YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Olsen

lines on the record
19
first
2018-04-23
most recent
2018-04-23
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “We talked about these things earlier around how technology is infecting insurance and education and other things. Language training and language learning was certainly on that list. And Luis was demonstrating a massive consumer following of people who were able to use his platform to learn English and other languages to provide better economic opportunities for themselves and their families. Thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on the show. An incredible guest to have on the show, and what can I say? I'm sold on the very exciting times ahead for the opportunities in the Midwest. And if you'd like to see more from Chris,”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's a belief that the only place you can find smart people is in Silicon Valley. And it's just not true. And I think that that's a real bias that we need to get away from. And it's funny, you travel around other places. It's perceived very differently. I have a friend of mine who said it best. He was like, I think San Francisco is great. It's a land of opportunity for the 1%. And I was like, whoa, it's a pretty harsh view of it. But I think that the way he describes that encapsulates a really strong misnomer about the place that is popularly held. Absolutely. And then let's finish on your most recent publicly announced investment. And why you said yes? So the most recent investment that has been publicly announced was Duolingo. And the reason that we said yes was because when we met with Luis for the very first time, it became clear that number one, this was a world-class founder who was in a world of education that was sorely needed technology. And just as”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “We've gone on in a funny turn of events. My wife actually was able to, she captured that moment on video because she got a picture of my daughter sitting in front of the boxes crying at that very moment in time. I believe that the decentralization of Silicon Valley is the biggest trend that we're going to live through in the next 20 years.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The biggest thing for me was when we were fundraising for fund one and in the process of doing that we had a lot of people that were telling us no in the beginning and we had been fighting and scraping and scrapping to get to our first close and we had gotten to a point where we thought we were there so much so that I called the movers to come to my apartment. Well, the movers come to my apartment. They are packing up the boxes and in the midst of all that they're packing, I get a phone call from my partner. had changed their mind. It was no longer going to be able to come into the fund. So here I was my whole life on a truck and heading out into something that was now unknown was something that was you have to make a choice. What do you do to do this? And in the process of doing that, I now put myself in a position of saying, well, I got to fling my whole family into the abyss. But we decided to do it.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “My favorite book is The Old Man in the Sea. I love that story as a metaphor for all things related to building technology companies where you're out in the ocean, you have no idea what's going to happen. And suddenly you hook onto something that you think is possibly the biggest thing you've ever caught. But the ability to pull it in is going to nearly kill you.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Think what we would do in the beginning is we didn't have an office, we just had a suburban and a laptop and that was really it. What we would do is we would drive the LPs around to what we thought were some of the most interesting startup companies that were here. And we take them to go see guys like there's a guy here called Sean Lane. And Sean is the founder of a company in Columbus called Crosschecks that he moved here from Baltimore. And Sean would talk to them about this is a guy who came from the NSA.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The LP is kind of bifurcated. We had some who they would take the meeting because it was two former Sequoia partners and they didn't want to miss anything and they were nice and they were polite, but they wouldn't invest in the fund. And then we had other folks who would really dig into the diligence and they would really dig into the data and they spent a lot of time with us and looking at our analysis and the research. And those are the LPs who ended up committing and to fund one. And the interesting statistic was, I understand the bias. I get it. I live through it every single day. The interesting thing is when you can actually get people on an airplane and they come and they visit, they see it and it's obvious. So 100% of the LPs in Fund One who came to visit us all invested into the fund.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, when we first started, radical is one way to describe it more favorably. I'd say my friends were like, dude, this is stupid. What are you thinking? You're going to the Rust Belt. You're going to this old manufacturing economy that has been the albatross around America's neck for the last two decades. Why in the world would you ever do that? And I think that the LP reaction was similarly mixed. And what was intriguing was we had a lot of LPs who said, hey, if you guys do this in Silicon Valley, we back you. And our reaction to that is, but I don't understand why. Like, well, at Silicon Valley. And we're like, but, you know, Silicon Valley's kind of already figured out. Like, we're not going to go out Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. Like, where's the innovation? What we're talking about is going to a place where there's hardly anybody investing. And if we can go there, then we can really build a competitive advantage that nobody has even in Silicon Valley.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “This idea and said that there was a disconnect in the perception of how the Midwest is today versus what is reality. So you look at the number of engineers who are here. There are more engineers graduating from Midwest universities than any other corner of planet Earth. It has the economy that would be the fifth largest economy in the world, bigger than Brazil, bigger than Russia, bigger than India. And it's on top of that has 150 of the Fortune 500 companies here. So we were looking for this customer set that was here fueled with engineers and felt like ultimately this was the opportunity of a lifetime. To do in Ohio in the modern era what Sequoia and other firms had done in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, that that would be something worth dedicating our lives towards working on and solving those problems. So in 2012, we set up the firm and started down this path to building a firm in the Midwest that aims to invest in all of these technologies that are”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The firms in Silicon Valley were prosecuting Silicon Valley. And I was out visiting a company here. We caught up over dinner. And he floated the idea behind me. He said, why don't you leave Sequoia and why don't you start the largest VC fund in the Midwest? And I immediately was dismissive of it. But I was so kind of intrigued by it because it was such a far out idea that I went down this path to try and prove it with the data. And it was interesting because usually when you meet with a company, the very first meeting you meet with an entrepreneur, that's usually your highest point. You know, after that, you're left in this very dreamy state. You believe everything. And as you get through diligence, you go through this return to normal or you get back to reality. And the investment is rarely as attractive in the second and subsequent meetings and diligence as it is in that first meeting. In this instance, this idea had the opposite effect. Every piece of diligence that I found actually validated”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Investing in other geographies, China and India, Israel and their growth fund, their global growth fund. And today, Sequoia and many of the other venture firms, they invest more money outside of California than inside of it. And while we were there, we will look at faraway places. And at the time, one of our partners at Sequoia, Mark Kwame, was tapped by John Kasich to come out and run a job development program in Ohio called Jobs Ohio. And in the process of doing that, Mark was a storied Silicon Valley person who had really grown up their whole life. He tells a story that he discovered Ohio. And in the course of discovering Ohio, what he found were all the wrong ingredients to make successful companies here. The more customers here in the Midwest, there's more universities and engineering grads here in the Midwest.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Where suddenly these infrastructure level engineering, a lot of those tasks were suddenly being commoditized. And the value flipped from being invested in where those few engineers were. It really flipped from being in technology to the enablement of technology as a kind of sneaked into every single business on planet Earth. And you see it today where the most valuable startup in the world is a taxi hailing application, right? So the remarkable thing about that is that we believe that you really to be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to get as close to your customers as possible. Ultimately, your investors aren't going to make you successful. It's the amount of revenue you can convince your customers to give you. And the folks who have a tendency of doing it best are the ones who really spend the time to be in close proximity to their customers and get to know them. So it's a sequoya's reaction to this phenomenon was to set off around the world and start”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, sure. So to tie back one last story on Sequoia was in that exact same first partner meeting where I was incredibly intimidated. There was also something that remarkable that happened in that meeting, and that was that there was a company on the agenda that was based in Petaluma. And the partnership decided not to invest in that company because it was too far away from Silicon Valley. Now, Petaluma is about 10 miles north of San Francisco. It's not like it's a faraway place at all. But the theory of the firm and the investment practice of the firm was rooted in investing in a bicycle ride of the office because when you're investing in technology through these companies that were in the 90s or early 2000s, what you're really investing in was groups of people that were highly specialized and really only located in one corner of the world in large quantities to build these next generation technology companies. Well, fast forward a few years and the advent of cloud computing really led us down a path.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “For me and learn very much about all the fundamentals of what it takes to be a great founder, of what it takes to be a great board member, what it takes to actually generate returns for limited partners. And I don't think there's any place you could learn that other than in the workforce itself, that you really, they believe you have to learn by doing. It's an apprenticeship model. And so that meant that there's no book that you can read, there's no class you can take. And I was given a lot of arguing maybe too much runway in the beginning to try and figure these things out. And I made a ton of mistakes, but the partnership there was probably the best training ground could ever imagine.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I'll never forget my first partner meeting at Sequoia. My very first reaction was, oh my gosh, I've made a huge mistake. I should have gone to business school. I'm completely out on. These guys are some of the smartest people I've ever run across, and now there's a whole room of them. And I'm afraid to even talk. But what I learned very quickly was that the partnership at Sequoia is unique because almost everybody there is a story of an entrepreneur and many times an immigrant founder who came to start their company. And they are a bizarrely approachable group of people who really value young people who are willing to work incredibly hard. And I was a beneficiary of that. Part of it was being the right place in the right time. But the lessons from having the experiences of working with some of the very best companies at Sequoia has been able to work with was one of those once in a lifetime experiences that went on for six years.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Anything about VC, I certainly didn't know anything about FOIA, but I knew that if you could send back $100 million and not miss it, that had to be a good business. I mean, I could figure it out. And that kind of tipped me to this whole world. And then from that tip, I just got my hands on everything I met with everyone I possibly could to try and understand more about what it was that VC is.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “When I was in high school, I had a disagreement with my father. My father wanted me to be a doctor. I didn't want to be a doctor. And so I decided I had to teach myself about business. And the best way I could do that was starting to read the newspaper. The very first newspaper I got was in addition to the Wall Street Journal. It was in print still at the time. And the very first article I read in that newspaper that day was about this firm in California that was sending back $100 million to the University of Michigan because they needed to disclose who it was they were investors in. And this was, if you know your VC history, this was the story of Sequoia sending back $100 million to the state of Michigan because through the University of Michigan because they ended up having to disclose things through FOIA requests. And Sequoia had at the time made the decision to no longer accept public funds because of this disclosure. They wanted to protect this stealthiness of their businesses.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “A product model was or anything like that meant starting from scratch. And the only place that we're hiring at that time out of college were these programs in New York, these investment bank programs. I was able to worm my way into one of the programs and then kept in touch with a bunch of the VCs and then was fortunate enough that a lot of the later stage VCs valued that cold calling model of the outreach and was able to get into one of those cold calling programs at a venture firm called TCV. And that's really how I started getting into investing.”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So for me, it was really the concert of good luck and hard work. And when I first came out of college, I decided I wanted to be a venture capitalist. But I graduated from college with a degree in political science, had tried my hand and professional squash career that didn't go very far. And so I decided my backup career could be in venture capital. So I figured the only way to do that was to go out to Sandhill Road and start cold calling on the VCs and knocking on doors. And eventually, a couple of them would meet with me. A for effort, but you got to go and you have to be relevant and learn something and you haven't gotten experience. And with nothing but a college degree, they were absolutely right. So I went back and just started to find jobs in business trying to figure out what business meant as a policy major. I didn't know what that even occurred. I hadn't even taken an accounting class before. So to me, to figure out what a balance sheet was or what”

    2018-04-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learning The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source