YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Fonstad

lines on the record: 101
first: 2018-02-21
most recent: 2018-02-21
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

“So, yeah, so we're typically focused on, well, we will certainly do consumer investments, we're investors in Baobal Bar, for example, and birch box, as you mentioned. So we do have some applications and investments in that area in commerce.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so digital health is another area that we continue to think mobile devices continue to offer that type of application and there's a number of consumer elements to it and even if it's through an employer you're at the end of the day it's consumers that are using these applications so that's a fundamental way there's also or investors in a company like Crew for example which uses applications it's like an everyday man's WhatsApp for how they manage their experiences in a shift Workforces like at McDonald's, or if you're a baggage carrier at Dallas Fort Worth from American Airlines and you want to change a shift or you want to grab someone to grab a part for you out of a supply thing, you're using crew for that type of application. So they may have business applications, but they're at the end of the day, they're consumers that are.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I think we're in early days, and there's some fantastic companies coming at a number of different problems. It's, again, sort of a new technology paradigm. And when you have a new technology paradigm, it's really the creativity of the entrepreneur and thinking through, well, how can I use this technology paradigm to solve this problem? Because it wasn't solvable before, but now being able to use blockchain for identity in different ways can cut out the minimalman in a lot of applications and things of that sort.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While they're outselling. And so, how do you manage that as a sales team? And so using AI and that application has been really powerful in using. There's a number of AI applications for business applications, Vita Health uses that, for example, and managing their relationship through the coaches. So that's one area that we're seeing a lot of interesting and sort of tied to that big data as being a theme.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody on the planet now has to think about software security. So the paradigm has really changed the way we think about security. And so there's been an explosion of new opportunities. So about a quarter of our portfolio is in that. We're also quite interested in using AI and machine learning. To focus on specific business problems. So, companies like Troops, which is using AI for solving problems for sales leaders and sales managers in companies. By serving between a sales force and then Slack and working over on a Slack. As a communication vehicle, and they can fetch and receive and aggregate information for sales teams while they're on the fly because everybody's working off of mobile devices, but many of the legacy systems are super hard Access while they're”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So we've typically invested around themes and then we see new themes emerging, as you would see typically, as new technology trends are cycling in. So about a quarter, a little over a quarter of our fund is actually focused on software security. And that's because we have seen some pretty major shifts in how people think about managing software in security. In the old days, it was about building a giant wall. Right. And hoping for the best. And today it's much more about assuming a break in, and now it's about capturing those break-ins. And containing them and eradicating them as quickly as possible with minimizing damage. And so it's just a fundamental shift. And also the types of companies that are using security software has changed. It's not just financial institutions and the government. It's Vox Media and pretty much.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why I had to do the calculation. Right, right. You just finished your second one. Let's first talk about what you think is interesting to invest in some of the investments you made and then about what's happening. Because, you know, one of the things that's happened is SoftBank has their mega fund, which is now moving. They're not in Series A, but they're moving closer and closer. There's a lot of money in the system. Let's talk about what you think are interesting investments right now and what you guys are looking at versus some people looking at cryptocurrency, some people are focusing in on SaaS was a big thing for a while. Talk about what you think you guys have done and then what you think is interesting”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Jennifer Fonstead. She is the co founder of Aspect Ventures, which is a venture capital firm that focuses on Series A investors. Jennifer, let's talk a little bit about, we talked about how you got to where you got in creating your own firm. Talk about the challenge. How much money do you have under management now?”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it was really not about that, actually. It was really much more about our excitement to sort of focus on this area again, which is where we had both started our careers. And we felt that both of our firms had grown so large. I joined DFJ when it was 140 million under management and I left it was about three and a half billion under management.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this series A. In focusing on Series A and rolling up her sleeves and company building, collaborating with other investors to help do that. And so I was talking to Teresa about that at lunch over at Stanford one day, said, hey, maybe we should do this together. And by the end of lunch, we were already collaborating on what we were going to do”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the next step, for the next step, that full life cycle. And so we joined. So I thought that was really where the opportunity was.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what ends up happening is that we ended up in an industry which was very barbell like. So you had a lot of money available company formation. You had a lot of capital available to accelerate growth and scale with the bulge bracket firms. But what was missing was in the middle, which was the classic series A, how do you build a company?”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was seeing and being able to do company building again in a way that. Wasn't so much about firm management. It was much more focused on company building. Helping entrepreneurs be successful, which is where I started my career. And it felt like there was an amazing change getting back to sort of change in our industry. When I first started in the venture industry. Think maybe 10% of DFJ's deals had any prior investor. There was the Angel network was very small. Ron Conway was sort of it and that was still very nascent at that time. But cycle forward 20 years, and you have incubators, accelerators, seed funds, angel networks, micro. And so the amount of capital available to get a company started is unprecedented.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really bring myself closer to a lot of the spinouts that were coming out of a lot of these tech companies like Facebook and Google at the time with many of my friends, Sonia Perkins and a number of others, and was bringing Teresa into that and was pretty excited about how the types of companies that we were seeing. And I was at DFJ and doing investments at DFJ, but I was allowed to make small investments $50,000 less checks through Broadway Angels and anything larger I'd bring to DFJ. And so I thought that was a great opportunity for them and for me. But what I found was I was really excited about the companies that.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so we had the opportunity to work together then and we went different directions. So she went to Stanford Business School. I went to Harvard Business School. And when I joined DFJ, one of the first... She was a founding business development VP at a DFJ startup. And I showed up at the first board meeting as a board observer, and we reconnected. At that time, and when she wanted to get into venture, she gave me a call a couple years later and jumped into Excel. And then we've had the 15 plus years of collaborating on all types of changes in our industry and our firms. And I had started an entity called Broadway Angels, which was an angel network to.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's on a 30 year brewing cycle. The time, so you're trying to predict, and then you're trying to match it to demand a bias KU across the country. So, anyway, it was a fascinating experience. And so Theresa and I had already had”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were trying to help them better predict their beer output and match demand with supply, particularly around different. I would even know where.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so Teresa Gow, who's my co founder, who had been at Excel Ventures for 15 years, she and I actually worked together at Bain& Company back when we both started our career. I forgot that. We worked on the same case team at Bain, four-person case team for over a year”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aspect of that, what I really wanted to do though in starting aspect was driving back towards company building 100% of my time and not spending my time on those global initiatives. But at the time, when I was younger and the firm was growing, I was learning a lot. It was very exciting to meet Robin Lee from Baidu and have the opportunity to help build an amazing company in China.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get a company started. But today it's a global business. And DFJ was very much at the forefront of getting that started by starting a venture funds across the world, which I was able to sit on investment committees of funds in Vietnam and Israel. And that's a pretty dramatic change to think about how venture capital has evolved. So for me, it was both an opportunity for me to learn and to grow. And as you know, I did have that bit of a Georgetown policy wonkish thing. So I really did enjoy the international.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I give Tim Draper a lot of credit in terms of being very forward thinking as he is continuing today with a lot of his cryptocurrency investments. But he was always about how do you, you know, what are the, what can we do to really drive the change in productivity and entrepreneurship? And he, so I would actually argue that there has been some fairly significant changes in venture. I mean, when venture used to be a hyper, hyperlocal business where you just have a group of people, a group of friends around the table that might throw a few dollars into the middle of the table and help.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, why did you continue at a firm? Is that like how do you look at the evolution of venture capital? People always talk about it changing, but it really hasn't changed. Since its conception almost, in little tiny ways, it has. When you look at sort of that sweep of what's happened, and we'll get to you starting your own firm, how do you look at that, not the journey, but why did you stay at one firm? What was the thing? People don't do that anymore. It's changed really significantly.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, yeah, we're both old, Jennifer. Older, older. Older? Older than we were before. But you stayed at the same firm for that long, what was... Because a lot of people, like I interviewed Sarah Tabill recently, she's shifted to a bunch of different ones. How do you look at your doing that and why did you do that?”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super significant diabetes, obesity, smoke secession, actually emotional health as well. These are all issues that can, if left to their own devices, can be very damaging to your personal health as well as for an employer. So they've been able to show significant change in behaviors and in outcomes because you can have an interaction. And as it turns out, if people believe that someone actually cares at the other end about your health and your well-being, they're more motivated to change their behavior.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's also a big shift, and there's a big shift away from solving reactive problems to you're sick, so you need to be taken care of to how do you think about preventative? How do you think about wellness? How do you change that? So we're seeing all these sort of health trends that are underlying that. So via health, for example, which is one of our current investment Is using an online coaching platform to manage chronic conditions.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still constrain choice. And consumers have always viewed and has viewed their experience with their medical as being somewhat paternalistic. Often it started with your employer. Is managing that for you. And then now it's shifting more towards the consumer Based service. But how do you then manage that manage quality, manage payments, manage risk? And so those are the challenges that we're trying to grapple with today.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and I think we're continuing to see amazing, and now with more data available, we're starting to see a lot of new applications for it. And, you know, these mobile devices enable us to both capture data and manage and monitor our health in ways that are still unprecedented. So part of it's the way we charge for healthcare and how we as a system.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was a thread that I followed throughout the early 21st century was, well, I was very passionate about trying to change the way health was both delivered. You're still working. I'm still working on it. I know.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we actually went, we were very patient investors. We did a number of things. So, I actually was very passionate about healthcare and healthcare IT at the time now called digital health. Right. So, I would as an early investor institutional investor in Athena Health at that time, and I made”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were the first institutional investors in Baida, which is now one of the largest search engines in the world, based in China, as you know. So those types of growth patterns were what we were looking for.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you were so, for example, we were early investors in Skype Very similar type of logarithmic growth. We were early investors in Baid”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I think we thought that it was going to be growing. Every technology wave seems to have accelerated or logarithmic growth. And we saw some of the early numbers, particularly through our experience in Hotmail, as showing fascinating logarithmic growth where you would have these clusters where a new technology would be captured in one geographic or community cluster. In this case, Hotmail had a founder that was from India. So you saw it start to blossom in India and then expand out globally. And you could see how quickly these clusters could grow. And so we were just looking for new waves of clusters of growth.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was acquired by Ultavista. It went public, then it was acquired by Altavista, and then it was actually acquired by Yahoo.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Negotiation and conclusion. And I was involved early on in our firm investing company called GoTo.com, which actually invested the concept of paid search.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it just went public anyway. So DFJ had just invested in Hotmail, so I sort of joined just as Microsoft was contemplating purchasing Hotmail. And that was quite an interesting negotiation strategy.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, it was really about trying to find great entrepreneurs. And so you looked in a lot of different places. I spent a lot of time out talking with engineers on college campuses at Stanford and out in young companies talking with other founders. A lot of folks spun out of existing companies at that time. And that's a pattern that we continue to see today. So some of the best companies are started by spinning out of a prior technology company. So that's where we spend our time.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was at the beginning of the internet boom. And I joined DFJ when it was their fourth fund, and it was five investment professionals, Tim John, Steve, myself, and Warren Packard. And we had a $90 million seed fund and we went to work trying to find interesting internet, primarily internet companies, although the firm itself is a broad technology. It was. It was much more”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, which is lesser, we'll talk about why that is later. But so you started there. What was that like the early days of making investments? And what were you focused on? That was what years were those.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly, there were more women in Venture then than there is now on a percentage basis. So there was about 10% of the investment professionals were women at that time, and now it's about 7%.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't tell you I think the main reason, so I wasn't technically trained, so I wasn't doing a lot of coding most of my time, as I mentioned, was more mechanical mind. But I began my career, professional career at Bain& Company. Which was really about a lot about business strategy and pattern matching. And so that's where I felt I was particularly strong. And so when I thought about, and I'm not particularly strong at management, which actually I think most entrepreneurs have at least a sense of how to take on that management role. And so for me, it was much more about pattern matching and helping great entrepreneurs be successful rather than being that entrepreneur myself. Being”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Denied to my foreign policy. A lot of us didn't go into foreign service from the foreign service school. A lot of people did, actually, and the CIA and places like that. You're not in the CIA, are you? You wouldn't tell me. I can't tell you. You can't tell me. I thought so. So you didn't go into computing yourself. You wanted to get into the investment of computing. Why was that?”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not go into the foreign service. I actually went and spent a year teaching in Western Kenya. Instead as my nod to my foreign policy didn't”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I didn't have a technical background, but I'm a very technical person. I spent a lot of time when I was in junior high and high school taking things apart, rebuilding them. Taking cars apart, retailing them. So my father was an engineer by training, and so that was sort of my mentality where I started intellectually. And then I went to Georgetown School of Foreign Ser”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so what I like very fast paced environments where there's a lot of chaos and I can put some structure and pattern match around chaos. And so I saw technologies really exploding, particularly around the internet at that time. And I'd spent a lot of time trying to understand how the internet was going to emerge into the market space and thought that this would be an environment where I would thrive.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At Bang Capital, and he talked about that notion of helping to build a company from the very get-go, and he talked about stocking the first shelves and the first stored staples. And I had never heard about venture capital until I spent some time with him and learned about what that was like and was very intrigued. And so when I was a business school, I spent some time on that and applied for the Kaufman Fellowship and matched with DFJ and was off to the races.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did not win, and I had been, he did not win, but he talked a lot about building, making investments in venture. He was one of the first investor in Staples, for example. Right”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, interestingly, I worked on a political campaign many years ago for a year. I took a year off from my business career and worked for Mitt Romney when he was running for the U.S. Senate Ken Ken Ken Ken Kennedy. Wow.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I joined right after business school. Through a program called the Kaufman Fellows, which was a program where you apply and if you pass through the many hoops, you match with a firm. And you are a fellow for two years, and then that firm decides whether they want to bring you on.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we make our investments, we look for All right, so but you started in a more traditional venture climb essentially. Can you go through a little bit of your background how you got to where you are?”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's been reported that we have the largest women founded fund inventure, though at this point our team is about half men and half women. Right.”
2018-02-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jennifer Fonstad, co-founder, Aspect Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT