YouSaid · the spoken record

Jess Lee

lines on the record: 57
first: 2022-07-05
most recent: 2022-07-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You date multiple people across many rooms, and then they follow what happens with those couples. And it seems like a contrived concept, although I have to say I almost debated starting a dating app with this very concept of getting to know people first before actually meeting or reviewing pictures. To me, that reflects this desire to return back to really getting to know people. It's like we're tired of this fake appearance-based swiping on Tinder, looking at people's perfect Instagram lives and just really wanting to get to know someone. We've been trapped in the pandemic for so long and apart from each other. I think there's this desire to go back to real deep connections with the decline of church as a gathering function. You're not knowing your neighbors as much anymore, kids just sort of being on social or in games, I think there's a real thirst to get back together.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I love Marvel and Star Wars, but I also love my trashy reality TV shows. There's a show called Love Is Blind, and it's a show on Netflix that is about forcing people to fall in love without seeing each other. You are stuck in two rooms with a wall in between you and you just talk to each other. And you have to fall in love and propose to the other person. You have to find someone that you feel like you can access.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring spec at Sequoia is not too different from the hiring spec for founders, which is you need to have a spike somewhere. You have to have something you're exceptional at. It doesn't have to be the same thing across everyone. There just have to be a spike. You have to be really great at something. And then you have to have a lot of grit. This job is not for everyone. Being a founder is not for everyone. And there's going to be moments where you're like, why did I do this? Oh, this is not working right now. And you just have to manage your own psychology and keep going. That was one of the things Jim gets said to me. He was like, you need to be able to manage your own psychology. Every investor at Sequoia has had a moment where they're like, oh, none of my investments are going well. This is not easy. Like, oh, maybe I shouldn't be here. How are you going to get through that valley? And I was like, well, you know, I ran a summer social company for nine years. That was not very certain. And there were many near-death experiences.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the kindest thing that people have done for me is just believe in me when it was like not obvious. A lot of people have taken career bets on me. The power of that belief of someone who's really good saying, no, I think you could do that is really, really powerful and life-changing for people. And several people in my career have done that. Marissa Mayer hired me as an APM at Google when I tanked in my interview and I was like, I don't know if I want this job. Like that's probably not the best thing in the world to say in an interview, but she took a chance on me. Rulaf and Jim at Sequoia took a chance on me joining Sequoia. Like I'd never done a single angel investment, not proven at all as an investor. And they were like, you know what? Let's give you a shot. And it has not been a straight up into the right journey by any means. But I always be really, really grateful for that, the power of that first believer is probably the kind of thing anyone stands for me.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really should be part of a lot of firms. Like if you have the budget and the fees for it, that should be part of your practice because otherwise you're just meeting other people in the Stanford GSB network. It's not that diverse. And that's not the best way to find the next great company in Austin or Atlanta or Toronto. You have to seek those non-contrarian non-obvious opportunities. And if technology were a little bit more involved, if people weren't just using Airtable and Salesforce to run their firms, it's like the only piece of software. I think that would be great. And then I also think about the percentage of dollars flowing to female founders. I care about that a lot. Will you represented? Are the problems of women being solved in the tech industry?”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a board member and a community builder and a product builder, I think I care about what my founders would say about me, the ones that I work with. Would they say yes, Jess, Sequoia, shifted our trajectory? Obviously, they did the heavy lifting, but there was that crucible moment, that difficult decision where I got maybe pushed one way or another or got a piece of advice that shifted the trajectory of a company just a little bit, a few degrees here or there to get us to where we needed to go. That's definitely one. Would they come to my funeral if I die? You know, do they care enough about me and I care about them very deeply? We talk about not just resume virtues, but funeral virtues, right? Like would they come and maybe want to say a word? I don't know. And then I would want to look at the VC industry and say, see lots of firms innovating and changing the way things are done, right? Like we're not the only firm with a data science practice, but we're one of a few.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And really galvanize this energy down in LA and around women's soccer and to bring together, there's a lot of tech people involved in the soccer team. There's a lot of celebrity media people involved. But she just builds bridges across different communities. And I'm sure that's going to turn out to help her. I know it has help her career-wise, but she's just someone I really admire for generosity and for her community building power.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. She goes above and beyond, treats people really well. She's loved everywhere she goes. And so she was able to pull together and co-found in her spare time a soccer team with Natalie Portman.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many incredible women inside of All Rays. Someone I really, really admire and have spent time with is Karen Nortman upfront. She's based in LA. She is such a generous spirit. And she has this way of bringing people together across industries to do really interesting things. So she created the women's soccer team, Angel City.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody's been able to get rid of that feature. I'm sure that code's really old and sucks, but people want to make their maps. And if you took them away, people would be really mad. Yeah.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was getting so much traffic, we literally thought someone was attacking Google Maps and trying to take us down. And that really showed me the power of community. It showed me if you give people tools and then empower them, the results can be quite surprising. And I just remember what that small team was like. We were so passionate about this project. We were so below the radar of management because nobody cared about this feature. But that allowed us to work really, really fast with a lot of passion, a lot of user testing, and it was an incredible experience. And that's part of why I decided I wanted to do startups next was that little tiny startup.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite project inside of Google Maps was this thing called My Maps, which I think has not been touched for many, many years, but still Google has not been able to get rid of it. It's this feature that lets you create your own map. You can bookmark your favorite restaurants, draw out a route, and it was at the time innovative because Google hadn't done a lot of user-generated content. YouTube wasn't part of the picture yet. It wasn't a thing. This was in 2006 maybe. We had this tiny little team, I think five people inside of maps, and we just went off and built this thing where anyone could make a map. And we released it. And it just exploded like wildfire. I remember we thought we were being dosed, but it was actually a wildfire in SoCal. And some radio station had made their own map of here's the safe zones, here's where the fires are, all this information.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the biggest mistakes first time founders make that I certainly made is just not making expectations clear. I used to look at some folks on the team and be like, why are they not doing their job? Or like, why did they do it this way? It makes absolutely no sense. They're just not doing a good job. And then I would learn something like how to do a better operational framework or how to set OKRs or how to clarify customer persona. It's like, oh, it was actually my fault. I did not explain what their job was or what expectations were or what goals I was trying to hit or who our customers were. And so there is an art to doing your internal storytelling of who your customer is, what the expectations are, that it's not like you walk out of the womb with that knowledge, you learn it over time. And that's a lot of what we try to teach founders in ARC. Here are the parts that you need to make really clear in how to communicate it really well so that your team can even know what their job is.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are one or two or three things that really, really matter where you have to really innovate and delight what those three things are varies from company to company. And then there's so much core people stuff over time, your job as a founder becomes not just product, but it becomes people. It's almost like the product that you're working on is actually the culture of the company and the board chart and the people and all the management. There's a lot where you do not need to innovate too much because it's not like human psychology has completely changed in the last five years. People are still motivated by they want autonomy and mastery and purpose. And so you need to figure out how to solve for those three things. It's not like that changed suddenly in the last year. So those are the areas where we really, really want to help you apply the best of to allow you to innovate on product, essentially technology.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open application. And so you can apply, send in your pitch deck. We use data science to help us screen, but ultimately we do look at every single application. A partner in Satisfoya looks. And then on top of that, we added a little bit more of these community and mindset elements that trip to Klarna so you can just see like this is what greatness looks like. What's your scale of ambition? This is what it could be one day, like just pushing people a little bit. And so those are some of the things that maybe that's the case study of ARP and how it's evolved over time. But it's been five years in the making through many iterations of the product. I think that's another part of what you do in product. Like you iterate, you ship an MVP, you iterate constantly, incessantly until it's better and better and better. And then you try to do bigger, bigger things along the way.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then in this iteration, I think we've expanded and we're adding new different types of learning. And so in addition to that framework, which might have been a deck at some point, a little bit of applying it yourself, there's actually a workbook. There's company design cards. And we folded this all up into a concept we call company design. The founders are the ones who are building the company. We're not company builders, but maybe we could play a role in helping them design or architect or apply the right design paradigms to their company. And so we think about that in terms of the core foundational concept, some of which are evergreen, some of which are more tactical and evolve over time. Think about community. Think about mindset. I think that's maybe the biggest innovation of ARC this time around is, well, two innovations. One is it's an open application process, which we never had before. Before, you know, you would figure out some way to get in touch with a Sequoia partner. Now this is a”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A framework that you apply for your own company. Instead of talking about culture at Zappos and why I was important, let's break down the culture of Zappos and break that down into a framework for what is a great core value is usually there's some pithy value statement deliver wow is one of Zappo's deliver wow Then there's the behaviors what does that mean it means customer service is excellent it means you can return things it means we go above and beyond And then what's the legendary story that goes with that? And for that, it's the story that goes legend of the customer service person who stayed on the phone for 10 hours with someone and got them a pizza and let them return their shoes one year later. That is actually how people absorb culture. It's not whatever poster you stuck on the wall. It's that story that exemplifies that behavior. And so we broke that down. We work with founders to actually write out their culture.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in our first class of arc right now, but it's actually been four or five years in the making. It started at first with curriculum and a cohort program we designed for our series A founders. And so the first version, we worked with a professor at the GSB, Garth Sloaner, and Ruloff was deeply involved. And we wrote 10 weeks of curriculum around the various company building concepts and tried it out. And it got great reviews. And then we thought, okay, how do we take this from maybe Stanford GSB style case studies to a little bit more hands on? And so the next iteration, we started to work more with the earlier stage founders and we turned the case studies into frameworks of like, here is actually how you break down this case study.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's powerful and emotional and very strong. That's probably Rula. I think I would say Alfred is Spider-Man. Spider-Man is secretly everyone's favorite. At one point was an underdog and underestimated, but is really smart. Spider-Man like invented his suit and all of that stuff and is loved around the neighborhood. You have no idea how much Alfred is loved internally and by his founders. So that's probably Alfred. I would say Pat Grady is Captain America. He's got a little bit of that Boy Scout good human moral compass, all American thing going on, smart, great leader. Yeah, yeah, he's definitely Captain America. Yeah, man, that might be all I got for you to think about.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, okay. Rulaf is the incredible Hulk. He has got this Bruce Banner side where he's just like an incredible genius, is capable of understanding sectors and industries to a really insanely deep level from like MongoDB to Instagram to 23andMe. I mean, he's intellectually gifted. But at the same time, he has this other side that comes out.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mantis, which is who I dressed up as for Comic-Con. She's the one with That's me. I could tell you the superpowers of all of our partners, but it's the mapping back to Marvel characters that makes that very hard.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I feel today that investment was only 10 years ago. So we have to continuously monitor and just make sure that we're ahead of the game. You know, we monitor our founder NPS obsessively. We look at what competitors are doing. We are constantly questioning, is this good enough? Every week we're, I think five weeks into the ARC program in Europe. And each week we're debriefing on like how we make it better next week. It's just sort of this relentless customer obsession.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both, both, absolutely. Any success we have today is because of work that was done 10 years ago from an investment perspective, certainly. The investment that we made in a public.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's just that rigorous culture around teaching and learning and training the next generation and empowering. There's a spirit of generosity. You hear sometimes at other firms about like, oh, I found this investment and then the senior person sniped it from me. It's almost the opposite. When I got to Sequoia, Ruloff found what he thought was a great investment. He's like, this is great. Do you want to work on it? And that's just how we roll. And it makes people want to stay. It makes people want to work there. That's combined with a high level of paranoia too. There's this constant like, are we good enough? Sukuha is very high imposter syndrome internally.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very much an apprenticeship model. Our team's pretty small compared to a lot of firms. They're investing team and each person is apprenticed to someone. And, you know, when I joined, I worked very closely with Brian Schreier. He met with me every Monday, debriefed on every partner meeting. I shadowed other partners at board meetings and got to see all the different styles of company building, right? Because we're all very different. Sequen has a diversity of styles. And so I got to see Alfred Lens on the numbers and say, this is the number you need to care about that is a leading indicator of this huge mess that you're about to uncover. Or Sean can really connect you. He's got like an incredible network and might be able to get you to that one person. And we all leverage each other's superpowers and strength. But being able to shadow, we're very explicit about let's do debriefs after each meeting so that what one person picked up can be shared with everyone else who might be newer.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reasons Sequoia has been successful for five decades has a lot to do with culture. And the same thing you hear from founders, culture eats strategy for breakfast, culture is the most important thing to get right. That's actually true at Sequoia as well. And there's two parts to the culture. It's performance and teamwork. And performance is around the scale of ambition to have the best fund in any vintage to innovate. We're paranoid, we want to reinvent when necessary. That's quite powerful and it's led to a lot of innovation from the Sequoia Capital Fund innovating on the financial structure to being allowed to create an engineering team of our size inside of Sequoia to the Scouts program. And not every experiment works. We've shut down things that haven't worked. And so there's that. And then there's also, I think, the teamwork pieces and what you mentioned, learning is really important.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gather people and put them together in rooms and just try to get them to help each other and try to help them with their careers. And that's it. It's not about all race and how you can help all rays. It's really like how can all raise help you. And so one of our most successful programs is actually really simple. It's just a cohort program. And you meet regularly with people who are at the same stage, GP or associate just with your group. And out of that magic happens, deal flow, new jobs. great investment opportunities. It's actually pretty simple.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Home and don't work to take care of the kids, right? And that burden tends to fall on women. That's actually a really big economic opportunity too. So I think there are really interesting businesses to be created that might be a little contrarian at the intersection of serving these customers and creating economic opportunity. I work with a company called MAVEN. It's the largest telemedicine network for women's health and family health. So it helps with the path to parenthood, fertility, IVF, pregnancy, postpartum. I use it extensively when I threw two kids. And it's an incredible work benefit for employers who want to keep women and have them come back as 46% of women don't return to work after pregnancy. That is a huge bet on that thesis on the caregiving side. I work with a company called Otter that helps you find care from other parents.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a lot of different factors. One is maybe you can't be what you can't see. The fewer big successful women CEOs and leaders there are, the younger generation, it's like, oh, maybe that path is not for me. And it's definitely changing. But that's part of it. And then I think there's just a lot of bias. You invest in what you know and what you understand. And so for all those people who said, oh, always women's fashion big thing, it's because they just weren't the ones reading the magazines or buying the products that way. In my investing, I've tried to identify top-down who are consumers that are vastly underserved. One train of thought is women often become the chief caregiver of the home as well as the chief medical officer of the home. You kind of end up making a lot of the doctor decisions for the kids or being the one to drop off or decide what to do or maybe you stay.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think who makes funding decisions impacts it? And then there's just systemic bias. And I think the best way to overcome that is to have those great counter examples. The more there are companies like Figs or Stitchfix run by women targeting maybe this underserved consumer. The more of those there are for founders, the more FOMO there will be. So I think that's the path forward. You have to help probably Queen make some of these women.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sadly, the dollars flowing to female founders has not gone up. It's been about flat. It goes back a little bit some years ahead, a little bit, but it's basically about the same since we started all raised four years ago. So that's sort of the next chapter for all race. How do we really step up and help the female founders?”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when I started, and then when we started tracking the numbers at all rays, which is sort of a nonprofit that I co-founded with 30 other women and venture that came out of this rage, there were 9% of Czech writers at VC firms were women. And now it's about 14, 15%. So it's definitely gone up in about four years. Sequoia is 25% women investors now. It's definitely moving in the right direction.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“70% of healthcare decisions. And so that was a big driver for me to even go into venture in the first place. I want to solve that problem. And it's a huge investment thesis of mine. And so I would say a larger thesis I have is there's underserved customers everywhere. You have to be a little contrarian to make money in investing. You have to either see opportunities other people don't or opportunities other people underestimate people to take risk on things that maybe haven't worked before. And I just saw firsthand as a female founder and working on a product target women that, hey, there's big businesses out there that people don't think are big businesses. And those underserved customers, if they are served, become wildly deliriously happy. And then you get that going back to the community point, a community and this incredible moat of community that leads to word of mouth growth.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same as enterprise SaaS company you wish you invested in would make a hundred million in one year. Sadly, that's no longer the case anymore given what's happened with the media industry, but that's what I did at the time. And people, you know, would be like, oh, draw their attention and they would equate at least the dollar amount to realize like, oh, you know what? Women or 50% of humans and 100% of us wear clothes. Maybe that is a big market. But through that experience, it just really drove home for me that the people who make the investing decisions and their life experience, biases, who they know as customers really impacts what problems in the world get solved and which customers get served at all by technology. And that filled me with immense rage. I was like, it's really hard for us to raise money because people don't think this is a problem or don't see a lot of women's problems, even though we control 80% of household purchasing power.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think my experience as a founder is what's shaped my investing lens the most. I was a female founder running a company targeted at women. And I just remember my fundraising experience and my company building experience, it felt very lonely. There weren't a lot of other female founders that I could talk to and there weren't a lot of investors who got what I was doing. I don't think I ever pitched a single woman. And I would often get these comments like, oh, is women's fashion a big market? Let me ask my wife about this. I started to resort to this parlor trick of taking like stacks of fashion magazines and like slamming them on conference tables to try to get attention, also to get them to look at me instead of my male co-founder, even if I was talking. And I would say this single issue of Vogue magazine, the September issue makes $100 million in a year, you know, which is about.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need to talk to customers every week. That never stops being part of your job. You really have to have your finger on the pulse and know soon whether that enthusiasm is beginning to waver or not. You can track your NPS data. You could instrument the heck out of it. There's a great tool called Sprigg that literally lets you push the customer NPS question or a series of questions out constantly and then categorize using AI the result. So I would just really instrument the business and then just it's a cultural thing. It's a metrics thing. Ask a personal obsession of the CEO too.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that goes back to our earlier point of product mindset and customer obsession. I think the best founders are customer obsessed. They talk to their customers all the time and then they're good at picking out this is who we serve right now. And yeah, sure, maybe one day we'll, everyone, but right now, this is who we're focused on. And we have to get this group so delighted and so happy that they tell their friends and then the base expands little by little. Eric you wanted Zoom is actually pretty famous for this. When they started, they said no a lot to customers. I think he might have stiff-armed, I think it was either Oracle or Cisco all the way till IPO. They just said no to the really, really big customers till post IPO because he just wanted to be sure that they would be happy and that he could serve them well. And there's all the stories of companies that have expanded too quickly and lost that core and tried to be everything to everyone. And I think that's one.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Comic-Con, I would say it plays a big role getting into Hall H and doing all of that, going through that ordeal. That's definitely not for everyone. But at the same time, you can, families bring their four and five-year-old kids and just roam through the exhibit hall. So there's always, I think, a path in to any community of seeing what it's like, a little bit on the edges. Let's wander the halls of Comic-Con and just look at the exhibits. And then there's for the true belief or inner circle hardcore nerds like myself, there's another experience.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just love it. I go each year and it's a huge hassle to get into anything because there's 100,000 people there and only 7,000 seats in Hall H, which is the hall where all the big panels come. You have to line up overnight for 30 hours with a group. Well, and no one wants to stay 30 hours. So you have to rotate people in there, like literally shifts. You bring food, you camp out, you sleep overnight, you're dressed in full cosplay. It's just a little bit of an ordeal. There's like little rituals around it. Some people need to escape to go to the toy place to buy all the cotton toys. We want to get into the panels. And so you bond. We form this group once a year to go to Comic-Con and hang out and just feel like the energy of the crowd together in that hall and really just geek out about things. And in the line, you're next to some random people, but you know you are there for the Marvel Cinematic Universe panel. And so you can talk about it together and hang out and you just kind of make.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just really love pop culture. I love Marvel. I love Star Wars. I'm a fan. I watch quirky sci-fi shows, the 100, and a chance to sort of escape into those worlds and then learn about the makings of the show and like the people behind and the actors. That's just what I love. I'm a fan, like the ultimate fan if you look behind me literally my comic book collection.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some relic or media about what this is that gets out into the world. So it draws other people in. And so that's maybe the photos that you see of the crazy costumes. You're like, oh, that looks kind of fun. Maybe I should go. Those, I think, are some of the key elements to building Greek comedy. But I think Burning Man does it like no other government. There's also the laws and the code. I mean, in some ways, similar to religion, but the religion is a little bit more of the rituals of it.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's this really old paper, I think it's called The Power of Community, and it talks about how you need four different elements to community. I think it's government, economy, religion, and media. And I think Burning Man does that really well. The religion piece is you're supposed to have like an ethos, a shared ethos, and a way of doing things that's sort of just known. You have to have an economy. There has to be a real sharing of value between the community members, burning man that's obviously like food and water and whatever you're bartering. Like it's literally a bartering economy. The ritual is the burner code, the principles, little rituals that you do. Like, I don't know, do a angel in the sand and just all the dressing up, but you feel like you belong to the religion of burning man. You exchange value and you give and you get out of the community. The media part is there has to be.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hilarious, it's really funny. Anyway, I think there's a lot you can borrow from the consumer playbook and the community playbook and then bring that to all kinds of companies.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lawyer, that pretty much all the founders use now. And he realized there's a lot that could be done in contracting if you used product. And so he created Ironclad and he began with just dinners, just helping the legal community hang out, share their issues, maybe even commiserate a little from being beaten up by the sales team so much. And that grew and grew and grew. And fast forward today, he has a chief community officer. That's not a title that you see much in enterprise companies, but that's how important community is. They have a community platform where the legal teams can hang out and talk to each other, solve each other's issues. They still do lots of events. And then even borrowing even further from the consumer playbook, they're big on TikTok. They have a guy named Alex Sue, who runs this account legal tech bro. It's really funny and it's just him commiserating about how tough it is to be a lawyer inside of the enterprise. And that draws eyeballs.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I work with a company called Ironclad, which is digital contracting platform. And the main customer are legal teams. If you think about legal teams, lawyers are maybe not the highest on the totem pole inside of an organization. They're not the biggest buyers with the biggest budgets. People are often complaining about the lawyers saying, hey, you guys are slowing down our sales contract. Like, why do we have to put all this protection and why can't I just sign this deal? And so the lawyers are doing this really important job, but they don't have a lot of budget. They're not the most loved. And that underserved user, that is a really big opportunity to surprise and delight with a great product, grow loyalty and have that group, which is very small, all talk to each other. And that's what Ironclad did. Jason is a former lawyer, so we had a lot of affinity and deep understanding. He actually created the open source seed docs that while he was”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Known or biggest community site in a space like consumer where there's very little longevity, brands go in and out of favor so quickly, we had a very loyal community and I remember maybe it was 12 years after we started our acquirers acquirer shut down Polyvore. And my Instagram, my DMs, I even got snail mail from community members who were really upset for something to have served.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the reason community is so relevant for business is that it's the ultimate growth engine. You're always worried about your CAC and how expensive it is to run an enterprise sales team, how difficult it is to acquire paid customers on Facebook or Instagram. And if you have a community, which basically means a group of customers who love your product so much that they're willing to talk to their peers about it, that is free word of mouth marketing. That is zero CAC. And so I think the best companies in both consumer and enterprise know that and really cultivate that obsessed, loyal group of community members. And those customers are loyal to the brand. They give you feedback when they don't like what you're doing. They're your ear to the ground. They're your greatest advocates. It's really, I think, a secret weapon. It's something we did really, really well. And my company at Polyvor was despite not being the most well-”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To reach out maybe one month sooner, maybe before they were raising and was able to establish that relationship. We look at all different kinds of signals. On the picking side, we have a lot of benchmarks at this point on how well different companies are doing. So for Sunday, we were able to see that their retention rate as a D2C subscription product was really best in class. And so that gave us a lot of confidence. It gave Stephanie this confidence to like, okay, I feel pretty good about this investment. Similarly with Gong, we were looking at their reviews and ratings data across them versus competitors and we kind of got the sense that they were the emerging category leader. And we invested it wasn't like entirely clear on winning. Like the founders like knowing we have this data and can use it to help them. So when I was working with Ironclad, I shared some of the data science analysis that we've done. And to this date, I still share sort of the NPS data, the ratings review data that we have to help.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the product role I hadn't talked about is the investors are also our customers. So we have a data science platform that we use to help us with all parts of our job. And if you think about investing job, it's sourcing, picking, winning, and company building. And we talked a little bit about the company building side, but we also help on the rest of that. On a nightly basis are pulling signals from all over the place to try to figure out what companies are inflecting, automated due diligence, comparison across, you know, to try to figure out who's the emerging category leader. That helps across all parts of the business. I can maybe share some examples. On the sourcing front, one of our partners, Bogomil, led an investment in a company called Infracost. Infracost has an open source component. And so we were able to see in GitHub that that company was inflecting. And so Bogomo was able”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On stage from Elon Musk. It's all interconnected, the better the firm is at helping founders, the more we become a magnet for other great founders of the next generation.”
2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source