YouSaid · the spoken record

Annie Kadavy

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31
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2016-06-22
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2016-06-22
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1
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  1. “Most recent investment is a company called Rome, which is Global network for communal living. The idea being what if, instead of paying one rent or lease to live in your apartment or home in one place in one city for one to two years at a time, you paid one lease and could go and live among a network of places with a group of like-minded people. There's a lot of reasons I find this very interesting. One is that the market is absolutely enormous and that two, that it's growing. The idea that where we work is increasingly not tied to from what we do, the idea basically enabled by the internet and being able to work from anywhere and access to information and seeing what the world looks like and aspiring to go and experience it leads me to believe that there is a very large group of people that are seeking community and seeking experience.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I do read a lot of things. I would say that my favorite one is the skim because it makes me laugh. I probably laugh out loud three days a week reading that. They have really hit on a demographic of which I'm part that all of their like, you know, off the cuff references while they are educating you on the global happenings in any way, shape, or form, they're doing it in such a funny and approachable way that I really do appreciate reading that every day.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “That is a very good question. I think Venture can be a lonely job. I don't think I recognize that coming in. It is a job where Are inherently in the middle of a lot of things. You don't own anything and you are not the leader of anything. You are the enabler of people and ideas, which is something that I really love about the job because I'm much more comfortable in that role than I am others. But I think that when I speak with people who are just getting into dementure, the things that I encourage them to do are, one, keep a list of the things you look at and what your reactions are. Like try to expedite your own learning to yourself. And two is build a support system around you of people within and outside your own firm. Because again, because the feedback cycle is so long, you want to be able to learn and support yourself through that.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Recently finished a book that I had been meaning to read for a long time called Mindset by Carol Dweck. She's a professor at Stanford Business School. And it's basically a perspective on a growth versus fixed mindset, which I think is valuable both from a personal perspective, but also in understanding entrepreneurs and hires at companies, not to mention peers in any workplace that you're in. But I think teaching and understanding a growth mindset is arguably one of the most important things that an organization can do for people because when you do that, you are inherently kind of opening up the opportunities to anyone, individual, or group of people to go and learn and create more effectively.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Biggest mentor is a woman who is about 20 some years older than I am. I actually met her probably 12 years ago. She was a mentor of my husband's first and I stole her from him because I liked her so much. So, you know, and she's a person who has been a mentor both professionally and personally, which is most important to me, importance to me because I do believe that those two things are inherently woven together.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “They may not be able to leverage the data that a Facebook or Google already retains, they may be able to partner with Messenger or show up in Slacks after, or sorry, bot directory and interface with consumers that way. Because at this point in time, we should be more open than closed in our thoughts around which of these will weigh and why we have a lot to learn.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Many, many starties out there that are building their own data sets, whether for specific vertical or specific demographic sometimes, there is the ability to create Q&A type of interfaces to build more personalized bots. And again, when I say personalized, I mean both from a consumer point of view or a business point of view. You can build a data set in a number of different ways. And obviously you want a volume of data to run through that. But it's becoming easier and easier to get a bought off the ground and it's a matter of how quickly can you teach it or personalize it to the use cases that you're trying to build. So my general sentiment would be to start with a vertical, ideally a vertical that is very high value to a consumer and build a depth of knowledge or experience there because people will flock to the things that work best in those bots while”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I absolutely believe that. I think that you just look at this sheer scale of Facebook Messenger and Google specifically. And while I think that others may be able to compete, the scale is just so vast.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, that's one. Many that have been quite funny, and we're just in the first inning of those kinds of bots. And how does one train their bot or a bot, a data science question more than anything else? But truly, I actually think is in line with how this next generation of people thinks about the world where people more transparent with their own information, they're more forthcoming with data. They're more interested and willing to educate a piece of technology or answer questions that give them a more personalized response or result on the other side.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think it's kind of funny because bots have been around for a very long time. You know, whenever you talk to a customer service recording, you're talking to a bot effectively. So the biggest question I have and the one that I find most interesting is the question, and I think you're asking too, of where will these bots live? Do they live on their own? Do they live in existing platforms? Do they live on my phone? Do they live in my contact list? My hypothesis is that at least at the beginning for sure, and I think going forward, they will live everywhere. One bot I should think of a bot like I think of a contact. It should be in my contact list. It should be in my Facebook messenger. Maybe it's in my Slack. Maybe it pops up when I am in another app or on another website to say, hey, let me be helpful to you in some way, shape, or form. The idea of having a bot that is plugged into the things that I am working on is super interesting.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “As a species, quite literally, have learned to communicate and how we communicate with our phones and computers today is still a very different version of that that is an acquired learning as opposed to kind of a natural inclination. So category one of businesses that I think become quite successful, Snapchat is a great example of this. It's something that creates a technology that more closely mirrors an offline experience. The second is piece of technology that gives someone a superpower. You think of Uber. Oh my gosh, I can touch a button and a car arrives in front of me. That is a freaking superpower. I think of even a company like Redfin comes to mind where I can now sit in my living room and look at the inside of homes all over the world is pretty incredible. There are lots more examples of that, but bots, I think, enable reducing friction and enabling people to”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It is all the rage. Bots are the new black. I think that I generally take an anthropological approach to consumer investing. And for me, the idea of a non-interface interface or a conversational interface being the next wave in the consumerization of technology is quite interesting. I think that many of the greatest companies we know could fall into one or perhaps two buckets in what they've enabled for consumers. One is that they have enabled them to behave more as we behave as humans offline. If you think about having a conversation with a person like you and I are having right now, being able to have that same interface, talk in a similar way with a phone or with a computer is highly compelling because it comes naturally to us, natural language is how we”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You're asking a person who has made very few SaaS investments. So yes and no. I would consider myself very much a novice public market investor, but your multiples on any sort of predictable revenue are going to be much higher than those when revenue is less predictable. So yes, of course, if I can build subscription into a consumer business of which many of my investments do have that nature class, we talked about Patreon being another great joy, of course. Those are really beautiful consumer businesses because your LTV has extended by months or even years.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Merchants in because they're able to run their businesses more effectively. Oftentimes that translates directly to dollars to the bottom line. They're able to learn from each other and create community. And from an investor point of view, the revenue streams associated with these marketplaces are really compelling because you're able to mix both SaaS predictable income as well as kind of transactional income from a marketplace business.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, I think SaaS marketplaces are really interesting, and I don't believe that we've seen many excellent examples of them so far. I'm quite interested in that model. Crater, by way of quick background, it provides a SaaS tool for people building subscription businesses, whether those be commerce or digital. I think that here again, it comes back to what does the supply side of the business need, in this case, what do individual merchants need. And when you have a product that is more complicated than just list an item or give a piece of advice or something that is a quick transaction, but is actually someone that is running a business that requires some more heavy lifting, we'll see more of these kind of consumer, I think of them as consumer facing SaaS marketplaces. So it does a few things. If I put my investor hat on, one, enables merchants to be more successful. It also locks”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Marketplaces, almost all of them are defensible by scale. Brand can help you achieve and maintain that, but I oftentimes joke that if you spend time on some of these larger marketplace websites, if you look at Yelp or if you look at eBay, there is no product designer in the world that's going to tell you that they are the most well-designed products on the internet. First of all, they're primarily on desktop as opposed to mobile. They have such a stronghold, Craigslist, right? It's like the ultimate example. The Craigslist user experience is terrible. However, because they have such liquidity in local markets, which are particularly defensible with scale, they are incredibly difficult to unseat.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Work on the types of projects or with the types of people that I want. I want more control. And it really depends business by business. And I think that to find success in a marketplace is to truly empathize specifically with the supply side first.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Quickly, it's also a localized business. So thinking about how do you sprout up new markets quite quickly? What do you need in order to do that? As opposed to Laurel and Wolf is a group of individual interior designers that are providing virtual interior design services to consumers all over the country. Who are those people? Where are they located? What are their current challenges, which are not always obvious? I see myself when I was thinking about my own business ideas and also we see many entrepreneurs that come in and they have observed an inefficiency in a market, but they haven't necessarily observed why or what are the core problems. And I think that taking time, especially on supply, to understand who are these people or businesses, what are their priorities, what are their biggest points of friction, what are they optimizing?”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Sure. You know, the inherent challenges that are most often talked about are the chicken and the egg. How do you ramp something up? I think that what has drawn me to marketplaces so much is that I do find them to be perhaps the most interesting business model out there because there are so many levers and also because at their core their anthropological studies, they are understanding supply and understanding demand and reconciling those two groups priorities and needs and how do you build something that enables both of those groups to get what they're looking for. So every business is a bit different. You mentioned ClassPaths and Laurel and Wolf as two of my investments with ClassPass. The supply side is gyms and studios or sometimes individual instructors for boutique fitness classes. That is a business that is defensible by scale and so they needed to grow quite”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Think that it's a natural evolution where eBay, I think of, is kind of the first true consumer marketplace that is connecting supply and demand and making a market more efficient by nature of connecting people regardless of physical location, effectively the rise of the internet, which has been, of course, more than just a few years, but the rise of mobile penetration, in my opinion, is really the most important key to what has made marketplaces really take off. People are now carrying around phones in their pockets and people who are the supply side of these marketplaces, people are businesses, are able to work from anywhere and want to work from anywhere and also may want to work several different jobs and or increase or decrease their hours in a given day or week and marketplace enable both the more efficient and effective but also a more flexible”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yes. And so my reaction to that was okay. Well, how do I dog ear this? How do I make myself more efficient such that my four years of sure can maybe feel like five or six or seven or eight? And that's where I came to this like, okay, let me create my own data set. I think that it helped expose some of my own biases to myself, which has been hugely valuable, specifically around. I am very much an optimist by nature. I get very excitable and caught up in ideas, markets and future versions of the world. My natural inclination is to dream the dream with the entrepreneur, kind of wave my hand at other things. And over time, you know, I've got much, much better at asking harder questions as it relates to the core metrics of the business and also understanding who the people are, which ultimately is the most important.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, one of my partners who I respect tremendously does a lot of kind of reading and research on what makes investors great based on all of the things he's read over, I think, nearly two decades of doing this. He says that the only metric that is correlated with success and venture is time doing it, which as a young person inventure is a really disappointing thing to hear.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “For an early stage venture fund that the bar for success in a consumer business, again, this gets into public company multiples in terms of real valuation. You have to oftentimes believe that the market can support a larger company than that. So for me, I've needed to kind of reframe what a quote-unquote venture backable business looks like.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Say instead of no thank you, this is not going to be a fit, instead saying, dear entrepreneur, thank you so much for your time. I really found it quite valuable. Here are my real-time thoughts and reactions and or your thoughts and reactions of my team as to why we're not going to be a fit for investment right now. Usually it's related to the data being too early to tell just given the stage at which we're investing or a market or market dynamics that we either don't fully understand or don't fully believe in. Usually it's like, you know, yes, we believe you can build a business here, but we don't know how big of a business. That for me was a real education coming into venture at the beginning. I thought, holy shit, these people are building businesses that can do $50 million in revenue. That is incredible, right? And that is incredible. But unfortunately, it's not always a great.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's a great question, and I think this is something that should be hopefully you can discuss this with lots of people and have more perspectives out there. I think that for me, and I know that for many other BCs, this idea of saying no so much is not what you expect when you come into this job. And you realize that it is what takes up a lot of your time. And so, you know, at the beginning, my perspective was, oh my gosh, my job is to basically be a dream crusher. This is terrible. I have all these incredibly smart, motivated, passionate individuals that are coming in and for whatever reason, not going to be a fit for investment for us. Oh, you know, like that just feels terrible. I think for me, it was really a reframing of what if I treat feedback as a gift and what if I hold myself to a bar of always being 100% transparent and honest.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “A reference on me or for something else, a positive reference. The idea being that relationships matter and life is long. And if I can hold myself to any standard, it would be treating people with integrity and respect. And I always want to do that. The second thing I've done on a more specific level is I don't really do this as much anymore, but I would say the first one to two years in venture is I kept an expansive list of every single company that I looked at, either by myself or with my team and what my kind of reaction was. You know, the market was too small, the product wasn't differentiated enough, whatever my reason was for not liking it or for liking it as an investment, I would just chot it down. What I was able to then do was give myself some feedback.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I love this question. And I think venture is a very strange job in that the feedback cycles are long. One of my partners who's been doing this for almost 20 years says that it takes you takes one person 10 years to know if they're good at this job or not, which is crazy when you think about it. I couldn't give you another example of a job that takes 10 years to give you that feedback. So for me, I would say it's two things. One is very short. I think many people answer this question and that they, the metric that you go by is that they want to be the first call an entrepreneur makes. I think that's a great one, but early in a venture career, you don't have that portfolio of entrepreneurs to be taking calls from. And so for me, it is the number of people who I say no to, which in venture you're saying no to investment 99% of the time, who I would still consider”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And look for the example you want to find, and you just might find it, which I took to heart and I did do that. And after I went and looked around, I found that many of the best investors out there, you know, if you look at the MIDAS list, which is one list that's put together that has a lot of extremely talented and successful investors on it, they by no means fit that mold that I earlier referenced, kind of calmed my own fears about that. And I think that in Venture, one thing I've learned is that best decisions are made from diverse groups that have a high level of trust. And instead of trying to conforming to the status quo, I actually think speaking with a different point of view can be extremely valuable.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Sure, I think that part of this was my own personal bias. I had looked at the people I knew in venture capital, the ones who were most outspoken, the ones who had been around the longest, and they all fit a very specific prototype, the ones that, and again, this was me looking with my blinders on. I think now my point of view is much broader as I've actually gone in and understood and met many more people. But what I saw were older Caucasian males who had operated for 20 years before coming into venture. And I looked at myself as someone in my late 20s at the time didn't have a long and expansive operating career. I just kind of thought to myself that couldn't possibly be for me. So it was really in my own mind psyching me out and a piece of advice I got along the way. I was asking people about, you know, is this something I should seriously consider was, you know, go out.”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “You know, do you have any interest in the Spenter thing to which I believed my prompt response was I have no interest in venture, but I'd be happy to come meet the rest of your team fast forward a few months from there and my own diligence trip up and down Santill Road meeting and talking to people about what is this thing about venture and what's the value proposition to a relatively young person venture was my biggest question once I felt like I'd had that answered a little bit more I ended up joining CRV about four years ago and it's been a really great unexpected journey”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well, you know, I know many people, I've been friends of mine, spent a long time thinking that they would end up in BC and went down a path of really trying to make that happen. I fell into venture in a funny way. It was not part of the plan. I don't think I knew what venture capital was until maybe I was graduating college. I did not grow up in the Bay Area and it was something that was new to me. I fell into venture because I had been for really as long as I could remember kind of working on and towards being an entrepreneur myself. And at the time four or five years ago now I was pitching my own idea for a business that never really ended up jumping the gun I think from being projects to true company but through that process I met one of my now co-workers and partners at CRV and so while the business didn't end up working out you know he came to me and said hey”

    2016-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source