Venrock

“I don't think we need to know someone for a year before making an investment, and that would be a little bit unlikely, although it happens from time to time. But, you know, the ideal scenario is to have a few months of working relationship, either, you know, m…”

“You know, I did that with Dollar Shave Club, where very few people believed that that company could become as large as they have and could disrupt, you know, a traditional legacy shaving market, men's grooming market.”

“I did it with live streaming with YouNow. Where very few people believe that a bunch of kids talking to each other on through mobile live video was gonna be big, and, you know, a year later, everyone believes that, so.”

“One of the areas of that investment thesis is will Amazon Amazon you by effectively commoditizing the category by launching an Amazon basics or, you know, an Amazon branded commodity version.”

“I flew to LA quickly and sat down with Michael and his team and started to go through the numbers. And I was very specifically focused on, let me see churn. Let me look, let me see what the early cohort churns are. And they were extraordinarily low.”

“A number of the firms Who were already seed investors either did not engage with the company around its series egg or took a look and passed. It wasn't terribly competitive around for me to win.”

“You know, they did about seven million in revenue in their first year, and they were on track to do twenty million in their second year.”

“So my first advice is to have slides. They're not only useful for fundraising, but the PowerPoint deck has become the de facto business plan. It can substitute for your mission statement, vision statement, etc. Like, there's never not a good time to have a goo…”

“But generally a team slide, it's hard to generate excitement and interest. Like you might all have very impressive backgrounds, but a five minute slog of three or four or 10 people's resumes, it's just not high energy. And it's much better to do it at the midd…”

“I assume going into every one of our companies that we're going to spend most of our time in board meetings and outside of board meetings, solving problems, fixing things, trying to make it better. We actually spend very little time congratulating ourselves on…”

“And to fund this immense growth, they've raised over twenty five million dollars in funding from some of the greats of the investing world, including Andy Weissman at USV, David Patman at Venrock, and a future guest on the show, I'm very excited to say, in the…”