Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Lack of major liquidity events constrains the New York tech ecosystem

Jack Groetzinger · 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek · Jun 1, 2018 · at 17:57

Jack Groetzinger is the founder and CEO of SeatGeek. He addresses the key structural drawbacks of hiring tech talent in New York City relative to Silicon Valley.

0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The challenge, of course, the flip side of that is just the total pool of people is smaller. Even more specifically, there haven't been that many really big liquidity events, you know, sort of Google-style companies. Equity events that spin off a bunch of people with a lot of capital other than doing their own startups, which definitely constrains things a bit here in New York.”

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 Jack Groetzinger

Insight
Technical skill is the most important factor for startup founders
“Being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success. Basically, you can't have too many technical people On a founding team.”
Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 4:23 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
Disclosure
SeatGeek raised nearly $100M before hiring its first finance employee
“We waited forever to hire a full-time finance person. I think we'd raised almost a hundred million dollars before we hired anyone full-time in finance”
Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 5:25 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
Opinion
SeatGeek can realistically be NYC's top employer brand, unlike in SF
“If we want to build a differentiated brand as we want to be the best place for an engineer to work in New York, that would be sort of a ludicrous, probably overambitious thing for us to say if we were based in San Francisco. There's just so many iconic technol…”
Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 17:41 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
Disclosure
SeatGeek prefers PhDs and quant traders over bootcamp data science grads
“The biggest challenge sort of sorting through the data science pool is filtering the people who are sort of very serious quantitative professionals versus folks who did a boot camp. For three months and are now trying to become a data scientist. And there's ab…”
Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 18:22 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
Insight
Every consumer web startup will eventually either rebrand or fail
“I think if you're doing particularly a consumer web startup, you have to look at it. It's just a matter of when, not if, because every company rebrands at some point, unless you fail.”
Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 23:19 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
Insight
Board seats are immutable commitments requiring extensive founder diligence
“When you agree to take someone out of your board and raise a bunch of money from someone, just how long-term sort of immutable the commitment is. I think if a lot of founders realized that fully, they would do more work and more diligence and spend more, more …”
Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 6:53 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
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.