YouSaid · the spoken record

David Fialkow

lines on the record: 60
first: 2021-09-21
most recent: 2021-09-21
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

“Happen or hasn't happened. It's just dead wrong. What you want is the ability to say, hey, this happened, help me and have people around you that have the same empathy. And what that does is it builds up this sense that there's a common good on being able to be there for others. So if I were to take what people have done for me, which answers your question, then say, okay, how do I pay forward and make GC a firm that has at its core the fact that we need to have empathy and understanding for that journey of founders? It's a pretty good world.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he did it. I thought that was amazing. And he's also been a great part. What I'm always touched by is I actually, there's so many people that have been helpful to me. I have such a non-jaded view of the world that way. I would have never, ever been successful, ever, ever been able to do a lot of things I've done if it weren't for the kindness and generosity of people, sometimes deserving, sometimes I wasn't. But it was through that. And by the way, that's empowered me. to try to live my mission of doing the things that you and I just talked about yeah pay forward and you know what it is through the effort of others i mean first of all i have two isms that matter to me one is that adversity does not teach character reveals it the other one is no one's spared everybody has bad shit that goes on in their lives their marriages their kids their friendships their businesses everything any of us that think have such a pollyana do that that isn't going to”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Nexiom, this guy Keith Renari got prosecuted and he's doing 99 years in jail with no parole. It wasn't good enough to make a really good series. We had to follow through to the nth degree because our mission is not making great films. It's making great films that tell you something you need to know that leads to action and social justice and what could be better than taking a bad ombre and throwing them in the slammer for 99 years. So that kind of purity to mission has been like an incredible guiding principle. So that was one of the kindest things. The second thing is interesting. It's this guy that I brought up twice named Jim Schwartz who excelled is another venture firm. They're good friends of mine, but they compete with us. I don't think a lot of the decisions that I would have been able to make, I would have made without Jim's guidance and wisdom, even though he didn't have to do it. He runs another firm.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what I mean? And no, no. Listen, I think that sometimes the most basic things and the things that matter the most, being super happily married and having a partner and a friend in life like Nina has been extraordinary. I mean, she's my film partner too. She's a brilliant filmmaker. I would have never, ever made Icarus or certainly ever won the Academy Award were it not for Nina coaching me on how to do it. I had some skill myself, but I wouldn't have been able to accomplish it at that level. And Nina's ability to keep me and others focused on the social mission of social justice. Just an amazing thing. We did the vow with great filmmakers from others. Kareem Jahan made this film with us. And it's a story about this cult in upstate New York, the Nexian cult. And the way that Nina does things is she not only produced the film with Kareem and Jahan, but then she made sure that despicable.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the kindest thing anybody's ever done is Nina Singh, who I met when she was 17, which she was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, but didn't marry me until 10 or 12 years later. She believed in me when there wasn't a lot to believe in. And I think that was like had to be kindness because it certainly wasn't intelligence.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not selling you on why you should invest in the business. They're trying to just tell you this is so good. It's you who thinks that you should invest in the business. They're just believing so much that they can't imagine why you wouldn't. The third thing is they're not trying to get you as a customer. They are just saying, again, like a person, you're an idiot to not use their solution. What may come off to us is selling, they're just telling you the way they really think about something.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Authenticity. A lot of the founders that we talked about, I would be hard pressed to say that they were charismatic. What I would say is they're obsessive about something that they believe in. And I always marvel, I love sports. I don't own a sports team. I love sports, but I'm always amazed at how... Royal people are to sports teams based upon where they live. Nobody could ever be a Yankee fan if, unless they were born in New York. Live in Boston, of course. So, what happens is people definitely believe in things to the point where they're blinded by. And that's a really good thing. Let me take your question, extrapolate the answer in the following way. They love it so much. They don't think they're selling you to join their business. They think you're a friggin' idiot if you don't.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was able to help companies in Boston really work together because he's just like, hey, let's get our shit together and get stuff done. You got Charlie Baker, who's our governor, who's a Republican, who's the same kind of person. We as a firm have access, Mark Warner is the head of Intel, Senate Intel, work closely with us and a lot of other VCs and a lot of companies around stuff around cyber. So these are big decisions that we as a firm have to make where it's investment, public policy, public good, and our ability to really, I think, change the way people think about things. And if we don't do that, we lose our opportunity.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politicians, that doesn't work anymore. Our generation of leaders in tech, we have the throwaway to be able to really influence people because people need our businesses. And more importantly, they trust us. So instead of beating them over the head with a stick, use a carrot. They need us. We can be helpful to them. You have people like Gina Romundo, who is the governor of Rhode Island. Brilliant governor of Rhode Island. Now the Secretary of Commerce. And she's doing an amazing job in areas like cyber and everything around treaties. She has part of the weather and the climate. Extraordinary throw weight. She's the one in charge of implementing a lot of the infrastructure stuff. Who better than a governor who was a former VC? We've never had that kind of talent. You have a guy like Marty Walsh who runs labor. We know him because he was the mayor of Austin, but like absolutely the guy, first of all, he's a really hard ass, tough guy. You would want to mess with him. But he...”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recruiters and young people and mentors and everybody to collaborate to create this seismic change in the way in which we look at the next generation workforce. Everybody has to go to college to earn a family wage and provide for their family quite well. The second thing that we all went hard after is voter rights. And we utilize a lot of our relationships with CEOs, both public and private and everywhere, to really play a role in doing that. Now, why am I bringing that up when you ask me what lies ahead? Well, firms like us never had that kind of throw weight where we could actually influence and take responsibility for trying to influence in a good way our public missions. It's just wrong not to give people an opportunity to earn a family wage. And it's just wrong not to give people the right to vote. And we can do that not because we can give money and we can donate to.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is you have to build a diverse team today, the likes of which we've never had to do before in our industry, diverse from geography to ethnicity to creativity. We need to build teams that bring a broad spectrum of thinking and creativity to everything that we do. And that's not just good for responsible innovation. It's good for helping founders build their business in line with that. A couple of things that we've done along that line is we have two fabulous partners at General Catalyst, Ken Chenault, former MX chief, and Ken Frasier, former Merck chief, who joined forces and came up with this program called 110, which is this program to provide black leadership and that families can earn a family wage, a million over the next 10 years, and really encourage employers and”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all the stuff that was going on, and she allowed us to load it in the middle of the night. There's this protocol that a film has to be loaded by 9 p.m. the night before for the whole day so they don't have technical screw-ups. And we said to her, this thing's arriving by 3 a.m. We're going to have to load it then. And she's like, huge believer. And by the way, isn't it great to have all these analogies? So here's a film. It's exactly, she's a VC, a great VC, supportive of her founder. If she hadn't let that movie play at Sundance, it would have never gone on to the prominence of the one of the top docs. There's been a lot of great docs made, but it certainly was a very transformative documentary. So that's the story of Icarus.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, no, we couldn't even promote what the movie Fed. We couldn't say we have prima facie evidence of Russian doping. We would have been laughed out of the world or Rachenkov would have been killed or something. So we had to go to Sundance. This woman, Carrie Putnam, deserves a shout out. She ran sundance. We went to her and we showed her a clip. And she was like, you're kidding me. You have proof that the Russians filmed in the Olympics. I go, we'll show it to you. We'll show it to you. Dan Kogan, one of our producers said to her, listen, you should see this. And Dan said to her, you got to let us in so we can play the movie. But we can't promote what's inside the movie. And Carrie is just a very, very, very fine CEO of Sundance, loves filmmakers. Same thing. She's just protecting a founder. She goes, you got it. So much so that we didn't have the film printed and finished until 3 a.m. the morning of Sundance.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I use this quote without a connection to factual number, okay? 40% of every return is what the market's doing at the time, some number like that. You can build the best company in the world and then in a shitty market, you're going to get lower things. How lucky could we be, Patrick, O'Shaughnessy, that the day the movie premiered at Sundance, the exact day is the day that Trump gets inaugurated, okay? And by the way, we talk about the Collisons, how good are guys are they? John Collison comes to that premiere at Sundance for me. I hope you like the movie. But he came. Nobody knew what this movie was”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We provide him air cover. We provided encouragement and nutrition along the way to keep going. And then when things got really ugly, and they did, we were getting all hacked, the Russians were going to try to kill Rachenkov, you know, all this kind of stuff. And we couldn't lose our resolve. We had to tell Brian, listen, hang in there, buddy. We're going to get you through this. And Brian was great founder. Oh my god. Me and Jim were really great partners. He was fabulous. And I think a lot of it is that we had some experience together doing deals in the VC. And I knew that this was a guy who wouldn't crack and would not ever do the wrong thing by Brian or another founder. So that transformation was Brian's vision. And we were there to support it. Now, what also got lucky was you had a character in Verchenkov, who's like right out of central casting. I mean, if we were going to make a feature movie.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And over dinner, we said to him, If you were going to do one thing to do something extraordinary, what the hell would that be? He'd go, I get tomorrow morning, I'd go to Moscow, and I'd find Gregory Hushenkov, and I'd figure out how he helped the Russians cheat in the Olympics. And we're like, that sounds like a really good pivot. This one's in the rearview mirror. It didn't work. Let's go. And we re-upped. We gave him a series A. We gave him more money. And what happened next is like the guy made one of the greatest films of all time. He, not us. All we did was help him pivot. Now along the way, yeah, with some help and adjustment ended up being important. Jim Schwartz found this great lawyer to help us, you know, with the U.S. judicial system. But we never abandoned him. The same thing that Jim and I do with early stage companies we did with folks.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fetal position in Geneva, Switzerland. I did worse, the movie failed. Well, not exactly. So Jim and I said, listen, we're VCs. This happens all the time. How do we pivot this to give you the next thing? And Brian was not a founder of a tech company. It wasn't something that he was expecting to take a headshot on.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's get facts straight. This was a movie that failed in fibre. Brian Fogel was introduced to us by Dan Kogan and this woman, Jarilyn Dreyfus, introduced us to film partners of ours. Introduced Jim Schwartz and me to Fogel who want to make a movie, which he described as supersized me for Viking, for doping. I'm going to race one year and we're going to film it. I'm going to race the second year on dope and I'm going to do better and it's going to be fun. Okay. But here's what happened. Here's what happens. The movie doesn't work. He erases undoped and he does really well. He then goes through a year of protocol. This is Fogle and he dopes and he does worse. Now he does worse for a variety of circumstances, not relevant why other than maybe he was doped. I don't know, but he didn't do well. So he is sitting there like a founder on the floor.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our own firm, what message does that send? Now, I'm not being critical of other firms, but God, you've got the best talent in the world sitting in your firm. Don't leave it underneath you. Let it flourish.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To run that business out there the way you think it should be run, it's going to be different pricing of deals, different networks, different ecosystems. If people feel you're always checking back with command control, you're dead before you begin. So you're going out there completely deputized. You've been with us for 10 years or eight years. You're the guy, build a team out there, and boom, he really did an amazing job. Had we not done that, and then Joel decided to move to New York. So we had basically Boston, New York, and San Francisco set up really well with three founders of the firm. The next thing we did is that allowed us to infuse some culture in different places. But then the next thing we did, which was unique, is we immediately gave people big role in the firm as young people for a very simple reason. We're a tech venture fund. If we don't believe in young people,”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you don't know the journey that you're on with huh? And you want to be able to provide the throwaway. So as a firm, like, so we start out in Boston. And for the first 10 or 12 years, yeah, we were only in Boston. Then we realized that we couldn't compete. We had a bad scenario where we thought we had to deal with a company. We flew back on the red eye while we were on the plane. They signed a term sheet with somebody else because we were. And they claimed it was because we weren't local. We then backed this guy, Jim Schwartz, who's been a friend of mine and mentor, who's founder of Excel. It said to me one day, well, I mean, if you guys are going to stay in Boston, you're going to be a marginal firm. So we moved out to the valley. And three things happen when we moved to the valley. One, we gave one of our brilliant young people, Hamant, and a couple of others a chance to run their own business. And we said, listen, we're connected. We're one firm because we have one culture that defines us and keeps us on track with mission and vision. However, we need...”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it totally deescalates it. You know, when it's one person helping one person, it's an uncomfortable scenario. When you bring a team of people with you to say, hey, this team is committed, Patrick, to your success. And it's a variety of different people. You feel really good.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I'm going to say is hey, if I love this founder, these are the things I can help you with. But these are the things I can't. That's why I need to bring in Steve Harrider, Joe Culler, Ken Chenault, you know, or Adam Valkin, when we're in businesses like this, we have access to amazing people, Patrick, why the hell would anybody try to bluff and pretend they know things or try to hamstring a founder by saying this matters, this and this. The best thing we do is say, hey, let's bring a couple of people in who really know. And we as a swarm can be much more effective in helping our founders. So that happens like all the time. So directly answer is, do we care about business models? We do when it matters. A lot of the businesses we do, that doesn't matter. And clearly that's a decision we make with a handful of us helping a founder. And it totally demystifies the process.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, I know enough to know enough to be helpful, but I can help you get better people than me to work on that stuff with you. And one of the problems is when we all try to assume we're experts and we're not, we're doing a disservice to our.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should have begun your questions by answering it this way. My greatest joy and the reason why I've been able to do the things that I do and be able to do them with some degree of success and an extraordinary amount of enjoyment is that people that have come into my world who do a lot of great things with me. in and of myself am incredibly mediocre at most things. However, if I have convening power and I have the ability to surround myself with extraordinary people, I'm the most blessed person in the world. And that's what gives a lot of the things that I've done in my life the throwaway, whether it's film or philanthropy or general catos, whatever the capacity to do it. So directing the answer to your question, you would not want me pontificate to you about business models.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it's academic or technical or being a founder of a business or a filmmaker, an athlete, or a philanthropist, whatever it is, it allows them to meet people from other places and learn a lot about other things.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Introduced into somebody who was like the perfect person to join his board because this guy had regulatory background and was the general counsel of Uber named Tony West. He did a great job cleaning up a lot of the stuff that he and Dara had to clear up at Uber. We stayed really close. And then he came to one of my comedians and he met Zach from Rowe. It wasn't a coincidence that I put the two of them together at this comening. Zach said, my God, that guy's like amazing. He knows everything in the world about scaling technology companies. He's been at Uber. He's worked at the Justice Department. He certainly knows the regulatory environment. And we put the two of them together on the dock in front of my house, Martha Zineyard. And Tony's been a board member for the last year and a half, which has been fantastically helpful to Row. So these convenings also can lead to relationships and partnerships. The best thing it does is it allows people who are myoplane focused in their own world.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did another one of our companies, a really good healthcare company that sells direct products to consumers, let's call it Rohel. Zach is one of the best founders ever. And Zach's journey at GC is fantastic. A great young guy, Peter Boyce, who was an associate at the time, found the company. Hamant helped him from a healthcare point of view. Joel helped him from a subscription point of view. Adam Valkin helped him from a fundraising point of view. I helped him from just some mentorship point of view. I mean, this was a GC scrum as we seeded the company and started to do a lot more work. My partner Holly looked at an acquisition with him. I mean, I'm just thinking about all the people that touched Rowe in its growth. And one of the things that we found was that as he pivoted the business, he pivoted because he had all of these people around him that were helpful to him. Then I brought him to a convening. At the convening, we”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentor and friend to him. Okay, so now we go back to this scenario of convening. I bring him to one of our convenings. He doesn't know anybody hypes and LPs there. I have a filmmaker. I have an athlete, a friend of mine, pro-a-a-a-a-a-thle friend of mine, and I have a professor from a business school, and I have three other founders. Austin by far was the youngest. And I watch this guy. And all he did was ask questions and listen to people. He could articulate what he was doing. But then what he really wanted to ask you is how you did it and get ideas from other people. And he was so curious and so nice about it, yet so focused around explaining to people why he was asking what he was doing. And I said, this is the kind of guy you just want to help. He's a good dude. And so those are the things that convenience allow you to do.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know what you're good at? No, what you're not. And Austin and I became great partners and fabulous friends till to this day, even in his new company that he started at Hatch to GC. But at the time I met him, I wasn't really good about cloud backup computing. I actually knew so little that when I went to see him, I said, well, you know, I'm really familiar with barracuda, hoping that it would somehow play a role in what he was thinking of doing as a business. I'm not putting barracuda down. He looked to be like, what the hell are you talking about? That is absolutely nothing to do with what I do. And I only told him a year later after I made the investment, I was just bluffing that I couldn't really understand what he was talking about. So I just threw a name at him. But I was smart enough, A, to get him the right partner at GC who knew a lot about this stuff, and B, to know what my role would be with him, which would be a great.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way to summarize some of these things. Imagine you put a tech file and let's call him Austin McCord, who's the founder of Data. And when I was trying to get to know him, he didn't want to take any outside money. He had built this thing the time I met, who was like 28. He had started in his basement and built it up to a really good business. I had met him through like a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend actually who asked me to interview somebody at Austin's company to help them get a job in accounting. It led me to say to the person, tell me about the company. And this person then told me about the founder. And I really wanted to meet this young guy, Austin McCord, this business he was building. So I got to Nome and I utilized two of my partners, Paul Sagan, who was the CEO of Acamai and Steve Harrod, who was the CTO of VMware who were both partners at GC to develop a technical relationship with Austin to help him if he allowed us to invest in building the business. That's another thing.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your life in a way that was organized, but he also knew how to scale things, he knew how to talk about things and say, if you want it to be like that big, you got to get this stuff right early. And very few of our firms, let's go back to hockey, you got to build a great firm and you have to be able to make good investments. And I think we were better until Ken came and making the investments than we were at building a firm. Because what happened is our culture just was myopically focused around this mission of Game of Founders. And sometimes we probably didn't make the best choices internally on how we were dealing with our own people and how we were dealing with our own platform and scale. And we were redlining the business a lot, which was good, but not skilled.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you from firsthand experience, he runs a huge company, he has all the accoutrements and trappings when he was American Express. But I could sit down with him and say, this is really not going well, this part or that part, or how do I deal with the situation? He always made it easy for me and others to trust him. He is just a Menshi trustworthy guy. And he's got unbelievable emotional IQ and intuition. He can sit there and in a nanosecond, say, I get it. Don't feel bad about that. These are the two things you do. The only other person I had ever seen do that was Bill Campbell, who was lucky that I got a chance to meet him the last five or six years and spend a lot of time in getting some mentorship from him. And Ken Chenault was the other guy. I mean, Bill knew the value so well. Ken was just different. Just judgment on how to deal with people, how to deal with every part.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you keep that quality of service to founder, which is hard. And it's our biggest challenge. Again, all your top 25, 30 venture firms where we wanted to play a difference in our differentiation was our ability to be empathetic and really be able to mentor founders. And that's where we needed a guy like Chanel. He had been the conciliary to so many founders, young, old, tech, non-tech, he'd been on IBM's board. He had been obviously Amex board for a long time, the lead outside director of Berkshire Hathaway. I mean, the guy's a total rock star, right?”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did a really transformative thing three years ago, and that we brought in Ken Chenault to help Hamant, Joel, and I at the time really scale and run the firm. People probably scratch their head and like, why would you hire or nobody hires Genshinau? Like he hired us, so to speak. But why would you bring on board somebody who ran a hundred billion dollar business called American Express? Well, number one, we knew him for 20 years. And he was a trusted advisor and friend to us and vice versa. When he transitioned said, hey, you know, I'm going to leave Amex. Joel and I and Amon got together and said, this is the guy. This is the guy who can really help us scale. Not because we needed to raise money. That's easy in the venture business, especially top decile or top 5% firms like ours.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About having money to be able to live my life, sometimes that mentality as well, if you give an entrepreneur money, they'll lose their hunger. So then I say to the investor, well, somebody gave you money and if you lost your drive, no, of course not. This person loves their product and loves their company so much. Why not treat them with dignity? Let them build the kind of life for themselves. So sometimes it's basic as that. Sometimes it's also being somebody who people feel is safe to talk to. I've spent a lot of my time in the last 20 years at GC with founders not talking about businesses, but talking about personal stuff, interpersonal relationships, lives, parents, kids, spouses, co-founders, just issues. Be safe. Be somebody that people want to talk to because you have good judgment for the year safe. That's a big part of what GC is. The third thing is knowing when you need help.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The part we've done well is build a maker mentality, it totally changed its way you deal with investors, founders, your team, board members, co-investors, everything. It's a myopic focus around that person in the chair building his or her business. And everybody's going to get alignment around that. I find that I do a lot of battles with other co-investors who don't treat our founders the way they should. Like for example, it comes to things very tactical, like secondaries. If a business can afford to do it and the team is great and you're in it in the long haul, the founders take some money out. I mean, they go home, they tell their families, everything's going really well, but I can't afford a house or life's a mess because financially, yeah, hey, I'm making X amount of money and the VCs are flying in their private planes and they're busting my, you know, what's.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to need me back all week Keep recording because we get this stuff so wrong all the time and we got to look at it as a learning experience and then we got to do it with empathy and dignity and make sure that the people around us are treated well.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is how he got around a beer company selling because beer companies can't sell spirit, tequila and vodka. But he built it out of beer malls because that's what great founders do. So who's that love of his product? Beer. But what really changed it for him was understanding the tastes and needs of other people. So that's the kind of stuff. I mean, so when we look at a founder, we look at, are they going to be that person that's going to be capable of making those pivots and stuff when they have to? And if you paint between the lines, you get too frustrated and you look at yourselves a failure. If you went to an either league school and then you went to a business school and you went to Goldman Sachs, whatever, your life had been about getting gold stars. I'm not saying that's not a bad life. It's just not the life you and I had. But you tend to look at risk as painful. I don't want to lose a gold star. I don't want to have a blemish. We're embarrassed all the time. Like, oh my God, you're going to ask me later. I know about failures. I mean, really.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beer business was tequila because no sugar, it's light, it's a great experience and young people started doing tequila and not drink as much beer. So Cook takes that away. What and he pulls out this can that he had made over the weekend, a red bull can a thin cylinder 10 ounce or whatever it is and it was vile tasting flavored soda water and he goes forget about what you think today 90 days from now this will be the biggest product on the market and he invented with our board member who became CEO the two of them invented truly, which went in three years from $0 to billion dollars zero to a billion it took Kim 40 years to get to a billion dollars in beer and in less than three years Trillium is over a billion dollars what an amazing founder he never said beer is failing he said it's just innovative it's change and he used beer malts”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Jim and I became really good friends over the years. He's just a fabulous fountain. He built a good business. About five years ago, Sam Adams was in deep doo-doo. It had a declining sales and it was trapped between really hip microbrews and the big guys who had gotten really good. So Jim said, hey, it would be great if you could join the board and help me and my team turn the business around. I didn't do much to turn it around, but I watched an unbelievable turnaround. This is the story. Jim Cook walks into a board meet one day and we're looking for a new CEO because our CEO who had been like kind of a co-founder with Jim was kind of done and done a great job and gotten the company to appoint. Now is the time to move on. And Jim says, a lot of you have been talking about how one product is going to kill the beer business. We had told one product that was going to kill.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get feedback. If they're good, they don't believe their product is a failure. They believe their creative instinct and their right brain can pivot it to be able to do something else. They never lose track of the fact that this is still their product. They don't say, okay, this is water and nobody liked water and therefore I'm going to turn its beer. Here's a great example. So I joined the board five years ago of Boston Beer Company, Sam Adams. Why? Because my neighbor is Jim Cook, the founder. And in one of my impulsive moments, which I'll share later, I almost bought a brewery and Jim said, it's a bad idea. The brewery I was going to buy and why I was going to buy it. It was in northern New England and it would have been like a boat anchor.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meatball question perfect. It's somebody that comes in and says they want to do a startup. And we're like, great, I don't know. I'm looking at all these different industries. Shawnee is he has a really good podcast. Maybe I'll do a podcast. Fialco's got a good venture firm. They're focused on the commercial part of this. You want somebody who's commercial, but that's not going to get them to the promised land. So normally what happens is we can give some examples of this, but people come, they want to have a discussion with us or other firms that is I got to tell you about what I'm building. And we're like, great. And let's not focus on margins or CAC LTV or any metrics yet. Let's just get straight what this product is. Because here's what happens. And this leads to the pivot. When somebody is so obsessed about their product and then”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often there will be interpersonal decisions that that founder will make about their life, their team, investors, their marketplace. It's hard to tell, but you can get a feel for somebody, whether they're going to be a stand-up person. Because the expression that's my guiding principle here is adversity does not teach character. It reveals it. We talked about Icarus. You know, Brian Fogel is one of the greatest founders of all time. He was the director and the character in Icarus. You've got to have that person that you feel that when bad shit goes down wherever it does, they will be in a position of being able to make the right decisions and don't rely upon a rule or some principles written down somewhere. They have a gut instinct about doing the right thing all the time. And those are the four things you kind of look at, Patrick. And I'll tell you, if you do it, it'll be very, very...”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to sell. And selling means can they storytell? Can they make it clear to others how important this product and this mission is? The third thing is that they absolutely have to have some form of modesty so that they listen to other people. The smartest people in the world are smart because they listen to others. Now they may not always follow the advice of others, but they listen. If we feel that somebody isn't going to listen to us or others who are maybe smarter than us, then it's hard to back them because you know at some point there's no room for a pivot, which is the major part of where venture capital returns come from. And the second thing is they're not going to take feedback in a way from many people, including people on their own team that's positive. And then the fourth thing is a true north. And that mission that I talked about earlier is deeply important to us because it'll get tested in channel.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me be very direct and answer the question in a sound bite. It's always, always a founder that loves their product so much, nothing else matters. They don't hear the other conversations in the room. They certainly don't hear criticism that you're making of it. They don't view the difficulty of the execution as a problem, which is a great thing. Hopefully they address it by bringing in people around them. So there are four things that we get turned on by in our filter. I hate to say it a checklist, but because it's a natural checklist. Number one, does that founder love their product and is willing to do anything to get Patrick and David to use their product? And we'll run through walls to make sure the world, because they believe that the world needs their product more than they need oxygen. Number two, do they...”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We bring athletes and we bring filmmakers, academics or research people, creative people, and then founders. And we try to have this be kind of a cross-pollination of right-brain visions that really help our founders, number one, feel like they're not odd to be odd, right? Number one, number two, they can build a network of people. Part of our investor group and of course, part of our network of entrepreneurs. All of our investors have the same common mission, which is they make money for other people. When you have that defined way to build a mission, it makes it so much easier to make decisions on who you bring into your team and who you end up investing with. It comes also from some things that other people certainly have said to you. If you pink between the lines, you'll never be an outlier. It just doesn't work that way.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we moved on and built our firm. One of the things we find is we find a lot of our time protecting founders from other investors who may have different agendas than us. This is a business where value is created. You're an investor compounding over many, many, many years. So why the hell would you encourage somebody to sell a business or do something crazy when you really want to be part of something creating value over a very, very long period of time? So being part of that journey with a founder means getting to know them really well. It's awful trying to make decisions on the early stage part of the business in particular with somebody that you've met for two hours and you've met them over Zoom or you've met them in some sterile office somewhere. So the things that we try to do is a lot of, we do a lot of collaborations. We do a lot of convenings. We bring people together all the time. And a lot of our, the ones that we bring together,”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Join you in this Odyssey. So, what we learned, certainly being founders ourselves and then sitting down and having this crazy idea of starting up a venture firm was we had to help at the beginning with empathy for the process, but help in storytelling. Patrick, what exactly is the business that you're trying to build? Great. What do you want to look like when you shut your eyes? Who do you think we're going to sell this to? you know, meaning the product. What kind of people do you want to work with? Patrick, you're a self-proclaimed technical nerd. Great. Let's partner you as somebody that isn't that way so that the two of you have a collaborative effect on things. And we always looked at that odyssey of being a founder, not only through our eyes, because that's, of course, limited. We only started a few businesses, but through their eyes and how could we be part of that? Sometimes it's...”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building a tech company is really like that. Not only do you have to be right about the idea, but you've got to execute and build the business. And what we found is there was a disconnect so often between one and two. One, an innovator's creativity to come up with an idea. The second, which is great, but then if we're really going to be helpful, it isn't providing money. Money is a commodity. What we needed to do is help them build that business. Now, what does it mean? It starts with empathy and an understand. The second thing, and I'm going to get back to Chris in a second, is about storytelling. You want to get a job. You want to get into college. You want to hire somebody. You want to raise money. You want to sell a business. You want to convince somebody to do something with you or for you. You have to tell a story, Patrick. And that story has to be authentic, or else nobody will.”
2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source