YouSaid · the spoken record

James Currier

lines on the record: 30
first: 2017-12-13
most recent: 2017-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There. People say that it's a Ponzi scheme, it's not. What is sand? And if you put enough sand down, eventually it becomes rock. And I think that's what's happening.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, love it. Love Bitcoin have been interested in this area since the 90s, was on the board of Second Life when they had Linden Dollar exploding. I was there for five years. The number of people who are”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you haven't read Razor's Edge by Somerset Mon, I would recommend that. It's a classic talking about our own personal journey of authenticity and creativity versus just playing to the crowd.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too much competition, and they leave it at that. What I say is the psychological and emotional needs of the consumer are largely being met, and it's more difficult to find reservoirs of those emotional and psychological needs that you could tap into to generate that viral storm, to build a new network, to build new identity for a consumer online. You're missing that psychological edge because it's been largely taken by most of the players who emerged in the last 10 years.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I agree with that. I think that it has been easier to do consumer businesses over the last 20 years than perhaps at any other time in history. I mean, when you look back at the early 90s, if you got a 10X on a venture investment, you were pretty psyched. And now, you know, we went through 20 years where you could get 50 or 100 or 400x on your investments because of the distribution of the internet and mobile. And many of the ideas, many of the main businesses have been discovered. We're moving now into more and more niche areas. You can still build billion dollar companies, but to build a $10 billion company is getting more and more difficult just as it was more difficult to build railroads in the 1880s than it was in the 1840s. These technologies emerge. They run through their course and then you need to find new technology bases. So yeah, we agree. We think that the business of finding viral social consumer apps is intensified. It's so difficult. Most people say, well, there's.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing it right means small experiments, lots of data tracking, lots of data love to find language, to find new channels so that your margin on that can be 4 or 5x what you're spending on the marketing. And many companies in order to get going are spending a dollar to get a dollar just to prove that they're in business. And my point to the people is, well, if that's all you're getting, we need to find a new business because that's not sustainable. So let's back up. Let's think about how we can spend a dollar to get $5. And once we've done that at a small scale, then let's move forward with lots of spending or lots of fundraising.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depend on luck. We've seen a diminution of the ability to grow virally over the last 15 years, and we've got this chart which shows that at the same time, Facebook and others have done a really good job of harnessing their formerly viral channels and turning them into paid channels slowly over time, every day, every week, every month”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, where we start out is that we don't like paint at all. That's where we start. We felt that way for 15 years and that has proven to be a good mentality to approach it with. And as a result, we were forced to figure out ways of growing in free viral ways. And that paid huge dividends for us in many companies. I think we've been involved in over 13 companies that we got to over 10 million users. And that mentality helped us get there. What has happened over the last 15 years, however, is the number of viral channels and the tools available to people to grow free, to grow virally has diminished. There's fewer ways to instrument the growth. What we've moved into is back toward more of a word of mouth society where your product has to be so good that people just want to talk about it because it's so extraordinary. And that's a great mentality to have when building a product, but it's also very unpredictable. And when you take venture capital, when you hire people, when you're searching to build a billion dollar company, you can't”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we do a lot of benchmarking. One of the designs of NFX Guild is to bring lots of companies together that are working on network effect businesses so that they can share their KPIs, their key performance indicators with each other with the goal of creating benchmarks. Because when one company is growing their email marketing at 200% a month and the other guy was happy at 40% a month, they suddenly realized that's where I could put the benchmark. And then the whole team understands they could put the benchmark higher. So by cross populating information between companies so that it's real, it's not just James telling you you should have a higher benchmark. It's you seeing others have achieved that higher benchmark and they are just like you. That really helps to let people calibrate the goals they want to hit faster and at a higher level. And you're right. It's hard. You don't want to demoralize yourself and others by setting too high a goal. But until you understand how high you can fly, you might just miss it. It might be right next to you.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is hard because there's a lot of fear. Like, hey, we got something good. Why would we shoot for 1,000% improvement? We've got something good if we just grew 20%. That would be great. We'd hit our numbers. And my point to them as well. Why don't you raise your site even higher? If I can register 47 million people in six months for a photo sharing thing, you can certainly grow this thing at 1,000%, not 50%.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we spend hours and hours with our teams working with them on the growth mindset. There's a lot to it, but basically it comes down to the courage to break things, the courage to back up, the courage to never be satisfied with a 30% monthly growth. There are these growth modalities available to companies that people don't even believe are there. But once you learn to look for them and you have methodologies for finding them, you can really systematically develop approaches which allow you to grow much faster than most people think you can. And that's the mindset you have to have, that you should not be satisfied with a 4% improvement or a 20% improvement. You really need to look for a thousand percent improvement, 10,000% improvement. And if you can teach all of your employees to have that culture, then even in the later stages of a company when you have 40, 50, 100, 200 people, they're still going to be willing to break things and move forward in a way that will take your company to hold different levels. So that mindset.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One in the market can build as valuable a product as you because you have a certain number of users. That's essentially how it works.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network effects are about defensibility, and this is something that is kind of invisible to most people. My partners and I really try to emphasize this to people, that your network effect is not a viral effect. A viral effect is about getting new users to you. And that's a whole different growth tactic, and there's playbooks for that. And we can do that all day, Stan and I have been doing that for 20 years or 15 years together. And Pete Flynn, my partner, he grew truly to a $3.5 billion acquisition with zero marketing spend. So there's lots of viral techniques and viral effects. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about network effects and the network effects means that every new user makes that product more useful for all the other users. What that does is it makes it difficult for your users to leave because they're getting so much value and it makes it difficult for your competitors to provide a better product and therefore it's defensibility. And so what you're looking for is getting as quickly as you can to a tipping point where”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just for networks and marketplaces. It's not just Facebook and eBay that have these, or Craigslists that have these network effects. It's data network effects. It's physical network, protocol network effects. There's so many different types, and each of them can have a playbook, and we've developed playbooks for each of them. And 60% or more of our companies are B2B. So many people think that all the network effects are just for these consumer companies, but they're really not. It's a law of nature. When you're painting your business, you want the network effect color, so to speak. You want to paint a lot of that color into your business and its design, whether you're in B2B or B2C. So we think it's very valuable, and we think it's only going to become more valuable because everything is so more easily connectable mobily and through data networks and bandwidth we now all have everywhere, more and more businesses, whether it's batteries for Tesla or whether it's security systems or it's largely going to be the winners are going to have network effects.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so our fund is called NFX, and that stands for network effects. We think it's incredibly important. We did a large study of companies that have been formed since 1994, 337 companies worth over a billion. And if you look at the market caps, the combined market caps of all these companies and identify which of them had network effects at their core, it's well over 60% of the value that's been created in tech since the internet arrived has come from companies with network effects at their core. And so we think when we have been looking at business plans over the last 10 years, we've seen that less than 20% of them even consider how they would get a network effect into the business, yet 60% of value is being created. So there's a mismatch there. There's an opportunity there, I think, to focus on bringing network effects into the business because they are so powerful. It turns out that so far at least we've identified 13 different types of network effects. There isn't just one. And as you pointed out and as we've discussed,”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah. There's a point at which you to not go there. You know, for the first meeting, you want to go a certain level deep. And then on the sixth meeting, when they're really digging into all the data, that's when you really bring all the data to the table. And then again, you have to back out after that sixth meeting so that you can then close the deal. So absolutely, you're absolutely right. There's a limit to how far you want to go. But by bringing data into each of yourselves.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A number in every sentence you speak. If you say a sentence without using a number, then you have wasted that sentence. When you learned that simple rule, your communication about the opportunity and how you're going to get there becomes a lot more effective. When you're telling a story for 10 or 20 minutes.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and that's the COO part of you. You have to be obsessed with the data that's coming out of your systems. You have to have your culture speaking with data. And when you tell the story to, let's say, an investor, and it's a high-level story, it's a big picture story, it gets you the meeting. Then you go into the meeting, you tell that same story for the first two or three minutes, they get them fired up again, they're not looking at their cell phone, and then you have to speak with data. Then you have to then weave in the proof points of data and your obsession with data into the whole story. That builds an effective communication that not only can I see where I'm going. Not only have I discovered an exciting and wonderful journey that I want to take my life on and I want to bring you the investor or the journalist or the employee on, but now I'm going to prove to you that how we're actually going to get this done. So then you move into that part of it. And what did I say to all the founders is when you're pitching the DL, especially for investors, you want to use”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into a CEO mindset, a storytelling mindset for the audience and really put themselves in the shoes of the listener and what they want to hear in the psychology. It's all part of that same process of empathy and understanding the psychology of the person you're talking to. And then you're going to tell them the right story that inspires you and inspires them. And then together you create energy and confidence and movement. And that's what brings these things into being that didn't exist before.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They most get it wrong because they talk about the solution as opposed to the impact on the people or the amount of money that can be made. As builders, we tend to focus on what we're building and the features and the technology and so they tend to focus on that. And one way of looking at it is that we spend all of our days as entrepreneurs as COOs, hiring people, working on minutiae, the minutiae that is required to make something beautiful and really simple for the customer. But then when we go out to tell our story, we tell that story, the story of what it's like to be the COO dealing with minutiae. And so our stories get too detailed. They get too focused on the technology and the features. And really what people want to be told is something that's inspiring to them or that triggers their greed to be part of something that makes a lot of money. And so that's really where people trip up. And that's how they think. They spend so many hours being COO that they need to get.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like the CEO and the founders are, that's their main job is to tell stories. And you come up with a great story. You tell it to yourself so that you get up in the morning and you get motivated and excited to do all the work that needs to be done to bring this thing to being. And then you take that same story or slightly modify it and you tell it to your employees every day. And you repeat yourself over and over again. I know a lot of the CEOs that I work with and invest in are so smart that they get bored with telling the story over and over again because they want to feed their brains. And what they have to learn to do is to tell that story again and again to their employees so that everyone feels that rhythm and gets motivated by the same things and is together. And then that story ripples out into the investors and telling the investors the story so that they want to be participating. And then it goes to the journalists. So you actually spend so much of your day as a founder telling that story. And if you get it right, magic happens. And if you get it wrong, it's just daily.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And a lot of people use the word incentives, and I think that's great. But I think that if you change that to say understand the psychology, you start to see things differently. You start, see, again, I'm using a different word, which is psychology instead of incentives. If you use that word, it starts to give a different perspective on how you navigate.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a lot of psychology to all these products. So, for instance, if you're doing enterprise sales and you think, well, this product will actually solve the problem. It might, but if it doesn't solve the psychological needs of the buyer or the psychological needs of the buyer's customer within the enterprise, then you're not going to actually get the sell through. And so you have to think about what their motivations are and how they perceive themselves in the world in order to language it properly, sell it properly, price it properly. And people often think, well, no, if I provide utility, that's enough. And what we've seen repeatedly, particularly in enterprise and in media and in viral products, this is not enough. You really have to understand and empathize with your customer. And sometimes you have to understand the psychology of the VCs. You have to understand the psychology of the journalists who are writing and what is feeding them. Absolutely.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's never enough. I mean, there's all these businesses are multifaceted, unique pieces of art, essentially. So you have to have all the different pieces fit together. But what we've seen is typically in our world, you know, we're builders. We're makers. Many of us are engineers, and we just like to go and build stuff. What happens is we see a problem, we imagine a solution, we build the solution, and then we slap marketing language on it. And we believe that that process is backwards. We believe that often you need to identify a problem, figure out the language that addresses that problem, and then from that language build a product that fulfills on the language. And so we're not saying that it's sufficient, but it's certainly an important factor that people underemphasize, and it can become a superpower for founders if they really start to hone in on how much it impacts them. And the companies we work with very much come in skeptical about this. And then when we've spent time, after a few weeks, they will come back to us and say, oh my God, I see it now. I see how powerful that is.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Word on the homepage that allowed the whole thing to happen. So we've, and I could give you hundreds of other examples of this. So we've seen how language impacts”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had several experiences where I've watched language make such an impact on the trajectory of a company, just switching a word or two. An example would be, I mean, certainly in naming, you watch a company like Yahoo 20 years ago, they had such an incredible name that was different from every other company's name. And so the press wanted to talk about them all the time. The consumers wanted to talk about them. And that word of mouth spread Yahoo, despite them not having the right approach or the best technology or the best team. They ended up being very large in part because of that language that they chose to use in their name. Or we had an experience years ago where we were storing photos on a website and we said store your photos here. And it didn't really grow very much. So we just switched to say share your photos. And that switch of language then rippled through the product and changed the product flow and change the product features so that within six months we registered 47 million people. And so there was literally that change of one.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think being first to market is actually that important in most cases. I mean, if you look at the great successes of the last 20 years, there were a couple companies who were first to market, which were eBay and Amazon, but that was 20 plus years ago. Then you look at your next great success, Google. They were the eighth to market. You look at Facebook. They were the 156th to market with the same five features. They just happened to have real names and a fantastic team. But those companies, once they got going in a space that had already been established, they were faster and they were higher quality and they hired better. And that formula of speed, quality, and then hiring in a superior way, that's what makes your giant sort of outcomes in these tech spaces. And first mover isn't typically correlated with that. You look at Prosper two years before lending club, a lending club ended up sort of taking that market. And now Prosper's copied lending club. But now they're doing better as well. So it's helpful to be first to market.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really great question because it comes up for us and for all the companies who work with a lot. And for me, it comes down to do you have a list of experiments you still want to do and you're excited about? So you've had a vision. You've had an interest in a particular market space and you've gotten fired up about it. You've started a company. You've tried a bunch of experiments. They haven't worked. Do you still have a bunch of things you see that you could try that you're excited about? If you don't, if you run out of that list, then it's time to back up and cast your vision more broadly, to maybe do a larger pivot or shut down and start something.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out that most of what happens is good luck, but you need to have a lot of at bats to have good luck. And so the reason that we have had four venture-backed companies that have all succeeded is because we have learned how to move so quickly that we try many times until we hit success. And what I tell people is that failure is temporary, success is forever. And once you hit a success, it's then a building block to then build more of your company on top of. And so you have to have many of bats go very fast and your mentality has to be set up to allow you to move on from your failures and to stay interested, stay motivated, even though you're failing every day because eventually when you hit that success, it's forever and it's a building block and you can build a bigger company from that. So that's why we haven't really failed yet and we haven't ever lost anyone any money when we've been entrepreneurs and building companies. And so that mentality we brought to everything we've done and it's proven to work quite effectively.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had been working at battery ventures as an associate in the 90s and learned all about the venture capital world and saw some things they were doing well and things that I thought they can improve on and eventually started my own company, exited successfully in 2004 and started Angel Investing and Stanchinovsky and I started investing made about 50 investments together and we've been thinking for many many years how would you create the next great fund and we've got a friend Geeky Levy Weiss in Israel and Pete Flant and we were talking with them about it and so that's how NFX came to be. We have been very intrigued by Y Combinator and Andreessen and first round have done in terms of media, in terms of operational funds, in terms of structuring things in a programmatic way. And so we started exploring that back in 2015 with a small 15 million dollar fund. Made about 80 investments and so now we're continuing the journey.”
2017-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source