YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Dishotsky

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26
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2019-05-17
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2019-05-17
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1
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  1. “Down to hope. So if you're in the middle of the country and you've always had this dream of moving to one of these great cities, well, if you're looking at the headlines today, you say, I can't do that. Fast forward five to seven years, that same person could say, I can now do that because of Star City. That's my dream.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so we want to be the brand that is recognized for making cities affordable and accessible to people again. And I think that the world is our oyster. Right now there is so many cities that people really want to get their foot in the door to, whether it be San Francisco to start a startup, whether it be LA to produce a movie or whatever it is. But maybe they have to be a barista or a bartender first to get there. They can't uncrack those cities because it's just so far out of reach and they can't get close to those places of action. And so we would love to be the globally recognized brand for people getting that foot in the door in the best cities in the world. And so we're actually building the buildings. We're actually building the community. We build software to make that experience really great. And so taking a holistic view, soup to nuts of like, what is the customer experience of moving to a new city? We would love to just be known as that. And then that kind of fundamentally”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I think actually the thing about fundraising, being in fundraising mode or not, I just don't think that's how you build relationships. Like being transactional on the thing that you care most or second most about your startup with the people that are going to give you the money to help you get along the way and give you the advice along the way, I just don't think that that can, like you said, happen in two or three weeks. I think it's building a long-term relationship. It's just fraught with so many disadvantages. So that's the thing that I really try to push back against.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Oh, well, we're sleep training my daughter again. And so that's a wild ride for any fathers and mothers out there. So my daughter, there's your answer.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think that people don't use their gut enough. We have this really great tool. People sort of throw out the window. When I'm looking to hire people or investors or anything like that, I use sort of competency, culture fit, and that this thing called chemistry. Chemistry is extremely important and people just forget about it. And in the real world, if somebody made you feel icky or weird, you would just avoid them. But for whatever reason, we don't do that in the business world. And I think that that's an extremely important skill for us to all learn. And so do that with your investors. If you feel good or bad with them, I think you should recognize that.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, I think that more female founders, more female VCs, more diversity and inclusion, and then also more conversations around mental health, I think it's not discussed and it should be top of mind for everybody.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Memory in that day and really get some distance on it. And so I think that once you have a family and kids, you actually get this wonderful opportunity to have that time. I think the other thing is that 20-year-olds, you sort of post college John might have been a little bit more.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I'm glad you said seasoning because food is terrible without seasoning. And so if you're calling old seasoning, I'm down for that. That's okay. Look, we were talking about this before, but like I get home from a hard day and I put my phone down and my daughter jumps into my arms and my wife is done with her work day. The day just sort of sort of slips into this sort of meditative different experience. It's an alternative universe, I like to call it, where your day kind of subs behind you and now you're in a whole different world and you're with family and you're just sort of having a lot different conversations. And I think that that's actually provided me a lot of value as a founder and leader because otherwise, then you know this, Harry, you're on 24-7. And I just don't think that that's how we're wired. You can do it for a short period of time. It's certainly okay, but I just don't think that that's how we're wired. We need to reset, right? We need the chance to wash out what happened in our”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “What the headlines might say. And I have a lovely family and a daughter. And like, these are things that I'm very, very grateful for. And it goes on and on and on. And so if I were you, I would really start with that journal as a step one, building that support group, investigating therapy on your own terms, and sort of building that sort of mental health support group so that you can always be in that positive frame of mind. And don't forget to exercise. And also, the other thing is you should definitely find a romantic partner. That's very important.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Like, you've got to find your mental health coaches. I think that there's nothing wrong with actually going to therapy. I think it has this stigma, but it really is mental health exercise. And I think that there's nothing wrong with it. And you should also be physically exercising. The other thing you can do is look at other founders as your sort of support group that are in your stage at that given time. That's really, really helpful and important to be able to share with folks about that. And then the other thing is just to say like, you know, starting with gratitude, and I know Justin Khan talks about this very publicly, and I really appreciate that, is saying that you have a choice every day to be really grateful. You decided to start this company. You're taking everybody on this journey. So you sort of have to really be intentional. And I think the thing that I really love to do is this daily gratitude journal, and that's waking up every single morning and saying, like, look, we have so much cool stuff around us. We live in such a wonderful city here in San Francisco, despite”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The first thing you do in the morning is have nine cups of coffee, so you're like very jittery, and that then permeates to your company. And so what you have to understand is that you can do it that way, but it's going to have cascading and unfortunate effects on your company. And I think that if I talk to younger founders now, I always talk about this. And I think it's something that we just don't spend enough time on. And I think we should be talking more about it.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Have to do is actually reprioritize yourself as number one, right? And this is kind of hard to do because you have so many people asking for so much stuff. And as a founder, you're probably really deeply care about solving people's problems. And so what you do is you sort of forget about yourself. So what I like to do, the trick is to just sort of like start first with really caring about yourself. And why that's important is that if your mental health and even your physical health is in a great place, that permeates your entire company. If you're in a good mood, if you come in and you show up to every meeting and you're in a good place, if you're prepared, if you've sort of exercised that day, if you're in a really good place, that then brings excitement to your team and the sort of year in a good mood and all that kind of stuff. And that has a cascading effect to the rest of the company. If you don't, if you put yourself last, you're going to start to see the sort of opposite where your mental health is a disability, where you're down on yourself, you're not taking care of your health, you're sort of eating crappy food. Maybe you're drinking every night or whatever it is.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, look, I have to say that I'm not a qualified therapist, but I was raised by a psychiatrist. My father, so mental health is something that our family really talks a lot about. He had a nickname, actually his nickname was Warm Norm because he had this, just like he was such a warm guy and like he is a warm guy and he had a hot tub that everybody would hang out in and just ask for advice. So anyways, all I want to say here is that like I think that there's, and I actually have to give kudos to the initialized guys for taking down the notion of sort of hustle porn as I would say there's this concept in the valley that like you should just grind to the limits of your existence and think about yourself secondarily and just really like focus on the product and build an awesome startup and all that kind of stuff. And I think that like what we found is, or at least is what the founding community has found is that they end up even if there's a great outcome having really not enjoyed the experience along the way. And so what you”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Kind of think of it as hiring. So in our case, there's multiple times in our fundraising process where we had some of the folks with the sort of big names come to us and in one instance actually had a guy, a partner, yell at us on like a pitch call. And I was like, if you're going to be this way when we're pitching you, what would it be like to actually work with you? And so in the end, actually, we took on the folks from Eric Z, from Bullband Capital. And I'm just a huge fan of bullpen capital and what Paul has built over there. And they were sort of very transparent. But I said, like, look, I would love to be in the trenches with Eric for the next 10 years. He's just such a nice guy. He's so objective. And so in that instance, I think it's really important to think about, yes, you might get a higher valuation, but is this partner on the other side going to really be there for you through the ups and downs? And how are they behaving in the fundraising process such that you can get a sense of what that relationship will look like?”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think the valuation thing is really funny in the early days, right? Like I think Gary Tan from Initialize actually had a tweet recently about this is like if you're trying to value invest at the seed stage, it's kind of a silly exercise. So I think that optimizing between a six cap and a 12 cap is really, like, I just don't know that that's going to be the right way to invest. I think you're just kind of like, is this going to be an enormous company? Let's go or let's not go. What a lot of founders forget is that you put somebody on your board, you have an investor that you really want to have this really deep connection with and close conversation with all the time because they're going to be there through all the ups and downs and especially as the CEO, you know, you're really beholden to the board and you want to make sure that the investors have a lot of confidence in you. So if that relationship isn't really good, then you can run into a lot of pitfalls. And so what I see a lot of founders do is they'll end up taking evaluation that a partner just because of a name or whatever it is and not really doing due diligence.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And so, YC could definitely be that way, right? Where you have all these partners who are trying to help and then you have part-time partners and then you have other YC founders and then you have your peers. And so really what it comes back to is saying like, okay, well, what is true for me and what is true for my customer? What is true for our co-founding team? And really try to not optimize on the average of all that advice, but really take in sort of the good and the bad, but take it and do it your way. And I think that's really, really important. Otherwise, you'll end up with a sum of a lot of mediocre advice.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, you know, I'm a huge, I drink the YC Kool-Aid. I had so much admiration along the way after having met so many YC founders, just the level of care and concern that YC really has for founders. And so, you know, I think what I tell people who are applying and interviewing is really just be yourself. Do not try to build a company that you think other people will like because you'll get so out of sync with yourself and you won't be able to pitch it the right way. And it has to be something that you really deeply care about. And so when you're replying and interviewing, just do that and hopefully that will resonate. The other thing that I would really recommend is that it kind of goes back to that first point, but you're going to get a ton of advice along the way, the sort of analogy of like being shoved off of a cliff and having airplane parts. And the advice is people with older planes flying by you and telling you what to do. And so you're like, well, I'm building a different version of the plane. And you have to build it before you hit the ground splat.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Is a massive problem. And the size of this market is enormous. And you're building a new product and no better place in the world to build a new product than Silicon Valley. And you will get people to get on board with you as long as you have that sort of MVP startup mentality of integrating and building a great product. And so I think what we found was that the PropTech thing was happening. VCs were warming up to a little bit more of the asset-heavy type of companies. And there's no other way to solve this problem than to build buildings, right? That's how we kind of looked at it”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So then we talk to the supply side, and these were like real estate developers and builders and things like that. And we found that nobody was really focused on this problem. And so then when we said, okay, we now have to build our first star city, right? This is co-living as we see it. So our MVP. And what I did is I went out and I raised friends and family money in order to do that. And I built my founding team along the way, I reconnected with Trip. Trip was the founder of Script and he was like, look, I can introduce you to VCs. And I was like, well, I don't know that VCs be excited about this. And then I met with Jared, his co-founder, who is now a partner at YC. And so I pitched Jared in this cafe. And this is in 2016. And he was kind of quiet at first. And I was like, he hates this. He hates this idea. And he sort of stood up in this coffee shop. And he's like, you have to apply to Y Combinator. You have to apply to Y Combinator. And I was like, whoa, okay. And I was like, add some Y. He's like, look, this is a huge problem. The affordability of cities is.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Can I be a super contrarian with you? And as a VC, at first glance, one could look at Star City and obviously not me because I'm incredibly open-minded as a VC, but they could look at it and say, oh, it's really asset heavy. No thanks. Why would I or that VC be wrong in this case to take that automatic view that asset heavy, counter-lean startup offering? And why would that be a wrong view? Yeah, so we didn't really approach the problem from looking at what would VCs think from the outset. We sort of said like, let's build the best thing we possibly can and then see what part of the capital markets would actually be open to helping us scale. And so we started the company by talking to 750 people who are making 50 to 120,000 dollars a year who had full-time jobs and were living in cities 20 to 50 years old. And we said, what do you hate about your apartment? What do you hate about the living experience?”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Companies that have grown to be multibillion, tens of billion dollars. And so it kind of took a while. Like, Airbnb can kind of be considered a prop tech company, but it's more of a marketplace. I think we work was the first one that really sort of set the stage. Before that, there was really only like LoopNet and Zillow and Redfin. And those were really taking a very Web 2.0 approach to PropTech of just being sort of like a website and things like that. But I think it was really wework that sort of set the tone for PropTech to really get to where it is today.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “A whole subset of people. And so that was sort of the moment where the sort of light bulb where I said, okay, let's build a product that makes cities accessible to everyone versus it only being available to a flex few. I absolutely love that. And I have to say one thing I always look forward to today when I invest is like found a market fit. And so hearing those kind of early days at Stanford with the different students is awesome to hear. But I do want to separate the show into two different parts. The tangible and the intangible. Does that sound okay to you? Okay, so with the tangible in mind, I want to discuss funding. You know, the prop tech spaces, it's not had the most love from VCs over the past few years, but it's suddenly become a very hot space. Can I ask, why did it take so long for PropTech to become hot with VCs? It's a great question. I think it comes down to really like, will they be able to provide returns to their LPs? And you know this now, there's a fund manager. And so it was really kind of like, what are the established”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “With sort of entrepreneurship when I graduated college and reconnected with a good old friend of mine, Trip Adler, who had started a company's script, he was in the second batch of Y Combinator and called me. He's like, hey, John, I know you do real estate related stuff. Can you help me build out a new office? And I was like, sure. From there, I met the Weebly guys. I met the optimize the guys. I met Parker from Xenophon's. And along the way, I really just sort of saw them be able to grow these companies from zero to these amazing things. And I knew I wanted to do that. So in 2015, I resigned from my career. And the headlines about cities being so unaffordable had just started to really grind on me. group of people living in an under one roof and thought that that could be a thing that really helped make cities more affordable.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, so my parents looked from the East Coast in the 1960s to San Francisco, California, and this was like during the middle of the counterculture hippie movement. And so they did live on communes, but eventually settled in Palo Alto. My dad was pursuing a medical degree at Sanford, and they ran a little experiment on our small family, which was that they had Stanford students living with us. So this was kind of co-living SID 0.1. And it was impactful for our family because the students got inexpensive childcare. This was a hack of ours. But it really fell in love with sort of cities when we went back to visit family in Manhattan. And I remember just sort of staying up one night when I think it was like seven or eight just looking at the city skyline. And I think every drawing I did after that at an elementary school was of a building or of a city.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So excited for this, Harry. I'm a huge fan of yours and you just got this lovely good old fashioned thing I call hustle. So congrats on all your success and excited to be here today. You are so kind and on a way to buzzing me up at the beginning, but I would love to keep with a little bit on you. So tell me, did you always kind of dream of recreating how About living in our cities.”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I am so excited for this episode. A huge thank you to Austin Atlamda and Jesse Alumi for the intro. But thank you so much for joining”

    2019-05-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source