YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Hartz

lines on the record: 85
first: 2024-07-22
most recent: 2024-07-22
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

“Oh, gee is far from. I mean, all the time that, you know, especially 18 months ago when it was crickets, like what a great time to be investing in that area. I mean, it's been great. And so whenever somebody tells you that an area is dead, make sure you heavily canvas that area and go after it hard because there's great stuff happening there.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was told there would be no math on 20 BC. But, you know, perhaps, but I guess it's a world-class problem to have, to be constrained on capital. Like I've always found that it's hard to find good places to get capital to work. And when you find it, you just go for it and you'll find a way to get more capital there. So it just feels like the capital trickles out because you've got to be very patient and patient and patient and wait and wait for those great companies.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the bees are separate. These are new investments. So, you know, for example, we let a bee about nine months ago and 10 months ago in a company called WAP.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what else have we seen? People just go Bill Gurley come from what was banking, Jeremy Levine from Bessemer was always inventor. He never operated and he's been an extraordinary investor over the years.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, a lot of venture investors are sociopathic, so that's part of the explanation. But I kid sort of, but what would I say about that? Empathetic, you know, look, what we've seen, I want to say that operators are the best and there used to be a vibe in the valley that said, oh, you got to be an operator to be an investor, a venture investor. You've had to walk in the shoes. And that's changed. And you see a journalist become one of the greatest venture investor, Michael Moritz slash Harry Stebbings.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's much more sharp elbowed, but maybe it's reverting to the mean because, you know, in times past in 80s, 90s and so on, you had these high ownership percentages, but greater mortality rates and just the extraordinary outcomes that we've had over the last couple decades of trillion dollar business now. So the stakes are very, very high, but it does feel like a period of less cooperation and there needs to be a very specific reason why funds would work together.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do target the double digits, but there's always the exception. As we all know, we would rather be with a smaller ownership with an extraordinary founder than high ownership with a company that goes nowhere.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, without a doubt, we're out of that era where, you know, an active investment for certain traditional funds, they had to own at least 30% or they couldn't be actively involved. Those days are kind of long gone.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always this discussion, and people say, Oh, TAM and TAN, this like brute TAM analysis is maybe overdone. I'd focus more on the teams, you know, great teams always find their way to slingshot from the small market to the big market, or it takes the small market to get into a big market. So I think it's more of a qualitative assessment in most cases.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preceding seed and then some bee, you know, kind of this 7030, mostly seed, but then when we see a great bee, we love getting involved.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in our second fund. We're just starting to deploy it. We're a $300 million fund, $600 million total under management.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason I have to like throw them under the bus a little bit with the Uber stuff is he used to call me up at Eventbrite and scream at me like he had a big rivalry with TechCrunch. And when we would ticket things for TechCrunch, he would get really angry and like just call me up and scream at me for doing that.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not, but we'll have to prove to the world that we're worthy. I love how Sequoia says we're only as good as our next investment. And, you know, that's the mindset is you just can't say, oh, back in Airbnb and Pinterest and Jason Calcanus loves to talk about his investment in Uber.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I like a challenge. Sometimes venture people aren't so nice. You are Harry. Don't get me wrong. I love Angel Investing, but it's just time to graduate up to the big leagues. And that's kind of the story here.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I just kind of feel that if you look historically over the decades, that if you just sit on all the companies and most will go to zero, you're power law winners will be so massive, they'll just dwarf everything else. I'm not in the practice of selling. I'm in the practice of finding and building companies and sitting on these things for life.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were able to put some amount of capital in the A that Reed Hoffman led, which thank you Reed, for making some room there. But then from our perspective, it pops so fast to a billion valuation at that time in 2011 or 12, it just seemed like, okay, it's run away from itself. We never really had the chance to concentrate capital. And mostly because it was such an efficient business that just didn't require the rounds that other businesses, like, you know, Facebook seemed to be raising quite a bit. And there was a lot of activity and a lot of secondary Airbnb. There was almost zero secondary. Which patterns which way you want to”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a fairly small check. Now, granted, we made them an offer. It was, I was Angel Investing and working on Eventbrite, and I was Angel Investing with Keith Rubois and Javid Krim. And Javid is the co-founder of YouTube. And we just fell in love with those guys and made them an offer. And Sequoia outdid us and got the lead, but they cut us in nicely because, you know, Brian Nate and Joe seemed to like us and roll off as well.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, these types of seeds like the seed of Airbnb, the seed of Pinterest at the time, even seed of PayPal, were very non-obvious. And the case of Airbnb, we'd go over to, I think the loft was on Natoma that Brian Joe all lived together and they were building together. And we'd go over and hang out with them. And they were just working nonstop. And I mean, I like to think about Airbnb as kind of distributed storage, but not for bits or images or sound or video. It's distributed storage for people. You know, you can have a EMC big drive on-prem in your enterprise, or you can have things distributed in it's far more efficient and cost effective. And when you think about Airbnb, they built the kind of perfect, massive distributed hotel throughout the entire planet. And what a wonderful business and what they can see.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I should be statistically focused on cereal, and we back a lot of serial founders. However, I just have a soft spot for first-time founders. the teens, it's the Bill Gates and his teens or Mark Zuckerberg and his teens. It's the first time around that it's so spiky or they're really swinging hard. It's that age, you know, the army sends the Marines in and they're 18 year olds because they're fearless and they just really go for it. But it's also a period of creativity, you know, where I have to say I'm ageist, I'm agist against myself, the Nobel Prize winners have all been, you know, I think within a very constrained age range of creativity and insight and genius or the Beatles. They broke up by the time they were 30 years old. And my goal is to kind of find the Beatles of the tech world, those great teams.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes talent is so raw that they run off a cliff or lack maturity and judgment fails. And a founder is kind of always right on the bleeding edge of things going dramatically wrong or dramatically right.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The lead director, however, does help that founder match with those areas of, I wouldn't call it weakness, but areas of go-to-market or growth hacking or engineering or reliability, you know, just help to shortcut a lot of these areas that founders will make a few mistakes before they get right.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd explain it like on a spectrum, and I'd put my two favorite peeps on each side, so I'd put Rolloff and Sequoia on one side of the spectrum, which is more hands-on providing services, providing oversight and insights and recruiting and everything else. And then Founders Fund and Peter on the other end of the spectrum that's the belief that, look, if you're an Elon Musk or a Zuck, you just need the money and go at it and you'll figure it out. You don't need to outsource PR team to help you with these things. You'll solve these. But given those two extremes, I actually lean more towards the Roloff Sequoia side because I've just seen that help and oversight and having that kind of star chamber of great talent cut so many corners of mistakes that would be made.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little oversight that you kind of drift a little bit. You don't have the same kind of tight discipline that you have if every little penny counts.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vehemently in agreement. This is the challenge of our time. I feel there's like Boyle's law as applied to capital. So if you raise a million dollar round for your seed company, you'll spend it and build a company with that million. But if you raise $5 million or $10 million, you'll spend it just the same and get to the same milestones. It's kind of like the capital expands to fill like the bank account, but it's used in the same manner. And we're kind of a wash with capital. So this is a period where we have so much capital, so little hands-on assistant in insights. We don't need the 80s or 90s to come back where venture capitalists would like strangle founders and throw CEOs out of office after, you know, two quarters, but there's no checks and balances. And so even the best founders have a lot of trouble when you have so much capital. And so”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a bit. You know, I always had like a little shtick going, and I wonder where that came in college I would say I was always kind of like selling things on the side and like my teens. But in college, I actually had a Facebook business pre-internet. Oh my God, that's old. It was called Faces in the Crowd and it was a picture book of students on campus. And we would get all the students photos and we would get advertising from all the local places and then we would sell the books. And I think I should probably go after Meta at this point now.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say a few things. I like kind of head shrinking teams and CEOs. I like to learn about their background. I like to hear what hard obstacles they overcome. And so I got a little embarrassed when you asked me about my background because I probably would have never given myself a check for like growing up in an easy waspy white middle class American town with no hard upbringing and a town full of lawyers and real estate people and doctors versus people like Max Levchin that escaped from Eastern Europe and Cheranobo.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is all about excellence and how do you up level to be the greatest company in business and operator that you can be? And he always had extremely high expectations of everyone around him and the companies that he's involved with. And maybe to give an impression, because I think it's very applicable today when he led the investment for Sequoia, it was Pierre and Roloff. Roloff was the junior partner, had just joined from PayPal.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roloff was just always metered and always has sound advice. I don't mean to make him sound like a boring person, but he is in the biggest crisis when the ship is being thrown left and right. He is steadfast and calm. And somebody of such good judgment and insights and so worldly is absolutely somebody you want in your back corner”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a huge Peter Teal fanboy. The things he says are indulgible, like he'll say things that maybe don't register at the moment, but then later on you'll really understand, you know, what it meant. He sees the world in a different manner. I would say that Peter like a lot of people at Stanford is incredibly brilliant, but it's also that he just views the world under a different lens. And with that lens, he can kind of tease things apart and interpret things in a way that when you look at an object or you look at, you know, one of these tests of an ink blot, he'll see something very different from everyone else.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, and I think it wasn't a drive for success, it was a drive for learning and really not to be bored. And that's why Silicon Valley is just so intriguing, so intellectually stimulating to all of us. It's like why we really do this.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people I talk to that are founders that have gone on always knew from the very beginning. And I would look up at my father who is now a retired attorney and I would say like, wow, how am I ever going to do better than my dad? He's a partner at a law firm. Wow.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would just say I had a crisis of how I wanted to have an impact on the world and very fortunately happened to be in the right place at the right time. And that is in Silicon Valley during this incredible first wave of technology innovation in the internet boom. I was lucky.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, you know, I always look for founders that have overcome some incredible obstacles or moved mountains. And my childhood was fairly uneventful. I just had an idyllic childhood all the way through wonderful parents and went on to Stanford University. I'd say I hit my kind of life crisis or uncertainty post-university.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He just views the world under a different lens. And with that lens, he'll see something very different from everyone else. If you look historically over the decades, if you just sit on all the companies, when most will go to zero, your power law winners will be so massive they'll just dwarf everything else. I'm not in the practice of selling I'm in the practice of finding and building companies and sitting on these things for life.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have strong conviction that we're in the early years of the biggest bubble. NVIDIA becoming the most valuable company on the planet is just the precursor towards the bubble of all bubbles.”
2024-07-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A* · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source