Zal Bilimoria
Founding Partner, Refactor Capital. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderoperatorhostexecutive@zalzally ↗LinkedIn ↗refactor.com ↗
Zal Bilimoria is the solo GP at Refactor Capital, a seed-stage venture fund investing in hard tech, climate, biology, and health. Before founding Refactor, he led mobile product at Netflix, worked as an operator at Microsoft and Google, and was an investing partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
2shows
4appearances
24statements
7resolved
2supported
2contradicted
29%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Zal Bilimoria said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Zal Bilimoria Believes Engineered Biology Is Eating the World
“We believed, Biology is eating the world. Literally every portion of it.”
Engineered Biology Will Replace Petroleum in Consumer and Industrial Products
“We're going to really be able to remove petroleum, which is the key input into a lot of these products, and use engineered biology to create a much safer, healthier, and really, really a long-term planet for us.”
Bilimoria: Apple HomeKit is currently a complete head fake
“Apple's HomeKit, and that almost seems like a complete head fake. I mean, if you actually go to their website, it's actually just a developer landing page with a couple of coming soon notifications”
Bilamoria: Apple Pay and NFC are bridging vitamins, not painkillers
“So, one can kind of think about Apple Pay, NFC, you know, this idea of facilitating offline commerce, you know, brick and mortar commerce, as a bridging solution until kind of, you know, maybe 10, 20, 30 years from now, when, like, everyone's got mobile apps a…”
Bilimoria: Game consoles drive over 60% of Netflix streaming hours
“I think more than 60% of streaming hours on Netflix are coming from the major game consoles.”
Solugen Produces Hydrogen Peroxide Using Only Air, Water, and Plant Starch
“And so Soligen figured out how to eliminate petroleum for the production of hydrogen peroxide using only air, water, and plant starch.”
Bilimoria: IoT market remains stuck in the trough of disillusionment
“If you think about the Gartner hype cycle, I think we're probably still in the trough of disillusionment. We're still crossing the chasm, so to speak, in terms of getting into the early majority of actually where are we going to get The real kind of, ah, major…”
Bilamoria: iPhone 6 Plus phablet is Apple's true Asian market strategy
“Apple's, you know, foray into China was supposedly the five C, and that really didn't go anywhere, and the six plus with fablet seems to be the right way to potentially go into and get into Asian markets finally.”
Bilimoria: Streaming hours was the metric most correlated with Netflix retention
“There was two metrics at Netflix that every product manager was geared toward. It's subscriber retention and streaming hours. The most highly correlated variable to subscriber attention was streaming hours, right?”
Andreessen Horowitz Sent NPS Surveys to Every Founder Who Pitched
“So all founders that interacted with A-Six-Z in a pitch setting, so regardless of us investing or not, would receive a short survey with one important question. Would you recommend A-Six-Z to friends and colleagues based on the interactions you had with this p…”
Zal Bilimoria Says Extreme Curiosity Is the Most Important Investing Trait
“And then the second thing I learned at A-Six-Z is how to be an insanely curious person, and why that's the most important thing about investing.”
Refactor Capital Prefers Scientific Founders With Clear Go-To-Market Strategies
“These founders who are scientists, especially that we spend time with in biology, especially need to have strong answers on these go to market questions. We of course help our founders in these areas as well, but we'd much rather see founders go from one to a …”
Scientist Founders Must Be Great Storytellers to Build Enduring Companies
“I think the scientist founders we meet have to be incredible storytellers. They need to be able to tell amazing stories to investors, which reduces financing risk, but they also have to be able to tell amazing stories To customers, to talent that they want to …”
Refactor Capital LPs Support Alternative Funding Structures for Deep Tech
“We're lucky enough to have some very wonderful LPs who are open to different funding structures to finance these companies.”
Average Time to Exit for Seed-Backed Startups Exceeds Ten Years
“The typical tenure fund life cycles are pretty hard, especially for seed investors that are writing those super early seed checks and time to exit time to IPO is maybe sometimes greater than 10 or 11 years now on average.”
More Than Half of Hard Science Startups Will Go to Zero
“You have to assume that more than half of your companies are going to go to zero, and that's no different when it comes to biology and other harder science companies.”
Bio-Industrial Startups Reach Product Launch Much Faster Than Therapeutics
“The idea of being able to actually create value in these companies can actually be much more rapid. They have the ability to launch products within the first few years after receiving seed funding versus a therapeutics company, which might take much longer.”
Very Few Dedicated Seed Funds Lead Rounds in Deep Tech
“Yeah, there's certainly a lot more capital and deep tech at the venture and the growth stages of investing. So let's say series a and beyond, which is really fantastic news for us at refactor, but we haven't seen many dedicated seed funds in these areas, espec…”
Series A Investors Demand Far More Traction Than Five Years Ago
“Some of these larger series A's as we've been seeing really do require quite a bit of commercial traction nowadays versus maybe even five or seven years ago.”
Bilimoria: Netflix spent over $100M for two seasons of House of Cards
“The hits are really starting to drive, I think, Netflix's business, which is why they realized that, They can spend a hundred million dollars to actually fund a total of 26 episodes across two seasons for House of Cards. Actually, it's probably much more than …”
Andreessen Horowitz's Early Investment Team Was Mostly Product Managers
“What I loved about A-Six-Z is that everyone had operating experiences of different kinds, especially on the investment team, which was mostly made up of PMs at the time.”
Refactor Capital Plans to Invest in 40 to 50 Companies Per Fund
“If we're going to invest in 40 to 50 companies in this fund, one of them has to be the breakout winner, and a few of them have to be able to, you know, cobble together another one X, let's say.”
Refactor Capital Uses Delighted to Track Founder Net Promoter Scores
“So we adopted it at Refactor, and we actually used this really great, inexpensive tool called Delighted to do all that.”
The other half of the tape: Zal Bilimoria's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Michael Copeland 2Kurt McMaster 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 3
2019 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Zal's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Founding Partner, Refactor Capital | 1 | 17 | 40% 2/5 | full record on 20VC → |
| a16zLEDGER | Founding Partner, Refactor Capital | 3 | 7 | 0% 0/2 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |