YouSaid · the spoken record

Kate Shillo

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36
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2016-01-13
most recent
2016-01-13
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1
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podcast

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  1. “This technology will through artificial intelligence will allow those companies to be able to communicate on those platforms using transactional cards, which will be really exciting. So you could actually transact right there in Twitter and Facebook Messenger instead of trying to go onto the app that that company has built and the customer service is slow. This has been really exciting and they have great, great things ahead for them in the next year.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “We recently invested in message.ai. It's a conversational commerce and AI messaging software that empowers brands to hold a personal conversation with consumers on demand and at scale across the most popular messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Kik, and others. The message.a platform leverages artificial intelligence to automate for an individual one-on-one consumer engagement for brands across marketing, sales, and services. So for now, when you're frustrated with a brand and you send a nasty tweet at them, they try to tweet back and say, we're so sorry, we'll give you X, Y, and Z in compensation or just please stop sending negative tweets.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I hope that we can become a name brand both on the company side and on the venture side. And I mean, we have an awesome roadmap ahead of us. You know, I hope that all of our plans come through. It's Jim, Chris, and Lawrence have surpassed my vision for my initial vision for galvanize eight times already with eight campuses. I just hope we keep doing this.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Kenny Lear? Yeah, he's the best. I feel like everything he turns to touches turns to gold and it's no accident. You know people like him, he's been able to move through the political world, the media world, and now the tech startup world. And he's a genius. And it's not to say that everything works out, but most do, and it largely because he's just such a great person that people just want to work with him.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Currently, because I'm still playing with it, I love it. Sunrise calendar moment app, which is for photos, two dots thanks to BetaWorks.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, I mean, it was a lot easier when we had a smaller fund, right? And now as things get larger, the attention to the portfolio is certainly where I'm needed probably most. I try to do like a 60-40 split. They're the first people I respond to. If they need something and if they're emailing me, they have usually several investors in their round. And I love seeing on the investor updates if something we provided at Galvanize was able to help them. So that's our priority.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That it's easy. I think from a lot of people looking in, it's fun because we're the ones controlling the capital, but it's incredibly stressful and we're sitting in between having no control over the company and hence the outcome. So we're really put in a tough position, but it's so exciting when it works out and the relationships that are formed are incredible.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Favorite book is something I read in college called God of Small Things. It was just so beautifully written. I mean, it reads like poetry.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, for sure. This is working. It's working out better than I think any of us expected. We are inundated with companies and there's a real need for the product that we're selling, which is the galvanized community and education along with venture. And we'd love to keep doing it. So for sure.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “In our initial checks are about one hundred thousand, you know, we can't play at the later stage and it doesn't, there's no more sort of deep diving into numbers.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's almost the other way when a company sells early on. I'm sort of like, oh, damn. Yeah, damn. But, you know, it's cool now looking at the Lira portfolio in hindsight because some of those investments we made in 2010 and six years later, they're killing it in their market sectors. And something like BuzzFeed, which has surpassed Huffington Post, which is a LER investment, and Jonah was one of the founders of Huffington Post, he took what he learned from, you know, so he's been working at this for years and years and years and years, but it feels like an overnight success. I'm pretty used to that gestation period. You know, this is a long game. There's a lot of ups and downs, and sometimes you see these companies completely turn it around. And I think that's exciting. But you have to know that they're staged to the portfolio. I mean, being a seed investor, we sort of get priced out after the A. So then we're just kind of monitoring and helping where we can, but we're no longer doing follow-ons because it doesn't make sense for the size of our fund, which is 10.2 million dollars.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's like a stage and even later. So there's a lot of companies that I've seen just teed up with these crazy valuations at the A stage because they've done all this work preemptively. And once the product works and functions, because that's the same stage that these investors are looking at, are used to looking at data, that's when they're more comfortable applying the trigger, which I completely understand.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Think we think of it in terms of crowdfunding. I often think of crowdfunding as a bit of advertising. I mean, it's great to have that money, but chances are they probably raised around a seed round before that. So it's more about validating the customer interaction. And maybe the capital is just gravy. I find as I'm an investor, seed investor in a lot of these in talking to later stage investors, their hurdle is shipping. If you haven't shipped your product and you can't talk about metric on how customers are engaging with your product, they don't want to invest until they have that data, which is totally fair.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So we've not seen that before. Things like Rachio where you can control your sprinkler system and see data before how much water you're using, which is so pertinent right now with California and Colorado. Can control that, you didn't have the ability to before with any sort of ease, and that also reduces your water cost and then your bills. I mean, I think that sort of stuff is exciting and really useful”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, hardware's hard. It's hard to go through the beginning stages of gestation where, look, we're raising money and we promise you that we're going to be able to build this product once we go through tooling and make sure we have the right manufacture and then everything gets delivered and then it works. I mean, it's a long process. So you have to be patient. But fortunately being a VC, we're in the game of waiting. Like this is how it is. I don't particularly strike a company down for waiting in the beginning so to speak because once they ship there's a lot of attention on that and then hardware also you have the opportunity to create several products under one company which I think is also exciting once they figure out those channels it can be quite fluid but I'd say the IoT space allows consumers the ability to control their experience you know like through data and results that you're getting with attaching a product to probably a mobile”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “That I said. Yeah, I think that might have been taken a little out of context. I probably said I'd geek out over it, which is true. I mean, hardware is still really, really excites me. And I think we started galvanizing February, March 2014, when a lot of the IoT space for home, especially home hardware, was starting to get hot. So a lot of our early investments, like Keen Home and Grove Labs and Luna, which is now eight sleep. Came out of that trend. And so we jumped in, it galvanized just to capitalize on that opportunity. And I mean, I love hardware. It's super exciting. It's great to see something.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's so fun. One of the co-founders is a BetaWorks alone too, which is cool. Yeah, so it provides functionality. For mobile keyboard for consumers, where you're not having to open up apps, you can do a lot of this activity, like putting a location from Foursquare right in through your keyboard. But it's also redefining search for mobile for feedback for partners such as Foursquare. So then they have added information direct in that way. So straddles both and can the founder would tell you that he's thinking of it in terms of a search product more than anything. And we have companies like Message.ai that are totally SaaS products immediately, which is for salespeople. And then we also have Blend, which is a consumer product. And I think you have to have bets in both. Because it's still such a hot market.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I completely agree with Fred's assessment. Consumer mobile is very difficult. Consumers are fickle. There's always going to be a new, exciting app or tool that's going to pull at their attention, especially as we start to appeal to younger generations. I mean, it's just the nature of the way things are working. But that doesn't mean that there's not a massive opportunity there. We all stare at our phones now more than ever, so that's not going to change anytime soon, and we're still building technology for mobile. on both sides of the market. And we've actually invested in both sides of consumer and SaaS solutions for mobile. Recently something like slash keyboard that we did straddles both. It like won for best product of the year. They were featured in Apple Store. They blew up at the end of December.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Thanks. Yeah, but I will say, just one thing I've noticed when I started doing this six or seven years ago till now is that I'm seeing female VCs start to collaborate quite a bit on deals with each other, which is rad. I'm so psyched about that.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yes, that is quite a lot of investments in a short amount of time. We wanted to keep a diverse fund initially, and I think that's still working for us. We wanted to be able to include any company that is a member and galvanize in our potential fund. So if we were to say that we were only doing IoT at the A stage, we would be very, very limited in terms of our investment opportunities in-house. So we wanted to keep it really, really open. And I find people define you, and I say people, I say, you know, the industry defines you pretty quickly anyway. So if you keep it open, that definition sort of gets pushed back a little bit longer. I've been told I'm running a fund purely for female founders, which would be awesome, but I don't happen to be. You know, that's just in the market. Because I'm a female working in BC.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, we're early stage. So the companies that are coming through our campuses that we like to invest inside and outside of Galvanize, right? They are small, early stage. They could be just an idea at that point. And we like to say we follow from precede all the way through Series A, which that's now defined as like the seed as a process stage. And we'd like to participate with you the whole way through as a startup. We do reserve for follow-on, so that's important. We want to make sure that we can be one of these up-and-coming seed funds that signals and indicates to later stage investors. And we share a lot of deal flow with Series A investors in later stage to say what's cool in coming up in these small markets. And those investors know that these companies have had help, right? We're not an incubator, but we coach them along the way.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Would come out of it. So I imagine that this was beta works at scale across the country. And what if we were doing what we did at Lair Adventures and why it worked so well plus the technologists plus the cool space? And if we applied that across the country in growing markets, you know, areas like Austin are starting to take off, areas like Denver, it's no longer cost effective to be building and trying to compete in cities like New York and San Francisco unless your business requires it. You know, if you can build a successful business in a smaller market where it's much cheaper, a million dollars that you raise in your first round goes much farther.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Galvanized Ventures is a small team. It's my partner, Nick Wyman, and I, and then the three partners, Jim, Chris, and Lawrence, who are running Galvanize as well. We have a huge advantage having all of these elements to a core business to provide to our startups. So not only do we have capital, but we have education, we have students graduating, we have entrepreneurial education, we have space, space to throw your events, hugely advantageous when you're a small startup and you just have limited capital, limited time, and you need a lot of these resources to just fall into place for you and some elements. So it actually reminds me a lot of beta works, and that's part of the reason why I was attracted to it, was that we had all of those resources. We didn't have a full education program, but we had technologists in our space working together collaboratively in so much cool stuff.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Sure. So this will be lengthy, and I apologize. But it's a little bit complex. And so Galvanize its own standalone company. And then we have Galvanized Ventures, which is a venture arm attached to it, but it is not a corporate VC. We have institutional investors to be clear. So there's a Chinese wall. And so galvanize the company as a, you know, we're an organization focused on continuous learning. We try to help our business and other businesses grow by converging community, curriculum, and capital. Those are sort of our three C's that we talk about. We like to think of ourselves as the new archetype in higher education. And we often say it's where learning goes to work. You know, we have students in full stack, web development, data science, data engineering, all learning on our campuses surrounded by technology startups and established tech companies. All in all, it creates an incredible”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Working, you know, the older industry is really working with the new industry of consumer and e-commerce and content companies that are coming out of the startup world.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Well, this was the beginning I find of Lear's really known for a lot of consumer technology. If you look at their portfolio, it's really robust with some of the great picks that are popular right now. I mean, Paperless Post was a perfect example of something that I used, I found, because I was doing events for Kenny and I just didn't want to address all these envelopes. And he was like, oh, this is really cool. And I was like, actually, it makes a lot of sense. And I mean, again, like my history with Martha Stewart, I understood why a consumer would want some piece of technology and be able to have it be beautiful. So consumer technology really took off and our fund, we understood things like Warby Parker and Birchbox and Bobblebar and Barkbox and, you know, the list is like massive because we would use those things. And that was the whole push that we're now seeing is that the New York market is really.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “For any sort of company that had any kind of content or wanted to have access to that and no VC would touch content at the time. They all, I mean, our first content investment, I think was Food 52, which is doing really well now, but no one would even consider it. And it appealed to me because of my history at Martha Stewart, you know, recipes and humcooks and a community around that sort of lifestyle.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Recommend it for everyone. I say to download it so you can search terms when you're looking for something because it's so much easier. The help of having the Huffington Post as a successful startup alongside, you know, we sold that in 2011 among all this. So like everything was sort of cooking at the same time and it couldn't have been a more perfect scenario. That really probably propelled us into the beginning of the New York City market because New York Tech was sort of unheard of at the time and there were VC firms more established for sure. But this was the market was down. No one was investing in seed. Everyone just froze their investments for a while. And we were writing small checks and all of a sudden it became, oh, go buy BetaWorks because they might write you a check and then there's also Leara Ventures that's there and we had the media connections. So that was really enticing.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “One day saying, like, that's it, we're starting with fun. We have to formalize this process. And I was like, what's a venture fund? I had no idea. He had an idea, but it's not as if he had a venture history or Ben did either. We all really started this together as novices, which was the cool part, you know, is that any idea with a good idea so long as you had some analysis behind it.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, so he and I had our own separate suite with like this cool MTV fish tank, the original one, because we worked for MTV. I mean, he just has the coolest history ever. And, you know, we just took meetings. Like that was his strategy. He was like, we'll just take meetings and see who comes out. You know, comes and hangs out, which was the most casual, fun. I mean, I couldn't imagine I was working with Ben Lear as well, you know, and there was a lot of stuff going on at Huffington Post. I mean, every day was just a blast. Like it was like, oh, look at this cool new technology that we're trying out. And, you know, it would be, I mean, like the guys were building the original maker bot a couple years in because Brie Pettis, you know, dropped it off. And like that sort of stuff was just incredible looking back at it. And so he had an idea at one point we were seeing a lot of startups in the beta works community and BetaWorks had a small investment arm and Kenny was doing some small angel investing without a frustration. I remember.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I went into the office, which was not much of an office, you know, if you go into bidwork now, it's just like teaming startup community. At the time, it was two suites at the same building with four engineers who barely said hello when I walked in the room. But that was some of the best years of my working career was hanging out with those guys. They taught me so much just even by osmosis. I was there like human tester for a lot of things because I was the only person in the office who probably was not technical other than Kenny. And they needed someone, a human, to test bitly links or whatever it was that they were working on.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “But he hadn't even hired, he had like three employees at the time. And this would have been the beginning of Huffington Post. And so I ended up getting that job with Martha like a couple weeks later. Kinney was still looking for someone when I quit in a different role, but he and I met again, realized that we, you know, hit it off. He was an awesome guy. He was just really, really smart and fun and felt like he had just this great energy that Martha had. You know, it was really similar in that same kind of vein. And I was like, I don't know where he's going, but I'll totally follow him and this will be fun, whatever it is. So I took a huge pay cut to do some experiments on startups. And at the time, Kenny was chairman of the Huffington Post, which had like 30 employees, and BetaWorks was like just starting. And he was chairman of that. But he was chairman of all those things plus the standard hotels and some other stuff. And we worked out a beta works every day.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So that was a risk. I had a great job and all of that and this was 2007. So if you just watch the big short, you know financially like where the US market was during that time. I had everything going for me and I decided I wanted I wasn't stimulated enough. I wanted to go do things in tech. I felt like that was an area that had more growth, rapid growth. So I quit and bought a surfboard and my parents were like what are you doing six months later I moved back to the city and had some interviews with Kenny Lear. The funny thing was that I actually met Kenny on an interview before I worked at Martha. You know, I was just going around on interviews and he was a friend introduced me to a headhunter said there's this awesome guy who's starting this thing, an internet newspaper. And I was like, oh, cool. So we met before I worked for Martha. I had a great conversation.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Well, she had this great idea, which I still wish they would do. I don't know why they haven't done it. She wanted to create Martha Pedia Which is the best name ever. Yeah, Yeah, she's got the best knowledge, so why not put it on a wiki page? I don't know. I wanted the rap genius guys to like do something with her on that. Maybe they still will.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And it's funny because it's, I mean, my job is not like that because she was so hands-on and she's such a genius that I was excited to go to work every day with her because it was like, I didn't know what we were going to be doing. And there was always some new creative idea coming out of her. It was kind of an interesting segue into VC and startups is because she was basically doing small startups within her company. She'd have this idea and I had to go create it, build it, and then present it to the board as an idea that we should be investing in as a company. So it's an interesting sort of cycle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like a small incubator at Martha's, you know, which is really cool.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yes, absolutely. I had I have a very odd path and I think every VC says this and I think that's sort of the trend of VCs is it's sort of serendipitous, especially these days. I started out working in sports marketing and I was an athlete in college so that was sort of the thought process there. And then I moved to New York City and promptly got an interview at Martha Stewart living Omnimedia, which was total sheer luck. And they just told me to show up anyway, fast forward a month into it, and I was hired as Martha Stewart's executive assistant, which was a surprise to me because I didn't even know at the time that that would be who I was tempting for. In the movie The Devil Wears Prada came out that year, and I can't tell you how many people bought me that DVD as a joke. It's great, great.”

    2016-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Investing in Hardware and The Future of IOT with Kate Shillo, Director @ Galvanize Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source