YouSaid · the spoken record

Kelsey Chase

lines on the record: 30
first: 2022-03-17
most recent: 2022-03-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think it took the entrepreneurial jump to doing a startup, but this might sound kind of cheesy, but finding your inner voice and listening to that, so it's, I don't know, you could also think about it as your gut. But I think being able to find that, harness it, understand it is how I would respond.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mom in particular, I give my mom a shout out here, but from the earliest memories I have, she hammered into my mind work ethic, dedication can unlock goals that you want to achieve. So I have many memories. My mom's a teacher, but it was, I think as early as I don't know, two or three years old, the earliest memories I have were just instilling work ethic and having dedication can help you sort of achieve the goals in life that you want to achieve.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would start with Tony, my co founder. Tony and I have known each other for eight or nine years, and by far our, even before Omni, just the ways that we again kind of supported our creativity and our entrepreneurial minds and tried to help each other think about how we could put our skill sets and experiences to work as entrepreneurs. And then ultimately coming together with Omni, I think we are, Tony and I are onto something really, really incredible and have had a really good run and a great dynamic between the two of us. And he for sure is at a personal and professional impact on me. The other individual is a guy by the name of Mike Brown. He was my mentor and partner at DLA Piper, and he actually just recently took the chief legal officer role at a company called Dexcom. But Mike was someone that I looked up to tremendously as a young attorney and he gave me a lot of professional, personal family life guidance and training. And he's now someone I considered.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a real eye for written communication. So, my biggest pet peeve is whether it's folks I'm interacting with or just things I see out there in the wild is a focus and emphasis on good writing. So it's always a work in progress, but that is one of my pet pews when I see writing work product that even things like typos or just grammar issues, that's something that as a lawyer I think I'll never be able to completely get rid of.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I practice yoga, generally try to lead my day-to-day in life with intention and mindfulness, but breathing is something I always try to focus on every day. If I can even find five to ten minutes, I try to really check in with my breathing and give some really good rhythm going. And I know it can be hard. I do have young kids, got a pretty busy career, but that is something I try to stay on top of, and I would consider probably one of my most important daily habits was just making sure I'm getting some good breathing in.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So companies headquartered in Utah have been out there for almost three years now, and I grew up doing winter sports, but of course Utah, you have things in your backyard. So I've become a complete ski addict. Like skiing is amazing. So we have had kind of a tough season, but I think you'll find me on the mountain in my free time.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're mission focused right now on analyzing and being the leader in the legal and data infrastructure behind these private market transactions. And for us, our view of the world is that we want to provide the infrastructure, sort of the data rails behind the entire waterfall and flow of capital from LP allocator to manager to company. We want to map out that legal and economic relationship. And then from that creates this amazing platform where you have unique value propositions of products for each of those stakeholders, I think the ability to provide data, market analytics and benchmarks to the entire ecosystem and other stakeholders that are not necessarily directly in these deals, but service providers, other individuals, it creates this just really amazing ecosystem and platform that we have a vision to realize and create.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to speaking to how this data changes behavior. When you think about raising a series B round in the runway and operating forecast and framework that you're trying to put in place, how are you actually going to spend the Series B dollars? Understanding just the data timelines and when the best markups are happening and when your window is to strike again is really, really valuable. And then I think what a lot of founders could probably rally around is 18 months for a startup, that is not a lot of time to prove things out and hit important milestones. So I would just say all of that data really helped focus us on we think there's a good window of time here where we need to prove things for Omni to get investors excited to continue investing in and fueling the company's growth into the future.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say it blew us away when we saw what the data showed. But let's focus again on companies, software companies going from B to C. It'd be interesting to just throw a poll out there. What is the sort of median timeline? And the median timeline that Omni came to was about 15 months. So Omni closed its round in August. The median C is happening 15 months after that. So that would mean for Omni, we're back in market later this year raising capital. But when you overlay valuations and markups alongside those timelines is where things get pretty interesting. So within six months of the Bees where we see the highest median markups, biggest valuation increases are happening within six months of your B. There still are strong valuations in months seven through 18, but not as strong as the first six months. But good markups really up through 18 months after your B. And then we see a pretty precipitous drop off after that 18 month marker. So that was going back to the...”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah. This was another thing that unless you've been exposed into the venture world really well, as I was a young attorney coming into this world, this concept of pro rata rights was always, it was initially sort of confusing for me that investors had this sort of contractual right or through a relationship with a founder, they have this ability to kind of maintain their ownership percentage in the company. And we're looking really closely at that set of rights that go around with pro rata investing. And the question I have that I'm really interested to look into is what do the pro rata misses cost managers? So if I'm a series seed, a series A firm and let's say I either have contractual rights to invest in the B, but because of my fund dynamics or my LP base, I can't actually come up with capital to exercise that pro rad amount. Or I have a relationship with the founder. I'm given an allocation in the subsequent round, but for some reason, again, for fun dynamics or other reason.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friendly terms that they've ever had. That's the reality in what we're seeing in the data companies, founders are taking on less dilution and growth rounds. Generally speaking, the rights that are allocated among investors and companies are swaying in the favor of founders. And so at Omni, we're kind of looking at this multitude of factors at play in a venture financing and coming up with sort of a way to score these as founder-friendly trends or friendly deals. And certainly what we're seeing is the trend is in the founder's direction.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would definitely confirm that. And at the macro level, what we have is this just growing interest and demand for access to the best private companies and see that even just anecdotally from LPs significantly wanting to increase their allocation to private over the next five years. I mean, it's significant increases that I'm seeing and hearing. So with that, you just have this availability and never really before seen amount of capital wanting to access private companies. And that is coming along with a time where deals are happening and coming together at incredibly fast rates. Competition for the best private companies, especially breakout growth companies, is the highest it's ever been. And with that, we talked about also the emergence of even new players coming into this world like crossover firms and that are taking a much more passive approach to growth venture investing. So all of that, I think, is creating an environment where founders have the most”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Share with you what I'm kind of dog fooding internally that I think is a lot of fun. One of the pretty just staggering trends that we're seeing is over the last decade, there's pretty linear growth in terms of the size of these rounds, like how much capital is coming into a Series B company, what's the total round size? There's a pretty linear growth over the last decade, but right around COVID is when you see this exponential spike. And so what you'd see is growth rounds be and beyond the size of those rounds even over the last couple of years has just exponentially grown as compared to more of the linear trends. So that probably would also check out with things you could read in the paper. There's a ton of capital coming into the privates and in particular into the growth rounds. So it's in some way a function of just the supply and demand elements of these private markets, but the reality is over the last couple of years you have growth rounds that dwarf what it would have looked like even five years ago.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at a small grouping of rounds, and we looked at the lead investors in those rounds, and the frequency at which they get board seats when they lead an investment. And the absolute percentage is still high. It's about 85% of lead investors in those rounds do get a board seat when they lead an investment. However, if you look across the last few years, the trend has been down. And I'm sure just anecdotally in the market, if you look at some of the emergence of crossover firms in a more passive investor type approach to private growth companies, that would check out that we do see this trend where a typical staple of leading a venture round is you get a vorte. You write a big check, you get a seat on the board. And we do see a slight trending downwards in that type of approach, which could be representative of just a holistically a new strategy or emerging strategies that you're seeing in the venture and growth world.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. It's a cool company. I just think it's a cool company to work at because most engineers have some entrepreneurial drive or want to have a role in the venture ecosystem. So they come to Omni, we can recruit based on, we'll give you a crash course on venture. If you want to start a company, this is the best company to work at because you're going to learn the inside and out of venture financings and how startups are built and understand how to fundraise and those sorts of things. We do study trends and look, I'm constantly asking questions of the database that I'm curious about in terms of venture. Couple of things that I think would be interesting, some data I could bring into the conversation was particularly around what are board dynamics. And there's, I wouldn't call this a major trend, but I think it probably would cross reference and check out with what you would hear anecdotally. But we do see a slight trending downwards. So what we looked at in this particular data point were lead investors in growth rounds. And for us, we just sort of contained that to B, C, and D. We just wanted to.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought to the venture world and bringing that into the LP arena. So we will be analyzing core foundational fund documents, structuring, analyzing, validating that data, and making it available for LPs so they can really understand their individual economic and legal relationship with managers, but can then also start to do more portfolio-wide and ultimately market-wide analytics across their fund investments.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think in a lot of ways our product and our team is just drawn to do more for our existing clients. Let's say an investor portfolio looks like today is they tend to have a lot more than just direct investments into companies. There's a secondary portfolio some firms are investing into other firms as LPs. And so as we started working with a more diverse set of investors in the market, we had this really nice opportunity to do more for if you take a fund to fund, for example, most funda funds do have some sort of direct investment strategy alongside their fund strategy. So Omni initially started with servicing their direct strategy, but we were really getting pulled by the clients to analyze their fund positions and what you have with allocations and investments into private managers is a really similar problem, similar opportunity. You have complex legal agreements that sit behind the relationship between an LP and a GP. And so what Omni is doing is bringing its legal analytical playbook that we”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we had questions around valuation, dilution, size of the option pool, board structure, all of these things that come up in every single venture financing, we look to our database to help inform those discussions, and it was definitely a value add type dynamic. But the real inspiring point for me was as soon as you close the round, and I think investors and especially entrepreneurs don't have a lot of guidance for what you should do after that. What is the next sort of growth and milestone set of milestones look like? How should you be thinking about in our case raising a series B if Series C is the next big inflection point? What does behavior look like and how should you be thinking about that period? So for me, the big inspiration”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we do address pretty specific and unique workflows within individualized roles at a firm. There are countless examples of firms that need to access information about prior investments and also wanting to do portfolio-wide analytics and aggregation. How have we ever invested across a series A company in San Francisco in fintech? What do the terms look like? What are the economics? What does the option pool look like? Founder has a question about how they should be thinking about structuring their option pool for the next growth round. Are there insights and data that we can bring into that conversation? And for me, I've found a lot of additional inspiration this last summer when we closed our Series B, which was led by JP Morgan and Pellion Ventures. Omni's headquartered in Utah, Salt Lake, and Pellion is one of the premier investors out there. They joined our board. But what was really inspiring for me was we brought data into our negotiations with J.P. Morgan and Pelle.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's everything from what I would consider basic workflow support that can sit inside the back office of a firm. So think of a general counsel, for example, that's looking and assisting with managing a portfolio of 100 active companies at any given time, that individual might get questions from the front office about how did we structure the board and XYZ deal from two weeks ago. I sort of want to take that structure and mirror it here. To get that answer now, the general counsel is going to have to either thumb through agreements, pick up the phone and call outside council. It's a very manual, a lot of friction to get that answer. And with Omni, because we've gone in now and structured all that data, they can get those types of inquiries and answers to those inquiries with a couple of keystrokes, and it's very straightforward. So I think how venture firms use that data, I would say the product and the data base has matured to a”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are structuring and analyzing and validating that data inside of those agreements. So, really specifically for the venture firms, we're looking at their direct investments into companies and the underlying legal documentation that's associated with those investments.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a great question. What we do for all of our clients is really the same. We focus on underlying legal records. So what that means for a typical venture fund, and let's just take a multi-billion dollar firm on Montsandhill Road, they likely have maybe a couple hundred active companies in the portfolio. These are companies that are still raising capital, maybe have not become public yet. And then if it's a large enough institution, they have prior vintages of firms and they have legacy companies that have exited or dissolved or whatever the case may be, however that company may have ended up. So what you have is a venture fund has all of these companies, whether they're legacy companies or active companies, and sitting behind all of those companies are likely multiple rounds of venture financings, each of which have their own set of five to six hundred pages of dense, complex closing agreements. So we're working with those firms, and we go through all of that information, all those legal agreements.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's in a PDF might be literally sitting in a printed out version on someone's bookshelf. This information lives in sort of this really difficult place to access. So enter the paradigm. We go into those documents and we're extracting and bringing life to those agreements. And when you look at the firms that Omni services today, which look like very large venture firms, mid-sized firms, emerging managers, corporate venture funds, family offices fund of funds. When you look at their portfolio, especially mature organizations that have been around for a long time, they have hundreds and hundreds of deals in the database. Well, in their database, and all this information lives inside of these agreements, and most firms have a difficult time unlocking and accessing that. So we come in, provide structure and action for that data and give it to them in this really amazing product.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is applicable really across any private market deal, but what that looks like is hundreds and hundreds of pages of complex agreements. It's typical that there are high-powered law firms like DLA and Wilson involved on definitely on both sides of the table, but also multiple sides of the table. There could be a variety of law firms. But there are complex agreements that come together that document these transactions. And in those agreements, you can really almost boil anything down to economics or control. So there's sort of this real economic piece investors want to understand how they can think about risk and preference and ultimately making return on their investment. But one of the unique features of private markets are these complex agreements that help spell out control mechanics. And so investors can get board seats. They can have special rights in terms of contractual limitations that the company can or can't do. All of this kind of information lives inside of these complex agreements.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm laughing because probably objection number one that Tony and I would receive early days across the board from investors was you guys are a bunch of lawyers. You don't know technology and a big credit to Glenn Anderson, our initial angel investor who got behind us who really backed the founders. He, I think, at its core, believed that Tony and I could creatively figure this out and bring solutions to the market. And now I think now the company's a bit more mature. I think our legal backgrounds actually are a shining point of us being able to excel. But we were fortunate to find our technical co-founder and CTO Rob Wise about eight months into the company. And Rob now has the largest team at Omni. He's got about 50 engineers and product folks on his team. But Rob is really the technical genius and visionary behind what we're doing. So from the very first moment we met Rob and him getting up to speed into what we're doing brought a lot of good data vision and strategy.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around that time, but also me personally, I was sort of ready to take that leap outside of law. I was at the right place in my career, had recently got married, didn't have kids yet. And so it was kind of this right mix of risk appetite and hadn't gotten used to the golden handcuffs too much as a lawyer. And so it was the right time to jump out, bootstrap, and go all in on this really cool and interesting idea. And yeah, thank God I did because it's been a hell of a run so far and we've had a lot of had a lot of fun doing it.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working with such amazing clients, entrepreneurs, and investors definitely kept me drawn in longer than I was expecting. So I had a really great run and enjoyed my experience. But I think I was hitting that point in a corporate associate's career path where you sort of hit a fork in the road. Do I want to put my head down and pursue partnership and stay on that track or other things I could do? Where I was fortunate to meet my co-founder, Tony at Wilson Sancini. And so it was right around that period where I was thinking about got partnership, I've got other ways to sort of leverage my experience. And Tony and I ultimately came together and said, hey, lawyers have this incredible purview on the market and the various interests of all of the stakeholders that play in this market. And we got some pretty interesting ideas about how we could make these markets better, more efficient, the need for data. And so it was right around, I chalk it up to, we had some pretty good ideas.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I ever had a plan to stay in law for that long. I loved the experience and I definitely could not do what I'm doing today had I not had that experience. But I spent about four or five years in that world. And so to your question, it was about less than a week on the job. And I had just graduated law school, was joining one of the best tech law firms, working with some of the best companies. And I was just blown away in my experience coming on how I observed millions and millions of dollars transacting and changing hands I really couldn't believe that was how it was done and so it was really probably within the first week of being an attorney in the corporate world doing private deals and just seeing all of the complex agreements that come together the various interests that are represented it was just shocking to me that that's how money moved in the private markets”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an attorney, I was able to see all angles of how these transactions come together and really understand the intricacies and the complexity of venture financings. And that was by and large where we had a lot of pain and would constantly have opportunities and ideas for how things could be better and how ultimately capital could flow and transact in a more efficient and better way. And a lot of that was some of the inspiration for what Omni does now.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. It is, as I tell all of our investors and clients that we work with, it's a bit of a unique entrepreneurial journey. I started my professional life as a corporate attorney with Wilson Sansini out on the West Coast and then also worked at DLI Piper. As a West Coast corporate attorney, my practice looked like working really closely with entrepreneurs, management teams, and investors and really starting my career at Wilson. I spent a lot of time working as outside counsel to startups. And the move to DLA was for a variety of reasons, but one was to open up my experience to working more closely with investors. And so what my background looked like as a lawyer was probably touched hundreds of venture deals and served as outside counsel to growth companies, early stage companies, whether it's a few individuals with an idea in a garage getting it off the ground to companies that are grazed hundreds of millions of dollars. And then also working with the investors too.”
2022-03-17 · Capital Allocators · Kelsey Chase – Analyzing Venture Transactions at Aumni (Capital Allocators, EP.241) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source