YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Brown

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30
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2019-11-29
most recent
2019-11-29
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1
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  1. “Building a service that can globally think for you and optimize based on what you want out of life and do all the thinking and the financial work to get you to your goals. So complete financial automation.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Five to one is a good number. Most fintech is below that because CAC is higher, but the best fintech firms are definitely in that five or higher ratio.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I wish I knew how freaking hard it is to build completely automated financial services. This is way harder than I had ever imagined.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It means that the interaction model moves to one of hey, what do you want as a human? Like, what are your goals? Whereas tools are a means to get to a goal, this lets you level up and say, hey, tell me what your goals are, and then I'll figure out how to get you there and do the work for you.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It means moving from a world where you're giving people tools and recommendations to one where you're really taking the burden and the task off of their plate off of their shoulders and you're doing the hard work in the thinking for them.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Sapiens, it's the most important business book to read because it helps you understand why we are the way we are and why society is what it is. And it supersedes kind of the operating system, if you will, that we're all beholding to in our day-to-day lives.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, how about I'll tell you concretely with Tally? So we have three core values, and I'll talk about the one that's closest to my heart. So the wording is change shoes often. And the underlying idea behind that is empathy. And we were really inspired by the walk a mile and somebody else's shoes. So it's valuing just the act of taking the time to imagine what it's like to be another person, both emotionally and intellectually, and really approaching them with curiosity such that you're actually interested in understanding their perspective, not making judgments about what they have to share. And I think that's one very concrete way that you can create inclusion is through the behaviors that create closeness and kind of status, if you will, within your company.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, in today's world, there's a lot of talk about diversity and the metrics associated. And if you get down to it is the enterprise value that diversity create is around diversity of thought and approach. And where I think that a lot of folks are kind of misled is that they're so focused on these metrics and these, I've got to hit this number and this number, that they missed a point.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's a really interesting point, but what is the opportunity cost of focusing on that? Or if that ends up not being true, why might it not be true? And then you get diversity of thought around issues and you leave the problem with the management team, but you open up their minds to different possibilities. And I think that makes some of the most productive input from board members.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Would give two pieces of advice. So the first one is when the company is facing issue X, do not say, oh, I saw another company that had a similar issue and they did Y. And the reason is that that is not contextualized to your company, your industry, the resources you have, the capabilities, your knowledge. And it's just flat out generally not helpful. What I think really good board members do is they have this big mental bank of all this learning and pattern recognition, but they contextualize it for your company and understanding what is really relevant to you. So that's the first thing. The second is as a board member, when another board member says something, do not agree nor necessarily disagree, but try to point out either the other side of the probability distribution on what they're suggesting, because no matter what, there's no way that what they're saying is either without risk or without some opportunity cost. So I think if board members between each other can say, hey, I”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, I mean, it does help a lot if you do an orientation. So you can set norms and expectations up front and you get a mutual contract on, hey, what we're going to do and how we'll conduct ourselves in the board meeting. So if you haven't done that, I actually think it's not a bad idea to establish those norms and actually meet individually with the board members and say, hey, look, I'm trying to make the board meeting overall more productive and I'd love to institute some norms that I'd like to get your feedback on them. So that way you're kind of doing a reorientation with everybody and it's not necessarily calling out one person. And once you have that contract, if you will, where everybody's agreed upon it, then you have that platform to say, hey, board member X, you know how we agreed upon, you know, no phones in the meeting, you know, I just observed that you were on the phone and that made me think that maybe that what we're covering was not important. So I'd love to have you not do that.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To leave the boardroom as the CEO without formally ending the board meeting, because in a really adverse scenario, if the board meeting is still running, things could happen that you wouldn't want. So you formally end the board meeting, but then give the investors an opportunity to talk amongst themselves and then come back. And I've received some very constructive, sometimes hard to hear feedback that has really helped me grow. So it's definitely makes it harder in some sense, but giving them the opportunity to reflect with each other and then give you some input is at least for me I've found has been helpful in my personal growth.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It actually begins way before the board meeting, so I do an orientation for new board members. And this is a structured onboarding where I make sure that they understand the Taliban strategy and our values and the norms that are expected in a board meeting. And I really try to bring a lot of intensity and intention to the board meeting. And the way that I encourage that is I'm pretty hardcore about making sure that nobody's on any devices or distracted during the meeting. And inevitably, that will come up. I have a conversation with a board member afterwards and just really make sure that they know that when we're together focusing on Tally for that two or three hours, that we're attentive and we're focused. And one thing to do is maybe provide a couple more breaks throughout the meeting so that people can step out and do their emails. Another thing that I find is that every single board meeting I'm learning something and it's new and it's hard and actually formally ending the board meeting. And that's actually important because you don't want”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So, I think the challenge of being in venture capital is that outside of the actual partner who's doing the investing, money is a complete commodity. And so the drive is to try to differentiate and undifferentiable commodity through the quote unquote value add. So I think it's more of marketing and what venture investors have to do to try to get entrepreneurs to see them as somehow a more valuable source of capital. And clearly there's a big difference between one investor and the next, but oftentimes that is represented in the partner and their expertise and who they are as a human. And it ends up really being differentiated on the person and less so on the overall firm.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Every item. And that way, investors who are busy can say, okay, cool. I've got this one task, and I know the other investors are handling other tasks. And you can really hold them accountable for working on those projects. And then you're in a position to move from neutral to value add.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I'm a little pessimistic on this one. My starting point is you have to have the mindset that VCs are going to provide no value. They will all go on and on about the value they'll provide. But what you're shooting for as a base starting point is zero value. And what you're trying to avoid is negative value. And negative value comes in distractions and potentially bad advice and steering you the wrong way. So really the battle is to make sure that they're not going to actually hurt the company. But once you're at a point of, okay, I'm confident that we're at least at a place of neutral. then it's really up to the ceo to say okay investor a i'm going to give you a specific job and a specific mission and this is what i need you to focus on and here are the expectations and the timelines almost like you would an employee where there's a clearly defined task that they can own and own entirely so maybe you've heard the term dri or just directly responsible individuals make sure that there is nothing that is held by the group there has to be one individual who owns”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So they're going to note that anyway, right? It's not like the team members aren't sharing the fundraising announcements with their friends. So it's more you need to put it all in perspective. And it's not to say that nobody's allowed to celebrate, but we at Tally never have and never will explicitly have a celebration around the fundraise. It's always going to be around product and delivering value to consumers.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You are thinking you needed to provide in order to give good returns to shareholders. So I just prefer to have all my team grounded and understanding that with that fundraising comes a big mountain decline. And quite honestly, a duty to deliver on the promises that were made when fundraising happened. So it's more matter of having the right mindset and I think celebration explicitly for fundraising really maybe leads some members on the team to not have the right paradigm.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, so every round that we've raised, I've done a talk with a team. I use a metaphor, and it's the road trip metaphor. So imagine you're on a road trip, maybe with some friends or family going from San Francisco to New York. And, you know, there's going to be some fun. There's going to be some monotony. But in general, it's about this journey. But in order to get from one coast to the next, you definitely need gas to put in your car. And so that to me is what fundraising is, is you're on this journey and you need to refuel, and clearly you need capital to do that. But in and of itself, putting gas in the car is not this big thing to celebrate. It's something to be appreciative of. But what we should celebrate as founders and his teams is shipping product, delivering customer value, and especially if, let's say you've raised a big round that's maybe ahead of where your business results are, all the more you should not celebrate because you should understand the gravity of what you've signed up for, which is as you signed up to deliver even more value than maybe.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Demand and therefore the price rises. So I would actually argue that given those constraints, venture funded companies aren't as overpriced as you might think.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I mean, I think maybe one of the implications there is around valuation. So even with short timelines, you can still get walks. So RRLs went very, very fast, but walks were still had. So I think there's still time for a couple hours stolen through the Presidio. But I think maybe your implied question is, am I worried about venture valuations? And I actually think this is more structural to the world economy at this point because more and more wealth is being concentrated in the top five, one percent. And those individuals tend to save and invest most of their money. So what that means is there's a growing glut of capital looking for returns, but with overall GDP of most nations being pretty low, that means that there's a relatively low supply of yielding investments. And what that translates to is that founders that have identified great markets and great opportunities and are executing are a very scarce resource and so that the overall supply much lower than the”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Drawn to suboptimal decisions as it relates to the company and the mission and those that are more grounded in their identity and what motivates them are going to be more likely to really align with what we're trying to do.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So, I think it starts early. So, half of my investors, I've raised four rounds of funding in the leads, two of them I knew beforehand, and those relationships were years old, and then two of them were new. And so I think focusing on the new relationships in the early times when you're trying to figure out, hey, do you want to take money from this person and work with them? I actually really enjoy walks. I think it's a great opportunity just to get out, spend a couple hours walking around. And what I'm looking for is I'm trying to get to the bottom of their motivation. What really makes them happy? What's their view of self-actualization? Is it status? Is it wealth? Or is it more making an impact and leaving something meaningful behind them? And it's the folks that are more intrinsically motivated by those things outside of superficiality that I'm drawn to because I believe that when you're in, let's just say a spot of bother in the company at some point, those that are worried about their reputation or how much money they're going to make are going to potentially be”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It's actually the inverse. I watch what questions they ask. So the majority of folks expressed a lot of excitement about our business. So, you know, our retention, we have 99% monthly retention of our users, our CAC-TALTV ratios, all those things, our growth rate. And I noticed that the majority investors really focus the substantive portion of their questions on those kind of things. And it was the investors that also spent time trying to understand the benefit to consumers. And, you know, our mission is to make people less stressed and better off financially and really digging into how we're doing that and wanting to get validation on the fact that we were really aligned with our own mission and just not saying it. So it was actually the investors who were doing their own diligence to validate that I think it showed the difference between, you know, kind of people that were excited about the numbers versus people that were excited about the numbers and the impact we're trying to have in the world.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You know, I think it's important to put yourself in a position to work with the best investors and best defined by the alignment with your mission and vision. So I really think it depends on the company. I personally tried to spend as little time fundraising as possible and as little time with investors as possible because every moment that I'm doing that, I'm not spending it with my team or focusing on products and delivering value to our customers. So it's more around the opportunity cost and trying to really focus on creating value.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “What about just like the mindset? Early on in my career, my mindset was all around quote unquote success and success defined by economic outcome and being famous and getting quote unquote being successful from a superficial standpoint I've learned”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Connect with them on a certain level and inspire them to quit their ridiculously overpaid job to take all this risk and a lower salary to work for you You know, you bump into that investor in an elevator and you have the instincts to capitalize on that and turn that into a meeting. So what I believe first time founders really struggle with is sifting between, let's say, that the half a million minutes that don't matter and the 10 that do in the year and that 10,000 hours or 20,000 hours of practice of doing it over and over really gives you that intuition on identifying what moments matter and then making sure that you can put points on the board when they present themselves.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So I respectfully disagree and disagree strongly. If that were true, then that also means that the 10,000 hour rule is a farce, this idea that when you focus on doing something really well for a long time, you get better at it. I believe that when it comes to being a successful founder, success comes down to these brief moments of high leverage. And what I mean by that is that there's about a half a million minutes a year. And most of those minutes are either the monotony of going through work or you're sleeping. But in a given year, there's a couple brief moments that really, really matter. And these are the moments where you're sitting in front of a potential candidate for some executive role and they're way outside your league, but you're able.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “The majority of our financial thinking and our financial work. So we founded Tally to be a financial automation company with a mission to make everybody less stressed and better off financially by creating a service that is complete financial automation and effectively take what the ultra wealthy already have in the form of family offices that maybe live in Greenwich, Connecticut, you know, this team of four or five people that figure out all the strategies and then actually execute those strategies on behalf of wealthy people. We are building that into software and allowing us normal people to be able to just articulate what we want out of life. Like I want to be debt free or I want to own a home and then have this intelligence service that can figure out how to get us there and then do the work necessary to make it happen.”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So, this is my fourth company that I founded, but it's definitely closest to my heart. And growing up, I had the most amazing parents. And I have kids now and I aspire to be half of the parents that they were. But the one thing that was big detractor was there was a pretty persistent level of financial anxiety and stress in our household. And I saw the toll that that took on my parents. And it's kind of an ever-present tax on the happiness potential. And so when I was thinking about the next 20 years, when they write the history books, what are going to be the big themes? And I believe one of the biggest is going to be the role that automation plays in really shaping the human experience. And in our modern lives, there is nothing more stress-laden and really anxiety inducing than our financial lives, especially for the majority of people. And what's really powerful is I believe it's possible to build into software, the capability of doing”

    2019-11-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Startup Valuations Are Not As Overpriced As You Think, How To Determine Whether An Investor Is Truly Aligned To Your Mission and What 2 Traits Make The Truly Special Board Members with Jason Brown, Founder & CEO @ Tally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source