James Beshara

Co-Founder, Magic Mind · 1 appearance on the record.

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

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James Beshara co-founded and served as CEO of the crowdfunding platform Tilt, which was backed by Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz and acquired by Airbnb. He later founded the functional beverage company Magic Mind and has angel-invested in over 150 startups, including Gusto, Mercury, and Clubhouse.

6statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.83/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 8said about them ↓

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

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 1 opinion · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 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 James 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

Assertion Supported
Tilt rejected a company mascot designed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
“So the background there is the founder of Reddit, who has a very adorable mascot in Snoo on that you see next to every Reddit logo. He built, he designed us a mascot, and we ended up not using it.”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 21:40 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% 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 4.7 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4.4 · compression 3.8

redirected or did not address 2 of 18 assessed questions (11%). Watch them ▸

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? →

244 words/min while actually speaking · 39 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,254 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 →

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

Assertion Not checkable as stated
82% of Tilt crowdfunding campaigns succeed, raising an average of 192%
“82% of tilts are successful, so that's you're very different than most crowdfunding campaigns where the majority don't reach their goal. The vast majority exceed their goal, and actually you know, if you have a successful tilt on our platform or a successful c…”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 11:11 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
Opinion
Reading blogs creates an illusion of productivity but is passive consumption
“I think blogs, they give you this, like it feels productive, but it's consumption, like watching TV. You feel like you learned something in little tidbits”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 21:04 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Crowdfunding will achieve mass market adoption through simpler second-generation tools
“And our hypothesis is, is that crowdfunding will have a very similar narrative arc to blogging to where, you know, 1213 years ago, blogging was this thing that had a lot of hand waving, had a lot of it was on the tips of you know, journalist tongues of the, yo…”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 6:09 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
Insight
Going public resets a startup's progress to zero for the founders
“Any company that goes public, it's, it, for the founders, the entrepreneurs, the leaders in that company, for the entire company, it's kind of like it all starts over again. It resets to zero. Now you've got to prove the world that prove the world wrong all ov…”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 17:31 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
Assertion Supported
Tilt rejected a company mascot designed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
“So the background there is the founder of Reddit, who has a very adorable mascot in Snoo on that you see next to every Reddit logo. He built, he designed us a mascot, and we ended up not using it.”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 21:40 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
Assertion Supported
Only 200,000 people globally had started crowdfunding campaigns by early 2016
“So it's, you know, it's a couple 100,000 that have started crowdfunding campaigns, a few million, about ten million have backed campaigns”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 5:39 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!

The other half of the tape: James Beshara's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Mike Duboe 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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01220162017201820192020202120222023episodes it came up in
00214220162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Jan 22, 2016 16m
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