YouSaid · the spoken record

David Lawee

lines on the record
15
first
2020-10-08
most recent
2020-10-08
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

  1. “Just love that, and such exciting times ahead for Capital G and the portfolio there. I do want to say a huge thank you, Stavid, for taking the time today. It really did mean a lot. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, you can on Instagram at hstebbing's 1996 with 2Bs. I always loved to see you there. But before we leave you today, I want to take a moment to mention Hello Sign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Someone who's doing one role doing another. And it's that type of nuance that I think makes the real difference in advising CEOs because you can tune in more to the challenges they're thinking about. Yeah, I think the level that Ben thinks is just so granular. And then tell me final one. What's the most recent publicly announced investment for you? And why did you say Yassin get so excited? We invested in Albert, which is a fintech firm. And I think for us in that case, what was exciting was that the finance problems for Americans can be automated and kind of a lot of decisions don't need to be decisions. They should just be done automatically. And that vision, I think, for the people that are not able to save money and pay their bills and for getting dinged by fees at banks for kind of that failing can really improve people's lives. David, as I said before this year, I had some really great chats with Layla, with Jean, with Elon. I had so many great things. Thank you so much for joining me today. And this was such a pleasure to do. Terrific. Thanks a lot for having me.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Involved in some of the most consequential companies in terms of impact and innovation and getting to work with those entrepreneurs is incredibly thrilling. The byproduct of that is strong returns, which is really the only way we're measured. So those are the dimensions. What would you most like to change about the world of venture? More diversity. Diversity of thinking, diversity of people. It's incredibly clubby and white male oriented. And I don't think that's helping the entrepreneurial world. It's kind of not helping the venture world decision making. So that's the biggest thing. It's also the hardest thing, but it's kind of the biggest thing that needs to change in my view. Who's the most memorable board member that you sat on a board with? And why? Well, I really like working with Ben Harretz as an example. I was always struck with how much detail he has around the functionings of a business. Like he could explain in detail how the planning group of the finance team versus the accounting group thinks and the challenges of having”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Let's start on probably the hardest of all, which is your favorite book and why if you had to choose one this summer I read Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. I don't know if it's my favorite book of all time, but I kind of read it in May and it was super timely to kind of tune into those issues and kind of understand his life growing up in South Africa. So I'd say for this summer, that's been my favorite book. What's the hardest element of your Olaf Capital G today, do you think? We want to have a high performing team, and it's challenging to figure out what the right time is over which to measure performance. You don't want to be short-sighted measuring it every year. You kind of have to like five years or seven years need to know where you are. So it's somewhere in between that you need to kind of make decisions on people. And because we're aiming to be a partnership that is compensating the partners equally, you need to have the bar pretty high. And so those decisions and when to make them are by far the hardest. What does success look like for you with Capital G? We really want to be in.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He have done over the last seven What would you advise me? I find it's not very effective to tell people what to do as a minority investor. I'd say it's a lot better to try and get them to see you as a mirror and be an honest reflection of what they're saying and help them think about whether they're focused on the right question. And so if people say to me, well, we're going to launch this product in six months and then six months later, they haven't launched it. My goal isn't to kind of give them a hard time about that, but when they're kind of talking about future deadlines or goals, I can be like, well, do we feel that we're better at estimating now based on kind of what we learned the last time? And I'm just reminding them without trying to, because who hasn't worked on software products that have taken longer, that their judgment should be improved now. Yeah, no, I totally get you in terms of that thinking. I'd love to dive into a quick fire answer. I see a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts in about 60 seconds or less. How does that sound? Sounds challenging. It's incredibly challenging.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And I guess has it changed over the years? It changes all the time. I think what I've realized increasingly is that different management teams need to be influenced in different ways. So I try not to have, here's the David Lowie formula for motivating people. And that takes a lot of personal time with the CEOs and the management team. I think you need to know how they think and how they make decisions and what things move them. And then you need to kind of work both inside the boardroom and outside. The goal is to be tuned to a pretty phenomenal company and try and help them. And that is an extremely hard thing to do. And so the last thing you want to do is kind of be tuned out in terms of what's the reality for them because then you're going to have more limited ability to influence them. And so that tuning time is a lot more nuanced than I kind of appreciated at the beginning. I've just joined my first boards over the last 18 months. What advice would you have for me having been on the boards and having sat with the incredible family?”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I don't think it differs. Maybe the incentives are different to do it. One of the benefits of being started within the alphabet family is there's a lot of experience in company building. And so a lot of the things that you might overlook as a small business, we have the benefit of people thinking about for a lot of different businesses. And so that could be like gender diversity, racial diversity. When we have these issues come up, we have the ability to tap into alphabet to get really good thinking in terms of how to kind of address these issues. And the same is true for some of these basic company building things. People were asking me, who's my successor from the beginning? So I didn't feel that it's something I'd kind of need to think of all of a sudden. I've always been thinking about that. That makes total sense. Can I ask, in terms of, we spoke about kind of investment.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Practically, we don't really need to think about reserves because we have one LP. So in every fund, we have the same LP. And so we can just think about every decision discreetly. And so we think about the diversification from the standpoint of, well, from alphabet's perspective, the whole thing is like pretty small. So they don't need to think about it. So then we could think about it from the point of view of our concentration of, let's say, my own investments. And I feel we've made 45 investments in seven years. I feel more than diversified. So actually, I feel like the concentration is better for us. That's why you'll see us kind of trying to participate in as many rounds as we can for the kind of companies that we're backing. No idea.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think people overvalue perceived diversification. I think you get a diminishing return in our business once you get past five or six investments. And the added diversification, like if you kind of take a more mature category, public stocks kind of be around that five or six, the extra value you get from the next investment in terms of diversification is actually quite low. Yeah, I agree.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Like I said, it differs by market. So today, the SaaS Enterprise SaaS businesses are priced to the moon on average and kind of a lot of other businesses are not. So I think when we're making enterprise SaaS businesses, we may be going a little earlier, kind of taking different kinds of risk as opposed to just taking valuation risk. But we're trying to cast a much wider net overall. It's amazing to me that in business where people know they're investing for five years or something, most of our competitors think of that. We think even longer. Yet people are very impacted by short-term gyrations in the public markets. So we have kind of frothy public markets or fully valued public markets right now, and that affects B-rounds, C-”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think about making money and making money kind of every year. And if I feel like we're investing in things that aren't going to make us as much money, that's not, I don't want to take the year off in terms of making money. I want to make money every year. So I do kind of hold us to the standard of trying to find equally good investments throughout the cycle, which I just don't think the averages are kind of really how things work out that you can find good investments at any time. And it's not like we're making a gazillion investment, so we shouldn't necessarily reflect the market.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Is not uniform, and I think we have the luxury of being able to invest across a lot of sectors and countries, and we should be able to find good opportunities in any sector. So I hold ourselves to a pretty high standard there. I would say personally, I do feel that there's a little bit of a disadvantage in protracted bull markets of having lived through these cycles because your experience has taught you to be more risk averse. And as you're kind of living through a bull market, that's kind of a negative. Ultimately, being a little more conservative is going to prove out, but it's not after kind of years of money making. Even in 2013, people thought the valuations were frothy. So kind of this whole time, I thought, this is kind of getting really frothy, really frothy, really frothy. And that's in a sense been negative.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “As an entrepreneur, it's super challenging to manage businesses where the environment is changing so meaningfully around you. So as an example, you're kind of in a prisoner's dilemma if your competitor ends up raising 10 times more capital than you have, where you need to raise the money and start investing at a pace to compete with them, even though that may be a little bit counterproductive and you're getting ahead of your skis. So that makes it extremely challenging. And at the extreme of that, I think is in markets like India, where kind of capital comes and then goes, kind of comes for two years extremely frothy and then people get nervous and leave the market and those entrepreneurs go from having burns that are 50 million dollars a year to kind of needing to survive on five million dollars a year. So it just is extremely hard from an operating standpoint. From the investor standpoint, I think people are kind of a little bit more cavalier and say, oh, I invest through the cycle and you're not going to make money. You're paid to put money to work and you're not going to make equal amounts of money in all parts of the cycle. And while that's true, I think the world...”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “To Larry Page, and the idea was for me in that conversation was to see if he wanted to invest his own capital in my firm. And he said, why don't you do this within alphabet? And I thought about that for a little bit and kind of came to the conclusion that we could do something in a super differentiated way inside of alphabet. And so I decided to start capital G with alphabet as the solar LP and we got going from there.”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So I started my career as a serial entrepreneur and one of the businesses that I started along the way was a venture capital firm in Toronto. So I was first exposed to the business in the late 90s during the dot-com boom and hexfire was the first business I started here in California. So I guess I was always kind of exposed to the VC world and different levels of investment at different stages and seeing kind of how the firms operated and the ecosystem, but from the entrepreneur side. Then I joined Google in 2005 ironically for a green card and have been at Google since, which is surprised all my friends. They never thought I would make it even to the green card moment at such a big company. And I ran marketing first. Globally, the chief marketing officer. And then I ran corporate development for five years we did. About 100 acquisitions and across the world in the business. And then in 2013 started Capital G. I guess at that point I was in the mindset of leaving Google and I talked”

    2020-10-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source