YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Thomas

lines on the record: 40
first: 2020-08-07
most recent: 2020-08-07
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

“More efficient and more effective first, but also at the same time make it more expressive so that way you build meaningful relationships with each other with a globally distributed workforce. I believe that we're really just scratching the surface with where we're at with video messaging and how far Loom can take it for the world.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to accelerate information flow for the global workforce, and we want to empower people to communicate more effectively wherever they are. I think that those great examples of organizations that have remained incredibly disciplined provided best in class user experiences for us specifically. It'll be video messaging. And from there, we can scale ourselves really, really far. I mean, we plan to address every single knowledge worker in the world and what's interesting is now that we have a mobile app in a space, we're starting to see not just knowledge workers, but people at work using video messaging to communicate with each other. So I like to say that we're changing the face of workplace communication. Fun little pun there, and that it's going to be a revolution in terms of percentage of communication that's happening over much higher bandwidth communication. That's more efficient, that's more effective, and most importantly, more expressive. And so if you can make workplace communication”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my grandpa on my mom's side, Wally, he was my mentor and idol. I grew up only 15 minutes away from him. He was the one to have that printing business that I mentioned at the top. And he just always treated me as an adult like there wasn't ageism in our relationship. And he taught me critical life lessons. And there are like very simple things, but life is relatively simple if you find out the keys to them. So one of them is treat people on the way up as you do on the way down, meaning treat everybody equally and don't have an inflated ego and smile because they're infectious. Just like bring joy and happiness to the world. And I think that for myself, I don't have them in my life anymore, unfortunately, but in the like 20 years that we spent together, I felt like he truly built the foundation for who I am as a, like partially as a man.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I believe dogs are way smarter than we give them credit for. And this is one that is pretty far out there, and it's not supported by any hard evidence, but human consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries that we have to this day. And I believe that we might have quantum elements to it that might actually help explain human consciousness.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we initially did a block of donations about three weeks ago, four weeks ago when this all really picked up. But what we collectively discussed as a leadership team, and this was spearheaded by Salesforce, which is the 1% contribution. And so we collectively as a company said that we were going to do that 1% donation. Right now it's revenue in the future. It'll be profit and we'll kind of like start to transition that over time as a 1% revenue, one percent profit. But we are committed to every single month donating 1% of our revenue to causes and in the near term over the next six to 12 months, it is going to be to organizations that are helping and on the front lines of civil rights. And I believe if you have consistent donations to certain communities or certain organizations over the long term, it means that you will mentally commit an”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, we need to be doing this across the board. And today, I would like to see a meaningful change in diversity and representation across all aspects of tech, particularly for the black community.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this one is actually pretty serious in nature. I was talking to a candidate the other day for a leadership position at Loom, and one of the questions that I asked them that is to get to know them was, what have you noticed that surprised you most in the last couple weeks? And they happen to be black and they said that they were surprised that the next civil rights movement akin to the movement in the 60s is starting right now in the States. And they were shocked with how much open pushback there has been across the nation in some of the highest positions in the country. And so I feel like it's our duty as leaders to look at ourselves and ask what are we doing to provide equal opportunity and representation, particularly for the black community, to make up for historical inequities. And then for myself personally, where I feel like I have control is within the tech sphere. So I think that”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I asked my wife this last night when we were kind of thinking about these questions. And she said a Negroni, I think that she was a little bit influenced by her summer vacation that we took a couple weeks ago, but I'll go with it because it's a classic. It's colorful. It's on the flavorful side. And it's still grown up. So I like to think that I'm a negroni.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe my biggest strength is authentic empathy to understand where a customer, a candidate or a co-worker is coming from, to genuinely want to find a mutually beneficial path forward because you deeply care about them, finding win-wins is truly the key to life and that comes from a place of authentic empathy, but it also cuts both ways. It's my weakness as a leader too. It can be exhausting and in an extreme form of empathy you become a people pleaser. And so sometimes at the expense of what the company needs me to do, I want to make an individual happy. So this is something that my executive coaches highlighted that I really need to work on, but I also believe it's my biggest strength.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sapiens. No, I'm just kidding. No, as a kid, it was Ender's game. So ignore the movie. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out, but it checked all the boxes for me. I'm a big science fiction fan. It has a competitive component to it. It was really fun. It stretched my mind from imagining what it would be like to operate in zero gravity. It revealed different aspects of humanity. It had a major plot twist. I didn't see coming. And as a children's book, I read it when I believed I was like eleven or twelve years old. It didn't shy away from a sad ending, which made me feel like a grown-up. So I really, really love Ender's game. But then as an adult, Krishna Marathi's think on these things. I believe that the quality of life is largely based on the quality of questions that you ask. And this book is chalk full of deep questions and thoughtful answers that I revisit regularly.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a special shout out also goes out to Andrew's now wife, Lizzie, for recording a loom, even though she had lost her voice. There was just so much passion that you could feel across the entire partnership. And I was so incredibly impressed with the above and beyond effort that Sequoia did with recording all those looms and sending them over.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put on the table. And the even more casual leave behind was when we were walking out, we were like, high five and like doing the hug thing. He was also like, oh, and one more thing. And he sent an email that had 20 sequoia partners and team members, including Ruloff, Douglone, Michael Morwitz, who all recorded a loom talking about why they were so excited to join Loom on our journey. And my wife and I went to Vinet's apartment that night to watch all of them together. And the cherry on top of all these looms was Doug Lion was in Hawaii at that time on vacation. And he has this incredible loom of him in the pool coming out of the water and talking authentically about the excitement for Loom and his sign off at the end of this 60 second loom was bye for now and then submerging back under the water again.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Andrew Reid was an intro from Dylan Field of Figma, one of our early angels, and Andrew and I built the relationship over the course of nine months at one of our coffee meetings. He told me, I know this is weird logic, but bear with me, I'm getting married in October, and I'd just really like to lead your series B before I leave for the wedding and honeymoon. And we told him that, and I told him that we didn't think we were going to be fundraising for another couple quarters, but, you know, we'll pull a deck together and see what progress we've made. And after a couple turns of feedback on the deck, Andrew asked me to meet him for a drink. And I thought that this was just to spend a little bit more time in a casual manner, which most of our meetings up until that point had been coffee meetings during the day or in the Loom office. And so I thought it was just kind of like a little bit of casual hangout. When we were about to leave, he was like, oh, I also have this for you. And it was a term sheet that he.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Price anchoring a little bit. So we always knew that we would have to go out and run a full fundraise process for the Series A, and we wanted to create that leverage for ourselves, knowing that GC and Trevor to lead the Series A was always an option on the table. The reason why we ended up going with Ilya and Kleiner is that his experience with Dropbox being head of product, he just had a depth of knowledge in terms of building this bottoms-up growth viral product within the workplace. And so we wanted to bring that into the loom world.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the co-lead in the seed rounds. Now, I think that there was the benefit of the Halo effect of having a tier one funds like GC being involved in the early days, its validation to talent that you want to bring into the team. It's validation to customers that potentially want to get involved and use the product. Like if general catalyst invested, then I think that we have a pretty high degree of confidence that they'll continue to be around. And so I think that there was very real tangible benefit to having general catalyst join in the early days. But co-leads are tough because there isn't the clear incentive for one individual to kind of like be that guiding hand and be super involved. And there's also the aspect of it, like you said, about maybe they aren't incentivized to increase or fight for the next round and increase the valuation in a meaningful way, aka.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that with our seed round being co-led by 0.9 and GC, Christoph and 0.9 were incredibly gracious with they originally put a term sheet on the table. It was exclusively to lead themselves. And after spending about a week on that term sheet, we decided to sign it because we just hadn't met Trevor at General Catalyst yet. And after we had signed the term sheet, we had a conversation with Christoph because Trevor and GC were incredibly excited about working together and getting involved early and asked him if he would be willing to do a code lead between 0.9 and GC. And there was no real incentive for Christoph to do it outside of just wanting to be a great early partner from the onset. And after him spending a little bit of time with Trevor and us coming to even split between GC and 0.9, we ended up”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think I've learned my lessons on that front as proper expectation setting. And I think that those investors who are willing to work with you as a founder and maybe as a first-time founder who's learning these lessons as they go is really important”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. So all investors, you have to, as a founder, see this with eyes wide open because while your partners in the business, their business model is to maximize their ownership in your company while not harming the trajectory of it. And so having investors who know where that threshold is of when to fight for ownership, when to push for it, and then when to let a tier one firm in who also has their ownership requirements is really, really important. I think that we got ourselves into a couple sticky situations when you go into fundraising is how much are you talking about in terms of ownership for each investor as they get really interested in the company and making sure to have those early conversations with the early investors to let them know what's coming to let the tier one in is critically important.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure that it survives. And so as we started to gear up for our Series A fundraise, I was having a lot of anxiety about getting that done. And pretty much every single investor helped in their own way in terms of packaging up the stories, making connections, doing the back channels to make sure that certain investment partners were hearing the right things. Now, we ended up fundraising from Ilya, who had moved over to Kleiner at that point from index, but we were worried even though he individually had a ton of conviction about Loom, we weren't able to get the seed round done with index. And so there was no guarantee that it was going to end up working out with him and Kleiner Perkins. And so there was just a ton of anxiety for about three, four months as we started to gear up for the series A, knowing that we weren't going to have revenue in order to show for the company's progress.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there was an O ship moment when we were going to raise our series A and we had not deployed our revenue generating product yet, which we believe was a critical risk vector to de-risk for our Series A investor to prove that people were willing to pay for it. And all the surveys and research in the world is not going to be the same data point as having a user actually paying you. And so as we went to go into the series A fundraise and cash was starting to get low on the balance sheet and you start to worry about are you actually going to be able to get a meaningful investment in this next round without diluting yourselves like crazy where all of a sudden you own a relatively trivial amount of the company early on in the life cycle in order to just keep it alive.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the three things that I thought about was conviction. So having true believers in the company that trust your vision is the most important.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody when you don't meet them in person. I also, one anecdote is that it wasn't quite the precede round, but our seed round that was co-led by point nine capital, Christoph and the point nine team had a ton of conviction around Loom after only meeting one of the co founders, Shahid, and after one forty five minute conversation, they put a term sheet on the table and we ended up working together because Christoph and the point 19 had recorded a bunch of looms and sent them over to us about what they felt like could be the partnership going forward. And I felt like that was enough for us to start to work together, even though they were in Germany and we were in San Francisco. So I think that there is a way to build meaningful trust with each other if you're intentional about it.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and I do believe that video is specifically like video conferencing is an incredibly powerful way to get to know somebody if you are structured with your time together. So one thing that I actually really enjoyed with CO2 in their onboarding process, this happened after the fundraise, is that we did a dinner together and it was over the course of two, two and a half hours. There were partners that came in and out of the video call, but what we did for one part of it was we actually went through that New York Times like 36 questions to fall in love and we asked these really deep and meaningful questions of each other to get to know the individual and I felt like even though I still haven't officially met Matt Mazio or Lucas Wisher of COT2 in person I feel like I know them at a pretty intimate level at this point. So I do believe that you can get to know them.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we actually saved multiple partner meetings and got multiple term sheets without having to do that 15 or 20 person meeting very simply because they washed the loom and that was essentially the pitch. And so they also loved it because they could watch it at 1.5 or 2x versus doing the meeting at 1x. So with these changes to the process being less geolocation anchored and more asynchronous, I think it opens up investment opportunities in a meaningful way for both founders and VCs.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Running, literally running sometimes from VC office to VC office for a couple weeks, which is a ton of work and overhead. And for those that haven't done a fundraise process, it sounds prestigious and fun, but it's really, it's a slog. And so this most recent fundraise was my favorite for a couple reasons. One, it was all over video conferencing, so there was no time between meetings trying to squeeze in emails or messages from a phone. I got a meaningful amount of non fundraise work done during this time, with all that time saved commuting from office to office or down to South Bay, and a willingness firm VCs to rethink, a shameless plug for Loom, I probably saved myself about ten hours during this fundraise process because I had pre recorded a ten minute loom walking through the deck that we had pulled together, that I'd leave with the one or two partners that I talked with in the initial meeting. And that included a link to the”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll take a few steps back here because hearing mistrust Leyden out loud is a little bit more negative and harsh than I thought when I originally wrote it, but I stick with a highly inefficient part. We kept hearing over and over again when we were raising our most recent round that was co-led by Sequoia and Kotu that we're calling our series B+, is that we're not quite sure we can make an investment with a company and team we haven't met in person. And it goes without thinking now a few months on that we're all kind of in this COVID territory is that this is antiquated thinking. The fundraise industry was very quickly and radically forced to change their operating procedures because some firms were willing to take that leap to make the investment during early COVID without meeting in person and they won deals as a result. So the inefficient part for me doing it in person was”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it relates to the most recent question as well, which is the fact that really good investors also caveat any suggestions that they provide with this is just a data point. And that's what I actually have felt really encouraged by Ilya and Andrew and the early investors is that they don't have full context into the business, as passionate as they are. We are the ones who are working on it day to day, hour over hour. And so I think that investor advice is always, always comes from a good place. We're all trying to maximize the value per share of the company and we're trying to innovate on behalf of our customers. But it's just one data point. And so to me, a data informed decision is critically important. Your investor's perspective is an important data point. But fundamentally, you're never going to have perfect information to make a perfect decision. And so it boils down to of all the data that you've collected including an investor.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think about the early investors that we were able to bring on and also how that's kind of scaled out to our board members in Ilya and Andrew. I've found that the best board members just very simply ask the best questions. They obviously have opinions about where it is that the company should go, but they don't mandate solutions. They don't mandate their thinking because the thing is that founders and operators are the ones who are doing the day-to-day work.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a VP or whether it's working on a workplace communication and collaboration doc for the entire company that you feel is critically important to spearhead because that's what your company offers to the world and what's really important as you triple headcount over the course of the year that you're able to clearly articulate to the company how to best communicate and collaborate with each other. So you give an update in terms of your progress on that front. And then from there you do a wrap-up which leads to the board content which is the slide deck usually. So you give a few highlights from that content and then you just link to the deck has generally been the structure. And then in terms of timeline, it usually takes me, I like to do it on Sunday because I can think big from that perspective. And so depending on if we have the board meeting on Wednesday or Thursday, I try and target getting the board content out at least 48 hours in advance, sometimes I'm not that good at it, but usually it goes out with the rest of the board content and it's the first thing that we link to.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's evolved over time as the business has evolved, but really what has stayed true from the beginning is that there's an intro vignette. So what is something that's top of mind that's interesting that I feel like is very relevant to our vision and mission? So make sure to start the letter with what it is that we're really doing at the company and where we're striving to go. From there, you touch on the key metrics to the business. What are the two or three North Star metrics that you're driving against? What was the progress over the last three months? And how do you feel about them? And then from there, there's going to be the key things that you as a board have decided is most important for you to work on in that quarter. And so you deep dive on those topics and you share what progress that you've made and how, again, how you're feeling about it. And then the last part of it is there's usually a special project for a CEO. So whether it's recruiting”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be truly helpful if you're open with the situation and how you're feeling about it. That was Ilya's Ilya Fischman, our board member from Kleiner, encouragement at every turn. Don't just give the facts, provide the perspective. And my advice to founders is that writing is a skill. Start sharpening it early. Write in narrative form. Tell a story. Make sure that it's relevant content and data, sure, but make it compelling. And if you do so, your ability to utilize this content beyond the initial reason for writing it is truly evergreen in nature. You can take a weekly CEO note and share it with a VIP candidate to give a true lens into how you think and what's going on in the company. You can share a letter to the board with the broader investor base to get help with the key issue. When you do long form writing, it has long-term value.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is a great question. And credit where credit is due. Bezos is the one to popularize long form writing in the modern workforce. He said something along the lines of clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand. So over the years, there have been many different beads of writing strung together that I've done from investor updates to fundraise learnings to board letters. This is actually a shout out to Peter Reinhardt of Segment who strongly encouraged me to get into the habit of writing board letters from the very first board meeting that we had. It's also team charters. I try and do a weekly CEO note, although that goes in waves depending on how busy I am. And each having their kind of like own structure and cadence. With one of our cultural values being lead with transparency, I'm pretty open booked with the challenges we're facing, with whatever group I'm writing for. And that's all rooted in confidence that whomever you share this long form writing with, they'll only be able”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important to me and spending informal time with peers, it's easier to build a relationship. There's a big space for big ideas, but also we hear many times in our talent pipeline that people are worried we're a remote first company because they've tried remote and it's not for them. So fundamentally it boils down to power to the people. There are people we wouldn't be able to work with if we didn't support remote. There are people who would seriously reconsider the opportunity at Loom if we didn't have office space. So setting up a hybrid culture allows us to work with the most talented people no matter where they are.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Documents be very intentional about the time that you spend live together and related to number one, you have to document everything by default. You record every meeting, you document your decisions, and if you do those two things right of default to async and document everything by default, you have second order effects, you have a more resilient organization, if somebody leaves or is out on vacation, you have the information you need to keep things moving along. More flexible collaboration so that time zones are not nearly as big of an issue. This loops us back around to being able to work with the most talented folks no matter where they are. Six of our eleven members of our leadership team, which is VPs or directors, are remote, and five of six of those would not be at Loom if we didn't have remote first as part of our DNA as a company. So from there, what's the benefit of having an office? I personally love going to an office myself. Physical separation of home and work is really important.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, we want to work with the most talented people wherever they are, and geolocation tends to be the predominant limiting factor. So I feel, and we, like Vanessa Heat and I feel very fortunate to have been guided to this conclusion of a hybrid company by our users. When we were five people in an SF office slash apartment, we ran a survey that found that 80% of our professional power users were using it to communicate with folks that they weren't sitting right next to. aka remote communication so we knew that we had a dog food that and the next five hires we made were all remote and we persisted that 50 50 split ever since now remote communication is the most complex so you default to those rules of engagement for everyone regardless of hq or remote which is why we have remote first as one of our five cultural values first you have to default to asynchronous communication slack messages looms”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space with, or we don't meet with in person nearly as often. So we need more sophisticated communication tools to support this. And video recording and sharing is a new mode of communication that offers more efficient, effective, and expressive means of communication. A fun fact is that you can actually talk six times faster than you can type so that long next message or email that you're about to write, you should do yourself a favor and record a loom, shameless plug. We feel like we're at the beginning of a workplace communication revolution that's powered by asynchronous video recording and sharing what we're calling video messaging.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place with this new consumer trends and comfort with video. So first, it was video feedback from product experts, but we very quickly learned that larger organizations wanted real-time feedback from their users. So we ended up building a Chrome extension to collect real-time video feedback from their users. And then from there, we had built such a beautiful user experience that a lot of folks just wanted the video recorder independent of the survey platform. So we said, that's actually relatively easy. But the most important thing, and this is Vinet's technical wizardry that we now have a patent on, is that he was able to make videos render instantaneously, which was the most important component of building a day-to-day communication tool. So we packaged that up and launched it in June of 2016, and it's been off to the races ever since. Beyond the comfort with video, the world of work is changing. Certainly during COVID, but well before that, our work is increasingly done with folks we don't share often.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About being a good product leader, about what it means to be a good operator within different size companies like 15 individuals and then 200 individuals and learning from leaders about just what works and what doesn't work on the culture front. And all of this was to recharge the batteries. I knew that I wanted to start my own business again. And I was impatiently waiting for the right idea and great co-founders, hence insert Shaheed and Vinay. I built a relationship with them and we were really good friends over the course of a year. And so one Sunday we got together on a video call and just started putting ideas on the whiteboard. And video was always at the core of what we were working on. It was everywhere in consumer. I was in Santa Monica during the rise of Snapchat, which was visual-based communication. And we were using it all day, every day to communicate with each other. So how can we bring a highly valuable seamless video product to the work?”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Illinois, and we just started working with local businesses and college startups. It was really fun. It paid the rent and bar tabs, and over the course of a couple years at college, by the time I got midway through my senior year, I realized I wasn't going to do anything with my major. So I actually ended up dropping out and moving out to California. And that was much to my parent chagrin. So we moved to Silicon Beach to get closer to the tech scene. And naturally, California, when you were born and raised in Illinois, California has a certain appeal to it. So very, very quickly after we moved out and started working with SaaS-based companies that had this SaaS model, it was apparent that the agency model, which is linear in nature, did not hold a candle to the SaaS model, which is exponential in nature. So I was offered a product role at my favorite client. And over the course of a couple years, I learned as much as I could about being a great product person.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It all started in the Chicago suburbs. Fun fact is that Shahid Vinay and myself are all from a twenty mile radius of each other who are the co-founders of Loom, but we didn't know each other until California. So for me personally, I come from a family of entrepreneurs, but they're not the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They're the Midwest entrepreneurs like running a golf course or having a paper print shop or even a local cable hunting television show. So I was always encouraged to do my own thing growing up. And when I went to school for economics at Indiana University, my freshman year was actually the 2008 market crash. And when I was looking around for internships, most specifically in the finance world, nothing really spoke to me. And it was something that really caused me to look internally and say, what is it that I want to do relatively early on in my college career? So I actually started a creative agency because my childhood best friend was a design major at University.”
2020-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source