YouSaid · the spoken record

Hussein Kanji

lines on the record: 117
first: 2025-01-20
most recent: 2025-01-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'll answer it a little differently. I mean, you know the direction of travel for the company. I would love for us to have built a partnership. And I'm thinking actively about this, and I can hand the reins over where I'm just one of a few and someone else is running the firm. If I can do that successfully over the next decade, I know I have a durable firm. I want to build a firm first a boutique versus a project that's not a shell over me. I want the firm to be around and I want to be able to pass the rains over within the next decade.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because I think JD Vance has made that very clear that sub $500 million deals, the FTC has no business trying to block transactions.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know where any of this stuff goes, but I think if you don't play, you have no way of knowing where this stuff goes. You have to be on the field to even learn.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, OpenAI has real revenue, and I think there's an increasing return to scale, but I think the same thing I just said about NVIDIA applies to a lot of this AI stuff. And the AI stuff, like I had dinner with Alex, who founded Wave, which is one of the AI companies here that does self-driving cars. And our discussion, this market is commoditizing so fast. The tools are getting so good, and then other people are building tools. I mean, you saw like a couple weeks ago, China is now like Kaifu has a company, Kaifu is my old boss at Microsoft. Kaifu is a company that's been able to replicate what GPT has, but with like a fraction of the compute because China doesn't have the computers and they kind of published around this stuff. It's commoditizing so fast. I don't know how much of this ends up as consumer surplus. In other words, we all benefit as humanity because the spend kind of goes in and everyone benefits, but it commodities so fast, no one company ends up skimming off enough of the cream to become the big, the kind of the big winner. I just don't.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the pieces of investment advice is you can't think of something as too cheap or too like you can't walk away, you can't go into a company because it's too cheap and you can't walk away from a company because it's too expensive. The big question for me for NVIDIA, NVIDIA has grown its net margins from 10% to 50%. And besides the revenue growth, which everyone looks at, it's become this natural monopoly. But if you look at what everyone is doing today, you look at what Apple's doing, you look at what Amazon is now doing and Matt has been working on this. They're all building chipsets to remove their dependence on NVIDIA. I don't know if those chipsets will actually get anywhere. I don't know what's coming around. I'm not a semi guy. I don't know what's coming around the corner that could commoditize it. 50% net margin feels high. And if that margin comes back down to even a very good margin, 30% net margin, the multiple changes. The end answer for that question, and this is why I think you have to be a technologist to do a technology investing, is what do you think is coming around the corner that may or may not threaten them?”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're going to go through something, and I don't know what the something is. Like, you look at the dot com industry, the household name companies of the time didn't necessarily turn out to be the big outcomes, the Yahoo's, the Netscapes. They went away. Amazon powered through, but Amazon was never the super hot company. eBay was the hot company back then and then the Googles didn't exist the Salesforces didn't exist like they came they came at the tail end of that I don't know what AI is going to look like five years from now”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you have to be prepared to be a little bit lonely and you can't be too lonely for too long because if you are, your companies don't get capitalized. So you need the capital to come in, but you have to be prepared to be a bit of an iconoclast for a little bit.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not so sure. And the reason why we're doing them is because people want to deploy. They want to write checks into these things. They don't want to miss out on the next big thing because they look foolish as a big firm missing out on the next big thing. This doesn't sound like a rest. And this sounds like it can go the right way, but it reminds me like hauntingly of like 1995, 1996, 1997.com.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It frauds just people not paying attention to details, people not turning up to things. It was just, it was a mess. And I think we're seeing some of that same stuff in AI. There's so much euphoria for AI that people feel they have to have some of these companies in their portfolio. We as a venture industry have to think about how to create monopolies. The regulator doesn't want monopolies, but we want monopolies. We want companies with increasing returns to scale, with deep defensible moats. You build this thing, it has this huge moat, and every extra revenue, customer, whatever it gets, increases the size of the modes and puts distance between it and itself until eventually it has to get broken up by regulators because it's just too darn powerful. That's what I want to put money into. I'm not so sure most of these companies, which get highly commoditized super fast, where there are 20 versions of the same thing and the expression that Brian and our team uses is knife fight in a fight.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Play the long game, be contrarian, but you gotta make sure that you get, the market sees you as right within a very short amount of time. So you can't be contrarian for like 10 years plus.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cusp was one of these. The foundational, we would have been, we are not doing foundational model deals. They're too expensive, too capital intensive.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good one. Historically, I would have been able to easily answer that, but these days I don't know historically, quick commerce, Amazon roll-ups elections. No, I'm saying that transparent.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build the next generation bigger, earlier stage firm. Like, we want to be one of those dominant five to ten firms. I think Rob does not want to do that. And Rob very much wants to build a very science-oriented, deep tech type firm. And it's just different.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's also an easy one. So 10 years in, we grew apart. That's what happens. I think as we've gone success, the nice thing about having success, and we made real money on Fun One, even though it was a $28 million fund, we did really well for ourselves personally. You get to build the firm in the way that you want to build it. And the big difference between Rob and myself is Rob wants to build a different type of firm. And we can think about how to make that work within the constructs of Hoxton, but it would be hard, right? You'd have to change the character of the firm. You'd almost be like a millennium where you have people or PMs running their own book, or you could say go gracefully, go build it. By the way, MelP and Rob's fun. And go do your own thing. I'll be the first check in the fund. You've got the full support. You have no restrictions on trade, et cetera, et cetera. You keep your track record. You keep the LP base and go do it the way you want to do it. And that's basically what we ended up deciding. It took us a while to be able to do that. But like, we very much want.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do not. I reached out to the person who wrote the LinkedIn post multiple times to grab coffee. Before that went out, the day that it went out, after it went out, and I've chased afterwards, she's never met me. That's where society's gotten a little bit more toxic. I would have much rather had that debate. You can have the debate on LinkedIn, like, and call me out. Like, look, if I say something stupid, call me out. Like, I have no problems with that. I can take it. And it was a fair criticism, I thought. But then sit down with me and have coffee and let's break bread.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I can't recruit from laterally because they're well taken care of. And there's a shortage of women in the industry. It is incumbent upon me. Like I have a responsibility to grow the next generation because if I can't recruit laterally and I know there are not enough people coming up through the pipe in the industry and I'm one of the establishment now, I can't be scrappy anymore. I probably have to invest some dollars and train someone and fix this problem. Like the problem falls on my shoulders. I think that's an interesting lens to think about this and that's kind of lens. I can't do that just yet. I don't have enough partners in my partnership. We're a small partnership. We're 3GPs.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is hard to find people to come into a partner only organization and you require people to be reasonably well trained. You're taking a chance on them, but you expect them to kind of be able to hit the job running. There are some great women who are very capable. It is hard for me to poach them because they're very well taken care of in their existing funds for very good reasons because there's a shortage of them. One of my LPs is a woman sat down with me. She's an individual entrepreneur. And she's like, the one thing that I didn't think about, and this is a genuine thing that she really made me reconsider, is I always used to think of us as like a two-year scrappy startup as a fund. Brand new fund, like 39 months to go raise fund one. It's like sketched in. It's like etched in my brain, right? It's like hard, hard yards. You know what? We're 11 years old. We managed a $200 million fund. As much as I don't like to admit it, like we're one of the establishment now. Like we're no longer the scrappy startup. Like we're establishment. And if there is a shortage of women,”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think it was a seed firm. You build great companies. By the way, if someone offers you 50x on your first investment, maybe there's actually a reason to take some money off the table. But normally you would have said do that. You get your 50xs at the IPO stage or at the very late stages. And then the same argument would apply. But if you get that in one year, the same logic applies, right? And you just do it one year. You do it one year in.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think most people realize this. Like once you get to that kind of size, you end up having to comply with all the SEC stuff. So you may not be publicly traded, but you're complying and doing of all the infrastructure to actually go public at any time that you want because you've had to build that because you've got too many shareholders that knew real.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boring is good for governments, but that's not the world that we're in, especially in an amplified social media or being a little bit more exciting is more fun and also gets you more credit and more kudos and more attention.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I don't say, I mean, I've passed my Don Dom, so I'm in the camp. I've said it publicly on X. I have no problems paying income tax on carried interest. I think it's income, right? I mean, it's not my capital work doing it. It's because I'm doing my job. I have no problems with this. But I think tinkering around with stuff and tinkering and changing it frequently. And the worry that I have is, okay, capital gains has now gone up when the UK, fine. Are they going to tinker it next year? Like, I want stability, right? I want these infrastructure things long-term, stable, consistent so I can focus on the really hard things of like building these companies. If they start tinkering with the stuff that I'm taking for granted, it becomes infinitely harder for me to actually like figure out how to adjust to that and build these companies up or have the founders kind of navigate.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we do not have enough reservoirs. If we wanted to build 10 million additional units of housing for 10 million more people, we would not have enough reservoir infrastructure. And I think the worry that I have for the governments in Europe, and it's also true in the U.S., but definitely pronounced here, are we making the long-term right bets that take 20, 30 years that are not election cycle bets, you don't get elected because you built a reservoir and it takes like a few years to kind of build a reservoir and really kind of fully come online and you benefit 30 years from now.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything that makes it easier, I'm supportive of. If the LSE is able to transform itself and become a viable exchange, great, another path of liquidity. But as a policymaker, if that's the problem that you're focusing, I'd much rather have the how do we make sure our companies get capitalized the right way and can become the top 1%. I was at a dinner, a CEO dinner last week, the Wall Street Journal threw it. But I was told one of the biggest impediments to housing in the United Kingdom, and housing is a big deal in the United Kingdom. We don't have enough houses, is we did not build reservoirs 30 years ago. And I had to look this up because I didn't believe it. We have a, this is a country, by the way, where it rains a lot. Like water is not our scarce resource.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why? It's like the same thing. It's like people want to solve Europe Inc. They want to make it really easy to incorporate a company in Europe. Like, why? Incorporate in Delaware or the UK, like problem solved.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was trading a huge multiple discount $732 million of revenue, like I said, trailing, trailing, got privatized at $5 billion. And that was a premium. I forget what the number was, 20 to the 30 cent premium over the stock price if the stock price bumped, right, on the day of the acquisition or the announcement of the acquisition.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, the first two big tech IPOs on the LSE that were supposed to reinvent, repower the LSE, were ours, Deliver, and Dartrace. Deliveries LSE, Dark Trace was LSE, and then right after that Tobit won public with Y's on the LSE, and I tried to talk him out of it. I said, go in America.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to go build those companies, get those companies to 200. We have a company in our portfolio. It's about two years away from IPO. It's appointing bankers right now, 150 million net, 160 million net revenue right now on a run rate basis will easily get to 250 of revenue, which is, I think, where the bar is to be able to go public. New York Stock Exchange.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From here, and our best companies there couldn't go public. We have a real problem. And if our pensioners couldn't access that, we fair. We have a real problem.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we looked at the data, the bar for an IPO today in the US is north of 200 to 300 million. Gone are the days where you could take a company public where you could raise. Like I remember when I was growing up in the industry like 10, 15 years ago, an IPO is like $100 million of revenue or an IPO candidate. Doesn't exist anywhere. That world is shifted. That was a 10-year-old world. There used to be a time, by the way, like remember Yahoo when Yahoo went public. Yahoo went public on like 10, 20 million of revenue, et cetera. And like was worth billions in the market. Those days are gone. We now have very deep, very liquid, very large markets across the industry. The other thing is the private markets are so big now that there are non-way there are other ways than going public of getting liquidity. I just don't know if this is that much. I mean, why are you solving a problem that is A, really hard to solve? And I would argue really probably doesn't matter. If the patent New York Stock Exchange listing was close,”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does a local liquidity market matter if the pension funds, if the pension funds here were like they were 20, 30 years ago where they had to invest locally, it matters because the pensioners are being screwed. The pension funds can invest globally. The only people who realistically get screwed are the service providers around the company. If you list on the LSE, Goldman in London gets to the mandate. Lazard in London gets the mandate. Ernst Young gets the mandate in London. You create more jobs around the industry. But the companies fine, the corporate tax is still a UK company.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wrong problem. Everyone here is talking about the London Stock Exchange. I just told you the pension funds in the UK define contribution schemes are investing 10% into the big tech names in the US. It is not hard on a Bloomberg terminal to put a few extra characters and to buy a share on a New York exchange or a NASDAQ exchange as it is on the LSC exchange. It just doesn't matter. The world is global these days. And if you live in a global world, why do you want to still down?”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if entrepreneurs or engineers and techies are thinking about macro when they're thinking about doing something that is a problem. And then the question is like, how do you scale the company? And I do worry that if you're scaling the company, your best path to scale from a financing perspective is America. The rounds are bigger. Chances of success are correlated with bigger round sizes. Experience that is bigger in the US. The market is bigger in the U.S. The trajectory of travel, and by the way, there's always been the thesis at Oxon. Like Dartrace made more money in America than it did in the UK from the very early days, had more staff in America than it did in the UK. Our directory of travel is find the best here and be the bridge to America and take them over there. From my perspective, I feel fine regardless of what's happening in macro. As someone who's living here, though, I'm terrified about macro because I think there's real quality of life repercussions if policymakers here do not get this stuff right. But I find that the policymakers here are focused”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, and I don't know what's going to happen to energy prices in Germany. I am worried and petrified about UK growth stagnating and quality of life here deteriorating. But from a company creation investing perspective, these two things, or these things are not at all related to what we do as an industry. And then I would argue.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And the FCA really made it easy from a sandbox perspective. When you look at this new big, but those who are niche, they're big niches, but they're niches, like in the tech industry. AI is much more horizontal. When you look at what's happening in AI, you got deep mind down the road in London. You got meta running its AI stuff in Paris. Like we are, for the first time ever in European history on par from the company creation or technology creation as the US and not a niche field, but in a horizontal field. I cannot interpret that in any other way than there's going to be opportunity in this stuff. Yes, I'm really terrified that the German car industry is going to get wiped out by China, by the EVs in China. I think they were asleep at the wheel.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a macro perspective, that's not what I do, right? I think this is like underlying fundamentals for my business. We're living in a world of AI. I think this is the big seismic shift for like the next 10 years. This is where we're going to, this is where the next wave of wealth creation is going to be. I'm looking at the conditions on the ground. We used to produce really interesting”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if this necessarily always resonates, but the minute there's a hiccup and you have these hard conversational founders, people grock it.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, the challenge in Europe is most of these companies need a little bit of tinkering versus like being you can't just fully, fully leave them alone. You have to think of Europe the way venture was in the 80s or 90s in the US, where these companies, if they didn't have a strong partner on board, helping them build. And you read these oral histories, you will see what I mean by companies like actually being getting guidance on what to build. We're in that mode. And I think the industry has shifted in the US to be like, you know what, the market takes care of that stuff. I just have to deploy capital. And in Europe, the market doesn't take care of itself.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't know about the general market, but in our portfolio for sure. That's why we've ended up concentrating on this.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because I think if you're saddled with a family, it's harder because you have dual interests and you end up in this like solo, like one mindset, right, which is build my company. And that's much harder to do when you're like raising your family. And I think if you're like 15, 20, unless you're like a superstar and really precocious, you probably don't have the accumulated wisdom to learn lessons. And I think there's a, like that 25 to probably 35 age or 25 to 40, like you can grind and you have enough experience to know what to do.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't matter younger or older. I think the people who are doing their life's work usually, if the company captures their life's work, that's kind of the only thing they do with their career.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will do a lot of first time founders. I think a lot of people in Europe won't back someone if they look like they're first time founders, but I think a lot of the interesting outcomes in our industry, and you can think about this anecdote.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're series A fun, but okay, fine. Nomenclature. There are a handful of funds that are bigger and aiming for big outcomes in Europe. But the market here has grown 30-fold. Like when we first started, there was about a billion that went into Europe in venture, these days about 30 billion that goes into Europe and venture. Weirdly enough, people seem to think like markets that get more liquid and more competitive or bad. I think markets that get more liquid and more competitive are good because the market's actually working. When the market goes up 30-fold, even if there's more competition, I'd much rather play in the bigger market than the smaller market. But I think there's a chance now for a few more funds to be on that list. I think you have the ambition. I have that ambition. And Aphelia has that ambition at Blossom. And some of us are going to make it. I don't know if the world right now needs yet another emerging manager, yet another microcap fund. I think what we need is like five to ten dominant superstar venture funds in Europe, kind of the way in the bay area. They're like 10 or”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's slightly more broad than that. I mean, I think Random would feel really annoyed if you didn't put them on the list. I think that's true of a bunch of other funds.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm worried. Like, I think in a bull market where you're writing the first ticket and someone else is then carrying the slack and picking it up, you know, it's easy to be the feeder fund for those folks and write the small checks. I think we've too many of them right now in the industry. I think right now the real opportunity in Europe is there a handful of really good venture funds at the top. We know who they are, right? Index, Axel, Sequoia, et cetera, like all very active in Europe.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hence 200. One to one rule of thumb. It's not quite what we do, but just double it because that's the easiest mental way to do it.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not a generic model. It's a model for material science. It's a foundational model that's bespoke. There's a piece of Microsoft research came out two years ago that proves that this kind of stuff can work. It's basically the AI building the next generation of materials using AI. It's a very different type of foundational model.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I don't know if it's going to make us money just yet. It's premature to say that. The company was funded in. We took the term with term she was March, I think Wire went in June. We're sitting in December. It'd be like foolish for me to say anything about that. I didn't know.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But I think in this case, we think AI on the foundational model is somewhat binary. It either works or it doesn't. Because if it works, and you've seen this with a bunch of AI.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not out of a $200 million fund. This is why you have to be a decent sized fund. If you're a $100 million fund, that's 10% of your fund right there. 5% of the fund is very different than 10% of your fund. And I would argue maybe that number should be like 200 to 300 if you're going to double down proactively. You have another vehicle, so you can double down out of another vehicle. But if you're not able to have another vehicle, and you're going to do it out of the same fund, you probably need to be closer, a little bit higher than your 125.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was a $30 million round where we took it off the table at 10. We locked it down, set the price, you put in 10. We put in 10. It was an AI company. A foundational model didn't necessarily need all the money on compute. So 10 in a foundational model and 10 is a really large number, but 10 in foundational model land is still a small number. We took it off the table and then everyone wanted in, and then we selectively let a few funds in Nortone came in, light speed came in, et cetera, and the round became 30.”
2025-01-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source