YouSaid · the spoken record

Barry Eggers

lines on the record
33
first
2020-11-02
most recent
2020-11-02
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. “I love binging on Netflix. Right now, you know, I've gone through succession on the big succession fan, Ozark, all those kind of shows. Right now I'm watching a so-called ratchet and it's based on a character, Nurse Ratchet, from one float of the cuckoo's nest, which is one of my favorite movies. It basically goes back before that and it follows this person Ratchet who becomes a nurse. It's quite good, actually. So I highly recommend folks that are looking for a new show to watch to watch Ratchet.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I think it will, especially if we end up with a Biden administration, I think it will. Listen, I mean, we've talked about the issues, right? Climate change is a problem. And you sort of look at what happened in the mid-2000s with clean tech investing. It wasn't very successful. That's because cleantech deals take a lot of capital to get off the ground before you even have a chance to take the product out to consumers. And usually you're going into markets that are filled with legacy commodity vendors. And so it's a very difficult set of markets. I do think that startups are going to need some help from state and local governments and federal government in terms of dealing with some of that funding gap. So I think there's big problems to solve. I think we'll see a resurgence of technology applied to those problems and hopefully get to work hand in hand with the government to actually accelerate some of these solutions.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Last night, I like to tell this story. I grew up in the Bay Area in Sunnyville, and when I was growing up in Sunnyville, it was mostly cherry trees and orchards, and there was no Silicon Valley yet. It was just really starting to emerge. And a lot of land and farmland. And as a kid, you'd go out and play. That's what you did all day, right? You'd go out and play football or baseball or whatever outside. And the court next to me, there were four boys. And so I spent a lot of time over there at their house hanging out and playing sports and stuff. And their dad actually worked for Fairchild. And I was at their house one time in the kitchen. And he had this big device sitting on the kitchen table and it was plugged into the phone line and it looked like a big copier, paper copier. And I asked him what it was. They said, well, this is called a modem. I said, what does it do? And he goes, well, you plug it into the phone and it'll actually send this piece of paper to another location. And I was totally blown away by that. It was the first time I'd ever seen technology. I was eight years old. So this was 1970. It really changed my perspective on what technology could mean to the world. And it sort of woke me up a little bit and took a while, but obviously growing.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's funny because people think about impact investing and they assimilate it with reduced returns because you're somehow doing something socially good. And I just, I reject that. Impact investing can produce even better returns than non-impact investing. So when I think about impact, I think about there's a bunch of stakeholders in a company, right? You have your investors, you have your employees, you have your customers, and you just have the community as a fourth stakeholder. And what's the impact on the community? And we have a lot of big problems to solve in the world. Beyond the pandemic, we have a lot of big problems. We have climate change. We have social unrest. We have all sorts of issues around health and well-being of people. So we're going to solve some huge problems in the world over the next 10 to 20 years. And those are impact problems, right? And so I think people are going to make a lot of money for the companies that get it right and solve these big problems.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I have a lot of favorite books, but let me talk about one of them I'm reading right now. It's called Channel Kindness, written by the Born This Way Foundation, so Lady Gaga, her mother, Cynthia Germanata, I'm born this way group. And it's basically just a bunch of stories about random acts of kindness that have impacted people. And I don't know about you, but there's a lot of negativity in the world right now. You turn on the news, and all you see is negativity. So I just needed a little bit of positivity. And when you pick up and read this book, it gives it to you. So I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for some positivity in their life right now. And also look into the Born This Way Foundation. They're a fantastic group.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Leverage is helping a founder, a CEO get something done faster than they would have without you. And overhead is making them get it done slower than without you. A lot of people like to make introductions to CEOs and CEOs oftentimes will have to take them because they feel obliged to do that, but the introductions don't lead anywhere. And I think you have to be careful taking up CEO's valuable time for those kind of introductions. You got to focus on the stuff.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Advice I give for someone that's a new board member is just try to put yourself in the entrepreneur's shoes and the founder's shoes. Understand what are their issues and concerns? What keeps them up at night? What are their motivations? What are their blind spots? And instead of focusing on your issues and your perspective, try to work from their perspective. And so how do you help them? How do you provide leverage for them in their job versus creating overhead? And there's a fine line. So that's the most important thing I think is really putting yourself in the entrepreneur's shoes.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Maybe it comes with Age, but I think when I first started in VC, you get into your board meetings and you're here good and bad news and you get super excited for the good news and you get super depressed about the bad news. And I was a lot more excitable when I first started in VC. And I think you learn over time that every company has a journey. You have a lot of ups and downs with companies. You have to take a long-term view, not a short-term view. And the more you can work with entrepreneurs to work through the difficult times and have a plan, the better the partnership's going to be when things are good. And so there's no reason to overreact with short-term news because all of these investments are long-term journeys.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You got to understand the business reason for doing this, right? You shouldn't do it just because it feels good and it gives you good PR. You should do it because there's a business reason for doing it. And we believe the business reason is by having a more inclusive team, we reach a broader set of entrepreneurs. And if you reach a broader set of entrepreneurs, you're going to see a higher quality set of deals. And if you see a higher quality set of deals, you're going to do better deals and you're going to have better performance. And so as you think about extending your network to underrepresented groups, ideally you reach everybody. And so we believe there's a huge business reason it's going to result in better performance for us longer term. It's going to take some time to develop it, but as you see with the fact that we have 10 females on our team now, it can happen fast and it can make a huge difference in the near term for venture firms. I've talked to a lot of my peers and a lot of my peers have different programs that they're putting in place internally and I think generally the industry wants to collaborate and we want to learn from each other as peers to accelerate the industry faster versus treating this as an area of competitive differentiation between”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And so we put the word out in our network informally that we were going to do this. Within two weeks, we had 350 people apply for 25 spots, and we decided because we had so many fantastic people, we increased it to 42 spots because that was the cap of what we think we could accommodate without starting to degrade the experience. So we took 42 scouts, 50% women, 50% men, a mix of black, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous. And we've already started to kick it off. We've already had a handful of investments being made by these scouts. So my hope is that we're helping to seed the industry with the next generation of BCs from underrepresented racial minority backgrounds.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, and this is an area that I feel really strongly about both with my light speed hat and my NBCA hat, and I'm making a priority for both organizations. The bottom line is we need more black and Latinx entrepreneurs, BCs, board members, LPs, and CapTable investors. So how do we make that happen? We've had some programs in place for diversity and inclusion over the last four years. We have one female investor four years ago. We have 10 now, which I think might be the highest in the industry. Great investors on our team want to do the same with black and Latinx. There's an opportunity. They're underrepresented, which means there's some great people out there that should join our industry. What we're doing actually, and we haven't really talked about this publicly, but we have a scout program where you have scouts that are out looking for deals, for lights being sort of sprinkling a lot of different small investments, 25, 50K in a lot of places. And as those investments sprout up, then they become relevant to lights being. So it's a way for us to extend our network to reach a lot more entrepreneurs. And we've been doing this program for about three or four years for 2020. We decided that our entire light speed scout program would be 100% racial minority.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think BCs are notorious for being poor people managers. That's why they become VCs and not operating people. But having said that, I like that aspect of the job and the business. I like working with our team and I like working with other VCs and the relationships that you develop and some of the challenges and opportunities that come along with it. So I really like that part of the job. It takes a lot more EQ than IQ to do that part of the job.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I mean, starting and running a fund is like running a business. And so it's not just the investment piece. It's the people piece as we talked about. It's the LPs piece. It's managing all the stuff around the business. It's making sure you have a long-term strategy. Where are you expanding to? How are you bringing in people? How are you building out your back office? How are you building out your front office? There's all sorts of elements of building a real business. We have 100 employees at Lightspeed. You know, we started, we had four. So it was definitely much simpler back then when we were just focused on investing and it takes a lot more to really build a platform that moves forward. So, you know, they're just very different things. Being in a partnership and focused on investing versus building a business are two very different things. We're more like the entrepreneurs we work with in terms of building a firm is more like building a company.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, it takes 10 years to be out of business, but I think once you're not able to raise a new fund, it's a slow death. And it's hard for you to be active in the market because entrepreneurs know that you're having trouble raising capital. So it's sort of a death spiral if you can't raise your next fund. So I think it's a faster death than you're portraying”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Listen, we've got a lot of venture funds out there. I think there seems like five new funds a day. I mean, there's a lot of funds out there every time I read about it. It feels like our industry is really expanding. The question is, what is the capacity longer term of the industry? And I think over time, we're going to have a consolidation that capital is not going to be as plentiful coming into our industry. And the best funds will”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think rolling funds are also, I mean, hey, it's convenient not to have to raise capital every time you raise a new fund, right? So if you can have a set of LPs or an LP that's willing to continue to fund you over time, I think that's an interesting option. I think we'll see more of rolling funds. And if you can do it, it's great.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Think there'll be solo capitalists that use their own capital and there'll be solo capitalists that raise outside capital. I mean, Sembel has his own fund now. So I don't think it's just a game of the 0.1%. I think if people have been successful as operators or as investors and they want to go on their own, they can be solo capitalists and they can raise funds from the outside because there's a lot of LPs out there that are looking for that alpha and are trying to find the next big fund and get in early so they can get good allocation to it.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “We've got to embrace and learn how to work with. I like the trend and I think it's also good for entrepreneurs to have someone like that that they can work with closely and develop a nice relationship with.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, again, I think it's an opportunity that was created by sort of structural issues within venture capitals. You said there's lots of money in our industry and a lot of funds are raising larger funds. And as they do that, they tend to move a little bit upstream. I know when we refer to seeds today within Lightspeed, they look a lot like what we used to call Series A's 10 years ago. We've just almost shifted everything to the right one. So Series A's now look like Series B's in some cases. So it creates an opportunity if these seeds start to get larger and they start to account for a larger percentage of the cap table creates an opportunity for people to come in and swoop in below the institutional VCs and get meaningful share of ownership. And that's what's driven this. And we also have a lot of really good entrepreneurs out there that have become VCs or solo capitalists and they can be really helpful to entrepreneurs. So I like the trend. I think it's something that we as a venture firm have to embrace and learn how to work with the solo capitalists. We have a really close relationship with Semel Shah. I think it's been on your show. He's a great dude. He's got a really nice track record and very thoughtful about early stage investing. He's an example of someone that”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's really hard to say. I don't feel like it's bad for anybody. You can compare, I guess, the outcome to what an IPO outcome could be, and someone could argue, gee, you're going to get a lot more bump off an IPO initial trading than you will off a stack. And I don't know whether the data is there or not. And do people view IPOs as the higher quality companies versus SPACs as lower quality companies? So that's the only negative that I could see, but I'm not sure the data is there yet to support those positions. And I think over time as we see more companies choose SPAC, more high quality companies choose SPACs as an option. reputational issue will evolve.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And we're going to see a lot of companies using that as an alternative to IPOs and direct listings over the next several years.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Because the spec is created. It's a vehicle. That vehicle then goes off and looks very company to merge with, like an acquisition dance. And once it finds a company to merge with and they set the terms, then all of a sudden that company becomes a public company. And there's usually a pipe associated with it that is to provide some additional funding so it doesn't have the same issue that direct listings do today. So better pricing and more flexibility on sort of terms than you would in a IPO. You have the pipe so you can raise capital so it's better than direct listing. It's typically faster than an IPO. You can put us back together in two to three months in terms of the acquisition part and going public versus taking six, seven, eight months to really get a company ready for an IPO. The challenge with SPAX is a sort of a lower profile, right? People, I think given the option today, people would prefer an IPO as more straightforward and sort of a higher profile than a spec. But I think that's going to change over time because there's a lot of SPAC vehicles out there. And so a lot of opportunity for liquidity and for companies to go public via SPACs. I think SPACs are here to stay.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I mean, Spax have all of a sudden become a really important factor in our portfolio company's liquidity options, right? So, what are SPACs and why should we worry about them? There's actually, going back to Bill Burley, he wrote a blog in August on SPACs and different options for companies to go public. And I think it's worth reading for anybody. Great pros and cons of each of the different options. And I'll just walk through them real quickly. IPO is the traditional option, right? But some of the issues with IPO are the underpricing that happens. People were leaving money on the table because we have to factor in a large increase on day one trading and also limited access, right? The average person doesn't get access to IPOs. It's spared for the best clients of an investment bank. So direct listings try to deal with that a little bit. And direct listings try to have better pricing mechanisms. So try to assimilate to market pricing. They try to provide better access to Main Street investors. And the problem with direct listings, though, is you typically today cannot do primary capital, right? The company can't raise additional capital through a direct listing, although that could change over time. So hence you come up with SPACs. And SPACs are sort of like a hybrid between an acquisition and an IPO, right?”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, the oversupply of capital venture is a problem. I agree with Bill Gurley on that. And what it does is it drives prices up at every ground. And so when prices go up, typically returns go down. Unless you can somehow compensate with a high-priced liquidity market, which we have in some places, but not everywhere. The idea of venture capital is to buy low and sell high. In some cases, we're buying high and selling higher. But there's only a matter of time while that works.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I mean, it's a great question. I think we all have different answers for that. I like to think about voting for the person that's going to be the best for our country, but each person has to make that individual decision. I think there are a lot of pros and cons to each candidate, but generally, I think that there can be some real positives that come out of a Biden administration. And there's been some positives out of the current administration, but not as many as we had in the past. And so I'd ask people to sort of think about the long-term impact of the presidency on the country versus your own individual short-term impact.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Going to continue, we're sort of in a trade war, and that's going to be a negative for our industry. And then on tax policy, I think there's going to be increased taxes on capital gains. I'm not talking about carried interest. I'm talking about”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Hopefully if Fiden wins, we can get that back on track. Climate change, I think that's going to be a real important part of the Biden administration policy. We've got real issues. Fires out here everywhere. We've got hurricanes on the east. We've got massive tornadoes. We've got flooding. I think it's hard to ignore the impact of climate change. And so I do think that climate change is going to be solved by technology largely and by people changing their daily routines, but technology is a key. And I don't think it's going to be necessarily solved by the big companies. I think the solutions are going to come from small companies and startups. And so I expect that the Biden administration will provide some incentives and work with the startup and VC community to try to enable that to happen fast. And of course, jobs, jobs, jobs, right? We've lost a lot of jobs all throughout the world. We've got to do something about that. And so the job creation engine of the United States is venture capital and its startups. And so we've got to find a way to extend ourselves, not only on the coast, but also in the middle of the country and really make up for some of those lost jobs that we have during COVID. On the negative side, they'll continue to be pressure on foreign investment, which has started with the Trump administration, but I think that's.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, it's a great question. And I get to look at this, though, through my light speed lens as well as my lens as I'm chairman, current chairman of the NBCA. So I get a lot of exposure to politics and policy that affect both startups and BC. So we've done a lot of analysis on which way it could go and what the implications are. I think we know what we're going to get with the Trump presidency if he's re-elected. One of the downsides of that, I think, has really been difficult on immigration policy, which I think has had some negative effect for sure on our industry. With the Biden administration and assuming more of a democratic Washington, I think there's some pros and cons. From the pro side, I think he's going to invest a lot in infrastructure, including high-speed internet. So I think it's going to continue to enable our industry and also potentially create opportunities for our companies to make money. He's definitely more friendly towards immigration. And so things like the startup visa, and that is where someone comes to our country and they create jobs, a company that creates jobs. We let them stay for an extended period. And I think that should just be automatic, but it's something that we're starting with the Obama administration, and it sort of got off track with the Trump administration.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So many elements of building a successful firm, but I think the people element is the one that people often overlook, and that is bringing in great people, retaining and motivating great people, and creating a culture and sort of working through all the people dynamics that you get in a firm. And it's not something that anyone teaches you in any school. And so you have to learn it on the job. Partnerships are way different than corporations. Corporations at least have some formal hierarchy. Partnerships are supposed to be flat. And so there's sort of this unusual element of sort of lack of hierarchy and it sort of finds its way over time. But the people element is really hard. And obviously you have good people situations and bad people situations that you have to manage through. But the best VC firms have great people and they work together well as a team.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It's been a great, fun ride with a lot of interesting twists and turns along the way. I've learned a ton about building a firm and feel fortunate that we're where we're at today. And hopefully we can continue to evolve as the industry evolves.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Off and start light speed. And it's funny because many VC firms are started by groups linering off from existing firms. And so light speed's no different. And the four of us splintered off and started Lightspeed and started from scratch, really. We had no LPs. We had a track record, which was helpful, but we had no portfolio, no fees coming in. So we raised a fund and started from there and then started hiring out the team. It took us two or three funds really to get to critical mass.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I'm sort of an unlikely VC. I didn't really know that I wanted to do a VC until I was in my mid 30s. I went through college and business school not thinking about VC. I didn't even take the VC class in business school because I just thought it was something I didn't want to do. I wanted to be an operating person. But one thing led to another, I was working at Cisco and I started doing acquisitions for Cisco and really enjoyed that and bought a few companies and all of a sudden one of the VCs that I'd gone to school with, business school, reached out and said, hey, have you thought about being a VC? And that's when I took a few months and really looked at the opportunity and one thing led to another and I joined VC industry in January of 1997, which was a great time to join because it was right in the beginning of the telecom boom. So I went through the initial boom of 97 to 2000 and then the bust. And that was a really quick cycle. And sort of in the early 2000s, looked around at my partners and there was a subset of partners I felt like we could create a different firm with. We could take and create more of a firm that's based on more of an equal footing firm. We had some hierarchy in the current firm I was in. We felt like there's a subset of us that could sort of splint.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Happy to be here the second time, actually. So it's just like starting it live if you host it five times, you get a jacket or something like that.”

    2020-11-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source