YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Floyd

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25
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2015-02-02
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2015-02-02
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1
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  1. “I don't know. Because I feel like they've got a stake in the ground with cars, and I think they will do more than cars, but I think that they'll probably always do cars. It'd kind of be like IBM. Somebody would have to effectively burn the ship's mentality and sell. Laptop division and move on. It'd be a pretty big mom”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think what you're going to wind up having is companies like BMW and Audi are going to catch up. Tesla has kind of that one to two year lead. And I mean, you see it with companies live with a car like the i8 coming out. I mean, other car companies are going to be able to do this. So I think that Tesla will eventually get that $40,000 or $50,000 kind of BMW competitor, but I think they're just going to be one of five or six dogs in the fight. I think what's interesting is as a battery technology company and the other aspects that they can plug that into could be pretty interesting.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “If you just look at valuations and you look at round sizes and you look at the sheer dollar amount of money raised by venture capitalists and deployed by venture capitalists in 2014, it's approaching the levels we saw in 2000. You look at the public tech tech company valuations. I mean, they're pretty rich.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “By long term, it's going to be around for a very long time. I feel like the whole cloud business is completely undervalued”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And so I think this just lays the basics and gets people thinking about early and gets people all in the same terminology. And I think that's incredibly helpful. I personally find behavioral economics that was my undergraduate degree. I find it just an incredibly interesting area. And I think every entrepreneur should read books like Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge. I mean, just fantastic books that get people thinking about the individual decisions that people make and why they're not necessarily rational and why you as an entrepreneur, how you as an entrepreneur can exploit that to To help, I guess, funnel people into the decisions that you think that will ultimately help them perform better.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think it just lays out the basics of building a sales and marketing organization. And I feel like for most SaaS companies, people are capable of building great products now on very little money. And so you get a lot of entrepreneurs who are very product focused, who see needs and they're trying to solve them. And then where they fall down is a little bit on building the sales and marketing engine.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So I think there, I mean, there's a bunch. I mean, I think every entrepreneur should read the lean startup. And I think everyone in SaaS should read predictable revenue”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Incredible compared to what I mean, I grew up in a middle class family in San Diego. Like, I had a pretty darn good life. So anything I accomplish just pales in comparison to starting from literally nothing, escaping communism.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think it's just an incredible story. My mom was born in China and she moved to the US in 1967, I think, with nothing more than two suitcases. And she put herself through college, became a doctor. Like, I just view that as”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's all about strengths and weaknesses. So if a team is amazing, I don't care what they're doing. I'm going to back them. And just because a market is huge doesn't necessarily mean that I would back somebody. So it really depends on what those strengths and weaknesses are and how they combine.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “If you had a red flag in any one of those four, you would probably want to make sure that you overcame it. But for that first meeting, you're just trying to dream the dream.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And so in diligence, once I've decided that I like a team and I like the idea they're going after it, then yeah, I'm going to go look at the biggest red flags. And they always fall into kind of one of four buckets. I mean, effectively, we're looking for the four T's, a strong team, good traction, big tam, which is totally available market size, and strong industry trends, trends that are going to be tailwinds.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I mean, I think the red, what I always tell you, what I always tell people is in first meetings as a venture capitalist, you're trying to dream the dream. The red flags are everywhere. You can find hundreds of reasons not to make an investment. When you're looking for is that one reason to make the investment.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's not much, it doesn't have to be much. In fact, a lot of it can be figured out that we can target people on Facebook for this price, get them to come to our website, and funnel through to conversion at these rates, and when they convert, you know, we have a customer lifetime value of X. If you can figure out the beginnings of that and you may only have 500K of revenue, that could be really exciting.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “We invested the series A stage, which means that we look for companies that And that usually means they have some sales metrics, some early sales and marketing metrics. And so for me, being a finance person, that's the area of the company that can get me most excited. If somebody has figured out and been testing on kind of early sales strategies and customer acquisition strategies, And they've got the numbers to prove it. There's nothing more exciting to me than that.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Because if you have three people and one of them really wants to quit because 100 million is a perfectly acceptable sale price for them, even if they're only getting 20 of it, they're perfectly happy with that. It's much more likely that they're going to hit the exit button and that causes the whole company to fall apart or so.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think it's because people balance each other out and they also drive each other forward. It's much harder to quit when you've got two other buddies that you're in the trenches with. And then also when you have decisions being made with the point of view of three people that can work well together, I think you generally arrive at higher quality decisions. Now, the flip side is, and this is something that a lot of people don't think about from an equity perspective, especially from a returns perspective, having more founders makes the outcome less attractive. It also forces people to take earlier exits.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That's an interesting question. I think if you look at the data, multiple founders generally increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So, the answer is going to be a little tilted towards enterprise because that's all I focus on. But we look for, we call X factors. And team is definitely one of them. If a team has worked together for a long time and they've demonstrated expertise of a particular market and technical proficiency, then that can be a very strong indicator for us. But there are a couple other ones. I mean, another one is go to market strategy. Having some unique method of attacking the market that other people haven't figured out yet. And I think benefits would be a perfect example of that. They get paid from the commission through the insurance brokerage so they can give their software away for free. And no one else figured that out. So they had an automatic leg up. So it's not just Team. It could be sales and marketing go to market. It could be some technical proficiency that no one else has achieved.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, because if you look at the entrepreneurs that we fund here at Emergence, primarily a lot of them come out of the same few companies, Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Oracle. I mean, because we do enterprise, it's kind of slightly tilted towards some of those enterprise names. So if you work for one of those companies and you build a network of engineers and product managers and VPs, they're the people who are going to be starting companies.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yes, but I would say if you're coming straight out of university, the best thing you can possibly do for yourself is. To take a more to take a job that's going to give you more concrete skills. I hate to say it, like the venture job doesn't really have a lot of concrete skills. It is a job, it's a people job. You're effectively going out, meeting people, and connecting people. Those are the two job functions you have. And so taking a job like investment banking or strategic consulting or working for a big tech company like Google will provide you the foundational skills as well as give you that first toe hold of a network.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Hundred venture capitalists, and I just sent them blind emails, and it was kind of like, hey, you know, I noticed we went to the same university. Or, hey, I noticed that we worked for the same bank a long time ago or whatever. And just try to get the 30-minute coffee meeting. And at every coffee meeting, I had, here are the hottest companies that I see in the valley right now. And with every meeting, I kind of honed that list better and better and tried to target the list to the investor and to the stage they like, to their target focus. And eventually some of them said, hey, you know, actually we're thinking about hiring. And I kind of got into a couple interview processes. And luckily I latched on with one. And that was kind of the start. It took a ton of meetings.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It's pretty much brute force. So the way I look at it is you have two ways of getting in. One, you can start a company, take it public, sell it for billions of dollars, and then become a venture capitalist. And that's a very hard route. And the second one is... Yeah, it's coming up through the junior ranks, which is kind of what I did, which is a really a brute force method because there are only so many seats available. Someone told me the staff, but there are Venture capital investors than there are professional footballers. So it's a pretty hard job to get. And so it really just becomes networking your way in and just eye contacted probably”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “No, I worked in investment banking in tech investment banking for two years straight out of college, and it was a tough job, but it was a really good way to learn the blocking and tackling of finance. And it's what set me up to do a startup immediately afterwards. I worked with a couple friends from Berkeley engineering, and we kind of cobbled together a mobile app, and I was just helping them. And that's what got me hooked on being involved with startups. And then I've been a venture investor ever since.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So I live in San Francisco and I work in Silicon Valley. And I think when you're here, the entire energy, it's almost like New York for finance is the same as Silicon Valley for tech. It's just the energy of all the entrepreneurs permeates every part of life. And so being, I think when you're here, you just want to be a part of it, whether it's starting a company, working for a company, or funding companies. And for me, I always had... Interest in stocks and investing growing up and venture capital was kind of a natural extension of that.”

    2015-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source