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John Henderson

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24
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2015-04-06
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2015-04-06
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  1. “It's a ticketing service for live events that charges its customers no booking fees whatsoever, so stands in stark contrast to almost all of its competitors. And why we said yes, I think the key factors were a spectacular team with directly relevant industry knowledge and product expertise. They had basically a working prototype at the time of our investment and we took one look at that and could tell both from the product itself and from the numbers they were having in their beta that this was a great product and then you had to build. And then finally in the event space I think you need relationships and these guys kind of knew the people that mattered in that space and would be able to do business development partnerships. So three key reasons.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Ah, sure. Well, most recent investment I was involved in is actually still in stealth. So let me tell you the second most recent investment. It's a company called DICE, Great London-based company, Seed Stage Investment that we made.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Ooh, tough one. Let me give two books. I think one would be Ben Horowitz's recent book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Tremendous, yeah. And, you know, just someone who has so much experience to share, I think it's worth everyone reading that. And then I think it's also worth knowing a little bit about kind of the history and the development of the space. And so I quite like Walter Isaacson's book, The Innovators, which just really tells the story of computer science from kind of the 1800s through to now. And I think provides some good context for what we're doing today.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Exactly. I also use Blog 11 a lot, which is a blog aggregator, and I use that as a sort of RSS feed to try and keep on top of the blogs I follow and that I think are interesting. I used a product called Nuzzle a lot, which essentially Essentially takes your social feeds and puts articles in front of you that a lot of people in your circles are reading. And then beyond that, it's things like Twitter and then scanning the major sites, whether it be TechMeme, TechCrunch, Pando, those kind of things.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So I'm hugely bullish on Bitcoin. I think in the short term, there will be ups and downs and maybe a few more scandals. Long term, though, I think the blockchain or this public ledger technology will be fundamentally disruptive to the finance industry and others. So very positive.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think it's always better. There are some founding teams you can point to and just look at the track record of things that they've done before. And if it's in the same sort of space and they have obviously directly relevant expertise, then perhaps you can make an assessment that these might be the right guys to do it again. But at WhiteStar, we always like to have a relationship with the founders for quite a while before we make that first investment. And I think it's important both ways, right? It's important that we get a sense of what they're like, what they're passionate about and how well they can execute. But I think it's also important that they get a feel for how we operate and whether we're helpful and how we can contribute to their business. So I think it's better for both sides if there's a relationship before the investment.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think my approach is similar in the sense that I'll consider the market opportunity and the space and that kind of thing in the same way as I would as a venture fund. But naturally as an angel investor you're going much earlier into the company. So in that sense it's always much more of a bet on the founder and the team and in the case of Coindesk the founder is a guy called Shaquille Khan who's a well-known entrepreneur. You should try and get him on this show actually but Shaq was a tremendously helpful advisor to us at Sumley. I know he's been helpful to a whole bunch of other companies like Spotify and others and I was just confident that he could pull off a great company in any space. So combine that with a space that I found interesting and it sort of seemed like an obvious thing to invest in.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, yeah, so my first angel investment was in a company called Coindesk, which I guess is now the leading news site for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. To your question about whether I approached it differently from a professional investment, in truth, I hadn't made any professional investments when I made that first angel investment. So, I don't have a good answer to that. I don't know if I was more cautious. I think in the case of”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So that's kind of the white star answer, but I think more broadly, you know, as an entrepreneur and as an early stage founder, you really have to do your due diligence on the fund. And one thing I always encourage founders to do is to do reverse due diligence. Once you have a term sheet from a fund, go ahead and ask to meet three or four of the entrepreneurs that they've invested in. Often I suggest that you specify entrepreneurs who've been through a tough time and then as a founder go and talk to those entrepreneurs and find out what was that investor like during the good times, how helpful were they, but also when things got tough, you know, did they step up and help? Were they antagonistic at that time? And I think you'll get a really good sense by talking to founders who the venture firm has invested in, what they're like through the good times and the bad. And a good venture firm”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “who was very actively involved in four or five years rolling out Facebook into European and other countries. And so he can add tremendous value there, both from a business knowledge perspective, but also a scaling perspective. And I could tell that story if our whole bunch of our different companies, you know, another one called Bloglove and moved from Sweden to New York. White Star, I think, is somewhat unusual in the sense that we have offices in both locations. And so can kind of be helpful across the Atlantic, which is unusual in early stage fund.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, you know, I think it's critical. And I think we see this at White Star as well. We have a couple of A couple of companies that I think really benefit from having White Star involved, one of which is Me Too, a sports social network. And within our team, we've got a guy called Christian Hernandez”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I mean, I think it's tremendously important. And I think this is, you know, a lot of early stage startups don't realize quite how important it is to have the right people around the table. If I look at our experience at Sumley, we had a group called Horizons Ventures who did the first round of that company, and they were tremendously helpful in terms of connections to the right people, in terms of validation for subsequent investors, and in terms of the group of advisors and supporters they brought around the company.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Time helping people for no immediate obvious gain. And, you know, whether that be entrepreneurs that We may not be investing in right now, but that we might be thinking about investing in in the next couple of years, or even entrepreneurs who we probably won't invest in. At WhiteStar, all six of us go out of our way to be helpful. And it's partly reputational. I think in the venture world, your reputation matters tremendously, whereas in a, you know, in a small company, it really doesn't. You just need to build something and you can be a lot more selfish in that sense. And it's also partly because our hope is in doing that and by being good actors in the ecosystem that entrepreneurs whose friends tend to be other entrepreneurs will go ahead and recommend us and we'll find great companies through that process. So it's a long-winded way of saying that a lot more of my time is spent now on helping people and things that are less clearly get you to an end.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, it's a great question, Harry, and it's one I think about a lot. You know, when you're in this kind of startup environment, It's sort of obvious what you should be doing. You have clear sort of tasks, clear deliverables, clear deadlines to meet, and it's very easy to work out how to spend your time. That's not the case in VC. Ultimately, all that matters in venture is whether you deliver a return to the investors in your fund. But how you spend your time to achieve that is completely unclear. It's very easy to fill your days with company meetings and attending events and doing various marketing and all that kind of thing but what's less easy is to work out which of those activities are actually effective and help you make great investments and realize returns on those. So I find myself spending my time very differently in this role at White Star Capital. And I spend a lot more”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “To be honest, Yahoo was specifically after the technical people in the company. So they took the CTO, they took the head of the algorithm, they took Nick. But for me, I was of less interest to Yahoo and I suspect they were not so interested in me either. It made sense to get the help get the company to the point of being acquired, but I think the real people they wanted to push on were the people who created that summarization technology.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it's been a tremendous success. It happened phenomenally quickly. So within, I think it was within three weeks of the acquisition being announced, Somley had been included within Yahoo News Digest, which is their mobile app. It's a bigger and better version of what we were working on at the time. And I think I don't have any visibility into this because I'm not with Yahoo. But I think more broadly, the Sunly technology, you know, the summarization technology that we had, I would be surprised if that wasn't being used more widely within Yahoo, because that's applicable to a whole bunch of mobile products, not just news. So this digest is just one example, I think, of what we're up to.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Companies get approached for acquisition all the time. And if you put all your eggs in that basket and if you spend all your time talking to that potential acquirer and making everything super neat and tidy and preparing due diligence rooms and all that stuff that you have to do, but if you spend 100% of your time on that and then for whatever reason that acquisition falls through, you're in all sorts of trouble. So in terms of how I spent my time in the lead up to the acquisition, I basically kept doing my day job. I kept working on the iPhone and the Android apps. I kept working on the technology and trying to do partnerships with various media companies. But then at night time, I did all the stuff that you do in the lead up to an acquisition. So tremendously stressful and busy experience, but day-to-day, the job stays the same because if it falls through, you've still got a company to run.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yes, the second part of your question. To be honest, the role didn't change all that much. It just got busier. So once you have acquisition interest from a large company, it can be hugely distracting for a company like Sunley. So, you know, at that time, we were still only a handful of people. And it's tremendously important at that stage that you keep doing what you're doing and keep building a great product”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Nick is, you know, he's a phenomenal entrepreneur of any age. And I would hope to be involved in whatever he does next because I think it will be as successful, if not more so, than suddenly.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's interesting. A lot of people ask me this, and for those of your listeners that don't know, Nick was 16 years old when I joined him. So he was still at high school at the time. And a lot of people ask me kind of what was it like working with such a young entrepreneur. And to be honest, Nick's age was interesting, but Nick is a phenomenal entrepreneur of any age. You know, he's technically gifted. He has an unparalleled eye for design and product. He's fantastic with stakeholders, you know, whether it be customers or investors. He's charismatic. He's just, he's everything you want in a founder. So for me, it was a tremendous experience. Obviously, there's an unusual dynamic there being 10 or 15 years older than your boss. But, you know, I really try and steer away from the age question to the extent that I can because”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “No sure that was through a guy called Christian Hernandez who ran Facebook for Emir at the time and he was an angel investor and advisor to the company. So I joined Semley very quickly and together with Nick and the rest of the team we ended up launching a couple of smartphone apps first for iPhone and then for Android and we went after the news vertical so we essentially made news app so that you could read personalized news in summarized form on your phone. And that was really well received. We were featured by Apple a few times which was helpful. We had hundreds of thousands of downloads and then ultimately we were required by Yahoo, I think in May of 2013.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “After the law firm, I moved on to management consulting and was with the Boston Consulting Group for a little while. And there I looked at digital transformations for a number of different businesses, whether it be ATV operators or media companies. And I think one of the interesting types of projects that I did was this was around the time of the smartphone kind of rising in popularity and then the iPad being released. And so we thought a lot about how content businesses should distribute their content via these new forms. So that was fascinating. After that, I had a brief stint at Facebook and it was from Facebook that I was introduced to a company called Sumley. And that was a very young early stage company that essentially had a piece of summarization technology that meant that we could take any long-form piece of written content and then algorithm.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Would have been 23, I suppose. And so we did that for a couple of years, as I say, and then for a variety of reasons, we ended up parting ways, not least of which because I think we both looked at this business and realized that while we probably could have made kind of, you know, a decent living from it, it was never really going to be a big thing. So we parted ways and then I went back to what I was trained in and became an M&A lawyer at an Australian law firm where I grew up. And so there I was doing technology M&As essentially so you know we did the merger of the two, the third and fourth biggest Australian telcos, we did a bunch of acquisitions of technology companies and I guess there I started learning a bit about these businesses through looking at their legals. You know, you can see all the deals that a company's done and who it has relationships and what kind of contracts it has and that perhaps sparked my interest for the sector.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, sure. You know, in a sense, my career has been a series of transitions, I suppose. I started out straight after university, not so much in the technology industry per se, but definitely in the entrepreneurial space. With a friend of mine from high school, actually, I co-founded a business called Bush Campus. Was a business that essentially provided an outdoor recreation experience for either a weekend or a week to high school students. We spent two years on that, and we did a bunch of different things, we built facilities, we had a team of 12, we had thousands of students come through our program, and it was a really tremendous kind of first start to small business.”

    2015-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source