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Emily Melton

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33
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2017-01-11
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2017-01-11
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  1. “Getting back to truly long term thinking one of the things that I've seen transform over the industry is from starting 15 years ago is we used to everyone kind of took for granted that it was going you were company building and that it would take a long time for these companies to be successful and that you recognized you were starting a longer term relationship and I think that some of the trajectory of some of these amazing companies which are truly outliers that have had this up and to the right success has forced all companies to be judged by that same curve and that's not the way that all companies are built and I think that it forces entrepreneurs to do and capital to do unnecessary things like putting too much capital to rest too early on trying to expand too quickly until you figure out the fundamentals of your business I really want people to start to think about things in terms of we're building a you know build businesses over 10 15 plus years and thinking about you know when to bring in capital once you de-risk key”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Right now, I'm obsessed with stratery, Ben Thompson. I just love reading. I think he has unique insights. He's very, very thoughtful. He goes deep. It's not just the headlines, but true substance. So I really enjoy reading that every day.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Challenged with this one. One of the things that I have found that helps me in my role, which I think is very different than most people in the venture industry, is that I view vulnerability as a strength. I view showing what you're excited about and what you're scared about and your weaknesses allows you to build authentic relationships. And I think a lot of people both on the VC side and on the entrepreneurship side, what they're always constantly having to say is everything's great. My companies are killing it. I'm awesome. And the challenge is that it's never that great and there's always challenges. And when you keep putting that up there, it becomes people get more and more insecure in the back end and it creates some bad behavior. And I found that just being really honest and open about here are some of the things that I'm working on that I'm excited about. Here are some challenges that I'm facing that allows you to build a more authentic relationship with entrepreneurs and your peers and also allows a level of empathy to enter into a relationship, which I ultimately think is critical for being successful.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The next steps of the business because that's that opportunity to still be helpful to them because there are a number of these companies that I want to say succeed. They just don't necessarily fit within the framework of the DFJ portfolio.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I had tried. I tried. I tried custom letters. I tried, but I really found that every single company is unique and every entrepreneur in the way that they're thinking about it is unique. And some of them, it's just easier no's. Some of them, the most challenging ones are where you know it's not going to be a good fit for your firm or your partners aren't enthusiastic, but you really want to see the company be successful. And in those instances where I'm really trying, it's not just saying no or it's not like I figured out why you're going to fail. It's like everything's on the margin and here's why I can't quite get there. But let me see if I can be helpful to you. Here are the kinds of investors that I think would be good for you. So it's time consuming and I'm not perfect on it by any means. But one of the things that I do as a key success is when I've passed on a company and that entrepreneur comes back to me for advice in terms of who they actually are considering raising around from or how they're thinking about.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Saying no to entrepreneurs, that is one of the most challenging things as they come in, they're passionate, they're excited, they're looking for a partner. And in most instances, 99% of the time, I have to come back with a no. And that can be really draining and challenging because I love this job because I love thinking what's possible. And it's very challenging for me to come back and tell someone why I can't get excited enough to make that investment.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Get two. Right now, I'm rereading mindset, which I read when I was trying to think about raising my daughters, and I recently heard Bill Gurley refer to this book again in terms of entrepreneurship and being in a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. So I'm rereading in that context, and there's a lot of great things there. The other one is a theory of justice by John Rawls. It was my honest thesis as an undergrad, which I think is very important as I think through the current political climate and the kind of world I want to live in.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You've learned from that and how you changed because that's going to be that's, I think, a more important indicator of long term success than just getting all the things right. No one gets everything right. The question is, how do you actually double down when you get something right and know when you're doing something wrong and make the right change to get back on path?”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “They aren't, that is probably not a good fit. So that's one of the other kind of things that I do to assess the kinds of people that I want to work with. If people are holding things really close to the vest, if there's been some training with entrepreneurs the last couple of years, it's like VCs are the enemy and you only want to need to know basis. And the problem is when everything goes well, that may or may not work, right? You may be able to actually just kind of keep them to the sidelines and not give them information. But if things go badly, if you actually need to do an inside round, if you're going to need help closing key candidates, all of the things where we can be useful, the more information that you give, the better suited we are to actually help you. So I found that that's actually one of the indications of an entrepreneur that I tend to work with well is where they're transparent and also where they're open to learning from their mistakes and talking through them and saying here's it's I just don't want to know when you're pitching me everything that's gone well that's great tell me everything that's gone wrong and”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Works. One of my entrepreneurs calls me or emails me. They're hearing from me as soon as I possibly can. And if someone asks to talk about me from one of my entrepreneurs, you'll get a response very quickly because they appreciate that I give them that turnaround. So I think there's a lot of ways of being able to do the due diligence and really suss out what that investor is like”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think the best way for an entrepreneur to assess that is to actually talk to other investments that the VC is working with. Everyone's in cell mode. It's why you don't want to get married to someone without dating them for a long time, right? Those first couple of dates can be great. They're happy. They're showing up with Chicken Noodle soup when you're sick. The question is, what is it two, three, four years down the road? Like, how are you still treating each other? I am trying to think, I don't think I've done a recent investment where my entrepreneurs have not done due diligence. And that's what if someone doesn't really appreciate a due diligence, if someone wants to talk about what they're going to do versus saying instead of hearing it from me, talk to any of my CEOs. I'll make introductions, but honestly, reach out to any of them. You don't have to kind of come through me. That's the way that you can tell. You can tell if, you know, if the entrepreneurs aren't responding immediately, you'll get a sense of how that relationship”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In startup companies. You have a lot of seed investors. Then you have all these different pools of capital, some of them that are more specialized, like the firm that I'm part of is DFJ Venture. We do early stage invest. We're very hands-on investors. But you have a lot of other investors that say they do that kind of investing as well as the late stage investing and are managing much, much larger pools of capital. So you have a lot of challenges as an entrepreneur to try to determine what's the right partner from in business, not only in terms of the individual, but also the firm and the amount of capital that I want to raise.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Talked about this. I'm doing the, I don't do a lot of press, which is, I don't know if that's good or bad. But one of the things I have found a little bit disturbing is this rise of kind of the celebrity investors or all of this need to do personal branding, particularly for venture capitalists early on in their career, because I think what really demonstrates if we're good is that our companies do well and that our entrepreneurs think highly of us. And the challenges is that can take a really, really, really long time. And most people aren't patient enough or don't want to wait that long. They want to be taken seriously or get all the credit early on in their career. I appreciate and understand that entrepreneurs have more and more options available to them. They're not just in terms of the amount of capital that's in the market, but the different stages of capital that is in the market. You have a lot of people who are becoming angels. Being an angel is suddenly cool. Like everyone wants to invest.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “When they get external, they're going to have external pressures to either sell or to give up. And you really need to understand what they're going to be drawn to, what's going to get them through those difficult times. So I think that's really one of the critical things is not just the what they're doing, but why they're doing it.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So, people who are building a company, people who are really building opportunities for the long term, have something that is driving them, that is beyond just a financial return. It's beyond just wanting to be famous. There has to be some core. For Elon, that's getting to Mars. That's actually truly a core, which is this necessity to believe that we have to have options beyond our planet. Aaron Levy at Box, he's been starting businesses since he was 14. He knew he wanted to be building a company and he was going out and trying to talk to the top entrepreneurs in Washington because he wanted to understand what it was to build one of these platform companies. He had this desire to bring his closest friends and build something that was longstanding. I think you need to really spend that time to dial down and understand what is motivating them because that's what's going to actually mean the difference between success and failure. Because there's going to be so many times in the course of a company where things are not going well.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, it's hard because I think that all entrepreneurs, they have different backgrounds, they have different styles, and that's where I think some people make mistakes is, you know, saying that they have to look a certain way or act a certain way or talk a certain way. And I think that, you know, as we discussed earlier, that's where you get to do some of that kind of lazy pattern matching. I think really misses the outsized opportunities. I kind of have two approaches to this. And one of the things that I've always said is I'm not just interested in the what, I'm interested in the why. I think that's really important to understand is why an entrepreneur is doing this. You have to recognize his building, an early stage company, is insanely risky. It is extremely challenging. Statistically, this is not something that a rational person wants to do. There are a lot of easier ways to go and make money or to have an impact without taking on the enormous personal and physical on your relationships, on your mental well-being, everything.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “One. You actually built the rocket because you had to build the rocket, right? But there are other companies where you think of like Box just in terms of file sharing. There were some simple early applications until you build out the platform. But what is consistent in both of those is that there was a drive by the entrepreneurs to do something that was substantial. And you saw that from the early days, even if their ways of getting there may have been different. And so that's the thing that we really spend most of our time trying to analyze is what can go right. And is this one that can actually go so right that it really becomes one of those transformative companies?”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Where I think people make mistakes is thinking that the worst you can go is always zero. That's always zero. One of the things I get very frustrated with, particularly in early stage, the kinds of companies that we typically invest in, when someone says, oh, worst case we're so and so will buy this. Or worst case worse, this team is amazing and someone will want to buy them. That I think gets to be lazy thinking, right? Because you don't worry about, you know, you're just trying to cap your downside. What you really want to think through, it's not the downside scenarios because we're investing early and we're not writing large, large text. But we really need to understand and what we're evaluating new opportunities is how much could this be worth if everything goes right? How do you really think about that true upside potential? How could you really gut and transform huge industries? And if that's where I think it allows you to do some of the exponential thinking and some of these really outsized kind of entrepreneurs and companies, and it's not obvious. Sometimes you start with small things. You know, you're not necessarily SpaceX is a”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Got involved in the companies at early stages without a ton of capital, and then were able to put more capital in as they started to meet key milestones, those have ended up being phenomenal returns for our limited partners.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's always going to be that it's a higher probability that you lose money versus actually making money. That's just the way this industry works. But what you really need to make sure is that you're actually doing what I call a portfolio of risk. You're being thoughtful about how you assess risk and that you create a portfolio where some of these companies, if they are successful, can drive such returns that that meets the obligations that we have to our limited partners. And a lot of times some of those things look crazy. Steve Jervis and my partner, I think, is amazing at balancing this risk in the way that he thinks about what's possible, what could actually happen if everything went right, and then being very thoughtful about putting the right amount of capillone in at right what time to make sure that we're not taking too much undue risk early on. And that's why we were able to be successful with entities like Tesla or SpaceX, companies that most people would find as not working well for venture, but the way that we thought about and how we”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I mean, the two customers are one entrepreneurs, which is, you know, we can discuss at length, which is the entities that I spend my most time with. It's the most intense customer that you have to service. And the other is limited partners. I get to invest other people's money in these opportunities. And the reason that they're giving us this capital is because they believe we're going to generate outside returns. And I think what we've discussed this in saying a lot of the entities that are moving money into venture capital are teachers' pensions funds, state pensions, other entities that need these returns to actually fulfill obligations to their members. And I have a number of my family members that are going to be dependent upon teachers' pensions and states' pensions. They are dependent or will be. So I take that responsibility very seriously. And it is challenging because you can't look at, as you had mentioned, this is a very risky asset class. You can't look at every single company and say, what is the chance I lose my money?”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That's a young guy out of YC with a hoodie that dropped out of Harvard, right? That is safe. But there are other companies that don't necessarily have that kind of pedigree but are doing something that's really interesting. That's why you have to come at it with the first principles. Why is this entrepreneur with this market at this time going to be building the compelling company? And that, I think, should free you, hopefully, of some of those biases that you're alluding to.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And now you're doing the Facebook. You want the dropout who has to be even younger because they're or Snapchat, even younger because they're going to see it. What I know for sure is that whatever the next big business is that is going to be built, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to look like the last big company. So these five-year cycles, like there's always some new entity that emerges that is actually seeing the world in a different place that makes those seismic shifts. I would love nothing more than for one of these seismic shift companies to be built by female, to be built by someone with a diverse background. We've already seen that in terms of a lot of immigrants that build these businesses because they actually come in and see the world as something that can be changed and manipulated. So I want to be cautious in that this is where I do think people in my industry can be simplistic in their thinking. In some ways it's like being safe. No one's going to look at you funny for investing in a company.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, no, I think it's funny. When I first started in 2000, it was the patterns always, the patterns have changed. So I want to take away what the pattern recognition is versus what is popular at that moment. There are fads. And where you get into a lot of trouble is where you conflate a fad with pattern recognition. So in 2000, what was extremely popular was like the eBay model. You take a young, thoughtful entrepreneur who's building some really interesting company, and then you go and get someone out of interest. You go and get someone like a Meg Whitman or someone who's run a big business and you bring them in a CEO and that's how you do success, right? And we saw a number of companies that tried that model. Some succeeded a number of them failed. And there was a period, which was, it was what I call the Google copycats, which is you really want PhD students. You really want people who are dropouts out of top PhD programs in CS. Those are the ones that are going to build great companies.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Level, how many direct reports should any single individual have? These are a lot of the things that you can go and try to learn it all from scratch, but it takes a lot of time and it's not useful to you because what you're working on is this world changing technology or approach. And so you want to leverage all of the things from the past that can help you be more successful without actually being driven to do the same thing that other people have done before. That's where I think that nuanced kind of where you want to be as an investor. And I'm still learning every single day I'm learning and every single company that I meet with provides me new opportunities to learn and grow. But all of that and all of that knowledge and all that experience is something that I bring to bear to try to help my entrepreneurs. It's my opinion. It's not like I have a clear path. This is the way to do it. But here are all the things that I've seen and this is what has worked and this hasn't worked and let's talk about what you think is best for your company given that context.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Go to which ended up was overture, which was acquired by Yahoo, which was at the time viewed as an amazing success. It was a couple billion dollar outcome. And yet search had just begun. And we didn't see that. And I think a lot of firms didn't see that. And it was what specifically about this team going after this particular opportunity is going to be different. So I think you want to break it down and make sure that you don't rely too heavily on analogies or the past to understand what's possible with this particular opportunity. Where I think the pattern matching and where I think that experience could come in very useful is on the company building side. It's what do you actually, what are some of the things that companies going through different phases of their life need? What are some of the struggles that they have? And you see this huge, profound difference between being a company of 20 people or 50 people to being a company of company of 200 people or even beyond 1,000. When do you start to need to bring in different kinds of support at the executive?”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I'm actually mixed on this one because I think there are some things that are useful in the pattern, and then there's some things that you don't necessarily want to be making investment decisions based purely off of patterns. And my partners will tell you, and I get very frustrated when people use analogies. It's simplistic thinking, right? It's the Uber for X. We got to hear that for two years, right? No wonderful business, no substantial business was built because it was an analogy off of something else. One of the things that I really believe and you can hear Elon Musk talks about this pretty frequently is always going back to first principles. What like rethinking of an industry? Why now? Why is this particular opportunity with this particular team at this particular time going to be interesting, right? And Google is one of the clearest ones. We at DFJ had already made three investments in search companies prior to Google even being funded. One of those was”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Pattern matching and being able to recognize that bad things happen and they aren't necessarily the end of the world or help you navigate through it. You want to have that kind of diversity of opinion around you as an entrepreneur because you're going to go through lots of ups and downs.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “For the individual, there's a whole variety of things that have to come together to make these companies become the successes. And that's why this is such a risky industry. That's why the vast majority of these companies fail and only some actually get through it. And I think you go through a process as a VC, which is, you know, it's almost like the Gartner hype cycle, right? Everything is gray, then you go through the trough of disillusionment where you hate everything. And then you got to start to recognize, you know, there are some real opportunities and there are some breakouts and how do I make these calculated risks and bets? And then how do I help de-risk those companies as much as possible over the investment period, which is really kind of a lot of the way I see my role. It's about trying to take out unnecessary risk to give them as much of a chance to succeed as possible. So I do think you get, you know, and that's one of the reasons I think there's great things about having people who are really early in their career involved in a company, but there's also importance of having people who've been through a couple of cycles. They're just going to be calmer.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Absolutely. I mean, well, there's two things there's in terms of the market, and then there's just being a young person in VC and how that changes over time. And so for the latter, like being a young person, I think you come in and there's something that I think the reason why VCs want young people around is there isn't any of the baggage. They only see the opportunity. You hear people saying no all of the time when you find it frustrating because you're like, everyone is going to be great. All these companies are going to work out and everything is going to be transformed. And after seven years in the industry, five years in the industry, you start to see, wait a minute, this is really hard. And a lot of companies that had absolutely the right idea were too early to market and someone else who actually had the same idea but a better timing or a better team ends up being worth hundreds of billions of dollars for the company that you were so excited about fails. The general market investment timing in terms of the ability to raise that next round of capital to be able to make that critical hire. You recognize that it's not just about the”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It becomes much more like a traditional financial services firm. But at the time, it was still late 90s, early 2000, it was still these kind of small partnerships that were trying to figure out how to react to the emerging technology ecosystem. So that's how I got in. And what's kept me here is this, it's an amazing job. It's a harder job than I think a lot of people recognize. But I get every single day I get to meet with entrepreneurs who want to change the world, who are passionate and brilliant, and see a different future. I don't really see that future, but have the gumption and the drive to actually try to make that vision a reality. And that is one of the most thrilling things. It's one of the best things that I could imagine doing every day is learning and being around engaging and passionate people. And hopefully in some instances, getting to invest these entrepreneurs and help them in a small way see their dreams and passion become reality and impact much larger components of the society when their product is actually taken to market.”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “All the questions about the company, their business model, the market, all the research that I could do, I started to ask questions. He didn't answer any of them. He just kind of smiled at me and said, I just want you to walk through your list of questions. I did that for about 10 minutes, and at the end of it, he said, why don't you come work for me? Doing what? And he's like, asking those questions of companies. And so that was literally how I joined DFJ as an analyst. This ended up being right before the market tanked. So late 99, early 2000. Been around the industry ever since, learned the industry growing up, and it's changed pretty dramatically since I originally started. I was one of the first kind of pre-early pre-MBA people at one of the firms. There were six of us at the time. We'd go get drinks and had a variety of various experiences and opportunities within the relative firms. And subsequently, the industries become a lot more professional. So you see a lot of associates and analysts and people have hired up and”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Wonderful world adventure. Well, I often refer to myself as the reluctant venture capitalist because it wasn't really a career that I actively pursued. I graduated from Stanford in 99 and at the time was interviewing and had a lot of friends that working at a lot of these hot startups and started to get a lot of job offers at a number of early stage companies. Some of them who I thought were willing to pay me insane amounts of money for someone who was 22. So I was asking the CEOs about things like revenue, profits, oftentimes getting answers that we don't have any. So I said, how are you going to pay me? Like, well, our venture capitalists give us money to build these products and grow. At this time, now realizing how presumptuous it was, I actually emailed a number of VCs. There were investors in a couple of the companies that I was thinking about joining. And one of those was Tim Draper, and he agreed to meet me. And I walked into a meeting. He was late too, and I was extremely nervous. I had a notepad. And I had...”

    2017-01-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source