YouSaid · the spoken record

Gil Penchina

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23
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2016-02-08
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2016-02-08
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1
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  1. “Oh, yeah, I find it very addictive because as a consumer, you're sort of playing with it and you're constantly trying to see who did I walk by? Who did I just walk by? Like, what was her name? There was this section on Craigslist and before that in the newspapers, it used to be called Chance Encounters and Chance Encounters was like, hey, we had eye contact, but I was too shy to meet you. Gee, I hope you read the newspaper and see that I thought you were awesome, right? This effectively automates chance encounters. walk by someone, look unhappin and go, oh wow, like I actually just saw her on the site and I can say hi.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'm generally worried with dating sites. It's pretty easy to start and anyone can copy. But the critical mass you need to have enough people in any square meter is pretty different. And so I think happen by getting to scale, which they've done nicely has a really nice network effect where the next guy is just not going to have as many boys and girls in any city. And it really starts to have sort of this magical effect where you meet all these people who are literally nearby.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I actually use a service called Nuzzle that I'm a small angel in. And Nuzzle basically curates for me the best content that all of my friends have read. That way I don't have to think about.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Me a call, I'm happy to help. I think it's really about coming up with a thesis and going out and finding great deals, right? It's easy to start a syndicate. You can do it in one click. The hard part, just like it's easy to start a company now. The hard part is getting traction and building momentum and turning into something big.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Of course, at Stanford, that's, I think, available that people can watch. If you think about his argument, which I agree with, in a world where it's easy to start something, the hard part becomes scaling it. And I think that's absolutely true. The value you get for a business with a billion customers instead of 10 million customers is enormously higher, right? It's like a log curve and not a straight curve. And so there's a ton of value now in being able to scale things at sort of unnatural rates.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “15 years ago, it cost you five to ten million dollars to get a website up, and now it costs you $10 for a URL and everything else is free. You're seeing a massive explosion in what I would call early stage experiments. And again, you have to give credit to Reed. He's working on a new book called Blitzcaling. And his argument is...”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, so the expansion fund is something I am working with Eric on, and it will co-invest with the syndicates in later stage rans.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So we're always working on two projects, and Eric is working on more of what I would call a traditional venture fund that will buy follow-on in various HL investments. And so there's some people who really like the 100 to 1 odds where you can make $100 or $200 or $500 times your money, which is what some angel investments are. And there are other people who are looking for something a little more conservative and would rather invest in series A and B and C companies. And so what Eric is doing is a fund more focused on sort of those later stage, I would say, still risky, but lower risk companies.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We've led a few bridges and priced a few seed and bridges. You know, I guess my argument is it's a more efficient way to move capital to startups and that ultimately the best judges of entrepreneurs tend to be former entrepreneur or current entrepreneurs and not spreadsheet jockeys. And so I think what Angelist does and what Flight does with our various families of entrepreneurs is we create a way for entrepreneurs to be the ones making the decisions about who gets funded. I think that's a better approach, but time will tell. My dream is that we'd be buying a 30 second ad on your show talking about our family of funds. And we'd have ads in a magazine just like Fidelity and Vanguard do and we would become one of those places where consumers invest to help themselves save for retirement.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Guys like Reed Hoffman are sort of the poster child for pay it forward Reed is always helping anytime you're in a meeting with him he's taking notes on like the things he's going to do for you and similarly asking you for help so he's probably my best poster child of that I don't know. I mean, you know, the future is unknown. Otherwise, it wouldn't be quite as exciting.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “They were selling, they weren't actually promising. And the worst VCs will actually just tell you, no, I'm not going to help. Once you let me invest, I'll help. But until then, I was just storytelling. Well, you know, this is a pay it forward area, right? All of us here are always helping other people. And when you're trying to evaluate how you're going to work with someone, I'd sure as heck like to get to know them and see how they perform before jumping into bed with them and having them on my board for the next eight years. And so to me, paying it forward is not only the right thing to do and sort of consistent with the culture of the valley, it's a great way to learn if you can work with someone.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So again, I approach the world as an entrepreneur, right? And when I'm out fundraising, I meet with a lot of VCs. And honestly, there are a lot of good ones. The challenge is part of the VC sales pitch is they say they want to help. And so every meeting you'll take, they'll talk about, you know, hey, let me help you with this or let me do this introduction or let me get you this information that might be helpful for you. I always find the meetings are awesome and I walk away all excited about the help I'm going to get. And to me, the best be seized in the valley will actually help with one of the three or four or five things they mention. And a lot of VCs, you know, I'll send them a note afterwards and say, hey, can we follow up on these three things you mentioned? The average VC ignores that email.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “We generally do. I think this game is my joke is all venture capital is a game of exceptions. Every deal is different. Every deal has some strange exception that you hadn't seen before. So I would say we insist upon it to a point and probably 80 or 90 percent of our deals. So per rada would be my guess, but we're also not rule driven and flexible bureaucrats. So if there's a reason why it doesn't make sense, we'll work through it with people.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Does. I mean, the idea that everyone from VPs of Engineering at Google to guys who work at Goldman are going to get messages when you need help with an introduction or help recruiting or help getting your message out on social media. These are like little grains of sand. Here's a simple task. Can you share this on Facebook? Can you do this introduction? Busy people are willing to spend a minute or two helping someone and 3,000 busy people can add up to a lot of help.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “VC, you know, you sort of learn the trade by looking at deals. And there's another group that's more sort of sales oriented and they just like hunting for the hot deal. And so we call those people scouts and we give them some of the carry and the deals they bring in if they help bring it in and manage it, sort of like a venture partner at a traditional firm. So there's 25 partners, there's 100 associates and scouts, and then there's 3,000 backgrounds. And we actually asked the backers to do work to help our companies as well. We built called Angel Mob that asked the 3,000 backers to do small tasks to help our companies. If you look at that whole period, you know, pyramid, there's 3,125 people working to help make us better.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So it depends how you define it. We have about 25 syndicate managers we work with. We have about 100 volunteers now. Anyone can email me or reach me on Facebook and join the volunteer list where they largely break into two groups. There's a group that likes doing analysis and learning about companies and sort of getting to be a”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's the same challenge with starting any company, which is turning nothing into something is always the hard part. You're starting from ground zero, you have no infrastructure, you have no office, you have every person you convinced to join you is doubling your staff. Getting started is the hardest part because it requires momentum. And so I find as an entrepreneur the best way to get momentum is to start doing things. You start doing, people get excited. They want to help. Pretty soon you're like a pied piper, you know, and there's hundreds of people following you.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I honestly don't think we convince people to give us money. We invest in startups that we think are very exciting and that have a lot of potential and either have great teams, great traction, or very disruptive ideas. And then we offer to let our friends go and invest with us. And no one's obligated to, and we share information so people can understand why we're doing what we're doing. And if you think about it, every investment has a cap of 99 people who can invest. And we have about 3,000 backers across the portfolio. So really, on any one deal, only 3% of the people are able to invest. And I often find that if anything, I tend to get complaints from people that they weren't able to get into the deal they wanted to get into. So we're trying to think about ways to fix that.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I'd say about 30% are in a entrepreneurial venture. They're either a founder or executive at an early stage company, another 30 or 40 percent are more broadly working in technology, whether that's IBM and Accenture or Dell or bigger companies like that. And then there's another 30 or 40% that are just people who want to be part of the revolution all over the world, doctors and dentists and private wealth managers. I think the only thing they seem to have in common is an interest in business and in many cases someone who owns their own business or is an equity owner in a business. So ownership seems to be a common theme.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I guess I look at what works in related industries and I try to see if those patterns replicate. And in this case, the related industry would be the mutual fund industry. If you look at a Fidelity or Vanguard investment company, they don't just have one fund like the S&P 500 fund. They believe consumers should have choice and that different consumers have different theories about what's going to do well. When I go to Fidelity, I can also invest in enterprise versus consumer versus utilities. I can invest in Southeast Asia versus a Euro fund. And so we're really trying to give consumers on Angelists, the other angels a choice in where to put their money. And that seems to work. They're very different people in the fintech syndicate than there are on the ed tech syndicate.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so we basically had to come up with a name for what we do. And so flight is just an umbrella name for the now 25 syndicates we run ranging from the SaaS syndicate to the FinTech syndicate to the IoT syndicate. We then branched out and launched syndicates in the UK and Germany and Israel and Canada. And we just sort of needed a name to call all of these things. So Flight has become our business card effectively.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It's an interesting question, right? I mused on venture a couple of times. Basically, I think I approach the world too much as an entrepreneur and not enough as an investor, to be perfectly honest with you. I get excited about the idea and then I get a lot less excited about negotiating annoying terms and things like that, which is sort of the primary BC profession, it seems. I never really wanted to do a full-time Angelist is this great sort of happy medium where you're working with entrepreneurs, my fellow investors, the backers of our syndicate, to fund small checks, 100 grand to a couple of million dollars to other entrepreneurs. And so it's really more of a community of people helping people than it is professional financiers trying to make money for Oxford and Harvard and Princeton's endowments.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Sure, I'm sort of a classic Silicon Valley guy. I'm an engineer who's always been tinkering and starting companies and then was one of the early folks at eBay where I learned how to sell beanie babies on the internet, spent eight years at eBay running various different functions and groups as the company grew from about 100 people when I joined to about 15,000 when I left. After eBay, I ran a spin-off of Wikipedia called Wikia, which is now a large consumer content site left Wikia and worked with a friend of mine to help start Fastly. And then in my spare time, I was through all of this. I've been an angel investor basically as a way to connect to young people who are trying to do interesting things.”

    2016-02-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Gil Penchina on Building The World's Largest AngelList Syndicate with Flight.vc · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source