YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Lerer

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30
first
2016-09-05
most recent
2016-09-05
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Hook, it is truly the soul of the business to help people. And Sam has just written an amazing book called For the Love of Money, which I believe is going to, if it's not already a New York Times bestseller, is well on its way to being one, it's all about the addiction to money and sort of living a reform life around really wanting to help people. And I think that that genuine desire to do something that's great for other people will show through in the concept, will endear his consumers to him, will endear investors and VCs to him, and ultimately give him the sort of tools he needs to build a really big business. And so that's why we did that deal. Course, thank you so much for having me. And I love the show and keep doing it if I can ever help with any introductions. Just ping me.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Anywhere from sort of three to four dollars a serving, which is competitive with all the very unhealthy fast food in those areas to counter that will also open up every table in more well-off business neighborhoods where they'll actually have dynamic pricing where people in the sort of more well-off neighborhoods will pay more for their food knowing that they are actually helping to offset food in these other neighborhoods where there is the real crisis for him started with something he realized around single mothers raising multiple children and just raising their families in incredibly unhealthy ways that led to shorter lifespans and real health problems. And so what I love about this business is he's building an amazing new food brand, but he's doing it with this incredible cause and this real mission behind it. And it's not a fun little charity.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Our most recent public investment, I think, is a company called Everytable, and every table is a, think of it as like a predemech or a sweet green in that it's a fast, casual restaurant concept. It's launched in Los Angeles, and the idea behind it is that it's really mission driven in that the founder, this amazing sort of reformed Wall Street banker named Sam Polk, had an idea to solve a public health crisis, which is the obesity and diabetes and just incredibly unhealthy eating that happens in less well-off urban neighborhoods around the country. So the concept is that he'll open up healthy, incredibly affordable, incredibly high quality commissary. Well, there'll be a commissary kitchen that creates for storefronts in less well-off neighborhoods that charge.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I am very nervous in that if we take for granted that Hillary has a huge lead and is obviously one million times more qualified, we might not show up at the polls the way we need to to put him down and make him never show his face again. So I'm worried just in people getting complacent. Him becoming the president would be the worst thing that has happened in the history of the United States since its inception. I think he is a racist pig who makes other racist, sexist, misogynistic, disgusting people feel like they are allowed to share those opinions and believe those things. And I would feel very uncomfortable having my family live in a country that would nominate somebody like Donald Trump to be the president.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “My father for sure. He had me as his son is how it came about. And, you know, we've been partnered investing for a long time and obviously built similar businesses at Huffpo and Thrillist and all that's great. But I think just the way that he's advised me from a business perspective in particular around making sure that before he worries about the performance of the business, he worries about me being happy is a very good lesson and one that I'm trying to pass on to my son and one that I think in some weird way, I actually try to sort of pass on to the companies we work with as well and just helping them understand that while this is important and is serious and we do care deeply about making a return and the business part of this that this isn't life or death and that you got to have fun while you're building these things.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I think we've very clearly decided as a fund we love early stage investing. We think we felt an incredibly strong brand in it. We think we offer a lot of value as a partner to sort of early founders. And so hopefully we can have a bunch more funds doing more of the same building of great portfolio of early stage founders. Maybe over time we're helping some of our companies with more later stage money, with some sort of opportunity funds of various sorts. But generally speaking, we want to be the strongest fund in early stage technology investing in the world.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That sounds great Favorite book. Well, I don't read nonfiction. I read smuddy fiction. I don't know what my favorite, I love so many. I have not read 50 shades. I'm reading the Goldfinch right now, which I adore. I'm loving the Goldfinch. So today that's my favorite book.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I think brand building 20 years ago was easier in that you, like you sort of could buy your brand growth, which was there was really one channel that was so much more powerful than all the others from a marketing perspective, which was television advertising. And so if you had the money to go and buy the linear TV spots in the finite amount of time that existed, in some ways you could win by yelling loudest. I think that that's much more difficult today because of how fragmented consumer attention is. And so it is not easier to build a brand today. That being said, if you are built for these modern pipes and you're smart about how you use them and you're a stepper to ahead of the rest of the market, you can make a lot of progress more efficiently and sort of less expensively, I think, than ever before. So it's a double-edged sword. It's more democratic today. Sort of anyone can win, but there are more people competing for time.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so, if they are going to build something and never sell it, you'd like to know that there's opportunities to sort of take little pieces off the table about being a good partner.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I mean, I think it's very driven by the founding team and what they want. You try to not make your investors, like as an investor, you don't want to be the ones making those decisions. I think obviously at certain times there may be moments where someone shows up and makes an offer that a company can't refuse or that they shouldn't refuse. And we have opinions in those places. But generally speaking, we'd love our companies to sort of take the approach that you've seen a war be take, for instance, which is we're going to build something for 20 years. We're going to put our heads down. And then in those situations, you would hope that the companies would create opportunities for investors to get pieces of liquidity as time goes on for investors as they think about creating liquidity for themselves. And that doesn't mean a one-to-one, but it just means that if a company is going to go it alone, you want to know that those founders have a respect for their investors, that they understand that they've invested money because they do ultimately want to”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Traditional guys in retail, the traditional guys in media, really the traditional guys in sort of most consumer businesses are all waking up and saying, oh shit, this digital thing, which has been an annoyance for the last 10 or 15 years, is going to be a lot more than an annoyance for the next 10 or 15 years, and we need to stop growing our business through stock buybacks, and we need to start growing our business through acquiring these new brands and this kind of talent. And you've seen Facebook and Google and Amazon and the best companies in the world all grow through acquisition. And I think better late than never, probably, you're going to see big retail and big media become very acquisitive in the next, you know, it's already started and you're going to see it continue for the next several years.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Just great at things that aren't the skills that are necessary to be successful today. And so all those factors are what make up, not to mention that they're typically run by people who just simply aren't the modern consumer. They're run by people who sort of are used to buying things and learn about things in a way that is no longer as relevant. And so for so many reasons, traditional big retail companies aren't poised to sort of thrive and lead today. It doesn't mean that many of them won't succeed because they have really robust balance sheets and they have brands that have a lot of recognition and they do have a bunch of valuable skill sets. But I think you'll see retail, just like you'll see media, consolidate and you'll see lots more acquisitions happening. The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the Jet and Dollar Shave acquisitions, you're seeing these are the first dominoes in what will be a bunch of dominoes falling, I believe, in consolidation where the”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Reaching audience and buying audience as retailers through those old pipes are generally speaking not the ones who believe in their heart of hearts that mobile is the first screen and who understand how to use social and search and modern advertising and modern communication tactics to reach the audiences that they ultimately need to get in front of. And so it's not just selling direct to your customer, but it's actually how you even build your brand, how you advertise your brand, how you use data to make decisions and how you use technology to make decisions in your business. All of these factors contribute to a new kind of retail company because the old retail companies were just built to do different things. They were built as amazing real estate speculators. They were built as amazing logistics companies where now so much of your logistics operations can be outsourced. They were built to be amazing linear TV media buying entities.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Of a world where everybody is connected, where you're able to effectively sort of benefit from, so information travels differently today than it did 30 or 40 years ago. So old brands were built on basically from a marketing perspective one set of pipes, which was your linear TV pipes really dominated by cable. And I think you're seeing this disruption happen in media today, but it actually affects every industry that used TV as an advertising medium, which is that there are new pipes, the new pipes for content discovery and content distribution are owned by Google and Facebook and Snapchat, and to a lesser degree, Twitter, and the Messengers. That is where new, that is where sort of millennial and that word is overused, but that's where the next generation of consumers lives and gets their information and spends their time for the most part. And so brands that are built are”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, so look, director consumer from a commerce perspective, I think, is it's very appealing for obvious reasons in that you own your own customer, you own your own data, you sort of control your own destiny, you're able to avoid margin dilution from middlemen. And obviously in a world where everyone is connected through social and through search and really just the internet has made the world smaller, we are more able to build brands more quickly and build direct-to-consumer businesses in more cost effective and agile ways than ever before. So it's inevitable that we're going to continue to see direct-to-consumer businesses being built. I don't think just being direct to consumer is disruptive anymore, though. Just selling products without a middleman is no longer enough to sort of consider yourself to be, you know, sort of breaking the old model. But I do think that taking advantage of”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I mean, the best pattern we have is that the teams that are the best win. And so let's always be team focused first and foremost and not let ourselves get sort of enamored with big sexy ideas, but with teams who don't really understand and who we don't think have the same, who we're not able to really compare from an apple's to apples perspective against other stuff that we.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It still happens, and it happens not infrequently, but more often now we're starting to see disruption happen further out from the core. And I think the key for us is going to be not to go and chase and say, well, you know, we've seen disruption of media and retail and the businesses we really understand. Now we're starting to see disruption in farming, in clean energy, in medical supplies. Not that there isn't going to be disruption, but that we may not be the guys with the most expertise to look at that stuff. And so I think we're now seeing more deals get further out from where we really think we're our smartest. And so that's a pattern that we're now recognizing. And I think we're just trying to make sure that we stick to our guns and we stay focused on what we've stayed focused on. There's still so much room in the categories that we're in. And maybe the disruption is going to be less obvious from the idea, but it's still...”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, that's a good question. I think from we've seen a lot more. I think that we've had the benefit of being inside so many great companies and getting weekly and monthly and quarterly updates from all these fantastic companies and also all these companies that for whatever reason haven't succeeded that we don't just have the pattern of we've seen a bunch of pitches, but we've actually seen a bunch of operations and we've seen a bunch of exits and we've seen a bunch of failures. more data is better as long as you're willing to sort of parse through it. I think one of the patterns that I would say we've definitely started to notice is so many of the big obvious ideas have been taken and there's multiple companies building them. It's rarer that we see some life-changing, brilliant invention or idea that we never imagined would be possible.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “That's a reason not to do a deal. A reason to do a deal is I absolutely have to do this deal and I'll go to the Matt fighting for it because X, Y, or Z.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Be decisive positively or negatively on a deal. And doing that, making fast decisions doesn't let you get caught up in FOMO quite as much, I don't think. But look, FOMO is like the second you stop being terrified of FOMO, you make FOMO investments. And over the 275 companies that we've made in the history of the fund, there are definitely ones that we could point to and say, FOMO investment, FOMO investment, FOMO investment, some of them have been successful. Some of them have not been successful. And there's been great companies that we've passed on and missed. And I think that you have to be comfortable with that. And you have to always stick your guns. And if you pass, you have to know why you pass. And if you don't pass, you have to know definitively why you don't pass. And it can't be, yeah, it seems pretty good and everyone sort of likes it. And we think that the team is smart and there's other good people around the table. Like, that's not a reason to do a deal.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Invested with people who you think can add value, but generally speaking, not ever making a decision based on who you're co-investors are, always making it based on the company. I think it's an easy trap to fall into, which is you see a bunch of good brand name VCs, and so you give a company more credit than it deserves. And so I think making sure that we, in some cases, have less information about who's investing makes me more capable of making cleaner decisions. I would also say that because we now write larger checks and generally lead almost every round that we're in, we actually have to have more conviction and move faster. And if we want to do a deal, we're not able to just sort of hang around and see if we like it and see if it gets hot and sort of hover. We need to strike and we need to go and we need to get sort of a leadership position from an investor perspective. That doesn't mean we need to go and like buy the dealer or pay up for the deal, but it means we need to have conviction and move fast.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so FOMO is a part of life as an investor. And I think more so a part of life in early stage than in later stage. In early stage, in some way, you're always investing in a dream. There's a lot of nice dreams and there's a lot of good salespeople and there's a lot of companies raising that you're not investing in. And so for us, FOMO is definitely something that we have to be aware of. Being aware of it is how you don't fall victim to it, always making sure that you are making investments, not because of a herd mentality, not out of fear, but out of sort of offensive desire and interest in a company, not out of, oh, but if we miss this, we're going to look like schmucks because we see it first and because our peers are doing it. And so a few different ways to avoid that. One of the ways to avoid it is frankly not asking really, I don't want to say not caring because it's always nice to.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “That they're going to be able to pivot because so many of the businesses that we invest in don't end up looking like what we invest in. We need to be able to have an imagination. And I think that balancing sort of the professionalism of fund investing with sort of the way that you use your emotion and your gut to make decisions as an angel is the line that we have to balance on.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That you wouldn't do also as a fund part of the success of any investor is pattern recognition. And I think by creating a fund and by sort of institutionalizing what we did, we were able to build a brand. And the importance of brand shouldn't be understated. Brand is what gives us so much amazing deal flow, which enables us to really be able to see enough companies to be able to identify the ones that seem to be the outliers and the really special ones. And so I think we're a lot better and better positioned to succeed. I think we see a lot more. I think we're more thoughtful and more careful as fund investors than we were as individuals. But at the same time, we have to follow our gut still. We can't make everything fit into a formula or fit into some plan where we're able to sort of, you know, do some risk analysis on the money. As early stage investors, emotion plays a role and gut plays a role and finding people who are doing amazing things and believing in them and really believe.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Well, I think the idea is that it doesn't. I think in its best scenario, you invest other people's money the same way that you would invest your own money because obviously you're very careful with your own money and you're trying to turn some of it into more of it and you're spending time investing in things that you believe in. And so from that perspective, nothing has changed. I think having to be more a little bit more buttoned up around thinking about this sort of balancing of risk and reward and thinking about reporting and thinking about just like how we have a real line into all of our companies at all times and know what's going on so that we don't have surprises is probably the biggest difference.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Came over and joined us, and that's when we got really serious and started investing. But I know this is the longest answer in the history of the world, but the thing I would just say is we're really not at the end of the day. I don't feel like I am a venture capitalist. I feel like I'm an operator who is able to invest because of the way we sort of set up our life and our businesses. But for me, the best investors, particularly the best early stage investors, are going to be people who have actually been in the trenches and built and sold their own businesses and raise money for their own businesses and gone through sort of that slog versus someone who is just an incredibly thoughtful number cruncher. I think that the operating experience is crucial and it's why we've been successful.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yes, but what the trade was is I had deal flow because my peers were the ones starting the companies and I knew the entrepreneurs and he had the access to the money and the idea was he brings the money, I bring the deal flow and we would start a small fund investing in our peers in New York. And what happened is that first group of companies we invested in turned out to be a very good one and that was Worbie Parker and Birchbox and Everlane and a bunch of very prominent consumer facing businesses that ultimately helped to benefit the Lir Ventures name at that point. That was before Eric joined us. And we got enough success from an investor perspective as well as enough brand recognition that it enabled us to go and raise more money and continue to do what we did at a larger scale. And then when he sold the Huffington Post, Eric Hippo, who had been working at Softbank and was a sort of professional investor prior to being an operator at HuffPo,”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And been quite successful. And within that sort of vintage was business insider and BuzzFeed and paperless post, a company called I'm in like with you that ended up becoming a gaming company and selling to Zynga. And so we had a number of successful startups that we had invested in as individuals. But my dad sort of took a step back and said, you know, I think things are changing. I see your friends and peers wanting to go and start companies rather than join companies. And I've been around in New York for a long time and I've seen a bunch of cycles and I feel like something special's happening here and we should have a more active role in it. And I sort of said that's a really nice idea theoretically, but I have a job and you have a job and I don't know where we're going to find the time for this. And he said, well, what about if we raise a fund and we can start to build out a team and get help? And so I said, fine. We said, let's go see if we can raise some money. He raised a lot of money. I raised approximately no money. But what”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Popular professions for decades leading up to sort of the 2000s. And as I started building thrills, my dad started building the Hovington Post, something changed in New York. And I think a lot of this was actually on the back of Facebook and just how Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and even the movie The Social Network started to sort of popularize and in many ways I think to a degree that wasn't even realistic turn entrepreneurs into celebrities and you saw all these people start to want to start businesses. And my father had been making some very haphazard small angel investments in technology companies, but there wasn't a huge number of them in New York and he had made them and sort of with consulting with me over the course of several years and about six years ago one day he sent me an email and he said, hey, look at the companies that we've invested in. Look at our list. And it was 10 or 12 companies that had all, to some degree, gone on.”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, so I think I sort of fell backwards into venture in that I had been operating and building thrillist, which I'm still building, and actually my father was operating as well and had been the co-founder of the Huffington Post. And he and I had started thrillist in the Huffington Post at similar times, both in New York City and were building our businesses in what was a very different time in New York. And so today it's easy to look at the New York sort of ecosystem or even like the U.S. tech ecosystem and say, oh, there's so many funds and there's so much money available and technology is this giant industry and this huge trend and there's this amazing community of founders. Well, a decade ago this wasn't really the case and in particular in New York people graduating from the best colleges in the best graduate schools didn't automatically want to go and start companies like they do today. And in fact, most of them wanted to go and work on Wall Street or go become lawyers or go do things that had sort of been the traditionally”

    2016-09-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source