YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Feng

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23
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2017-07-03
most recent
2017-07-03
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Have time on Holler from an average DAU session basis such that it's rivaling news apps, it's rivaling video apps, it's rivaling social networks. People are shopping hauler for entertainment. And those two sats were just so compelling to me and I'm very excited to be an investor in the company.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, back in October, invested in a company called Haller, which is trying to bring the dollar store online, low cheap discounted goods offered in a mobile environment through the convenience of shopping online and loved the team first and foremost. I know that's always a stereotypical thing to say, but really fell in love with the team about why I invested. But taller, there were just two stats that I absolutely was blown away by. And it wasn't even about revenue and gross margins, which are all great, but the two stats that I was blown away by is first is the percentage of orders that came from browse not search. It was the vast majority. And that's amazing. It's people not going with an intent to buy one item like you see on Amazon, but opening up the service just to discover what is going on there. Going on a treasure hunt, that to me was a very unique shopping experience that they had created. And then the second was time spent. People just like my example with Offer Up, people are spending considerable amounts.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Number one, get an electric toothbrush, change your life. First of all, it's just a much better clean, and second off, you get two minutes of your life back every day to think about cool stuff because you don't have to concentrate on what teeth I should be moving and cleaning at this moment in time. The toothbrush does it all for you. Speaking of autonomous, that's another trend. Maybe autonomous teeth cleaning soon, too.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I would love in the role of VC to get feedback faster on decisions that we make and have more opportunities to learn. The feedback cycles are just so crazy long. It's funny when I talk to far more experienced investors than I, they say, look, you're not going to know if you're going to be any good in this for about five years. And to me, that is crazy. That is just insane, especially coming from an operating world where if you don't get signal for five hours, you're sweating. So I would love for this industry to somehow figure out a way that we could get signal faster and really help us improve. It's kind of like maybe the story that you shared with me with your dad.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And it's more of a societal comment. I wish us as a society would really pay attention to the great work that's happening there because it is so meaningful and important to our world.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Most hyped, I would say autonomous, autonomous everything. Got autonomous chairs. We have autonomous water bottles. Everything is autonomous these days. Under hyped, climate change. I wish that we would pay more attention to the great things coming on around clean tech, around sustainable energy and focus more on that.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Adventures in the stream trade by William Goldman. I love the media industry. Bill Goldman is one of my favorite writers and I love the inside look at the guts of actually what goes on. Truth, raw, unfiltered look at actually what goes on behind the scenes. And that book is so fascinating.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Until there's product market fit. So if that's the case, that just goes super early where the valuation is a more reasonable and we can get higher ownership. And then the other strategy is on the other side of the barbell is that once there's product market fit and the company has clearly worked, let's just invest in a company regardless of price because it's proven to work. There's going to be binary outcome here and whether you pay X entry price or two X entry price, it really doesn't matter. It's going to meaningfully change the return profile outcome. So those companies that work, let's just stop obsessing over the valuation and let's just figure out if we have enough confidence that this is truly working and let's just invest in it. Let's just do everything we can to win the entrepreneur's business. So I think in consumer, that barbell strategy is really important.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Performing or about to inflect, or if categories are starting to perform or about to inflect. So we are bringing some of that technology in-house and starting to develop our own internal tools to help us find signals. And that's not unique to Kleiner. There's a lot of other great firms that are doing similar things, whether it's signal fire or good water in terms of some of the newer firms that are relying a lot on great technology or Google Ventures that I'm pretty envious in terms of the amount of tech and data that they have access to and get to look at. So that is one area that we continuously try to innovate on the investment side. But I think from a strategic standpoint on consumer, I've learned something that may have been obvious to a lot of other people, but took me a while to fully appreciate this. And that's consumer companies are binary. They work or they don't work. And when they work, it just really doesn't matter what your entry price is. So in a binary opportunity, what we try to do is pursue more of a barbell investment strategy, which was let's go super, super early. And we're going to take about the same amount of risk.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I do, and I still think that every person and really every industry needs to look for an edge. We are no different. And in our industry, we also have to look for our unique edge as well. And I think the challenge is that what I'm saying is certainly not unique. And there's a far smarter people than me, such as yourself, pursuing similar things. And I think that that necessitates that we keep looking for our edge as investors. And one of the ways that we've been doing it here at Kleiner, and I think this is pretty common amongst a lot of firms, is actually develop a lot of technology. So go figure. We're investing in technology companies. Why don't we try to bring some of that technology in house? So Kira Kleiner, we have a bunch of interesting tools that help us look for early signal in companies, look for inflection points, look for interesting derivative movements on the app store charts, look for signals and transaction data, because there's just a lot of data now that you can get access to that can help provide early signal as to if companies are”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Not a matter of if anymore, it's just a question of when. I think that is maybe a society or certainly as an industry, we've lost a lot of our innate skepticism. And I think that's a good thing. We believe that technology is just going to be fundamentally transformative. And now it's just a matter of timing. But unfortunately in our business and investing, timing matters so much because it is just as damaging to be too early to the party as it is to be too late. And I think for a lot of those big categories, the timing is likely not now in terms of making smart investments that deliver meaningful returns for LPs. So the things that we're looking at here on the consumer side are actually more iterative as opposed to transformative. And we believe that there's still a tremendous amount of iterative change happening that can”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Keeping me going. Thank you, Harry. I appreciate you. You're keeping me going. So I don't want to paint pessimistic viewpoint here. It's just kind of doing an honest survey of the landscape and just trying to be as pragmatic and objective as possible. But I still think there's a lot of room for optimism. I'll start off by saying first that there is so much exciting stuff on the horizon that I've rarely seen a moment in time where there's nothing but optimism for those next generation technologies. What I mean by that is when you think about VR and autonomous vehicles and machine learning and IoT, there's almost no skepticism that all of those are going to be huge breakout transformative categories for the world. Whereas before there's a lot of skepticism about like, I don't know about this mobile thing or this internet thing. I don't get this. Whereas those new categories, when you talk to a lot of investors, they all believe that they're going to be amazing new categories. And the only question is when.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Those first generation devices, and that led to a lot of low-hanging solutions that would create a lot of value for users. Whereas fast forward today, most of those low-hanging problems, they are solved. You're not walking around every day with a very broken experience. So the bar to actually create something that can provide meaningful value that consumers really appreciate and that's memorable and that's sticky to them. That bar is so, so high now. I mean, you can't just launch a service that shares a photo. You got to launch a service that has unlimited storage and machine learning and visual search and video and filters and augmented filters. And that's just table stakes. That's like your V1 product to even have a seat at the table now because of how good these platforms are and how good the solutions are already today. So I think that's a huge contributor to why there's been a slowdown on the consumer side. And it's going to be interesting to see how that logjam gets unbroken.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That's right. That's exactly right. I think that they see the things that could be disruptive on the horizon because they grew up in an area, an era where they themselves are disruptive. They understand disruptive forces. They understand the innovator's dilemma and they know how to respond. And they are not afraid to acquire companies. They're not afraid to directly compete with companies, copy companies, do whatever it takes because they have grown up in this next wave of innovation. And they are the saviest, strongest, most nimble, fast-moving group of incumbents that I think the world has ever seen. And that's a daunting task and challenge when you're a startup trying to compete. So that's another reason why there could be this lull that we're seeing in the consumer side. And the third reason is I think that the mobile platform is just maturing. When you first got your iPhone or your smartphone eight, nine years ago when the iPhone really first launched, you're walking around every day with a whole bunch of painful problems. You couldn't get turned by turn directions. You couldn't get media on.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “If your social companies, you could grow off the backs of Facebook distribution and Twitter distribution. But all of those channels are now clogged down. They're now incredibly optimized and they're largely pay-to-play. So it's very difficult for a startup to actually find an arbitrage opportunity in those distribution channels to actually get to scale. The second issue that we're starting to see or sort of force preventing potentially another breakout consumer company is just how strong and how savvy and how good the incumbents are. I just can't imagine anyone sneaking up on Facebook or anyone sneaking up on Uber or sneaking up on Google these days, whereas a generation before maybe it was possible to sneak up on IBM and some of the great tech Titans of previous generations because they had holes in their offering and there was some very disruptive tech in the disruptive ways that products were built that they just weren't prepared for. But this current generation of incumbents, they've grown up in the era of digital, in the era of fast innovation, the era of mobile. They invented and pioneered those platforms and technologies.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I actually do think we are. When you look at the data trends, I completely agree with you that the last breakout iconic consumer company that's proven today in Snapchat, and that launched in 2011. So it's been almost six years since we had that level of success on the consumer side, whereas one quick generation before, they were happening every year. You know, we were having WhatsApp followed by Pinterest and Uber and Airbnb and Snapchat, just bang, bang, bang, right after another. And we've had a bit of a lull here. And I think that they're actually, when you look at it, a couple of very clear reasons why that makes sense. The first is that distribution is just so hard. A lot of the great consumer companies were built off of free or unoptimized distribution, whether it was Facebook grew a lot off of email back in their early days. And you had Amazon and other sites going off of SEO in the early days. And then in their early days of mobile, the app store, app store promotions that was very effective in terms of getting free distribution.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, you know, a couple of things which is people have kind of two completely different views on venture capitalists. There's those that think that, you know, all money is the same, just write a check, get out of my way, can't really be that helpful. And then there's others that actually are more selecting about the investors they choose to work with. They consider it as almost like hiring a member of the team. It's a part of the family because there's a lot of influence and there's a lot of benefits that the right firm can provide. And to be perfectly candid, I started out more in the second camp. I was just like, you know, how much can you really know about this business? I'm an entrepreneur. I'm doing this day in and day out. You parachute in for board meetings. How much can you do?”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Up incubating a company within Kleiner that we sold to another Kleiner portfolio company. I then went and ran engineering at another one of our portfolio companies called Footboard. And I did this almost four-year tour through the portfolio just to really immerse myself in innovation and entrepreneurship in the valley. And it was just a really fun experience. And then in 2015, I got summoned back to the mothership. So John Doher, who is a great friend and mentor, and he was our board member at football, approached to me in the summer of 2015 and said, hey, would you consider coming back? It was an interesting time and could use your help on a couple of things. And I thought it was the timing was good, and I thought that the opportunity was really exciting. So I rejoined in 2015 and have been investing here at Kleiner for about a year and a half now. And here at Kleiner, I focus on our early stage consumer investment practice. We're trying to find the next great.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Was doing a lot of work out of our clean tech practice, also helping to look at digital companies. So the way that I described it is that I was certainly a kind of a useless leech on the Kleiner system in the clean tech space because I didn't have much background. It was just more of a personal passion. But then at night, I try to make up for it and pay the bills by helping out with our internet digital practice. So working on things like our investment in Twitter. And was doing that. But when I was up here, I realized something that I really hadn't realized before, which is building products and building companies in the Bay Area is just so fundamentally different than doing it elsewhere. So all the engineering work, all the product work, all the technology I work that I've done had never been in Silicon Valley, in places like Austin and Seattle and Beijing and LA, but never in the valley. And I just really wanted to go off and experience that. So in 2012, I took a step away from Kleiner, but was still in the family in that I did a big tour of duty through our portfolio.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So in 2009, I got introduced to Al Gore through Chihuahua and was fortunate enough to get to spend time with Al over the next year. His son, Al Jr. and his daughter Sarah, were living in LA, so he would come down to the area a lot. And he was also very interested in media. So we would just catch up every other month on a variety of issues from climate to media tech to what's going on in the industry. And he's just such an amazing, thoughtful person that thoroughly enjoyed every one of our interactions together. And it was Al that came up with the idea of, have you ever considered joining Kleiner Perkins? Have you ever considered doing something else? And maybe it would allow us to spend more time together and we could actually work more on formal projects together. And to be perfectly ended, I told him I never considered it, but my gosh, that sounds pretty amazing. So noodle it over it and ended up making the plunge in 2010 to join Kleiner, primarily to work without. To me, it was just this once in a lifetime opportunity to work with somebody I consider just a personal hero of mine. And started here in 2000.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Arguably the best network around is Kleiner Perkins, 44 year old venture capital firm and just knows everyone in the industry. And I got to meet the fine folks at Kleiner back in 2007 and ended up just becoming friendly with them and helping them occasionally look at companies and offering feedback on technologies and maybe occasionally helping them interview a VP avenge candidate and just got to know the partnership and had no ambitions at that point to be an investor hadn't even crossed my mind. But Kleiner, as generous as they always are, would always ask like, hey, you know, you're being very helpful to us. Is there anything we can do to be helpful to you? And nothing really crossed my mind until one day they're like, oh, you know, you talk a lot about climate change, which is something that was like, I was very personally passionate about. Used to read a lot of books in the category, just was very intellectually interested in it. And a friend of mine at Kleiner at that time, Chi Hua Chen, asked, would you like to meet Al Gore? And I was like,”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “But my background is one that actually I didn't expect to end up in Venture. I've always considered myself an engineer and I continue to build products to this very day. And throughout my career, I've been at a number of really interesting places where I got to build some cool stuff. Started out at a software company in Austin, Texas called Trilogy Software. And I was there. I got to incubate a company, which we sold to a publicly traded company up in Seattle. And that's how I ended up later on at Microsoft. And when I was there, I got to do research and I was doing that both in Redmond and also in their Beijing research lab. And the entrepreneurship bug struck me again and I started a company which I ended up selling to Hulu. And I ran product and engineering at Hulu for a couple of years. But throughout this entire time, just writing code most days, building products, and just trying to create things that was really what got me excited. But one of the things that you know about Venture is that it's such a people-driven business and it's one that it's really about the network. And one of the firms that has”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “That is a wonderful world indeed, and I am very excited to be living in the world with you. One of my fellow venture capitalists in the industry.”

    2017-07-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source