YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Redlitz

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14
first
2015-04-09
most recent
2015-04-09
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “We actually have two that we've done recently. You know, I think one was a company called Nuco that's CEO is John Battel and John is very, very well known in media. He's done multiple startups and it's really kind of a unique approach to conferences, creating festivals, and there's a lot of offshoot benefits to that. So he's a very experienced guy. And then we did one that hasn't been announced yet, but that was an entrepreneur in a previous startup that we had. And for him, it was just, you know, he's a rock star CTO. We have an announcement that one yet. But I think that just shows the sort of different types of entrepreneur. One who's been around, very experienced and one who's relatively new, but just a really proficient in technology.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Okay, well write in your neighborhood losing your virginity by Richard Branson's a really good one. Start up a view by Reed Hoffman. And one that I used to give you two I'm going to cheat Good to great is always like a Bible.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I see a national and I see many of the guys that are graduates actually running the program and I see myself stepping back a bit. Not that I don't want to be involved, but I want to give the guys and the program a chance to really step up and lead.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think it's working with government agencies not to say that they're resistant, but whenever you're doing something new and different, we're used to disruption, this whole idea of disruption in the startup environment. But when you're dealing with legacy agencies, that's something that's a little scary. So it's been a lot of an education for them from us, but also we've had to be patient. So realizing that as opposed to running hard and expecting change very rapidly in a startup environment, we have to show a lot of patience. And I think that's been the most difficult thing for us just because of how we're wired. But, you know, I think part of it is you just have to be very methodical about your approach and we have. But that's probably been the most difficult.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, for the coding side, we actually built it out so that it is virtual. So we do the instruction from San Francisco and do a feed into the prison. And we actually are instructor inside also has connectivity. None of the guys have locally, to their local machine have connectivity, but we built a basically a self-sustainable sort of simulates the web environment for the guys to use. But one of the reasons we did the virtual instruction is because we are going plan to go to multiple prisons. And that's the best way to do it. So I think the scalability of that is going to be really fantastic when we start rolling it out, which probably will be next year.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, for the entrepreneurship program, they meet twice a week for three hours a session. They have a lot of out-of-class work that they do. In the coding side, it's actually, it's very immersive. They are meeting Monday through Thursday, 10 hours a day. So they have two sessions of virtual instruction by a group in San Francisco called Hack Reactor, who does the curriculum, and the rest of the time is lab time. So it's a pretty intensive. The guys are doing very, very well, and I think it's surprised a lot of people where I think half the class had never touched a computer and no one certainly had done any coding, and they're doing extremely well.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, we have actually two tracks. One, we have an entrepreneurship track where we teach them how the world has changed primarily with technology since they've been inside and many guys have been inside for quite a while. We teach them to build a business plan, they create that plan, and then we actually have a demo day inside the prison where they present their ideas. We just had a demo day week ago Friday, and the presentations are incredibly good. We have people from the outside come in. I think we had about 120 visitors come in, and there's probably at least a dozen VCs that came in, friends of mine. And just struck by the quality of presentations. That's the entrepreneurship track. And we also this past year started a coding curriculum where the guys learn CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, and it's the first coding program in the country in a U.S. prison.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, we started about five years ago, and I really had no background in prisons, didn't know anybody in prison, never had a relative in prison. But I was invited into San Quentin, which is in California. It's probably one of the most well-known prisons I would think. It's actually the oldest prison in California along with Alcatraz. I was invited in there to do a talk about entrepreneurship to a group of men. And I really didn't know if they would understand what I was talking about or be interested. But the response was so overwhelming that it really got me thinking about things that we do every day in the valley, working with young entrepreneurs. Why couldn't we use some of those same”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, I mean, I was exposed to a lot at Reebok. You know, we did product placement there at an early stage. There's product design, there's working with promotions and agencies. We also, within our product placement, we were pretty heavily in the music business with hip-hop at the time. So I got exposed to that, but then I, as I said, I was involved in the online yellow pages, which sort of is a peripherally in media. And I just kind of stuck with that. So that worked for me, I understood it. And, you know, at the time, it was a small market. It's obviously grown into a huge market. Saw the disruption pretty early on that online will disrupt traditional media and obviously that's come true.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And that company went on to become omnipure, become, you know, go public and was acquired by Adobe. So that was a big success. And part of Josh's success also was that he was the CEO throughout, took it public through the acquisition, and he also maintained most of the founding teams. So his leadership qualities are tremendous, and now he has a company called Domo, which we're also invested in, which is doing extremely well. So, you know, for me, it's always been looking at who the people are because companies will pivot in their product, in their strategy, but if you have a strong team, you can get through those times.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I don't think it's, I mean, I've always been in and around media from early on. So that's been my focus. And I sort of really look at companies that I am sort of the Warren Buffett approach. You have to really know what you're investing in or else you shouldn't invest in it. And that's really what I've done. I stayed really in areas that I know well. But it really still about people. You know, one of the first companies that I invested in was 97 or 98 was a guy out of Salt Lake City named Josh James. And I just was struck by him. And frankly, he'll probably admit this, his product wasn't that great at the time, but he just had this, the it factor, so to speak.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Sure. Well, those Snapchat LinkedIn and Twitter were all through acquisitions. Scan was a company that was acquired by Snapchat, Snappy TV was acquired by Twitter, and Nozle was acquired by LinkedIn. So that's how we have positioned those companies. We focused on very early stage. We focus primarily on the entrepreneur, but we're also somewhat sector specific where we invest in digital media, mobile commerce, marketing automation platforms, things like that. So we have a more of a sector focus.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “To start online yellow pages, so I work with them in a very sort of nascent stage of the internet, and we worked on that company, was eventually sold to super pages, but that sort of, for me, was I got the bug then. When you work for a company like Reebok and go through a tremendous growth, you think lightning's not going to strike twice. But when I saw the internet, I thought this is a really tremendous opportunity, not knowing at all that it would be what it is today in those early days. But that's really how I got started. And I've done multiple startups since then. I started investing in the mid-90s individually. And we formalized our fund almost six years ago.”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I took a fairly non-traditional route. I actually early on worked for Reebach. I was a competitive runner, but really that was my sort of passion, was always been sports and athletics. And I joined the company very, very early on in the early 80s when the company was doing just, I think we were doing about 10 to 12 million dollars in sales and was with them for about 11 years through the whole growth period, IPO. So that was a tremendous experience to be with a company like that. And in 94, I actually, some of the guys I was working with at Reebach wanted to do something online. And I was a prodigy in CompuServe user at the time. And they wanted...”

    2015-04-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 026: Chris Redlitz on The Importance of People, Pivoting and The Last Mile · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source