YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Paley

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38
first
2015-11-18
most recent
2015-11-18
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah, so Cuvet is trying to reinvent distribution in the wine industry, packaging and distribution using technology. So with CUVE, you can pour from a bottle for 30 days, a wine bottle for 30 days without losing any quality. And there's a whole sort of digital learning and curation experience that goes with it that I'm very excited about. So I won't say too much, but there's more to come on that company. And I think if done right, it will make wine much more accessible and enjoyable for home consumption.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Cool. Okay, but I have to give you something that's been announced. So I'm going to go back just a little bit. It's not my most recent, but it's been relatively recently. And it's pretty well known that we invested. It's a company called Cuve. Because it's a pretty quirky one, and I always tell everyone at the time we invest in any company, the company's story isn't built out yet. And so what later one day becomes Uber at the beginning just sounds like another ground transportation company, of which there are thousands, and why did we invest in a ground transportation company? So every investment sounds a little uninteresting in some ways in the moment. I think this one sounds very interesting, but I'm not sure everyone will agree.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “They're not household name, but it's one of the great companies that have been built in this period of time. And I'm just really proud of that work. So I think we measure, and it's not just me, I think it's true of Dave and Micah too. We measure ourselves based on the ways we're contributing.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Rely on us a lot, and we like that. That doesn't feel like a burden to us. It really feels like we're valued in helping. And then the ones we're on the boards of are the ones we get to know the most intimately. So we invest in the trade desk in the beginning of 2011. And Jeff Green and I have had a phone with the CEO of a company and I have had a phone call at least every two weeks by his insistence since we invested in that company. And the company's been an incredible rocket ship, an amazing experience. We have some pretty big ambitions for where it's going. It's every single list of the fastest growing companies in America. It's a top 20, if not a top 10, on that list. And it's just an amazing, like that's been an amazing experience. If I said, what's the best experience I've had working with a company? It's just been an incredibly gratifying experience. And that company isn't very flat.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I'd start with my partnership, to be completely honest. I mean, I think this gets to be a very lonely business and very transactional business if the people you're doing the work with every day aren't having fun doing this with you and you're not having fun doing it with them. So I think the team we have here, we have an eight-person team. My two partners, the quality is the bedrock of that relationship is the bedrock of what we do. And then the next thing I'd say is we take the most pride in the work we do with founders. So when we're not leads, we try to be good sounding boards and available to founders and some use us frequently and some don't come to us that much. And that's okay, right? Because what we're not trying to do is overly manage these companies or overhead burden to what they have to do every day. If they're getting the help, they need somewhere else, that's great. But for a lot of those founders, they do.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Whoo, that's really good. You know, I'll take a somewhat less known one, but I was very lucky to have Kelsey Worth on my board. Who was the founder of Invisalign? And we had gone after this industry that I never imagined we'd go after that was certainly very quirky to the venture community. And Kelsey had built a billion dollar company in five years in that industry, enabling mass customization, but on the output side, and we were on the input side. And she really played a great mentoring role with me, would come out to the company a half day a month and just sit in meetings, you know, share her thoughts with me, give me feedback. I would throw the toughest things I was thinking about at her. And she always was willing to dive deep and give me an opinion, but not be dogmatic, understanding that she had only the data I was giving her in a limited data set. And she was just a great mentor and collaborator in that way.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I would also say, like, we've learned so much from SV Angel and the way they think about working with founders, and I feel like they pioneered so much of what it really means to be supportive and help founders. Anyway, I can go on and on, but there are a lot of great people in this industry.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You know, I could rattle off a lot of names. I mean, I think there are a lot of really good people in this business, but we think very highly of first round and leer ventures and floodgate and here in Boston, I think very highly of Nextview. And Steve Anderson's done a great job at baseline. And I've had the opportunity to work with Bryce Roberts at OATV, and that's been a great experience. And Roger Ehrenberg at iAventures. And this is an industry of some really, really great people. And I've learned a lot from a lot of these folks. I think very highly of them. And I almost feel bad making a list like that because they're easily another dozen folks that I should probably mention.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Happen again, or sometimes things fail, and you think, oh, I'll never do a company like that again. I've seen this movie before. It doesn't work. And of course, every company that works, somebody had tried before and failed in one way or another. And so you have to be very open-minded to that. I really, I'm probably interrupting your speed round, so you should keep going. But that book is very relevant, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Who, um, my favorite book, I think, just related to what we do, I would have to say fooled by randomness. Is a phenomenal book that I think every entrepreneur in VC should read because it really is easy to be fooled by randomness and get convinced you're doing things really well that are just random distributions. I think that's a very interesting colors the way I think about the world and my frameworks are all about there's no certain situation or certain probability. It's all about tilting the probabilities as much in your favor as you possibly can, you know, largely in what we do through talents and good strategy. But that's how we tilt the world, the probabilities in our favor. And that book talks just a lot of about thinking about probability. And just because something goes really well doesn't mean that it wasn't just the extraordinary lucky outcome. And it does mean you're smart or that way.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You know, there is a very human side of this business that is completely real. And when you're investing at a stage where there isn't a business yet, in most cases, you're betting on a person. And when you're betting on that person and they're going through a divorce or they have a sick kid or a sick parent or meaningful medical issues of their own, I mean, I don't know how you don't engage the human side of that. And I think the very best investors that I most admire talk about that a lot. And it is a very real part of all of this. So I think, yeah, I mean, we value these relationships. We value the founders, even the ones who end up having to leave their companies. We're upset to see them leave their companies. And we know how hard that is. And that does happen sometimes. And we hate seeing that happen. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of emotional roller coaster to this business, but for sure there's a certain grounding of knowing that we're doing well by our investors. And the whole thing is very, feels more worthless.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Of another way to put it is for every bit as hard as this business is, it certainly is very good to know we have a lot of things working well. You know, it would be way harder if the fund wasn't doing as well in terms of taking our lumps every day with our founders who are struggling through tough stuff. By the way, not just their professional lives. I mean, it's such a sacrifice to run a company. And, you know, a lot of their personal lives suffer in various ways. And we're there alongside them through a lot of that.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Does amazingly well, and it's really fun to help those companies, and we do get involved, and we do contribute to those too. But they don't really need us very much. And so I think, and I'm also well aware that we're in a particularly good period in venture capital. And just because the portfolio looks really great on paper and we feel really good that we've given back all the money our investors have given us and then some in our first fund because that makes me sleep better at night knowing that we have enormous upside, but certainly a lot of risk in the portfolio. So, you know, we try to keep it grounded in building companies is really, really hard. And we spend our everyday working with our founders to build companies. And their struggle is so much deeper than ours because they're on the front lines doing it. And we're there to help. But we feel all the tough stuff with them. So it's hard. I mean, it's actually like, so I look at, you know, it's sort of...”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So it's been a great experience, right? I work with two of my best friends and we're having a lot of fun and we're working with great founders and it feels like it's working. I think there's a lot of humility in this business that people probably should show more. I don't know if everyone feels comfortable talking about it. But just because those companies are doing well doesn't mean my most recent investments are doing well. And we take our lumps every day, right? And we're in a business where you can only lose one extra money, but you can make many, many, many hundreds of multiples on some extraordinary outcomes. And yet we take those losses every bit as hard, maybe even harder than we enjoy the multiples of gains in terms of how it affects our day-to-day. So I feel like we're working hard and struggling through how hard it is to build companies in 90% of our portfolio. And then there's the 10% that just”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And more lottery ticket type of investing. And we see our investing strategy as much more of a rational averages play. It's not that we don't believe we'll have great outliers. We have three, what people like to call unicorns in our first fund right now. And that's great. But we don't assume that that is a requirement to have great outcomes in our funds.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I put it this way I'm very surprised how few funds there are out there. So we have a big peer group now of seed funds that I really think are terrific. I mean a lot of people I love working with insanely talented individuals who could raise much bigger funds and choose to be seed investors. And I can name names, but a really, really terrific peer group. But I am surprised at how rare it is to find a fund that really focuses only on that seed stage and doesn't want to write lifecycle checks. And I think there are a bunch of reasons for that. One is conventional wisdom is what it is. One is that sense that FOMO, that fear of missing out of what you said before, oh my goodness, how did I could have invested in Uber also at 300 million? And today it's worth, depending on what press you read, $60 or $70 billion, right? And I missed out on that. And I think that logic flow leads to more.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “When it works out, you always feel smart. Every company that does really, really well, you always ask yourself, why didn't we own more of that company? But across an entire portfolio, we have a different strategy.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “But I think what gets lost in that conversation is how much of the upside we're capturing of Uber. So it's for sure the case that we could have captured even more had we invested it every single round. But if you really just, you know, I won't do the math because I can't share all those numbers. But if you sit and you simulate that math, what you find is we capture, I mean, it's not as if the company going up thousands of times in multiple doesn't capture most of that upside, right? That growth, if we had invested in every single round, we still wouldn't, I don't think, come close to doubling what our current value is. And accounts for something, I'd be delighted to double my current value, but we're capturing a tremendous amount of that upside. And so I think people lose track of that and instead get very focused on investing at later stages.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “With small checks, you can build very, very interesting portfolios. But we do also lead investments and write bigger checks, which we've done in terrific companies like the Trade Desk and SeatGeek and Integral Ad Science and PillPack and Book Bub. And those are important to our portfolio strategy as well.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Right, but even if you do, we've been doing this strategy for quite some time all the way back to 2004 as Angels, and we've sustained IRR that is beyond my own, meaningfully beyond my own expectations of what's possible, not because we write small checks, but because I think they're just surprisingly high. I think our fund is performing people like to say top quartile, top decibel. I think decile. I think our fund's truly one of the very counting your hands the number of funds performing as well right now. So I don't know if we're going to live up to that over time, but even if you remove our best outlier, the performance is really surprisingly good. But again, we're in very good times and a lot of it's on paper and who really knows. But I am a deep believer if David is actually listening that that's absolutely...”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so we are, you know, as investors in Uber, and we didn't write a very big check, I think that current value alone of that small check would be very attractive to any venture fund of any size, even though our check that we started with was small.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “We write checks at the seed stage between $200,000 and $2 million. So it depends if we're leading or we're participating. We don't have a lot of ego about leading. The question for us is, is there an opportunity to lead and who's the most qualified fund for this particular opportunity to play that role? Because we don't think we can lead every interesting investment that we see. So if we're participating, we'll typically write a $200 to $400,000 check sort of more in line with what David's saying. If we're leading, we typically write a million plus dollar check.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yours. And I think there's still a lot of that out there. But if the whole sort of ethos of we're also founder friendly is something that keeps BCs focusing on the importance of being founder friendly and understanding that what the founder is doing is so much harder than what the VC is doing. I think that's a pretty good thing overall. So I think the sort of the magnitude of how founder friendly you are, which is a funny metric people are going to have to reference and they're going to have to try to understand how you acid test that and how you structurally try to build alignment. And that's fine. But if ultimately the ethos of the industry now is shifting towards truly being more founder friendly, I think that's a great thing.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “No, I think it's great. I honestly, so I think I built Bronte in a time where VCs didn't particularly pride themselves on being founder-friendly. They prided themselves on being shrewd and smart. And I used to joke that if there's a dollar on the table and you're sitting across the table from a VC, they're certain that dollar is theirs”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And instead of investing at aggregate post money valuations of 8 million or 10 million or 15 million, over time you're investing at aggregate post-money valuations of $30 million, $50 million, $100 million. And so I think a lot of seed funds today, a lot of our peer group, a lot of whom I respect very much, they really look like Series B funds in terms of where their average dollar goes in. They may be starting very early, but their average dollar is weighted towards Series B. And our average dollar release stays at the seed stage.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, they don't need you to take parata. And it actually causes problems with follow on investors. And if the company is doing badly, very few people are eager to write their parada check. So it's not that the founder gets an option. It's that the investors get that option. And every option that benefits somebody has a cost to somebody. And so we think that generally has a cost to the founder. But actually, interestingly, as much as investors love their paraderites, it actually is an interesting cost to investors as well, which most people don't believe because they view the world as lottery tickets. And if you're lucky enough to have one of those, you want to own as much of those companies as possible. And that's a logic flow that bears out in a bunch of interesting ways. But the other thing you're doing when you're exercising parada over and over again is your dollar averaging down your returns or otherwise you could say your dollar averaging up your cost basis”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I think there are a few things. I think we have a lot of insights into what we're looking for in these founders at the seed stage. Usually they don't have a lot of traction to go on. Sometimes they don't even have product. Their businesses are not that built out, but we have a lot of sense of what we're looking for in those founders. And that started with David's own intuitions about what makes a great founder. I think alignment counts for a tremendous amount. I think there's actually a pretty big returns benefit to investing at the seed stage. So I know some folks asked you to talk for me to ask me about parada. And we don't do a lot of parata for a bunch of reasons, including we don't think in most cases, in many cases parada is aligned to the founder because the problem with parata is you're always a net buyer of the founder's company and they're always a net seller. And if the company is doing well, they don't need your money.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Performing way better. I mean, four times as well as these top quartile VCs. And so that started kind of a journey of why. What was happening? What was the insight that was driving these types of returns? It wasn't just one deal or being very lucky. It was a number of companies performing very well. Companies like Media Radar and OPAR and Trial Pay. And it was exciting to think about and ultimately the four of us broadly, but Dave and I were the full-time folks from the start thought there was something here and that we should start a fund around what we thought the underlying premise was, which was better alignment to founders at the seed stage, offering a capital, filling a capital gap because back then there were very few seeds stage investors with a much more aligned offer than”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Started co investing with him in a lot of these opportunities. And by the time 2000, A 2009 rolls around and we start talking about creating Founder Collective, we actually had a 13 company portfolio that was doing extremely well. And David had invested in about 26 companies since 2004. And I started looking at a couple venture funds that were interested in having me join because I was getting ready to leave 3M. And I look at their portfolios and they were both tier funds, top quartile results. And the performance was just okay. It was a tough vintage. Not many funds did very well. And then I had the sense like, you know, it feels like the stuff we've done is done way better than this. And David thinks David has done have done really, really well. So we kind of analyzed that and we saw that body of that portfolio, that body of work was”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Hey Eric, I'm really interested in this company, but I'm competing with some other US VCs for the deal. I think the entrepreneur likes me but doesn't know me well. Would you mind doing a reference call for me about why they might want to work with me? And I'd say for sure, happy to do it. You're the best angel anyone could ever hope for. Let me talk to him. I'll try to convince him. And then at some point, he'd say, you know, Eric, I'm not going to be in the States for another two months. And there's this company I'm really interested in. Would you sit down with the entrepreneur and let me know what you think? And he was doing the same with Micah and he was doing the same with another classmate of ours from business school who's Kristix and narrowed Andrew Senoritz. And so we all started looking at opportunities for David. And then at some point he'd say, hey, you know, what are you guys seeing? interesting founders that I should know and so we all started looking for deal flow for David and then we”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Exactly. And David had put $500,000 into Bronte's. And I always say this, but I think it's hard. It's always hard to remember the world as meaningfully different than it is today. And back then in 2004, there were very few people that you'd ever call super angels. There were a decent number of angels. There weren't actually a ton. But they were writing $50,000 checks or $25,000 checks. David, much like Peter Thiel was doing in that time, was writing big checks. He wrote us a half a million dollar check. And that check put us in business, right? That bet on us made it possible for us to start that company. And so after we exited, I committed to spending time at 3M and I was happy to. It was actually a really good experience. So I was going to spend some period of time there. But David was doing all of this investment activity from South Africa. And so I get phone calls from him that went something like...”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So Bronte's was acquired by 3M, which is one of the largest companies in dentistry in 2006. And 3M is the most innovative company in the space, and they really understood what we were doing. And it was a great partner for us to really build the market for the product, which was very exciting. And it was a great return to our investors. Our first investor, which I shouldn't skip over because it's very relevant to the story, was David Frankel, who's today my partner and founder collective.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And our view was CADCAM had been trying to come into the industry digital output process, but all of it started with the dental impression. And if you could change that and create a digital 3D model that was way more consistent and accurate, you could switch the entire industry to mass customization. And that was the premise for Bronte's technologies, which was a great adventure. I can stop there. We can go in whatever direction you want.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And spent a lot of time, and we looked at endoscopy, video games, spent a lot of time looking at industrial inspection in particular, and thought we'd go down that route. And late in the game, we were having trouble raising money, we retrenched and got really excited by a market I never thought I'd be interested in, which was dentistry, because we were convinced that if you could change the input process from an analog physical process to a digital process in dentistry, you can enable mass customization and what later we learned or came to believe was the largest remaining cottage industry in the world, where every unit of production was a completely unique unit of production, every crown, every bridge, every implant, even every orthodonic device was completely unique for that patient. It was extremely analog cottage process for producing those products, which made them very costly.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Where I met David and where I met Michael Rosenblue, my two partners today. And during my second year of business school, Micah and I started working together with a team out of MIT to look at some three-dimensional opportunity for three-dimensional imaging technology. And the technology was really raw. It actually didn't quite work, but it was pretty interesting reason for researching an area in a space, and they were talented folks that we got an opportunity to work with. And it wasn't a business that started with us seeking out to build a business. It really started with getting to know some people working in a space. And our assignment as MBA students and both of us have been entrepreneurs was a great entrepreneurial challenge, which is, okay, there's some really neat potential technology here. What should we do with it? And we looked at a lot of different markets for that technology. We looked at almost 40 markets, everything from facial recognition to industrial...”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Go to business school to be an entrepreneur that is for certain. But I think for many entrepreneurs who go there looking for the key learnings that they can take away toward founding and building businesses, there's a lot you can get out of it.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Clients and then when the bust happened, I really felt like I was out ahead of myself, that it was great to get challenged, but I think in really good times you feel extremely, you know, probably people feel a little overconfident right now is probably one of those times. And in bad times, you sort of retrench a little bit and think about what should I know that I don't know or how do I get a little more sophisticated at what I'm doing. And I was 25 years old and I'd been running a company for two years. And so I thought if I went to business school, I'd learn a lot more about things I didn't know very well, like traditional marketing and how to think about that or finance or even more of a framework for entrepreneurship. And I think there are a lot of people quite critical of business school. But for me, it was awesome. I learned a ton. I met extremely excellent people. You don't need to be.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Sure. I was a founder of two different companies. I think growing up, I was always quite interested in entrepreneurship. I didn't know exactly how to go about it. My first job out of undergraduate was in consulting and I didn't actually enjoy it very much. And I wanted to be somewhere where I was much more challenged in actually creating every day. And I looked to found a business that we could found with effectively no capital. So ultimately left my job along with my brother and my cousin. And we started a web development company during the dot-com boom and worked for a lot of startup clients. And luckily, a few brands that weren't startups because when things imploded, it was good to have some non-startup clients. Exactly. And that company is called Abstract Edge, and it still exists. It's still run by my brother, my cousin, and they've been at it for quite some time now and done great work with lots of Nikki.”

    2015-11-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 089: Eric Paley @ Founder Collective on Outliers, Inspirational Founders and Pro Rata · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source