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Laela Sturdy

lines on the record: 59
first: 2024-08-16
most recent: 2024-08-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Harry, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, and I love your questions and look forward to catching up over non-recorded and recorded session again soon to dig in even more.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is where not all leaders have that. I think some leaders have followership that their outlier characteristics require success require success as an and some have the attributes as a leader that people will stick with them through the hard times as well. And those tend to be, you'll look at those companies have really strong culture. Maybe there's a vision that is even more ambitious, that's harder to achieve, and there's an expectation among those following that there will be hard and dark periods. And then I think others, you see flee ship as soon as things start getting hard because they were following a leader for a certain attribute that if they don't see it translating into success, they're out.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you have the very best companies. You do need both, but I would argue that sustained durable growth, if you can't recruit world-class talent, is very, very hard to sustain that.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you not think I would argue that it is more actually the outlier point that we talked about earlier. I think most of the exceptional leaders that I have worked with, they don't all have the same characteristics, but they have something that is incredibly important to followership that allow followership to happen. So followership is the consistent outcome, but what and how they get exceptional people to follow them differs wildly across companies or across leaders.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think venture is a lot more of a people business than maybe others do. The insights you have about leaders, what's different about them, what's unique about them, what would make people want to follow them?”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I knew just how important getting the really big things right would be. Venture is a business of 80-20 outsize returns. So you have to make a few big, big decisions, bold bets right. And I wish I knew to really focus all of the small activities because you have to do a lot of work and a lot of small activities sort of along the way that build into those big bets that you step up to at the right time. But I wish I really knew the power law and how strongly it existed and to sort of stay focused on that and stay focused and prioritize my time accordingly.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not trading, Harry. I like our chance at a championship. I really wouldn't trade our portfolio. Well, I hope they enjoy the trade.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't like you. It's important to me to get to know people and really invest in relationships I'm going to work with over the long haul.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my goodness, I will bring up Daniel again because when you say tell the kids about Daniel, I flew to New York within weeks of coming back from attorney leave with my third child. I have three kids and chased him down to New York this time. And I remember that first meeting, not only because I was fresh off maternity leave, so I had a lot going on leaving little kids at home, but I also remember that the majority of the first meeting we talked about our upbringing, our families literature, and very little about automation. So that was the first of a very deep relationship, business and personal on getting to know each other. And I think that is certainly important to me and I think important to a lot of the founders that I work with, that there's trust and there is a relationship that is based on really liking each other.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're primarily focused on growth. There are times we go earlier. There are times that they go a bit later. When that happens, we will collaborate. We'll work together, which we've done in many great companies. But most of the time, we're focused in different areas.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We believe that over the last 18 months, the best opportunities have been going earlier in these AI companies, and that is what we've done. That being said, the market changes rapidly. So I think there are really exciting set of, I was just looking at our pipeline actually yesterday afternoon of growth stage AI investments, and they are scaling at extraordinary rates. There's really interesting technical differentiation founding teams. I am excited about the look forward of investable opportunities in AI and things change rapidly. So who knows what the strategics or other capital sources will do. So we're always focused on building relationships and tracking the very best companies and confident that when the valuation is right, we will get in there. But I do agree with you that the previous 18 months that the AI market has been robust.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what Elod Gill has done in the AI space has been really extraordinary. I always enjoy chatting with him and respect him a lot.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's incredibly supportive to the founders. He has really great relationships with the executive team. He asks the hard questions. He does the work. And he's really insightful and good person”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best people in the world can always benefit from having help, right? I think that the best founders will only be better if they have a really strong board, as an example, or they'll only be better if they have a strong set of advisors, friends, colleagues that they can go to to help answer questions quickly, to provide additional resources, to be a sound new board. And we are here to support and be as great of a partner as we can.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a lot of places, the way companies scale are quite different. So I'll use India as an example. You know, you looked at the typical size, the number of employees of an Indian tech company, and it was significantly higher than a lot of the U.S. counterparts. Just the operational complexity of running those types of markets, really understand or those types of businesses, really understanding the consumer landscape, you know, GDP per capita, all those purchase behaviors and getting market timing right, getting the overall business models right, I think have been, they're just harder bets and require sort of a different understanding of the risks you're getting into. And I would argue in some of those markets during the peaky bubble points in the global tech markets, that that risk wasn't necessarily priced in on the valuations. So I think you found in some of the cases, at least on a deal-by-deal basis, that we made, I think there were more mistakes there.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had some, the global markets you bring up, a very, I think, important point. We've started Capital G from the beginning as a global firm, global investment mandate. But I would say we've also made mistakes in entering markets where we didn't have a robust set of history or local resources on the ground, particularly those that were serving more local markets where there were more surprises. And that has been certainly some hard learned lessons along the way.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During sort of 2021, you might have some questions. So I think it's always a balance of how you do it. But we look at holding positions as continuing to buy into the thesis. We love continuing to buy into the thesis of our very best companies.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the last five to seven years and showing just how much of it came from multiple expansion, right? So meaning just how much of the returns in the private equity landscape came from exits, companies trading at multiples higher than historical averages, which of course we all know for anyone that exited in 2021 as an example. If you exited there at all, it wasn't just company performance. You were exiting for almost every company, trading at significantly higher than historical averages. So there's an element of timing as well that you're underwriting the financial performance, and then you have to be prudent when you're managing positions to think about the macro environment and to de-risk in some cases or lean into the risk of your overall portfolio. And if you're talking to an LP, whether it's one or multiple, and you had a large portfolio and you didn't deliver any DPI,”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, that's all, that's the fun part about our job, Harry, is we got mistakes on the entry, mistakes on the exit, which keeps it interesting and wins on both sides, right? So I think it's humbling to know when to sell, right? Because you have, as you said, your own conviction on the, which translates by the time his company is public, your conviction should show up in the financials that you're willing to underwrite. So again, we're gross stage investors. We're investing 50 to 200 million dollars in these companies. So we put a, these are big bets where we have a significant amount of resources on our team to really understand the customers, the company performance, the financial model that we're willing to underwrite. So it first starts with what are you willing to underwrite and how much conviction do you have in that? And then the decision to sell is also, of course, impacted by, I mean, I saw a chart last week that was showing sort of X.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think that LPs have a lot of different incentives that they're managing and they have full-time investment professionals, many of them managing their public positions and public investors tend to have different access to data and insights and decision making that help them decide when is the right time to hold and sell in the broader context of their portfolio. So I could see the case why that could be more important than an early stage investor who has information from when the company was private that they think is going to inform the right decision to buy or hold when a lot of other things are going on in the public markets. So I have been surprised by some, not you Harry, because you're particularly”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a huge advantage for us because it means that we can invest and hold over the long term why we're so obsessed with finding generational companies that will compound over the long term because that creates incredible money on money and incredible IRR returns without having a false reason to have to sell companies that we really want to own.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of what do we underwrite to a capital G three to five X returns, money on money returns and depending on the stage. So if it's early, it will be 10x. But the core of what we do in growth is three to five X money on money returns”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they going to put her out any good investment has the counterpoint and the part that is less obvious? The job of us, especially as gross stage investors, it's not just to get conviction in the thesis, but it's to get conviction in the thesis at that price, which does require for the best companies because the more obvious it is, the higher the price you're paying. You have to find deep conviction regardless.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me tell you when I did that deal, I remember talking to lots of other investors, and the pushback would be it's in a commodity market, it's value too high, there's not real differentiation. So it's always easy to look, and I, of course, believed the opposite and talk to dozens of customers, spend a ton of time with the team, really understood the cohorts and why this was a differentiated go-to-market strategy that they have. So I believe something very differently, but I won't call out names of many smart investors that sort of believe the obvious or believe the opposite. UiPath, you know, made that investment in the series B, the numbers were extraordinary, but the pushback was this company's been around for 10 years based in Romania. Why is it all of a sudden exploding now? And all the risks that people feel around category creation, like really is RPA going to be that big of a market.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never felt obvious. I tell this to my younger members in my team starting out, I'm like, if you feel nervous and like you're advocating for something so hard and others are telling you no to the point that it almost makes you doubt it yourself, you're exactly where you should be. You're exactly where you should be.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You that. And when they lose momentum and are not executing, it can be a double whammy in terms of recruiting and retention. And I think those companies are either going to have to, again, figure out what an opportunity is to combined with other businesses or how else they're going to restart, refresh, whether it is a down round to get the right sort of equity investment, mostly, again, for their employees. Because you need people around the table that believe, like building startups is so hard. It's takes so much longer and so much more emotional and other energy than I think anybody expects when they're starting a company. And certainly even when you expect just being a board member or partner, advisor to a CEO, it's really in it for the long haul. Always having that belief is critical.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're trying to figure it out. I think the hardest first reality check is to figure out if they get those companies can recruit a team and retain a team that still believes in the dream. Are they able to execute and are able to grow? Like obviously their valuations, many of them are going to be way off what the valuations would be if they were marked in this current cycle. And those that have the ability to grow into the valuation and are continuing to execute both from a financial performance and then you can feel it. And when you talk to employees and when you talk to the leadership team and you can really, in my opinion, feel whether the belief is still there and the excitement is still there and the momentum is still there to build something big and they're eager and many of them already have caught up to their valuations at peak amounts. And then you see the other set of companies where they raise way above maybe what arguably you could say the company should have been valued.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some, I think, good investment opportunities in what we believe are going to be franchise type companies in large markets. So maybe you have to work a little harder than some of the heydays of when we're at a peak market opportunity. But I think that there are many great investments to be made, you know, people that operate counter to the generally accepted views in the market are probably going to be the ones that have the most outsized returns.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, volume and activity is definitely down from the peak 2020-21 for sure, if you exclude the AI deals that if you add in AI deals, the volume and dollar amount actually looks quite high. Definitely volume is down, but that is different from being dead. I think there are still, you know, I started investing in 2014, 2015. Like you see, there are activity levels where there are great companies that are growing quickly and opportunities to invest. And then there's the later stage. And that's early growth, the later stage of sort of pre-IPO companies where I think you're starting to see some interesting rounds where they're not going public because of the macro reasons we've talked about, but they want to raise a little bit of primary capital and some early stage investors want to sell some secondary capital. And those companies are being priced in line with public comps. So there are some.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As they've done. And our job is to try to pick those. And then our other job that I would say has been interesting to me seeing how different parts of the industry go risk on and risk off. But I would say 2023 for us as an example was a great year. We did, I think, a lot of really great investments. And when a lot of the market was pulled back, you're starting to see people lean in more now. But I think there are a lot of great, great investments across all the stages. We've gone earlier as well, especially in industries like AI. But we're seeing opportunities across the board.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we invested in them, nobody, or I would say lots of people didn't believe that they could compound and continue to grow at such a strong rate that actually the valuation multiple that we were paying into was more than fair because they would compound in such a large market and expand into other adjacent markets and could be a much, much bigger company than perhaps you imagined at that time. So that's the part that is the judgment part of this. And of course the risky thing in venture is that it's easy to assume that all of these companies are special flowers that will compound at extraordinarily high rates deep into the future. And of course, most of them don't. Those in retrospect end up looking like less good valuations if you paid up for future growth. But there will always be the outliers that you couldn't imagine that they would grow as robustly and as well.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the way that you think of fair in growth, I mean, it's a funny word, so I'll define it a bit is, you know, you look at valuation multiples and you take a set of comps and you have obviously public market comps and then you have all the private market comps. There are stages of the market that the multiples that you're paying are extraordinarily high and they don't make sense from historical averages and they don't make sense sometimes compared to the public markets depending on the cycle. So it's all that's probably the most objective way to define fair is just how does the multiple vary based on comps. But the part of the equation that's hard to figure out is what do you believe the future growth prospects of this company are? And if you're more bullish that it can grow faster, better different than other companies in the comp set, then you are in fact paying a fair price. You know, we can pick the big winners. Like go with Stripe, you know, 2017.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never found generalizations to be great. And we have always found great companies to back during every single point of all the cycles. Some points it's been harder or easier, but there are always great companies to be bought and invested in at fair prices. You don't always know they're fair at the time, but when you look back, if you made the call right, they're very fair.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the context of working with a private equity partner, if they were to do a roll up or invest in more traditional profitable assets that either trade from the public markets to the private or have been private the entire time, then we're very open to partnering with those companies. And we'll write, we typically write 100, $150 million check into a larger buyout that those firms are doing. And we have had a lot of success with those partnerships. So we do it in that capacity. We haven't, I should say, never say never, but we haven't done a roll-up on our own accord so far in our history.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That category that have been well funded. Some of them still have a significant amount of capital on their balance sheets that are trying to figure out if they can invest to try to reaccelerate growth. And I think you'll see a range of outcomes. And there'll be some good investment opportunities in that.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or 20%, but most of the time you see a DK curve. So most of the time, if you're growing 15, 20%, you'll see that decay to single digits. And I do think that those companies, it's going to be hard to remain independent, many of them. And I think many of them that I see in the market are trying to figure out how to be sustainable. So figure out at that scale, can they reach profitability, single digits profitability? But that's obviously going to be a tough tough public market case, a tough case to sort of return invested capital. So I think there's a lot of creative conversations happening about that set of companies. Can they be combined into a bigger entity and try and figure out scale? Is there a model where they could be much more profitable? Because if you're 100 million, but you can get to 20, 30 percent EBITDA margins, then that's a whole different financial profile. That's going to be a really important question. And there are dozens and dozens of companies in.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's going to be a very interesting investment opportunity and a good question. I mean, I do think that there group of companies. We probably are operating in smaller markets than maybe everyone anticipated when they started the company. And as they've grown, if you see companies growing at that rate at that scale, it's usually either a signal that the market size is not going to be big enough to build a $500 million billion dollar business. Or there could be some element of their growth. It could be a vertical marketplace or a vertical software company where it's a slower growth. But as you add the R&D capabilities, you can increase share of wallet and add product modules. So you can see some companies that when they reach 100 million in scale, they continue to compound at 50%.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say there's a difference for the zero to one versus the scaling a company on that particular insight. I could see how that is stronger when you really just need to get to product market fit. There's something and I do think outsized genius in that area. And I'm a big believer in spikiness. I mean, that's one of my core investment theses is always look for outlier metrics and look for outlier personality traits in a founder. I believe that outlier data is really important to pay attention to and that will end up having outsize impact and returns.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to really love and want to be doing what you're doing to be the best in your field. Sometimes it's just a match for personal passions and some people just like to build zero to one more than they want to build one to a hundred. They like or dislike the people management and the team complexity side of things. Then I think there are just some attributes around running a larger scaled company that are important, some operational skills. It's a better match to bring someone else in. But I think typically and almost always we've seen in our portfolio that even when a founder doesn't have those skills, he or she has extraordinary talent again and passion and drive that got them to that point and they can hire in the right executive team to build out the team needs those skills. No one person ever needs a particular experience set or particular skills. That's why company building is a team sport.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would invest in a non founder led company. You point out Satya, I know dozens of incredible CEOs that were not founders and have same but different mix of special sauce that makes them the right person to lead that company and often to lead the company through different stages. Some founders only want to do the early stage nature of the companies and their genius really is in the more entrepreneurial pursuits and they want to bring in a partner that has more strengths and scaling or large company building.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I think that the IPO markets will open back up. Gosh, who knows that, but I think they will open back up. And when they open back up, I think you're going to see a ton of great companies go public. And I think, you know, you asked a question about M&A. I think Capital G at least what we're focused on when we make gross age investments is we really believe in founders and companies being able to control their own destinies. So we look at opportunities and say, could this be a standalone public company? And we would never underwrite something dependent on M&A, although as you say, like M&A historically in tech has been a wonderful exit for a lot of investors and a great place to land for companies and founders. Multiple paths are always great when you're leading any organization to consider them, but we're always looking for the standalone, control your own destiny. And almost all cases, that means being a public company at some time. And, you know, that's what we look for.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I think it's necessarily a scale thing. I've seen a hundred million dollar revenue companies that are operating with that level of precision have their story tight, have their execution plan really tight, and would be a good candidate to go public and could reap a lot of the advantages of that access to capital and some of the other things we talked about. And then I've seen other companies that are above 500 million in revenue and are operating without that level of discipline or where it would be quite a hard transition, I think, to get into that sort of quarterly reporting cadence and they need to make investments in order to do so.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they're going to continue to grow, how they're going to deliver profitability and returns to shareholders. And they need to do what they say they're going to do. And that's a different discipline. And I believe if you do that, if you tell your story well and you execute how you tell investors and the public markets on how you're going to invest, you actually have high degrees of freedom to invest in the things you want to invest in. I think there's a bit of a myth that once you go public, you can't make the investments that you want. I don't believe that's true. I think you can make the investments you want, but you are accountable to delivering those results. And when you don't deliver those results, you go into the penalty box. And the penalty box can be a more constraining play to operate. That's where some of, in my view, sort of the fear and the myths and the realities of the public market stories stem from.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the sort of biggest challenge I see in a lot of companies making the transition from private to public is really around predictability. Typically, especially in the environment we've been in for the last decade as private tech companies, the rewards have gone to founders that have been ambitious, think big, try to grow as quickly as possible. Obviously, we've seen a correction and a move towards profitability along with growth the last two years. But there's a premium for just like dream big, execute well, and get approximately there. That's different in the public markets. The public markets, you really need to say what you're going to do and then do it. And the companies that are rewarded in the public markets are able to tell their story well about why this is an important market, why they are a big and impressive company.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think a lot of it is just about the same thing that incumbents tend to do underestimation, really thinking hard about the right to win and why their product is differentiated, and then focus and resources, so not being focused or resourcing the effort well enough to truly win.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the common errors are having a ton of success in your core business, which is hard enough. So you get to this point as a startup and a startup founder, you're like, wow, we've done the impossible, right? We were this scrappy little company and now we're a big, meaningful share gainer in this important market. They almost make the same mistakes that the incumbents that they beat in their first act are making. don't fully appreciate how hard it is to win share in that adjacent market. They don't think hard enough about like right to win. The easy cases are when right to win are around sort of you already have the distribution and it's a logical extension. But I think some companies overestimate that. I've seen lots of companies sort of launch Second Acts in markets where, again, their product isn't competitive and they can't get the share that they expect and that they got in their first, that they got in their first core market.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you have to be able to do it within your core as well as the second and third act. Common challenge in growth stage companies.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For scale than others. Like, again, we talk about the examples of stripes of the world. Their core business is so, so large that and so, so complex that there's going to be a significant amount of investment in that core business for a long period of time. But you also get to the stage where you have the opportunity to invest in adjacent areas and expansion opportunities. And the mistake I typically see companies doing at that stage, the growth stage, is too much, not making concentrated enough bets in the second, third act. And they're not significant enough. They're not focused enough. They're not large enough to really to make a meaningful impact on the core business and to make a meaningful investment to, again, be large future revenue streams. So I think the actual same advice holds, you need innovation at that stage. You need focus. You need prioritization.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's really a timing issue. I trust that that is the right advice for early stage companies. And I think the best companies we've invested in have followed that advice. And they have stayed extraordinarily focused. They've nailed it in their core market. So this is more really advice for the growth stage companies where, you know, you get to a certain scale, you're at 100, 200 million in revenue, a private company. By that point, you're investing a significant amount of capital in operating expenses, in R&D and sales and marketing across the board. So you're starting to, and you typically have a large team, you have hundreds of people, sometimes more than that. By that point, you're operating with a complexity where you do have the ability to execute against multiple priorities. If you don't, you're probably going to have more trouble in the longer term. So I think the same advice holds. You stay focused on your core business. You make sure you optimize. And some have more opportunities.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm a gross age investor, so I would say in the growth stage, more often they wait too long, particularly as they're ramping up in the couple of years prior to IPO, because it's almost always needed for a strong public company to have some sort of diversification and again, some sort of evidence that you're going to have durable growth over time. And that usually requires expanding your market in some way or deepening your relationship through additional product offerings with your core customer. And more often than not, oh, those founders believe there are a couple years behind where they would like to be in proving to themselves that this story is true and that this is the right investment. And then, you know, proving to public market investors that this really are going to be durable revenue streams.”
2024-08-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source