YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Fisher

lines on the record: 87
first: 2024-01-22
most recent: 2024-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Not succeed in that particular thing, it's very hard to say this time is right, this time it's going to work. But I would say that the best thing about patent recognition over time is that you recognize what won't work. It's not what will work. Now, if you recognize what won't work, it will help you avoid spending time on bad deals or bad entrepreneurs. Or if you're on the board of a company, bad strategies, that is where pattern recognition is priceless. And it takes time and experience to develop that. But that's ultimately what I think I'm paid for and why entrepreneurs are attracted to me. It's not because I know the right way. It's because I know all the wrong ways.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole, it's a good thing. It definitely helps you recognize winners that you've seen before and gives you the confidence to move much more quickly than you otherwise would. At the same time, you're absolutely right when you've lost money or you've seen others.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could think of about four companies that I have written off. They're not enormous investments. I have yet to have an investment where I kind of double down and kept raising the...”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because I try and move out of my comfort zone, I accept that sometimes I have a lot of biases towards certain types of entrepreneurs, and I can't always invest in the same Adam Fisher typecast entrepreneur that even though that works for me, it doesn't scale, and I'll probably miss out on some very good ones. But on occasion, my misgivings were about the entrepreneur. It could be a lack of transparency or pure communication or just some signals in the beginning that threw me off and I wasn't quite sure to dismiss it as a bad first impression or something that was going to prestage what was going to happen now over the next few years. They're also most difficult because you kind of saw it.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tough one. I think it's when I talk about the entrepreneur. I'm unsure about the entrepreneur. I'm not always 100%.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We typically just again talk about it in terms of growth. They won't grow very fast or they might have trouble fundraising. But having done this of 25 plus years, let me tell you, there are so many other ways in which you can”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. Some people focus on what the outcome could be. It could be $50 million outcomes, zero, $500 million, a billion. I actually focus on what could go wrong and what can go right. Forget the valuations for a second. Now, what could go right? We typically just think in terms of growth rates. That's oversimplistic. That's just not the way a company evolves. It's not simply a growth rate. The growth rate is a function of other things that are happening in the market and the product strategy and their go-to-market vis- ⁇-vis the competition, partnerships. That requires a lot of imagination, but it just shows you that there are avenues to get there. The harder part, and one, we probably don't spend enough time in, is what could go wrong. That's infinite as well.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't present well. It wasn't at all really focused on exactly how they were going to make money. I was just a little bit too focused on the entrepreneurs and the surface area of opportunity of being able to create anything you want on the web, which to me just seemed like the future. But I couldn't yet bring it down to a product and business model that was compelling. And so it's one of my toughest investments to explain in retrospect how and why I did it.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The easy ones are Wix and Fiverr for me because at the time I was the first institutional investor to come in both of those. The entrepreneurs themselves didn't entirely know yet what they were doing. It was too early. And I think many other investors passed or would have passed had they seen it. In both cases, I received what would be politely lukewarm feedback from their partnership. In fact, in the case of Wix, it was outright negative feedback, but it had arrived a little bit too late.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just have a very different approach being in early stage investor. That makes sense for later stage. Being an early stage investor, you have to accept that the further you try and peer into the future, the less clear it is and the more chance there is for surprises, both good and bad. I think when you invest in good people with compelling ideas in big enough markets, you just have to be a bit more imaginative for how it can unfold. Some of my smallest investments ended up being my biggest outcomes. And I was very hesitant to make them for the same reason. Who would buy this? How big could it be? What is it? And two or three million dollars turned into hundreds of millions of dollars.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some markets that any way you cut it, you look at it, you just say, I just, this is never going to be a big market. That's a fair assessment. I think I've more often been right than wrong on those. But there's a problem that investors make when, or even entrepreneurs as well, when they think it's a large market, but what they're really focused on is a small subset of that market. And that doesn't make it really any easier. I personally like to invest in smaller markets for two reasons. The first is that there's unlikely to be competition focused on those same market and the second is that if you price it right, the deal that is and you've come in at the right valuation, you can still achieve an exit in that smaller market, what you might call a niche. Now, a niche that has no potential of expanding, that is problematic. I like niche areas where there are adjacent sectors where you can understand they could grow this way, they can grow that way, they can go upmarket, they can go into a second.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're probably right. I think the ones that show an entrepreneurial streak in their background generally are entrepreneurs. But I wouldn't exclude others. Sometimes they don't have the right environment. Sometimes they grow it up in an environment that is a little bit too conservative, that doesn't allow them to explore that. So I wouldn't write off those who grew up in a more corporate state environment. It's certainly possible.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are signs of efficiency. Those are signs. Hire somebody which is spending money before they know themselves that it makes sense, that they're going in the right direction.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It starts in the very beginning. I can't tell you lately, or at least in the past few years, how often I met with entrepreneur and they were raising money for their first round. And then it occurred to me that two of the founders are still working at their current employer. They haven't even left. They haven't even shown the most basic sign of taking risk. Now you might say, what does that have to do with efficiency? Well, generally speaking, taking risk is what it's all about. Using your own money, taking career risk, working from home in the first few months, putting on some debt on the credit card. These are really important signs. Now, those people generally go on to do things on their own, to meet customers on their own, not to hire a salesperson, but to actually figure out themselves, wait, how do I pitch this? What are customers actually saying? These are critical, critical steps. So you ask, what am I looking for? Well, if they've already established a company, yes, I'd like to know who made the first sales. I would actually expect the CEO to have made the first sales. Sometimes it's the CEO has also written the first code.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a combination. It's rarely growth at all costs in my book. That just doesn't last. And it's very painful when it stops. Everything about your model to your culture to where you source funding to your evaluation becomes a serious problem for the company. Having said that, trying to focus on KPIs when a company has half a million dollars of ARR also doesn't make much sense. Those numbers, if they're fantastic numbers, I say it's anecdotal. And if they're horrible numbers, I say, well, if we need a bit more scale to get a set makes sense of it. The important thing is that the company and the CEO in particular is thinking about efficiency, that it's an important attribute for them, that they care about it, that they're not just trying to satisfy me as an investor, that they also view it as a key to their own success.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a one-on-one conversation with customers that they can give a pitch to the customer, that they can identify the customer's pain and explain why their solution is going to work. And of course, you can't just raise on a story. You have to have some execution behind it. You have to show that you've delivered the product that's working, that there's some customer love, that you've been very efficient, that you have plans that make sense. I mean, any early stage company that's raising $50 million, I don't know what stage that was that you were thinking about, it's inappropriate. There was an author type of entrepreneurs that I back.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I don't think in terms of specific investors ever. It's easier to predict who will acquire a company that is who will invest in the company. It's a combination of the entrepreneur, the CEO in this case. Will they be able to raise money? I invest in people who I think can raise money, even when they don't meet their plan. It's so important. I can't emphasize this enough. The ability to fundraise with ease. We can talk about what that person needs to show, but they're a storyteller. They've got a history of execution, and they connect with like-minded investors.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, and I think about that when I invest as much as I am willing to be contrarian, I'm not willing to invest in something that others are not going to fund. So I need to find, it's a fine line, but I need to find something that perhaps is not mainstream, perhaps is not yet a headline in TechCrunch, but is also not going to be dismissed by other investors as not interesting. Maybe because the entrepreneur, it may be because some of the trends that this company is writing on. But I'm not going to go completely contrarian and do something that everybody says that they no longer do. Making sure that next round of funding is accessible and doable is a critical part of my strategy. It's so easy to fail by simply not being able to raise that next round of funding.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They made a very compelling argument why all the competition belonged to a different era and a different architecture and how they all had the same fundamental problem and how they were going to succeed. And they convinced me. And I remember when I wrote the investment recommendation, I had to list 20 different competitors at the time. This is in the late 90s, fabulous chip companies were funded left and right. They were acquired and they even went public with design wins, not even revenues. So the idea that most of them would fail never really crossed my mind. I just thought this one would succeed. In retrospect, they all failed except for this one. Now that doesn't mean I can be right in the next one, but I think over time I realized that it's a better arbitrage opportunity to be the lone player or the first mover, even in a smaller market, even in a niche market than to be the number two or three in a large market. Because a number two, it's like a gladiator competition.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or how to think back as many years to think back, the pace of investing was so different back then. It was one investment every 18 months. I did a little bit of both, including investing in companies where there was lots of competition and deciding that despite the competition, this was the one. I only have really one case that I'm thinking about right now, it was a chip company called Dune Networks that made a switch fabric chip. This is back in the year 2000 really dating myself.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally There's two types of investors out there those that get comfortable when there's competition and they get comfortable because that gives them a sense that there's investors out there willing to put money in it and that there must be a market if multiple people see the same opportunity. But I'm the other type. I say, oh no, there's already competition and there's not even a market and that competition can attract the better talent or they can raise more money or maybe they'll get acquired by the only potential acquirer. I get comfortable when I think, well, it's only us. But if we're right, we're going to be the leader.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sell into the developers within organizations from the bottoms up, they exist. You're not creating that category, but you're essentially identifying I need in a new buyer with a product. That makes sense. Again, in retrospect, you'll say they created a category of developer SAS. It's not exactly true.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think from the get go, if you're talking about creating a category, you're making a mistake. A lot of times when we talk about category creation, it's in retrospect that we see that a category was created. It wasn't started that way. It became an independent category. And it's typically not because that one company created it, but because there were multiple companies with very similar mindset. And sometimes that also includes some of the incumbents who are also moving in that same direction. And luckily, you were ahead of the curve. But if I was to start and make an investment that is trying to create a category out of nothing, it's challenging. I think where category creation makes sense is when they've identified a new type of customer or a new type of buyer. Perhaps it's a new vertical industry. If you decided all of a sudden that e-commerce was a new vertical segment that I want to sell into, meaning e-commerce shops, that would be an insight. It's not so much a category creation. The category is being created. You're now creating a product for that category. Or if you were to decide that I'm going to...”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the outsider approach. It's common to Israel because Israelis typically are coming from outside, not only physically from a market perspective and industry. It's just also the attitude. The Israelis think they can do anything. I find they just bring a lot more innovation and openness. Of course, again, they have to figure out what they don't know and they have to recognize there's a lot they don't know. So as long as there's that self-awareness of, I don't know anything and I need to figure it out, they can be the best because they can innovate in ways that insiders can't. Insiders are just blinded by convention, by knowing a little bit too much of what hasn't worked in the past, of where others failed. Naivete is a strength in these cases. And if you have the right owner who, again, is self-aware and perhaps also as a certain degree of charisma, meaning to kind of sell a vision, both to his employees and investors and eventually to customers, it's incredible.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said before, there are two types of second time entrepreneurs, there are those that don't recognize the luck that was involved. They think that building something big is just more ambition. I steer clear of those. And then there's those that are much more rational. And those I will back again. But do I prefer them over first time? Not really. I actually love first-time entrepreneurs. The key for looking at first-time entrepreneurs is identifying somebody that you have chemistry with, that you have back and forth from, that they can learn from you. You're learning from them. It's also people who progress very fast on the learning curve. Meaning from meeting to meeting, you can witness what they've discovered, what they've learned. Other people that they've discussed it with. That is generally an indication of what the next several years are going to look like. And the fact that I haven't created a company before doesn't mean they can't learn from other people's experiences and from your own experience. And so for me, that's fantastic. I often look at my portfolio and again, I have a lot of second-hand entrepreneurs.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the other style of second time entrepreneur. And those types are also the ones that want to hear feedback. They actually want to brainstorm with me. They want to share the idea and they want to hear pushback. Or they want to hear confirmation. But if they're so certain about the idea at such an early stage, to me that's a bad signal”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe. I have a different view on that. I've Privilege of having backed many second time entrepreneurs. And I challenge them because I think they're second time entrepreneurs who sometimes are somewhat blinded by their previous success. And they think they can do anything and they want to build something bigger typically. Nobody wants to build something the same size, let alone smaller. And their idea about building something bigger is being more ambitious, raising more money, higher valuation.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't, but I think when it's a smaller check, when you're amongst other VCs that can take your place if you bow out, I think there's a place for that. I'm talking about the types of deals where I'm the only VC in the round, I'm leading it. If I move forward, I assume all the burden going forward. I can't withdraw at any point. Or if I do withdraw, it's the end of the company. Those are real decisions, fateful decisions. And to force that to happen in such a short amount of time is crazy. I mean, I remember a time when it was three months to diligence a company and get to know one another. And I actually enjoyed that process. But when it's so concentrated in time, you're going to make a lot of mistakes.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's NPS. I think it's the speed. There's something about the speed that is not fair. It's literally speed dating. It's speed dating where the outcome is actually a marriage proposal because that's what founders are doing when they're choosing their VC and partner. They're essentially adding another founder of sorts. Now, of course, they don't get common. Just statistically, and yet you want to make a decision as an entrepreneur within two meetings, within seven days, that to me is horrible. And is obviously from an investor's standpoint, having been on the board of companies for ten plus years, I realize that I also don't like that. My worst decisions have been the ones that I made in the least amount of time due to pressure.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horrible way. I hated it. Also, being a very young and inexperienced venture capitalist at the time, I didn't like it. I didn't like seeing that. And one of the things that I eventually did myself when I started a Bessemer, this is in 2007, was to take a very different approach, to take this partnership type of approach with entrepreneur. Because I realized what they really need is not somebody that tells them how to do it, but a partner that they can confide in, that they can tell them what good happened today, what bad happened today without hesitating.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I prefer now just because of the experience I have back then. There weren't many people you could actually learn from. And even if they existed, they didn't write down their thoughts. You couldn't access them. It was a very closed industry. It was not only local, it was very closed. Nobody shared their investment strategies online the way we do now. Nobody even exchanged their war stories or what went right and what went wrong. So it's a much more open industry. And I think it's not just that other investors benefit from that and new investors. I think entrepreneurs do as well. And so that openness now that you have with entrepreneurs is refreshing. I worked back then at a time where it was much more adversarial relationship with entrepreneurs. The VCs acted as if they knew what they were doing, that they knew the right way. A lot of these VCs were former maybe entrepreneurs themselves or at least executives in larger corporations. And in the relationship was one very paternal, if I might say.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did and they were kind of you know look at me and it's a strange this is 1996 and so that's how I got started as an intern this was a tiny fund all funds in Israel at the time were tiny were talking 15 to 20 million dollar funds there was one partner one secretary and one internet connection and I had to ask the secretary to get off her computer so I could search the internet this is pre-Gogle obviously business plans would come in the mail in a big fat Manila envelope and I like to say those business plans actually taught me more than my undergrad degree did because they really spent a lot of time explaining everything and these were very technologically oriented companies so that's how I got started very young I'll admit very early”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was serendipitous, I was a student. At the time I was undergrad at Georgetown University, and I did a one-year program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And my first days, I was looking for an internship. That's just what we did at Georgetown. Every single semester, I had an internship somewhere. These are unpaid types of roles where you learn. And somebody pulled out, they went through this like box full of letters or faxes and they said, well, here's one. Now I told them I was interested in business. And it was for a venture capital fund. Now, it's serendipitous because literally a month before I had read an article about venture capital in Israel and a now defunct Israel American business magazine called Link at the time. And I just leapt at that opportunity. I said yes. Now nobody knew what venture capital was at the time, certainly not in Israel, but also not in the United States, not at college students. And for years I would tell people what this was and what I was.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vansha partners, where he's made over 60 investments and checked this out, had an astonishing 23 X's. What a hit rate. He's led the seed rounds for Milio, Hi Bob, and many other incredible companies, including also Fiverr and Wix. But before we dive into the show today, Hive is the marketplace for private stock. Whether you run a fund, lead an investing syndicate, or invest solo. Hive gives you unparalleled access to some of the most exciting companies in the world all before they go public. think flexport, Reddit and Airtable, alongside many other companies I've featured on the show. Secondaries are so much easier with Hive. Stay on top of the private market with free access to volumes of real-time market data and enjoy Hives' automated trading experience with thousands of trades across hundreds of unicorns. Hive is the fastest growing pre-IPO marketplace in the world, create a free account today at Hive.com forward slash 20V”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that the way you build a big company or the way you get a big exit is by investing in the most ambitious companies, growing the fastest. Those are also the companies that crash and burn. I think we delude ourselves into thinking we know exactly which company is going to be a big outcome. We don't. Oftentimes, 90% of the value that is created in the company happens in the last 12 or 18 months of the company's life. As an investor, you need to decide, are you going to make your mark by having hit one out of the park or by having multiple hits? This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I started 20 VC nine years in 2700 episodes ago because I wanted to be the best investor in venture and I wanted to learn from the best. And the podcast today is a great example of this. The learning still carries true today and this episode is one of my favorites that I've done recently. So joining me in the hot seat, one of the most successful Israeli investors of the last two decades, Adam Fisher, partner at Bessie.”
2024-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Small Markets are Better Than Big Markets, The Biggest Delusion of Early Stage VC, Why AI Investing is like a Horserace and Why The Most Ambitious Companies Growing the Fastest are not the Best Investments with Adam Fisher, Partner @ Bessemer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source