YouSaid · the spoken record

David Sze

lines on the record: 40
first: 2021-04-19
most recent: 2021-04-19
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

“Into security when we needed that, jumped into social when we needed that, and each time made that area better when it was hanging on the edge of disaster. Ari Staman, a lawyer by training in the organization when China, our relationship with China, was not going well. He picks up, moves over to China, turns that whole thing around and makes it one of the most exciting potential things in the future for Roblox right at a moment when it was going to crash and burn on the ground. And then I'll even go down to the person that greeted you at the front door at Roblox. Her name's Karen Neeman. And she is just this ball of energy and she carries the culture in her own way. And so it's just a reminder to me always of that joy that I found from the operating side that a company is made of all kinds of people doing great things together and rowing in the same way and the culture could be held as much in the CEO as it is in the person that sees you in the front door every day and that's always just a joy to witness.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give two. One is, I think I've talked about before, and it's very fast, which is the perseverance of seeing Dave stick with it. There were seven to ten years of carrying water through the desert where no one believed and everyone told him he needed to do it differently, and he stayed focused, and if he'd done all the things, if he'd taken the thousands of pieces of ice and gotten all mixed up and twisted around, there's no way Roblox would have succeeded, and he had that. So I love that story. I love the underdog story. I love the 17-year success that counters the idea that this is all really easy and fast. And I love the founder that will always stick with a vision and continue to evolve and grow with it. The other thing I love about Roblox is it's a wonderful story of team and of people, how so many people help in different ways. So Dave is this visionary. He sets the tone. He's always thinking about where do we end up 10 years out. Craig Donato, their chief business officer. He's the anchor. He's the one who's translating Dave and making sure the train stand tracked and helping things together. Jeff Mauro came over from Kabam and was this jack of old trades, jumped in.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes. So I met Reed through a mutual friend, an individual named Ned Hoy, and six years later had gotten wind and liked him, but it was a very brief meeting at a party. And we hadn't touched base for probably four or five years. And we ended up on this confab in the early days of China opening up to venture and technology. And I just tracked him down and we sat the back of the bus each time on every stop on this tour through China. And we just mind-melded. It was great. We got along so well. We were fast friends and that led to the investment in LinkedIn and me inviting him to come to Greylock. And it's been 20 plus years of just a wonderful friendship.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, as we were saying earlier, I wish I'd invested in this earlier. So I advise everyone who is messing with their sleep in horrible ways to invest in these other tooling kits to help you. So I have an Aura ring, which I use and look at. I use a product called Sleep Timer every night, and I use another product called Auto Sleep. All three do different versions of checking your sleep, but I like to correlate across all of them because I don't actually think one is exactly right. And sometimes I can see patterns among them and other times I can, if I'm particularly stressed one day, I'll choose to pick and choose what I want to see and make myself feel better about the day.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would go back and I think Peter Channon was someone that I really learned a ton from in a very condensed period of time in some ups and downs. His perspective, his ability to cut to the core to say less and be more effective, to challenge but in a way that was supportive, you know, here's a guy that was an English major at Berkeley that became the COO and launched Fox, a television network, which was an insane idea at the time. And not to miss, part with Rupert Murdoch. So you have a very liberal Democrat and you have an extremely conservative Republican and he figured out how to make that partnership work. And so I learned so much from it. And now he does it again. He goes and starts sharing in entertainment. Everyone says he's done. And he's like one of the most successful companies out there. So I just admire him and I've seen him in a boardroom how he works and the impact, including also his mentorship of young people and making them successful, has always been really inspiring to me, continues to be.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the biggest thing we thought, the reason you succeed was that it was providing a different model of what games could be and what community and social can be, that it had a flywheel that was an economic flywheel and robots. It had a flywheel that was a creator flywheel and that had a flywheel and a user and social flywheel. The obvious downside can be you don't get those flywheels working in harmony. You mess up the economy. We've seen that happen in the past with Second Life and others. And of course, the challenge of aging up and continuing to grow with people. And so that was, by the way, also true Facebook. There was a lot of people that said, oh, Facebook, that's just for college kids. It'll never be used by anyone over 20. Forget 30. Forget 40. Forget 50. There's no way. And so, you know, one of the reasons that I was over to come some of the downside potential on, say, Roblox around age, and I still believe this is we underestimate that those kids that are nine, ten, eleven, 12, and 13 today are the kids that are 14, 50, 16, 17, 18 of tomorrow, and Roblox is where they live.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you backed off maybe at the end, or you got beat maybe at the end, and they turned out to be complete disasters. Everyone forgets those. So if as long as you keep that box along with your success box in your mind, I think you'll do much better in this business.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, this business is all about FOMO. Every one of us has their list of all the misses they made. I looked at Baidu at fourteen million pre, and because we had this rule of thumb that said we had to be boots on the ground all the time at that time. It was that narrow a definition again back in those days. I was told that I was going to be going to China every week if I was doing this investment. And I was like, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen for me. That made us miss Baidu. So like, oh boy, do I have my list? Twitter. Like Evan Biz and those guys and Jack, everyone's got their list. If you don't have your list, you actually haven't done this business right. And I also say, I think another thing is I always say to keep myself humble. And I say this to my partners is anytime you start thinking about how you made all these great calls on the LinkedIns, the Facebooks, the Discords, the Next Doors, the Robloxes, whatever, what have you, always remember that box of the two by two that was the deal that you really wanted, that you didn't get, that was a complete disaster, because that'll keep you humble. And that list is also massive too. The things that you really went after.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasonable and deserved criticism of VCs in that regard. On the flip side, if you take the view of the world that says it's inherently massively random, whether your companies are going to be successful enough, if you're humble enough to say there's a heck of a lot of randomness and luck involved in this business, and I believe that is the case, then if you see something that gives you 10% or 20% predictability, that's really important signal. And so like on the one hand, you can say, yeah, that's a rule of thumb because in a world of total randomness, something that you think has a 20% probability of being true is really important anchor. On the flip side, 80% of the time it's not going to be right. And so you have to be able to live with that kind of dialectic to be successful in this business. And you always have to be somewhat hungry and paranoid. Otherwise, I don't think you'll succeed.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to be good at this business, you need to be pretty humble, ironically, and you always need to be paranoid. It's always changing. I mean, I remember when I joined, someone was telling me how Dave Strom wasn't a success, and I looked at his record and I was like, oh my God, if he's not a success, I have no chance. So, you know, there is so much Schadenfreud in this business. If you don't stay humble, if you don't stay sort of paranoid that, you know, you're going to lose your edge. And if you have some level of insecurity, then I don't think you're going to be successful. Because at the end of the day, we have to be honest and recognize that the chances that any investment we make will fail are much higher than the chances that they will actually succeed. And so when I see new partners, I sort of say like, look, there's these funny things that go on that, you know, you talked about what are the things I learned because I came in in this sort of strange time, I sort of looked at all these kind of base primitives that become the assumptions of this business and sort of to tear them down and think about why would they be different. And so, for example, there's this thing of like VCs or lemmings, they all go after the same thing or they rule of thumb. And like, I think there are some truth to that. There is some like.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data for amateur sports and it pivoted. So if you don't have an ability to sort of see where it can be and trust that the entrepreneurs will work with you and have that kind of vision and flexibility to figure out how to make something great happen, then you can't start anywhere. But if you have that, you can jump in in all kinds of places. And once you start to see that, you can start to see it in later stage firms, in later stage companies, early stage companies, all through it, you just have these models of that kind of combination of exciting potential that you have. Doesn't always work out, but it is the right bet to make in my experience.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, again, I think it comes a little bit back to the rough way I entered this industry where I walked in and the world ended and then I three years later was maybe going to get fired or leave or some convergence of the two. It kind of opened me up to have a very different view that was very flexible about where opportunity was and to not be locked into one simple model or one simple way of thinking. And so my function is really I look at is a journey I want to go on and is it folks that I want to go on that journey with? Whether that's early in the process, mid in the process or late in the process, if I believe that that journey has the kind of legs, has the kind of opportunity to be a world changing experience like Robux has done to the game world and beyond, then that's what really gets me excited. That's what I've learned to really care about. And the truth is they change so much. Take Discord. It was a game company, right? When it first started and it pivoted and it became this incredible communication tool that's changing the world. Take Nextdoor. It started out as a company called fan base that was going to do sort of like ESPN and”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the audience that he had been associated with through dignation and his television shows and also then the transferred over in a dig. That was part of his success. But I think that that group of individuals actually became pretty trollish, quite honestly, by the end of it. And navigating how to succeed through that was very hard for Digg and for Kevin. And you watched someone like a Reddit come through and they actually harnessed their community in a positive way and expanded it. And Reddit looks like much more of a community than it does a voting up and down of articles product, whereas Dig had this great community and was this product, but like the community never evolved and actually turned and held us down and we didn't figure out how to break through that. So it can be any number of things and they're always easy once again. The successes are always obvious in retrospect and the failures are always obvious in retrospect. So it's just a learning process. It's really where experience matters.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think that one of those lessons I touched on earlier, which was a learning about how to help companies and how to help founders and what founder-friendly really means, I came in early on, like I said, believing that founder-friendly meant you back the founder, whatever they said you did, and whatever they said you backed. And what I learned is that's not always the case, that you need to help founders be better. You need to help the founders encourage them on their instincts when they're good. You need to challenge them to get them to think on their processes when maybe your experience says they might not be in the decision. You still at the end, I think, defer to the entrepreneur in most cases, but taking on that active role, active partnership, active education, active devil's advocate in a smart but a supportive way, that's something that I learned a lot in terms of what the definition for me, at least, of being sort of founder-friendly is, is it isn't always just backing blindly. And I think in this situation with Dig, Kevin Rose is a brilliant, brilliant founder, and incredibly creative, incredibly smart. But I think, you know, look, he had success at an incredibly young age, and he got caught a little bit, I think, between the success of the company.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paper, you have some very blunt big force objects that are like large hammers, but you never want to use those if you can do it. Like, you never want to change the CEO ideal. Your best scenario is that you have this wonderful CEO, Dave Bazooki or Mark, or that just goes all the way through in scales. You do have the ability to do that. And that is a very blunt tool, but you never really want to use it. I say to them, the two things you do control are what journeys you go on and who you go on them with. So make sure that the journeys you go on are ones that you really want to be on through the bad times, the good times, whether it works out or not, that you don't say, oh, someone else talked me into that journey, or I rationalize that versus I believed in it. And then who you go on them with? You have to be with people that even in the worst times, every one of those companies that we just described, the successes, had horrifically horrible times, incredibly stressful moments, weird things go on. It just is the nature of the beast in startups that scale so fast and become huge companies. That if you didn't love the people you were with, you didn't figure out how to work through.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it's funny, I'll harken back to another one of my now retired partners who asked me, how do you make decisions in my interview with Greylock when I was talking to them? And it was an interesting thought process and it's similar to your question, which is, I tend to start with the heart, which is I have to sort of fall in love with the idea or fall in love with the founder or some combination of that and what it could be. Then you go to the head and you do all your work and you crunch all the numbers and you find all the data you can. But at the end of the day, if you've done a lot of work as an analyst in your history or done a lot of the analysis, you know at some point you can make the numbers say whatever you want if you twist that Excel spreadsheet or you play with that Google Doc. So you have to go back to the heart again after you've done those two steps and unify it all and make the call. That for me is my process. It's sort of heart, head, heart back again to make the call. The other thing I say to new partners is in VC you think you control all kinds of things. There's this mythology from the outside that like, oh, these all-powerful VCs, they make all these. Look, it is true.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the most important things for a young partner is to have the ability to do the work, but then make the call, to put down some bets. And one of the other failures we've seen in the partner is they can be really analytical, but they just can't make the call. Have the right instinct to decide when there are six competitors, LinkedIn's the one I want to back, not the other five, not tribe, not Plaxo, not da-da-da.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, there's so many ways you can fail, and so many ways you can succeed in adventure. I don't think there is one. But there are certain things. I mean, we've had folks fail because they didn't understand how to navigate the dialectic between team and individual. Usually more to individual in the sense of like running over people or not listening to feedback or not learning. That's something that I think is a very fast failure mode, at least in our culture. I think another one for younger partners is learning how to ask questions and to listen, but also how to assert themselves and to take risks. I think one of the toughest things in this business is you never know. Everything looks so obvious in retrospect. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Next door looked obvious. Discord looked obvious. All these things looked obvious. That is not the case. And then you can see that in some of these memos. It's kind of funny to look back at the memos that we post on our website and you've seen about these original investments and how quaint and early and odd LinkedIn was the memo was or Facebook the memo was or roblox the memo was so there's so much uncertainty prospect”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's like, I'm stepping down because I want people to understand we didn't want a CEO. And Greylock is not a place where there should be a king on a throne or a crown or anything of that sort. And that kind of idea has permeated us today, today, like the partners who are senior feel like an incredible responsibility in the institution to make the younger partner successful. The partners is senior realize their voice can be heard as louder. And so they need to be careful about how they use it. And the partners are senior, one of their biggest goals is to get out of the way, to become obsolete, because that is the definition of success for the next generation and it'll be the definition of success for Greylock in the long run.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think there's a couple rules of thumb in here. Greylock are lucky enough to have had a lot of these great calls made early on by our founders or the first couple generations, and we've only picked up those and adapted them to the times. One of those is, like I said, the senior partners need to get out of the way, and they also need to know that their voice can be dangerous because it can be overpowering to newer partners. And this was early on one of our three founding partners, Bill Elfers, the original LP, said, we need a CEO if we're going to back Greylock. And they were like the three partners were like, well, we're partners. We don't want to CEO. We need a CEO. Okay. So I went away and threw a pretty arduous process for them because of the personal relationship and they'd come in evenly. They elected one of our great founders, Bill Elfers, the CEO. So he came as the CEO and he announced to use the CEOs, the LPs, and they were happy and Grelock was off in the running. The next year, 12 months later, he came to his partner to say, I'm stepping down. Who's the new CEO? And the other partners are like, Bill, it was hard to make the decision to make you the CEO. We just went through that. Like, we don't want to do that again.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like I think when I first started out, I probably was trying too hard to control things, trying too hard to make things manifest themselves that I believe should be the case. And, you know, I've learned over time to have that separation to say, look, the most powerful thing I can do is to both empower, support, encourage, also help educate with perspectives my founders rather than trying to make something happen myself and impose it. So I would say that's one thing. On the flip side, I'll say almost again in this dialectic kind of world, I've also learned, oh, there's certain cases and certain situations which are a minority in less than when I started, where you really actually do need to be more aggressive and lean in and make your point. But in a way that they can hear. And so that's why building that relationship and building that trust is important. So in both those cases, the cases when you're saying less and you're supporting more in the few cases where you really need to lean in harder that you're listened to and heard on the other side.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so funny you say that I was just talking to a younger partner of ours and advising them. And it's something that I had to learn, which is actually the more confident you are, the more experience you are, the less you should say. And the more quiet you should say it. And in truth, I remember a class example for me was being involved with Pandora Board and being lucky enough, I recruited Peter Charon in there, who was a friend of my partner Bill Hellman's, and I got to meet and I recruited him onto the board and he joined. And I just remember he would say so few things. And he would say them in this really calm way, but when he said them, they were completely on point. And so people actually leaned in and listened to him. And I was sort of advising this younger partner who has a lot of energy and is incredibly smart to say like, you know what? When you know you're right, instead of sort of like being a blunt force object and saying it louder and trying to hit everyone with it, say it less. Say it quietly because there's a power to that that's built. And so I think the same thing is true is like you can be really effective. It's almost zen like. You can be really effective.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the leaders of this firm in the next five to seven years, and I'm super excited for that. And I just remember being like, I'm like, whoa, I'm like barely a year in here. And you're like this hugely successful person. How can you say that? But it's the nature of the beast where we're like, how do we make everyone successful and how do we keep what is Greylock successful for the next 50 plus years, not how one individual is successful? And so that's, again, that weird dialectic where you're talking about to be successful as Greylock, we need individuals to be successful, all the individuals successful, but we also need to look at the team and we look at the institution and say that's an incredibly important thing that we're proud of.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A culture where one of our greatest successes is we've been one of the longest standing venture firms and that means we've survived and thrived through ups and downs and we've thrived through partner transitions. And so one of the most powerful things is embedded in our culture from the beginning is this idea of we're a team and the team's going to evolve and that the people that are most senior now are not going to be the people that are most senior in the future. It's actually going to be the people that are newer or junior. And so as a result, yes, is it true that probably someone like me or we carry a little more weight when we say something because of our experience? Yeah, is that unwarranted? Probably not. But I would say on average on basis, someone who is new to the partnership on a relative basis has an incredible amount of power to say things. And so we really work as a team where we empower every partner to say what they mean, do what they say, and to own what they decide to do and to work together as a team. And I think that sort of sense of saying, like, I remember one of the most successful partners took me aside early on to breakfast and was like, David, you're going to.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you want to use it? And so to me, the most powerful moment is when the partnership gives the conditional yes and when the partner who owns the deal goes away and thinks about it, when they come back in those cases, when they come back and they go, you know what? I took the feedback, I did some more work, I'm not going to do this deal. That is the most powerful signal to the partnership because the trust goes through the roof at that point with that person. It means they will do the work. We can ask the tough questions. We can hand them the hunting license and they won't just say, whew, I got through like the partnership meeting, so I'm just going to do this deal. They go, oh, now I'm going to own this. Now I really need to think, is this right? Do I want to continue for that last mile to make this deal happen? And so that's how we work in our partnership.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a real balance, and we see it in our deals too. So we work in our deal process. The individual has to be an advocate for their deal, but if they oversell, you'll find in our customer there immediately there's a negative reaction to that. And so they have to be able to be positive because they're going to own it and we want them to own it. So they better know that they really want it. But on the flip side, they better not be selling the partnership. They better be straightforward. And the partnership better be able to dig in. And we have a culture where you need to be able to ask the tough questions and people need to be able to take those questions, do the work, and come back, and really think about it. And so I always say to new partners, one of the most powerful things is, I always say to new partners a couple of things. One partners go, oh, it's so hard to get it through the process. There's so many people. And I'm like, look, the reality is at Greylock, if you do your work, you can get most deals through the partnership if you really believe in it, in the way we are. You'll get challenged, but if you do the work and you push and you believe in it, most of the cases and the vast majority of the cases, you can get a deal done. So be really careful. It isn't actually that hard. The truth is you have that opportunity.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really important thing. I mean, at the end of the day, there is a dialectic and a venture firm. There's a dialectic in the sense that you have a dialectic between the individual and the team, and you have to balance certain things. For example, you want to have a team. You want to have everyone together. Everyone's got to trust each other. Everyone's got to be in it together. They can't be backstabbing. There can't be I told you so. We need to be all agree. When we make a decision, we're making it as a team. That being said, it's the individual that has to own it. So we're very focused on individual primary ownership of a relationship. That doesn't mean that we don't team hunt. That doesn't mean we don't team help our companies. But if I'm the board member or I'm the representative for Roblox, I need to have the full weight of understanding when I propose and say we should do that deal that it's going to be on my back. I'm not going to get to go past that off to some other partner, some junior partner if it's not going well or I'm not going to get to sort of walk away from that kind of deal because that's not the pact that we make with our partners and it's not the pack we make with our entrepreneurs. And so there is this dialect that needs to go on.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think at some level philosophical, it's part of the nature of the beast in this kind of times. On the flip side, I think it's very dangerous and I think there's going to be people that get extremely burned when the music stops. And the music will stop. I will say, however, I am now, I've become that old guy that walks around the office for the last five years and says, you know, this isn't going to be like this all the time.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think a lot of it comes down to your reputation. We always encourage our founders to do the checking. It is always in our favor when they do their checking on Dreylock, when they do checking on our partners. You know, take a young partner like Mike DuBeau. Incredibly brilliant. You talk to anyone that knows him and you do those checks, you're going to come away. You can't come away saying anything but this is a guy I want to work with. This is a guy I want on my side. And on the flip side, I think if you do checking, you can often find in our business bad behavior by people. And I wish people would do more of that checking to your point, Harry, because the marriages happened so fast in these things that like you don't realize I always say be really careful that you get too wrapped up on the wedding because it's a long-term marriage. I mean, the reality of these things is everyone looks back and say they were immediate successes, but LinkedIn was eight to ten years to going public. Facebook was 10 to 12, Robox 17 years. And so these are long-term relationships and so much gets lost in the crazy mayhem of the wedding of the deal and of the match.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, it's a real challenge, Harry. I mean, the industry, like you said, just by your statement of never having seen a downturn, we're in a business that the longer you never see a downturn, the more things get extreme on so many vectors. And so the time we have to do deals, the amount of relationship building we have is cut to the core bone at this point, I think. And it is really hard. But at the end of the day, one of the things we believe in is if you bring sort of your operating background, if you bring that sort of connection and understanding of the journey and that sympathy and you explain how you can help, that relationship will transcend. And when we may have less time, we still can do important time together. And so the efficiency of that time can increase as you build those relationships.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Dave, you saw someone that had incredible sense of purpose and this focus and this belief in himself. I remember when I first met him he was doing the original physics Roblox engine at my kids school science fair and it looked like nothing and it was kind of cool but like super simple and I remember him saying we're going to be bigger than Minecraft someday and at that time that was like the most laughable statement in the world but Dave was convinced and I just remember I'd checking with him and he'd chip away at it and eventually it became true. So it's like this interesting combination of understanding your purpose and focus and I would say all of them had that but also this incredible hunger for learning and adapting and all of them had that too and that allows them to change because you can't be the same person that is doing that small physics engine project test at the school of science fair that now leads the $40 billion public company you just can't be that same person so you need to evolve and always be curious but you also need to stay on focus and mission”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this has been a real learning adventure for me in the sense I always came in with the belief having worked and operating that you need to be founder friendly and you needed to support the founders. And I learned through some tough experience as well that like that is exactly right. But the ways in which you do that often can include tough love, can often include pushing them in harder ways than maybe I initially thought. And so, you know, what was great about, for example, Reed, my partnership with Reed was he was a wonderful thought partner. We would bang things back and forth. There was nothing that was out of bounds. We would push on edges. He would push me, I would push him. And in the end, we'd get to better results as a result of that. And I think that's a critical thing that I look for. With Mark Zuckerberg, I would say this was a person that was an incredible learner, always looked to different kinds of people that weren't just like him to learn from. And so if you think about a Jim Briar or Don Graham or Sean Parker, et cetera, et cetera, such different people. But Mark saw the value and knew how to extract learning from every single one of them in a way that was really powerful.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think every situation, you bring your lessons from the past to it, but I also think every situation is somewhat bespoke and you have to be careful about applying things too blindly. So I do think that you need to have price discipline. And so you need to think about does this have the ability to run to a huge outcome? Does this show the potential to be a winner takes most or winner takes all kind of business? If that's the case and you think you have the right team in place as well, which is the other critical aspect of that, and we can talk about that in terms of what you look for in a leader of a team because I think that's critical. You have those two things together, then I think you can be more flexible on those decisions along the way. And I think it's been proven, particularly in consumer and now increasingly with SaaS and enterprise, that you can invest at different points along the stack than we used to think and have great returns.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so ironically with 2020 hindsight, one of the benefits of struggling in venture and having the sector that I was in, including the whole domain struggle, was that I had this perspective that like I looked at it from a fresh page. And when we came out of that and when I was given the mandate to go back and look at consumer, I came to it with a completely fresh perspective. And my belief was, and I became an advocate for the fact that the world was changing before consumer, you came in and you were a generalist, a partner like mine, Dave Strom, in his days, he invested in all kinds of areas with incredible success. But the business was becoming very specialized and much more focused. And so I was pushing to say we need to have people that have expertise in a domain. And as a result, if you're going to”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your domain. Tell us why you would go and take your career and put it in this weird thing called consumer that seems like it's dead. And I made a pitch to them that sort of explained why I thought consumer was in a cyclical downturn but was secularly a long-term huge opportunity. And I also made a pitch to them on why I thought in a venture portfolio there was a place for consumer. And then the last piece is I actually also did a bunch of work debunking a bunch of myths that existed at the time. There was the myth that like there was no defenses in consumer. There was no defensibility. So everything, all economic rents were going to be drawn down to zero. And then I tried to explain to them the value of brand and the fact that there was accrual of consumer behaviors to really only wanting a limited number of choices in any kind of domain. And so that you could build big companies with big returns and good businesses.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, it was pretty hard. There's a lot of, obviously, when you do portfolio management and look at where you start and how the markets are when you start affect your results. I walked into Venture and the world ended, and in particular, consumer was considered, you know, done. It was considered something that was a fad and you were kind of a pariah if you believed in consumer. And so, you know, in Greylock, I actually was encouraged to look at enterprise software and ended up starting to look in security and systems management. And it just kind of became clear for me at least very quickly that the difference between passion and intellectual challenge. So it was an intellectual challenge to learn about systems management. But I had no passion around it. And so I actually went back to Greylock and said, look, I'm going to go join a consumer company because I really rotate around consumer, whether that's venture or operating. I don't rotate around venture to go to, say, enterprise is what I've learned. And so I almost left the firm in 2003. We had a mutual conversation where they said, look, we really like a lot of things about you. We know you're playing.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Together, it'll be a lot of fun, and I'm a sucker for a good pitch, so I ended up joining in early 2000, walked in the door January 2000, and done the world changed around me quite quickly.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so look, I joined Excite the very beginning of the internet, and it was an incredible journey. Wonderful people, but yet all over our skis in incredible ways as the world was changing around us and we were trying to keep up. And so it was amazing sort of first phase of the internet to experience from a search engine. By sort of late 99, I'd gotten to the point where I was sort of ready for another challenge and had sort of poked my head up and was thinking about what was next. And a good friend of mine from business school, individual named Neil Bush for you today is the CEO of Workday, saw that and like any good VC. He had joined Greylock about nine months earlier to help build out the West Coast and he saw that I'd pick my head up and grab me and like a good VC closed me hard and gave me the pitch to say, look, Greylock's this great firm that has a long-storied history mostly in Boston, but there's been some great developments in the West Coast and I've joined to come anchor the growth of the West Coast on the enterprise side. I believe that we should be doing a lot more in consumer come join arms with me and let's go do that.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my background is I was in startups for a number of years. Originally, actually in gaming, so I worked for a couple video game companies, Electronic Arts and Crystal Dynamics. And then this strange thing called the internet started to appear in sort of late 94, 95, and it looked like a really fascinating development that could change the world. And so it was this opportunity for me to sort of hit the ground floor on a new technology revolution and ended up joining a search engine called Excite that was one of the early search engines competing with Yahoo and others in those days. And I looked around and said, what's going to be a fundamental aspect of everyone's needs in this new world with everyone's connected and information is flowing? And at that time, when most of the information was a content layer, and we can talk about how social became the next layer, but at those days it was mostly content being put up, a search engine seemed to me like a critical aspect of everyone's need on the Internet as it grew.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you, for inviting me. I've heard such great things about you, and I know all those folks have enjoyed being on your show.”
2021-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source