YouSaid · the spoken record

Brett DeMarrais

lines on the record
29
first
2016-09-07
most recent
2016-09-07
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. “Since then. And so it's one of those deals nobody probably knows about outside of the investors. I'm in love with the team. The market is like wide open. There's not a lot of competition. And if it is, it's archaic. And their customers, I talk to people that were using the software and they couldn't stop raving about it. And what's nice is that the customers were so happy with it that it was like becoming a collaborative thing. They were like part of the team and they were helping improve the product and give feedback. And I think that's always a phenomenal side.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The company is called Gather. The website is gatherhere.com. They're based in Atlanta, which is one of these things I love because I'm fond of companies that aren't necessarily in San Francisco or New York and kind of these tertiary markets. They are working in what I would call like a hidden market where you would never know it's a thing unless you like worked in the industry. And so they help restaurants and event spaces manage their events better. And so if you want to throw a 40th birthday party for your dad and you want to have it at a restaurant that's got a private room, that process is really arduous on the end of the restaurant and they usually have a person managing those events and they have to communicate with the chef and get special menus and take deposits and do all this stuff. And so Gather is helping automate that and they're doing just phenomenally well. I invested the founders are incredible. They got really, really far with almost no money. And then when they went to go raise around, they raised a really healthy seed round and they've just been stepping on the throats of everybody who comes in there.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Or at least get on the phone and say hello and introduce themselves. And then it becomes on me to kind of foster that relationship and figure out how to bring it into my comfort zone, which is like these deeper, more meaningful connections that last decades. I've had the same five best friends since I was like three years old.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So I take zero credit in establishing Ludlow. It was all Jonathan. He was doing it years and years before me. Without him, I would not have a job. I would not have a career adventure. And so he did all the establishment of the law. I'm not even going to go down that path. I think the biggest challenge, I think the biggest challenge for me in Venture is I am naturally an introvert. And so I think that I'm not a very good natural networker. And so it takes me a very long time to establish a relationship with somebody. But when I do, it's very deep and very meaningful. And so overcoming that and trying to balance that with just getting myself out there and making initial touch points and then figuring out how to get deep with somebody, especially based in Detroit, has been a really big challenge. But the good thing about the entrepreneurial technology ecosystem is like everybody are so open. I have almost had no bad experiences where I reached out to somebody and put myself out there and they weren't willing to kind of help.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Mark Suster's both sides of the table is my favorite blog, and then newsletters, PrimeX term sheet. Those are no-brainers.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think it's a game changer for collaboration and workforces. I think it's an extension of entertainment for people. I don't buy in VR is going to be a replacement for movies or television or books. It's way too much of an active experience. And I think storytellers like to control the narrative experience and kind of walk users down the path that they want them to go down and use that as a tool. And I think putting somebody in an environment and letting them look around, they can oftentimes miss the most important part of the plot.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And then the other thing, especially coming back from Crohn's, I was really weak and I kind of did these false starts a lot where I'd tell myself I was going to go to CrossFit. I'd go to one class. I'd be like, man, this is way harder than I remember. And I would like quit. And then a month later, I'd go back. And so I always looked at those as kind of like little failures. And I would say like false starts are not failures. They're just kind of opportunities for you to try again, try again. And if you keep trying again, keep trying again. Eventually, you'll kind of start up again and it won't be seen as a failure.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, so the first thing I ever learned at CrossFit was you can lift more than you think. And so I'm a decently sized human being. I'm like six foot 205. And the first day I went in there, I squatted like 95 pounds, something really like puny. And that was because I never squatted before and I didn't think I could. And literally the next day I probably squatted 40 more pounds. And so you can always lift more than you think you could. That's applicable in anything. Don't set kind of upper bounds for your own life. The easiest gains are always at the beginning. So beginning of my CrossFit career and even coming back to it after being diagnosed with Crohn's, the amount I could lift would increase rapidly up into a certain point and then it was exponential effort to get a minuscule gain. And I think that's a lot like working at a startup. So you're obviously going to have a 500% growth rate going from one to five that will continue to a certain point and you're going to hit a wall, I think, eventually and having the mental fortitude to push through that.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, ready player one is my favorite book I read in recent memory just because it kind of delves into what the future is going to be like and it really delves into virtual reality in particular and it also calls back to a lot of AD stuff that makes me all tingly and excited. But if you haven't read the original Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring, that was like the first book I ever read that really got hooked into. And so if you're a fancy fan and you haven't read that, I don't know how that's possible, but you should go read that.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So I don't want to get there, and I think there's a lot of interesting questions around AI about, I think it could go either extremely well or be terrible, and we could be in a Terminator matrix type situation. And so I'm glad there's smarter people than me working on hopefully preventing that.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so I don't know, it might. And so I don't know if that's out of our lifetime, but I think that's a question that's going to need to be answered. And I'm not sure that the computer will necessarily, at least in the first versions, be judging and weighing whose life is worth more. But I think it could get to that point where I don't want to see kind of a dystopian future where if I have a bigger bank account, the computer knows that. And if there's a person driving in a car next to me who's got some kind of ID on them or something and has a lower bank account that, you know, the computers collectively go to save my life more because I can pay more to have collision protection for my artificial intelligence overlord or whatever it is.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Is it the auto manufacturer who kind of programmed the computer to make that decision? And so all these kind of like weird liability things and these hypothetical situations where a computer is making life or death decisions on behalf of a passenger really kind of fascinate me.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so I think trust is going to be a huge thing, especially in the transitional period where some people are in self-driving cars and some people are driving their own cars. I think it gets easier and easier to trust a system where every car is autonomous and its computers making decisions because it's much more predictable than human responses. I also think liability is a huge issue and it's something I think about a lot and there's probably way smarter people than myself who are both philosophers and working on artificial intelligence is if I'm in a self-driving car and there's an accident about to happen and there's a family of three next to me driving down the road, is the computer going to decide to swerve out of the way to protect my life and then endanger the family of three or is there a greater good type philosophy programmed into it that says, all right, well, the family of three, the car next to me, I shouldn't put them in danger so my driver is going to be at risk. And if that happens, who has the liability? It's not the driver because they weren't driving.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it's going to be like everything a little bit of both. I think GM has really shown with some of their acquisitions and investments that they're really thinking about this in the future. Forward, I think, I don't know what they're doing internally. They came out recently and said they're going to have a completely self-driving car with no steering wheel, no pedals, no anything by like 2021, which is six years out, five years out, whatever it is, which is shockingly fast. I did not think that was going to be happening so soon. I'm also curious to see how consumers react because there's an element of loss of control. You know, if I get in a car and it's portaling me around at 80 miles an hour and there's no steering wheel or pedal, that might be a bit of a freaky experience, especially with other drivers on the road who aren't in self-driving cars.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, this is like the internet. And so I get really giddy. So I think car ownership is going to be a thing of the past because when autonomous vehicles come around, there'll be these fleets of vehicles. You can just call on one button. I think it'll be cheaper. It'll be more convenient. You can take your garage now and turn it into a cool man cave, whatever you want to do with it. That's all going to be a wasted space. I get really kind of interested in what this means for car manufacturers and kind of the design”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I mean, it's painful. It's not a fun conversation to have. And so hopefully, you know, what I spoke about is building that friendship is that what makes it a little bit easier? Because the founder knows you're coming from a place of their best interest, the company's best interest. It doesn't seem like you're trying to backchannel them and get them out. And hey, we need to replace you because this isn't working. And so honesty is something that we always try to do. And so whether it's passing on a company and giving a couple of reasons why we're passing, I think everyone at Ludlow tries to do their best to be honest with that assessment. Sometimes, you know, we'll just straight up say like, we don't believe in this. Like, we don't think this is a good idea. And I don't think this is going to work as respectful a manner as possible. Those conversations are painful. And so building that kind of basis of friendship and trust and transparency is what allows you to have those conversations without the other person on the other side of the table thinking there's some malicious intent behind it.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “With us because we're known as the people who do things right and treat you right and have your best interests at heart and are not just worried about turning your profit. So I think long term, that aligns more with our fiduciary responsibility than kind of short-term terrible gains.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Better outcome for both our LPs, us, and the founder than trying to sell the company and claw back our money. Because at the end of the day, when you make an investment, the worst thing that happens is you lose your investment, which is a set cap number. That's it. And the founder can always come back. And if you make their experience good and you treat them with respect and dignity and all these kind of things that I think go towards founder first, they'll come back to you and it'll pay off tenfold a year from now. They'll start another company or their friend will start a company or they'll tell another person that they know who's starting a company that these guys did everything right by me and every single company for the rest of my life I run into I'm going to send to them and one of those companies will be the ones that pay off so I would trade I would trade kind of the short term effect of selling a company for 10 15 million and maybe getting 1x 2x 3x you know my 300 000 seed investment for somebody sending me amazing deal flow speaking good about me in the community and really kind of increasing my brand so that everybody wants to work”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, it's an interesting question and something I think I struggle with from time to time. But whenever I get to that place, I really try to think long-term. And so if we're talking about what's in the best interest of our LPs and our fiduciary responsibility, I would argue that making sure that the caveat included saying like if the founder is doing anything malicious and stealing money from the company embezzling, whatever, then it becomes a whole different story. But assuming the founder is acting with good intentions, doing the best of their ability, they're getting burnt out, whatever. I would argue that handling that person and putting their needs above the company, because in most of my experience, the founders that are struggling the hardest are oftentimes at the early stages or things aren't going right and there's not a lot to grasp onto is that saying a company that is probably not going to have a good outcome anyway but is driving this founder insane they're a good person they're going to have more companies than them treating that person well handling it with respect making sure that they're comfortable is long term”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “People and they're not an asset class to be invested in. And so I think when more and more VCs understand that and treat entry capital as a customer service business, as a human relationship business, then we'll all be better off.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so I think, you know, like I said, I think a lot of the founder friendly stuff is very surface level. It's like we're nice, we're friendly, we'll be pleasant to talk to you. I think there could be a bigger emphasis on like diving deeper with people, developing real relationships. I think in general, you know, every once in a while I see a Twitter thread pop up of VCs mocking people who are trying to get in front of them and tell them about their idea. And that just makes me cringe. One, I think it's short-sighted on the VC's part because, you know, if a kid from Missouri who has a business idea and has not been exposed working at Google or Facebook or the tech community at large sends you an email asking for advice or 30 minutes of your time for coffee, even if you respond politely, but then he sees on Twitter that you started something like, ha ha, dear sir, madam, another one of these, when that person finally figures it out and reads a couple blog posts about how to get entered to a VC, they're not going to come to you anymore. And so I think it's just a general sense of that people starting businesses are”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I don't think that's a problem at all because I think the closer you can come to developing an actual friendship, the better the business relationship will be. And so I think if you're the person who they want to go to the ballgame with or have a beer with or watch football with or talk about their failing marriage or whatever with, then they'll feel comfortable coming to you and saying, hey, listen, we have two months of cash in the bank. I don't think we're going to be able to raise another round. What are we to do? Because they're going to go to somebody about that anyway. And most likely it's going to be their closest friends and family and their confidants. And so if you can become one of those inner circle of people, you'll hear about it before anybody else and you'll be the person they're coming to telling you about their problems. And then it also makes it a lot more fun to fucking celebrate when things are good because then you're with people you like and it's a real honest to goodness celebration not because you both just made a little bit of money. It's because you went through this journey together and you're triumphant and that's like the better better feeling than anything.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, so I think founder first becomes synonymous with nice and friendly. And I think it should run deeper than that. So there's a common emotional experience that I think most entrepreneurs go through, whether you're Travis at Uber or you're Joe in Iowa, you know, running a plumbing company, whatever, there are certain things and self-doubt and mistakes and all these things that you go through that I think a lot of VCs can lose touch with and take out the emotional part. And so when we say founder first, we really try to make it about an investment in people.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I had to go back to the drawing board because it literally would not convert one single thing. So, you know, that was one of those where I just looked myself in the mirror, kind of sighed and said, like, all right, lesson learned, you dummy. So why don't you talk to the people who are actually going to be buying from you and figure out what they want to see and how they wanted to look and feel and what is important to them. And so, you know, you take the good with the bad. Sometimes I got lucky and I made a good decision. Sometimes I completely screwed up and really hobbled myself. But that's kind of part of the journey. You're never going to handle everything right. Even if you're experienced entrepreneur, there's always something new that comes up that you're going to botch.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yes. So, you know, I think one of the big struggles was I think I was really kind of underfunded for what I wanted to do. And I didn't really have a good understanding of how to run a business. I was right out of college. I didn't even have a Bachelor of whatever it is, a business degree. And so I really had a very fundamental is putting it nicely, understanding of profit and margin and how businesses work. And so I made a lot of mistakes. For example, one of my first mistakes was, and this is a hard lesson learned, is I took $30,000 of about the $75,000 I raised and I hired someone to design a website for my company. what our target audience women getting married would want and we designed probably the most hideous website ever and it was not functional and every woman who looked at it after I had already paid for it and launched it said this is hideous and so I had to go back”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, that's a good question. I wasn't apprehensive at all. I said, yes, I think he was shocked at how quickly I said yes because there was no fund for me to really go work at at the time. There was no vehicle to invest out of him. And so I said yes on the spot. And then it was six to nine months of toiling away or raising money before we actually took paychecks. And so I didn't have an expectation. I saw how Jonathan operated every day and the mentality at Ludlow and what he really started from the beginning was we're going to be really really founder friendly, really great guys to work with. We're always going to have the founder's best interest at heart. And as an entrepreneur who was really struggling at his own startup at the time, I really was drawn to. And I said, if I can go do what he's doing with other entrepreneurs, I'll figure the rest out. But that looks like something that would be really fulfilling and something I'd want to try.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “No, no, I think if you ask him, he'll for sure say, no, I just didn't want to lose a friend. I think he'll now say that he got lucky that I was actually somewhat competent. So, yeah, that's how I ended up in Venture. We were literally sitting in his house one night. He's like, I'm about to raise a new fund. Let's go kind of do it and see how it goes. And I said, okay”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I saw a problem when I started a company, and after three years of every Sunday going to a wedding show, my friends were sitting down to drink beer and eat chicken wings and watch football, I said enough. And I was going to move to San Francisco. And that's when my friend Jonathan Trias, who I got to know working alongside of him, our desks were pretty much next to each other in a co-working space in downtown. And so for three years, we got to know each other as I was starting my company. He was starting Ludlow. He asked if I wanted to join Ludlow. I would like to think, because he saw a spark of something in me that was potentially good at investing, but I think more so. He just didn't want to lose basically his only friend in Michigan.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “The one word that would summarize it is the clock. I graduated college in 2009 from the University of Michigan and I started, well, it was like the worst job market ever to graduate into. And my degree was probably the most worthless degree ever. It's called a Bachelor of General Studies, which means I was kind of a generalist in school. And so no one wanted to hire me with that. So I decided to start my own company, which was called Weddit, which is kind of the first crowdsource wedding videography company. So back in the day when flip cameras were popular, we'd send them to couples who were getting married. They used those cameras to crowdsource the video, send it back to us in a prepaid box. We'd host all that stuff, make it easy to share to social networks. And then we hired a network of remote editors who are professionals by day who would edit their wedding videos nights and weekends. I did that for three years or so, and it was an interesting experience. I didn't raise a lot of venture. It was based in Detroit. I had never been to a wedding before. I know interest in the wedding industry.”

    2016-09-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is Wrong With The VC Industry, Why VC Is A Customer Service Game and Why Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past with Brett DeMarrais, Partner @ Ludlow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source