YouSaid · the spoken record

Jana Messerschmidt

lines on the record: 111
first: 2019-11-20
most recent: 2019-11-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh no, I got that all the way back in like 07 or 08. But that was my nickname as a high school basketball player. Just all the animals. I'm so sorry.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture capital. I want to see increased dollars going into female founders. So, you know, that number of like women get two to three percent of venture funding has been pretty static. More companies are getting funded, but seeing female founders getting funded at every stage. And that just takes time, right? You've got a lot more women coming into like seed and A companies, but like seeing some huge successes by female founders.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you're right experience out of the box. So, has, by the way, a lot of the Chinese communications apps and everything else. It's just the surveillance part that just makes me slight. And maybe not even true. I'm being surveilled by Facebook and Instagram too. But it's just to sell me toilet paper versus possible other things. I don't know. I'm curious what's happening.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm obsessed with feedback. It's replaced. Well done. It's replaced my Facebook and Instagram and Snap usage. But one of the things that TikTok does so great is like you open up the app, you don't have to build out a follow graph. You don't have to put effort into it to get immediate joy out of it. And that's one of the dog eating space.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a sad ending, if that is the end. But, you know, I think like Twitter had a bunch of technical debt, which really slowed down execution and pace of, you know, kind of being able to launch new features and stay competitive with newer companies like Instagram and Snap that popped up. I think a lot of that technical debt should hopefully be erased by now, but I just want to continue to see them execute and really pick up that pace of execution. I think Twitter could be used by everyone in the world, which still is kind of hard for people to understand how to get value out of it.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitter. Oh gosh, you know, Twitter has so much potential. It always does. It always does, right? I mean, I've never reaches it.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the space is getting increasingly crowded. Yeah. Right. So all of the early advantages that Netflix had from a tech perspective, being first mover into streaming, being the first company kind of embedded in all these devices, being the first to produce original content.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, last question. You know, you've been at Netflix, you've been at Twitter, you're doing this bird and lyme, things like that. What if you had to fix anything about one of those two companies that you worked at or venture capital? What would it be if you could wave your wand?”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“List of fun things to do. No, I'm not going to do that, Janna. Not gonna do that. It's like asking for it. It's scooters. I've gone far enough. I have my brother on my case all the time. I have to wear wristguards now, apparently, which I'm going to. Why not? I like my wrists. They work well.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seen the rental solution. Yeah, Co I think actually the one wheel would be tough as a rental because there is a learning curve.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know there's a lot of them. It's interesting. I'm watching them. I see them around, but mostly owned. They're mostly owned. I haven't seen the rental solution yet. Scooter seems to be a perfect solution if you can get past the safety issues.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it's interesting. It's an interesting thing. But I do think people immediately go to the least common denominator of the complaints. And I'm like, you're not thinking this thing through. They actually really work and people really like them.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether there's bike lanes in cities, could you change the equation and whether you can get helmets on people? That's in the safeties. And then figuring out sort of how to build a better piece of hardware to be able to withstand potholes and things like that. But safety is the principal problem. And then there's a few others that are, you know, city regulatory kind of stuff, but it seems inevitable that these last mile in Los Angeles, I just saw those tiny little bikes, those motorized bikes. Which is really interesting. I'm not sure. I didn't get on one yet”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fascinating. You either love it, which most people who use it do, or you hate it, and then you're a reporter who wants to write about them lying all over the streets. But you can't combine the two. I'm sick of those stories. I'm like, you know what? They'll work it out just like they did with Uber, just like they did with Lyft. Now, whether it's a, and to me, it's a better business. Like, it actually is a better business than it. There's no driver. There's no driver. complications. The big issues are safety.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he landed on electric scooters. And I remember talking to him the first time, and he's like, This is either going to be incredibly successful or it's going to completely flop. I don't know if consumers are going to love it or hate it. Like, we'll see. And it's like, when you have that first experience on a scooter, it's so freaking magical. Agreed.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. So he basically was just like, you know what? I'm going to go to China and I'm going to spend some time looking at different form factors and try to figure out what many.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He basically coming out of Uber on Left had realized that for trips under three miles, it just wasn't well served by Uber.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. What a Silicon Valley story. Yeah, I actually listened to your Joe Krauss. I love this interview. Oh my goodness.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So my husband and I were talking about this last night. It might go the way of hatching Twitter. It took me a few years post-leaving Twitter to read hatch”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hardware hell. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a hardware bet, but there will be a whole class of new applications, services, tools that will serve kind of the audio use case. And as you move to a world where audio is potentially always on, I mean, when I walked in today, like you had your AirPods in, like you now have the ability to be in somebody's ear at any given moment. Right, absolutely. Which is a pretty like that movie her.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can be my first friend. So vertical social, I think, is definitely kind of something that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. I'm also spending a lot of time thinking about audio. So as new hardware has emerge, things like AirPods, things like Alexa.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's definitely one area that I'm spending time in. And I've made a few investments at Light Speed so far, and two of the three I've made have been kind of in that space. I also think that vertical social networks are going to continue to become popular. And you already see pieces of this, right? You've got Nextdoor for neighbors. You've got Discord for gamers. But there are just natural communities that form.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, I think that you've seen a lot of the innovation happening in social, actually happening in places like China and India. And so my take is that as NPS, so Net Promoter Score, basically satisfaction with Facebook continues to decline. And developed markets, their growth has been stagnant or declining. You're going to see more of an opportunity for entrepreneurs to come in and kind of create the next wave of social because Facebook's not quite the dominant force that it once was. Oh, that's a big.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There hasn't, and I think you know, if you look at why and you talk to entrepreneurs as to why that is, is for a long time your exit was either Facebook was going to buy you or they were going to copy you”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, the big difference between angel investing and venture investing in addition to check size is an angel investor. I could write like 10 or 15 checks a year because there's smaller checks. But with venture investing, you usually make a few bets a year. So you really have to like kind of have a different filter and you're also typically signing up to hopefully work with the company for like a decade taking a board seat. So it's just a different level of commitment. But some of the areas that I've been really interested in, both as an angel but now also at light speed, is I'm staying close to my operating roots because I definitely feel like I'll be able to really add a lot of value for the founders. But digital and social media. So my personal belief is like we're entering into social 3.0. You know, we had.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in my life when I've worked at different companies and people are complaining that you know the free snacks aren't quite as good”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this was my job. And I think Erica did this job for a while too. For six years growing up as a kid, you'd go out into the cornfields and you would basically pull the tassels off the top of corn to create certain hybrids of corn. There's male corn and there's female corn FYI. Janet?”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm trying to be very optimistic. I mean, maybe that's just being at light speed and seeing all the strides that we're taking on this front around hiring different types of folks. And by the way, I think we talk about diversity a lot and we think about gender or maybe we think about race or we think about sexuality. But I also think you have to think about diversity in terms of like backgrounds. That's right.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, I've got some of the same Silicon Valley networks that a lot of folks do. You do. But we also have tapped into some differentiated networks. And so, you know, especially with like hashtag angels, when founders are like, why should we work with you? And it's like, okay, we've got all this operating strains. It's like 100 years or something between all of us. But we're also in different networks than you. So we've helped a lot of our companies find those first female engineers or find those first like female exec hires because we're in networks. They may not be.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Shopify or Stripe. Yeah, I'm always interested in the concept. I think Gene Case was talking about this there isn't a lack of talent, there's a lack of opportunity. In places. So, do you tend to think that's your advantage in being at LightsMeter? Hashtag Angels is that you have a different perspective?”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also think, especially on the consumer side. You know, the technology has become democratized, whether it's through things like Shopify or Stripe or AWS, where the next great consumer companies can come from anywhere. It doesn't have to be out of the Bay Area. And you've already started to see this, right? Like there are huge pockets of success coming out of LA, out of New York, cameo is based in Chicago. We've seen some really interesting stuff in Atlanta and Austin. So I think you're going to continue to see founders that don't come from the same places and don't maybe look exactly like what they look like 10, 15 years ago. Yeah.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is pretty incredible. And it's not just to do that to be good. It's a really interesting because it's always painted by a lot of people. Oh, we just want to do that to be good. And I'm like, no, because you have opportunities you're not seeing. If you're just sitting here in Sandhill Road with the same old people, you're going to get the same old result. And you may in fact be successful because there's plenty of rat holes to shove the money down. But it still doesn't mean you're doing a very good job.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calm that asshole. Yeah, I mean, I think it's great because we're starting to see a lot more women come in to investing roles. And I'd say we're kind of stage one for a lot of these firms where it's like they've hired one woman. And it's like, yeah, that doesn't solve the problem. You got to continue to hire and you've got to continue to diversify across the team. So I've been really excited by how much attention LightSpeed's paid to it. And then I think that's starting to show in the numbers too. Like on the consumer side of investing, I think it's about a third of our companies over the last few years have a female founder, which is pretty incredible.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, we have eight women on the investing team now, right? Which is incredible. I know. Like, I haven't felt so much diversity pretty much ever in my career. No, no, no.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Measuring is the first step. Also, I think a big step is getting people to understand equity. If you've been around in the valley for long enough, you start to understand like here's how you value the equity that you're”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start their next companies self funded so that they own as much of it as possible. They're the ones who get to choose what philanthropic endeavors that they want to give to, what political campaigns they want to give to. And like women just don't have a seat at that table at all. So the policies, politics, philanthropies that are being shaped, like women are just far underrepresented.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think when you look at the impact, like when you look at all the downstream impacts of the wealth that's generated in the valley, the people who are the billionaires or the hundreds of billionaires, they're the ones who are in the privileged position to go start the next venture funds. They're the ones that”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you look at the cap table, it's primarily That have the majority of equity. It's founders, it's early employees, which those skew engineers, because those are the first people building the company. It's executives, and then it's your investors. Those are the people who take up the big chunks of the cap table. And behind investors, you know, there's obviously individual investors and there's insurance investors. And then behind the venture investors, there's LPs, which is like a whole other ball of wax to get into. But you have to start getting representation of more female founders, more early engineers and early employees, and then also more female executives. Like that's how you start to close that gap. And you have to be able to measure it. So CART is one example of a company that's doing this. Another company that we backed at hashtag Angels is a company called Compass. Comp as a service, not the real estate play. Got it, got it. It's actually these two female founders, one Zolder Last Company to Facebook, another sold her last company to St.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first up is you have to measure it So Carta has some tools now that allow their companies to measure who has ownership. Henry actually, after he went through this exercise, he measured his own gap table and basically allocated an additional $8 million of equity awards for women to close that gap. He's also been very public around wanting to hire more female executives as well as more female board members.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that kind of turned into this broader rallying cry for us, which is even though with hashtag Angels, we want to continue to be great investors and continue to back great companies. Our mission is how do we get more women on the CAP tables?”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you could look at all of the S1s from this year and go through and look at who are the people who own significant chunks of the company. And women are practically nowhere.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of who owns what in the valley. So we did this big project, and the headline that comes from it is that even though women make up a third of employees, they hold just 9% of the equity.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are some friends who work. Yes, I'm also an investor both with hashtag Angels as well as Lightspeed as an investor as well. But before Carta, you basically had paper stock certificates. I still have some of these from my first year or two of Angel Investing. And CARTA has basically digitized all of that. And they have a huge vision of how they're going to completely disrupt private markets, which is super fascinating. So anyway, so CARTA is sitting on this data. He had over 6,000 companies worth of data. And he's like,”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we put out this blog post call to action, start measuring this, and then Henry Ward, who's the CEO of Carta, he reached out to us immediately and he's like, I have your data. He's like, do you guys want to do a project together? We're like, absolutely. So we ended up working with his data science team.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we basically said, you know, we think that even though women make up roughly a third of employees in tech now, we think that they hold far less equity.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is money, right? It's the power, it's the wealth, it's the dynamics that are generated from this wealth that's created from successful companies. And so we're like,”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And so we kind of like had this realization that like, okay, it's great that tech has started to measure representation of women and minorities in terms of like what does it make up in terms of your employee count? That's a great start and it's really important in terms of like how products and policies are developed.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the realizations that we had a few years into doing this when we had sat on enough cap tables was We had seen the cap tables, and oftentimes we were the only women on them. There were no other female angel investors unless there was a female founder. It was just completely MIA from any sort of diversity.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, actually, one other thing that I just want to touch on with hashtag Angels before we move off of it is, you know, you asked a little bit about, you know, did we go into this kind of thinking about backing only women or female founders? Yeah.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might be something that we'll consider. You know, I think angel investing is still really different than venture investing. Investing personal capital versus having accountability to LPs is like really different. Also, round dynamics are really different. So getting, you know, maybe it's like a few hundred K from all of us into a round, that's like one thing going out leading or co-leading around that's a different thing to get to ownership requirements to be able to return a fund.”
2019-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jana Messerschmidt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source