The other half of the tape: Scott Cooper's own voice is left out of every number here.
Other people bring the name up 12 times in
6 episodes on the a16z Podcast. 41 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Insight
Cooper: Startup CEOs need a finance leader as soon as go-to-market begins
“As soon as you think about go-to-market, right, and you start to think, okay, now I'm going to spend marketing dollars. Do I understand what my lead generation costs? Now I'm going to hire sales. What's the throughput and conversion rate and quota and all that…”
Insight
Kupor: Early sales hires must seek honest market feedback over superficial success
“So much of the early customer engagement should be like figuring out the product market fit. And so you really want market feedback that you can use. And if you have somebody that like, you know, every meeting is a good meeting and they're using relations, thi…”
Insight
Kupor: Corporate proof-of-concept programs rarely connect directly to procurement
“Many large companies have outreach programs to start up. So like if you engage with a, you know, a finance company, like a large bank, they'll be like, listen, we work with startups all the time. They have whole groups that take these things and pock them. Tha…”
Insight
Kupor: Startups must plan modular packaging early to prevent revenue cannibalization
“If you don't know you're going to do this beforehand, you may not have the flexibility to actually pull out independent bits of value. And so now you've got You know, on one hand, either you cannibalize yourself with like a, an over feature rich product for th…”
Insight
Kupor: Inside sales models require mature markets and simple products
“The cost of like an ISR is going to be much less than a direct sales force, but only certain types of products or markets are amenable to an inside sales model, right? Like if it's a very mature market and the customer's educated is probably more amenable than…”
Disclosure
Kupor: Inexperienced startups nearly give away site licenses to enterprise buyers
“I've been in multiple situations. We were very close to basically giving site licenses to like a 100,000 person organizations for almost no pricing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cooper: Tech corporate M&A is surprisingly weak given incumbent cash balances
“I would have expected at this stage of the cycle to have a more robust M&A environment, which, you know, we've talked about in prior posts and others about, you know, whether it's activist shareholders or other things that potentially are making it more diffic…”
Prediction Held up
Cooper: Secondary trading markets will emerge to supply VC liquidity
“I think the other thing that, you know, is potentially likely to happen over the next several years is potentially the establishment of a more, you know, fundamental secondary trading market for not just employees, which we see today, but potentially also earl…”
Insight
Kupor: Startup founders systematically underestimate their required capital
“From the perspective of the deals that we see, I think almost to a fault, everybody historically underestimates how much capital they will actually need to get to either, either the next milestone or to an exit.”
Insight
Kupor: SaaS subscription economics mirror traditional cable and telecom business models
“None of this stuff is actually that new, this concept that we're talking about here, right? So if you think about, you know, a company like Comcast, right, or you think about AT&T, they'got this same problem, which is, you know, it costs a lot of money to acqu…”
Insight
Cooper: Changing sales rep quotas is key to shifting sales behavior
“If you want to change the way you sell your product, the best thing to do is change the quota structure for your sales reps.”
Assertion Supported
Cooper: Corporate VCs participate in 15% to 20% of startup deals
“Something like 15, 20% of deals often have a corporate partner in them, so it's grown a lot over the last 10 years.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cooper: Top 10% to 20% of VC investments drive 90% of returns
“So basically what that means is the way this business works, the difference between success or failure in this business means you've got 10 or 20% left of your investments that need to basically generate, you know, 90% of your returns, and so”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cooper: 40% to 50% of venture capital investments result in total loss
“The basic way to think about a venture portfolio is you know, about half, 40 to 50% of what we do, we're gonna get wrong. And there's this very euphemistic word that we have in this business, which I know you and I've talked about, called you have an impaired …”
Insight
Founders must never use employer laptops for side projects
“So our best advice on this stuff is, look, if you've got a great idea number one, you know, don't ever use your work laptop for any of these things, right? So have some physical separation, and you know, when you really get to the point where you feel like, ok…”
Assertion Supported
Cooper: Canada lets companies deduct engineering hiring expenses from corporate taxes
“So for example, in Canada today, many companies when they hire engineers, they're able to deduct a lot of the expenses associated with those engineers from their taxes.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cooper: Capital scarcity defined venture capital from the 1970s to mid-2000s
“And that was kind of most of actually the first 30, 40 years of venture capital from kind of early 19 seventies to mid 2000, I think was characterized by that. You know, capital was scarce. The VCs had it and therefore You went to the BC to get the money.”
