YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Kan

lines on the record: 59
first: 2019-06-10
most recent: 2019-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Asking about in Silicon Valley, they're always, you know, that's a question here. But the best entrepreneurs here, the ones who have created lasting companies and lasting value, they stick with their thing for decades. And that's what impresses me most now. And I wish that I had kind of realized that before.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop hating beets at work. Number three would be you should, you know, things take time. Like don't be in such an, you know, it's not like a one year, one and done. Like you're a billionaire. If you look at the, let's say, any sort of like the Amazon share price or like market cap over time, right? It looks like even through the last couple of years, looks like an exponential curve, right? And so, you know, if Bezos had been like your 15, which is a long time to be starting a company, like oh man, I made it. I'm done. Like, I'm going to retire. Like, well, the company would look a lot different, right? So, you know, things take time. And I have to constantly remind myself that I think humans, you know, here in Silicon Valley especially, but then human beings in general are wired to always want the new, you know, look for the new thing. What's new? Like what's your new thing, something that everybody...”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I'm just getting started Probably join Facebook No, but maybe the real answer. Actually, I don't really regret any of the economic choices or anything. I think I've had this tremendous opportunity to like. Build and discover these new things and build companies. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I think the thing I could have done better or learned back then is self-improvement is a thing. You should probably work on that. Maybe that's number one. Second thing”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I found myself actually doing that a lot of times. I realized I felt like I had a high degree of empathy for other people, but I realized that was for people who I felt like were performing really good, where my observation was like high performance. But where my observation, where my feeling was that there wasn't high performance, I felt like I would slip into this like low empathy mode. And the problem is that when you're in that mode, you don't admit what are the things that I have done, Justin, what are the things I have done to contribute to that?”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing book. The premise of the book is really there's two ways to treat other people inside the box and outside the box, but really, I mean, like without empathy or with empathy, like treating them like an object or a person. And the idea, the fundamental idea behind the book is if you treat people like an object, number one, they don't like it. But the second thing is if you treat people like objects who are just there to fulfill something for you, right? Like at work, it would be like to, you know, hit some number or metric or whatever, do some job. The problem is that you will lie to yourself about when there's negative situations about what your role is. You'll self-deceive. You'll say, oh, this person is 100% at fault and I'm 0% at fault.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that was a very important message to me to realize and internalize that actually these attachment, these things that I think will happen that will drive happiness, like experiences or events or whatever will never actually drive true internal happiness. So, amazing book, The Untethel, highly recommend it. Another book that I think made me a much better leader. It was this book I read called Leadership and Self-Deception.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have control over my own phone anymore, but the consequence of that is I read a lot more books, which is good. A couple ones that have been particularly impactful to me. Number one is this book called The Untethered Soul. So this book changed my life. It's really about the idea is that you are not the thing that you think you are. Most people go through life thinking they are the experiences that they've experienced, the thoughts that they have, or the emotions that they have. But really, you're just the observer of these things that are happening. And by creating, it's almost like you're watching a movie, right? movie that has all the five senses plus emotions plus thoughts of like a seven-dimensional movie of the just in life right”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can lock installing new apps. You can delete the app store and put a passcode lock on it. I gave my wife the passcode, or she put in a passcode. I don't know what it is. This is like a parental lock. It's a parental lock, yeah, exactly.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's great. So reading a lot, actually, because I deleted all the entertainment apps off my phone, including the browser, and I locked it so that I can't install new apps because I was a total phone addict. That includes you.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad things like things, you know, there's going to be good and there's going to be bad. So if you don't figure out a way that you psychologically are okay with that, You're going to give up. And if you give up, you're never going to see it to the ultimate potential that whatever your startup is can be.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of unhappiness that was created around it that would make it actually less sustainable for me to continue on because I was always, you know, you can't, human beings don't want to live in a high stress, high anxiety, stay for too long. That's how you burn out, right? So startups are not, I mean, contrary to popular belief, it's not a sprint. It's a marathon, right? There's these overnight successes. Twitch came out of nowhere eight years from incorporating that company into selling it, almost exactly eight years. So that is a long time. And in order to last a long time, you need to figure out a way that you are okay with what's going on and what's going on is always going to involve”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is true. I firmly believe it's true. And it's something that the sooner you start practicing that in your head, really feeling that and experiencing that in yourself internally, then the happier you'll be. And that's not to say that a lot of people I come into contact with, like friends even or people work for me, are like, well, my drive, like that need to win at all costs is my edge. But I really don't believe, I mean, maybe that's true for other people, but for me, I never found that to be the case. It's like, no, it was just like the...”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small business, right? You go in being like, I'm going to raise Series A from Andreessen and we're going to be this product that just goes the next Snapchat or whatever. And so I think that it's always a battle against your own kind of devil on your shoulder who's telling you, you're not good enough. You're not doing well enough. You could be doing better. And I think the way that you win that battle is by really internalizing and realizing that whatever happens, you're going to be fine. And you're probably going to be the same. You're not going to be happier or less happy, actually. And now most people do not actually successfully internalize that well enough, in my opinion.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I always think that every entrepreneur's expectations for themselves are very exceedingly high, right? If you're the type of person who was a PM or engineer at one of these fan companies and then you're like, I'm going to start a startup because I see other people doing it, then you don't go into it thinking, well, I'm just going to create like a whatever, something that's like a nice.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I think about where we're at, where all these people who I saw in the early days, like 13 years ago, all these different founders, these two-person startups that weren't even anything, where they're at, their company might not have succeeded, but they have created some value here in Silicon Valley by being in that ecosystem, being helpful, and then maybe becoming an executive at someone else's company or becoming an investor, early stage investor at another company that really worked. And so there really is like that feeling of if you kind of get out what you've put into this community. And that's one of the things I really love about it.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is something that is going to kind of pay dividends for us as a brand. That's something I believed personally. And then also at Etrium throughout my entire career.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that core ethos of iterating quickly, that's like a YC ethos. That's something that we really did carry ons at the very beginning. So speed was something that's pretty important. I think that really being helpful in the community, not just your startup, I mean, including your startup, but also the community of startups, that's something that we learn, behavior, we learn from the early days of YC. And even like our community of friends who are founders who all became successful helped each other out. And then now today, it's an ethos that would take to Atrium to really build a company that kind of four startups buy startups that helps out these fast-growing startups. So that ethos is probably something that's pretty similar. Kind of similar to what you guys have had in Andreesen, right? Which is like if we can be the most helpful in terms of providing these networks of service.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That core product market was so good, it was just a rocket ship, and then people were just trying to hang on. Now, eventually, I think they do figure it out, but oftentimes in those early days, I think it's actually quite not intentional and oftentimes not that good.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They conflate the correlation with causation, right? They're like, because we have behavior, maybe we're like a low-empathy company, let's say, but they don't call it that. They're just like, we make decisions based on meritocracy, right? And they're like, but the best idea is going to win. But then maybe that's because that's a behavior that they propagated. But that might not be the real reason why they've actually been winning, right? I think a lot of companies in Silicon Valley. Kind of succeed despite their management actually, not because of it. And what I mean by that is like the idea was so good. That a bunch of 25 year olds could run the company.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, we had never worked at a place with good culture or a culture, right? Because we had always worked at our own company. So we were just making it up as we went along. When you're not intentional about your culture or type of company you want to be, then you make the culture ends up being the accidental collection of good and bad choices and like personality quirks and good and bad behaviors that your founding and executive teams Propagate right, and it's accidental, right? And oftentimes there's things that are not good behaviors that get propagated culturally. And oftentimes people justify it because they're like, well,”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a company populated by team members who really believe in these sets of principles. And so we're kind of going through a process of trying to implement that at our company. And really, culture is one of the highest, it went from something that I didn't prioritize to my top priority.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I'll say that we're doing is recently I read this book called The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which is an amazing book, but it's really about building a certain type of company, what the authors call a conscious company. But I would center it around that locus of control question, like, do you have radical responsibility for what's going on in your life, in your company, regardless of who you are? read that book and I realized this is the type of company that I want to work at.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From those things, right? If we build a company that has a high empathy for each other, where we have care for each other, where people are very collaborative, where we are, people feel like the locus of control for what's happening is inside of them instead of outside of them. Things are happening through them, not to them. I think all the execution will actually flow from that. One of the things I never understood before, which I feel like I really understand now, is that saying that culture eats strategy, right? I felt like I have very good strategy with Atrium, but I forgot about culture in that first part of the company. And now I realize how important it is.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the problem with that was that a year in, I realized, oh, shoot, I need to like, there are like a lot of things that I've neglected that are actually affecting our ability to execute. And the number one thing there was the culture going to be. People didn't know what's the alignment aspect of what are we building? What kind of company are we? Who are we? What are we building? And then what's the culture? How are we being intentional about it? So we did a lot to work on that, ran through a collaborative values process over a year ago where we brought the whole company together, figure out what we care about. And then more recently, I've been thinking about after a lot of this self-work in terms of making myself feel kind of consistently good every day and remove my attachments to outcome, I've realized there's a set of principles that I want to implement at the company and that I think that execution will flow.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a great question because it's something I think a lot about. So I had never thought before a couple months ago, and this may sound stupid in a way, but I never thought, what is the kind of company that I want to show up to work at? So 14 years later, finally thinking about it. But the real answer is like when you're a 22-year-old just starting your company or you're in Silicon Valley and you're thinking funding rounds and exits, you're always thinking, what's the next milestone? Like how do I just claw my way desperately, however it takes, how do I get to that next milestone? It's do or die. And for some, you know, oftentimes it is do or die. You don't have the luxury oftentimes of thinking about what kind of, or you feel like you don't have the luxury of thinking about what kind of company you want to build culturally. And so I started atrium actually very much in the same way. What are the metrics milestones we want to hit? What's the next metrics milestone? What do we need to get for a series B or a next round of funding?”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. This guy. Yeah, that was great. Incredible. Highly recommend. Can't speak. He's like changing my life. I feel like he's an angel sent down from heaven to teach me finally after 14 years how to like manage a system. And I've learned a lot from him. Those are kind of three sets. You know, executive coach, the pure mentors, and then kind of those early stage mentors that I had back in the day.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, and just knowing how they think about everything, executive hiring, et cetera, has been really helpful to me. So luckily here in Silicon Valley, I have a lot of great resources. And the last thing I'll shout out is I have this new executive coach, Matt Mochari, who's amazing. This guy is the guru. He's mentors a lot of different fast-growing startups around here.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's great to have friends who are kind of doing the same path in a lot of ways but are one or two steps ahead of you. So it's still the case. Obviously Emmett, my co-founder who's still running Twitch, it's over a thousand people. I think it's like 1,500 people or something like that. My brother who's a COO of Cruise, co-founder of Cruise, the self-driving car company, and they're like over 1,000 people and Steve, the founder of Reddit, they're like 400 something people or whatever. Seeing what their problems are, you know, obviously the problems are always the same, actually. The problems are always like, I don't have the right alignment among my team and I don't have the right executive team. It's usually some variation of those things. But hearing it from the horse's mouth is super helpful in terms of making decisions for me. And then even outside of DeBoe, sometimes I venture into Soma and having some of those kind of early YC founders who have really made it drew from Dropbox.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So, like, the best part about Silicon Valley, in my opinion, is that there are people here who have done it before who are willing to help you. We would never have made it here even day one without people who helped us when it was like economically bad, you know, a waste of time. It didn't look like a hot prospect company or anything, right? So those people were Paul Graham, great example, founder of Y Combinator, Paul Buhait, who's like a partner in Y Combinator, but the inventor of Gmail inside of Google. These are people who invest in us very early on, mentored us very early on, and helped us out. And that was pretty amazing. And really, that ethos perpetuates itself because then as a partner in White Commentary and even today as an entrepreneur where there's like lots of conflicting competing interests for my time, I always make sure to spend a little bit of time mentoring other startups because it's kind of like a”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so then we raise funding for Justin DV and we were able to make a little salary. Then we became profitable. We made a lot more and then we sold like one company. Then we sold a lot of companies. And so we kind of ramped over time. And after the basics in the basics of Maslow's hierarchy of needs were taken care of. I felt like I could go out to eat. I don't know if that's on one of those Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But after that basic thing, I can afford to go out to eat. None of it never mattered. It never made me sustainably more happy. And so just reminding yourself of that and try to remove those attachments in your mind, it's easier said than done, but having that as like an active practice has been really important to me.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to be any happier or any less happy in the long run. There might be a short burst of unhappiness if it fails or happiness if it succeeds amazingly. But you're not going to get any happier really. If you're relying on outside things, external factors to drive your inner happiness, you will always be disappointed in the long run. And the funny thing is I've actually run the experiment, not an A-B test, but a linear experiment on that because we had more and more success over time. Like we started off, you know, really like paying ourselves, I think, with Kiko, $1,700 a month, but we only paid ourselves every other month.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I've been working on a lot as well, last thing I'll say is just working on realizing that your attachment in the very early days of Justin TV and Twit, Kiko and all these companies, I had a huge ego attachment to the outcome of the company. My identity and the companies were very intertwined. And more recently, I realized that was the same at Atrium, actually. Like, again, I was like creating that same pattern, but it was like, it's a very unhealthy pattern. So what I realized was I needed to start reminding myself that no matter what happens with this company,”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the way I think about it is if you want something to be part of your identity, talk about it. If you want to learn something, teach it. And I really believe that. So for me putting out what I've been doing on the mindfulness side and for myself to be more emotionally kind of stable throughout the days and weeks and months as a startup founder, that's been really valuable to me. So if I can spread that to other people, it's going to help reinforce it as an identity for me, but it's also going to hopefully help those people as well. Right.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so diet, another thing, I stopped eating pizza. Entirely? Well, I started eating a ketogenic diet, which is a high-fat diet, but really the reason for that. For me, just like starting off with Headspace last year and then now I've been doing transcendental meditation, which is kind of what Ray Dahlia talks about in principles, that's worked really well for me to just be more present during the day in my life. It's pretty amazing, amazingly profound effect.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember the day we came in and pitched you guys here. I run my graduate journal. I get to pitch Andrews and Horowitz. That's amazing, right? Even whatever happens, that's an incredible opportunity. It puts me in the top 0.001% of people in the world with opportunity. So that was like pretty amazing. And then every day there's something like if you really think about it, there's so many amazing things that happen to you as a human being here in Silicon Valley. Even just like actually one thing I think in the morning, oftentimes it's like the supply chain, the global supply chain to deliver coffee from around the world so that I can grind up fresh coffee in a pour over in my chemics in the morning.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so now, more recently, like with Atrium, it's been a tremendous vehicle for my own personal discovery because I experienced this stress again. I was like, oh my God, it's stressful again. This is crazy. Why is it so stressful? And so I started looking for ways to deal with that. And I really, I mean, I had a number of things that started working for me after I started really exploring it, a number of things that started working for me starting last year, everything from a friend of mine recommended a daily gratitude journal. So I've just been doing that every day, writing this gratitude journal, five-minute journal. You write down the three things every morning that you're grateful for. And that seems like a very simple thing and kind of hokey actually when I first heard about it. But what I realized was it helps recontextualize all the ups and downs that you experience as an entrepreneur, especially, I mean, the downs, really, like throughout the day. They're not as big of a deal because in the morning you're writing down like, wow, this opportunity.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happen. You know, everything was kind of accidental, like we would, you know, I was not dealing with stress well at all if there was a problem in the company. I would be very emotionally avoidant to it. Or I would like drown my sorrows in alcohol, right? Which is not a very good coping mechanism at all. And so, and then in terms of even just down to like what we were eating at lunch, we were talking about this earlier, but we would have like pizza every day at lunch at Justin TV. And then I'd like fall asleep. Like I'd go into like a carb coma in the afternoon, like every day.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 years later. Yeah. So in the early days, 10 years ago, I was not doing anything in terms of improving myself. In fact, I think I used to think about people's attributes, maybe not your skills so much in terms of like, you know, is your skills at programming or stuff like that, but more of like your attributes. Like, I don't know if you ever played Dungeons& Dragons, but when you create a character in Dungeons& Dragons, you roll these like 20-sided die and your strength. It's like 14, your intelligence, you roll it, and it's six or whatever. And that's what you have. You don't change it. And so I felt like people's attributes were kind of like that. So I never worked on that very much self-improvement stuff outside of, you know, like, yeah, I became a better programmer because we were programming. But I didn't work on things to make myself, I don't know, smarter, right? Or harder working or awake more hours of the day, right? Like alert more hours a day or anything like that. So it was a very...”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly Yeah, that's a great example. If you're going to build like a new bank, right, like an online or like a mobile first bank, which is, I think some people are doing, would you want to raise $1 million or $1 million seed around or $5 million seat around or raise a $50 million Series A out the gate? Obviously, if it's available to you, you want more money because you know people need banks, right? It's just a matter of can you do it better, right? That's a perfect example. And there's many others here in Silicon Valley. I think we've actually shifted more as the cycle has changed over the last 10 years, the tech cycle. We've shifted more to these execution risk startups. And so, you know, you've consequently seen, I mean, it's a chicken and egg thing really what came first, but like you've seen these more and more like bigger rounds, I'd say, that are supporting these companies.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And I think it's something where, to your point, if something that you're working on is primarily execution, then that means that there are times and places where you can use money to solve it. Versus it seems like in a part of the market risk thing is it just you know to your point it sort of lets you buy more lottery tickets but but it may not accelerate the process of actually doing it right and so I think that that sort of feels like one main difference and then the other one is you know that just to build on what you're saying is that if you are in an industry where trustworthiness is really important then being well capitalized is key the same way you wouldn't you know if you're gonna you know for example you know build a fintech startup where you know you're gonna you're gonna ask consumers to trust their money with you. Yeah, exactly. You want to be legit. You want to be well capitalized. You want to have super strong executives and board members and investors. And that's a strategy kind of that's a little bit kind of like self-perpetuating as well. Yeah.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speed to market and execution was really important. And I felt also like this market really supported and required it because it is the legal space. There is a lot of value in making sure that the clients and the talent, the attorneys talent and other legal providers like think this company is going to be around so that's very important. And so this is a strategy. I don't necessarily recommend to anyone who can raise a ton of money that this is the right strategy. It's just the strategy that we picked. In terms of the tactics of like how we did our round, especially our series A, my idea was because VCs are kind of naturally adjacent to legal, right? Like, for example, when you fund a company, they need someone to help them on the legal side with all of the paperwork.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I'm not convinced that raising a ton of money out of the gate is the right strategy. The Silicon Valley is litered with dead bodies of these companies, the Duceros and the Cools and all these companies that have raised a ton of money. And then when you have a ton of money, you spend a ton of money, right? Now there's other companies like the Jet.coms that they made it work. So I'm not convinced it's the worst strategy ever, but I'm not convinced it's the best. But for me personally, where it's an execution risk business, I'm too rich to like fuck around with the like, you know, okay, I'm just going to do a seed round and just take a long time, right? Like for me.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. And so one of the things, one of the clear advantages in all of this is that let's talk about fundraising and the decision on whether or not to raise a bunch of money out of the gate versus doing the kind of ramen profitable cockroach thing, right? That's sort of like one common contrast. And then obviously you had a very unique fundraising strategy as well. So maybe talk about that decision and then kind of how you ended up pursuing it.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. You have a lottery ticket, right? It's a lottery ticket, and if you pivot a bunch of times and listen to your customers, you might be more and more lottery tickets. But your lottery tickets are just as valuable as the experienced entrepreneurs lottery tickets that he's buying. So he's a fool to play that game. And I don't think you see as many experienced entrepreneurs playing that same game. Whereas with execution risk businesses, my lottery ticket now is way bigger than the guy who's like the 22-year-old Justin, right? So for a B2B startup, I know, oh, I can attract talent. I can hire a sales team. I can raise capital. And so it's a lot more for something where it's very established that that's going to be a business or some business is going to be in there. Yeah. It's like he's stupid to play against me”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want Sure. That's great. So Twitch and Atrium are the perfect examples, right? Almost. So Twitch, it's like when we started, when we pivoted Justin DV to Twitch, or even Justin DV is a good example, but Twitch is the best one probably. When we pivoted Justin DV to Twitch, nobody believed that this was a market, right? No one believed, no investors, very few or even internal employees believed. And even the founders were skeptical. Emmett deserves the credit here because he had belief, but like a lot of the other co-founders were skeptical. I'm like, does this exist as a business? And so the good part is that the competition there was very low, right? There weren't experienced entrepreneurs being like, this is going to be a huge business. We should compete. So really it was the entire thing was market risk and figuring out, do we have product market fit and how do we build product market fit?”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd probably have a disadvantage because I'm already more set in my ways. I'm less in tune with the culture. I don't know what the kids are doing. So with the Justin of today invent the Twitch of today, I don't think so. I'm an old guy now.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it was really hard to find product market fit, right? Like, I don't have any advantage in finding product market fit with a consumer app more than the 22-year-old Justin.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horrible managers. We basically had nothing going for us. When you have nothing going for you except for your willing to put in hard long hours on a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, then you should focus on things that are like where there's a lot of market risk. Because ideas where there's market risk, you can potentially win those, right? Now as someone who has abilities and skills, right? I've learned skills over the last 14 years, you want to focus much more on execution risk things. And so I felt like B2B startups are more about execution risk. I felt like this, you know, the legal market particularly was already a big market. And you just have to figure out how to do it 10 times better. And I felt like on a roadmap for how to do that in my head. And so that's where I felt that this was a better use of time. Because, you know, some of the consumer startups that I'd incubated and played around with Postwitch.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, Twitch, I guess, is really the ultimate consumption thing because you're consuming someone consuming video games. For me, I felt like maybe this was an analysis I've done like retroactively, but I think I've had this discussion with a couple people, multiple time founders. And when you're an early stage founder, when we started Kiko and then Twitch, when we started Twitch, we were like Justin TV was like, we were 23 years old. And we had no skills. I never had a real full-time job in my life. And even though we were programmers, we were like new college grad programmers. We were not good.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so for the first couple months of Atrium, I was like, oh man, this is a dream. I've finally leveled up. I learned all these skills. I've made it as a founder. And then reality, boom, set in. And of course, there were nothing ever goes according to plan. There were pains. There were struggles.”
2019-06-10 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source