YouSaid · the spoken record

Eddie Vivas

lines on the record: 42
first: 2022-04-01
most recent: 2022-04-01
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

“We want to be the place you go to for all expert advice, able to help as many experts as possible monetize their passions. And hopefully it's not just helping you buy things, right? So we sold you a set of skis and hopefully we're helping you plan your ski trip. We sold you baby stroller, baby crib, and we're helping you with sleep training for your kid. We sold you a coffee maker and we're teaching you how to make your first cup of coffee. The fact that we have live human in the loop means that you can do so many things that haven't been done in the past and we're always thinking about ways we're going to unlock that.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I think the real answer for decompressing is three things maybe really decompress me. One is just spending time with any kind of physical activity. That has been a really key part of my regimen. The second is extended periods of time off. Like a weekend doesn't do it for me. Like I need at least a week for me to actually start to like slow down and chill out. And the third thing is spending time with people who truly get me and can help me think through problems. When I leave a weekend or at some period of time where I've talked through my problems with people and we've made progress that goes a long way.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got a lot of weaknesses. Instead of trying to change it, I just surround myself with people who can cover my weaknesses.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less smoke and mirrors. I think most people paint this picture that it's perfect and we're all crushing it. And the reality is it's an awesome journey, but it is hard as hell.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good way. I call my investors very often. It's not that they're reaching out to me and they want weekly check-ins and things like that. I'm constantly going to them. I'm seeing this problem. How have you seen this solve before? Can you introduce me to this person? Surrounding yourself with the right people, both your own team and your investors is really important.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that people over index on valuations and not on finding the right partner. And I try to find the right balance of what's fair for my team and what's fair for the investors. I'm not a really big believer in running an auction process, right? And going and bidding everybody against each other. Historically, we've said like, here's the price that we believe is fair. And that's just what we've gone with. I think we're entrepreneurs get it wrong is they're very focused on who's going to pay them slightly more, but you're stuck with this person for the next five to seven years. And does that half a point or point of delusion justify not working with somebody you love? Because if they're actually a good investor, they should add substantially more value than that. Otherwise, it's just dumb money. And I think, especially in the early stages of a business, dumb money is just giving you a longer rope to hang yourself with versus smart money and really strong investors will really call you out on your bullshit, push you on do you have a good business here and guide you in the right direction. And they're very, it can be hands-on.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A time and place for both. The worst thing that you can do, in my opinion, is take somebody who comes in and they're super excited when they join a company. They have all these big ideas and they get shut down and they're like, you know, you ask them 18 questions basically just shut it down and you make the path towards getting whatever they're thinking about it to turn it into reality made it very long. On the flip side, an idea, an hour people were just constantly meeting about ideas but not actually executing on them is not good. And so I think that a way of solving this, what we do is we have operating priorities as a business. We say these are the most important things for the company to solve here, the metrics that we're trying to move. Here's what we're trying to accomplish. When those ideas map to those initiatives, it makes it a much easier conversation because typically”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do especially our key meetings are all very documented and we're very analytical as a company whenever possible people are very cautious about making broad statements about being able to back them up. Like you better know your answer if you just say 50% of users are doing something and it's not actually 50% users an example because you're using some like you're overestimating something, people will call you out very quickly because we're all very deep in the data.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a couple things. For starters, one of the things we did was we don't have titles of the company. One thing I observed when I worked at LinkedIn was if a director said something at an associate was in the room, the director was always right, but the associate often was the one who was right. But just because the more senior person was the one who said something. The second thing is we interview just very, very aggressively for people who feel comfortable with debate. If you don't feel comfortable on conversations, this is not going to be the place for you. We rarely leave a meeting. In fact, I can't think of one where people left heated, but we debate things like all hell.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With you, I might go and say, that's great, but we have to for X, Y, and Z, we're doing this, we're going down this path. But I think creating a culture where people feel very comfortable pushing back and people feel very comfortable voicing their decision is important.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much time do you have? Probably the thing that I would say I suck at the most is I'm very disorganized. I need to surround myself with people who can take my unstructured thoughts and understand when is there something good here versus it's just an unstructured thought. One of my leadership skills that I built over time is building a team that feels very comfortable pushing back on me. Like just because I've given them an idea doesn't mean that they're expected to go do it unless I tell them, hey, like I'm making an executive decision here. And that's really important for somebody like me. And I think a lot of product-minded, creative entrepreneurs can be the type that they've always got a lot of ideas like we could do this and we could do that. And that only works successfully if you surround yourself with super high quality people who understand when there's value there and when there's not. And they have to feel confident to be able to push back on you. Our company culture is one where literally, it doesn't matter if you're an intern or you're one of my co-founders, you'll push back on me in public. And again, that doesn't mean that I'm going to.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suck in more places than I'm good at, but what I'm very good at is surrounding myself with a team that covers my weaknesses. And I think that's really important. I think it's very, very, very hard to be such a well-rounded leader that you're just great at everything.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have kids, which change probably the most is that I went from having very few people I worked with that had kids to a lot of people that had kids. And the one thing I've learned is don't screw people's kids. Like don't ever push somebody to prioritize work above their family. I think family should always come first. And if someone's got a kid's soccer game or they need to do some school thing, like do not create pressure in making them feel guilty by not going to do it. I've been burned a few times and learned. That never ends well.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sound cliche, but I think the biggest relationship that I've shifted I've had with money is that I realize it doesn't bring happiness. It empowers you to do a lot of really interesting cool things, but everybody kind of goes on everybody, but a lot of people go through life and they're like, I have this goleman, and I have that goal, and then I have that goal. And then all you realize is my goal continues to go up and that becomes a hamster wheel. And so what's more important is to actually find purpose. I love what I do and I do it for the love of the game and the love of building things. And I personally generate happiness, creating wealth for others than for myself. And that ends up being actually a really virtuous cycle because if you care about doing right by others and helping them out, then they help you out and it compounds really quickly. Money obviously solves a lot of problems at the early onset. Like financial stress sucks. But like once you've covered certain needs, like I don't have to worry about my house. I don't have to worry about my kids' school. I don't have to worry about like my ability to travel. It's diminishing returns really quickly.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing I'm super proud about is we've offered our team a few secondaries and the take rate has been less than 10%. In one case, we didn't even have enough secondary demand to cover the legal fees. I think strong companies and strong founders and the people who work at those companies who believe in the companies should want to keep their ownership. That's my thinking on this has evolved. Some life happens. And if you have a very long journey, you need liquidity points. And I think as a company, for example, for us, I want to stay private as long as possible. So I want to create secondary opportunities. I don't want my team taking half of their equity off the table. But if they need by home or they're having a child or whatever it might be, I think it's a healthy thing for companies to be able to introduce some of that. But to your point, early companies found her taking $10 million off the table. Personally, I think it sends a lot of weird signals.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not really. I mean, I think that listen, the pendulum is in absolutely the core of the entrepreneur. Right now, capital is super ubiquitous. People want to hit certain goals because they want to puff up their valuations even higher. I think different times call for different approaches. And so this advice is not timeless. There will be times where it is completely irrelevant what I'm saying. But right now there is a lack of high quality entrepreneurs and there's an excess of capital. And so investors are trying to fund whatever they can. And so to the person that's trying to hit X goal because they're trying to do $6 million in ARR in X period of time so they can get some silly high round number. Good for them. I mean, I think that there's pros and cons to that model. I think it becomes really hard to build a high quality sustainable business from it. And I think the most important thing here, raising capital does not equal success at all, right? Like it doesn't mean anything, actually. It just means you were able to convince some people to fund your business. But until you actually sell the business or you turn a profitable business.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The issue is that the line is a bit blurred. Everybody can generate more revenue by just burning more money, right? And so you hit X revenue goal, but what”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure that spending my money faster is going to help my runway. Right. And getting bums in seats, like that's full transparency. Like, I think that's stupid. If you're a good entrepreneur, you don't only have to rely on metrics to convince your investors that you're making progress in the business. If you're super clear about like, here's what we're setting out to achieve, here's what the progress you've made, here's where we're going. I think a big mistake first time entrepreneurs and just entrepreneurs make in general is they're overly focused on showing progress towards vanity metrics versus building actual value in a company.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Startup when you lose people, it really impacts the morale of the team. And you can lose a few people, and it's okay. But if you start losing quite a few people, everyone starts to question themselves and like, is this business actually working? Why is this person leading? And so I'm all about like getting it right from the beginning and making sure I trust that person.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made a ton of mistakes hiring. The biggest mistake I've made in hiring is trying to convince people to join us. And I think it's that if I sell the dream and I convince you to come, and inevitably the dream doesn't come true, you're going to be demoralized. You weren't really that bodied in the first place and you're not going to be that high of impact. That's probably been my biggest learning lesson. My second learning lesson, and I think that everybody builds this guy intuition over time is sometimes you just have to trust your gut where there's a few yellow flags about somebody. And just because they have an incredible pedigree doesn't mean they're the right person for you. But I think that the first is probably more important than the second. The second is, and sometimes I'm wrong, by the way. Sometimes I've taken risks on people and I'd be like, I'm not sure they actually end up being great. I do think there's a, I'm a really big believer in the if hiring slow, really making sure that this makes sense for both the person and for us. Because if it doesn't make sense for either, here's where things really go wrong, especially if”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because, and here's why if you hired smart people, they're going to figure the shit out anyways. You can hide things from dumb people. Smart people are going to figure it out. So you might as well be straight up with them. And because if I have a sense of urgency behind certain decisions, it's because, hey, here's much cash we have left in bank. Here's where we're progressing towards numbers. If they understand we're doing well or we're doing poorly this month, this quarter, they have context on decision making. They're going to change their decisions accordingly. They're going to think about spending capital differently. And so I'm a really big believer in transparency. I think you can full mediocre teams, but smart people always will figure your bullshit out.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I'm sure I've made mistakes. Yes, I'm sure, but I can't think of any of them right now. I mean, I think that we may have been slightly too conservative, but I'm a really big believer that startups aren't for everybody. And if you try to make them for everybody, it makes it for those who it's really good for, not as good, if that makes any sense. You're like watering it down. I think in my past, I was very cash focused and I learned that like people only cared about the next month's paycheck versus today. I get people to really fundamentally care about the health of the business. And I just think that's better.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, irrespective if I'm founding a company, I'm a really big believer in an equal partnerships. I actually don't like the idea of as much as possible. I don't like the idea of the CEO having always the largest amount. I always think that means you brought in somebody who you don't believe is equal to you. Broader speaking, like we just look at comp data and we go 99% on equity and we lean in there.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be incredibly generous with people on the equity side. There's nothing, in my opinion, that's more fucked up than when a company gets acquired and you find out that the team just owns such a small percentage of it. If your team are large equity holders in the business, your problems are now their problems. We've got to figure this thing out together. It's no longer just Eddie's problem. And it's hard, right? Because people talk about how competitive the market is and how people are churning a ton. I mean, I don't want to jinx myself. I think we've lost one person in the last 12 months, right? And we're 135 people. I think over the course of the history of the company, we've lost less than I can count on my hand. And a large part of that is we don't hire mercenaries where we really make sure people are bought into what we're doing. I sure as well don't try to sell them on the company. I'm like, let me talk to you about all the things you're going to run into and all the challenges. Isn't this going to be hard? At times it's going to suck. It's also going to be really fun, but it's only going to be fun if you really believe in what we're doing. If I'm starting a company, like lean in heavily into being generous to people in the equity front, be thoughtful about.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Missionary people ask a lot of questions about the business. They really want to understand it. I agree with you that people sell it well, but people often reveal their cards pretty quickly to on what actually matters to them. One of the things for us is our compensation model solves for a lot of this. I'm a very big believer that if you're going to go join a startup, you should be focused on equity. And so the people who are equity focused are already more missionary focused than the very much more cash-oriented people. And I tell people, if you're trying to solve for cash on a risk-adjusted basis and you want stability in life, you should go to a thing. Like VP at a fang is the most sustainable way to make a considerable amount of wealth. Startups you should go to because you want to be happy, right? And maybe, yeah, sure, there's upside. Maybe the thing works out. And if it does work out, you should be incredibly well rewarded. The competition model solves for a lot of it.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By exactly what you just said, right? Like literally, you just dictated the playbook on how people fuck it up. I worry like crazy that because capital is so ubiquitous that you can become too comfortable and start to scale it before business is ready and or bring in the wrong people. One of the things that I'm really passionate about hiring a team of missionaries, not mercenaries, because I think that like you need people who genuinely believe in your mission, because especially when you're working on a really hard problem, it's not a matter of hiring somebody who to solve like to build this feature, this tool, roll up this program. It's somebody who's genuinely going to help figure out fundamental problems the company has. Somebody who, when you hit roadblocks along the way, they're going to be able to weather the storm. Those people take a long time to hire. Like they don't come quickly. Fucking it up for me was lowering my bar on trying to like get people to join my company because we were slow on hiring.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very magical things happen. Like, it's actually a very enjoyable experience. And so, our experts love the work they do, not to criticize Instacart or Uber, but if you think of a spectrum of like, I work in the gig economy or passion economy, one is I'm delivering a good or a person somewhere. And the other one is I'm monetizing my passion and my knowledge, and I'm teaching somebody something. People very, very, very much prefer focusing on the things they're passionate about. The fact that people are having these amazing conversations, experts were making money, talking about the things they loved, our attention.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a couple of things, so, some who were data driven and some were gut intuition driven. On the analytical side, it was just purely that our conversion rate was so high, right? When we connected, somebody to an expert, they just converted at such a high rate. It was the fact that it increases conversion rates. It decreases return rates, so a big challenge in e-commerce is return logistics. Our return rate is between 1 and 2%, meaning people shipping the items back. So that's a huge benefit to us. And then the third is that from our second sale, we had consumers reaching out to us saying, I'd like to tip by expert. And so half of expert compensation is actually covered by the consumer via tips. When somebody goes and says, hey, this is a nice thing in terms of ratings and reviews, that's one thing. Another thing is when 90% of consumers are going and tipping experts. On the gut side, again, just observing these conversations that were happening. And one of the things that we saw was when you bring someone together or people together who have equal passions, one party respects. The other one's actually looking for advice from the other.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. If I always tell people if this business doesn't work out, it's because I messed up. It's because basically we accelerated too fast and blew the plane up midair. When you read our reviews online, they almost look cooked or fake.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nice to haves are often things that are shiny but aren't core to the success of the business. So in the challenge with this, you don't really figure out those things until multiple years into your problem. My old boss, David Thacker, who led our series B, used to tell me startups fail for one of two reasons. They either scale before they find product market fit or they never find product market fit. But it's all a matter of time. And so what's nice to have and must have, unfortunately, the real answer there is it just takes time to figure those things out and then to become obsessed with just solving those problems and having a ton of clarity because the biggest challenge that most companies have is they've just spread their resources over way too many things and there's people constraint, there's capital constraints and you don't get to focus the right amount of energy on all those things.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tried to buy wherever possible. The challenge for us is we have a very B2B approach in a B2C business. When you chat with somebody I curated, that expert has their own phone number. They have their own email address. That's the way you would think of like a B2B company selling SAS software. Like all the tools that are out there where I chat with curators as a company, not I chat with Kelly or Jack who work at Curating. And so all of the tooling was just going to be slightly off. One of the things we've come to terms with is if I stack a bunch of 90% solutions on top of each other, it gets really mediocre really quickly. It feels like I'm making just a small compromise with the first, but I'm actually making a lot of compromises. It really depends is this thing nice to have or a must have. There are certain things I have to get right. And for things I have to get right, you should build them. And for the things that you need to get right, then it's a matter of like if you have to build, then great, but otherwise absolutely buy. And we definitely went into this expecting was to take half the time to build everything. The benefit is if you've built everything and you've built it the right way.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curated the thing that we learned was if you're coming to us to be able to chat with an expert, we need to make sure that every time you're connected to an expert, they're an incredible expert. And that's actually quite a hard problem because we'll receive 100 applications and we've learned we can only really accept one. We have to vet somebody on technical competencies. We have to make sure they're a strong communicator. We need to make sure that they're actually going to be reliable and available. The amount of tooling that we had to build, because we learned we don't know who a good expert is. Our experts know who good experts are. So we had to build a social hiring platform. Then we had to build a platform to figure out, okay, well, how do we measure the supply and demand of when customers are coming in and when we're going to schedule experts? And how do we determine which experts get which time slots? Because not all experts are creative equally. Some are better than others. Because when you come in, we like to, we call it our real-time connection rate. 95% of the time, we're connecting with somebody in under a minute. There's just so much infrastructure that has to exist. When you look at curated from the outside, you're like, oh, this is a simple site. I just chat with somebody. But there's really like seven.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right things are what are the things that you have to get right for your business to work, right? There's a lot of things that are nice to have, and there's a lot of things that are must haves.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going after something, at least with curiating, that's really ambitious. And that's about going slow. It's about doing things the right way because we're doing something in a place where a lot of people have failed in the past because they didn't actually build the right foundations. And if you scale a business that doesn't have the right fundamentals, you're either just going to raise a ton of money in a hope that you get yourself out of that hole, or you're going to blow up eventually anyways. So it's less about going slow. It's more about like building the right things to actually build a sustainable, strong business.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I disagree. Say a couple things. When I invest, I very much look failed entrepreneurs. I think it's incredibly humbling. I think anybody who's, I think you go into building your first startup thinking all the stuff that you read on the internet about how great it is and how easy it's going to be. And the reality is it's really tough. I think one of the benefits of being a serial entrepreneur, and it's very much a luxury, is you're given the benefit from an investor that you'll figure things out. So you can approach things with a much longer term mindset, right? I'm not worried about like, do I hit this number this month? I'm worried about like, am I on the right path towards the big outcome? That difference between being able to be long-term focus versus short-term focus is a huge, huge, huge advantage. I always tell entrepreneurs like, don't take this advice from me because what I do as a repeat entrepreneurs would be different than what you're going to do from somebody who's just getting started, but I think serpentre is a big advantage.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Bright, the biggest thing that I was known for was I cared a lot, but I was very intense. We were at the office till nine o'clock at night. That was my badge of honor. Like, if you were working your ass off, I was happy. And I thought that being late at the office meant creating impact. And it turns out, like, not really. That's just a quick way to burn out people. And the people who stick around will end up just being the people who aren't your stars in the first place because your stars want to be learning and they want to be happy and they want to be creating impact. So I'd say that's probably the biggest thing a much longer term focus, right? Like I'm not worried about the next month. I'm worried about the next year. I'm worried about the next 10 years. Worried more about building the right foundations.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I call the people that I know, but I only know so many. And so we just went all in. And the idea, the aha moment, I guess you could say, that I always reference is I'm from Florida, so didn't grow up skiing much or spending much time in the snow. But 10 years ago, I used to go on the ski trip all the time with my friends once a year. Galilee, it was miserable. Like, I loved hanging out with my friends, but I was just getting my ass kicked out there all the time. At some point, I'm like, all right, I'm going to get an instructor, go to the top of the mountain, ride down with the instructor. We meet at the base. And the guy's like, this is all wrong. And essentially, like, I had gone into a ski shop, bought a bunch of high end deer because they just sold me the most expensive stuff, me assuming more expensive is better. Turns out like that was for experts. I'm a beginner. Guy goes into a shop, rents me a bunch of the most basic stuff I grow back out. Absolutely have an incredible time. And so that was kind of this aha moment where like I wish that I would have been able to talk to somebody who would have pointed me in the right direction. And how do we help with curate to actually make that happen?”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curated had an interesting path. I had been at LinkedIn for four years. I had given them nine months notice that I was going to be leaving. And about a month into that, Microsoft acquires the company. I had this opportunity all of a sudden to work with a bunch of people that I had been working with the past couple of years who said, I love LinkedIn. I've been here five years, 10 years. I love this company, but I'm not ready to go be part of Big Co. And so I had 10 people who I really, really respected, who had essentially become like my founding team. And the team knew that they wanted to work with each other before we actually even had an idea. And so then I went back to what was one of the most ambitious ideas that I never had, but that I candidly just thought was too hard to work on. And the idea is one that I think a lot of people have had before when I'm trying to make a major decision. I wish that I could talk to somebody who knew a lot about that thing. Google has indexed all the world's published knowledge, but there is somebody out there that I wish I could talk to when I'm trying to make a specific decision. And I often leverage my network to do this today.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I probably had more resentment early on. The system had done me wrong. And then one day I woke up and was just like, I got to figure my own thing out because no one's going to solve this problem for me. And so as a kid, I was always super entrepreneurial. I mean, I started a t-shirt company, designed websites for people. I always was trying to figure out a way to build my own little businesses. But there was definitely some tough years there where I was questioning myself as to what was going to happen.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Bright, which I want to go focus on. And then another one was called Applovin, or my brother and my co founder, Adam Fergie went to go focus on.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't get it through to them and they did accept it. They were pissed as hell. Yeah, we got into a big disagreement. I held my ground. They held their ground. And so I grew up in a small town and I moved to Miami to go live with my grandparents. And my whole family was like essentially that cut me off, which was the right decision in hindsight, obviously. And so I spent the next three years working in a warehouse backing boxes. And then I woke up one day and I was like, this doesn't work. This sucks. And so I was like, I need to figure out a way to make some money. I'd always been quite technical. So I started building websites. I built a recipe cook cook website. And I went from making like, I don't know, $1,800 a month to like $20,000 a month in a matter of six months. And I took all of the money that I made from this website that I had and I just kept reinvesting it. And I started my first company. And so that was an ad tech business, ran that business for about seven years and one day realized my heart just wasn't in it. So we sold that company. But before we did, we spawned out a few assets. One of them was.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So my journey into tech was a little different than most. I dropped out of high school, which didn't go over incredibly well on my family as both my parents were first generation immigrants and doctors.”
2022-04-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make Hiring, The 2 Reasons Startups Fail and How to Avoid Them, Why Most Startup Equity Plans are F****** and Why You Should Scrap Titles From Your Company with Eddie Vivas, Founder & CEO @ Curated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source