David Beisel

Co-Founder & Partner, NextView Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderauthor@davidbeisel ↗davidbeisel.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

David Beisel co-founded the seed-stage VC firm NextView Ventures in 2010 after co-founding Sombasa Media and serving as Vice President at Venrock. His prominent investments include thredUP, TripleLift, Parsec, TapCommerce, and BookBub.

11statements → 7claims → 2claims resolved → 3.82/5average certainty → 1.91/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 12said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 4 assertions · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how David argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up

Beisel: Amazon will ship 20M to 40M Echo devices in 2017

“Somewhere between 20 to forty million are going to be Shipped in here in 2017.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 10:47 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

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

100% certainty 3

none yet certainty 4

100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.4 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.6 · compression 4

answered every one of 8 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

224 words/min while actually speaking · 9.2 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,394 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10

setup questions received 55%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 17:16“Is a bridge round not just a sign that you failed to hit series A metrics?” ▶ 14:07“To what extent do you think they'll very much impose a walled garden approach, or do you think it will be very much of an open source community whereby it is very much more free-fl…” ▶ 12:24“Where do you see the, the kind of potentially nascent markets for investment?”

when David pushed back ▶ 17:20“I would say only sometimes, but most often. I mean, I think other times you can see things that other investors don't see, or the metrics weren't there.”

What they said11 What others said12 Episodes1

Everything David Beisel said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Held up

Beisel: Amazon will ship 20M to 40M Echo devices in 2017

“Somewhere between 20 to forty million are going to be Shipped in here in 2017.”

Prediction Held up

Beisel predicts 50 million voice-connected devices in homes by late 2017

“By the end of the year, literally, fifty million devices in people's homes are going to have that kind of connection.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 11:20 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

Insight

Beisel: Bridge rounds usually mean a startup missed its Series A metrics

“I would say only sometimes, but most often. I mean, I think other times you can see things that other investors don't see, or the metrics weren't there. You might actually have hit the right metrics, but the market moved on you.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 17:20 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

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Beisel: NextView writes an investment memo for every seed deal

“We actually, at NextView, write an investment memo for every single seed investment we make.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 5:41 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

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Beisel: NextView requires unanimous partner consent for follow-on investments

“For follow-on funding, we actually make it unanimous entirely.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 6:51 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

Insight

Beisel: Solving distribution solves most other problems for B2B and B2C startups

“I think if you can solve distribution and get your product out there, whether it's a B to C company or B to B company, lots of other problems go away, right?”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 8:06 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

Insight

Beisel: Voice computing's primary bottlenecks are monetization and distribution

“The challenges right now with voice computing are really around monetization and distribution, right?”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 12:30 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

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Beisel: Voice fragmentation creates opportunities for startups to build connective tissue

“A consumer in their bedroom or in their kitchen isn't going to want to talk to the different device differently, and so there's probably some area for startups to kind of be connective tissue around a cohesive experience.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 13:50 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

Insight

Beisel: First-generation apps on new platforms merely replicate older platforms

“Yeah, so the idea is that, like, when you have a new platform shift, right, so if you go from PCs to mobile and Or mobile to, you know, hopefully here voice computing. The first kind of love application just replicates what the other one was, what happened in …”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 14:55 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

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Beisel: NextView uses a two-step voting process for initial investments

“We actually have a two-step voting process where We vote very early on when we meet with entrepreneurs, then we vote, then we actually vote again when we make the final decision-making process.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 6:37 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

Assertion Not publicly verifiable

Beisel: Amazon shipped 10 million Echo devices in 2016

“So, ten million devices were shipped in 2016.”

David Beisel Aug 16, 2017 ▶ 10:43 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

The other half of the tape: David Beisel's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 5 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Rob Go 8 Harry Stebbings 3 Lee Hower 1