Referrals from existing portfolio founders drive most of DST's deal sourcing
Rahul Mehta · 20VC: Investing $200m In Facebook, The 3 Stages of Founder Development & Why Creating A New User Behaviour Can Be Unit Economics Inefficient with Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner @ DST · Jul 24, 2017 · at 16:29
Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner at DST, attributes much of DST's proprietary deal flow to its existing network of portfolio founders.
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“A lot of the credit for our sourcing like would go to the existing founders in the network and like what they have managed to build.”
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More from Rahul Mehta
Startups with capital and product-market fit should aggressively pursue market share
“If you have access to capital and the product idea fundamentally makes sense, then I would say it overall is the right thing to do to be pretty aggressive early on and try and take as much market share as possible.”
Only 10 internet companies globally had achieved $10B GMV by 2017
“There are only 10 internet companies globally, public or private, which have ten billion GMB, and there are less than 15 companies It's globally with a million orders a day.”
DST's initial $200M Facebook investment came directly from Mail.ru's balance sheet
“The first investment in Facebook actually happened from the mail balance sheet. And then when this was the first two hundred million dollar round that we did in May, 2009, that all came from the mail balance sheet.”
DST has exclusively invested in founder-led companies since its inception
“So our investment thesis has always revolved a lot around the founder, and we've only invested in founder-led companies from the very beginning.”