-Led-Growth GTM, What is a Sales Hiring Scorecard and How To Construct Yours & How To Structure the Onboarding Process for all New Sales Hires with Dannie Herzberg, Partner @ Sequoia Capital
Dannie Herzberg is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital and one of the great sales leaders of the last decade. Prior to entering the world of venture, Dannie spent 4 years at Slack as their Head of Enterprise Sales, there Dannie built & scaled the self-serve / SMB, mid-market, and enterprise sales orgs across the Americas as Slack grew from $100M - $1B in revenue. Before Slack, Dannie spent over 5 years at Hubspot building sales, opening an SF office, and then joining product to launch CRM & platform.
In Today’s Episode with Dannie Herzberg You Will Learn:
1.) How Dannie got her first job in sales at Hubspot through being a waitress in a Boston Diner? What were her biggest lessons from her 5 years scaling sales at Hubspot? How did Dannie's 4 years at Slack impact her operating and sales mindset today?
2.) The Playbook:
- Does the founder need to be the one to create the sales playbook?
- When is the right time to bring in the first sales hire? Should they be a sales leader or rep?
- When is the right time to bring in a CRO, sales enablement and revenue ops?
- What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring their first in sales?
3.) The Hiring Process:
- How should founders structure the hiring process for their first sales hires?
- What should be achieved or learned in each consecutive interview?
- How can founders use sales case studies most effectively?
- What are early signs of a 10x sales hire? What are red flags to look out for in the process?
4.) Sales Onboarding:
- What does the ideal onboarding process look like for new sales hires?
- What tasks and duties should all sales hires perform in the first 60 days?
- What are early signs that a new hire is not performing to the right standard?
- How does the first few months differ for sales reps when comparing a product-led-growth company to an enterprise company?
- How can new sales hires really engage with broader functions within the team in the first 30 days?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Dannie Herzberg
Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online
20VC: How Startup Valuations, Fund Deployment Cycles, M&A and IPO Markets Will All Change in This New Market, Where Will The Biggest Crunch Be, When Is The Right Time To Be Aggressive vs Conservative with Roger Ehrenberg, Founding Partner @ IA Ventures
Roger Ehrenberg is a Founding Partner @ IA Ventures, one of the most successful seed funds of the last decade with $475 million across their four funds. Previous investments include The Trade Desk, Datadog, Digital Ocean, Wise and Recorded Future. Most recently, Roger took a step away from the day-to-day running of the firm, since he started IA Sports Partners, investing in sports franchises and other sports-related assets. Last month, Roger, alongside his two sons, started Eberg Capital, an investment vehicle focused on web3, crypto, NFTs and next-gen infrastructure.
In Today’s Episode with Roger Ehrenberg You Will Learn:
1.) How Roger made his way into the world of angel investing and venture having had a successful career on Wall St? How did seeing the booms and busts of the dot com and 2008 impact his investing mindset today? How does today compare to those times?
2.) The Investor Mindset:
- What is Roger's #1 rule when it comes to managing investor psychology in volatile times?
- What does Roger do to calm his mind and prevent worry and fear when markets crash? What works? What does not work?
- How does one assess how close we are to the bottom? Why does Roger believe there is more "blood on the streets to come"?
- When does Roger believe is the right time to pullback vs when to be aggressive in deployment?
- What company profiles will do well vs poorly moving into this new cycle?
3.) Investing Strategy:
- How does this new market impact the three different investing categories; early, Series A & B and growth?
- Why does Roger believe deployment timelines will be extended? How will pricing be impacted?
- Why does Roger believe that the Series A & B crunch is the most worrisome? How will their bar for what makes a great company change?
- Should early stage managers alter their reserves strategy in the face of more stringent Series A rounds? Why does it not make sense to invest in "pay to play" rounds?
- How does Roger adivse the companies that he works with today on burn vs growth?
4.) AMA:
- How does Roger evaluate his own relationship to money today? How has it changed over time?
- What does Roger believes makes a truly successful marriage? What can one do to foster extreme trust and safety in a marriage?
- What does Roger believe have been some of the biggest insecurities he has had to overcome over the last decade? How did he overcome them?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Roger Ehrenberg
20VC: The Robinhood Memo: The Early Metrics That Showed Robinhood was a Breakout Company, The Cost Structure of Robinhood in the Early Days and Why it is a More Efficient Business than eTrade & How Vlad Has Developed as a Leader Over Time with Rick Yang a
Scott Sandell is the Managing General Partner of NEA, one of the leading firms of the last 3 decades with now close to $24Bn under management and a portfolio including Salesforce, Robinhood, Plaid, Databricks and more. As for Scott, since joining the firm in 1996 he has led investments in Salesforce.com, Tableau Software, WebEx and Workday and serves on the board of Robinhood, Cloudflare, Coursera and Divvy to name a few.
Rick Yang is a General Partner and Head of Consumer Investing @ NEA, since joining in 2007 he has led investments in the likes of Masterclass, Plaid, Robinhood and many more.
In Today’s Episode with Scott Sandell and Rick Yang You Will Learn:
1.) How Rick came to meet Vlad, Robinhood Founder, for the first time? What impressed Rick most in that first meeting? How did the internal discussions proceed at NEA? Was it a unanimous decision to make the investment?
2.) The Market:
- How did Rick and Scott evaluate the market at the time? Bottoms up, top down?
- How did the market change and evolve both in ways they did and did not expect?
- How do Rick and Scott evaluate market timing risk today when investing?
- How did Rick and Scott approach outcome scenario planning with Robinhood?
3.) The Traction:
- What core signals and datapoints made Rick realise Robinhood had product-market-fit?
- How did Rick and NEA analyse Robinhood's early organic customer acquisition? How did the board advise on how to spend their first marketing dollars?
- How does the cost structure of the business compare to Charles Swaab and eTrade? Why is Robinhood such a superior model?
4.) The Team:
- How has Vlad evolved and developed as a leader over time?
- How did Vlad handle the 36 hours in Feb 2021 when he had to go and raise $3BN+?
- Who is the unsung hero of the Robinhood team? What have they done to deserve this?
20VC: Sweetgreen Founder Jonathan Neman on Leadership Lessons from Managing Through COVID, The Importance of Failing Fast and Iterating & How the Best Leaders Bring Together Brand, Capital Allocation and Strategy
Jonathan Neman is Co-Founder & CEO of Sweetgreen, the mission-driven restaurant brand that serves healthy food at scale. Alongside his co-founders, Jon has scaled Sweetgreen from one small restaurant to one of the US' leading food brands with over 5,000 employees, over 140 locations and $300M+ in revenue. If that was not enough, Jon is also an active board member of MeUndies.
In Today’s Episode with Jonathan Neman You Will Learn:
1.) How Jon took the decision to leave his "dream job" as a consultant at Bain to start Sweetgreen? What did his Bain boss tell him that persuaded Jon it was the right decision to leave? How does Jon think about and advise people when it comes to choosing the safe vs the risky path?
2.) How Sweetgreen was not an Overnight Success:
- At what moment did Jon really not think that Sweetgreen would make it? Why?
- How did he deal with those moments of intense stress and pressure?
- How does Jon test for true grit and resilience both in hires and in founders today?
3.) Brand + Capital + Business Strategy:
- How does Jon think deeply about what brand means today?
- What did Sweetgreen do right when it comes to their brand building? How did they marry art and science in the right way?
- What do the unit economics look like on a per store basis? What is the payback period on a per store basis? How has this changed over time?
- How does the store design impact the profit per store? How has store design changed over time?
- What have been some of the biggest lessons in terms of when, where and how to open new stores?
4.) Leading Through COVID:
- What were some of Jon's biggest lessons from leading a consumer brand through COVID
- What were some of the toughest elements for Jon? How did he overcome them?
- How can founders bring people along with their thought process and inspire?
- Who is Jon's biggest mentor? What has he learned from them?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Jonathan Neman
Jon’s Favourite Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman
20VC: 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki on How To Approach Trust in Business and Personal Relationships, Leadership Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg and Reflections on How The Best Founders Manage Their Boards
Anne Wojcicki is the Founder & CEO @ 23andme, offering DNA testing with the most comprehensive ancestry breakdown, personalized health insights, and more. To date, Anne has raised over $1BN for the company from the likes of Sequoia, GV, NEA and many more incredible names. Prior to founding 23andMe, Anne spent a decade on Wall Street investing in healthcare and felt frustrated by a system built around monetizing illness instead of incentivizing prevention. If that was not enough, Anne is also on the board of Cazoo and The Anne Wojcicki Foundation and is an active angel investor with investments in the likes of Embark and Maven Clinic.
In Today’s Episode with Anne Wojcicki You Will Learn:
1.) How Anne made her way from Wall St healthcare investing to founding one of the leading healthcare companies of the last decade in 23andme?
2.) Trust and Friendship:
- How does Anne determine whether someone is genuine or is being transactional? What are the signs?
- How does Anne approach trust in relationships? Start from a base of full trust and it is to be lost or start with none and it is to be gained?
- What does Anne believe are the core of the best and most healthy relationships she has?
3.) Leadership:
- How does Anne reflect on her own decision-making processes today?
- How does Anne create a safe space where her team feel they can pushback on her and tell her how they feel?
- How does Anne approach internal role migration? What does Anne do to get the very best out of her team?
- How has Anne's leadership style changed over the years?
- How has being on the board of Cazoo changed how Anne reflects on her own board leadership? What have been some of her biggest lessons from Alex Chesterman?
4.) AMA:
- What is the hardest element of Anne's role with 23andme?
- What is Anne's morning routine?
- What 3 traits would Anne most want her children to have?
- Anne can have a billboard anywhere, what do it say on it and why?
- What would Anne most like to change in the world of healthcare over the next decade?
20VC: How I Lost a $125M Deal with Yahoo by Being Too Honest, The M&A Meeting with Steve Jobs That Did Not Go Well and How U2's Bono Saved The Day For One Tech Startup with Ali Partovi, CEO @ Neo
Ali Partovi is the CEO @ Neo, a mentorship community and communal VC fund that announced their new $150M fund last year on the back of early hits from Fund I including Vanta and Kalshi. As an angel, Ali has made personal investments in Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Convoy and many more. Prior to investing, Ali founded 2 companies, the first; LinkExchange which he sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998 and the second, iLike which was acquired by Microsoft in 2009.
In Today’s Episode with Ali Partovi You Will Learn:
1.) How Ali made his way into the world of startups with the founding of his first company? How Ali made his way into angel investing and then starting and raising Neo, as a fund?
2.) How To Kill a $125M By Being Too Honest:
- How did Ali lose this $125M with Jerry Yang and Yahoo?
- What led Ali to believe that Paul Graham was so special in 1995? What would Ali have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?
- How does Ali feel about investment misses today? What are his biggest misses? How has it impacted his mindset and approach to investing?
3.) The Meeting with Steve Jobs Did Not Go Well:
- Why did the meeting with Steve Jobs not go well?
- What was wrong with the way Ali phrased his final statement? What did this teach Ali about how founders should communicate the difference between hype and reality?
- What did this experience teach Ali about how founders should run both fundraising and M&A processes? How does Ali build trust with every touchpoint?
4.) U2, Airbnb and Google at Seed:
- How did Bono come to save the day for Ali for his startup in 2009?
- What did this teach Ali about how to frame risk and when to go all in vs hold back?
- How did Ali miss investing in the seed for Airbnb? How did he make up for it with a later investment?
- How did Ali come to miss investing in the Google seed round? Does FOMO haunt Ali today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Ali Partovi
Ali’s Favourite Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro
Rob Schutz is Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder at Ro, the healthcare technology company building a patient-centric healthcare system. To date, Ro has raised over $870M with a last reported valuation of $5BN and under Rob’s growth leadership, Ro has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the country. Prior to Ro, Rob was VP of Growth at Bark, the makers of BarkBox, and helped scale revenue from zero to $100 million. He also founded a Washington DC-based daily deals site that was acquired by kgbdeals in 2011.
In Today’s Episode with Rob Schutz You Will Learn:
1.) How Rob made his way into startups and growth through the world of daily deals? How that led to his leading growth for Bark and ultimately founding Ro? How did leading marketing for Bark impact his growth strategy today with Ro?
2.) What is "Growth" and When to Hire For It:
- How does Rob define "growth and "Head of Growth"?
- When is the right time to start thinking about a growth team?
- Should founders hire a "Head of Growth" first or hire younger growth reps?
- Where should the growth team sit within the organization?
3.) How to Hire Growth Leader and Reps:
- What is the step-by-step process to hire growth leaders and reps?
- How does it differ when hiring growth leaders vs reps?
- What questions does Rob always ask? What separates good from great answers?
- What case studies does Rob like to use to determine candidate quality?
- How can one tell whether marketeers and growth candidates truly understand data?
4.) How to Structure the Onboarding Process:
- What does the optimal onboarding process look like for new hires?
- What tasks and duties do you expect reps and growth leaders to complete in the first month?
- What are some early red flags that the candidate you have is not good enough?
- How can leaders deliberately manufacture moments for growth teams to interact with other teams?
- What are the biggest mistakes growth teams and leaders make in the early days?
20VC: Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on How To Narrow The Focus and Increase The Quality, Why Every CEO Should Feel Anxious, Why Performance Reviews are BS & How to Unleash the Best People in Your Business
Frank Slootman currently serves as Chairman and CEO at Snowflake and has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and executive in the enterprise software industry. Prior to Snowflake, Frank served as CEO and President of ServiceNow taking the company from around $100M in revenue, through an IPO, to $1.4B. Before ServiceNow, Frank served as President of the Backup Recovery Systems Division at EMC following the acquisition of Data Domain Corporation/Data Domain, Inc., where he served as the CEO and President, leading the company through an IPO to its acquisition by EMC for $2.4B. You must check out Frank's book, Amp It Up. It can already be pre-ordered here.
In Today’s Episode with Frank Slootman You Will Learn:
1.) Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality:
- How does Frank determine what to focus on? What does the prioritisation process look like?
- What one question does Frank ask his team to ensure they are focused?
- What are the best answers? What are the worst? When should you change focus?
2.) When There is Doubt, There is No Doubt:
- What does Frank mean by this? What does it apply to? When is there nuance?
- How long does Frank give people who are underperforming? How does he communicate their underperformance to them directly but productively?
- What is the right way to fire someone? Why are performance reviews BS?
3.) Make The Good People Great:
- How does Frank get the very best out of his teams? How does he make the good great?
- How does he use compensation and equity structures to supercharge his teams?
- How does Frank set stretch targets that are both ambitious but also attainable?
4.) The Art of Leadership and Board Management:
- Why does Frank believe every CEO should be anxious?
- How has Frank changed as a leader over time?
- What is the biggest mistake founders make when it comes to board management?
- How can founders actively manage and control their board?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Frank Slootman
Frank’s Favourite Book: Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favours the Brave, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything
20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Devin Finzer is the Founder & CEO @ Opensea, the world's first and largest NFT marketplace allowing you to discover, collect, and sell extraordinary NFTs. To date, Devin has raised over $423M for the company with their last $300M round valuing Opensea at $13.3BN. Before changing the world of NFTs, Devin co-founded ClaimDog which was acquired by Credit Karma and before founding ClaimDog, Devin was an engineer at Pinterest. Do want to say, I always love Semil Shah's startup of the year, for 2021 it was Opensea, check out his piece here.
In Today’s Episode with Devin Finzer You Will Learn:
1.) How Devin made his way into the world of NFTs and came to found the first and largest NFT marketplace in the form of Opensea?
2.) The Scaling Story:
- What were the first early signs that Opensea was working when they were in YC? What core metrics did they look at to determine success?
- Given NFTs not being "hot" at the time, how was the fundraising process for Opensea coming out of YC? What were the early investors most excited about?
- What was the inflection point when Opensea and NFTs really started to take off? What most surprised Devin about the way in which the inflection point happened?
- When scaling from $150M to $4BN in GMV, what are the first things to break in a company?
- How does Devin maintain company morale with such volatile crypto and NFT markets?
3.) The Next Decade of NFTs:
- How does Devin predict large brands and companies will utilise NFTs for their businesses?
- In what ways does Devin think creators and celebrities will use NFTs moving forward to create more efficient business models?
- How does Devin respond to the statement, "NFTs do more to harm than help income inequality?"
- What are Devin's biggest concerns moving forward when analysing the NFT market?
- How does Devin see the future for the development and experimentation of NFTs?
4.) The Future of NFT & Gaming:
- How does Devin see NFTs impacting the world of gaming most?
- How does Devin think about interacting with these gaming communities that are external to the centralised Opensea marketplace?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Devin Finzer
Devin’s Favourite Book: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
20VC: The Memo: Never Before Revealed Metrics; A Full Breakdown of Unit Economics Behind JOKR, How Does Emerging Markets Compare to Developed Economies & The Biggest Misnomers on Quick Commerce with Ralf Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ JOKR
Ralf Wenzel is the Founder & CEO @ JOKR, a global platform for instant retail delivery at a hyper-local scale serving both the US and LATAM. Ralf has raised over $260M for the company, most recently valuing it at $1.2BN. Prior to JOKR, Ralf spent 7 years as the Founder & CEO @ foodpanda, as well as, enjoying roles as Chief Strategy Officer @ Delivery Hero, Interim Chief Product and Experience Officer @ WeWork and even moving to the other side of the table as a Managing Partner with Softbank.
In Today’s Episode with Ralf Wenzel You Will Learn:
1.) What is the unit economic breakdown for quick commerce business models? What levers can be used to improve it over time?
2.) Comparing the US to LATAM:
- What is the AOV (average order value) in the US vs LATAM?
- What is the order frequency in the US vs LATAM?
- How does labour cost vary when comparing LATAM to the US?
- How does real estate cost for fulfilment centres differ when comparing LATAM to the US?
- How do product margins on a per product basis differ when comparing US to LATAM?
3.) New Market Growth and Maturation:
- What is the payback period for new markets? How has this changed over time?
- How does the payback period reduce with every new market being opened?
- What % of AOV is spent on marketing when a new market is opened? How does this marketing spend change over time?
- In mature markets, how much new customer acquisition is organic vs paid?
- What is the average weekly growth rate in new vs mature markets?
4.) Business Model Expansions:
- How does Ralf and JOKR approach the potential for private label goods?
- How does private label change the margin structure of the goods?
- What have been their lessons from starting their first private label goods?
- How does Ralf approach the ability to integrate advertising and paid search?
- What is needed for paid search and advertising to be a meaningful part of the business?
20VC: Former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney on Why "Only the Niche Will Survive" in Crypto, How Governments and Central Banks Retain Control in a World of Decentralised Finance & The Winners and Losers in Crypto Exchanges and NFTs
Mark Carney is Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management and Head of Transition Investing. Prior to Brookfield, Mark served as the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, and prior to that as Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 until 2013. Mark was also Chairman of the Financial Stability Board from 2011 to 2018. Mark is a long-time and well-known advocate for sustainability and is currently the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. If that was not enough, Mark serves on numerous other boards including Stripe, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Mark Carney You Will Learn:
1.) How Mark made his entrance into the world of finance and came to the role of Governor of the Bank of Canada? How did that role lead to his becoming Governor of the Bank of England? How did seeing multiple booms and busts impact Mark's investing mindset?
2.) Governments, Central Banks and Regulation:
- How do governments and central banks retain control in a completely decentralized financial world?
- Can traditional currencies and digital currencies peacefully co-exist?
- What are Mark's predictions for central bank digital currencies?
- How does Mark expect governments and central banks to regulate digital currencies in the coming years?
3.) The Winners and Losers:
- What does the future hold for crypto exchanges?
- How do competitors for digital gold perform?
- Why does Mark believe in crypto "only the niche will survive"?
- What does the rise of Defi mean for traditional banks? What will determine those that survive?
- What does Mark mean when he says the winners will decide "what is my interface with this crypto world?''
4.) The Future of NFTs:
- Do NFTs do more to help or to harm income inequality?
- How does Mark see the future for the development and experimentation of NFTs?
- Who are the winners and losers in the next decade for NFTs?
- How does Mark feel about the pause between productivity gains and real wage benefits that exist today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Mark Carney
Mark’s Favourite Book: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
20VC: Whoop Founder, Will Ahmed on How CEOs Can Perform at their Highest Level, Why There is Value in Struggle Early On, Why Realism is Overrated in Startups and How To Create a Culture of Delegated Decision-Making
Will Ahmed is the Founder and CEO @ Whoop, the company on a mission to unlock human performance with their wearable device that is your digital fitness and health coach. To date, Will has raised over $400M for the company with the last round valuing Whoop at $3.6BN and with a cap table including the likes of Softbank, Accomplice, Founder Collective, Foundry Group, IVP and more.
In Today’s Episode with Will Ahmed You Will Learn:
1.) How Will went from being a professional athlete and college student to founding one of the hottest startups in fitness and healthcare? What are the similarities and differences of being an athlete and being a CEO?
2.) What does Will mean when he says, "there is value in the struggle early on"? How does Will advise founders on when to give up vs when to stay the course? If Will had not struggled with funding in the early days, would the Whoop journey be different? How does Will advise founders when it comes to taking funding when it is on the table? What are the nuances to this?
3.) In what way does Will believe "realism is overrated"? When does Will believe it is good to be realistic? In what ways can it be good to be idealistic? How did Will get some of the largest sports stars on the planet to use Whoop in the early days? Why did Will always refuse to pay sports stars to use Whoop? What were the benefits of doing this?
4.) How does Will define high performance? Why does Will believe it is crucial for leaders to disassociate their own personal feelings from the progress of their company? What advice does Will give to leaders in an attempt to do this? What has Will done to be a better CEO in the last year? What does Will believe are his biggest weaknesses as a CEO?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Will Ahmed
Will’s Favourite Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
20Growth: The Biggest Growth Lessons from Leading Teams at Instagram & Instacart, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth Teams, How To Onboard Growth Reps Efficiently and The Relationship Between Growth and The Rest of the Org with Bangaly Kaba, H
Bangaly Kaba is the Head of Platform Growth @ Popshop Live, a live streaming mobile marketplace that combines commerce, entertainment, and social. Prior to Popshop, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, where he built and led the product team that helped grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs. If all of this was not enough, Bangaly has also spent time investing as a Sequoia Scout having made investments into Career Karma, Binti.com and Squad App to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Bangaly Kaba You Will Learn:
1.) How Bangaly made his way into the world of growth and came to lead some of the largest growth orgs in tech at the likes of Instacart and Instagram?
2.) How does Bangaly define the rule of "Head of Growth"? When is the right time for founders to start hiring a growth leader? How do they know whether to hire a growth leader or junior growth reps? Where should founders place these first growth hires in the org? Product or marketing?
3.) How would Bangaly structure the hiring process for any growth hire? What are the must-ask questions? What case studies would Bangaly ask all candidates to complete? What are the signals of a 10x growth hire? What are some core red flags that show in the interview process?
4.) What does the ideal onboarding process look like for new growth hires? What are the signs that a new growth hire is hitting target and expectations? What are some early warning signs that a growth hire is not meeting expectations?
5.) What is the ideal relationship between the Head of Growth and the CEO? How often should they meet? How should they structure the discussion? How should the growth team work with product teams to be successful? How should growth teams work with marketing teams?
20VC: John Doerr on Buying 12% of Google for $12M, His Biggest Investing Lesson from 30 Years in Venture & The Climate Crisis: Why Governments are The Biggest Problem and Where the Biggest Opportunities Are in Climate Investing?
John Doerr is an engineer, venture capitalist, the chairman of Kleiner Perkins, and the author of the #1 New York Times best-seller Measure What Matters. For over 40 years, John has helped build some of the most generational defining companies of our generation. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than a million jobs. A pioneer of Silicon Valley’s cleantech movement, John has invested in zero emissions technologies since 2006. Check out his latest book, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
In Today’s Episode with John Doerr You Will Learn:
1.) What was John's entry into climate change investing? Having backed the likes of Amazon and Google, why did John decide then was the right time to do a climate fund, a pandemic fund, an iPhone fund? How does John think about market timing risk today? How does John determine between risks he is vs is not willing to take?
2.) What was one of John's biggest lessons on risk and upside from working alongside Tom Perkins? How did the Google deal come together? Where did John first meet Larry and Serge? What convinced John to write them a $12M check for 12% of the company? Why was it a contested deal within the partnership? How did the discussion go internally?
3.) Why and how is climate innovating and investing different today than it was in 2008? What are the core OKR's laid out in the book, that we need to achieve as a society? Why does John believe that governments are the biggest problem to us achieving these objectives? What does John mean when he says, "I am hopeful but not optimistic"?
4.) What does truly great listening mean to John? How would John describe his style of board membership? What do the truly special board members do? What does John do that makes him often cited as one of the best at recruiting? What is John's biggest investing miss? How did it change his mindset and approach? What investment is John most proud of, that no one knows?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with John Doerr
John’s Favourite Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
20 Sales: When To Hire Your Head of Sales/ First Reps, What To Look for in 10x Sales Candidates, How To Structure The Hiring Process, How To Onboard New Reps Efficiently, How To Set First Quotas and more with Kyle Parrish, Figma's VP Sales
Kyle Parrish is VP Sales @ Figma, the company that connects everyone in the design process so teams can deliver better products, faster. At Figma, Kyle built the sales engine from scratch to today, with over 100 incredible people in sales. Before Figma, Kyle spent over 5 years at Dropbox in numerous different roles including Head of Sales, where he scaled the Austin, Texas office from 3 to over 80 people to Global Partnerships lead, where he was responsible for growing Dropbox’s partner ecosystem.
In Today’s Episode with Kyle Parrish You Will Learn:
1.) How Kyle first made his way into the world of sales and came to be one of the 3 performing sales reps in a 300+ sales team? How that led to his joining the hypergrowth journey of Dropbox? What led Kyle to make the move from Dropbox to the rocketship that is Figma?
2.) When and Who: Does the founder need to be the person to create the sales playbook? How can a founder know whether it is right to hire sales reps or a Head of Sales first? In terms of ARR, is there a time when you have to have a Head of Sales? Does Kyle agree with Jason Lemkin in terms of bringing in reps, two at a time? Where do founders make the biggest mistakes when it comes to the timing of these hires?
3.) How To Know and Test: What non-obvious characteristics do 10x sales hires have? What questions or case studies does Kyle find to be most revealing in identifying these non-obvious traits? How should founders structure the process for new reps and a Head of Sales? Meeting by meeting, what should we look to achieve?
4.) Setting Up for Success: What does the ideal onboarding process look like for new sales reps? What tasks and processes would Kyle expect new reps to complete within the first month or two on the job? What are the clearest signs of a new rep hire not working out? How should founders approach 1-1 and 360 reviews with their new reps?
5.) Working Together: What is the ideal relationship between the founder and the new Head of Sales? How often should they meet? What should the founder expect from the new Head of Sales? How should the Head of Sales work with the Head of Marketing most efficiently?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Kyle Parrish
Kyle's Favourite Sales Blog Post: The Sales Learning Curve
20VC: Bill Gurley and Michael Eisenberg on The First Signs of an Impending Bust, What Happens with a Market Crash, How Do Public Markets Impact Private Valuations & The Biggest Lessons from 20 Years Investing in Venture
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, Modern Treasury, Snapchat, StitchFix, and many more. As for Bill, widely recognized as one of the greats in venture having worked with GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, and Zillow. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
Michael Eisenberg spent 15 years as a General Partner @ Benchmark working alongside Bill and the Benchmark partnership. Following Benchmark, Michael co-founded Aleph, one of the leading Israeli venture funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Lemonade, Melio, and HoneyBook, just to name a couple of Aleph's unicorns.
In Today’s Episode with Bill Gurley and Michael Eisenberg You Will Learn:
1.) How does the current market activity in venture today compare to the dot com bubble? What elements are different? What elements are the same? What were the ramifications of the dot com bubble? Would Bill and Michael expect to see the same again? Is there anything good that comes from bubbles? How did the prior bubble impact Michael and Bill's investing mindset?
2.) Does Bill Gurley agree that Benchmark are the only firm to have retained price discipline in this crazy market? How do Bill and Michael think about their own relationship to price today? How does Bill try and answer the question, "what could go right?" when he meets entrepreneurs today? On reflection, what have been Michael and Bill's biggest miss? How did it change their approach?
3.) How does one compete in a world of Tiger and crossover funds? When it comes to capital deployment and pacing, do Michael and Bill agree with the suggestion of "playing the game on the field"? What are the nuances to this statement? What companies does Bill believe capital can be a moat for? What companies is capital not a moat and they should be conservative with raising and pre-emptive rounds?
4.) Do Bill and Michael believe that ownership still matters today with outcomes being larger than ever? How do Bill and Michael feel about the importance of temporal diversification today in a world of compressed deployment cycles? What investing lesson learned over 25 years in the business do Bill and Michael wish they had known when they started?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Bill Gurley and Michael Eisenberg
Bill’s Favourite Book: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
20VC: AppLovin’s Co-Founder & CEO, Adam Foroughi on How AppLovin Might Be The Venture Capital Industry’s Biggest Miss, How To Run a 1,000+ Organisation with Very Few Meetings & Balancing the Demands of Wall St with Long Term, Sustainable Growth
Adam Foroughi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ AppLovin, the company that allows developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. Under Adam's leadership, he has taken the company public, grown the team to over 1,000 people around the world, and scaled revenue in 2020 to $1.5Bn. Prior to AppLovin, Adam founded two companies—Lifestreet Media and Social Hour, and before that Adam started his career as a derivatives trader.
In Today’s Episode with Adam Foroughi You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of the world's largest gaming, advertising and marketing companies in the form of AppLovin?
2.) Adam founded 4 companies before AppLovin, does Adam believe in the benefits of serial entrepreneurship? What has he done differently with AppLovin having learned from past experience? What did he do the same, having seen it work before?
3.) Why does Adam advocate for as few meetings as possible within the company? Why does Adam believe meetings are unproductive? How do decisions get made internally without meetings? What is the structure and process? How does Adam create an environment where people make decisions without the fear of the repercussions? What are the breakpoints in company scaling?
4.) Why does Adam think that VCs did not want to invest in the early rounds? What were his biggest takeaways from those early fundraising days? How has Adam found the transition to being a public markets CEO? What does he like? What does he not like? How does Adam feel about pleasing the street but also having a long-term mindset?
5.) How does Adam structure his day? With 5 children, how does Adam approach work/life balance? What does his exercise and sleep routine look like? How does he do both weights and running without losing the productivity of the weights? What changes has he made in the last year that have made a significant difference?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Adam Foroughi
Adam's Favourite Book: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
20VC: The Contentful Memo: Point Nine's Christoph Janz on The Cold Email That Led to a Unicorn Investment, How To Approach Market Sizing and Timing & The Pros and Cons of Pre-Emptive Rounds, When To Do Them vs When Not To?
Christoph Janz is the Co-Founder and General Partner @ Point Nine, one of Europe's leading early-stage firms with a portfolio including the likes of Zendesk, Algolia, Revolut, Nex Health, Loom and of course, Contentful. Prior to co-founding Point Nine, Christoph was a prolific angel investor and also the Co-Founder @ Pageflakes, leading the company from inception to their acquisition by LiveUniverse in 2008. Christoph is also one of the most thoughtful writers in SaaS and you can find his writing here.
In Today’s Episode with Christoph Janz You Will Learn:
1.) How did a cold email from the solo founder of Contentful convince Christoph to lead their first round? What was it about the email that made Christoph excited? How does Christoph advise founders today when it comes to crafting cold emails to VCs?
2.) The Market: How did Christoph analyze the market when making the investment? How much of a role does market sizing and analysis play in determining whether Christoph will make an investment? What matters more team or market? How did the market change in a way that Christoph was not expecting? How did it evolve in a way he was expecting?
3.) Business Model: How does Christoph advise SaaS founders today in crafting variable pricing mechanisms? How can you create a pricing mechanism that does not disincentivize usage but also optimizes for value extraction? Where does Christoph see many founders go wrong when it comes to pricing?
4.) Fundraising: How did the early fundraising rounds for Contentful come together? How does Christoph advise founders today on whether to take pre-emptive rounds? When can they be helpful? In what circumstances can they be very damaging? What is the best outcome that founders should be optimizing for today with fundraising?
20VC: Eugene Wei on "Status as a Service", Why Networks Grow and Stop Growing, The Worst Design Choices Social Media Incumbents Have Made & The Next 10 Years of Media and the Metaverse
Eugene Wei is one of my favorite thinkers, writers, and strategists in tech today. Having spent the majority of his professional career at consumer internet companies, Eugene started his career with a 7-year stint at Amazon with a focus on product. He then joined Hulu leading the product, design, editorial, and marketing teams. Post Hulu, Eugene co-founded Erly, later acquired by Airtime, and then joined Flipboard as Head of Product. Finally, Eugene's last position was with Oculus as Head of Video. You have to check out Eugene's blog and can find his writing here.
In Today’s Episode with Eugene Wei You Will Learn:
1.) How Eugene made his way into the world of tech and startups with his first position at Amazon? What did Eugene do differently that made him stand out to the recruiters at Amazon?
2.) Decision-Making: Why does the process and medium by which decisions are made matter so much? How has Euegene's decision-making process changed over time? Where do many people go wrong in constructing and optimising their decision-making process? What are Eugene's biggest takeaways and lessons from Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs on messaging?
3.) The World of Social: What does Eugene believe is the graph design problem for so many social apps today? What does Eugene believe are the best and the worst design choices social media incumbents have made? How does Eugene encourage the next generation of consumer social founders to think through design decisions?
4.) Status as a Service: What does the concept of "Status as a Service" mean to Eugene? What is the biggest misunderstanding people have with the concept? What has fundamentally changed this concept in the last 2-3 years? How does the rise of crypto and NFT's impact the notion of "status as a service"? How does Eugene believe this will look in 10 years?
5.) The World of Media: How does Eugene think through the attention economy today? Why is media and content harder than ever today? Why does Eugene believe media has now become zero-sum? What does Eugene believe will be the future business model for media?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Euegene Wei
Eugene's Favourite Book: The Sound and the Fury, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Andy Johns is one of the pre-eminent growth leaders of the last decade. Andy's career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. Andy is also an active angel investor and advisor with companies such as Poshmark, Robinhood, Webflow, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Opendoor. If that was not enough, Andy is currently a Venture Partner @ Unusual Ventures where he focuses on consumer social and network-driven startups.
In Today’s Episode with Andy Johns You Will Learn:
1.) How Andy made his way into the world of startups and growth with his joining the Facebook growth team? What were the biggest takeaways from his time with Facebook, Twitter and Quora? How did that impact his mindset today?
2.) How does Andy define "VP and Head of Growth"? When is the right time to start hiring for your growth team? How should founders determine whether they need a growth leader or growth engineers in the early days? What is the core question founders need to ask on network effects to answer this question? Should the growth team be incorporated into the product team?
3.) How does Andy structure the hiring process for growth hires? What does the structure of the interviews look like? How does Andy test for real depth with candidates? What case studies does he do to really understand their quality? Where do many go wrong with the interview process? What are Andy's biggest suggestions for how to optimise the process?
4.) What does the optimal onboarding process for new hires look like? What takes and processes should they complete in their first month? What are early signs of a poor candidate? How long should one give them if they are not performing? How does Andy approach structure post-mortems within the team? What is the ideal relationship between CEO and Head of Growth?
20VC: Thrive Capital's Kareem Zaki on The One Rule That Drives Investment Decision-Making and Focus at Thrive, Why Every Large Institution Will Enter Venture Capital Over the Next Decade and How To Create a Firm Culture That Attracts The Best Young Talent
Kareem Zaki is a General Partner @ Thrive Capital, with a portfolio including Stripe, Instacart, Instagram, Nubank, Github, Glossier and many more, they have cemented their position as one of the leading venture firms of the last decade. As for Kareem, he is a co-founder and board member to Cedar, Nava, Scope Security and Cadence and has invested in the likes of Affirm, Lemonade, Ramp and Trade Republic. Prior to entering venture, Kareem spent 3 years in private equity with Blackstone.
In Today’s Episode with Kareem Zaki You Will Learn:
1.) How Kareem made his way from the world of private equity to backing some of the most innovative next-generation companies with Thrive Capital?
2.) Portfolio Construction: What is the one rule that drives all decision-making at Thrive? How does Kareem think about maintaining focus with such a broad mandate? How do Thrive think about asset allocation internally with such a broad mandate? How does incubating companies also help Kareem be a better investor?
3.) Investing Style: How has Kareem's investing style changed over the last 10 years? What does he focus on now that he did not before and visa versa? How does Kareem assess his own relationship to price? Through what lens does Kareem approach market sizing and timing? Where do many investors make mistakes here?
4.) The Landscape: How does Kareem respond to the activity and cadence of Tiger? In what way does Kareem believe the venture landscape will have changed most significantly in the next 10 years? How do the existing incumbent firms need to change in the wake of this? How do Thrive respond to the pace and cadence of check writing today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Kareem Zaki
Kareem’s Favourite Book: How Will You Measure Your Life
Kareem's Most Recent Investment: Cadence
20VC: The Anduril Memo: Founders Fund's Brian Singerman on What Makes Palmer Luckey One of the Greatest Innovators in History, Why It Is BS The DOD Do Not Want To Work With Silicon Valley & Why in Venture You Have To Play A Different Game to the Hedge Fun
Brian Singerman is a General Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the most prominent venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla, Palantir, Stripe, Affirm, Airbnb, Facebook, and many more. As for Brian, he has led investments in the likes of Affirm, Oscar Health, Wish, Asana, Oculus, and Postmates to name a few. Brian also sits on the board or is an observer to The Long Term Stock Exchange, Solugen, Cloud9, Modern Health, and of course, Anduril. Prior to Founders Fund, Brian spent a very successful 4 years as an engineer and executive at Google.
In Today’s Episode with Brian Singerman on Anduril, You Will Learn:
1.) How did Brian first come to meet Palmer and the Anduril team? Where did the meeting take place? How did the discussion go? Did Brian instantly feel that Palmer was special? What about the way Palmer presented, suggested this to Brian?
2.) The Market: What gave Brian the confidence Anduril would be successful where so many others had failed? How did the market change or evolve in a way Brian did expect? In what ways did the market surprise Brian? Does Brian think we will see the relationship between Silicon Valley and the DOD change over time?
3.) Anduril: The Business: Why is Anduril as a business, so hard to copy? How did Brian gain comfort around their defensibility? What does Brian think is the biggest misconception people have of Anduril as a business? How does Brian think about when is the right time to add secondary and ancillary products?
4.) Investing Today: Why is Brian no longer Zoom investing today? What does Brian mean when he says you have to, "play a different game to the hedge funds today"? In what way does he and Founders Fund look to do this? How does Brian think about the current levels of pricing? How does he determine when to pay up vs when to be disciplined?
20VC Special: Accel Founders Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz on Building Accel Into One of the Most Prominent Venture Firms Over Four Decades, How Today's Market Compares To The Dot Com Bubble, How To Do Generational Transition Well and Why Accel Will Nev
Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz founded Accel in 1983. Under their leadership, they have built Accel into one of the most prominent venture firms of the last 4 decades.
Starting with Arthur, as the lead investor, Arthur has helped management teams develop companies into market-defining leaders over an incredible four decades. Prior to co-founding Accel, Arthur was a General Partner of Adler & Company with his career in venture starting at Citicorp Venture Capital.
As for Jim, Jim has been the lead director of more than 50 successful companies. He was instrumental as a founder/mentor of Accel London and in the founding of Meritech Capital. Before Accel, Jim was the founding general partner of Adler & Company, which he started with Fred Adler in 1978 after his tenure as a vice president of Citicorp Venture Capital.
In Today’s Episode with Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz You Will Learn:
1.) How Arthur and Jim made their first entry into the world of venture capital in the 70's? What was the founding moment for them with Accel? Where did the first discussion happen? Did they align on strategy? Why did they decide to name the firm Accel?
2.) What did the venture ecosystem look like when Arthur and Jim founded Accel in 1983? Why does Arthur believe the specialist always beats the generalist? What was the hardest Accel fund to raise? Why was it the hardest to raise? When did the Accel brand hit an inflection point and fundraising became easier? Where do Arthur and Jim disagree on this?
3.) How do Jim and Arthur feel about the current frothiness of the venture market? Why does Jim believe we are entering a market correction? How do they feel about the inflation of asset value? Through what lens is now the same vs different to 1999/2000? What have been their biggest lessons from experiencing 5 macro booms and busts?
4.) How did Jim and Arthur think about when to expand with a new Accel product? What did Accel do specifically to make the expansion to London and India so successful? What is the key to doing generational transition well? Where do many go wrong here? Do Jim and Arthur agree with Doug Leone, "when you lose seed, you become private equity"?
5.) How do Jim and Arthur think about partner selection within the firm? How have they structured decision-making to ensure politics do not get introduced? How does one create a decision-making framework of accountability without fear to take big risks? What do Arthur and Jim mean when they speak of "the prepared mind"? How does it help them think and operate better?
20VC Unscripted: Pricing is Crazy, Pre-Emptive Rounds are Normal, Pricing at 200x Revenue Multiple is Common, There is More Cash Than Ever. What Happens Next; Market Analysis with Ryan Denehy, Founder and CEO @ Electric
Ryan Denehy is the Founder & CEO @ Electric, the company that provides a modern IT solution that's simplified. To date, Ryan has raised over $188M for the company from the likes of GGV, Bessemer, Slack Fund, and 01 Advisors to name a few. As for Ryan, he is a 3x entrepreneur with his first company being acquired by USA TODAY Sports and his second company, Swarm Mobile being acquired by Groupon in 2014.
In Today’s Episode with Ryan Denehy You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his way into the world of startups with his first startup being acquired when he was still in college? How have experiences raising $180M with Electric, impacted how he thinks about the venture market today?
2.) Is Ryan concerned by the lack of due diligence investors are doing today? How has the DD process changed over the years? What materials should founders provide to investors? How should founders reference check investors? What do many founders do wrong here?
3.) Should founders always take the most money at the highest price? When thinking about price, what do you founders have to think through? Why are some of the prices we are seeing today so crazy? How can founders outcome scenario plan to come to the best price option? When are founders and investors misaligned when it comes to price?
4.) What does Ryan mean when he says, "sales and product-market fit are more closely related than people think"? How does Ryan advise founders on when to really raise big? Does Ryan believe in the notion of "skipping a round"? Does this ever happen? Does Ryan ever believe the "this will be our last round before we breakeven" statement?
20VC: Mac the VC on the Journey from Homeless To Becoming A VC, What It Takes To Raise a Fund on Twitter, Why the Venture World is F***** Up and How Institutional LPs Need To Change
McKeever "Mac" Conwell II is the founder and managing partner of RareBreed Ventures, a pre-seed fund that invests outside of large tech ecosystems, with a concentrated portfolio approach being the first check with up to $250K. Mac's journey into venture is nothing short of inspirational, Mac went from being homeless to being an engineer to founding his own companies to today, raising Rarebreed largely on Twitter.
In Today’s Episode with Mac the VC You Will Learn:
1.) How Mac went from being homeless to becoming an engineer and starting his own company? How did his time operating lead to his becoming a VC and building his Twitter brand?
2.) What are the biggest ways that venture is messed up today? Why does Mac believe it does not matter about getting into hot deals? Why does Mac believe that the brand of the VC that does your round does not matter? Does Mac see the leading venture brands investing outside SF and NYC? What elements of an investment compel them more than others?
3.) In the wake of the George Floyd event, who does Mac note did not say anything? How does Mac want to see diversity introduced at the institutional LP level? What does Mac believe institutional LPs care about? What can institutional LPs do structurally to allow themselves to invest in the next generation of emerging managers?
4.) Why does Mac not like AngelList Rolling Funds? How did he structure his fund in a creative way? How does Mac feel about the requirements for GP commits? How did Mac use Twitter very specifically to raise his fund? Which people went out of their way to help him? What were some of the biggest takeaways from those discussions?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Mac the VC
Mac’s Favourite Book: Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?: How Reginald Lewis Created a Billion-Dollar Business Empire
20 Growth: The 3 Levers to Successful Growth Models, The 3 Types of Growth Hires Startups Need To Know, The 3 Stages All Successful Growth Teams Need To Go Through with Elena Verna, Advisor @ MongoDB and HP
Elena Verna is a master when it comes to all things starting and scaling growth organizations. Previously, Elena spent over 7 years as SVP Growth @ SurveyMonkey where she ran product, growth marketing, and data teams. Post SurveyMonkey, Elena worked with the rocket ship that is Miro both as Interim CMO and as an advisor. Elena has also advised some of the best growth orgs with advisor roles at HP, MongoDB, Netlify, Maze, and many more awesome companies.
In Today’s Episode with Elena Verna You Will Learn:
1.) How Elena made her way into the world of tech and growth from a Craiglist job listing? What was her big break in the world of growth with her first Head of Growth role?
2.) How does Elena define "growth" and "Head of Growth"? When should startups not have a growth team? What are the 3 main levers to the growth model today? How does Elena advise between hiring a CMO vs Head of Growth? Where do many founders make mistakes with this decision in mind?
3.) Who are the wrong people to hire for your growth team? What characteristics and traits do these people have that make them bad for growth? What questions does Elena ask in interviews to determine if they have these traits? How does Elena advise founders structure the process of hiring their "Head of Growth"? Should it be internal promotion or external hire?
4.) Where do most founders go wrong in the onboarding phase of their growth team? What do you have to have in place before the growth team starts? What are the biggest red flags for founders when reviewing their growth teams in the first 3 months? Why does Elena not like post-mortems? What is the optimal relationship between CEO and Head of Growth?
5.) How can growth teams work most effectively with both product and engineering teams? How do they need to communicate to ensure a healthy relationship? Where do growth teams most often make mistakes here? What have been some of Elena's lessons on how growth can experiment without angering engineering teams?
20VC: Deliveroo Founder Will Shu on The IPO This Year, The Rise of Quick Commerce and The Fierce Competition with Uber Eats
Will Shu is the Founder & CEO @ Deliveroo, the company that provides your favorite restaurants and takeaways, delivered to your door. Prior to their IPO earlier this year, Will raised over $1.7BN for the company from some of the best including Accel, Index, General Catalyst, Greenoaks, and more. Before Deliveroo, Will worked in finance as an analyst with SAC Capital, ESO Capital, and Morgan Stanley in New York and London. Fun fact, Will still enjoys regularly delivering food orders on his bike.
In Today’s Episode with Will Shu You Will Learn:
1.) How Will made his way from hedge funds and Morgan Stanley to changing the world of food and delivery with Deliveroo? Why did Deliveroo not work the first time Will started it?
2.) Restaurant + Customer Acquisition: How did Will acquire the first restaurants to the platform? What did that education process look like for them? What do the restaurants care about? How did Will acquire the first customers? How has that changed over time? What matters to customers; speed, selection or price? How does this change by geography and country?
3.) New Markets: How do Deliveroo select new markets to enter? What makes one more attractive than another? From a resource perspective, what does it take to open a new market? What have been some of the biggest lessons on zone maturity and time to breakeven? Why does Deliveroo not track driver efficiency on a number of drops basis? What is the right mechanism to measure driver efficiency?
4.) Competition: How did Deliveroo come late to markets like France and end up winning them? What was it like competing against Uber with Eats? How important is restaurant exclusivity to Deliveroo retaining its position? What would Will have done differently with regards to competition, with the benefit of hindsight?
5.) Quick commerce: What does Will make of the unprecedented rise of quick commerce? Will we see many winners on a per market basis or will this be a consolidatory environment? What do many of the new entrants mistake or not understand? Why is the vertical ownership of the supply chain such a superior model to working with grocery partners?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Will Shu
Will’s Favourite Book: From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom
20VC: Breaking News: Ankur Nagpal Raises $70M for Vibe Capital, What The Next Decade For Venture Will Look Like, Do VCs Actually Add Any Value & Pre-Emptive Rounds, When To Take Them and When To Reject Them
Ankur Nagpal is the Founding Partner @ Vibe Capital, today announcing his new $70M solo GP fund and with a track record that includes the likes of Roam Research, Eight Sleep, Circle, Hone Health and Maven to name a few. Prior to entering venture, Ankur was the Founder and CEO @ Teachable, a platform where educators can create and sell their own online courses. Ankur led the company until their reported $250M acquisition to Hotmart in 2020.
In Today’s Episode with Ankur Nagpal You Will Learn:
1.) How Ankur made his way into the world of venture investing having founded and exited Teachable for over $250M having raised just $13M in venture funding?
2.) From Angel to Fund: How did Ankur's mindset change with the transition from angel to institutional VC? How does Ankur feel about the rise of party rounds? What does Ankur advise founders trying to get brand names on cap tables?
3.) Portfolio Construction: With the new fund, how does Ankur think through portfolio construction? What is his required level of ownership? How does Ankur feel about optionality checks to get data and information for a larger check down the road? Does Ankur feel it is possible to build ownership in your best companies?
4.) The Future of Venture: Why does Ankur feel that largely, VCs detract value when they invest in a company? Base level, what is Ankur's promise to founders he invests in? From his time as a founder, what does founders most want in their cap table? Will we see a generation of operator-led funds? Will this be a game of the 1%? How will the large funds respond to this?
5.) Emerging Markets: What are the 3 core characteristics that make emerging markets so attractive for Ankur? What elements concern Ankur when investing in emerging markets? How does he screen for integrity with more granularity? How does Ankur analyse the progression of emerging markets in terms of their own hype cycles?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Ankur Nagpal
Ankur’s Favourite Book: Losing my Virignity
20VC: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo on Why You Need Sponsors Not Mentors, Where Management Skills Align with Good Parenting & The First 100 Days as CEO at Instacart; The Challenges, The Surprises and The Next Chapter
Fidji Simo is the CEO @ Instacart, the company that allows you to order whatever you want from local stores, delivering it straight to your door. Fidji joined the Instacart board 10 months ago and just 3 months ago, Fidji joined Instacart full time as CEO. Prior to Instacart, Fidji spent an incredible 10 years at Facebook in numerous different roles including Head of Facebook App and before that Vice President of Games, Video and Monetisation. If this was not enough, Fidji earlier this year announced her co-founding of Metrodora, an integrated medical ecosystem with the vision of advancing women’s health.
In Today’s Episode with Fidji Simo You Will Learn:
1.) How Fidji made her way from a small coastal fishing town in France to leading the Facebook App and becoming one of the most powerful CEOs in tech with her new role at Instacart?
2.) The Rise @ Facebook: How did Fidji rise in the ranks at Facebook so much faster than anyone else? What were the biggest inflection points in her rise? What bets did she make that others did not see? How did they play out? Did any of the bets go wrong? What did Fidji learn about management style when the bet went wrong?
3.) Problem Solving and Decision-Making: What framework does Fidji use to have the most effective problem-solving and decision-making process? How does Fidji built such tight trust and honesty with her team members? In what way can leaders make people feel safe to take big bets but also not lose accountability if it does not work out?
4.) The Move To Instacart: Why did Fidji decide that CEO of Instacart was the right next move for her? What was Fidji's hypothesis of how the first 100 days would go? What has been a surprise in the first 100 days? How do the best leaders onboard into new CEO roles? How does the role of CEO change when moving from private to public company?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Fidji Simo
Fidji’s Favourite Book: The Night Circus
20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market?
George Kurtz is the CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a leading provider of next-generation endpoint protection, threat intelligence, and services. Prior to Crowdstrike's incredibly successful IPO in 2019, George raised funding from the likes of Accel, General Atlantic, CapitalG, IVP and Warburg Pincus to name a few. Before founding Crowdstrike, George spent close to 7 years at McAfee in roles such as Worldwide Chief Technology Officer and GM as well as EVP of Enterprise. Finally, before McAfee, George started Foundstone in 1999 leading them very successfully to their acquisition by McAfee in 2004.
In Today’s Episode with George Kurtz You Will Learn:
1.) How George came to found Crowdstrike having been Worldwide CTO @ McAfee? How did the founding of his prior companies impact how George thought about the early days of Crowdstrike? What does George believe are the pros and cons of serial entrepreneurship?
2.) Funding: With the benefit of hindsight, how does George reflect on his approach to fundraising? How did what George needed from VCs change over time? How does George approach investor selection? Through what framework does George advise founders as the right way to construct their cap table? Where do many go wrong on investor selection?
3.) Talent Acquisition: What has enabled George to hire some of the best talent in the world? What is the right way to construct the hiring process to recruit the best? What does George mean when he says, "you cannot forget the spouse factor"? Why is cash a moat and important when it comes to talent acquisition?
4.) Leadership: How has George's style of leadership changed over time? What stage of leadership did George find the most challenging? How does George find being a public markets CEO? What elements does he enjoy the most? What does he enjoy the least? Why does George believe the company has been so well received by public markets?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with George Kurtz
George’s Favourite Book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't
20VC: Chris Sacca on Coming Out of Retirement To Unf**k The Planet with Lowercarbon, How Chris Evaluates His Relationship To Money Today, Why We Have Bred a Generation of Ass**** Kids, Do VCs Provide Any Real Value and The True Unfiltered Opinion on Faceb
Chris Sacca is the Founder and Chairman @ Lowercase Capital, one of the best performing funds in the history of venture capital with a portfolio including Uber, Stripe, Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Docker and many more. Despite this incredible success, in 2017, Chris and his wife, Crystal announced they would be stepping back from day to day investing to focus on ongoing efforts to rescue our democracy, heal the planet, promote diversity within venture capital. Earlier this year, they announced Lowercarbon Capital, with $800M AUM, with the mission to back companies that make real money slashing CO2 emissions, and buying us time to unf**k the planet. Fun fact: As a result of his incredible investing success Chris has also been a Shark on Shark Tank and even starred in an episode of Billions.
In Today’s Episode with Chris Sacca You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris made his way into the world of investing having started life as a lawyer? What was his first investment? How did the first Twitter $25K angel check come about?
2.) How does Chris evaluate his own relationship to money and wealth? Why did Chris and Crystal interview some of the wealthiest people? What did they learn from those discussions? How does Chris view the role of luck? Why was it when Chris lacked optimism he lost the most money? How did being $4M in the hole from public markets impact his mindset?
3.) What does it mean for Chris to bring up healthy and happy children? Why does Chris believe today's parenting has bred a generation of asshole kids? In what way is great parenting aligned to great team management? How does Chris give feedback to his teams vs his children? What tone should be used? Should it always be "radical candor"? Should it be immediate?
4.) Does Chris believe that VCs really add any value? What does Chris believe is his secret sauce? Why does Chris believe that as a VC you have to be outspoken and loud about the value you provide? What have been some of the biggest lessons for Chris from sitting on boards and working with Bill Gurley? Why does Chris believe that most VCs are shitty managers?
5.) Why did Chris decide to come back from retirement and found Lowercarbon with Crystal? Why did he not decide to do it all with his own money? Why is now different for climate tech than prior generations of climate tech innovation? How big does Chris want to scale Lowercarbon? Will Chris make more money from climate investing than from tech?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Chris Sacca
Chris’ Favourite Book: Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived, How To Raise an Adult
20VC: Squarespace Founder, Anthony Casalena on Scaling Squarespace from Dorm Room To Public Company with over $700M in ARR, The Decision to Direct List over Traditional IPO or SPAC & What Changes When You Go Public?
Anthony Casalena is the Founder & CEO @ Squarespace, the company that allows you to create a website, sell anything and market your business. To date, Anthony has raised over $948M for the company from the likes of General Atlantic, Index Ventures, Tiger Global; culminating in their IPO in May 2021. Despite the incredible size and scale of Squarespace today, Anthony started the company from his dorm room in 2003 and bootstrapped the business for many years to today with over 1,100 employees around the world.
In Today’s Episode with Anthony Casalena You Will Learn:
1.) How Anthony came to start Squarespace from a dorm room and turn it into a public company with over 1,200 employees globally?
2.) Why did Anthony decide to bootstrap with Squarespace for over 6 years when the company was scaling fast and profitable? How was Anthony's mindset impacted by the efficiency of bootstrap scaling? How did Anthony's mindset change when Squarespace raised their first large round? How does Anthony advise founders today on raising venture vs bootstrapping?
3.) Why did Anthony decide to do the direct listing over the more traditional IPO or a SPAC? How does Anthony advise other founders contemplating the same exit choices? How does Anthony personally describe this chapter of the company? Does he enjoy being a public company CEO? What are the best elements? What are the worst?
4.) E-Commerce has been a massive driver for growth for Squarespace, how does Anthony feel about the future of e-commerce on Squarespace? Only 1% of Squarespace's $700M ARR comes from enterprise, does enterprise hold a meaningful position in the future of the company? What are the core challenges of moving into enterprise? How does the company need to change?
5.) With the growth of the company, how has Anthony changed his style of leadership? What are his biggest strengths? What are his biggest weaknesses? What are the most obvious breakpoints in the scaling of companies?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Anthony Casalena
Anthony’s Favourite Book: Thinking Fast and Slow
20VC: The Two Largest Changes in the Investing Market Today, Why The Scarce Resource in Venture is Access & Why Investors Are Acting Mostly Rational and Upside Scenario Planning Needs To Change with Anton Levy, Co-President @ General Atlantic
Anton Levy is Co-President, Managing Director and Global Head of General Atlantic’s Technology sector. Anton has led General Atlantic’s investments in the likes of Alibaba, CrowdStrike, Facebook, Slack and Snapchat and co-led investments in Adyen and Bytedance. As a result, Anton has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top investors each year from 2014 to 2021. Anton has also enjoyed board positions either as a member or observer in companies such as Uber, MercadoLibre, Klarna and Meituan to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Anton Levy You Will Learn:
1.) How Anton made his way into the world of growth investing? What have been some of Anton's biggest lessons from seeing the booms and busts of the macro-environment?
2.) The Landscape: What does Anton believe are the two largest changes/trends in the venture landscape today? What does Anton think is the right way to respond to the threat of Tiger Global? How should founders think about active vs passive cash? How does Anton reflect on his own price sensitivity? What have been some of his biggest lessons on pricing?
3.) Portfolio Construction: How have GA had to change their approach to investing over the last few years? Why have they decided actively to move earlier and write smaller checks? How does a $50M investment from an $8BN impact portfolio construction thinking? How does GA determine which of their winners to size up into and write a $500M check? What is the process for that?
4.) Deployment Cycles: How does Anton think about the compression of deployment cycles in venture? Are people acting rationally? When will the bubble burst? How do interest rates impact capital inflows into venture? Why does Anton believe we are entering a golden age of innovation? What elements concern him?
5.) Culture- Building: What have been Anton's biggest lessons when it comes to culture building internally? Where do many make mistakes here? What have been the most surprising elements of scaling GA to Anton? What mistakes did they make? How did they move to correct them?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Anton Levy
Anton’s Favourite Book: Bridge to Terabithia
Anton’s Most Recent Investment: Articulate
20VC: The Opendoor Memo: Keith Rabois on The Origins of Opendoor from a Conversation with Peter Thiel, Why Cash is Not a Competitive Moat for Startups Today and What People Misunderstand About Black Swan Events in Real Estate and How it Impacts Opendoor
Keith Rabois is a General Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with home runs in the likes of SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Anduril, Facebook, Airbnb, Nubank and many more. As for Keith, he led the first institutional investments in DoorDash, Affirm and has also led investments in Ramp, Trade Republic, Faire and Stripe. Prior to venture, Keith had the most stellar operating career, joining PayPal when their monthly burn-rate was $6 million; Keith joined LinkedIn, Slide and Square when they had no revenue. Fun fact, five companies Keith helped build are now publicly traded with market caps >$1 Billion. Three others have been acquired for greater than $1 Billion or are publicly traded IPOs. If that was not enough, Keith is also the Co-Founder and CEO @ OpenStore, acquiring small DTC businesses.
In Today’s Episode with Keith Rabois You Will Learn:
1.) How Keith first came up with the idea for Opendoor? How a conversation with Peter Thiel led to the founding of the first iteration of the company? Why did it take Keith close to a decade to pursue the idea fully, post having the idea in 2003?
2.) The Market: What made Keith so excited to pursue Opendoor from a top-down market analysis perspective? What does Keith look for in markets he likes to invest in? How did Keith expect the market to change and evolve? What did the market do differently to how Keith thought it would behave?
3.) The Business Model: With debt being the oxygen for Opendoor, how many homes did they need to acquire before they could prove they could price homes accurately? What were Keith's lessons from the first homes they bought? What did not go to plan? Why does Keith disagree, if macro hits real estate, Opendoor's model is challenged? Why does Keith believe it is stronger then?
4.) The Team: What does Keith look for in the founding teams he backs? How does Keith detect diamonds in the rough? How can teams systematically de-risk an opportunity with their experience? With the benefit of hindsight, what would Keith have done differently with the team?
5.) The Funding: Was fundraising for Opendoor always easy? How did the seed round go down? How does Keith feel today about pre-emptive rounds where little company development has taken place? Why did Opendoor decide to SPAC? Why not a direct list? Was this the right choice? What makes for the best SPAC partner?
20VC: The Rise of Quick Commerce and Why CPGs ARe Misaligned Being Powered By Ad Spend, The 5 Core Components Consumers Care About When Ordering Today & Why Amazon and Alibaba Will Not Be The Big Players in 10 Years with Ralf Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ JOKR
Ralf Wenzel is the Founder & CEO @ JOKR, a global platform for instant retail delivery at a hyper-local scale. To date, Ralf has raised over $170M for the company from the likes of GGV Capital, Balderton, Softbank and Kaszek, just to name a few. Prior to JOKR, Ralf spent close to 7 years as the Founder & CEO @ foodpanda as well as enjoying roles as Chief Strategy Officer @ Delivery Hero, Interim Chief Product and Experience Officer @ WeWork and even moving to the other side of the table as a Managing Partner with Softbank.
In Today’s Episode with Ralf Wenzel You Will Learn:
1.) How Ralf made his way into the world of startups and came to found foodpanda? What were his biggest takeaways from foodpanda that have impacted how he thinks about scaling JOKR today?
2.) Fulfillment Centres: What are the selection criteria when deciding what is the right location for a fulfillment center? How does real estate cost differ when comparing LATAM to the US? How does Ralf think about the balance between consumer choice and SKU minimization? In what way does Ralf believe they have a moat due to their catalog management system?
3.) The Driver: Why is JOKR different to every other provider in the way they employ their riders? Does it not severely impact their margins by providing equal benefits across their entire rider workforce? How many drops per hour is a good level of driver efficiency? What have been Ralf's biggest lessons when it comes to driver retention?
4.) The Consumer: How did JOKR acquire their first consumers on the demand side? What marketing strategies worked? What did not work? Is Ralf concerned by the immense amount of money invested in the space driving customer acquisition prices way higher? How has Ralf seen CACs change over time in mature markets?
5.) Expansion Opportunities: How does Ralf feel about incorporating own brand products, produced by JOKR over time? How does this change the margin profile of the business? How does Ralf feel about paid search as a core part of their business? Will CPGs be able to pay to be ranked higher in JOKR?
Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit
Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite where he leads the PM, product design, research, and growth marketing teams. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey spent close to 3 years at Pinterest where he led the growth product team. At Pinterest, Casey turned SEO into a scalable acquisition strategy, increasing conversion to signups 5x. Before Pinterest, Casey started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub's demand-side acquisition and retention strategies. Casey played an instrumental role in scaling Grubhub from 3 cities to 1,000+ and from a $1 million series A to an IPO and $7.3 billion exit. If that was not enough, Casey has also advised the likes of Canva, Hipcamp, Reddit, Faire and Career Karma to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Casey Winters You Will Learn:
1.) How Casey made his way into the world of startups and came to lead some of the most powerful growth orgs in the world from Pinterest to Grubhub to Eventbrite?
2.) How does Casey define "growth" and "Head of Growth"? When is the right time to start thinking about implementing a growth team? When should one hire a growth leader? How should founders structure the process of hiring a Head of Growth? What do the stages look like? What signals suggest A* talent? What questions does Casey always ask? What tests does Casey do?
3.) What does the optimal onboarding process look like for growth teams? What tasks should a growth team perform in their first few months? What are clear signs you have an amazing candidate in place? What are some obvious red flags? How do the best growth teams approach post-mortems? How are they structured? Who attends them? How often?
4.) What is the ideal relationship between the Head of Growth and the CEO? How often do they meet? What do the best CEOs expect from their growth teams? How does Casey approach the relationship between growth teams and product teams? How does one know when to have an independent growth team vs within the product or marketing team?
5.) Casey AMA: What has been a decision that Casey made without data to back it up? How did it go? What were Casey's lessons? How does Casey prevent past experiments from impacting his future tactics? How does Casey's management style differ when managing larger vs smaller growth teams? How has angel investing impacted his approach to scaling growth teams?
20VC: Investing Lessons From Rounds In Peloton and Square, Why Great Investing is Stock-Picking and Sector Penetration & The Next Decade in Venture, Is Tiger's The Right Model with Hans Tung, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at GGV Capital, one of the leading venture firms of the last 2 decades with a portfolio including Alibaba, Xiaomi, Peloton, Airbnb, Slack, and many more. As for Hans, he has been named to the Forbes Midas list nine consecutive years from 2013-2021, most recently ranking #3. His portfolio includes 18 unicorns including Affirm, Airbnb, Coinbase, Divvy Homes, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Wish and Xiaomi. In 2005, he was among the first Silicon Valley VCs to move to China full time, spending eight years investing in the fastest-changing tech landscape in the world before returning to Silicon Valley in 2013 to join GGV Capital.
In Today’s Episode with Hans Tung You Will Learn:
1.) How Hans made his way into the world of venture from founding his first two companies? How did seeing the booms and busts of the macro-financial markets impact both his investing mindset and the companies he likes to back?
2.) The Landscape: How does Hans analyze the current venture landscape today? How does one compete in a world of Tiger and crossover funds writing term sheets post first meeting? How does Hans think about his own price sensitivity today? How does he determine when to pay up vs when to say no? What have been some of his biggest lessons on price?
3.) Working with the likes of Peloton, Square, Alibaba, what have been some of Hans biggest lessons on market size? What do most investors get wrong when it comes to market sizing? How does Hans think about an attractive enough exit multiple for a growth stage check? What did Peloton teach Hans about insertion points when investing?
4.) How does Hans think about when is the right time to sell? What have been some of his biggest lessons on taking cash off the table? Despite the success, how does Hans ensure he has the mental plasticity to approach every new deal with a fresh perspective? What does he do to ensure he does not have an unconscious bias from his past successes?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Hans Tung
Hans’ Favourite Book: Outliers: The Story of Success
Hans’ Most Recent Investment: JOKR
20VC: Getir Founder, Nazim Salur on The Future of Last Mile Convenience, Who Will Win? Lessons on Driver Acquisition and Efficiency, Zone Maturity and Time To Profitability and Scaling to 300 Cities in the US in 2022
Nazim Salur is the Founder & CEO of Getir, one of the leading rapid delivery service providers that distribute over 1,500 everyday items within minutes. With an established status in Turkey, where the company trends towards a super-app, and a London launch behind it, Getir has further European and US expansion plans on the horizon. To fuel this expansion, Getir has raised over $1BN from Sequoia and Mike Moritz, Silver Lake, Mubadala, and Tiger Global to name a few. Prior to founding Getir, Nazim launched his first tech startup in 2012, BiTaksi, which brought people taxis in three minutes.
In Today’s Episode with Nazim Salur You Will Learn:
1.) How Nazim made his way into the world of startups with his founding of BiTaksi and how that led to his realization of the need for Getir?
2.) Why does Nazim believe that owning the entire vertical stack is a superior model? What are the selection criteria for the micro-fulfillment sites? What makes one more attractive than another? How does Getir think about the balance between SKU minimization and consumer demand? How does Getir think about building defensibility through their warehouse management system?
3.) How did Getir acquire their first drivers? What worked? What did not work? How does their driver acquisition strategy change depending on location? What is the core measurement that Getir uses to measure driver efficiency? What is the secret to driver retention? How has Nazim seen driver acquisition costs change over time in mature markets?
4.) How did Getir acquire their first customers? What is the most important element for consumers; speed or choice? How does Getir think about allocating marketing spend efficiently today? How has Nazim seen CACs change over time with the maturation of markets? With the immense funding for the space, is Nazim concerned about this?
5.) What are the decision-making criteria for what makes an attractive region to expand into? How much capital does it take to launch a new region? What is the time to profitability on each zone? How has this changed over time? How does Nazim think about expansion into the US? What excites him most about the expansion? What elements will be most challenging?
20VC: Sequoia's Doug Leone on What Has Been Instrumental To Scaling Sequoia Over Generations, How Sequoia Think About International Expansion and What They Learned From China and India & Why When You Lose Pre-Seed You Become Private Equity
Doug Leone is the Global Managing Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s most renowned and successful venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Google, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Stripe, Zoom and many more. As for Doug, he joined Sequoia over 33 years ago and has led investments in Nubank, Meraki, ServiceNow and TradeRepublic to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Doug Leone You Will Learn:
1.) How a 5PM Monday meeting with Don Valentine led to Doug joining Sequoia over 33 years ago? What did Don ask Doug in the meeting? What does Doug believe led Don to offer him his first role at Sequoia?
2.) The Leader: How did Doug change when he made the transition from a "COO" role to more of a "CEO" role with Sequoia? Doug has previously said, "Sequoia is a team, not a family". What does he mean by this? How do Doug and Sequoia do to give the team an unwavering sense of duty to the Sequoia brand? What does Doug believe Sequoia have done so well to allow them to move seamlessly from generation to generation?
3.) The Investor: Doug's first 3 investments all went on to successful IPOs, how did this impact his mindset at the time? What does Doug mean when he discusses "the abyss" he went through post this time? How does Doug advise others going through the abyss? What are the signs certain people will make it through vs not?
4.) The Landscape Today: How does Doug think about and react to newer entrants like Tiger and Softbank? How does Doug think about and assess his own price sensitivity today? How does Doug determine when to be disciplined vs when to pay up? Through what lens does Doug assess the compression of deployment cycles in venture today? Should we "play the game on the field"?
5.) The Expansion: In 2005, Sequoia expanded to China. Why was this the right time? What was the decision-making process for the Sequoia China team? Why does Doug believe, "when you lose pre-seed, you become private equity"? How does Doug react to the notion that success in venture is cyclical and compounds?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Doug Leone
Doug’s Favourite Book: The Fountainhead: Ayn Rand, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To
Sameer Gandhi is a Partner @ Accel, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Dropbox, Atlassian, Hopin, Spotify and more. As for Sameer, he led investments in Crowdstrike, Dropbox, Flipkart, Spotify and more. Prior to Accel, Sameer spent close to 10 years as a Partner @ Sequoia.
In Today’s Episode with Sameer Gandhi You Will Learn:
1.) How Sameer first came to meet George, Crowdstrike Founder and CEO? How did a 30-minute meeting turn into a 2-hour discussion leading to Accel's investment?
2.)The Market: How did Sameer analyze and break down the market at the time of the investment? What hypothesis did he have on market evolution going in? What elements went as thought? In what way did the market evolve in a way Sameer did not expect? How does Sameer think through market timing today? Through what approach does Sameer assess market sizing today?
3.) Financing: How did Sameer build the confidence to lead multiple rounds of financing, one after the other? How did Sameer build the trust and strength of relationship with George to win each round? Why did Sameer advise George to "go shop his term sheet"? What was the rationale? How does Sameer advise founders on taking pre-emptive rounds today?
4.) Execution: What specifically allowed Crowdstrike to move so fast in the early days? Does Sameer believe that speed of execution is the strongest moat a company can have? How does Sameer advise companies today on services revenue? In what shape did this look with Crowdstrike in the early days? What is a healthy proportion of services to product revenue?
5.) The Team: How did George evolve and develop as a leader in the decade Sameer worked with him? What were some of the core inflection points that caused those changes? Who are some of the unsung heroes behind the scenes who moved the needle for Crowdstrike? What is Sameer's favorite memory from working with the company?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Sameer Gandi
Go to thetwentyminutevc.com to download the original Crowdstrike Investment Memo.
20VC: Marcelo Claure, CEO of Softbank Group International on Lessons From Investing $1BN Per Week with Masa Son, How Softbank Could Have Up To 8 Companies Go Public in LATAM Alone Next Year & How Softbank Analyse Both Deal Pricing and Competition Today
Marcelo Claure serves as CEO of SoftBank Group International and COO of SoftBank Group Corp., the world’s largest tech investor. At Softbank, Marcelo oversees the company’s strategic direction and its portfolio of operating companies, including WeWork, SB Energy, Fortress, Boston Dynamics, as well as SoftBank’s stake in T-Mobile U.S. He also spearheads the SoftBank Latin America Fund, a $5 billion fund dedicated to investing in technology growth opportunities throughout the region. If that was not enough, Marcelo serves as Exec Chairman @ WeWork, is on the board of Arm, is the president of Club Bolívar, Bolivia's most popular and successful soccer team; co-owner and Chairman of Inter Miami CF and most recently co-owner of Girona FC.
In Today’s Episode with Marcelo Claure You Will Learn:
1.) How Marcelo made his way into the world of startups and came to found his first company, Brightstar? How did Brightstar lead to Marcelo meeting Masa and moving to Tokyo to invest $1BN per week with him?
2.) From spending a year with Masa in Tokyo, what did Marcelo learn about Masa that he did not know before? How did spending this time with Masa impact Marcelo's operating mindset and his investing mindset? What were the most memorable founder meetings that Marcelo and Masa had in that year? Why did those ones stand out?
3.) When starting Softbank's LATAM Fund, what hypothesis did Marcelo have going into investing in LATAM? Which were confirmed? On the flip side, which proved to be wrong? How does Marcelo respond to people that say "LATAM produces copycat companies"? Why does Marcelo bet that Softbank will have 8 portfolio companies in LATAM go public next year?
4.) How does Marcelo think about the importance of price and price discipline today? What is their decision-making framework when determining whether to pay up or not for a deal? What have been some of Marcelo's biggest misses? How did they impact his decision-making process moving forward? How does Softbank approach conflicts when investing today?
5.) How does Marcelo analyze the increasing competition in the LATAM ecosystem? How has his style changed as a result? Through what lens does Marcelo assess the role that Tiger has played over the last 18 months? Why does Marcelo think that other firms have trash-talked Softbank before? How does Marcelo see the venture landscape as fundamentally changed?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Marcelo Claure
Marcelo’s Favourite Book: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic
Marcelo’s Most Recent Investment: Uala
20VC: Has Price Discipline Disappeared? Is it Possible to Build Ownership Over Time? Why Venture Is Less Collaborative Now Than Ever? How fast Do Breakout Companies Become Obvious? How To Construct an Optimised and Repeatable Investment Decision-Making Pr
Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors, one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms investing today with a portfolio including the likes of Klarna, Kavak, Quinto Andar, Credit Karma and more. As for Frank, prior to QED, Frank was one of the earliest analysts hired into Capital One and spent almost 13 years there helping build many of the company’s business units and operational areas. Post Capital One, Frank went on to found a student lending company before joining up again with Nigel Morris to co-found QED.
In Today’s Episode with Frank Rotman You Will Learn:
1.) How Frank made his way into the world of venture having spent 13 years scaling Capital One? What was the founding moment for Nigel and Frank with QED? How does Nigel compare to poker to venture capital? Where are they similar? Where are they different?
2.) Does Frank feel that price discipline has disappeared in the venture market today? What have been some of Frank's biggest lessons on price? Is Frank concerned by the compression in deployment timelines for funds? How does Frank feel on the rise of pre-emptive rounds? In what way does Frank advise his founders when they are offered pre-emptive rounds?
3.) How important does Frank believe sizing your initial position is, from an ownership perspective? Is it possible to build ownership in your winners? What have been some lessons for Frank with regards to the speed of which breakout companies are clear? How does Frank assess and analyse bridge rounds and whether to participate or not?
4.) Why does Frank believe that the VC world is less collaborative than ever today? What has caused this? What can VCs do to change this? How do we solve the structural problem of VCs needing ownership for their business and founders not wanting excessive dilution? What does Frank believe is the most dangerous trend in the VC market today?
5.) How does Frank think about what he can do to improve his investment decision-making process? What repeatable process has Frank landed on that works? Where do many make mistakes here? How does Frank view the relationship between process and outcome?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Frank Rotman
Frank’s Favourite Book: Tom Robbins
Frank’s Most Recent Investment: Hello Alice
20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C
Emilie Choi is the President and Chief Operating Officer @ Coinbase, the easiest place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Prior to their IPO earlier this year, Coinbase raised funding from some of the best in the business including USV, a16z, Initialized and Ribbit to name a few. As for Emilie, before Coinbase she was Head of Corporate Development for @ LinkedIn and before Linkedin served in various positions at Warner Bros., including as Manager of Corporate Business Development and Strategy. If that was not enough, Emilie currently serves on the board of Naspers and ZipRecruiter.
In Today’s Episode with Emilie Choi You Will Learn:
1.) How Emilie made her way into the world of startups, came to lead Corp Dev @ Linkedin and how that led to her joining forces with Brian @ Coinbase as COO & President? What lessons did Emilie learn from Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner that she has taken with her to Coinbase?
2.) Corp-Dev Guide: Why are so many startups trying to hire Head of Corp Devs today? What are the signals that suggest now is the right time? How would Emilie structure the process of hiring a Head of Corp Dev? What questions should be asked? How can you test their skills? What mistakes do CEOs often make when hiring Head of Corp Devs?
3.) COO Guide: What does the role of COO really mean to Emilie? How does Emilie advise founders on whether they do actually need a COO? How would Emilie structure the process of hiring a COO? What are some common red flags that concern Emilie when hiring COO's? What is the right relationship between CEO and COO?
4.) Resource Allocation: How does Coinbase think about internal resource allocation between core product and their venture products? What was the thinking behind Coinbase Ventures? Why do they have no full-time staff? What is the core objective of the fund? Why does Emilie think it will be one of the best performing funds in venture?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Emilie Choi
Emilie’s Favourite Book: The Secret History
20VC LATAM Part 2: a16z's Angela Strange on When To Expand Beyond Your Core Market, Why Serving the Unbanked is Such Good Business & Whether the Startup Will Acquire the Distribution before The Incumbent Acquires the Innovation?
Angela Strange is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Github, Slack, Airbnb, Asana and more. As for Angela, she largely focuses on investments in financial services and a16z has made significant investments in LATAM in the likes of Loft, Jeeves, Pomelo and Addi to name a few. Prior to a16z, Angela was a product manager at Google where she launched and grew Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS into two of Google’s most successful mobile products.
In Today’s Episode with Angela Strange You Will Learn:
1.) How Angela made her way into the world of venture from a career of running marathons and product management at Google?
2.) Does Angela believe we are going to see regional winners in LATAM with players owning their segment for Argentina, Mexico, Brazil etc? Why does Angela believe there is a huge business to be had in catering to the unbanked? How does Angela analyze whether startups can acquire distribution before incumbents acquire innovation?
3.) How does Angela respond to the suggestion that LATAM merely produces copycat companies of Western alternatives? How does Angela respond to claims that there is a lack of viable exit opportunities with insufficient local public markets and few international acquirers in the region? Does Angela believe there is a sufficient depth of engineering talent in the region?
4.) What has been Angela's biggest miss? How did it change her investment process? How does Angela analyze TAM? Where does Angela think many make mistakes in their underwriting of market size? How has Angela learned to think through societal and behavioral changes that impact market timing (cash-based economies, COVID etc?)
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Angela Strange
Angela’s Favourite Book: More More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places
Angela’s Most Recent Investment: Jeeves
20VC LATAM: LATAM's Largest Fund, Kaszek Ventures on Scaling from $100M to $1BN, Why Capital is not a Source of Moat & Why LATAM is More Than Copycat Companies with Nicolas Szekasy, Co-Founder @ Kaszek Ventures
Nicolas Szekasy is a co-founder and Managing Partner of Kaszek Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in Latin America with a portfolio including the likes of Nubank, Notco, Creditas, Bitso and more. Before Kaszek, Nicolás was CFO for 10 years at MercadoLibre (Nasdaq: MELI), Latin America’s largest online commerce and payments platform, where he led its $333 million IPO in 2007. Before MercadoLibre, Nico spent 7 years as CFO @ PepsiCo. If that was not enough, Nico is also on the board of Endeavour, empowering a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs.
In Today’s Episode with Nicolas Szekasy You Will Learn:
1.) How Nico made his way into the world of startups with MercadoLibre? What were the biggest takeaways from his 10 years with MELI? How did his time with MELI and seeing the boom and bust impact his investing mindset?
2.) What have been the most significant changes in the LATAM ecosystem over the last 20 years? What has improved? What has become more challenging? Is Nico concerned by the sheer amount of capital now flowing into the LATAM ecosystem at such speed?
3.) How does Nico respond to the statement that LATAM just produces "copycats" of successful companies from other geographies? How does Nico respond to the common suggestion of the challenges in scaling engineering teams in LATAM? How does Nico respond to the assumption that exit opportunities and IPOs are less available to LATAM companies?
4.) How was the experience of raising the first Kaszek fund? What has been the biggest challenging in the scaling from a $100M fund to a $1BN fund? How has Nico seen his own investing style change over the last decade? What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he started Kaszek?
5.) How does Nico reflect on his own style of board membership? What does Nico believe makes the best board members? What takeaways did he have from his time @ MELI on what makes the truly special board member?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Nicolas Szekasy
Nico’s Favourite Book: Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
Nico’s Most Recent Investment: Notco
20VC: The Lyft Memo: Floodgate's Ann Miura Ko on Why Successful Seed Investing Is Not Investing In a Company But The Development of a Set of Secrets, Whether Capital Is a Defensible Moat Today &How Startups Should Approach Competition
Ann Miura Ko is the Co-Founding Partner @ Floodgate, one of the leading early-stage firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Okta, Outreach and more. As for Ann, not only did she lead the round for Lyft but in the last 12 months has led rounds for 2 of the hottest companies in the valley; Popparazzi and Popshop Live. Due to her immense investing success, Ann is a multiple Forbes Midas Lister and is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford, a co-director of the Mayfield Fellows Program at Stanford, and a member of the Board of Trustees for Yale University.
In Today’s Episode with Ann Miura Ko You Will Learn:
1.) How Ann made her way from a PhD in Quantitative Modelling at Stanford to co-founding one of the leading early-stage firms in the valley?
2.) What does Ann believe is the secret to successful seed investing? What insight development did Ann believe Lyft had? How had they approached customer development in such a unique way? What are the leading signals to Ann today that founders really understand the customer development process? What questions does she ask to discover this?
3.) Why does Ann not engage in the compression of fundraising timelines today? How does she build relationships of trust and honesty with founders so early? Does Ann worry that founders have such large capital injections too early today? Why should employees examine capital efficiency, not capital raised? How does Ann advise founders on pre-emptive rounds?
4.) How did Ann and the Lyft team approach prioritization in the early days? In what ways did Lyft decide to "play their own game" when it came to the competition? How did Uber and its growth impact the financing strategy for Lyft? In what deliberate ways did John and Logan set the culture for Lyft? What have been Ann's biggest lessons from them on culture building?
5.) Does Ann believe that capital in itself is a competitive moat today? What does Ann believe needs to be proven before capital can be used as a weapon to win? In the case of Lyft, what signals or measurements did Ann define as guiding metrics for success? How did they change over time? How can founders determine their own in their businesses?
20VC: Mike Lazerow on Why How You Operate As a VC Is More Important Than Who You Are and What You Have Done, Why Boards Are More Important for the Entrepreneur than Investor & How The Best Entrepreneurs Prep Their Boards & Extract Value From Them
Mike Lazerow is a serial entrepreneur and now Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Velvet Sea Ventures alongside his wife, Kass. Prior investments from the Velvet Sea Partners include Twitter, Square, SpaceX, Snap Inc., Facebook, Pinterest, Domo, and more. Prior to becoming an investor, Mike founded Buddy Media in 2007, selling the company to Salesforce just 5 years later for $745M. Before Buddy Media, Mike co-founded Golf.com, a multi-million dollar profitable golf media property that Mike and Kass sold to Time Inc in 2006.
In Today’s Episode with Mike Lazerow You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his way into the world of startups way back in 1993, how that led to Golf.com and Buddy Media? Why did he decide he wanted to be a VC? How did seeing the dotcom era fundamentally impact Mike's approach to business and investing?
2.) Why does Mike believe how you operate as an investor is more important than who you are and what you have done? How does Mike aim to invest and operate with this in mind? What are 3 core elements that Mike looks for in every deal? How does Mike approach his own investment decision-making process? How has it changed over time? How does he use gut to make decisions?
3.) What does Mike believe are his biggest insecurities as an investor? How does Mike think about the challenge of moving from a collaborative angel to a competitive VC? How does Mike think about the importance of ownership today? What has Mike learned about how the best VCs engage with round construction?
4.) How does Mike analyse his own style of board membership today? Why does Mike believe that boards are more helpful for the entrepreneur than for the investor? As an entrepreneur, how did Mike prepare for his boards? How does Mike advise founders to get the most out of their boards? Where do many make mistakes? How can one optimize the board member/founder relationship?
5.) Why does Mike believe that "having sex with your partner is a feature, not a bug"? How do Kass and Mike work together in such a complementary fashion? How do they ensure that personal matters never intrude on work decisions? How does Mike think about his relationship to money today? How does Mike want to imbue the same hard work and ethics to his children?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Mike Lazerow
Mike’s Favourite Book: Man's Search for Meaning
Mike’s Most Recent Investment: LeoLabs
20VC: A Masterclass in Leadership and Scaling Companies: The Decisions only the CEO Can Make, The Secret To Talent Acquisition and Retention and How To Find The Unscalable Things that are Fundamental To Scale with Christa Quarles, CEO @ Corel Corporation
Christa Quarles is the CEO @ Corel Corporation, building software solutions that simplify the task journey for knowledge workers. Prior to Corel, Christa spent close to 4 years as CEO @ Opendoor, driving a chapter of transformational change for the company. Before Opendoor, Christa was Chief Business Officer @ NextDoor, and finally pre-NextDoor, Christa spent 4 years at The Walt Disney Company where she led Disney Interactive to profitability as Senior Vice President, Interactive Games. If that was not enough, Christa is also on the board of Affirm and Kimberly Clark.
In Today’s Episode with Christa Quarles You Will Learn:
1.) How Christa made her way into the world of startups having spent close to 10 years in investment banking? What were the biggest takeaways from her time at Walt Disney? How did her 3 years as CEO @ Opentable impact how she approaches leadership today?
2.) Company Breakpoints: What are the different breakpoints in the scaling of companies? When did this start to happen at Opendoor? How does decision-making need to change with scale? How can leaders ensure teams feel safe to be the most ambitious they can be? In what ways can leaders create environments of safety for them to be their best selves?
3.) The Role of the CEO: What decisions can only the CEO make? How can leaders determine when a C-Suite hire is a stretch too far? How has Christa's board membership on other boards changed how she runs her board today? Given a board's limited information, how can leaders extract the most out of them?
4.) "Operating is a Full Contact Sport": When has Christa found operating and leading the hardest? When faced with hard times, how does she push through them? How does Christa advise leaders on the challenges of their own scaling process? Where do many make mistakes in their own scaling? What is a "stuck state" and why is it the worst state to be in?
5.) Team Building and Trust: How does Christa approach trust today? Does she start from a position of being fully trusting or not trusting and there to be gained? What is Christa's favourite interview question to ask? In what way does Christa believe truly special candidates represent their passions in interviews?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Christa Quarles
Christa’s Favourite Book: Caste, The International Bestseller
20VC: Ribbit Capital's Nick Shalek on How To Think Through Ownership and Price Sensitivity, When More Money and Pre-Emptive Rounds are Good vs Bad & Investing Lessons from Yale's David Swensen
Nick Shalek is a General Partner @ Ribbit Capital, specializing in fintech they are one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Robinhood, Coinbase, Revolut, Nubank and more. As for Nick, he started his career as a Senior Analyst @ Yale Investments Office before moving to the world of operations as Director of Business Operations @ Verne Global, a provider of 100% carbon neutral data centers.
In Today’s Episode with Nick Shalek You Will Learn:
1.) How Nick made his way from Senior Analyst at Yale's Investment Office to be one of the leading fintech investors in the world with Ribbit? What were Nick's biggest lessons from his time working with David Swenson @ Yale? How would Nick summarise Yale's investment algorithm?
2.) Entering Venture and Advice: Why does Nick tell many friends entering venture, to not join a new fund? What does Nick believe is takes to build an enduring firm in venture? What were the core reasons and inflection points in the success of Ribbit? What have been some of the biggest challenges in the professionalisation of Ribbit over the years?
3.) Pricing and Ownership: Is Nick concerned by the levels of pricing we are seeing in fintech today? How does Nick analyze his own relationship to price? How does Nick view the importance of ownership? Is it possible to build ownership across rounds? How does Nick advise founders now receiving very fast offers to pre-empt their rounds?
4.) Investment Decision-Making: How does Ribbit structure its investment decision-making process for initial investments? In what way does this process change for re-investments? Why does Nick believe in the benefits of not having attribution within venture partnerships?
5.) AMA: What has been Nick's biggest miss? How did it change his investment decision-making process as a result? What does Nick know now that he wishes he had known when he started in venture? What have been Nick's biggest lessons from his working with Micky?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Nick Shalek
Nick’s Favourite Book: A Piece of the Action: When the Middle Class Joined the Money Class
Nick’s Most Recent Investment: Kavak
20VC: Jeff Immelt on Leadership Lessons from 16 Years as CEO @ GE, Incumbent Innovation; Why Some Have Failed and Other Succeeded, When Boards Have A Positive vs Negative Impact on a Company & The One Fear Startup Founders Are Allowed To Have
Jeff Immelt is a Venture Partner @ NEA serving on both the technology and healthcare investing teams. Prior to entering the world of venture, Jeff served as chairman and CEO of GE for 16 years where he revamped the company’s strategy, re-established market leadership and quadrupled emerging market revenue. As a result, Jeff has been named one of the “World’s Best CEOs” three times by Barron’s. In addition, Jeff is on the board of Sila Nanotechnologies and Twilio.
In Today’s Episode with Jeff Immelt You Will Learn:
1.) How did it feel when Jeff was told he was going to be CEO at GE? How did that come about? Did he feel the weight of responsibility when it was announced?
2.) When it comes to incumbents embracing innovation, what strategies work? Why do they work? What lessons does Jeff take from his time at GE on what worked? What strategies do not work? What are the biggest mistakes large incumbents make when adopting new products or strategies? What advice does Jeff continuously tell large company CEOs who ask this question?
3.) When does Jeff believe boards can be fundamentally impactful? In what circumstances do boards actually cause harm? What are the signs of the truly great board members? What are the causes of why board members can be misaligned with their founders? How should founders approach whether to listen or not to their board?
4.) How does Jeff think about trust in teams? Does he start fully trusting and it is their to be lost or start not trusting and it is their to be gained? What people do you want around you in a crisis? What are the signals of these people? What does Jeff mean when he speaks of "crisis accelerants and crisis absorbers"?
5.) How does David think about fear in leadership? What is the one thing that leaders are allowed to be afraid of? How do the best founders approach their relationship to paranoia? How do the best communicate their fears to their team?
20VC: a16z's David George on Leading a16z's Growth Fund Today, The Biggest Misconceptions of Growth Investing, How a16z Think Through Portfolio Construction, Investment Decision-Making and Scenario Planning & How The Entrance of New Players Has Changed Th
David George is a General Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz where he leads their growth investing practice. Since joining in 2019 David has invested in the likes of Clubhouse, Coinbase, Databricks, Figma, Instacart, Robinhood and TripActions just to name a few. David also sits on the board of Current, Greenlight, and Workrise. Prior to a16z, David spent 7 years growth investing at General Atlantic where he invested in the likes of Airbnb, Crowdstrike, Opendoor, Slack and Uber.
In Today’s Episode with David George You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of growth investing with General Atlantic and how that led to his leading the newest iteration of a16z growth funds? What were David's biggest takeaways from his time with General Atlantic? How did it impact his investing?
2.) Misconceptions of Growth Investing: Why does David believe that great business models are table stakes at growth today? What gives the best the edge? Why does David believe that people over-rotate on TAM? Why is it misleading in many ways? What is the right way to assess TAM at growth today? What does David look for when digging into unit economics? When is the right time to focus on unit economics?
3.) Portfolio Construction and Scenario Planning: How does David think about portfolio construction with the new a16z growth fund? What is the right level of diversification? How does David think about loss ratio today? How does David approach outcome scenario planning? What is an attractive level of upside for David to engage at growth? How has that expectation changed over time?
4.) Valuations and Crossover Funds: How does David assess the valuation landscape today? How does David determine whether he will pay up or sit out on an investment? How has the rise of crossover funds, PE funds and hedge funds entering growth impacted the valuations being paid and the investment process itself? What does David make of these new entrants? What challenges do they bring?
5.) Investment Decision-Making: How do a16z approach decision-making at growth? Who is on the core IC? Why does David strongly believe in the single trigger model in venture when it comes to decision-making? What are the biggest reasons for politics in venture firms today? What can be done to mitigate them?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with David George
David’s Favourite Book: Increasing Returns To Scale
David’s Most Recent Investment: Loom
20VC's Therapist Thursday: We Are Not All Crushing It All The Time So Let's Stop Pretending, Working Through Challenges of Self-Worth and Self-Doubt & How To Find Joy in the Striving with Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight
Nick Mehta is the CEO @ Gainsight, the leader in all things customer success helping you put your customer at the heart of your business. Last year, as a result of their incredible success, Gainsight was acquired by Vista for a reported $1.1Bn but prior to that had raised over $156M from Lightspeed, Battery, Bessemer, Insight and Bain to name a few. As for Nick, he has been named one of the Top SaaS CEOs by the Software report three years in a row and holds one of the highest Glassdoor approval ratings for CEOs. Prior to Gainsight, Nick was the CEO at LiveOffice, which grew substantially and eventually sold to Symantec.
In Today’s Episode with Nick Mehta You Will Learn:
1.) When did mental health really become a prominent thought for Nick? When was the first time Nick feels he really showed true vulnerability in leadership?
2.) Self-Worth: Does Nick feel like he is enough? What does he do when he questions himself severely? How does he talk to his wife about these challenging thoughts? Where does Nick believe this comes from? What are the dangers of people-pleasing? How does Nick try and counter people-pleasing in his role as a leader?
3.) Identity: How does Nick think about his own identity when it is so attached to Gainsight? In what ways does he try to detach? What has worked? What has not worked? How have children helped Nick in this way?
4.) Striving: Why does Nick believe that hunger and striving are fundamentally a good thing? How does Nick try and factor gratitude and appreciation into the work and success he experiences? How does Nick encourage this same striving in his children?
5.) Relationship to Money: How would Nick evaluate his relationship to money? How has it changed over time? How does Nick try to imbue the same values he had growing up in his children? Does Nick believe it is possible to "change" your children and have that impact?
20VC: Jet.com's Marc Lore on How To Assess Human Potential and "The Resume Test", Why Chief People Officer Should be One of Your First Hires and Why We Need a New Type of Venture Capital
Marc Lore is a serial entrepreneur turned investor who’s started and sold four companies. Most recently Marc was the President and CEO of Walmart eCommerce US following the sale of his company, Jet.com, to Walmart for $3.3 billion in 2016. Prior to that, Marc founded Diapers.com/Quidsi which sold to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million. As an investor, Marc announced his new venture firm, Vision Capital People, with his co-founder, Alex Rodrigues, earlier this year with $50M of Alex and Marc's own money. Fun fact, in 1996 Marc qualified to be in the US national bobsled team.
In Today’s Episode with Marc Lore You Will Learn:
1.) How Marc made his way into the startup world, how he came to found Jet.com and what led to his most recent transition to the world of investing?
2.) How does Marc assess human potential? What does he mean when he says "the resume test"? What are the clearest signals of outperformers? What are signs of lack of performance? Why does Marc not believe in referencing? Does Mark start from a position of trust for it to be lost or with none and for it all to be gained?
3.) How does Marc evaluate his relationship to risk and fear? How has it changed over time? What did Marc's wife say when he left his safe job and put all their savings into his new business? What does Marc mean when he discusses finding "Sixth Gear"? How does Marc balance that intensity and ambition with romance and family life?
4.) Why does Marc believe Chief People Officer should be one of your first hires? What are the commonalities of the best Chief People Officers? What does the optimal relationship between CEO and CPO look like? How does Marc test for his core characteristics in interviews? What questions does he ask every candidate? What are the most revealing?
5.) How does Marc think about portfolio construction with the new fund today? Does Marc believe it is possible to take 40%+ of companies without alienating future investors? Is Marc concerned about over-capitalising companies too early? How does Marc think about reserves strategy and concentrating capital into the best companies?
20VC: CapitalG's Laela Sturdy on The Current State of Growth with Crossover, PE and Hedge Funds All Entering, How To Think Through Upside and Downside Scenario Planning at Growth & The Biggest Challenges Startups Face Post Product-Market-Fit but Pre-Scale
Laela Sturdy is a General Partner @ CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund with investments in the likes of Stripe, UiPath, Looker, Robinhood and Lyft to name a few. As for Laela, she joined CapitalG shortly after inception in 2013 and has led investments in Stripe, Duolingo, Gusto, UiPath and Unqork, to name a few. Prior to CapitalG, Laela was at Google as Managing Director of Emerging Businesses and held leadership roles within YouTube and search.
In Today’s Episode with Laela Sturdy You Will Learn:
1.) How Laela made her way into the world of venture and came to be a General Partner at Alphabet's independent growth fund, CapitalG?
2.) The Market: With the rise of crossover funds, hedge funds, private equity, all entering growth stage venture, how does Laela analyse the current state of the market? How has the increase in capital supply impacted pricing at growth? How do CapitalG compete in a world where competitors pay 2x the valuation and have different outcome expectations?
3.) Portfolio Construction: Given CapitalG's single LP and evergreen structure, how do CapitalG think about portfolio construction? What is the right level of diversification? How doe CapitalG structure internal investment decision-making? How does this change for re-investments? How do CapitalG think about attribution internally?
4.) Upside and Downside: Given prices being so high, when outcome scenario planning, how does Laela think about good vs great when it comes to multiple expectations? How has this changed over time? On the flip side, how does Laela think about loss ratio at growth today? Has this changed with rounds becoming more and more pre-emptive?
5.) Scaling Unicorns: What are the commonalities in the biggest challenges founders face post-product-market fit but prescaling? What are the clear signs to Laela that a founder is uniquely skilled at hiring? Does Laela agree that the best founders do not need help on hiring? How does Laela feel about the future of venture being services platforms?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Laela Sturdy
Laela’s Favourite Book: The Great Gatsby
Laela’s Most Recent Investment: Webflow
20VC: Twilio's Jeff Lawson on What It Takes To Create a Tribe, How To Create Anti-Fragile Organisations Through Decentralised Decision-Making and Why Values Are Nice But Principles Are Better
Jeff Lawson is the Founder & CEO @ Twilio, the company that allows you to unite communications and strengthen customer relationships across your business. Prior to their incredibly successful IPO in 2016 Jeff raised funding from some of the best including Bessemer, Union Square Ventures, Redpoint, Salesforce and Founders Fund to name a few. Before founding Twilio, Jeff was co-founder & CTO of NineStar, founding CTO of Stubhub.com, co-founder, CEO & CTO of Versity, and one of the first product managers for Amazon Web Services.
In Today’s Episode with Jeff Lawson You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way into the world of tech and startups and what that founding a-ha moment was for Jeff with Twilio? When explaining new ideas to people, what signals to Jeff that the idea is resonating? Are there clear indicators an idea is not resonating?
2.) Leadership: What does great leadership mean to Jeff today? How has Jeff's leadership style changed and evolved over the years? What does Jeff believe is the key to great storytelling? How has the leadership style required, changed in a COVID world? What have been the biggest inflection points in his leadership?
3.) Culture: What does Jeff believe are the 3 key ingredients to company culture? How can leaders create a tribe that people associate with? What are the biggest lessons we can take from sport and religion when it comes to culture building? At what points has Jeff been concerned about the Twilio culture? What did he do to rectify it? Why are "values nice but principles better"?
4.) Decision-Making: How has Jeff created a culture of decentralised decision-making? What has Jeff done to ensure the best ideas rise to the top? In what ways can leaders ensure people feel safe to be bold and go big, without the fear of failure? How does Jeff determine when to give or remove resources from new ideas? How does Jeff think about the importance of "focus"?
5.) Diversity: Frank Slootman previously said, "diversity should not override merit". What are the core problems that Jeff has with this statement? How do Twilio construct their recruitment pipelines to ensure diversity? Why does Jeff believe the secret to human assessment is one of "miles travelled"? What are the signals of this?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Jeff Lawson
Jeff’s Favourite Book: Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures
Mark Mullen is the Co-Founder of Bonfire Ventures, one of LA's leading early-stage funds, now on their 3rd Fund with $101M in the latest. In the past, Mark has invested in the likes of Trade Desk, Scopely, GOAT, ChowNow, Niantic and Pendo to name a few. Prior to co-founding Bonfire, Mark was a solo GP with Double M and then through Mull Capital, Mark is also an LP in other funds investing in 15 including the likes of Upfront, Freestyle, Backstage and Crosscut to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Mark Mullen You Will Learn:
1.) How Mark made his way into the world of venture, came to found Double M and why he decided he wanted to co-found Bonfire and be in a partnership, not a solo GP model?
2.) Portfolio Construction: With the new fund, how did Mark think about the right portfolio construction? What is the right level of diversification? How many lines should be in the portfolio? How important is ownership today? Is it possible to build ownership in your best companies over time? How does Mark think about proactive reserve allocation today?
3.) Investment Decision-Making: How does Mark think about the right investment decision-making structure with Bonfire today? How can one retain speed but also increase the number of decision-makers? How does Mark feel about the compression of fundraising timelines today? What advice does Mark give to founders when selecting their cap table?
4.) Boards and Time: How does Mark evaluate his own style of board membership? How has it changed over time? What do the best do on boards that makes them so great? How does Mark think about time allocation across the portfolio? Should you only spend time with winners? What have been some of his biggest lessons from this?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Mark Mullen
Mark’s Favourite Book: Undaunted Courage
Mark’s Most Recent Investment: Topia
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer on Turning the UK Into a Talent Magnet, What Can Be Done To Drive Further Investment in UK Venture & A Breakdown of Morning Routines, Peloton Favourites and Managing Nerves
Rishi Sunak was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer on 13 February 2020. He was previously Chief Secretary to the Treasury from July 2019 to February 2020, and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government from January 2018 to July 2019. He spent his professional career before politics in business and finance, working internationally. He co-founded an investment firm working with companies in multiple geographies and used that experience to help small and entrepreneurial British companies grow.
In Today’s Episode with Rishi Sunak You Will Learn:
1.) Rishi's first job was waiting table in a restaurant, what were his biggest takeaways from that first job? How did Rishi's time at Stanford impact his operating mindset today? How did Rishi make his way into the world of politics following a very successful career in finance?
2.) Talent: What does the UK need to do to become a global talent hub? How can Visa programs be reformed and innovated to ensure the UK is an attractive destination for the best talent? On reflection, where has the UK done well on talent and immigration? On the flip side, what has not worked? Why? What would Rishi have done differently?
3.) Entrepreneurs Relief & Capital Gains: What is the logic behind the removal of entrepreneurs relief? Why is it inefficient in its current form? How does Rishi think about using capital gains as a tool to attract the best to build and invest in the UK? Why does Rishi believe the UK is the most attractive place to build a business from a tax perspective? How does the UK compare to the EU and US?
4.) Driving Further Investment in the UK: What worked and what did not work with regards to "The Future Fund"? What would Rishi have done differently? What can Rishi and the UK do to encourage pension funds to invest more in venture moving forward? What are some elements the public assume the government can and should do, but in reality, you cannot?
5.) Rishi Sunak AMA: What does Rishi's morning routine look like? What time does Rishi wake up? What does he have for breakfast? What does the workout routine look like for Rishi? Who is his favourite Peloton instructor? Why? What is his guilty treat food-wise? How often does he have it? How did it feel for Rishi when he delivered his first budget? Was he nervous? How does Rishi deal with nerves today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Rishi Sunak
Rishi’s Favourite Book: Roald Dahl
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets
Rafael Ilishayev is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ GoPuff, one of the market leaders delivering daily essentials in minutes. GoPuff's latest funding round priced the company at a reported $8.9Bn in March 2021 and to date, Rafael has raised over $2.4Bn for the company from the likes of Accel, Softbank, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, D1 Capital and more. Rafael has scaled the company to over 550 US cities with over 7,000 employees nationwide.
In Today’s Episode with Rafael Ilishayev You Will Learn:
1.) How Rafael made his way into the world of startups with the founding of GoPuff and how he turned it from a college delivery business into a nationwide leader with over 7,000 employees?
2.) Funding: Why did Raf wait until 2.5 years into the business before raising funding? What did that time bootstrapping the business teach Raf? How did it change his thinking on unit economics? How were GoPuff able to be EBITDA profitable from day 1? How do they have such superior margins in an industry blighted by low margins?
3.) New Markets: How does GoPuff determine attractive markets to scale into? What are the leading indicators of "good markets"? What resources are required to open new markets? What is the time to breakeven on new markets? How many micro-fulfilment centres does it take to win a new market? What are the biggest challenges moving into new markets?
4.) Competition: The market has become a lot more competitive, why does Raf feel this is not a market you can win without years of experience? What have they built that other new entrants do not have? Will this be a consolidatory landscape or will many of the new entrants die? Why is Raf planning to invest hundreds of millions into Europe over the coming years?
5.) Driver Efficiency & CACs: What have been Raf's biggest lessons when it comes to driver efficiency? How many deliveries does a driver need to make in one hour for the model to work? How does Raf think about the negative network effects of the model where the more demand, the longer delivery time? How can GoPuff prevent that?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Rafael Ilishayev
Rafael’s Favourite Book: Trillion-Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond
Jay Simons is a General Partner @ Bond Capital, with their $1.25Bn debut growth fund in 2019 they made their mark on the venture landscape and have since made investments in the likes of Revolut, Canva, NextDoor, IronClad and my favourite, On Running. As for Jay, prior to entering venture, he spent an incredible 12 years at Atlassian including 9 years as President, playing an instrumental role in their hyper-growth journey. Jay is also a board member with both Zapier and HubSpot, two of my favourite SaaS companies.
In Today’s Episode with Jay Simons You Will Learn:
1.) How Jay made his way into the world of startups following a stint as a pianist in Asia and how that startup journey led to his joining Bond on the venture side?
2.) Why does Jay believe the best companies build economies around themselves? What does this look like in reality? When is the right time for the company to start building these economies? As an investor, what are the signs that a founder is proactively thinking about this? What are some of the biggest mistakes people make when building economies?
3.) Why does Jay believe Partner/Channel networks can be so powerful? When is the right time to build out channel partners? What is the training framework for these partners before they can represent your products in market? How do channel partners change the internal structure and resource allocation for a company? What mistakes do people make with these partners?
4.) How does Jay think about when is the right time to build a second product? What were the biggest takeaways from his time at Atlassian on building product suites? How does Jay determine when is the right time to move upmarket into enterprise? How does this change in a world of product-led growth?
5.) Why did Jay decide now was the right time to move into venture with Bond? For what reasons did Jay choose Bond, over all the other firms? What have been the biggest surprises for Jay from his first 100 days in venture? What have been the most challenging elements? How did Jay embrace the common challenge of building the conviction to write the first check?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Jay Simons
Jay’s Favourite Book: The River Why
Jay’s Most Recent Investment: Sentry
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on The Art of Great Leadership Today, Why The Best Give All of the Credit and Take All of the Blame & How DoorDash Have Won The Best Talent Against the Toughest Competition
Tony Xu is the CEO and Co-founder of DoorDash, the company empowering merchants to grow their businesses by offering on-demand delivery, data-driven insights, and better in-store efficiency. Prior to their IPO in December 2020, Tony raised over $2.5Bn for DoorDash from some of the best including Sequoia, Coatue, Softbank, Kleiner Perkins and DST, to name a few. Before co-founding the business in 2013, Tony worked in Product at Square, led special projects for the CEO and CFO at eBay, and began his career at McKinsey and Company.
In Today’s Episode with Tony Xu You Will Learn:
1.) How did Tony make his way into the world of startups and what was that founding a-ha moment for Tony with the founding of DoorDash? What were Tony's biggest takeaways from seeing his parents work ethic at such a young age? How did it impact his operating mentality?
2.) Leadership Style: What does great leadership mean to Tony today? In what ways has Tony's leadership style changed over the DoorDash journey? How does Tony assess his own persistence and grit? Through what framework does Tony decide what to delegate vs what to control?
3.) Decision-Making & Risk: How does Tony evaluate his decision-making process today? What does Tony mean when he says, "you have to reduce the scope"? How does Tony think about understanding the interplay of different variants in a decision? Through what framework does Tony assess risk today? How has Tony's approach to risk and decision-making changed over time?
4.) Talent Acquisition: What have been Tony's biggest lessons in acquiring the best talent? What has worked well in the past? In what ways have they not acquired talent they should have acquired? What type of talent worked in the early days? How has that changed? Through what framework does Tony decide between a stretch VP and a stretch too far?
5.) Culture & Diversity: How does Tony think through the breakpoints in the scaling of culture? At what points did Tony feel the DoorDash culture was not what he wanted it to be? How did he react to change it? Through what process has Tony measured the success of DoorDash's diversity efforts? Which initiatives have worked? Are there any that have not?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Tony Xu
Tony’s Favourite Book: Score Takes Care Of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Ramp's Eric Glyman on Why You Should Never Take The Highest Price, Working With Venture Funds vs Crossover Funds and How To Determine What To Buy vs Build as a Founder Today?
Eric Glyman is the Founder and CEO @ Ramp, the only corporate card and spend management platform designed to help you spend less. To date, Eric has raised over $390M for the company from some of the best including Thrive, Stripe, Founders Fund, Coatue and Box Group to name a few. Prior to changing the game of spend management, Eric founded Paribus, the price-tracking app that raised seed funding from General Catalyst and Greylock, which was acquired by Capital One in 2016.
In Today’s Episode with Eric Glyman You Will Learn:
1.) Entry to Startups: How Eric made his way into the world of startups with Paribus and how that journey and exit led to his founding the recently minted unicorn, Ramp?
2.) Decision-Making: How does Eric deal with moments of intense pressure as a leader? How does pressure impact Eric's decision-making quality? Through what framework does Eric evaluate his decision-making process today? Why does Eric believe operational velocity is so key to company success? How does Eric determine between being fast vs spending real time on something?
3.) Funding Rounds: Why does Eric believe that "funding rounds are science experiments"? What should founders look to prove or disprove with each round? Why does Eric believe "you should never take the highest price"? What are the downsides? How does it impact employee stock options? Does it change investor sentiment? How does it change customer acquisition through referrals?
4.) The Rise of Crossover Funds: What does Eric make of the rise of crossover funds? In what way does their value differ to the value provided by traditional VCs? How does their communication style differ compared to traditional VCs? Does Eric worry about the signalling risk of having crossover funds invested early? Does Eric believe they will change the landscape of venture?
5.) Board Management: How does Eric analyse his style of board management today? How has it changed over time? Where does Eric believe many founders go wrong when it comes to board management? How can boards be used to bring together the wider team and company? What documents does Eric always prepare for the board?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Eric Glyman
Eric’s Favourite Book: John Wooden: The Legendary UCLA Coach's Top 20 Quotes
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: The Twilio Memo: Bessemer's Byron Deeter on How a $125K Initial Check Became Bessemer's Largest Position, What The Influx of Late-Stage Capital Means For Venture Today & Why The Incumbent Advantage Is Now An Incumbent Disadvantage
Byron Deeter is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the world's leading investors in SaaS and cloud. To date, nineteen of Byron’s investments are valued above $1 billion, including ten IPOs and counting. Some of the incredible companies within Byron's portfolio include Twilio, ServiceTitan, Hashicorp, Canva, Intercom, DocuSign, SendGrid, the list goes on. Prior to joining the world of venture, Byron was an entrepreneur, raising a Series A from Bessemer and scaling the company to be one of the first global SaaS companies, reaching profitability and successfully selling to IBM.
In Today’s Episode with Byron Deeter You Will Learn:
1.) How Deven made his way into the world of venture and how that led to his becoming a Managing Director @ Insight, way back in 2000?
2.) The Market: Many people passed on Twilio, what did Byron see that others did not? Did Byron have concerns around the TAM? What made Byron feel comfortable they were not too early? How did Byron assess whether customers would churn off Twilio when they scaled to a size they could build their own infrastructure? How does Byron advise founders on this challenge today?
3.) The Team: What did Byron find some compelling about Jeff so early on? Jeff has been an incredible CEO from pre-seed to post-IPO, what has enabled Jeff specifically to scale with the company so successfully? What does Byron do to build the trust and rapport with founders that he does? What works? What does not work? How does that look today with Zoom?
4.) The Incumbents & Competition: Why does Byron believe the incumbent advantage is actually an incumbent disadvantage? What specifically has Byron found underwhelming about how the incumbents have tried to respond? In what tangible and specific way are startups better placed to win than incumbents? How does Byron advise founders to assess other startup competitors?
5.) The Funding: Twilio is Bessemer's single largest position ever, how does Byron know when is the right time to double down on an investment? What signals does he look for? Has this changed with the massive price inflation we have seen over the last year? How does Byron analyse the influx of new capital? Where is it good? What are the challenges to it?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Byron Deeter
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20VC: Why Bundling Does Not Work, How The Best Founders Analyse Unit Economics, Why The Way We Approach Mental Health in Venture and Startups is Wrong with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ QED Investors
Nigel Morris is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors, one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms of the last decade with numerous unicorn investments, including Credit Karma, NuBank, Avant, SoFi, Klarna, GreenSky, and AvidXchange. Prior to QED, Nigel co-founded Capital One Financial Services in 1994. During his 10-year tenure, Nigel transitioned Capital One from an emerging start-up to an established public company valued at over $20 billion with over 15,000 employees. Finally, Nigel also sits on or has sat on the board of Nubank, Prosper, Zopa, Klarna, The Economist and London Business School to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Nigel Morris You Will Learn:1.) How Nigel made his way into the world of startups with Capital One back in 1994 and how that journey led to his founding one of the leading fintech investment firms in QED? What made Nigel want to develop QED from a family office into a large scaling venture firm?
2.) Where does Nigel's passion for mental health stem from? Why does Nigel believe VC and entrepreneurship is riddled with mental health problems? How does Nigel deal with his own self-doubt and insecurity? In what way does Nigel analyse his own relationship to money today? How has it changed over time? How has that relationship to money changed how he thinks about investing?
3.) What does Nigel believe it takes to be a great listener? How does Nigel think about asking the risk questions to move the founder to the right insight? How does Nigel create the conditions where the entrepreneur can be much more open? What questions would Nigel never ask? How does Nigel describe his style of board membership? How has it changed?
4.) How does Nigel think about the centrality of unit economics? What does Nigel look for in the way that the entrepreneur thinks through and analyses unit economics? When does Nigel believe you have tangible data to rely on to justify unit economics? What is the biggest challenge with unit economics? What should companies do when their competitors raise massive funding rounds?
5.) Why does Nigel believe that "bundling" is a canard? What does not work regarding how traditional "bundling" works? Why might it be different for the next generation of fintech providers to bundle different products? Why does Nigel believe lending is a much harder insertion point to start than current accounts? How does Nigel think about the right insertion point?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Nigel MorrisNigel’s Favourite Book: Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Nigel’s Most Recent Investment: Bitso
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20VC: Farfetch Founder, José Neves on Zen Buddhism and Its Impact on Leadership Mentality, Why Head vs Heart is Not the Right Way To Think About Decision-Making & How To Work Through Self-Doubt and Identity as a CEO
José Neves is the Founder, CEO & Chairman @ Farfetch, the #1 destination for high-end fashion offering the world's Greatest Selection of Luxury. Now a public company, José has raised over $1.7Bn with Farfetch from some of the biggest names including Alibaba, Richemont, JD.com, Index Ventures and DST to name a few. Prior to Farfetch, José has been involved in the fashion start-up world since the mid-1990s when he launched footwear business SWEAR. José later founded SIX London, a fashion licensing and wholesale company selling to 600 retailers worldwide. Finally, in 2001 José opened the renowned boutique bstore, which won the British Fashion Award for Retailer of the Year in 2006.
In Today’s Episode with José Neves You Will Learn:
1.) How José made his way from creating footwear brands in the days of the Spice Girls and cyberpunk to changing the fashion industry itself with Farfetch?
2.) Why does Zen Buddhism resonate with José in such a profound way? How does his adoption of it impact his style of leadership today? How does José deal with the loneliness of being a CEO? What does José mean when he says the most successful leaders, "know how to fall and how to get up"? How has José responded to his greatest failures?
3.) How does José think about decision-making today? What are the biggest misconceptions people have with regards to effective decision-making? Why is head vs heart the wrong way to think about decision-making? How does José adopt a sense of emotional detachment when making decisions? What works? What does not work?
4.) How does José evaluate his relationship to money today? In what ways has it changed over time? What does José believe that others do not believe when it comes to risk and risk management? How does José balance the demands of Wall St and investors with the knowledge that everything is inherently uncertain?
5.) Does José ever feel self-doubt? How does he manage it? In what ways does he advise earlier stage founders to grapple with their own self-doubt? How does José think about tying one's own identity to their company? Why is this so dangerous?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with José Neves
José’s Favourite Book: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
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20VC: Insight Managing Director, Deven Parekh on The Current Funding Mania, Compression of Round Timelines, Fund Deployment Speeds Increasing & How To Think Through Price and Time Allocation Across the Portfolio
Deven Parekh is a Managing Director at Insight Partners, one of the leading investing franchises of the last 25 years with $30Bn+ in capital commitments, 400+ primary investments and over 200 portfolio acquisitions. Deven himself has made more than 90 investments since joining in 2000 including in the likes of Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Chargebee and Automattic (WordPress) to name a few. Deven also sits on the boards of Checkout.com, Calm, Saks.com, Optimizely and 1stDibs, again naming a few. If that was not enough, Deven also serves on the Board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Board of the Tisch New York MS Research Center. As a result of his investing success, Deven has been named on Forbes Midas List 5 time and has been selected as a Top 100 Venture Capitalist by CB Insights 4 times.
In Today’s Episode with Deven Parekh You Will Learn:
1.) How Deven made his way into the world of venture and how that led to his becoming a Managing Director @ Insight, way back in 2000?
2.) How does Deven analyse the current fundraising mania? Does portfolio discipline and temporal diversification matter anymore? How has Deven and Insight seen the velocity of fundraises change over the years? What can Deven and Insight do to get compress their decision-making timeliness with the compression of fundraising timelines?
3.) How does Deven assess his relationship to price and price sensitivity? What have been some core lessons for Deven when comparing deals that they did which were "cheap" vs "expensive"? How do Insight think about required levels of ownership today? Does Deven believe it is possible to build ownership over time? What is required to do so? What are the challenges?
4.) How would Deven describe his style of board membership today? How has it changed over time? What advice does Deven have for younger board members scaling into the role? How does Deven think about his time allocation across the portfolio? What is the optimal? How does this differ from reality? Why do your winners never need you?
5.) How does Deven evaluate his own insecurities and self-doubt today? In what way have these changed over time? How does Deven analyse the "weight of his words" within Insight? How does Insight structure the internal decision-making process to ensure that everyone's voice is heard? In what ways can firms foster that security for young partners to feel they can bring anything to the table?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Deven Parekh
Deven's Favourite Book: What We Know About Climate Change (The MIT Press), Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
Deven’s Most Recent Investment: TetraScience
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20VC: Qualtrics Founder, Ryan Smith on The 2 Hour Decision Whether To Sell Qualtrics for $8Bn in Cash, Why Tying Your Identity To Your Company Will Never Make You Happy and His Relationship To Risk, Wealth and Responsibility as a Result
Ryan Smith is the Founder and Executive Chairman @ Qualtrics, the leader in customer experience and creator of the experience management (XM) category. Ryan has grown the company from a basement startup to one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world, with 25 offices globally and more than 13,000 customers. Qualtrics raised $400M in funding from Accel, Sequoia, and Insight Venture Partners. Three days before the company was initially scheduled to go public, SAP announced its intent to acquire Qualtrics for $8B, which was the largest private enterprise software acquisition ever. In 2020, Qualtrics and SAP announced plans to take Qualtrics public as an independently operated company.
In Today’s Episode with Ryan Smith You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his way into the world of startups having travelled the world and came to found Qualtrics in his basement over 21 years ago?
2.) How does Ryan think about his relationship to happiness and what it means to "be happy"? How does Ryan think about identity and founders aligning their identities to their company? How does Ryan think, if not careful, tech can eat you up? What does Ryan mean when he says he would rather be "opportunistic than an entrepreneur"?
3.) How does Ryan approach decision-making today? In what situations does Ryan think with his head vs his heart? How does Ryan approach risk today? How has his relationship to risk changed over time? What did the sale process to SAP look like? What was that decision-making process to sell to SAP for $8BN in cash vs IPO? What advice did his wife give him?
4.) How does Ryan evaluate his relationship to money today? How did it feel when Ryan sold Qualtrics to SAP for $8BN in cash? How does Ryan think about giving his children the right mentality and upbringing while being brought up in extreme wealth? What are the challenges of doing so?
5.) How does Ryan think about the weight of responsibility? Ryan and his brother Jared, did a lot very young, did Ryan feel the pressure of having to grow up faster than one usually would? How did that impact his mentality? How did Ryan's travels to Mexico and Japan change the person he is today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Ryan Smith
Ryan’s Favourite Book: Alchemist: A Fable about Following Your Dream
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20VC: MercadoLibre Founder Marcos Galperin on Optimising Decision-Making, Effective Resource Allocation, Growth vs Profitability, Fundraising Strategies and more on the Journey To Build a $72Bn Market Cap Company
Marcos Galperin is the Founder and CEO @ MercadoLibre, one of LATAM's most successful companies of the last 2 decades. Today MercadoLibre's market cap exceeds $78Bn and the business includes everything from commerce to payments to logistics. Marcos is widely considered one of the great entrepreneurs of the last 2 decades scaling the business from its founding in 1999 while in business school at Stanford to today, a leader in LATAM operating across 18 countries and plans to end 2021 with over 32,000 employees.
In Today’s Episode with Marcos Galperin You Will Learn:
1.) How Marcos made his way into the world of startups and came up with the idea for MercadoLibre while at Stanford Business School?
2.) Talent Acquisition and Retention: What have been some of Marcos' biggest lessons on what it takes to acquire A* talent? Does Marcos believe individuals can scale across company stages? When is a stretch hire a stretch too far? What has been the secret to Marcos having such a retained leadership team? What works? What does not?
3.) Risk and Decision-Making: How does Marcos evaluate his relationship to risk today? What frameworks does Marcos use to make effective decisions today? How does Marcos think about short term vs long term when it comes to resource allocation? How does Marcos prioritise where he makes decisions vs where he is willing to delegate?
4.) Funding and The Crash: How does Marcos reflect on his biggest lessons from going through 2 crashes with MercadoLibre? How did he change the way he ran the business post crash? How does Marcos advise founders today when big rounds are on offer, take the money or wait? What other components are important to consider in this decision?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Marcos Galperin
Parker’s Favourite Book: Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
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20VC: David Tisch on Why Ownership in Venture Does Not Matter, His Biggest Investing Misses and Hits and How His Investing Style Changed as a Result & 3 Core Reasons VCs Pass That Do Not Make Sense
David Tisch is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Box Group, one of the leading seed focused firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Airtable, Glossier, PillPack, Plaid and many more. Prior to founding Box, David was Managing Director of Techstars New York and was a prolific angel investor making early angel investments in the likes of Vine and Warby Parker to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with David Tisch You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of tech and startups and came to change the state of seed funding in NYC with the founding of Box Group?
2.) Why does David believe that ownership requirements are "VCs projecting their problems on founders"? Why does David believe that ownership today fundamentally does not matter? How does David feel about his own relationship to price? Why is it important to be price aware across the portfolio, not on a per deal basis?
3.) What does David make of the rise of pre-emptive rounds? How does David advise portfolio founders who have them on the table? What other arguments does David use to founders contemplating taking seed rounds from multi-stage funds? How does David believe founders should assess their importance to the fund investing in them?
4.) How does David feel about his relationship to FOMO today? What have been some of his biggest misses in recent years? How have some of his biggest misses changed how he acts as an investor today? How have some of his biggest successes changed his investing lens? What changes did David and Box make to their decision-making process as a result?
5.) What does David believe are the biggest mistakes to turn down a company? Why is "too early" never a reason to turn down a company? How does David assess and think about market size today? Through what framework does David evaluate and assess competition today? What does David believe are some core concerns that are reasonable to turn down an opportunity?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with David Tisch
David’s Most Recent Investment: Ramp
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20VC: The Roblox Memo: First Round's Chris Fralic on The 17 Year Journey to Build a $41BN Market Cap Company, Why It Is Way Harder To Increase Ownership Across Rounds Today & What Happens Post SPACMania
Chris Fralic is a Board Partner @ First Round Capital, one of the leading seed-stage venture firms of the last decade with investments in the likes of Uber, Square, Notion, Warby Parker and more. As for Chris, he has led deals in Roblox, Ring.com, HotelTonight, Rec Room and many more incredible companies. Prior to the world of venture, Chris was VP of Business Development at social bookmarking and tagging company del.icio.us through the Yahoo! acquisition. He was also one of the early employees at Half.com and after the eBay, acquisition spent six years with eBay in a variety of business development, media and entertainment roles.
In Today’s Episode with Chris Fralic You Will Learn:
1.) How did Chris come to first meet Dave and the team at Roblox? Where was the first meeting? Who was in attendance? How did Chris feel post that first meeting with the team?
2.) Turning the company down: Why did First Round turn down Roblox on first look? How does Chris assess his own relationship to price? Through what mechanism does he determine whether to pay up or not? How does Chris retain relationships with founders when saying no? Does Chris believe you can buy up ownership post first check today, with the capital proliferate we have?
3.) What does Chris mean when he discusses the lessons from First Round's portfolio when it comes to "slow bake vs fast bake"? How did the First Round partnership analyse the Uber, Square, Roblox portfolio at the time? Through what framework does Chris think about reserves management given the challenge of "slow bake companies"? How does he address it today?
4.) What does Chris mean when he discusses the hype to substance ratio? Why is it more important than ever today? What does this mean for startups? How can startups with a low hype to substance ratio raise funds at good prices? What advice does Chris have for them? How does Chris think about the importance of firm and individual brand in venture today?
5.) How has Chris seen Dave evolve as a leader and CEO over time? What caused the changes in his leadership style? What moments stand out as the most challenging moments to Chris in the scaling of Roblox? Who does Chris believe are the behind the scenes rockstars that made Roblox possible?
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Rippling’s Parker Conrad on Why The VC/Founder Marriage Analogy is Weird, Why The Notion of Focus, Focus, Focus is Overrated, Why Narrow Point Solutions Are Not Best in Class Products & The Rise of the “Compound Startup”
Parker Conrad is the Founder and CEO @ Rippling, the employee management platform allowing you to manage your employees' payroll, benefits, devices and more—in one place. To date, Parker has raised over $197M for Rippling from the likes of Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Initialized, Bedrock, Greenoaks and Coatue. Prior to founding Rippling, Parker was the Co-Founder and CEO @ Zenefits and if that was not enough, Parker is also a prominent angel having invested in the likes of Census, Pulley and then also AgentSync and TrueNorth, alongside 20VC Fund.
In Today’s Episode with Parker Conrad You Will Learn:
1.) How did Parker make his way into the world of technology and startups? What was the founding a-ha moment for Parker with Rippling? How did his journey with Zenefits change or alter his leadership style today with Rippling?
2.) Why does Parker believe that the conventional advice of focus, focus, focus is BS? What does Parker mean when he states, "The Compound Startup"? How does the approach of the compound startup differ from traditional approaches of product and company building? What are the core benefits of using the compound startup approach?
3.) How does Parker think about providing sufficient product quality with an increasing breadth of product offering, entailed within a compound startup? In what way does pricing differ when comparing compound startups to traditional startups? How can compound startups optimise their pricing on a bundle basis? What has Slack and Microsoft taught us about this?
4.) Why does Parker disagree with the conventional analogy of the VC founder relationship being a marriage? Why does Parker refer to it more as a "General Contractor" relationship for a house? What can founders do to sufficiently protect themselves from overarching VCs? What can VCs do to be the very best partners to the founders they work with?
5.) How does Parker evaluate his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time? What does Parker know now that he wishes he had known at the start of his founding of Rippling? What have been Parker's biggest lessons on talent acquisition? Why did Parker decide to bring on a COO when he did? How has it changed his role?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Parker Conrad
Parker’s Favourite Book: Matilda by Roald Dahl
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Segment Founder Peter Reinhardt on His Learning Process, How Great Leaders Listen and Encourage Debate within Their Organisation & How To Use Data Intelligently To Improve Decision-Making
Peter Reinhardt is the Founder and CEO @ Segment, the leading customer data platform with over 20,000 companies using Segment to collect, clean, and control their customer data. Prior to their $3.2BN acquisition by Twilio in 2020, Peter raised over $283M for Segment from Accel, Thrive, Meritech, GV, General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins to name a few. Peter is also an active angel investor having made investments in the likes of Retool, Newfront, Pilot and more.
In Today’s Episode with Peter Reinhardt You Will Learn:
1.) How Peter made his way into the world of startups and how he came to found a company, Segment, by actively trying to prove to his co-founder that it would not work? Why does Peter believe the Airbnb story is the most destructive myth for founders to follow?
2.) Learning: How does Peter think about learning frameworks for new topics? How does he construct his? How does Peter use data within this learning process to increase his rate of learning? Where do the majority of people go wrong in constructing their framework for learning?
3.) Listening and Debate: What does Peter believe is required to be "a good listener"? What questions do the best listeners ask? What tone do they use to ask these questions? How does Peter create an environment of safety internally where people feel they can debate? How does one balance between debate and thinking vs putting those thoughts into action?
4.) Problem-solving: How does Peter breakdown problems into their component parts? Through what mechanism does he determine what to prioritise first? How would Peter describe his decision-making process? How does he determine between head vs heart in decisions? In what way does Peter use data to further inform the decisions he makes?
5.) How would Peter describe his management style today? Has it changed over time? In what way has working with a coach changed the way Peter thinks about leadership? What elements do they focus on? How often does he see his coach? What have been some of his biggest takeaways?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Peter Reinhardt
Peter’s Favourite Book: The Chalice and the Blade, Crucial Conversations
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20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
David Sze is a General Partner @ Greylock where he has led some of the firms most notable investments including Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora. David has consistently been at the forefront of innovation in the consumer landscape leading to his investments in Discord, Roblox, Medium and more. Prior to Greylock, David was SVP of Product Strategy at one of the first search pioneers, Excite and then Excite@Home. Before Excite, he was in interactive entertainment — in product marketing at Electronic Arts and development at Crystal Dynamics. As a result of his incredible investing track record, David has been frequently named to the Forbes Midas List.
In Today’s Episode with David Sze You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of venture and came to lead consumer investing at Greylock with investments in Facebook, Linkedin, Roblox and Discord?
2.) How did David's investments in Facebook and Linkedin challenge Greylock's investment strategy at the time? Paying $500M for Facebook, how does David reflect on his own relationship to price and price sensitivity? How does David evaluate the rise of pre-emptive rounds today? Is David concerned by the excess supply of capital in the market today?
3.) Having worked with Mark @ Facebook, Reid @ Linkedin, David @ Roblox, what are the commonalities of these incredible founders? What does David do to build relationships of trust and vulnerability with founders? How does David do this in the compressed fundraising timelines we have today?
4.) The Partnership: What does David believe Greylock have done well in terms of creating an environment of safety within the partnership where people can really challenge each other? What works? What does not? For younger VCs, what is the difference between those that succeed and those that do not? What is David's biggest advice to those in the earlier years of their VC career?
5.) The Board: How does David evaluate his own style of board membership today? How has it changed over the years? What does David believe are his biggest strengths and his biggest weaknesses as a board member? What advice does David give to younger VCs assuming their first board roles?
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Wade Foster is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Zapier, the company that moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. Post YC in 2012, Wade raised $1.4M for the company from Bessemer and Threshold but since that round, he scaled the company to $140M in ARR and a $5Bn valuation with Sequoia and Steadfast buying out some early investors earlier this year.
In Today’s Episode with Wade Foster You Will Learn:
1.) How Wade made his way from email marketing manager to founding one of YC's most successful alum in the form of Zapier? Does Wade agree with the "fake it till you make it theory"? How does Wade advise grads on starting a company vs joining a startup vs joining an incumbent?
2.) Remote Work: Zapier has been remote since 2012, what do Zapier do very specifically that Waade believes has enabled them to be so successful remote? What did not work? What were some of the biggest challenges of scaling the team remotely? In terms of tooling, what specific tools do Wade and Zapier use to make the org as transparent as possible?
3.) In the scaling journey, what have been the most significant breakpoints in the org scaling? How has Eade scaled his style of leadership? What has been the most challenging element to scale? How does Wade structure internal meetings? Who is invited to what? What materials are shared? How are the meetings structured?
4.) Why did Wade decide not to take the venture path and scale the company from revenues? What does Wade believe so many founders misunderstand when it comes to fundraising? What does Wade believe they gained from the bootstrapped approach? Why did Wade still maintain relationships with VCs? How did he choose those he wanted to stay in touch with?
5.) How does Wade feel about his relationship to money? What does Wade think about the rise of secondaries? In what framework does Wade advise founders who have the chance to take secondaries? What is the right amount to take off the table? How does one communicate this?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Wade Foster
Wade’s Favourite Book: Harry Potter
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20VC: Revolut Founder Nikolay Storonsky on His Leadership Style and Relationship To Ambition, His Biggest Lessons From Scaling Revolut Globally; What Worked, What Did Not & Why Speed of Product Shipment is The Most Important Thing
Nikolay Storonsky is the Founder & CEO @ Revolut, one of the world's largest and fastest-growing fintechs offering everything from personal to business banking, providing a better way to manage your money. To date, Nikolay has raised over $905M with Revolut from Ribbit, Index, DST, Balderton and Bond Capital to name a few. Nikolay has scaled Revolut to over 2,000 employees across 4 continents. Before changing the world of neo-banking, Nikolay spent 8 years as a derivatives trader at both Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse in London.
In Today’s Episode with Nikolay Storonsky You Will Learn:
1.) How Nikolay made his way into the world of startups from derivatives trading and how that led to his changing the world of fintech with Revolut?
2.) How would Nikolay describe his style of leadership today? How did his time in banking impact his operating style? What elements has Nikolay found the hardest to scale into as a leader? How does Nikolay assess his relationship to ambition? What drives him today? How does Nikolay deal with self-doubt and vulnerability in leadership?
3.) Why does Nikolay feel the most important thing in a company is the speed of product shipment? From a product perspective, how does Nikolay determine what to do next vs what to do later? What does that prioritisation process look like? Has it changed over time?
4.) How does Nikolay think about gepgraphic expansion today? Given Monzo's challenges in the US, why did Revolut decide the US remained a good strategy? What does it take to launch and scale a new country? How does Nikolay think about the relationship between growth and profitability? What companies does Nikolay admire most for their international scaling?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Nikolay Storonsky
Nikolay’s Favourite Book: Principles by Ray Dalio (PDF)
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20VC: Checkout.com Founder Guillaume Pousaz on The Transition From Bootstrapped Founder to Raising $830M and a $15Bn Valuation, What It Means To Have "3 Roadmaps For Life" & How Becoming a Parent Changes the Type of Leader You Are
Guillaume Pousaz is the Founder and CEO of Checkout.com, one of the world's leading global payments solutions providers and one of Europe's most valuable private companies. Guillaume founded Checkout.com in 2012 and bootstrapped the business until its record-breaking $230M Series A led by Insight and DST in 2019. Since, Guillaume has raised a further $600M for Checkout from the likes of Coatue, Tiger, Blossom, GIC and Greenoaks. As part of this process, Guillaume has scaled the team to over 900 people around the world and Checkout as one of the category leaders in payments with a reported $15Bn valuation.
In Today’s Episode with Guillaume Pousaz You Will Learn:
1.) How Guillaume made his way into the world of payments following a travelling experience? How that experience led to his founding the now $12Bn, Checkout.com?
2.) Why did Guillaume wait 7 years into the running of the business before raising a massive $230M Series A? Why was then the right time? Was it a difficult mental transition to move from lean, capital efficiency to raising $230M? Why have Checkout never spent a single dollar on marketing? Is it true, Checkout has never spent a single dollar you have raised?
3.) What does Guillaume mean when he says he "has 3 roadmaps for life"? How does he structure his planning for the next 2,5 and 10 years? How does Guillaume think on his own identity and how it is tied to Checkout, the company? How does Guillaume advise founders in terms of tying their identity to their company?
4.) Why does Guillaume believe that becoming a father made him a better CEO? How did it impact his operating style? How does Guillaume analogise the role of the CEO to the profession of being a sailor? How does Guillaume think through his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time? How does he think about ensuring it does not impact his children?
5.) In what way does Guillaume structure his decision-making process today? What does Guillaume believe it is about the velocity of decisions that determine the quality of the leader? What topics does Guillaume struggle to make fast decisions on? What advice does Guillaume give to founders in situations when you just do not know what to do?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Guillaume Pousaz
Guillaume’s Favourite Book: Dune by Frank Herbert
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20VC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on The Scaling Journey to a $26Bn Market Cap, The Challenges in Moving From Single To Multi-Product Company & How To Scale Efficiently into $M+ Enterprise Deals
Olivier Pomel is the Founder & CEO @ Datadog, the company building the next generation of tools for DevOps teams. Prior to their incredibly successful IPO in 2019, Olivier raised over $147M for the company from Index, ICONIQ, Meritech, IA Ventures, Amplify and OpenView, to name a few. Prior to founding Datadog and changing the world of devops, Olivier was a VP with Wireless Generation for 8 years leading an engineering team of close to 100 of the best developers in NYC.
In Today’s Episode with Olivier Pomel You Will Learn:
1.) How Olivier made his way into the world of startups and what was the a-ha founding moment for his creating of Datadog, changing the world of devops?
2.) Why does Olivier believe that "short term failure is a source of long term success?" Why did both seed and Series A investors not get Datadog? What would Olivier have done differently if fundraising again? What do investors misunderstand today when investing in big markets looking for the "entry wedge"?
3.) What has been Olivier's biggest learnings on how to run Datadog during a pandemic? What attributes does Olivier look for when hiring senior leaders? Why does Olivier believe the CEO has to be the "equaliser in chief"? What does that mean in practice? How can leaders creat eenvironments of safety where their team can approach them with anything?
4.) What have been the biggest challenges in moving from a single product to a multi-product company? How does one know when is the right time to add additional products? What is Olivier's decision-making process to determine which products to build next?
5.) How does Olivier assess his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time? In what ways has becoming a father impacted Olivier's operating mindset? What 3 traits would Olivier most like his children to adopt?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Olivier Pomel
Olivier’s Favourite Book: Kurt Vonnegut
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20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom
Linda Lian is the Co-Founder and CEO @ CommonRoom, the place where your organization and your community come together. To date, Linda has raised over $50M with CommonRoom from the likes of Danny Rimer @ Index Ventures, Sarah Guo @ Greylock, Dylan Field @ Figma, Dick Costolo and of course 20VC Fund. Prior to changing the world of community though, Linda spent close to 3 years at Amazon as a Senior Product Manager on AWS and Alexa. Before Amazon, Lida was on the other side of the table in venture as an associate at Madrona.
In Today’s Episode with Linda Lian You Will Learn:
1.) How Linda made her way into the world of startups and came to start on the venture side with Madrona? How did Linda's time at Amazon shape her thinking around founding CommonRoom? What were Linda's biggest lessons from her time at Amazon and then also being mentored by Jeff Weiner
2.) How does Linda describe her leadership style today? What are the biggest lessons Linda has learned in terms of how to speak with compassion but also directness and clarity? Why is Linda not a fan of "the shit sandwich"? What is the most effective way to give feedback?
3.) What did Linda decide to only hire senior and experienced individuals with CommonRoom? What are the benefits of doing so? What are the downsides? How does Linda approach hiring such senior talent? What works? How is this also challenging? What does Linda mean by "the long poach"?
4.) How does Linda approach delegation today? What framework does Linda use to determine what to do vs what to delegate? How does Linda approach head vs heart when it comes to decision-making? What does it take for Linda to change her mind? What is required?
5.) What does Linda believe are the biggest misnomers around the search for product market fit? Why did Linda deliberately choose to stay in stealth despite raising over $50M from some of the world's best investors? How did that impact their ability on both product and customer discovery?
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20VC: Benchmark's Peter Fenton on The Single Question That Defines The Art of Early Stage Venture, Marketing Timing Risk, Why The Oversupply of Capital Is Good & His Biggest Lessons from 12 Years On The New Relic Board
Peter Fenton is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the great venture firms of the last 3 decades with a portfolio including the likes of SNAP, Twitter, eBay, New Relic, Stitchfix and many more. As for Peter, he has led deals, sits or has sat on the boards of Elastic, New Relic, Digits, Docker, Optimizely, Yelp and Zuora to name a few. Prior to Benchmark, Peter was a General Partner @ Accel Partners in San Francisco. As a result of his incredible track, Peter has been on the Forbes Midas List more times than I have done podcast episodes!
In Today’s Episode with Peter Fenton You Will Learn:
1.) How a round of golf led to Peter Fenton leading the New Relic Series A? What did the deal look like both in check size and valuation? What does Peter think that round would be in today's market?
2.) How does Peter create an environment of safety with entrepreneurs where they feel they can be vulnerable with him? How does Peter approach building relationships of trust in compressed fundraising timelines? In what way has Peter seen relationships go bad? What can been done to mitigate that and optimise the Founder VC relationship?
3.) How does Peter assess market timing when making investments today? What does Peter mean when he says, "you have to understand whether you are unlocking consumption"? What does unlocking consumption look like in reality? How does Peter think about positive or negative externalities that could impact the business?
4.) Does Peter agree with Bill Gurley that the biggest challenge today is the "oversupply of capital"? Where does the oversupply of capital become a real challenge? What does Peter advise growth-stage founders do to prevent this from damaging them? How does Peter think about capital efficiency in the companies where he is on the board?
5.) What were Peter's biggest lessons on what it takes to be a great board member from his 12 years at New Relic? How did he see his style of board membership change? On the founder side, how do the very best founders manage and navigate their board? What do most boards misunderstand or mismanage?
Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Peter Fenton
Peter's Favourite Book: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
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20VC: Nubank CEO David Velez on Scaling Nubank to a $25BN Company, Why What Makes a Great Founder Does Not Make a Great CEO & The Responsibility Framework and How Leaders Can Use It To Drive Efficiency
David Velez is the Founder & CEO @ Nubank, one of the fastest growing digital banks in the world with operations in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia. To fuel this growth, David has raised over $1.5BN for Nubank from some of the best in the business including Doug Leone @ Sequoia, Micky @ Ribbit, Thrive, Founders Fund, DST, Tiger and more. Before changing the world of LATAM finance, David was a Partner @ Sequoia where he was responsible for all LATAM investments. Prior to Sequoia, David was the co-founder of General Atlantic's South American investment programme.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of startups through becoming a Partner @ Sequoia? How that led to his founding of Nubank? How his time at Sequoia impacted how he thought about building Nubank?
2.) How does David think about the relationship between growth and quality in company scaling? When scaling so fast, what are the first things to break? How does one know when is the right time to expand geographically? What is the right thought process to go through when determining how to know when is the right time to expand product lines?
3.) Looking at the market today, how does David for-see the future of digital banks? Will we seen increased consolidation over the coming years? How does David think through the verticalisation of neo-banks? What does the reduction in barriers to creating neo-banks really mean? How did Nubank scale to the scale it is today with $0 CACs?
4.) How has David seen his leadership style change with the growth of the company? Why does David feel it is wrong that the titles of Founder & CEO are so inextricably linked? What element of being a great founder are actually not good for CEOs to have? What elements of great CEOs are bad for founders to have? What has David found the hardest to scale in himself?
5.) How does David use "the responsibility framework" when making decisions today? What are David's thoughts on imposter syndrome within leaders today and how it can be harnessed for good? How does David approach head vs heart when it comes to decision-making today? Does David engage with regret minimisation as part of this?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
David’s Favourite Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude
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20VC: The Pinterest Memo: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on The Secret To Success within User Generated Content Plays, Where Most Investors Make Mistakes When Analysing Consumer Social and How The Pinterest Deal Wouldn't Have Happened without a Diverse Partners
Jeremy Levine is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the leading venture firms of the last 2 decades with a portfolio including the likes of Pinterest, Shopify, LinkedIn, Yelp, Twilio and many more. As for Jeremy, five of his early-stage investments—LinkedIn, MindBody, Pinterest, Shopify and Yelp—grew into billion-dollar publicly traded companies. As a result of his incredible portfolio, he has featured on the Forbes Midas List for several years running.
In Today’s Episode with Jeremy Levine You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeremy came to make one great decision and make one big mistake all in one rainy afternoon in Palo Alto? What was the story behind meeting the Pinterest team for the first time? Who was there? How did it go down?
2.) Market: How did Jeremy analyse the market at the time of the investment? What had been some core lessons Jeremy had learned on what made successful user-generated content plays? Where was Jeremy wrong in how he analysed the market? In what way is Jeremy surprised with how the market evolved? How does Jeremy analyse market timing today?
3.) Team: Jeremy has previously called Ben Silberman a "product visionary", what made Jeremy say this about Ben? How did Jeremy get over the concern of many VCs that Pinterest did not have a technical co-founder? Having seen Ben change over the last decade, what have been the biggest changes in Ben's leadership style over the last 10 years?
4.) Traction: When evaluating traction, where does Jeremy think so many investors make mistakes today? How should founders determine what is their core North Star metric? What gave Jeremy the confidence Pinterest could "cross the chasm"? How did the early Pinterest cohorts look both from usage and retention? What elements surprised and impressed?
5.) Pre + Post Mortem: What did Jeremy see as the likely reasons why Pinterest would not work? How did Jeremy think through what it took for UGC platforms to monetise at the time? Where was he wrong here? What did Jeremy see as the upside? What did he believe Pinterest could be if all the stars aligned?
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20VC: Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on His Relationship To Risk, Money, Vulnerability and Self-Doubt, Fantasising About Being Fired, How To Optimise Decision-Making and Minimising Regret
Jason Fried is the Founder & CEO @ Basecamp, the project management and team communication tool trusted by millions. Over an incredible 22 year journey, they have scaled to over 3.5M accounts and in 2020 they went back to being a multi-product company with the launch of their integrated email client & service, HEY. Jason is also the co-author of the widely acclaimed, ReWork and has also made several angel investments in the likes of Intercom, Gumroad and Hodinkee to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason Fried made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of the leading project management and team communications tools in the form of Basecamp?
2.) How does Jason analyse and evaluate his relationship to money? Why does Jason believe that he has this inherent downside protection when it comes to money? How does he structure his personal finances between stocks, cash, crypto etc etc? What have been some of Jason's biggest lessons when it comes to tying happiness to monetary levels?
3.) What does Jason mean when he says, "I have a fantasy of getting fired"? How does Jason think about knowing when is the right time to step away from the business? What would he like to do with that time? How does Jason feel about the challenge of tying his identity to his company? What are the dangers of doing so?
4.) How does Jason approach decision-making frameworks? What does Jason believe is the right way to respond when a decision does not go as planned? Where do many make mistakes here? Does Jason feel regret with decisions? How does Jason try and minimise regret?
5.) How does Jason feel about his biggest insecurities as a leader and CEO today? What are Jason's views on a CEO's ability to have self-doubt and be vulnerable? How have his views on this changed over the years? In what way has having kids impacted Jason's operating mindset? How has it changed what he values and appreciates?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Jason’s Favourite Book: In Praise of Shadows
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20VC: Rappi Founder Simón Borrero on Growth vs Profitability, Capital Efficiency, Raising $1.7Bn as a LATAM Company and Why Uber Eats Did More To Help Than To Hurt Rappi
Simón Borrero is the Founder & CEO @ Rappi, the startup that has become a cornerstone of the Latin American mobile ecosystem, coined as "the next Everything Store of Latin America". To date, Simon has raised over $1.7Bn for the company from the likes of Sequoia Capital, a16z, Softbank, DST Global, Y Combinator and more. Prior to Rappi, Simon was the founder of multiple former companies including Imaginamos, a software studio he grew to over 300 people.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Simon made his way into the world of startups and came to found "the next Everything Store of Latin America" in Rappi?
2.) How does Simon think about the importance of zone density for a business like Rappi? What are the number of deliveries required for Rappi to make for the business to be breakeven? What is the key metric that determines the success of the business for Rappi today?
3.) How does Simon approach the balance of capital efficiency vs growth? How does one know when to pour fuel on the fire and go for growth? When is the right time to really focus on unit economics? Why does Simon believe expanding Rappi can be analogised to scaling a coffee shop?
4.) Rappi has now raised $1.7Bn from some of the best investors in the world, what does Simon believe Rappi did to enable them to be so successful fundraising? Was it a difficult shift for Simon to make moving from lean to capital abundance with the successful fundraises? What changed? How did Simon change as a leader? What is the story of Sequoia coming in?
5.) Customer acquisition: What were some of the biggest challenges when it came to initial customer acquisition for Rappi? What does Simon mean when he says "donuts for downloads"? What is the story there?
6.) Driver acquisition: In the UK and the US, driver acquisition is a big challenge, what did Rappi to do enable them to scale their driver supply so efficiently? What works? What does not work?
7.) Restaurant acquisition: What were the hardest elements of onboarding the first restaurants? How did Uber Eats entering the market actually make Rappi so much more efficient as a business and service?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Simon’s Favourite Book: The Prosperity Paradox
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20VC: Tony Fadell "The Father of The iPod" on Mentors, Self-Doubt, Vulnerability, His Relationship To Money, Why Entrepreneurs Need to Be Coachable, Why VCs Need To Be More Direct & Why The First Trillionaire Will Innovate Around Climate Change
Tony Fadell, often referred to as “the father of the iPod,” is currently Principal @ Future Shape, a global investment and advisory firm coaching engineers and scientists working on foundational deep technology. Prior to Future Shape, Tony was the Founder & CEO @ Nest Labs, the company was ultimately acquired by Google for a reported $3.2Bn. Before Nest, Tony spent an incredible 9 years at Apple Inc, where, as SVP of Apple’s iPod division, he led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Fun facts, Tony has filed more than 300 patents for his work and is also a prolific angel investor having invested in the likes of mmhmm and Nothing to name a few.
In Today’s Episode With Tony Fadell You Will Learn:
I. The building blocks of an entrepreneur
What was the moment that Tony realised that he wanted to be an entrepreneur?
“I got my first money when I was in third grade, because I had an egg route. We'd go get eggs from the farmer, and I'd load them in my wagon. Then my younger brother and I would go door to door around the neighborhood, and we'd sell eggs. And that was an every week or every other week situation. And I got money in my hands. And I was like, Oh my God, I can do whatever I want with that money – I don't have to ask anybody, I can just do it. And so that was the level of freedom that, especially when you're young, feels really cool. And then as I got older, I started to buy Atari video game cartridges for my 2600 (yes, I'm that old!), and that was really, really fun too.”
What was the biggest lesson that Tony learned from his father on sales and building trusted relationships?
"And he said, very clearly, Look, this is a relationship. If I make this person successful, he's gonna want to come back to me over, and over, and over. But if I sell him something and it doesn't sell, and he has to discount and he loses money, he's not going to come back. Even if I don't have the right product, I'll tell him where to go to get the right product they're looking for, or if they're picking the wrong one, I'll tell them, here's the right one, because my job is to make them successful. Because if they're successful, they'll come back to me year after year after year. And even when we have a down year, they're going to trust me, and they're going to come back."
II. Reflections on experience
How does Tony Fadell think about and assess his own relationship to money? How has it changed over the years?
"So my relationship to money now is that it's just a means to make change happen. And so literally, for me, I can just have a backpack, my computer, my phone, a couple of roller bags with my clothes. And that's enough to live life with my family. I don't need all this other stuff. COVID taught me that even further."
How does Tony determine true friendships vs transactional relationships?
“If it's not a reference – if it's not coming from somebody saying, Hey, you really need to meet this person – I take everything with a grain of salt. With anybody who comes to me cold, I think they probably want something. I try to find that out through the network, Do you know this person? What are they about?"
III. Tony Fadell on becoming a mentor
Why does Tony Fadell believe that founders have to be "coachable"?
“I think anybody who's trying to do something that the world has never seen before, or trying to work with people who are, they'd better be coachable. Because you're going to be so narrowly focused, you're going to be so heads down, you're going to be so on a mission, that sometimes you'll be blinded, and you'll need somebody to come from left field and go, Wait a second, dude, you're not thinking about this right."
What are the core signs that an individual is coachable?
- Trustworthiness
2. Willingness to listen
What does Tony believe is the right way to deliver advice without fluff?
"First, it's about trust. You have to be able to have a trusted relationship with somebody. And second, there are different ways of delivering a message. You can deliver a message the first time in an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove kind of way. But sometimes the velvet glove is going to come off."
How do people make mistakes when giving advice?
“I'm in too many board meetings; we have over 200 investments. I've seen all kinds of different CEOs and different boards, where the investors don't want to feel like they're going to get a bad rep because the CEO is going to say something if they say something negative."
What does Tony Fadell advise founders when it comes to finding mentors?
“Usually, a really great mentor is going to be highly selective. They're going to be like, I don't want to work with you. They only have so much time for people who are actually coachable."
What are the characteristics of the best mentors?
"You're gonna have tough love with them, you're gonna say things that they don't want to hear, you're not going to be liked all the time. Hopefully, one day, you'll be respected if not liked. And that's what it means to be a mentor.”
IV. Changing perceptions
How does Tony assess his own relationship to self-doubt?
“Everyone goes through imposter syndrome. Everyone does. We all have gone through it, I go through it. Because you know what, when you're doing stuff you've never done before, and you're changing the world, no one else has done it either. No one else has done it either. That means it's okay. And I always say, if you don't have butterflies in your stomach each day, you're either not paying attention, or you're not pushing hard enough and taking enough risk."
What are Tony's views on failure?
“Now, there's taking stupid risks versus risk mitigation and taking calculated risks. But you should always be living on the edge of pushing yourself because that's where the growth is, that's where the change is happening."
Does one learn more from success than from failure?
"How we do and change the world is through the same method. We go do, and then we fail, and then we learn from that, and then we do again.”
What does Tony mean when he says, "do, fail, learn."
“Look, it's do, fail, learn; do, fail, learn. There's no such thing as learn and then you're able to do. No, no, no. When you really learn in life is after you've tried to do it."
What is the right way for entrepreneurs to present their boldest of ambitions?
"Look at Elon now. If he was pitching what he's doing now 15 years ago, people would go, No way! A few people, like Jurvetson and others, said, Yeah, sure, okay, great. But very few people would get behind that huge boldness."
“So what they do is – and this is what I've had to do – they start and just pitch that simple ‘What's the next three to four years look like?’ and never tell anybody about the big picture. Because you scare most people off."
How do investors need to change how they think about ambition and upside?
5.) Why does Tony believe the first trillionaire will originate from the climate change space? Why is the majority of plastics recycling total BS today? Why does Tony believe we need to fundamentally transform our economies? How do funding markets need to change to fund this structural reshaping of society?
20VC: NEA's Scott Sandell on SPACS and Why Liquidity is One of the Challenges of our Time, Why We Are At An Inflection Point For Secondaries & Why There Is Nothing To Suggest The Boom Will Not Continue
Scott Sandell is the Managing General Partner of NEA, one of the leading firms of the last 3 decades with now close to $24Bn under management and a portfolio including the likes of Salesforce, Robinhood, Plaid, Databricks and many more incredible companies. As for Scott, since joining the firm in 1996 he has led investments in many industry-transforming technology companies including Salesforce.com, Tableau Software, WebEx and Workday. Scott also serves on the board of rocketships including Robinhood, Cloudflare, Coursera and Divvy to name a few. As a result of this investing success, Scott is among the most frequently named venture capitalists to the Forbes Midas List.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Scott made his way into the world of venture close to 3 decades ago back in 1996? How he came to be Managing General Partner of NEA today? What is entailed in the role of "Managing General Partner"?
2.) What has been the single biggest change in the venture landscape that Scott has observed since his entering in 1996? How did the boom and bust of the dot com and 2008 impact his investing mindset? Consequently, how does Scott advise founders to think about capital efficiency and business model flexibility? What concerns Scott today?
3.) Why does Scott believe "this is an incredible moment in history for the asset class of venture"? How does Scott think about the core physics of company building changing? How is it companies are able to scale and grow so much faster today? Does their speed of growth change their capital requirements?
4.) Does Scott agree with Bill Gurley, "the biggest challenge is the oversupply of capital today"? How does Scott analyse his own relationship to price and price sensitivity? What is Scott's framework for determining when to pay up vs when to remain disciplined? How does Scott feel about the rise of SPACs? How will this shake out over the coming years?
5.) How much have NEA companies raised over the last decade? Of that, how much did NEA invest? Is the answer to continuously scale AUM? How does NEA approach investment decision-making with the size of partnership it has? What does Scott mean when he says, "we vote on the process"? How do you create a partnership of trust at scale?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Scott's Favourite Book: The Old Man and the Sea
Scott’s Most Recent Investment: Loanpal
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20VC: Spotify Founder Daniel Ek on Optimising Decision-Making, Structuring Effective Learning Processes, The Trials and Tribulations in The Transition From Founder To CEO & The Future of Building Prima Materia with Shakil Khan
Daniel Ek is the founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of the board of directors of Spotify, the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 345m users, including 155m subscribers, across 170 markets.
In Today’s Episode With Daniel Ek You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way into the world of startups and came to found the most popular audio streaming subscription service in the world in the form of Spotify?
2.) How does Daniel approach effective decision-making today? What is his core process? How does Daniel determine between reversible and irreversible decisions? What does Daniel's learning process look like for new topics and material? How does this differ from topic to topic? What does Daniel mean when he says "I look to become the Chief of X Officer" for a time?
3.) How does Daniel think about the transition from Founder to CEO? Why is the topic not discussed enough? Where does Daniel see many founders struggle to make the transition? Which elements did Daniel find the most challenging? How has he scaled into them over time? Is it possible to change who you are as a person with this transition?
4.) How does Daniel think about what it takes to create an environment of safety where everybody can feel free to express their ideas, thoughts and concerns? What sort of failure does Daniel accept? What sort of failure does Daniel not accept? How does good news flow through an organisation differently to bad news? How does Daniel determine when to quit a project vs when to persist and stick to it?
5.) Prima Materia: Why is Prima not just another fund? How is Prima fundamentally different? What does Daniel believe Shak is world-class at? A walkthrough of Shak and Daniel's decision-making process for choosing to partner with each other on Prima? What has been their first investment? Why gave them the conviction to write this check as their first?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Daniel Ek
Daniel’s Favourite Book: Shantaram
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20VC: Robinhood Founder Vlad Tenev on His Biggest Lessons Managing Through A Crisis, The Events of The Congressional Committee, Raising $2.4Bn Fast and Why It Was Necessary & Why It Is Ludicrous To Suggest Robinhood Put The Business Ahead of it's Customer
Vlad Tenev is the Founder & CEO @ Robinhood, the company that provides commission-free investing, plus the tools you need to put your money in motion. To date, Vlad has raised over $5.6BN with Robinhood including a $2.4Bn raise this month and some of their investors include the very best in the business; Ribbit, Sequoia, Greenoaks, Index, IVP, Thrive, GV and more incredible names. Before Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Vlad made his way into the world of startups and how the "Occupy Wall St" movement spurned much of the inspiration for the founding moment of Robinhood?
2.) Looking back over the last month, does Vlad believe Robinhood is a victim or an enabler of the crisis? What does Vlad believe upset customers the most? With the benefit of hindsight, what would Vlad have done differently? What does Vlad believe are some of the biggest misconceptions about how the last few weeks played out?
3.) Funding: Why did Robinhood need the scale of funding that it took, so fast? What are the capital requirements for a business like Robinhood? Who regulates their compliance? Was Robinhood forced to put the interests of the business ahead of the interests of their customers? Why does VAR need to be changed as a risk estimation mechanism?
4.) What has Vlad learned as CEO about managing through a crisis? What did Vlad do to ensure morale remained high internally, despite the external events? What works? What does not work? What did Vlad learn about himself through the experience of the congressional committee and testifying before them?
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Klarna Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Scaling Europe's Most Valuable Private Tech Company, How To Motivate and Challenge Your Team Most Effectively & The Biggest Lessons From Working with Mike Moritz
Sebastian Siemiatkowski is the Founder and CEO @ Klarna, the company that makes online shopping simple, allowing you to buy what you need today and pay later. To date, Sebastian has raised over $2.1Bn for the company from the likes of Sequoia, Silver Lake, Blackrock, DST, Northzone, Creandum and even Snoop Dog to name a few. Klarna has been an incredible 16-year journey for Sebastian with it now being the most valuable private technology company in Europe with over 3,500 employees.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
I. The Importance Of Learning To Learn Fast
What is the best way to learn fast?
“People talk about it like there's this learning curve, and the best spot is at the place where you're challenged to the precise point where you're almost giving up, but not entirely. That's exactly it.
“And I have this amazing swim teacher for my children, her name is Petra, and she's just fantastic. I just love watching her because she has this ability of taking my children in the pool and pushing them to that exact point where they are almost, almost giving up, and they're learning at such a pace. And if I can recreate such an environment in Klarna, if I can create an environment, if I can be part of creating an environment where we put people in that position where they just are exactly at that curve where they are challenged, supported, and kind of at the edge and being given the ability to learn really fast and really discover what it means to have an impact.”
Does Sebastian compare his work to other companies’?
“I don't think that much about what other people or other companies or other things out there could have done different. And there's pros and cons to that. But the benefits of that is that it speeds up my learning. Because a lot of people – and I've realized that as I manage other people – is that because they're so obsessed with trying to think about what other people could have done differently, and why situations arose, and why it wasn't their responsibility and so forth, they spend a lot of time on that, because we've unfortunately been brought up in some kind of guilt that it's bad to do wrong, and it's bad if it's our fault, and you want to avoid that.
“And these psychological constraints, unfortunately, hinder people from developing much faster, because if you go into every situation and say, the only thing that's relevant here is what I could have done differently, what I could have learned from this – if that's the only thing, it's just like, whatever, I accept my responsibilities. What could I have done differently? If you only focus on that, you just learn much faster.”
How does Sebastian transform his self-doubt into a positive?
“I think self-doubt is not nothing. It's not a bad thing, right? It's a very healthy thing, if it represents you continuously trying to understand, am I doing the right thing? Is this something that I want to do? Am I making the right decisions? So I think it's extremely healthy to do that. I'm not saying it's not painful or tough when you have it. But I think it's a very positive thing.
“I'm much more worried when people tell me they have no self-doubt. And then I'm like, uh-oh, because that means that you're not really reflecting on your actions, and you're not learning from them. So I wish I could give you something more comforting than that, but I would actually say enjoy it. Be happy that you have it, and it's gonna make you a better person.”
II. Sebastian’s Management Philosophy
What does Sebastian believe companies can learn from soccer?
“I love the fact that Michael Moritz wrote this book that I still haven't read, so it's kind of funny that I'm referring to it, but he wrote this book about Ferguson, that manager of Manchester United. And I think it's very relevant, because today, the saying is that for people to be motivated at work, they need to have a higher purpose, the company needs to do something good, and so forth. And I am not disputing that, that is very true that it contributes to people's sense of purpose, and so forth.
But before you even get to that level, we have to ask ourselves, what is it really that makes people motivated and enjoy themselves? And I think when I think about that, I often look at sports, because why do people love soccer? What's the higher purpose of winning Champions League? People say, oh, there's a massive higher purpose, but not entirely, you're not really making the planet better by winning. Still, people are massively engaged in these things. Why?
“Because it's a team effort, there are clear roles, you know exactly what you're supposed to do – I'm supposed to put the ball in that score. And then it's very clear how you win, there is a referee that stops people from cheating. And so there's a lot of things in that environment that makes it motivating, that makes people engaged, and those things are usually lacking in companies.”
How do you know when someone is at that crucial point of the learning curve?
“The problem with a company is that it's a much more complex environment with a lot of other things going on in parallel in people's lives. And so I have definitely occasionally missed to see that people are beyond that point.”
“In Sweden, there's this course called Situation Adopted Management, which basically means that there is no single management technique. You look into the situation, you try to understand it from multiple angles. And then depending on where that individual is, and how you perceive the mental status, and the mood of that individual, and so forth, you try to adapt. Either you coach or you challenge or you instruct or you do different things. There's not a single methodology that will allow you to deal with those situations. But a lot of it is empathy. It's the ability to look at people and read them, and try to understand, and ask them questions, and understand where they are.”
III. How Sebastian Manages Complexity At Scale
What are Sebastian’s biggest lessons learned from Klarna growing to 3000+ people spread across multiple offices across the world?
- It’s the manager’s job to deal with the complexity in a company
- It’s not for everyone
What role does Sebastian believe a manager should play in a company as it scales?
“I think a lot of times as a company grows, what ends up happening is the thing just becomes so complex. So management tries to organize the company in a way that makes sense to them and that is easy to understand for them. But the consequence of that often, unfortunately, is it makes no sense for the person who's actually doing the job. So they lose the purpose. Why am I coming to work? What are we trying to achieve? All of these things get lost.
“So what we said is, we have to do the exact opposite. The critical element is that the people who are actually supposed to do something – not the manager – the people actually supposed to do something, if they program or to do a marketing campaign, or whatever they're doing, they need to come to work every day and feel I know exactly why I'm coming, I know how I'm contributing, I know who I'm contributing for, I know what value I'm creating.
“And if that thing creates tons of complexity for us, as managers, because the whole system becomes much more complex, then that's what we're getting paid for. That's the one. That's why we're getting a good salary. Because we need to manage that complexity.”
What does Sebastian look for in talent?
“Keep very close on the recruitment … Especially in a country like Sweden, a country where a typical saying is, alla ska komma med, which means, everyone should come, everyone should join. And it's very nice. And I appreciate that with Swedish culture, I'm not trying to really call it. I think it's fantastic and it's a fantastic society. But as a consequence, it took us some time to conclude something which maybe in the US or maybe even in the UK as it would have been much more obvious, which is that it's not a company for everyone. It is a company for the people that want to have that challenge, that want to be in that environment, that think that's interesting, that want to learn a lot fast, and want to get a lot of things done. And that's not everyone, and that's okay.
“Like when you play soccer – some people play soccer for fun, other people play to win the Champions League. People do it for different reasons. And they have different ambitions with it and different objectives with it. And the same applies to us.
“So it took us some time to realize that we need to tell people, look, just so you know, this is not going to be your standard company, you're going to be expected to do a hell of a lot of things, you're going to be expected to be challenged, you're going to expect it to do your utmost. And we're going to try to support you and help you and grow. So just know what you're getting into, before you get into it.”
IV. Retail Banking 10 Years From Now
What does Sebastian see as the future of everyday banking services?
“One thing I would say, it's going to be a much smaller industry. And that's because it is ridiculous that moving money back and forth is a trillion-dollar industry. That is ridiculous. There is no good reason for that whatsoever. This is going to be a much more cost-efficient, much smaller revenue business than it is today. But even though it would be much smaller than it is today, it's still massive, and Klarna has the opportunity to be one big player in that industry, similar to what Tesla is doing in cars or whatever, that's what I want to do. And I feel we have all the prerequisites to accomplish that.”
“There's going to be this push that's going to transform this industry and the people are going to lose on it are the suits in the marble offices in the city centers. That's where the pain is going to be felt, but the winner is going to be the consumer.”
What do the next five years look like for Klarna?
“It's a little bit like self-driving cars – we all know it's going to happen, the question is when. And based on what I've seen in the last 15 years, and I've seen how retail has gone from retail to ecommerce and all these trends, this decade is going to be the disruption of retail banking.
“At the end of this decade, there will be a couple of new total players that will be very dominating in this space, and the rest will either cease to exist, will merge and try to acquire some of the new ones, or maybe a few of them will manage to reinvent themselves. But this is going to be an extremely interesting time.”
Sebastian’s Favourite Book: The Neverending Story
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20VC: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence on His Biggest Lessons Building and Growing Blackberry, The Right Way to View Competition and Innovation Cycles & How To Make The Transition From COO To CEO Most Effectively
Patrick Spence is the CEO @ Sonos, the sound experience company connecting millions of listeners around the world to the content they want. Prior to their IPO, they raised over $450M from the likes of Mike Volpi @ Index, Satish @ Redpoint and e.ventures to name a few. As for Patrick, prior to Sonos, he spent an incredible 14 years with RIM (makers of Blackberry) across multiple different roles.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Patrick made his way into the world of tech and startups and became an instrumental part of the exec team at Blackberry? How that led to his joining Sonos as COO and later becoming CEO?
2.) How did building and growing RIM influence everything that Patrick does at Sonos? From the battle with Apple, what were Patrick's biggest lessons on the right way to approach competition? How does Patrick think about both partnering with Google today whilst also suing them at the same time?
3.) From COO to CEO: How did Patrick make the transition from COO to CEO so successfully? What were the most challenging elements to scale into? How does Patrick empower his team to have the confidence to stand up and say no to the CEO? How can one encourage debate and dissent in the team?
4.) How does Patrick feel about the role that vulnerability has to play in leadership? How does Patrick approach his own self-doubt as a leader today? How does he manage it? How does he advise founders unsure if they can scale into their leadership roles? What mentors does Patrick have? What has he learned from them?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Patrick’s Favourite Book: The Infinite Game: How Great Businesses Achieve Long-Lasting
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20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
Jeremy Liew is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the leading firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Affirm, Snapchat (Snap), Mulesoft, Epic Games, Carta and more amazing companies. As for Jeremy, in the past he has led deals and sat on the boards of Snap, Affirm, Blockchain.com and The Honest Company to name a few. Before Lightspeed, Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of corporate development and chief of staff to the CEO, and then as general manager of Netscape. Due to his incredible investing success, Jeremy has been featured on the Forbes Midas List multiple times.
In Today’s Episode We Dissect The Snapchat Memo:
I. How Jeremey first learned of Snapchat
How Jeremy Liew first heard about Evan Spiegel and Snapchat?
"It's actually kind of a roundabout story. We first heard about Snapchat, because one of my partners Barry Eggers is a very involved dad. And he noticed that his daughter had started taking weird selfies"
What was the process to first get in touch with Evan?
"The challenge was, the website only had info at Snapchat email address was the only info The only contact info available. So I emailed them, and I never heard back.
Why was it such a challenge?
"I then looked up Snapchat on LinkedIn, and I couldn't find any contact information. And I was in a little bit of a loss, I wasn't getting any responses from the email, there was nothing listed on LinkedIn. So I ended up doing a who is look-up to try to find out who had registered the Snapchat URL, and I got an info@ snapgrouplimited email. So I emailed that. And then as again, I didn't get any response.
What was the breakthrough in the end?
"....Finally, what I decided to do was since Evan was a student at Stanford, and since I graduated from Stanford for business school, at that time, Facebook allowed you to message people who were in the same network, and Stanford constituted that. So I messaged him through Facebook, and I finally got a response. But this time, I got a response within five minutes."
II. The Analysis Of Snapchat's Early Market
What are the 4 things Jeremy looks for when making an investment in consumer?
- Can this become part of pop culture?
- Does this create new habits?
- Is there a scalable way to grow?
- Does the founder have a unique insight that explains the success?
Why does Jeremy believe that usage with young females is the biggest predictor of future consumer social success?
"Generalising, Women build their relationships through, you know, conversations, and they build those relationships through sharing information with each other. And obviously, that sort of conversation or relationship is a fantastic conduit for word of mouth for anything that people really appreciate."
In what ways does Jeremy like to see consumer social companies become part of pop culture?
"Today, if you think about whether it be social networking, apps, messaging, e commerce, streaming media, it's all part of pop culture. And so as much as movies or television or music or dance, and so if you ask yourself who are the early adopters of pop culture"
What are examples of this?
"Social networking, apps, messaging, e commerce, streaming media, it's all part of pop culture."
Did the market evolve the way that Jeremy thought it would?
"And one of the things that surprised us a little bit was that this was very strong in Southern California, Northern California, and Georgia, when we first invested and parts of the South"
What was a surprise to Jeremy Liew in terms of market evolution?
"In Norway, which had actually transcended, that sort of high school and college-age population, in fact, become the number three most downloaded app, most popular app, in Norway at that time. So ahead of Instagram, ahead of Facebook, and so forth. And so that's what I think gave us that early indication that the app was going to be able to break out beyond its high school, college student, initial starting point, not just in the US, but everywhere"
III. Reflections on Snapchat's Early Traction
What did the Snap user to install count look like at the time?
"In, you know, March, April of 2012, they had about 90,000, daily active users off of the base of 180,000 installs."
How does this compare with many others in the consumer social space?
"That's a very, very high ratio."
What were Snap's retention numbers at the time?
"50% retention after 90 days, which again, suggests high engagement, high retention, high growth that speaks to upside volatility"
How did Snap's frequency of usage on an individual basis look like at the time?
"So people were opening the app six times per day, they were opening at least once every second day."
Across, retention, usage and user to install, what are the benchmarks for great, good and average?
" I would say as a rule of thumb, in messaging and social networks, you would want to see at least a DAU to MAU ratio of north of 50%. And you would want to see at least a D 30 of say 30 to 40%, for your for something to really be working to be sort of at that outlier level."
IV. The Truth About The Snapchat Founding Team
What unique insight does Jeremy believe that Evan always held for the company and the product?
"One of the things that was so special about Evan, and that I think, has continued to contribute to the success of the company has been that he's always been able to do that to look at something with fresh eyes, and not iterate over what the current state of the art is that, you know, just from first principles basis"
How has Jeremy seen Evan change and evolve as a leader?
"I think his maturity as a business leader, as a leader of people, as a manager, you know, as a strategist, although he always had very good strategic instincts, but they've just continued to grow and evolve and blossom."
What were some of the big inflection points in his development?
"So you know, the feed has always been up until this point, in reverse chronological order, I think largely because that's what friendster do choose to do. And then Evan comes along. He says, How do you tell stories beginning, middle, end. Now go to social media? How do they tell stories in reverse chronological order means and middle beginning? Well, that doesn't make any sense. And so he said, we're going to create a whole new feed of stories, and they're going to be told in chronological order beginning middle end."
Who are some unsung heroes from the Snap journey that were transformational?
"Bobby doesn't get enough credit. From the very beginning from I think maybe a couple of months in was thinking about the breakthroughs that had been happening computer vision and the implications for what that could build....Imran Khan, he really helps take a lot of the load off of Evan allowed me to focus on product engineering, he took over sales and monetization Ops, he did a lot of the financing work in the time when Snapchat raised a lot of capital."
20VC: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon on How To Approach Effective Decision-Making in Leadership, When Is The Right Time To Hire Recruiters and Heads of People, Balancing the Expectations of Wall St with Long Term Vision and What Truly Successful Board Management
Todd McKinnon is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Okta, the identity layer for the internet, providing one trusted platform to secure every identity, from customers to your workforce. Prior to their IPO in 2017, Todd raised over $229M for the company from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, a16z, Greylock, Khosla and Floodgate to name a few. Prior to founding Okta, Todd was VP of Development @ Salesforce.com where he spent an incredible 5 years and before that enjoyed an 8 year run in the software development team @ PeopleSoft.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Todd made his way into the world of startups with PeopleSoft and Salesforce? What was the a-ha moment for Todd with the founding of Okta? What were the biggest management takeaways from his time with PeopleSoft and Okta? How did Todd convince his wife that leaving a safe job with Salesforce to found a company was the right decision?
2.) How does Todd approach decision-making today? What frameworks does he use to optimise his decisions? How does Todd analyse reversible vs irreversible decisions? How does Todd know when he has done enough work and is ready to make the decision? Who does he debate the most important decisions with?
3.) What does Todd believe makes for a truly great enterprise software entrepreneur today? What were the first elements to break in the scaling of Okta? When is the right time to hire your first recruiters and Head of People? What should you look for in those people? How did Todd make mistakes when it comes to hiring recruiters?
4.) What are Todd's biggest lessons on successful board management? How would Todd describe his style of board management? How has it changed over the years? What can CEOs do to extract the most value from their board? What were the biggest mistakes Todd made in the early interactions with his board?
5.) How does Todd balance the growth expectations of Wall St on a quarter by quarter basis with the long term vision and strategy? Why does Todd believe that Okta has been able to make the transition from unsexy to one of Wall St's most loved companies? What is the secret to investor relations as a public company?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Todd’s Favourite Book: Slaughterhouse 5
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20VC Special: The Real Estate Fintech OGs on Why This Is Not The End For The Bay Area and What Can Be Done To Solve It, The Pros and Cons of Working with Corporate Investors and How Leading Their Teams Has Fundamentally Changed in a COVID World
Assaf Wand is the Founder & CEO @ Hippo Insurance, with over $700M in funding Hippo are setting a new standard for home insurance and offer protection for what’s important to today’s homeowner.
Nima Ghamsari is the Founder & CEO @ Blend, with over $665M in funding they are the digital platform streamlining the journey from application to close — for every banking product.
Max Simkoff is the Founder & CEO at States Title, with $229M in funding States Title are using machine intelligence to create a vastly more simple and efficient closing experience for lenders, real estate professionals, and homebuyers.
Brendan Wallace is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Fifth Wall, with over $1.3Bn in commitments and AUM across multiple different vehicles, they are the largest venture firm focused on the real estate industry and property technology for the Built World.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) 3 of the largest and most successful founders in the financial real estate market, what have been their biggest learnings from their friendship over the last 5 years? What have been some of the most hotly debated topics they have had as a group? How did their opinions and views change as a result?
2.) How do they think and feel about the tech exodus from Silicon Valley, temporary movement due to COVID or fundamental shift? How closely correlated is the move out of California with the explosion of liquidity from IPOs and acquisitions? What pisses Max off most about people leaving CA currently?
3.) How have their roles as leaders changed in the time of COVID? What have been the most challenging elements? What have they had to embrace? What have they had to disregard or stop? What advice do they give to other founders scaling into hyper-growth in a remote format?
4.) What do they believe is the fundraising strategy that allowed them to raise over $1.5Bn as a group? How do they think about what they look for in each stage of investors? How does it change when entering growth stages? How has their experience been having corporates play a large role in their financing? What are the biggest challenges of working with corporates? What does one need to do to extract the most value from them?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Max’s Favourite Book: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
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20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction
Christian Reber is the Founder & CEO of Pitch, the collaborative presentation software for modern teams. To date, Christian has raised over $52M for Pitch from some of the best in the business including Index, Thrive, Blueyard and then some amazing individuals including Instagram's Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Zoom's Eric Yuan, Datadog's Olivier Pomerol and Tiny's Andrew Wilkinson. Prior to Pitch, Christian was the Founder @ Wunderlist, raising $35M from the likes of Sequoia and Atomico before being acquired by Microsoft.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Christian Reber made his way into the world of startups? How that led to his founding te global phenomenon, Wunderlist? How his experience with Wunderlist led him to start Pitch most recently?
2.) Does Christian regret selling Wunderlist to Microsoft? What was the reasoning and logic behind it? What does Christian believe Microsoft did wrong that resulted in Wunderlist no longer being in existence today? How did Christian deal with the personal depression post the sale of Wunderlist?
3.) How does Christian assess and evaluate his personal relationship to risk? What does he do when making risky and large decisions to ensure he is comfortable? How does Christian feel about his relationship to money? How has it changed over time? How does Christian approach personal finance today between startup investing, fund investing, cash and savings?
4.) How does Christian think about what great product design means today? How does he balance gut and instinct with granular data when making product decisions today? How has this changed over time? How has Christian structured his team to make the fastest and most efficient product decisions?
5.) How would Christian reflect on his own style of board management? How has it changed over time? What element does he still to this day find most challenging? What board moment would he say is his most memorable? Who has been his favourite board member to work alongside?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Christian’s Favourite Book: The Unbanking Of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
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20VC: Scaling to a $1.3Bn Valuation While in Stealth, The Power of Different Network Effects Within Payment Platforms & How To Leverage Your Board and Investor Base for the Most Value with Matan Bar, Founder & CEO @ Melio
Matan Bar is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Melio, the company that provides the simplest way to pay vendors and contractors. To date, Matan has raised over $254M for Melio from the likes of Accel, Bessemer, Aleph, Coatue and General Catalyst to name a few. Prior to founding Melio, Matan Bar was Head of PayPal Consumer Product Center and before that was a Head of Product and GM @ eBay in their Israel Innovation Center.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matan Bar made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of the fastest-growing companies today in the form of Melio?
2.) What is the single most important thing in a financial transaction business? How does Matan think about the balance between optimising for transaction volume vs revenue? What does Matan believe are the core network effects within payments businesses? Why do most opt for closed network effects? How is Melio different?
3.) What have been some of the biggest challenges of adding 170 people in one year? What breaks first? What needs to be in place to ensure the culture can scale with the headcount? How does Matan structure the leadership team to manage this hyper-growth? Has Matan struggled with self-doubt in his leadership during this hyper-growth?
4.) What specifically has Melio and Matan done to achieve a 49% female to male ratio within the company? What works when it comes to implementing diversity at scale? Where do so many people make mistakes? What specific strateies have allowed Melio to hire some of the best female engineers?
5.) How does Matan most like to interact with his board? How does he determine the advice to ingest vs the advice to reject? What have been some of his biggest lessons when it comes to successful board management? Where do many first time founders make mistakes when it comes to investor value add and extraction?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Matan’s Favourite Book: The Unbanking Of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
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20VC: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg on Why Generalists Over Specialists, Why Boutique Smaller Firms Over Multi-Stage Firms, Portfolio Construction Theory, Capital Concentration Limits and How To Think Through Reserve Allocations with Market Cycles in Mind?
Michael Eisenberg is a Co-Founder and Equal Partner @ Aleph, with over $550M under management and a portfolio including the likes of Lemonade, Melio and HoneyBook, they are one of the leading early-stage firms of the last decade. Prior to founding Aleph, Michael spent 15 years as a General Partner @ Benchmark and before that, made his way into venture with Israel Seed Partners where he built an incredible portfolio over an 8 year period. If all of this was not enough, Michael is also an author having published 4 books.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Michael made his way into venture over 25 years ago and how his 15 years at Benchmark led to his founding Aleph?
2.) How has seeing multiple booms and busts impacted Michael's investing mindset? What do many misunderstand when it comes to reserve allocations in market cycles? Why does Michael believe busts are more psychologically impactful than financially impactful?
3.) How does Michael approach portfolio construction with Aleph today? How does Michael think about the right level of portfolio diversification? How does Michael think about the right level of capital concentrated into one company? How does Michael assess the difference between risk and uncertainty? What do many misunderstand between the two?
4.) Why does Michael believe in generalist VCs over specialist VCs? Why do they win? Why does Michael believe in small boutique firms vs large multi-stage firms? How does Michael think about the notion of ownership on first check? Is it possible to really build ownership across rounds today?
5.) How does Michael reflect on his own style of board membership today? How has it changed? What have been some of Michael's biggest lessons on board membership from Bruce Dunlevie @ Benchmark? What advice does Michael have to newer investors joining boards for the first time?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Michael’s Most Recent Investment: Melio
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20VC: Why VCs Should Care More About Cost of Capital and Less About Ownership, Investing Lessons from working with Peter Thiel at Founders Fund, Why Liquidity Aligns Incentives Between Founders and Investors & Why It Is The Last Double That Matters in Ven
Justin Fishner-Wolfson is founder and the managing partner of 137 Ventures, a growth-stage venture firm that provides customized liquidity solutions to founders, investors, and early employees of high-growth private technology companies. Their portfolio includes the likes of SpaceX, Wish, Anduril, Flexport, and Rigup to name a few. Previously, Justin worked on the investment team at Founders Fund and before that served in the US Department of State under Alan Larson, Undersecretary for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Justin made his way into the world of venture with Founders Fund and how that led to his founding 137 Ventures? What specific lessons did he learn from Peter Thiel that he has applied to his investing mindset?
2.) What does Justin mean when he says, "it is the last double that matters"? Why does Justin believe that liquidity aligns incentives between VCs and founders? When is the right timing for this liquidity and are there limits to the sizes of secondaries founders and teams should take?
3.) How does Justin think about his own price sensitivity today? Why does Justin believe that the conventional VC views on ownership are outdated and no longer as relevant to this class of company? How does Justin think about diversification among the portfolio today? What is the right level? What is too diversified? What is too concentrated?
4.) Why does Justin believe that standard thoughts around CAC/LTV are wrong? How have they changed over time? How should founders think about this and present these metrics to investors? Given these metrics, how does Justin feel about the revenue multiples we are seeing today both in private and public markets?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Justin’s Favourite Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Justin’s Most Recent Investment: Lattice
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20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Ilkka Paananen is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Supercell, the makers of some of the most wildly successful games of the last decade including Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach and more. Prior to Tencent acquiring a majority stake in the company at a reported $10.2Bn acquisition, Ilkka raised over $143M for the company from Accel, Index, Atomico, IVP, LVP, Initial and Lifeline. Throughout his incredible leadership of Supercell he has coined the term, "the least powerful CEO", a fascinating concept and one we dig into in this episode.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ilkka made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of Europe's most valuable companies in the form of Supercell?
2.) How does Ilkka think about his own relationship to risk? Why does Ilkka believe the No 1 reason companies die is due to their relationship to risk? How does Ilkka evaluate his relationship to money? How has it changed? How does Ilkka feel the weight of responsibility with his wealth?
3.) What does being "the least powerful CEO" mean in practice? What does Ilkka belive is key for leaders to really empower their team to be bold and ambitious? How can leaders create environments of safety where it is ok to fail? Where do many leaders go wrong here?
4.) The first 3 Supercell games were failures, how did Ilkka deal with those really hard times? How can leaders sustain morale in such hard times? Supercell then had 3 big hits in a row, how does one prevent ego and over-confidence in teams? What is the beer vs champagne culture?
5.) How does Ilkka think about the importance of focus? What has Ilkka done and learned to be a much more focused leader? How does Ilkka approach the aspect of competition today?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Ilkka’s Favourite Book: What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz
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20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard
Hubert Palan is the Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard, helping product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap. To date, Hubert has raised over $64m for ProductBoard from the likes of Sequoia, Index, Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer and Credo Ventures to name a few. Prior to founding the company, Hubert was VP Product Management @ GoodData where he played an instrumental role in their scaling from 6 to 300 people.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hubert made his way from Eastern Europe to SF, made his way into the world of product management and came to found ProductBoard?
2.) Why does Hubert believe that "founder insight" is overrated? What strategies and tactics does Hubert give to founders to be more mentally plastic and flexible? How does one know when to persist when things are not working vs when to give up? What is the decision-making framework?
3.) Why does Hubert believe that "big and bold product vision can be dangerous"? How does Hubert think about when is the right time to release a second product? What are the core elements to tackle when thinking about a second product? Where do many make mistakes here?
4.) Why does Hubert believe that, "if you get to product market fit by accident, you could be in trouble?" What does Hubert advise in terms of studying if and how you got to product market fit? How can one use post-mortem analyses here effectively?
5.) Why does Hubert believe that transparency is so necessary today with the team? Should founders be transparent when it comes to M&A, fundraising etc? Where are the limits? What makes it so hard to instil effectively? What do many founders misunderstand?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Hubert’s Favourite Book: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook
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20VC: The Memo: Sequoia's Alfred Lin on Why Chasing GMV Leads To Bad Behaviours, How To Approach Competition and Capital Efficiency & The Core Importance of Understanding the Difference Between Input and Output Metrics
Alfred Lin is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most renowned and successful venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Google, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Stripe, Zoom, Doordash and many more. As for Alfred, he has led deals in the likes of Airbnb, Doordash, Instacart, Reddit and Houzz to name a few. Prior to the world of venture, Alfred was Chairman and COO @ Zappos for 6 years leading to their acquisition by Amazon.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alfred made his way into the world of venture and came to be a Partner @ Sequoia? How Alfred first met DoorDash? Where did the meeting take place? Who was there? What were the first impressions?
2.) Market: How did Alfred breakdown the food delivery market when doing the diligence for the investment? How did Alfred forsee the market changing over time? What were some unexpected elements of the market Alfred did not forsee? What does Alfred look for in markets; size or growth?
3.) Competition: How did Alfred analyse the competitive landscape for food delivery at the time? Why does Alfred believe that great companies are not built by focusing on the competition? What does Alfred mean when he says, "you have to be customer-obsessed and competitor aware"?
4.) Traction: Does Alfred agree with Sarah Tavel in the dangers of chasing topline GMV? What negative behaviours can chasing GMV trigger? What does Alfred mean when he says, "founders have to be able to distinguish between input and output metrics"?
5.) Acquisition: What does Alfred believe DoorDash did so well in terms of acquiring drivers more efficiently? How did they retain them so effectively? What allowed DoorDash to compete so effectively when it came to merchant acquisition? What were some of Alfred's biggest takeaways when it came to DoorDash's customer acquisition journey?
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20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
Phil Libin is the Founder and CEO @ mmhmm, the app that allows you to level up your remote presentations, making high-quality video content in minutes. To date, Phil has raised over $30M for the company from an incredible investor base including Sequoia, Kevin & Julia Hartz, Tony Fadell, Instagram's Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and Brianne Kimmel. Prior to mmhmm, Phil was a Managing Director @ General Catalyst and prior to his time in venture, Phil most famously founded Evernote, where he led the business with phenomenal success, as CEO for over 8 years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Phil made his way into the world of startups, came to found Evernote and how that led to his founding of mmhmm, most recently?
2.) How would Phil describe his management style today? How has it changed over time? Why does Phil believe shortcuts are the greatest mistakes startups make? What does Phil believe you can vs cannot take shortcuts on? What have been some real world lessons there?
3.) What were Phil's biggest takeaways from his time in venture? How did it change his operating mindset? Does Phil believe there is an incentive misalignment between founder and VC? Why is Roelof Botha the best board member Phil has worked with? What makes him so special?
4.) How does Phil think about the unbundling/verticalisation of Zoom? How does he predict the market evolving? How does Phil see the differing usage patterns between consumer and business? Why does Phil believe more can be learned from looking at similarities and not differences?
5.) What does Phil believe are the two classes of mistakes when scaling startups? What have been Phil's biggest lessons on acquiring and retaining the best talent? How does Phil create an environment of dissent where anyone can bring their entire self and beliefs to the table?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Phil’s Favourite Book: Kafka on the Shore
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20VC: Hims Founder Andrew Dudum on Hims Going Public, The Reasoning and Benefits of SPACs, The Biggest Misconceptions of Successful Company Building & Wall St's Changing Perceptions Towards Growth and Profitability
Andrew Dudum is the Founder & CEO @ Hims & Hers, offering a modern approach to health and wellness and one of the fastest-growing companies to reach $1Bn. Prior to their going public on Tuesday this week, Hims raised over $158M from some of the best including Thrive, Forerunner, Founders Fund, IVP, Redpoint and more. As for Andrew, alongside his role at Hims he is also Co-Founder of Atomic, a company builder and venture fund all in one, backed by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen to name two. Prior to Atomic, Andrew led product at TokBox managing a team of 30 leading to their acquisition by Telefonica in 2012.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andrew made his way from Head of Product at Tokbox to venture capitalist with Atomic to changing healthcare with Hims?
2.) What are the biggest misconceptions people have with regards to what it takes to build a successful company? Why do you not need big teams? How can leaders drive efficiency within small teams? What have been Andrew's biggest lessons in acquiring the best talent in market? What works?
3.) Hims is the fastest company to scale to $1Bn, how does Andrew reflect on how he managed hyper-growth? What did he do well? What was the first to break? What would he do differently? When is the right time to go from generalist to specialist? When is the right time to add more products?
4.) Why did Andrew believe now was the right time to IPO just 4 years into the founding of the business? How did the SPAC process play out? What are the core advantages to Andrew of the SPAC over an IPO? Why will more founders use it in the future? How does Andrew assess the importance or lack of, when it comes to the pricing pop on IPO day?
5.) How does Andrew reflect on his relationship to money? Why does he feel more scared of it now than ever before? How does he think about bringing up his children with an appreciation and respect for money? What 3 traits would Andrew most like his children to have?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Andrew’s Favourite Book: The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
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20VC: Etsy CEO, Josh Silverman on 2 Defining Traits of Great Leadership, The Danger of Attaching Happiness To Milestones, How To Structure Teams To Optimise for Experimentation and Agility &Whether You Learn More From Success Than Failure
Josh Silverman is the CEO @ Etsy, leading the company as it builds a platform that empowers creative entrepreneurs around the world. Prior to their IPO, Etsy raised funding from some of the best in the business including Danny Rimer @ Index, Albert Wenger @ USV and Jim Breyer @ Accel to name a few. Prior to Etsy, Josh served as President of Consumer Products and Services at American Express, was the CEO of Skype, and CEO of shopping.com, and he held various executive roles at eBay. Josh is also currently on the board of directors of Shake Shack.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Josh made his entry into the world of startups, came to be CEO of Skype and how he came to be CEO of Etsy? How did Josh's political background prepare him for being a public markets CEO?
2.) How does Josh think about 10 year plans? What is the right alternative? What does Josh do when he does not know what to do? How does Josh think about head vs heart in decision-making? How does Josh think about downside protection and risk mitigation with decisions?
3.) Why does Josh believe that you should, "never let a crisis go to waste"? How does he interpret that? Does Josh believe you learn more from success than failure? Why does Josh believe many succeed in spite of, not because of? How does Josh connote happiness to a milestone of success? What is true happiness for Josh?
4.) How does Josh think about winning today? What is the framework Josh believes founders need to put in place to optimise their chance of winning? How does Josh structure his team at Etsy to optimise for speed and experimentation? What has worked? What has not worked?
5.) How can leaders create a system where failure is minimised? How does Josh implement a "red hat vs green hat" decision making process around new ideas at Etsy? What question does Josh and the team ask with every experiment? How should one analyse the cost of rolling back a decision?
6.) How does Josh determine between dogma and good practice in a company? What is the right way to remove antiquated dogma without damaging morale? What were some of the biggest challenges from his doing this on entry at Etsy?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Josh’s Favourite Book: Grant
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20VC: Databricks CEO, Ali Ghodsi on The 3 Phases of Startup Growth, How to Evaluate Risk and Downside Scenario Planning & Who, What and When To Hire When Scaling Your Go-To-Market
Ali Ghodsi is the Founder & CEO @ Databricks, bringing together data engineering, science and analytics on an open, unified platform so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. To date, Ali has raised over $897M for the company including from the likes of a16z, NEA, Microsoft, Battery, Coatue, Greenbay and more. Prior to Databricks, Ali was one of the original creators of open source project, Apache Spark, and ideas from his research have been applied to Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ali made his way from fleeing Iran as a refugee to living in a Swedish ghetto? What was the founding moment for Ali with Databricks?
2.) How does Ali think about and evaluate risk today? Why does Ali always make his team do downside scenario planning? How does Ali think about his relationship to money today? Why does Ali disagree with gut decisions? What is his process for making decisions effectively?
3.) Stage 1: The Search for PMF: What are the core elements included in this phase? What types of leaders thrive in this phase? What type struggle? How can leaders sustain morale in the early days when it is not up and to the right? Who are the crucial hires in this phase?
4.) Stage 2: Scale Go-To-Market: What are the core roles needed to expand GTM fast and effectively? Why should you hire sales leaders before marketing leaders? Why is hiring finance leaders so crucial here? What mistakes are most often made here? How do the board resolve them?
5.) Stage 3: Process and Efficiency: What are the first and most important processes that need to be implemented? How does Ali need to change the type of leader he is to fit this stage? How does one retain creativity and nimble decision-making at scale and with process?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Ali’s Favourite Book: Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters
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20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions
Annie Duke is a former professional poker player and the author of National Bestseller, "Thinking in Bets" & "How To Decide". During her poker playing days, Annie was a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, the winner of the 2004 Tournament of Champions and the only woman to win the NBC National Poker Heads Up Championship. Today, Annie is also the founder of How I Decide, a non-profit that creates curricula and tools to improve decision making and critical thinking skills for under-served middle schoolers.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Annie made her way from professional poker player to National Bestselling author and coach to the world's leading investors?
2.) How does Annie evaluate the nature of risk? What is good risk vs bad risk? How does Annie think through reversible vs irreversible decisions? What is her framework? Why does Annie believe most irreversible decisions are actually reversible? How does it change your thinking?
3.) How does effective solo-decision-making differ from effective group decision-making? What decision-making biases does Annie often see venture being guilty of making? What 3 things can one do to improve the decision-making of the collective group?
4.) How does Annie think about sunk cost? How does one know when enough is enough and you have to walk away? How does this tie into Annie's thinking on portfolio theory? How does Annie think about pre-mortems? How should they be structured? What is included?
5.) How does Annie define critical thinking? What tips would Annie give to someone in really advancing their level of critical thinking? What behaviours can one implement to seek to protect critical thinking? How does this differ in team environments?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Annie’s Favourite Book: The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
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20VC: Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone on The 3 Stages of Wealth, The Return To Twitter in 2017 and the Associated Missions and Challenges & Why Silicon Valley is not an "Insiders Only" Universe?
Biz Stone is best known as the Co-Founder of Twitter and Medium. Biz is also an investor in the likes of Slack, Square, Intercom, Beyond Meat and Blue Bottle Coffee. Biz also co-founded Jelly, a "human in the loop" AI search service, which was acquired by Pinterest. Due to his many successes, Biz has been recognized as INC Magazine Entrepreneur of the Decade and one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Biz make his way into the world of startups and come to found Odeo/Twitter one day on a car trip with Ev Williams?
2.) How does Biz evaluate his relationship to money? How does Biz think about teaching his son the value of money? What does Biz mean when he says wealth 'accentuates your current self"? How did Biz get off the treadmill of always wanting and chasing more?
3.) How does Biz think about insecurity and self-doubt? How does Biz approach saying no? How does he get comfortable with not always being Mr Popular? What is so challenging here? How does Biz feel about founding tieing their identities to their company?
4.) Why did Biz come back to Twitter in 2017? With hindsight, what would he have done differently if he were to return again? What were the biggest challenges when he arrived? Why was internal morale low? What did he and Jack do to increase it? What worked? What did not?
5.) Why does Biz not feel Silicon Valley is an "insider-only" universe? Why does Biz feel Silicon Valley is a mindset? How does Biz think about the decentralisation of talent moving forward? How does Biz compare the UK to the US startup ecosystem? What is worse in the UK?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Biz's Favourite Book: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
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20VC: Bill Gurley and Howard Marks: What Happened In 2020? What Can We Expect Looking Forward to 2021?
Howard Marks is co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, a leading investment firm with more than $120 billion in assets. Prior to founding Oaktree, Howard spent 10 years at The TCW Group, where he was responsible for investments in distressed debt, high yield bonds, and convertible securities. Howard has also written two books, most recently Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side, and it was Warren Buffet who said, “When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they’re the first thing I open and read. I always learn something.”
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many many more. As for Bill, widely recognised as one of the greats of our time having worked with the likes of GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix and Zillow. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Before entering venture, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) In March Ray Dalio stated we would be entering a "global recession", how do Howard and Bill feel about this statement? How does today's environment remind Howard and Bill of 2010/11? What is similar? What is different? How does Bill think about investing through cycles?
2.) How does Bill think about investing through cycles? What have Bill's lessons been from seeing many venture vintages on LP performance across cycles? How does Howard think about investing through cycles from a distressed debt perspective? What have his lessons been from Oaktree's performance over the years?
3.) Do Howard and Bill agree we will not see interest rates go anywhere for the next 3-5 years? What is the impact of this sustained low-interest rate environment? What could be done that would see interest rates increase in the future? How does Bill believe this will impact the supply of LP dollars in venture?
4.) How do Bill and Howard evaluate the state of the public markets today? Why does Howard believe that FOMO has really taken effect? How does Bill think about network effects and the laws of compounding with regards to public companies?
5.) Do Howard and Bill agree we are seeing a retreat from globalisation? What are the core impacts of this retreat? Why is Bill so concerned about "regulatory capture"? Why does Bill fear that today, "Washington is for sale"? What would he like to see change?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Howard’s Favourite Book: Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America
Bill’s Favourite Book: How Innovation Works
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20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst
Quentin Clark is a Managing Director @ General Catalyst, one of the most prominent firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Stripe, Airbnb, Snap, Anduril, Deliveroo and Cazoo to name a few. As for Quentin, at GC he has led deals in the likes of Kernel, Coda, Commure just to name a few. Before entering the world of venture Quentin was the CTO @ Dropbox and before that he was the Chief Business Officer @ SAP. Finally, before SAP, Quentin spent an incredible 20 years at Microsoft in a variety of different roles play a key part in their hyper-growth.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Quentin made his way from CTO @ Dropbox and 20 years at Microsoft to being an MD with General Catalyst today?
2.) What were Quentin's biggest management takeaways from his 20 years at Microsoft? What is his favourite story about working with Bill Gates? How does Quentin think about the art of delegation? How does Quentin differentiate between leadership and management?
3.) How does Quentin believe the world of fundraising has changed with COVID? How does Quentin build relationships of trust in these compressed fundraising timelines? What works? What does not work? How can you really build that relationship off Zoom? How does this change the fundraising landscape moving forward?
4.) What does Quentin mean when he says he likes to "lead without authority"? How does that translate into his management style? How does Quentin evaluate his style of board membership? How does Quentin know whether to wear the investor vs the operator hat on the board?
5.) Does Quentin believe we are really moving the needle in terms of the projects that venture is funding today? What would Quentin like to see more of? What would Quentin like to change about the world of venture? How does Quentin evaluate market timing risk when investing?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Quentin’s Favourite Book: Stranger in a Strange Land
Quentin's Most Recent Investment: Sprout Therapy
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20VC: Why the Theory of Pro-Rata is Often False, How Rolling Funds Impact Both Pricing and Competition & The Biggest Lessons from Working with Jack Dorsey with Avlok Kohli, CEO @ AngelList Venture
Avlok Kohli is the CEO of AngelList Venture which has facilitated the funding of over 5,000 startups including 47 unicorns and is home to 4,300 funds and syndicates with $2.2B in assets under management. This year, AngelList Venture launched the much-discussed, Rolling Funds and Avlok recently launched his own rolling fund, Avlok Capital. Prior to AngelList, Avlok built and sold two companies; FastBite, acquired by Square in 2015 and Fairy, also acquired. If that was not enough, Avlok is also an angel in 25 companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Avlok made his way into the world of facilitating over $2Bn in AUM having sold 2 prior companies on the other side of the table as a founder? What is Avlok's favourite Jack Dorsey story?
2.) Why does Avlok believe Rollings Funds are the "printing presses of innovation" for capital markets? Does Avlok believe that everyone should be a fund manager and managing capital? What are the benefits of rollings funds vs traditional micro funds?
3.) How does the rise of rolling funds impact the early stage pricing of companies? How does it impact the competitive landscape for seed and pre-seed allocations? Is Avlok concerned about a wave of undisciplined capital entering the market?
4.) How does Avlok evaluate reserve allocations for early stage and micro fund managers today? What does the data show for funds that do reserve for pro-rata vs those that do not? How has this impacted Avlok's own approach to pro-rata and reserve deployment?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Avlok’s Favourite Book: Meditations
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20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
David Hsu is the Founder & CEO @ Retool, the company that allows you to build internal tools, remarkably fast. David has raised over $69M with Retool from the very best in startups including Sequoia, YC, Patrick and John @ Stripe, Henrique & Pedro @ Brex, Paul Graham, Nat @ Github, Peter @ Segment, Tomer @ Gusto and Elad Gil to name a few incredible names. Today Retool works with some of the biggest companies in the world from Amazon to Volvo to Mercedes Benz.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way from studying philosophy at Oxford to creating one of the valley's hottest companies in the form of Retool?
2.) How does David analyse pivots today? How does one balance between vision and persistence vs realism and knowing when is the right time to pivot? How did a conversation with John Collison change the course of Retool? What advice does David have for founders on pivoting?
3.) Why does David believe that YC is useful pre-product-market fit but useless post-product-market fit? What elements are so helpful vs not about YC? Why did David raise his Series A as a split between Sequoia and prominent angels? Why was that transformational for the company?
4.) Why was David sceptical of VCs for a long time? Why does David believe VCs are useless pre-product-market fit and useful post-product-market fit? What have been David's biggest takeaways from working with Bryan Schrier @ Sequoia?
5.) Why does David believe that once you are profitable and growing it is actually quite hard to become unprofitable? How does David advise founders considering raising VC vs bootstrapping? How does David know when to allocate resources more aggressively to a segment? What are the signs?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
David’s Favourite Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
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20VC: Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces
Dylan Field is the Founder & CEO @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish and is one of 2020's fastest-growing companies. To date, Dylan has raised over $132M with Figma from some of the best including Sequoia, a16z, Index, Greylock, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. Figma's latest round valued them at a reported $2Bn. Prior to founding Figma, Dylan enjoyed internships at Flipboard, LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dylan made his way from an internship at O'Reilly Media and a Thiel Fellowship to founding Figma, one of the fastest-growing unicorns?
2.) How does Dylan feel about the future of education? What core questions do students need to ask before entering? How does Dylan assess the impact of the Thiel Fellowship today? Why does Dylan believe that everyone should be an intern? What did he take from that experience?
3.) How would Dylan describe his leadership style today? How has it changed over time? How did he get past micro-managing in the early days and learn to delegate? How does Dylan think about insecurity and vulnerability as a young leader today?
4.) What does Dylan foresee as the biggest challenges in Figma's transition from application to platform? How does Dylan evaluate the success of the Figma plugin ecosystem? How does Dylan think about the right cadence to roll out new products? How does Dylan think about catering to power users vs catering to the standard everyday user?
5.) What have been the most significant impacts of COVID for Figma? Why did Dylan choose to adopt a hybrid model for Figma in terms of working styles moving forward? What have been Dylan's biggest lessons of what it takes to attract the very best talent? What works? What does not?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Dylan’s Favourite Book: Snow Crash
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20VC: Hopin, The Breakout Startup of 2020 on Scaling from 10 to 230 People and $174M in Funding in just 13 Months, The 3 Phases of Startup Scaling, How To Lead Remote Teams Effectively, The Future of Events Post-COVID and more
Johnny Boufarhat is the Founder & CEO @ Hopin, one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet, providing an online events platform where you can create engaging virtual events that connect people around the globe. In the last 13 months, Johnny has raised over $174M for Hopin from the likes of Accel, IVP, Slack, Northzone, Coatue, Salesforce and of course, 20VC Fund. With the funding, again in just 13 months, Johnny has grown the team from 10 people to over 210 people in 37 countries. In October of this year, Semil Shah awarded Hopin the label, "The Breakout Tech Startup Of 2020".
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Johnny made his way into the world of startups and how severe health challenges led to his realisation and founding of Hopin?
2.) What have been Johnny's biggest lessons scaling the team from 10 to 235 in just 12 months? What starts to break and when? What does Johnny believe are the 3 stages of startup growth? What have been Johnny's learnings on what it takes to acquire the very best talent?
3.) Why does Johnny believe that remote has so fundamentally changed the game? How does remote culture differ from physical culture? What advice does Johnny have for those shifting from physical to remote? Where does Johnny see so many make mistakes with the remote model?
4.) Why does Johnny believe fundraising is a game of leverage? How does Johnny advise founders to structure their raise? Should they shop their term sheets around? Should founders always be raising? How should they think through a pre-emptive round? How does COVID change the world of fundraising?
5.) What does the world of virtual events look like in a post COVID world? What events will remain virtual? What will not? How does Hopin expand beyond purely events into the much wider "connection" space? How does that look both from M&A and product expansion?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Johnny’s Favourite Book: Nineteen Eighty-Four
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20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset
Reid Hoffman is a Silicon Valley stalwart in the modern technology world. On the investing side, he is a Partner @ Greylock, one of the leading venture firms of the last 2 decades with a portfolio including Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Figma, Appdynamics and Okta to name a few. Reid has led investments in Airbnb, Convoy, Coda and Aurora to name a few. As an operator, Reid co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network and before LinkedIn, Reid served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. If that was not enough, Reid is the co-author of Blitzscaling and two New York Times best-selling books: The Start-up of You and The Alliance.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Reid made his way into the world of startups, came to found Linkedin and how that led to his joining Greylock?
2.) Does Reid consider himself an innate and natural leader today? How has his leadership style changed over time? What elements does Reid struggle with? How has he scaled to these leadership challenges? What does Reid believe are the different strands of leadership?
3.) How does Reid think about what separates the good from the great board members? What is the biggest danger for board members today? How do the very best founders manage their boards? How does Reid think about the weight of his words today?
4.) How does Reid think about the importance of ownership? How does Reid analyse price today? What was the story behind Greylock investing in Airbnb? What did Reid see so clearly and before anyone else saw it? What is the story with Stripe? Why did Reid turn Stripe down?
5.) How does Reid think about ensuring venture partnerships always have a learning mindset? What can be done deliberately to ensure this? Where do many people struggle here? How can partners develop trust within venture partnerships? Where does trust most often break down?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Reid’s Favourite Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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20VC: Stitch Fix Founder Katrina Lake on Growth vs Profitability, Her Biggest Lessons From Working with Bill Gurley at Benchmark and The Importance of Mental Flexibility as a Leader
Katrina Lake is the Founder & CEO @ Stitch Fix, a multi-billion dollar public company, which has brought an entirely new model to retail apparel by combining data science, technology, and personal stylists, to create a unique shopping experience tailored to the individual consumer. Prior to their IPO in 2017, Katrina raised just $42M in venture funding from some of the best in venture including Bill Gurley @ Benchmark and Steve Anderson @ Baseline. In just 6 years Katrina took the company from founding moment to $2BN IPO and was even cash flow positive after just 3 years. If that was not enough, Katrina is also on the board of both Grubhub and Glossier.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Katrina made her way from being an associate at a venture firm to reshaping the world of fashion with Stitch Fix?
2.) On reflection, is Katrina happy that the business was forced to be so capital efficient so early? What did Katrina do to structure the business and its inventory management to preserve cash? How does Katrina think about the balance between growth vs profitability?
3.) What have been some of Katrina's biggest lessons from working with Bill Gurley? How does Katrina ensure not to overweight his opinion on the board? What have been Katrina's biggest lessons on effective board management? How has being on the Grubhub and Glossier board changed the way she operates the Stitch Fix board?
4.) How does Katrina think about imposter syndrome and self-doubt today? How does she remedy it? How does Katrina ensure she remains on the front lines with customers despite being a public company CEO? What benefits are there for founders to stay in the trenches even when a large company?
5.) How does Katrina think on the importance for founders to have a vision today? Where do they need to be flexible? What are some dangers or pitfalls associated with "the vision"? How far are Stitch Fix along in cementing their vision?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Katrina’s Favourite Book: Between The World And Me
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20VC: Robinhood Founder Vlad Tenev on The Single Most Important Thing Leadership is Responsible For, How To Manage Fear and Self-Doubt as a Leader & The Future of Fintech; Bundled or Unbundled
Vlad Tenev is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Robinhood, the company that provides commission-free investing, plus the tools you need to put your money in motion. To date, Vlad has raised over $2.2BN with Robinhood from some of the very best in the business including Sequoia, Greenoaks, Index, DST, Ribbit, IVP, Thrive, NEA, GV and more incredible names. Before Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Vlad made his way from Bulgaria to studying Math at Stanford to founding one of the fastest-growing companies of the decade in Robinhood?
2.) How does Vlad describe his own style of leadership today? How has this changed with the scaling of the business? What phase has been the most challenging? Why does Vlad think so much about "the tempo" of the company? What can you do to ensure the highest tempo?
3.) How does Vlad think about self-doubt as a leader when recognising the sheer size of the Robinhood team today being over 1,000? How does Vlad analyse the role that fear has to play in leadership? How does Vlad manage the weight of expectation? What works? What does not?
4.) What have been Vlad's lessons in what it takes to acquire the very best talent? Where do many founders make mistakes here? How does Vlad think about the role of mentorship with young team members? Why and how does Vlad bet so big on giving young team members responsibility?
5.) How does Vlad assess the current state of the fintech landscape today? Does Vlad believe we are entering a period of bundling or unbundling? Will we see the continued rise in the M&A activity we saw earlier this year? Why? What is likely to change in 2021?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Vlad’s Favourite Book: The Mars Project
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20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Chasing GMV Will Lead To The Wrong Direction, The 2 Crucial Tipping Points For Marketplace Adoption, Why UGC Plays Are Like Marketplaces & How To Determine Between Existential and Non-Existential Risk
Sarah Tavel is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many more. As for Sarah, prior to joining Benchmark, she was a General Partner at another globally renowned firm, Greylock, where she led deals in Sonder and Gixo. Pre-Greylock, Sarah was the first PM @ Pinterest where she led three acquisitions, launched Pinterest internationally, and was responsible for closing their $100m Series C financing.
20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Chasing GMV Will Lead To The Wrong Direction, The 2 Crucial Tipping Points For Marketplace Adoption, Why UGC Plays Are Like Marketplaces & How To Determine Between Existential and Non-Existential Risk
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her way from being the first PM at Pinterest to being a General Partner at one of the world's leading venture firms, Benchmark?
2.) What does Sarah mean when she says, "the small things are not the big things"? How does Sarah determine between existential vs non-existential risk? How does this impact the type of board member Sarah is? How has Sarah seen the best board members engage? Who are they?
3.) Why does Sarah believe that in marketplaces, chasing GMV will lead you in the wrong direction? How does Sarah think about good vs great when it comes to 1.) Average order values? 2.) Repeat purchase rates. 3.) NPS? 4.) Net revenue retention? How should they change with time?
4.) In marketplaces, what is a tipping point? What are the 2 crucial tipping points to be aware of? How can marketplaces ensure demand brings further demand? What can they determine from how demand engages with different suppliers? How does Sarah feel about feedback systems?
5.) Why does Sarah believe that UGC plays are like marketplaces? What lessons can be drawn from TikTok to suggest this? How does Sarah think about her biggest lessons when analysing the growth of DoorDash? What do many not see that is important to recognise?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Sarah’s Favourite Book: Pachinko: The New York Times Bestseller
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20VC: Alexis Ohanian on Why Now Was The Right Time To Start Seven Seven Six, The 2 Very Distinct Types of Deals In Venture & The Unbundling of Social in 2021
Alexis Ohanian is the Founder @ Seven Seven Six, his new fund which just recently announced their first investment leading the $4M seed round for Dispo. Prior to founding Seven Seven Six, Alexis was the Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Initialized Capital, where he backed many a unicorn including Ro, Flexport, Patreon, GOAT just to name a few. Alexis is also the co-founder @ Reddit, commonly referred to as the front page of the internet, their latest valuation priced the company at $3Bn.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) When Alexis left his L Sats to go get waffles, what did he learn about himself? How did that lead to founding Reddit? How did Reddit lead to angel investing? How did that lead to Initialized?
2.) Why did Alexis leave Initialized? Why was now the right time? What worked with Initialized that he has taken with him to Seven Seven Six? What did not work with Initialized that he has learned from? How does he view VC NPS as a result of this and the learnings?
3.) How does Alexis analyse his own relationship to money today? How did his relationship with his mother and her illness impact how he thinks about wealth and happiness? How did he feel when at 22 he sold Reddit? How does he feel about the "keeping up with the Jones'" mentality?
4.) How did having Olympia change how Alexis operates and invests today? How does Alexis define backing projects he would be proud to talk to Olympia about? How does he feel about the type of deals many investors make today?
5.) How did Alexis first meet PG from YC? How did he feel when he heard he believed in him and Steve with Reddit? How did that change how Alexis feels about being the first person to really back someone?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Alexis’ Favourite Book: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Alexis’ Most Recent Investment: Dispo
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20VC: Slack Founder Stewart Butterfield on Leadership Styles, Decision-Making, The 3 Levels of Wealth, IPOs vs Direct Listings & Why Effective Entrepreneurship is Like Parkour
Stewart Butterfield is the Founder & CEO @ Slack, the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems and drive their businesses forward. Prior to their direct listing in June 2019, Stewart raised over $1.3Bn from the likes of Accel, Thrive, Softbank, Kleiner, IVP, T Rowe, GV and a16z to name a few. Prior to founding Slack, Stewart co-founded Flickr, a company he built into one of the largest web services in the world. Due to his many incredible successes, Stewart has been named to the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine, and one of the Top 50 Leaders by BusinessWeek.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Stewart made his way into the world of startups and came to found Flickr? What was his founding moment for the Slack journey?
2.) How does Stewart think about and assess his relationship to money? How has it changed over time? What does Stewart believe are the 3 levels of wealth? How does Stewart think about his identity being tied to the company? Is that a challenge? How does he mitigate it?
3.) How does Stewart describe his management style and philosophy today? How has it changed over time? How does Stewart approach reversible vs irreversible decisions? How does Stewart structure post-mortems? Why does Stewart believe effective entrepreneurship is like parkour?
4.) How does Stewart think about and advise on the debate between direct listing, IPO and SPAC? What has been better/worse and different since making the transition to being a public company? What have been some of the biggest surprises?
5.) Why does Stewart believe that for most companies, comprehension is the reason for the lack of adoption and customer acquisition? How does he look to solve that with Slack? What have been their biggest mistakes on messaging and branding?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Stewart’s Favourite Book: Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box, Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, The Courage To Be Disliked
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20VC: Accel's Dan Levine on The Current State of Seed & Series A, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Solo Capitalists and Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed & Market, People and Product; What To Prioritise?
Dan Levine is a Partner @ Accel, one of the world's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Slack, Qualtrics, UiPath and Deliveroo. As for Daniel, he actually joined Accel in 2010 before leaving to join Dropbox. At Dropbox, he worked on the platform team helping open the platform to third-party developers and launched and managed many of the company’s developer-facing initiatives. Following Dropbox, he rejoined Accel and has led investments in Scale.ai, Mux, Vercel and Sentry to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dan made his way into the world of venture with Accel? How that led to his joining Dropbox? What led to his re-joining Accel 3 years later?
2.) How does Dan assess the current state of the seed and Series A landscape? How does Dan analyse the rise of pre-emptive rounds? How does Dan determine when to lean in and pre-empt vs when not to? What does Dan think is the biggest myth about raising a Series A?
3.) How does Dan analyse multi-stage funds so actively entering seed? What has Accel's seed portfolio data shown? How many went on to raise a Series A? How many did Accel lead? How many companies died? What is the biggest problem this portfolio presents?
4.) How does Dan analyse the trio of people, product and market? How does Dan approach market sizing? How does Dan approach the risk associated with market timing? What risk is he willing to take? What is he not? When can one stretch on market? When is it a stretch too far?
5.) How does Dan evaluate the rise of solo capitalists? What does he see as the core pros and cons of the model? What are the pros and cons of the partnership model like Accel has? How does Dan evaluate the rise of investor personal brands today? What worries him?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Dan’s Favourite Book: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Vintage)
Dan’s Most Recent Investment: Altinity
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20VC: Lessons from Investing in Uber and Airbnb, How To Think Through Bundling vs Unbundling, Late Stage Funds Moving Earlier, Early Stage Funds Moving Later& The Mechanics of Venture That Founders Should Know with Derek Zanutto, General Partner @ Capital
Derek Zanutto is a General Partner @ CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund with investments in the likes of Stripe, UiPath, Looker, Robinhood and Lyft to name a few. At CapitalG, Derek has led investments in Collibra, Dataiku and Armis as well as sitting on numerous boards. Prior to CapitalG, Derek spent a decade investing in such companies as Uber, Airbnb, Lynda.com and CAA at investment firms TPG, Hellman & Friedman and GIC.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Derek made his way from the world of TPG and growth equity to being a GP with Alphabet's independent growth fund, CapitalG?
2.) Does Derek agree with Bill Gurley, "the biggest challenge is the over-supply of capital"? How does Derek see this changing with interest rate changes or lackof? How do interest rate changes impact later stage pricing? How does Derek assess his own relationship to price?
3.) How does Derek approach investments thinking through the bundling vs unbundling lens? What have been some core examples of this over the last decade? How does Derek assess market timing risk? What risks is he willing to take? How does he build a thesis ahead of meeting companies?
4.) What does Derek make of large later stage firms moving earlier and doing Seeds and Series A's? What do entrepreneurs need to know about these firms? What does Derek think about early-stage firms scaling into multi-stage firms? Why is stage specificity so important?
5.) What are the core economics of venture capital that all entrepreneurs need to understand? How do different GPs and funds have different motivations according to fund size? How do different funds approach carry allocation and fees? Why does this matter to founders?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Derek’s Favourite Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Derek’s Most Recent Investment: Armis
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20VC: Zach Weinberg on Whether A Company is a Democracy, The Importance of Ownership, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed and How he Approaches Both Risk and Personal Capital Allocation
Zach Weinberg is a Co-Founder of Operator Partners, operators funding operators, with no outside LPs, just their own capital. Fun fact, 20VC Fund has actually invested with them in 3 companies from Alt, Dooly.ai and Boom Pay. Prior to founding Operator Partners, Zach was the Co-founder/COO of Flatiron Health (acq @Roche for $2b) and before Flatiron Zach co-founded Invite Media (acq @Google for $81m). If that was not enough, Zach has also been an incredibly successful angel in the past with a portfolio including RigUp, Ro, Color, BlueApron and Plaid to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Zach made his way into the world of startups, came to found Flatiron (acq for $2Bn) and how that led to Operator Partners?
2.) How does Zach analyse his own personal capital allocation? How much in funds? How much in cash, equities, direct, credit etc etc? How does Zach analyse his relationship to money? How has it changed over time? How does Zach evaluate his relationship to risk?
3.) What does Zach make of the rise of pre-empted rounds? When should founders takem them vs reject them? How does Zach feel about multi-stage funds re-entering seed aggressively? How does he advise founders? What are the pros and cons of having multi-stage money?
4.) How does Zach think about the importance of ownership? How does Zach analyse the re-investment decision? How does he approach reserve allocation? How does Zach reflect on his own price sensitivity? How has his relationship to price and ownership changed with time?
5.) How does Zach feel about Brian Armstrong's piece on employees bringing their own political and external beliefs into the workplace? Why does Zach believe that companies are not a democracy? Why does Zach believe that we do not live in a democracy any longer?
Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode
Zach's Favourite Book: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Zach's Most Recent Investment: David Energy
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20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh
Barry Eggers is a Founding Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners and currently Chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) Board of Directors. Lightspeed is one of the premier funds of the last decade with homeruns including Snapchat, Affirm, Mulesoft, Nutanix and Stitch Fix. Prior to LSVP, Barry spent close to 6 years as @ Cisco developing Cisco's initial M&A program and leading the company's first wave of acquisitions and integrations.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Barry made his way into the world of venture over 20 years ago and how he came to found one of today's leaders, Lightspeed?
2.) What are the implications of a Biden administration? How does this compare to a Trump administration? What can be done to mitigate the tax concerns around Biden's policies? How does Barry think about each candidate's stance on immigration? What are the challenges here?
3.) How will SPACs change the world of venture? What will it take for them to be viewed in the same class as IPOs? Why are they often better than direct listings? How does the rise of solo capitalists change the state of venture? What does Barry make of rolling funds being born?
4.) What does Barry believe we can do to swing the race pendulum in venture? What were Barry's biggest lessons in taking the Lightspeed partnership from 1 to 10 female partners? How can this be done with ethnic minorities also? What advice does Barry give to his counterpart GPs?
5.) How would Barry describe his own style of board membership? How has it changed over time? How does Barry keep his head in boards with many around him are losing theirs? What advice does Barry give to new board members adopting board seats for the first time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Barry’s Favourite Book: Channel Kindness: Stories of Kindness and Community
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20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member
David Helgason is the Founder @ Unity, the company that gives content creators the tools to create innovative RT3D experiences and deliver better processes for almost every industry. Prior to their IPO in 2020, Unity raised from the likes of Sequoia, Thrive, DFJ, SilverLake and then individuals including Max Levchin and VMWare's Diane Greene. If that was not enough, David is currently a Partner @ Nordic Makers, a group of ten top Nordic angels working together to be the best angel investors in the Nordics. David also serves on the board of Labster, Realm.io and Quizup.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way from founding Unity in a cafe in Denmark to the $10Bn+ public company it is today?
2.) How would David describe his leadership style? How has it changed over time? What were the biggest challenges David faced as the Founding CEO?
3.) What was the decision-making behind David's transition out of the CEO role? What was challenging? What was key to make the transition successful? How did David know John Riccitiello was the right person for the role? How does David advise other founders contemplating the same?
4.) How does David analyse his own board management style? What are the most important elements a board member can do to help the company and founder? What makes Roelof Botha such a special board member to have? How does David advise new board members today to be successful?
5.) Why does David believe running a company is like a liberal art? How does David think about the importance of vision? How does David assess the current state of the European tech landscape? What can be done to improve it? How can investor approach change for the better?
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20VC: Sequoia's Roelof Botha on His Biggest Lessons Working Alongside Don Valentine, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone, Leading Sequoia's US Business and What Sequoia Do To Retain Their Edge at the Top & The Crucible Moments That Define Startup Success
Roleof Botha is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Instacart, Stripe, UiPath, Zoom, the list goes on. As for Roelof, at Sequoia he has led rounds into the likes of YouTube, Instagram, Eventbrite, Square, MongoDB, 23andMe and Unity Technologies to name a few. Before joining the world of venture, Roelof was the CFO @ Paypal playing a key role in their hyper-growth from 2000-2003.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Roelof go from actuary in South Africa to CFO @ Paypal? What were his biggest lessons from seeing Paypal burn $10M per month? How did Paypal lead to his joining Sequoia as a Partner?
2.) Market Evaluation: Does Roelof agree that the market is crazy today? How does today compare to prior vintages? How does Roelof assess the compression of fundraising timelines? With compressed timelines, how does he build relationships of trust with founders?
3.) Founder Evaluation: What were Roelof's lessons on founder assessment from Don Valentine? What matrix did Don teach Roelof to assess founders on? How does Roelof feel about the rise of competitive rounds? When should founders take them vs remain heads down on execution?
4.) Investment Mentality: How did Roelof prevent becoming too confident when early investments went well? How does Roelof prevent relying on past failures as a reason for turning down opportunities today? What can investors do to retain a very flexible mind? Why does Roelof believe you are only as good as your next investment?
5.) Sequoia's Edge: How does Roloef think about what it takes for Sequoia to retain it's edge at the top? How does Roloef measure the success of the Sequoia scout program? How did they structure it? How has the structure changed? What do they plan to do moving forward?
6.) Board Membership: How would Roloef evaluate his current style of board membership? How has that style changed over time? What elements did he find challenging? What advice would Roelof give to new board members adopting their first board seats?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Roelof’s Favourite Book: Man's Search For Meaning
Roelof’s Most Recent Investment: mmhmm
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20VC: Intercom Founder, Eoghan McCabe on How To Deal with the Weight of Expectation, Having Your Identity Tied To Your Company, How To Be Your Authentic Self Even with Stakeholders & Why There Are No Rules
Eoghan McCabe is a technology entrepreneur. He's started a number of companies, the most notable of which is Intercom, the conversational relationship platform. He was CEO of Intercom for nearly 10 years, during which he grew the company to hundreds of millions in annual revenue, nearly 700 employees, and raised nearly $250M from the likes of Kleiner Perkins, Index, Bessemer, and ICONIQ. He's also invested in dozens of companies including Stripe, Figma, SuperHuman, and Coda. In the summer of 2020 he moved to the role of Chairman of Intercom.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eoghan made his way into the world of startups from Ireland and came to build one of the Valley's greats with Intercom?
2.) How does Eoghan thinking about living and thriving with a chip on one's shoulder? What does Eoghan advise in terms of one's search for their true selves? What were his biggest learnings in his search? What does Eoghan advise people who maybe feel they have lost themselves?
3.) Having been CEO of a $Bn company for close to 10 years, how does Eoghan think about dealing with the weight of expectation placed on shoulders? How did he manage it? How does he think about his identity being so tied to his company?
4.) In terms of being one's authentic self, how can one achieve this while also respecting their stakeholders who may hold different views? How does Eoghan think about being an authentic leader vs bowing down to the demands of your team? What is the right balance?
5.) Why does Eoghan think that vision can actually be limiting? How does Eoghan think about stress testing one's vision and ambition? What adversity from early VCs did Eoghan have to fight against? How does Eoghan encourage dissent and debate within his teams?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eoghan’s Fave Book: Breathe: simple breathing techniques for a calmer, happier life
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20VC: Cyan Banister on Her Relationship To Money, Risk, Her Investment Decision-Making Process, Why We Will See A Reckoning in the Early Stage Market, Her Biggest Takeaways from HQ Trivia & The Future of Silicon Valley
Cyan Banister is one of the most successful and renowned early-stage investors of the last decade. Her portfolio includes the likes of SpaceX, Uber, Affirm, Opendoor Postmates, Niantic and Thumbtack to name a few. Today Cyan is a Partner @ Long Journey Ventures, joining the team there following a 4-year stint @ Founders Fund where she led deals in both Niantic and HQ Trivia. Prior to Founders Fund, Cyan was a super successful operator and angel, co-founding Zivity and before that being an early employee at Ironport, leading to their acquisition by Oracle.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Cyan made her way into the world of startups? How SpaceX came to be her 1st angel investment? How that led to her joining the world of VC?
2.) How does Cyan think about and assess her relationship to money? Why does someone believe she had a fear or loathing of money? What made Cyan the capitalist she is today? How does Cyan analyse her relationship to risk? Has Cyan always trusted her own convictions?
3.) How does Cyan think about her own investment decision-making process? What were Cyan's biggest lessons from her experience with HQ Trivia? How did she change how she interacts with founders pre-investment? Why does Cyan never Google someone before meeting?
4.) How does Cyan think about price sensitivity today? Why does she believe there will be a reckoning? How will this shake out in terms of who succeeds and who fails? Why is Cyan in favour of party rounds? How does she think about VCs with sharp elbows?
5.) Why does Cyan believe SF is eating itself? What can be done to reinvigorate the city positively? What can be done to solve much of the homelessness problem? Why does Chesa Boudin never convict anyone? Why does Cyan believe her "BLM tweet is not spicy"? Why is Cyan fundamentally sad and worried for the current state of the world?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Cyan’s Fave Book: Snow Crash
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20VC: How To Determine The Risks To Take vs To Pass On, Should Founders Meet Investors When Not Raising & The Most Important Non-Obvious Role of the CEO with Spike Lipkin, Founder & CEO @ Newfront Insurance
Spike Lipkin is the Founder & CEO @ Newfront Insurance, the modern insurance brokerage empowering risk management experts with advanced technology to deliver innovative solutions to their clients'. To date, Spike has raised from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, Meritech and 20VC Fund. Prior to founding Newfront, Spike was one of the first employees at Opendoor, where he helped grow the team from 5 people to an enterprise value of over $5Bn today. Prior to Opendoor, Spike was an investor at Blackstone, where he served on the startup team that built Invitation Homes into the largest owner of single-family real estate in the United States.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Spike made his way from banking to be one of the first operators at Opendoor to founding the next generation of insurance with Newfront?
2.) What were some of the biggest takeaways for Spike from his time at Opendoor as employee #5? How does Spike approach prioritisation? How does he determine what to delegate vs what to control?
3.) How would Spike describe his own style of leadership? How has Spike needed to change his style with the business? What does Spike believe is his biggest weakness as a leader? What is he doing to confront it and grow as a leader? What is the most important thing a leader can do?
4.) How does Spike think about what it takes to acquire the very best talent? What does his framework for hiring look like? Why did Spike decide to hire a COO? Why was then the right time? How does Spike think about the balance between hiring external vs promoting internal?
5.) Why did Spike believe it was important not to announce any of his prior fundraises? How did Spike approach investor selection with Newfront? Does Spike believe founders should meet with VCs between fundraises? Which angel has done the most to move the needle for the company? How?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Spike’s Fave Book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
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20VC: CRV's George Zachary on His Relationship To Money and How it has Changed Over Time, Why The Best Founders Have Often Experienced Parental or Home Instability and The Stories Behind Investing in Unicorns; PillPack, Yammer and Udacity
George Zachary is a General Partner @ CRV, one of the nation's oldest and most successful early-stage venture capital firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, DoorDash, Dropbox, Niantic and many more. As for George, today at the firm he focuses on advancing health through revolutionary computer science, centred around bio-engineering. During his incredible 16 year tenure at CRV, he has led deals in the likes of PillPack, Udacity, Scribd and HealthIQ. Before joining CRV, George was a General Partner @ Mohr Davidow Ventures for over 6 years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How George made his way into the world of venture over 21 years ago and how he came to be a General Partner @ CRV 16 years ago?
2.) How did seeing the booms and busts of the dot com and 08 impacts George's investment mindset? What is the right way to voice concerns in an internal investment discussion? How does George now view capital intensity? How does it impact his conviction and check size?
3.) Why does George believe one should invest in founders who do not need their investors help? Why does George believe the best founders have experienced some form of parental instability? How does George detect the psychological need to win when he meets founders? What are the signs?
4.) How would George describe his own philosophy of board membership? How has it changed over time? What are the 2 control functions that a board member has? What advice does George give to new board members today? Where do many young board members make mistakes?
5.) How does George analyse his own personal relationship to money? How has it changed over the years? How did his relationship to money change his relationship with people? Was that challenging? How did he cope with it? How does he advise others who experience the same?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
George's Favourite Book: Foundation Trilogy
George’s Most Recent Investment: Glympse Bio
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20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves
David Lawee founded CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, in 2013, drawing on his experience both at Google and as a serial entrepreneur. Since then, he has helped transform high-potential startups into some of the most highly valued businesses of our generation, including Airbnb, Lyft, Snap, Robinhood, Credit Karma, Oscar, Lending Club and Thumbtack. Prior to CapitalG, David played a pivotal role in Google’s growth story--first as Google’s Chief Marketing Officer and then as the instrumental VP of corporate development where his group spearheaded over 100 acquisitions for the company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of startups, came to be the first CMO @ Google and how that led to his founding CapitalG?
2.) Having operated and invested through both the dot com and 08', how has seeing the booms and busts impacted David's investing mindset? How does David think about temporal diversification today with CapitalG? Why does David believe diversification is largely overrated?
3.) How does David think about portfolio construction today, given CapitalG is a growth fund? How does David compare early-stage to growth today? How does David think about loss ratios at growth? How does David benchmark good vs great from a multiple perspective at growth?
4.) How does CapitalG approach investment decision making today? How does David avoid consensus thinking/following the crowd when it comes to deals? Why does David believe investment clubs operate much more successfully than partnerships? How does that change the structure for CapitalG?
5.) How has David seen himself evolve and develop as a board member of the years? What type of board member would David say he is today? How does that change with the founder? Who is the most memorable board member David has sat on a board with?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
David’s Most Recent Investment: Albert
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20VC: Arlan Hamilton: "We Have Come For Cake, Not The Crumbs", Arlan's Plan To Return $1Bn in 10 Years, Why Arlan Plans To Giveaway or Invest 90% of Her Wealth & What The LP Class Can Do To Ensure More Under-Represented Managers Get Funded
Arlan Hamilton is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Backstage Capital, the seed fund that has paved the way investing exclusively in startups that are led by underrepresented founders. Backstage Capital also expanded their model and now have Backstage Accelerator working with companies across 4 cities. Last month, Mark Cuban gave Arlan $6M to invest in underestimated founders (ArlanWasHere Investments Fund I). Arlan is also an Author of "It's About Damn Time". If you would like to invest with Arlan, you can, check out BackstageCrowd.com with over 2,000 accredited and non-accredited investors, they just completed their 6th deal and $1m raised within 3 months of launch.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Arlan made her way from the airport floor to founding her own venture firm, Backstage Capital and writing a book, "It's About Damn Time"?
2.) How does Arlan assess her own relationship to money and wealth? What is Arlan's thinking around her desire to give away 90% of her wealth? How does Arlan evaluate her own appetite for risk? How has that changed over time?
3.) From a strategic perspective, what are some core elements to Arlan's strategy that are not obvious? What are the main misconceptions that remain with regards to under-represented founders? What does Arlan believe are the leading indicators when assessing founders today?
4.) What does Arlan believe have been the biggest challenges in building the firm that is Backstage? What have been the core breaking points in the scaling of people and strategy? How does Arlan think about the relationship between brand vs reputation? What does Arlan believe are the main misconceptions people have about her?
5.) How would Arlan like to see the world of venture change over the next decade? What can LPs do to encourage more under-represented founders are backed? How can this be measured? Who should be held accountable?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Arlan’s Fave Book: What I Know For Sure by Oprah Winfrey
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20VC: What Is Founder Narrative Fit and How to Detect and Invest In It, How To Avoid Consensus Thinking When Investing, Price Sensititivity; When To Pay Up vs Stay Disciplined & From New York Times To General Catalyst; Why Venture and Journalism are Not S
Katherine Boyle is a Partner @ General Catalyst, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Snapchat, Airbnb, Canva, Cazoo, the list goes on. As for Katherine, at GC she has led deals in game-changing companies such as Anduril, Nova Credit, Spring Discovery and Airmap to name a few. Prior to General Catalyst, Katherine entered the world of venture with Founders Fund and before that spent an incredible 4 years at The Washington Post where Katherine investigated entrepreneurship in many forms.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Katherine made her way from investigating entrepreneurship at The Wall St Journal to being an intern at Founders Fund to today, being a Partner @ General Catalyst?
2.) Why does Katherine believe that journalism is like venture? Why does Katherine believe there are two different styles of venture? What were Katherine's biggest takeaways from her formative years in venture with Founders Fund? How did that impact her investing mindset?
3.) What does Katherine mean when she says she "invests solely on founder narrative fit"? Are there leading indicators of this fit? What advice did Katherine take from her conversation with Mike Moritz pre VC career? How does Katherine strategically avoid consensus thinking and decisions?
4.) How does Katherine approach market sizing? How does Katherine think about strategic insertion into niches that expand to much larger markets? How does Katherine assess market timing? How does Katherine determine the velocity of a market tailwind? What is an example of this?
5.) How does Katherine evaluate the rise of pre-empted rounds today? What advice does Katherine give to founders considering taking multi-stage money at seed? Why did it make sense for Anduril? How does Katherine gain the time of the founders when they are not raising?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Katherine’s Fave Book: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
Katherine’s Most Recent Investment: Ophelia
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20VC: Anduril Founder, Palmer Luckey: "I Am Here To Build a $50Bn Company", How Palmer Evaluates His Relationship To Money Pre & Post Oculus' $2.3Bn Exit & Why The US DOD Needs To Be More Like China in It's Approach
Palmer Luckey is the Founder @ Anduril Industries, founded on the premise of radically transforming the defence capabilities of the United States and its allies by fusing artificial intelligence with the latest hardware advancements. To date, Palmer has raised over $385M with Anduril from Founders Fund, a16z, Elad Gil, Spark Capital, Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC to name a few. Prior to changing the world of defence, Palmer founded Oculus VR where he designed the Oculus Rift. Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for $2.3Bn in 2014.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Palmer made his way into the world of startups, made his way from trailer to selling Oculus for $2.3Bn to changing the defence industry with Anduril today?
2.) How does Palmer evaluate his own relationship to money? How has that changed since his $2.3Bn Oculus exit? How does Palmer assess his relationship to risk? How does Palmer approach the correlations between money, risk and happiness?
3.) What were some of Palmer's biggest takeaways from his time scaling Oculus? How have they informed his mindset with Anduril? What worked? What did not work? How has Palmer changed as a leader? How does Palmer approach personal development? How does he optimise for it?
4.) Palmer scaled Oculus to 1,400 people in 1 year, where do organisations break with scale? Why does Palmer believe, "you never want to play yourself"? Where does he feel his biggest weakness is as a scaling leader? How does Palmer approach hiring at scale yet maintaining culture?
5.) From a defence standpoint, why does Palmer feel the US needs to be more like the Chinese? Why is the DoD so poor at investing in innovation? What does it take to sell into the DoD really effectively? Why have the only 2 successful defence companies been founded by billionaires?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Palmer’s Fave Book: The Three-Body Problem
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20VC: The 4 Phases of Effective Decision-Making, The No 1 Quality of Good Decisions, How To Approach Effective OKR Setting, & How To Optimise and Improve Your Operating Cadence with Shishir Mehrotra, Founder & CEO @ Coda
Shishir Mehrotra is the Founder & CEO @ Coda, the startup that brings all of your words and data into a flexible all-in-one doc. To date, Shishir has raised over $140M from some great names including Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, NEA and Homebrew to name a few. Prior to founding Coda, Shishir spent an incredible 6 years at Google in a couple of different roles; first as Director of Product for Youtube Monetisation and then moving to Youtube VP of Engineering, Product and UX. Before Google, Shishir was with Microsoft for 6 years as a Director of Program Management. Shishir also serves on the board of Spotify.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Shishir made his way into the world of tech, came to be VP of Engineering, Product and UX @ Youtube and how it led to founding Coda?
2.) What is the No 1 quality of a good decision? How does Shishir think through reversible vs irreversible decisions? What are the 4 phases of decision-making? When should decisions be based on speed vs not? How can teams adjust questions to come to more productive outcomes?
3.) How does Shishir encourage debate and dissent within team discussions? How can leaders build deep trust with their teams? How can leaders create true democracy for idea sharing and meritocracy? Should ideas always be acted on immediately? What are the pros and cons?
4.) How does Shishir think about and evaluate his own operating cadence? How has this changed over time? How does Shishir approach time allocation? What have been his core learnings? How does Shishir divide his time between proactive and reactive tasks?
5.) How does Shishir approach OKR setting? What can leaders do to create aspirational and inspirational goals? How should goals be correctly communicated across orgs? How many OKRs should one team/person have? How should attribution across OKRs be given?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Shishir’s Fave Book: Switch: How to change things when change is hard
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20VC: The Chainsmokers on Raising Their First $35M Fund and Entering The World of Venture, Dealing with Vulnerability and Insecurity Today & How Music and Venture Compare; The Similarities and Differences
Alex Pall and Drew Taggart are the Founders of The Chainsmokers and Mantis. The Chainsmokers are one of the most sought after musical acts of our time. As for Mantis, just last week they announced their first $35M venture fund and have backing from Ron Conway, Mark Cuban and Keith Rabois. They have already invested in hotly contested rounds for Fiton and Loansnap. Drew and Alex also own a production studio, are stakeholders in the spirit brand JaJa Tequila and last year co-founded the anti-scalper ticketing platform Yellowheart.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Drew and Alex made their way into the world of tech and startups and how they came to found a venture firm with Mantis?
2.) Why did Alex and Drew decide now was the right time for the fund? What did they look for in their LPs? How do they use their LPs to strategically help their companies? What is their preferred stage, sector? Do they have ownership requirements?
3.) Are Alex and Drew nervous about making the move into venture? If everyone has a chip on their shoulder, where does the chip on their shoulder come from? How do they think about their own vulnerabilities? How do they manage them? What works? What does not?
4.) What ways do Alex and Drew most like to work with their founders? Where do they provide outsized value? What are some examples of this? How do they think about working with VCs to get into the best rounds? How do they want to position Mantis in the ecosystem?
5.) With the tequila brand, the film production company and now the venture fund, how do they think about the expansion of "The Chainsmokers Empire"? What does this look like in 10 years? How would they like it to expand and grow?
Items Mentioned In Todays Episode
Drew's Favourite Book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on How To Assess Your Relationship To Risk and Money, Why San Francisco Is A Case Study For The Greatest Squandering of Wealth in History & Why Complexity Increases Exponentially with Scale
Austen Allred is the Founder & CEO @ Lambda School, the startup that remotely trains people to become a web developer or data scientist and the students pay no tuition until they are hired. Just last month, Lambda's $74M Series C was announced led by Gigafund bringing their total funding to date to over $129M with prior investors including Stripe, Bedrock, GV, Gigafund and GGV to name a few. Prior to founding Lambda, Austen was Senior Manager for Growth @ LendUp and before that co-founded Grasswire.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Austen made his way into startups having slept in a Honda Civic and how he went from homeless to rockstar founder @ Lambda?
2.) How does Austen evaluate his own attitude to risk? How does Austen think about downside protection today? How has this changed over time? How does Austen feel about founders taking secondaries? How does Austen think about his own relationship to money?
3.) Having raised his Series C last month, why did Austen choose the investors he did? How did the round progress? What made Gigafund different to alternate options? What makes the best board members in Austen's mind? What makes the worst?
4.) What have been the most challenging elements for Austen of scaling the team? How does complexity change with time in team scaling? Why did Austen bring in a COO? What did he look for in the role? How does Austen advise others on bringing in a COO?
5.) Why does Austen believe that post-COVID we will never go back to the valley as we knew it? Why does Austen believe the valley represents the biggest potential squandering of wealth in history? How does Austen evaluate the government intervention we have seen?
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20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
Ravi Gupta is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Instacart, Stripe, UiPath, Zoom, the list goes on. As for Ravi, prior to Sequoia, he spent 4 years as COO & CFO @ Instacart playing an integral role in their hyper-growth journey. Before that Ravi spent 10 years as a Director @ KKR.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ravi made his way from KKR to being one of the key execs leading Instacart? How Instacart led to Ravi becoming a Partner @ Sequoia?
2.) When thinking about team, what does Ravi believe is the single most important question to ask? How does Ravi determine between good and great when assessing talent? What are the leading indicators? What have been Ravi's lessons on what it takes to acquire those great talents?
3.) How does Ravi think about and approach prioritisation today? How does Ravi analyse what to delegate vs what to control? Should you get good at your weaknesses and double down on strengths? How does Ravi think about vulnerability within leadership? How did he show that vulnerability as a leader at Instacart?
4.) In joining Sequoia, what has Ravi been most impressed with in regards to the team? What has he been most surprised by? Why is Ravi so bullish unanimous decision-making is right? How do founders determine which Sequoia Partner will be on their board?
5.) How does Ravi think about what it takes to be the very best board member? Who is the best board member Ravi has worked with? What made them so special? What advice does Ravi give to new board members adopting board seats for the first time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ravi’s Fave Book: Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?
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20VC: Calm Founder Alex Tew on What It Takes To Build Viral Products Today, The Current State of Customer Acquisition Costs, What Makes The Best Brands
Alex Tew is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO @ Calm, the #1 App for Meditation and Sleep allowing you to find your calm, sleep more, stress less and live better. To date, the company has raised over $143M in funding from some of the best including Lightspeed, Insight, TPG and then some very cool names such as Ashton Kutcher, Harry Styles, Brad Feld and Jason Calacanis. Prior to Calm Alex founded numerous other startups including PopJam, Pixelotto and most famously rose to internet fame with his founding of The Million Dollar Homepage.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex went from playing Fifa with Michael Acton Smith in Berwick St, London to founding one of the hottest startups in the valley, Calm?
2.) What does Alex believe the very best brands do today? How do they message? How do they present? How do they divide opinion? How did Alex think about the early Calm brand? How has it changed? How does Alex advise others looking to build a company brand?
3.) Does Alex agree with Peter Fenton, "there is a lack of free and open distribution"? How does Alex analyse the economics for customer acquisition costs today? What is a good paid vs organic ratio? How do CACS change over time in Alex's experience?
4.) What have been Alex's biggest learnings on what it takes to build a viral product? Where do many people go wrong? Why does Alex believe pressure is the enemy of creativity? Does Alex believe people should create time for creative thought? What does Alex do to stimulate idea creation?
5.) How has Alex seen himself evolve and develop as a leader over the last 5 years? What have been the hardest elements to scale? How does Alex think about effective delegation? What have been Alex's biggest lessons on what it takes to hire A* people consistently?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
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20VC: a16z's Angela Strange on Why Every Company Will Be A Fintech Company, How Founders Should Think About Niches and Optimal Insertion Points, How To Transition To Become The System of Record & Are We Entering A Period of Bundling Or Unbundling for Fint
Angela Strange is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Github, Slack, Airbnb, Asana and more. As for Angela, she largely focuses on investments in financial services and is currently a board member of Addi, SynapseFi, and Tally. Prior to a16z, Angela was a product manager at Google where she launched and grew Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS into two of Google's most successful mobile products.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Angela made her way into the world of venture and came to be one of the leading fintech VCs with Andreesen Horowitz?
2.) Why does Angela believe that every company is going to be a fintech company? What is driving this shift? How does removing the barriers to entry for more products change both product quality and cost? How does Angela think about the role of regulation here?
3.) How does Angela think about what makes the best insertion points? How big does the initial wedge into the market have to be? When do you need to be able to prove you can transition from the insertion to the wider market? How does Angela fundamentally assess market size today?
4.) How does one transition to being the system of record? Do you have to be the system of record from day 1? Which examples are most striking for Angela on becoming a system of record? What are the biggest challenges in making this transition? Which metric tells you if you have become it?
5.) Does Angela think we are in a period of bundling or unbundling? What are the leading indicators of each? How does Angela assess the Fintech M&A market today? Will we continue to see large consolidatory moves in the form of Credit Karma, Plaid etc etc?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Angela’s Fave Book: Investing: The Last Liberal Art
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20VC: Biggest Lessons from Working with John Doerr, How Founders Can Have Discussions of Vulnerability with Their Board and Investors & Marrying Another Founder; The Pros, Cons and Ways To Make it Succeed with Alyson Friedensohn, Co-Founder & CEO @ Modern
Alyson Friedensohn is the Founder & CEO @ Modern Health, a one-stop solution for employee mental well-being through evidence-based support and digital content. To date, Alyson has raised over $45M in funding from some of the best in the business including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, John Doerr, 01 Advisors and Katrina Lake to name a few. Prior to founding Modern Health, Alyson was a Product Partner for Operations at Collective Health and before that was an operations manager @ Keas (acquired by Welltok).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alyson made her way into the world of startups and came to change how we think about mental health with Modern Health?
2.) How does Alyson think about and assess her own psychology? How does Alyson deal with crisis modes? What works? What does not? What is the driver for Alyson to get her through the very toughest of times? How does Alyson approach her own attitude to risk?
3.) What is Alyson's biggest pieces of advice for non-technical founders? What are the biggest challenges Alyson has had to overcome as a non-technical founder? How did she do it? How did Alyson strategically invest in the sales process? What worked? What did not? How does Alyson think about the balance of hitting sales quota and mental health?
4.) With some of the best VCs in the world, how did Alyson approach the process of investor selection? What can VCs do to build that relationship of trust with their founders? How does multi-stage VCs investing impact whether the founder remains in a "sales process" for the next round? How does Alyson temper the weight of John Doerr's words?
5.) What have been Alyson's biggest lessons in making it work marrying another founder? What works? What is challenging? How do they as a couple think about switching off? How does Alyson advise Harry on his own love life?!
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alyson’s Fave Book: How to Win Friends and Influence People
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20VC: SPACs. What Are They? Why Now? How Do They Change The Venture Landscape? Are They Better Than IPOs & Direct Listings? How Should Founders Think About Them? Kevin Hartz & Troy Steckenrider @ A*
Kevin Hartz is Co-Founder & Partner @ A*, a newly listed special acquisition company which raised $200M to acquire and take public a tech startup. Kevin is also the Co-Founder, former CEO, and Chairman Eventbrite (NYSE: EB). Before Eventbrite, Kevin was the Co-Founder & former CEO of online money transfer service, Xoom (acquired by PayPal for $1.1B). Kevin is also one of the most successful early-stage investors in the business with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb (Seed, Series A), Uber (Series B), Pinterest (Seed, Series A), Trulia (first check) and PayPal (Seed).
Troy Steckenrider is Kevin's co-founder and Partner @ A*. Prior to A*, Troy was COO @ ZeroDown changing the landscape for homeownership with $136M in funding. Before ZeroDown, Troy spent 5 years at Opendoor as Director of Capital Markets. Before that hyper-growth experience at Opendoor, Troy enjoyed roles at both Bain Private Equity and McKinsey.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Troy and Kevin came together to co-found A*? What is a SPAC? What are Kevin and Troy looking to achieve with the SPAC?
2.) What does Kevin believe are the primary drivers for the rise in SPAC's over the last few years? How will they change the structure of both the VC and startup industry? How will the SPAC landscape evolve over the next few years? What is the biggest challenge they face?
3.) Why does Kevin believe that the fee structure for SPACs is egregious? How would they like to change the incentive structure? How does the timeline for a SPAC transaction compare to that of an IPO? How does the fee structure compare when comparing SPACs to banks in IPOs?
4.) Why did Kevin and Troy choose $200M for the right size for their first SPAC? How does the size of the SPAC determine the type of company the SPAC will merge with? What are Kevin and Troy looking for in their partner company?
5.) What does the fundraising process look like for a SPAC? How do SPAC sponsors deal with the challenge that LPs call pull out if they do not like the proposed partner deal? When evaluating SPACs, what do investors look to invest because of? What makes A* special?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Troy’s Fave Book: Churchill: Walking with Destiny
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20VC: PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada on A Leader’s Relationship To Risk, Insecurity, Making Decisions with Imperfect Data & What Successful Board Management Looks Like
Jennifer Tejada is the CEO @ PagerDuty, the company that provides a real-time operations platform ensuring less downtime for your digital services. Prior to their IPO in 2019 PagerDuty raised funding from some of the best in the business including Accel, a16z, Baseline, Bessemer and Harrison Metal to name a few. As for Jennifer, prior to PagerDuty, she was CEO of Keynote Systems leading to their acquisition by Dynatrace. Before Keynote, Jennifer was Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Mincom, leading them to their acquisition by ABB. If that was not enough, Jennifer is also on the The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jennifer made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be one of the leading enterprise CEOs today with PagerDuty? How does Jen advise graduates on joining a startup vs large incumbent?
2.) How does Jen analyse and evaluate her relationship to risk? What does Jen do to remove herself from her environment and make the clearest decisions? How has Jen's decision-making process changed? How does Jen encourage debate and free thought sharing internally?
3.) How does Jen think about the role of insecurity within leadership? What would Jen say are her biggest insecurities? How does Jen manage them and mitigate them today? What works? What does not? Why does Jen believe data is the key to overcoming insecurities?
4.) What have been Jen's biggest lessons on what successful board management looks like? What separates good vs great board members? How can CEO's structure their board in an optimal way? What do they need? What do they not need? How does scale change this?
5.) How does Jen think her style of leadership has changed over the years? What have been Jen's lessons on what it takes to both acquire and retain the very best execs? Where do many go wrong here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jennifer’s Fave Book: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
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20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed
Sahil Lavingia is the Founder and CEO @ Gumroad, the company that helps creators do more of what they love. With Gumroad, Sahil has raised funding from an all-star list of investors including Accel, Kleiner Perkins, First Round and then Max Levchin, Chris Sacca, Ron Conway and Naval Ravikant on the individual side. However, most recently Sahil has made waves launching one of the first rolling funds on AngelList with his being $6M per year. In the past, Sahil has backed the likes of Lambda School, Figma, HelloSign and Haus to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Sahil make his way into the world of startups and angel investing? What were his biggest takeaways from being employee #2 at Pinterest? How did that experience impact his mindset?
2.) Why did Sahil decide to make his new fund an AngelList rolling fund? How is it structured? Does Sahil think this will represent a seismic shift in early stage investing? Is this a game of the 1%? Why does Sahil think early-stage remains so undervalued? How will this impact Series A pricing?
3.) How does Sahil assess his own price sensitivity today? How does Sahil think about the right way to turn down a founder? Where do many go wrong? How does Sahil feel about the rise of pre-empted rounds? How does Sahil advise seed founders with offers from multi-stage firms?
4.) What does Sahil believe founders care most about today in their investors base? How does Sahil think about investor brand and distribution? How does Sahil analyse the pros and cons of party rounds? How does Sahil advise founders on constructing their early cap table?
5.) How does Sahil think about his relationship to risk and to money? How did Sahil deal with it when his investors wrote off his company? How did Sahil feel about the weight of expectation placed on his shoulders at such a young age? How did he deal with this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sahil’s Fave Book: How to Win Friends and Influence People
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20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty
Ben Rubin is the Founder & CEO @ /talk, the anti-meeting tool for fast, decentralised conversations. Prior to co-founding /talk, Ben was the Co-Founder & CEO @ Houseparty, where he scaled the product to millions of users and raised over $70M in funding from the likes of Sequoia, Greylock and Entree Capital to name a few. In addition over the last few years Ben has enjoyed roles at Sequoia as a Scout and then also at Benchmark as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ben made his way into the world of startups and came to found Life on Air, later turning into Meerkat and Houseparty?
2.) What were Ben's key learnings from the Houseparty scaling experience? Why are the traditional metrics we use to measure startup success (DAU, MAU etc) insufficient? What is the nuance to metrics? How does Ben think about being first to market vs being the best to market?
3.) How does Ben believe the product principles differ when comparing the 0-1 stage vs 10-100 stage? How does Ben think about where to be rigorous on product? How does Ben advise founders to discover the key guiding product principle? What was it for Ben with Meerkat?
4.) Meerkat pivoted to Houseparty 3 months after having raised $40M, how did Ben communicate that to the board? How did they respond? How does Ben believe the best boards operate? What does Ben most look for in his board members? Where do many go wrong with board management?
5.) From the team side, when in hypergrowth, when do things start to break? What profiles are usually the first to break? Does that mean one should not hire those profiles? What can the leader do to create that intimacy and trust amongst the team?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ben’s Fave Book: Seneca: The Shortness of Life
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20VC: Why Entrepreneurs Care Less About Firm Brand at Seed, How LPs Should Think About GP Commit & How The World of LPs and Fundraising Will Change Post COVID with Apurva Mehta, Managing Partner @ Summit Peak Investments
Apurva Mehta is the Managing Partner @ Summit Peak Investments, investing in early stage venture capital funds and making direct co-investments. To date they have backed the likes of Raymond Tonsing, Lachy Groom and Josh Buckley to name a few on the fund side and then on the direct side, invested in Airtable, Virta Health and Sourcegraph. Prior to founding Summit Peak, Apurva spent 7 years as the Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Cook's Children's Hospital and before that spent 3 years as Director of Portfolio Investments at The Juilliard School.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Apurva make his way into the world of fund investing? How did that lead to his founding Summit Peak and also becoming a GP?
2.) How does Apurva think about how much importance to place on references when diligencing managers? What reference types mean a lot? Which mean less? Why does Apurva still believe early-stage is the most inefficient segment of the venture landscape?
3.) How does Apurva think about GP commits? Is it fair to have a required benchmark? How does Apurva advise founders on LP concentration limits? When is one LP too much of a fund? How does Apurva advise managers on selling a stake in the management company?
4.) As a fund of funds, how does Apurva approach fund portfolio construction today? How does this differ between the fund portfolio vs the direct portfolio? How does Apurva think about the compression of fundraising timelines both with GPs and Founders? Why does Apurva believe founders at the early-stage care less about firm brand today?
5.) How does Apurva feel about investing in managers he has not met in person? How does the GP/LP fundraising process need to change? How does COVID change the fundraising process for venture funds? How will LPs react to these changes?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Apurva’s Fave Book: Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Apurva's Most Recent Investment: Sourcegraph
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20VC: Why Few Firms Are Doing True Early Stage Investing Today, Why Founders Should Spend Time with Analysts When Raising & The Rise of Pre-Empting Rounds and How To Know When To Engage vs Wait with Anna Khan, General Partner @ CRV
Anna Khan is a General Partner @ CRV, one of the pre-eminent firms of Silicon Valley stretching over what is now an incredible 18 funds. In their portfolio, they have the likes of Airtable, Doordash, Postman and PillPack to name a few. As for Anna, prior to joining CRV, she spent an incredible 6 years at Bessemer investing in the likes of Intercom, NewVoiceMedia, RainforestQA and Zylo. If that was not enough, Anna is also the Founder & CEO @ Launch X Ventures, offering female entrepreneurs an immersive opportunity to learn how to raise capital for their businesses.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anna made her way into venture as an analyst with Bessemer and how that led to her scaling the venture ladder to now being GP @ CRV?
2.) How does Anna feel about the importance of analysts in venture? Should founders spend meaningful time with analysts? How should they determine which to spend time with? What were the biggest lessons Anna learned about venture and people from being an analyst at Bessemer?
3.) With the rise of rounds being pre-empted, how does Anna determine when to lean in and move on a deal vs when to wait? How does Anna determine when to stretch vs be disciplined on valuation? Why does Anna believe very few firms are "doing real early-stage investing" today?
4.) Why does Anna believe that there are so much fewer women in venture? How does Anna respond to the suggestion that it is a "pipeline problem"? How would Anna advise an all-white male partnership looking to truly change how they work? How does carry come into showing commitment?
5.) What advice does Anna give to people on developing your early network? Why does Anna believe VCs spending time with VCs is antithetical? How has Anna's investment decision-making process changed over the last 9 years? How does Bessemer's compare to CRV's?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anna’s Fave Book: Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams
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20VC: MongoDB CEO, Dev Ittycheria on Why Sometimes You Have To Be Inefficient To Be Effective, The 2 Different Types of Decisions and How Great Leaders Respond To Each & Why Value To Overhead Ratio Is The Metric To Use When Selecting Investors
Dev Ittycheria is the President and CEO @ MongoDB, recognized as the world's most popular next-generation database and the first database company to go public in over 26 years. Prior to their IPO, MongoDB raised from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, USV and NEA to name a few. As for Dev, before Mongo Dev was Managing Director at OpenView Venture Partners, Venture Partner at Greylock Partners, and CEO/Co-founder of BladeLogic, which was acquired by BMC for $900 million. Dev has also sat on some incredible boards including AppDynamics, athenahealth and BazaarVoice.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dev made his way into the world of startups? How Dev made his entry into the world of venture? How that led to his joining Mongo as CEO?
2.) How has Dev seen his style of leadership change over the last few years? What are the 3 core benefits of being vulnerable with your investors? Why does Dev believe you sometimes have to be inefficient to be effective? What element/trait would Dev like to improve and develop as a leader?
3.) Where does Dev believe the majority of leaders make mistakes when it comes to scaling their teams and orgs? How does Dev think about the debate of whether to promote internally or hire externally for a role? Why does Dev believe the asymmetry of information there is dangerous?
4.) What has been Dev's biggest lessons when it comes to the speed that information is relayed within orgs? How does this differ between good news and bad news? What can leaders do to create environments where bad news is shared freely? Where do many go wrong here?
5.) How does Dev advise founders on the criteria they should use to determine which investors to work with? What has been so impressive to Dev about working with Sequoia? How would Dev describe Roelof Botha's style of board membership? How can investors crucially build trust with their CEOs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dev’s Fave Book: High Output Management
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20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully
Joe Thomas is the Founder & CEO @ Loom, the startup that helps you get your message across by making it easy to record instantly shareable videos. To date, Joe has raised over $68M from some of the valley's leading firms including Sequoia, Kleiner and Coatue as well as individuals such as Mathilde @ Front, Kevin & Mike @ Instagram and Dylan Field @ Figma to name a few. Prior to founding Loom, Joe was in LA as Director of Product at MyLife.com and before that Director of Operations at MediaPass. Due to Loom's success, Joe has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for Enterprise Tech.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joe made his way from the mid-West to the valley and came to found one of the hottest startups today in Loom?
2.) What does Joe believe are 3 rules to operate remote teams successfully? Why does Joe believe in remote + HQ as a model so much? How do the tools and culture need to change with this as a new format for work? How do leaders now need to learn to write more than ever before?
3.) How has fundraising fundamentally change in the world of COVID? What are the benefits? What can founders do and tools can they use to increase their chances of getting funded in a COVID world? What did Coatue do to build rapport and trust without meeting in person?
4.) What advice would Joe give to founders on how to pick their early VCs? How does Joe advise founders when it comes to accepting multi-stage money at seed? Why does Joe believe you need to be upfront with your VCs about their ability to build future ownership?
5.) Sequoia and Coatue led the Series B, how did the round go down many months before Joe and Loom planned to raise it? What did Sequoia do to win and close the deal? How did that as a founder make Joe feel? How does Joe advise VCs on what it takes to win the most competitive of deals?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joe’s Fave Book: Enders Game, Think On These Things
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20VC: Steve Jurvetson on 20 Years of Friendship with Elon Musk, How To Analyse Market Timing, Why Venture Does Not Scale & Why He Has Never Sold A Share in Any Company He Holds
Steve Jurvetson is the Co-Founder @ Future Ventures who announced their debut and flagship $200M Fund in 2019. Steve's incredible portfolio includes the likes of SpaceX, Tesla, Planet, Memphis Meats, Hotmail, and the deep learning companies Mythic and Nervana. Steve also sits on the board of both SpaceX and Tesla. Prior to founding Future, Steve was the co-founder of renowned valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson where he led investments in 5 companies that went public in successful IPOs and several others that became billion-dollar acquisitions.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Steve made his way into the world of startups and Silicon Valley and how that led to his creation of “The Lean Startup Movement”?
2.) How does Steve think about and assess market timing? How does Steve assess technical risk? Given the long term horizons of such deep tech projects, does Steve think we need to change the 10 + 2-year fund life structure? How would Steve like to see funds structured?
3.) Given the sheer size of outcomes if these plays work, how does Steve assess his own price sensitivity? How does Steve approach the challenge there is a lack of downstream investors for such deep tech projects? How does Steve try and catch an industry on the cusp of a transition?
4.) How does Steve assess his own relationship to money? How has it changed over the years? Why does Steve fundamentally believe that venture partnerships do not scale? Where do venture partnerships breakdown? How can one introduce cognitive diversity into a firm?
5.) Having worked with Elon Musk across both SpaceX and Tesla, what does Steve believe makes Elon one of the most gifted entrepreneurs of our time? What is Steve's most memorable moment from his many years of friendship with Elon? What have been his biggest takeaways from SpaceX and Tesla?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steve’s Fave Book: Out Of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
Steve's Most Recent Investment: Prellis Biologic
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20VC: Why The Unbundling of Fintech Will Continue, How VCs Are Propping Up The Neo-Banking Industry & Why We Need A New Framework To Value Businesses Today with Clay Wilkes, Founder & CEO @ Galileo
Clay Wilkes is the Founder & CEO @ Galileo, the API standard for card issuing and digital banking, powering many of the leading global FinTech companies including Chime, TransferWise and Monzo to name a few. Prior to their reported $1.2Bn acquisition by SoFi, Clay raised just $86M in funding with Galileo from the likes of Accel and Ryan Smith @ Qualtrics, having run the company as a profitable company before that for over 15 years. Clay also has a keen interest in philanthropy having created the Galileo foundation with his wife in 2005.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Clay made his way into the world of tech and startups more than 20 years ago and how he came to build the foundations for many fintechs today with Galileo?
2.) When looking at the current financial ecosystem does Clay believe we are in a phase of bundling or unbundling? Does Clay believe we will see the verticalisation of banking? Will every company become a payments company? Does Clay believe we will see consolidation in the space?
3.) What does Clay believe were the benefits of going 15 years withour raising VC money, building a profitable business? What are the trade offs? What could he have done if he had raised? With hindsight, does Clay wish he had raised earlier? Why was then the right time to raise?
4.) Why does Clay believe the discovery mechanism for VCs finding startups is broken? How did Clay select the venture firm he chose to work with, Accel? What advice does Clay give to board members when it comes to being the best board member to their founders?
5.) Why did Clay believe that selling to SoFi was the right decision? What are the benefits of the merger? How does Clay think about the competitive element that many of Galileo's current clients are competitors with SoFi? How do they remedy and solve for that today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Clay’s Fave Book: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
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20VC: Brad Feld, Jerry Colonna and Tracy Lawrence on Depression and Mental Health, The Dangers of Tying Happiness To Milestones & Why Fear, Anxiety and Guilt Are Useless Emotions
Brad Feld is a Co-Founder and Managing Director @ Foundry Group, one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Zynga, Fitbit and Sendgrid to name a few. Brad is also a co-founder @ Techstars and prior to Foundry, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital.
Tracy Lawrence spent the last 8 years as Founder & CEO @ Chewse, the startup that it effortless for office managers to order delicious food for their teams. Tracy grew the team to 300 people across 4 markets, raised millions in venture capital, and ultimately sold the business to Foodee.
Jerry Colonna is the CEO of Reboot.io where he is now the professional coach to some of the world's leading founders. Prior to his work with Reboot, Jerry was an early-stage VC co-founding Flatiron alongside Fred Wilson in 1996.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Brad, Jerry and Tracy all experience their first forms of depression? At what stage did it become a more prominent part of their life? Why do they think then was the catalyst?
2.) Why does Jerry believe that despite what people say, no one is crushing it? How can founders present their vulnerability as a strength? At what point did Tracy realise this? How did she convey her vulnerability to her team? Who is to blame for the lack of vulnerability and fear of opening up?
3.) How does Brad think about tying happiness to milestones? What are the biggest dangers of doing so? Does this mean one does not have goals? How does one balance between ambition and appreciating the present? How did Brad learn this when Amy asked for a divorce? How did he respond?
4.) Why does Brad believe fear, guilt and anxiety are useless emotions? What was the result of Tracy tying her mental state to her revenue line? How does Tracy think about the loneliness of being a founder? What does Brad believe is some of the biggest BS in the industry?
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Steve Blank on Why The Startup Ecosystem is Partially A Ponzi Scheme, 3 Things That Determine Startup Survival in a COVID World & Facebook: Platform vs Publisher and Where Does Their Responsibility Lie?
Steve Blank is one of the leading luminaries of Silicon Valley, credited with being foundational to the creation of The Lean Startup movement and having spent the last 9 years at Stanford University as a professor and the last 8 as a Senior Fellow @ Columbia University. Steve is the author of "The Four Steps To The Epiphany" and "The Startup Owner's Manual". Prior to joining the world of academics and writing Steve spent over 20 years in the world of entrepreneurship as part of, or co-founded eight Silicon Valley startups ranging from semiconductors, video games, personal computers, and supercomputers. If that was not enough, Steve is also on the Defense Business Board for the United States Department of Defence.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Steve made his way into the world of startups and Silicon Valley and how that led to his creation of "The Lean Startup Movement"?
2.) Why does Steve vehemently disagree with Adam's Smith's "Invisible Hand" theory when it comes to government intervention? Why is this proven to have failed? How does this only help the rich become richer? As a result, what needs to change in the mechanics of the economy?
3.) Why does Steve not believe that there is accountability placed on investors and founders for projects they create and invest in? Why does Steve believe for the majority of investors today, they have no social conscience? How could this be changed and improved?
4.) How did seeing the booms and busts of the dot com and 2008 impact Steve's operating mentality? What are the 3 core traits that will ensure success for founders in a post COVID world? How should founders change their decision-making process post-COVID? Why does Steve believe in "benign dictatorship"?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steve’s Fave Book: Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Chamath Palihapitiya on Why IPOs and Direct Listings Are Broken, Turning Social Capital Into A Combination of Berkshire Hathaway, Koch Industries and The Red Cross, Why Forecasts Are Worthless, What Creates True Defensibility & Why You Have To Be Pr
Chamath Palihapitiya is Founder & CEO @ Social Capital, the organisation on a mission to transform society by using technology to solve the world’s hardest problems. Social's portfolio includes the likes of Slack, Yammer, Front, Intercom and Carta to name a few. As for Chamath, prior to founding Social, he spent an incredible 4 years at Facebook including as the original exec in charge of FB Platform as well as being responsible for overseeing core growth components and overseeing FB's mobile efforts. If that was not enough, Chamath is also an owner @ The Golden State Warriors & Chairman @ Virgin Galactic.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chamath made his way into the world of tech and startups, came to be a VC with Mayfield before joining Facebook and then starting Social?
2.) What were Chamath's biggest takeaways from his team building the growth team at Facebook? Why does Chamath believe that forecasts are worthless? What should founders focus on instead? What did Facebook teach Chamath about defensibility and moat building?
3.) What was the realisation moment for Chamath that the venture firm he was building with Social was not what he wanted to build? Why does Chamath believe the biggest mistakes he made were "compensation and partner selection"? How would he do them differently now? What does he look for most in partners today? How does he detect for integrity?
4.) Why has Chamath doubled down on the SPAC model? What are the core benefits both to the founders and investors? What are the core challenges with both direct listings and IPOs? How does Chamath think about scaling his SPAC strategy? What are the core challenges in doing so?
5.) Facing alcoholism and psychological challenges with his parents, how did Chamath deal with becoming a carer sooner than expected? How has becoming a parent changed Chamath's operating mentality today? How does Chamath analyse his relationship to money today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chamath’s Fave Book: Liar's Poker: From the author of the Big Short
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
Alex Mather is the Founder & CEO @ The Athletic, the startup bringing you in-depth sports stories you won't hear anywhere else. To date, Alex has raised over $139M with The Athletic from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, Bedrock, Y Combinator and Emerson Collective to name a few. Before founding The Athletic, Alex spent an incredible 5 years as part of the hyper-growth @ Strava serving Vice President of Product Management and Product Design.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way into the world of tech and startups with Strava? How did his time at Strava lead to his founding The Athletic?
2.) With the scaling of The Athletic to over 500 people, how has Alex seen his leadership style change and adapt? What does he need to improve? How did having children impact how he thinks about management? What lessons did he take from Strava on what worked for community building?
3.) What was it like raising money for a subscription media business back in 2016? Who was the first person to really take a bet on Alex and The Athletic? What value adds does Alex think are the most important for VCs to provide? What are the biggest investor misconceptions around media?
4.) How does Alex see the future structure of the media landscape? What elements of media is Alex most concerned about right now? Does Alex view Substack as competition? What does Alex believe will be the 2 ways to succeed in media moving forward?
5.) What have been the biggest customer acquisition learnings for Alex from The Athletic? How does Alex feel about platform reliance for customer acquisition with Facebook? What does it take to successfully acquire customers on Facebook at scale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: The Kingdom of God is Within You
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20VC: 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale on How To Foster Contrarian Thinking Within Venture Partnerships, Why The Best VCs Are Company Builders & Why It Is Not Possible To Build Multi-Billion Dollar Companies and Have Worklife Balance
Joe Lonsdale is a General Partner @ 8VC and in the past has invested in many notable companies including Wish, Oculus, Oscar and Guardant Health. As a result, in both 2016 and 2017, Joe was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List. Prior to 8VC, Joe co-founded Palantir, one of the world's most impactful multi-billion dollar software companies. Joe also co-founded and serves as Chairman @ Addepar, which has over $1.8 trillion managed on its wealth management technology platform. If that was not enough, Joe is also a founder of Affinity, Anduin and Esper.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joe made his way into the world of tech and startups, came to co-found Palantir and Addepar and how that led to his founding 8VC? How does Joe
believe the study of history makes one a better investor?
2.) Why does Joe believe that the best VCs are company builders? How does Joe think about, evaluate and put into action the incubator model? How does Joe respond to LPs that suggest it is a distraction? How does voting for incubations differ for investment voting?
3.) What does contrarian thinking really mean to Joe? What does Joe do to specifically engender contrarian thinking in the 8VC partnership? What is the relationship between contrarianism and political correctness? How does Joe think about the dangers of woke culture today?
4.) How does Joe advise founders to think through cash burn and runway today? What is going to happen to companies that sacrified growth for gross margin in 1 year? How does Joe advise founders on the balance of sticking to your vision and mission vs knowing when to give up?
5.) Why does Joe think it is important to not just start new companies but new cities also? Despite the insane cost of living, why does Joe believe the Valley has given rise to the insane levels of innovation it has done? Will the dominance of the valley remain over the next decade?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joe’s Fave Book: How Innovation Works, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus
Joe’s Most Recent Investment: Beacon
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20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor
Julia DeWahl is one of the rising stars of the Silicon Valley angel investor community with a portfolio including the likes of Linear (Sequoia-backed), Modern Fertility (USV backed) and Primer (Founders Fund backed). Prior to angel investing Julia was one of the first 10 employees at Opendoor seeing their hyper-growth first hand in many different roles from Head of Seller Experience to being General Manager of Pheonix & City Operations. Before Opendoor, Julia spent 3 years as a consultant at Bain. If that was not enough, Julia is also an avid cyclist and is setting up a women's cycling apparel line alongside her investing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups with Opendoor from Bain and how that position at Opendoor led to her angel investing? What were the 1-2 takeaways for Julia from her time at Opendoor that have most impacted how she angel invests today?
2.) Customer Discovery: When is the right time to engage in deep customer discovery work? How does one select the customers to go deep with? How does Julia structure the process? What questions are most revealing? Where do many go wrong? How does one determine the feedback to accept vs which to reject?
3.) How does Julia think about implementing systems for growth? What is the structure of these systems? Where does one start? How does Julia determine the metrics to track and focus on? How does Julia balance between growth vs profitability?
4.) Does Julia believe people can really scale with the company? What are the leading indicators that people are struggling to scale with the company? How does Julia advise generalists to survive and thrive in a scaling organisation? Should they specialise?
5.) What have been some of Julia biggest lessons of what it takes to be successful as an angel today? Who has Julia learned and gained the most from in this new discipline? How does Julia measure her own success as an angel? What are the core challenges?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Julia’s Fave Book: The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness
Julia’s Most Recent Investment: Primer: Homeschool with superpowers
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20VC: Oren Zeev on Why Diversification Is Overrated, The Downside of Thematic Investing, Making Quality Decisions In Uncertain Conditions & Why He Has No Reserves Allocation
Oren Zeev is the Founding Partner @ Zeev Ventures, one of the best and most under the radar firms in the early stage Silicon Valley landscape. Over the past decade, Oren has backed the likes of TripActions, Tipalti, Audible, Houzz, Chegg and Hippo Insurance to name a few. Prior to crushing it with Zeev Ventures, Oren spent 12 years as a General Partner @ Apax Ventures, starting in Israel and then moving to the US where he headed the Technology Practice of Apax and the Silicon Valley office.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Oren made his way into the world of venture with Apax and how that led to his founding his own firm, Zeev Ventures?
2.) Having been in a venture partnership, why did Oren want to be a solo GP? What are the benefits? How does it change decision-making? What are the downsides? How does Oren discuss deals and ideas without partners? How does Oren explain the decision to LPs on being a solo GP?
3.) Why does Oren not believe in thesis-driven investing? What are the dangers and downsides to it? Why do most managers still do it then? Why does Oren specifically look for under-appreciated markets? How is pricing and competition different there? How does Oren assess his own price sensitivity?
4.) Why does Oren think that diversification is overrated? How does Oren think about cross-fund investing? Why is it such a strength that managers should use? Why do many not do it? How does Oren think about reserve allocation? Why is he the only VC to not have a reserves strategy?
5.) How does Oren think about fund deployment timelines? Why do LPs not like the annual fundraising approach? How does Oren size up his position in companies over time and round? How does Oren feel about founders taking secondaries?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Oren’s Fave Book: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm
Oren’s Most Recent Investment: Treeverse
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20VC: How Fundraising For Funds Has Changed in The World of COVID, The Benefits of Managers Selling Part of Their GP & How To Think Through Your “Minimum Viable Fund Size” with Lo Toney, Founding Managing Partner @ Plexo Capital
Lo Toney is the Founding Managing Partner @ Plexo Capital, a very unique firm making both direct investments and fund investments. They have invested in Precursor, Boldstart, Female Founders Fund and WorkBench on the fund side and then PlayVS, Replicated and StyleSeat on the direct side. Prior to Plexo, Lo was a Partner @ GV (Google Ventures) and before that was a Partner with Comcast Ventures where he led the Catalyst Fund. Before venture Lo was an operator enjoying exec roles at Zynga, Nike and eBay.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Lo made his way into the world of venture with GV and how that led to his innovating on the venture model investing in both funds and directly with Plexo today? What were Lo's biggest takeaways from his 5 years as a Partner @ GV?
2.) How will GPs raising today be impacted by COVID? How does this differ dependent on the stage they invest and the size of fund they are raising? How does Lo advise managers communicating with existing and new potential LPs today?
3.) What does Lo mean when he discusses your "minimum viable fund size"? How does Lo advise GPs when it comes to closing strategies? How much do they need for first close? How many closes should there be thereafter? Should they take the money when it is on the table?
4.) How does Lo feel about anchor LPs taking/investing in the GP? What are the benefits for the manager of doing so? Why does Lo believe there is such a binary view towards it? Why does Lo disagree with the benchmarks set of what a GP commit "should be"?
5.) Why does Lo believe we will see the hybridization of GP/LP over the coming years? What are the benefits of having your LP also direct invest? What are the core challenges to the model? How does Lo envisage the world of venture evolving over the next decade?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Lo’s Fave Book: Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?: How Reginald Lewis Created a Billion-Dollar Business
Lo's Most Recent Investment: PlayVS
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20VC: Andrew Wilkinson on Building The Berkshire Hathway of Tech, Sustainable vs Unsustainable Growth and The Relationship Between Money and Freedom
Andrew Wilkinson is the Managing Partner @ Tiny, a vehicle that buys, builds and invests in wonderful internet companies. Within their family of companies is Dribble; home to the world's best design professionals; MetaLab and Supercast to name a few. Tiny does also make venture investments in the likes of Superhuman, SpaceX, Pitch and Buffer. Today Andrew oversees a group of companies with over 300 employees and tens of millions in revenue.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andrew made his way from founding a design agency in Canada to starting Tiny and building a family of companies with over 300 people?
2.) What does Andrew mean when he says, when buying companies he looks for companies like New Zealand? What qualities/features do they have? How does Andrew think about price sensitivity when acquiring these companies? What determines paying a premium price to Andrew?
3.) How does Andrew assess and analyse true defensibility within company strategies today? Why does Andrew not believe they will lose any companies? How does Andrew think about grow vs profitability? Are they mutually exclusive? When does one pour fuel on the fire and raise big?
4.) How has Andrew seen himself develop and change as a leader over the last 5 years? What does truly great delegation look like? What is Andrew's biggest weakness? What is his biggest insecurity? How does Andrew think about sink the boat vs non-sink the boat decisions?
5.) Does Andrew believe we will see the unbundling of social networks moving forward? What are the core characteristics that determine whether a social network will win? Why does Dribble have defensibility as a brand against all large incumbents?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andrew’s Fave Book: Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman
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20VC: Craft Ventures’ David Sacks on How To Assess Founder Psychology, How To Accurately Evaluate CAC, Burn and Churn & What Makes The Very Best Startup Boards
David Sacks is the Co-Founder @ Craft Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's leading early-stage funds with David's portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Affirm, Airbnb, Slack and Bird to name a few. David started his career in tech as the first product leader and COO @ Paypal, growing payment volume from $0-$500M per month, leading to their $1.5Bn acquisition by eBay. David then founded Geni.com, creating a family tree for the whole world, the company was acquired 3 years later by MyHeritage. David then founded Yammer, the secure solution for internal corporate communication and collaboration, acquired by Microsoft for $1.2Bn. Finally, David then became COO and Interim CEO @ Zenefits before starting Craft.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way from founding Yammer to creating one of the valley's newest and most prestigious firms in Craft Ventures? Given David's operating success he could have angel invested continuously, why decide to start a fund? What does he ultimately want to achieve with Craft?
2.) How did experiencing the Dot Com Bubble with Paypal and then 2008 impact David's investing and operating mindset? Does David believe VCs really are "open for business" today? How is VC behaviour shifting when comparing early to later stage? How is Craft responding?
3.) Unit Economics: How does David assess unit economics in early-stage opportunities he is looking to invest in? What does proper attribution look like? Where do many go wrong with unit economics? Is it too early to try and assess unit econ at seed? How does David think about having mental plasticity towards unit economics, recognising how they change over time?
4.) Customer Acquisition: Does David agree with Peter Fenton, "there is a complete lack of free and open distribution"? What are the rules of thumb on CAC that David does and then does not agree with? How does David feel about blended CAC? What separates good from great when it comes to CAC/LTV?
5.) Churn: How does assess net negative churn in the businesses he works with? What is great, good, decent and poor? How does avid think about logo vs dollar retention? How does David advise founders who feel COVID has not impacted churn for them? What should they expect?
6.) Burn + Capital Efficiency: How does David analyse burn and capital efficiency today? What does he mean when he discusses "the burn multiple"? How should the burn multiple change with the stage of the business? How does David advise founders on how aggressively to cut burn today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David's Fave Book: Thucydides’ Trap
David's Most Recently Announced Investment: Sourcegraph
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Substack Founder Chris Best on The Future of Public Journalism, Why The Economics Of Attention Have Been Flipped & Why Micropayments For Content Will Not Work
Chris Best is the Founder & CEO @ Substack, the company that makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter. To date, Chris has raised over $17M in funding from the likes of a16z, Y Combinator, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and Zynga Co-Founder Justin Waldron to name a few. Prior to founding Substack, Chris was the Co-Founder & CTO @ Kik, letting users connect with friends, groups and the world around them. The company raised over $220M in funding from Spark, Tencent and USV to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris made his way into the world of startups and came to found Kik? How his journey with Kik led to his founding Substack?
2.) During COVID, traditional media publications have been hit hard and Substack has taken off, how does Chris see the correlation there? Given the public journal of record has always been free, how does Substack interact with public news? What does Chris
3.) Why does Chris believe that micropayments are a fundamentally bad idea? Structurally why would they not work? Does Chris agree the biggest problem consumers face today in content is one of discovery? Why not?
4.) When designing the Substack product today, how does Chris think about incentive design? Why does Chris believe with incentives, Substack is the opposite of Twitter from a product perspective? Why have the "economics of attention now been flipped?"
5.) How has Chris seen himself evolve and change as a leader over the last 3 years? What advice would Chris give to CTOs making the move into the role of CEO? What does Chris believe his greatest strengths and weaknesses are as a leader? How does Chris find the war for talent today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris’ Fave Book: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture
Merci Victoria Grace is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the valley's leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Affirm, AppDynamics and more. As for Merci, prior to entering the world of venture, Merci spent 3 years at Slack including as Head of Growth where she grew the growth team to over 50 people and drove DAU's from 500K to 5M in under 2 years. Merci is also the Founder of Women In Product a global community of incredible women in product management.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Merci made her way into the world of venture having led the growth team at Slack for close to 3 years?
2.) Merci has been working to productise venture, so what core elements of venture need productising? What systems and tools has Merci put in place to create a product around these processes and methods? What have been the biggest challenge in the attempt to productise VC?
3.) How does the decision-making process look like at Lightspeed? How does Merci use post mortems to help her improve post having lost a deal? How does she structure those post-mortems? What have been some of the core takeaways? What internal tech stack does LSVP run itself on?
4.) How does Merci see the future of the collaboration tools market? Are we entering a period of bundling or unbundling? How does Merci feel about the debate between synchronous and asynchronous? How does Merci determine between those who have grown sustainably vs unsustainably in the time of COVID?
5.) Why do the majority of collaboration tool startups fail? What do they get so wrong in their go-to-market? For those that succeed, what are the commonalities in those that succeed? Why is being good at Twitter a competitive advantage? How does Merci feel about the Superhuman, high touch onboarding style?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Merci’s Fave Book: Never Split The Difference: Negotiate As If Your Life Depended on It
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20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric
Daniel Erickson is the Founder & CEO @ Viable Fit, the startup that allows you to find product-market fit faster than ever by collecting structured user feedback to measure PMF on an ongoing basis. Daniel has raised funding from the likes of David Sacks @ Craft Ventures, Todd Goldberg and Superhuman Founder, Rahul Vohra and then also Brianne Kimmel @ Worklife Ventures. Prior to founding Viable Fit, Daniel was VP Engineering @ Eaze and before that spent time as CTO @ Getable and then also had a front-row seat for the hyper-growth of Yammer with a 3-year stint there.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way into the valley and startups from setting up a consultancy in Portland and how that led to founding Viable Fit?
2.) How does Daniel define product-market fit today? Why does Daniel believe it is the single most important metric for startups? What happens if you do not have product-market fit? How does Daniel feel about investors spending so much time analysing unit economics at seed?
3.) What is the single most important question one can ask to determine whether you have PMF? How does customer segmentation play a role in revealing the true PMF number? How do you productise this and put it in a process? What does Daniel make of the rise of closed betas?
4.) Once they have the customer data, what elements of the data should founders double down on to determine PMF? How do they determine between feedback to adopt vs discard? Why does Daniel believe PMF is transient and you always have to measure it?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Daniel’s Fave Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: It’s Time To Talk About Drinking; How To Stop, The Impact It Has, How Life Changes Post-Alcohol and The Biggest Misconceptions on Drinking with Ryan Petersen, Founder @ Flexport, Justin Kan, Founder @ Twitch, Matteo Franceschetti, Founder @ Eight
Ryan Petersen is the Founder & CEO @ Flexport, the operating system for global trade with over $1.3Bn in funding from the likes of Softbank, Founders Fund, DST, GV and First Round to name a few.
Justin Kan is the Founder @ Atrium and Twitch (acq by Amazon for $1Bn). Justin is also a prolific angel with a portfolio including the likes of Scale AI, Digits, Cruise and Triplebyte to name a few.
Matteo Franceschetti is the Founder & CEO @ Eight Sleep, the #1 Smart Mattress, designed to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep. To date, Matteo has raised over $70M from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Kevin Hartz and Ryan Petersen to name a few.
Steve Schlafman is a Coach and Investor @ High Output. Previously Steve was a Partner @ Primary Ventures in NYC and before that Principal @ RRE.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) What was your realisation moment for stopping drinking? How did it come about? What was your prior relationship to alcohol like?
2.) For me I always found an excuse to not stop drinking, when you think about your attempts to give up, what excuses did you provide as reasons for continuing to drink? What insecurities and vulnerabilities did drinking hide and mask for you? How did it impact them?
3.) From a literal standpoint, how did you approach giving up the act of drinking? What tools did you find most helpful? What resources do you recommend? How has your life changed since you stopped drinking? Matteo, you have the data from Eight Sleep, what does the data say about how stopping drinking truly impacts your sleep?
4.) People often say that stopping drinking kills your social life, what would you respond to that commonly held belief? What other core misconceptions do you find people hold towards drinking? To those considering giving up drinking, what would you advise them? What do you know now about alcohol that you wish you had known earlier?
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: TravelPerk’s Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession
Avi Meir is the Founder & CEO @ TravelPerk, the travel management platform that combines the best of leisure and corporate travel into one smooth experience. To date, Avi has raised over $134m with TravelPerk from the likes of DST, Spark Capital, Felix Capital and Heartcore to name a few. Prior to founding TravelPerk, Avi co-founded HotelNinjas, a hotel management product that was acquired by Booking.com. Before that Avi was VP Product at budgetplaces where he managed a team of 50 across product and marketing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Avi made his way into the world of startups and came to change the way we think of corporate travel with TravelPerk?
2.) Why has Avi advocated for the re-opening of society much sooner than others have done? If Avi were in government, what would he advocate for and do? How does Avi try and effectively assess the core risks of COVID both from a societal and economic perspective?
3.) How does Avi feel when he hears the comparison of COVID to Saars or 9/11 when it comes to their impact on travel? Why is this so different? Why does Avi believe 2021 will be a bigger year for business travel than 2019?
4.) How does Avi advise founders heavily impacted by COVID to really effectively analyse their spend and optimise runway? How does Avi think approach the element that sales and marketing is now non-revenue driving? How does Avi approach resource allocation as a result?
5.) Does Avi believe we will see a fundamental re-shaping of corporate travel? What will change? How does domestic travel change? What will the landscape look like on the other side? Who will survive? Who will thrive? Does Avi feel now is an opportune time for M&A?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Avi’s Fave Book: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Elad Gil on Startup Offense and Defence in a Recession, How The Venture Landscape Has Shifted & All Things Valuations, Secondaries and Layoffs
Elad Gil is one of Silicon Valley's most successful and prominent angels of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Square, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instacart, Flexport and Brex to name a few. Prior to solely company investing, Elad was an operator as Founder and CEO @ Color Genomics for their first 3 years. Before Color, Elad was a VP of Corporate Strategy @ Twitter following their acquisition of the company he founded, Mixer Labs. Before founding Mixer, Elad spent 3 years at Google where he was involved with 3 acquisition including the Android acquisition.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Elad made his way into the world of startups and how that led to his investing in some of the most prominent companies of the last decade?
2.) How is the venture and startup landscape shifting right now? What does Elad make of the large multi-stage funds re-entering seed? How does Elad advise founders when it comes to taking secondaries?
3.) What are the core elements startups need to assess to fully understand their cash position? What is the optimal runway to have and to raise for today? How can founders stress test their runway models? Where does Elad see the most mistakes when it comes to runway?
4.) Does Elad believe the VC messages of "Open for Business" during COVID? How does Elad advise founders when it comes to valuation sensitivity today? What are the core terms that founders should watch out for when raising? How does Elad see venture fund reserve allocations changing?
5.) What are the core tenets of an effective layoff strategy? How should they determine the right level of aggression with which to make cuts? How can layoffs be done in a way that maintains internal culture and morale? Where does Elad see many going wrong when it comes to layoffs?
6.) Which business will thrive in COVID times? Which will die? What are the leading indicators of each? How does Elad determine in the businesses that are growing immensely during COVID, those that are sustainable growth and those which are purely due to COVID?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Elad’s Fave Book: Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Elad’s Most Recent Investment: Deel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Elad and on Twitter here!
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20VC: TripActions CEO Ariel Cohen on The Future of Business and Personal Travel & Layoffs; How To Do Them The Right Way & Maintain Company Culture and Morale
Ariel Cohen is the Founder & CEO @ TripActions, the company trusted by more than 4,000 companies to manage their business travel and expenses. To date, Ariel has raised more than $980M with TripActions from the likes of Lightspeed, Oren Zeev and a16z to name a few. Prior to TripActions, Ariel co-founded StreamOnce, a business multimedia integration platform which was acquired by Jive Software. Prior to StreamOnce, Ariel led Product Management in a senior leadership role at Hewlett-Packard.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ariel made his way into the world of tech and came to change the way we think about business travel today with TripActions?
2.) What are TripActions doing in their business to be there for their partners, customers and suppliers in the long term? TripActions engaged in layoffs, how did Ariel approach the size of layoff required? What is the right way to do layoffs? How does this change in a remote world?
3.) Given the uncertainty, how does Ariel advise founders to assess and correct their burn and spending? What is a reasonable amount of runway to reserve for? For those hit hard on the demand side, what can they do to build durable defensibility when they can't scale demand?
4.) How does Ariel view the future of business travel? Does Zoom replace much of the business trips? What will the landscape look like in 3 years? What players will survive? Who will thrive?
5.) From a founder psychology perspective, what has Avi done to cope in these very challenging times? What has worked? What has not worked? What does Ariel advise founders struggling to cope psychologically? What can investors do to be there for their founders?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ariel’s Fave Book: Mr Vertigo
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: Deconstructing Economies of Scale, How To Assess True Market Size, Assessing Risk vs Uncertainty, What “Brand As Power” Really Means with Hamilton Helmer, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Offi
Hamilton Helmer is the Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer @ Strategy Capital a long-only public equity fund that selects securities for investment based on Power Dynamics, a proprietary model of fundamental value, developed by Hamilton over decades of strategy consulting with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Adobe and more. Hamilton is also the author of one of my favourite books, 7 Powers. If that was not enough, Hamilton is also an Instructor in the Economics Department @ Stanford University.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hamilton made his way into the world of investing from advising some of the largest tech titans on the planet with Adobe and HP?
2.) What is a strategy mental model? What makes the most effective strategic models? What characteristics do they have? How should founders balance between sticking to models and being willing to change them? What are Hamilton's biggest takeaways from working with Netflix?
3.) "All strategy begins with invention", what did Hamilton mean by this? How does Hamilton explain the success of copycats in markets? How does Hamilton separate between first mover and creator? How does Hamilton analyse the transition from startup to pricer with scale economics?
4.) How does Hamilton advise founders to view and approach competition? Why does Hamilton totally disagree with the requirement of being 10x better than your competition? Is product innovation alone enough without brand or business model innovation?
5.) How does Hamilton define "brand"? Is brand an attainable strategy alone or is it the byproduct of something else? How transferable is brand in one category to alternative categories? How does a brand truly know when they have sustainable leverage and power?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hamilton’s Fave Book: The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, Stardust
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Sarah Kunst is the Founder and Managing Director @ Cleo Capital with a portfolio including the likes of StyleSeat, Glow Bar and PlateJoy to name a few. Prior to venture, Sarah served as a senior advisor at Bumble where she focused on their corporate VC arm, Bumble Fund, and on the board of the Michigan State University Foundation endowment. If that was not enough, Sarah is also a contributing editor @ Vanity Fair. Due to her success, Sarah has been named a Future Innovator by Vanity Fair and a top woman in VC by Wall St Journal.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her way into the world of venture from Bumble and how that led to her founding Cleo Capital?
2.) Does Sarah believe VCs really are still "open for business"? What does Sarah make of all the dry powder sitting on the sidelines? How does Sarah think reserve allocation strategies will change today? Why does Sarah believe another great vintage of funds is to come, as it did in 08'?
3.) What would Sarah most like to change about the world of venture? Does Sarah agree that GP commit expectations prevent diversity in venture? How was the fundraising process for Sarah? How can VCs prove skin in the game without having personal capital?
4.) What is the #1 piece of advice Sarah is giving her founders in these COVID times? How does Sarah advise her founders on approaching the talent market today? How does Sarah advise her founders on burn and capital allocation given COVID?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sarah’s Fave Book: Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the science of adult attachment can help you find – and keep
Sarah’s Most Recent Investment: Planet Forward
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah and on Twitter here!
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20VC: Floodgate’s Mike Maples on 3 Key Breakthroughs Startups Experience in Success, The Rise of Angel and Operator Funds, Multi-Stage Funds Re-Entering Seed Investing and The Insight Development Framework
Mike Maples is a Founder & Partner @ Floodgate, one of the leading early-stage firms of the last decade with investments in the likes of Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, Okta and Sonos to name a few. He has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and was also named one of “8 Rising Stars” by FORTUNE Magazine. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (IPO TIVS, acquired by IBM) and Motive (IPO MOTV, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.)
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his way from founding startups to entering the world of venture and the gap he saw in the market when founding Floodgate?
2.) Mike has previously said, "a startup is not a company, it is a series of breakthroughs". How does Mike define a breakthrough? What are the 2 most meaningful breakthroughs a startup can experience? Which excites Mike the most to see? How do the best startups scale pre-breakthrough to post-breakthrough?
3.) What are the core ways inflections can create breakthrough opportunities? What were Mike's learnings on inflections from investing in Lyft? What does Mike mean when he talks about the importance of "backcasting"? What did investing in Twitch teach Mike about forecasting?
4.) How does Mike feel about the rise of operator and angel funds? How does Mike analyse the re-entrance of large multi-stage funds back into seed markets? Does Mike agree with Semil Shah, "founders are voting with their feet and taking multi-stage money at seed"?
5.) As Mike's peers have all moved into larger funds, Mike did not, why? How does Mike view "fund size as your strategy"? How does Mike think about the centrality of ownership? Does Mike really believe you can concentrate capital into your winners? What are the challenges? Why does Mike feel self-promotion is one of the biggest challenges in VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Mike’s Most Recent Investment: CommonStock
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike and on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research
Conor White-Sullivan is the Founder & CEO @ Roam Research, the tool taking over our industry providing a seamless note-taking tool for networked thought. Prior to founding Roam, Conor founded 2 prior businesses and also worked at HuffPost as a Co-Founder of HuffPost Labs where he reported directly to Arianna Huffington and HuffPost CTO.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Conor's high school wrestling career taught him "how to win"? What was the founding story with Roam? How does Conor think about when to stay true to the vision and persist vs when to give up?
2.) How does Conor think about the product design philosophy they have @ Roam? Conor has said before, "Roam is not about taking better notes", what is Roam about then? How does Conor think about the importance of adding challenge to a product? What does he mean when he discusses the importance of "low floors and high ceilings" with regards to product design?
3.) How would Conor analyse his own hiring and team-building philosophy? Why are the two most important traits, "girt and autodidacts"?How does Conor really stress these two characteristics in an interview process? Why does Conor choose to live with the team? What are the benefits of this?
4.) Does Conor believe we are in a phase of bundling or unbundling when it comes to collaboration tools? Does Conor believe we will see large players acquire and consolidate over the coming months? Why does Conor compare Roam more to Google than other collaboration tools?
5.) How does Conor think about go-to-market today? What were some of Conor's biggest takeaways for bootstrapping for years with revenue from customers? Why is Conor borrowing from the Tesla GTM? What does that really mean in practice?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Conor’s Fave Book: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Conor and on Twitter here!
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20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
Mark Cuban is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. His career began with his founding of MicroSolutions, a company he went on to sell to CompuServe in 1990. Then in 1995 Mark co-founded Broadcast.com - streaming audio over the internet. In just four short years, Broadcast.com (then Audionet) was sold to Yahoo for $5.6 billion dollars. Following the acquisition in 2000, Mark acquired the Dallas Mavericks where since his taking over they have competed in the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history in 2006 - and becoming NBA World Champions in 2011. They are currently listed as one of Forbes' most valuable franchises in sports. If that was not enough, Mark is also one of ABC's "Sharks" on the hit show Shark Tank.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mark made his way into the world of technology and startups having been fired from his first job in sales?
2.) How does Mark evaluate his relationship to wealth and money? How has that changed over time? What advice does Mark have to those that tie happiness and money together?
3.) What does Mark think about Silicon Valley investors today? Why does he believe they and the valley are like Hollywood? Why does Mark believe that if the greatest tech companies of today had been started elsewhere, they would be more successful?
4.) How does Mark evaluate his own investing philosophy today? How does Mark think about price and price sensitivity? Why is Mark so keen to have his investment funded from the cashflow of the business? Does this not narrow opportunity and limit upside? How does Mark evaluate risk today?
5.) Why does Mark believe post-COVID is the single greatest time to be an entrepreneur? What advice would he give to an entrepreneur starting their new business in this time? How would Mark go about the re-opening of society post lockdown?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mark’s Fave Book: Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mark and on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Framework For Hiring The Best Talent 100% Remotely, Raising $32M From Benchmark and GV Pre-Launch and How To Think Through Capital Efficiency and Runway Today with Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, Co-Founders @ Digits
Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert are the co-founders @ Digits, the company that gives you a complete, real-time understanding of your expenses, all in just a few clicks. To date, Wayne and Jeff have raised over $32M for Digits from some of the best in the business including Peter Fenton @ Benchmark and Jess Verrilli @ GV and then with the most incredible base of angels with the founders from Box, Github, Stitch Fix, Tinder, Gusto and more. Prior to Digits, Wayne and Jeff co-founded Crashlytics, acquired by Twitter for a 9-figure sum in Jan 2013 and then acquired from Twitter by Google in 2017. If that was not enough they are also LPs in some of the world's most exclusive funds and angels in the likes of Gusto, OpenDoor and SoFi to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Jeff and Wayne make their way into the world of tech and startups? How did Wayne crashing a startup dinner start everything for them?
2.) How did Jeff and Wayne's prior success with Crashlytics impact their operating mindset scaling Digits today? What worked? What did not work? What gets easier with time? What gets harder the second time around?
3.) What have been Wayne and Jeff's biggest lessons from having a remote team from Day 1? What structure and framework do they use to hire the best remote talent? How does that change at the exec level? How do they think about optimising product management for remote teams?
4.) How would Wayne and Jeff summarise their design philosophy with Digits? Why does Wayne believe "minimalism only favours the designer"? When does it make sense to actually add some complexity to your product?
5.) Digits raised $33M pre-launch, why did they favour this approach? How do they think about when to transition from lean and iterative to aggressive and pouring fuel on the fire? Why did they choose to work with Peter Fenton? How do they think about optimising their angel network?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Wayne’s Fave Book: Enders Game
Jeff's Fave Book: Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
Howie Liu is the Founder & CEO @ Airtable, the all in one collaboration platform that has taken so much of our ecosystem by storm. To date, Howie has raised over $170M from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Thrive, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital, Founder Collective, CRV and Freestyle to name a few. Prior to founding Airtable, Howie was the Co-Founder @ Etacts, an automated intelligent CRM that was acquired by Salesforce just 9 months after creation. Howie then led the social CRM product at Salesforce. Fun fact, Howie started his career as an intern at Freestyle Ventures.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howie made his way from founding Etacts to changing the way we think about databases and spreadsheets today with Airtable? How did Salesforce acquiring Etacts impact Howie's operating mentality with Airtable?
2.) With the rise of remote work, what have been Howie's core observations from the last month of the world going WFH? What does it take to succeed? What mistakes have Airtable made in their process of work from home? Why did it not work? What lessons did Howie take from that?
3.) How does Howie think about Airtable's transition from an application to a platform? What does he perceive as the core challenges in making the transition? What lessons has he learned from studying others who have done it? Why did Howie choose Peter Fenton @ Benchmark to work with?
4.) How has Howie seen himself evolve and scale as a leader over the last few years? What have been the most challenging elements? How does Howie think about which individuals he would like as mentors? How does he determine which advice to ingest vs to reject?
5.) How does Howie analyse the remote work/collaboration tools environment today? Does Howie believe we will enter a period of consolidation with the proliferation of new tools created? Does Howie believe we will see an unbundling in collaboration tools?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howie’s Fave Book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, Spying on Whales
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
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20VC: Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra on How 1-1 Customer Onboarding Can Scale Efficiently to $100M ARR, Why Gamification Does Not Work But Game Design Does & What Game Design Means For The Next Generation Of Product Managers
Rahul Vohra is the Founder & CEO @ Superhuman, the startup that has rebuilt the inbox from the ground up creating the fastest email experience ever made. To date, Rahul has raised over $56m with Superhuman from some of the best in the business including a16z, First Round, Box Group and then 2 of my favourites in Jeff Morris Jr @ Chapter One and Ed and Elliot @ Boldstart. Prior to founding Superhuman, Rahul was the Founder @ Rapportive, a company later acquired by LinkedIn in 2014. If that was not enough, Rahul is also an investor having co-founded a new firm with Todd Goldberg just last year.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rahul made his way from making the first plugin for Gmail with Rapportive to changing how we think about email today with Superhuman?
2.) Why does Rahul believe game design is worth doing? What is the difference between game design and gamification? What does it take to create a game? What is the truth on game design?
3.) What are the core 5 factors that make up effective game design? How can products incorporate goals to make the user feel emotion when engaging? What emotions does one want the user to feel? How can they be tested? What controls should be placed around the UX? Why are controls so fundamental?
4.) What is the difference between a toy and a game? How can one effectively incorporate toys into their product? How has Superhuman done this effectively to date? Hw can designers create a system of flow in the user experience? What works? What does not work?
5.) Did Rahul intentionally create an entirely new category when it comes to onboarding? Why does Rahul pushback on people that suggest 1-1 onboarding is not scalable? What does the unit economics look like? How does this scale to $100M ARR?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rahul’s Fave Book: The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Upfront’s Mark Suster on COVID Redefining What A Great Company Looks Like and What Valuations Look Like, Why Pay-To-Play Is Back On The Table & Why We Will See The Death of Party Rounds
Mark Suster is the Managing Partner @ Upfront Ventures, one of LA's leading and largest venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Bird, GOAT, Maker Studios and Ring.com to name a few. Prior to joining the world of venture, Mark was the founder & CEO of two successful enterprise software companies, the most recent of which was sold to Salesforce.com where Mark became VP, Products. Mark is also the author of one of my favourite industry blogs, Both Sides of The Table.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mark made his way from founding enterprise companies to joining "the dark side" of venture with his move to Upfront?
2.) How does the current economic landscape change the world of B2B? How will renewals be impacted? How will customers approach discounting? Similarly, how will the world of B2C be impacted by COVID? How does this impact marketing and ad spend?
3.) How does Mark think about reserve allocation today with Upfront? How does that change in the face of COVID? Why does Mark believe this environment will redefine valuations? How should founders respond in the face of heavily changed valuations?
4.) Does Mark believe we will see a graveyard of new venture firms who have deployed too quickly and have too many hungry mouths to feed? How does Mark think about building temporal diversification into the portfolio? How can managers use reserves more intelligently moving forward?
5.) Does Mark agree with the Twittersphere that VCs remain "open for business"? How will we see deal volume impact? How will we see size of transaction impacted? What is the most important role a VC can play today? How will the M&A market also be impacte din the face of COVID?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mark’s Fave Book: Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
Mark's Most Recent Investment: Solve
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mark and on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Notion's Fundraise with Index: The Most Anticipated Deal in The Valley: How It Came To Be | The Future of Remote Work |How Notion Approach The Balance of Growth and Profitability
Sarah Cannon is a Partner @ Index Ventures, one of the world’s leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Dropbox, Skype, Figma, Bird, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Sarah, at Index, she works with groundbreaking companies including Notion, Slack, Pitch, Quill and Instabase. Prior to Index Sarah spent time at CapitalG, Warburg Pincus and even worked in The White House as Policy Advisor for the National Economic Council.
Akshay Kothari is the COO @ Notion, the company that has taken the modern working world by storm as the all-in-one workspace to write, plan, collaborate and get organised. Just last week Notion raised a $50M round led by Index at a reported $2Bn valuation. Prior to Notion, Akshay spent 5 years at LinkedIn following his prior company, Pulse News, being acquired by LinkedIn in 2013.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Sarah make her way into the world of venture from The White House and come to be a Partner @ Index today? How did Akshay parlay his angel investment into Notion into joining as COO the company 5 years later?
2.) With such a proliferation of collaboration tools today, how does Sarah see the remote work/collaboration tools landscape playing out? Are wein a phase of bundling or unbundling? Will we enter a phase of heavy consolidation? How does Notion think about the transition from an application to a platform? What are the challenges in doing so?
3.) What have been some of Akshay's core observations and learnings from watching the world move to remote work overnight? What behaviours will remain post COVID? What behaviours will not? What sectors will be forever changed due to the crisis? What opportunities does that bring about?
4.) Why did Notion decide to keep the team so small for so long? What are the advantages? How does Notion think about maintaining quality when hiring for scale now? What have been some of Akshay's biggest learnings in what it takes to attract A* talent to Notion?
5.) Why did Notion choose the route of profitability over the more conventional early path of the VC treadmill? How does one's mindset change when suddenly raising a large round of new financing? What becomes possible? What guard rails still need to be set?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Akshay’s Fave Book: Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
Sarah's Fave Book: Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Basecamp Founder David Heinemeier Hansson on Why It Is The Biggest BS To Chase Being A Unicorn, His Relationship to Wealth and Status and Why Now More Than Ever It Is A Myth Entrepreneurs Have To Raise VC
David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh) is the creator of Ruby on Rails, founder and CTO at Basecamp (formerly 37Signals), and the best-selling co-author of Rework and Remote: Office Not Required. If that was not enough, fun fact, he went from not having a driver’s license at 25 to winning, at 34, the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, one of the most prestigious automobile races in the world. It is often called the “Grand Prix of endurance and efficiency.”
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of tech and startups from his childhood living in Copenhagen and how a cold email led to the founding of Basecamp with Jason Fried?
2.) What have been some of David’s core observations as people move to remote work over the last few weeks? What is the #1 mistake that 90% of teams make? How does David advise founders to approach loneliness and depression in their team? What strategies have Basecamp used to unite the team and inspire collaboration and teamwork?
3.) Why have David and Jason always tried to keep the Basecamp team as small as possible? Why does David believe one of the biggest problems is that execs have too much time? How does that manifest itself? What does David’s week look like? How does he approach meetings?
4.) Why does David hate the majority of “mission statements” today? What are the best composed of? What are the worst? What feelings does David believe your mission statement should inspire in the reader? What does David believe one needs to do to build a challenger brand today?
5.) Why has David and Basecamp always resisted the conventional path of raising VC funds? Why does David believe needs VC money is total BS? Why does David believe it is BS to chase being a unicorn? Why have founders got this so wrong today and what can they do to change?
6.) How would David describe his relationship to money? How has that relationship changed over time? What are the core challenges as one moves from a monetary to a deeper appreciation of what makes one happy? How did the transition occur for David? How does David advise others in terms of finding their moment for the transition?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Erich Fromm: To Have Or To Be
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David and on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Why Venture Fund Life Cycles Do Not Align To Companies Today, Actionable Strategies To Separate Good From Great When Assessing and Hiring Multiple Candidates & Why We Need More Adventure in Venture Capital with Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO @ Boom Sup
Blake Scholl is the Founder & CEO @ Boom Supersonic, the world's fastest commercial aeroplane, aspiring to bring back supersonic passenger flight at an affordable price. To date, Blake has raised over $166M in funding with Boom from the likes of Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Ray Tonsing @ Caffeinated Capital, Homebrew and 8VC to name a few who have featured on the show in the past. Prior to changing the world of commercial flight, Blake started his career with a 5-year stint at Amazon as a Manager of Social Networks and Automated Advertising. Blake then went on to found his own company, Kima Labs, acquired by Groupon in 2012 where he then spent 2 further years before founding Boom.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Blake made the move from Groupon to changing the way we think about commercial travel today with Boom Supersonic?
2.) How was the fundraising process for Blake given he was raising for supersonic jets? What is his most memorable fundraising moment? Where does Balek believe investors provide outsized value? Where could the investing class improve? How should the fund structures today change?
3.) What deliberate choices and decisions has Blake made to find and acquire the best talent? What is Blake's favourite interview question? What works? What does not work? What specific elements has Blake built into the culture at Boom to build operational excellence?
4.) How has Blake seen himself evolve and develop as a leader over the last few years? What have been the most challenging elements to develop and scale? How does Blake feel on whether founders should have experience on the industry they are entering or if there are benefits of not having so?
5.) What would Blake really like to change about the world of tech and Silicon Valley today? How does Blake feel about the current level of both innovation and founder ambitions? What can be further done to foster this in the coming years?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Blake’s Fave Book: Atlas Shrugged
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Blake and on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Are VCs Still “Open For Business”, How VCs Attitude To Risk Has Changed & The 2 Most Valuable Assets To Founders Today with Fred Destin, Founding Partner @ Stride VC
Fred Destin is a Founding Partner @ Stride.VC, one of Europe's newest and largest early-stage seed firms. Prior to co-founding Stride, Fred was a General Partner @ Accel where he was the lead investor and board member at Deliveroo, Pillpack (acq. AMZN for $1BN) and Carwow. Prior to Accel, he was a partner at Atlas Venture (now Accomplice) where he invested in and served on the board of Pillpack, Zoopla (IPO), Secret Escapes, Integral Ad Science (partial exit to Vista at $850M) and TheCurrencyCloud to name a few. Fun fact, his portfolio has a total enterprise value of more than $10BN and he generated in excess of $700M in exit value to investors.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Fred make his way into the world of venture and come to co-found one of Europe's newest and largest seed funds in Stride.VC?
2.) If you look to Twitter, all VCs are "open for business", does Fred really believe the market is still open for business? How will deal volume be affected? How bad does Fred think this could get? How does this downturn compare to that of the dot-com and 2008?
3.) Why did Stride decide to take the decision to pause on investing at this moment in time? How does Fred respond to the suggestion of better pricing and less competition at this time? How does Fred believe venture investors view of risk evolves at this time? What is the first to change?
4.) With many new funds deploying their first fund in 18 months, does Fred think we will see a gravyard of new fund managers out of cash and with cash hungry portfolios? What advice does Fred give to newer managers of other elements they have to be minfdul/aware of?
5.) How does Fred think about the right way for managers to communicate with their LPs at this time? What has Stride done that has worked? Does Fred believe we will see many LPs defaulting on their initial commitments? How does Fred think emerging managers can navigate this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Fred’s Fave Movie: Mulholland Drive
Fred’s Most Recent Investment: Collective Benefits
As always you can follow Harry, Fred and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Raising A $1.35Bn Fund I, The Emerging Secondary Opportunity For Early Stage Managers and Founders & What It Takes To Win The Best Growth Deals Today with Ravi Viswanathan, Founder & Managing Partner @ NewView Capital
Ravi Viswanathan is the Founder and Managing Partner @ NewView Capital, launched in 2018 with their $1.35Bn Fund I, they have already set themselves as leaders in the world of growth funding with 3 massive exits in less than 2 years in the form of Plaid, sold to Visa for $5.3Bn, Acquia, sold to Vista Equity for $1Bn and then Scout, sold to WorkDay for $540M. Prior to founding NewView Ravis spent 14 years at one of the largest venture firms in the business, NEA where he co-led their venture growth equity practice and in 2016, became COO @ Nea. Before the world of venture, Ravi spent 4 years as a VP @ Goldman Sachs and before that was at McKinsey & Co.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ravi made his way into the world of venture from investment banking and how that led to his founding the monster $1.35Bn Fund I for NewView Capital?
2.) Given the first fund being $1.35Bn, how did Ravi find the fundraising process for NewView? On reflection, what did he and the team do well that they would do again? What did they not do well that they would alter? What advice would Ravi give to first-time fund managers raising today?
3.) Would Ravi agree with Bill Gurley, "the biggest challenge today is the sheer quantum of capital flowing into the industry"? What does Ravi make of the rise of private equity (PE) houses entering the venture landscape? How does it change the exit landscape?
4.) How does Ravi think about the right way for funds to navigate and approach the secondary market? What advice would he give to emerging managers? How does Ravi feel about founder secondaries? What framework does he use to determine whether the amount is reasonable?
5.) How does Ravi think about what it take to truly win the best deals in competition today? If one does not have the budget of a16z, how does one build a venture platform? Where do the majority of investors make mistakes when it comes to VC value add?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ravi's Fave Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE, Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Ravi’s Most Recent Investment: Plaid
As always you can follow Harry, Ravi and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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20VC: The Framework to Scale A Team From 20 to 190 in 24 Months, How To Structure The Perfect Investor Updates & How To Create A Culture of Distributed Ownership with Radical Transparency with Jean-Charles Samulian, Co-Founder & CEO @ Alan
Jean-Charles Samulian is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Alan, the startup revolutionising health insurance with a service centred on people, simplicity and comfort. To date, Jean-Charles has raised over $85M in funding with Alan from some of the best in the business including Jan Hammer @ Index, Shakil Khan, Tom Stafford @ DST, Xavier Niel and Brent Hoberman to name a few. Prior to changing the healthcare insurance system, Jean-Charles founded Expliseat, revolutionising airline seating for economy class, now used by some of the world's leading airlines.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jean-Charles made his way from re-inventing the airline seating industry to re-inventing the way consumers experience healthcare insurance? How did re-inventing the airline seat prepare and impact Jean-Charles' mindset going into the highly regulated healthcare market with Alan?
2.) How does JC structure his investor updates? What framework does JC believe these investor updates should take? Does he include thank you's at the end? Does he include requests for help? How does he involve the team in the writing of these updates? How does JC insert core strategic thinking into his updates? How much time does JC allocate to writing updates? How does JC think about transparency when coming investor updates?
3.) How has JC created a culture of distributed ownership combined with radical transparency? What are the key elements to achieve this? Where do so many go wrong with culture maintenance and creation? What have been the biggest challenges in scaling from 20 to 190 people in just 2 years? What has worked? What has not worked?
4.) How does JC structure the hiring process at Alan? Why does JC believe in the importance of "shadowing" for people to be excellent at hiring? How does JC define "excellence" in a potential candidate? What questions does JC most like to ask candidates? How does JC think about the right way to optimise new employee onboarding? Where do many go wrong with onboarding? What have been their core lessons at Alan as to what it takes to make it great?
5.) How does JC think about extreme self-organization today? How does JC structure his day and his time? How would JC summarise his relationship to his phone? What does he actively do to reduce his dependence on his phone? What has worked and what has not worked with regards to increasing productivity? How does JC advise others looking to make their first steps in increasing their productivity?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jean-Charles’s Fave Book: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jean-Charles and on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Howard Marks on How COVID-19 Impacts Our Economy, Liquidity and National Debt, Why The Theory of Falling Knives and Market Bottoms is Wrong & Why The Best Investors Are Fundamentally Unemotional
Howard Marks is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, a leading investment firm with more than $120 billion in assets. Prior to founding Oaktree, Howard spent 10 years at The TCW Group, where he was responsible for investments in distressed debt, high yield bonds, and convertible securities. Previously, Howard was with Citicorp for 16 years, where he served as Vice President and senior portfolio manager in charge of convertible and high yield securities. Howard has also written two books, most recently Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side, and it was Warren Buffet who said, “When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they’re the first thing I open and read. I always learn something.”
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howard first made his way into the world of finance over 50 years ago? How did not getting an investment banking job change the course of Howard’s life?
2.) What does Howard believe is the fundamental economic crisis occurring today? How does Howard expect liquidity availability to change over the next few years? What analogies of prior downturns and recessions can we look to learn from? How does this downturn differ and align to prior recessions and downturns? What policies would Howard like to see governments enact to prevent the worst-case scenario?
3.) In conditions of such uncertainty, how does Howard think about how to manage and move forward with such volatility? What are Howard's frameworks and mechanisms to analyse crises events like this? Taking the analysis one level further, how bad does Howard believe this could get? If short of The Great Depression, are there scenarios that could lead there? What are the leading signals?
4.) Being proactive, how does today's situation change the mentality and activity at Oaktree? Why does Howard not agree with the notion of "the falling knife"? How does Howard think about market bottoms? How does Howard determine the right insertion point? Why does Howard believe the best investors are unemotional? How can one manage the psychology of catching a falling knife that falls further?
5.) What advice would Howard give to the may millions of working professionals today that have never seen a recession in their professional career? What makes Howard the most nervous when he looks at and assess the landscape today? What does Howard believe is the biggest misconception people believe with regards to the current economic crisis?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howard’s Fave Book: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Howard on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How To Solve The Chicken and Egg Problem in Marketplaces? How Important Is Differentiated Supply? How To Prevent Leakage? How to Create Marketplace Defensibility and more with Alyssa Ravasio, Founder & CEO @ Hipcamp
Alyssa Ravasio is the Founder & CEO @ Hipcamp, the startup that allows you to book unique camping experiences on over 300,000 campsites, cabins, RV parks, public parks and more. To date, Alyssa has raised over $41M in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, a16z, Brad Feld, Dave Morin, Sam Shank @ Hotel Tonight and more. Prior to founding Hipcamp, Alyssa enjoyed numerous diverse roles including being Director of Sales & Marketing @ Revel Systems to working on International Information and Communication Policy in the US State Department.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alyssa made her way from the US State Department to founding the game-changer of camping experiences in the form of Hipcamp?
2.) How did Alyssa solve the classic chicken and egg problem for marketplaces in the early days with Hipcamp? How important does Alyssa believe it is for marketplaces to have truly differentiated supply? How does Alyssa think about what it takes to prevent leakage in marketplaces today? How can marketplace founders be strategic in building moats around their business? What works? What does not work when building marketplace defensibility?
3.) How does Alyssa manage the psychology of being CEO? What does Alyssa find to be the most challenging element of the role? What have been Alyssa's biggest lessons from her last 12 months in the role? How has she seen her style of leadership change and develop over time? How does Alyssa deal with the shit hit the fan moments?
4.) How did Alyssa find the fundraising process for Hipcamp? Why did Alyssa wait 5 years before raising the Series A? What changed in the business that made Alyssa realise then was the right time to raise big? How did the Series B with a16z and Andrew Chen catalyse so fast? Why did Alyssa select the investors she did? What investors did Alyssa not select or not select her that she would also loved to have worked with?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alyssa’s Fave Book: The Overstory: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alyssa on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Multi-Stage Funds Investing At Seed Are Option Value Investing, Why The Biggest Enemy For Venture Firms Is Group Think and How Running Companies Changes Your Investment Mentality with Manu Kumar, Founder @ K9 Ventures
Manu Kumar is the Founder @ K9 Ventures, one of the leading seed firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Carta, Lyft, Twilio, Auth0 and Lucidchart to name a few incredible companies. Prior to K9, Manu was either the founder or co-founder of 4 companies, 3 of which with successful exits and the 4th being the fantastic Carta. Manu also has an incredible model with K9 where he not only invests in companies but also founds them and is currently the founder and CEO @ HiHello, the company that allows you to network smarter providing digital business cards designed to help you curate and grow your network.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Manu made his way into the world of venture having founded 4 prior companies and how he came to found K9 and be one of the OG's of pre-seed funding, having coined the term?
2.) What does Manu believe have been the biggest and most significant changes in the early stage market over the last 7 years? How does Manu evaluate the rise of operator and scout funds? Would Manu agree with Semil Shah, "founders are voting with their feet and taking multi-stage money at seed?" What advice does Manu give to founders on taking multi-stage money at seed? How does Manu evaluate their aggressive movement back into the seed stage? Why is it?
3.) Given Manu only makes 3-4 new investments per year, how does Manu think about and assess his own portfolio construction today? How does Manu think about building temporal diversification into the portfolio? What does Manu believe is the biggest mistake early-stage managers make in the first few years? Why does Manu believe that "group think" is so dangerous for funds today? What can they do deliberately to avoid it?
4.) Manu not only invests but also founds companies at the same time, how does Manu split his time and what does his day look like? What are the benefits of investing and operating simultaneously? What are the biggest challenges and drawbacks? What elements did Manu believe as an investor before starting his new company, HiHello, that he has now changed his mind on, post founding the company?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Manu’s Fave Book: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Manu’s Most Recent Investment: Workona: A Better Way To Work
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Manu on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How To Assess Risk and Value Creation, Why It Would Be Better If VCs Had Smaller Portfolios & How To Optimise Internal Decision-Making with Misha Esipov, Founder & CEO @ Nova Credit
Misha Esipov is the Founder & CEO @ Nova Credit, the startup that allows you to use your international credit history to apply for credit cards, apartment rentals, loans and more. To date, Misha has raised over $69M with Nova from some of the best in the business Kleiner Perkins, Index, First Round, Pear and Core Innovation Capital to name a few. As for Misha, prior to changing the world of credit history, he spent over 5 years in the more traditional world of finance including time at Apollo in the world of private equity and then also Goldman Sachs in the world of investment banking. If that was not enough, due to the incredible impact Nova is having, Misha also sits on the board of World Education Services.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Misha made his way from the world of investment banking and private equity with Goldman and Apollo to changing the way we think about international credit with the founding of Nova?
2.) How does Misah think about and asses both risk and value creation? How did Misha's time at Goldman Sachs influence his operating mentality and how he thinks about the value of data today? Why does Misha find the growth at all costs and revenue later mindset challenging? What core fundamentals around unit economics did Misha establish early with Nova? How does Misha advise founders when it comes to unit economics?
3.) Misha has raised over $69M from some of the best, how did Misha find the process of fundraising? Where specifically does Misha believe his investors provide outside value? What is the optimal way to use an investor in the recruitment process? Where does Misha believe investors could do better and improve? How does Misha advise founders when it comes to manager selection?
4.) How does Misha manage the psychology of being CEO? How does he deal with the shit hit the fan moments? How has his role changed over the last 3 years? What elements have been the most challenging to learn and scale?
5.) How does Misha advise founders on building a diverse pipeline of recruitment candidates from day 1? Why does Misha believe that no recruitment firm can solve for diversity? What is his process as a result for ensuring a truly diverse team? What works? What does not? How does Misha building a culture of accountability? How does Misha think about optimising internal decision-making?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Misha’s Fave Book: Mastery (The Robert Greene Collection)
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Misha on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: True Ventures' Toni Schneider on How Being CEO @ Automattic (Wordpress) Made Him A Better Investor, The Biggest Lessons from Automattic on Running Successful Remote Teams and The Right Way For Investors To Show Founders They Have Their Support (Note
Toni Schneider is a Partner @ True Ventures, one of the valley's leading early-stage firms with a portfolio including the likes of Peloton, Hashicorp, Fitbit, Automattic (Wordpress) and Tray.io to name a few. As for Toni, he has spent 14 years as a Partner @ True but during that tenure, he was also the CEO of Automattic for 8 years where he helped WordPress.com become a top 10 global internet destination with close to a billion monthly visitors. Before that, he was a VP @ Yahoo post their acquisition of the company he was CEO of Oddpost, much of their work formed the basis for Yahoo mail.
(Note: Recorded Pre-Coronavirus)
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Toni made his way into the world of venture following two turns in the seat of CEO and then joining Yahoo?
2.) Does Toni fundamentally believe it helps when investing to have been both an operator with Automattic and Partner @ True? How did being CEO @ Automattic shape how he thinks about investing today? How did Toni manage the balancing act of a being a CEO and Partner at a venture fund for 7 years? Having been a CEO and having worked with the best, what does Toni believe are the qualities that make the great CEO of today?
3.) Why does Toni believe that startups do not have to be as stressful as they are or are portrayed to be? How does Toni deal with the shit hit the fan moments? What can an investor do in times of high stress when the founder is not performing? What is the right way for them to express that the performance is not where it needs to be? On the flip side, what is the right way for investors to show their support to the founders?
4.) What are Toni's biggest learnings from the Wordpress days on what it takes to run a truly successful remote team? Where does Toni see many people going wrong today? What does Toni advise those considering going remote first? What does Toni believe are the biggest pros and cons of the model? What infrastructure does one need to have in place to make it seamless? Does it still make sense for companies to be in the valley?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Toni’s Fave Book: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Toni’s Most Recent Investment: Piavita
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Toni on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: 3 Addictions Of Early-Stage Startup Founders, How Founders Should Strategically Think Through Unit Economics From Day 1 & Why Micromanagement Can Be Beneficial In The Early Days with Adena Hefets, Co-Founder @ Divvy Homes
Adena Hefets is Co-Founder @ Divvy Homes, the startup that turns your monthly rent into a down payment allowing you to get on the property ladder, sooner. To date, Adena has raised over $189M with Divvy from some of the best in the business including a16z, Ray Tonsing @ Caffeinated, Max Levchin, DFJ and Threshold Ventures to name a few. Prior to founding Divvy, Adena was an early-stage fintech investor at DF. Before the world of venture, Adena was part of the original team that started Square Capital and grew the product to over 10,000 advances ($50M) within 1 year. Finally, before that, Adena started her career in the world of private equity with TPG.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adena made her way from the world of venture with DFJ to changing the way we think about homeownership with Divvy?
2.) What does Adena believe are the 3 addictions of many early-stage startup founders? How does Adena advise founders on the right way to think about paid marketing? What have been some surprising lessons from seeing Divvy's CAC change over time? How does Adena advise founders to construct a playbook and cadence for hiring?
3.) How does Adena think differently about unit economics today? Is it fundamental to have this mindset from Day 1? Where does Adena believe many founders go wrong when it comes to unit economics? Who is to blame for this desire for synthetic growth? The founders? The VCs?
4.) Considering female founders get a tiny portion of VC funds raised, how was the fundraise for Adena with Divvy? How does Adena advise other female founders and minorities on fundraising successfully? Does Adena believe that founders should always be raising? How does raising debt differ to raising equity? Why is it so much more challenging?
5.) Why does Adena believe that micromanagement can be beneficial in the early days? How does Adena ensure that it does not lead to dependencies and dejected team members? What does Adena to do push people to really get the most out of them? What works? What does not?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adena’s Fave Book: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adena on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.
20VC: Matt Mochary, Coach To Silicon Valley's Leading VCs & Founders on How To Deal with Imposter Syndrome and Self-Doubt, How To Manage Fear and Anger & Why Board Seats Are The Death of Investors
Matt Mochary coaches some of the world's leading venture capitalists and founders helping them to build the best organizations possible. On the VC side, Matt has worked with Peter Fenton @ Benchmark, several Sequoia Partners, Hemant @ GC and Mamoon @ Kleiner to name a few. As for founders, Matt has worked with the founders of Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Reddit, Flexport and more. Prior to coaching, Matt began his business career as an investor with Spectrum Equity Investors. He then co-founded Totality, eventually sold to MCI/Verizon. In his own words, Matt went on to have fun (making the Academy Award short-listed documentary Favela Rising) and do good (starting the Mochary Foundation).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matt made his way from growth investor to immensely successful founder to now coaching the world's leading investors and founders?
2.) How does Matt advise founders to think about their relationship towards fear and anger? Why doe they generate bad quality of decision-making? What should be done when one recognises they are fearful or angry? Where do many founders and investors go wrong here?
3.) How does Matt advise founders who struggle with issues of self-doubt and imposter syndrome? What process should they go through to gain their confidence? What should they not do? How should they communicate their self-doubt to their team and the world?
4.) How does Matt advise founders in terms of the optimal communication strategy both with their team and their co-founders? Does radical transparency need to be instant or should it be timed correctly? What are the best conflict resolution strategies between founding teams?
5.) Why does Matt believe boards are the death of investors? Why are board members not optimally placed to advise their founders? What does Matt believe makes the best board members having worked with the likes of Peter Fenton? What does Matt advise new board members to be the best board member they can be?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Most Founders Do Not Structure Their Fundraise Correctly, The Pros Of Having An MBA As A Startup Founder & How To Manage The Psychology Of Being CEO and Overcome Self Doubt with Iman Abuzeid, Founder & CEO @ Incredible Health
Iman Abuzeid is the Founder & CEO @ Incredible Health, the startup that connects hospitals with nurses and other high shortage healthcare professionals to dramatically speed up the hiring process. To date, Iman has raised over $17M with Incredible Health from some dear friends of the show including NFX, a16z, Charles Hudson @ Precursor and Obvious Ventures to name a few. As for Iman, prior to Incredible, she was a medical doctor, a McKinsey alumnus and led product management at AliveCor, a Khosla-backed health tech startup.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Iman made her way into the world of startups from a family of surgeons and then through being a medical doctor herself?
2.) How was the fundraising process for Iman as a female minority founder? What advice would Iman give to other women and/ or minority when it comes to getting the very best investors? Where does Iman see so many founders make mistakes raising? How should founders structure their meetings with VCs?
3.) Where does Iman believe VCs can be most helpful? Where do many think VCs are helpful but they are actually not? What does Iman think of the "VC Twitter" ecosystem at play today? What investors said no along the way but Iman really liked? Why? Why does Iman believe MBA's provide such an advantage to startup founders today?
4.) How does Iman manage the psychology of being a CEO? How does Iman deal with moments of self-doubt and imposter syndrome? How has Iman seen herself evolve and change as a leader over the last 3 years? What elements have been the most challenging to come to grips with?
5.) Why does Iman still believe if you are not building your startup in the bay, you are missing out? What is so special about Silicon Valley? What advice does Iman give to founders looking to build a diverse team from day 1? How does Iman think about inevitable hiring mistakes? When is the right time to pull the plug?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Iman’s Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Iman on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Index Ventures Partner, Mark Goldberg on The Questions Founders Must Ask A Multi-Stage Fund Before Taking Their Money At Seed, Why Most Angels Will Lose Their Money & Why We Will See Our First $100Bn Neo-Bank Shortly
Mark Goldberg is a Partner @ Index Ventures, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Dropbox, Revolut, Supercell, Plaid and Transferwise to name a few. As for Mark, since joining Index he has largely specialised on all things financial services and sits on the board of Plaid, Nova Credit, Intercom, Pilot and more incredible companies. Prior to Index, Mark spent 3 years in BizOps at Dropbox where the company increased tenfold during his time there.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mark made his way into the world of venture with Index having spent 3 years at Dropbox during a transformational time for the company? What were Mark's biggest takeaways from seeing the growth cycle at Dropbox? How did that impact his investing mindset with Index?
2.) Why does Mark believe that venture as an asset class is commoditising? What does Mark believe the best funds will have to do to stay ahead? How does Mark build relationships of trust and authenticity so early with founders? What works? What does not? What is the right way to deliver direct and tough feedback to founders?
3.) How does Mark feel about multi-stage funds re-entering seed investing again? What are the right questions seed founders should ask multi-stage funds when determining whether to take their money? What does Mark believe it takes to be competitive and win the very best of deals? How is the Founder VC dynamic changing with capital supply?
4.) Why does Mark believe that most angels are going to lose their money? What does Mark wish all angels knew when they started? How does Mark feel about the rise of founders investing alongside operating? What are the pros? What are the cons? How does Mark feel about the rise of scout funds? Where is there place in the ecosystem?
5.) We are seeing unparalleled levels of activity in fintech, is this a boom or are we at the start of a fundamental shift in the landscape? Why does Mark believe we will soon see our first $100Bn neo-bank? Why does Mark believe we will see a strong rise in the consolidatory environment for fintech moving forward?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mark’s Fave Book: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mark on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con
Tomer London is the Co-Founder @ Gusto, the people platform for small businesses providing one place to run payroll, manage benefits, and support your team. To date, Tomer and the team have raised over $520M with Gusto from some of the industry's leading investors including General Catalyst, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, T Rowe, Fidelity and more and then individuals including Shopify Founder Tobias Luttke, Sam Altman, Max Levchin, Matt Mullenweg, Kevin Hartz and Elad Gil to name a few. Prior to Gusto, Tomer did a PHD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford and before that was Founder and CEO @ Vizmo, mobile self-service technologies for enterprise to try to fix customer care.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tomer made his way from creating inventory management software for his Father's small business in Israel to Stanford and founding the unicorn that is Gusto?
2.) Why does Tomer believe that most founders approach fundraising with the wrong mindset today? What does he mean when he says, "fundraising = creating change"? What is the "values motivation alignment"? How can founders use it to help them select the right investor for them? Why should you add investors just as you would new team members?
3.) Having raised over $200M in the latest financing, how does Tomer think about when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire and go big? Is it a fundamentally different mindset when you have so much cash thrown on you? What would Tomer advise founders with suddenly expanded budgets? With 111 investors on the Gusto cap table, what would Tomer advise founders when it comes to cap table management?
4.) What have been Tomer's biggest learnings when it comes to building a delightful product at scale across different segments? How important does Tomer feel time to delight from the UX perspective is? How does Tomer think about testing levels of user delight? NPS? Product analytics? How does Tomer think about the balance between product development and going all out for scaling?
5.) How has Tomer seen himself change and evolve as a leader of the last 5 years? What elements has he found super challenging to come to grips with? Where does Tomer believe he has a superpower on the flip side? Question from Laela @ CapitalG, what specifically did you do to create the culture that you did in the early days?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tomer’s Fave Book: No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Modern Israel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Tomer on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Vinod Khosla on What Venture Assistance Really Means, Why Many VCs Are Not Qualified To Advise Founders & Why Startups Can Innovate So Much Faster Than Incumbents
Vinod Khosla is the Founder @ Khosla Ventures, one of the valley’s most renowned firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Square, Affirm, DoorDash, Impossible Foods and OpenDoor just to name a few. As for Vinod, he started his career as a Founder, founding Daisy Systems, a company that went on to IPO. Then in 1982, Vinod founded Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. In 1986, Vinod joined his longtime friend, John Doerr and became a General Partner @ KPCB where he helped incubate Juniper Networks and helped transform the telecommunications business with Cerent Corporation, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7.2 billion.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Vinod made his way into the world of startups with the founding of Daisy and Sun Microsystems and how that led to his entry into the world of venture with KPCB and ultimately founding Khosla Ventures?
2.) How does Vinod feel about the term "venture assistance" today? Where does Vinod believe VCs can really drive value? How does Vinod allocate his time to drive as much value for the portfolio as possible? How does Vinod get involved when it comes to talent acquisition for the portfolio?
3.) Why does Vinod believe that most board members are not qualified to advise entrepreneurs today? Why does Vinod believe that most value is driven outside of the board? What can founders to do make their boards as efficient as possible? How does Vinod advise founders to determine which advice to take vs which to disregard?
4.) How does Vinod assess his own approach and attitude to risk today? What does Vinod believe are acceptable vs unacceptable risks in startups? How does Vinod believe the very best founders think about risk management? Does Vinod agree time is the biggest killer of startups? Why does Vinod believe startups are so much quicker to innovate than incumbents?
5.) Why does Vinod believe that tolerance for failure has gone down in Silicon Valley? How does Vinod determine between the realism of when something is not work and to give up vs the visionary persistence to see a project through to the very end? What experience of his own have really led his thinking here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Vinod’s Fave Book: Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, The Third Pillar
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Vinod on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
Emmett Shear is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Twitch, the world's leading live streaming platform for gamers and the things we love. Prior to Twitch's exit to Amazon for a reported $970M, Emmett raised over $42M in funding from some of the best including Thrive Capital, Bessemer, Mike Maples, Aydin Senkut, Paul Graham and Y Combinator. Emmett is also a part-time Partner @ Y Combinator, advising YC companies on everything from fundraising strategy to product decisions to hiring and firing. Before Twitch, Emmett co-founded Kiko, a company he later sold on eBay for 6 figures.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Emmett made his way into the world of startups with Kiko? How he ended up selling that for 6 figures on eBay? How that led to the creation of Justin.TV & Twitch?
2.) Why does Emmett believe starting a startup is like "deciding to take on the burden of Sisyphus?" At what point in the journey does is start to get easier? Does Emmett agree with many on the show who say, "it does not get easier, it just gets different"? How does one know when to give up vs when to persist and follow the vision?
3.) How does Emmett think about structuring an org at 1,500 people? Why does Emmett believe there is a fundamental tension when scaling teams between centralisation and decentralisation? How does one structure a reorg without causing instability? How does one communicate the reorg to the team? Where does Emmett see many go wrong here?
4.) Does Emmett agree the best CEOs are the best resource allocators? How does Emmett approach internal resource allocation today between both functions and projects? What does he find most challenging here? What does the decision-making process look like? What are his taekaways from Apple, Amazon and Microsoft in how they determine and process resource allocation internally?
5.) How does Emmett believe he has changed and evolved as a leader over the last 10 years with Twitch? What elements has he found the most challenging to master? What has he done to combat those weaknesses? Where has he always been naturally strong? What makes him so good at those particular functions?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Emmett’s Fave Book: Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Emmett on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Ashton Kutcher on Early Lessons From Investing in Airbnb and Spotify, Why VC Ownership Requirements Are Becoming More and More Egregious & What Being Good At Product Truly Means
Ashton Kutcher is a Founder & General Partner @ Sound Ventures. Over the last 5 years, Ashton and his partner, Guy Oseary, have built Sound into one of the West Coast's leading new entrants with a portfolio including Lambda School, Calm, Gitlab, Affirm, Bird and many more incredible companies. As for Ashton, he started his investing career as an angel with early home runs including Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, Airbnb and Optimizely. Due to his immense success both in media and technology, Ashton has been named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ashton made his way into the world of startups with his foray into angel investing in Skype, Spotify etc? How did that lead to his founding Sound Ventures most recently?
2.) How does Ashton's background in the world of media impact Sound's investment strategy and the type of deals they get excited by? Question from Daniel Ek @ Spotify: How did your deal sourcing look lin the early days? How has that changed over time and with the institutionalisation of Sound?
3.) Why does Ashton believe people creating the future are perpetually young? What question does Ashton always like to ask founders? What does he look for in their answer? How does Ashton ensure founders feel comfortable with him? What does he do to allow them to open up? What is the hardest thing Ashton feels he has persevered through?
4.) How does Ashton build strong product intuition about products in areas he is not familiar with? In terms of great product, Ashton backed Spotify with Daniel Ek and Shak Khan, what did Ashton see in Spotify way back then? How did Shak and Daniel innovate on distribution and customer acquisition with him and Spotify?
5.) What have been Ashton's learnings in what it takes to truly win the best and most competitive deals? Before as an angel, Ashton's check size was friendly, now with Sound it is competitive with VCs, how does Ashton approach the element of now competing with many VCs he once co-operated with? What does Ashton make of the rise of many celebrity investors today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ashton’s Fave Book: The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies
Ashton’s Most Recent Investment: Community
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ashton on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How Founders Should Think Through Distribution and Customer Acquisition Today, The Challenges of the Digital Advertising Duopoly Currently & How To Structure Company Post Mortems Effectively with Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo
Gabriel Weinberg is the Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. Over the last 12 years, Gabe has scaled DuckDuckGo to doing 1.6Bn private searches every month, a team of 83 full time fully remote employees, raising funding from some of the best in the business; USV and most importantly, being a profitable company. If that was not enough, Gabe has also written two phenomenal books, Traction and Super Thinking.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Gabriel made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of today's leading search engines and privacy companies in DuckDuckGo?
2.) Gabriel decided to raise $13M from USV 4 years into the life of DDG, why did he believe that was the right time? Why does Gabe believe that DDG never needed any primary capital? How does Gabe advise founders to think when it comes to chasing profitability early? How does Gabe view the relationship between growth and capital? Are they in conflict or aligned? What does Gabe make of the many $100M rounds getting done today?
3.) How does Gabe feel about the lack of free and open distribution today? How does Gabe strategise when it comes to channel diversification? What is the right level of marketing channel diversification to have? How do you know when to really double down on one that is working? How should founders be thinking about channel saturation rates? What have been Gabes biggest lessons on payback period over the last 12 years with DDG?
4.) How does Gabe feel about the digital advertising duopoly on the internet between Facebook and Google? Why does Gabe argue that this duo of incumbents are so much more powerful than any other prior generation of incumbents? How does Gabe think about strategies to reduce their data monopolies?
5.) DDG is 83 people and fully remote, what have been Gabe's biggest lessons on what it takes to run a fully-remote team from Day 1? What mistakes did they make? WHat would Gabe advise founders contemplating the fully remote strategy? Why does Gabe have nor formal hierarchy or org chart internally at DDG? Why is this so important for culture and employee morale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Gabe’s Fave Book: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Gabe on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I
Jude Gomila is the Founder & CEO @ Golden, creating the world's first self-constructing knowledge database built by artificial and human intelligence. To date, Jude has raised from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, a16z, SV Angel and one of my dearest friends, Josh Buckley. Jude is also a prolific angel having invested in over 150 companies including Carta, Airtable, Superhuman, Gusto, Linear and many more incredible companies. Prior to Golden, Jude started Heyzap (now used by 100,000 mobile apps) alongside former guest Immad, now Founder of Mercury.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jude made his way into the world of tech and Silicon Valley having been born and raised in Harrow, London? How did he then make his way into the world of investing?
2.) What models should investors and founders have common ground on? Where are founders and investors often misaligned? What does Jude mean when he says he uses "algorithms for investing"? How are these algorithms structured? What is within them? How can/should people build their own?
3.) Why does Jude very much disagree with spray and pray to be the dominant model to make money at seed? How does Jude think about portfolio construction having now made 180 investments? How has Jude's approach and attitude to ownership changed over time?
4.) Does Jude agree with Semil Shah that founders are voting with their feet and taking multi-stage money at seed today? How does Jude evaluate the approach of multi-stage funds back into seed? How does Jude think about VC value add? Where does he believe they really can add value? Where do people think they do but they actually do not?
5.) How does Jude foresee the future of the early-stage market? Will we see a generation of old school venture firms die out? Why does Jude believe younger investors have a higher chance of finding and winning the next best deal? How does Jude believe the angel ecosystem will shake out? Will we fundamentally see the unbundling of capital?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jude’s Fave Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Jude's Most Recent Investment: Linear
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jude on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin
Shoaib Makani is the Co-Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin, the modern fleet management platform building solutions that make drivers and fleets safer, smarter, and more efficient. To date, Shoaib has raised over $229M from some of the world's leading investors including Index, GV, Greenoaks, IVP & Scale Venture Partners. Pre-founding KeepTruckin, Shoaib was an investor @ Khosla Ventures where he led investments in Instacart, Everlane and Indiegogo to name a few. Before venture with Khosla, Shoaib was on the operations side enjoying roles at both Google and Admob.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Shoaib made his way from the very comfortable world of venture to changing the way trucking fleets are managed today with KeepTruckin? How does Shoaib analyse and assess his own attitude to risk today?
2.) How has Shoaib seen himself change and evolve as a leader over the last few years? How did his time investing impact how he approaches the role of CEO? How does Shoaib think about appropriate market sizing today? What advice does he give to founders on this? What is a reasonable market penetration to assume if successful?
3.) What advice would Shoaib give founders when it comes to successful board management? How does Shoaib ensure investors have the right context at the right time to provide advice? What does that information flow to investors look like? How does Shoaib determine between the advice to accept vs what to reject?
4.) Shoaib thought about distribution and customer acquisition long before he launched the product, why? What did this thought process conclude with? Does Shoaib believe you have to own your own lines of distribution to succeed? How does Shoaib feel when it comes to current CAC's on incumbent platforms?
4.) As a founder, what does Shoaib say is his biggest mistake made in the KeepTrickin journey? How does Shoaib think about what it takes to acquire the very best talent? How does Shoaib advise founders work with recruiters? What can they do to really get the most out of them? When can this function be brought in house?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Shoaib’s Fave Book: Presidents of War
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Shoaib on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Breaking News: Meet First Round Capital's Newest Partner, How To Approach Generational Transition as a Venture Firm & The Dangers of Attribution In Venture
Todd Jackson is First Round Capital's newest Partner (announced today) having spent the last 2 years as a Founder-in-Residence working with the FRC portfolio. Prior to his time in venture, Todd spent close to 3 years at Dropbox as VP Product & Design. Before that he was with Twitter as Director of Product Management, following his startup, Cover, being acquired by Twitter in 2014. Before founding Cover, Todd was a Product Manager @ Facebook where he helped lead major redesign of Newsfeed. Finally, Todd started his career at Google as a Product Lead taking Gmail from 0 to 200m users in 4 years.
Todd is joined today by his Partner @ First Round, Phin Barnes. Phin also writes the most fantastic blog, sneakerheadVC, that really is a must-read.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Phin, what is the exclusive news you would like to break on the show today? Todd, taking one step back, how did you make your way to this stage, what was your entry into technology and how did you come to be a Partner @ First Round Capital today? What were Todd's biggest takeaways from working on some of the most transformative social products in Gmail, Twitter, Newsfeed @ Facebook and Dropbox?
2.) What advice does Phin have for Todd when it comes to entering a venture partnership? Where do many people go wrong in their first year in venture? What should Todd be optimising for in the partnership? In terms of measurement, how does one measure success of the first year of work as a Partner?
3.) Todd, making the move from angel to institutional VC is a mindset shift, how does Todd think his investment mentality will be impacted by the shift from angel to institutional VC? Having raised funding as a founder, what type of founder experience and investor does Todd want to be and bring?
4.) Phin, it has been a long time since FRC added a Partner, walk me through the recent changes at the top of FRC? What are the most important qualities for First Round when adding a Partner? What are the biggest tips to doing generational transition well? Where do many firms go wrong in generational transition?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Todd’s Fave Book: Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
Todd’s Most Recent Investment: Papaya Payments, Snackpass
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Todd on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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20VC: Alexa Von Tobel on Raising NYC's Largest Ever Female Led Fund , Portfolio Construction, Compression of Fundraising Timelines, Reserves Management & Personal Branding in Venture
Alexa Von Tobel is the Founder & Managing Partner @ Inspired Capital, announced in 2019 as the largest ever female-led VC fund based in NYC. Prior to co-founding Inspired, Alexa founded LearnVest where she enjoyed an incredible 11-year journey culminating in their $250M exit to Northwestern Mutual in 2015. Alexa is also the author of New York Times Bestseller "Financially Fearless" and is an inaugural member of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship for the White House.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alexa made her way into the world of startups with the founding of LearnVest? How did that experience running LearnVest lead to her founding NYC's largest-ever female-led VC fund in the form of Inspired?
2.) How does Alexa think about portfolio construction with the new $200M fund? What does she mean when she says they have segmented it into 3 distinct and separate buckets? How much is in each bucket? How does Alexa think about reserves and re-investment decision making? What is the process here?
3.) As a former entrepreneur, how does Alexa think about those moments when the VC and the Founder are no longer aligned? What are those moments? How does Alexa approach the aspect of saying no to founders? What is the right way? How does Alexa feel about the compression in fundraising timelines? How does Alexa meet founders before they raise their round?
4.) Why does Alexa believe that capital is no longer the differentiator? How does Alexa think about personal brand in venture today? Where does Alexa believe are the most crucial times for reputation building? How does Alexa approach time allocation across the portfolio? What is the correlation between decision-making and reputation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alexa’s Fave Book: The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
Alexa’s Most Recent Investment: Snackpass
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alexa on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do
Katie Stanton is the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, investing in founders who make life and work better. Prior to Moxxie, Katie was a Founding Partner of #angels and has the most incredible angel portfolio including Airtable, Carta, Cameo, Coinbase and Modern Fertility to name a few. Katie also served in numerous executive operating roles at Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Color and also served in the (Obama) White House and State Department. If that was not enough, Katie is also on the board of Vivendi and previously sat on the board of Time Inc.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Katie made her way into the world of tech with Yahoo? How did that translate into her investing in Lowercase Fund I? How did the angel investing lead to founding Moxxie? How has Katie found her investment mindset has changed moving from angel to VC?
2.) How did Katie find the fundraise for Moxxie? How many LPs did Katie meet and how did she structure the process? What does Katie think she did well in the fundraise? What would she look to improve or change when raising for Fund II? What advice was Katie given in the process by Semil Shah which really changed her thinking? What advice would Katie give to other emerging managers raising today?
3.) Does Katie agree with Semil Shah that "founders are voting with their feet in taking multi-stage money at seed"? What advice does Katie give to founders who do have these offers from multi-stage funds at seed? How does Katie assess these later stage funds moving earlier? How should smaller micro-managers respond to this?
4.) How does Katie think about portfolio construction today with Moxxie? What are the hard rules that mean Katie is willing to walk away from a deal? How does Katie think about and assess her own price sensitivity? In terms of decision-making, what support system has Katie built around herself to enhance her decision-making process?
5.) How does Katie advice founders when it comes to selecting their VC? What are the most common ways founders look for and need to help with? How does Katie think about party rounds? When are they good? When are they not? Why does Katie believe so much of the power has shifted to the hands of the founders?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Katie’s Fave Book: Becoming by Michelle Obama, Angel by Jason Calacanis
Katie’s Most Recent Investment: ethel's club
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Katie on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The Most Successful Companies Are Not Where Employees Work The Most, How To Know When To Promote From Below Or Bring in External Candidates & Why It Is A Unique Advantage To Be Building A Company Outside A Tech Hub with Rick Nucci, Founder & CEO @ G
Rick Nucci is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Guru, the knowledge management platform that delivers everything you need so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. To date, Rick has raised over $38m with Guru from some of the best in the business including Thrive, Emergence Capital, Firstmark, Slack and Salesforce. Prior to Guru, Rick was the Founder of Boomi, which defined and led a new segment as the first-ever cloud integration platform-as-a-service. Boomi was ultimately acquired by Dell where Rick went on to grow the organisation into the industry leader it is today.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rick made his way into the world of startups originally and how he came to change the way we think about knowledge management with his founding of Guru?
2.) How would Rick describe his leadership style today? How has he seen his style change over the years? What have been those learnings and the inflexion points causing them? Does Rick believe can be learned as a leader? What does he recommend to founders wanting to become more empathetic?
3.) Culture is a fluffy and overused term, what does it mean to Rick? What has Rick done to purposefully build a very specific culture that he wanted to create? What specific initiatives have worked well? What have not worked so well? How does Rick think about culture maintenance with scale? What are the challenges with scaling culture?
4.) How does Rick think about the interview process when adding to the team at Guru? How do they literally structure it? What does their culture interview encompass? How heavily is it weighted? What specific questions do they ask and responses they look for? If it does not work out, what have been Rick's biggest lessons on letting people go?
5.) Rick is based in Philadelphia, often people say if you are not in a tech hub it is not possible to get the best talent, does Rick agree with this? In what roles does it make sense to hire from a tech hub for? What are the advantages of hiring outside of a hub? Fundraising wise, does Rick believe you have to have a presence in a core hub to raise from Tier 1 VCs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rick’s Fave Book: The 9 Types of Leadership: Mastering the Art of People in the 21st Century Workplace
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rick on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks on The Most Important Skill An Investor Can Have, The Right Way To Think About Price Sensitivity & Where Are We At Today; Take More Risk or Less?
Howard Marks is co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, a leading investment firm with more than $120 billion in assets. Prior to founding Oaktree, Howard spent 10 years at The TCW Group, where he was responsible for investments in distressed debt, high yield bonds, and convertible securities. Previously, Howard was with Citicorp for 16 years, where he served as Vice President and senior portfolio manager in charge of convertible and high yield securities. Howard has also written two books, most recently Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side, and it was Warren Buffet who said, “When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they’re the first thing I open and read. I always learn something.”
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howard first made his way into the world of finance over 50 years ago? How did not getting an investment banking job change the course of Howard's life?
2.) Where does Howard think we are in the cycle today? What leads his thinking here? What is it crucial for all investors to remember at any point in the cycle? From a risk distribution and diversification perspective, does Howard believe now is a better or worse time to increase risk?
3.) Having worked through and been at the forefront of some of the most significant downturns of financial markets, what have been Howard's biggest learnings from seeing the booms and busts? How did it impact his investment mindset? At a point in 2008, Oaktree were deploying $600M per week for 15 weeks running, so how does Howard think about when is the right time to be aggressive vs when to pullback?
4.) How does Howard think about and assess his own price sensitivity? If there is one thing Howard wants to know to determine the right price, what is it? How does Howard believe we are seeing pro-risk mindsets alter investors attitude to price? How does Howard think about his right vs wrong and consensus vs non-consensus matrix?
5.) Howard and his Partner, Bruce have a very special relationship, what have they done to foster a relationship of radical intellectual honesty and that environment of safety? What are some things Howard will say to his team to encourage productive disagreement? What to Howard is the most important skill an investor can have is?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howard’s Fave Book: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Howard on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Sumeet Gajri is the Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta, the startup that helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. Sumeet is largely responsible for all things fundraising and M&A and Carta have raised over $485m from a16z, USV, Thrive, Spark, K9, Lightspeed and Meritech to name a few. Sumeet is also Managing Partner @ Original Capital, where he has partnered with companies including Front, Tonal, Instabase, Everlywell and Cockroach Labs to name a few. Finally, Sumeet is also an LP in world-leading firms such as USV and Valar Ventures.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sumeet made his first foray into the world of venture in NYC having grown up in Scotland? How that led to his move to operations with Carta? How his learnings from Carta led to his establishing Original Capital?
2.) How is Original Capital different from every other micro-fund? How does Sumeet approach portfolio construction with the fund? What is the optimal number in a portfolio? How does Sumeet think about loss ratio? What 3 criteria dos every new investment have to pass to make it into the portfolio? How does check size vary by deal?
3.) How does Sumeet invest in some of the best companies in between "official rounds"? What does this conversation look like with the founders? How does Sumeet analyse reserve allocations? What makes the right strategy? What are his capital concentration limits per company? How does Sumeet think about using SPVs effectively?
4.) Sumeet helps his companies fundraise a lot, what does the first step look like? How does he advise on investor selection? How does he advise on pipeline management? Should founders speak to investors when they are not raising? How open should they be in these meetings? What can founders do to catalyse the process? Where does Sumeet see many founders make mistakes?
5.) How does Sumeet think about distribution vs product? What can founders do to adopt a more distribution first mindset? What have been some of Sumeet's biggest lessons in turning Carta from a single product company to a multi-product company? Do companies have to own their own lines of distribution today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sumeet’s Fave Book: Howard Marks: The Value of Predictions
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sumeet on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Khosla Ventures Founding Partner, Samir Kaul on Why Pro Rata Is A Cop Out, Why He Likes Technical Risk and Does Not Take Market Risk & How To Approach Time Allocation Across The Portfolio In Venture
Samir Kaul is a Founding Partner and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures, one of the valley's most renowned firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Square, Affirm, DoorDash, Impossible Foods and OpenDoor just to name a few. As for Samir, he led the firm's investment in Guardant Health, Impossible Foods, Nutanix [NASDAQ: NTNX], Oscar, among others. Prior to Khosla, Samir spent five years at Flagship Ventures where he started and invested in early-stage biotechnology companies, including Helicos Biosciences which went on to IPO. Samir was also founding CEO of Codon Devices and led the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative at Craig Venter’s Institute for Genomic Research.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Samir made his way into the world of venture from the world of biotech and came to found one of the leading firms of the last decade?
2.) How did seeing the booms and busts of the last 2 decades impact Samir's investing mindset? Why does Samir think it is dangerous for a VC to have a "conservative mindset"? How does Samir analyse and think about upside maximisation when investing today? How does Samir think about when to sell your position and how to determine the right time?
3.) What does investment decision-making look like at Khosla? What are the criteria that re-investments are made upon? Why does Samir believe that pro-rata is a kop out? Which should be the core questions that determine whether to double down or not? How does Samir and the partnership think about time allocation across the portfolio?
4.) How does Samir approach the exercise of market sizing? Why does Samir never want to take a risk when it comes to market? Why does Samir want to maximise his risk when it comes to technological risk? How does Samir think through having to carry these deep tech companies for longer? What were his learnings from the clean tech days on this?
5.) How would Samir analyse his own price sensitivity today? What was his most formative inflexion moment as an investor? What did he learn from it? From a people side, who had the biggest impact on Samir as an investor? What were the core elements he learned from them? How does Samir deal with the element of self-doubt? How does he get through those moments?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Samir’s Fave Book: Start Something That Matters
Samir’s Most Recent Investment: Lightship: Direct to Patient Clinical Trials
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Samir on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor
Kurt Rathmann is the Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor, the startup providing an automated bookkeeping solution at its core, bringing all of your company’s important financial information into one place. To date, Kurt has raised over $105m with ScaleFactor from the likes of Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, Coatue, Canaan Partners, Stripes Group and Firebrand to name a few. As Michael @ Coatue told me before the show, there is no way Kurt was not going to be the founder of a bookkeeping company given his background. Prior to ScaleFacotr, Kurt was the CFO of KNS Communications and a Senior Audit Professional @ KPMG.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Kurt make his way into the world of startups and come to found the gamechanger for bookkeeping in the form of ScaleFactor? Does Kurt believe that Founders do need to be mission-driven or can founding a company be a more analytical exercise?
2.) How did it come to be that Kurt raised 3 separate funding rounds and over $105m in just 13 months? How does Kurt feel about the saying, "when there is money on the table, take it"? Having had his B and C pre-empted, how does Kurt feel about the rise of pre-emptive rounds today? How did Kurt approach the mental challenge of transitioning from resource-starved to relative resource abundance? Was that tough to do?
3.) What is Kurt's biggest advice to founders when it comes to investor selection? What does Kurt believe are the 5 things that VCs can do to add value? Why does Kurt believe it is the responsibility of the founder to extract that value from the VC? What can founders do to really get the most out of their investors? What has Kurt found to be the biggest value from his cap table? Where do founders think VCs add value but they do not?
4.) What are some very unique and deliberate things that Kurt does to create an amazing culture at ScaleFactor? How does he advise on creating great energy in the office itself? How does Kurt think about retaining that core ethos with the expansion to multiple offices? What have been some of the biggest challenges in scaling communications internally?
5.) Does Kurt believe that being outside of a core tech hub severely limits his ability to hire the best talent? What do founders outside of these hubs need to very strategically do? How does being outside of a core hub also impact how Kurt thinks founders need to approach fundraising? What specifically can they do to increase their odds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kurt’s Fave Book: The Empowered Challenger Playbook: How Brands Can Change the Game, Steal Market Share, and Topple Giants
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kurt on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Now Is The Hardest Time To Raise an Institutional Pre-Seed in the Last Decade, What To Do When The Founder and VC Interests Do Not Align & The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds with Gaurav Jain, Founder & Managing Partner @ Afore Capital
Gaurav Jain is Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Afore Capital, one of the west coast's leading pre-seed funds with a $124M fund focused purely on pre-seed. To date, they have backed the likes of Petal, BetterUp, BenchSci and Modern Health to name a few. Prior to co-founding Afore, Gaurav was a Principal @ Founder Collective where he was directly involved with some incredible companies including Cruise (Acq. by General Motors for $1B+), Periscope (acq. by Twitter), Airtable and Dia & Co. Before venture, Gaurav spent time in operations both at Google as one of the first engineers for Android and then also founding his own company, Polar, a leading mobile solutions provider with $10m in funding.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Gaurav made his way into the world of venture with Founder Collective and how that led to the realisation that Afore needed to exist in the funding landscape? What were the 3 biggest takeaways for Gaurav from his time at Founder Collective?
2.) Why does Gaurav believe now is the hardest time in the last decade to raise your first institutional round of funding? What is driving these capital reductions at pre-seed? How does Gaurav assess the rise of operator funds and super angels we have seen in the last 5 years? How does Gaurav advise founders on investor selection at pre-seed?
3.) What does Gaurav make of large multi-stage funds entering into pre-seed? Why does Gaurav strongly believe that you cannot apply the same financing product to a different market? Does this mean the multi-stage funds will revert back to later stages?
4.) How is Gaurav seeing Series A funds behaving? Why are they more aggressive now than ever before? What does Gaurav make of the rise of pre-emptive rounds? How does he advise founders on pre-emptive rounds?
5.) How does Gaurav think about portfolio construction today with Afore? What is the right level of diversification across the portfolio to be sufficiently diversified at pre-seed? How does Gaurav think about reserve allocation today? How does the decision-making process compare when comparing initial to re-investment decision?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Gaurav’s Fave Book: Trillion-Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
Gaurav’s Most Recent Investment: Modern Health
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Gaurav on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Rahul Vohra @ Superhuman, The Most Downloaded Founder Episode of 2019
Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO @ Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world. Fun fact, users get through their inbox twice as fast — and many see Inbox Zero for the first time in years! To date, they have raised funds from our friends at Boldstart, First Round, John Collison, Sam Altman, Wayne Chang, Mike Ghaffery and Yes VC just to name a few. Previously, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Rahul make his way into the world of startups with the founding of Rapportive and how did that transition to changing the world of email with Superhuman?
2.) What does Rahul mean when he says, “you can reverse engineer a process to get to product-market fit”? What does Rahul believe is the defining metric which determines your “product-market fit score”? What is Julie Supan’s framework? How did Dropbox and Airbnb use it to increase their product-market fit? How can founders implement it into their process?
3.) What can founders do to expand the customer base to include users that currently are “somewhat disappointed”? What are the right questions to ask? What do we do with this feedback? How do we further segment the user base? Why should we “disregard the users whereby the primary benefit of the product does not resonate”?
4.) How does Rahul approach product roadmap and prioritisation? How can founders ensure that continuous tracking and user feedback is engrained within the organisation? What tools does Rahul do to monitor and capture this? What are some of Rahul’s biggest lessons from going through this painstaking process stage by stage?
5.) Finally on fundraising, what does Rahul mean when he says, “always be raising but never be actively raising”? What are the benefits of this? How can founders transition catch up coffee into fundraising subtly? How does Rahul feel about party rounds? What are the pros? What are the downsides? How does Rahul advise founders here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rahul’s Fave Book: The Art of Game Design
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Inside The Acquisition Decision-Making Process at Cisco, How To Measure True Success in M&A Evaluation & Why By Not Speaking To Corp Dev Teams You Are Closing The Door On The Biggest Potential Accelerator To Your Business with Rob Salvagno, VP of Co
Rob Salvagno is VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments at Cisco, where he is responsible for leading all M&A efforts as well as managing Cisco’s strategic venture capital which invests hundreds of millions of dollars annually. At Cisco, Rob led the $1.2 billion acquisition of Meraki, one of the most successful platform acquisitions in Cisco’s history, and the $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics, cementing Cisco’s place in the business intelligence, analytics and IT operations market. Most recently, Rob engineered the $2.3 billion acquisition of Duo, the leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud. Prior to the world of M&A, Rob was a technology investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rob made his way from investment banking to leading the M&A and venture activity for one of the world's largest tech players of the last decade?
2.) How do M&A teams like to get to know startups that they could invest in or acquire? How does Rob like to work with the venture ecosystem? How does Rob think on Paul Graham's comment of "do not talk to corp dev"? What are the nuances here? How does it differ for consumer vs enterprise?
3.) How does Rob define true success when it comes to M&A evaluation? Should corp dev be strategy first or transaction first? What have been Rob's biggest lessons on successful integration? Where do so many go wrong with integration post M&A? What questions can be asked ahead of time to know if integration and culture will be a fit?
4.) How does Rob reflect on his own price sensitivity today? How does Rob feel about the multiples enterprise companies are currently trading at? What have Rob's most successful acquisitions taught him about price and price sensitivity? How does Rob deal with the inherent conflict of investing and also acquiring companies? How does he communicate that to the companies he invests in?
5.) What does the acquisition-decision making process look like at Cisco? How does it differ on a deal by deal basis? What do Cisco do to allow them to move so much faster than any other M&A teams? What have been Rob's lessons on the importance of speed in winning the best transactions?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rob’s Fave Book: The Poisonwood Bible
Rob’s Most Recent Acquisitions: CloudCherry, Voicea
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rob on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Most Downloaded Episode of 2019 with Bill Gurley, General Partner @ Benchmark Capital
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many many more. As for Bill, widely recognised as one of the greats of our time having worked with the likes of GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix and Zillow. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Before entering venture, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston where his research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Bill make his way into the world of VC from Credit Suisse and come to be GP at one of the world’s leading funds in the form of Benchmark? What were Bill’s biggest takeaways from seeing the boom and bust of the dot com? How did that impact Bill’s investment mentality today?
2.) Why does Bill believe that one of the biggest challenges today is the abundance of capital? Subsequently, does Bill agree with Peter Fenton statement, “never turn down a deal based on the valuation it is a mental trap”? How does Bill assess his own price sensitivity? What was his learning here in meeting Larry and Serge early on with Google?
3.) How does Bill think about and approach market sizing today? How important is it to him when analysing an investment? Where does Bill believe a lot of managers make mistakes when assessing market sizing today? What was his big lesson here with Uber? How does Bill think about and evaluate market creation and market expansion plays?
4.) Bill has spent over 3,000 hours on some of the most famed boards of the last decade, how has Bill seen his style of board membership change over the last 10 years? What advice would you give to someone who has just joined their first board? How does Bill think about time allocation across the portfolio? What is the right ratio?
5.) How does Bill and Benchmark approach the element of partner selection today? What are the 5 core things that Bill looks for when adding to the partnership? What have Benchmark done that have allowed them to be so successful in generational transition? Why is an equal partnership so transformative when it comes to generational transition?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Bill’s Fave Book: Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
Bill’s Most Recent Investment: Good Eggs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Bill on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Inside UiPath, The World's Fastest Growing Startup, How The Best Leaders Approach Decision-Making & WhY Vulnerability Is Central To SuccessFul Leadership Today with Brandon Deer, VP of Operations & Strategy @ UiPath
Brandon Deer is VP of Operations & Strategy @ UiPath, one of the world's fastest-growing companies providing a complete software platform to help organizations efficiently automate business processes through robotic process automation. To date, UiPath has raised over $977m in funding from some of the best in the world including Sequoia, Accel, Meritech, IVP, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, Coatue and more. As for Brandon, prior to UiPath he spent 4 years as Vice President @ OpenView Partners where he made investments in Expensify, Logz.io, VTS and Pipefy to name a couple. Before OpenView, Brandon spent close to 4 years at Intuit in Strategy and Business Development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brandon made his way from being a rising star in the world of venture with Openview to leading one of the fastest-growing companies in history in UiPath? What has been the most surprising element in making the transition from investor to operator?
2.) How does Brandon think about decision-making today? How does he determine what to spend time on vs what to delegate? What does he mean when he says, "you have to think whether it is rubber or crystal?" How does that ultimately guide decision-making?
3.) What does the UiPath software actually do? What is the relationship between RPA and AI? Where do they differ? Where do they intersect? Recently, RPA has seen a meteoric rise, is this sustainable over the long term? How does Brandon respond to the suggestion that RPA is replacing human jobs? What is the human and societal impact?
4.) How does Brandon think about vulnerability in leadership? Why does Daniel and Brandon's relationship work so well today? What has Daniel (Founder) taught Brandon about communicating that vulnerability the right way and authentically? What does Brandon advise founders in terms of being open to their vulnerabilities?
5.) What are the biggest challenges in scaling an organisation to the 1,000+ person organisation that UiPath is today? What breaks When does it break? How does one maintain culture wit such scale? What have been the challenges of building a truly global business from Day 1? How do they look to mitigate them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brandon’s Fave Book: The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brandon on Twitter here!
20VC: How To Think Through Portfolio Construction and The Business Model of VC, Why You Cannot Grow Ownership In Your Best Companies Over Time & How To Make The Space for Serendipity To Strike in VC with Adam D'Augelli, Partner @ True Ventures
Adam D’Augelli is a Partner @ True Ventures, one of the West Coast’s leading early-stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of Fitbit, Peloton, Hashicorp, Tray.io, Ring, Automattic (makers of WordPress) and many more amazing companies. As for Adam, he has spent close to 10 years at True where he has led investments in Hashicorp, Ring, Splice and Namely, just to name a few. Prior to joining the world of venture with True, Adam was an instructor at The University of Florida in Business Finance. Before that Adam was the Founder of Perfect Wave Records, a donation-based record label - helping bands better monetize the relationships with their fans.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam made his way into the world of venture with True having had a slightly unorthodox start as an Instructor at The University of Florida?
2.) How does Adam think about portfolio construction today with True? Is it still possible to get 20% ownership on first check? Does Adam believe you can build ownership in subsequent rounds? Does this mean we are seeing the end to rounds being co-led? What does Adam make of pre-emptive rounds? How do True respond to them today?
3.) How does True think about initial vs re-investment decision-making? How do the decision processes differ? Does Adam believe it is possible to stack rank companies and allocate capital accordingly? What is the right way to tell a founder you will not be re-investing? How does Adam think about risk maximisation at a company level?
4.) As a partnership, how does True look to create an environment of safety where both conviction and concerns can be expressed? What should partnerships not do? Why is attribution so dangerous to this EQ of the partnership? How does the partnership work with the companies at a company level? How does True view board seats? How does True think about when is the right time to roll off boards?
5.) What were Adam's biggest takeaways from leading Ring's seed to their acquisition by Amazon? How does Adam think about the importance of market vs the importance of people when investing? How does Adam think about company failure, post-mortems and subsequent next steps?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adam’s Fave Book: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State
Adam’s Most Recent Investment: Membio
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Unusual Ventures’ John Vrionis on Why We Need To Raise The Bar In Venture, Why Taking Multi-Stage Money At Seed Is Not In The Best Interest of Founders & Why To Be The Best, You Have To Specialise To Be The Best
John Vrionis is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Unusual Ventures, the firm that is redefining seed investing and raising the bar for what entrepreneurs should expect from a seed investment firm. Prior to founding Unusual, John spent 11 years as a Partner @ Lightspeed where his investments included Mulesoft, AppDynamics, Nimble Storage and Heptio to name a few. Before Lightspeed John spent time in product management and sales @ Determina and Freedom Financial Network.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did John make his way into the world of venture and come to be a Partner @ Lightspeed? How did that lead to his founding Unusual? How did his father's MS diagnosis change his mentality towards both investing and how he views the world? What were John's biggest takeaways from his 12 years with the Lightspeed partnership?
2.) Where does John feel the bar needs to be raised in venture? What does the current product not offer? What do seed-stage founders fundamentally need? How have Unusual structured the firm to provide this? How was the fundraise for John? What does John know post-closing that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What advice would John give to aspiring emerging managers? Why is LP diversity so important to John?
3.) Why does John believe taking multi-stage money at seed is not in the best interests of the founder? How does John explain this logically to founders? Does John agree with Semil Shah, "founders are voting with their feet and choosing multi-stage funds"? Why does John believe to be truly best in class, you have to specialise? Does this not go against the data of Benchmark, Sequoia, Founders Fund, all generalist funds, having the best returns?
4.) How does John think about being company vs being founder first? What does one do when alignment erodes between the interest of the firm and the interest of the founder? How does John look to build a relationship of trust and honesty with his founders? What works? What does not work? How does John feel about VCs being friends with their founders?
5.) What is the most challenging element of John's role today with Unusual? Who is the best board member John has ever sat on a board with? Why and what did he learn? What would John most like to change about the world of venture today? What would he like to remain the same?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
John’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
John’s Most Recent Investment: Shujinko
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and John on Twitter here!
20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane
Emmanuel Schalit is the Founder & CEO @ Dashlane, the company that provides your all-in-one internet shortcut for passwords, payments and personal info. To date, Emmanuel has raised over $192m in funding for Dashlane from some of the best in the business including Jim Goetz @ Sequoia Capital, Rick @ Firstmark, Alex @ Bessemer and Habib @ Rho, just to name a few. As for Emmanuel, prior to founding Dashlane, he was the CEO @ CBS Outdoor in France and before that COO @ La Martiniere Group.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Emmanuel made his way from CEO of 5,000+ people companies to founding Dashlane and changing the world of passwords and identification? How does Emmanuel asses his own risk profile moving from CEO of a large company to starting Dashlane?
2.) Is Emmanuel concerned by the excess capital available today? Why does Emmanuel believe that raising a mega-round makes your life as a founder harder, not easier? What specifically becomes harder? How does Emmanuel advise founders when it comes to burn and capital efficiency? How does Emmanuel think about when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire?
3.) Where does Emmanuel think that VCs do tangibly add real value? Where does Emmanuel believe that despite what some think, VCs do not add value in certain areas? What have been Emmanuel's biggest lessons of operating and managing a VC board? What does he advise founders starting out on this learning curve?
4.) What does Emmanuel believe are the core challenges of scale? What breaks at what specific points? How has Emmanuel seen himself scale in his role as CEO? What have been the most challenging element to scale into? How did Emmanuel get through them and what does he do to mitigate them now?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Emmanuel’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Emmanuel on Twitter here!
20VC: BoxGroup's David Tisch on Whether Concentrated Investing At Seed Works, Do Founders Really Want Direct Feedback and Is It Good For Them & Why Consumer Social Is Interesting Again
David Tisch is the Founder & Managing Partner @ BoxGroup, one of the leading early-stage firms in NYC with a portfolio that includes the likes of Flexport, RigUp, Ro, Glossier, Clearbit, PillPack and Plaid, to name a few. Recently they raised their first external capital with 2 separate vehicles totalling over $160m. David is also Professor and Head of Startup Studio @ Cornell Tech. Prior to BoxGroup, he was Managing Director of Techstars NYC and before that was an Executive Vice President @ KGB.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of early-stage investing? How he made the transition from prolific angel investor to raising $160m+ in external capital? Why did David feel now was the right time to raise external funding after 10 years of self-funding? How has taking on external capital changed his investing mindset?
2.) Many suggest that "concentrated seed investing does not work", how does David think about and assess portfolio construction? May others also suggest that, "seed investors are not company builders", does David agree with that? Does David believe investors can change the trajectory of a company? Where can they help the most? Where do many think they help but they actually do not?
3.) Why does David believe that founders do not speak openly about bad experiences with VCs? What have been David's biggest lessons on the right way to turn down an opportunity? Do founders really want direct and honest feedback? Is it actually damaging to give it to them? Why? How does David approach this?
4.) Why does David believe "consumer social is interesting again"? Why was it not interesting for a while? How does that mean David is approaching the category? What does David mean when he says, "for the first time ever there is no channel to arbitrage on the internet"? Is David concerned by the state of CACs today? How much attention does David pay to CAC/LTV in the early days? What are the key signals?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave TV Show: Survivor
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally
Jason Brown is the Founder & CEO @ Tally, the startup that allows you to pay off your credit card debt faster and save money. To date, Jason has raised over $92m for Tally from the likes of Mamoon @ Kleiner, Angela @ a16z, Nikhil @ Shasta and Aileen @ Cowboy just to name a few. As for Jason, prior to Tally, he spent 5 years as the Founder and CEO Kleiner Perkins backed, Gen110. Before that Jason founded Bask, a company providing both technical support and pro-active maintenance.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason came to change the world of consumer finance with Tally having spent 5 years in the solar financing sector and even a year in venture? Given his prior entrepreneurial activities, does Jason agree with Joe Fernande @ JoyMode that "serial entrepreneurship is overrated"?
2.) Does Jason believe that founders should always be raising? What is the right way to truly determine whether an investor is aligned to your mission? What should you look for in how they behave and speak? How does Jason like to build relationships with investors pre-term sheet? Is Jason concerned by the compressed fundraising timelines today?
3.) Why does Jason believe that VC funded companies are largely not over-priced? What elements of the macro-economy does Jason attribute as the reason for the high valuations today? Why does Jason believe that we should not celebrate new fundraising? Is the celebration not good for the morale of the team? What should we celebrate instead?
4.) Why does Jason believe that the target for investors is they provide no value? What are you looking to avoid? What are the core ways an investor can damage the success of a company? What can founders do to truly extract the most from their investor base? Does Jason believe one should focus on the VC partner or the firm? Why?
5.) What does Jason believe makes the best board members? What advice would Jason give to new board members on how they can truly be the best board member? Why does Jason do onboarding sessions for all new board members? What does he look to instil in this process? What behaviour at the board should not be tolerated? How should the founder communicate this to their investor?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
20VC: Why The Best Entrepreneurs Are Cockroaches, What Everyone Underestimates About Customer Acquisition & What You Don't But Need To Know About Payback Periods with Josh Buckley, Founder & Chairman @ Mino Games
Josh Buckley manages a $50m early-stage fund and as an angel has built a portfolio that includes the likes of Clearbit (Chairman), Rippling, Boom Supersonic, Lattice, Embark and many more incredible companies. Josh is also the Founder & Chairman @ Mino Games, the gaming studio he scaled to $20m in annual revenue and raising $40m in funding for the company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Josh make his way into the world of startups at the age of just 15? How did that lead to becoming the youngest YC founder ever?
2.) What does Josh mean when he says, "the best entrepreneurs are cockroaches"? How does Josh think about capital efficiency today? Does Josh agree with Bill Gurley in stating the biggest challenge today is "the oversupply of capital"? How does Josh advise his portfolio today on raising big rounds? Capital efficiency? Burn rates?
3.) As both a fund manager and founder, what have been some of Josh's biggest takeaways from now investing in 100+ companies as an angel? How has investing impacted Josh's operating mentality? What are the benefits of angel investing? What are the potential dangers? What advice would Josh give to founders entering the world of angel investing?
4.) What are the biggest elements people underestimate when it comes to CAC? What have been Josh's biggest lessons on the volatility of CAC over time? How are we seeing the platforms evolve and develop their tech and pricing? How important is channel diversity to Josh? What is balanced? What is not? What have been Josh's biggest lessons when it comes to payback period and it changing over time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Blog/ Newsletter: Paul Graham Blog
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here!
20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Ash Fontana is a Managing Director @ Zetta Venture Partners, the fund that invests in AI-first companies with B2B business models. As for Ash, prior to Zetta he started the money side of AngelList, where, he launched online investing, created the first startup ‘index fund’. He also ran special projects like AngelList’s expansion into Europe and the UK. Simultaneously, Ash led syndicates and made investments in Canva, Mixmax and others. Before AngelList, Ash co-founded Topguest, a Founders Fund-backed company that built customer analytics technology and was ultimately sold in an 8 figure transaction 18 months after the company was founded.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ash made his way into the world of venture with AngelList and how that led to his joining Zetta today, investing exclusively in AI? What did Ash's time working on his family farm teach him about vertically integrated businesses? What were his biggest takeaways from AngelList and working alongside Naval?
2.) What does AI-first really mean to Ash? How crucial is it for companies to have proprietary datasets today? Are data moats truly defensible and real? What are the 5 characteristics that determine the level of defensibility of a dataset? How does Ash analyse the quality of a dataset? What does Ash do to determine if they are predictive of value?
3.) We often hear the term, "system of record", why is Ash so much more excited by the "system of intelligence"? Why is the basis of competitive advantage shifting from SaaS today as a model? How do the margin structure vastly differ when comparing AI-first companies to SaaS companies? How does that mean one should view capital efficiency?
4.) What does Ash believe drives business model quality? What are the commonalities in the business models of those that have made it big? Why does Ash believe it is difficult for incumbent companies to become AI-first? How difficult is it for incumbents to acquire smaller AI-first firms and integrate their policies and technology?
5.) Why does Ash love Howard marks and what has been his biggest learnings from studying him? How has Ash applied these learnings to his investing today? What has Ash also learned from the Italian masters of design? How has this study helped Ash as a VC? What has Ash optimised lately? What is Ash's favourite optimisation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ash’s Fave Book: The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ash on Twitter here!
20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast
Dom Holland is the Founder & CEO @ Fast, the world's fastest login and checkout with no more passwords, no more typing credit card details or shipping addresses. The special announcement today, Fast have just raised their seed round led by Jan Hammer @ Index, joined by Susa Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Global Founders Capital and then angels including Nick Molnar, Founder @ Afterpay and proud to say I joined the round as an angel also. Prior to Fast, Domm was a Director @ Tap Tins, a network of smart tap-to-donate collection terminals. Domm was also the Founder & CEO @ Tow, an on-demand towing platform which transacted $50m in its first 4 years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Domm made his way from founding an on-demand towing company in Queensland, Australia to founding one of Silicon Valley's hottest new startups in Fast?
2.) What did Domm do in prior companies that worked and he will do again with Fast? What did not work and he will look to avoid? Does Domm agree with Joe Fernandez @ JoyMode in saying, "serial entrepreneurship is overrated"? What advice does Domm give to first-time founders? Where do they most often make mistakes?
3.) Over the last few years we have seen incredible innovation on the merchant side of payments with Stripe and Adyen but why does Domm believe we have seen no innovation on the consumer side? Why have large internet platforms not built it themselves? Does it have to be an independent 3rd party, external to Google, Facebook, Amazon etc?
4.) With the war for talent, rising rents and a lower standard of living, why did Domm choose SF as the base for Fast? How has the move been? What have been the biggest challenges? What would Domm advise founders contemplating moving to SF? How has Domm been able to hire some big hitter valley operators so early on? How does Domm think about equity sharing and optimising ESOP plans?
5.) Jan Hammer @ Index has discussed Domm's work mentality, so how does Domm structure his day? What does Domm do to ensure he optimises every minute? What work habits has Dom found to be most effective? What has not worked? How does Domm think about balancing speed and quality when executing today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dom's Fave Productivity Tool: Superhuman
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Domm on Twitter here!
20VC: Firstmark's Rick Heitzmann on The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, His Biggest Learnings From The Pinterest Board, 2 Things VCs Can Do To Prepare Their Companies For The Downturn and Why Now Is A Good Time to Be Contrarian and Invest In Consumer
Rick Heitzmann is a Founder and Partner @ Firstmark Capital, one of the leading East Coast venture funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Pinterest, InVision, Shopify and Discord to name a few. As for Rick, he led the seed round for Pinterest and also led the deals from Firstmark in Ro, Riot Games, Draft Kings, Discord and Airbnb. Prior to founding FirstMark, Rick was an entrepreneur as a founding member at First Advantage which he helped grow and sell to First American (NYSE: FAF). Rick has been recognized by CB Insights and the New York Times as a Top 100 Venture Capitalist globally.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rick made his way into the world of venture and came to found one of NYC's leading venture funds in the form of Firstmark?
2.) How did seeing the booms and bust of the macro impact Rick's investment mentality today? With the impending crash, what 2 things does Rick advise managers need to prepare their portfolio by doing? Does Rick agree with Bill Gurley in saying, "the biggest challenge of today is the over-supply of capital"?
3.) How has Rick seen his style of investing change over the last 20 years? How does Rick think about price sensitivity today? How has that changed over the years? How has Rick seen himself change and evolve as a board member? What does Rick believe makes the best board members? What advice would Rick give to someone who has gained their first board seat?
4.) How does Rick think about the structure of the Firstmark portfolio today? How important does Rick believe it is to have temporal diversification within the portfolio? How does Rick think about optimising investment decision-making processes at Firstmark? Why does Rick believe, despite the negatives, that attribution is fundamentally important?
5.) Does Rick believe that we are in a consumer bubble today? What are the core elements that pique Rick's interest when analysing a consumer investment today? How does Rick think about CAC's scaling way faster and higher than anyone expected? Why does Rick believe the duopoly of FB and Google is now over? Why does Rick believe that true venture size exits can still occur in consumer?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rick’s Fave Book: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Rick’s Most Recent Investment: Crisp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rick on Twitter here!
20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric
Ryan Denehy is the Founder & CEO @ Electric.ai, the company that provides a world-class IT solution that's centralized, secure, and lightning-fast. To date, Ryan has raised over $37m in funding from some dear friends of the show in Rich @ GGV, Bessemer, Primary, Bowery, just to name a few. As for Ryan, he started his career at the tender age of 17 launching an action sports video production company, which was acquired just 4 years later. Ryan then spent 5 years at USA Today in numerous different roles. Following USA Today, Ryan started his second company, Swarm, acquired by Groupon just 3 years later.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his way into the world of startups from launching an action sports video production company at the age of 17?
2.) Having founded 2 prior companies, would Ryan agree with Joe Fernande @ JoyMode in saying that "serial entrepreneurship is overrated"? What did he do right in the first 2 companies that he would look to do again? What did not work that he is avoiding? Where does Ryan most often see first-time founders make mistakes scaling?
3.) How does Ryan think about and assess wartime leadership? What is the right leadership style and approach to battle through the really tough times? Ryan's investors talk of his speed of execution, how does Ryan balance the speed with the quality when it comes to execution? How has Ryan seen both his role and the way in which he executes it change with the scale of the company and of himself?
4.) How does Ryan thnk about and assess forward planning when it comes to recruitment? How should this recruitment planning align to fundraising? Why must it start before the fundraise? How does Ryan think about levelling up individuals internally vs hiring external candidates? How does Ryan think about and present internal expectation setting?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ryan’s Fave Book: Barbarians At The Gate
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Inside The Mind of A Leading LP: How LPs Evaluate New Fund Managers on Everything from First Meeting to Portfolio Construction To Fees and Carry with Lisa Edgar, Managing Director @ Top Tier Capital Partners
Lisa Edgar is a Managing Director @ Top Tier Capital Partners, one of the leading venture fund of funds over the last decade. Included in their stellar fund portfolio is the likes of Index, Initialized, True Ventures, a16z and Boldstart, to name a few. Prior to Top Tier, Lisa was part of the asset management team at WR Hambrecht + Co focusing on new and emerging private equity funds. Before that, Lisa spent ten years at Horsley Bridge.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Lisa make her way into the world of investing in funds and how did that lead to her becoming Managing Director at one of the leaders, Top Tier?
2.) Lisa has seen the boom and bust of the macroeconomy twice now, how has that impacted her mindset today when investing in funds? What have been the most prominent changes in the venture ecosystem that Lisa has seen over the last 20 years? What changes have been good? What changes have been bad?
3.) What is the best way to get in the room with LPs? Does it have to be through warm intro? What are the signs for the GP that that first meeting went well? If an LP does not respond to emails, does that mean they don't want to do it? How does Lisa and Top Tier structure the investment decision-making process? How does that differ when re-investing in existing managers? Is it worth it for first-time funds to pitch institutions for fund 1 when they know they will not invest in the fund?
4.) How does Lisa think about GP commits today? How does Lisa look at what is reasonable and what is required? Is it individual and context-based? How does Lisa feel about different carry structures? Are kickers when past a certain return profile amenable to LPs?
5.) Lisa has seen some of the best emerging managers in the US over the last decade, what learnings does she have from them in terms of what separates the good from the great? How do they think about partnership dynamics? How do they think about firm culture? How do they think about generational transition?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Lisa’s Fave Book: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Lisa’s Most Recent Investment: Boldstart Ventures
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing
Vlad Magdalin is the Founder & CEO @ Webflow, the startup that allows you to build better business websites, faster, without coding. To date, Vlad has raised over $73m with Webflow from some dear friends of the show including Accel, Ron @ Rainfall, Brianne @ Work Life, Benjamin Ling and Y Combinator to name a few. Prior to founding Webflow, Vlad was a Senior Software Engineer @ Intuit. Before Intuit, Vlad co-founded Chatterfox, a web application allowing people to stay in touch with groups of friends, family, or co-workers.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Vlad made his way into the world of startups? How did the original idea to democratise the world of design and site creation with Webflow come about?
2.) Webflow has had an unorthodox funding path with their recent $73m Series A, how was it for Vlad raising the seed round with Webflow? What lessons did he learn from that raise? Why did they drive to be breakeven so much earlier than others might? Why did Vlad believe now was the right time to go big and raise the Series A?
3.) Vlad chose to partner with Accel, what advice does Vlad give to founders in determining which funding partner to choose? What makes for the best VC founder relationships? What is the optimal way to build those relationships? Where does Vlad believe that VCs can strategically move the needle? Where do many think VCs can really help but they most often cannot?
4.) What have been Vlads biggest lessons when it comes to successful board management? What advice would Vlad give Harry when it comes to joining boards as new board member? What does Vlad mean when he says, the best board members come to the board with the mindset of "servant leadership"? How do they show that in their actions? How can investors create an environment of trust at the board?
5.) Vlad AMA: Why does Vlad believe that it is a distraction for founders to be angel investing alongside their role as a founder? How does he believe this creates a wedge between them and the team? How has having kids impacted how he thinks about operating today? What have been the big takeaways from fatherhood?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Vlad’s Fave Book: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Vlad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: a16z's Ben Horowitz on How To Create An Environment of Trust with Founders, How and Why Creating Shocking Rules Is So Impactful To Culture & What The Samurai, Shaka Senghor and Toussaint Teach Us About Company Culture Building
Ben Horowitz is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading and most prestigious venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Github, Slack, Lyft, Coinbase and many more incredible companies. Ben is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29. Prior to a16z, Ben was Co-Founder and CEO of Opsware, acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Ben make his way into the world of venture having previously co-founded Opsware? What was the original thinking for a16z? How did seeing the booms and busts of the market as an operator, impact how Ben thinks about investing today?
2.) In the book Ben says, "If soldiers trust the general, communication will be vastly more efficient". What have been Ben's biggest lessons on how to create an environment of trust quickly? As a board member, how does Ben create an environment of trust for the founder? What is Ben's advice to Harry having just gained his first board seat last year?
3.) Ben has said before of the importance of creating "shocking rules". What are the rules for creating these shocking rules? What are the best rules composed of? Given their shocking nature, how does one instil them in the organisation? What does Ben think is the most shocking rule he has implemented at a16z?
4.) What does ben believe that founders can take away from the rituals of the Samurai? Why does Ben believe that "meditating on company downfalls will enable you to build your culture the right way". Why is the negativity so helpful in forming the right culture? How does ben advise founders when their company is struggling, the team knows it and morale is low? What happened at Okta? How did they turn the culture and business around?
5.) Ben has previously spoken about bringing in external leadership from the cultures you want to master. How does one know when is the right time to bring in this external influence? What can we learn from observing Google Cloud's strategy? How does one retain the old culture but augment it with the new? What were some of Ben's biggest hiring lessons when operating? How does Ben get employees to "feel a sense of urgency", when a change needs to occur?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ben’s Fave Book: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here!
20VC: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on Scaling Teams; What Works and What Does Not, A CEO's Relationship with Stress and Managing It & How To Structure Internal Decision-Making Effectively
Steve Huffman is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Reddit, home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection. To date, Reddit has raised over $550m in funding from some of the world's leading investors including Sequoia Capital, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Sam Altman, Josh Kushner, Alfred Lin and Tencent, just to name a few. Steve started his career at Y Combinator as one of their first alumni back in 2005. At YC, Steve co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, which they sold in 2006 to Conde Naste Publications. In 2010, Steve co-founded Hipmunk, making business travel seamless and easy. Then in 2015, Steve re-joined Reddit as their CEO.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Steve made his way into the world of startups and came to be one of the very first ever entrants in the now hailed Y Combinator? How did that lead to the founding of Reddit? Why did Steve return to Reddit, the company he founded, in 2015?
2.) What were Steve's biggest lessons from his journey with Hipmunk when it came to product feedback and iteration? How does Steve assess people's reliance on data today to drive product decisions? Why does he believe 3 criteria must be considered? What are the other two? What time did Steve see the confidence of his own intuition really increase?
3.) How does Steve think about stress management today? What was he like when he was younger in his relationship to stress? What did he actively do to change his relationship to stress? How has Steve seen himself change and develop as a CEO? What have been the inflection points? What has he struggled and also made mistakes in the journey?
4.) What have been Steve's biggest lessons when it comes to hiring truly A* talent at scale? What are the commonalities in the very best hires Steve has made? In the cases of it not working, what does Steve advise founders on the right way to let someone go? How does one do it with efficiency and compassion?
5.) Why does Steve believe that in dense cities, self-driving cars will not be that useful? How does Steve envisage the future of consumer transportation? What does he believe are the alternatives to self-driving cars? How does Steve see the future for the unbundling of social networks? Will they be unbundled into specific communities? How will this look?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steve’s Fave Book: Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga: A Novel of Japan
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Lightspeed's Arif Janmohamed on Why Market Risk Is The Most Dangerous Risk To Underwrite As A VC, How To Determine When to Stretch vs Not on Price Today & The $TRN of Market Cap Up For Grabs Today In Enterprise
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the leading firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Max Levchin’s Affirm, AppDynamics and many more incredible companies. Some of Arif's most notable companies that he has led or been involved with for LSVP includel; TripActions, Blend, Nutanix, AppZen, MoveWorks and more. Prior to Lightspeed, Arif worked in the corporate business development team @ Cisco as part of transaction leadership and execution on a number of deals including WebEx. Before WebEx, Arif founded WVP Ventures, a student-run venture capital organization.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Arif made his way into venture and came to be one of the valley's leading enterprise investors with Lightspeed?
2.) We are seeing pricing hit 100x ARR multiples, does Arif believe we are seeing enterprise investing as past it's peak? Are we seeing late-cycle momentum investing? Would Arif agree with matt Harris, "Series A pricing does not matter anymore?" How does Arif assess his own price sensitivity today? How has it changed over time?
3.) Why does Arif believe that market risk is the most dangerous risk to underwrite as a VC? How does Arif think about and assess market timing? What has changed over the last few years to unlock such quantums of capital into the enterprise market? With the acquisitions of Duo, Mulesoft, Qualtrics, will we have a next-gen incumbent set or will it be an environment of existing incumbent consolidation?
4.) What does Arif specifically believe founders need to get right when it comes to company design, in order to scale to a $5-10Bn market leader? In terms of the go-to-market, who does Arif think has nailed it most recently? Why? How does Arif test for a founding team's ability to execute on go-to-market when meeting them early on?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Arif’s Fave Book: Stumbling on Happiness, How Not To Die: Discover the foods scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease
Arif’s Most Recent Investment: TripActions
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Arif on Twitter here!
20VC Exclusive: Roy Bahat on Bloomberg Beta's New Fund, The Truth About Valuation That Very Few VCs Will Tell You & Why Founders of Venture Backed Startups Make The Best Angels
Roy Bahat is the Head of Bloomberg Beta, one of the leading early-stage funds in the valley and NYC with a portfolio that includes the likes of Flexport, Kobalt, Textio, Rigetti Computing and more incredible companies. Prior to Bloomberg Beta, Roy was the Co-Founder & Chairman @ Ouya, the company that created a new kind of games console and raised over $33m from the likes of Kleiner, Alibaba and even $8.6m on Kickstarter. Before the world of startups, Roy held numerous incredible and fascinating roles including Director of International Strategy at New York's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games and also was a Senior Policy Director in the Office of the May of New York City.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Roy made his way from policy director for Mike Bloomberg to entering the world of venture and leading Bloomberg Beta?
2.) What is the big news when it comes to Bloomberg Beta? Roy has previously said, "your fund size is your strategy", what did he mean by this? What does that mean for BB moving forward? How has Bill seen what founders want from their VC change over the last 6 years? How is being "founder-friendly" vs the founder being your "customer" different?
3.) Investment Decision-Making: Does Roy believe that speed is the biggest determinant in winning deals today? What else does Roy believe is crucial? What have been some of Roy's biggest lessons in how to build trust early with founders? How does Roy and BB approach investment decision-making on initial investment? How does this change when it comes to reserve allocation decisions?
4.) Price sensitivity: Roy has said before that, "price is the dependent variable", what does he mean by this? Why is it wrong to assume that the price a VC is willing to pay shows their level of belief in your company? How does fund size change this? How does Roy think about large multi-stage funds playing at seed? How has it impacted seed?
5.) Boards: Why does Roy call boards "b-o-r-e-d-s"? When does Roy think it is important to instil a board? Why is it dangerous to have a board too early in the life of a company? What have been some of Roy's biggest lessons from sitting on a board with Alfred Lin @ Sequoia?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Roy's Fave Book: Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Roy’s Most Recent Investment: States Title
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Roy on Twitter here!
20VC: Worklife Ventures' Brianne Kimmel on Why More Operators Should Start Their Own Fund, How To Structure Your Round for the Highest Signal Round & What The Multi-Stage Funds Playing At Seed Means For The Rest of The Asset Class
Brianne Kimmel is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Work Life Ventures, a very new firm focused on the future of work backed by some of the best in the valley including Marc Andreesen, Chris Dixon, Zoom's Eric Yuan, InVision's Clark Valberg and then dear friends of the show, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan and Matt Mazzeo. To date, Brianne has invested in the likes of Webflow, Tandem, Lunchclub and Girlboss to name a few. Prior to starting Work Life, Brianne spent 2 years at Zendesk on their GTM strategy; building Zendesk for startups, ultimately representing 3,000 startups and 250 accelerators. From 2013-2017 Brianne also taught over 5,000 students at General Assembly all things user acquisition and growth marketing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brianne made her way into the world of startups and SaaS, how that led to her angel investing and what was that a-ha moment for the founding of Work Life? Why did Brianne choose to structure Work Life as a holding company?
2.) With the fund, how does Brianne think about portfolio construction? What is the right check size for her? Why does Brianne think we are seeing more angel funds than ever today? Why are we seeing so many celebrity names on the cap tables of great companies? How does Brianne think about scout programs? What impact have they had? Why is Brianne against founders actively angel investing?
3.) What does Brianne advise founders on how to structure a high-signal round? What are the two types of angels that exist in the world today? What can founders do to keep their angels actively engaged? How have what founders expect from their angels changed over the last few years? How does one measure the true value of an angel?
4.) Does Brianne agree with Semil Shah, we are seeing "founders vote with their feet and bypass seed funds for multi-stage funds"? How does Brianne advise founders when choosing between a boutique seed firm and a large multi-stage firm? What does Brianne believe are the pros and cons of taking multi-stage money at seed?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brianne’s Most Recent Investment: Pace
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brianne on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Guild Education's Rachel Carlson on The Benefits of Scaling Startups Outside of Silicon Valley, Why Mission and Margin Are So Tightly Integrated & Why Mums Are The Most Under-Utilised Asset In The Economy
Rachel Carlson is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Guild Education, the leader in education benefits offering the single most scalable solution for preparing the workforce of today for the jobs of tomorrow. To date, Rachel has raised over $71m in funding with Guild from some of the best in venture with the likes of Michael Dearing @ Harrison Metal, Wes Chan @ Felicis, Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, Aileen @ Cowboy Ventures and Scott Raney @ Redpoint, all backing Guild. As for Rachel, prior to Guild, Rachel was the Founder of Student Blueprint, providing students with academic and career planning tools.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rachel made her way into the world of startups having started her career in politics and how insights gleaned from politics formed the idea for Guild Education?
2.) Why does Rachel believe that ambitious Mums are the most under-utilized asset in the economy? What are the biggest misconceptions people have about hiring and working with Mums? How can founders really implement practically facilities, tools and an environment where one can be both ambitious personally and professionally?
3.) Before the show, Byron Deeter @ Bessemer said, "Rachel has been among the best at recruiting star execs across their portfolio”. What have been Rachel's biggest lessons when it comes to hiring the very best talent? Where do most go wrong? How has her hiring style changed over the years? What are Rachel's favourite questions to ask candidates?
4.) Why does Rachel believe that mission and margin are tightly integrated? How did Rachel acquire Walmart as one of their first clients? What are the positives and negatives of having a client so huge, so early? What advice would Rachel have for other early-stage companies when they have such behemoths as clients in the early days?
5.) Why did Rachel make the move from SF to Colorado? What did Rachel strategically do to ensure the chances of success were higher? How does Rachel feel about keeping leadership teams in SF and then the rest elsewhere? How did the move impact their ability to hire the best talent? How did their move impact their ability to access the best capital? Between customers, capital and employees, who is it most important to be near?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rachel’s Fave Book: To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, Where The Crawdads Sing
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rachel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The Ultimate Episode For Emerging Managers: How To Determine How Big A Fund To Raise, What Is The Right Closing Strategy With LPs & Why We Will Not See The Eradication of Pre-Seed with John Fein, Founder & Managing Partner @ Firebrand Ventures
John Fein is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Firebrand Ventures, one of the leading early-stage funds in the midwest with a portfolio including the likes of ScaleFactor, Replica, Dwolla and more fantastic companies. As for John, prior to founding Firebrand, he was the Managing Director of Techstars based in Kansas City and before that spent close to 9 years at OptumRx where he managed multi-billion dollar large-scale programs for the $15B pharmacy benefit manager division of UnitedHealth Group.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How John made his way into the world of venture from scaling a pharmaceuticals business to almost $2Bn in revenue and how that led to founding Firebrand?
2.) What was it like for John raising the first fund for Firebrand with no existing network of LPs or high-net-worth individuals? How did John approach his closing strategy? How did he decide the amount of money to raise for the fund? How did Techstars Founder, David Cohen change and impact his thinking here? Was John surprised by how long the fund took to raise?
3.) What does John know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of the fundraise for the first fund? Does it ever get easier? What does John believe are the biggest challenges in managing your own fund? What does he do to mitigate them? How does running your own fund differ from operating in a venture partnership?
4.) "Seed" is so confused in meaning today so what does "seed stage" really mean to John? Does John agree with Harry that we are seeing the eradication of the pre-seed stage? Where does John believe is the ideal insertion point? Does John believe that ownership can be built over time? How does John think about reserve allocation?
5.) How does John think about the relationship-building process with founders? Is John worried by the compressed fundraising timelines we are seeing today? What can investors do to build trust with founders quickly? What signs impress John in the early days of getting to know the founder? What are some common red flags for John?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
John's Fave Book: Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna
John’s Most Recent Investment: The Minte
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and John on Twitter here!
20VC: How To Drop The BS and Relationship Build With Investors, What Investors Can vs Cannot Help Your Company With & Why When There Is Doubt There Is No Doubt In Hiring
Jason Boehmig is the Founder & CEO @ Ironclad, the startup that provides powerful legal contracting for modern legal teams. To date, Jason has raised over $84m with Ironclad from some of the best in the business including Sequoia, Accel, Greylock, Emergence, IA Ventures, Semil Shah's Haystack and Ali Rowghani who led their recent $50m Series C from Y Combinator Continuity Fund. As for Jason, prior to founding Ironclad, he was both a corporate attorney with Fenwick & West and then also an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason left the world of law and made his way into the world of startups and came to be founder of one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, Ironclad? How did Jason's experience at Lehmann Brothers impact his operating mentality today as a founder? What were his big lessons on personal conviction from seeing Lehmann unravel?
2.) Ironclad is famed for their customer discovery process, so how does Jason think about product development in the early days? What core questions does Jason ask to understand customer needs and desires? How does Jason determine what to implement and what to prioritise? How does Jason think about the balance between data vs gut in product decision-making? What have been his lessons here?
3.) When it comes to hiring, how does Jason approach keeping top of funnel constantly full? Why does Jason believe that when hiring, "when there is doubt, there is no doubt"? What are the common reasons that Jason does not hire a potentially strong candidate? How does Jason determine between a stretch VP and a stretch too far?
4.) How does Jason think about relationship building with VCs? Where do so many founders make mistakes in this process? What advice does Jason have on successfully negotiating with VCs? What works? What does not? What value-add has Jason realised VCs really can and do provide? Where is there a suggestion that they do but rarely do?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Fave Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Brad Feld on Why Market Size At Early Stage Is Not Helpful, His Biggest Learnings From The Boom & Bust of The Dot Com and How The Best VCs Work For Their CEOs
Brad Feld is Managing Director @ Foundry Group, one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio that includes the likes of Zynga, Fitbit, SendGrid and many more incredible companies. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars, the worldwide network of entrepreneurs in 150 countries and 300,000 alumni. Brad is also the co-author of the incredible, Venture Deals, for your chance to win a signed copy email venturedeals@foundrygroup.com with the code "First Episode".
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brad made his way into the world of venture following 40 angel checks and how that led to his co-founding Foundry Group? Why did Brad find the transition from angel to VC in the early days such a challenge? What 2 core things did he focus on when writing angel checks? How has that changed now as a VC?
2.) How did seeing the boom and bust of the dot com impact Brad’s investing mindset today? How does Brad think about investing through market cycles and the right way to think about investment cadence? Why does Brad believe that to be successful as a VC you have to be fundamentally optimistic?
3.) Where does Brad believe we are today in the cycle? Does he agree with Bill Gurley on the biggest challenge being the "oversupply of capital"? What must entrepreneurs understand with regards to market cycle dynamics and how they can and need to future-proof their business?
4.) From analysing his best investments, why has Brad come to the conclusion that TAM in the early days is really not helpful? What are the commonalities in how Brad's most successful companies approach experimentation?
5.) What does Brad mean when he says, "don't have fake CEO or fake VC days"? What does he mean when he often says, "run your fucking business"? What in Brad's mind would constitute a "fake day" vs moving the needle for your business? What does Brad think is the best way for VCs to truly get to know one another? Why is, "hey let's do a deal together one of the most hollow and fake statements in venture?"
6.) Brad has sat on some of the most meaningful boards of the last 2 decades, what have been Brad's biggest learnings on what it takes to be a great board member? How does that change with the progression of your career? What advice would Brad give to me, having just gained my first board seat? If the VC does not support the CEO, what is the right process? Why does Brad believe the VC should work for the CEO?
7.) What is Brad's biggest advice when it comes to learning how to say no? What advice does Brad hear most often that he commonly disagrees with? Why does Brad feel we are in a moment of peak noise in the ecosystem today? To be a great leader, what 2 skills does Brad believe you need to have?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brad’s Fave Book: Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates
Brad’s Most Recent Investment: Boundless
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early
Julia Enthoven is the Founder & CEO @ Kapwing, the startup that provides a new, collaborative platform for creating images, videos, and GIFs. To date they have raised $13m from some dear friends of the show including Saar Guur @ CRV, Mamoon Hamid @ Kleiner Perkins, Niv Dror @ Shrug and Nikhil Basu Trivedi @ Shasta. Prior to founding Kapwing, Julia was an Associate Product Manager @ Google where she worked on everything from image search to sign up workflows.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups and came to found the future of content editing with Kapwing?
2.) What does Julia believe are the 4 benefits to building a website over an app today? How does this change your development cadence and speed of product iteration? How does this change your economics and margin structure? Where does Julia see many founders making mistakes here?
3.) Why does Julia believe that marketing innovation is as important as product innovation? Kapwing is now at 1m users per month, what has been Julia's biggest lessons in scaling a customer base to this size with very little spend? How does Julia think about marketing channel mortality rate? How should founders approach this?
4.) Why did Julia decide it was better to bootstrap than straight away trying to raise VC dollars? What were the benefits of this? Was it the right decision? What was the turning point when Julia realised was the moment to raise external funding? How did her mindset change as a result of the funding? How does bootstrap life compare to VC funded startup?
5.) How is Julia finding the personal scaling journey from PM to CEO? What have been some of the biggest challenges? What has she done to overcome them? What advice would Julia have for other newly minted CEOs? What have been some of Julia's biggest lessons in what it takes to hire the very best talent early?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Julia’s Fave Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Julia on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Bain's Matt Harris on Why Valuation And Market Size Are Not The Most Important Thing At Series A, Why Backing Sociopaths Can Work & Late Cycle Momentum Investing & The Changes That Will Stay in Venture Forever
Matt Harris is a Partner @ Bain Capital Ventures, a leading US venture fund with a portfolio that includes the likes of LinkedIn, Lime, SendGrid, Jet.com and more incredible companies. As for Matt, he specialises in financial technology and services and has led investments in the likes of Acorns, OpenFin, SigFig, Ribbon and Billtrust. Prior to joining BCV, Matt founded Village Ventures, which he ran for 12 years and where he focused on early-stage fintech investing. Before Village Matt actually started his investing career Bain Capital private equity in 1995.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matt made his way into the world of venture from private equity and what led him to specialise as he has done in the world of fintech?
2.) How did seeing the boom and bust of the dot com impact Matt's investing mindset today? How has Matt's fear of the cyclicality of markets actually lost him a lot of money in the past? What has that taught Matt on trying to time markets? What were the main takeaways for Matt from running his own firm? How does it differ to a partnership?
3.) Why does Matt believe we are seeing late-cycle momentum investing today? What is the evidence to suggest this? How does Matt think about the right cadence to invest through market cycles? What does Matt mean when he says, "Series A valuation does not matter anymore"? Why? How does Matt assess his own price sensitivity today?
4.) Why does Matt believe that investing in improbable ideas is a good strategy? What does this mean the internal investment decision-making process looks like at Bain? Why is full consensus sometimes a concern? How does Matt approach market sizing? Why does it not matter at Series A? When does it really start to matter?
5.) Matt has said before that "backing sociopaths can work". What did he mean by this? What founder type does Matt most like to back? Does one have to manage the relationship with them very differently to other founder types? What are the acceptable risks vs unacceptable risks with this founder type?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Matt’s Fave Book: The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
Matt’s Most Recent Investment: Finix
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Mercury Founder Immad Akhund on Why Angel Investing Makes Founders Better Operators, The Right Way For Founders To Discuss and Present Competition To Investors & How To Think About Your Initial Wedge Into The Market and How It Expands Over Time
Immad Akhund is the Founder & CEO @ Mercury, the startup that makes bank accounts that help tech companies scale. To date, Immad has raised funding from some of the best in the business including a16z and CRV on the fund side and then individuals including Elad Gil, Airtable's Howie Liu, Plaid's Zach Perret, Naval Ravikant, Justin Kan and OpenDoor's Eric Wu. Prior to founding Mercury, Immad held enjoyed numerous different roles including being a part-time partner at Y Combinator and then also founding HeyZap, building developer tools for mobile game developers, ultimately acquired in 2016.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Immad made his way from studying in the UK to being a YC Partner in 2017 and building one of the valley's hottest startups today in the form of Mercury?
2.) What does Immad want to do differently this time around with Mercury vs his time with HeyZap? What 1-2 mistakes that he made the first time round is Immad looking to avoid? How does being a serial founder impact one's ability to acquire the best talent? What does Immad think is harder the second time around? How has becoming a parent changed the way that Immad thinks about founding and building companies?
3.) How does Immad approach the process of picking the idea? What was the specific process with Mercury, step by step? Why does Immad believe it is an advantage to not have a background or prior career in the space you are looking to innovate in? What advice does Immad have for founders looking to move into highly regulated industries?
4.) How does Immad approach and assess the element of competition? What is the right way for founders to present competition when pitching to investors? Why is a 2x2 matrix the wrong approach? What does Immad advise portfolio founders he has invested in with regards to competition and the landscape in front of them?
5.) What have been some of Immad's biggest learnings from making over 120 angel investments? How has angel investing specifically helped certain parts of how he thinks about operating and being a founder today? What advice does Immad give with regards to investor updates? What makes the best ones? What makes the worst? How often should they be?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Immad’s Fave Book: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disaster
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Immad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Haystack’s Semil Shah on Whether Founders Are Bypassing Seed Funds in Favour Of Less Dilutive Multi-Stage Funds, How Fund Strategy Changes With Fund Scaling & Why The Hardest Challenge is Price Discipline
Semil Shah is the Founder & General Partner @ Haystack, one of the valley's leading seed funds of the last 5 years with a portfolio including the likes of Instacart, DoorDash, Carta, OpenDoor, Hashicorp and more $Bn companies. Alongside his role at Haystack, Semil is also a Venture Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to founding Swell, Semil was on the operating side as an early advisor and employee at Concept.io (Swell), acquired by Apple in August 2014.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Semil make his way into the world of venture from his start writing about startups and financing rounds? How did that also lead to his role as Venture Partner @ Lightspeed today?
2.) What does Semil mean when he says, "the most talented founders are bypassing seed firms and seed rounds"? How does this mean that seed funds need to respond? For founders, what are the pros and cons of taking a multi-stage fund at seed? Will they really get GP time with such a small check? How should they also think about potential signalling risk?
3.) Does Semil share Harry's concern with regards to pricing today? What do multi-stage funds investing at seed do to pricing? Why is staying disciplined on price the biggest challenge for Semil? How does Semil assess his own price sensitivity and when to stretch? Does Semil believe that ownership is built on first check or overtime?
4.) How does the strategy for Semil change moving from a $25m fund to a $50m fund? Why does Semil think that temporal diversification is such an important element to bake into a portfolio? What are the benefits? How does Semil think about effective reserve allocation today? What does that investment decision-making process look like the 2nd time?
5.) How has Semil seen the ecosystem for VC fundraises change over the last 5 years? What would Semil like to change about the ecosystem of LPs? What blanket rule does Semil believe that LPs should introduce for new managers to ensure discipline? For Semil, how did the fundraise differ for the latest $50m fund compared to the prior $25m fund?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Semil’s Fave Book: Reboot by Jerry Colonna
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Semil on Twitter her
20VC: Clearbit Founder Alex MacCaw on How To Successfully Negotiate with Investors, What Value-Add Do VCs Really Bring & Why You Should Only Have Operators on Your Board
Alex MacCaw is the Founder & CEO @ Clearbit, the marketing data engine for all of your customer interactions, from customer understanding to prospect identification to personalising every sales and marketing interaction. To date, Alex has raised $17m in financing from some incredible people including Geoff Lewis @ Bedrock, Ash Fontana @ Zetta Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Battery Ventures and then former guest Ilya Sukhar, Naval Ravikant and Josh Buckley. Prior to founding Clearbit, Alex spent time in the engineering teams at both Twitter and Stripe.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way from the UK to becoming one of the hottest founders in the valley with the rise of Clearbit? What does Alex believe is more important mission and vision or organisational discipline? What does Alex mean when he says he started the company as a "vehicle for growth thinking and self-actualisation"?
2.) What did Alex mean when he said, "when you hit product-market-fit, it is time to move into company making"? What does company making mean to Alex? What would Alex like to fundamentally change about the way we manage companies today? When is the right time to make this transition? What needs to be in place to do it successfully?
3.) What does Alex mean when he says, "The 6 Pillars Behind Clearbit"? What elements does Alex think the team should not have full transparency on? How does Alex approach transparency when it comes to fundraising and M&A opportunities? What have been some of Alex's biggest learnings on both delivering and absorbing feedback? What can one do to create an environment of radical candor and rich feedback?
4.) Why does Alex believe that health has to be the #1 priority for every founder? What does that look like in practice? What can one provide the team to encourage this? How does Alex respond to those that might say, "fine but we cannot afford it"? How does Alex suggest there are 3 ways you can become more self-aware as an individual?
5.) What advice does Alex give to founders on successfully negotiating with investors? What value has Alex found that VCs really do bring? What does Alex optimise for when selecting his investor base? What value do most think that VCs bring but they actually do not? When does Alex think one should establish a board? Why does Alex think your board should only have operators and no investors on it?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Matrix’s Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing
Ilya Sukhar is a General Partner @ Matrix Partners, the firm steeped in 40 years of history with over $4Bn invested enjoying 110 acquisitions and 65 IPOs. As for Ilya, at Matrix he has led deals in the likes of FiveTran, Flock Safety, Slab and Height just to name a few. Prior to Matrix, Ilya was a part-time investing partner @ Y Combinator and before that was Head of Developer Products at Facebook. His time at Facebook came about as a result of his former company, Parse, being acquired by them for close to $100m in April 2013. If that was not enough, Ilya also has one of the best angel tracks in the business with a portfolio including the likes of former guest Scale, Checkr, Algolia, Airtable, Gitlab the list goes on.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ilya made his way into the world of technology and startups having moved to SF from the Soviet Union? How did his growing up in the Soviet Union and moving to the US shape his thinking, operating and investing mentality today?
2.) How did Ilya's mindset change with the shift from angel investing to institutional investing? How does Ilya assess how his operating experience has impacted the way he works and engages with founders today? What are the pros? What are the cons? Why does Ilya believe the engineering CEO is so crucial?
3.) How does Ilya feel the seed ecosystem is serving startups today? What are the core ways that Ilya believes it is not optimised? How does Ila think about advising founders on the right amount to raise and the appropriate amount of runway? How does Ilya feel on the subject of bridge rounds? How does Ilya approach price and price sensitivity? What have been his learnings on price from observing his angel portfolio?
4.) Why does Ilya believe that "referencing is one of the most important skills for founders and investors"? How should founders structure their referencing? Who should they speak to? How many people is an appropriate dataset? What are the core questions to ask? How can references lead one astray? What must you watch out for?
5.) How has becoming a father changed Ilya's investing mentality today? How has it affected how he selects the projects he wishes to work on? How has it changed his relationship to time and productivity? Why in many ways does Ilya wish he had had kids earlier?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ilya’s Fave Book: When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management, The Stranger
Ilya’s Most Recent Investment: FiveTran
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ilya on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Scale Founder Alex Wang on How To Hire Incredible Talent Before You Are A Hot Company, Why Beating Competition Is Not As Clear Cut As Investors Believe & Why AI Is Under-Hyped Today In Terms of Total Impact
Alex Wang is the Founder & CEO @ Scale, the data platform for AI providing high-quality training and validation data for AI applications. To date, they have raised over $123m in financing from some of the best investors in the business including Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Thrive, Spark and Coatue and then also some of the world's best operators and founders of Dropbox, Instagram, Quora, Github and Twitch to name a few. Prior to founding Scale, Alexandr was a Tech Lead at Quora, directly responsible for all speed projects and before that a software engineer at Addepar responsible for building and maintaining financial models.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way from growing up in Los Alamos to being one of the hottest founders in the valley with Scale's new round giving them a unicorn valuation? How did growing up outside the ether of the valley shape Alex's operating mindset today?
2.) Why does Alex believe that AI is under-hyped relative to the state of technology today? Would Alex agree that most projects claiming to be AI are merely rebrandings from actuarial science, data science etc etc? What questions does Alex ask to determine true AI or BS?
3.) How does Alex think about how AI can deal better with ambiguity of data? What other core areas would Alex like to see meaningful step-function improvements in? How does Alex think about the value of data-set size? How does he think about the utility value of data reducing with every incremental data point? How does Alex think about the rise of synthetic data? How does this change the landscape?
4.) What are Alex's biggest lessons on what it takes to hire incredible people before you are a hot company? How does Alex determine whether someone has the right risk profile and desire to work in a startup? What questions reveal that? Where does Alex believe that many go wrong in the early days of hiring? What would he do differently now?
5.) For the $100m Series C, how did the round come together? What did the process look like? How did this round compare to the other rounds? How does Alex think about and approach the element of investor selection? How can founders build relationships with investors in these hyper-compressed fundraising timelines? What have been Alex's biggest lessons when it comes to CEO growth and then also board management?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How Founders Can Gain Leverage in Fundraising Negotiations, The Metrics You Need To Raise Your Series A in Consumer & What We Have To Change About Cap Table Construction with Jana Messerschmidt, Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners
Jana Messerschmidt is an investor @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the best performing funds of the last decade with a portfolio including Snapchat, Mulesoft, Max Levchin's Affirm, Cameo, StitchFix and many many more incredible companies. Prior to LSVP, Jana co-founded #Angels in 2015, a first of its kind investment collective specifically designed to get more women on the cap tables of successful companies. Her portfolio includes the likes of Carta, Lambda School, Bird, Forward and Cameo to name a few. In addition to #Angels, Jana spent 6 years at Twitter as VP of Global Business Development and Platform where she led the 150+ person organization responsible for Twitter's global strategic partnerships. Finally, before Twitter, Jana spent 2 years at Netflix as Director of Business Development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jana made her way from the worlds of Twitter and Netflix to founding #Angels and becoming an angel to today, investing on the front lines with Lightspeed?
2.) What were some of Jana's biggest takeaways from her time with Netflix? How did that experience impact her operating mentality today? How can leaders determine the true quality of their team and their conviction in them? What is "the leaver test"? What does Netflix do internally to drive such high performance? What does Jana mean when she says, "leaders have to provide context, not control"?
3.) Does Jana believe that founders should "always be raising"? What is the right way for founders to approach OKR setting with regards to requirements for the next round? When should this OKR discussion for the next round take place? Who should be involved? How can founders get potential investors to do the work upfront and determine interest?
4.) In terms of metrics for the Series A, they depend based on the vertical and business model but what is required, metric wise, to raise a Series A in:
- A D2C brand? What revenue levels would be expected? What growth levels would be expected?
- A consumer subscription business? What level of churn is acceptable? What does Jana see as a good CAC/LTV?
- Why does Jana believe that you cannot grow your business on ad spend perpetuity? How does Jana think about the cost of advertising today? What have been her biggest lessons when it comes to how CAC changes over time?
5.) What tips and advice does Jana give to founders to allow them to enter fundraising negotiations with leverage? What can founders do to gain leverage if their numbers are not in place? What does Jana think should be some of the biggest considerations for founders when it comes to their cap table?
6.) How does Jana think that founders can put their cap table to work in the most effective way? Is there a way to stress their suggested "value-add" prior to their investment? What can be done to actively improve the lack of women and underrepresented minorities on cap tables? What would Jana like to see change here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jana’s Fave Book: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook, Dark Money
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jana on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship
Clark Valberg is the Founder & CEO @ InVision, the digital product design platform powering the world's best user experiences. To date, Clark has raised over $350m with InVision from some of the world-leading investors including Iconiq, Spark Capital, Accel, Battery Ventures, Tiger Global, FirstMark and even Atlassian. Prior to founding InVision, Clark spent 8 years as the Co-Founder of Epicenter Consulting, a leading web application design business. If that was not enough, Clark is also a leading angel with a portfolio including Algolia, Voiceflow, Unsplash and BentoBox, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Clark made his way from running a successful design agency to fundamentally changing the way designers design products and consumer experience them through InVision?
2.) Why does Clark believe that all aspiring entrepreneurs questions have a false premise? What is the fundamental false premise of entrepreneurship? How does Clark assess the importance of vision and mission over alternate elements? What advice does Clark give to the many aspiring entrepreneurs that ask for his advice?
3.) How does Clark think about market timing today as an entrepreneur? How does Clark think investors should approach and think about market timing? How does Clark look to measure impact not just size of the market? How has angel investing changed Clark's operating mentality as an entrepreneur with InVision?
3.) Why does Clark believe that enlightenment is a daily task? What does Clark do to fundamentally make himself present enough to appreciate those inflection points and moments of enlightenment? How can everyone use note-taking to gain this level of self-consciousness? How are the notes structured? What routine needs to be built around them?
4.) How does Clark think about taking the time to appreciate the milestones that are achieved? Why do we have to make celebrating a ritual? What can be done to ensure these moments of company and personal growth are recognised? What have been Clark's biggest moments of realisation on this theme?
5.) With InVision being an almost fully remote team, what have been Clark's biggest breakthroughs in making it work so well with his marriage and his family? What are "date days"? How does Clark use them to ensure the right balance of work and romance? What has Clark found to be the weirdest thing of operating a 900-person remote firm?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Clark’s Fave Book: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: The Battle for Your Mind
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Clark on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Sequoia's Mike Vernal on His Biggest Lessons From 8 Years of Hyper-Growth at Facebook, Why The Strength of Data Moats Is Over-Rated Today and The Challenge of "Overthinking Investments" In Venture
Mike Vernal is a General Partner @ Sequoia, one of the world’s leading and most renowned venture firms with a portfolio including WhatsApp, Zoom, Stripe, Airbnb, Github and many more incredible companies. As for Mike he has led and sits on the board of Citizen, rideOS, Rockset, Threads and Houseparty (acquired by Epic). Prior to venture, Mike spent 8 years at Facebook as VP of Product & Engineering leading multiple different teams including Search, Commerce, Profile, and Developer product groups. Prior to Facebook Mike spent 4 years at Microsoft as a PM lead in Microsoft's Developer Division.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made the move from VP of Product & Engineering at Facebook to General Partner at the world-famous, Sequoia Capital? What were Mike's biggest takeaways from his 8 years at FB seeing the hyper-growth first hand?
2.) Mike has previously said that he has struggled in the past when it comes to "overthinking investments". What does he mean by this? How does it play out in reality? How does Mike balance between trusting his gut and relying on the data? How does Mike think venture partnerships should participate in this balancing act?
3.) Why does Mike believe decision-making in venture to be fundamentally different to decision-making in operations? How do they compare? How does the decision-making process and approach change as a result of this contrast? How does Mike think about his own time allocation now in venture? What is the most challenging element?
4.) How does Mike evaluate the proliferated SaaS landscape today? Why does Mike believe that the notion of SaaS as a construct will fade over the coming years? What does Mike believe is the reasoning for SaaS apps becoming more and more niche? What problem does that pose for VC? Will we enter a period of consolidation in SaaS? What size do the incumbents have to be to really engage in the M&A process moving forward?
5.) Why does Mike struggle to see the strength of data moats? What are the major downfalls associated with the argument of their strength? At what point is the asymptotic point of the utility value of the data for models today and how does that change over the coming years? What does Mike instead see as durable and sustainable moats?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mike’s Most Recent Investment: Verkada
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Cruise's Daniel Kan on Lessons From Scaling The Team From 40 To 1,500 People, How Daniel Thinks About Continuous Learning & Self-Development and Why CEOs Hiring Themselves Out Of Roles Is Wrong
Daniel Kan is the Chief Product Officer @ Cruise, the company building cutting-edge hardware and software that work seamlessly together to transform the way we all experience transportation. In 2016, Cruise was acquired by GM for a reported $1Bn. Since the acquisition Cruise has raised $7.25 billion in committed capital and has attracted SoftBank, Honda, and T. Rowe Price as investors. As for Daniel, he started his career at a startup called UserVoice. He then founded Exec, an on-demand hospitality service company, and successfully sold Exec to Handy. As a result of his many success, Daniel was listed as number 7 on Fortune’s 2016 40 under 40 list for the most influential people in business.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way into the world of startups and came to co-found the game-changing company of the next movement mega wave of transport innovation in Cruise?
2.) What have been Daniel's biggest lessons on what works for leaders in scaling themselves? How can a leader ensure their team feel real ownership and accountability for their roles? How does Daniel think about KPI and goal-setting? How does Daniel look to strike the balance between ambitious but achievable goals and then unrealistic?
3.) How does Daniel think about micro-management? Is there ever a time for it? What are the leading indicators you or someone on the team is micro-managing? What can they do to correct it? What are the dangers of micro-management? How does Daniel think about assessing human potential in terms of a stretch VP and a stretch too far?
4.) Why does Daniel believe that "if you are not growing, you are dying"? What has been transformational to Daniel in increasing his own level of self-development and learning? How does the organisation need to be set up to ingest these learnings in real-time and improve? Where do many go wrong when it comes to mistakes and learnings?
5.) At acquisition, Cruise had just 40 team members, today the team consists of 1,460. What have been some of Daniel's biggest lessons in the process of scaling the team with such rapidity? What have been some of the core challenges? How has Daniel's style of leadership had to change and evolve with the growth?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Daniel’s Fave Book: Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga: A Novel of Japan
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Daniel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: True Ventures' Puneet Agarwal on Why EQ Is Going To Separate The Best Firms In Venture Over The Next Decade, The Negatives of Attribution in Venture & What Makes A Truly Efficient Venture Partnership
Puneet Agarwal is a Partner @ True Ventures, one of the leading early-stage VC funds of the last decade with big wins including Fitbit, Peloton, Ring, Hashicorp, Duo Security and Blue Bottle Coffee, just to name a few. As for Puneet, at True he has led deals in Duo Security, Tray.io, Lumity, Solo.io and more. Before the world of VC, Puneet spent 6 years in product management with Geodesic Securities and BEA. Before product management, Puneet actually cut his teeth in the world of VC as an associate at Mayfield which he joined post a 2-year stint at JP Morgan.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Puneet made his way into the world of venture from JP Morgan? How seeing the boom and bust cycle impacted his investing mindset today? How his career in operations led to his joining True?
2.) Why does Puneet believe that EQ is going to separate the good from the great in venture firms over the next decade? What can VCs do to remove the barriers to access them? What have been Puneet's biggest lessons on what it takes to build real relationships of trust and respect with founders? What is a test of a strong founder VC relationship?
3.) What does Puneet believe are the 2 feelings a board member can bring to a board meeting? Why would an investor bring fear to the board meeting? Why is this a sign and result of the culture of their own venture partnership? What have been Puneet's biggest lessons on how investors can bring the feeling of safety to a board meeting? How has Puneet changed his style of board membership over the last decade?
4.) Why does Puneet strongly advocate for a venture structure without attribution? What are the benefits of not having attribution? How does this also impact the re-investment decision-making process? How does Puneet think about how he spends his time across the portfolio? What have True done to optimise the investment decision-making process? Why is unanimity not required?
5.) How does Puneet and True think about portfolio construction today? What amount of initial checks give them enough diversification to feel comfortable but also enough reserves to double down? Does Puneet believe that ownership can be built over time? Where does Puneet believe there is a whole in the funding environment? How does True think about minimizing risk on the first check?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Puneet’s Fave Book: Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
Puneet’s Most Recent Investment: Upsie
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Puneet on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader
Hiten Shah is the Co-Founder @ FYI, the startup that allows you to find your documents in 3 clicks or less. Before FYI, Hiten co-founded QuickSprout alongside Neil Patel, together they scaled the platform to over 500,000 readers every month. Before QuickSprout, Hiten was the Co-Founder and CEO of KISSmetrics, raising over $19m in the process for the company from the likes of True Ventures, Uncork Capital and Felicis Ventures just to name a few. Finally, Hiten is also the Co-Founder @ Crazy Egg, the heat mapping tool used by thousands to improve the effectiveness of their websites. Finally, Hiten is also an angel investor with a portfolio including Buffer, Clearbit, Front, Gusto and more incredible companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hiten made his way into the world of startups, growth market and SaaS and how that led to his co-founding FYI today? Having founded multiple startups, does Hiten agree with Joe Fernandez @ JoyMode that "serial entrepreneurship is overrated"? Why does Hiten believe that fundamentally, nobody knows what they are doing?
2.) How does Hiten feel about the compression of fundraising timelines today? How does Hiten advise founders on building authentic relationships with investors? What is it crucial that founders understand about the investing class? How does Chetan advise founders on building hype and urgency within their fundraising? What works? What does not?
3.) Why does Hiten believe that we have seen the eradication of the friends and family round? What other large trends has Hiten observed in the early stage over the last few years? How does Hiten advise founders on how to approach which seed investors they take on board? Does Hiten think founders and investors can be friends?
4.) How has Hiten seen himself change and evolve as a leader over the last decade? What have been the biggest learnings on what great leadership really means? What are the 5 core elements that all great leaders must focus on? How does he split his time across these 5 disciplines? Where do founders often not spend adequate time among the 5?
5.) How does Hiten think about the element of "burnout" and depression today? Has Hiten ever felt burned out himself? How does this stress manifest itself? How does Hiten think that burnout and control are correlated? What can one do to change their relationship to control? What has worked for Hiten? What has not?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hiten’s Fave Book: The Courage To Be Disliked
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hiten on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta on The One Question To Ask When Analysing Market Size, How To Compete in Today’s War for Talent & Why We Have Seen An Over-Rotation In Running Businesses Based on Metrics
Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many many more. As for Chetan, at Benchmark he has led deals in the likes of Duffel, Sketch and Pachyderm. Before Benchmark, Chetan was a General Partner @ NEA where he led investments in Elastic, MongoDB and Mulesoft to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chetan made his way into the wonderful world of venture, came to invest in Mulesoft and Elastic and how that led to becoming a GP with Benchmark today?
2.) How does Chetan feel about the push to run businesses based on metrics and benchmarks relative to other companies? What are the metrics they should hone in on? What are the metrics they should disregard? How does Chetan advise his portfolio on the right way to view competition? What is core to analysing competition effectively?
3.) How does Chetan assess the "war for talent" in terms of startup recruiting today? How do the very best CEOs recruit the best talent to their team? Who has done this best from Chetan's portfolio that comes to mind? How much weight does Chetan place on references? What should one watch out for with references?
4.) With the rise of remote, does Chetan believe that a startup even has to have an office in SF today? How does Chetan think about the "tribal knowledge" that remains within the valley? What does Chetan advise his companies that are not in the valley and contemplating it? What works? What does not?
5.) How does Chetan think about market size today when considering new opportunities? Where does Chetan think most managers go wrong when assessing TAM? How does Chetan think about time allocation across the portfolio? What have been his biggest lessons on managing his time effectively as an investor and board member?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chetan’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
Chetan’s Most Recent Investment: Duffel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chetan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Passion Is Overrated When It Comes To Starting Companies, Why VC Is Overrated As A Financing Mechanism & Why You Should Never Sell Your Company with Waseem Daher, Founder & CEO @ Pilot
Waseem Daher is the Founder and CEO @ Pilot, the startup that takes care of your bookkeeping from start to finish so you can focus 100% on making your business succeed. To date, Waseem has raised over $58m in funding from some of the very best firms and people in the business including Index, Stripe, Okta's Frederic Kerrest, Gusto's Josh Reeves, Stripe's Patrick and John Collison and Lola's Paul English, just to name a few. As for Waseem, Pilot is the 3rd business he has founded with his co-founders, the first being Ksplice and the second Zulip, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. He has also enjoyed spells with the likes of Oracle and Dropbox in the interims.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Waseem made his way into the world of startups over 15 years ago and how that lead to his founding of Pilot today, changing the world of accounting? Does Waseem agree with Joel Fernandez at JoyMode that "serial entrepreneurship is overrated? What has Waseem done differently this time as a result of his 2 prior founding experiences?
2.) Why does Waseem believe that "passion is overrated when it comes to starting companies"? If passion is not fundamental, what does Waseem believe is fundamental to ensuring one sticks the course? How does Waseem think about the craft of company building as a passion in itself?
3.) What is it about Waseem's relationship with his 2 co-founders that makes it so successful for the third time around this time? What do they do to ensure that unity and trust remains? Where do they have weaknesses and flaws in the co-founding relationship as a result of it's maturity? What advice does Waseem give to newer co-founding partners?
4.) Waseem has previously said that "VC is overrated". What does he mean by this? How does Waseem think about the decision to bootstrap vs to raise VC? What are Waseem's biggest lessons when it comes to investor selection? How much of a role does brand play? What core questions should the founders ask the VC?
5.) What does Waseem mean when he says, "never sell your company"? What were his biggest lessons from exiting two companies to Oracle and Dropbox? How did it shape his thinking on M&A and exits? How has Waseem seen his role scale and develop as a leader and as CEO? What are the biggest challenges he has found in his personal scaling?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Waseem’s Fave Book: Harry Potter
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Waseem on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Smart executives and business owners know that harnessing the power of AI, embracing the cloud, and prioritizing cybersecurity are the cornerstones of growth. Every day, Wrike helps thousands of companies worldwide do this by revolutionizing how they approach work. Our secure, automated,cloud-based work management tool helps businesses future proof their cultures and evolve fast. How? Wrike ‘s award-winning, collaborative, all-company platform keeps everything in one easily-accessible space. Time to embrace next-gen work management at the executive level and encourage lean thinking from the top down. With Wrike, crushing your objectives and mitigating risks at scale is a cinch. Give Wrike a try for free.
20VC: Former Tinder CPO Brian Norgard on His Biggest Product Takeaways from Launching the Top Grossing App in the World, The Top 10 Reasons Why Products Fail Today & How The Best Founders Assess Risk and Use It
Brian Norgard is the Former Chief Product Officer at the top-grossing mobile app in the world, Tinder. In less than 3 years, Tinder created over $11Bn in market value and with Brian's creation of Tinder Gold, Superlike and Boost, the platform has seen over 200m downloads and created millions of matches. Prior to Tinder, Brian founded Tappy, a mobile messaging application backed by Kleiner Perkins and acquired by Tinder. Before that, Brian built one of the fastest-growing Facebook applications in history (Chill) which reached over 30MM people. Fun fact about Brian also, at 25, Brian was the youngest GM/VP in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp after the acquisition of his first company Newroo where he served as the GM of MySpace News. If that was not enough, Brian is also a prolific angel investor with investments in Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList and Coinmine.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brian made his way into the world of startups and came to be the youngest VP at News Corp at the tender age of 25? How did that lead to his becoming CRO then CPO @ Tinder?
2.) What is the No 1 reason that products fail today? What can founders and designers do to retain the simplicity of product over time? How does complexity change the product experience? Why does Brian believe that product experience is an art? Bring in science, to what extent does Brian believe testing and iteration is key to success in product? How does one know how long is enough time to test for vs too short and not enough data?
3.) When thinking about distribution, what does Brian look for in the way that people describe a product to their friend? How does Brian think that the most successful products bake distribution into the core user behaviour? How does Brian think about community building around product? Who has done this best in Brian's mind?
4.) How should the very best founders and product people think about product risk? How can they know when to use risk to their advantage vs be mindful of excessive risk? On the features themselves, how important is it for a product to be 10x cheaper/faster etc? Why does Brian believe that is largely VC jargon?
5.) What were Brian's biggest takeaways from launching Tinder Gold and seeing Tinder become the Top Grossing App in the world? How does that sort of event also impact the team? How does Brian think about whether one should celebrate those moments or push forward to the next goal?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brian’s Fave Book: The Old Man and The Sea
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Smart executives and business owners know that harnessing the power of AI, embracing the cloud, and prioritizing cybersecurity are the cornerstones of growth. Every day, Wrike helps thousands of companies worldwide do this by revolutionizing how they approach work. Our secure, automated,cloud-based work management tool helps businesses future proof their cultures and evolve fast. How? Wrike ‘s award-winning, collaborative, all-company platform keeps everything in one easily-accessible space. Time to embrace next-gen work management at the executive level and encourage lean thinking from the top down. With Wrike, crushing your objectives and mitigating risks at scale is a cinch. Give Wrike a try for free.
20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing
Jesse Beyroutey is a General Partner @ IA Ventures, one of the top-performing early-stage funds of the last decade. Their incredible portfolio includes the likes of TransferWise, DataDog, Digital Ocean, X.ai and The Trade Desk, just to name a few. As for Jesse, his investments at IA include Digital Ocean, IronClad, TransferWise, Sight Machine and more fantastic companies. Prior to joining the world of venture, Jesse studied Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jesse made his way into the world of VC pretty much straight out of University and how that led to his being a GP with IA today?
2.) What is Game Theory? What does it mean to Jesse and how does it impact his investing mindset today? How does Jesse think about and assess startup positioning today? How important is positioning in the early days of the company? How does Jesse think about data as a sustainable moat or not? Does Jesse think in today's excess supply of capital environment that cash alone can be a moat?
3.) How does Jesse and IA think about portfolio construction today? Does Jesse ever feel the "pressure to deploy"? How have IA structured their own fundraises to ensure they never feel that pressure? How important a role does ownership play for Jesse when making an investment? Does Jesse believe ownership is built on first check?
4.) How does Jesse assess his own price sensitivity? How has it changed over the last 8 years? How does Jesse and IA approach both investment decision-making and reserve allocation decisions? How does the lead rely on the rest of the team when making decisions? Why does capital efficiency become a core question when determining reserve allocations?
5.) Why does Jesse feel that the reading to writing ratio that currently exists between founders and investors needs to change? What should the ratio be? How does the relationship between founder and investor change when the investor provides more content? How does Jesse look to avoid news cycles in the week? What works? What does not? What is Jesse's advice for anyone looking to do the same?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jesse’s Fave Book: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Jesse’s Most Recent Investment: Gauntlet
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jesse on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Gitlab Founder, Sid Sijbrandji on Lessons From Scaling from 400 to 1,000 People in 1 Year, Why You Have To Have A Low Level Of Shame On The Product You Release & The Secret To Making Remote Work So Effectively At Scale
Sid Sijbrandij is the Founder & CEO @ Gitlab, a single application for the entire software development lifecycle. From project planning and source code management to CI/CD, monitoring, and security. To date, Sid has raised over $145m in funding for Gitlab from the likes of GV, August Capital, YC, Khosla and Goldman Sachs just to name a few. What is incredible, Sid has scaled the team to over 762 team members across 55 countries and is famed for his openness and transparency on how he builds both the product and company. You can find the fantastic Gitlab handbook here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sid made his way into the world of startups, learned Ruby in the early days and came to found Gitlab? What was that a-ha moment?
2.) In 2019 Gitlab is growing from 400 to 1,000 people, what are the biggest challenges that come with such operational growth? How does one hire at such pace and retain quality? How does Sid think about the right way to onboard new employees? How does Sid think about KPI and goal setting in the early days?
3.) Today all 750 Gitlab employees are remote, what does Sid believe is the secret to making remote teams work at scale? How does Sid think about the balance between fast shipping cadence and perfect product releases? Why does Sid believe, "you have to have a low level of shame on the product you release"?
4.) How does Sid think about operating Gitlab as a totally transparent company? What does that mean both in reality and in process? Why does Sid believe it is optimal to have a roadmap that is open for everyone to see? What are the pros? What are the cons of such transparency? How do competitors respond?
5.) If every great business is bundling or unbundling, where does Sid believe he and Sid are in the process today? How does Sid think about being too much to too many people? How does the open-source community really come into play in the development of Gitlab?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sid’s Fave Book: High Output Management
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sid on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Zoom From Series A to IPO, How VCs Can Provide CEOs with Additional Leverage and Why The Negative Effects of Signalling Are Very Real with Santi Subotovsky, General Partner @ Emergence Capital
Santi Subotovsky is a General Partner @ Emergence Capital, one of the valley's leading venture firms of the last decade focusing on enterprise & SaaS applications. Within their incredible portfolio is the likes of Salesforce, Zoom, Box, Veeva Systems, SuccessFactors and many more. As for Santi, he has led deals in the likes of Zoom, Crunchbase, Clearbanc, Top Hat and Chorus.ai to name a few. Before Emergence, Santi founded AXG Tecnonexo, a SaaS e-learning company in Argentina which he expanded to 150+ employees across Latin America and the U.S. Santi is also a founding board member of Puente Labs, an organization that helps founders of Latin American high-potential growth companies scale their businesses globally.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Santi made his way from founding a Latin American EdTech business to being one of the valley's most successful investors of 2019 with Zoom's IPO? What was the biggest barrier he faced when getting into VC? How did he overcome it?
2.) What does Santi believe his superpower as an investor is? What did Santi see in Eric Yuan and the 30 person team at the time that made him believe they would be successful? What made how Eric thinks about presents product so special? What did the relationship building process look like between Eric and Santi in the early days?
3.) How does Santi like to work with his portfolio companies? How does Santi think about time allocation across the portfolio? Why does Santi believe it is crucial to not just spend time with the CEO but the exec team also? Where does Santi most like to provide value and leverage to the CEO? Why does Santi believe all VCs are just sales reps?
4.) Why does Santi believe that a vertically focused fund is the optimal strategy to pursue today? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks? How does Santi think about the obvious overlap between consumer and enterprise today? With the thematic focus, how does Santi think about loss ratio and batting average? How does Emergence approach the element of both ownership and price? Where do they optimise?
5.) With larger and larger funds, how does Santi see the future of venture? Why does he believe that we will see vertically focused capital-as-a-service? What does this look like in reality? Is Santi concerned by the extended window of privatisation that is now present in today's capital markets? How concerned is Santi by the compression of fundraising timelines and what does that to investor founder relationships?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Santi’s Fave Book: Candide by Voltaire
Santi’s Most Recent Investment: Openpath
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Santi on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: HitRecord's Joseph Gordon-Levitt on How Show Business Prepared Him For Life As An Entrepreneur, What Founders Should Look For Most In Their Investor Base & Why The Current Ad Model of Social Is Harming The World's Creative Spirit
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the Founder @ HitRecord, the startup that allows you to be creative, together, encouraging less self-promotion and more collaboration, so you can create things you couldn't have made on your own. To date, Joe has raised funding from some personal favourites of mine in the form of Alex @ Javelin, Masterclass Founder David Rogier, Twitch Founder Kevin Lin and CrossLink Capital just to name a few. Alongside his role with HitRecord, Joe is also an A-List Hollywood Actor and filmmaker starring in some of my favourite films of all time including The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, 10 Things I Hate About You and many many more.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joseph made his way into the world of technology and startups with the founding of HitRecord? How did much of Joe's early acting career inform much of the HitRecord product today?
2.) Having had such success in the acting world, what caused Joe to really push forward with HitRecord? Question from David @ Masterclass: who has been Joe's biggest mentors in his transition to tech? What have been his biggest takeaways from them? How does Joe balance both being an actor and entrepreneur at the same time? What are the challenges?
3.) Why did Joe decide now was the time to raise VC funds for HitRecord this late into the company life? How does Joe approach the element of investor selection? What specific value add did Joe want to see in his potential investor? How did the pitch process go? How does it compare to presenting for a role in the acting world? What was Joe's biggest lesson about what successful technology pitches do?
4.) When Joe thinks about the HitRecord community, what has surprised him the most with the growth of the community? Why have they purposefully decide to never spend on user acquisition or traffic? What is the strategy behind this? What is Joe's biggest advice to individuals wanting to scale their community and the essentials?
5.) How does Joe assess both the content and social media landscape today? Why is the creative spirit of the world being killed by the current ad model of social platforms? How does Joe think this can be countered and where does HitRecord fit into this evolving landscape?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joe’s Fave Book: Letters To A Young Poet
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joe on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Bessemer’s Byron Deeter On Lessons From Investing in 14 $Bn Companies, What The Heck Is Going On In Cloud Today and Why Cloud IPO Floodgates Are About To Burst Open
Byron Deeter is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners where he has established himself as one of the leading investors in SaaS and Cloud authoring the iconic laws on the state of cloud computing. In terms of track record, fourteen of Byron’s investments are valued above one $1 billion, including eight IPOs and counting. Byron's investments include the likes of Twilio, Intercom, SendGrid, Gainsight, Box, DocuSign and many more. Prior to the world of venture, Byron was a Bessemer Founder raising his Series A from them back in 2000 with Trigo Technologies. The company rapidly scaled to profitability and was acquired by IBM.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Byron made his way into the world of venture from founding Trigo Technologies and selling to IBM in 2005? How have seeing multiple booms and busts impacted Byron's investment mentality today?
2.) What the heck is going on in cloud today? Is Byron concerned by the very rich multiples being paid in the ecosystem today? How does Byron think about how public market performance impacts his day to day role investing? Why does Byron believe that the floodgate for cloud IPOs is about to burst open?
3.) Having seen so many cloud IPOs, what should founders take from the lessons of those that have already been so successful? With 14 $Bn companies, what does Byron attribute his investing success to today? How does Byron think about what he wants to invest in today? Are we in an entirely new wave of cloud?
4.) As a former founder, how does Byron think that he engages differently with founders than more financial backgrounded VCs? What can board members really do to build that trusted relationship with the founder in the early days? Is it good for founders and board members to be friends? Is there a line of professionalism that has to be drawn?
5.) How has Byron seen his style of board membership change over the last decade? What would his advice be to someone who has just gained their first institutional board seat? What does Byron believe makes the best board members? What founder he has worked with most excels when it comes to board management? What made them so extraordinary?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Byron’s Fave Book: AI Superpowers, Legacy
Byron’s Most Recent Investment: ScaleFactor
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Byron on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Self-Driving Is Still Under-Hyped in The Medium To Long Term, What Will The Ownership Mechanism Be Both In Physical Assets & Data and How To Assemble A World Class Exec Team As A Young Founder with Alex Rodrigues, Founder & CEO @ Embark
Alex Rodrigues is the Founder & CEO @ Embark, the world's leading developer of self-driving trucks. Embark operates the longest automated freight route in the world. To date, Alex has raised over $47m in funding for Embark from some of my favourites in the form of Pat Grady @ Sequoia, Matt Ocko @ Data Collective, SV Angel and Y Combinator, just to name a few. As for Alex, it started early with his winning a World Robotics Championship while he was in Middle School (the championship was for adults). Post that incredible achievement he dropped out of Waterloo, became a Thiel Fellow, worked as a software engineer @ Nuance Communications, before joining Khan Academy as a software engineer and also teaching robotics @ Khan Lab School.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way from winning World Robotics Championships while he was in Middle School to founding the leader developer of autonomous trucks in Embark?
2.) Why does Alex believe in the medium to long term, self-driving is still under-hyped? What is the market analysis to support this? How did his meetings with the world's best public markets investors impact his thinking here? How does Alex think about adoption timelines for self-driving? How do investors think about this when investing?
3.) Does Alex believe that when it comes to self-driving vehicles, they will largely be a public utility? What ownership mechanism does Alex expect to see? What are the pros and cons associated with each? How does Alex think about ownership of the data generated through self-driving? How do we balance privacy and public safety?
4.) With such large milestones and proof points in self-driving, how does Alex think about effective goal setting? What are the core KPIs to be driving for? How can they be broken into more meaningful and achievable wins for the team to get around? What is the core challenge to morale maintenance when the challenge is so long term?
5.) Where does Alex see the commonalities in the biggest mistakes that young founders make? What does Alex know now that he wishes he had known at the start? What have been Alex's biggest lessons on hiring the world's best in their respective fields? What have been Alex's biggest takeaways when it comes to successful board management?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: High Output Management
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Sequoia's Pat Grady on What Sequoia Is Focused On Today, How Sequoia Think About Investment Decision-Making Processes & Why It Is Important To Trade A Few Points of Efficiency for Culture When It Comes To Attribution
Pat Grady is a Partner @ Sequoia, one of the world's leading and most renowned venture firms with a portfolio including WhatsApp, Zoom, Stripe, Airbnb, Github and many more incredible companies. As for Pat, at Sequoia he co-leads the firms growth investment team and has been involved with some of the true greats, Hubspot, Zoom, Okta, Qualtrics, the list goes on. Prior to Sequoia Pat spent three years with Summit Partners.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Pat made his way from Summit Partners to co-leading Sequoia's growth investment team? Was it intimidating for Pat entering a partnership with Jim Goetz, Don Valentine, Roelof Botha? How did he manage those nerves?
2.) So many different funds and activities, so what is Sequoia focused on today? Where does Sequoia think about their ideal insertion point today? How do they see the deployment of their blended capital across rounds? Does Pat believe in ownership on first check or building ownership over time? How does Pat think about the extended window of privatisation with IPOs being continuously delayed?
3.) Does Pat believe that VC really is a team sport today? Does Pat agree with Josh Kopelman's statement, "I would rather be a better picker of partners than investments"? What are the core requirements, skills and traits that Sequoia looks for when adding to their partnership?
4.) What is the investment decision-making process at Sequoia? How do they feel about unanimity vs conviction based investment decisions? What are the pros and cons of each? What does Pat believe is the most non-obvious investment decision that Sequoia have made? Sequoia run an incredibly rigorous process when investing, how does Pat balance between that level of rigour with the speed to win the deal?
5.) What advice would Pat give to someone that has just gained their first institutional board? What does Pat know now that he wishes he had known when he started in VC? How does Pat think about time allocation across the portfolio? Concentrate on winners or the strugglers are where your reputation is built? Leading Sequoia Growth and with a beautiful family, how does Pat approach work/life balance?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Pat’s Fave Book: God Friended Me
Pat’s Most Recent Investment: Embark: Revolutionizing Commercial Transport
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Pat on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need?
Steven Galanis is the Founder & CEO @ Cameo, the startup that allows you to book personalised shoutouts from your favourite people. To date, Steven has raised over $65m in VC funding for Cameo from some of the very best in the business including Bedrock, Nicole Quinn @ Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Spark Capital, just to name a few. Prior to founding cameo, Steven was a Senior AE @ LinkedIn and before that was an options trader in Chicago. With their immense success, they have been featured in all major publications including The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Cameo has also been voted as "The Best Place To Work In Chicago" by GlassDoor.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Steven made his way from AE @ LinkedIn to revolutionising what an autograph means today with his founding of Cameo?
2.) What does Steven believe is the No 1 reason that startup founders fail with their startup today? Why does Steven believe that you have to give up your job to pursue your startup, even in the earliest of days? What advice does Steven give to founders and young graduates who approach him for advice in the earliest of days?
3.) As the company scales, how does Steven think about and approach role allocation internally? How does he prioritise hiring for them? How does he think about internal upscaling? How has he dealt with letting go of responsibilities and delegating to the team? What are the core challenges here? What does he advise founders facing this?
4.) Steven has said before, "don't let good get in the way of great", what did he mean by this? How does he determine between good enough and a stretch too far? How does Steven think about the statement of hiring for 6 months ahead of where you are? What have been his biggest lessons from scaling internationally so fast?
5.) How does Steven think about and approach investor selection? What can founders really do to leverage their investor base and get the most value from them? How does Steven think about the incredibly high CACs of the core channels today? What must founders in the world of consumer do to acquire customers more efficiently?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steven’s Fave Book: Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
As always you can follow Harry, Steven and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Benchmark's Bill Gurley on 5 Traits Benchmark Look For When Adding To The Partnership, Why The Abundance of Capital Is Today's Biggest Challenge in VC & The Right Way To Think About Market Size When Assessing Opportunities
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many many more. As for Bill, widely recognised as one of the greats of our time having worked with the likes of GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix and Zillow. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Before entering venture, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston where his research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Bill make his way into the world of VC from Credit Suisse and come to be GP at one of the world's leading funds in the form of Benchmark? What were Bill's biggest takeaways from seeing the boom and bust of the dot com? How did that impact Bill's investment mentality today?
2.) Why does Bill believe that one of the biggest challenges today is the abundance of capital? Subsequently, does Bill agree with Peter Fenton statement, "never turn down a deal based on the valuation it is a mental trap"? How does Bill assess his own price sensitivity? What was his learning here in meeting Larry and Serge early on with Google?
3.) How does Bill think about and approach market sizing today? How important is it to him when analysing an investment? Where does Bill believe a lot of managers make mistakes when assessing market sizing today? What was his big lesson here with Uber? How does Bill think about and evaluate market creation and market expansion plays?
4.) Bill has spent over 3,000 hours on some of the most famed boards of the last decade, how has Bill seen his style of board membership change over the last 10 years? What advice would you give to someone who has just joined their first board? How does Bill think about time allocation across the portfolio? What is the right ratio?
5.) How does Bill and Benchmark approach the element of partner selection today? What are the 5 core things that Bill looks for when adding to the partnership? What have Benchmark done that have allowed them to be so successful in generational transition? Why is an equal partnership so transformative when it comes to generational transition?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Bill’s Fave Book: Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
Bill’s Most Recent Investment: Good Eggs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Bill on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Justin Kan on Why We Have To Normalize Vulnerability in Startups Today, Why Attaching Happiness To Future Outcomes Will Only Lead To Suffering & Why It Is Total BS That You Have To "Suffer" When Doing A Startup
Justin Kan is the Founder and CEO @ Atrium, the startup providing a full-service corporate law firm that uses modern technology to give startups a legal experience that is fast, transparent, and price-predictable. To date, Justin has raised over $75m in funding from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, a16z, First Round, General Catalyst, Thrive, Initialized and more. Prior to founding Atrium, Justin was a Partner @ Y Combinator, the globally renowned accelerator and the birthplace of some of today's largest startups. Before that Justin was the Co-Founder @ Twitch, the world’s leading video platform and community for gamers which was acquired by Amazon for $970m. If that was not enough, Justin is also a prolific angel investor with investments in the likes of Cruise Automation, Rippling, Zenefits, Triplebyte and more.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Justin made his way into the world of startups and YC? How that led to the founding of Justin.TV, later Twitch? What was that a-ha moment for Atrium?
2.) Why did Justin feel that being an investor full time was not for him? How does Justin think about and approach the learning process as a founder? What advice does Justin give to those who want to quit? What was it that made Justin embrace the series of self-improvement habits he now practices?
3.) What does Justin mean when he says, "attaching yourself to outcomes will only cause your own suffering”? How does Justin think about and advise founders when it comes to burnout? How does Justin feel about the "crushing it" culture in tech? What can we do to normalise vulnerability? What were Justin's biggest takeaways from "The Score takes Care of Itself"?
4.) What have been Justin's experiences with therapy? How does he advise founders thinking of engaging with therapists? What have been his biggest lessons that drive success in therapy? How does Justin look to show authenticity through positivity? What does that really mean?
5.) What have been Justin's biggest takeaways from "The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership"? What are the core principles? What is required to roll out these values and principles within an organisation? What are the fundamental challenges to successfully roll this out on a large scale within your company?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Justin’s Fave Book: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
As always you can follow Harry, Justin and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Historical Loss Ratios Are Simply Too High, Why Data Is The #1 Most Important Piece When Evaluating Effective Reserve Allocation & Why Nothing Is Truly Defensible Today with Jonathan Hsu, Co-Founder and General Partner @ Tribe Capital
Jonathan Hsu is Co-Founder & General Partner @ Tribe Capital, one of Silicon Valley's newest funds on the block being founded by Jonathan, Arjun Sethi and Ted Maidenberg. To date, Tribe has invested in the likes of Carta, Cover, Mode Analytics, Prodigy and SFOX. As for Jonathan, before founding Tribe he was a Partner @ Social Capital where he utilized data and technology to augment sourcing, evaluation of investment opportunities and the management and value add for portfolio companies. Before that he led the creation of the analytics and data science team at Facebook, including leading the hiring of 200 of the world's leading data scientists and analysts.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jonathan made his way from leading 200 data scientists at Facebook to the world of venture and founding his own firm in the form of Tribe Capital today?
2.) If we structure VC simplistically, there are 4 core components:
- Sourcing: How does Jonathan think about the role of data in actively surfacing the best opportunities? that are the leading data fields that Jonathan would track? Why does Jonathan believe most early-stage firms are just using Linkedin Sales Navigator intelligently?
- Evaluating: How does Jonathan think about the potential for data to really aid in the picking process? At what stage does this really become possible? How much data is required for data to evaluate opportunities?
- Winning: Winning deals is seemingly a case of human relationships but how does Jonathan think intelligent data usage and benchmarking can actually help firms win the most competitive deals?
- Value Add: How does Jonathan think about portfolio management with data? How does this differ from the more traditional "value add" that other VCs provide? Where are the common pitfalls Series A companies you work with face in not achieving product-market fit?
3.) Given the data-driven nature of the approach, does Jonathan think that there is an optimal portfolio construction? Why does Jonathan strongly believe that historical loss ratios are too high? Does data allow firms to really intelligently price these assets at the Series A and B? What are the challenges in pricing these assets so early?
4.) How does Jonathan think about reserve allocation? Why is data more critical than ever in the decision to re-invest or not? What are the leading data signals that Jonathan looks for when determining reserve allocation? Why does Jonathan think that so many firms go wrong in how they approach reserve management and distribution?
5.) Question from Henry Ward @ Carta: What does N of 1 markets mean to you Jonathan? Why are they so inherently attractive? How do pricing dynamics play out in markets that are N of 1? How does Jonathan think about defensibility when analysing opportunities today? Is anything truly defensible anymore?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jonathan’s Fave Book: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Jonathan’s Most Recent Investment: Carta
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jonathan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Lime CEO Brad Bao on How Lime Assess The Micro-Mobility Landscape and Competition Today, What It Takes To Launch and Win A New City & Why Lime Have Spent $0 on Marketing To Date
Brad Bao is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Lime, the startup that provides distribution of shared scooters, bikes and transit vehicles, with the aim to reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short distance transportation. To date they have raised over $775m in funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, GV, IVP, Uber, Fifth Wall, GGV, Atomico and Bain Capital Ventures just to name a few. As for Brad, prior to founding Lime he was Managing Partner @ Kinzon Capital for close to 6 years and before that spent an incredible 8 years at Tencent in numerous different roles including VP of Business Development for Tencent Games and General manager for Tencent's US branch where he was responsible for Tencent's US operations.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brad made his way into the world of technology with Tencent, how that led to the world of investing and then what was that a-ha moment for the founding of Lime? How did Brad's time with Tencent impact his operating mentality today with Lime?
2.) With significant levels of competition, how does Brad assess the competitive landscape today for micro mobility? Does Brad believe customer loyalty comes into play in the segment? Is capital itself a defensible moat in this market? Why is Brad adamant that it is important to spend $0 on marketing? What does this say about the product?
3.) How does Brad think about technological innovation within the space? Does it subscribe to Moore's law in the advancement of the core components? How does Brad think about inherent trade-offs that have to be made in product decisions? How does Brad think about prioritising for unit cost vs product superiority? Why can you not have it all?
4.) How does Brad think about launching new cities? What does it take to win in those geographies? What are all the necessary parts to setup when entering a new location? What is the biggest determinant of a location success? Density? Maturity?
5.) Brad has assembled a truly world-class exec team, what does Brad think it takes to attract truly A* talent? When should founders really start to think about building out their own exec team? What does Brad believe it is that makes his partnership with Toby Sun work so well? What have been his learnings from the development of that relationship?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brad’s Fave Book: Good To Great by Jim Collins
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: a16z's Scott Kupor on The Biggest Learnings From Scaling a16z from $300m to $7Bn AUM, The Biggest Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching VCs & Why VC Is Simply A Customer Service Business
Scott Kupor is Managing Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most renowned venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, Github, Lyft, Coinbase, Slack and many more. As for Scott, he has been with the firm since its inception in 2009 and has overseen its rapid growth, from three employees to 150+ and from $300 million in assets under management to more than $7 billion today. Before a16z, Scott was a VP @ HP where he managed a $1.5 billion (1,300 person) global support organization for HP Software product portfolio. Scott joined HP as a result of his prior company Opsware, being acquired, where he served as a Senior VP across numerous roles across an incredible 8-year journey.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Scott made his way from the world of law to startups to being Managing Partner at one of the world's most renowned venture firms in the form of a16z?
2.) How did seeing the boom and bust of the dot com bubble and 2008 impact Scott's operating mindset today? Why does he argue that those times are so drastically different to today? How do public markets fundamentally diffferent? How do teams approach to capital efficiency and scaling differ significantly?
3.) What does Scott believe entrepreneurs get most wrong when pitching VCs? Why does Scott argue that product is not the core when pitching VCs? Does Scott agree with Fred @ Okta in weighing it: 70% market, 20% team, 10% product? What is Scott's weighting? Why does Scott believe that the compression of fundraising timelines is a problem? What pitch sticks out to Scott above all others? What made it so memorable?
4.) How does Scott advise founders on determining the right amount to raise for? Does Scott believe that founders should ask for a specific number or a range? Why does Scott believe raising for "runway" is the wrong mindset? Does Scott believe that most bridges are bridges to nowhere? If so, what is the next step? How does one relay that information to the founders?
5.) What have been some of Scott's biggest learnings from building the firm with Marc and Ben? What does Scott believe have been the biggest inflexion points in the public status of a16z? What have been the biggest challenges for Scott in the scaling of the firm? How does he foresee that changing in the future?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Scott’s Fave Book: Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Plaid's Zach Perret on Why You Have To Hire For Spikes and What That Really Means, Fintech Predictions From Incumbent Entrants To The Rise of Europe & The 2 Big Questions That CEOs Should Ask Themselves
Zach Perret is the Founder & CEO @ Plaid, the startup providing the easiest way for users to connect their bank accounts to an app whether it be transactions, identity or authentication. To date, Zach has raised over $300m with Plaid from some of the best in the business including Mary Meeker, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis, Spark and Homebrew, just to name a few. As for Zach, as CEO he has scaled Plaid to today with over 300 employees, 3 international offices and over 10Bn transactions analysed. Prior to founding Plaid, Zach was a consultant @ Bain.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Zach made his way into the world of startups from consulting at Bain and what led to the founding of Plaid and the mission to unlock consumer finance? What advice would Zach give to emerging grads today, questioning whether to join or start a startup?
2.) What does great leadership and CEOship look like to Zach? How has Zach seen himself evolve and develop as a leader over the last few years? How does Zach think about prioritisation? How does Zach determine what to say yes vs what to say no to? What has Zach found the most challenging in scaling as a CEO? What has he done to mitigate this?
3.) How does Zach think about constructing the optimal recruitment process? What have been some of Zach's biggest lessons in what it takes to really recruit world-class talent? What does Zach mean when he says, "you have to hire for spikes"? How does Zach manage the tension of keeping the high-quality bar whilst also sustaining the very steep growth curve?
4.) Plaid recently raised $275m, how does Zach think about capital efficiency with Plaid today? How does Zach determine when is the right time to transition from the mindset of lean and iteration to raising a war chest and going for the home run? What is Zach's biggest advice to founders when it comes to investor selection? Is it possible for the investor and the founder to be "friends"?
5.) When assessing the fintech landscape today, what is Zach most excited to see develop over the next 12-18 months? How are we seeing much larger incumbents like Goldman innovate in the proliferated world of fintech startups? How does the US view the fintech innovation that has occurred in the UK? What does this mean for US fintechs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Zach’s Fave Book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Zach on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Portfolio Construction Is Inefficient, Why The Only Thing That Matters In Venture Is Pricing & The Future of Venture; Bundled or Unbundled with Zach Coelius
Zach Coelius is Managing Partner @ Coelius Capital and in his own words, "a pretty eclectic investor who loves to see just about any deal". To date, Zach has made investments in the likes of mParticle, Cruise Automation, Branch Metrics, SkySafe, ProsperWorks and more. In addition, Zach is or has been an advisor to LiveRamp, Hellosign, Art19, Loom.ai, Survata and StartGrid just to name a few. Prior to his investing career, Zach was CEO @ Triggit, an online adtech company which he raised over $18m for and was ultimately acquired in 2015. If that was not enough, Zach is also a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Zach made his way from the world of operating and adtech to investing and advising startups today? When does Zach feel the ecosystem really started to take him seriously as an investor? What did Zach learn from being in the adtech space that he has applied to his investing today?
2.) The Future of Venture: Naval has previously said we will see "the unbundling of VC", does Zach agree with this view? Why does Zach feel we are seeing both the bundling and the unbundling of venture platforms? What unique challenges does this pose for both sides of the equation? How should entrepreneurs evaluate the different options, bundled vs unbundled?
3.) Portfolio Construction: Why does Zach believe that portfolio construction is fundamentally inefficient? What 2 core areas of venture does portfolio construction cause issues for? When does Zach view to be the ideal insertion point if optimising for absolute returns and not following portfolio construction?
4.) Reserve Allocation and Pricing: Why does Zach think that the current mechanism for reserve allocation is broken? Why is it a fundamentally bias process? What does the optimal investment decision-making process look like to Zach? How does Zach think about the asymmetric information that is gained from being early into a company? How can investors really use it to their advantage? Why do they not?
5.) Why does Zach compare being an entrepreneur to being a gladiator and a rocketship? Why does Alex believe the transition from space articulation to product articulation is the most important thing an entrepreneur can do? What is the true sign of this transition in customer interactions? Where do many entrepreneurs make mistakes here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Zach’s Fave Book: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Zach’s Most Recent Investment: Mud\Wtr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Zach on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living
Kulveer Taggar is the Founder & CEO @ Zeus Living, the startup providing a home of your own for business travel with smartly furnished homes for extended stays. To date, Kul has raised over $14m in VC funding from some dear friends of the show in the form of Garry and Alexis @ Initialized, James and Pete @ NFX, Mike @ Floodgate, Y Combinator, GV and Naval Ravikant just to name a few. Prior to Zeus, Kul co-founded Auctomatic alongside Stripe's Patrick Collison, they ultimately sold the company for $5m. Before that, Kul co-founded Bosco, alongside former 20VC guest, Monzo's Tom Blomfield, they raised seed funding from YC before moving to the states to start Auctomatic. If that wasn't enough, Kul has also made several angel investments in the likes of Boom, Airhelp, Meetings.io and more.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kul made his way from Oxford University to being at the centre of one of tech's most powerful hubs of YC and then with the founding of Zeus? What were Kul's biggest takeaways from his first 2 startups? How did that impact his operating mentality?
2.) What did the idea generation process look like for Kul with Zeus? How was James Currier @ NFX so foundational helping here? Why does Kul believe that the idea "really is everything" today? Why does Kul believe that customer acquisition channels are a core part of the product that must be considered from Day 1?
3.) Before hitting on Zeus, Kul and the team had many ideas, what did that idea validation process look like? How did Kul keep morale high in the team when continuously trying and stopping work on new projects? How does Kul think you can use culture as a superpower? As a leader, how can you be both vulnerable and strong at the same time?
4.) Kul has previously said that "tech-enabled businesses are just much harder than pure software plays". Why is that? What makes them so much more challenging? How do the required skills to be successful change when moving from pure software to tech-enabled? What single question remains the most important to ask when innovating in either?
5.) VCs are not so used to such operationally heavy businesses so how did Kul find the fundraising process? Why does Kul advocate that all founders should speak to investors and A/B test their idea before starting work on it? How did investors differ when comparing SF vs NYC? How did the messaging have to change? What was the most common pushback or concern? What have Initialized done to have such a foundational impact? What makes Garry such a special investor to have on board?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kul’s Fave Book: How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Y Combinator's New President, Geoff Ralston on The Single Most Important Perspective An Investor Can Provide A Founder, The Biggest Lessons From Working Alongside Paul Graham & Why You Will Lose As An Investor If You "Profile Invest"
Geoff Ralston is President @ Y Combinator, the world's leading accelerator with a portfolio that includes the likes of Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, Instacart, DoorDash, Flexport and so many more. As for Geoff, he started his career running engineering at Four11, where he built RocketMail, which in 1997 became Yahoo! Mail. At Yahoo! Geoff worked in engineering, then ran a business unit, then became Chief Product Officer. After Yahoo! he was CEO of Lala, which was acquired in 2009 by Apple. Post Lala, Geoff then co-founded the world’s first educational technology accelerator, Imagine K12 which funded dozens of edtech companies including ClassDojo, Remind, and Panorama Education. Imagine K12 merged with YC in 2016.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Geoff made his way into the world of technology and startups, came to found Imagine K12 and how that led to becoming President @ Y Combinator today?
2.) What were Geoff's biggest takeaways from seeing the boom and bust of the macro environment in the dot com and 2008? How did those times impact both his operating and investing mentality? Why does Geoff believe 2000 was "purifying"? Why can the same not be said for 2008? How was 2008 so different?
3.) Frederic Kerrest @ Okta said: "it is 70% market, 20% team and 10% product", would Geoff agree with this weighting? How has his weighting changed over time? YC has "10 Minute Meetings", how can YC really determine whether someone is investable in 10 mins? How does Geoff think about the hailed VC term, "pattern matching"? Why does Geoff believe you lose as an investor if you fall back on "profiles"?
4.) Geoff has worked with 100s of founders in the idea validation stage, how does Geoff know when a founder has the right idea? How does Geoff think about the balance between mission and vision but then also being realistic about when something is not working? When do you quit? Why is the decision internal not external? What is the most important perspective any investor can give a founder?
5.) How does Geoff think about the coined term "product-market fit" and how does he analyse it in terms of retention and growth? If they have some signs of it, how should founders think about when is the right time to raise their first round? How does Geoff think about the benefits for founders of convertibles and now SAFE's? What does Geoff believe will be the future of legal round mechanics?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Geoff’s Fave Book: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Geoff on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s
Mathilde Collin is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Front, reinventing the email inbox with new workflows and efficient collaboration so people can accomplish more together. To date, Mathilde has raised over $79m in VC funding with Front from some of the best in the business including Bryan Schreier @ Sequoia, Initialized, Uncork Capital, Boldstart and individuals including Andrew Chen, Elad Gil, Ray Tonsing the list goes on. With 4,500+ customers, and 100+ employees, in Paris, San Francisco and Amsterdam, Front is one of the fastest growing companies in SaaS and Mathilde has become a thought leader for the next generation of SaaS CEOs, read more on her blog here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mathilde made her way from product manager in Paris to founding one of the hottest and fastest growing companies in the world of SaaS in the form of Front?
2.) What does Mathilde mean when she says, "I would choose discipline over vision any day of the week"? What does discipline really mean to Mathilde? Why is it a priority in the early days? How can a VC stress test and determine the level of discipline a founder has in first meetings? What are the signs or leading indicators?
3.) Communications:
- Investor Updates: What is Mathilde's biggest advice to founders when it comes to investor updates? What should they contain? How often should they go out? How should founders ask for help in updates? Where do founders often make mistakes?
- Revenue Updates: Why does Mathilde do revenue updates with the team? Is there a danger of being too transparent? What are the benefits of this transparency? What is the structure of the update? Who is privy to it?
- Direct Reports: How does Mathilde communicate with her direct reports? Why does Mathilde believe that CEOs should have their calendar public? What is the right cadence for these direct reports?
4.) How does Mathilde approach and think about fundraises with Front today? How can founders know when is the right time to raise? How does Mathilde think about building relationships with investors when she is not raising? How transparent should founders be when they are not raising? What are Mathilde tips for always overshooting her numbers? How does Mathilde conduct DD on potential investors in the company?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mathilde’s Fave Book: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mathilde on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Softbank Managing Partner, Jeff Housenbold on How Softbank Approach Portfolio Construction, Their Optimal Investment Decision-Making Process and What Excites Softbank Most In Opportunities Today
Jeff Housenbold is a Managing Partner @ Softbank Vision Fund, the leading and most influential firm in the venture space investing more than $93 billion in the businesses and technologies they believe will enable the next stage of the information revolution. To date, Jeff has backed the likes of OpenDoor, DoorDash, Wag, Clutter, Brandless and Katerra just to name a few. Prior to Softbank, Jeff spent 11 years as President and CEO @ Shutterfly, during his tenure the company enjoyed incredible growth with the growth of the team from 103 to 2,600 employees. In the past, Jeff has sat on the board of Caesers Entertainment (the world's largest casino entertainment company), Groupon and Chegg and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Mellon University.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way from being President and CEO of Shutterfly for 11 years to writing $200m-2Bn checks as Managing Partner @ Softbank Vision Fund?
2.) We have Wag on the small end and Uber on the high end, so how does Softbank think about portfolio construction and insertion point today? Blended, at what stage would Softbank like their capital to be most concentrated? Does Jeff believe that ownership is largely built on the first check or built over time?
3.) What does the internal investment-decision making process look like for Softbank? How does this decision-making process change when considering reserve allocation? How does Softbank think about and approach reserves given their later entry into companies? Given the size of check being written, what does diligence look like in the standard process for Softbank?
4.) Given the forthy pricing environment today, how does Jeff assess his own price sensitivity? Does this differ depending on the stage of entry? With many suggesting Softbank have extended the period of privatisation for companies, how does Jeff and the team think about liquidity? How does Jeff think about the future of secondaries for seed managers and angels?
5.) Question from Eric Wu @ Opendoor: How does Jeff think about and analyse the opportunity in fragmented categories? What is the bottoms up thought process to this thesis? Speaking of Opendoor, how does Jeff most like to work with the founders he backs? How does Jeff think about he allocates his time across the portfolio?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeff’s Fave Book: The Fountainhead
Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Katerra
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeff on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Want to book your own travel and not have the admin team chasing you for every receipt? Take your business travel program to the next level with TravelPerk. They’ve built the world’s largest inventory of low-cost flights, hotels, airbnb, trains, cars, you name it, all in one gorgeous booking experience. AND they’re built for business. Book, manage, support, analyze, and optimize your business travel, all in one place. Add to this a support team made up of dedicated travel experts who deliver a 7-star experience around the clock, and you’re taking corporate travel out of the dark ages. 20VC listeners can score a free lounge pass to over 1200 airports for a whole year. Not only will you be able to add “company savior” to your email signature, but you can also enjoy the luxury of amazing airport lounges all over the world. Click here to find out more!
20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity
Jon Dishotsky is the Founder & CEO @ Starcity, the startup on a mission to make cities more affordable to everyone allowing you to live with great people in the city you love. To date, Jon has raised over $28m in funding for Starcity from the likes of Social Capital, Y Combinator, Bullpen Capital, NEA and Kima Ventures in Paris, just to name a few. Prior to founding Starcity, Jon did over 3M square feet of commercial real estate transactions for clients including Optimizely, Cruise Automation, Weebly, Zenefits and many more. Before that he spent 8 years at the prestigious Cushman & Wakefield. Jon is also an active angel investor with investments in the likes of Remote, Fond and Savvy.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jon made his way from doing real estate transactions for clients including YC to being one of the hottest prop tech startups making cities affordable with Starcity?
2.) Why did it take so long for the venture ecosystem to get excited by the rise of proptech? What was the catalyst? When advising VCs, how do you advise them to get comfortable investing in these heavy asset, non-lean startup businesses? What are the biggest mistakes investors make when analysing proptech?
3.) What were some of Jon's biggest takeaways from his time at YC? How does Jon advise other founders looking to get into YC today? When it comes to investor selection, in what cases would Jon take a lower valuation against other offers? How does Jon advise founders on investor selection? What questions should they ask? Why is it like hiring? What are the common mistakes that Jon sees founders make when selecting investors?
4.) How does Jon advise founders when it comes to improving the quality of their mental health? Where do Jon struggle? How does Jon engage with social media knowing the psychological effects it has? What have been some major breakthroughs for him? Why does Jon believe having kids has made him a better founder? Why does Jon believe that older entrepreneurs are actually more successful than younger founders?
5.) What is Jon's biggest advice to founders when it comes to building relationships with VCs? Should founders "always be raising"? How transparent should founders be with VCs both in the relationship building process and the fundraise itself?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jon on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on The Strategy Behind The New $600m "Back To The Future" Fund, The Truth To Price Sensitivity at Series A & Why Venture Team Building Is Like Basketball Team Building
Mamoon Hamid is a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture firms counting Google, Airbnb, Amazon, Spotify, Square and many more $Bn companies among their portfolio. As for Mamoon, he has invested in and served on the boards of some of the most innovative software companies of recent times including Box, Figma, Intercom, Netskope, Slack and Yammer. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon was a Co-Founder and General Partner at Social Capital and before that Mamoon was a Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), where he spent six years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Mamoon make the transition from electrical engineer to VC and how did that translate to his role today as Partner @ KPCB?
2.) With Kleiner's new $600m early stage fund, Mamoon had a blank canvas, how does Mamoon think about portfolio construction from a bottom-up perspective? Why is that strategy optimal? How important does Mamoon believe it is for VCs to have a sector focus today? What does he mean when he says, "VCs need to have both majors and minors"?
3.) In today's heated early stage ecosystem, how does Mamoon analyse and reflect on his own price sensitivity? What deal has changed the way he thought about price and he either regrets not paying it or is thrilled he did pay it? How does Mamoon feel about the compressed fundraising timelines we are seeing today? Is this a concern?
4.) How does KPCB think about reserve allocation with the new $600m fund? How do they approach the opportunity cost of dollar deployment in terms of when to stop following on? How does the investment decision-making process change when comparing initial to reserve investment?
5.) Where does Mamoon believe that founders need the most help from their venture investors? Where does Mamoon see the commonalities in founders struggles to scale themselves with their role? What are the biggest mistakes Mamoon sees being made when initial traction has been hit and they start to scale? How can founders avoid these?
6.) How does Mamoon think about and address what it takes to build the most successful and efficient venture partnership? How does Mamoon compare this to a basketball team? Is venture really a team sport today? what are some of the biggest challenges in scaling venture firms over time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mamoon’s Fave Book: Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Mamoon’s Most Recent Investment: Viz.ai
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mamoon on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises
Michele Romanow is the Founder & CEO @ Clearbanc, the startup that provides entrepreneurs capital to grow without giving up a piece of their company. In 2019 alone, Clearbanc plans to invest $1B in 2,000 companies. To fund these ambitious plans, they have backing from some of the best in the business including Founders Fund, Santi @ Emergence, Social Capital, Precursor Ventures and Y Combinator just to name a few. As for Michele, prior to Clearbanc, she founded SnapSaves, a leading mobile savings platform that was acquired by Groupon. Before Snapsaves, Michele founded Buytopia, one of Canada’s leading e-commerce companies with over 2.5m customers. If that was not enough Michele is also a Dragon on Dragons Den Canada, the youngest dragon ever.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Michele made her way from serial entrepreneur with exits to Groupon and being a Dragon on Dragons Den to changing the way we fund today's businesses with Clearbanc?
2.) Why does Michele fundamentally believe we need to rethink the way we fund our businesses? Why does giving away equity to buy FC and Google ads not make sense? What is the solution? What types of business with what types of revenue does this work for? Why does Michele believe we need to fundamentally stop celebrating fundraisings?
3.) So if Clearbanc lends on repeatable revenue from Google and Facebook, how does Michele think about the volatility of CACs we see as businesses progress? Is Michele concerned by the large incumbents pushing up CACs on traditional platforms? Investors can also be wise strategic advisors, how does Michele think about the potential loss of these advisors and board members with an alternative financing mechanism?
4.) From Clearbanc's data, what have been the big learnings on how venture is currently distributed across the US? To what extent does Michele believe that unconscious bias pervades into the decision-making of much of venture? What have Clearbanc discovered in terms of the diversity of the founders they back, purely through objective data analysis of their businesses?
5.) How does Michele respond when shit hits the fan? What is her coping mechanism? How would Michele advise young founders today in coping with tough times? What were Michele's lessons from her first sturgeon caviar business not being a success?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Michele’s Fave Book: Little Black Stretchy Pants
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michele on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Want to book your own travel and not have the admin team chasing you for every receipt? Take your business travel program to the next level with TravelPerk. They’ve built the world’s largest inventory of low-cost flights, hotels, airbnb, trains, cars, you name it, all in one gorgeous booking experience. AND they’re built for business. Book, manage, support, analyze, and optimize your business travel, all in one place. Add to this a support team made up of dedicated travel experts who deliver a 7-star experience around the clock, and you’re taking corporate travel out of the dark ages. 20VC listeners can score a free lounge pass to over 1200 airports for a whole year. Not only will you be able to add “company savior” to your email signature, but you can also enjoy the luxury of amazing airport lounges all over the world. Click here to find out more!
20VC: Why Consumer Brands Must Embrace Physical Retail To Avoid Inflated Online CACs, How To Alter Fund Strategy When Investing In Consumer Retail & Why The Era of The 1,000 Store Brand Is Over with Brendan Wallace, Founder and Managing Partner @ Fifth Wa
Brendan Wallace is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Fifth Wall, the fund with the core thesis being the physical world around us is colliding with technology. Within their portfolio is the likes of Lime, OpenDoor, Clutter, ClassPass, Lyric and Hippo just to name a few. As for Brendan, before co-founding Fifth Wall he co-founded Identified, a data & analytics company focused on workforce optimization that was acquired by Workday in 2014. Prior to that, Brendan co-founded Cabify, the largest ridesharing service in Latin America. If that was not enough, Brendan has been an active angel investor having led over 60 angel investments including Bonobos, Dollar Shave Club, Lyft, SpaceX, Clutter, Philz Coffee and Zenefits.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brendan made his way from founding the largest ridesharing platform in Latin America to changing the face of early stage real estate and consumer retail investing with Fifth Wall?
2.) What is really going on in retail today? Is "retail apocalypse" a fair term to give to the landscape today? What formats does physical retail no longer work for? What is it perfect for? How does Brendan think about the distribution of physical retail for emerging brands? Will they need 1,000s of stores or is the 1,000 store brand era over?
3.) Why do digitally native brands fundamentally need retail? How much of consumer US spend relies on physical retail still today? When do these DNVB's need to expand into physical retail? From speaking to DNVB CEO's what are the most common challenges they face when making the expansion?
4.) How does expanding into physical retail change the game in terms of customer acquisition for DNVBs? At what point do DNVBs hit the invisible asymptote where acquiring customers through traditional online channels is no longer efficient? How have Amazon impacted the CACs for DNVBs in recent years?
5.) Given the consumer retail focus of the fund, one would expect a lower loss ratio, is it right to assume the lower loss ratio? How does Brendan think about portfolio construction with the fund? How does reserve allocation differ when investing in physical retail vs pure software plays? Is Brendan concerned by the lack of downstream capital in the physical retail space?
6.) How does Brendan assess outcome potential when comparing physical retail to pure software plays? Why des Brendan believe we will see a ton of intermediate outcomes? How does this change the type of entrepreneur that Brendan looks to back with the retail fund?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brendan’s Fave Book: The Great Gatsby
Brendan’s Most Recent Investment: Heyday
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brendan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Want to book your own travel and not have the admin team chasing you for every receipt? Take your business travel program to the next level with TravelPerk. They’ve built the world’s largest inventory of low-cost flights, hotels, airbnb, trains, cars, you name it, all in one gorgeous booking experience. AND they’re built for business. Book, manage, support, analyze, and optimize your business travel, all in one place. Add to this a support team made up of dedicated travel experts who deliver a 7-star experience around the clock, and you’re taking corporate travel out of the dark ages. 20VC listeners can score a free lounge pass to over 1200 airports for a whole year. Not only will you be able to add “company savior” to your email signature, but you can also enjoy the luxury of amazing airport lounges all over the world. Click here to find out more!
20VC: Okta Founder Frederic Kerrest on Why You Want To Be A Monopolist In A Small Market, The Biggest Challenges in Scaling Okta To IPO and Being a16z's First Ever Fund Check
Frederic Kerrest is the Founder & COO @ Okta, the independent and neutral platform that securely connects the right people to the right technologies at the right time. To date Frederic has raised over $415m with Okta from some of the best in the business including Doug Leone @ Sequoia, Marc Andreessen @ a16z, a dear friend of the show in Mike Maples @ Floodgate, Aneel Bhusri @ Greylock and Vinod Khosla, just to name a few. Okta IPO'd in April 2017 at a stock price of $17, today they sit at $102. Before founding Okta, Frederic enjoyed roles with Hummer Winblad on the other side of the table as a VC and also at Salesforce and Sun Microsystems on the operations side.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Frederic came to found the now public Okta having spent time with Salesforce, Sun Microsystems and Hummer Winblad as a VC?
2.) What about an idea makes it worth pursuing and investing in? Does Frederic agree with the advice he was given, "it is 70% market, 20% people and 10% product"? When evaluating a market, what characteristics make for the most attractive markets? How does Frederic think about insertion points into markets? How does he evaluate market adjacencies? Why is it so good to be a monopolist in a small market?
3.) What were some of the hardest times Okta went through? How does Frederic determine the balance between vision and realism? How does Frederic as the leader personally deal with these challenging times? How can a founder determine from their hiring process whether they have product-market fit? What were the key turnings points that contributed to Okta's success? What did you have to get right to keep scaling?
4.) A little birdy told me there was an amazing story behind the a16z investment, what is that story? How did Frederic meet Marc and Ben and how did his relationship with them evolve over time? When analysing his investor base, where did each add real strategic value? What advice does Frederic give to founders today on the theme of investor selection? What should the core considerations be?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Frederic’s Fave Book: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Frederic on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Lead Lime's Series D Funding Round, Why Engineers Are Underpaid & Why 74% of US Venture Firms Still Do Not Have Female GPs
Sarah Smith is a Partner @ Bain Capital Ventures, a leading US venture fund with a portfolio that includes the likes of LinkedIn, Lime, SendGrid, Jet.com and more incredible companies. As for Sarah, what a start she has had to her time at Bain leading investments in the likes Perksy and the unicorn that is Lime. Prior to joining Bain, Sarah spent 5 years at Quora both as VP of Advertising Sales and Operations and then also from 2012-2016 as VP of HR, Recruiting, and Operations scaling the company from 40 to 200 employees. Before Quora, Sarah spent 4 years at Facebook as Director of Online Operations where her team scaled revenue to $1 billion ARR while reducing churn and increasing customer satisfaction.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her way into the world of venture having seen the hyper-growth of both Facebook and Quora over 9 years in operations? What were the biggest takeaways from her time with Facebook and Quora? What lessons did Sarah learn as an elementary school music teacher that she has applied to her role in VC?
2.) Sarah and Bain led the Series D in Lime, so how does Sarah think about:
- Market Size: How did Sarah think about and assess market size when evaluating Lime? How does Sarah respond to Peter Fenton's statement, "I always laugh when I hear investors say they look for big markets"?
- Competition: How did Sarah look to get comfortable entering such a fiercely competitive space? Is capital itself a defensible moat?
- Dilution: With such huge future funding requirements for these companies, how did Sarah get comfortable with the level of dilution that will surely occur?
- Hardware & Unit economics: How does Sarah think about and respond to the current level of break rates? How does Sarah believe Lime can have positive unit economics within 18 months?
3.) Why does Sarah believe that engineers are fundamentally underpaid? How does this tie into their mindset and attitude to equity? Why does Sarah believe the 4-year vesting schedule is fundamentally outdated? What would Sarah advise founders in terms of comp package to put in it's place? Does Sarah believe the high attrition rate in the valley is a feature or a bug?
4.) Why does Sarah believe it is glib to say the lack of equality is merely the problem of VC being an old boy club? What are the more foundational and systemic problems that have caused this inequality? Why does GP commit fundamentally inhibit diversity? For firms looking to add a female partner, what is their literal next step? What does that process look like? What can they do to ensure their success in the first year? Where does Sarah see many firms going wrong here? What must firms avoid?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sarah’s Fave Book: Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley, The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Sarah’s Most Recent Investment: Perksy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Startup Founders Have One Core Job, How To Reduce Risk & Increase Probability In Your Startup & Why You Should Not Send A Pitch Deck Pre-Investor Meeting with David Rogier, Founder & CEO @ Masterclass
David Rogier is the Founder & CEO @ Masterclass, the startup that brings you online classes taught by the world's greatest minds including Steve Martin, Natalie Portman, Margaret Attwood and more. To date, David has raised over $140m in funding for Masterclass from the likes of IVP, NEA, Javelin, Michael Dearing @ Harrison Metal, Atomico and past guests of the show Sam Lessin and Philip Krim. As for David, prior to founding Masterclass, he was on the other side of the table as an investor with Harrison Metal. Before venture, David spent time with IDEO helping to create new consumer products and brands.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of startups? How a lesson from his grandmother when he was only 7 shaped the type of company David wanted to build?
2.) David has previously said, "as a founder, you have one job". What is that job? How does David think about how raising VC changes outcomes? Why does David think many founders approach fundraising the wrong way? What questions must founders always ask a VC pre-term sheet? How can founders do their work and diligence on the VC?
3.) Why does David try at all costs to not send the deck to the VC ahead of meeting? Why can this be damaging? How can founders say no politely? Does David agree with the conventional wisdom that "founders must always be raising"? What is the optimal way to structure relationship building with investors?
4.) What does David mean when he says, "pick your investors as board members, not investors"? What does David believe makes the truly special board members? What were David's biggest learnings from Michael Dearing @ Harrison Metal when it comes to boards? What does David believe are big red flags in potential future board members?
5.) When validating the idea and the product, how does David think founders should use testing to prove their thesis at every stage of the business? Why, if proved, does this automatically secure your funding for the next round? What do VCs like to see in this testing? How does David think about when is the right time to go and raise big?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Creativity Inc
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on Why It Is More Important To Be Right Than Contrarian, The Most Common Mistakes Made By Hyper-Growth Companies & 3 Characteristics That Make An Individual Incredible At Sourcing
Jeremy Liew is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the leading firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Max Levchin’s Affirm, AppDynamics and many more incredible companies. As for Jeremy, he is best known for being the 1st investor in Snapchat and has also led investments in StitchFix, Affirm, Ripple, Giphy and Bonobos just to name a few. Previously, Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of corporate development and chief of staff to the CEO, and then as general manager of Netscape. Due to his incredible investing success, Jeremy has been featured on the Forbes Midas List multiple times.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeremy made his way into the world of venture with Lightspeed and came to be one of the valley's leading consumer investors and minds?
2.) How does Jeremy think about and approach sourcing today? How has mindset on sourcing shifted over the last decade? For a new VC, what would Jeremy advise them in terms of building them benchmark for distinguishing between good and great? How does Jeremy distinguish between good and great? Who does Jeremy believe is the most naturally gifted sourcer and hunter he has worked with?
3.) What does Jeremy mean when he says, "it is more important to be right than contrarian"? From winning some of the hottest deals, what have been Jeremy's lessons on what it takes to win the most competitive? What does he mean when he says, "you have to find your home advantage"? Should investors spend time amplifying their strengths or improving their weaknesses? How does Jeremy think about the round compression timelines on hot deals today? How can investors and founders build relationships fast?
4.) Why does Jeremy believe that founder to VC engagement can be similar to a driving instructor and student? What are the biggest mistakes startups make when they hit initial traction and start to scale? WHat patterns has Jeremy seen? How can founders avoid them?
5.) How does Jeremy fundamentally structure his week and time? What time is devoted to internal meetings and partnership meetings? How much time is allocated to the existing portfolio? How much time is spent with new prospective companies? What is Jeremy's favourite and least favourite activities within the role?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeremy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Figma Founder Dylan Field on The Biggest Mistakes Young Founders Most Often Make, How To Go Slow To Go Fast With Venture Dollars & How The Design Process Will Fundamentally Change Over The Next 5-10 Years
Dylan Field is the Founder & CEO @ Figma, the startup that provides a better way to design, prototype and collaborate, all in the browser. To date, Dylan has raised over $82m in funding from some of the world's best investors including Sequoia, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Index Ventures and more. Prior to changing the world of design with Figma, Dylan held roles at Flipboard, Microsoft and LinkedIn and was part of the renowned Thiel Fellowship.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dylan made his way from Thiel fellow to changing the world of design and prototyping with Figma?
2.) What is the story behind the 4-year journey to the launch of their first product? How did Dylan maintain morale with such an extended window between creation and launch? What are the core challenges of building tools companies and getting initial traction? How did Dylan satiate VCs desire for fast growth with such a long period to launch? Is it possible to "go slow to go fast" with VC dollars?
3.) Sequoia led Figma's Series C, how did the round come together? What was it that made Dylan choose the lead investors for each of his rounds? How did this round compare to prior rounds led by Index, Kleiner and Greylock? How does Dylan advise founders to build relationships of trust and transparency with their VC in short period of time?
4.) How did Dylan approach the topic of board construction? What did he most want to get out of his board? What have been some of Dylan's biggest learnings when it comes to board management? What has Dylan found the most challenging element?
5.) As a young founder himself, where does Dylan see commonalities in the mistakes that other young founders make today? As a young founder, how has Dylan been able to hire A** talent execs? What have been some of the biggest learnings on team assembly and construction through the process?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dylan’s Fave Book: Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dylan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: So You Want To Be Acquired? Instacart VP of Corp Dev, Dave Sobota on His Biggest Lessons From 10 Years in Google's M&A Team Working on The Acquisitions of Motorola, Waze & Android
Dave Sobota is the Vice President of Corporate Development @ Instacart, the company that delivers your groceries in as little as 1 hour. To date the company has raised over $1.9Bn in funding from some of the very best investors and operators including Mike Moritz @ Sequoia, Jeff Jordan @ a16z, Aaron Levie @ Box, Sam Altman, Garry Tan and more incredible names. As for Dave, prior to Instacart, he was Director of Corporate Development @ Google for over 10 years and before that was with leading law firm, Wilson Sonsini.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dave made his way from the world of law to Director of Corporate Development at Google to his position at Instacart today?
2.) In 2016, we had 513 BC backed exits, 499 were M&A, so how does Dave assess the M&A landscape today? Why id Dave bullish on the future M&A environment, at least for the next 12 months? Where are his concerns around M&A clustering? How does Dave view the entrance of large scale PE into the tech M&A arena?
3.) From leading Google's M&A practice, what have been Dave's core learnings on whether an entrepreneur should sell their company or remain independent? Paul Graham once said, "startups only talk to corp dev when they are doing really well or really badly". Does Dave agree? What are the reasons a startup would not speak to corp dev? What is the right way for them to communicate this while leaving the door open for future conversations?
4.) How does Dave operationalise the tracking of the startup market and determine what startups he wants to meet? How does Dave like to and think about working with the VC community here? What does that relationship building process look like? In those early meetings, what are the core questions that founders must ask? How much of a role does price play for Dave when considering an acquisition?
5.) How can founders ensure when they sell their company, that it will be properly integrated? What answers from the acquirer suggest it will or will not be? From countless M&A processes, what do the best integrations look like post-acquisition? Where are mistakes often made? Does Dave agree with Paul Graham in stating it is a "gruelling" process?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dave’s Fave Book: Lonesome Dove
Dave’s Most Recent Acquisition: Tenor
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Carta Founder Henry Ward on Why The Best Companies Are Not Product Led But Distribution Led, 3 Requirements Needed For A New Market/Investment To Be Exciting and Why Small Markets Are So Attractive
Henry Ward is the Founder & CEO @ Carta, the startup that helps private companies, public companies, and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. To date, Henry has raised over $147m in funding from some of the industries leading investors in USV, Spark, K9 Ventures and Meritech and then also leading founders including Flexport's Ryan Petersen, Transferwise's Taavet Hinrikus and Slack's Stewart Butterfield. Prior to founding Carta, Henry was Founder of SecondSight, a portfolio optimization platform for retail investors.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Henry made his way into the world of startups and came to found the gamechanger of cap tables and valuations with Carta?
2.) What does Henry mean by the term "executive half-life"? How does Henry determine between an exec that can scale with the company and an exec that cannot? What are the leading indicators? When weaknesses are revealed, how does this manifest itself? Does the exec open up and admit to it or does the leadership team have to be proactive?
3.) Question from Manu @ K9: As a first time CEO, what have been the biggest personal challenges for Henry in the scaling of himself? Why does Henry think it is unfair founders are given exemption from blame in scaling but execs are not? How does Henry make decisions differently now to the early days? What have been the improvements?
4.) How does Henry buck the conventional wisdom with his willingness to go after very small markets? What does the N of 1 vs 1of N rule mean here? Why does Henry believe the N of 1 markets is the most attractive? What are the core advantages to owning your market? How can founders think about insertion points? When is the right time to add additional products? How does Henry respond to the traditional notion of "focus"?
5.) Why does Henry believe most founders are afraid to put investors to work? If fundraising is, as Henry suggests "an auction process", what can founders do to optimise it? How does Henry approach the element of value creation and value extraction? How does this influence his approach to pricing? How does Henry think more tech founders can leverage acquiring services businesses and automating their processes over time? Where is the arbitrage in pricing here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Henry’s Fave Book: The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Henry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: NEA Partner, Dayna Grayson on Sourcing, Picking, Winning, Gut vs Data in Investment Decision-Making & The Evolution of Entrepreneurial Expectations of Venture
Dayna Grayson is a Partner @ NEA, one of the leading venture firms over the last 4 decades with a portfolio including the likes of Opendoor, Jet.com, Uber, WorkDay, Plaid, Box and many more incredible companies. As for Dayna, she has led the firm's investments in the likes of Desktop Metal, Formlabs, Onshape, Glamsquad, Framebridge and Curalate, just to name a few. Prior to joining NEA, Dayna was an investor at North Bridge Venture Partners where she championed companies including Camiant (acquired by Tekelec) and Tapjoy. Before venture Dayna was an engineer at Eye Response Technologies, later acquired by Dynavox Mayer-Johnson and also a product designer at Blackbaud (BLKB), the leading global provider of software to nonprofit organizations.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dayna made her way into the world of venture and came to be a Partner at NEA from her roots in product design and engineering?
2.) Sourcing: How does Dayna approach the sourcing component of venture today? What does the deck filtering process look like to Dayna, prior to meeting? What has Dayna found works best in really building rapport in the first meetings? What does the conviction building process look like for Dayna from there? If negative, how has Dayna found is the most effective way to say no?
3.) Decision-Making: How does Dayna think about optimising the investment decision-making process? How does Dayna balance between data vs gut? Does NEA require unanimous decision-making? Why does Dayna believe that at A or earlier, the price really does not matter? When does price really become a big issue?
4.) Evolution of Expectations: How does Dayna believe entrepreneurial expectations of VC has changed over the last decade. Where does Dayna believe investors can really provide the most value? Which board member has been the most impressive to Dayna when sitting alongside them on the board? Why?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dayna’s Fave Book: Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America
Dayna's Most Recent Investment: WhireWheel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dayna on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: One Question Founders Must Ask Themselves When Approaching Investor Selection, Why Series B Is One Of The Most Challenging Phases & What Makes For A Successful CEO Transition with Jeff Russakow, CEO @ Boosted
Jeff Russakow is the CEO @ Boosted, the startup producing vehicle grade electric skateboards rethinking how we travel. To date, they have raised $74m in funding from the likes of Khosla Ventures, iNovia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and our friends at Initialized. Prior to Boosted, Jeff was CEO @ Gimbal where he doubled revenue in his first year and added 80 new enterprise clients. Before that, Jeff was the CEO @ Findly where he grew the company to 450 employees and 20m end users. Jeff also enjoyed prior roles with the likes of Symantec, Adobe, SAP and Yahoo.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way from leading enterprise CEO to re-thinking the way we travel today as CEO of Boosted?
2.) How does Jeff analyse the current sentiment to fundraising in the valley, specifically with regards to business construction? How has Jeff seen the investor class fundamentally transition over the last 20 years? When approaching investor selection, what is the 1 question that Jeff always asks? Where do founders often make mistakes here?
3.) Having raised the $60m round in 2018, how does Jeff approach the theme of capital efficiency today with Boosted? How does Jeff determine when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire? Why is Series B often the most challenging phase when considering the focus on unit economics and vision simultaneously?
4.) What is Jeff's gut reaction to the statement, "hardware is hard"? Why does Jeff feel this to be a glib statement that misses the point? How does Jeff respond to the criticism of the commodity element of hard, easy to replicate and copy? How would Jeff like to see the investor class change their mindset to hardware? What is the right way to approach it?
5.) What are the core elements required for a successful CEO transition? For a potentially incoming CEO, what must they be wary of with regards to the information conveyed to them by investors of the company? Where has Jeff seen many go wrong in CEO transitions? What can the founders do to make this process as smooth as possible?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeff’s Fave Book: The Missing Piece
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Initialized's Garry Tan on The Most Important Thing A Seed Investor Can Do For Founders, How Ownership Requirements Change With Evolution of Funds & Why There Is Not Too Much Capital Chasing Too Few Deals
Garry Tan is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Initialized Capital, one of the West Coast's leading early-stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of Coinbase, Instacart, Cruise, Flexport and Opendoor, just to name a few. As for Garry, before co-founding Initialized, he was a partner at Y Combinator for nearly five years where he advised and funded over 600 companies. He was also co-founder of YC-backed blog platform Posterous (acquired by Twitter in 2012). Before that he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir's financial analysis product, and also fun fact, Garry designed Palantir's logo.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Garry made his way from Founder and YC Partner to managing over $500m AUM today with his leading of Initialized? How did Garry's investment mindset change with the transition from angel to an institutional investor?
2.) What does Garry believe is the one thing pre-seed and seed investors must do that is more important than anything else? What relationship to the very best founders have with failure? How do they think about and approach it? How has Garry seen his own conviction building process in founders change over time? How does Garry approach the turning down of opportunities? What is the right way to deliver that feedback?
3.) Ownership: Initialized's funds have scaled from Fund I being $7m to Fund 4 being $225m, how have their ownership requirements changed with the evolution of their fund size? How does Garry think about collaboration and co-opetition with others funds as a result? What are the core challenges here?
4.) Price Sensitivity: With the larger fund and slightly more flexibility, how does Garry evaluate his own price sensitivity? What deal has Garry passed on due to price and it has stuck with him and taught him a valuable lesson? On pricing, how does Garry and Initialized approach reserve allocation?
5.) Investment Decision-Making: Garry has previously said "decision-making is a differentiator", what do Initialized do to ensure the highest quality of internal discussion and decision-making? How do they approach unanimous vs single partner decision-making? How does Initialized approach internal attribution with this in mind?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Garry’s Fave Book: Peter Thiel's Zero To One, Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters
Garry’s Most Recent Investment: Standard Cognition
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Garry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Buffer's Joel Gascoigne on The Moment The Founder Is No Longer The Boss, The Questions Founders Must Ask Their VCs and Why We Need A Spectrum of Different Financing Mechanisms Other Than VC
Joel Gascoigne is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Buffer, the social media management tool that makes it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place. They had raised both seed and Series A rounds but last summer, spent $3.3m to buy out the majority of their Series A investors, making them much more independent. Joel now runs Buffer as a profitable business with $2m in profit in 2017 and $3m in 2018. Before co-founding Buffer, Joel co-founded OnePage and StartupMill and was a web developer in the UK.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joel made his way from web developer in the UK to founder of Buffer, in 2018 a business that did $3m in profit?
2.) What does Joel mean when he says that "fundraising is a bigger decision than most people realise"? At what moments does Joel believe that the founders are no longer the boss? When did Joel feel he was no longer the boss? What does Joel wish founders knew more about the VC process and mechanics? What questions must they ask VCs?
3.) Would Joel agree with Anand Sanwal, previously on the show that "VCs foie-gras their startups", forcing synthetic growth? What is the right way for founders to respond to this pressure? How did Joel personally handle the pressure? How does Joel assess and analyse the current VC ecosystem? What would he most like to change?
4.) There was a time when individuals did not want Joel to be CEO, how did Joel deal with that? What would Joel advise founders in the same position? What are the right steps to take? Joel then lost his co-founder, how was that process for Joel? What does he know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of that process? How does he look to retain that level of support and guidance from someone other than a co-founder?
5.) What does Joel mean when he says, "leaders must lean into transparency"? Are there any limitations to being overly transparent? Now as a profitable company, how does Joel think about profit sharing with the team? What does profitable status allow the team to achieve and do that is not normally possible for VC backed co's?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joel’s Fave Book: A Little Life
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Spark Capital's Alex Clayton on How The Best Growth Investors Source, Evaluate and Win Deals, Why Market Depth Is Crucial When Analysing Markets & Why Capital Is Only A Temporary Competitive Advantage
Alex Clayton is a Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Slack, Postmates, Oculus, Cruise, Twitter, the list goes on. As for Alex, he co-led Spark's investments in Pendo and Outreach and then led Spark's investments in Justworks, Braze (Appboy) and JFrog. Before Spark, Alex spent three years at Redpoint Ventures as a senior associate where he sourced or was actively involved in the firm's investments in Duo Security, JustWorks, RelateIQ (Salesforce.com), Infer, Lifesize and Sourcegraph. Prior to joining Redpoint, Alex was in the TMT investment-banking division of Goldman Sachs where he worked with Intuit, Yelp, SanDisk, and others. Fun fact, in the past Alex played on the ATP World Tennis Tour, competing in the U.S. Open and many other ATP events.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way from the world of investment banking with Goldman Sachs to one of the valley rising stars in the world of enterprise investing? What were Alex's biggest takeaways from his time at Redpoint and working with Tom Tunguz?
2.) How does Alex think about and approach sourcing today? How does Alex find most of his deals? How does Alex breakdown both thesis and network driven sourcing? How does sourcing at growth differ to sourcing at the early stage? If Alex has to meet founders when they are not raising, what does Alex advise founders who are told that you should not "always be raising"?
3.) How does Alex think about market sizing and evaluation today? What does he mean when he says he closely examines "market depth"? How does Alex determine whether a company has the ability to scale from a niche into a much larger TAM? What are the risks Alex is willing vs not willing to take when it comes to market?
4.) How does Alex think about competitor analysis when evaluating an opportunity today? In a world of almost infinite capital, does Alex believe that cash alone is a significant moat for competition? In customer calls when they discuss competition, what excites Alex to hear? How does Alex structure those customer reference calls?
5.) Alex has studied some of the best in class when it comes to SaaS, what do the best in class look like when it comes to: 1.) Quota attainment. 2.) Payback period. 3.) Net dollar retention and churn? 4.) Capital efficiency? Growth rate? Ultimately, what does Alex believe that it takes to go public having studied so many S1s?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Alex’s Most Recent Investment: Braze
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The Acceptable vs Unacceptable Risks To Take When Seed Investing, Why Loss Ratio Is Not A Consideration & Why Series A Is The Right Time To Establish A Board with Mike Hirshland, Co-Founder @ Resolute Ventures
Mike Hirshland is the Co-founder of Resolute Ventures, one of the leading pre-seed and seed stage funds of the last decade having recently announced their new $75m Fund IV. In prior funds they have the likes of OpenDoor, Mixmax, Greenhouse, AppZen and more incredible companies. As for Mike, prior to founding Resolute, he founded Dogpatch Labs, the community which helped launch over 350 companies including Instagram. Before Dogpatch, Mike was a partner with Polaris Venture Partners from 1999-2011, where he was the original seed investor behind Automattic, Q1 Labs (acquired by IBM for $600 million), Quantcast and KISSmetrics.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his way from a legal clerk in the US Supreme Court to founding his own venture firm in the form of Resolute Ventures?
2.) What does Mike mean when he says Resolute invest at the "old seed stage?" What stage of development and traction are the companies at this stage? Why does seed investing out of a $Bn fund not make sense to Mike? What are the acceptable vs unacceptable risks at this stage?
3.) How does Mike think and assess portfolio construction today? How many lines in the portfolio is enough to be sufficiently diversified? How does Mike think about ownership given his thesis on diversification? How does Mike assess his own price sensitivity today? How does Mike think about loss ratio within the portfolio today?
4.) What are the ideal attributes of the founder/VC relationship to Mike? Is it right for the investor to also be friends with their founders? What can founders do to really build and deepen relationships with investors both during and outside of official fundraises? Where does Mike often see founders making mistakes here?
5.) How does Mike think about the right time to establish a board? What does Mike advise founders in terms of board composition in the early days? How does Mike look to build a sense of "board intimacy" with his founders? Why does Mike believe that there is a "counter-productivity to boards at seed"?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: A Little Life
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why The Current VC Financing Mechanism For Consumer Brands Is Broken, Why The Infrastructure To Power Emerging Brands Is Broken and What The Re-Platforming of Retail Means For The Next Decade in Consumer with Adam Pritzker, Chairman & CEO @ Assemble
Adam Pritzker is the Chairman & CEO @ Assembled Brands, a holding company providing working capital and financial services to emerging brands. In October 2018, they raised $100m in development capital from the prestigious Oaktree Capital Management. As for Adam, he is also a co-founder of General Assembly where during his tenure, prior to its acquisition by Addecco Group, he served as Chief Creative Officer, Chief Product Officer, and Chairman. For his entrepreneurial endeavors, Adam was featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Vanity Fair’s The Next Establishment, Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30, and Business Insider’s Silicon Alley 100.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam made his way into the world of startups with the co-founding of General Assembly and how that led to his founding Assembled Brands and financing the future of brands?
2.) Why is Adam optimistic about the current state of the consumer brand and retail environment? How does Adam respond to Alex Taussig @ Lightspeed's suggestion of the "re-platforming of retail"? How does Adam approach the changing demographic of consumer spend? What does this mean for both the brands and the channels they use to acquire customers? Does Adam believe we are in a consumer bubble today?
3.) How does Adam think about the lack of free and open distribution today for consumer companies? Are the traditional channels now too expensive to acquire customers on? How does Adam advise consumer founders on the saturation rate of marketing channels? How can they foresee the ceiling ahead of time?
4.) Adam has previously stated that Instagram is the new QVC, what did he mean by that? What type of consumer brand is Instagram best suited for? Why does Adam believe that in many cases the venture financing method is suboptimal and wrong for these scaling brands? What can founders who have taken VC funds and now seen it was potentially a mistake do?
5.) Why does Adam believe that the "infrastructure to power emerging brands is broken"? How can the current stack and infrastructure for brands be improved? What metrics should consumer founders really hone in on today? What sort of metrics suggests a brand is VC backable vs is not VC backable? How does Adam think about the ability of the consumer brand space to provide venture returns at scale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adam’s Fave Book: (1.) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. (2.) The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It
Adam's Most Recent Investment: Felix Gray
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: What It Takes To Be The Most Effective Coach To Startup Founders, The Biggest Surprises and Challenges About Transitioning To Venture From Operations & 3 Trends Shaking The World of Consumer Today with Victoria Treyger, General Partner @ Felicis Ven
Victoria Treyger is a General Partner & Managing Director @ Felicis Ventures, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade backing 2 unicorns per year since founding including Shopify, OpenDoor, Flexport, Adyen, Twitch, Fitbit and many more. At Felicis, Victoria led the firm’s investments in prior 20VC guest Assaf Wand @ Hippo, Sentio, Sentilink, Blume, Floravere, and other stealth brands. Prior to joining Felicis, Victoria was Chief Revenue Officer of Kabbage. During her six-year tenure, Victoria and her team were instrumental in scaling revenue into the hundreds of millions of dollars and delivered a compound annual growth rate of over 100%. Victoria’s deep operating experience also includes leadership roles at Amazon, American Express, Travelocity, and RingCentral.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Victoria made her way into the world of VC as GP @ Felicis today having scaled revenue into the 100s of millions with Kabbage on the operating side of the table?
2.) Having just made the move from the world of operations, what are the most surprising aspects of venture? What elements have you found to be the most challenging? How does Victoria think about what it takes to be the most effective coach? What can the investor do to build that level of trust and transparency with the founder?
3.) In terms of being a board member, how involved does Victoria think the board member should be? Who is the best board member Victoria has worked with? What made them so special? What are Victoria's biggest pieces of advice to founders when it comes to how to run an efficiency board? What is the right way for founders to think about board composition?
4.) What 3 trends in the world of consumer and CPG make Victoria so excited to be investing in the space today? What has fundamentally changed about the distribution of those products that changes the way we consume the products? Does this mean Victoria would disagree we are in a D2C bubble today?
5.) Speaking of distribution, how does Victoria respond to the suggestion "there is a lack of free and open distribution today" with customer acquisition costs being so expensive? How does Victoria think about the consumer and CPG space's ability to provide venture returns at scale moving forward?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Victoria’s Fave Book: Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, Personal History
Victoria’s Most Recent Investment: SentiLink
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Victoria on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on Why Unemployment Is An Optimisation Problem That Will Be Solved Over The Next 20 Years, Why The Speed and Quality of Decisions Are Not Mutually Exclusive & The 1 Question All Founders Must Ask Themselves Befor
Austen Allred is the Founder & CEO @ Lambda School, a 9 month, immersive program that gives you the tools and training you need to launch your new career—from the comfort of your own home. As a Lambda student, you pay nothing until you’re earning $50k or more. And if you don’t, it’s free. To date, Austen has raised over $48m with Lambda from a personal favourite of mine Bedrock, GGV, GV, Stripe and Ashton Kutcher just to name a few. Prior to founding Lambda, Austen was Senior Manager for Growth @ LendUp and before that co-founded Grasswire.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Austen made his way from being broke, sleeping in a car to founding one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups in the form of Lambda School?
2.) Austen lived in his car for many months in Palo Alto, what did Austen come to learn about himself from that experience? Before Austen has said, "it is not about money", so how would Austen describe his personal relationship to money? Consequently, what does this mean for Austen's relationship to risk?
3.) Austen previously stated he was "determined to never raise VC again before Lambda School". 2 years and $47m later, what changed in his attitude to raising VC? How mus every founder examine their business model before raising VC? What is the one question they must ask pre-raise?
4.) Austen recently raised a $30m Series B round, how did that round come about? What is Austen's biggest advice when it comes to investor selection? How does Austen think about when is the right time to raise big? How does that impact and affect operating mentality? What was it about Geoff Lewis that made Austen take his offer over others?
5.) Question from Geoff @ Bedrock: How does Austen iterate on all aspects of the business so fast? Why does Austen believe that the speed and quality of decisions are not mutually exclusive? Why does Austen believe the faster you ship, the higher quality they will be? How does Austen determine which experiments to stick with vs drop?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Austen’s Fave Book: Les Miserables, The Wright Brothers
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Austen on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The Transition From Founder To CEO, How To Determine When To Stretch On Price in Venture & The Benefits of Attribution for Partnership Dynamics with Jeff Richards, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital
Jeff Richards is Managing Partner @ GGV Capital, one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Alibaba, Slack, Square, Xiaomi, Peloton, OpenDoor, just to name a few. As for Jeff, he sits on the board of or is an observer at BigCommerce, Brightwheel, Gladly, Lambda School, Namely and Tile just to name a few. Jeff also led GGV’s investments in Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce), HotelTonight, Flipboard and has been actively involved in GGV’s investments in Opendoor, Domo, Square and Wish. Prior to joining GGV, Jeff founded two software companies: R4 (acquired by VeriSign), and QuantumShift, backed by Texas Pacific Group (TPG).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way into the world of VC with GGV from founding and scaling 2 software companies in the 90s? What were Jeff's 2 biggest takeaways from having the company he founded raise over $100m then go to $0 in the crash?
2.) How does Jeff approach and see the transition from founder to CEO today? When does this transition need to occur? How do first-time founders differ compared to experienced serial entrepreneurs when it comes to building their teams? Where do they often struggle or make mistakes? What advice does Jeff offer them?
3.) Jeff has previously said, "do not raise for the highest valuation", what is his thinking here? What specific examples does Jeff have of why it can hurt and damage both the founder and the company? How does Jeff think about his own price sensitivity today? How does he determine when a stretch is a stretch too far? From backing the likes of Alibaba, Xiaomi and Didi, what were his biggest takeaways when it came to price?
4.) Decision-making is one of the only products venture has, how does Jeff and GGV approach decision-making as a firm today? Being a slightly later stage firm, how do they think about reserve allocation? What does the re-investment decision-making process look like? How does GGV think about attribution as a firm today? What are the benefits?
5.) What advice would Jeff give to an individual that has just entered VC? What does Jeff know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? How does Jeff think about what it takes to be a truly special board member? What one or two things can a board member do to move the needle in their relationship with their founder?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeff’s Fave Book: In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington
Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Lambda School, Electric
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeff on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How To Optimise Decision-Making Frameworks, How To Really Get The Most Out Of Your Board and When Your Brother Is Also Your Co-Founder; The Secret To Working with Family with Rob Sadow, Founder & CEO @ Scoop
Rob Sadow is the Founder & CEO @ Scoop, the startup that dramatically improves your commute providing convenient carpools with co-workers and neighbours. To date, Rob has raised over $37m in funding for Scoop from the likes of Danny Rimer @ Index, Brook Porter @ G2VP, Zaw Thet @ Signia Venture Partners and BMW i Ventures just to name a few. Before founding Scoop, Rob was a Manager @ Bain & Company and before that spent time in Israel with Better Place, working to provide electric vehicle networks to help accelerate the global transition to sustainable transportation.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rob made his way from the world of consulting and Bain to founding the future of convenient commutes with Scoop?
2.) How does Rob approach key decisions? What does Brook Porter @ G2VP mean when he says, "from a first principles perspective"? How does Rob determine when to make decisions with the head or the heart? Does Rob agree with Fred Destin, "as a founder, decisions are never perfect, it is about batting average"? Where does Rob see many make mistakes when it comes to decision-making?
3.) How does Rob find the dynamics of working with his brother as his co-founder? What are some of the core challenges? How does one make it scale and how does the relationship need to change over time? What is Rob's biggest advice to others when thinking about the person they partner with?
4.) How does Rob think about board construction? What have been some of Rob's biggest lessons in really using your board to get the most out of them? What works well for this? What does not work? How can founders create this level of relationship with their board members? Should founders direct their ask to specific individuals when soliciting help from their board?
5.) Why does Rob believe that they have next to no attrition of employees at Scoop? What have been some of Rob's biggest lessons when it comes to both culture creation and maintenance? How does Rob think leaders can invest more in their employees? What does this look like? Where do many go wrong or misallocate?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rob’s Fave Book: The Wheel of Time
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rob on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware
Frank Chen is a Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most prestigious venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Coinbase, Github, Lyft, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Frank, prior to joining the world of venture, he was a VP of Products & UI Design at HP Software and before that held the same title at Opsware. Before that, even cooler, Frank was Director of Product Management @ Netscape where he led a cross-functional team that defined, shipped, and marketed Netscape's award-winning LDAP directory and security products.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Frank made the move from the world of operations with Opsware and HP to being a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz?
2.) How does Frank view the current state of play for AI and machine learning? How does the rise of automation shift the economy as we know it? What does it do to class distinctions? How does Frank view it's impact on the labour market? How does Frank think about the value of truly large datasets? Where is the asymptotic moment where the utility value of data is realised?
3.) With the rise of self-driving, how does Frank perceive the future of car ownership? Who will fundamentally own and operate the vehicles? Will it be a horizontal play or a vertical play? In terms of adoption, why is Frank negative towards a driver assisted transition phase and believe in a more binary transition?
4.) How does Frank perceive the rise of automation and self-driving cars impacting public infrastructure? How will the layout of our cities change over time? How does Frank believe urban real estate could be optimised in a more efficient manner? Which nations does Frank believe will be the first to innovate here?
5.) What is the most challenging element of Frank's position as Partner @ a16z? How does Frank think about the right way to say not to an entrepreneur? How does Frank look to scale the learning curve rapidly when investigating new industries? What are the challenges here? What advice would Frank give to someone looking to scale learning curves?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Frank’s Fave Book: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings
Frank’s Most Recent Investment: Branch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Frank on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Superhuman's Rahul Vohra on How To Measure Product Market Fit, How To Construct A Process To Increase It & How To Implement A Strong Feedback and Reporting Cycle To Sustain It
Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO @ Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world. Fun fact, users get through their inbox twice as fast — and many see Inbox Zero for the first time in years! To date, they have raised funds from our friends at Boldstart, First Round, John Collison, Sam Altman, Wayne Chang, Mike Ghaffery and Yes VC just to name a few. Previously, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Rahul make his way into the world of startups with the founding of Rapportive and how did that transition to changing the world of email with Superhuman?
2.) What does Rahul mean when he says, "you can reverse engineer a process to get to product market fit"? What does Rahul believe is the defining metric which determines your "product market fit score"? What is Julie Supan's framework? How did Dropbox and Airbnb use it to increase their product market fit? How can founders implement it into their process?
3.) What can founders do to expand the customer base to include users that currently are "somewhat disappointed"? What are the right questions to ask? What do we do with this feedback? How do we further segment the user base? Why should we "disregard the users whereby the primary benefit of the product does not resonate"?
4.) How does Rahul approach product roadmap and prioritisation? How can founders ensure that continuous tracking and user feedback is engrained within the organisation? What tools does Rahul do to monitor and capture this? What are some of Rahul's biggest lessons from going through this painstaking process stage by stage?
5.) Finally on fundraising, what does Rahul mean when he says, "always be raising but never be actively raising"? What are the benefits of this? How can founders transition catch up coffee into fundraising subtly? How does Rahul feel about party rounds? What are the pros? What are the downsides? How does Rahul advise founders here?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rahul’s Fave Book: The Art of Game Design
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: AOL Founder, Steve Case on Why The Best Venture Investments of The Next 10 Years Will Likely Not Be In The Valley, Why The CEO Must Be The Shock Absorber For Company Morale and Why Vision Without Execution is Hallucination
Steve Case is Chairman and CEO of Revolution with the mission being to establish themselves as the premier venture firm outside of Silicon Valley. On the other side of the table, Steve is recognised as one of America’s best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs as the co-founder of America Online (AOL). Under his leadership, AOL was the first internet company to go public and became the world’s largest and most valuable internet company delivering an 11,616% return to shareholders. In 2000, Steve negotiated the largest merger in business history, bringing together AOL and Time Warner. Among many other achievements, in 2014, Steve was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Steve has also been a leading voice in shaping government policy and was instrumental in passing the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act. Finally, Steve is also Chairman of the Case Foundation, where he and his wife, Jean, have invested in hundreds of organizations, initiatives and partnerships.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Steve made his way into the world of technology with the founding of AOL in 1985 and how that led to his founding of Revolution and investing today in the "rise of the rest" today?
2.) Having sat on both sides of the table both as founder and VC, what does Steve thinks make the truly special VCs? How do they engage with entrepreneurs? How do they actively move the needle for their companies? How would he like to see VCs of the future change and adapt their ways?
3.) How does Steve think about market timing when investing today? What were some of Steve's biggest lessons from seeing the dot com bubble and 2008 in both the role of entrepreneur and investor? What does he mean when he says, 'it can be dangerous to have a depression mentality' when investing?
4.) How does Steve analyse and assess the current fundraising environment today? Why does Steve see an incredible opportunity in funding companies outside the 3 traditional hubs of Silicon Valley, NYC and Boston? What needs to happen to drive this equalisation of funding further? What would Steve like to see change?
5.) What does Steve think are the 3 seminal roles of the CEO? What does Steve mean when he says that the CEO 'must be a shock absorber for company morale'? How does Steve deal with s*** hit the fan moments? What are his coping mechanisms and how does he advise entrepreneurs on them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steve’s Fave Book: The Third Wave, Be Fearless: 5 Principles For A Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Steve on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Brex Founder Henrique Dubugras on Why Being Mission Driven Is Not The Only Way To Build A Massive Business, Why You Should Not Associate Fundraising with The Cash Needs of Your Business & Why You Don't Have To Follow Startup Theory When It Comes To
Henrique Dubugas is the Founder & CEO @ Brex, the first corporate card for startups offering instant online application, no personal liability, and tailored rewards. In a staggering 2 years, Henrique has grown Brex to a $1.1Bn valuation having raised over $180m in funding from some of the best in the business including Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, DST, Y Combinator and IVP just to name a few. As for Henrique, prior to founding Brex he founded Pagar.me, a payments solution that he sold in Sept 2016, a year that the platform processed over $1.5 billion in GMV.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Henrique made his way from learning to code games in Brazil to starting a leading payment processor to founding one of the world's fastest growing B2B companies in Brex?
2.) How does Henrique think about hiring the very best people? How has that strategy shifted and changed over time? What is the best advice Henrique has been given on hiring? What interview questions does Henrique think are crucial to ask? What are leading indicators that an individual has the ability to scale with the company?
3.) Why does Henrique think it is wrong to down people for being "compensation motivated"? How does Henrique think about compensation structures? Should candidates have to take pay cuts to join startups? What have been some of Henrique's biggest learnings and challenges here?
4.) How does Henrique approach the current sentiment to fundraising in the valley today? Why does Henrique disagree with founders who have periods of not speaking to VCs? What does Henrique believe is the right way to build VC relationships? How does Henrique think about the right time to raise? What advice does Henrique have for founders when it comes to investor selection?
5.) How does Henrique think about his own personal development? Where would he personally like to improve and strengthen? What is he doing to make this happen? How has Henrique seen himself as CEO change over the last 2 years with Brex? What have been some of the challenges of scaling himself as CEO?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Henrique’s Fave Book: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Henrique on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Techstars Founder David Cohen on Why Seed Investing Is A Different Asset Class To Venture, What Makes The Best And The Worst Board Members & Why Every Company Has To Have A Pessimist In The Room
David Cohen is the Founder and co-CEO of Techstars, the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. To date, David has backed hundreds of startups including the likes of Uber, SendGrid, Twilio, ClassPass, PillPack and more. In total, these investments have gone on to create more than $80B in value. Prior to Techstars, David was a co-founder of Pinpoint Technologies which was acquired by ZOLL Medical Corporation in 1999. Later, David was the founder and CEO of earFeeder, a music service that was sold to SonicSwap. If that was not enough, David is also theco-author (with Brad Feld) of Do More Faster; Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way from, his words "geeky hacker" to the founder of one of the world's largest accelerators, Techstars and investor in multiple unicorns?
2.) What does David mean when he says that when assessing founders he studies "the moment of integrity"? What does he want to see from founders in those moments? What are some potential red flags? If a negative response, what are the subsequent actions an investor must take in this situation?
3.) How does David think about the right time to establish a board? What are the benefits of establishing your board with the seed round? What does David believe is the key to highly efficient boards? How has David changed as a board member over the years? Why does David believe, when building a company, "you always have to have a pessimist in the room"?
4.) When negotiating deals, what does David mean when he says "the terms must match the story"? How does David determine between a bridge and a bridge to nowhere? What can investors do to protect themselves if the targets of the business are not met and they have an uncapped note in place? How should they communicate this?
5.) Techstars today invests in over 500 companies per year, how does David think about reserve allocation across the portfolio? How does David feel about stack ranking portfolio co's quarterly and concentrating capital accordingly? Why is this not effective? Why should seed and angel investing be an entirely different asset class to VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life
David’s Most Recent Investment: Ordermark
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: What Makes The Best Venture Firms Today So Special, The 3 Structural Impediments That Face Venture Today and Why The Debate on AR vs VR is BS with Anjney Midha, Founder & CEO @ Ubiquity6
Anjney Midha is the Founder & CEO @ Ubiquity6, the startup that allows you to edit reality together, turning any location into a space for real-time, shared AR and VR experiences. To date, Anjney has raised over $38m in funding for Ubiquity6 from some of the very best in the business including Phin @ First Round, Mike Volpi @ Index and Mitch @ Benchmark. Prior to Ubiquity6, Anjney spent 4 years on the other side of the table as an investor @ Kleiner Perkins and then as Founding Partner @ KPCB Edge, Kleiner's program helping founders get off the ground in AR, VR and Computer Vision.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anjney made his way into the world of startups on the investing side of the table with Kleiner Perkins and how that transitioned to his founding of Ubiquity6?
2.) What does Anjney believe is structurally wrong with venture now more than ever? How does the extended period of privatisation affect emerging partners in venture firms? How does Anjney think the very best of investors think about and analyse history? Why does Anjney believe venture is the business of financing "creative hits"?
3.) What are the 3 structural impediments facing venture today? Why and how does Anjney believe we will see a new class of VC enter the space and be very successful? In what form could this take? How can they outcompete the current crop of VCs? What does Anjney mean when he discusses the "squishy middle" of VC?
4.) Anjney is backed by Index, Benchmark and First Round, what are the commonalities among those firms that make them so special? How do the very best of firms engage and build relationships with their entrepreneurs? How does Anjney believe that focus can be successfully applied to venture? What is the right way for VCs to evaluate themselves?
5.) What do VCs really want to know when they are approaching risk assessment with founders? What can founders do to mitigate risk when pitching to VCs? How do the very best founders attract the very best talent to their team? What are the commonalities? Where do some go wrong in building the optimal team?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anjney’s Fave Book: Rainbows End
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anjney on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Slow Ventures' Sam Lessin on How VC Forces Certain Companies To Exist and Makes It Difficult To Finance Others, Why Cities Won't Let Scooter Companies Be Profitable and Why Dapps Are A Concern and Where Emphasis Should Be Placed In Crypto
Sam Lessin is a Founding Partner @ Slow Ventures, one of the leading early-stage funds on the West Coast with a portfolio including the likes of Robinhood, Gusto, Pinterest, Casper, Postmates and many more incredible companies. Sam is also the Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ Fin Analytics, the startup that provides precision measurement and coaching for high-performance operations teams. Before founding Fin and Slow, Sam spent 4 years at Facebook as a VP of Product Management following their acquisition of his prior company, Drop.io.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sam made his way into the world of venture with the founding of Slow following the acquisition of his company and 4 years in product at Facebook?
2.) How does Sam think about the difference between investing small personal checks vs managing institutional funds? What is the subsequent effect on mindset when investing? How does one prevent an increased conservatism? What does Sam mean when he says "VC forces some businesses into existence and makes others hard to fund?
3.) Why does Sam believe that man + machine must have a symbiotic relationship in the future? What does this look like in reality? When comparing today to the industrial revolution, is Sam concerned by the increased rate of adoption today? What does this mean for different categories of work? Why does Sam believe we will need more philosophers?
4.) Why does Sam believe that too much emphasis in the world of crypto is placed on Dapps? Why is he concerned by Dapps? What are of crypto does Sam believe is most exciting and investable today? Does Sam agree with Elad Gil that we will see the re-centralisation of talent back to the valley with the scaling of crypto co's?
5.) On governments, why does Sam not believe that both local and national governments will allow scooter companies to become meaningfully profitable in the future? How does Sam think about the balance and trade-off between privacy and security that faces many governments today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sam’s Fave Book: Lessons of History
Sam’s Most Recent Investment: Fetcher.ai
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How To Build Meaningful Relationships With Your Investors, 4 Key Elements CEOs Must Focus On In Scale Mode & How Top Optimise Leadership Team Dynamics with Joel Flory, Founder & CEO @ VSCO
Joel Flory is the Founder & CEO @ VSCO, the startup that allows you to take your photography to the next level, with the mission to help everybody fall in love with their own creativity. To date, Joel has raised over $70m in funding with VSCO from some of the best in the business including Accel, Glynn Capital Management and Goldcrest Investments. Prior to founding VSCO, Joel founded his own photography company which he ran successfully for 10 years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joel made his way from photographer to one of San Francisco's hottest startup founders today?
2.) How does Joel approach the current sentiment and approach to fundraising? Why were Joel and his co-founder unable to raise in the early days? How does Joel approach the element of investor selection? Brand name or partner? How does Joel look to really build relationships with VCs in compressed timeframes? What is Joel's litmus test to determine if a VC is interested? What single value add can a VC provide that is most important?
3.) What does Joel mean when he says, "you have to align your business model with your mission?" How can one really determine if they are aligned? How does this alignment change and alter with scale? What was the thinking behind the shift to a subscription business with VSCO? Was Joel worried it would impact the valuation and change the valuation mechanism to a multiple of revenue assessment?
4.) What do the optimal leadership team dynamics look like to Joel? What has worked well for Joel in binding the leadership team together? What have been some of the biggest challenges? How does Joel think about cross-functional communication across the leadership team?
5.) How does Joel think about his personal development today? Where would he like to improve? Where is he already strong? With a family and company in hyper-growth, how does Joel think about attaining that work-life balance? What advice would he have for other here? How does Joel determine what to say yes vs no to? What are some tips and hacks to this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joel’s Fave Book: How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY.
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20VC: First Round's Josh Kopelman on Why Price Is Both An Art and A Science, Why Ownership Must Be Built on First Check and The Negative Consequences of Attribution in Venture
Josh Kopelman is Founder & Partner @ First Round, one of the world’s leading seed funds with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Warby Parker, Flatiron Health, Square, HotelTonight, GOAT and more incredible companies. As for Josh, he founded First Round in 2004 to reinvent seed stage investing. Since he has invested in over 200 startups and been ranked 4th in Forbes Midas List and named one of the top ten ‘angel investors’ in the US by Newsweek magazine. Josh has previously sat on the boards of Flatiron Health, Clover Health, AppNexus and more.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Josh made his way into the wonderful world of venture from angel investing and what the inspiration behind the founding of First Round was?
2.) How does Josh think about price sensitivity today? What were his learnings from being priced out of the seed round for Twitter and Dropbox? How has Josh seen his relationship to price change over time? How did witnessing the boom and bust both as operator and investor affect his investing mentality today?
3.) How does Josh and First Round think about reserve allocation? How has their thinking changed and evolved over time? Does Josh believe that ownership is fundamentally built on first check? What does the investment decision-making process look like for reserves? In terms of allocation, how does Josh think about time allocation across portfolio? Spend it with the winners, they return the fund or the strugglers and save cents on the dollar?
4.) Josh has spent over 3,000 hours on boards, what have been some of the biggest inflection points that have changed the way he thinks about being a good board member? How has he seen his style and approach change over time? What advice would Josh give to an individual that has just gained their first institutional board seat?
5.) Why does Josh believe that we fundamentally neglect "the pick" today in startup world? Why does Josh believe a high degree of startup mortality begins at the pick (idea) stage? How do the very best founders aproach this stage? How should these founders approach picking their investors? What should they look for? What should they be wary of?
6.) Why does Josh want to be known as a better picker of partners than investments? How has Josh thought about the building ou of the first round partnership over time? If there was anything he would have done differently, what would it be? Why does Josh fundamentally disagree with attribution? How does Josh think about generational transition? What are the steps required to do it well?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Book: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY.
Ready for tax season? Wishing you’d kept a closer eye on your books this year? Set yourself up for success in 2019 with Pilot. Pilot is a bookkeeping company focused on the needs of startups. Their team of SF-based bookkeepers are assisted by engineers to automate the most error-prone parts of bookkeeping, so you know you’re getting an accurate report every month. Plus, Pilot does accrual basis bookkeeping in Quickbooks Online, so you’re never locked into a proprietary platform. Learn more and sign up here. Don’t wait – the first 100 members of the Twenty Minute VC community get 20% off Pilot Core for six months.
20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax
Olof Mathé is the Founder & CEO @ Mixmax, the startup that provides powerful analytics, automation and enhancements for your outbound communications. In the past, Mixmax achieved the almost the impossible in SaaS, true viral growth and a $0 CAC. As a result, Olof has raised over $13m in funding from some dear friends of the show in the form of Jason @ SaaStr, Mike @ Harrison Metal, Mike @ Floodgate and Carl @ Creandum, to name a few. As for Olof, prior to Mixmax he led the team that built Inkling Habitat, now adopted by the world’s largest publishers and before that he was an entrepreneur and worked at Skype and McKinsey.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Olof made his way from the world of McKinsey and Skype to changing the way we interact with our email today with Mixmax?
2.) What does Olof mean when he says that founders go through 3 stages of denial when scaling their team? How does Olof think about the right time to add certain roles? What have been some of his big learnings here? Where do people make mistakes in the timing of hires? How does Olof think about the transition from generalist to specialist with scale?
3.) Why does Olof believe that in the majority of cases, it is not optimal or possible for founders to hire through their network? What is the right way for founders to approach building candidate pipe? What is the right way for founders to engage with recruiters? What is required in the recruiter/founder relationship for it to be a success?
4.) Why does Olof get worried when he hears "they will grow into the role"? What are the core leading indicators that suggest someone has the ability to scale vs not scale with the role? How much time does one give an employee to provide value and show their ability in the team? How does Olof think about the right way to let someone go?
5.) What are the 3 interview questions that all founders must ask in the hiring process? What answers indicate a candidate that is best suited for the role and company? What are red flags to watch for both in their answer and tone? How has Olof changed his hiring style over the last few years with Mixmax?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Olof’s Fave Book: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Olof on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY.
Ready for tax season? Wishing you’d kept a closer eye on your books this year? Set yourself up for success in 2019 with Pilot. Pilot is a bookkeeping company focused on the needs of startups. Their team of SF-based bookkeepers are assisted by engineers to automate the most error-prone parts of bookkeeping, so you know you’re getting an accurate report every month. Plus, Pilot does accrual basis bookkeeping in Quickbooks Online, so you’re never locked into a proprietary platform. Learn more and sign up here. Don’t wait – the first 100 members of the Twenty Minute VC community get 20% off Pilot Core for six months.
20VC: The Framework LPs Use To Assess Emerging Managers, What Concerns and Excites LPs in Potential Opportunities & The Current State of Seed Today with Hunter Somerville, Partner @ Greenspring Associates
Hunter Somerville is a Partner at Greenspring Associates, a leading venture firm and fund of funds. On the direct side their portfolio includes the likes of Sonos, App Annie, Docusign and Alibaba just to name a few. As for their fund investing, they have backed the likes of Accel, Founders Fund, Thrive, Lightspeed, Foundry Group and many more incredible managers. As for Hunter, he is actively involved in the assessment of micro-vc managers for the Firm where he sits on the LP advisory boards for the likes of Pear, Foundry Group, Scale Venture Partners and BullPen Capital just to name a few. Prior to joining Greenspring, Hunter worked as an Associate for Camden Private Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hunter made his way into the world of fund investing and came to be a Partner @ Greenspring?
2.) How does Hunter assess the world of micro-VC today? Does Hunter think we will see the market start to shrink as LPs become over-allocated to the space? Why does Hunter believe the barriers for micro VCs to raise are lower than ever? What does this mean for the future of early stage?
3.) How does Hunter fundamentally approach the assessment of new funds? Is it all about track record? How does he look to build a framework/model to predict future performance? What makes Hunter sceptical when assessing new opportunities? Where do many managers go wrong in the fundraising process? How does Hunter think about loss ratio?
4.) As an LP having to allocate to multiple different stages, why does Hunter feel there is a shortage of dedicated A and B round funds? How does Hunter expect both reserve allocation and loss ration to alter as we move from early to later stage? How does Hunter feel about opportunity funds? How does Hunter and other LPs assess GP led restructurings?
5.) Why is Hunter bullish on the future for direct secondaries? Why does he believe this is fundamentally good for the ecosystem? How does Hunter think about early stage managers in their needs for early liquidity? To what extent will early stage managers need to navigate the private secondaries market to attain this liquidity?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hunter’s Fave Book: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Hunter’s Most Recent Investment: Amplify Partners
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder. Is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY.
Ready for tax season? Wishing you’d kept a closer eye on your books this year? Set yourself up for success in 2019 with Pilot. Pilot is a bookkeeping company focused on the needs of startups. Their team of SF-based bookkeepers are assisted by engineers to automate the most error-prone parts of bookkeeping, so you know you’re getting an accurate report every month. Plus, Pilot does accrual basis bookkeeping in Quickbooks Online, so you’re never locked into a proprietary platform. Learn more and sign up here. Don’t wait – the first 100 members of the Twenty Minute VC community get 20% off Pilot Core for six months.
20VC: Why Every Company Looks One Round Earlier Than It Should Be, Why Investors Don't Understand Term Sheet Psyche & How The Brand Behind The Investor Can Overweight The Attention Their Opinion Is Given with Assaf Wand, Founder & CEO @ Hippo
Assaf Wand is the Founder & CEO @ Hippo, a new kind of insurance company that provides smart coverage for homeowners with a quote in just 60 seconds. To date, Assaf has raised over $109m in funding for Hippo from some dear friends of the show in the form of Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, Fifth Wall, Zeev Ventures and Lennar just to name a few. Prior to re-imagining the world of insurance, Assaf founded Sabi, creating products that improve everyday life with superior functionality and design. Sabi was acquired by Urbio in 2015. Before that Assaf held numerous different roles including as a consultant at McKinsey and Investment Associate at Intel Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Assaf being the worst employee in the world lead to his entrance into the world of early-stage startups and the founding of Hippo?
2.) How does Assaf analyse the current sentiment and approach to fundraising in the valley today? Why does Assaf believe that every company looks one round earlier than it should be for the VCs? How does Assaf think about investor selection? What is the single biggest value a VC partner can provide? Does Assaf agree that founders should "always be raising"? Why does Assaf believe that top funds should not get significant discounts?
3.) What does Assaf believe are the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when building their board? On boards, why does Assaf believe there is a danger that partners from top funds have their ideas overweighted due to the prestige of their fund? What can be done to prevent this? What does Assaf believe is the right screening process for new board members?
4.) What does Assaf believe separates the good from the great when it comes to board members? How does Assaf really look to building meaninful relationships with his board members? What has worked well? On the flip side, why does Assaf believe the No 1 element of a board is "do no harm"? Where can board members actually be damaging?
5.) Hippo is growing 30% MoM and will be in 80% of the US in the next 12 months, how does Assaf think about when is the right time to put the pedal to the metal? What are those leading indicators? Where do many founders go wrong here? Is it simply a case of whenunit economics work, one is ready to scale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Assaf’s Fave Book: The Fountainhead, The Pillars of The Earth
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder. Is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY.
Ready for tax season? Wishing you’d kept a closer eye on your books this year? Set yourself up for success in 2019 with Pilot. Pilot is a bookkeeping company focused on the needs of startups. Their team of SF-based bookkeepers are assisted by engineers to automate the most error-prone parts of bookkeeping, so you know you’re getting an accurate report every month. Plus, Pilot does accrual basis bookkeeping in Quickbooks Online, so you’re never locked into a proprietary platform. Learn more and sign up here. Don’t wait – the first 100 members of the Twenty Minute VC community get 20% off Pilot Core for six months.
20VC: Stride's Fred Destin on The Acceptable vs Non-Acceptable Risks When Investing, How Startup Founders Can Improve The Quality of Their Decision-Making and Must Play for Batting Average & Why Plans Do Not Matter and No Board Member Should Bash An Entre
Fred Destin is a Founding Partner @ Stride.VC, one of Europe's newest seed funds with a portfolio including the likes of Cazoo and Forward Health. Over his 17 year career in venture, Fred has established himself as one of Europe's leading VCs with the exit value of 3 of his portfolio companies alone last year totalling more than $4.5Bn with PillPack's $1Bn sale to Amazon, Zoopla to Silverlake for $3Bn and Integral Ad Science to Vista for $850m. Fred has also led investments as a General Partner @ Accel in Deliveroo, the world leader of food on demand and Carwow, the number 1 for new car sales in the UK.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Fred made his way into the world of venture and early stage? What was behind his decision to leave Accel to found Stride with Harry?
2.) Why does Fred think many today misunderstand "risk" in venture? How does that apply across the portfolio? Does Fred agree with Brian Singerman, "venture is a game of upside maximisation"? What risks does Fred define as acceptable vs non-acceptable risks? How does Fred really look to strength test the quality and depth of a founder pre-investment? What are the benefits of going through conflict early?
3.) How does Fred think about price sensitivity? What are the core questions a VC can ask when considering the pricing of an opportunity? How does Fred think about reserve allocation? How does Fred analogize this to the best traders? To what extent does TAM play a dominant role in Fred's evaluation? What does Fred mean when he says "we have to remember, we are the ones that get picked also"?
4.) How does Fred think about and assess innovation within venture? How does Fred perceive the role of data to impact venture over the coming years? Why does Fred believe it is exaggerated that data will disrupt the early stage in the coming years? Where would Fred like to see further innovation in the mechanics of venture?
5.) What does Fred believes separates the good from the great when it comes to board members? How can board members create an environment where the entrepreneur feels they can say all that is wrong? Where do many board members go wrong? Why are board members so wrong to bash a founder for missing their numbers? Why does Fred believe that plans are fiction? WHy is the framework of the plan what really matters?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Fred’s Fave Book: Man's Search for Meaning
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Fred on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you thinking about life insurance in the new year? Ladder. Is the smart and easy way to get term life insurance online. With Ladder there are no commissioned agents and no policy fees — you can be done in minutes. Even better, coverage can start today, if you qualify, and you can cancel anytime. Ladder is licensed and backed by trusted partners, with billions in coverage. Visit ladderlife.com to apply and get an instant decision on fully underwritten term life insurance, and check life insurance off your list TODAY.
Ready for tax season? Wishing you’d kept a closer eye on your books this year? Set yourself up for success in 2019 with Pilot. Pilot is a bookkeeping company focused on the needs of startups. Their team of SF-based bookkeepers are assisted by engineers to automate the most error-prone parts of bookkeeping, so you know you’re getting an accurate report every month. Plus, Pilot does accrual basis bookkeeping in Quickbooks Online, so you’re never locked into a proprietary platform. Learn more and sign up here. Don’t wait – the first 100 members of the Twenty Minute VC community get 20% off Pilot Core for six months.
20VC: How Founders Can Really Get The Most Out of Their Board, Why Culture Fit At The Board Level Is Not Discussed Enough & Why Growth and Culture Are 2 Sides of The Same Coin with Avi Meir, Founder & CEO @ TravelPerk
Avi Meir is the Founder & CEO @ TravelPerk, the startup that allows you to book, manage and report all your business travel in one place. To date, Avi has raised over $73m with TravelPerk from the likes of Felix Capital, Yuri Milner, Spark Capital, Sunstone and LocalGlobe to name a few. Before founding TravelPerk, Avi founded HotelNinjas, a web-based hotel management software platform that was ultimately acquired by Booking.com. Prior to that, Avi was VP Product at Budgetplaces.com, which was acquired by Palamon in 2011.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Avi made his way from the world of hotels to the world of founding startups and what was his entry point? How did Avi's experience with HotelNinja's impact his operating mindset with TravelPerk today?
2.) How does Avi think about attaining the right board composition? What is the ideal structure? How important is it to have industrial experience around the table? What are the 2 other core skills that Avi believes are required on the board? What can founders do to ensure plasticity of mindset at a board level?
3.) What makes the truly special board members? What do they do both in the good and the bad times to make them so good? What does Avi believe makes the more challenging board members to work with? Why does Avi believe that culture fit at the board level is not discussed enough? What can be done by the founder to improve this?
4.) TravelPerk has now raised over $75m in funding, what does Avi believe they have done well to date to allow them to raise this? For the next round, what would Avi like to improve upon and pushback on further? What advice does Avi have for founders entering negotiations when it comes to both valuation and option pool?
5.) Why does Avi believe that culture and growth are 2 sides of the same coin? What have been some of the biggest challenges in scaling the team with the scaling of the company? How does one retain startup culture when no longer a startup? What would Avi do differently with regards to expansion with the benefit of hindsight?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Avi’s Fave Book: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Avi on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Scott Belsky on Why We Must Challenge Our Faith In The Strength of Resources, Why We Must Rethink The Product Creation and Design Process & How To Determine Between The Good and The Truly Great When Assessing Individuals
Scott Belsky is an executive, entrepreneur, author, and investor. He currently serves as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Before Adobe, Scott co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Alongside his role at Adobe, Scott is a Venture Partner at one of the world's leading venture firms, Benchmark. Scott also actively advises and invests in startups personally having one of the most incredible angel portfolios with early checks in Pinterest, Uber, Periscope, Warby Parker, Carta, Flexport and more. Scott is also the author of Harry's favourite book of 2018, The Messy Middle.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Scott made his way into the world of startups with Behance, how that translated to the world of angel investing and being Chief Product Officer @ Adobe? WHat does Scott mean when he discusses the correlation between utilisation and happiness?
2.) What does Scott mean when he says he looks for people whereby 'conversations improve by step function?" What are the best examples of this? How have they shown this? How does Scott think startups founders can manufacture motivation? How has Scott seen the best founders hire the very best team? How do the best founders determine between a stretch and a stretch too far?
3.) In terms of product, what does Scott mean when he refers to the "value of slow cooking"? How does that relate to product creation? Why does Scott often have issues with the MVP approach seen today? How does Scott think about the importance of product simplicity? How can one maintain that over time? Why does Scott believe more founders should spend more time crafting the last mile user experience than they do?
4.) Simplicity is great but VCs often suggest, non-defensible, how does Scott think about building defensibility with simplicity? Simplicity often also narrows market size, how does Scott think about and analyse market size today when investing? Where does Scott think many investors go wrong today when trying to measure market size?
5.) What does Scott mean when he says "resources are like carbs, resourcefulness is muscle"? Why does Scott believe we need to challenge our faith in the strength of resources? What advice does Scott given when founders ask, "when is the right time to raise big"? How has Scott's writing of the book influenced his mindset when engaging with founders today and investing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Scott’s Fave Book: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic
Scott’s Most Recent Investment: Assembled Brands
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Most Downloaded Founder Episode of 2018: Andrew Dudum, Founder & CEO @ Hims
Andrew Dudum is the Founder & CEO @ Hims, one of the fastest growing consumer brands of our time and the fastest growing men’s health and wellness brand. To date, they have raised over $97m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Thrive, Founders Fund, Forerunner, IVP, Redpoint and SV Angel just to name a few. Andrew is also Venture Partner at Atomic, a venture-builder backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and many of the world’s best investors who recently announced their new $150m fund to start companies solving the world’s problems. Prior to Atomic and Hims, Andrew led Product at TokBox.com, the leader in web-based communication and In 2012 TokBox was acquired by the global telecommunications company Telefonica ($TEF).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andrew made his way into the world of startups, came to build a venture builder backed by Thiel and Andreesen before starting the fastest growing men’s health and wellness brand in Hims?
2.) How does Andrew view the world of online and offline marketing in today’s proliferated D2C space? What were the core elements that allowed Hims to achieve such success with their branding? How does Andrew respond to suggestions that there is a lack of free and open distribution due to incumbents paying up for traditional channels making CAC unachievable for startups? How does Andrew look to solve for this?
3.) What does Andrew believe it is that has allowed Hims to execute faster than any other D2C brand in history? How does Andrew distinguish between people and process when considering the scaling at different stages of the business? What are the pros and cons of having such constraints on headcount? When is the right time to pour fuel on the fire?
4.) Hims raised their last round at a $200m valuation in less than a year of operating, how did Andrew evaluate this one? Does this not effectively price Hims out of the majority of M&A? What leads Andrew’s thesis with his suggestion that he thought the valuation was “quite frankly, a great price for investors”? What advice would Andrew have for founders entering the fundraising process?
5.) Andrew is also the co-founder @ Atomic, so what really is a venture builder? How have Atomic built a framework around idea generation? How do Atomic determine which ideas to pursue and which to disregard? How does data and benchmarking play a central role in this process?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andrew’s Fave Book: Creativity Inc
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andrew on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Much like how Carta changed how private companies manage their cap tables and 409A valuations, Carta are now doing the same for fund administration. With Carta’s new, modern fund administration software and services, you get a real-time dashboard of your general ledger, can securely share info with your LPs, and issue capital calls–from the same platform, you accept securities and request cap table access. So essentially, Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, fund administration, and valuations. Go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off.
20VC: A Framework For Approaching Risk and How It Affects Portfolio Construction | Lessons and Advice From Working with Dropbox's Drew Houston | Why Being A Learning Animal Is The Most Important Factor For Success with Ted Wang, Partner @ Cowboy Ventures
Ted Wang is a Partner @ Cowboy Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's leading early-stage funds with the likes of Philz Coffee, Dollar Shave Club, Brandless, DocSend, Accompany and Brit + Co all in their portfolio. As for Ted, prior to VC, Ted spent X years as a leading Silicon Valley lawyer with Fenwick & West where he worked with some of the most notable companies of our times including Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Square and Spotify just to name a few. Ted also created the Series Seed Documents - a set of open-sourced financing documents posted on Github used by thousands around the world today.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ted made his way from one of the most renowned lawyers in the valley with Fenwick & West to partner @ Cowboy alongside Aileen Lee?
2.) How does Ted fundamentally approach risk today? Given this mindset, how does this impact Ted's thinking on optimizing portfolio construction? On the flip side, how has Ted seen many founders wrongly approach the theme of risk? What is the question they need to be asking? What is Ted's story about risk related to his time working with Jet?
3.) What is it that makes Ted believe that "advice is often oversimplified"? If so, how can VCs provide tangible advice to their portfolio companies today? How can founders determine what is the right advice to accept and integrate vs listen and disregard? How does this lead Ted's thinking on the 2 core value adds a VC can provide? What advice did Dropbox Founder, Drew Houston give Ted on when to accept advice?
4.) What does Ted mean when he says "there are 4 parts to venture"? How does Ted think about the theme of learning and self-improvement when assessing founders? How does he look to do this pre-investment? What questions reveal the most? Applying it to himself, where will Ted place his biggest efforts on learning within the realm of venture over the next 12 months?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ted’s Fave Book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Ted’s Most Recent Investment: Fullcast
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ted on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Much like how Carta changed how private companies manage their cap tables and 409A valuations, Carta are now doing the same for fund administration. With Carta’s new, modern fund administration software and services, you get a real-time dashboard of your general ledger, can securely share info with your LPs, and issue capital calls–from the same platform, you accept securities and request cap table access. So essentially, Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, fund administration, and valuations. Go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off.
20VC: Why Founders Should Not Always Be Raising, How To Build Relationships with VCs In A Condensed Timeframe, Why The Founder To VC Relationship Is Not Like A Marriage with Dave Vasen, Founder & CEO @ Brightwheel
Dave Vasen is the Founder & CEO @ Brightwheel, the child management software solution you need and now the #1 platform for early education. To date, with Brightwheel, Dave has raised over $33m in funding from some of the best in the business including Bessemer, GGV Capital, Lowercase Capital, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, our friends at Eniac Ventures and then the likes of Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca. As for Dave, prior to Brightwheel, he was a VP of Product @ AltSchool and before that spent 3 years at Amazon in numerous different roles including Head of K-12 Education on Kindle and developed and launched the “Made for Kindle” licensing program – both domestic and global.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dave made his way into the world of edtech and startups from being a consultant at Bain and product manager at Amazon?
2.) Why does Dave fundamentally disagree that founders should always be raising? What is the right way that founders should approach the fundraise? How can founders turn down investor meetings politely when requested and they are not raising? What is the right way to think about capital as a weapon today and the effective allocation of it?
3.) Why does Dave disagree with many elements that the Founder/VC relationship is a marriage? What one element, other than capital, does Dave most look for in a potential investor? What can founders do to really compress the fundraise timeline? How can founders build relationships with VCs under these compressed conditions?
4.) In the valley there is a large amount of glorification around the scaling and founding of companies, how does Dave feel personally about this glorification? How would Dave like to see this mindset fundamentally change? In terms of mindsets, why does Dave push back against the suggestion of VC "pattern recognition"? How has being an older founder and father changed the way he thinks about building Brightwheel today?
5.) How does Dave interpret the meaning of focus today with regards to company building? How does Dave determine the elements to really double down on? How does Dave think about saying no to opportunities? What framework does he use? What have been some of Dave's biggest learnings on culture and being prescriptive around it?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dave’s Fave Book: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dave on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Top 3 Considerations When Evaluating Consumer Businesses Today | 700 Meetings, 70 LPs, 2 Years, What It Takes To Raise a First Time Fund| The Power of The Female Network In Action Today with Anu Duggal, Founding Partner @ Female Founders Fund
Anu Duggal is the Founding Partner @ Female Founders Fund, a leading early-stage fund investing in female-founded technology companies. Within their incredible portfolio is the likes of Zola, Rent The Runway, Maven Clinic, Tala and previous guest, Rockets of Awesome. They also have the most incredible mentor network including the founders of Stitchfix, Care.com, Zola and Tala. Prior to founding Female Founders Fund Anu was CEO @ Doonya, a dance fitness and media company inspired by Bollywood and fun fitness. Before that, Anu was Founder @ Exclusively.In where she headed up New Business Development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anu made her way into the world of VC with her founding of Female Founders Fund?
2.) What does Anu mean when she says she likes to focus on "non-obvious opportunities"? What are some clear examples of this? These non-obvious opportunities often appear to have smaller markets, how does Anu think about market size and evolution when investing? Can one blame male VCs for sometimes not identifying with the problem set being solved? What can be done to solve this problem?
3.) What 3 elements do Anu most look for when investing in consumer today? How does Anu respond to the statement that consumer may produce healthy revenue but at the end of the day they will never really produce venture return and be sold for 1.6x EBITDA? How does Anu assess the state of the M&A market today in the world of CPGs?
4.) How was the first fundraising for Female Founders Fund? What did the process look like in terms of amount of meetings, total committed LPs and duration spent raising? What were the common pushbacks from LPs in the fundraise? What did Anu do well that she would do again? How did the raise of the 2nd fund compare to the raise of Fund I?
5.) What does Anu mean when she states, "the power of the female network"? How has Anu seen this work in the real world? How does this allow Anu to see the best deals? How does Anu think about scaling check size and ownership with fund II? How does Anu think about reserve allocation when re-investing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anu’s Fave Book: Educated: The international bestselling memoir
Anu’s Most Recent Investment: Co-Star, Hyper-Personalized, Real Time Horoscopes
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anu on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams
Anand Sanwal is the Founder & CEO @ CB Insights, the tech market intelligence platform that ingests massive datasets, to answer complex questions and predict future trends. CB is the 9th best place to work in the US according to GlassDoor and one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the US. To date, CB Insights has raised over $11m in VC funding, a topic Anand discusses at length in our episode today! Prior to founding CB, Anand held numerous roles at American Express including running a $50m Innovation Fund and managing the company's discretionary investment spend ($4-5Bn p.a.). Before American Express, Anand was one of the early team @ Kozmo.com, one of the most well-funded and infamous startups in NYC history.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anand came to found CB Insights from running American Express' $50m Innovation fund and the a-ha moment there?
2.) Why does Anand believe that revenue funding is the best kind of funding? What 3 elements does Anand believe it fundamentally allows? What does Anand mean when he says "most have 3 masters, you can only serve two of them at once"? Does Anand believe that founders today are treating their investors as customers?
3.) How does Anand distinguish between business that can be funded from revenue vs those that cannot? How does Anand think about the relationship between growth and margin? Why does it make sense for VCs today to push for the suggestion that startups need to raise big to grow? How can founders think about and respond to this?
4.) Why does Anand believe that most B2B content today is crap? What are the core pillars that make great B2B content today? How does Anand think about potentially going too far when it comes to the risque nature of the content? What advice would Anand give to B2B founders wanting to ramp up their game in content? Where do many go wrong?
5.) What does Anand mean when he says that "pedigree is often overrated"? How has that led Anand's thinking when building out the team at CB? Where does Anand see most founders make mistakes when it comes to both team and company scaling? What interview question does Anand find most revealing of an individuals' character?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anand’s Fave Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anand on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on His Biggest Lessons On Price, Ownership, Board Dynamics & Building Consumer Businesses from Backing The Likes of King, Skype, Farfetch, Glossier and more...
Danny Rimer is a Partner @ Index Ventures, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Dropbox, Skype, King, Bird, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Danny, he is known for his investments in Dropbox, leading the company's Series B, Etsy, King (makers of world famous, Candy Crush), Skype and more recently many retail and fashion businesses such as Farfetch, Glossier and GOAT. He's been on the coveted Forbes Midas List for more than a decade and in 2017 was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to business and charity and the New York Times included him in its list of the top 20 venture capitalists worldwide.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Danny made his way into the world of venture and came to be a Partner @ Index Ventures?
2.) Having backed the likes of King, Skype, Glossier, how does Danny respond to Peter Fenton and Jeremy Levine's suggestions of a "consumer downturn"? Does Danny believe there is a lack of free and open distribution today? Can startups compete with such inflated CACs? Henry Davis @ Glossier asks: how have you seen acquisition models change over time? How do you envision acquisition models of the future?
3.) Peter Fenton said on the show previously, he always laughs when he hears VCs say they like big markets, how does Danny assess market sizing today? What have been Danny's biggest lessons on assessing market size when looking at his portfolio? How does Danny think about niche markets today in such an Amazon dominant world? How does Danny assess price today? How does Danny determine when to stretch vs stay firm?
4.) Having helped many companies scale to global success, what does Danny believe to be the core considerations in getting your startup ready for global expansion? How did Danny find Index's expansion when opening up their first US office in 2011 in SF? What were some of the biggest challenges? How does Danny think about and assess generational transition within venture and Index more specifically today?
5.) Danny has spent over 3,000 hours on boards to date, how has Danny seen himself evolve as a board member over that time? What were some inflection moments in those hours that fundamentally changed the way Danny thinks? What advice would Danny give me, having just gained my first institutional board seat?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Danny’s Fave Book: Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Danny’s Most Recent Investment: Goodeggs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Danny on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Monzo's Tom Blomfield on The 3 Phases of Startup Scaling, The Secret To Building a 1.2m Community with No Advertising & How To Use Boards As A Tool To Instil Operational Excellence
Tom Blomfield is the Founder & CEO @ Monzo, in it's simplest words, the bank of the future allowing you to open a full UK bank account in minutes, from your phone. To date, Tom has raised over $190m in funding for Monzo from the likes of Thrive, Accel, General Catalyst, Stripe, Mike Moritz and Goodwater just to name a few. As for Tom, prior to Monzo he was the Co-Founder of another of London's rocketship startups in the form of GoCardless and before that co-founded student marketplace Boso.com alongside Triplebyte Founder, Harj Taggar.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tom made his way into the world of startups from University and came to found the bank of the future in Monzo?
2.) Why does Tom believe that scaling a company today can really be broken up into 3 distinct phases? What are those phases? How does what one needs for each phase differ accordingly? What elements has Tom found most challenging to navigate in the scale-up phase? Are there challenges or elements that are the same across every company?
3.) Why does Tom believe that product decision-making is both an art and a science? How does Tom determine when is the right time to add ancillary products? How can one really stress-test true customer love for the first product? How does Tom balance between product expansion vs geographical expansion? How does Tom balance between being customer-driven vs customer informed?
4.) Tom has grown Monzo to 1.2m users with virtually no advertising, how does Tom respond to the statement that there is a lack of free and open distribution today? What does Tom mean when he says "when it comes to customer acquisition you have to play a different game"? In building community, what have Monzo done so right? Where have they made mistakes? What have been some big lessons on early community building?
5.) Having raised over $190m in VC funding, what have been some of Tom's biggest lessons when it comes to fundraising? Why does Tom believe that so few boards are managed and run well? Where do they go wrong? What do great board managers do to run an efficient process? What does Tom mean when he says "use board meetings as a tool to instil operational excellence?"
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tom’s Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Tom on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Raising A First Time Fund Is Like Raising A Seed Round, Why We Need New and Different Fund Models & Why Longevity Is The Most Rewarding Place To Invest with Laura Deming, Founding Partner @ The Longevity Fund
Laura Deming is Founding Partner @ The Longevity Fund, the first VC firm dedicated to funding high-potential longevity companies. To date, Laura has raised $26m across 2 Longevity funds and has backed the likes of Unity Biotechnology, Precision Biosciences, Metacrine, Navitor, and Alexo Therapeutics. Prior to Longevity, Laura was accepted to MIT at the age of 14 to study physics and then dropped out to join the Thiel Fellowship and start The Longevity Fund. If that wasn't enough, Laura most recently founded Age1, a four-month startup accelerator program focused on founders creating longevity companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Laura made her way from studying physics at MIT at just 14 to founding The Longevity Fund and dropping out to join The Thiel Fellowship?
2.) As a 16-year-old, looking to raise a fund to invest in longevity, how was the fundraise process for Laura? Why does Laura believe that raising your first fund is very much like raising a seed round for a company? What was the catalytic moment when the fundraise started to come together? What were the biggest challenges of the raise?
3.) Why does Laura believe that there is a shortage of young biotech founders today? What can be done to solve this and increase pipe? How does Laura find biotech founders compare to more traditional consumer and B2B founders she engages with? How does what they look for from their investor base differ?
4.) Laura has spoken before of "the importance of going against the herd"? How does Laura assess the current landscape for biotech investing? Is Laura concerned to see the entrance of much more traditional VCs into the space? How does Laura look to try and avoid groupthink? What is crucial to this?
5.) How does one need to think about portfolio construction when investing in an inherently riskier biotech space? Does Laura agree with the conventional wisdom around the lack of follow-on funding for biotech companies? How does Laura think about reserve allocation with Longevity today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Laura’s Fave Book: The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain,
Laura’s Most Recent Investment: System1
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Laura on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Investing Lessons From Observing Doug Leone and Bill Gurley, Why It Is Easier To Be Contrarian As A VC Than As An Angel & What It Takes To Run Tinder's Product and Revenue Alongside A Seed Fund with Jeff Morris Jr, Founder @ Chapter One
Jeff Morris Jr is the Founder of Chapter One, an early stage seed fund investing in blockchain assets, mobile and subscription businesses. Chapter One's Portfolio includes the likes of Lyft, Brandable, Crypto Kitties and many more incredible companies. However, Jeff is unique as Chapter One is only one of his hats, Jeff is also the Director of Product & Revenue @ Tinder and when asked to lead the revenue team they were ranked #17 in the app store. Within a year, under Jeff's leadership, Tinder became the #1 top grossing app in the world.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way into the world of startups and angel investing, how that lead to his role as Director of Product and Revenue @ Tinder and a leading early-stage investor with Chapter One?
2.) Jeff has previously said, "apply an investor mindset to every product decision I make". What are the foundational questions involved? What are the inherent challenges of being so deep in product and investing simultaneously? What does Jeff think of VCs giving product advice to founders? What should the founders look for? What advice does Jeff give to the common question of "how do I get into investing and VC"?
3.) Why does Jeff disagree with the platform shift and the downturn in consumer mobile? What core innovations will drive the next wave of consumer mobile? Valuations in the space are often lofty, how does Jeff think about price and evaluate his own price sensitivity? How does Jeff think about scalable customer acquisition today in a world where incumbents dominate and price up the traditional channels?
4.) Jeff has said before that "investors treat crypto teams as if they are superhuman", what makes Jeff think this? How do their interactions differ than towards non-crypto teams? Why are lofty expectations dangerous for valuations? How does that put undue pressure on employees? Why are lofty expectations dangerous for product development? How do they affect the product roadmap negatively?
5.) How does Jeff approach the diligence aspect when it comes to investing? What have been some of his major lessons from making over 35 investments on the right diligence framework? How do shortened fundraising cycles negatively affect investor diligence processes? What can founders and investors do under these constrained time frames?
6.) Having worked with some of the greats from Doug Leone to Bill Gurley, what are some of the common traits in how the very best investors engage with founders? What were Jeff's personal learnings from seeing these greats in action? How did it change the way Jeff thinks about founder interaction and engagement?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeff’s Fave Book: The Catcher In The Rye, Googled
Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Radar Relay
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeff on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Warm Intros Are Mostly Dumb, Why Ownership is Built On First Check and 4 Crucial Elements To Make Cold Inbound Attractive with Leo Polovets, General Partner @ Susa Ventures
Leo Polovets is a General Partner @ Susa Ventures, one of the valley's leading early-stage seed funds with a portfolio including the likes of Flexport, Robinhood, Lendup, Qadium, Rigetti, the list goes on. As for Leo, prior to joining the world of VC, he started his career as the second non-founding engineer at LinkedIn. After two years at LinkedIn, Leo spent 3 years at Google, largely working on real-time payment fraud detection. Finally, his last stop pre-Susa involved spending 4 years at Factual, a location data platform.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Leo made his way into the world of VC from being the 2nd non-founding engineer at LinkedIn?
2.) Why does Leo believe that the hailed "warm intro" is actually dumb? What are the biggest drawbacks to this being commonplace in our ecosystem? What does Leo believe the mindset of investors should be instead? How does Leo filter through cold inbound? What are the 4 elements Leo looks for in all inbound? What can founders do to really make them stand out?
3.) Leo has previously heavily emphasised the importance of moats, how does Leo define moats and defensibility? When do founders have to think about moat building? Pre-product? Pre-launch? Pre-scaling? What questions suggest that a founders mindset is heavily oriented to moat building? With the majority of incumbents being usurped by platform shifts, does that not render moats significantly futile in the long term?
4.) What does Leo believe is the right way for investors to pass on an opportunity and communicate that to founders? What is wrong with the current way many do it? How does Leo present his opinion without getting into an argument with the founder on reasoning? What feedback has Leo been given from founders that has changed the way he thinks about being an investor?
5.) Controversial capitals Round:
- Ownerships is built on first check? Agree or disagree and why?
- Whether it is a $6m, $8m or $12m, if it is at seed, it is so early that price really does not matter so much? Agree or disagree and why?
- There is no point VCs spending their time with struggling companies in the portfolio. At best they return cents on the dollar. Only work with the outperformers to drive returns. Agree or disagree and why?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Leo’s Fave Book: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook
Leo’s Most Recent Investment: Interviewing.io
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leo on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Being A Wartime Leader in a Time of Peace, Why Marketing Channel Diversification Is Like The Life of A Scientist and Why Small and Mighty Beats Loud and Weak with Ooshma Garg, Founder & CEO @ Gobble
Ooshma Garg is the Founder & CEO @ Gobble, the startup that allows you to cook a fresh homemade dinner in just 15 minutes. To date, Ooshma has raised over $30m in funding for Gobble from some of the best in the business including Initialized Capital, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman, Founder Collective, Felicis, Andreesen Horowitz and Thrive just to name a few. As for Ooshma, prior to founding Gobble she founded Anapata, an online site that matches students looking for jobs with potential employers. The company was ultimately acquired by LawWerx.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ooshma made her way from Wall St to changing the way America eats with Gobble today?
2.) Everyone has an opinion on the food delivery space with the public nature of Blue Apron, what does Ooshma mean when she says "small and mighty beats loud and weak"? Why did Ooshma not take the path of other competitors in the space of racing big and running fast? What is Ooshma's advice to founders on dilution and raise amounts?
3.) Would Ooshma agree with Alex @ LSVP that marketing portfolios are like venture portfolios, diversified and then double down? Would Ooshma agree with the concern around unfeasible CACs due to incumbents bidding them up on major platforms? Where does Ooshma see blue ocean when it comes to marketing channel success?
4.) What does Ooshma mean when she says "success is survival"? Why is capital efficiency even more important in online/offline businesses? What are some of Ooshma's examples of her "wartime approach" to capital efficiency? How does Ooshma explain this more sustainable growth to the growth-hungry VC community? Who is to blame for the insatiable desire for unreasonable growth; the founders or the VCs?
5.) Ooshma has raised over $30m with Gobble, analysing herself in fundraising, what does Ooshma believe she did particularly well during the raise and advise other founders to do? What elements would she like to improve upon for the next round? What is the story behind how Ooshma sprinted down the 101 to get Keith Rabois as an angel?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ooshma’s Fave Book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ooshma on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R
Avidan Ross is the Founding Partner @ Root Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most exciting newer generation of funds dedicated to backing bold engineers at seed. To date they have backed some incredible companies such as Nautilus Labs, Dusty Robotics, Tortuga AgTech and Instrumental.ai just to name a few. Prior to founding Root, Avidan was CTO at The CIM Group, with an aggregate of $15Bn AUM, Avidan was responsible for establishing the company’s technical vision and leading all aspects of the company's technology investment. Before that, he built algorithmic trading platforms as Director of Technology at WHW Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Avidan went from building algorithmic trading platforms to back the next generation of revolutionary engineers with Root?
2.) What does Avidan mean when he says "the peace dividends of the autonomous car wars will generate more value outside of transportation?" How does the commoditisation of these core components affect subsequent industries? With their commoditisation, does it not become a raise to the bottom on price and margin?
3.) How does Avidan approach the layering on new software products to emerging hardware devices? What does this mean for the margin required both for the hardware and the software? How does Avidan's investor mentality alter when investing in hardware vs software?
4.) Why does Avidan believe "old and boring industries are the most exciting to build software in?" How does Avidan approach the common problem of customer education and selling to a customer base that does not want to talk to you and does not believe in your product? What do founders selling in these industries need to focus on to break through?
5.) How does Avidan assess the current landscape in terms of the quality and quantity of engineer CEOs? Why does Avidan believe the MBA CEO will be replaced by engineers? How has Avidan seen a variance in the background in the entrepreneurs innovating in "old and boring" industries?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Avidan’s Fave Book: Drive by Daniel Pink
Avidan’s Most Recent Investment: Dusty Robotics
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Avidan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Ryan Caldbeck on Why The Business Model of VC is Broken, Who is To Blame, How The Best Funds Will Use Data Intelligently Moving Forward & Whether We Are In A Consumer Bubble Or Not?
Ryan Caldbeck is the Founder & CEO @ CircleUp, the startup creating a transparent and efficient market to drive innovation for consumer brands. To date, Ryan has raised over $50m with CircleUp from some friends and prior guests of the show including USV, Collaborative Fund and Canaan Partners just to name a few. Prior to CircleUp, Ryan spent nearly 7 years investing in consumer products with the likes of TSG Consumer Partners and Encore Consumer Capital. As a result of Ryan's success with CircleUp he has been recognised as a "Titan of Retail" by Bloomberg and "40 Under 40" by the San Francisco Business Times.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his way into the world of consumer investing and what the realisation moment was for him that the market needed a solution, CircleUp?
2.) Why does Ryan believe that venture capital has a fundamental problem? What is it about the economics of funds that Ryan has a problem with? Who is to blame for this situation; the LPs who fund it or the AUM hungry VCs? Why does Ryan believe the majority of micro VCs are micro as that is all they could raise? Is that really fair or true?
3.) Why does Ryan fundamentally believe the LP ecosystem and mechanism for backing funds is inherently broken? What is so wrong with current LP incentives? What does Ryan believe can be done to encourage more risk-taking and innovation from within the LP class?
4.) Recognising the antiquated nature of much of VC, what does Ryan believe the future of VC looks like? How will we see the use of data impact both sourcing and investment decision-making? Where does Ryan believe it has the most potential? Where is data so sparse that it will be challenging? How does Ryan believe the best managers of the future will use data?
5.) Consumer brands and DNVBs are riding high today, does Ryan believe we are in a consumer bubble? What does Ryan believe is so wrong about how the majority of the current crop of VCs analyse consumer businesses? How should they be analysed? Why does Ryan believe consumer exits will be smaller? Is it fair to say consumer is more capital intensive and largely sells for 1.6-1.8 EBITDA?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ryan’s Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The 2 Core Roles Played By The Best Seed Investors Today, What To Look For In Potential Co-Investors & Why Seed Funds Can Grow Ownership in Their Best Companies Across Rounds with Ron Bouganim, Founder @ Govtech Fund
Ron Bouganim is the Founding Partner @ Govtech Fund, the first-ever venture capital fund dedicated to government technology startups. To date, he has backed some incredible category leaders including mark43, Neighbourly, MindMixer and SeamlessDocs just to name a few. Prior to GovTech, he was Accelerator Director @ Code for America and was an active angel investor and advisor working with more than twenty startups including ShareThrough, HelloSign, PagerDuty, and Close.io.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ron made his way into the world of technology and startups and became angel investing? How that led to the founding of Govtech and the belief in the space today?
2.) There is the notion that there many challenges to investing in Govtech and scaling companies in the space, how does Ron respond to the suggestion the sales cycles when selling to government are too long for startups to navigate successfully? How does Ron respond to the suggestion that the growth rates in the space are to low for venture returns? How does Ron respond to the suggestion that founders in the space are inherently older as only they have experienced the problems of government tech?
3.) Why does Ron believe that a vertically focused fund is the right strategy is creating a massively outperforming fund? How does Ron respond to the possibility of missing moonshots in alternate categories? What does Ron most look for in the co-investors that he invests with? What do they bring to the table?
4.) What does Ron believe are the 2 fundamental roles of a seed investor today? How does that differ from previous generations of seed funds? Why does Ron believe that fundraising and hiring help is now merely table stakes? What else can seed investors do to meaningfully move the needle for their portfolio?
5.) Why does Ron advocate for a highly concentrated portfolio? How does Ron respond to LP concerns around a lack of diversification? Does Ron believe that you can grow ownership of your best companies over subsequent rounds? What is the sign of success for Ron when the founder comes back for re-financing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ron’s Fave Book: Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
Ron’s Most Recent Investment: Sema: Automated Code Maintenance
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ron on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
Phil Libin is the Co-Founder & CEO @ All Turtles, the startup that believes they have a better way to make technology products, placing products first and companies later. Today they are building AI products in San Francisco, Paris and Tokyo. As for Phil, prior to All Turtles he was a Managing Director @ General Catalyst. Before that he spent 23 years founding different companies including founding Evernote, taking it from idea generation to productivity powerhouse raising over $160m in VC funding in the process, from some of the very best including Sequoia Capital. Phil is also an extremely successful angel with a portfolio including Gusto, TellApart and Binary Thumb just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Phil made his way into the world of tech startups many years ago, how that led to his entering VC with General Catalyst and to now, founding All Turtles?
2.) How does Phil assess the state of Silicon Valley today? Why does Phil believe that Silicon Valley has been becoming increasingly redundant over the last 20 years? Why does Phil argue that the VC Silicon Valley model has been primarily effective at serving it's own needs? What needs to occur for this to change?
3.) Why does Phil argue that the balance of power between startups and incumbents is shifting for 5 core reasons? Why does Phil believe that the data incumbency argument with AI startups is largely overstated and a fear tactic? How does Phil believe people's attitude toward working for incumbents has been shifting over the last few years?
4.) Why does Phil believe that the concept of a "company" is fundamentally outdated? What is so broken about this model? What does Phil believe will be the model of the future for the world's best product creators? Why does the idea of a generalist VC in this model largely not make logical sense to Phil? What does Phil believe the future of VC is?
5.) Why does Phil believe that his time in VC has made him a better CEO than even his time in operations? What have been his core learnings? How has his operating mindset fundamentally shifted? Why does Phil argue the core role of the CEO is not management upscaling? Why does Phil argue it is wrong to assume the only mindset is growth?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Phil’s Fave Book: Clock of The Long Now
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Phil on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins
Linda Xie is a Co-Founder & Managing Director @ Scalar Capital, one of the leading crypto asset funds to have been born over the last few years with Linda becoming one of the most prominent figures in the space. Prior to co-founding Scalar, Linda was a product manager at Coinbase where she worked with regulators and law enforcement. Before Coinbase, she was a portfolio risk analyst at AIG. If that was not enough, Linda is also an advisor to 0x, the critical infrastructure layer in the emerging financial stack built on a foundation of Ethereum token standards.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Linda made her move into the world of crypto joining Coinbase back in 2014 and how that led to her founding of Scalar? What were her biggest takeaways from seeing the first-hand scaling of Coinbase?
2.) What is a privacy coin and why does it matter? What are some of the dominant legitimate uses for privacy coins? From ZCash to Monero to Dash, there are many players in the space, what are some of the core benefits and tradeoffs of each platform? What is the fundamental problem with privacy coins today?
3.) What is a decentralised exchange, why does Linda believe it is inherently important? How does Linda assess the current exchange environment today? Where does she see it moving over the coming years? What have been some of Linda's biggest learnings advising 0x? Given the mission and ethos of crypto, does Linda believe that centralised exchanges fundamentally go against the core ethos of the space?
4.) How does Linda perceive the state of ethereum today? What are some of the core challenges facing ethereum today? How does ethereum compare to alternative smart contract platforms? What is their differentiation? Will we see a winner take all/most market within smart contract platforms? Will we see smart contract platforms be regionally fragmented?
5.) How does Linda address the fundamental challenge of valuing tokens today? What has been her preferred model in doing this to date? How does Linda assess the mega raises we have seen over the last year? How does Linda think about preventing projects from raising huge rounds just to stay in step with the mega raises of their competitors?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Linda’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Linda’s Most Recent Investment: Kadena
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Linda on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Too Many People Give Up Too Quickly, Why You Should Never Start A Venture Without Owning The Underlying Data & Why We Have Over-Estimated The Ability of Automation with Dennis Mortensen, Founder & CEO @ X.ai
Dennis Mortensen is the Founder & CEO @ X.ai, the startup that realises scheduling sucks and provides ridiculously efficient AI software that solves the hassle of meeting scheduling. To date, Dennis has raised over $44m in VC funding from the likes of Firstmark, IA Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, DCM and more fantastic names. As for Dennis, he is an expert in leveraging data to solve enterprise use cases and prior to X.ai he was the Founder & CEO of 3 companies, 2 of which were acquired and one which went bust or as he describes a rather expensive MBA. Dennis is also the author of Data Driven Insights, on collecting and analyzing digital data.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dennis made his way from Copenhagen to New York, the world of startups and came to found one of the hottest AI companies of our day in X.ai?
2.) What were Dennis' biggest lessons from enjoying 3 successful exits prior to X.ai? What were Dennis' learnings from his one failed startup? What would he do differently if he were to start another company? How does Dennis navigate the balance of between pursuing a vision and miss vs when something is just not working?
3.) Does Dennis believe that there really is such a thing as an AI first company? What is the right mentality to approach a company solving a problem through AI with? How does Dennis view the standardisation of AI tools today (Tensor Flow, libraries etc etc)? Does this remove barriers and defensibility for AI companies? What is the key to success for all AI companies?
4.) What does a truly differentiated data acquisition strategy look like? How can one determine the different utility value between different sizes of data? At what point does Dennis believe utility value of data diminishes due to the sheer size of existing data?
5.) Does Dennis believe that conversational UI is truly a paradigm shift in the way we interact with our devices or an iterative improvement? What have been some of the biggest lessons for Dennis in designing conversational UI products? What have been some of the fundamental challenges?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dennis’ Fave Book: The Narrow Road: A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dennis on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: First Round's Phin Barnes on How The Best Founders Optimize for Learning Per Dollar Spent, What Makes A Truly Special Founder/VC Relationship and Why Pattern Recognition is Another Term For Intellectual Laziness
Phin Barnes is a Partner @ First Round Capital, one of the most prestigious and successful early-stage funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Square, Warby Parker, HotelTonight, GOAT, PatientPing, Atrium and more incredible companies. As for Phin, in his own words, he learned the business of startups helping grow AND1 from $15M to $225M in revenue as Creative Director for Footwear, and started his own fitness video-game company, producing Yourself!Fitness, the first game of its kind for Xbox and PlayStation 2 where he built partnerships with the likes of Procter & Gamble and McDonald’s. Phin also writes the most fantastic blog, sneakerheadVC, that really is a must read.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Phin came to be a Partner @ First Round by working for free, with no plans to be a Partner?
2.) What were Phin's biggest lessons from learning from and observing Josh Kopelman? How does Phin define true success as a VC today? Why is the model of determining success according to returns fundamentally flawed? How does Phin approach the need for VCs to be both curious and competitive? What is the nuance there?
3.) Why does Phin believe that the commonly discussed "pattern recognition" is another term for intellectual laziness? What does Phin do to prevent his forming assumptions on the founders he meets? Why does Phin fundamentally disagree with the common VC habit of looking for weaknesses in founders?
4.) Does Phin agree that we have an oversupply of capital in market today? How does Phin determine when a stretch on price is a stretch too far? Why does Phin think that more emphasis should be placed on the business model that VCs have? What does Phin mean when he says that he is on the "sell side"?
5.) What does Phin mean when he says that "VCs should focus on a founders ability to optimise for learning per dollar spent"? Is cash ever a defensible moat in it's own right? What does Phin believe is the right way for founders to use capital as a weapon?
6.) How does Phin and First Round think about the right way to allocate reserves effectively? What does that look like in reality? What does the decision-making process look like on re-investments? Why does Phin believe that the framework of "pro-rata is largely lazy?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Phin’s Fave Book: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
Phin’s Most Recent Investment: Ubiquity6
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Phin on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: 7 Key Themes To Building A Great Company To IPO, The Right Way To Assess Market Timing & How To Balance Between Speed and Inspection When It Comes To Decision-Making with Patrick Morley, CEO @ Carbon Black
Patrick Morley is the President and CEO @ Carbon Black, the company that combines unfiltered data collection, predictive analytics, and cloud-based delivery to provide superior endpoint protection. Prior to their IPO in April 2018, Carbon Black had raised over $150m in VC funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Accomplice, Kleiner Perkins and Highland Venture Partners just to name a few. As for Patrick, under his leadership, he has taken Carbon Black from startup to market leader with over 800 employees. Before Carbon Black, he was CEO of Imprivata Corporation and held senior leadership positions with six venture-backed software companies, including three that had successful IPOs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Patrick made his way into the world of startups and came to be CEO @ Carbon Black where he turned a startup into a public company and market leader with 800 employees?
2.) Patrick has previously said "there are 7 key themes to building a great company", what are those themes? From taking 4 companies public what are the patterns in building a business the right way? How does Patrick look to create a culture of accountability but also with a risk-taking mentality? How does one retain startup culture with scale?
3.) How does Patrick view his role as CEO today? What 3 characteristics do all great CEOs need to embody and then act on? Would Patrick agree that some people are destined for certain stages of a company's life? How does Patrick determine between a stretch and a stretch too far in a VP? What does that subsequent communication look like?
4.) Mike Dauber @ Amplify previously said on the show "timing kills more startups than dollars", would Patrick agree with this? How does he view market timing? What advice would Patrick give to founders who are 3-4 years ahead in market? What are the challenges? What are the right ways to communicate the path to timing it right?
5.) Why did Patrick choose this year to take Carbon Black public? What are the fundamental pros and cons of being a public company today? How does Patrick assess the role that VCs played in the building of Carbon Black to IPO? What must investors always remember in their interactions with founders? What must founders be cognizant of when selecting their investors and board members?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Patrick’s Fave Book: Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Learnings From Backing The Likes of Spotify and Airbnb, The World of Growth Investing Today and The Right Way For Investors To Think About Liquidity with Woody Marshall, General Partner @ TCV
Woody Marshall is a General Partner @ TCV, one of the most successful growth funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, AirBnB, Spotify, LinkedIn and many more incredible companies. Woody joined TCV in 1995 and has since led investments in Spotify, Netflix, AirBnB, Peloton, Groupon and the list goes on. Due to this phenomenal success, Woody has been named numerous times to the Midas List by Forbes as one of the industry’s top technology investors. Prior to joining TCV, Woody spent 12 years at Trident Capital, where he focused on the payments, internet, and mobile markets.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Woody made his way into the world of VC over 23 years ago and came to invest in products of a generation such as AirBnb, Spotify and Netflix?
2.) What have been the foundational changes Woody has seen over his last 23 years in venture? How did witnessing the boom and bust affect his operating and investing mentality? How does Woody approach price sensitivity? When is stretching on price a stretch too far?
3.) How does Woody analyse and assess the extended period of privatisation for companies today? How does the mega raises of funds from Softbank, Sequoia, GC, Lightspeed etc change the competitive landscape for Woody? Is there a surplus of capital in market today? Why does Woody believe the pie is larger than it has ever been?
4.) Does Woody agree that the dominant role of CEO is management upscaling? From Woody's portfolio, on hearing this, who is the first CEO that comes to mind and what is the story behind it? What are the mistakes that CEOs tend to make most often when scaling into hypergrowth? What are the 2-3 things that all companies need to focus on when product market fit is apparent and they need to scale?
5.) Woody has spent over 3,500 hours in the board seat, how has he seen himself evolve and develop over time as a board member? What were the biggest learning curves and points of development for Woody? How do the best founders manage and operate their board? Who exemplifies this best from recent memory? What do they do?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Woody’s Fave Book: The Boys in the Boat
Woody’s Most Recent Investment: Peloton
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Woody on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why Entrepreneurs Should Let Everyone Rip Apart Their Business Idea, How To Construct Frameworks for Success & Why You Should Not Always Test Your MVP with Afton Vechery, Founder & CEO @ Modern Fertility
Afton Vechery is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Modern Fertility, the startup that guides you through your fertility hormones now so you have options later. To date they have raised over 7m in funding from some of the leading players in venture including USV, First Round Capital, Maveron, SV Angel and Y Combinator. As for Afton, prior to Modern Fertility, Afton was a Product Manager @ 23andMe where she was the sole product manager responsible for all consumer-facing genetic tools. Before 23andMe, Afton was a Strategy and Finance Consultant @ Willow Pump where she participated in fundraising that led to successful $15M fundraise.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Afton made her way into the world of startups with 23andMe and then came to change the way we think about fertility with Modern Fertility?
2.) Afton has previously emphasised the importance of having "frameworks for success". What does that mean? How do those frameworks break down? How does Afton think about the decision-making process around prioritisation? How does Afton think about the difference between being customer informed and customer driven?
3.) Why does Afton believe that there are times when you should not test the MVP? Why is this? What would Afton do differently in the MVP process if she had her time again? How does Afton think about and respond to the statement "move fast and break things"?
4.) Why does Afton believe it is important to let everyone "rip apart your business"? What are the fundamental benefits of this? From the ripping aparts, Afton has experienced, what have been the biggest takeaways? What was their argument? How did Afton respond? How did her thinking and mentality change as a result?
5.) Why does Phin Barnes @ First Round say Afton is "hard as nails"? What were some of Afton's biggest learnings from her early engineering role? How does Afton think about entrepreneurial resilience today? What advice does Afton give to emerging entrepreneurs and first-time founders?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Afton’s Fave Book: Motherhood Rescheduled
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Afton on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: USV's Rebecca Kaden on Whether Venture Returns Can Be Made At Scale In Consumer Today & How To Navigate Consumer Investing In A World of Amazon
Rebecca Kaden is a General Partner @ Union Square Ventures, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Twilio, Zynga, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Lending Club and many more. As for Rebecca, prior to USV, Sarah was a General Partner @ Maveron, a consumer-only seed and series A fund where she invested in the likes of Allbirds, Dia & Co, Periscope, Earnest and Eargo just to name a few. Before Maveron, Rebecca took the route of many great VCs and was a journalist, working as Special Projects Editor @ Narrative Magazine.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rebecca made her way into the world of VC from journalism? How her journey with Maveron led to her becoming a General Partner with the prestigious USV?
2.) Having mastered the craft of VC in the world of consumer, how does Rebecca respond to Peter Fenton and Jeremy Levine's statement, "we are in a consumer downturn"? How does Rebecca think about the lack of free and open distribution today? How can startups compete with incumbents for cost-efficient customer acquisition?
3.) How does Rebecca evaluate the role of Amazon today? How does Rebecca look to get comfortable that Amazon is not moving into the space of a portfolio company? Does Rebecca agree, "if you are not a top 3 priority", you have a couple of years on them? How can startups learn from the execution advantage shown by Amazon over the last decade?
4.) With several recent consumer acquisitions under $200m, does Rebecca still believe that venture returns can be made at scale in consumer? How does Rebecca analyse how to think about multiple on revenue when evaluating consumer companies? Why Does Rebecca believe we are in a moment of fragmentation, not consolidation?
5.) How does Rebecca compare the partnerships of US and Maveron having been a GP now at both firms? What are the similarities? What are the differences? What does Rebecca believe are the core advantages of small partnerships and controlled fund sizes? How does the addition of the thesis-driven investing style effect Rebecca's thinking?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rebecca’s Fave Book: Pale Fire
Rebecca’s Most Recent Investment: Modern Fertility
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rebecca on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise
Maynard Webb is truly unique, he has worn 3 different hats and excelled in all of them. First, he is the Founder of The Webb Investment Network, the institutionalisation of his personal investing where he has invested in the likes of Zuora, GOAT, WePay, Okta, PagerDuty and many more incredible companies. He is also a Co-Founder and Board Member at Everwise, the startup that helps companies tailor, scale and run training at enterprise scale. Everwise has raised over $26m in funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Canvas Ventures. Finally, Maynard sits on the board of some of the biggest companies of our time including Salesforce and Visa. Previously Maynard was Chairman of the Board of Yahoo!, CEO of LiveOps, and COO of eBay.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Maynard made his way into the world of startups and came to invest in his first company, founded by Sequoia's Jim Goetz and how that led to eBay, LiveOps and more?
2.) Does Maynard believe we have an excess supply of capital in the market today? What does Maynard think of the mega $Bn+ funds being raised on a frequent basis? How does this distort pricing in the market? How does Maynard think about his own price sensitivity? What does this mean for his available reserve allocation?
3.) Does Maynard believe that the dominant role of CEO is management upscaling? How does Maynard advise on the transition from manager to inspirational leader? How do the vest best CEOs hire the very best execs? How does Maynard know when a stretch VP is a stretch too far? How should founders determine and approach "bet the company" decisions?
4.) When should a founder start installing their board? What does Maynard believe is the optimal board construction, both in characters and profiles? How has Maynard seen his own style of board membership changed over the years? What are the best board members talk to listen ratios? How can founders create alignment among their board?
5.) What is the right way for founders to deal with "s*** hit the fan moments"? What is the framework to approach this with? Where do many go wrong in their approach? How does one communicate this to the wider team, investors and board? What have been Maynard's biggest personal learnings here from eBay?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Maynard’s Fave Book: The Better Angels of Our Nature
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Maynard on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Investing Success Lies In Small Markets Adjacent To Very Large Ones, Why You Have To Be Judicious On When To Pay Up vs Be More Price Sensitive & Why Crypto Investing Is Like The Early Days of AdTech Investing
Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark, one of the world’s leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. As for Sarah, Sarah has led Benchmark's investments in and currently sits on the boards of Chainalysis and Hipcamp. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners, where she led Greylock's investment in Sonder and another (unannounced) company. Before Greylock, Sarah was one of the first 35 employees at Pinterest where she led the company's international expansion and aided in the closing of the Series C financing. Sarah was also the product lead for search, recommendations, machine vision, and pin quality and led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper-growth.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her first foray into the world of venture with Bessemer over 10 years ago? How that led to Pinterest and how she came to be a GP at Benchmark today?
2.) Speaking of Sarah's operating career with Pinterest, Pat Grady said on the show "never has the rate of decay on operating experience been greater". How does Sarah think about and respond to this? How has operating made Sarah a strong investor? What are the drawbacks that this operating experience can present for investors?
3.) Moving to evaluation, Andy Rachleff, Founder @ Benchmark said on the show, "good team poor market, market wins; good market, poor team, market wins. How does Sarah think about the balance between founder vs market? Why is going after big markets so hard? What should investors look for in a market with that in mind? How does Sarah determine the right time to open up adjacent markets?
4.) There has never been a greater supply of capital in the market than today, does Sarah believe we have an excess supply today? Does Sarah agree with her Partner, Peter Fenton, "no good deal is too expensive in hindsight"? How does Sarah assess her own price sensitivity? How does it depend on the opportunity? How has it changed over time?
5.) Having 2,5000 hours on boards, how has Sarah seen herself develop and change as a board member? What have been some of the biggest learning curves? What are the commonalities in the very best board members Sarah works with? how doe the best entrepreneurs manage and use their boards effectively?
6.) Why does Sarah think that crypto today is very much like the world of adtech in the early days? How does Sarah think about the requirement for specialisation in the space? WIll this be a game for the specialised crypto funds or can generalist VC funds compete?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sarah’s Fave Book: Creating the Kingdom of Ends
Sarah’s Most Recent Investment: Hipcamp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: How To Build Credibility with Investors, Employees and Customers, How To Determine When A Stretch VP is A Stretch Too Far and The Right Way For Founders To Think About Dilution with Amol Deshpande, Founder & CEO @ Farmers Business Network
Amol Deshpande is the Co-Founder and CEO at Farmers Business Network, the farmer-to-farmer agronomic information network improving the livelihood of farmers by making data useful and accessible. To date, they have raised a whopping $193m in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins, T Rowe, GV, Temasek and more. As for Amol, prior to FBN, he was a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins where he invested in the likes of Harvest Power and Agilyx and before Kleiner, Amol was a Director @ Black River Asset Management.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Amol made his way into the world of startups, came to be a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins and then came to change the world of farming with Farmers Business Network?
2.) What were Amol's biggest takeaways from his time with Kleiner? Although important to think really big, how does Amol think about the Peter Thiel School of Thought, starting in a very small niche and expanding? Where does Amol see many founders go wrong when it comes to market size and assessment?
3.) How does Amol believe the very best CEOs hire the very best talent? What core characteristics does Amol look for when adding to his exec team? What are the leading questions and indicators that would excite/concern Amol? Why does Amol believe the smartest people do not always make the best hires? What are the core signs that a stretch VP is a stretch too far?
4.) What is the key to success for founders in building credibility with customers, investors and their board? What is the most challenging element of credibility building? Where does Amol see many founders go wrong and lose credibility today? How does your approach have to alter according to which class of individual you are looking to build with?
5.) How does Amol fundamentally approach the topic of capital efficiency? What does Amol believe is the right way for founders to think about dilution when raising? How does Amol determine when is the right time to raise big and pour fuel on the fire?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Amol’s Fave Book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Amol on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Lessons Learned Scaling PillPack from Seed to Amazon Acquisition, Why Investors Should Spend More Time Assessing Human Capital Risk Taken by Founders & The Right Way To Think About Capital Efficiency in Scaling with David Frankel, Managing Partner @
David Frankel is Managing Partner @ Founder Collective, one of the leading seed funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, PillPack, Coupang, Hotel Tonight, Venmo, Buzzfeed and many more incredible companies. David himself sits on the board of PillPack, Olo, Adhawk and SeatGeek. Prior to founding Founder Collective, David was the Co-Founder and CEO of Internet Solutions, one of the largest ISP providers in Africa. This led to his entrance into angel investing where he enjoyed immense success investing in the likes of Chris Dixon's Hunch and Alex Rampell's TrialPay, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of startups and angel investing from founding Africa's largest ISP provider and how that led to his founding of Founder Collective?
2.) Does David agree with Andy McLoughlin on the inherent mindset shift required when moving from angel to institutional investor? What does David believe is the key to making a new venture partnership work well in the early days? How was the process between him and Eric Paley? What were some of the core challenges/ highlights and breakthroughs?
3.) What does founder-market fit truly mean to David? Why does David believe it is one of the most crucial elements to look for in all investment opportunities? How was this so perfectly evident in the case of Elliot and TJ @ PillPack? How does David navigate the balance between the perfectness of the fit and the investability of the market?
4.) From watching TJ and Elliot at PillPack, what does David believe the truly special founders do to continuously attract the best talent? When does David believe is the right time to really build out the exec team? How did Elliot and TJ align their scaling of the org chart with the growth of the business so well?
5.) How does David think about the lack of free and open distribution in acquiring new customer in a capital efficient manner today? Why does David believe the companies of the future will be advantaged in distribution? In what shape and form can this advantage take? How does David think about the right time to put the pedal to the metal and aggressively grow?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
David’s Most Recent Investment: Adhawk
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. Terminal.io is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, setup, and support these teams – from physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don’t take my word for this, take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC guest Hims, and Dialpad – all customers and lovers of Terminal. You can find out more today at Terminal.io.
20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext
Howard Lerman is the Founder & CEO @ Yext, the company that allows you to control your brand experience across the digital universe. Due in part to Howard's incredible leadership of the firm, Yext went public in April 2017 with an opening price of $11 a share, today the stock price sits at $26.85 and a market cap of $2.65Bn. Prior to the IPO, Yext raised over $117m in VC funding from Insight Venture Partners, IVP, SV Angel and CrunchFund to name a few. As for Howard, Yext is his 4th company and he is also Co-Founder and Chairman of Confide, a leading off-the-record messaging service.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howard made his way into the world of startups and came to Partner with is co-founders to start the now public company that is Yext?
2.) Why must every founder know about Teddy Roosevelt and his "Five Minute Meetings"? Literally, what is the right way to structure these meetings? What one question is the right question to ask? How can a leader look to retain that startup culture and ethos with scale? Why does Howard believe running a global company is like running a country?
3.) What have Howard's biggest takeaways been from studying "John Lennon's Storytelling Trick"? How can founders use this trick both to inspire their team more effectively internally and then to present a better vision for the company, externally?
4.) Howard has said before "fundraising is not an end in itself". Does Howard believe that company financing should be celebrated? How was the IPO process for Howard? From a literal standpoint, how does the process run? How did Howard choose which banks to work with? How did the 10-day roadshow shape up? How did the pricing decision-making process look the night before IPO?
5.) Why does Howard believe it is fundamentally better being a public company? What does "public" status allow you? How does being public introduce a challenge never before seen to founders? Why must founders always examine the motives of the VC behind whether they are pushing them to remain private or go public?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howard’s Fave Book: Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get From Good to Great
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Howard on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The Biggest Lessons From Working Alongside John Doerr, How To Optimize The Speed of Investment Decision-Making & Why Saying No Graciously Is The Most Important Thing with Shabih Rizvi, Founding Partner @ Gradient Ventures
Shabih Rizvi is the Founding Partner @ Gradient Ventures, Google’s new AI-focused venture fund, which will invest in and connect early-stage startups with Google’s resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. Prior to Gradient, Shabih was a Partner at KPCB, where he was actively involved with investments in TrueCaller, Mobcrush, Veem and Ujet. In addition, he helped the firm build their seed program and served as advisor to Flipagram and Victorious. Before KPCB, Shabih founded and led the startup outreach program for Google Play. Prior to Google Play, Shabih worked on the Mobile Apps Lab team which built SMB products. His primary focus was scaling TalkBin (Acquired by Google) to enterprise clients. Shabih joined Google after Google’s acquisition of AdMob, where he was a manager on the Business Development team.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Shabih made his way into the world of venture with Kleiner Perkins and how he came to be a Founding Partner @ Google's AI focused venture fund, Gradient? What were Shabih's greatest lessons from working side by side with John Doerr?
2.) Shabih has said to me before "founder relationships and their longevity really matter". What does Shabih mean by this? How has this played out for Shabih in an investing environment? What have been Shabih's subsequent learnings?
3.) How does Shabih identify the "3 buckets" that VCs source from? How does Shabih look to filter through opportunities at scale? What must he see in the deck? What are his quick no's? What is Shabih's framework for saying no both with efficiency and kindness? Why does Shabih believe this is one of the hardest parts of the role?
4.) What does the internal investment decision-making process look like at Gradient? Why do they believe that 2 partner meetings a week is optimal? Prior to that, how does Shabih structure his meetings with founders? Why does Shabih believe it is so important to go to them at their HQ? Should all investors go to the founder?
5.) Why is Shabih a strong believer in the decentralisation of talent away from the valley? What are the primary drivers for this decentralization? How does Shabih think about pricing in different regions? To what extent does it differ wildly? How does Shabih respond to traditional SaaS wisdom that you have to build your SaaS business in the valley?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Shabih’s Fave Book: Measure What Matters, When Breathe Becomes Air
Shabih’s Most Recent Investment: Scotty.ai
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Shabih on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. Terminal.io is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, setup, and support these teams – from physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don’t take my word for this, take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC guest Hims, and Dialpad – all customers and lovers of Terminal. You can find out more today at Terminal.io.
20VC: The Mindset The Best Investors Assume When Assessing Opportunities, Why So Many Hardware Startups Fail Today & The Right Way To Think About Employee Retention with Andrew Farah, Founder & CEO @ Density
Andrew Farah is the Founder & CEO @ Density, the startup that measures real-time occupancy of every room in your office. To date, they have raised over $16m in funding from some great friends of the show in the form of Founders Fund, Mark Suster @ Upfront, Ludlow Ventures, Jason Calacanis, Hiten Shah and Arjun Sethi, just to name a few. As for Andrew, prior to founding Density, he was a Managing Partner @ Rounded, a software development agency & product studio. There, Andrew and the team built the first Density prototype.
In The Show Today:
1.) How Andrew made his way into the world of technology and product with Rounded and came to found the people counter of the next generation in Density?
2.) How does Andrew view the role of super-connectors today? What specific time has a super-connector really moved the needle for Andreq and changed the trajectory of Density? What can one do to first build relationships with these people? What can be done to sustain that relationship and really engage and deepen it?
3.) How does Andrew view the importance of "employee retention" in the ultimate success of a company? Density have never had an employee leave in 4 years, what does Andrew believe they have done right? What has not worked for them? What does he mean when he says, "the best leaders answer employees questions before they are asked"?
4.) What has Andrew found to be the commonalities in the truly special VCs? What do they do that makes them so special? How do they view the world and the assessment of companies that is so right? How does Andrew think about investor selection? Where does Andrew see many founders going wrong with this?
5.) Why does Andrew think that so many hardware startups fail today? What do they consistently underestimate and not understand? What are the core challenges in building a global supply chain? How does one have to think about cost of goods (COG) and unit economics when scaling hardware startups?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andrew’s Fave Book: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andrew on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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20VC: What It Takes To Found and Scale A Global Venture Firm Like Lightspeed, 3 Ways Firms Do Not Succeed in Generational Transition & What Makes The Truly Special Board Members Like Jim Goetz with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partn
Barry Eggers is a Founding Partner @ Lightspeed, one of the world’s leading venture funds with a portfolio that includes the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Affirm, StitchFix, AppDynamics, Nutanix and many more incredible companies. Barry himself has led investments in Snapchat, Metasolv Software (acquired post-IPO by ORCL), Calista Technologies (acquired by MSFT), Arbor Networks (acquired by DHR), Growth Networks (acquired by CSCO). As a result of his incredible success, Barry has been named to Forbes Midas List numerous times. Prior to VC, Barry held executive roles at Cisco Systems where he established many of the company’s largest distribution channels across OEMs, Service Providers, Distributors, and VARs. He also developed Cisco’s initial M&A process and directed the first wave of acquisitions and integrations for the company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Barry made his way from the world of Cisco to the wonderful world of venture and came to found one of the most successful firms of the decade in Lightspeed?
2.) How does Barry break up the development of the venture ecosystem into 3 distinct stages? What does Barry believe have been the positive changes? What does Barry believe have been the negative changes? Does Barry believe there is an excess supply of capital today? Why does Barry believe there are too many first time funds? What is the outcome?
3.) Did Barry always aim to build the multi-stage, multi-geography firm that he has built with Lightspeed, from the start? What have been the fundamental inflexion points for Lightspeed both in the increase in brand value and liquidity to LPs? Why does Barry believe building a firm really is an art? What should managers most look for in their first LPs?
4.) What does Barry believe are the 3 ways a venture firm can fail in a generational transition? How can firms incentivise young partners to see the career path and trajectory ahead? What must the older partners at the firm be willing to do? What have been Barry's biggest lessons in their successful generational transition?
5.) Barry has sat on boards for over 21 years, how has Barry seen himself develop and evolve as a board member over time? What makes a truly functional board? What are the best practices? Who is the best board member Barry has ever sat on a board with? What makes Jim Goetz such a special board member?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Barry’s Fave Book: Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (Scientific and Engineering Computation)
Barry’s Most Recent Investment: Audius
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Barry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Casper Founder Philip Krim on The Right Way To Think About Marketing Channel Diversification, When To Accept Strategic Investors & How To Successfully Build Out Your Exec Team
Philip Krim is the Founder & CEO @ Casper, the global sleep company that launched in 2014 offering perfect mattresses directly to consumers. Since then they have raised over $239m in funding from the likes of NEA, Lerer Hippeau, IVP, Norwest Venture partners and even include Leonardo Di Caprio on their cap table. As for Philip, he is a serial entrepreneur having founded 2 previous startups, launching his first business out of his very own dorm room at the University of Texas. Due to his immense success, he has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and been awarded a TechCrunch Crunchie award for Best in E-commerce.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Philip made his way into the world of startups and came to launch one of the most successful consumer brands of our day in the form of Casper?
2.) We continuously hear about "the end of retail". What does retail done poorly mean to Philip? How does he perceive the future of retail and retail done right? How does retail fundamentally change the margin structure of an originally online brand like Casper? What does Philip perceive to be the biggest challenge to opening up retail significantly?
3.) Why does Philip think we have seen many online mattress brands struggle over the past year? How has this affected how he operates and executes the plan with Casper? How does Philip think about diversification within customer acquisition channels? How does Philip assess the saturation rate of different distribution channels?
4.) Casper's latest lead investor was a strategic investor, Target. How does Philip think about accepting strategic funds? What was the internal debate and decision-making process? What advice would Philip have to founders contemplating accepting strategic money? How can strategics sometimes have ulterior motives?
5.) Does Philip agree with many former CEOs on the show, the most important role of the CEO is management upscaling? What other functions does Philip consider core? How did Philip think about building out the core of his C-Suite? Does he wish he had done it earlier? What element of the C-Suite was the hardest to hire for?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Philip’s Fave Book: Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Philip on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: The Commonalities In The Makings Of Truly Great People, How Silicon Valley Will Become The Home For Crypto and Frontier Tech Once Again & Why Games Are Such A Good Tool To Understand Human Motivation with Daniel Gross, Founder & Pioneer, Head of AI
Daniel Gross is the Founder @ Pioneer and the Head of AI @ Y Combinator. Taking them in turn, Pioneer is the home for ambitious outsiders of the world where they are building a community of creative young people working on interesting projects around the globe. YC is obviously the world’s most successful accelerator with alumni that includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Flexport and many more incredible companies. Prior to Pioneer and YC, Daniel was a Director @ Apple where he focused on machine learning, as a result of his prior company, Cue (also a YC company) being acquired by Apple in 2013. Finally, Daniel also has one of the valley’s most impressive angel portfolios with investments in OpenDoor, Cruise (acquired by GM), Gusto and Github, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way from a military camp in Israel to start a company at YC to selling the company to Apple to now, creating a global community of the world's most ambitious people?
2.) What does Daniel believe is the commonality of truly great people? Why did Daniel decide to start Pioneers now? What are the terms for entering Pioneers? How is Daniel looking to create the global talent engine through gamification with Pioneers? Why is gamification such a strong tool to understand human motivation?
3.) Why did Daniel decide it was the right decision to bring the Pioneers to SF? In the world of decentralized entrepreneurship, why did Daniel feel it necessary to bring everyone to the valley? What does Daniel believe Silicon Valley needs to solve if it is to become the home for crypto and frontier tech? What role does optimism play in the success of SF?
4.) The program is funded through Stripe and Marc Andreesen, many have suggested this poses conflict with potential optionality on projects and talent, how does Daniel think about this conflict? Why is it not a concern? What other challenges does Daniel forsee as being the biggest barriers to the success of Pioneer?
5.) How does Daniel think about KPI's for the coming 12 months? What are his core KPI's? How does Daniel construct a framework that will allow him to love previously disliked tasks? How can anyone do this with success?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Daniel’s Fave Book: Finite and Infinite Games, Enders Game
Daniel’s Most Recent Investment: Jump, Retool
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Daniel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Joist has built the go-to platform for contractors. Joist enables contractors to professionally handle everyday tasks like estimating, invoicing, collecting payments, and manage projects, while also helping them grow their businesses as a streamlined CRM. More than 500 thousand contractors have used the Joist platform to manage more than $8.5 billion in invoiced work in North America, the UK, and Australia. Learn more at joist.com. WePay’s got a great case study about how another platform, TeamSnap, is working with WePay to make payments its #1 revenue stream… more than its subscription business. Get it at wepay.com/harry.
Lattice is the #1 people management solution for growing companies and helps companies like Asana, Reddit and Cruise build a strong company culture. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 reviews, share ongoing feedback, facilitate 1:1s, set up goal tracking, and run employee engagement surveys. Lattice is the only solution that combines performance management and employee engagement, so operators can make sure top performers are happy. Lattice is giving away three months of Lattice free to 20VC listeners. Just go to lattice.com/20vc to receive the offer. Build an award-winning culture with Lattice. The #1 people management solution.
20VC: Lessons From Scaling Trulia to IPO, How To Maximise Your Impact within Your Organisation and Why No One Is Ever 100% Ready For The Next Job with Heather Fernandez, Founder @ CEO @ Solv
Heather Fernandez is the Founder & CEO @ Solv, the startup that simplifies everyday healthcare by providing access to high quality, last-minute care. To date, Heather has raised over $23m in funding from some of the great of the world of venture including Bill Gurley @ Benchmark, Theresia @ Aspect, James Slavet @ Greylock and Pete Flint @ NFX. Prior to Solv, Heather was part of the early team @ Trulia, where she led advertising product, marketing, and sales strategy and saw the team go from 20 people through to the $2.5B acquisition by Zillow Group. Before Trulia, Heather was at Morgan Stanley and more interestingly was National Deputy Press Secretary for Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. If all of that was not enough, Heather is also a Board Member at the global behemoth, Atlassian.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Heather made her way into the world of startups from the world of politics? How she came to be one of the early team at Trulia? What was the a-ha moment for Solv?
2.) How does Heather fundamentally define "culture"? What is the trust equation? Why does it play such a central role in successful culture building? What does Theather mean when she discusses "constructive candor"? What are the common mistakes Heather sees founders make when it comes to scaling culture? What literal actions can be done to instil trust and respect within the team?
3.) Does Heather agree with James @ ThredUp, "marketplaces founders have to be immensely stubborn"? Would Heather agree with Leah @ TaskRabbit with regards to marketplace NPS and "one side of the equation will always be less content"?
4.) What advice would Heather give to managers to maximize their impact in their organisation and their career? How does Heather think about bringing in the right people at various stages of the company? How does it change with scale? On funding, Solv has raised $23m, how does Heather think about when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire?
5.) Heather is also on the board of Atlassian, so what are the core benefits of simultaneously sitting on a board and managing your own board? What have been Heather's biggest learnings from her time on the Atlassian board? How do the best founders manage their boards successfully?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Heather’s Fave Book: The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Heather on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: The 2 Core Areas Value Will Accrue In Crypto, Why Crypto Will Drive The Re-Centralisation of Talent Back Into Silicon Valley & Why Regulation Is The Opposite of What We Should Be Concerned By in Crypto with Avichal Managing Partner @ Electric Capita
Avichal Garg is the Managing Partner @ Electric Capital, one of the leading crypto asset management firms today investing in both liquid and illiquid tokens that are emerging stores of value and rooted in novel technology. Prior to Electric they personally invested in Coinbase, Bitwise, Basecoin and more. As for Avichal as well as Electric, he is a part-time partner at YC and prior to YC, he was Director of Product Management at Facebook where he led the Local product team (a $3.5Bn line of business at the time). Before FB, Avichal worked on Search and Ads at Google, started and sold a few companies, and invested in startups including Optimizely, Boom, Color, Cruise, Instawork, CaseText, and many more.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Avichal made his way into the world of startups, began angel investing, discovering the power of crypto and why now for Electric Capital?
2.) How does Avichal break the world of crypto into 4 fundamentally distinct buckets today? Which 2 elements does Avichal believe will be the biggest value accruers? What is the core question to ask when assessing a crypto opportunity today? How does angel investing compare to crypto investing?
3.) Where are the majority of ICO dollars going today? Why does Avichal believe that ICOs in large part do not fundamentally make sense from an investment and pricing perspective? How does Avichal think about liquidity in the world of crypto? As an institutional manager, what mindset does Avichal embrace when liquidity is possible?
4.) Why does Avichal believe that regulation and government controls is the opposite of the real risk to the space? If this is not the biggest risk, what does Avichal believe is the biggest risk to the potential of the space? Why does Avichal believe that the US government have handled the space with nuance and intellect?
5.) Why does Avichal believe that decentralized teams will not work? How does this correlate to the progression of platform complexity with time? Why does Avichal believe this will lead to the re-centralization of talent back to Silicon Valley? What catalysts will act to speed this up or hamper it's re-centralisation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Avichal’s Fave Book: Ender's Game
Avichal’s Most Recent Investment: Coda Cryptocurrency Protocol
As always you can follow Harry, Avichal and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Why Founders Must Use VCs as a Barometer, How to Make Distributed Teams Work Successfully & The Biggest Mistake People Make Early In Their Career with Dylan Serota, Founder @ Terminal
Dylan Serota is the Founder & Chief Strategy Officer @ Terminal, the startup that helps you create world-class technical teams through remote operations as a service. They recently raised a phenomenal $13m Series A with some of the world's most renowned names including Lightspeed, KPCB, Craft, Thiel, Atomic and Jerry Yang just to name a few. As for Dylan, he is also a Founder-in-Residence @ Atomic, one of the valley's most exciting new institutions which both founds and funds companies and includes the likes of Hims, TalkIQ (acq by Dialpad) and more. Prior to Atomic and Terminal, Dylan was Head of Platform @ Eventbrite where he led platform product org, built third-party developer ecosystem and platform partnerships.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dylan made his way into the world of startups with Eventbrite and how that led to his realisation on the future of development operations with Terminal?
2.) Why does Dylan believe that it is important for startups to build distributed teams earlier in their growth curve than often suggested? What are the key aspects to making remote teams work well? Why does Dylan believe that "companies overvalue their culture"? How does Dylan assess culture across remote teams?
3.) Jason lemkin says "startups can either hire a stretch VP or a burnt out mediocre VP", does Dylan agree with this? How does Dylan assess the balance between hiring functional specialists vs jack of all trades? When is the right time to make the transition from generalist to specialist?
4.) Hw does Dylan analyze and assess a startup leaderships team ability to adapt and prioritize speed? What is key to successful decision-making today in startups? How does Dylan think about the importance of speed when it comes to product ideation and iteration?
5.) What does Dylan believe is the biggest mistake many people make early in their career? What are the commonalities of the truly successful people in how they have structured their careers? How does Dylan think about the balance between title vs salary vs experience? What should one optimise for and when?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dylan’s Fave Book: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dylan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Why Partners Are There To Save Each Other From Themselves, Why Effective Reserve Allocation Is The Hardest Question In Venture & What Makes The Truly Special Board Members with Jeff Fagnan, Founding Partner @ Accomplice
Jeff Fagnan is Founding Partner @ Accomplice, one of the East Coast's leading early-stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of AngelList, PillPack (acq by Amazon), Freshbooks, Hopper, Secret Escapes and many more incredible companies. Accomplice is also unique as it is a platform builder creating incredible initiatives such as Spearhead, Maiden Lane and Boston Syndicates, really moving the needle in seeding local ecosystems. As for Jeff he is well known as a founding investor, working with most of his portfolio since inception, sometimes as a co-founder including Veracode (Sold to CA Technologies). Jeff also sits on the board of AngelList, PillPack, InsightSquared, Hopper, Freshbooks and more.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way into the world of VC from consulting over 18 years ago? How did his experience of the bubble influence Jeff's mindset and thinking?
2.) What did Jeff learn about building an optimal venture partnership with the transition from the 23 partner Atlas to the tight-knit Accomplice? Where does Jeff believe most venture partnerships go wrong today? What does Jeff believe is the right size partnership in venture? Why does Jeff believe that partners are there to save each other from themselves?
3.) How did Jeff's experience with Atlas effect his views on portfolio construction? Why does Jeff advocate for the model of raising $200m every 2.5 years for a pure seed strategy? How does Jeff think about building an effective reserve strategy? Why does Jeff not believe pro-rata should be guaranteed? Why does Jeff believe force ranking a portfolio is dangerous?
4.) Jeff believes the best VCs are able to manage 2 things, what are those 2 things? From his 18 years on boards, what does Jeff believe makes the truly special board member? Who is the best he has worked with and why? How does Jeff look to gain the balance of being both proactive to opportunities and reactive to inbound?
5.) Accomplice has recently made it's foray into the West Coast, what was the thinking behind that move? How does Accomplice think about establishing mindshare as a new entrant in a hotly contested environment? What does Jeff believe is the key to successful geographic expansion in venture?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeff’s Fave Book: Where The Wild Things Are
Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Perch
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Armon Dadgar is the Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp, the open-source software company that provides consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect and run any infrastructure for any application. To date, Hashicorp has raised over $74m in VC funding from many friends of the show including Scott Raney @ Redpoint, Glenn Solomon @ GGV, Semil Shah, True Ventures and Mayfield. As for Armon, today he leads the Hashicorp research group and focused on industrial research in the security and large-scale system management space. Prior to founding Hashicorp, Armon was a software engineer @ Kiip and Amazon.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Armon made his way from intern at Amazon to founding Hashicorp and creating the game-changing suite of tools in the world of DevOps?
2.) Hashicorp has enjoyed success after success with new products, so what does Armon believe is the secret to continuous product innovation? What does Armon mean when he says "there are really 3 phases to product adoption"? How does Armon determine between vision for a product and the realism when it is not working, when launching products?
3.) Hashicorp only recently started generating revenue, why was now the right time? At what point does one go from building products for the community to building products people will pay for? How does Armon assess professional services today? What does Armon believe are the 2 foundational problems with "professional services"?
4.) Many VCs suggest it's impossible to build big infrastructure businesses today given the commoditizing forces to open source and cloud computing. How have Hashicorp navigated that and bucked that conventional wisdom? How has Armon also bucked the conventional wisdom on the importance of focus? What core tenets must remain if one wants to go against this emphasis on focus?
5.) Armon and his co-founder brought on a CEO early, what was the realisation moment for the need to bring in an external CEO? How did Armon look to get comfortable with this transition? What advice would Armon give to founders contemplating bringing in an external CEO? With the benefit of hindsight, what would Armon do differently if he had the time again?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Armon’s Fave Book: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Armon on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: 3 Core Considerations When Investing In Physical Product Co's, Are We In A Direct-To-Consumer Bubble & Why Many Sub $100m Funds Are Moving Earlier and Earlier with Nick Brown, Managing Partner @ Imaginary
Nick Brown is Managing Partner @ Imaginary, founded alongside Net-A-Porter founder, Natalie Massenet, Imaginary invests in early–stage opportunities at the intersection of retail and technology. Included in their incredible portfolio is the likes of Glossier, Daily Harvest, Farfetch, Everlane and many more awesome companies. Prior to co-founding Imaginary, Nick was a Partner at 14W Venture Partners where he invested in the likes of Goop, Outdoor Voices, The Real Real and Business of Fashion just to name a few. Before that Nick was Head of New Media @ NV Investments.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nick made his way into the world of venture and consumer investing from the days of investment banking?
2.) We have seen an explosion in the world of consumer with regards to D2C brands, does Nick believe we are in a D2C bubble? There is a lot of skepticism around physical product companies being venture businesses, so what are the core considerations for Nick when investing in physical product brands today?
3.) Having backed the likes of Glossier, Farfetch, Everlane etc, what does Nick believe are some of the leading indicators from the early days whether a company has a sustaining and authentic brand? What does Nick believe is the future for direct to consumer of the next 24-36 months? What is he most excited by?
4.) How does Nick think about the interaction between D2C brands and wholesale and physical retail? When is the right time to pull the wholesale lever? What does Nick believe is a healthy ratio between paid to organic customer acquisition? What are the commonalities in the consumer brands that have broken out within his portfolio?
5.) In terms of character traits, what commonalities does Nick see in the most successful consumer founders he has backed today? We have seen a rise in the celebrity founder over the last few years, so what is the role of the celebrity founder? When does it work? When does it not work? How does the future of celebrity founder look to Nick?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nick’s Fave Book: To Kill A Mockingbird
Nick’s Most Recent Investment: Fitplan
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess
Adam Goldberg is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the world's leading funds with a portfolio including the likes of SNAP, Mulesoft, Max Levchin’s Affirm, AppDynamics and many more incredible companies. As for Adam, at age 13, Adam enrolled as a full-time student at UC Berkeley, where he studied pure and applied mathematics and conducted research in number theory and machine learning. He went on to work as a mathematician for the Department of Defense and as a researcher Berkeley, Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford. Following that, Adam worked as an engineer at Palantir and Dropbox and was an early product manager at Rubrik. In 2016, Adam left Rubrik to become a partner at Lightspeed where he has invested in the likes of Basis, Vector and Totemic Labs, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam made his way into the world of venture from the department of defence and working at titans such as Palantir and Dropbox?
2.) Why does Adam believe the rate of founder learning is the most important skill that an investor can evaluate and assess? What does optimizing for learning really mean to Adam? In practice, what can one do to optimize for learning? What are the common traits and signs of those founders that do this well?
3.) Why does Adam believe that there remains today no mass market decentralised consumer product? What is needed for this to happen? How does Adam forsee the development of token economics over the coming years? What novel token financing solutions does Adam respect? What is required within token economics for Adam to gain real comfort?
4.) Why does Adam believe that the Telegram ICO got such attention? Why is Adam fundamentally bullish on the opportunity? What 2 core characteristics does Telegram have that are required for crypto projects to be successful? On the other side of the table, where is there cause for concern when reviewing the opportunity?
5.)How does Adam think about "betting on fundamental trade-offs in crypto"? What are the 4 key trade-offs that founders must contemplate? What are the trade-offs that Adam is willing to accept vs not accept? How does Adam envisage the willingness to accept trade-offs so widely, change over time in the space?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adam’s Fave Book: Flowers for Algernon
Adam's Most Recent Investment: Strangeworks
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown
Eddy Lu is the Co-Founder & CEO @ GOAT, the largest marketplace in the world for buying and selling authentic sneakers. To date, GOAT have raised over $97m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Accel, Index, Upfront and include angel investments from Elad Gil, Ashton Kutcher and Alexis Ohanian. Prior to GOAT, Eddy enjoyed numerous different roles including founding a chain of Japanese dessert stores building a slew of different 99c apps and started on Wall St with Lehmann Brothers and Deloitte.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eddy made his way from Wall St to making 99c apps to creating a chain of Japanese desert stores to founding the world's largest sneaker marketplace in GOAT?
2.) Pivoting from social dining to sneaker marketplace, how does Eddy determine between mission and passion for the vision vs when something is simply not working? What core metrics made Eddy realise this pivot was needed? How did Eddy communicate the pivot to the existing investor base? How did he get them on board for the next chapter?
3.) Over the years, GOAT has had many investors wanting to invest, how does Eddy approach investor selection? What advice does Eddy have on optimising for valuation and the terms that founders should really focus on? What have been the biggest lessons from having former Twitter COO, Adam Bain on the GOAT board?
4.) Does Eddy agree with Paul at Canvas that marketplace founders should give up if they do not have differentiated supply? What does Eddy believe is the core characteristic of the most successful marketplaces? To what extent does Eddy believe that early marketplaces must rely on existing distribution and offline activities to scale?
5.) Eddy took the decision to merge with Flight Club, what was behind the decision to open up the business to physical retail? Why does Eddy believe that physical retail does not affect the margin structure massively when compared to it's online counterpart? How does Eddy assess the categories that make sense for physical retail between those that do not?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eddy’s Fave Book: Crime and Punishment
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eddy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: The Metrics That Matter In Early-Stage Consumer, Why Moats Matter More Than Brand Today and How VCs Deal with S*** Hit The Fan Moments with Jason Stoffer, Managing Partner @ Maveron
Jason Stoffer is Managing Partner @ Maveron, the consumer-only venture fund backing a new breed of brands. Their stellar portfolio includes the likes of eBay, Zulily, General Assembly, Allbirds and Dia&Co, just to name a few. As for Jason, Jason is the master of all things consumer education, e-commerce and marketplace businesses. He has been a Board Member of a number of category-leading consumer businesses, such as zulily (Nasdaq: ZU), General Assembly (acquired by Adecco), Common and more. Prior to Maveron, Jason was Senior Director of Strategic Operations at Career Education Corp where he saw the business scale to a market cap of over $4.5Bn.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason made his way into the world of VC from the world of journalism? What were his biggest takeaways from seeing the boom and bust cycle of 2001 and 2008?
2.) Why does Jason believe that moats matter as much, if not more than brand today? How can founders look to create the strongest form of defensibility? How does Jason analyze the 2 paths for consumer businesses today; raise large amounts of capital and buy growth or raise little, grow slowly, understand unit economics and channels over time? Does Jason think we will see a graveyard of immensely funded consumer businesses?
3.) How does Jason view paid acquisition today? Does Jason agree with Peter Fenton. "there is a lack of free and open distribution in consumer today"? When does Jason believe that consumer founders should really focus on CAC/LTV? What metrics really matter in the early days for consumer? How does Jason analyse acquisition channel mortality? When does he mean when he says, "CAC works, until it does not"?
4.) Jason has said before that "VC is a struggle". What elements does Jason find most challenging? How does Jason deal witht he shit hit the fan moments as a VC? Can VCs in this hyper-competitive world be openly vulnerable in Jason's eyes? How has Jason seen his approach to hard and challenging situations in VC develop over time?
5.) Does Jason believe we are in a consolidatory environment today or will we see the next generation of mega consumer brands being built? When investing, does Jason ask, who is the potential acquirer? Why? What multiple is achievable? Would Jason agree with Kirsten Green that "Amazon does more to make the market than destroy it"? How does Amazon affect Jason's investment philosophy and approach?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Fave Book: 100 Years of Solitude
Jason's Most Recent Investment: Imperfect Produce
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com
Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive
Fritz Lanman is the CEO @ ClassPass, the startup that provides the most flexible fitness membership ever. To date, they have raised over $154m in VC funding from the likes of Thrive, GV, CRV, Fifth Wall and Temasek just to name a few. As for Fritz, prior to ClassPass he was the Founder & CEO @ Livestar, a mobile recommendations startup that was acquired by Pinterest. Before that, he was a Senior Director in the Corporate Strategy Group @ Microsoft where he led several multi-billion dollar M&A evaluations and strategy projects including the Facebook investment and Yahoo deal. If that was not enough, Fritz is also a tremendously successful angel with a portfolio including the likes of Square, Pinterest, Wish, Flexport, Everlane and 75 or so more companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Fritz made his way into the world of startups with Microsoft? How that led to angel investments in Wish, Flexport, Square and more? How he came to be CEO @ ClassPass?
2.) How did the $250m Microsoft investment in Facebook come about? What made Fritz so confident he told Steve Ballmer he was willing to bet his career it would be a $10Bn company? What was the decision-making process internally around that deal?
3.) How does Fritz assess his own asset allocation strategy? Why does Fritz not agree with thesis-driven angel investing? When starting angel investing, how did he approach portfolio construction? Why does Fritz believe it is immensely synergistic to be both an operator and angel? As a result, how does Fritz approach placing investors in a quadrant between helpfulness and high maintenance?
4.) Why does Fritz believe that your investor cannot be your recruiter? What have been Fritz biggest learnings on continuously attracting the best talent? Why does Fritz believe that it is BS that one should not celebrate fundraising? Ultimately, what does Fritz elieve fundraising signifies?
5.) ClassPass has expanded to 34 markets over the last few years, how does Fritz determine when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire? What are the 2 fundamental questions one must ask before you do? Does Fritz believe that aggressive growth and capital efficiency are mutually exclusive? How does Fritz think about capital efficiency with ClassPass today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Fritz’s Fave Book: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Fritz on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. Terminal.io is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, setup, and support these teams – from physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don’t take my word for this, take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC guest Hims, and Dialpad – all customers and lovers of Terminal. You can find out more today at Terminal.io.
Whether you’re starting your own small business or getting serious about making your small business more efficient, you need to invite FreshBooks to the table. FreshBooks makes cloud accounting software that’s so ridiculously easy to use and you’ll quickly understand why over 10 million people use it to radically streamline how they deal with their admin and paperwork. Plus, FreshBooks can handle a lot more than accounting related tasks. Using FreshBooks is kind of like having your own admin assistant who’s got your back, 24/7. To claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, click here enter Twenty Minute VC in the “how did you hear about us section”.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook on The Commonalities of The Truly Great CEOs, How To Hire The Very Best Execs, Why Cash is A Defensible Moat Today & The Pros and Cons of M&A and IPOs
Elad Gil is the Founder @ Color, the startup that shows you your genes can help you make better health decisions. They have raised over $112m in funding from the likes of General Catalyst, CRV, 8VC, Aaron Levie and more incredible names. Elad is also an incredible angel, counting the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Optimizely, Opendoor and Wish all in his portfolio. Now Elad is adding a new string to his very talented bow with the release of his book, High Growth Handbook, published by Stripe in which Elad interviews 14 leaders from the valley from Marc Andreesen to Reid Hoffman to Patrick Collison. Plus shares his own experiences from Google, growing from 1,500 to 15,000 and Twitter, growing from 100 to 1,500. Not only is this the first book I have read voraciously from cover to cover in a long time but it is now outselling Zero To One and Lean Startup as pre-order.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Elad made his way into the world of startups, came to found 2 companies that sold to Twitter and Google and came to invest in Airbnb, Stripe, Wish etc?
2.) How does Elad define the role of the CEO today? What are the commonalities in those truly great CEOs? How do the very best CEOs hire the very best execs? How do they address role allocation internally? How do they determine between employees that do and do not scale with the firm? Where do CEOs make the most fatal mistakes in high growth startups?
3.) Why are pre-emptive rounds so common today? Why does Elad believe many people will lose a lot of money in them? What advice does Elad give to founders when they are an option? Does Elad believe the lack of liquidity is good for venture this cycle? How does Elad assess the emergence of megafunds? How does this alter and distort the market?
4.) With regards to market share, how should founders prioritise between pricing and market share? Is cash ever a defensible moat? What does Elad mean when he says that "too many people are stuck on Amazon as the winning model"? Why does Elad believe that margins and capital leverage are the unsung heroes of tech?
5.) Why does Elad believe we have seen such a reduction in M&A? Why do many founders not fully assess the financial benefits of being bought by a high growth startup? What are the big questions founders should ask when an M&A opportunity does arise? What does Elad believe are the reasons to avoid IPOing? What are the inherent benefits of going public?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Elad’s Fave Book: Ben Horowitz, Andy Grove
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Elad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. Terminal.io is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, setup, and support these teams – from physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don’t take my word for this, take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC guest Hims, and Dialpad – all customers and lovers of Terminal. You can find out more today at Terminal.io.
Whether you’re starting your own small business or getting serious about making your small business more efficient, you need to invite FreshBooks to the table. FreshBooks makes cloud accounting software that’s so ridiculously easy to use and you’ll quickly understand why over 10 million people use it to radically streamline how they deal with their admin and paperwork. Plus, FreshBooks can handle a lot more than accounting related tasks. Using FreshBooks is kind of like having your own admin assistant who’s got your back, 24/7. To claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, click here enter Twenty Minute VC in the “how did you hear about us section”.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: Why Fundraising Is Like Dating and How to Play The Game Successfully & How To Increase The Flexibility of Your Burn When Growth is Ambiguous with Rachel Blumenthal, Founder & CEO @ Rockets of Awesome
Rachel Blumenthal is the Founder & CEO @ Rockets of Awesome, the startup that is reinventing the way parents shop for their kids clothes. To date, Rachel has raised over $19m in VC funding from the likes of Kirsten Green @ Forerunner, August Capital, General Catalyst, Gwyneth Paltrow and Female Founders Fund to name a few. Prior to Rockets of Awesome, Rachel founded fashion jewelry brand, Rachel Leigh. Rachel scaled the business to being available in over 300 stores worldwide and being named one of Oprah's "Favourite Things". Before that Rachel began her career in the publicity department at Yves Saint Lauren.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rachel went from founding a company that created one of Oprah's "favourite things" to reinventing the way parents shop for their children today?
2.) Why does Rachel believe that "fundraising is like dating"? What does Rachel mean when she says "you have to play the game"? What does this literally look like in practice? What works in generating investor interest? What does not? Where does Rachel see many make mistakes in the fundraising process?
3.) How does Rachel think about capital efficiency with the evolution of her business? What tips and suggestions does Rachel give to increasing burn flexibility when future growth is ambiguous? Why does Rachel disagree with the thesis of raise money when you don't need it? What length of time does Rachel believe is the right time to raise for?
4.) Rachel has said before that, "the best investors are operators". What makes Rachel believe this? What are the drawbacks to operator VCs? What are the benefits to non-operator investors? What makes the truly special investor? How can a founder stress test this prior to their investment? What advice would Rachel give to a non-operator VC to improve their empathy and experience with founders?
5.) Rachel previous sly said to me that "being a woman in this male-dominated environment is everything the stereotype suggests", what moment or story particularly resonates for Rachel when saying this? How did she respond? How can less confident first time minority founders respond in these situations?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rachel’s Fave Book: Fast Company, Inc
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rachel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Whether you’re starting your own small business or getting serious about making your small business more efficient, you need to invite FreshBooks to the table. FreshBooks makes cloud accounting software that’s so ridiculously easy to use and you’ll quickly understand why over 10 million people use it to radically streamline how they deal with their admin and paperwork. Plus, FreshBooks can handle a lot more than accounting related tasks. Using FreshBooks is kind of like having your own admin assistant who’s got your back, 24/7. To claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, click here enter Twenty Minute VC in the “how did you hear about us section”.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: Lessons From 2x $Bn Exits in Trulia and lastminute.com, 3 Leading Indicators That Suggest Potential Marketplace Success & Why We Are Going To See A Fundamental Change To The World of VC with Pete Flint, Managing Partner @ NFX
Pete Flint is a Managing Partner @ NFX, one of Silicon Valley's newest and most exciting funds with the recent announcement of their new $150m fund late last year. Prior to VC, Pete was a serial entrepreneur building one of today's most successful marketplaces, as the co-founder of Trulia. Pete led the company from inception to more than 50 million monthly unique users, $250m in VC funding from the likes of Sequoia and Accel culminating in their merger with Zillow in 2015 that valued Trulia at $3.5 billion. Before Trulia, Pete was part of the founding team of lastminute.com, a leading European online travel site that was acquired in 2005 for over $1 billion.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Pete made his way into the world of startups joining the founding team of lastminute.com and how that led to the founding of Trulia and entry into VC?
2.) Why does Pete believe that startup timing is so crucial? How does Pete analyze market timing risk when investing? What is the right way for investors to think about the innovation cycle we are in today? On review, what does Pete believe lastminute.com did most right? What would he most want to change?
3.) What are the leading indicators that suggest potential in a network effect business? Would Pete agree with Josh @ Jackson Square that not all GMV is created equal? How does Pete anlyse the lack of free and open distribution today and how that affects marketplace scaling? Why does Pete still believe marketplaces are some of the most capital efficient businesses to grow?
4.) What has been Pete's greatest time of failure in his career? What is the framework Pete uses to analyse and assess his own ego? What are the commonalities in how Pete has seen truly great founders overcome failure? How does Pete balance between realism when something is not working and the mission and vision of the founder?
5.) How does Pete think about optimising decision-making, both in investing and operating? How does Pete approach the balance of head vs heart? When is the right time to decide with your head? When is the right time to decide with your heart? Why does Pete argue early stage investing must be decided with your heart?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Pete’s Fave Book: Leonardo Da Vinci
Pete’s Most Recent Investment: Ribbon
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Pete on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Whether you’re starting your own small business or getting serious about making your small business more efficient, you need to invite FreshBooks to the table. FreshBooks makes cloud accounting software that’s so ridiculously easy to use and you’ll quickly understand why over 10 million people use it to radically streamline how they deal with their admin and paperwork. Plus, FreshBooks can handle a lot more than accounting related tasks. Using FreshBooks is kind of like having your own admin assistant who’s got your back, 24/7. To claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, click here enter Twenty Minute VC in the “how did you hear about us section”.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode
Joe Fernandez is the Founder & CEO @ JoyMode, the startup that allows you to lend everything you need to have the experiences you want. To date, Joe has raised over $16m in funding for Joymode from friends of the show including Homebrew, Slow Ventures, Founder Collective, Scott Belsky, Collaborative Fund and Lowercase, just to name a few. As for Joe, prior to founding JoyMode, Joe founded Klout, one of the leading social media analytics platforms of the day and raised $40m in funding from Kleiner Perkins, IVP, Venrock, Greycroft and more. Klout was ultimately acquired by Lithium Technologies where Joe sits on the board.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joe made his way into the world of startups with the founding of Klout? Given his entrepreneurial start, would Joe say he is unemployable?
2.) Question from Craig Shapiro: What was your single greatest lesson from the Klout journey? How has that impacted how you operate JoyMode today? How has Joe approached fundraising fundamentally differently today than with Klout? How is Joe's team building strategy today different to his with Klout?
3.) Why does Joe believe that "serial entrepreneurs are over-rated"? What does Joe mean when he says, "you have to know which hill you are willing to die on"? How does Joe look to accurately ego check today? What innovative methods does Joe employ internally to ensure that his views are validated and not submitted to?
4.) What does Joe mean when he says, "you have to make big bets to win"? How can you implement this risk-taking mentality in larger teams? What is the right way for both the team and investor base to respond? How does Joe use continuous iteration and data-centricity to test and validate these theses?
5.) How does Joe approach investor update emails? Why does Joe look to terrify investors with each update? Does Joe believe that it is right to thanks specific individuals in those emails? Does like like to select individuals and request their help in the emails? How can past updates be used to attain future investors?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joe’s Fave Book: The Accidental Superpower
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joe on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: Why Most The Value In Crypto Will Accrue in Governance, When Institutional Capital Will Enter The Space and How To Think About Liquidity In Crypto with Joel Monegro, Founding Partner @ Placeholder.VC
Joel Monegro is Founding Partner @ Placeholder.VC, one of the new venture capital partnerships that invest solely in crypto assets and more specifically in decentralized information networks. Prior to founding Placeholder, Joel spent three years at Union Square Ventures developing the firm's blockchain investment thesis and portfolio. Before USV, Joel started the Digital Economy Department at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the Dominican Republic, a government office in charge of developing the country's national and technology agenda.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joel made his way into the world of VC with USV and what created his love of crypto and led to his leaving USV to found Placeholder? What were some of Joel's biggest investing lessons from his time with USV?
2.) How does Joel approach portfolio construction in building out a crypto portfolio? How does the use of reserves and building positions change when comparing VC to crypto? Why does Joel believe that the most interesting place to invest in crypto is in the assets themselves, rather than the companies?
3.) When does Joel think we will see institutional capital begin to move into the space in a meaningful way? What needs to happen/change for this institutional interest to materialize? How is the element of "custody" crucial to the entrance of institutions?
4.) In terms of fund construction, liquidity is often an attractive element to crypto, why does Joel believe that a traditional venture fund structure is necessary for Placeholder? What are the benefits both to the fund and the projects it backs? How do LPs both traditional and non-traditional respond to this?
5.) Joel has said before the 2 core elements are crypto economics and governance, why does Josh believe this? Why is governance the foundational layer where value will accrue in the space? How does the lack of defensibility of crypto projects make governance ever more valuable?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joel’s Fave Book: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
Joel’s Most Recent Investment: Decred Investment Thesis
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: The 4 Key Skills All VCs Need To Be Successful, How To Build, Maintain and Scale Your Network in VC and What is The Process Through Which VCs Build Conviction in Opportunities with Max Motschwiller, General Partner @ Meritech Capital
Max Motschwiller is a Partner with Meritech Capital, one of the West Coast's leading growth investment firms with over $150Bn in IPOs and a portfolio that includes the likes of Facebook, Salesforce, Snap, Box, Mulesoft and Cloudera just to name a few. As for Max, prior to Meritech he spent 3 years with Kleiner Perkins (KPCB) where he was actively involved with investments in Dropcam (Nest/Google), Duolingo, MyFitnessPal (Under Armour), RelateIQ (Salesforce.com) and Stance. Before joining KPCB, Max worked for 3 years at Summit Partners and was actively involved across Summit’s technology portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Max make his way into the world of VC with Summit and KP from University? What did that decision-making process look like for Max?
2.) As a career VC, would Max agree with Pat Grady @ Sequoia, "the rate of decay on operating experience has never been greater"? What would Max say are the biggest elements he missed through lack of operational experience? How do the skills required from early to pre-IPO change the type of background required?
3.) Max has said before, "to be a good VC you have to do 4 things well", what are those 4 things? Why does Max believe that picking is the greatest skill to develop? At growth, what does Max mean when he says "the picking is around price"? How do the very best VCs approach price sensitivity?
4.) Question from Rob Ward: Max has mastered network development from an early age, what advice would Max give with regards to developing a network? What did he do well and works? What did he try and did not do well? How does Max think about depth vs breadth of network? How does he apply this to investing and due diligence?
5.) In a time of Softbank and Sequoia's $7Bn fund, how does a firm like Meritech look to compete in such frothy environments? How has growth bifurcated into 2 clear stages? What are the advantages of being a small pure-play growth firm? How does the portfolio construction and return expectation change for you given the fund size and stage of investment?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Max’s Fave Book: Home Deus
Max’s Most Recent Investment: Amplitude
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Max on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
20VC: General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja on Why We Are In A Golden Age For VC, Why Pro-Rata Is A Lazy Posture and Why He Does Not Focus On Price
Hemant Taneja is Managing Director @ General Catalyst, one of the world's leading venture firms of the last decade with Airbnb, Stripe, Snapchat, Hubspot and Gusto all in their portfolio. As for Hemant, he has led investments at GC in Stripe, SNAP, Grammarly, Gusto, Livongo, Color Genomics, Class Dojo and more. He also directs the GC Stripe Platform Fund, a $10 million initiative to help start new ventures that are built on top of the Stripe Connect platform. On the educational front, Hemant holds 5 degrees from MIT and sits on the board of Khan Academy.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hemant made his way from 5 degrees at MIT and wanting to be an academic to pursuing startups in the world of VC with General Catalyst?
2.) Question from Sam @ ClassDojo: What were the hardest elements of establishing GC on the West Coast? With hindsight today, what would Hemant do differently given the chance? How does Hemant think about the development and ability to accelerate the creation of local reputation? What is crucial and works most effectively?
3.) How does Hemant respond to Elad Gil's "everyone is looking for the next truly deep dein to explore"? Why is Hemant so bullish that we are in the "golden age of venture capital"? Why does Hemant believe that "scale" as a key measure has run it's course? What does Hemant's thesis of the future of "unscaling" really mean?
4.) How does Hemant analyse price sensitivity in todays forthy environment? How has his relationship to price changed over time? With regards to price, what have been some of his biggest regrets and learnings drawn from real-world examples? How does Hemant assess reserve allocation? Why does he think pro-rata is a lazy posture?
5.) Hemant has said on boards for over 1,800 hours, so what does Hemant belive makes the truly special board members? How does Hemant think about first building that rapport and "intimacy" with the founder? Secondly, how important does Hemant believe it is to build similar relations with other board members? Which founder exemplifies the best board management in Hemant's mind?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hemant’s Fave Book: Home Deus
Hemant’s Most Recent Investment: Spring Discovery
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hemant on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Single Founders, The Benefits of Party Rounds At Seed and How To Pre-Game Your Launch To Have Customers From Day 1 with Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO @ The League
Amanda Bradford is the Founder & CEO @ The League, the exclusive dating app that wants you to spend your time a little more intelligently when it comes to finding the perfect match online. They have raised funding from the likes of Aileen Lee @ Cowboy Ventures, Sherpa Ventures and Alex Rosen @ Ridge Ventures just to name a few. Prior to founding The League, Amanda spent time at Evernote as a Product Manager, as an investor with Sequoia Capital and started her career in the strategic partnerships team at Google.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Amanda made her way into the world of startups and how she came to want to change the world of dating with The League?
2.) Why does Amanda totally disagree with the conventional wisdom that you cannot be a single founder? What are the benefits of being a single founder? How has Amanda used this to incentivize her team further? What are the core challenges that remain in being a single founder? What 2 reasons does Amanda feel 90% of startups fail?
3.) What does Amanda really mean when she says about "the art of the launch"? How can founders pre-game their launch to have existing users on day 1? What benchmarks does Amanda set when launching a new product, to determine the success of the launch? How core is the 7-day retention number to Amanda in her metric stack?
4.) How does Amanda think about the right time to turn on monetization? How can founders determine the level of consumer appetite for premium products, pre-developing them? What are the main challenges when turning on monetization? How does monetization affect investor appetite?
5.) Amanda has raised from Cowboy, Sherpa, Ridge, how was the fundraising process for Amanda? Why did Amanda choose to pursue the party round approach at seed? What are the core benefits of doing so? Has the lack of lead investor meant a reduced willingness to help from the investor base?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Amanda’s Fave Book: The Giver
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Amanda on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust CultureAmp. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Why Process is Everything In Good Venture Firms, Why GPs Should Have More Empathy For LPs and Lessons from 32 Years In VC, Chairing Over 25 Boards with Peter Parker, Managing Partner @ Bioinnovation Capital
Peter Parker is the Managing Partner @ BioInnovation Capital, the $130m fund transforming life science investing through backing companies based in shared laboratories in Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego, Durham, and NYC. For the past three decades, Peter has devoted his life to venture and startups, starting in 1986 with his establishing Ampersand Ventures life sciences platform which he managed until 2006. During this period he was the first institutional capital and a Director to over 2 dozen life sciences startups and enjoyed more exits than I have done podcasts. He is also a co-founder of LabCentral, Inc, a not-for-profit shared facility for companies who need biolab space enables more than 75 companies to pursue their biotech start-up ambitions.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Peter made his way into what was a very different VC industry back in 1986?
2.) Peter has seen the venture ecosystem develop enormously over the last 30 years, what have been the biggest changes and transformations? What are both the most positive and negative changes to hit venture? How has specialization changed the investing game? What would Peter like to change about the world of VC today?
3.) What does Peter mean when he says the best VCs understand the importance of process? What is the right way to construct your process in VC? How does this affect Peter's thinking on functioning partnerships in venture? What can one do to optimise the quality of those relationships and conversations with partners?
4.) Peter has chaired over 25 boards over the last 32 years in VC, how has Peter seen his style of board membership fundamentally change over that time? What have been the inflection points in his learning? How do OKRs play a crucial role in how he drives board operations? How has Peter approached removing the CEO? What is the right way to do it?
5.) Peter's most recent fund is a $130m seed fund, how was the latest fundraise for Peter? What drives Peter's passion and enthusiasm for fundraising and LP communications? What makes the best LP meetings for Peter? How has Peter seen his presentation style to LPs change over time? What has Peter learned is crucial for LP conversion?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Peter’s Fave Book: The Barbarian: A Surfing Life
Peter’s Most Recent Investment: Graphwear
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: From Sequoia To Accel To General Catalyst: What Makes The Best Board Member & The Hiring Methodology To Attract World Class Talent with KAYAK & Lola Founder, Paul English
Paul English is the Co-Founder of both Lola and Kayak. Starting on Lola, the company brings joy to business travelers by finding the best flights for busy schedules and perfect hotels that suit personal preferences. To date, Paul has raised over $44m with Lola from the likes of CRV, Accel, General Catalyst and GV just to name a few. Prior to Lola, Paul co-founded Kayak, the incredible success story that helps millions of travelers make confident travel decisions. Prior to their IPO, Paul raised over $229m in VC funding from Sequoia, Accel, IVP and General Catalyst before their reported $1.8Bn acquisition by Priceline. Paul is also a prolific philanthropist and due to his success has had much press attention including the Tracy Kidder book, A Truck Full of Money.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Paul made his way into the world of startups from having his first taste of entrepreneurship buying and refurbishing air conditioning units?
2.) Paul is behind many groundbreaking ideas of the last decade, so what does the idea generation process look like for Paul? How does Paul determine between a good and a great idea? How has this process changed over time? How does Paul pull other individuals into validating ideas or not?
3.) Paul's VCs stated "Paul is the best founder in the world for hiring", how does Paul approach team building? What does Paul think is required to attract truly world calls talent? Can this skill be taught? Where does Paul believe so many founders go wrong in recruitment? What does Paul mean when he says you want to see "arrogant humility"
4.) Having raised from Sequoia, GV, General Catalyst and more, what has Paul found to really encapsulate the truly special VCs? What are Paul's lessons on raising the highest quality capital possible? When is the right time to optimize for valuation and when is it not? What made Mike Moritz and Joel Cutler so special to work with on Kayak?
5.) How does Paul approach the aspect of board management? How has this changed over time for him? What relationship should founders desire with their VCs and then between the VCs themselves? How does one look to optimise for efficiency in board conversations? How does Paul look to handle board disputes?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Paul’s Fave Book: The Trumpet of Conscience
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Paul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust CultureAmp. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: What John Doerr Taught Me About Great Investing, Why Not All A Rounds Are Post-Traction and Why Despite Overfunding, There Is Still Gaps In Venture Financing with Trae Vassallo, Founding Partner @ Defy.vc
Trae Vassallo is the Co-Founder and Managing Director @ Defy.VC, one of Silicon Valley's newest and most exciting Series A funds with the announcement of their debut $151m fund in Sept 2017. Prior to co-founding Defy, Trae was a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers where she invested in a number of leading companies including eero, Nest Labs, Dropcam, Aggregate Knowledge, and Opower. Before Kleiner, Trae founded Kleiner portfolio company, Good Technology which was ultimately acquired by Blackberry in 2015 for $425m. Trae is also the co-author of the incredible study, “Elephant in the Valley”, highlighting the underlying data around the experiences of women in technology.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Trae made her way into the world of VC and Silicon Valley with a cold reach out to John Doerr and how that led to a role with Kleiner Perkins?
2.) What were Trae's biggest learnings from having John Doerr on her board, as a first-time founder? What were some of the most memorable moments working with him? What was it about him that made him such a special board member? What was the moment that Trae realized what type of board member she is?
3.) What does Trae mean when she says "Kleiner taught me what a great investment looks like"? How does that affect her investing philosophy today? How did Trae's investing learnings differ between John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, and Kevin Compton?
4.) Why does Trae believe that the venture industry is simply "overfunded"? If so, what was her reasoning for the founding of Defy? How does Trae see the expansion of multi-stage funds as presenting a market opportunity? Why are the larger players no longer incentivized to play at the Series A stage?
5.) How did Trae find the fundraising process? What were some of the core challenges in terms of the raise itself? Were there commonalities in the pushbacks that LPs had for Defy? How did Neil and Trae respond to the first time team question? How does Trae think about the infrastructure element of funds? Can it all be outsourced?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Trae’s Fave Book: Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
Trae’s Most Recent Investment: Owl Car Cam: The First Security Camera For Your Car
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Trae on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust CultureAmp. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
Jack Groetzinger is the Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek, the world's largest ticket inventory on the web serving more than 500,000 artists and teams in over 380,000 venues. To date, Jack has raised over $160m in VC funding with SeatGeek from the likes of John Locke @ Accel, Founder Collective, TCV and most recently a $57m Series D led by Glynn Capital Management. Prior to SeatGeek, Jack founded Scribnia, a web app that used collaborative filtering to recommend bloggers and blog content, sold to an ad network in 2009. Jack is also a Founder Partner @ Founder Collective and angel investor in Troops, Inc.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jack made his way into the world of startups and decided to reinvent the ticketing industry with SeatGeek?
2.) How does Jack think about the combination of technical vs commercial skills for founders today? Where has Jack struggled with this balance? What would his advice be to prospective founders? How does Jack use OKRs to drive efficiency at SeatGeek? How can OKRs be constructed the right way? What is a rate of failure that suggests you are being ambitious enough?
3.) Jack has raised multiple rounds and over $160m in funding, how have the rounds differed from round to round? How does what Jack wants from an investor differ with time? What one ability do truly unique board members have the ability to do? How does Jack think about board conflicts and the right way to communicate with boards?
4.) How does Jack determine when is the right time to raise big? What is the one core metric that says now is the right time? How does Jack think about both the diversification and mortality of customer acquisition channels? How have SeatGeek seen theirs fundamentally change over time?
5.) Jack led the $56m Toptix acquisition, how was the acquisition process for Jack? What were the big learnings for Jack in terms of buying something that is large? With the acquisition, how does Jack think about the balance between capital efficiency and aggressive growth? What would Jack have done differently with regards to their growth trajectory if he had his time again?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jack’s Fave Book: Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jack on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It's the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it's a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It's so easy to use, that there's no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you're in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust CultureAmp. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: Lessons From Slack and Opendoor on Price Sensitivity, Why The Best CEOs Are Able To Manage Momentum and Why Being A Board Member is a "Full Contact Sport" with Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital
Glenn Solomon is a Managing Partner @ GGV Capital, one of the world's leading venture funds with $3.8Bn under management across 8 funds and a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Xiaomi, Alibaba, Slack, Square, the list goes on. As for Glenn, since joining GGV in 2005 Glenn has helped 7 companies go public including Pandora, Zendesk, Square, SuccessFactors and more and has led investments in Airbnb, Slack, Opendoor, DOMO and Hashicorp just to name a few. Prior to GGV, Glenn was a General Partner with Partech and before that spent time with Goldman Sachs. You must also check out Glenn's blog here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Glenn made his way from tennis at Stanford to the walls of Goldman Sachs before entering the world of VC with Partech and then GGV?
2.) Having been in VC for over 20 years, how has Glenn fundamentally seen the startup and VC landscape alter? How did advice from John Doerr alter his thinking on platform shifts? Does Glenn agree with Elad Gil that we are all looking for the next vein of innovation to explore? How must VCs respond?
3.) How has Glenn seen the development of himself as an investor over the last 20 years? What has he found to be the commonalities amongst the very best VCs? How does Glenn think about the importance of investor specialisation?
4.) How does Glenn think about price sensitivity? When has Glenn made his biggest mistakes with regards to price? How does Glenn's opinions change with the differing insertion points from Series A to pre-IPO?
5.) What does Glenn believe makes the truly special board members? What does he mean when he says being on a board is a "full contact" sport? What are the foundational pillars that Glenn has learnt make the most productive and successful board meetings? What can both founders and VCs do to drive efficiency from their time in board meetings?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Glenn’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog, Born A Crime, Irena's Children
Glenn’s Most Recent Investment: Unravel Data
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Glenn on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It's the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it's a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It's so easy to use, that there's no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you're in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Warby Parker, Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.
Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust CultureAmp. So put your people and culture first and find out more on cultureamp.com.
20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
Adrian Aoun is the Founder & CEO @ Forward, a health care system combining world-class doctors with advanced technology to empower patients to take control of their health. To date Adrian has raised funding from some of the true greats of the business including Marc Benioff, Eric Schmidt, Joe Lonsdale, Aaron Levie and Josh Kushner, to name a few. As a result of the incredible work at Forward, they were named to TIME’s Best Inventions of 2017. Before Forward, Adrian was the head of special projects for the CEO of Google/Alphabet and Adrian arrived at Google following the acquisition of his artificial intelligence (AI) company, Wavii. Adrian is also a prolific angel with the likes of WorkRamp, Atrium, Convoy and more in his incredible portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adrian made his way from selling Wavii to running special projects for the CEO @ Google, to now changing the world of healthcare with Forward?
2.) Why does Adrian believe that ideas don't have to be inspiration based and you can follow a process to come to a startup idea? What is the framework for that process? What is it fundamental that one focuses on the problem not the solution? Post problem identification, what is the next step?
3.) Why does Adrian believe that today, the Lean Startup Methodology makes less and less sense? What leads Adrian to suggest that "regulation is not nearly as scary as people think? How does Adrian break regulation up into 3 different categories? How should investors assess and evaluate opportunities that do face regulation?
4.) What does Adrian believe are the core benefits he has received from investing in over 150 startups? What has Jason recognised with regards to the power law effect when investing? How does Adrian approach pro-rata? What has being on the other side of the table taught Adrian about good and bad actors in the world of VC?
5.) How can angels act as a check/balance on the behaviour of VCs? How does Adrian think about investor behavior in both the good and the bad times? How do the best in the business react in both situations?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adrian's Fave Book: Sapiens
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adrian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Why The Days of Spray and Pray at Seed Are Over, How To Compete In A World of Sequoia Seed Funds & Why Price Doesn't Matter with Dan Scheinman, Angel Investor @ Zoom & Arista Networks
Dan Scheinman is one of the West Coast's leading angel investors with a portfolio including the likes of Zoom.us, Tango.me, TomFoolery (acquired by Yahoo) and Arista Networks, where he also sits on the board. Prior to angel investing, Dan spent 18 years at Cisco in numerous roles including Senior Vice President of Corporate Development where he rebuilt corp dev as a growth enabler for Cisco. Dan was also the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG), an internal startup which successfully developed and marketed a hosted software.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dan made his way into the world of angel investing following leading the M&A and Corp Dev teams at Cisco?
2.) Why does Dan believe that the days of spray and pray angel investing at seed are over? What does the re-entrance of large funds like Sequoia back into seed investing mean for angels and early-stage VCs? How must the early stage alter their approach with the re-entering of these giants?
3.) Why does Dan believe that the No 1 destroyer of value in a VC portfolio is founder drama? How does this lead his thinking when assessing opportunities? How can this be mitigated? Why does Dan believe it is much harder for people over 35 to raise VC funding?
4.) Why does Dan believe that in the best deals price does not matter? What opportunities has Dan passed on a deal due to price, what have been his subsequent learnings? How does Dan approach the aspect of reserve allocation? What is the decision-making process around reserves? What are the reasons he would not take his pro-rata? How does he communicate this to founding teams?
5.) Why are incumbents no longer so willing to acquire for technology and talent? What problems do these early-stage acquisitions cause for their internal dynamics and culture? When done, why are these early-stage acquisitions less and less friendly for the early investors of the company being acquired?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dan's Fave Book: Moneyball
Dan’s Most Recent Investment: Cycognito
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: 3 Questions Founders Must Stress Test VCs with, What Separates the Good From The Great VCs & Why 80% of VC Detract Value From Board Meetings with Seth Sternberg, Founder & CEO @ Honor
Seth Sternberg is the Founder & CEO @ Honor, the startup that provides homecare your family will love. To date Seth has raised over $60m in funding with Honor from the likes of Thrive Capital, a16z, Homebrew and 8VC. Prior to Honor, Seth was the Co-founder & CEO of Meebo, a web communications platform backed by the likes of Sequoia, Khosla and True Ventures. Meebo reached $50M in revenue and close to half of the US internet population before being acquired by Google for $100M in 2012. At Google, Seth became a Product Director working on the Google+ Platform and GoogleX. Seth is also a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Fitbit and Gusto to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Seth made his way into the world of startups with the founding of Sequoia backed, Meebo? How did he transition from social network to homecare provision?
2.) From his experience with Meebo, what are the biggest elements Seth has done differently with the building of Honor? What was successful the first time that he has carried with him to Honor? How does Seth approach the hiring process fundamentally differently the 2nd time around?
3.) Seth has worked with the likes of Sequoia, Khosla, Thrive and more, what are the commonalities that make the best VCs so special? Where does Seth believe VCs can add true value? Where do many seriously detract value? Why does Seth believe that 80% of VCs are actually detrimental to board meetings?
4.) What 3 questions must all founders ask when considering to take on a new investor? What is that investor-founder assessment structure? When there is a disagreement with investors, how does Seth approach this? What is the best method for doing this in as fast and efficient method as possible?
5.) Would Seth agree with David Barrett @ Expensify that we are going through a wave of founders creating companies for the quick flip? How does Seth's 20-year time horizon with Honor affect how he both thinks about hiring and individual scaling within the firm? Why is he so jealous of Google and Facebook with regards to this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Seth’s Fave Book: The Firm
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Seth on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Why Crypto Is The Biggest Disruptor To Hit VC In A Decade, The State of Crypto Today & Why Investing In Decentralized Platforms Requires A New Mental Model with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures
Boris Wertz is the Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures, one of North America's leading early-stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of previous guests Coinbase, AngelList, Shippo, TopHat, Polychain Capital and many more incredible companies. As for Boris, prior to VC, Boris was the COO @ Abe Books, where he led a team of 60 people until their acquisition in 2008 by Amazon. In addition to this, Boris is also a Board Partner with a16z and the lead independent director @ Ether Capital, a Toronto-based technology company aiming to become the central investment hub for the Ethereum ecosystem.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Boris made his way from creating the largest European marketplace for used books to becoming one of North America's leading investors with Version One?
2.) How does Boris analyze where we are at now in the development and hype cycle of crypto? How does it compare to the internet bubble of 99'? Does Boris get concerned by the amount of dumb money entering the space? What resources and tools does Boris advice for people looking to learn the foundations as quickly as possible?
3.) Why does Boris believe you have to apply a new mental model when investing in crypto? What do existing VCs need to do to ensure they are not left behind by the emerging world of crypto? What does Boris believe would need to happen for the existing institutional LP class to embrace crypto?
4.) Does Boris believe existing investors can transition into this space or will vertically specialised funds be the clear winner? If existing investors can, what is required within their partnerships to make this happen? What does Boris make of VCs investing in ICOs? How does Boris evaluate the Telegram ICO?
5.) How does Boris view the future of VC in tandem with the world of crypto and ICOs? What would VCs becoming small cap hedge funds mean for the industry? How would life change? What have been Boris' biggest learnings from watching first hand a16z's attempts to innovate the VC model at scale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Boris' Fave Book: Shoe Dog
Boris' Most Recent Investment: Coinbase
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Boris on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Hims' Andrew Dudum on The Scaling Playbook of The Fastest Growing Mens Wellness Brand, How To Be Truly Innovative In Today's World of Online Marketing & Raising at a $200m Valuation within Year 1
Andrew Dudum is Co-Founder & CEO @ Hims, the fastest growing men’s health and wellness brand that has raised over $45m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Thrive Capital, Forerunner Ventures, IVP, Redpoint and SV angel just to name a few. Andrew is also co-founder and General Partner at Atomic, a venture-builder backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and many of the world’s best investors. Prior to Atomic and Hims, Andrew led Product at TokBox.com, the leader in web-based communication. In 2012 TokBox was acquired by the global telecommunications company Telefonica ($TEF).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andrew made his way into the world of startups, came to build a venture builder backed by Thiel and Andreesen before starting the fastest growing men's health and wellness brand in Hims?
2.) How does Andrew view the world of online and offline marketing in today's proliferated D2C space? What were the core elements that allowed Hims to achieve such success with their branding? How does Andrew respond to suggestions that there is a lack of free and open distribution due to incumbents paying up for traditional channels making CAC unachievable for startups? How does Andrew look to solve for this?
3.) What does Andrew believe it is that has allowed Hims to execute faster than any other D2C brand in history? How does Andrew distinguish between people and process when considering the scaling at different stages of the business? What are the pros and cons of having such constraints on headcount? When is the right time to pour fuel on the fire?
4.) Hims raised their last round at a $200m valuation in less than a year of operating, how did Andrew evaluate this one? Does this not effectively price Hims out of the majority of M&A? What leads Andrew's thesis with his suggestion that he thought the valuation was "quite frankly, a great price for investors"? What advice would Andrew have for founders entering the fundraising process?
5.) Andrew is also the co-founder @ Atomic, so what really is a venture builder? How have Atomic built a framework around idea generation? How do Atomic determine which ideas to pursue and which to disregard? How does data and benchmarking play a central role in this process?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andrew’s Fave Book: Creativity Inc
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andrew on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Andy McLoughlin is Partner @ Uncork Capital, formerly SoftTech and one of the leading early-stage funds on the West Coast. In their incredible portfolio, they have the likes of Fitbit, SendGrid, PostMates, Front, PoshMark, Eventbrite and many more. As for Andy, he loves to invest in "unsexy ideas" with stellar teams and has led deals in the likes of Postmates, LaunchDarkly, Human Interest (previously Captain 401), and Focal Systems just to name a few. Prior to VC, Andy co-founded Huddle, an enterprise collaboration platform which raised more than $80M in venture funding before its acquisition in 2017. Andy also has a stellar angel portfolio with the likes of Buffer, Intercom and Pipedrive all angel investments.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andy made the transition from Founder of one of the UK's hottest startups to one of the leading early-stage VCs in Silicon Valley?
2.) Why did Softtech decide to make the big decision to rebrand to Uncork several years into the journey? What is core to successfully relaunching a VC brand to the ecosystem?
3.) Andy likes to back "non-obvious founders" building "non-sexy businesses". What does Andy mean by "non-obvious founder"? How do they tend to behave differently to more seasoned serial entrepreneur founders from the valley? What does a "non-sexy business look like to Andy"? Why does he see such inherent opportunity within these segments?
4.) How does Andy evaluate the challenge of immensely long sales cycles within these industries? How can these be mitigated and measured against? How does this affect Andy's thinking on the right amount of runway to raise for? How does Andy assess the often issue of regulation? How does Andy distinguish between viable/ non-viable?
5.) How does Andy assess VC value add? Where does Andy believe he can provide the most value to his portfolio? Why does Andy believe startups are not just competing against other plays in their space but every startup in the valley?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andy’s Fave Book: Venture Deals
Andy’s Most Recent Investment: Fritz
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Why VCs Are Wrong About Bootstrapped Founders, How Content Can Be Used As A Key Customer Acquisition Tool & How To Use Humour When "S*** Hits The Fan" with Jesse Genet, Founder & CEO @ Lumi
Jesse Genet is the Founder & CEO @ Lumi, the startup that is used by thousands of e-commerce companies to get world-class packaging at unbeatable prices. To date, Jesse has raised close to $10m in VC funding from some of the best in the business and old friends of the show including Satya @Homebrew, Kirsten @ Forerunner, Spark Capital, Lowercase, Ludlow and more incredible names. Prior to Lumi, Jesse founded Inkodye, a bootstrapped business that Jesse scaled to 7 figures in revenue and was sold in retail stores around the world.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jesse made her way into the world of startups and VC having bootstrapped her prior business to 7 figures in revenue and being sold in 1,500 stores?
2.) Given that Lumi is Jesse's first VC backed business, does this make Jesse a first-time founder? How did the bootstrapping to 7 figures in revenue with her last business, influence her philosophy and mindset with Lumi? What has Jesse done differently as a result? What are the dangers that Jesse was aware of and looks out for?
3.) What types of companies does an active content strategy make significant sense for? What are the core benefits of a well-executed content strategy? What have been the core pillars to Jesse's success with content? Where does Jesse see many firms going wrong with their content strategy? How does Jesse look to measure the ROI from content?
4.) How was the fundraising experience for Jesse, given the "non-sexy" sector of packaging and supply chains? How did Jesse determine whether an investor was engaged or not? What does Jesse think she did well in the fundraising process? What would she like to improve for the next round? What is the common stereotype that VCs attribute to founders with bootstrapping experience?
5.) How does Jesse think about the benefits of her team being small vs her 10,000+ incumbent challenger teams? Why does this mean she has the advantage? How does Jesse manage the expectations of her employees when no one could do 1/10 of what Jesse does?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jesse's Fave Book: Gone with the Wind
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jesse on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam - as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours - tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Why Follow-On Investments Are Always A Better Investment, Why Spray and Pray Investing Is Like The Stock Market & Why Startups Need A Board From Day One with Jerry Neumann
Jerry Neumann is one of New York's leading angel investors with a portfolio including the likes of The Trade Desk (IPO: 2016), Datadog and Flurry (acquired by Yahoo) just to name a few. Prior to angel investing, Jerry built the first open market for the pricing and exchange of real-time consumer data in the form of Root Markets. Jerry was also the Managing Director @ Omnicom's Venture Capital Division where he enjoyed an incredible 5 IPOs from the portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jerry made his way into the world of VC in the 90s and why it was difficult to lose money in venture at that time?
2.) Why does Jerry believe that the vast portfolio construction model is "wrong" and a "dead end"? In what circumstances does Jerry believe "spray and pray" investing can work? Why does Jerry believe you can only have as many companies as you can actively help? How does this lead Jerry's thinking on his own portfolio construction?
3.) Why does Jerry believe that startups must have a board from Day 1? What are the inherent benefits of having a board so early? In the earliest of stages, how should those board meetings be run? Who are the best board members Jerry has worked with? Why were they so exceptional? How does Jerry think about building board intimacy?
4.) Why does Jerry disagree with the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley that price does not matter because the exit will either be huge or a zero? How has Jerry seen the best firms in their thinking on market price vs indicated discount price? How has Jerry's thinking on price sensitivity changed over the years?
5.) Why does Jerry believe that the follow-on investment is always a much better investment? How does the risk-reward ratio change from initial to follow-on investment? How does Jerry assess and prioritize future financing risk when investing in an opportunity? How does he mitigate that as much as possible?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jerry's Fave Book: Console Wars by Blake Harris
Jerry’s Most Recent Investment: Edmit
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jerry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
We also speak about Movidiam - as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours - tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.
20VC: Why Your Board Are Right 50% of The Time, Biggest Lessons From Being Mentored By Reed Hastings & Raising $130m in Funding and The Balance Between Growth and Capital Efficiency with James Reinhart, Founder & CEO @ ThredUp
James Reinhart is the Founder & CEO @ ThredUp, the world's largest online thrift store, and consignment store. To date, ThredUp has raised over $130m in VC funding from many friends of the show including Tim @ Redpoint, Patricia @ Trinity, Eric @ Founder Collective and Ian @ Goldman Sachs just to name a few. As for James, prior to ThredUp he was a Goldsmith Fellow in Social Enterprise at HBS and a Bill George Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School. Before that, James co-founded Beacon Education Network, a charter management organization serving low-income students on California's Central Coast.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How James' childhood dream of being an architect changed to founding the world's largest online thrift store?
2.) Tim Hale @ Redpoint: "James is one of the most naturally talented leaders I have ever worked with". So what does great leadership mean to James? How has James seen the way he communicates and inspires change with the scaling of the company? What has James observed as the core characteristics that great leaders share?
3.) Why does James believe that investors are inherently wary of the female and child clothing market? How did James see the funding rounds differ from round to round? What did James really look for in his early investors? How does investor value-add change with time and scaling?
4.) What have been James' core learnings in managing a board with transparency and efficiency? James has said before "your board is right 50% of the time". How does James look to determine which 50% is right vs wrong? What is a time when James has gone against the decision of the board? How did the situation result?
5.) Having raised over $130m in funding, how does James think about the balance between aggressive growth and capital efficiency? How does James assess when is the right time to pour fuel on the fire? How does James react to the mindset of "sustainable growth"? How do investors think about capital efficiency?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
James’ Fave Book: Sapiens
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and James on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne
Chris Olsen is the Founding Partner @ Drive Capital, the venture firm that believes the Midwest is the opportunity of our lifetime with more entrepreneurs building billion-dollar companies in the Midwest than in the last 50 years combined. Since inception in 2012, Drive have built an exceptional portfolio including the likes of Duolingo, FarmLogs, LeadPages and Udacity. As for Chris, prior to founding Drive he was a Partner @ Sequoia Capital on the West Coast where he learned the craft from some of the very best in the business. Before that he spent time at both TCV and UBS.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris came to found the largest venture fund in the midwest, Drive, from being a Partner @ Sequoia Capital and learning the craft of venture there?
2.) Why does Chris believe that the biggest trend we will live through is the decentralisation away from Silicon Valley? What are the essential ingredients an ecosystem requires in order to foster this thriving tech hub? What does Chris believe it is fundamentally essential for companies to be in close proximity to?
3.) How does the lack of venture funds in the Midwest affect Chris' views on pricing? Would Chris agree with Peter Fenton, "never turn down a company based on valuation, it is a mental trap"? How does Chris look to differentiate between expensive and too expensive?
4.) How does Chris think about reserve allocation with Drive? What framework does Drive adopt to determine where to allocate reserve dollars? How does the shortage of follow-on investors in the midwest impact Chris' approach to follow on financing? What level does a company need to be in order to attract attention from larger growth funds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris’ Fave Book: The Old Man and The Sea
Chris' Most Recent Investment: Duolingo
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chris on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learnings The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne
Chris Olsen is the Founding Partner @ Drive Capital, the venture firm that believes the Midwest is the opportunity of our lifetime with more entrepreneurs building billion-dollar companies in the Midwest than in the last 50 years combined. Since inception in 2012, Drive have built an exceptional portfolio including the likes of Duolingo, FarmLogs, LeadPages and Udacity. As for Chris, prior to founding Drive he was a Partner @ Sequoia Capital on the West Coast where he learned the craft from some of the very best in the business. Before that he spent time at both TCV and UBS.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris came to found the largest venture fund in the midwest, Drive, from being a Partner @ Sequoia Capital and learning the craft of venture there?
2.) Why does Chris believe that the biggest trend we will live through is the decentralisation away from Silicon Valley? What are the essential ingredients an ecosystem requires in order to foster this thriving tech hub? What does Chris believe it is fundamentally essential for companies to be in close proximity to?
3.) How does the lack of venture funds in the Midwest affect Chris' views on pricing? Would Chris agree with Peter Fenton, "never turn down a company based on valuation, it is a mental trap"? How does Chris look to differentiate between expensive and too expensive?
4.) How does Chris think about reserve allocation with Drive? What framework does Drive adopt to determine where to allocate reserve dollars? How does the shortage of follow-on investors in the midwest impact Chris' approach to follow on financing? What level does a company need to be in order to attract attention from larger growth funds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris’ Fave Book: The Old Man and The Sea
Chris' Most Recent Investment: Duolingo
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chris on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success
Marco Zappacosta is the Founder & CEO @ Thumbtack, the startup that allows you to find local professionals for pretty much anything. To date, Thumbtack has raised over $270m in funding from some of the very best including Sequoia Capital, CapitalG (Google Growth), Ali and Hadi Partovi, Scott and Cyan Banister and Jason Calacanis. Due to Marco's incredible success scaling Thumbtack to helping millions of Americans today, he has been recognized by Forbes as 30 under 30 and Thumbtack was recently acknowledged as one of GlassDoor’s best places to work.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Marco made his way into the world of startups and came to create one of the most prominent marketplaces of the day in Thumbtack?
2.) What does Marco mean when he says "founders must treat board members as employees"? How does Marco view the optimal structure for a board meeting? What are the core elements that founders must takeaway? Where do most first time founders go wrong with board management?
3.) Thumbtack has raised over $250m in VC funding, how can one look to achieve both operational efficiency and capital efficiency with such large injections of capital? What is core to maintaining this sense of frugality despite such large investments? How does Marco think about when is the right time to raise that warchest round?
4.) How does Marco suggest that marketplace founders can entice the supply side in the early days? How has Marco seen his supply-side acquisition change and develop with time? What has worked and what has not? Does Marco agree with Leah Busque that in marketplace, the NPS for one side will always be down?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Marco’s Fave Book: The Wizard and The Prophet
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Marco on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: How a16z Uses NPS To Create Better Founder Experiences, Why Intellectual Curiosity Is The Most Important Investor Trait & Creating A Fund To Last Through The Ages with Zal Bilimoria, Founding Partner @ Refactor Capital
Zal Bilimoria is Founding Partner @ Refactor Capital, one of Silicon Valley's newest entrants to the early stage scene with a $50m fund looking to back founders solving fundamental human problems. Prior to co-founding Refactor, Zal was a Partner @ a16z where he co-led investments in Omada Health, Branch.co, AltSchool, Honor, and more, while helping to launch the firm's Bio Fund. Before becoming an investor, Zal spent 10 years as a PM at Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn. He worked on emerging markets for Windows, became one of the first monetization team members at YouTube, and then became the 1st Head of Mobile at Netflix and helped start the Sales Solutions business at LinkedIn.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Zal made his way into the world of VC with a16z from the very corporate worlds of Microsoft, Google, Netflix and LinkedIn?
2.) What were Zal's 3 biggest learnings from seeing the internal processes and scaling of a16z? How does a16z use NPS in such a compelling way that it automatically improves founder treatment and interaction within the firm? What was it about a16z that led Zal to believe being insanely curious is the biggest skill of an investor?
3.) What are the signs and leading indicators that a scientist has the mental plasticity and ability to translate into a CEO and business leader? What are the biggest challenges as a VC in assessing whether this plasticity is present? Why does David believe that the very best founders are looking to solve "fundamental human problems"?
4.) Over the last few years we have seen an explosion of deep tech capital, Elad Gil suggested this reminded him of the 2007 cleantech days, does Zal agree with this suggestion? How does Zal think about the common concern of having to carry companies for longer given the extended milestones to prove progress?
5.) Zal has said before his goal is "to build a seed firm to last among the 100s of others", what does Zal believe is crucial to this sustainability of fund and brand? How does Zal evaluate the insanely crowded seed market today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Zal’s Fave Book: Seveneves
Zal’s Most Recent Investment: Solugen
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Zal on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why You Have To Raise $100m+ If You Want To Go Big Today, The 5 Fundamentals To Starting and Scaling A Successful Marketplace & Why Female Founders Under-Promise and Over-Deliver with Paul Hsiao, Founding Partner @ Canvas Ventures
Paul Hsiao is a Founding Partner @ Canvas Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's leading and newer entrants to the Series A scene. At Canvas, Paul has made investments in the likes of Everwise, Fluxx Labs, Roofstock, Thrive Global, Transfix, and Zola. Before founding Canvas, Paul was a partner at NEA, where he led an early-stage investment in Houzz, as well as, had the privilege of helping eight companies go public on the NYSE or NASDAQ and seventeen companies with successful M&A exits during his 10-year tenure with the firm. Prior to VC, Paul was an entrepreneur with the founding of Mazu Networks, a pioneer in network security that was acquired by Riverbed Technologies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Paul made his way into the world of VC with NEA and got Scott Sandell as his first mentor in VC?
2.) Question from Oren Zeev: Having been a partner at both, how does Paul compare the culture and strategy of two such differing firms of Canvas vs NEA? How does Paul's thinking on exit expectations and requirements change with the change of fund? How does a smaller fund fundamentally change the way you think about investing?
3.) What does Paul believe are the 5 fundamentals of building and scaling a successful marketplace? Why does Paul believe that it is the supply side that tells you if your marketplace is or is not working? Why does Paul believe stubbornness is good in marketplace founders?
4.) Why does Paul believe that raising $100m is critical for new companies if they want to go big? What does this mean for capital efficiency? What does this mean for ownership with multiple dilutive rounds impacting investor returns? How should founders then think about winning the "capital arms race"? What are the exceptions to these rules?
5.) Female founders receive 2.19% of VC funding, however, Paul has many more female founders in portfolio than the industry. Why does Paul think this is? What would Paul like to see change in the distribution of VC funds? What is the required steps to make this happen?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Paul’s Fave Book: The Innovator's Dilemma
Paul’s Most Recent Investment: Thrive Global, Roofstock
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Paul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
Darian Shirazi is the Founder & CEO @ Radius, the startup that provides you with not just data but truth allowing you to gain clarity to reach and convert your best B2B prospects. To date, Darian has raised over $105m in VC funding with Radius from some of the very best in the business including our friends at Founders Fund, 8VC, Salesforce Ventures and rockstars like Jared Leto and Charlie Songhurst. Prior to Radius, Darian has enjoyed roles such as first external engineering hire at Facebook and working on the "Sell Your Item" team at eBay. Darian has also made several angel investments in the likes of MessageMe, Sprig and Try.com just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Darian made his way into the world of tech as Facebook's first ever intern at the age of 17 and how that led to the founding of Radius?
2.) According to Joe Lonsdale @ 8VC, "Darian is one of the most respected founders and CEOs in the valley". How does Darian define great CEOship? What have been the commonalities he has seen in the great leaders he has engaged with from Mark @ Facebook to Mark Pincus?
3.) How did Darian approach the fundraising strategy for the $85m he has raised with Radius? How does Darian believe that founders can test quickly whether an investor is truly interested? Why is it so important to be fundraise as fast as possible? If an investor could only provide Darian one thing, what would it be and wh?
4.) How does Darian respond to investors that suggest founders should not be actively angel investing, as Darian is? What operational benefits does Darian gain from angel investing? How does Darian think about angel portfolio construction and specialisation? How has Darian seen investor attitudes alter when it comes to capital efficiency?
5.) As an early Bitcoin miner, how does Darian evaluate the world of crypto today? Why does Darian believe BTC has reached escape velocity compared to other currencies? Why was Darian skeptical on Ethereum for so long? What are Ethereum's ongoing challenges? Why does Facebook have the chance to dominate the world of crypto?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Darian’s Fave Book: Sapiens
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Darian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: Greylock's Jerry Chen on The 2 Fundamentals To Assessing Startup Risk, Why Good Investors Have To Be Optimistic & Why VCs Get In Trouble When They Move Outside Their "Strike Zone"
Jerry Chen is a Partner @ Greylock Partners, one of the world's most successful VC funds with prior investments in the likes of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, AirBnB, Dropbox, AppDynamics, Coinbase and many more incredible companies. As for Jerry, Jerry invests in entrepreneurs building new enterprise SaaS applications and in all aspects of AI and cloud infrastructure. Jerry currently sits on the Board of Docker, Cato Networks, Gladly, Rhumbix, Spoke, and Blend. Prior to joining Greylock, Jerry was Vice President of Cloud and Application Services at VMware where he was part of the executive team that scaled the company from 250 to over 15,000 employees and $5B in revenue. Check out Jerry's recent writing on Risk: The Game of Strategic Investment here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jerry made his way into the world of VC with Greylock from being on the exec team at VMWare, responsible for their scaling from 250 to over 15,000 people?
2.) What does Jerry believe are the different frameworks for how investors should measure risk? Why does Jerry believe to be a good investor, one has to be an optimist? What does Jerry find the most challenging element of risk assessment? What types of risk can Jerry tolerate and which can he not in a potential investment?
3.) How does Jerry break the theme of risk down into 2 very different categories? How does one define "uncertainty" in an investment? How does this compare to "probability"? How does both "uncertainty and probability" alter when comparing differing sectors? Does Jerry think that current pricing takes fair account of both "uncertainty and probability"?
4.) What does Jerry mean when he says, "you have to have product go-to-market fit"? Why does Jerry believe that platforms shifts are fundamentally distribution model shifts? Where does Jerry see an inherent opportunity within these net new nodes of distribution shift?
5.) How does Jerry evaluate the SaaS world today of bottoms up or top down? Why does Jerry believe that if you are budget additive, bottoms up with small ACVs is the current strategy? What does this mean for those that are budget replacements, both in sales model and ACV?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jerry’s Fave Book: Skin In The Game
Jerry's Most Recent Investment: Blend
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jerry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley is a global law firm built around supporting start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them. Now we have spoken before about their forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, and forming more VC funds than any other law firm in the world but Cooley also represents more than 6,000 high-growth startups across the globe – through the full company life cycle. They are the #1 law firm for VC-backed exits (M&A and IPO) ranked by PitchBook, and since 2014 has represented more companies in their IPOs than any other law firm. Simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at Cooleygo.com.
20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
Rachel Drori is the Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest, the direct-to-consumer brand that delivers real, unprocessed, unrefined foods in the most convenient format possible: frozen. To date, they have raised over $43m in funding from the likes of former guest Alex Taussig @ Lightspeed, Collaborative Fund and future 20VC guest Beth Ferreira who sits on the board. As for Rachel, prior to starting Daily Harvest, Rachel harnessed her skills as a customer-centric marketing executive, leading teams at Gilt Groupe, American Express, and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rachel made her way from the corporate world of American Express and The Four Seasons to founding Daily harvest, looking to change the eating habits of millions?
2.) Why did Rachel decide to deliberately raise small Seed and Series A rounds? What does Rachel believe these capital constraints allow companies in the early days? How did Rachel prioritize where to spend and where not to? How would Rachel advise emerging startup founders when it comes to capital efficiency today?
3.) Rachel recently raised $43m Series B, how did Rachel see the rounds differ from round to round? Why does Rachel believe it is imperative to VC date before the fundraising process begins? Why was Rachel's Series A very unconventional in the modern world of fundraising? What did Rachel look for most in the investors she chose from round to round? How is that different considering her single founder status?
4.) Question from Alex Taussig: How has Rachel seen the NYC ecosystem develop and evolve since the founding of Daily Harvest? Would Rachel agree that there remains a lack of early stage conviction investors in NYC? What are NYC's biggest strengths and then biggest weaknesses?
5.) Rachel has said before, "fake it till you make it" when was the last time Rachel did this and what was the outcome? Rachel also said previously, "ask for forgiveness not permission", when was the most recent occassion of this and what did it result in?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rachel’s Fave Book: Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food: Volume 1
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rachel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: How Great VCs Handle Themselves In An M&A Process, Why M&A Has Become The Primary Method of Exit & How The Best M&A Teams Operationalise Their Process with James Loftus, Corporate Development Lead @ Square
James Loftus is Corporate Development Lead @ Square where he has made multiple acquisitions and investments including the likes of acquiring OrderAhead and investing in Eventbrite. Prior to Square, James was responsible for strategy, business development and operations at STX Digital. Before that James was a Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz where he led strategic coverage for the firm’s 45+ consumer-facing portfolio, advising them on everything from capital raising to partnerships to M&A. Prior to VC with a16z, James was VP & Head of Corporate Development @ Yahoo and also spent time in the M&A team at Google.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How James made his way into the world of corporate development and M&A with Andreessen and how that translated to leading Square's M&A efforts today?
2.) Why does James fundamentally disagree with the notion that "companies are bought and not sold"? What are the nuances behind the scenes that make this wrong?
3.) 514 VC backed exits in 2017, 499 were M&A, so how does James assess the M&A landscape at present? Is it now the undeniable leader in primary exit method? How does James believe we will see the M&A market evolve over the next year? Who are the new entrants? How will their entering effect both volume and pricing of M&A?
4.) How does James respond to Paul Graham's article titled "Don't Talk To Corp Dev"? How does James and Square think about operationalizing the tracking of companies in the landscape? When is the right time for startups to relationship build with corp dev? How does James most like to interact with VCs in the processes? What makes the best so good?
5.) Paul Graham has also called the process "grueling", would James agree with this? What does James do to minimise pain and friction both for startup and acquirer? How does product play a pivotal role in this "grueling" process? How should cor dev also be thinking about the emotional and sentimental elements of selling companies?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
James’s Fave Book: A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters
James’s Most Recent Investment: Eventbrite
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and James on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy
Dan Lewis is the Founder & CEO @ Convoy, the startup that really is the future of freight with trucking services powered by technology to drive reliability, efficiency and insights. To date they have raised over $80m in funding from some of the world's best-known investors and individuals including Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Greylock, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Drew Houston, Kevin Systrom and leading angels, Ali and Hadi Partovi. Before Convoy, Dan served as general manager of new shopping experiences at Amazon and spent time at Google and Microsoft in a number of logistics-related roles.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel first fell in love with the logistics space as a little boy, made his move into the world of tech with Google and Microsoft and came to found Convoy?
2.) How does Dan truly define the differences between linear and non-linear businesses? Why does Dan believe that startup timing is like surfing? How must founders think about this through the different stages of the business?
3.) What was Dan's strategy for choosing the right investors and how did he think about board composition? How can investors be used to build customer trust? How does Dan analyze and look to enhance board chemistry? What was a time for Dan when he actively went against the advice of the board? How did that play out?
4.) Why did Dan accept so many investors at the seed round? What changed between rounds that made Dan want to go big with the $62m Series B? Does Dan agree with Reid Hoffman, "if you can raise the money, do"? Why did Dan choose YC Continuity Fund as the lead growth investor of choice? What were the benefits?
5.) Why does Dan believe that scaling the first initial customers is the hardest of all? Why does Dan believe that a culture of experimentation is key across functions? How does Dan think about his own scaling as CEO? How has he seen his role change with the growth of the firm? What have been the biggest challenges of this personal learning?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dan’s Fave Book: The Stranger by Albert Camus
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Finding VC Partners That Look Beyond The Numbers, The Black Box of VC Secrets That Needs To Be Shared & The 1,000 Reasons A VC Won't Invest In You When It Has Nothing To Do With You with Leah Busque, General Partner @ Fuel Capital
Leah Busque is a General Partner @ Fuel Capital, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed funds with the most incredible portfolio including many previous 20VC guests Ryan @ Flexport, Florian @ Mesosphere, Alex @ Clearbit and Dan @ Convoy (episode Friday). As for Leah, prior to VC, she was a pioneer of the sharing economy with her founding of TaskRabbit, one of the leading online labor marketplaces in the US, raising over $37m in the process before their sale to IKEA last year. Due to this incredible success, Leah has been named to Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business".
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Leah made her way from sitting on the couch discussing dog food with her husband to founding TaskRabbit and how that translated into the world of VC today?
2.) How did Leah's time in operations affect:
- Question from Sean @ Shasta: the founders Leah backs and why she chooses them?
- Question from Craig @ Collaborative: the business models and unit economics Leah backs and why she backs them?
3.) Leah has said before that "authenticity and transparency between VC and founder are now table stakes", what more can be done to improve the VC product? How did Leah select the investors she worked with on TaskRabbit? How can founders truly determine "founder friendly" VCs?
4.) What have been Leah's biggest surprises on her move into the world of VC? What elements has Leah found most challenging? How has Leah looked to scale that learning curve?
5.) What does a successful marketplace look like? How does one know when is the right time to really scale a marketplace? What is the inflection point? How can marketplaces be efficient with their unit economics from day 1? How does one balance the NPS of the supply side with the NPS of the demand side?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Leah’s Fave Book: Founders at Work
Leah’s Most Recent Investment: Bark: Parental Control Phone Tracker App
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Mike Silagadze is the Founder & CEO @ Top Hat, the market leader in student engagement software, and is used by millions of students at three-quarters of the top 1,000 colleges and universities in North America. To date, they have raised over $47m in VC funding from many friends and former guests on the show including Albert Wenger @ USV, Boris Wertz @ Version One, Uncork Capital, Felicis and Emergence just to name a few. As for Mike, prior to TopHat, he was a developer at MioVision Technologies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his way into the world of startups and came to realise the current method of learning was so broken?
2.) Why does Mike believe that investors have an automatic dislike to edtech? Why does he believe it is the most difficult to market to enter? Why is go to market one of the biggest challenges? How can on innovate on this antiquated go-to-market to enable the rapid scaling required? How did TopHat achieve this?
3.) Why does Mike believe that most companies hire in fundamentally the wrong way? How does Mike balance the complex elements of raw IQ over culture when hiring? If there was one predictive factor Mike uses to hire, what is it? What is the framework and methodology Mike has constructed to ensure the best hires?
4.) What were the biggest mistakes Mike made in scaling out the sales team? Why does Mike think he made them? If he were to advise a younger self, what would be the biggest advice and tips with regards to scaling the sales team, from an engineer's mindset?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Lightspeed's Alex Taussig on VC Risk Mentality, The Current State of Retail & The Mechanics of Cash Flow
Alex Taussig is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the leading firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Max Levchin’s Affirm, The Honest Company and many more incredible companies. As for Alex, at Lightspeed, he has made investments in Zola, Daily Harvest, Vector & Poncho. Before moving to the West Coast, Alex spent 7 years at Highland Capital Partners, where, as a Partner, he made investments in thredUp, JauntVR and RentJuice (acq by Zillow) and was involved in several IPOs. Alex is also the writer of a fantastic newsletter: Drinking From The Firehose.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex was inspired by being at Harvard at the time of Facebook to make the move into tech and how that landed a role in VC with Highland Capital Partners?
2.) Why is Alex optimistic about the current state of the retail environment, despite media skepticism? What are the value propositions that physical retail provides online retailers (Warby Parker, Real Real etc)? How does Alex believe we will see the re-platforming of retail in the future?
3.) In today's incumbent world, how can consumer apps demonstrate breakout growth? What does Alex mean when he discusses the importance of product channel fit? Once found, should fuel be poured on the fire to exploit the fit? What would suggest sustainable vs non-sustainable product channel fit to Alex? Who has done this particularly well?
4.) Why does Alex believe that Amazon's cash flow is one of the main reasons for it's success? What is the key working capital metric? How does this unpack into 3 core elements? What is "negative working capital"? What are the core benefits of this? How can startups use these mechanics to use cash flow as their prime advantage?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: The Divine Comedy
Alex’s Most Recent Investment: The Daily Harvest
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: 2 Levers To Fundraising: FOMO & Leverage and How To Use Them, How To Implement "A Sustainable Growth Mindset" & How To Put VCs To Work For You with Leore Avidar @ Lob
Leore Avidar is the Founder & CEO @ Lob, the startup that provides a powerful suite of API's to deliver robust automation and scale for anything with a stamp. To date, Lob has raised close to $30m in funding from some of the greats of the investing world including Floodgate, Initialized, First Round and most recently YC's Continuity Fund. As for Leore, prior to Lob he spent time in the technical business development team at Amazon Web Services and before that was a derivatives trader on Wall St with Citigroup.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Leore made the move from the world of trading on Wall St to founding one the game-changing companies in the world of API's, Lob?
2.) What does Leore believe are the 2 levers that founders must use when fundraising? How can founders create a sense of VC FOMO when raising their round? How can founders enter a round with leverage? What does always having the upper hand in fundraising look like?
3.) How does Leore define "sustainable growth"? Why does Leore believe that most fast-growing companies do go bankrupt? What is Leore's biggest fear with regards to "sustainable growth"? How does Leore advise founders to think about macro funding conditions when operating their company and thinking about expenditure?
4.) How has Leore seen his role as CEO change with the scaling of the company? Why does Leore believe the main job of the CEO is to hire and replace yourself? What have been the biggest challenges for Leore in the scaling of himself?
5.) Leore wants to create a company where people stay for 30+ years, what are the foundations to a workplace culture with such deep routes? What must be done from management to ensure this? How does Leore approach accountability and responsibility amongst the team?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Leore’s Fave Book: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leore on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Why, How and When To Think About Growth Teams, The Right Way To Think About Network Effects & Scaling from Phase 1 To Phase 2 of Startup Life with Anu Hariharan, Partner @ YC Continuity Fund
Anu Hariharan is a Partner @ Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, the growth stage investing arm of Y Combinator that has made investments in the likes of Segment, Lob (coming on Friday), Convoy, where Anu is a board member and RazorPay. Prior to YC, Anu was an investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she worked actively with the management teams of portfolio companies including Airbnb, Instacart, Medium, OfferUp and Udacity. Before that Anu was a Principal at The Boston Consulting Group's Private Equity practice where she led multiple growth equity due diligences in the consumer and fintech sector.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anu made her way from engineer to consultant to Andreesen investment partner to now, one of the leading members of YC's growth stage investing vehicle?
2.) How does Anu truly define "network effect"? Where does Anu think startups most commonly misunderstand network effects? Which form of network effect does Anu find most exciting? Why? How has this evolved over the years?
3.) What are the 2 core indicators that show the sustainability of network effect? Looking at past examples of products and founders, who has best executed on this? What are the signs that founding teams fundamentally analyze and optimize network effect virality?
4.) Why does Anu believe that growth teams will be a fundamental requirement for companies in the future? What are the 2 mistakes startups make when establishing their growth team? How does one know when is the right time to build their growth team? What are the core challenges in scaling growth teams? How does this drive decision-making?
5.) How does Anu describe "Phase 1" and "Phase 2" of company scaling? What transition must the CEo adopt when making this scaling transition? Comparing founders, what are the commonalities in those that succeed with the transition and those that do not?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anu’s Fave Book: Grit by Angela Duckworth
Anu’s Most Recent Investment: Convoy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anu on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: The Right Way For Founders To Think About Capital Efficiency, How To Create A Culture of Continuous Learning & The Secret To Talent Assessment and Optimisation with Mariam Naficy, Founder & CEO @ Minted
Mariam Naficy has pioneered consumer Internet models since 1998, when she co-founded the first online cosmetics retailer, Eve.com, which was sold for over $100 million. Today, Mariam is the Founder & CEO @ Minted, the startup that uses crowdsourcing and analytics to bring the best designs to market faster than anyone. To date, Mariam has raised &89m in VC funding with Minted from some of the best in the business including our favourites Floodgate, Benchmark, Menlo, Slow, Ridge Ventures and then prominent individuals such as Marissa Meyer and Jeremy Stoppelman. In addition, Mariam sits on the Board of Yelp and Every Mother Counts.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mariam made her way into startups from investment banking and came to sell her first startup, Eve, for $100m in cash within a year before founding Minted?
2.) What were the biggest lessons Mariam learnt from Eve and applied to Minted? Why did Mariam not want to pursue VC funding in the beginning with Minted? What was the inflection point in not taking VC to taking VC funds?
3.) How did Mariam think about capital efficiency in the early days of Minted? How did Mariam see that change with the sudden injection of VC capital? In the heavily funded landscape today, would Mariam have raised VC money from the start, if starting today?
4.) Mariam is a master of internal upscaling, what is the secret to creating a culture of internal continuous learning? Why is rotation within the company roles such a core element? How has Mariam's assessment of people talent changed over the years?
5.) What would Mariam say is her greatest strength and he greatest weakness as a CEO? How has she seen this change with her 20 years of founding companies? How did having children change her outlook on managing people?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mariam’s Fave Book: The Effective Executive
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mariam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Why The Current Crop Of VC Does Not Understand Design, Why Product Market Fit Is A Liquid Not A Solid & How Graduates Can Optimise Their Career for Personal Development with Steve Vassallo, General Partner @ Foundation Capital
Steve Vassallo is a General Partner @ Foundation Capital where he sits or has sat on the boards of Pocket (acquired by Mozilla), PrivateCore (acquired by Facebook), Sunrun [RUN], Sentient Energy and many more. Prior to Foundation, Steve was Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering @ Ning, the social platform he helped launch in 2004. Before that, Steve was a project leader at IDEO, where he developed more than a dozen successful products for companies including Cisco, Nike, BMW and McDonalds. In addition, this year, Steve published The Way to Design, a guidebook for becoming a designer founder and building a design-centric company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Steve made his way into the world of VC with Foundation from the land of product management?
2.) Why does Steve believe we have seen design move from a styling exercise to the main stage and a foundation of product? How does Steve feel the current crop of VC's analyse and appreciate design? What are they getting wrong? What can be done to engender a new sense of appreciation for good design?
3.) What advice would Steve give to a young person entering the workforce considering founding a startup, joining one or joining an incumbent? Where do they make their biggest mistakes? What is the optimal choice for learning and personal growth?
4.) Why does Steve have a problem with the term "product-market fit"? Where do people misunderstand about PMF? What is one looking to achieve with product market fit? How does Joe Gebbia @ Airbnb best present this idea?
5.)Steve has worked with dozens of 1st time founders over the last decade, what are the commonalities in the mistakes they make? What advice does Steve hear most commonly given that he disagrees with?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steve’s Fave Book: Poor Charlie's Almanack
Steve’s Most Recent Investment: forusall
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Steve on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: The Fundamentals Of Optimising The Fundraising Process, SAFE's vs Priced Equity Rounds & Why Hiring Is Really A Big Data Problem with Chris Hutchins, Founder @ Grove & Former Partner @ Google Ventures
Chris Hutchins is the Founder & CEO @ Grove, the startup reinventing financial planning allowing you to reach your goals with personalized financial advice. Just last week they announced their seed round from some of the best in the business including First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, Box Group and SV Angel. Prior to Grove, Chris was an Partner & EiR with Google Ventures and before that co-founded Milk (acq by Google) alongside Kevin Rose.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris made the move from Google acquired Founder to Partner @ Google Ventures to now, founding First Round backed, Grove?
2.) What does Chris believe are the foundational elements founders must consider pre-fundraise? How does Chris suggest founders structure the process? How important is a fundraise deadline? How does Chris advise founders on getting warm intros, what is best?
3.) How can founders really optimise VC interactions? What is the biggest mistake founders make when meeting VCs? What should founders be looking to take from these meetings? How transparent should founders be about their meetings with other investors?
4.) What are Chris' view on the rise of SAFE's vs priced equity rounds? In what situations do SAFE's make sense? How did Chris think about this with his own fundraise recently? Does Chris believe there is too much money in the ecosystem? Where are there gaps and where is there overfunding?
5.) Why does Chris think hiring is a "big data problem"? Where do many founders make mistakes in recruiting in the early days? What hacks can be done to ensure a quality stream of candidates continuously?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris' Fave Book: Happy Money
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chris on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on Being The First Investor in Snapchat, Why The Pessimism Around Consumer Is Wrong & Why Silicon Valley Is An Isolated Bubble and What Can Be Done To Change This
Jeremy Liew is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the leading firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Max Levchin's Affirm, The Honest Company and many more incredible companies. As for Jeremy, he is best known for being the 1st investor in Snapchat and has also led investments in StitchFix, Affirm, Ripple, Giphy and Bonobos just to name a few. Previously, Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of corporate development and chief of staff to the CEO, and then as general manager of Netscape. Due to his incredible investing success, Jeremy has been featured on the Forbes Midas List multiple times.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeremy made his way from AOL and Netscape to one of the most successful consumer investors of the last decade?
2.) How did the Snapchat deal come about? What did Jeremy see in the early Evan Spiegel that made him so excited? How has Jeremy seen him alter and grow with the company? What did the economics of the deal look like?
3.)Why does Jeremy disagree with much of the pessimism over consumer? How does Jeremy think about the lack of distribution channel availability with Google, Amazon, Apple owning them? How can this also present an opportunity in consumer?
4.) How does Jeremy think about price and price sensitivity? Would he agree with Peter Fenton on, "never turn down a deal based on valuation, it's a mental trap"? How does Lightspeed think about reserve utilization? What does the conviction building process look like for reserve deployment?
5.) Jeremy has sat on the boards of Snapchat, Giphy, Bonobos and had 1,500 hours of board experience, so what makes the truly special board members? Who does Jeremy most like to work with on boards?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeremy’s Fave Book: World War Z
Jeremy's Fave Blog: The Information
Jeremy’s Most Recent Investment: Rothy's
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeremy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: How To Think About Founder-Category Fit, Why The Biggest Opportunities Are In Category Re-Architecture & What Can Be Done To Increase The Amount of Women In VC with Nadia Boujarwah, Founder & CEO @ Dia & Co
Nadia Boujarwah is the Founder & CEO @ Dia & Co, the startup that provides premier plus size clothing and styling for women. To date they have raised over $20m in funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Alfred Lin @ Sequoia and the team @ NextView Ventures. Prior to Dia&Co Nadia was the CFO and COO @ Frieda and Nellie and also enjoyed time in the marketing and strategy team @ Diane von Furstenberg.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nadia made her way from HBS grad to founding one of the hottest e-commerce companies of the day backed by Sequoia, Dia&Co?
2.) Why does Nadia believe that the biggest opportunity for value creation is through category creation? What does Nadia mean when she discusses category re-architecture? How does she think of the inherent cons (CAC, consumer education, distribution etc.)
3.) Despite the likes of Sequoia being invested now, the first year of Dia gained no institutional money. Why does Nadia think this is? What was the inflection point for VC interest? Is there anything that Nadia would change about how she has run the fundraising process?
4.) What does Nadia suggest as some core solutions to ensuring that more females become VCs? How does Nadia believe this will impact the types of companies that are being funded and built? What remain the core issues today?
5.) How does Nadia differentiate between customer centricity and customer devotion? Why is this so crucial in today's proliferated world of e-commerce? How does Nadi and Dia determine with data, the extent to which they achieve their customer devotion targets?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nadia's Fave Book: Competing Against Luck
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nadia on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally
Dick Costolo is the Chief Executive and co-founder of Chorus, a startup that is reimagining the path to personal fitness. Dick is also a Mentor @ Index Ventures, one of the world's leading venture funds, which he joined in 2016. Costolo was most recently Chief Executive of Twitter from 2010 to 2015, where was at the forefront for their hypergrowth onto the main stage of tech. Prior to joining Twitter, Dick co-founded and ran three startups, including FeedBurner, which sold to Google in 2007. The former improv comedian has been a consultant on HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and currently sits on the boards of Patreon and IfOnly.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dick made his way from Improv Comedian to founding a startup acquired by Google and then becoming CEO of Twitter?
2.) Why does Dick believe that starting a company is like an improv stage? What were Dick's biggest personal learnings from his drama career that he has applied to being a better leader today?
3.) Having given up the comedy dream for tech, how does Dick balance the entrepreneurial unwavering vision with a realism of when things are not working? What is the inflection point?
4.) What was the biggest challenge over the 5 years in scaling Twitter? What strategies did Dick utilise to combat this? How does Dick think about creating a culture of accountability without fear? How does this change the ownership of decisions?
5.) What is Dick's biggest superpower and super weakness? Why must all entrepreneurs have to have a fundamental ability to compartmentalize? In terms of temperament, what were Dick's biggest lessons from watching Youtube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, operate?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dick’s Fave Book: Creativity Inc.
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dick on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: Why Vulnerability Is A Strength In VC, 3 Core Components That Make The Most Successful VCs & How VCs and Entrepreneurs Can Build Meaningful Relationships Pre-Investment with Brian Garrett, Founding Partner @ Crosscut Ventures
Brian Garrett is the Founding Partner @ Crosscut Ventures, one of LA's leading venture funds today with a portfolio including Super Evil Mega Corp, The Black Tux and Mobcrush just to name a few. Incredibly during the early days of Crosscut, Brian went back into a full-time operating role with a Public-company turnaround at Quepasa.com before co-founding vertical eCommerce brand StyleSaint.com. After surviving with the equivalent of two full-time jobs for roughly 6 years, Brian the attention of institutional capital, which enabled CrossCut to scale into a fund with $75M raised for CrossCut 3 in 2015. This has snowballed to their latest fund raised in December being $125m.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brian made his way into the world of VC and came to found one of LA's leading funds in the form of Crosscut?
2.) What does Brian believe are the 3 core components that make for a successful VC? How important is the presence of humility for VCs today? How does Brian look to balance between arrogance and confidence? How is this shown in the entrepreneurial class?
3.) Why does Brian believe that vulnerability is actually a strength today? How can entrepreneurs be honest and vulnerable without ruining market perceptions and future fundraising aspirations?
4.) How does Brian look to place his relationship with the entrepreneur at the very core of every investment he makes? What does this relationship onboarding process look like? Is this possible in the fast-moving world of US deals today?
5.) What was the most challenging fundraise for Brian? Why was this case? How has he seen the evolution of Californian tech over the last few years since Fund III? What was the most memorable LP meeting for Brian?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brian's Fave Book: The Alchemist
Brian’s Most Recent Investment: Fuzzy Pet Health
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.
20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro
Andy Pflaum is the Founder & CEO @ Astro, the startup that brings email, calendar, and an AI-powered assistant together to help you focus on what’s most important. They have raised over $10m from leading West Coast investors such as Satish @ Redpoint, former guests Kent Goldman @ Upside and Michael Dearing @ Harrison Metal. As for Andy, prior to founding Astro, he spent 15 years in the valley, serving as the CMO @ Zimbra where he saw their immense scaling to their $350m acquisition by VMware where he then spent time on the other side of the table before moving to Chile to manage a family winery for 1.5 years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andy made his way into the world of startups, made the transition to large corporates with VMware and Yahoo, came to run a Winery in Chile before founding Astro?
2.) Found a startup, work in early-stage startup or work at large incumbent; where does Andy believe young people today have the biggest growth opportunities? How does this mean emerging startups have to react to attain that talent?
3.) Why does Andy disagree with the notion that more and more incumbents are falling? Why is it harder than ever to compete against such a strong set of incumbents? What are the dangers of dependency on paid growth?
4.) How does Andy feel about distributed workforces? What is core to attaining the individuals and then scaling them successfully as a team, in a distributed fashion? How does Andy feel about hiring technical talent in the bay today?
5.) Why does Andy also argue, despite the incumbents, that it is also easier than ever to operate a business today What are the core changes that have allowed for this to happen? How does Andy break down the tech stack they use for Astro?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andy’s Fave Book: The Wright Brothers
Andy’s Fave Blog: Tom Tunguz, Michael Dearing: Harrison Metal
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Investing Lessons From Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham @ USV, How CEO's Can Operationally Utilise Their Board & The Single Most Important Quality of A CEO with Andrew Parker, General Partner @ Spark Capital
Andrew Parker is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the best performing funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Slack, Oculus, Medium, PostMates, Cruise (acq $1Bn) the list goes on. As for Andrew, he has led Spark’s investments in Carta, Kik, PanoramaEducation, Socratic, Splash, Particle and Quantopian. Prior to joining Spark in 2010, Andrew was a member of the investment team at Union Square Ventures. Before becoming an investor, Andrew did UI design and user-experience testing at Homestead Technologies and was a web developer at Groupspace.org.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andrew made his way from UI design and user-experience testing to joining the investment team @ USV and then joining Spark?
2.) Andrew credits USV with 2 big takeaways that influence how he invests today, what are they? What were his big lessons from working alongside Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham? How did this experience change and improve his thinking of developing and investing in a thesis??
3.) Question from Henry Ward @ eShares: What is the most important quality in a CEO? How does Andrew balance between founder naivety and realism? What are the signs that although a vision is present, a founder is also realistic?
4.) What is the most important quality in being a board member to a CEO? How has Henry @ eShares constructed his board to allow them to have maximum impact in the internal operations of the company? How does this further improve board meeting? What does Andrew view as his biggest strengths and weaknesses as a board member?
5.) How does Andrew think about pricing and how the importance of pricing changes along the investing spectrum from seed to later stage? What does an investor's response to price reveal about the proposition? How does Andrew analyze capital allocation on reserve financing? What does this decision-making process look like?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andrew’s Fave Book: Snow Crash
Andrew’s Fave Blog: Money Stuff by Matt Levine
Andrew’s Most Recent Investment: Particle
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andrew on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork
Neil Young is the Founder & CEO @ N3twork, the next generation mobile games maker and publisher with their services already touching millions of customers. They have raised over $17m in VC funding from some of the very best in the business including Mike Maples @ Floodgate, Bing Gordon @ KPCB and the team at Google Ventures. Prior to N3TWORK, Neil founded ngmoco, a leading social mobile games company, acquired by DeNA for a reported up to $400m. Before ngmoco, Neil spent many years at Electronic Arts where he was responsible for producing some of EA's most successful game franchises including: The Lord of the Rings, The Sims, Medal of Honor and Command and Conquer, among others.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Neil made his way from telling his mother in the UK he was not going to university to producing world-leading games, to selling a company for a reported $400m?
2.) What are the 2 questions Neil believes everyone should ask when evaluating the potential of a new platform? How does Neil think about the platform shifts at present given his publishing to mobile? Where do most people make mistakes when assessing platform shifts?
3.) Peter Fenton stated on the show: "startups are starved of free and open distribution". How does Neil think about incumbency advantages with regards to distribution? Would an open platform yield greater potential distribution? How does Neil view the world of paid and performance marketing today? How has his views changed on the space?
4.) What are the 3 things that Neil believes all founders must do in order to assemble and manage a board successfully? Why is it important to listen to board members on their own and as a group and compare? Where do most founders go wrong in board management?
5.) Neil sold ngmoco for a reported $400m, what does Neil believe are the 2 big questions that all founders must ask themselves when contemplating a potential sale? What are the 2 different types of acquisitions that exist today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Neil’s Fave Book: The Second World War
Neil’s Fave Blog: Gaming Insiders
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Neil on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Why Brands Can Have The Same Revenue Multiples As Enterprise Companies & The Right Way To Think About Amazon In Today's World of Commerce with Eurie Kim, General Partner @ Forerunner Ventures
Eurie Kim is a General Partner @ Forerunner Ventures, the early stage firm dedicated to investing in entrepreneurs defining the next generation of commerce. Fun fact, they are the only firm to have investments in both Jet.com and Dollar Shave Club, two of the biggest and highest-profile e-commerce exits in recent years. Forerunner also counts Birchbox, Bonobos, Glossier, Hotel Tonight, Warby Parker and Zola among its portfolio companies. Prior to Forerunner, Eurie was a consultant at Bain and before that an investor at Castanea Partners. Eurie currently sits on the boards of companies such as Away, MoveWith and The Farmers Dog, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eurie made her into the world of VC and investing in the next generation of commerce with Forerunner?
2.) How does Eurie look to argue that commerce deals do attain the same revenue multiple on exit as enterprise deals? Do Forerunner think about exit potential when investing in companies? How does this Eurie's thesis on both ownership and price sensitivity? What are the required fund-returning ownership levels today?
3.) With the time it takes for brands to flourish, how does Forerunner think about reserve allocation? How does Forerunner determine which companies to double down on and which to constrain capital? Why does Eurie believe that it takes less time than ever for brands to flourish today? What is a good example of this?
4.) How does Eurie define the term "digitally native vertically integrated brand"? What are the core components that make those all star brands of today shine in the early days? What are the commonalities in those successful founders that build these mega brands?
5.) Given the rise of some prominent new brands eating incumbent market share, does Eurie believe this is a market of consolidation or new incumbents will be made? How does Eurie view the role of Amazon? To what extent does Eurie observe and analyse Amazon's activity?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eurie’s Fave Book: Blue Ocean Strategy
Eurie's Fave Blog: Business of Fashion
Eurie’s Most Recent Investment: Shop Shops
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eurie on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere
Florian Leibert is the Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere, the most flexible platform for containerized, data-intensive applications. They are trusted by some of the world's leading companies from Yelp to Yammer to Verizon and have raised over $120m in VC funding from the likes of a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla, Data Collective and then incumbents such as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard. Prior to founding Mesosphere, Florian spent time with Twitter and Airbnb, both as a tech lead and if that was not enough, Florian also has a stellar angel portfolio including the likes of Away, Cockroach Labs, Drift and Buoyant.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Florian came to found Mesosphere? What were the big takeaways for him from his more formative years at Twitter and Airbnb?
2.) Why does Florian believe that sometimes "you should not listen to your investors"? What is the right way to communicate this disagreement to them? What supporting evidence is required to substantiate your thoughts? What method would Florian prefer to receive such feedback?
3.) What are the biggest benefits of having strategics such as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard on the cap table? What are some potential drawbacks? What advice would Florian give to founders contemplating taking strategic investment? When is the right time for these staretgics to insert themselves?
4.) With the scaling of Mesosphere, how have Florian's thoughts and approach to sales execution changed? What have been the core struggles? Why does Florian think it is imperative to build the sales team slowly?
5.) At what point does Florian think that operational efficiency must be front and centre for founders scaling their companies? What has Florian found to be the most challenging personally in achieving such operational efficiency?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Florian’s Fave Book: Alchemist: A Fable about Following Your Dream
Florian's Fave Blog: Seeking Alpha
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Florian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Sam Altman, Y Combinator President on What Makes Truly Great Leaders, Why We Will See A Compression of Seed Funding & The Future Scaling of YC
Sam Altman is the president of Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with alumni that includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Flexport and many more incredible companies. Sam is also the co-chair of OpenAI, thenon-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. Prior to YC, Sam was co-founder and CEO of Loopt, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2005 and acquired by Green Dot in 2012. Sam also founded Hydrazine Capital, whose stellar portfolio included the likes of Zenefits, Flexport and Soylent.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sam made his way into the world of startups with Loopt and YC? How he came to invest with Hydrazine Capital and then rejoin YC as Partner and now President?
2.) Having watched and seen Paul Graham since Batch 1, what does Sam believe makes Paul Graham the special leader he is? What makes Sam and Paul such great Partners? How did they enact the transition of Sam to President? How did it change the relationship?
3.) What is Sam's tactic that he uses to fully evaluate the skills and execution of a founder? When investing where did Sam make his most frequent mistakes? Why does Sam expect seed stage investing as a whole, will compress? Is Sam concerned of too much capital in the market at present?
4.) Question from Jack Altman: what is the main difference between a great seed investor and a great Series A investor? Sam has said before he likes to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies". How does Sam determine between the fixable and the unfixable? How much of a role does price play in his evaluation of an opportunity?
5.) One of Sam's recent goals was "figure out how to scale YC 2x". How does Sam think about this in terms of stage? Will YC replace VC with lifecycle funding? How does Sam think about YC's expansion geographically into China? How does Sam assess the vertical expansion of deep tech and bio tech that YC is going after?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sam’s Fave Book: The Making of The Atomic Bomb
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: LinkedIn's Head of Corp Dev on Why and When Startups Should Start Relationship Building With Corp Dev, What The Structure of M&A Traditionally Looks Like & How To Mitigate The Biggest Risk of M&A, Integration Risk
Emilie Choi is Head of Corporate Development @ Linkedin where she has led 40+ acquisitions, acquihires or investments. In terms of acquisitions, Emilie led the acquisitions of Lynda, Bizo, Newsle, Bright, Pulse, SlideShare, and Rapportive just to name a few. On the strategic investment side, she led Linkedin's investment in Cornerstone On Demand and G2 Crowd. Before Linkedin, Emilie enjoyed roles such as Director of Digital Business Strategy and Operations at Warner Bros, International Strategy and Ops @ MySpace and Corp Dev and Strategy @ Yahoo. Emilie has also sat on the Naspers board for the last 10 years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Emilie made her way into the world of M&A and came to lead over 40+ game-changing acquisitions for Linkedin?
2.) In 2016, M&A made up 95% of startup exits, how does Emilie evaluate the current state of exit environments? What 2 reasons have caused the drop in startup M&A? How does Emilie view the rise of PE and strategic investors to the acquisition markets?
3.) Paul Graham said ‘startups should only talk to corp dev when they are doing really well or really badly’. What are Emilie's thoughts on when is the right time for startups to have conversations with Corp Dev teams? When does Emilie you most like to begin the relationship? How does Emilie like to work with VCs in this relationship building?
4.) Paul Graham also described the structure of M&A as "grueling". Does Emilie agree with this? How does Emilie map out the structure of a typical M&A deal, from start to finish? How much of a role does price play in her evaluation of a deal? How does Emilie measure the success of an acquisition?
5.) Matt Switzer @ Hootsuite stated the biggest M&A risk to be integration. What does smooth integrations look like for both consumer vs enterprise? Why do they differ? How can this integration work be de-risked and front loaded?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Emilie’s Fave Book: The Bonfire of the Vanities
Emilie’s Most Recent Investment: Heighten
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier
Henry Davis is the President and COO @ Glossier, a New York brand that has taken the beauty world by storm. To date they have raised close to $35m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including past guests on the show Kirsten Green @ Forerunner, Index Ventures, IVP and our friends at Thrive. As for Henry, prior to entering the world of beauty and brands with Glossier, he sat on the other side of the table as a VC with Index Ventures in London. Before that, for his sins, Henry spent time in the world of corporate finance with Citi Group.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Henry made his way from rising star in London VC with Index to President of New York's hottest beauty brand, Glossier?
2.) From a personal security standpoint, was it tough to move from a more secure role in VC to startups? Why does Henry believe the nature of risk is forgotten in entrepreneurship? Why does Henry believe the best entrepreneurs risk mitigate?
3.)What does branded e-commerce really mean to Henry? Why does Henry believe that Amazon have already won multi-brand? What 3 dimensions does Henry present for how Amazon has changed a consumer's expectations of e-commerce? Have Amazon done more to make the market than destroy it?
4.) Why does Henry not believe that brands have as much brand loyalty as they think they do? With that in mind and many recent acquisitions, is this not a market of consolidation? Why are acquisitions cheap for incumbents today? How does this compare to the supply of capital available to startups, ultimately, altering their willingness?
5.) Henry has stated before that there are 3 strategies that can be done to improve diversity in the workforce, what are they? How must your hiring process be structured? How must your culture be structured? Where do most people go wrong in hiring diverse teams?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Henry’s Fave Book: Anna Karenina
Henry’s Fave Blog: Human Rights Watch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Henry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital
Crystal Huang is a Principal @ GGV Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms partnering with entrepreneurs in the world's largest markets, the US and China. At GGV Crystal led the firm's investment in Wigo (acquired by Cinemagram) and attends board meetings at Tile and Flightcar. Crystal is also a board member @ NextGen partners, the organization representing the future General Partners within the bay area. Prior to joining GGV, Crystal worked as an analyst in Blackstone's Technology M&A Advisory Group and due to her immense promise and success already, Crystal has been named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Venture Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Crystal made her way into the world of VC from Tech M&A with Blackstone?
2.) How does Crystal view the ongoing debate of operator vs non-operator experience? Does Crystal agree with Pat Grady that the rate of decay on operating experience has never been greater? What elements of operational experience, applied to VC, do stand the test of time?
3.) What does Crystal believe are the 3 key differences when comparing the US and Asian tech markets? How do deal sizes change across geographies? What does this do to the unit economics of the businesses? How does vendor engagement and sales cycles differ?
4.) In a world of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent quickly acquiring or copying innovative ideas, is there a market for true later stage VC in Asia? Where are the market opportunities? How does incumbent power in Asia differ to incumbent power in the US?
5.) How does Crystal fundamentally see distribution models vary between the US and Asia? Has Asia enjoyed the same rise of the "self-service model" enacted by many in the US? What does this mean for internal org structures and unit economics?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Crystal’s Fave Book: The Code Book
Crystal’s Most Recent Investment: BitSight
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Crystal on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Why This Is Just The Start for Consumer Mobile, 3 Lessons China Taught About How To Invest Better In The US & How To Think About The Opportunity Cost of Capital Deployment with Hans Tung, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner @ GGV Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms partnering with entrepreneurs in the world's largest markets, the US and China. Evident when looking at Han's incredible investments in the likes of Wish, Poshmark, musical.ly, Slack and OfferUp in the US and then Xiaomi, Forgame, and Domob Ads in Asia. Previously, Hans was with Bessemer Venture Partners, where he helped global players such as Skype expand into China. Hans was also a founding member of two pan-Asian internet startups that were subsequently sold to telcos. Due to his incredible success, Hans has been ranked as a top VC on the Forbes Midas list since 2013 and was recognized by The Founder and CBN News magazines in the past as a Top 10 most entrepreneur-friendly VC in China.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hans made his way into VC with Bessemer having founded and exited 2 prior startups?
2.) Why does Hans believe that the globalisation of consumer mobile companies is the biggest trend in his career? Why is Hans still so attracted to consumer with lacking distribution channel availability and incumbents like Amazon? Have Amazon already won?
3.) What were Hans' biggest lessons from investing in China that have allowed him to invest better in the US? How does Hans evaluate prior US companies entering strategies into China? How does he analyse Uber's entering into China?
4.) Hans has backed some of the hottest companies in the business from Airbnb to Wish, how does Hans respond to price sensitivity and having to pay up to get into the round? How does Hans think about the opportunity cost of capital deployment?
5.) Why does Hans remain so bullish on the globalisation of tech? In a world of Trump and Brexit are we not in ever more atomistic times? How does Hans see the convergence of millenial consumers when comparing the US and Asia?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hans' Fave Book: The Information, Stratechery
Hans' Most Recent Investment: iBotta
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hans on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap
Ben Marcus is the Founder & CEO @ Airmap, the startups that provides everything one needs to unlock and scale drone operations in the ever-changing world of airspace. They have raised over $40m in funding from industry heavyweights Sony, Rakuten, Qualcomm, Airbus Ventures and then also many friends of the show including Semil Shah, Lux Capital, Microsoft Ventures, General Catalyst, BullPen Capital and David Waxman at TenOneTen, just to name a few. Prior to AirMap, Ben co-founded and was CEO of the world’s largest light business jet sales company, Jetaviva and before that started his career as a flight instructor and later became a flight test engineer. Fun fact, Ben is also an FAA-certified Airline Transport Pilot and Flight Instructor with over 4,500 hours of flight experience.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ben made his way into the world of startups and drones from being a pilot and flight test engineer?
2.) What does Ben think is a strong investment strategy when investing in the drones? What 4 categories present nascent opportunities to Ben? What elements of the tech stack should potential investors further drill down on with potential investments?
3.) Question from Hemant Taneja: How does Ben assess the presence and desires of Amazon and Google with their pre-existing mission to win the airspace? Question from Semil Shah: Does this lead to a world of consolidation and startup M&A by incumbents?
4.) What does Ben believe are the core catalysts that will take drones to 100s of millions of people? How does Ben assess the similarties and differences in serving enterprise vs consumer drone markets? Does Ben agree with Jonathan Downey in his expression that enterprises like "boring" offerings?
5.) How does Ben evaluate the hardware vs software paradigm in the drone market? Does Ben see the commoditisation of drone hardware in the coming years? How does Ben evaluate the likes of DJI with their prominence? Does the weaponisation of drones cause significant alarm for Ben?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ben’s Fave Book: The Wealth of Nations
Ben’s Fave Blog: Social Capital Newsletter
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox's time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Why VC Is A Game of Maximising Serendipity, How VCs Can Characterise Their Approach To Working & Product Lessons from Jack Dorsey & Sonos' John MacFarlane with Kevin Thau, General Partner @ Spark Capital
Kevin Thau is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the best performing funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Slack, Oculus, Medium, PostMates, Cruise (acq $1Bn) the list goes on. As for Kevin, he has led investments in Medium, LOLA, CTRL Labs, Aura and Haven. Prior to Spark, Kevin enjoyed an incredible 7 years at Twitter, when he joined they had less than 20 employees and 1m users and he carried roles such as Director of Mobile Products and VP of Business & Corporate Development. Before Twitter, Kevin was employee number 7 at Software.com (which became Openwave) where he helped ship the first mobile browser, mobile messaging services and mobile websites.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kevin made his way into VC with Spark having spent years in operations with Twitter and Silicon Graphics?
2.) What were Kevin's biggest lessons from watching the hyper-scaling of Twitter? What are the most prominent challenges companies face at this stage? What were his takeaways from working with product visionaries like Jack Dorsey & Sonos' John MacFarlane?
3.) As an operator turned investor, how does Kevin characterise his approach to working with portfolio companies? What were Kevin's early VC learnings from his discussions with Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet on VC profile and psychology?
4.) Why does Kevin believe that VC is a game of "maximizing serendipity"? How does Kevin assess personal time allocation, today as a VC? What has Kevin found most challenging since making the move to VC from operations?
5.) How does Kevin assess the consumer landscape at present? Does Kevin agree with Kirsten Green that "Amazon does more to make the market than crush it"? Why does Kevin find Instagram such a special tool for evaluating brands? What does he look for in the Instagram profiles of these emerging brands that really excites him?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kevin’s Fave Book: Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game
Kevin’s Most Recent Investment: CTRL-Labs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kevin on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox's time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month.
Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!
20VC: Most Downloaded Founder Episode of 2017: Brian Armstrong, Founder & CEO @ Coinbase
Brian Armstrong is the Founder & CEO @ Coinbase, the startup that provides the world’s most popular way to buy and sell bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin. They have backing from some of the biggest and best in VC having raised over $215m from the likes of Andreesen Horowitz, IVP, USV, DFJ and many more incredible investors. As for Brian, prior to Coinbase he was a Software Engineer @ Airbnb and before that founded his own startup, Universitytutor.com
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brian made his way from Airbnb to founding one of the early disruptors in the crypto space with Coinbase?
2.) Doing an 80/20 analysis, what are the 3 fundamental differences between Bitcoin and ethereum? What is Brian’s opinion on the scaling path ahead for ethereum? How do the teams behind ethereum and Bitcoin differ and what effect do these differing approaches have?
3.) What is an ICO? Does Brian believe ICOs will be a sustainable method of company financing in the future? What needs to take place to ensure for the continued momentum of ICOs? What have been the biggest surprises of ICOs for Brian?
4.) How does Brian view the regulatory stance around both ICOs and blockchain more generally? What is he concerned will happen? What would be the optimal regulatory framework for the theme to thrive?
5.) How does the rise of blockchain disrupt the VC industry? Why does Brian agree with Naval in stating the future will involve the unbundling of money, control and advice from the realms of VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brian’s Fave Book: Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
Brian’s Fave Blog: Week In Ethereum
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: 2nd Most Downloaded Episode of 2018: Kirsten Green, Founding Partner @ Forerunner Ventures
Kirsten Green is the Founding General Partner @ Forerunner Ventures, where she has raised over $250M from leading investors and has invested in more than 40 early-stage companies. Forerunner Ventures is the only VC firm to invest in both Dollar Shave Club and Jet.com, two of the biggest and highest-profile e-commerce exits in recent years, and counts Birchbox, Bonobos, Glossier, Hotel Tonight, Warby Parker and Zola among its portfolio companies. She’s been honored in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2017, named VC of the Year at TechCrunch’s 2017 Crunchies Awards, and is part of Forbes 2017 Midas List.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kirsten came to found one of the most successful early stage funds of the past decade in Forerunner?
2.) Question from Michael Kim @ Cendana: How does Kirsten view the optimal portfolio construction theory for a thematically specialized consumer fund? What is the one question Kirsten asks herself pre-investing in a startup?
3.) Question from David Pakman @ Venrock: Given the scope of consumer as a space, is Forerunner large enough to attain the required ownership levels? What does this mean for the future of Forerunner in terms of further funds, opportunity funds and entry points?
4.) What are the 3 core principles to developing an exciting investment opportunity in the consumer space? What commonalities do they have? What do you look for in a consumer brand founder that might be different from a software founder?
5.) Why does Kirsten believe that Amazon has done more to make the market opportunity than they have to crush it? What makes Kirsten believe we really are in the early innings for commerce? How will we see the notion of brand evolve over the coming years?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kirsten’s Fave Book: Charlie and The Chocolate Factory
Kirsten’s Fave Blog: TheSkimm
Kirsten’s Most Recent Investment: Packagd
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kirsten on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: Most Downloaded Episode of 2017: Peter Fenton, General Partner @ Benchmark
Peter Fenton is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the world’s leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. Peter himself sits or has sat on the board of Twitter, previous guest Cockroach, Optimizely, New Relic and ZenDesk just to name a few. Prior to Benchmark, Peter was a Managing Partner @ Accel. It is clearly not just me that has a man crush on Peter though as he has been named to Forbes Midas List for many consecutive years with the last list placing Peter as No 3 in the world.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Peter made his way into the world of VC with Accel and came to be a General Partner @ Benchmark?
2.) How does Peter differentiate between the good and the great VCs? How can VCs use hyper-curiosity and hyper-competitiveness to improve their investing ability? Why does Peter not believe that operational experience is a necessity pre-VC?
3.) How does Peter view the importance of valuation in the investment decision making process? How much of a role does it play for him and what is his psychology around valuation, especially with regards to ownership levels?
4.) Why is Peter amused when he hears other investors say they must ‘invest in big markets’? What were his big takeaways from watching the investment and hyper-growth journey of Snapchat? How did that influence his view on markets?
5.) Peter has previously said that he is a ‘student of great board members’. What are the commonalities among the truly great board members? How do they engage and interact with the entrepreneur? How do they get the most out of their fellow board members?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Peter’s Most Recent Investment: Zen.ly
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Peter on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely
Matt Straz is the Founder & CEO @ Namely, the leading HR platform for mid-sized companies. Since founding Namely, Matt has grown Namely to over 1,000 clients, 150,000 users, and has raised $158M from the likes of Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, Matrix and Bullpen, just to name a few. Prior to Namely, Matt was co-founder of Pictela, an ad tech company he sold to AOL in 2010, and a long-time media and advertising executive. Due to this success, Matt has been named one of the 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matt made his first forays into the world of tech and startups and the a-ha moment for the founding of Namely?
2.) When does one go from a world-class startup team to a world-class leadership team? How did Matt go about making this transition? What were the core challenges? Does Matt agree with Chris Caren in saying, "you should look to individuals with 3-4 years of runway"?
3.) When upscaling, how does Matt think about internal promotion vs external hire? What is the right way to communicate that to the current team? Where do most managers go wrong in expectation setting with their team?
4.) What role does the board play in the upscaling of management? What process takes place for new senior hires to be made? How does Matt look to balance the challenge of negotiating with the current team and the board on new hires?
5.) Why was Matt wrong in his initial response this year for Namely's need to reset their Mission, Vision and Values (MMV)? When must all companies look to revisit this? How does Matt look to balance the immediacy of today with product roadmap and vision of tomorrow?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Matt’s Fave Book: 438 Days
As always you can follow Harry, Matt and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX
James Currier is the Managing Partner @ NFX and one of Silicon Valley’s foremost experts in growth and network effects. Just last week, NFX announded their latest fund, a new $150m fund to turn NFX into a significant institution. As for James, before becoming an investor, he co-founded one of the internet’s first successful user-generated companies, Tickle, in 1999. Under James’ leadership, Tickle grew to become the 18th largest website in the world and was acquired by Monster for $110 million. James then co-founded three other successful companies - Wonderhill (online video games, merged with Kabam in 2010 which then sold for $800M), IronPearl (acquired by PayPal in 2013), and Jiff (raised $68M from Venrock & GE before merging with Castlight in 2017).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How James made his way from multiple success in the world of operations with Tickle, Jiff and Wonderhill to now managing NFX's new $150m fund?
2.) Why does James believe speed is the number one superpower for startups? How important is being first to market for products? Why does language and psychology play a much more prominent role? What should the correlation be between product and the language used to market the product?
3.) What does James believe the main job of the founder is? Where do most founders go wrong in depicting their story? Why is it so important for founders to "speak with data"? How can one retain that personal sentiment when heavily using data?
4.) Why does James believe that network effects play such a prominent role within value creation of companies? What really is core to network effect success? Other than marketplaces and social networks, what other forms of network effect exist and succeed?
5.) What does James believe is the right mindset for growth? What has James always believed about paid growth? Why is James altering his views on paid growth in today's environment? Does James believe we are in a fallow period for the consumer space?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
James’ Fave Book: The Razor's Edge
James’ Fave Blog: The Edge
James’ Most Recent Investment: Outdoorsy
As always you can follow Harry, James and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: Inside The World's Leading Crypto Fund, The Future Exit Environment for Crypto Assets & The Beauty Of Benevolent Dictatorship with Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder @ Polychain Capital
Olaf Carlson-Wee is the Founder & CEO @ Polychain Capital, one of the world's premier funds actively managing a portfolio of blockchain assets. Having founded the firm less than 2 years ago with their initial $4m fund, Polychain now has over $200m AUM with backing from the likes of Sequoia, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and USV just to name a few. Prior to founding Polychain, Olaf was the first employee at Coinbase serving as their Head of Risk and as product manager. In addition, Olaf has also been an active angel with a portfolio including the likes of Robinhood, Ethereum and Numerai.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Olaf made his way into the world of crypto from academic studies to Coinbase to today with Polychain?
2.) What really is Polychain Capital and what is the primary mandate with the $250m AUM? With the firm's investments being always liquid, how does one look to stay aligned to founders with an exit possible at any time? How does Olaf think about LP fund withdrawal, would that symbolize a snowball effect in the crypto space?
3.) How does sourcing crypto opportunities differ from sourcing venture opportunities? How does the subsequent DD process change when evaluating crypto opportunities? What does Olaf want to see in whitepapers and what are the big red flags when analysing crypto investments?
4.) How does Olaf think about the exit environment for crypto assets? How does Olaf believe traditional corporate acquirers will respond to crypto assets and those that have raised through ICO? What does Olaf mean when he says, "we will see token network acquisitions in the future"?
5.) Have tokens created a paradigm shift in the method through which companies are funded? Charlie Lee @ Litecoin stated on the show, "ICO's were his biggest concern for crypto". Does Olaf share this concern and where does he see the nuances?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Olaf’s Fave Book: Infinite Jest
Olaf’s Most Recent Investment: 0x Project
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: AppDynamic's Jyoti Bansal on The Sale vs IPO Process with AppDynamics' $3.7Bn Exit & The 3 Simple Things VCs Look For When Investing In Startups
Jyoti Bansal is the former Founder & CEO of AppDynamics, backed to the tune of over $350m in VC funding from the likes of Lightspeed, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins, just to name a few, before it’s ultimate acquisition by Cisco for $3.7Bn. Today, Jyoti is the Founder and CEO of BIG Labs, essentially a laboratory for creating, developing, and launching innovative ideas. The first of these ideas being turned into companies being, Harness.io the industry’s first continuous delivery as a service platform, where Jyoti is the Founder & CEO. As a result of his tremendous success, Jyoti has been a recipient of many leadership awards including, “Best Cloud Computing CEO to Work For,” “Best CEO” by San Francisco Business Times.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jyoti made his way from selling farm machinery with his father in India to founding and selling AppDynamics for $3.7Bn?
2.) How does Jyoti look to build world class teams around him? What are the core characteristics and profiles and seed success into an organisation? How does Jyoti look to optimise each individual function in the organisation?
3.) What did the sale process of AppDynamics look like? Did Jyoti and the team run a dual process of acquisition & IPO? How did the deal come about? What were the negotiations like? Why did Jyoti turn down the first two offers? What was critical to the successful deal?
4.) Jyoti has said before, "there are 3 simple things VCs look for". What are those 3 things? How did the fundraising of AppDynamics go in the early days? What was it about the first 20 pitches that made VCs say no? What does Jyoti most look for now when choosing the VCs to work with?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jyoti’s Fave Book: Crime and Punishment
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jyoti on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: The Value Chain of Machine Learning, Is There Really An Incumbency Advantage in ML & Will The Rise In Cyber Remain For the Long Term with Jake Flomenberg, Partner @ Accel
Jake Flomenberg is a Partner @ Accel, one of the top performing venture funds of the last decade with investments in the likes of Dropbox, Slack, Facebook, Deliveroo and Atlassian, just to name a few. As for Jake, at Accel he specializes on all things Big Data and has led investments in the likes of Demisto, Origami Logic, Sumo Logic, Trifacta, and Zoomdata. Prior to Accel, Jake was director of product management at Splunk, where he was responsible for the product’s user interface and big data strategy. Before that, he worked at Cloudera where he helped the founding team tackle a broad array of sales, marketing and product issues.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jake made the transition from the world of operations with Cloudera and Splunk to the other side of the table, as Partner at Accel?
2.) Why does Jake believe a large element of his role is "how to make AI not BS"? How does he approach this from the three-legged stool of machine learning, data and workflow? How do each subsequently rank?
3.) To what extent is Jake concerned by the data incumbency advantages that are present in the market with Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA)? Where is the room for real opportunity and innovation? When should a startup be concerned about GAFA entering?
4.) How does Jake respond to Aaron Van Devender's suggestion that the value of large datasets is overplayed? Where are the inflection points in dataset value? How does David compare the value of initial data vs derivative data and the subsequent value?
5.) How does Jake assess the current state of the cybersecurity market? Is this increased investment period sustainable or due to more macro attention and events? Where does Jake feel the real opportunity is in cyber today? Where is it overplayed?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jake’s Fave Book: Ready Player One
Jake’s Fave Blog: The Morning Paper (Harry's Favourite also)
Jake’s Most Recent Investment: Radar
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jake on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: Accel GP, Rich Wong on When Is The Right Time To Scale A Startup, Optimising Initial vs Follow-On Investment Decision-Making & The Globalisation of VC In Recent Years
Rich Wong is a General Partner @ Accel, one of the world's leading venture funds with investments in the likes of Dropbox, Slack, Facebook, Deliveroo and Atlassian, just to name a few. As for Rich, Rich has led investments in the likes of Rovio (IPO), SwiftKey, AdMob, MoPub and more incredible companies. Rich also sits on the boards of the likes of Checkr, Osmo, Rovio and Atlassian where he was first outside Board member and lead investor. Prior to joining Accel, Rich served as SVP of products for mobile pioneer, Openwave Systems and CMO of Covad Communications.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rich made his way into the world of VC with Accel from OpenWave and having been active in the mobile and broadband ecosystems?
2.) What does Rich mean when he states the rise of the "Globalisation of VC"? How does Accel both find and win deals in locations such as Australia, Finland? How do the founder's mentalities differ to Bay area founder mentality?
3.) How does Rich think about price sensitivity when assessing opportunities? What would be considered a good return multiple when investing from the early stage fund? How does this differ from the growth fund?
4.) What is the internal structure of investment decision making at Accel? How does Rich analyze reserve allocation? How does initial to reserve decision-making differ? How does the Accel partnership determine the 10% of portfolio that are "winners"?
5.) Question from Manu Kumar @ K9: How does Rich decide when is the right time for a company to scale? What is the balance of not too early and not too late? How should unit economics play a role in this decision? What characteristic must be inherent within multiple functions of the business, pre-scaling?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rich’s Fave Book: The Big Short
Rich’s Fave Blog: Wolf Street
Rich’s Most Recent Investment: Instabug
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rich on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Namely is the all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits platform your employees will love to use. It’s as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. See how Namely can transform your workplace at www.Namely.com.
Eero is the world’s best-reviewed wifi. A system of eero and eero Beacons wirelessly connects to blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi, so despite the increased number of devices with Christmas coming, you’ll still be able to get powerful mesh WiFi in every nook and cranny of your home, backyard included. No more dead spots, slow spots, drop-offs, or buffering — right out of the box. Eero is only available in the US and Canada and you can check it out here!
20VC: Overcoming The Engineer Boys Club, Disrupting The "Pink Aisle" & Why VCs Are Missing A Trick Not Investing In The CPG Space with Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox
Debbie Sterling is the Founder & CEO @ Goldieblox, an award‐winning toy company on a mission to “disrupt the pink aisle.” An engineer and entrepreneur, Sterling has made it her mission in life to tackle the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Sterling was named TIME's “Person of the Moment” and Business Insider's “30 Women Who Are Changing the World” and is regarded as one of the leaders of the movement toward getting more girls interested in engineering and technology. In January 2014, GoldieBlox beat out more than 20,000 businesses in a contest run by Intuit to become the first‐ever small business to air a commercial during the Super Bowl.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Debbie overcame the "engineering boys club" at Stanford and the a-ha moment that led to the creation of Goldieblox?
2.) How does Debbie look to overcome those really tough times as an entrepreneur, from exclusion to the "engineering boys club" to a harsh reception at an accelerator, how did Debbie look to deal with that personally?
3.) Question from Kanyi Maqubela: Is the gender diversity issue primarily a pipeline problem? Where are the key cracks in the system? What does Debbie believe is the point of key leverage?
4.) Question from Harley Finkelstein @ Shopify: How does Debbie ensure that everyone of Goldieblox's videos go viral as it does? What is both the content creation strategy? How does Debbie look to optimise distribution of their content to attain that virality?
5.) Why does Debbie believe that VCs are missing a massive opportunity by not investing in CPG and hardware? What single value add would be most attractive to Debbie for an investor entering the space? What must hardware and CPG founders really look for in their investor base?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Debbie’s Fave Book: The Brothers Karamazov
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Debbie on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. After purchase, you will receive $25 credit to Uber this Holiday season. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridges.com and/or Selfridges on Oxford St. and farfetch.com to shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Why Convertible Notes Are Ridiculous, Why Party Rounds Are Bad For Both Founder and Investor & Why Pro-Rata Rights Are A Mess with David Waxman, Founding Partner @ TenOneTen Ventures
David Waxman is the Founding Partner @ TenOneTen Ventures, one of the leading new venture firms in the rising tide of LA tech. Their portfolio companies have enjoyed exits from the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon Cisco, AirBnB and including companies like eCommerce pioneer and unicorn, Wish and the world’s leading airspace services platform, AirMap. As for David, prior to TenOneTen, David enjoyed an incredible career in operations starting with the founding of his first company, Firefly in 1995, an early pioneer in personalization and privacy technology which he sold to Microsoft in 1998. David then co-founded PeoplePC, a company dedicated to simplifying the process of joining the online world. The company went public in 2001 and was acquired by EarthLink in 2002.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way from selling a company to Microsoft and taking the next public to being one of the leading new managers in LA's tech scene?
2.) Why does David believe that market sizing is a futile effort, or as he calls it "Tamfoolery"? What is the right way that founders should present the market to investors, both in discussion and visually? Why is it impossible for investors to foresee market magnitude?
3.) Why does David strongly dislike convertible notes? Why does he believe that they are worse for not only investor but founders too? In what rare cases do they make sense? Why are they completely ridiculous in multi-million $ deals?
4.) Why does David believe that pro-rata rights have become such a mess? How can founders honour the agreements with their early investors and satiate the ownership appetite of A funds? How would David navigate this if he were a founder today?
5.) Why does David believe the biggest asymettry in VC is the DD that founders engage with, in comparison to that of VC on Founder DD? How should founders structure this DD on investors? What is the right framework? What is the crucial question to ask?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm
David's Fave Blog: Strictly VC, Nuzzel
David’s Most Recent Investment: Velocity
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. After purchase, you will receive $25 credit to Uber this Holiday season. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridges.com and/or Selfridges on Oxford St. and farfetch.com to shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Bing Gordon on Lessons From Serving On Amazon & Zynga's Board, Why The Best Investors Are Good Listeners and Sceptical Optimists & The Most Important Value Add A VC Can Provide
Bing Gordon is a Partner and Chief Product Officer @ Kleiner Perkins, one of the world’s most prestigious venture funds with prior investments in the likes of Google, Amazon, Twitter, Square and Airbnb just to name a few. At Kleiner Bing has either worked with or invested in the likes of Spotify, Zynga, Amazon, Twitter and Magic Leap, just to name a few. Bing also serves on the boards of Zynga, Zazzle, N3twork and until March this year, Amazon. Prior to Kleiner, Bing had been a long-time executive at Electronic Arts, beginning with EA’s founding in 1982 with initial funding from Kleiner Perkins. He was chief creative officer at EA from 1998 to 2008 and previously headed EA marketing and product development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Bing made the move from Chief Creative Officer at EA to Partner @ Kleiner Perkins?
2.) What were Bing's biggest lessons from sitting on the boards of Amazon and Zynga and working with Jeff Bezos and Mark Pincus? What is the most important value-add that a VC should bring? What question must all new board members ask themselves?
3.) Why does Bing believe there are two types of investors in VC? How does Bing determine whether it is right to fix losers or ride winners? How does Bing look to balance between being the cheerleader or critical analyst to the CEO?
4.) What are the signs of truly great and productive board meetings? From Bing's vast experience, which VCs does Bing most like to sit on a board with and why? Which board meeting sticks out in Bing's memory as being of particular significance and why?
5.) What mentality do all great investors have when entering deals? What are the two commonalities of people that are largely right in their choices? How important a role does valuation play for Bing when evaluation potential opportunities?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Bing’s Fave Book: Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)
Bing’s Most Recent Investment: N3twork
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Bing on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. After purchase, you will receive $25 credit to Uber this Holiday season. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridges.com and/or Selfridges on Oxford St. and farfetch.com to shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Why Strategic Investing Is Slow Motion M&A, Why Valuation Is The Hardest Element of M&A & What Determines Between Cash vs Stock Deals with Chad Richard, SVP of Business & Corporate Development @ Yelp
Chad Richard is the Senior Vice President of Business & Corporate Development @ Yelp, where he leads acquisition and investment activity. Yelp is one of the most active in the space having acquired both NoWait and Turnstyle Analytics, plus selling Eat24 to GrubHub for $287.5m, all in the past year. Prior to Yelp, Chad spent six years at Apple as Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing focused on Apple’s operating systems and internet services. Prior to Apple, he cofounded and was CEO of Simple Star, a photo and video software and services company that was acquired by Roxio. If that was not enough, Chad has also advised the likes of Flipboard, MoveWith and Curbside, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Chad make his way from startup founder to leading Apple's M&A charge to today, running M&A with Yelp?
2.) What did the Apple M&A strategy look like when Chad was with the company? Why was Apple so keen to pursue a product focussed M&A strategy? What were Chad's big learnings from that experience with Apple?
3.) How does Chad look to build potential startup pipe with Yelp? What attracts Chad to one startup over another? What does Chad wish that startup founders did and knew more about in the initial relationship building phase?
4.) Yelp also makes strategic investments, how does Chad ease founder and VC concern that a strategic investment is not an acquisition? Does a strategic investment prevent a startup from partnering with other firms? What should founders be aware of when accepting strategic investment?
5.) How does Chad analyse the compensation element? Why does Chad believe that valuing potential acquisitions is the hardest element of the process? How do acquirers determine whether to present a cash vs stock deal? What should founders consider with stock deals between private and public company stock?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chad’s Fave Book: Disneywar
Chad’s Most Recent Investment: Turnstyle Analytics
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. After purchase, you will receive $25 credit to Uber this Holiday season. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridges.com and/or Selfridges on Oxford St. and farfetch.com to shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Zynga's Mark Pincus on When To Ride Your Winners and Cut Your Losers, Why People With "Broken Resumes" Make The Best Hires & The 2 Biggest Lies Told In Silicon Valley By Founders and VCs
Mark Pincus is a serial entrepreneur and investor, best known for founding Zynga, the first company to introduce the mass market to social gaming. To date, more than one billion people around the world have played Zynga’s games, which include hits like FarmVille and Words with Friends. Mark is also known for his investments in some of the internet’s largest and most successful companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Snapchat and Xiaomi. One of the earliest pioneers in social networking, Mark founded multiple startups including support.com and tribe.net, before going on to create Zynga. A fun fact - recognizing the importance of social networking, in 2003 Mark teamed up with his friend Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, to purchase the fundamental Six Degrees patent – which broadly covers social networks – in order to keep it out of the hands of patent trolls and guarantee that all players could innovate on this technology.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Having founded one of the first social networks, Tribe and seed invested in Facebook, what convinced you that 2007 was the right time to start a social games company, Zynga?
2.) Having mastered distribution with Zynga, does Mark believe we are in a "fallow" period for consumer with a lack of distribution channel availability? If distribution is not the core problem, what does Mark believe is the fundamental issue?
3.) What have been Mark's biggest lessons when it comes to assembling truly great teams? What does Mark mean when he says that he looks for people with "broken resumes"? Why is that so beneficial to potential candidates?
4.) When investing, how does Mark determine timing on when to ride winner and cut losers? What does Mark really mean when he says, ''you have to instill a mindset of expected value over loss avoidance"?
5.) What are the 2 biggest lies in Silicon Valley told by founders and VCs? How can founders truly test the alignment with their VC? How did Mark do this in pitches with Zynga? What were Mark's learnings on optimising board composition and performance?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mark’s Fave Book: Ready Player One
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mark on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Why Valley Investors Are Really Gamblers, Why The Business Model of Selling To The Biggest Sucker Is Wrong & Why The Best Potential Hires Don't Care Who Your VC is with David Barrett, Founder & CEO @ Expensify
David Barrett is the Founder & CEO @ Expensify, the startup relieving the world’s frustrations, one expense report at a time. With 35,000 companies and more than 5 million users, David has raised close to $30m from the likes of Redpoint, OpenView, Travis Kalanick, Baseline and SV Angel. However, David certainly does not have traditional views on funding, something we very much touch on in the interview today! Prior to Expensify, David built a peer-to-peer file transfer technology called Red Swoosh with Uber's Travis Kalanick, which was acquired by Akamai in 2007.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David went from founding Red Swoosh with Travis Kalanick to changing the sexy world of expense reporting with Expensify?
2.) Why does David want to change the cult of the second time entrepreneur? Why does David believe that Silicon Valley fundamentally changes exits in the wrong way? How does David define true operational success?
3.) Why does David believe that Silicon Valley investors are not investors but gamblers? Why does David believe that the business model VCs have created is not only not optimal for founders but poor business practice with "profit" being a dirty word?
4.) What does David believe are the fundamental benefits of capital constraints? How does having financial independence influence your stance when speaking with investors? When does the decision of financially lean or VC backed need to be taken?
5.) Why does David believe the more hiring you do, the more problems you have? What are the core issues of revenue being tied to headcount growth? Why does David believe Silicon Valley is poor for hiring and you must look further afield?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Enders Game
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Why VCs Fundamentally Assess Founders The Wrong Way, Why VC Needs To Innovate On The Scouting Model & Why SAFE's and Convertible Notes Are The Future Of Investing with Elizabeth Yin, Founder & General Partner @ Hustle Fund
Elizabeth Yin is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Hustle Fund, as they describe, the ventue fund for hilariously early hustlers. Elizabeth is also the co-founder of HustleCon, a conference series for non-technical entrepreneurs to launch and scale their startups. Prior to Hustle Fund, Elizabeth was a Partner @ 500 Startups where she ran the 500 Startups seed program in Mountain View and where she and her partner saw over 20,000 startup decks. Before that Elizabeth was a successful operator, as the Co-Founder and CEO of Launchbit, an adtech platform that was acquired by BuySellAds.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Elizabeth made her way from successful founder with LaunchBit to Partner @ 500 Startups to now founding partner of Hustle Fund?
2.) Why does Elizabeth believe that VCs fundamentally assess founders the wrong way? What is the right way to assess founders in such early stages? How can one really stress test the level of hustle from the founding team?
3.) How does Elizabeth assess innovation in the practice of venture capital? Why does Elizabeth believe that there has been very little creativity towards innovation? Who has innovatively addressed sourcing the best companies?
4.) In a world of noted rounds with a cap structure, how does Elizabeth feel about gaining the pro-rata in deals? Why does Elizabeth believe that ownership stake and portfolio size are not in conflict with one another?
5.) How does Elizabeth view the future of the VC industry? How can the early stage funnel be flipped on it's head? Why does Elizabeth believe that SAFEs and convertible notes are the future of investing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Elizabeth’s Most Recent Investment: The Pill Club
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Elizabeth on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: a16z's Alex Rampell on The Struggle Between Innovation vs Distribution, When How To Determine Whether An Application is Optimised Through Centralised or Decentralised Networks & Why Most ICOs Today Are Ridiculous
Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads the firms fintech investments and serves on the boards of Branch, PeerStreet, Point, and Quantopian. Prior to joining a16z, he was the CEO and co-founder of TrialPay, a leading transactional advertising and payments company with 100 employees and over $300M in revenue. TrialPay was acquired by Visa in 2015. Previously, Alex cofounded FraudEliminator, the first consumer anti-phishing company, which merged into SiteAdvisor and was acquired by McAfee for $75M in 2006. Prior to joining the firm, Alex had been an active angel investor with the likes of Pinterest, Bloomreach, SiftScience among many others in his portfolio and served as an advisor to the SV Angel fund. He also co-founded three other companies: TXN, Point, and Affirm, with Max Levchin.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Alex make the move from serial entrepreneur with numerous successful exits to General Partner @ a16z?
2.) Question from Chris Dixon: What were the key takeaways for Alex from his time in operations? Having been both entrepreneur and VC, how does Alex view the continuous struggle between innovation and distribution? Can you succeed with only one?
3.) How does Alex believe the new generation of large incumbents are acting in the market? Why does he believe that a counter-revolutionary strike from them would not be atypical?
4.) How does Alex really define "data network effects"? How does Alex look to analyse them effectively? How does Alex believe that startups can use inflection points in the sales process to enter an incumbent heavy market?
5.) How does Alex view the rise of ICOs? Does Alex share Charlie Lee's concerns that they are the most concerning element of the crypto world? What framework does Alex use to determine whether an applications is optimised through centralised or decentralised databases? Why does Alex believe that most ICOs are ridiculous?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Alex’s Fave Blog: Chris Dixon
Alex’s Most Recent Investment: Propel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker
Lloyd Tabb is the Founder & Chairman @ Looker, the startup leader pioneering the next generation of business intelligence (BI). They have raised over $175m from some of the best in the business including CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, First Round, Redpoint & PivotNorth. As for Llyod himself, he has spent the last 25 years revolutionizing how the world uses the internet, starting with his founding of Commerce Tools, which was acquired by Netscape. At Netscape, Lloyd led several releases of Communicator and helped define Mozilla.org. Following Netscape, Lloyd later was CTO of LiveOps, co-founder of Readyforce and founder then advisor to Luminate.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Lloyd make his way into the world of startups and come to sell his first to Netscape at such a young age?
2.) Why did Lloyd decide to hand over the reigns of CEO to Frank at such an early stage? What was the thought process? What advice does Lloyd have for founders contemplating the same? What is the most important skill for the original founder to have?
3.) How did Lloyd learn about creating and scaling company culture from teaching middle school kids? What are the inflection points in scaling company culture? What are the foundations that must always be core? Why does Lloyd dislike the "burnout culture so much"?
4.) What is the hardest element for Lloyd in scaling Looker to this day? How does Lloyd believe automation must be used within business processes to create a streamlined and efficient organisation? What should the ultimate goal of all CEOs be?
5.) Why does Lloyd believe that the conventional wisdom, "the common path is the safe path", is fundamentally not true? How does Lloyd view the role of mentors, in terms of career progression? What can people do to attain the mentor they would like?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Lloyd’s Fave Book: Seth Godin
Lloyd’s Fave Blog: What The F*** Just Happened Today
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Lloyd on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure
Eric Ries is the author of International Bestseller, The Lean Startup, which changed the language of business introducing terms such as A/B testing, MVP and "pivoting". The book has sold over 1m copies and been translated into over 130 languages launching a global "lean startup" movement. Eric is also the author of the recently released, The Startup Way, detailing transformations at tech titans such as Facebook and Amazon, providing a framework for entrepreneurial management. In addition, Eric is also the Founder & CEO of The Long-Term Stock Exchange and has served as an EiR at the likes of Harvard Business School, IDEO and Pivotal.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) What is the origin story of "The Lean Startup" and Eric's realizations for the importance of the methodologies presented in the book?
2.) What is the matrix management structure? In which cases does it work well? Where does the traditional structure fall down? How does this affect how startups should think about their structure from day 1?
3.) Why does Eric believe that "we have to create a new accountability paradigm"? Why does Eric believe that most organizations have a pathological fear of failure? How is this conveyed in their structure? What are the consequent dangers of this fear? What does a "productive failure" look like?
4.) How does Eric view the creation and maintenance of culture? How exactly does Eric define culture and what it is to a company? Why does Eric not believe in manifestos!
5.)How can employees determine how committed their employer is to enacting these policies? How can this be reflected in the company attitude to budget? Why does Eric believe that each element of the organization should have independent fluctuating budgets?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eric’s Fave Book: Ancillary Justice
Eric’s Fave Blog: Kickstarter Blog
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: Oren Zeev on Why Diversification Does Not Work, Thesis Based Investing Is Sceptical & Partners Mostly Stay Together For LPs
Oren Zeev is the Founding Partner @ Zeev Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most under the radar but high performing funds with a portfolio including the likes of Houzz, Chegg, Audible, Bonobos and recent guest with Adi Sideman @ YouNow. Prior to founding Zeev Ventures, Oren was a General Partner @ Apax Partners, as part of the founding Apax Israel team. Before VC, Oren was a founding team member of IBM's chip design group in Haifa.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Oren made his way into the world of VC as part of the Apax Israel founding team? What was the catalyst behind his decision to go solo with Zeev Ventures?
2.) What were Oren's biggest lessons from investing in the up and down of the bubble with Apax? Why did this lead to Oren's belief that "diversification does not work"? How does that play out in his portfolio construction?
3.) Why does Oren believe that "LPs are suckers for longevity"? How does that influence the partnerships that they generally back? How does Oren assess VC partnership dynamics? How should founders evaluate VC partner relationships?
4.) Oren has spent over 1,000 hours on the boards of some of the most transformational companies, how has he seen his style of board member change over the years? What has been his biggest lesson? What board member behavior does he dislike the most?
5.) Why is Oren skeptical of thematic investing? Why is this not optimal in producing funds that deliver out-sized returns? What examples does Oren have that prove adopting a generalist approach is beneficial from a returns standpoint?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Oren’s Fave Book: The Innovator's Dilemma
Oren’s Fave Blog: AVC, The Twenty Minute VC
Oren’s Most Recent Investment: Next Insurance
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Oren on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. With purchase, receive credit towards Tablet Hotels for the next year. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridge’s and shop Raden today.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
20VC: What Is Core To The Best Investor - Founder Relationships, The Biggest Risk For Founders In The Early Days & Why EQ Is The Most Important Trait For Managers with Jack Altman, Founder & CEO @ Lattice
Jack Altman is the Founder & CEO of Lattice, actually our partners for this month on the show and as you will hear, they are the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. Lattice have raised close to $10m in funding from some of our favourites in industry including the likes of Miles Grimshaw @ Thrive, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil, Alexis Ohanian and YC’s Daniel Gross. Prior to founding Lattice, Jack was the Head of Business Development @ Lattice where he saw the firm move into hyperscaling. Jack has also build an incredible angel portfolio including the likes of Gusto, OpenDoor, Instacart, Zenefits and Soylent.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jack made his way from leading angel investor to Head of Business Development @ TeeSpring to the world of SaaS with the founding of Lattice?
2.) What does Jack mean when he says "founders must do what it takes to get the best people on board"? To what extent does Jack believe that great investors provide social validity to future hires?
3.) How does Jack think about really getting the best from his team? What is core to empowering them? Why does he believe that EQ is the most important skill for managers? What does Jack believe is the right way to give clear and direct feedback?
4.) Why does Jack believe that the best relationships with investors are less formal? What does Jack really look for in his relationships with investors? What does Jack mean when he says ''investor advice is right on valuation''?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jack’s Fave Book: Meditations
Jack’s Fave Blog: SaaStr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jack on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige
Paul Buchheit is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with portfolio companies including the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Twitch, the list goes on. Before YC and starting from the beginning, Paul was the 23rd employee at Google where he created Gmail, developed the original prototype for Google AdSense and even suggested the company's former motto, "Don't Be Evil". He then started FriendFeed in 2006 where he created the like button as we know it, the company was later acquired by Facebook where Paul worked until his move to Y Combinator in 2010, where he is a partner. Paul is also a prolific angel having created an immense portfolio with the likes of Gusto, Checkr, Optimizely and many more incredible teams.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Paul made his way from creating Gmail in the early Google days, to founding the like button we know today, to being with Y Combinator currently?
2.) What does Paul believe it is that makes Paul Graham (PG) the special individual that he is? How has Paul seen the scaling of PG and Jessica Livingstone as leaders with the scaling of YC?
3.) Why does Paul believe it is fundamental to attain 100 happy users? How can one stress test levels of customer satisfaction accurately? How can founders determine which users and which advice to incorporate and which to disregard?
4.) Having worked alongside the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Paige, what does Paul believe makes the truly special founders? How does Paul assess the balance between stubbornness and vision? What is the telltale sign of stubbornness beginning?
5.) Question from Justin Kan: How does Paul look to determine the 10% that delivers 90% of the value? Where has Paul made mistakes and seen others make mistakes in trying to implement this level of focus?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Paul’s Fave Book: Eckhart Tolle
Paul’s Most Recent Investment: Greo
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Paul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: YC's Ali Rowghani on Leadership Lessons From Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and Jack Dorsey & The 3 Traits All Truly Successful Leaders Share
Ali Rowghani is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with portfolio companies including the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Twitch, the list goes on. At YC, Ali leads the Continuity Fund where has made investments in the likes of Segment, Convoy and Lob, where he also sits on the board of all 3. Prior to investing with YC, Ali spent 4 years at Twitter, starting as CFO before becoming COO. Whilst at Twitter, Ali saw the company scale from $0 revenues to over $2Bn and 20m users to close to 300m users. Before Twitter, Ali was the CFO @ Pixar Animation Studios.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ali made his way from CFO @ Pixar and COO @ Twitter to now leading YC's continuity fund?
2.) Ali describes a story of his time at Pixar working with Steve Jobs? How did he carry himself both as a leader and an operator? What was it about Steve that makes Ali say he is the most impressive exec he has ever worked with?
3.) Having seen the likes of Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, Jack Dorsey in action what have been Ali's biggest takeaways with regards to what makes the truly great leaders? Why does Ali believe there are 3 traits all great leaders share? What are they?
4.) How does Ali look to bring that experience to his role now, investing with YC Continuity? How does that affect his mindset and evaluation when assessing investment opportunities today?
5.) Why does Ali believe that too many startups have been damaged by the amount of capital they have raised? As a former CFO, how does Ali analyze the capital being raised today and some of the burn rates in the valley?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ali’s Fave Book: Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Ali’s Fave Blog: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd
Ali’s Most Recent Investment: Segment
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ali on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Why Decentralisation is Key For Digital Media Distribution, Why Gradual Decentralisation Is The Most Practical Approach and Why Incumbents Are The Biggest Barrier To The Rise of Crypto with Adi Sideman, Founder & CEO @ YouNow
Adi Sideman is the Founder & CEO @ YouNow. Since founding the company in 2011, Adi has grown YouNow to be a global social network with more than 100 million user sessions a month, and creators now producing more than 50,000 hours of original live content each day. They recently released PROPS (Telegram available here), the next generation platform that leverages the power of crypto economics & participation in digital media. To fund this growth, they have raised over $25m in funding from some of the greats of the investing world including Andy Weissman @ USV, David Pakman @ Venrock and future guest Oren Zeev. Due to this incredible progress, YouNow has been named one of the most innovative companies of 2016 by Fast Company and was a finalist for Fastest Rising Startup of 2016 at the Crunchies Awards.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adi made his way into the world of participatory digital content, came to found the world's first online karaoke company and then found YouNow?
2.) Setting the scene now, where are we at with TV? What platform does Adi believe will rise formidably in it's place? How does that affect the age-old industry of advertising? Why does Adi believe after so many years, now is the time for micro-payment content creation?
3.) Why does the digital media content landscape need to be decentralized? What is fundamentally broken with the current centralised networks? What are the benefits of such decentralization?
4.) How does Adi envision this decentralization to be? Does Adi believe we will build new decentralized protocols and exact the decentralized network through them or does he believe we will integrate new protocols into existing services?
5.) Why does this decentralized network be crypto-based? With centralized networks the value largely accrues to investors and founders, how does Adi sell the value of a decentralized network to an investor base with fiduciary responsibilities?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adi’s Favourite Book: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Lightspeed's Nicole Quinn on Why We Are Not In A Consumer Downturn, Why M&A Has Not Been This Exciting For A Long Time & Why Amazon Is Never Your Friend
Nicole Quinn is a Partner @ Lightspeed, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Nest, StitchFix, AppDynamics and Max Levchin's Affirm, just to name a few from their incredible portfolio. At Lightspeed, Nicole focuses on the consumer market having made investments in the likes of Cheddar, Zola and Rothy's. Prior to Lightspeed, Nicole worked at Nutmeg, one of London's leading fintech players and before that spent 8 years covering consumer, eCommerce and brands at Morgan Stanley on the equity sales and research side. At Morgan Stanley, Nicole worked on the IPOs for Facebook, Groupon and Pandora. Fun fact: Nicole is also a star of the big screen featuring on Apple TV's Planet of The Apps.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nicole made her way from Morgan Stanley to a leading London Fintech player to now, a partner a Lightspeed in San Francisco?
2.) How does Nicole define "digitally native brands"? What are the core benefits of owning the entire customer journey? Why does Nicole believe that brand is a key network effect today?
3.) Why does Nicole disagree that we are in a fallow period for consumer? How does Nicole analyze the incumbent heavy competitive landscape? Does Nicole believe that Amazon does more to make the market than destroy it?
4.) Why does Nicole believe we are in a consolidatory environment? What about the current ecosystem makes now the most exciting time for M&A in a long time? How does Nicole analyze M&A's ability to move the needle with transactions like Bonobos' acquisition?
5.) Being a star of Planet of The Apps, how important does Nicole think it is for investors to have public brands today? How does Nicole view VCs and digitally native brands in the same way? How does this mean that VCs should act in market?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nicole’s Fave Book: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
Nicole’s Fave Blog: Lean Luxe
Nicole's Most Recent Investment: Rothy's
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nicole on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Semil Shah on How To Raise An Institutional Venture Fund, Why LPs Mostly Have Reserve Allocation Theory Wrong & Why IPOs and Acquisitions Are Severely Constrained
Semil Shah is the founder of Haystack, an early stage investment firm now investing out of it’s fourth fund, with previous investments in the likes of Instacart, DoorDash, Giphy, OpenDoor & Managed by Q. Semil is also a Venture Partner @ GGV Capital, one of the leading multi-stage funds and in the past he has also been a consultant to the likes of Kleiner Perkins, DFJ, General Catalyst and more. If that was not enough, Shah also has an extensive career in media having been a contributor for both TechCrunch and the Harvard Business Review in the past. Due to all of this, Shah is known for being on the speed dial of some of the industry’s most respected VCs with the likes of Marc Andreessen naming him one of his ’55 Unknown Rockstars in Tech’.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Semil made the transition from the world of writing to investing alongside some of the best in venture with Haystack?
2.) Why do more and more managers want to introduce institutional capital into their LP base? What are the advantages? What are the drawbacks? Where does Semil see most managers going wrong when pursuing institutional capital for the first time?
3.) What does Semil mean when he states the importance of "pre-marketing"? How open is one in these pre-discussions with potential LPs? What is the right amount of time to be pre-marketing for? How does Semil determine whether to adopt a piece of LP advice and when not to?
4.) In the raising process, why does Semil never like to the use the deck when meeting in person? What core elements of the presentation did LPs always hone in on? What tips does Semil have to potential managers to ensure they can pitch at any time, not just the boardroom?
5.) How has moving from non-institutional to institutional fund, changed how Semil thinks about reserve allocation? Why does Semil believe that the majority of LPs have a wrong thesis to reserve allocation?
6.) Why does Semil believe the VC business model is severely constrained in terms of exits through IPO and acquisition? What does this mean for the use of secondaries? How will managers need to incorporate this into their strategy?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Semil’s Fave Blog: AVC
Semil’s Most Recent Investment: Ironclad
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Semil on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Eventbrite Founder, Julia Hartz on The Lessons Learned Scaling Eventbrite to Unicorn Valuation & $3Bn in Gross Ticket Sales
Julia Hartz is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Eventbrite, the unicorn startup that is the world's largest event technology platform, powering over 2 million events around the world each year. They have raised over $330m from some of the greats of industry including Roelof Botha @ Sequoia Capital, Jeff Clavier @ SoftTech, David Saks, Bebo's Michael Birch, Tiger Global and many more. Under Julia's leadership, she has taken Eventbrite to become the world's largest event technology platform and has received multiple accolades for workplace culture, being named the best place to work in SF for 7 years running. Personally, Julia has won numerous awards including Fortune's 40 Under 40, Inc's 35 Under 35 and Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Julia came to found Eventbrite with her husband Kevin from a small apartment in Potrero Hill and turned it into the unicorn it is today?
2.) How did Julia and Kevin meet? What was the meet-cute? How did that translate into the founding of Eventbrite? How did Julia think about partnering with her fiancee at the time, as a business partner? What made it also a great business partnership?
3.) Why does Julia believe that creating a company is like creating a family? How has Julia seen herself scale as CEO of the company, with the immense scaling and growth of the firm? What have been the challenges and how did she overcome them?
4.) What does Julia believe are the requirements for successful CEO transition? How can this be managed correctly both internally and externally? What other elements made last year a particularly momentus year for change at Eventbrite?
5.) How does Julia think about balancing the immediate elements of the present day with the long-term vision for the roadmap? What is the right mindset to adopt? How does one look to prevent "Innovators Dilemma"? How does Julia split her time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Julia’s Fave Book: Overwhelmed
Julia's Fave Blog: The Skimm
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Julia on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman
Sam Arbesman is the Scientist-In-Residence @ Lux Capital, the fund that supports scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the project, the better. Sam works with companies and founders that recognize the future happens at the boundaries of science and technology infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing.Sam’s scientific research has been published in everything from the Wall Street Journal to The New York Times and The Atlantic. Sam is also the author of the award-winning The Half-Life of Facts and the new book Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sam made his move from being a best-selling author to Scientist in Residence for Lux Capital? As Scientist in Residence, what does Sam do on a day-to-day basis?
2.) What does Sam mean when he says that startups need to embrace "radical interdisciplinarity"? What really is "radical interdisciplinarity"? What are the benefits it brings to an organisation? Does this go contra the importance of specialisation?
3.) How does Sam view the partnership between man and machine? Why does Sam believe we will see computational creativity in a way never seen before? How does Sam view the societal barriers to the embracing of this partnership?
4.) How does Sam view the promise of analogizing in the face of such complex systems? How does Sam assess the perils of such analogies? Does Sam believe that VCs of today are equipped to invest in such complex systems? What must they remember?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sam’s Fave Book: The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, The Three Body Problem
Sam's Fave Blog: Marginal Revolution
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender
Aaron VanDevender is the Chief Scientist at Founders Fund, one of the world's leading fund with investments in the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX, Spotify and many more incredible companies. At Founders Fund, Aaron monitors the scientific impact of the portfolio, works with portfolio companies, assesses new technologies, and conducts his own research. Prior to Founders Fund, Aaron has designed single-photon and single-atom quantum computers in academia and government (NIST), advanced the quantum-mechanical theory for microscopic black holes, patented the fastest transparent optical switch, and is a co-inventor of yoctotechnology. He then developed next-generation DNA sequencing technology at Halcyon Molecular. His broad scientific interests encompass energy, biotech, nanotech, and computing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Aaron made his way from microscopic black holes and DNA sequencing to the world of Founders Fund? What does a Scientist-In-Residence do?
2.) Why does Aaron believe that AI is mostly a scam? Where does Aaron see and then want to see further progression in the field of AI and ML? How does Aaron distinguish between crazy and genius? What are the signs?
3.) Why does Aaron believe that the value of massive datasets is largely overplayed? What characteristics of datasets are exciting for Aaron to see when evaluating an opportunity? Where and how can datasets be misleading and lose their value?
4.) How does Aaron view the societal effects of 4m truck drivers being unemployed by the rise of self-driving? How does Aaron view trucking both as goods distribution and wealth distribution networks?
5.) How does Aaron view the implementation of universal basic income? Why does Aaron believe we have a challenge decoupling wealth and virtue? To what extent is this a core problem?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Aaron’s Fave Book: Tales From The Thousand & One Arabian Nights
Aaron's Fave Blog: Slash Dot
Investment Aaron is Most Excited By: Ayar Labs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Aaron on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Duolingo's Luis von Ahn on How CEO's Can Scale With The Company, How VC Herd Mentality In The Valley Really Works and How Chatbots & AI Play A Role In The Future of EdTech
Luis Von Ahn is the Founder & CEO @ Duolingo, the leading language learning platform with over 100m users. They have backing from some of the best in the investing world with over $100m in funding from the likes of USV, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Google Capital and even Ashton Kutcher. Prior to Duolingo, Luis is known for inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow (“genius grant” recipient), and selling two companies to Google in his 20’s. Luis has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine, one of the 20 Best Brains Under 40 by Discover.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Luis, a man as he describes "never great at learning languages", came to found the leading language learning app, Duolingo?
2.) Why do VCs generally believe Edtech to be such a "hard" space? Is that really a fair assumption? How does the role of government change the distribution and landscape of edtech? How does content creation play a pivotal role in edtech today?
3.) What role does Luis believe AI and ML will play for the future of edtech? Will the transition to bots represent a transformational shift in the interface paradigm? How does gamification and edtech integrate? Why does Luis always measure themselves against the most addictive of games?
4.) How has Luis seen himself scale and change as a leader with the scaling of the firm? What story shows an element that Luis struggled with and how did he overcome it? What were the major inflection points in the growth of the firm?
5.) Duolingo recently raised their $25m Series E, how did this round differ from prior rounds? Why did they want to negotiate down the figure they wanted to raise? How did Valley based VCs present herd mentality for the duration of the recent raise?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Luis’s Fave Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Luis' Fave Blog: AVC by Fred Wilson
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Luis on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: What Does It Take To Raise A Venture Fund Today, An Analysis of The Explosion of Seed Financing & Why IRR No Longer Takes Centre Stage with Samir Kaji, Senior Managing Director @ First Republic Bank
Samir Kaji is what one might call, a master of all things seed stage and micro VC financing. Over his 18 years in venture capital, Samir has assisted or advised over 700 companies and 300 VC firms and has completed tech financing transactions totaling over $4.0 billion in committed capital. Today, Samir is the Senior Managing Director @ First Republic Bank where leads the technology banking team managing venture capital and startup company relationships. He joined First Republic in 2013 from Silicon Valley Bank, where he was also a managing director.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Samir made his entry into the world of VC from the ground up and has come to advise and assist on over $4Bn worth of capital commitments?
2.) Where is the micro VC and seed market today? What is the overview? What has fundamentally changed over the last few years? Are all increases in capital supply good or is this too much? Why is Samir concerned by valuation bloat at seed?
3.) How are LPs reacting to this explosion in seed and micro fund managers? How does this differ when assessing the differing classes of LP from institutions to HNWs and family offices? What are the likelihoods of 1st-time funds attaining institutional capital?
4.) How should potential managers think about the right fund size to raise? How long a timeline should be given to the raising of micro and seed funds? What exceptions are there to this timeline? How does the role of multiple closings play into this timeline?
5.) How does Samir differentiate between raising a fund and building a franchise? What does this mean about how a certain set of anagers not only engages in the fundraising process but also depicts the narrative?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Samir’s Fave Book: Hard Thing About Hard Things
Samir’s Fave Blog: Strictly VC, AVC by Fred Wilson
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Samir on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Michael Dearing on 5 Key Principles He Uses To Assess Startup Founders, Why Benevolent Dictatorship Is A Beautiful Thing & Why Markets Are Better Capital Allocators Than CEOs
Michael Dearing has established himself as an icon of early-stage venture over the last decade. With his founding of Harrison Metal in 2006, he has backed the likes of Twitter, MoPub, Birchbox, 99Designs and PagerDuty just to name a few of his incredible companies. Prior to being in VC, Michael spent 6 years at eBay across numerous roles and before that held positions at Shoe Warehouse as CEO, The Walt Disney Company in corporate strategy and then Bain & Co as a consultant.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Michael made his way into the world of venture from selling shoes with Shoe Warehouse to eBay to founding his own fund?
2.) Michael has said before that he looks for "personal exceptionalism" within the teams he backs, what does that really mean? How does he distinguish brilliance from arrogance? What is the balance between vision and stubbornness?
3.) How does Michael think about price sensitivity? How does he use it as a determining factor to test his level of conviction in the deal? More broadly, how does Michael view pricing in the market today? Why are the convertible debt markets so toxic?
4.) How does Michael view strategy around reserve allocation? Why does Michael believe reserves are where he has made the biggest mistakes? What are his takeaways from those mistakes? Why does recycling not feature as a core tenet of his strategy?
5.) Why does Michael believe that "benevolent dictatorship" is a beautiful thing? Does this thesis change in the debate over founder vs company first? How does Michael use McCallum's 5 key principles to assess founders and their ability?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Michael’s Fave Book: Confederacy of Dunces
Michael’s Most Recent Investment: Astro
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michael on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
20VC: Why CEOs Must Read Less & Listen Less, What VC Funding, Shelf Space & Time Have In Common & Why CEOs Must Look After Themselves Like Athletes with Sami Inkinen, Founder @ Virta Health & Trulia
Sami Inkinen is the Founder & CEO @ Virta Health, the startup on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes for 100m people by 2025. They have raised over $35m in funding from the likes of Max Levchin, Ev William's Obvious Ventures, Paypal, Ray Tonsing @ Caffeinated Capital and previous 20VC guest, Bob Kocher @ Venrock. Previously, Sami was a co-founder, COO and President of Trulia until it’s IPO and eventual sale for $3.6B. Sami, an avid athlete, is a triathlon world champion in his age group, and recently rowed across the Pacific Ocean from California to Hawaii unsupported with his wife at a record speed to raise awareness about healthy nutrition.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sami made his way into the world of startups, came to co-found Trulia and then realized his mission to reverse type 2 diabetes with Virta?
2.) Why does Sami disagree with conventional wisdom and say you learn "more from success than you do from failure"? What are the educational benefits of success that you do not get from failure? What did Sami learn from his Trulia journey?
3.) Why does Sami believe that CEOs should read less and listen less? What are the benefits to not empathizing extensively with the problems of the team? What operational structure must be in place for this level of management to occur?
4.) How does Sami compare VC funding to real estate mortgages? Why does Sami believe that it is always better to raise little? What is the one thing time, money and shelf-space all have in common?
5.) What does Sami mean when he says "CEOs must look after themselves like athletes"? What are Sami's top health and nutrition tips for founders and operators with hugely busy lives?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sami’s Fave Book: Unbroken
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sami on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Key Questions Entrepreneurs Must Ask in M&A's, Why Acquihires Come In 2 Different Categories & Why M&A Is Lumpy with Bram Sugarman, Director of Corporate Development @ Shopify
Bram Sugarman is the Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at Shopify, the e-commerce titan that has over 500 merchants in 150 countries on their platform. Prior to joining Shopify, Bram was a venture capitalist with OMERS Ventures, the venture capital arm of one the largest pension funds in the world. As a VC, Bram worked on more than 20 transactions helping the OMERS Ventures grow from 1 investment to 24 investments. Bram helped lead and manage OMERS Ventures' investments in Shopify (IPO), HootSuite, VidYard, PasswordBox (Acquired by Intel), BusBud, Hopper, League, and AppHero (Acquired by Fuse Powered).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Bram made his way into the world of VC and then jumped to the other side of the table, buying startups with Shopify?
2.) What does using corporate development as a platform to accelerate product roadmap mean? How does this mean it differentiates from traditional M&A? How does Bram work with product team in the M&A process? What are the benefits of doing this?
3.) How does Bram assess the attractiveness of acquihires? What are the 2 differing types of acquihires? What are the essential characteristics of the individuals in those acquihire situations?
4.) With integration being the biggest risk of M&A, what does the ideal post-acquisition process look like? What must be done on both the side of the startup and the acquiror to make the process as smooth as possible?
5.) With regards to pricing and valuation, why does Bram urge founders to consider the long term and what does that mean? How can founders determine the truth with regards to long term objectives of their acquiror?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Bram’s Fave Book: Einstein by Walter Isaacson
Bram’s Most Recent Acquisition: Oberlo
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Bram on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: 3 Things Acquirers Look For In Startup M&A's, How To Price A Startup Acquisition & The Biggest Risk of M&A with Matt Switzer, SVP of Corporate Development @ Hootsuite
Matt Switzer is the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development @ Hootsuite, the social media management platform that has raised venture funding from some of the best in the world including Accel, Insight Venture Partners and Fidelity. At HootSuite, Matt and his team have raised over $250m in funding, acquired 8 companies and launched 4 new products. Prior to Hootsuite, Matt was on the other side of the table as a VC, where he helped to establish a new fund and manage an incubator.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matt made his way into the world of VC and then decided to jump to the other side of the table as acquirer with Hootsuite?
2.) What is the build, buy or partner thinking process? When analysing markets, what does that deep dive and examination look like and entail? How does Hootsuite identify and select startups within the identified markets?
3.) How does Hootsuite most like to interact with startups in pipe? What does the relationship building look like? What platforms and tools are used to monitor those relationships post initial meeting?
4.) What does the internal conviction building process look like around a potential deal? What is the traditional structure of such a deal? How does Matt assess price sensitivity and it's ties to product market fit achieved by the startup?
5.) From the other side of the table, when should startups look to be building their M&A pipe? In conversations with potential acquirers, what are the foundations for them to remember? What role do VCs play and value do they provide in these conversations?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Matt’s Fave Book: Red Notice
Matt’s Fave Blog: Tom Tunguz
Matt’s Most Recent Acquisition: AdEspresso
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun
Roger Dickey is the Founder & CEO @ Gigster, the smart development service combining top developers and designers with artificial intelligence. They have raised over $30m in funding from the likes of a16z, Redpoint, Marc Benioff, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Jordan and then previous guests Rick Marini and Felicis Ventures. Prior to Gigster, Roger founded Mafia Wars, where he built the business to $1Bn in revenues and 100m users. Roger is also a prolific angel investor and LP in venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Docker, ClassDojo and Addepar, just to name a few. If that was not enough Roger is also an advisor to 8VC, Lemnos Labs and OpenDoor.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Roger made his way from founding Mafia Wars to changing the world of software development with Gigster?
2.) Roger has said before "if you dislike VCs, you have never worked with a good one". So what makes a truly great VC to Roger? What does Roger believe are the core components VCs can add to a company? How should founders view investors when investing in them?
3.) Following Roger's discussion with Mike Vernal, Partner @ Sequoia, why does Roger believe that the Series A is a hiring decision? How does this change how founders should think about the A round & present themselves throughout the round?
4.) Why does Roger think it is important for startup founders to invest in other startups? What benefits does this bring to you and your own company? How does Roger prioritize, time-wise between LP, GP and founder?
5.) When angel investing, Roger admits that he takes the "market first" approach. Why is this? How does Roger assess the element of market creation? How does Roger look to balance between founder first vs company first?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Roger’s Fave Book: On Intelligence
Roger’s Fave Blog: Elad Gil
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Roger on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Why VCs Have Forgotten Their Job To Invest In Entrepreneurs not Technologists, How To Know When Growth Creates Value and When It Destroys It & How To Bootstrap Learning Most People Acquire Over Decades with 8VC Founding Partner, Drew Oetting
Drew Oetting is a Founding Partner @ 8VC, one of Silicon Valley's youngest and most exciting new entrants to the VC market with $425m for their debut fund. In just a few years they have built a portfolio including the likes of Oculus, RelateIQ, previous guest Elad Gil & Color, recent guest Mario @ Oscar and many more incredible companies. As for Drew, previously he served as Chief of Staff to fellow 8VC Founding Partner, Joe Lonsdale and was a two-time Bill Gates Investment Asset Management Fellow. Drew is also an advisor to Living On One, Rubicon Global and is a Founding Board Director @ Affinity Technologies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Drew made his way from Joe Lonsdale's Chief of Staff to Founding Partner @ 8VC?
2.) Why does Drew believe the way we think of VC today will change? How does the extended period of privatization affect the role of the VC and their relationship to the founder vs the company?
3.) Why does Drew believe that funds make big mistakes in the internal setup of their operation? Why do funds not do a good job of developing talent? What are the problems of funds being internally competitive with deal by deal carry etc?
4.) As a Founding Partner of a $425m fund at 26, what were the challenges of having such a position, earlier than usual? How did Drew overcome them? What advice would Drew give to young people who want an accelerated career path?
5.) Why does Drew believe that "VCs have forgotten their job is to invest in entrepreneurs NOT technologists"? How does Drew determine whether someone has the ability to bridge both technologist and entrepreneur?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Drew’s Fave Book: Barbarians At The Gate, Fooled By Randomness
Drew’s Fave Blog: Dan Primack: Axios
As always you can follow Harry & The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Benchmark's Eric Vishria on Why Career VCs Have Advantages Most Under Appreciate, Why We Are In An Infrastructure Renaissance & What Makes The Best VC Partnership
Eric Vishria is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the world’s leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. At Benchmark, Eric has led deals and sits on the board of the likes of Confluent, Amplitude, and Bugsnag. Prior to being in VC, Eric was the Founder & CEO @ Rockmelt, the startup that sought to re-imagine the browser for the way people use the web today, the company was ultimately acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Prior to Rockmelt Eric held numerous different roles including VP of Products @ HP and VP of Marketing @ Opsware.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eric came to be one of the 5 GP's at Benchmark following operational success with Rockmelt, HP and Opsware?
2.) Why does Eric believe the pendulum has swung too far to the operational route into VC? What are the under-appreciated benefits of career VCs and the perspective they bring? How does Eric expect the pendulum to swing in the coming years?
3.) What makes the best-performing venture partnerships? How does Benchmark think about partner composition and career pre-VC? How does Benchmark structure investment decision-making? Why do they favor advocacy over unanimity?
4.) What does Eric mean when he says we are at the beginning of an infrastructure renaissance? What opportunities does this create in the venture landscape? How does this lead Eric to consider the current state of the consumer landscape?
5.) How does Eric view multi-stage investing? Why does Eric and Benchmark favour stage specifity when it comes to investing? What are the dangers of larger stage funds investing in earlier rounds for optionality?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eric’s Fave Book: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage To The Antarctic
Eric's Most Recent Investment: Confluent
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Raising Over $700m From The World's Best Investors, How To Innovate In Highly Regulated Markets & The 3 Superpowers of Insurance Companies with Mario Schlosser, Founder & CEO @ Oscar
Mario Schlosser is the Founder & CEO @ Oscar, the startup that makes health insurance easy. They have raised over $700m in funding from some of the world's best investors including the likes of Founders Fund, Google Capital, Thrive Capital, Lakestar, Khosla Ventures and Jim Breyer just to name a few. Previously, Mario co-founded the largest social gaming company in Latin America and held roles with the likes of Bridgewater Associates and McKinsey. Fun fact, as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Mario wrote 10 computer science publications, including one of the most-cited computer science papers published in the past decade.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mario made his way into the world of healthcare and Oscar from founding Latin America's largest social gaming company?
2.) Why is insurance one of the most complex spaces in tech? Why is there a chance for companies, not governments, to cut costs and innovate on the current system? Does Mario agree with Brian Singerman, "once we go to a single player, innovation ends", thesis?
3.) Oscar has raised over $700m, to what extent does Mario believe that too high a valuation can be a liability? How did Mario look to select his investors? What are the challenges of raising funds for a category-defining opportunity?
4.) Oscar now has over 600 in the team, where have been the inflection points in the scaling of the company? Where have things broken? How does Mario look to rectify and observe these inflection points ahead of time?
5.) How does Mario look to optimise team composition? How does he look to balance athletes with heavy domain experts? Does Mario believe that too much domain expertise can prevent innovation due to a lack of naivety?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mario’s Fave Book: Herr Lehmann
Mario’s Fave Blog: Spiegel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mario on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs
Jeremy Conrad is a Partner @ Lemnos Labs, the fund that believes in the earliest stages of building hardware, every dollar counts, every hour matters and every decision is crucial to success or failure. Consequently, Lemnos invests in pre-seed and seed hardware startups encountering these very real challenges. Among their portfolio is the likes of previous guest Swift Navigation and Airware, just to name a few. As for Jeremy, prior to VC he was in the United States Airforce where he was in charge of an $80m tests and targets group and was also responsible for the BMC4I system of the Airborne Laser (ABL).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeremy made his way from the United States Airforce to investing in the next generation of great hardware founders with Lemnos?
2.) Why does Jeremy believe that now is the time for robotics? What megatrends mean now is the right time? Why does Jeremy believe that core AI today is largely a bunch of nifty tricks?
3.) Why does Jeremy believe that Silicon Valley will dominate the future of robotics? What characteristics does the valley have that mean this is the case? What is the dirty secret of Silicon Valley?
4.) How does Jeremy view the funding environments for hardware? Where is there constrictions of capital for hardware startups? What must hardware founders have in place in order to raise a Series B?
5.) Why does Jeremy believe that consumer electronics is the hardest space for venture today? With the likes of Juicero and Pearl, is consumer still possible today? Are the likes of GoPro and FitBit merely anomalies in the dataset?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeremy’s Fave Book: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Jeremy’s Fave Blog: Dan Primack: Pro Rata
Jeremy’s Most Recent Investment: Marble
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeremy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market
Mike Volpi is a General Partner @ Index Ventures, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Supercell and Deliveroo just to name a few. Mike currently sits on the boards of prior guests, Cockroach Labs and Wealthfront, as well as Blue Bottle Coffee, Sonos and Zuora just to name a few. Prior to Index, Mike was a director @ Cloud.com (acq by Citrix) and StorSimple (acq by Microsoft). Before that, Mike held a number of executive positions including Chief Strategy Officer at Cisco. He also serves on the board of Fiat Chrysler Automotive.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his transition from operator and M&A exec to General Partner @ Index and opening their West Coast Office?
2.) Question from Dave Morin @ Slow: How did Mike's childhood in Italy and Japan affect how he views and interacts with entrepreneurs today? Question from Danny Rimer: How has Mike found the transition from player to coach with the move to VC?
3.) Question from Andy Rachleff: Having seen both the US and European venture markets, how do they compare? Why does Mike think being an entrepreneur in Europe is far more solitary? What does it take to create a VC brand, like Index in an already very crowded West Coast market?
4.) Having had a front-row seat for the brand building of the likes of Sonos, Blue Bottle and Eero, what does Mike believe are the core tenets to building generation-defining brands? How has this changed over the last 5-10 years?
5.) Does Mike agree with Rob Siegel that the enterprise market is now less exciting given we might be entering a period of consolidation? Why does Mike believe this actually represents opportunity? How will we see open source play a role in the next wave of these enterprise companies?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: Undaunted Courage
Mike’s Fave Blog: The Information
Mike’s Most Recent Investment: Eero
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Litecoin Founder, Charlie Lee on Why ICO's Are The Biggest Threat To Crypto, Why Ethereum Will Run Into Huge Scalability Problems & How To Assess The Trade Off Between Decentralisation & Scale
Charlie Lee is the creator of Litecoin, the most popular alternative currency to Bitcoin, which Charlie created as a side project in 2011 while working at Google. Today Litecoin has a market cap of $3.29Bn. As well as creating Litecoin, Charlie is also the Director of Engineering @ Coinbase, working alongside recent 20VC guest and Coinbase founder, Brian Armstrong. Prior to this, Charlie held roles at Microsoft, Google and Guidewire.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Charlie made his way from Google to Coinbase to founding Litecoin in his free time? What were Charlie's biggest takeaways from being at Coinbase?
2.) What does Charlie believe is the biggest barrier to the world of cryptocurrency and BTC? What is the holy grail to securing this and the future of the space within mass consumer usage?
3.) How does Charlie think about the largest problem for crypto and BTC, scaling? Why does Charlie believe that Ethereum will have large problems scaling? How does Charlie assess the balance of centralization, scaling and transaction efficiency?
4.) Why is Charlie's biggest concern the current ICO market? Why does he believe it is the "wild west"? What happens to alternative currencies when the ICO market crashes? Who are the ultimate winners in the ICO markets?
5.) How does Charlie analyse the differing communities when comparing ETH to BTC to LTC? Does community serve as a core form of IP for currencies and their stability moving forward?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Charlie’s Fave Book: Game of Thrones
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Charlie on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: Why VC Is A Lifestyle Not A Job, Why You Must Do Post-mortems On Good and Bad Deals & Why Society Is On A Downgrade with Kathleen Utecht, Managing Partner @ Core Innovation Capital
Kathleen Utecht is a General Partner @ Core Innovation Capital, I would say one of the most under the radar but immensely exciting funds in market and they are looking to revolutionize financial services with their portfolio. With their portfolio are the likes of NerdWallet, PayJoy, fundera and Mayvenn just to name a few. Prior to Core, Kat was an investor at Comcast Ventures and WVP Ventures. Prior to her venture roles, Kath invested in and led Green Rock Entertainment, an online/offline commerce startup. Before that, Kat cut her teeth in the world of finance working as an investment banker at Raymond James.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kat made her way from car entrepreneur dreams to operator to now, General Partner @ Core?
2.) Why does Kat believe that "society is on a downgrade"? Does Kat agree with the Thiel thesis of "we expected flying cars and were given 140 characters"? Where does Kat most want to see entrepreneurs spending their time and skills?
3.) How does Kat view regulation with regards to startup operations and expansion? Why does Kat believe that "sector specific funds should be in every highly regulated deal"? What are the core benefits? How can VCs really aid with regulation?
4.) Kat has previously said that "VC is a lifestyle not a job", what does Kat mean by this? How does this mean VCs should behave with regards to founder interactions and communications? How can entrepreneurs stress test whether a VC has this belief?
5.) How does Kat view the process of losing companies? What does her post mortem analysis look like? Why does Kat believe that if you do not lose companies, you are not taking enough risk?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kat’s Fave Book: Atlas Shrugged
Kat’s Fave Blog: AVC by Fred Wilson
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kat on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: USV's Andy Weissman on The Future of The VC Industry, Why USV Does Not Vote On Investment Decisions & Why VCs Should Be Invisible
Andy Weissman is a Partner @ Union Square Ventures, one of the world’s leading VC firms with investments in Twitter, Twilio, Zynga, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Lending Club and many more. At USV, Andy sits on the boards of YouNow, ScienceExchange, Figure 1 and previous guest, CircleUp. Prior to joining USV, in 2007 he co-founded betaworks, which both created and invested in social, real-time applications and services. You can also check out Andy's fantastic blog here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Andy made his way into the world of startups and investing, came to found Betaworks and then made the move to USV?
2.) Andy has previously said the business "is more about luck than skill and process rather than foresight". Why does Andy place so much emphasis on process? How has Andy seen his process evolve over the years? How does the process of an individual balance with the process of the firm?
3.) Why does USV not agree with voting as a method of investment decision making? How do Andy and USV approach reserve allocation? What model and simulators do they use to determine which companies receive follow on funding?
4.) Why does Andy believe that recycling cash from early exits is good for everyone? How has Andy found that LPs respond to this? What is the balance? What is the right amount for recycling, 110%, 120% or 130%?
5.) How does Andy view price sensitivity? To what extent does Andy agree with Peter Fenton that "valuation is a mental trap"? Has there been a time when Andy has lost a deal due to price? How has that changed his psyche and approach to the topic?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Andy’s Fave Book: On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Andy’s Fave Blog: Phish.net, Continuations, Radio Free Mobile
Andy's Most Recent Investment: Flip
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Andy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com
Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.
20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor
Wayne Chang is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. His latest company, Crashlytics, was acquired by Twitter in a 9-figure acquisition, its largest acquisition at the time. 5 years later, Crashlytics was acquired again, this time by Google. Wayne is also a prolific angel investor with a portfolio that includes the likes of OpenDoor, SoFi, Gusto, JetSmarter and Planet Labs just to name a few. If that was not enough, Wayne is also a limited partner in several prominent funds including the likes of 137 Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Boston Seed Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Wayne make his way into the world of founding tech companies and what was the founding story with Crashlytics?
2.) Why does Wayne believe that one of the first hires founders must make is a recruiter? What are the benefits of having this as a dedicated function so early? What must founders look for in these early recruiter hires?
3.) Why does Wayne believe that with regards to VC, you "must avoid the board room"? What is a better environment to interact and pitch? How can early stage startups look to stand out in the rather process driven pitching game?
4.) What is the optimal way for founders to be put in touch with VCs? Should founders speak to associates in the fundraising days? Why does Wayne believe the power of the warm intro is lopsided?
5.) How can founders look to create a sense of urgency within the VC community when raising and closing their round? How can founders look to create a sense of FOMO within the investor class they are pitching? Should they name other funds they are seeing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Wayne’s Fave Book: Enders Game
Wayne’s Fave Blog: Hacker News
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Wayne on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: Why Investors Have The Biggest Problem with Bias, Why Our Job Is To Maximise Risk & Why It Is Essential To Get Good at Losing with True Ventures Founder, Jon Callaghan
Jon Callaghan is a founder of True Ventures, one of the West Coast's leading early stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of Fitbit, recent unicorn Peloton, Automattic (makers of Wordpress) and more amazing companies. Jon also led the deals and sits on the board of Fitbit, Brightroll, Peloton and Glu Mobile, just to name a few. Prior to True, Jon founded 3 of his own companies, the first being in 1986 with Mountain Bike Outfitters Inc. Following several years founding companies, Jon made his move into VC with Summit Partners and then enjoyed roles with AOL's venture incubator, CMGi's Venture group and Globespan Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jon made his first forays into the world of VC and came to co-found True with Phil Black?
2.) How does Jon look to straddle the divide of "founder/VC"? Why does Jon believe it is crucial to have an entrepreneurial mindset as an investor?
3.) Why does Jon believe VCs biggest bias is loss aversion? Why does Jon always believe that the role of the VC is to maximise risk? What 1 thing must all prospective investors get good at very quickly?
4.) How does Jon view reserve allocation? True invest -1% per deal in each company, how do they look to efficiently deploy reserves? What must the communication be between founder and VC with regards to attaining follow on funding?
5.) Why does Jon believe that current board meetings do not serve startup founders? What are the characteristics of the best board members and how they conduct themselves? What is the single biggest problem boards bring to founders?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jon’s Fave Book: Moby Dick
Jon’s Fave Blog: Dave Pell: NextDraft
Jon’s Most Recent Investment: Brava
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jon on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: True Ventures Founder, Phil Black on 4 Major Risk Categories for Startups, Why The Funding Gap Is At The "Rational B" Round & Why VCs Must Start Small But Think Big
Phil Black is a founder of True Ventures, one of the West Coast's leading early stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of Fitbit, recent unicorn Peloton, Automattic (makers of Wordpress) and more amazing companies. Prior to True, Phil learnt the craft of venture at Summit Partners and at the predecessor firm to Lightspeed Venture Partners. However, it was in 2003 that Phil co-founded a small angel fund, Blacksmith Capital with the mission to prove his thesis that great founders of early stage technology companies can and often prefer to start their businesses and get a lot of traction with $2.5 million or less of initial funding.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Phil made is first forays into the world of VC and his big learnings in the early days of cutting his teeth in the industry?
2.) What were the big takeaways for Phil from experiencing the massive dot com boom days to experiencing the very lowest of funding environments? How did that affect his investment mindset? How does that affect his view of startup raising?
3.) What does Phil consider the 4 major risk categories for startups? What combination of risk categories mean a successful outcome is more possible? Which combination mean that Phil would likely not invest in the company?
4.) How should startups determine the "right" amount to raise for? How does Phil assess optimising runway and evaluating burn? What does Phil make of the hailed "bridge round"? WHy does Phil believe lean is always best?
5.) With considerable funds AUM how does sharing in sub $2.5m rounds provide sufficient levels of ownership to ake fund returns? What is True's required level of ownership? How does Phil assess reserve allocation and pro rata rights?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Phil’s Fave Blog: Om Malik, Dan Primack: Axios
Phil’s Most Recent Investment: Orecco
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Phil on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation
Tim Harris is the Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation, the startup focused on building a world-class organization that will power the next generation of GPS-enabled robots and autonomous vehicles. They have raised over $45m in VC funding from some of our favourites including the likes of First Round, Felicis, Lemnos Labs and NEA. As for Tim, prior to Swift Tim held numerous roles from supply chain consulting to corporate finance encapsulating strategic partnerships and M&A.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tim made his way from supply chain consulting to providing navigation for an automated future with Swift?
2.) Why does Tim believe that Silicon Valley is no longer optimised for deep tech creation and investing? Why does Tim believe we have seen the transition in Silicon Valley from technology innovation to business model innovation? Is this a problem?
3.) Tim has said before "there is a big lie to Silicon Valley", what is that lie? How does Tim assess unit economics with regards to deep tech businesses? How does he look to evaluate the viability of a deep tech business model? What are the core components?
4.) From the VC perspective, does Tim believe deep tech is an attractive investment opportunity for the current investor class? How does Tim respond to the longer exit cycles and higher capital intensity of deep tech? Does this create inherently frothy environments for valuations given the dilutive element?
5.) How does Tim view the working together of incumbents and deep tech startups? Is this an environment of consolidation, partnership or over arching disruption? What are the core questions founders must ask when considering a partnership?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tim’s Fave Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Tim’s Fave Blog: First Round Review
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital
Alina Cohen is a General Partner @ Initialized Capital, one of Silicon Valleys leading early stage seed funds. Their portfolio includes the likes of recent unicorn, Coinbase, Flexport, Cruise Automation, OpenDoor and many more incredible companies. As for Alina, prior to Initialized, she ran tech investments for Tamares Group, the first outside investor in Palantir, and previously founded Recrec, a computer vision startup which was acquired by Facebook, where she worked on Platform and Groups.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alina made her way from selling her computer vision startup to Facebook to GP with one of SF's best new seed funds, Initialized?
2.) Why does Alina think gaming is so similar to start-ups? What core components are the same? What about gaming led Alina to realise there were secrets to the world of starting companies and growing startups in Silicon Valley?
3.) Why is Alina so focused on engineering-centric founders? Why does Alina feel they are the most attractive investment opportunities? Why are they the founder profile that deals best when pivots have to be made?
4.) Why does Alina think that AI is more artificial than intelligent today? If ML is a "leveraged play on data", where are the opportunities for startups with such data incumbency? Does AI just help the big get bigger?
5.) Why is Alina so bullish on the future of personal voice computing? What does Alina think will be the catalyst to consumer adoption? What are the compelling consumer applications with voice? Why does this remind her of the early FB platform days?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alina’s Fave Book: The Three-Body Problem
Alina’s Most Recent Investment: Fly.io
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alina on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: The First ICO Blockchain Incubator Ever, Why ICO's Will Change The World of Venture As We Know It & How The M&A Market Will Respond To ICO's with Mike, Jones, Co-Founder @ Science Inc
Mike Jones is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Science Inc, one of America's most successful incubators with an incredible 3 Science Inc portfolio companies exiting in 2016 alone with the sales of Dollar Shave Club, Hello Society (acquired by NYT) and Famebit (acquired by Google). Science continue to push the frontier of tech with their recent announcement of Science Blockchain, the first ICO blockchain incubator ever, with the ICO pre-sale starting in just 13 days from now. Prior to Science, Mike was the CEO @ MySpace, where he was responsible for one of the most high-profile turn-around challenges in the industry.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his way from MySpace CEO to founding one of the nation's most successful startup incubators?
2.) Firstly, what is a token in the world of crypto? How does securitized and utility tokens differ? Why does Mike believe the current state of utility tokens is reminiscent of the early days of domain names?
3.) What are the core barriers to traditional investors transferring assets on mass into crypto? What will be the catalyst causing this asset allocation shift in the future? What needs to happen to crypto for it to be attractive for traditionals?
4.) How have we seen the M&A market respond to tokenization? How can we as an ecosystem look to build a framework and structure that allows for a healthy M&A environment?
5.) With so many ICOs occurring today, what will be the determining factors between those that succeed and those that do not? How can individuals from around the world look to assess potential ICO's?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: Ready Player One
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: Nuzzel's Jonathan Abrams on Why The Top VCs Do Not Have A PlayBook For Startup Success, Why Most Boards Are Not Successful & Why He Is Bored Of Hearing "I Fell Into VC"
Jonathan Abrams is the Founder and CEO @ Nuzzel, the startup that offers personalised news discovery and curated newsletters for busy professionals. They have backing from some of the investing greats including Marc Andreesen, Naval Ravikant, Homebrew, SoftTech and Lowercase just to name a few. Prior to Nuzzel, Jonathan was the Founder of early social media machine, Friendster attaining funding from Benchmark, Kleiner and Reid Hoffman. Jonathan is also a prolific angel investor counting AngelList, Docker, Front, Instacart, and Slideshare amongst his portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jonathan made his way into the world of startups and came to found Nuzzel?
2.) Why does Jonathan dislike it when he hears that a VC "fell into the industry"? Why does that not resonate with entrepreneurs? How can it be better phrased to align with operationally minded people?
3.) Why is Jonathan tired of hearing the word conviction from investors? Why does it not make sense to say you invest with conviction? How would Jonathan like to see the use of data to prove conviction-driven (high ownership) is optimal for fund returns?
4.) Does Jonathan believe there are too many seed funds in market today? Why does he believe we have seen a reduction in the numder of $'s going into seed companies? Does Jonathan believe the future is thematic for seed funds?
5.) Why does Jonathan believe the majority of boards "are just not very successful"? What does Jonathan believe makes a great board member? Likewise, what can entrepreneurs do to most effectively manage their board? Why do we need more operational people on boards?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jonathan’s Fave Book: Beggars in Spain by Nanacy Kress
Jonathan’s Fave Blog: Strictly VC
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jonathan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: What Are The Big Questions Entrepreneurs & VCs Must Ask Corporate VCs, Why Corporate VCs Are Not Your Best Lead For Series A & Why The "You Have To Network Your Way To Us' Is Wrong with Allison Goldberg, Managing Director @ Time Warner Investments
Allison Goldberg is a Managing Director & Senior Vice President @ Time Warner Investments, focusing on investment opportunities that directly enhance Time Warner's ability to meet specific strategic goals. Their portfolio consists of the likes of Mashable, Discord, Admeld (acq by Google) and Mic just to name a few. Allison also directly sits on the boards of Outpost Games, Yieldmo, Bustle and Mic. Prior to Time Warner, Allison cut her teeth in the finance industry with a stint at Morgan Stanley.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Allison made her way from investment banking with Morgan Stanley to running the investment arm of Time Warner?
2.) How has Allison seen the world of corporate VC change over the last 16 years? How has Allison seen the VC perception of corporate VC change over the years? Do corporates still get the preference rights they once received?
3.) What are the big questions entrepreneurs must ask corporate VCs when entering into discussions with them? What are the big red flags entrepreneurs should look for in their dialogue? What line of conversation should give the entrepreneur confidence?
4.) Is there a signalling risk for startups of having corporate investors rather than Tier 1 VCs? How can this signalling risk be mitigated? Why does Allison not think corporates make for good Series A lead investors?
5.) How does Allison view fund structures for corporates? How does the lack of fund end affect how corporates can invest long term? How does it affect their time allocation without needing to raise future funds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Allison’s Fave Book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Allison’s Fave Blog: NextDraft
Allison’s Most Recent Investment: Mic
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Allison on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: YC's Daniel Gross on How YC Can Democratise AI & Reduce Incumbency Advantages, Why ML Enabled Software Will Eat The Software That Ate The World & Whether AI Will Produce Independent Companies or Be Technology within Incumbents
Daniel Gross is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world's most successful accelerator with alumni that includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Flexport and many more incredible companies. At Y Combinator Daniel heads up all things YC AI having been a Director @ Apple where he focused on machine learning, as a result of his prior company, Cue (also a YC company) being acquired by Apple in 2013. If that was not enough, Daniel also has one of the valley's most impressive angel portfolios with investments in OpenDoor, Cruise (acquired by GM), Gusto and Github, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way from YC founder to being acquired by Apple to being YC partner?
2.) How does Daniel respond to the statement that "AI, is in part, a scam"? Why does Daniel believe that the impact of AI has not lived up to the hype?
3.) What are the 3 economies of scale that you have with machine learning when you are a large company? What can startups do to mitigate these incumbency advantages? What does Daniel mean when he says it is his job to "democratize AI"?
4.) Does Daniel believe we will see the rise of "AI companies" or machine learning as a sustaining innovation that existing incumbents use? What is Daniel fearful of with regards to this?
5.) How does Daniel view the potential for business models to be built around AI? Daniel has said "machine learning software will eat the software that has eaten the world". What does he mean by this? How does this play out?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Daniel’s Fave Book: Enders Game, High Output Management, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Daniel’s Fave Blog: Slate Star Codex
Daniel’s Most Recent Investment: Rippling
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Daniel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app – all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: What Larry Paige, Mary Meeker and Ben Horowitz All Have In Common, Why You Have To Build A Movement Not A Brand & Why This Really Is A Great Time To Be An Entrepreneur with Joey Zwillinger, Co-Founder @ Allbirds
Joseph Zwillinger is the Founder @ Allbirds, the startup that makes the world's most comfortable shoes check this out, made out of wool. They have funding from the likes of Maveron, Lerer Hippeau and Slow Ventures and an army of loyal fans that includes Larry Paige, Ben Horowitz, Mary Meeker and Dick Costolo. Prior to co-founding Allbirds, Joey enjoyed a range of careers from investment banking with Goldman Sachs to venture capital with Industry Ventures to working at next generation food and nutrition company, TerraVia.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Joey made his way from investment banker to venture capitalist to Founder @ Allbirds, Silicon Valley's hottest brand?
2.) How does Joey view the core tenets to creating a successful brand? Why must brands today go further to more of a movement? How can companies look to create movements within their customer base?
3.) How does Joey assess the effects of Amazon on retail? How does Joey evaluate the economic ramifications of Amazon's flea market approach on the brands behind the products? Why does Joey want Allbirds to stay far away from Amazon?
4.) How does Joey look to prioritize what he and Allbirds focus on? What is the one core metric that guides all their decisions and behavior? How is this applicable to every company of all stage and sector?
5.) Why does Joey think that not enough VCs are people orientated? How does Josh assess the VC class of today? What does he look for when deciding which investors to choose?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Joey’s Fave Book: Man's Search For Meaning
Joey’s Fave Blog: First Round Review, Dan Primack
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app - all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: How To Design Investment Decision Making That Allows For Outliers, Why Personal Voice Computing Is The Next Big Platform & The Challenges That Could Prevent It with David Beisel, Founding Partner @ NextView Ventures
David Beisel is a co-founder and Partner at NextView Ventures, one of the East Coast's leading early stage funds with their recent $50m seed fund being announced just this month. David was most recently a Vice President at Venrock and previously a Principal at Masthead Venture Partners. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, David co-founded Sombasa Media, an e-mail marketing company best known for its flagship product BargainDog. Sombasa was successfully acquired by About.com where David served as Vice President of Marketing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of early stage venture and came to co-found NextView?
2.) How did Nextview design an investment decision-making process that allows for outliers to get through? How does this change with the decision for follow on investment?
3.) Why should firms write investment memos for every investment, regardless of stage and sector? How can firms implement a voting process that is both rigourous yet innovative?
4.) Why is David so excited by the voice computing space? With incumbents like Google and Amazon dominating, where is the opportunity for startups to play? Why does David believe that voice is the most natural user interface possible?
5.) Why does David believe distribution is one of the biggest challenges facing startups today? What does David look for in founders that suggest inherent knowledge of marketing and distribution prowess?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Look Homeward, Angel
David’s Fave Blog: Gotham Voices, Hearing Voices
David’s Most Recent Investment: Skyways
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app - all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: Jason Calacanis on The 4 Questions Investors Must Ask Founders, Whether YC Have Scaled Their Process Successfully & Why Early Founder Liquidity Is Good Not Bad
Jason Calacanis is arguably one of the world's greatest angel investors, as he says he has "got lucky" 7 times and counting with a portfolio that includes the likes of Uber, Thumbtack, Evernote, Tumblr and more incredible companies. Jason has also previously been a scout for Sequoia Capital, where he made the original Uber investment. On the operational side, Jason was previously a Sequoia Founder with Weblogs, sold to AOL for a reported $25-40m. Today he is the Host of This Week In Startups and Founder of The Launch Festival, bringing entrepreneurs together with potential investors. You can buy his fantastic new book, Angel here!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Jason make his move into the world of angel investing? Why was now the right time to write, Angel?
2.) What does Jason believe are the 4 questions investors must ask founders? What response to those questions excited Jason to hear? What responses make him nervous?
3.) Why does Jason believe that founders having the option for early liquidity is good? Why does he believe it does the opposite of what VCs think and actually makes them continue to work? What are the dangers of offering early liquidity to those founders?
4.) Why does Jason believe that companies are always bought and not sold? Does VC access to corporate development teams then become a futile exercise?
5.) How does Jason view the scaling of Y Combinator? How does Jason evaluate the valuations placed on YC companies? Why does Jason believe that progressive term sheets are ridiculous?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app - all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry
Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more. With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.
20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common
Brad Hargreaves is the Founder & CEO @ Common, the startup that provides shared housing for those that live in common. They have raised over $20m in VC funding from some of our very favorites including the likes of Maveron, Slow Ventures, Lowercase Capital, 8VC and Brendan Wallace @ Fifth Wall. Prior to Common, Brad was the Founder of General Assembly, the global school for tech, business, and design which has, to date, raised over $140m and has locations across 4 continents.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brad made his way into the world of tech, came to found General Assembly and then made his move into the world of real estate with Common?
2.) Why have we seen the price of real estate in core urban areas hit an all time high today? How does Brad think this will affect the future of malls?
3.) Why does Brad think that in a scalable business not every element has to scale? What does he mean by this? What proportion of elements have to scale? What are the inflection points in scaling that suggest potential for venture returns?
4.) How does Brad think about the secondary affects of AVs? Which areas does Brad think have the most potential for innovation? How does Brad think about the negative externalities of AV's? What can be done to mitigate their effects?
5.) Why does Brad think that occupational licensing is one of the biggest barriers to economic growth in the US? What reform can be made to enhance this and allow for growth?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brad’s Fave Book: The Lever of Riches
Brad’s Fave Blog: Kim Mai Cutler, Fifth Wall Newsletter, Steven Smith
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: The 7 Requirements For Startup Scaling, Why VCs Must Approach Every Conversation with A Yes Mentality & Why We Will See The Humanisation of Technology with Renata Quintini, Partner @ Lux Capital
Renata Quintini is a Partner @ Lux Capital, one of the leaders in the rise of deep tech investing supporting scientists and entrepreneurs providing solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the project, the better. Before Lux, Renata was a partner at Felicis Ventures, where she worked with the likes of Cruise, Dollar Shave Club, Rigetti Computing and Bonobos, just to name a few. Prior to VC, Renata was an investment manager at Stanford University’s endowment, which invests in dozens of private equity and venture capital funds.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Renata made her way from LP in venture with Stanford University to dominating seed VC with Felicis to now leading the deep tech investing charge with Lux Capital?
2.) How does the mentality shift from making the move of LP with Stanford to VC with Felicis and Lux? How does Renata believe being an LP made her a better VC? How has what it takes to be a successful emerging manager changed over the last 5-10 years?
3.) What are the 7 rules that Renata gives to all startups at the start of their journey to ensure they do not implode? Where do startups most often falter, from Renata's perspective? How have the requirements and demands of founders changed recently?
4.) How does Renata look to approach every investment opportunity, mentality wise? Why does Renata believe this stance is optimal over the alternative? What are the caveats that must be placed on this to ensure for realism also?
5.) What makes Renata believe that we are seeing the humanisation of technology? How does this affect how deep tech will be designed moving forward? How does this affect how technology truly interacts and integrates with consumer behaviour?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Renata’s Fave Book: Daring Greatly
Renata’s Most Recent Investment: Common Networks
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Renata on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
Seth Bannon is a Founding Partner at Fifty Years, a San Francisco seed fund that backs entrepreneurs solving the world's biggest problems with technology. With a proclivity for deep tech, Seth has invested in a range of startups shaping the world for the better -- from a company culturing real meat to eat without animals, to a company building small satellites to cover the earth in internet. A graduate of Y Combinator, Seth was named twice to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurship.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Seth made his way from working on Obama's digital campaign to being a YC founder to now, founding Fifty Years?
2.) What is the Friedman Doctrine? Why does Seth think it is the most dangerous doctrine in the world? What leads Seth to believe in the potential for both purpose + profit? What is driving this change in millennial mindsets for the importance of purpose?
3.) Why does Seth believe we have seen a large increase in VC $ moving into deep tech as a space? What are the technical reasons for why seed stage deep tech investing is now such an attractive market segment? Do we have adequate deep tech growth financing?
4.) Why does Seth believe that much of Silicon Valley's talent is going to waste? How would Seth like to see talent redistributed to produce the greatest returns for society? What needs to be done for that to occur?
5.) Why is Seth so bullish in his belief for the need for fund cycles to be extended? How does Seth respond to suggestions that due to long development cycles in deep tech, investors have to carry companies for much longer? How has Seth seen the secondaries market open up over the last few years?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Seth’s Fave Book: The Idea Factory
Seth’s Fave Blog: Hacker News
Seth’s Most Recent Investment: Athelas
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Seth on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Coinbase's Brian Armstrong on The Rise & Short Term Correction in ICOs, The Regulatory Framework Required For Blockchain To Succeed & How The Rise of Blockchain Disrupts The VC Industry
Brian Armstrong is the Founder & CEO @ Coinbase, the startup that provides the world's most popular way to buy and sell bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin. They have backing from some of the biggest and best in VC having raised over $100m from the likes of Andreesen Horowitz, USV, DFJ and many more incredible investors. As for Brian, prior to Coinbase he was a Software Engineer @ Airbnb and before that founded his own startup, Universitytutor.com
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brian made his way from Airbnb to founding one of the early disruptors in the crypto space with Coinbase?
2.) Doing an 80/20 analysis, what are the 3 fundamental differences between Bitcoin and ethereum? What is Brian's opinion on the scaling path ahead for ethereum? How do the teams behind ethereum and Bitcoin differ and what effect do these differing approaches have?
3.) What is an ICO? Does Brian believe ICOs will be a sustainable method of company financing in the future? What needs to take place to ensure for the continued momentum of ICOs? What have been the biggest surprises of ICOs for Brian?
4.) How does Brian view the regulatory stance around both ICOs and blockchain more generally? What is he concerned will happen? What would be the optimal regulatory framework for the theme to thrive?
5.) How does the rise of blockchain disrupt the VC industry? Why does Brian agree with Naval in stating the future will involve the unbundling of money, control and advice from the realms of VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brian’s Fave Book: Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Brian’s Fave Blog: Week In Ethereum
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: When Should CEOs Ask Their VC For Help, When Do Companies Really Need A Board & What The Series A Expansion Means For Startups with Max Gazor, General Partner @ CRV
Max Gazor is a General Partner @ CRV, one of the nation’s oldest and most successful VC firms now on their 16th fund and with a prior portfolio consisting of the likes of Twitter, Yammer, Zendesk and ClassPass just to name a few. As for Max, he has led deals in the likes of Airtable, Simplivity, Xamarin and many more incredible companies. Prior to CRV, Max led acquisitions and investments across enterprise and emerging technologies for Cisco’s Corporate Development team.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Max made his entry into VC and came to be General Partner @ CRV?
2.) How does Max look to really build conviction around the 1% of companies that he invests in? CRV, now on Fund 16, what have been the major lessons as a firm about operating a VC fund successfully? How does CRV actively implement policies to place the entrepreneur first?
3.) How does Max consider capital allocation across stages and the efficient use of follow on funding? How does he stack rank the portfolio and determine which companies to double down on and which not to?
4.) Why does Max believe that AI is where the cloud was 10 years ago? Within the segment, where is Max most excited? Why does Max often advocate for his startups to remain in stealth mode following funding?
5.) When is the right time for startups to formalize their boards? What is the right size of board in the early days? What is the one feeling that the board should make the founder feel in meetings?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Max’s Fave Book: Old Man and The Sea
Max’s Fave Blog: The Twenty Minute VC
Max’s Most Recent Investment: Airtable
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Max on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: What Metrics LPs Really Use To Measure Manager Success, Why 10 Year Fund Structures Really Do Not Work & Why Venture Is So Similar To The Movie Business with Will Porteous, General Partner @ RRE Ventures
Will Porteous is the General Partner & COO @ RRE Ventures, one of New York's leading venture funds with investments in the likes of Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Giphy and Paperless Post just to name a few. As for Will, he works primarily with media and hardware companies, where he is a Director of BuzzFeed, Paperless Post, Spaceflight, and Spire. Prior to VC, Will held senior management positions with SupplyWorks and NetMarket, the e-commerce pioneer now owned by Cendant Corp.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Will made his entry into VC and came to be the hardware and media specialist as General Partner and COO @ RRE Ventures?
2.) Why does WIll believe VC is like the movie industry? How can VCs be prepared to movie producers? How does the talent required to make a great movie resemble that of making a great startup?
3.) Why does Will think the current venture model of 10-year life cycles is broken? How would he like to see LP liquidy opened with iterations on the current venture model? How can the secondary market be revolutionized to provide such liquidity?
4.) Why does Will believe that location awareness will drive a wave of value creation an order of magnitude greater than anything we have seen before? What is the thesis behind this? What are the barriers, both from a technology and cultural perspective?
5.) What were Will's biggest takeaways from being mentored by the legend, Bill Campbell, Former Chairman and CEO @ Intuit? What did he learn about leadership and incentivising a workforce from Bill? What example does Bill provide from seeing this at Google?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Will’s Fave Book: Radical Candor; Be A Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Will’s Fave Blog: AVC by Fred Wilson
Will’s Most Recent Investment: The Outline
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Will on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visitwepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal
Nathan Wenzel is the Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal, the startup that helps legal operations reduce legal spend and improve operational efficiency. They recently raised their $10m Series A led by leading SaaS investors, Emergence Capital with participation from our favourites in the team at Susa Ventures and Rincon Venture Partners. As for Nathan, prior to founding SimpleLegal he spent time in consulting and as a Partner @ BI analytics firm, Edge Solutions.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nathan made his way from consulting to BI analytics to founding one of SaaS's hottest "overnight successes" in SimpleLegal?
2.) Why does Nathan advocate for the slow and steady approach in startups? What type of business does this make sense for? Does this not go contra the traditional theory of move fast and break things?
3.) Nathan has said before that "most bay area millennials have not seen market corrections". How does Nathan's experience seeing these corrections affect his running of SimpleLegal? Why does Nathan think we have an impending market correction to come?
4.) Why must founders always know the day that they will become profitable? How does that change the way they operate and strategise the running of the business? Why is it also crucial for them to know their zero cash day?
5.) What did John really look for in his investors? What questions should founders ask potential investors pre-investment? How would John look to improve his fundraising process for the Series B?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nathan’s Fave Book: Only The Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
Nathan’s Fave Blog: SaaStr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nathan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Why YC Is The Exact Opposite of Proprietary Deal Flow, Why Having No Follow On Dramatically Aligns Incentives & Why Founders Do Not Have To Be Passionate About Their Idea From The Start with Michael Ma, Founding Partner @ Liquid 2 Ventures
Michael Ma is a Founding Partner @ Liquid 2 Ventures, one of San Francisco's younger and more exciting seed funds, also unique in having Hall of Fame quarter back, Joe Montana as another Founding Partner. Their portfolio includes the likes of previous guest, WorkRamp, NerdWallet, FanDuel and many more very exciting young companies. Prior to Liquid 2, Michael was the co-founder of TalkBin, a YC alum that later sold to Google and was an Investment Team Partner @ First Round's Dorm Room Fund.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How from Michael's parents arriving in the US with $300 Michael made his way into tech ended up in YC, selling his company to Google and ultimately being a VC with Liquid 2?
2.) Does Michael agree with the common suggestion that too much money is chasing too few deals at seed? How does Michael think raising now is different to when raising for Liquid 2? How did having Joe Montana as a founder affect the fundraise?
3.) How does Michael view the optimal decision making process? Does Michael believe in unanimity or conviction driven processes when investing with a partnership? How does this change for follow on? Why is it so important to have silver bullet deals in partnerships?
4.) Does Michael agree with the commonly stated assessment that with the scaling of YC the quality has reduced? How does Michael use his own YC experience to argue against this? How should investors be approaching YC today, in this structure?
5.) How does Michael view fund cycles when investing in such deep tech as he has? Are they too short? How does Michael look to scale the learning curve on new industries and transformational technology?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Michael’s Fave Book: Count of Monte Cristo
Michael’s Fave Blog: TermSheet
Michael’s Most Recent Investment: Vivid Vision
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michael on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users – within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visitwepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Investing $200m In Facebook, The 3 Stages of Founder Development & Why Creating A New User Behaviour Can Be Unit Economics Inefficient with Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner @ DST
Rahul Mehta is a Managing Partner @ DST, one of the world's leading late stage venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and Alibaba just to name a few of the incredible companies they have backed. As for Rahul himself, he leads the firm's efforts in the US, Indonesia and India where he led deals in Snapchat, Slack, Ola Cabs, Houzz and Zalando. As a result of this incredible portfolio, Rahul was listed to the Forbes Midas List in 2016.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rahul made the way from tech investment banking to one of the leading growth funds of all time with Yuri Milner investing in Facebook?
2.) Having invested in the likes of Facebook, Snap and Alibaba, how does Rahul assess the leadership teams of some of today's leading players? What makes them the great leaders they are? How can leaders look to make the transition from Founder to CEO?
3.) Why does Rahul argue that founder led businesses are always best? What are the fundamental benefits to this? What hurdles do they have to face to remain CEO for the duration? Where does Rahul see commonalities of CEO's struggling?
4.) How does Rahul look to assess unit economics? What does Rahul have to see in the market to see the long term sustainability of unit economics? Why do companies sometimes have to have poor unit economics in the beginning?
5.) How does Rahul assess the balance of building competitive barriers to entry or focussing on aggressive expansion and being first to market? How does this differ according to sector and funding? How will this change in the future?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rahul’s Fave Book: Open by Andre Agassi
Rahul's Most Recent Investment: Wish
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users - within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: The 2 Types of Sexism & How They Play Out In Tech, Why You Should Not Always Get Customers To Pay For Your Product Immediately & Why You Must Ask Operator VCs Different Questions To Non-Operator VCs with Jenna Brown, Founder & CEO, Shipamax
Jenna Brown is the Founder & CEO @ Shipamax, a data driven communications platform for brokers and operators. They recently raised their seed round from the likes of FF Angel, Y Combinator, Cherubic Ventures, and top angels including Lee Linden and my personal favorite, Andy Rankin. Prior to Shipamax, Jenna was Head of Global Expansion @ GoCardless, one of London's leading Fintech players and before that was herself a trader at RWE Trading.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jenna made her way from ship broker to YC alum, changing the world of shipping with Shipamax?
2.) How does Jenna compare fundraising in the UK to Europe? Was it a challenge raising US funds, considering Jenna was operating outside of the valley? How did Jenna look to mitigate these concerns?
3.) How did Jenna experience both direct and indirect sexual discrimination throughout the fundraising process? Which form was harder to deal with? How did Jenna respond? In hindsight, would Jenna have done anything differently?
4.) What does Jenna advise founders in terms of taking operator VC money vs non-operator VC money? What differing questions must be asked? What should founders be wary of with both types of investors?
5.) Why does Jenna disagree with the commonly held suggestion that you must get people to pay for your product as soon as possible? Why is this not the case always? In what cases is it optimal to have a smoother and faster onboarding?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jenna’s Fave Book: Hard Thing About Hard Things
Jenna’s Fave Blog: SaaStr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jenna on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users - within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Why It Is BS That You Never Regret Paying A High Price To Get Into A Good Company, Why There Are Only 2 Price Points That Work in SaaS and Why eSports Will Be Bigger Than Traditional Sports in 5 Years Time with Jason Pressman @ Shasta Ventures
Jason Pressman is a Managing Director @ Shasta Ventures who have made investments in the likes of Nest, Dollar Shave Club, Smule, Class Dojo and more. With 10 portfolio company investments under his belt, Jason invests in both enterprise and consumer, currently serving on the boards of Crittercism, subscription billing unicorn Zuora, as well as Nextdoor and mobile music platform Smule. Prior to joining Shasta, Jason was Vice President, Strategy and Operations at venture-backed Walmart.com, where he took the online retailer from zero to large scale revenue in five years.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason made his way into the world of venture from Walmart? What were the big takeaways from seeing Walmart enter their hyper-growth phase?
2.) Why does Jason believe it is bullshit to say, "you never regret paying a high price for getting into a good company"? How does Jason evaluate entry point? What makes one entry point attractive and another not?
3.) What does Jason see as the catalysts for the opening of public markets to tech companies? How long does he think this will continue? Is he concerned by the likes of Yext, IPOing with less than aggressive growth rates?
4.) Why does Jason believe there are only 2 price points that work in SaaS? What are they? How does this affect the structure and operations of your SaaS startup? What are the circumstances in which these price points do not apply?
5.) Why does Jason believe that eSports will be bigger than the NBA in 5 years? What are the catalysts driving this change? What needs to be formulated within eSports for this to happen?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Fave Book: First, Break All The Rules
Jason’s Most Recent Investment: Plays.tv
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users - within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: VC of The Year: Forerunner's Kirsten Green on 2 $Bn+ Exits in 1 Year, Why We Are In The Very Early Innings For Commerce & How Brand Has Fundamentally Changed Over The Last Decade
Kirsten Green is the Founding General Partner @ Forerunner Ventures, where she has raised over $250M from leading investors and has invested in more than 40 early-stage companies. Forerunner Ventures is the only VC firm to invest in both Dollar Shave Club and Jet.com, two of the biggest and highest-profile e-commerce exits in recent years, and counts Birchbox, Bonobos, Glossier, Hotel Tonight, Warby Parker and Zola among its portfolio companies. She’s been honored in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2017, named VC of the Year at TechCrunch’s 2017 Crunchies Awards, and is part of Forbes 2017 Midas List.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kirsten came to found one of the most successful early stage funds of the past decade in Forerunner?
2.) Question from Michael Kim @ Cendana: How does Kirsten view the optimal portfolio construction theory for a thematically specialized consumer fund? What is the one question Kirsten asks herself pre-investing in a startup?
3.) Question from David Pakman @ Venrock: Given the scope of consumer as a space, is Forerunner large enough to attain the required ownership levels? What does this mean for the future of Forerunner in terms of further funds, opportunity funds and entry points?
4.) What are the 3 core principles to developing an exciting investment opportunity in the consumer space? What commonalities do they have? What do you look for in a consumer brand founder that might be different from a software founder?
5.) Why does Kirsten believe that Amazon has done more to make the market opportunity than they have to crush it? What makes Kirsten believe we really are in the early innings for commerce? How will we see the notion of brand evolve over the coming years?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kirsten’s Fave Book: Charlie and The Chocolate Factory
Kirsten’s Fave Blog: TheSkimm
Kirsten’s Most Recent Investment: Packagd
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kirsten on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users - within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry
PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.
20VC: Max Levchin on What Makes A Truly Great CEO, Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Trait For Entrepreneurs & Why When There Is Doubt There Is No Doubt
Max Levchin is the Founder & CEO @ Affirm, the company that aims to remake consumer finance from the ground up. They have backing from some of the best in the business with over $400m in VC funding from the likes of Founders Fund, Lightspeed, Andreesen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital just to name a few. Prior to Affirm, Max held numerous exec positions including Chairman of Yelp for 11 years and sitting on the board of directors @ Yahoo. Before that, Max founded Slide, subsequently bought by Google and was the Co-Founder & CTO @ Paypal.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Max come to co-found Paypal and how did that serve as the foundations for his founding of Affirm today?
2.) Why does Max believe there is a crucial misalignment between service providers and consumers in financial services? Does Max agree with Bill Clerico that 'we are still in the very early days for Fintech?'
3.) Having co-founded Paypal, Slide and now Affirm, how has Max changed as a leader and CEO? What does Max believe makes the truly great CEOs? Are there commonalities in how they operate and their skills?
4.) What does Max look for in all new hires or when evaluating founders for potential investment? Why is self-awareness so important for entrepreneurs to have? Why does Max want to be slightly terrified by how smart an individual is?
5.) How has having Children changed Max's perception of what is important and what he chooses to spend his time on? How does that reflect in his actions and self-discipline?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Max’s Fave Book: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Max on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: The Blurring of Early & Late Stage, Why Your Go To Market Strategy Is More Important Now Than Ever & Why Venture Is The Academia Of Tech with Roseanne Wincek @ IVP
Roseanne Wincek is an investor with IVP, one of the leaders in growth financing with a portfolio including the likes of Snap, AppDynamics, SuperCell and Slack. At IVP, Roseanne focuses on investing in later-stage, high-growth consumer and enterprise companies, currently serving as a Board Observer for MasterClass and actively working with IVP’s investments in Compass, Glossier, and Qubole. Prior to IVP, Roseanne was a Principal with Canaan Partners where she completed transactions for Beckon, Metacloud, and Stayful, just to name a few. Prior to VC, Roseanne was a co-founder @ imthemusic working to built music apps on the early Facebook platform.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Roseanne made her way from science labs to startups and one of the valleys leading growth stage funds?
2.) Question from Maha Ibrahim @ Canaan Partners: How has the transition been from early to late stage? How do the industries differ in terms of startup visibility? Assessing the "what could be"? Allocation to reserve funding? Expected hold period?
3.)Why does Roseanne believe we are seeing a blurring of the lines between early and late stage? What is the effect for late stage of earlier stage funds having opportunity funds? What is the effect for early stage funds to see growth funds investing earlier??
4.) Why does Roseanne believe go to market strategy is now more important than ever? How serious does Roseanne believe the incumbency with regards to distribution channels is? Does this mean startups have to develop proprietary organic distribution channels?
5.) How does Roseanne view competition within the financing market? Question from Jenny Lefcourt @ Freestyle: How has Roseanne consistently gotten into some of the hottest most competitive deals?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Roseanne’s Fave Book: Einstein's Refrigerator: Tales of Hot & Cold
Roseanne’s Most Recent Investment: Masterclass
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Roseanne on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Benchmark's Mitch Lasky on The Snapchat Journey From Series A to IPO, Why Small Is Beautiful In Venture Partnerships & Why Venture Is Very Much Like Hollywood
Mitch Lasky is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the world’s leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. As for Mitch himself, Mitch has made investments or is on the boards of Snapchat, Riot Games, Discord, Outpost Games and Cyanogen, just to name a few. Prior to Benchmark, Mitch was CEO @ JAMDAT Mobile where he led the mobile gaming company from a 10 employee startup to a 700 employee global business leading their IPO on the NASDAQ in 2004 and later negotiating their sales to Electronic Arts for $680m.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mitch made his way from leading a 700 person gaming company to IPO to being General Partner with Benchmark?
2.) What does the investment decision-making process look like at Benchmark? Why does Mitch believe small is beautiful when it comes to VC teams? What is it that makes the Benchmark partnership the very special partnership it is?
3.) What makes Mitch say that "venture is very much like Hollywood? What does he mean by this? How does he apply this to talent evaluation? The hits-driven nature of the business?
4.) Why does Mitch struggle when analysing the future for VR? What is it about the current crop of innovation around VR that makes Mitch nervous? Where does Mitch see potential within the realms of VR & AR?
5.) How does Mitch view the continued rise of eSports? Does he believe that the industry will ever be as large as the traditional sports industry? What aspects of the industry does Mitch think is highly investable or not investable?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mitch’s Fave Book: The Genius of System
Mitch’s Fave Blog: Above The Crowd
Mitch’s Most Recent Investment: Outpost Games
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mitch on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Why Radical Candor Is Crucial in Workplaces, Why 85% of Work Relationship Mistakes Happen and Why You Should Not Try and Be More Likeable with Kim Scott, Co-Founder @ Candor Inc
Kim Scott is the Co-Founder @ Candor, the startup that allows you to become a better leader. Prior to founding Candor, Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter and several other Silicon Valley companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University, developing the course “Managing at Apple,” and before that spent 5 years at Google on AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google. Previously, Kim was the co-founder and CEO of Juice Software, a collaboration start-up.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kim came to founder Candor and be an advisor to Twitter, Qualtrics and Dropbox?
2.) How did Kim's interactions with Sheryl Sandberg while at Google shape how Kim views employee feedback? What is the most effective way for a superior to convey their feedback to their employee?
3.) What really is radical candor? How does it differ to more traditional "feedback"? What are the challenges of ruinous empathy? How does this play out in the work environment? How does this contrast to "obnoxious aggression"?
4.) Is this a gender issue? What makes it so difficult for people to be radically candid? Why is it a problem that people are told to 'be professional'? How does that act to de-humanize people?
5.) How do males go most wrong when conveying feedback to their female counterparts? Why is this a problem for both the males and the females involved? What can the female do to ensure that she is not disadvantaged by this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kim’s Fave Book: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Kim’s Fave Blog: Rands In Repose: Management
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kim on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: How To Get Back To 200 Tech IPOs Per Year, Why We Are In A 'Bulge" Not A Bubble & The Impending Flat & Down Rounds To Come with Barry Schuler, Partner @ DFJ Growth
Barry Schuler is a Partner @ DFJ Growth, the team that seeks out companies that have gone through the early stages of funding and are category leaders or are poised to be. Their portfolio includes the likes of Tesla, Twitter, Box, Unity 3D and more fantastic companies. As for Barry, he is credited with being one of the pioneers of the modern Internet as chairman and CEO of America Online and an entrepreneur for over 30 years. Today he serves on the board of some truly game-changing companies in the likes of Coinbase, Unity and Foursquare just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Barry make his way from Chairman of Americal Online to Partner @ DFJ Growth, one of the leading growth funds?
2.) Why does Barry believe we have seen a drought of tech IPOs in the last few years? What needs to be done to change this and generate the "200 IPOs a year that we need"?
3.) Why does Barry believe we are in a "bulge and not a bubble" in today's current startup ecosystem? What does Barry suggest will happen to the many highly priced tech startups with lacking exit options?
4.) Why does Barry believe that companies are 'bought and not sold'? How has Barry seen the growth and momentum patterns change for those in hypergrowth? How does that affect the IPO market and their price sensitivity?
5.) Why is Barry concerned that there is too much money chasing too few deals? What does that do to his funnel in producing 10m+ revenue scaling startups?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Barry’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Barry’s Most Recent Investment: Unity 3D, Giphy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Barry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today
Eric Feng is a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins, one of the world's leading venture capital firms with prior investments in the likes of Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Uber, Twitter and more. At Kleiner Eric focuses on consumer and incubation with his current being his co-founding role with Packagd, the startup building a family of apps offering a new mobile shopping experience. Packagd recently raised a $6m Series A led by Forerunner and GV. Prior to KPCB, Eric held the role of CTO at both Flipboard and Hulu.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eric made his way into venture, all thanks to the help of Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins?
2.) What does Eric believe are the 2 opposing views of VCs? What side does it sit on? Has he always sat on that side? What was it that changed his mind?
3.) Why does Eric think consumer today is harder than ever before? How does the incumbency issue with regards to distribution affect Eric's thinking? Why does Eric believe we have never seen incumbents as strong as those of today?
4.) Why does Eric believe consumer companies are binary? How does this affect his attitude to price sensitivity? How does this influence his ownership requirements?
5.) How are VC funds building and using their own data platforms to find the best startups? Are we seeing the start of VC funds being disrupted by technology? What advantages does using this technology have?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eric’s Fave Book: Adventures in The Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood
Eric’s Fave Blog: TechMeme
Eric’s Most Recent Investment: Hollar
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Why You Do Not Want Diversity Of Thought, Why You Have To Build A Sports Team and Not A Family & Why Extreme Cultures Are Easier For People To Understand with Ari Mir, Founder @ Clutter
Ari Mir is the Founder @ Clutter, the startup that provides simple, painless solutions to your storage problems. They have raised over $90m in VC funding with their recent Series C round being a $64m round led by Atomico with participation from Sequoia, GV and the fantastic Brendan Wallace @ Fifth Wall. Prior to Clutter, Ari founded Gumgum, the world's largest image ad network in the visual AI space and PocketChange, a startup backed by Google.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ari made his way into the world of early stage startups and came to found Clutter?
2.) Why does Ari believe that you should build a sports team and not a family, with regards to your team? What does that really mean? How does that affect both hiring, training and objective attribution?
3.) Why does Ari say 'culture is not a happy hour'? How can one look to build a culture that is driven by humane performance management? Does this not instantly instill a culture of fear?
4.) Why does Ari believe that diversity of thought is so dangerous for early stage startups? How does this view change with the scaling of the team? What key inflection points has Ari noticed with the scaling of the Clutter team?
5.) Why did Ari only hire individuals with finance backgrounds in the early days of the company? What are the benefits of this, particularly for on-demand startups with a heavy focus on unit economics?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ari’s Fave Book: Sam Walton: Made In America
Ari’s Fave Blog: AVC
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ari on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Bessemer's Ethan Kurzweil on How To View Pattern Recognition and Deal With The Anti-Portfolio, The Next Frontier In Developer Focussed Businesses & Why eSports Is Interesting Again
Ethan Kurzweil is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the world leading venture funds with prior investments including the likes of Skype, LinkedIn, Yelp and Pinterest just to name a few. As for Ethan, he focuses on consumer facing technology and developer platforms having made investments in the likes of Twitch, Periscope and Dropcam on the consumer side and Twilio, Intercom and SendGrid on the developer platform side, just to name a few from his outstanding portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ethan made his entrance into the world of venture and came to be a partner @ Bessemer?
2.) What was the developer roadmap that Ethan established a couple of years ago? Why was it controversial at the time? How have we seen this play out and come into fruition? What is the next frontier in developer focussed businesses?
3.) Ethan has previously said, 'history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme'. How does Ethan view pattern recognition? How does Ethan look to avoid biases and escape the echo chamber of Silicon Valley?
4.) How does Ethan see the world of eSports evolving? From an investment perspective, where does the equity value creation lie; the brands being built or the core underlying technology?
5.) Bessemer publishes their anti-portfolio, why is this? What does one need to take away when assessing the opportunities they have missed? How can one build a process of self-reflection around the anti-portfolio?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ethan’s Fave Book: The Namesake
Ethan’s Fave Blog: Nuzzel
Ethan's Most Recent Investment: Periscope Data
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ethan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on Why We Are In A Fallow Period For Consumer, Why It Is Bogus That Operational VCs Can Add More Value & 2 Golden Rules To Always Tell Entrepreneurs Pre-Investment
Jeremy Levine is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the world's leading venture funds with prior investments in the likes of Skype, Shopify, LinkedIn and Twitch, just to name a few. As for Jeremy, 4 of the companies he has invested in with Bessemer have become $Bn companies with 2 of the above; LinkedIn and Shopify, in addition to Yelp and MindBody. If that was not enough, Jeremy is also on the boards of some phenomenal companies in the likes of Pinterest, Yelp and Shopify to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeremy made his entrance into the world of venture and came to be a partner @ Bessemer?
2.) What are the 2 rules Jeremy has with every founder he invests in, prior to making the investment? Why does Jeremy have these rules? At what stage of the pre-investment process are they illustrated?
3.) What are the 2 main reasons that Jeremy believes we are entering a fallow period for the world of consumer? What elements of the incumbency advantages of Facebook, Apple and Google concern Jeremy most? Where does he also see great opportunity?
4.) How has Jeremy seen his style of board member change over the last 16 years? How does Jeremy believe founders can optimize their board through strategic positioning of the VCs they have and where they are placed?
5.) Why does Jeremy believe that it is bogus that operational VCs can provide more value than non-operational VCs? What is the thesis behind this? Where are the core strengths of operational VCs? Where founders must be wary of operational VCs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeremy’s Fave Book: The Outsiders
Jeremy’s Fave Blog: Dan Primack
Jeremy's Most Recent Investment: Toss
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeremy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Why Every CEO's Goal Should Be To Be The Laziest CEO, The Benefits of Being Both Founder and Investor At The Same Time & Why Every CEO Should Try A CEO Coach with Bart Lorang, Founder & CEO @ Full Contact
Bart Lorang is the Founder & CEO @ FullContact, the leading contact platform for professionals, teams and businesses. They have raised over $45m in funding from some of the best in the business and dear friends of the show in the likes of Foundry Group with Brad Feld, David Cohen and Techstars and Howard Lindzen at Social Leverage just to name a few. As well as being the rockstar founder @ FullContact, Bart has a unique position as he is also Managing Director @ V1.vc, a seed stage VC fund based in Colorado and San Francisco, providing Bart unique insight into both founding and investing in companies at the same time.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Bart made his way into the world of early stage startups and came to found FullContact?
2.) Bart is also a VC with V1, how does being both a founder and a VC affect how Bart views startups and operates @ FullContact? What have been the key learnings for Bart with regards to capital allocation and portfolio construction?
3.) Bart has a CEO coach being the famous, Jerry Colonna, so what was the catalyst for Bart's desire to have a CEO coach? What have been the inflection points in Bart's journey with Jerry? Should every CEO have a CEO coach?
4.) What does Bart believe are the core tenets to successful negotiation? What can be done to ensure a win-win situation for both parties? From what mindset should this be approached? Does Bart agree that you should only monetise to 30% of your value?
5.) Why does Bart pay every employee $7,500 per year to go on holiday on top of their standard salary? Whare the the key rules to ensure this is successful? What are the key benefits that can be derived from this essential vacation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Bart’s Fave Book: Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Bart’s Fave Blog: Abundance Insider by Peter Diamandis
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Bart on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Elad Gil on Becoming One of Silicon Valleys Top Angels, Why Most People Get Market Sizing Wrong & Should VC Services Always Be Bundled Together?
Elad Gil is the Founder of Color Genomics, however, Elad is also one of the most prominent angel investors in the valley with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Square and Pinterest just to name a few. Prior to founding Color Genomics, Elad was VP of Corporate Strategy @ Twitter where he ran various product teams including geo and search. Before that, Elad spent 3 years at Google where he started Google's mobile team and was involved with 3 acquisitions including Android.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Elad made his way into the world of angel investing and came to invest in Airbnb, Square and Stripe?
2.) Why does Elad take a very market-driven approach to investing? Does this go against the very founder-first approach taken by many in the valley today?
3.) Why does Elad believe that people totally mislead themselves when sizing up potential markets? How should markets be addressed and evaluated? What are the core elements to look for?
4.) Should VC services always be bundled together? Is there a smarter way to decouple these services to make the best products for founders? How could this look in reality?
5.) How does Elad approach valuation? Does Elad agree with Peter Fenton that 'all best companies always seem expensive at the time and cheap in hindsight'?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Elad’s Fave Book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Elad’s Most Recent Investment: Checkr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Elad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Benchmark's Peter Fenton on How To Differentiate Between Good & Great VCs, Why Ownership Is A Bigger Determinant Of Returns Than Valuation & What Makes A Truly Exceptional Board Member
Peter Fenton is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the world's leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. Peter himself sits or has sat on the board of Twitter, previous guest Cockroach, Optimizely, New Relic and ZenDesk just to name a few. Prior to Benchmark, Peter was a Managing Partner @ Accel. It is clearly not just me that has a man crush on Peter though as he has been named to Forbes Midas List for many consecutive years with the last list placing Peter as No 3 in the world.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Peter made his way into the world of VC with Accel and came to be a General Partner @ Benchmark?
2.) How does Peter differentiate between the good and the great VCs? How can VCs use hyper-curiosity and hyper-competitiveness to improve their investing ability? Why does Peter not believe that operational experience is a necessity pre-VC?
3.) How does Peter view the importance of valuation in the investment decision making process? How much of a role does it play for him and what is his psychology around valuation, especially with regards to ownership levels?
4.) Why is Peter amused when he hears other investors say they must 'invest in big markets'? What were his big takeaways from watching the investment and hyper-growth journey of Snapchat? How did that influence his view on markets?
5.) Peter has previously said that he is a 'student of great board members'. What are the commonalities among the truly great board members? How do they engage and interact with the entrepreneur? How do they get the most out of their fellow board members?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Peter's Most Recent Investment: Zen.ly
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Peter on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
eShares is the No 1 Cap Table Management platform, allowing for equity management, 409A valuations, and liquidity, all in one place. eShares is made for companies of all sizes with over 5,000 trusted customers including the likes of Squarespace, Kickstarter, and DoorDash just to name a few. To try out the must have service of the industry, simply head over to esharesinc.com it is a must.
Fond is the employee engagement suite with 3 core products, rewards: a recognition platform for rewarding achievements and milestones, perks: a premium corporate discounts program to show employees you care about them and then finally engagement IQ, a free employee engagement survey that allows you to measure the health of your organization. To check it out head over to fond.co
20VC: Is Series B Really The Hardest To Raise? Should The Only Limiting Factor Post Series B Be Cash & When Is The Right Time To Move To The US with Nicolas Dessaigne, Founder & CEO @ Algolia
Nicolas Dessaigne is the Founder & CEO @ Algolia, the most reliable platform for building search into your business. Just last week they raised $53m in funding led by Accel with participation from Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr, Point Nine Capital, AppDynamic’s Jyoti Bansal, Intercom’s Des Traynor and InVision’s Clark Valberg and more incredible investors.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nicolas made his way from Paris to YC to founding one of the hottest SaaS startups of the day in Algolia?
2.) Tom Tunguz has said before that the Series B is the hardest to raise, having just raised his, does Nicolas agree with this? How did this round differ from others? How can founders know what is the right amount to raise? Is 18 months still the desired runway?
3.) Does Nicolas think he made the move to the US at the right time? Too early or too late? What advice would Nicolas give to founders making or thinking about making this move? What areas are Europe and vice versa the US better at hiring for?
4.) Which functional areas do both Europe and the US lead in their respective fields? Why does Nicolas think that it is harder to hire well in the US? Does Europe still have a fundamental lack of experienced sales and marketing professionals?
5.) How did Jason Lemkin train Nicolas to approach the fundraising process? What other than funds can founders gain from the process? How can these conversations be initiated?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nicolas on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Tony Conrad on Straddling The Role Of Founder & Investor, What True Founder/Product Fit Looks Like & The Dangers of Party Rounds
Tony Conrad is a Partner @ True Ventures, one of the leading early stage funds on the West Coast with a portfolio including the likes of Automattic, Fitbit, Blue Bottle Coffee and recent unicorn, Peloton. Tony is also the Co-Founder & CEO @ About.me (acquired by AOL in 2010). They have since raised funding from some of our favorites in the industry including Brad @ Foundry, SoftTech and BullPen just to name a few. Prior to About.me, Tony founded Sphere (acquired by AOL) in 2008.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tony made his way from founding About.me to moving into VC with True Ventures?
2.) How has Tony's investment mentality changed since being an incredibly successful angel to now writing institutional cheques with True? What has he learned about investing from the transition?
3.) Why does Tony look to straddle the divide between investor and founder? How does this help him to examine what true product/founder fit is? How does this affect his ability to source deals? Why should more investors look to do the same?
4.) How does Tony view party rounds/ why are they so dangerous? Why is it so wrong for founders to optimize for valuation? What are the later repercussions of doing so? What is a more effective way for founders to approach the raise?
5.) Having spent over 1,500 minutes in board meetings, what has Tony learned about what makes the beat board members? How can founders detect the board member that is truly aligned to them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tony’s Fave Book: Endurance by Shackleton
Tony’s Most Recent Investment: Teamable
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Tony on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?
Kevin Rose is a Venture Partner @ True Ventures, one of the leading early stage funds on the West Coast with portfolio companies including the likes of Automattic, Blue Bottle Coffee, About.me and recent unicorn, Peloton. As for Kevin, he is a serial entrepreneur best known for founding Digg and Revision3. Following such success in the field of operations, Kevin made the move into VC becoming a General Partner and advisor @ Google Ventures. Kevin has also been a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Square, Facebook, Foursquare, and Zynga just to name a few incredible companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kevin made his way from founding Digg to moving into VC with Google Ventures?
2.) How did Kevin alter his investment mindset when making the transition from angel to General Partner @ Google Ventures? How does the decision making process change? How does asset allocation change? How does portfolio theory change?
3.) Why is Kevin so bullish on the future of mobile? Why does Kevin believe that distribution channels are actually becoming more equal, allowing for greater startup access? Why does Kevin not believe in the future of VR?
4.) How does Kevin view the optimal relationship between VC and founder? Can a VC be a friend as well as an advisor and board member? What can the VC do to ensure their positioning alongside not above the founder?
5.) How does Kevin view the age old debate of work like balance? How does Kevin approach it? What does Kevin recommend to anyone looking to improve their worl life balance?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kevin’s Fave Book: Essentialism
Kevin’s Most Recent Investment: Lead.rs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kevin on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Chris O'Neill is the CEO @ Evernote, the productivity powerhouse allowing millions of users around the world to remember everything. They have raised over $160m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Sequoia Capital. As for Chris, prior to Evernote, he spent over 10 years at Google including roles as Managing Director of Google Canada and global business operations at Google X. Whilst at Google Chris saw the hyper growth of the company from startup t a global behemoth.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris made his way into startups and came to be CEO @ Evernote?
2.) Chris has previously said 'the team you build is the culture you build'. How does Chris look to build high-performance teams that can scale differing stages of company growth? Are individuals destined to fit one stage of company growth?
3.) How does Chris look to balance the immediacy of short terms actions and events with the grander vision and longer term in mind? What are the challenges? What strategies can be done to ensure both short and long term goals are addressed?
4.) How does Chris approach product line expansion? When is the right time and reason to expand the product line? How can this be communicated and executed across the broader team?
5.) Chris has previously said he 'learned more from sport than he did from school'. What were Chris major takeaways from sport? How can they be applied to business and his role @ Evernote today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris’ Fave Book: A Prayer For Owen Meaney, Zone to Win
Chris’ Fave Blog: Benedict Evans
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chris on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Why Cheque Size & Follow On Decision-Making Does Not Matter, Why Intelligence Is Overrated & Why You Should Do Everything You Can To Make Other People Successful with Anthony Pompliano, Founding Partner @ Full Tilt Capital
Anthony Pompliano is the General Partner @ Full Tilt Capital, the firm that wants to reinvent friends and family investingby democratizing access to opportunity for the thousands of founders who are underserved. They have done 22 deals in just 90 days and shows no signs of pulling back. Prior to VC, Anthony lead the growth team at Snapchat and before that ran product and growth teams @ Facebook.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anthony made his way from leading startup exec with Facebook and Snapchat to being General Partner @ Full Tilt Capital?
2.) Anthony has previously said that he likes to 'prioritize the founder over the company', is this any different to the traditional 'founder-friendly VC'? How does Anthony like to stress test the founder's ability to withstand stress *& establish comfort with unpopular decisions?
3.) How does Anthony respond to suggestions that 39 investments in 9 months is 'spray and pray'? Why does Anthony believe that cheque size and follow on allocation does not matter?
4.) How does Anthony differentiate between 'picking' and 'building' investments? Why do most VCs go wrong with their thesis around this and the belief in the 'J Curve'? Is it possible that the traditional J curve does not correspond to outsized returns?
5.) How does Anthony respond to Hunter Walk's thesis around the presence of 'dark deal flow'? With such a growing portfolio, how does Anthony scale his ability to add value with the ever scaling portfolio number?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anthony’s Fave Book: Rich Dad Poor Dad
Anthony’s Fave Blog/Podcast: Polina Marinova: The Profile
Anthony’s Most Recent Investment: Everly Well
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anthony on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Founders Fund's Brian Singerman on Why VC Is About Upside Maximisation Not Downside Minimisation, Why There Is No Right Way To Do Venture and Why They Do Not Have Monday Morning Partner Meetings At Founders Fund
Brian Singerman is a Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the world’s most prestigious and successful VC funds with prior investments in the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX, Spotify and many more incredible companies. Prior to Founders Fund, Brian spent 4 years at Google where, among other projects, Brian founded iGoogle. Whilst at Google, Brian also started his career as an investor, founding his own angel fund, XGYC Fund. Brian also currently sits on the board of Affirm, Oscar, AltSchool and Emerald Therapeutics. Due to Brian's immense success he was named No 5 on Forbes Midas List for America's Top VCs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brian made the way from Google, to his own angel fund to being General Partner @ Founders Fund?
2.) How has Brian seen his investment mindset shift over the years from angel investing to his angel fund, XGYC to now being a partner at Founders Fund?
3.) Why does Brian believe that success in VC is purely about upside maximization? What does Brian think downside minimisation is unimportant?
4.) What does the investment decision-making process look like at Founders Fund? How does this change with the scaling cheque size? What are Brian's views on conviction driven vs unanimous team voting structures?
5.) Why is Brian a staunch generalist when it comes to investing? For Brian, why does he believe that being a generalist will deliver outsized returns over being a specialist?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brian’s Fave Book: Snow Crash
Brian’s Fave Blog: Dan Primack
Brian’s Most Recent Investment: Affirm
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Trivago Founder on Why Incumbents Have Lost Their Main Business Model, Why You Have To Destroy Everything Ego Related & Why Transparency Is The Key To Capital Flow
Rolf Schrömgens is the Co-Founder and Managing Director @ Trivago, the world's top hotel price comparison site. In 2012, Expedia acquired 62% of Trivago for $531m and in Dec 2016, Trivago raised $287m through their IPO on the NASDAQ. As for Rolf, he has been a serial entrepreneur since 1999 when he founded Amiro.de, later merged with Ciao.com. At Ciao, Rolf successfully led the product launch of the company in his role as Director of Strategy and Product Development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rolf made his way into the world of startups and came to found Trivago?
2.) Having had one of Europe's best-funded startups with Ciao, what is Rolf's take on the number of startups taking large amounts of VC money today? What advice would Rolf give to those contemplating a more lean approach vs attaining large amounts of VC money?
3.) Why does Rolf believe transparency is so key for the flow of capital within a market? What can founders do to engender this basis of trust between the capital sources and them?
4.) Why does Rolf think it is unthinkable that the incumbents of today will survive the wave of disruption? Why does Rolf question their ability to a consolidator market environment?
5.) Why does Rolf think it is so important to destroy everything that is ego related? What are the dangers of ego in the company building process? How does Rolf look to stamp this out without damaging culture and internal morale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rolf’s Fave Book: How To Create A Mind by Ray Kurzweil
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rolf on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: How Both Founders & GPs Should Construct Their Pitch, Why VCs Are Eternal Optimists & What Makes The Best Post-Investment VC/Founder Relationship with Brian Ascher, Partner @ Venrock
Brian Ascher is a Partner @ Venrock, a leading fund with prior investments including Nest, Dollar Shave Club, AppNexus and many more. At Venrock, Brian invests broadly across enterprise and consumer markets and has enjoyed no less than 10 of his investments exit successfully. Due to this exit rate,Brian has been named to the Forbes Midas List multiple times, for the VCs who have backed the most profitable winners in the last four years. Prior to Venrock, Brian was a Senior Product Manager at Intuit responsible for Quicken and Quicken.com.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brian made his way into the world of VC and came to be a partner at Venrock?
2.) Does Brian believe that in today's world of 'ask for advice and get money', that slide decks are necessary anymore?
3.) How does Brian like pitches to be structured? How should the deck start? Why should the deck not start with the team or the origin story? Should the deck include the amount being raised?
4.) What are the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make in pitches? How can they turn these into an advantage and show the VC their unparalleled insight?
5.) How does Brian view the post-investment relationship with founders? What makes for the optimal relationship? Is it possible for VC to be both friend and board member? How does Brian look to scale the relationship curve when getting to know a founder?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brian’s Fave Book: Extreme Ownership
Brian's Most Recent Investment: Socrates
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Kleiner Perkins' MZ Zaveri on Why Success In Venture Is About The 3 F's, How VCs Can Manage Deal Heat & Is There Too Much Venture Dollars At Seed
MZ Zaveri is a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins, one of the world's most prestigious venture funds with prior investments in the likes of Google, Amazon, Twitter, Square and Airbnb just to name a few. Prior to KPCB, MZ was with Tencent, where he was part of the investment team in Palo Alto, working on investments in companies such as Vurb, Tile, Satellogic, and Weebly to name a few. Prior to Tencent, Muzzammil co-founded Proxino, a Y Combinator (S11) backed startup in the JavaScript error detection space.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How MZ made his way into the world of VC and came to be a partner at Kleiner Perkins?
2.) What were MZ's biggest takeaways from his time with Tencent? How does that inform how he evaluates and analyses startups today with KPCB?
3.) MZ has said before, 'success in venture is all about the 3 F's'. What does he mean by this? Question from Niko Bonatsos @ General Catalyst: How does MZ look ensure the best opportunities are in the pipeline? How does MZ then look to manage and optimise that pipeline?
4.) What are MZ's thoughts on deal heat? How does MZ look to avoid being sucked into echo chambers of Silicon Valley of what is "hot or not"? What does MZ mean when he says "deal heat can be a false positive when there are more seed funds than ever"?
5.) How does MZ evaluate the seed market today? Does he believe it is over financed with the 10x increase in funds we have seen over the last 10 years? What fund model innovations is MZ most excited by and why?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
MZ’s Fave Book: Neverwhere by Neil Gaimon
MZ’s Fave Blog/Podcast: The Twenty Minute VC
MZ's Most Recent Investment: UJet
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and MZ on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Tinder's Sean Rad on Why Humility Is The Key Trait For Founders To Have, Why Today's Incumbents Are Stronger Than Any Before Them & How Leaders Need To Scale With The Scaling Of Their Company
Sean Rad is the Founder & Chairman @ Tinder, the world's most popular app for connecting with new and interesting people around you. Every single day there are 26m matches made on Tinder. Alongside his role with Tinder, Sean is the Chairman of Swipe Ventures, the investment vehicle that will continue to grow Tinder's reach through acquisitions, investment opportunities and development of new business. Prior to Tinder, Sean was the Founder and President of both Adly and Orgoo.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sean made his way into the world of startups and changed the way people connect with Tinder?
2.) How has Sean seen his startup evaluation process evolve since his time angel investing to now, investing institutionally with Swipe Ventures?
3.) What are the character traits that Sean most looks for when evaluating startup founders? Why is humility key to success as a founder? How can this be balanced with passion and vision?
4.) How has Sean seen his leadership and mentality evolve with the growth of Tinder?What have been the major inflection points in his learning as CEO?
5.) Why does Sean believe that today's incumbents are different than any we have seen before? How does their mentality to startup competition differ from incumbents before them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sean’s Fave Book: The Nurture Assumption
Sean’s Fave Blog: TechCrunch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sean on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom's their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: The Biggest Indicators Of Success In Founding Teams, How To Balance Both Vision and Operations & Taking Money From "The Man At The Rug Store" with Mar Hershenson, Founding Managing Partner @ Pear.vc
Mar Hershenson is a Founding Managing Partner @ Pear.vc alongside Pejman Nozad. After earning a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999, Mar had developed a ground-breaking technique for optimizing the design of analog semiconductors. Having combined a hardware/software focus during her studies, she spent the next 13 years co-founding three startups in the mobile/e-commerce, enterprise software, and semiconductor industries, work that led eventually to her registering 14 separate patents. Mar has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a Top Innovator Under 35 and named a Champion of Innovation by Fast Company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Mar make her way from professor @ Stanford to startup founder to founding Pear.vc?
2.) Question from Matin @ Heap: How does Mar decide which founders have the highest potential? What are the seeds that suggest huge potential growth on initial screening?
3.) Question from Nicky @ Nova Credit: How does one look to balance the inherent challenge of vision and operations? What do the best founders do?
4.) How important is it for there to be role segmentation in a VC partnership? Why does it not matter at certain stages of the funding lifecycle?
5.) Why does Mar believe venture is an intensely service based industry? How does Mar look to maintain her scaling board roles with a scaling portfolio?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mar’s Fave Book: The Four Steps To The Epiphany
Mar’s Fave Blog: Elad Gil, Dan Primack
Mar’s Most Recent Investment: Nova Credit
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mar on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom's their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.
20VC: Founders Fund's Kevin Hartz on Why Investing In Silicon Valley Is Broken & Why Fearlessness Is What Makes The Truly Great Investors
Kevin Hartz is a Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the world's most prestigious and successful VC funds with prior investments in the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX, Spotify and many more incredible companies. Prior to Founders Fund, Kevin was Founder & CEO @ Eventbrite, the company that powers thousands of millions of events around the world with backing from the likes of Sequoia and SV Angel. Before that Kevin was the Founder of Xoom Corporation, the international money transfer company that went public in 2012 and was acquired by Paypal in 2015. Kevin has also been a prolific angel with a personal portfolio including Airbnb, Uber, Paypal, Pinterest and Yammer.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Question from Brian Singerman: How did Kevin come to be the world famous Kevin Hartz? What was Kevin's entry into the world of VC?
2.) How has Kevin seen his investment decision making and evaluation process change when comparing his angel deals in Uber, Paypal and Airbnb to today, investing institutionally with Founders Fund?
3.) How does Kevin see believe his time in operations lends to him being a better investor today? Does Kevin agree with Pat Grady @ Sequoia in stating, 'the rate of decay on operating experience has never been greater'?
4.) With no Monday morning Partner meetings, if a Partner wants to push a deal through, how do you do it at Founders Fund? How do you structure those conversations internally?
5.) What have been Kevin's biggest learnings since joining Founders Fund? How did Kevin look to scale the VC learning curve as fast as possible? What elements did Kevin find most challenging?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kevin’s Fave Book: Peter Thiel: Zero To One
Kevin’s Most Recent Investment: HyperTrack
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kevin on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom's their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business.
Vidyard is the video platform for business that helps marketing and sales teams drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global leaders such as Microsoft, McKesson, Lenovo, and LinkedIn rely on Vidyard to power their video content strategies and turn viewer into customers. Check them out at vidyard.com.
20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Jonathan Downey is the Founder & CEO @ Airware, the startup that allows you to make better-informed decisions with aerial date, captured by drones. They have raised over $65m in VC funding from some of the very best in the industry including a16z, Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures just to name a few. Jonathan is also the General Partner @ Commerical Drone Fund, making $250K-$1m investments in early stage companies in the commercial drone space. Prior to Airware, Jonathan was a commercial pilot and a flight controls engineer @ Boeing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jonathan made the move from commercial pilot to startup founder with one of the hottest drone startups, Airware?
2.) What has been the catalyst for the rising belief in the potential for drones? What has changed about the landscape to make them now not only a commercially viable opportunity but also consumer viable?
3.) How does Jonathan view the commercial landscape today? Where does Jonathan see the highest potential for the commercial application of drones? How does one approach go to market strategy and business model in a completely undefined landscape?
4.) What are the current barriers to adoption for corporations with drones? What does it mean and entail for an organization to adopt drones in terms of new workflows and training? What are the key transformative technologies that will enable new applications and market expansion?
5.) With incumbents now heavily investing in the space, does Jonathan believe this will be a market of disruption or consolidation and acquisition by the exisiting incumbents?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jonathan’s Fave Book: Elon Musk by Ashley Vance
Jonathan’s Fave Blog: Chris Dixon
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jonathan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Why It Is Good Company Funding Has Been Down 6 Quarters In A Row, Why Unanimity Does Not Work In VC Decision-Making & Why It Is Dangerous To Be A Spreadsheet Investor with Scott Raney, Partner @ Redpoint Ventures
Scott Raney is a Partner @ Redpoint Ventures, one of the valley's leading multi-stage funds with over 434 investments, close to $4bn in assets under management and 136 IPOs and M&A. At Redpoint Scott has made investments in the likes of Twilio, Stripe and Heroku, just to name a few. Prior to Redpoint, Scott was responsible for new products at NorthPoint Communications, and before that Scott worked at Bain & Company helping clients in the private equity and technology industries.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Scott made his first forays into the world of VC and came to be a Partner @ Redpoint Ventures?
2.) Why does Scott think it is a good thing that we have seen company funding down 6 quarters in a row? What does this mean for startups trying to raise?
3.) What 2 types of companies will continue to find it easy to raise in these markets? What types of companies will struggle to raise? Is there market cyclicality or a return to normal more sustainable times?
4.) Why are investors a lot less willing to take future fundraising risk? How does Scott view the optimal investment decision-making process for a VC partnership? Why does unanimity not work?
5.) Why does Scott believe it is dangerous to be a spreadsheet investor? With the bar being higher today, what are the milestones that startups need to reach in order to be attractive from an investment perspective?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Scott’s Fave Book: Born To Run By Bruce Springsteen
Scott’s Fave Blog: Tom Tunguz
Scott’s Most Recent Investment: Hashicorp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Khosla's Keith Rabois on How To Create Sustainability Behind Growth, How To Assess The Potential Of Individuals & Teams & The Biggest Takeaways from LinkedIn, Paypal & Square
Keith Rabois is an investment partner at Khosla Ventures where he has led investments in Stripe, Thoughtspot, HealthTap and Teespring among many others. He also started OpenDoor, which aims to transform the process of selling a home through technology. Keith's unparalleled operational track record does not stop there as he has forged several of the most important new social and commerce platforms over the last decade holding key roles at LinkedIn, Paypal and being COO at Square. As a board member, Keith guided Yelp [NYSE: YELP] and Xoom [NASDAQ: XOOM] from inception to successful IPOs. Simultaneously, he also invested in other like-minded entrepreneurs with early stakes in YouTube [acquired by GOOG], Yammer [acquired by MSFT], Palantir, Lyft, AirBnB, Eventbrite and Quora.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Keith made the move from key executive at LinkedIn, Paypal and Square to being a VC with Khosla?
2.) Question from Lee Hower: What were the biggest learnings from playing a key role at LinkedIn, Paypal and Square? How do they compare to learning from Slide, a not so successful project? Does one learn more from success or failure?
3.) Question from Jason Lemkin: How can founders assess the potential of their teams? How long is it possible to allow individuals to stretch to their roles? What are the signs that people are either exceeding or falling below expectations?
4.) Eric Yuan @ Zoom has previously illustrated the importance to me of sustainable growth. What is Keith's view of this? Why does he not like this term? What are his thoughts on the key constraints on growth for most startups?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Keith’s Fave Book: The Upside of Stress
Keith's Fave Blog: Stratechery
Keith’s Most Recent Investment: Forward
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Keith on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Building Shopify From $5m To IPO, Why The Future Of Retail Is Not Online vs Offline & Why Law School Is Like Finishing School For Entrepreneurs with Harley Finkelstein, COO @ Shopify
Harley Finkelstein is the COO @ Shopify, the e-commerce platform that has allowed a generation of people to become entrepreneurs and business owners. Harley joined the business with revenues of $5m, today the company has targeted this year for over $600m with over 400,000 merchants on the platform. They have raised over $120m in VC funding from very good friends of the show including Aydin @ Felicis, Jeremy @ Bessemer and Amish @ Firstmark. In May 2015, Shopify went public with a valuation north of $1bn.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Harley make the move from laywer to COO @ Shopify?
2.) Question from Aydin @ Felicis: What have been some strategic inflection points that at the time did not seem like a big deal? How have Harley and Shopify produced and maintained such consistent revenue growth? What is the secret?
3.) Why does Harley believe that the future of retail is not online vs offline? How does Harley react to the suggestion that retail stores need to transition from transaction based, to experience based?
4.) How does Harley view the rise of personal brand in today's technological world? How has this allowed previously non-monetized channels to be monetized? What are some good examples of this?
5.) Why did Harley and Shopify choose to IPO in 2015? How was the roadshow? What was the key learnings for Harley both pre and post-IPO? What does Harley believe it means to be a trusted public company?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Harley’s Fave Book: High Output Management
Harley’s Fave Blog: Wait But Why
Harley's Fave Shopify Store: Boosted Boards
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Harley on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: The 3 Forms Of Edge A Founder Can Have, Lessons From Being on A Board With Bill Gates & Why There Are A Lot Of Tourist VCs Who Are Going To Lose A Lot Of Money, with Josh Wolfe, Co-Founder @ Lux Capital
Josh Wolfe is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Lux Capital, the fund that supports scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the project, the better. Josh is a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, making cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. In 2008 Josh co-founded and funded Kurion, the company was among the first responders to the Fukushima disaster. In February 2016, Veolia acquired Kurion for nearly $400 million—more than 40 times Lux’s total investment.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Josh make his way into VC from the science lab? What was it about venture that got Josh hooked?
2.) How does Josh view the rise of thematic investing? Why does Josh believe there are a lot of tourist VCs who are going to lose a lot of money?
3.) Investing in such frontier technologies, how does Josh view market creation? How does Josh look to build a thesis and a methodology when investing in a company without an existing market?
4.) What is the inflection point for Josh for when heavy science and R&D becomes investable? What is that tipping point where science becomes commercialized?
5.) Does Josh get concerned that with such heavy IP and corporations not investing in R&D that this is a market for acquihires? What are the pros and cons of this shortened liquidity cycles?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Book: Sapiens
Josh’s Fave Blog: Media Redefined
Josh’s Most Recent Investment: Recursion Pharmaceuticals
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Harry Stebbings on The Biggest Takeaways From Interviewing The World's Best Investors, What Makes A Truly Great Interview & Some Big News... with Mattias Ljungman, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Atomico
Mattias Ljungman is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Atomico, one of Europe's leading VC funds which Mattias launched in 2006 alongside Niklas Zennstrom. Whilst at Atomico Mattias has been involved in significant exits and transcations including SUpercell (acquired by Softbank), Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto and 6Wunderkinder (acquired by Microsoft), just to name a few. As for Harry, Harry Stebbings is the founder of The Twenty Minute VC, the world's largest independent VC podcast with guests including Brad Feld, Andy Rachleff, Peter Fenton and many more. Harry also works very closely with Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr where they work to produce The Official SaaStr Podcast. More recently, Harry joined the fantastic team at Atomico as an EIR on the investment team.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Harry made his first foray into the world of entrepreneurship and then made the move into VC?
2.) From interviewing over 800 of the world's best investors, what have been the biggest takeaways for Harry, both in the realms of investing and interacting with entrepreneurs?
3.) What does Harry believes makes a truly great interview? Is it sheer intellectual rigour or does charisma and energy play a large role? Does Harry release all the episodes he records?
4.) What have been Harry's major takeaways since joining the team at Atomico? What have been the best moments both in terms of intellectual learning and then sentimental memories?
5.) How has Harry's perception and analysis of the VC market changed over the 800 interviews? What does Harry see as the fundamental emerging trends within the VC model itself?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Harry’s Fave Book: Madame Bovary, What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars
Harry’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily
As always you can follow Harry, Mattias and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Why We Are Still In The Very Early Days For Fintech, Why Your Company Has To Have An Opinionated Culture & Why The CEO Should Not Be The Sole Point Of Contact With The Board with Bill Clerico, Founder & CEO @ WePay
Bill Clerico is the Co-Founder & CEO @ WePay, the most complete payments solution for platforms. To date, they have raised close to $75m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Max Levchin, Dave McClure and August Capital just to name a few. As for Bill, alongside his role with WePay, Bill is a part-time partner @ Y Combinator and an angel investor. Prior to startups, Bill cut his teeth in the industry at Jefferies in investment banking.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Bill made his way into the world of startups from investment banking?
2.) How does Bill assess the pivot? What is required to pivot successfully? How can this be communicated to both your board and your team?
3.) How does Bill look to relationship build with investors? What are the fundamentals to a healthy and sustainable investor relationship?
4.) Why should founders ensure they are not the only company representative with the board? What are the benefits of the board having many touchpoints within the family? How can this be done effectively?
5.) What does Bill mean he says you must have an 'opinionated culture'? How can this be conveyed to the team and across the organisation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Bill’s Fave Book: Failure Is Not An Option
Bill’s Fave Blog: The Information
As always you can follow Harry, Bill and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: How LPs Can Add Strategic Value To Portfolio Companies & Why Real Estate Is On Every Whiteboard In Silicon Valley with Brendan Wallace, Co-Founder @ Fifth Wall
Brendan Wallace is a Co-Founder of Fifth Wall, the fund that specializes in technology for the built world and real estate tech. Prior to Fifth Wall, Brendan was Co-founder & CEO of Identified, a data & analytics company that raised $33 million of venture capital and was acquired by Workday (WDAY) in 2014. Brendan also co-founded Cabify, the largest ridesharing service in Latin America, which has raised $143 million and operates in 14 countries and 50 cities. If that was not enough, Brendan has been an active angel investor and manages one of the largest syndicates on Angellist, having led over 50 angel investments including Bonobos, Dollar Shave Club, Earnest, Philz Coffee and Zenefits.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brendan made the transition from the world of startup founding to investing with Fifth Wall?
2.) How does Brendan feel fund managers can approach LP composition in order to provide strategic value add to portfolio companies? How did he approach this?
3.) How do the differing sources of LP money differ when comparing corporate LPs to more traditional fund of funds and endowment funds? Why did Brendan decide it was optimal to have both in Fifth Wall?
4.) Brendan has previously said 'autonomous cars are the next meteor to hit the real estate industry'. What are the 3 differing types of risk that could prevent this rise? What timeline does Brendan believe we are looking at for self-driving?
5.) How does Brendan see the urban landscape evolving and developing over time? Will we see a renewed period of urbanisation or urban spread? How do the macro levers affect this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brendan’s Fave Book: The Accidental Superpower
Brendan’s Fave Blog: CB Insights
Brendan’s Most Recent Investment: VTS: The Leading Asset and Asset Management Platform
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brendan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Explosion of First Time Funds, Only 1 Mega Fund Raised: What The Heck Happened in Q1 Venture Markets with Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures
Beezer Clarkson is Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures where she leads Sapphire’s investments in venture funds domestically and internationally. Prior to joining Sapphire, Beezer managed day-to-day operations @ DFJ’s Global Network, which had $7 billion under management across 16 venture funds worldwide. She has also spent time at Omidyar Network created by Ebay founder, Pierre Omdiyar, Hewlett Packard and Morgan Stanley. Beezer also founded OpenLP.com, an effort to help foster greater understanding in the entrepreneur-to-LP tech ecosystem.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Beezer make her way into the world of limited partners?
2.) How has the venture industry performed as a whole for Q1 2017 both in funds raised and $ invested? How does this compare to previous years?
3.) How is the 1st time fund manager ecosystem developing? Is it fair to say that first-time funds and micro funds are now an established part of LP portfolios? To what extent does shortening fund cycles concern Beezer?
4.) What other areas of the market have we seen explosive growth in? Why was the # of $100-$250m down last year? Why is it different this year?
5.) How does Beezer analyze the recent activity in the public markets? How does this liquidity affect the fundraising market for both startups and GPs? Will we see a return to bubble like times?
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Beezer on Twitter here!The thoughts, comments and opinions in this podcast do not represent investment advice and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sapphire Ventures.
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Why Move Fast and Break Things Is Not Right, How To Instil Radical Candor In Your Organisation & What Founders Must Ask For From Their Investors with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally
Jason Brown is the Founder & CEO @ Tally, the startup that is building a better credit card experience giving power to the consumer. They have investment from some of the leading names in early stage finance including Shasta Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Ludlow Ventures and Blake Byers @ GV just to name a few. As for Jason, prior to Tally, he founded 3 further startups including most recently Gen110 where helped to bring a new consumer debt product market that finances residential solar installs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Jason come to found Tally following his 3 prior startup founding experiences?
2.) Why does Jason think you should never settle with candidate hires? What shall startups do when they are growing fast and need someone now? Why does Jason believe you should never use external recruiters?
3.) As this is Jason's 4th startup and he has raised from the likes of Kleiner Perkins in the past, what has Jason learned in terms of fundraising through his past entrepreneurial experiences? What does Jason believe founders should look for from their VCs?
4.) Why does Jason believe that in the majority of cases 'move fast and break things is completely wrong'? What industries does Jason believe you have to lean into the regulators?
5.) How does Jason look to instill radical candor within Tally as a fast scaling startup? What does Jason think this is important for all startups to have engrained in them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Fave Book: Science of Interstellar
Jason’s Fave Blog: First Round Review
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com - and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: 2 Signs That A Company Is Ready For IPO, Why Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Management Teams Do Not Want To Go Public with Gene Frantz, General Partner @ CapitalG
Gene Frantz is a Partner of CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth investment fund which has investments in the likes of Airbnb, Snap Inc and Stripe. As for Gene, before joining CapitalG, Gene was a partner at TPG Capital, a global private equity fund. During his 13 years at TPG, Gene was responsible for multiple technology and telecom investments and represented TPG on multiple public and private company boards of directors. Prior to TPG Capital, Gene worked at Oracle Corporation leading its venture capital effort and previous to that in corporate development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Gene made his way from the world of traditional private equity to investing with Google?
2.) Gene has seen many investment cycles, how has Gene experience of both the ups and the downs of the market affected how he invests today?
3.) What does a company need to show or provide today in order to get a large late-stage cheque or IPO? How has this changed over the years?
4.) Why does Gene think that late stage financing has been massively commoditized? How can late stage funds looks to differentiate themselves in today's market?
5.) How does Gene view the extension of private markets and the delayed IPO? Why does he think management teams are less willing to IPO today? Does it concern him?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Gene’s Fave Book: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Religion & Politics
Gene’s Fave Blog: The Information
Gene’s Most Recent Investment: Stripe
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com - and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Inside Google's Growth Fund & The 3 Criteria They Look For With Potential Investments with Laela Sturdy, General Partner @ CapitalG
Laela Sturdy is a Partner @ CapitalG, Alphabet's growth investment fund that have invested in the likes of Stripe, Snap Inc, Airbnb and many more incredible companies. As for Laela, she has made investment in category leaders such as language learning platform, Duolingo, payroll and benefits provider, Gusto and jobs site, Glassdoor. Prior to investing with CapitalG, Laela was a Director of Sales & Business Operations at Google where she helped start, scale, and lead teams in several emerging product areas including video and display advertising, local and SMB services, and mobile commerce.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Laela made the transition from an operator at Google to one of the industry's rising star investors with CapitalG?
2.) Market size is fundamental to CapitalG decision-making process so; what is a large enough market? How does Laela look to evaluate market size; bottoms up or top down?
3.) How does Laela look to assess product differentiation? Is brand significant enough IP to be classed as product differentiation?
4.) Why does ownership not play such a pivotal role in investment decision-making process? How crucial is unit economics to Laela at this stage of investment?
5.) With Google's obvious operational value add, does Laela believe we will see the further rise of operational value add within VC? What does this mean for entrepreneurs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Laela’s Fave Book: Americanah
Laela’s Fave Blog: Dan Primack: Axios
Laela’s Most Recent Investment: Care.com
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com - and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount!
FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
20VC: Back To Back Female Led IPOs & Why It's Harder To Be A Female CEO Than A Male CEO with Leura Fine, Founder & CEO @ Laurel & Wolf
Leura Fine is the founder and CEO of leading online interior design service Laurel & Wolf. Driven by the desire to connect clients and designers through a digital platform, Leura launched Laurel & Wolf from her home dining room in 2014. Two years later, she has a rapidly growing team of more than 60 employees and a marketplace of more than 1,000 interior designers. They have raised over $30m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, CRV and former guest, Kent Goldman @ Upside Partnership.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Leura made her way from interior designer to founder of one of today's hottest marketplace startups, Laurel & Wolf?
2.) Why does Leura feel it is harder to be a female CEO than a male CEO? How are her actions compared and judged differently than those of her male counterparts?
3.) How does Leura approach the selection element of choosing her investors? What should matter to founders that their investors can bring? How does Leura look to select the best board member?
4.) How did Leura approach the chicken and egg problem of marketplaces in the beginning with Laurel & Wolf? What is her big advice to other founders building out their marketplaces?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Leura’s Fave Book: Pride & Prejudice
Leura’s Fave Blog: Oh Joy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leura on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: Investing; A Game Of Access Or Picking, Why Technical DD At Seed Is Irrelevant & Why A Contrarian Mindset Does Not Always Lead To Optimal Returns with Leo Polovets, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Susa Ventures
Leo Polovets is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Susa Ventures, one of the west coast's most exciting new seed funds. They have investments in the likes of previous guests RobinHood, Flexport, Andela, LendUp, and Qadium, just to name a few from their stellar portfolio. As for Leo, Prior to Susa, Leo was one of the first engineers at LinkedIn in 2003, then worked on payment fraud detection at Google, then designed and built the data cleaning and deduping engines at Factual. He is an angel investor in over a dozen companies, including DataFox, Boomtrain, Lumoid, and Momentum Machines.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Leo made the transition from the world of operations with LinkedIn to co-founding Susa Ventures?
2.) How does Leo evaluate the supposed success that comes from investing with a contrarian mindset? This that the only way? Is investing merely a game of access without picking?
3.) If one is to follow the crowd, there is often a high price? What is Leo's approach to valuation sensitivity? At what stage does price become unreasonable? How does Leo instill a sense of disciple and rigor in maintaining this mindset?
4.) How does Leo react to founders who raise large sums of capital on slowly increasing caps? How central should dilution be to the mindset of founders when raising?
5.) Why does Leo think there is very little valuable to be gained from enaging in technical due diligence at seed? What else does need to be examined pre-investment?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Leo’s Fave Book: Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers
Leo’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily, 25IQ
Leo’s Most Recent Investment: TalentIQ
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leo on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: Can Founders Really Trust Their VC & How To Navigate The Acquisition Process Successfully with Josh Felser, Co-Founder @ Freestyle.vc
Josh Felser is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Freestyle, one of SF's leading early stage seed funds with investments in the likes of About.me, Airtable, Intercom and Patreon just to name a few. As for Josh, prior to being in VC with Freestyle, Josh started two successful Internet companies, Spinner and Grouper/Crackle, which were acquired by AOL Time Warner and Sony for $320 million and $65 million, respectively.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Josh made the transition from the world of startups to founding Freestyle?
2.) Can founders really trust their VC? What is the sign that you can and then cannot trust your VC? How does this depend on the differing stages?
3.) When is the right time for founders to throw in the towel and sell? What are the signs? Is it the role of the board member to encourage and push the founder forward?
4.) Josh has said before that 'companies are sold and not bought'. What does he mean by this? How can founders optimize the acquisition process in terms of the dialogue with the acquirer? How should they approach the topic of valuation? How can they create a sense of urgency? Who are the certain stakeholders they must be talking to?
5.) How has Josh seen himself develop as a board member? What have been the inflection points in his learnings? What are the core components that make up a great board member?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Book: Snowcrash
Josh’s Fave Blog: Five Best Ideas of The Day: The Aspen Institute
Josh’s Most Recent Investment: Carbon Robotics
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Deals & Why Founders First Point Of Contact Should Be With The Investment Decision-Maker with Spencer Kimball, Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs
Spencer Kimball is the Founder & CEO @ Cockroach Labs, the open-source database for building global, scalable cloud services that survive disasters. They have backing from some of the greats of the world of VC having raised from the likes of Sequoia, Benchmark, Google Ventures and Index. As for Spencer, prior to Cockroach he spent 10 years at Google where he oversaw their hyper growth transition from startup to global behemoth. He also spent two years at unicorn payments company, Square as well as co-founding 2 prior startups.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Spencer made his move from a decade @ Google to starting Cockroach Labs?
2.) Why does Spencer enjoy speaking to VCs? What has Spencer taken away from the best of VC conversations? What are the best ways Spencer feels investors can make initial contact? What are the signs of bad investor interactions?
3.) How does Spencer want his VCs and board members to interact with him? How do the best board members provide constructive advice and feedback?
4.) How can investors get into the best deals? If they fail the first time, what can be done on their behalf to show continued interest?
5.) How does Spencer implement a 4 day work week at Cockroach and remain so highly productive? What are the benefits of this for the team and culture?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Spencer’s Fave Book: The History of The Decline & Fall of The Roman Empire
Spencer’s Fave Blog: Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: Why Young VCs Must Have Cheque Writing Ability & Why Corporate VC Is The Best Training Ground For New VCs with Nagraj Kashyap @ Microsoft Ventures
Nagraj Kashyap is the Head of Microsoft Ventures, the early stage investment arm of Microsoft. They have made investments in the likes of Cahoot, CloudSimple and Outreach just to name a few from their fantastic portfolio. As for Nagraj, prior to Microsoft, he was a senior vice president and head of Qualcomm Ventures where he built Qualcomm Ventures from a US/China-focused team of three in 2003 to a global leader in corporate venture capital with 25 investment professionals and direct investments around the world.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nagraj made his way into the world of corporate VC and came to be Head of Microsoft Ventures?
2.) Question from Matt Goldstein: What does it take to start a fund from scratch and build a team like Nagraj is doing with Microsoft Ventures? How does he look to establish mindshare for entrepreneurs with a new brand?
3.) Why does Nagraj feel that corporate VC is not viewed in the same regard as traditional VC? Why is this view wrong? What are the benefits of taking corporate VC money?
4.) Why does Nagraj feel it is imperative to let young VCs write cheques and learn from their mistakes? How does Nagraj structure the learning process for new and young VCs?
5.) What does the future hold for the world of corporate VC? Will we see an expansion of this capital source? Why is Nagraj so bullish?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nagraj’s Fave Book: The Omnivore's Dilemma
Nagraj’s Most Recent Investment: Kahoot
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nagraj on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: AngelList's Naval Ravikant on The Secrets To Success At Seed, Why Micro VC Is The Return of Traditional Series A & Why We Will See The Unbundling Of Traditional VC Brands
Naval Ravikant is the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList, where the world meets startups either to find great jobs, invest in startups or raise funding. Before AngelList, he co-founded Epinions, which went public as part of Shopping.com, and Vast.com. He is an active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including more than a few “unicorn” mega-successes. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS, which Cisco just bought for $635 million in cash.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Naval made his way into angel investing and came to found AngelList?
2.) Question from Parker Thompson: How does Naval internalize the power law math and how does that affect his ability to pick the best companies?
3.) Why does Naval believe venture to be a bundle of advice, control and money? How does that affect his thought process surrounding what makes a good investor?
4.) Why does Naval believe we will see the unbundling of VC firm brands and the rise of personal partner brands? How will this affect access to proprietory deal flow?
5.) Question from Jonathan Abrams @ Nuzzel: What is the vision for AngelList? How much further up the funding stack can AngelList go?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Naval’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Naval’s Fave Blog: Farnham Street
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Naval on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai
Anna Shedletsky is the Founder & CEO @ Instrumental, the startup that helps consumer electronics companies ship high-quality hardware, on time. They have funding from some of the best in the business including First Round Capital and a huge thanks to Phin Barnes @ First Round for the intro to Anna today. As for Anna, prior to Instrumental, Anna was a product design lead and manager for the Apple Watch and before that, a product design engineer for the Apple iPod.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Anna made the move from working on the Apple Watch to starting her own startup Instrumental?
2.) How does Anna approach the learning of new things? What is the methodology? What elements in particular has Anna found most challenging to grasp?
3.) Anna has experienced 2 very strange and different fundraising processes? What was strange about them? How did they differ? What did she learn from this experience?
4.) How can founders create a feeling of FOMO within their investors? What is core to this? What should founders be careful of when doing this? How should this be structured?
5.) Coming from Apple, Anna did not have a network among VCs and Founders. How did Anna build her network of VCs and founders? How can others founders do this? What is required for this to be done in a non-transactional organic way?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Anna’s Fave Book: The Lord of The Rings
Anna’s Fave Blog: First Round Review
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anna on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: Why Spray & Pray Investing Is Wrong, Why Data-Informed VC Beats Data Driven VC & What To Look For When Investing In A Marketplace with Josh Breinlinger, Managing Director @ Jackson Square Ventures
Josh Breinlinger is a Managing Director @ Jackson Square Ventures where he has made investments in the likes of Contently, OfferUp and rented.com, just to name a few incredible companies. He is also the ultimate master of all things marketplaces, especially when early stage startups must deal with the inevitable chicken and egg problem. Prior to life as a VC with JSV, Josh was part of the founding team @ ODesk, a co-founder @ Rev and the Head of Product and Marketing @ Adroll.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Josh made the transition from the world of startups to investing with Jackson Square?
2.) Josh previously said, 'data informed VCs will always beat data-driven VCs'. What makes Josh say this? What does being data-driven lead to weak investment decision making?
3.) Josh also said, 'we will see the rise of the master marketplace'. What does he mean by this? How is this different from current marketplace startups today? With such specialization does this not make it an unattractive sector for VCs with a smaller TAM?
4.) Following from Josh's statement that 'not all GMV is equal', how does that affect how Josh views; transaction size and frequency, share of wallet, value post-match being made and disintermediation?
5.) Why does Josh think rewarding VC activity is fundamentally wrong? What does it show that is, in reality, a falsehood?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Book: The Wright Brothers
Josh’s Fave Blog: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd
Josh's Most Recent Investment: ScriptDash
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: Homebrew's Hunter Walk on Why There Is No Series A Crunch, How To Package Portfolio Companies For The Next Round & Why The Bridge Round Is Not Always A Negative Sign?
Hunter Walk is a founding partner @ Homebrew, one of Silicon Valley's breakout seed funds of the last 5 years. They have investments in the likes of Shyp, the Skimm, Managed By Q just to name a few incredible companies. As for Hunter, prior to Homebrew, Hunter led consumer product management at YouTube, which he originally joined in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for Google Adsense. Hunter is also a thought leader in the industry and his excellent blog can be found here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hunter made the transition from Google to VC with the founding of Homebrew?
2.) How does Hunter view the bridge round? Does he agree with Mike Maples @ Floodgate in stating, 'it is often not a bridge but a pier to nowhere'?
3.) How does Hunter look to package his portfolio companies for the next round of investors? Does Hunter agree with Jason Lemkin in stating, 'the best investors are those that specifically know the metrics required to achieve the next round'?
4.) Why does Hunter not believe there is a Series A crunch? How can founders look to describe their story in a narrative that is attractive for VCs? What one trait does Hunter look for in founders more than any other?
5.) What is the biggest challenge in the coming year for Hunter with Homebrew? How does he measure his success as a VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hunter’s Fave Book: Harold and The Purple Crayon
Hunter’s Fave Blog: Ben Thompson: Stratechery
Hunter's Most Recent Investment: JoyMode
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hunter on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: Why Every Founder Should Bootstrap Their Startup, How To Solve Information Asymmetry Between Founders and VCs & Living In A Cupboard For Two Years To Fund StyleSeat with Melody McCloskey, Founder & CEO @ StyleSeat
Melody McCloskey is the Founder & CEO @ StyleSeat, the largest and fastest growing marketplace in the $78b beauty and wellness industry. They have raised over $40m in challenging funding conditions from some of the true greats of the business including Alfred Lin @ Sequoia, Chris Sacca, Jeff Clavier, Aileen Lee, Lightspeed, the list goes on. As for Melody, as well as running StyleSeat she is also a mentor for the Thiel Fellowship working with some of the brightest and best next generation entrepreneurs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) What was the origin story of StyleSeat for Melody and how did Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp come to be angel investors?
2.) Melody has previously stated that 'CEOs do not have all the answers'. What did Melody find most challenging that she struggled to answer? How has her approach to decision making and delegation changed over the last few years?
3.) Melody has been CEO for 6 years, a rarity in tech today, so what has been the core to her success long term as the leader of StyleSeat?
4.) With $40m in funding over 3 rounds, how did Melody find the fundraising experience? How did she feel the rounds differed? What does Melody believe she did well and what would she improve for further rounds?
5.) How does Melody approach transparency internally with fundraising? Should founders tell the team about fundraise opportunities? When is the right and wrong time to do so?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Melody’s Fave Book: Hard Thing About Hard Things
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Melody on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: How Investors Can Get Into The Best Y Combinator Startups & How YC Startups Should Choose The Right Investors with Jared Friedman, Partner @ YC
Jared Friedman is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world's most successful accelerator with portfolio companies including the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Twitch, the list goes on. Prior to YC, Jared was Co-Founder & CTO @ Scribd, the digital library and document sharing platform, which has over 80 million users and attained funding from the likes of Marc Andreessen, Redpoint and CRV. As well as his time in operations, Jared is also a prolific angel investor with investments in the likes of Instacart, FundersClub and Cruise Automation just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jared made his way from founding the immensely successful, Sribd, to being a YC partner?
2.) What is the process behind the invites for YC demo day? What does it take for one to get a hotly anticipated seat? Is there really a black list?
3.) A lot of investors suggest that if you are seeing the company at demo day it is too late, what is the thesis around letting friends and family in to view and invest in the companies before demo day?
4.) How can investors look to get into the best YC companies? What can the investors do to show their value to both the companies and the YC partnership? How do you look to advise companies with regards to selecting investors?
5.) Demo days have scaled massively so I have to ask, is there enough capital to go into the 120+ companies now being produced at YC demo days? What are the strategies for scaling YC effectively?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jared's Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Jared’s Fave Blog: HackerNews
Jared Most Recent Angel Investment: Starcity
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jared on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite's CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code "20MinuteVC" at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: How Investors Can Build Relationships with Founders In Organic, Non-Transactional Ways & How VCs Should Handle Founder Disputes with Saar Gur, General Partner @ CRV
Saar Gur is a General Partner @ CRV, one of the nation's oldest and most successful VC firms now on their 16th fund. At CRV, Saar has made investments in some incredible companies including DoorDash, Dropbox, Patreon and Ring to name a few. His brilliance in VC is not just acknowledged by us but Forbes and Venture Capital Journal who named Saar to the top 8 up and coming Venture Capitalists and a top 10 VC under the age of thirty-six. Prior to VC, Saar was the Founder of Brightroll, a leading video ad network that was acquired by Yahoo for a reported $640m.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Saar made his way into the world of VC and came to be a GP at CRV?
2.) When can VCs know when to pull the plug on an investment? How does Saar balance financial prudence with vision and belief in the startup and founder?
3.) What does Saar's relationship building process look like? How does Saar build relationships with founders in natural and organic ways?
4.) How can VCs handle founder disputes? How does Saar look to be as helpful and productive in this process as possible? What does Saar recommend to other VCs in this situation?
5.) How does Saar view the inflection points in the growth of startups? At what moments is their the potential for elements to break? How should this be mitigated?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Saar’s Fave Book: The Wright Brothers
Saar’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: TechCrunch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Saar on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite's CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code "20MinuteVC" at checkout.
Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse's Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that's scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.
20VC: How To Raise $200m In Any Economic Climate, Scale From Garage To Global In Record Time & The Biggest Startup You Have Not Heard About with Christian Lanng, Founder & CEO @ Tradeshift
Christian Lanng is the Founder & CEO @ Tradeshift, the startup with the vision to transform the way businesses work together. With 250+ people, offices in 9 countries and over $200m in funding from some of the best including Data Collective, HSBC and Intuit, they are likely one of the biggest and best startups you might not have heard of. As for Christian, he is one of the most visionary European entrepreneurs of the last decade having grown from digitising invoices in Denmark when he was at Uni to working on digitizing the EU later.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Christian made his way from Denmark to founding one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley?
2.) What does Christian mean when saying, "we should be discussing the globalization of technology"? How will we see the evolution of manufacturing over time? What is the bottleneck for automation?
3.) Christian has previously stated that his competitors have 'hostages not customers'. Why does he say this and how does that affect his view of competition and customer service?
4.) Christian has raised over $200m in varying fundraising climates, how did the rounds differ? What were Christian's keys to fundraising success? What does he know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
5.) How does Christian approach networking in a very unconventional style? What are the benefits of doing so? What does Christian advise startup founders looking to expand either their founder network or their investor network?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Christian’s Fave Book: The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck
Christian’s Fave Blog: SaaStr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Christian on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
But before we dive into the show today, there are some products that you simply cannot remember what life was like before them—for me that is x.ai. They bring you Amy and Andrew, the AI-powered personal assistants who schedule meetings for you. The beauty of Amy or Andrew is that you interact with them just like you would any other person, in plain English. You hand over meeting scheduling, and they get the job is done. Which means that you can avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong usually required to schedule a single meeting. Even better though, there is no sign in, no password, nothing to download. All you do is cc amy@x.ai Beautiful! And you can check it out now on https://x.ai/20vc/ It really is a must!
Link: https://x.ai/20vc/ Code for your first month free: 20VCWorkable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: How Every VC Firm Is A Marketplace, Why A Large Amount of Promise in AI Today Is Impossible & Entrepreneurs 3 Main Pain Points of Fundraising with Alex Mittal, Founder & CEO @ Funders Club
Alex Mittal is the Founder & CEO @ Funders Club, the company that uses software and networks to provide investors with access to the world's most promising startups. Their portfolio includes the likes of Slack, Greenhouse, Shippo and Flexport just to name a few. They are backed by some of the world's leading investors themselves with the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Felicis Ventures and First Round Capital. Prior to starting FundersClub, Alex was the founding CEO of Innova Dynamics, a VC-backed touchscreen hardware company, leading the company from university laboratory to securing design-in collaborations with today's major consumer electronics companies. Previously, he was the founding CTO of Crederity, a VC-backed identity and credential verification enterprise software company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way from YC founder to revolutionizing seed stage investing with Funders Club?
2.) Why is Alex still so bullish on the on-demand space? How does Alex evaluate on-demand startups? What metrics are attractive in the space? What do good unit economics look like for on-demand startups?
3.) Does Alex agree that we are experiencing a AI bubble? Where are the shortcomings in the current state of AI and machine learning? How does Alex expect the space to play out and what does Alex advise entrepreneurs in the space?
4.) What does Alex make of the rise of investing in hard science startups? Why does he get concerned to see traditional software VCs investing in the space? How should VCs view the rise of nontech businesses both in hard science and consumer?
5.) You have said before that 'the API is not in the past but is still to come'. Why are you so bullish on the continued expansion of APIs? Where do the inherent oportuities and use cases remain?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex's Fave Book: The Art of War by Sun Tsu
Alex's Fave Blog: Eric Newcomer, Mattermark Daily
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-powered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: SaaStr's Jason Lemkin on The 3 Things You Want From Your LPs, Why Most VCs Do Not Add Value & Why The Best VCs Know How To Package Startups For The Next Round
Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, now with the $70m SaaStr Fund, Jason has paved the way for the new wave of VC in what I describe the 'platformification of VC'. Jason has led or sourced the first VC investment in some of the fastest growing SaaS companies of today with the likes of Algolia, TalkDesk, Rainforest QA and PipeDrive. Prior to being in VC, Jason was the Co-Founder @ Echosign, leading to the very successful acquisition by Adobe where he oversaw Jason oversaw the growth of Adobe Document Services ARR from $50m in 2012 to $100m in 2013.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason made his way into the world of VC from being a $100m+ exit founder to founding SaaStr and SaaStr Fund?
2.) What is it like for Jason having his own fund vs being part of a bigger fund? What does the investment cheque size say to founders about the fund? Should they be concerned if the investment represents less than 1% of the fund?
3.) What was the fundraising process and environment like for Jason with SaaStr? Is all LP money the same? What differentiated value-add elements can LPs provide fund managers?
4.) Does Jason agree that most VCs do not add value? How does Jason look to add value with his 3 pronged approach? Where does Jason believe that most startups need help and advice?
5.) How does Jason evaluate the micro-VC stage at present? Where does Jason see opportunity? Where does he believe the space is over-heated?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Most Recent Investment: Automile
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Why Success in Gaming is Like Success in VC, The Key To Building An Enduring Game & Why Few Metrics Matter in Gaming with Kevin Chou, Founder & CEO @ Kabam
Kevin Chou is co-founder and CEO of Kabam, a world leader in mobile free-to-play games. At Kabam, Kevin catapulted revenue to $400 million and a valuation of more than $1 billion in 2014. Under Kevin’s leadership, Kabam has raised more than $240 million from venture and strategic investors, including some of the world’s largest entertainment and internet companies such as Alibaba, Google, Intel and Warner Brothers. Before Kabam, Kevin worked at Canaan Partners, Kabam’s initial investor and where he invested in 14 consumer technology and online media companies. In 2014 Kevin was named one Fortune magazine’s prestigious “40 Under 40” and, in 2012, was identified by Fortune as one of the “Smartest People in Tech.”
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kevin came to found the wildly successful Kabam from a life in VC with Canaan Partners?
2.) How does Kevin respond to investors that say games is so challenging as it is so hits driven? What are the requirements to build an enduring and successful games company?
3.) What are the metrics that define success in gaming? Why does Kevin believe that gaming is unlike any other in terms of metrics?
4.) To what extent does Kevin believe it is right to monetise games from the beginning vs the free to play market? What are the features and challenges required for success in the premium end of the market?
5.) How does gaming alter both in terms of design and monetisation when comparing the East to the West? What feature sets are preferrable in both? Why doe the East want to pay for as much up front as possible?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kevin’s Fave Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Kevin’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Dean Takahashi: VentureBeat
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kevin on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy
Carl Eschenbach is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading funds with investments in the likes of Google, Apple, Whatsapp, Paypal and Stripe just to name a few. As for Carl, prior to Sequoia, Carl was President and CEO @ VMWare where he grew the team from 200 to 20,000 people. If that was not enough Carl has also stepped in as CFO at a $5Bn company and transitioned 3 CEOs.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Carl made the move from President and CEO @ 20,000 person company, VMWare to Partner @ Sequoia?
2.) Question from Alfred Lin, Partner @ Sequoia: How did Carl look to build a culture of performance at VMWare?
3.) Question from Pat Grady, Partner @ Sequoia: What were Carl's biggest learnings with regards to high performance teams? What are the common mistakes in scaling a go to market strategy?
4.) How does Carl view the internal workings at Sequoia to the external perception? Was the move to Sequoia everything he expected? What was different or challenging?
5.) What does Carl believe are the core components that make a great board member? How has Carl's time in operations affected his view of boards and their working?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Carl’s Fave Book: Half Time
Carl’s Most Recent Investment: Zoom
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Carl on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Sequoia Partner, Pat Grady on Why Data Is The New Oil, Why We Will See The Return of The Apprenticeship Model in VC & The Defining Characteristics of The Next Generation of Great Software
Pat Grady is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading funds with prior investments in the likes of Apple, Google, Whatsapp, Paypal, Stripe and many more. At Sequoia, Pat has made investments in many past guests of this show and the SaaStr podcast including Zoom, Namely and Qualtrics, just to name a few. Prior to Sequoia, Pat spent 3 years with the team at Summit Partners.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Pat made his way into the world of VC and one of the most famous funds in the world, Sequoia?
2.) How does Pat view the apprenticeship model in VC? How can VCs attempt to develop and convey the founder empathy when they have not been a founder? Do 'career VCs' get the same respect from founders?
3.) What does Pat believe to be the defining characteristics of the next generation of great software? What are the commonalities?
4.) Pat has said before that 'data is the new oil', what makes Pat think this? How does this affect his investment thesis going forward? Are there elements of being 'data long' that make Pat nervous?
5.) How does Pat think the data incumbency advantage can be mitigated? What can startups do to build a moat?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Pat’s Fave Book: The Boys In The Boat
Pat's Fave Blog: CB Insights
Pat’s Most Recent Investment: Namely
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Pat on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Wealthfront and Benchmark's Andy Rachleff on Why Delight Is The Greatest Form Of Virality, Why Competition Does Not Matter & What The Future Holds For Automated Personal Finance
1.) How Andy made his way into the world of VC, became the Co-Founder @ Benchmark and what was the origin story behind the founding of Wealthfront?
2.) On rejoining Wealthfront as CEO Andy stated, 'I am an investor, not a CEO but what I did not realize was that I am a founder'. At what point did Andy realize this? Would Andy say that this is a strategic inflection point for Wealthfront with his return?
3.) What are the few elements that will make or break Wealthfront in the coming years? It it the best CEOs that are able to both balance the challenges with the opportunities?
4.) What does the future hold for Wealthfront? What is the exciting news? What does this mean for the road ahead and the world of automated personal finance?
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Andy on Twitter here!X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures
Lee Hower is a co-founder and Partner at NextView Ventures, one of the East coast's leading early stage funds with investments in the likes of Dia & Co, Sunrise, TaskRabbit and GrabCad just to name a few. As for Lee, prior to being a VC with NextView, Lee started his career as an early employee of PayPal in product and business development roles, through the company’s 2002 IPO and sale to eBay. After PayPal, Lee was a co-founder of LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and served as head of corporate development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Lee made his way from the early days of PayPal with Elon Musk to the founding team of LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman to founding NextView and being a VC?
2.) What were Lee's biggest takeaways from his time working with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman in the early days of PayPal? How has that experience affected how he invests today?
3.) Unlike other Paypal mafia members, Lee decided not to pursue the multi-stage investing strategy. Why was this? How does Lee evaluate the current seed environment?
4.) Why does Lee believe it is fundamental to study the history of VC and innovation? How does this affect his mindset when investing?
5.) What would Lee advice to a junior VC or someone looking to move into the industry in terms of differentiation and personal branding? What is key? How should this be approached?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Lee’s Fave Book: The Globalisation Paradox
Lee's Most Recent Investment: Optimus Ride
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Lee on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year
John Borthwick is the Founder & CEO @ Betaworks, the New York-based startup platform combining 3 areas of expertise. They have a studio where they have built products including Giphy, Dots, Bitly and more. They have a fund with prior investments including Tumblr, Medium and Kickstarter. Finally they have a camp, a thematic accelerator program for companies in frontier technology sectors. As for John, Prior to Betaworks, John was an SVP at Time Warner Inc following John's previous company, WP-Studio, being acquired by AOLTW.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How John made his way from AOL and Time Warner to founder of Betaworks?
2.) Why is John skeptical of the traditional VC model? Why does John believe that the market has adapted but the VC model has not?
3.) Why does John believe fund cycles are simply too short, in the same school of thought as Matt Ocko @ Data Collective? What are the problems with this?
4.) How does John evaluate Fred Wilson's post on the consumer downturn? Why does John think we are addicted to short term rapid fire hits?
5.) Why is John not surprised that AI, Bots, VR and AR are being 'labeled a disappointment for the last year? What does he think will be the catalyst for their rise?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
John’s Fave Book: King Lear
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and John on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Why Product Market Fit Is Like Porn, How The Entrance of Facebook and Google Into Enterprise Software Effects Traditional Enterprise Companies & The Future Pricing Model For The Enterprise with Dennis Mortensen, Founder @ X.ai
Dennis Mortensen is the CEO and Founder of X.ai, the artificial intelligence driven personal assistant that lets people schedule meetings using plain English and nothing more than a CC to amy@x.ai. Their female persona Amy is so lifelike that users have asked her on a date at a rate of one request per month! X.ai is now one of the best funded AI startups having raised over $30m from our friends at FirstMark and DCM and a big thanks to Matt Turck for making the intro and from DCM, who also helped us with some of the questions for Dennis!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dennis came to found one of the leading AI startups today with X.ai?
2.) Why is product market fit like porn? How does this analogy affect Dennis' evaluation of product market fit?
3.) What are the fundamental features required to turn a single user consumer product into an enterprise product? How should that transition be managed?
4.) Is Dennis concerned by large incumbents making their entrance into the world of more traditional enterprise companies with the likes of GSuite and Facebook for Work?
5.) How did Dennis evaluate the right pricing method for X.ai? What pricing mechanisms did he consider? What does Dennis believe is the future of enterprise pricing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dennis' Fave Book: Shoe Dog
Dennis' Fave Blog or Newsletter: Azeem Azhar: The Exponential View
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dennis on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: The Power Of A Concentrated Seed Portfolio, Why Operational Value Add Models At Seed Do Not Make Sense & Why We Will See A Shakeout Of Growth Stage Investors with Roger Ehrenberg, Founder & Managing Partner @ IA Ventures
Roger Ehrenberg is the Founder and Managing Partner @ IA Ventures, one of New York’s leading early stage funds with investments in the likes of TransferWise and The Trade Desk. Prior to IA, Roger was a prolific angel investor making investments in over 40 companies including BuddyMedia and previous guest, Howard Lindzon’s StockTwits. Before that, Roger served as President and CEO @ DB Advisors, Deutsche Bank’s internal hedge fund trading platform which managed $6Bn in capital across multiple geographies.
In Today’s Episode with Roger You Will Learn:
- How Roger made his way into VC from the world of Wall St?
- How does Roger view the diversification model of 50+ in a portfolio in micro VC? What levels of ownership does that require?
- With regards to small and honed portfolios Roger has previously said that ‘small is beautiful’. How does Roger approach this with IA and what capital pools does this allow his partners?
- Roger has also said that ‘VC platforms are not a panacea’. What does he mean by this? What do founders really want from an investment partner today?
- What is the effect of Roger and IA being outside the traditional echo chambers of Silicon Valley? How does this affect Roger’s dealflow? Hiring ability? Partnership opportunities?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Roger’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Maria Popova: BrainPickings
Roger’s Fave Book: Out Of The Crisis
Roger’s Most Recent Investment: Octane Lending
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Roger on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-powered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.
20VC: Benchmark's Scott Belsky on What Makes Truly The Best VCs? Why Entrepreneurs Must Focus on 'The First Mile' & The Key Ingredients To The Perfect Onboarding Process
Scott Belsky is a Venture Partner @ Benchmark, one of the world's leading VC funds. As an early-stage investor himself he has made investments in the likes of Uber, Warby Parker, Pinterest and Flexport just to name a few. Prior to Benchmark, Scott co-founded Behance in 2006, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. After Behance's acquisition, Scott served as Adobe's Vice President of Products, rebooting Adobe's mobile product strategy and leading Behance until 2016. If that was not enough Scott is also, the co-founder and Chairman of a new marketplace product under development.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Scott made his move into VC with Benchmark having founded Behance and been a VP @ Adobe?
2.) How did Scott see his investment decision making process change when comparing being an angel to a VC? What was it about VC that made Scott realise that he would not be a traditional VC?
3.) Why does Scott believe that when momentum is growing too fast it is generally likely to fade out? At what point is the transition point between large momentum that is and is not sustainable?
4.) Why is Scott fascinated by 'the journey in between'? What gives Scott hope when reviewing a company in this stage? What does he always look for?
5.) Why does Scott think that autonomous vehicles in cities will be a public utility? Will the data sets produced be publicly or privately owned? Who will operate mass transit systems?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Scott’s Fave Book: Tribe: On Homecoming & Belonging
Scott’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: The Information
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must!
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20VC: Raising $24m From The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Why EdTech Is So Misunderstood & Why The Future Of Work Is Decentralised with Andela's Jeremy Johnson
Jeremy Johnson is the Founder & CEO @ Andela, the startup that aims to bring a scientific approach to building engineering teams. They have backing from some of the best investors in the world with the likes of the Zuckerberg-Chan Initiative, Spark Capital, Google Ventures and our friends at Susa Ventures just to name a few. As for Jeremy, prior to founding Andela, Jeremy co-founded 2U, one of the fastest-growing education technology startups in history. 2U went public in 2014 (NASDAQ:TWOU) and continues to transform higher education. Jeremy has spoken on education and entrepreneurship at meetings hosted by the White house and Congress and was named “30 Under 30” by Inc. Magazine in 2012 and Forbes in 2013 and 2014.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeremy made his entry into startups and came to found Andela?
2.) Question from Paige Craig: How did the Zuckerberg-Chan Initiative deal come about? What has been the effect of taking that round for the company and for you as the founder?
3.) How does Jeremy view the contrast between being CEO and being founder? What does he believe makes a truly great CEO?
4.) Andela is an intensely operational and logistics based business, how did Jeremy learn to handle this? What were the fundamental challenges?
5.) How does Jeremy view the future wof work? Why does Jeremy believe the future can only be in decentralised work forces?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeremy’s Fave Book: The Power of One
Jeremy's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Social Snippets, Charles Hudson @ Precursor
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeremy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund
Ben Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund, they invest in startups co-founded by designers and build and educate design teams through their program, Bridge. Designer Fund's portfolio includes the likes of Gusto, Stripe, Shyp, Operator and many more incredible companies. As for Ben, previously Ben was a design lead at Facebook for over 5 years where he helped build products for nearly a billion people and grow Facebook’s world-class design team. He was also the design director at Varien which he helped build into one of the world’s leading e-commerce firms.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ben made the move from designer to General Partner @ Designer Fund?
2.) How does Ben's design background inform how he invests in companies and then supports them post-investment? How does he evaluate design opportunities from the design perspective?
3.) Why now has design become such a competitive advantage in tech? What has changed? What are the fundamentals of beautifully designed products today?
4.) How does Ben believe the current crop of VCs view design? What do they not understand? What should they look to understand? Will we see a new class of design-centric VCs?
5.) From seeing the likes of Facebook, Medium and Asana scale deign teams, what have been the takeaways to effectively scaling design teams with the growth of an organisation? What is required for this to be successful?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ben’s Fave Book: The Power of One
Ben's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Social Snippets, Charles Hudson @ Precursor
Ben’s Most Recent Investment: Hustle
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Pejman Nozad: Tech's Most Unlikely VC: From Yoghurt Shop To Investing In Startups Now Worth $20Bn+
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner @ Pear.vc, one of the leading seed stage funds in the valley. However, Pejman did not enter the tech industry like most venture capitalists. Having immigrated from Iran, he lived in an attic above a yogurt shop and took a job at a rug store in the Valley. But he immersed himself in what was happening in technology. Slowly, with a few small investments, he developed a reputation for identifying talent and helping take promising ideas to the next level. From next to nothing, he built a $20B portfolio, investing in over 100 startups and seeding several multi-billion dollar companies such as Dropbox, Lending Club, SoundHound and Gusto.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Pejman made his way from football in Iran to rug dealer in Palo Alto to leading seed stage VC?
2.) Mike Moritz has previously said that 'a call from Pejman is a call he will always take'. What led Mike to say this? What makes Pejman the brilliant networker and community builder that he is?
3.) How does Pejman assess early stage founders and teams? From seeing an early Andy Rubin, what did Pejman take from that as to what makes the best founders?
4.) Pejman invested $400K in Andy Rubin's Danger which exited 8 years later for $500m yet Pejman only 2x his money. What did he take from this? What have been the other major learning inflection points for Pejman in the journey?
5.) From working alongside some of the best investors of our generation, what does Pejman perceive to be the commonalities of the best investors? How do they operate? How do they evaluate early stage opportunities?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Pejman’s Fave Book: Power of Now
Pejman's Most Recent Investment: Gfycat
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Pejman on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why Founders Should Not Focus On Top Line Valuation, Why Capital Efficiency Is Key To Returns And Investment Success & Why Despite Popular Thought, $100m Is An Exciting Exit For VC with Micah Rosenbloom, Managing Partner @ Founder Collective
Micah Rosenbloom is Managing Partner @ Founder Collective, one of the leading seed funds in the world with investments in Uber, Buzzfeed, Makerbot, PillPack, Coupang and Cruise, just to name a few. As for Micah, prior to VC with Founder Collective, his career was varied starting as a Hollywood agent before becoming a serial entrepreneur founding 3 companies with the last, a successful exit alongside his now Partner Eric Paley with Brontes Technology. Micah also is a Board Member with Sequoia Funded Dia and Co and board observer with both MoveWith and Sense360.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Micah made the move from Hollywood agent to leading seed stage VC?
2.) Why does Micah believe it is wrong to have themes to invest against? Why does he believe that the most interesting businesses can be found in weird and wonderful places?
3.) Why does Micah believe it is a problem for founders to focus exclusively on top line valuation? Why does Micah disagree with the common notion that a $100m exit is not exciting for VC?
4.) Why does Micah believe it is wrong for founders to build their company for the next round? Why does Micah disagree with Jason Lemkin in stating, 'the best investors know the benchmarks clearly for the next round'.
5.) How does Micah deal with the fire hose of activities inherent within venture? How does he prioritise those activities? What thesis does he base all his decisions around?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Micah’s Fave Book: Thinking Fast and Slow
Micah’s Most Recent Investment: Skysafe
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Micah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why We Are Valuation & Ownership Insensitive, Why We Do Not Take Board Seats & The Effects Of The Series A Crunch with Topher Conway, Co-Managing Partner @ SV Angel
Topher Conway is a Co-Managing Partner of SV Angel, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed funds with investments in the likes of Facebook, AirBnB, Twitter, Dropbox and many more. At SV Angel, Topher works particularly close with Gusto, Github, Lookout and many more incredible companies. He was included in Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 in 2015. Prior to SV Angel, he worked at EQAL, Inc. At EQAL, he worked with the Business Development and Sales teams and lead efforts in creating new business opportunities. Prior to EQAL, he held positions at eCost and a 2004 summer internship in Google's Direct Sales Organization. He is also a member of the UCLA VC Fund, helping foster entrepreneurship at the University.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Topher made his way into the wonderful world of VC and came to be Managing Partner @ SV Angel?
2.) How has the rise of the pre-seed market affected Topher's access to deals? How has Topher reacted to the creation of this new market segment with their new fund size?
3.) How does Topher evaluate grit within founders? Do Topher and SV prefer serial or first-time founders? How does Topher and SV approach startup pivots? Where is the line between stubbornness and vision?
4.) To what extent does Topher focus on valuation and ownership? Why does he believe that it is not important at this stage? What is his determinant to see whether it will be a problem?
5.) To what extent has Topher witnessed the Series A Crunch? Where does he see gaps in the investment landscape? Why does Topher not have a problem with bridge rounds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Topher’s Fave Book: The Score Takes Care Of Itself
Topher's Most Recent Investment: BetterUp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Topher on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: How Startups & VCs Can Build Relationships with Potential Corporate Acquirers? The Challenge Of Operating Both A B2B & B2C Business Model & Why Fundraising Is The One Element Founders Cannot Control with Gautam Gupta, Founder & CEO @ NatureBox
Gautam Gupta is the Founder & CEO at NatureBox, the startup that allows consumers to discover new & healthy foods through a monthly subscription service. They have raised over $50m in VC funding from the likes of General Catalyst, Redpoint, SoftBank and many more. Prior to launching NatureBox, Gautam was a Principal at General Catalyst Partners. While at General Catalyst, he sourced and was actively involved with the firm’s investments in GoodData, Bigcommerce, Honest Company and many more. Gautam joined General Catalyst from Procter and Gamble, where he analyzed brand strategy and consumer preferences in the Consumer Market Knowledge group.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Gautam made his way into VC straight from college and then came to found NatureBox?
2.) What did Gautam take with him from his time in VC to founding NatureBox? How did the experience change the way he handled fundraising? How does Gautam view the 'career VC'?
3.) Why does Gautam look to operate both a B2B and B2C model with NatureBox? Does that not go against the startup advice of 'focus'? What are the inherent benefits and challenges of both models?
4.) Why does Gautam believe we have seen such an increase in VC interest in the food space? Does it concern Gautam that VCs are beginning to invest where they have little domain knowledge?
5.) Why is Gautam so bullish on the exit opportunities for food startups in the coming years? What is the liquidity event and how is that changing with time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Gautam’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog
Gautam’s Fave Blog: The Twenty Minute VC
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: The Radical Changes In Public Market Expectations, The Right Way To Assess Valuation & What It Means To Be A Disciplined & Diligent Investor with Randy Glein, Partner @ DFJ Growth
Randy Glein is a Co-Founder & Partner @ DFJ Growth where he looks to partner with entrepreneurs that have achieved market validation and are looking to scale rapidly. Randy's investments include the likes of Twitter, Tumblr, SpaceX and Tesla just to name a few. Prior to DFJ, Randy was CFO @ Feedburner (acq by Google), a business development executive at DIRECTV. Randy was also named to the Forbes Midas List in 2013, 2014, and 2015 as one of the world's top tech investors and to the New York Times / CB Insights list of top 100 venture capital investors in 2016.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Randy made his way into VC and came to found DFJ growth?
2.) What does it mean to be a diligent and disciplined investor? How can a futuristic mindset be balanced with an analytical and academic approach to evaluation and due diligence?
3.) How does Randy evaluate invest time horizons? How important is it to push for liquidity events as soon as possible? What is it that LPs really want to see?
4.) How have we seen public market expectations of tech companies change over the last 10 years? What are public market investors willing to give up in exchange for predictability? What are the benefits of tech companies staying private longer?
5.) What are the metrics that suggest a company with market validation and ready to scale into hyper-growth? What are the required levels of revenue and ARR?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Randy’s Fave Book: Being Digital
Randy's Fave Blog: Brad Feld, Fred Wilson
Randy’s Most Recent Investment: Unity 3D
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Randy on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: What Does It Take To Gain A Late Stage Cheque Today? The Fundamental Mistakes CEOs Make In The Scaling Process & The Importance Of Building The Next S Curve For Founders with Jules Maltz, General Partner @ IVP
Jules Maltz, is a General Partner @ Insight Venture Partners (IVP) where he has made investments in the likes of Slack, Zendesk, Twitter, Zenefits and many more incredible companies. Prior to IVP, Jules held roles at the likes of 3i, Admob and Bank of America. Jules has also been named to The Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investors and been featured in the likes of Inc and Fast Company. I also want to say a huge thank you to Rebecca Lynn @ Canvas and Clark Landry for the intros to Jules today.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jules made his way into growth stage investing with IVP?
2.) What are the major trends that Jules has observed in the later stages over the last few years? Where is there funding gaps and room for opportunity?
3.) What does it take for companies to attain later stage cheques today? What are the benchmarks required? How have we seen these benchmarks change?
4.) What are the fundamental mistakes that CEO's make in these scaling stages? When is the right time to scale rapidly? How does Jules view product market fit?
5.) Jules has previously stated the importance of building the next S curve. What does he mean by this and how should founders adopt this mentality?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jules' Fave Book: All The Light We Cannot See
Jules' Fave Blog or Newsletter: Nir and Far
Jules' Most Recent Investment: Checkr
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why I Do Not Regret Taking 'Peter Thiel Money', What Is The Difference Between Leadership & Management & What Conversations Are For The Founding Team Only with Tim Junio, Founder & CEO @ Qadium
Tim Junio is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Qadium, the startup that creates and organizes knowledge about the world's devices. They are backed by some of the best in the business including the likes of Founders Fund (Peter Thiel), NEA (Scott Sandell) and our good friends at Susa Ventures. Prior to Qadium, Tim started his career at the Central Intelligence Agency, and also worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and DARPA. Tim remains a research affiliate at Stanford, where he lectures and advises students on cybersecurity research topics.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tim made his way from the world of the CIA to founding venture backed, Qadium?
2.) How does Tim view his role as CEO? Why does he view leadership and management as 2 different things?
3.) How does Tim view transparency as a leader? What are the conversations that must only be for the founding team? How are those decisions managed and discussed?
4.) Considering Peter Thiel's recent press coverage how does Tim feel about taking 'Thiel Money'? Why does he think Thiel is one of the most interesting and brilliant minds? What are the challenges for Silicon Valley in eschewing the world of politics for the next 4 years?
5.) What does Tim see as the worst of Silicon Valley? What are the benefits to many 'shallow apps' not getting funded? How does this affect startup economics and hiring programmes?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tim’s Fave Book: Snowcrash
Tim’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Bruce Schneier
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: The Fundamentals To Creating A Successful Venture Partnership & The Optimal Investment Decision Making Process with Ryan McIntyre, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group
Ryan McIntyre is a Co-Founder @ Foundry Group, one of the leading VC funds of the last decade with investments in the likes of Fitbit, SendGrid and Makerbot. Prior to Foundry, Ryan started his career in VC at Mobius Venture Capital in January 2000. While at Mobius Venture Capital, Ryan led the firm’s investments in Postini (acq. GOOG) and Sling Media (acq. DISH). Prior to Mobius, Ryan co-founded Excite in 1993, which went public in 1996 and later became Excite@Home following the $6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home in 1999. At the time this acquisition was the largest internet transaction to date and created a company that achieved peak revenues of $616 million in 2000.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his way into the wonderful world of VC and came to co-found Foundry?
2.) At what moment did Ryan realise that he wanted to be a VC rather than his previous life of an entrepreneur? What was the catalyst moment for Ryan?
3.) What does the investment decision making process look like @ Foundry Group? What are the benefits and challenges of implementing such a model?
4.) What are the fundamentals to creating a successful venture partnership? How important is differing skill sets and contrarian thinking?
5.) What makes the great board members to Ryan? How has Ryan seen his style of being a board member alter over the time he has been on boards?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ryan’s Fave Book: Dune by Frank Herbert
Investment Ryan Is Most Excited By: Sendgrid
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: How 50% Of VCs Hurt Entrepreneurs, How To Build A Relationship Of Trust With Your VC and How Entrepreneurs Can Detect VC BS with Jason Mendelson, Co-Founder @ Foundry Group
Jason Mendelson is Co-Founder @ Foundry Group, one of the leading VC funds of the past decade with investments in the likes of Fitbit, SendGrid and Makerbot just to name a few. Prior to Foundry Jason co-founded SRS Acquiom, the largest merger and acquisition closing platform that completed over $200Bn in merger transactions. Prior to co-founding SRS, Jason was a Managing Director and General Counsel for Mobius Venture Capital, where he also acted as its chief administrative partner overseeing all operations of the firm. If this was not enough Jason is also the Co-Author, alongside Brad Feld, of the best-selling book, Venture Deals: How To Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer, a must read for all.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jason made his way into the wonderful world of VC having been a lawyer?
2.) Why does Jason believe there is too much BS in VC? What does Jason think causes this opaqueness? How does he look to build a relationship of trust and clarity with his entrepreneurs?
3.) How has the rise of social media affected the transparency and BS element in VC and startups? How can entrepreneurs know when a VC is lying to them? What are the tells?
4.) Jason has previously said that some VC behaviour is 'rather narcissistic'. What does he mean by this? How would he like to see this change in the future?
5.) How does Jason look to optimise board meetings? What are the expectations of both founders and VCs prior to board meetings when it comes to preparation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jason’s Fave Book: Atlas Shrugged
Jason’s Most Recent Investment: Borrowed and Blue
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jason on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for marketing and customer support together on one integrated platform. With Intercom, businesses can chat directly with prospective customers on their website, engage current users with targeted messages based on their behavior, and provide personal support at scale with an integrated help desk and knowledge base. This is perfect for Businesses that want to help people visiting their website become customers. Marketing and growth teams that want to onboard and retain users by sending the right messages at the right time and Support teams that want to move beyond email to provide personalized, scalable support so simply head over to Intercom.com/20MVC
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Why You Should Build Your Investor Team Like A Sports Team & How To Leverage The Abilities Of Your Investors Effectively with Ted Blosser, Founder & CEO @ WorkRamp
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ted made the move from early employee at Box to founding WorkRamp?
2.) What were the big takeaways for Ted from seeing the rocketship growth of Box? How has he applied them to starting WorkRamp?
3.) Ted has previously said, 'you should build your investor team like a sports team'. What does Ted mean by this? How did this affect what he looked for in his investors? What does Ted advise other founders when it comes to VC selection?
4.) How does Ted view the short term and the long term value add of investors? How does Ted look to leverage their abilities and connections and get the most out of having them on board?
5.) Taking a step back, many VCs want product market fit, how does Ted assess product market fit? What have been his learnings from YC that shape his attitude to PMF?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ted’s Fave Book: The Last Lecture
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Ted on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Preparing For The Next Big Trend, Why Conversational Will Be The Next Big Thing & How Entrepreneurs Should View Market Size with Sarah Guo @ Greylock Partners
Sarah Guo is an investor @ Greylock Partners, which she joined in 2013. Prior to Greylock, Sarah was at Goldman Sachs, where she invested in Dropbox and helped take Workday public. She advised pre-IPO private technology companies (as well as public clients including Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia) on strategic and financial issues. Previously, Sarah worked with Casa Systems, a venture-funded startup that enables cable operators to meet growing demand for broadband services. She is an advocate for STEM education for women and the underserved, as well as education more generally.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her way into VC with Greylock Partners?
2.) Question from Josh Elman: What were Sarah's biggest learnings from taking key companies public with GS in 2011? Why is narrative so important? Who has done it well?
3.) How does Sarah view market size and market creation? What is a big enough market size to be attractive? How does this change with time and product?
4.) How does Sarah view the next fundamental platform shift? Where does conversational fit into this thesis? Will we see 'machine learning as a service'?
5.) What does the future of VC look like? What does the next generation of VC need to do to stay on top and ensure pattern matching algorithms do not outperform them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sarah’s Fave Book: The Most Human Human
Sarah’s Most Recent Investment: Rhumbix
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Greylock's John Lilly on How Greylock Continues To Invest In The Next Big Markets, The Importance Of Building Tribes & Why There will Be Another Boom In Mobile
John Lilly is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of the world's leading venture funds of the past decade. At Greylock John has led investments in the likes of Instagram (acq by Facebook), Tumblr (acq by Yahoo) and Dropbox. John also sits on the board for Quip, Figma and ClearSlide just to name a few. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How John made his way into the wonderful world of VC following his time as CEO @ Mozilla?
2.) John has invested in the likes of Quip, Figma and Dropbox, so why are we seeing such a rise in productivity tools beyond Office and Google Apps? Will it always be a market of consolidation like we have seen with the likes of Quip?
3.) Does John believe the first boom of mobile is over? What about sensors makes John excited for the future of the phone? Does John agree with Ben Evans in viewing the phone as the sun of the solar system?
4.) Question from Sarah Guo: How does Greylock to continue to invest in the next big markets, rather than in what has made them successful before? What does the brainstorming sessions and meta-thinking look like internally?
5.) Question from Josh Elman: How does John view growing one's tribe and then growing together through all of your careers? What are the challenges and what is required in order to be successful?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
John’s Fave Book: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, John on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte
Harj Taggar is the Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte, the startup that is changing the world of engineering recruitment by building a new kind of interview that evaluates tech skills, not credentials. They have raised from some of our favourite seed investors and all past guests on the show including Felicis Ventures, SV Angel and Initialized Capital. As for Harj, prior to Triplebyte, he was the first partner brought in at Y Combinator since its founding, where he remained as a Partner for 4 years. Before that he was a YC founder, co-founding Auctomatic which was acquired by Livecurrent Media.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Harj made his way from the UK to YC's first Partner to now founding Triplebyte?
2.) Question from Garry Tan: What was the most surprising thing when Harj first became a Partner @ YC? What were Harj's biggest learnings from working with Paul Graham and Jessica Livingstone in the early days?
3.) Remaining in those very early stages, from Harj's experience seeing so many companies pass through YC, what do startups look like at those very early stages? How does Harj recommend finding co-founders? Test and iterate on ideas? Work towards product market fit? What does product market fit look like to Harj?
4.) How should we approach hiring as an early stage startup? What are the signs of great hires? What does the optimal interview process look like? How can we optimize the on boarding process?
5.) What should founders look for in VCs and vice versa? What were Harj's learnings on how to be a great seed stage investor from his time with Garry & Alexis @ Initialized??
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Harj’s Fave Book: Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Harj on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: How To Test The Strength Of Co-Founder Relations, The Dangers Of Raising A Large Series A & Why The Biggest Challenge For Consumer Companies Is Finding The Second Big Hit with Rishi Garg, Partner @ Mayfield Fund
Rishi Garg is a General Partner @ Mayfield Fund, where he focuses on new media platforms, disruptive financial services and new marketplaces. Prior to joining Mayfield, Rishi was as Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Twitter where he led the company’s most active M&A program, including the acquisitions of Periscope, TellApart, TapCommerce, and many others. Prior to Twitter, Rishi was the first Head of Corporate Development at Square. Rishi was also the Founder of a leading venture-backed startup, FanSnap and has also held roles at Google, Highland Capital Partners and Morgan Stanley.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rishi made his way into VC following time at Twitter and Square?
2.) How does Rishi look to analyse the state of co-founder relationships? What questions get to the core issues? What are the signs that encourage and worry Rishi?
3.) To what extent does a co-founder leaving the company concern Rishi? In what circumstance is this understandable? How should this process be played out?
4.) How much of a role should VCs play post-investment in the relationship of the founders? What are the dangers of this? How should VCs balance helpful and over involved?
5.) Why is Rishi anti the rise of the very large Series? What are the inherent dangers of this? How does he convey this concern to founders?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rishi’s Fave Book: The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, Malcolm X
Rishi's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Wait But Why
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Rishi on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund
Tim Chang is a Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund and Tim was referred to me by many other VCs as 'the fittest man in silicon Valley', notable tech publications even write it. His eclecticness does not stop there as he is also a musician in 3 bands and a serious body hacker. As for his investments, he has had AdChina (acquired by Alibaba), Playdom (acquired by Disney) and Basis (acquired by Intel) just to name a few. Prior to Mayfield, he spent time at notable institutions including General Motors and Norwest Venture Partners. It is not only us that appreciate Tim’s skills though as he has also been named to ‘Top 100 Innovators’ on Forbes Midas List for 2 years running.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tim made his way into the wonderful world of VC following Stanford Business School?
2.) How did Tim's perspective of starting VC around 9/11 shape his perspective coming into the industry? Why does Tim believe you need to see multiple cycles to be a good VC?
3.) Where are theWhy does Tim believe that startups need to be better capitalised than they currently are in the early days? Why does Tim argue for the existence of the Series B Crunch?
4.) How does Tim view the creation of a business model for machine learning? What are the 2 elements that founders need to consider before deciding in a pricing mechanism?
5.) How does Tim evaluate machine learning startups today in the plethora that have been created over the last few years? How does Tim determine true machine learning talent?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tim’s Fave Book: Nexus
Tim's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Wait But Why
Tim’s Most Recent Investment: Next Entertainment
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Tim on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Building An AI Company For The Long Term? How Humans & Machine Learning Can Work Together? What Applications Are The Conversational Interface Best Suited To with Maran Nelson, Founder & CEO @ Clara Labs
Maran Nelson is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Clara Labs, the truly human interface that uses conversational intelligence trained on high-quality data to schedule your meetings. They have secured funding from some of the best in the business including previous guest Kent Goldman @ Upside Partnership and Greg Brockman, Founder of the prestigious OpenAI. As for Maran, she is also the Founder of Interact, a community of 100 young makers and technologists coming together for an annual retreat in Tahoe.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Maran come to found one of the hottest AI startups of the day in Clara Labs?
2.) What is the right way to think about a digital assistant? How does Maran think consumer expectations and behaviours will change towards them in the coming years?
3.) Question from Shivon @ Bloomberg Beta: How does Maran think about building an AI company for the long term? How does Clara look to build scalable and transparent feedback loops?
4.) Why is Maran so bullish on the conversational interface? To what situation does this interface lend best? What other verticals and applications could this have in the future?
5.) Does Maran think that humans will always be needed in this process? At what stage will they become obsolete?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Maran’s Fave Book: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Maran on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ
Emily Melton is partner at DFJ, where she focuses on consumer and mobile technology, as well as healthcare technologies and marketplaces. Emily has made investments in the likes of BetterUp, Elation Health, Livongo, Redfin, Shift, and Wellframe. Early in Emily's career, she sourced investments in Box (NYSE: BOX), Meebo (Google), Kudo (Google), RichRelevance, and Flux (MTV Networks). She was also an advisor to Pulse Network (LinkedIn), Healthtap, and Poshmark.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Emily made her way into the wonderful world of VC following her meeting with Tim Draper?
2.) How does Emily view the importance of pattern recognition? Why does Emily believe that you should not invest from patterns? What is the difference between a pattern and an investing fad?
3.) Why does Emily hate analogies? Why does she believe it is simplistic thinking? How can this be mitigated for startup founders in describing their company?
4.) How does Emily view the portfolio approach to risk in venture? What questions need to be asked to determine the potential outcome of the business?
5.) Why does Emily get concerned by the rise of the 'celebrity investor'? How can investors build their brand in the proliferated world of early stage startup investing?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Emily’s Fave Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck, A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
Emily’s Most Recent Investment: BetterUp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: DFJ's Josh Stein on Why VCs Must Adapt To Their Founders, The Major Transition Points For Aaron Levie @ Box & Why SaaS Startups Are Growing At A Rate Never Seen Before
Josh Stein is Partner @ DFJ where his current board responsibilities include Box (NYSE: BOX), Chartbeat, LaunchDarkly, LendKey, SugarCRM, and previous guests with me on SaaStr in Periscope and Talkdesk. He is also actively involved with the firm's investments in AngelList, Doximity and Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) just to name a few. Prior to joining DFJ, Josh was a VP at Telephia, where he managed a group providing strategic analysis and information to the nation's largest wireless carrier. Previously, Josh was a co-founder for ViaFone (NYSE: SY), a DFJ portfolio company and a leading provider of wireless enterprise applications. Josh met the DFJ team when the firm co-led ViaFone's Series A investment.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Josh made his way from the world of operations to Partner @ DFJ?
2.) How does Josh analyze the VC/ Founder fit? How does Josh look to build trust and transparency in that relationship? What is an example of how Josh has changed his style to fit the character of an entrepreneur?
3.) Question from Greg Sands: What did Josh see in the early days of Box with a young Aaron Levie, what was it that made him so excited?
4.) Question from Mamoon Hamid @ Social Capital: Looking at Box today, what will it take for Box to 10x their value? What needs to happen in the market? What needs to happen to the product roadmap?
5.) Question from Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr: How is it that we are seeing companies like TalkDesk and Twilio grow at a rate never seen before in today's SaaS environment?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Blog: TermSheet
Josh’s Fave Book: Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success
Josh’s Most Recent Investment: LaunchDarkly
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: eShares' Henry Ward on Why Portfolio Theory Is Wrong? Why Investors Will Never Take Market Risk & Why You have To Have A Line of Sight To A $Bn Outcome
Henry Ward is the Founder & CEO @ eShares, the No 1 cap table management platform providing equity management, 409A valuations and liquidity all in one place. They are backed by leading investors and past guests including USV, SV Angel, Spark Capital, Semil Shah, Manu Kumar, Tim Draper and Kamal Ravikant, just to name a few. Prior to eShares, Henry was Founder @ SecondSight, the first registered investment advisor to go direct to your brokerage and improve your portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Henry made his way into the world of startups and came to found eShares?
2.) How does Henry challenge the notion that investors should have such high fail rates? How does Henry believe investors can build a strong and sustainable portfolio without home runs?
3.) Why does Henry believe that investors will never accept market risk? How much of a role does Henry believe herd mentality plays in the VC ecosystem?
4.) How does Henry view the increasing exit horizons for startups? Is this a problem? How can we create liquidity options pre large exits?
5.) How does Henry view the role of regulation in private markets? How does this differ to public markets? What would Henry like to see change in the VC ecosystem?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Henry’s Fave Blog: Hacker News
Henry’s Fave Book: The Essays Of Warren Buffett
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Henry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Having Marc Benioff & Reid Hoffman As Mentors
Phil Libin is Managing Director @ General Catalyst and Founder and Executive Chairman @ Evernote. At Evernote, Phil took the company from idea generation to productivity powerhouse allowing millions of users around the world to remember everything and in the meantime, providing Evernote with over $160m in VC funding from some of the very best including Sequoia Capital. Now in the world of VC, Phil has a particularly fondness towards all things bots, a theme we discuss heavily today. Phil has also made several angel investments in the likes of Gusto, TellApart and Binary Thumb just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Phil made his way from Founder @ Evernote to Managing Director @ General Catalyst?
2.) Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director @ General Catalyst asks: What were your biggest takeaways from your time with Evernote that lend to you being a better investor? What are the biggest surprises about the move into VC?
3.) Why have we seen an explosion of hype and excitement around the bot space over the past year? What was the catalyst for the rise of the bot?
4.) Why are we not there yet with bots? Should all be conversational? How does the infancy of messaging platforms affect the rise of bots? What unsolved technical challenges remain?
5.) Will the transition to bots and conversational interfaces represent a major point of disruption or more of an evolution in the interface paradigm?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Phil’s Fave Blog: The Economist
Phil’s Fave Book: The Three Body Problem
Phil’s Most Recent Investment: Sunflower Labs
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Phil on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com
Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook. It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to. It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC
20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures
Charlie O’Donnell is the Founder and Sole Partner @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the first venture capital fund based in Brooklyn, who manage $23m across 2 funds. Prior to founding Brooklyn Bridge, Charlie worked at the prestigious First Round Capital, with the likes of Josh Koppelman and Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson. If that wasn’t enough Charlie is one of only a dozen to be named to Business Insider’s 100 Most Influential People in NY Tech five or more times and has served on the founding board of the New York Tech Meetup and is one of the group’s first 100 members. His blog, This is Going to Be BIG!, is one of the ten most widely read VC blogs in the country with over 8,000 readers.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Charlie made his move from college to venture and then struck out on his own from USV?
2.) Charlie has previously said that 'venture capital is humbling'. How does Charlie look to construct his portfolio with Brooklyn Bridge? How does he come to terms with the fact he will be wrong most of the time?
3.) What are Charlie's views towards follow-on funding and allocating reserves of the fund? How important is this from a return multiple perspective? How much of a difference does it make for founders to raise a next round with 100% of seed investors committed?
4.) Charlie has previously suggested the importance of being helpful and hard working. Is that really enough to build a brand in today's competitive VC environment? Is brand a form of defensible IP?
5.) How does Charlie react to Ben Lerer's suggestion that Jet.com and Dollar Shave Club are the first dominoes of an incoming wave of e-commerce M&A?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Charlie’s Fave Blog: Wait But Why
Charlie's Most Recent Investment: Industrial Organic
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Charlie on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12
Nitesh Banta is the Founder and CEO @ B12, the startup that uses AI to superpower their team of world class creatives to create even more intelligent websites. They have backing from the likes of Jim Breyer, General Catalyst and our friends at Founder Collective. As for Nitesh, prior to B12, he was on the dark side as a VC with General Catalyst for 5 years before Co-Founding Rough Draft Ventures, the General Catalyst program designed to develop the next generation of student founders.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nitesh made the move from VC with General Catalyst to AI Startup founder with B12?
2.) How difficult was it for Nitesh to leave the security of venture to start B12 as Founder? What does Nitesh suggest to those that are unsure of whether to make the jump?
3.) Why does Nitesh believe that AGI (artificial general intelligence) is not as close as people predict? What are the implications of this towards humans relationship with technology?
4.) Is Nitesh bullish on humans creating new and unique machine learning algorithms or the rise of 'machine learning as a service as a sector? Where does the real value lie, the data or the machine learning algorithms?
5.) Why is Nitesh contra the common pessimism surrounding AI and the future of work? How does Nitesh believe AI will impact human work processes in a positive way?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nitesh’s Fave Blog: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd, Nuzzel
Nitesh’s Fave Book: Oh The Places You'll Go
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nitesh on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
20VC: Using Valuation As A Litmus Test, Why Valuation Does Not Matter At Seed Stage & How Seed Funds Can Serve Founders Better with Kent Goldman, Founder @ Upside Partnership
Kent Goldman is the Founder of Upside Partnership, one of the leading seed-stage investment firms in SF with investments in the likes of Laurel and Wolf, Digit and Lily. In 2015, he was named to the Midas Brink List. Prior to forming Upside Partnership in 2014, Kent was a Partner at seed investment pioneer First Round Capital. While there he led investments in companies including Airware, Hotel Tonight, and MemSQL. He also served on the board of Mashery (acquired by Intel). Earlier in his career, Kent was a member of Yahoo!’s corporate development team and also led business strategy for Yahoo! products generating $1 billion in annual revenue.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kent made his way into the world of early stage investing and came to found Upside?
2.) What were the big takeaways from First Round for Kent? How has he applied those learnings to his formation of Upside?
3.) What does Kent look for in the LPs that invest in his fund? Why should founders look to learn which LPs are invested in the fund investing in them?
4.) How has Kent seen his investment decision-making process alter with time? What have been the big changes?
5.) Why does Kent believe valuation does not matter so much at the seed stage? What does really matter to him at the seed stage? How does this progress with rounds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kent’s Fave Blog: Howards Marks: Oaktree Capital
Kent’s Fave Book: A River Runs Through It And Other Stories
Kent’s Most Recent Investment: Live Neighborly
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kent on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud
David Politis is the Founder & CEO @ Bettercloud, the first ever unified SaaS management platform. Bettercloud have raised over $40m in funding from some of today's best investors including past guests from Accel, Greycroft Partners and Flybridge Partners, just to name a few. Before founding BetterCloud, David was an early employee of Cloud Sherpas (acquired by Accenture [NYSE: ACN]) where David led Cloud Sherpas to become the leading Google Apps services provider and reseller to SMBs worldwide. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, David was the founding employee and General Manager of Vocalocity (acquired by Vonage [NYSE: VG]), which he grew into one of the top providers of cloud PBX technology.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dave came to found Bettercloud? What was the a-ha moment for him?
2.) Why does David like to invest in everything but perks? What are the challenges of incentivising a team with Perks? What are the alternatives?
3.) What are the limits to transparency? Can there ever be too much transparency? How do you engender a culture of radical transparency within the workforce?
4.) How was the fundraising process for David? how did it alter and develop with every round? What did he do well and what would he improve upon?
5.) How can founders optimise the on boarding process for new hires? What is fundamental? What are the common mistakes and how can this be hacked for success?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David's Fave Blog: Recode
David's Fave Book: Banker To The Poor
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever?
Parker Thompson is a Partner @ AngelList and creator of popular parody Twitter Account, Startup L Jackson. At AngelList Parker has made investments in the likes of former guests, Algolia, Realty Shares and Keen IO. Prior to joining AngelList, Parker was a Partner at 500 Startups in SF and his illustrious path prior to investing includes Pivotal Labs, co-founding PlaceSite, preserving the interwebs at the Internet Archive, and working on digital copyright at UC Berkeley’s iSchool.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Parker made his way into the world of early stage investing from the world of operations?
2.) How does Parker look to evaluate startup founders? What questions does he like to ask? What traits does he like to see in the core exec?
3.) Why does Parker think "not enough traction" is a BS VC excuse? How should VC's approach saying no to founders? What are the real reasons a VC is saying no in this case?
4.) Why does Parker believe the jump to Series A is bigger than ever? What has caused this? What metrics do startups have to achieve to make this move successfully?
5.) How should founders determine how much money to raise? If they can should they raise a 'warchest'? Why should founders not be concerned with dilution in the early days?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Parker’s Fave Blog: Stratechery, Nuzzel
Parker’s Fave Book: The Modernist Cuisine
Parker’s Most Recent Investment: Common Networks
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Parker on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: Learnings From Mary Meeker & Larry Summers, Missing Out On Uber & The Changing World of VC with Canvas Partner, Rebecca Lynn
Rebecca Lynn is a Partner @ Canvas, where she focusses on Fintech, Digital Health, SaaS and mobile. Rebecca led an early stage investment in Lending Club, which was the largest US technology IPO of 2014 and the 4th largest Internet IPO since 2001. She has also led investments in the likes of Check (acquired by Intuit), RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), Proximity, Practice Fusion and more incredible companies. Prior to being in VC, Rebecca held operational roles at NextCard where she rose to become VP of Marketing and Head of Customer Acquisition and saw the company going public with a $1.3bn market cap.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rebecca made her way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) How does Rebecca view the importance of brand and thematic focus in the world of VC today? How can a VC be focussed thematically without missing moonshots?
3.) What were Rebecca's biggest lessons from sitting on boards with the likes of Mary Meeker and Larry Summers? How did that change how Rebecca viewed being a board member?
4.) "Fintech is all about distribution and acquisition". What does Rebecca make of this statement? How have we seen evolution in both distribution and acquisition in the rising tide of new fintech startups?
5.) How does Rebecca analyse fund economics? What does she make of the mega $1Bn funds raised over the last year? What is the optimal size fund for Rebecca?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rebecca’s Fave Blog: The Daily Shot
Rebecca’s Fave Book: Influence by Robert Cialdini
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rebecca on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: Qualtrics' Ryan Smith on Building A $Bn Company & Raising The Largest Series A Since 2008 From Sequoia & Accel
Ryan Smith is the Founder & CEO @ Qualtrics, an online survey company with 1,200 employees and a valuation of more than $1bn. They have backing from some of the world’s best investors including the likes of Sequoia, Accel and Insight Venture Partners having raised a $150m Series B in 2014. As for Ryan, there are many awesome things, first, he has built Qualtrics from Utah allowing him to gain perspective outside of the traditional tech bubbles, second, he held off on attain VC funding for many years despite the common belief that it is necessary for unicorn growth and finally he has the most incredible work life balance I have seen and if you have not already you must check out this piece on him in Forbes, it really is a must.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his way into startups and came to found Qualtrics?
2.) Sequoia’s Bryan Schreier states that Ryan’s success is due to running the company on ‘first business principles’. What does he mean by this? How does this affect the way Ryan runs Qualtrics?
3.) Why did Ryan decide to bootstrap the company for such a long time with the likes of Accel and Sequoia looking to invest? What are the benefits of retaining such control? What are the financial requirements to do so?
4.) What makes the best CEO’s? How do they view the internal structure of the company? How do they perceive their role? How do they manage their day and optimise their time?
5.) How does Ryan look to instill ‘radical transparency’ in the organisation? What are the benefits of doing so? Can an organisation ever be too transparent? What are the challenges of such transparency?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: Garry Tan on The Biggest Takeaways From Advising 700 Companies @ Y Combinator & Why Now Is The Golden Age For The Early Stage?
Garry Tan is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Initialized Capital, one of Silicon Valleys leading early stage seed funds. Prior to founding Initialized, Garry was a Partner at Y Combinator where he invested in and directly worked with over 700 companies in 5 years from the earliest possible stage, often just an idea. Garry's portfolio includes the likes of previous guests Tilt, Eero, Flexport, LendUp and many more incredible companies. Before being at YC, Garry Co-Founded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions, ultimately acquired by Twitter. Garry also co-founded the engineering team for Palantir Technology's quant finance analysis platform.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Garry made the transition from Founder @ PostHaven to YC Partner to Initialized GP?
2.) What were Garry's biggest takeaways from advising 700 startups at YC that he has taken with him to Initialized?
3.) Why does Garry believe now is the golden age for early stage investing? What opportunity does the mass of late stage capital provide the early stage?
4.) How does Garry approach desired ownership? What level of ownership provides incentive for a VC to work whilst also allowing collaboration with other VCs in a round?
5.) What are Garry's thoughts on the rise of thematic investing? Why does he not believe it to be optimal at the seed stage?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Garry’s Fave Blog: SaaStr
Garry’s Fave Book: Chaos Monkeys
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Garry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: Reddit's Alexis Ohanian on How It All Started With Paul Graham @ YC, The Biggest Surprises About Making The Move Into VC & Why Alexis Believes All The Best Investors Have Operating Experience
Alexis Ohanian is co-founder of Reddit & Initialized Capital. After graduating from UVA in 2005, Alexis and his co-founder Steve Huffman started Reddit, which they sold in 2006 to Conde Nast. In 2015, he returned to a full-time capacity with Steve Huffman as the two returned to the helm of a fully independent Reddit, which is now the 8th largest US website. In 2016, he joined Garry Tan in kicking off the third fund for Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital firm. He's invested in and advised over two hundred tech startups and was a partner at Y Combinator; Alexis has also written a national best-selling book, Without Their Permission and was named on Forbes 30 Under 30 list two years in a row.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alexis made his way into the world of VC from founding Reddit?
2.) What were the biggest surprises for Alexis about making the move into venture full time? What have been the biggest challenges?
3.) How do Alexis and Garry (Alexis' partner) look to integrate process into their investing with Initialized? What is core to the success of this process? Why should more VCs be doing so?
4.) What does Alexis believe makes the best seed investors? What are the benefits of investors that have been in the trenches? How can they add to their companies in a way those without operating experience cannot?
5.) How does kindness integate into Alexis' role as an investor? Can one win in investing while being kind? How does Alexis look to show his kindness to founders and investors?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alexis’ Fave Blog: Reddit
Alexis’ Fave Book: Slaughterhouse 5
Alexis' Most Recent Investment: Workramp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alexis on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: The Future For 3D Printing? Why European VCs Are More Conservative Than US VCs & How 3D Printing Truly Changes The Manufacturing Process with Peter Weijmarshausen, Co-Founder & CEO @ Shapeways
Peter Weijmarshausen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shapeways, the world’s leading 3D printing marketplace and community. Shapeways have raised funds from some of the world's leading investors including the likes of USV, Andreesen Horowitz and Index Ventures just to name a few. Prior to Shapeways, Peter was the CTO of Sangine, where he and his team designed and developed satellite broadband modems. Peter was also Director of Engineering at Aramiska, where he was responsible for delivering a business broadband service via satellite.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Peter made his way into startups and came to found Shapeways?
2.) Where are we in the 3D printing cycle today? Has it developed slower or quicker than Peter expected? How was it for Peter inhabiting a space with so much hype?
3.) When does 3D printing make the transition from early adopter market to mass market? What are the determinants that will allow for this to happen?
4.) Having started life in an incubator, why did Peter decide that for the origin of Shapeways? What are the benefits? What type of founder is this model right for?
5.) Shapeways have raised from Index, USV and a16z, so how was the fundraising journey for Peter? What would he like to improve upon for next time? What did he do well?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Peter’s Fave Blog: New York Times
Peter’s Fave Book: Leadership and Self-Deception
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Peter on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we're able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It's also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: How To Assess Founder Psychology, Why Talking About Financial Returns In The First Meeting Is Always Wrong & How To Allocate Time Amongst A VC Portfolio with Kara Nortman, Partner @ Upfront Ventures
Kara Nortman is a Partner @ Upfront Ventures, one of LA's leading venture funds. Kara is also co-founder of Seedling where she currently serves as Chairman. Prior to starting Seedling, Kara spent close to seven years at IAC where she acted as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Urbanspoon and Citysearch. Prior to Urbanspoon/Citysearch, Kara co-headed the M&A group at IAC where she lead some of their most successful acquisitions, notably Urbanspoon, Dictionary.com and Aston Hotels. While at IAC, Kara also served as a board member to Hatch Labs, IAC’s mobile technology incubator, where she recruited and advised Tinder. Kara also spent time at Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, and Battery Ventures.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kara made her way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) Question from Greg Betinelli and Jenny Lefcourt: What is the most surprising thing about moving from an operator to a VC? What does Kara prefer more about being a VC?
3.) Having been an entrepreneur with a board, what does a good board member look like to Kara? How does Kara allocate her time amongst her portfolio?
4.) How does Kara assess founder psychology? How does Kara look to get to know the founder both post and pre-investment? What are some signs and tells for Kara of the truly successful operators?
5.) How does Kara view diversity in the VC landscape? What are prime examples of where it is going wrong? What can be done to change this? What are Kara's hopes and concerns for the future?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kara’s Fave Blog: Both Sides of The Table
Kara’s Fave Book: Grit by Angela Duckworth
Kara's Most Recent Investment: Stem
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kara on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we're able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It's also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: Lessons Learnt From Marc Benioff & Selling To Salesforce For $2.7bn, What Product Market Fit Really Looks Like & Why Pricing Is Startup's Biggest Problem with Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner @ HighAlpha
Scott Dorsey is the Managing Partner @ High Alpa, the startup studio that both builds and invests in some of the most exciting SaaS companies today. Prior to HighAlpha, Scott was a successful entrepreneur who co-founded ExactTarget and led the company from start-up to global marketing software leader. ExactTarget went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2012 and sold to Salesforce.com in July 2013 for $2.7 billion. At Salesforce, Scott worked directly with Marc Benioff to execute the ExactTarget vision within Salesforce.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Scott made his way into the world of venture from founding ExactTarget?
2.) What was it like to work directly for Marc Benioff? What were the biggest learnings and takeaways? What were the biggest challenges?
3.) With a startup studio producing companies and a fund investing in them, how does Scott avoid the negative signalling that is inherent within these 2 structures?
4.) Having seen so many successful SaaS startups, what does product market fit look like to Scott? From the studio, what are the biggest challenges his startups face in hitting product market fit?
5.) What are the fundamentals that all startups should focus on in the quest for product market fit? What are the challenges? How should this be measured?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Scott’s Fave Blog: SaaStr
Scott’s Fave Book: Good To Great by Jim Collins
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we're able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It's also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen on Why Investor Relations Are Overrated, Why Boards Have To Be Rethought & Why MBAs Do Not Make Bad Entrepreneurs
Ryan Petersen is the Founder and CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarder for the internet age. Flexport recently raised a phenomenal $65m Series B from the likes of Founders Fund, First Round, Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, Yuri Milner, Susa Ventures and more incredible investors. With none other than YC founder Paul Graham stating ‘Ryan has the rare ability to not just satisfy the market but grow it’. Prior to Flexport, Ryan was Founder and CEO of ImportGenius.com, the largest provider of business intelligence to the import-export industry.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan came to found Flexport? What was the a-ha moment for him?
2.) Why does Ryan believe it is crap that MBA's do not make good entrepreneurs? How did Ryan design his life to be an entrepreneur without the opportunity to work for someone else?
3.) How has Ryan found the experience of being a single founder? What are the pros and cons? What was the investor reaction? What does Ryan advise other single founders?
4.) How did Ryan find the fundraising for the latest $65m raise? What did he do well? What would he like to improve upon for later rounds? How did he educate investors without being patronising?
5.) Why does Ryan want to see boards be rethought? What is so inefficient about boards? When did Ryan gain his board? What would Ryan advise fellow founders on building a board?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ryan's Fave Blog: SaaStr
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at Xero.com/twentyVC
20VC: Why There Is A Revolution In VC, Why Boards Are Inherently Inefficient & Why Data Will Be Central To VC In The Future with Chris Farmer, General Partner @ SignalFire
Chris Farmer is a General Partner @ SignalFire, as he describes, 'the most quantitative fund in the world.' Chris has also assembled 50 other on-demand advisors to aid portfolio companies including Slack CEO, Stewart Butterfield, AltSchool Founder, Max Ventilla and Pinterest President, Tim Kendall. SignalFire's portfolio includes the likes of Uber, ClassDojo and Rocksbox just to name a few. Prior to SignalFire, Chris was a Venture Partner @ General Catalyst where he aided the development of their seed program. Prior to General Catalyst, Chris spent 4 years as a VP @ Bessemer Venture Partners.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chris made his way into the world of venture and came to be Founding Partner @ Signal Fire?
2.) Why does Chris believe the VC industry has not changed in the last 40 years? Why are the old guard of VCs worried for the evolution?
3.) Why does Chris believe data and tech will be centre to the revolution that is happening in VC? How will data be used to enhance the VC value add to startups in the coming years?
4.) From interviewing over 500 Founders, what was the most common challenges and problems founders face today? How should VCs be positioning themselves to provide additional value?
5.) What does Chris believe boards are so inherently inefficient? What would Chris like to see change in the world of boards? How does Chris position himself in terms of, board to partner ratio?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chris' Fave Blog: Above The Crowd: Bill Gurley
Chris' Fave Book: The Success Equation
Chris' Most Recent Investment: Frame.io
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chris on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at Xero.com/20vc.
20VC: Why Market Is More Important Than Team, The 4 Key Roles of A Board Member & Why Founders Get Market Sizing So Wrong with Rory O'Driscoll, Founding Partner @ Scale Venture Partners
Rory O’Driscoll is a founding member and Partner at Scale Venture Partners. An active investor for the past 20 years, Rory is focused on early-in-revenue software companies benefiting from the move to Software as a Service and the wider transition of enterprise computing to the cloud. Rory currently sits on the boards of Axcient, Bill.com, Box, Chef Software, DataSift, DocuSign, DroneDeploy, Forter, Katch, OneLogin, Pantheon, WalkMe and Wrike. Prior investments include ExactTarget (ET; Acq: SFDC), Omniture (OMTR; Acq: ADBE), ScanSafe (Acq: Cisco), Frontbridge (Acq: MSFT), Placeware (Acq: MSFT) among others. Rory has been recognized by the Forbes Midas List and AlwaysOn Power Players in Venture Capital for his investments.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rory made his way into the world of venture and came to be a Partner @ Scale.
2.) How does Rory address market size? Does he utilise the bottom up or top dpwn approach? What is his strategy?
3.) Why are markets more important to Rory than management? What do each element have a different role in achieving?
4.) How does Rory look to navigate board conflict? When conflict does arise, how does Rory look to resolve a CEO who does not listen?
5.) What are the 4 fundamental roles of a board member? Why is competence underrated? What should founders and CEOs look for in prospective board members?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rory's Fave Blog: Term Sheet
Rory's Fave Book: SuperForecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction
Rory's Most Recent Investment: DroneDeploy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rory on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc
20VC: a16z's Balaji Srinivasan on Why There Is A Financial Incentive For Truth In VC & Why The Best VCs Invest In Founder To Make Them Richer Than Themselves
Balaji Srinivasan is the Founder & CEO @ 21.co, the company that believes for bitcoin to succeed we need to build the full stack infrastructure for bitcoin, from silicon to hardware. 21.co have backing from some of the best in the world including a16z, Peter Thiel, Scott & Cyan Banister, Naval Ravikant and previous guest Data Collective's Matt Ocko. Balaji is also a Board Partner @ a16z, where he has served for the past 3 years. Prior to a16z and 21.co, Balaji was Co-Founder & CTO @ Counsyl, the genomics startup that now tests 4% of all US births and raised $65 in funding.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Balaji made the move from operations to a16z and the back to startups? How did his time in operations affect his investing mentality and vice versa.
2.) Why does Balaji believe that the number 1 barrier for most startups is regulation? Why does Balaji look to the unseen?
3.) With such value being held back by regulation, what is the FDA, FAA, SEC etc holding back? How can that value be unlocked? How can you carve out jurisdictions where you can have early adopters?
4.) How can new products look to gain customer validation through micro testing market segments? What are the requirement to do this successfully? What are the common mistakes
5.) How does Balaji view the future of regulation? How can tech help make regulation faster and more efficient? What are the barriers to it's widespread adoption and implementation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Balaji's Fave Book: The Sovereign Individual, The Princeton Companion To Mathematics
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Balaji on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Venture Capital Is One Hell Of A Drug, What VCs Expect From Founders Once They Have Raised & Why Customers Validate Your Business Not Venture Capital with Eric Paley, Managing Partner @ Founder Collective
Eric Paley is the Managing Partner at Founder Collective, one of the world’s most successful seed funds with investments in the likes of Uber, Hunch, Makerbot and About.me. Prior to Founder Collective, Eric was the Co-Founder and CEO of Brontes Technologies, later acquired by 3M for $95m. Following it’s acquisition Eric began making angel investments and it was not long before Eric and David, ‘super angel’ at the time, saw the potential for a Founder First seed fund and Founder Collective was born.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eric made his move into the wonderful world of venture from founding Brontes Technologies?
2.) How does raising VC money affect the founders in both the long term and the short term? How does it alter exit expectations and time horizons?
3.) How does raising VC money affect startup management and burn rates? At what time is it too late to cut the burn? When should this moment of realisation be?
What are Eric's rough expectations of valuation uptick based upon VC funding? How does Eric approach the bridge round? What metrics are required for Eric to think it is an acceptable round? Is it merely a case of failing to hit Series A metrics?
5.) Does Eric believe VCs really need $Bn exits to succeed? What is the math behind it? How should founders think of exits with the investors hat on? What does Eric make of the rise of mega funds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eric’s Most Recent Investment: Crayon
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Data Collective's Matt Ocko on The Dark Side Of AI & What Happens When 3-4m People Become Unemployed Overnight
Matt Ocko is the Co-Managing Partner and Co-Founder @ Data Collective and has over 3 decades of experience as a tech entrepreneur and VC and has made investments in the likes of Facebook, Zynga, Uber and AngelList just to name a few. If that was not enough he is also an inventor on over 40 granted or in process patents. A truly deep thinker and one of my fave ever shows to record.
In Today’s Episode with Matt You Will Learn:
- How Matt made his way into VC and came to co-found Data Collective?
- What is the biggest challenge facing the rise of AI today? How does this evolve the further into the category we get?
- How does this affect the future of work? What will the 3-4m unemployed non-college educated do? What is the solution to this? Universal basic income?
- How does the rise of AI radically alter the structure of society? How does it affect national economies and global macroeconomics?
- Why is the Keynesian belief, that human wants and needs are infinite and we will simply adjust to AI life, not relevant? What does that say about the adoption and disruption rate?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Matt’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: MIT Technology Review
Matt’s Fave Book: The Way Things Work
Matt’s Most Recent Investment: Tradeshift
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Ed Cooke, Grandmaster of Memory on What Is Missing In EdTech? What Does The Integration Of AI & Education Look Like & The Core Pillars Of Optimising Memory
1.) How Ed went from being a Grandmaster of Memory to a startup founder with Memrise?
2.) What is the essence of learning? How does Ed break down the process? Does the segmentation of these parts allow you to optimise certain elements?
3.) What are the prospect ahead for the world of Edtech? Was Tim Berners-Lee right to say that the web has some way from fulfilling it's potential?
4.) How important is gamification for the future of EdTech? How does this affect retention? How does this affect monetisation and conversion?
5.) How does Ed believe AI will integrate into the future of EdTech? What kinds of intelligence will be able to be created?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Ed’s Fave Blog: Continuations by Albert Wenger
Ed’s Fave Book: From Dawn To Decadence
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ed on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Investing In Sectors That Were Cool 2 Years Ago, What Accel's Facebook Fund Taught a Generation of LPs & Why LPs Need A New Discovery Process with Paul Martino, Founding Partner @ Bullpen Capital
Paul Martino is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Bullpen Capital, the fund that finds overlooked companies by understanding biases in venture capital. Paul has led several of Bullpen’s key investments including FanDuel, Namely, Ipsy, SpotHero, Classy, and Airmap. Prior to forming Bullpen, he was an active angel investor and personally invested in the first rounds of Zynga, TubeMogul, and uDemy. Before becoming an investor, Paul was the founder of four companies including Ahpah Software (a computer security firm acquired by InterTrust); Tribe (one of the world’s first social networks), and Aggregate Knowledge (a big data advertising attribution company acquired in 2014 by Nuestar).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Paul made his way into early stage investing from founding and exiting 4 companies? What was the data that made Paul excited for venture?
2.) First has Paul witnessed the Series A Crunch? What does the crunch mean for founders? How should they navigate it and approach burn rates? How does this affect the fundraising time horizon? How does this affect how much startups should raise?
3.) How does the crunch affect valuation? How does this affect investor expectations of startups pitching them? How does Paul respond to Mike Maples' statement, 'bridge rounds are often because startups have simply not hit the metrics for Series A'?
4.) What would Paul most like to see change in the venture ecosystem? Why does Paul not believe there are enough innovative funds? Why is it so hard for innovative funds to raise from traditional LPs?
5.) What would Paul most like to see change in the LP ecosystem? What was the affect of Accel's Facebook fund on the LP community? Why is that such a problem?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Paul’s Fave Blog: Matt Ocko
Paul’s Fave Book: The New Thought Police
Paul's Most Recent Investment: Cleanify
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Paul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow
Rick Marini is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor with over 45 investments in early stage startups. Some of Rick's investments include the likes of Snapchat, AngelList, Luxe and Nuzzel, just to name a few. Prior to his prolific angel investing career, Rick was the Founder & CEO of BranchOut - the largest professional network leveraging the social graph with more than 800 million profiles. BranchOut raised $49 million in funding from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Mayfield Fund and more. BranchOut was acquired in 2014 by One-Page. Previously, Rick was also the Founder & CEO of Talk.co. Talk.co was acquired in 2014 by Hearst Corporation. Prior to BranchOut and Talk.co, Rick was the Co-Founder, of Tickle. Tickle operated as a profitable company with almost $40 million of revenue. Tickle was acquired in 2004 by Monster Worldwide for $100 million.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Rick made his way into early stage investing from founding and exiting 4 companies?
2.) What is Rick's approach to pre-investment value add? Should investors hold it back and wait until the term sheet is signed? What have been some of Rick's biggest lessons from Naval @ AngelList?
3.) Naval Ravikant says, 'you need to make 30 investments before you know what you are doing'. Does Rick agree with this and can this be applied to the venture ecosystem?
4.) How does Rick approach the common angel problem of dilution? What are his thoughts on getting squeezed out by VCs and growth investors in later rounds?
5.) How does Rick measure his success and value as an angel? What are Rick's biggest concerns when viewing a prospective investment?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Rick’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily
Rick’s Fave Book: Hero With A Thousand Faces
Rick's Most Recent Investment: True Facet
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rick on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: VC / Founder Fit with 3 Things Founders & VCs Must Agree Pre-Investment & Why Having No Company Budgets Creates Internal Entrepreneurs with Jay Desai, Founder & CEO @ PatientPing
Jay Desai is Co-Founder and CEO of PatientPing, a company that connects health care providers across the country with real-time notifications to seamlessly coordinate patient care. They have raised funding from some of the best in the world including Google Ventures, First Round Capital and SV Angel. Prior to co-founding PatientPing, Jay worked at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation where he helped design and implement ACO, Bundled Payment, and other innovative payment models funded by the Affordable Care Act. Jay's previous experience includes Triad Isotopes, Parthenon Capital, and Lehman Brothers.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Jay came to found PatientPing? What was the a-ha moment for him?
2.) How does Jay assess the chemistry and alignment of VCs and their portfolio founders? How can founders detect if the VC is right for them?
3.) We always hear the importance of focus. How does Jay decide the single most important thing? Does this vary with stage and size? How does Jay look to balance such focus with a broader vision for the company?
4.) How important is internal entrepreneurialism for Jay? How does that play out in his management style? What boundaries need to be set? Does Jay agree with Suster, 'constraint enforces creativity'.
5.) Why does Jay have not internal budgets at PatientPing? What are the benefits? How does that affect the team's approach to spending, responsibility and accountability?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Jay’s Fave Blog: The Morning Consult
Jay’s Fave Book: Pastoralia
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jay on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Who Will Own The Data? Is There An Incumbency Advantage in AI? When Will Artificial Super Intelligence Come To The Forefront with Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Director @ Glasswing Ventures
Rudina Seseri is Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, Boston's own AI focussed fund. Prior to Glasswing, Rudina was a Partner at Fairhaven Capital, sering as lead investor and Director on the Boards of Celtra, CrowdTwist, Jibo, SocialFlow and Statisfy. Before Fairhaven, she was a Senior Manager in the Corporate Development Group at Microsoft where she was responsible for sourcing, structuring, and negotiating Microsoft's acquisitions and strategic investments. Rudina has served as Entrepreneur-In-Residence for Harvard Business School for 4 consecutive years and is an advisor for L’Oréal USA Women in Digital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Rudina made her way from Microsoft into VC with Fairhaven and then Glasswing?
2.) Why is now the time for an AI fund? What technological advances have happened to allow narrow artificial intelligence to come to the foreground in such a prominent way?
3.) Does the potential incumbency advantage in AI concern Rudina? How can founders look to mitigate this and gain access to substantial data sets?
4.) In terms of disruption cycles, where does Rudina believe we are in current cycles? How does this affect adoption cycles of technology? Why will this be the fastest ever?
5.) Predictions: How long till artificial super intelligence comes to the forefront? How long until mass adoption of driverless cars? Will this be a winner take all market?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Rudina’s Fave Blog: Paris 1919
Rudina’s Fave Book: Wait But Why
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rudina on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: Binary's Justin Caldbeck on Specialisation Being Key To Success In VC, The Biggest Problem In VC Today and Why The Future Is A Moneyless Barter Economy
1.) How Justin made his way into venture and came to found Binary Capital?
2.) Question from Binary LP, Judith Elsea: Has it been harder to win deals at Binary without the big and established fund names behind you? How has the conversation with founders changed?
3.) Why is Justin so excited by what he calls, 'vibrant moneyless commerce platforms? What has done previously in the space? Why is it different now?
4.) Why is Justin so bullish on the often over-hyped 'on-demand' economy? Which verticals provide the best opportunities to provide an on-demand experience without the need for local infrastructure?
5.) Friends and Family Round: Ryan Caldbeck @ CirleUp: What VCs does Ryan most admire and respect? 2.) What makes 1 VC a great board member and another not? Tiffany Zhong: What are your biggest misses? 2.) What are the biggest issues in VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Justin’s Fave Book: Grit by Angela Duckworth
Justin’s Most Recent Investment: Recharge
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Justin on Twitter here!Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc.
20VC: CEO Whisperer Jerry Colonna on How Investors Mimic Aggressive Behaviour To Cover Insecurity and Why Vulnerability is Key To Success In VC
1.) How did Jerry enter the world of VC and then make the transition to be the ultimate CEO/VC coach, aka, 'The CEO Whisperer'?
2.) What is Jerry's first step for anyone looking to self-evaluate in what Jerry calls, 'radical self-inquiry'?
3.) Once self-evaluated, how can one look to be their true self in a world that is not necessarily accepting of such vulnerability, compassion and emotion, for example, VC and startups?
4.) How does Jerry evaluate the current crop of VCs in terms of them being their inner self to the external world? Why is Jerry so optimistic?
5.) Questions from Brad Feld: 1.) What should VCs be spending more time on? 2.) If Jerry could give one piece of advice to VCs what would it be?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Jerry’s Fave Blog: Fred Wilson: AVC, Brad Feld: Feld Thoughts, The School of Life
Jerry’s Fave Book: When Things Fall Apart
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jerry on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
20VC: Why You Have To Be A Good Long Term Actor To Succeed in VC & How Owning An Esports Team Could Be A $Bn Outcome with Clinton Foy, General Partner @ Crosscut Ventures
1.) How did Clinton make the transition from COO at $Bn games company to being a VC in LA?
2.) Question from Crosscut LP: Judith Elsea: What were the biggest takeaways from operating that make Clinton a better VC? What are the biggest surprises about being a VC? What are the biggest adjustments Clinton have had to make to be a VC?
3.) How important does Clinton feel network building and relationships are to being a good investor? Is this a market of predators? Can the 'nice guys' sometimes win? How does Clinton look to relationship build in a natural and organic way?
4.) On the operations side, Clinton helped Esports company, The Immortals raise a seed round. How was that experience for Clinton? What were the challenges? Is investing in an e-sports team a venture investment with potential $Bn outcome?
5.) What is the reason for the mass rise in Esports and Esports investing? How does the rise of mobile affect this? What is the future of Esports vs traditional sports?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Clinton’s Fave Blog: Dean Takahashi: Venture Beat
Clinton’s Most Recent Investment: The Immortals
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Clinton on Twitter here!Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
20VC: Social Capital's Mamoon Hamid on Disrupting The Venture Model & Advancing Humanity By Solving The World's Toughest Problems
Mamoon Hamid is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Social Capital, a firm he co-founded in 2011 with the mission to transform society by using technology to solve the world’s hardest problems. Mamoon leads the firm’s private investing activities which focuses on building breakthrough healthcare, education, financial services, consumer and enterprise software companies. He currently sits on the board of companies that includes Slack, Intercom, Netskope and Greenhouse. Prior to starting Social Capital, Mamoon was a Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), where he led early stage investments in companies like Box and Yammer. Mamoon started his Silicon Valley career in 1997 at Xilinx where he spent six years in various engineering and marketing roles.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Mamoon made his way into VC and came to found Social with Chamath and Ted?
2.) How did Mamoon approach the team building aspect of Social? What did he look for in his partners and additional team members?
3.) According to Mamoon, what have been the inflection points in the incredible rising story of Social Capital? When has Mamoon's and the team's learnings really increased?
4.) What does Mamoon think of 'The Top 5 US Companies by Market Cap Being Tech Companies'? Why does he believe that there will be more from this cohort than any other cohort?
5.) What are Mamoon's expectations of growth, goals achieved at different stages of the company lifecycle etc? How does this differ according to the market he invests in?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Mamoon’s Fave Book: Blue Ocean Strategy
Mamoon’s Most Recent Investment: Front: The Invoice For Teams
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Mamoon on Twitter here!Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
The Twenty Minute VC is proudly sponsored by Luma, Luma is the world’s first ever Surround WiFi system that brings speed, security and control to the home network. And Unlike traditional routers, Luma comes in a pack of two or three sleek devices to place in different rooms in your home. Luma then creates a mesh network that work together to create an outrageously-fast, ultra-secure Surround WiFi network. Lastly, Luma’s app lets you easily see and control which devices, users and content are on your network. To buy your Luma, simply dead to getluma.com or amazon.com.
20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria!
1.) How did Ryan transition from being a restauranteur to founding Hootsuite?
2.) What were the big lessons Ryan took from his hard journey as a restauranteur? How has he applied those lessons to his role with Hootsuite today?
3.) How does Ryan look to create an environment of employee ownership and internal entrepreneurs? What has been successful? What has not?
4.) Meetings suck. What does Ryan do to optimise the meeting for simple enjoyment and productivity?
5.) How was the fundraising process for Ryan? What does he think he did well and what would he like to improve on for the next rounds? How was fundraising in 200*? Is now a good time to be raising?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Ryan’s Fave Blog: Media Redefined
Ryan’s Fave Book: The Long Walk
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: Why You Don't Have To Have Operational Experience To Be A Good VC, Why There Is No Optimal Stage To Invest & Why VCs Should Focus on Reputation Ahead of Cash On Cash Returns with Lyon Wong, General Partner @ Spectrum 28
1.) How did Lyon come to be GP of Spectrum 28 with their recent $170m fund?
2.) Why does Lyon believe that you do not have to have operational experience to be a good investor? What are the core components to beeing a good investor and value add investor?
3.) Why does Lyon believe that there is no optimal stage to invest? How does he evaluate the efficiency curve and positioning on it? How does this affect his thesis?
4.) Why does Lyon believe that funds must focus on reputation instead of cash on cash? What is the most effective and scalable way to build a reputation in today's venture ecosystem?
5.) How does Lyon evaluate team building at Spectrum 28? What did he look for in potential partners? How does he look to implement generational transition into the fund?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Lyon’s Fave Blog: Medium, Quora
Lyon’s Fave Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Lyon’s Most Recent Investment: PatientBank
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Lyon on Twitter here!Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: More $ Raised This Year Than The Past 15, War Chests Being Built & Decline In First Time Funds: So What The Heck Is Happening In Venture with Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures
Beezer Clarkson is Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures where she leads Sapphire’s investments in venture funds domestically and internationally. Prior to joining Sapphire, Beezer managed day-to-day operations @ DFJ’s Global Network, which had $7 billion under management across 16 venture funds worldwide. She has also spent time at Omidyar Network created by Ebay founder, Pierre Omdiyar, Hewlett Packard and Morgan Stanley. Beezer also runs the incredible openlp.com which is really opening up the world of LPs and if you have not checked that out, it really is a must!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Beezer make her way into the world of limited partners?
2.) $27bn was raised by 137 funds in Q1 + Q2 of 2016, what does this mean for the theory that venture is a game of the have's and have nots? How does this compare to previous years?
3.) How is the constriction in capital affecting first-time funds? How many were raised so far this year? What were the common characteristics in those that were successful?
4.) How is the Series A market performing this year? Does the data agree with the common thesis of the rise of the late stage 'private IPO'? Does this lack of liquidity concern Beezer?
5.) Why is Beezer so bullish on the future ahead for tech? How does Beezer think Brexit will affect the wider market?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Beezer’s Most Recent Investment: SaaStr Fund
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Beezer on Twitter here!Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: Why Adaptability Is Key To Fundraising, Why Supply Is Always The First Priority In Marketplaces & Why Sometimes You Have To Hire Fast & Fire Fast with Nav Athwal, Founder & CEO @ RealtyShares
Nav Athwal is the Founder & CEO @ RealtyShares, a curated marketplace connecting real estate developers and operators with investors across the country. Realtyshares recently announced an incredible $200m funded deals through the platform and have raised from some of the world's best investors including Union Square Ventures, General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures. Before starting RealtyShares, Nav was a real estate and land use attorney at San Francisco based law firm Farella Braun & Martel, LLP.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nav made his way into startups and came to found RealtyShares?
2.) As a marketplace founder, where did Nav start: supply or demand? Why does Nav think marketplace founders should always focus on supply first?
3.)How did Nav look to relationship build and network with the mentors that he wanted to have help him? What would Nav suggest to those looking to gain great mentors?
4.)How was the fundraising process for Nav with USV, Menlo and General Catalyst? What have been his big lessons from his 3 rounds of fundraising??
5.) What should founders optimize for in the fundraising process? Should founders look to instil a sense of realism with regards to valuation or let it be largely inflated?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nav’ Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Nav’ Fave Blog or Newsletter: Fred Wilson: AVC, Mark Suster: Both Sides of The Table
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nav on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world.
20VC: Greenfield Opportunities For Machine Learning, Why Massive Corporates Finally See It's Potential & Why VC's Investment Decision Making Process Needs To Change with James Cham, Partner @ Bloomberg Beta
James Cham is a Partner @ Bloomberg Beta and one the pre-eminent thinkers in the machine learning space. Prior to Bloomberg, James was a Principal @ Trinity Ventures and before Trinity, James was a VP at Bessemer Venture Partners. At Bessemer, James was a Board Member of CrowdFlower and Open Candy. However, James has not always been a VC as he was originally a programmer receiving his degree in Computer Science from Harvard.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How James made his way into the wonderful world of VC from being a programmer?
2.) How are organisations and corporations thinking about machine learning? How are they looking to incorporate it into their current infrastructure?
3.) Kieran Snyder @ Textio said, ‘the writing is on the wall for enterprise to embrace machine learning’. What are James' thoughts and how does the business model vary from licensed and SaaS?
4.) How is building machine learning models different from software development? On the topic of software development, how does James perceive the productivity differences between software developers?
5.) Moving to VC and how does James approach the investment decision making process as a VC? How does James relationship to religion intertwine with his investment career?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
James’ Fave Book: Man Who Lied To His Laptop
James’ Fave Blog or Newsletter: Rob May, Jack Clark, Tyler Cowan
James’ Most Recent Investment: Netlify
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and James on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world.
20VC: Investing Lessons From Fred Wilson & Brad Feld and Why Fundraising Is An Art & Not Everyone Can Be An Artist with Howard Lindzon Founder @ Stocktwits & Managing Partner @ Social Leverage
Howard Lindzon is the Managing Partner @ Social Leverage, where he has made investments in the likes of Angellist, Datafox, previous guest Robinhood, Rent.com (acq by eBay for $415m) and many more incredible companies. Howard is also the Founder of StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors, named one of the ten most innovative companies on the web. He is also an author with multiple published titles that can be found here. If that was not enough, he also continues to manage the hedge fund he started in 1998. A man of many hats for sure!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howard made his way into the world of hedge funds, tech and now VC with Social Leverage?
2.) Why is trend following a good thing to do when starting investing? How can you trend follow and still invest with conviction?
3.) Why Howard believes people need to lose money to learn about the market and ecosystem What have been his learnings from missing Twitter and Zynga?
4.) Who Howard believes that fundraising is an art and not everyone can be taught it? What are the core elements that lead to a successful fundraise?
5.) What was Howard's biggest lesson from investing alongside Fred Wilson and Brad Feld? How did that alter his approach to price and ownership?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howard’s Fave Book: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Howard’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Fred Wilson, Abnormal Returns, Josh Brown: The Reformed Broker
Howard’s Most Recent Investment: Civic
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Howard on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world.
20VC: How You Can Learn To Be A Great Business Leader & Why All Successful Business Must Be Loved or Needed with Moisey Uretsky, Founder @ Digital Ocean
Moisey Uretsky is the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer @ Digital Ocean, the second largest and fastest growing cloud computing platform, with more than 700,000 developers having deployed more than 20 million cloud servers. The company has raised $123 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Access Industries, IA Ventures, CrunchFund, and Techstars. As for Moisey, before founding DigitalOcean, he studied Mathematics at NYU and launched CorreGroup, a big data startup that provided valuable analytics to billion-dollar hedge fund firms in New York City.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Moisey came to found the 2nd largest cloud computing platform with Digital Ocean?
2.) Moisey has previously said: 'we did everything wrong for a decade'. What were the biggest mistakes Moisey made and how did he look to rectify them and learn from them?
3.) Does Moisey believe that you can learn to be a great business leader? Is it inherent or if not, what are the steps required to increase your chances?
4.) Moisey has previously said: 'businesses that succeed are either needed or loved'. What does he mean by this? What category does Digital Ocean fall into? How does that affect his management style and thought process?
5.) Question From Ari @ Techstars: How do Moisey and Digital Ocean fundamentally scale love? What are the inherent challenges of building this type of culture? How does the theme of love play out in the hiring and the on boarding process?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Moisey’s Fave Book: Innovator's Dilemma
Moisey’s Fave Blog: Tom Tunguz
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Moisey on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
I’d like to thank Wealthfront for sponsoring today’s podcast. Wealthfront are financial advisors that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars. Wealthfront’s modern financial services helps tailor plans specifically for you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront has low fees and no trading commissions… It’s financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online. And if you sign up using my URL, you’ll get your first $15,000 managed for free. Go to Wealthfront.com/20vc.
20VC: Why Many VCs Fail To Raise, Why LP Compensation Is A Massive Problem & Why Fund of Funds Will Become More Prominent with Lindel Eakman, Managing Director @ Foundry Group
Lindel Eakman is a Managing Director @ Foundry Group and is a nationally recognized leader in the LP community having successfully managed the private investment program for the combined $35 billion pool of capital managed by the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO). There he was responsible for overseeing a portfolio of private equity fund managers which represented approximately 25 percent of endowment assets. Prior to UTIMCO, Lindel worked for KPMG in the mergers & acquisitions tax practice where he worked with many fund managers across due diligence processes and private investment partnership activities. Check out Lindel's Partner @ Foundry, Brad Feld, on the show here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Lindel made his way into the weird and wonderful world of LPs and then Foundry? What is the origin story behind is first fund investment, Union Square Ventures?
2.) Question from Michael Kim @ Cendana: How is Lindel approaching portfolio construction for Foundry Next? What combination of GP portfolio & direct exposure diversifies the portfolio while retaining upside through individual deal performance?
3.) With the direct co-investment platform how does Lindel look to mitigate the negative signalling that can occur with opportunity funds? Does Lindel agree with Chris Douvos in stating this could lead to the 'hybridisation of GP and LP'?
4.) Where do most prospective fund managers fail when pitching to LPs? What does Lindel look for in a risk strategy for a potential fund investment?
5.) What are the biggest problems with the LP community today? What would Lindel like to see change? What do the financial compensation plans look like for LPs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Lindel’s Fave Book: The Creature from Jekyll Island, Daemon
Lindel's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Reiley Brennan: Future of Transportation, Fred Wilson, Benedict Evans
Lindel’s Most Recent Investment: Resolute Ventures
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Lindel on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
I’d like to thank Wealthfront for sponsoring today’s podcast. Wealthfront are financial advisors that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars. Wealthfront’s modern financial services helps tailor plans specifically for you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront has low fees and no trading commissions… It’s financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online. And if you sign up using my URL, you’ll get your first $15,000 managed for free. Go to Wealthfront.com/20vc.
20VC: Floodgate's Mike Maples on What Makes Category Kings, What Most Venture Funds Do Wrong When Hiring & 'The Dance Of Product Market Fit'
Mike Maples is a Founding Partner @ Floodgate, one of the leading early-stage venture funds in the valley. Mike has made investments in the likes of Twitter, Twitch.tv, Weebly, Chegg, Bazaarvoice, Okta, and Demandforce. As a result, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and was also named one of "8 Rising Stars" by FORTUNE Magazine. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (acquired by IBM) and Motive (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.)
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike made his way into VC and came to found Floodgate?
2.) How did the investment decision-making process change for Mike with the institutionalisation and fiduciary responsibility of an LP backed fund?
3.) How does Mike approach team building with Floodgate? What does he look for in his partners? What do most funds do wrong when hiring and expanding their team?
4.) Mike has a very different way of reading product and the associated market. What does Mike mean by saying the ‘dance of product market fit’? Who leads what? How do they work together? What are the reasons startups do not achieve PMF?
5.) How does Mike assess the aspect of category creation? What are the fundamentals required to be a category king? What characteristics do category kings have?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Mike’s Fave Book: The Top 5 Regrets of The Dying
Mike’s Most Recent Investment: Dispatcher
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
I’d like to thank Wealthfront for sponsoring today’s podcast. Wealthfront are financial advisors that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars. Wealthfront’s modern financial services helps tailor plans specifically for you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront has low fees and no trading commissions… It’s financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online. And if you sign up using my URL, you’ll get your first $15,000 managed for free. Go to Wealthfront.com/20vc.
20VC: What Makes A Great marketplace Founder, The Key Metrics Marketplace Success Is Centred On & 3 Ways To Prove To Investors You Are A Domain Expert with Karthik Sridharan, Founder & CEO @ Kinnek
Karthik Sridharan is the Founder & CEO @ Kinnek, the platform which empowers small business owners to take control of their purchasing operations. Kinnek have been crushing it lately and have raised funding from some of today’s leading investors including Matrix, Thrive, Version One, Naval Ravikant and many more incredible names. As for Karthik, prior to Kinnek he was the lead architect of research systems at the hedge fund, AQR and before that spent time at the likes of JP Morgan and Merril Lynch.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Karthik made the transition from hedge funds to founding Kinnek?
2.) How does Karthik view market networks as opposed to marketplaces? What are the differences and where would he position Kinnek?
3.) Is GMV the sole metric that marketplace founders should focus on? How does GMV affect Karthik's few on take rate, transaction size and frequency? What other metrics should marketplace founders be measuring themselves against?
4.) How does Karthik view the competitive landscape with the likes of Alibaba in the space? Is expansion into Asia part of upcoming plans for Kinnek? How will Karthik approach that?
5.) Kinnek has raised funding from the likes of Thrive, Matrix and Version One. How did Karthik find the fundraising process? What did he do well and what would he improve on for the C round?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Karthik’s Fave Book: The Code Book by Simon Singh
Karthik’s Fave Blog: On Startups, Tom Tunguz
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: The Secret To Building Pattern Recognition, Why MBA Does Not Always Equal Great Founder & What Are The Right Reasons To Start A Company With Hardi Meybaum, General Partner @ Matrix Partners
Hardi Meybaum is a General Partner @ Matrix Partners and similar to Josh Hardi is a natural born entrepreneur. Prior to becoming a VC Hardi was a Founder of GrabCAD where he built the company into the world’s leading cloud-based collaboration platform for engineering teams to manage, share, and view CAD files. He sold GrabCAD to Stratasys in 2014 for a reported 100m dollars, and continued to lead GrabCAD for the next year.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hardi made the transition from founding GrabCAD to becoming a General Partner @ Matrix?
2.) When times were really hard for Hardi in making the move to the US, what were the big elements that drive him to continue? What stopped him from giving up?
3.) What does Hardi's time allocation split look like? How does he look to optimise this?
4.) How much of a role has David Skok played in Hardi's progression? What are the key takeaways from the mentorship?
5.) What are the right reasons to start a company? How does Hardi assess founder product fit?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hardi’s Fave Book: Deep Work: Rules For Focussed Success
Hardi’s Fave Blog: David Skok: For Entrepreneurs
Hardi’s Most Recent Investment: SketchDeck
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hardi on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial.
This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: Why The Best CEO's Are The Best Capital Allocators, How You Can Build A Business In A Space You Are Not Passionate About & When Is The Right Time To Put The Pedal To The Metal with Josh Hannah, General Partner @ Matrix Ventures
Josh Hannah is a General Partner @ Matrix Partners where he has led investments in the likes of Canva, Quora and Huddle just to name a few. However, Josh really is an innate entrepreneur himself having co-founded Betfair in 1999, the worlds first online sports marketplace which is now publicly traded on London Stock Exchange and processes more than $50bn in transactions per year. Following Betfair, Josh bought and turned around eHow where he increased traffic and revenue 30 x before selling the company to Demand Media. Josh has also made some stellar angel investments in the likes of Angellist, HotelTonight and Minted.com.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Josh made the transition from founding Betfair and turning around eHow to becoming a General Partner @ Matrix?
2.) Josh took large amounts of VC funding with Betfair and entirely bootstrapped his 2nd business, eHow. How did the two experiences differ and how can founders determine whether to raise VC funding or bootstrap it themselves?
3.) Why does Josh believe capital allocation has gotten worse from founders over time? How does this affect the role of VCs as board members?
4.) Why does Josh believe that people are wrong to say ideas are worthless and it is all about execution? How does Josh approach the process of idea generation? How can this be optimised?
5.) Why does Josh believe, contra to conventional wisdom, that one can build a strong business in a space that you are not passionate about? What are the potential pitfalls that can be avoided?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Josh’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir By The Creator of Nike, The Rise Of The Robots
Josh’s Fave Blog: Benedict Evans
Josh’s Most Recent Investment: Kinnek (On The Show On Friday!
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: Why The Evolution of Digital Media Presents A Multi $Bn Opportunity with Brit Morin, Founder & CEO @ Brit + Co
Brit Morin is the Founder & CEO @ Brit + Co the online media and e-commerce platform that provides tools to teach, inspire, and enable creativity among women and girls. They have raised funding from some of the world's best investors including Index, General Catalyst, Intel Capital, Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau just to name a few. As for Brit, prior to Brit + Co, Brit worked at Google in product management and before that with Apple on iTunes.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brit came to found Brit + Co?
2.) How have we seen the traditional media landscape change over the last few years with the rise of digital? Does Brit agree with Marc Andreesen's assertion that print journalism is converging in quality and technique with blogs and Wikipedia?
3.) How does Brit view the competitive landscape for digital media? Is this an M&A by larger traditional media companies, will smaller startup media companies merge to form modern media powerhouses?
4.) How does Brit view the importance of niche communities? What does it take to foster and grow an organic niche community?
5.) Brit + Co is backed by some of the best funds in the world so what was Brit's approach to fundraising? How did Brit see it alter and evolve with the differing funding rounds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brit’s Fave Blog: The Information
Brit’s Fave Book: The Giver
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brit on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.comand also atcooleygo.com.
20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures
Dave Morin is Founder & Partner at Slow Ventures, the leading valley venture fund with investments in the likes of Slack, Pinterest, Evernote, NextDoor, Postmates just to name a few. Prior to Slow, Dave was the Co-Founder and CEO of Path, the social network that serves tens of millions of people every day. Path was acquired by Kakao in 2015. If that was not enough, he also spent several years at Facebook where he led Facebook Platform and Connect during periods of rapid innovation and growth. Today, he serves on the Board of Directors of Eventbrite, Dwell, and Hinge.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Dave made the transition from Facebook and Path to founding Slow Ventures?
2.) As a new entrant to VC, how does Dave look to develop pattern recognition with founders and ideas? What is the most challenging element?
3.) Why did Dave, Sam and Kevin decide to institutionalise Slow for the 'club' to the structured fund that it is today? How did that change their investment decision making process?
4.) What role does network play in the value and operations of Slow? How do they look to increase the network effect to further provide value to their companies?
5.) What role does valuation and ownership play for Dave when investing? How does that change with the larger cheques?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dave’s Fave Book: The Alchemist
Dave’s Fave Blog: The Information
Dave’s Most Recent Investment: Perlstein Lab
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dave on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also atcooleygo.com.
20VC: The 3 Things LPs Want To See From VCs & Why The Table Stakes For VCs Is Higher Than Ever with Judith Elsea, Co-Founder @ Weathergage Capital
Judith Elsea is a Co-Founder @ Weathergage Capital, one of the world's leading fund of funds with over $950m AUM. Prior to Wealthergage, Judith was Chief Investment Officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation from 1993 to 2001. As CIO, she directed a $2 billion globally diversified investment portfolio, committing over $600 million to US early stage venture funds and other private equity partnerships. She was also instrumental in the creation and implementation of the Kauffman Fellows Program, a global apprenticeship program designed to train the next generation of venture capitalists.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Judith made her way into the world of LPs and what makes her think venture is such an attractive asset class?
2.) What gets Judith really excited when viewing prospective fund managers for potential investments? What differentiators does Judith look for?
3.) What are the most common reasons Judith finds for her rejecting fund managers for investment? What are they not doing and how can they optimise this?
4.) To what extent do LPs have a commitment to invest in further funds having invested in one fund? Are there any situations where this changes?
5.) What are the similarities and differences between fundraising for LPs vs fundraising for startups? How should the different elements be approached?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Judith’s Fave Book: Patrick O'Brian
Judith’s Fave Blog: The Twenty Minute VC, a16z, Founder Collective
Judith’s Most Recent Investment: Felicis Ventures
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Judith on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also atcooleygo.com.
20VC: Intercom's Eoghan McCabe on What Makes A Truly Great CEO & What Founders Should Look For In Their Investors
Eoghan McCabe is the CEO and co-founder of Intercom. The customer communications platform that has taken the SaaS world by storm in the last few years with 116m in VC funding from truly some of the world’s best including Bessemer, Social Capital and Index Ventures. Prior to Intercom, he founded Contrast, an award-winning software design consultancy, and co-founded Exceptional, a developer tool startup acquired in 2011 and now a part of Rackspace.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eoghan came to found Intercom?
2.) Question From Andy McLoughlin: What were the biggest lessons from your previous startups?
3.) How did Eoghan find the early fundraising process? How did he come to meet his angel investors? How did he get them to look beyond the product and invest in him?
4.) Eoghan raised his Series B just 6 months after his Series A. Why was this so quick? How did he select his investors?
5.) What separates good from truly great CEOs? How has Eoghan seen his own management style changed over the Intercom journey?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Eoghan’s Fave Blog: SaaStr, The Intercom Blog
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eoghan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.comand also atcooleygo.com.
20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC
Michael Skok is a Founding Partner @ Underscore VC. Michael started his first software business as a teenager, spent 21 years as an entrepreneur where he founded and recruited teams that attracted over $100m in private equity for investments in multiple software companies. Over the last 13 years as a venture investor. Along the way, he also mentored and taught for 4 years at Harvard as an EIR at Harvard Business School, and spent a year interviewing entrepreneurs on a “listening tour” before founding _Underscore.VC. Michael also started the most incredible education series, 'Startup Secrets', in collaboration with Harvard iLab, check it out here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Michael made his way into the wonderful world of VC with Underscore?
2.) From Michael's listening tour, what did he discover that entrepreneurs wanted in an investor?
3.) How did Michael present the innovative model of Underscore to prospective LPs? What was their response? What did Michael look for in the LPs he selected?
4.) What does Michael mean when he says you have to create minimum viable segments?
5.) How does Michael view market creation? What his framework for this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Michael’s Fave Book: Daemon
Michael's Fave Blog: Mattermark
Michael’s Most Recent Investment: Mautic
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michael on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also atcooleygo.com.
20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Index Ventures where he has made investments in the likes of Slack, Intercom, Dropbox and Optimizely. Prior to joining Index, Ilya was the head of product at Dropbox. As one of Dropbox’s first 75 employees, he helped build and run the company’s business and corporate development functions, before taking on a product leadership role and building out Dropbox, Dropbox for Business and the developer platform. Before Dropbox, he was a principal at Khosla Ventures and the Director of Technology at the solar cell startup Solar Junction.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ilya made his transition from Dropbox to return to the world of VC with Index?
2.) Does Ilya agree that to scale successfully you have to reinvent yourself every 6 months? Why does Ilya believe you must infuse an element of delight into the people side of the business? How can this be done effectively?
3.) How did Ilya and the Dropbox team look to effectively manage and scale the employee on boarding process with the growth of the company?
4.) Question from Lars @ Balderton: Does Ilya believe his extensive operational background allows him to get into deals he would otherwise not have been able to win?
5.) Question from Lars: Does Ilya believe an excess of capital is driving prices in the valley excessively high? Will we continue to see this in the coming years?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ilya’s Fave Book: Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master & Margarita
Ilya’s Most Recent Investment: Slack, Culture Amp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ilya on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also atcooleygo.com.
20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts
Nick Weaver is the Founder & CEO @ Eero. The company that makes your wifi hyper fast, super simple and brilliantly efficient. Prior to founding Eero, Nick was himself a VC at Menlo Ventures where he worked with companies like Uber, Betterment, Periscope and Dropcam. Before becoming a VC, Nick co-founded StartX, the community for the best Stanford entrepreneurs providing them with the required resources to build the next generation of leading companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nick made the move from VC with Menlo to Founder and CEO @ Eero?
2.) How can founders identify nascent and attractive markets that are ripe for disruption?
3.) How did Nick approach the pricing mechanism with Eero? Why do hardware startups need to have a greater margin than software startups?
4.) Why did Nick raise 2 rounds of funding before the product launched? Why did Nick decide he wanted to own all the parts of the production chain with Eero?
5.) How does Nick view the competitive landscape for such products? How does he view large incumbents like Netgear, compared to smaller startups like Luma?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nick’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Term Sheet: Dan Primack
Nick’s Fave Book: Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nick on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Do VC's Really Hustle Enough? The Takeaways From Watching Twitter Scale From 30 to 2,500 & Why Chris Sacca Is Like Yoda with Ryan Sarver, Partner @ Redpoint
Ryan Sarver is a Partner @ Redpoint where he focuses on early stage consumer startups. He sits on the board at Luxe, where he led the seed and A rounds, and was an early investor in Memoir. Prior to joining Redpoint, Ryan was a director at Twitter, where he oversaw the Twitter Platform and its developer ecosystem. Before Twitter, Ryan was director of consumer products at Skyhook Wireless, which pioneered the Wi-Fi and cellular tower triangulation technology incorporated in the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and MacBook.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made his move into the world of VC?
2.) What were Ryan's biggest takeaways from seeing Twitter scale from 30 to 2,500? How does he apply those to his formative days learning the investing game?
3.) Coming from the hustle of operation, do VCs have enough hustle and grit in Ryan's opinion?
4.) What really is an EIR program? Why does Redpoint have it? What are the fundamental benefits? How do investors collaborate and work with EIR’s?
5.) Ryan has said before that AI is the next transformational platform. What does AI as a platform look like to Ryan? How does hardware and sensors integrate with this thesis? Why is it easier than ever to build these smart devices?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ryan’s Fave Book: Sapiens
Ryan’s Most Recent Investment: Luxe
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Redpoint's Tom Tunguz on Winning with Data: How To Gain A Competitive Advantage & Dominate Markets with Data and 5 Steps To Create A Data Driven Company
Tom Tunguz is a Partner @ Redpoint Ventures, where he has invested in the likes of Axial, Dremio, Expensify, Electric Imp, Looker, and ThredUP. Tomasz is also the co-author of Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future, which explores the cultural changes big data brings to business, and shows you how to adapt your organization to leverage data to maximum effect. Before joining Redpoint, Tomasz was the product manager for Google’s AdSense social-media products and AdSense internationalization.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) When did Tom perceive the true power of data for the first time?
2.) What is the biggest difference between a company that is data driven and one that is not? What are the inherent benefits and how can non data driven businesses become data driven?
3.) What are the best data driven teams doing to operationalise their data today?
4.) Adam Grant: 8% of job interviews are productive. So what structure can management use to ensure higher efficiency in the hiring process?
5.) What are the complexities and skills required for strong data analysis in today's environment?
6.) Data often leads to over confidence in decision making, how do you prevent illusion bias once data has been obtained?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tom’s Most Recent Investment: Dremio
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Tom on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: Giphy's Adam Leibsohn on From Being Homeless To Founding a Multi Hundred Million Dollar Startup & The Challenges of Creating One of The World's Largest Search Engine
Adam Leibsohn is the Founder and COO @ Giphy, the company that brings you joy and laughter through gifs. Earlier this year, Giphy raised a phenomenal $55m Series C financing from the likes of General Catalyst, Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed and Betaworks. As for Adam he is one of the coolest and most genuine founders I have ever interviewed and is so committed to the startup cause that at one point he went without a home to pay for the startup dream!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam went from being homeless to the Founder of Giphy?
2.) What were the biggest lessons Adam learnt from his failed startup? When should founders know when is the right time to stop?
3.) Why gifs and why now? What has allowed for the spectacular rise of gifs?
4.) How has Adam created such a unique culture at Giphy? What have been his key learnings? What has worked, what has not worked?
5.) Giphy is now a cultural icon but how does Adam look to turn that into a massive globally profit making business?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adam’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: The Information, Dealbook
Adam’s Fave Book: East of Eden
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adam on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures
Brett DeMarrais is a Partner @ Ludlow Ventures, who have investments in the likes of ProductHunt, Sprig, AngelList and uBeam. Prior to joining Ludlow, Brett founded Wedit, a crowd sourced wedding video platform that reduced the cost of wedding videos and made them social. Within the first year of launching the company Wedit had won the top industry awards for customer satisfaction (Brides Choice 2012 and Best of The Knot 2012). Previously, Brett worked at Out of the Blue Entertainment.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brett made his move into VC and came to be a partner @ Ludlow?
2.) What do most VCs mean they say 'founder friendly'? How does Brett and Ludlow approach the popularised saying?
3.) How does Brett balance between being an investor and advisor to a founder and then being their friend and confidante?
4.) How does Brett look to balance the fiduciary responsibilities to his LPs when appreciating that the needs of the founder come before the needs of the company?
5.) Brett has previously said, 'car ownership will be a thing of the past'. Why does Brett think this and what does this mean for the car industry as a whole?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brett’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Both Sides Of The Table, Dan Primack: Term Sheet
Brett’s Fave Book: Ready Player One
Brett’s Most Recent Investment: Gather
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brett on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A
Ben Lerer is a Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures and co-founder & CEO of Thrillist Media Group. Ben was among Ernst & Young’s 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winners, Forbes list of “Most Powerful CEOs Under 40”, ” Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top 5 Entrepreneurs of the Year,” and Silicon Alley Insider’s “100 Coolest People in Tech”. Ben is also an active mentor for NYC Venture Fellows, TechStars and E[nstitute].
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ben came to found Thrillist and then join the founding team at Lerer Hippeau?
2.) How did Ben's mentality shift from investing angel money to the fiduciary responsibility of a fund?
3.) How does Ben view FOMO? How does he look to negate and contol his emotions when investing?
4.) How has Ben seen his personal pattern recognition change over time? How does Ben use data to further improve his ability of pattern recognition?
5.) Why have we seen the rise of direct to consumer businesses? Is it easier to build a brand today than in previous years? Will we see continued M&A in the retail world with the likes of Jet.co and Dollar Shave Club?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ben’s Fave Book: The Goldfinch
Ben’s Most Recent Investment: Everytable
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.
20VC: How To Win The Strategic Process Of Fundraising and Optimising Co-Founder Relationships and Break Ups with Kathryn Minshew, Founder & CEO @ The Muse
Kathryn Minshew is the Founder & CEO @ The Muse, named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media and Inc.’s 15 Women to Watch in Tech. Before founding The Muse, Kathryn worked on vaccines in Rwanda and Malawi with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and was previously at McKinsey. Kathryn has spoken at MIT and Harvard, appeared on The TODAY Show and CNN, and contributes on career and entrepreneurship to the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kathryn came to be Founder of The Muse following charity work in Rwanda?
2.) Question from Adam Quinton (investor): What is it about Kathryn and Alex's relationship that works so well? How do they deal with founder disputes?
3.) Prior to The Muse, Alex and Kathryn founded another business with 2 other founders. What did they learn from the breakup and how have they applied to The Muse?
4.) How has Kathryn managed to maintain startup ownership culture as the team has grown to over 100 people ?
5.) The Muse has now raised large Series A & B rounds. What were the lessons Kathryn learnt along the way and what would she do differently for the C round?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kathryn’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: The Atlantic, The New York Times
Kathryn’s Fave Book: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kathryn on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.Did you know companies that regularly communicate with stakeholders regularly are 200% more likely to get follow on funding? Visible.vc is the leader in stakeholder communication & engagement powering updates & reports for over 1,600 companies including customers Amazon and Skyscanner. They integrate with apps you already use to run your business like Google Sheets, Quickbooks, Xero, Salesforce, Stripe and more.
Listeners make sure to check out visible.vc/20 to get an exclusive deal just for you and schedule a call with your own data analyst.
20VC: Why Great Founders Are Both Visionary & Stubborn, The Investment Mindset Shift From Angel To VC & How To React When The 'S*** Hits The Fan?' with Jesse Middleton, General Partner @ Flybridge Capital Partners
Jesse Middleton is a General Partner @ Flybridge Capital Partners. Prior to joining Flybridge, Jesse was an early executive at WeWork, one of the fastest growing and most valuable startups in history. He co-founded WeWork Labs in 2011, and ran WeWork X, M&A, startup investments, business and digital product development as well as inside sales during his five-year tenure at the company. Prior to WeWork, Jesse was the co-founder and CEO of Backstory, a venture backed startup. Jesse also has experience as a prolific angel investor having invested in the like of Fitmob (acq by ClassPass) YourTrove acq by LiveNation and inDinero, who you might remember we had Jessica Mah, Founder @ inDinero on the show.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jesse made the transition from operator with WeWork to General Partner @ Flybridge?
2.) At what stage does founder vision transition to become stubbornness? How does Jesse approach the situation of telling a founder when it is not working?
3.) How does Jesse's investment mindset shift from making the move from angel to VC with fiduciary responsibility?
4.) How does Jesse look to develop pattern recognition as a new entrant to VC? How important a role does mentorship play for Jesse?
5.) What are the characteristics Jesse looks for in a founder that suggest an innate problem solver? How does Jesse deal with problems when the 'shit hits the fan?'
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jesse’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Purple, The Skimm
Jesse’s Fave Book: Leadership & The Challenge of Self Deception
Jesse’s Most Recent Investment: Squire
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jesse on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Science Inc's Peter Pham on Why The Battle Between Entrepreneurs & VCs Is Unfair, How To Even The Playing Field & How To Tell When A VC Really Is Interested
Peter Pham is a Co-Founder at Science, the startup studio that helps incubate companies co-building them alongside CEO's, with recent companies like Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever for $1B) and leading marketplace, DogVacay. More recently Science created created one of the top 100 iOS Apps called Wishbone. Peter has also helped his portfolio raise over $350M in that time. Previously as an operator, he led Photobucket to its $300M acquisition by Fox Interactive Media as well as CEO of BillShrink (acquired by MasterCard.)
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Peter made the transition from operator to company builder with Science?
2.) How does Peter approach the fundraising process itself? How does he instruct founders about the right ways to approach and enter the fundraising game?
3.) How can entrepreneurs determine whether a VC is saying not to them? What are the signs that an investor is genuinely interested?
4.) With 3,000 no's from investors, how does that affect Peter's mentality? How does he avoid the negativity surrounding a VC saying no?
5.) What are Peter's major learnings on how companies scale effectively today? How important are network effects to this scaling?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Peter’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Recode
Peter’s Fave Book: How To Win Friends & Influence People
Peter's Most Recent Investment: Handstand App
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Peter on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.20VC: Maximising Engagement and Retention on Mobile & Why There Should Always Be Availability To A Free Product with Sean Brecker, CEO @ Headspace
Sean Brecker is the CEO @ Headspace where he is the driving force behind all financial and commercial matters including overseeing the company's growth of it's product line which now has over 8m downloads. Sean was also instrumental in attaining the first institutional round of financing which included investment from the likes of LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner, Jim Breyer, Jessica Alba and Jared Leto, just to name a few. Prior to Headspace, Sean spent 15 years in banking with the likes of JP Morgan, Lehmann Brothers and Citigroup.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sean made the move from banking to CEO of meditation service, Headspace?
2.) Meditation can be viewed with some hippy stereotypes, how does Sean look to optimise the onboarding for new users and incorporate elements of education?
3.) How does Sean implement a strategy of habit forming within the users? In the words of Nir Eyal, how do we get them ‘hooked’? How long on average does it take for an action to be completed before it becomes a habit?
4.) How does Sean try and optimise the transition from free to paid user with Headspace? How does Sean try and remove as much friction as possible in the process?
5.) How has Sean seen the growth of the health and wellness space over the last few years? We obviously have the likes of Calm, is this market a winner takes all and how does Sean approach market competition at Headspace?
6.) How was the fundraising process for Sean? How did he come to meet investors like Jeff Weiner, Jim Breyer, Jessica Alba and Jared Leto?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sean’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: The Information, Recode
Sean’s Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things, A Man In Full
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sean on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WeAreLATech is the number one resource uniting the LA startup community. Immediately integrate into the explosive LA tech scene by visiting WeAreLATech.com/VC. WeAreLATech offers a unique combination of curated offline experiences, the #1 LA Tech podcast called “WeAreLATech”, and the only mobile app that keeps you in the know with a full calendar of events. Make sure go to WeAreLATech.com/VC to explore and learn all about everything LA tech and silicon beach. You’ll also get access to a private LA tech immersion call exclusively for 20 Minute VC listeners.Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Why Raising A Fund Is Like Raising A $25m Seed Round with No Product & Why Not All LP Money Is Equal with Chad Byers, General Partner @ Susa Ventures
Chad Byers is a General Partner @ Susa Ventures and very exciting news, Susa last week announced the raise of Susa II, a new $50m fund, testament to the quality of fund 1 which included the likes of former guests Lyst, RobinHood, LendUp and many more incredible companies. As for Chad, he focuses on investments in enterprise software, fintech, and healthcare. Prior to Susa, Chad spent time in various marketing and product management roles. As well as being a prolific angel investor in over 30+ companies.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Chad made the transition from angel investor to General Partner @ Susa?
2.) How was the fundraise with Susa 1? How was the fundraise for Susa II? How did the funding rounds change for each fund?
3.) How does Chad assess LP fit? Is all LP money not equal? What does Chad look for in his LPs?
4.) Question from Michael Kim @ Cendana: How does Chad look to establish the mindshare with entrepreneurs and other VCs for Susa in today's competitive environment?
5.) How does Chad approach the reserve structure of Susa fund II? How did Chad come tot hat conclusion as the optimal amount for follow on?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Chad’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Coding VC, Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd
Chad’s Fave Book: When Breathe Becomes Air
Chad's Most Recent Investment: Modsy
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Upfront Ventures' Greg Bettinelli on Testing For Founder 'Grit' & What It Takes To Build A Successful Consumer Brand Today
Greg Bettinelli is a Partner at Upfront Ventures where he specialises in businesses at the juncture of retail and technology. Prior to Upfront, Greg was the CMO for HauteLook, a leading online flash-sale retailer that was acquired by Nordstrom for $270mm. Before HauteLook, Greg was Executive Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at Live Nation, responsible for strategic direction and key business partnerships for Live Nation’s ticketing and digital businesses. Before Live Nation, Greg held a number of leadership positions at eBay and StubHub and was the business leader who led eBay’s acquisition of StubHub in 2007.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Greg made his way into VC from the unconventional world of retail and consumer?
2.) How has Greg's unconventional background altered how he views investments and founders? How does Greg test for the 'grit' required to be a founder?
3.) With the rise of direct to consumer, will we see the end of the physical retail store? Why do big retailers still have such little e-commerce presence?
4.) To what extent does Greg view brand as a form of IP in a prospective investment? How have we seen changing brand loyalty in the last decade?
5.) What are the fundamentals for growing a consumer brand successfully? Who has exemplified this?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Greg’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Dan Primack: Term Sheet
Greg’s Fave Book: Michael Lewis
Greg's Most Recent Investment: Happy Returns
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Greg on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
WeAreLATech is the number one resource uniting the LA startup community. Immediately integrate into the explosive LA tech scene by visiting WeAreLATech.com/VC. WeAreLATech offers a unique combination of curated offline experiences, the #1 LA Tech podcast called "WeAreLATech", and the only mobile app that keeps you in the know with a full calendar of events. Make sure go to WeAreLATech.com/VC to explore and learn all about everything LA tech and silicon beach. You'll also get access to a private LA tech immersion call exclusively for 20 Minute VC listeners.Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: How Entrepreneurs Should Manage Their Board & Why Time Constraints Are Always The Key To Progress with Paul Berberian @ Sphero
Paul Berberian is the CEO of Orbotix, the company that created Sphero, the robotic ball controlled from your smartphone. They have investment from our friends in Boulder, Brad Feld and David Cohen. Prior to Sphero, Paul was the co-founder of Raindance Communications (NASDAQ: RNDC). Paul also founded Market Force Information, an emerging information company with a vision to provide retailers. As well as, LINK-VTC, a video teleconferencing company, which was sold in 1995 to Frontier Communications.
In Today’s Episode with Paul You Will Learn:
1.) How Paul came to be CEO @ Sphero?
2.) Paul has founded and run 7 businesses, How has Paul seen his style of leadership change over the past decade or so?
3.) Question from Brad Feld: When Paul disagrees with his board, how does he resolve it? What have been Paul's learnings in maintaining a happy board environment?
4.) Sphero have raised, at last count, $80m? How has Paul seen investor sentiment to hardware alter over the 5-6 years? How did he meet his investors? What did Paul do well and what would Paul like to improve upon for next time?
5.) Question from Brad Feld: ‘Sphero looks like a massive success but every startup has had failures, so what have Paul's failures been and what did he learn from them?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Paul’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Quora
Paul’s Fave Book: The Black Box
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Paul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Why Hardware Is Actually Software Wrapped In Plastic & "Of Course Hardware Is Hard, Everything Is Hard" with Ben Einstein, Founder & General Partner @ Bolt VC
Ben Einstein is Founder and General Partner @ Bolt, Bolt is a fund designed to address the unique needs of early-stage startups at the intersection of hardware and software, investing up to $500K in pre-seed, pre-product companies. They have created and backed some world class businesses that have received later funding from Khosla, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, and Softtech just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode with Ben You Will Learn:
- How Ben made his way into VC from such a product centric background?
- Why have we seen a rise in hardware investing over the last 5 years? How has this affected the hardware ecosystem?
- To what extent do hardware and software integrate today? Why have we seen the rise of software determining the hardware winners?
- Why is brand the most important thing in consumer hardware? Who has done it best? Who has not done it well?
- What is Ben’s biggest advice to hardware founders today? Why is raising too much money extremely dangerous for hardware founders?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ben’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Ben Evans
Ben’s Fave Book: The Box
Ben’s Most Recent Investment: Grow: Redesigning Gardening
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Dave McClure is the founding partner of 500 Startups, who have made over 1500 investments in the likes of Twilio, SendGrid, Intercom and Makerbot just to name a few. Prior to 500 Dave was on the investment team at Founders Fund, he also led the Facebook Fund Incubator and was Head of Marketing @ Paypal pre IPO.
In Today’s Episode with Dave You Will Learn:
- How Dave made his way into VC and came to found 500 Startups?
- Do you need unicorn exits to have significant venture returns? What is the 500 view with regards to the hit ratio of finding unicorns?
- How much ownership does 500 typically take? Does this allow Dave enough of a right to follow on in further rounds with such a small initial slice?
- How does Dave and 500 avoid the inherent signalling risk involved with their fund and accelerator? How prominent is signalling in today’s market?
- What did Dave think of Sam Altman’s statement on YC not accepting companies from other accelerators? How does Dave view YC companies?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Dave’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Brad Feld, AVC, Mark Suster
Dave’s Fave Book: Guns Germs and Steel, The Mystery of Capital
Dave’s Most Recent Investment: Markhor
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dave on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress - made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up - it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing
Adam Nash is the President and CEO of Wealthfront, where he is on a mission to put the client first and change the bad practices of the financial services industry. Adam joined Wealthfront from Greylock Partners, where he was an Executive-in-Residence. Prior to Greylock, he was VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, where he built the teams responsible for core product, user experience, platform and mobile. Adam also held a number of roles at Ebay, Atlas Venture Preview Systems and Apple.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam came to be President and CEO @ Wealthfront?
2.) What makes a great product person and how does that compare to Adam's role now as CEO and the skills required to be a great CEO?
3.) Is it fair to suggest that PMs are the CEO of a mini product? How transferrable are the skills of product managers to the skills required of CEOs?
4.) How was the transition for Andy in making the move from PM to COO to CEO? What were the biggest challenges and surprises?
5.) Why does Andy believe that building software through hierarchy does not work? How can leaders empower their team with a sense of ownership?
6.) Why do humans suck at investing? Will we see the domination of full scale financial robo advisors in the next 10 years?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Adam’s Fave Book: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Adam’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Nuzzel
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Adam on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.20VC: Dollar Shave Club's Series A & B Lead Investor, David Pakman on The Requirements For A Successful Subscription Business & Why A Lot of Investors Do Not Like Consumer
David Pakman is a Partner at Venrock and the man behind Venrock’s leading of the Series A and B rounds for Dollar Shave Club. Prior to Venrock David spent 12 years as an internet entrepreneur. Including being CEO of eMusic, the world’s leading digital retailer of independent music, second only to iTunes. Prior to eMusic, David co-founded Myplay in 1999, which he later sold, in 2001, to Bertelsmann’s ecommerce Group. If that wasn’t enough David is also the co-creator of Apple Computer’s Music Group.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
- How did David make his way into the world of VC with Venrock?
- David invested in Dollar Shave when subscription ecommerce funding was largely out of favour. What was it that excited Dave about Dollar Shave and why did he choose to invest?
- To what extent do we see the existence of party rounds in today’s funding environment?
- Venrock took the rather unusual position to lead both the A and B rounds for Dollar Shave. What was the internal conversations like within Venrock towards this decision?
- Dollar Shave was growing at phenomenal rates with impressive growth, what was behind the decision to sell at this time? What were the incentives behind selling to Unilever?
- Will we see other large e-commerce exits in the future? What does the future M&A environment look like for consumer businesses?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Matt’s Fave Book: Mindset by Carole Dweck
Matt’s Most Recent Investment: Pearl
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Data Collective's Matt Ocko on Why "All Fund Size Models Are Wrong" and The Lifecycle of Current Venture Funds Is Inefficient?
Matt Ocko is the Co-Managing Partner and Co-Founder @ Data Collective and has over 3 decades of experience as a tech entrepreneur and VC and has made investments in the likes of Facebook, Zynga, Uber and AngelList just to name a few. If that was not enough he is also an inventor on over 40 granted or in process patents. A truly deep thinker and one of my fave ever shows to record.
In Today’s Episode with Matt You Will Learn:
- How Matt made his way into VC and came to co-found Data Collective?
- Why does Matt believe “All Fund Size Models are Wrong”. Does the current bifurcation of VC into angels/micro-VCs, small seed/A funds, big bruisers, and post-C/pre-IPO make for sub-optimal returns both on a societal and monetary perspective?
- What does the opportunity fund allow Data Collective? How do they use the initial fund to invest for insight in into companies at the earliest stages? How do they avoid the negative signalling risk that is normally ensued with an opportunity fund?
- How important is thesis driven venture firms? Does specialisation aid or hinder venture returns and why?
- How does Matt view the lifecycle of current venture? Matt has previously said it is inherently inefficient, why?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Matt’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: MIT Technology Review
Matt’s Fave Book: The Way Things Work
Matt’s Most Recent Investment: Tradeshift
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Eve make 1 perfect mattress - made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up - it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.
20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos
Dhananja Jayalath is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos, creating the new standard for fitness by changing the way we train the human body. Athos have funding from our friends at Social Capital, Felix Capital and DCM Ventures just to name a few of their investors. Prior to Athos, DJ turned down a job with Apple straight from University to pursue his vision of creating the next generation of consumer fitness wearables with Athos.
In Today’s Episode with DJ You Will Learn:
- How DJ went from University to turning down Apple to founding Athos?
- How did DJ come to meet Chamath @ Social? How was the fundraising experience? What did Athos do well and what would DJ like to improve for the next round?
- How does DJ approach iteration and testing within product testing at Athos?
- What are the lessons DJ has learned in the manufacturing and iteration process with Athos?
- How does DJ approach business models for Athos today? Does DJ agree that the winners of hardware will be determined by software?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
DJ’s Fave Book: Velocity: The 7 New Laws For A World Gone Digital
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and DJ on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: From Seed To Series A: The Due Diligence, The Valuations, The Investment Decision Making Process with Steve Schlafman @ RRE Ventures
Steve Schlafman is an early stage investor @ RRE Ventures, where he specialises on marketplaces, mobile services, and hardware. Steve is responsible for RRE’s investments in theSkimm, Hightower, TinyBop, Breather, and Managed by Q. Prior to joining RRE as a Principal, Steve was a Principal and rockstar seed investor at Lerer Ventures. Before becoming a venture capitalist, Steve worked at Stickybits Inc. and Turntable.fm, and served as Director of Venture Investments at The Kraft Group. Steve also worked at Massive Inc. and at Microsoft, where he focused on Biz Dev Strategy and Corporate Finance.
In Today’s Episode with Steve You Will Learn:
- How Steve made his way into VC from Microsoft, to Kraft to startup to VC?
- Why does Steve think Seed to Series A is such a different ball game? What are the different characteristics encompassed within each?
- With such little data at seed, what does Steve’s DD process look like? How does that affect his investment decision making process @ RRE?
- What is the valuation comparison between Seed and Series A? How is this determined and how has this changed since Steve’s time at Lerer?
- Why do the best markets often appear small and become meaningful? How does Steve look to detect these small markets?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Steve’s Fave Book: Who (Hiring Process), Work (Hiring @ Google), Leading (Michael Moritz)
Steve’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: AVC, Stratechery, The Skimm
Steve’s Most Recent Investment: Brightwheel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Steve on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: YC's Justin Kan on The 3 Qualities All Successful Investors Have & Why 'VCs Don't Really Do Any Real Work'?
Justin Kan is a Partner @ world renowned, Y Combinator. The birthplace of the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits and many more incredible companies. Prior to YC, Justin co-founded SocialCam, acquired by Autodesk for $60m and Twitch.tv, the world's leading video platform and community for gamers, acquired by Amazon for $970m in 2014.
In Today’s Episode with Justin You Will Learn:
- How Justin came to found Twitch.tv and then later made the transition into VC with YC?
- Having been a YC alum, how has Justin seen YC as an institution change over time? How have the interviews, demo days, mentoring arrangements altered? How can YC keep the same quality of startup treatment with the mass scaling taking place?
- YC always positions itself as an accompaniment to the VC industry, does the new $700m YC growth fund not directly compete against VCs?
- What 3 qualities does Justin believes all good investors must have? How has Justin looked to establish his own personal brand? What has worked and what has not?
- Justin is very bullish on Snapchat, why so? What makes Justin so excited for the platform? How does Justin use it to such success? What would Justin like to see change in the platform?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Justin’s Fave Book: Shogun
Justin’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Nuzzel & The Information
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Justin on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
20VC: Why People Should Never Be Surprised If Fired, Subscription E-Commerce Is Hot & People Never Give True and Direct Feedback with Amir Elaguizy, Co-Founder @ Cratejoy
Amir Elaguizy is the Founder & CEO @ YC backed, Cratejoy, the website builder and backend for subscription e-commerce stores. Cratejoy have funding from the likes of General Catalyst, Andreesen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Charles River Ventures With regards to Amir, he previously founded Market Zero, a poker software company which was acquired by Zynga, where he then spent time as a game CTO.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Amir came to be an entrepreneur, got acquired by Zynga and then started Cratejoy?
2.) With the recent acquisition of Dollar Shave Club, the subscription e-commerce business is hot, why does Amir think most people misunderstand the space?
3.) Amir previously said, ‘owning recruiting is the single most important thing you can do’, why does he believe this? Does Amir believe that the early team might not necessarily be the team to evolve from a $1m business to a $20m business?
4.) What is the difference between foundational team members and mercenary team members? What are the signs an individual is worth spending time to grow with?
5.) Amir previously said, 'most people have never received true direct feedback on performance’, how does Amir look to differentiate himself? Is it suitable for the leadership to be the bad guy?
6.) How can the firing process be approached with respect and dignity? Should it ever be a surprise? If it is a surprise what does that suggest about your leadership previously?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Amir’s Fave Book: Hard Thing About Hard Things
Amir’s Fave Podcasts: The Twenty Minute VC, SaaStr
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Amir on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: Mythbuster: Is Mobile Dying? Is AR/VR Overhyped? Is The Excitement Around Bots Justified with Sean Flynn, Partner @ Shasta Ventures
Sean Flynn is a Managing Partner @ Shasta Ventures where he invests in mobile-enabled consumer Internet and enterprise software companies. Sean has led Shasta's investments in Dollar Shave Club, Whisper and serves on the board of directors for the likes of TimeHop, Zefr, Swipely, Bloc and TigerText. Before joining Shasta, Sean worked at Yahoo, where he focused on growing the company's communication and messaging products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Groups and Flickr.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sean made his way into VC from the titan that is Yahoo?
Now today I want to do something slightly different and do a myth busting episode, take a couple of sectors and discuss whether they are truths and complexities to the core statement.
2.) Starting with the most common assumption in VC that it is all about team, to what extent does Sean place team ahead of product and is this a slight misconception?
3.) Many are saying mobile is a dying space. Sean previously said, 'it is not dead yet'. Why is there promise for mobile? What will be the catalyst of it's death? How does this affect Sean's investment decision making?
4.) Another much hyped topic is AR/VR, is the excitement surround AR and VR justified? Where does Sean stand on investing in the installation phase of cycles?
5.) Similar to AR/VR is the hype surround bots justified? What will be the sustainable business model for bots?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sean’s Fave Book: What Do You Do With An Idea
Sean’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Nuzzel, 538 Blog
Sean’s Most Recent Investment: Tally
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sean on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: Semil Shah on Why The Most Important Thing An Investor Can Do Is Attract Follow On & The Fundamentals of VC Branding
Semil Shah is the founder of Haystack, an early stage investment firm now investing out of it’s third fund, with previous investments being Instacart, DoorDash, Managed by Q. In the past he has also been a consultant to some of the leading funds in the valley including the likes of Kleiner Perkins, DFJ, General Catalyst and more. If that was not enough, Shah also has an extensive career in media having been a contributor for both TechCrunch and the Harvard Business Review in the past. Due to all of this Shah was listed by Marc Andreesen as one of his '55 Unknown Rockstars in Tech'.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Semil made his way into VC? How did he come to create Haystack?
2.) What were the challenges and concerns for Semil in raising and establishing his own fund?
3.) Question from Michelle Tandler: How does Semil send deals through to Series A? What is his 'cool' process? What are the commonalities of those that make it to Series A and those that do not?
4.) How has Semil approached the aspect of personal VC branding? How does he evaluate the rise of the personal VC brand in the last few years?
5.) Why does Semil believe he is not 'founder friendly' in the conventional sense?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Semil’s Fave Book: Burmese Days by George Orwell
Semil’s Most Recent Investment: AquaCloud
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Semil on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.
20VC: Unity 3D's David Helgason on Building a $bn Business, Getting Funded By Sequoia and Powering The Pokemon Revolution
David Helgason is the Founder and Board Member @ Unity 3D. The company that recently announced a new $181m Series C, valuing the company at $1.5bn. Unity’s platform has revolutionized the game industry by allowing any size studio from Indie to Triple-A to create beautiful and compelling games and experiences and monetize them with their advertising and analytics services. As for David, he served as CEO of Unity from its founding in 2003 right up until 2014 taking the company through numerous funding rounds including from the one and only Sequoia Capital.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David came to found Unity 3D?
2.) How pivotal was the rise of the App stores to the rise of Unity 3D? What does David make of Apple's recent announcement to add paid search and subscription pricing?
3.) How does David evaluate the current gaming landscape? What does he not like abou the industry and how the major players are operating?
4.) What are David's thoughts on the emerging platforms like AR and VR? How does he incorporate them into Unity's future product roadmap?
5.) How was the fundraising process for David with Unity? How did the Sequoia investment happen and what has it been like to work with them and Roelof Botha?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David's Fave Book: Guns, Germs & Steel
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and David on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: Why The Whole Industry Is Backward Looking, The Best Funds Are Entrepreneur Led and Venture Is All About Access with Alex Bangash, Founder @ Trusted Insight
Alex Bangash is a Managing Director @ Rumson Group where he helps his clients invest in some of the best performing funds around the world. Alex has done just that having made over 50 investments into funds across the globe. If that was not enough he is also the founder of Trusted Insight, the worlds largest platform for institutional investors and backing from the first investors or founder @ Facebook, LinkedIn, Mint and Match.com.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way into the world of investing in VC funds?
2.) Why does Alex believe the whole finance industry is backward looking? Is this why he thinks there is so much VC churn?
3.) Why does Alex believe VC is always about access? Is this why Alex has such a strong preference for funds that are also platforms?
4.) Why does Alex believe true early stage is getting smaller and smaller? How does his return expectations differ according to the size of the fund?
5.) What happens when funds do not go to plan or do not have notable exits to raise fund II? What happens then?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: Ben Horowitz: Hard Thing About Hard Things, Peter Thiel: Zero To One
Alex’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Paul Graham
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Alex on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: Flybridge's Jeff Bussgang on Why It Is Not All About Unit Economics & Why VCs Are Big Data Decision Makers
Jeff Bussgang is a Co-Founder and General partner @ Flybridge Capital, where has made investments in numerous incredible companies including 2 former guests of the show, Jeff Seibert @ Crashlytics (sold to Twitter) and Josh Udashkin @ Raden. Jeff is also a Senior Lecturer @ Harvard Business School where he has co-authored no less than 15 cases. He is also an author having written the renowned, Mastering The VC Game to the acclaim of The Financial Times, TechCrunch, BusinessWeek and more. Jeff also has an incredible blog, Seeing Both Sides, which you can find here.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his way into VC? How did he come to co-found Flybridge?
2.) To what extent does Jeff believe there is a glass ceiling for people without operations experience to progress up the VC ladder?
3.) How can companies establish cultures and processes when they have to change and reinvent every 6-12 months?
4.) What are venture returns? What metrics does Jeff use to determine his success?
5.) Is a focus on unit economics now one of the only ways to achieve equity value creation? How can consumer adoption drive equity value creation?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jeff’s Fave Book: Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Jeff's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Mattermark Daily
Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Sentenai
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jeff on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero
Kyle Hill is the Co-Founder & CEO @ HomeHero, one of the largest providers of non-medical home care in California. HomeHero has provided over 1 million hours of care to thousands of families and won "Best Employment Website of 2014". Due to this immense success Kyle has been on CNN, Forbes, Wall Street Journal and many more. HomeHero has raised funds from some of the world's best investors including Chamath & Mamoon @ Social Capital, Jason Calacanis @ TWIST and Peter & Michael @ Science Inc.
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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kyle came to found HomeHero? What was the a-ha moment for him?
2.) Question from Mamoon @ Social Capital: Considering that this is not your typical software business; being largely people centric, how does Kyle think about the profitability of such a business?
3.) How much of a role does unit economics lay in the mind of Kyle? How does Kyle look to balance growth with profitability?
4.) How was the fundraising process for Kyle with Chamath & Mamoon @ Social Capital? What did Kyle do to prepare for the pitch? What did Kyle do well? What would Kyle look to improve upon? How would Kyle like VCs to treat him as a Founder?
5.) ?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Kyle's’s Fave Book: Black Swan
Kyle’s Fave Blog: The Best Designs.com
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Kyle on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion
Brad Burnham is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Union Square Ventures. I feel Brad is far better described by his partner Fred Wilson, than I ever could so this is Fred's words on Brad. "Brad and I founded USV together in 2003. We had both been in the venture business for more than a decade, had made a fair bit of money, but were still hungry to prove ourselves. Brad is the strategist and the most principled investor in our firm. It was Brad's idea to write a treatise on venture capital and the internet before we set off to raise our first fund and that exercise we did together continues to be our guiding light. Brad is the person behind phrases like "the application layer of the technology stack" and "large networks of engaged users" that I use all the time. He gives me most of my good stuff which I often get credit for."
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brad made his way into VC? How did he come to co-found USV with Fred in 2003?
2.) How did Brad approach team building with USV? What does he look for in his partners?
3.) Brad has previously stated his belief that 'history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. How does this affect Brad's view toward market cycles, the way tech is adopted and ultimately replaced?
4.) What does Brad make of the extension of the private market? Are we entering a period of consolidation? What makes Brad believe this?
5.) Looking back at the history of USV, what have been the inflection points in both the stature of the firm and then Brad's learnings as a VC?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Brad’s Fave Book: The Irrational Optimist
Brad’s Most Recent Investment: OB1
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Brad on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: USV's Albert Wenger on Automation Replacing Humans, The Universal Basic Income and The Instalment & The Deployment Phase
Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the world's leading VC firms with investments in Twitter, Twilio, Zynga, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Lending Club and many more. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert also writes a fantastic blog at Continuations.com and did a brilliant Ted X Talk here!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Albert made his way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) Albert breaks down the differences between the instalment and the deployment phases of technology? At what stage USV choose to invest and why?
3.) How much of a role does valuation play in Albert's investment decision making process? At what level does speculation become irrational exuberance?
4.) Why does Albert want to limit network effects that are provided to winning companies? What does Albert think makes a contestable market? What are the characteristics?
5.) Why is Albert such a protagonist for the basic income guarantee? What are the challenges? How will this affect human's relationship to automation? What will mankind do with this increased abundance of time?
6.) Why does Albert believe that every individual has the right to be presented by a personal bot? What are the prominent use cases? How does it invert the power relationships between networks and their participants?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Albert’s Fave Book: Beginning of Infinity
Albert’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Azeem Azhar: The Exponential View
Albert’s Most Recent Investment: Clue: Period and Ovulation Tracker
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Albert on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Frank Mycroft is the Founder & CEO @ Booster Fuels, the on-demand fuel delivery service backed by the likes of our friends at Maveron and Version One. As for Frank himself, he is literally a former rocket scientist with Nasa and has more degrees that I have done podcast episodes, making him one of the smartest guests we have ever had on the show. Directly prior to Booster Fuels, Frank was the VP of Strategy @ Planetary Resources, the Redmond based, asteroid mining company.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Frank came to Found Booster Fuels from his days with Nasa?
2.) How important a role does naivety play for founders starting building their company?
3.) With Fuel being such a low margin business, how does Frank balance growth vs profitability with Booster Fuels? What are the tips for doing so in the on-demand economy?
4.) When is the transition point between growth at all costs to focusing on profitability and unit economics?
5.) To what extent is regulation a limiting factor for the growth of Booster fuels?
6.) Question from Dave Wu @ Maveron: What did Frank look for in his Series A investors? Question from Angela @ Version One: What is Frank's wider vision for the future of on demand and Booster Fuels?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Frank’s Fave Book: Oh The Places You'll Go
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Frank on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.
20VC: What It Takes To Raise A VC Fund & Investing in First Time Fund Managers with Michael Kim @ Cendana Capital
Michael Kim is the founder and Managing Partner of Cendana Capital, a fund of funds which invests in seed VC funds. Michael has many of our previous guests in his portfolio including the likes of SoftTech, Freestyle, Founder Collective, Collaborative Fund and many more, clearly great minds think alike! Prior to Cendana, Michael was one of the original partners of Rustic Canyon Partners a VC firm with $1bn AUM.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Michael made his way into VC and then made the transition into the world of LP?
2.) Why have we seen the proliferation of seed funding? Is this a good thing for the economy? Is dumb money good or bad for the early stage environment?
3.) Chris Douvos states we will begin to see the hybridisation of LPs and GPs, does Michael agree? What are the inherent problems with this happening?
4.) What is Michael's blackbox for assessing emerging fund managers? What does he look for? How can they present their edge?
4.) How does Michael respond to Dave McClure's portfolio construction theory of allocating capital to many startups with the realisation that 0.5% become unicorns?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Michael’s Fave Book: Catcher & The Rye
Michael's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Techcrunch, The Twenty Minute VC
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Michael on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: The 4 Required Powers For A Startup To Be A $500m Business with "The Most Powerful Woman in Startups", Ann Miura Ko, Co-Founder @ Floodgate
Ann Miura-Ko has been called "the most powerful woman in startups" by Forbes and is the Co-Founder of Floodgate, one of the valley's leading early stage funds with investments in the likes of Twitter, Twitch and TaskRabbit. Some of Ann's investments at Floodgate include Lyft, Ayasdi, Xamarin, Refinery29, Chloe and Isabel, Maker Media, Wanelo, TaskRabbit, and Modcloth. Ann is also a lecturer in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where she got her PhD focused on mathematical modeling of computer security.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ann made her way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) Ann's 2nd day in VC was 9/11, how does Ann view investing in times of crisis and downturn? How does this effect the macro-economy and her investing cadence?
Floodgate state that all venture bankable high growth companies share 4 very common characteristics with regards to power. Here we break them down:
- Proprietary Power: What is it? What are it's characteristics?
- Product Power: What does this imply about product market fit? What are the nuances and complexities?
- Company Power: What does it take to be created and maintained? How have so many unicorns established themselves without credible and sustainable business models?
- Category Power: Why it is so important to create a new category? How can this be done and who has done it well in the past?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ann’s Fave Book: The Poisonwood Bible
Ann's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Benedict Evans
Ann’s Most Recent Investment: The Greatist
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ann on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here! This episode was brought to you by DesignCrowd, the online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to designers from around the world. How Does It Work? Once you have launched your brief, designers will begin submitting quality designs for you to review. With some constructive feedback, you can quickly generate a large gallery of designs that really do fit your needs. You can have exactly what you need within just three days. Once you have selected your favourite design, you will be sent all the files you require to update your branding. If you don’t like any of the submitted designs, then DesignCrowd offers a money back guarantee. So checkout designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 to get an astonishing $100 off your next project.20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden
1.) How Josh came to found Raden and what the a-ha moment was for him?
2.) Why does Josh believe in the benefits of the dual approach to selling both being online and with physical retail stores?
3.) Why have we seen such innovation in the space in the last 30 years? The incumbents have said, they are bad at selling online, what are they doing wrong? What is Josh doing to optimise the process?
4.) Why is Josh bullish on omni-channel retail? What are the benefits?
5.) How are hardware products innovating on the hardware as a service model and integrating physical retail products with superior mobile experiences?
6.) What trends have we seen in investing in hardware products in the last 5 years or so? Why is hardware becoming more attractive an investment field?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Josh’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
Josh’s Fave Blog: Business of Fashion
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC and Harry on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! If you are looking to make your move into the world of VC or improve your investing skills, Venture Capital Unlocked: Secrets of Silicon Valley Investing is a must! It is a 2 week crash course at Stanford run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 Startups. You will learn the mechanics of all things Silicon Valley investing, check it out here. The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Lees is like the TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Here are 3 reasons why they are the best place to get your new mattress: Leesa has done away with the awkward mattress showroom experience by allowing a fully online experience, shipping to your doorstep for free. Their 10 inch mattresses come in all sizes and is crafted with 3 unique layers o foam including2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of really cool latex like foam design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are made 100% in the US or UK and they give you a 100 night trial, to make sure the mattress is perfect for you. Go to leesa.com/VC and enter promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster
Wesley Chan is a Manging Director @ Felicis Ventures where he has led investments in the likes of Canva, Flexport and Luma, just to name a few. Prior to Felicis, Wesley was a General Partner @ Google Ventures. Before Google Ventures he was an early employee at Google, where he founded and launched Google Analytics and Google Voice, resulting in his being awarded Google’s Founders Award–the company’s most prestigious recognition–for leading the development of Google’s early client efforts, which led to the development of Google Chrome. Fun fact about Wesley he is a massive hacker and IOT enthusiast with over 100 connected devices in his home.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Wesley made the transition from Foundering Google Voice and analytics to being a VC?
2.) What were Wesley's biggest takeaways from leading investment at Google Ventures? When looking at his investment in Nest, what makes Nest such a truly phenomenal connected device?
3.) Wesley previously said, ‘I look for patterns similar to Google Analytics in how if you build something great.' What are those patterns and what does that thought process lead to in terms of thought outcome? What is a good example of this?
4.) Where does Wesley think we are on the programmable interface element of consumer hardware? What would he like to see change or improve in the space?
5.) How has Wesley seen the investor sentiment to hardware change over the last decade? What have been the rivers in the rising positivity of investing in hardware?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Wesley's Fave Book: The Big Short
Wesley's Most Recent Investment: Luma
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Wesley on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here!
If you are looking to make your move into the world of VC or improve your investing skills, Venture Capital Unlocked: Secrets of Silicon Valley Investing is a must! It is a 2 week crash course at Stanford run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 Startups. You will learn the mechanics of all things Silicon Valley investing, check it out here.
The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Leesa is like the TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Here are 3 reasons why they are the best place to get your new mattress: Leesa has done away with the awkward mattress showroom experience by allowing a fully online experience, shipping to your doorstep for free. Their 10 inch mattresses come in all sizes and is crafted with 3 unique layers o foam including2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of really cool latex like foam design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are made 100% in the US or UK and they give you a 100 night trial, to make sure the mattress is perfect for you. Go to leesa.com/VC and enter promo code VC75 to get $75 off!
20VC: Techstars Founder, David Cohen on Scaling Techstars Ventures and Investing In Uber, Twilio and Sendgrid
David Cohen is the founder and managing partner at Techstars, so a few amazing stats on techstars first, they have a total of 762 companies of which 90% are active or have been acquired, having raised more than 2bn in funding, as for David he is a serial entrepreneur having founded Pinpoint Technologies which was acquired by ZOLL Medical Corporation in 1999. and David was also the founder and CEO of earFeeder.com, a music service which was sold to SonicSwap.com in 2006.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made the transition from Founder to VC with Techstars and Fund I?
2.) Fund I is one of the most successful funds in history; what was the structure with Fund I? Why did David choose a $5m fund size? How did he decide initial to follow on ratio?
3.) Why was David so valuation sensitive with Fund I? Why was David so rigid on a consistent cheque size on Fund I?
4.) Why did David decide to expand from being a solo GP fund? What are the challenges and complexities of fund scaling and did David approach this?
5.) Question from Ari Newman: What does David think about uncapped notes? Why does David like big boring companies? Brett Jackson: How did you meet Ryan Graves @ Uber and how did the Uber deal come about? Jason Seats: Where does David still see inefficiencies in the current venture model?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
David's Fave Book: The Soul Of Money
David's Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and David on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here!
If you are looking to make your move into the world of VC or improve your investing skills, Venture Capital Unlocked: Secrets of Silicon Valley Investing is a must! It is a 2 week crash course at Stanford run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 Startups. You will learn the mechanics of all things Silicon Valley investing, check it out here.
The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Leesa is like the TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Here are 3 reasons why they are the best place to get your new mattress: Leesa has done away with the awkward mattress showroom experience by allowing a fully online experience, shipping to your doorstep for free. Their 10 inch mattresses come in all sizes and is crafted with 3 unique layers o foam including2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of really cool latex like foam design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are made 100% in the US or UK and they give you a 100 night trial, to make sure the mattress is perfect for you. Go to leesa.com/VC and enter promo code VC75 to get $75 off!
20VC: X.ai's Dennis Mortensen on Why There Is No Incumbency Advantage in Artificial Intelligence
1.) How Dennis came to found X.ai and what the a-ha moment was for him?
2.) What did the training look like for X.ai? How long did it take? How much data did you have to painstakingly annotate? What is more important; data or algorithms?
3.) Many VCs are concerned about large incumbents having proprietary data sets. Does this concern Dennis and what can be done to mitigate this
4.) Question from David Cheg @ DCM: How will AI startups interact with giant corporates also investing heavily in AI research?
5.) How was the fundraising journey for Dennis? How did he approach it strategically? What challenges did he face? How did he go about choosing his investors?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Dennis’ Fave Book: How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis
Dennis’ Fave Blog: Wait But Why
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Dennis on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! If you are looking to make your move into the world of VC or improve your investing skills, Venture Capital Unlocked: Secrets of Silicon Valley Investing is a must! It is a 2 week crash course at Stanford run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 Startups. You will learn the mechanics of all things Silicon Valley investing, check it out here. The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Lees is like the TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Here are 3 reasons why they are the best place to get your new mattress: Leesa has done away with the awkward mattress showroom experience by allowing a fully online experience, shipping to your doorstep for free. Their 10 inch mattresses come in all sizes and is crafted with 3 unique layers o foam including2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of really cool latex like foam design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are made 100% in the US or UK and they give you a 100 night trial, to make sure the mattress is perfect for you. Go to leesa.com/VC and enter promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV
Annie Kadavy is a General Partner @ Charles River Ventures. The prestigious VC fund that is now on it's 16th fund and has backed the likes of Twitter, Yammer and Mailbox just to name a few. At CRV, Annie focuses on all things consumer and has either led or sourced their investments in ClassPass, Cratejoy, Patreon, Laurel & Wolf and DoorDash. Prior to CRV, Annie spent time with SV Angel and Warby Parker.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Annie made her way into the world of VC?
2.)Why have we seen the explosion of marketplaces in recent years? What are the inherent challenges of two sided marketplaces; typically consumers and micro-entrepreneurs? Does Annie agree with Jeff Jordan in stating that these marketplaces need to nurture and manage conditions of perfect competition?
3.) What are the core components to growing traditional producer consumer marketplaces? How do they broach the chicken and the egg problem of supply and demand?
4.) Why is Annie so excited for the potential of bots? Will the transition to bots and conversational interfaces represent a major point of disruption or more of an evolution in the interface paradigm?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Annie's Fave Book: Mindset: How You Can Fulfill Your Potential by Carol Dweck
Annie's Fave Blog: The Skimm
Annie's Most Recent Investment: Roam
20VC: Andy Rachleff, Founder @ Benchmark & Wealthfront on What Makes The Best CEO & Board Member & Why Ivy League Endowments Are The Best Managed Capital In The World
1.) How Andy made his way into the world of VC and what was the origin story behind the founding of Benchmark?
2.) Andy took the opposite route to most having been a VC and then founding Wealthfront. So what does Andy make of doing VC first and then becoming an operator?
3.) Why does Andy believe Ivy League endowments are the best managed pools of capital? What do they do well and what separates the good from the great?
4.) Andy has worked with some of the world's best CEO's and board members, so what makes the best board member and what makes the best CEO?
5.) How has Andy seen the VC industry evolve and develop over the last 20 years? How has Andy seen his own investment decision making process and patter recognition alter over that time?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Andy’s Fave Book: The Innovator's Dilemma
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Andy on Twitter here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp
Sasha Orloff is the CEO and Co-founder of LendUp, a fintech startup offering online and mobile personal loans and credit cards in the United States. Prior to launching LendUp Sasha was on the other side of the table as a VC with Citi Group’s corporate venture capital arm. On the topic of VC funding, LendUp raised an incredible $150m in Jan 2016 from likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner our friends at Susa and Google Ventures just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Sasha come to found LendUp following a stint in VC with Citi Group?
2.) What Sasha learnt from VC about running a successful startup and how he applied them to his founding of LendUp?
3.) Was it difficult leaving the security of a VC job to found a startup? Would you have done the same had you had children at the time?
4.) What trends in FinTech is Sasha most excited for? Why does Sasha think banks are in so much trouble? Is there the potential to co-operate rather than replace banks?
5.) How was the fundraising process for Sasha? What was his preferred round and how did they differ from stag to stage?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Sasha’s Fave Book: Banker To The Poor
Sasha’s Fave Blog: Sam Altman
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sasha on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Will LPs Replace GPs with Chris Douvos, Managing Director @ VIA
Chris Douvos is Managing Director @ Venture Investment Associates (VIA) where he is a member of the Firm’s Investment Committee and has responsibility for the management of relationships with the funds’ managers and its limited partners, as well as the identification and development of new relationships for the Firm. Prior to joining VIA, he spent time at The Investment Fund For Foundations (TIFF). where he was responsible for over $1 billion. Prior to that, Chris worked on Princeton University’s endowment team. One of Chris’ most notable investments is his pre-first fund investment in First Round Capital. Chris is also the author of the fantastic blog, www.SuperLP.com, definitely check that out if you have not had the chance yet.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Chris make his way into the world of limited partners?
2.) How does Chris respond to FOMO as an LP? Does it affect his decision making process? How does he look to avoid it?
3.) What patterns and processes has Chris developed to asses the ability of potential GPs?
4.) Is Chris concerned by the increasing time it is taking for startups to exit? How does this affect his think as an LP and cash on cash relationship to this asset class?
5.) In 2013, Chris aid micro VC was the most exciting space in VC, where is he most excited for now? Where will we see innovation in the VC market?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Chris' Fave Blog: RedEye VC, Tomasz Tunguz
Chris' Fave Book: The Great Gatsby
Chris' Most Recent Investment: Other Lab
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Chris on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: What LP's Want In VCs with Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures
Beezer Clarkson is Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures where she leads Sapphire’s investments in venture funds domestically and internationally. Prior to joining Sapphire, Beezer managed day-to-day operations @ DFJ’s Global Network, which had $7 billion under management across 16 venture funds worldwide. She has also spent time at Omidyar Network created by Ebay founder, Pierre Omdiyar, Hewlett Packard and Morgan Stanley. Beezer also runs the incredible openlp.com which is really opening up the world of LPs and if you have not checked that out, it really is a must!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Beezer make her way into the world of limited partners?
2.) How do LP's find a new and talented fund manager? Is it a similar referral process as in startups with? How does the sourcing element of the LP world work?
3.) How do GPs raising a fund differ from startups raised their round? What are the similarities and differences in the processes?
4.) What does the investment decision making process look like for Beezer? Are their commonalities in the process of great LP’s processes? What do you at Sapphire focus on when investing??
5.) At Sapphire you have extensively researched the formulas of what makes a great VC, what have been your findings? What are the commonalities amongst the great VCs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Beezer's Fave Blog: Term Sheet, Strictly VC, The Information
Beezer's Fave Book: The Tale of the One Way Street
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Beezer on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva
Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO at Canva the disruptive online platform allowing anyone to create professional quality designs. They have over 10m users from 179 countries and have funding from our friends at Shasta, Felicis and upcoming guests Blackbird Ventures and Airtree in Australia. Prior to Canva, Melanie was the Fusion Yearbooks which she grew to be the largest Yearbook publisher in Australia.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Melanie come to found Canva, what was the a-ha moment for her?
2.) How has Melanie looked to scale the team whilst maintaining the same core startup values and company ethos? What are the strategies at play here?
3.) What does it take to grow in international markets? Where were the benefits of founding Canva in the isolated tech ecosystem of Perth??
4.) What did Melanie look for in her investors? As a newbie to the VC scene how did she approach the fundraising process and what would she like to improve on?
5.) How can products that have both a free and a paid model offer enough in the free version to entice users, whilst retain enough for the paid to justify the price?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Melanie’s Fave Book: Designing The Obvious
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Melanie on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Spark's Nabeel Hyatt on Investing in Oculus and Cruise & What It Takes To Invest Ahead Of The Curve
1.) How did Nabeel make his way into the world of VC?
2.) What are the biggest lessons Nabeel can apply from his time in the trenches to being a VC at Spark? How has his investment strategy and decision making changed over time?
3.) What were the biggest takeaways for Nabeel as an observer and investor in Oculus?
4.) What is the story behind Spark's investment in Cruise (recently acquired by GM)? How did Nabeel come to meet Kyle and the team? What was the product like? How did it evolve?
5.) What does Cruise’s acquisition mean for the autonomous car industry? What are the inherent challenges for the industry as a whole? How will they be overcome and what timeline are you placing on the industry to come into fruition?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Nabeel’s Fave Blog: AVC
Nabeel’s Most Recent Investment: Fig
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Nabeel on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Spark's Bijan Sabet on Investing in Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare & Why First Time Founders Are So Exciting
1.) How did Bijan make his way into the world of VC?
2.) How did the Twitter and Tumblr deals come about? What made you say yes?
3.) Looking at Bijan's thesis, is it true that Bijan has a preference for first time founders? What are the commonalities of all great first time founders?
4.) Often first time founders nail product market fit but struggle to scale the operations to suit the growth of the product. How does Bijan as a VC lend to this situation?
5.) Does Bijan agree with Fred Wilson's assessment of the consumer downturn? Why does Bijan think that David must beat Goliath in the end?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Bijan’s Fave Blog: Ready Player One
Bijan's Fave Blog: AVC
Bijan’s Most Recent Investment: Lily: Your Throw and Go Camera
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Bijan on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: inDinero's Jessica Mah on Why Angel Money Is Better Than Institutional Money and Boards Should Work For Founders
Jessica Mah is Founder and CEO of inDinero, which she started back in 2010 to help entrepreneurs with all their accounting and tax needs after going through the same challenges with her own businesses. Jessica has grown inDinero from zero to multi-million dollar revenues with over 100 full-time employees and has been featured in the Forbes and Inc 30 Under 30 Lists. The company has raised over $10M to date and is growing rapidly. Her goal is grow inDinero into being the leading accounting provider for businesses.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Jessica come to found Indinero, an SMB accounting startup when she was at University?
2.) Why did Jessica decide to raise funding from angels over VC's? What were the benefits of this?
3.) Why does Jessica believe that institutional capital is never patient capital? What additional value add do angels bring that VCs and HNW's do not bring?
4.) How does Jessica like to involve her investors in the hiring process? How can founders do this and why should they?
5.) Why does Jessica believe it is better to have a board that works for the founder and not the other way round? Does this not lead to conflict?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Jessica’s Fave Book: A Guide To The Good Life
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jessica on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: The Future For Autonomous Vehicles & How Software Is Eating Cars with Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Investor @ Shasta Ventures
Nikhil Basu Trivedi is an early stage investor with Shasta Ventures, where he focuses on consumer, mobile and SaaS. Prior to joining Shasta, Nikhil was a member of the Insight Venture Partners team in NYC. Before making the move into venture, Nikhil co-founded Artsy in his sophomore year at Princeton University, Artsy now employs over 100 people and has raised over $50m in venture financing. One of Nikhil's main passions is self driving cars and so today's show will be centred around the proliferation of autonomous vehicles and what that means for us as a society?
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Nikhil come to be a VC in SF having spent his early years in the UK?
2.) Why is Nikhil so excited about self-driving cars? What is the enabler that is allowing this mass rise of the autonomous vehicle?
3.) What happens in a world of little mechanical engineering at all, where repairs can be achieved with software updates? How does this change the complexity of production? How does this change what the supply chain might look like? How does this change the capital structure required?
4.)How does the rise of the autonomous vehicles effect the sharing economy? Is Nikhil bullish on Lyft, Uber, Didi? With on demand, when will we reach a point of equilibrium when the supply of drivers that gets drawn in and the price that attracts consumers will be equivalent?
5.) Who is the leader, is this a winner take all, will the acquisition of GM and Cruise mean a dominance? Who has Nikhil been impressed by?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Nikhil’s Fave Book: Leading by Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz
Nikhil’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily, CB Insights
Nikhil’s Most Recent Investment: Tally
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Nikhil on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Is Big Data Still A Thing with Matt Turck, Managing Director at FirstMark Capital
Matt Turck is Managing Director of FirstMark Capital where he invests across a broad range of early-stage enterprise and consumer startups. Prior to FirstMark, he was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures, the investment and incubation arm of Bloomberg LP. Previously, Matt was the co-founder of TripleHop Technologies, a venture-backed enterprise search software startup that was acquired by Oracle. Matt organizes two large monthly events, Data Driven NYC (focuses on Big Data and AI) and Hardwired NYC(focuses on IOT, AR/VR, drones). At Firstmark, Matt has made investments in the likes of Sketchfab, Sense 360 and the much loved X.ai with Amy Ingram as your personal secretary.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Matt make his way into the world of VC?
2.) What does big data really mean? With the cool kids in the data world moving on to obsessing over AI, is big data still a ‘thing’ in 2016?
3.) Why is now the time for big data? What has enabled big data to have sudden mass utility across a variety of applications?
4.) How does Matt view the integration of big data and AI? Is AI helping big data deliver it’s promise?
5.) How can we combat the incumbency advantage of large companies owning the majority of datasets? How can startups access similar datasets?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Matt’s Fave Blog: AVC, Chris Dixon, Brad Feld, Wait But Why
Matt’s Most Recent Investment: Hyperscience
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Matt on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: The Information's Jessica Lessin on The Future For Online Journalism & The Benefits Of A Subscription Based Business Model
1.) How did Jessica come to found The Information following The Wall Street Journal?
2.) Marc Andreesen: 'print journalism is converging in quality and technique with blogs and Wikipedia'. Does Jessica agree with this? Has revisability has led to a lower quality initial publication?
3.) How does Jessica view the competitive landscape for journalism today? Who are competitors and what would Jessica say is complimentary to The Information??
4.) We have seen the decentralization away from the central forms of authority in journalism. What effect has this decentralization had on distribution? Competition? Market size?
5.) What is the monetisation strategy for The Information? Why choose that strategy over the more prevalent others such as advertising?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Jessica’s Fave Book: Ben Bradlee: A Good Life
Jessica’s Fave Blog: Doug Young
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jessica on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Sam Lessin on Why Bots Will Change Business & The Internet Has Mostly Failed
Sam Lessin is a Partner at Slow Ventures who have made investments in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Mattermark, AngelList,Dropbox and many more. On top of this, Sam is also the Founder and Co-CEO at Fin, which is basically like Siri Echo or Google now except it actually works, truly a phenomenal product. Prior to Fin and Slow, Sam was VP of Product Management at Facebook following the acquisition of his company, Drop.io by Facebook in 2010. Sam is also an intern at The Information where he reports directly to the boss Jessica Lessin!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Sam come to found Fin and what was his route into VC with Slow?
2.) What are the fundamental shifts that have occurred in the world of tech? How has this affected the wider tech and investing ecosystem?
3.) Will the transition to bots and conversational interfaces represent a major point of disruption or more of an evolution in the interface paradigm?
4.) How can bots establish the same relationship and stickiness with the user as apps? In a world of bot domination where strong data sets is the ultimate weapon, are we not at a fundamental incumbency disadvantage? How can the platforms react to this?
5.) What will the effect of self driving cars be on society? How long before this was be possible? How does the sharing economy and capitalism survive in unison?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Sam’s Fave Book: The Three-Body Problem
Sam’s Fave Blog: The Information
Sam’s Most Recent Investment: Common
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sam on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: K9's Manu Kumar on His Approach To Risk, Valuation & Believing What Other People Don't
Manu Kumar founder and Chief Firestarter at K9 Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage micro-VC fund based in Palo Alto, according to K9 they invests ‘frighteningly early’ and like to be the first institutional capital invested in a startup. K9 is an investor in Lyft, Twilio, Occipital, eShares, and their companies have been acquired by the likes of Linkedin, Facebook, Dropbox, Paypal and more. Prior to K9, Manu was either the founder or co-founder of 4 companies, 3 of which with successful exits and the 4th being the fantastic eshares!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Manu come to found K9 and what was his route into VC? How does Manu define entrepreneurialism and how did this play out in his early life?
2.) “The best buys are found in things most people don’t understand or believe in.” How does this play out in Manu's investment strategy? ?
3.) “The riskiest thing is the belief there’s no risk.” How does risk assessment feature in Manu's investment mentality? How does Manu transition this to your portfolio construction? ?
4.) Josh Koppelman states “What has to be remembered is the defining role of price.” How much of a role does valuation play in Manu's investment decision making process?
5.) “An absence of losses can give you a great start toward a good outcome.” As a seed fund how does Manu approach inevitable losses? How does Manu try and minimize mortality rate?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Manu’s Fave Book: The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll
Manu’s Fave Blog: Strictly VC, Dan Primack: Term Sheet
Manu’s Most Recent Investment: GradeScope
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Manu on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward
1.) How Rod came to found one of New Zealand's breakout tech startup in Xero?
2.) What were the very first days of Xero like? How and why did Rod decide to IPO from the start? How did Rod convey the narrative so well from day 1?
3.) What does it take to transition a firm like Xero from a 50 man startup to a 500 an company? What are the challenges? How do you assure a consistent hiring quality and mechanism?
4.) How are Xero doing in the US in terms of fighting Intuit? Is it a winner take all market?
5.) How was the fundraising process for Rod? How did Rod choose and meet his investors? What was important for Rod when making the selection?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Rod’s Fave Book: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future
Rod’s Fave Blog: Feedly, Techmeme
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rod on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: How Startups Should React To Today's Funding Environment & Why Big Markets Are More Forgiving with Jenny Lefcourt, Partner @ Freestyle.vc
1.) How did Jenny made his way into VC from founding and exiting 2 startups?
2.) What were the differences in raising money as a founder and as a VC? What learnings as a founder did Jenny have that have helped her move into VC?
3.) How have the large macro-economic changes affected Jenny's investing style? Has she seen a change in her investment cadence? Does Jenny place more emphasis on burn reduction now?
4.) Why does Freestyle not invest with a thesis? What are the benefits of this? How does Jenny make investment decisions going forward without a thesis?
5.) What does Jenny mean when she says that VCs suffer from duck syndrome? What can VCs do to make them the best and their founders life easier?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Jenny’s Fave Book: Dreamland, Blinkist (Harry's Suggestion)
Jenny’s Most Recent Investment: CREXi
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jenny on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Rob Go @ NextView on WTF Is Seed Investing Today and Why Raising Too Much Money Can Harm Your Startup
Rob Go is a co-founder and Partner at NextView Ventures, Next View are hands on, high conviction true seed stage investors. Prior to founding NextView, Rob was at Spark Capital and focused on early stage investments in consumer web and mobile. Before joining Spark Capital, Rob worked at Ebay as the Business Product Lead for “Finding”. In this role, he oversaw the launch of major products that enhanced the search, browse, and product discovery experience for tens of millions of users.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Rob come to found NextView and what was his route into VC?
2.) NextView are seed investors but what does that really mean today? Why has the entire seed stage moved further down the funnel?
3.) With regards to runway, there are two side son the table, those like Jeff Clavier and I who believe 36 months is optimal. What side of the table is Rob on? Longer or shorter runway?
4.) Why are smaller rounds optimal according to Rob? What do they allow you to do that you cannot do with larger rounds? What does the rise of pre-seed do for Rob as a true seed investor?
5.) Regadless of label competition between VC is now larger than ever, what does Rob make of the personalisation of VC and branding tactics used by Mark Suster etc?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Rob’s Fave Book: Ready Player One
Rob’s Fave Blog: Wait But Why
Rob’s Most Recent Investment: Dia & Co
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rob on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! Attend one of the best conferences of the year, Sunrise, with speakers from the likes of Atlasssian, Canva and Planet Labs. Check it out here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!\20VC: Creating A Competitive Process Between VCs & Having Bill Gurley As A Board Member with Aaron Hirschhorn, Founder & CEO @ DogVacay
Aaron Hirschhorn is the founder, CEO and “Top Dog" of DogVacay, the leading online and mobile pet sitting company. DogVacay connects pet parents in need of services with more than 25,000 vetted and insured pet caregivers in 10,000 cities across the country. Founded in March 2012 and based in Santa Monica, CA, the company has over 80 employees and has raised $47M from investors including Omers, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to DogVacay, Aaron spent several years in venture capital and technology, working at Monitor Group, Upfront Ventures, and Monitor Ventures. Previously, Aaron was an analyst at Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Aaron come to found one of the startup hits to come out of LA? In the beginning what was the harder element the demand or the supply side?
2.) How did Aaron know when he had achieved product market fit with DogVacay? What were the signs and how did he follow this up? How did Aaaron react to VCs laughing at his concept and how did he stay energised and positive?
3.) How was the fundraising process for Aaron with DogVacay and Benchmark, Andreesen and First Round? How can founders look to control the dialogue? How many investors should founders look to target? What makes Aaron want and not want a particular investor?
4.) What business fundamentally work in the on demand economy and what don't ? How should marketplace founders be approaching the issue of unit economics and should growth still be the priority?
5.) What is it like having Bill Gurley as a broad member ? What will be the enabler that will allow DogVacy to achieve that market penetration required?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Aaron's Fave Blog Or Newsletter: Bill Gurley, Jason Calacanis: Inside As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Aaron on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Why More People Should Be Entrepreneurs & How Do You Know When You Are Ready with Matt Clifford @ Entrepreneur First
1.) How did Matt come to found the world's top technical talent pre-company programme?
2.) Should everyone be an entrepreneur? How can a founder determine whether this is the right path for them? Can entrepreneurialism be taught or is it an innate skill within?
3.) What does Matt think of the idea and fear of many founders that they are simply not ready? How do we know when one is ready? What are the signs?
4.) How important is mindset for founders? Matt has previously stated the importance of a growth mindset? What does he mean by this and how does he advise founders to approach this?
5.) What is the most common mistake Matt sees entrepreneurs in EF make? How does he help to combat this?
6.) What does the future of work look like? Where will jobs be at this century?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Matt's Fave Book: Sapiens (Same as Parker Thompson @ AngelList)
Matt's Fave Blog: Marginal Revolution
Matt's Most Recent Investment: Cloud NC, Third Eye
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Matt on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!\20VC: Raising A Solo GP Fund & Why They Are So Prominent Today with Charles Hudson, Managing Partner @ Precursor Ventures
1.) How did Charles made his way into VC from working with the CIA? What were Charles biggest takeaways from his operational experience?
2.) Why have we seen the rise of the solo GP fund? What tools and services can be used by solo GPs to make their lives easier?
3.) Chris Sacca said, 'you have to be a moron to launch a solo VC fund'. What does Charles think about this and what was it about Precursor that made him want to leave SoftTech?
4.) How does Charles' market requirements change now as a pre seed investor, a 100m exit is excellent. Do you you still need unicorns?
5.) How does Charles look to differentiate with Precursor in the sea of emerging VC funds? What is the most important thing for him about pr-seed investing?
6.) What is Charles' vision for Precursor? What would success look like for him?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Charles' Fave Book: Alec Ross: Industries of The Future
Charles' Fave Blog: The Information
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Charles on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst
1.) How did Chris come to found one of the hottest fashion startups, Lyst? What was the interview process with Benchmark like?
2.) Why did Chris become a VC first before an entrepreneur? What does being a VC allow you to become a better entrepreneur with?
3.) Chris has said before that we have not scratched the surface of e-commerce, so why have we not? What is the vision and what are the challenges that stand in the way? Question from Harry Briggs: Will we see physical retail stores largely disappear?
4.) Lyst place heavy emphasis on data collection and usage. Why is this? What does it power to Lyst to do? What interesting consumer trends and behaviours have been revealed from the data?
5.) How was the fundraising process for Chris? What did being in VC teach him about the process that he could implement in entrepreneurship? What were the challenges? What would he do differently if he were to raise again?
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Chris on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market
Brian O’Malley is a Partner @ Accel Partners, where he spearheads Accel's work with next-generation marketplaces and consumer-focused companies. He led the firm’s investments in Amino, Gametime, HotelTonight and Luma, as well as disruptive software-as-a-services businesses Duetto and Narvar. Brian joined Accel from Battery Ventures, where as a general partner he led investments in companies like Dollar Shave Club, BazaarVoice (public), Coupa, Skullcandy (public) and TradeKing (acquired by Ally). Prior to Battery, Brian led sales efforts and built some of the first web service-based API integrations for Bowstreet, Inc. (acquired by IBM).
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Brian make his way into one of the world's leading VC firms? What were Brian's biggest takeaways from being in the trenches during the bust of the dot com bubble?
2.) What is the macro economic view to value compression? How should startups being approaching and dealing with this?
3.) How can startups maintain growth as the priority whilst maintaining investor expectations on burn rates? What is Brian's approach to the growth vs retention theory?
4.) What retention metrics would Accel look for indifferent products? How does this vary from category to category? What are the commonalities Brian has seen in products that have insane retentive ability??
5.) Where does Brian stand on market size and the potential for market transition down the line? Does the market even need to be there today for it to be investable today?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Brian’s Fave Book: Zero To One By Peter Thiel
Brian’s Most Recent Investment: Luma: Fast, Reliable Wifi
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Brian on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Bessemer's Byron Deeter on The Commonalities Of Truly Great Founders and Learnings From Investing In Box, Twilio and GainSight
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Prior to being a VC, Byron himself was a veteran cloud CEO & Founder returning to venture capital in 2005 to lead Bessemer’s global cloud practice where he has been actively involved with over 100 cloud investments representing a third of the market cap of all public cloud companies. Byron has lead investments in the likes of Box, Twilio, Intercom, Cornerstone On Demand and many many more. Byron's pedigree is recognised globally as he is consistently ranked one of the top global investors across all industries.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did Byron make his way into VC from being a veteran cloud CEO and Founder?
2.) What are the commonalities angst the truly exceptional operators that Byron has worked with? What is it that makes the likes Aaron Levie so special?
3.) We saw a $63bn drop in late stage SaaS valuations, so what does this really mean for the early guys? In these markets should founders be placing greater emphasis on unit economics?
4.) With the increasing importance of customer retention will we see further increased growth in the field of customer success? How important is it really now for startups?
5.) How does Byron define efficient growth, what does cash is king mean? Where does Byron stand on the bottoms up sales approach, is this the new sales method of the 21st century?
6.) What have been the biggest takeaways for Byron of watching Box, Sendgrid, Twilio go into hyper growth mode and scale into the rocketships that they are
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Byron’s Fave Book: The Everything Store
Byron's Fave Productivity Tools: Clutter
Byron's Fave Blog: Bleacher Report, Techcrunch
Byron’s Most Recent Investment: Rainforest QA
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Byron on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Why It Is All Still About User Growth and How To Address Retention For A Consumer Social App with Mike Mignano, Co-Founder & CEO @ Anchor
1.) How did Mike come to found one of the hottest new audio startups, Anchor?
2.) Why have we seen such a renaissance of podcast listening? Will this continue in the long term future and if so, what will drive the long term future growth?
3.) How did Mike use the beta testing phase to learn and iterate on customer behaviour? Following this, how did he implement this feedback to create a community that could be harnessed on launch?
4.) When examining alongside Sarah Tavel's hierarchy of engagement, how does Mike address retention and the creation of virtuous loops within Anchor?
5.) How does Mike fundamentally attempt to menthes Anchor? At what level of growth can the cash taps be turned on? How can Anchor be made to be revenue generating for both the platform and content creators?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Mike's Fave Blog: The Skimm
Mike's Fave Book: Cat's Cradle
Sarah Tavel's Hierarchy of Engagement Jakob Nielsen UX Designer As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Mike on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Why Every Successful Company Pivots and Good Companies Get Funded in Good & Bad Markets with John Frankel, Founding Partner @ ff Venture Capital
John Frankel is the founding partner of ff Venture Capital and has been an early-stage investor since 1999. He has served on the boards of more than 35 companies and has led investments in more than 80 companies, including Cornerstone OnDemand (CSOD), Indiegogo, Ionic Security, Unikey, Socure, Skycatch, Plated, 500px, Distil Networks, and Bottlenose. Prior to founding ffVC, John worked at Goldman Sachs for 21 years in a variety of roles that involved technology development, reengineering and capital markets. At Goldman Sachs, he worked closely with some of the world’s leading hedge fund managers and developed a keen understanding of emerging technologies and portfolio risk/return management.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How did John make the move from Oxford grad to NYC venture capitalist?
2.) How has the massive decrease in startup costs affected the seed funding environment? How does David identify the startups he invests in with the plethora that are now available?
3.) How much of an extent is portfolio a branding tool for VCs? In recent years we have seen the rise of the operational VC model with the likes of Andreesen, will this continue as a prominent model in VC?
4.) How as a seed investor does John advise his founders when chasing a valuation that will only lead to a down round? What is John's views on the dreaded down round?
5.) Many companies pivot in the process? Does John like to see pivots? If pivoting what is it important for founders to remember and focus on?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
John's Fave Book: The Accidental Superpower
John's Most Recent Investment: Wade and Wendy
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and John on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Europe's Youngest Series A Venture Partner, James Wise @ Balderton Capital on How To Get Into Venture & What The Future Of The VC Industry Looks Like
1.) As Europe’s youngest venture partner, is venture capital a viable career going forward? What makes James say this? Has there been a time when you doubted this thesis and why?
2.) So it is a viable career, where do we go from here? Why should we choose venture in Europe over venture in the US? What are the inherent pros and cons? Does James get the itch to head to the Valley?
3.) So VC in Europe is the place to be, so why did James choose Balderton? There are a plethora of great and emerging funds in Europe, what attracted James to Balderton?
4.) What does the next 10 years of VC look like? Where we are heading? Although a viable career now, will this continue to be with increasing power of crowd sourced financing and decreasing startup costs?
5.) What advice would James give a young individual looking to get into the industry? How can an individual show their passion and inherent interest for VC and startups in a tangible way?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
James' Fave Blog: The Morning Paper by Adrian Colyer, Nathan Benaich Newsletter
James' Fave Book: Score Takes Care Of Itself: Bill Walsh, Nick Bostrum: Superintelligence
James' Most Recent Investment: Magic Pony
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and James on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Fundraising Is Also Business Development with Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder & CEO @ Algolia
1.) How did Jonathan make his way into tech and come to found the likes of Friendster and Nuzzel? What were his biggest lessons from working at Netscape?
2.) How did Algolia go about crafting their company culture and how have they approached maintaining it as they have gone into hyper growth mode?
3.) What des Nicolas think are the most common challenges with regards to the building and maintenance of a company culture? What pitfalls and advice would Nicolas give to an early stage founder looking to build that culture from the offset? How can investors determine the strength and sustainability of the company culture when viewing startups?
4.) How was the fundraising process for Nicolas? How did the rounds differ from round to round? What elements surprised or challenged him? For Algolia, an incredibly hot startup, how did Nicolas go about about selecting which investors to have?
5.) Talking of the highly competitive round and the very excitable startup community, how do you respond to all of this insane hype and positivity. How do you ensure that you do not fall into the trap of drinking your own cool aid and remain grounded and humble?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Nicolas' Fave Blog: SaaStr
Nicolas’ Fave Book: Creativity Inc
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Nicolas on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: The Rise Of The Celebrity VC & The Pros and Cons Of Staying Private with Logan Bartlett @ Battery Ventures
1.) How Logan made his way into the wonderful world of venture capital?
2.) So as young chap entering the industry, I would love to hear how you have gone abut trying to build your brand and identity? What are the key personal marketing strategies for you? How important do you think the brand of the VC is? How do you address the juxtaposition of branding and marketing yourself and battery?
3.) How does Logan approach the deal sourcing aspect of the job? What is his approach to this vital thesis?
3.) Moving to more financial matters I want to address both the seed end and the later stage end of the market today. So starting with the seed funding environment, in recent years we have seen a massive drop in the cost of company creation in conjunction with a large rise in seed funding,. What is the effect of this for you as a Series A-B investor, potentially located in what some may call the funding gap?
4.) You are very much located in the B2B space, d I am intrigued wht kind of ARR do you look for at the stage you are investing and what price point per customer do you believe allows for that ARR metric to be hit within a reasonably short amount of time?
5.) Moving to the later stages of the market I have seen in a slide of yours from the past that you stated that more institutional investors have made their way into the private markets and startups are staying private longer. You followed up by staying that this is a win win for all? Why do you think that is? Does it not mean later stage VCs are priced out of rounds due to the inflow of public money? Does it not mean later stage startups attain inflated valuation that will only lead to a down round at follow on or IPO?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Logan's Fave Book: Gang Leader For A Day
Logan's Fave Blog Or Newsletter: Dan Primack: Term Sheet
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Logan on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: The Best Determinant Of Product Market Fit & Why Prior Experience Is Not Required For Founder Success with Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner @ Battery Ventures
1.) How Neeraj made his way into the world of VC?
2.)Question From Logan Bartlett: 'What is your thought process on what makes a good vs a bad deal? Also, how have you developed your ability to process deals and poke holes in logic?'
3.) How can early stage Saas founders determine the extent to their product market fit??
4.) What is it like to back rocketships like GlassDoor or Marketo and helping scale operations when you’re in hyper growth mode? Does Neeraj agree with Sheryl Sandberg’s statement, it doesn’t matter where you sit, as long as you have a seat on the rocketship?
5.) Neeraj previously stated in a Nasdaq article that it is all about the team and the market. So I am intrigued what are Neeraj's thoughts on VC founder alignment? Neeraj also places emphasis on the market, so how does Neeraj view the juxtaposition between current and future market?
6.) One hurdle preventing some companies from growth is the ability to attain later rounds of funding so as a largely Series B investor, why is raising a Series B so tough? Is it the embodiment of the funding barbell?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Neeraj's Fave Blog: Brad Feld, Jason Lemkin
Neeraj's Most Recent Investment: Pendo.io
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Neeraj on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: From Netscape To Friendster To Nuzzel: Jonathan Abrams on A Silicon Valley Adventure
1.) How did Jonathan make his way into tech and come to found the likes of Friendster and Nuzzel? What were his biggest lessons from working at Netscape?
2.) How can founders determine the customer stickiness and value proposition in the early days of product testing with friends and family?
3.) How does Jonathan view the competitive landscape for news aggregation? Why is consumer app such a competitive space?
4.) Question From Matt Mazzeo: How does Jonathan compare this moment in time to previous points in the innovation curve?
5.) Having worked with both the old and the new guard of VC, how does working with Lowercase, Homebrew and Softtech compare with the old guard of Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Jonathan's Fave Book:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jonathan on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta
Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a new venture fund backed by Bloomberg L.P. Prior to Bloomberg, Roy was chairman of OUYA, a new kind of game console, where he was the first investor. Before that Roy spent five years leading News Corporation’s IGN Entertainment, an online media company with a monthly audience of 70 million people, a top 10 YouTube channel, and the leading website in its category in almost every market globally. Roy served on the board of Revision3 (acquired by Discovery) and was a board observer at Flixster (acquired by Warner Bros). Before joining News Corp., Roy was in the public sector in the office of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and at New York’s 2012 Olympic bid.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Roy made his way into the world of VC from working alongside Mayor Michael Bloomberg?
2.) What do all these definitions within AI mean? What does artificial intelligence include? What is machine learning? What is deep learning?
3.) When we talk about AI are we talking pure AI , with the likes of Watson and DeepMind or are we talking consumer centric software with elements of AI?
4.) With data playing such a huge role in the efficiency of AI, do large incumbents like Google and Facebook not have a massive advantage? How can startups get access to datasets? Is AI not fundamentally an acquihire industry?
5.) How important has open source in allowing and encouraging the progression of the machine intelligence ecosystem? What more can be done to further it's growth?
6.) With the rise of machine intelligence, what does the future of work look like? How will we live in a world where 47% of white collar jobs will be replaced by machines and AI?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Roy's Fave Book:
- Watershed Down
Roy's Fave Blog or Newsletter:
- Media ReDefined by Jason Hirschhorn, Asim Azar, the exponential view
20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
1.) How Aydin made his way into the world of VC from being a Senior Manager @ Google?
2.) What does Aydin suggest to all those looking to make the move into VC who have potentially, an unconventional background??
3.) What caused Aylin's shift from angel investor to VC ? What was Aydin's investment strategy look like at the beginning and how has that evolved over time? How does Aydin look to differentiate Felicis from the plethora of seed funds?
4.) How does Felicis' stage agnosticity work in practicality for Aydin and the fund itself? How much of a role does valuation play in Felicis' investment decision making?
5.) Question from Rob Hayes @ First Round: How did the Rovio investment come about? Why do you say you are most proud if it?
6.) Question From Hiten Shah: How do you approach the topic of growing the organisation, whilst still supporting founders with the same time and quality?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Aydin's Fave Book:
Aylin's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Aydin on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Sprig's Gagan Biyani on The 3 Principles Of Fundraising and Building The World's Largest Restaurant
1.) What was the origin story for Sprig? What was the aha moment?
2.) Question from Josh Elman: What lessons have Sprig and Gagan learnt from Chipotle, both in terms of their growth and their food?
3.) What are the coolest things that Gagan has learnt about foods that have learnt and not worked from user and product testing?
4.) On TWIST Gagan stated that the food delivery market is a winner take all market , so what makes Gagan believe that and what will ensure that Sprig is the startup that will be victorious?
5.) How do Sprig address expansion theory? Are they the Uber or the Lyft in terms of aggressive market expansion? How do Sprig choose which new market to enter? Is there a scientific approach?
6.) From having raised 9 rounds of VC and angel funding, what are Gagan's biggest tips and takeaways to anyone entering the VC or funding process?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Gagan's's Fave Book:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Gagan on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!20VC: Greylock's Sarah Tavel on What Founders Need From A Good Investor and Why Products Need To Be 10X Better & Cheaper
1.) How Sarah made her way into the world of VC from selling ads in college?
2.) What is the deal sourcing story behind your sourcing of Pinterest for Bessemer? What made Sarah so excited about the product? At what stage did Sarah realise the huge potential Pinterest did have?
3.) How did Sarah decide Greylock was the right VC to choose over the plethora of other options?
4.) How does Sarah try and appeal to the inner founder? What does she do to make sure she is the first person they call? What forms of communication does Srah like to communicate with?
5.) What is Sarah's attitude to VC's personal brand? How has Sarah seen the personalisation of VC in recent years? Why the shift from blog to Medium?
6.) What is the most important attribute for a consumer product to have? Does it have to be both 10X better and cheaper?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Sarah's's Fave Book:
Sarah's Fave Blog or Newsletter:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Josh on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Greylock's Josh Elman on Why We Are Not In A Consumer Downturn, The Next Wave Of Social and What Twitter Should Do Next
1.) How Josh made his move into the VC world from Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook?
2.) What were the biggest takeaways of watching fb, Linkedin and Twitter to hyper growth mode?
3.) Question from Jeff Seibert: What would Josh do with the Twitter product today??
4.) How would Josh apply his principles of the on boarding process to Twitter? What does he mean when he refers to the ladder of engagement?
5.) How does Josh respond to Fred Wilson's out on the consumer downturn? Is consumer really as hard as Fred makes it out to be? What sort of metrics really get Josh excited when viewing consumer startups?
6.) How has Josh's own investment decision making process been honed and refined since joining Greylock?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Josh's Fave Book:
Josh's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Josh on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: RobinHood's Baiju Bhatt on The Importance Of Design in Fintech and Having A 10X Better Product
Baiju Bhatt is the Co-Founder and CEO at RobinHood, the wildly successful stock market trading app with absolutely no commission fees. Since launching RobinHood there have been many amazing milestones including being awarded an Apple Design Award (first Finch company ever to achieve this), funding from the likes of Index, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and even movie star Jared Leto. They were also nominated for best mobile app at The Crunchies by TechCrunch this year.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Baiju made his way into the world of tech and came to found RobinHood?
2.) How did Baiju deal with the regulatory hurdles heading into the fintech and trading world?
3.) How did Baiju go about building the waitlist for RobinHood to 1m people? What were the defining strategies and channels that made the difference?
4.) What is the thesis behind the design of RobinHood? Will this design enable previously untouched markets to tap into the growing trading market?
5.) What are the biggest challenges for Baiju and RobinHood going forward? What keeps Baiju up at night? What is Baiju's biggest piece of advice to a founder scaling their startup?
6.) How can early stage founders really determine whether they have product market fit and what does this look like? What re the metrics required to suggest serious traction?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Baiju's Fave Blog or Newsletter: TechCrunch
Baiju's Fave Productivity Tool: Slack
Baiju's Fave Book: The Case For Mars
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Baiju on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC
Paige Craig is a Founder and General Partner of Arena Ventures. He is an experienced angel investor who has invested in over 110 startups in the last seven years, including companies like Lyft, AngelList, Wish, Postmates, Twitter, Styleseat, Zenpayroll, Quizup and more. Paige spent the first half of his career in the Marine Corps and US Intelligence Community and later launched a defense contractor, driving alone into Iraq in 2003 with just $10,000 and expanding operations across the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa and Southeast Asia.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Paige made his way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) What were Paige's biggest takeaways from his previous career in the military? How did this shape his investment thesis?
3.) Arena VC have both the fund and the AngelList syndicate, why did Paige choose this dual model? What have been the drivers of it's success?
4.) What does Paige believe makes a great VC? What aspects of himself would he like to improve upon? Is an inherent fight mode common among VCs?
5.) What advice would Paige give to someone looking to start a syndicate? What would Craig recommend to someone looking to join a syndicate?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Paige’s Fave Book:
Paige’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Paige on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: Homebrew's Satya Patel on The Key Components of Being A Great VC & The 3 Main Reasons Startups Fail At Seed
Satya Patel is a Partner @ Homebrew alongside Hunter Walk. Prior to Homebrew, Satya was VP Product at Twitter, building and leading the Product Management and User Services teams. Before Twitter, Satya was a Partner at Battery Ventures, where he co-led the seed and early stage investing practices. In 2003, Satya joined Google and was responsible for AdSense product management and partnerships. Before heading to Silicon Valley for Google, I worked for DoubleClick, in venture capital and as a strategy consultant.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Satya made his way into the world of tech and came to Partner with Hunter @ Homebrew?
2.) Is hustle the key component of a great VC? What does Satya believes makes a great investor?
4.) How can startups present emotion and depict their narrative to the VC? What are the benefits of doing so? What founder is most
5.) From Satya's experience, what are the most common reasons startups fail at the seed stage? What can they do to maximise their chances of survival?
6.) We always hear that products should focus on a niche but how then do you attract VC money that is looking for a broad opportunity that can return the fund?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Satya’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: CB Insights, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld
Satya’s Fave Book: A Fine Balance
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Satya on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!Immediately's Branko Cerny on The Rise Of Bottoms Up Sales and The Importance of Branding For Enterprise SaaS Companies
Branko Cerny is the Founder and CEO at Immediately, the mobile platform for modern sales professionals whose mission is to elevate sales back to it’s core foundation, a relationship driven craft. Immediately has some of the US’s finest backing in terms of investment with the likes of Naval Ravikant @ AngelList, Ryan Holmes @ Hootsuite, Jonathan Abrams @ Friendster and Nuzzel and previous guest Kate Shillo @ Galvanize.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Branko made his way into the world of tech and came to be CEO @ Immediately?
2.) How does Branko find being one of the youngest enterprise CEO in the business? What are the challenges and what are the benefits?
3.) What can enterprise companies learn from the likes of Tinder and Equinox? How important is brand building for emerging enterprise sales companies?
4.) To what extent will we see the bottoms up sales process continue in enterprise sales? How does this change Immediately approach to UX, UI and brand building? Why did Branko choose to focus on a mobile platform with Immediately?
5.) How did Branko come to meet his stellar lineup of investors? What value add was he looking for when assembling the lineup? Is he concerned by the large number of investors Immediately has at an early stage?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Branko's Fave Blog or Newsletter: First Round Review, Nir Eyal
Branko's Fave Productivity Tool: Intercom, Moleskin Notebook (Harry's Productivity Tool too!)
Branko's Fave Book: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Branko on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? A hundred? A thousand? The answer is too many. But here’s the thing—even though I knew I wanted to do something about it, I didn’t know how. It’s called SaneBox. SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. Visit sanebox.com/20VC today and they’ll throw in an extra $20 credit on top of the two-week free trial.20VC: Maveron's Rebecca Kaden on The Patterns Of Entrepreneurship and Taking A Consumer Product From Niche To Mass Market
1.) How Rebecca made her way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) Maveron have shown their belief in the consumerisation of IOT. What are Rebecca's thoughts on the space, how it is progressing, barriers that are preventing mass adoption?
3.) What is your take on the integration of messaging and chat with IOT? Whis there a recent broader market positivity towards chat interfaces at the moment?
4.) Maveron have also shown their likeability towards hardware investments so why is this? Why do Maveron not feel the broader VC market concerns of shipping, logistics? Are we seeing a shift in investing patterns in hardware?
5.) How do Rebecca approach the common problem with consumer startups transtioning from an early adopter market to a mass market product? What does Rebecca feel is the tipping point? What is necessary to make the transition from SF hipster client to everyone?
6.) What are the benefits are of having a narrow investing thesis (only consumer)? How has Rebecca found it? Is it challenging when finding companies you would like to invest in but are outside the mandate?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Rebecca's Fave Book:
Rebecca's Fave Blog or Newsletter:Rebecca's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rebecca on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? A hundred? A thousand? The answer is too many. But here’s the thing—even though I knew I wanted to do something about it, I didn’t know how. It’s called SaneBox. SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. Visit sanebox.com/20VC today and they’ll throw in an extra $20 credit on top of the two-week free trial.Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future
Rob Hayes is a partner at First Round Capital where he opened up the firm's San Francisco office. Over the past eight years, he has led investments in companies such as Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), Gnip (acquired by Twitter), Square, Uber, eero, and Planet Labs. Prior to joining First Round, Rob became the first venture investor at Omidyar Network, the investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. While there, he led most of the initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group. Before that, Rob worked at Palm, where he product managed Palm OS and started the company's corporate venture fund.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Rob made his move into the VC world from working with Palm in the heyday?
2.) Question From David Hornik : How did Rob's seed investment in Uber originate? What made Rob invest? Did Rob realise the potential for Uber when he invested? When did Rob realize it was going to be huge?
3.) Has the investment in Uber changed how Rob views seed investing? Talking of the Uber’s of the world, how do you ensure that you find and decide to invest in the next Uber, when it raises a seed round?
4.) In terms of deal closing, how does Rob approach that element of the deal and what was the competition and closing environment around the Uber deal?
5.) Question from Satya at Homebrew: Stepping back and looking at First Round, what has changed in FRC’s approach as the firm has grown? How does the firm think about managing generational transition?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Rob's Fave Book:
Rob's Fave Blog or Newsletter:Rob's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Rob on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? A hundred? A thousand? The answer is too many. But here’s the thing—even though I knew I wanted to do something about it, I didn’t know how. It’s called SaneBox. SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. Visit sanebox.com/20VC today and they’ll throw in an extra $20 credit on top of the two-week free trial.Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup
Puneet Mehta, Founder @ Msg.ai, an artificial intelligence startup for conversational commerce and for an AI founder you don’t get much better than starting your career at IBM's TJ Watson Center, which is exactly what Puneet did. He then went on to build predictive platforms to power large-scale trading systems aka bots on Wall St. It is clearly not joust us who think he is awesome as Advertising Age named Puneet to the Creativity 50 list in 2014, honoring the most creative and innovative thinkers and doers.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Puneet made his way into the world of AI and came to be the founder of YC's latest, Msg.ai?
2.) How has the YC experience been for Msg.ai and for Puneet as a founder? Have YC been able to keep the same quality of mentorship with the largely expanding number in their latest batch?
3.) VC funding is usually very available to YC alums graduating, how will Puneet go about picking his investors? What are the fundamental determinants?
4.) What have been the biggest takeaways for Puneet? What has been the highlight? What has been tough? What was surprising and unexpected? How did Puneet deal with the requirement for 10% weekly growth?
5.) Taking a step back now, Puneet has stated before about building the Turing test for money. So what does he mean by this and how does he look at AI as a key driver for conversational commerce?
6.) What is it about messaging that makes Puneet believe this is the platform of the future? What is it that bots provide that has never been possible before?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Puneet's Fave Book:
Puneet's Fave Blog or Newsletter: As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Puneet on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Ciaran O'Leary is the General Partner at one of Europe's newest funds, BlueYard. A $120m fund located at the early stage, centring around 3 key areas: The decentralisation of markets, the democratisation of capabilities, and the liberation of data. Prior to BlueYard, Ciaran was a Partner at Earlybird with investments in the likes of Peak Games (emerging markets social gaming), 6Wunderkinder (productivity apps), Moped (private messaging), B2X Care Solutions (outsourcing platform), madvertise (mobile targeting network) and simfy (digital music distribution company). Before Earlybird, Ciarán co-founded a startup and gathered operational experience at others.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Ciaran made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) What is the thesis with BlueYard? What is the preferred cheque size, sector and geography?
3.) With the mass of VCs emerging, how can startups at the early stage determine whether a VC really is early stage? Are there any defining characteristics?
4.) For startup founders out there who always hear from fellow founders that everything is going gangbusters, how should they react to that? How can you determine whether a startup really is doing well?
5.) Say the startup really is going well and they are looking to scale and hire, we always hear we need a world beating, world class X? How can they communicate that hire better to their current team and their board? What should the CEO or Head of Talent be focusing on when viewing talent? Is there anything they should look out for in particular?
6.) Now when a startup really scales, board meetings become a big part of a CEO’s life. So how can CEO’s turn useless board meetings into very useful value added meetings? How can they optimize that time? What should they look for? What should they ask for?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Ciaran's Fave Book: The Road
Ciaran's Fave Blog: The Economist Espresso
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ciaran on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing
Matt Mazzeo is Managing Director at Lowercase Capital, alongside legendary angel investor, Chris Sacca. At Lowercase Matt leads a seed and series A investment strategy managing a portfolio of over forty investments including Uber, Twitter, Stripe and Optimizely just to name a few. Prior to joining Lowercase Capital, Matt spearheaded many of the digital and venture efforts at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Matt helped shape the agency’s seed stage investment strategy and played an integral role in the founding of CAA’s incubated start-up companies, including Funny or Die, WhoSay, and Moonshark. Matt has been recognized as an innovative force across technology, entertainment, and advertising for which Fast Company named Matt one of the Most Creative People in Business. In addition to making Forbes Midas Brink List in 2014, Matt has been recognized on both Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 List in 2013, and The Wrap’s Inaugural Innovators List.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Matt made the transition from the world of celebrity management to the world of venture capital?
2.) How have we seen the personalisation of VCs in the emerging eco-system? Are VCs themselves brands now? How does Matt look to establish his brand?
3.) What are the required KPI's to make a successful investor? What is Matt pleased with in himself and what would he like to improve?
4.) Why will we see the decentralisation of VC away from the traditional Sand Hill Road? How does being in LA affect the operations and deal flow of Lowercase?
5.) What are Matt's biggest learnings from being partner with Chris? What has Matt founded the most challenging in making the transition from CAA to VC?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Matt's Fave Book:
Matt's Fave Blog or Newsletter:Matt's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Matt on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: Niccolo De Masi on The Bursting Of The Tech Bubble and What It Takes To Be A Celebrity Partner with Glu Mobile
Niccolo De Masi is the CEO & Chairman @ Glu Mobile, one of the world’s hottest gaming companies with title including the current No 1 Game in the App Store with the Kendall and Kylie Game, Glu is also the maker of the Kim Kardashian game and the likes of Deer Hunter and many more. Prior to Glu, Niccolo was CEO at mobile entertainment company Hands On Mobile and before that Niccolo was the CEO at London listed mobile entertainment company, Monstermob Group Plc.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) What does Niccolo make of the wildly unrealistic pricing applied to early stage startups today? What will result from this incredibly optimistic pricing?
2.) If Niccolo were a VC today, how would he respond to the impending implosion of the early stage startups? What are the best VCs currently doing and what can startups do to preserve as much value as possible?
3.) How central a role does first mover advantage become in a down turning market? Will we see large scale consolidation and if so what will the effects of this be? How can startups position themselves to be the consolidator not the consolidated?
4.) How do Glu pick the celebrities that are featured for their celebrity feature games? What are the KPI's? What are the requirements in terms of existing brand and audience for a celebrity game to be a success?
5.) Why are women better at establishing larger social following than men? What celebrities would Niccolo most like to have on Glu's platform who they currently do not have?
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Niccolo on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: Christian Hernandez on The Importance of Mobile and The Relationship Between Growth vs Revenue
Christian Hernandez is the Co-Founder and Partner @ Whitestar Capital in London. Prior to co-founding White Star Capital, Christian worked at Facebook and led the international expansion of the company’s Business Development, Platform and Developer Network groups. He previously held leadership roles in the U.S. and Europe at Google and Microsoft and started his career in technology at MicroStrategy, a startup he joined prior to its 1999 IPO. Christian has worked closely with entrepreneurs and leading VCs and has been an active angel investor and advisor. He represents White Star on the Boards of KeyMe, Glow Media, Bloglovin’ and Hole 19. Christian also serves as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Christian made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) Having worked with the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, how has Christian seen the ecosystem develop; for both the good and the bad?
3.) Moving to White Star specifically now, what is the thesis, investment mandate? Average cheque size, preferred sectors? Geography? Talking of geography, WSC has a transatlantic model with offices in both London and NYC, why is that? What are the benefits of having this spread?
4.) According to Mattermark, White Star have 38% of your portfolio in mobile, so what are Christians views on the evolution of mobile? How does he respond to Fred Wilson’s post about the mobile downtown and the difficulty in attaining and maintaining traction for mobile apps? What are Christian's thoughts on discovery?
5.) Where does Christian stand on the relationship between growth and revenue? Are there any cases where it can be beneficial to focus solely on growth? In today’s environment, with VCs moderating their valuations more, is it possible to raise on pure momentum growth?
6.) Christian recently wrote an article: ‘Hiring For The Future Of Your Company’, so what does he really mean by this? Is it not a little ironic coming from the VC scene, an inherently risky asset class who have a fundamental unwillingness to move away from the old hiring style of investment bank or consultancy, in many cases?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Christian's Fave Book: Physics of the Future
Christian's Fave Blog: Medium, Nuzzel
Christian's Most Serendipitous Investment: Keyme
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Christian on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Tom Tunguz on Why Now Is The Best Time To Be Investing and The Effect of Late Stage Valuations on Startups
Tom Tunguz is a Partner @ Redpoint Ventures, where he has invested in Axial, Dremio, Expensify, Electric Imp, Looker, and ThredUP. Before joining Redpoint, Tomasz was the product manager for Google’s AdSense social-media products and AdSense internationalization. Tom is also the author of the world famous blog and newsletter which can be found at http://tomtunguz.com
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Tom made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) What does the huge drop in late stage saas valuations mean for the early guys? Does Tom expect them to hunker down? Take more time? Spend less cash?
3.) In recent years with the likes of Zenefits, we have seen the rise of Free Saas Enabled Marketplaces, why have we seen this rise, what are the benefits of adopting this strategy? Does the lack of predictability and lower (30%) gross margin not generate concern towards the model?
4.) Where does Tom see room for real innovation in SaaS? Is Tom excited about mobile enterprise?
5.) Question from Javier Soltero @ Microsoft: How have you approached developing your 'personal' brand and how that has made an impact in your development as an investor?
6.) Question from Eric ver Ploeg (episode 70) and Tak Lo (Episode 37): Where does Tom generate the ideas for articles and what does the idea creation process look like?’ What does the scheduling look like to churn our such high quality content on a daily occurrence?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Tom's Fave Book: Narcissus and Goldmund
Tom's Fave Blog: Saastr, David Skok
Tom's Most Recent Investment: Dremio
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Tom on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC FF: Hiten Shah on VC Funded vs Bootstrapped Businesses and How He Decides Which Startups To Advise
Hiten Shah is one of the most prominent players in the data marketing industry having co-Founded both KissMetrics (raised $10m+ VC Funding) and Crazy Egg (bootstrapped), both wildly successful businesses serving some of the world's largest companies. Hiten is also an extremely successful angel investor with investments in the likes of Buffer, Mattermark and MessageMe (acquired by Yahoo.) In addition, Hiten is also a serial startup advisor having been an advisor with Linkedin, SlideShare and Wordpress' Automattic.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Hiten made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) Why did Hiten decide to take VC funding for on startup and not the other? Did taking VC funding allow for much greater growth or make him less resourceful and creative?
3.) How have Hiten's entrepreneurial endeavours altered his attitude to investing? How does Hiten's large personal brand add to his investing style?
4.) Hiten has said before that he likes to ask founders 'what is their earliest most traumatic memory'? Why is that and what does Hiten learn from that?
5.) Question from Erik Torenberg @ ProductHunt: How does Hiten assess which startups he wants to spend time with as an advisor?
6.) Question from Ryan Hoover @ ProductHunt: What is the most counter-intuitive advice for this starting a company?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Hiten’s Fave Book: The War of Art
Hiten’s Fave Blog: 731 Users Reveal Why Slack Is So Addictive
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Hiten on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures
Jim Scheinman is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Maven Ventures, a leading seed stage consumer VC with investments in the likes of AngelList, WealthFront and Altspace. Prior to founding Maven, Jim was a pioneer in the early days of the social media revolution as Head of Business Development and Sales at the first social networking site, Friendster. However, in 2005, Jim left Friendster to join co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch to launch Bebo as the first employee and Board member. Bebo later went on to become a unicorn for Jim, however, that was not his only unicorn as he was also an investor in Tango ($bn valuation) and NBCi (IPOd for 6bn.)
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Jim made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) What was it like being in the midst of the social media revolution as it was taking place? How does Jim view the social scene today? Why does Jim think there is skepticism to investing in social?
3.) On consumer mobile Fred Wilson stated: ‘doing anything in the consumer mobile space is super hard. i can’t think of many consumer mobile apps that have gained massive traction and sustained it. can you?' So why is the space so hard? Is it not a monopoly play with the dominant incumbents?
4.) How has Jim seen the consumer landscape develop over the last decade with the rise of mobile? How can you tackle the distribution challenges inherent within mobile? Does Jim agree that with mobile consumer product market fit is no longer enough to gain a large user base?
5.) What are the core elements of building a successful consumer business? What are the challenges? Is there a pareto’s principle on this, with 20% determining 80% of the returns?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Jim's Fave Book: The Boys In The Boat
Jim's Fave Blog: Mattermark, Strictly VC, TechCrunch
Jim's Most Recent Investment: HomeMade
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jim on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Andy McLoughlin is a Partner with SoftTech VC, where he primarily invests in B2B, SaaS, developer tools and mobile applications. Prior to joining SoftTech, Andy was co-founder of London-based Huddle, under Andy’s leadership, Huddle became one of Europe’s most awarded and well-known technology startups, raising over $80M of venture funding to date. Since 2010 Andy has been a prolific angel investor building a portfolio covering 35 startups, mostly in the SaaS / B2B space. Just to name a few of the investments from his incredible portfolio Andy was an angel in the likes of Buffer, Intercom, Pipedrive, Postmates, Secret Escapes, just to name a few.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Andy made his startup as an entrepreneur and then VC?
2.) What was it that made Andy make the move from the world of entrepreneurship to VC?
3.) As a seed stage investor, what does Andy make of the Series A crunch? How prevalent has it been for him as an investor? What is the optimal amount of runway founders should raise for?
4.) What does Andy think of the size and cadence of the first funding rounds that we are seeing now? What does he make of the rise of the second seed or the bridge round? Is it an indication of trouble?
5.) SoftTech are near the closing of Fund V, so what is the thesis and the mission going forward? What themes and spaces is Andy most excited by and why?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Andy's Fave Book:
Andy's Fave Blog or Newsletter:Andy's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Andy on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content
Gary Liu is the CEO @ Digg, the incredibly famous platform that allows users to find, read and share the most talked about stories on the internet. Prior to joining Digg, Gary was an early employee at Spotify holding numerous positions including, Head of Spotify Labs and Global Director of Ad Product Strategy. Gary joined Spotify from AOL, where he was the Director of Sales Strategy and Operations at Patch. Before joining AOL, Gary was a business and sales operations leader at Google and Clickable.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Gary made his entry into the world of tech and later became CEO at Digg?
2.) What were Gary's biggest takeaways from his time at Google and being an early employee at Spotfiy? How has he adapted those learnings to his role now at Digg?
3.) What really happened at Digg? What went wrong? Why did Digg not live up to the early hype of being the darling of the internet age? How are Digg evolving to change this?
4.) In the vastly competitive space of content creation and distribution, how do Digg stand out and differentiate themselves from the plethora of options available to consumers?
5.) How do Digg try to engage and unite the community through the commenting process without alienating people through the potential for malicious posts and trolling?
6.) How does a platform like Digg plan to monetize content with the ever disappearing ad dollar? Does it concern Gary or does he see potential in other avenues?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Gary's Fave Book: J.D Salinger, The Catcher and The Rye
Gary's Fave Blog: Jon Russell, Asia Tech News Review
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Gary on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: Investing In The Next Frontiers Of Tech & Harry Potter with Adam Draper, Founder & CEO @ Boost VC
Adam Draper is a fourth generation venture capitalist and the Founder & CEO @ Boost VC, a specialised seed stage accelerator that invests in blockchain and virtual reality startups. Before starting Boost, Adam angel invested in 20 companies including Coinbase, Plangrid and Practice Fusion. During his angel investment period, Adam was also the Founder of Xpert Financial in his aim to revolutionise the financial markets for private companies.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Adam made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) Why is Adam so bullish on the topics of bitcoin and virtual reality?
3.) What are the fundamental use cases for bitcoin and why have we not seen mass adoption on a global scale so far? What are the barriers to adoption?
4.) What is the investment attitude to the bitcoin and VR space? Does the volatility of the price in bitcoin affect the level of investment going into the sector?
5.) What would Adam like to see more of in the space? What is he most excited for and where does he see the most potential?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Adam's Fave Book: The Name Of The Wind
Adam's Fave Blog: Mugglenet
Adam's Most Recent Investment: Joystream
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Adam on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Tim Draper on Investing In Tesla, The Best Pitch He Has Ever Seen & The Evolution of Venture and Startups
Tim Draper is the founding partner of leading venture capital firms Draper Associates and DFJ. Some of his Venture successes include Skype, Baidu, Tesla, Hotmail, Twitch.tv, and hundreds of others. Fun fact about Tim, it was his original suggestion to use viral marketing in web-based email to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail, YahooMail, and Gmail and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by thousands of businesses. His prominence is evident through his being named 100 most influential Harvard Alumni, and seven on the Forbes Midas List. He was named Always-On #1 top venture capital deal maker.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Tim made his way into startups and the investing industry?
2.) Having founded Draper Associates in 1985, how has Tim seen the investing landscape develop over time?
3.) Draper obviously invests across a variety of stage, but what is Tim's preferred stage? Where does he see the most opportunity for venture returns? Why?
4.) Of all the companies Tim has seen, which was the best pitch? Why? Which founder inspired Tim the most? Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
5.) What is DraperU? What are the plans for the future? What is the vision? Why did Tim choose to do a reality show in StartupU? Has it been a very different experience being the lead in a TV show compared to investing in startups?
6.)Why is behind Tim's immense belief in Bitcoin. Why is this? When did Tim realize the potential? How long will adoption take?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Tim's Fave Book: The Startup Game by William Draper, Michael Rothschild: Bionomics
Tim's Most Recent Investment: Laurel and Wolf, Favor Delivery
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Tim on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC: Niccolo De Masi @ Glu Mobile on Private Market Valuations, Being A Public Market CEO & The Trends Of Mobile Gaming
Niccolo De Masi is the CEO & Chairman @ Glu Mobile, one of the world's hottest gaming companies with title including the current No 1 Game in the App Store with the Kendall and Kylie Game, Glu is also the maker of the Kim Kardashian game and the likes of Deer Hunter and many more. Prior to Glu, Niccolo was CEO at mobile entertainment company Hands On Mobile and before that Niccolo was the CEO at London listed mobile entertainment company, Monstermob Group Plc.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Niccolo came to be CEO at one of the world's hottest gaming companies, Glu Mobile?
2.) How did Niccolo make the transition from feature phone business to smartphone business with Glu so successfully? How did Glu's public market status affect the transition?
3.) How important is transparency within organisations as a leader, whether it be Founder or CEO? What are the important elements to communicate with your team and your investors?
4.) Why are private market valuations so misaligned with the public market? What will happen to the plethora of newly made unicorns?
5.) How does Niccolo source potential acquisition targets, what does he look for in, so called 'well valued assets'? What makes them well valued?
6.) What is Niccolo's turnaround strategy for his acquisition targets? How can Glu's platform elevate companies that are in distress?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Niccolo's Fave Book: The Rise and Fall Of The Great Powers
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Niccolo on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Tyler Willis is probably one of the best angel investors around and has invested in seed stage companies that have gone on to raise from the likes of Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and others. Some of these investments include the likes of wildly popular ride sharing app Lyft, the incredible Patreon (now delivering 2m a month to creators) and Change.org which now has over 80m users.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Tyler made it into startups and the investing industry?
2.) Where does Tyler sit on investor specialisation? Is it best to have preferred sectors and round sizes?
3.) What elements are essential for Tyler pre investment and what can be tweaked later down the line?
4.) Question from Arielle Zuckerberg: How does Tyler evaluate customer acquisition so well? What is his approach to this with potential investments and portfolio companies?
5.) Why are people so negative on the future of innovation? Is Founders Fund's 'we expected flying cars and instead got 140 characters' fair?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Tyler's Fave Book: Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
Tyler's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Mattermark Daily
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Tyler on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Arielle Zuckerberg @ Kleiner Perkins: A Review Of My First 6 Months in Venture
Arielle Zuckerberg, Partner @ Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Arielle Zuckerberg joined KPCB in 2015 and focuses on early-stage investments in the firm’s digital practice as part of the venture team. Arielle joined Kleiner from Humin, where she led product for the company’s mobile apps. She started her career as a product manager by day and Hackathon host by night at Wildfire Interactive, Inc., which was acquired by Google in 2012. After the acquisition, Arielle worked as a product manager on social ads at Google. Outside of KPCB, Arielle has made several angel investments across the food tech and health sectors in the likes of Partender, Bitty Foods and The Ticket Fairy, just to name a few.
We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Arielle made it into startups and the investing industry?
2.) What has the move been like from angel to VC? What theories and investment theses are adjustable? How doe the fiduciary responsibility to your LP's adjust your risk profile when investing?
3.) Questions from Tyler Willis: How does Arielle evaluate new products? How does Arielle learn and how does Ariele come down on the learning curve on new things so quickly (new investor to KPCB in ~2 years, for example).
4.) Arielle has now spent her first few months in venture, what have been the biggest surprises? Biggest challenges? What is Arielle's fave part and what is her least fave part?
5.) How does Arielle see the AI space now? Where does she see room for innovation? Is there anything Arielle is concerned about?
6.) Now when doing research for this interview I came across Arielle's New Years Resolution list from 2012! So what are your new years resolutions for 2016? What are the goals you are aiming for?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Arielle's Fave Book: The Symposium by Plato
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Arielle on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC FF 035: Why Crowdfunding Is Not Right For Tech Startups with Ryan Caldbeck @ CircleUp
Ryan Caldbeck is the Founder & CEO @ CircleUp, the online investing platform that allows you to invest in innovative consumer companies. They have raised funding from some of the best including USV, Maveron and Canaan Partners (all past guests). Before Ryan founded CircleUp, he worked in consumer product and retail-focused private equity at TSG Consumer Partners and Encore Consumer Capital exposing him to many great consumer and retail businesses that were too small to obtain funding through the customary private equity channels. As a result, he decided to make funding available to these promising companies through CircleUp.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ryan made the move from the world of VC to founding his own tech startup?
2.) Why is CircleUp marketplace investing, not crowdfunding? What does Ryan believe are the misnomers around the term crowdfunding?
3.) Where do you see this sector making sense and where does he think it is not so efficient? Why is it wrong for tech companies?
4.) One manjor aspect in the UK that this segment has struggled with is it’s ability to attract institutional investors to the sector. So with CircleUp, how are institutional investors getting into this market and is there anything more Ryan would like to see with this regard?
5.) To what extent does Ryan think this is disrupting private capital formation? Should VCs be concerned? What sector of the funding environment is most vulnerable to being disrupted by the rise of marketplace investing?
6.) How was the funding process for Ryan? CircleUp raised over $30m over several rounds with investors from our friends at USV and Maveron, how that came about and what Ryan would advise founders entering the process?
Items Mentioned In Todays Show:
Ryan's Fave Blog: AVC, Jeff Jordan, Bill Gurley
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC and Harry on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane
1.) How Dustin made it into startups and the investing industry?
2.) What were Dustin's major takeaways from his operational experience and how has he applied them to his role investing with Maiden Lane?
3.) Where does Ryan you democratisation of funding going in the next five years? What direction does Dustin believe we are moving in?
4.) Dustin has said that 'capital is a crappy differentiator' so what value add should founders look for in their VCs? How are we seeing the VC value add evolve over time?
4.) How does Dustin sell Maiden Lane in the sea of seed funds that have emerged over the last few years? How important does Dustin think it is for VCs and funds to have personal brands? What is bigger the brand of the VC or the fund?
5.) What is it Dustin looks for in products? Are there any must haves? Any design requirements?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Dustin's Fave Book:
Dustin's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Dustin on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc
1.) How Gil made it into startups and the investing industry?
2.) Why did Gil choose numerous syndicate approach over one huge syndicate? What are the benefits of having numerous specialized syndicates?
3.) What is included in Gil's sell of Flight as an investor? What is the driving force behind the success of Flight? What is the biggest challenge within this job as founder?
4.) How does Gil try and convince the startups that the syndicate method of investment is better for them? How does Gil portray his value add to startups?
5.) Does Gil insist on pro-rata rights? Should founders always grant them to early stage investors?Which VCs does Gil like to work with and what makes them a good VC?
6.) Where does Gil see the future of first AngelList? Will it replace the archaic system of VC? What are Gil's plans for his syndicates? Is Gil looking to move into Series A and B rounds? How do you plan to become the Fidelity of this asset class?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Gil's Fave Book:
Gil's Fave Blog or Newsletter:Gil's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Gil on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
20 VC FF 034: What Fintech Can Learn From Uber and The Shift From Financial Organisation To Financial Efficiency with Kelly Peeler, Founder & CEO @ NextGenVest
1.) How Kelly made it into startups and what was the origin story for NextGenVest?
2.) How has the Fintech ecosystem evolved over the last 5 years? What does Kelly mean by Fintech 1.0 and the next phase of Fintech?
3.) How can emerging brands and in particular fintech brands build loyalty with the emerging millennial generation? What is the attention graph for millenials looking like?
4.) What does Kelly mean when she states a shift from financial organisation with Mint to financial efficiency today?
5.) What key determinants that have made Uber so successful can be used within Fintech startups to build the same trust and relationship?
6.) What is Kelly's view of startups taking a platform dependent approach? What are the benefits and what are the concerns?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Kelly's Fave Book:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Kelly on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: The Evolution Of Mobile & The Importance Of Follow On Funding with Hadley Harris @ Eniac Ventures
1.) How Hadley made it into startups and the investing industry?
2.) What does an engineering degree provide when investing? Why did Eniac decide to focus solely on mobile?
2.) How has Hadley seen the NY venture and startup scene develop over the last years? Does an ecosystem need anchor companies to be great? Ex-Googlers, and ex-Facebook, ex-LinkedIn, ex-Sun, etc. are so important to the Bay Area ecosystem. What are New York's anchor companies? How has that affected the ecosystem?
3.) What is it like helping companies like Soundcloud and Airbnb scale when in hyper growth mode? At the seed level, how important a role does valuation play when determining whether to invest or not?
5.) Why is raising a Series B so tough? Is it the embodiment of the funding barbell? Has NYC, like London, seen a rise in the second seed round?
6.) What are Hadley's thoughts on VC founder alignment? What are the common characteristics of the best founders that Hadley has worked with and invested in?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Hadley's Fave Book:
Hadley's Fave Blog or Newsletter:Hadley's Most Recent Investment:
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Hadley on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!Index's Martin Mignot on Sourcing Rocketship Companies, Evaluating Founders and His Attitude Towards Risk At The Early Stage
1.) Where did it all start for Martin? What is the Martin Mignot story?
2.) How does Martin view venture as a career vs coming into it later on? Why does Martin think venture is now a viable career from the offset?
3.) Does Martin agree with Sheryl Sandberg’s statement, it doesn’t matter where you sit, as long as you have a seat on the rocketship? How important is valuation for Martin when making the decision?
4.) How Martin goes about sourcing the latest and greatest startups from the European ecosystem?
5.) How does Martin evaluate founders and consider their ability to execute on their plan, prior to making the investment?
6.) Talking of difficulty for startups attaining funding, what are your thoughts on VC founder alignment? You have said to focus before on the business and not the team, unless exceptional cases prevail, this is very strange for me to hear. Why is it you have adopted this stance and why do you feel it is best?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:Martin's Fave Book:
Martin's Fave Blog or Newsletter: As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Martin on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC FF 032: Jeff Seibert on Lessons From Being Acquired By Twitter & Box and Now Leading Twitter's Consumer Product
Jeff Seibert is an experienced serial-entrepreneur and currently Senior Director of Product at Twitter. Previously, Seibert was the CEO of Crashlytics, which he co-founded in 2011 with Wayne Chang. Crashlytics delivered crash analysis tools for iOS and Android apps via an SDK that reached 300 Million mobile devices worldwide. Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter in 2013 for $259m. In 2007, Seibert co-founded Increo and served as its COO and lead architect until its acquisition by Box in August of 2009. He subsequently oversaw the integration of Increo’s document preview and annotation technologies into the company's cloud-based content platform.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Jeff made his move into the wonderful world of tech?
Today we are going to break up your story into 3 chapters:
1.) Acquisition by Box:
- What was it like going to Sand Hill Road to raise in 2009?
- How much runway would Jeff advise for a startup and how can companies know whether a strategic acquisition is optimal or whether they should continue building with a further round?
- Jeff has spoke before about being overly transparent with this team about the acquisition. What are the problems with being overly transparent and how can you balance the two?
2.) Acquired by Twitter:
- At what point did Jeff transition to thinking the acquisition by Twitter would be a beneficial and viable and why?
- A reason for Jeff being favourable to the acquisition was Twitter's agreement of continued investment in the space. How can founders negotiate and ensure that this occurs with their acquisition? One of the mistakes stated about the acquisition by Twitter was the reporting structure. How can founders ensure that they are speaking to the VPs of engineering, CEOs etc and attain the support they need?
3.) Life at Twitter:
- How life is following the acquisition? What are Jeff's plans for the future as Senior Director of Product at Twitter?
20VC: Lessons From Working with Chris Sacca, The Rise Of Mobile Commerce and Improving Push Notifications with Ellie Wheeler, Partner @ Greycroft Partners
Ellie Wheeler is a Partner at Greycroft Partners where she focuses on investment opportunities in next-generation commerce, consumer mobile, and associated SaaS solutions. Ellie manages several investments for Greycroft, including BaubleBar, Flashpoint Intel, Eloquii, and Plain Vanilla Games (QuizUp). Prior to joining Greycroft, Ellie worked in a similar role evaluating investment opportunities at Lowercase Capital with Chris Sacca. Before working with Lowercase, Ellie worked at Cisco where she was involved in multiple acquisitions and investments, including PostPath, Jabber, Xobni, and Tandberg.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Ellie made her way into the wonderful world of tech and VC?
2.) What were Ellie's biggest takeaways from working with the legend that is Chris Sacca?
3.) As an investment focus of Ellie's, how does Ellie think the mobile commerce space has changed and how consumer behaviours are changing in the space?
4.) What are Ellie's views on push notifications? What are the Do's and Don'ts? What can be done to make push notifications more effective?
5.) Do wearables change the push notification space? What are Ellie's views on wearables with their investment in BaubleBar? Are consumers ready for them?
6.) Talking of wearables, how does Ellie respond to hardware investments? Typically a space VC shy away from? What are the problems for Ellie? What attracts her with hardware?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:Ellie's Fave Book: The Power of One
Ellie's Most Recent Investment: Blinkist As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ellie on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Bryan Johnson @ OS Fund & Braintree on Investing In The Operating Systems Of Life & Why VC Should All Be Open Source
Bryan Johnson is an entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder of OS Fund and Braintree, the latter of which was bought by eBay in 2013 for $800 million in cash. Bryan launched OS Fund in 2014 with $100 million of his personal capital to support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity. His investments include endeavors to extend healthy human life to 100+ (Human Longevity), replicate the human visual cortex (Vicarious), mine an asteroid (Planetary Resources), reinvent transportation (Matternet), and reimagine food (Hampton Creek), among others.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Bryan made his start in the world of tech and how he has come to the OS fund today?
2.) What was the pivotal moment in Bryan's career? When was the turning point? What was was the hardest part of the entrepreneurial journey and how did Bryan conquer it?
3.) What is the main motivation behind the OS fund? Which areas does Bryan most want to solve and where does he see significant market opportunities?
4.) Does the longevity of return to Bryan's exits concern him? Most investments exit with 10 years, human lifespan startups take a little longer! What sort of time frame does Bryan have in mind when investing in these companies?
5.) What does Bryan really perceive synthetic biology to mean? Are we seeing improvements in this sector?
6.) The OS Fund have recently released a white paper detailing extensively their process for investing? Why did Bryan decide on this open source style of investing?
7.) What would Bryan like to see more of? Where does Bryan see a lot of people investing that he thinks is a mistake?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:Bryan's Fave Book:
Bryan's Most Recent Investment: As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Bryan on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
James Beshara is the Co-Founder @ Tilt the micro-crowdfunding platform that allows you to receive funding from friends—changing the way collaborative funding works. Tilt has raised $37 million from 3 rounds of funding from the likes of Andreesen, SV Angel, Alexis Ohanian, Naval Ravikant and Sean Parker just to name a few. As for James Before co-founding Tilt, he studied Development Economics as an undergrad and then went on to build dvelo.org, a site for crowdfunding loans and donations to poverty-alleviation organizations in developing countries. In order to vote for who you think will win James and Harry's beer pong match, head over to @twentyminutevc on Twitter and vote using our poll.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) What were the origins of Tilt? How did James go from a micro loans collector in Africa to founder of one of SF's hottest startups?
2.) What does James make of the current crowdfunding landscape? What will it take for crowdfunding to go mass market?
3.) What are Tilt doing to make crowdfunding more bite sized and consumer friendly? How important is the on boarding process for Tilt? How are Tilt approaching customer retention? What are James' targets for the year ahead with Tilt?
4.) With investors like Andreesen, SV Angel, Naval Ravikant, Sean Parker just to name a few, what the investment journey like? I heard the first funding took 6-8 months and the series A took 6 days with a16z. What changed to turn it around?
5.) On PH LIVE James stated that founding a company is a destination less journey and although admirable I struggle with that from the investors perspective. How did James sell a startup in a pitch with no exit strategy?
6.) What was it that attracted James to the investors that he chose? What value add was James most attracted to?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: James' Fave Book: 100 Years of Solitude, The Power Of Now As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and James on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: James Cameron @ Accel on Building Great Startup Communities and The Rise of Enterprise and Cyber Security Software
James Cameron is an early stage investor at Accel where he focuses on enterprise software, security, fintech and marketplace businesses. Prior to joining Accel, he founded and ran BipSync, a SaaS-based research platform for investment management. James also spent time on the tech banking team at Morgan Stanley and as a corporate lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How James made his way into the world of startups and investing?
2.) How does James go about finding the needles in the haystack in the sea of amazing startups? Do James use data to find great companies? Do you think this will be a continuing trend, in terms of algorithmic deal sourcing?
3.) What cool stuff has James been seeing in the enterprise software and security sector? Does James think there are any underhyped or overhyped segments of these markets?
4.) One very dominant eco system for tech in general but specifically security is Israel, how do the UK and Israeli ecosystems differ? Is there anything we can do in the UK to harness the spirit encapsulated by the Israeli ecosystem?
5.) What are the catalysts or drivers of these communities’ growth? Do you agree with Marc Andreesen in saying we shouldn't think about building "The Silicon Valley of X" because the components that make up SV aren't repeatable and areas should instead specialize on specific verticals, like bitcoin or security. What do you think about that concept?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: James' Fave Book: Crossing The Chasm James' Fave Blog or Newsletter: Adrian Colyer: The Morning Paper James' Most Recent Investment: Doctolib As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and James on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired?
Fred Destin is General Partner at Accel in London where he focuses on consumer and software investments. He is the lead investor and board member at Deliveroo, Pillpack (featured in ep: 89 with Eric Paley) and KNC. Prior to Accel, he was a partner at Atlas Venture where he worked with with companies like Zoopla (public), Secret Escapes, Integral Ad Science, Dailymotion (acquired by Orange), PriceMinister (acquired by Rakuten) and others.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Fred made his way into the world of startups and investing?
2.) What is it like investing in rocketships like Deliveroo and PillPack?
3.) What are the reasons most startups fail at the seed stage? What are the most common reasons that founders get fired?
4.) Why does Fred believe raising a Series B so tough? Is it the embodiment of the funding barbell?
5.) What are Fred's thoughts on VC founder alignment? Why does Fred deliberately cause tension between a founder prior to making an investment? In what form does this take?
6.) When I asked Fred for topics he was interested in, he gave me a list and one of them, I have never had suggested before and it is ‘Why are VC’s so schizo’? What does Fred mean?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Fred's Fave Book: Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master & Margarita Fred's Fave Blog or Newsletter: The Atlantic, Tech.eu Fred's Most Recent Investment: Deliveroo As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Fred on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet
Matt Lieber is cofounder and President of Gimlet Media. In a previous life, Matt produced radio shows (On Point, Fair Game) and podcasts (Slate Culture Gabfest). He also worked as a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, where he focused on media and digital business. Then he chucked it all for Gimlet. He holds an MBA from MIT Sloan.
In Today's Show You Will Learn:
1.) Matt reveals the origins of Gimlet?
2.) What were the dilemmas for Matt in raising Gimlet's round? What determinant made Matt realize raising was right? What advice would Matt give to founders who are unsure if they should raise or not?
3.) One of the main concerns with raising suggested by Alex Blumberg was that the company would feel like a totally different company, and by different ‘I mean worse’, to quote Alex. So how can a Founder maintain company culture as they grow excessively?
4.) Why did Matt decide to play it cool and not announce to VCs Gimlet were raising? Did Matt expect to get a term sheet as quickly and easily as he did? Were there any hiccups to the funding process? Were Gimlet tempted by any other offers? What value add about Tim O'Reilly made Gimlet most attracted to him?
5.) Question from Matt Hartman at Betaworks: How does Gimlet decide which new shows to create? Is it about creating new shows for an overlapping audience or to expanding audience demographics??
6.) Where does Matt see the future of podcasting going? Many do not believe in it’s potential to be a big business, what does Matt say? What are the challenges, what needs to happen to combat them?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Matt's Fave Book: Great Plains by Ian Frazier
Matt's Fave Blog: Stratechery by Ben Thompson
As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Matt on Twitter here!
Likewise, if you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures
1.) How Kate made her way into the world of startups and investing?
2.) What were the biggest takeaways from Kate's time at Lerer Hippeau Ventures and working with the amazing Ken Lerer?
3.) What was it about Galvanize that made Kate leave LHV and Kate provides a brief synopsis on Galvanize Ventures? Sectors? Stage? Geography?
4.) With 42 investments since Feb 2014. What is the strategy at Galvanize? Galvanize's sector weighting is largest in mobile, how does Kate view the space and how would Kate respond to the likes of Fred Wilson stating consumer mobile is very difficult with difficult customer acquisition and then even harder, customer retention?
5.) How has the process been for Kate in establishing the fund? What are Kate and Galvanize's key differentiators to the sea of other NYC seed funds? How does Kate approach deal sourcing at Galvanize? If investing outside the Galvanize community, what channels are the preferred channels?
6.) Why is Kate so excited about hardware? Where does Kate see the future of IOT going? Is crowdfunding an option for hardware startups?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Kate's Fave Book: The God of Small Things Kate's Fave Mobile Apps: Slack, Sunrise Calendar, Moments, TwoDots, Panna, Wildcard Kate's Fave Blog or Newsletter: AVC, Ben Evans Kate's Most Recent Investment: Msg.ai As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Kate on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC: David Tisch @ Box Group on The Future of Consumer Mobile, Developing Pattern Recognition and FOMO
1.) How David made his way into the world of startups and investing?
2.) Having started Box in 2008, how has David seen the NY venture and startup scene develop over the last years? Matt Hartman @ Betaworks: how has that impacted the type of investments you make? Has it changed your thesis, theme, or any other aspect of how you invest? Kanyi Maqubela @ Collaborative: Does an ecosystem need anchor companies to be great? What are New York's anchor companies?
3.) What is the vision with Box? Is this a fund that lasts through the ages? Last year I heard you made 3 hires, is this a sign of a desire to create the NYC fund? At Box you have a weighting towards mobile consumer tech, how do you respond to Fred Wilson’s post about the mobile downtown and the difficulty in attaining and maintating traction for mobile apps?
4.) What was the motivation behind moving into the world of entrepreneurship with Spring? What aspects of Alan's and Box as a product has contributed to it’s massive success?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: David's Fave Productivity Tools: Captio David's Most Recent Investment: Nucleus: The Smart Home Wireless Intercom As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and David on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria
Ivan Mazour is a serial entrepreneur, investor and author. He is the CEO and Founder of Ometria - a predictive analytics and marketing platform built specifically for retailers, letting them use data to increase revenues and provide an improved customer experience. Alongside this main role, he is also the Founding Partner of Innova Kapital - an early stage VC firm investing in UK-based technology startups, including companies like YPlan and organisations like Entrepreneur First. Ivan also writes a popular blog called “A Young Entrepreneur in London”.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Ivan progressed from making 30+ investments to founding one of Europe's hottest startups?
2.) Considering Ivan's recent fundraising, what does Ivan think of the recent funding environment and landscape? How was it raising venture funding now?
3.) What was the difference between raising an angel round to raising a VC round? Did Ivan have to adapt your pitch accordingly? Do they have differing desires and expectations?
4.) Having raised both VC and angel money recently for Ometria, how has that led Ivan to view his own investing style? Is there anything Ivan looks for or at differently now he has experienced fundraising from the other side?
5.) What have been the hardest and most challenging aspects of growing Ometria? How did Ivan overcome them?
6.) Taking futuristically now on the sector of e-commerce, where does Ivan see the future of technology integrating with retail? Will we see an end to bricks and mortar stores?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Ivan's Fave Book: Rich Dad, Poor Dad & How To Win Friends And Influence People Ivan's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Saastr Ivan's Fave Productivity Tools: ToDoist, Google Keep, Google Hangouts As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ivan on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC: Philipp Moehring, Head of AngelList Europe on Scaling Seed Stage Funding and Why 500 Is Not Your Traditional VC
1.) How Philipp made it into startups and investing with AngelList and now 500?
2.) In a recent post Philipp said that management consulting, investment banking and accounting were the worst backgrounds for VCs. Why do you think this and where would you like to see the new breed of VCs emerging from?
3.) Considering your work with AngelList, how do you think the US investing scene differs from the European? Why are we seeing this sudden influx of US capital into European markets? What is driving this influx?
4.) The recent £400m that AngelList received from CSC, Philipp tells us a little more about this and what it means for European companies?
5.) How does Philipp's role with 500 integrate with the AngelList model? How does Philipp split the time? Is Philipp ever concerned that with the dominance of syndicates in the years to come, VCs will become non existent?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Philipp's Fave Book: Snow crash, Follow Philipp on GoodReads Here Philipp's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Brad Feld's: Feld Thoughts Philipp's Biggest Productivity Tips: SelfControl (Mac) As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Philipp on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing"
Morten Lund, best know for his seed investment in Skype, he has also founded and co-invested in more than 100 startups including the likes of Airhelp who you might recognize as we interviewed their CEO Nicolas Michaelsen in episode check 32, as well as Bullguard, Maxthon and many more. In today’s incredible interview we talk about the story behind his skype investment, how he went from $150m to bankruptcy moving to the present both with his work with Coders Trust helping coders in developing countries to improve their lives to his rocketship journey with one of the world’s most exciting fintech companies in Tradeshift, who have raised a total of over $200m. If you love today's episode, simply click here and share the love!
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn:1.) How Morten got into the technology industry and the world of investing?
2.) How did Morten's investment in Skype come about? How did Morten deal with the bankruptcy and how it changed him as a person?
3.) How does Morten view the current state of European fintech? Where are the significant market opportunities that are yet to be exploited?
4.) Following Morten bankruptcy, he only works with "really cool people". So what makes Morten like someone and believe in them?
5.) How did TradeShift come about from Morten's basement? What was the a-ha moment? What has driven the immense success with over $200m invested? What is the future for the company and the future of money?
6.) Looking forward, what is Morten's main goal and aspiration and how does he plan on attaining it?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Morten's Fave Book: Shantaram Morten's Fave Blog or Newsletter: The Economist Morten's Most Recent Investment: Hippocorn As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Morten on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20VC FF 028: Where To Start Your Startup and Single Founder vs Co-Founder Model with Richard Hanson, Co-Founder & CEO @ HiringScreen
1.) What were the origins of Hiring Screen? What was the a-ha moment for Richard?
2.) What advice would Richard give to founders contemplating entering accelerators? What should they look for and why should they be wary of?
3.) Why does Richard believe that a startup with multiple founders is more beneficial than single founder startups? What would he suggest someone looking to find a co-founder is to do?
4.) Why did Richard start Hiring Screen in Hong Kong? What are Richard's views on Asia's emerging tech scene? What advice would Richard give to a founder deciding where to start a startup?
5.) What has been the most challenging element of growing Hiring Screen? How did Richard overcome it and alter the company from there?
6.) If Richard were to found Hiring Screen again, what would he do differently? Is there anything he wishes he had known before the process?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Richard's Fave Book: The Alliance by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh Richard's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Calacanis, Feld Thoughts As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Richard on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! Free Ebook: How to boost your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) by over 100% I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's show: LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk20 VC: How To Say No Fast and Efficiently and Why UX Must Always Be At The Core Of What You Do with Sitar Teli, Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures
Sitar Teli is Managing Partner at Connect Ventures and has been a venture capitalist for eight years, focusing on early-stage investments in both consumer and B2B companies. Previously with Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, where she led their Series A round in SoundCloud, she has experience with content, gaming and ecommerce startups. Sitar has a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from Duke University.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Sitar make her way into the wonderful world of VC? 2.) How does Sitar approach the difficult task of saying no to entrepreneurs? What is the framework she has adopted over her 8 years in venture?3.) There are a large amount of sources of capital for business in the seed stage, why did Sitar believe this was the stage with the most opportunity? Is too much capital chasing too few deals?
4.) With the increasing prominence of crowdfunding, is it a viable alternative to VC? Is Sitar concerned that quality deal flow is being lost to Crowdfunding?
5.) What is driving the growth of the European tech startup scene?
6.) Prior to making investments such as that of Citymapper, one obviously has to look at the team and the product. So what do you look for in a founder and what to you makes a great product?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Sitar's Fave Book: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Sitar's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Benedict Evans Newsletter Sitar's Fave Apps: Outlook, Sunrise, Citymapper Sitar's Most Recent Investment: Knyttan As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sitar on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! Free Ebook: How to boost your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) by over 100% Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures
Boris Wertz is one of the top tech early-stage investors in North America and the founding partner of Version One. He is also a board partner with Andreessen Horowitz. Before becoming an investor, Boris was the COO of AbeBooks.com which sold to Amazon in 2008. He was responsible for marketing, business development, product, customer service and international operations – leading a team of 60 people. In 2005, he was named the Pacific Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year.
A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Boris make his way into the wonderful world of VC?2.) Why have we seen a mass re-emergence of the marketplace model now?
3.) What was the objective in writing Version One’s book, A Guide To Marketplaces? What did Boris feel the public needed to know that was not already known?
4.) For an entrepreneur looking to move into the marketplace sector, how can they select the right market, are there any essential components they must consider?
5.) The book discusses the benefits of both direct and indirect network effects for marketplaces but in the early days what should startups focus on; demand or supply? How should they go about addressing this element?
6.) What are the core required elements of scaling a marketplace?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Boris's Fave Book: Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz Boris's Fave Blog or Newsletter: AVC by Fred Wilson Boris's Most Recent Investment: Headout To check out The Two Minute Takeaway from today's show, click here! As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Boris on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! Free Ebook: How to boost your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) by over 100% Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk20 VC: Are Unicorns Necessary To Make Big Returns and The Series A Crunch with Sumeet Shah @ Brand Foundry Ventures
Sumeet Shah is an investor @ Brand Foundry Ventures, who have investments in the likes of Warby Parker, Birchbox and Contently. Sumeet himself is pivotal in sourcing and managing new opportunities at Brand Foundry with over 6 years of experience across the startup and private equity industries, formerly running new business strategies at Gist Digital and handling business development and project work at Gotham Consulting Partners.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sumeet made his way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) What stage is Brand Foundry active in? Does Sarah Lacy’s analysis of a ‘Series A Crunch’ concern Sumeet? Has he seen a widening in the gap between the amount that raise seed to then go onto raise Series A?
3.) What does Sumeet believe are the key pieces to run a successful business? In the first 100 days, what are the most important elements to focus on?
4.) Sumeet recently tweeted ‘To All Startups, the most helpful investor is not always the largest’. How can startups determine who is the most helpful? What should startups expect from their investors? What does Sumeet believe makes the best investor?
5.) What would Sumeet say is his biggest strength as an investor and what would he most like to improve upon? As a seed investor, how does Sumeet respond to Aileen Lee’s suggestion that in investing you can only make really money when invested in unicorns?
6.) Is Sumeet bullish on the future of NYC tech? What are the strengths of NY? Where is it booming? Are there any elements of SF, Sumeet would like NY to have?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Sumeet's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Term Sheet by Dan Primack, Strictly VC
Sumeet's Fave Book: Things A Little Birdy Told Me by Biz Stone
Sumeet's Most Recent Investment: Lola: A Better Month Awaits You
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sumeet on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
Free Ebook: How to boost your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) by over 100% Have you ever wanted to know who someone is simply from an email address?With Loyalty Bay's Super Users product now you can. Simply input an email address and it will go off and find publicly available profile information i.e. Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc for that email address. This is incredibly powerful in building a richer data profile on your users for marketers and business development people alike. Free 30 day Trial. Check out www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC: Running Lerer Hippeau Ventures Like A Startup with Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner @ Lerer Hippeau Ventures
3.) What does Eric think makes a great VC and what makes a great operator? Are there any commonalities in the individuals he has come across?
4.) Eric reveals the best pitches he has seen and what made them so effective and flips the coin to discuss the worst pitches and what not to do when pitching a VC?
5.) Eric has made many investments in adtech and content, an area most VCs are hesitant of. So why are VCs hesitant of this space and why does Eric think he and Ken have been able to master it and produce great returns?
6.) With Eric's experience as CEO at Huffington Post, how does Eric view the changes to the media landscape and what are his predictions and concerns for the next few years?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Eric's Fave Book: The Lord of The Rings Eric's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Strictly VC, Dan Primack: Termsheet Eric's Most Recent Investment: The Drone Racing League As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Eric on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! Free Ebook: How to boost your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) by over 100% Have you ever wanted to know who someone is simply from an email address? With Loyalty Bay's Super Users product now you can. Simply input an email address and it will go off and find publicly available profile information i.e. Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc for that email address. This is incredibly powerful in building a richer data profile on your users for marketers and business development people alike. Free 30 day Trial. Check out www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC FF 027: Risk, Incentive and Opportunity in Starting A Company with Daniel van Binsbergen, Founder @ Lexoo
1.) What were the origins of Lexoo? What was the a-ha moment for Daniel?
2.) Was Daniel nervous about leaving the security of the legal profession to found a startup? What does Daniel advise people who want to make the leap but are not sure if it is worth risking everything?
3.) Why is there a divergence between the advancement of tech and the lacking progression of the legal space?
4.) Why did Daniel start Lexoo in a completely no tech, manual way? How was that? What would Daniel advise fellow founders who do not have the technical skills to build their idea?
5.) How did Daniel meet his investors? How did he find the fundraising experience? What was the challenging and surprising elements of the journey?
6.) If Daniel were to found Lexoo again, what would he do differently? Is there anything he wishes he had known before the process?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Daniel's Fave Book: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick Daniel's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Mattermark, Seth Godin, James Altucher Daniel's Must Have Software: Sunrise, Trello As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Daniel on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!20 VC 097: Betting Big on Consumer Fintech with Matthew Bradley, Investor @ Forward Partners
Matthew is an Investor at Forward Partners: a super-early stage London VC. Forward Partners invests in solo-founders, idea stage and seed stage eCommerce, marketplace and related software businesses providing them with funding, office space and the support of an expert in-house engineering, product and growth team. Before becoming a VC, Matthew had varying degrees of success (!) with retail and security tech start-ups. He began his career in Sales, Structuring and Trading at investment banks. He holds a BA in Economics and Politics and an MBA from SDA Bocconi. A huge thank you to Mattermark for all the data discussed in today's show and you can find them here!
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In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Matt make his way into the world of VC? What would he advise someone wanting to get into the industry?
2.) How does Forward Partners differentiate themselves in such a sea of seed funds? What is unique about their model?
3.) What are the key activities that entrepreneurs can do to build a successful business, ready for Series A? What would Matt advise someone who has an idea but no technical skills?
4.) What are the nuances and complexities of the early stage funding environment? How do Forward approach and overcome them? Are there any common misconceptions?
5.) What are the similarities and differences between the US and the UK with regards to start-up attractiveness? Where would Matt choose to found his startup if he were a founder?
6.) Considering YC’s recent intake, where does Matt see growth areas in consumer facing startups?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Matthew's Fave Book: Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master & Margarita
Matthew's Fave Newsletter: Mattermark Daily, The Equity Kicker, First Round Review
Matthew's Most Recent Investment: Live Better With
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matthew on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners
Dharmesh Raithatha is the Product Partner at Forward Partners. He works with idea stage investments on product, growth and business strategy. He has a passion for User Research, Lean UX and using data to inform decision making. Dharmesh has over 15 years in product roles for companies like Mind Candy and the BBC. He has founded 2 startups and successfully sold one. A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in today's episode and can find out more about Mattermark here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Dharmesh make his way into the world of VC?
2.) How has Dharmesh's startup driven past, altered his investment pattern? What are the benefits and weaknesses to this kind of operational experience?
3.) At Forward there Open Office Hours where people come and share ideas, so what is it about the ideas you like that make them good, what makes the bad ones bad?
4.) What are Dharmesh's tips or advice for idea creation and brainstorming?
5.) What would Dharmesh advice non-technical people looking to found a tech startup?
6.) What does Dharmesh believe makes a great founder? Has he seen any commonalities in the great founders he has worked with?
7.) What should teams focus on in the first 100 days of their startup? What is the 20% that produces 80% of the results?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Dharmesh's Fave Book: How To Create A Product Customers Love by Marty Cagan
Dharmesh's Fave Newsletter: Silicon Valley Product Group
Dharmesh's Most Recent Investment: The Gifting Company
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dharmesh on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's show: LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Ryan Hoover is the Founder and CEO @ ProductHunt, winner of TechCrunch "Best New Startup 2014". ProductHunt is a community of people sharing, upvoting, and geeking out about new technology products, games, and books. Before Product Hunt, Ryan was an EIR at Tradecraft and Director of Product at PlayHaven. As a writer, Ryan has contributed to Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal and written many essays, including features for TechCrunch, Forbes, Pando, Fast Company, and The Next Web. He writes about startup trends, product designs, and production growth on his blog, ryanhoover.me.
I would like to thank Mattermark for providing all the data and analysis for this interview and you can check them out here!
CLICK TO PLAY
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did ProductHunt get started and what was the a-ha moment for Ryan in the founding of ProductHunt?
2.) PH has gone from a newsletter to friends to a a16z backed startup with employees around the globe. What have been the drivers of PH's success?
3.) PH harness the crowd for feedback on everything from designs to features. Why does Ryan prefer this open sourced feedback approach? What are the benefits? What would Ryan suggest to founders looking to adopt a similar feedback style?
4.) Question from Matt Hartman at Betaworks: Considering Ryan's work with Nir Eyal on Hooked, are there elements of Hooked that Ryan baked into the infrastructure of PH and what were they?
5.) How has Ryan created such a close and intimate relationship with his audience? What are the tools and strategies that Ryan uses to build that community? What advice does Ryan give for people looking to network and make a community around them?
6.) Where does Ryan see PH in 5 years time? What is his vision for the PH platform? How does a platform such as ProductHunt plan to monetise?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Ryan's Fave Book: The Art of Game Design: A Book Of Lenses
Ryan's Fave Podcasts: TWIST by Jason Calacanis, Startup: Gimlet Media, Mystery Show: Gimlet Media
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 095: How VCs Find Startups and How To Add Value Once Invested with David Teten @ ff Venture Capital
David Teten is a Partner at ff Venture Capital and is also Founder and Chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York, the largest angel group in New York. David is currently co-leading the first study on “how to disrupt the investing industry.” He led the first-ever study of best practices of venture capital and private equity funds in originating new deals (#1 all time most-read study in the Journal of Private Equity) and the first-ever study of VCs in creating portfolio company value. He has published in Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor, and other leading publications. David's blog is one of the most extensive and actionable blogs there is, seriously you have to check it out and it can be found at teten.com.
I would like to thank Mattermark for providing all the data and analysis for this interview and you can check them out here!
CLICK TO PLAY
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did David make the move into the world of vc and technology?
2.) What is David's approach to deal sourcing? What strategies would he recommend to other VCs to find the best startups and entrepreneurs?
3.) What does David think are the most effective ways that VC and PE funds are helping to increase portfolio company value?
4.) How should an entrepreneur evaluate how value-added a VC can be? Are there any signs that one VC has more value add than another?
5.) Is VC moving to the operational model in terms of headcount, with the moves of firms like a16z who provide extensive services as additional value add?
5.) Why did David and ff invest in Indiegogo? Is it not an alternative finance method that is competing with VC? Has David notice a loss in deal flow to AngelList?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
David's Fave Book: Edward Tufte: Graphical Communication of Quantitative Data
David's Fave Blog: PandoDaily
David's Most Recent Investment: Skycatch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 094: Kanyi Maqubela @ Collaborative Fund on Rocketships, Feedback Loops and Turning Lemons Into Lemonade!
Kanyi Maqubela is a Partner at Collaborative Fund, who have made investments in AngelList, CodeAcademy, AltSchool, Reddit, Task Rabbit just to name a few. On a more personal note, and a little background on Kanyi, he is originally from Johannesburg South Africa, and was a founding employee at Doostang, a venture-backed peer-to-peer career marketplace, he attended Stanford University and as Kanyi states his most meaningful and difficult work done so far is his work on the Obama Campaign in 2008. You can checkout Kanyi's blog here! I would like to thank Mattermark for providing all the data and analysis for this interview and you can check them out here!
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In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kanyi made the move into VC and tech from South Africa?
2.) Was the decision to leave Stanford tough? Why would Kanyi advise others to say in school? What was so tough about the startup experience for Kanyi?
3.) What is the investing thesis at Collaborative Fund? What stage do you prefer? Average cheque size? Sector preference? Does specializing in themes result in higher returns?
4.) How is it being such a young partner in the industry? What are the challenges Kanyi has face? Does Kanyi think his age acts as a disadvantage when it comes to attracting older founders?
5.) What are Kanyi's personal marketing strategies that he uses to establish his own personal brand? What platforms are most effective?
6.) How effective does Kanyi find demo days and hackathons as source of deal flow? Are there any tips Kanyi would suggest to maximise their utility? What is Collaborative's most effective form of deal sourcing today?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Kanyi's Fave Book: The Brothers Karamazov
Kanyi's Most Recent Investment: CircleUp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kanyi on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC FF 025: Crowdfunding Gimlet Media and Why The Nature Of Startup Equity Is Changing with Erin Glenn, CEO @ Betaworks' backed, Quire
Erin Glenn is the CEO @ Quire where she aims to create a way for communities to invest and collaborate with companies and their founders. Quire is changing the way companies are owned and built. Prior to being CEO, Erin was CFO at SF based video game maker KIXEYE, an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and UBS, and a management consultant in the US and South East Asia. All the data and research mentioned in today's show is provided by the kind team at Mattermark, check them out here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Erin made her way into the wonderful world technology?
2.) What is Quire, how does Quire work, what companies does Quire raise for?
3.) Over the last few years we have seen a massive increase in the crowdfunding sector in general. What are the key drivers of the rise of this sector?
4.) With the greater and greater amounts being raised on these platforms, many are suggesting they have the potential to replace VC. What are Erin's thoughts on this? Or are the systems fundamentally different?
5.) What are the greatest barriers to mass market adoption of the crowdfunding model? What have been the biggest challenges faced in the journey with Quire?
6.) How does Quire, as a crowdfunding platform plan to draw investors away from funds and other portfolio based assets given the level of risk associated with investing in young companies?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Erin's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Fred Wilson: AVC
Erin's Fave Book: Magic
Erin's Fave Quire Funded Companies: Gimlet Media, Kano, Duel
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Erin on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 093: Where Is The Micro VC Market Going with Samir Kaji @ First Republic Bank
Samir Kaji is the Managing Director @ First Republic Bank, a leading private bank and wealth management company on Sand Hill Road. Samir, has 13 years of banking experience, working with venture capital and private equity clients in Silicon Valley. Prior to joining First Republic, Kaji worked for Silicon Valley Bank. Samir writes an awesome blog on the VC, investing and startup scene at (http://pevcbanker.com). All the data and research mentioned in today's show is provided by the kind team at Mattermark, check them out here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Samir made his way into the wonderful world of venture and technology?
2.) We often hear the term, Micro VC bandied around, are there any common characteristics and criteria that discern Micro VCs from traditional VCs?
3.) Why has there has been this massive growth of the seed stage funding environment? What is driving this end of the funding cycle? Is it being damaged with the rise of AngelList syndicates?
4.) What trends and emerging themes has Samir seen come out of this exponentially expanding sector? What effect has AngelList had on the MicroVC market?
5.) What are Samir's thoughts for the future of seed funding? What do you think the seed funding landscape will look like in 20 years time?
6.) Why do smaller funds tend to outperform larger VCs?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Samir's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Dan Primack: TermSheet, Ezra Galston: Breaking VC
Samir's Fave Book: Phil Jackson: A Team In Search Of It's Soul, Adam Grant: Give & Take
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Samir on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 092: The Repeatable Playbook of SaaS with Ed Sim, Founding Partner @ BoldStart Ventures
Ed Sim, Founding Partner @ Boldstart Ventures, Ed truly has had the most astonishing career in early stage SaaS having led first round investments in todays market leaders, LivePerson (now on Nasdaq) and GoToMeeting (acquired by Citrix). Over the 19 years in early stage SaaS he has also helped a number of entrepreneurs scale from seed to market leader with his portfolio companies being acquired by the likes of Google, Linkedin and Salesforce, and I would like to say that all the data and information presented in today's show is provided by the kind folks at Mattermark, check then out at www.mattermark.com
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ed made his way into the wonderful world of venture?
2.) Why did Ed start a seed stage SaaS fund? Where did he see the market opportunity?How was the fundraising process for Ed? Were there any surprises?
3.) How does Ed view the current seed stage funding environment, is there too much money chasing too few deals?
4.) Ed backed cloud companies in 2000. What is different from then vs today’s saas companies?
5.) How do you value early stage SaaS startups, when there are often very few clear metrics at this stage?
6.) What makes a great enterprise founder at seed stage?
7.) How has the seed stage SaaS environment changed over the 19 years of Ed's career?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Ed's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Jason Calacanis: LaunchTicker
Ed's Fave iPhone App: Slack
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ed on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
Have you ever wanted to know who someone is simply from an email address?With Loyalty Bay's Super Users product now you can. Simply input an email address and it will go off and find publicly available profile information i.e. Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc for that email address. This is incredibly powerful in building a richer data profile on your users for marketers and business development people alike. Free 30 day Trial. Check out www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Nikos Moraitakis is the Founder & CEO @ Workable, one of Balderton Capital's latest additions to their portfolio. Workable is the affordable and usable hiring software that which replaces email and spreadsheets with an applicant tracking system that your team will actually enjoy using. Prior to founding Workable, Nikos was a Senior VP of Business Development at Upstream where he played a key role in the company's growth from startup into one of the world’s top marketing technology companies, where he was actively involved in enterprise sales across 40 countries in 4 continents.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nikos made his way into the world of startups and tech and founded Workable? What was the a-ha moment?
2.) What was it like starting a company in Greece? Were there sufficient levels of engineers? Why did Workable decide to move some operations to the US?
3.) Why does Nikos think the enterprise SaaS space has become so hot? What has changed? Has this upturn in interest made it easier with more capital inflowing or more difficult with increased company creation?
5.) How did Workable meet their investors? How was the fundraising experience? What was the challenging and surprising elements of the journey? Advice to founders?
6.) Looking back at his time founding Workable, what does Nikos wish someone had told him at the beginning?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Nikos' Fave Book: Fooled by Randomness
Nikos' Fave Blog: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nikos on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsors today, LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Daniel Waterhouse is a General Partner @ Balderton Capital, which he joined in 2013 and he currently sits on the boards of Top10, ROLI, Lovecrafts, TrademarkNow, Tictail, Achica, Thread and Workable. Prior to Balderton, Daniel spent 5 years as a partner at Wellington Partners and invested in a number of fast-growing companies including EyeEm, Hailo, YPlan, Bookatable (also a Balderton portfolio company), SumAll, Readmill (sold to Dropbox) and Qype (sold to Yelp). Before Wellington, Daniel was a sector partner at 3i where he worked on all of their venture and private equity investments in the internet sector in North America and Europe.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) How has Daniel's mathematics background impacted his investing style?
3.) At Balderton 50% of the partners have very operational backgrounds and 50% are much more investment rooted. What has Daniel gained and missed as an investor from having a outside view of the startup world?
4.) How has Daniel seen the landscape change in the last 15 years? What was his first pitch meeting like? What was his last like?
5.) What are Daniel's thoughts on the enterprise SaaS space? Do Daniel think there is further to go in the consumerisation of Enterprise Software? Does the announcement of Emergence moving from the sector signal a turning tide?
6.) Daniel led the investment in Curious AI and Thread, using machine learning to augment its stylist approach, so what makes Daniel excited about the developments in AI? How is the sector going to develop over the next 20 years?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Daniel's Fave Book: The Brain That Teaches Itself
Daniel's Most Recent Investment: Curious AI
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Daniel on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's show: LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Suranga Chandratillake is a General Partner @ Balderton Capital. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer having founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He then lead the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1Bn. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation - joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team and ultimately serving as the company's US CTO in San Francisco.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Suranga made his way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) Why are so many technical European CEOs fearful of continuing the position as CEO? What can we do to improve it?
3.) What does Suranga think makes a great CEO? Which CEO Suranga respects the most and why?
4.) How have Suranga's years as an entrepreneur affected his investing style? Does Suranga have a consistent investing style or does he look to iterate a lot?
5.) Balderton is an Equal Partnership VC, what does that really entail? Why does Suranga think this model is the most efficient? Looking at the new appointment of Lars, how do the GPs assess new candidates for the treasured GP position?
6.) What sectors is Suranga most excited by and why? Does Suranga think there is further to go in the consumerisation of Enterprise Software? Does the announcement of Emergence moving from the sector signal a turning tide?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Suranga's Fave Book: The Old Man And The Sea
Suranga's Most Recent Investment: Cloud Nine
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Suranga on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's show: LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk
20 VC FF 022: Crowdfunding Is Here To Stay with Ayan Mitra, Founder & CEO @ Crowdbnk
Ayan Mitra is the Founder & CEO @ Crowdbnk, an investment crowdfunding platform that allows you to invest in high growth businesses through both equity and debt. Ayan himself has a background as an enterprise architect and technical manager, having worked with leading consumer companies including M&S, Orange and First Direct. He took his LBS MBA to follow his passion and launch CrowdBnk in 2011. Since 2011 Crowdbnk has raised nearly £20m for high growth startups.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Ayan make his way into the world of startups and tech and start Crowdbnk?
2.) What is Crowdbnk, how does it work, what companies Crowdbnk raise for, what is their minimum investment etc?
3.) What are the key drivers of the massive rise of the crowdfunding sector? What effect will the recent SEC ruling have on global crowdfunding?
4.) With the greater and greater amounts being raised on these platforms, does Crowdfunding have the potential to replace VCs in the future?
5.) What are the greatest barriers to mass market adoption of the crowdfunding model? What have been the biggest challenges faced in the journey with Crowdbnk?
6.) How do crowdfunding platforms plan to draw investors away from funds and other portfolio based assets given the level of risk associated with investing in young companies?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Ayan's Fave Book: Intelligent Investing by Benjamin Graham
Ayan's Fave Crowdbnk Investment: Gojimo by George Burgess
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Crowdbnk on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata
Eric Paley is the Managing Partner at Founder Collective, one of the world's most successful seed funds with investments in the likes of Uber, Hunch, Makerbot and About.me. Prior to Founder Collective, Eric was the Co-Founder and CEO of Brontes Technologies, later acquired by 3M for $95m. Following it’s acquisition Eric began making angel investments and it was not long before Eric and David, 'super angel' at the time, saw the potential for a Founder First seed fund and Founder Collective was born.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eric made his move into the wonderful world of venture from founding Brontes Technologies?
2.) What does Eric make of early stage valuations? When creating a venture fund why did Eric believe the seed stage was the stage with the most opportunity?
3.) Question from the legend, David Hornik @ August: At such an early stage where Founder Collective traditionally put in $0.1m-$0.3m, does Eric feel they put in enough money to make it matter?
4.) Does Eric believe that by not doing follow on rounds they are missing out? Does this resistance to seed funds set Founder Collective apart? David did mention that you have begun to follow on now, so what makes you follow on with one portfolio company and not another?
5.) The Founder journey is testing both physically and emotionally, what elements of support do Founder Collective provide outside of the business relationship?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Eric's Fave Book: Fooled By Randomness
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 088: David Frankel @ Founder Collective: The Most Founder Friendly VC in Existence
David Frankel is the Managing Partner at Founder Collective, one of the world's most successful seed funds with investments in the likes of Uber, Hunch, Makerbot and About.me. Prior to Founder Collective, David was the Founder and CEO of Internet Solutions, one of the largest ISP providers in Africa. Following it’s acquisition David made his move into the investing game becoming one of the very first ‘super angels’, following exceptional success in this field, David along with Eric Paley (coming on the show on Wednesday) and Micah Rosenbloom founded Founder Collective, a seed stage venture fund whereby everyone at Founder Collective has started a technology company, they have lived and breathed the founder experience, a true founder friendly venture fund.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did David make his move into the wonderful world of venture from being a founder and 'super angel'?
2.) Question from Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst: How has David evolved as an investor over time? Has his strategy and approach altered?
3.) David has experienced some immense cycles both up and down, how has he seen the seed funding environment evolve?
4.) What was it like working with Chris Dixon from a16z? What advice would David give to someone looking to maintain or create a network around them? What other sources of deal flow do you utilize? How do you most like to be approached?
5.) How did FC's investment in Uber come about? What does David make of the regulatory hurdles Uber face with regards to employees or contractors? What is the future for Uber?
6.) What can we expect from Founder Collective? What is David excited about and why?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
David's Fave Book: Eating Well For Optimum Health, Playing The Enemy
David's Fave Blog: Dan Primack, Term Sheet
David's Most Recent Investment: Pillpack
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC FF 021: From TechCrunch to Founder to TechCrunch with the legend, Steve O'Hear
Steve O’Hear is best known as a technology journalist, currently at TechCrunch where he focuses on European startups, companies and products. He first joined TechCrunch in November 2009 as Contributing Editor for TechCrunch Europe, where he worked alongside Editor Mike Butcher to help build TechCrunch’s European coverage. However, in June 2011 having caught the startup bug, Steve took a break from journalism to co-found the London and Prague-based startup Beepl. In November 2012, Beepl was acquired by Brand Embassy. Steve is also the writer and director of the critically acclaimed Silicon Valley documentary ‘In Search of the Valley’.
Before we delve into the show today, our dear friend and kind donator, Brad Feld has agreed to do a competition giveaway featuring signed copies of his amazing book, Venture Deals, all you have to do to be in with a chance is headover to the website at www.thetwentyminutevc.com and sign up for our newsletter. It’s that simple.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Where did it all start for Steve, how did you make he make his entrance into the tech industry, journalism and then founding Beepl?
2.) How did Steve find the transition from journalist to entrepreneur? What were the hardest aspects of the journey? What surprised Steve about the fundraising process for Beepl?
3.) In such a crowded space such as news generation, what is it about TechCrunch that makes it The Bible to the tech community?
4.) Obviously articles and news brings comments from the community. How do TechCrunch try and engage and unite the community? Have there been any difficulties with the commenting process etc?
5.) How does a platform like TechCrunch plan to monetize content with the ever disappearing ad dollar? Is it something that concerns TechCrunch?
6.) Where does Steve think we are going in both wider media and journalism? Is journalism heading to the short form with the increasing prominence of platforms such as Buzzfeed? How does the industry
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Steve's Fave Book: The Big Sleep
Steve's Fave Blog: Tech.eu
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Steve on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone
Jeppe Zink is the General Partner at Northzone, who have investments in the likes of Spotify, Bloglovin and TrustPilot, just to name a few. Jeppe himself established the London office of Northzone and his primary areas of focus are fintech, SaaS, marketplaces and mobile and has made investments in Wallapop, SpaceApe Games and many more.
Before we delve into the show today, our dear friend and kind donator, Brad Feld has agreed to do a competition giveaway featuring signed copies of his amazing book, Venture Deals, all you have to do to be in with a chance is headover to the website at www.thetwentyminutevc.com and sign up for our newsletter. It’s that simple.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hussein mad his way into the wonderful world of venture?
2.) What was it like to start a new fund with Hoxton and why did Hussein leave the security of Accel to start his own?
3.) Why did Hussein believe this was the stage with the most opportunity? Does he think there is too much capital chasing too few deals?
4.) With DarkTrace (portfolio company), Hoxton were the only VC money in at the early stage? How did that come about and what was it about Hoxton that made Mike take your money?
5.) Why did Hussein choose to setup the fund in London? What does he think is driving the surge in European tech with the rise of the Nordics etc?
6.) With Steve O’Hear Hussein stated he looks for brand new markets that are going to be formed (Playfish)? What does he think those are?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Jeppe's Fave Book: Zero To One, Startup Growth Engines
Jeppe's Fave Blog: Strictly VC
Jeppe's Productivity Tools: CityMapper, Genius
Jeppe's Most Recent Investment: CrossLend
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jeppe on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 086: Starting A New Venture Fund and How London Compares To The US with Hussein Kanji @ Hoxton Ventures
Hussein Kanji really is a pedigree in the industry having started off his career with Microsoft, he made the leap into venture with Accel Partners where he was a board observer with the likes of Playfish, acquired by Electronic Arts and made seed investments in the likes of OpenGamma and Dapper acquired by Yahoo. Following such success, Hussein raised his own fund and is now the founder of Hoxton Ventures, a 2013 fund with $40m under management. Despite, Hoxton’s age their portfolio is immense with the likes of Deliveroo, DarkTrace by the famous Mike Lynch from Autonomy and Campanja, recently acquired by 24/7 customer.
Before we delve into the show today, our dear friend and kind donator, Brad Feld has agreed to do a competition giveaway featuring signed copies of his amazing book, Venture Deals, all you have to do to be in with a chance is headover to the website at www.thetwentyminutevc.com and sign up for our newsletter. It’s that simple.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hussein mad his way into the wonderful world of venture?
2.) What was it like to start a new fund with Hoxton and why did Hussein leave the security of Accel to start his own?
3.) Why did Hussein believe this was the stage with the most opportunity? Does he think there is too much capital chasing too few deals?
4.) With DarkTrace (portfolio company), Hoxton were the only VC money in at the early stage? How did that come about and what was it about Hoxton that made Mike take your money?
5.) Why did Hussein choose to setup the fund in London? What does he think is driving the surge in European tech with the rise of the Nordics etc?
6.) With Steve O’Hear Hussein stated he looks for brand new markets that are going to be formed (Playfish)? What does he think those are?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Hussein's Fave Book: The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Ronald Cohen, Flowers from Algernon
Hussein's Fave Blog: Josh Koppelman: Redeye VC, Abnormal Returns
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Hussein on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed
Willie Biggart is the Chairman @ Spoonfed, a startup on the cusp of 2 extremely hot sectors, SaaS and food. Spoonfed offers a new way for catering companies and restaurants to take advantage of the growing corporate food drop off market. They are currently raising a £500,000 round on SyndicateRoom, which you can check out here! With regards to Willie himself, Willie founded his own business, BD Network in 1990 and exited in 2002 and BD Ntwk is now one of Europe’s largest marketing agencies. Since 1990 Willie has started, developed and sold 3 businesses.
CLICK TO PLAY
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Willie make his move into the entrepreneurial path and come to be Chairman of Spoonfed?
2.) Why does Willie believe it is more beneficial to have SaaS based businesses rather than people based businesses?
3.) Often the hardest problem for SaaS businesses is finding their first customers, how did Willie go about getting Spoonfed's initial user base?
4.) What strategies did Willie undertake to try and understand what features his customers wanted and then how to attract them?
5.) Why does Willie believe the food tech space has seen explosive growth, both in the UK and the US?
5.) Having invested and raised money in the seed round of the funding cycle, both as investor and operator, what advice would Willie give for founders entering a seed round.
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
SpoonFed's Current Fundraising Campaign on SyndicateRoom
Willie's Fave Book: Eric Ries: The Lean Startup, The E-Myth Revisited
Willie's Blog or Newsletter: Kenny Fraser, Sunstone Communications
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Ashish and LawTrades on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 085: Mark Suster @ Upfront Ventures on Being A Super Entrepreneur Driven VC
Mark Suster is Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures which he joined in 2007, having previously worked with Upfront for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Before joining Upfront Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com following its acquisition of Koral, where Mark was Founder and CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder and CEO of BuildOnline, a European SaaS company that was acquired by SWORD Group. Mark is also the writer of one of my favourite VC blogs, Both Sides Of The Table which is a centre piece to the whole VC community and is a must read for all interested in entrepreneurship and VC.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Mark make his way into the world of tech and later make the transition to VC?
2.) How have Mark's entrepreneurial origins influenced his investment style and approach to startups?
3.) What really gets Mark excited in terms of the founders and the companies they have built?
4.) How does Mark recommend that startup founders can meet investors and get those initial meetings?
5.) What sector is Mark most excited by and why?
6.) Mark has said in the past 'too much money too early often fucks companies up'. Why is that and how should founders determine what is the right amount to raise?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
My Fave of Mark's Posts: Entrepreneur DNA, I Invest In Lines Not Dots
Mark's Fave Book: The Accidental Superpower
Mark's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Stratechery, Ben Evans, Chris Dixon, Tom Tunguz
Mark's Most Recent Investment: Mitu Networks
As always you can follow Harry, Mark, The Twenty Minute VC and Upfront Ventures on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 084: Meet Felix Capital: A Venture Firm For The Creative Class with Antoine Nussenbaum
Antoine Nussenbaum is a Principal and member of the founding team of Felix Capital. Prior to Felix, Antoine was a Partner at Atlas Global, a private equity fund originally part of GLG Partners. Over the past five years he has worked closely with various early-stage digital startups including Mirakl, Jellynote, Pave, Reedsy and 31Dover and actively helped them launch their businesses. If that wasn't enough he has also been involved since inception with Huckletree, a fast growing coworking operator dedicated to the UK digital community which was started by his wife.
To check out the available positions at Felix Capital click here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Antoine make his move into the world of VC?
2.) What sectors do Felix invest in? What stage? Geography?
3.) How do Felix position themselves in the VC space? How do Felix plan to differentiate between other VCs firms in Europe? As for the structure of the fund, why did Felix choose an advisor heavy approach?
4.) Why does Antoine think Europe has the edge at the moment? Also, with the rise of the Nordics and Berlin, why did Felix choose to setup in London?
5.) How does Antoine assess the London and European funding and tech environment at the moment? Does Antoine agree with the media hype over a tech bubble?
6.) How do digital brands address the issue of the millenials with reducing brand loyalty? Does Antoine think this will be a problem for consumer startups in the fashion, food and travel space?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Felix's Manifesto, HuckleTree, Co-Founder @ Huckletree on CNBC
Antoine's Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, Capital In The Twenty-First Century by Thomas Picketty
Antoine's Fave Productivity Tools: Streak, Slack, Evernote, Pocket
Antoine's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Fred Wilson: AVC, ProductHunt
Antoine's Most Recent Investment: The Food Assembly
As always you can follow Harry, Antoine, The Twenty Minute VC and Felix Capital on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades
Ashish Walia is the Co-Founder & COO at 500 Startups portfolio company, LawTrades. LawTrades aims to decentralise the traditional legal hiring process through providing an amazing marketplace of attorneys with domain experience in the startup world having worked with companies from the likes of YC, Techstars and 500. Ashish is also the Host of The Ashish Walia Show, a podcast dedicated to interviewing the latest and greatest world changing entrepreneurs, you can listen to Harry's interview on The Ashish Walia Show here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) I would love to kick off today’s show by hearing a little about your background and the origins of LawTrades? What was the a-ha moment for you?
2.) Was Ashish nervous leaving the security of the legal profession for the life of a tech founder? What would Ashish advise people who want to make the leap but are not sure if it is worth risking everything?
3.) The legal space is about a century behind the rest of the consumerised world of tech, why is there this divergence between the advancement of tech and the lacking progression of the legal space?
4.) How did Ashish come to raise funds from 500? What was the process and interview like? Why did Ashish choose 500 out of all the accelerators? What were the challenging and surprising elements of the fundraising journey?
6.) What would Ashish do differently if he was founding LawTrades again? What does Ashish wish he had been told before he became an entrepreneur?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Ashish's Fave Book: Peter Thiel: Zero To One
Ashish's Fave Entrepreneurial Resources: Gary Vaynerchuk, This Week In Startups, How To Start A Startup
Ashish's Fave Blog: James Altucher, Tim Ferriss,
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Ashish and LawTrades on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
We would like to say a special thank you to our partner for this very special 500 Startups Feature Week, LawTrades, the go to place for startups and VCs to get their legal work done. For all 20VC listeners LawTrades are offering a special $150 off your first piece of legal work when you mention ‘The Twenty Minute VC’. You can follow them on Twitter here!
20 VC 083: 500 Startups Week: New Funds, Startup Mentoring and Dave's Masterplan with Marvin Liao, Partner @ 500 Startups
Marvin is a Partner at 500 Startups, running the SF based accelerator program as well as investing in Seed stage start ups. Prior to 500 Marvin is a 10.5 year veteran of Yahoo! Inc., having held roles in various departments from Sales, Business Development, Ad Operations and Marketing and presently serves on the boards/advisory boards of several internet advertising and ad technology companies across the globe.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Marvin make his move into technology and the investing game?
2.) How was Marvin's time at Yahoo? How did Marvin see the company change over the 10 years he was there? How do you feel your position at Yahoo equipped you for 500 Startups?
3.) So coming from 10 years at Yahoo you could have had your pick of VCs to join. What was it about 500 that attracted you and why do you believe this very early stage is the biggest opportunity to exploit?
4.) 500 has now ironically invested in 1000+ startups, leading me to ask, what is the admissions process like and what Marvin's criteria at 500 for investment decisions? What are the key metrics you look at?
5.) How does Marvin respond to the notion that investing with 500 Startups removes the talent of investing through the spray and pray method?
6.) Now 500 Startups has recently raises an new $85m fund, alongside a new fund of $30m for Japan, $10m for South East Asia and a $10m fund for Thailand. So firstly, does this prove that the 500 model is successfully scaling? What does the future hold for 500? Where do you see the most innovation and progress?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Marvin's Fave Book:The Art of Worldly Wisdom, The 4 Hour Work Week
Marvin's Fave Productivity Tool: Evernote, Calendly.com
Marvin's Fave Blog: James Clear, James Altucher, Tim Ferriss, Fred Wilson, Mark Suster
Marvin's Most Interesting Investments: Neighborly, Agfunder
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Marvin and 500 on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
We would like to say a special thank you to our partner for this very special 500 Startups Feature Week, LawTrades, the go to place for startups and VCs to get their legal work done. For all 20VC listeners LawTrades are offering a special $150 off your first piece of legal work when you mention ‘The Twenty Minute VC’. You can follow them on Twitter here!
20 VC 082: 500 Startups Week: Growth Hacking 101: How To 10x Your Conversion with Matt Lerner, Head of Distro Dojo London
Matt Lerner is a Distro Partner with 500 Startups, and runs their London office. He specializes in conversion optimization, analytics, engagement and retention. As a member of the in-house growth (AKA “Distro”) team, he partners with 500 portfolio companies to help them build growth engines and scale. Previously, as a 500 Startups Mentor, Matt helped over 40 companies develop and execute growth strategies. Prior to joining 500 Startups, he worked as a Marketing Director at PayPal, where he built and managed three growth teams that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue across the funnel. Here are some of Matt's amazing growth hacking slide decks:
10 Growth Hacking Tools To Disrupt Your Competitors
For your chance to win a signed copy of Brad Feld's amazing Venture Deals, all you have to do is click the click to tweet link here: http://ctt.ec/C61w6 and you will be entered into the competition.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matt made his move from Paypal to VC with 500Startups?
2.) What is the mission at 500 in London with the Distro? What is the investment thesis? Preferred round? Sector? What process do you take the companies through when they are with you in the Dojo?
3.) What does growth hacking really mean? Is it not another BS new techie term?
4.) What has Matt found to be some of the most effective growth hacks and why? What are the biggest mistakes companies make with regards to growth? How can they avoid them?
5.) When does Matt think a company should start to focus on growth?
6.) Who does Matt personally admire and think has been extremely effective and why? What campaigns or pieces of work have led him to this conclusion?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Matt's Recent Investments: Tom Beverly: Fy, Tamatem
Matt's Fave Book: Do You Talk Funny: The Guide To Public Speaking, The One Thing You Need To Know
Matt's Fave Newsletter: Doug Scott, Susan Su: Distro Snack, Tim Ferriss Podcast
Matt's Growth Hacking Idols: Dave McClure: Pirate Metrics Talk, Sean Ellis: Inventor of Growth Hacking Term, Andy Johns @ WealthFront,
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Matt and 500 Startups on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
We would like to say a special thank you to our partner for this very special 500 Startups Feature Week, LawTrades, the go to place for startups and VCs to get their legal work done. For all 20VC listeners LawTrades are offering a special $150 off your first piece of legal work when you mention 'The Twenty Minute VC'. You can follow them on Twitter here!
20 VC FF 018: Brian Wong, Founder @ Kiip on Raising $30m in VC Funding by 24
Joining us in the hotseat today is a young man who is insanely smart, he skipped 4 grades in school and graduated University at just 17, at which point he moved to the states on his own and within months was working alongside tech legends Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson at Digg. However, it was not long before he started his own company Kiip, a category-creating mobile rewards network that is redefining mobile advertising through an innovative platform that leverages "moments of achievement" in games and apps to simultaneously benefit users, developers and advertisers. If you have not guessed it by now, shame on you, it is of course, the incredible Brian Wong, one of the youngest people to ever raise VC funding receiving investment from the likes of Hummer Winblad, previous guest at Transmedia Capital Chris Redlitz (Episode 26), True Ventures and many more.
For the chance to win Brad Feld’s amazing book, Venture Deals, all you have to do is head on over to ProductHunt’s new podcast section and upvote this episode of The Twenty Minute VC if you enjoyed it, by clicking here!
A huge thank you to our sponsors for today's show, LawTrades, the marketplace that connects startups & VCs to awesome attorneys to get their legal work done at the best price!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Brian start his career? What is the Brain Wong origin snapshot?
2.) What was it about Fred Wilson that made Brian most wanting to talk to him above all other VCs when he made the move to NY?
3.) What was it like working with amazing founders like Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson? What were Brian's biggest takeaways from the experience?
4.) As a 19 year old, how difficult was it raising capital for your startup? Has it become harder raising further rounds from seed to series A to growth rounds?
5.) How have Brian's board of directors helped or hindered along the Kiip journey? How do experienced executives respond to working with such a young CEO and does age make it difficult to retain top talent?
6.) With the evolution of technology and progression of time, how are Kiip addressing the growing competitive market and how are you navigating Kiip into new social media channels?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Brian's Fave Book: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Brian Fave Blog: Inside.com by Jason Calacanis
Brian's Fave Productivity Tool: Evernote, Box
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Brian on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 081: From YC to VC with Weston Gaddy @ Bain Capital Ventures
Weston Gaddy is a Senior Principal at Bain Capital Ventures where he focuses on investments in early-stage companies and assists the portfolio operations group. Weston is also a YC alum with Frogmetrics, a handheld survey device company, he co-founded in college and received funding from Founders Fund, Y Combinator and Alexis Ohanian at Reddit. Outisde of the tech and VC world Weston was a Weston worked as a strategy consultant for media, financial service, and consumer product clients at Bain & Company in New York.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Weston make his way into the technology and VC?
2.) What was Weston's biggest takeaway from the YC experience? Has the experience impacted his investing strategy?
3.) Why is the world of branding changing from dominant players using traditional mainstream channels to a more open opportunity for startups to connect with consumers? What is changing?
4.) On the topic of brand loyalty how brands create brand loyalty in the fickle generation of young millenials often with a mercenary outlook?
5.) What sectors have most opportunity to exploit this revolution in branding? Why do you say those sectors? Have you based any of your investments around these assumptions?
6.) How important is it for VCs to specialize and have superb sector knowledge in something?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Weston's Fave Book: The Sixth Extinction
Weston's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Dan Primack's TermSheet
Weston's Most Recent Investment: Jet.com
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Weston on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 080: How VCs Can Differentiate Themselves with Patricia Nakache, General Partner @ Trinity Ventures
Patricia Nakache is General Partner at Trinity Ventures where she focuses on funding companies launching innovative online consumer and business services. Her portfolio of past investments is just astonishing with the likes of LoopNet and Care.com IPOing, PayScale being acquired by Warburg Pincus, Uptake being acquired by Groupon and many more.
To be entered into the competition to win a signed copy of Brad Feld's legendary Venture Deals, all you have to do is click here and upvote this episode on ProductHunt and you will be automatically entered into the competition.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Patricia get into the technology industry and then later make her transition into the world of Venture Capital?
2.) A recent study has shown that the total number of female partners has fallen from 10% to 6% in the time that you have been at Trinity. Why is there this gender misrepresentation and what can be done to improve female equality in the VC industry?
3.) Sheila has invested in some incredible female entrepreneurs such as Sheila Marcelo at Care.com, Illana Stern at Weddington Way and Anna Zornosa at Ruby Ribbon? What excited Patricia about these entrepreneurs and what can female entrepreneurs do to increase their chances of funding?
4.) With the increasing amount of capital available, VCs face greater competition between firms, what can VCs bring to the table to beat the competition?
5.) What elements of the on demand economy face danger in the coming years in a similar way to Homejoy?
5.) Which sector is Patricia most excited about and why?
6.) Why has there been a resurgence in the marketplace model particularly in ecommerce? What are the drivers of this change?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Patricia's Fave Book: Good To Great by Jim Collins
Patricia's Fave Blog: Strictly VC, Owler
Patricia's Most Recent Investment: Mayvenn
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Patricia on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session you can follow Harry on Instagram here!
20 VC 017: BETAWORKS WEEK: Kuan Huang, Founder @ Poncho
For your chance to win a signed copy of Venture Deals by previous guest and legend, Brad Feld all you have to do is click the Click To Tweet Link here: http://ctt.ec/d1dE3
Kuan Huang, is the Founder of Poncho an internally built company at Betaworks. A simpler weather service with a personality, delivered to you every day. Prior to creating Poncho, Kuan was a Hacker in residence at Betaworks and as he describes the luckiest engineer at Hatch Labs a mobile focused startup incubator funded by IAC.
I would like to direct your attention to one of Betaworks investments on the west coast in the amazing ProductHunt, and you must check out ProductHunt’s new podcast section, which is the best discovery platform for finding new and amazing podcast episodes!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Kuan get into the world of Betaworks and what was Kuan's aha moment for Poncho?
2.) What was wrong with weather apps when Kuan started Poncho? What made Kuan think there was a gap in the market?
3.) Kuan said in an interview with TechCrunch “The core objective is to have Poncho become a default part of your routine,” How has Kuan gone about to ensure that there are habit forming functions in poncho? What makes the user come back? Does Kuan prefer mass market testing or niche 100 person testing?
4.) What role does Betaworks play in the development of Poncho? What are the main value adds of being a Betaworks company?
5.) Looking back at the Poncho journey so far, what were the breakthrough moments where progress was really made? What were the most challenging elements and how did Kuan overcome them?
6.) What would Kuan advise a founder looking to work with Betaworks? Is there anything they can do to increase their chances of a collaboration?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Kuan's Fave Reading Material: Medium, Instapaper
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kuan on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 079: BETAWORKS WEEK: East vs West Coast Investing with Peter Rojas, EIR @ Betaworks, Co-Founder @ Weblogs & Engadget
Peter Rojas is an entrepreneur-in-residence at betaworks focusing on early stage investments. Prior to joining betaworks he was VP of Strategy at AOL. He also co-founded several startups, including Weblogs Inc (with previous guest Jason Calacanis) (acquired by AOL in 2005), where he created tech sites Engadget and Joystiq; he also created gdgt, a social commerce platform (acquired by AOL in 2013); and gadget blog Gizmodo (now part of Gawker Media). Previously Rojas worked as an editor at the original Red Herring, a columnist on emerging technology for The Guardian, a contributor to Wired, The New York Times, Fortune, Money, and many more.
One of Betaworks investments on the west coast is the amazing ProductHunt, and you must check out ProductHunt’s new podcast section, which is the best discovery platform for finding new and amazing podcast episodes!
Also, would you like the chance to win a signed copy of Venture Deals by Brad Feld? All you have to do is leave a review on iTunes and then email harry@thetwentyminutevc.com with the name that you left the review under!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) From tech blogger and entrepreneur to founding Engadget, and then a product person and now at Betaworks. Peter gives a snapshot of his career so far?
2.) What is Peter doing on the West Coast when Betaworks is based in NYC? How do you compare the two technology environments and ecosystems?
3.) What is involved in being EIR at Betaworks? Why has this position become so popular over the last few years?
4.) How does Peter and Betaworks approach the changing world of seed and as I have seen recently, pre seed investments? Do you have any set metrics that you stick to? What KPIs are always the first ones you look at?
5.) What VCs does Peter admire and look to emulate?
6.) What has Peter learnt from his 1st month in venture? What has been the biggest surprises and challenges about the industry?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Productivity Tools: Reeder
Peter's Fave Blogs or Newsletter: Jason Hirschhorn: REDEF, ProductHunt
Peter's Fave Book: Antifragile
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Peter on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side of Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Matt Hartman is director of seed investments at betaworks. Prior to joining betaworks, he was co-founder of ReferBoost, a profitable b2b company in the real estate and social media space, and JustBecause, a mobile app used by Uber, Birchbox, Jackthreads, and other e-commerce companies for customer acquisition. He started his career building the technology platform for Trammell Crow Company (acquired by CBRE) before joining Hot Potato (acquired by Facebook).
In this interview with Matt we talk about one of Betaworks investments in ProductHunt and I would love to direct you all to go check out ProductHunt’s new podcast section, it’s the best way to find new and amazing podcast episodes, check it out!
To win a signed copy of Venture Deals by Brad Feld? All you have to do is leave a review on iTunes and then email harry@thetwentyminutevc.com with the name that you left the review under!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How you has Matt ended up at the amazing Betaworks, what was his career pre-Betaworks?
2.) How does Matt define betaworks and his role in particular in the Betaworks organisation? What makes this model the most effective and successful in Matt's view?
3.) How does Matt believe the structure of social networks alters user behavior and therefore impacts distribution? How do social networks include habit forming behaviours to ensure user retention on their networks?
4.) What does Matt think makes a strong community? What was it about ProductHunt that signaled to you this was the beginning of a rapidly growing community?
5.) With Betaworks investment in Gimlet Media, how does Matt see the future of podcasting? Does investing in Gimlet not break the rule that it has to be a potentially $bn exit?
6.) Question from Ryan Hoover, Founder at ProductHunt: ‘What product or app has impressed Matt the most in the past year and what really gets Matt excited when trying new products both as an investor and as a user’?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Most Read Blog or Newsletter: Founder's Notebook by David Jaxson
Matt's Favourite Book: The Psychology of Pursuasion by Robert Cialdini
Matt's Fave Productivity Apps: Drafts
Most Recent Investment: Disruptive Multimedia by Ryan Leslie
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013
To win a signed copy of Venture Deals by Brad Feld, click the link below and like our Facebook page and you will be entered into the competition. https://www.facebook.com/The-Twenty-Minute-VC-769935093077190/timeline/
Chad Fowler is the CTO at 6Wunderkinder (acquired by Microsoft), the company behind the wildly successful Wunderlist, previously cited by Michael Treskow and Mattias Ljungman on the show as their must have productivity app. Prior to 6Wunderkinder, Chad was the Senior VP of technology of the daily deals site, Living Social and before that we was CTO at InfoEther, a Ruby and Ruby-On-Rails consultancy firm. Fowler is also the host and organiser of numerous tech conferences and wrote "The Passionate Programmer", a career guide for software developers.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Where did it all begin for Chad and how did he make the move from his musician dreams to CTO of tech startups?
2.) As an American, working in Europe, how does Europe's tech community compare to the US?
3.) Wunderlist was the App of the Year, what does Chad believes makes it so special?
4.) Is there more to go in improving the consumer feel of enterprise software?
5.) How did Chad go about creating a product with such habit forming ability?
6.) Question from Carolina Brochado @ Atomico: What is it like moving from a small manned startup to a giant corporation like Microsoft?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Chad's Fave Book: The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chad on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side of Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 077: Part 2: Kamal Ravikant: The Future Of Venture Capital
For your chance to win a signed copy of Venture Deals by previous guest and legend, Brad Feld all you have to do is click the Click To Tweet Link here: http://ctt.ec/Q41ZG
Kamal Ravikant is an absolute hero to me after I read his incredible best selling book, Love Yourself Like Like Your Life Depends On It. As for an intro to Kamal, it goes without saying that he has worked with some of the best people in Silicon Valley and is a true tech and investing icon, but he has also trekked to one of the highest base camps in the Himalayas, meditated with Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lama's monastery, held the hands of dying patients, earned a US Army Infantry patch, walked 550 miles across Spain, been the only non-black, non-woman member of the Black Women's writers' group and written books including my favourite the previously mentioned, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Where does Kamal see the future of Venture Capital?
2.) What worries Kamal about the tech scene?
3.) How does Kamal sort the wood from the trees in the frothy market of tech startups?
4.) What are Kamal's must read books and blogs?
5.) Which leaders or figures is Kamal inspired by and why?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
My Fave Book: Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant
Kamal's Fave Book: The Alchemist, The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope
Kamal's Fave Blog: James Altucher
Kamal's Most Recent Investment: Bolt
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kamal on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow Harry on Instagram here!
20 VC 077: PART 1: Kamal Ravikant: 'I'm Not Your Traditional VC'
For your chance to win a signed copy of Venture Deals by previous guest and legend, Brad Feld all you have to do is click the Click To Tweet Link here: http://ctt.ec/Q41ZG
Kamal Ravikant is an absolute hero to me after I read his incredible best selling book, Love Yourself Like Like Your Life Depends On It. As for an intro to Kamal, it goes without saying that he has worked with some of the best people in Silicon Valley and is a true tech and investing icon, but he has also trekked to one of the highest base camps in the Himalayas, meditated with Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lama's monastery, held the hands of dying patients, earned a US Army Infantry patch, walked 550 miles across Spain, been the only non-black, non-woman member of the Black Women's writers' group and written books including my favourite the previously mentioned, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Kamal make his way into the world of Venture Capital?
2.) What were Kamal's biggest takeaways from working as an entrepreneur?
3.) What really makes a great VC? How can VCs provide true and genuine value add?
4.) Why is now the best time to be an entrepreneur? What has changed?
5.) What would Kamal advise an entrepreneur looking to build a startup?
.) Where does Kamal see the future of Venture Capital?
6.) What worries Kamal about the tech scene?
7.) How does Kamal sort the wood from the trees in the frothy market of tech startups?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Kamal's Fave Book: The Alchemist, Hemingway, The Great Work of Stephen Cope,
Kamal's Fave Blog: James Altucher
Kamal's Most Recent Investment: Bolt
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kamal on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow Harry on Instagram here!
FF 015: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Eric Glyman, Co-Founder & CEO @ Paribus
Eric Glyman, Co-Founder and CEO @ Paribus (Y Combinator S15), the service which scans your inbox for receipts and automatically saves you money when the items you bought drop in price. Stores often guarantee that you will get the lowest prices. But they don’t follow through unless you work for it. Paribus does the work for you.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) What was Eric's career before Paribus and what was his a-ha moment was for the idea?
2.) How did Eric do things differently from the typical startup? Was this effective or would it have been more productive to go full in?
3.) What were Paribus' testing hypotheses like? Does Eric prefer mass market testing or niche 100 person testing?
4.) How was the admissions process for YC, why did Eric choose YC and why were YC attracted to Paribus?
5.) What would Eric advise founders looking to get into YC? Is there anything they can do or know that will increase their chances of getting into YC?
6.) What were the breakthrough moments for Paribus? What were the most challenging elements and how did Eric overcome them?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Eric's Fave Book: I, Robot
Eric's Fave Blog: AppSumo by Noah Kagan
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Eric and Paribus on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, follow Harry on Instagram here!
20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC
Aaron Harris is a Partner at Y Combinator and also newly one of my favourite podcast hosts with his brilliant show, Startup School Radio, for all startup lovers it is a must listen. Prior to YC, Aaron was cofounder of Sequoia backed Tutorspree, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2011. Before Tutorspree he worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed product and operations for an analytics group. He also writes an awesome blog which can be found here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Aaron make his move into the world of entrepreneurship with Tutorspree and then become a YC Partner?
2.) Why did Aaron join YC and why does he believe the biggest potential lies at this stage of the cycle?
3.) Now at YC, Aaron is a Partner, what does that entail, what level of interaction do you have with the founders, where does YC look to add serious value?
4.) With the mass of startups now in the 100s coming out of each YC demo day, how does YC assure the same quality and level of value add?
5.) With regards to testing what is YC’s opinion? How does YC assess whether a product does have product market fit? What are the YC requirements for growth whilst in YC?
6.) What happens after the YC experience, does YC maintain conversations and communication? How does YC try to maintain valuations at a reasonable level to stop YC price inflation?
7.) What is the future for YC? Are we going to see another funding round? Is the YC model scalable? Could we have a YC Europe?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Aaron & YC's Podcast: Startup School Radio
Aaron's Fave Book: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Founder's At Work by Jessica Livingston
As always you can follow Harry, Aaron, The Twenty Minute VC and YC on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 075: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Kirsty Nathoo, CFO @ Y Combinator
Kirsty Nathoo is the CFO of Y Combinator. As CFO, she holds the keys to the kingdom – literally. Not only does she control and manage Y Combinator’s internal finances, from paying bills to helping organize demo days to actually making sure Y Combinator’s money is wired to startups from the proper accounts; but she helps YC startups coordinate outside financings, tax issues, incorporation and other fiscal matters. She’s the financial brains behind the entire operation, with YC partner Harj Taggar stating that ‘YC would cease to operate if Kirsty was not around’.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Kirsty made her move from PWC in Cambridge to CFO at the World’s Most Successful Accelerator?
2.) Joining YC permanently in 2010, how has Kirsty seen it develop to today’s current state? What has been the key drivers to the success and growth of YC?
3.) As CFO Kirsty has developed a certain pattern recognition with regards to what investors and VCs like to see in the terms of startups. What are they?
4.) Kirsty has seen the progression of many startups, what are the most common problems startups face in the fundraising cycle? What are the commonalities in those that are successful?
5.) How does YC address the issue of potentially inflated valuations for their alum?
6.) What are some financials that all founders should know all the time?
7.) What is the future for YC? Are we going to see another funding round? Is the YC model scalable? Could we have a YC Europe?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Y Combinator on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Alice Bentinck is Co-Founder at Entrepreneurs First, the accelerator program that puts founders first! Previously, Alice worked at prestigious consultancy firm McKinsey & Co, before turning down an offer from Google to found Entrepreneur First alongside Matt. She taught herself to code, and founded Code First Girls in 2013 to help more women get into tech. She sits on the board of Sherry Coutu's Founders4Schools, is on Imperial College London's Department of Computing Industrial Liaison Board, and acted as the Prime Minister's expert on startups at the Northern Future Forum. She has been recognised in Management Today’s 35 under 35 and the Evening Standard’s Top 1000 most influential Londoners.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alice came up with the idea for EF and why she decided to found the company?
2.) What would Alice recommend is the best way to build a company from scratch? EF is for technical individuals, what can non technical individuals do?
3.) What would Alice say makes a great founder? Has she seen any commonalities in the great founders that have exited EF?
4.) What is Alice's opinion on equity divisions within startups? What is the right way to approach the topic?
5.) What should teams focus on in the first 100 days of their startup? What is the 20% that produces 80% of the results?
6.) What has been the hardest aspect of growing the business and how did Alice overcome it?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alice on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry and many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 074: The Future of Healthcare with Bob Kocher, Partner @ Venrock
Bob Kocher is a Partner at Venrock and focuses on healthcare IT and services investments. He currently serves on the Boards of Aledade and Jiff, and is a Board Observer at Grand Rounds and Doctor on Demand. Prior to Venrock, Bob served in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and Economic Policy on the National Economic Council. In the Obama Administration, Bob was one of the shapers of the Affordable Care Act. Before the White House, Bob was a Partner at McKinsey & Company where he led McKinsey Global Institute’s healthcare economics work and Center for United States Health System Reform.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Bob made his way from The White House to Venrock as a VC?
2.) How did working at The White House prepare Bob for his career as a VC, where does Bob have the biggest opportunity to change the healthcare system?
3.) What are the barriers to entry that a preventing full scale innovation and business growth in the healthcare IT space?
4.) Why have we seen a large increase in healthcare startups? What more would you Bob like to see in the healthcare space, either from the side of the startups or VC’s?
5.) How does Bob perceive the integration of software and healthcare in the future?
6.) As a healthcare professional, what would Bob recommend an individual with a high powered, demanding job in order to lead a healthy lifestyle?
Items Mentioned In Todays Episode:
Bob's Fave Book: The System
Bob's Most Recent Investment: Lyra Health
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Bob on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito night, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 073: Life Inside Accel Partners with Michael Treskow @ Accel
Michael Treskow is a VC @ Accel Partners, one of the world's most successful venture firms having funded the likes of Facebook, Dropbox, Spotify, Etsy and many more. At Accel, Michael is responsible for the firm’s investments in SpaceApe, a mobile games developer, and GoCardless, an online direct debt provider. Michael was also instrumental in Accel's investments and ongoing work with Funding Circle, Packlink, Qubit, Semmle, Trufa and WorldRemit. Prior to Accel, Michael focused on early-stage investments in technology companies at Warburg Pincus in San Francisco, invested in publicly traded technology companies at Highside Capital, and helped advise technology companies as part of Morgan Stanley's investment banking team in New York.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Michael made his way into the VC industry? Do you think it is very important for VCs to have entrepreneurial experience?
2.) How does Michael compare the investing environments between London and SF? What was his biggest takeaway from Warburg Pincus in SF?
3.) Accel is stage agnostic, why is that? What size market attracts Michael? How can Michael tell whether founders have the ability to exploit the market?
4.) What Michael believes are his key value adds? Have these changed over time?
5.) We often hear startups being described as ‘uber for’, ‘tinder for’. Do VCs like this simplification of business? How else would Michael suggest a complex concept can be broken down into something easily digestible?
6.) Does Michael still believe there is room for improvement in the consumerisation of enterprise software? Does Emergence Capital's pivot signal a turning tide?
Items Mentioned In Todays Episode:
Michael's Fave Book: The Innovator's Dilemma, Crossing The Chasm
Michael Productivity Tools: Wunderlist
Michael's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Dan Primack, Term Sheet
Michael' Most Recent Investment: CartoDB
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Michael on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito night, you can follow him on Instagram here!
FF 013: 'Make Bets And Believe In What You Are Doing' with James Borow @ Shift & Brand Networks
James Borow is Chief Product Officer at Brand Networks which delivers social marketing and advertising to 650 enterprise customers, following their acquisition of Shift where James was CEO and Co-Founder and led the business to being the No 1 marketing software company for social advertisers with clients such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. James was named a semi-finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in 2014, and is a thought leader in digital advertising, with articles in Forbes, The New York Times, Bloomberg and Business Insider. James is also an active angel investor, having invested in Kixer, a mobile advertising platform, Gradient X, a mobile DSP (acquired by SingTel) and Conversion Logic, an online advertising attribution platform.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) What were James' entrepreneurial origins and what was his aha moment?
2.) How did James get his first clients and what were the hardest aspects of growing the business?
3.) What was it like working with these tech titans like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin?
4.) Shift obtained $14m in VC funding. How did James meet his investors? How was the fundraising experience for James? What were the surprises and challenging aspects?
5.) Shift was acquired by Brand Networks for $50m but what were James' reasons for selling? Was there any clash between James and his investors when it came to the sale?
6.) What advice would James give to founders contemplating selling their business to larger acquirers?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
James' Fave Book: John Adams by Dave McCullough
James' Fave Apps: Snapchat, Business Insider and ProductHunt
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and James on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 072: Super Angel, Fabrice Grinda: The Future of Startup Investing
Fabrice Grinda is among the world’s leading Internet entrepreneurs and investors with over $300 million in exits and 200 angel investments including the likes of Alibaba, LendingClub and BrightRoll. Fabrice is currently investing in startups and building companies through FJ Labs, which he cofounded with business partner Jose Marin. Fabrice is also co-founder and executive chairman of Beepi, a next generation used car marketplace which recently raised $60 million in series B funding.
Prior to FJ Labs and Beepi, Fabrice was co-founder and co-CEO of OLX, one of the largest websites in the world with over 200 million unique visitors per month.
Submit Your Startup To Fabrice
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Fabrice make his entry into the world of investing?
2.) How important is it for investors to have entrepreneurial experience?
3.) What are the most common problems Fabrice's portfolio companies face?
4.) What is Fabrice's selection criteria for startups when investing and what determines the valuation of a startup?
5.) How does Fabrice respond to the allegation that he is a clone collector?
6.) With Fabrice's $1m syndicate, does he believe syndicates have the potential to replace VC?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Fabrice's Fave Book: What If by Randall Munroe, Think Like A Freak by Stephen Dubner
Fabrice's Fave Newsletter: TechCrunch
Fabric's Most Recent Investment: Flexport
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Fabrice on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow Harry on Instagram here!
20 VC 071: Pre-Seed Investing, Why Now Is The Best Time with Nicholas Chirls @ Notation Capital
Nicholas Chirls is the Founder and Partner @ Notation Capital, one of New York's genuine pre-seed funds investing in pre-growth startups with huge potential. Prior to Notation, Nichoas was Head of Investment at Betaworks, leading investments in companies such as Electric Objects, Estimote, URX, Namo Media (acquired by Twitter) and Grand St. (acquired by Etsy).
If you would like to email Nick, his email is nick@notationcapital.com
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nick made his move into the venture industry?
2.) Who does Nick consider a mentor and thought leader in the VC industry?
3.) Why now is the best time to be a pre-seed fund in NYC?
4.) At the pre-seed stage what metrics does Notation focus on?
5.) How does Nicholas evaluate the valuation ecosystem?
6.) How does Nicholas handle deal sourcing? Where does he find startups to invest in?
7.) Does crowdfunding act as a competing finance method at the pre-seed stage?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Nick's Fave Book: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Nick's Fave Newsletter: Wait But Why
Nick Most Recent Investment: Zipdrug: Your Prescriptions Delivered on Demand
Best Meditation Apps: Headspace, Calm
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Nick and Notation on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many mojito sessions, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 070: Do Investors in California Outperform The Rest of The World with Eric ver Ploeg @ Recursive Capital
Eric ver Ploeg has sat on both sides of the table as an entrepreneur and a VC. Eric started his career as an entrepreneur with the founding of Adknowledge, the 1st internet ad serving company, which was sold for $193m. He then went on to Angara, a Kleiner Perkins backed startup which led to his move into venture with VantagePoint, where he led VantagePoint's investment activities in the mobile arena, leading over $160m in investments. Eric is also a fantastic writer and his articles can be found on Medium here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Eric made the move from Angara, Kleiner Perkins company, to his role in venture?
2.) How being a founder affected how Eric interacted and invested in startups?
3.) How can founders learn the skills of interacting with their investors and board?
4.) What makes the hot companies, hot and the others struggle?
5.) Does Eric agree with startups raising a 'warchest' of funds if they can? How can startups determine what is the right amount to raise?
6.) Why are SF angels so much more successful than other investors? What do they have that other do not?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Eric's Fave Book: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Eric's Fave Newsletter or Blog: Tomasz Tunguz
Research and analysis provided by CB Insights
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here?
20 VC 069: Jeff Clavier, King of Seed Funding @ SoftTech VC on Brad Feld, Fitbit and Standout Startups
Jeff Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most established seed VC firms in Silicon Valley, having closed 150 investments since 2004. An early angel investor in Web 2.0, Jeff and his team have backed successful startups like Mint (Intuit), Milo (eBay), Bleacher Report (Turner), Fitbit, Eventbrite, Sendgrid, Postmates and Vungle. The portfolio has also seen acquisitions by Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL. The firm is currently investing out of its $85M Fund IV, making 16 commitments of $850K per year in mobile/cloud saas, consumer hardware, marketplaces and healthcare IT.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jeff made his entry into the world of VC?
2.) In a time when hardware was not heavily invested in, what attracted Jeff to Fitbit?
3.) How did Jeff convince Brad to invest in Fitbit?
4.) What can startups do to standout in the crowded market that exists today?
5.) What do startups need to have to get a meeting with you at SoftTech?
6.) What VCs does Jeff most like to invest alongside?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Jeff's Fave Book: June by Gerbrand Bakker
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Jeff and SoftTech VC on Twitter here!
For a more colourful look into Harry's life, you can follow him on Instagram here!
FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Javier Soltero is Corporate Vice President of Outlook @ Microsoft. This position arose due to Javier's startup, Acompli, being acquired by Microsoft for $200m in 2014. Prior to Acompli, Javier spent a year at Redpoint Ventures, where he assisted in helping the firm extend their reach into both enterprise and mobile markets. However, Javier's entrepreneurial career did not start with Acompli, as he co-founded Hyperic, which he bought for $1 and within 5 years turned into a $10m+ revenue generating company.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Javier start his entrepreneurial career and what were the origins of Acompli?
2.) What was Javier's biggest takeaway from the failure of his first startup, back by Sequoia?
3.) How did Javier control his burn rate once large amounts of VC money was in his company?
4.) How does Javier approach product market fit?
5.) How did Javier meet his investors for Accompli and how did Javier find the fundraising process?
6.) What were Javier's reasons for selling Acompli? Was there any conflict with his investors in selling the company?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Javier's Fave Book: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Javier's Fave Newsletter or Blog: Wait but Why?
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Javier right here on Twitter!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow Harry on Instagram here!
FF 011: 'The Savviest Investors Don't Ask What If' with Ben Nader, CEO & Founder @ Butterfleye
Ben Nader is Founder and CEO at Butterfleye, the most advanced wireless home monitoring system. In other words, Google Nest meets Dropcam. Butterfleye's investors include some of the biggest and most prominent names in the industry including our friends and past guests Brad Feld and Jason Calacanis. Butterfleye currently have a campaign on Indiegogo, which you can support here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Ben come up with Butterfleye?
2.) How does Butterfleye differentiate itself from other competitors like Dropcam?
3.) How much better does a new product have to be to beat the existing incumbents?
4.) Does Ben prefer mass market testing or small targeted testing with fewer individuals?
5.) How did Ben get his first customers?
6.) What has Ben done to drive the success of his Indiegogo campaign? What tips would he give to founders looking to raise on these platforms?
7.) How did Ben get Jason Calacanis as an angel? How did Ben find the fundraising process?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Ben's Fave Book: The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
Ben's Fave Newsletter or Blog: Brad Feld's Feld.com, Jason Calacanis' Launch Ticker
Ben's Fave Productivity Apps: Asana, Sunrise Calendar, Calm Meditation App
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Ben and Butterfleye on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with some mojito sessions to come, you can follow him on Instagram here!
20 VC 068: Why Now Is The Best Time To Be An Entrepreneur with Sean Seton-Rogers @ PROfounders Capital
Sean Seton-Rogers is a founding Partner at PROfounders Capital, a venture capital fund for entrepreneurs powered by entrepreneurs. Their investors and principals number some of the best-known players within the digital media space -- people who have built some of Europe's most successful companies. Prior to PROfounders, Sean has been investing in technology companies across both the US and Europe, when he was at both Balderton Capital and Commonwealth Capital Ventures in Boston. In addition to the PROfounders portfolio companies, he has in the past worked closely with others such as Bebo, Wonga.com, and ConstantContact.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Sean make his entry into the VC world at the peak of the first tech bubble?
2.) What was the biggest lesson Sean learnt from experiencing the bubble imploding?
3.) Why are we seeing this trend of US VC funds investing in Europe?
4.) What are the key drivers to the growth of the European tech ecosystem?
5.) Why is there a serious decline in the amount of Series C rounds, only 7 in Q2 2015?
6.) Is Sean concerned by the rise of Crowdfunding? Does Sean see it as a competing finance model to VC?
7.) Do investors on Crowdfunding platforms experience the same deal terms as VCs?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Sean's Fave Book: Robert Cialdini: Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, Neal Stevenson: Cryptonomicon
Sean's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Benedict Evans Newsletter
Sean's Must Have Productivity Tools: Evernote, Google Apps
Sean's Most Recent Investment: Made.com
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Sean and PROfounders on Twitter right here!
For a more colourful view of Harry and maybe a few mojito sessions follow Harry on Instagram here!
20 VC 067: Scaling Startups Into Unicorns with Atomico's Mattias Ljungman and Carolina Brochado
Mattias launched Atomico in 2006 alongside Niklas Zennström. In that time, Mattias has been involved with exits including Supercell (sold a majority stake to SoftBank), 6Wunderkinder (acquired by Microsoft in 2015), The Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto for $1.1B in 2013), Xobni (acquired by Yahoo! in 2013). Mattias works closely with a number of portfolio companies on their expansion, including Truecaller, Klarna, Hailo, and ChemistDirect.
Carolina is Vice President @ Atomico, working on sourcing, evaluation and due diligence of investments. Carolina is based in London, however she travels frequently to Latin America to evaluate opportunities for Atomico to help companies in the region to scale. Prior to Atomico, Carolina started her career at Merrill Lynch's investment banking division before moving to private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners.
Did you like the double guest show today? If so click here!
If you prefer a single guest click here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mattias and Carolina made their way into the VC industry with Atomico?
2.) How important is it for VCs to have entrepreneurial backgrounds?
3.) What advice would Mattias and Carolina give to anyone looking to enter the VC industry?
4.) What is Atomico's selection criteria? Average cheque size? Round preference? Sector preference?
5.) Why is now the best time to be a European entrepreneur? What has changed?
6.) What does it take for a tech ecosystem to thrive and grow?
7.) What is required for startups to scale from small markets to mass market adoption?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Mattias' Fave Book: The Girl Who Saved The King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson
Carolina's Fave Book: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
Mattias' Fave Blog or Newsletter: Benedict Evans
Carolina's Fave Newsletter: The Skim, Dan Primack: TermSheet
Atomics's Most Used Productivity Tools: Wunderlist, Evernote, Pocket, SmartNews
Atomics's Most Recent Investments: TrueCaller, GymPass
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Carolina and Mattias on Twitter here!
For a more colourful image of Harry and maybe some mojito sessions, follow Harry on Instagram here!
FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail
Carl Waldekranz is the CEO and co-founder of Tictail. With the vision of creating the worlds most used and loved e-commerce platform Tictail has been called the Tumblr of e-commerce and been celebrated as one of Europe's hottest startups. The vibrant community now hosts more than 85,000 stores on their service. Due to this phenomenal growth Tictail recently closed a $22m Series B from Balderton, Acton, Thrive and Creandum.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) What were Carl's entrepreneurial origins and how did Tictail get started?
2.) What does Carl's idea creation process look like? How does Carl brainstorm?
3.) Tictail now sells 2m products on their platform but how did they get their first customers?
4.) At what moment in the Tictail journey was Carl the most worried or frightened?
5.) What would Carl say are the essentials for funding? How did Carl meet his investors? What is the difference between the different funding rounds for startups?
6.) Why did Carl pitch other startups before pitching VCs?
7.) Question from Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton: How has Tictail maintained the magic company culture in Sweden, whilst expanding to NY?
8.) If Carl could start his time with Tictail again, is there anything he would have done differently?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Carl's Fave Book: The Score Takes Care of Itself, My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh
Carl's Fave Blog or Newsletter: First Round Capital Blog
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Carl and Tictail on Twitter right here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry and a few mojito sessions, you can follow Harry on Instagram here!
20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Seth Levine is one of the most successful VCs on the planet having Co-Founded Foundry Group, Seth has made investments in the likes of Fitbit (IPO), Admeld (acquired by Google), Zynga (IPO) and Gnip (acquired by Twitter). The Foundry Group now has 5 funds, 4 early stage and 1 growth fund, totalling over $1bn in assets. Prior to Foundry Group, Seth started his career in venture with Mobius Venture Capital and lead the IPO of FirstWorld in 2000. Seth writes an awesome blog on technology, venture capital and colorado at www.sethlevine.com.
If you enjoyed today's show, share the love on Twitter by clicking here!
In Today's Show You Will Learn:
1.) Where it all started for Seth and how he made his move into the technology and venture industry?
2.) Question from James Altucher: Do you have to be in Silicon Valley to get the best access to deal flow?
3.) How has Foundry group developed since 2006 as VC firm?
4.) Why are all funds raised by Foundry the same, $225m? How is VC fundraising the same as startup fundraising?
5.) Question from Elizabeth Kraus: How does Seth stay motivated having enjoyed so much financial success with Foundry Group?
6.) What areas of tech is Seth most excited about?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Most Used Apps: Slack, Voxer, DarkSky
Seth's Fave Book: The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Seth's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Hidden Brain
Seth Most Recent Investment: Sourcepoint
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Seth and Foundry Group on Twitter here!
For a more colourful view of Harry's world and maybe a few mojito sessions, check out Harry's Instagram here!
20 VC 065: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Brad Feld: Founders Should Be Obsessed, Passion Belongs In The Bedroom
Brad Feld is one of the world's leading VCs having Co-Founded Foundry Group, Brad has made investments in the likes of Zynga, Makerbot and Fitbit, just to name a few. Brad is also Co-Founder of Techstars, one of the world's most prominent startup accelerators, whose portfolio companies have raised over $1.3bn in funding.
If that wasn't enough Brad is also a best selling author having co-athoured Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC, alongside Dick Costolo and Startup Communities: Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your Community. In addition to his investing and writing, Brad has been active with several non-profit organizations and currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and co-chair of Startup Colorado. Brad is a nationally recognized speaker on the topics of venture capital investing and entrepreneurship and writes the widely read blogs Feld Thoughts, Startup Revolution, and Ask the VC.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Brad made his move from entrepreneurship to VC and later co-founding, The Foundry Group.
2.) Does Brad agree with the view that it is important for entrepreneurs to fail?
3.) Why did Brad turn Fitbit down on 1st opportunity and what changed the 2nd time?
4.) What gets Brad excited in a startup? What areas are Brad most interested in?
5.) What is the main characteristic that makes the Foundry Group the huge success it is?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Brad's Fave Business Books:
1.) Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Brad's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Fred Wilson's Blog, Dan Primack: TermSheet, MatterMark Daily
Brad's Most Recent Investments: GlowForge: The 3D Laser Printer, Sphero
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Brad and Foundry Group on Twitter here!
FF 009: How To Leverage Your Connections To Grow Your Business with Sarah Schupp, Founder & CEO @ University Parent
Sarah Schupp is the CEO and founder of UniversityParent. UniversityParent is the #1 site for college parents to find everything they need to help their children succeed. The company, which began with a single print guide for the University of Colorado Boulder, now prints parent guides for more than two hundred colleges, features information for 3,000 colleges and universities on its website, and distributes a weekly e-newsletter. In May 2014, UniversityParent celebrated its 10th anniversary and was named to the Mercury100, BizWest’s ranking of the 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in Boulder Valley.
Sarah has been named one of Inc. Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, Businessweek's top 25 Entrepreneurs under 25, and one of the Denver Business Journal's Top Women Under 40. She’s been named a "Player to Watch" by the Gates Foundation, and was recognized by the White House and the United Nations as one of the country's top young entrepreneurs.
In Today's Show You Will Learn:
How the idea for UniversityParent came about?
How did Sarah manage to juggle a growing business with a University degree?
How individuals can leverage their university network to grow their business?
How important is it for entrepreneurs to be surrounded by like minded entrepreneurs?
In what circumstances should founders confide and not confide in their team?
How does Sarah as a leader show her support for her team?
How has Sarah found the fundraising process and what would Sarah change if she could start over?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Harry's Fave Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Sarah's Fave Book: The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo
Sarah's Fave Newsletter or Blog: Think With Google
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah on Twitter here!
20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock
Nick Beim is a Partner @ Venrock where he focuses on internet, mobile, SaaS, big data and fintech investments. Nick blogs on the economics of innovation at www.nickbeim.com. Nick led the initial venture investments in a number of pioneering consumer internet companies including the Gilt Groupe, and Care.com (IPO). He also led the initial investments in a number of today’s leading big data innovators including Dataminr and Intent Media. Prior to joining Venrock, Nick was a General Partner at Matrix Partners and worked in the technology groups at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Nick’s primary passion outside of venture investing is international development, in particular accelerating international development through entrepreneurship. Nick serves on the board of Endeavor, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs in developing countries that Tom Friedman has called “the best anti-poverty program of all.”
In 2011, Forbes named Nick one of the “Elite 8″ to watch in Venture Capital.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Nick made his move into venture and started a bidding contest between two funds a bank for him!
- How Nick got to be involved with DataMinr and how Nick believes society will use data in the future?
- How does Nick standout in the super competitive rounds? What is Nick's value add?
- Is it still harder for female founders to get VC funding? Why?
- What can be done to improve this imbalance in the tech ecosystem?
- What is impact investing? How do you balance LP returns with social impact improvements?
- Our friend @ August Capital, David Hornik asks Nick, what is the difference between investing in NY compared to SF?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Nick's Fave Book: Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Nick's Fave Newsletter or Blog: Reid Hoffman, Essays on Entrepreneurship
20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Ezra Galston is a VC @ Chicago Ventures, where he focuses on consumer facing and marketing tech investments and is actively involved with Blitsy, BloomNation, Kapow Events, Luxury Garage Sale, Shiftgig, SpotHero, and Zipments. Ezra’s thoughts on startups, have been published in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Re/code.Prior to Chicago Ventures, Ezra was a Young Entrepreneur at Foundation Capital. Before business school, Ezra served as the Director of Marketing for CardRunners Gaming – the parent company of CardRunners, Hold’em Manager and DraftDay – and before then earned a living as a professional poker player. If that wasn't enough he is also the author of one of our fave VC blogs www.breakingvc.com.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Ezra became a Poker Player and then transitioned to the world of Venture Capital?
- What is the mission with Chicago Ventures? Average ticket size? Preferred sector?
- How important is it for startups to be close to their investors, geographically and relationship wise?
- For marketplace startups, what metrics does Ezra really deep dive on?
- With the likes of Instacart raising huge rounds, why are we seeing this huge increase in food tech?
- In hugely crowded markets, how does Ezra sort the wood from the trees?
- What advice would Ezra recommend to individuals looking to enter the VC industry?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Ezra's Fave Book: The Little Prince
Ezra's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Stratechery by Ben Thompson, Carpool.vc
Ezra's Fave Productivity Tools: Rapportive, Bitmoji
Ezra's Most Recent Investment: Luxury Garage Sale, Attendant
Bill Gurley: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces
HungryRoot: Charlie O'Donnell, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ezra on Twitter right here!
FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Pierre Valade is Co-Founder and CEO @ Sunrise, the beautiful calendar app, acquired by Microsoft for $100m in February 2015, where he now works on Outlook Mobile for Microsoft. Prior to Sunrise, Pierre worked as a UX designer @ Foursquare following a successful hackathon in which he built an app in 6 hours, called Agora. Agora impressed Foursquare Founder, Dennis Crowley to the extent that Pierre was hired in the same month. As a result of Pierre's success he was named on the Innovators Under 35.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Pierre came up with the idea for Sunrise?
- What made Sunrise standout above all calendar apps as the best calendar?
- What features are most requested by Sunrise users?
- How was the design process in altering the design from a iPhone to a Apple Watch?
- What was Pierre and Sunrise approach to testing and iterating products?
- Having raised VC funding prior to acquisition, how did Pierre meet his initial investors, what was his fundraising experience like? Were there any surprises or challenges?
- How did the Microsoft Acquisition come about? How has Pierre's role and Sunrise changed since the acquisition?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Pierre's Fave Book: Zero To One: Peter Thiel
Pierre Most Impactful Purchase: iPhone 6
Pierre's Fave Newsletter or Blog: Stratechery by Ben Thompson
20 VC 062: Shaking Up London's VC Scene with Fede Pirzio-Biroli, Founder @ Playfair Capital
Fede Pirzio-Biroli is Founder @ Playfair Capital, a leading investor in seed level, technology based startups. Fede founded Playfair Capital from his first investment in December of 2010 and the portfolio quickly grew to 20 investments by the end of 2012, including the likes of Duedil, AppearHere and On Device Research. During this period, Fede was an angel in residence at White Bear Yard. After working closely with Passion Capital, he built the Playfair Capital team and moved into Warner Yard, Playfair's current home. Prior to Playfair, he spent several years in Africa working for the UN, Oxfam and PharmaSecure, after which he lobbied government and large aid organisations to increase the transparency of aid flows.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Fede made his move into angel investing and then transitioned to form his own fund?
2.) What is the mission at Playfair? What is the average ticket size? Does Playfair have any preferred sectors?
3.) What do startups need to have to get the Playfair stamp of approval? What are Playfair looking for?
4.) How has Fede seen the seed funding environment change in London?
5.) How does Fede and Playfair stave off competition for the 'hot' startups looking to raise VC money?
6.) What benefits do founders get for working in a co-working space? How important is it for VCs to offer this service?
7.) How does Fede create a united company culture in a co-working space with so many different companies?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Fede's Fave Book: The Circle by David Eggers
Fede Fave Newsletter or Blog: Dojo, AngelList
Fede's Most Recent Investment: Knytton (Techstars London W14)
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Fede on Twitter right here!
20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup
Roxanne Varza is currently the startup lead for Microsoft in France, running both Microsoft Ventures Paris and Bizspark. Prior to Microsoft, Roxanne was Editor of TechCrunch France and has been a guest author for the likes of The Telegraph and Business Insider. Roxanne is also the Co-Founder of Tech.eu, one of the few publications to cover the European tech industry as a whole, with the brilliant Robin Wauters. If that wasn't enough Roxanne is also the Co-Founder of Girls In Tech both in Paris and London, which aims to raise the visibility of women in technology,entrepreneurship and innovation though monthly events, leadership programmes and much more. Roxanne has won a range of accolade including Top 30 Women Under 30 In Tech, Coolest 25 Women in Tech and 10 Women Shaking Up Tech In Their 30s.
P.S. If you are looking for an amazing new podcast on the Tech Scene in Europe, check out Tech.eu's new show here: Tech.eu Podcast #4
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Roxanne made her move into the tech industry and then made the move from TechCrunch to running Microsoft's Accelerator in Paris?
- What would Roxanne recommend to people in tech contemplating moving countries?
- What are the best and most effective ways to learn code from scratch?
- What is the mission at Microsoft Ventures? What is the deal? What are the benefits?
- In the 10 minute pitch to Roxanne, what does Microsoft want to hear?
- How does Microsoft determine product-market fit?
- What does the increase in US funds entering the European market suggest?
- What are the benefits for startups of having global investors?
- What can startups do to increase their media exposure in the sea of new startups?
- What do journalists look for in emails from founders?
- How can founders be successful through submitting guest posts?
- What are the best and most effective ways to learn code from scratch?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Roxanne's Fave Book: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Roxanne's Reading Material: News.me: Digg
Fred Wilson: Investing In Startups In Europe
Microsoft Ventures Alumni: Zocdoc: Find a Doctor, Xobni: Your Smarter Address Book Is Waiting
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Roxanne on Twitter right here!
FF 007: Founding Europe's Largest Trading App with Nick Bortot, Founder @ Bux
Nick Bortot is the Founder & CEO at Bux, Europe's largest mobile trading platform with an incredible 175,000 active users. In his former life he was one of the driving forces behind the Dutch market leader in online brokerage, BinckBank. There he held several commercial positions before he was elected member of the executive board. After having spent five years in the boardroom, Nick started dreaming about a new company that would make the financial markets both fun and exciting. This dream turned into BUX. Bud has attained many incredible mentions and awards including being named on the Fintech50 2015. You can also check out their first TV add right here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Nick made the move from broking to founding Bux?
- What are the benefits of being a slightly older founder?
- What Nick would recommend to anyone looking for a technical co-founder?
- How to build a team of individuals with complimentary skills?
- What are the drivers for the incredible growth to 175,000 users?
- How is Nick planning to convert an audience of non trader to start trading?
- What advice would Nick give founders entering into heavily regulated markets?
- How Bux have built a great brand in a competitive market?
- Having raised funds from Orange Growth Capital, what was surprising and challenging for Nick about raising angel and VC money?
- What would Nick do differently if he was raising funds again?
- Does Nick agree with the concept of building a 'war chest' of funds?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Nick's Fave Book: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
Nick's Fave Newsletter or Blog: VICE News
Nick's Fave App: BRAINTOSS: Toss your thoughts straight into your inbox
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Nick and Bux on Twitter right here!
20 VC 060: 12 Acquisitions, $1bn In Exits, Mike Jones, Former MySpace CEO on Life At Science Inc.
Mike Jones is the Founder and CEO at Science Inc. a disruptive media, marketing and commerce company that creates, invests, acquires and scales successful digital businesses. Their incredible portfolio includes the likes of Medium, DollarShaveClub and DogVacay and their leadership is responsible for an astonishing 12 acquisitions and over $1bn in exits. Prior to Science Inc, Mike was the CEO at Myspace, where he was responsible for the relaunch, one of the most high-profile turn-around challenges in the industry, before selling MySpace to SpecificMedia on behalf of NewsCorp. Mike is also an active early stage investor having personally invested in over 30 startup businesses including Klout, Betterworks, Formspring, ShoeDazzle to name a few.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Mike began his entrepreneurial career, how MySpace came about then how Mike made the move to Science Inc?
2.) What is the mission at Science, what does Science provide and how do they differ from the likes of YC and Techstars?
3.) Science have a specific methodology to identify the best startups and the best sectors. What is involved in this methodology? Has it changed since the start of Science?
4.) What can a startup founder do or show you to impress you? Are there any real red flags for you when meeting startup founders? What are the commonalities of the great founders?
5.) What is Science's involvement with the companies, what are their key value adds at Science?
6.) On Twist Mike said ‘growth is the most important thing, without growth there is no money’? So what at Science how do they approach growth and what are the challenges posed by this need for growth?
Items Mentioned in Todays Episode:
Mike's Fave Book: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do by Chris Duhigg
Mike's Fave News Source: FlipBoard
20 VC 059: How To Approach VCs with Arteen Arabshahi, VC @ Karlin Ventures
Arteen Arabshahi is a VC at Karlin Ventures, where he specialises in enterprise software, commerce platforms, and marketplaces. Prior to Karlin Ventures, Arteen spearheaded the launch of Built In LA, an online community for digital entrepreneurs and innovators. However, his passion for startups flourished while helping run operations at Excelerate Labs, now Techstars Chicago. In today's incredible interview we delve into the best strategies for contacting any VC you want, how to make the approach, how to deal with the emotional and psychological pressure of starting a company and the rise of marketplaces. When not with startups, Arteen sits on the board of TEDxVenice Beach and is a supporter of TWLOHA, a non-profit raising awareness and support for those struggling with mental health.
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Arteen and Karlin Ventures on Twitter right here!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Arteen made the jump into the world of Venture Capital, from originally wanting to be a plastic surgeon!!
- How did Arteen approach VCs when applying for positions?
- What did Arteen say in those emails to achieve such a high response rate?
- What tools did Arteen use to ensure he got the VCs real email address?
- Does Arteen agree with the traditional routes into Venture: Startup Founder, Consultant, Investment Banking?
- Why is Arteen so excited about marketplaces? Are there any in particular that Arteen is doubling down on?
- How big a market does a market have to be to get Arteen excited?
- What would Arteen advise founders potentially struggling from self doubt or lacking in confidence?
- What mental health tools would Arteen recommend to help with this?
- The biggest red flags for Arteen when being pitched to?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
- Email Address Tools: Rapportive
- Arteen's ProductHunt Collection
- Arteen's Fave Book: Fightclub
- Arteen's Marketplace Investments: Laurel & Wolf, ShipHawk
- Arteen's Fave Newsletter: Ben Evans Blog, Strictly VC
- Artene's Most Recent Investment: Policy Genius
FF 006: Acquired by Amazon, CEO @ Digg, EIR @ a16z and now Founder @ Pro.com with Matt Williams
Matt Williams is Founder and CEO of Pro.com. Prior to Pro.com, Matt served as entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, following his time at Digg where he led the complete overhaul of Digg which he joined as CEO in 2010 to rebuild the site from the ground up and contributed to its successful acquisition by Betaworks in 2012. Before Digg, Matt spent 12 years at Amazon where he managed Amazon’s Auctions and Marketplace, Community and Cross Merchandising, Tech Alliances, Web Store, and Consumer Payments divisions. Prior to Amazon, Matt founded and was the CEO of Livebid, which was acquired by Amazon in 1999.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Matt made his way into entrepreneurship and then later the VC world?
2.) How did LiveBid come about when Matt was only 23 and how did he build the product and the initial user base?
3.) What was the hardest aspect of the entire LiveBid journey and how did Matt overcome it?
4.) How did Matt's life and work change moving from your own startup to working in a massive organization like amazon? What would Matt advise founders who have sold or are thinking of selling their companies to large corporations?
5.) Following a number of years at Amazon. How did you attempt to turn Digg around as CEO and was their anything you would have done differently?
6.) As EIR at Andreessen Horowitz what was it like, for Matt, working at a16z? Was there anything that surprised Matt about the move to venture?
7.) What would Matt say was the biggest lesson from working at these tech titans was? How has that affected how Matt runs Pro.com today?
20 VC 058: 10 Key Traits To Be A Successful Founder with David Wu, General Partner @ Maveron
David Wu is a General Partner at Maveron, which he joined in 2012 to help identify new investments in Web companies that have the potential to become leading consumer brands. He sourced and led Maveron's investment, Eargo and Darby Smart, also serving on their board. David is very much founder focussed and you’ll often find him coaching entrepreneurs at top Bay Area incubators such as Y Combinator, AngelPad, 500 Startups, and Stanford’s StartX and was previously EIR at Redpoint Ventures. His close ties to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial community have led him to invest personally in over 30 start-ups, including Practice Fusion, Postmates, Tile, Jaunt VR, and SeatMe.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How David made his move into the world of venture capital?
- How David perceives the current seed funding environment?
- What makes Stanford the breeding ground of tech unicorns that it is?
- How to create a bay area style culture?
- What is the most frequent problem David sees startups encounter and how do they overcome it?
- How can entrepreneurs know which funding source to go for? Crowdfunding, VC, Angel?
- Why should startups take seed VC money over angel money? What is the difference?
- What are the key traits required to be a great founder?
- How can products with early adopter usage transition to a mass market product?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
- David's Fave Books: Game Of Thrones
- David's Most Recent Investment: Jott
As always you can follow Harry, David, The Twenty Minute VC and Maveron on Twitter right here!
20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital
Did you know: The name Point Nine Capital originates from the 0.9 version of a product that is early but has great potential.
Nicolas Wittenborn is a VC at Point Nine Capital, one of the leading seed funds in Europe. Prior to Point Nine, Nicolas worked for the Team Europe Seed Fund. You can follow Nicolas' incredible blog here, which include my favourite ever blog post, outlining the exemplar pitch deck that startups should follow!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Nicolas made the move from iPhone sales arbitrage to VC analyst!!
- How big does a market have to be to get VCs excited?
- Do VCs have preferences with regards to teams? Technical or not? Multiple founders or not?
- At the Seed stage what do VCs expect in the product itself?
- What are the key metrics investors look for when viewing startups for the 1st time?
- What are the different types of competition and how can founders determine whether they are a real threat?
- How can startups and mobile apps in particular, grow organically in the early stages?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
- Nicolas' Fave Book: What Makes Sami Run?: Budd Schulberg
- Nicolas Fave Newsletters: Benedict Evans Newsletter, Point Nine Newsletter
- Nicolas' Most Recent Investment: Green Blender: Superfood Smoothie Ingredients Delivered To Your Door
As always you can follow Harry, Nicolas, The Twenty Minute VC and Point Nine Capital right here!
Similarly if you want to see Harry in a more colourful light, head over to Instagram for copious amount of mojitos!
Founding WIRED 2014's Winner, with Mutaz Qubbaj, Founder @ Squirrel
Mutaz Qubbaj is Founder @ Squirrel, a financial wellbeing platform that allows employees to regain control of their financial lives. Mutual has celebrated much recent success with Squirrel having been named winner of WIRED 2014 and Pitch @ The Palace. Mutaz is also an expert on all things accelerator having been an alum at Barclays Techstars London with Squirrel, which you may remember from our interview with Greg Rogers, where Greg named Squirrel the next company to disrupt an industry. Prior to Squirrel, Mutaz has had a financial career that includes an LBS Masters in Finance and more than a decade at Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and PIMCO as a trader, strategist and marketer.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Mutaz made his movement from banking to being a startup founder?
- Was it difficult for Mutaz to leave the security of banking for the risky journey of entrepreneurship?
- What would Mutaz advise anyone looking to make the jump into the world of entrepreneurship?
- How did joining Techstars, help Squirrel as a company and Mutaz as a Founder?
- What is the Barclays Techstars process like?
- How can Founders decide which accelerator is right for them?
- What red flags should founders look for when investigating accelerators?
- How much equity do traditional accelerators take?
- What tips does Mutaz have to get the most out of the accelerator experience?
- How do individuals know when to give up the day job and become an entrepreneur?
Items Mentioned in Todays Show:
- Mutaz's Fave Book: Exponential Organisations: Why New Organisations Are 10 Times Cheaper, Faster and Better Than Yours by Salim Ismail and Michael Malone
- Mutaz's Fave Reading Material: TechCrunch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Squirrel on Twitter here!
20 VC 056: The Life Cycle of Startups with Guy Turner, Partner @ Hyde Park Venture Partners
Quote of the Day: 'Invest in people who do what they say they are going to do and have done what they said they would do'. Guy Turner, 20VC
Guy Turner is a Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners where he focuses on fast growing companies run by ambitious entrepreneurs with disruptive ideas. All of his incredible findings can be found through his blog at vcwithme.co. Guy joined Hyde Park Venture Partners in 2011 from Boston Consulting Group where he focused on corporate strategy across a variety of industries; he started his investing career as an Associate and then actively investing Member of Hyde Park Angels in 2009. Guy has led investments in numerous B2B software companies and is a Director at Geofeedia, InContext Solutions and Iris Mobile. Guy is also a Siebel Scholar, Kauffman Fellow and a co-inventor on two US Patents.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Guy made his move into the investing industry?
- How did Guy find the transition from academia to venture?
- Why is it crucial for startups to innovate, test and sell quickly?
- How can a startup determine whether their project is successful or if they should pivot?
- What are the three steps to the 18 month runway, all startups need?
- Do investors mind providing more financially to increase the runway?
- What can startups do to maximise the hype surrounding their business?
- Can hype ever be detrimental to a startup?
- What are Guy's preferences in terms of founders?
- How can a startup know when VCs are subtly rejecting them?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
20 VC 055: VC Done Right with Jonathon Triest @ Ludlow Ventures
Quote of the Day: 'Advisors are the most crucial element to success for the young generation'. Jonathon Triest, 20 Min VC
Jonathon Triest is the Founder and Managing Partner of Ludlow Ventures and Sandwich Fund. Prior to launching Ludlow, Jonathon worked as creative director for New York’s Discovery Productions. He founded and operated Triest Group, a design firm with a deep UI/UX focus. In addition to his role at Ludlow, Jonathon is a Kauffman Fellow and a mentor at numerous technology accelerators including Silicon Valley’s Up West Labs, Cincinnati’s The Brandery, and San Francisco’s Highway 1. He is board member of The Trico Foundation and Venture for America.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Jonathon made his unorthodox way into starting his own fund at the age of 27?
- What was Jonathon's first investing strategy and how has it developed?
- What Jonathon believes is wrong with the typical VC? How are Ludlow different?
- How does Jonathan find the fundraising process as a VC?
- Other than capital what are the benefits of fundraising?
- How does Jonathon differentiate Ludlow from the huge amount of seed funds?
- What are the benefits of accelerators for Jonathon and Ludlow?
- How does Jonathon approach deal flow?
- What does Jonathon look for in founders?
- Does Jonathon have design input in his investments?
- How important are advisors for the young generation coming into this community?
- How Jonathon managed to convince the likes of Brad Feld and Eric Ries to mentor him?
Items Mentioned In Todays Show
Jonathon's Fave Book: The Thief of Always by Clive Barker
Jonathon's Most Recent Investment: Rapify
Founders Friday 004: Life As A Non-Technical Co-Founder with Will Sacks, The Fertility King @ Kindara
Will Sacks is Co-Founder and CEO at Kindara, the fertility awareness app that provides tools to understand fertility and be in control of their own body. Kindara has achieved phenomenal success having significant press in the likes of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, New York Times and Forbes. Their first product Kindara Fertility for iPhone has been ranked #1 on the App Store Medical Charts. In this incredibly diverse conversation our talk ranges from wire framing and programming to vasectomies and uterus', it's a must listen!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- Why Will started Kindara and how he got the initial product off the ground, without being able to code?
- Should Founders learn to code or learn how to be the best CEO they can be?
- How and what was the wire framing process like? What advice does Will have for other non-technical co-founders?
- How does Will feel being a male CEO for a female product?
- How has Will created this community of incredibly engaged users?
- How has Will managed to grow his audience so effectively?
- What has Will learnt from raising $1.7m in angel and VC funding?
- What is the hardest aspect of fundraising?
- What advice would will give to a startup thinking of raising funds?
- How is Will planning to transition into the world of hardware?
- What theories of The Lean Startup did not work for Will?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Will's Favourite Books:
- Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg
- 4 Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank
- Eric Ries: The Lean Startup
- Will's Fave Blogs
- Seth Godin: Circles of Marketing
- Brad Feld: Blog
- Paul Graham: How to raise money
- Marc Andreesen: Reasons You Won't Get Funded
- Will's Must Have WireFraming Tool
- Balsamiq
20 VC 055: David Pakman @ Venrock on The Future Of The Music Industry
Quote of the Day: 'A great entrepreneur has the ability to bend the world to their will'. David Pakman, 20VC
David Pakman is a Partner at Venrock, having spent the past 12 years as an internet entrepreneur. This includes David's appointment as CEO of eMusic, the world’s leading digital retailer of independent music, second only to iTunes. Prior to joining eMusic, David co-founded Myplay in 1999, which he later sold, in 2001, to Bertelsmann’s ecommerce Group. Before Myplay, he was Vice President at N2K Entertainment, which created the first digital music download service. If that wasn't enough David is also the co-creator of Apple Computer’s Music Group.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How David started his career as an entrepreneur and later made the move to VC?
- How David found the transition from entrepreneur and CEO to being a VC?
- What is the main value add that both Venrock and David provides to their investments?
- What makes a great entrepreneur for David?
- How long do VCs need to know entrepreneurs before making investments?
- What 3 tips would David give for best sourcing deals as a VC?
- What areas does David believe are soon to be disrupted? How does David predict the next big industries to be disrupted?
- What did David think of Jay Z's launch of Tidal?
- Who will dominate in the music streaming sector in the coming years?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
- David's Fave Book: Mindset by Carole Dweck
- David's Favourite Blog: Ben Thompson's: Stratechery
- Dollar Shave Club: Shave Time, Shave Money
- YouNow
- Tidal: High Fidelity Music Streaming
As always you can follow Harry, David, The Twenty Minute VC and Venrock on Twitter here!
20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Quote of the Day: 'Keep an open mind from an early age'. Jonathan Libov, 20VC
Jonathan Libov joined the investment team at Union Square Ventures in September of 2014. Jonathan hails from New York but has lived for the last few years in Tel Aviv, where he most recently worked as a Product Manager at Appsfire. He's a graduate of Vassar College with a degree in Cognitive Science and began his career in neuroscience research. He designs and codes, with Fifty among his side projects.
In Today's Show You Will Learn:
- How Jonathan made his move from product guy to VC at USV?
- What is the key determinant for USV's success?
- How Fred Wilson and USV use blogging to market USV as 'smart money'?
- Is SMS dead? What is and will it be used for in the future?
- What sectors are ripe for disruption?
- How can technology and sport be integrated?
- Apple Music: Success or failure?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Favourite Book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
OB1: Making Trade free for everyone, everywhere
Founders Friday 003: 2m users, $2m Seed Round, 220,000 Instagram Followers with Phil Jacobson, Founder @ PumpUp
Phil Jacobson is Co-Founder At PumpUp, a community for healthy and active living, with over 2m users. Phil leads the operations, finance, marketing, business development and external relations for PumpUp, with great success having accumulated over 220,000 Instagram followers! Prior to PumpUp, Phil held brand management positions at Unilever and PepsiCo.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Phil started PumpUp?
- How Phil got 1,500 downloads in day one?
- What marketing strategies are PumpUp working on to continue growing?
- What social media strategies Phil recommends founders attempting to build an online presence?
- How did Phil accumulate the 220,000 instagram followers organically?
- What has Phil done to create such a heavily engaged user base?
- Who are Phil's biggest competitors and how does PumpUp aim to stay ahead of them?
- Where are PumpUp in the fundraising process, what has Phil learnt from the $2m seed round?
- How can startups determine how much they need to raise?
- What are PumpUp doing to ensure customer retention rates remain high?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
- PumpUP App
- General Catalyst Partners
- Favourite Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- Favourite Blog: MatterMark Daily
As always you can follow Harry, Phil, The Twenty Minute VC and PumpUp on Twitter here!
A new one recommended by Phil, click here to follow the awesome Instagram pages of Harry and PumpUp!
20 VC 052: How To Make The Leap From Seed To Series A with Ari Helgason @ Dawn Capital
Ari Helgason is a VC at Dawn Capital in London and a former entrepreneur with operational experience in both London and New York. Prior to Dawn, Ari founded SaaS sales and workflow management system World on a Hanger and ecommerce clothing marketplace Fabricly.com. More recently, he launched ecommerce sites for fashion and luxury brands in London and New York. Ari is an alumnus of the Y Combinator startup accelerator and he regularly visits Silicon Valley where he has extensive relationships.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How Ari made his move into the VC scene?
- Why Ari decided to bootstrap his first business?
- Does Ari believe that Founders should always be fundraising?
- Should Founders take more money than they need, 'a war chest'?
- What type of goals do VCs want to see from founders?
- What do investors expect from startups at Series A?
- How can founders learn what KPI's make sense for their business?
- How can founders know when is the right time to fundraise?
- How can startup founders get their foot in the VC door?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
- Predictable Revenue: Aaron Ross (Mandatory Reading for All SaaS CEO's)
- Elon Musk: How The Billionaire of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping Our Future
- Saastr by Jason Lemkin
- AVC.com
As always you can follow Harry, Ari and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20 VC 051: The New Silicon Valley Style VC in London with Alessandra Sollberger @ Mosaic Ventures
Alessandra Sollberger is a VC at Mosaic Ventures, a new Silicon Valley style venture firm based in London, focussing on Series A rounds. Alessandra previously worked in private equity at Blackstone, covering sectors ranging from consumer brands to software. Prior to that, she worked in startups in the US and Europe and in M&A at Goldman Sachs. She is also the founder of Bright Mentors, an edtech non-profit teaching coding and science in secondary schools through a network of technology professionals.
In todays episode you will learn:
- How Alessandra made her move into the VC world?
-
What are you Mosaic looking for? What is their typical investment size?
-
What Alessandra thinks of the different paths into venture?
-
What advice would you give someone looking to enter venture?
-
Why Alessandra believes there has been a resurgence in marketplaces? What is driving this growth?
-
What startup marketplaces is Alessandra most excited about?
-
Alessandra's thoughts on the next big sector to be disrupted and why?
As always you can follow Harry, Alessandra, The Twenty Minute VC and Mosaic Ventures on Twitter here!
Founders Friday 002: Balderton's James Wise interviews 20VC Founder, Harry Stebbings
Today is a very special show as James Wise, Principal at Balderton Capital turns the tables on Host of The Twenty Minute VC, Harry Stebbings. In today's brilliant interview by James we delve into what has led to Harry's interest in the VC industry, why did Harry start The 20 Minute VC, how does Harry identify guests to interview, how does he approach those guests, how has Harry found his first experience in the venture industry, what has surpassed Harry about the VC industry, what traits has Harry spotted that are common among the great VCs interviewed, is Harry optimistic or not about the venture industry, what would Harry recommend for other people looking to go into venture.
Items Mentioned in Todays Show:
Harry's Favourite Books: Tim Ferris: 4 Hour Work Week, 4 Hour Body
As always you can follow Harry, James and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20 VC 050: Starting, Building and Selling in SaaS with the King of SaaS, Jason Lemkin, Managing Director @ Storm Ventures
Jason Lemkin is Managing Director at Storm Ventures focussing on early stage SaaS and enterprise startups. Jason is an acknowledged thought leader in SaaS through his creation of the SaaStr community, connecting thousands of SaaS entrepreneurs and generating upwards of 1,000,000 views a month around core SaaS topics, with a particular focus on accelerating revenue and early-stage SaaS sales and marketing. Prior to Storm, Jason served as CEO and co-founder of Storm Ventures-backed EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service. Jason led EchoSign from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. in 2011. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
How Jason made his way into the SaaS and VC industry?
What actions did Jason do to get his blog to 1m+ page views per month?
What advice would Jason give to founders thinking of selling to large companies?
What type of entrepreneur does Jason like to invest in?
How does Jason see SaaS valuations, with recent enormous rounds from Zenefits?
What areas of the SaaS industries are neglected or undervalued?
Is the 40% growth rule broadly correct and can this be applied to early stage tech companies?
What is Jason's pre-investment meeting approach like?
What makes a founder insane in a good way, rather than a bad way?
How are SaaS companies innovating to acquire new customers?
Quick Fire Round:
- Apple: Hit or Miss
- Most exciting SaaS companies and sectors
- Jason's favourite book and why?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Jason's Favourite Book: The Lion Who Shot Back
Follow: @saleshacker (amazing content from VPs of Sales @ Top Tech Startups)
Slack: Stewart Butterfield, Zenefits: Parker Conrad
20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners
Spencer Lazar is a Principal at General Catalyst Partners, based in New York City. He focuses on early stage software & internet investments, with a particular interest in online marketplaces, mobile applications, web services, and enterprise IT. Spencer was previously the cofounder of Spontaneously, Inc - an iOS development studio. Prior to that he was an early stage software & internet investor at Accel in London, where he sourced and worked with companies including Hailo, Birchbox, Bonobos, ForgeRock, and Qriously.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
How is the roads into the venture industry changing?
What young people can do to make themselves more attractive to VCs?
What would make Spencer's perfect founder?
How important is geography when investing in startups?
How does Spencer feel the education technology space is developing?
What metrics Spencer examines when investing in a startup?
What sectors is Spencer most interested in?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Spencer's Favourite Book: The Everything Store on Jeff Bezos
Spencer's Latest Investment: CampusJob
How Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew invested in Snapchat?
Hot EdTech Startups: Lynda.com, PluralSight, General Assembly, Grovo, ClimbCredit
Oscar, Sensio
As always you can follow Harry, Spencer and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Founder's Friday 001: How to Create Great Company Culture with Anand Sanwal, Founder @ CB Insights
Anand Sanwal is the CEO and Co-Founder of CB Insights. Specifically, CB Insights tracks financing trends and private companies in the healthcare, industrial, technology, software, energy & utilities, renewable, internet and mobile industries. CB Insights works primarily with venture capital, private equity, angel investors, corporate development, corporate strategy and family offices. Formerly, Sanwal was the Vice President at American Express. Sanwal was responsible for managing three primary functions which included the (1) Chairman’s $50 Million Innovation Fund, (2) CFO’s strategic planning function and (3) Enterprise Investment Optimization group. He is the author of “Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management” which features a forward by former American Express and Citigroup CFO, Gary Crittenden.
In Todays Episode You Will Learn:
- Why Anand chose not to take VC funding for CB Insights?
- Should all subscription based companies be revenue funded?
- What one key determinant has contributed to the success of CB Insights?
- How has Anand's hiring strategy changed over time?
- How strategies does Anand use to create this company culture?
- What is the biggest challenge facing Anand today?
- What tactics have not worked when trying to create a good working environment?
- Is CB Insights replacing VCs, potentially losing their core customers?
- What metrics Anand would most look for in a startup?
We then delve into a quick fire round and discover what is Anand's favourite business book, what gets Anand excited, what advice Anand would give to himself 10 years ago starting out in the industry and finally the next 5 years for Anand and CB Insights.
20 VC 048: What Do VC's Really Add To Startups with Christian Claussen, Managing Partner @ Ventech
Quote of the Day: "Capital is a crappy differentiator". Dustin Dolginow
Christian Claussen is a Managing Partner with Ventech, a VC firm with offices in Munich and Paris. He has 16 years of experience investing in innovation and he leads Ventech investment activities in the German-speaking regions of Europe. He serves as a board member for Picanova and TV Smiles.
In today's amazing episode with Christian we learn:
- Which value adds are most important for founders to look for?
- How can Founders determine whether VCs will carry out on their 'Value Add'?
- What are the signs of VC bulls***?
- Will we see all VCs transition to Andreesen Horowitz service based VC model?
- How have VCs offerings to startups changed over time?
- What advice would Christian provide to founders entering a round of funding?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Christian's Favourite Book: Phillip Roth: Everyman
Christian's Article on VC Value Add
Speex: Online Language Training That Really Works
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital
Rob Moffat is Principal at Balderton Capital, one of London's leading VC firms. At Balderton Rob specialises in Fintech, Martech, Gaming and Marketplaces. Rob is currently a board director or observer with six portfolio companies: Qubit, Wooga, Housetrip, Carwow, Rentify and Nutmeg. Other investments Rob has been involved with at Balderton include Citymapper, Top10, Scoot and Archify. Prior to joining Balderton Rob worked for Google in London, as a Manager in the European Strategy and Operations team. He started his career with five years in strategy consulting with Bain, working mostly with financial services clients.
In today's amazing discussion with Rob we discover:
- What characteristics make a great VC?
- How VCs assess incoming business plans and investment opportunities?
- The biggest problem facing Rob today, as Principal at Balderton?
- How the structure of VC firms is changing to a service based environment?
- Does Crowdfunding pose a threat to VC as a alternative method of finance?
- For individuals wanting to move into Venture, what can they do to optimise their employability in the VC world?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Rob Moffat: Medium
- Rob's Favourite Book: The Circle: Dave Eggers
- Crowdcube
- Just Park
- Nutmeg: Online Investment Management
As always you can follow Harry, Rob and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20 VC 046: How VCs Evaluate Investment Opportunities with Alan Chiu, Partner @ XSeed Capital
Alan Chiu is a Partner at XSeed Capital, with a strong background in enterprise software and data storage. Alan is currently Vice President for Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs, an alumni association that seeks to strengthen Stanford’s startup community by fostering relationships among entrepreneurs and alumni investors. Prior to XSeed, Alan was previously Director of Product Management at Bycast (acquired by NetApp), and was engineering manager at Creo, which was acquired by Kodak for $1B in cash.
In todays amazing discussion with Alan we discover:
- What the checklist is for Alan when investing in startups?
- Why Stanford is the amazing place it is for startups?
- What is the most important value add that VCs can bring to a startup?
- When is the right time to pivot and how important is a product roadmap?
As always you can follow Harry, Alan and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate
Alan Jones is Chief Growth Hacker at Bluechilli, who have set the incredible goal of building 100 startups by 2016! Alan is also Founding Investor and Mentor at Startmate, an Australian Y Combinator style accelerator. If that wasn't enough Alan also invests and advises through Blackbird Ventures, Pollenizer and Startmate.
In Today's Amazing Discussion with Alan We Discover:
- What you should do when you have a great idea?
- How to validate a market?
- How to figure out if it is a viable business?
- What can non technical co-founders do to get their idea of the ground?
- What individuals can do to meet technical co-founders?
- What are the biggest tips for entrepreneurs when facing a pitch?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational
Tzukuri: Bluetooth Wearable Technology
OtherLevels: Mobile Marketing Automation Platform
20 VC 044: Dominating AngelList Syndicates with Doug Scott
Doug Scott has one of the largest AngelList syndicates, now with an incredible £396,000 in his. Doug is one of first investors in Techstars, Ignite.io and Entrepreneurs First in Europe ( still an investor in all 3 ). Prior to angel investing Doug founded several internet companies based in the UK, carrentals.co.uk - over 1 million rentals, discountvouchers.co.uk - 6 million subscribers, timetobreak.com - over 5 milion page views per day.
In today's discussion Harry and delves into what Doug really expects from founders, how Doug would like to be pitched by prospective startups, is AngelList challenging the VC model, what investors and startups can expect from Doug's syndicate, his biggest tip to an aspiring entrepreneur and much more...
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Doug's AngelList Syndicate, Gil Dibner's AngelList Syndicate, Tim Jackson AngelList Syndicate
Oxygen Accelerator, Jon Bradford, Springboard
Cashkaro, Meals, Lifebox, Chew
You can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Doug on Twitter here!
20 VC 043: How To Be A VC Analyst and Lessons From Union Square and First Round with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Venture
Charlie O'Donnell is the Founder and Sole Partner @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the first venture capital fund based in Brooklyn. Prior to founding Brooklyn Bridge, Charlie worked at the prestigious First Round Capital, with the likes of Josh Koppelman and Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson. If that wasn't enough Charlie is one of only a dozen to be named to Business Insider's 100 Most Influential People in NY Tech five or more times and has served on the founding board of the New York Tech Meetup and is one of the group's first 100 members. His blog, This is Going to Be BIG!, is one of the ten most widely read VC blogs in the country with over 8,000 readers.
Among the many discussions Harry and Charlie delve into how to enter the VC job industry, how the seed stage fund raising environment is behaving, what Charlie learnt from Union Square and First Round, tactics that individuals can do to increase their own branding, Charlie's views on investing in hardware, investing in Kickstarter backed companies, the next five years for Charlie, what has blown Charlie's mind in the last four weeks, the marketing possibilities of Instagram for startups and much more...
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- How To Be A VC Analyst: Charlie's Post
- Charlie's Hardware Portfolio Companies: Ringly, GoTenna, Canary Home Security
- Hungryroot: Farm Fresh 7 Minute Meals
- Tinkergarten
James Altucher: Ideas, Investing and Entrepreneurs
James Altucher is a successful entrepreneur, investor, board member, and the writer of 11 books including the recent WSJ Bestseller, "Choose Yourself!" (foreword by Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter). He has started and sold several companies for eight figure exits. He's on the board of a billion $ revenue company, has written for The Financial Times, The New York Observer, he's run several hedge funds, venture capital funds, and is a successful angel investor, having invested in over 30 startups alongside Silicon Valley's Top VC's.
In today's conversation Harry and James discuss how to continuously come up with great ideas, what tasks activate the 'idea muscle', what tactics have produced the greatest investing returns for James, what traits do great founders have, how has James' investing strategy developed, what is the future for Uber, the scam that is University and much more...
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Alternatives to College and Careers: Learn to Become an iOS Developer, Learn to Become a Web Developer
James Altucher: Choose Yourself!
Tim Ferriss: AngelList Syndicate
Shyp: The Easiest Way To Ship Your Stuff
Jason Calacanis: The World's Greatest Angel Investor
Jason Calacanis is arguably the world's greatest angel investor with over 60 investments including the likes of Uber (1st round), ThumbTack and Calm, just to name a few. Jason is also the Host of This Week In Startups, the world's biggest startup podcast and Founder of Launch and Launch Festival, the world's biggest startup festival.
In this interview we discuss, how Jason invested in Uber's 1st round, what Jason looks for in startups, how Jason can tell whether a founder has got what it takes, which VC's Jason most likes to work with, which entrepreneurs Jason most likes to invest in, what pisses Jason off more than anything, what inspires him more than anything, what industries will see the most disruption in the coming years, what makes a great entrepreneur and how startups can position themselves best for entering a round of funding.
Enjoy! All show notes, links and resources from this episode can be found at http://www.thetwentyminutevc.com and you can follow Harry, Jason and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter.
Mentioned in Today's Show:
20 VC 040: The Required Qualities To Be A Great Founder, with Scott Taylor, CEO @ miDrive
Scott Taylor is the CEO @ miDrive, a startup focussed on reinventing the learner driving experience. Scott is also an advisor to leading London based VC firm EC1 Capital. If that wasn't enough he is a mentor at Richard Branson's Virgin Startup Program and an investor in Coupang and Mavrx. Prior to miDrive, he was Chief Product Officer at Livedrive, one of Europe's leading cloud storage providers, assisting with its sale to j2 Global.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- TreeHouse: Learn Web Design, Web Development
- LifeCake Acquisition
- FestivalFriends App
- Crowdcube: Online Investing, Equity Crowdfunding
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Ben Horowitz
- Into The Woods: John Yorke
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) Where it all began for Scott and how he made his move into technology and venture?
2.) Having founded several successful companies, what Scott believes the qualities required to be a good founder are?
3.) The hardest part for Scott in building companies and how he overcome them?
4.) What is Scott's role at EC1, what is he looking for in companies at EC1 and how does that differ from his own angel investments?
5.) At Virgin Start Up, what is the process like to attain funding?
6.) What are Scott's views on early stage funding? Does he agree with the friends and family round?
7.)What would you suggest to entrepreneurs looking to gain external capital?
The episode will then finish with a quick fire round. Where we hear Scott's thoughts on:
Next 5 years for Scott? Asian tech market? Favourite book and why? Most recent investment and why he said yes?
You can follow Harry, Scott and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter
How to Pitch a Top VC with Simon Menashy @ MMC Ventures
Simon Menashy is Investment Director at MMC Ventures where he is responsible for leading new and follow on investments as well as supporting existing MMC portfolio companies. He also sits on the board for WeDo, Boticca and Sky Futures and works closely with a number of other B2B and B2C businesses including Growth Intelligence, Mubi, Small World, Somo. Prior to MMC Simon worked in European tech and media consulting, working with clients including the BBC, Virgin Media, BT, Thompson Reuters and Ofcom as part of the Deloitte Strategy team in London
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Simon made his move from consulting into the world of VCs?
2.)Simon recently tweeted how not to pitch to VCs, so what should founders be doing when pitching? What are the fundamentals in terms of required documentation?
3.) Does Simon agree with Peter Thiel’s opinion that disruption is fundamentally bad for society? What industries does Simon feel will be next disrupted?
4.) With the increasing length of time it takes for venture backed companies to IPO, how does Simon feel the funding path is changing?
5.) How does Simon believe the tech eco system is going in London and what can be done to increase VC funding and engender a silicon valley esque feel to London?
Today's episode finishes with a quick fire round where we hear Simon's thoughts on the apple watch, what the biggest red flags are when viewing a pitch and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
You can follow Harry, Simon and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter.
20 VC 038: How Make Connections with VCs and Maximise Employability with Angela Tran Kingyens @ Version One Ventures
Angela Tran Kingyens is an associate at Version One Ventures, where Angela manages the day to day activities of the fund from identifying new startups to advising portfolio companies on product. Prior to Version One, Angela Co-Launched Insight Data Science, a Y Combinator backed startup, helping academics transition into a career in industry. In today's episode, Angela describes the best ways to network with VCs, how you can increase employability instantly and the most effective ways to conduct market research!
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Headout: Your Best Local Friend in a New City
In Today's Episode you will Learn:
1.) How Angela made the transition from a career in academia to a YC backed startup to a Palo Alto Venture Fund?
2.) What can individuals do to network effectively with VCs, even if they have no existing VC contacts?
3.) What advice Angela would give to someone looking to leave the academic path for a career in tech? How can they maximise employability?
4.) What should individuals look for when considering incubators? Do they increase the validity of a startup, from the Version One perspective?
5.) Version One specialise in Marketplaces. Why is that? Is it normal for VC funds to specialise? What Angela thinks the future of marketplaces will look like?
6.) How to identify where there are up and coming areas for disruption? What resources are most effective for this market research?
We then finish today's episode with a lightning round where we hear Angela's thoughts on what industry she would never invest in, whether Uber will be a $trillion company, how VCs measure their own success, Angela's favourite business book and her most recent investment and why she said yes?
You can follow Harry, Angela and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here.
20 VC 037: How To Get a Job at a Startup, Startup Lessons and Brad Feld's 'Open Office Hours' with Tak Lo, Director @ Techstars
Tak Lo is Director at Techstars, helping entrepreneurs do more faster - on both sides of the Atlantic through Techstars London and Techstars NYC. Tak is also Founder at Travelst and Frontlyst. Prior to his road into entrepreneurship, Tak was a Consultant at Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton and was a specialist in the US ARMY. In today's incredible episode Tak shares his lessons from his own startup experience, the required reading for all entrepreneurs and of course when thinking TechStars, how can we not discuss the man himself, Brad Feld, and how Tak has adopted Brad's use of open office hours.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Must Read Tech Blogs: Fred Wilson, Brad Feld Thoughts, Tomas Tunguz: Redpoint Capital, Christopher Janz: Point Nine Capital
- Must Read Books: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Adam Grant: Give and Take, Peter Thiel: Zero to One, Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Must Have Apps: Buffer: Save Time On Your Social Media, Feedly: The Stories You Need To Keep Ahead
- Networking Tools: Silicon Drinkabout, Meetup
- Team of Rivals
- Adam Grant: Give and Take
- Peter Thiel: Zero to One
- Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How and why Tak made the transition first from the army to a career in consulting and then what made Tak take the entrepreneurial route and start his own company?
- Tak is renknowned for the amazing service and contribution he brings to every startup. What services does Tak bring and what does Tak feel all entrepreneurs and advisors must add?
- Does Tak back singular founders, or does he prefer a founding team?
- Tak is a Specialist on Leadership, for founders wanting to gain or develop their leadership skills, what can founders do, read or learn to further their leadership skills?
- For individuals contemplating moving into the tech world, how do they know which is the right job? Are there any immediate aspects they must look for or be wary of?
- What are the biggest misconceptions of the tech industry?
- How can people find out about networking events
- What sector Tak believes is the next to be disrupted and why?
- What is the premise behind Brad Feld's 'Open Office Hours'? Why has Tak decided to adopt this tactic? What does Tak hope to gain from it? How is it going so far?
We then finish today's episode with a lightning round, hearing Tak's thoughts on the greatest leader and why, the future of the asian tech market, his favourite book and why and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
Follow Harry, Tak, The Twenty Minute VC
20 VC 036: The Pitching Process: From Email to Term Sheet with Stephan von Perger @ Wellington Partners
Stephan von Perger is an Early Stage VC at Wellington Partners where his primary role is identifying investment opportunities and building lasting relationships with the entrepreneurs behind these companies. Stephan started his career at McKinsey before moving to Stylistpick.com as Head of Operations, he then progressed to setup and run the business operations at CityMapper.com. In today's interview Stephan walks us through the pitching process from the first email to signing the term sheet!
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
- How and why Stephan made his move from the world of startups to the venture industry?
- What are the right reasons for a founder to enter a round of venture funding?
- How should founders go about meeting and connecting with VCs? What can founders actively do to position themselves well and how should founders phrase their emails and communication?
- Are there any aspects or buzzwords in emails which instantly make VCs interested?
- What documentation is required for the initial meeting? Is there anything founders must bring?
- How can founders make the most out of their meeting with VCs? Are there any questions founders should ask? How should founders respond to a question they do not know the answer to?
- What happens if a VC says they will contact you but a week later the founder has heard nothing? What should the founder do?
We then finish todays episode with a quick fire round where we hear Stephan's thoughts on which pitch or communication has impressed him the most, what single thing Stephan most looks for in founders and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures
Jay Acunzo is NextView Ventures VP of Platform and runs the View from Seed blog. At NextView, he leads the creation of business development and educational resources for startups, from board deck templates to mobile workshops to the popular Hitchhiker's Guide to Boston Tech (bostontechguide.com). Prior to NextView, Jay led content marketing and production teams at HubSpot (IPO) and Dailybreak Media (acquired). A former sports journalist, he began his career in tech at Google. As a result of Jay's tremendous success Jay has been named Top 10 B2B Marketer in Boston, 70 Rising Social Media Stars and 100 Most Influential Content Marketers.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
- Jay's Article in TechCrunch
- a16z
- GoDaddy
- Wordpress
- The Weird Things Business People Do On Twitter
- The Content Marketing Institute
In Today's Episode you will Learn:
- How Jay made his move into the world of tech with Google and how he then transitioned into the world of venture with NextView?
- What does VP of Platform really entail? Why has it become an emerging trend in the venture industry?
- How is the structure of VCs firms changing, with the likes of a16z moving to a much more service orientated venture fund.
- Are there any individuals or sections of society that should or should not be blogging?
- How can individuals drive traffic to their blog and what tactics Jay uses to get visitors to his blog?
- What Jay would suggest to business and startup founders thinking about whether to start blogging?
- What is the best platform to market your content or startup? Is Twitter really an effective marketing tool? How can individuals and businesses increase engagement on Twitter? What not to do on Twitter?
We then finish today's episode with a lightning round where we hear Jay's thoughts on the best and worst aspects as VP of Platform, his best resource for content marketing, his favourite book and why.
20 VC 034: 250 Investments, AngelList Syndicates and Microsoft with Jon Staenberg
Jon Staenberg is one of the most experienced venture capitalists in the Pacific Northwest, having made over 250 startup investments and having raised two funds totaling over $100 million. Jon's investments include the likes of AngelList, StubHub, SAPHO, KitchenBowl (through AngelList syndicates) and many more. If that wasn't enough Jon sits on the boards of Class.com, Micropath and even owns his own vineyard! Previously, Jon worked in the marketing area at Microsoft for six years and is a Stanford alum!
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jon started off in the tech industry and then made his move into venture?
2.) Having established 5 companies, what was the hardest element of the process and how did Jon overcome it?
3.) Having invested in over 250 startups what is Jon's investment strategy? What is Jon looking for in startups?
4.) Once invested in a startup, what is Jon's role and what services can VCs bring to a startup?
5.) Whether Jon feels AngelList syndicates are going to change the funding environment? Does it present a challenge to the more traditional VC model?
We then finish with a quick fire round where we hear Jon describe the highlight of his glittering career, the biggest tip Jon would give to an aspiring entrepreneur and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO
Quote of the Day: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." John F. Kennedy
Chris Dark is President International at C2FO, the Union Square Ventures backed company is the priceline for working capital where companies 'name their own price'. Prior to C2FO, Chris was VP at Atomico, the London based venture fund founded by Nicklas Zennstorm. At Atomico, Chris was on the boards of Chemist Direct, Fab, Hailo, Quipper, Wrapp, Knewton, Bebestore, and Gengo. If that wasn't enough Chris has also held roles at AOL, Bain & Co and started his own company GameReplays.org, an early esports community, which Chris built to 1 million uniques per month!
Items Mentioned in Today's Show
In Today's Show You Will Learn:
- Where it all began for Chris and how he made his move into venture?
- What skills Chris learnt from founding his company and how he applied them to the venture industry?
- What were the hardest aspects of building Chris' company and how did he overcome them?
- What are the best reasons to want to join the venture industry?
- What made Chris leave his VP role at Atomico to rejoin the entrepreneurial game with C2FO?
- Having both invested in startups and raised funds as a startup, what tips would Chris give to founders potentially entering a round of funding?
- How does Chris feel the tech eco system in London is developing and what Chris believes can be done to further improve it?
We finish today's show with a lightning round where we hear Chris' thoughts on whether university is necessary or not, the next 5 years for him and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
20 VC 032: Inside Y Combinator with Nicolas Michaelsen, Founder @ AirHelp
In today's show I am joined by the immensely talented Nicolas Michaelsen, Founder & CMO at AirHelp, the go to place if you have grievances during air travel. Nicolas draws back the curtain on the exclusive world of Y Combinator, this includes the admissions process, the infamous interview, the tutoring available to YC startups, the effects of YC on the valuation of startups and the key takeaways from his time at YC.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Kevin Hale: Founded @ Wufoo, Partner @ Y Combinator
- Paul Buchheit: Creator of Gmail, Partner @ Y Combinator
In today's show you will learn:
- How Nicolas got AirHelp started?
- At what point did Nicolas realise that Y Combinator was the place to go?
- Had Nicolas considered other more local incubators?
- What was the admissions process like? Is there any specific documentation required to apply?
- How is the YC interview structured? What type of questions do the partners ask?
- What percentage of the partners need to say yes for a startup to be accepted?
- How does the tutoring system work at YC? Who did Nicolas receive as tutors for AirHelp?
- What is a typical day in the life of a YC startup?
We then finish today's episode by hearing Nicolas' thoughts on his most valuable takeaway from YC, the impact of YC on the valuation of a startup, what the future holds for AirHelp?
If you would like to follow The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter, click here!
If you would like to stay up to date with Nicolas and AirHelp, click here!
20 VC 031: Investing in Gaming, Luxury Goods and Disruption with Maha Ibrahim, General Partner @ Canaan Partners
Maha Ibrahim is General Partner at Canaan Partners. Maha is renowned in the venture industry for her ability to to spot technology trends extremely early, proven through Maha being one of the 1st investors to recognise the huge potential of social gaming. As a result, Maha led Canaan's early investment in social games pioneer PicksPal (acquired by Liberty Media) and was a seed investor in Kabam, the world's largest developer of massively multiplayer social games. Due to Maha's incredible success in venture, she was included in Silicon Valley the '40 Under 40' award by The Silicon Valley Business Journal and is a regular on Bloomberg TV.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
In today's episode you will learn:
- How Maha made her transition into the world of Venture Capital?
- As one of the 1st investors in social gaming, what did Maha see that other people did not?
- With the gaming industry being as fast moving and fickle as it is, shown through the likes of Zynga's troubles, is Maha concerned for her gaming portfolio companies, in their ability to maintain their dominant presence in the sector?
- Maha is an investor in The Real Real, a company which had revenues of over $100m last year. What does Maha believe is the reason for this incredible success and where does she see the future for The Real Real?
- Increasing amounts of capital means increasing competition for VCs, what does Maha believe VCs can bring to the table to beat off the competition?
- What is Maha most impressed by, in terms of entrepreneurs pitching to her?
- Where does Maha believe the next big forms of disruption are coming from?
We finish today's episode with a quick fire round where we hear Maha's thoughts on the hardest part about being a VC, how Maha measures her success as a VC and her most recent investment and why she said yes?
You can follow Maha on Twitter here!
20 VC 030: VC Funds, Angels and IPOs with John Taylor, Head of Research @ NVCA
In today's show I am joined by John Taylor, a nationally recognised authority in the venture capital and entrepreneurial finance sector. Currently, John is Head of Research at the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). In 2003, he co-founded the NVCA CFO Task Force which focuses on regulation and emerging issues dealing with a diverse range of
Some of the many gems of this conversation include: where venture funds actually obtain their funds from, what is the main difference between an angel and a VC, what investors expect from their VCs, how has the IPO market changed since 2000, what do VCs look for in potential investments, how do VCs manage their time, what is the typical workload of a VC, can University students go straight into the VC industry?
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
20 VC 029: The Potential Upside To A Technology Bubble with TechCrunch's Brandon Lipman
The debate over whether or not we are in a tech bubble is dominating the minds of many in the tech world and today Harry talks to major player, Brandon Lipman, Co-Founder of 3DLT and writer of the recent TechCrunch Article: The Potential Upside To A Technology Bubble. Brandon shares his views on why seed deals have decreased by 300%, following from Scott Nolan's TechCrunch article, Brandon answers Does Burn Rate Really Matter, what sectors will survive or thrive in a tech bubble and why companies are preferring to raise later rounds rather than go public. They also dive into the dogfight between Meerkat and Periscope, the biggest winners from a bubble and the companies Brandon is most excited about.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Chris Sacca and Tony Hawk with Jason Calacanis on TWIST
500 Startups: Dave McClure on Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
20 VC 028: Co-Founding TechCrunch and The Benefits of Not Raising Venture Funding with Keith Teare
Keith Teare is the Founder of Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs whose incubated startups include the likes of M.Dot (acquired by GoDaddy), TechCrunch (acquired by AOL) and Ivan Kalanick's Red Swoosh. Keith is also the Co-Founder of TechCrunch alongside Michael Arrington. Prior to TechCrunch Keith founded RealNames Corporation raising more than £130m of venture funding before filing for an IPO with an implied valuation of £1.5bn.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Michael Arrington
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Chat Center: Universal Chat for Everyone on the Planet
- DownTown App: Your Personal Waiter
- Weendy: Sunshine App
What you will learn in todays show:
- How did Keith get into the tech world at a time when technology was not mainstream?
- A venture of Keith's, Cyberia was heavily used by women. Does Keith believe that there have been improvements in balancing the gender gap?
- What Keith believes can be done to reduce the gender inequality that persists throughout the tech sector?
- How did Keith's Co-Founding of TechCrunch with Michael Arrington come about?
- Why did Keith try and persuade Michael not to create TechCrunch?
- What are the benefits of bootstrapping your startup and not raising venture funding?
- Why Keith was never able to raise venture funding in the UK?
- How is the valley different from creating a company in the UK?
- Keith's beliefs on the barbell venture capital ecosystem that persists in the US?
We then finish today's episode with a quick fire round where we hear the best advice Keith has ever been given, the highlight of his career so far and the 3 companies that he is most excited about and why?
20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech
Greg Rogers is Managing Director at Techstars, the world’s leading accelerator programme for early stage technology start-ups and is responsible for the Barclays Accelerator. Prior to joining Techstars, he spent eleven years in New York City as an entrepreneur and senior manager. Most recently, he was founder and CEO of Pictela, a super rich media technology company that was acquired by AOL in 2010. An active angel, Greg was an early investor in Schedulicity and has recently co-founded SmartUp, a new ed-tech company with Frank Meehan (Siri), Brent Hoberman (Lastminute.com), and Barry Smith (Skyscanner).
Items Mentioned in Today’s Show:
The Fundraising Rules by Mark Peter-Davis
Brent Hoberman, Frank Meehan, Jon Bradford
In today’s episode you will learn:
1.) How Greg got into the TechStars world?
2.) What attracted Greg to the the Fintech space and how has he seen Fintech develop over the last 5 years?
3.) What areas within the Fintech space Greg finds most interesting and why?
4.) What does Greg see the future of Fintech looking like? Does he see any trends arising in the space in 2015?
5.) What does Techstars offer startups and what do they take in return?
6.) What does Greg think are the characteristics of effective mentors? Are mentors necessary for startups in their early growth?
7.) What is Greg’s new venture, SmartUp. Who is involved and what are his plans for the future of SmartUp?
We finish today’s episode with a quick fire round where we hear Greg’s plans for the next five years, what tip Greg would give Fintech entrepreneurs and the 3 companies from TechStars or Barclays Accelerator that Greg is most excited about and why?
20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile
Chris Redlitz is Managing Partner at Transmedia Capital, an early stage venture fund specializing in digital media. Their portfolio includes the likes of Snapchat, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook, just to name a few. Chris also Co-Founded The Last Mile with his wife Beverly, a program that integrates the nation’s penal system with the technology business. Prior to Transmedia and The Last Mile, Chris launched the first online independent yellow page directory, automated coupon platform and content syndication system. As a result, he received Ad Age's prestigious i20 award for his contributions to the development of interactive marketing and advertising.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Scan.me (acquired by Snapchat)
- SnappyTV (acquired by Twitter)
- Newsle (acquired by Linkedin)
- Josh James: Domo, Omniture
- Richard Branson: Losing my Virginity
- Good to Great by Jim Collins
- The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman
- Newco: John Battelle
In today’s Episode you will learn:
1.) How Chris made his transition into the Venture Capital industry?
2.) How do VCs compete to be involved in the funding rounds of such attractive startups, such as, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook etc?
3.) How has Chris’ investment strategy changed over the years? What were his early deals? What did he learn from them? What does he do differently now?
4.) What is the premise of The Last Mile?
5.) How does Chris plan to scale the Last Mile to be nationally adopted in all prisons in the US?
6.) What has been the most challenging aspect of Chris’ journey with the Last Mile and how did he overcome it?
The episode will then finish with a quick fire round where we hear Chris plans for the next five years for The Last Mile, the resource he would most recommend to aspiring entrepreneurs and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital
John Henderson is Principal at White Star Capital, a VC firm helping exceptional entrepreneurs build great technology companies, with a presence in Europe and North America. Prior to White Star, John was Head of Business Development and Operations at Summly, playing a crucial role in the build up to their acquisition by Yahoo in May 2013. John has also spent time at Facebook working in strategy and business development and was a strategy consultant at The Boston Consulting Group.
Items (and incredible people!) Mentioned in Today's Show:
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
Shakil Khan, Christian Hernandez, Nick D'Aloisio, Frank Meehan
What you will learn in today's episode:
- How John got into the technology industry and later made his transition into the world of Venture Capital?
- As Head of Business Development and Operations at Summly, what was it like for John working with Nick D'Aloisio? How did his role change in the buildup to the acquisition by Yahoo?
- What does John think about Summary's evolution into Yahoo News Digest?
- What has been the biggest difference between John's life as a entrepreneur compared to his life as a VC?
- Does John believe it is crucial for startups to find a well-suited VC for their startup?
- What does John advise startup founders to do or ask to ensure that a VC is the right match for them and their company?
- Having made angel investments of his own, does John approach these personal investments in a different manner to his professional investments?
- What advice John would give to anyone contemplating angel investing?
The episode then finishes with a quick fire round where we hear John's thoughts on the future of bitcoin, John's personal news reading preferences and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
20 VC 024: Financing Finch with Marc Bernegger of Orange Growth Capital
Marc Bernegger is Venture Partner at Orange Growth Capital, a Fintech investment firm with notable investments in the likes of Bux, Knip and Zopa. Prior to OGC, Marc was Partner at Next Generation Finance Invest (today Ayondo Holdings). However, Marc has experienced both sides of the table, as he was only 20 when he founded usgang.ch (trade sale to Axel Springer) and later went on to be founder of amiando (trade sale to Xing). As a result of these many successes Marc was awarded 'Newcomer of the Year 2010' by Swiss ICT.
Items mentioned in today's show:
In today's show you will learn:
1.) How and why Marc made his entry into the VC world in 2010?
2.) Marc specializes in the Fintech sector and has done since 2010, when it was really a very niche sector. How has Marc seen Fintech develop over the last 5 years? What did Marc see that everyone else did not?
3.) Which areas within the Fintech space Marc finds most interesting?
4.) What Marc sees the future of Fintech to look like? Does Marc see any trends arising in the space in 2015?
5.)In recent years Switzerland has trailed behind the likes of London and Scandinivia in Fintech, this seems to be changing with the recent Fintech hackathon held in Zurich, what does Marc think is bringing about this change?
6.)Where does Marc stand on the social integration of mobile payments?
7.) OGC is a investor in Bux, the social gamified trading platform, is this the way Marc believes stock market trading is moving? How does Marc respond to critics who suggest Bux allows the mass market who do not have the significant investing knowledge to gamble recklessly.
The episode will then finish with a quick fire round where we hear Marc's thoughts on the future of Bitcoin, what tips Marc would give to aspiring entrepreneurs and what the biggest difference between being an entrepreneur and an investor.
20 VC 023: The Recipe for a successful Crowdfunding campaign with Tom Britton
Tom Britton is Co-Founder and CTO of Syndicate Room, an equity crowdfunding platform that allows it's members to co-invest alongside professional investors. To date Syndicate Room have raised an incredible £20m for 30 companies. Prior to Co-Founding Syndicate Room, Tom was a professional football player playing in a number of countries including the US and UK.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
Nesta Report: Crowdfunding Page 52
In today's episode you will learn:
1.) How Tom got into the technology industry and then moved into the very early concept at the time of, equity crowdfunding?
2.)How does SynidcateRoom operate and does their process differs from the likes of Crowdcube?
3.) How much of the £19m was invested by people on the Syndicate Room network rather than the anchor angels?
4.) Does Tom believe with the rise of crowdfunding in recent years, the crowd are a competing finance model to the traditional VC model?
5.) Having witnessed numerous successful campaigns to date, what does Tom believe are the recipes for a successful crowdfunding campaign?
6.) For startups contemplating raising funds for their business, what are the largest benefits of raising seed capital through SyndicateRoom?
7.) CrowdCube is the No 1 equity crowdfunding site in the UK, how does SyndicateRoom treat this competitive threat?
The episode will then finish with a quick fire round where we hear Tom's plans for the next 5 years, the hardest obstacles Tom has faced in building Syndicate Room and the 3 companies that Syndicate Room has funded that Tom is most excited about?
20 VC 022: Letting go of the life we planned and the Power of the Female Narrative with Matthew McCall
Matthew McCall is a Partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital and was previously a Partner with DFJ Portage. He has been involved with investments with Feedburner (acquired by Google), Playdom (acquired by Disney) and EverDream (acquired by Dell), just to name a few. Matt has been named in Chicago's '40 under 40' and their Top Tech 25 list. He has been named as one of the Top 100 VCs in the US, a Media 100 and a Hollywood 100 Power Player.
Items Mentioned in Todays Show:
- Matt's Blog: Beyond the Profit Line
- SMS Assist
- Bill Gurley predicts dead unicorns
- Steve Job's Commencement Speech
- Finding Joe with Joseph Campbell
- Hello Giggles with Zooey Deschanel
- Jessica Alba: The Honest Company
- BigFrame with Sarah Penna
- Eric Ries: The Lean Startup
- Stephen King:On Writing
- Robert McKee: Story, Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
- Christopher Voglar: The Writers Journey
- Viv: The Global Brain
In todays show, you will learn:
- How Matt got into the VC world?
- What is Matt's normal investment size?
- When investing does Matt have a mental timeline of the startup with a clear strategy of when a desired exit will take place?
- Matt has been named to the AlwaysOnTop 100 VCs list, leading me to ask how has Matt's investment strategy changed over the years? What were his early deals? What did Matt learn from them? What does Matt do differently now?
- Matt has written about the 15 year tech cycle and has quoted Steve Juvertson ‘if you can see it, it isn’t the revolution’, leading me to ask where does Matt stand on a ‘tech bubble’. Is it occurring and why does he say that?
- Has Matt seen a rise in the emergence of the female entrepreneur?
- Matt LOVES commencement speeches. Why is that and are there any Matt would recommend in particular?
The episode will then finish with a quick fire round where we hear the resource that Matt would most recommend to an aspiring Founder and Matt's recent investment and why he said yes?
*Shortly after the interview Matt strongly recommended to me Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
20 VC 021: Gender Equality, Startup Valuations and 'Friend Raising before Fund Raising with Sharon Wienbar
Sharon Wienbar invests in Mobile and Internet companies at Scale Venture Partners, where she sits on the board of Actiance, Applause, BeachMint, Everyday Health, PlayPhone, Reply.com and uTest. Prior to working at Scale Venture Partners, Sharon was VP of Marketing for Amplitude Software and Critical Path.
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
- Applause
- Kate Mitchell
- National Venture Capital Association
- Why Software is Eating the World?
- CloudHealth
What you will learn in Today's Show:
- How Sharon made her entry into the technology world and later the Venture Capital sector?
- Why is there gender misrepresentation in both the tech and the VC industry and what can be done to improve this gender inequality.
- What Sharon's views are on investing outside of the valley?
- What are the necessary aspects required for a startup located outside of the valley?
- With such large amounts of capital creating extremely high valuations, is it possible to make money investing in startups?
- With increasing competition between VC firms for startups, what else can VC's bring to the table other than capital?
- What sector is Sharon most excited about and why?
We then move on to a quick fire round where we hear Sharon's thoughts on what Sharon likes and dislikes about being a VC? The most recent investment Sharon has made and why she said yes?
20 VC 020: Revolutionising Investing with Luke Lang, Co-Founder of Crowdcube
Luke Lang is Co-Founder and CMO of Crowdcube, the world's leading investment Crowdfunding platform. Crowdcube enables anyone the opportunity to invest alongside professional investors in start-up, early-stage and growth businesses. They have raised over £67m for an incredible 207 companies and have an amazing 150,000 registered investors
Items Mentioned in Today's Show:
What you will learn in today's episode:
- How Luke got into the technology industry and really came to be Co-Founder to the world's 1st quit Crowdfunding platform in the world?
- Other than capital what else will Balderton bring to you to aid your growth and development?
- Does Luke believe Crowdfunding is a competing finance model to the traditional VC model?
- Having seen 207 companies experience successful Crowdfunding campaigns, Luke describes what he believes the formula to be for a successful campaign?
- For businesses thinking about Crowdfunding, what are the biggest benefits to businesses of raising seed capital through the Crowd?
- With the increasing number of Crowdfunding sites, how does Crowdcube treat the competitive threat?
- Is there an opportunity to attract more institutional style money to Crowdcube through retail bonds, which might appeal to income funds.
As the interview comes to a close we engage in a quick fire round where we hear Luke's views on the hardest obstacle Luke has faced in building Crowdcube? Where Luke sees Crowdcube in 5 years time? 3 companies funded by Crowdcube that Luke is most excited about?
20 VC 019: Funding the Future with James Wise of Balderton Capital
James Wise is Principal at Balderton Capital, one of Europe's most successful venture funds. At Balderton, James invests and advises early-stage technology start-ups, holding board member positions at Crowdcube.com, Surnrise.am, 3Dhubs.com and many more... Prior to Balderton, James helped build one of the UK's first social venture funds and was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, working with entrepreneurs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Items Mentioned in Todays's Show:
- Crowdcube.com
- JustPark
- Sunrise.am
- Chilango
- MyTomorrows.com
- An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin
What you will learn in today's show:
- How James made his entry into the world of Venture Capital?
- How does James feel the VC model differs in the UK compared to the US?
- Does Silicon Valley deserve the plaudits it receives for producing revolutionary tech companies?
- Following Balderton's recent investment in Crowdcube.com, how does James believe the crowd will become more involved in the future?
- Is Crowdfunding not a competing method of financing to Venture Capital?
- What is Balderton's competitive advantage for winning deals?
- What James believes makes the perfect Series A round?
- Does James believe the mini-bond, introduced by Crowdcube.com have the potential to revolutionise funding for businesses?
- Which sector James is most excited about and why?
- When thinking of success who is the first person that comes to James' mind and why?
We then move into a rapid fire round where we hear James' thoughts on his latest investment and why he said yes? Does James experience a fear of missing out (FOMO) when passing on investments? Finally, James' favourite book and why?
20 VC 018: Seed Stage Investing with Stefan Glaenzer of Passion Capital
Stefan Glaenzer is Founding Partner at Passion Capital an early stage VC fund who have invested in the likes of DueDil, GoCardless and CarThrottle. He is also Co-Founder of White Bear Yard, a co-working space in London's East End. Prior to Passion, Stefan was Chairman of Last.fm, an early investor in Wahanda and remains an active member of their board and founder of Ricardo, which went public in 1999.
Items Mentioned in Todays Show:
What you will learn in today's episode:
- How Stefan got into the technology industry and later pivoted into the VC world?
- What is Stefan's preferred stage to enter into an investment and what is the standard amount invested in a startup?
- How much equity Stefan would look for in an investment?
- What interaction is typical for VCs following investing in a startup?
- How individuals should pitch their idea to Stefan?
- How many startups does Passion typically invest in on an annual basis?
- Does Stefan encounter the fear on missing out on a startup?
- What is it about the Peer to Peer lending sector that excites Stefan so much?
- Does Peer to Peer have a brighter future than Crowdfunding?
- What sector is Stefan most excited about and why?
- How can an entrepreneur show their enthusiasm and make an awesome pitch?
- Is there a formula for making a successful pitch?
- What are Stefan's red flags when a startup pitches to him?
As the interview concludes we ask Stefan some quick fire questions where we hear his thoughts on the hardest decision of his life? The best piece of advice Stefan has been given and his most recent investment and why he said yes?
For all the resources mentioned in today's show head on over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com
Likewise, if you have a suggestion for a VC that you would like us to interview please do let me know by emailing harry@thetwentyminutevc.com
20 VC 017: Nektarios Liolios of Startupbootcamp on Fintech, Pitching and London's Tech Scene
Nektarios Liolios is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Startupbootcamp Fintech, the leading innovation program in the financial industry providing access to a global network of investors and VCs for up to 10 lucky startups selected. Nektarios himself has more than 15 years in business, having spent the last three with InnoTribe, running the Innotribe Startup Challenge.
Items mentioned in today's show:
What you will learn in today's episode:
- How Nektarios got into the world of tech accelerators?
- How Startupbootcamp Fintech varies from the traditional VC model?
- What makes the best pitches at Demo Days?
- What is the selection process to get accepted at Startupbootcamp?
- What can startups prepare to do before pitching to Startupbootcamp?
- What is the most common reason Nektarios says no to startups?
- What would Nektarios advise someone who is looking to find a co-founder?
- What sector is Nektarios most excited about for the future?
- What Nektarios thinks about the future of bitcoin?
We then complete todays interview by having a quicker round where we hear Nektarios' thoughts on his favourite entrepreneur? The happiest moment Nektarios has enjoyed in his career? A day in the life of a Managing Director of a Startupbootcamp? What was Nektarios' most recent investment and why he said yes?
For all the resources mentioned in today's show, head on over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com
For any suggestions about future guests or questions you would like to hear, we would love to hear from you. If so email harry@thetwentyminutevc.com
20 VC 016: Y Combinator, Twitch.TV and Socialcam with Mike Seibel
Mike Seibel has enjoyed the most incredible career in the technology industry on both the Founder and the VC side of the table. He was Co-Founder and CEO of Justin.TV which was part of the Y Combinator Winter Class of 2007, and was later acquired as Twitch.TV by Amazon for $970 million. In that time Mike also created a spin off from Justin.TV, SocialCam, where he was Co-Founder and CEO, culminating in their acquisition in 2012 for $60 million by Autodesk.
Items mentioned in Todays' Show:
- Twitch.TV
- SocialCam
- Y Combinator
- Dropbox
What you will learn in this episode?
- How Mike got into the technology industry and later the tech accelerator business with Y Combinator?
- Why Mike did not learn to code?
- Mike's own experiences in Y Combinator.
- What is it that Y Combinator does to produce such amazing and revolutionary companies?
- What does Demo Day look like at Y Combinator?
- What is the selection process for choosing which companies to back and which not to?
- What do you look for in the interviews with the Founders?
- Are top level University degrees necessary for entry into the Y Combinator class?
- What are Mike's biggest red flags when looking at startups?
- Why Mike would never outsource engineering?
- What can startups do to prepare themselves for the Y Combinator process?
- What sector is Mike really excited about and why?
- What is a day in the life of a Y Combinator partner?
We then finish todays episode with a rapid fire round where we hear Mike's thoughts on the best piece of advice Mike has received, the hardest decision Mike has had to make in his career, how can an individual start a company with no technical skills or experience?
For all the resources mentioned in today's show, check out www.thetwentyminutevc.com
Likewise, we would love to hear from you, so if you have any questions you would like asked or VCs you would like to have on the show, send an email to harry@thetwentyminutevc.com
20 VC 015: Marketplaces, IPOs and the NY Startup Scene with Lisa Wu
Lisa is Vice President at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), where she focuses on early to late stage investments with emphasis on consumer internet. Before joining NVP, Lisa worked in Amazon's Worldwide Corporate Development Team, in which she evaluated acquisition targets and identified strategies for potential expansion. Prior to Amazon, Lisa was at Bessemer Venture Partners. If that wasn't enough Lisa also founded her own startup, Banzaa! Fresh, providing high quality nutritious foods to schools and hospitals in Northern California.
Items Mentioned in Todays show:
Etsy
Lending Club
SkyBox
FireEye
Jet
DoubleClick
What you will learn in today's show:
- How Lisa got into the investing game?
- Why Lisa is investing in marketplaces?
- What Lisa's normal investment size is?
- Lisa's most recent investment and why Lisa said yes?
- Does Silicon Valley deserve the accolade it gets? Or is NYC fast approaching?
- Do VCs investment attitudes differ when comparing SF to NYC?
- How early is too early for Lisa to invest?
- What was the one thing that propelled Lisa's career?
We then move into a quick fire round where we hear Lisa's thoughts on the best advice she has ever been given, the number 1 reason Lisa says no to startups and what Lisa would do if all she had was a laptop and $100!
20 VC 014: Acquired by Salesforce turned VC with Kyle Lui
Kyle Lui is Principal at DCM Ventures where he helps entrepreneurs scale their companies and advise on product development across IOT, consumer internet and mobile and enterperise Saas. Prior to DCM, Kyle was Co-Founder at ChoicePass, a enterprise perks and rewards Saas company backed by prominent angel investors, later acquired by Salesforce.com and Rypple. At Salesforce, Kyle served as Director of Product Management on the founding product team for Work.com, growing the business to over 1,000 enterprise customers.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Learn Python the Hard Way
- AnyPerk
- Eaze
In this episode you will learn:
- How Kyle made the leap from Startup Founder to Venture Capitalist?
- How did Kyle learn to code?
- How did Kyle feel on selling ChoicePass to Salesforce?
- What was it like working in such a large company, such as Salesforce?
- How did your role change when Salesforce was acquired?
- What was the most difficult element faced by Kyle in his time at ChoicePass?
- Where does Kyle see the future of incentivising employees and how important is this aspect of corporate life?
- When investing in a company what aspects really attract you to a deal and what can be a real red flag?
- Are University and College degrees necessary for you to invest in a founder?
- Is Kyle concerned that a potential increase in regulation could damage his investment in Eaze, medical marijuana delivery startup?
We conclude today's show with a quick fire round where we hear Kyle's thoughts on what Kyle would do if all he had was a laptop and $100, what advice Kyle would give to entrepreneurs starting a company?
For all the resources and items mentioned in todays show, head on over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com
If there are any VCs you would like us to interview, send an email to harry@thetwentyminutevc.com and we will arrange it!
20 VC 013: Frank Meehan Series A, Spark Labs and The Future of The Asian Tech Market
Frank is Co-Founder and General Partner at Spark Labs Global seed fund where he has invested in 40 companies in the US, UK and Asia. Previously, Frank was part of Horizon Ventures where he represented them on the boards of Siri, Summly and Spotify, just to name a few.
Items mentioned in today's show:
SparkLabsGlobal
Horizon Venture
Brent Hoberman
Smartup
Youth Digital
Castle.io
Clinkle
In today's episode you will learn:
- How Frank made his entry into the technology industry and later the world of venture capital?
- What Frank would recommend someone who is trying to learn to code?
- Is coding necessary for a Founder to be successful?
- What does Frank believe makes the perfect Series A round?
- How early is too early to invest for Frank?
- How do VCs compete for the most competitive rounds?
- What was Frank's most recent investment and why he said yes?
- What sector is Frank most excited about and why?
- When thinking of success, who is the 1st person that comes to Frank's mind?
- What Frank learnt from working at Horizon?
We then finish today's episode with a quick fire round where we hear Frank's thoughts on the future of the Asian tech market and the hardest decision of Frank's career.
For all the resources mentioned in today's show, head over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com
Likewise we would love to hear from you, if you have any questions you would like us to ask, send us an email harry@thetwentyminutevc.com
20 VC 012: Angel Investing, Accelerators and AdTech with Clark Landry
Clark Landry is Founder and Chairman at Shift, the leading social advertising network for brands. He is also Executive Chairman of GraphEffect, a prominent social media marketing firm. In recent years Clark has made his foray into the investing industry with investments in the likes of AngelList and Lettuce. In his short time investing in startups, Clark has achieved an incredible 10 exits.
Items Mentioned in today's show:
In today's episode you will learn:
- How Clark made his entry into the world of tech and what caused his transition into angel investing?
- The most valuable insight Clark has learnt from being both a Founder and an Investor?
- How does Clark pick which startups to back, does he focus on any particular aspects of the company?
- What sector Clark is most excited about and why?
- How can someone make an entry into the tech startup world without having any coding ability?
We then finish the interview by hearing Clark's thoughts the effectiveness of tech accelerators, his most recent investment and his favourite book.
For all the reasons mentioned in today's show, head on over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com
If you have a question you want answered, send it in to harry@thetwentyminutevc.com and we will ask it on an upcoming show.
20 VC 011: London's Early Stage Funding Scene with Thomas Jones
A very exciting day on the 11th episode of The Twenty Minute VC as we welcome our 1st London based guest on the show, Thomas Jones. Thomas is Founder and Partner at Charlotte Street Capital, who invest up to £200,000 in early stage UK technology companies. Their impressive portfolio includes the likes of Chilango, GoSquared and SeedCamp, just to name a few. Prior to Charlotte Street Capital, Thomas was Founder and Executive Director of SMARTS Group International, offering a real time market surveillance platform, now used in dozens of stock exchanges around the world.
Items Mentioned in todays show:
- Crowdcube
- Seedcamp
- Kidslox
In today's session you will learn:
- How Thomas made his entry into the world of Venture Capital?
- When investing in a startup, do you have a mental timeline of the startup's journey in your head with a clear strategy of when a desired exit will occur?
- When it comes to investing, what really gets Thomas excited about the potential of a company?
- What Thomas believes the main differences to be between VCs in Europe compared to the USA?
- With the evolution of funding methods, how does Thomas see the 'crowd' becoming more involved in the future of early stage funding?
- What advice Thomas would give to a graduate looking to make their entry into the industry?
We finish today's episode with a quick fire round, where we hear Thomas' immediate thoughts on the future of disruption and the all time best business book!
For all the resources mentioned in today's show head over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com where you can sign up for you free 7 DAY BUSINESS PLAN COURSE
We would love to hear from you, so if you have a VC you would like to hear from, send us an email: harry@thetwentyminutevc.com and we will see what we can do!
20 VC: Niko Bonatsos on Startup Valuations
It is a great pleasure to have Niko Bonatsos on today's episode of The Twenty Minute VC. Niko is Principal at General Catalyst Partners where he specialises in mobile, consumer and healthcare technology. At General Catalyst Partner, Niko has been involved in the investments in the likes of Snapchat, TuneIn and SpoonRocket, just to name a few. Niko is also reknowned for being the 1st Angel Investor in Yik Yak, recently valued between $300-400 million.
In today's episode you will learn:
- How Niko made the jump into the world of Venture Capital?
- What were the fundamental lessons Niko learned when his startup failed?
- Why Niko prefers to invest in founding teams instead of individual founders?
- How Niko determines whether a startup will be successful or not? What Niko looks for in startups?
- Does Niko ever experience FOMO (fear of missing out) on an investment?
- How do you value a company, in particular a startup with no revenue?
- Does Niko think Silicon Valley will continue to be the dominant hub for innovation and investment?
- What parts of the world have seen large growth in both funding and innovation?
- What Niko would advise graduates looking to make the entry into the Venture Capital industry?
- What is the best piece of business advice Niko has ever received?
We then move onto a quick fire round where Niko tells us his thoughts on the future of education technology and the primary reason Niko says no to startups.
For all the resources mentioned in today's show, check out www.thetwentyminutevc.com
We would love to hear from you. If you have any questions you would like to ask the VCs, drop us an email at harry@thetwentyminutevc.com
Likewise if you have a VC you would like us to interview, send us an email and we will arrange it.
20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd
On today's show I am hugely excited to welcome Joe Floyd to the hotseat. Joe is Principal at Emergence Capital Partners. His expertise in building cloud startups has evolved over 10 years of advising and investing in startups. Prior to Emergence, Joe worked in American Capital's technology group where he focused on fast growing internet companies. At American Capital Joe was involved in their investments with the likes of PeopleMedia and HomeAway.
Items Mentioned In Today's Show
20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Mark Peter Davis is a serial founder and investor. He is the founder of Interplay Ventures with investments in the likes of Venwise and Warby Parker, just to name a few. Mark is also author of 'The Fundraising Rules', which clearly outlines the funding process of startups. If that wasn't enough Mark is Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Singularity University. Business Insider has listed Mark as one of the most influential Digital NYers and is included in a list of the 30 most interesting members of the Columbia University Startup Community by CVC30.
Items Mentioned in Todays Show:
In this episode you will learn:
- How Mark got into the VC industry?
- How startup founders can increase their network and gain influential mentors?
- When looking at startups what makes Mark want to get involved?
- What are the biggest mistakes made by startup founders?
- What are the key characteristics for a founder to have, in order to be successful?
- How does an individual or startup get a meeting with a VC?
- What Mark would advise graduates wanting to get into the Venture Capital Industry.
We end todays show with The Ultimate Quick Fire Round. Here Marks explains his views on startup valuations and how much equity the traditional VC looks for when investing.
Thank you so much for listening, if you are loving the show please do subscribe on iTunes and I would be so grateful if you would leave a review. If you do, you will be entered into the competition to win a meeting with one of the VCs and all the books mentioned in the first 10 episodes.
20 VC 007: The Evolution of Content and the Venture Capital Industry with Peter Csathy
I am hugely excited to welcome Peter Csathy for Session 7 of The Twenty Minute VC. Peter has had an astonishing career in the media industry with an unbroken track record of success in startups and emerging growth companies. Peter is currently CEO of Manatt Digital Media, which not only offers Venture Capital but is unique in also providing legal services and business consulting. Prior to Manatt, Peter was CEO of Sorensen Media, which serves 70 of the Fortune 100 and CEO of SightSpeed, Inc in which Peter oversaw their acquisition by Logitech.
Items Mentioned in Todays Show:
In this episode you will learn:
- Why Peter decided to enter into the Venture Capital Industry?
- What are the unique service that Manatt offer that other VCs do not provide?
- Why are these service necessary for startups to have access to?
- What is the most important thing for a startup to have in order for you to invest?
- Does an entrepreneur's track record of failure reduce the chance of you investing?
- Where do you see the disruption of content in 2015?
- What book would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur looking to attain funding?
In the final few minutes, we delve into a quick fire round where we hear Peter's thoughts on: The importance of location for a startup, future of online video and the company Peter is most excited about.
As always we absolutely love to hear from you. If you would like to get in contact email harry@thetwentyminutevc.com or visit www.thetwentyminutevc.com
20 VC 006: Google Glass & Founding Teams
Ifty Ahmed, General Partner at Oak Investment Partners. Ifty started his career with Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Ventures before joining Oak Investment Partners in 2003. He currently focuses on investing across the technology sector with an active interest in Consumer Internet companies.
*This episode was recorded before Google's anouncement to stop producing Google Glass prototypes, making Ifty's prediction even more impressive.
Items mentioned in today's show:
- Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted by Ian Ayers
- Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth by David Thompson
In this episode you will learn:
- How Ifty got into the Venture Capital industry?
- What does Ifty believe are the must haves for startups, in order for them to gain funding?
- Why Ifty prefers to invest in a founding team rather than a single founder?
- What Ifty would recommed to to an individual founder starting a company?
- What are the uncomfortable questions companies should ask VCs before they accept VC funding?
- What Ifty believes a startup should do before a pitch, in order to increase the chances of success?
- What book would Ifty give to an aspiring entrepreneur?
- What advice Ifty would give a graduate wanting to get into the VC industry?
- What tips Ifty would give to about where to network with VCs?
We finish the episode with a quick fire round where we hear Ifty's views on the future of Google Glass, the valuation of Snapchat and the potential for Bitcoin.
20 VC 005: Be The Best CEO with Kent Godfrey
In episode 5 of The Twenty Minute VC, we are joined by Kent Godfrey, General Partner at Pond Ventures. Prior to entering into the VC industry Kent was Chairman and CEO of Andromedia before merging it with MacroMedia. Kent was also CEO of Frictionless Commerce concluding with the sale of the company to SAP in 2006.
Kent has previously served on the board of numerous companies including LiveRail (acquired by Facebook), TRM Corporation (Nasdaq:TRMM), HipBone Communications (acquired by Kana) and Vocal Point Inc (acquired by Telecom Italia).
In this session you will learn:
- What is the most challenging aspect of being a CEO?
- Should CEO's have a clear and precise strategy for the future?
- What can a CEO do to position themselves to be more successful?
- How can an individual develop the skills to be a successful CEO?
- What Kent learnt from his meetings with Steve Jobs?
- What is the most challenging aspect of transitioning from CEO to VC?
- What do VCs do when concerned about an investment?
- What is the best aspect of being a Venture Capitalist?
- Is it possible to go straight into the Venture Capital industry from University?
We end the episode with a quick fire round where Ken describes the future of the Internet Of Things (IOT). Why Founders are better than a Founder? Plus, what the biggest misunderstanding of the Venture Capital industry is?
For all the resources mentioned in today's show heav on over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com
20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Welcome to Session 4 of The Twenty Minute VC, on today's incredible show, I am hugely excited to present David Hornik. David started his career as legal attorney to some of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley before making his foray into the Venture Capital Industry with August Capital in 2000. If that wasn't enough, David created the 1st Venture Capital blog, VentureBlog and is also the presenter of VentureCast.
In today's episode you will learn:
- Why David made the transition from the legal world into the VC industry?
- What is so special about Stanford that enables a continuous flow of revlolutionary companies?
- Whether legal skills are attributable to the funding industry?
- What David looks for when investing in a company?
- Does it always have to be a big market opportunity for VCs to invest?
- What the best piece of business advice David has ever received?
- What book David would recommend to a Startup Founder?
We then progress into a quick fire round where we hear David's views on Peter Thiel's 20 Under 20 and the 1st $Trillion business.
20 VC 003: Bob Ghoorah on Startups, The Pitch and Uber
On today's episode I am thrilled to welcome Bob Ghoorah, Managing Director at Columubus Nova Technology Partners. Bob has experienced both sides of the table having been an early employee at three technology companies in Silicon Valley; LoudCloud (Nasdaq: LDCL), Opsware (Nasdaq: OPSW) and Ning, a privately-held software platform (sold to Glam Media in 2011).
In this episode we find out:
- The benefits of having a legal knowledge in the Startup community.
- What characteristics make the best entrepreneurs?
- Who does Bob think of, when the word 'success' is mentioned and why?
- Where Bob sees the future of Uber?
- What aspects of a Startup are essential in order to obtain VC funding?
- Is it important for Startups to be located in Silicon Valley?
- What books Bob woulg give to an aspring entrepreneur and startup founder?
- What advice Bob would give to anyone looking to get into the Venture Capital Industry?
Finally, we head to the quick fire round. Here, we get Bob's immediate reactions to the latests tech topics including tech bubble, company valuations and the first trillion dollar company.
For all the resources mentioned in todays show head over to The Twenty Minute VC.
20 VC 002: How to become a VC with Kris Jones
In this session of The Twenty Minute VC, I'm so excited to have the opportunity to interview Kris Jones. Kris has enjoyed an amazing career in the technology industry, founding PepperJam, an internet marketing agency in 1999 and later selling it to Ebay in April of 2010. More recently, Kris has made his transition into the Venture Capital Industry through the founding of an early stage technology investment fund, KBJ Capital, which includes portfolio companies Highlighter.com, French Girls App, ReferLocal.com, LSEO.com and many more incredible companies.
In this session you'll learn:
- Why Kris decided to make the transition from the Startup ecosystem to the world of Venture Capital.
- How did it feel for Kris, selling his company to Ebay?
- What was the most important lesson Kris learnt in the journey from having the idea for PepperJam to being acquired by Ebay?
- What is the key characteristic a Founder must have?
- What can an individual do to get employed in the Venture Capital industry.
Kris is also a prolific writer here are some of his articles, you can check out!
Forbes: 15 Steps to Set Your Company Up for a Successful M&A
20 VC 001: Guy Kawasaki of Apple, Motorola and AllTop.com
Welcome to the 1st episode of The Twenty Minute VC, on today's show we have Guy Kawasaki, Guy is the Founding Partner of Garage Technology Ventures, a seed & early stage venture capital fund investing in extraordinary entrepreneurs with unique technologies. Previously, he was Chief Evangelist of Apple Inc and an advisor to the Motorala Business Unit of Google. Guy is also the author of many best selling books including the recent best seller, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users.
In this episode we delve into:
- Why Guy made the transition into the VC industry?
- What is the most important aspect for a startup to have?
- What drives Guy insane about startup founders today?
- What books Guy gives to aspiring entrepreneurs?
- What software & apps Guy cannot live without?
We then finish on a quick fire round where we discover Guy's thoughts on the future of Amazon, Tesla and whether we really are in the midst of a tech bubble.
All of the products mentioned in todays show can be found at www.thetwentyminutevc.com
If you love the show, please do leave a review on the iTunes store and don't forget to subscribe!
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Podcasten The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch är skapad av Harry Stebbings. Podcastens innehåll och bilderna på den här sidan hämtas med hjälp av det offentliga podcastflödet (RSS).
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