YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Douvos

lines on the record: 95
first: 2017-07-03
most recent: 2017-07-03
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

“A series of funds. So they've got the $500 million early stage, two billion dollar growth fund, a fund in China. So it's actually like a lot of money. Now, I'm sure those guys will make money, but the problem is this is what I call the Steven Botcho effect. So the TV producer, Botchco, did some really edgy artsy stuff, right? You know, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, all these things. And so, you know, his characters would either swear or be, you know, show their butt, you know, on TV or whatever, you know, all in the service of art. It was authentic and gritty and real and boundary pushing, but appropriately so in the service of art. And then what happened? Once that taboo is broken, then you get like temptation island and naked people kind of frolicking on reality TV, right? So what happens is, so Sequoi goes out and raises $4 billion. And then, you know, Billy Bob Joe's venture firm thinks they can raise $4 billion. And by the way, there's a lot of money coming to the asset class that they can. So, you know, this kind of value.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so you're talking about kind of sequoia benchmark Greylock, you know, Kleiner Perkins. But here in, and I don't, you know, I don't mean to kind of trash talk anybody, but ultimately, when you're talking about venture capitalists, they're capitalists, right? And those are all great firms that I just mentioned. But being capitalist, people understand the laws of supply and demand, right? And when there's more demand than there is supply, price goes up. And so, you know, you see a lot of value capture by these funds. So they're taking higher and higher incentive fees, right? This is endemic to all of finance. And they're growing larger and larger, right? So I just saw the other day, like today in the wire, you know, Sequoia has closed on $4 billion.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, right. You know, so it's interesting because when it comes to this question of you have to be with the best or don't play at all, I often think venture capital is like Congress. Everybody hates Congress but loves their congressperson. And so everybody, like if I ask 50 LPs to give me the top 10 venture firms, the top four or five will be on everybody's list, maybe in different places.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might have missed the medical device club. There's a notion of investors and venture capital that it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that everyone seems to know who the best venture firms are. They generate the best returns. The entrepreneurs want their money more than others. And so if it was an efficient market and the venture capitalists all knew who the best companies were likely to be, there's only a small number of them that get to back them. Is that true, number one? And number two, what was that model? You sort of touched on this lean model. Like what was that model that was different from the, hey, you have to be with the best or you shouldn't play at all? Right.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, so it's a really interesting question. And this is one thing I learned from Yale, right? Like Yale was unafraid to put people in business. And so I think back to some elements of my own history where I've been most successful is kind of finding people who are doing really interesting stuff and capitalizing them. So there are a couple of initiatives I've got going on right now where it's people are focused on kind of university spinouts and maybe in some different areas like things like material sciences or hardware where I found people who are managers who will engage with people on these kind of campus environments in a much more thoughtful way than I could but it's important for me to be there and be on campus and kind of really get a sense for the zeitgeist which by the way I was at school I was talking to this this Katie's got this amazing device and he's like oh yeah well I was like when did you start working on this he's like well I was president of the medical device”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing I'll say is that even now the early stage feels crowded. There's a lot of chaos capital and we've seen crowdfunding come into the market. So I'm actually going yet earlier. I'm spending a lot of time literally running around college campuses, not like I'm going to find the entrepreneurs, but find vectors into entrepreneurial seams. And college campuses are amazingly entrepreneurial hotbeds. Everybody wants to be Stanford. By the way, if I could short Stanford, I would. It's a fantastic place, but talk about perception, you know, kind of all those entrepreneurs coming out of there have very full perceptions themselves. But there are other campuses that I've gone to that are producing kind of comparable talent and comparable ideas with much more humility. Sure.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can maybe time adjust it slash duration adjust it, but that's nothing. And then I think at the other end, you have high opportunity in the late stage if you've got the timing right. And so that tends to be more of a beta market. And there's some people who have been able to be have systemically asymmetric beta in their favor. There's some firms that are just good at that. Over cycles even, but they tend, you know, they tend to be in the market stops left holding the bag. And that's my history is having joined Princeton in 01, we were dealing with the wreckage of a lot of people who had been left holding those bags. From my perspective, I've always been a super early stage investor. The downside of that is that the holding periods are really...”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In normal markets, there's almost like a U shaped opportunity curve. And with, I guess, the X axis being stage of investment. So I think that the earliest stages tend to be most interesting because that's where risk is highest. And if you can mitigate and get paid for those risks, you can find interesting companies and make them better and et cetera, et cetera. I think there's a lot of potential return. And historically, that's been shown to be true. that raw innovation is the stuff that really gets me jazzed. Then I think you get to the mid stage where you tend to have more price fluctuations and nature and capital markets both abhor a vacuum. And so when there's real opportunity in the midst, later stage folks will come in and price things up. And so people say, are there better risk adjusted returns in the midst? I go, I don't know how you risk adjust venture. The risks are so high as to be almost infinite, so you can't risk adjust it.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morgan Stanley, all rights reserved. And now, back to the show. This dynamic is kind of similar to what I remember from the late 90s and early 2000s. And you have this interesting game theory where if you're a venture capitalist and you know that the exit of the public markets or valuing things high, you might be a little bit less sensitive to your entry price because if you can turn things fast enough and time gets short, you can get out. If you don't do it, your neighboring venture capital firm might, and if they get out in time, the returns are high enough. I remember having this exact conversation back then with a friend of mine saying, look, it's rational that venture capital should pay more for deals because there's, yes, we're all trying to generate absolute returns, but there's also, like everything else, a relative performance aspect to it. How do you think about that? Let's just go right to today's market.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failure here? Like, why is that company worth what it's worth and what have you? And so it was interesting kind of sitting in the lobby, there's a little thing on the Bloomberg ticker that said, you know, short sellers to target startups going public. And while that's notionally bad for me, I'm like, it's about friggin' time. Let's return some kind of rationality in the public markets and the acquisition markets to return rationality into the private markets.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gets large, opportunity shrinks. What's amazing in venture is that perception and value is actually almost in this like recursive loop. Why is Snapchat a $25 billion company? Because people think it's worth $25 billion, right? That's surreal. That's surreal. And so in the three area codes I mentioned, 415650408, we live in this vortex where perception actually drives value. Now, the reality is that you have to get liquid somehow, right? So either you sell to somebody who may or may not buy into the vortex, or you have to sell to the public market. And in the public market, that's where that relationship should break down. So right now, Snap, I hate trash talking snap, but it's out in the public markets. And I'm just like, I'm like stunned that it's as highly valued as it's stunned. And I'm like waiting, like, what is the market?”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McCanz from Greylock, and I call Mr. McCant's way, Derrick Cheater calls Geo Tory Mr Torrey. Mr McCants once said to me in two thousand two, reflecting back on the bubble, he said When Venture's working really well, time is really cheap and capital is really expensive. He says, what happens in bubbles is that time becomes really scarce and expensive. People don't have any time. And as a result, their capital becomes cheap. And when you have that kind of a relationship, watch out. And it's really interesting to watch kind of people's perceptions of time as a proxy for how much energy they can devote towards actually improving things and making an impact. This is the fundamental equation of any asset class that doesn't hold inventure. I call it Buffett's equation. It's only because I've totally assigned it to him. I don't know if he ever said it. But opportunity equals value minus perception.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture's been this interesting asset class because it's so mythologized, right? The secret sauce at Yale for many years, I mean, Yale does so many things so well, but one of the key secret sauces has been venture capital. But really, so people have kind of come to the asset class with this almost lottery ticket-like mentality, right? And in fact, we use lottery slogans with Ivy League Veneer. So you got to be in it to win it means optionality. Hey, you never know means, you know, asymmetric payoff, right? And we've kind of created this whole kind of mythology around how you make money and venture, very little of which is true. And outside of the 415-650 and 408 area codes, there's this perception of venture which actually isn't true. There's amazing stuff that goes on. There's amazing innovation. But the investment in that innovation is a really, really tricky thing. Now to your question of, you know, how I'd invest, Mr. McCance.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so that's a really interesting question. That's a very long answer. I'll try to give the shortest answer. Everybody who's ever done any modern portfolio theory knows about the optimizer and you've got this, you know, you got on one axis, you've got expected return on the other axis, you have risk, which is measured by volatility. Now, there's a whole riff I can go on about how that completely is a misspecified measure of risk, even in public stuff, but especially in private stuff, not only with stale prices, but like when I think about the startups that I”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's take a detour to the whole notion of portfolio construction. Because I really like the way you phrase it. Yeah, there's a degree to which in the public markets and certainly in hedge funds there are people are looking for inefficiencies and you say the venture world, this is growing the next great business. So if you were tasked with having, hey, you've got billions of dollars of your own money, knowing what you know today.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want you to come on board, and I want you to invest courageously. I want you to do some heroic investing. I was like whoa, you've got me. Like you've got me at hello, right? And so I was like, I came on board and it took me about a year to get my sea legs air and like to really kind of formulate some hypotheses. And then kind of 2005, 6, 7 were really productive years in terms of finding some stuff that was really different then. Today's actually kind of a little bit overrun.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started talking to him about what I was seeing and about how I thought there was an opportunity. David's got this amazing, you know, kind of magnetic personality. He's like, you know, I hear the Clintons are like this. Like when you're talking to them, you feel like the only person in the world. And I was telling them about all the elements of lean startup. And Dave just started looking at me and going, yes, yes, yes, Chris, yes. Like nodding his head. And I felt like I had stumbled on the most eternal truth I had goosebumps. And he was like, Chris.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they, you know, people are thrilled to talk about what they're up to. And then you can get all kinds of really good insights. And so in kind of 2002, 2003, I started that for every hour I spent with a venture capitalist, I'd spend an hour with an entrepreneur. And I started finding out these really interesting things like what we today call lean startup, people were just starting to get hip to then. And I was like, whoa, I'm like on the front edge of a really interesting kind of wave, the bleeding edge. And if this is true, then our whole venture portfolio is wrong-footed. That's not entirely true, you know, like any blanket statement like that generally isn't true, but I believed it to be actually pretty true. And the more I thought about this stuff, the more I thought, wow, I got to do something different. Meanwhile, kind of in late 2003, David Salem at TIFF reached out to me and he said, you know, we're looking for somebody to help co-head our private equity effort. And I've heard great things about you. I'm like, my marketing dollars are well spent. But I sat down with David.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the time it was. That's hilarious. So I was going out to California with some frequency and I made this rule for myself. I said, you know, being a history major, like we've prized primary sources. And the primary sources were the entrepreneurs. I started going out and just cold calling entrepreneurs and people, you show up, you talk about their business.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was actually amazing because I set a rule, you know, Herodotus was not only the first historian, but I call him the first investor because he would go around and you read the histories by Herodotus and he says, and then I was in the land of the Lydians. And these are the stories that the Lydians told. And then I was in the land of the Achaeans. And I'm like, you know, I need to be in the land of the Stardepians. And so I made this rule, you know, because the way most people do diligence is they run up and down Sandhill Road and they say, hey, Mike Moritz, who's good today, hey, John Doore, who's good today? And you're just getting this warmed over conventional wisdom with sometimes a healthy dose of politics on the side. What I thought was like, you know, I was a history major in college, right? You know, besides good cocktail party conversation, a relatively impractical major, would you study?”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billion dollars because people felt like they were Goldilock size, right? But you look at kind of what Princeton and Yale and Northwestern's $10 billion, Stanford's $20 billion, these guys continue to put up great numbers at very large sizes. And we always thought size was the enemy of performance. It's actually one of the reasons why I left Princeton kind of in retrospect, probably foolishly so.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a really important question because one thing that Andy Golden, our CIO said that was really important. He said that all of the risk premium have been arbitraged away except for one. He said horizon. People just need cash sooner. And by being a long-term liquidity provider, if we can be, I think his phrase is BLT investor. If we can be a beyond the long-term investor, then we can capture some risk premium, like durable risk premium. I was like, whoa, that's actually really interesting. In venture capital is like the perfectly suited asset class for that. David Salem, you know, our founder at when I was at TIFF, always did a survey and he asked CIOs of the top 100 endowments and foundations if you could start your career today, like what size pool of assets would you ideally want to start with? The answer is always four or five.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your time at Princeton, you started with this idea of hey, this is like managing your own billions of dollars long time horizon in the team, what resonated there and what was different from what you thought going in?”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About, he says, I see the genius of the modern, the child of the real and the ideal, forging a nation so grand, heir to a past so grand to forge in New America. And I thought like holy smokes, like I'm like in the epicenter of this utopian ideal. And I got back to Princeton. I said, you know, in hedge funds with all due respect, it feels like we're just fighting over how big our slice of a pie is going to be. Whereas in private equity and venture, especially it feels like we're growing the pie. I said, this is where I want to focus. I spent the rest of my time at Princeton focusing on private equity bias towards venture. It was amazing.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they're smarter people to me. John Erickson is working on timber and real assets and stuff. So I was working, I spent half my time in hedge funds and half my time in private equity. And I remember in February of 2002, I went out to California and I was driving down 280, which is a scenic road. And I started thinking about some, I took a Walt Whitman class at Yale. And there's this great poem Song of the Redwood Tree. And it says, you know, this was written in 1858. It says, California, a flashing and golden pageant, populous cities and the latest inventions, with many a thrifty farm and steamers and the latest machinery with diggings of wool, wheat, the grape, and yellow gold. And I always thought about that populous cities and the latest invention. Here we were. I showed up at this meeting and I'm sitting this meeting in two thousand two and we're talking about all of the stuff that's going on in technology and innovation and that poem ends with Whitman talking.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're walking out, and Mike looks at me and goes, Hey, kid, how about we play golf this weekend? It would be really fun to get the sticks out. And this is super pleasant. We can go out there and talk some more. Call my assistant. And he like pats me on the back and walks off. Jody's face turned red. Steam was coming out of her ears. It was just amazing. The whole lunch I heard about. Now, I will tell you, I didn't call him to play golf, nor did I go into railroads. I went into investing. But I got a great story out of it. But the essence of the story is that, you know, Yogi Barra said it.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He literally said that. Isn't that amazing? The foresight. I mean, this is amazing. And so we're kind of laughing about that. I go, all right, railroads, plastics, railroads. I got it. And we're walking out of the bathroom. And just as we're walking out of the bathroom, Jodie's standing there.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny that ye say that. I was just thinking the other day that I should clean off my clubs. Ha ha ha. We had a little jibber-jabber in there. We go. We'd finish our business. We're washing our hands. I go, hey, Mike, I'm going to head off to business school in the fall. What advice do you have to me for me? And he goes, you know, here's your plastics moment, kid. Railroads. I'm like, railroads. He goes, yes, railroads. He's like, all of my students at the business school are into technology, media, telecom, startups, venture capital, banking, consulting. Nobody's going to railroads. He goes a young charismatic, putatively smart guy like you. You should be able to get into railroads. You'll be CEO of Burlington Northern within fifteen years and watch, Warren Buffett will buy it. And I go, you literally.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm like, oh, now I'm going to have an idea of how much networking goes on in the men's room. So I go, hey, Mike, you plan a lot of golf because I knew he was an all-American in golf at Princeton. And he goes,”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because she's like, you cannot believe how much networking goes on in the men's room. I'm like, I know exactly how much networking goes on. You go in, you do your business, you get out. Boom. Nobody wants to jibber jabber while you're in there. She's like, no, no, no. You don't understand. You have no idea. So it's Jody's last day. And here I am. I'm a big spender. I'm going to take her across to the Cambridge side gallery and buy her lunch at Aubon Pin to, you know, to thank her for being my roommate before my office mate before she goes off to law school last day, you know, celebrate Jodi. And we go to the bathroom before, you know, stop in the hallway. And she turns right to go to the ladies and I turn left to go in the men's room. And I walk into the men's room, and there's Mike Porter, who was, you know, the kind of spectral ephemeral presence that monitor. Like nobody ever saw him except during the speech. He's one of the firm's founders and you'd give the speech at global orientation and then you'd never saw him again. And oh my gosh, I met the URL right next to him.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I always had this kind of how do we turn the cube on its side question, right? How do we get a different angle? And then there was this like amazing moment I had. And let me take a little detour because this is one of my favorite stories. So when I was at Monitor, my office mate was this amazing woman, Jodi, and she had been president of the Harvard Womanist House. And they were, you know, they were WMYN. They weren't woe men. They were women, right? I respect that. She was just really amazing, but very kind of passionate about gender equality and good for her. Ahead of her time, and one of her big issues is co-ed bathrooms, right? Like she's always pushing for co-ed bathrooms. Why”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so it's interesting because growing up in Brooklyn, you got to work harder, you got to be a lot smarter, you got to be a self-starter, all that, you know, all that good Hamilton stuff. And, you know, I learned early on that I couldn't play the game that other people were playing.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is Just to circle back, there's some contrarian thoughts coming into my head, right? In 1999, at the height of the internet bubble, you went to business school. In 2001, when everything had started to shift, And you're talking about trees”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, cool. And he said, And when you go to Princeton, talk about timber. And so I learned everything I could about timber. This is 2001. And I showed up at Princeton and I probably spent three of my five hours of interviews talking about timber and got the job. Oh my god, to this day I can tell you all about timber, which for a kid from Brooklyn where we have one tree. I mean, this is, you know, I always think like, you know, it's amazing. Like a tree grows in Brooklyn. We got one tree over there.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And had this, my business school summer was doing investment banking at Morgan Stanley, and that was an oppressive experience. And so I got back to Yale and actually hung out with a guy who had been a year behind me three years behind you, Seth Alexander, who's now the CIO at MIT. And I was talking to Seth about how miserable I'd been at Morgan Stanley. And he said, dude, it's because you were an agent and you've got a principles mentality. And he's like, you should, you know, you should think about endowment management. He said, you know, it's the most amazing job. It's like the closest you'll ever come to managing your own multi-billion dollar fortune. You have incredible flexibility, low liquidity needs, long, if not infinite time horizon, few tax headaches, a single client, et cetera, et cetera. This is amazing stuff. I said, wow, this sounds really amazing. Can I come work at the LI Investments Office? He says, well, no. Because we like to hire out of undergrad like we did with Ted and”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, I really need to go to business school because I need to figure out this eyeballs thing and actually learn something. And he goes, what? What? Duvos. It's 1999. Going to business school now is like studying geology during the gold rush. You're crazy. Get out of the classroom. Get out of the field. What's the matter with you? Well, I take no satisfaction in the fact that that company was bust in 18 months, but it would have been an amazing experience. And I would have ended up probably going to work at General Catalyst and life would have been radically different. But instead I went to business school.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A factor of two either way. So there I was. I was like really confused. But meanwhile, there was this guy, David Fialco, who was one of the founders of a venture firm General Catalyst. And Fialco is this wild man. He's the most amazing, engaging guy, and he's got this kind of crazy Einstein hair, and he's like super in your face all the time. And it's amazing. He's a force of nature. And I was talking to him about joining one of his companies potentially and had interviewed and he wanted me to join.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, you know, I don't want to be in New Haven. I want to be in Boston or New York. The dumbest thought I've ever had in all my life, because what an amazing time that was to be at Yale and to be with those guys and to really be kind of pioneering portfolio management, as it were. But I went off, worked on a congressional campaign in that 94 election after graduation, and that was just a bunch of shenanigans and kind of sandblasted any idealism I might have had away. And then went to work in strategy consulting. So that was a great time. I worked at monitor company up in Boston, Michael Porter's firm, and I'll tell a porter story in a little bit. But what was funny is in 99, I decided to go to business school because I didn't know what was going on and companies, you know, we were working for a bunch of companies and they were all stressed out about how companies were getting valued on eyeballs. And I didn't know is every user one eyeball or two? Like, how do you, what does this measure? I'm off by, you know.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a lot of fun. We did indeed. Difficult intramural softball loss. Well, that was good fun. So, yeah, so we were in college together. And then actually one thing that's funny is you went off to the Illinvestments Office and you said to me, you said, you know, you should come talk to these guys”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He put the shift, I don't think so. I don't think so. That would be really funny. Theo outsmarting us back then, even. Anyhow, so here I was. I'm trying so hard just to smack up all the opposite field and I get this pitch, just fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat pitch. And I swing as hard as I can, and I just get right under it and I hit this weak pop-out to sit the second baseman for the third out. And we lost on that. I was the last out. And you just looked so crestfallen at first base because we weren't the... The intramural champions, and the only aside from bragging rights, you got these really swank shirts, and all I wanted was one of these shirts. I only got one of those shirts in my time in college. And that was my second chance for one. And so I'm sorry. I'm sorry I flied out weekly to the second.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And we had a swank team. I mean, that was a quality squad. And if you recall, we went to the championships and we were playing Berkeley. And I remember we were down one run in the bottom of the last inning. And I came up and runners on second and third. And here I was. I was this hitter. I was supposed to, I was a player. Like I had played baseball in high school and everything. And I remember you were coaching first base. And I remember Berkeley had this shift on. And so I thought, oh, I'm going to be clever. I'm going to like smoke a liner out to right center field scorch room. It was theoretical.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, before we get started, can I apologize to you? I have an apology that's twenty six years in the making In the spring of 1991, you were the captain of our co-ed softball team.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is going to be our first podcast really talking about a subsector of the broad investment landscape venture capital. But let's just get started with how you ever got into this stuff in the first place.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School of Management. Our conversation starts with Chris's path to venture capital through strategy consulting, investment banking, and an endowment investment office. We talk about perception and reality in venture investing, exciting areas of future innovation, and the nuts and bolts of research, portfolio construction, and decision making when running a portfolio of venture funds. When Chris pulls off his suit, the red undershirt of the super LP remains. He's a charismatic guy with great insight into how the venture game is played and draws many parallels from venture to investing in general. You know the one I'm talking about. There's someone you've known forever and trust and love so much. You probably only see each other maybe every year or two.”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest today is Chris Duvos, Managing Director of Venture Investment Associates, a fund that invests a billion dollars in commitments to venture capital funds. Chris is responsible for the management of relationships with the funds managers and the identification and development of new manager relationships. He is the author of an entertaining blog about venture capital entitled Super LP Adventures in Investing, available at superlp. comprior to joining VIA, Chris spent seven years co heading the private equity program at the Investment Fund for Foundations or TIF. In this role, he was responsible for another billion dollars in new capital commitments. Before joining TIFF, Chris worked on Princeton University's endowment team. He started his career as a strategy consultant at the Monitor Company. Chris is a graduate of Yale University and the Yale”
2017-07-03 · Capital Allocators · Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source