YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Libov

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37
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2015-07-13
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2015-07-13
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1
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  1. “Take rates. I think Amazon's take rate for their marketplace is something like 15%. You could drive that all the way down to zero if you're using something like OpenBazaar.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, I think the most recent investment that we have announced is the company is called Obi-Wan, which is based, is it the company that operates the OpenBazaar protocol, which enables more open marketplaces, and this is partially based on the blockchain. So one of the ideas here is that typically in any marketplace, you've centralized the authority. So Amazon has a marketplace, Etsy has a marketplace, but they are the central authorities. So when it comes time to, let's say, well, let me take a step back and say, why do we have central authorities? One of the reasons is that it's difficult to say handle disputes without a central authority. So if somebody sells something and doesn't get paid for it, who do they turn to if they don't have a central authority? But OpenBazaar and Obi-Wan are doing some really unique things that would really enable decentralized marketplaces so anyone could sell anything anywhere according to protocols and would do quite a bit for reducing”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's funny. When About 10 years ago, I was something of a tech Ludite and really kind of believed that tech and the internet were going to be ruinous all. And then what happened there is when I was in college, a friend and I had an idea for what it's basically Tinder now, but this was pre-iPhone. and tried to get us started off the ground where we had a prototype working on a Windows CE phone, if you remember those. So I think And I think given how much I found to love tech and to love this industry, I probably would have recommended myself to have kept a much more open mind from an earlier age. Whereas around when I was in college, I was pretty sure I knew how the world worked, which is not an uncommon problem.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Rather be independent, that they like the freedom. They don't like being an employee. So I think it's not such a, the dividing lines here are not so clear, and I think they'll find a way to work them out.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, well, I think they're so well capitalized that they can figure out a way to make their model work with W2s or 1099s. I think the California ruling, it's sort of important to keep it in perspective that it only affects companies in California for now. And they can adjust their practices so that they're more in line with a 1099 workforce than a W2 if that's what they want. I think another thing to keep in perspective is it's sort of easy to see the headlines about the lawsuits and think that all the drivers want to be W2s. And if you actually look at some of the polls, it's actually not the case. I mean, if you even talk to a lot of Uber drivers, I'm not even aware of it. And if you ask them if they prefer to BW2 or 1099, I mean, not necessarily in those terms, they say that they'll say that they...”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And it actually also, in reading her blog really got me thinking that someone's music and the media and the things they write probably all belong in the same place. And that could work out quite well for apple music.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The one thing that I found that I think is compelling also about Apple Music is, and this is something I've really only grown to appreciate in the last month, as you saw that TIFF between Taylor Swift and Apple, that actually really got me to appreciate how an artist can connect directly with their fans these days. I mean, it sounds a little bit cliche, but it really, until you look at Taylor Swift's blog, see how genuine it is. I mean, I had sort of always written her off as someone who's persona and music was sort of a group effort, sort of managed. And when this whole TIFF came about, I started looking into it quite a bit deeper and even through Twitter, I learned that she's actually running the show there, which made me really come to appreciate her.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “That's actually the exact analogy that I made, and it's sort of that's one reason to be not so optimistic about Apple Music. As soon as, I mean, it just, that struck me immediately as not at all the way that I think about music, you know, just choosing between rock, jazz, classic rock, rap, I mean, just hitting those circles. There's something that feels like it's intended to be playful, but actually it feels quite sterile. And that's the... Not to be so optimistic about”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “The things not to like is it's sort of like a daddish quality. I mean, if you look at the, you know, like I have trouble parsing the interface, but there's that connect section and there's playlists about Apple.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I'm struggling. I mean, it's actually quite remarkable that you think that the entirety of the iTunes catalog is available to you all at once. Whereas there are some cases on Spotify where I run into content that I would like that isn't there. There's some aspect of the radio which I think is There's something there might be something fundamental about it that we might have looked over in this rush to make everything on demand My wife actually really likes to listen to radio and likes to be like sort of the spontaneity of it and then the fact that when a song that you really love comes on there's quite a bit more of a rush than when you just tap the song yourself.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, I'm flatter. As you asked that question, I was agonizing between two books to talk about. So I hope I chose the right one.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And then once you have a new framework, it's sort of flips a switch, right? And suddenly the whole framework breaks down and you can build a whole framework anew from that. And I think that's actually, you know, I hate to sound too grandiose. I think some of those ideas are actually applicable in investing where you bring with you a certain framework for looking at the world. And then that framework breaks down and you can build a new framework anew.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Favorite book. No, I really love, there's a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Which I was a science student in undergraduate, I read in a science technology and society class. And one of the things that's really phenomenal about that book is that it really crystallizes what it's like to be looking at the world through a certain framework. If you think about how we looked at astronomy, for example, before Copernicus, we had a certain framework that gave us an idea about what was happening in the heavens and we looked at stars, I think it was Socrates, I could be mistaken, who thought that the stars were holes in the sky, that light was shining through from beyond, from outside those holes. Absolutely.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's not as if you ever said, Oh, we were waiting for this, but all of a sudden it totally makes sense. Absolutely. All the time that you've spent looking at healthcare and things that didn't make sense, something walks in totally unexpected.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That these don't, it doesn't necessarily lead to we're looking for a company like X or a company like Y. If you take a company like figure one, which is one of our portfolio companies, which that company came in, that investment happened right around the time that I was hired, so I wasn't there for the pitches or anything like that. But one of the funny things is you see a lot of companies in the healthcare space, or at least USB did, and spent a lot of time thinking and talking about it. And at no time did anyone at USV think, well, you know, there should probably be a media network for doctors or an Instagram for doctors. But then figure one walks in, and while I shouldn't say they walked in because I think Andy had heard or read about them somewhere and gotten in touch and gotten to know with them over time. But then you sort of, you stumble across a figure one.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Where we tend to follow our thesis and our intellectual interests quite a bit more. And we're trying to look at companies and things that are happening out in the market in a way that helps us further our understanding. And one of the funny things, I think, is, you know,”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, one of the things that's unique about USV, insofar as I can tell, because this is the only venture capital firm that I've ever worked at and I've only been here for 10 months, is that we're thesis driven, which means that we look out at what's happening based upon our sort of core beliefs about the internet and how to grow a business on the internet. So, in contrast to some firms which are more, I think, deal flow oriented, where they're looking out on the market for what deals are out there and available and whether or not they might be the right fit for those deals.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You know, another thing I should mention is that we're so small that we don't really have, we're too small for things to be sort of broken up by sectors or verticals. So anything that we're analyzing, we're sharing pretty eagerly with the rest of the group, the rest of the team here, and blogging out in the open about things like that.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, well, the 50 thing and the sports thing is sort of a personal interest. And a tough one for a VC is just because a lot of that industry is locked down by intellectual property and things like that, which actually is something that we had to deal with with 50. So there's two analysts at USB myself and Joel Monnegro. And we do look at particular sectors. It's not particularly a matter of assigning ourselves or getting assigned any particular sector. I mean, these things really align kind of with our interests and where we're sort of hanging out online. I think both of us are deeply interested in all the topics or all the sectors that the two of us both specialize in, but sort of by virtue of where we're hanging out online and what networks we're involved in, we're more likely to hear about and learn about interesting tidbits. And so we go deep on those sectors.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And so part of the idea with 50 was also that we would curate that for you. So we would automatically pull tweets from beat writers of a particular team, the players in that team, so that as soon as you fire up the app and you switch to a particular game, you're getting all the tweets from those players. And it was an idea to sort of make Twitter more accessible to people who might be intimidated by using Twitter in general but are also missing out on all the content that's there.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That the score, the box score doesn't, you actually get a really quick visual snapshot of how the game went, which we think is pretty neat, and I think the 50 uses of the last season really enjoyed, and we hope they do this coming season. The other aspect of 50 that I think had more mixed results is there's a lot of great content on Twitter about profile and sports in general. And as someone who's very into Twitter, it's easy for me to curate a timeline or lists of people who have smart things to say about football beyond the kind of boilerplate stuff that you hear from announcers and color guys on ESPN and whatnot.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And one of the things that we found were frustrating, two things that we found frustrating were that, one, there's a lot of great advanced analytics that are happening around pro football and other sports that weren't really in a terribly digestible format. So one of the things that 50 allows you to do is it looks at the win percentage as the game is occurring. So your team might be up, let's say, 21 to 14, but the other team has the ball near your end zone, which is two minutes left, which means the other team might actually have a higher percentage of winning the game, even though they're down in terms of the score. And what it does is if you look particularly at the past Super Bowl, which had a lot of wild swings, you get a visual graph of the game, which really tells the story of the game in a way.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “50F was something that my friend and I were talking about before I joined USV, and I worked on it quite a bit on the summer before I joined here. So 50 app is an app for watching and consuming pro football, NFL football.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And they'll sort of sort it out with a restaurant, and then they'll get back to you. And what's kind of nice is instead of what would be the traditional way of doing that would be sending you a notification and that that loads up the app and you get a little spinner while it's loading up the interface to receive the content of your notification. They just send you an SMS and say, all right, your reservation is confirmed. Do you have any questions? And then you say yes or no. And then you have a conversational interaction from there on out. And there have been cases where I did have questions that would not have been convenient to input through the app, which might have led me to an email address or something like that. So the SMS was quite timely and quite convenient for answering any questions that would not have been so easy to address through the traditional app interaction model.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Well, one of the experiences I had, which was quite nice, is, so the way the app works is they have a network of restaurants that they work with so that you can submit for a restaurant and a time that you'd like your reservation for”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think a lot of people are grappling with it. There's one in particular. I use an app called Reserve for making restaurant reservations here in New York.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Phone. I don't believe that, but I do believe that there really is a time and a place for SMS as there is for over the top messaging to take the interaction out of an app framework and into a more conversational framework.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I certainly don't believe SMS is dead, and in some ways you could argue that its relevance, it's becoming ever more relevant as we move from the desktop to mobile. Whereas on the desktop, your email address was your identifier. It's what you would use to actually sign up for any particular website. Whereas on mobile, if you notice, most of the time you're giving a phone number, they're sending an SMS and you're to give you a code that you punch in to verify that you are who you are. And I think more and more it's actually becoming the most important identifier on the phone. I do also think that in a variety of cases, I'm not a believer that SMS is going to, there are people who are quite a bit more optimistic than I am that SMS is going to be one of the primary ways that we interact with services in our”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, my blog is kind of homespun. So I built it on Rails. But a blog probably now about once every three weeks. I would like to do it even more if I had more time. I mean, I have a list of things that I would like to write about and often on the walk to and from work, I'm half writing blog posts in my head so that by the time I get in front of the keyboard, it all just kind of spills out. But if I had more time, I'd love to blog more. But now it's about once every three weeks.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, I couldn't recommend it more highly. I mean, it's probably not for everyone, but for me, and the reason why I do recommend it is because there's nothing quite like thinking out loud. It's one thing to think about a particular topic from your armchair at home. But if your attention is as short as mine, you might only give that a few seconds of thought from here and there. But when you're formulating it for a blog post and something that's meant to be consumed, you really need to think deeply and figure out every single angle that you're communicating something which is coherent and”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well I was blogging quite a bit before I joined USV and I was I think inspired enough by Fred and Andy and Albert's blog that when it came time for me to apply here I think some of the ideas that I had expressed in my own blog probably resonated because perhaps they had originated from the partners here.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “you I think they had a real belief that networks would be the defensible quality of the internet or the defensible thing about building a business on the internet. Whereas let's say in prior businesses like Microsoft Office or Windows or any other software that came packaged in a CD or even a box, that reliability was actually one of the primary differentiators and probably also features. I mean if you think about Office, it's the most, it was the most reliable and feature-packed piece of software out there. But on the internet, it would be network effects and the bonds between all the nodes in the network that would actually allow a business to be defensible.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, I think a lot of this is what I've gleaned from the team here because this is all well before my time. I think when Brad and Fred started the firm, they really believed, and we're going back to around 2004, I believe. They should really check with them or maybe with Wikipedia, see if that you're correct.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “It's very, very true. It's funny to think back, like take, for example, when if you had mentioned the word network to me before I started working here, I would think quite literally in terms of a social network with friends and like buttons and whatnot. And one of the things that's actually been quite incredible here is when we use, let's say, when the term network comes up, we're talking in the most, let's say, literally talking about networks of all types. I mean, they could be, it could go back to the railroad network. It could be actual social networks. And that gives you a real sort of fundamental intellectual framework for thinking about some of the companies that we see who come in here and pitch and some of the companies that we're interested in. What the market looks like.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Well, I think I've learned more in this 10 months than any 10 months of my entire life. That probably includes the 10 months from the day I was born till when I started walking, I think it's quite”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Well, the initial screening involved recording two two minute videos. I think the questions were what aspects of tech most inspire you or what are your greatest inspirations? And the other question was, I think just to tell them a little bit about myself. And then so I submitted those and then I heard back about two weeks later. I met with a few of the partners and some of the team in one interview and then did another interview with the other half of the team here, which is quite small. So it's very feasible.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “While I was a product manager at Apsfire in Tel Aviv, I had been there for about four years and really gotten to know the mobile ecosystem really well. I think that was one of the reasons they brought me on here. So I'd been there about four years and kind of identified that my time there was coming to an end as the company was actually being more focused in Paris than Tel Aviv. I hadn't at all thought about joining VC, but I was a regular viewer of the USV website and regular reader of Fred's blog where they announced that they were hiring two new analysts. I've been following those guys forever and thought, well, I would do that. And I applied and lo and behold, one interview after another, I found myself as an analyst here, along with my counterpart, Joel Megro.”

    2015-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source