YouSaid · the spoken record

Fred Destin

lines on the record: 48
first: 2016-01-18
most recent: 2016-01-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't actually know when we're going public on it. It might be early January. But I'm doing a new one in the In the consumer space, which I'm quite excited about. No otherwise was delivery, and I think Delivery was a question of IMI will September maybe fell in love with the guy will shoe. We dug into microeconomics fairly hard and then he was an insane feeding frenzy because I think they had five or six competing term sheets. We were in first, we were well below market valuation, but so we had a very engaged set of discussions with Well and I really developed so much respect for him through the negotiation that it's just a deal that or an opportunity that I decided I had to be involved with so it really for me there's really an aspect of falling in love with the founder and I think that's what happened and that's the reason fundamentally why I said yes and then you want to tick the boxes and rationalize your way back but I loved Will Shu I loved this vision and you know”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just read Twitter and I feed off the stream. So I'm very good at processing a ton of information really fast. I love the Atlantic. I think the Atlantic is phenomenal. Alexi Madrigal probably is my favorite rider. I read quartz. I like a lot what TechieU has been doing on the tax scene in Europe. I think Robin and his team have done really well. But, you know, I just feed off. I also try and feed off laterally from cognitive science to child psychology to science to media, et cetera, because I think, I guess, most of my ideas by crossing different disciplines. So I read all over the shop. I like slate, I like wired. I mean, I kind of read across the board.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, I think there's a composite if I listened whenever I listened to Rulafot Sequoia, you know, a very thoughtful guy. When, I mean, I love Freddie and the boys at USV, you know, just that whole crew actually, you know, Andy, Fred, and so forth, just got the model right in terms of being good investors, but being incredibly foundacentric and also just always anticipating the future. So I like the fact that they spent so much time thinking about themes that are really going to carry their fund. So I don't know. I draw inspiration from a ton of people around the marketplace. I think Bijan Sabet at Spark is a great example of somebody who's got a lot of soft skills, very respectful founders, but is clearly also great investor. So guys like Bijan kind of show you that you don't need to be an asshole to be a successful investor.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“shooting fish in a barrel sometimes like we move so fast on opportunities that i think most of our vc competitors don't often realize like how quickly and how aggressively we move when we see things that we like but i think for the ecosystem as a whole you know we need a bit more of that paranoia speed you know pace to everything that gets done but apart from that i think london is phenomenal boston has a very deep well of technical talent and sometimes i wish i could import a bunch of them machine learning experts but i think if you look at europe in a distributed fashion we have a ton of great engineering and tech talent and you know the hubs are working more and more together so i think i just i think europe might be the most exciting venture opportunity on the planet right now”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was really positively surprised going back to London. I came here mostly for family reasons, for personal reasons, and I wasn't super excited about coming back. And I've actually been blown away with just how vibrant the ecosystem is. I think the US is still faster, more transparent, more professional. I think there's a better VC landscape in the US. Just people understand, like I said before, the more tolerant to people fading and losing money and so forth. But primarily they're just quicker. So the US happens at a faster pace. It's sort of got a faster metabolism. So companies get created more quickly. Competitors share information more freely. Acquisitions happen faster. Just everything happens at a slightly different pace. And I think this is still the stuff that we need to learn from the US. For Excel, it's great because it's a bit like...”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meet the needs of their own clients in the right way. And they're usually individual investors, pensioners, you know, real people. So I care about that quite a lot.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies that most of the guys I worked with, Scott Knoll and Integral at Science, I mean all these guys, they're people whose DNA and ethics and the way they work and the way they treat people is something that I respect. There mostly people I'd want to work for. So I think for me to think that I've put in business people who I'd love to work for is very gratifying. And so it's probably top of my list of motivations is to build great companies with people I appreciate. Money is way, I mean money personally is way down the list. It's maybe five, six or seven making money for our investors is number two because we look after pensioners money and we look after pensioners money in Canada, the USA, the UK, Holland. And I care a lot about that, you know, making sure that we do right by them. So it's not so much about making money per se, it's more about making sure that we help these investors.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So first of all, being a successful inventor, it's fascinating how long it takes before you know. So I've been in the business for a scary sixteen years, man. That makes me sound like an old fart. I would say it took me a good ten to twelve before I knew whether I had any success as an investor. And that's a long time to be working where you don't know because a lot of these companies, they really take time to mature and the best ones may mature late. So if you look at Atlas, I probably invested about $100 million. I think I'm going to end up being three and a half times my money four times maybe. But it took forever for these numbers to come through. So it's fascinating. So I do think at the end of the day, you're an investor if you can't make money. You shouldn't be in the business. I do pride myself on the fact that we've built some great.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, I think... I've missed Dels like everybody else, I try and learn from the mistakes that I made in terms of saying no, I said I've said no to a bunch of things that have been successful. I do not rude deals. I think it's life's too short. You know, I used to think Wonga was a huge miss. And, you know, Wonger is an Excel portrayer company. It may yet live to see a great future. some of the stuff that I missed Turns out not to have worked and some of the stuff that I missed turns out to have been phenomenal. I never look back or feel bad and I'm thankful that my portfolio is kind of strong enough that on balance I seem to be right more than 51% of the time and that's kind of all you can hope for.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, Master and Margarita by Bolgakov because it's a phenomenon written, it's Russian, it's crazy, it's sensual, and it's wonderful.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've been guilty of dropping the ball maybe twice a year. I'll drop the ball on someone. I hate myself when it happens, and I'm sure the entrepreneur.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's sort of a nice way. People don't feel bad, etc. And then you don't get into an argument. So sadly enough, very often you sort of default to that is the kind of way to say no. And is it lazy? I don't know. Is it based on experience? You bet. So I try not to do too much, but very often I will say great to meet you. We're focused on other stuff, you know, good luck with the fundraising.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My decisions, no, here's some feedback you may find useful and you find that people are like, well, you said no for all the wrong reasons and you're not a smart person. I'm like, you know, I may not be. I just have to make a decision with limited information as to whether I'm going to invest in you or pursue the opportunity. And I decided not to. So very often you find that it's sort of sad, but there's not that much to be gained. So you find that most VCs like Bradfeld and Fred Wilson and me and a bunch of others, we all go like, hey, it was awesome to me to we're prioritizing other stuff. Like literally, because you know, it's sort of a”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say, it was great to meet you. Here are three ideas for improving the business. Here's three reasons why it's unlikely to be for us. And if I thought they were awesome, I'll offer them one or two intros. If not, I'll just say, you know, thanks a lot for coming by. If I think they were great, but they're too early or there's a lot of work to be done, I will tell them explicitly. I'll say, I'm interested, I like you, let's make sure we keep in touch. Send me regular updates and let's have a touch point in the future. In most cases, what I've found is, so I used to write this beautiful no emails that were very, very well grounded with a lot of feedback. You know what systematically happens? These people come back and they're like, you didn't get this, you didn't get that, you didn't get that. It's like, I'm actually not trying to be right. I'm just trying to provide constructive feedback, but I have to make decision. And my decision.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll tell you a funny story, but I was with one of Boston's most successful venture capitalists, and he said, you know, I'm too old and I'm too successful to keep saying no. So my strategy right now is I just let things fizzle out. And so literally this guy was like, I've said no most of my career, I'm tired of it. And his strategy for letting startups know that he wasn't going to invest was kind of fade into gray. And it kind of made me laugh. I mean, it's really not great for entrepreneurs to hear that. But you know, I had some sympathy with it because you have to say no all the freaking time. So my strategy for saying no is completely inconsistent. There are some people who I can tell have the chops that I can tell in the meeting with constructive feedback. And whenever I can, I'll do that.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founded support, family support, loved the company, loved the company, and then suddenly from one day to the next, actually we're not backing you. And entrepreneurs fucking hate that with good reason. And so again, it's back to that relationship of what helps you get over it is mutual trust and respect. And mutual trust and respect is hard to build when you're wearing so many hats at the same time.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the other aspect of schizophrenia is there's a lot of people who are buddy buddy buddy buddy buddy with the company until they go back to their partnership, their partnership tells them the company suck and suddenly they pull the plug on you. So what you need to do again is going to be consistent and warn people ahead of time and you don't want to surprise entrepreneurs who are trying hard to build a business. You want to give them time to turn around, look for alternatives, et cetera. But the elements of schizophrenia sort of run deep between this kind of unfriendly, but I need to fire you. I'm a board member, but I'm an investor. You sort of have so many conflicting thoughts in you because you champion a project, but you may need to kill it someday. And it's really navigating that fine balance is something that takes, I think, a lot of soft skills. The reason why this is get a bad rap is because typically there'll be like”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“need to make a decision at some point not to reinvest even if it's a company that I like because I have to be rational with my investment decisions so sometimes you find yourself talking to and I had this early in my career with Realize 3D I loved Benoit I loved all the employees at the company but honestly I consider strategy working and I had to tell the guys and you know I was the first investor to tell them we're not going to reinvest the difference between being an asshole and being someone who does their job well is you tell them early enough”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like it's not like you need to be a rocket scientist to do it. In fact, people sometimes who are too smart can be terrible investors. However, there is a real difficulty in managing your own schizophrenia. So on the one hand, I need to be a founder sounding board and trusted confident, if you like. On the other hand, I also need to make sure they perform. And, you know, I need to make sure that we are hitting some kind of plan and that we are hitting some kind of milestones. So that's one. I need to be a bold member, so I'm looking primarily after the interests of the company, its employees, its customers, but at the same time, I'm also an investor acting on behalf of a fund which has a fiduciary responsibility. I will champion it, etc.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I have a blog post in me that I haven't written yet called Visual Schizos. And I think, so people, you know, there's nothing fundamentally difficult intellectually about being a venture capitalist.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or from London to the south of France and not get bought in the car because frankly we're going to be together for five or six years like if we don't get along and banter and have a bit of fun together like you know it's not a it's not an investment criteria but certainly a lot more pleasant if I can invest in people that actually enjoy being with And a lot of my founders end up being friends, you know, TJ at Pillpack and Alex. Adzupla, etc are people that I really enjoy seeing socially in some cases that become real friends”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do it on anything. I mean, you can sort of do it on, you know, are they hiring the right team members in this really pushback on some of the people they hired? You can do it on a deal term if you want to. I don't know. You can just engineer a situation. I will literally engineer a situation of some tension, even if I can't find one, just because I need to know you discover about people when they're a little bit under tension. And it's all very easy to say, oh, I love your vision. I'm going to back you. And for the entrepreneur to say, I'm so happy you're writing a check and everybody gets married and you haven't had a single fight. And the first one that happened.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won a real strategy session that is not a scripted, slide based presentation, but that is a whiteboard session around let's take a strategic issue the company is facing, let's whiteboard it and let's think together how we would solve it so one has to be some kind of discovery exercise one has to be some kind of disagreement so I will engineer disagreement just so we see like what are we like in conflict right because you never know about people until they're going to get stuff”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so if you're talking about how long we need to get to know people before we invest, I'll first make the statement that the investments that I regret making are systematically the ones where I didn't spend enough time getting to know the founders. So there's an almost perfect correlation with shit where I wish I hadn't invested and the fact that I didn't have time to build a relationship. So in an ideal world I would get to know people for months or quarters before investment because you can really think about you can have a few disagreements and see whether you work through disagreements in a collaborative way. You can get to know how people are working and see how much you like them. So if I can do that, I love to do it. The reality is sometimes, you know, we don't have time to do that. So we have to go through an accelerated getting to know your process. And I think for me, it's like...”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like, oh my God, we're not making progress and they start to panic and maybe they agitate other investors. We see the very often assholes because they're in a logic of control. Their viewpoint of the world is like, hey, you work for me, you have to deliver results, which is of course completely wrong because the realities we're only trying to enable a project called a startup to be successful. We're not here to control anything. We're here to help a founder and a founding team build a business in conditions of extreme uncertainty and chaos and in which in most cases we're going to fail. And if you rethink your job as like, I'm trying to help a group of people navigate through chaos instead of I'm controlling a bunch of guys who work for me, you'll have a much healthier bold. But you know too few people think like that.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, right, they were close to the market, they knew what needed to be done, but it was never possible for them to communicate to their board in a way where the right decisions got made, and they ended up being the full guy for what was really a mix of market difficulty, you know, being overambitious on timing and so on and so forth. And so, again, we're back to that issue of how do you create, I call that intimacy, but how do you create intimacy between a board of investors and angels, etc., and yourself as a founder and how you create that mutual relationship of trust. It's very difficult when your investors don't understand your business or are toxic. And angels is sometimes the worst offenders because angels are very afraid of losing their money in many cases, especially on the European side. Angels just hate writing shit off. And so their fear starts driving their behavior.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“start showing progress and maybe the product wasn't ready and maybe the founder didn't have you know the confidence or the board wasn't conducive to the kind of discussions where you can say hey i don't think my product's ready i don't think i can fulfill what i promised you in terms of numbers we have to reset our expectations it's going to take 12 months more it's going to take six months more and and usually that's what happens it's like misaligned expectations and a founder that either doesn't have the courage to say it or has a board that does not allow that kind of discussion and you end up with this board trust gets eroded and the board has a duty a fiduciary duty to say hey we're trying to build a real company here so at some point they have to make a CO decision but I found so many times so many stories of founders who end up feeling screwed over because they were”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“by having some toxic investors on your board or some people who are not tolerant of chaos and uncertainty. And so the board very often does not create an environment in which the founder feels confident that they can express those doubts and those concerns and just be very transparent. And so very often what ends up happening is typical case would be we launch a product, we then start to sell the product in the market, and it doesn't sell well. And then we say, well, surely that's the VP sales fault, so why don't we fire our sales guy, hire a new one? The new guy comes on board, he doesn't perform better than the first one, so now we say, well, it must be the CO's fault we have a CEO issue. What do we fire the founder? So very often you'll find that there's sort of a vicious cycle like that. The reality very often is that maybe the board put too much pressure on the founder to start delivering revenue numbers early, to start selling.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can on occasion have people just wrong for the job, but I think in general found there's a strong, talented people that should really have a long-term role in the company. Whether the CEO material or not is really hard to tell and you have to give them time to scale. And part of the reason why founders get fired in the process of scaling is one of the primary reason is a breakdown in trust at the board level. So what will typically happen is a founder feels they feel very lonely. They're building their business. There's a lot of problems mounting. Maybe they have fear in their guts and the fear is moving to that chest. Because they wonder how they're going to make payroll. They don't want to disappoint anyone. And they can end up being feeling very lonely and also feeling like they're not in a position where they can trust their board or their investors to share those issues. And very often you'll find that that is compounded.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's a vexing topic, right? So one of the great failings for me is when we have to let a founder go and I hate doing it and it's only happened twice in my career and I hope it doesn't happen again.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have told a couple of And in both cases, I haven't reinvested in either of them, but I can tell you in both cases I was probably right on the business prognosis. And they are great founders just tackling on difficult problems that I didn't necessarily believe in. But I did give them a seat check because I thought they were exceptional people.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To lose my money. Like, you know, I'm not going to hold you responsible for the next 20 years of your life because I gave you a million dollars at seed. I'm just going to be honest with you and tell you, hey, it may be time to let it go and look at the next project. Let's learn as much as we can from this one. But not every startup is going to make it. And I think very often, especially in Europe, founders are being made to feel extremely guilty when things don't work. Whereas in the US, you find this attitude very different, which is like, hey, we tried with a big ambitious problem, turns out we can't solve it, or whether the team to solve it, and we're going to move on. And I think that's fine.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or some kind of poetry, right? What I do care about is whether I'm in business with people who have the grit determination, talent, and stay in power to build a real company. And that I'm assessing all the time because this is not a game, right? We're trying to build a real business. And the last thing is on occasion, you have to tell people to fold. And investors hate to do that, but I don't want you wasting five years of your life trying to build a business that I think is the wrong idea or maybe is too early for market or maybe it's just so hard to execute you probably won't get there. I think sometimes it's our job as investors and more as human beings really to tell founders, hey, you know, you can keep going down that track, but I've looked at your strategy, I've looked at your team, I've looked at the market you're in. I don't think you're going to make it. And by the way, I'm allowing you”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“almost ran out of money three times, and most companies go through these periods where you need to be patient, you need to be understanding the long-term view, you need to have real empathy with founders who are struggling, and just look through temporary difficulties and see, do I have the right team? Are we addressing a big problem? Is it worth being patient and just building it properly rather than being obsessed about hitting some kind of arbitrary short-term milestone? And so what you need is an investor to have sort of some kind of mental plasticity where you're not setting rules, you're just constantly adjusting your expectations based on what the team can actually deliver. And you get into know the people and you're keeping an open mind about how good they are. What I do do though is I look very hard at the talent we have inside a company because I don't really give a shit whether you hit your plan or not or we all know business plans.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think my philosophy on this stuff is you try and create a relationship of trust in what you might call almost intimacy from the outset. And the relationship of intimacy is one where the founder feels like there is no issue with explaining his fears, his doubts, where he's stumbling, what's going wrong almost on a week by week basis. Why? Because I posit my own ignorance. I don't know any better than they do how well the company is going to do, how fast it's going to develop, and I'm not pretending like we have all the answers. So it's one thing to put pressure to perform on people, which I think is quite healthy. It's quite another thing to set arbitrary goals that if a company doesn't meet them, suddenly they're worthy of unworthy of being funded. Because some of our best companies, if I look at bit 9, one of the Atlas companies in the security space that is a phenomenal success story,”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is disappointed because you've missed most of your milestones. And in reality, that's called startup life. Like you probably did nothing wrong. You probably executed very well. You're probably thoughtful. You probably hired a few wrong people. But everybody does. And, you know, it's just, you're just going through the chaos that is being a seed company. But your irrational expectations of what you can do in a short amount of time end up costing you the survival of your business.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's more around just always project realistically what you can do within a certain amount of time and plan for the worst. Like if you're mentally ready and you understand that you're likely to fail most of your deadlines because it's going to be way harder and way more chaotic than you think, at least you will then tailor your fundraising strategy to timeframes that are more realistic and also promise to people milestones that are just a little bit more defensive because half the problem is when you oversell yourself at the beginning, which is what you need to do to raise money, you then get a bunch of investors in who are expecting the moon from you under very compressed time frames. You will have a tendency to not tell them how bad it's going because you're hoping you can recover. And then by the time you're coming to ask for more money from your existing investors or new investors.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second mistake people make is they completely overestimate what they can do in the amount of time that is allocated to them. So typically you'll see a perfect plan that says, hey, first three months, we're building product, we're doing product market fit, and we're building product. Next three months, we're doing a test launch. And last three months with these wonderful metrics, we're going to raise an extra round of finance. And the reality, of course, is they go out to test product market fit. It takes them way longer to figure out what the customers want. So instead of three months in, they're five month thing by the time they get a prototype ready. Then they find out that their backend database doesn't scale and they have to shift from whatever it is, you know, a graph database back to postgraph or whatever programming you want to run into. And then that cost them another three months. And now you're eight to nine months into your financing and you still haven't really launched your product. You're still in alpha. You have no metrics and you're running out of cash.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From college or just you going out and trying to hire technologists or salespeople depending on your own strength and you don't understand what you're hiring if you're a tachy guy trying to hire salespeople you will hire the wrong people if you're a sales guy who doesn't understand tech trying to hire technologies you will generally hire the wrong people but you find that usually just getting the wrong team Again, these first few highs are so critical that getting the wrong first two or three people will almost surely kill your company.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, the first comment on that would be ventures are hard business and people get lost in the headlines of super fast-growing company, unicorns, et cetera, but it masks a level of hardship and difficulty that's really high. And, you know, it's very easy to forget how tough the path is for founders. And the path is always the hardest in the first 24 months. And so what I find, I've done a lot of seed investing. When I was at Atlas, I did about 25 seeds and spent half of my life basically fundraising for these guys to help them get through the next stage. And very often at the seed stage, what happens is people, the defeat starts at home, as I call it. So the number one reason why seed companies fail is because they hired the wrong co-founders, whether it's family members, your boss,”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have almost no overlap with just it or delivery hero. What we're doing is bringing a new kind of service to people who've never used food delivery before. And it's a bit like Uber being a market expansion play. You know, most people had never used a taxi maybe before or rarely used a taxi before they started using Uber. In this case, most people that we have as clients have never done food delivery except maybe for the occasional pizza.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deliver is the fastest growing startup I've been involved with. Again, growing fast is not an objective in itself. I think growing fast in their case is more around seizing an opportunity than being obsessed about growth. But yes, we're basically taking a model that works in one city and launching it across 50, which effectively means hundreds of delivery zones across the world with thousands of drivers, tens of operational teams in a company that's under three years old. And again, the speed of growth is phenomenal. But why? It's because we've hit a consumer desire or consumer problem that really wasn't solved or a consumer offering that really resonates with the clients that we have. And it's a market expansion play. So we're not going into an existing market trying to take people away from just the...”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we spend a lot of time assembling diverse and strong teams at the beginning because we know that when we have the right players on the field, just figure it out on the fly.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Works, you then need to build a team behind it to be able to support scaling and processes and so forth. And the moment you feel like the engine's working, then you can move into hypergrowth mode. Now it's still scary as hell and it's still at speeds that probably defy the imagination of most people. I don't think people understand how fast these companies grow. So there is an element of just creative chaos, just sort of assembling the 47 in flight. But if you get your fundamentals right and more importantly, you're putting the right players in the field, then I think you can scale these companies, which brings me to the key thing that we need to do in these early businesses, and which I think we've done well both at PillPAC and Deliveroo and Zoopla in the past, which is your core eight to ten first key hires, especially at the executive level, need to be great. You really just cannot afford to make too many hiring mistakes.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a very hyper local business. So if you saw Delivery work in KNC and then in Islington and then in Hamstead and you could see that these customers were acquiring were all behaving in the same way, their repeat rates were the same, the cohorts were kind of consistent. And the restaurants were super happy with the service. Then you could say, well, if it works in three London zones, surely it must work in 30, which it does. And then if it works in London, maybe it works in Brighton. So you then test out secondary cities and they work, and then you roll out across the UK. And then you say, well, probably the French won't like delivery. So why don't we do a three month test in Paris again in a tiny zone? And then turns out the French actually love the service. And so now we're plastering Paris with Delivere drivers. And you sort of see this repeatability at the microeconomics level, and then you have an engine that...”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at companies like Deliveroo, I think, first of all, you have to be strapped in. In other words, when companies truly grow at exceptional speeds, it's very important to let go of your fear, especially as an investor, and to be able to make decisions with very imperfect information on the fly. And the difference is that when you're growing really fast and you make the wrong decisions, it has consequences that are on a much larger scale than when you're trying to iterate product market fit. So a company like Deliveroo, the benefit of companies like Deliveroo and Pillpack and most of the ones I've backed have done well, like Zoopla in the past, is that if you look at the microeconomics of the business, that the little engine that runs inside of it, I tend to like things that work well before we start skating them. So in other words, I don't like to lean into models that I don't understand. In the case of Deliveroo, I started working in Kensington and Chelsea.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weather derivatives in the Pacific region, so all sorts of weird and wonderful instruments, and did that for about seven years. And then I guess I saw firsthand how the world of finance moved from hedging risks to arbitraging the shit out of everything. And I decided to, I opted out, and I'd always been quite passionate about creating stuff, etc. So I figured if you understand risk and finance and if you're passionate about creating things, what's the best thing you should do? And the answer is probably to be an investor. So I moved into super early stage investing with a bubble vehicle called Speed Ventures. And I gradually worked my way into decent funds like Atlas and Excel over time.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, probably everybody you've interviewed, I think I have the worst background to be doing what I'm doing, to be honest. So I studied life as a derivatives guy at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and actually was part of a team that did the first ever credit derivative back in the day. Did things like movie rights, securitization.”
2016-01-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source