YouSaid · the spoken record

Hunter Walk

lines on the record: 84
first: 2018-11-27
most recent: 2018-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I love paying that forward. And I was pretty good at hiring people who were young in their career but with a really high ceiling. A lot of them are now doing amazing things, running product at WeWork and starting companies and all this type of stuff. And I guess fundamentally as a seed investor, that's kind of what I'm doing too. investments that other people want to be in and we're just fortunate enough to be chosen and then there's investments where we've put the person in business because we're the one who took the took the risk. And I'm sure both over time will provide equal returns, but I'd sort of be lying if I didn't say that the ones where we've sort of put them in business will always have a special place, sort of not just cap table and LP letter, but like emotionally.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I've end up with a little bit of social media following, a little bit of people who care of what I think about. And so every time I can use that to put a spotlight on somebody who quality of character is greater than reputation so far, just because either they're young in their career or because they are comfortable.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a bunch of boldface names to the left of me, boldface names to the right of me. And it allowed me to sort of get out of my kind of tunnel vision of just being within this big company, learn about a lot of people, talk about a lot of people. And, you know, a few years later, I sort of thanked them. I said, you know, I didn't deserve to be at that first one. And he sort of like stopped me. And he said, like, you deserved to be at that first one. Just the world didn't know it yet. It's like, but I did. And I always think about that because, you know, I've ended up with like through being in the right place at the right time. And as my comms lead at YouTube said, because you don't say stupid stuff and you have kind eyes, I'd get put on the road a lot. I'd try to explain the hard decisions we were making to reporters. So I ended up with a set of relationships which turn into, you know, at least within not like celebrity, but like within a small sliver of like the San Francisco internet economy, I think it also benefits from having a name that's memorable. Like if my name was like Adam Smith, I don't think people would remember me.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the kindest thing that people can do is what I'd call bet on you early. So extend some of their own capacity, extend a willingness to sort of bring you to their table or give up their seat at the table for you. And so one of the things that comes to mind for me is there's a fellow venture capitalist who works at.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the CEO has to figure out what transparency means at those levels. And you sort of have this litmus test for was it a tactic or was it a value? Because if it's a value, you have to figure out how to make transparency work at 5,500 people. If it was just a tactic, Then you sort of put it aside. So it's a bunch of conversations, not just about the mechanics of, okay, where's the next funding coming from? Let's look at the sales efficiency ratios. Let's look at your product roadmap. It's this moment in time of, wow, this is working. What so far are you going to pull forward? And what do you have to leave behind? And sometimes that includes people.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. Oh, my relationship with this founder is going to change. Sometimes they ask us to stay on, we'll do it. But for the most part, our throughput model relies on us stepping off the board. It's also the point at which CEOs, especially first-time CEOs, realize, oh, I might do this for a long time. This is working. And I can't do this by myself. So if I don't have a management team yet, wow, I got to build out a management team. I can't just put more stuff on my shoulders. And some of the things that we're working before are now straining. I have to figure out the things like not everything that got me here is going to get us the things that got me from five people to 50 people are going to have to change to get from 50 people to 500 people. And you also find these really interesting things. You know, everybody, sometimes folks will talk about the culture of their company, right? We valued transparency. And you see that that was when it was six of you, five of whom had worked together before. And it was all about spinning, you know, you're sitting in one room, spinning your chairs around and like sharing what's going on. Great. Then all of a sudden it becomes 50 people, 500 people.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People sometimes say, Oh, tell me about your favorite company. And for a while, I mean, I hate that question because once we make the investment, we're on board. It's like, what's your favorite child? It's like I'm just trying to help this kid become the best version of itself. The only thing I had ownership of, you know, truly or decision in was conception. Now we're going with it. But I did find that the two most emotional phases for me that I really enjoy are the first 90 days after an investment because that's when you're building the trust and context. Even though I sort of talked earlier that like, oh, you know, we want to make sure that people know what it's like to work with us. And it's not just pitching. There's still some pitching that's going on. They're trying to convince us. We're trying to convince them. First 90 days, okay, let me prove to you that I can deliver against what I said. Let me show that you can tell me whatever you want to tell me. And we're going to have good conversations. The other part, though, is kind of midway between the series A and Series B when things are working out. So because we technically step off the board at Series B, there's this sort of point at which you start to realize like, oh, this is going really well.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you want to talk about? Strangely enough, what's the internet meme? You know, find yourself somebody who can do both. You want A or B, find yourself somebody who can do both. What we hear from our founders is getting both of those out of your venture investor from any stage, let alone early stage, is pretty rare. Because you either have tactical operators who know how to do one thing very well. And so they can give you advice on growth marketing or give you advice on this or give you advice on that. But if you get outside of that, If they can't do it with their own hands, they don't know how to help you. Or you have people who know how to help you puff up your story and market you to the next round of VCs, but you don't have a real personal relationship. You're afraid to sort of, you have to manage those investors. You're afraid to have real conversations. So your investor's only getting 50% of what's actually going on. And so I don't know. I mean, that's the combination for us. I think the two most important phases for us.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, what we're trying to do, we don't sit on these org charts. They're not our companies. So, what we're trying to do is help founders, especially CEOs, make smarter, faster decisions. That sometimes can be bringing them our expertise, connecting them with other types of data expertise, relationships. That's the trees, right? So that the micro level, what we're doing with them on a weekly or every other week basis is talking through the tactical things that we could do to help them move faster, them getting our advice, helping them close candidates, sourcing, recruiting. I think all these companies are fundamentally built on a tripod of product distribution and team. So we are deploying resource and expertise against all of those. That is valuable, but what's also valuable is, let's call it the forest, which is essentially just two things, the things you believe to be true and what you needed to accomplish to get to that next phase, which is usually a next funding. Are we right and are we on track? The other thing is, how are you doing? Are you building something you're proud of?”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put real money back into RLP's pockets that we had. You had different types of investors who were really paying forward from a valuation standpoint. And it was just the prudent thing to do independent of our forecasting for the success of that company.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of understand what my interests are. I think amongst those two sides, I can't spend my life in any one of them. I can't spend my life thinking I'm just in this quiet little nook of the Chesapeake Bay and nothing that's going on macro should bother me. But I think it would be low ROI to spend too much of my time thinking macro and theoretically about the landscape in front of me, given that I'm 0.0002% of assets under management in this weird illiquid space. So yeah, so maybe it's a little bit of both and I end up thinking at a company by company basis what macro has in store for us. But I guess if I was going to predict anything, if we were going to, you know, what'd you say? This was the 115th episode. So if we came back and I did your 200th episode, I bet I would tell you that we took money off the table in growth rounds in some of our most promising companies because it was a chance to”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God only knows the amount of growth that that company is going to have to have in order to be meaningful. Does it become a, we're going to buy a bunch of other businesses that are in the same umbrella? We're going to smash that. I don't know what that outcome eventually looks like. I do know that if I'm a, and I'm not a seed investor in any of those companies, but I have friends who are, if you're a seed investor in that company, you're all of a sudden you're just along for the ride. You're surely not doing your pro rata in a 350 on 350 round. The board in some cases gets cleared out to founders, maybe even a new CEO that they put in place in them. It looks like something very different than the company you invested in and you're, you know, you're hoping that you get some money back. So I sort of have a blog post in me somewhere that says like, you want Softbank to invest in your second quartile of companies, not your best. So I have to think about that stuff because some of my founders are going to have to think about that stuff and they're going to both want my advice, but I'm also going to have to.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, it's very interesting in the Softbank case in particular. They have two, I mean, from an observer standpoint, it seems like they have two types of checks. They have the established company, the Uber, where it has a good amount of secondary. And a lot of early investors start taking off the table. And hallelujah, they love.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The West Coast deals are now starting at a lot of people saying, well, I'm raising three on eight, three on nine, three on 12, you know, type of stuff, which is very West Coast. Cut everything back by a third. And a lot of people will get it. We're never the highest check. So when people are working with us, they're trading off some degree of, I could take money from somebody else who I'm not as excited to work with, or I could work with these guys who we've found a point that we each give up a little, you know. But I think my company is going to be more valuable long term because of that. And that's a good place for us to be, I think. With having to understand, so on this side of where this thing matters, I do have to understand the macro because it doesn't impact so much our initial investment, but it impacts the exit. So it impacts this question about should we start looking for early partial liquidity and growth rounds of these companies? Does the soft bank check provide me the option to take money off the table? Does it look more like a private?”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had to pay one and a quarter million for our 14% versus $900,000 for our 14% isn't going to matter given our strategy. So that's one mind is I don't care about anything macro, anything in the world around me. All I have to keep making sure is that I'm finding six to eight great investments a year and ownership trumps price. Then there's the other side, right, which is, wow, this year we're seeing another increase in sort of pricing, market clearing, pricing for seed companies. Where is that?”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we sort of start out by saying we're five funds 20 years, and then we shut the lights off. So we'll see what our arc looks like. We're just starting out of fund three. And we reserve the right to sort of change our mind, but that's the way we started. I'm sort of between two worlds on this. One is picture a map of the eastern coast of the continental United States. There's a dense map. There's a lot going on. Zoom down to a very small nook, you know, and let's say the Chesapeake Bay. That's us. So there's all this stuff going on, macro, this and that, SoftBank Vision Fund, so-and-so, so and so, so and so, we have three funds. Each fund is under $100 million. We make six state investments a year. My numerator is always going to stay the same. No matter what's going on in the world, my denominator is always going to be large enough that if we're good pickers and getting in to a handful of interesting companies with power law outcomes, the fact that”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you have a second and third truck behind that that are autonomous. So trying to look for what I sometimes call one or two horse horse races versus 20 horse horse races. You have a small number of teams, maybe only one team trying something. They might be right. They might be wrong. If they're wrong, it's usually the technology can't be built or the market is too small or the market's not ready. But if they're right, they've got a unique head start on pioneering a new market. That seems like the right investments for us to make.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close their funding round. So because they are early into these revenue contracts, they seem to not be reliant upon venture subsidies. Now, they can continue to raise money here and there, especially if they want to aggressively forward invest. In some weird way, a password protected video of a really smart young engineer driving his Audi to an accelerator demo day in 2013 leads to an investment in public sector autonomy and contracting. And then we had to ask ourselves, okay, so what next? So we've got something in the shipping and navigation operating system that's meant to eventually turn into autonomous freight shipping. We've got something in the trucking space that's taking a little bit of a different approach. They're focused on convoying as opposed to totally autonomous trucks. It's the idea that you have a driver in the first truck.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there. Where is a lot of this talent gathering? Uber, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Google. Are those companies going to do government contracting? Our suspicion was no, and I think if the events of the last year have shown, for a lot of reasons, including what their employees want and the fact that they're international businesses, they are not going to do that type of contracting. And so if you get a sort of dedicated mission-driven team who is building really compelling, life-saving technology for the public sector, the worst case scenario is there are very valuable acquisition by one of the multi-multi billion dollar contractors. The best case scenario is they are the next great contractor. That was the bet we made. The Andreessen Horowitz guys did the next round, so that's a little bit validation there for you. And the least money they've ever had in their bank account always happens the day after they.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short answer why we made the investment, besides being an amazing team, was U.S. government's not going to buy DJI drones. I mean, this was clear even before 2016 election. You weren't going to start a Chinese company wasn't going to sell military grade. Second, the last grade set of defense contractors were built around an inflection point in platform technology, namely rocket engines, jet engines, that type of stuff. If you believe that the next great public sector contractor is going to be built on AI, autonomy, computer vision, then you ask yourself the question, well, and you know that that talent is scarce, you ask yourself the question, is that talent at Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lucky? They're very, very smart people. I'm sure they have some people like this, but I think it's fair to say that not all that's talented.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw my friends' colleagues killed. I saw civilians killed when people went into areas with incomplete information. You're so smart. How can we get more information about these areas? And so the first product that they developed is a drone that can be deployed from a distance. It goes into interiors and it sends back a bunch of mapping, video information, so on so forth. This essentially gives you information about an area. At the time, that was not an attractive area for venture for two reasons. One, public sector is a bad market. It's hard to sell into it's very political, so on and so forth because of their DNA. These folks had already figured that out and we're well on their way to the right pilots, the right this, the right that. Their advisor turned down a job working for Mattis, all this type of stuff. It was also at the moment where drones are a bad investment because you start to have all these consumer drone companies not panning out, essentially DJI was beating everything.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a smaller focused fund, that's a less interesting place for us to be. So we have to sort of skate to the frontier, ask ourselves the question well, what have we learned? Well, we've learned that small teams can punch way above their weight in this area. There's still a fixed number of engineers who really understand this stuff. And we've learned that there are areas that this is going to be transforming, that people are disbelievers. But when it flips to, if you're right and it flips to believing, there's a lot of value there very quickly. So we started looking at areas that were sort of, we thought autonomy could impact, that people didn't yet believe in. And we found this company in San Diego called Shield. Shield makes essentially AI for the public sector. Founding team includes two brothers, one of whom was Army Ranger, Navy was essentially in the military, came back from tours of duty.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software hardware, and there were substantial parts of his drive down 101 from San Francisco to Mountain View where his hands weren't on the wheel and his feet weren't on the pedals. How big a check can I write you? Investing thesis. When good videos show up with password protection, write the check. But so we were, I guess, fortunate enough to get introduced, smart enough to recognize was an opportunity. And then from there, all of a sudden, people start thinking you're insightful. So you start getting to see all these other autonomy deals. Now, in the interim between the sort of time we made that investment and then the exit to GM, everyone got conviction around self-driving cars at the time that Cruz had started. Google was doing their project. There were some other things there, but there wasn't sort of mass market conviction and it was also thought that only large companies could do this by the time they exit, all of a sudden you have all these startups raising $30, $40, $50 million for self-driving this or LIDAR that like.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sort of grow and harvest and then start saying, well, okay, what next? And that leads me to sort of the second thing that's changed or that we've observed. And this totally goes to, you know, you've interviewed a bunch of VCs, and I'm sure some of them are folks who believe that they either can prognosticate or create the future versus luck, good fortune, and then the value of a good brand. We were lucky enough to be early investors the first year of our first fund in a company called Cruz, the Autonomous Car Company that GM later bought. So, you know, one of those sort of 18 months later, you billion dollar. Essentially, GM spending 2% of their market cap to protect the other 98%. So people say, was that an area that you knew a lot about? How did you get involved? The reason we got involved was we ended up, forget how we got introduced to the founder, but he was part of White Combinator. This was before demo day, and he sent us a password protected video of him driving down to demo day in an Audi that had been sort of aftermarket installed with the crews.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those smart humans by helping them figure out the questions that the data is showing and then allowing the business leads to make whatever decisions they want. So we have a bunch of companies that I sort of think of in that space. It's sort of workflows that were previously digitized now being made smarter or the quote-unquote knowledge worker being made as smart as the computer. So it doesn't get rid of people. It helps people focus on the work that they should be doing. And we're seeing that in sales and we're seeing that in marketing. We're seeing that in a lot of these data driven industries. And so I think some being an investor and being an investor in some of these things in an evergreen fashion, you sort of decide what's the next cycle of innovation within this space. You try to invest into the sort of best of class companies in the first half of the innovation cycle. Then you try to stop investing in the back end of that innovation cycle.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually across all of their customers' data, they can also tell you when's going on is anomalous. So the early examples were, hey, you know, they work with an e-commerce global e-commerce retailer. Your click-through rates in Mexico are down 5% this week. That essentially means your revenue in Mexico next week will be down 7%, which means the probability of Mexico missing its quarterly target is going up by 12% unless you want to spend another few hundred dollars, $5,000, whatever on Mexico ads this week. So they do a lot of interesting work that before the first generation of companies, and there's lots and lots of valuable companies that were created on sort of taking all these numbers and building new dashboards, but still leaving you with having to hire a bunch of business analysts to figure out what questions to ask, not just how to answer those questions. So Outlier augmented”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two that come to mind. The first is within sort of the SaaS software, you know, software as a service, cloud software. I look in our first fund and a lot of the opportunities were about these industries that predate the PC getting the benefit of high quality mobile SaaS software for the first time. So I mentioned Building Connected in the construction space. We have other things like that, legal marketplaces, so on and so forth. So it was essentially the digitization of workflows that hadn't yet been digitized. The wave that we're investing into right now is more traditional types of SaaS augmented with artificial intelligence machine learning. So we have a company called Outlier that's essentially, they call it sort of AI for your BI. So as opposed to just having systems that show you graphs, you plug all those into Outlier and it tells you what you should be looking at or looking for. And because they're able to benchmark across all your data.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A chord multiple time financial services fintech entrepreneur who wanted to do debt collection in what I'd call sort of a better, more win-win fashion. So as opposed to consumer debt sort of falling down this collection ladder getting sold and resold for”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you might have to use a standalone startup, link your bank account, and have them do the savings for you. Well, no, no, no, your debit card can just do this for you. And eventually may even sort of turn into what people are calling kind of a challenger bank. So what do the next generation of banks look like? It's not citibank stapling on yet another kind of coolly designed card to focus on millennials, but it's rethinking what are the services and opportunities for the next generation of consumers. We have a whole bunch that actually I think sort of fall into that. Millennials do things differently. Like Chime, millennials bank differently, skim, millennials consume the news differently, you know, Winnie, millennials parent differently. And it's not just saying that 20 somethings, early 30 somethings do something differently. It's saying that these generations of consumers who grew up with different understandings of technologies, different value systems are going to be durably doing these things differently. We had the chance similar to invest early on in a company called”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deposit with us, but they felt like so long as they got people using it and spending, the economics would be pretty good. One of the brilliant things they did early on was their choice of test markets. Sacramento, California, and Kansas City. So I see so many companies that are building apps for a 27-year-old software engineer in San Francisco who's making $200,000 and doesn't know what to do with their cash. That's a wonderful problem to be in. And I'm sure there's lots of good businesses being built around those folks, but that's not a relatable issue for tens of millions of Americans who are underserviced or underserviced or victimized by financial institutions. And so what Chai has built is sort of an easy-to-use financial product that then all of a sudden became really a platform. You can do things like automatic savings and other types of features that previously”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had been one of the sort of internal founders of Visa's prepaid card business and then was at Green Dot. So knew how money is made and transferred interchange in this and float and so on and so forth. And his co-founder, Ryan King, was one of the technology executives at Plaxo. So if people remember, I think Comcast didn't buy, but people remember sort of like one of the first viral address books. So he understood, you know, how do things spread amongst consumers, especially sort of utilities, right? Plaxo was like the idea of, oh, if we all have a connected address book, when I update my email, your address book will be updated. I don't have to send you a, hey, we've moved, you know, so on and so forth. So he understood how do utility value props spread virally amongst consumers. And so they wanted to build a debit card that wouldn't try to make its fees off of the consumer. So no overdraft fees, no $5 a month if you're not direct.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand and analyze that data in different ways, share data in different ways, create a direct relationship with a consumer in a more sort of scalable way than you could have before. We think there's opportunity. So our financial services fintech investments actually span things like chime, direct-to-consumer debit card, all the way to plaid financial API. We just invested in a company called Hummingbird that does anti-money laundering technology and software for fintech and financial service institutions. And so we have stuff that's plumbing and stuff that's doing close to 2 million cardholders signing up another 175,000 a month and doing their first TV ads. In all cases, though, we think it's about large amounts of data that can be used in new ways to make better experiences or reduce costs to customers. So Chime was started by their CEO, Chris Britt.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent a good amount of time telling you about how much I love creativity and the work that I've done in virtual worlds and avatars. And then you look at our portfolio and you're like, wow, you've got a lot of money tied up in weird fintech. Like, yeah, well, you know, remember I told you a left brain, right brain. So anytime that technology allows an industry to start doing a few different things, A, accumulate data.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bring your tribe together or curate for your tribe that I think people are very excited to be a part of as spending shifts from what's on the shelves at Walmart to what's in your feed at Instagram.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silver bullet, but they have like legs of the stool, right? So skim has multi-million dollar sort of sponsorship branded, you know, high-end brand integration. They have a multimillion dollar revenue stream for a subscription app. And they have a multimillion dollar sort of commerce affiliate revenue stream and a few other. Their three-legged stool will eventually become a six-legged stool, eight-legged stool. But I think those things all become available to you at different levels of audience, at different moments in time where you've built up the credibility to be able to then recommend things to your audience, that type of stuff. So I guess I'd say like if I was going to do the conventional wisdom, I would have a down arrow on ads, a slightly up to the right arrow on pure subscription, and all the way up arrow on merch, commerce, events. There's a lot of opportunity to continue to sort of.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commerce being a big example. So the merch business grows pretty substantially. Some of those things are physical. Some of those things are digital. So in the esports world, selling sort of the skins and other things that have no real, they're just symbolic statements of value and tribe. But it turns out people are willing to pay for things that bolster their identity, let alone the idea of being able to sell more traditional merch or white gray label products or things like that. One of the most successful”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at where my income came from, it came from, you know, personally, it came from businesses that were ad driven. I clearly have experienced the value that comes with ad models at scale. That being said, I have not invested any businesses that talk about, well, we're just going to get to scale and then we're going to plug in an IAB standard ad unit. That's the race to the bottom these days. If you're thinking ads, you know, you're thinking sponsorship, brand, high-end premium stuff. The subscription model is great. I am a real believer that people want to pay, but what they want to pay for isn't always sort of the purely transactional value. They're paying to be part of a community. They're paying to support a brand, a company that they believe in. Sometimes feels like in media, I call it like fan club 2.0 more than subscription wall 2.0. That's a big opportunity. But we are seeing more and more kind of legs of the stool beyond those.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, people are filling arenas, watching Twitch, the hours that they're spending on Reddit. You know, if you can durably figure out where attention is going next, you'll have entrepreneurs that will surely figure out where the dollars come from after that. So we invest sometimes in shadow economies of attention, believing then that the shadow economies of dollars will follow.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So attention, and where is that attention going is also a way to figure out where our dollar is going to go. So when people get into esports and that type of stuff, the leading indicator of that was”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so I think we did their first cohort analysis for them. It turned out that if you stayed with it, you stayed with it. And such an I knew from our time again at YouTube and Twitter that underserved audiences gather quickly and stay durably with new sources of content, new communities that they can be a part of. And millennial women are the most underserved, valuable audience in the world. Today, more than 7 million people read the skin. It's 90% in college or college educated, 80% female. That's almost all US. So on any given day, they are bigger than, you know, they are a top five news site. And we were the last VC they pitched because they were going to stop pitching VCs. We were fortunate enough to invest. And like in some ways, even though that's not sort of the shadow economy, from a dollar's perspective, they weren't monetizing yet. They didn't monetize for the first two years. They just wanted to focus on building the product. It was the shadow economy in terms of, if you think about,”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were basically corresponding, they were receiving that information via email. We're passing because nobody uses email. They said via email. Or, hey, you guys should really focus on this. This is great. We love you, but you should focus on getting a lot of Facebook shares. They hadn't even included share this with your network. There was no growth hacking going on. They were growing because women were forwarding it to their friends and saying you should sign up for this.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At 6 30 in the evening, and they had a lot of incredibly successful smart, but also very busy friends who felt like they didn't know what was going on in the world. And so they quit their job. They were roommates. So they sat on their couch. They opened their laptops. They started a MailChimp account. They wrote up what's called the skim, a daily newsletter summary of what's gone on in the world. And they sent it out to everybody in their Gmail contact list and said, hey, this is what we're doing. If you want to receive this, we'd be honored, otherwise we won't bother you again. Six, seven, eight months later, they had 75,000 mostly women reading it every day. They hadn't raised venture money. They'd started to get introduced to VCs, and every VC said no. They said no because this was 2013. Email is dead as a format. This was pre-newsletter. Which Carly and Danielle, the founders, always thought was very funny.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partner. And so something about what we've done in our background or something we've written or something they've heard us talk about convinces them to reach out to us. I sort of say, you know, adventure is finding needles and haystacks because there's just two of us, we don't have time to jump into the haystack, but we are very good at building magnets to pull the needles towards us. And so it's when you get that introduction from somebody who says, this is kind of weird, but I think you're going to like it, or somebody sends you the email that says, hey, I watched that video of the talk you did, so-and-so, and I want to tell you about something I'm doing. That has led to great investments for us. It's now sort of a name brand company, but I describe a media audience company called The Skim out here in New York, started by two women, XNBC news producers, who saw news junkies throughout their lives and saw that all the content that they were creating at NBC wasn't watched by their peers because it was primarily video content that”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's where you have to. So there are many businesses we invest in that follow a traditional venture path. And what I mean by that is it's folks who come from the technology industry, maybe they're working at large tech companies or other startups, maybe they've studied at some of the name brand universities, or they're accomplished in their fields and now looking to partner with technologists to build new businesses. And they get 10 introductions through their network or they know you already and they sort of make the rounds and it becomes, you know, who has conviction and then of the people who have conviction who can win the deal. Like those are great. The shadow economy stuff and some of this other things tend to be the outskirts of that. It tends to be people who have built something that's already doing well in some sense. And now they are ready to usually self-funded or fund it off of revenue. And now they are thinking about taking money. They're looking not just for a capital partner but a thought.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area, morality, or legality sense, but they kind of grow in the shadows of where mainstream people are looking. And then once you start realizing how big they are, it's quote unquote too late.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love shadow economies. So I would define shadow economy as economies that are tough to measure, either by and sometimes by design because the folks operating the shadow economy don't necessarily want to signal how large it is yet. So for example, I think a lot of, as we're talking about earlier, a lot of these creative platforms end up with tremendous shadow economies until the platform starts talking about how many dollars are actually going through the ecosystem. The YouTube economy was substantial before anybody ever realized that creators can make millions of dollars. Amazon doesn't release figures on their self-publishing business, but it's possible that their self-published books, if you put them on, then the New York Times bestseller list, you know, might actually dominate that chart. So I love shadow economies because they have a certain degree of Wild West to them, not in sort of great.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be a good venture investor, but it's the one that we've chosen and it's the one that I think is most consistent with our portfolio strategy, our brand, the type of founders that we are fortunate enough to work with.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important. I also think fundamentally in venture, which is different than a lot of other segments, you can't get too caught up in the listing all the things that could go wrong. You have to understand the structural reasons this company might fail. If they're creating new technology, how difficult is that technology to create? How ready is the market? But if you can manage the risk on both of those, you quickly flip to the, well, what happens if it works? juice worth the squeeze or whatever. And then if the answer is yes, we ask ourselves a last question, which is, do we want to wake up every morning and put sweat and reputation behind these people? And if the combination to the problem market is yes and the people is yes, then so long as you can find the right risk-reward entry point, you're making the investment. There's a lot of different ways of doing it. I don't think that set of questions or that pathway is the only one that leads you to”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I definitely, you know, sort of the large urgent, valuable sort of notion is something I use a lot. I'll also ask entrepreneurs about push demand versus pull demand. So is the customer looking for you? Or do you have to look for them? That goes a lot into what's the cost of acquisition going to be? Does the customer know what they're looking for? Or do you have to educate them? I'll sometimes say, why now? So the future you're describing is clearly accurate. We have an agricultural robotics company in the second fund. It is clear that there's a lot of crops today that are what's called the mechanically assisted in their harvests, like wheat threshers, so on and so forth. There's a bunch of crops that, especially in produce, are still very manual. There will be some human augmentation. There will be some robotics, some mechanics that help make this harvesting more efficient. But why now? Which is the complement to YU. So being sort of to answer the questions, why you, why now are very important?”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who woke up one morning and decided they wanted to spend their next 10 years working in the preconstruction value chain. And it'll turn out to be a great investment.”
2018-11-27 · Invest Like the Best · Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels - [Invest Like the Best, EP.112] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source