YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Landis

lines on the record: 73
first: 2021-02-05
most recent: 2021-02-05
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

“Well, first, let's talk about how they're the same. I think the feeling that one gets here is we're reminded that a little optimism is a great thing and too much optimism you can drive right off the road and that can be a really bad thing. So it's good to have people looking forwards the future, looking to see, well, what could we do? What could this company do? How do we change things for the better? And it should be about that. I think somewhere along the line, though, there's a segment that simply is saying, how do we just get rich? And there's nothing wrong with profit motive. It's great. I'm a capitalist, but it should be, how are you making the world better and what are you really...”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that pipe investment is highly supportive of back transactions. And it's almost becoming a standard part of it, like a required part of it. That's kind of like building your book on the IPO, figuring out who's going to own that stock afterwards. And it has a lot of the lower costs associated with direct listing. So people are talking about the blended cost with your pipe plus spac transaction. So the market's trying to find the right the right mix of that.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the reaction to those kind of got conflated. So corporate fraud and busted IPOs kind of got conflated and everyone said, despite the fact that those management teams all went to jail under existing law and justice was served, people still said there ought to be a law. And so they made Sarbanes-Oxley. And I think that's the equivalent of going home and kicking the dog because your boss is mean to you. So the dog they kicked there was the next 20 years of tech companies wanting to go public. The other thing I'll say there is that, you know, the direct listing and the SPAC merger are actually kind of converging on a similar path. Today, there's usually a big pipe of public investment or a private investment and a public equity.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Going public in 2000 was still really, really easy. But if you look at the scandal, if you look at all of the busted IPOs, the whole pets.com generation, and then you combine that with some of the corporate scandals, i.e. WorldCom, Tycho, Enron, those are kind of my big three. You could say fraud.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That well because it is just, it is really onerous and it is really tough on the company. So you really need to be able with a lot of resources before you do it. And that's unfair to a lot of people. You should be able to go public a little bit earlier, a little bit sooner. And frankly, today that SPAC process allows you to talk a lot more about where you're going instead of just being restricted and only being able to stay where you've been. And where you're going is kind of what matters for SOC.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, first of all, I think it's a good thing that people get in the habit of looking at companies through the same lens. A late stage public company, you ought to look at it the same way you look at a public company. And I think that level of scrutiny, that's a good thing. But I'm a really big fan of competition. I think it really brings out the best in us. So I view direct listings and facts as basically other ideas coming in and competing with sort of this historical model of IPOs, the standard S1. And I don't know if I would say the old style S1 process is broken, but it's certainly bent out of shape and doesn't work.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that we've always had a bit of an egalitarian dent here where it should be available for everybody, and it shouldn't just be this kind of, I don't want to say elitist, but it shouldn't just be an investment vehicle that's only available for the few. It should be available for everybody. And so I like the idea of publicly listed vehicles. I mean, that's kind of the reason that we didn't start out with a hedge fund to begin with. We wanted the doors open to everybody. And of course, we're unconventional enough that”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was that just sort of fell into place and we looked around and said, okay, we're just going to buy, we're going to look at, we're not changing how we look at companies. We're still looking for the same things, right place, right time, market that we like. This looks like the winner. And that allowed us to really kind of go back to doing what we'd always done. I always told people, you know, you don't need to pay me to go buy Microsoft for you. You know, you kind of already discovered that one just today nobody needs to pay me to go buy Apple. You can buy it on your own. But what you're looking for are those companies you haven't heard of yet. And so that's why we made that shift.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evolved into this odd kind of a credit granting model. But we went back to the original version of that, which is, no, we see business development company. We can make this a venture capital portfolio. And that was right around the time that companies like shares post in the second market were making it easier to get shares in startup companies.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It failed to adapt. And when we started out in the 90s, I made fun of Dak and Data General, you know, and then by 2010, we were all making fun of Yahoo and plenty of others believe me. And I kind of looked at that and I said, well, I'm running a mutual fund, but in the industry is referred to as a 40-act fund. Because it's the investment company act of 1940. And so one day I just sort of look in the mirror and said, right, I'm here in Silicon Valley making fun of people who fail to evolve. And I'm running a 1940 act fund. And I thought about that a little bit and said, you know, I think we need to adapt. So we realized that there was an obscure branch of the Forty Act that talked about business development companies, BDCs. And that had kind of”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really draconian regulations that just made it really, really difficult. The IPO went from being sort of this rite of passage that people were striving for to being this awful ordeal that people were avoiding at all costs. And we just realized as we got into 07, 08, 09 that companies by the time they went public They were so well known and so expensive that a lot of those early returns had already been and you just couldn't get them in the public market. So, you know, I had by this time already made a career out of mocking and ridiculing”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was a great moment in time here. I mean, you're probably well acquainted with how easy it was for companies to go public in the late 1990s and then the just the dramatic backlash against that, the pendulum swung really hard the other direction. And it wasn't just people being skeptical of startups and of IPOs, but it was also Sarbanes-Oxley and a bunch of other”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This guy is dog. And same thing, you bump into somebody you haven't seen in a few months at the grocery store. You're always swimming in it. And so people ask, what's your process for going out and getting ideas and getting scuttle button? That's like saying, what's your process for getting wet when it's raining? Just go outside. Still sitting and shopping. Yeah, right.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you can't bump into people and chit chat without picking up industry scuttlebutt. I mean, I had an example just the other day. My wife and I were working with this dog rescue organization, and we took a rescue dog for a weekend while the fosters were out of town. You know, the guy came back to pick up the dog and we were chitchatting and all of a sudden before you know it, we're talking about what's going on at VMware and what's the matter with this company and that company. What do you think about the CEO leaving there to go to Intel? And all of a sudden I'm in the middle of a research meeting. And I'm just...”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We pulled a couple of million dollars out of our address books and got in touch with people that we had gotten to know who believed in us and said, here's this vehicle we're investing in and let's see if we can make you some money. And that was basically our little startup stage there. I think the joke was that our management fee was enough that we could each buy a sandwich each day and that was it.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was really daunting because a lot of times when you're, particularly when you're young starting out, you have this feeling like the existing businesses are some sort of a club and you need to get an invite to get in or somebody needs to give you a chance and you have to make that leap that says you kind of have to make your own luck and no one's going to hand it to you. And so my partner and I basically figured out how to form a mutual fund. At that time, I couldn't believe there was no high-tech mutual fund based in Silicon Valley. And I couldn't believe that I couldn't find any examples of tech funds that were run by engineers. And it seemed like, oh my gosh, if I don't do this, I'm going to regret it for a really long time. So we need to figure out how to do this. And then we basically just...”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So after being starting out as an applications engineer, customer facing with my dad's firm, and then being a junior analyst and a market research firm, then I spent a couple years as a product manager at a little chip company in Silicon Valley. And again, it was a great just example for myself to realize some of the nitty gritty stuff that I thought I understood as an analyst.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're an analyst, again, at a high tech market research firm and somebody from a big-name financial firm calls and starts asking you a bunch of very naive questions, it doesn't take you long to realize that the emperor has no clothes and that maybe you need to modify your thought to realize that the world is not this perfectly ordered place where everything's all worked out. There's actually a lot of confusion out there and that information is not really evenly distributed. And all of the forces that finance professors will teach you about why markets tend towards efficiency, they're all valid arguments, but things are usually changing fast enough and people are imperfect enough that markets don't really always have it just right.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the explanations for efficient markets is that there's a lot of just incredibly brilliant gifted people doing perfect research and that everything that can be known about a company is already in the stock price.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's right. But it taught me a great deal about human nature and about business and business strategy. And it led to the second job that I got after business school as an analyst. High technology market research firm, which also began teaching me a lot of the things that I had thought that I had learned in school that actually weren't true.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So There was, and I considered that, but this is one of those moments where fate sort of intervenes. And my dad's business was as a manufacturer's rep in Silicon Valley, meaning he was the customer facing office. He and his partner were the customer facing office for tech companies based outside of Silicon Valley, dealing with Silicon Valley customers. And his partner had a heart attack and had to go in for coronary bypass surgery during my senior year in college. My dad needed me to come join the business because he would have looked like a one-man band otherwise. So I spent the first four years of my professional career instead of learning more things about engineering, learning a lot about business and human nature and how to deal with people.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finally, one of them said, you know, Kevin, if you can figure out the history that hasn't happened yet, then you're going to be all right, son. And the other quickly agreed, and I thought about that on and off ever since, that if you can figure out the history that hasn't happened, that's a really good thing. And I think that's a pretty good encapsulation of what I do.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a long, boring story of how I touched every stone along the path where there's more of the moment in time parable answer. And I'll give you the moment in time answer. And that is when I was in the fifth grade, I told my parents that I wanted to be a historian when I grew up. Now, my parents were both children of the Great Depression, and so they were immediately horrified that I was unwittingly I was pointing to a profession that wouldn't make me very financially successful or secure. And they really tried hard to talk me out of it.”
2021-02-05 · Masters in Business · Kevin Landis on Technology Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source