YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Liew

lines on the record: 104
first: 2017-02-22
most recent: 2017-02-22
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

“Now that you mentioned it, yes, it is. But my true infrastructure in enterprise, that innovation is still happening in Silicon Valley. But as I said before, because popular technology has become, because consumer technology become popular culture, you really need to understand popular culture to be able to have an insight about it and then to be able to drive new innovation from that. And I think Silicon Valley is such an isolated bubble. Our reality is not the reality of a normal American in normal America. And that is what is preventing as much insight and therefore innovation happening here.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think on the infrastructure and enterprise side, you're still seeing a ton of innovation based in Silicon Valley because it does require people to.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What does that do? What prevents you live in Silicon Valley? What prevents that from happening here? Because it seems maybe it's just me. I feel like the innovation has dried up quite a bit. Like you don't see a lot of fresh ideas or feel like there's freshness. There's a lot of recycling, a lot of just feature creep, I guess. I don't know what else to call it, but it doesn't feel like, I think probably Snapchat was the freshest idea to come for a long time. And obviously it's taken off and people are copying it. But how do you imagine you keep that innovation mentality going?”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For one person to be video and the other person texting back. It's not that he questioned these rules. He saw that there was a construct, a metaphor that was constraining what could be. And he starts from first principles and asks himself, what would people do? And this is not something that just happened once, it's happened many times now. Right”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Evan's observation is if you're messaging with somebody, you know they're there, so it doesn't need to ring. Doesn't need to be two way either.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just did what had been done before, and Emman comes along and says, Well, what makes more sense? Another great example is with video chat in Snapchat. Even if you think about FaceTime or any other video chat application, it borrows a phone metaphor. It rings. See if you're there, then you pick it up Then you're both talking to each other.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, your citation. I think a lot of this comes down to Evan being a pretty special person. You know, most of us, we use these sort of unconscious metaphors As we think about new companies or new businesses, new products. Even the best product management visionaries in the world oftentimes rely on these unconscious metaphors. And so a good example might be Friendster started doing reverse chronological order in the feed. And ever since then, every other social network has done reverse chronological order in the feed. And then Evan comes along and says, Well, how do people tell stories? They tell them beginning, middle, and. Reverse chronological order is and middle beginning That doesn't make sense. Maybe we'll do ours beginning, middle, and so that's a great example where people never even question the metaphor.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why wasn't that possible here? What was his unique insight that was not happening at, say, Facebook sort of sold itself as utility and still does to this day, which is sort of a dull way to, you know, it's like, oh, it's a utility, which sounds like electric company or something else. What was the unique difference there? Because, you know, obviously all Facebook does right now is copy Snapchat or it seems to borrow is the way they like to say it and borrow ideas and stuff. So what was the, why was it incapable of companies here to understand that?”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, there was no way that I could have organically understood what that engagement process looked like. But what I could do was open up the Flurry Analytics dashboard with Evan and look at the numbers and see 50% month on month growth and see engagement and retention metrics. There were multiples of what we might expect from other companies. So something was working and it didn't matter that I didn't understand it right away. It didn't matter that my intuition was bad. What matted What mattered was the data. And the next question is, okay, this is clearly working. Why is it working? And Evan could explain it. He had some really unique insights that said why Snapchat was taking off at the time, and we listened and we said that makes a lot of sense.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But well, at the time it was primarily used by young teens, women teens. And I don't hang around with a lot of young women teens.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I told you that I had the insight that I knew as soon as I saw the product what it could be. But the reality is that it's a social product. And so unless you have a lot of friends using the product organically.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, with the barriers to entry from a technology perspective coming down, it's the unique insight to popular culture that becomes the unique resource. And I think that we are actually seeing more of that from the traditional centers of popular culture than from Silicon Valley.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right, and it's because the barriers to entry have dropped the technology needs have dropped. You're back in the day when you needed 30 engineers just to launch a website. There's only one place in the world that you could find enough engineers who knew enough about it to start a company, and that was here. Today, if you want to build an e-commerce site, you can get it off a Shopify off the shelf. If you want to build an app, you can read some blogs and figure it out. And anybody can do that.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But today, where everybody's got a smartphone, everybody's got fast broadband wireless access, you're talking about Middle America. And if you are not representative of Middle America, and in particular if you're not representative of the early adopters of popular culture, then yeah, you've got to look at the data. And that's why I think you're seeing an explosion of startups in New York and in LA, which have historically been the places that lead popular culture.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The early adopter marketing, so people's judgment and intuition was perfect, and they got very reliant on that to pick companies.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's why your judgment. Actually, no good anymore Now, this is different from the first boom, right, in 96, 97, 98. The internet was these sort of techie early adopters, and Silicon Valley was actually a completely representative of”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, I'd say that I think about consumer technology's popular culture. So, if you're thinking about popular culture, the early adopters of popular culture tend to be young women. And so if I see a product, a service, you know, an app that is really taking off amongst young women and taking off because of genuine word of mouth, then that's something that gets me really excited. I think that's predictive of the future.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there are lots of different ways to do venture capital. If you do early stage venture capital, you tend to need to have a perspective on the future that's independent. If you're going to do momentum investing where you can identify winners and then jump into them, then it's a different approach. And I think there are lots of different ways to make money.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things like if you see a problem, jump in and try to fix it And things like making sure you hit budget and hit plan and really being focused on what can go wrong and how you can accommodate that so that you always hit plan. Make the month, make the quarter, make the year. Think those instincts actually can lead you astray in venture capital. So, for instance, let's talk about making decisions quite quickly. You can't unmake an investment decision as a venture capitalist. Once you make that decision, you're living with it for the next seven, eight years. And so it teaches you to, it actually rewards you to just be a little bit more thoughtful and... And do your diligence a little bit more.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that to be a good operator, you learn certain habits, things like make decisions quickly. Because if you make the wrong decision, you can always reverse it.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that you have to know what you're good at to be a really great operator, I think you need to have a singular focus and level of leadership. And management and charisma that can make you incredibly successful. And I've seen what Good looks like, and I'm okay.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so right after I finished up at Netscape, I got a call from a friend from business school who asked me if I'd ever thought about venture capital.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's interesting because the point you're making is that Washington, D.C. is living in the past. Maybe Silicon Valley is living in a version of the future that isn't representative of the present.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll get into that later. Yeah, but look, look, it's a great point because if you lived here in Silicon Valley and you sort of just judged from the experiences that you had, you would think that the Tesla Model S is the top-selling car in America. Right, right, exactly.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the point is, you know, that we use the internet differently than normal people do, right? It was my homepage, and therefore, and because I was the general manager of the site, I was seeing it 10 times a day, 20 times a day. And so I was sick of seeing that same article. The normal people at that time were not logging onto the internet. Multiple times a day, every single day. And so it was new to them. And just that sort of understanding that Middle America is interacting with technology dramatically different from the way that I am and that my intuition and my judgment, which had gotten me to the place that I had gotten to, was actually no good anymore. I had to look at the data. That is something that has continued with me throughout my career”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She said, I'll change it when people stop clicking on it. And I was like, well, that's actually a really good point. Okay, carry on.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a feature article. And it wasn't a news article, but it was service journalism, but it was the same. It was like, you know, top 10 ways to something, I don't know.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the thing that really stuck with me about AOL and Netscape is that the core user for technology is Middle America The things that we see here in Silicon Valley are not necessarily representative of the way that things look in Middle America or what's going to appeal to Middle America. Sure. And I'll give you an example. I was running Netscape, and of course, Netscape was my homepage. And so I would see the same article every day as the header on the Netscape homepage. And I went to our editor-in-chief. I said, why is this still in the middle of the homepage? It's been like the fourth day in a row.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's very true. Very true. And so, what we discovered is from that 2000s to 2006 period is that yes, you could, in fact, build a media business, and that's what gave AOL, a little bit more of the kind of data to say, okay, we should take this plunge. We should totally. Remove access from content and build a content business on its own and just accept the fact that it's going to go down before it goes back up. Sure. And that's in fact what happened.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“John is a very likable guy, and I think that helped a lot. You're right that people always sort of, there was always a level of kind of dissatisfaction because of what had happened in the past. But fundamentally, we needed to come to the conclusion that we did need to carve off the content business, but it was a big bet to do it. With AOL. And so, what we end up deciding to do was to run an experiment first. See if you could build a media business. And AWL had bought Netscape back in 99, right? And so I dropped into run Netscape in about 2004 with the express mandate to see if we could build a standalone media business there.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what was it like working for that? Because that was literally the worst period of AOL's. There was so much, the disaster of the merger and left, case left, Pittman left, John was there. I think Ted was still around. Ted Leonces was still around. And then there was such an enity from the time Warner side for people. So how did you manage through that besides telling them it wasn't, I'm not. Meyer Burlow. I don't think that works necessarily.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that you bring up a really good point. There's this sort of sway between walled gardens and the content being brought inside to openness and then back to walled gardens. And so, yeah, there's definitely kind of cycles, you know, as people think about that”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the problems was that they wouldn't do that at Time Warner. They wouldn't combine the content. It never got fully integrated or integrated at all in any way, or they didn't embrace any of the digital technologies, largely because of personalities, not because it wasn't the right idea. I mean, years later, that's exactly what they did, which was interesting. And you could sort of argue that Facebook was kind of AOL, the next version of AOL, or it still is in a lot of ways.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of the work that we did was trying to think about could we build a media company separate from the access business. And it was totally unclear. At the time, if we could do that. This is the period where you had seen all of the pure play internet companies fall off cliffs. So we decided that you just had to do this. You couldn't hold back the tide. This wasn't what needed to be done. And there was pain that needed to be taken, but you had to do it”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was SVP corporate development and chief of staff of the CEO. And so a lot of the work we were doing was strategic in nature in that we were managing this transition from a bundled access plus content plus service company. Through a world where the core of that, which is the dial up access, was becoming less and less relevant.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I found is that when I meet people that have a certain level of insight and that I feel like I can learn from, I want to just keep on. And early in my career, that's a policy that served me well”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was an interesting job for John. I remember him. His big line was when everyone was so mad because everyone was mad post-merger and everyone was furious and essentially having baby tantrums, little executive baby tantrums. He had a sign or he kept telling people, I'm not the person who towed your car. Like it was after someone, he had seen that at a tow place and he was like, I didn't tow your car. So don't And so he tried. He tried to, that was a very fraught period. You wanted to walk into that AOL mess at the time.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was working on a lot of these acquisitions, and everything that I ended up buying ended up reporting to the president of IAC, John Miller So, when John left to be CEO of AOL in 2002, I ended up following him”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not only that, but you know, if you look at just IAC narrowly now, you miss the fact that it spun off companies like Expedia, companies like TripAdvisor match, you know, Ticketmaster. These are all part of the same company. And he's always been very good at capital market stuff and trying to figure out whether things are more available together or apart and spreading them appropriately.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're exactly right. You're exactly right. And he saw a lot of he was taking a bet on the trend. That things we need, the commerce was going to go interactive, and he had some insights from being early at QVC and HSN that shopping and commerce was a huge opportunity on the internet. And that's where he placed. He was very early.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was a really fascinating experience to get a seat at the table when some of these massive transactions were happening.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was interesting because that was the period of transition from USA networks to IAC. Right. So we sold the cable channels, we sold the TV in the movie studios. We bought in Ticketmaster, we bought Spedia, we bought hotels.com. It was that transition”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be in the valley, City Search ended up merging with Ticketmaster Online, became part of what's now AAC, it was USA Networks at the time. I ended up spending my summer between first and second year at USA Networks, and then I ended up joining them when I graduated as VP of Strategic Planning. And I spent a few years there.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two years at business school. Two years. And luckily enough, that was the 98 to 2000 period. It was a very good time. Right.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of running a business, which is that it was about people and customers and product and technology. It wasn't about spreadsheets in Excel and balance sheets And projections. And I felt like if I was really going to understand that, because I really decided to draw me in, then getting closer to Silicon Valley and to Stanford, which was really regarded as the epicenter of all that innovation. Would be the best place for me to be. And so that's what brought me to business school there.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially. It is very much sitting down with someone and trying to convince somehow you can help their business. Right. And CDSEC also had an events component, but at the end of the day, the money was made by selling websites to small businesses. And I ended up leading the sales team for the new markets whenever we rolled out. And what I realized that there was this huge difference between this sort of McKinsey view of the world and the reality.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I had come from management consulting into this startup, and I was doing the sort of typical ex-consultant stuff. I was doing strategic planning. I was doing business development. And I wanted to get a little bit closer to the business. One of the things that Charles said to me is like, if you want to get close to business, you should work on the thing that's most important to us in that sales. And that's not what I thought of myself as doing. But it's what I did. And so I started selling websites door to door in 1996, which was not easy. We were literally knocking on doors and trying to convince everyone from cafes to oxygen tank resellers”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. That happens to me a lot. I don't know why. But yeah, so actually after that fell apart, I ended up going to business school. So I came up here and went to business school at Stanford.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually they let me in. I called to find out what was going on. It turned out the deal had fallen apart the night before and no one had told me.”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was there for a couple of years, and actually there was another company called Zip2. Elon Musk's first company. And there was a long period of time where City Search and Zip2 were looking at merging with each other. a deal signed and I was in charge of the post-merger integration. And I found myself up in Silicon Valley going to visit the Zip2 offices when I was barred from entering the building by security. Really? And I thought, this is unusual”
2017-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT