YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Singerman

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62
first
2019-04-02
most recent
2019-04-02
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1
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  1. “Anything they put $100,000 check is because I know the founder personally and think they're really good. It doesn't matter at that stage. It doesn't matter what they're doing. It's just kind of like the sound is ridiculously good. Of course, I'm going to put in a check here. But sourcing for not those checks, sourcing for different kinds of companies, man, that is one of the biggest areas that we need to work on. I think probably every firm needs to work on. Venture capital comes down to do you see the right deals? Can you pick the right deals? Can you get into the right deals? Part four is how do you help the company after you're in? I actually think that part's the least important part because the best founders can.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “A totally fair question. It was more prominent in 2008, we would see social network for dogs and social networks for dead people and social network for whatever, right? Just because we were the Facebook guys. And so, of course, if you liked Facebook, you must love this. And the answer is, of course, always going to be, no, we actually don't like that because we're in Facebook, right? And if we believe that's such a huge company, then we don't want to see clones of it or byproducts of it. And so, I mean, trends of the last couple of years are this is going to sound so derivative. Crypto is, of course, a trend of the last couple of years. And bottoms up enterprise SAS is a trend and rockets are actually a trend these days. Space technology and I mean, I'm always just looking for great companies. I'm not paying attention to trends.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, no, that's really important because if something comes in, if I have these preconceived notions of what, oh, this thing is a trend, I should look for that or built on this technology or this technology is enabling this. No, I mean, I'm always looking for like why didn't this? Anything that comes in the door. And so I'm hesitant to talk about specific technological changes that lead to better companies because I still always believe it's the best founders lead to the best companies.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Mean there's the standard answers like the prominence of the cloud and stuff, but I'm not sure that impacts how we think of things, specifically because I'm what I call a purely reactive investor. And to do that well, I think you have to be open to anything that comes in the door. So I don't assume to know what the big”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Honestly, we've had authors come in to try and help us put that into words. What is a Founders Fund founder? We've never been able to put that into specific terms. There's certainly certain personality types that I tend to be attracted to. Like, I don't feel like I'm a good pure mentor. I'm attracted to founders that know how to run their business. I don't know how to run a business. I'm an investor. I'm attracted to founders who really know how to run their business, are looking for strategic soundboarding or looking for somebody who can do honest back and forth with them, but not the types of founders that need actual help running their businesses. And so that probably plays into what I'm looking for in a founder. But again, other people are different.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “A lot. The only way to learn about investing is by investing. We have an awesome team here, even the junior members are everybody can drive investments here of a certain check size. And I think that that's kind of the only way you learn how to do this. And it's the only way to actually get your cut going is by making investments. On the positive side, if we make an investment, if we make a couple hundred K investment and it goes to zero, it doesn't really have that much of an impact on us. Venture capital is all about upside maximization. You have to train your gut by making investments, period.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think all of this is an art. But Founders, one, we have a very small investment team for the amount of money under management, but it is very important we all run our own strategies. I do not know how to do spreadsheet analysis. I've never looked in a model in my life. I have no idea how to do that stuff. For me, I'm very gut driven. Other people are absolutely numbers focused, and that's totally welcome here. You can kind of have whatever strategy you want. For me, market analysis or anything else for that matter is going to be purely an art. Whereas for some other people, they might do rigid analysis on the market sizing and maybe do it in a more scientific way.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, even if it requires a lot of capital, if it means we're going to make a lot of money off of it, then we'll consider it.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We care, but we care. But some businesses require very little capital. Some businesses require a lot of capital. It doesn't really matter. The question for us is always, I mean, how much money can we make on this investment?”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Made the decision to put $150 million into Airbnb in less than a week, even though it was one of our largest six in history because that was the clearest moat we had ever seen. Maybe since Facebook, but pretty clear moat also. So other examples of moats are SpaceX. It's like, okay, good luck, go build a rocket factory yourself. That's probably not getting cloned. I love things that aren't easily cloned by the talented software companies we have in Silicon Valley.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Totally open to any sort of unique definitions of, but maybe it's the team has certain inside insight, especially at the early stage, or this is the only team that could potentially pull this off, might be an early stage mode to something as when we invest in Airbnb, it was kind of post it already having a huge international network effect alikes, it which we had never seen before. So that's a moat.”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Market execution. It does not matter the sector. It does not matter the stage. We'll write checks anywhere from $100,000 to $300 million, totally stage agnostic within that. But always I'm looking for, okay, does the company have an existing moat? Not one of these, oh, if I do this and this and this and this and this, then I'll have a moat. But instead of an existing moat, is it a big enough market to have an impact on our latest fund is about $1.4 billion or so? So it's got to be a big enough market to support a large return for that kind of fund. And does it have a founding team that can execute from moat to market? We only invest in founding teams, founding CEOs. Are they good enough that on their own, they can take this from whatever moat they have to the big market?”

    2019-04-02 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Singerman – Investing in the Best Founders - [Invest Like the Best, EP.127] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source