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Kulveer Taggar

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16
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2019-05-31
most recent
2019-05-31
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1
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  1. “This was going to be a very special show by countless people that I also didn't name. You've absolutely blown me away today. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Than I would like, but I guess that's part and parcel of growing quickly. I mean, my word, that was far more analytical than mine. Mine included a large amount of mahitos and amoretto, but I'd love to tell me, I want to finish on probably the most exciting of all. The next five years for you and for Zeus, just how big could this get cool? This could get very large. Like real estate companies just have a way of growing and growing, you know, shelter is, I think it's 18% of GDP, 18% of income is spent on it. We have a global ambition. We want to be in every major city around the world. And I genuinely think like Zeus enables mobility. I've had friends live in New York and have had amazing opportunities come up in San Francisco and haven't done the move just because they didn't want to deal with the friction and stress of finding apartments and like and so on. So I really hope that we can make it easier for people to move around the country or move around the world and really pursue the opportunities that excite them. Cool. As I said at the beginning, I had”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Henry Ford, where you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. So maybe this ties back into the bragging thing, but I actually think it's a lot more powerful to sort of just do things and show the world rather than talk about doing them. I have to say, I haven't heard that quote. I love Henry Ford, obviously, but I haven't heard the quote. That's one I'm going to remember. Tell me, how do you deal with shithit the fan moments? It's always tough. On a personal level, take a deep breath, sort of use some of the techniques from meditation where I try and sort of become aware of what's going on in my body, what am I thinking, what are the emotions underpinning that, and then just calming myself down and getting through them. You know, sometimes we have these moments at work and we have this process called the five whys. I think it originated with Toyota. But if something really bad happens, we'll bring in various teammates or anyone that's somehow related to it and we will keep asking why until we think we get to a sort of root cause why and then from there do proportional corrective actions. These tend to happen more frequently.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Of friends and CEOs that I'm quite close with where we can all sort of be open and genuine with each other. But yeah, sometimes that's tough for me to deal with. How do you use software to streamline what was a non-digital activity? And I have to give James Carrier credit for this one. You know, our entire company at Zeus is basically this using software to streamline a non-digital activity. The mindset that we have at Zeus is we treat it like a software optimization problem. And by that I mean whenever we run into a bottleneck, we will use software to break through the bottleneck and sometimes it involves changing processes. But there's countless things where we write some code and something that was a very manual process that a human had to do, we've now given them 3x or 5x leverage. And this is basically the definition of a tech enabled startup. So I'd say everything that goes into property management, we've used software to streamline it. What more quote do you most frequently revert back to? When I was younger, I remember I think it's a quote by”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think, and it sort of introduced me to his computational theory of the mind. And it was a mixture of being very technical, very enlightening on a sort of anthropological, evolutionary point of way, and then just sort of blew my mind to the complexity that is our brains. And even I remember the first chapter was just about how the eye works. And when we look at all the companies trying to do autonomous driving today, it's sort of testament to that complexity. I haven't actually heard of that, so I'm going to add that to the list. This one I'm really interested by, especially given growing up in Britain, so what would you most like to change about tech and silicon valley today? I think I would like to change the bragging culture. I found this kind of difficult to adjust to when I came out here, where everyone's kind of crushing it or, you know, in the press, it's like I raised this much and you throw these vanity metrics out there. I can kind of understand why it happens, but I actually think it can be counterproductive. And I feel grateful that I've got a”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Was that for me building the team here? I always want everyone to bring their full self to work, like whatever it is. And so I couldn't agree with you more there and couldn't agree more in terms of the need to remove the distinction between kind of personal and professional self. So supremely happy to hear that. I do though want to move into, I have to admit my favorite element of any interview, being the quick firearound. So I say my immediate suggestion and then you give me your immediate thoughts. How does that sound? Sounds great. Okay, so your favorite book and why, what must I read on my next trip to the West Coast? This is a tough question because I think favorite books sort of vary over time, but for me, midnight's children by Salman Rushdie, I think it's some of the best prose ever written. I really enjoy historical fiction and I think they call this book as having some magical realism, but it's sort of the history of India told from its moment of independence later through certain characters. And then my other book that I'd really recommend is How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker. I read that when I was”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I remember reading, I think it read Hastings from Netflix who said that culture eats strategy for lunch. And what I realized very quickly in Zeus was there were going to be multiple teams and multiple sort of skill sets that we'd need to be successful. And we'd have to foster this environment where people were really comfortable communicating while giving feedback and collaborating. And if we had any sort of problems there and if ever people weren't thinking with a larger sort of mindset of what does it take to make the company successful, we would run into problems. And related to this, I had this breakthrough moment with the company where at some period when I was going through a challenging part of the company, I actually just opened up to the”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “post-product market fed. If you're pre product market fed, all you should be doing is trying to get product market fit and actually you can be very, very quick. I don't think it takes more than a month to really test whether you have it. If you're close to it and you're using Rahul Vora's method, then I think you can keep working towards a goal. And what I saw was once I had product market fit, everything changed for me. You know, one of the interesting things I think that happened is the equation on your time changes. Now every marginal hour that I spend working on Zeus increases the expected value of the outcome. And so now I have this push to basically work really, really hard. And so I actually often think that success or having product market fit causes you to work hard versus working hard causing you to get product market fit. So I think you need both. I don't think product market fit on its own without some capacity to really work hard and grind what make you successful. But I do think it is really important.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I think firstly, I would sort of just expand what goes into the idea. And so one thing I learned from NFX was the channels that you would use to acquire customers is almost like a fundamental part of the idea you've had. And so I'd sort of expand like when you say I have a startup idea, it means not just a way to solve a problem, but the way that you would acquire customers, the way you'd position it in the market, the language you would use to describe it. So I think that's one sort of trivial way of broadening that point. And then I actually think if you do that, then those sorts of ideas where you line up market entry points, channels, language and positioning, it's not that common to have the full sort of spectrum of that all lined up. So I don't, I would disagree that those are really sort of common. And then I've just been there where I've had bad ideas. I've had good ideas and I've just seen the difference. And I've actually come to believe that in a startup, there are two states, pre-product market fit.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, it was hard. It was definitely hard. I started seeing a coach who really helped me. You know, one of our original co-founders ended up actually leaving and then Joe Wong could work with Trini before, ended up joining. So, you know, it wasn't without some cost. I think coming back to that point of thinking on a sort of longer term horizon, that makes it easier. When you're impatient and you're like, oh, I need to do something this year or within the next couple of years, you add an extra layer of pressure on yourself. And I've actually started to believe now that if you're doing a startup, almost the only thing that matters is the idea. I used to be one of these people that believe execution was everything and the idea didn't matter. And I've come to realize now that you don't really know when you're going to have that idea and at what level and where it's going to come from. And if you recognize that, then I think it can sort of take the pressure off to have that immediate, you know, brilliant idea on day one”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, that's a great question. This is probably where it's part science, part intuition and part data. We probably did about six weeks worth of data experiments where we were testing conversions and then we did a few weeks of qualitative research where I was talking to users and at the same time I was talking to investors and trying to talk to anyone I could in the real estate world and see what I could learn from them. I do remember after about maybe two months of diligence research and testing, one of the partners at NFX, Gigi Levy, he sort of sent me this test. He was like, okay, you have six weeks. I want you to sign up 10 homes. Go. And we were like, okay, this is our pilot. Let's test. Is there really a market out there? Would homeowners let sort of no-name startup manage their homes? How scalable was the idea? What's the margin structure? And so I think in total from having the idea to completing that pilot was maybe four or five months. Yeah, it was a mixture of some level of intuition and some level of like looking at the”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The other sort of takeaway I had was the importance of sort of being intentional with your culture. So we had a lot of fun working on the startup. It was five guys living in a two-bedroom apartment in Soma. And we had, you know, we're British, they're Irish, we had a very sort of jokey kind of ban for culture going on. But there were times when it maybe went a little bit too far. And it was interesting there were some mornings I'd wake up and I was like, oh, you know, I'm actually not looking forward to work today. And that was something that I took into zoo. So I was like, okay, you can create really productive collaborative environments, but it takes being intentional about it to do it.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Those are a couple of large takeaways. You know, my team then, it was me, my cousin Hajtagger, Patrick and John Collison of Stripe. And I think the biggest takeaway was we were thinking on a shorter time horizon back then. I think we were all maybe a little bit impatient with wanting to become successful and launch great big products. And I actually remember it was startup school in 2007 when Mark Zuckerberg spoke and he first sort of laid out this idea of how much of an advantage it can be if you're thinking on a 10-year horizon or a 20-year horizon. And then the more I learned about Jeff Bezos, a similar sort of idea came to mind. And we ended up selling that business within a year of starting it. And I actually think if we were thinking on a longer-term horizon, we would have done better. So that was one of the lessons I had coming into Zeus was like, let's actually think really long term here. And I think it basically gives you an advantage when you're making decisions compared to other people who are working on a short time horizon.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “What would be the quantum leap improvement in user experience for this process? What if you could go to a website, type in the address for your home? It gives you a price and you just click rent. And then that's it. There's nothing else you have to do. Your home is rented out at that price. And I was partially inspired by Open Door. I was partially inspired by, you know, when the first time I saw the stripe demo where you could copy paste seven lines of code to start taking payments. And I sort of had this realization I was like, oh my God, this could work. There's a lot more rental data out there now. The way I would offer this is I would offer to sign a lease with the homeowner. And then I realized I would have captive inventory and I could solve the problem on the demand side. So yeah, it was actually Joe's process of moving that sparked the idea and really made vivid the sort of pain point that people experience.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Got CMAX, Levchins, Incubator, and a few other things. And then I was like, okay, this is where I need to be. I need to find out how I can get to San Francisco. And, you know, with Zeus, Zeus happened. The idea came up about three years ago, and it was actually one of these sort of light bulb idea moments, which I never thought actually happened or existed. But my co-founder, Joe, was moving from San Francisco to Palo Alto. His wife's a doctor and she got residency at Stanford. And, you know, Joe is a brilliant guy. He's from MIT. But the process of trying to rent out his home was taking weeks, like, you know, trying to get her home rent ready, dealing with Craigslist, figuring out contracts, taking out photos and doing the repairs. And we were in the middle of the NFX accelerator at that time. And I remember feeling frustrated at how frustrated Joe was at this process of trying to rent out his home and move to Palo Alto. And so one night, I remember lying in bed, it was around midnight on a Sunday. And I sort of just asked the question.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Made your way into the world And what that With Zeus. Yeah. So I didn't actually grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur. I took a gap year and I worked at Deutsche Bank and it was actually somebody I met there, a friend of mine called Sachen Dougal who'd started a business when he was 15 selling computers. And so that was the first time I was like, oh, that's interesting. I didn't know you could just start a business. I always thought banking would be my default path. And then the second thing happened was when I actually went to university in Freshes Fair, someone had a stall up for the Occident Entrepreneurs and I put my name down on it and I thought, you know, this sounds interesting. A few months later, I got an email that they were looking for committee members and I applied to join as a PR officer, not really knowing what PR was. And then my eyes were completely open to this whole world of entrepreneurship. And at that time, sort of Silicon Valley and tech startups was becoming a thing. And I was lucky enough to just before finals come out to San Francisco and I got to visit the Google office.”

    2019-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source