YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Goldberg

lines on the record
27
first
2018-07-30
most recent
2018-07-30
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yeah, so we announced our investment in StrangeWorks earlier today, actually. It's a quantum computing software company. I think that the thing that's really exciting here is the space is dominated by researchers and academics. So it was really refreshing to see an experienced product-oriented team jump in and build solutions instead of a research lab.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “This one's going to be pretty funny. I think a key part of Venture is to put yourself out there. And I'm actually really introverted. So I've been working on that more, and that's why I'm here.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I actually struggle with naming a particular person, but I think it's never needing to work again, but still working because you love it so much.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'd like to see a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem. So I actually have a diversity and inclusion side letter that I sign with my founders. And what it says is for every executive or board position, they'll consider at least one candidate with a diverse background.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I'd say most people don't. I think you can make excuses, but keep in mind that most people don't push through the hard things in life. I think you should be different and be yourself.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I would actually say read crypto Twitter. It's the focal point of the community. Every project's on there, every investor's on there. And it's a really, really open platform where people are open to questions from newbies and open to questions from people who are really deep in the space alike.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, flowers for Algernon. I think it's got it all. It's got science fiction and sort of the principle that ignorance is bliss. And I think that just makes for a really interesting journey.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, I think that white papers pay respects to the origins of the space, which were pretty academic, to be honest. I think if you look again at the traditional centralized world, people used to write business plans. And business plans eventually evolved into executive summaries and eventually evolved into DECs. And I think that something similar is already happening here. DECs are a very efficient way to communicate, and you still need to iron out all the details of what you're doing. And you should have a white paper, but you need to have a friendlier entry point for investors, employees, and partners alike. And I think that”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, so I think that it isn't quite black and white. So some projects launch when they're in beta or launch right before beta. And I think that if you're in a highly contested space, it's not unreasonable to try and suck the air out of the room and get some attention. I think there's some companies in the gambling infrastructure space and some companies in the prediction market space that have tokens that are traded today, but that approach seems to be advantageous because the communities have faith that they will execute and deliver. I think on the opposite polar end of that is companies that are basically exits gaming that are launching a token with no intention of building the product and trying to run away. But it's really a delicate balance. And I think that we're going to see what happens with all these projects. And five years down the line, there will be scar tissue built from the things that went poorly and best practices established from the things that went well.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “A token before the underlying product's ready. I think these decisions are quite easy in the centralized world because there's a lot of scar tissue from the dot-com era, but it's really a greenfield discussion here. So specifically,”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “But that may generate a lot of hype in the short term. I generally biased towards engineering heavy teams because that's how you build a scalable protocol that has longevity. But if you think about it, the trade-off's not all that simple, right? If you look at an enterprise infrastructure company in the early days, people hire a lot of engineers so they could build the product. If you look at a consumer brand company that isn't physically building its own product, marketing's what rules. Another example is fairness. I think that what people have seen to date is primarily early investors and founders of blockchain projects that are successful, accruing a lot of value. And that doesn't affect things that much in the short term, but you have to wonder in the long term what that looks like. If you're 10 years down the line in evaluating whether you participate in the token network, you have to make an economically appealing decision. If there's no value left in that or you're really just subsidizing others, that's challenging. And I think the last one, which is particularly fascinating, is launching”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, and I think there's honestly probably way more than four even. The ones that I was talking about are really because this is such a new world, founders can make choices that benefit themselves in the short term but harm in the longer term. And like we talked about, there's sort of these two phases to a blockchain project that actually make these decisions pretty difficult. So one example is how you handle the fundraising docs in your regulatory strategy. I think that if you wait too long for the regulatory environment to settle and you wait for the perfect set of docs, one of your competitors might suck the air out of the room with a huge fundraise. That's scary. At the same time, it's a little scary on the other side to have to push things along and maybe have a little bit extra regulatory risk just to get money in earlier. Another example is sort of how you set up your team. I think that a lot of teams are extremely marketing heavy in this world. And that's generally the wrong approach for long-term success.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so I think that they advertised some really aggressive timelines and really impressive technical goals. As with any project, you need to make sure that the team can execute on it. So if you look at the team here, Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov, they've built two apps, VK, which is the most popular social network in Russia and the surrounding countries, and Telegram itself, both of which have hundreds of millions of users. That gives comfort that they can build something that scales but also deliver a powerful user experience. And I think that it's also really exciting that they have an impressive engineering team that's complemented by many math and computing Olympiad winners. That being said, it's really hard to fully validate a complicated technological approach to one of the most challenging problems known today.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, so I mean, there's sort of a lazy answer, which is that they raised a lot of money. But the more interesting answers that there's two things that are really important for building a blockchain DAP platform. And those two things are distribution and scaling. So we spoke about scaling earlier. Maybe we can focus on distribution here. Telegram has hundreds of millions of users, but most importantly, they don't have a perceived affiliation with a government. And I think in a world where owning your own data becomes more important to users by the day, they're extremely valuably positioned because they're the largest such platform that sort of meets that criteria. You think about Facebook, you think about WeChat. They're perceived differently. They're perceived as affiliated to a government, whether that's true or not. And I think the other really exciting thing is Telegram can build front ends for DAPs within their platform. They can lower the bar to entering the ecosystem while still maintaining a very, very powerful user experience. They can be the DApp store, which is a”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, so I think that a lot of this question comes down to where value accrues. And value will usually accrue into either equity or a token network. It's very rarely both, but if it is both, it's probably like a 95% 5% split. So we haven't released it yet, but we are in process of writing up a template term sheet for both fungible token and non-fungible token projects at the formation stage. And the very high level of that is the easiest way to do the initial round is to have a price to equity round that has a modified pro rota clause that grants a proportional amount of the tokens held by the company. So if say there's 100% token supply overall and you hold 50% for the company itself for investors for the founders strategic deals, et cetera, and we own 10% of the company, we get 10% of that 50%. I think that aligns the two structures.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think what's really interesting about the blockchain world right now is we're in a place where projects are not only innovating on technology, but also their business model. And that's fundamentally pretty scary. But I'd say that one of the most interesting problems I've seen is the convexity one, which is that projects are most exposed to their own token in the beginning, but they gradually sell it over time to fund their operations. So if you think about it, many projects keep 20 to 50 percent of their token, which are intended to fund the project in perpetuity. And that's really tough because if the project's successful, the value of the token goes up over time. And that means you want to sell later and not earlier. So I think some nonfungible token projects have overcome this in a pretty interesting way. The ones that are minted by companies actually could gain exposure over time. So if you're doing something like Crypto Kitties or something similar that's IP-based, if your product's a success, 10 years down the line, you could be selling 10 times.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I think that some of these trade-offs are really false dichotomies. I think something like security or scalability is quite hard to compromise on. I don't think if we were talking about a centralized application, you would give that sort of leeway. I would really first and foremost just give yourself a test. If you're building something on the blockchain, is it as interesting if you just use the word database instead of ledger or blockchain? And if you do, then you don't need to be building on the blockchain. It's sort of the same thing around how a lot of companies are built on top of AI. You could substitute out the word statistics for AI, and that's an interesting litmus test too. So I think that there certainly are trade-offs, but at the extreme ends of these trade-offs, it really means you're using the wrong technology.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Sure, I think it actually looks a lot like the consumer brand world. It's really a function of trust, right? If you're working on a blockchain project and I want to make a modification and fork off to do something else, the question is, why should people trust you rather than me to do the right thing? It could come down to the team. It could come down to track record or just perception. It's completely intangible.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But the key is that users need to get some of these secular benefits without feeling the pain of blockchain. Yeah, so glad to hear Kyle was on. He's a good friend, actually. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Scalability inherently isn't something you can trade off if it makes your product unusable. So I think it's a great point that features can be copied, and that's the nature of most open source worlds. And really what that comes down to is you need to own the community because in this blockchain world, anyone can try to fork away from you.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “In a unit of account that they understand. So, this is why stablecoins are extremely important. It's hard to have an e-commerce or e-commerce use case without a unit of account. So what this all stacks up to is the biggest problem is that people are really excited about blockchain. And when they're building things often, tout features is crucial, even if they're not. So we need to think about what secular trends are enabled by blockchain. Back in the early days of the internet, it would be kind of like saying, I have this protocol TCP that lets me send bits over a wire, right? You hear people say blockchain gives me censorship resistance and immutability and so on. But the question is, why are those important? Those are features of an implementation detail. In the traditional internet world, you should be talking about how the internet makes people more connected to each other. That's Facebook, to information, that's Google, and to purchases. That's Amazon. We're still figuring out exactly what the secular trends are for the blockchain world.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, well, thanks. It's great to know that people think I have knowledge. I must have been fooling them somehow. But to your question, I think there's several reasons. I think that the first and most obvious ones that the underlying infrastructure can't support mass market dApps. So Crypto Kitties alone clogged up the Ethereum blockchain. If you think about it from sort of a higher level perspective, the Visa network processes thousands of transactions per second, and that's only doing payments. How can you build apps on top of something that only can really do a couple dozen transactions per second? I think another reason is the lack of emphasis on user experience. So on the side of blockchain-based games, I don't think the barriers really technology. I think it's a lack of interesting game mechanics. You could build a game like Fortnite in a centralized manner while having its cosmetic assets live on the blockchain. That's a very low throughput requirement. And I think in other reasons that mass market consumers want to pay for DAP and for service.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so throughout my life, I changed from math to computer science and engineering to product management to venture capital. And I did that so that I could learn as quickly as possible. I think that math is a great building block and was really only computer science that let me build things. And I think that product management lets you see sales and marketing engines get built and customer support organizations. And you get to bring a customer perspective to engineering discussions. But I ultimately picked venture because it's a job that nobody can ever master. There will always be a new space or a paradigm shift to learn about. And, you know, that's sort of what we were talking about earlier. And that's why I gravitate towards founders who have, they operate in a growth mindset. They digest anything that they can. The ones who really can take any sort of beating from customers or from their employees with difficult situations, but iterate and come back and improve.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I feel like it's had someone response to challenges or failures. So I think if you face a hardship in your company, maybe a customer beats you up in a presentation, instead of becoming down about that, it's really exciting if you're able to identify what went wrong, make changes. Maybe that means you're building a different product. Maybe that means you're just presenting yourself better. But that mindset is seeing a hardship as an opportunity really gets me excited about your ability to execute.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “There's a professor at Stanford who says that a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. He's talking about lines, you know, that whole y equals mx plus b bit. But the point is really no matter how far ahead someone is, if they learn and grow less quickly than others, they'll never maintain their lead. So that's why I get really excited about founders who are constantly improving. They're the ones who will master their spaces and build great products. Everyone starts as a first-time founder, so how quickly you learn matters much more than how many times you've done it before.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “When I was at Stanford, I was part of the summer fellowship program, and I was fortunate enough to be paired with a great mentor, Barry Eggers, who's actually still a mentor for me today. And I think between that and being at rubric where Ravi Matra was the board member, I got a taste for the firm and realized that when I wanted to do something more broad than just the enterprise data management space that rubrics in, it felt like the right place to go”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Things marry very nicely together into blockchain. And although I didn't start investing professionally until a couple years ago, I was involved in a first rounds dorm room fund when I was at Stanford. And I think that as someone with an unusual background, I have a lot of empathy for founders and realize that they can come from anywhere. And that's why I care where they're going and not where they're coming from.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, come on. That was almost two years ago. In essence, I was fortunate enough to be able to accelerate my education. So I was homeschooled until I was 10, and then I went to a community college for a few years because I really liked mathematics. So after that, I went to UC Berkeley at 13 to keep studying math. I finished at 16, but I didn't really feel ready to go out into the world. I didn't want to be a math professor or something like a quant. So I decided to go back to college and do undergrad again, this time at Stanford and to study computer science. So big games are difficult for me, as you might imagine, but I always root for the home team. And along the way, I spent time at several research labs at Palantir, at Dropbox, and I was the first product manager at Rubrick, one of our portfolio companies in the enterprise infrastructure space. But the thing that I felt most fortunate about is that when I studied math, I focused on number theory and cryptography. And when I studied computer science, I focused on systems and distributed systems.”

    2018-07-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner Adam Goldberg on Why There Remains No Mass Market Crypto Consumer Product, The Future For The Token Economy, The Good and Bad of Telegram's ICO and Why The Rate of Founder Learning is The Most Important Element A VC Can Assess · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source