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Tyler Willis

Co-Founder and COO, Unsupervised · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutiveinvestoroperatorhost@tylerwillis ↗LinkedIn ↗tyler.is ↗

Willis co-founded Unsupervised, an enterprise AI analytics platform that has raised over $50 million from major venture firms. He also manages a venture fund and has angel-invested in early-stage startups including Lyft, Patreon, Lattice, and Change.org.

12statements → 1claims → 1claims resolved → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.42/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 9said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 assertion · 3 opinions · 8 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved. 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 Tyler 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
Willis: Aaron Levie had no enterprise experience when he founded Box
“At the same point, Aaron Levy didn't know anything about the enterprise before he started box. And that worked out brilliantly well.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 13:30 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4 · compression 3.9

answered every one of 15 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? →

280 words/min while actually speaking · 38.5 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,469 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 ▾ 1/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 65%

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

Insight
Willis: Value investing does not work in private company markets
“Value investing doesn't work in, in private company markets.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 5:44 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Opinion
Willis: A 10x return target is too low for seed-stage winners
“You know, the rule of thumb here is you want to have at least a 10 X, you know, path to, for the winners. And I think that's actually low, especially at the seed stage.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 6:05 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: VCs and angel investors cannot save a failing startup
“Angel investors and VCs can be very important, can be very valuable, but I don't think they do much of the work, and I really don't think they can save a ship from going off the wrong course.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 7:30 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: Hiring a growth hacker fails unless founders are obsessed with growth
“It's not something where you go, I'm going to hire a growth hacker and they can figure it out. But it's instead something where the founder is obsessed with growth or, you know, a big part of the team is obsessed with growth.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 10:20 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: Active angel investing requires a 20-year commitment to see real returns
“Active angel investing is something you should not do unless you want to do it for the next 20 plus years of your career. Because you're not going to see the big benefits of it for 10 or 15 or 20 years.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 16:13 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Opinion
Willis: Media focus on trivial, overfunded startups obscures real technological progress
“We've got this massive trend that is pushing towards increased innovation But we don't believe it because the stories we hear on a day-to-day basis are about the person who undeservingly got, you know, ten million dollars for their stupid idea or who, you know…”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 19:45 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: Wanting to work for a founder is a strong investment signal
“In fact, the kind of easy heuristic I use for that is, would I want to, am I tempted to go work for this person? You know, I've got all these things that I'm doing my own, and I control my own day and my own schedule, and that's fantastic, and, you know, I can…”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 8:31 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: Growth professionals are like poker players enduring 90% failure rates
“I think a lot of growth people are, you Are also kind of like poker people, right? They're just, they're kind of grinding it out, waiting for the right hand to hit, and nine hands they play are bad, but as long as the 10th hand is good, it all works out.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 11:01 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: Venture investors should avoid rigid rules and focus on outliers
“So I think as a, as an investor, your job is to avoid taking a hard stance on anything that isn't, that is potentially more noise than signal. Because you, what you're looking for are outliers.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 13:36 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Insight
Willis: The "sunlight paradox" explains why public pessimism grows despite progress
“You get this kind of sunlight paradox, which is the way you cure darkness is by shining light on it. But by shining light on it, you show everyone that the world is dark and people get very scared and very nervous.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 17:48 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Opinion
Willis: Tech publication The Information is severely underrated
“I think the information is slept on a lot more than it should be. They do a killer job of reporting. It's absolutely fantastic.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 22:20 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
Assertion Supported
Willis: Aaron Levie had no enterprise experience when he founded Box
“At the same point, Aaron Levy didn't know anything about the enterprise before he started box. And that worked out brilliantly well.”
Tyler Willis Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 13:30 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation

The other half of the tape: Tyler Willis's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 1 episode on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Arielle Zuckerberg 1

Statements about Tyler Willis, by other people (1)

Assertion Partly supported
Stebbings: Patreon reaches $2M monthly payouts while Change.org hits 80M users
“And some of his investments include the likes of the wildly popular ride-sharing app Lyft, the incredible Patreon, now delivering two million a month to creators, and Change.org, which now has over eighty million users.”
Harry Stebbings Feb 17, 2016 ▶ 0:35 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0041812016episodesmentions
0112016episodes it came up in
0040.5812016episodesmentions per episode
2016 8 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Inn Feb 17, 2016 19m
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