YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Jones

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30
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2015-06-15
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2015-06-15
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1
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  1. “They are building a really interesting set of glasses of eyewear, really high quality eyewear, which is part of the Internet of Things generation. If you spend $500 on a pair of sunglasses, you really don't want to lose them. And this is a pair of glasses that you'll be able to find from your smartphone.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The two most reasons I'm most excited about at the moment. One is called Muru Music. It hasn't launched yet. It's a really interesting new spin on automatically generating playlists. So not playlists where every song sounds like the previous song, but a playlist the way a DJ creates a playlist. So you say I want to set the runs for two hours and I want to start with this mood of music. I want to peek up around in this other genre and then I want to finish in this third genre. And Mirror Music is going to build a custom playlist that'll do that for you. And we think that's the first time anybody's ever been able to do that. I'm excited about that because the people coming to that startup are a wonderful mix of really high quality app developers and people deep in the DJ community in Europe. Alice started off, I'm really excited about now. It's got a Japanese name so it's hard to spell. It's called Zukuri, TZUK. I think I've got that right.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think it's really important to read outside of your field, read relevant things that can have an impact on what you do if you sit down and think about it. So I would highly recommend, or I'm in growth hacking, I'm all about acquiring customers, about activating customers you've acquired and increasing the average lifetime value of that customer to the startup's business. So one of my favorite fields is behavioral economics. One of my favorite authors is an MIT professor called Dan Arielli and a good starting point for anybody who's interested in what makes people buy things as a book.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “If we really take a random sample of a thousand startups, I think the VC startups are going to win more often. So it's a general truism that if you're working on a startup idea, whether you're aware of it or not, there are 20, 30 other startups working on that same idea that you haven't heard about yet. So winning generally comes from scaling more quickly, right? And investment capital gives you not just money to grow sales and marketing, but it helps you build a better and more effective product team. It introduces you to distribution relationships and ultimately acquirers of your business.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “From Blue Chili, obviously, we're going to smash our 100 stat goal, but I think realistically in the next five years we're going to be aiming for 500 startups across Asia, across North America and across Europe.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So global growth for blue chili. So we have aggressive international expansion plans. Last October we started investing from our first venture fund, a $10.5 million fund that makes matching investments and startups graduating from our portfolio. So when we first started trying to raise $10 million, that's in like a really scary, super big thing for us to try and attempt. Done it. And so now we're moving on. So in the Australian marketplace, there are now a number of funds in about that size, and all of us are looking to about 10x the size of our investment capacity. So I think we'll see in the next five years. I think we'll see a number of 100 mil and greater tech startup funds out of Australia.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think it's always a good idea if you're an investor to focus on what you know, right? So I have a 20-some year history of working on product development and product communications. And so I think probably where I've been most successful is investing in startups that are solving problems for other startups. So building the platforms and the tools that you need as a starting founder. So I recently had an Australian startup called OtherLevels that did an IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange that was very successful. They're a business that provides analytics for our publishers to help them track where there are anybody's reading and responding to the push messages and the SMSs and emails that get sent to users of that app. So that's a problem that I've faced before. I understand what it feels like to be an app publisher and not know who my customers are and whether or not they're responding. And so for me, that investment's gone quite well and I think I've been able to add some value.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And the founders themselves have to really care about the customer, the problem that they face and how we solve them for them.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “If that's just a niche that we've identified, I'm sorry, but we don't care enough about it to really win in a customized handbag space. I've learned from doing charity fundraising for endurance events, things like Oxfam Trailwalker, that even though I've got friends who really love and care about me, when I ask them to donate to my Oxfam Trailwalker walk later this year, I know it's going to take a bit of bothering from me to get them across the line. I'm going to have to do a little bit more work. And investing is the same kind of thing. As an early stage investor, I have to work a little bit harder to get my startups in front of the VCs that I know are going to like this idea. Even though the VCs like me and we're close friends, they get a lot of pictures all the time. And for me to be effective as an early stage investor, I have to help my startups raise their next round. And the only way I can do that is if I work extra hard and the only way I work extra hard is if I really care. So me, my other early stage investors.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So it's been a while, but the formula that I use these days is that let's assume that no matter how exciting, no matter how much traction an early stage startup has received. There will be hard times at some stage. And in order for me to work as hard as I should and in order for the founders to work as hard as they need to make this business successful, we all really need to care about a couple of things. We really need to care about the customer that we're addressing. We really need to care about the problem that they're facing and how we solve that, how well we solve that for them. We've all been to business school and we've identified an opportunity to create an e-commerce site that sells custom personalized handbags to women between the age of 25 and 35.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The purpose of a great pitch is the beginner discussion, right? So even a y combinator, term sheets happen after the pitch, right? They happen in the discussion one-on-one, in the room when it was mingling. And more typically in markets outside of Silicon Valley that happen over the course of weeks, maybe months and a series of meetings. So that gives us months and months and months to go through the detail, to supply metrics. So the purpose of the pitch is to get invited back to have that detailed discussion. If you're not grabbing people by the heart and making them feel, wow, I really have to make this team. You never get to next base.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Unless we sit down and break it down frame by frame, we can't really express what it is about that storytelling that works. But great storytelling has a narrative arc, it has a beginning and an end, it has a climax or multiple climaxes, it has a hero, it has a bad guy, it has romantic love interest, right? There's lots of different narrative archetypes, but all great starter pictures fall into one of those great narrative archetypes. So we need to become great storytellers and that never, never, never fits the templates that the VCs want to see. Why? Because the VCs want to punch all of your metrics into a spreadsheet and judge you coldly and rationally. The best thing that we can do is grab them by the nuts, grab them by the heart, pull them irrationally, grab their emotions and get them to love us as a team, lovers as an idea, get them to help us build what we have in mind.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Going to be equally as non-memorable as everybody else's. So I encourage my startups to remember about the fact that pitching is storytelling. And storytelling is the oldest form of human communication. 400,000 years ago around the campfire at night looking up the SARS, there was some old elder who could tell a cracking story. And that was how all of the knowledge of our society was passed on from one generation to the next, how to make a weapon, how to start a fire, where to look for food, how to kill a wildebeest, all that was passed on through great storytelling. So we have evolved to be highly receptive to great storytelling. We don't have the defenses against great storytelling, right? So the difference between a typical tech startup pitch and a really great TED talk is so enormous, and most of it's really...”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Viewing many, many, many pictures at a time. And investors like to make rational, logical decisions about the investments that they make. And for most of us, that's the worst possible way for us to be judged. If you're trying to be the next Airbnb, there's 30 other people all trying to be the next Airbnb. And if you're all just going to be judged on rational, logical metrics, then there's almost always going to be somebody better than you. And they're going to get the investment capital, not you. The other challenge with that approach is if you're at a pitch event with another 20 teams or another 30 teams and everybody's using that pretty much that same narrative, then you're going to blend right in and your available domain name brand name that you've chosen What's OEO.com is”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, so if you Google how to do a great startup pitch right, you will find templates, a lot of templates on the same kind of basic model, right? So at some point a VC or a textile entrepreneur has put up a template and everybody else is copied or major changes to that. Basically, you get up in front of an audience and say here's a problem and here's the traditional solutions to that problem that don't work very well. Here's our suggested better solution to that problem. And this is how big we think the market is and this is how much of that market we think we can claim. This is the awesome rockstar team that we have working on this problem. This is how much capital that we're hoping to raise. This is when we expect to close around. I'm generalizing, but that's the broad model, right? The reason why that model is so popular is that we pitch to people who are”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And the journey of the business down into the kinds of things that are going to motivate a potential technical co-founder. So there are things like recommendation, algorithm. There are things like drunk walk solutions to trying to find the best way to get a package or several packages in a delivery vehicle through multiple stops along the way. There are kinds of great programming problems that always merit further work. And we can sometimes involve a potential technical co-founder in our business if we can kind of refactor our business challenge into something which is a really interesting software developer challenge.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So if you check Cora actually, Cora, somebody asked a question a little while ago, you know, how do I, what's the best way to attract a co-founder? And I'm pretty sorry about the fact that my answer to that question is the top rated answer. So look, great technical founders, it's not a good thing to stereotype people. And so every great software developer or every great hardware engineer is going to be different to the next. In general terms, if we may just stereotype a little bit just to make some progress, these are people who are interested about solving interesting problems and they don't see generally, they don't see business problems as nearly as interesting, as great mathematical or logical or programming problems. And so I encourage people to break their business goal and their customer aspirations.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “performing certain kinds of tasks that makes them really, really gifted software developers. So you and I could learn to play the piano, certainly we could learn another language, absolutely. Are we going to be the best? Either it's going to become a professional tennis player? Probably not at this stage in our lives. So I think if all you need to do is build a very, very basic minimum viable product, and time is not an issue, then certainly I would say go and learn some coding skills and see if you can get far enough to bring some other co-founders on board or perhaps find an accelerator program that will accept you and help you find matchmake you with a technical co-founder.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So I think majority of startup founders would want to have best of breed and everything that they do, right? So if I'm appointing a VP of sales, I'm going to try and get the best possible person I can for that job. Same with your VP of marketing and ideally your CTO as well. So I guess the question there comes down to your own self-knowledge of it. And for most of us, we would want the best possible technical founder of the business. And for most of us, if that was going to be us, then we would have learned that about ourselves when we were in our early teens. Great software developers, I think, I really do think there's something very early in the development of the person, perhaps even inherited from their parents, that makes people particularly good at certain kinds of learning.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Product, the kind of pricing model we want to introduce and the kind of marketing messages that might work to actually acquire those customers.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Perhaps they're too early to market, or perhaps the customer demography that they imagined they were going to appeal to doesn't take up the product, or perhaps even just at the end of the day, even though they're requiring customers, the cost of acquiring customers is greater than their average revenue per customer and the economic models don't work. So in the last few years in lean startup methodology, we've developed a bunch of really great practices and also there's a whole suite of really good software as a service tools that you can use to validate a business model, to validate a marketing strategy all in advance of going to the trouble of building a product. So that helps us establish, first of all, whether or not we have a viable business to build a product for. And second of all, we can start to test a lot of our assumptions around the kinds of feature, features that we might want to include in that.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I'll preface that advice with no one piece of advice is going to work for everybody, but If you're a great product person, so if you've spent five or seven or ten years building tech starter products, then your greatest skill and your most likely part of the market is to bootstrap and build your own product. That way you're not using other people's capital and you're applying your time and experience to something that you know well how to do. But in Australia and a lot of other places in the world, many non-technical entrepreneurs spend a lot of time going on to meetups trying to find that potential technical co-founder. So that wastes a whole chunk of time. And then potentially when They might spend several hundred thousand dollars building a product first and then take it to market and then find that the economics don't work.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, it's getting more international all the time. So currently we have three startups in the US, one in New York, one in LA, one up in Toronto. And that's been a great growing experience for us. Here in Australia, we have the majority of our startups based in Sydney, but we have a few in other regional capitals. And earlier this year, we opened a Melbourne office. Melbourne is our second biggest city here. So we have a dedicated team there, an incubator space and five healthy growing startups down there too.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, we have a massive great pitch to us button on our website. You can't really miss it if you're there for longer than three seconds. And anybody can and does use that button. So we get receive on an average month about 200 applications online. We don't ask a lot of questions in that form. The goal is to get a discussion going. Of those 200 applications, we screen out roughly 20 each month for further due diligence. And we have a guy, a very hard working Irishman whose full-time job is doing that screening and doing that first round of interviews with startup founders. Then over that 20, our goal is to enter into commercial negotiations with four or five each month, of which we hope to bring two new startups into our program each month.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Five or six startups at a time. We have an accelerator program to make sure that the founders that we're working with, the entrepreneurs are fully skilled up on all the experience and all the business model testing and market strategy validation that they need. And then ideally the founding team graduate from our accelerator program at the same time as their product graduates from our product development team. Then we're able to go to our investor network and say, okay, here's a startup that we're super confident about because we've educated the startup founders and we've built the product and we're both confident of both being able to scale.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, so over the past three years, Blue Chile has built a portfolio of 54 startups, and we're on track. In fact, I think we're pretty confident we're going to smash our goal of 100 by 2016. So Bluetooth is a bit unique in that we partner with non-technical entrepreneurs who've got an idea for a tech startup. What we've observed in Australia and a number of other markets around the world is that the great potential technical co-founders go off to work on their own ideas or they move to Silicon Valley because the rewards are so much richer there. And in markets like Australia, as a result, all the great people moved to Silicon Valley or they want to work on their own ideas. So there's no shortage of entrepreneurs in Australia, but there's a real shortage of technical co-founders. So Blue Truly acts as the technical co-founder for the Start Tennis portfolio. We actually have our own product development team of nearly 40 people now, and they work simultaneously on”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So we ran that business for a couple of years and then Blue Chili was a business that was similar enough to ours that we used to refer each other work. And they were looking to bring a few new members of management team on board. So they made an offer that we're pleased to accept.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “About five years ago, an old friend and I started a digital agency which specialized in helping startups and we were trading off our experience as serial entrepreneurs in the startup space and the community of other experienced people working in the startup industry in Australia who were working on their own startup idea part-time a couple of days a week and who also needed to pay the rent or mortgage and so on. So we were able to pull together great project teams of experienced startup founders with expertise in user experience design or software development or online marketing. We could pull these teams together on the fly and get them to work on a startup project at a cost that other startups could afford.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “When print publications started to go to this new thing, the World Wide Web, I decided there was going to be faster and cheaper and more fun to be publishing things online than in print and started trying to make a transition. I went to work at Microsoft for a few years for things that became part of the MSN network and then took what I imagined was a huge risk and joined a small internet search startup that nobody had ever heard of that huge risk turned out to be my first big lucky break and I was an early hire at Yahoo back in the day.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think I hesitate to call it Korean, but I've definitely Korean back and forth from thing to thing. I started as a technology reporter so long ago that in those days people read their news about the computer industry on the printed page in magazines. And I was the editor of a magazine called MacWorld centuries ago.”

    2015-06-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source