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Arjun Sethi

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2022-03-14
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2022-03-14
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  1. “Super early. And so our whole firm was built to start identifying that. And then eventually, which is what we did very quickly, the value exchange to bring that back to the founder and build products so that they could see it. That was the first year. That was how we started the firm.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “reputation at the time to be like some crazy person with hundreds of millions of dollars that I can just deploy into my own funds and I'm going to prove it out so we bootstrapped it and the way to do that just like when you bootstrapped a company was that we started again lucky that it was happening at that time we started with SPVs and built a brand around not the SPV but that we were investing across early mid and late stage and that if we sent a term sheet to someone that we were going to commit our time our concentration to that company those were our first set of investments we invested in some crypto companies that are kind of well known today we invested in some insurance companies and then you know eventually Carta what we were kind of known for immediately very quickly but even relativity space and the process was can we see inflection points in these companies can we see a speed of growth that other people can't and you could call us momentum investors but we just see it super simple”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Did it, they did it. But what was interesting is that when they did it, they were different from the rest of their peers. And I think a lot of people forget that, which is the reason they were able to make Marx is that they had a different approach and they had a unique value proposition that endured. And it made sense to folks. And so ours was, okay, great. Like, what do we know how to do the best of? Which is to build companies, build growth in data science teams, and build a lot of these products from zero to one and beyond with a certain team member. And so my whole goal was like instead of thinking about like, let's raise capital for a fund, it was a core of the team members that we need around the table in order for us to help facilitate this. And then how do we build financial products? And that's hard. Imagine going into a room to tell an LP, I want to build multiple chassis around a technology firm that helps deploy capital across early, mid, and late, and crypto. You just get laughed out of the room. That's impossible. Doesn't make any sense. You don't fit the checkbox. It was very hard for us to do. And I didn't have a brand.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's the lingo that we speak and that we deploy capital across multiple opportunities across early, mid, and late stage equities and crypto. It's a different mindset. And the reason I say that is that part of our Mondays and Wednesdays and our stand-ups every day, just like a company, is that we're building product, we're building infrastructure, we're automating pieces. We have quant models that we're using that help us identify intrinsic value in a specific way that is our point of view in the world. And we have a very, very specific point of view on how to think about evaluating a company versus sourcing a company. And that is what we want to build our unique value proposition around. Some people call it edge. Some people call it like, that's your shtick when you're talking to an entrepreneur in LP. To us, we didn't use those words. To us, it was purely, we can either do it the same way that other people have. When you look at a benchmark or a sequel, you want to aspire to be like them because they've done it. And when A16Z”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The piece that I think most people do is they go out and pitch a fund and they said I was working at this other firm or I might have had this other experience or it could be India focused or Africa focused or diversity and inclusion focused and they say I'm going to do everything the same way but my focus for this fund is going to be in this sector and then you go from fund to fund to fund if you are successful and you're trying to figure out how to build a firm My whole aspiration day one was I wanted to build a technology company and so a technology company that deploys capital and how do you do that what are the first principles approach that you need to take like what do you need to learn as quickly as possible and the folks that you need to have around the table So I took the same lessons from my companies. What are ways in which we had to reinvent the wheel? What are things that we needed to augment? And we internally tend to not view ourselves as an investment firm, but a technology company.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, when it came time to launch your own firm, how did you take all of your entrepreneurial experiences and your investing experiences and bring them together into what you felt was the approach you wanted to take?”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Sniper shots as a team, and it wasn't just me. There's a couple other folks that decided to join the bandwagon and focus their time and attention there. And so space ended up being sort of the passion or the driver around some of my time that I spent there.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “In order for me to have a unique value proposition as a story to tell founders beyond what I've done as a founder myself because it outdates itself over three, six, ten months, that this the first investment that I make as a consumer person or software enterprise focus that I had at the time, the first investment I make is a 3D printing startup that's launching rockets into space. That in itself is a statement and that's like a huge part of the conversation when you talk to any entrepreneur for any product that you're building because it's naturally curious because it's hard or rocket scientists at a certain point if you can get up to speed quickly enough. Now I used to read a lot of that Elon Musk used to talk about which is first principles. How do you tear something down all the way to its basics and start the process of learning right from there? And I try to do that with space and it's TBD on if relativity work, but we did it with a company called Swarm. They ended up selling the SpaceX and I think we just ended up being very good at taking”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think truthfully just taking a bet on anything in space just seem like it was a statement that you could do that too. And so of course I fell in love with the sector. It's like an extreme part of my focus today. But at the time it just, I felt like”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Like some of the best advice I got when I first got there, which is if you choose to invest in a certain part of the industry and you don't know enough about it, you better get up to speed very quickly. Also, it takes and sucks a lot of your time, which means that the next deal you might miss. So my goal then was, great, how do I get deeper into some areas that I care about? B, how do I augment my capability to identify something very quickly so I don't miss it? And that was where the data science team came in. That was how I spent most of my time at Social Capital was how do I identify things very quickly that are up and down the middle software and tech enabled services? And then what are the areas that I want to dive deep into, whatever that might be year to year.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Learning experience. And the second was the data science team that was there. As I learned more and more about what they were building and the thoughts that they had, how could we productize this? What are ways in which we could automate it? It was in my mind, but it didn't mean we could execute on it. And then I started voicing these at the firm and moving in that direction. And then counter to the first investment, I decided to deep dive into areas that not a lot of people were thinking about where there were more binary chances of success. So I started looking into space and launch products. And maybe I got lucky there was enough companies that I could start assessing there. And so the first company I ever did was relativity space, which ended up, I remember one of my partners, Mahmoud, is that Kleiner Perkins just gave me really good advice. He said, like this company, it may or may not work, but if it does work or it doesn't work, it's going to suck a lot of your time. And so you got to be very, very good at like this industry just to understanding it.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So, my biggest problem is that I always feel like I can do it better. I think I walked into the organization thinking, what are the pieces that I need to learn so that I could build this myself one day? So there's a little bit of hubris in that. It's an entrepreneur attitude. But at the same time, my thought process was that it's going to take me 10 years before I start thinking about building something on my own. And I know how hard it is and how long it takes to cultivate the relationships of the LPs, making sure you have a track record. So my goal was that I want to be the biggest badass investor that's out there. And to be able to do that, you need to make good investments and you need to make sure that you have some sort of edge. So I spent all my time in two places at the firm, actually, first couple weeks that I got there. I spent all my time with a finance and back office team because no one spends any time with them, just understanding what they do, what they build, how they communicate with the LPs, just as a purely”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “In the same ecosystem, that was the reason why I went there. I really went there because I felt like we had the ability to change the game in some way or look at the world with a very different point of view. And that was a chance worth taking versus going to your typical top tier firms that were out there.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Work was really done on like is the company even working. And that to me was so foreign. That said, I didn't really comment and I just like these guys do what they do. They're very good at it. And so I should do the same. And so social capital was the only firm that I had met that had built out a growth and data science team at the time. And so what I give credit to this rich month, he built his team at Facebook this way. And I think his desire was that A16Z had built out their enterprise infrastructure, what they do on the BD side to help with their teams. They built out their portfolio management really, really well, and it was working. It created a unique value proposition in the market. And I think he had a desire to do the same. I don't think we successfully did that, but I think we did successfully marketed ahead of what we could do. But we did bring some of the brightest minds around the table. We all were working in the same rooms. We had all worked with each other in some way over the last 15 years.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And then they explain it to everyone, their version of it. And then if it seems interesting enough, some of it is qualitative, some of it is quantitative. Of course, if they had enough time, they do the work. They look at the data room if there is one, depending on what stage of the company it is. And then they say to the founder, why don't you come in and pitch to us like a court jester? Just show us that you have something. And then when they leave, then people would bring up every single thing that they could think of qualitatively. He didn't take a bath or he looked like he's messed up. Like maybe he does drugs or does she have the wherewithal to like build this company all the way to what it needs to take to be an enduring company for 20 years. Everything that you could think of that had nothing to do with how their business runs or what that team may look like. And then by the time they got to it, I'm being a little extreme here. I felt like everyone had made a decision about that company in that room during the presentation that none of the”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I'd only learned a couple of ways of investing and watching folks and the traditional path is you're known for being an operator or a founder and then a typical VC comes to you and says he or shey why don't you join VC I think you could be good at it Then you say oh wow me I could be good at this and I never thought that I would hold you guys in high esteem There's still this like weird aura that any VC brings to you and they say hey you can join our club and so in the beginning that got me excited and I would visit a lot of these funds you know some of these top tier firms that we all know and love and you would sit in the room and the path of making an investment decision was extremely archaic to me and so what's the process someone meets with a founder they write some notes or a quick memo whatever it might be it's all done in email or like a document format they send it to the rest of the partnership or they look for a sponsor”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So today we call it a quantitative approach to product market fit, but at the time you wrote gap accounting for growth for startups, which is what are all the things you need to measure to see at a high level, your business and your software metrics on like, are you on the right path? Do people use your product? And taking a very consumer style attitude to any business, and you would look at that and say you could munch together the frameworks we had and the finances that we're thinking through together and have a very, again, elegant way to get to your goal, which is the North Star of a company. What is it that you're trying to build? What is that product trying to do? And that was it. And it's simple in concept. It's just very hard to actually execute on it. We did growth in data science consulting for Snapchat, for Uber, for Airbnb, all these companies. And when I say that, I don't mean it to be facetious. Like we actually sent and built teams for them. We would do multiple offsets with them. We would actually build products on the side for them so that it could help them scale out their SMS system, Uber first.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “My base foundation. I could have just made my teams move at a faster pace. This is a natural sort of way I got into social capital”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Team acquisition, interestingly enough, was that we ended up selling a small portion of our designs and products to Telegram. And so you see a lot of that today. So we're probably one of the only outside shareholders that own parts of Telegram. And then I went to go run the growth data science team with my co-founders at Yahoo. And actually, you know, it was there that I really scaled up thinking about what it meant to invest actually because I was running a portfolio of products, Yahoo. things that were already at scale, things that were subpar that had product market fit, but it might have been growing at a sublinear rate, some were growing superlinear, but how do you identify it? And I read this blog post from an individual at Social Capital named Jonathan Sue, who is my co-founder today. And everything that I had been working on with my team, everything that we had been doing for the last 10 years, he just articulated it extremely, extremely well. And I said, wow, if I just knew to use this.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And the wherewithal to continue to build that. Although we got to, I think at its peak 15 to 20 million monthly activities, it got there, it still didn't feel big enough. And the reason it didn't feel big enough is that if you were to benchmark all the other messaging apps at the same time, we were at the low end. The interesting aspect there was that, again, we built out our data and our infrastructure. It was very robust because that's what we were trained to do so that we could build products and iterate very quickly. And Marissa had started her time at Yahoo and her tenure, and there was a couple other folks that we knew there. And they basically kind of offered us a soft landing, which is like, if you come here, we know what your skill sets are, why don't you build growth and data science teams? And why don't you build some of these products that we're thinking through at Yahoo? And it felt like, all right, this is the right thing to do, right thing for the team and the company. And it would be the first time some of my co-founders made money in their whole life. So we did that. We had moved to Yahoo. Part of the asset sale.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We sold to Nexon that were based in Korea. So I just got a lot of exposure to what was happening in Korea, what was happening in Japan and Southeast Asia. So the WeChats, the cacaoes, all of these companies that were growing at, again, high velocity. And remember my background is just continuing to identify growth. How do these products get built so quickly and just trace routing it? And then the smarter thing for me would have been to identify that and invest in them. But the irrational passion on my side was that I'm an entrepreneur. I can do it too. I can do it better. And so that's why I built message me. Message me was kind of a struggle. And we got spoiled from our social and mobile gaming days when we launched a product we would get instant distribution. We'd get it so fast and then we would iterate. Message me. That happened in the first week and then it fell flat and we were scratching our heads and we're like, whoa, we haven't seen this before. What do we do now? So I don't think we had the person.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So the team's basic, but the first thing you needed to do was essentially really figure out what was your North Star. And so if it's users, if it's usage, if it's integration, it's like the number of share count on Facebook. It was something called an object that changed it over time. It was really how do you build out and substantiate the systems and the metrics from the North Star? That was the beginning. And as common as it sounds, like this is what you need to think through. There's lots of blog posts. People write about this. When you're a founder, sometimes you're a deer in the headlights. You can see it. You can see what people are saying. But just going through the process, seeing the artifact, seeing how that can help you orient your business or your product and how you want to change it. It's a journey in itself. Part of why I think you see accelerators and people talk about this is that you have to train yourself to do it because you're going from an irrational passion of building something because you believe it needs to exist to a place of as it's starting to exist how do you evolve it and form it into something else”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Continue to do that as I was building out my growth and data science team. Again, the expertise that I was thinking through and I was providing when I was working with these companies was that I had growth in data science background and you had to build these teams and I could help them think through that when they raised their first rounds of venture capital.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I sort of had a track record of being the guy or one of the folks in the ecosystem that you would talk to about growth and how to think about growing your products at high velocity, what would be tactics you should use, what you should measure. And one of my investors, Mike Kirstlin, who runs a fund called Resolute Ventures, he had been at Polaris previously and was an investor in my company. He basically said, why don't you help me find early stage companies? And we didn't use the word scout, but he'd set up a separate entity. And embarrassingly enough, that was like the beginning of what people called arge fund, which that would be the name on the cap table. People knew it was me. I was going to fairly sarcastic, but just very good at what I did. And maybe you wanted me around the table. And that was the beginning. So I would write some of my own checks. I would write through him, his vehicle. Eventually, I wrote through a couple of other vehicles, including with social capital. Eventually messaged me sold to Yahoo.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So I did everything that anyone else did. If I liked some people, I liked the idea. I just shot the check. And you get lucky every once in a while. But I decided to take something else away from it over time is that because I was buying my opportunity to see how these companies were being built, I saw the products that they were building. I saw the culture that they were creating. I looked at that and I said they're doing it better than me, at my own company. So maybe the way I should think about it is that I should actually start reorienting my checks towards folks that I felt were very good at building product engineering, culture, streamlining their operations. And that was the beginning of my angel investing career. I got very, very lucky with a handful of companies. And I also had the same loss ratio that you see typically at the early, early stage Angel Rounds, which is 80% of the stuff you invest in fails. So after we had sold low laps, I started my second company called Message Me, continued to invest in a bunch of these companies.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “During Wallapse, we would literally sit around that this is a dog patch area into the mission in San Francisco and basically say if you help me I will help you. So give me advisory shares and then advisory shares turned into angel investments. And angel investments at that time really meant 5K here, 10K here. It's all we really had. I think the most amount of money I had in my bank account, even though I was running a huge operation, was like $16,000. And taking”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Like many, many, many years later. And I just felt like he had articulated what I had seen. And that was a perspective that I had learned from the military. It wasn't really used in my entrepreneurial career as explicit as you would think, but it might have been used implicitly just by the sheer fact that I was looking at teams being formed, was looking at camaraderie. You know, you were only as strong as your weakest link. Those lines and those proverbial sayings that people say are true in certain circumstances. So just the act of what team building means and how do you work with multiple teams in order to get an assignment done actually really matters. And I didn't appreciate it as much, but I think I might have implicitly used some of them when I was running a little apps and I was thinking in that way and figuring out how to build teams. You have to figure out a way in which teams can be built for folks that have, frankly, huge egos in the room, and you have to figure out how to retrain them.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “A part of the ecosystem sort of been cool. Just the experience, maybe the pre-college experiences in high school. And so I didn't go to college right off the bat. I went to the military and then for the military, I worked my way back into college and I went to University of Maryland College Park and studied math and history there. And the reason I kind of skip education is that it's not a huge part of my learning experience. I went there for the STEM. I didn't go there because I felt like I was going to learn an extreme amount of skill sets that said it. I learned some stuff about history and math I was already kind of up to speed on. So it was there just to get the stamp. From the military side, because I enlisted in the Army, but I didn't stay and I went to contract with the agencies, part of the program was that you would go to the base, you'd be a part of the process, but you also lived on a part of the line where you could break the rules. And so what I saw a lot of, I was reading this book called Loon Shots.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I'm Indian American, so my dad came 50s and 60s, and my mom came during the late 70s. I just watched them struggle from an extremely early age, that kids early. I think my dad felt any sort of extreme racism. But I got passed up and I could do a better job than my boss. And the reason my boss got promoted is that from his skin or his color, or he's part of some sort of club. And I didn't witness that. I wasn't a part of that. So I don't know. But that was ingrained into my mind that in order for you to succeed, you had to focus on education, you had to focus on making sure you continue to work hard. So the stream of consciousness at home always was work as hard as possible. Now, you would typically someone in the story would say, then I end up working hard. I didn't. I failed everything I did. I failed school. I had like a 1.0 GPA. I would barely attend. I was focused on the things kids focus on, friends.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And when company that sort of recognized this and knew that and had similar characteristics, but they had larger top of the funnel was a company called Nexompt. They did a majority buyout of us in 2011. That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I was thrown into the hot seat.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “In my company called Raffle Play while we were building all these apps, we merged. I ended up starting to work on product. And then we just sprinted in building out the company, went from zero to a couple hundred people. We eventually sold the company in 2011. We had built out a framework to, and you'll see the similar theme. It was a quantitative approach to making sure that when we built a game with distribution, we could measure the half-life of how long it would last. And you could see what the CAC to LTV could look like. We would have a predictive nature on the way in which people would interact in the first one, five, and ten days of how much they would spend over their lifetime. And that's how much spend we would put against it. So to kind of give you a scale, we would spend upwards of $50 to $60 million a month in advertising across mobile and social platforms. We had to be very, very good at measuring it because if you didn't, you would just fail.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “With a couple of friends of mine that were focused on the Facebook platform when it first came out. And that was a company called Rolling On the Floor, Laughing. And there was a similar company called LOL Apps, so laughing out loud applications. And they were focused on distribution of these gifts and quizzes on Facebook, essentially getting hundreds of millions of users very quickly. When I say quickly, the size and scale of how this happened for us and for them, in about a year, I think we went from zero to over 100 million in monthly active uniques for these apps. So what that forced you to do was build data teams, infrastructure teams and a quantitative approach towards making sure that your products stay in the hands of customers as long as possible. The goal was how can we take these distribution models and build longer-term applications? And in a way to do it also was to pool our resources together. So this company called Lolab.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Places, then I slowly started following them back and wanting to work with them. Really around 2006 to 2008 you had the global financial crisis that declined there. While that was happening, everyone was struggling together. So no one could raise capital. Folks were just building, building, building, seeing what they can do. So I used to write white papers. I would do anything. I was actually even an EA for an executive. It was at a startup company just to make sure that we had exposure and building encoding on the side. The unfortunate part was I was actually pretty poor at building and architecting things. And so I was always zero to one scrappy, but I was never able to get past a certain threshold. So part of it was learning how to build and work with a team and figure out what my strengths and weaknesses were. There was this inflection point where I had contracted with Facebook, I had contracted with MySpace, Google, and ORCID open protocols. There were lots of things happening that I ended up starting a company.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I probably insecurity is trying to be cool. I ended up enlisting in the Army, around 17 years old, and to have this process of taking these IQ tests as like the ASVAB test. If you pass that, you take the next one, the next one, the next one. I guess luckily it passed through all of that. So the way in which they think about it is once you go through basic and you've gone through enough of the training of what you were specified to do that you signed up for, some of the three letter agencies come by and then ask if you want to work with them in some way. And so ended up landing with the DIA for a certain period of time and spent my time in the Middle East and a couple of other places at a pretty young age while just contracting and freelancing to build web pages really started with a set of folks that I was freelancing with and got connected with when they started working at post 2001 and things started coming back. They went from Yahoo to Google to a couple other places.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Started my own company, sort of, I guess, mimetic desire to kind of copy what I was seeing around me. And it ended up me just building out web pages for folks and getting paid extremely low wages under the minimum wage just because I was a kid.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Born and raised in California, Santa Clara, and people used to joke that I was just a product of Silicon Valley. My dad was in the startup ecosystem. My mom was in it as well. They had some fits and starts, some failures. But in the late 90s, my dad started a company called Berkeley Network, so that was in the networking gigabit switch side. And up until then, we had lived pretty lower middle class, but I grew up with a computer. I was learning how to code. I was being taught it from my elder cousins. My sisters were doing it. My dad was kind of in the thralls of it as well. It just became sort of the natural education. And then I”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Story to share and something to prove. That said, this field moves quickly so as the disclaimer goes, past accessibility is not a guarantee of future capacity. My guest on the 10th episode of Ventures Eating the Investment World is Arjun Sethi, the co founder and CEO of Tribe Capital, a $1.3 billion venture capital fund built by engineers and scientists to focus on using product and data science to engineer N of one companies and investments. Argent was an entrepreneur who founded and sold two businesses and became an active angel investor before turning to venture capital. Our conversation covers Argin's upbringings in an immigrant family, his early endeavors as an entrepreneur, success as an angel investor, and different way of looking at venture investing. We then turn to his experience implementing his hypothesis at Social Capital in a tribe, including using data science to identify product growth, qualitative factors, decision-making, and working with portfolio companies.”

    2022-03-14 · Capital Allocators · Arjun Sethi – A Technology Company that Deploys Capital at Tribe, Venture is Eating the Investment World 10 (Capital Allocators, EP. 240) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source