Taussig: Silicon Valley VC culture incentivizes fair treatment as a repeat game
Alex Taussig · Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig: Vinted CEO's Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces | E1114 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Feb 12, 2024 · at 1:00:50
Alex Taussig, General Partner at Lightspeed, discusses the cultural factors that differentiate Silicon Valley venture capital from emerging tech ecosystems.
0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Silicon Valley has this like weird risk loving kind of culture. And we also know that it's a repeat game. We know that we're going to be playing the game with these people for decades. And so we got to treat everyone right.”
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 Alex Taussig
Taussig: Higher interest rates benefited Vinted against discounting competitors
“The end of zero interest rates benefited us a lot. I remember when, early when I joined the board, it was still, we're still in this era of like insane discounting by some of our competitors in various regions. And we had to make these hard choices. Like, do w…”
Taussig: High-margin eBay is losing market share yearly to Vinted
“Usually the highest EBITDA margin businesses have the lowest growth, right? And so it's this kind of funny thing where You know, the business like eBay has a great EBITDA margin. It hasn't really, it's not really growing and it's kind of losing market share ev…”
Taussig: Lightspeed risks losing most capital for small chance of unbounded upside
“Lightspeed is really a Silicon Valley firm founded in Silicon Valley, but we invest globally, but everywhere we invest, we bring that Silicon Valley mentality and technological optimism. And what I mean by that is we're definitely willing to take risk, perhaps…”
Taussig: U.S. retail saw more store openings than closings in 2017
“There were actually more store openings than closings across the retail sector in 2017.”
Taussig: Frozen food startups operationally outperform fresh delivery businesses like Blue Apron
“Frozen has some inherent advantages over fresh food. Namely, the operations of manufacturing are more similar to consumer packaged goods than the complex cooking operations you might find inside of a blue apron or freshly. Moreover, customers who don't consume…”