Everything Rahul Mehta said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Creating new user behaviors often causes temporary unit economic inefficiency
“If you're creating a new user behavior, it can be unit economics inefficient for some time.”
DST deliberately keeps some late-stage portfolio investments unannounced in stealth
“And we have a few companies in the portfolio, which were given as late stage investments We never announced them for a long time.”
Poor deal selection damages a venture firm's future access to elite founders
“You would not be able to pick the best company unless you have access to it, so you need to have access first, and if you've made a lot of type one, type two errors in picking, then you wouldn't have The same access to high quality founders in the future eithe…”
Local footprints suit early-stage VC, while global scale suits late-stage VC
“For early stage, being local is a competitive advantage, as you're, you know, actually involved in building the product, hiring the engineers, etc. The later stage, global becomes, becomes a competitive advantage as well.”
Scaling founders cannot delegate building relationships with regulators and ecosystem partners
“As a large company, you cannot have blind spots, and corrective course of action becomes tougher as you become bigger, so you're better off basically investing in the team ahead of time, and second, I would say investing time in building a relationship with th…”
Growth-stage investments always look expensive initially because valuations price in projected growth
“Yeah, I think most investments that you make in the space, they look expensive on the day you're investing, because you're investing so much for the projected growth.”
DST launched in 2009 with Facebook and expanded globally in 2011
“At that time, when, even before I had joined, you know, Yuri already had the vision of being global, which was a crazy idea at the time, and so we got started with DST only in, like, mid-二-thousand-nine or so, with a Facebook investment, and then we truly went…”
DST aims to build founder relationships 12 to 18 months before investing
“But ideally, you know, call it 12 to 18 months before, and then you've had, like, a few interactions with them.”
Referrals from existing portfolio founders drive most of DST's deal sourcing
“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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