Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Multi-product cross-selling reduces customer acquisition cost close to zero

Sumit Gajri · 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta · Jan 17, 2020 · at 29:00

Sumit Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer at Carta, explains why companies relying on third-party advertising have high burn rates compared to multi-product companies leveraging existing distribution channels.

0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And I think that's a reason a lot of these companies that you see today have uncontrollable burn rates, because the only way that they are growing is spending money on customer acquisition channels that they don't actually have a lot of control over. And as a result, their growth is very expensive versus companies that are able to build one product and then go for their own distribution channels to sell the second product or the third product. Their customer acquisition cost is close to zero because they already have a relationship with the customer.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Sumit Gajri

Disclosure
Five companies represent 93% of Original Capital's deployed capital
“Despite the fact that we've written over 50 checks a day and made investments in 42 different companies, Five of those companies account for 93% of our capital today.”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 10:40 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Insight
Early founder secondaries misalign incentives and deter prospective investors
“Where I do get concerned is like when you have these early series BC runs and founders are taking large percentages of our ownership off the table. That can be quite concerning because I think that it's not a good formula for a long-term success, especially if…”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 45:20 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Insight
Compressed timelines lead founders to bypass dedicated seed funds
“I think what I am seeing though, is the time between those seed rounds in the series A's getting compressed. And as a result, I think founders are actually choosing to, in certain cases, bypass seed funds that can only diverse seed rounds and really go target,…”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 46:30 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Insight
Successful tech companies must become distribution-centric, not product-centric
“The general model for successful tech companies is that they become distribution centric rather than product centric.”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 25:23 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Insight
Enterprise search is solved by targeting specific interactions, not search bars
“Where in his opinion, if you really wanted to solve the problem of enterprise search, it was actually, you go narrow, not broad. Search isn't actually a text box anymore. It's the interactions that people internally or externally are having with the informatio…”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 32:43 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Insight
Narrative matters more than KPIs in successful fundraising
“For the best businesses ever, and also for the most successful fundraisers, what matters more is the narrative that you're able to tell, and then you have KPIs which are, you know, backing up the narrative that you're sharing with.”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 38:04 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.