YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Neundorfer

lines on the record: 26
first: 2020-10-03
most recent: 2020-10-03
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

“With someone, and we have a good gut feel, and we say, Yes, we really try to check our own gut feel and our instincts with data from people who know them well.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's easy to stand up some sort of MVP of a product, right? The first version is probably going to be ugly. It may be held together on the back end manually with a little bit of duct tape. But we'd like to see someone who has used the product and is wild about it. But then the third place guy that we spend most of our time is on the founder and the team and getting to a place where we believe that that team is differentially suited to build this company and to be successful. So sometimes it's unique insight that they have. Sometimes it's really differentiated experience. Sometimes it's just sort of a magnetic leader that can make things happen. And that to a certain extent, that is a gut feel, but we try to put data into it. We spend a lot of time doing reference calls so that it isn't, you know, Mar and I sitting here and we have a call.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We look for three things when we're looking at founders. The first is a big market. We need to believe that the company is going after a big market or that they're going to create a big market. The second that we look for are.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that we are really conscious of in our process not to have 10 meetings with a founder because they don't have that type of time. So, you know, I think being protected of your time as a founder and running a tight process, getting to a quick no, if that's where it's going, don't be afraid of that, but really leaning in hard to the ones where there does seem to be a fit. And then, you know, Guy, I mentioned this before, but really doing diligence on your investors. So much of the fundraising dynamic is set up for funds and GPs to diligence founders, but it really should be a two-way street because you're giving these people ownership in your company and make sure that they are willing, that we, right, that we as venture capitalists are willing to work for that ownership and that we're really going to provide value.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we encourage our founders to really invest in nailing that virtual pitch. And one thing that we really love is when founders do, whether it's using Loom or some other screen recording, send us a pitch that is not just a slide deck, it's them delivering the pitch. And there's nothing better than that. You have to be charismatic. You need to get the points across. But then we hear how the founder would tell their story rather than flipping through on a static PowerPoint. So that's one way that we really encourage founders to stand out. And then it's all about running a tight fundraising process. And so being clear about who it is that you think you may be a good fit for going after them hard and creating some urgency and momentum around the race. Because frankly, the scarcest resource in all of this is a founder's time. Every single fundraising pitch eats up their time.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See so many pitches, and it is hard to make a pitch stand out in this new world. And it's even harder to make a pitch stand out when you're doing it via Zoom. You don't know what the person who's watching the pitch is doing on the other end.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, Deborah, that's such a great question. And one of the things that we're doing, Deborah, is taking a hard look and being intentional at the questions that we ask founders. So one of the ways that bias can show up is in the things that venture capitalists ask founders when they're in a diligence meeting. And so we've taken a really hard look at that and have actually begun to script out the key questions that we want to cover so that they are the same, whether it is a white woman, a black man, a black woman, whoever it is. And also regardless of the geography, because I have invested now both on the coast and in the middle of the country. And there's a lot of bias that we see in terms of the questions that founders from the middle of the country get asked versus founders on the coast.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what we've done is gather 10 to 15 other GPs, other venture funds, to join us for those pitches. And it's a small thing, but it's one of the examples that we are doing to just try to take that friction out and really try to support founders because there's a lot of opportunity, but it's also a really challenging time to build a business.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“70% of the founders said their experience was that funding opportunities were drying up. And so with that context, it's very easy for venture capitalists like me to sit here and say, now's the time to build, go out, great companies are going to be born. But as a founder, considering making that leap, that's a scary environment to just leap right into. And so, you know, our response to that was to launch new initiatives to really make it easy for founders to fundraise at scale. One of the things we did and continue to do is an event called Pitch Collective. We have all these inbound cold pitches, right? Where we're meeting founders who aren't in our network. But we realized that they're just pitching us. And at the end of the day, that's not that scalable because they're going to have 20 to 50 meetings with venture capitalists.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there will be great companies that are born out of the constraints of this moment. And we've seen that historically. I think that will happen again. But that said, it doesn't make it any easier for prospective founders to make the leap because the reality is it's actually quite hard to raise money right now. So right after COVID hit in April, we did a survey of our early stage founders. We talked to 250 early stage founders in our community. And it was interesting. 50% felt that COVID would negatively impact their business, but 50% had already pivoted, which just speaks to the nimbleness of early stage founders and the fact that in a certain sense, COVID has put everyone back at the starting line and sort of reset the opportunities for early stage startups. But the more interesting point, Guy, was that”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think the second question, if founders are interested in venture capital, is to really do the diligence on the fund and the partner who is leading that deal. Because there's just a wide variety of outcomes that funds are shooting towards and stylistic differences between partners. And so that, you know, we always encourage our founders to do diligence on us because that really will make or break the quality of that experience and I think will shape how the founder feels on the flip side of having taken venture money.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some cases, yes. And, you know, one of the things that I talk about a lot is venture capital is not right for every business, and not every founder should feel like they have to go out and raise outside capital. And I think my main piece of advice to founders and a conversation that I always have with founders is part of meeting them is aligning the incentives of the capital with the vision and motivation.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that supply of black Latinx LGBTQ, that supply has always been there. And so for us, it's not that we're suddenly seeing a new surge now. I think that we are seeing at sort of the industry level that it is a conversation that more people are having. So there's more visibility around the conversation. This taps into our whole belief for starting January. Those founders have always been there. You know, so much of what we are doing is trying to make venture accessible to those founders because for so long it hasn't been. And if their names become synonymous with the Bill Gates and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, that's when we will know that we have been successful.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Person or all of these childcare providers, many of them have gone out of business, she's really become a thought leader and is starting during COVID while people were locked at home laid the foundation for now what the business is doing is getting employees back to work and making sure that parents can find childcare even if it's not where they were sending their child prior to the pandemic.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One other company that I'll highlight is a company called Kinside, a founder, Shadia Segala, who is a repeat founder. And with Kinside, the problem that she's solving is how employers and employees find childcare. And I mentioned Shadia because she's an amazingly charismatic entrepreneur. She's a great leader. She had built a great company. But we got to March and the world shut down. And suddenly no one was sending their kids anywhere. Everyone was locked at home. And so for this moment, you know, it suddenly a lot of her business was in question. And like many of our founders, Shadia saw the long-term opportunity and this looming childcare crisis that is on the horizon of parents not being able to get back to work because either they can't send their children.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. And they are really the first ones to do that. And what we've seen in the past six months is that consumers, you know, between being at home and suddenly really caring about what food they eat and then all of the very visible events in the last couple months around climate change, consumers are really starting to, there's an acceleration in consumers' awareness of climate-friendly foods and being conscious of the choices that they make and wanting those to be sustainable.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question, guy. It's really about the ingredients and where brands and CPG companies are sourcing the ingredients for their foods. And they would basically evaluate the sustainability and on a number of different metrics, including the carbon footprint, including how those ingredients were actually farmed, and then be able to suggest alternative sources, whether it's a different farmer, a different type of ingredient that will have the same impact, so that I as a brand could make those adjustments and make a more sustainable and regenerative food product.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is the part that I love talking about. It's sort of like talking about your kids. And it's hard to pick just one, but I'll give you a sense for some of them. We are investing in problems that we believe are big and we really care about solving. We're really focused on investing in companies that are addressing big, broad problems that are going to shape the future. And so one of those founders that is really doing this is a founder, Julia Collins, who is the CEO of a company called Planet Forward. Julia is a founder who has deep roots in both food and sustainability and great founder market fit. That's something that we look for a lot. And Julia is building a regenerative supply chain for sustainable foods.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mentioned that venture has been so long really inaccessible to most founders. And a lot of that is because many venture capitalists rely on their network to source deals. And that's fine, but most of the people that are in someone's network look or are similar to have similar characteristics to that person. We hear a lot of VCs talk about the test. Can a founder get a warm intro to them? And if so, then they're willing to consider taking a meeting. We turned that on our head at January. And so from the day that we launched, we have been open to cold pitches. And when we went out with that, many of our peers told us that we were crazy. We weren't going to see great pitches. There was no way that we could handle that sort of.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the traditional circuit that most funds pitch, whether it's by geography, race, ethnicity, we've really tried to work hard to diversify our LPVs.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our investors range, so many of them are the typical investors that you would expect to see family offices, high net worth individuals, and some institutions and foundations. But from the beginning, my partner Marin and I wanted to be very deliberate about who are investors, who are limited partners were because so much of the traditional venture model has relied on a very small set of investors or limited partners and has reinforced this flywheel around making that small group very wealthy. And so what we have done in both of our funds is proactively reduced the barriers for non-traditional investors to invest in our fund, whether that is a founder who is just beginning to accumulate capital and wealth and may not have a lot of liquidity and finding ways for them to participate or pitching LPs who fall outside.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we're deploying out of a $20 million fund. We're typically writing checks that range up to half a million plus because we're investing at a stage when founders are raising $250, $300 up to a million dollars at those earliest stages and often the first capital in.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The capital and resources that they need to really generate momentum for their business and get to that scalable growth curve”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We invest at the preced and seed stage, and one of the reasons that we do that, Guy, is when we started January, we did some early research. And there had been a lot of data talking about how little venture dollars women receive in 2019, female-only teams received just 3% of venture dollars. And if a woman happened to have a male co-founder, she received 11% of venture dollars. But what we found in our data as we look just at the earliest stage is that there's not only a gender gap, but it really starts early. So for every dollar that a male founder raises at the precede or seed stage, a woman raises 38 cents, and a black woman raises just two cents. And so that is really where we are focused in January, because as you can imagine, a dollar versus 38 cents on the dollar versus two cents on the dollar, many of those founders are handicapped from the start. And so our focus is on getting”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We invest primarily in tech-enabled software businesses. So we are investing in companies that we believe can be high growth scalable companies that are going to be capital efficient. We are investing the capital early and then are looking for outsized returns. So we're looking for companies that can go on to be $100 million billion dollar companies and really be those outliers that generate returns for our fund.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're doing differently is really building a venture firm that is designed around access and transparency. That's not what venture has traditionally been known for. And it's what has really underserved women and underrepresented founders. And so we make it very easy for founders to pitch us and find us and everything that we do is focused on removing friction for those founders at the earliest stage.”
2020-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT