Google Ventures

“We would estimate Google Ventures returns at about 4.1 X”

“They've raised over seventy million dollars from the likes of Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field, Elad Gill, and even the legend that is Mark Benioff.”

“I think GV's investments are actually, Less than half actually use Google Cloud, so it's not like they lock us into, to Google.”

“And so we've now done over 50 companies we've invested in 12 countries. We just break through half a billion dollars in the UK alone with our investment in isomorphic last week”

“We invested in Stripe in 2017, and one of the things that struck me is the Collinson brothers were tracking a KPI. They were tracking the number of series A companies that That transact online that they actually, you know, that are using Stripe and the number …”

“Given the choice between Picking where a company's HQ is, or where the bulk of the employees are, or where the IP is generated, or where it's listed, I'm taking the first three. They're way more valuable.”

“This is one of the things, reasons we invested in nothing. We believe they've got seven million devices out there that are potentially conduits for their AI.”

“But some of our best portfolio companies like Stripe aren't listing anytime soon, and they're finding ways to deliver liquidity.”

“They've now raised more than five hundred million dollars from investors such as OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Bloodgill, and me.”

“Every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody and we're investors. So at GV, we want them to be successful and to have these huge markets. But it doesn't start there. So to build successfully, usually you have to be much more focused and much …”

“If you do them in a clump like that, then the patterns are just much more obvious. You have to, at the end of the day, it's just really clear what were the big takeaways.”

“And that idea of just doing five of them You hit what's called data saturation. And so this is the thing in qualitative research where the kind of the common version of this is everybody after four or five is like, oh, for God's sakes, please don't let me sit …”

“I don't write a report. I haven't written a report in, I don't know, 10 years because we've at the end, when we capture those big takeaways, that's the team has captured it, right?”

“Comically narrow is exactly what it is. And there are times that teams will just be like, Oh, for God's sakes, Margolis, like, just like, this is too much. The reason that I do that is I'm pushing them to identify a person who they all would agree. This person…”

“Another typical exclusion Criteria is I don't want somebody who knows too much. So your core bullseye customer, I want somebody who's pretty typical. So in this case, like if I were to find out that somebody was a pharmacist or worked in healthcare, I'm like, …”

“The way I think about it is kind of in these three groups. So there are inclusion criteria, there are exclusion criteria, and then there are, what we found is very important are triggers.”

“If you haven't studied your competitor's product and not just gone through it, but like seeing how people respond to them, you're just missing something, right?”

“We have people manually taking notes and not using AI to take notes. The reason for this is what we found is we want people to lean in to this experience. We want you to focus and engage and pay a lot of attention. And if you know somebody else is taking notes…”

“Now we have made investments in Gen AI, but more in infrastructure, more in the application layer, more in the sort of picks and shovels to support, but we've not thus far invested in foundation models.”

“And I think what you're talking about is when the money's used for premature scaling, it's really damaging because costs go up. When your costs go up, ironically, you actually become less adaptable. So your clock speed goes down. So if your primary job in a bu…”

“Yeah, so the former, I think is actually great for the portfolio companies they invest in, because I think they're in our category of smart, smart. Like, they will be specialists at something, and the founder will be able to ask them for advice, and there's no…”

“Now, when you start talking about raising funds, that worries me a lot because building a company is ridiculously hard. Like there's only a handful of people that have ever managed to kind of build multiple companies concurrently. And this idea of having a sid…”

“The fourth S that I increasingly think is important is actually selling salesmanship. Like, great VCs are selling to LPs, they're selling to founders to take their money, and then increasingly, they're also selling to, you know, exec hires to go into portfolio…”

“We have a sort of bias that whenever we're looking at businesses, we see them on an S curve. It's very difficult to imagine new S curves, but the best businesses will continuously put themselves on new S curves and create new opportunities.”

“I don't understand in our industry how anyone can have complete conviction on anything. That makes no sense to me. Like I studied physics at university. We would go through a proof and I still didn't have complete conviction that I got it right. And then now w…”

“I think one of the best groups of founders are those that have come out of the rocket ship companies because actually they kind of instinctively know they need to aim at big opportunities and they know how to run a Fast growth business.”

“So our approach at GV is primarily be founder first, and we can take a very long time. You know, we have ten billion dollars under management. Alphabet does not put us under time pressure. We're less worried about IRR than we are absolute returns. And so we fo…”

“Now we have made investments in Gen AI, but more in infrastructure, more in the application layer, more in the sort of picks and shovels to support, but we've not thus far invested in foundation models.”

“We invested a hundred million bucks into Stripe in 2020. We extended the series G round”

“We invested in Lemonade, Series A, wonderful founders. One, Shai, had done Fiverr, product and design guy. Daniel, lawyer, had done hardware, and they were going into insurance. Combined insurance experience between those two? Zero.”

“During COVID, we invested in Neuralink.”

“And I passed on it because, you know, I looked at it and, you know, talked to my team at Google voice and everybody looked at it. It's like, oh, this is easy to do. Like, you know, once the company gets big enough, they don't need toilet anymore. Boy, I didn't…”

“That was 57 or eight. It was no post. The pre was like 41, 42, you know, something along those lines.”

“To date, Vlad has raised over 5.6 billion dollars with Robin Hood, including a 2.4 billion dollar raise just this month, and some of their investors include the likes of Ribbit, Sequoia, Green Oaks, Index, IVP, Thrive, GV, and more incredible names.”

“We closed our series B last December. You can see that publicly. It's a twenty-five million dollar round led by GV.”

“To date, Wayne and Jeff have raised over thirty-two million dollars for Digits, from some of the best in the business, including Peter Fenton at Benchmark, and Jess Verrilli at GV, and then also the most incredible base of angels, with the founders from Box, G…”

“So we're a seventy-five million in our seed. Was led by Bowery Capital with participation from Google Ventures and Greylock and a whole host of other folks. Social Capital led our A. Bain Capital led our B. Harmony Partners led our C.”

“Oh, I think none. If I'm a founder, and I tell someone at VC or at GV, oh, you know, I just had this great conversation with this other investor. I'm going to be like, great, I'll call them and see what's really happening. VCs all know each other. They all tal…”

“In the last fortnight, they raised a whopping sixty-four million Series C, led by Atomico, with participation from Sequoia, Google Ventures, or GV, and the fantastic Brendan Wallace at Fifth Wall.”

“I definitely know that largest GVs ever done is Uber, where it was two hundred and fifty four million, I believe. So it was our entire fund into one of their rounds.”

“GB was a little bit different than your typical fund that is invested over the course of two to three years, whereas ours was refreshed annually. So we had a brand new you know, three hundred million dollar checkbook come January first.”

“So we raised a very good round and investors included somebody like Mark Cuban, for example, and top VC firms like Google Ventures.”

“And today they've done over 300 investments and it's grown to be a five hundred million dollar a year fund.”

“LendUp raised an incredible hundred and fifty million dollars in January, 2016, according to the trusty PE Hub, from the likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner, our friends at Sousa Ventures with Chad Byers, who I've got to thank for making the intro today, and then G…”

“Investors included somebody like Mark Cuban, for example, and top VC firms like Google Ventures.”

“Well, they were invested in by the likes of Andreessen, Google Ventures, Index, Slow Ventures, and many more of the world's best.”

“Besides us and Google ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, first round capital OpenView does some work on this area. A lot of other firms talk about it, but they've hired one or two people, right? They don't have a whole set of resources”