YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Scheinman

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31
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2016-03-02
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2016-03-02
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  1. “But I thought an Airbnb for food idea was a big idea. We saw two companies that we were very seriously considering over the last two years investing in which we did not for various reasons. And when I found out that homemade, that Nick and Mike on their own bootstrapped this for a year in New York, started getting traction, got back into TechStars the second time they applied and graduated. I like that. That showed me that these guys, again, had that vision worth fighting for. They had the perseverance to keep at it. They truly were passionate about this and that we could help them build a billion dollar company. So check it out. You can get great food on homemade.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “We literally just closed our first investment for Fund 2. It's a company called Home Made, like Homemade Food. It's a first in a lot of ways. Number one, it's our first fund to investment. Number two, it's our first non-Silicon Valley investment. We invested, they're based in New York. They will be coming and spending some time with us. We're going to give them the Silicon Valley ethos. But we're comfortable with them staying in New York. They're a graduate of Tech Stars. I met Nick, the founder and Mike, his co-founder over a year ago when they were trying to get in Tech Stars and did not get in. But we shared the same vision, which was allowing anyone to be a chef at home and bringing home cooked food to neighborhoods so you can meet your neighbors, you can build a community around food. People can have a second source of income. In some cases, their full source of income doing what used to be a hobby now, right? This is a vision that we had as soon as I saw Airbnb. Missed that one too.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “A tough one, so I'll tell you what I'm going to answer the question, but it may not be the answer that you are seeking. We co-invest with 15 plus amazing venture investors in some angel investors. And I think some of them I would call mentors learn a lot from these folks. Some are mentors from a distance. So I think there's some great consumer software investors that we love to co-invest with that I admire. I don't think I could pick out one. So I'll say that I greatly admire Warren Buffett. And the reason is for these qualities. Number one, he's successful and consistent. Number two, he has a focus and he sticks to it, right? And number three, he's humble. And those are the kind of traits I think that, you know, we try to have also at Maven.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “As a seed investor before that for five years I missed a couple of companies, in particular one that I got there just a little bit too late was Waze. I love Waze. And Kleiner put a bunch of money and it was too expensive for me at that point. But I love those guys. And then I took that idea and I thought, what else could be a ways like idea? And this was a long time ago, but finally last year we invested in a company that we call the Waze for Weather. It's called Sunshine. And it's for the first time in human history using your smartphone passive device and a little bit of community. We have accurate weather data for 48 hours. So even though we miss some, I learned from those mistakes.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, now you know you have to read it. That's probably why we're doing this interview, right Let me tell you why I chose it because it's a story. It's a great, it's an amazing book and it's a great story, but it's a story of entrepreneurship at its heart. You know, it's a story about people, especially on the leadership who had a vision. They could take these group of boys who had no business being at any kind of level. Forget about competing in the Olympics, but just beating the Harvards and Yale's and the Princetons at the time, right? Here were a group of boys in Washington stayed who were some of them had, you know, they were living on their own as kids or from lower middle income families, but they had a drive to be excellent. And they had coaching that got them there. And they had a vision that was worth fighting for. And they had the persistence. And it was a great team. And they accomplished amazing things. And that's exactly what a startup needs to go through. So I highly recommend that book.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, this is tough, but I'll mention one that I recently read, and it's not necessarily in the tech industry. It's called The Boys in the Boat. It's the story of the rowing team that won in the Olympics during the Nazi era.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “A self driving car company. That's interesting, and that's going to change the world. We're an investor in a company called Neighborly, which is building a marketplace where people could invest in bonds to build their local schools. It's a big idea, right? If that scales, that's going to be a massive company doing good in this world.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I personally would agree with you. I think that you can argue either way, we're not an investor in Bitcoin. And money works. It could be better, yeah. We'll see. I mean, I'm not in super opposition to a Bitcoin, but it didn't speak to us. There are examples of companies that like WhatsApp, I mean, they were texting before WhatsApp, but they did something so much better, international texting for free, essentially, that wasn't done before and some group texting stuff that wasn't done. They really did something unique. But you could argue it's a thousand times better than what was there. But the great companies that we love to invest in, Snapchat created a new way for people to communicate. The reason that took off is because that didn't exist before. And it spoke to people. Like it solved a problem. You know, Steve Jobs was brilliant about finding opportunities that people didn't even know they needed. And those are the kind of companies that we love to invest in. Not the ones that incrementally change, but the ones that are truly going to bring something new. Like we're an investor in.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, where else can you do this today? Like, most startups fail in the consumer space when they build something that's a little bit better than what you can do. Because frankly, like, we're lazy. Consumers are lazy. And if I have to learn a new habit, it better be something so great that I need to do or so much better than what already I can do. I'm not going to bother learning this new habit. And usually the so much better is tricky because.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The vision worth fighting for is just as important to us as the team. And it's about, first of all, having a great idea that you're passionate about because you're going to be doing this for the next five to ten years of your life. And if you don't love this and if you're not really proud of bringing this to the world, it's probably not going to happen. I mean, doing startups is really hard. You could be doing other stuff. So it's easy to give up at some point. But if you have to bring to the world Airbnb because you know it's going to do good in this world, it's going to change people's lives. And you're super passionate about it, you're not going to give up. And you're going to create something amazing. But the thing about the vision worth fighting for is not only does it have to be a great idea, you're passionate about it, it's solving a massive market opportunity. We see a lot of great ideas that are good for like 100 people. That's not a venture-backed business, right? So it has to be a big market opportunity. But the one thing that a lot of consumers don't think about is a consumer startup founders don't think about is, and frankly, a lot of investors. We see don't think about.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You know, so last year we decided to write a blog about what are the 10 things you need to do to build a billion dollar consumer company? And the first nine you really have to do and have to do well. And I'll talk about two of the nine I think are the most important. But here's the trick. If you do those nine well, that's necessities, right? That's the 20% you have to have to build a billion dollar consumer company. Number ten, which unfortunately you and I have very little control over, is luck and timing. And that's about 80%. You have to do all these amazing things, have the right vision, have the right team, have the right culture, have the right marketing, you know, and those are really hard. And that's about 20% of the success. You're likely going to have a successful company, but to have a breakout, Uber, Facebook, you need a lot of luck. And I think the two most important things early on for consumer startups is vision, and we call it a vision worth fighting for, and the team.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Facebook is really interesting what they're allowing and some of the mobile distribution. There's still ways to build your company work. It's going to be hard to really scale the next massive consumer company on the existing platforms.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, I would say it's not going to die. These smartphones are amazing. And I live on my iPhone, you know, like we all do. Even when the mobile started taking over, the internet didn't die. It's still an important part of your distribution strategy. One of the things that we do while at MAVE is we focus a lot on growth. I would say that the lifeblood of consumer startups is growth, right? And without your growth or hyper growth, and ideally where you're not just spending money to acquire customers, but people love your product so much for telling other people about it, their terms of art now, growth hacking or viral marketing. But in essence, it's a very simple idea. If you build a product that people love, and ideally that's even better when I invite a friend or you invite a friend, it makes it a better experience for us, you've got a very interesting company on the consumer side. So we think about how do you play in distribution around mobile. There's still opportunities there, right? The app stores are interesting.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “But there will be one. I'm 100% sure that's going to be another cycle. It's just a matter of what it's going to be and when.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, I think, look, I would agree that in the last three years, it's harder to find companies that have scaled in a big way. Yeah, so I would say Snapchat, you now, which is interesting. I know that early investors there, musically and those kinds of companies, we're an investor at a company called Schotz, which is a mobile social play, the selfie app, but it's really about a place young kids can express, teens and young adults can express themselves without feeling bullied. Justin Bieber is an investor, lots of celebrities. It's a great idea. But the truth is, it's going to be really hard to scale another consumer app in the mobile shop. I mean, it's just mature. It's a mature market. And the big players that have a monopoly like Facebook and Twitter are not opening their platforms anymore, right? So we have to wait for the next platform.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think that until recently it was like the mobile phone industry, right? Where to do anything in the consumer health space, you had to work with hospitals, insurance companies, impossible to scale a company that way. And that's changing, right? It's not changing overnight as rapidly as we'd like, but it's happening. I think there'll be massive consumer companies that are going to be built in the consumer e-health space. Going back to your question, it is hard. We love it. We're good at it. And we love getting companies that people looked at and said, no way would that work to get to scale? And then we take it to people like Fred and Mark and all the other great investors that we take our companies to for series A and Series B investing. And we work with them to take it to the next level.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Love it. They started people thinking about it. I'm not sure Amazon's the one that's going to necessarily be, you know, often we always believe that it's the software startup that's going to actually be successful. We're looking at some companies in that space. We're also really excited about consumer health tech. We think that there's been a lot of innovation on the enterprise side of health, but not on the consumer side.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “When we see the right team with the right vision, we have a good sense this is going to be potentially a billion dollar idea. By the way, we should also mention at Maven, we do about eight to ten company investments a year. And every one of our companies we think can be multi-billion dollar company. We don't look for the single or double. We're looking to change the world with companies that we feel will bring something of value to the world. So I agree with them. It is hard. With that said, there's amazing opportunity. We're still at the very early stage of consumer adoption and technology, and there are going to be companies that are going to change the world like Facebook over the next couple of years, over and over and over again. And in particular, we're looking at not only AR and VR, we're also looking at companies in the esports space. Esports is changing the world of how kids interact with sports, right? It's video game sports. It's already massive overseas, but here in the US, it's starting to take off. We're interested in that space. Drones, I think, are really interesting. What the world...”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, listen, I mean, I completely agree with Fred, and he's not the only one that Mark Andreessen's on record recently saying, you know, when it comes to consumer software, consumer startups, we don't know early. We wait. They're happy to pay up in the A and the B round to see when there's traction. But that's great for us because that's exactly what we do. We get in early. We're there from the very beginning with a vision and two people trying to build a company. And I think the reason why we've been so successful at it is number one, it's what I love to do. Like it's my passion. I'm sure I'm curious about a lot of other stuff. I'd love to learn more about some SaaS enterprise stuff or some big data stuff or energy. I mean, it's a great company that's going to be built around there. But I know how to build consumer startups. I've done it for 15 years before. I've invested now for over 10 years in the space. I can add a lot of value immediately in that space. Moreover, actually, we have a very strong set of filters.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And the price comes down, and you can imagine that every teenager can come home from school and put on their VR headset, or even better, it's not something so intrusive, but you can still get that engrossing environment for 50 bucks or something or 20 bucks. Once that happens and there is hundreds to millions of those devices or billions of those devices out there, there's going to be a massive shift in how consumers, you know, how we, I should say, like how we interact with each other.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “You know, to do deals here was like you had to do a partnership Verizon or ATT. Good luck. That was a two year process and you had to get on deck. That was never going to scale. As soon as in 2007, I saw the iPhone and said, this is going to change the world again. So we invested in 10 companies in consumer apps on the platform. And several of them are some very successful companies, including one called Check, which we sold intuit last year for almost $400 million. Tango, I helped name that company. It was the first Moba messaging video conferencing app on the iPhone, Android phone, still has 350 million customers. We had a billion dollar valuation last year by Alibaba investment. So that's my third unicorn. There will be another platform. And the next one is, you know, I think one of the next ones is going to be VRAR. One of the constraints is the quality has to be great on the hardware side. And we don't really invest in hardware. So we rely on other people. But if the hardware is great,”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Just like all the other barriers have been before, there were mobile phones before the iPhone came out, but until the iPhone came out, there wasn't a So you needed a platform where consumer companies can actually build their business on and where the platforms want that to happen. And you may or may not remember, but there were prephone, Android phones, there were billions of cell phones out there, the flip phones.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It's amazing. If you try the best VR experiences today, they're like nothing that you've ever experienced before. And two years ago, I was fortunate to meet a company called Altspace and Eric Roma as a founder. And as soon as I put on the Oculus and tried the demo, I got the chills just like I did when I was at Friendster. And I said, this is going to change the world. And I think AltSpace is going to be the company to do it, but somebody's going to. And so clearly we invested in AltSpace and we're looking at other companies that are doing AR, VR communication platforms, which are super exciting. I actually, I'll go on Regular Say, I think in three to five years, and maybe even sooner, we'll look back and laugh at how we thought swiping through pictures on mobile or looking at photos on the internet with social networking. When you are in a VR state, it's truly social networking. It's at least to the next degree. And then we start thinking about what does a world look like.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “A couple of years ago, we've been looking at ARVR for a while, but it was too early. I mean, a lot of the consumer investing is about timing. And, you know, one of the issues for Francis, maybe it was about a year or two soon, where Facebook came along about a year, year and a half later. So timing is really critical. You have to have enough mass out there. But have you ever tried the VR, the Oculus?”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “At the next platform. In particular, I think we're very excited about AR and VR. We see that as a game-changing platform for consumer, and we've made a couple of investments in that space.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “It's a good question. I mean, I think a lot of VCs and us included are very wary of investing in that space. And we do invest in the social space and we love it. And that's something we have core expertise. We look at it in a little bit different way. I think that right now, the platform for social is pretty saturated. So there was the internet that was the first consumer platform. And then mobile, and we'll talk a little bit about mobile. It was the second platform. What we need is the next platform to arise in consumer. And then there'll be massive opportunity once again for new social communication platforms or social media or whatever we're going to call it in that phase. And I think we're at the starting point. It's happening now. And I think in the next couple of years, there are going to be massive opportunities. So we're not necessarily looking for great social consumer plays on the mobile or the internet space. Although if we see them, we will invest and we're looking at some right now. But we are thinking ahead.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Heard in a weekend, any company ever changing someone's life. She said, yeah, I met a friend I talked to in 10 years, and I got a date next weekend. And I said, okay, this is a big idea. And so I joined Friendster. And that really was a $100 billion idea. Unfortunately, it didn't work out for Friendster. And I wrote a white paper, you can do a search on Google for why Friendster failed and Facebook and Bebo and others eventually won. But fortunately, I got to meet Michael and Sochi Birch, the founders of Bebo, through that, and joined them to launch Bebo. And that was a really nice ride for three years. We sold that in 2008 AOL for almost a billion dollars. So it's kind of my second unicorn.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, it was incredible. Again, I met Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster, and really the founder of social networking when he started a company, we were partnering with him at NBCI. I was head of marketing and strategy and partnerships. And then when he started Friendster, he asked me to be one of the alpha testers. And I thought, well, this is interesting. It was really something different. I'd never see anything like it. And at the time, I was evaluating an opportunity to work at Google, which was also pre-IPO and knew it was a great company. But the thing with French, who was, you know, it was going to be one of the top first five employees. And I thought that this had a chance to really change the world. I mean, I remember I got goosebumps the first time that I played around with the product. And they did something I thought was very smart. At the time, I was married with a couple of kids. So it wasn't necessarily speaking to me, but I had someone who worked with me who was single try out the product on the weekend. She came back on Monday and she said, I asked her how was friends. She said, change my life. I'm like, what?”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And we became MBC Internet, and we went public. And overnight we were a $6 billion company. It was pretty cool. It was my first unicorn. Thank you. And then from there left after the Web 100 bust, and we sold it back to GE. And then I joined Friendster and then Bebo. And then the second half of my career took off.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Multimillion dollar revenue business and retail. We use the internet in TronNet before the Internet, and this was back in the 80s and 90s. Then I went to law school, practiced for a couple of years. Fortunately, practice in Palo Alto. And that got me close to what was happening in the heart of Silicon Valley and realized that I needed to go back to my roots of being an entrepreneur. So after a couple of years practicing law, I went and joined a company called CNET, which was a very big internet company back in the day. It still is around today. We spun out a company called Snap. And the reason we did that is we saw the internet portal. I saw that whoever controlled the starting point for the internet was going to be a massive, massive opportunity. And so we wanted to compete in that space. It was Yahoo and still around, not for long, though. Lycos and Excite. And we were Snap. We actually had the number one performing search engine. And then in 99, we got acquired by NBC.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I'll start sort of somewhat at the beginning in the middle and then kind of work a little way back. But briefly, I was very fortunate to be in Palo Alto when the internet happened. Everything that I had done in my career previous to that enabled me to see that the internet was going to change the world. And so while I wasn't necessarily in tech before my first internet company that I joined, it was something that was part of what I saw that was going to be something that was absolutely necessary for me to get involved in.”

    2016-03-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source