Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Bannon: Silicon Valley talent is largely wasted on trivial tech problems

Seth Bannon · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · Aug 7, 2017 · at 27:37

Seth Bannon, founding partner at Fifty Years, critiques how talent in Silicon Valley is allocated toward ad optimization rather than impactful problems.

0:00 / 0:28exact quote · 28.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think there's just such incredible talent in Silicon Valley, and I think it is largely going to waste. I think that way too many incredibly talented people are working on incredibly trivial things, and I see it around me a lot where people are going through existential crises, and you talk to them, and you figure out that they are, you know, spending all their days figuring out how to squeeze a bit more money out of every ad impression, and it's like, you know, of course you're having an existential crisis.”

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 Seth Bannon

Opinion
Bannon: One-for-one impact models like Toms Shoes are inherently flawed
“We really don't like the sort of like one for one model companies. Right. So like the Tom's shoe or like for every shoe we sell, we're going to donate shoes to a country in the third world because then the good you're doing always has to be defended. When you'…”
Seth Bannon Aug 7, 2017 ▶ 14:36 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
Prediction Open · timeframe Aug 2117
Bannon: Animal agriculture will be completely eliminated within 100 years
“I believe that animal agriculture will be eliminated from the face of the earth within the next hundred years.”
Seth Bannon Aug 7, 2017 ▶ 26:59 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
Opinion
Bannon: The Friedman Doctrine is one of history's most dangerous economic ideas
“We think it's actually one of the most wrongheaded and probably dangerous doctrines in the history of the world, and I know it sounds a little Strange to say that an economic doctrine is very dangerous, but we think it's allowed a lot of businesses to pursue p…”
Seth Bannon Aug 7, 2017 ▶ 7:41 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
Disclosure
Bannon: Deep tech startups should shift to debt after three equity rounds
“So almost every single deep tech company that we've invested in has a clear path to growing off of equity for maybe three rounds, and then growing off of project or debt financing for the rest of their life.”
Seth Bannon Aug 7, 2017 ▶ 17:59 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
Insight
Bannon: A 15-20 year fund lifecycle is VC's biggest opportunity
“I think the biggest opportunity in investing right now might just be a fund that has a 15 to twenty-year life cycle.”
Seth Bannon Aug 7, 2017 ▶ 21:55 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
Opinion
Bannon: Impact investors lack tech skills, tech VCs only care about profits
“When we talked to investors, we found that they all basically fell into one of two buckets. Either you had the people who really cared about the why, or, you know, what are traditionally called impact investors, but who knew basically nothing about technology …”
Seth Bannon Aug 7, 2017 ▶ 5:29 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years
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.