The Wisdom Wall

“When you're investing your own money, do the right thing. When you're investing my money, pay the minimum you can pay.”

“Third party retail is not a business.”

“When a woman has to pitch, especially to a majority of men, alright, you have to come off tough. Yeah, that's fair. You have to, and it's, unfortunately, it's a catch-twenty-two for women. Either you're cocky or me. Yeah, if that was a man standing up here and being like that, you'd be like, oh, he is all that.”

“When VCs hear black, they automatically think small. Every time.”

“when you build a SaaS company in Latin America, Numbers are not easy to build a one billion company, but when you create a transactional model on your product, that changes.”

“But when I think about, especially things in ed tech, where I think there's an AI element, I think like, what is AI good at doing today? Where do I think it will be in 12 and 24 months, and what does that do for the opportunity? And in most cases, I think it's compression, not expansion.”

“The challenge that we found is you actually need people to give you Mint-like access to their data, because if, if I, if all I know is your paycheck, I don't know your credit score. I don't know how much debt. You actually need people to give you a fair amount of information to make good recommendations, and what they…”

“This is the point of Venture capital and investing at Prec, like it's to invest in technology. We're not going to know the, this is the moonshot pitch. And I think those are the pitches that you have to make the bets on. And it's, there's no way to de-risk it. There's no way to analyze the business or not analyzing the…”

“Startups never really die of starvation. They always die from overeating.”

“we do a lot of hardware, and I don't know why, it always seems to take seven million dollars to get to a commercial product.”

“I also think you should not wait for a lead. And you should just set terms and pull people in like one-on-one. Increase the valuation as you go along. Because as you need money less, you can increase that valuation.”

“I think it's hard to actually be both of those. I think you are either one or the other, so if you're in the small group, it's all about small groups... or you're more in the Pinterest category... But I feel like trying to message both is going to be very challenging, and actually, uh, that, that, I think that product…”

“the entrepreneurs in this space who are really good at food and beverage tend not to do as well as the entrepreneurs who come into it as, like, performance marketers.”

“You know, I've had investors tell me you never want to build a company for investors. That's bullshit. Investors are going to invest in what they like. And if they're the only ones that can provide you access to capital, then, then you have no choice. Otherwise your idea doesn't get done.”

“And it led me to the conclusion that the thing that makes Twitter successful is the very thing that makes it awful.”

“If it's a good business, you'll have lots of opportunity, like, it's more important to build a really good business that has the ability to remain independent until something else happens than it is to, every time I've tried to forecast, oh, so-and-so company will pick this up, I'm, like, wrong a hundred percent of the…”

“Brand dilution doesn't come from someone chubby like me wearing their brand. It comes from the fact that most people are waiting until it goes on sale before they buy it.”

“building a startup isn't about condensing your, your ideas. It's not about, uh, building a startup is not about saying, I can't do that. Right? Building and, and shooting for something great is, yeah, we can, we can do that. Why not? And you give it a shot. My point is basically, you have to have the entire ecosystem,…”

“One of the things we've realized over the past two years is the United States is not a fertile market for agriculture tech. And that's primarily because the USDA gives so many subsidies that it's still cheaper for, for a farmer to cull their animals because they're going to be insured.”

“The model is more that, like, there ought to be a way for you to get a return on your money that doesn't require a gigantic IPO. There are ways through the profitable operations of the business for me to return capital. Might be capped at a three X, but there's a mechanism for you to get a return that doesn't require…”

“The thing I can't get over is everyone I've met who's tried to do a new format eventually runs into the paid acquisition monster, and it just ends up being really, really expensive.”

“it's really, it's really easy to say, I love you, baby. But it's, it's much, much harder to actually cut you a check. If they love what you're doing, people are greedy with their money. They would want to make money on it.”

“What the on-demand economy got wrong was it takes so much scale for it to work. Um, what we realized is people don't always want things ASAP, they want it at a scheduled time.”

“But I also, it's very interesting, and this is, this is data, this is not me, this is not my opinion, But interestingly enough, women always ask for less. Women founders always ask for less. It's not a lack of confidence. It is something else, and we're all trying to dissect this.”

“We, we all know we can have five developers do it in five months. It's, if, if she has the publishers... It doesn't matter. She can have a worse product if she owns the publishers.”

“I think part of the challenge for founders is there is this whole, I'm going to anchor high and get negotiated down to something I can live with. It doesn't really work that well in venture because as a founder who's raising money, your real competition is not the people on your competition slide. It's every other…”

“I've seen so many businesses get crushed under the weight of, like, raising VC too early, right? And businesses that would otherwise be really healthy, um, big businesses that just kind of never got their start because investors were expecting 300% growth year on year when that was just unrealistic. It was just…”

“I just fundamentally believe that the biggest companies in consumer tech are horizontal user-generated content platforms.”

“The big revenue generator is the software. Okay. It's not the device. Um, the device is purchased or licensed, but it's really the software and the data. Okay. That is the true value.”

“I feel like layoffs are something where you avoid them as long as you can, so it's really important to just kind of move forward as fast as possible until things seem more and more inevitable.”

“If you, as an investor, expect every founder you meet to be in a position to drop everything and just work on their startup for some arbitrary period of time, as a show of commitment, you're gonna end up excluding people who, for really valid financial reasons, cannot do that.”

“Well, the, the reason why prenatal care exists as a category is actually to manage blood pressure. Everything else is an extension.”

“My conclusion has been the technology is actually the least important piece. The most important piece is finding people who have an entrepreneurial mindset, who will go out and hustle and find customers who understand how to do kind of all of the business building, and no amount of technology actually makes them better…”

“But when you actually look at the data, even like Chase, a big behemoth, most people don't have a bank and a credit card and a mortgage and all the other products with Chase. Most people have maybe one thing with Chase and then other things with other banks, right? So it is actually very hard even for the big companies…”

“the really important insight was that all the technology is already here. Like, they're, they're fantastic robots. They're fantastic devices. We don't need to rebuild any of that. The missing piece was a software stack that connected it all. So all of our IP, all of our patents are around that, and then creating a…”

“Lending companies have a hard time getting to scale as a VC backed business, because you don't want to obviously force bad loans, right? But there's always sort of this pressure to grow.”

“you can compete on two things, like loan quality, And price. Both of which put pressure on your ability to scale the business. Either you have to compete over lower quality loans, which will push your loss ratios up, or to win the good ones, you have to make less money. And so it's really, and there really aren't any…”

“I think most B to B SaaS things are basically commodity. They're a database with a UI on top if you really push hard enough. Like that's what they are.”

“Look, I, I think one of the big mistakes I've seen companies in our portfolio make is they take two to three million dollars, and it's very hard to have two to three million dollars and not magically have it all disappear in 24. Everyone's like, oh, don't worry. We're gonna, like, put the other two to three million,…”

“Don't ask the investors for references to founders. Go to their portfolio list on their website and find a company that's no longer in existence. And reach out to that founder on LinkedIn. A founder of a failed company is going to give you a lot more information on an investor than a founder of a company that's doing…”

“I think you have to be at least at 20%. A lot of things are psychological and maybe you're okay with things now, but as you go along and everybody gets diluted down, like you're gonna feel less excited about the company as things go on, right?”

“It was actually pretty good at, like, vibrating whenever I was stressed, but aside from someone to take a deep breath, like, I think one of the shortcomings is what is that final step, and that's something that a device cannot solve. So, I think there's this question then of, you know, the retention on it, I don't wear…”

“I just think single variable wearables are really hard now. I was probably more bullish on them five or 10 years ago when we didn't have as many things.”

“looking at some of these more mature apps like jungle where you realize like, no, actually the user interface can be a moat. The user experience, the brand becomes the moat. And yeah, everybody's using the same models on the other side, but like, The end user doesn't know or care. What they know is that the problem…”

“I think every founder should come in with multiple plans.”

“Founders, never, ever say a price for your round unless you already have terms.”

“I don't think you necessarily present all, you know, several plans, but you should have like a plan in mind for if you, If you cannot raise X, you should be able to do something with Y. I a hundred percent agree with that. If the company is down in the water because you can't raise X, that's a problem.”

“And so we think we can build a really exciting and aspirational brand around the first of its kind smart running shoe in a way that you just can't around an insole that's hidden inside of your shoes or a gadget that's attached to your laces.”

“the thing about running-related injury and the rate of injury, it hasn't changed for 50 years, it hasn't improved. It doesn't matter what shoes are running in, and so ultimately what we've learned The shoe can have a small impact, the materials of the shoe, and the way that it cushions the impact, but ultimately, the…”

“I think like just doing some back, back of the napkin math on a 21 post to hit like our Outcome goals. There'd have to be at least a six hundred million dollar exit with no additional financing. And as you mentioned, like one of the things that you're looking at is raising a series A. So that might be like an…”

“my big takeaway is these businesses tend to trade at two to three times top line revenue at the end of the day, and so for me the big question Isn't how do you get to 50, it's how do you get to two to 300.”

“anything that's hard to do is hard to disrupt. And there's a lot of SaaS and AI going on in the market right now, and for us, it's like, once we have a hardware component there, it's very difficult to remove, just because the city doesn't want to have to make another decision.”

“my rule of thumb is don't let anybody be an advisor who can otherwise be an investor.”

“I actually think most people probably shouldn't fundraise. I think most businesses that are fundraising probably shouldn't fundraise.”

“You should be having four conversations every couple of days, if not every day.”

“So I always assume that there's going to be at a minimum two seed rounds for a hardware company to actually get to a place where there's meaningful traction.”

“I get a little concerned when I see only US VCs in an, in a foreign country.”

“The money in vertical sass is full stack. Like, that's the playbook, like, you do it all.”

“Well, I think my challenge is I fund so many companies with terrible pitches that it's actually only partly the pitch, but also the actual idea and the messaging again catered towards the right investor is what matters more.”

“I think revenue multiples for a seed round is too early. That's more of a series A conversation.”

“Every founder should know, don't say anything. If you don't know something, don't say anything.”

“a good way to lose money as an investor is to fall in love with something that the founder is not as focused on as you are. So for me personally, I'm out”

“The expectation when you go out and raise that seed is in the hundreds of thousands of users at a minimum.”

“You can be an organic farmer and plant the same crops year after year after year, and that is stripping the soil. Just because you're organic doesn't mean you're focused on soil health.”

“direct to consumer is good for getting started and getting data. It's good for you to be able to then Take this data and go to Whole Foods and say, look, this is your audience, and these are the numbers I'm doing. But from a scale perspective, you have to be able to win in stores.”

“I don't believe these charge operators want five different software systems. They're gonna pick one. And if he can make it work, he has a chance to be an early winner and lock up a bunch of distribution that will be very difficult, if not impossible, for someone else to come and take away from him.”

“No, cold emails really do work. Not everyone will respond, but I think you will get some bites.”

“The worst are the people who, like, think that you have to, and they do, like, two weeks of founder dating, and, you know, then become equal partners. It's, it's horrible.”

“Because of the rules around how you have to use it in the time period you have to use it, it's not free money, and it's not money that is like an extra cushion.”

“What it is, it's, it's a demonstration of how solvent your business is. It's like, can you get your together enough to apply for this program in short order and have your finances in good shape so that you can like, just do better for your business. They put it in the bucket of like, is this business doing everything…”

“a lot of people say, buy American, you know, build in America, but then when it comes time to buy a product, like, They're gonna buy based on price, and like, you have to figure out, you have to figure out what you're willing to do around that.”

“And these customers, their desire to digitize, at least what I've seen, is much greater than their ability to digest New technology, particularly on the workflow side.”

“Being honest, they don't give a about my personality, about who I am, they give a about my numbers. And whether I'm a good investment at the end of the day.”

“as soon as you use the word pivot, it's like, A record stopping. It's like, you know, nails on a chalkboard, because a lot of companies have not done very well with pivots.”

“And what we found is a lot of great brands out there, but when you're talking about a product that's, I don't know, 500 dollars, 700 dollars, maybe even a thousand dollars. That little extra convenience of being able to fill out a survey in someone's home didn't overcome either the lack of trust or really the lack of…”

“You know, both sides, if both sides are free, you'll get to scale more quickly, and that'll enable you to generate the leads, and to generate more sponsorship revenue, and those kinds of things. But you need scale.”

“sometimes that middle point is the worst point. One dollar, maybe, I mean, one dollar seems ridiculous. It's just not right. You either do free, or you do something considerable.”

“a lot of these companies, I have two right now, they have an anchor, they're building it out, and that anchor's going to buy them.”

“external CEO also is a red flag for me. Um, at this stage in the company, a pre-seed company, a founder should probably be CEO.”

“The only way you can really compete with them is to just play a different game, which is organic, bottoms-up community.”

“Are you gonna make twenty-x your money? Then make an investment, equity investment. If not, revenue-based financing.”

“The more automated the experience, the shittier the service was for me as a customer.”

“everyone who's tried to do generic blue collar has failed because a roofer, a plumber, and a restaurant worker are all blue collar workers, but they make radically different amounts of money.”

“Every time I've gotten excited about a platform that's fundamentally about conversations, whether it was Whale, AMA on Reddit, Quora, it, it breaks somehow. Either the conversations become so long-tailed and esoteric that they can't build an audience, or the monetization piece ends up being harder than it feels like it…”

“Part of what makes someone a good salesperson is they can sell you things that you don't need or that don't exist.”

“Niche is the first thing you're gonna hear when you're focusing on particularly minority customers.”

“It's basically impossible, as you probably know, it's basically impossible to raise money For anything in music, because generally you get stuck in the morass of licensing and the labels”

“So if the, if the company is going to derail or the fundraising situations is going to derail because someone takes two months off Because they're having a baby, like, it's probably not a good company.”

“No, I just don't, I just don't think it's required. I don't think it's required for people to work 80 hour weeks to, to build a great company, and.”

“And personally, I've just found when you have a wide valuation gap between expectations on both sides, I personally have never Been successful at closing gaps that are bigger than about 50%. It just, it requires too much movement from one party, probably to a place where either I'd be uncomfortable or you'd be…”

“I can tell you that a lot of, you know, nonprofits should act more like businesses and figure out how to make it profitable so they can do more like what you're saying.”

“a non-profit, many of them have difficulty scaling, obviously sustainability issues, I, I know so many organizations that I give money to, they don't have the metrics, they're unable to sustain themselves, and they'll get halfway through their mission, and then they won't be able to finish it because they're…”

“Um, you know, I think the only way to make money in VC is, um, to take a non-consensus view that turns out to be right.”

“our problem, I think, is that the capital structures are set up to be either or. Either you're for maximized shareholder profit, Or maximize mission. And I think most founders actually are somewhere in between on the spectrum, but they're pushed to one side or another just because the capital market was set up with…”

“Well, it means you have to focus on revenue first and foremost, which means you can't just say, oh, we have this grand vision, and once we reach 10,000 users or whatever, then we can turn on the money machine, or we're gonna be ad supported, or, you know, it's, it's not about quantity, it's really about quality. Can…”

“We're going to have some of those, no doubt, but in reality, in the travel space, the super users are a very small percentage because traveling is exhausting.”

“And I was going to say, the other thing that most of the really good Booking platforms you've been a part of, they get somehow involved in the, the workflow, whether it's collection of payments, you know, collection of information about the people, actual execution, billing, like, where do you think you can remove…”

“when I find people who know tons and tons and every detailed number about cost of acquisition, and I'm like, oh, you are a paid acquisition machine, and I actually don't like those businesses personally.”

“You are still A one-on-one where the other person has to consume, ah, their person hours times rate, which is back to a service model, which is an inefficient model that lawyers and accountants and everybody else are desperate to get out of.”

“And the one thing I've learned about VR is I think there's a lot of apps that have been unsuccessful because they're actually not better in VR. They're actually better in any other medium in the real world, two D, whatever it might be. Having seen the demo, this is one of the first things I've seen that I'm like, this…”

“Like she can hire a growth marketer. That's, I don't think that like, I don't think she needs that skill set as a co, as a co-founder. Like this is, I mean, this is a seed deal.”

“Well, I don't think that having no patent means that there's no defensibility.”

“My working assumption, people will take care of those they love better than themselves.”

“I mean, I think in food there isn't much defensibility, like McDonald's and Burger King both sell hamburgers and like, I think it comes down to like, do you connect with a brand that makes you feel like this is the, like, look, I'm in this, I drink this brand of water because I really like it.”

“Because the number one reason why people don't video chat is because they don't like the way that they look. So if you can change that, um, that allows more and more people to share video, to talk on video, et cetera, et cetera.”

“having one single API for this stuff, it becomes way more valuable over time because logistics just gets more complex.”

“I think, I actually think people who have children use their time more wisely, women who do, because they really have to. They don't have a choice. And so I really find that time management, interesting enough, for working mothers is, uh, uh, Is more efficient. They work more efficiently.”

“I'd rather her build the brand organically, just DDC, just online, selling it direct, and work with influencers online to build the brand and to get traction and get like a real core following of people who are buying a direct consumer where you have really high margin.”

“once you sell a part of your company, you're kind of on the hook to sell the whole company.”

“Over time, this kind of model tends to gravitate towards more power users, right? It's a great service and power users will gravitate towards it. And so the, the, the use case becomes more power users.”

“Just at a high level, I think more than product innovation, more than technology innovation, business model innovation is like the true value creator in like in tech, right? And, and, and in, in business more generally.”

“to be a true billion dollar direct consumer brand, like the brand has to resonate and brand isn't one of those things you can necessarily iterate on. I don't believe, like, I think The consumer thinks what they think of you, and I think you can evolve a brand and build on it, but you can't, it's not software where…”

“I don't care how good your product is. Because that's not what business is built on. Business is built on relationships. That's what business is built on.”

“Millennials are buying vinyls like crazy. Why? Because they, they, they never see and touch the content they have and they love.”

“I, I just think that venture capitalists are so much better At their job if they've been entrepreneurs themselves.”

“I think a lot of great businesses have been built on the back of hacks, right? Sort of taking advantage of loopholes in the system.”

“Um, there's community formed in coffee shops organically, but I think, and I might be wrong, that's really not around the coffee, but it's around just the place, the destination.”

“I think they're doing it the right way, where they have the gym marketing dollars behind them, and the adoption will be in the gym, and then they can expand it into at home.”

“Like, to me, LOIs are, I mean, those are, that's bullshit.”

“There was a negative stigma attached to the term bridge, and now people are calling it post seed, seed extension, whatever. C two. There are companies that are in these bridge rounds that are distressed companies that are looking for an influx of capital to help them resuscitate and get them, you know, back on track.…”

“I always tell founders that, um, early stage investors are actually co-founders.”

“I just think the operational stuff, it's always more complex than you think, and I'm saying that because I, I've been through it personally, and people that, people that are gonna work for you for 20 bucks an hour, driving or whatever, like, there's gonna be days where they don't show up, and there's all these…”

“You know, one person said to me that the businesses that you roll your eyes at, right, are the ones that ultimately are the best. The people that have, uh, the most ridiculous ideas are the ones that you should pay attention to the most.”

“We don't have six months to teach someone to get up to speed when an average fundraise gives you 18 months of runway to try to get to, you know, profitability.”

“For us, it felt more important and more of the right thing to do to, um, not just maintain the team during the PPP period and then Make cuts after that, but to really think about how this can be a lifeline into the future, and how we can have a team through the PPP and beyond.”

“the thing that people have the hardest time connecting the dots to is often the biggest opportunity. And I, I, you know, I would stick by that.”

“I get it's really easy if it's just pure software because it just scales easier, but also having humans in the process can also become a moat.”

“Optimism is not fantasy. Optimism is, yes, it's going to work out. It's not, I'm going to be larger than epic. That's just fantasy.”

“Now, I found that when people are getting a lot of no's, they over prepare, and so she's spending a lot of time to be really, really, really ready. But I guarantee you that her peers are not. And so a little bit of that sort of winging it, I know that sounds crazy, actually goes a long ways. And it's also honest, which…”

“I think, for me, one of the things that I don't like about the mechanics of this model is there's constant churn with the direct-to-consumer model, right? And it's like, you graduate, okay, I no longer need this, and then now you have to go and get the next cohort of people who are going to graduate soon. So it's like,…”

“I think the issue is, what are we trying to solve? Are we trying to solve education or are we trying to solve credentialing? I actually think the two should be separate.”

“the process you develop is only gonna come from somebody who's not in the beer industry. Like, somebody in the beer industry who wouldn't even ever think to try what you did to create what you did, because it doesn't, it probably doesn't make sense to them.”

“it's actually way easier to run a company with product market fit at a high level than it is to just hit your head against class on something that's not working at seed stage.”

“People tend to over index on the, the bombastic founder and less on the more measured. And sometimes the more measured founder is the one who's going to be the better operator.”

“But actually, I think of all the sort of non-VC categories, whether it's hardware, e-commerce, or all these other things, I think food is actually one of the most lucrative. Just people eat and drink so much stuff.”

“I mean, I think if we're going to be realistic for e-commerce It's really hard to get to 18 to 24 months. I don't have any e-commerce founders in that boat.”

“The reason is the D to C side is just the marketing. So if you get rid of the DTC brand, you've now taken away your largest marketing tool for the industry.”

“I'm bullish on AI for professional services, but I'm also bullish on what I said as a thesis, right, to sell the outcome, not the software, because the more revenue you can generate as a company, the more you can invest in growth, and I think that's, unless you screw it up, a self-reinforcing mechanism, and if you…”

“I, I love sort of interesting analytics plays because retention is pretty high in that you are not judged based on performance, unlike marketing tech or sales tech or any of that, like you're tied to performance except for analytics, right? Nobody gets rid of Google Analytics, Optimizely, or whatever, because it showed…”

“Because frankly, if they're not, franchise industry won't welcome them.”

“I think that it is the perfect storm to be able to start your own company, because our brains are built to do what has never been done before, to think in a way that no one has ever thought before. It is a perfect opportunity to utilize those skills to create a world that doesn't exist.”

“And it just showed me that if you have a fanatical market, you could sell them anything.”

“I think ultimately like that community has to be excited about money in some way. Otherwise I go to nonprofit. I go to working with government. I go to you being an amazing, brilliant content creator and having your own business as yourself versus like a venture scale business.”

“we do a lot of hardware, and I don't know why, it always seems to take seven million dollars to get to a commercial product.”

“You should take all the money you can right now as a hardware company.”

“I think there are real gems in these areas where people categorically pass.”

“I would say that the main integrations that you need to operate Is accounting. That's critical for the operation. Right now, I, I would say that 90% of the need they have is for the accounting process, ok?”

“When we started, we made a mistake. What was the mistake? Prospecting the purchasing managers in, in every company. We got some calls with them and they say, I love your product. We want your product, but they didn't buy it. Jesse Middleton: No budget. Ariel Puga: No, no, because they don't have the power to make the…”

“The challenge that we'll have in going to market is the people at the top get it. The users get it. The people in the middle, they're the ones that we have to educate.”

“And I think more broadly speaking, between pre-seed and seed, like, I'd say seed, which is kind of where the valuation range is that you're looking at, the bar is higher than landing one customer.”

“It's not easy to recognize in shaky video on a cell phone walking around a room if something is out of place.”

“in general, I prefer operators, but I would say this is entirely a partnerships and sales game, and at the higher levels of management consulting, it's all sales, right?”

“we've done a bunch of FDA things. Always takes longer. Always costs more money.”

“I assume a hardware company takes seven to ten million dollars to get the thing done.”

“the biggest mistake we've seen founders do is Take grants that don't fit in their existing plan.”

“You can coach people on presentation, on answering questions, I think it's hard to coach people on, like, the thing they want to build.”

“It's like education. It's hard to make money, but where the most money usually goes is to test prep.”

“Like, so I think you basically have to get people to pay for the semester, or for the school year, or pay the annual rate, otherwise you're gonna churn people out. Every summer or, and you're going to need to reacquire them.”

“When people talk about revenue, they're missing at least 50% of the story, which is there's revenue, and then there's revenue quality. If you have a bunch of revenue that's, that's churning, any investor with their salt is going to look under the hood at your metrics and be like, this is bull . There's a delta between…”

“And that's a world where you're not even going to really know if you're in, let's say, uh, you know, a petroleum powered device or vehicle versus an electric powered vehicle. And that's when the energy transition happens.”

“I think what, what I've seen in like the higher margin hardware businesses is like you start with a very high margin, smaller run products. So you can build like a very capital efficient business. And then as things get to more scale, then you might lower your margin, but you're making higher volume”

“So you might think restaurant operators want more dashboards and analytics, but they do not. I will tell you that every time we've tried to offer it, they're just like, tell us what we need to do.”

“So anyone who's sold into a restaurant knows going door to door does not work.”

“I mean, if I'm advising anyone, like sales one-on-one, don't throw out the first number.”

“If you think about Pinterest as this data set of consumer intent, you can think about Aura's data as a set of information on employee intent to save, spend, and invest their paycheck.”

“VCs have been chasing the ghost of Mint for 20 years.”

“For injury prevention, for anything preventative, actually, you know, people have pause around, should I pay on a monthly basis to prevent something from happening?”

“people often make the mistake that the technology is the brand, and it's not. The fact that it's smart is not a reason enough to buy it, and I didn't get the sense of like, what's the feeling you want to give people when they buy this brand?”

“I also do think like, wow, most casual runners are happy to change shoe brands. Most regular runners in my experience do not.”

“And with beauty, that's rarely the right path to go. And so what you're talking about with building the business up into the tens of millions of revenue, and then getting it acquired in the hundreds of millions of revenue, I think that that is achievable. I think that is smart. I think that is how most people exit in…”

“There's probably like a, a lower floor on the places this brand can show up and still command the price point and the mental position that you're meant to.”

“Like, if you negotiate with me like this, you're definitely negotiating with, like, your customers, like, that's a strong indicator.”

“the funny thing about college campuses is it's very enclosed as a community, and I think that's an insight I didn't have years ago. But it makes the unit economics easier because everything is happening in this dense area, right?”

“Yeah, he's better off optimizing the campuses he has, and really, you know, making them very cash efficient, huge revenue generators before moving on to the next campus, but I feel like so many investors are fixated on, let's expand all these campuses.”

“I don't even care so much about the conversion into an actual purchase, but if, like Pinterest, there's people who go on there every day four times a day and never purchase anything, but that engagement is really powerful.”

“I know you're, you say that they're responsible for it, but I've, I've seen these kind of things where, you know, you sign a demo deal and then nobody's really responsible for customer acquisition, and at the end of the, of the LOI, everybody's like, this thing didn't work.”

“If she had a bottoms up strategy, she could also then go and get the money from the campus, because you go to USC and go, look, you know, there's already eight sororities that are competing against each other. Why don't you buy a site license because they're already doing it?”

“if you have a fanatical market, you could sell them anything.”

“I mean, venture capitalists, they're brilliant and they've seen so many things, but trusting ourselves in terms of like taking that information in, but not treating it as gospel is a very important skill for moving forward in the direction you intend to.”

“The crux actually in building a successful media business is around focusing on just one or two things.”

“Consulting companies sell at three or one X revenue, maybe three or five X EBITDA.”

“I used to, before I would have said 50% going to the A. It just doesn't It doesn't happen that often in our, if you do a pre-seed, a seed, and a seed extension, you're not going to see it.”

“This is gonna be trite, but if you're building a, if you have a consumer company that's kind of meh, if you pivoted into the B to B version of it, there's probably something interesting there.”

“one of the biggest failure points in ed tech companies is that sales cycles are so long that they don't get to a point of viability before they run out of cash.”

“if you want to have impact on the physical world and you want to really Change the impact of these legacy industries. You have to, and that's what we're in this for, but it does mean that you're right. There's a 12, 1824 month period wherein you have a ton of traction But not a lot of revenue to show for that traction…”

“One of the bigger problems with the low utilization of EAPs is that HR people aren't typically marketers. They don't know how to do it that well. No one knows how to talk about mental health that easily. And they don't have a budget for creating newsletters and content around these things.”

“employers, when they consider the things they purchase, it's a tough sell unless there's some strong ROI.”

“That to me just seems like a easier business model than trying to spin this up as something you sell directly.”

“You can't be at a point where I will do whatever it takes to get your money, because at the end of the day, you have to have conviction of what you're building.”

“No, it is actually being an accelerator manager is one of the hardest sales jobs because everyone is like, oh, I'm giving up all this equity. Why? And that's like, that's, you have to sell that.”

“It's hard for people to understand, in this line of work, we are wrong most of the time.”

“startups usually fail, um, for other reasons, like maybe they don't find product market fit, or they have personnel issues, like conflict with their co-founder.”

“I think licensing this to industries that are trying to assess these rural properties. From, um, liabilities in terms of, for, um, fire liabilities, right, for, um, building road infrastructure, for urban planning, for, I mean, there are just so many different applications for this data, and I think that's really, to…”

“And in this space, you know, the branding and how that comes across is really, really important. I would actually do a full, just rebrand, because these are your selling points, And you need to be able to capture that attention in two seconds, not in 20 seconds, two seconds.”

“I'm an investor in a company that makes, um, crackers, where the inputs are all regenerative. And this is mostly just a marketing exercise. They have basically a single vector message, which is we make crackers grown with regenerative practices. And the thing that was surprising to me is there is an emerging consumer…”

“This is a marketing business. You have to be, you have to be good at marketing or have someone who is.”

“It's often easier to start with existing communities in these pockets that are big enough, and maybe the college market in this case might be a good one.”

“The thing, the reason you end up with Red Oceans is because there's a nugget of a good idea there and everybody else screws it up.”

“I tell founders in crowded spaces, always start with your competitive landscape. Because that's the only thing I'm gonna care about.”

“My biggest dumb-dumb investments at Precursor have been where I've worked with someone for a year and not invested, and then when they raise, it's at some crazy place, and I'm like, I just worked for free and helped this person for a year. I should have put money in if I was gonna help them anyway.”

“So I think that's a more, more genuine and more sticky approach to obtaining your first customers. And the downside is that that takes an incredibly long time. And I think a lot of investors don't want to hear that it's going to take six to nine months or maybe even a year or more To acquire your initial audience. But…”

“The challenges in food, I feel like in many cases, there's less under your control with the road to distribution than there are in some other businesses that we work on where like the distribution challenges are hard, but they're largely like under your control.”

“my experience with sports teams is you can't do little things without people reading every letter of the contract anyway. So even to have done a little thing, somebody did the work to figure out, can we actually, and they're going to be at the Philadelphia Union for the whole season next year.”

“If you think about it, if you're Heinz, like, what level would they have to sell before you even pay attention or care? Fifty million dollars worth of ketchup? A hundred million dollars worth of ketchup? Like, for Heinz to divert? Yeah. It's the classic big company resource problem.”

“when you have very specific knowledge and expertise, you're not just asking, you are already exchanging. Even if they don't need your help right now, they're adding you as somebody that they might be able to reach to in the future”

“The challenge I think sometimes, especially when you're talking to, you know, teams that are two or three founders, is I really care about the dynamics between those founders, and sometimes it's harder to read those across three different Zoom windows than it is when they're all in the same room together.”

“There's certainly many VCs and investors and angels who believe that, but there are also many others who don't care.”

“technically a convertible note actually is debt. It is technically an IOU, and sometimes there's this option to take your money back plus interest, and that can often harm the company if, you know, you're raising a lot on convertible notes. So I think the details of that, like, are important, and as Hunter said, I…”

“It can often feel like free money until it converts, and then you're trying to figure out all these notes with different caps, and different discount rates, and different interest accrued. Yeah. And, uh, all of a sudden you realize you sold off more of your company than you, than you thought.”

“anybody who tells you, oh yeah, we're in, if you have other investors, just, I would actually be very wary. It does not mean that they're in.”

“I have a big belief that, uh, a good cold email, proof of being the type of entrepreneur who has, uh, developed something and even without funding, you know, has started to build a business, um, goes a long way in the mind of an investor.”

“if you are bringing in a strategic investor, There are pros and cons sometimes. So you might be, let's say you partner with one manufacturer, you might be blocking partnerships with others who compete with that manufacturer.”

“Even the successful businesses you read about, like there's usually a lot of problems. Like most businesses are always on the verge of failing many times. And so what you need during those times are founders who will just not give up. And most people would give up. It doesn't really make any sense to keep going.”

“And one thing I really didn't want to do culturally for the team was for there to be multiple rounds of layoffs, so that people end up working from home, like, constantly looking over their shoulder, waiting for when the next round of layoffs are going to be. And I was like, I want to, if we're going to do layoffs, I…”

“And I think in times like this, it's very easy to get attached To what you were doing before, but I don't think investors give you credit for persisting with something that probably won't become a big idea.”

“I just brought that up because we have a few companies in our portfolio where what they realized is the cost of fulfilling a sample was cheaper than buying a customer through digital.”

“So first off, I think even in a world without COVID for a consumer app like this, I think VCs are very cautious just in general for consumer apps. There are only a handful of VCs that want to do them at an early stage. And I think in particular, when VCs do invest in those companies at that early stage, they want to…”

“UberX is a tough business. UberBlack is not a tough business.”

“I know that pet owners pay so much, and that they really don't care about cost, they care about trust.”

“When you think about it, like the holy grail in the custom clothes space is to get basically a universal sizing data set on people. And once you have that for all these individuals, you can pretty much sell them anything.”

“when you charge them something for it, they take it more seriously, and they, they give us feedback. They get, you know, I mean, they're using the software. They're looking for ways of improving it. So it's, it's more of a, of, we're thinking of the psychology behind it more than just giving away something for free.”

“I often think that if you can have one sort of halo anchor partner, right, to help you build the product, that, that we look for in most of our companies.”

“whenever something's free, you're, you are the product. In other words, there are so many people, for instance, a lawyer may pay 50 dollars or a hundred dollars a lead you pass over. That's a big, chunky revenue. All these partners and services you have around these pass through, or maybe Verizon would pay for it, a…”

“Because I'm starting, with all these businesses, you really invest into, um, the finish line. Right, and so what I'm trying to see when I invest in a business is what it's, has the capacity to be in three years. What it looks like, and then I work backwards from that. And it's not necessarily the exit, but I'm really,…”

“I worry it's going to be impossibly hard for you guys to kind of get out of the gate without like a really crisp initial customer and like exactly who that target demo is, what their problem is, how they solve it today, and why your solution is better. I think that's got to be really locked down.”

“you're going to know a little bit about a lot of customers instead of a lot. About a small number of customers, and to me, that's like the recipe for startup death.”

“I think from observing these other companies that do have developed products, I think at the end of the day, the biggest struggle actually has been on the customer acquisition side. Getting people to pay for this.”

“You have a rather large team for a company of your stage, and I think my fear is, like, you have a team of five or six that's already a little amorphous, and, like, adding more money might actually make the problem worse, not better.”

“It's a good question, because most of the pitches are bad, even in the companies that turn out to be phenomenal.”

“In markets where there, there's already an existing player, and they're making a lot of money, and their product is terrible, that is more compelling to me to have a product pitch. It's like, well, actually, there are already a lot of people paying for this with somebody else, so I'm just gonna go and steal their…”

“And the best founders that I've met over the years, They can self-correct in a pitch and say, you're right. I haven't done this. I'm going to go after this pitch and, and get that for you. And then they'll come back to me a few days later and say, this is what I've learned.”

“revenue-based financing, like, I don't have to believe this will be a billion-dollar-plus outcome. I just have to believe, can she pay me back with interest? And I, I would take that bet any day. She seems like she's operating her business well.”

“we found that when you have those layers, you insulate yourself from turnover, because managers are lasting five months. So if I sold you as a restaurant today, odds are you're not going to be there. Our champion's gone, and I have to sell you again in three to five months.”

“Google has the flywheel effect. So every time you use Google, you add to their prediction machine. It's so strong that even the largest company on the planet can't catch up.”

“these are people where the existing tools for reputation and Career management, like, don't apply. Like, the LinkedIn's of the world. There isn't a reputation, resume, experience tech stack that's readily available for these people because it's a different, it doesn't fit neatly on.”

“Like, it seems like there is no user acquisition without existing platforms. So like, you're trying to cut through the noise, but you need the noise.”

“Like, basically, she uses the membership fees to pay for her customer acquisition and break even, then she's just amassing an audience that she can upsell all kinds of stuff to. Like, that's exactly what the hustle does.”

“if you're an inexperienced person who wants to exploit Facebook and Instagram for DTC, I think that's like running into a buzzsaw.”

“I want them to be excited about working with us and excited about our company, and after I've sent several emails, I just feel like if, you know, if, if he's excited about the company, then he'll, he'll remember to reach back out, but I, I just didn't want to be pushing some, someone and forcing someone to do something…”

“And that innovation, there's no incentive for those existing manufacturers to innovate. It's because there's low cost sewing.”

“you can't really do much in hardware for less than five million bucks”

“and ultimately, like, your customers' problems end up being your problem when you're in logistics business.”

“When I think about consumer products, I'm typically looking for one of two behaviors. Either one, a high enough purchase where you will be significantly profitable on first purchase. Think mattresses, right? Or something more like a subscription box like razors where you can point to a six to 12 times a year.”

“The winner of the space will have a moat, and the moat is really simple. Who got the stars on and using it?”

“I think all good consumer pitches, for me, come down to an insight on human psychology.”

“I don't want to negotiate against myself, so when they ask me to lower the valuation, I ask them, well, how else can you help? And I think there's a trade-off there.”

“So look, there's two things that are always true about Starting a business. It always costs more, and it always takes longer. And I've never met an entrepreneur that says, you know what my problem was? I just raised too much money.”

“being anchored on a price that's unrealistically low can be just as dangerous to a business as being anchored on a price that's too high.”

“I think, I actually think people who have children use their time more wisely, women who do, because they really have to, they don't have a, because they don't have a choice.”

“You really have to believe and put yourself into this mindset that you are giving people the opportunity to ride this wave with you. You're giving people the opportunity to grow their money with you. That's the mentality. So there's no like, oh, oh, we got it. Thank you so much. Like there, I mean, of course you say…”

“I think part of a good pitch is the entrepreneur needs to control the dialogue. He needs to control the flow of the conversation.”

“there have been a lot of predictive planners out there. They all don't work because they have no idea what's happening before work and what's going on after work. They don't know if you didn't sleep enough. Maybe meditating in the morning would really help. Maybe going on a walk after your meetings would be helpful.…”

“I think part of your job as a founder is to recognize when you're losing the room. And instead of allowing things to spin out of control, stop and like, hey, maybe I haven't been clear. Let me start over.”

“You could get that valuation if you were a multi-repeat entrepreneur, and you had this crazy good track record, and they're just not even buying into your company, just the person.”

“Anytime the answer to the question of where that valuation comes from is, people told us to price it at that amount, when those people aren't investing, anytime you hear that, that's a no.”

“It's like one of the things that we look for as investors is a grittiness and a willingness to learn because you will not have all the answers. Therefore, what happens when you get it wrong? Can you, can you quickly get back on your feet? That's what we care about more than do you have the right answer to begin with.”

“Well, it means it can be bad in a couple ways because if you come out of the gate saying this thing is worth thirty million dollars, Then you have to create value to increase that over the next. 12 to 18 months when you go out and fundraise again.”

“Yeah, heart rate is a very, it's a tough way to measure, um, Output, first of all, right, because it's subject to so many external factors, whether it be stress or caffeine.”

“I think that they want to see that the business is going to work, and if I'm already talking about what we're going to do if we fail, that's not going to, that's not going to instill confidence in an entrepreneur that they've just met five minutes ago.”

“Most companies do it too late in the game when they're really desperate, and things are really failing, and they're like, out of money and everything else, then they're like, all right, let's pivot.”

“You're, like, into, you're deep into lost cause territory. I mean, like, you're halfway through, like, if it were a normal meeting in my office, you would be... Like, it would have, it would have been so far, like, we don't have enough time now.”

“Like, that's not a winnable argument as an entrepreneur. What was a winnable argument was he could have told us a lot more, but let me tell you about the actual value that I'm delivering for both sides of the marketplace.”

“Everything that people tell you is hard. Once you figure out how to do it, it's totally a competitive advantage.”

“So I think the natural order is that all of these formats need to be under big umbrella brands so that they can stick around.”

“I think there's a big difference between Being somebody who enjoys a pastime and being somebody who has a mission-driven sense of solving a problem. There wasn't a problem to be solved. There was a slight tweak and improvement to be gained.”

“realized that the bottleneck is really in processing capacity.”

“I just think the operational stuff, it's always more complex than you think, and I'm saying that because I, I've been through it personally, and people that, people that are gonna work for you for 20 bucks an hour, driving or whatever, like, there's gonna be days where they don't show up, and there's all these…”

“when something's really important to me, and I'm asking for money from people, I make sure I'm 10 minutes early. And if I have to make sure I'm half an hour early and sit and wait, I do, because it's, it's, it creates a little, like, it's disrespectful.”

“I think also wrapping around that kind of consultative bespoke service as an upcharge is key, because that is less replicable.”

“You just learn so much more about who your buyer is. Why they buy. All the questions you had. Who's your buyer? How often did they buy? We didn't talk about repurchase, right? It's like, this is all stuff that you... And you can't know with retail.”

“So one of the biggest downfalls of startups is scaling too fast. Just because you have the money to hire a ton of people doesn't mean you actually need to.”

“I, I think like getting a founder that makes you believe, and then there, there are like some proof points and it feels like, like just the next change is the one that's going to make it. So like, if you can get an investor to believe in that, like that this next thing is the thing that's going to make it, that's,…”

“Just so you know, I've worked with TickMaster a lot. This is not an easy left. Just so you know, it's hard to integrate into their system. It's hard to get in their trust. It's a long sales cycle. It's a long integration cycle. It's a long, it's, there's a lot ahead.”

“Once you get VCs involved, I'm not saying we won't do this, but they just, there's a lot of complications. They want board seats, they want warrants, they want a lot more information, and the angel investors, I think, give us more autonomy as a company to kind of operate and run the company how we want.”

“launch vehicles or rockets are only really good for getting into space. They're not good for doing the last mile, or in space, really, the last 20,000 miles. They're not very good at precision placement of assets.”

“What is the earliest indicator that a student is likely to drop out? It is attendance.”

“education is one of the hardest education, healthcare. Those are the longer sales cycles. Those are the most problematic.”

“That's a bad reason. You don't pick the market with a long sales cycle.”

“Number one, the primary thing is messaging, is communication with the people back home. That is absolutely number one, no question. However, once you get in the door with messaging, in the back of their mind, they're saying, you know, it's nice that I have this SOS button as well.”

“it's very hard to invest in a company that can't show a big gross margin, because it's very hard to ever get to a net margin.”

“For the listeners, I think what they have to see in this one is that you can come in here with tremendous potential in a business, but if you can't crystallize the value of your business to investors, it doesn't work.”

“And typically I see a slightly lower burn, even just adjusted for a head count in non Bay area, non coastal cities.”

“the path for most of the marketplace investments I make, The path to getting big is really simple. Like I can see it. I'm like, okay, we do this one thing. We're just gonna do it a thousand times more often than we do it today. And it tends to be doing the same thing to a greater degree.”

“I think redundancy is valuable for retailers because, because you remember these networks are, they, they stretch and they grow. You might, you might hit a point where all the Postmates people are out delivering lunch.”

“After a show, uh, typically there's a buzz around these, these, these companies, and they all gonna raise their round extremely quickly, within a matter of weeks, and if you can't do due diligence enough, ask enough people, you can't, if you don't get enough comfort, then it's, it's better not getting into the fear of…”

“The number one thing you look for in these startups, because they're very early stage, is can they, can you work with them, and can they pivot? All companies pivot, no matter what, they'll pivot, all these companies are going to pivot five times, but can you work with them as a person, are they likable, and will they…”

“because I think cult brands grow without really loud marketing.”

“I always think every founder has one, maybe two superpowers.”

“Apparel companies can do that. You get to 50, especially all e-commerce, we can sell you for 90.”

“this is not like a software marketplace winner-take-all market, like these categories just end up with a bunch of winners, and which is why I think you keep seeing, whether it's nail polish or makeup, you keep seeing new companies Born on Instagram, born on social media, rocketing to huge sales volumes in fairly short…”

“True innovation, you know, I say this all the time, and I think Steve Jobs, um, helped sort of raise the awareness to this, um, but true innovation never tests well. Consumers can only tell you what they know, not what they don't know, and I think investors are the same, right? They tend to, to keep investing in the…”

“Like all entrepreneurs that are successful that I've seen are fixing a problem that they've seen in their lives.”

“when you deal with healthcare, it's a long sales cycles. It really is. Um, you're dealing with so many, so much friction”

“I just love these old stodgy industries that are all paper, because there's no one else there.”

“There are two seasons of fundraising in the year. There's one in like February, March, and then there's another one that's like August, September, but that's like when they start.”

“I think what, what we often see is in beverages and food, you get kind of these halo, you know, hero stories that kind of bring up an entire category, right? So like, I think the coconut water category is a really interesting one where like, you know, you couldn't, you couldn't study the category and say, oh, this…”

“And I think, you know, when we talk about margins and distribution, like, their distribution innovation was, we're going to forget about the shelf space, and we're going to go straight to You know, next to the cash register. And so the, the, the innovation there was, you know, the sales team is not, you know, going in…”

“I don't actually think it is clear that you can go direct to consumer. Like I think that happens in some cases when brands have leverage. I think when brands don't have leverage or when they're just starting out, it's kind of The, the, the retailers, I think, dictate a little bit more.”

“I think the food category is an incredibly hard one. Um, it's very competitive. It's ruthless, and if you do get good, you know, the other compliment you're going to get is Kraft's going to get cheap.”

“investors aren't just looking for good companies that make good things. They're looking for the next massive hit. And while Petit Poe is a perfectly good business, a really good business that's already profitable and could be in Walmart stores everywhere before you know it, these investors aren't as interested in a…”

“Valuation is purely driven by negotiation and standards in the industry. So I think I've had founders come into my office and pitch me and say, hey, we have a hundred K in revenue. And we think that means that we're worth ten million dollars. And I would just say, well, you might be, but I wouldn't pay that…”

“the medical market is a little bit of a different animal, because this is not just a matter of, okay, you know, you throw enough salespeople at it of any variety, it's all gonna work out.”

“Almost all of our successful portfolio companies have started with a really deep founder pain point, a really personal founder pain point. And, and that doesn't guarantee success, but I think it's kind of a necessary condition, right?”

“It always, it always worries me as an outside investor to come in on a seed extension where The first question I'm asking is, why aren't insiders doing this?”

“Well, the, the thought was, if we go solve this market, um, parents are really particular. They're very concerned about security. Um, you're building something incredibly small for small children, so it's gonna be small, lightweight. It's gonna last forever, because no one wants to recharge this stuff every day. So, if…”

“If, you know, you invest in an entrepreneur and the company goes under, like that entrepreneur is not going to stop being an entrepreneur. And that early show of courage, you know, they'll always remember that. And when they, you know, go on later to start another company and another company and another company after…”

“I, I think having a point of a differentiated point of view on how to get the product to the consumer, like is the thing that matters here. Cause I think you've, you do actually do have a pretty innovative product. I just worry that you kind of get lost in the noise and really don't penetrate the market. Um, in the,…”

“Look, I think you can build billion dollar businesses as category definers in, in kind of the beverage category.”

“It either needs, like, some kind of unique brand identity that if it's, if you're using traditional distribution like retail, and I'm walking to Charles's point, I'm walking down the aisle, right, it's gonna grab me. I'm gonna be like, wow, I gotta try that. Something about the form factor, or the identity, the…”

“So it's again, like, learning how to actually answer an investor. Like, when he asks you for something, you give the answer, and then you explain, versus you explain, and then you lose the answer.”

“the 20% of folks that download the apps, tip a brand's app is the brand enthusiast. They're already following them on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. And that, that 20% typically generates 80% of the revenue.”

“And that's where I think it becomes really defensible and really valuable is if we can, if we can say to the 1000th customer, you benefit from the 999 other customers that already signed on.”

“Like there's so many more dimensions to making an investment decision other than, um, you know, are we going to hit these short term metrics, which by the way, I've been a founder. There are ways to game that anyway.”

“if everybody believed in your product, then it would exist already. You know, it would already be in the world en masse, and the fact that it isn't means it requires a certain type of investors to see the future, to see where we're going”

“50 to 300 is our target distance, is what we call the electric hall, where the economics of electric cars really benefit you. Because further than that, you have to charge the car too much. Shorter than that, like a gas powered car kind of benefits you because you don't have to charge.”

“Hit one thing, do it well, and then expand from there. Don't try to educate everybody, don't try to create a game, don't try to do this, try anything like that. Focus in what is the most viable way to be able to deliver the healthiest meal.”

“the holy grail in a gym is community. If you can get that community feel in your gym, strengthen those relationships, you drive retention through the roof.”

“You never really know exactly what the relationship's gonna be like before you invest, no matter how much diligence you do.”

“The content creators are really hard. I mean, I think these guys are sharp, and they're, they're working on an interesting niche, for sure. But, um, when it comes to new social games, like, mobile apps, basically, like, I think predicting which next studio is going to be huge. Like, how could you have picked Angry…”

“It's just like gambling. You're trying to pick winners, and then six months later, Someone else comes out with a game that's a similar concept, but a little better, a little cuter. Boom.”

“when you're in the zone as a player, and you, when you win money, when you actually win a jackpot or you win, they are upset because it takes them out of the zone. It's not actually about winning or losing. It's just about a departure from their life.”

“Like your job is to be in on the first institutional role these companies raise. And like you, the answer doesn't have to be, you'll do it a hundred percent of the time, but you should move the slider.”

“The other thing that's important to think about as a fund manager that I don't think is obvious is that even if the best strategy is to invest in pre-seed, seed, and post-seed, there is a lot of value to, at least from the external perspective, having a really clear focus. Because if you have no focus, You'll do any…”

“I don't think you can build a really great business on just these hardware sales. And I think that's really what you need to make this business big long term.”

“Very, very clearly, virtual reality is looking for its killer use case. It's found one in the gaming and is still looking for any other killer use case out there.”

“To be able to have and to get access to early window content from the studios, you need to prove to them that the content that's on your devices will never ever end up on the internet.”

“And then just started networking in the space and researching and talking to people and realized that the bottleneck is really in processing capacity.”

“when something's really important to me, and I'm asking for money from people, I make sure I'm 10 minutes early. And if I have to make sure I'm half an hour early and sit and wait, I do, because it's, it's, it creates a little, like, it's disrespectful.”

“I don't intend to, um, Run an ethical business, uh, at the expense of profits, but I don't intend to make a profit at the expense of ethics either.”

“What I say about opinions are, if you hear opinion once, it's still an opinion. If you hear opinion twice, it's still opinion. If you hear an opinion three times, that's a consensus, and that's something, then you do something about it.”

“Never leave money on the table because it goes away and you unfortunately miss out on working with people.”

“When you're in between milestones, pretty much the only people that will fund you are existing investors. Otherwise, most people will just say, like, it's just too risky. I'm just going to wait until you clear that threshold.”

“She wakes up in the morning, is excited about a, what is seemingly a very boring problem to a lot of people. And that is a moat.”

“It certainly raises the burden of proof. Like, you were given a million, and this is what you did. Now I have to believe that two million will be invested differently than the original million.”

“You essentially need to kind of be in survival mode to get you into when the market really takes off.”

“I do agree that intuitively the market needs a solution, but I've also seen a lot of people just sign up for things on a waitlist and then never convert as well.”

“Because especially in fintech, a lot of VCs have gotten burned by customer acquisition. So in, in many ways you have to address problems That are unrelated to your business that have been created by other fintech companies.”

“We're selling sizzle at the pre-seed, right? And as soon as it's like stake, it's, you know, there's something to measure, then you can start to scrutinize the business, and if you start to insinuate that there's maybe more stake than there is, then we'll start to scrutinize it, and we'll, it's really just sizzle,…”

“we believe students are experiencing chatbot overload, and they often don't even know what to ask a chatbot, so we really tried to create chunked out tools that help them with specific parts of the process as they need them”

“Willingness to pay is highly variable domestically, but internationally you could charge significantly more for this product because those people generally aren't eligible for financial aid.”

“And at 1500 dollars today, I don't think you can actually deploy your own salespeople to go after individual schools because the ACV per school is too low.”

“The issue is not the sales cycle. The issue is the resources required to make something, and the resources required to sell something, those numbers don't work well today.”

“One of the things that a lot of people don't realize about EdTech is it used to be a lot more lucrative in the nineties. When we think about games like Oregon Trail, Reader Rabbit, and all of those, um, the way sales cycles happened back then was different. They didn't happen at the district level. Teachers had more…”

“a lot of healthcare investments require you to believe like a systemic change. Like they require a massive shift in behavior and how, what they pay for and infrastructure.”

“It, it's actually when things are not going that well, or there are issues, is when people want to sell.”

“Realistic is not the thing we're optimizing for. It's like the unrealistic things that Have some small probability of working, and you take that bet.”

“It can be really, really tough for a new brand to break in, but even more so, it becomes really tough for a new brand to scale. Like, I've seen companies get two million, two million in revenue, 3.5, it starts to plateau. And then it seems like there becomes a different game to play.”

“We have seen massive companies build, come out of labs, start in government, and then over time transition, and the technologies that come from government are usually very transformative and usually really big companies.”

“Build a business you want to own and still will others. So if you focus on good growth, cash flow, profitability, you could spit off cash dividends, you could be acquired, you could go public. There will be exit ramps every single step of the way.”

“So I think when you have that reasonable win and you're coming at it again, you come really prepared and you come with this feeling that like, I'm, I'm going to make a difference, an even bigger difference.”

“Find the five smartest people you know, and let them shred your company. It sucks for somebody to be like, this is a terrible idea. This part sucks. This part sucks. But I think that the thing that I wish I would have told myself is like, really lean into the negative feedback, because that's, those are the questions…”

“Somebody once said to me, like, do what you love to do, and you'll never work a day in your life, and I, I've actually come up with this one, which is, do what you love, and you will work every day of your life, all the time, with no boundaries, and take things extremely personally, because you care so much.”

“You can build a really cool product, but if developers don't want to use it, it's out of there. So while you're, you're selling to the executive buyer, it's important to brand for them.”

“I find that, like, when people don't pay themselves, the external money issues sometimes creep into, like, company decision making in a way that's suboptimal, so I generally, I also think it's, the goal, the startup should be able to support you financially, and so having a burn rate that actually reflects, like, what…”

“The fact that it was six, I was like, well, this is what you get for six. Like really good people and like not a lot of data.”

“The reason I come to it for the why is because ultimately you're selling this to someone, and you ultimately need to get that why conveyed. Otherwise, I'll take the cheaper one.”

“when you're pitching a new market, the founder has to be that much better at telling the story. You have to be the spokesperson for your business and the market.”

“The time to invest is now, before everyone else catches up. Because once all the VCs agree that heatless hair care is the future, the opportunity will have passed.”

“if you can sell a service and under the hood it's 98% automated, you can actually sell a service at the margin of a software business.”

“I think the other thing is I've spent a bunch of time looking at this, and I think, to Elizabeth's point, I think most of the discrete problems have been solved, but the podcast producer's problem isn't a discrete problem, it's a workflow problem”

“I don't think it's actually that important if the cumulative time savings is meaningful and that you're good enough at all of the individual components.”

“and so the trick to having that human-like quality to the output is making the AI do what the human does, which is everything is iterative.”

“Some companies can do an acquisition, and they will absorb the, the company they're acquiring, and integrate it in, and you kind of lose your identity, and a lot of times these acquisitions become failed acquisitions.”

“service businesses are where I see the most opportunity. You know, things like, again, the haircare and automotive space, where you're not having to constantly get inventory, you are, ah, you know, doing a markup for a service, and the profit margins are a lot higher.”

“the hardest thing is getting market awareness. You got to spend a lot on marketing, but if you prioritize those local investors first, they're there for the grand openings. They're bringing people to the grand opening.”

“Every company we have that's scaled, we have an incontinence brand focused on sort of the other Stage of life. You end up being multi-channel in the mix of D to C, B to B slash wholesale and retail. Every company ends up with a different formula, but that seems to be the magic, getting that from the right, for your…”

“Figuring out how to grow is a problem money solves. A lot of founders we see have other problems that money doesn't solve that we're trying to get to. When you got a founder where their only problem is I need money to solve this problem. That is something that VCs are really good at.”

“faith ecosystems are completely relational. Right, so our network, connecting with them, establishing that trust, that's how we win as pastor's kid.”

“Most ed tech companies fall apart because they run out of capital before they can figure out the sales cycle to be sustainable.”

“That's a red flag. It's one thing to be willing to do a flat round if a VC asks. It's another thing entirely for the founder to suggest it.”

“just kind of what VCs think about is every round you want to somewhat double your valuation.”

“That was a very good life moment of don't cut your own legs off if you don't need to. If nobody is selling you short, don't be the one to short yourself.”

“the funny thing about college campuses is it's very enclosed as a community, and I think that's an insight I didn't have years ago. But it makes the unit economics easier because everything is happening in this dense area, right?”

“Yeah, he's better off optimizing the campuses he has, and really, you know, making them very cash efficient, huge revenue generators before moving on to the next campus, but I feel like so many investors are fixated on, let's expand all these campuses.”

“once you capture a user and now that's their memory bank of all the things that they want to buy to then have them switch over to a different platform, it's, I've got all of my favorite things that I shop in there. So now you have a hundred links, like, It wouldn't be as quick of a, let me go try this other platform,…”

“I think you'll find over and over again it's actually more about the ego. Um, it's not about the money.”

“however, this community is not, uh, influenced by money. It's very much altruistic. Um, we've, we've tried to like offer that as a concept. It's just not something that they're interested in. They want the case solved.”

“I feel like any one of those has a business in it, but when you try to do all the businesses, then you, you really struggle.”

“And you're being, you're being asked to fund a, a, an interim business model towards the pivot, which is just too hard.”

“So I always assume that there's going to be at a minimum two seed rounds for a hardware company to actually get to a place where there's meaningful traction.”

“Consulting companies sell at three or one X revenue, maybe three or five X EBITDA.”

“I'd like people to be in the very, very high thirties to low forties going to the A. It's just hard with seed, with everyone doing two seed rounds. I used to, before I would have said 50% going to the A. It just doesn't It doesn't happen that often in our, if you do a pre-seed, a seed, and a seed extension, you're not.”

“The money in vertical sass is full stack. Like, that's the playbook. Like, you do it all.”

“This is gonna be trite, but if you're building a, if you have a consumer company that's kind of meh, if you pivoted into the B to B version of it, there's probably something interesting there.”

“My opinion about building teams in different countries is that you need to have people that really trust you, and you need to be there at least once a month outside of the office. I mean, having a beer, you know, and meeting their families. To me, that's crucial, because when you meet their families, you can connect as…”

“I do think in how it happens in education, traditionally, there's a lot wrong with it, but it's not just about being a good learner and doing well in school. It's about like, how do I build the good habits that I need to be a good human and show up consistently? And that's more, of the behavioral science part apart…”

“In VC speak, stay close to this typically means I'm not writing a check anytime soon.”

“I sometimes find that for these types of businesses, uh, late career or retired executives from industries that this might touch are fertile for, you know, angel type checks, even if they don't think of themselves as angel investors.”

“If you just send someone a potential client, they should pay you for that lead.”

“You've got to right size your business for the stage that you're in. You can't shoot for the moon straight away. First, you've got to get your plane off the ground at Kitty Hawk. So, What you have to do is find a way to get your first investors to buy into the first part of your plan, which by the way is why venture…”

“Services kind of have to be sold in that fashion along with a product.”

“So what we find is that people over the age of 35 are not very flexible about trying new coffee drinks. [447] Debbie Wei Mullen: Um, so it's primarily millennials, yes, especially people, um, the highest conversion is definitely people who have experience with specialty coffee”

“I'm a believer in having control of your own destiny, and sort of selling it yourself as opposed to relying on a partner like the manufacturer to sell it.”

“going from steps or activity to vitals, it's like, it's, it's, it's real R&D and engineering.”

“I think that's really smart of you to focus on food service and not on brick and mortar retail, because A, that's a very crowded space of bars. And getting shelf space is exceedingly difficult and expensive.”

“You just gotta take a point of view. And you can't just be like, there's like seven different things, like, you just gotta take a point of view.”

“When investors raise concerns about your product, it means they're really engaging with your pitch. So as long as you've got convincing answers ready, you're in good shape.”

“heart rate is a very, it's a tough way to measure, um, Output, first of all, right, because it's subject to so many external factors, whether it be stress or caffeine.”

“Um, right now the way it works is it flips kind of the way social media works, so rather than influencers creating content and fans reacting, the community creates the content, they up and down vote the good and bad content, and the influencer is able to interact.”

“when we lead, the three things I usually try to think about are like, what's a price that I think would pull in the other people who we need as investors? What amount should we commit to sort of like help catalyze the round? And then like, what else can we do to help you find the capital you need? Those are always the…”