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Dharmesh Raithatha

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31
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2015-12-14
most recent
2015-12-14
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1
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  1. “How do we automate that process? How do we find a way for this to scale? Which might be a combination of software and AI, maybe a bit of sharing economy, so that there's a few memes that are coming together to solve this, which I like having hard technical problems because I think they can be solved. But the reason why we invested in that is because of the big market and the fact that we've already seen what good or great looks like. And now it's the challenges how to build software to get that 10x version of it.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so the most recent investment is a company called the Gifting Company. And Ben has for the last year. Love's buying gifts and started to do it for other people just as a kind of an evening thing for friends and for family. He'd been doing it by hand, but people love the gifts that he buys for them or recommends for them. Gifting is a huge market and we invest in e-commerce companies and gifting is a huge part of their space. And I've never really seen anything that solves the problem. You get a lot of you can buy vouchers or experiences or you get big marketplaces where you still have to do a lot of work to kind of go through and find a product. Whereas his solution by hand is a 10x improvement. It's actually you don't have to go and search on Amazon or not in the high street. And the ideas that he comes up with are really creative and people just love them. And the big challenge is how”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I guess Mighty Kagan will love me again. So he wrote a book called How to Create a Products That Customers Love. And he talks about the whole kind of how to kind of develop a product muscle and ways for you to do that, processes to do that. So that's probably my favorite book that I give to all the founders as a recommended reading this.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “As I was saying earlier, for me a lot of it hinges on the founder. Obviously there's a good idea and a big market, but the founder and the ability to go real deep into their user minds, for me, looking for that in founders. Asking that up early, like, you know, what do you what do you know about your customers? Do you feel their problems? Have you even gone out to figure that out? So I think for me that's huge.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so I've always loved in the consumer space. I find B2B not really my cup of tea. And then I guess within that, at the moment, health for me is a super exciting place, especially kind of preventative health. I see so many problems with, especially in this country with the NHS, but in health in general. And you've now got devices that can track a lot of data about you. You've got apps like Headspace who do meditation, which has massive health improvements. And it all delivered through an app. There's just so many problems from booking an appointment with a GP to the nature of research and how long it takes to filter through to the end customer and how people are therefore trying to circumvent that and get access to data earlier. So, you know, for me, so many problems to solve.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “a hard one given my routing most people I see in VC probably come from thought about going into VC from day one so I guess there's a few routes right you know create a startup have it do very well and then join VC after that I would say that I can see that the VC world is changing and having some operational or startup expertise helps”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So my favourite blog is he only writes once a month, but it's called svpproduct.com. written by Marty Kagan, who's probably my mentor in product, kind of the person that first started writing about product management. So he always writes something and it's always amazing and massive influence in my career really.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So they launched with a homepage and a form and after the month of interviews at that point Daniel the founder was doing everything by hand so inquiry would come in to find a lawyer he would be speaking to that person he would be going to find a lawyer trying to match them up he was finding value he could add value and he didn't have a lot of software to solve it and then he you know was able to understand what software he needed to build but also like what are the real problems people are facing what language do they use what questions do they ask because he knows that his product has to answer those”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Watch people trying to solve that problem themselves and then the next piece is actually trying to immerse yourself in that problem. So for a whole month and that's probably short to be honest but that's you know we have a 12 month program that we try to get them to a valuable business but we spend a month really thinking about that problem which then feeds into the first product solution and the value proposition that they create and then probably over the first six months to be honest, the whole 12 months for the first six months even the products that they create everything is optimized for having more customer contacts and more learning. So for example with one of the companies we've invested in called Lexus a legal marketplace.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, so I can't tell you a bit about what we do when we get a founder that comes in. So they come in with an idea, they've thought about it for quite a while. They can see the problem. So they come in, they've got investment from us, and we will tell them, the thing they don't want to hear really, they think, all right, I'm going to go and build my product now, let's get going. And the first thing I say is like, actually, we're going to probably spend the first month going out and talking to people. Depending on who it is, they struggle with sometimes. And we go out and we maybe speak to 40 people of different sort of customer segments that make sense for their target market. We'll do an interview and none of it will be about pitching their idea. All of it is about understanding how they're solving this problem at the moment, how they feel about that problem, what solutions they currently have, you know, where do they go. And then we'll go further. If we can do, we'll go in.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, but the core value is I want to do exercises and I don't want any of those little pains that come along the way. And that's where they sort of focus their energy. And their branding is really strong. They just nailed it. It's like, and for me, it was like, wow, I've been looking for that for a long time.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “For fitness, yeah, it's like, and it's 10x better because you don't have to go to the gym and you don't need a personal trainer. It kind of just does it all for you through kind of content and algorithms. They've really boiled down what it is about the problems about getting fit and what are the kind of barriers that can be in the way of you getting fit. So they've made it only body weight exercises so you can do it anywhere. So that whole, I need to get to the gym, I need equipment is gone. You know, they give you like these little videos explaining exactly how to do the exercises. They use algorithms to decide, to constantly improve the workout so they always get better over time. So you never have to worry about what exercise do I have to do. You just do the ones they tell you. And then they've kind of layered on the whole motivation piece through content and through a social layer.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “For me, I guess the big thing is most good startups are able to explain their idea very succinctly with a very short phrase that captures the core value that they offer. Probably 80% of their time is kind of And that 20% is like, what is the core value that I'm offering to the world? And what I've seen is, you know, if they don't spend enough time really understanding what is that core value to a really deep level, then they can optimize it and maybe they'll get to a 2x better solution, but they'll never really make an amazing company. So in the first hundred days, I think the big focus is really getting down to the root of what is the value that I'm offering. I guess as an example, there are an app at the moment that I'm using is called Freeletics and it's like an online personal coach, a mobile app that's a personal coach.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I like founders that think about 10x products. So where they found a solution that's ten times better? You know Elon Musk is going for 10x solutions. And those tend to be where they understand technology well enough that they can see a way to improve this by 10 times. So for me, those types of founders are really exciting. They've taken a problem and they haven't just made it two or three times better, but it's like a radical solution.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And they're going out and they're speaking to people a lot. So I've started to look, assess people in terms of their product muscle because ultimately they're building products coupled with a whole manner of other things, right? Like their ability to inspire people, their ability to have a big vision. But for me, I'm now looking at what's their kind of product strength or do they just think that someone else will build it for me and I'll just build the business because I think that that's hard.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, so I start, you know, we've seen a few founders and I've worked with quite a few now at Forward partners. Obviously on my side, the ones that I've seen that do well, they have a very good understanding of their users. It's internalized, it's there, they really got a really strong. So when they're making these calls about to do X or Y, they're making good calls.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So you can do it. It's just, and I'd probably say try all of those before you try and outsource because most outsourcing agencies cost a lot of money and they need to know more about what you want to build. And by definition at that stage you don't really know.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And they met at the Lean Startup weekend. So Riquet went there and presented and met her co-founder and then they went off and built it from there into a really interesting company.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So I guess for me, it's like, you know, if you can, I'm going to give you three, right? So I think if you can cultivate those relationships, you know that you want to do a startup. Maybe you're working in a startup. Think about those relationships that you're forming with people and think about how that relationship could spin out when you leave. So at MindKandy, I've got quite a few friends now that have left and joined and created their own startups together. So they've made those relationships earlier. If you're at university, that's another place to do it. If you don't have that network, so one of them is applied to forward partners. We're trying to solve that problem. And I guess the fourth one is you do have to go and hustle at these meetups. So I've got one of my friends does borrow my doggy.com.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think it's very hard. I think the good people are cultivating those relationships well before they start their startup. So it worked in a startup, they've been working with someone who's amazing and then they kind of spin out of that startup and then they've already made the pairing. So that works fine. You see, some people who have enough money that they think that they can just outsource it because they don't understand the pain of outsourcing your idea, especially at the early stage when you're changing things so quickly. So I'm super anti outsourcing.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So forward partners, we tend to take people that are in the main solo founders. Who tend to be non-technical? And the problem that they're having is they've been running around going, I don't actually know how to build this idea that I have in my head. So they might be going to all these meetup groups and they don't have a network. So they're going out trying to meet up groups. So trying to find tech people, they've got no idea how to evaluate who's good or not good. They've got nothing to even attract someone that is good. Apart from their own kind of personality”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And you have to develop that muscle before you go out and spend the next five to ten years of your life building something.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So I guess, I mean, internally, we have our own investment themes. Where we will be researching different sectors, we'll be looking at long-term trends in technology and seeing where kind of consumer behavior is going. Internally, we're not actually brainstorming specific ideas because then we throw that out to the world and say, hey, who's got ideas in that space that makes sense? But I guess for founders, so I guess there's multiple routes to this. One is you've experienced a problem yourself and you just know that there's no solution out there that makes sense. That's an easy one. Another one is, so for me, I think a big thing is you can have, you know, you brainstorm lots of ideas, but then the next step is to go out and talk to people and interview them and observe them and try to understand more detail in that problem, you know, how are people trying to solve it now? Where are their frustrations? Which parts of competitive products do they enjoy?”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yes, I mean, you know, so one of our companies that I've been doing really well appear here. They're like Airbnb. Ross Bailey, right, you know, very young when he joined us, I think was 1920. But he had experience of trying to run a pop-up shop. He understood the problems out there of trying to do that, trying to solve that for himself. So it wasn't that he had deep sector experience, but he had an internalized experience of that problem And that served him really, really well.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Of the problem, they found a problem and they're going to go, right, we're going to build a startup, but they don't have that kind of deep understanding of either they felt it themselves or they've spent time really researching that problem and therefore we won't do the investment. The best ones are a strong idea that feels very different to the ones that you see normally. Either that's because it's in a market that no one's tackling or they're taking a kind of big leap in the solution for how to solve that problem coupled with a big market.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So we do this monthly office hours where people with ideas can come and just spend 15 minutes with us, whether that's pitching or whether that's actually just getting some advice. The good ideas we see a lot and I've kind of seen you see certain memes that kind of float through. So whether that's a marketplace for this or a marketplace for that or sharing economy of this and people are slowly picking away at a new niche. So I think the ones that seem to be most exciting when you start to see so many, the ones that seem exciting, they pop out clearer because they are slightly different or the problems that they're trying to solve, you can clearly have a sense that yes, there's something here that no one's solving at the moment coupled with the founder. So we've seen lots of similar ideas, but the founders don't have the kind of deep understanding.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I'm relatively new to the investment world, but I can kind of see working in startups, you only get to see a few ideas get to any stage. So you're very into detail and you're really into like growing that one company versus suddenly I'm exposed to thousands of ideas and trying to think about longer-term trends, which I think unintuitively good at, but you can still see the difference between someone like Nick who's done it for a long time and has got a muscle that is developed in that. And I'm still developing that. Having said that, with my kind of product background, I'm able to look at companies with that lens. And I think that's useful, right? That's a useful lens to look at because these are all software companies and the products are huge parts of their businesses.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Having someone that understands products can help massively because depending on the company there's a lot of challenges either seed or series A where they need to start scaling up maybe the CEO has been doing the product function themselves and now suddenly they're like okay how do I create a product function how do I hire in that expertise what processes do I need to put in place and for us for the idea stage it's even more important because you know our founders don't even have any they don't even have a product yet so I think at those stages like having someone that gets products can be really really helpful kind of seeing the different stages of startup growth and understands how product functions need to change in that in that landscape”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So I would probably say yes, wouldn't I? So no, it's interesting actually, you know, we can see a trend that as startups are looking, as they raise money, they're looking for more than just the money itself. They want some synergies, whether that's sector expertise or whether you have some skills that can help them. I think for the early stage funds.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I love strategy and early stage stuff and then met Nick Brisborne who's the managing partner and he was kind of setting up this new model super early stage. At the time they weren't even sure whether they needed a product person or not. So I said look I don't know either. Never done this before. Let's work together for six months and see how it goes. And then very quickly it was clear that there was a synergy between my desire to work with startups to kind of work on strategy, to work with multiple companies with the whole VC bit on top. So that's how I kind of joined forward partners and then I became a partner in the company and it's gone from strength from there really.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, so I think when moving to VC has been very unusual. So my background is pretty much working in startups, either doing software development, and then probably for the last eight years product management. So the last company I worked for was Mind Candy, where I kind of joined them very early on and had three years of pretty amazing growth. And I've had a couple of startups myself with sort of the first one. I didn't have a clue what I was doing and the second one managed to get a small exit. So I've kind of done the startup thing myself. And then after I left Mind Candy, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I was kind of wanted to do another product role, wasn't sure if I wanted to do another startup, but I wanted to stay in the startup space.”

    2015-12-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 096: Developing The Idea Muscle and VCs Providing More Than Just Money with Dharmesh Raithatha, Partner @ Forward Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source