YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Fernandez

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29
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2018-07-06
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2018-07-06
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1
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  1. “It wasn't that long ago when I would walk into somebody's house or apartment and stumble on their CD collection or their DVD collection. And it was this really interesting view into their world and their interest. Now when that happens, it's weird. And I ask them, do you not know about Netflix? Do you not know about Spotify? Like, why do you have this stuff? And our goal with Joy Mode is to make access better than ownership. And I want it to be weird when you go into somebody's house and you see things that are used less than weekly, things that are super common now. Like, I don't believe you need to own. And I want to help create a world where what you do is more about what you can imagine than what you own. So that's what I'm excited about. And in making that world a reality.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think it's really a belief that shit is always going to hit the fan, so not getting too up or too down. And whatever good day you're having is like going to be followed by tough days, especially as CEO, your job is to deal with the shit no one else can. And I grew up around the sport of boxing, love boxing, and somehow the act of getting punched in the face has been very helpful for my startup career, like knowing you can handle, like, get punched in the face and keep going is a big part of perseverance in a sad way, but the perseverance of knowing it's going to be hard and you're going to keep going.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There's a few, but what I think a lot about is how long do you want to spend learning the rules before you start playing the game? And it is really easy, especially we are surrounded by smart people, the people on the team are brilliant and it's really easy to get caught up in like overthinking things and just getting in there, like figuring out those small tests, you know, being quick, being audacious and willing to make bets and not just paralyzing yourself overthinking things.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I remember one of the first rounds of funding we raised for Cloud going to an investor meeting and we were doing a partner pitch. You got all the way, that's the last step before you get the check. And the investor who was sponsoring us right before we walked in the door, I said like, hey, what do you think the biggest pushback is going to be from your team? And he said to me, you're not from the academy. And I didn't know what that meant. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, oh, well, you know, you didn't go to Stanford. You didn't work at Google. You're just not from the academy. We've never invested in someone like you. And he didn't mean it in a bad way at all. He ended up investing and being great and super supportive. But like that comment really shook how lucky I was to make it to that room, but how unfair it was that so many people don't. And I think diversity in, you know, this is the theme of the moment of finally and appropriately is diversity in the venture space and giving people chances who”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I've really been just amazed and thinking kind of nonstop about this book called, and it's totally not business related, but it's called Accidental Superpower by Peter Zahan, I think is how he pronounces his name. It's really a look at the world from the perspective of demographics and geography. And the notion that politics are like fashion, they kind of come and go, but like geography and demographics are really what shaped the world and it helps understand a lot of what is going on around us. And I don't know, I'm just not super fascinating.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I love building a company in LA. The access to talent is amazing. The consumer spirit down here, you have Snapchat or Tinder, are just companies really doing bold things that don't follow the playbook of Silicon Valley. It's been amazing. And there are lots of reasons our company could fail over time access to talent won't be one of them. So couldn't be more happy being here.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I always want to create competition between my investors. I want the folks who have helped me to be recognized, to subtly shame the ones that haven't, and show appreciation for the people who are constantly going out their way and making introductions and helping us work through things. And it's a great way to keep the investor base engaged. Again, especially because there is a challenge because they don't see us much being here in LA and they can't use the product. And, you know, it's easy to slip from their conscious if not kind of poked in that way.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “200 pages long now. I take it from the standpoint of it's not at all about spin, it's not at all about like making them feel comfortable that they put all this money in the company. I want them to be terrified that they put money in this company. Like we are all in the same boat. So I feel really empowered to tell them what I'm afraid of and what I need help with and focus on those things. And it is somewhat therapeutic and just getting it out there. But it also then mobilizes and focuses the”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “With the board and the investor base there. I'd love to hear we chatted before about investor update emails. I'd love to hear how do you approach investor update emails, Joe? So at Cloud, I never sent an investor update email. And I always found something more important to do, and it was something that was just like not on my priority list in any way. Clout was mostly in San Francisco, so I also always saw my investors. They would always stop by. We would get coffee. They were kind of in the loop kind of in general. Joy mode is in LA, so being in LA, I don't see my investors much. And in fact, they can't even use our product because our product is only in LA. I use investor update emails to replace the fact that I don't see them, but I found that was kind of the initial intention. But it's turned into so much more than that. And I write really in-depth investor emails like spend six, eight hours on one. They're all archived on a Google Doc that is like almost.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Bing on this show. He's a formidable personality. Yeah, he's amazing and I love being, but like he's on the board of Amazon at the same time, sitting across from Bezos and then the next day sitting across from me and I feel super self-conscious about that and really deferential to the board. And I felt like, wow, these are people that are like, you know, on the board of Amazon and were there on the beginning days of Google in terms of Kleiner in general. And they know what they're doing. I should probably listen to them. And the reality is nobody really knows what they're doing. And we're all trying to figure it out. And they are data points that are board provides data points that can be really helpful, but it's your job to synthesize those data points with everything else and with your vision and make decisions. So that was a long transition for me. I feel like shout out to my first early investors for probably investing 20 million in me just to learn how to be a CEO in terms of time wasted kind of spinning in circles. Well, I'm sure it's paid off now, but we're kind of talking about kind of your communication.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Met an investor before. I'd never been in a boardroom before. I didn't know how board meetings worked. And I felt this desire to please them in the sense of thank you for taking a chance on me. I promise I won't disappoint you. And that dynamic was really hard to change. And I had really great but really strong personality people on my board. I had like Bing Gordon on my board who...”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So it was a big deal where clout would be a part of big search results and a really high profile deal. And we were about to release this big release like in the middle of kind of closing that deal. And my board was like, are you kidding me? This is a really bad idea before what happened last time. Let's just wait. Hold on, hold on. But the team had been driving so hard on this release. And we were all looking at it and feeling really great about what we had created. And ultimately, I told the board we're launching this. And it turned out to be great. And if anything speeded up the Microsoft deal and it was something I was really proud of as a CEO, I really struggled with board management, just having never been around investors. And, you know, that was like a moment where I felt like I kind of grew into being a CEO. Can I ask, what's the toughest thing that you found about board management? I had this interesting dynamic where I had never”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think Facebook's moved to decision For sure You communicate that one of my favorite sayings is if you don't listen to the board, you might get fired. If you do listen to the board, you will get fired. And I think that's true. And the specific example of that is Act Cloud, we had a release that went really bad, like huge press blowback. I remember hashtag Occupy Clout was trending on Twitter, and this was during the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's not a great PR stance, really. The best part was my phone number was included in that hashtag. So I was getting death threats about people's cloud scores. It's like a really bad day at the office. Yeah, it was a fun couple weeks. So that release went so bad. The next release, a really big release we were working on, was coming up about the same time we were talking to Microsoft about they made a like basically a $20 million investment in us.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think you should always have an initiative that you are working on that a huge portion of the team and investor base is afraid will kill the company. Like that is a good barometer of like, are you being daring enough? And most people are going to tell you just the same way when you start your company, most people tell you it's a bad idea when you're like in the process of building your company. People are going to tell you that stick to these paths that are kind of clear and have been paved before you and where you have traction. And it's easy to fall into that. And I think being willing as a founder, CEO to look at that data and think about your big vision and where you're going to need to get to and continuously being willing to risk it all to make that next jump is absolutely critical factor in these companies that kind of go on and become staples of our daily life was their stories of them.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Not all making One of the challenges as a founder is it's so hard when you're starting, especially if you haven't been through it before and you've never raised money, you don't have those connections, just crawling into the game, so to say, like meeting the investors, getting that first round done. You've probably been living on no salary for a while, you're begging, borrowing, stealing, everything you can do to just squeak by and you just want a chance and you finally get that first investment and you got your little bit of a paycheck and like it feels like a real company and you're starting to feel like legit. It is really scary to then think about like throwing that away. So you start getting into this like play not to lose. And I think that is where a lot of companies stall out. A lot of companies, CEOs, founder, founding teams, it is so hard to make it up that first hill that they can't accept the fact that what got them there won't get them to the next stage. And there's fear in making”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “We are really focused on setting one or two high level company goals and then making sure every team has a goal that flows into those company goals and every person flow into their team goals so that it's easy for everybody in the company to know what they're working on and how it impacts the overall growth of the company. And we spend a huge amount of time, three weeks a month working through those OKRs, making sure we're setting them in a way that is both achievable and a stretch and because there's nothing worse than setting an OKR that day one everyone knows you like have no chance to hit or setting one that you hit halfway through a quarter. So it really is an investment in planning and resource allocation, in the math equations behind your business and making sure you've got top of funnel and paid acquisition lined up and all the different pieces that”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “A sense of what you need to learn to feel confident that you're investing your time in the right place has been critical for us.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “In a consumer startup, the biggest advantage you can have is speed. So the pace that you can learn is ultimately a huge, huge factor in your long-term success. So we've spent a lot of time as a team being very methodical about what questions we needed to answer that gave us confidence to move forward. And clarity around these waypoints let us then devise test and with a specific goal of making those tests as easily actionable as possible to build our confidence that we were on the right path. So again, just being really methodical about understanding those questions and what proving them gave you confidence around and then moving really aggressively to do that. We tool everything we measure everything that is startup table stakes at this point. But asking those questions and really from the start, having”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It's a real challenge, and as this quote unquote serial entrepreneur, I find myself always trying to check if I'm overcorrecting for something that happened in the past that isn't really happening now and kind of letting that scar tissue dictate how I act. But specifically around knowing when to keep pushing versus like when to face reality, I think it's more about knowing what hill you're willing to die on for kind of lack of a better analogy. Like there are things in our business, for example, we have this notion of a membership, which is kind of controversial in our structure that I'm willing to basically kill the company to prove it is right. And I believe so strongly that that is kind of a core function of the value prop, that we will keep iterating on it until we die. There are other things that clearly aren't that high. Don't rise to that level of just”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's really about finding people who will tell you when you're wrong and being open to listen to them. And one thing I've done in the past that has been really successful is actually offering a reward to prove me wrong. So for example, there's been big initiatives that we talk about taking and they're going to, you know, we're going to put a whole team on it and it's going to take a quarter. And that's like a really big investment. So offering like almost a bounty of, you know, let's say $10,000 to somebody who can concretely say why this is a bad idea and why we'd be better off putting our resources somewhere else is like a small price to pay to avoid taking that wrong turn. So that's like a big example. But the small examples are just, I'm lucky I have somebody like Hunter who I talk to weekly if not every couple days and he has probably 80% of the time a different opinion than me and I can hear that opinion and make a decision if I want to.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Know it all, and I tried to find ways to break that. And then it also, when I don't know it all, which is all the time, it makes me really stressed of like why I should know this, like I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been through this. Why don't I know this thing? Why is this hard? And startups are just hard and I don't think it matters how many times you've been through it. It's going to be hard. And some of the serial entrepreneurship stuff I think has inflated, though I appreciate the benefit I get from it daily.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I mean, I definitely benefit every day from the worshipping of serial entrepreneurship in this industry. The benefit of the doubt you get as a serial entrepreneur is awesome, both from investors who kind of will believe more of what you say and from potential candidates that want to get on the bus with somebody who has a proven outcome in the past. The challenge, though, and why I say serial entrepreneurs can be overrated is I'm not a different person than I was on day 99 of clout. We signed a deal, we got acquired, it was a reasonable outcome, but I'm not a different person, but the way people perceive me and the interaction with people act like I am, like I've totally done something that's never been done and it's just kind of strange to me. And I find that it creates a danger in myself of believing my own hype and I have to be really careful not to think I”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The early days of cloud was a really ragtag crew. When I started the company, I'd literally never met anyone who worked at Google. I knew nobody in the startup world at all. So the bar to get hired at Clout was like willingness to quit your current job. If you were basically willing to quit your current job, you were on the team. So, yeah, we got some really lucky diamonds in the rough that we found that went on hugely successful at Clout and hugely successful after. But when I look back at clout, the team is what I'm most proud of, but there's really four or five generations of team that as we were able to kind of raise our profile and attract a different level of candidate, we were able to continue to up level the team. The pleasure of building Joy Mode and kind of having that second time around network and notoriety around that is from the start we've been able to really pull the best possible people and kind of have a top 1% team.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “With Joy Mode, I've been really focused on getting the right people in and doing that at the expense of valuation. I'd rather have homebrew and the pleasure of working with folks like Satcha and Hunter and the collaborative fund and 10110 and all these great investors we have. I wanted to make it easy for them to say yes and not spend time going in circles trying to raise and squeak out a couple extra percentage points here or there just to get back to work with the people I wanted on my team. And that so far has served us really well and I'm fortunate to have the folks around the table that we do have.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You know, at the time, it didn't feel that way. You know, we had term sheets at higher valuations and more money, and it felt like we were being responsible and the opportunity, I still believe, is huge in that space, like there should be a foundational multi-billion dollar fabric of the internet level company and doing what Cloud was trying to do. The pressure to grow though at the speed needed to grow when we didn't have product market fit in the way we needed it just it made it impossible to make good decisions and have the time we needed to play out what we had hoped to achieve”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Companies and eventually it caught up to us and it was really challenging to break through to the next plateau that you have to get to at like a super high valuation. We are fortunate to be able to see it through to a successful outcome and an acquisition but ultimately I think we cut short what the real opportunity could have been by putting so much pressure on ourselves.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Clout was a really intense experience. I went that having been an entrepreneur but never at any real scale, like the biggest company was only like four people. And at Cloud, we raised nearly $50 million. We had Kleiner Perkins as our main investor. We had IVP. We had Microsoft as investors. We grew to like 100 people. You know, it was like a pretty big machine at the pinnacle. And through that process, basically did everything wrong at some point. And the biggest learning I had was mistakes generally don't kill you if you are proactive about correcting them. And I like to think that we were intellectually honest and faced reality and made changes as we need to. There was one mistake that was really basically impossible to fix. And it was raising too much money at too high of a valuation. I'd heard that a million times before, but it was always something that wouldn't happen to me. That was something that happened to other”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I absolutely am. In fact, in high school, my parents used to really get on my case about getting a job. And a friend and I had this game where we'd go try to get jobs together to see who could get fired first. I managed to get fired from a dry cleaner in four hours. So I've been very unemployable for a very long time.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, joy mode is a really exciting new venture. Funny thing is, I actually was working on this before Cloud. I had moved to New York City and was in a really small apartment. I met my girlfriend there. We moved in together eventually later got married, but the place was so small that just a function in it anytime either one of us bought something we had to get rid of something. So I got really obsessed with the notion of ownership, but I couldn't figure out what to do with it and how to make this a company and had the idea for cloud and started that and kind of had that adventure and came back to join mode. But I've always been an entrepreneur going all the way back to kind of middle school days and buying and selling used video games and a kind of bunch of graveyard of bad ideas in between.”

    2018-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source