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Kulveer Taggar

Founder & Managing Partner, Phosphor Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderinvestorexecutive@kul ↗LinkedIn ↗kulveertaggar.com ↗

Kulveer Taggar is an entrepreneur and investor who runs Phosphor Capital, a venture fund dedicated to backing Y Combinator startups. He is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of flexible-housing platform Zeus Living and the co-founder of Auctomatic, an early YC company acquired in 2008 alongside Patrick and John Collison.

13statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.69/5average certainty → 2.23/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 2said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 2 opinions · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 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 Kulveer 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
Taggar: Gary Tan Saved Instacart and Wired Money to Coinbase
“I think it was he who accepted Instacart into Y Combinator after the deadline had passed for applications, and similarly with Coinbase early on, I think this is public, but there was a moment where they were having a bit of a liquidity crunch, and Gary just wi…”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 11:20 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

How they sound: speaking style how? →

235 words/min while actually speaking · 1.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Kulveer Taggar: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 23 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,785 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Kulveer Taggar is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 1/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 55%

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

Insight
Taggar: If You Question Having Product-Market Fit, You Don't Have It
“If you have to question whether you have product market fit, you probably don't.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 15:37 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
Opinion
Taggar: The startup idea is almost the only thing that matters
“I've actually started to believe now that if you're doing a startup, almost the only thing that matters is the idea. I used to be one of these people that believed execution was everything and the idea didn't matter.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 19:26 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
Insight
Taggar: Product-market fit drives hard work, not vice versa
“I actually often think that success or having product market fit causes you to work hard versus, you know, working hard, causing you to get product market fit.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 21:37 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
Insight
Taggar: Real Estate Tech Startups Find Better Investor Understanding in New York
“There was a bit of a difference between pitching and fundraising on the West Coast and in New York. And I think it's the LP base with the East coast investors. A lot of them are all very familiar with real estate. Often they've made a lot of money out of real …”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 10:10 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
Assertion Supported
Taggar: Gary Tan Saved Instacart and Wired Money to Coinbase
“I think it was he who accepted Instacart into Y Combinator after the deadline had passed for applications, and similarly with Coinbase early on, I think this is public, but there was a moment where they were having a bit of a liquidity crunch, and Gary just wi…”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 11:20 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
Insight
Taggar: Founders Can Validate Product-Market Fit in a Few Weeks
“You can actually figure out or get to product market fit even within a month or a few weeks and use language and positioning to really test how receptive people are to your ideas.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 15:51 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
Opinion
Taggar: Silicon Valley's bragging culture and vanity metrics are counterproductive
“I think I would like to change the bragging culture. I found this kind of difficult to adjust to when I came out here, where everyone's kind of crushing it, or, you know, in the press, it's like, I raised this much, and you throw these vanity metrics out there…”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 26:34 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
What-if
Taggar: Thinking long-term would have made Auctomatic more successful
“And I actually think if we were thinking on a longer term horizon, we would have done better.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 6:58 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
Insight
Taggar: Tech-Enabled Physical Startups Are Harder to Scale Than Software
“It's harder to scale than a pure software play because we are acquiring and creating physical things. You know, we can't just add servers and increase our database size. When we rewrite code, we also have to rewrite processes in the real world with how we do t…”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 8:14 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
Disclosure
Taggar: Zeus Living Secures Captive Inventory via Direct Master Leases
“The way I would offer this is I would offer to Sign a lease with the homeowner, and then I realized I would have captive inventory, and I could solve the problem on the demand side.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 5:47 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
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Taggar: Early Zeus Pitch Yielded 20 Follow-ups Out of 25 Investor Meetings
“And I remember of those 25 meetings, I had 20 follow-up meetings set up after just sort of talking through the idea in the market.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 16:32 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
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Taggar: Zeus Living Tested 17 Landing Pages Before Launch
“With Zeus, we did a lot of positioning testing, a lot of language testing. I think we set up 17 landing pages to really hone in on what the value propositions were going to be before we started anything.”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 17:04 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
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Taggar: Zeus Living software gives property managers 3x to 5x leverage
“There's countless things where we write some code, and something that was a very manual process that a human had to do, we've now given them three X or five X leverage”
Kulveer Taggar May 31, 2019 ▶ 27:19 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

The other half of the tape: Kulveer Taggar's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Tom Blomfield 1

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Valida May 31, 2019 21m
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