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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“Why? I mean, I think we were selling a story that nobody believed in, right? Europe is going to produce really good outcomes. Prove it to me. Well, there's no data. Like you look in the rears, there are no outcomes. Now 15 years later, 13 years later, it's obvious that their outcomes here. So it's much easier to tell that story. Now people shop for this product. But you're basically selling a product that nobody is designed to buy.”
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
“Oh, yeah. So I got this advice from Mike Maples, who said do not do a fundraise for a size of the fund. Do a fundraise for time of the fund. So in other words, give yourself 90 days, whatever you get, go start investing. You're a smart guy. You can figure out how to do portfolio construction with a smaller amount of money or a bigger amount of money. Go deploy it. Go put points up on the board. Go prove that those investments are actually really good and then go back into the market to go raise more capital. Again, floodgate had four big LPs Princeton, Yale, Horsley and I forget who they were and I think Notre Dame was the fourth. And it was a $75 million first time fund. So to me, it was like, this is great advice, but it's like kind of luxury advice, right? Because look at your LP base and look at the size of your fund. So I ignored it. But the advice I give every emerging manager is Mike's advice, which is that's what you ought to do. Like, give yourself a finite amount of time. Do not do what we did 39 months to basically do nothing with your life.”
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 then it was like a grind for the next two, two and a half. The early money was easy, and it was like two, two and a half years. And then finally, we found a family who believed, who then ended up writing a check to us. And then about a couple of years later, they wrote a check to Isomer.”
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 had a lot of friends because we had two buckets of people. We went to American people, like mostly individuals, like, we don't really understand this Europe thing. It doesn't make any sense to us. We don't understand why you want to be in Europe. But we like you. We'll write you a small enough ticket, which turns out to be a decent-sized ticket, a small enough ticket where if you lose all this money and we're mentally prepared, you're going to lose all this money. We'll still invite you around for dinner every once in a while. So that was our merit. And we got to about 8 million on the basis of that. And then we had a lot more to go. We had to get to at least 25 for the first one to make it viable.”
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
“A fun one was a bear. Fun one was 39 months to get going, like 39, like over three years. You mentally think at 24 months.”
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 don't do that from an investment perspective, but we do it once we're actually involved in the company. So, like, the nice thing about being a seed investor is these companies have a little bit of life, 12 to 18 months, before they have to worry about kind of this crisis mode. But then at that point, we start building in this resilience.”
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 even just a company. Like, who's the buyer? What's the division? Who's the person? Who's going to be that protagonist?”
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 think about all the range. If this company falls into trouble, like we had a, we have a strategy in the fun. If the company, the founder gets hit by a bus, we had an incident in one of our companies where the founder got diagnosed with bipolar syndrome late in life. I like how that explains a lot about the founder. But, you know, he had taken himself out of commission and was getting medicated. It's like if something like that happens, a weird externality type of event, what do we do with the company? Every quarter, we have an immediate shopping list, which is if this company falls into trouble, I'm picking up the phone, I'm calling this person at this buyer in this level of the organization who wants this kind of product technology technology team. I can kind of grease the wheels to get an acquisition done. I hope I never make that call, but I'm like mentally prepared for making that call. All of us are.”
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 how many investors have come on who think in this kind of language? Like, I will worry about my downside and the upside will take care of itself. But the venture industry is all about the power law, all about the outliers, all about those kinds of outcomes that I was talking about. And Europe doesn't have 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
“And Facebook hadn't done the transition to mobile yet, right? And how does Facebook really make money? It captures all your attention on the mobile phone and then as a result has the right to be able to serve you ads. And that's kind of their durable mode. But that wasn't clear even all the way up to the IPO. So these new categories, they're really fuzzy up until they're not. And then when they're not, you see realistic, like really big outcomes. And I don't think people in Europe think in that kind of way. I think people in Europe are largely trained in private equity. They think about how do I minimize my downside. I will do the vertical SaaS company because I know I can't lose money on it. The metrics are really good. I can understand them. I can characterize 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
“The whole industry is like massively grown, so there's a lot of money to be made. But if you think about the big iconic, the household name companies, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Ubers, the Netflixes, they were all mostly brand new category creators. That category didn't exist. There wasn't an Uber before those Anuber. There were a bunch of search engines, but none of them really succeeded. And Google kind of became his thing. There was also friends to 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
“Yeah, I would say even for us, we have a challenge when it comes to LPs, and this is like not us specific, us in the general. Which is the entire industry looks at what the next markup is. Who's following your deal? Who's marking it up? Is the company well capitalized for the future? And really, is it a signal of quality when a Sequoia ends up writing the check? Like, have you picked a really good company? I think that's true in the general. The problem is the venture world is not a general type kind of industry, right? The average and the medians are very deceptive in our industry. That's not where the returns are. So weirdly enough, we're in this weird predicament in the industry where you kind of have to do things that are a little bit off piece. You kind of have to build for the big outcome. And you have to be a little bit contrarian and then very quickly about a year or two later, the world has to recognize that you're right in order for you to really get credit.”
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 we went into a market where money was effectively free. And the way you get promoted inside of most firms, remember, we're exceptions to the rule, right? Because we own our own firms. Like these are our businesses. So we think like business owners, not like employees. If you're the general employee, you optimize for getting to the next career ladder. And how do you show that you can get to the next career ladder? You do a deal and then general catalyst or index or Kleiner or Sequoia or Andreesen. I mean, there are so many of these great firms market up at a significant premium and then someone else, Tiger, et cetera, marks it up after that. And all of a sudden, it doesn't make a difference if you've not made any money, you look like you've picked the hot 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
“Build the long term durable big company of tomorrow. And I don't think there are that many people in Europe who do those kinds of things.”
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 a good question. By the way, I think the venture world does not need yet another fund. We have a lot of them, right? It's coming down in numbers, but we have a lot of people playing VCs. 11, 13 years ago when we first started, we're 11 years old, but we started fundraising a little bit before then. The world did not have that many VCs in Europe. Had a lot of them in the US, had a lot of them in China, had a lot of them in India. But nobody was here in Europe. In fact, the seed funds of record year, you won't even remember the names. There were Eden and Pond. They're like a bygone. People raise money in the dot-com boom, mismanage their capital all the way through the collapse, and kind of left. And so the world really needed a venture player in Europe. And that was the thesis of Oxton. And then if you look at where we are today, the world now has quite a bit of venture funds in Europe, but there are not that many old-fashioned venture funds left in this industry. I think most of us become momentum investors in this industry. We write the check largely to get the next markup, not to”
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 I remember. I was like, I had my laptop on a pillow in my bedroom staring at me. I was like, who's this Harry kid? Like interviewing me.”
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
“There is a correlation between how much money goes in to a company and what the probability of success is. The average is about like 300 million to get to unicorn status. Your best path to scale from a financing perspective is America. The rounds are bigger. Do not do a fundraise for a size of the fund. Do a fundraise for time of the fund. Give yourself 90 days, whatever you get, go start investing.”
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