YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Trenchard

lines on the record: 64
first: 2021-12-09
most recent: 2021-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Taste, what made a Apple product really great? What made a Sony product at that time really great? I was very lucky to be around to the best consumer product, electronics companies at the time. And so that's probably what holds over the most for me from my early upbringing. And I did go to Cornell. I was very lucky to have an amazing experience there. I started my first company when I was an undergrad as a sophomore that was right in the mid-90s when Netscape was getting going. It was the early, early days of the internet, like Netscape Communicator just had launched. And I originally started this concept kind of like a city search thing, but ultimately that didn't go anywhere. It kind of pivoted into being a consulting shop in one of my...”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that I learned early on from looking at all those products, and I think I got a sense of Steve Jobs had this famous saying about Microsoft. He said, they just have no taste. They just got no taste. Like their products are just not wonderful. They were obviously a behemoth in the 90s and in the early aughts, but they just had no taste. And so I think what I learned or at least got a sense through exposure to so many different products early on.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it one of the first national supercomputing centers, one of the few, and had a legendary computer science department? That's what I went there to go study originally. You know, even before Cornell, I was lucky that I got exposure to a local founder who started a company and I did a lot of hacking for him as a kid. He hired me when I was 13 years old. And so that was the beginning of my career, really, was when I was starting to build databases and apps for this guy that was in the town I grew up and I grew up in a town called Larchmont in Westchester County. And he was building these businesses. So that gave me this early exposure to entrepreneurship as well and what it was like to really own one's own career and destinate, which was also very lucky for me that I got that exposure at such a young age.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's funny that you mentioned back in the day early apples and all the mags and everything, my first rig was a Commodore 64. And I remember putting Flight Simulator in and waiting two minutes and 40 seconds for that thing to load. So you went to Cornell and Cornell was like a hotbed of cool stuff going on in that era especially.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you really fall in love with. And the advantages of compounding knowledge over time for me, I was just super lucky to have that start early in my career.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being in the industry and bringing home these great products, he got to borrow from work, whether it was the latest Mac computer or it was some Sony product like a Sony Walkman or video camera. There was always something coming home. And in addition to that, he also knew I love to devour information about tech and he would bring home Mac Week, PC Week, Mac World. Mac user, all these magazines and periodicals. That was the way you got information. There was no internet back then. There's all the news about tech was in these weekly and monthly periodicals. And I would just pour through them. And it had a major impact on me. I fell in love with tech at a very young age and I had unusual access just because my dad's job to really cool devices and cool tech along the way and saw some ideas that were ahead of their time. Like the first general magic device, the magic link, which was foundational to so many things that happened later with mobile devices. In any career, I think there's a tremendous amount of value in going deep on something. And often you do that with the things.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you, Chris. Really excited to be here. I was really lucky. I was a child in the 80s at a time when technology was coming up and really starting to hit its mainstream with consumers and really starting to go from these personal, you know, we were starting to get personal computers. We're going from these big room size computers down to things that you could have on your desk. And it was the era of Steve Jobs and Wozniak in the early days of Apple. I was only five years old when the Apple II came out. But I was very lucky that I had a father who worked in tech. He worked in what was then called MIS management information systems. It now would be called the IT department. And he ran a group at Sony Electronics, doubly good for maybe because Sony was also a fantastic product company in the 80s, putting out some of the best tech products of the era for consumers, but he also got access to all these great computers. And so what got me hooked early was exposure through my dad and just having my”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. You know, whenever I sit down with somebody, I'm reminded of this old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that I probably saw at some point in the mid-80s. And it was one of the Sunday Calvin and Hobbs, which was a full page, and it was gloriously illustrated. And it's Calvin and Hobbs, the Insuciant Boy in his imaginary tiger walking through the forest. On a crisp fall day with leaves everywhere, browns and ambers and golds. And they just walk for several panels. And in the last panel, Calvin turns to Hob and he says, has it ever occurred to you that the entirety of human history has conspired to get us in this place together at this time? Now, what about you, Bill? Tell me how you got excited about tech and tell me about your journey to finding us together walking on this beautiful fall day.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First round has been historically a very size disciplined firm, whereas a lot of their peers have now grown to managing in each fund many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. They've still stayed pretty much only one and a half to two times their original size. During that time, they've admitted a couple of new investors. But I was lucky in that being an early investor, we took a pretty big stake. And even though I've moved a couple of times, I've been fortunate that that's kind of come with me. And so we're today about where we were as a percentage of the fund in 2008 when they raised FRC2, but that's required a lot of begging and cajoling and an arm twisting and all that stuff. Competition for allocation is the LP world looks really collegial, but boy, the sharp elbows can come out then.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one more question. You started as the first institutional investor in first round. Over the years, they've become one of those desired massively oversubscribed funds. Really curious your experience getting capacity when the likes of the Yalees and MITs in Princeton are there and wanting as much as they can get.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Bill is one of the first hires, and they've brought on since Haley Barna and then Todd Jackson and now Meka Asonia. And what I love about it is there's such a strong culture because a lot of venture firms are set up as tennis teams where everybody's playing their own match. Different things work for different firms, but what works really well at first round is, Josh, he's not really an investor. He's a fund entrepreneur. And he's run that place as a startup. And now a company that's mature. I mean, there's 75 people working on platform initiatives investing content production, et cetera. And there's a very strong culture because Josh knows that the CEO sets the tone. And even though they're”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big question I have is in venture, what is it that's durable about a firm? The number of firms that have failed in generation or transition. Outnumbers by orders of magnitude, the numbers of firms that have had successful generational transitions. And so I said, look, Josh is a force of nature. Josh is going to die with his first round boots on. But as Rob and Chris started downshifting a little bit to partner from managing partner, they were bringing on new folks. And Finn Barnes is there.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Josh compliment and Howard Morgan. And they're running this little fun called first round. It's kind of Josh's and Howard's money, I think, they said. And they really get what we do. And it turns out that I've by that point gone to TIFF in early 2004. And I said, wow, this is really cool because first round's right around the corner for me in Codshock in Pennsylvania. And I started sitting down with Josh Kaye. And Josh started articulating a vision for a new kind of venture firm. He said, look, with first round, what we're trying to do is turn venture on its head. The typical venture firm runs like a hub and spoke model where everything's going through partners. We have the technology. What if we could create kind of a peer-to-peer dynamic where the entrepreneurs or the network and the entrepreneurs are helping each other and you remove the bottleneck of the ventricleist? And by creating that community of entrepreneurs who could help each other with different tech-enabled stuff that the freshron guys have built, you could potentially create something really powerful. In 2004, it was just a vision. But man, it's been fun to watch them grow and evolve over.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a wild time. We're talking like 2003, 2004. I was kind of a young buck at Princeton's Endowment End, and I was like, hey, it feels like something's going on in entrepreneurial finance. And we were post.com bust. Funds had gotten really big and then had shrunk, but I kept hearing from entrepreneurs that the game was like changing radically. The way that everybody did due diligence is they run up and down Sandhill Road and they ask their favorite investors who's good today. And you just get like warmed over conventional wisdom because everybody's chilling their buddies. So I started going to see entrepreneurs and I'd show up at these places and when I was out in San Francisco with a couple of cases of beer and pass them around to the team and we'd sit around and jibber jabber. And I said, well, you know, is anybody doing it different? And when I was with the video ed guys, they said, well, look, we've got three investors. We've got August Capital, who was great. They loved August and more traditional firm. Mavron out of Seattle. And these two guys found us, these two fillies.”
2021-12-09 · Capital Allocators · Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source