YouSaid · the spoken record

Lee Hower

lines on the record: 27
first: 2017-03-08
most recent: 2017-03-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“MIT, the team has worked at ZipCar, Google, and other places that have relevant expertise, so just really a very exceptionally talented and unique team for the AV space.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one which has not yet been publicly announced, but the most recently publicly announced actually was the autonomous vehicle company I alluded to. It's a company in Boston called Optimus Ride, which came out of a number of folks with ties to MIT. And while I can't get into the exact details of what they're doing, they've announced their ride and they have a website and what have you, but their specific plans are still a little bit in stealth mode. The reason why I said yes was both my broader belief, which I mentioned in terms of the transformation that's happening in transportation and mobility, which, by the way, last year was the cruise acquisition was sort of a Sputnik moment and set up a bunch of things. But this is still going to play out over the next 10 plus years. And the reason why I said to Optimus yes to Optimus was not only their go-to-market approach, but primarily their team. There's five co-founders, three of them are FPDs from MIT. Two of them were on the DARPA challenge team when they were PhD students that.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think two things. The first is, which I think others have provided this guidance is develop a point of view and a perspective that is unique. That might be around a particular sector.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The usual set. I actually like I strive every day to look at both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you know, digital editions, but the metaphorical front page. I find that consuming general kind of news as well as business news is useful to me even when I'm spending most of my time in the sort of technology startup realm. So those are my starting points every morning.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably Reed Hoffman has been, I've been fortunate that I've had a couple different people who have been mentors for me over the arc of my career. I'd say Reed's probably the most influential. I started working with him at PayPal during my time there. And then when he was putting together the founding team for LinkedIn, I was one of those folks. And I reported to him as our CEO for the early years of LinkedIn. And then even to this day, obviously, he's become a VC investor as well after successfully doing a lot of things as an angel. And he continues to provide not just friendship, but also mentorship and thoughtful guidance for me.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a believer, I think, Brad Freld and others have kind of promulgated this idea of work life harmony. What I think there is it's less about a balance of it's an equal ratio of time and energy at any moment in time because there are times where aspects of your personal life certainly come to the fore and take precedence. And there's times where your professional life certain things might take precedent at that particular moment. So I believe in harmony.balance. And for me, what works, I'm not sure that this works for everybody. For me, what works is a fairly bright delineation of my work life and my personal life. I try not to mix the two too much and I find that that helps me keep the two things in harmony. And a small tip for me that happens to have worked in that regard is when I get home at night, plug my phone in and in the kitchen and I can hear it. It's available. If there's something urgent, I need to deal with, but I don't walk around my house with my smartphone so I can be genuinely with my wife and small daughter and spend time together.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite book always tends to be the one that I'm reading at that moment in time. What I happen to be reading at this moment in time is a book called The Globalization Paradox that authors, I may be mispronouncing this as Danny Roderick, who's a professor at Harvard. It's an interesting book given sort of the global political and economic climate in that it builds on books that he'd written previously and proposes. Potentially there's a trilemma, an economic trilemma of democracy, hyper-globalization of people and capital and national sovereignty. I'm still forming my own opinion of whether I agree or disagree with that, but it's been an interesting read thus far. I'm about halfway through.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transportation, which is a huge, huge piece of the global economy, that's going to play out over the next decade. And maybe more than a decade. And so I'm quite bullish in that.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think not sustaining, there's a lot of emphasis on sort of chatbots and messaging AI happening at a messaging layer. I think that's actually going to be critical in many, many ways to a broad array of applications. But I think undue emphasis has probably been placed on it within the past year in terms of how many companies are going to be built solely based on an innovation that happens in chatbots or message AI. Things that will endure and persevere, I'm biased because one of the most recent investments I led was in an autonomous vehicle company. But I think we are in the very early days of the impact AI, computer vision, and a confluence of technologies are going to have in changing transportation and mobility. The future always takes longer than you think to get here. And so I happen to be of the opinion that self-driving autonomous vehicles everywhere in a very, you know, in the next two years or three years. But I do believe that there's a massive opportunity in transforming.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In time, most people thought the internet and consumer internet was a terrible idea and not an interesting place to invest because we had just been through kind of this huge boom and bust cycle of Web 1.0. Google was a private company at this point in time, if you can think back to this point in time. But it turns out investing in the next wave of consumer internet companies from 2003 to 2010 has created, in our case, LinkedIn, but obviously Facebook and Twitter and Airbnb and Uber and all these other businesses that were started in that timeframe, right? And so taking the long view of innovation waves, I believe enables you as a VC investor to not just capture that kind of initial hype cycle, but to capture the value that's built by a new innovation over a long period of time.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it stems from having studied as an undergraduate engineering in business and also just having a personal passion for history generally. But I'd like to also understand not just the history of VC, but the history of innovation waves has enables me and others who think like this to take the long view of innovation. And what I mean is oftentimes we get caught up in when new and innovative things happen, what's going to happen in the very first phases of the proliferation of a technology or an innovation wave. You know, the classic hype cycle that early days of things people get in many ways overly optimistic and then there's a trough of disillusionment, but over time successful technologies and innovations sort of become pervasive. And so I can draw a direct analogy to my own career and experience as an investor. In 2003, we started LinkedIn at the end of 2002, literally a handful of people working out of Reed's apartment, Reid Hoffman's apartment in Mountain View. And we raised our first capital in 2003, Series A.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That than I am. I think that's a good thing. I don't think that's a crutch in our investment strategy. Because at the end of the day, investment strategy is not purely on based on theme or investment sector. It also includes stage. It also includes what's the nature of the teams that you like to pack. It also includes how do you think about the life cycle of capital and your role in different stages of investment. So to me, an investment strategy is not synonymous with an investment theme or a sector.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that we as VCs can be extremely thoughtful about markets and innovation waves based on both our activities as investors and sometimes our experience as entrepreneurs or operators before becoming investors. And so I think it's entirely possible for VCs to think and develop very thoughtful themes about investing. That being said, there are literally thousands and thousands of very thoughtful and talented entrepreneurs out there who are thinking about new market opportunities 110% of their time. I might like to think that based on my experience at PayPal, I'm a thoughtful fintech investor and I have invested in a number of fintech companies here at NextView. But there are undoubtedly countless talented, thoughtful entrepreneurs thinking about a narrow market 110% of the time or a newly developing market 110% of the time. And so I believe that by being open to learning about new markets and learning about new themes from people who are deeply thoughtful and frankly spending more of their time thinking just about”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there's no absolute truth here. This is a situation where there's relative truth. So I think you can point to VC investors who take a highly thematic approach, and it has been highly effective for them, both because the nature of the partners at that firm and how they see the world and how they think, and also can be how that thematic approach positions them in the ecosystem. You know, you look at folks like Union Square, Foundry, or others who have taken a highly thematic approach they're investing and have been very successful at it. I don't think that means that thematic investing is the only way to go. You know, we think about investing as an early stage VC along a continuum of being purely opportunistic where it's simply build a great network and brand and get to know the best entrepreneurs however you can regardless of what sector or theme that they might be working on versus the other end of the continuum where you're purely thematic and don't invest in anything even if it looks exceptional that's outside of your theme”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 100 200 million dollar scale can be impactful for our fund. But that doesn't mean that that's all that we look for. That's sort of the soldiers of success. We want to back entrepreneurs that are building great businesses and transforming markets. And that means that when a firm like ours has a portfolio company that does become a unicorn or a deck of corn, not just on an unrealized basis, but on a realized basis, it means that the fund level returns for our fund as the earliest investor typically at the lowest cost basis are even more exceptional than a later stage investor. Probably exceptional for both, but they're even more exceptional for the seed stage investor.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so as a seed fund, we think very similar. In fact, Micah and the folks at Founder Collective, we collaborate a lot with and have a lot of respect for. For us, we think about the world in the same way, right? If you're an entrepreneur and you raise a modest amount of capital and you build a very good business that exits for $100, $200, $300 million, that's a win for most folks. And as a seed stage investor, we can win with that as well. Our funds are sort of sub $100 million by and large. Not all seed funds, but by and large. And so if you own rough math, if you own 10% of a company that exits for $100, $150 billion with a 40, 50, 60, $75 million fund, you can still return a meaningful portion of that fund with a hundred, $200 million exit. Obviously, the math is very different if you're a multi-stage investor investing out of a half billion or billion dollar pool of capital where that exit really does not move the needle. I think, though, that I wouldn't want to put words in Micah's mouth or final collective's mouth, but certainly the way we think about it here at NextView is an exit of”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That valuation. They put themselves out of challenge for future rounds of funding or for exit even. So that's a long-winded way of saying we care a lot about valuation. We think about it a lot. But we're not dogmatic about it. We target ownership and frankly there's no subprime model to venture capital investing, right? You can't invest in the mediocre companies at a cheap price and produce a good outcome because the distribution of outcomes is a power law. It's not a normal distribution.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's of critical importance, but the first and foremost thing is we want to identify exceptional entrepreneurs, teams of founders and co-founders, working on a potentially transformative idea in a big market. In that regard, even though we're seed investors, we think like traditional early stage VC or multi-stage VC in terms of the nature of the founders we want to back and the nature of the businesses and scale and scope that they have in terms of their potential. With respect to valuation, we want to make a good risk adjusted sort of return on our capital. So by definition, the earliest investment into a company is typically going to be the riskiest. And so we want to be compensated for that risk. We also think about not just the initial round of seed capital that goes into a company, but the whole life cycle of capital for a venture-backed startup. And at any point in the life cycle, you could create a valuation overhang where if a company raises capital at an exceptionally high valuation and can't hit value accretive milestones along the way to merit that.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funds, whether you're saying non traditional institutions that might do some seed investing or family offices that might do some seed investing, angelist syndicates and kind of a whole panoply of people and entities that are investing at the seed stage now. Another thing that we've witnessed is when we started investing in 2010, your average seed round was about a million bucks or slightly larger. They tended to be within a relatively tight band in terms of the size of the round and the stage of the company and the valuation. Today you see a continuum from what some people describe as preseed through kind of institutional seed and what some others describe as post-seed.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. And candidly, one that we think about and evaluate here at NextView on a daily basis. Rob, David, and myself started the firm in 2010, which is not that long ago, but it feels like ages ago in the seed stage landscape. We certainly weren't the first seed VC fund here in the US, folks like first round and soft tech and Floodgate and others kind of pioneered the way in sort of the 2006, 7, 8 timeframe. But when we started in 2010, there were really still not that many seed VC funds in the US. And we here at NextView Office in Boston and New York were pretty active in both ecosystems. And we invest throughout the United States. So we've got a portion of our portfolio on the West Coast and a portion here on the East Coast, but certainly it's skewed more towards Boston and New York. And at the time that we start in 2010, there were relatively few seed funds here in New York area and the Boston area. Fast forward to today, you know, 2017, there's obviously been a proliferation of seed investors. Whether you're saying sort of pure dedicated”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I mean, for me after PayPal and then after I was part of the founding team at LinkedIn, after those two startups, I ended up moving from California to the Boston area and got into the VC side. I actually started work before we started, we found a next few in 2010. I actually started to work for a couple years at another firm that was sort of Series A-B stage investor. And, you know, to”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, it's one of those things where there was a very good team of people that were building that business, and it was a very good business and remains a tremendously good business today. But also we had some good fortune in being able to raise a substantial amount of capital before the kind of internet 1.0 boom bubble burst. And so, and that sustained us and we raised more capital later on, but that sustained us to IPO. I described PayPal as a experience was a rocket ship. We went from being from inception to IPO in something like three and a half years. The company went public in early 2002, in something like three and a half, four years. Sometimes the rocket was pointed straight up at the sky. Sometimes it was pointed straight back down at the ground, but the rocket motor was lit the entire time.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes into entrepreneurship just generally, even though I wasn't a founder of PayPal, I was an employee, but was there in the earliest days and got exposure to the founders. The second thing I learned is virtually no startup is a up and to the right linear business that doesn't hit bumps along the road. Even the most successful startups almost always hit bumps along the road at some point in time. In some respects, PayPal was a pivot for both the original X.com and the original Confinity because both were focused on different things at the beginning. But then as I think is widely known for people who know the PayPal story, during my first year working there in 2000, we had essentially three different CEOs over the course of that year at our worst point. We were burning more than $10 million a month. We had challenges with fraud. We had minimal revenue. I mean, there's a variety of challenges to the business.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it was a really unique group of people to work with, both because, one, it was a pretty young organization. I mean, I was very young. I was 21, 22 years old. I was right out of college. But if you look at our senior leaders at PayPal, Peter Thiel, who became CEO after Elon, Elon himself, who was CEO for a while of the combined company, David Zachs, who was my first boss, because I started off as a product manager when he was CP product, Reed Hoffman, who I ended up working on for later on, Max, and on down the line, lots of other folks. The senior leaders of the company were in their 30s and still relatively young by and large. And so it was a youngish organization, but made up of really, really talented and smart people. And ultimately, PayPal became a very entrepreneurial organization, not just in terms of building PayPal itself, but then the different companies that spawned from the PayPal mafia as you highlighted. And, you know, I learned a lot of things. I learned the kind of passion and energy.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sat next to him and Chuda's ear off and asked him what it was like starting companies. He was just at the early days of starting X.com at that point. So this was his second company and the sort of fortuitous place to be. He asked me what I was interested in doing after school and I said I was interested in working a startup and he kindly invited me to fly out to Palo Alto and interview with the team. So I ended up joining X.com during my senior year of college and started work at the combined x.com PayPal.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Penel alum a few years older than me, and so he came back, gave guest lecture. This was after he had sold his first business, which was called Zip2. This is back in the sort of late 90s kind of Internet 1.0 company, which was also backed by Sequoia and ended up getting sold to the old Alta Vista Digital Equipment Corporation. But make a long story short, this was before he was a famous and well-known worldwide as an entrepreneur and doing brilliant things, but he came back and he gave a guest lecture, and I was interested in getting a job after school in a technology startup in Silicon Valley and went to meet him at the lecture. And there was a small dinner afterwards for a handful, maybe a dozen students or so with the guest speaker. So I went to that and most of the people who went to the dinner were actually folks early on in their college career, kind of underclassmen, who really wanted to just get a nice free meal on the whart in school. And so nobody literally, the seat next to Elon was literally empty. Nobody sat next to him.”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's a fun story for me. I was fortunate to join PayPal as one of the early employees, literally my first job out of undergrad. And I don't know how much you know about the genesis of PayPal, but there were originally two separate companies in the early days. There was one half started by Elon Musk called X.com. It was backed by Sequoia Capital. That's the part of the company that I joined. The other half was called Confinity, which was started by Maxilovchin and Peter Thiel, backed by the old Nokia, now Blu-ray Ventures. And the two companies sort of started off independently and were working on their own thing, but both ended up focusing on online payments and particularly in the early days of eBay, a sort of electronic transactions for eBay, for eBay buys and sellers. So the two companies ended up merging 50-50 merger of equals in the spring of 2000. So I joined originally the X.com side, and the way I got my job was Elon Musk. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, UPenn as an undergraduate and did a program there that combined an engineering degree and a business degree. And Elon is a”
2017-03-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source