YouSaid · the spoken record

Avidan Ross

lines on the record
25
first
2018-11-05
most recent
2018-11-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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

  1. “Our most recent investment is dusty robotics and the reason we were extremely excited about Dusty was not just because she's focused on a trillion dollar industry of construction, but the process by which she went through to deeply understand the market and use her background in robotics in order to solve big problems for the industry led to an amazing, amazing solution set that we think is going to change the way that both residential and commercial buildings are built”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, I would say they're both the same thing. I am a loudmouth and I say exactly what I'm thinking. And a lot of people love that. They love.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, I would say make sure you want to do this for the rest of your life or for at least a very long time. And I know that the rest of your life is going to be a very long time as one of the younger emerging managers out there. But I think that at the end of the day, it's a very long, open loop to find out how you're doing. And so I would say make sure you invest the time to understand venture and understand that it's something you want to do because the early days or the honeymoon phase are very, very exciting and you want to make sure that you're understanding the next steps. understanding what it takes two, three, five years, second fund, third fund. And so just make sure you're ready for that commitment.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, what I would say is board members have to remember that they work for the company and you don't join a board for the prestige or the addition to your resume. You join the board because you're ready to work. You become an extension of the organization. And if you're not ready to fight for the company through thick and threat and work hard for all the shareholders, I think you're in for a terrible surprise when if markets ever shift, the board is going to be asked to do a lot more than we do today.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So I think we don't spend enough time talking about mental health. I think athletes are constantly working out. They're going to the gym and trying to hit peak performance. Silicon Valley is a world of people whose peak performance is around their mental state. Their ability to work extremely hard, think about complex problems, be able to resolve 30 different things in a matter of a day. And that takes a toll on your mental health. I think burnout is a real thing. And I think we need to speak about it, but not to speak about it, but talk about various types of resolution for it. So I think we should spend a little bit more time prioritizing mental health as if we were athletes focused on peak performance.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, I'm going to give a little bit of an oldie and a goody. So, Daniel Pink wrote a book called Drive, which is subtitled The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. And from my perspective, this changed everything about how I worked with technical teams. At the end of the day, it's not about money. It's not about just quote unquote winning, but it's a lot about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And this is how we at Root Ventures motivate ourselves, but we also help motivate our understand the motivations of the founders in our portfolio because so many of them are built around purpose, built around mastery of a very complex problem, and want the autonomy knowing that VCs are the coaches and not the quarterbacks. And so from our perspective, Drive really encompasses a lot of how we think about the market and how our teams are operating.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “A lot of the engineering schools have been cultivating their entrepreneurial studies programs. And so what we found is that a lot of the best engineering schools are now turning out people with amazing foundational engineering skills, but a hunger to build a company, not just build a point solution. And from our perspective, the timing as to why is it today that we're going to see more masters and PhD engineering degrees at the CEO helm of companies than MBAs is because of those things. And it's taken a while for engineers like myself to build out positions in the venture capital community. And while it might be slow for the engineers to become CEOs and founders of these companies, we think it's inevitable. We think that having that technical lean at the top of an organization is essential.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So we think about market timing risk a little bit differently. We think about market timing risk as to why now? What about today makes it the perfect time to be investing in deeply technical founders, in hard tech, and people focused on complex software problems, complex physical computing problems? And we believe that the timing today comes from the fact that a lot of people before us have paved the way. So we think that big companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft have built out fantastic engineering manager programs. So all of these people who have had spectacular experience building solutions are now building teams to build those solutions, which is a great path by which they become CEOs or CTOs or founders of entrepreneurial organizations because they understand all the things around recruiting and motivation and sales and marketing. And a lot of the building blocks that makes them a technical CEO. And I think the next piece is that”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's really interesting that you ask that because we were looking recently at our CEOs and what we end up finding is that the more common trait amongst them is a hunger to learn and hunger to solve big problems. The reality is that when you're investing in big heavy industries,”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Supply chain from end to end. So not only are you going to arrive perfectly on time at Long Beach or in Los Angeles, you're going to arrive on time based on any backlog of cargo that you need to bring back to China. So it might be perfect to arrive on Tuesday or it might be perfect to arrive on Wednesday and you really get into a very interesting marketplace dynamic that wasn't otherwise possible if you weren't sitting on every single ship.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Has to understand they need to start from a point of a clear, concise ROI, and then they get to employ what we call the Trojan horse mentality. And this is our key element to investing in B2B and enterprise. The Trojan horse idea is you bring something into the customer that has a clear ROI, but once they've adopted it, then you can start upselling them or taking advantage of the data you're collecting from being inside of that company or that industry and change the industry as a whole. So another great example is Nautilus shipping. And what Nautilus is they put a black box on extremely large container ships and cargo ships and are able to precisely control the speed of that ship to optimize for fuel savings. Another great example, very close to extreme trucking, but the opportunity lies one step further, which is if you have this box on hundreds or thousands of ships, you now can control optimization of movement of package of all of the goods in the supply chain.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think it's a fantastic question about the audience and the buyers in the legacy industry. And the reality is that they are not digital natives. They are not tech first thinkers, but they know their business extremely well. And they understand the levers they can pull in order to grow top line and bottom line. And from our perspective, we're looking for entrepreneurs who understand what's technically possible, but also understand how to meet the market where it is. I think a great example of this is an investment we made in a company called Extreme Trucking. to create active aerodynamics for long-haul trucks. I mean, this is an industry that has not evolved in years, but when you show them a 5% fuel savings, they quite simply say, I don't care about the tech. I care about the savings. I am willing to adopt technology if it's a clear ROI. So I think that anyone going out to sell into businesses”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “A whole so a great example is we're invested in a company called Tortuga, and Tortuga builds automated harvesting robots for the agricultural industry. That's a world in which there's been a little bit of automation because John Deere has made bigger and better tractors. But the ability to make hyperintelligent decisions about which strawberries to pick or which fruits are ready for sale is a very interesting decision because you can either make it purely based on its readiness or you can understand the entire supply chain to realize that there is a glut of this type of fruit already in the supply chain. Leave it on the vine for an extra 24 to 48 hours. And I think that when you look at that way, you start to see that there is an entire set of industries out there in the world that have not received the Silicon Valley treatment as far as digital transformation beyond just the traditional back office enterprise SaaS type of tech.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, so when we think about the old and boring industries, we're actually thinking about really, really old industries. We're thinking about agriculture, mining, construction, supply chain, logistics, manufacturing. And these are industries that are trillions of dollars in size. But the impact they've received from the technology world has been primarily in the back office, new ERP systems, new CRM systems. They are using software to change their behind-the-scenes workflow, the amount of automation they've received has been quite minimal. And that is because we didn't have the ability to make really, really smart decisions out there in the field. So what I believe is happening today is that all of these legacy industries are starting to realize that there is an opportunity for them to bring automation out into the field and change the industry.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “For manufacturing that are function based rather than form based. And that's only possible today because designers have GPUs built into their desktops. Now, it could have worked years ago, but it would have taken hours, if not days, for you to see the results of your computational structures. Now, with a GPU in every box, we're able to run that code directly on the GPU and create a real-time experience, meaning the engineer now has software that operates at the speed that they design.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, so we look at our hardware investments as actually software companies at their core. The definition of these companies is often that the software is the differentiator. But we also make a lot of investments purely in software companies. Now, that being said, many of those software companies are only viable today because of that example of the peace dividends of the autonomous car. So a great example is a lot of investment has been made in GPUs, ultra high speed processors that are able to do multi-point graphics processing. So they're very prevalent in video games and Bitcoin mining and specifically in the world of autonomous vehicles of taking in lots of data and making really intelligent decisions.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, there are absolutely pieces of hardware or physical products out there that can get to venture scale without the post-purchase revenue. But most of them rely on being a very, very heavily branded consumer experience. And the harsh reality is that everybody on our team, all four investing partners are engineers by background and training. And so our empathy lies often with the business unit and our empathy lies often with engineers. So we're more often going to be investing in developer tools over a very fancy branded new consumer AR sunglasses. I mean, no offense to Snap, but that's not the area that we look at more often.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “De facto drone platform so it's not just about buying the drone it's about applications that run on top of the drone. That being said we see companies all the time that are great margin businesses and we often turn to them and just ask the question of why venture because the reality is there's so many physical products out there in the world that are just quite simply not that venture scale or backable and we're very upfront and honest with entrepreneurs building physical products and hardware.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, so we won't invest in something that relies just on margin alone. From our perspective, that's not a venture scalable business. And by the way, it is a great business for many people to build a product that they simply sell for a profitable margin and move on to sell the next thing. What gets us more excited is the ability to stack on recurring revenue or other forms of entrenchment in the business. So whether that is to raise a razor blade model of selling a product and then selling disposable items or add-ons, the services model similar to Dropcam or Ring, selling you video storage for your product, being building a platform, right? So one of our companies is a company called Particle. Particle is the largest professional IoT development platform in the world. And basically what that is built is a huge engineering ecosystem building applications and services on top of their firmware and IoT distribution and platform. DJI is another great example. They've become”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Information coming from the end node or from the edge, connect it to all of the other sources of information out there in the world and make the most intelligent decision possible or provide a service to the end node so that your nest is doing the ultimate decision making about when to turn your thermostat on and off based on knowing not only the weather forecast, but the historic information for how your house performs based on turning the temperature up and down to optimize for savings. So that is something that is not about the commodity component, but instead the ongoing services provided so many people are able to charge a premium for that ongoing service.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Absolutely. The commoditization of these components is the ultimate benefit to entrepreneurs because any entrepreneur who's coming in and saying, I'm going to create the next Wi-Fi chip, we are always asking that question of, well, what happens when this becomes a commodity component? Because no matter what, if someone's simply thinking about it as a line item on their bill of materials, they're simply looking at it as the utility it provides during manufacturing. What we think is more interesting is the fact that all of these things are benefiting from connectivity. Nest is obviously Wi-Fi connected with multiple radios. And when you're connected, you now have the opportunity to sell services. You get to interconnect your componentry to the internet. So think, for example, about a low-cost sensor is sitting out in the field. Now it has unlimited free connectivity into the cloud. The cloud now has extreme amounts of compute. And with that computation, you can now take advantage of”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Was a capital efficient world of people focusing on legacy industry. And I just had this revelation and turned to my partners and said, we need to do something about the moat built around these companies is neither deep nor wide. And it's getting narrower and shallower. And their decision was to go out and raise a distressed buyout fund to buy the companies being exposed. And I said, I think there's a better opportunity in seed stage. So I took a year off, ended up doing some fun side things like building fire breathing pizza ovens on the food network for a show that never made it to air. So that was a blast and then made my way into investing in all these early stage startups that are focused on hard tech and disrupting legacy industry.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Them, they said, Well, come to Menlo Park and we'll show you. And I got to see the Elon Musk Martin Eberhardt School of Building Hardware, which was the Tesla Roadster. I don't know if you remember the Roadster, but it was awesome. Yeah, it's a beautiful car and Tesla was called a car company. But the great story behind the Roadster was that it was actually a lotus. They ripped out the drivetrain, built a custom drivetrain, which was no small feat, but were able to call themselves a car company. So that's the ultimate MVP, demonstrating your core technology. And the next piece was, you know, maybe the car wasn't pre-ordered on Kickstarter, but it was a pre-ordered car. So the supply chain risks and minimum order quantities were much more under control. They were using digital fabrication techniques and most importantly, the car was treated like a rolling platform, meaning people purchased the car and then upgraded software, added autopilot, did all these things that were simply saying you didn't have to rely as much on the margin of the vehicle because there were other opportunities for gaining revenue downstream. And so that sort of opened my eyes. I went super deep into understanding of”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Head of IT for a small investment firm down in Los Angeles. And I would say I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And we grew from 200 million under management to over 35 billion under management during the eight years I was there. And I rose from being the head of IT to the CTO. And early on, we weren't investing in much that piqued my interest. But over the years, we started doing a lot of investing in energy and infrastructure. So infrastructure is in like water, wind, solar, smart grid, vehicle telematics, building energy management. And this all sort of came to a head about eight years ago, I was approached by a team leading Tesla. And they basically said to me, we need $2 million and we're going to build a vehicle telematics company that's basically going to compete with a $200 million rollup we had just done, not believing.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Thank you very much, Harry. I appreciate you taking in the call this morning. I am well caffeinated, but I would tell you that you have been my driving buddy to Palo Alto more times than you know. I've thrown your podcast on 2X Fast Forwards. You're the 12 minute VC to me, but it's been awesome having your show and really just what you've documented for the world adventure. My path to venture is not exactly the straight and narrow path. I started out as an engineer working in the 90s and 2000s. I was working on cable modems at Excited Home, which was a big collapse in the first dot-com boom. I worked on voiceover IP handsets while doing my research at Columbia University, studying computer science and embedded systems. I even worked on fax to email gateways at a company called EFAX or J2 down in Los Angeles. But after the crash in 2001, 2002, I ended up sort of falling backwards into the investment world, not the traditional venture world, but the much more old school private equity-style investment world from the tech side.”

    2018-11-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source