YouSaid · the spoken record

Kanyi Maqubela

lines on the record
69
first
2021-03-30
most recent
2021-03-30
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

  1. “Yes, a venture investor who I very much admire said, Oh, that company works despite our best efforts. He said it in passing and I said, excuse me, I think you made a typo when you're thinking there. You said, despite your best efforts. You said, oh, yeah, absolutely. And he said, for once, we didn't add negative value to the company. And they continued to proceed ahead. And so then I pushed them a little bit further and I said, well, when companies are going really well, how much of that do you think is attributable to a venture capitalist involvement? He says, in the vast majority of cases, not that much. He says, a venture capitalist job is to help companies that aren't going well, die more gracefully, and help companies that are knowing terribly die quickly. The companies that go well, they go well for a whole bunch of other factors. That's why we're minority investors. And exactly. And so I thought, huh, instead I started asking more people about that. And I started thinking about that a little bit more deeply. I even got to the point where the platform, which is a very, very”

    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. “Means a couple of things. The first thing is the extent to which the founder impacts the outcome among the vectors that you can actually underwrite for is probably still forever underrated. I think it's so underrated. Founders are so, so important. There's this old trope around whether it's team idea or market. And the joke is that nobody says idea because”

    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. “Startups. So they look at it in classical mechanics and they think, oh, well, now that you've hired a co founder and now that you've built V1, you're modestly less risky than you were before. But the truth is, to go back to the point about founders, when I underwrite a founder, I can tell, can you find someone brilliant to partner with you? I can tell that pretty darn quickly. You have a feeling for that. You can tell that most people can tell that. And you convince anybody to use the product once you've built it. I can tell that right away. Now, what I can't tell is, are there a series of events that are impossible a priori for anyone to predict that are going to suddenly result in your risk changing? Because nobody can tell that. That's the unknowable. And so I actually think that the risk just jumps from state to state as you go from the very early gestation of seed to product market fit.”

    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. “Social audio formats and then a totally exogenous force strikes almost impossibly to predict and everyone goes into global lockdowns and is sitting at home and wants to do something that gives them just a little bit of multitasking and just a little bit of social that just happens to be right when they pivoted into Clubhouse. So you could have known everything about their hiring co-founders, building V1, getting a couple customers to use it, and had no sense whatsoever as to whether or not it was going to be clubhousing. Why? Because an element of randomness to that. And then almost the moment that they did it, and of course they took a series of really brilliant tactics from that point forward, all of a sudden the risk just changed and it changed pretty fundamentally, pretty immediately. So I do think there's an element of like there's something stochastic and there's some randomness and some chaos or something like that involved in how you make those jumps, which is misunderstood when a lot of people evaluate early stage.”

    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. “When you get your first five users, six users Z plus one, and so on and thus. That's a basic way of thinking about how you de-risk a company over the course of the creation period. But I actually think it's actually much more like quantum states. And quantum states, as you or your listener may know, you don't move smoothly between them. You jump from one to the next. You literally jump, instantaneously jump. So I think that there's actually something more like an instantaneous jump that happens in the risk in the earliest stages at the smallest moments. And that's a better way of thinking about how companies de-risk. And so we should talk about that a little bit further because the implication to it is quirky, but here's a good way of expressing it. Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth start join talk show. Join talk show is a very timely and an interesting concept and it's a way to have a talk show online. User experienced founders. They've been spending a lot of time thinking about new”

    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. “Actually, like to use the analogy of factual physics because one of my favorite books is by an author named Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions and he is a scientific philosopher. And what he talks about is paradigm shifts. And one of the paradigm shifts he talked about was how when you start to get to really high speeds, Newtonian mechanics start to look a little bit different because quantum theory starts to get involved. And when you start to get to very, very, very, very, very small magnitudes, similarly, Newtonian mechanics start to look a little bit weird because quantum mechanics start to get involved. What that similarly means at seed is the risk curve is when you do a certain set of things, the risk changes proportionally or the risk changes in some predictable pattern. When you hire a technical co-founder, the risk should change by some predictable formula X. When you build V1 and get V1 launched, it should change by some predictable formula Y.”

    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. “Some of them were pre product, some of them were pre traction, but that was a consistent through line. So as I started thinking about that and then thinking about the risk curve at seed, I started to have a working hypothesis that the risk curve at seed was maybe not actually a curve and that thinking about it in classical mechanics where you add an input of force and then you change the acceleration just a little bit more might actually not be the right way to think about how the risk changes at seed. was the initial gestation of an idea as well.”

    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. “The entry point looked like it was non consensus. So the first thing that came to mind for me was that there's a persistent non-consensus opening at the beginning of the startup journey that one can conceivably build a framework for and one can conceivably figure out how to pursue consistently equality over time. The second was a theory around risk, which we've talked about a little bit before, but it dawned on me that in so many of the companies that we funded that had gone on to be successful, the founder had something that was immediately apparent. And the founder, whether that was persuasiveness or some indefatigability or an inevitability to them that you could underwrite emotionally and frankly, you could even probably describe qualitatively within the first 25 minutes of meeting. Some of these people were pre-co-”

    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. “One of the things that most influenced me was when I was at my private firm, we took a moment to look back on all the companies that were driving our portfolio, and we tried to talk about the moment of decision for all of those companies. And we found that in no fewer than half of them, the seed opportunity was a non-consensus opportunity. The seed opportunity was one where non-consensus internally at our firm and non-consensus to the market. Like there weren't a lot of people making a lot of offers. These weren't hot rounds for at least half. And that got me curious. And so then I started looking at the unicorn list. And maybe I should be looking at the decacorn list these days, but I was looking at the list of companies that have become category defining. And I found that anything from 30 to 50 percent of the companies that go on to be successful, if you unpack what”

    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. “But I think what's more important is these areas have consumer touch points today, these areas matter to the everyday worker. And when you think about essential workers today, your five or six job titles away from moving bits and atoms if you ask the average person, which means that there's a lot of cultural currency to them today. And I think that's actually better because we used to intuitively think of our logistics and our supply chain and the way that the world is moving stuff around as something invisible that happens in the background and it's certainly happening in the foreground now. And COVID was a big part of 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

  11. “The impacts of redomiciling a lot of our infrastructure were the richest man in the world depending on what time of day is laser focused on thinking about re-domiciling so much of our infrastructure outside of the stratosphere. So moving atoms and bits and how you're moving them and where you're moving them is as important and heady a topic today as it maybe has ever been. And along those lines, you're seeing that there's digitization of old world. So you're digitizing rail in a way that's really interesting. We've seen self-driving trains that are looking at switch stations and that are thinking about ways to optimize the safety. We've looked at trucks that are self-driving as well because it turns out that maybe long haul freight is going to be a faster thing to automate than consumer cars. We're looking at space ride sharing. So people who are hitching rides on SpaceX rockets, reusable rockets, not just SpaceX, but the complements to that. And we're actively investing in these areas.”

    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. “We made an investment into a company called Cloud Trucks, which is building a business in a box for independent truckers. I remember writing about the investment on the day that the first set of vaccines was leaving the first facility. And I think it was the Pfizer vaccine. And it was a very, very emotional video. And it was just a couple of trucks pulling out of a way station. But gosh, you felt like the fate of the future was in the hands of those truck drivers. And there was a woman who was actually one of the truck drivers. And she'd been an owner-operator and had been part of fleets. And she was a 67-year-old woman from the south who was truly one of the heroes carrying us to the future in some sense. But it did put in really, really a tight aperture this notion that moving atoms and moving bits is actually essential to protecting our future. We're coming out of an administration where we've been thinking a lot about re-domiciling.”

    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. “Into, but a lot of fortunes are going to be lost on the transportation side. And then similarly on the telephony and I guess software would be the right way to put it today because we're not really dealing in the radio world, but there's an irony though, because Clubhouse is one of the most of the moments new social platforms today. And it is the new talk show. It is new terrestrial radio in some ways. I do find the parallels to be delicious, if terrifying. So I'm trying to have bumpers up though because, as I said, the recessions did come and there were many recessions over the course of that decade. And when you've got a lot of emotions, and we all know how that decade ended, there's a lot of fortunes to be lost.”

    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. “Examples today of retail investors mainstreaming at yet another order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude higher. So that's a parallel that I find to be interesting. Another parallel that I find to be interesting is that telecom infrastructure and transportation infrastructure, well, this is actually a kind of an exciting one and an optimistic one, but also a scary one. And so I think about airplanes, automobiles and radio and the leap that commercial aviation made over the course of that period of time, the leap that consumer auto mass production made over the course of that period of time were both remarkable, but a lot of fortunes were lost. And I can't help but think about air mobility and the rolling set of spacks around air mobility today and how we're pulling the future forward for electric aviation. We're pulling the future forward for self-driving. We're pulling the future forward for so many of the things that we've been waiting for for 15 years that we've now jumped forward.”

    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. “There's two macro things that I learned that are cause for me having bumpers up. The first of which is that it wasn't all up and to the right the entire decade. There were moments of mini recessions within that period in a time where you're so emotionally driven by the macro conditions, everything from GameStop to vaccines and everything in between has a lot of emotional content that is being played out in live television right now for everyone who's watching. And so the emotion adds an extra element of intensity and one of the mild parallels that I see, even though it's at a higher order of magnitude is I was reading about the Securities Act passed in 33 and then the Securities Act in 34 and there was this point where there were more and more people participating in the economic activity and the idea of a retail investor at scale was mainstreaming and you look at Robin Hood today and you look at so many”

    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. “At seed is a little bit of a red herring because you can't do a discounted cash flow and discount to any future value is a little bit weird when there isn't even a there because there's so few fundamentals to underwrite to. So what you're often doing is thinking about their budget, the closest set of milestones that they can get with said budget and what your own funding model is to map to that. So what ownership can you get to help them get to that budget? And are you comfortable with that? That's really the material bounds of it. It is really, really, really vertigo-inducing head spinning. This is a strange time.”

    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. “Remember when a seed round was 500K to 1.5 million dollar round where there were four or five players buying two to six percent and all were perfectly happy to do that because they were effectively super angels or micro VCs and the cost basis was sub $6 million of post money. And so that's a very different scenario than a crossover multi-billion dollar hedge fund doing a preseed today, which is frankly what we're seeing. It is a reformatting of the players and it's a reformatting also of the implication on pricing and how you think about risk and how do you think about pricing that risk that is even affecting SSE. Now the truth is it doesn't affect us at seed nearly as much as it does downstream investors because we're funding companies who are only going to mature five years from now. So by the time they get to the surface, they'll be getting to the surface in a totally different world. A, and then B, valuation.”

    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. “The financial crisis, and so everything has been up and to the right. So we don't actually have the kinesthetic muscle memory of what a bubble feels like. And so I'm trying to read about that. I'm trying to read, frankly, about what the people who sat out the 1920s felt like because can one afford to sit it out? Is the opportunity cost of being out of the market too high? When the opportunity available Is so once in a generation, like so many signals are suggested.”

    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. “Sure. So Peter Gill said on TV a couple of months ago that we might look back on this as when the 21st century started, this period with COVID. I was chatting with a friend earlier about the state of affairs of the market because valuations are hyperaggressive, rounds or hyperaggressive and almost getting reformatted. I'm seeing companies that are getting a discounted terminal value when they've been alive for six months as a pricing strategy in a way that really just defies the balance of rationality. But meanwhile, mRNA and malaria vaccines as a positive externality of all the extra focus on the COVID vaccine. And so I'm trying to make sense of whether if this is in fact Roaring 20s part dieu, how to think about it. I'm trying to figure out what the Roaring 20s might have felt that. I'm trying to figure out what bubbles feel like. And so I'm part of a generation of investors who started investing after.”

    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