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Charlie O'Donnell

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31
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2017-01-02
most recent
2017-01-02
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1
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  1. “Thank you very much, and I hope that one day I come on and talk about FUM3. So let's hope that FUN 1 turns out good enough that I can do that.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And so it's extremely scalable, especially at larger scale. And they already have some beta customers willing to pay to process their material, some local restaurants that are very into footprint and reuse and being good environmental citizens. And frankly, they were paying to have the stuff thrown away anyway. So this represents a very easy switch for them. And I'm extremely excited to be backing Amanda Brett on a project that is both worthwhile and an extremely large space because, well, you know, we think of Facebook as having scale because of the billion plus users that they have. But not every human being on the face of the earth has a phone yet, but every single human being on the face of the earth produces organic waste.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Sure. So I've publicly stated that I am leading a round of a company called Industrial Organic, which is not yet closed, but will be very shortly. And it is an alternative to composting, and it is a processor of food waste or organic waste. And organic waste makes up about 20% of landfills. And we do not currently have a scalable way to recycle that material in a way that is urban friendly. You know, basically we put the stuff in a pile, in a field in the middle of nowhere and let it rot for weeks on end. And that's about as much as good as we've come up with as a technology. And what industrial organic does is seals it with some special microbes in a container that the microbes will emit CO2. And the process can take less than a week.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think it's a lot of process engineering and a lot of listening and empathy. It's those two things. It's asking people what they need, being very upfront about, you know, what are you struggling with and trying to pull apart like why is that the case? Like, why is PR so hard? All these other firms are out there. Why are they not succeeding at this? What is going on systematically that is causing some difficulty and being sort of experimental about things?”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I would say Josh Koppelman, because I got a fantastic opportunity to work for him, and Josh very much helped me become a better and more effective board member.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Retail experience. And so the ice cream is terrific, but it even surprised the founder a little bit that just having a pint of ice cream was enough for the CEO of Disney to say, this is somebody I want to get involved with. It's not just we built a brand. We made damn good ice cream.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, it's sort of an interesting question what is the brand there? Is the brand an awareness and belief in the product? Is the brand good execution on marketing that somehow I know that Dollar Shave Club exists, but I don't realize that Gillette has an equivalent product? I mean, it's a combination of all of those things. And I think, yeah, brand absolutely has value, but brand comes from product execution, right? And it's actually funny. I was having a conversation with Brian from Ample Hills Creamery, and he was sort of telling the story of how they wound up in Disney World. the CEO of Disney, Bob Eiger, found them in a Wall Street journal article and started ordering the ice cream online. And the thing about Ample Hills Creamery is it's built to be a very engaging and exciting.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Wait the five years to build our way into a market, and frankly, we don't have the building DNA. And I think that's a lot of what they're buying.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Sure, as co investors with Ben in both Hungry Root and Ample Hills creamery, the ice cream shop, I certainly hope he's right. And yeah, it's very interesting because you look at something like a Dollar Shave Club and you say, wow, like for that amount of money, was it really impossible that Unilever could have built that? And frankly, it's the same conversation when Google buys anything, right? It's like, well, if Google has all these engineers, they could probably build most of the stuff that they buy, but they don't. And why is that? It's because companies make trade-offs and they say, well, we have a $50 billion market cap. And if we spend one percent of our market cap or 2% of our market cap to overnight transform the strategy of our company or give us a successful competitive position, we're going to do that and we aren't going to”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Most fundraising has been done by technically inclined white males building technology for enterprises. It's just not the same type of deal, so it's a little hard to say that the criteria should be the same.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “If somebody has a conversation and I actually feel listened to, and that's the reason why I cast my vote. Does that make them not a good campaigner? I think at the end of the day, it's all about the votes. And I think the same thing, you know, on the venture side, where VC fundraising has happened in a certain way in the past, and things have changed. People are able to build personal brands in such a way. We've got a much wider diversity of who is pitching. We've got a wider diversity in terms of the types of deals being raised, right? Where you've got consumer products investing like dollar shave club or companies like that where it's about brand creation and your marketing team now is just as important as your technical team. So these are all things that would point to I'd say, well, you know, maybe we shouldn't judge people on their ability to fundraise based on how, you know, in the past 30 years.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, no, it is a potential thing. I mean, it's very much, it reminds me of, I hope I get his name right. I think it's Ezra Klein Vox today. Very interesting report on Hillary Clinton. And what he said was he said campaigning, as we know it, since women only got the right to vote in the United States in 1920. The vast history of campaigning has been very male. And so what you get is a campaign that relies a lot on talking, not a lot on listening. And so we judge campaigners by the campaigners that have gone before. And so if it's all about who has the loudest voice and talks the most and all this sort of stuff, it's sort of a very kind of male approach to things. And so a lot of times you've seen in the media that Hillary's gotten dinged as not being a good campaigner as we know campaigning to be.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The words that they use and what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say. And I think there's a little bit of a separation between being good at venture fundraising and being good at running a company. And it's over and above just being a good advocate for your company.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, yeah, she's terrifically smart and very thoughtful. And so, you know, I was talking about her, we were talking about this with her. And I think where we've gotten to now, unfortunately, is that there are certain skills about how to navigate fundraising that are separate from how to run a company. Obviously, one of the key aspects of running a company is being an advocate for that company and being able to tell your story. I do think there are a lot of investors who, frankly, aren't very experienced through multiple cycles. If you look at, for example, demo day phenomenon and the way cadence in which presentations happen at demo day, I mean, could even parody them on the Silicon Valley show. I mean, there's a walk and a talk that kind of goes along with how people pitch.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, it's actually a really interesting question, and I was just having this conversation with Sarah Tavill, who's a good friend of mine at”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “My public persona is not so much marketing, but just hey, here's what I think about this stuff, here's what I'm like as an investor, decide for yourself whether or not you want to come and pitch me. I'm not trying to market myself to you. I'm just trying to say if you sit”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It will really depends on the market. So, in San Francisco, where I happen to be visiting right now, I think personal brands and marketing that comes from sort of being public as a VC, it is important because it is marketly competitive here to get into deals. And whereas in New York, I think of it more along the lines of just making it known that it is available, you know, that so maybe some entrepreneur who comes out of a bank who has some banking friends who might otherwise go to them for their first round of capital knows that seed funds are there and trying to be helpful and that we exist. But I don't feel like it's a competitiveness with other seed funds. And, you know, sometimes it's more to be helpful just to say, hey, should you even raise around?”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “For series A, I don't think it makes that much of a difference for their own confidence, although if you have a fund that doesn't do follow-ons or whatever, I'm not sure it matters. Although I would have to say, if you started a company in the first place and one of your seed funders doesn't follow on, knowing most entrepreneurs, I don't think I would do anything to interrupt their confidence. They would just think I was an idiot. And so it's very hard to shake the confidence of people who start companies. But where I do think it plays is in the round, whether you call it institutional seed or seed plus or just seed, and maybe what I'm doing is preseed. Whatever the case, this two to three million dollar round that sometimes happens before a series A, I think that's a spot where you're not getting a huge check.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Will follow on, and anybody who's able to raise an outside round. If you can get somebody else, I will not lead a next round. But if you can get somebody else to participate, you know, I will do a small amount of follow on across the board. And it's not going to be large. I'm looking to get 80, 90 percent of the money that I invest into the first round. The reason why I'm doing it mostly is to make those next rounds easier because the entrepreneur can then say, yes, everyone is participating.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And so you call it a seed fund, but it's only seed in the sense that that's where it started. So to say that you expect a much greater return from seed funds versus series A, you're only really talking about a difference of about 10 to 15 percent of the capital put to work. So yeah, there could be a difference, but it's slight. It's not that high in terms of your dollars.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, it's interesting. I was originally thinking of that question slightly different, but that is, I think there's two things there. Should you expect more from a seed fund than you do from a sort of Series A and beyond fund? Yes, I think that's probably fair, but more along the lines of when you look at a Series A fund and you actually look at the dollar cost average of where they put their money, I think a lot of people don't realize that most of their funds are actually much later staged than they think, right? So if you have a seed fund that makes its initial $200,000 to $500,000 bet in seed round and then follows on all the way through, if you do that math, probably about 60% of the money is in the B rounder later.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Now, if they are billion dollar outcomes, that's great because then my fund will be a 10x fund. And nobody will fault me for being off plan in that scenario. So I would rather keep the quote-unquote model grounded in some form of reality and then fail on the upside.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The way I think about it is for every 30 or so deals, the 10% drive about 75% of the returns. You've got three deals that are doing most of the work. And so when I look at it, you have to create roughly about a billion dollars of total enterprise value to make a small fund like mine about a 3x fund. And so when you look at that math, actually those quote unquote outliers, I'm pegging at two hundred fifty million dollars. And that might sound small to a lot of people, but when you look at the average tech M&A transaction, the average is not a billion dollar exit. The average is something like more like $250. And so when I build my model and I say, oh, these guys are winners. To me, it's not a good analysis and not a good plan if I expect my winners to be billion dollar outcomes.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, that's the thing, though, is that they aren't going to plan from the individual company perspective. They're not going to the founder's plan, but they are going to plan, at least, you know, from my perspective, from a portfolio. So I built a model and as any good former investment analyst from an institutional limited partnership, I literally have a venture capital cash flow model”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You feel very powerful sometimes writing a check, but you feel not as powerful when you realize all you can do is put up the sale, you can't control the wind and the 40-foot swells.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The truth of the matter is, you're going to get it wrong a lot, or rather, not that you're going to get it wrong, but the outcomes are going to be less than positive a lot. It's important to separate decisions and outcomes. Hopefully you make all good decisions, but you can't control the outcome. And that's sort of the humbling thing is that you can check off every which box you come up with in terms of decision-making and screening and where you get the companies and the markets are big enough and the founders are, you know, exactly who you said is the type of person that you want to back. And you're just doing really hard things. And sometimes it's not going to work out despite the extremely hard work of very smart people doing things that should be attempted. And so when you realize you can't control for outcomes, the world is a lot bigger than you are.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Actually, turned out to be 15.3 because somebody heard about it through the ether and after we announced really tried hard to get into the fund. So it's a little bit larger than announced.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Exciting companies that I led the seed rounds of put the fun to work in three years and one quarter. And so not bad for a three-year fund.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Sure. So, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures Fund one invested in thirty five companies. Basically we do eight to ten deals a year as it panned out. We did everything we said we were going to do. We stayed on pace. All of the deals were part of the first million dollars that the companies ever raised. So basically I have a rule that if you've already raised $750,000 in a previous round, it's actually too late for me. And so, you know, we did napkins and prototypes and ideas and founders, you know, all sorts of various versions of Early. So we stayed on plan in terms of stage. The vast majority, almost all of the companies are New York based, and a couple of the moved. And directionally things look pretty good. We have some really...”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Then I transitioned over to working with them as their first analyst. And a couple years later, after trying my hand at entrepreneurship, I joined first round capital to help them open up their New York office and spent two years doing investments for them before I launched my own fund in 2012.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So I apprenticed my way up the chain. I started out as an analyst at an institutional limited partner at the General Motors Pension Fund. So GM had been investing in venture capital since the 70s, since before I was born. And I had an opportunity to be a part of their venture team doing mostly investments in funds, some private equity investments in funds, and also doing direct deals. So I got to meet a lot of the top tier Silicon Valley and Boston area investors, you know, as my first job out of school. That's the way I met the team at Union Square Ventures, Fred and Brad when they were first launching their fund in 2004, which is getting on to be a longer time ago than I'm willing to admit.”

    2017-01-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source