YouSaid · the spoken record

Ilya Sukhar

lines on the record: 37
first: 2019-09-09
most recent: 2019-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you. That was a lot of fun. And hopefully we do another one in another few years. And I hope I've learned more by then.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Abstraction on top of it. And so there's really like the customer doesn't have any knob sitoon, no settings. It's just really set in forget it without going into all the details. That's really hard to do, obviously. But they were relentless in pursuing that. And I really resonated with that approach.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The investments I've made this year are not yet announced, but there's one I made kind of at the end of the summer. Last year, a company called FiveTran, which is a company that hooks up to all of the data sources inside an organization. So relational databases, SaaS tools, you name it, everything, and centralizes all of that data in a really clean way into the cloud data warehouse of choice, either Redshift, BigQuery, or Snowflake. And for one, I really enjoyed spending time with the founders, really thoughtful, humble guys. They went through a long journey to get to where they are. First product didn't work. They didn't give up. They didn't raise a bunch of money. They kind of just wandered through the desert, stuck to it, and came out something really interesting along the way. The other thing is the spirit of the product really resonated with me in a similar way to parse, they take a very messy ecosystem with lots of different players, lots of grunt work, lots of pain, engineering pain, and they put this really simple.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my biggest takeaway was the importance of focus and ruthless prioritization. I think working with Mark, the thing that really struck me about him and how he runs his organization and what he pushes down through the ranks is we can only do so many things at once and he's set up his company in a way that roughly every six months on the planning cycle, he sets out like one to three big priorities. And like the whole company kind of pretty fluidly shifts and reprioritizes around that. Lots of things fall by the wayside, get left behind, lots of people switch teams. You know, big things change in the trajectory every six months, which has made Facebook a tremendously nimble company for how big it is and sets it up for a lot of success.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of on the theme, the importance of the level of communication bandwidth you have with the founders you back. And that at the end of the day, I do love working with builders and I love thinking through all the things at the early stage around building the product, but there's so much more to building a company, recruiting, fundraising, and so on. And those can all be learned, but it does help to back people who”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably go back to this patients thing. I think the lack of a feedback loop in my first couple years was really hard because I just thrive on that. What I loved about programming, which was kind of my entry to startups, was like the immediate feedback. You write some code, you compile it, either works or it doesn't, you get better and better and better over time. Your program does more and more and more over time. That's kind of hard to measure in venture. It's on a long time frame, as we all know. It's hard to know if you're pointing in the right direction, if you're getting better as an investor. I'm starting to see some signals now, so I'm not too worried about it, but I have to keep reminding myself to be patient.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we did. And that said, that's always with hindsight. And so I don't spend a lot of time fretting about it and trying to rerun history in my head. Yeah, we sold early. I think we had a lot of momentum, something great going. One thing I think people don't realize is the venture market actually really didn't appreciate the type of thing we were doing in the same way that it appreciates it now. You look at great companies like Netlify and others who have a lot of the same spirit we had and are doing great. The venture market was not there for us. So when we looked at what Facebook was selling us on, the stream, which didn't come to fruition, but the dream was build Amazon Web Services, put the Facebook version of it under the Parse brand with the Parse ecosystem as the starting point. I was like, that's amazing. I would love to do that. It didn't happen. You know, things changed strategies change. It is what it is. But I do think we had something special. And I think if we had kept going and stuck to it, we would have endured in some way, an interesting way. So I do miss working on it.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this has been a thing that I've really struggled with for a lot of my life. And after I quit Facebook and kind of was in my free phase of trying to figure out what to do next and really kind of focusing on myself and health and that kind of thing, I went through a learning period of trying to find the right solution for insomnia, not sleeping pills, not the typical things around exercise and diet, which I had already been doing. But I actually wrote a blog post about this. I think I have a pretty good solution that's backed by science about how to get insomnia under control. And so I recommend people check out my website and read that blog post.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, on the non business side, I've always liked this book called The Stranger by Albert Camus. Philosophical Makes You Think Book Pretty Short has a ton of history and analysis to back it up. So after you read it, you can read an endless amount of things online about it. The most interesting business book I've read recently is a book called When Genius Failed, which is about the rise and fall of a fund called Long-Term Capital Management. It's a pretty good story about a set of very, very smart people, very, very ambitious people who got in over their head, let big checks sway their rationality, push them to the brink, and ultimately almost took down the entire American economy with them. So I really enjoyed reading that as a story of things that could happen and ought to be avoided.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always wanted to be running 100 miles a minute, get home at the end of the day, still get back to work, get on my email, whatever. And I think having a daughter now, time is precious. And I think I'm much more patient now because I realize that everything good takes time and sometimes there's only so much you can do, I guess, is the other angle of it, right? So my investments go through ups and downs and I give my feedback, I do whatever the founder wants me to do to help. But sometimes I just have to be patient and not fret about it, not stress about the fact that it's not going faster. And I do think having a daughter who, you know, when I come home at night runs up to me, wants all my attention, wants me to like sing the itzy bitsy spider a thousand times in a row and won't let me go, it helps with that because I think it is sort of this kind of a calming grounding effect of it that is helpful, I think, in my professional career. And in many ways, I wish I had kids earlier because I think they've been really great for me.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe in two ways. One is it has a ton of upsides and I love it, but it does dramatically, dramatically affect your level of free time and flexibility in a number of regards. And so I think that has made me a much more effective allocator of my own time and a more effective prioritizer of my own time. And I think it's made me care a lot more about who I'm getting in business with and who I am currently in business with because time is very precious and every hour on the phone talking about some tricky issue over the weekend is an hour that I'm not with my daughter. I'm not with my wife. And I still work a lot. I still take those calls and I think the founders will attest to it. But it means that incremental board seat is so much more important. I think the other part that kind of ties into this venture job is patience. I think I historically have not been a super patient person. I love a frenetic energy and pace of startups. It's a little too slow at a big company. And I've just generally”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, agreed, agreed. I definitely take it as a good sign if someone's doing their homework on meat because it means they care about who I am and whether they want to be in business with me.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and sometimes I ask a founder or I tell a founder, hey, I'm going to go dark for a little bit and just spend some time referencing you just a heads up, need to make intros, but that's kind of my process. I give them a heads up. I think it's the right thing to do. And they're like surprised and it's clear that a bunch of other people are not doing that at all and it blows my mind.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, part of that is taking negative references too seriously and not framing them in the context of where they're coming from and who you're talking to, right? And so I think I generally reference well, but I'd be certain there's some people out there that would point out some of my weaknesses along the way. And I think”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to speak on their journey, they step on some toes, they have disagreements, whatever. I think that's actually typically a good sign, at least in moderation. But they always leave a trail of respect along the way and people can often talk to their strengths. And if you're not hearing that, I think that's a bad hire.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To your assessment of a person, what they've achieved in their past, how they work well with people or not. And so I really encourage people to put in the time and effort and to do it if they can, you know, throughout the interview process so that your successive on-site or whatever your process is is informed by what you've learned, say, talking to their coworker for the last job or their manager from three jobs ago, have they progressed on their weaknesses? Have they doubled down on their strengths? You really want that to be part of your process. And I think it's probably a longer conversation to go through all the questions I like to ask. But I think one thing that's important is to have people put in to the context in which they were in, right? Are they outperforming the rest of their team? Are they a great team builder? Are they a great recruiter, irrespective of kind of what roles they're in? And is the person you're talking to, the back channel reference, whether they give a glowing reference or a mixed reference, do they respect that person? Because I think, you know, a lot of really ambitious people can break some glasses.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a lot of what I help folks with is hiring, you know, hiring engineers and some companies I've literally interviewed every of the first 10 or 15 engineers. Actually, more importantly later on is hiring executives, hiring more senior people that need to round out that skill set like we talked about. And one thing I've been really astonished by is the default level of referencing, I think, in our ecosystem, which is just pretty low. I think people don't put in the effort to go hustle around and get good back channel references that just aren't on someone's resume or aren't fed to you. I think that is just an incredible way to learn more about a candidate, learn more about the person you're about to bring into your organization and invest in and pull a lot of energy into. And so I don't know if there's a magic number or anything. I think as much as you can, no interview process is perfect. Nobody's judgment is perfect. And it's not to say that references should be the main way you decide things, but they can add so much color.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I kind of grew up as an entrepreneur in the YC ecosystem. And so Paul Graham's fundamental innovation and how he changed our entire world is he bet on folks that others weren't willing to. The kind of young hacker who can build and learn everything else. And I really just believe in that. I think there's a lot of other challenges beyond building that great product, but is kind of the fundamental foundation for every great company. And I think I'm able to judge that, resonate with the people who are doing that. And then we can all selectively fill in the rest. And there's certainly other types of successful companies, but I think kind of looping back to our earlier conversation, I think this business is only fun if the people you're working with are on the same wavelength. And I just feel like that's my tribe and that's why I want to be working with.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a blend. I think I've learned. I still care a lot about ownership, right? If I'm going to dedicate a lot of time and we're going to have a deep relationship, I want to know that I've been able to buy enough of the company up front to really make that investment over many, many years. And at least at Matrix, we have a very staged focus. So we do seed in series A. We really don't do any Series Bs at this point, and certainly nothing later. And so we don't have the luxury of buying up ownership over like four or five rounds. We're not going to really increase our ownership dramatically beyond that first check. And so we do care about what that looks like.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an evolution. I'm always learning. I think by default in my Angel Investing and here at Matrix, we think price matters, right? If it's twice as expensive, then your total returns are capped at half, right? But one thing I've really taken in the last, I don't know, maybe a year or so is at the very early stage, it doesn't really matter. I care a lot more about ownership that I get. You know, when I look at my Angel portfolio, which is finally starting to bloom, I don't know, seven years into it. I think I wrote my first check in 2012. There's some good companies and it doesn't matter if I invested at 12 pre or 24 pre. The power laws just dominate in such a dramatic, dramatic way. I do believe the saying is all about being in the best companies. That said, you have to have some manner of discipline because if you're overpaying for everything, your portfolio is just going to suffer and you're going to by default cap your expected returns.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they want to wait until they can write a 12 to 15 million dollar check in the Series A, but that means the bar is higher. And so I think founders get trapped solution-wise at the seed stage and might be better off otherwise.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think that's necessarily the case. One thing I like to do is an early Series A, which could be effectively a replacement for the seed round or not, maybe a $6 or $7 million check. At the end of the day, just like any other fund, we're shooting for 20, 25% ownership. And once you stack up all the checks, all the seed funds, all of the angels in a typical seed round, they add up to that. And so the question is, do you have multiple seed rounds? And maybe they're a little bit smaller. Maybe you have multiple seed rounds of 15% each. But do you have multiples of those or do you have one committed party that is sort of like, okay, we're going to make this happen almost no matter how long it takes to get to that first great V1, in which case you might give up a little bit more ownership in a single round, but you're not necessarily stacking the rounds on your way to that breakout series A. I think the other kind of story here is that the breakout series A is that the bar has risen. There's a lot of people who have a lot of capital to deploy. A lot of our peers have grown, their fund size, our triple the size as they were, I don't know, seven years ago.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Launch something that quickly takes off or it doesn't. And I think the place where the CD ecosystem is not serving the founders well is more often than not if you optimize around that trajectory, you're probably not going to succeed on your first try. And I see a lot of founders get into this tricky situation where they are running out of their seed round any round these days lasts 12, 24 months, no matter how much you raise. They're kind of toward the end of that and they have a little bit of something working, but clearly not enough to make that big leap to the big series A that all the big funds are doing. And then they get into this trap of extensions inside arounds, bridges, whatever you want to call them, people don't like doing those. There's a couple of funds here and there who kind of make a living on doing that, but people don't like doing those. And so I think founders are not being set up for success because they'd be better off understanding how long it's going to take, seeing the typical trajectory for companies that have really broken out today.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, a lot of low hanging fruit has been picked and where there's tons of companies that have started in the last three years. And so the bar has moved dramatically higher. You can't just launch with that very simple, rough nugget of value because you're competing against 15 other things that look roughly like you. Users have tried a bunch of them. Buyers have tried a bunch of them. You're just in this noisy place. And so the same thing is happening in a bunch of new categories, places like AIML, Frontier Tech, Chips, Hard Tech. There isn't that quick path to an MVP for kind of a different reason, which is there's not amazing distribution built in, or it just takes a much deeper product to get to market. And so the CD ecosystem, I think, is still tuned to the era of startups that I grew up in. You obviously have many more funds, lots more players, but I think people are still have kind of an expectation that a company will raise, let's say, two, three, four million dollars work for 12 to 24 months.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Era, many much more successful than we were and are still enduring, they were able to build an MVP kind of a hacky V1, but had that nugget of value, that aha moment that kind of showed people the way and got people excited about it, both users and investors, they were able to build that. I don't know, in 12 to 18 months, I think, maybe even less sometimes. We launched in month four or something with something very basic. And it's always rough. It was unstable. It was just the very core nugget of things. But you could use that to get some momentum, to get people excited, to get some users, to get some traction, and then ultimately to raise the next round off the back of that traction, which is what happened to us and many of our peers at the time. And when I look at the seed ecosystem today, what I've seen on the company side is things are taking much longer. And I think this particularly true in a couple of categories, what's actually true in two ways. It's true in established categories like, say, productivity, SaaS, developer tools, infrastructure, places where”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of fundamentally serve startups as well as it could stay. So I'd love to hear how do you think the CD ecosystem is serving startups today? What's your thinking around this? Yeah, you know, I think this is something I think about a lot because at Matrix we are very early stage. So a lot of what we do can be considered seed. We typically do it in a pretty committed way where maybe it looks like a small series A as opposed to a typical seed round. But in terms of stage, we're very much into the very early stuff pre-product, pre-revenue, a lot of concept stuff. And so when I think about the options in front of founders, I try to reflect on just trying to put myself in their shoes again, what's going on really. And I think one thing that's under discussed, there's lots of things to discuss here, but one thing I've not heard a ton of discussion about is how things have changed in terms of the types of products that are viable in the market and how long it's taking to build them. And so when I was getting started, let's say with the last company Parse in 2011, a lot of the companies that were successful in that.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I think I really resonate with. Let's break it down. Let's think about where the leverage is. What's the most important thing? There's this kind of wavelength that I like to be on. I think that typically comes out with engineering-minded founders. And those are the kinds of companies I like to be involved with. To answer because we”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recently, and he said that actually his operating background. Hands off VC. So I'm interested. How do you think your operating experience and engineering background maybe impacted how you like to work and engage with founders? Yeah, to address the hands-off thing specifically, I think that's an interesting thing. I think I have the perspective having done this myself to know what investors can and can't really meaningfully do for a company, how to, I think, engage at the right level, how to let the founder kind of take the lead in terms of what type of engagement they want. That said, looping back, I try to self-select into situations where the founder does really want me involved, where I think they want to have a tight feedback loop. They want to talk a lot. They want me to try to put sweat into the company. And I don't do it in an overbearing way. And I let them take the lead. Like I said, but that's what I seek out in my relationships. You know, I try to select situations where I'm working with folks of the same mindset. So not everything about a company's engineering, obviously, but there is an engineering mindset to solving problems.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's all of the above, right? It's do I feel like I have a high bandwidth type of communication going with this person? Do I feel like we have the same values? Do I feel like they care what I think? Do they want to listen to me? Are they picking me in particular for a set of reasons that I think are the right reasons as opposed to the most attractive terms sheet or this or that? Are they picking me for me as opposed to other things? And so, yeah, it's a bunch of factors.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In people's early days, and the founders credit it later on. At the end of the day, YC is not in the boardroom, angels aren't in the boardroom. It's typically the people who are leading the rounds later. So anyway, as a VC now, when I think about, do I want to be in business with this founder? I really think about what is it going to be like to be in that boardroom, to be along the ride, to be there through thick and thin, things go sideways and we have to really work through some big challenges. What is that going to be like? As an angel, frankly, you have a pretty large portfolio typically. You can kind of not think about that. Either the founder will lean on you or they won't, but it's not on you as one of very few to help a company in a time of need. And so I think about that a lot.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was a learning experience. I mean, there's some pretty basic things, which is not your money and you're not making the decisions in isolation. We have a pretty nice setup at Matrix where we don't really have a formal vote and we're not oriented around consensus decisions. But at the end of the day, my partners have different views on various things. I've learned a lot from them and it's a really different experience to make a decision in that context versus you have a meeting with a founder, Mike check the product out, maybe talk to a customer, whatever, but you're kind of making that decision on your own and you can do that in a matter of hours maybe. So it's just more involved and I think than the other factor that I think about is it's a much deeper relationship and a much bigger commitment, right? As an angel, you're one of many often. And if you do a good job, you can often build a really deep relationship with the founder. But at the end of the day, you're not a huge part of their cap table. They get board members at some point. They can often move on in some ways in the same way that I think YC is a huge factor.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's basically who I am. And so my career, I think it gives me a deep, deep appreciation for the opportunities available in our American society here, the power of capitalism, the power of programming, the power of startups to empower people and do interesting things for them. And so long story short, it's a big deal and I can talk endlessly about it, but glad you asked.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother and I out of the country when things were sort of loosening up in the later 80s. And through a long, arduous journey through parts of Europe, we actually eventually ended up in San Francisco, which was totally random. There was just someone he knew here that was going to put us up, give us a room in their apartment. And we landed in San Francisco, which was obviously a big setup for my life going forward. We landed in San Francisco and I got to see, you know, I was a kid, so it didn't totally dawn on me at the time. But in retrospect, I basically got to see my parents live the American dream. They were cleaning houses, painting houses kind of around where I've lived in San Francisco, which is a little bit crazy. Eventually got programming jobs, worked as programmers and startups during the dot-com boom, kind of climbed up the ladder through my childhood. And so, you know, in many ways, we are kind of the quintessential immigrant American dream. And so it's hard to scope out how that affects my life.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a deep topic, so I'll try to be brief and not try to cover all of it. In short, it's a huge, huge part of who I am, my worldview, how I've approached my career, and many of the biggest decisions in my life. To kind of rewind, yeah, I was born in the mid-80s in the Soviet Union. My family was not particularly well set up. A couple of examples of that are not a particularly high level of education going back up the tree. My grandfather did, as far as I know, basically three things in his life. He was in the army. He worked in a factory, I think, on the assembly line, and he was a taxi driver. And then my family was Jewish in the Soviet Union, which for those of you that don't know, closes every door available in terms of great education, advancement, just economic opportunity of all sorts. And so, and it also makes you kind of suppress your identity in a broader society. And so not particularly well set up in that regard. And my father did a very, very courageous thing. He was younger than I am now. He was probably 27 or 28.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really enjoy investing, but sometimes you're one of many and you're not necessarily that one call that the founder has for any given thing. And so I got really excited about it and dove in.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I come at this from a startup founder persona. I spent basically my 20s right after college working on a series of startups, first as sort of an early engineer, then as a founding product person, then as a founder CEO. The last company I worked on parsed, we sold to Facebook. I spent a few years there. And I came out of Facebook. I'm actually thinking I'd start another company doing professional investing was not really on my radar. But for a series of things, I realized it wasn't the right time to start a company. And I started to account for my own time. I was unemployed blissfully. But still, you know, in the mix, you know, mostly spending my time with founders, helping them out, writing my own angel checks. I started to get really excited about that. And so at some point through conversations with various people, it sort of dawned on me that's a career path that's open to me. I could keep doing more or less the same thing day to day hour by hour, but get paid to do it, do it at a higher level, do it with more commitment. I got really excited about deeper relationships you can build as a board member, as a VC that's along for the entire.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad to be here and I'm glad to finally be here. I remember those emails and I think I was not quite ready to talk about something I was just brand new and now I've settled in and I think I forgot the groove going. So I'm excited for that.”
2019-09-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source