YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Kraus

lines on the record: 132
first: 2019-08-30
most recent: 2019-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so cities are looking at how do we integrate micromobility, which they think is a good thing. But make sure it's not this crazy unbridled war on the streets where hardware gets dumped and basically it.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I would say if you look at the history of BikeShare in China, it is a story of unbridled competition to basically win market share with no spend efficiency. They basically just dumped bikes everywhere. Now the good news is that for the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, basically any market but for China, and even China though today, nobody wants that.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vehicles in Uber or not, scooters are on the street visible, so you have to be a good partner with cities. You can't just kind of slip under the radar.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, alphabet has Plays You know, in a scooter business, Uber's hidden in plain sight, like Uber X, you can't tell if that”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the third is we thought that their approach to government relations was really just plain better in the way that they interacted and worked with cities. The old model was this kind of Uber combative model, but our view at GV, looking at the whole space was”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To say, should we invest in any company? And there were several. And then the question was why the one we're looking at. And ultimately, we came to the conclusion that Lyme was the best company for that. Once we answered, yes, it's a durable trend. Yes, you can make money, and yes, we think the competitive landscape will allow independent companies to exist. We picked Lime for several reasons. One, we love the executional prowess of the team. They were not first to market in scooters, but they were gaining share. They were still behind, in that case, Byrd, at that time. But they were gaining ground. Second is that they had built their own supply chain and we felt like hardware was going to be a critical component of the business.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was novel in the United States back 18, 20 months ago. And so first watching people figure out what this is, but then the second is literally the smile they would have on their face when they took off on one of these scooters. I argued that this is the closest thing humanity's devised to a magic carpet. People smile and then they figured out how useful it was, how much time it saved them. And you saw that in the numbers. Basically, you saw incredible growth in terms of trips, revenue, users. And that was kind of the first signal. And then the question we had to ask ourselves was, is this a fad or a durable trend? If it's a durable trend, can you make money from it? And then, how does the competitive landscape emerge? And so going through those questions was really the diligence process we did.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The main thing I saw was just incredible growth. Any investor is really looking for, especially in an early to mid stage investor, they're looking for evidence of product market fit. And what was incredible is it was clear that scooters were something people loved. Not just Liked and used, but you would just watch people stand on a street corner and you'd see people try to figure out what is this thing, how do I ride it, what do you mean it's for rents because this kind of sharing model, dockless sharing mobility, was something that was really novel in the United States. It was common in China.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they had started in the bike sharing space, starting with pedal bikes, and they had just introduced e bikes. And by the time I was looking at it, they had started introducing scooters. Their own scooters. One of the things that I thought was interesting about them is they didn't use other people's scooters like a nine-bot segue, but they were instead using scooters that they had built themselves. So what did I see at that time? And that was back now in April of 2018.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supreme is no longer cool. I understand the bloom is off the road. If somebody like me is talking about Supreme, it is definitely not cool. Yeah.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see, kind of looking back, Turo is one company that's a peer-to-peer car rental company, obviously still going and doing quite well. In the trucking space, I invest in a company called Keep Truckin, which is basically in bringing technology to this huge segment of the American economy that not many people address. Was an investor in a company that's not related to transportation but in the marketplace space, which is the other spot called StockX. To market that's kind of hidden in plain sight. It's a secondary market like Stubhub is to tickets, StockX is to these hard-to-get sneakers and t-shirts, and it's actually much bigger business than people realize.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I've found transportation really, really interesting in general because I think maybe one of the things that I yearn for is the ability to affect people's real non-digital lives. There's always an interesting business going on with some new digital thing, be it the rise of the other.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes we work together. Yeah, I mean, I'd say the first wave was around consumer with search engine. JotSpot was really around small to mid-sized businesses and dealing with customer acquisition and business problems about long-term value versus cost of customer acquisition.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have kind of a venture group called Google Ventures and a private equity style later stage, bigger checks called Capital G.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A venture capitalist. You know, for me, I really thought about starting a third company. That's what I thought I would do when I got to Google. I started a list the first day I got to Google of great product managers, engineers, designers, BizDev people that I was meeting. And once a quarter I would stack rank the top five people, just thinking this is a group of people that I'd want to recruit. The reality is when I got to Google, I had one kid. And when my kind of earn out was done at Google, I had three. And so I just felt like I wasn't cut out for operations at that time in my life. So basically took a decade and invested, and I loved it in terms of the intellectual variety, but what I missed was the relationships you form with people when you struggle to do the impossible. That's just incredibly rewarding at a personal level.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so two guys had gotten Google Ventures off the ground, and then I, along with several others, joined as really kind of the founding general partners. As Google moved from investing hundred million dollars a year up to now about a billion dollars a year. So I was there for a decade as a general partner focused on Marketplaces, but also transportation. It turns out Lime was my second to last investment at Google Ventures, and I got so excited about what I saw in terms of the growth, the megatrends that I just wanted to get back to.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was that same trend about working together and getting off of email? But I think they really figured out that it was about messaging. Right. Better than we ever did”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then slack in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing how the extension of that, if I look today at Lassie and very successful company that has obviously things like JIRA for bugs, but they had Confluence, which was a competitive product at the time. And what I think Slack really took to the next level.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we commercialized basically technology for allowing people to spin up wikis. It was a SaaS company, which was new at the time. And group editing was new, again, at the time, obviously notes, Lotus Notes back and way back in the day was something that had existed. Ultimately, Google looked at it as they were building out their doc suite. So”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. This was right as Wikipedia was getting going. I think Wikipedia was probably 03, something like that. But the basic premise was back in 2003, I don't know. We were on Word or Microsoft Office 11. And so one thought was. The whole office suite was really around making an individual more productive. But at least Graham, my co founder in both Excite and Jotspot, we were thinking, how much more productive can an individual get in Office 12 versus Office 11? But the Internet had been around for about a decade email was clearly a way that people were communicating and more and more groups were needing to work together over long distances. And so the idea was, well, Actually, it's about group productivity is what's going to be more important and wikis were starting to come out as a group editing tool.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To come off, I did some traveling, ultimately did some political work, joined the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and then started a second company in 2004, which is a small wiki collaborative group editing company called Jotspot. Oh, Jotspots. Yeah, we sold that in 2006 to Google.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you were Prescient in terms of. I don't remember what the price was, but it's on that order of magnitude for sure. It was a lot”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great guy Oh, so you're responsible for the poor deal structure that we ultimately did. Yeah, exactly. Thank you very little”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's the governor of Congress. Colorado? Yeah, he's the son, Jared. Great guy. He's a great guy. It was interesting because the husband and wife, his parents who had started the companies, were kind of hippies. Did you know they called me during that? Everyone's like, how'd you get that scoot? I'm like, they called me to ask my advice. And I said, take the cash, don't take any of that stuff, and run for the hill.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was involved in the Blue Mountain Arts Bar thing. Yeah, this was back in the day when eyeballs were the hottest thing to try to grab and there was a greeting cards company, an e-reading cards company called Blue Mountain Arts. Which we bought, and that was certainly a mistake. Although now, isn't he the governor? He's the governor of Colorado. Colorado? Yeah, he's the son.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cable internet access company is what I was thinking. And so we took Ecite Public in 96, and then we sold it in 99 at home. And then I left in April of 2000 and took some time off.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a slide. This is the famous slide. I decline to ride the You know, the problem with that slide is it actually generated a tremendous amount of static electricity. So as you went down, you were being constantly shocked.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were a 99, I believe. Something like that. Yeah. There was Altavista in there, which had a big run for a while as well. A little”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then there was the innovation about essentially including in search results ads, and then Google really took it obviously further with their bidding system and separating ads on the right-hand side. Right, right.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Yahoo did the whole browsing thing. We were doing the search thing. But that was back in the day when search was viewed as like a means to an end. You would gather traffic but couldn't monetize it directly.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Internet was just getting commercialized with the web in 94, and friends of mine and I coming out of Stanford didn't want to work for anybody else. We started an early internet search engine that was called Excite. Took a public in 96. That's how we met.”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how we met All right, so I've been in the valley about 25 years. Graduated Stanford in 93. Typical. Typical. Right. One, really a birth lottery, truthfully, because”
2019-08-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Lime president Joe Kraus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT