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Dustin Dolginow

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30
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2016-02-10
most recent
2016-02-10
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1
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  1. “At venue, a not obvious investment for us, but a huge, huge thanks to Tom Williams for steering us in the right direction and just opening our eyes to the company and what it could be. And it's a fascinating story for another time, but really Tom Williams deserves credit there.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Know what's my favorite book, the one that left a really, really lasting impression on me was development as freedom by Marquessen, is because it basically helped me understand why we can and should wake up every day to make GDP grow. That was something I've thought about a lot. It wasn't obvious why GDP should just consistently grow, but when you unpack that book, it really lays out an impressive case that resonated with me.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I dance all over the place. I take a very shotgun approach to try and get out of the echo chamber. So I'll grab stuff from Twitter, tech me all over the place, but I try and dance around a lot.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Division for Man and Lane is a community of absolutely kick-ass syndicate leads that are so good that entrepreneurs call for them by name. And then when they get liquidity themselves want to become a member of our community and continue to pass kind of the torch down through mentorship to future generations.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “There's probably in the sector, but I think Canada for the last two years deserves full credit for just really slaying it. I think it's an indication of how important cost of living is to young companies getting their start. And Canada as a country is just from my seat, just really killing it between the developer tax credits. I mean, the exchange rate's definitely not hurting them right now. It gives them more runway. And we're just seeing consistently solid things from understated, really aggressive good entrepreneurs out of Toronto and Vancouver. So hats off to Canada.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think Ryan Hoover at Product Hunt deserves massive credit to see how they've unfolded that is just really, really impressive. And it's a great community. And community is so freaking hard. And every time I go back, it's just there's more thoughtful stuff around it and they're cutting it in different ways. I mean, I think in the last couple years, I've just been really impressed with him.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think I look for a lot of the same things as most people high minded design and just thoughtfulness for the user. But ultimately, the magic comes in how someone solves a problem. And I think the people who do it really well are just incredibly good at anticipating users' needs. And that's what it really boils down to. And so the more of that you have, the more excited. I think all investors get and the more inclined they are to invest. I don't think I'm super unique in that area. It's just for me my major, major emphasis pretty much the expense of all other stuff.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “In the same way Airbnb is not going to delete hotels overnight. It's going to change how hotels work. I think that's a better metaphor.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We work with, he called it conviction based investing. In that case, you do not go to a committee to make your investment. It is based on your diligence, your socialization of the investment, and then your ability to have that capital and invest. And then for LPs, the third bucket will be direct investments where they basically take from their managers opportunities that they already have shares in through their investments in funds like Maiden Lane or First Round Capital or Sequoia. And then they invest directly into companies that are a fit for the bigger broader portfolio. And so the future, I think you're going to see the consensus buckets start to decline a little bit. You're going to see non-consensus or conviction investing start to expand. And I think you're going to see direct opportunities from LPs also starting to expand. But Sequoia benchmark Andrews and Horwoods, they're not going away anytime soon. This isn't like we're out to beat them and kill them.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's my responsibility to build a community around it so that our LPs can make a really healthy outsized return, right? And that shift in thinking to do that, you need to move the economics with it, right? And that's where I think the future is going is the economics of venture are changing. And Angelist has basically taken them and unbundled them. And so you can rearrange them in whatever form that you want. And that's pretty fascinating. I don't know where it lands exactly other than to say, I think community is a big part of it. I think flexibility is a big part of it. We're going to see three pretty basic models emerge for how decisions are made all the way up from LPs down to small seed funds. And the three buckets are going to be consensus-based decision making. And that's every fund that has pretty much existed to date. Group of people get together, they look at investments, and they decide as a group. Then there'll be non-consensus. Someone yesterday coined the term is actually Ed Roman ascending.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I don't think it'll be a complete depocratization. Unfortunately, the reality is there's a scarce number of insanely talented and crazy people who can build big things. They don't need thousands of people on their cap table. And so what's really democratizing is instead of people like myself being an intermediary to capital, right? I think where venture capital moves is more explicit sets of communities, right? Maiden Lane has not led the way here, right? We're actually standing on the shoulders of several other people, you know, including Y Combinator, including first-round capital. I think even SV Angel deserves some credit there. And if you look at like the best versions of the future, it's the capital is more like a shared resource. I think that's where it goes even more explicitly than Y Combinator and SV Angel and First Round Capital. And that's how I see Maiden Lane moving is the capital is not mine. It's not my budget to invest.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To make they cost less. I mean, on and on and on, everything everyone already knows, right? But yet the model we use to allocate capital stayed exactly the same. And I think at the very basic level that's what Maiden Lane is trying to do is say, hey, what if we re kind of jigger some of these assumptions and take some of the best parts of that, but try and move it into modernity? And I think a lot of people want that. I think they want to work in a more seamless, more efficient manner. And I think they also want to work with a group of people that may not be inside a traditional fund. And so we're trying to provide that.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Much the exact same way. A group of people get around a table every Monday morning. They hear a hero pitch and they kind of thumbs up, thumbs down. I don't know. It's just maybe just me, but the way businesses are built has nothing to do with 60 years ago.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, you're too kind. I don't think we've established much quite yet. We need to return capital to our LPs and show that the model is sustainable. So we're going to quickly track towards that. And then we also need to make our syndicate leads money, right? I think it's one of the biggest kind of milestones for us is going to be when a syndicate lead makes a million dollars. That's something that I'm counting on the Day Store and working really hard to make happen. We haven't really done much yet on that front. I think what we have done is just said, look, We think there's a new way forward and we're willing to put our names on the line and we're really excited about that. And I think some people have recognized that and we'll take it. But we're definitely still in learning and kind of open-minded mode around where the future takes us. And that's why I got so excited about Maiden Lane. And I think a lot of the initial excitement has really been around that because venture hasn't really changed in 60 years from the very first set of venture funds to now capital has been allocated in pretty”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Allows them to do their syndicates work outside of their office, but still have a space that's more professional than their home. And so my job is to do things like that and create a community in the norms around that community so that we can scale and become hopefully a very, very successful fund in its own right. And so there are things that are worth sharing in a partnership. That's why VCs are rarely single investor funds, right? There's nice economies of scale and sharing things. And so we're rethinking that with Mainline.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The thing that makes Maine Lane so unique, yes, is that we have 30% carried interest. There are other funds that have 30% carried interest. Sequoia and many others demand premium carry and get it because they've demonstrated better returns. The reason we ask for 30% carried interest is because we share 15 to 20 percent of that carried interest with syndicate leads. So the amount of profit that I get is actually less than the syndicate leads. And the reason for that is they are the ones sourcing the deal. They are the one adding value. And they are the one ultimately driving the maiden lane brand. They interact with companies on a more regular basis than I do. My goal is to be more of a shepherd amongst all the syndicate leads and for the fun to create resources that we can share together, right? One of our first things that we did was we opened a live, work, loft so that people could do meetings and host dinners and just kind of a third space because most all the syndicate leads have a full-time job, right? And so this will”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Say, I'm really excited about this company. I've known the founder for five years. I've worked in and around this space. This is a good investment. Let's go do it. And in doing that, we share our carried interest. Carried interest is how VCs make their money. It's a form of profit sharing, right? It's usually just shared from within the GPs of the fund, but at Maine Lane, we have more GPs and we share it more aggressively with people thanks to Angel Asyndicates.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So, we really focus on what makes us different. And there's two main pieces that really differentiate us from pretty much every fund out there. The first is that we were born and bred online, and that means we define roles and activities a little bit differently. So we don't have your classic Monday meeting and big office with a bunch of people in it. We really try to do everything product first because we believe that can make our process and our judgment better by using the data that that creates. The second thing that makes us different is most people think I sit around and make decisions like Click Fire Go on Angel is kind of like a trading desk. Or they think I sit around and invest mainlane's money directly and neither of which are true. What's really going on is I'm working with a set of angel investors who invest our money on our behalf, right? So they take it and they”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Much bigger, more robust container, right? They have hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in all the stuff around that, the infrastructure and all that. What Angelist is allowing people to do is set up effectively more just like a box, right? Also a container, one that we can fold with our bare hands and get going more quickly. And there's a lot more flexibility and new things that can be done with the ability to spin it up so quickly. But a fund is just a container. I think it's really important to understand that because it should sit in the background of the people working on the investment and the company. At the end of the day, venture is a people business. It's really about humans. The fund and the brand and things like that we use to market and kind of get advantages in terms of accessing good deals. But I think they should sit in the background of what's actually happening on a company by company basis.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It turns out that it scaled very quickly, and so 95% of the investments that we make are done through Angelists and specifically through syndicates. So that kind of just shows you how little was known back in 2014 and how quickly we're moving. Where I see this going is it's amazing Angelist is unbundling the activities of venture capital. And so what's happening in short order is people are starting to learn and understand and internalize all the mechanics of venture. And I think that's really exciting. And so what Maiden Lane is is just a player in that and one of the biggest and earliest fans of unbundling venture capital, productizing as much of it as we can, and then building your strategies with that new approach. And the fund piece of it is relatively unimportant. What I like to say is funds are containers, a traditional fund like benchmark or sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, they're just”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so the reason people sometimes confuse Maiden Angel is we were born on Angelists. We're sort of like a native app on Angelist, if you will. But to say that we are Angelist is to say that Uber is Apple because you use it on an Apple device, right? That makes no sense. Angelist actually has some of its own funds, just as Apple has some of its own apps that it uses on iOS, right? And so that's actually just the cleanest way to think about it. We are legally separate. Mainlane's just a fund. It's just chosen as strategy to only work on Angelist. Initially, we didn't even think there would be enough deal flow on Angelists. And so we put it in our documents that we would do half the deals offline in a more traditional manner and then half online, kind of waiting for the platform to scale.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Maiden Lane's riffing on. And so I moved out to San Francisco in 2014 to close the fund and in April start investing the fund. And that's what I've been doing full time since.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, some people in the New York press just pilloried us and said, these guys totally checked out what an echo chamber these people are so stupid they don't even know that that's the name I was like nope definitely no think it's funny And then there's obviously also a maiden lane in London Center as well. I haven't visited that one, but it's a common name of a street in most major cities. And I also see it as a contrast to Sandhill Road. You can walk on Maiden Lane, you can actually host events there. It's open to the public. We're not hiding in some suburban country club where you have to be an insider to know what to do. Maiden Lane is being built and Angelist is being built in the middle of a city center of a major city. And I think that's sort of the bigger trend of where venture is going. It is no longer going to be a skill set or knowledge of the very few. It's going to become more distributed. And that's really at the really high level what”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “From where angelists' offices are for at least a few more weeks. It's a very special two little teeny blocks in the middle of San Francisco. It has a storied history. The name itself also has a storied history. I got a little bit of a giggle out of the fact that one of the bailout funds that Goldman used for the real estate assets was named Maiden Lane, which obviously sort of the ashes from which I rose.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Think just continue to drink the Kool-Aid around online investing. In 2012, I moved out to San Francisco and worked really closely with the Angelist team. That was the year that they passed legislation to make everything that we see today legal. That's kind of the why now, Evangelist. In 2013, when they launched syndicates, my partner, Jeff and I had the idea of starting a fund purely dedicated to investing in Angela Syndicates. At the time, syndicates was barely off the ground. I think we had run maybe three or four investment quietly just to like get the kinks out of the system. But we figured that it could be something impactful not just for individuals, but for institutional investors as well. And we wanted to kind of learn by doing and say, let's just get on this platform in a real material way and figure out what this means. And so we raised $25 million. We named the fund Made in Lane. The name comes.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Sure. So I joined Atlas in 2010 and started getting emails from two guys I never met, one, Nivi, the other Naval, and started taking introductions to the companies they introduced me to as really my first source of deal flow. I was a very, very, very early user evangelist all the way from Waltham, Massachusetts at that point. And a big believer that Venture was moving online and sort of, I think my venture career has probably focused mainly on this thesis that the game of venture is changing and how companies are built today are obviously also changing. And so where is it going to go in the next five to 10 years? And really for the first couple years just became a fan of what Angelist was doing. And so just was a normal user. I didn't really have any special access. Atlas would end up leading the Series A for Angelus very quietly and have invested in every round since.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I don't know if it shaped my thesis. I think what it did for me is it really instilled a deep sense of empathy. I have so much respect for people who are able to start something and get it off the ground. I really, really, really make an effort to not snicker and kind of fault people for not building something maybe as big as a Facebook or a Google or an Apple because I myself wasn't able to do that. And so I don't think it informed a thesis per se, but I can connect with people and really feel that, you know, this is not a small task to build a company. And I think it makes me a better advocate.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Fun called Atlas Venture. We've since rebranded the fund to accomplish. And so I joined that shop in April of 2010. And what I thought would just be a few years to get my feet wet has an ended up being approaching a six-year run. And it's been a lot of fun.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “A snapshot of your background prior to starting Maiden Lane and how you made your way into the VC and the tech world Yeah, so the way back is I was born on a farm in Missouri. I walked off the farm to the east coast to go to college, then down to Wall Street to watch the largest bankruptcy in history decided business schools did not need another white guy from Leon Brothers applying and so got the itch to build a company and started working on a product idea I had and the payment space. I think in the best case scenario there were a few features of Square involved with it but maybe not even that it was basically a year and a half of me teaching myself the concepts behind product development, front-end web development and just shifting my thinking away from the finance world. I ended up really serendipitously getting introduced to my partner Jeff who at the time”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Austin, welcome to the 20-minute VC. I must admit I'm incredibly excited to have you on the show having been recommended you by Philip Murring at Angellist and Eric Vlu. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Harry.”

    2016-02-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The First Online Venture Fund Built On AngelList with Dustin Dolginow @ Maiden Lane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source