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Kanyi Maqubela

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69
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2021-03-30
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2021-03-30
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  1. “They were expanding their purview a bit. And so we got set up with them via this list and got to arrive in New York City at JFK with a thousand dollar zero interest loan and a chance at building a life in America. Really nice.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Kindest thing that anyone's ever done for me was actually done for my parents, but I was there. And so I'm borrowing it. The U.S. Ambassador to Botswana in 1986 sent his child to a boarding school in Cabaroni in Potswana where my dad was a chemistry teacher. And we were in exile at the time from apartheid in South Africa. And we're looking to get on asylum lists in places very far from South Africa. And the United States was very, very hard to get into as a South African. It was hard because the political relationship between apartheid South Africa and the Reagan administration was one that didn't particularly lend itself to a lot of refugees. The U.S. Ambassador de Botswana got us on a list and he got us on a list and set us up with the Hebrew International Aid Society, which had obviously built its legacy, repatriating and also saving Holocaust refugees.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The Silicon Valley trope for it is I think there's something about the rocket ship analogy there, which holds some insight, which is when there's something that's much bigger than you that you have a chance to be a part of, especially when you're young, just do it.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “More VC firms in Brazil and Nigeria. I would try and fund more in Tanzania, Dara Salam is going to have 100 million people pretty darn soon. Nigeria is going to have 100 million person city pretty darn soon. Demographics are destiny. We saw what happened in China. We see what's happening in India. And so I would be taking more geographic risk.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Risk tolerance that they could actually get their cargo and they could get their explorers everywhere they needed and get them back, which is actually incidentally where a lot of the early infrastructure and the philosophy around venture capital came from. And I think we need to do way more. We need to go to further corners of the sea. And I think that that can only happen if we break out of some of the silos for how venture capital itself should look. And that's part of what we're trying to do. The second one that I would change, and I think it's changing already, but My partner Steve beautifully says Silicon Valley is a mindset. I think that that is something that we finally, maybe for the first time ex-China in the history of software-driven innovation have fully embraced as a culture is amazing culture defining massive companies can be built anywhere. I would, as an LP, if I were an LP, try and fund.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Oh, there's way too many funds. There's a lot of entrepreneurs in strange corners of the universe whose eyes roll so far back into their heads they're blind. I think what we do have is too many investors that think the same way, too many investors that approach the market the same way. And so as a result, you end up with feast or famine and we have total indigestion in the feast section, but you still have default famine. And I think that that's just a waste of talent. It's a waste of resource. We've built such an amazingly false-tolerant industry whereby I can invest in 25 companies. 12 of them can be goose eggs, and I can deliver 3X and get invited to do it again. That is one of the most remarkable genius bits of fault tolerant infrastructure that's maybe ever been built. I think a lot about risk at sea and the old insurance risk where they would go out and figure out how to assess the risk of sharks and of hurricanes and typhoons and everything and how to build the models whereby”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “First thing I would change is I think limited partners overweight GP references in their evaluation of managers. I think they do it for very logical reasons. And I think they do it because it's the only asset class where the asset chooses the manager. They do it because getting access to great deal flow is the only way that you can invest in said great deal flow. And that access is not evenly distributed. And so figuring out how those distributions flow is important. And this is because of the second point. I think that as a society, a global society, we are not nearly entrepreneurial enough. I think as a global society, we're not starting nearly enough companies. We're not taking nearly enough bets. We're not taking nearly enough risk on building the future as we can be, given the amount of infrastructure that we now have built in place for it. So I think that when we say”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Pretty meticulous in describing why they put something and having note taking in the moment of decision so they can always refer back to it so that they don't persuade themselves of something later. So along those lines get into the habit of making bets and figuring out what your own decision making and bet driven proclivities are and strengths and weaknesses are. And you can do that at a macro scale with your career. You can do it at a micro scale with this is one of the smartest people I know. I'm going to help them with everything they need over the course of the next 10 years. So once you get used to making bets, then you start to have a point of view about your own ability to make them and then you can build the architecture of a fund on top of that. But it's too often that people don't get the opportunity or don't get the position to make bets early enough. And so they don't develop those instincts. And I think that's really important.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “First advice I would give is make bets because bets hit different. The biggest difference between working in venture capital and being a venture capitalist is that you have to make bets. Making a bet means putting skin in the game, putting your reputation at stake. It means investing your emotion behind your conviction and then investing your dollars behind both those and then seeing the results. So make as many as you can, make calculated bets, learn how to make bets. learn where you are persuading yourself that you're smarter than you are and learn where you are persuading yourself that you are worse than you are so one of the things that i was taught early on was that we have a very very good ability to persuade ourselves ex post facto around all the decisions that we've made and why we made them and that's why almost every one of the best pickers that i've had the benefit of being mentored under has been”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That felt fresh almost because of how unlikely it should have been given where we were in the cycle. This was 2018. We were in some ways late to the party with that one, but I think it was a delightful choice and thereby a choice that I'm so proud that we made.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, the key is how do you come up with an idea of sufficient, delightful quality that the prototype and the test are going to result in an insight, then rinse and repeat. And so how I did that with my own life was trying to figure out how to become a venture capitalist and realizing the moral of the story is realizing that, you know, I was, A, a better coach than player. And then B, I wanted a partner and I wanted to be in a partnership where I was constantly learning and constantly self-improving around a set of hypotheses that I thought were reasonably non-consensus. All of this stuff came from maybe I shouldn't join a firm. Maybe I should start one. Maybe I should have the audacity to start a firm when there are a thousand new seed firms have been created in the last 10 years. Let me start the 1,001th. And there's some level of audacity and almost silliness to thinking about it that way, right? As a result, though, when I was able to partner with Steve, when we were able to raise Kindred Adventures 1, the first LP vehicle, it was something.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “and then define is how do you come up with a thesis statement around what the problems are that are sufficiently punchy that to the point of the domain insight, you could put it on a post-it and put it on a wall and a whiteboard somewhere in an office and they'd say, oh, that's interesting. That's cool. And so how do you define in a way that demonstrates insight about what you've observed? And then the most important part is come up with a definition of the problem. And ideally, it's one that was tweet length, then you hypothesize. This is my favorite part. The hypothesis isn't optimized for utility. It isn't optimized for function. It's optimized for delights and optimize for WOWs and giggles. And you want to optimize for wows and giggles because this is part of the what could go right exercise. What if I quit my job, we move across the country and I start that company?”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Your life and to designing your life. What does that look like? The empathize, define, and ideate were the three that required a little bit of translation. So the empathize one was, well, how do you listen to yourself? The whole point of design thinking, when you're trying to figure out how to solve somebody's problem, you don't ask them they need you observe, you identify the places where they frown, or you identify the places where they hesitate because that's where you build the empathy with them and you figure out, ah, that might be the problem. So how do you do that for yourself? That includes everything from journaling and it's actually something that's, I think, really powerful in venture investing too. If you write down in the moment of your thought why you think something, then three months later, three years later, three generations later, when you say, oh, this is why I made decision X, you actually have some accountability with your prior self. Journaling is a really important way to just create empathy with yourself. So we have an exercise whereby you do that.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Designing life is a course that's done at Stanford by a gentleman named Bill Burnett and a guy named Dave Evans. Dave was part of the team that designed the mouse and was one of the co-founders of EA and Bill Burnett as a celebrated industrial designer. So they're very much at Silicon Valley at Silicon Valley Gats. But one of the things that they were thinking was how to apply design thinking processes to things other than industrial design. So the design thinking process in its most simple form is you first empathize, then you define, then you hypothesize or ideate, then you prototype, and then you test. And each one of those is a really, really, really important step, and you can't miss a step. But if you go through that with the right sort of guardrails on it, the theory is that you can come up with an innovative path for so many different things in life. So they thought, well, what does it look like to apply the design thinking methodology to”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Funded and under supported for the last 30 years as of four or five years ago, Kaufman Foundation said that we were at the lowest rate of entrepreneurship in 25 years in the United States. And almost cost disease, making health insurance and healthcare more and more expensive is actually constraining us and has been constraining us historically for the last decade, maybe even two. So I do think a lot of those things are going to have to and are starting to be reversed as you look forward. And I think that for all the very extreme tragedy that we just had to go through over the course of this pandemic, it's also opened up opportunity there because of the stimulus. It's also opened up opportunity there because of the digitization wave that's resulted in so many new startups. And so I am optimistic.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Think it has to. I am optimistic that it will. One of the things that the last 10 years I note we saw and you look at NASDAQ and you just see the distribution and the weighting of the market caps in NASDAQ, there's been unprecedented extreme consolidation. That's happening at many, many, many levels. The largest companies, market caps are going crossing a trillion here and there, crossing a trillion, crossing a trillion, crossing a trillion. And you look at the health of the stock market and it's great. But if you take away those companies and it looks like a starkly different picture, which just speaks to the intensity of that consolidation, and then you even look at who owns stocks. And the huge percentage of the stock ownership in the United States is pensions, but the pension is on the decline. The retail investor has not picked that up by being an LP and hedge funds. There's more and more people who aren't even participating in the stock market growth. And meanwhile, the small business has been under”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Blown up, but I think there's going to be a layer of retail financial advisors and retail experts and people building a creator class on top of that energy that's currently explosive in the market. I think that we're going to have a whole new set of people that are going to feel empowered and able to work on side projects because they now have a little bit of runway. One of the things that Mark Andreessen said that was so powerful about Obamacare was that health insurance was the reason so many people stayed at their jobs when they otherwise would have taken a shot. So this idea of giving somebody a little bit of runway and giving them a chance to bet on themselves may just have had the doors of it blown wide open in a way that we haven't seen it.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Into a company called Catch is predicated on this thesis that the future of work and how work gets created and propagated is going to look so far different from the manufacturing assembly line of the 1950s that the social safety net attached to that is going to have to be totally rewritten because I'm not going to work at one company for 50 years. I'm going to work maybe at seven things all at once and they're going to all go to be side hustles that bubble up into an income stream. Do some of it on social platforms. That's one theme that we're certainly seeing. I can't help but think that one of the things about the Roaring 20s that I find to be so neat is this is the first time in 30, maybe 40 years that there's been a stimulus directly to the poor and what the impact of that is going to have on something like a creator economy. We've seen that the retail investor landscape has completely”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Informal and just making videos on one platform call it TikTok, just making dance videos, and yet generating a revenue stream, just building Roblox infrastructure and earning robux, just being a digital art designer who's running a studio for NFT producers as it is to be a corner shop grocer. The infrastructure for it though is going to need to look more like a corner shop grocer because ultimately that's what they are. They're a sole proprietor, they're a business person, they're an LLC, they're the coral reef of the American economy. All net new jobs in the US are created by small business. Small business is the engine, the economic engine that powers our growth. And that's what they are doing. And that's where there's a ton of value currently being created, but there currently is an infrastructure for it at scale and in these new form factors and in these new modalities that we're seeing. And so one of our investments.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “A conversation that happened relatively recently on Clubhouse between the founders of Spotify, Shopify, and Facebook. And on its face, those don't look like companies that are in a sufficiently close enough universe to have a coherent conversation. They were all talking about creators. And they were all talking about how the primacy of the creator, how creator is becoming the central narrative. And I thought there was something really profound about that that has actually been a through line in a lot of the investments that we've been looking at. So creator is an old word, but it's a new concept, which is a more constructive and optimistic and creative way of framing the individual proprietor. The reason why it's not a small business owner or a single LLC member or an entrepreneur is because it has a different element to it. It's somebody who's as likely to be”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Can empower original creators. So the original creator, and how do you empower them, and how do you create a line of earning potential back to them is a through line that I'm seeing not just in crypto, which is one of the pioneers in this conversation today, but in fintech more broadly, in social more broadly. And frankly, it's one of the most important trends that I've seen manifest across some of our strongest portfolio founders period.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Track of when a song gets listened to or when a piece of digital content gets interacted with, how do you figure out who sent it to whom and who's the original owner and how do you create, again, that chain of custody. So the idea of a programmable contract that gives the original creator a permanent and infinite royalty stream wherever that piece of digital content propagates into the future is something incredibly relevant, not just for digital artists as we're seeing today really profoundly with people and everyone in that community, but also for physical artists that are trying to figure out what a digital print looks like and then also for photographers and then also for musicians also for the MP3 itself. And so almost every artifact that went from being super scarce until extraordinarily, extraordinarily abundant from 1999 until now has an opportunity to have some scarcity attached to it again. And that scarcity though in what's key is something that”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, one way is on the street. We saw a concept for an NFT as a marker, as a pointer, as a way to represent a fractionalized real estate offering. And we saw this a year and a half ago. And we thought, oh, that's interesting, because fractionalized real estate is an exciting concept and creating more ways for this retail revolution that we're seeing to participate in the different nooks and crannies of the economy makes a ton of sense. But how do we make sure that the chain of custody is carefully managed? And how do we make sure that it's done in a way that's trustworthy and that doesn't necessarily need a centralized actor? And what does it look like to build infrastructure for that? That's one example. The other example is just in the structure of NFTs themselves, the fact that they are sitting on top of smart contracts, which are programmable agreements that can persist wherever they're transacted. One of the hard things about DRM is keeping”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Is we don't have to necessarily assess the strength of the market that one's building in, we just have to assess the strength of your conviction, the tactics that you plan to employ, and how well those things fit together, and then believe that it'll manifest from there”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Era, and so they were trying to build a way that you could create a system of record that would follow the ownership custody chain of a given digital object as it traversed the internet. I said, oh, that sounds pretty cool. That sounds like it'll solve the photography problem online or the MP3 problem online. What it then turned out was that it was both very wrong and very right. It was going to manifest later as the non-fungible token concept, but it was substantively too early. And my partner Steve had also made an investment in a company where you were trying to figure out how to do margin lending and build a short position against a cryptocurrency. Then they went through an immediate period of extreme enthusiasm and then it got a little quiet and it got a little quiet because people were like, we don't need to short Bitcoin. It's going to short itself. I think one of the things that being founder driven in looking for early markets allows us.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “2014 to 2016 was one moment where investing in crypto was a little bit of a head scratcher. And then second half of 2016 through 2017, it felt like the thing everyone was doing. 2008 to about midway through 2020, crypto was not something that was that popular. The first wave was marked by the ICOs that had started to happen. I think the first ICO was in 2013. And then there was a little bit of curiosity around there being a new funding mechanism. And was that a way to exit companies thinking that crypto was going to be a vehicle for exiting companies? And then maybe it was a vehicle for funding companies up front. And there was a lot of energy there. Steve and I both prior to partnering were very excited about it. I remember investing in a company that failed that was doing trying to do digital rights management in the crypto.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “One piece of this pathway, then you can have some velocity here because this person is hurting them and they don't even know it.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Passionate about it. So small groups with intense passion are way more interesting than big groups with modest interest, especially in nascent markets, because that's indicative of who's going to have the initial substrate to create the spark that may light that fire. And then in big markets, what I often try and do is when I talk to a customer, I don't ask the customer about anything relating to the solution. I ask them to walk through their workflows. And you can hear it in their voice. You can hear it in their description of their experience, the intensity and the nature of the pain. So in both cases, it's the intensity of the pain or it's the passion of the novelty of the solution that I'm looking for in order of magnitude calculation on. So in the intensity of the pain, when somebody says, well, gosh, you hear that big sigh and you think, well, I have to go through X spreadsheet or I have to call this person and I'm thinking about this experience, then I just think to myself, aha, there's so much low-hanging fruit here that if you can just build something that automates.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Makes for good problem space. I think there's a couple different types of problem spaces that are equally interesting. One of them is nascent market problem spaces. So nascent market problem spaces, our friend Chris Dixon characterizes it as what are the smartest people you do tinkering with on nights and weekends? The nascent market problem space is the one where I actually like the example analogized to music of Sarah Borellis and the A&Rs who was reviewing Sarah Borellis when she was still an up-and-comer went to one of her early shows and hadn't heard much about her, but got to the show and found that it was packed and it was packed with a very, very specific demographic of people who had driven from very, very, very far away. So it was in New York City, but they had driven from Ohio, from northern Virginia, from all over just to go see Sarah Borellas because there was a small group of people who were intensely packed.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “What happens? And some founders stumble. Some founders can't put themselves into that space. Other founders say, oh, they paint a picture that feels a little bit like a Jetsons in their little corner of the world. And you know that they have that vision in their heart. So I love somebody who really has a what could go right and has a wild and crazy and ambitious one that sounds a little bit like sci-fi that they're just waiting to tell you if only you'd ask.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Two questions I most enjoy asking are what are the risks with this business that I'm underrating or that most investors underrate? This doesn't appear on many slide decks, but I inevitably love it finding it in a pitch is when a founder tells me the objections that I already have and then frames a few new objections for me. Like I want a founder who understands the risks and is more comfortable with framing them and sharing them than I am. That's the what could go wrong or how to think about the downside and how to think about the problem from all angles question that I try and look for. And then the other question that I'm interested in, I think Bruce Dunlevy from Benchmark who said that venture isn't the wrong business. It's the what could go right business. I ask them to paint a universe where everything goes well. Every single thing goes well through the life of your company.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “And not all movement builders are movement builders from the front. A lot of movement builders are movement builders from the middle, but they have a keen sense that they're movement builders, which means are you building something that feels more important than you as an individual, then your team, and in some cases, than your company? And can you articulate why it's important? And that's also a shape of the market question in some ways, but are you a movement builder? And do I get the sense that you have a keen awareness of that and that you have a good instinct for that and that you're going to be playing offense when you start to build your company in leading that movement? Because ultimately we're looking for category defining companies. We're looking for market leaders. We're looking for companies that are so much more impactful than their market cap on society. You need to find somebody who can be an appropriate steward for that.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And is it well articulated? Because I actually think if you have a sense for the shape of the market, then you're thinking in systems. And then the other is, as you think about team design, do you have a good sense of your own strengths and weaknesses? Do you have a good sense of your co-founders? Have you thought about complementary skills? And are those skills going to be applied in a way that's strategic to the problems in the order that you're going to be tackling them? Those things are actually really important to me. And so I think about those things and they're applicable across all types of industries. And so that's not germane to specifically software, specifically SaaS, specifically A, B, or C. It's actually a way of thinking about how do you take infinite possibility and create a plan out of it. And so that's the thing I focus on most urgently when I get started. So the first is systems design and whether or not you're a systems thinker. The second is the extent to which you seem to be a missionary rather than a mercenary. Or if you are a mercenary, the extent to which you are movement building.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “There's a couple of things that I try and do, one of which is I try and test their altitude switching capacity. So how quickly can you go from one foot in front of the other to 10,000 foot vision and how naturally can you do those? And do you have equal comfort with those? I actually think that's an interesting input for whether or not somebody is thinking about the system. Another one is how well are you able to articulate the shape of your problem and the shape of your market? Shape means the urgency of it and why it bothers the people who have that problem the way that it does and then in terms of the shape of the market, the shape of the market today and the shape of the market with you in it. What's going to happen when all the sudden you introduce, do you use the Coinbase example, a hosted wallet to be able to hold cryptocurrencies? What's going to happen to cryptocurrencies? What's going to happen to wallets? What's going to happen to money? What's going to happen to consumers? Is that persuasive?”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “The most important thing, in my view, is internal consistency. So what that means is if you deviate, know that you are and have a point of view as to why. Come up with a plan in the first place.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Immediately want to share because I'm not thinking about the way we move as stigmargy, this idea of like swarm intelligence. And I do think about that natively and naturally in software, but I forget to think about it in humans despite it being something originating in ants and termites in high density environments. And so domain insight is, you know it when you see it, but those are some of the hallmarks of it. when somebody describes a market structure in a way that's totally fresh. And when somebody says something that you want to repeat, because sometimes it's just a simpler articulation of a very old problem. Sometimes it's a more elegant articulation than a very old problem.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “The heuristic that I use for it is if somebody says something to me in a pitch and I write it down because I'm going to want to steal it and tweet it later, that's an example of domain insight. Another example of domain insight is if somebody describes the structure of their market in the way that I've never heard it described before, that strikes me as an example of domain insight. I remember the first time that we heard an articulation of the taxi market and the ride-sharing market and this idea of packets being moved across the world in a programmatic central nervous system that's automatically managed. It's something that we know in software, but we don't know it in person. Imagine if we could build a system whereby you knew that in person. How would cities move? You hear that and you think that is insight. That is something that I'm going to be.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Curiosity and their enthusiasm and their energy to bear on it. So as a result, I've been thinking about this space for 10 years and I'm obsessed about it, in my view, is a little bit overrated as an input on somebody being a priori fundable. I'm extremely curious. I have a great knack for when there's momentum building on it. I think it's terrific. That's another trope that's been somewhat misunderstood and as a result of something that people wrongly look for. The third one that I think about is domain experience. If I had to choose between somebody who has domain experience and somebody who does not, I would choose the latter. And the reason I would choose the latter is I'm actually looking for something on an orthogonal plane. I'm looking for domain insight. And I think domain insight is something that is distributed very differently than experience. And if anything, somewhat anti-correlates with experience.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Doesn't love risk. And I also want somebody who feels confident that they can de risk things quickly. That's actually what we're looking for when we talk about risk tolerance. I think people who hate risk and want to get rid of it as quickly and efficiently as possible is a lot better than people who take lots of risk. That's something that I think has been misunderstood in the tropes and in the essays. Another one is this idea that founder market fit is a really interesting question for me. I'm of the personal belief that momentum begets momentum. I think Scott Belsky might have said something like that on one of your prior chats, who's somebody we work closely with and admire. But along those lines, I think that passion can be an output of success rather than an input to it. I think that people like it when things work. I think that there's a lot of people who are naturally polymathic. If something works, then they'll bring their...”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Are a couple of tropes around what makes a company or a team fundable that we question. One of those tropes is around risk tolerance. I don't think that risk tolerance is inherently good. If I had to choose between it being inherently good and inherently bad, I would say it's inherently bad. I think that there's a lot of people who take huge amounts of risk and are punished by it. And I think that risk in the mindset and in the example of a founder is make sure you don't have any risk of personal ruin. And if there's somebody who has no risk of personal ruin, then that's a minimum logical step that we have to get agreed upon. And then the next one is only modest risk of personal financial ruin. At most. And it depends on what your externalities are there too. I actually want somebody who”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “We did have a point of view about that, but it was really that we had this system whereby we had a learning mode and we were listening for the really great founders and we were trying our hardest to follow them into the future. And that's, I think, part of what allows us to maintain non-consensus and not get swept up in trends and not get in the wrong side of beta in a place where there's a ton of capital.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And so along those lines, I'm looking for eagles. I'm looking for that founder at the top of the mountain who I think is going to carry us to the future. Wherever the future is, I want to go behind that person. And so as a result, one of the things that Steve and I have really tried to do is not wet ourselves to a normative view of how the future should look and only wet ourselves to a normative view about how our process for evaluating founders should run. And then when themes happen, we embrace those themes. And we welcome those themes with open arms, but we don't start the theme and then fit founders into it. We start with the founders and the themes will agglomerate around them. Steve had been an investor in Coinbase, and we were investing in X-Coinbase alumni working on the weirdest, craziest stuff and the highest referenced founders coming out of that group that we could find. Three years ago, we were investing in NFTs. And three weeks ago, it feels like there was some level of clarity.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Part of that is predicated on my belief around how risk works, a view that if you go earlier that doesn't perfectly correlate with your need to do that many more, but rather just really need to have a clear understanding of risk, you need to have a very strong relationship with your founders. The second thing that we do is we like to be reactive with our themes rather than proactive with our themes. I think it was Ross Perot who said, who was a great venture capitalist as a side note, he's not just a presidential spoiler, but he said that venture capital is like eagle hunting and eagles don't flock”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “At the seed, the one thing we do the most differently, which is structural, is we invest in about half of the number of companies at entry that many other seed investors do. So most seed investors are investing in 35 to 45 companies per fund. We're investing in 20.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Pivoted into success, started off as long haul hitch a ride and turned into short-term ride sharing and gone on to become public companies. So I think that structuring your relationship with the founder such that you can be the honest broker and such that you can be the yes when they need that yes is the work that we have to do. As Steve and I spend time with companies, one of the things that we do is we think about the law and order mode where you sit across from the accused and you say, tell me everything. No, no, no, everything. If they're telling us bad news first, then we're in a position whereby we can be an honest broker and we're in a position whereby when they need us to dig deep and make a call, we can make a call.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Really, really, really important. A fair number of venture capitalists actually still allow you to go through the funhouse mirror. So you think you're eight feet tall when you get out of it, when it turns out you're not, or you think you're three feet wide or whatever. That's a little bit of a psychological one, but there's tactical implications to it. And then the second is conviction in a company doesn't end when you say yes. It starts when you say yes. And I think that the most important yes for a founder is the first one, but I think I'm underrated and maybe equally important yes is the second one from the person who gave you the first one. When the market has deemed your progress not obvious and your insider says, I still believe, that is an unusually powerful signal that your existing investor can only do for you. And I've seen companies saved by that. I've seen companies that have”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “There's a couple of answers to that. The first answer is a venture capitalist can do two things that no other business person can do for a founder. The first of those is to give them a mirror as a venture capitalist. It should be our job and the mark of a venture capitalists deliver in great service. It is to honestly reflect back to the founder their strengths and weaknesses because the shape of a company, especially at this early stage, is so closely manifesting the strengths and weaknesses of the founder that just being an honest broker and telling you exactly what you're good at and exactly what you're bad at and keeping it completely real with you is really valuable because otherwise you're walking through a funhouse mirror because your co-founders are going to not tell you the truth. Your employees obviously aren't and your customers won't without even knowing that they aren't. And then nobody else cares enough. And so having somebody who can be a mirror is”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Because what I had started looking for almost without realizing it until I spent time with Steve was I wanted a partner who had extreme operational distance traveled, who was sort of like a Marco Polo of startups because that person could really stress test for me a lot of these observations that I was starting to develop a point of view around. Theoretically, if that person also believed some of the hypotheses that I had around how risk works and how startups work, then maybe that would be a good partner for me. And it turned out that it wasn't only that, but Steve shared the same view, which is, oh, you actually can help companies at the early stage. It's very hard, it's very specific, and we should talk about how, but you actually can. And I said, okay, let's dive in. Let's see what this looks like.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Extraordinarily humbling. I'm going to have to think about this. So then, what I thought a little bit further about was, okay, if the so-called value added service is typically deployed to win deals, if the idea of help is a lucky side benefit of the value-added service, but not the point, is it possible that a value-added service can have genuine intent? Can you actually add value? Is it possible that you can have a platform that actually serves to do some manner of de-risking? Can you actually do value-added service that actually does meaningfully change the trajectory of a company up when it's already a company that's likely to succeed? And I became obsessed with that idea. And I became obsessed with that idea because I kept on hearing the other side of that, especially from people who were really expert and experienced. So when I got to know Steve Jang, that was when it kind of fit together for me.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Topic in venture capital today since it's the only asset where the asset chooses the manager and how the platform is used to persuade a founder to partner with a given firm. I asked a couple of the managers who have really great platforms, really well-regarded platforms, how they think about their platforms. And a few of them said, oh, our platform is what we use to win deals. We don't use it to help companies. The companies that succeed don't really need our help. And I thought, hmm, once again, two profound considerations from very experienced venture capital is back to back.”

    2021-03-30 · Invest Like the Best · Kanyi Maqubela - Dawn of the 21st Century - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 219] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source