YouSaid · the spoken record

Jude Gomila

lines on the record: 40
first: 2020-02-11
most recent: 2020-02-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Over and over again because they're trying to get the unicorn. That's why they're coming back into the game again. And so I went into that. And the product is great. And now everybody loves it. Everybody's trying to get into the rounds. It's impossible to get into the rounds. But getting there before anyone is important. And there's always a 10-year journey before it, usually, or at least something happening before it.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the reason why I'm first checking linear is that Carrie, I have been watching him and Jury, and I think they're amazing for 10 years. So it's been a 10-year journey and they joined companies as employees. And then it came back. And, you know, they tried something before called KIP. And I advise KIP, and it didn't work. But I still think they were brilliant. And, you know, they got even better as employees. They got better skills and learned from Airbnb and Coinbase. And when they came back together, just the sheer quality of them as a production team, as being able to produce cool products was so high. I didn't wait for anyone. I said, I'm in. I want to do it right now. I don't think he had even started formally raising. I'm like, I want to do it right now. I want to back you guys again. And I wanted to undo as some mistakes I had done where I had not regone back to founder that I thought was great or founding team I thought was great because they failed. And so done that a few times where I found someone great and they failed and I didn't back them again and I should back them again because it is a career investing as well that you're going to back these founders.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you want both. I think a great founder in a bad market will waste a few years switching to a good market. They're going to end up doing a pivot or starting a new company. So you should back that second time founder again. That's another thing. Well, back the founder who's failed but you think is still brilliant because they will find something. And if you look at Alex Chu, you know, million dollar homepage, he had that very early success. And then with Popjam, it didn't work. And I think some people had written off. But now with Calm, you know, he's got unicorn. He was always a brilliant person. He was always a brilliant founder, right? So I think backing the founder, the market part helps as well, like meditation and has been like a great wave to ride. But yeah, I think having both is important. Otherwise, the great founder can waste a ton of time. And sure, if it's a terrible founder in a great market, some of them can get by if they hit a distribution mechanism early on. And that actually may turn them into a great founder as well, just writing that scaling. But they're going to have to have some magic for sure.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I knew this at the beginning, so I'm going to throw this first one out, and I'll try one I didn't know at the beginning. So I was going to say back something that you would build yourself. So if you really would build it yourself, you would stop everything to go and found the company around it. That is probably a good investment to make. In terms of something that I learned that I didn't know about in terms of backing, I think prioritize the founder above the idea. Now, I know why CF said this for a long time, but I was very market and product obsessed than I still am. But I do think that the priority is the founder and the founding team, and especially the founder, really, really dig deep into that one.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right answer. We're going to try and do both perfect strategy and really fast. So, some of these things oppose each other, and you're going to have to see the trade-offs and realize that you will not be able to be perfect on every dimension.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for this one, I was thinking through that if you think of an Aston Martin, I think there's a particular 177 model, they do all the surfaces in a perfect way to a T-Re way, including surfaces so they machine these surfaces, even the ones you can't see and you will never see. And they do this because people want to buy that product as if it's a perfect watch that's being constructed that you may not be able to see the perfection that's inside it. So they do that because that's what people want to buy. Now, in pragmatism, if you don't necessarily have time for normal cars, you wouldn't do that. You would not machine surfaces that the user is not going to see in a perfect tier A way. So I think you've got to pick your battles on what you're going to do perfectly and what you're not going to do perfectly. And you can't do everything, absolute everything to a perfect degree. So thinking through what would be, do you want to shine on the user interface and you're going to reduce the number of features that you have? How's this going to play out against your competition? Say for it being an investor as well, like what are you going to be perfect on? Are you going to be perfect on response times or strategy? Are you going to be slow but come back with a”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as we get more data and we get more analytics, that means more complexity and more opportunity to be analytical. So I think the skill actually goes up. Some of the art maybe goes down, but the skill can go up. So is an F1 car today with lots of controls and like lots of dashboards and is it more skillful or less skillful than driving like 1920s race car, which maybe it's more art than science? So I think they both can be skillful in different ways.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really enjoyed Go to Ashabach. I know a lot of people say this answer as well, and it's true. And what I like about the book is that it does dance between art and science, and it embeds the science in the art, and it takes the art into the science. I think it's both. I think the art part is a part that's hard to specify, hard to verbalize, but it's still truth. So it is both. And I think there's a shift. I would like to shift it to more of a science, but I don't think you can verbalize everything into it being a science. I think there's always going to be some art and a very large part of art into it.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's going to be consolidation for the traditional VC where there's going to be some players that are the main players and they've gone full stack, they're full stack, full service, traditional VC, and all the traditional VC other ones fall apart. And then there'll be a bunch of verticalization of extremely deep specialization, in particular scientific fields or technology fields. And then there'll be this swarm, a massive network of individuals who can power and get a company off the ground, even do series, like individuals doing series A's. I can see that happening in the future as well. So I think the suits are going to be removed from the game and creators and operators and makers are going to be more empowered with dollars to make it. But there will be giant warehouses. I mean, it's kind of like both players will go to both extreme sides of the board. One extreme side is full stack, giant company helping you in every different way, perfect quality. The other one's lots of individuals, highly creative, highly unique, helping you in a network.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gold balls that represent something just sitting around in a vault doing nothing that does absolutely nothing. It doesn't build any technology. It doesn't write any books or make any content. But if you liquidate all that stuff, virtualize the whole thing, get off. I'm not saying necessarily it's a good thing or a bad thing, but unlock that value and you take all that money and you go and power it into all these passionate entrepreneurs. It does end up building interesting things and it gets us away from negative yield curves. So the capital is more efficient when it's distributed, not fully distributed. So there's this once again this is perfect when we talk about this balance. There is this like the capital needs to be not fully perfectly distributed because you don't get anything interesting happening if it's not aligned around creators, makers, decision making. It needs to also map to the incentives and the potential upside of the network. So I think it's this unbundling, but it's not perfect randomness over the whole network of like every single person having exactly the same number of dollars around the world.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. Well, I think there are two parts. Drivers that unbundle things and there are drivers that consolidate things. So, you know, a classic monopoly company is consolidating things and the network effect has this tendency to want to consolidate things. But there are some things that like to break apart. So, you know, if we think about, I don't know, a rock on the top of a hill, the rock is going to weather and it's going to fall apart and it's going to unbundle. But, you know, later down the line, it's going to go into the soil and there'll be some geology processes. And eventually there's going to be some compression and there's going to be some rebundling of this thing. So I think on all these dimensions, there are unbundling and rebundling phases and simultaneously occurring, to be honest. So with capital, I do think the capital is unbundling. And the capital as an instrument for powering and network of information interchange or like people creating things, it is more efficient when it's liquid. It is more efficient when the capital is distributed into the hands of people that are going to make new things. So if we have these.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The seed it's not right, do secondary on the seed unless they had bootstrapped the company and they're making loads of money. And at the end of the day as well, this is a more founder-driven world where the founder is getting more power than the investor. And I think that's okay. I think that's actually a good thing for innovation. And I think it's good to shift the power away from capital more to the kind of compute machine or the consciousness of the human.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think there's different scales of liquidity that affects people in different ways. So in San Francisco, something like a million dollars, it's not crazy liquidity. You can just about get a house. So I think when I see secondary, I'm thinking about it from an efficiency standpoint. Does it make the founder more efficient? Does it make them more relaxed, but not too relaxed? So if you look at an athlete running 100 meter sprint, they have to be pretty relaxed. If they're overstressing, they will not win the gold medal. But they can't be too relaxed. So I think there's like this optimal state. And liquidity, if they were taking $100 million off the table, that's going to completely change their life. They're going to buy a giant house. They're going to start decorating and they're going to be extracted. They're going to have everything. So there's a curve of what things unlock. And I think the first thing for a founder to have some security in a house, they're economically more efficient. They can pay themselves a lower salary. That's a good justification for doing a secondary. I think that kind of secondary is okay. And it's always in proportion to how big the round size is. And, you know, is it on the A, is it on the B? I think on.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for some, I've met the founders. I think it would be terrible if they got into the game. So I think it depends on the founder type. And when the investor looks at it, they should just look at the real situation and be like, is this an advantage for them? Does this help build the network up of the product trying to sell? Does it help build up their brand and attract more people to the company and attract talent? Does it help them be a better CEO and learn playbooks faster? And that's a more nuanced answer where there are different founders that it's for and if some that it's not.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think having a natural allergic reaction to it themselves on the first point you made, like, oh, it feels like a distraction, then they shouldn't do it because it will be a distraction to them. Whereas I don't think they should do it because of perception of other people. I don't think they should not do investing because they think, oh, my investors are going to be really annoyed with me and think I'm getting distracted. If they feel like they're going to get distracted, they probably will because that person, there are different kinds of people. Some embrace madness, chaos, complexity, and they get a lot out from it and they get a lot of learning out from it. Some are not like that. Some are craftspeople that need to focus and don't need to learn by themselves and need to learn by doing. And those type of founders, maybe they should not be investors at this stage. Some learn by mental models and by abstractions and by networks and by analogies and by anecdotes and stories. Those people, those operators do get a lot out of there. So for me, it's been invaluable as well for building companies and being a better CEO.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who build companies have also been investing in things as well. And it keeps a variety high. It keeps things interesting.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earlier spotting particular trends. So I think with a number of rising investors in total, things are going to become a lot more local. So you have to play to new advantages. And that may be like knowing your local market. So maybe Lisbon would have a bunch of different angels inside it. And I think there's going to be angels across the entire world. And there's going to be a lot more hybrid players where their operators and their founders. And I had a little chat with Josh Buckley about this, another investor out there who I respect. And part of this was about building a brand. And, you know, if you're going to build a brand, you could build a brand on content. or you could build a brand on building a unicorn. So if you built a unicorn, you're going to have a lot of deal flow. So it does pay, it's not just about the investments and the deal flow. You're going to be connected into an ecosystem. So for operators, it is advantageous to also be investors as well. Jeff Bezos, he was a major investor in Google. And I think the actual operator investor dichotomy question, it hasn't really been a question. It's been going on for ages. If you look back through all business time, good business.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always like to look at the dynamics that are occurring in the background that lead to the conclusions. So one of them is that we know prices are going up. So pre-seed prices are previous A rounds and seed rounds, previous A rounds. All the prices are going up, but also the headroom on the top is going up as well. And most importantly, the speed to get there, the tooling around software and the leverage that people have, and the playbooks are getting more understood to building a huge unicorn in a shorter and shorter amount of time. So there's different dynamics, you know, the headroom maybe is going up, the speed, i.e. the IRR and your rate of return every year is, I would argue, going up. The price is also going up as well. So between these kind of three numbers, your kind of the X or the IRR that you're going to get as an investor is changing. And it's not necessarily going up. It's probably going down. But the amount of capital in the network is also being, it's being distributed to a lower level. There are many younger investors that are getting into the game and actually have a massive advantage on some of the older players when it comes to getting into deals.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The absolute best bet. And I realized that some of the riskier bets I'd done smaller check sizes on, and I realized that was actually not the right decision. And the risky bets, you still want to have the same check size. So I actually have converged and I talked to a few other master investors who are better than me or at least been in the market for longer than me. They also play that game as well. But it might be provable with some kind of a statistical theory that you could actually like should be consistent with check sizes.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I originally started, I played it more of a poker game, but depending on the kind of risk threshold on the board, I would range out there and I would do different check sizes. The big difference between investing in the poker game is that there's not this feedback loop where the market's going to react to that amount that you put in to try and win that part, but it's not the same game. So actually, over time, I've preferred being more stable with the check size. There's different dynamics of that. One is this minimum. You've got opportunity costs over time, so you're going to have a minimum threshold. Now, if you say, okay, well, I'm going to go, I'm going to do two or three or four x larger than that, well, that comes with a different responsibility bracket, and that may not run into the way that you want to spend your time. So I actually think there's pressure from above on maximum check size and there's pressure from below on maximum check size because of your opportunity cost. And that means that the dynamics are pointing towards like having a single number is constant. And the other way to look at it is the point you made where you don't know some of your riskiest bets maybe.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vanilla, but ownership is becoming more important, but ownership also brings you responsibilities. Do you own a significant percentage? You have major responsibilities for that company as well.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I didn't care too much for it, I just cared about taking part in the round. I cared more about optimizing the upside of the company in terms of how the maximum market cap that you guys can possibly be. And the two are kind of linked together in terms of like the price sensitivity, price, and the ownership. And they can be slightly unbundled with some particular move sometimes. So the more, as I've done more investments and I've become busier, I've definitely thought more about ownership in that there does end up with this opportunity cost of time for the investor where they have to start picking which ones they're really going to back. So I think once you've booted up your kind of portfolio in terms of numbers and you've kind of seen some of the mechanics and you've done some learning, then there's going to be maybe a strategy of like reducing the number that I've done and increasing check size, ownership, not necessarily price sensitivity, but ownership by deploying more dollars because the ownership can be reached in different ways, either on the pricing side or also legal ways to like push through ownership, which I don't really like from a founder's perspective. I like these deals to be pretty.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing, trying to find a couple of different key shapes that all, when you put these T's together, they kind of build a nice little structure of your dream team of investors. And then, you know, having alignment as well, sometimes for a founder, this is very difficult to do. They're just trying to raise around and they can't actually necessarily architect around correctly. But I think the best investors will see founders architecting around, and that is another signal to them that, hey, they're architecting around. They're thinking this through properly, and they're really building up the dream team and also balance of power. They have to think about, is this person going to counteract this other investor in terms of power? Because you can't lump all the, you don't want enemies on your cap table together. But if everyone was a perfect, perfect, perfect ally, that's not necessarily good from a power perspective. You may want someone to go and oppose someone else that's blocking you from doing an exit and think about how the power might play and how the voices are going to kind of collect together.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something they need to find the gaps that they have as a founding team. What gaps do they want to fill? I think they should break down some of the dimensions of how investors can help. So some might be useful for sales, some may not. Some may be amazing at product. Some might be great at building teams. I always think about a dream team of investors that the founders should try to architect and not have everybody be the same thing. So if you go off the brands, well, the brands don't have as much time. So you want some brands for Signal and for press and for hiring and you want some non-brands because you want their time. So working out the dimensions that you're trying to get. So you want a bit of brand. There's always a trade-off on these dimensions, right? I'm trying to think through what the dimensions are. And then someone's really good at sales. They're probably not necessarily going to help you on your API architecture, or maybe they can help you with your pricing policy. So I think building a collection of different spiky T-shaped, I don't know if you've heard it as T-shaped concept of like a great generalist, but very, very, very good at one.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it's just like a top up round or something. So I've definitely seen this new mechanics due to the new players coming in and everybody trying to fit into different parts and differentiate and stuff like ICOs, crypto raising could have had a huge, huge impact on the whole investment game. It didn't deliver kind of failed because of laws. It got blocked by governments effectively and it failed because there were terrible fake projects out there that ruined things for everybody else. So we aren't necessarily heading into that ICO world that people wanted and where we were going to completely unbundle things like accreditor investor laws. That could have really radically changed it. But we are going to see like the shift of numbers. Numbers investors all playing out on some kind of game boards and trying to find some new way to differentiate affecting the mechanics.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, going to be honest with you, I don't know the stats. I don't know the numbers on this. So I wouldn't want to judge it from my perspective on the numbers that I see because I don't think they're necessarily representative of the entire market. So for a question like that, I would actually like to see the numbers and see the stats. Something I have seen, though, people are, as there are more entrants of investors into the market coming into the market, I'm seeing definitely more people having to push to different extremes on this kind of game theory landscape. So for example, Union Score Ventures, you know, they were in seed and they moved up to the A and then we're seeing many new investors go into this pre-seed and trying to shift seed into the new A. So they're trying to like some people moving bases and some people actually trying to move the base by creating a new category somewhat. So I think, and you could even say there's going to be some kind of category creators between the rounds. There'll be some people that they're not formally leading around and they're not taking a board seat, but they just want to go between an A and a B and a bridge round will be converted into some kind of new.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would not be good. Every investor is different. So you could say most investors, when they come onto a cap table, don't add that much value. That's actually my current position, and they really should, but they don't. And I would say 50% of investors add into a cap table are just a drag factor on time for the founder. And then maybe another 30% are neutral to slightly positive, and then there are stars that are actually a transformational to the company”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if it's doing really, really well, it may not be the actual reason, well, it's difficult to say it wouldn't be the actual mean reason to say this company built something that people really need if it did well. So if it does really well, there is a confirmation that your hypothesis is correct. If you bank something that you thought needed to exist and it doesn't do well, if it didn't do well for certain reasons like the founding team fell apart, you could still go again. And I actually go again on the same hypothesis that I think something really needs to exist. I'll bet up to like two, three, four times until it's proven that that is not what someone needs. So if something falls apart investment-wise, you should look into the mechanics why it didn't work out. Did it not work out because of the founding team? Did it not work out because of the market timing or the specific idea? And was the idea bad itself? So, yeah, you've got to be careful about the confirmation bias. On the flip side, you've got to use it. You've got to use that information. And it's difficult to make this the perfect science for sure. And it's difficult to even make this a statistical science, but you should try at least. I think being completely random with it.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Features and business model go to market plan, all that kind of stuff. So that really impressed me that he was just super, super focused on culture. And it actually is played out right. So Augusto, have a unique culture. So I think back to your questions, like thinking through things that need to exist, thinking through things that you would build yourself and that you need yourself and going after those companies is a decent algorithm to kick off with.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so from my perspective, I like to think through what companies need to exist. So we knew at the time that ADP and Paychecks were pretty crappy software companies. The software was terrible. There was not a monopoly on either side. Both companies had roughly equal market share. The org chart was particularly broken with one of them, I forget which one. So from my perspective, I put this in a blog post of ideas that I was thinking through. I wanted to see, I think I said a bank simple of payroll. And what I really meant by here simple was regarded as like really amazing UI at the time. And I wanted to see really amazing UI and a great customer experience around payroll. And I think Josh saw the post and reached out to me and we met up and we actually talked about culture for one hour. We didn't talk about the software. We didn't talk about the features. We didn't talk about the business model. We didn't talk about any of that. We just talked about the culture that he wanted to build. And I'd never been sucked into a conversation for that much time on culture with a founder who was normally pitching a business pitch.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is changing faster than we will see a lot more verticalization and people focus their algorithms in avert commons are focused on particular verticals and markets and that's going to change much quicker and I think there's different ways to compete in your algorithm and compete in the algorithm of your help, your help style.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there is a situation where the company might change your framework the way the company impacts the market, like a Facebook situation completely might change the way you think about companies. I think you've got to be ready for the investment itself changing your algorithm. And it might modify it in a doubling down sense. And you may say, I'm going to double down. I gave that a weighting of a certain amount. Now I'm going to give that even more weighting because it turned out to be true. And that was the main reason it worked. So I think always changing what you're doing, modifying it slightly in different directions and maybe not going too far because we know people can overshoot as well and overcompensate for things. So it's finding this kind of optimal balance. We know that everything is changing quite quickly. And I think the rate of change is higher now from an algorithm's perspective in investing human perspective is not changing as much. And that's why maybe you can say things like entrepreneur first have really deep angle because they're focusing in on the part that doesn't change so much, the people side and psychology side. So I think if the market”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you become relatively consistent in what you're doing and then prove it out by did we make the right decision? And if we didn't, maybe we should change some of that algorithm. We should modify it. And our algorithm may be wrong. We may be missing out again. There's like false positives and false negatives. We might need to change our algorithm to check we're not doing something wrong. So I do that as well. And as another component as well, that you've got to add a little bit of randomness in because your algorithm, you won't be able to learn in the quickest possible way unless you need a little bit of randomness to go against your kind of feelings and your algorithm.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chemistry, or we look at founder motivation or incentives and the types of founders, the psychology there. And there's certain models that we can repeat in markets where markets are shifting. Humans, I would say the human psychology is not shifting for 2,000 years, really. Markets are definitely shifting and dynamics are shifting. The mathematics doesn't shift. The network effect mathematics doesn't shift. The understanding of how to attach to it is shifting all the time. So those different things that are shifting in terms of what is going out and there are parts that are not shifting. So I think figuring out processes around these parts and what you're looking for and trying to write it down is really useful. And there may be too many things to write down. So maybe you have to summarize these rule sets. And so I got a bunch of rule sets that I look for. Some of them are unconscious and you're trying to, it becomes your gut feeling, right? And I'm trying to make them conscious and trying to make them so you can write them down, specify them and break them down, find the mechanics of these areas and come up with principles and then link it back to an ethical framework.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, so I see kind of like two classes or investors, and there's a spectrum between some people are very feeling driven, and that feeling may be correct. The algorithm may be unconscious. So the process, this repeatable process that you could write down and specify, what are you doing, why are you picking this one? Like what is your filter for saying no? So I've got lots of different kinds of algorithms. Let's just call it thousands of different ones. So some of them are filters for saying no. So situations that I will always say no, red flags or black flags. And then the other one would maybe collections of yellow flags or things that you may be able to fix and the weighting of, oh, that seems a little bit too wrong. I can't fix that or we can't fix that. So the algorithm is this process that every time we're making investment, we're trying to come up with a hypothesis, we're testing it, it might be a hypothesis you never get to test again. It might be such an unusual business that you're never going to get to know was this a good algorithm or not. So we know that this consistency in certain algorithms that we can keep reapplying, i.e. when we look at founding.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with HayesUp, we had raised money from UnionSquare Ventures who we were in the worst time for raising. This was a crash of 2008, 2009. It was April. We had just burnt through all our YC money. We tried to be as frugal as possible, and we ran out of money, and now we had to raise our seed rounds. Half the companies in our batch completely died. They could not raise any money at all. We had another company on our batch called Airbnb, which ended up being pretty big. I met with about 300 angels to raise money for Hazapp. I met with so many. I just did a complete tour back to back, like six per day over and over and over again. And everyone was saying, no, not just necessarily because of the business, but because the market was crash. So I ended up learning that most of these investors were pretty crappy, I'm going to say it.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we had to get out of it. One of my co founders had a visa issue. So, you know, to skip other parts of the story, I rushed over to effectively, I needed lots of money at that point because we've invested in this business that had not worked. So I spent 76 hours trying to make cash. And I ended up making quite a lot of money on selling Nintendo Wii's, which I imported from Europe when all the Wii's ran out. I saw this coming and I bought the stock of Nintendo Wii's and I physically sold them at 3X the price and I made a bunch of cash off that and that was a good break that was my first proper break for me and I rushed out to San Francisco determined to get into Y Combinator in 2008 and got into YC and that was the start of my real tech career trying lots of other things including as you allude to the egg packaging”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We ended up managing to get market share by selling into the supermarkets, but then we realized the margins were razor thin. There was no margin for us. We weren't the manufacturer. We were just representing the manufacturer. So the business configuration was completely wrong. So we decided, okay, we need to get out of this. Let's try something for Christmas, something that we can do ourselves. We have visited China quite a few times as manufacturing engineers. So we went down there and we decided to try and find a product that we thought lots of people would want in Europe. And that was a digital photo frame. So this is around the kind of 2006 time. So we came into the market and we started to sell our own brand called Sugar and we got it into Harrod's and Selfridges, which was amazing to actually get it into a high-end side of the market. That was the easier place to get into. We actually found it very difficult to get into the low end of the market. And the high end of the market was actually easier to sell into, which was very surprising. And that led to a lesson of sell high, like your prices should be high. So what happened with the digital filter frame market? Other competitors came in, the prices collapsed.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a bit of a random walk. So I didn't really have any kind of particular place to kick off. So we just started to try and make money. In university, so when I was around 18, I just had this feeling I wanted to start a company. And I was like, I am going to start a company and make a massive company. And that's just like, that is going to happen. I formed a consultancy with two people from my university. We started to pick up some projects and get paid for it, get paid some money. We really needed cash. So this is in the third year of university. And one of the projects we came across was taking a large Chinese manufacturer of egg packaging into Europe. So they weren't in Europe yet. And we wrote a plan of attack of how they could get into Europe. And we gave that to them and said, hey, this plan is so on point that we want you to run the business. So we said, okay, let's set up the company. So we set up the company and I rank every single farm in the UK to try and make a sale. And it was really difficult. The farmers did not want to really change a way to a different packet, especially something from outside of Europe.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have tried many experiments to get into business and understand and also actually align my passions. I have passions around technology, around learning how the universe might be working from a physics level or a math level. And I've had these different separate areas that I've been interested in. I've been interested in instantiation of physics in a kind of technological form, so really hardcore engineering. And I've been really interested in super abstract ideas like G ⁇ del's theorem and randomness and computability. And in looking back at a little bit, I was thinking about this last night that I've slowly been trying to converge my passions together. In doing that, I never really wanted to work for someone. I had this allergic reaction wanting to go to a company and sit there behind a desk, just do what's being prescribed. I wanted to build things and build interesting things. I really wasn't aware of the tech scene when I was in the UK growing up. I wasn't really aware of the tech scene. I wasn't aware of what was happening in, say, the dot-com booms, really getting into the business.”
2020-02-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source