YouSaid · the spoken record

James Beshara

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26
first
2016-01-22
most recent
2016-01-22
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I think a lot of five years out, it's fun to think about what we have a chance to accomplish because that's a lot of time. I think five years out we could be playing beer pong in San Francisco and what I hope the conversation we're having around is that we're able to build a crowdfunding platform that took this really amazing behavior, this really amazing, instantaneous digital way for us to collaborate on how we spend our money and taking it mainstream and mobile.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “No, we didn't. So, background there is the founder of Reddit, who has a very adorable mascot in SNU that you see next to every Reddit logo. He designed us a mascot and we ended up not using”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Not needed, very appealing, very attractive, and maybe helps some startups to be able to build kind of a personality in the product, which is great, but definitely not needed.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I don't know if I read blogs nearly as much as I did before. I think blogs, they give you this like, it feels productive, but it's consumption, like watching TV. You feel like you learn something in little tidbits. But one of the things that I think about a lot right now is really forming our own independent thinking and becoming experts in our own right and what we're doing.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I write the three important tasks that I need to get done before I go to sleep on my hand. And I keep to-do lists that get to twelve, thirteen items, but the three most important that I do before I go to bed every night goes on my hand. It's worked since high school.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Man. Favorite book outside of work, I would say I love a hundred years of solitude, but that has no relevance, and I love the power of now being able to live in the moment and appreciate the moment.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “To come to terms with because that flexibility is at end the openness to being wrong is absolutely critical to being a good executive.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I'd say a major one is having a lot of probably overconfidence at the beginning was really key. Really confident in what we're getting into and ignorance is blessed. We didn't really know. And I think that that was helpful for us. But it's been a very big transition to now I'd say I approach it each day with questioning assumptions daily or weekly, making sure organizationally we're not overconfident, making sure that we are very mindful of maybe some of the assumptions we had. We need to prove them out. They're not right. Kind of basically losing that overconfident certitude that might have been helpful in the early days now as a CEO, you really don't want that because it can really inhibit the growth of leaders around you when you just operate each day like you know everything and you're super confident without data to back it up. That's been just a personal journey is I think it's that's one of the hardest ones that founders that are maybe hardheaded that are really dedicated to their ideas”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “For sure, they're thinking about a destination and a return on their capital. But I think the best investors, they want to hear that these guys or girls are going for broke and they're swinging really big.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It wasn't, and I'd say that is the virtue of investors in Silicon Valley. They absolutely have a destination in mind. But their destination is the ultimate one is being a standalone, durable, long-lasting company and going public. That might be their destination. As we have all seen, any company that goes public for the founders and entrepreneurs, the leaders in that company, for the entire company, it's kind of like it all starts over again. It resets to zero. Now you've got to prove the world wrong all over again. We've seen that with Facebook and we're seeing that now with Twitter. It's as if the previous seven, eight years never even happened. It really is better to have that mindset of it being destinationless because then you really, at least for us, you build on fundamentals and you think about it in terms of, all right, what's going to build the most value over time. But yeah, for investors.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That two minute interview to get into YC was we just had so much just kind of road testing before we even had that interview. But I mean, there's no denying it was a grind and it was really, really tough. I remember a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of just questioning, were we doing the right things? And is there some, maybe there's writing on the wall if it's taking so long to raise just $500,000. But by kind of continuing with it and being really persistent and really believing in what we're building, it ended up being a really formative experience that honed our pitch for subsequent financings and made the other ones much easier. The other thing that we had in our bag that made it helpful was that we had a growth graph going into our Series A. And a growth graph that we didn't really have in our seed.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Sure, it's a question I don't get asked very often. For the entrepreneurs out there, the thing that I'll tell you is one of the best things that we ever went through was the fundraising process when it was just two of us in Texas way outside of Silicon Valley, trying to fundraise from quite literally investors that invest in real estate and oil and gas in hardware companies. I mean, Austin, Texas is the home of Dell computers. And so that's kind of the world that they understand and understood. And being in that situation where we had to hone our pitch down to 90 seconds.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Then you can do that really easily through these commerce features that we built. And one of the great things about that simplicity is you're going to see those contributors start their own campaigns and you're going to get a notification of them inviting you to their campaigns. The cannabis becomes a self-reinforcing communal tool that you just start using with your group over and over again.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Absolutely. And the idea is really making it so simple that whenever you think of groups and money, whenever you think of collecting money from a group, fundraising from a crowd or selling to your community, we've just started to release some really cool commerce features in the last 12 months that allow you to sell. And so instead of tilting at your goals $500 or $1,500, now we've built in features for you to be able to tilt a number of items sold. So if you want to sell tickets to an event and the event only happens if you sell 35 tickets or 135 tickets, or you want to produce a really simple item, you don't need to do a complex crowdfunding campaign of where you have to make a five-minute video and eight levels of rewards, but you just want to sell one item and it tilts at 25 sold.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “campaign, you'll be on an email chain seven weeks later of someone trying to collect money for a grouped gift for the office admin who's having a baby or there's going to be a family friend that says as dealing with a fire on their house and has another cause that you say, you know what we should use tilt for this. And so contributors to one campaign become word of mouth drivers for subsequent ones.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The vast majority exceed their goal. And actually, if you have a successful tilt on our platform or a successful campaign on our platform, then the average successful campaign raises $192% of its goal. So basically gets 2x, what they set out to raise on average. That's one of my favorite stats. It just shows the effectiveness of, we really are creating a lot of value for a user that comes in to use the product for the first time. And that is huge. Second part of it and kind of where we grow is think people that join that first campaign because it's really built for a much more accessible version of crowdfunding kind of to where we feel like almost everyone in the world over the next 12 weeks will have a chance to use tilt. If we can make the product good enough, the experience good enough, then you'll want to recommend it to the friend that after you join that nephew.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. People having their first experience be a successful one. 82% of tilts are successful. So you're very different than most crowdfunding campaigns where the majority don't reach their goal.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “In fact, I'd say that's one of the biggest challenges as a company or as for a product is to take something that's conventionally been pretty ornate, pretty involved process and break it down into its simplest form. I think when a casual user downloads the app and is able to start a crowdfunding campaign and collect payments from around the world in 12, 13, 15 seconds, I think they will feel, and we hear this pretty often, wow, that was simple. That was awesome. But I don't know if they'll know how much pain and consternation and focus, maniacal obsession over simplifying it has taken place behind the scenes to fit that into a mobile UX. So yeah, absolutely. It has been still is a major focus of ours to continually obsessively. simplify it.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I think a lot of it starts with just the product hypothesis, the product design from the beginning, and then a lot of”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “A little bit built for the every man and woman, then you might be able to introduce it into people's daily lives a little bit easier. So we think that that might be the case with kind of the second generation of crowdfunding tools and crowdfunding arc.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Integrity and takes up, and obviously none of that has really come to, it hasn't been that alarming. And by and large, it's been a really democratizing shift in the way information is published with blogging, but it took a few years. And actually, in our view, it took really the second generation of blogging platforms that really took to the mainstream. Things like Twitter that had a more bite-sized, simpler version, a more accessible version for you to publish information online. And something like WordPress that was much more powerful and robust. Very different than live journal and blogger. And those platforms were and are awesome. But, you know, Blogger getting to one to two million active users in the first few years and Twitter really getting into 300 million active users. It kind of shows, in our view, it kind of shows if you can make craft and a little more accessible, a little more bites.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So it's a couple hundred thousand that have started crowdfunding campaigns, a few million, about 10 million have backed campaigns. But yeah, you're right. It is so indicative of just the early innings of where we are with crowdfunding, the fact that it's only a couple hundred thousand people that have started crowdfunding campaign. And we're five, six years into this being a topic that people have talked a lot about, but there's 2 billion connected devices in the world. And that number's really small. And so then started to ask yourself why and our hypothesis is that crowdfunding will have a very similar narrative arc to blogging, to where 12, 13 years ago, blogging was this thing that had a lot of hand waving, had a lot of, it was on the tips of journalist tongues of what's going to happen in the world when everyone has ink by the barrel and blogging just ruins journalistic.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “There's a simple answer and a little more nuance. The simple one is an investor said, hey, you need a co-founder. This thing is going to be so hard. You don't even know how hard it's going to be that you really just especially for young founders, he really recommended, co-founder. The more nuanced answers is really just an understanding of my limitations, I am a pretty poor developer. And what we were going to be building is there's no two ways about it. It's going to be a pretty what we aim to build as a massive technology company and really needed an excellent technologist and CTO to join me. So those two things combined, and they presented the need, the intro to Caleb kind of presented the solution of, wow, yeah, this is the guy, even in a three-hour coffee with him, I could tell I got to get this guy on board.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, Caleb is the luckiest thing that ever happened to the company was the introduction to Caleb. He was helping run strategy at Rackspace even as a 26-year-old and is a phenomenal technologist, developer, strategician, just a great all-around person that could be the CEO of any company. And when I started building out the first version of Tilt, an investor put us in touch, and I was able to convince him to not start his own company, but come join me and build out Tilt Together.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Funding, this crowdfunding thing that seems to be codified by a journalist in 2010, I was like, wow, this is going to be really big. Much bigger than the way I'm building it. And then the second insight, truthfully, it was kind of in 2011 feeling like, all right, this is going to be bigger than my narrow focus, but also I don't know if any platform is really building it for a mobile world and thinking about kind of what's on the horizon, which is just a much more mobile driven web and digital ecosystem. And so started combine those two insights and that birth tilt mobile focused crowdfunding platform.”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Sure, the high level is, it really is kind of a circuitous path to starting silk. But the high level is I studied, and my background is in economic development economics specifically was my degree. But I picked up web development in college, and right when I graduated while working on the ground in poverty alleviation in Cape Town, South Africa, just outside of Cape Town, I got to marry those two passions. And I started to build out essentially what ended up becoming a crowdfunding platform for poverty alleviation through microfinance, micro insurance, total. Won't get into what that is, but it definitely showed me the power of social software around money and what it can become. And so while building that had this one insight of, wow,”

    2016-01-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source