James Beshara
Co-Founder, Magic Mind. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutiveauthorhost@jamesbeshara ↗LinkedIn ↗jjbeshara.com ↗
James Beshara co-founded and served as CEO of the crowdfunding platform Tilt, which was backed by Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz and acquired by Airbnb. He later founded the functional beverage company Magic Mind and has angel-invested in over 150 startups, including Gusto, Mercury, and Clubhouse.
2shows
4appearances
26statements
6resolved
4supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything James Beshara said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Beshara: Pre-commerce will become the dominant retail model within seven years
“This pre-commerce, this notion of buying something before it exists is, I mean, it's radically different right now, but you fast forward five years, six years, seven years, and it will just be the best way to sell something.”
Beshara: Tilt is the fastest growing app on US college campuses
“We're the fastest growing app on college campuses in the US.”
Beshara: Tesla used customer pre-orders to secure $2 billion in debt
“Yes. You could sell today directly to your customers, get the demand before you put an ounce of production to work and use that to Tesla since use that, I believe for debt financing of two billion dollars. So be able to use that to verify the demand and securi…”
Beshara: Crowdfunding campaigns reach an unstoppable tipping point at 34% funded
“If you can get to about 34,000, it kind of takes on a life of its own. When you get to about five people and about 33, 34%, that community is committed. They obviously pulled out their wallets. They want this thing to exist. And now they become advocacy to get…”
Beshara: Banks cannot compete on UX, fintechs cannot match bank security
“Banks that have tried to get into, kind of, the UI, UX, I don't think they'll be able to compete with 50 really dedicated designers, developers that are just focusing on the user experience the user interface, and those 50 people will not be able to compete wi…”
Beshara: Merchant savings from lower payment fees will reach consumers
“Well, if it goes to the merchant, then it will go to the consumer. And it might not be a complete hundred percent pass through, but I'd say that the transfer of wealth will make it its way to the consumer. It just always does.”
ESPN rejected Tilt's pitch for a Magic Johnson-led LeBron dunk campaign
“We mocked something up overnight, and sent it to Ryan. I was like, we need to do this to where Magic Johnson is hosting a crowdfunding campaign, branded ESPN for LeBron, to the, to do the dunk contest. I thought it was, ah, slam dunk. Actually, that was no pun…”
82% of Tilt crowdfunding campaigns succeed, raising an average of 192%
“82% of tilts are successful, so that's you're very different than most crowdfunding campaigns where the majority don't reach their goal. The vast majority exceed their goal, and actually you know, if you have a successful tilt on our platform or a successful c…”
Reading blogs creates an illusion of productivity but is passive consumption
“I think blogs, they give you this, like it feels productive, but it's consumption, like watching TV. You feel like you learned something in little tidbits”
Beshara: Tesla generated $14 billion in Model 3 pre-orders in days
“In about three or four days, they sold 200,000 cars. I mean, this is a car manufacturer. I think they've sold essentially about fourteen billion dollars worth of their new model. And they're expecting, you know, 30% to drop off, but still 70% of that would be …”
Beshara: A six-person drone startup reached $35 million in pre-orders
“There's a drone company. They were a six person company. They launch, and within about 30 days, they reached ten million in orders, and then they went on to reach about thirty five million dollars of orders, so you don't have to be a large brand.”
Beshara: True social commerce requires participatory collective purchasing, not just social graphs
“I think it will be much more nuanced, but much more powerful than just, oh, add your social graph to your credit card transaction. It's much more participatory of collectively, socially.”
Beshara: Deferring shipping details in pre-orders significantly increases mobile checkout conversion
“What is really interesting, what we've seen is actually heightens conversion from the conventional points of just, you're only taking in the credit card. You ask for shipping later. It's super just you, it's basically six fields instead of 18 to convert on a m…”
Beshara: Only $5B of $1.2T US peer-to-peer payments happen digitally
“The closest thing that I can get to is, I know in, and in some estimations, peer-to-peer payments in the US is 1.2 trillion dollars a year. The amount that happens electronically, digitally, is only about five billion.”
Crowdfunding will achieve mass market adoption through simpler second-generation tools
“And our hypothesis is, is that crowdfunding will have a very similar narrative arc to blogging to where, you know, 1213 years ago, blogging was this thing that had a lot of hand waving, had a lot of it was on the tips of you know, journalist tongues of the, yo…”
Going public resets a startup's progress to zero for the founders
“Any company that goes public, it's, it, for the founders, the entrepreneurs, the leaders in that company, for the entire company, it's kind of like it all starts over again. It resets to zero. Now you've got to prove the world that prove the world wrong all ov…”
Tilt rejected a company mascot designed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
“So the background there is the founder of Reddit, who has a very adorable mascot in Snoo on that you see next to every Reddit logo. He built, he designed us a mascot, and we ended up not using it.”
Beshara: Xiaomi announces phones up to 12 months early for pre-orders
“And in each model, they will basically the equivalent of tweeting it out This is what we're getting. This is the new model. This is everything that's going to be in there nine to 12 months and order it now to get in line, and then you're batched based on when …”
Beshara: Pre-commerce eliminates working capital risk by securing exact customer demand
“So instead of a working capital risk of, all right, let's build one factory and hope that we choose the right number. You actually get to know the right number before you start production. It's hard to overstate how valuable that is in manufacturing.”
Beshara: Unreleased game Star Citizen presold to 300,000 customers via crowdfunding
“There's a self-hosted crowdfunding, a game out there called Star Citizen that has had 300,000 people buy into this game. It hasn't been released yet, as far as I know. But there is a subreddit with about 30,000 people just talking about the game every day.”
Beshara: A top DJ duo crowdfunded and sold out a tour
“The number one DJ duo in the world used Tilt to bring to life an entire tour. The first time anyone had quote unquote crowdfunded a tour. And I use that term crowdfunding kind of lightly because it's, it crowdfunding can mean a hundred things, a hundred differ…”
Tilt's largest user demographic is 18 to 24 year olds
“Our biggest demographic is 18 to 24 year olds”
A fantasy football league raised $6,000 on Tilt for a draft party
“There was a draft party, I think we saw one that was like 6000 dollars to rent out an entire bar because it had the biggest, like 120 foot big screen that they wanted to use for their draft.”
Two out of 12 Tilt fantasy football users start separate campaigns
“Our platform grows pretty virally, you use it for a fantasy football league, and out of those 12 people two will split off, start their own campaign, and they'll do it for a draft party, a tailgate, a late night party, a group trip, or something like that.”
The other half of the tape: James Beshara's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Mike Duboe 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 8
2023 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens James's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder, Magic Mind | 3 | 20 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder, Magic Mind | 1 | 6 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |