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

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  1. “Worked because we did what we love to do, which is to be part of that founder's journey. We didn't know any better. Here's the problem. The word investor doesn't work in my mind in the venture business. We're builders. We're makers. I'm a filmmaker by background. Joel was a photographer and a creative person as well. We like being part of the making of this stuff and the creative aspect of what it takes to start things from a bottom up and help founders be part of that journey by providing them whatever the heck they need versus being stileed investors. And that kind of led me to another analogy. I'm a hockey guy. The thing that makes hockey so difficult is you got to be able to skate and you got to be able to play hockey. Venture capital is a bit like that, but”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Really want to be around A entrepreneurs? How are you going to do that? And I said, let's start a venture fund. And he said, we know nothing about investing. We know nothing about technology. And I said, correct, we have no bad habits. We're outside as we're total outsiders. And the other thing is we weren't kids that went to Ivy League schools and worked at Goldman Sachs. So we weren't accustomed, Patrick, to getting gold stars for painting within the lines. We were accustomed to doing things creatively and dynamically outside those. When we started, we just had this idea. Certainly couldn't raise money from the outside. The only way that we could raise money was by using our own capital. So our first fund was like small, 60, 70 million, mostly at our own money, a couple of friends of ours gave us money. Not because they believed we make them a lot of money, but they believed that we would show them deals that they could co-invest in. And I get it. It worked really 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

  3. “Not as painful as it was for them to give me that million dollars. But while I was there, Patrick, Joel and I was sitting on a rock, and Joel said to me, and we were with a bunch of our buddies, and Joel said to me, are we A, B, or C entrepreneurs? I'm like, we're A entrepreneurs. What do you mean? We just sold our business. We had a blast. We did it together. We didn't have any investors, no VCs. How good is that? And Joel made some comments about my leadership style, which he felt was inconsistent and that we were very fortunate to be able to build a large business and be able to inspire a lot of people in the ways that we did, which is basically delegating authority, which a lot of them thought was a positive thing. We were delegating authority because we didn't know any better. So I said to Joel, I think we're A entrepreneurs and we went through it and we realized how weak we were at leadership, how we were at Project Management, at finance, other things. And he said to me, if you”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So they kind of challenged me. Did I still have the firepower and do something extraordinary athletically? So I bet these folks a million dollars that I could do the Hawaiian Iron Man in 90 days qualifying and doing it if they give a million dollars to the Crohn's and Kaleitis Foundation. And of course, I had to succeed because there was no option other than to do it. So I did it. I qualified. I went to Hawaii, got a million bucks from these clowns.”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “A duty free business And Joel and I decided to take a break. Joel has Crohn's disease. He had spent a lot of his life with some help from me and others raising money for Crohn's. And I came up with his hairbrain scheme of building something at Children's Hospital in his honor. And it was so expensive. I went like, wow, I think we've got to go out and raise money from others. And as I was walking home literally from meeting with the hospital, I went to a taco restaurant with my wife, Nina. And I was sitting with a bunch of business guys I knew and I had gotten a little hefty in my last few years of running the business from my lean hockey weight of years ago. And they were commenting and I made a comma, which I thought was the right comment, which is I'm allowed to weigh double what my wife weighs. She weighed one of vibe, I could weigh 210.”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “People that were our teammates to be as enjoy driven as the people that were sending away. And that experiential energy really flowed. And the business did fabulously well. We got lucky. We were young. We got lucky and we ended up selling it. Right around the time we sold it, we had an opportunity to really reflect on what we wanted to do next. And the company generate a lot of cash. And we were always enamored with the founder. We were founders. We wanted other founders around us. We had like 100,000 feet of office space. We had a lot of people around. We were tech driven. So we came up with this idea while we were running the business. Why don't we seed other companies and let them use our space at National Lesion, which is our travel company, and hatch a bunch of new companies. And when we sold our business, which was a travel business, a payment business,”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, we got lucky. We sold it after eight years at a time when the business was really growing. And it was a fun business because it was young people and it taught me everything as so much about number one, empower young people because we were all young and none of us had any experience. People go, I don't know, try it. Failure was not trying that the outcome wasn't right. Number two was we really believed in people coming from the outside. We didn't hire anybody from the travel business. We wanted to recreate the experience. The travel business sucked. Nobody cared about your experience. People who were just booking, they didn't care if you liked your hotel, your flight was on time, the beach was right. We cared deeply. We wanted you to have the best experience of your life just because you were paying less didn't mean you should have a less experience. On the contrary, you should have a better experience. So we wanted people involved in the business.”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Dollars you go away a month from now. We don't have to pay our vendors until a month after you come home. So we get this two months of float. Now that two month of float only works as long as you grow the business. Because if you stop growing, 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

  9. “Living coming out of college with a degree in filmmaking. So me and my best friend, Joel Cutler, started a travel company. And that travel company became one of the largest travel companies in the US. Then we built it on a very simple premise that Joel came up with that everybody likes travel, travels fun, travels great enjoyment. Why not wait till the last minute and book it? Who really cares whether you go to Aruba or St. Martin or Antigua or whether you go to London or Paris? So if it's half price or a third price, why not just go where you can afford to go? And we caught the wave of everything at the same time. More leisure time for people, people wanting to travel. Obviously the internet with Joel's idea and a lot of luck and grit. We built a fabulous company that we ended up selling. We didn't take venture capital money because the beauty of the travel business is O'Shaughnessy books a trip today and pays a thousand.”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, first of all, thank you. It's great to be here with you, Patrick. Icarus is very much in the same combination of venture capital, which is the art of luck, the pivot backing great people, and doing things along the way that make sense based on three main things. Number one, always, always, always deferring to your founder or filmmaker and trusting their instincts on things. Number two, never giving up. Failure is only defined by giving up. And when we say that there's no more gas in the tank or fuel or legs on a bicycle or something, the third thing is surrounding yourself with people that are going to be super positive, tree founders, filmmakers, with empathy and understand how difficult it is to do it. My background was I was a filmmaker. My wife's a filmmaker. I couldn't make”

    2021-09-21 · Invest Like the Best · David Fialkow - Paint Outside the Lines - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 243] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source